But anyone with half a brain should be able to realize that all those years of evolution must have made a difference for people living in different environments and facing different types of problems.
Not terribly much difference. If you're living near the equator you need more protection from the sun, hence more melanin. Asians tend to be shorter, maybe because food was more scarce in much of Asia? All of this is irrelevant to the discussion though. It's never been shown there's any mental differences between different geographic groups.
But if you start from an assumption that all races are equal
And here is the start of the flaw in your logic. First of all there's no such thing as "race". The word itself implies some kind of inherent difference between people. I don't think you meant to imply that, but I think the word iteself has that connotation. You must mean skin color. The question is "Are there any meaningfull difference in the socio-economics of people of different skin color?" The obvious answer is yes. People with "white" skin color have a higher percentage of people in the middle class than people with brown skin color. It's a cycle that perpetuates itself. Middle class people tend to value education more, live in areas with better schools, don't live in areas with high crime, etc. Should it be any surprise that middle class kids tend to grow up and have better jobs than poor kids? But the fact of the matter is, if you start from that assumption - that all races are equal - then there must be something - some link in the chain somewhere - holding these ethnic groups back from getting these jobs.
See, this is where people get into trouble with the reasoning. People of one skin color have no genetic advantages over someone of another skin color (except perhaps resistance to sunburns). That doesn't mean that the environments are at all similar. The link is obvious, and it's economic. Poor people tend to produce more poor people. Middle class people tend to produce more middle class people. You don't specifically state it, but your assumption sounds like the break in the chain is racism. Obviously there's some of that, but the problem lies more with just being poor.
As you've found out word is intended to create paper documents, not web content. I think you really need to look at the bigger picture here. You're currently taking word documents and desperately trying to convert them to HTML so they can be published on the web. Great, but not a good solution to your larger problem.
The really the question is, why are you accepting word documents in the first place? If your authors are serious about publishing on the web you should really be pushing them to give you content in html, or look into some kind of content management system. Any major website and most minor would cringe at the thought of using word as a content creation program. Those should really be your long term goals as this word->html business is really quite a crappy system. If you don't start pushing people now to change to something more sane they never will.
Eventually you're going to end up with a difficult site to manage because of all the word->html conversions. Solve the short term problem with some cleanup program, but you really need to work on the long term problem before it kills you, or the site.
More choices allows us to pick the best of those available, thus resulting in the "best future".
Nonsense. More choices can give us better choices, but they can also just lead to confusion and stagnation. Look at the competing Blu-Ray and HD-DVD standards. The most likely route is the two choices will only confuse consumers into sticking with DVD. No one likes adopting dead-end technology.
The point is that when you need one standard that lasts for a long time more choices lead to no choice. Eventually one will likely beat out the others, (which could wind up being the old technically inferrior standard), but more choices doesn't always lead to a better outcome.
Similar tools in various Linux distros are getting better, but are not as good.
Redhat network for Redhat enterprise linux far exceeds what Windows Update can do. Can Windows update manage entire groups of machines, schedule updates and reboots via a website, tell you the patch status of all your machines, and install software via the website? Redhat network can.
the national average for killowatt hour costs last year was 8.7 cents per KW hour. but many places it's well over 10 cents/kw hour. It will be rising sharply since the new clean-coal laws were passed this year as well as the price of natural gas going up due to the war.
Except this isn't a program in all of the US, it's a program in Indiana. The best electric rates I could get are from 1999, which puts the rates at just where I said, between 6 and 7 cents/kilowatt hour. See http://www.incontext.indiana.edu/2001/oct-nov01/de tails.html When I measure the current it, draw 11.4 amps average current on average. so thats 130 watts
You must have a very powerfull machine, or you're measuring it while playing a game. Most PCs at idle don't use much power. The processor and graphics chips only draw large amounts of power when performing calculations. Most of the time the PC is going to be idle. See: http://www.macalester.edu/cit/faq/power_usage.html for actual numbers. add on a monitor and were up around 200 watts.
