Wrong. Politicians need money. There's no way around that. Like others have already mentioned, at the very least, they need it for campaigning. How are you going to get elected in this day and age if your name and face aren't plastered across the ol' boob tube?
Taxachussets is trying to do something about it---candidates can get govt. funding to run their election given enough signatures and minimal outside donations. Sad thing is that one of the first such candidates made a total ass of himself by slandering everything he could get his mouth on (Tolman: http://www.tolman2002.com/). He lost in the democratic primary and Mass. is left choosing between O'Brien and Romney, both well backed by "bribes."
Also sad is that this faithful attempt to get money out of politics is about to get its air supply cut off. The Mass. budget has red ink everywhere and this program is on the cutting block. The people don't even seem to want it anymore---a Nov. ballot question asks whether the people want to keep it. Polls indicate that they'd rather have the money (not surprising considering that Tolman was the figurehead). Again, it's not the companies and politicians that are the problem---it's the voters.
The asteroid may not "feel" the pull of the earth, but an outside observer could scientifically determine that it was the object doing the accelerating, not the earth.
Uh. Yeah. The asteroid creates a whole 0.00000000001 m/s^2 pull. Very significant:-P
Don't you know that Martians regularly launch various size rocks toward earth? I think it's 25 points for hitting a girl's foot. Some alien hit the jackpot with this one:
http://www.positron-press.co.uk/c3-5.htm (post by jukal)
I don't buy it. It's one thing to be moving at a constant velocity, hit something, and say that the other thing hit it. That's fine. But, here, we're talking about some *serious* acceleration that is not indistinguishable between reference frames. It is *clear* that the asteroid accellerated toward the big, blue sphere-like object and hit an object standing on it's surface. However, the big, blue object is the one to blame for causing the asteroid to accelerate, so you could say that the big, blue object (and hence the object standing on its surface) deserved what it got!
The fact that such issues have arisen is evidence that RH isn't MS. If MS did such things, cries would have fallen on deaf ears and there wouldn't have been discussion (except in the very core geek communities). RH made bad moves with glibc and gcc, but instead of pressing on and ignoring their mistakes, they listened. Worlds better than I can imagine MS ever being.
Just started reading the review and noticed this paragraph:
It's been nearly one year to the day since we first eyed the Pentium 4 running at 2.0Ghz, which debuted on August 27, 2001, and today we are testing the new Pentium 4 2.8Ghz. According to Moore's law, Intel is ahead of the schedule to double processing power every 18 months and if all goes according to plan we should be toying with a processor above to the 3Ghz mark before long.
Sorry for my ignorance, but when did 3GHz become twice as fast as 2GHz? According to 2.0GHz and 2.8GHz point estimates, Intel should hit 4.0GHz about a year from now (2.8*(2.8/2.0)=3.92). A little slower than Moore's law predicts...
There's nothing wrong with the US Patent Office. They record patents. Some people have high hopes that the office might be able to filter out bad patents. But, that's not as easy as it sounds and there's hardly any reason why they should. Doing so requires significant judgement and interpretation of the law. That's what the judicial branch of the US govt is for.
I'd be happy to see the elimination of software patents, but I also don't think the situation is as bad as it's made up to be.
Problem with patents is that it's usually difficult to tell whether you're really infringing. I found the BT vs. Prodigy decision illuminating. BT effectively patented the Internet. But BT didn't lose because the judge thought patenting the Internet a silly notion. Rather, he picked apart their wording & caught them on technicalities. A technology lawyer might have predicted the decision, but I think most hackers wouldn't have guessed that it would have come out like that! Same thing could easily happen with OS technique patents. You and I might look over a patent and think that someone has patented virtual memory. A lawyer might look at the patent, compare it to the Linux implementation and find sufficient technial differences to convince a judge.
I think Linus is right in his opinion. Ignore the patents. There are patents on just about everything, but they don't mean anything until they've been tested in court. And, the more you go looking, the more patents you find and the less coding you get done.:)
Anyway, what have we got to lose? The basis for most patent suits is lost revenue. RedHat, SuSE & other companies that sell Linux could be sued. Linus should watch his back since he indirectly benefits from Linux sales (through licensing of the Linux trademark). But, there's hardly any basis to go suing a kernel developer. The developer makes no money off the implementation *and* the code is free for the company (the one with the patent) to sell if they wanted to! Company suing a developer is actually evidence that the company only wanted to use the patent in the courts, not for traditional revenue generation. Evidence of bad faith like can be enough to have a patent suit thrown out.
