Try, just once, reading the linked article, reposted here because the site has had trouble keeping up with load this morning:
If you elect us to a majority in the Nokia Board of Directors we will pursue the following agenda:
* Return the company to a strategy that seeks high growth and high profit margins through innovation and overwhelmingly superior products with unrivaled user experience.
* Maintain ownership and control of the software layer of the Nokia products. Software is where innovation, differentiation and shareholder value can most easily be created.
* Revamp hiring strategy to target the top young software talent from around the world. Only if Nokia is able to attract and keep the best talent in the industry it will be able to generate the level of innovation that is needed to achieve sustained growth and consistently high profit margins.
* Dramatically increase efficiency by eliminating outdated and bureaucratic R&D practices like geographically distributed software development and outsourcing.
* Avoid at all cost becoming a poorly differentiated OEM with only low margin, commodity products that is unable to attract top software talent and cannot create shareholder value though innovation.
If you elect us to a majority in the Nokia Board of Directors we will take the following concrete actions:
* Immediate discharge of Stephen Elop from his duties as President and CEO of the company. Appointment of a new CEO with an international mobile industry background. The new CEO will be committed to carry on the rest of the actions listed below.
* Restructure alliance with Microsoft as a tactical exercise focused primarily at the North American market. Release one or two Windows Phone devices under a Nokia sub-brand. Only if carrier acceptance, sales volumes and profit margins are satisfactory, consider releasing more WP devices and make them available in Europe. Windows Phone will not be the primary development platform for Nokia. The Nokia phones with Windows Phone operating system will simply take advantage of the existing developer tools and application ecosystem already put in place by Microsoft.
* MeeGo will be Nokia’s primary smartphone platform. This is where the bulk of the innovation will happen. If MeeGo does not bring great devices to market on an accelerated pace, this strategy will not work. MeeGo smartphones and tablet devices will offer overwhelmingly superior experiences and applications than iOS and Android based competitor products. To reduce time to market, all MeeGo R&D will be done in-house and in a single geographical location. If necessary, suspend cooperation with Intel and concentrate resources on innovation and releasing new Nokia MeeGo devices to market faster.
* Increase the lifespan of Symbian to a minimum of 5 years. Reap the profits of the existing market share and consumer preference that Symbian already enjoys in Europe and Asia. Increasingly use Symbian to target mid-tier and feature phone segments. Up-sell existing Symbian users to MeeGo. Focus Symbian efforts in specific countries in Europe, Asia and Latin America where Nokia and Symbian enjoy a high level of consumer goodwill and can be sold at healthy margins.
* Developer strategy based on QT with primary focus on MeeGo, but providing a credible developer story for Symbian. Enable developers to make money by targeting the huge Symbian installed based while simultaneously offering their best user experience on the MeeGo platform. All this with a common developer ecosystem that allows writing and releasing software for both Meego and Symbian with minimal interoperability work.
* End of distributed R&D. Transition to an R&D setup where 90% of all Nokia R&D takes place in only two geographical locations. One of them will be in Finland and the other will be defined later. There will be no more R&D projects with resources in multiple cities and different time zones. Only small tactical software projects will be allowed to tak
I would like to be able to openly protest and fight against those efforts while not at work without fear of being fired.
Good luck with that. In the world I live in, it's easier to use online handles that my employers don't know and fill my public real-name Facebook and Linked-In accounts with bland politically correct sentimentality.
...I should be able to fire them, for whatever reason I choose. I guess that's the way it was before freedom of association in America was killed off. It may be bad business, and I personally wouldn't want to work for anyone who had such a stringent policy, but any employer should be free to make such decisions, and be free to either benefit or suffer the consequences.
Take that attitude too far and you get backlash like the UAW forming in your town. Sometimes freedom to make mistakes can go too far.
Nurse at a hospital worked there for 24 years, had a bad day and started ranting around the office about what salaries everyone made and how unfair life is (ever seen M.D. - Nurse working relationships up close? unfair doesn't even start...) Otherwise she was an average to good employee.
I did a summer internship at an electronics factory in 1987, then and there the floor people would tell the managers "be nice to the interns, they'll be coming back in a couple of years as your boss." At that time in that place, that was entirely possible, though there were better opportunities available for most college grads than being front-office engineering managers at a factory, especially that one.
