This is a classic case of a good deed being punished.
Here's a guy who had ethical problems with: 1. Rubber-stamping death penalty, as in, anyone who qualifies for it will be prosecuted as such.
2. Knew the American government was intentionally shipping it's enemies off to countries where torture is a part of law enforcement culture.
Does the right thing and leaves as a professional. "Thanks, but this stuff is not for me."
Ends up at another department where the notion of Laws are even **more** willfully disregarded and does the right thing by telling the press. No grandstanding. Just tips them off.
Now Federal law enforcement won't leave him and his friends alone.
Subverting the Rule of Law is now sanctioned at very lowest levels of government.
I drove an '89 Honda Civic into the ground this month and replaced it with a Prius.
I'm not happy with the touch screen controls at all. For example, turning on the heat. I live in SoCal, one rarely needs to do this.
1. press climate hardware button along the side of the touch screen. On the touch screen: 2. press recirculate 3. press the appropriate fan speed. 4. press defrost front 5. press defrost rear
Turn the car off and run errand. Repeat steps 1-5 after errand because it doesn't save those settings.
In the Civic, this was all done by feeling for the buttons on the dash and sliding the vent controls. I could do all of that and still keep two eyes on the road. I have to check the touchscreen on the Prius which I don't care for at all.
Given the way desktop computer UI's have only become more complicated, I'm positive the car's touchscreen UI will only get more complicated. That's a bad thing.
So, Developer Danny, I notice that 8 out of your last 10 commits have had someone else's name on them.
Proving my point nicely, thank you!
The corporate emphasis is the number of commits. Management is the one scoring productivity by commits. Which, starts the "not invented here" environment, which is why Sun is doing such a bad job maintaining MySQL.
Did Danny's commits make a better product? What about the time vetting outside contributions? What about the expertise developed working on code so long you can look at a contribution and see it's value? As Danny's manager, that should be enough to justify his employ. But it isn't.
The number of commits with Danny's name on it no matter the quality is how a good product goes horribly wrong in the typical corporate environment. The waning popularity of MySQL has begun.
1. "Downhill" is not like skiing or rapelling downhill. 80% down and 20% up makes that 20% downhill *days* worth of extremely hard effort.
2. Physical issues. Having camped above 10,000 feet, I can tell you the amount of water required for drinking so you don't get dehydrated is crazy. Medium physical efforts at that altitude leave you breathless. Imagine trying to move ~200 lbs dead weight around clothed like the Michelin Man.
3. Hostile environment. Lack of oxygen, extreme and unpredictable weather, and water and food delivery requirements all add up to a l-o-n-g time up and down the mountain.
It all adds up quickly to a months-long effort to retrieve a body.
Having gotten myself into a bit of altitude sickness hiking up to 14,000 feet too quickly, parent post calls it exactly right. The signs that your body isn't adjusting to the altitude begin hours before the trouble sets in.
Most of these personalities climbing Everest have made quite a bit of money ignoring warnings/taking risks. They either don't know their bodies well enough, summiting Everest is a catered affair, or intentionally ignore their body's warnings. They are more inclined to die simply because they want the prestige of summiting(sp?) Everest.
couldn't they have benefited from it without paying $1B?
That magic number they use in the press release to acertain a sale value for MySQL is dreamed up.
The typical NYSE/whatever corporate method to "buy" some property is to offer a teeny-tiny bit of cash for signing the deal. The rest of the deal is sometimes paid in the future based on "performance." "Performance" is a magic number that the new overlords destroy in order to pay the lowest possible price while employing the owner in some well-appointed office no one visits while his control over the project evaporates into the corporate machine.
In the end, the owner gets some cash up front, a decent salary for a year or two before quitting out of frustration. Then the corporate overlords "run out of money" to pay their obligations to the former owner. Since the former owner isn't well capitalized, the corporate overlord can litigate the former owner into bankruptcy.
If such forks are superior, then they should eventually find their way back into the parent model
Many corporate environments simply refuse to operate in this manner. It's like telling a room full of executives their bonuses aren't coming this year. The disbelief is palpable, the laws of gravity no longer apply.
Sun's old-school command-and-control corporate hegemony will not fall to some management model that can't be accounted for in whatever back-stabbing, powerpoint-presentation-driven, corporate culture exists there.
Faster by far, just don't expect to run gnome or kde desktops, which are the default window manager/desktops in most distros. The more RAM you have the better off you will be. 500MB will do nicely.
