Actually I think "beta" partially means "we are figuring out the business model right now". Like email - it's not that they are holding back on a wide release of GMail to add more features. They are just tweaking the profit model, and recognize that as part of that process they may be forced to modify functionality substantially.
By keeping it in "beta" they can change the featureset or tweak to satisfy advertiser demand and have a cover-your-ass story just in case they change things ("sorry, that wasn't a finished product you were using, it was just a beta test").
Once they have a firm idea of how they are going to make money off of the product and have added advertising into the mix fully, it seems to come out of beta.
This is a silly thread, as your argument is still nonsensical and your point a syntactic technicality. When I said "pedophile" I meant it as a synonym of child molester, I am not trying to condemn people for fantasies or thought crimes - like any male, I certainly have been known to have dirty thoughts about a 16 year old girl now and then, I obviously don't consider that criminal or inherently wrong.
When I said "that's nasty" that was shorthand for "I find the thought of a person who takes pride in (the act of, and their habitual practice of committing) child molestation repugnant". Excuse me for speaking in the parlance of our times rather than focusing on the precision of my words.
Regardless, the state of being black bears no relationship prima facie relationship to acts that one commits, so you can hardly blame me for finding your post illogical.
Suuuure, because being black, gay or pagan similarly involves sexual activity with somebody legally, and most would say intellectually and emotionally, incapable of giving informed consent for the kind of activities you want to engage in with them? Activities which, regardless of your perception of them in morally absolute terms, have the distinct possibility of leaving the other party emotionally scarred for life.
Don't try to defend your position by throwing out completely invalid analogies. Your attempt to paint me as some sort of fascist because I don't embrace NAMBLA types is laughable.
Jesus, I thought you were trolling, then I went to his web site. He really is a pedophile - that's frigging nasty. It may be off-topic, but it's hard to imagine being so proud of that that you would openly advertise it in your Slashdot profile.
So, one of my closest friends has been in China for the last 6 months and has regularly been sending me reports about the way things are for a foreigner living over there. It is true that the Chinese government doesn't take well to dissidents, and will gladly dole out extreme punishment to them. However foreigners, at least those who are not of Chinese descent, are not generally held to the same standards as Chinese citizens. Even the Chinese aren't held to the standards their government claims most of the time.
Are there swift executions with no appeal? Yes, but they usually only happen to somebody who committed murder. According to my friend, the cops will often watch violent bar brawls where people beat each other to a pulp, even stabbing each other with knives and broken beer bottles in the extremities, all without intervening or arresting anybody. Of course, if somebody actually kills someone else, they can expect to be dragged off by the cops and summarily executed within a few days.
However, unless you seriously fuck with the government or senior party members (not recommended) or openly disrespect their laws and culture (i.e. bring drugs into their country), or kill someone, you aren't going to be dragged off to a labor camp. The Chinese government has no interest in pissing off the American government, assuming you are an American, by detaining their citizens willy nilly. Seriously, firewall circumvention by a foreigner isn't going to get you thrown into jail - that's excessively paranoid overreaction. Now, if you start handing out fliers or encouraging Chinese citizens to disobey the rules of their social order, that's another story.
To stand up for Mr. Perry - he has a good point, which is that QC is very much at the intersection of theoretical computation and physics, and doing work in it requires a decent amount of knowledge in both areas (as a former QC research assistant at MIT, I can state this with some authority). I was a physics major with a decent background in computer science, and even so getting started in quantum computing research was a real bitch (this was back in '98/'99 - there were just very few "getting started" resources at the time).
There may be some better summary papers available these days, but I still think there's a need for a book that can provide enough background in physics for a computer scientist to understand quantum computing (though that's a tough order), or enough computer science to a physicist to understand QC (this is less hard).
Nonetheless, it would be tough to teach an undergraduate class that caters to both these students simultaneously. A physics major who's already taken q. mech. will just be bored with the first 40% of the course material. And a computer science major may find it difficult to sufficiently grok the quantum mechanics and math rapidly enough to get to the good material (I may be biased here as a physics major, hehe).
