If the British citizens didn't spend thier money the UK Gov't gives on the Dole (lazy bastards) the US Businesses wouldn't have any customers and no customers means they would close up and go away. Not to menton your immigration system is even MORE porus than the one on this side of the Atlantic! And this system where you get to be in the Gov't because your family has been there for 200 years since some King made him a Nobleman or something.
Your country is it's own worst enemy!
Re:Golden parachute! Golden parachute!
on
HP Fires Father of OOP
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
If he can make HP slightly more profitable for two years then he is better than Carly even if he is less educated.
As a rule, BODs don't make good turnaround CEO picks as they often want someone who will see things like they would like it seen,not someone who is going to do what needs doing to make things work. Then at the oppisite end you get the BODs that picked "Chainsaw Al" Dunlap (who was a criminal in CEO's clothing) and pretty much answered to no one and had a iron fist.
Carly has been gone about 90 days or so. She was fired. The new guy is trying to undo her mess. However getting rid of people is only a SHORT-TERM solution, and won't help after they are gone.
The law says if you were a Gov't employee and worked on awarding a contract to Company X you cannot legally leave the Gov't to work for X or a period of at least one year. Boeing got hammered for this about a year ago on the 757 Tanker deal. They and the Air Force Senior Officer they hired definately knew better. The then Boeing CEO thought it wouldn't matter since everyone would look the other way. Lockheed didn'tand brought it to the attention of the Air Force. The contract award was cancelled, many millions of $$ lost. Of course then they caught Stonecipher screwing his sexa-tary and that was the last straw. He did get a nice "retirement" bonus though when he should have gotten thrown off the building for being so stupid TWICE!
Burden of proof is on the plantiff side (MS). That could have happened but they got to prove it. Plus they got to figure out a way to sue Google's Chinese subsidiary. If they were taking a risk I'm sure they covered their ass.
The results you like to say are absolute are no where near that. A LOT depends on the state where you live, if you live in Texas for instance it can invalidate most generic restrictive contracts cocerning employment with a competitor. See http://www.akllp.com/Page.aspx?Doc_ID=2244, It's a very long and detailed legal and public policy and seperation of powers white paper but can be summed up as
"... the clear message is to avoid overreaching, vague and overly broad non-compete agreements. Thought must be invested in every such agreement to insure appropriate application to the facts applicable to the particular employee and marketplace-and no more restrictive than absolutely necessary to protect the good will and business of the employer. Pure non-competition agreements should be supplemented by other types of agreements, such as non-disclosure agreements and agreements not to solicit customers. Those types of agreements may be more enforceable."
It is a state by state issue it seems so there is NOT an absolute case to be made for either side winning.
Kind of hard to enforce the US Law on Contracts in China! He has broken no laws in China so MS hasn't got a chance in hell of suing him, so they sue his employer. Unless Google went out and actually recruited him they are toast, even if they did and he never said a thing about a 1 yr non-compete MS is not going to win. The ONLY way they win is to sue in an EMPLOYER friendly state and prove he was recruited. These cases are really realllly hard to win unless you got hard evidence Google initiated the recuritment. If all he did was make a phone call, send a resume or chat with a Google worker who encouraged him to apply MS is sunk. This is Bill Gates trying the SCO strategy called "we got no evidence but lets sue them anyway and maybe they will settle"
Perhaps 20 is the most the course can handle w/o too much clutter at the start from broken down rigs? As I recall last year the first mile or so there were a lot of dropouts. Maybe there are only 20 judges, one for each vehicle to make sure no one cheats?
Of course seeing as this IS the Government the number 20 probably came from on high and it is 20 because "we say so".