Regulation is required to get some transparency and a better sense of confidence into markets. CDO's are the perfect example.
How big is the market for CDO's? What's the liability to investors? Were counterparties *required* to put up capital? What are the terms of the CDO agreements? What kind of leverage is there in CDO's?
None of those questions can be answered at this time and yet once-mighty investment banks literally vanished overnight with unknown leverage conditions.
would the rapidly decreasing market-share mean that MS will have a better chance of avoiding any monopoly-related issues/charges
1. I wouldn't call this a *rapid* decline.
2. There's not much avoiding they have to do. There is no political will to dredge up this case.
3. The monopoly effect is still in play. They get to demand a huge premium for their product, stifle innovation, and restrict the supply of computers.
Even if they squander more desktop share away, they've still got several monopoly-powered crack pipes most enterprises are happy to over-pay for like Exchange.
My sincerest hope is management doggedly sticks to their current strategy. They are really going places with it.
More even more generally than laying blame on the CDS fiasco, one could explain the financial industry's woes on too much leverage and no actual risk management controls. One could also generalize the leverage problem out to the American consumer too..
Leverage: $100 in the bank is used as collateral for borrowing $1000 (10x leverage) It works great if you get a return on the $1000. But when the credit stops and the person that put the $100 in the firm wants their money back, it's a steep fall. That's why many financial firms evaporated overnight.
I'm sorry to break the news, but just because you created something photo-conductive, even super-off-the-charts-photo-conductive doesn't mean it will become a digital camera sensor.
My question is, how is it that a UCLA grad student got a whole article out of bad research?
Even worse, the department will smile upon his non-work work because of the press generated more than anything else.
But darn it; when will someone finally offer a reasonably-priced, open-platform...
News flash, it will never exist. Ever.
Maybe he hasn't heard the media conglomerates controlling distribution want to extract every possible dollar at every possible moment of entertainment.
MS might have a really bad year. Redmond is blowing it.
Many slashdotters agree with your post, but that's typically not Microsoft's customer. Microsoft's customer is the person with the power of the purse. Most techs have had an experience where they recommend one thing and the company makes an entirely different purchase regardless of the issues the techs have with the purchased product. Microsoft's customer is the group that made the bad decision and spent the money, not the tech.
They have no back-out strategy from the strong-arm tactics
They don't need one. They are still price and market makers, so they don't have to care one bit about their customers because there is no other place for them to go. That's monopoly power in action.
Regarding HP's position, what I find particularly intolerable with this personality type is their indifference to screwing others until they themselves are on the wrong end of a situation.
Finally, what most fail to understand is HP's products are planned +/- 24 months out. Microsoft screwed HP over for two years of planning and unknown, but large expenditures on products with changes to Vista capable.
The problem with that is that most companies with enough spare money to pay have created ridiculous patents.
For example, the Telco's have ridiculously vague patents they've used to crush innovators like Vonage. A while ago, Microsoft was using language like, "[Insert OSS project demon] violates 23 Microsoft patents."
The unfortunate among us know that Patent litigation is a way to bankrupt under-capitalized competitors. The beauty of this tactic is that most of it stays out of the media and the litigant typically repeats the litigation a variety of ways until the competitor is bankrupt. My definition of "patent troll" would include the fat, lazy and well-capitalized.
I've been a Lenny user for at least 6 months and performed a number of server and desktop installs with some versions of the new installer.
The most important part of the installer that has changed for the better is you can easily start the installation by selecting from gui and text options from a menu. The Etch installer you had to type something to start the installer.
The Lenny installer runs circles around the Ubuntu installer. Among other cool details you can configure LVM, or software raids prior to the disk formatting and installation.
Though the comments are a bit inflammatory, they are pretty close to the truth.
Debian has been on ARM forever. I've got a NSLU2 from a couple of years ago running Debian with zero issues and fantastic performance. http://www.cyrius.com/debian/nslu2/
I fail to see where this improves Canonical's chances of turning a profit. Dell's deal sure doesn't seem to have helped them very much.
The story remarkably overstates the obvious thus turning it into a kind of fear mongering exercise. I typed in mind control on Google and I got no surprises. Some historical CIA stuff, other historical stuff and a couple of sites devoted to the topic.
They aren't doing youtube-like traffic, don't have that much going on in terms of forums. Nothing to see here. Move along.
