MS has an obligation to ensure that their products do not cause harm to others according to nearly ever product safety law in the world. If you steal a Ford pickup and it needs a recall and you kill someone as a result of the defect, Ford won't be let off the hook.
One of these days Microsoft is going to get nailed by a "innocent third party" law suit and then the avalanche of law suits will start.
IANAL, and I doubt that you are either, but I suspect the result would be that the MS attorney will appropriately point out that they didn't build the stolen version...otherwise it would have been patched. Case dismissed.
OMG...I thought I'd never see another one of the POS Florida Data printers. When I first joined this company, 22 yrs ago as a computer technician, we had about twenty of them. Half of the damn things were always broke (mostly awaiting parts...print heads were constantly dying), and that was in spite of the fact that we had cannibalized parts from others in order to keep as many of them alive as possible.
It Sure Sucks Having a RealLife (tm)
on
D&D Is 30
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· Score: 4, Insightful
I was indoctrinated into the world of D&D while getting computer technician training at Keesler AFB, MS back in '77 (made less than $5k income that yr). Some of us spent much of our free time trying to make saving throws. That carried over to my next 2 yrs at Offutt AFB, NE...nothing else worth doing in Neb anyway. I've still got all the books & dice, but haven't played since about '85...went back to college, got married, had a kid, became a responsible adult (YUCK!). Now, nearly 25 yrs later, with a household income nearly 40 times what I made back then, I think I was enjoying life alot more in my D&D days:-(
This is a good point. Frankly make them sign a contract or a LOI stating that if they do anything illegal that they have to indemify the university of any illegal actions and take full recourse for the aforementioned.
IANAL, but I was under the impression that in order to indemnify someone, you need to have the funds to be able to back up that promise. Certainly, very few college students could do so, and that would make such an agreement useless. Then again, I might be speaking out my ass.
A comprehension or perception of reality by means of a sudden intuitive realization: "I experienced an epiphany, a spiritual flash that would change the way I viewed myself" (Frank Maier).
Why my company doesn't do LINUX
on
Why PHBs Fear Linux
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· Score: 5, Interesting
I work for a major defense contractor, where I've been integrating systems for numerous years. One of the primary reasons we don't do LINUX is because there's no profit in it for us. If we integrate a Sun, SGI, PC, etc., we get to tack on our 10% to the OS costs...and yes, I do believe this is a huge waste of taxpayer money, but that's how it's done. You can't make a profit by saving the govt. money.
If cable companies have to open up their lines, what's the difference? Your favorite ISP will just set up a domain, or maybe a mail and www server near the cable system's backbone, and charge whatever the cable company charges them + 50% retail markup. Strangely enough, it will cost about the same, have the same level of service, etc.
You'd think that maybe we all would have learned something after the DSL fallout earlier in the decade.
The point is that competition is lacking. I'm currently paying Cox Cable roughly $110/mo. (Extended basic, HBO, Showtime, and high speed (~2700+) internet). I live in urban northern VA, very near AOL HQ, and can't even get DSL because Verizon won't get off their asses and upgrade the local office. My only other option is to go with satellite. Why do you suppose companies like AOL & MSN can get away with charging $20+/mo for dial-up now...because the major competition has disappeared!
I think your memory of the DSL fallout is flawed. The telephone companies stonewalled on providing access to many of those other ISPs. Even so, they were successful in providing access at lower cost. The reason they can charge less is because they don't have the high overhead of the larger companies. I doubt that you could list a single DSL provider that was charging more then the telephone companies (I never saw one) were during the height of the.com revolution. We could certainly debate why some of these companies failed, but that would involve the.bomb fallout, the recession, and not just bad business plans.
Well, this is a very common problem. I remember when I went for interviews in 2000...all the reps at Raytheon and Boeing were saying how a huge part of their workforce was going to retire, and all that knowledge was going to walk right out the door.
Clearly, your hiring patterns have to be continuous. You can sit out economic cycles, but you can't sit out entire generations.
As a 22 yr veteran of one of the above mentioned companies, I can tell you that we've been through at least five cycles of hiring & layoffs. One of the options when layoffs are about to occur, is for management to ask folks who are nearing retirement to take that walk a bit earlier, usually for a little extra incentive. This usually frees up a high-paying postion, along with the associated dollars. Unfortunately, at companies as large as our, consistency isn't the same from site to site. So, you're likely to hear a different story at just about every facility. We have nearly 2000 folks at my location, and though there are occasionally serious losses, there's never been what you described.
The Civil War is over, buddy. Jeff Davis, Robert E Lee, and good ol' Stonewall are all dead and buried. It's time to let Virginia back into our hearts.
Damn, hate it when I get my enemies mixed up. Good catch, though it's true that most of us Virginians have no great love for Richmond (or Redmond for that matter). Guess I'm already slackin' off that New Year's resolution to preview more.