LCDs are cheap enough that most new computers for business are coming with them because of the smaller space, and decreased power usage. At most an LCD uses 40 watts, many use far less. With AC the efficiency of the unit under ideal conditions is not the measure of how it performs under actual conditions. You are assuming that the cooling power needed is delivered in a perfect fashtion to where it is needed.
I actually never stated any conclusion about heating costs. I'm merely pointing out that they're far less than 1/1. You can nitpick about perfect efficiency, but the costs are obviously far less than 1/1. your're right about the 300K->500K slip up, though the estimate is essentially correct given the stated inputs. You just want to use different inputs.
So being off by a factor of 1.66 is "essentially correct"? That's a big amount to be off by for something to be correct. When you order a dinner and they're off by 66% in telling you how much it costs is that "essentially correct"? aside from a quibble over the AC its essentially correct.
A factor of two is a "quibble"? He's dead wrong about doubling costs for cooling. He's wrong from a thermodynamic perspective, and a usage perspective. Add up all those large errors, and you get one big huge error.
500K * 200 watts = 100 Megawatts of power at 10 cents a kilowatt hour is $10,000 dollars per hour to operate. In winter time this might offset the cost of heating if they can distribute the heat, but the rest of the year the cooling costs to offset this heat load will double the operating cost. (since it usually takes one watt of cooling to offset 1 watt of heat generation)
You're off on your estimates of every single number. It's 300,000 machines, not 500,000. A PC uses about 60 watts of power, and LCD monitor uses maybe 40 watts. Power costs about 6-7 cents per kilowatt hour.
So that's ((300,000 * 100) / 1000) *.065 = $1950. You're only off by a factor of 5. but the rest of the year the cooling costs to offset this heat load will double the operating cost. (since it usually takes one watt of cooling to offset 1 watt of heat generation)
I don't know where you got this figure, but the cooling efficiency of a typical air conditioner is far greater than 1/1. Air conditioners made since 1990 are required to have an efficiency of 8/1. That means you can move 8 units of energy at a cost of 1 unit. A central AC has an efficiency of at least 9.7. Central AC can be had with efficiencies approaching 17.
Since school usually isn't in session during the summer the cooling costs are going to be even less. In all you're only off by another factor of 10. Perhaps you should consider that you're not too good at estimating costs.
It's just you. then suddenly, something hits it and damages the tiles causing it to break up later. Then, the very first shuttle launched after this suffers the exact same fate.
No, nothing hit the orbiter on this flight at all. Debris did come off, but it didn't hit the orbiter. Out of 100's of shuttle missions, 2 have had this problem right after each other, what are the odds?
Of stuff hitting the orbiter if debris comes off? Pretty good. They didn't think much of the problem 2 1/2 years ago because it happened all the time. Why have we never heard of shuttles having tiles repaired in space before
Because NASA has never had a tile repaired in space before and they've still not repaired a tile in space. Generally you don't hear about things that don't happen. or having damage caused by something hitting it?
Because we've never lost a shuttle before 2 1/2 years ago due to debris. The space shuttle is old news and a minor detail about damage to a tile from debris doesn't catch the eye of the news media (until now that is). Just because it doesn't appear in national media doesn't mean Nasa hasn't released details about it. Hell, when the Shuttle was new it lost a lot of tiles off the orbiter on each launch.
The article is a bit long, but you'll find this vulnerability was patched 6 months ago. The issue here is that Cisco wasn't upfront about the seriousness of the flaw.
You need to do some actual measurements of the performance load you're going to put on the server. Depending on the queries you're doing a Dual Xeon could be extreme overkill, or not nearly enough.
Completely screw all the die-hards that buy early or pre-order machines, so they don't get a feature that'll be a major selling point a while down the road.
Pff.. HD-DVD is going to be a hard sell to the vast majority of consumers. Everyone already has DVD players, and no one wants to upgrade to HD-DVD because they don't even have a high-definition screen to take advantage of it. DVD is at the "good enough" stage right now. That might not be the case in say 5-10 years, but I find it doubtfull that many studios are even going to release very many HD-DVD movies anytime soon.
In summary HD-DVD is going to be a mostly useless technology like mini-disc. I think Microsoft has made an excellent decision. Wait on HD-DVD until it becomes cheap and available. It still won't be very usefull to anyone, but it'll draw in enough people that care about specs (PS3 supporting blu-ray) to be worth it.