You had PUNCH CARDS? We wrote all our code in HARDWARE! We had to go to the iron ore mines, fight off the dragons, endure the bitter code, dig out our the iron ore, dig out the coal, build a fire, smelt the ore, and cast the little magnets in our core memory, find some lodestone, magnetize each core, then wire them together with the South end at the Top to be a Zero and the North to be a one.:)
What about NATURAL fertilizers such as manure and nitrogen rich cover crops. In the very old days the best fertilizer was bat guano from South America as the chemical stuff had not been invented. This will help but there is still the energy cost of the diesel fuel to plant, till, and harvest. It goes back to Physics 101, "energy is neither lost nor gained it simply changes form". It's (at best) a zeo sum game, you breakeven in the long run or you die;)
Thanks for the correction. I recall they had all sorts of issues with the implosion design firing the high explosives in the right sequence and timing the firings correctly to implode and not explode.
However, the sand particles in the "dust devil" can be quite a problem. They are abrasive and carry static electricity. Could be a problem that say solar cells would get etched by the storms and drop their efficiency. I bet it would play hell with electronics as well, and also with transmission of signals via radio. Not the destructive knock everything in it's path down power of a tornado but nothing to ignore either. The only similar thing on earth would be the large sandstorms they get in the Persian Gulf areas.
LOL...War Games...I'm surprised anyone here believed that. It was good fiction but there is ALWAYS a "man-in-the-loop" to lauch weapons, even little ones:)
Take it from someone who knows and has been there. It can't happen.
A lot of Uranium is actually found in Copper Mines. The problem is you are looking for Uranium ore that has a high percentage of the fissle U-235 that can be seperated. The normal ratio is about 500:1 but some ores are higher. Uranium is found many places in the world, Africa, the former Soviet Union and even in the USA. Read about the projects and technologies they used to seperate U-235 and U-238, it is interesting how they did it then had to scale it up 1000 fold to get enough for ONE bomb. This was before they learned to bombard the leftover U-238 with neutrons to turn it into Pu-239 which is what "breeder reactors" did. The Pu-239 was a much better bomb material.
Nukes do NOT have "rods". They have highly machined components of Plutonium, the exact size, shape, weight is classified. The first bomb had two hemispherses of Uranium that were polished smooth.
LOL, the Russian mob is more likely to sell you the material than the boss/workers concept. Anyway, after the material was transferred I doubt there would be anyone left alive to tell the world what the deal was. No witnesses means no messy loose ends that lead back to the source of the funds.
There are all sorts of sites out there that describe launch procedures, and it's a lot more complicated than you think. Accidental launches CANNOT happen with an armed warhead. This was all figured out in the 1950's and 60's . If the missle is launched w/o pre-arming the weapon all you have is MAYBE a "dirty bomb" where the impact would spread radioactive materials but no detonation of the weapon would occur.
But what if you are running it in an embedded system that has been deployed on a Spacecraft?It's NOT easy at all to make that change! Zlib is in a LOT of places where data compression is needed as the algorithm and code are free. We found this zlib bug close to 3 years ago at NASA IV&V duing Code Analysis for the SWIFT mission using an Automated Tool (CodeSurfer). The tool told us we has a possible buffer/memory overflow problem in the zlib code at a certain spot. We had to figure out what was causing it which we non-trivial. TWe reccommended a fix then, and I'm pretty sure it was patched by the developers at least for the SWIFT mission. I'm surprised it has taken this long for the problem to be noticed in the mainstream software community. As others have said, keeping your libs up to date can resolve the problem. But once the code is released it becomes a much bigger task. It's theoretically possible to test software for all know conditions that might be serious enough to crash the system or open doors that should not be open. However, that task is VERY timeconsuming and the software DOES have to get to market! It's a hard line to walk to determine how much testing is enough and where to test deeper and where not to. Profilers and Analysis tools are very helpful but in the end it comes down to a human judgement (mistake) that things are "good enough"/
The drug companies fund most of the research ( not all of that is in house..a lot goes to Universities). The cost is staggering to get a drug to market. I'm not sure Asprin would make it past the FDA reviews today.
