My brother is an IT consultant, he says the contract job opening has been consistently high and the unemployment is quite low in that field. However his skill set is mainly in coding on the PeopleSoft API. Comp Sci degree is not required for that job. Wonder how many high school students flock comp sci thinking of coding jobs? How many are going to confronted with concepts like P and NP problem sets and equivalences and find that harder than calculus?
By not being one of those PC manufacturers. That is how you missed the bus. If you were making and selling PCs at that time, if you promise not to pre-install Netscape you got a bulk discount on other Microsoft products you were selling. Most of the big names paid a flat fee and sold unlimited copies of Ms Windows. They got ridiculously low prices on Ms-Office to keep Netscape out.
Well, it is once in a lifetime chance. The law firm is negligent, is violating privacy law HEPA or whatever. Ambulance chaser in the cross-hairs. Sue that law firm for everything it got.
Well, back in 1990s developers fell over themselves to develop applications for the new fangled thingie called MS-DOS. They had a slew of killer products. Lotus-123! Harvard Business Graphics. Word Perfect. dBase III. One by one Microsoft also entered into the same market segment and used its control over the platform to screw the developers and bankrupted them. They were fooled once.
Then came Mark Andreeson. He thought, "may be if I give my product, the browser, away for free and try to make money by selling tools to create the web browser, may be I can survive". But Microsoft priced its browser below zero and killed his company. The developers were aghast. But they were fretting and fuming but could not do anything about it. Microsoft can just issue a press release saying, "We are thinking of doing XYZ" and the venture capital for startups trying to develop apps that do XYZ vanish like a curl of smoke. They were fooled many times more than once.
Now, with a plethora of systems available, from Android to iOS to linux to simple plain HTML you think developers would trust Microsoft as far as Ballmer can throw a chair? No way buddy. No way.
Traditionally if it goes into a salad it is a vegetable, if it goes into dessert it is a fruit. But that rule of thumb is getting fuzzier and fuzzier as the chefs are under constant pressure to innovate.
I wonder if the defendant can legally refuse to give the password. On one hand, there is a law against self-incrimination. But on the other hand during discovery the plaintiff subpoenas documents, even if they are inside a safe to be revealed. Are there any precedences for this in US courts?
Offshoring, in my experience over the past 3-4 years, has been more trouble than it is worth.
The work ethics and habits of American workers evolved over the decades when long career in one company with a gold watch and a pension. They work in certain way. The management on its part should be nurturing the workers who have a deep understanding of the company and the customers, especially those workers who cultivate skills that can not be useful seeking employment elsewhere. But management ditched the gold watch, picked up the golden parachute.
The work ethics and the habits of the body-shopping firms evolved in a climate where the relationship is definitely not long term. Both sides knew it. Both sides expected the other side to take maximum advantage of it. American management went in thinking American work ethics in third-world prices. But it is not dealing with employees but intermediate contractors. Even if the body-shopping contractors have long term employees who are loyal, they would be loyal to the contractor, not to the outsourcing companies. Further everyone knows the cluelessness of the middle management. So they found every loop hole in the contract, every stretchable point, every exploitable gap and the body shopping contractors took the American management to the cleaners faster than you can say "aloo gobi, channa masala, butter nan and mango lassi please".
There are world class employees and workers in India. But they (I should say we, because I am a desi who would not work for a desi salary) go up the value chain pretty quickly and are not available for hire at third world prices. What you do get for third world prices are third world class work.
"The 1% had even stronger media control, and even stronger stranglehold on the government machinery in the past. They were broken."
When did this happen? The 1% and their counterparts have had and maintained their stranglehold from feudalism to today. Call them the nobles, the aristocracy, or just the rich. A tiny minority has always held all the wealth and stood on the backs of everyone else. They might not have titles and be appointed by a king anymore but they are still an exclusive club that most members are born into.