You didn't have to tell us that you didn't read the article. It's obvious by your comment.
Weed's software doesn't diagnose you. At the simplest level, it just works as a search engine. Asking a doctor to keep abreast of all diseases and their symptoms is like asking you or me to track all useful information on the web. It's impossible. That's why we have Google and that's why the medical community needs Weed's software (or something like it).
Connecting symptoms with diseases is a simple, boring job; it involves a *lot* of information. People aren't particularly good at this sort of job. Computers excel. Weed isn't trying to take the doctor out of the picture. He's just trying to make the search part the simple, boring job that it should be.
Jason
Ebay announces increase in P/E ratio
on
Ebay buys PayPal
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Viewed through dot-com glasses, I have trouble seeing the sense in this purchase. Through more traditional financial analysis, I have even more trouble.
EBay is a profitable company (strange, I know!). PayPal is not. Hell, it ain't even close (-78.7M ttm income vs. 139.6M revenue). Buying PayPal puts a serious dent in EBay's own numbers. Before the purchase, its P/E ratio was about 146 ($17B market cap divided by $117M income---I'm looking at 3/31/02 numbers). After, it will be about 448 ($17B market cap divided by $38M income). If that doesn't look bad, consider profit margin. It's currently about 14% ($117M income divided by $840M revenue). After PayPal, it drops to 4% ($38M income divided by $979M revenue). Ouch!
EBay seemed to be one of the (very) few dot-com companies with a head on its shoulders. Now I even wonder about EBay.
Btw, did EBay really think that PayPal would be around for *that* long? At the rate it's bleeding cash and annoying customers, I'd think it would be dead in another 3-4 years. Or, did the EBay CEO forget that sometimes it's useful to think of the long-term future of a company?
I don't think the advice on that web page is particularly good. It may be decent advice in general, but I think yours is somewhat of a special case.
The tech industry is coming out of a period where starting salaries were depressed. There were so many unemployed techies that companies tried to push starting salaries down as low as possible. If there's someone in your company with an identical job who's been there for 1.5-2 years, they probably have a salary that's close to what you've been counter-offered (maybe more!). My guess is that the counter-offer is reflecting the fact that employers no longer have an endless pool of job applicants---they wouldn't be able to pick-up someone else at your old salary if you leave.
So, my advice is: if the *only* reason you'd leave your current company is the salary, accept the counter-offer and stay where you are. Most of that web page advice doesn't apply to you and changing jobs can be a major pain in the a**!:-)
The author makes a very poor argument. Consumers have a reasonable expectation of performance from (e.g.) MS Windows because they pay for it. You can't make the same argument for software that you get for free.
This bill cannot kill open source *development*. It may, however, make the selling of open source software much more difficult. If this bill passes, companies like RedHat would now be liable for bugs in Linux. Of course, RedHat can (and does) take a snapshot of Linux and make lots of modifications and tweaks before making a release, but there's no way they're going to catch all of the bugs. They're best bet would be to get heavily involved in the system of releases of open source software. This will be very tricky, though, as developers will not be happy to see a company have such control...
They know that the fire & brimstone is coming. I guess they're just trying to have some fun along the way. Somebody in the marketing dept. though it would be cool to paint floors purple!
Is this not the weirdest pair of bed-buddies you've ever heard of? Wasn't Unisys once a "Unix" vendor? Or, was it VMS? Unisys is even more old-school than Sun. Why is MS cozying up to them?
Here's a quick snapshot of Unisys history, grabbed from unisys.com:
1989 Unisys introduces Micro A, the first
desktop, single- chip mainframe. 1961 Burroughs introduces the B5000 Series,
the first dual- processor and virtual
memory computer. 1951 Remington Rand delivers UNIVAC computer
to the U.S. Census Bureau. 1873 E. Remington & Sons introduces first
commercially viable typewriter.
