Cisco appear to have acquired Tandberg (video conferencing stuff) and are hiring. This huge layoff/outsourcing doesn't give me a great deal of confidence in them, so what's going on?
What are they up to?
I suppose they could get some new development going and then outsource to India it after 12-18 months.
I see, we could distract them to the point of stupefaction with our porn, eh?
There's one little fly in that particular ointment: we don't know how they reproduce. Also, they are most likely physically completely different to us and unlikely to find our unusual-to-them (i.e. ugly) forms appealing. That is, if they are visually stimulated.
What if their species, for example, reproduces by some sort of body clock causing an alteration in behaviour that results in a transfer of genetic material? It could be a compulsion like thirst or hunger with little to no pleasure involved.
Maybe it would be purely rational: I need to continue my line therefore I will offer you some of my seed.
Who knows, but I can guarantee that our porn will be of little more than scientific (biological, psychological and sociological) interest to them.
I hope they have a good laugh about how it can reduce erstwhile rational and composed intelligent adults to grunting, cavorting, goo-producing objects. And the ugly ones get left out.
Have they tried the Brits? They had a very extensive nuclear power programme and there are all kinds of used nuclear fuels from all the magnox and AGRs lying around at Sellafield.
Surely there must be something there that they can use?
"Capitalism" (companies and people that operate in capitalist economies) has come up with things like Lean Six Sigma and other trendy buzz-wordy type things to try to address these issues.
What happens is that people and companies "doing capitalism" for the first time haven't got there yet: they've got to the short-term cost-cutting and cheap-as-possible stage.
Up until very recently I worked for a company that did Lean Six Sigma very successfully. They've just sold us to an outsourcing company (to do the same work) that doesn't (they're from India). However, the outsourcing company's PHBs have waffled fantastic to our former employer's PHBs about their new and innovative culture and management techniques that can bring costs down etc.
We asked them about Lean and Six Sigma. They don't know what it is. But they did say, "We only do what the customer wants us to do." And "we're going to show you new and more efficient ways of working."
What they actually do is to hire cheap, enthusiastic, naive Indian graduates by the thousand, work them long hours ("empower" them) and encourage them to deliver quick, untested, badly designed (if at all) solutions.
This is not the environment I want to be working in. Been there, done that, got the migraines, seen the company go bust etc.
PS: technically, one type of nuclear decay (which doesn't happen in Th-232, btw) can be affected by chemical composition. To the tune of 0.01% of decay speed.
So you shoot a laser at the thorium and it makes a "heat surge." You use the heat to make steam to run a turbine etc.
If I shoot a laser at most things I'll get a "heat surge."
So what?
For this to be of any use, more energy must be coming out than going in with the laser, which implies some kind of (nuclear) reaction going on in the thorium. I'd imagine there would be fission products and neutrons given off in that case.
So what are the fission products? Do they need to be contained? How much heat do you get out per Joule of laser energy put in? How big is the neutron flux? Big enough to be a hazard to biological systems nearby (people)? Neutrons can be captured by other atoms and cause induced radioactivity, for example some kinds of steel containing nickel become highly radioactive given a neutron flux, not to mention the sodium found in common salt.
Google is now in the PHB phase, something that all companies enter when they become "mature."
This is when the traditional PHBs come in and take control. They cut back on proper R&D and innovation and decree that the company must concentrate on "core business."
There then follows a period of (hopefully) several years where the company is bled dry by the board of directors and the "investors." Meanwhile, the real innovation is done by small competitors and individuals with the good ideas and motivation.
A traditional company would ensure that they have a huge patent portfolio to crush this type of competition, to nip it in the bud.
After a few years, the company will become top heavy and any engineering will be outsourced. All that will be left is a few PHBs and a "brand."
You don't need to let yourself become dominated by a desktop environment.
I've been using a plain old window manager, Window Maker, for 10 years now, since AfterStep became crippled by bells and whistles.
I watch desktop environments come and go.
Window Maker is wonderful. It's tasteful, light-weight and it just works. Best of all, it has a very simple menu (right-click on the root window) and it can be edited with vi. if you can't be bothered running the GUI tool.
It would take a loaded gun at my head to take me away from Window Maker.
Other people in this thread were speculating the Boeing would be working interns 18 hours a day for free to compete for the chance to be selected to go on the CST.
I know they were being sarcastic, but I also know that a lot of American companies expect students to work for free for "internships." It's a nasty, exploitative practice that's starting to spread to the UK.
As for socialism, since when was working for free to let a rich person get richer ever a good idea? I don't understand why the USA insists of protecting a system that lets the super-rich get richer while the workers at the bottom (white- and blue-collar) become increasingly over-worked and poorer.
That's a problem that can be fixed without Socialism, but the foaming-at-the-mouth types refuse to acknowledge that.
America could be great it it wanted too, but the political bigots will make sure that doesn't happen.
Why do you Americans fall over yourselves to do unpaid work for greedy corporations when you're young?