Anyway, I'll try to post some actual useful feedback on this book at some point in the next few days when I get a chance to at least skim it in some detail.
Yes, being able to do the job is an advantage. I would argue that any good manager should be at least roughly knowledgeable of all the jobs of people who work for him, and capable of doing some of them extremely well. But that alone isn't enough - that will help you get the respect of those who work for you, but if you're an asshole and treat them like shit, and look down on them (by calling them "normals", for example) they certainly won't like you.
And having a good, positive working relationship with the people whose work you'll be judged by is a pretty important part of being a manager.
You are likely to be better at something if you enjoy it. If you feel like you were "pushed" into management and don't want to be doing it, then find a role as a technical lead, architect or similar where your primary responsibilities are still deeply technical, not managerial.
Nobody wants to be managed by somebody who doesn't want to and doesn't know how to be a manager or a leader. You don't need formal training, unless you want to advance to higher ranks, then it might help. But for most purposes, you just need a willingness to listen and to talk and to think about things from a non-technology-driven perspective at times.
I am not sure what "Borgish" management methods are (you must be a graduate of Starfleet Academy's MBA program?), but it certainly sounds like something that nobody would enjoy being subjected to. Not everybody is as smart as you, but if you go around treating people like they are a different species ("normals" from your own post) don't expect to develop a good working relationship with them. If this is what you mean by your "personality", then no, that won't be an advantage in a management role, period.
I think of myself as a "geek" in certain ways, I enjoy understanding and creating technology, I like to take things apart and hack on them, and I can spend hours focused on a task intently. But I realize that when I'm operating in a management role, decisions are driven by the best long term interests of the business and the team, not by technology in isolation. And you reap what you sow with the people who work for you. If your team respects your intelligence AND likes you, there is nothing they won't do for you. That's a strong, loyal team. If they think you are a smart geeky asshole and they shit on you regularly behind your back, don't expect them to achieve very good results for you, and don't be surprised when *your* manager realizes how ineffective you are and gives you the boot.
The linux community doesn't help the poor, cure disease or feed the hungry, it only produces software. That's fine, but don't overstate the righteousness of free software.
Well what exactly does Bill Gates do? Microsoft "only produces software" as well. They are just good at converting that software from bits to dollars, which have lined Mr. Gates' pockets. The Linux community chooses to give away their software as part of a community effort instead of trying to maximize personal wealth with it.
This means that by definition the Linux community doesn't have as much money to give away to do other good works like vaccinating children. Of course, all that money Microsoft made from the bits had to come from somewhere, namely other people's pockets. And those people now have less money to use on a discretionary basis for other things, including good works like vaccinating children.
I am not a rabid Linux zealot, nor a rabid Microsoft hater. The Free/Open Source software communities don't see software as something to convert into maximal dollars all the time. I think this is fine, and we don't need to belittle them for not having grossly wrenched as much money as possible from people's hands which they can now "generously" give back to causes supporting the poor in the third world.
Luckily, other people whore my fix for me these days, but see my sig for a link to Slashfix. And when 1.1 comes out in a few months, this won't be necessary any more as the underlying issue has been patched ages ago.
Okay, allow me to restate. The information and energy content propagates at c. In most cases, this corresponds to a group velocity of c. In the case of X-waves and certain other weird situations, the peak exhibits interference effects causing it to transitorily appear to move faster than c. No information is transmitted faster than c, and the energy doesn't propagate faster than c.
Normally group velocity *is* the velocity at which energy and information propagates in a wavefront. So this is a bizarre exception resulting from the formal definition of group velocity and anomolous dispersion effects. But there is no superluminal information transmission which (back when I was studying physics) was considered one and the same as superluminal group velocity.
They cut prices in a market only until they drive the existing players out of business. Are you telling me Office is cheap? List price is $499, street price more like $350-400. They can charge this much because they no longer have any effective competition in this market due to their file format lock in (yes, I know OpenOffice is free and good enough for many geek users, but it's still not really viable competition in most people's minds).