What I've experienced in the macro-economic picture since then is that I have steadily increased my annual income at a rate that seems to have outpaced inflation by about 0.8% per year, progress, but not much. While I've been treading water like this, I've watched the bottom end lose ground at a much faster rate, using the same metrics, I'd say that most "line workers" have been sinking at more like 1.5%/year vs. inflation.
We all can afford cell phones, computers, and 67" plasma TVs now, if we want them. But things like food, gasoline, and housing have gone up 3x in the last 25 years. It doesn't feel like real progress to me.
Contrast your story with my hiring experience: posting 20hr/week intern positions. Occasionally we'd get "volunteers" who wanted an unpaid position, for the most part we got what we paid for, though occasionally (almost predictably, I think) we'd get a valuable personal referral out of one of these people for a kid who was really productive.
As for the "hired gun" interns who came for the money, we couldn't get anyone in the door for less than $20 per hour, and those that came for that money were more interested in pursuing their own projects and bitching about how their company issued PC was "lame," than doing any of the actual work they were assigned. You'd like to think that they would pick up and learn as time went along, but in reality their productivity steadily declined while they were in the position. It was all attitude, and it was the first time I felt a separation from "kids these days."
I experienced this personally with "anti dandruff" shampoo in the 1980s - as long as you used it, you needed it, stop for a week and you get horrible dandruff. Stop for two months and the microbe colony in your scalp rebalances and dandruff settles down to about the same as when you were using the shampoo.
The same thing happens with antiseptic mouthwash, use it twice daily and you'll need to use it twice daily, because the first bacteria to recolonize your mouth are nasty. Not saying vaccines are like this, but so much of what gets pushed at us is.
I won't bother recounting my set of anti-vax reasoning, the whole thing has been debated ad-nauseum and every point has three counter-points from the opposite side. I'm glad you did the research and reached your conclusions for yourself and your children. I had unlimited access to Pub-Med at the time, and I did drill down into the references and look at them too. The major flaw in my research is that I used the current press as my starting point, so my sampling was skewed by basing on whatever was stirring up the press during that 3-4 month window when I did my research. I recognize this, but I was also more interested in the new findings at the time (2003).
My feeling on vaccines is this: Polio vaccine is great, an amazing triumph of modern medicine, much better than drinking sewage to get the same effect. Whooping cough and some of the other major killers of the past, also a very very good idea. Today we're over doing it, period. By how much is hard to say, but I definitely feel we have passed the point of doing more harm than good. Too many new vaccines, too many kids with fevers spiking to 105 following the shot, too obviously pushed by the pharma money machine, and if you think that last statement makes me a conspiracy kook, take a look into what happened with HPV vaccine rollout and the Texas Governor and schools right at that time when I was forming my opinions. The WHO studies looked at populations as a whole, I am only raising two boys.
The whole thimerosal debate was raging at the time too, and whether or not mercury in vaccines ever did any harm to anybody or not, it has no more reason to be there today than it does in fillings in your mouth, or lead does in paint and gasoline.
We put the brakes on the vaccine schedule after our children started presenting serious ASD symptoms. That puts us in a more or less 1% of the population category, not enough to harm herd immunity even if the whole group opts out. I know anecdotes prove nothing, but our younger son, who stopped his vaccine schedule at age 2.5 instead of 4, has much less severe difficulties, still needs a 1 on 1 aide in first grade, but at least he can function in a mainstream classroom.
The study I have never seen is the one that looks specifically at families with a history of ASD and compares vax/no-vax in that population. Those are the results I was trying to infer from the studies I read, and the the results were inconclusive.
Our kids are vaccinated against all the major killers, and they will continue to get tetanus updates into the future, but they damn sure don't need to be in the first wave of boys to receive HPV vaccine. The schools are notified and they will stay home if there's any outbreak of something they're not vaccinated for. With the awareness, monitoring, and care-giving ability of present-day medicine in the United States, I don't feel that they are a significant health threat to others, or at significant risk of significant harm from anything the vaccines might protect against, and the law does still protect our right to opt out.
I wouldn't want to live like the Amish, but I respect their right to choose that lifestyle.
researchers have tried time and time again to show a correlation between various conditions such as autism and vaccination and the results have been negative. There is no link. None.