I completely agree with you. However, I think the game designers will also agree with you. Coupled with the facts that games just don't take up more space than a DVD can hold, it seems extremely unlikely that any game maker is going to put out a game on HD-DVD.
There's simply very little reason to do it, and a lot of good reasons NOT to do it. What game designers want to piss off all the early adopters of a platform? (And that's exactly who they'd piss off if they came out with a HD-DVD only game).
That is a problem since researchers and engineers are constantly building upon what was previously done. Thus working for one company necessarily exposes you to confidential information that your old company would need to hide from your new company in order to remain competitive.
What a lot of baloney. Non-disclosure agreements are what's used to protect confidential information. Patent law is meant to protect new developments. Trying to own someones ability to work is simply not the way to protect a competitive edge.
Anyway, if you'll remember the analogy was supposed to be about how specialization is necessary in certain cases. See how your argument doesn't apply? You said, and I quote:
If you're a heart surgeon it's important to be the best at heart surgery. Increasing your skills in dermatology to avoid non-compete clauses would only take time away from knowing more about heart surgery.
This implies that heart surgeons spend all their resources learning about heart surgery and won't take the time to broaden their education on other parts of the body. That is wrong. If you want to further clarify what you meant there, by all means do so. That is what the "Reply" button is for.
Umm.. heart surgeons DON'T spend time learning about dermatology. Why would they? It has nothing to do with heart surgery and would teach them absolutely nothing usefull. You may have some personal value about everyone in every profession having a broad knowledge base, but that doesn't mean it's usefull to people in specialized professions or that they try to have a broad range of knowledge.
There is such a thing as a general practioner. They're the ones that need to maintain the broad knowledge base, but specialists always go for depth.
Is he moving away from 'good-enough' with lots of features constantly coming out, towards a more BSD-esque, move along slowly with stable-code philosophy?
I wouldn't say that. It used to be that active kernel development took place on odd kernel numbers (2.1,2.3,2.5), and bugfixes only happened in even kernel numbers. This has changed recently due to odd branches not being tested enough by distributions. Of course this leads to instability in the kernel because new untested stuff is "dangerous".
This move toward getting all the mess at once, and then trying to work out the problems with the mess is an attempt at rectifying the stability problems that have crept up because of active development in the 2.6 series. It's much easier to fix bugs if you don't get any surprises midway through the bugfixing process.
Really I think this is just another example of striving for "good enough". Few would argue that instability in the kernel qualifies as "good enough". With this change in the development process I think Linus is trying to get more toward "good enough".
This court case is about the specific terms of this guys contract. The general idea of noncompetes still remain solid.
The law is largely based on precedent. A ruling on this case can effect more than just this one guy. Fortunately we have this legal invention known as a "court of law" to work out weither the terms are fair or not, as opposed to the "court of slashdot" which can't even get it's spelling right.
Right, because the court of law always determines fairness. Courts determine who wins, and what the laws are but never determine fairness. Each individual determines for themself what is constitutes "fair". It should come as no surprise that people on Slashdot have strong opinions when it comes to companies trying to enforce these unethical employment agreements. Strangely we're not all executives with big golden parachutes, million dollar salaries, and the ability to negotiate away things we don't like in a contract.
Except heart surgeons are doing the same thing each time. Researchers and engineers are not, or at least that is what these contracts are designed to enforce. Thus your analogy is flawed.
There's new techniques all the time. I'm sure each surgery isn't exactly the same. People are different, disease among people is different. Even if heart surgeons DID do the same thing each time, why would that make the analogy flawed? Doctors are required to take a broad selection of courses in med school. They need a broad understanding of biology and human anatomy in order to perform their basic job and to later adapt when the procedures change with new technology. It is certainly not the case that they know everything about the heart and nothing about the skin.
I never said a heart surgeon knows nothing about skin. The difference is a heart surgeon doesn't know very MUCH about dermatology, and would be completely unqualified to be a dermatologist. It's even very likely that a heart surgeon has forgotten most of what he/she learned in dermatology say 15 years ago.
