If what you mean by "you probably are" is that many employers include some sort of NDA in their employment contract then the obvious answer is YES.
Access to AT&T or SCO source code required companies to have some sort of intellectual property protection policy in place. Furthermore, almost all employment contracts generically require that you comply with company policies, which includes intellectual property and trade secret policies.
The fact remains that if you admit to copying AT&T or SCO source code at work, you and your employer are almost certainly in trouble.
I don't understand if you're disagreeing here or not.
You wrote:
No. Unless I sign an NDA, I'm not bound by it.
That's just wrong. You don't have to sign a specific NDA in order to have to comply with it. You are bound by the terms of your company's employment contract, which probably requires you to comply with all trade secret and intellectual property rules of your company. If you violate the company's NDA, the company is liable to whoever they signed the NDA with, and you are at least in breach of contract with your employer and possibly in violation of laws protecting trade secrets.
So, when your employer signs an NDA, your obligation is primarily to your employer, while your employer's obligation is primarily to their partner, but both of you have obligations related to the terms of the NDA and both of you are in trouble if you break them. That's why you are both "bound" by the NDA.
Graham's method is called "naive Bayesian", and it's called "naive" for a reason. It works surprisingly well, but it barely scratches the surface of what people are doing with statistical models of text.
The lack of references on Graham's web site to prior work on text classification makes one wonder whether he just is unfamiliar with a huge body of literature going back decades or whether he just deliberately ignores them. Either way, Graham didn't invent any of the techniques and they are far from state-of-the-art. (Incidentally, you'll probably find Octave or Perl/PDL a more convenient language for implementing this stuff than Lisp.)
Anybody seriously interested in text filtering should at least do a little bit of background reading. "Readings in Information Retrieval" by Jones and Willett covers some of the basic papers.
This is what Microsoft means when they clamor for "free markets and competition": high-tech feudalism and indentured servitude.
If Microsoft were replaced with a dozen or so smaller companies that were in competition with each other, they couldn't afford to do this sort of thing to their workers.
It means that mapping induced by the program in the trajectory space doesn't agree with mapping induced by the specification.
You apparently aren't just a poor computer scientist, you are also an uneducated mathematician. Mathematicians understand that automated decision making does not reduce to proving the equivalence between a specification and a program. Decision making involves knowledge, uncertainty, validation, and many other factors. The people working on that in CS don't have all the answers, but they know a lot more than you apparently do.
FireWire is, of course, fine, too. USB2 and FireWire are nominally roughly the same speed, and both are so much faster than the disk drive that any differences don't matter.
For backup, even USB1 actually is fast enough: you just set it down and let it do its job in the background.
Anybody who relies on a dive computer to avoid the bends is just asking for trouble. Dive computers are useful as an additional safety measure, but you should always calculate your dive profiles by hand. "Closely spaced dives" are particularly problematic and should either be avoided entirely, or you should include a big extra safety margin. Unless this guy did all that and kept meticulous dive logs, I think his lawsuit has no merit, even if the computer was completely broken.
Dive tables and dive computers are rough guides, but there are far too many variables to be able to make any guarantees.
Beyond that, "the bends" may cause all sort of really unpleasant permanent injuries, but, while they can be fatal, that is fairly unusual.
The only case in which access to source code would be of interest would be if SCO or its predecessors made the code available themselves, without requiring an NDA. That could be accidental (putting it up for FTP on a public site) or deliberate (publication in a book, sending it to a university research group).
In all other cases, access to it would probably be in breach of either NDAs or computer crime laws. For example, if you had access to SCO source code through your employer, you are covered through their NDA. If you made your own copy of it, you and your employer might be in a lot of trouble. If SCO or someone else accidentally left open an NFS mount with the source tree (as has happened in the past), you'd probably be guilty of computer hacking if you tried to access it. So, be careful of what you admit to.
Overall, I think people should just ignore SCO and go about their business until SCO comes forward with concrete claims. There is no need to spin our wheels or waste any amount of time on this right now. After SCO makes concrete claims, any reasonable judge should give the open source community ample time to respond, and SCO's secretiveness and unwillingness to let people fix whatever they are complaining about probably only hurts their case.
If you are going to go with a jukebox, as some people are recommending, consider getting one that interfaces with your computer. That way, you don't have to manually catalog everything that's on it. A company by the name of PowerFile makes them, and there seem to be BSD drivers for it (I'd guess they either have been ported to Linux or would be easy to port).
I had one of those and found it to be not very practical. It takes a lot of bookkeeping to figure out which disc is where, and you still end up having boxes full of now empty jewel cases. I think you are better off keeping your CDs and DVDs on a shelf than to put them into a box like that.