Like I said about the polarized, prejudiced positions everyone has on the subject. It sounds to me like no amount of links or evidence I compile will change your mind. I did my research in 2003, just after my 2 year old stopped talking, and smiling. I dug deep in dozens of press stories, following up on the studies they referenced, reading those studies, and weighing the evidence for myself. At that time, the studies concluding that vaccines do no harm were based on relatively small sample sizes, dozens at best. They got tremendous press with dramatic headlines and emotionally charged stories about how this proves, once and for all, that we all need to vaccinate our children with every shot available, to do otherwise would be irresponsible and EVIL. There were also several studies published around that time that did find links - these studies tended to be based on long term data collected across thousands of children, things like the Danish health registry, and another across the state of California. They did show a significant link in their data, not smoking gun damning proof, but enough to raise a concern and look into it further. These tended to get quiet, balanced press coverage from just a few outlets.
The more experience I get with issues like this, the more respect I get for our lawmakers, I used to have absolutely none. The laws surrounding issues like these tend to protect minorities against whiplash popular opinion, protecting society against itself for the ultimate good of everyone. The law provides an "out" for people who do not want to vaccinate their children. We can conjecture for a long time why that option is preserved and whether or not we'd all be better off if it weren't.
Personally, I don't want to live in a world where the government sends you to a leper colony just because you haven't had your leprosy vaccine.
I have worked in the med-device industry since 1990, the whole time doing cutting edge research while anticipating the probable outcome of that research so the company can patent solutions to the problems that people don't know they need to solve yet.
Ultimate goal: profit. Scheming to make millions? Yes, we all did it. I have been under the impression we are acting like good capitalists following the American dream, taking risks to have a chance of reaping great rewards. Falsifying research, suppressing unwanted results? Not in my jobs, but rumors of bigger companies (especially pharma), doing it abound.
The whole vax/anti-vax thing has evolved into a sad prejudiced polarization of opinion, worse than religion and politics for most people I hear debating it.
You could show me a video of Jenny McCarthy giving Dr. Wakefield a blow job before he published his "research" and even if I believed the video was authentic, it isn't going to sway my opinion on whether or not following the current U.S. recommended vaccine schedule is in the best interests of my children. Wakefield's study is just one data point among millions, and it never was the fundamental basis for my opinions. I had already discounted his findings it when I learned that he had funding to do a study on 150 children, but declined to do so, staying pat with his results from 12.
AFAIK, the H.264 decoder in FFmpeg is LGPL licensed... not sure when the underlying license for the codec patents kicks in, but I think it's in 10K unit quantities, would affect Google, but not most independent software developers.
On one there is personal freedom, on the other is personal responsibility and accountability.
I used to believe that, when I was 12. The longer I live, the more I realize that life is a lottery - you can make all the best choices and be absolutely screwed, and you can screw off and do grossly irresponsible things and be rewarded for them like a King.
Odds are better that you will do well if you "follow the path" - you've got maybe 60% chance of being "average," but I know way too many people who have followed that responsible path just to be kicked to the gutter by things totally out of their control.
On the other hand, it is all to easy to throw yourself in the gutter - we are all presented with hundreds of opportunities to do so every day. It's a miracle that there is anything resembling civilization at all, considering how easy it is to screw it up.
Yeah, I was giving actual credit to Tron for the concept - it's a good one, one that deserves a couple of more attempts at development (besides the Matrix...)
I "grew up" through the TRS-80 / Apple II era, and I think that the "magic" of BASIC is still accessible on today's machines - sure you can't (easily) program super slick applications in it, but then you never could, even in the old days.
For me, BASIC was great because it was interpreted, very fast to try something and see what happens. It also had enough "power" in its relatively simple syntax (60 to 70 commands) to do a lot of things without resorting to insanely huge bloated libraries (stdlib/Boost/Qt - I'm thinking about you now...).
I don't agree with Dijkstra's comment that programmers are "ruined" by BASIC, I think programmers are ruined by too much / too little pressure to deliver working systems in too short / too long a time frame. Teach someone basic and put them in the typical high pressure to deliver quickly scenario and yes, they will fix things quickly with GOTOs - more a result of the schedule than the language. Even worse than fixing things quickly under pressure using a GOTO or two is spending 8 years teaching someone theory, then giving them so much luxury of time to architect and plan and scaffold and framework that they construct elaborate extensible polymorphic frameworks that are universally reusable for practically nothing. I've seen a lot of very ambitious code over the years that can be effectively replaced by something 1/50th the size.