The situation is very similar to someone who studied Computer Science in college. Someone who's gone into the networking field isn't going to know a hell of a lot about specialized data structures and C++ programming, even though the computer science education is fairly broad and likely covered both of those topics.
Should it be possible for a big corp to throw lots of money at the key employees of the competition and drive them out of business?
I don't know if that should allowed or not, but that's not what we're talking about here. What your describing sounds like anti-competitive behavior from another company. If that's what you're really against then ask for laws against that kind of thing. Maybe such laws already exist.
but a contract is a contract is a contract. If you sign your name to a contract stating you won't do something, you shouldn't do it.
Bzzzt. Sorry, but just because you put it on paper and sign it doesn't make the contract valid. There's MANY examples of things that aren't enforceable under contract law. I believe a California judge struck down a 2 year non-compete clause an employee had with his/her employer because it didn't let the employee earn a living.
Which is completely irrelevant as to whether non-compete clauses are legal. Standard employment contracts for large corps are just filled with things that lie on very shaky legal ground, or are just completely illegal. It's all about scare tactics, not actual law.
The above is funny/ironic especially when propped up right next to the advice given every time an outsourcing story shows up here. Gee, only good at one thing? What's that about having broad skills?
Specialization is necessary when what you're trying to do is difficult. If you're a heart surgeon it's important to be the best at heart surgery. Increasing your skills in dermatology to avoid non-compete clauses would only take time away from knowing more about heart surgery. He was paid very well at Microsft. He can afford a time-out till the slashdot lawyers figure something out.
This case isn't about one guy. This case is about the validity of non-compete clauses. This guys ability to live for 5 months or more is irrelevant.
It doesnt say that you cannot program, or make a living, but not with a competitor.
Riiight. So take a guy who say is an expert in search technology. He can still work at Burger King, but not what he's the most qualified to do. Totally evil. If the shoe was on the other foot, and a Google employee went to Microsoft and managed to get the jump on Google's X number of projects, Im sure there would be a lot of support for non-competition agreement.
That could easily be covered by non-disclosure agreements. I don't have any problem with those, few people do. Unfair competition is one thing, but simply being able to make a living doing what you're trained to do is quite quite different.
I just can't see how a non-compete clause in a contract can possibly be valid. Are employees supposed to be owned by their former employee even after they're not being paid? Intellectual property is one thing, but the broad powers of a non-compete clause is just criminal.
What's really bad is the judge issued a restraining order, and the trial isn't set until January 9th! Any normal person would be crippled by not being able to work in their industry for at least 5 months.
There's a couple of possibilities you hadn't thought of. Say you can track down a printer to a certain store. How many printers of that model were sold in the last say 6 months? Even if it's as high as a hundred that's a decent lead if you have other leads to correlate that information with. If in your list of names there's a guy who's had a record for counterfeiting or fraud, well that's a good possibility right their.
There's other possibilities for the technology beyond just finding suspects. Let's say Phunny Joe prints up a bunch of funny money, and sells it to a bunch of rubes for 5 cents on the dollar. Rubey the Rube gets caught passing funny money, and tells the secret service he bought it from Phunny Joe. By this time Phunny Joe has finished this counterfeitting run and has no evidence lying around when the Secret Service raids his house (figuring that some of the rubes are going to get busted..being that they're rubes). Joe kept the printer though, since it was quite expensive and is normal office equipment. Using the encoded serial numbers on the funny money Joe's printer then can be used to prove that Phunny Joe was the original counterfeiter, so Joe goes to prison.
The other possibilities are just something akin to traffic analysis. Knowing that a lot of counterfeit money is coming from the same printer, and thus the same person is valuable information. It establishes patterns, times of operation, etc.
The problem is that it's impossible to even know what they're even trying to create in the first place. Without some kind of guideline to start with you might as well ignore the recipe they came up with and use your own.
It's as if you've got a collection of code that's incomplete, but you're not sure what the completed product was actually supposed to do. How would you possibly fill in the missing pieces of code?
Slashdot Mirror
their bosses don't care if they make the Sysadmin's job harder.