This kind of thing is much more common than the story suggests. Much like other myths, people connect to and share some illusion or story. Much of which is culturally driven. So there are *shared* stories about black helicopters, red and white cars, virgin births, etc. Another related tidbit, the more repressive a culture, the more things like speaking in tongues is present.
It's also important to note that one person's "mental illness" is another persons "religious belief" or more generically, faith-based construct of their Self. You could easily flip the story around and put some common religious beliefs in there.
These are great ways to explore conciousness. (sp??)
The cost was absorbed by the manufacturers No such thing. They have a material cost budget that is derived from working backwards from a target retail prices over the life of the product. Those material costs are passed onto the consumer in any case.
The illegal markup per unit probably isn't all that big. You bet it is. In the quantities that these items are purchased, I've seen calculations out to the 10th of a cent. If they are measuring 10th's of cents, you better believe a penny is a big deal.
this will amount to a small increase in the profit margins No, actually it translates into fewer units sold. Profit is something else and entirely impossible to quantify. There is no question fewer units are sold.
Finally, the transactions in question are from long ago. The finished product has long since been sold through. There is no price consumers pay that will decline as a result.
You and the moderators really have no clue how this works, how often it is done, and how much it harms all consumers. Ignorance isn't an excuse for very poor moderation.
Does the US government actually bother to prosecute these cases
No. In fact this very informative thread is about how things work in the U.S. gov't contracting world. BAE's got really entrenched, corrupt competitors in the U.S. doing the same thing.
Another way to say it, if a criminal investigation were ever funded, they'd find every party breaking a whole host of rules and regs such that there would be no one left to supply the U.S. Govt.
Lots of little guys are following the rules, but no big guys.
Slashdot Mirror
This is a classic case of a good deed being punished.
Here's a guy who had ethical problems with:
1. Rubber-stamping death penalty, as in, anyone who qualifies for it will be prosecuted as such.
2. Knew the American government was intentionally shipping it's enemies off to countries where torture is a part of law enforcement culture.
Does the right thing and leaves as a professional. "Thanks, but this stuff is not for me."
Ends up at another department where the notion of Laws are even **more** willfully disregarded and does the right thing by telling the press. No grandstanding. Just tips them off.
Now Federal law enforcement won't leave him and his friends alone.
Subverting the Rule of Law is now sanctioned at very lowest levels of government.
G r e a t.
I drove an '89 Honda Civic into the ground this month and replaced it with a Prius.
I'm not happy with the touch screen controls at all. For example, turning on the heat. I live in SoCal, one rarely needs to do this.
1. press climate hardware button along the side of the touch screen.
On the touch screen:
2. press recirculate
3. press the appropriate fan speed.
4. press defrost front
5. press defrost rear
Turn the car off and run errand. Repeat steps 1-5 after errand because it doesn't save those settings.
In the Civic, this was all done by feeling for the buttons on the dash and sliding the vent controls. I could do all of that and still keep two eyes on the road. I have to check the touchscreen on the Prius which I don't care for at all.
Given the way desktop computer UI's have only become more complicated, I'm positive the car's touchscreen UI will only get more complicated. That's a bad thing.
So, Developer Danny, I notice that 8 out of your last 10 commits have had someone else's name on them.
Proving my point nicely, thank you!
The corporate emphasis is the number of commits. Management is the one scoring productivity by commits. Which, starts the "not invented here" environment, which is why Sun is doing such a bad job maintaining MySQL.
Did Danny's commits make a better product? What about the time vetting outside contributions? What about the expertise developed working on code so long you can look at a contribution and see it's value? As Danny's manager, that should be enough to justify his employ. But it isn't.
The number of commits with Danny's name on it no matter the quality is how a good product goes horribly wrong in the typical corporate environment. The waning popularity of MySQL has begun.
1. "Downhill" is not like skiing or rapelling downhill. 80% down and 20% up makes that 20% downhill *days* worth of extremely hard effort.
2. Physical issues. Having camped above 10,000 feet, I can tell you the amount of water required for drinking so you don't get dehydrated is crazy. Medium physical efforts at that altitude leave you breathless. Imagine trying to move ~200 lbs dead weight around clothed like the Michelin Man.
3. Hostile environment. Lack of oxygen, extreme and unpredictable weather, and water and food delivery requirements all add up to a l-o-n-g time up and down the mountain.
It all adds up quickly to a months-long effort to retrieve a body.
Having gotten myself into a bit of altitude sickness hiking up to 14,000 feet too quickly, parent post calls it exactly right. The signs that your body isn't adjusting to the altitude begin hours before the trouble sets in.
