It boils down to why you want to get the certification. Is it a respected/valued certification in the industry? What do you expect from it?
A while back I got the SCJP basically for the hell of it, so I didn't have great expectations riding on it. Much to my suprise, it translated into a small promotion, pay raise, and a nice little bonus. But that says more about my employer and director than anything, I think.
A colleague of mine also attempted the SCJP exam and failed badly. He commented that "passing the test doesn't mean you're a good programmer", and while I agree, a good programmer would certainly be able to pass the test.
The SCJP only really attempts to be able to validate the exam taker posseses the minimum baseline competencies in the language. I presume the same is true for many other of the technical certifications out there. If you want to take one for the hell of it, or if it's seen in the market as desireable, then take it. Just see it for what it is.
Well, someone yesterday made a comment about when they were in school, they were exhorted to list in their papers any military applications the technology might have in order to ensure securing additional research funding, etc. That was the first thing I thought of when I read "...this technology may be used in devices to detect bioterrorism chemicals."
Sounds we'll be seeing a lot of technology with terrorism-fighting potential for a while to come.
I typically am working on at least three different projects at any time, and once I realized that I was spending a fair bit of time re-reading the code and trying to remember what I was doing and where I left off last time, I got kinda religious about writing good comments that explained, for instance, what the method does, but also the assumptions and failure states, etc.
Since then, I've found that the modest amount of time it takes to write good comments pays off with dividends next time I pick up the code again. I also think that verbalizing what you are doing in code forces you to think about it in a different way and not infrequently, the resultant code benefits.
I recently read the Jack Reeves article What is Software Design?. His thesis, really, is that the code is the design. I didn't really want to accept this at first, but I do see that there are some benefits to looking at it this way. In fact, I think that if one were to take this to heart while coding, the result will be better, more intelligible and maintainable code.
Quality comments are one aspect of this (and I think that javadoc, for instance is a great tool). But just as the code isn't static, the comments need to also get updated, and it's fairly easy to refactor a method and forget to update/redo the comments.
Another thing I don't usually see enough is coding to actually check whether input parameters are valid, or otherwise enforcing the "contract" between a class/method and it's caller. Simple, basic stuff, but I know what happens when fatigue set in and people are hurrying to meet deadlines.
It's too bad you posted AC, as this could have been an interesting discussion. Never-the-less...
You quoted all but my last sentance, in which I state that the relationship between mathematics and music are that a) music and math use a symbolic notation, and b) you can describe anything using math. Note that I am making a distinction here between describing music mathematically and the way a composer actually conceives of music.
You mention that since one finds symmetry in Mozarts phrasing, he must have conceived of his musical ideas in mathematical terms. This is nonesence. If that's the basis of asserting the relationship between music and math, why don't people commonly insist on the same link between math and the visual arts? Classicism was keen on symmetry in all the arts, not just music. This hardly means, however, that artists conceived of their subjects in mathematical terms.
Music and mathematics were in many ways the same field for a while
I assume you are refering to the ancient Greeks and their discovery of the ratios that describe the natural harmonic series.Yes we are aware of the theoretical contribution, but this hardly consitutes classical Greek musical practice. In fact, what's left of the fragments of Greek music hardly suggests that it was mathematically obsessed or conceived.
...many of us now do appreciate and compose with a tangle of aesthetic sensibilities, very much including mathematical elegance / precision.
Well good for you and Stockhausen. The problem with the vast majority of that kind of music, is that it's very interesting theoretically, but it's not terribly musical and usually rather uninteresting to *listen* to. Don't get me wrong, this kind of stuff interests me a great deal, but I find that with most of these kinds of works, they are better appreciated in the abstract, rather than their implementation. An example of the contrary would be Ligeti's piano etudes -- there is certainly an abstract basis underpining the etudes, perhaps mathematically conceived in terms of the mechanism he wanted to compose out, but the etudes themselves are consumately musical, and once the *framework* was conceived, the rest was purely musical.
Remember that he [Mozart] started writing in the Baroque period, where mathematical precision and principles were being explored in music. See Bach for instance.
This statement is misinformed.
While Mozart was born in the same year that Bach died, there was no
stylistic relationship between them. It wasn't until much later in his
life that Mozart even discovered the works of Bach. Even in his day, Bach was considered old fashioned, and was very much "out of style".
While Bach looked back to the old contrapunctal methods of structuring a piece of music, Mozart (and his contemporaries) were involved with largely homophonic music written in the Sonata form. In terms of texture, music from the classical common practice (including Mozart) consists of a melodic subject, and an accompaniment, whereas textures in Bach's music relies heavily on imitative counterpoint.
