This is because of the eternal legal arms race. We pay lawyers good money to find loopholes in contracts. We then pay lawyers good money to write contracts without loopholes. Lather, rinse, repeat.
To be fair, I'm pretty sure that most "person-in-the-street" interviews are edited so as to highlight the worst of the bozos because that makes for good television. When I was a kid I'd watch these and go "Ooh! Ooh! Pick Me! PickMeeeeee!!! I know the answer". Later I realized this would be the best way NOT to make the final cut that aired...
I have taken to calling this "Popular Science Fatigue". It's where you read about some wonderful breakthrough technology in Popular Science or some other mass-market source and then it disappears never to be seen again.
I don't know what it's like in NYC, but I know that in Boston one of the big advantages of Uber/Lyft is the ability to pay by credit card AT ALL. Whenever one attemps to pay by credit card in Boston the driver will claim this his machine is "broken", and only if you don't have any cash and there's no other option will it magically "repair" itself.
When the simulation theory began making the rounds, I realized that this could explain part of the uncertainty principle where a particle does not achieve a definite state until it is observed. How would a particle know that it's being observed, after all? If we're living in a simulation, though, the uncertainty principle becomes a rendering optimization: why compute the final state of a particle that nobody is observing or interacting with? In other words, the particle doesn't know if it's being observed, but the simulation does.
Well, consider f'rinstance the uncertainty principle. Certain phenomena (e.g. the state of a particle) do not fully manifest until someone/something is observing it. That strongly resembles a rendering optimization to me...
I thought that the original deal to use the RD-180 also came with blueprints and specs so that we could build the same engine on our own. Why aren't we pursuing this?
I abandoned Orkut well before the Brazilian invasion due to hideously slow performance. Back then it was because I thought that Google had simply badly under-provisioned a "20%" project. Then I remembered another early social network, Friendster, that also collapsed due to hideously slow performance. Basically, the first social networks failed to take into account the issue of scaling to massive numbers of users... and you *need* massive numbers of users to make the site interesting and to accommodate everyone's six-degrees-of-friends. Facebook figured that out with its fuzzy updates and randomized newsfeeds that hide the fact that an individual's view of the database is almost never consistent.
Actually, my office is right across the street from Uber's Boston HQ. A couple weeks ago I suddenly heard a mad chorus of car horns. Looked out the window and it turns out the Boston cabbies were staging a brief rolling protest by driving by and honking, handing out leaflets, etc. There was police and a news truck.
I don't know what the situation is in Europe, but in many cities in the US the taxi industry is a victim of its own protectionism. Boston, for instance, has issued a fixed number of taxi medallions. If I wanted to start a cab company, I couldn't simply go down to city hall and get a license; they've all been issued. I'd have to persuade an existing player to part with theirs... which they won't do unless I shell out some SERIOUS cash. As in, mid-to-high six figures. The price of the car itself is down in the noise by comparison.
The secondary market in medallions has turned them into major assets. Thus the city can't simply issue more medallions; that would dilute the value of the ones already out there.
In the end, a policy that Seemed Like A Good Idea At The Time has produced a result where there's a fixed supply and growing demand. Until now policymakers just threw up their hands and ignored the issue because there didn't seem to be a good way out of this mess. The introduction of Uber and Lyft suddenly means the issue can't be ignored anymore.
Getty Images makes no bones about asking a lot of money for their images and making sure they get paid. I own a business that among other things produces fine art prints. Some time back a customer asked about a print of a particular Old Master painting that wasn't listed in any publisher's catalog. Tracking down a high-resolution image that I could print myself led me to Getty Images. The minimum royalty for this kind of use was in the $300 range. The rep came right out and said that their royalty structure would not be economical for one-off print like I was seeking.
This, BTW, is for an image that is theoretically in the public domain.
This reminds me of when they were developing the original pilot for the original "Star Trek" series. They wanted to know how the green-skinned Orion slave-girl would look when filmed. They covered her in green makeup and shot some test footage. It came back from the lab with normal pink European flesh tones. So they tried darker makeup. Still pink. They tried the darkest, densest makeup they could find. Still pink. It turned out that the lab was oh-so-helpfully "correcting" the color for them. I think this speaks volumes as to the article's premise...