But they do (or should) care about added cost. Harder usually means it takes extra time, extra expertise, or both. That's more expensive.
But anyone with half a brain should be able to realize that all those years of evolution must have made a difference for people living in different environments and facing different types of problems.
Not terribly much difference. If you're living near the equator you need more protection from the sun, hence more melanin. Asians tend to be shorter, maybe because food was more scarce in much of Asia? All of this is irrelevant to the discussion though. It's never been shown there's any mental differences between different geographic groups.
But if you start from an assumption that all races are equal
And here is the start of the flaw in your logic. First of all there's no such thing as "race". The word itself implies some kind of inherent difference between people. I don't think you meant to imply that, but I think the word iteself has that connotation. You must mean skin color. The question is "Are there any meaningfull difference in the socio-economics of people of different skin color?" The obvious answer is yes. People with "white" skin color have a higher percentage of people in the middle class than people with brown skin color. It's a cycle that perpetuates itself. Middle class people tend to value education more, live in areas with better schools, don't live in areas with high crime, etc. Should it be any surprise that middle class kids tend to grow up and have better jobs than poor kids?
But the fact of the matter is, if you start from that assumption - that all races are equal - then there must be something - some link in the chain somewhere - holding these ethnic groups back from getting these jobs.
See, this is where people get into trouble with the reasoning. People of one skin color have no genetic advantages over someone of another skin color (except perhaps resistance to sunburns). That doesn't mean that the environments are at all similar. The link is obvious, and it's economic. Poor people tend to produce more poor people. Middle class people tend to produce more middle class people. You don't specifically state it, but your assumption sounds like the break in the chain is racism. Obviously there's some of that, but the problem lies more with just being poor.
As you've found out word is intended to create paper documents, not web content. I think you really need to look at the bigger picture here. You're currently taking word documents and desperately trying to convert them to HTML so they can be published on the web. Great, but not a good solution to your larger problem.
The really the question is, why are you accepting word documents in the first place? If your authors are serious about publishing on the web you should really be pushing them to give you content in html, or look into some kind of content management system. Any major website and most minor would cringe at the thought of using word as a content creation program. Those should really be your long term goals as this word->html business is really quite a crappy system. If you don't start pushing people now to change to something more sane they never will.
Eventually you're going to end up with a difficult site to manage because of all the word->html conversions. Solve the short term problem with some cleanup program, but you really need to work on the long term problem before it kills you, or the site.
More choices allows us to pick the best of those available, thus resulting in the "best future".
Nonsense. More choices can give us better choices, but they can also just lead to confusion and stagnation. Look at the competing Blu-Ray and HD-DVD standards. The most likely route is the two choices will only confuse consumers into sticking with DVD. No one likes adopting dead-end technology.
The point is that when you need one standard that lasts for a long time more choices lead to no choice. Eventually one will likely beat out the others, (which could wind up being the old technically inferrior standard), but more choices doesn't always lead to a better outcome.
Similar tools in various Linux distros are getting better, but are not as good.
Redhat network for Redhat enterprise linux far exceeds what Windows Update can do. Can Windows update manage entire groups of machines, schedule updates and reboots via a website, tell you the patch status of all your machines, and install software via the website? Redhat network can.
the national average for killowatt hour costs last year was 8.7 cents per KW hour. but many places it's well over 10 cents/kw hour. It will be rising sharply since the new clean-coal laws were passed this year as well as the price of natural gas going up due to the war.
Except this isn't a program in all of the US, it's a program in Indiana. The best electric rates I could get are from 1999, which puts the rates at just where I said, between 6 and 7 cents/kilowatt hour. See
http://www.incontext.indiana.edu/2001/oct-nov01/d
When I measure the current it, draw 11.4 amps average current on average. so thats 130 watts
You must have a very powerfull machine, or you're measuring it while playing a game. Most PCs at idle don't use much power. The processor and graphics chips only draw large amounts of power when performing calculations. Most of the time the PC is going to be idle. See:
http://www.macalester.edu/cit/faq/power_usage.htm
for actual numbers.
add on a monitor and were up around 200 watts.
LCDs are cheap enough that most new computers for business are coming with them because of the smaller space, and decreased power usage. At most an LCD uses 40 watts, many use far less.