My thinking has always been that if the "Mozart effect" actually has any basis, it's in the structure of the melodic phrasing: antecedent consequent.
In classical common practice, melodic phrasing usually followed the convention of an Antecedant phrase (often moving harmonically from the region of tonic to dominant), followed by a Consequent phrase (often harmonically moving from dominant to tonic). This creates a very strong sence of symmetry. To pick a tune probably everyone here is familiar with, think of the opening phrases (or any other for that matter) from Eine Kleine Nachtmusik.
It is this powerful effect of aural symmetry that I suspect has the most profound effect on our minds. It also typifies classicism in every sence: reason, order, symmetry.
BTW, I really find no basis for the all-too-common assertion of the link between mathematics and music. Composers (excepting people like Stockhausen perhaps) do not conceptualize music in mathematical terms. There is a relationship in that both music and mathematics have a symbolic notation, and that one can describe anything using mathematics, but that's about it.
I can't help but wonder if he's been paid by AOL and MSFT to give a reverse testomonial *for* the Can Spam bill. Reader reads "Spammer doesn't like Can Spam bill"; reader thinks "Hmmm...that bill must be pretty good.
Yes, I am joking, but feel free to don the tinfoil.
Having read the article, I was impressed by how clever their proposed solution was, though since I don't have a CS background, I don't understand how a mathematical computation can be essentially bottlenecked by memory latency -- I'd love it if someone could give an explanation of how that works.I'm guessing that some cryptographic hash needs to be held in memory, such that the nature of the data structure and physical access to it proves a bottleneck. This is probably way off.
But having read the/. comments, it becomes clearer to me that this solution, and many other proposed solutions face problems insofar as they "break" the assumed contract under which email has worked for so many years. To me, this seems to boil down to a challenge / response system (allbeit one that increases the overhead of the transaction signifigantly). The problem with these systems is that for a time, email will be broken for certain people, or broken when trying to communicate with certain people depending on whether or not one has migrated to the proposed system. I'd worry that this would have the effect of segmenting email users into little fiefdoms determined by which email system they are using.
I don't think a migration can happen unless there is some "benevolent dictator" who can force everyone to migrate to such-and-such a new email model and system, and frankly, I wouldn't want that forced on us.
It seems that the challenge to any such spam-reduction system is that migration must be immediate and non-backwards-compatible, and universal, otherwise for a time email users will be segmented into little fiefdoms based on whether they've migrated, and solution to which they've migrated.
The thing that kills me is that SCO's stock is still around $14 (up from $1 in March but falling the past week) - which means that most investors believe that SCO will be worth more in the future.
No, I don't think that follows. First of all, you mean investors in SCOX, not all investors. Secondly, it seems much more likely to me that some / most are bying because of the limited downside (you're out what bought in at) and a potentially very large upside. Granted, I think most also realize that the likelihood of the upside being reached is very small; but with risk, reward. The small liklihood of realizing the large upside makes the limited downside attractive.
No, it's not necessarily a contradiction. Simplest example: Players A and B have the same rating and win, lose and draw an equal number of games. Let's also say that both of their games (technique) is improving at an equal rate. Therefore, their ratings do not change, even though their play has improved.
That's the tough thing about chess. You can play a very deep game and still lose. You don't get credit for having played well -- it all comes down to mate or a draw.
Hey -- I don't disagree with you at all. I'm just responding to the guy who was trying ot argue there isn't anything fishy here becasue stock sales by SCO officers only amounts to 2% of the outstanding shares.
I postulated that much of the motivation of this lawsuit had to do with the stock price and CEO/Corp Officer compensation back in the beginning of June (when most people thought this was a ploy to get SCO bought out by IBM) and got modded flamebait for it, too. Go figure.
This is a really overblown story. The figure they're quoting is only about 2% of insider shares, so it's not like this is a "pump and dump."
Dunno whi I'm bothering to respond to this -- not like anyone will see this comment, but you need to realize that shares owned by corporate officers are what is called "restricted stock" (rule 144 of the NASD if I recall). You can't simply dump all the shares you have at one time. You must first file a form wtih the NASD or SEC indicating that you intend to sell x number of shares (how do you think Yahoo can report on the shares sold by corp. officers?). There are rules around how many shares you can sell at one time, usually relative to the total shares outstanding.
The rule was put in place to discourage insider trading and prevent corporate officers from affecting the market for a given security. Imagine if an officer had a controlling interest of shares outstanding. He could just dump all his stock at once, and cause the market for that stock to tank.
