What about lower fares? Didn't deregulation pay for itself with lower fares? Apparently not. Morgan Stanley shows that airline pricing has been falling for 40 years. Eyeballing the chart, the fall in prices was steeper between 1962 and 1978 than after deregulation.
The U.S. has a first-to-invent system, so the speed of your paperwork is irrelevant unless it takes you more than a year.
You want to complain about most of the rest of the world; almost all other countries use a first-to-file system, which is easier to adjudicate but can be unfair to slow paperwork-fu.
Posted results are the past. Layoffs are based on expectations of the future.
Last summer at raise time they told IBMers that the new raise package was based on the expectation of future revenue, and since it wasn't looking good, the raises were small. Now IBM made more than expected, but everyone who got shafted by the raise won't see it.
Posted results are great -- except that they don't make up for an (undeservedly) low raise. Who do you think will see the unexpected money earned in Q4... the rank-and-file, or the executives and shareholders?
About the tax thing: you're right, until GWB and Congress changed tax law in 2001 there was a tax penalty for being married, if both spouses worked. Now that it's gone, there's effectively a "single person" tax penalty -- that is, take any two single people who are employed and not married; if they went and got married to each other they'd then pay less in taxes.
Given all the other financial benefits of being married (actually about the same as living together) I really wish the tax code would go back to the Marriage penalty; it's more fair.
If there were a marriage penalty again, gay marriage would have the interesting property that gay people would be asking to pay more in taxes to have a legal union (just like before 2001). And yet, I'm sure most of them would do it, since the marriage decision isn't (usually) about finances anyways.
All companies I'm aware of use outside counsel, for a simple reason: someone to blame (and sue) if something bad happens.
If a deadline is missed on a patent with significant business value, damages can be recovered. If an attorney has been suborned and deliberately sabotages the claims, damages can be recovered. You can't get damages back from yourself if an employee is at fault.
The Federal Circuit recently ruleden banc that if your patent doesn't involve specific physical things, it's not actually patentable. So at the moment any software not tied to a specific hardware device is invalid again.
What Congress does with this will be interesting to see. They were taking up patent reform several times in the last session. Probably half or more of IBM's patents are on software methods.
Since when does the ability to use something that someone else thought was clever or clear, but didn't document exhaustively, have anything to do with the ability to write various forms of software?
At the risk of being flamed myself, I'm a software engineer too. A good one. I suck at administering a box, because I'm not a good admin. I can manage to get things working, but usually only with the help of folks who already know all the stupid quirks or Ubuntu, nVidia, etc.
For example, it took me a few days to get my second monitor working since I wanted to use it rotated 90 degrees. The crap xorg.conf that nVidia spat out had a syntax error so I got an unusable screen (and had to have someone show me the magic key combo to get into a terminal so I could copy my backup xorg.conf back. After a bunch of google searching I finally found the error in the config file and fixed it and I now have the second monitor at 90 degree rotation. It took a few days because, frankly, I had actual productive work to do as well.
I've had problems with Evolution (doesn't seem to like the exchange server's directory), etc., etc. To me that smacks of mediocre software, if not only can't I get it working but it doesn't tell me why it's not working.
I have had similar problems with Windows, though. I typed in my wireless password wrong once and it just failed to connect. No error message. It took about an hour to figure out how to get Vista to forget it knew about that connection/password combo so I could try again.
Please don't confuse being good at using a tool with being good at making tools. That's like assuming only a good football player could be a good football coach, or only a good driver can make or design a good car.
The xorg.conf that NVidia spat out didn't work. It had a one-line error that I had to fix by hand after some google search (it put in 'Screen 0 "Screen0" 0 0" instead of 'Screen 0 "Screen0"', and with such a small change my video would no longer come up). Then I had to put the Rotate CCW line in by hand too.
But I too have dual-head with one rotated in Ubuntu. After fixing nVidia's crap.
Oh, and when I just had one monitor and I tried to rotate it with the System panel it didn't work either. I forget what happened exactly but I had a bear of a time getting something visible so I could fix it.
I fired them because they weren't paying me what I was worth to them. I'm getting paid more now (but the benefits are less, so it probably balances out).
I did get to write a lot of code that skipped as much of the process as I could (mostly the parts outside my group; it still went through design and code reviews). I was one of those guys making constant, iterative improvements in the guts of my component, that had no "business justification" because the only thing it made better was future development and bug investigation. But in the process of that hacking I also identified dozens of real bugs that I wouldn't have found otherwise.