With AC the efficiency of the unit under ideal conditions is not the measure of how it performs under actual conditions. You are assuming that the cooling power needed is delivered in a perfect fashtion to where it is needed.
I actually never stated any conclusion about heating costs. I'm merely pointing out that they're far less than 1/1. You can nitpick about perfect efficiency, but the costs are obviously far less than 1/1.
your're right about the 300K->500K slip up, though the estimate is essentially correct given the stated inputs. You just want to use different inputs.
So being off by a factor of 1.66 is "essentially correct"? That's a big amount to be off by for something to be correct. When you order a dinner and they're off by 66% in telling you how much it costs is that "essentially correct"?
aside from a quibble over the AC its essentially correct.
A factor of two is a "quibble"? He's dead wrong about doubling costs for cooling. He's wrong from a thermodynamic perspective, and a usage perspective. Add up all those large errors, and you get one big huge error.
500K * 200 watts = 100 Megawatts of power at 10 cents a kilowatt hour is $10,000 dollars per hour to operate. In winter time this might offset the cost of heating if they can distribute the heat, but the rest of the year the cooling costs to offset this heat load will double the operating cost. (since it usually takes one watt of cooling to offset 1 watt of heat generation)
You're off on your estimates of every single number. It's 300,000 machines, not 500,000. A PC uses about 60 watts of power, and LCD monitor uses maybe 40 watts. Power costs about 6-7 cents per kilowatt hour.
So that's
((300,000 * 100) / 1000) *
but the rest of the year the cooling costs to offset this heat load will double the operating cost. (since it usually takes one watt of cooling to offset 1 watt of heat generation)
I don't know where you got this figure, but the cooling efficiency of a typical air conditioner is far greater than 1/1. Air conditioners made since 1990 are required to have an efficiency of 8/1. That means you can move 8 units of energy at a cost of 1 unit. A central AC has an efficiency of at least 9.7. Central AC can be had with efficiencies approaching 17.
Since school usually isn't in session during the summer the cooling costs are going to be even less. In all you're only off by another factor of 10. Perhaps you should consider that you're not too good at estimating costs.
Is it just me or is this a bit of a coincidence?
It's just you.
then suddenly, something hits it and damages the tiles causing it to break up later. Then, the very first shuttle launched after this suffers the exact same fate.
No, nothing hit the orbiter on this flight at all. Debris did come off, but it didn't hit the orbiter.
Out of 100's of shuttle missions, 2 have had this problem right after each other, what are the odds?
Of stuff hitting the orbiter if debris comes off? Pretty good. They didn't think much of the problem 2 1/2 years ago because it happened all the time.
Why have we never heard of shuttles having tiles repaired in space before
Because NASA has never had a tile repaired in space before and they've still not repaired a tile in space. Generally you don't hear about things that don't happen.
or having damage caused by something hitting it?
Because we've never lost a shuttle before 2 1/2 years ago due to debris. The space shuttle is old news and a minor detail about damage to a tile from debris doesn't catch the eye of the news media (until now that is). Just because it doesn't appear in national media doesn't mean Nasa hasn't released details about it. Hell, when the Shuttle was new it lost a lot of tiles off the orbiter on each launch.
The article is a bit long, but you'll find this vulnerability was patched 6 months ago. The issue here is that Cisco wasn't upfront about the seriousness of the flaw.
What do I need?
You need to do some actual measurements of the performance load you're going to put on the server. Depending on the queries you're doing a Dual Xeon could be extreme overkill, or not nearly enough.
Completely screw all the die-hards that buy early or pre-order machines, so they don't get a feature that'll be a major selling point a while down the road.
Pff.. HD-DVD is going to be a hard sell to the vast majority of consumers. Everyone already has DVD players, and no one wants to upgrade to HD-DVD because they don't even have a high-definition screen to take advantage of it. DVD is at the "good enough" stage right now. That might not be the case in say 5-10 years, but I find it doubtfull that many studios are even going to release very many HD-DVD movies anytime soon.