Procedures are procedures, regardless of the language.
I saw the original - I was staying with my Grandmother during summer vacation at the time, I think I was 14 - I never watched it again.
From what I recall, now two lifetimes later, there wasn't really any plot in the first Tron, either. It had a sci-fi-ey premise, a couple of live action sequences clearly made to resemble practical video games of the time (especially the light-cycles), and a lot of black-lights. That's all that made a lasting impression on me. Actually, thinking about it for a minute, the premise is kind of out there with the William Gibson "into the machine" novels, but dumbed down for a Disney production.
When the new one comes to DVD, I'll put it and the original in our Netflix queue, might even pop 'em up near the top, but I'm not expecting much. I do think I'll watch the new one before re-watching the old one, from what I remember, I imagine I'll get so bored with the old one that I walk away after about 20 minutes.
Maybe the kids (boys 7 and 9) will like it - they seem to like all things Jim Henson lately, including Fraggle Rock - it, and a lot of other things they like, have the same coma inducing effect on me that I expect from re-watching Tron I.
Yeah, I just cleaned my wife's e-mail "attachments" folder, with live files from 1999 forward... they were migrated there from 2 previous machines, but she's used Eudora continuously since about 1999, so all the attachments were there - figured since we hadn't looked at any of them in 10+ years, we could use the 3GB of space for other things.
Slashdot Mirror
1000 shares isn't that hard to pull off - they have 2000+ "Facebook Likes," so if those people all own an average of $5 worth of Nokia stock each...
few subcontractors are dumb enough to allow a "Nokia can end this relationship at any time, becasue they feel like it, with no penalty" clause.
Umm... so what did they do to MeeGo?
Try, just once, reading the linked article, reposted here because the site has had trouble keeping up with load this morning:
If you elect us to a majority in the Nokia Board of Directors we will pursue the following agenda:
* Return the company to a strategy that seeks high growth and high profit margins through innovation and overwhelmingly superior products with unrivaled user experience.
* Maintain ownership and control of the software layer of the Nokia products. Software is where innovation, differentiation and shareholder value can most easily be created.
* Revamp hiring strategy to target the top young software talent from around the world. Only if Nokia is able to attract and keep the best talent in the industry it will be able to generate the level of innovation that is needed to achieve sustained growth and consistently high profit margins.
* Dramatically increase efficiency by eliminating outdated and bureaucratic R&D practices like geographically distributed software development and outsourcing.
* Avoid at all cost becoming a poorly differentiated OEM with only low margin, commodity products that is unable to attract top software talent and cannot create shareholder value though innovation.
If you elect us to a majority in the Nokia Board of Directors we will take the following concrete actions:
* Immediate discharge of Stephen Elop from his duties as President and CEO of the company. Appointment of a new CEO with an international mobile industry background. The new CEO will be committed to carry on the rest of the actions listed below.
* Restructure alliance with Microsoft as a tactical exercise focused primarily at the North American market. Release one or two Windows Phone devices under a Nokia sub-brand. Only if carrier acceptance, sales volumes and profit margins are satisfactory, consider releasing more WP devices and make them available in Europe. Windows Phone will not be the primary development platform for Nokia. The Nokia phones with Windows Phone operating system will simply take advantage of the existing developer tools and application ecosystem already put in place by Microsoft.
* MeeGo will be Nokia’s primary smartphone platform. This is where the bulk of the innovation will happen. If MeeGo does not bring great devices to market on an accelerated pace, this strategy will not work. MeeGo smartphones and tablet devices will offer overwhelmingly superior experiences and applications than iOS and Android based competitor products. To reduce time to market, all MeeGo R&D will be done in-house and in a single geographical location. If necessary, suspend cooperation with Intel and concentrate resources on innovation and releasing new Nokia MeeGo devices to market faster.
* Increase the lifespan of Symbian to a minimum of 5 years. Reap the profits of the existing market share and consumer preference that Symbian already enjoys in Europe and Asia. Increasingly use Symbian to target mid-tier and feature phone segments. Up-sell existing Symbian users to MeeGo. Focus Symbian efforts in specific countries in Europe, Asia and Latin America where Nokia and Symbian enjoy a high level of consumer goodwill and can be sold at healthy margins.
