I will probably get scraped and spammed to death, but my email address is gander @ tralfaz dot org and I would be happy to have a discussion outside of this forum.
Geoff
I read the article too. I am a product manager, been doing it for > 14 years, in a variety of companies and environments. He clearly wasn't up to the task, and really should never have been hired for that role in the first place. Then I read about how soon after graduating he had that role. That is one of the paths to failure in this field. Dumped into a product management role without the foundation or background? You're gonna have a bad time
When I started my Master's thesis, I began learning to program the Cray-XMP. In Fortran still, with some C (pre-ANSI C for you whippersnappers). Then I got a job, and that opportunity fell by the wayside. I still am in awe with how those machines were optimized.
Of course today, I would just use Matlab, and if I needed more speed, I would compile it to C++ and run natively. But it has been a long time since I have done any serious number crunching.
For a good read, pick up "Turing's Cathedral", it is a good story of the birth of electronic digital computers, and an eye-opener.
That, plus some small defense companies. Westingouse made Nuclear sub components there, and Lockheed (now Lockheed Martin) is there. My dad worked at Lockheed Missiles and Space for a long time. It has also won many awards for the best run small city (population was always about 100K). Lived there off and on for 38 years.
Would love to go back, but damn, 50's vintage tract homes that are teardowns still sell for $700K+
Well, I am going to blow out my moderations for this story.
What you say is fine in theory. Patent examiners are well suited to examine, and determine validity. But, they are so swamped at this point, there are far more patents to process than they can reasonably work through.
A former colleague worked at the USPTO, as an examiner, and he explained what happens. When you apply for a patent you are obligated to include the prior art that you found. In theory, they (the examiner) is also supposed to conduct a search for prior art, and to use that in their review process. But, one side effect of their being so overloaded is that this becomes a cursory search (if at all), and thus they rely on the submitted by the filer prior art declarations.
And here is how you game the system. A company tells their people to not be too diligent in their vetting and searching. Thus major prior art is not stated, and the patent moves forward, because the examiner believes that it is novel, given what he has in front of him.
Back in the old days, (mid 1990's) I worked at a company that made chip building systems. We filed lots of patents. We deserved to file for them, as we spent beaucoup bucks developing techniques to apply to chip inspection and measurement. We always were sent back to revisit the prior art by the patent examiners. My last job? Some of the stupidest business process patents sailed through, although an afternoon searching on Google would have found reams of invalidating prior art.
If you want to fix the patent system, we need to treble the number of examiners. Alas, the congress critters seem intent to not increase the funding to get to a healthy state.
Yep, I had a heart attack at the ripe old age of 44. Mother of all pre-existing conditions. Without the ACA, I could never get away from a W2 job that provides group coverage. But with exercise, dietary control, and a cocktail of oh so fun medications, I can expect to live another 40 years easily.
Most of the people either don't travel by air, or travel very infrequently. Those of us who are road warriors are vastly more likely to hate the TSA with vehemence.
This. I am amazed by the professionals in information handling who genuinely answer that Email is fine for exchanging sensitive information. I heard a hospital IT manager honestly answer that he thought that email of patient record via PDF was fine. Sigh.
You should read "The Panic Virus" by Seth Mnookin. It starts off with a tale of how a young child dies from Whooping cough, one of those "Extinct" diseases. The truth is that they can and do re-appear, often with catastrophic results.
The fact is that vaccines have probably done more to extend life spans in the 20th century than any other medical advance.
I would call parents who elect to not vaccinate their children "idiots" and child abusers.
I wish I kept the link. There was an interview with the founder of Evernote on this very topic. The conversion rate is miniscule, and while they can afford to keep the doors open, the number of paying customers is barely covering expenses.
As a product manager, I do a lot of work on pricing, and Fremium is hard to get right. I will not categorically say it can't work, but your business model has to anticipate a very low conversion rate, and the fine balance between free and benefits for paid service are hard to do in the real world. The example of Dropbox with 4% of paying customers is huge. I pay, but my wife, who is thrilled with it, will never have a need to share more than 2G between her computers. But would dropbox be as successful is the free storage was only.5G?
Cough - My understanding of Australia is that on the east and south east coasts, the density is relatively high, moderate density on parts of the west coast and the gold coast, and not much in the middle. I suspect that around Ayer's Rock there is coverage, but the vast outback, not so much.
Not excusing the US cost bases, but the suburban and rural majority of the US does have enough population to matter, and it costs a lot to cover that even half assed.
That won't work for an upper division Physics class. You begin to dream the mathematics you are studying so much. GE and less stress courses, much more likely.