Most of these personalities climbing Everest have made quite a bit of money ignoring warnings/taking risks. They either don't know their bodies well enough, summiting Everest is a catered affair, or intentionally ignore their body's warnings. They are more inclined to die simply because they want the prestige of summiting(sp?) Everest.
couldn't they have benefited from it without paying $1B?
That magic number they use in the press release to acertain a sale value for MySQL is dreamed up.
The typical NYSE/whatever corporate method to "buy" some property is to offer a teeny-tiny bit of cash for signing the deal. The rest of the deal is sometimes paid in the future based on "performance." "Performance" is a magic number that the new overlords destroy in order to pay the lowest possible price while employing the owner in some well-appointed office no one visits while his control over the project evaporates into the corporate machine.
In the end, the owner gets some cash up front, a decent salary for a year or two before quitting out of frustration. Then the corporate overlords "run out of money" to pay their obligations to the former owner. Since the former owner isn't well capitalized, the corporate overlord can litigate the former owner into bankruptcy.
Today's lesson: Make money. Get paid today.
If such forks are superior, then they should eventually find their way back into the parent model
Many corporate environments simply refuse to operate in this manner. It's like telling a room full of executives their bonuses aren't coming this year. The disbelief is palpable, the laws of gravity no longer apply.
Sun's old-school command-and-control corporate hegemony will not fall to some management model that can't be accounted for in whatever back-stabbing, powerpoint-presentation-driven, corporate culture exists there.
Faster by far, just don't expect to run gnome or kde desktops, which are the default window manager/desktops in most distros. The more RAM you have the better off you will be. 500MB will do nicely.
Install debian by downloading the CD and burning it: http://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/lenny_di_rc1/i386/iso-cd/debian-testing-i386-netinst.iso
Follow these instructions to get an XFCE desktop: http://wiki.debian.org/DebianXFCE
History has shown a country can and has spent their way out of recession(s). It was called the WPA. Learn a little history: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Works_Progress_Administration
Regulation is required to get some transparency and a better sense of confidence into markets. CDO's are the perfect example.
How big is the market for CDO's? What's the liability to investors? Were counterparties *required* to put up capital? What are the terms of the CDO agreements? What kind of leverage is there in CDO's?
None of those questions can be answered at this time and yet once-mighty investment banks literally vanished overnight with unknown leverage conditions.
would the rapidly decreasing market-share mean that MS will have a better chance of avoiding any monopoly-related issues/charges
1. I wouldn't call this a *rapid* decline.
2. There's not much avoiding they have to do. There is no political will to dredge up this case.
3. The monopoly effect is still in play. They get to demand a huge premium for their product, stifle innovation, and restrict the supply of computers.
Even if they squander more desktop share away, they've still got several monopoly-powered crack pipes most enterprises are happy to over-pay for like Exchange.
My sincerest hope is management doggedly sticks to their current strategy. They are really going places with it.
More even more generally than laying blame on the CDS fiasco, one could explain the financial industry's woes on too much leverage and no actual risk management controls. One could also generalize the leverage problem out to the American consumer too..
Leverage: $100 in the bank is used as collateral for borrowing $1000 (10x leverage) It works great if you get a return on the $1000. But when the credit stops and the person that put the $100 in the firm wants their money back, it's a steep fall. That's why many financial firms evaporated overnight.
I'm sorry to break the news, but just because you created something photo-conductive, even super-off-the-charts-photo-conductive doesn't mean it will become a digital camera sensor.
My question is, how is it that a UCLA grad student got a whole article out of bad research?
Even worse, the department will smile upon his non-work work because of the press generated more than anything else.
Well said.
I would add that most most markets are not, in fact, competitive. Most are mature which means some form of monopoly, duopoly, oligopoly.
I'm sure the reason your post did not get it's +5 Insightful is the pitiful inability of most moderators to understand what you wrote.
But darn it; when will someone finally offer a reasonably-priced, open-platform...
News flash, it will never exist. Ever.
Maybe he hasn't heard the media conglomerates controlling distribution want to extract every possible dollar at every possible moment of entertainment.
Oh, and there are probably a dozen boxes already.
MS might have a really bad year. Redmond is blowing it.
Many slashdotters agree with your post, but that's typically not Microsoft's customer. Microsoft's customer is the person with the power of the purse. Most techs have had an experience where they recommend one thing and the company makes an entirely different purchase regardless of the issues the techs have with the purchased product. Microsoft's customer is the group that made the bad decision and spent the money, not the tech.