Also imagine if these rules weren't in place. McBride and friends could dump it all at once, fold up, and leave the rest of the investors high and dry.
Given all this, it's not surprising the seemingly unimpressive figure of 2% of insider shares have only been sold --- yet. The rules were designed to slow this sort of thing down.
Most interesting was the bit about the "unclean hands" affirmative defence:
Unclean hands is basically saying you don't deserve to get any relief because you have been bad yourself. Here is dictionary.com's definition:
"a legal doctrine which is a defense to a complaint, which states that a party who is asking for a judgment cannot have the help of the court if he/she has done anything unethical in relation to the subject of the lawsuit. Thus, if a defendant can show the plaintiff had "unclean hands," the plaintiff's complaint will be dismissed or the plaintiff will be denied judgment. Unclean hands is a common "affirmative defense" pleaded by defendants and must be proved by the defendant. Example: Hank Hardnose sues Grace Goodenough for breach of contract for failure to pay the full amount for construction of an addition to her house. Goodenough proves that Hardnose had shown her faked estimates from subcontractors to justify his original bid to Goodenough."
The one thing everyone is forgetting is that perjury is defined, by the law as:
The deliberate, willful giving of false, misleading, or incomplete testimony under oath. ...the RIAA were acting as agents of Usher(R&B) and, in good faith to their client were attempting to remove his copyrighted material from public distrobution. There is nothing perjorous in their act.
Well the problem with your assertion is that here you are giving an affirmation that it *is* the case that you represent the lawful copyright owner, even though you know damn well you haven't done the due diligence to confirm that this is actually true. This is usually refered to as due diligence.
If you make an assertion under oath where you know that there is a good chance that the assertion you are making is false (because you haven't bothered to do due diligence), doesn't that constitute a "deliberate, willful giving of false, misleading, or incomplete testimony under oath."
Mod up parent! I wish I had some mod points left...
This is very true and is, in fact, how it actually works. You have local project managers and analysts who have domain knowledge of the specific industry (or niche), who then simple create a set of requirements which are shipped to India (or wherever else) for build.
Not that this actually works very well all the time. For instance, I know of a project in my company (we're a financial services industry), which spent about a month trying to debug some strange inconsistancies in an application. It was finally determined that the cause of the defect was result of the Indian developers thinking a dividend was a fee that clients pay rather than money they receive.
Arguably, you could just as well fault the analyst for failing to anticipate a lack of a basic contextual understanding on the part of the developers (e.g. what a dividend is), but you'd just end up with an even bigger pile of documentation that no one will probably read.
This type of problem is actually comomnplace, but it's not a factor in the cost/benefit analysis that mangement performed when deciding to "offshore" developemnt work.
Lastly, I gotta say that I think that the analysts are next in line to play "race to the bottom", even if as the example above suggests, it may not be worth it to business in the long run (costs associated with those type of defects).
Well, not that it'll happen, but the point is that if people quit giving the RIAA members money by buying CDs, there won't be an RIAA left to blame P2P.
My wife used to buy new CDs every now and then -- mostly music from 20+ years ago, as she increasingly felt that the new stuff being released was vapid garbage. When I told her about the RIAA stories I've read on/. she was appalled and had no idea what a shitty pack of bastards was responsible for the shitty music being turned out these days.
When I told her the story about chewplastic, she agreed to never buy a new CD again (thankfully there is such a thing as a used CD store). Hey, it may not change the world, but she feels better knowing that her money isn't being used to ruin someone's life.
Bottom Line: buying options contracts has a predetermined downside: the cost of the contract. On the good side there is no limit to the upside...
Yes. What's interesting to me, especially since most option traders I know don't do this, but, it's the people who write (or sell) contracts that are the real winners in the options market. These are the people who write a contract, collect the premium, and when the contract expires out the money, the've earned a modest amount of money -- the premiums they collected. However, you do this consitantly, and it adds up. The upside is limited, but so is the downside if, say, you're writing covered calls (selling calls against stock you already own).
I've found that most people get into options because they are attracted to that unlimited upside, but they get burned soon enough and either swear off options, or leave it at coverd calls.
It's a curious thing about options, that they can be the safest investment you make, depending on the options strategy you use, or they can be the most volotile and dangerous.
Re:shareholders..
on
SCO SCO SCO!
·
· Score: 1, Flamebait
I tend to agree and actually suspect that stock price is a huge motivator in this saga, rather than an attempt to get bought out. If you look at the actions that SCO has undertaken, it seems that this lawsuit is an attempt to inflate their stock price int he near term on speculation:
Announce you're launching a lawsuit for a staggering amount of money on an IP/Contract claim against IBM.