* Developer strategy based on QT with primary focus on MeeGo, but providing a credible developer story for Symbian. Enable developers to make money by targeting the huge Symbian installed based while simultaneously offering their best user experience on the MeeGo platform. All this with a common developer ecosystem that allows writing and releasing software for both Meego and Symbian with minimal interoperability work.
* End of distributed R&D. Transition to an R&D setup where 90% of all Nokia R&D takes place in only two geographical locations. One of them will be in Finland and the other will be defined later. There will be no more R&D projects with resources in multiple cities and different time zones. Only small tactical software projects will be allowed to tak
Any GPS I have ever used has been a stand-alone device, personally, I'd rather use a system with fewer potential points of failure.
Is this the same 4G that is going to kill GPS functionality? http://www.avweb.com/avwebflash/news/4G_Broadband_May_Jam_GPS_204069-1.html?CMP=OTC-RSS
That's right. Due to this oppressive legal ruling, you can no longer fire your boss for sharing their negative opinion of you online.
But this is America - you can sue them for defamation.
I would like to be able to openly protest and fight against those efforts while not at work without fear of being fired.
Good luck with that. In the world I live in, it's easier to use online handles that my employers don't know and fill my public real-name Facebook and Linked-In accounts with bland politically correct sentimentality.
...I should be able to fire them, for whatever reason I choose. I guess that's the way it was before freedom of association in America was killed off. It may be bad business, and I personally wouldn't want to work for anyone who had such a stringent policy, but any employer should be free to make such decisions, and be free to either benefit or suffer the consequences.
Take that attitude too far and you get backlash like the UAW forming in your town. Sometimes freedom to make mistakes can go too far.
Nurse at a hospital worked there for 24 years, had a bad day and started ranting around the office about what salaries everyone made and how unfair life is (ever seen M.D. - Nurse working relationships up close? unfair doesn't even start...) Otherwise she was an average to good employee.
Fired within a week.
I did a summer internship at an electronics factory in 1987, then and there the floor people would tell the managers "be nice to the interns, they'll be coming back in a couple of years as your boss." At that time in that place, that was entirely possible, though there were better opportunities available for most college grads than being front-office engineering managers at a factory, especially that one.
What I've experienced in the macro-economic picture since then is that I have steadily increased my annual income at a rate that seems to have outpaced inflation by about 0.8% per year, progress, but not much. While I've been treading water like this, I've watched the bottom end lose ground at a much faster rate, using the same metrics, I'd say that most "line workers" have been sinking at more like 1.5%/year vs. inflation.
We all can afford cell phones, computers, and 67" plasma TVs now, if we want them. But things like food, gasoline, and housing have gone up 3x in the last 25 years. It doesn't feel like real progress to me.
Contrast your story with my hiring experience: posting 20hr/week intern positions. Occasionally we'd get "volunteers" who wanted an unpaid position, for the most part we got what we paid for, though occasionally (almost predictably, I think) we'd get a valuable personal referral out of one of these people for a kid who was really productive.
As for the "hired gun" interns who came for the money, we couldn't get anyone in the door for less than $20 per hour, and those that came for that money were more interested in pursuing their own projects and bitching about how their company issued PC was "lame," than doing any of the actual work they were assigned. You'd like to think that they would pick up and learn as time went along, but in reality their productivity steadily declined while they were in the position. It was all attitude, and it was the first time I felt a separation from "kids these days."
Don't agree with me? Then GET OFF MY LAWN!
I experienced this personally with "anti dandruff" shampoo in the 1980s - as long as you used it, you needed it, stop for a week and you get horrible dandruff. Stop for two months and the microbe colony in your scalp rebalances and dandruff settles down to about the same as when you were using the shampoo.
The same thing happens with antiseptic mouthwash, use it twice daily and you'll need to use it twice daily, because the first bacteria to recolonize your mouth are nasty. Not saying vaccines are like this, but so much of what gets pushed at us is.
I won't bother recounting my set of anti-vax reasoning, the whole thing has been debated ad-nauseum and every point has three counter-points from the opposite side. I'm glad you did the research and reached your conclusions for yourself and your children. I had unlimited access to Pub-Med at the time, and I did drill down into the references and look at them too. The major flaw in my research is that I used the current press as my starting point, so my sampling was skewed by basing on whatever was stirring up the press during that 3-4 month window when I did my research. I recognize this, but I was also more interested in the new findings at the time (2003).