LOL. Talk about misinformation and hype. It's trivial to transmit an interference wave with a phase velocity faster than the speed of light. That doesn't imply that you can send a signal with information content faster than light - the group velocity (the information carrier or signal you actually control) can't go faster than light.
Your post explains why I have left the software industry (or at least the world of "enterprise software" bullshit).
From a management perspective (I've been there before), I understand you don't want the whole fate of the company to rest on one person's shoulders. You want source code that is clean and well documented so if somebody leaves, somebody else can pick it up and eventually figure the damned thing out. But if a key team member leaves, it WILL have an adverse affect on the project and time lines, and pretending otherwise is just ridiculous.
Would anybody actually want to work in a CMM level 5 organization? In my experience CMM is bullshit anyway. The reason projects usually required heroic efforts wasn't immature, non-predictable development processes, but because project requirements changed throughout development, and deadlines weren't moved to match. If you know what you're building and you have good craftsmen with experience estimating project timeframes, it's not terribly hard to do.
And no, stuff like XP doesn't help when your sales people change their minds about what's critical regularly as they find another client potentially willing to part with a half million bucks if only we have feature X. Those clients never actually parted with their money, I found - feature X as a roadblock was almost always a bullshit excuse, and when we pulled a week of all-nighters to demo feature X, it never actually closed a deal.
Most of those aren't really what I'd consider critical systems. I agree you could probably do some mischief with the network connection activation/deactivation stuff in theory, though it may be pretty difficult to do anything with it in practice. And getting into the Student Employment Office job database seems pretty useless.
As for the resume stuff, well, is that so different from having your resume up on Monster.com? Sure, it's the closed University system, but it's getting blasted to tons of potential employers anyway. Shrug.
Obviously, all these services ought to require PIN or passwords to access, and I'm sure now that it's been pointed out, that will be done. But let's not be too hysterical about it.
I'm not clear this stuff was developed in house by Harvard. Harvard's IT people are generally quite anal about security stuff - the system that lets you log in and check your grades, for example, requires a special PIN number. If you lose your PIN number, there is NO way to retrieve it, online or otherwise. You have to make a request, and if you are a current student, they will mail you a new PIN number to your current registered student snail mail address (at least such was the protocol a few years back).
And if you want to request a formal copy of your transcript, no way to do it by phone, fax or email. You must show up in person at the registrar's office, or send a signed, written request form.
No, none of this stuff is foolproof, but it shows that in general, Harvard is quite serious about not just throwing anything up willy-nilly online just because it can be, with no thought to security. My guess is that certain departments or groups have access to data and have their own IT people or had third parties develop some web apps for them that had suck-nut security. And the Pharmacare thing is a third party system entirely, they just happen to be doing stupid stuff with data that Harvard foolishly entrusted them to deal with. But as I understand it, the use of ID numbers as passwords was on the Pharmacare site, and not done by Harvard itself.
Doesn't excuse any of this stupidity, just pointing out that Harvard's IT people are not quite so sloppy as they are being painted here in this thread.
Malda is always like that. He clearly has no concept of how to manage his editors or ensure quality in his publication. Sure, *he* may not look at the names of submitters, but clearly Michael does, and posts an outrageous amount of Roland Piquepaille click-whoring crap.
True, entrepreneurship isn't emphasized much as a value in the educational system here in the US, and certainly not in the UK from people I know who lived over there.
Of course, if you're smart enough to do it, you're probably smart enough to learn it yourself as I did and apparently you did too. It's strange though, as our culture, or at least substantial portions of it, in the US definitely does value entrepreneurship, it's just that people often don't realize this until they get out there and are confronted with how much working in a menial job for somebody else actually sucks.
I think part of the issue is that teachers and educators aren't exactly renowned capitalists. It's not terribly surprising then that they don't emphasize this stuff more. Anyway, it would be good to offer a semester or two of this sort of stuff at the high school level - it's not _hard_, it's just some practical general business and entrepreneurial knowledge that would help make people better small business owners, and to be honest, better employees too.