Announce revenues are up as the result of threatening letters to companies who use Linux.
Publicly announce that MSFT bought a licence (I think MS is involved in this somehow, BWT).
McBride fodders the market with rumors that they are looking to be bought by IBM. Nothing makes a stock price jump like rumors that small company X may be bought out by huge company Y.
I'd to know how much of McBride's compensation (and other senior officer's) is in the form of SCOX stock options. It is much more common than you think, that a CEO gets an ungodly number of options as compensation and does whatever he can to inflate the stock price in the near term in order to cash in. Al Dunlop and the Sunbeam corporation is a classic example of running a company into the dirt to line the CEO's pockets.
I'm not sure they are actually looking for a buyout.
If you are trying to get bought out, you want to make your stock price attractive, perhaps *lower*; however, SCO seems to be doing just the opposite. Everything that's been going on with SCO could be seen as an attempt to pump up their stock price in the near term:
Announce you're launching a lawsuit for a staggering amount of money on an IP/Contract claim against IBM.
Announce revenues are up as the result of threatening letters to companies who use Linux.
Publicly announce that MSFT bought a licence (I think MS is involved in this somehow, BWT).
McBride fodders the market with rumors that they are looking to be bought by IBM. Nothing makes a stock price jump like rumors that small company X may be bought out by huge company Y.
Now, why would they do this? I think we'd have the answer to this if we knew how much of McBride's compensation was in the form of SCOX stock options.
Your thesis that most geeks tend to have hardware less than 18 months old doesn't ring true to me, and your statement that most Linux dostros "run like a dog" on a Athlon 875mhz with 512mb of ram & 7200rpm hdd system seems suspect to me.
In fact, most of the (non-gamer) "geeks" that I know are rather happy with 1-2 year old (or more) hardware. None of my boxes have specs that surpass yours, and Slackware just zips along. As a matter of fact, were it not for Linux, I would never have been able to continue wringing so much use out of all of my old boxen. Hell, one of my boxes is an old *P75 with 16MB RAM* -- it's great, as I've set it up as a thin client, you just log into a remote X session and you're off.
Right now, I happen to be prepping for a Gentoo install. Very nice ideas with that distro -- you tailor/optimize everything for your specific box.
...there was a time a decade ago when Unix had different principals, when hackers were hackers and not just selfish fun-centric ultra ghz 20somethings, when many a Unix had a lighter footprint than Windows (and Windows was feather light back then compared with now).
The great thing about Linux is that there'sa flavor for everyone. Don't want to run Gnome or KDE? Get a WM designed to be lean and fast (like icewm or blackbox). Want to cram Linux into an old system? Try Peanut Linux. You get my point.
Figure out what your needs and limitations are, look around, and I'm sure you'll find a solution, whether it's a WM, a specific distro, or a set of configuration options.
I've read a lot of bitter comments on this forum about the fact that java isn't an open technology. This hasn't mattered much to me because of their community process, and otherwise open attitude, and open off-shoot projects (STL, Struts, Tomcat, etc).
I'm not trolling here at all -- I wonder what the implications for Java could be in the face of a buyout. Obviously, that would depend in some part on the buyer. And there would always be
the GNU foundations
free implementations. OTOH, perhaps a buyout could actually prompt Java to be handed over to a standards board.
These are rumors though, and I can't recall ever hearing a merger/buyout rumor that actually panned out (maybe I just hear bad gossip, though), so I don't put a lot of beleif into this story. It's just speculation about what Sun might do in an x86's world .
I will say that it's interesting to me to see how it's usually not the case that the best technologies survive. However, when looked at from a natural selection viewpoint, one realizes that since the computing ecology is shifted towards MS products, the x86 architecure hardware has an advantage, even though it isn't the best.
Change the OS ecology, and x86 may not be the de facto architecure...
What *would* you expect a usability person to say about *any* kind of ads? Really? In what way does advertisement actualy enhance the user experience? The two obvious situations where they can were mentioned in his article -- search engines and classified ads.
I was struck by the last link in the Cringely article others have mentioned (
We've Been Framed!
):
1968 NLS demo, which has realplayer clips of this 90 minute demo of the NLS system.
NLS allowed you to create documents which linked to other documents or content, create heirarchical document structures which could expand or collapse, and even was designed to interface with ARPAnet -- the demo shows a program designed to show a list of networks, what services were available on each, their various protocals, etc...
Viewing this really makes clear the debt we owe to our predecessors. So many "innovations" today are simply inevitable considering the work done by our predecessors -- somtimes more than one generation removed!