Fun fact: Robert Mills taught my freshman honors Physics class in Spring 1994. He got sick (heart problems I think) that quarter and couldn't finish it out, so the prof I had the previous two quarters finished for us. RM actually made the undergrad quantum mechanics vaguely understandable in class. I thought he was a really great teacher and I was sad not to finish the quarter with him.
But at the time I didn't know there was an equation named after him.:-)
Last week I rewrote some code that had been annoying me since early 2003. I knew intuitively it could be done better at the time but I didn't have time (or, I think, skills at the time) to dig into it. After 5+ years of the code working okay but bugging me every time I came across it again, having hacks added on top, and constant improvement of the stuff around it (including a lot of deleting) I finally had my a-ha moment.
32 modified files and thousands of lines of code later, it was done, and my team rejoiced.:-)
Sometimes certain sections of code can't really be fixed until the stuff around it is improved first, because it all ties together.
The biggest disadvantage to agile that I see is that, if you have lots of customers (think MS Word, or slightly more niche, Solaris OS), you can't really get feedback from all of them (and even if you could they want different things). Also, you can't really release a new version of an OS frequently -- customers hate even planned downtime and are often running versions that are 5 years old because it works and there's risk in trying something new.
I like the idea of agile, I work that way mentally, but the realities of large software projects in large corporations seem to make it impossible.
It'd be clustered. Here's a few numbers that I think are public domain.
The physical box can contain up to 128 CPUs, with 4 way SMT makes 512 CPUs. The box can have up to 16TB I believe, but of course that's terribly expensive. Given the numbers listed (300k cores, 620TB) it sounds like there's about 483 cpu's per TB of memory, so there's likely to be 586 boxes with a little over 1TB each.
If they're running AIX, there will be one OS instance per box, and they will have some software on top of the OS to manage the whole cluster so it can all solve one problem.
to think you are so special that you don't is both arrogant and naive.
Sure, except I don't drink Coke or Pepsi (or their bottled water variants), I don't buy expensive sports clothing, and I don't eat at McDonald's or Burger King. And I don't shop at Wal*Mart. So none of that advertising will have an effect on me. (I also don't watch TV so I miss the most annoying advertising).
I agree that measuring the effect of advertising on an individual level is extremely difficult, but I don't agree that any specific person *must* have been affected by advertising. I think it's clear the stuff works, but the question of *why* (or on which people) isn't answered (and wouldn't advertising agencies love to know that?)
The specific case of Douglas Kmiec goes against that theory. He publicly supported Obama and was denied communion. He personally is against abortion but supported a candidate who is in favor of abortion rights.
That *does* seem like meddling -- can a Catholic not lend their support to someone who disagrees with some particular corner of the Catholic faith?
[Stuff on Nobel] And what does that have to do with religion?
The context wasn't fully explained, I admit.
The gist is, there's an argument to be made that the "smartest" people in various scientific disciplines don't believe in God. Those would be the Nobel winners. My point was that they are smart in a scientific sense but generally lacking in emotional (and spiritual) intelligence. Folks at the top of the academic ladder tend to be very focused and driven on that one specific thing, and the example of not spending time with family was about lacking emotional intelligence. They don't have the same need for closeness, or they would be with family and not working in the lab 16 hours a day.
"Look at all these nice things! I can't explain why people did such things in certain situations! Therefore... God exists, or it is reasonable to believe in god, or whatever!".
Well, actually, I was trying to say that these are some reasons *I* choose to believe in God. You look at these same things and choose different beliefs.
Your mode of thinking is antithetical to scientific and reality-based thinking and action.
Why is that? What in my mode of thinking hinders science? Perhaps I love science because I like understanding how God did things. I find evolution to be a really clever way of deriving amazing results in diversity and adaptation with extremely simple rules (a little random mutation, some time, and the possibility of not reproducing).
(and "why" in such a term is utterly meaningless regardless, but I'll indulge you)
The fact that you believe it meaningless says it has no meaning to you. To a philosopher, it has meaning. I could believe that there is no why. It makes me happier to believe there is. I cited a few things above that lead me toward that belief. Those same things clearly do not lead you to that belief, which is fine.
I don't need to be "right" on this; in fact I admit that there's no way to prove it one way or another. But you keep trying to insist that, because there's a lack of proof and it's rather improbable, I must be wrong and I must admit it.