My feeling on vaccines is this: Polio vaccine is great, an amazing triumph of modern medicine, much better than drinking sewage to get the same effect. Whooping cough and some of the other major killers of the past, also a very very good idea. Today we're over doing it, period. By how much is hard to say, but I definitely feel we have passed the point of doing more harm than good. Too many new vaccines, too many kids with fevers spiking to 105 following the shot, too obviously pushed by the pharma money machine, and if you think that last statement makes me a conspiracy kook, take a look into what happened with HPV vaccine rollout and the Texas Governor and schools right at that time when I was forming my opinions. The WHO studies looked at populations as a whole, I am only raising two boys.
The whole thimerosal debate was raging at the time too, and whether or not mercury in vaccines ever did any harm to anybody or not, it has no more reason to be there today than it does in fillings in your mouth, or lead does in paint and gasoline.
We put the brakes on the vaccine schedule after our children started presenting serious ASD symptoms. That puts us in a more or less 1% of the population category, not enough to harm herd immunity even if the whole group opts out. I know anecdotes prove nothing, but our younger son, who stopped his vaccine schedule at age 2.5 instead of 4, has much less severe difficulties, still needs a 1 on 1 aide in first grade, but at least he can function in a mainstream classroom.
The study I have never seen is the one that looks specifically at families with a history of ASD and compares vax/no-vax in that population. Those are the results I was trying to infer from the studies I read, and the the results were inconclusive.
Our kids are vaccinated against all the major killers, and they will continue to get tetanus updates into the future, but they damn sure don't need to be in the first wave of boys to receive HPV vaccine. The schools are notified and they will stay home if there's any outbreak of something they're not vaccinated for. With the awareness, monitoring, and care-giving ability of present-day medicine in the United States, I don't feel that they are a significant health threat to others, or at significant risk of significant harm from anything the vaccines might protect against, and the law does still protect our right to opt out.
I wouldn't want to live like the Amish, but I respect their right to choose that lifestyle.
researchers have tried time and time again to show a correlation between various conditions such as autism and vaccination and the results have been negative. There is no link. None.
Like I said about the polarized, prejudiced positions everyone has on the subject. It sounds to me like no amount of links or evidence I compile will change your mind. I did my research in 2003, just after my 2 year old stopped talking, and smiling. I dug deep in dozens of press stories, following up on the studies they referenced, reading those studies, and weighing the evidence for myself. At that time, the studies concluding that vaccines do no harm were based on relatively small sample sizes, dozens at best. They got tremendous press with dramatic headlines and emotionally charged stories about how this proves, once and for all, that we all need to vaccinate our children with every shot available, to do otherwise would be irresponsible and EVIL. There were also several studies published around that time that did find links - these studies tended to be based on long term data collected across thousands of children, things like the Danish health registry, and another across the state of California. They did show a significant link in their data, not smoking gun damning proof, but enough to raise a concern and look into it further. These tended to get quiet, balanced press coverage from just a few outlets.
The more experience I get with issues like this, the more respect I get for our lawmakers, I used to have absolutely none. The laws surrounding issues like these tend to protect minorities against whiplash popular opinion, protecting society against itself for the ultimate good of everyone. The law provides an "out" for people who do not want to vaccinate their children. We can conjecture for a long time why that option is preserved and whether or not we'd all be better off if it weren't.
Personally, I don't want to live in a world where the government sends you to a leper colony just because you haven't had your leprosy vaccine.
I have worked in the med-device industry since 1990, the whole time doing cutting edge research while anticipating the probable outcome of that research so the company can patent solutions to the problems that people don't know they need to solve yet.
Ultimate goal: profit. Scheming to make millions? Yes, we all did it. I have been under the impression we are acting like good capitalists following the American dream, taking risks to have a chance of reaping great rewards. Falsifying research, suppressing unwanted results? Not in my jobs, but rumors of bigger companies (especially pharma), doing it abound.
The whole vax/anti-vax thing has evolved into a sad prejudiced polarization of opinion, worse than religion and politics for most people I hear debating it.
