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It's deeper than just the hours vs. the compensation. It sounds like your boss has no vision. What is the problem being solved? What are your customers either asking for or complaining about? Simply adding "features" without any connection to the customer is pointless. It sounds like your PHB has read Spolsky out of context and has no clue.
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samzenpus
from the young-inventor-society dept.
Knile writes "While not the youngest patent recipient ever (that would be a four year old in Texas), Bryce Gunderman has received a patent at age 8 for a space-saver that combines an outlet cover plate with a shelf. From the article: '"I thought how I was going to make a lot of money," Bryce said about what raced through his brain when he received the patent.'"
Mondrian was a TopView clone created by Dynamical Systems Research, a company formed by Nathan Myhrvold and Chuck Whitmer. Microsoft bought them because Mondrian was arguabley smaller and faster than the IBM product. The team of engineers went to work in the WIndows team and were a good part of the reason that Windows 3.0 emereged as the "good enough" GUI to dominate the industry efver since.
Windows 1 was developed by people that had been with Microsoft and worked on MSDOS 1-3. IBM's Topview was considered to be the real competition, so Microsoft bought a company named Dynamical Systems (Nathan Myhrvold and Chuck Whitmer). This company had created a TopView clone named Mondrian that was smaller and faster than IBM's product. These are the guys that drove the effort that eventually became Windows 3.0, generally acknowledged as the first one that was good enough to use.
I was in Best Buy last weekend and they were demonstrating the Kinect. My 9 year old daughter, who doesn't like to play console based video games, started playing one of the demos. It was sort of like Breakout, but you kicked or punched the balls instead of using a remote. I had a hard time getting her to leave.
Lipton was one of the co-authors of a great analysis called "Social Processes and Proofs of Theorems and Programs" (http://www.cs.umd.edu/~gasarch/BLOGPAPERS/social.pdf). It points out how a very complex proof is only as valid as the community of scientists who believe it. There are great risks for subtle lapses of logic in a 90 page proof and at best, a distinguished team of reviewers can only agree that they have not found a flaw. That said, the P != NP proof is great in that it has started a new social process that will undoubtedly uncover more good things.
Officials in Riverhead, New York are using Google Earth to root out the owners of unlicensed pools. So far they've found 250 illegal pools and collected $75,000 in fines and fees. Of course not everyone thinks that a city should be spending time looking at aerial pictures of backyards. from the article: "Lillie Coney, associate director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington, DC, said Google Earth was promoted as an aid to curious travelers but has become a tool for cash-hungry local governments. 'The technology is going so far ahead of what people think is possible, and there is too little discussion about community norms,' she said."
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timothy
from the so-what's-a-few-snapshots-anyhow dept.
PSandusky writes "A report issued by the Lower Merion School District's chosen law firm blames the district's IT department for the laptop webcam spying scandal. In particular, the report mentions lax IT policies and record-keeping as major problems that enabled the spying. Despite thousands of e-mails and images to the contrary, the report also maintains that no proof exists that anyone in IT viewed images captured by the webcams."
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Soulskill
from the that's-a-lot-of-pkd dept.
Dynamoo writes "The NYT reports that a two-part edition of PKD's Exegesis will be published next year. This huge work, a combination of journal and philosophical treatise, has been published in part before, but this is the first time that the whole version will be made generally available."
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kdawson
from the thought-they-were-banning-e-cigs dept.
ZosX sends along a puff piece from Wired's Brian X. Chen: "Apple on Monday approved Puff Puff Pass, a $2 game whose objective is to pass a cigarette or pipe around and puff it as many times as you can within a set duration. So much for taking the high road, Apple. The game allows you to choose between smoking a cigarette, a cigar, and a pipe. Then you select the number of people you'd like to light up with (up to five), the amount of time, and a place to smoke (outdoors or indoors). And you're ready to get right on puffing."