In summary HD-DVD is going to be a mostly useless technology like mini-disc. I think Microsoft has made an excellent decision. Wait on HD-DVD until it becomes cheap and available. It still won't be very usefull to anyone, but it'll draw in enough people that care about specs (PS3 supporting blu-ray) to be worth it.
I completely agree with you. However, I think the game designers will also agree with you. Coupled with the facts that games just don't take up more space than a DVD can hold, it seems extremely unlikely that any game maker is going to put out a game on HD-DVD.
There's simply very little reason to do it, and a lot of good reasons NOT to do it. What game designers want to piss off all the early adopters of a platform? (And that's exactly who they'd piss off if they came out with a HD-DVD only game).
That is a problem since researchers and engineers are constantly building upon what was previously done. Thus working for one company necessarily exposes you to confidential information that your old company would need to hide from your new company in order to remain competitive.
What a lot of baloney. Non-disclosure agreements are what's used to protect confidential information. Patent law is meant to protect new developments. Trying to own someones ability to work is simply not the way to protect a competitive edge.
Anyway, if you'll remember the analogy was supposed to be about how specialization is necessary in certain cases. See how your argument doesn't apply?
You said, and I quote:
If you're a heart surgeon it's important to be the best at heart surgery. Increasing your skills in dermatology to avoid non-compete clauses would only take time away from knowing more about heart surgery.
This implies that heart surgeons spend all their resources learning about heart surgery and won't take the time to broaden their education on other parts of the body. That is wrong. If you want to further clarify what you meant there, by all means do so. That is what the "Reply" button is for.
Umm.. heart surgeons DON'T spend time learning about dermatology. Why would they? It has nothing to do with heart surgery and would teach them absolutely nothing usefull. You may have some personal value about everyone in every profession having a broad knowledge base, but that doesn't mean it's usefull to people in specialized professions or that they try to have a broad range of knowledge.
There is such a thing as a general practioner. They're the ones that need to maintain the broad knowledge base, but specialists always go for depth.
Is he moving away from 'good-enough' with lots of features constantly coming out, towards a more BSD-esque, move along slowly with stable-code philosophy?
I wouldn't say that. It used to be that active kernel development took place on odd kernel numbers (2.1,2.3,2.5), and bugfixes only happened in even kernel numbers. This has changed recently due to odd branches not being tested enough by distributions. Of course this leads to instability in the kernel because new untested stuff is "dangerous".
This move toward getting all the mess at once, and then trying to work out the problems with the mess is an attempt at rectifying the stability problems that have crept up because of active development in the 2.6 series. It's much easier to fix bugs if you don't get any surprises midway through the bugfixing process.
Really I think this is just another example of striving for "good enough". Few would argue that instability in the kernel qualifies as "good enough". With this change in the development process I think Linus is trying to get more toward "good enough".
This court case is about the specific terms of this guys contract. The general idea of noncompetes still remain solid.
The law is largely based on precedent. A ruling on this case can effect more than just this one guy.
Fortunately we have this legal invention known as a "court of law" to work out weither the terms are fair or not, as opposed to the "court of slashdot" which can't even get it's spelling right.
Right, because the court of law always determines fairness. Courts determine who wins, and what the laws are but never determine fairness. Each individual determines for themself what is constitutes "fair". It should come as no surprise that people on Slashdot have strong opinions when it comes to companies trying to enforce these unethical employment agreements. Strangely we're not all executives with big golden parachutes, million dollar salaries, and the ability to negotiate away things we don't like in a contract.
Except heart surgeons are doing the same thing each time. Researchers and engineers are not, or at least that is what these contracts are designed to enforce. Thus your analogy is flawed.
There's new techniques all the time. I'm sure each surgery isn't exactly the same. People are different, disease among people is different. Even if heart surgeons DID do the same thing each time, why would that make the analogy flawed?
Doctors are required to take a broad selection of courses in med school. They need a broad understanding of biology and human anatomy in order to perform their basic job and to later adapt when the procedures change with new technology. It is certainly not the case that they know everything about the heart and nothing about the skin.