I just keeep a lump of mirror matter around. It couples weakly with regular matter and radiates off most of the heat as mirror photons. Also works great for cooling Pentiums, and you can run cables right through it. I thought all geeks did that.
The Matrix is some mishmash of mostly biblical myths, mostly Old Testament. For example, the city is called "Zion" and looks like a Middle Eastern bazaar and the ship is called the "Nebukadnezar". And the humans are faced with and enslaved by a powerful enemy. I suggest reading up on your Bible.
It could be that they just pilfered the Bible for ideas, with no goal in mind other than a lot of eye candy and stories people can relate to (the Bible is a great source of stories). Or, maybe they are using science fiction for "recruiting" people to some form of Judeo-Christian belief system. Or maybe they actually have a philosophical point somewhere.
Taken on their own, I am somewhat underwhelmed by the philosophical underpinnings of the first two episodes. Despite the punditry, to me, it doesn't live up to anything more than a flashy scifi story. I think the whole story probably have done better without the biblical allusions and pretenses. But perhaps the Wachowski brothers have something interesting to say when things get resolved in the third episode.
CDs are no good for backup anymore--way too small. Get yourself an external USB2 drive for backup and just copy over everything, then put it away in a safe and secure place, far away from the computer.
Don't reinstall "just because". Yes, Windows XP installs still have problems with falling apart after a while, but less so than it used to be. Yes, applications on Windows still sometimes uninstall poorly (or not at all), but less so than it used to be. Generally, you are OK and disk drives are big enough that you can accumulate dead Windows bits with no ill effects much longer than you used to be able to.
Of course, with something like Debian Linux, there is no need to reinstall ever because both applications and the operating system are managed by the package manager and even broken things tend to correct themselves with the next update (or can be corrected manually without a full reinstall).
And whatever maintenance you perform, a little done frequently is better than a lot done all at once. Just like for dieting, exercise, and cleaning up the house.
PostScript survived because of its imaging model, which was far better than anything else around at the time. The PostScript language only survived because of the imaging model; the language itself has required numerous workarounds, add-ons, and conventions to make its continued use in printing practical, making it a complicated mess that still doesn't really work all that well as a language.
Adobe has pretty much admitted as much with their creation of PDF. Apple also dumped PostScript for PDF, for the same reasons.
PostScript was an idea worth trying, but a few decades later, we really know that procedural languages do not make good page description languages. The future belongs to standards like PDF and SVG.
No, you went on to talk about hype, etc. There need not be any hype for it to be rational that Gates and Ballmer diversify.
I was responding to two completely different points: (1) that it's good to diversify, and (2) that selling a large chunk of stocks would cause a drop in their price.
Indeed, just because a stock is overvalued doesn't mean it is necessarily rational to sell it. And I didn't claim that.
It only tells us that Gates and Ballmer are not 100% convinced that MSFT will outperform EVERY OTHER INVESTMENT OPPORTUNITY AVAILABLE TO THEM.
Yes, that's what I was saying and that's exactly what it tells us. So, what's your point?
what's wrong with that...
on
Is SARS From Mars?
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
What's wrong with that theory is not the idea that viruses and microbes may rain down onto earth from space. It still doesn't seem particularly likely, but it's possible.
But a virus that infects human cells and evades the immune system sufficiently long to kill has to have evolved in vertebrates. So, unless the universe is filled with vertebrates and they have a habit of coughing in our general direction, that doesn't seem particularly plausible.
More likely, the SARS virus belongs to the viruses that we have never bothered to identify before: among viruses and microbial life, we have identified and characterized only a tiny fraction so far.
20 year treasury bills are at 4.6% and Aaa corporate bonds at 5.33%. 30 year fixed mortgages are 5.05% today, so just paying off your mortgage may give you that kind of return.
Yes: there is a lot of hype and gambling, and then there is actual value. And to discover how much of a stock's price is due to hype, you compare how much it actually earns for a given amount of money invested in it relative to other investments. That's the point of the comparison.
and you really are looking at a longer term for stocks, not just one year.
Maybe you are. Most investment managers aren't.
Optimal investment strategies strike an optimal balance between the cost and risk of trading and the cost and risk of staying with a given portfolio. Given that trading has become very cheap, it makes sense to trade shares much more frequently than it used to.
And even if you do think that its a good stock measurement then why not buy Philip Morris?
You answered your own question: PM is an even higher risk investment than Microsoft. But Microsoft's lawsuits will probably become as vicious and pervasive as the tobacco lawsuits: not only will the monopoly lawsuits expand, you'll probably also get liability and patent lawsuits.