I know what the NIH is and what it does. The figures are still misleading. The "Biology" dollars are spread across research and studies in the many different areas you indicated not just Cancer and HIV which is what the article addresses (which combined probably get 60% of the funds). Biology research and research for developing Drugs (BioChemistry) are definitely NOT the same thing. There is certainly some cross-over especially in the areas of drugs from natural sources such as Tamoxifen. The NIH pays for a lot of things, drug testing of Company X new drugs is not usually one of them. There is a lot of money spent understanding diseases, transmission mechamisms, and a lot of reporting on disease fatalites (and the crazy bogus AIDS data) comes out of the NIH budget.
Top Drug companies, Pfizer, Merck, Abbot, McKesson, Bristol-Meyers, Wyeth, Am. Pharm, J&J, Celgene, Lilly, Bayer, Aventis..the list goes on. What was that about there not being but a few. I can find 50 easy on Google. The money they spend verus what the NIH spends make the NIH money look like peanuts.
Your numbers are full of crap and misleading to boot. Biology research is NOT the same as DRUG reasearch. Biology research covers everything from the migratory patterns of Caribou to studies on aging. As an example about your dollar figures, I went and looked up a major drug company financials from 2004 and then alone spent $7.7B on R&D and this company is not even the biggest drug company.
I don't think drug companies are hiding anything either, and researchers even less. With the publish or perish plan for tenure in plan for most Universities they are eager to get the news out if something good is found. The drug companies are a bit slower as they tend to need to protect the IP and Patent the drugs which takes time, and THEN they need FDA approval which takes more time. IF the drug in the referenced article is indeed the "cure" for AIDS/Cancer then it will likely still be 2 or more years before you can buy it in the USA.
Considering India and Pakistan have a LONG history of not getting along isn't that second route pretty high risk as well? I sure wouldn't send anything sensitive on it as the Indian Gov't will surely be reading it.
If they mandate such strict standards and fines, IMHO their business would take a HUGE hit. There are LOTS of small businesses out there that can't meet that standard, as well as large businesses. The small business that Mom & Pop run or the craft shows both of which are several Billion dollars in sales, I can't see Visa giving that up but I can see the merchants giving up Visa. The problems have NOT been with the retail merchant but with the clearing houses. So why does Visa want to punish the small end of the problem? If Visa wants to fine a business upwards of several hundred K per violation I can see 1) Lots of Bankruptcies where Visa joins the list of creditors or 2) Merchants refuse to take the card thereby costing VISA lots of money or 3) MasterCard/Discover/Amex offer better conditions and take Market share from Visa. When Visa gets 4-6% of each Sale that adds up quick in 2)and 3). Wal-Mart almost stopped taking Visa over a debit fees issue, the merchant "fines" just might be the last straw for some merchants with Visa.
So, based on [1] we can expect that the Internet will NOT meet performance and/or security requirements for 30 percent of B-to-B traffic? If true that IS scary.
Of course the network itself can be quite secure, just the bozo's servers on the other end as easily hacked and the data stolen there.
You mean people PAY to get [2]? That is just common sense!
Well put. Gartner is often in the business of SELLING FUD as well as reporting it. Many many times Gartner has been wrong. They often re-report the hype Company X's Marketing Team tells them, without any validation. Too many managers put faith in Gartner versus doing the research before making a decision. Also, Garther is just like Google in that you can pay to have you products "placed" in strategic locations or described with certain key words designed to attract attention. Take what they say with a LOT of Salt, but they do provide a good starting point for doing you own research.
You will be working with Management that does not know anything, and will have student help that does not know anything yet you will be required to bring the project in on time and on budget. You will be required to make sure the "students" come first and then the professors and then the administration and then maybe your project when scheduling test time before deployment which means you'll get some test time about 1AM Christmas morning. On the other hand if you are even reasonably competent, don't molest the students, be nice to the profs, suck up to the Administration you have some very good job security but the pay will suck.
