yeah, damn the MBA's... oh wait I am one, but then I had already been working in software development for over a decade before I chose to learn about the dark side

The business education was painful and enlightening. It was both maddening in how companies rate investment against perceived roi (no business person would ever fund pure research with no clear return on investment over what they could make just shutting down research in favor of a stock portfolio) and troubling (how business 'ethics' has been transformed into an all-out race for short term profits to meet shareholder expectations regardless of long-term outcomes)

If left to the business people, this entire country would be reduced to a backwater selling buggy whips in MLM schemes that maximize profits at the top and the rest of the world would be scrambling to leave us in the dust. I think that the most dangerous thing for a technology company to do is to allow their fate to fall into the hands of a business person with no technical background that only cares about the next quarters returns and ignores the need to plan ahead 5, 10 and 20 years into the future

Every time that I speak with an HP hardware rep they spend all of their time pushing the integrity/Itanium servers for about 10x the cost of the (formerly Compaq) proliant x86-64 line

They are wasting their breath, when we finally moved out the last of our DEC/Compaq Alpha servers we switched everything to proliant/operton servers running SUSE linux for our databases and blade servers (with lowest total cost per core) for vmware

I would have loved it HP had seen the looming failure of Itanium and Alpha was delivering its ev-12 generation, but that was not to be and HP should see its future in the path that it took Alpha down, obsolescence

HP wants to be what IBM used to be (and still struggles to be), the single source provider for their customer

Autonomy looked like a great opportunity, but just like inexpensive hardware has undercut high-end server sales, open source solutions and tens of thousands of developers using those tools have undercut their market and dimmed the rosy projections that made HP willing to lay down so much cash

I think that this is less about Autonomy's shrinking value and more about HP's willingness to pay any price to enter new markets and their failure to recognize an opportunity to drive down the selling price by being willing to walk away from the deal

On Autonomy's part, they 'enhanced shareholder value' and returned a greater profit to them by negotiating the highest selling price possible, Do we really expect corporations to behave differently?

I remember watching the old BBC show, 'Connections'

It was a fascinating take on history, but after a while I noted that almost every invention was first developed (at great cost) to aid some war effort (blow up stuff, target artillery, canned food for soldiers, refrigerated beef for soldiers...)

Even a vast amount of 'foundational' research that produced our beloved net-centric world was largely produced to provide decentralized communications following a nuclear war...

So, then 'profit' is probably a better incentive than 'killing' and the 'sake of knowledge' is pretty much left to crack-pots and tinkerers

Natural diamonds are not rare, it is simply that the people who have the largest supplies of them (de Beers, the Russians and now some folks in Canada) create an artificial scarcity by controlling the amount that they release onto the market

Used to play a lot of Xenon pinball machine back in '82 (while avoiding EE classes my first year of college)

http://www.ipdb.org/machine.cgi?gid=2821

Just loved getting the multi-ball and making the machine 'climax' by winning games. Maybe it was the voice synth, the sexy graphics, or the speaker aimed at my groin, but I really did love that machine... *sniff*

MP3.com was awesome, first place I ever heard 'Laziest Men on Mars' and the ever popular 'Terrible Secret of Space'

That said, they added a 'feature' that allowed people to use 'cloud' storage and the Evil Ones (UMG) demonstrated that somebody stored *gasp* copyrighted material there

The company was sued out of existence and was eventually taken over by Vivendi Universal

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mp3.com

Yep, delivering content directly from Artist to Consumer and not allowing the record companies to sequester the bulk of the money to themselves will get you sued... imagine that

Go DotCom, Go DotCom

I am fairly certain that ESRI can show prior art on this, unless of course it was part of a defense mapping contract...

I also find that my nano-particle infused wrist band that is tightly quantum-coupled with my nano-particle infused mouse pad allows each mouse click to perform TEN TIMES as many system configurations than my outdated neoprene mouse pad alone. This performance increase alone more than justifies the $12,000 cost

please, it is not the 1960's anymore and nobody really buys that whole 'enemy going to launch tonight if we fail to show absolute strength'

More likely that Taiwan wants to have more Apple plants built there and does not want to piss them off

Then you dismantle the entire base and replace it with paper mache and blow-up objects so that the potential enemy targets a fake base while you re-build it in secret

Shake, bake and repeat

Because, at that time I lacked the business acumen to take advantage of it... I had led the development of postscript based high resolution mapping and even got our agency to receive national awards for the work. My first inclination was to give lectures to other GIS-folk on how to do it themselves. My first presentation was 20 minutes of me talking as fast as I could and a room full of people who looked like a pterodactyl had just swooped over their heads... complete and utter incomprehension

At that point, other ArcInfo users started hiring me on contract to apply the methods to their systems, and even then I horribly undercharged them for the work and spent my own time training their people to take it over

That is to say, I had no idea on how to profit from my knowledge and I missed on out on a prime opportunity because of it

I'll agree with you that obscure hacks suck, even more so when they are rife with regular expressions and scant man pages like awk and sed...

My approach was to do things in a repeatable manner so that the next time that I ran into the problem I already had a solution in my head that I could either apply directly, or extend in a common manner to handle the problem at hand. I can not tell you how much it pisses me off to have a single developer apply a different solution each time they run into the same problem... The big things (many to many relationships and cursor processing) took me a couple of week-long headaches to get a handle on, but the pain resulted in re-usable code that I would apply repeatedly (eventually I switched from Infos to pl/sql and started making my work more reusable with calls to stored procedures). Honestly, when I read my own code it might as well just be comments because it is based on an internal approach that I already understand. With larger teams I have had to write (and ask others to write) more universal comments, but at least I can communicate to them the reasons for the effort and the benefits that they will receive

I really do feel sorry for the person who ran into the first dynamic segmentation project that I worked up... But, that was what the 'jerk' me wanted to happen anyways