They have no back-out strategy from the strong-arm tactics
They don't need one. They are still price and market makers, so they don't have to care one bit about their customers because there is no other place for them to go. That's monopoly power in action.
Regarding HP's position, what I find particularly intolerable with this personality type is their indifference to screwing others until they themselves are on the wrong end of a situation.
Finally, what most fail to understand is HP's products are planned +/- 24 months out. Microsoft screwed HP over for two years of planning and unknown, but large expenditures on products with changes to Vista capable.
Why not go after patent trolls
The problem with that is that most companies with enough spare money to pay have created ridiculous patents.
For example, the Telco's have ridiculously vague patents they've used to crush innovators like Vonage. A while ago, Microsoft was using language like, "[Insert OSS project demon] violates 23 Microsoft patents."
The unfortunate among us know that Patent litigation is a way to bankrupt under-capitalized competitors. The beauty of this tactic is that most of it stays out of the media and the litigant typically repeats the litigation a variety of ways until the competitor is bankrupt. My definition of "patent troll" would include the fat, lazy and well-capitalized.
So, "patent troll" is a pretty big umbrella.
Instead of having an article entitled "Millions of identities stolen" with text like "massive compromise" we have a revenge story.
That's why corporate officers get paid the big bucks. They screw you and you feel good about it.
I've been a Lenny user for at least 6 months and performed a number of server and desktop installs with some versions of the new installer.
The most important part of the installer that has changed for the better is you can easily start the installation by selecting from gui and text options from a menu. The Etch installer you had to type something to start the installer.
The Lenny installer runs circles around the Ubuntu installer. Among other cool details you can configure LVM, or software raids prior to the disk formatting and installation.
I got KDE4 packages from http://kde4.debian.net/ Absolutely the best way to go for kde4.
Though the comments are a bit inflammatory, they are pretty close to the truth.
Debian has been on ARM forever. I've got a NSLU2 from a couple of years ago running Debian with zero issues and fantastic performance. http://www.cyrius.com/debian/nslu2/
I fail to see where this improves Canonical's chances of turning a profit. Dell's deal sure doesn't seem to have helped them very much.
The story remarkably overstates the obvious thus turning it into a kind of fear mongering exercise. I typed in mind control on Google and I got no surprises. Some historical CIA stuff, other historical stuff and a couple of sites devoted to the topic.
They aren't doing youtube-like traffic, don't have that much going on in terms of forums. Nothing to see here. Move along.
This kind of thing is much more common than the story suggests. Much like other myths, people connect to and share some illusion or story. Much of which is culturally driven. So there are *shared* stories about black helicopters, red and white cars, virgin births, etc. Another related tidbit, the more repressive a culture, the more things like speaking in tongues is present.
It's also important to note that one person's "mental illness" is another persons "religious belief" or more generically, faith-based construct of their Self. You could easily flip the story around and put some common religious beliefs in there.
These are great ways to explore conciousness. (sp??)
I really don't understand the purpose of "law" anymore.
Laws are meant to be circumvented in the name of the Contractor winning the next contract or the Government official being enriched somehow.
It's sad your comment was modded informative.
The cost was absorbed by the manufacturers
No such thing. They have a material cost budget that is derived from working backwards from a target retail prices over the life of the product. Those material costs are passed onto the consumer in any case.
The illegal markup per unit probably isn't all that big.
You bet it is. In the quantities that these items are purchased, I've seen calculations out to the 10th of a cent. If they are measuring 10th's of cents, you better believe a penny is a big deal.
this will amount to a small increase in the profit margins
No, actually it translates into fewer units sold. Profit is something else and entirely impossible to quantify. There is no question fewer units are sold.
Finally, the transactions in question are from long ago. The finished product has long since been sold through. There is no price consumers pay that will decline as a result.
You and the moderators really have no clue how this works, how often it is done, and how much it harms all consumers. Ignorance isn't an excuse for very poor moderation.
Does the US government actually bother to prosecute these cases
No. In fact this very informative thread is about how things work in the U.S. gov't contracting world. BAE's got really entrenched, corrupt competitors in the U.S. doing the same thing.
Another way to say it, if a criminal investigation were ever funded, they'd find every party breaking a whole host of rules and regs such that there would be no one left to supply the U.S. Govt.
Lots of little guys are following the rules, but no big guys.