As I said in an earlier post, HP needs their PC's to get leverage to sell their two strongest product lines, laser printers and inkjet cartridges. I have no use for inkjet cartridges, but every HP laser printer I've owned, from high end to low end, has been an absolutely solid piece of machinery.

What could possibly go right with this idea?

Freudian slip?

HP's best products are its laser printers. Its most profitable products are probably its inkjet cartridges. If HP spins off its PC business it's going to have a harder time selling its laser printers and inkjet cartridge cartridges (aka printers).

Instead of $15/hour techs working for AOL doing regular maintenance they've switched to outside contractors billing at $100-200/hr when the shit hits the fan. I don't think this idea is going to work very well.

If your software processes credit cards, that type of environment is banned by Visa. Among other restrictions, you have to run supported versions of all software. You have to have a release process, including code reviews. You have to have a development process. It doesn't have to be strictly Agile, but the process has to be documented and followed. I've worked in other sectors at other companies where things are much more chaotic.

As a programmer, you should take work which makes you a better programmer, while making enough money to be reasonably happy. You know if you're getting better as a programmer or simply treading water until the next job comes along. If you take work for the money, you're more likely to fall into the latter trap. The amount money you make, whether the company will survive longer than a few years into the future, and the exact processes at work at the company don't have that much to do with improving your skills as a programmer. What does improve your skills as a programmer involve things like how much design are you doing, do you get to see your work through to completion, do you get to be exposed to a variety of technologies and environments (not necessarily the latest fads), and do you get to work with other highly skilled technical people (especially other programmers).

As usual, Mr. Stallman is right. Pay attention to the message, not the delivery.

There is plenty of innovation, even in the United States, and despite the patent system.

It is difficult to see innovation because our lifestyles quickly adapt to it. Let me give you three examples of major innovations during the past 20 years or so:

1) You can now obtain just about anything with very little effort. Wanted a rare book, a used import auto part, some kind of odd screw, or an antique coin, in 1980, and you'd have to spend lots of money and days, weeks, or years tracking it down. You might fail. Nowadays, if something is out there that you want, it's probably being offered on the Internet. Let's say that you want a couch for nothing. How would you do that in 1980? Today you can post a message on craigslist and someone reading it might respond by telling you to come and pick up. Maybe he's willing to get rid of it for 50 bucks.
2) For pennies a day you can communicate with a billion people, and you can broadcast your wants and and desires to a like-minded group. Doesn't matter where they live. Around 1985 zone calls (> 25 miles away) cost $8.00 an hour. Long distance to different area codes in the United States was a bit cheaper at around $5.00 an hour. That's communicating with one person at a time, or to a bulletin board system, which had very limited communities of a few hundred people or maybe a few thousand.
3) Myspace 2-3 years ago and Facebook and Twitter today. Not even in 2005 could you communicate with a pool of hundreds of millions of people with such ease.

Point is, we have tons of innovation and it is happening at a rapid pace. We're taking it up so quickly we don't even notice.

Maybe he used a piece of proprietary backup software that he had no source code for to do the backup, but it's hard to believe that he wasn't stealing the data.

There is debate about whether HFT provides more liquidity. I am of the opinion that it does. HFT is used to make quotes, an order pair with a bid and an ask price [and quantities]. When there is a market in something, you can buy it or sell it. Without a market the thing you want to buy or sell is illiquid, and a trade cannot take place. Correctly-written HFT algorithms can enter orders of magnitudes more quotes than a manual or semi-manual process and importantly adjust those quotes when they become out of line, replacing them with new quotes. HFT also reduces the gap between bid and ask prices because an asking price that's too cheap or a selling price that's too low is more quickly eliminated (executed as a trade).

HFT then gives you a great idea of the price of something and the ability to execute a trade at that price or close to it. It's like going to the grocery store and being able to buy a dozen apples for between $2.00 and $2.01. In the past, roughly speaking, you might not be able to buy those apples at all or the price range would have been between $1.90 and $2.10. Maybe a better analogy would be that tangelo would not have been available to you in the past for a reasonable price because nobody wants to sell it at that reasonable price for fear of losing money.

A great example of computers providing liquidity is craigslist. Want to get rid of that couch? For a nill transaction cost you can enter a sell order of $50.00 + pick up with a quantity of one and in this liquid market you will have a high probability of a successful execution. The Internet has made your old couch into a now more liquid asset. HFT is like that, except with orders of magnitude higher speeds.

Living in the eighth largest state, Michigan, my vote means a hell of a lot less than someone's vote in West Virginia. That is because the upper house of the US legislature, the Senate, has two representatives per state, regardless of population. One result of this imbalance is that my state subsidizes other states. In other words, the taxpayers here pay more to Washington in taxes than they receive: The roads here in Michigan are so bad in part because West Virginia's Senator Byrd was on the transportation subcommittee and so West Virginia received more money than it should have received for roads at the expense of Michigan drivers.

So it's like voters in West Virginia have voting shares and Michigan voters have nonvoting shares in the stock known as US citizenship.

Call me crazy but I prefer reading in silence. I don't want a television experience with a book. If I did I'd watch television.

Forget about "geeks," no programmer wants to use a language that messy. All of the popular programming languages read more or less like English, and that is because we have already learned to read English (or perhaps a similar Western language).

Why do you think that programming is a lot like writing, and that good code reads like a good novel? Good spellers tend to be good programmers. We're using the same part of the brain.

Even mathematical expressions read like English. Why? Because of our language bias.

It's like Facebook, except with more intrusive advertising and several of the annoyances that killed Myspace. Most importantly, though, the site is run by the freedom-destroying Chinese government. Why in the hell would you want to share anything at all with China, unless forced to by the barrel of a gun?

There is nothing wrong with the pursuit of knowledge for knowledge's sake. You have to think about it like this. Your research could lead to something amazing 100 years from now, long after you are dead. A small fragment of what you've discovered may inspire some other research that changes society. Perhaps your negative results will cause someone to pursue another alley with success.

Cooperation sounds good but you shouldn't feel pressure to produce an immediate piece of technology. That sounds like bad science to me.