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If the British citizens didn't spend thier money the UK Gov't gives on the Dole (lazy bastards) the US Businesses wouldn't have any customers and no customers means they would close up and go away. Not to menton your immigration system is even MORE porus than the one on this side of the Atlantic! And this system where you get to be in the Gov't because your family has been there for 200 years since some King made him a Nobleman or something. Your country is it's own worst enemy!
If he can make HP slightly more profitable for two years then he is better than Carly even if he is less educated. As a rule, BODs don't make good turnaround CEO picks as they often want someone who will see things like they would like it seen,not someone who is going to do what needs doing to make things work. Then at the oppisite end you get the BODs that picked "Chainsaw Al" Dunlap (who was a criminal in CEO's clothing) and pretty much answered to no one and had a iron fist.
Carly has been gone about 90 days or so. She was fired. The new guy is trying to undo her mess. However getting rid of people is only a SHORT-TERM solution, and won't help after they are gone.
Funniest /. post in a long time. ROTFLMAOPIMP.
/. :)
Who needs a *ZOT* when you got
OMG, that rhymes!
The law says if you were a Gov't employee and worked on awarding a contract to Company X you cannot legally leave the Gov't to work for X or a period of at least one year. Boeing got hammered for this about a year ago on the 757 Tanker deal. They and the Air Force Senior Officer they hired definately knew better. The then Boeing CEO thought it wouldn't matter since everyone would look the other way. Lockheed didn'tand brought it to the attention of the Air Force. The contract award was cancelled, many millions of $$ lost. Of course then they caught Stonecipher screwing his sexa-tary and that was the last straw. He did get a nice "retirement" bonus though when he should have gotten thrown off the building for being so stupid TWICE!
Burden of proof is on the plantiff side (MS). That could have happened but they got to prove it. Plus they got to figure out a way to sue Google's Chinese subsidiary. If they were taking a risk I'm sure they covered their ass.
The results you like to say are absolute are no where near that. A LOT depends on the state where you live, if you live in Texas for instance it can invalidate most generic restrictive contracts cocerning employment with a competitor. See http://www.akllp.com/Page.aspx?Doc_ID=2244, It's a very long and detailed legal and public policy and seperation of powers white paper but can be summed up as " ... the clear message is to avoid overreaching, vague and overly broad non-compete agreements. Thought must be invested in every such agreement to insure appropriate application to the facts applicable to the particular employee and marketplace-and no more restrictive than absolutely necessary to protect the good will and business of the employer. Pure non-competition agreements should be supplemented by other types of agreements, such as non-disclosure agreements and agreements not to solicit customers. Those types of agreements may be more enforceable."
It is a state by state issue it seems so there is NOT an absolute case to be made for either side winning.
Kind of hard to enforce the US Law on Contracts in China! He has broken no laws in China so MS hasn't got a chance in hell of suing him, so they sue his employer. Unless Google went out and actually recruited him they are toast, even if they did and he never said a thing about a 1 yr non-compete MS is not going to win. The ONLY way they win is to sue in an EMPLOYER friendly state and prove he was recruited. These cases are really realllly hard to win unless you got hard evidence Google initiated the recuritment. If all he did was make a phone call, send a resume or chat with a Google worker who encouraged him to apply MS is sunk. This is Bill Gates trying the SCO strategy called "we got no evidence but lets sue them anyway and maybe they will settle"
Perhaps 20 is the most the course can handle w/o too much clutter at the start from broken down rigs? As I recall last year the first mile or so there were a lot of dropouts. Maybe there are only 20 judges, one for each vehicle to make sure no one cheats? Of course seeing as this IS the Government the number 20 probably came from on high and it is 20 because "we say so".
Wish I had mod points today, but I used them all yesterday!
They should take the top 3 vehicles that finish the course, add weapons and turn them loose again. The one that comes back wins.