The case of textbooks is special for many reasons. First, students (and I am talking University Students here) MUST buy them. No choice in the matter. Second, there has long been a lively secondary market for used books. This infuriated the main line publishers, that they couldn't get fresh money for fresh books every semester/quarter/year. Third, to counter this, they collude with the authors, and have frequent revisions. Never changing much, but enough that lesson plans would be altered with the wrong edition text. Thus, it is rare that a text is god for more than 2 years between revisions.
Couple that with the fact that there is a limited run on text books (never a large production run), a captive market, and thus really high prices, and you get a very warped market. The publishers are actually happy to sell a reduced price electronic version, DRM'd, to each student, and cut out the secondary resellers.
That said, when I chased my Physics degree, for my core, I always bought new, marked them up, and keep them. Today, my two volumes of Graduate level Quantum server merely to intimidate coworkers.
If they were "only" printers, then I could see your point. But the office class, multi function devices that are printers, copiers, and scanners, often running additional applications like cost recovery, fax server connections, document ingestion into content management solutions etc. These devices would greatly be helped by a multitasking, card based UI and some clean design guidelines.
As someone who manages a product with dedicated connectors for the various MFP devices (the big ones, in offices, not the $250 office depot specials), I for one HOPE there is a WebOS based change in the landscape.
All the vendors use shitty resistive touch screens, pissant code models, and have such a wide range of display size/capabilities that developing and testing are a nightmare.
I have long thought that an iOS based UI for a printer would be a humongous step forward. Likewise, a WebOS interface will be an enormous advantage.
Yeah, that is how it was before 9/11. And it was privatized, and paid for by the airlines with fees for landings at airports. It was contracted out to the lowest bidder, who used mostly immigrant labor, at very low wages. The risk assessment done by a private firm would yield that the likelihood of another terrorist attack on an airplane with an entry vector of weak security was low enough to greatly reduce the stridency of the security process.
Don't get me wrong, I would like to abolish the TSA, as their policies and procedures are far more theatrical than sound security practices. But don't assume that the private sector will do a better job, unless you want the armed mercenaries that were used widely in Iraq to be the security agents. That would be far worse than anything that the TSA has foisted on the population
Sigh, I was a huge Atari fan back in the day. Great systems. I ran a BBS, I have 8" floppy drives (more data) and lots of fun, interesting hardware. I miss those systems.
There is a lot of armchair quarterbacking on this. I used to work for a company that made gear for solar production (including the CIGS type that Solyndra uses). Fascinating industry, with some odd dynamics.
If you harken back to 2008, Solar PV was taking the world by storm. Europe had very generous feed in tariffs making the deployment very attractive. This drove demand through the roof.
This drove electronic grade silicon prices from mid $20 per kg to close to $500 a kg.
The market being what it is, looked for more efficient use of materials. This spawned thin film PV's to become more attractive. Whether it was amorphous Si based, or CdTe based (the technology employed by First Solar), or the latest (at the time) CIGS (CuInGaSe2) based devices. This technology had (and still has) the best efficiency potential of any of the thin film types. It is just really hard to do in a production volume setting. Companies that manufacture it today are Solibro, Global Solar, and others.
Fast forward to today. The Si shortage is gone. Electronic grade silicon is back to $20 a kg range. There is oversupply of silicon. China has invested metric buttloads into their industry, driving traditional silicon based PV panels remarkably close to $1 a watt. CdTe is has pretty much won the think film race (Applied Materials shut down their Amorphous Si think film equipment group and took a huge writeoff for it earlier in the year. Most deployments today are panels made in China, of silicon wafer based PV.
All the CIGS makers are struggling, but the double whammy of Solyndra, hard to make films + unique topography makes for bankruptcy. I would have bet on Nanosolar being the first to go belly up in the Silicon Valley.
I have a degree in physics. I have a knack for teaching (done educational programs in my past). I enjoy imparting knowledge to the sponges that science minded highschool students are. They have an acknowledged shortage of Science and Mathematics instructors. I know I would find it fulfilling. Much more so than what I do now. I would welcome a career change to education, the lowered stress, and greater fulfillment.
But the pay scale is less than 1/3 what I make now. I can't give up 2/3 of my salary for happiness. 1/3 less and I would be jumping all over it.