Does it make any sence to reward or even allow overly-broad patents, especially where there is no concrete implementation or prototype? It would seem that a criteria for gaining a patent should be some repayment of the debt owed to our predecessors -- some tangible contribution back to humanity for the next generation of innovation. Otherwise, you simply encourage people to file patents on things that will be inevitably produced or invented by someone else -- you do *no* work, then collect.
I recall reading about a geneticist who had done some remarkable research, made a name for himself, etc, but no one could replicate his work. It later came out that he merely faked his results, as it was clear to him that someone else would make the break-throughs eventually, and substantiate his work. Not too dissimilar to the patent situation, IMHO.
So, I'd like to see a requirement for patents which mandates a workable prototype or some concrecte research which can eventually be given back to humanity to repay our debt to our predecessors.
Seeing how many feel the H1B program to be abused, let's ask, what are the chances that an agency wanting to buy a specific closed-source product, simply defines their requirements in such a way that the only acceptable purchase decision is the closed-source product?
Slashdot Mirror
It boils down to why you want to get the certification. Is it a respected/valued certification in the industry? What do you expect from it?
A while back I got the SCJP basically for the hell of it, so I didn't have great expectations riding on it. Much to my suprise, it translated into a small promotion, pay raise, and a nice little bonus. But that says more about my employer and director than anything, I think.
A colleague of mine also attempted the SCJP exam and failed badly. He commented that "passing the test doesn't mean you're a good programmer", and while I agree, a good programmer would certainly be able to pass the test.
The SCJP only really attempts to be able to validate the exam taker posseses the minimum baseline competencies in the language. I presume the same is true for many other of the technical certifications out there. If you want to take one for the hell of it, or if it's seen in the market as desireable, then take it. Just see it for what it is.
Well, someone yesterday made a comment about when they were in school, they were exhorted to list in their papers any military applications the technology might have in order to ensure securing additional research funding, etc. That was the first thing I thought of when I read "...this technology may be used in devices to detect bioterrorism chemicals."
Sounds we'll be seeing a lot of technology with terrorism-fighting potential for a while to come.
Amen to that.
I typically am working on at least three different projects at any time, and once I realized that I was spending a fair bit of time re-reading the code and trying to remember what I was doing and where I left off last time, I got kinda religious about writing good comments that explained, for instance, what the method does, but also the assumptions and failure states, etc.
Since then, I've found that the modest amount of time it takes to write good comments pays off with dividends next time I pick up the code again. I also think that verbalizing what you are doing in code forces you to think about it in a different way and not infrequently, the resultant code benefits.
I recently read the Jack Reeves article What is Software Design?. His thesis, really, is that the code is the design. I didn't really want to accept this at first, but I do see that there are some benefits to looking at it this way. In fact, I think that if one were to take this to heart while coding, the result will be better, more intelligible and maintainable code.
Quality comments are one aspect of this (and I think that javadoc, for instance is a great tool). But just as the code isn't static, the comments need to also get updated, and it's fairly easy to refactor a method and forget to update/redo the comments.
Another thing I don't usually see enough is coding to actually check whether input parameters are valid, or otherwise enforcing the "contract" between a class/method and it's caller. Simple, basic stuff, but I know what happens when fatigue set in and people are hurrying to meet deadlines.
It's too bad you posted AC, as this could have been an interesting discussion. Never-the-less...
You quoted all but my last sentance, in which I state that the relationship between mathematics and music are that a) music and math use a symbolic notation, and b) you can describe anything using math. Note that I am making a distinction here between describing music mathematically and the way a composer actually conceives of music.
You mention that since one finds symmetry in Mozarts phrasing, he must have conceived of his musical ideas in mathematical terms. This is nonesence. If that's the basis of asserting the relationship between music and math, why don't people commonly insist on the same link between math and the visual arts? Classicism was keen on symmetry in all the arts, not just music. This hardly means, however, that artists conceived of their subjects in mathematical terms.
I assume you are refering to the ancient Greeks and their discovery of the ratios that describe the natural harmonic series.Yes we are aware of the theoretical contribution, but this hardly consitutes classical Greek musical practice. In fact, what's left of the fragments of Greek music hardly suggests that it was mathematically obsessed or conceived.
Well good for you and Stockhausen. The problem with the vast majority of that kind of music, is that it's very interesting theoretically, but it's not terribly musical and usually rather uninteresting to *listen* to. Don't get me wrong, this kind of stuff interests me a great deal, but I find that with most of these kinds of works, they are better appreciated in the abstract, rather than their implementation. An example of the contrary would be Ligeti's piano etudes -- there is certainly an abstract basis underpining the etudes, perhaps mathematically conceived in terms of the mechanism he wanted to compose out, but the etudes themselves are consumately musical, and once the *framework* was conceived, the rest was purely musical.