Correct, I am talking about that large sweep of history. Two hundred years ago the 1% could actually kill with impunity (using their hired thug underlings) and throw people in jail. Four hundred years they could do it personally, without using intermediaries. In 1890s company towns, company stores and company scrips were common. In the 20th century every town had a handful of newspapers which were hand maidens of the local cliques of top 1%. Their media control and news distribution was absolute. With Radio and then network television, between 1950s till about 1980s the entire country listened to just three TV news broadcasts. Politicians had to speak simultaneously to both friend and foe at the same time. So we were able to reform atrocities and fight for civil rights, against segregation, clean air, clean water etc. As network news waned, as politicians from Regan fine tuned the "coded" message that means one thing to the general uninitiated but sends a signal to their base, the 1% are gaining strength. So yes, the top 1% had incredible levels of power and control in the past. It waned, now it is waxing again, and I am sure it will wane again.
Forgot to mention the main thrust of the posting! oops!
Not all the data deserve to be backed up. When you back up too much, it takes longer to find what you are looking for. It increases the costs too. No developer would archive the object files and libraries. When you go looking for a lost file and the back up system throws back at you eight draft versions and you are not sure which one was the final it reduces the effectiveness of the back up process too.
Like most famous inventions, the exact moment this invention happened has been very accurately recorded. It was exactly on the day a top sidekick of Ballmer decided to quit Microsoft to join Google. The CEO discovered the ballistic properties of office furniture and how effectively they can be projected to affect employee behavior and give feedback to the employees about the management's attitude towards them. But it was not a simple joy ride to the patent office. Much more serious development and testing took place. Tables were too heavy. Paperweights were too ineffectual. After a decade of hard work, the invention has paid off and now Microsoft has obtained a patent "for a tool that can give feedback to the employee about their actions and behavior which can also be sat upon to work when not used in that capacity."
Claim slashdot mod system is prior art, invalidate the patent, slay the dragon or at least one of its scales and show the skeptical slashdotters the stuff you are made of. Come on. Grab the moment. Seize the day.
Typically software developers demand and get serious back up of their source code. Their tails will be on fire if things go wrong, so they are usually quite serious about it. They also demand decent source control, and so there is a central repository and it gets backed up. For the checked out code, now a days there is less demand for back up at personal workstation level, because of things like private-branching and private-check-ins that allow the developers to use the central back up system for even code not ready for production.
But most of the time, the test cases, use cases, user documentation etc get the short end of the stick. Especially code documentation that does not sit well inside the source code. [In grad school I used a bizzare thing called Cweb that had a single source code for both code and documentation. You run cweave to get the post script document via TeX and LaTeX. And you run ctangle to get c sources. There was a fortran version too. But it never seemed to gain commercial success]. Scientific papers that form the basis of the scientific codes, profiling data, important lessons learned about the data structures and scaling, painful gotcha bugs fixed etc are rarely documented, forget about comprehensive indexed search-able documentation of the lessons learned in developing the code.
Outside software development and may be accounting, there are areas where the need for back-ups conflicts with the desire for secrecy and control and frankly paranoia and delusions too. Salesmen guard their rolodex and its electronic clone zealously. Business plans should not be leaked, strategy session presentations should be kept in strict confidence etc, and most executives don't realize most sys-admin and IT already have full access to the un-backed up data. They are not losing much by allowing a clean back-up solution, but they don't seem to realize that.
Then there is Legal. They are so worried about electronic discovery. Now there are AI equipped scanners that are sixth or seventh generation progeny of humble awk and grep. They see patterns, they find keywords, they even find the euphemism and missing links, they can tell when a sensitive thread of communication goes off electronic to avoid leaving behind a e-trail or paper trail. So they too want to control the back up process.
In the end, corporate back up is not something simple like you have in your home, where the data preservation is the only criterion.
Thats what they want you to think. No one can stop me from imagining the most paranoid delusional scenario. It is a free country and I have the freedom to be fearful of future, gays, the 99% hippies, the mexicans. I will not be pacified, I will not be ameliorated, I will not be persuaded from using words like ameliorated, It is my time, It is my mind, and I'm gonna blow it on the most trivial stuff.