Here's a piece of brilliant advice: don't call it a wiki. Called it a distributed knowledgebase and content management framework for medical applications when you are selling it.
Make sure it's a secure system, make sure you've thought about the use cases and what you expect people to put there and set up a framework of initial content. Make sure you know why you are using a wiki and what benefits it offers this application, and that you aren't just using it because wikis are cool. Establish rules for the use of the system to make sure HIPAA compliance is in order. Then give it a cute-but-serious sounding name to help sell it to users and make sure there's a training plan in place so the value proposition is immediately clear to users and you don't just get the gadgeteers futzing around with it.
So good idea, but it's a lot of work. If you just throw up a wiki on a server somewhere and expect it to get used, forget about it. No way. And you really need to make sure the benefits are there before you sell this project to your bosses and invest lots of time, effort and money into it.
Are you suggesting this is unique to the movie business? This is a rule of thumb in business in general - when you are dealing with any entity outside of your own company, you always want points on gross, because you have no control over how net is calculated and they will show you bullshit figures.
This rule doesn't usually apply for internal compensation deals, however, where the presumption is a personal relationship with the people who control calculating of profits. Certain types of companies, like small consulting shops, money management firms, etc. split up a bonus pool as a percentage of profits, and you usually trust that your own accounting people aren't feeding you bullshit (hopefully).
In any case, in this situation, it seems pretty clear that the royalty payments should be essentially pure profit, since Marvel didn't produce or market the movie itself. Trying to argue otherwise is a load of horseshit.
Guess he didn't negotiate a contract entitling him to 10% of movie-related profits. I gather Stan Lee, in addition to being a creative guy, is probably a saavy businessman.
Stop thinking like a geek. The point is that they (where "they" is the media in cahoots with the RIAA/MPAA and their political allies) are using the word "P2P" and attempting to smear it as if it equals software piracy. In fact, they are having so much success with this linguistic legerdemain that this story describes as P2P something that is clearly also described as centralized (they ran servers as part of an underground group).
In any case, the internet isn't really peer to peer anymore, since the vast majority of nodes are dynamically addressed mostly-clients with assymmetric transfer speeds. And the web and email are not a network of equal peers either. It is true that when the internet was _created_ it was envisioned as a network of peers, and that there is nothing inherently nefarious about running a server on your desktop machine.
So talk of banning P2P is ridiculous, since it's no different than banning FTP servers. The real question seems to be about anonymity and accountability.
I must be weird, I still think of Coleridge and stately pleasure dome decrees, and I have no fucking idea what the deal is with the Olivia Newton John references. Such is the curse of being born in '79, I guess.
This whole proposal sounds more and more like MSIL(.Net bytecode) or Java bytecode marked up as XML, with full debugging information/comments intact.
And the same problems occur with bytecode that you describe. For example, see efforts like Python.NET. It's possible to take a language and map it onto such an intermediate form, but not without losing much of what makes the language unique, and settling on least common denominator features. At that point the differences in languages seem to end up becoming syntactic sugar.
Well, I agree that companies that compensate talent better tend to get better talent. It's just that there are lots of ways to compensate people. 5 years ago when I graduated from college NOBODY with talent went to a big company, period. You'd be nuts - I could make 60k working for IBM, or 130k working for Trilogy software (yeah, that was my offer, pretty nuts, huh?). There are a few big companies that have been able to consistently hire a large portion of top talent (Microsoft, for example). Do IBM and HP have top notch people? Sure, but those top notch people are a small portion of their overall employee pool - I would say based on the folks I've interacted with at some of the biggest tech companies, the quality is decidedly middling compared to the people I've met from smaller companies.
And there are decidedly more opportunities for advancement at small companies, which tend to be more meritocratic and less bureaucratic.