You had PUNCH CARDS? We wrote all our code in HARDWARE! We had to go to the iron ore mines, fight off the dragons, endure the bitter code, dig out our the iron ore, dig out the coal, build a fire, smelt the ore, and cast the little magnets in our core memory, find some lodestone, magnetize each core, then wire them together with the South end at the Top to be a Zero and the North to be a one. :)
What about NATURAL fertilizers such as manure and nitrogen rich cover crops. In the very old days the best fertilizer was bat guano from South America as the chemical stuff had not been invented. This will help but there is still the energy cost of the diesel fuel to plant, till, and harvest. It goes back to Physics 101, "energy is neither lost nor gained it simply changes form". It's (at best) a zeo sum game, you breakeven in the long run or you die ;)
Thanks for the correction. I recall they had all sorts of issues with the implosion design firing the high explosives in the right sequence and timing the firings correctly to implode and not explode.
However, the sand particles in the "dust devil" can be quite a problem. They are abrasive and carry static electricity. Could be a problem that say solar cells would get etched by the storms and drop their efficiency. I bet it would play hell with electronics as well, and also with transmission of signals via radio. Not the destructive knock everything in it's path down power of a tornado but nothing to ignore either. The only similar thing on earth would be the large sandstorms they get in the Persian Gulf areas.
LOL...War Games...I'm surprised anyone here believed that. It was good fiction but there is ALWAYS a "man-in-the-loop" to lauch weapons, even little ones :)
Take it from someone who knows and has been there. It can't happen.
A lot of Uranium is actually found in Copper Mines. The problem is you are looking for Uranium ore that has a high percentage of the fissle U-235 that can be seperated. The normal ratio is about 500:1 but some ores are higher. Uranium is found many places in the world, Africa, the former Soviet Union and even in the USA. Read about the projects and technologies they used to seperate U-235 and U-238, it is interesting how they did it then had to scale it up 1000 fold to get enough for ONE bomb. This was before they learned to bombard the leftover U-238 with neutrons to turn it into Pu-239 which is what "breeder reactors" did. The Pu-239 was a much better bomb material.
Nukes do NOT have "rods". They have highly machined components of Plutonium, the exact size, shape, weight is classified. The first bomb had two hemispherses of Uranium that were polished smooth.
LOL, the Russian mob is more likely to sell you the material than the boss/workers concept. Anyway, after the material was transferred I doubt there would be anyone left alive to tell the world what the deal was. No witnesses means no messy loose ends that lead back to the source of the funds.
There are all sorts of sites out there that describe launch procedures, and it's a lot more complicated than you think. Accidental launches CANNOT happen with an armed warhead. This was all figured out in the 1950's and 60's . If the missle is launched w/o pre-arming the weapon all you have is MAYBE a "dirty bomb" where the impact would spread radioactive materials but no detonation of the weapon would occur.
But what if you are running it in an embedded system that has been deployed on a Spacecraft?It's NOT easy at all to make that change! Zlib is in a LOT of places where data compression is needed as the algorithm and code are free. We found this zlib bug close to 3 years ago at NASA IV&V duing Code Analysis for the SWIFT mission using an Automated Tool (CodeSurfer). The tool told us we has a possible buffer /memory overflow problem in the zlib code at a certain spot. We had to figure out what was causing it which we non-trivial. TWe reccommended a fix then, and I'm pretty sure it was patched by the developers at least for the SWIFT mission. I'm surprised it has taken this long for the problem to be noticed in the mainstream software community. As others have said, keeping your libs up to date can resolve the problem. But once the code is released it becomes a much bigger task. It's theoretically possible to test software for all know conditions that might be serious enough to crash the system or open doors that should not be open. However, that task is VERY timeconsuming and the software DOES have to get to market! It's a hard line to walk to determine how much testing is enough and where to test deeper and where not to. Profilers and Analysis tools are very helpful but in the end it comes down to a human judgement (mistake) that things are "good enough"/
The drug companies fund most of the research ( not all of that is in house..a lot goes to Universities). The cost is staggering to get a drug to market. I'm not sure Asprin would make it past the FDA reviews today. I know what the NIH is and what it does. The figures are still misleading. The "Biology" dollars are spread across research and studies in the many different areas you indicated not just Cancer and HIV which is what the article addresses (which combined probably get 60% of the funds). Biology research and research for developing Drugs (BioChemistry) are definitely NOT the same thing. There is certainly some cross-over especially in the areas of drugs from natural sources such as Tamoxifen. The NIH pays for a lot of things, drug testing of Company X new drugs is not usually one of them. There is a lot of money spent understanding diseases, transmission mechamisms, and a lot of reporting on disease fatalites (and the crazy bogus AIDS data) comes out of the NIH budget. Top Drug companies, Pfizer, Merck, Abbot, McKesson, Bristol-Meyers, Wyeth, Am. Pharm, J&J, Celgene, Lilly, Bayer, Aventis..the list goes on. What was that about there not being but a few. I can find 50 easy on Google. The money they spend verus what the NIH spends make the NIH money look like peanuts.