The sad part is the national government is in bed with Microsoft.
Wow, you need to take off the tin-foil had buddy.
I've been working for 26 years on govt. contracts using just about every flavor of *NIX you can think of. There's no great love for Richmond any more than there is for other large companies. Now if you're talking about lobbists being in bed with govt...that's an entirely different story.
Same as the other respondant above, though mine isn't as "low-end" as his. My iMac DV (400MHz G3 w/192M RAM) runs OS X just fine, along with Safari (works great on my cable modem), Office X and folding@home, all full time. I think I've needed to reboot it maybe twice in the last year. I'm just now thinking about upgrading, but just because I can, not because I have to.
6. In the end, award the contract to Raytheon, Boeing, Lockeed.
One small error...Raytheon is #4. And, you forgot #3, Northrop Grumman.
I've worked on DARPA projects, for one of the above companies...those folks are SO fickle it's rediculous. There's no need for any conspiracy as these companies are virtually guaranteed contracts because of political influence. Weather or not you think that's a bad thing, it seems to have worked well enough to keep us from getting the shit kicked out of us so far.
As a ten year stockholder in Micron, I may be able to add a bit to this...
Sure Micron slashed job in Manassas (I live 5 miles away)...everyone was slashing jobs back then. The Hynix purchase was not shot down by the Korean govt. In fact, they were pushing for it. The government had bailed Hynix out of bankruptcy a couple of times already (via the state controlled creditors), and the company was pouring money down the toilet. Hynix was over $6B in debt, and threatening to take its creditors down with it. The deal was ultimately shot down by the Hynix board of directors despite severe pressure from their creditors. The pressure to abort came mainly from Korean unions who didn't want to be working for Americans (I could tell you alot more about this, having lived there for six years!).
As for what Micron's goal was, well your speculations about moving jobs outside the US or gobbling up competition may be correct. But, I'd speculate that when you're the world's #2 producer, and you've got a chance to become the world's #1 producer, you just take the shot...simple as that. Anyway, there's a good summary of the outcome here.
In an attempt to compete with companies that are able to sell memory at below cost prices because they don't have to make a profit (why bother when you're constantly bailed out?), it's hard to blame Micron for raising the memory dumping problem. That said, if they colluded to fix prices, they should pay the penalty too.
You obviously don't have kids. As the parent (and single dad for six years) of a thirteen yr old, I know what my daughter does online, I know all of her friends & their parents, and I always know where she is when she's out playing. That said, it is IMPOSSIBLE to monitor your kid 24/7, so don't lay this at the feet of the parents.
As for a game being freedom of speech, I think you're really stretching the founding fathers definition...no speech has been banned here. Try inciting a riot, yelling fire in a theater, or plotting a murder with a buddy...all are "free speech", right? Same goes for the folks who were screaming freedom of speech when the Dixie Chicks were getting beat up about the Geo. Bush comment. They definately had the right to make their comments, but so do the folks who disagreed with them.
According to their site the first release was on 6/8/98. Not sure if distributed.net was before that, but you weren't running it "more then a year before seti".
They were way off on the user stats by nearly an order of magnitude. The statistics page shows over 4,800,000 users.
"It has been more than ten years since such information appliances as ATMs and grocery store UPC checkout counters were introduced"
Try 30+ years for UPC. They came about back around 72 at Krogers in Ohio. And ATMs...at least 20+ years, but that Google is left as an exercise to the reader.
No, you are wrong...la, la, la, la, la! If you would reread the orignial post, and mine, you would notice that the word "investors" was used...not analysts and markets. As an investor for over twenty years (lifetime member of AAII), I'll agree to disagree with your ASSumption that ROI doesn't matter.
Real investors don't care if a product doesn't make much money as long as it pays for itself completely.
Not quite right. Investors care dearly about the overall Return On Investment (ROI). That's why companies shed off low margin parts of their businesses in hopes of increasing that number. Hopefully, Steve & Co. are makeing plenty on the sale of iPods.
I spent much of my 20's & 30's (I'm an old fart now) working on 2 week shift rotations, through weekends and holidays. As if that weren't bad enough, we were expected to do software design, code & test on that kind of schedule. Humans can adapt to just about any straight shift, but if you want to see a bunch of zombies, put 'em on a rotation.
Slashdot Mirror
MS has an obligation to ensure that their products do not cause harm to others according to nearly ever product safety law in the world. If you steal a Ford pickup and it needs a recall and you kill someone as a result of the defect, Ford won't be let off the hook.
One of these days Microsoft is going to get nailed by a "innocent third party" law suit and then the avalanche of law suits will start.