Abstract
A location information system uses a positioning system, such as the civilian Navstar Global Positioning System (GPS), in combination with a distributed network. The location information system includes a radio transceiver for communicating to the distributed network and a GPS receiving system. The GPS receiving system receives a signal from the GPS and converts it into a coordinate entry. The coordinate entry is transmitted to the distributed network for retrieval of corresponding location specific information. The location specific information may reside on a web page. The coordinate entry may be incorporated into the web page address that supports the coordinate entry or linked to an existing web page associated with the coordinate entry. The web page and associated information is displayed. Bar code labels, infrared beacons and other labeling systems may also be used in the location information system in place of or in addition to the GPS receiving system to supply location identification information.
Unfortunately, the patent does not cover a self contained system using GPS receiver. This patent is about transmitting the gps coordinates to a network, either in the url itself or using GET or POST methods or by a table of URLs for for the given GPS coordinate.
One small ray of hope is, what it does after posting the URL. It can display a web page. So if you argue that widgets and apps and other things are not really displaying a web page, may be you can escape.
Usual disclaimers. Not a lawyer, does not mean to play one on slashdot.
So what if some Dems were also helping the banksters steal our money? What makes you think OWS is ok with Dems stealing the money? Looks like you are the hyper partisan here looking everything from a R vs D view point. Let us throw all the pols in cahoots with the banksters to the dogs. It might so happen we will end up throwing more Rs than Ds. But it is ok even if the mix is reversed. I am ok with it. Are you? Or would you rather let the banskters steal our money so you can have your precious R majority?
Nah. Tea party is a genuine astro turf organization by Dick Army. Well coordinated media events, spin doctors present, buses rented to bring in people for the day etc. It started as a spontaneous movement, but it was immediately co-opted by a radical faction of the Republican party, redirected the anger towards Democrats and hijacked the Republican party. It claimed the natural ebb of support that happens after every historic election, 2008 this time and is pushing Republican party to the extremes it does not really want to go. Its over reach already cost the Republicans two senate seats in 2010 they could have had. It is affecting their nomination for the Presidential elections.
OWS on the other hand is a genuine grass roots movement without any leadership, without media savvy, without spin doctors, without even self-policing to root out the hooligans and vandals who are attracted to any protest movement. Time will tell, which one is real and which one is astro-turf.
The 1% had even stronger media control, and even stronger stranglehold on the government machinery in the past. They were broken. If the 1% are smart they will voluntarily and peacefully allow the taxes to go up and bring deficit under control in a more equitable manner. If not, it is going to be a lot more ugly than a bunch of hippies camping out in some public park.
I was under the (mistaken) impression that syllogism is a generic term for a flawed argument, and the circular argument is a specific variety of it. Also did not know nowadays is a single word. Thanks for the corrections.
My visual cortex knows that "begs the question" is almost certainly meaningless filler and its application 99.9% of the time has no relation to its actual meaning, so I do not process/see it.
Begs the question is one of the most misused, abused and misunderstood phrases in English today. This phrase is a literal translation of the Latin phrase "petitio principii". It literally means the "answer" is begging the "question" to be let off the hook. The answer is admitting that it is insufficient to prove what has to be proved. For example if the question is "Why is there overpopulation?" and the answer is "Because there are too many people", it is a circular argument, a syllogism, and the answer has to come begging the question to be excused so that it can go away and hide its face in shame.
But so many English speakers now a days use the phrase to really mean, "raises the question".
A laptop or netbook works better because you can use VI...
For your kind information smug Emacs users remind you that all you have to do in emacs is to invoke the paper and pencil mode using
c-h c-p esc- meta-p alt-h meta-2
Or you can simply stick in prop_pap_pencil(mode((dragger(doctor-watson(2),pencil_lead_type(h2)))) in the.emacsrc file.
