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User: gr8_phk

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  1. Re:Leadership vs Management on Simulations and the Future of Learning · · Score: 1
    In the simplest possible terms, Management is reactionary and Leadership is proactive.

    A manager keeps the sheep in line doing what the upper manager or the customer (or the market or the investors) asked them to do. One big problem is that the customer generally doesn't know what they want. Customers have problems they want solved - they don't know what a good solution looks like although they may have some suggestions. If they have solid specifications your really doing contract work not product development. Never tell a manager he's wrong - there's nothing you can do.

    A leader has a real vision of where the product is going and what it's going to look like. This differs from solid visions of profit or growth based on nebulous product ideas (CEOs are particularly stricken with this idea of "vision"). Good leaders may not always be correct. However, they can be convinced to change direction - they don't change with the wind or based on stock prices. They change direction because they solidly believe there is a better way to go. As long as they aren't an egotistical A$$ these people can be great to work for. Don't tell a leader he's wrong either, convince him there is a better path and he may change direction.

    The old term "design by committee" comes from people who work under a manager. You get a bunch of people kicking around ideas and politics determines what gets implemented rather than solid rational decisions and an idea what the thing should look like when it's done. When it's finnished and it sucks, it's really hard to point to someone. The manager will claim he "managed" the developers just fine and this is what came out of that process.

    Large corporations are often full of managers. Startups often have leaders. Large corporations are fairly consistent but not real innovative - that's what managing a bunch of people doing the same thing (hence requiring no big decisions) gets you. Startups innovate and break new ground - that's what vision and leadership get you. Startups can fail if the vision is not really something the market wants. Large corporations can fail if more of the same old thing is not what the market wants.

    I'm really starting to ramble now. Go to business school to be a manager. Join the military to learn leadership. Get experience in a field to form a sensible vision. And by all means, read Dilbert - Scott Adams doesn't just make that $hit up.

  2. Re:No mention of sender pays on FTC Wants Comments on Email Authentication · · Score: 1
    " How are you going to handle payments and payment verification anonymously?"

    I was refering to proof of work methods. The receiver [software] requires proof that the sender did a certain amount (receiver adjustable) of computation in order to accept a message. The computation is hard to do but easily verified. It depends on the content of the message and header so that it must be done for each message. This adds a computational cost to sending email but not receiving it. Sending billions of messages (spam) would be prohibitive due to the significant real money cost of the computation hardware. Sending a few emails would be free because most computers are under used when they are on anyway.

    People bring up the zombie networks that could offload the cost to the spammer, but 1) that's a different problem that requires a solution of its own regardless of the spam problem. and 2) People would notice something wrong when their machine runs slowly because it's caclulating postage all the time for spam.

    There are implementations of this already. They just aren't in widespread use right now. Google for it.

  3. gnome integration on Open Source Speech Recognition - With Source · · Score: 1
    When GNome adopts a speech synth and an API, people will start to use it. When people start to use it, people will demand better quality. Then someone will improve it.

    Now for a great idea (someone will patent it I'm sure):
    Have your RSS feed reader queue up headlines or even sysnopis. Have your music player monitor the news queue and when there is enough stuff, wait for the current song to end and read the headlines as a news report. This would be easy with a nice integrated text to speech API. Get your tunes and news without interrupting your work.

    Then I'd optionally want a virtual person (torso) in a small window with lip-sync to do the job. Combine speech recognition with gnome-storage and you'd have an office assistant thats worth having - so long as s/he's hot (i.e. not a paperclip).

    Aim high and integrate what's already out there. It's not perfect, but it needs to be integrated with other stuff before people will really want to improve it a lot.

  4. Leadership vs Management on Simulations and the Future of Learning · · Score: 4, Insightful

    No one in my company knows the difference. Simply teaching that would be a big help.

  5. Use a shill on Microsoft Releases FlexWiki as Open Source · · Score: 1
    "Note how it is designed to stop unscrupulous people from charging you a royalty. Something that GPL doesn't do."