Slashdot Mirror
I will probably get scraped and spammed to death, but my email address is gander @ tralfaz dot org and I would be happy to have a discussion outside of this forum. Geoff
I read the article too. I am a product manager, been doing it for > 14 years, in a variety of companies and environments. He clearly wasn't up to the task, and really should never have been hired for that role in the first place. Then I read about how soon after graduating he had that role. That is one of the paths to failure in this field. Dumped into a product management role without the foundation or background? You're gonna have a bad time
Yes, there are Amazon gift cards. Physical cards. And I do believe I saw them at Walmart too.
When I started my Master's thesis, I began learning to program the Cray-XMP. In Fortran still, with some C (pre-ANSI C for you whippersnappers). Then I got a job, and that opportunity fell by the wayside. I still am in awe with how those machines were optimized.
Of course today, I would just use Matlab, and if I needed more speed, I would compile it to C++ and run natively. But it has been a long time since I have done any serious number crunching.
For a good read, pick up "Turing's Cathedral", it is a good story of the birth of electronic digital computers, and an eye-opener.
That, plus some small defense companies. Westingouse made Nuclear sub components there, and Lockheed (now Lockheed Martin) is there. My dad worked at Lockheed Missiles and Space for a long time. It has also won many awards for the best run small city (population was always about 100K). Lived there off and on for 38 years.
Would love to go back, but damn, 50's vintage tract homes that are teardowns still sell for $700K+
Well, I am going to blow out my moderations for this story.
What you say is fine in theory. Patent examiners are well suited to examine, and determine validity. But, they are so swamped at this point, there are far more patents to process than they can reasonably work through.
A former colleague worked at the USPTO, as an examiner, and he explained what happens. When you apply for a patent you are obligated to include the prior art that you found. In theory, they (the examiner) is also supposed to conduct a search for prior art, and to use that in their review process. But, one side effect of their being so overloaded is that this becomes a cursory search (if at all), and thus they rely on the submitted by the filer prior art declarations.
And here is how you game the system. A company tells their people to not be too diligent in their vetting and searching. Thus major prior art is not stated, and the patent moves forward, because the examiner believes that it is novel, given what he has in front of him.
Back in the old days, (mid 1990's) I worked at a company that made chip building systems. We filed lots of patents. We deserved to file for them, as we spent beaucoup bucks developing techniques to apply to chip inspection and measurement. We always were sent back to revisit the prior art by the patent examiners. My last job? Some of the stupidest business process patents sailed through, although an afternoon searching on Google would have found reams of invalidating prior art.
If you want to fix the patent system, we need to treble the number of examiners. Alas, the congress critters seem intent to not increase the funding to get to a healthy state.
Yep, I had a heart attack at the ripe old age of 44. Mother of all pre-existing conditions. Without the ACA, I could never get away from a W2 job that provides group coverage. But with exercise, dietary control, and a cocktail of oh so fun medications, I can expect to live another 40 years easily.
Most of the people either don't travel by air, or travel very infrequently. Those of us who are road warriors are vastly more likely to hate the TSA with vehemence.
Email is the weakest link on the internet.
This. I am amazed by the professionals in information handling who genuinely answer that Email is fine for exchanging sensitive information. I heard a hospital IT manager honestly answer that he thought that email of patient record via PDF was fine. Sigh.
dang, my mod points expired yesterday. I want to mod this up so much.
Damn, my moderator points expired yesterday. Spot on, and true.
You should read "The Panic Virus" by Seth Mnookin. It starts off with a tale of how a young child dies from Whooping cough, one of those "Extinct" diseases. The truth is that they can and do re-appear, often with catastrophic results.
The fact is that vaccines have probably done more to extend life spans in the 20th century than any other medical advance.
I would call parents who elect to not vaccinate their children "idiots" and child abusers.
I wish I kept the link. There was an interview with the founder of Evernote on this very topic. The conversion rate is miniscule, and while they can afford to keep the doors open, the number of paying customers is barely covering expenses.
As a product manager, I do a lot of work on pricing, and Fremium is hard to get right. I will not categorically say it can't work, but your business model has to anticipate a very low conversion rate, and the fine balance between free and benefits for paid service are hard to do in the real world. The example of Dropbox with 4% of paying customers is huge. I pay, but my wife, who is thrilled with it, will never have a need to share more than 2G between her computers. But would dropbox be as successful is the free storage was only .5G?
Cough - My understanding of Australia is that on the east and south east coasts, the density is relatively high, moderate density on parts of the west coast and the gold coast, and not much in the middle. I suspect that around Ayer's Rock there is coverage, but the vast outback, not so much.
Not excusing the US cost bases, but the suburban and rural majority of the US does have enough population to matter, and it costs a lot to cover that even half assed.
That won't work for an upper division Physics class. You begin to dream the mathematics you are studying so much. GE and less stress courses, much more likely.