I never said a heart surgeon knows nothing about skin. The difference is a heart surgeon doesn't know very MUCH about dermatology, and would be completely unqualified to be a dermatologist. It's even very likely that a heart surgeon has forgotten most of what he/she learned in dermatology say 15 years ago.
The situation is very similar to someone who studied Computer Science in college. Someone who's gone into the networking field isn't going to know a hell of a lot about specialized data structures and C++ programming, even though the computer science education is fairly broad and likely covered both of those topics.
Should it be possible for a big corp to throw lots of money at the key employees of the competition and drive them out of business?
I don't know if that should allowed or not, but that's not what we're talking about here. What your describing sounds like anti-competitive behavior from another company. If that's what you're really against then ask for laws against that kind of thing. Maybe such laws already exist.
but a contract is a contract is a contract. If you sign your name to a contract stating you won't do something, you shouldn't do it.
Bzzzt. Sorry, but just because you put it on paper and sign it doesn't make the contract valid. There's MANY examples of things that aren't enforceable under contract law. I believe a California judge struck down a 2 year non-compete clause an employee had with his/her employer because it didn't let the employee earn a living.
Which is completely irrelevant as to whether non-compete clauses are legal. Standard employment contracts for large corps are just filled with things that lie on very shaky legal ground, or are just completely illegal. It's all about scare tactics, not actual law.
The above is funny/ironic especially when propped up right next to the advice given every time an outsourcing story shows up here. Gee, only good at one thing? What's that about having broad skills?
Specialization is necessary when what you're trying to do is difficult. If you're a heart surgeon it's important to be the best at heart surgery. Increasing your skills in dermatology to avoid non-compete clauses would only take time away from knowing more about heart surgery.
He was paid very well at Microsft. He can afford a time-out till the slashdot lawyers figure something out.
This case isn't about one guy. This case is about the validity of non-compete clauses. This guys ability to live for 5 months or more is irrelevant.
It doesnt say that you cannot program, or make a living, but not with a competitor.
Riiight. So take a guy who say is an expert in search technology. He can still work at Burger King, but not what he's the most qualified to do. Totally evil.
If the shoe was on the other foot, and a Google employee went to Microsoft and managed to get the jump on Google's X number of projects, Im sure there would be a lot of support for non-competition agreement.
That could easily be covered by non-disclosure agreements. I don't have any problem with those, few people do. Unfair competition is one thing, but simply being able to make a living doing what you're trained to do is quite quite different.
I just can't see how a non-compete clause in a contract can possibly be valid. Are employees supposed to be owned by their former employee even after they're not being paid? Intellectual property is one thing, but the broad powers of a non-compete clause is just criminal.
What's really bad is the judge issued a restraining order, and the trial isn't set until January 9th! Any normal person would be crippled by not being able to work in their industry for at least 5 months.
There's a couple of possibilities you hadn't thought of. Say you can track down a printer to a certain store. How many printers of that model were sold in the last say 6 months? Even if it's as high as a hundred that's a decent lead if you have other leads to correlate that information with. If in your list of names there's a guy who's had a record for counterfeiting or fraud, well that's a good possibility right their.
There's other possibilities for the technology beyond just finding suspects. Let's say Phunny Joe prints up a bunch of funny money, and sells it to a bunch of rubes for 5 cents on the dollar. Rubey the Rube gets caught passing funny money, and tells the secret service he bought it from Phunny Joe. By this time Phunny Joe has finished this counterfeitting run and has no evidence lying around when the Secret Service raids his house (figuring that some of the rubes are going to get busted..being that they're rubes). Joe kept the printer though, since it was quite expensive and is normal office equipment. Using the encoded serial numbers on the funny money Joe's printer then can be used to prove that Phunny Joe was the original counterfeiter, so Joe goes to prison.
The other possibilities are just something akin to traffic analysis. Knowing that a lot of counterfeit money is coming from the same printer, and thus the same person is valuable information. It establishes patterns, times of operation, etc.
The problem is that it's impossible to even know what they're even trying to create in the first place. Without some kind of guideline to start with you might as well ignore the recipe they came up with and use your own.
It's as if you've got a collection of code that's incomplete, but you're not sure what the completed product was actually supposed to do. How would you possibly fill in the missing pieces of code?