What is the big deal about these earthquakes? What's the maximum damage it can do? Kill a few thousand people? Easily fixed, corporations are people, we will just create a few thousand corporations to make up the difference. Property damage? Why, the value of all the undamaged properties will rise, and may be even bring some underwater mortgages above water. So it is no big deal.
If at all you want to do something, give voting rights to corporations, they should not be discriminated in the access to the ballot boxes. And more tax cuts. Always more tax cuts.
Slashdot Mirror
My brother is an IT consultant, he says the contract job opening has been consistently high and the unemployment is quite low in that field. However his skill set is mainly in coding on the PeopleSoft API. Comp Sci degree is not required for that job. Wonder how many high school students flock comp sci thinking of coding jobs? How many are going to confronted with concepts like P and NP problem sets and equivalences and find that harder than calculus?
By not being one of those PC manufacturers. That is how you missed the bus. If you were making and selling PCs at that time, if you promise not to pre-install Netscape you got a bulk discount on other Microsoft products you were selling. Most of the big names paid a flat fee and sold unlimited copies of Ms Windows. They got ridiculously low prices on Ms-Office to keep Netscape out.
Well, it is once in a lifetime chance. The law firm is negligent, is violating privacy law HEPA or whatever. Ambulance chaser in the cross-hairs. Sue that law firm for everything it got.
Then came Mark Andreeson. He thought, "may be if I give my product, the browser, away for free and try to make money by selling tools to create the web browser, may be I can survive". But Microsoft priced its browser below zero and killed his company. The developers were aghast. But they were fretting and fuming but could not do anything about it. Microsoft can just issue a press release saying, "We are thinking of doing XYZ" and the venture capital for startups trying to develop apps that do XYZ vanish like a curl of smoke. They were fooled many times more than once.
Now, with a plethora of systems available, from Android to iOS to linux to simple plain HTML you think developers would trust Microsoft as far as Ballmer can throw a chair? No way buddy. No way.
Traditionally if it goes into a salad it is a vegetable, if it goes into dessert it is a fruit. But that rule of thumb is getting fuzzier and fuzzier as the chefs are under constant pressure to innovate.
I wonder if the defendant can legally refuse to give the password. On one hand, there is a law against self-incrimination. But on the other hand during discovery the plaintiff subpoenas documents, even if they are inside a safe to be revealed. Are there any precedences for this in US courts?
This.
Offshoring, in my experience over the past 3-4 years, has been more trouble than it is worth.
The work ethics and habits of American workers evolved over the decades when long career in one company with a gold watch and a pension. They work in certain way. The management on its part should be nurturing the workers who have a deep understanding of the company and the customers, especially those workers who cultivate skills that can not be useful seeking employment elsewhere. But management ditched the gold watch, picked up the golden parachute.
The work ethics and the habits of the body-shopping firms evolved in a climate where the relationship is definitely not long term. Both sides knew it. Both sides expected the other side to take maximum advantage of it. American management went in thinking American work ethics in third-world prices. But it is not dealing with employees but intermediate contractors. Even if the body-shopping contractors have long term employees who are loyal, they would be loyal to the contractor, not to the outsourcing companies. Further everyone knows the cluelessness of the middle management. So they found every loop hole in the contract, every stretchable point, every exploitable gap and the body shopping contractors took the American management to the cleaners faster than you can say "aloo gobi, channa masala, butter nan and mango lassi please".
There are world class employees and workers in India. But they (I should say we, because I am a desi who would not work for a desi salary) go up the value chain pretty quickly and are not available for hire at third world prices. What you do get for third world prices are third world class work.
"The 1% had even stronger media control, and even stronger stranglehold on the government machinery in the past. They were broken."
When did this happen? The 1% and their counterparts have had and maintained their stranglehold from feudalism to today. Call them the nobles, the aristocracy, or just the rich. A tiny minority has always held all the wealth and stood on the backs of everyone else. They might not have titles and be appointed by a king anymore but they are still an exclusive club that most members are born into.
