22 Jul 2005
HP Fires Father of OOP

Who needs a research department, anyway? They don't contribute to next quarter's bottom line, except as an expense!

It really pains me to see what's become of what was once the crown jewel of American technical prowess: HP has been reduced to a shill for foreign hardware products and will now lack even the baseline for any software innovation.

I don't know where William Hewlett and David Packard are buried, but beware of small earthquakes in the area as they roll in their graves over the shambles that has been made of their baby.

Hewlett-Packard has disbanded its Advanced Software Research team and sent its leader, renowned programmer Alan Kay, packing. From today's Good Morning Silicon Valley: 'HP is bidding adieu to legendary Silicon Valley technologist Alan Kay. A founder of Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center, Kay -- who once said, "The best way to predict the future is to invent it" -- was instrumental in the development of the windowing GUI and modern object-oriented programming. He envisioned a laptop computer long before the first ones rolled out and his Smalltalk programming language was a predecessor to Sun Microsystems' Java. Hard to believe HP's cutting him loose.'

(link) [Slashdot]

00:00 /Technology | 0 comments | permanent link

British Police Demand Access To Encryption Keys

Bush is right - the War on Terror is being won. But he's wrong in his assertion that we're winning it: free societies are crumbling around the edges under the bombing and terror campaigns of al Qaeda, as this example from the UK shows.

Meanwhile, here in the land of the free, we're doing our part to insure that all citizens are safe from "terrorists", by making certain that no citizen is safe from his government.

And the really sad thing is that I'm not sure there is a good solution. I had always imagined that if our freedoms were doomed to dissipation, it would be in the "Big Bang" of a global thermonuclear war. Now it seems we're frittering them away, one piece at a time, to defend against a bunch of thugs with dynamite.

What a bitter trade-off.

In the wake of recent terrorist attacks, police here in the UK have asked for sweeping new powers they claim will help them counter the threat. Among these is making it a criminal offense for people to refuse disclosing their encryption keys when the police want to access someone's files.

(link) [Slashdot]

00:00 /Politics | 0 comments | permanent link

Wife influences husband's marijuana use during first year of marriage

Another Study in Stupidity ... note that the "researchers" saw the obvious, but only noted it in passing:

"Substance use tends to decline as individuals progress through their 20s," Leonard added. "This may be a part of the maturing process, but it also reflects periods of transition in life, such as marriage with its increased responsibilities."

They even correlated this bit of obviousness:

The researchers said their findings may not generalize to other young adults who use drugs and are not married.

And yet they still maintain that the results of this survey are valid! How do you spell agenda?

While it's the husband among newlywed couples who has more influence on whether the couple engages in heavy drinking, it's the wife who appears to be in the driver's seat when it comes to determining her husband's marijuana use, according to researchers at the University at Buffalo's Research Institute on Addictions (RIA).

(link) [EurekAlert! - Breaking News]

00:00 /Humor | 0 comments | permanent link