You could show me a video of Jenny McCarthy giving Dr. Wakefield a blow job before he published his "research" and even if I believed the video was authentic, it isn't going to sway my opinion on whether or not following the current U.S. recommended vaccine schedule is in the best interests of my children. Wakefield's study is just one data point among millions, and it never was the fundamental basis for my opinions. I had already discounted his findings it when I learned that he had funding to do a study on 150 children, but declined to do so, staying pat with his results from 12.
AFAIK, the H.264 decoder in FFmpeg is LGPL licensed... not sure when the underlying license for the codec patents kicks in, but I think it's in 10K unit quantities, would affect Google, but not most independent software developers.
On one there is personal freedom, on the other is personal responsibility and accountability.
I used to believe that, when I was 12. The longer I live, the more I realize that life is a lottery - you can make all the best choices and be absolutely screwed, and you can screw off and do grossly irresponsible things and be rewarded for them like a King.
Odds are better that you will do well if you "follow the path" - you've got maybe 60% chance of being "average," but I know way too many people who have followed that responsible path just to be kicked to the gutter by things totally out of their control.
On the other hand, it is all to easy to throw yourself in the gutter - we are all presented with hundreds of opportunities to do so every day. It's a miracle that there is anything resembling civilization at all, considering how easy it is to screw it up.
Yeah, unfortunately it's the children of rocket scientists and engineers who inherit it more often.
Yeah, I was giving actual credit to Tron for the concept - it's a good one, one that deserves a couple of more attempts at development (besides the Matrix...)
Thanks, was 1am and time to give up on researching references.
Fair enough, I was just thinking about "guilty pleasure" throw-away films - not so much about eye candy vs. plot.
War Games has plot, and plenty of cheese too.
I "grew up" through the TRS-80 / Apple II era, and I think that the "magic" of BASIC is still accessible on today's machines - sure you can't (easily) program super slick applications in it, but then you never could, even in the old days.
For me, BASIC was great because it was interpreted, very fast to try something and see what happens. It also had enough "power" in its relatively simple syntax (60 to 70 commands) to do a lot of things without resorting to insanely huge bloated libraries (stdlib/Boost/Qt - I'm thinking about you now...).
I don't agree with Dijkstra's comment that programmers are "ruined" by BASIC, I think programmers are ruined by too much / too little pressure to deliver working systems in too short / too long a time frame. Teach someone basic and put them in the typical high pressure to deliver quickly scenario and yes, they will fix things quickly with GOTOs - more a result of the schedule than the language. Even worse than fixing things quickly under pressure using a GOTO or two is spending 8 years teaching someone theory, then giving them so much luxury of time to architect and plan and scaffold and framework that they construct elaborate extensible polymorphic frameworks that are universally reusable for practically nothing. I've seen a lot of very ambitious code over the years that can be effectively replaced by something 1/50th the size.
Procedures are procedures, regardless of the language.
Last Starfighter is a good comparison - and here's a few more: Space Camp, War Games, and the #5 Robot movie - is Dabney Coleman in all of these?
I saw the original - I was staying with my Grandmother during summer vacation at the time, I think I was 14 - I never watched it again.
From what I recall, now two lifetimes later, there wasn't really any plot in the first Tron, either. It had a sci-fi-ey premise, a couple of live action sequences clearly made to resemble practical video games of the time (especially the light-cycles), and a lot of black-lights. That's all that made a lasting impression on me. Actually, thinking about it for a minute, the premise is kind of out there with the William Gibson "into the machine" novels, but dumbed down for a Disney production.
When the new one comes to DVD, I'll put it and the original in our Netflix queue, might even pop 'em up near the top, but I'm not expecting much. I do think I'll watch the new one before re-watching the old one, from what I remember, I imagine I'll get so bored with the old one that I walk away after about 20 minutes.
Maybe the kids (boys 7 and 9) will like it - they seem to like all things Jim Henson lately, including Fraggle Rock - it, and a lot of other things they like, have the same coma inducing effect on me that I expect from re-watching Tron I.
Yeah, I just cleaned my wife's e-mail "attachments" folder, with live files from 1999 forward... they were migrated there from 2 previous machines, but she's used Eudora continuously since about 1999, so all the attachments were there - figured since we hadn't looked at any of them in 10+ years, we could use the 3GB of space for other things.