This statement is misinformed.
While Mozart was born in the same year that Bach died, there was no stylistic relationship between them. It wasn't until much later in his life that Mozart even discovered the works of Bach. Even in his day, Bach was considered old fashioned, and was very much "out of style".
While Bach looked back to the old contrapunctal methods of structuring a piece of music, Mozart (and his contemporaries) were involved with largely homophonic music written in the Sonata form. In terms of texture, music from the classical common practice (including Mozart) consists of a melodic subject, and an accompaniment, whereas textures in Bach's music relies heavily on imitative counterpoint.
My thinking has always been that if the "Mozart effect" actually has any basis, it's in the structure of the melodic phrasing: antecedent consequent.
In classical common practice, melodic phrasing usually followed the convention of an Antecedant phrase (often moving harmonically from the region of tonic to dominant), followed by a Consequent phrase (often harmonically moving from dominant to tonic). This creates a very strong sence of symmetry. To pick a tune probably everyone here is familiar with, think of the opening phrases (or any other for that matter) from Eine Kleine Nachtmusik.
It is this powerful effect of aural symmetry that I suspect has the most profound effect on our minds. It also typifies classicism in every sence: reason, order, symmetry.
BTW, I really find no basis for the all-too-common assertion of the link between mathematics and music. Composers (excepting people like Stockhausen perhaps) do not conceptualize music in mathematical terms. There is a relationship in that both music and mathematics have a symbolic notation, and that one can describe anything using mathematics, but that's about it.
I can't help but wonder if he's been paid by AOL and MSFT to give a reverse testomonial *for* the Can Spam bill. Reader reads "Spammer doesn't like Can Spam bill"; reader thinks "Hmmm...that bill must be pretty good.
Yes, I am joking, but feel free to don the tinfoil.
Having read the article, I was impressed by how clever their proposed solution was, though since I don't have a CS background, I don't understand how a mathematical computation can be essentially bottlenecked by memory latency -- I'd love it if someone could give an explanation of how that works.I'm guessing that some cryptographic hash needs to be held in memory, such that the nature of the data structure and physical access to it proves a bottleneck. This is probably way off.
But having read the /. comments, it becomes clearer to me that this solution, and many other proposed solutions face problems insofar as they "break" the assumed contract under which email has worked for so many years. To me, this seems to boil down to a challenge / response system (allbeit one that increases the overhead of the transaction signifigantly). The problem with these systems is that for a time, email will be broken for certain people, or broken when trying to communicate with certain people depending on whether or not one has migrated to the proposed system. I'd worry that this would have the effect of segmenting email users into little fiefdoms determined by which email system they are using.
I don't think a migration can happen unless there is some "benevolent dictator" who can force everyone to migrate to such-and-such a new email model and system, and frankly, I wouldn't want that forced on us.
It seems that the challenge to any such spam-reduction system is that migration must be immediate and non-backwards-compatible, and universal, otherwise for a time email users will be segmented into little fiefdoms based on whether they've migrated, and solution to which they've migrated.
No, I don't think that follows. First of all, you mean investors in SCOX, not all investors. Secondly, it seems much more likely to me that some / most are bying because of the limited downside (you're out what bought in at) and a potentially very large upside. Granted, I think most also realize that the likelihood of the upside being reached is very small; but with risk, reward. The small liklihood of realizing the large upside makes the limited downside attractive.
No, it's not necessarily a contradiction. Simplest example: Players A and B have the same rating and win, lose and draw an equal number of games. Let's also say that both of their games (technique) is improving at an equal rate. Therefore, their ratings do not change, even though their play has improved. That's the tough thing about chess. You can play a very deep game and still lose. You don't get credit for having played well -- it all comes down to mate or a draw.
Hey -- I don't disagree with you at all. I'm just responding to the guy who was trying ot argue there isn't anything fishy here becasue stock sales by SCO officers only amounts to 2% of the outstanding shares.
I postulated that much of the motivation of this lawsuit had to do with the stock price and CEO/Corp Officer compensation back in the beginning of June (when most people thought this was a ploy to get SCO bought out by IBM) and got modded flamebait for it, too. Go figure.