    So the unscrupulous company gets a patent and then tells developer X (who does not work for them) to put it into the code without telling that it's patented.

    It was a nice try by IBM, but it doesn't solve the real problem which is the patent system. They've also created yet another "open source" license. I'm still waiting to hear if it's really GPL + an attempt to handle the patent issue. If it's not as solid as GPL in any other way, I'd prefer it not exist. IANAL so someone please educate me :-)

  6. No mention of sender pays on FTC Wants Comments on Email Authentication · · Score: 3, Interesting

    There was no mention of sender pays postage as a solution. Anything that prevents anonymous email has an inherent central control which the internet doesn't need more of.

  7. Re:Uses the IBM Public License on Microsoft Releases FlexWiki as Open Source · · Score: 2, Informative

    The FSF has stated that the CPL (is that the one they're using?) is not GPL compatible due to patent issues. They did not express an opinion about the patent requirements of the license, just that it makes it incompatible with the GPL.

  8. Re:Its called a trademark silly on Open Source And Closed Standards? · · Score: 1
    J++ was not a Sun product and it wasn't called Java. Remember, if Sun wants to truely open source Java, they must relinquish control. Yet they are trying to retain control of the standard. You can't have it both ways. The trademark would allow them to control what gets called "JAVA", but if the open source version forked and moved away from their standard and became the defacto standard then they would have lost control anyway. This won't happen as long as they do the right thing, but there is little reason to think they will.

    In the end, they can't have it both ways.

  9. Where's the GPS on PDA Designed for the Great Outdoors · · Score: 1

    Forget Blue Tooth, an outdoor device requires GPS.

  10. What will happen on More Calls for Patent Reform · · Score: 4, Insightful

    1) These high profile people will convince congress that the system needs change.
    2) Business interests will direct the changes.
    3) The system will be worse than today.

  11. Re:Uhm, economics, no? on Europeans To Monitor American Voters · · Score: 1
    What does that mean? You think their economy would be hurt by holding a middle finger to the US regarding money owed?

    Why I respond to an AC who will never see the response is beyond me ;-)

  12. Its called a trademark silly on Open Source And Closed Standards? · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Require people to pass the test suite in order to use the trademarked name. It doesn't matter. There is already an open source JAVA implementation in the works. Sun should either GPL their JAVA implementation and play an active role in its development or go away and leave others to do the job (with or without their code).

  13. Re:Humans are not dinosaurs on Asteroid 4179 Toutatis Will Miss Earth, This Time · · Score: 1
    "I am willing to bet that the last surviving species on Earth will be humans and microbes."

    It's always nice to make bets where you don't have to pay if you lose. ;-)

  14. Re:How about some less fuzzy terminology? on Pumps Without Moving Parts · · Score: 1

    "No moving parts" makes me think of MHD pumps which are not terribly efficent and only work on conducting/ionised fluids. MHD truely has no moving parts unless you count electons flowing in wire.

  15. Oshkosh on Burt Rutan On his Upcoming X-Prize Attempt · · Score: 1
    I saw Burt and Mike speak at Airventure2004 in Oshkosh. 2 hours of great stuff including fantastic video - well worth the trip. Anyway, he said a couple times that he'd "really really like" to bring SS1 to Oshkosh and raffle off a pair of tickets to ride into space during the show! He seemed skeptical but hopefull about getting the OK to do it. I expect the following at Airventure2005 in decreasing likelyhood:

    1) They bring SpaceShipOne
    2) They launch it during the event
    3) He gets to send a couple ordinary folks

    Oh, and 0) Burt will have a lot to say which will be very interesting.

  16. Re:Uhm, no. on Europeans To Monitor American Voters · · Score: 1
    "if the US were in turmoil, it would significantly negatively impact the rest of the world."

    I think you overstate our importance. Sure, we provide most of the muscle for the U.N. forces, but that's just because WE need to. If the US collaped, do you think European nations would suddenly start having wars among themselves? Would China suddenly pick a fight with India? There would be some fighting over the newly available oil (that the US wouldn't be using) but I suspect all of the major areas could continue on reasonably well.