IANAL, and I doubt that you are either, but I suspect the result would be that the MS attorney will appropriately point out that they didn't build the stolen version...otherwise it would have been patched. Case dismissed.
OMG...I thought I'd never see another one of the POS Florida Data printers. When I first joined this company, 22 yrs ago as a computer technician, we had about twenty of them. Half of the damn things were always broke (mostly awaiting parts...print heads were constantly dying), and that was in spite of the fact that we had cannibalized parts from others in order to keep as many of them alive as possible.
I was indoctrinated into the world of D&D while getting computer technician training at Keesler AFB, MS back in '77 (made less than $5k income that yr). Some of us spent much of our free time trying to make saving throws. That carried over to my next 2 yrs at Offutt AFB, NE...nothing else worth doing in Neb anyway. I've still got all the books & dice, but haven't played since about '85...went back to college, got married, had a kid, became a responsible adult (YUCK!). Now, nearly 25 yrs later, with a household income nearly 40 times what I made back then, I think I was enjoying life alot more in my D&D days :-(
This is a good point. Frankly make them sign a contract or a LOI stating that if they do anything illegal that they have to indemify the university of any illegal actions and take full recourse for the aforementioned.
IANAL, but I was under the impression that in order to indemnify someone, you need to have the funds to be able to back up that promise. Certainly, very few college students could do so, and that would make such an agreement useless. Then again, I might be speaking out my ass.
epiphany
n. pl. epiphanies
A comprehension or perception of reality by means of a sudden intuitive realization: "I experienced an epiphany, a spiritual flash that would change the way I viewed myself" (Frank Maier).
I work for a major defense contractor, where I've been integrating systems for numerous years. One of the primary reasons we don't do LINUX is because there's no profit in it for us. If we integrate a Sun, SGI, PC, etc., we get to tack on our 10% to the OS costs...and yes, I do believe this is a huge waste of taxpayer money, but that's how it's done. You can't make a profit by saving the govt. money.
If cable companies have to open up their lines, what's the difference? Your favorite ISP will just set up a domain, or maybe a mail and www server near the cable system's backbone, and charge whatever the cable company charges them + 50% retail markup. Strangely enough, it will cost about the same, have the same level of service, etc.
.com revolution. We could certainly debate why some of these companies failed, but that would involve the .bomb fallout, the recession, and not just bad business plans.
You'd think that maybe we all would have learned something after the DSL fallout earlier in the decade.
The point is that competition is lacking. I'm currently paying Cox Cable roughly $110/mo. (Extended basic, HBO, Showtime, and high speed (~2700+) internet). I live in urban northern VA, very near AOL HQ, and can't even get DSL because Verizon won't get off their asses and upgrade the local office. My only other option is to go with satellite. Why do you suppose companies like AOL & MSN can get away with charging $20+/mo for dial-up now...because the major competition has disappeared!
I think your memory of the DSL fallout is flawed. The telephone companies stonewalled on providing access to many of those other ISPs. Even so, they were successful in providing access at lower cost. The reason they can charge less is because they don't have the high overhead of the larger companies. I doubt that you could list a single DSL provider that was charging more then the telephone companies (I never saw one) were during the height of the
Blueballs kill geeks, so I'm not feeling real sorry for the fish at this time.
Well, this is a very common problem. I remember when I went for interviews in 2000...all the reps at Raytheon and Boeing were saying how a huge part of their workforce was going to retire, and all that knowledge was going to walk right out the door.
Clearly, your hiring patterns have to be continuous. You can sit out economic cycles, but you can't sit out entire generations.
As a 22 yr veteran of one of the above mentioned companies, I can tell you that we've been through at least five cycles of hiring & layoffs. One of the options when layoffs are about to occur, is for management to ask folks who are nearing retirement to take that walk a bit earlier, usually for a little extra incentive. This usually frees up a high-paying postion, along with the associated dollars. Unfortunately, at companies as large as our, consistency isn't the same from site to site. So, you're likely to hear a different story at just about every facility. We have nearly 2000 folks at my location, and though there are occasionally serious losses, there's never been what you described.
The Civil War is over, buddy. Jeff Davis, Robert E Lee, and good ol' Stonewall are all dead and buried. It's time to let Virginia back into our hearts.
Damn, hate it when I get my enemies mixed up. Good catch, though it's true that most of us Virginians have no great love for Richmond (or Redmond for that matter). Guess I'm already slackin' off that New Year's resolution to preview more.
The sad part is the national government is in bed with Microsoft.
Wow, you need to take off the tin-foil had buddy.
I've been working for 26 years on govt. contracts using just about every flavor of *NIX you can think of. There's no great love for Richmond any more than there is for other large companies. Now if you're talking about lobbists being in bed with govt...that's an entirely different story.