It's the height of craziness, especially considering the cost of your education is so high and if you get sick at any time in your lives you'll probably be bankrupted by medical bills, unless you just rot away slowly in pain.
The new mixed-race, politically neutral,. inclusive, sexually ambiguous well-educated and eco-friendly super (or moderate) hero (or achiever). Differently-abled and culturally-aware with healing crystals, a dream catcher, wind chimes and a cape made from recycled hemp fibres.
Everybody stays poor simply to prop up the egos of the rich.
I got the impression recently that everyone stays poor because the rich keep trying to squeeze every last gram of value out of us. They look at us as a resource to be exploited to keep them in luxury. Meanwhile they let us keep just enough so that we can struggle buy and keep producing so that they can keep squeezing us.
Never mind trying to have a life. It's very difficult to do anything without spending money these days.
The late Hamish Park, Head of Department of Music at Ellon Academy, despite the fact that he loathed electric guitars, Slayer and Megadeth did teach me one thing about music: it's all about contrasts - loud and soft, high and low, major and minor...
He was pretty cool in a lot of ways. He liked his Glenn Miller and he taught me syncopation. But he didn't like Dave Mustaine.
There was sufficient diversity in PeeCee hardware by 1991 (and I dare say that compilers were good enough to write games in portable high-level languages like C or Pascal) that clock cycle counting for timing was a bad idea.
By then there were a plethora of different processors on the market and in use. Just in the PeeCee compatible world there were all of the intel processors (8086, 80286, 80386SX, 80386DX, 80486) and clones from NEC and AMD with different clock cycle counts per instruction, cache memory, different instructions being available, etc....
Heck, if your game was written in C you might even have been able to (recompile and) run it on a 68000-based machine with hardware-accelerated graphics.
1991 wasn't all that primitive.
Now, 1981 is a different story... A hex loader was a luxury in those days and colour and sound was for posh people...
Slashdot Mirror
I can't believe neither of you mentioned The Beatles.
I can. They sucked.
The Beatles are one of the most overrated pop-groups in history.
Cisco appear to have acquired Tandberg (video conferencing stuff) and are hiring. This huge layoff/outsourcing doesn't give me a great deal of confidence in them, so what's going on?
What are they up to?
I suppose they could get some new development going and then outsource to India it after 12-18 months.
I see, we could distract them to the point of stupefaction with our porn, eh?
There's one little fly in that particular ointment: we don't know how they reproduce. Also, they are most likely physically completely different to us and unlikely to find our unusual-to-them (i.e. ugly) forms appealing. That is, if they are visually stimulated.
What if their species, for example, reproduces by some sort of body clock causing an alteration in behaviour that results in a transfer of genetic material? It could be a compulsion like thirst or hunger with little to no pleasure involved.
Maybe it would be purely rational: I need to continue my line therefore I will offer you some of my seed.
Who knows, but I can guarantee that our porn will be of little more than scientific (biological, psychological and sociological) interest to them.
I hope they have a good laugh about how it can reduce erstwhile rational and composed intelligent adults to grunting, cavorting, goo-producing objects. And the ugly ones get left out.
Have they tried the Brits? They had a very extensive nuclear power programme and there are all kinds of used nuclear fuels from all the magnox and AGRs lying around at Sellafield.
Surely there must be something there that they can use?
"Capitalism" (companies and people that operate in capitalist economies) has come up with things like Lean Six Sigma and other trendy buzz-wordy type things to try to address these issues.
What happens is that people and companies "doing capitalism" for the first time haven't got there yet: they've got to the short-term cost-cutting and cheap-as-possible stage.
Up until very recently I worked for a company that did Lean Six Sigma very successfully. They've just sold us to an outsourcing company (to do the same work) that doesn't (they're from India). However, the outsourcing company's PHBs have waffled fantastic to our former employer's PHBs about their new and innovative culture and management techniques that can bring costs down etc.
We asked them about Lean and Six Sigma. They don't know what it is. But they did say, "We only do what the customer wants us to do." And "we're going to show you new and more efficient ways of working."
What they actually do is to hire cheap, enthusiastic, naive Indian graduates by the thousand, work them long hours ("empower" them) and encourage them to deliver quick, untested, badly designed (if at all) solutions.
This is not the environment I want to be working in. Been there, done that, got the migraines, seen the company go bust etc.
Ah, a fellow TWI-certified Visual Inspector of Welds!
Are you wiv me?
FORTRAN IV of all things: the mind boggles!
If I had the time and the brain power, I'd probably try writing an OS kernel in D
Ah, this would be k-electron capture?
It's been a while...I'll dig out my books.
PS: technically, one type of nuclear decay (which doesn't happen in Th-232, btw) can be affected by chemical composition. To the tune of 0.01% of decay speed.
Out of interest, which one's that?
So you shoot a laser at the thorium and it makes a "heat surge." You use the heat to make steam to run a turbine etc.
If I shoot a laser at most things I'll get a "heat surge."
So what?
