It seems to me that MySQL and DB2 are very different products that serve different markets. I would expect IBM to continue both. Possibly move MySQL back toward its "RDBMS Lite" roots, where it is often a good choice when the full power of DB2 is just going to get in the way.

I don't know enough about the other product pairings to comment on them, but perhaps some of the others would dovetail in a similar fashion?

Yes, that's right, I was using it in pejorative sense.

Avoid all the risks associated with a private sector job even though the potential rewards would be much greater; keep a low profile to avoid any risks in the current job; don't have any opinions since those, too, are risky. Do what has to be done to stay comfortable (not hard with the fringe benefits) until retirement (taking advantage of the nice annuity packages along the way). This is the English model of civil service that brought about the Empire that the Sun never set on, and it is a good model for the lower echelon roles. Makes for excellent mail carriers. But it is not so good when someone who fits this stereotype rises to a level where they are influencing policies and building treaties.

Google "500 kelvin = ? F"

Answer is: 500 kelvin = 440.33 degrees Fahrenheit

That is a little below the ignition point of books, which according to Ray Bradbury is Fahrenheit 451

Ain't Google wunnerful? You can ask it all kinds of questions

You might want a bike shop to check for chain stretch (should take about a minute; they'll have the right tool). Also whether the chain is the correct one for the index shifters (even if it is the "original" chain: picking the wrong chain during assembly can happen). As the number of cogs goes up, the allowable tolerances on chain dimensions get a lot more narrow. (Also have the shop evaluate wear on the chain rings at the same time they check for chain stretch: if the chain is bad, the chainwheels get chewed up quickly).

If you are thinking about a new bike, looking at the modern internal hub gear systems would be worthwhile. There are some sweet seven speed hubs out there... including some that are using a drive shaft instead of a chain. The reduction in maintenance is awesome: you not only get rid of the derailleurs but you also get a stronger rear wheel (no dishing), so fewer broken spokes, less fuss with keeping the wheel true, etc. Most of the speeds on a 27 speed bike are either redundant or are too radical to be used anyway: you've probably got less than 10 combinations that have any value to you, and a couple of the lower ones are probably slower than getting off and walking the bike up that cliff. An appropriate 7 gear hub will probably get you everything you want for an around the town bike. Plus, a bike with a drive shaft instead of a chain is a definite chick magnet.

There are also some new hub designs with continuously variable transmissions. That would be sweet-- but out of my price range for now.

In theory, the joins of Moebius tubes will be twice as strong as using standard tube-and-lug fabrication, since there will be only one edge on each tube. That is, assuming that current topological problems in designing the lugs can be overcome with today's geometry.

Arcane frame building humour aside, the first likely bicycle application is prolly going to be in the tires. A Moebius tire will roll twice as far with half the wear, which would have obvious value on utility and commuting bikes.

And you should realize that those "cash reserves" are retained earnings, profits that were withheld from distribution to the stockholders, for their long term benefit. Any intention to use those funds for anything else, such as keeping up the pretense of being a "going concern" when they are hemorrhaging (what parent post described), would bring about a stockholders' revolt and criminal charges for the Chairman of the Board and the corporate officers. No matter how that played out in the courts, the result would be the end of the Microsoft we all love to hate.

Compared to the Enron follies of yesteryear, or what is going on right now in Detroit, Microsoft's possible collapse under these conditions would not even be that big a deal. I its not like the end of Microsoft would put a whole industry out of work. Businesses would simple speed up their migrations to Linux, the people who worked with Microsoft products would move into similar slots supporting FOSS software, everything would be almost back to normal. Except everyone's budget for software licensing and virus related costs would go down.

You might want to hold on to your doubt for a bit longer.

Carmen Suro-Bredie, who signed the letter rejecting the FOIA request, is a hold-over from the Bush Administration. Could be she never got the memo that things have changed. She actually predates Bush: she was chairing hearings about trade agreements in 1992, and apparently has at least 30 years of Federal Civil Service behind her. She has always kept a very low profile: the only biography of her on the web is remarkable for saying very little and providing no dates at all. These are the hallmarks of a career bureaucrat; the kind of person who works hard, not out of any sense of ideals, or for the good of the team, but to assure that their personal situation will be more comfortable next year than it was last year (no matter who is in charge or what the new goals of the organization are).

Now that she has stumbled into the Internet's spotlight, it will be interesting to see if there is any change in her career. Her style doesn't seem to fit well with Obama's approach. OTOH, she has been working the same small patch of ground for more than 16 years, so she might know too much to be easily shown to the door.

The treaty in question has a long way to go before it is ratified. There will be opportunities for Obama to open up the process; let's see if he takes them.

The key here is "shovel ready". Most road improvements involve long and costly arguments with land owners about the value of the fifty foot long by ten foot wide strip that the city or state needs to acquire before the first construction worker can put on his hard hat. The only income generated during that first phase is what the lawyers make... and as a group lawyers don't stimulate anybody's local economy. But in this situation Microsoft already owns the land involved, so it should be a matter of a few weeks before some guys can step out of the unemployment lines and put on their hard hats.

To put this another way: the stimulus dollars will work best when they are used for "shovel ready" projects. And anyone who has hung around slashdot for a couple of weeks or more knows that there is no corporation that is as ready to shovel it around as Microsoft.

I think this may well be a good project. Provided that it will still retain some value after Microsoft goes tits up.