Typewriters? Would you trust your valuable data to a typewriter company?:-)
They're not putting Linux on secretaries' desk-tops. As the article discusses, they're replacing unix servers with linux machines (company wide). This isn't the grad revolution that the title implies. It's the small one that's been going on for years now. Yes, Merril Lynch, linux is much (!) better than a hodgepodge of various unix machines. I'm surprised it took them this long to realize. Maybe the other big finance firms will wise up too.
> Here in Ireland we've seen the effects. It > doesn't really get warmer but it's got a hell > of a lot more extreme in the heights of summer > and the depths of winter. It's a lot wetter > too.
Huh? What do you mean? How can you distinguish underlying trends in temperature from random fluctuations? We've just had our warmest winter in 130 years here in Boston. Much of the northeastern U.S. has been experiencing near drought-like conditions recently. Is mother nature selective about how it applies "global warming"?
Anyone read "The Skeptical Environmentalist"? It has whisked up quite a bit of controversy. Scientific American has bashed it. The Economist has praised it. Have any Slashdot readers read it? How does it compare with Satanic Gases?
I think this is a very good ruling. I do not think that every e-mail exchange is legally binding; either standards should be established or each case should be considered separately.
I think e-mail is legally binding in this case because it is obvious that the buyer and seller had every intention to conduct a sale together (Seller: "Once we sign the P&S we'd like to close ASAP."). If the seller was courting other buyers simultaneously, he was lying; the seller was not acting in good faith. On the other hand, the buyer was acting in good faith and the two parties went through all of the negotiations of a normal house purchase.
It is true that e-mail can be forged, but so can signatures. In fact, signatures are easier to forge than a full series of e-mails. As he should be, the judge is more interested in evaluating whether a contract (whether verbal, electronic or written) was negotiatioed and agreed upon and evaluating whether one of the parties was acting in bad faith. In this case, one party was acting in bad faith, hence that party should not be allowed to escape from the contractual obligations.
Slashdot Mirror
Is Slashdot so behind-the-times that it considers FFox news relevant?
Uh, have you ever read US legal code? Most of it reads like this.
Jason
Wrong. Politicians need money. There's no way around that. Like others have already mentioned, at the very least, they need it for campaigning. How are you going to get elected in this day and age if your name and face aren't plastered across the ol' boob tube?
Taxachussets is trying to do something about it---candidates can get govt. funding to run their election given enough signatures and minimal outside donations. Sad thing is that one of the first such candidates made a total ass of himself by slandering everything he could get his mouth on (Tolman: http://www.tolman2002.com/). He lost in the democratic primary and Mass. is left choosing between O'Brien and Romney, both well backed by "bribes."
Also sad is that this faithful attempt to get money out of politics is about to get its air supply cut off. The Mass. budget has red ink everywhere and this program is on the cutting block. The people don't even seem to want it anymore---a Nov. ballot question asks whether the people want to keep it. Polls indicate that they'd rather have the money (not surprising considering that Tolman was the figurehead). Again, it's not the companies and politicians that are the problem---it's the voters.
Jason
Does it? I'm still waiting for this process to bomb:
24345 jrennie 20 19 625M 625M 514M R N 0 98.8 41.4 62713m findFeatures.perl
Jason
You don't think court cases cause perspiration? :-)
Jason
The asteroid may not "feel" the pull of the earth, but an outside observer could scientifically determine that it was the object doing the accelerating, not the earth.
:-P
Uh. Yeah. The asteroid creates a whole 0.00000000001 m/s^2 pull. Very significant
Jason
Don't you know that Martians regularly launch various size rocks toward earth? I think it's 25 points for hitting a girl's foot. Some alien hit the jackpot with this one:
http://www.positron-press.co.uk/c3-5.htm (post by jukal)
Jason
I don't buy it. It's one thing to be moving at a constant velocity, hit something, and say that the other thing hit it. That's fine. But, here, we're talking about some *serious* acceleration that is not indistinguishable between reference frames. It is *clear* that the asteroid accellerated toward the big, blue sphere-like object and hit an object standing on it's surface. However, the big, blue object is the one to blame for causing the asteroid to accelerate, so you could say that the big, blue object (and hence the object standing on its surface) deserved what it got!
Jason
Whohoo! Opera crashes less than Mozilla, yet it has the decency to return you to the point where it crashed. When will Moz wise up?