Folks like Balmer have to sell some time, and there is no reason why he should wait until he dies.
Exercising stock options isn't the same as selling shares in the company. After exercising his options, Ballmer could hold on to Microsoft shares.
If he sold these shares in order to consume something (holiday on the moon, whatever), that's one thing. If he sold those shares in order to invest elsewhere (which it seems like he did), it tells us that he thinks there is a significant risk that Microsoft shares will underperform or even crash.
The whole point of giving stock options is for the company to compensate their people without paying for it directly.
Yes, they are a big tax and accounting fraud. But that has nothing to do with how we are to interpret the sale of Microsoft shares.
If Gates and Ballmer were 100% convinced that Microsoft's stock would continue to go up in the long run, they wouldn't diversify if they were rational.
Furthermore, if Microsoft share prices were to collapse when there are large sales, that would mean that the amount that the shares drop by doesn't actually represent valuable assets.
So, basically, the analysis of Gates and Ballmer's shares tells us: (1) much of Microsoft's stock price is hype and does not represent actual value, and (2) they are uncertain about the future of Microsoft.
Of course, the first point we already knew. The second point is interesting because it seems to be dawning on Microsoft executives that the goose that laid the golden eggs is about to be fried.
Unless you encode to the exact format of WMA that you're playing or a lossless format, you will lose quality
So high-fidelity nuts pay Microsoft's subscription fee. That's the same kind of people who get suckered out of thousands of dollars for special amplifiers, extra-thick copper wiring, or odd speakers.
This is because each format has it's own sonic priorities
Oh, goodie, sonic the hedgehog does signal processing.
Even if the loss of quality from re-encoding mattered, the effect can be reduced by re-encoding at a somewhat higher quality.
So, you either end up with a copy the same quality as the WMA (which is not perfect compared to a CD) or worse.
Yeah, or worse: you might end up with an mp3 of a teenage boy band or Britney Spears or Celine Dion. And that's something you can't fix with a quality setting, unfortunately. No, I take that back: encoding that at 32 kbps might, in fact, improve it.
Slashdot Mirror
Access to AT&T or SCO source code required companies to have some sort of intellectual property protection policy in place. Furthermore, almost all employment contracts generically require that you comply with company policies, which includes intellectual property and trade secret policies.
The fact remains that if you admit to copying AT&T or SCO source code at work, you and your employer are almost certainly in trouble.
I don't understand if you're disagreeing here or not.
You wrote:
That's just wrong. You don't have to sign a specific NDA in order to have to comply with it. You are bound by the terms of your company's employment contract, which probably requires you to comply with all trade secret and intellectual property rules of your company. If you violate the company's NDA, the company is liable to whoever they signed the NDA with, and you are at least in breach of contract with your employer and possibly in violation of laws protecting trade secrets.
So, when your employer signs an NDA, your obligation is primarily to your employer, while your employer's obligation is primarily to their partner, but both of you have obligations related to the terms of the NDA and both of you are in trouble if you break them. That's why you are both "bound" by the NDA.
Graham's method is called "naive Bayesian", and it's called "naive" for a reason. It works surprisingly well, but it barely scratches the surface of what people are doing with statistical models of text.
The lack of references on Graham's web site to prior work on text classification makes one wonder whether he just is unfamiliar with a huge body of literature going back decades or whether he just deliberately ignores them. Either way, Graham didn't invent any of the techniques and they are far from state-of-the-art. (Incidentally, you'll probably find Octave or Perl/PDL a more convenient language for implementing this stuff than Lisp.)
Anybody seriously interested in text filtering should at least do a little bit of background reading. "Readings in Information Retrieval" by Jones and Willett covers some of the basic papers.
sig: "All science is either physics or stamp collecting." - Ernest Rutherford
And Rutherford spent most of his career stamp collecting...
Unless I sign an NDA, I'm not bound by it. I am not in general bound by my employer's legal obligations.
Not "in general", but when it comes to keeping trade secrets in particular, you probably are.
This is what Microsoft means when they clamor for "free markets and competition": high-tech feudalism and indentured servitude.
If Microsoft were replaced with a dozen or so smaller companies that were in competition with each other, they couldn't afford to do this sort of thing to their workers.
It means that mapping induced by the program in the trajectory space doesn't agree with mapping induced by the specification.
You apparently aren't just a poor computer scientist, you are also an uneducated mathematician. Mathematicians understand that automated decision making does not reduce to proving the equivalence between a specification and a program. Decision making involves knowledge, uncertainty, validation, and many other factors. The people working on that in CS don't have all the answers, but they know a lot more than you apparently do.