    I think it's hard to say what would happen.

  17. The US election was fine on Europeans To Monitor American Voters · · Score: 1, Insightful
    The last US election went fine. Remember, Bush won Florida by a little bit. Gore got all upset and went to court for recounts and all that. We all talked about interpreting chads and crap and in the end, Bush won Florida and the election. It pointed out a strange property of the system that allows the person with the popular vote not to win, but that is the system that's been in place for ages.

    The voting system isn't perfect - never has been. People hate Bush, look at the legal battle and recounting (which Gore wanted) and the fact that he didn't have the majority vote nationwide, and think he somehow cheated.

    The only major flaw I see is the one that has all attention focused on the 2 inferior candidates. Oh, that and Diebold voting machines. But then, I could be blind.

  18. pchdtv and the future on Is The Public Stuck With The Broadcast Flag? · · Score: 2, Informative
    They are building a new rev of the card. The old ones were 5V which don't work on newer boards with only 3.3V PCI. The drivers are apparently not quite perfect either - they do work and the geekier you are, the better luck you'll have. This is changing slowly.

    The new card is supposed to have windows drivers. I suspect it's in peoples best interest to help if possible to make sure they get good working Linux AND Windows drivers for the same hardware. When the flag goes into effect, they will likely have to stop shipping source code for drivers and obey the flag - they'll probably be a windows only card but you could download the Linux drivers still.

    All speculation on my part though.

  19. College costs on India Launches World's First Education Satellite · · Score: 1
    The government thinks offering student loans will help increase the number of educated people. Really, all it does is allow schools to charge more because there is more money available. Many students buy into it and end up in major debt by the time they finish - if they finish. Stop the subsidies and the prices will fall.

    And now they'd like to cover prescription drugs - i.e. hand over money to drub companies and raise prices for everyone.

  20. Re:Geostationary Satellite Server on NASA Releases World Viewer · · Score: 2, Interesting

    It says it includes the Blue Marble image. I have that on CD and it takes the full CD (2 TIFF files). What compression do they use with this one?

  21. What about the others? on Submit and Moderate Questions for Bush and Kerry · · Score: 1

    What about the other candidates?

  22. Lack of direction on Is Sun Turning against Linux and Red Hat? · · Score: 1
    So what you're saying is that Sun will do whatever seems to bring in dollars. That's not a strategy or a plan. It's very common to hear companies say that type of thing and claim they're willing to 'adapt to the market' or some such. To me it just means they have no real plan. How could you invest in someone that can't state what they are doing clearly?

    Does your company have managers or leaders?

  23. Re:Won't this legalize Spyware? on Anti-Spyware Bill up for Vote in Congress · · Score: 4, Insightful
    "It appears that the house bill is very simple and just disallows installing without notice."

    Installing software on someones computer without notice is already a crime - especially if the installed software sends data back to the party who installed it. People go to prison for that type of thing, but apparently it's different if a corporation hacks an individual instead of the other way around.

  24. Upgrades on AMD vs Intel: A Linux Bout · · Score: 1

    I got stuck when I bought a 700MHz SlotA that I'm still using. I wanted to upgrade vs buying new for a long time but I can't. Now I'll be getting a 939 in the hope that I can drop in a dual-core in the future. Aside from that, you'd be correct. I don't see clock speeds increasing fast enough to offer significant upgrades before everything changes. If AMD64 gets in the 3-4GHz range, they'll probably be using DDR2 by then and require a board change which will then put you into PCIX graphics...

  25. Re:Rights on UTD Lifts Ban On WiFi Equipment · · Score: 1

    So FCC regulations trump everyone. That's what I was getting at. Why then doesn't the 2nd amendment trump state or local gun laws? Not that I favor it, but why can a company require employees not to carry guns to work as a condition of employment (even if they have a CCW permit). Clearly the constitution has more authority than the FCC, so what part of "the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed" is vague enough to allow this discrepancy in school/workplace rules vs the FCC regulation of spectrum?