Dunno whi I'm bothering to respond to this -- not like anyone will see this comment, but you need to realize that shares owned by corporate officers are what is called "restricted stock" (rule 144 of the NASD if I recall). You can't simply dump all the shares you have at one time. You must first file a form wtih the NASD or SEC indicating that you intend to sell x number of shares (how do you think Yahoo can report on the shares sold by corp. officers?). There are rules around how many shares you can sell at one time, usually relative to the total shares outstanding.
The rule was put in place to discourage insider trading and prevent corporate officers from affecting the market for a given security. Imagine if an officer had a controlling interest of shares outstanding. He could just dump all his stock at once, and cause the market for that stock to tank.
Also imagine if these rules weren't in place. McBride and friends could dump it all at once, fold up, and leave the rest of the investors high and dry.
Given all this, it's not surprising the seemingly unimpressive figure of 2% of insider shares have only been sold --- yet. The rules were designed to slow this sort of thing down.
Groklaw has a breakdown of each of these defenses as well.
Most interesting was the bit about the "unclean hands" affirmative defence:
Well the problem with your assertion is that here you are giving an affirmation that it *is* the case that you represent the lawful copyright owner, even though you know damn well you haven't done the due diligence to confirm that this is actually true. This is usually refered to as due diligence.
If you make an assertion under oath where you know that there is a good chance that the assertion you are making is false (because you haven't bothered to do due diligence), doesn't that constitute a "deliberate, willful giving of false, misleading, or incomplete testimony under oath."
The more I read, the more I value the efforts of the GNU project and the FSF. At the very least, GNU/FSF offers a wedge against crap like this.
If you find value in the work of the GNU project and FSF, please consider offering your support in the form of your
Mod up parent! I wish I had some mod points left...
This is very true and is, in fact, how it actually works. You have local project managers and analysts who have domain knowledge of the specific industry (or niche), who then simple create a set of requirements which are shipped to India (or wherever else) for build.
Not that this actually works very well all the time. For instance, I know of a project in my company (we're a financial services industry), which spent about a month trying to debug some strange inconsistancies in an application. It was finally determined that the cause of the defect was result of the Indian developers thinking a dividend was a fee that clients pay rather than money they receive.
Arguably, you could just as well fault the analyst for failing to anticipate a lack of a basic contextual understanding on the part of the developers (e.g. what a dividend is), but you'd just end up with an even bigger pile of documentation that no one will probably read.
This type of problem is actually comomnplace, but it's not a factor in the cost/benefit analysis that mangement performed when deciding to "offshore" developemnt work.
Lastly, I gotta say that I think that the analysts are next in line to play "race to the bottom", even if as the example above suggests, it may not be worth it to business in the long run (costs associated with those type of defects).
Well, not that it'll happen, but the point is that if people quit giving the RIAA members money by buying CDs, there won't be an RIAA left to blame P2P.
/. she was appalled and had no idea what a shitty pack of bastards was responsible for the shitty music being turned out these days.
My wife used to buy new CDs every now and then -- mostly music from 20+ years ago, as she increasingly felt that the new stuff being released was vapid garbage. When I told her about the RIAA stories I've read on
When I told her the story about chewplastic, she agreed to never buy a new CD again (thankfully there is such a thing as a used CD store). Hey, it may not change the world, but she feels better knowing that her money isn't being used to ruin someone's life.
Yes. What's interesting to me, especially since most option traders I know don't do this, but, it's the people who write (or sell) contracts that are the real winners in the options market. These are the people who write a contract, collect the premium, and when the contract expires out the money, the've earned a modest amount of money -- the premiums they collected. However, you do this consitantly, and it adds up. The upside is limited, but so is the downside if, say, you're writing covered calls (selling calls against stock you already own).
I've found that most people get into options because they are attracted to that unlimited upside, but they get burned soon enough and either swear off options, or leave it at coverd calls.
It's a curious thing about options, that they can be the safest investment you make, depending on the options strategy you use, or they can be the most volotile and dangerous.
I tend to agree and actually suspect that stock price is a huge motivator in this saga, rather than an attempt to get bought out. If you look at the actions that SCO has undertaken, it seems that this lawsuit is an attempt to inflate their stock price int he near term on speculation:
- Announce you're launching a lawsuit for a staggering amount of money on an IP/Contract claim against IBM.
- Announce revenues are up as the result of threatening letters to companies who use Linux.
- Publicly announce that MSFT bought a licence (I think MS is involved in this somehow, BWT).
- McBride fodders the market with rumors that they are looking to be bought by IBM. Nothing makes a stock price jump like rumors that small company X may be bought out by huge company Y.