Obviously companies that are too broke to pay competitively and otherwise give perks and bennies to make themselves attractive are going to have a tough time attracting top talent.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually I think "beta" partially means "we are figuring out the business model right now". Like email - it's not that they are holding back on a wide release of GMail to add more features. They are just tweaking the profit model, and recognize that as part of that process they may be forced to modify functionality substantially.
By keeping it in "beta" they can change the featureset or tweak to satisfy advertiser demand and have a cover-your-ass story just in case they change things ("sorry, that wasn't a finished product you were using, it was just a beta test").
Once they have a firm idea of how they are going to make money off of the product and have added advertising into the mix fully, it seems to come out of beta.
This is a silly thread, as your argument is still nonsensical and your point a syntactic technicality. When I said "pedophile" I meant it as a synonym of child molester, I am not trying to condemn people for fantasies or thought crimes - like any male, I certainly have been known to have dirty thoughts about a 16 year old girl now and then, I obviously don't consider that criminal or inherently wrong.
When I said "that's nasty" that was shorthand for "I find the thought of a person who takes pride in (the act of, and their habitual practice of committing) child molestation repugnant". Excuse me for speaking in the parlance of our times rather than focusing on the precision of my words.
Regardless, the state of being black bears no relationship prima facie relationship to acts that one commits, so you can hardly blame me for finding your post illogical.
Suuuure, because being black, gay or pagan similarly involves sexual activity with somebody legally, and most would say intellectually and emotionally, incapable of giving informed consent for the kind of activities you want to engage in with them? Activities which, regardless of your perception of them in morally absolute terms, have the distinct possibility of leaving the other party emotionally scarred for life.
Don't try to defend your position by throwing out completely invalid analogies. Your attempt to paint me as some sort of fascist because I don't embrace NAMBLA types is laughable.
Jesus, I thought you were trolling, then I went to his web site. He really is a pedophile - that's frigging nasty. It may be off-topic, but it's hard to imagine being so proud of that that you would openly advertise it in your Slashdot profile.
So, one of my closest friends has been in China for the last 6 months and has regularly been sending me reports about the way things are for a foreigner living over there. It is true that the Chinese government doesn't take well to dissidents, and will gladly dole out extreme punishment to them. However foreigners, at least those who are not of Chinese descent, are not generally held to the same standards as Chinese citizens. Even the Chinese aren't held to the standards their government claims most of the time.
Are there swift executions with no appeal? Yes, but they usually only happen to somebody who committed murder. According to my friend, the cops will often watch violent bar brawls where people beat each other to a pulp, even stabbing each other with knives and broken beer bottles in the extremities, all without intervening or arresting anybody. Of course, if somebody actually kills someone else, they can expect to be dragged off by the cops and summarily executed within a few days.
However, unless you seriously fuck with the government or senior party members (not recommended) or openly disrespect their laws and culture (i.e. bring drugs into their country), or kill someone, you aren't going to be dragged off to a labor camp. The Chinese government has no interest in pissing off the American government, assuming you are an American, by detaining their citizens willy nilly. Seriously, firewall circumvention by a foreigner isn't going to get you thrown into jail - that's excessively paranoid overreaction. Now, if you start handing out fliers or encouraging Chinese citizens to disobey the rules of their social order, that's another story.
To stand up for Mr. Perry - he has a good point, which is that QC is very much at the intersection of theoretical computation and physics, and doing work in it requires a decent amount of knowledge in both areas (as a former QC research assistant at MIT, I can state this with some authority). I was a physics major with a decent background in computer science, and even so getting started in quantum computing research was a real bitch (this was back in '98/'99 - there were just very few "getting started" resources at the time).
There may be some better summary papers available these days, but I still think there's a need for a book that can provide enough background in physics for a computer scientist to understand quantum computing (though that's a tough order), or enough computer science to a physicist to understand QC (this is less hard).
Nonetheless, it would be tough to teach an undergraduate class that caters to both these students simultaneously. A physics major who's already taken q. mech. will just be bored with the first 40% of the course material. And a computer science major may find it difficult to sufficiently grok the quantum mechanics and math rapidly enough to get to the good material (I may be biased here as a physics major, hehe).
