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Comment Speaking from personal experience... (Score 2) 212

I've had the opportunity in the past to work closely with people who learned their IT skills in the military. Without exception they were very competent and a pleasure to work with. If I were hiring today, a candidate who learned IT skills in the military would get a closer look than the guy with the degree from the local community college.

I'm not saying that everyone who learns IT skills in the military is awesome, but the ones I've met have been.

Comment 100 Tahoes? (Score 2) 81

Pfffffttt..... surely there are more interesting and useful things we can do with 100 Tahoes. How about welding 6 of them together side by side to form a solid wall of Tahoe, then deploy them on 6 lane freeways. People who refuse to travel at least at the speed limit will be run over by the wall of Tahoe - thus eliminating gridlock.

Comment Cost? (Score 2) 195

From the manufacturer's website:

Right now, I am just an idea. I will be as easy to use as an Xbox or Wii. I’ll be as big as three Xbox 360s and as expensive as three Xbox 360s. I will sit on your desk and quietly build your ideas, drawings and dreams.

So, now we are measuring dreams in XBoxen?

Comment Actual Text (Score 1) 79

For those too lazy to go RTFA, here is the actual text of the warning label:

"Remove Before Use This device is capable of determining its (and your) physical, geographical location and can associate this location data with other customer information. To limit access to location information by others, refer to the User Guide for Location settings and be cautious when downloading, accessing or using applications and services."

Dry, but straightforward.

Comment Let Me Translate The Article For You... (Score 5, Insightful) 73

These are systems that Yahoo built to help it handle large numbers of users on its websites, but that don't necessarily give it a competitive advantage, said David Chaiken, chief architect at Yahoo, in an interview in Bangalore on Friday.

Uhm, here's a bunch of code we wrote that is mostly useless to us. Let's bestow it on the unwashed masses and see if they can make it useful.

The company has to first make sure that each of the technologies will really be useful and provide significant value outside Yahoo, before releasing it to open source, Chaiken said. It takes time and effort to go through the open source process, and to build a community around open source, so the company has to first make sure there will be interest from developers, he added.

Let's float some new stories to some techie sites to see if anyone would like to fix our stuff for free.

Releasing technology to the open source community helps Yahoo build recognition and a technical brand in the technical community, and also develop relationships with universities and companies, Chaiken said. There could also be some financial benefits in getting community developers to work on a project, he added.

We love free labor.


In all seriousness, this article seems like a non-story to me. Some huge corp is releasing stuff that they don't find very valuable in an attempt to see if someone out there can make it valuable for free. I'd be a whole lot more interested if they were releasing something that was already a technological breakthrough. Using the open source community as your free labor drones just feels wrong.

Piracy

Submission + - Report Finds Most Piracy Driven by High Prices (ssrc.org) 1

langelgjm writes: The Social Science Research Council, an independent, non-profit organization, today released a major report on music, film and software piracy in developing economies. The product of three years of work, the authors conclude that piracy is primarily driven by excessively high prices and that anti-piracy education and enforcement efforts have failed. Still, chief editor Joe Karaganis believes that businesses can survive in these high piracy environments.

The report is free to readers in low-income countries, but behind a paywall for certain high-income countries, although the SSRC notes that "For those who must have it for free anyway, you probably know where to look."

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