The case of textbooks is special for many reasons. First, students (and I am talking University Students here) MUST buy them. No choice in the matter. Second, there has long been a lively secondary market for used books. This infuriated the main line publishers, that they couldn't get fresh money for fresh books every semester/quarter/year. Third, to counter this, they collude with the authors, and have frequent revisions. Never changing much, but enough that lesson plans would be altered with the wrong edition text. Thus, it is rare that a text is god for more than 2 years between revisions.
Couple that with the fact that there is a limited run on text books (never a large production run), a captive market, and thus really high prices, and you get a very warped market. The publishers are actually happy to sell a reduced price electronic version, DRM'd, to each student, and cut out the secondary resellers.
That said, when I chased my Physics degree, for my core, I always bought new, marked them up, and keep them. Today, my two volumes of Graduate level Quantum server merely to intimidate coworkers.
If they were "only" printers, then I could see your point. But the office class, multi function devices that are printers, copiers, and scanners, often running additional applications like cost recovery, fax server connections, document ingestion into content management solutions etc. These devices would greatly be helped by a multitasking, card based UI and some clean design guidelines.
As someone who manages a product with dedicated connectors for the various MFP devices (the big ones, in offices, not the $250 office depot specials), I for one HOPE there is a WebOS based change in the landscape.
All the vendors use shitty resistive touch screens, pissant code models, and have such a wide range of display size/capabilities that developing and testing are a nightmare.
I have long thought that an iOS based UI for a printer would be a humongous step forward. Likewise, a WebOS interface will be an enormous advantage.
Yep, as someone who had a heart attack at the ripe old age of 45, living with the aftermath, while not fun, is at least a future.
Point of Sale. It behaves like a terminal front end for Amazon's marketplace.
Yeah, that is how it was before 9/11. And it was privatized, and paid for by the airlines with fees for landings at airports. It was contracted out to the lowest bidder, who used mostly immigrant labor, at very low wages. The risk assessment done by a private firm would yield that the likelihood of another terrorist attack on an airplane with an entry vector of weak security was low enough to greatly reduce the stridency of the security process.
Don't get me wrong, I would like to abolish the TSA, as their policies and procedures are far more theatrical than sound security practices. But don't assume that the private sector will do a better job, unless you want the armed mercenaries that were used widely in Iraq to be the security agents. That would be far worse than anything that the TSA has foisted on the population
Sigh, I was a huge Atari fan back in the day. Great systems. I ran a BBS, I have 8" floppy drives (more data) and lots of fun, interesting hardware. I miss those systems.
Good observations though.
There is a lot of armchair quarterbacking on this. I used to work for a company that made gear for solar production (including the CIGS type that Solyndra uses). Fascinating industry, with some odd dynamics.
If you harken back to 2008, Solar PV was taking the world by storm. Europe had very generous feed in tariffs making the deployment very attractive. This drove demand through the roof.
This drove electronic grade silicon prices from mid $20 per kg to close to $500 a kg.
The market being what it is, looked for more efficient use of materials. This spawned thin film PV's to become more attractive. Whether it was amorphous Si based, or CdTe based (the technology employed by First Solar), or the latest (at the time) CIGS (CuInGaSe2) based devices. This technology had (and still has) the best efficiency potential of any of the thin film types. It is just really hard to do in a production volume setting. Companies that manufacture it today are Solibro, Global Solar, and others.
Fast forward to today. The Si shortage is gone. Electronic grade silicon is back to $20 a kg range. There is oversupply of silicon. China has invested metric buttloads into their industry, driving traditional silicon based PV panels remarkably close to $1 a watt. CdTe is has pretty much won the think film race (Applied Materials shut down their Amorphous Si think film equipment group and took a huge writeoff for it earlier in the year. Most deployments today are panels made in China, of silicon wafer based PV.
All the CIGS makers are struggling, but the double whammy of Solyndra, hard to make films + unique topography makes for bankruptcy. I would have bet on Nanosolar being the first to go belly up in the Silicon Valley.
Damn you AC, now I need a new keyboard. That will become my sig...
This sums it up well
I have a degree in physics. I have a knack for teaching (done educational programs in my past). I enjoy imparting knowledge to the sponges that science minded highschool students are. They have an acknowledged shortage of Science and Mathematics instructors. I know I would find it fulfilling. Much more so than what I do now. I would welcome a career change to education, the lowered stress, and greater fulfillment.
But the pay scale is less than 1/3 what I make now. I can't give up 2/3 of my salary for happiness. 1/3 less and I would be jumping all over it.