Anyway, I'll try to post some actual useful feedback on this book at some point in the next few days when I get a chance to at least skim it in some detail.
Yes, being able to do the job is an advantage. I would argue that any good manager should be at least roughly knowledgeable of all the jobs of people who work for him, and capable of doing some of them extremely well. But that alone isn't enough - that will help you get the respect of those who work for you, but if you're an asshole and treat them like shit, and look down on them (by calling them "normals", for example) they certainly won't like you.
And having a good, positive working relationship with the people whose work you'll be judged by is a pretty important part of being a manager.
You are likely to be better at something if you enjoy it. If you feel like you were "pushed" into management and don't want to be doing it, then find a role as a technical lead, architect or similar where your primary responsibilities are still deeply technical, not managerial.
Nobody wants to be managed by somebody who doesn't want to and doesn't know how to be a manager or a leader. You don't need formal training, unless you want to advance to higher ranks, then it might help. But for most purposes, you just need a willingness to listen and to talk and to think about things from a non-technology-driven perspective at times.
I am not sure what "Borgish" management methods are (you must be a graduate of Starfleet Academy's MBA program?), but it certainly sounds like something that nobody would enjoy being subjected to. Not everybody is as smart as you, but if you go around treating people like they are a different species ("normals" from your own post) don't expect to develop a good working relationship with them. If this is what you mean by your "personality", then no, that won't be an advantage in a management role, period.
I think of myself as a "geek" in certain ways, I enjoy understanding and creating technology, I like to take things apart and hack on them, and I can spend hours focused on a task intently. But I realize that when I'm operating in a management role, decisions are driven by the best long term interests of the business and the team, not by technology in isolation. And you reap what you sow with the people who work for you. If your team respects your intelligence AND likes you, there is nothing they won't do for you. That's a strong, loyal team. If they think you are a smart geeky asshole and they shit on you regularly behind your back, don't expect them to achieve very good results for you, and don't be surprised when *your* manager realizes how ineffective you are and gives you the boot.
The linux community doesn't help the poor, cure disease or feed the hungry, it only produces software. That's fine, but don't overstate the righteousness of free software.
Well what exactly does Bill Gates do? Microsoft "only produces software" as well. They are just good at converting that software from bits to dollars, which have lined Mr. Gates' pockets. The Linux community chooses to give away their software as part of a community effort instead of trying to maximize personal wealth with it.
This means that by definition the Linux community doesn't have as much money to give away to do other good works like vaccinating children. Of course, all that money Microsoft made from the bits had to come from somewhere, namely other people's pockets. And those people now have less money to use on a discretionary basis for other things, including good works like vaccinating children.
I am not a rabid Linux zealot, nor a rabid Microsoft hater. The Free/Open Source software communities don't see software as something to convert into maximal dollars all the time. I think this is fine, and we don't need to belittle them for not having grossly wrenched as much money as possible from people's hands which they can now "generously" give back to causes supporting the poor in the third world.
Luckily, other people whore my fix for me these days, but see my sig for a link to Slashfix. And when 1.1 comes out in a few months, this won't be necessary any more as the underlying issue has been patched ages ago.
Okay, allow me to restate. The information and energy content propagates at c. In most cases, this corresponds to a group velocity of c. In the case of X-waves and certain other weird situations, the peak exhibits interference effects causing it to transitorily appear to move faster than c. No information is transmitted faster than c, and the energy doesn't propagate faster than c.
Normally group velocity *is* the velocity at which energy and information propagates in a wavefront. So this is a bizarre exception resulting from the formal definition of group velocity and anomolous dispersion effects. But there is no superluminal information transmission which (back when I was studying physics) was considered one and the same as superluminal group velocity.
They cut prices in a market only until they drive the existing players out of business. Are you telling me Office is cheap? List price is $499, street price more like $350-400. They can charge this much because they no longer have any effective competition in this market due to their file format lock in (yes, I know OpenOffice is free and good enough for many geek users, but it's still not really viable competition in most people's minds).
