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Comment Times have changed (Score 1) 742

There must be higher number of people in the field as compared to like 1990 or so, but there is a greater choice available. Coupled with the spin/hype it leads people towards popular fields/technologies. I do not think linux/kernel people do the kind of "evangelism" that gets done elsewhere.

Comment Between 'collaborators' (Score 1) 181

I have seen situation where my then employer was providing consultancy using a software made by a UK company. They also provided support in their geography to other users and acted as resellers. There was an greement between these two companies under which they could not hire an ex-employee of the other company for a period of 6 months after the employee having quit. It seems like a fair deal. BTW, there was no case of any person leaving and joining the other company for close to 10 years. They just did not interview such cases.

Comment Help in fighting the real menace (Score 1) 640

From the looks of it, the drug menace had the side effect of bribing at the petty levels. This should get eliminated. Should also lead to a (likely) greater focus on the real fight that is with the organized gangs rather than action against individual addicts. Additionally the government sponsored deaddiction programs will lead to lesser sales on the streets. Theoretically a good twin move. Practically, the implementation will decide the outcome (if the lower levels of police are still not on the job of fighting the bigger menace, or the deaddiction program has maginal impact).

Comment Optimization (Score 1) 88

One problem in optimization for brick-and-mortar companies with huge supply chain is "minimum landed cost at best profit margin". A friend of mine does such calculations for such organizations and provides ways to fine tune the supply chain leading to direct savings. Throw in things like lowest latency and mininum number of hops etc the techniques apply to problmes for a company providing services related to the internet. For a company that spends a big portion on electricity to provide services to its consumers it is another parameter to optimize for (some of the cases he did inluded things like political stability/labour laws to check for advisabililty of setting up a center in a particular geographical region). It will be interesting to see the results on the screens of the end-users. I have started to feel that a few of the sites I access most frequently have slowed over time. Maybe, it is just me but maybe there is a real problem and some people are trying to solve these.

Comment Test baloons? (Score 2, Interesting) 298

Do not know if it is due to the reporter or the strategy itself.
In an effort to expand its Linux offerings, Dell is researching new netbook-type devices and will soon offer netbook Linux OS upgrades, a company official said on Wednesday.
It ends with
The company is also researching Google's Chrome for use in netbooks.
Makes netbooks-are-atom-and-smartbooks-are-ARM distinction.
However
Dell couldn't say whether it would ultimately offer a smartbook.
Maybe just floating of test baloons.

Comment Re:They want to monopolize THEIR way (Score 0) 190

Being in control of what they want to do is the precise reason for not taking up the offer. The issue of net-neturality is a red herring as these kind of things are best tackled through the usual route of lobbying. It will never in the interest of the management (out to deliver shareholder value quarter after quarter) to go to the hinterland and deploy infrastructure. It just stops them from being the supermen (increasing revenues) they would like to be in the eyes of their shareholders. Also, govt becomes a shareholder if they accept the money and another set of objectives get added to the list which will definitely have defocussing effect. Mind you, bonuses (Big banks anyone?) are not the only motivation for the management!

Comment I am happy for you (Score 0) 543

You got what meets your needs. Surely, others too will find what meets their requirements. It might as well be GPL (or something elses). No big deal. TFA says:
Before deciding to pull away from GPL, Haynie says Appcelerator surveyed some two dozen software vendors working within the same general market space. To his surprise, Haynie saw that only one was using a GPL variant. "Everybody else, hands down, was MIT, Apache, or New BSD," he says.
Adopting any of the existing licenses may be the only practical option. Writing your own license (you know what you'd like the terms to be) should have been tried.
Then:
"The proponents of GPL like to tell people that the world only needs one open source license, and I think that's actually, frankly, just a flat-out dumb position," says Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation, one of the many organizations now offering an open source license with more generous commercial terms than GPL.

Never heard any of the GPL proponents say such a thing. BTW, GPL is not about Open Source. It is about Free Software.
Further:
Alternative licenses offer liberal code distribution terms (which means more revenue potential) and more clearly written licenses -- and they have eager and qualified developer communities, advocates say.
GPL does not stop you from making revenues. It just is more careful about freedom. It will be a good idea to write a more clearly written license taking care of revenue potential

Comment Review Articles (Score 0) 289

From TFTA:
The ghostwritten papers were typically review articles, in which an author weighs a large body of medical research and offers a bottom-line judgment about how to treat a particular ailment. The articles appeared in 18 medical journals, including The American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology and The International Journal of Cardiology.
This did not happen at the level research reported in journals. This was at another level where a doctor not reading the original articles would look at the state-of-the-art and the friendly pharma company's medical communication guys interpret it for you. Surely a case of biased/selective reporting of happenings in the field. I have myself often wondered at (seemingly) contradictory results getting reported in newspapers. Things like "wine found good for heart patients" and "wine linked to complications in heart conditions" at an interval of a few months or a year. The reporters in this case would perhaps be reading summaries of some kind or getting briefed by the researchers of the study being reported which IS news.
Research by different groups can lead to different conlusions and this fact was perhaps being used by these guys.

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