For this to be of any use, more energy must be coming out than going in with the laser, which implies some kind of (nuclear) reaction going on in the thorium. I'd imagine there would be fission products and neutrons given off in that case.
So what are the fission products? Do they need to be contained? How much heat do you get out per Joule of laser energy put in? How big is the neutron flux? Big enough to be a hazard to biological systems nearby (people)? Neutrons can be captured by other atoms and cause induced radioactivity, for example some kinds of steel containing nickel become highly radioactive given a neutron flux, not to mention the sodium found in common salt.
This sounds like a lot of balderdash to me.
Google is now in the PHB phase, something that all companies enter when they become "mature."
This is when the traditional PHBs come in and take control. They cut back on proper R&D and innovation and decree that the company must concentrate on "core business."
There then follows a period of (hopefully) several years where the company is bled dry by the board of directors and the "investors." Meanwhile, the real innovation is done by small competitors and individuals with the good ideas and motivation.
A traditional company would ensure that they have a huge patent portfolio to crush this type of competition, to nip it in the bud.
After a few years, the company will become top heavy and any engineering will be outsourced. All that will be left is a few PHBs and a "brand."
You don't need to let yourself become dominated by a desktop environment.
I've been using a plain old window manager, Window Maker, for 10 years now, since AfterStep became crippled by bells and whistles.
I watch desktop environments come and go.
Window Maker is wonderful. It's tasteful, light-weight and it just works. Best of all, it has a very simple menu (right-click on the root window) and it can be edited with vi. if you can't be bothered running the GUI tool.
It would take a loaded gun at my head to take me away from Window Maker.
Other people in this thread were speculating the Boeing would be working interns 18 hours a day for free to compete for the chance to be selected to go on the CST.
I know they were being sarcastic, but I also know that a lot of American companies expect students to work for free for "internships." It's a nasty, exploitative practice that's starting to spread to the UK.
As for socialism, since when was working for free to let a rich person get richer ever a good idea? I don't understand why the USA insists of protecting a system that lets the super-rich get richer while the workers at the bottom (white- and blue-collar) become increasingly over-worked and poorer.
That's a problem that can be fixed without Socialism, but the foaming-at-the-mouth types refuse to acknowledge that.
America could be great it it wanted too, but the political bigots will make sure that doesn't happen.
Signed, A. Eurocommie.
Why do you Americans fall over yourselves to do unpaid work for greedy corporations when you're young?
It's the height of craziness, especially considering the cost of your education is so high and if you get sick at any time in your lives you'll probably be bankrupted by medical bills, unless you just rot away slowly in pain.
Slashdot has always been full of linux/java fanboys
The MS-apologists appeared back about when XP came out and drowned out the Linux fanboys. There have been very few Java fanboys on here, ever.
Now, IBM fanboys....
The new mixed-race, politically neutral,. inclusive, sexually ambiguous well-educated and eco-friendly super (or moderate) hero (or achiever). Differently-abled and culturally-aware with healing crystals, a dream catcher, wind chimes and a cape made from recycled hemp fibres.
Everybody stays poor simply to prop up the egos of the rich.
I got the impression recently that everyone stays poor because the rich keep trying to squeeze every last gram of value out of us. They look at us as a resource to be exploited to keep them in luxury. Meanwhile they let us keep just enough so that we can struggle buy and keep producing so that they can keep squeezing us.
Never mind trying to have a life. It's very difficult to do anything without spending money these days.
Interesting, insightful, informative.
NTL was previously hypothesised as being an experiment in making BT's customer service look good.
Indeed. I gave up my NTL cable and went to (nominally) slower ADSL. The ADSL was slower, but at least it worked for more than 10 minutes a day.
It took NTL 10 months to actually get anything done about the problems with their pathetic service.
aluminum rusts
No it does not.
The late Hamish Park, Head of Department of Music at Ellon Academy, despite the fact that he loathed electric guitars, Slayer and Megadeth did teach me one thing about music: it's all about contrasts - loud and soft, high and low, major and minor...
He was pretty cool in a lot of ways. He liked his Glenn Miller and he taught me syncopation. But he didn't like Dave Mustaine.
This sounds interesting, More details please.
There was sufficient diversity in PeeCee hardware by 1991 (and I dare say that compilers were good enough to write games in portable high-level languages like C or Pascal) that clock cycle counting for timing was a bad idea.
By then there were a plethora of different processors on the market and in use. Just in the PeeCee compatible world there were all of the intel processors (8086, 80286, 80386SX, 80386DX, 80486) and clones from NEC and AMD with different clock cycle counts per instruction, cache memory, different instructions being available, etc....
Heck, if your game was written in C you might even have been able to (recompile and) run it on a 68000-based machine with hardware-accelerated graphics.
1991 wasn't all that primitive.
Now, 1981 is a different story... A hex loader was a luxury in those days and colour and sound was for posh people...
You, sir, are today's winner!
What are you, some kind of lily-livered yellow wuss pinko-commie liberal socialist fascist un-American terrorist lover?