LOL. Talk about misinformation and hype. It's trivial to transmit an interference wave with a phase velocity faster than the speed of light. That doesn't imply that you can send a signal with information content faster than light - the group velocity (the information carrier or signal you actually control) can't go faster than light.
Your post explains why I have left the software industry (or at least the world of "enterprise software" bullshit).
From a management perspective (I've been there before), I understand you don't want the whole fate of the company to rest on one person's shoulders. You want source code that is clean and well documented so if somebody leaves, somebody else can pick it up and eventually figure the damned thing out. But if a key team member leaves, it WILL have an adverse affect on the project and time lines, and pretending otherwise is just ridiculous.
Would anybody actually want to work in a CMM level 5 organization? In my experience CMM is bullshit anyway. The reason projects usually required heroic efforts wasn't immature, non-predictable development processes, but because project requirements changed throughout development, and deadlines weren't moved to match. If you know what you're building and you have good craftsmen with experience estimating project timeframes, it's not terribly hard to do.
And no, stuff like XP doesn't help when your sales people change their minds about what's critical regularly as they find another client potentially willing to part with a half million bucks if only we have feature X. Those clients never actually parted with their money, I found - feature X as a roadblock was almost always a bullshit excuse, and when we pulled a week of all-nighters to demo feature X, it never actually closed a deal.
Most of those aren't really what I'd consider critical systems. I agree you could probably do some mischief with the network connection activation/deactivation stuff in theory, though it may be pretty difficult to do anything with it in practice. And getting into the Student Employment Office job database seems pretty useless.
As for the resume stuff, well, is that so different from having your resume up on Monster.com? Sure, it's the closed University system, but it's getting blasted to tons of potential employers anyway. Shrug.
Obviously, all these services ought to require PIN or passwords to access, and I'm sure now that it's been pointed out, that will be done. But let's not be too hysterical about it.
I'm not clear this stuff was developed in house by Harvard. Harvard's IT people are generally quite anal about security stuff - the system that lets you log in and check your grades, for example, requires a special PIN number. If you lose your PIN number, there is NO way to retrieve it, online or otherwise. You have to make a request, and if you are a current student, they will mail you a new PIN number to your current registered student snail mail address (at least such was the protocol a few years back).
And if you want to request a formal copy of your transcript, no way to do it by phone, fax or email. You must show up in person at the registrar's office, or send a signed, written request form.
No, none of this stuff is foolproof, but it shows that in general, Harvard is quite serious about not just throwing anything up willy-nilly online just because it can be, with no thought to security. My guess is that certain departments or groups have access to data and have their own IT people or had third parties develop some web apps for them that had suck-nut security. And the Pharmacare thing is a third party system entirely, they just happen to be doing stupid stuff with data that Harvard foolishly entrusted them to deal with. But as I understand it, the use of ID numbers as passwords was on the Pharmacare site, and not done by Harvard itself.
Doesn't excuse any of this stupidity, just pointing out that Harvard's IT people are not quite so sloppy as they are being painted here in this thread.
Malda is always like that. He clearly has no concept of how to manage his editors or ensure quality in his publication. Sure, *he* may not look at the names of submitters, but clearly Michael does, and posts an outrageous amount of Roland Piquepaille click-whoring crap.
True, entrepreneurship isn't emphasized much as a value in the educational system here in the US, and certainly not in the UK from people I know who lived over there.
Of course, if you're smart enough to do it, you're probably smart enough to learn it yourself as I did and apparently you did too. It's strange though, as our culture, or at least substantial portions of it, in the US definitely does value entrepreneurship, it's just that people often don't realize this until they get out there and are confronted with how much working in a menial job for somebody else actually sucks.
I think part of the issue is that teachers and educators aren't exactly renowned capitalists. It's not terribly surprising then that they don't emphasize this stuff more. Anyway, it would be good to offer a semester or two of this sort of stuff at the high school level - it's not _hard_, it's just some practical general business and entrepreneurial knowledge that would help make people better small business owners, and to be honest, better employees too.
