Comment 43 Million Dollars!? (Score 5, Funny) 275
Well there's the problem right there... they only paid 43 Million dollars. I think that's enough to buy one license of Oracle DB... for maybe a week or so...
Well there's the problem right there... they only paid 43 Million dollars. I think that's enough to buy one license of Oracle DB... for maybe a week or so...
As the expense of caring for the Elderly increases, I predict this will become a very popular notion. Sure some will abuse it, but it's not like we don't already treat our elderly people as disposable. At a certain point there will be a deluge of stories like this. There will be stories of "brave" elderly who take their own lives to save their children the inconvenience of their existence, even when they aren't ill... It's kind of the way of a society focused on efficiency and productivity, that no longer really gives a role to the elderly. (There are cultures that value the elderly and see our modern culture as abhorrent, but they don't have wikipedia...)
Yeah there was that one coinkydink, but the visual effects were spectacular, and I can't remember enjoying a superhero movie to the degree I enjoyed this one. Maybe it's because my teenage daughters all have a crush on Thor, but it was a decent fun movie, well made, and worth the price of admission.
One option that's missing is "Fly through Time" (rather than space). Even if it were a few minutes at a time, I would never need be late again.
I still use our local library, though I'm a huge fan of ebooks. There are certain books I don't want to purchase, but can access via library or interlibrary loans, that make accessing the books more feasible. I take my kids there and they have a chance to just look through the shelves and find something they would not normally take home and read on their own. One daughter started reading a series I'd never heard of lately because she was attracted to the covers of some of the later books in the series, we had to place a hold on the first book which wasn't in this branch of our library, then as she started reading, she was a little perturbed by some of the content which she shared with the whole family, reading aloud passages that she thought were a bit gory--though I could tell she was secretly delighted by... This same daughter was a very slow to take to reading and required special reading assistance in grade school when younger, and not til she read the Harry Potter series did she really enjoy it. Now she's in High School and is absolutely thrilled to be reading "classics" like "The Crucible" while the rest of her class are dreading it.
I also like how you only get the book for a couple weeks at a time. To me, it's motivating to read the book or move on... you have to choose to actually pursue the book. You don't collect a hundred of them on your edevice and never finish them...
The nicest thing about a trip to the library is how much I pay to go... I do worry that even with cheaper books to access, the whole "free to read" concept is jeopardized by our need to affix a pricetag to everything.
kind of ironic the story leaked. I don't see why he can't tell us everything... right now... he's kinda made a living on doing that.
Mr. Shuttleworth probably has an Amiga Computer... best darn computer ever (just ask someone who owned one), ahead of its time, and completely forgotten nowadays...
Carly actually did this, citing HP's long history of caring for its workers. Many employees donated their pay to keep layoffs from happening. By the end of the Summer of 2001, though, she went ahead and enacted lay-offs anyway. In fact it about a month prior to 9-11. After announcing the lay offs, she then promptly announced the acquisition of Compaq, which she clearly had in mind ahead of time.
Other than that, she spent a lot of time talking about espeak, which never really amounted to anything, because XML (a non proprietary open standard) became accepted as the defacto application interface meta-data language. She wanted to turn HP into Computer Sciences Corp, doing consulting and software services, because she saw IBM's success...
But HP has never really done software all that well. (Just check out any HP programs that come installed or packaged with your workstation or print/scan center... (I'm not talking drivers, but the software that presents that information... it's always abominable and on most of my systems it breaks quickly.))
Lew Platt was Carly's predecessor, not successor. Lew split off Agilent first, then Carly came along and enacted the first ever lay-offs inthe company's history, because she was enamored with the draconian Cisco model leadership, which boasted a mandatory firing of the bottom 5-10% of the workforce every year, which was in direct and utter opposition to the HP Way (the basic concept that if you trust your engineers, give them what they need to succeed, they'll rise to your expectations and do a great job). The summer prior to the Lay Offs, Carly begged the employees to give back part of their pay to avoid lay offs, claiming it would avoid the inevitable. Then she "cut the fat" as she saw it... and then bought Compaq... then she butchered both those companies... which left all those who endured the lay off wondering why they'd donated their salaries to finance their eventual lay offs. It was a new low in leadership, that has only gotten worse with the ridiculous scandals and such that continue to plague a once decent company.
Now, now, those were heady days before we knew things like 9-11 and that Cisco wasn't the end-all company that she thought it was... or its mandatory firing of the bottom 10%... that she salivated over and tried to impose on a company that had never even seen a single lay-off.
Whacky fun.
Thankyou, whomever made this poll, for allowing me to vote for using evil itself. Hee hee... made my day.
The problem with teaching children in utero is the smarter ones hack mommy's system and that makes for a difficult pregnancy, with her constantly craving hot pockets, bacon flavored snacks and highly caffienated beverages.
One problem with math education is that it simply isn't the same thing as logic or computer linguistics. Even Discrete Mathematics uses a whole different set of terms, jargon and solves only a subset of the sorts of logical conditions one can expect to program in a computer. But then that's been a problem for mathematics since its inception--its application to real world issues and uses...
And very few schools actually teach programming, even at the High School level, let alone at lower level education. One reason is that a programmer generally gets paid better than a public school teacher, and so if you know how to program you've probably got a better paying job not at school. Further there's the question of what is a decent education in programming--and do you focus on programming at all with the limited time and access to computers--or teach them basic computer skills and be happy with it.
In a public school you can probably expect the computer science teacher to double as a coach, with his first love being coaching. My High School experience was a bunch of us "smart kids" (most of them were kids who had dads with computers and that had taught them a few things) figuring it out, while the teacher floundered to explain sorting algorithms and what recursion was. (He had no clue, though I didn't realize this until I got to College and what had taken months to study and explain was all explained in perfect clarity by a grad student in about an hour lecture...)
Agreed. It's less a jury and more a beauty contest, where the judges are all in the audience... and nobody has enough time to vett all the comments so the sooner you reply the more likely you are to get noticed.
I agree that some languages make Programming a very heartless and painful experience, but then others are just fun to get working. It's how I fell about Perl. I love that I can get to a solution via an assortment of different ways and that there's not just one way to do everything. It allows me to express my individuality and creativity and helps me maintain a sense of ownership. Sure, that's not always a top priority to your boss, but as a programmer, it makes you feel more than you're just another project resource... probably vanity or hubris, but sometimes you need something to have a little pride in doing--code that isn't just generated by next-year's code generator.
Life is a healthy respect for mother nature laced with greed.