FireWire is, of course, fine, too. USB2 and FireWire are nominally roughly the same speed, and both are so much faster than the disk drive that any differences don't matter.
For backup, even USB1 actually is fast enough: you just set it down and let it do its job in the background.
Anybody who relies on a dive computer to avoid the bends is just asking for trouble. Dive computers are useful as an additional safety measure, but you should always calculate your dive profiles by hand. "Closely spaced dives" are particularly problematic and should either be avoided entirely, or you should include a big extra safety margin. Unless this guy did all that and kept meticulous dive logs, I think his lawsuit has no merit, even if the computer was completely broken.
Dive tables and dive computers are rough guides, but there are far too many variables to be able to make any guarantees.
Beyond that, "the bends" may cause all sort of really unpleasant permanent injuries, but, while they can be fatal, that is fairly unusual.
The only case in which access to source code would be of interest would be if SCO or its predecessors made the code available themselves, without requiring an NDA. That could be accidental (putting it up for FTP on a public site) or deliberate (publication in a book, sending it to a university research group).
In all other cases, access to it would probably be in breach of either NDAs or computer crime laws. For example, if you had access to SCO source code through your employer, you are covered through their NDA. If you made your own copy of it, you and your employer might be in a lot of trouble. If SCO or someone else accidentally left open an NFS mount with the source tree (as has happened in the past), you'd probably be guilty of computer hacking if you tried to access it. So, be careful of what you admit to.
Overall, I think people should just ignore SCO and go about their business until SCO comes forward with concrete claims. There is no need to spin our wheels or waste any amount of time on this right now. After SCO makes concrete claims, any reasonable judge should give the open source community ample time to respond, and SCO's secretiveness and unwillingness to let people fix whatever they are complaining about probably only hurts their case.
If you are going to go with a jukebox, as some people are recommending, consider getting one that interfaces with your computer. That way, you don't have to manually catalog everything that's on it. A company by the name of PowerFile makes them, and there seem to be BSD drivers for it (I'd guess they either have been ported to Linux or would be easy to port).
I had one of those and found it to be not very practical. It takes a lot of bookkeeping to figure out which disc is where, and you still end up having boxes full of now empty jewel cases. I think you are better off keeping your CDs and DVDs on a shelf than to put them into a box like that.
I just keeep a lump of mirror matter around. It couples weakly with regular matter and radiates off most of the heat as mirror photons. Also works great for cooling Pentiums, and you can run cables right through it. I thought all geeks did that.
The Matrix is some mishmash of mostly biblical myths, mostly Old Testament. For example, the city is called "Zion" and looks like a Middle Eastern bazaar and the ship is called the "Nebukadnezar". And the humans are faced with and enslaved by a powerful enemy. I suggest reading up on your Bible.
It could be that they just pilfered the Bible for ideas, with no goal in mind other than a lot of eye candy and stories people can relate to (the Bible is a great source of stories). Or, maybe they are using science fiction for "recruiting" people to some form of Judeo-Christian belief system. Or maybe they actually have a philosophical point somewhere.
Taken on their own, I am somewhat underwhelmed by the philosophical underpinnings of the first two episodes. Despite the punditry, to me, it doesn't live up to anything more than a flashy scifi story. I think the whole story probably have done better without the biblical allusions and pretenses. But perhaps the Wachowski brothers have something interesting to say when things get resolved in the third episode.
CDs are no good for backup anymore--way too small. Get yourself an external USB2 drive for backup and just copy over everything, then put it away in a safe and secure place, far away from the computer.
Don't reinstall "just because". Yes, Windows XP installs still have problems with falling apart after a while, but less so than it used to be. Yes, applications on Windows still sometimes uninstall poorly (or not at all), but less so than it used to be. Generally, you are OK and disk drives are big enough that you can accumulate dead Windows bits with no ill effects much longer than you used to be able to.
Of course, with something like Debian Linux, there is no need to reinstall ever because both applications and the operating system are managed by the package manager and even broken things tend to correct themselves with the next update (or can be corrected manually without a full reinstall).
And whatever maintenance you perform, a little done frequently is better than a lot done all at once. Just like for dieting, exercise, and cleaning up the house.
PostScript survived because of its imaging model, which was far better than anything else around at the time. The PostScript language only survived because of the imaging model; the language itself has required numerous workarounds, add-ons, and conventions to make its continued use in printing practical, making it a complicated mess that still doesn't really work all that well as a language.
Adobe has pretty much admitted as much with their creation of PDF. Apple also dumped PostScript for PDF, for the same reasons.