Your numbers are full of crap and misleading to boot. Biology research is NOT the same as DRUG reasearch. Biology research covers everything from the migratory patterns of Caribou to studies on aging. As an example about your dollar figures, I went and looked up a major drug company financials from 2004 and then alone spent $7.7B on R&D and this company is not even the biggest drug company.
I don't think drug companies are hiding anything either, and researchers even less. With the publish or perish plan for tenure in plan for most Universities they are eager to get the news out if something good is found. The drug companies are a bit slower as they tend to need to protect the IP and Patent the drugs which takes time, and THEN they need FDA approval which takes more time. IF the drug in the referenced article is indeed the "cure" for AIDS/Cancer then it will likely still be 2 or more years before you can buy it in the USA.
Considering India and Pakistan have a LONG history of not getting along isn't that second route pretty high risk as well? I sure wouldn't send anything sensitive on it as the Indian Gov't will surely be reading it.
If they mandate such strict standards and fines, IMHO their business would take a HUGE hit. There are LOTS of small businesses out there that can't meet that standard, as well as large businesses. The small business that Mom & Pop run or the craft shows both of which are several Billion dollars in sales, I can't see Visa giving that up but I can see the merchants giving up Visa. The problems have NOT been with the retail merchant but with the clearing houses. So why does Visa want to punish the small end of the problem? If Visa wants to fine a business upwards of several hundred K per violation I can see 1) Lots of Bankruptcies where Visa joins the list of creditors or 2) Merchants refuse to take the card thereby costing VISA lots of money or 3) MasterCard/Discover/Amex offer better conditions and take Market share from Visa. When Visa gets 4-6% of each Sale that adds up quick in 2)and 3). Wal-Mart almost stopped taking Visa over a debit fees issue, the merchant "fines" just might be the last straw for some merchants with Visa.
So, based on [1] we can expect that the Internet will NOT meet performance and/or security requirements for 30 percent of B-to-B traffic? If true that IS scary. Of course the network itself can be quite secure, just the bozo's servers on the other end as easily hacked and the data stolen there. You mean people PAY to get [2]? That is just common sense!
Well put. Gartner is often in the business of SELLING FUD as well as reporting it. Many many times Gartner has been wrong. They often re-report the hype Company X's Marketing Team tells them, without any validation. Too many managers put faith in Gartner versus doing the research before making a decision. Also, Garther is just like Google in that you can pay to have you products "placed" in strategic locations or described with certain key words designed to attract attention. Take what they say with a LOT of Salt, but they do provide a good starting point for doing you own research.
You will be working with Management that does not know anything, and will have student help that does not know anything yet you will be required to bring the project in on time and on budget. You will be required to make sure the "students" come first and then the professors and then the administration and then maybe your project when scheduling test time before deployment which means you'll get some test time about 1AM Christmas morning. On the other hand if you are even reasonably competent, don't molest the students, be nice to the profs, suck up to the Administration you have some very good job security but the pay will suck.