FiOS deployment is very patchy in the Boston area. I live in a suburb of Boston and I own a retail shop there. My home and shop are about four blocks apart. I had FiOS in both locations since 2008.
Recently I moved my shop to a new location a block and a half away. It is actually between my home and my previous location. No FiOS service, though; I had to settle for DSL.
What's funny is that this sort of "alignment" has been taking place for *years* in dead-tree textbooks.
An example: Back in the 80s I was taking a class in differential equations and was having some trouble. So I went down to the library to see if different textbooks might have different approaches that could help me out. I pulled down four textbooks (different authors) and sat down to read. Turns out EVERY SINGLE ONE of them presented exactly the same concepts in exactly the same order with pretty much the same descriptions. Didn't help me one bit, but it shows how a math professor can make a few extra bucks for very little effort... #include
This article sounds like an arrogant person with a serious case of sour grapes: "Yeah I bombed that test, but look at me! I'm seriously successful and I don't need to use any of the stuff that's on that test anyway! Stupid test!"
I remember when I was a schoolkid other kids would whine things like "Why do I need to learn fractions? I'm never going to use them!"
I understand that "anecdote" is not the singular form of "Data", but here's my story: I've been in the UNIX/Linux internals field for over 25 years. About a year ago, we were scrambling to get a feature into a partner's release, and we were running into one problem after another. The deadline was looming, and the problems were multiplying.
A young-un would probably burn the midnight oil, slave away nights and weekends and death-march themselves right off the deadline cliff (I remember once working with another young programmer who honestly thought he could keep coding right up until the ship date)
I have quite a number of coding and integration marathons under my belt... sometimes we got lucky and things worked, other times we missed the boat, still other times things blew up spectacularly in our faces.
I, took a step back and sized up our situation. I then went to my boss and said, "We need to prepare for the contingency that this feature does NOT make it into the next release"
It's not clear from the original article... is this an internal helpdesk or a customer-facing helpdesk? If you're in a customer-facing position I agree that a look that reinforces your "brand" is good business. If your "customers" are all internal, though, then I have to wonder about management's motivations. Either they're trying to send a subtle message about your current mode of dress, or else they're scheming to get more attention (and resources) from upper management ("We want to make sure they KNOW who helped them out come budget time!")
A more-flexible and less-costly alternative to shirts, though, might be special "help-desk" *badges* that you wear when you're on the clock. These serve the same branding function, but you only have to buy one per employee (if they expect you to wear the shirts four days a week, they damned well better issue at least four shirts per employee!)
Hmmm... I'd say that Sunbelt doesn't have a thing to worry about. RetroCoder obviously doesn't have a lawyer worth a damn, if indeed they have one at all. No lawyer in their right mind would allow their client to keep digging themselves into a hole like this.
Then again, maybe that says something about their legal team... maybe the SCO lawyers are moonlighting?
A few years back, I read an early "leaked" script for the movie "Star Trek: Generations" that had been circulated on the Net. Early on in the movie, before Kirk appears on the Enterprise-B, the script describe a scene of Kirk engaging in "orbital sky-diving", with Scotty and Chekov waiting for him at the landing zone. Since the rest of the script was dead-on compared to the movie, this scene *must* have been part of the original concept. Whether it was actually filmed is another story...
No matter how full your snail-mail box is, it only takes a couple seconds to empty it and sort through it.
Something else to consider is the following: In most countries, the postal system is a monopoly, and this monopoly has very clear rules for how mail should be labelled and paid for. As a result, the "sorting criteria" for snail mail can be made very straightforward.
To invoke a USAn example: when sorting my snail-mail box, anything bearing full first-class postage gets my immediate, undivided attention -- it is most likely a personal, one-to-one communication that is highly relevant and of interest to me (the electronic analogue would be work-related email from a colleague).
Next down the list would be matter bearing "presorted first-class" postage. It was likely sent out in a large batch but still not at "carpet-bombing" rates; it is likely to be of significant interest to a class of people that includes me. An electronic example of this would be a newsletter from a company that I regularly do business with.
On the bottom of the heap is mail bearing bulk-rate postage. This is the physical equivalent of spam, and I can almost certainly dispose of it unread without adverse consequences. If it's a slow mail day, I might give some of it a glance; otherwise, into the recycle bin it goes.