Microsoft is not going to survive this financial winter in its current form: its skills are all about identifying the next big wave and fighting for the best spot to surf it. That has sometimes involved tipping better surfers off their boards when they get in its way. But those skills do not translate well to the new economy, where the ability to paddle your kayak through an Eskimo roll in freezing waters is a better image for what the successful company needs to know. Redmond needs to ask whether the value of the overpass is going to be worth its half of the investment if Microsoft is no longer as big a part of its tax base three years from now.

I would expect that the project will have some long term benefits, but probably much less than most of the good people of Redmond had hoped for.

Your quote made me realize that it has now been many years since I have trusted the realism of any photos. Aside from photos that I remember from the days before shopping, I know that I will never have any idea of exactly how anyone looks.

PS: I love the GIMP.

Parent post should be modded up. There is something to be said for using a rigorous methodology when comparing the value of different employees, and that will necessarily reduce to numbers at some point.

That being said, TFA is either seriously oversimplifying what its author learned, or the companies it describes are doing it wrong.

TFA is basically describing ways of developing and presenting sociograms. The shape of any sociogram is as dependent on the choice of qualitative tools used to develop it as it is on the reality that it claims to represent. To be brief, any sociogram, no matter how numeric its appearance, is qualitative and not quantitative and has a huge amount of observer bias built into it. It is a tricksy sideshow mirror that reflects an unstated bias and is inherently untrustworthy.

I've been trying to find a way to say more without ending up as tl;dr and I can't do it adequately. So here are some teasers:

The first steps to effective HR management involve developing good job descriptions of the existing roles. Performance measures can be used to determine how well HR has done this work: do those who actually work in or with each role agree with HR's description? The next steps involve reshaping the company as a whole by changing all of those job descriptions to support the new workflows. Some of this can be quantified: your employees represent a pool of very detailed knowledge about how the jobs could be done.

Only after the above is done can you start looking at employee performance, both current and predicted in the new roles. Very little of this is truly quantifiable: about the best you can do is to say "On a scale of 1 to 5, how legible is Mr. Anderson's handwriting?" And even then, recognize that some of the most critical information may be very hard to come by.

An example of the last: Do you know that you have an entry level programmer that everyone goes to as a technical resource because he has twenty-plus years of extensive experience leading development teams, but now he's satisfied with a low pressure day job to pay the bills while he writes his first novel in the evenings? His LOC stats are miserable, because he spends a lot of time with drop-in visitors who are wondering how he would approach this bug, or refactor that monster object, or shed some light on what the hell the guys who wrote this legacy code 15 years ago were thinking about when they used that schubert approach on what is clearly a brahms problem? You probably don't want to lose this guy: he is improving the efficiency of everyone around him. But he is not going to show up favorably on any of your metrics. And in a dirty professional field like software development, he and his kind are legion.

It seems like GNU was not self-defeating, and that the gnu is no longer an obscure animal. Other than that...

Say, what was your point again?

BTW, the meaning of "caustic" to most people doesn't have much importance since most people won't be the direct customers of Caustic Graphics. The name does have a lot of meaning to the company's potential market: caustics are generally the most expensive and often critical part of photorealistic rendering. A company that chooses that word as part of its name has got to be pretty ballsy.

Um,. well, it doesn't. Should have been the other form, "March Fourteenth".

If there is justice on slashdot my karma should now be reduced from "Excellent" to merely "Very, very good".

Need more coffee....

I, for one, welcome my legislatures' recognition of the irrational in government.

In formal English, the date has always been written out as "...on Saturday the fourteenth of March, two thousand nine, at three o'clock in the afternoon" (as in an invitation). Note that the year is a parenthetical phrase set off by commas. In less formal writing with the slash abbreviation this becomes "...on Sat 3/14, 2009, at 3:00 pm" which is a form that has been in use in the USA before there was a USA. So the further contraction to "3/14/09" simply continued the process.

Now it is becoming common to use the dot abbreviation with European dates, so "3/14/09" and "14.3.09" are understood to be the same. This was becoming somewhat popular in USA communications in the first years of the Internet, but the ISO standard is now gaining favor: "2009-03-14".

A personal favorite in journals and such where I might want to sort entries by date and time, and don't want to fuss with concatenations is "20090314.1500". This fully numeric representation is compact, very sortable, and easy to move between plaintext, spreadsheets, databases.

Next, I would like to see the legislatures recognize the imaginary component in government...

I misread the statement as well, taking it at face value. So I was about to blast the editors for not catching such a blatant transposition of digits. 74% would be about right: 71% open ocean, and roughly 3% in permament lakes and such (I think the biggest of these in surface area is the Amazon River basin, which I have heard described as a slightly tilted, very shallow fresh water sea.)

Editors should be blasted for not catching and clarifying the ambiguity. This is NOT a matter of bad grammar or any mere syntax problem. This is matter of bad semantics.

Does slashdot need a cadre of semantic zealots to go along with all the grammar nazis? Could those two groups coexist?

Above post has serious blinders on. Other possibilities:

• he cooperated with the FBI investigation
• he was informed of the FBI investigation before the arrests
• he initiated the FBI investigation

Any of these is quite likely, and the last is, exactly the kind of action I would want to see a CEO take if in the course of his work he became aware that something suspicious was happening in his business. What would be the alternative? "I'm firing you two because I'm pretty sure that you're guilty of crimes in my company's cubicles?" That would be tacky. That would be SO last year.

What say we wait and see what the story is before taking such Olympian long jumps to conclusions that might not actually be a landing place.