Correct, I am talking about that large sweep of history. Two hundred years ago the 1% could actually kill with impunity (using their hired thug underlings) and throw people in jail. Four hundred years they could do it personally, without using intermediaries. In 1890s company towns, company stores and company scrips were common. In the 20th century every town had a handful of newspapers which were hand maidens of the local cliques of top 1%. Their media control and news distribution was absolute. With Radio and then network television, between 1950s till about 1980s the entire country listened to just three TV news broadcasts. Politicians had to speak simultaneously to both friend and foe at the same time. So we were able to reform atrocities and fight for civil rights, against segregation, clean air, clean water etc. As network news waned, as politicians from Regan fine tuned the "coded" message that means one thing to the general uninitiated but sends a signal to their base, the 1% are gaining strength. So yes, the top 1% had incredible levels of power and control in the past. It waned, now it is waxing again, and I am sure it will wane again.
But by your logic the helium balloon has lower density than this newfangled material.
Wave function is a real object? You gotta be kidding. Next thing you will say "corporations are people". Oh! wait..
Not all the data deserve to be backed up. When you back up too much, it takes longer to find what you are looking for. It increases the costs too. No developer would archive the object files and libraries. When you go looking for a lost file and the back up system throws back at you eight draft versions and you are not sure which one was the final it reduces the effectiveness of the back up process too.
Like most famous inventions, the exact moment this invention happened has been very accurately recorded. It was exactly on the day a top sidekick of Ballmer decided to quit Microsoft to join Google. The CEO discovered the ballistic properties of office furniture and how effectively they can be projected to affect employee behavior and give feedback to the employees about the management's attitude towards them. But it was not a simple joy ride to the patent office. Much more serious development and testing took place. Tables were too heavy. Paperweights were too ineffectual. After a decade of hard work, the invention has paid off and now Microsoft has obtained a patent "for a tool that can give feedback to the employee about their actions and behavior which can also be sat upon to work when not used in that capacity."
Claim slashdot mod system is prior art, invalidate the patent, slay the dragon or at least one of its scales and show the skeptical slashdotters the stuff you are made of. Come on. Grab the moment. Seize the day.
But most of the time, the test cases, use cases, user documentation etc get the short end of the stick. Especially code documentation that does not sit well inside the source code. [In grad school I used a bizzare thing called Cweb that had a single source code for both code and documentation. You run cweave to get the post script document via TeX and LaTeX. And you run ctangle to get c sources. There was a fortran version too. But it never seemed to gain commercial success]. Scientific papers that form the basis of the scientific codes, profiling data, important lessons learned about the data structures and scaling, painful gotcha bugs fixed etc are rarely documented, forget about comprehensive indexed search-able documentation of the lessons learned in developing the code.
Outside software development and may be accounting, there are areas where the need for back-ups conflicts with the desire for secrecy and control and frankly paranoia and delusions too. Salesmen guard their rolodex and its electronic clone zealously. Business plans should not be leaked, strategy session presentations should be kept in strict confidence etc, and most executives don't realize most sys-admin and IT already have full access to the un-backed up data. They are not losing much by allowing a clean back-up solution, but they don't seem to realize that.
Then there is Legal. They are so worried about electronic discovery. Now there are AI equipped scanners that are sixth or seventh generation progeny of humble awk and grep. They see patterns, they find keywords, they even find the euphemism and missing links, they can tell when a sensitive thread of communication goes off electronic to avoid leaving behind a e-trail or paper trail. So they too want to control the back up process.
In the end, corporate back up is not something simple like you have in your home, where the data preservation is the only criterion.
Thats what they want you to think. No one can stop me from imagining the most paranoid delusional scenario. It is a free country and I have the freedom to be fearful of future, gays, the 99% hippies, the mexicans. I will not be pacified, I will not be ameliorated, I will not be persuaded from using words like ameliorated, It is my time, It is my mind, and I'm gonna blow it on the most trivial stuff.
