MTS, my former employer, has just shut down the division I was laid off from just 8 months ago. The press release says it all. Not!
The consolidation will result in significant earnings improvement going forward primarily due to facility and overhead cost reductions.
That overhead includes laying off 55 honest, dedicated, hardworking people. Well.... three of them I would not describe as honest, dedicated or hardworking. So 52 honest, dedicated, hardworking people, some with 10 or more years with the company, unceremoniously get the boot.
Today, after getting laid off from there 8 months ago, I am much better off. I have a much better job that pays a lot more and the company I work for is actually growing and fun to work for. I wish all my former co-workers the best of luck.
It appears that Microsoft has declared war on the GPL, going so far as to specifically exclude GPL'd code from royalty free licenses. Hmmm, I never thought of doing this before. Maybe when I release my news aggregator I could make it freely available to everyone, except to forbid its use by employees of Microsoft?
How to respond to such a loss is different for everyone, in this case Robert Cringely wants to combat SIDS:
So here is what I propose. It is my plan to devote much of my resources and a good portion of the rest of my life to combating SIDS. I can't cure it, but I think I can help babies to evade it. The trick is to first develop a very cheap, very accurate, recording medical sensor.I imagine a $10 device that can be strapped or stuck or otherwise attached to, 100,000 little babies, measuring and recording respiration, heartbeat, body temperature, and anything else we can think of. At least 50 of those babies will die of SIDS, but through the use of these monitors, we'll gather more SIDS data than has ever been gathered before. And rather than follow the traditional scientific method of first stating a hypothesis that we prove or disprove, I want the data to speak for itself. I want to get the best rocket scientists on Wall Street to apply their neural nets and other tools to divining from all this data a real leading indicator for SIDS.
It can be done, and once it is done, we can reprogram those same monitors into devices that actually CAN predict SIDS and help to prevent it, either through detecting babies most at risk or by literally predicting the onset of SIDS in time to evade it.
He also has the right attitude about the doctors:
Still, as a grieving nerd, I feel the need to do something. And I am not at all convinced that epidemiologists are to be trusted in this. After all, they are medical statisticians and mainly play the odds. I want to defy the odds. If current monitors won't work, I want to make ones that do.
Will he succeed? I dearly hope so.
Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed people can change the world: indeed it's the only thing that ever has!Margaret Meade
Robert Cringely's 74 day old son died of SIDS.
SIDS has alwys scared the hell out of me. I have three sons ages 2, 6 and 8. I check on them every hour after they go to bed, watching their breathing, right up until I go to bed. I usually wake at least once in the middle of the night, and I check them again.
We do all the things the doctors advise: sleeping them on their backs or sides, only one thin blanket, no toys, no pillows, etc. I also read one theory that exhaled CO2 pools in the crib and that SIDS children may lack a natural response to the lack of oxygen which would cause them to wake and move and thus disturb the air, so all of our kids have ceiling fans in their rooms which run while they sleep.
So far, so good. When will I stop checking on them? When I have to drive to their dorm room at college...