Same as the other respondant above, though mine isn't as "low-end" as his. My iMac DV (400MHz G3 w/192M RAM) runs OS X just fine, along with Safari (works great on my cable modem), Office X and folding@home, all full time. I think I've needed to reboot it maybe twice in the last year. I'm just now thinking about upgrading, but just because I can, not because I have to.
Now I can spend more hours sitting on my ass drinking coffee (gotta watch out for that Type-2 diabetes ya know), watching the Simpsons over wireless.
6. In the end, award the contract to Raytheon, Boeing, Lockeed.
One small error...Raytheon is #4. And, you forgot #3, Northrop Grumman.
I've worked on DARPA projects, for one of the above companies...those folks are SO fickle it's rediculous. There's no need for any conspiracy as these companies are virtually guaranteed contracts because of political influence. Weather or not you think that's a bad thing, it seems to have worked well enough to keep us from getting the shit kicked out of us so far.
As a ten year stockholder in Micron, I may be able to add a bit to this...
Sure Micron slashed job in Manassas (I live 5 miles away)...everyone was slashing jobs back then. The Hynix purchase was not shot down by the Korean govt. In fact, they were pushing for it. The government had bailed Hynix out of bankruptcy a couple of times already (via the state controlled creditors), and the company was pouring money down the toilet. Hynix was over $6B in debt, and threatening to take its creditors down with it. The deal was ultimately shot down by the Hynix board of directors despite severe pressure from their creditors. The pressure to abort came mainly from Korean unions who didn't want to be working for Americans (I could tell you alot more about this, having lived there for six years!).
As for what Micron's goal was, well your speculations about moving jobs outside the US or gobbling up competition may be correct. But, I'd speculate that when you're the world's #2 producer, and you've got a chance to become the world's #1 producer, you just take the shot...simple as that. Anyway, there's a good summary of the outcome here.
In an attempt to compete with companies that are able to sell memory at below cost prices because they don't have to make a profit (why bother when you're constantly bailed out?), it's hard to blame Micron for raising the memory dumping problem. That said, if they colluded to fix prices, they should pay the penalty too.
Parents should just do their job.
You obviously don't have kids. As the parent (and single dad for six years) of a thirteen yr old, I know what my daughter does online, I know all of her friends & their parents, and I always know where she is when she's out playing. That said, it is IMPOSSIBLE to monitor your kid 24/7, so don't lay this at the feet of the parents.
As for a game being freedom of speech, I think you're really stretching the founding fathers definition...no speech has been banned here. Try inciting a riot, yelling fire in a theater, or plotting a murder with a buddy...all are "free speech", right? Same goes for the folks who were screaming freedom of speech when the Dixie Chicks were getting beat up about the Geo. Bush comment. They definately had the right to make their comments, but so do the folks who disagreed with them.
Happy New Year!
Finally, we'll find out...
* Do bears shit in the woods?
* If a tree falls and nobody's there to hear it, does it make a sound?
* Is the Pope Catholic...
Oh well, maybe 2 out of 3.
If he doesn't believe in warming, does that make him a cold danish?...
According to their site the first release was on 6/8/98. Not sure if distributed.net was before that, but you weren't running it "more then a year before seti".
They were way off on the user stats by nearly an order of magnitude. The statistics page shows over 4,800,000 users.
Let's see...Saabs, cell phones, and BLONDE CHICS...OKAY, we give up, but only because of the blonde chics!!!
"It has been more than ten years since such information appliances as ATMs and grocery store UPC checkout counters were introduced"
Try 30+ years for UPC. They came about back around 72 at Krogers in Ohio. And ATMs...at least 20+ years, but that Google is left as an exercise to the reader.
"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers."...IBM Chairman Thomas Watson, 1943
"Computers in the future may weigh no more than 1.5 tons."...Popular Mechanics, 1949
"There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home."...Digital Equipment Corporation Chairman Ken Olson, 1977
"By the turn of this century, we will live in a paperless society."...General Motors Chairman Roger Smith, 1986
No, you are wrong...la, la, la, la, la! If you would reread the orignial post, and mine, you would notice that the word "investors" was used...not analysts and markets. As an investor for over twenty years (lifetime member of AAII), I'll agree to disagree with your ASSumption that ROI doesn't matter.
Real investors don't care if a product doesn't make much money as long as it pays for itself completely.
Not quite right. Investors care dearly about the overall Return On Investment (ROI). That's why companies shed off low margin parts of their businesses in hopes of increasing that number. Hopefully, Steve & Co. are makeing plenty on the sale of iPods.
I spent much of my 20's & 30's (I'm an old fart now) working on 2 week shift rotations, through weekends and holidays. As if that weren't bad enough, we were expected to do software design, code & test on that kind of schedule. Humans can adapt to just about any straight shift, but if you want to see a bunch of zombies, put 'em on a rotation.