PostScript was an idea worth trying, but a few decades later, we really know that procedural languages do not make good page description languages. The future belongs to standards like PDF and SVG.
No, you went on to talk about hype, etc. There need not be any hype for it to be rational that Gates and Ballmer diversify.
I was responding to two completely different points: (1) that it's good to diversify, and (2) that selling a large chunk of stocks would cause a drop in their price.
Indeed, just because a stock is overvalued doesn't mean it is necessarily rational to sell it. And I didn't claim that.
It only tells us that Gates and Ballmer are not 100% convinced that MSFT will outperform EVERY OTHER INVESTMENT OPPORTUNITY AVAILABLE TO THEM.
Yes, that's what I was saying and that's exactly what it tells us. So, what's your point?
What's wrong with that theory is not the idea that viruses and microbes may rain down onto earth from space. It still doesn't seem particularly likely, but it's possible.
But a virus that infects human cells and evades the immune system sufficiently long to kill has to have evolved in vertebrates. So, unless the universe is filled with vertebrates and they have a habit of coughing in our general direction, that doesn't seem particularly plausible.
More likely, the SARS virus belongs to the viruses that we have never bothered to identify before: among viruses and microbial life, we have identified and characterized only a tiny fraction so far.
The "UK scientist" is actually Dana Scully.
20 year treasury bills are at 4.6% and Aaa corporate bonds at 5.33%. 30 year fixed mortgages are 5.05% today, so just paying off your mortgage may give you that kind of return.
federal reserve
There are huge issues that go into market cap
Yes: there is a lot of hype and gambling, and then there is actual value. And to discover how much of a stock's price is due to hype, you compare how much it actually earns for a given amount of money invested in it relative to other investments. That's the point of the comparison.
and you really are looking at a longer term for stocks, not just one year.
Maybe you are. Most investment managers aren't.
Optimal investment strategies strike an optimal balance between the cost and risk of trading and the cost and risk of staying with a given portfolio. Given that trading has become very cheap, it makes sense to trade shares much more frequently than it used to.
And even if you do think that its a good stock measurement then why not buy Philip Morris?
You answered your own question: PM is an even higher risk investment than Microsoft. But Microsoft's lawsuits will probably become as vicious and pervasive as the tobacco lawsuits: not only will the monopoly lawsuits expand, you'll probably also get liability and patent lawsuits.
Folks like Balmer have to sell some time, and there is no reason why he should wait until he dies.
Exercising stock options isn't the same as selling shares in the company. After exercising his options, Ballmer could hold on to Microsoft shares.
If he sold these shares in order to consume something (holiday on the moon, whatever), that's one thing. If he sold those shares in order to invest elsewhere (which it seems like he did), it tells us that he thinks there is a significant risk that Microsoft shares will underperform or even crash.
The whole point of giving stock options is for the company to compensate their people without paying for it directly.
Yes, they are a big tax and accounting fraud. But that has nothing to do with how we are to interpret the sale of Microsoft shares.
If Gates and Ballmer were 100% convinced that Microsoft's stock would continue to go up in the long run, they wouldn't diversify if they were rational.
Furthermore, if Microsoft share prices were to collapse when there are large sales, that would mean that the amount that the shares drop by doesn't actually represent valuable assets.
So, basically, the analysis of Gates and Ballmer's shares tells us: (1) much of Microsoft's stock price is hype and does not represent actual value, and (2) they are uncertain about the future of Microsoft.
Of course, the first point we already knew. The second point is interesting because it seems to be dawning on Microsoft executives that the goose that laid the golden eggs is about to be fried.
A well-designed, well-implemented print spooling system could be useful for other applications. Unfortunately, we don't have one of those yet.
lpd, lprng, and cups all have a nasty habit of getting into weird states. And lprng and cups can also be a b*tch to configure.
Unless you encode to the exact format of WMA that you're playing or a lossless format, you will lose quality
So high-fidelity nuts pay Microsoft's subscription fee. That's the same kind of people who get suckered out of thousands of dollars for special amplifiers, extra-thick copper wiring, or odd speakers.
This is because each format has it's own sonic priorities
Oh, goodie, sonic the hedgehog does signal processing.
Even if the loss of quality from re-encoding mattered, the effect can be reduced by re-encoding at a somewhat higher quality.
So, you either end up with a copy the same quality as the WMA (which is not perfect compared to a CD) or worse.
Yeah, or worse: you might end up with an mp3 of a teenage boy band or Britney Spears or Celine Dion. And that's something you can't fix with a quality setting, unfortunately. No, I take that back: encoding that at 32 kbps might, in fact, improve it.