Jason
The fact that such issues have arisen is evidence that RH isn't MS. If MS did such things, cries would have fallen on deaf ears and there wouldn't have been discussion (except in the very core geek communities). RH made bad moves with glibc and gcc, but instead of pressing on and ignoring their mistakes, they listened. Worlds better than I can imagine MS ever being.
Jason
Just started reading the review and noticed this paragraph:
Sorry for my ignorance, but when did 3GHz become twice as fast as 2GHz? According to 2.0GHz and 2.8GHz point estimates, Intel should hit 4.0GHz about a year from now (2.8*(2.8/2.0)=3.92). A little slower than Moore's law predicts...
Jason
There's nothing wrong with the US Patent Office. They record patents. Some people have high hopes that the office might be able to filter out bad patents. But, that's not as easy as it sounds and there's hardly any reason why they should. Doing so requires significant judgement and interpretation of the law. That's what the judicial branch of the US govt is for.
I'd be happy to see the elimination of software patents, but I also don't think the situation is as bad as it's made up to be.
Jason
Problem with patents is that it's usually difficult to tell whether you're really infringing. I found the BT vs. Prodigy decision illuminating. BT effectively patented the Internet. But BT didn't lose because the judge thought patenting the Internet a silly notion. Rather, he picked apart their wording & caught them on technicalities. A technology lawyer might have predicted the decision, but I think most hackers wouldn't have guessed that it would have come out like that! Same thing could easily happen with OS technique patents. You and I might look over a patent and think that someone has patented virtual memory. A lawyer might look at the patent, compare it to the Linux implementation and find sufficient technial differences to convince a judge.
:)
I think Linus is right in his opinion. Ignore the patents. There are patents on just about everything, but they don't mean anything until they've been tested in court. And, the more you go looking, the more patents you find and the less coding you get done.
Anyway, what have we got to lose? The basis for most patent suits is lost revenue. RedHat, SuSE & other companies that sell Linux could be sued. Linus should watch his back since he indirectly benefits from Linux sales (through licensing of the Linux trademark). But, there's hardly any basis to go suing a kernel developer. The developer makes no money off the implementation *and* the code is free for the company (the one with the patent) to sell if they wanted to! Company suing a developer is actually evidence that the company only wanted to use the patent in the courts, not for traditional revenue generation. Evidence of bad faith like can be enough to have a patent suit thrown out.
Jason
You didn't have to tell us that you didn't read the article. It's obvious by your comment.
Weed's software doesn't diagnose you. At the simplest level, it just works as a search engine. Asking a doctor to keep abreast of all diseases and their symptoms is like asking you or me to track all useful information on the web. It's impossible. That's why we have Google and that's why the medical community needs Weed's software (or something like it).
Connecting symptoms with diseases is a simple, boring job; it involves a *lot* of information. People aren't particularly good at this sort of job. Computers excel. Weed isn't trying to take the doctor out of the picture. He's just trying to make the search part the simple, boring job that it should be.
Jason
Viewed through dot-com glasses, I have trouble seeing the sense in this purchase. Through more traditional financial analysis, I have even more trouble.
EBay is a profitable company (strange, I know!). PayPal is not. Hell, it ain't even close (-78.7M ttm income vs. 139.6M revenue). Buying PayPal puts a serious dent in EBay's own numbers. Before the purchase, its P/E ratio was about 146 ($17B market cap divided by $117M income---I'm looking at 3/31/02 numbers). After, it will be about 448 ($17B market cap divided by $38M income). If that doesn't look bad, consider profit margin. It's currently about 14% ($117M income divided by $840M revenue). After PayPal, it drops to 4% ($38M income divided by $979M revenue). Ouch!
EBay seemed to be one of the (very) few dot-com companies with a head on its shoulders. Now I even wonder about EBay.
Btw, did EBay really think that PayPal would be around for *that* long? At the rate it's bleeding cash and annoying customers, I'd think it would be dead in another 3-4 years. Or, did the EBay CEO forget that sometimes it's useful to think of the long-term future of a company?
Jason
I don't think the advice on that web page is particularly good. It may be decent advice in general, but I think yours is somewhat of a special case.
