You're an idiot.

If you take me on as a subcontractor, your ownership of my work become even more tenuous. If you hire me not to build your boat but to build an engine for it, unless we have a contractual agreement to the contrary, you are buying engines from me. - "Anybody with a typewriter can sue."

If you hire me to write a computer program for and you do not specifically state in the contract that product of my work belongs to you, I own the software and you merely have a license t use it. Larry Wall, creator Perl, was working on a contract and created Perl to simplify the job. When he was done, he put the floppy with the first version of Perl on it into his pocket and walked out. He has never been sued.

Fight however can mean a lot of things but first of all it means strategy. Sun Tzu said that the epitome of excellence in warfare is to win the war without fighting a single battle. Barring that be smart. Forget what you learned from movies. Remember what you learned from playing Go. At the signing of the Vietnam Peace Treaty in Paris, essentially a surrender, an American general confronted a Vietnamese General and said "You never defeated us in battle!" The Vietnamese General replied 'That's irrelevant now isn't it?"

If these two companies didn't see digital photography coming at them like a bus they were stupid. It was get on board in a big way or be roadkill. I'm a darwinian capitalist. No business gets bailed out. When the banks tanked the government should have bailed out the bad mortgage holders, not the banks. Like the FDIC - insure the citizens, screw the businesses. They want to make money? Don't screw up.

If someone pays you to make something, it's theirs. If you do it on your own it's yours. If you develop a tool to make the thing you were hired to make, the tool belongs to the workman...especially if it saves the contracting party money. Otherwise, on a time and materials contract you have no incentive to be creative.

It's the same concept. If drive manufacturers add more actuators, the algorithms need to change. Unless you make a lot of assumptions, a read is queued and the thread blocks. Meanwhile the next task queues a read. Unless you are doing priority queueing and probably even then, you have no idea where the sector needed for the next read is. No point in defragmenting the disk unless it's some single threaded, single user system. So you do the reads in an order that is most efficient for the passengers (tasks) and the elevator (performance, energy efficiency, etc).

Word has a little box under properties fro "keywords". The keywords are not visible in the Word document but a search through Word resumes will see those keywords. And there seems to be no limit on the number of keywords. Same is true for HTML and other types. You dump in a huge list IT and comp sci words and every search hits on your resume. You get a phone call "I'm calling you because of your experience with ...(not having actually read your resume, you hear shuffling of paper as he goes through your resume looking for the skills he searched on.)

This is "selection bias" taken to an extreme. I read he had a lump on the left parietal lobe from playing the violin and that pianists have a corresponding lump on the right. Did you read this in the Onion?

I'm 63. I design and build my own computers, I do heterogeneous parallel programming, something which this jerk undoubtedly can't spell much less understand what it is or do it. I program FPGAs and experiment with various pieces of hardware, software and shit he can't imagine. I just came back from VLDB (the Intl. Conference on Very Large Databases) in Istanbul where I attended a workshop on hardware accelerated databases, which is my interest. I work with Oracle Exadata Machines. I've talked with developers of Hadoop and from Yarcdata (a subsidiary of Cray), while this guy was jerking off some VP at a large corporation trying to make a sale. $100 says he doesn't know what a TLB is or why it exists. Yes, things are changing at an exponential rate so reading voraciously and getting your hands dirty is what keeps you ahead. In a technical debate I could cut him to pieces. Oracle is working with Fujitsu on a new processor specifically design for databases - their Exadata systems, which I have worked with, are specifically designed for databases and already have such capabilities as moving part of the query processing to the storage node reducing the disk reads required. SAP doesn't stand a chance against a company that can deliver hardware that run the software much faster than general purpose machines. I mentor little shits like him.

When I designed a database to store sequenced DNA and it's attendant "annotation", clients had to subscribe individually to about 80 feeds (beyond a few free ones) of data. Each one was a negotiated rate and contract. A client told me that if I could negotiate with all of these sources and deliver data from a single source, he sou;d make me an extremely wealthy man. I found that the only way to accomplish this would be bribes, beatings and blackmail. This is why Netflix has a lineup of movies for streaming that include the worst movies ever made, from "Amazon Women on the Moon" to "Nazis from the Center of the Earth". There is no reason why every movie, every made, in every language couldn't be available to stream on the web. Movies aren't that big and bandwidth is growing. I watch HD movies over wireless - no problem. Negotiating with the movie owners and getting reasonable contracts is the problem. He who can do this will become a very wealthy man (or woman). DVDs, CDs, etc. are used less and less to distribute everything, including software. If you must, at least for the moment, sell the DVDs that people can't get anywhere else.

A college education costs more and more and becomes worth less and less. As it is, in many professions, a company will hire someone with a bachelors degree and three years experience before someone with a bachelor's and a master's. This makes the ROI for a master's a negative number. As technology is advancing at an exponential rate, the value of degree decreases at a corresponding rate after it is acquired. The Stanford professor who taught an AI course online and had 100,000 students quit to pursue this methodology full time. MIT is putting all of it's courses online, free. Maybe colleges will become research institutions. But in that regard, when some grad students started working on fuzzy logic, their professors told them "Pursue this and your career is over" and peer-reviewed journals refused to publish their papers. Similar stories come out of every field. Nothing has changed since Galileo. I remember the scene in "Good Will Hunting" where Matt Damon tells a Harvard student that he could have gotten his $50,000 education (back then) for the price of library card. Now it's online. By the way, the text for the AI class was $100. That has to go. Doing a google search and finding that most of the papers on Hidden Markov Models cost $15-$35 is most disconcerting. That has to go. The only people left behind should be alchemists and assholes.

Purchased by who? Vendors of new PCs and residents of asylums around the world? No one cares! Maybe, just maybe, more machines will be running Windows 7 than Windows XP shortly. Since no one is running it, no one is looking for vulnerabilities, ergo no malware.

But you'll probably have to. Especially if get the wife-kids-house going. I took a difficult comp sci class and got a B. A year later I ran into someone who was also in the class. She got an A. I could remember everything and she could remember nothing. College is to many people a sort of intellectual bulemia. Cram and puke. Get a good grade, remember nothing and don't care. You can always teach yourself later if you need it. Pursue what you like - whether it's math, comp sci, physics, carpentry, or anything else. You can't go wrong. If you pursue money, degrees, academic status, etc. then you have a problem with your perception of yourself. You see yourself as needing something to improve your self-worth. Self-esteem problems. But the world generally doesn't see it that way. Tony Robbins is making a lot of money feeding the pathology of neurotics. I like people who just crave knowledge and suck up as much as they can. Usually they have some general focus areas but they go after everything they come across. They're usually seen as crazy in some way but of course everyone's nuts, it's just a matter of taste. My girlfriend and I have a house where she teaches piano and violin (Juilliard, doctorate, etc.), I'm off consulting where I'm at a large corporation doing database work but not kissing anyone's ass and at night I have a condo full of computers in some stage of design, build, modification and programming. I'm gonzo, batshit crazy but holding down a full-time job. I tell people my long-term goal is galactic domination (actually I've always wanted to be the sadistic warden of a women's prison) and that I'm doing research on time travel or building an anti-gravity device. I could say that I can calculate the distance to the nearest exact duplicate of earth and everything on it or I could engineer a rabbit with a jellyfish gene that makes it glow purple in the dark. But that's all been done before.