It includes evolution, for example, and certainly has no room for the "you have to believe it because it's written here". Like gays and lesbians are "sinning"? What a load of crap.
Who are you arguing with? Because it's not me. As I said in another comment, I think evolution is the best scientific explanation for the diversity of life we see. I don't think it's a sin to be gay if you're gay.
You're attacking someone else's religion. As I said above, it's frustrating to me that, because of some vocal idiots, there's a lot of people that think that, because I believe in God, I must therefore also believe all these other things that are ridiculous.
If the supernatural isn't any part of nature, how does the supernatural affect the natural world?
By analogy, let me suggest one way.
Remember Flatland? To a two-dimensional creature, a three-dimensional creature can do some amazing things. It doesn't know how and can't really conceive of it, but they were nevertheless possible.
Realize this is an analogy only; I can't claim to know how God affects the world, though I have some theories. But they're not *scientific* theories, they're really more like interesting philosophy exercises (how many angels can dance on the head of a pin; if a tree falls in the woods and no one hears it did it make a sound).
Choose one, then we can tear that apart.
You are very convinced that you're right, clearly. I don't need you to believe in my god or any other god. But you don't seem like you'll be happy until you prove me (or others who believe as I do) wrong.
BTW: GodDidIt, is not an answer to the question "why" - it's still wishful thinking.
If you don't believe in God then of course God can't answer the why. In that case you're left with *no* answer to the why, which is fine if you like it. But thousands of years of philosophers tells me that some people at least want to speculate on the why.
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Bah. "Would you like some scroto?" was so funny even my wife quotes it.
Bzzzt. Prices feel faster during regulation than after deregulation.
What about lower fares? Didn't deregulation pay for itself with lower fares? Apparently not. Morgan Stanley shows that airline pricing has been falling for 40 years. Eyeballing the chart, the fall in prices was steeper between 1962 and 1978 than after deregulation.
The U.S. has a first-to-invent system, so the speed of your paperwork is irrelevant unless it takes you more than a year.
You want to complain about most of the rest of the world; almost all other countries use a first-to-file system, which is easier to adjudicate but can be unfair to slow paperwork-fu.
Posted results are the past. Layoffs are based on expectations of the future.
Last summer at raise time they told IBMers that the new raise package was based on the expectation of future revenue, and since it wasn't looking good, the raises were small. Now IBM made more than expected, but everyone who got shafted by the raise won't see it.
Posted results are great -- except that they don't make up for an (undeservedly) low raise. Who do you think will see the unexpected money earned in Q4... the rank-and-file, or the executives and shareholders?
I'm glad I got out.
About the tax thing: you're right, until GWB and Congress changed tax law in 2001 there was a tax penalty for being married, if both spouses worked. Now that it's gone, there's effectively a "single person" tax penalty -- that is, take any two single people who are employed and not married; if they went and got married to each other they'd then pay less in taxes.
Given all the other financial benefits of being married (actually about the same as living together) I really wish the tax code would go back to the Marriage penalty; it's more fair.
If there were a marriage penalty again, gay marriage would have the interesting property that gay people would be asking to pay more in taxes to have a legal union (just like before 2001). And yet, I'm sure most of them would do it, since the marriage decision isn't (usually) about finances anyways.
All companies I'm aware of use outside counsel, for a simple reason: someone to blame (and sue) if something bad happens.
If a deadline is missed on a patent with significant business value, damages can be recovered. If an attorney has been suborned and deliberately sabotages the claims, damages can be recovered. You can't get damages back from yourself if an employee is at fault.
The Federal Circuit recently ruled en banc that if your patent doesn't involve specific physical things, it's not actually patentable. So at the moment any software not tied to a specific hardware device is invalid again.
What Congress does with this will be interesting to see. They were taking up patent reform several times in the last session. Probably half or more of IBM's patents are on software methods.
Last year it was $750 for each application filed, and another $500 on issue. If there are more than 4 inventors the $3000 and $2000 is split evenly.
Don't forget the money for a patent attorney to draft claims, deal with non-final rejections, etc. The attorney's fees are around $20k per patent.
Since when does the ability to use something that someone else thought was clever or clear, but didn't document exhaustively, have anything to do with the ability to write various forms of software?