Here's a piece of brilliant advice: don't call it a wiki. Called it a distributed knowledgebase and content management framework for medical applications when you are selling it.
:)
Make sure it's a secure system, make sure you've thought about the use cases and what you expect people to put there and set up a framework of initial content. Make sure you know why you are using a wiki and what benefits it offers this application, and that you aren't just using it because wikis are cool. Establish rules for the use of the system to make sure HIPAA compliance is in order. Then give it a cute-but-serious sounding name to help sell it to users and make sure there's a training plan in place so the value proposition is immediately clear to users and you don't just get the gadgeteers futzing around with it.
So good idea, but it's a lot of work. If you just throw up a wiki on a server somewhere and expect it to get used, forget about it. No way. And you really need to make sure the benefits are there before you sell this project to your bosses and invest lots of time, effort and money into it.
And if you're successful let us all know!
Are you suggesting this is unique to the movie business? This is a rule of thumb in business in general - when you are dealing with any entity outside of your own company, you always want points on gross, because you have no control over how net is calculated and they will show you bullshit figures.
This rule doesn't usually apply for internal compensation deals, however, where the presumption is a personal relationship with the people who control calculating of profits. Certain types of companies, like small consulting shops, money management firms, etc. split up a bonus pool as a percentage of profits, and you usually trust that your own accounting people aren't feeding you bullshit (hopefully).
In any case, in this situation, it seems pretty clear that the royalty payments should be essentially pure profit, since Marvel didn't produce or market the movie itself. Trying to argue otherwise is a load of horseshit.
Guess he didn't negotiate a contract entitling him to 10% of movie-related profits. I gather Stan Lee, in addition to being a creative guy, is probably a saavy businessman.
Stop thinking like a geek. The point is that they (where "they" is the media in cahoots with the RIAA/MPAA and their political allies) are using the word "P2P" and attempting to smear it as if it equals software piracy. In fact, they are having so much success with this linguistic legerdemain that this story describes as P2P something that is clearly also described as centralized (they ran servers as part of an underground group).
In any case, the internet isn't really peer to peer anymore, since the vast majority of nodes are dynamically addressed mostly-clients with assymmetric transfer speeds. And the web and email are not a network of equal peers either. It is true that when the internet was _created_ it was envisioned as a network of peers, and that there is nothing inherently nefarious about running a server on your desktop machine.
So talk of banning P2P is ridiculous, since it's no different than banning FTP servers. The real question seems to be about anonymity and accountability.
I must be weird, I still think of Coleridge and stately pleasure dome decrees, and I have no fucking idea what the deal is with the Olivia Newton John references. Such is the curse of being born in '79, I guess.
This whole proposal sounds more and more like MSIL(.Net bytecode) or Java bytecode marked up as XML, with full debugging information/comments intact.
And the same problems occur with bytecode that you describe. For example, see efforts like Python.NET. It's possible to take a language and map it onto such an intermediate form, but not without losing much of what makes the language unique, and settling on least common denominator features. At that point the differences in languages seem to end up becoming syntactic sugar.
Well, I agree that companies that compensate talent better tend to get better talent. It's just that there are lots of ways to compensate people. 5 years ago when I graduated from college NOBODY with talent went to a big company, period. You'd be nuts - I could make 60k working for IBM, or 130k working for Trilogy software (yeah, that was my offer, pretty nuts, huh?). There are a few big companies that have been able to consistently hire a large portion of top talent (Microsoft, for example). Do IBM and HP have top notch people? Sure, but those top notch people are a small portion of their overall employee pool - I would say based on the folks I've interacted with at some of the biggest tech companies, the quality is decidedly middling compared to the people I've met from smaller companies.
And there are decidedly more opportunities for advancement at small companies, which tend to be more meritocratic and less bureaucratic.
Obviously companies that are too broke to pay competitively and otherwise give perks and bennies to make themselves attractive are going to have a tough time attracting top talent.