I'd to know how much of McBride's compensation (and other senior officer's) is in the form of SCOX stock options. It is much more common than you think, that a CEO gets an ungodly number of options as compensation and does whatever he can to inflate the stock price in the near term in order to cash in. Al Dunlop and the Sunbeam corporation is a classic example of running a company into the dirt to line the CEO's pockets.I'm not sure they are actually looking for a buyout.
If you are trying to get bought out, you want to make your stock price attractive, perhaps *lower*; however, SCO seems to be doing just the opposite. Everything that's been going on with SCO could be seen as an attempt to pump up their stock price in the near term:
Now, why would they do this? I think we'd have the answer to this if we knew how much of McBride's compensation was in the form of SCOX stock options.
Your thesis that most geeks tend to have hardware less than 18 months old doesn't ring true to me, and your statement that most Linux dostros "run like a dog" on a Athlon 875mhz with 512mb of ram & 7200rpm hdd system seems suspect to me.
In fact, most of the (non-gamer) "geeks" that I know are rather happy with 1-2 year old (or more) hardware. None of my boxes have specs that surpass yours, and Slackware just zips along. As a matter of fact, were it not for Linux, I would never have been able to continue wringing so much use out of all of my old boxen. Hell, one of my boxes is an old *P75 with 16MB RAM* -- it's great, as I've set it up as a thin client, you just log into a remote X session and you're off.
Right now, I happen to be prepping for a Gentoo install. Very nice ideas with that distro -- you tailor/optimize everything for your specific box.
The great thing about Linux is that there'sa flavor for everyone. Don't want to run Gnome or KDE? Get a WM designed to be lean and fast (like icewm or blackbox). Want to cram Linux into an old system? Try Peanut Linux. You get my point.
Figure out what your needs and limitations are, look around, and I'm sure you'll find a solution, whether it's a WM, a specific distro, or a set of configuration options.
I've read a lot of bitter comments on this forum about the fact that java isn't an open technology. This hasn't mattered much to me because of their community process, and otherwise open attitude, and open off-shoot projects (STL, Struts, Tomcat, etc).
I'm not trolling here at all -- I wonder what the implications for Java could be in the face of a buyout. Obviously, that would depend in some part on the buyer. And there would always be the GNU foundations free implementations. OTOH, perhaps a buyout could actually prompt Java to be handed over to a standards board.
These are rumors though, and I can't recall ever hearing a merger/buyout rumor that actually panned out (maybe I just hear bad gossip, though), so I don't put a lot of beleif into this story. It's just speculation about what Sun might do in an x86's world .
I will say that it's interesting to me to see how it's usually not the case that the best technologies survive. However, when looked at from a natural selection viewpoint, one realizes that since the computing ecology is shifted towards MS products, the x86 architecure hardware has an advantage, even though it isn't the best.
Change the OS ecology, and x86 may not be the de facto architecure...
I read this spoof the other day, and got a chuckle... Jakob Nielsen Declares the Letter "C" Unusable
What *would* you expect a usability person to say about *any* kind of ads? Really? In what way does advertisement actualy enhance the user experience? The two obvious situations where they can were mentioned in his article -- search engines and classified ads.
I was struck by the last link in the Cringely article others have mentioned ( We've Been Framed! ): 1968 NLS demo, which has realplayer clips of this 90 minute demo of the NLS system.
NLS allowed you to create documents which linked to other documents or content, create heirarchical document structures which could expand or collapse, and even was designed to interface with ARPAnet -- the demo shows a program designed to show a list of networks, what services were available on each, their various protocals, etc...
Viewing this really makes clear the debt we owe to our predecessors. So many "innovations" today are simply inevitable considering the work done by our predecessors -- somtimes more than one generation removed!
Does it make any sence to reward or even allow overly-broad patents, especially where there is no concrete implementation or prototype? It would seem that a criteria for gaining a patent should be some repayment of the debt owed to our predecessors -- some tangible contribution back to humanity for the next generation of innovation. Otherwise, you simply encourage people to file patents on things that will be inevitably produced or invented by someone else -- you do *no* work, then collect.
I recall reading about a geneticist who had done some remarkable research, made a name for himself, etc, but no one could replicate his work. It later came out that he merely faked his results, as it was clear to him that someone else would make the break-throughs eventually, and substantiate his work. Not too dissimilar to the patent situation, IMHO.
So, I'd like to see a requirement for patents which mandates a workable prototype or some concrecte research which can eventually be given back to humanity to repay our debt to our predecessors.
Seeing how many feel the H1B program to be abused, let's ask, what are the chances that an agency wanting to buy a specific closed-source product, simply defines their requirements in such a way that the only acceptable purchase decision is the closed-source product?