At the risk of being flamed myself, I'm a software engineer too. A good one. I suck at administering a box, because I'm not a good admin. I can manage to get things working, but usually only with the help of folks who already know all the stupid quirks or Ubuntu, nVidia, etc.
For example, it took me a few days to get my second monitor working since I wanted to use it rotated 90 degrees. The crap xorg.conf that nVidia spat out had a syntax error so I got an unusable screen (and had to have someone show me the magic key combo to get into a terminal so I could copy my backup xorg.conf back. After a bunch of google searching I finally found the error in the config file and fixed it and I now have the second monitor at 90 degree rotation. It took a few days because, frankly, I had actual productive work to do as well.
I've had problems with Evolution (doesn't seem to like the exchange server's directory), etc., etc. To me that smacks of mediocre software, if not only can't I get it working but it doesn't tell me why it's not working.
I have had similar problems with Windows, though. I typed in my wireless password wrong once and it just failed to connect. No error message. It took about an hour to figure out how to get Vista to forget it knew about that connection/password combo so I could try again.
Please don't confuse being good at using a tool with being good at making tools. That's like assuming only a good football player could be a good football coach, or only a good driver can make or design a good car.
The xorg.conf that NVidia spat out didn't work. It had a one-line error that I had to fix by hand after some google search (it put in 'Screen 0 "Screen0" 0 0" instead of 'Screen 0 "Screen0"', and with such a small change my video would no longer come up). Then I had to put the Rotate CCW line in by hand too.
But I too have dual-head with one rotated in Ubuntu. After fixing nVidia's crap.
Oh, and when I just had one monitor and I tried to rotate it with the System panel it didn't work either. I forget what happened exactly but I had a bear of a time getting something visible so I could fix it.
If you're talking about HAL...
I fired them because they weren't paying me what I was worth to them. I'm getting paid more now (but the benefits are less, so it probably balances out).
I did get to write a lot of code that skipped as much of the process as I could (mostly the parts outside my group; it still went through design and code reviews). I was one of those guys making constant, iterative improvements in the guts of my component, that had no "business justification" because the only thing it made better was future development and bug investigation. But in the process of that hacking I also identified dozens of real bugs that I wouldn't have found otherwise.
Fun fact: Robert Mills taught my freshman honors Physics class in Spring 1994. He got sick (heart problems I think) that quarter and couldn't finish it out, so the prof I had the previous two quarters finished for us. RM actually made the undergrad quantum mechanics vaguely understandable in class. I thought he was a really great teacher and I was sad not to finish the quarter with him.
But at the time I didn't know there was an equation named after him. :-)
This won't show you the file names that matched.
find . -exec grep $1 {} /dev/null \;
or limit it to C source files:
find . -name "*.[ch]" -exec grep $1 {} /dev/null \;
or limit it to plain files:
find . -type f -exec grep $1 {} /dev/null \;
Last week I rewrote some code that had been annoying me since early 2003. I knew intuitively it could be done better at the time but I didn't have time (or, I think, skills at the time) to dig into it. After 5+ years of the code working okay but bugging me every time I came across it again, having hacks added on top, and constant improvement of the stuff around it (including a lot of deleting) I finally had my a-ha moment.
32 modified files and thousands of lines of code later, it was done, and my team rejoiced. :-)
Sometimes certain sections of code can't really be fixed until the stuff around it is improved first, because it all ties together.
Just imagine a Cloud of CherryPals!
The biggest disadvantage to agile that I see is that, if you have lots of customers (think MS Word, or slightly more niche, Solaris OS), you can't really get feedback from all of them (and even if you could they want different things). Also, you can't really release a new version of an OS frequently -- customers hate even planned downtime and are often running versions that are 5 years old because it works and there's risk in trying something new.
I like the idea of agile, I work that way mentally, but the realities of large software projects in large corporations seem to make it impossible.
It'd be clustered. Here's a few numbers that I think are public domain.
The physical box can contain up to 128 CPUs, with 4 way SMT makes 512 CPUs. The box can have up to 16TB I believe, but of course that's terribly expensive. Given the numbers listed (300k cores, 620TB) it sounds like there's about 483 cpu's per TB of memory, so there's likely to be 586 boxes with a little over 1TB each.
If they're running AIX, there will be one OS instance per box, and they will have some software on top of the OS to manage the whole cluster so it can all solve one problem.
It depends on your focus.
If you focus on the asshattery, then homicide leads to fewer asshats.