:-)
The tech industry is coming out of a period where starting salaries were depressed. There were so many unemployed techies that companies tried to push starting salaries down as low as possible. If there's someone in your company with an identical job who's been there for 1.5-2 years, they probably have a salary that's close to what you've been counter-offered (maybe more!). My guess is that the counter-offer is reflecting the fact that employers no longer have an endless pool of job applicants---they wouldn't be able to pick-up someone else at your old salary if you leave.
So, my advice is: if the *only* reason you'd leave your current company is the salary, accept the counter-offer and stay where you are. Most of that web page advice doesn't apply to you and changing jobs can be a major pain in the a**!
Jason
The author makes a very poor argument. Consumers have a reasonable expectation of performance from (e.g.) MS Windows because they pay for it. You can't make the same argument for software that you get for free.
This bill cannot kill open source *development*. It may, however, make the selling of open source software much more difficult. If this bill passes, companies like RedHat would now be liable for bugs in Linux. Of course, RedHat can (and does) take a snapshot of Linux and make lots of modifications and tweaks before making a release, but there's no way they're going to catch all of the bugs. They're best bet would be to get heavily involved in the system of releases of open source software. This will be very tricky, though, as developers will not be happy to see a company have such control...
Jason
They know that the fire & brimstone is coming. I guess they're just trying to have some fun along the way. Somebody in the marketing dept. though it would be cool to paint floors purple!
Jason
Is this not the weirdest pair of bed-buddies you've ever heard of? Wasn't Unisys once a "Unix" vendor? Or, was it VMS? Unisys is even more old-school than Sun. Why is MS cozying up to them?
:-)
Here's a quick snapshot of Unisys history, grabbed from unisys.com:
1989 Unisys introduces Micro A, the first
desktop, single- chip mainframe.
1961 Burroughs introduces the B5000 Series,
the first dual- processor and virtual
memory computer.
1951 Remington Rand delivers UNIVAC computer
to the U.S. Census Bureau.
1873 E. Remington & Sons introduces first
commercially viable typewriter.
Typewriters? Would you trust your valuable data to a typewriter company?
Jason
Sun should know better. MS is the only company that can use strong-arming as a business model and get away with it :-}
Jason
They're not putting Linux on secretaries' desk-tops. As the article discusses, they're replacing unix servers with linux machines (company wide). This isn't the grad revolution that the title implies. It's the small one that's been going on for years now. Yes, Merril Lynch, linux is much (!) better than a hodgepodge of various unix machines. I'm surprised it took them this long to realize. Maybe the other big finance firms will wise up too.
Jason
> Here in Ireland we've seen the effects. It
> doesn't really get warmer but it's got a hell
> of a lot more extreme in the heights of summer
> and the depths of winter. It's a lot wetter
> too.
Huh? What do you mean? How can you distinguish underlying trends in temperature from random fluctuations? We've just had our warmest winter in 130 years here in Boston. Much of the northeastern U.S. has been experiencing near drought-like conditions recently. Is mother nature selective about how it applies "global warming"?
Jason
Anyone read "The Skeptical Environmentalist"? It has whisked up quite a bit of controversy. Scientific American has bashed it. The Economist has praised it. Have any Slashdot readers read it? How does it compare with Satanic Gases?
Jason
I think this is a very good ruling. I do not think that every e-mail exchange is legally binding; either standards should be established or each case should be considered separately.
I think e-mail is legally binding in this case because it is obvious that the buyer and seller had every intention to conduct a sale together (Seller: "Once we sign the P&S we'd like to close ASAP."). If the seller was courting other buyers simultaneously, he was lying; the seller was not acting in good faith. On the other hand, the buyer was acting in good faith and the two parties went through all of the negotiations of a normal house purchase.
It is true that e-mail can be forged, but so can signatures. In fact, signatures are easier to forge than a full series of e-mails. As he should be, the judge is more interested in evaluating whether a contract (whether verbal, electronic or written) was negotiatioed and agreed upon and evaluating whether one of the parties was acting in bad faith. In this case, one party was acting in bad faith, hence that party should not be allowed to escape from the contractual obligations.
Jason
Have you read Java in a Nutshell (O'Reilly)? It's compact and serves as a nice reference.
Jason