Abstract A location information system uses a positioning system, such as the civilian Navstar Global Positioning System (GPS), in combination with a distributed network. The location information system includes a radio transceiver for communicating to the distributed network and a GPS receiving system. The GPS receiving system receives a signal from the GPS and converts it into a coordinate entry. The coordinate entry is transmitted to the distributed network for retrieval of corresponding location specific information. The location specific information may reside on a web page. The coordinate entry may be incorporated into the web page address that supports the coordinate entry or linked to an existing web page associated with the coordinate entry. The web page and associated information is displayed. Bar code labels, infrared beacons and other labeling systems may also be used in the location information system in place of or in addition to the GPS receiving system to supply location identification information.
Unfortunately, the patent does not cover a self contained system using GPS receiver. This patent is about transmitting the gps coordinates to a network, either in the url itself or using GET or POST methods or by a table of URLs for for the given GPS coordinate.
One small ray of hope is, what it does after posting the URL. It can display a web page. So if you argue that widgets and apps and other things are not really displaying a web page, may be you can escape.
Usual disclaimers. Not a lawyer, does not mean to play one on slashdot.
So what if some Dems were also helping the banksters steal our money? What makes you think OWS is ok with Dems stealing the money? Looks like you are the hyper partisan here looking everything from a R vs D view point. Let us throw all the pols in cahoots with the banksters to the dogs. It might so happen we will end up throwing more Rs than Ds. But it is ok even if the mix is reversed. I am ok with it. Are you? Or would you rather let the banskters steal our money so you can have your precious R majority?
OWS on the other hand is a genuine grass roots movement without any leadership, without media savvy, without spin doctors, without even self-policing to root out the hooligans and vandals who are attracted to any protest movement. Time will tell, which one is real and which one is astro-turf.
The 1% had even stronger media control, and even stronger stranglehold on the government machinery in the past. They were broken. If the 1% are smart they will voluntarily and peacefully allow the taxes to go up and bring deficit under control in a more equitable manner. If not, it is going to be a lot more ugly than a bunch of hippies camping out in some public park.
I was under the (mistaken) impression that syllogism is a generic term for a flawed argument, and the circular argument is a specific variety of it. Also did not know nowadays is a single word. Thanks for the corrections.
My visual cortex knows that "begs the question" is almost certainly meaningless filler and its application 99.9% of the time has no relation to its actual meaning, so I do not process/see it.
Begs the question is one of the most misused, abused and misunderstood phrases in English today. This phrase is a literal translation of the Latin phrase "petitio principii". It literally means the "answer" is begging the "question" to be let off the hook. The answer is admitting that it is insufficient to prove what has to be proved. For example if the question is "Why is there overpopulation?" and the answer is "Because there are too many people", it is a circular argument, a syllogism, and the answer has to come begging the question to be excused so that it can go away and hide its face in shame.
But so many English speakers now a days use the phrase to really mean, "raises the question".
His original iDea was to create an iNternet that would work only with iDevices. But he was thwarted.
A laptop or netbook works better because you can use VI ...
For your kind information smug Emacs users remind you that all you have to do in emacs is to invoke the paper and pencil mode using c-h c-p esc- meta-p alt-h meta-2
Or you can simply stick in prop_pap_pencil(mode((dragger(doctor-watson(2),pencil_lead_type(h2)))) in the .emacsrc file.
If at all you want to do something, give voting rights to corporations, they should not be discriminated in the access to the ballot boxes. And more tax cuts. Always more tax cuts.
...what happens when this super slippery meets that super sticky gecko tape http://science.slashdot.org/story/11/11/07/1615221/gecko-inspired-tape-can-be-reused-thousands-of-times. Logic bomb?
There will be a tear in the space-time continuum, the neutrinos will cross the Alpine mountain faster than light.
Cray is still alive? Wasn't it gobbled up by Silicone Graphics? and then SGI too went belly up? Well, it is a blast from the past.