If you focus on the anger that comes from dealing with asshats, then suicide leads to fewer angry people.
I think we need a research project to see which focus is correct. :-)
The more experienced runners will tell you that Nike is an inferior brand, compared to Mizuno, New Balance, Asics, Brooks, etc., etc.
Personally I find their shoes don't fit (too narrow) so after experimenting with the Free I gave up on them.
to think you are so special that you don't is both arrogant and naive.
Sure, except I don't drink Coke or Pepsi (or their bottled water variants), I don't buy expensive sports clothing, and I don't eat at McDonald's or Burger King. And I don't shop at Wal*Mart. So none of that advertising will have an effect on me. (I also don't watch TV so I miss the most annoying advertising).
I agree that measuring the effect of advertising on an individual level is extremely difficult, but I don't agree that any specific person *must* have been affected by advertising. I think it's clear the stuff works, but the question of *why* (or on which people) isn't answered (and wouldn't advertising agencies love to know that?)
The specific case of Douglas Kmiec goes against that theory. He publicly supported Obama and was denied communion. He personally is against abortion but supported a candidate who is in favor of abortion rights.
That *does* seem like meddling -- can a Catholic not lend their support to someone who disagrees with some particular corner of the Catholic faith?
[Stuff on Nobel] And what does that have to do with religion?
The context wasn't fully explained, I admit.
The gist is, there's an argument to be made that the "smartest" people in various scientific disciplines don't believe in God. Those would be the Nobel winners. My point was that they are smart in a scientific sense but generally lacking in emotional (and spiritual) intelligence. Folks at the top of the academic ladder tend to be very focused and driven on that one specific thing, and the example of not spending time with family was about lacking emotional intelligence. They don't have the same need for closeness, or they would be with family and not working in the lab 16 hours a day.
"Look at all these nice things! I can't explain why people did such things in certain situations! Therefore... God exists, or it is reasonable to believe in god, or whatever!".
Well, actually, I was trying to say that these are some reasons *I* choose to believe in God. You look at these same things and choose different beliefs.
Your mode of thinking is antithetical to scientific and reality-based thinking and action.
Why is that? What in my mode of thinking hinders science? Perhaps I love science because I like understanding how God did things. I find evolution to be a really clever way of deriving amazing results in diversity and adaptation with extremely simple rules (a little random mutation, some time, and the possibility of not reproducing).
(and "why" in such a term is utterly meaningless regardless, but I'll indulge you)
The fact that you believe it meaningless says it has no meaning to you. To a philosopher, it has meaning. I could believe that there is no why. It makes me happier to believe there is. I cited a few things above that lead me toward that belief. Those same things clearly do not lead you to that belief, which is fine.
I don't need to be "right" on this; in fact I admit that there's no way to prove it one way or another. But you keep trying to insist that, because there's a lack of proof and it's rather improbable, I must be wrong and I must admit it.
It includes evolution, for example, and certainly has no room for the "you have to believe it because it's written here". Like gays and lesbians are "sinning"? What a load of crap.
:-)
Who are you arguing with? Because it's not me. As I said in another comment, I think evolution is the best scientific explanation for the diversity of life we see. I don't think it's a sin to be gay if you're gay.
You're attacking someone else's religion. As I said above, it's frustrating to me that, because of some vocal idiots, there's a lot of people that think that, because I believe in God, I must therefore also believe all these other things that are ridiculous.
I only believe *one* ridiculous thing.
If the supernatural isn't any part of nature, how does the supernatural affect the natural world?
By analogy, let me suggest one way.
Remember Flatland? To a two-dimensional creature, a three-dimensional creature can do some amazing things. It doesn't know how and can't really conceive of it, but they were nevertheless possible.
Realize this is an analogy only; I can't claim to know how God affects the world, though I have some theories. But they're not *scientific* theories, they're really more like interesting philosophy exercises (how many angels can dance on the head of a pin; if a tree falls in the woods and no one hears it did it make a sound).
Choose one, then we can tear that apart.
You are very convinced that you're right, clearly. I don't need you to believe in my god or any other god. But you don't seem like you'll be happy until you prove me (or others who believe as I do) wrong.
BTW: GodDidIt, is not an answer to the question "why" - it's still wishful thinking.
If you don't believe in God then of course God can't answer the why. In that case you're left with *no* answer to the why, which is fine if you like it. But thousands of years of philosophers tells me that some people at least want to speculate on the why.