What's important here are two things: first, the postal monopoly imposes strict, standardized labeling requirements on the mail to indicate how it was paid for. Second, the rates themselves are set so that there is a strong economic incentive to use bulk-rate mail despite the fact that it basically has to bear a great big "SPAM" label.
By contrast, the nature of email is such that there is no economic incentive to label a mass-market spam as such. Thus, it costs about the same to send a personal email to one's best friend as it does to send a piece of spam. Worse, the nature of "labeling" email allows for deceptive labeling that cannot be filtered. A few years back, it was all the rage among junk snail-mailers to send their pitches in envelopes that were made to look as much as possible like the envelopes that government checks were mailed in. Fortunately for the public, the tell-tale bulk-rate indicia still had to be there.
History does have a sickening way of repeating itself...
I was working for Digital (remember them?) when they were bought by Compaq. I remember all the same justifications being touted back then -- "The combined company will be the #2 computer maker after IBM" and all that.
After a while, the truth of the matter became abundantly clear: the "synergy" was that Digital was hurting bigtime, while Compaq's CEO was facing serious questions as to his effectiveness. Hey presto! Let's merge the two companies! Doing so bought time for those parts of Digital that survived, and also bought time for Eckerd Pfeiffer. Any problems that the combined company faced could be attributed to the turmoil of the merger.
After about three years, though, the merger stopped being a viable excuse. Compaq faced increasing problems with profitablility and market share... kind of like Digital a few years earlier. Along comes H-P, whose CEO is facing serious questions as to her effectiveness... sound familiar?
I bailed out of Compaq shortly after the merger was announced. For my part, having gone through one round of merger turmoil, I was not eager to go through another (though said turmoil would have been a great excuse to slack off and do jack for a couple more years).
It's unfortnate, but it turns out that mediocrity is often the business optimization point for a given product or service. Investment in quality beyond this yields diminshing returns. Microsoft, among others, discovered this a long time ago.
If you really want to emphasize *quality* in your products, you're going to have to do a realignment of your business strategy. Right now you probably crank out websites alongside thousands of also-rans, all of whom produce sites of about the same mediocre level of quality. If you could somehow turn quality into your *unique value proposition* and sell THAT to your customers, you might have a story you can take to the bank. It will be a bit of a sell-job, though. The basic message you're selling is that "Yes, it costs more, but it won't go down when you need it most, it won't lose orders, it won't have security holes, etc. etc."
I was on the team that developed Freeport Express. That was a few years ago, when Sun was making the transition from SunOS to Solaris. Currently Freeport Express only works on SunOS executables, and there are currently no plans to re-target it for Solaris. In other words, it is of limited utility today.
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This is because of the eternal legal arms race. We pay lawyers good money to find loopholes in contracts. We then pay lawyers good money to write contracts without loopholes. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Despite this shift in opinion, employers are still going to require a four-year college degree in order to get a job as an entry-level file clerk...
To be fair, I'm pretty sure that most "person-in-the-street" interviews are edited so as to highlight the worst of the bozos because that makes for good television. When I was a kid I'd watch these and go "Ooh! Ooh! Pick Me! PickMeeeeee!!! I know the answer". Later I realized this would be the best way NOT to make the final cut that aired...
I have taken to calling this "Popular Science Fatigue". It's where you read about some wonderful breakthrough technology in Popular Science or some other mass-market source and then it disappears never to be seen again.
I don't know what it's like in NYC, but I know that in Boston one of the big advantages of Uber/Lyft is the ability to pay by credit card AT ALL. Whenever one attemps to pay by credit card in Boston the driver will claim this his machine is "broken", and only if you don't have any cash and there's no other option will it magically "repair" itself.
When the simulation theory began making the rounds, I realized that this could explain part of the uncertainty principle where a particle does not achieve a definite state until it is observed. How would a particle know that it's being observed, after all? If we're living in a simulation, though, the uncertainty principle becomes a rendering optimization: why compute the final state of a particle that nobody is observing or interacting with? In other words, the particle doesn't know if it's being observed, but the simulation does.
Well, consider f'rinstance the uncertainty principle. Certain phenomena (e.g. the state of a particle) do not fully manifest until someone/something is observing it. That strongly resembles a rendering optimization to me...
I thought that the original deal to use the RD-180 also came with blueprints and specs so that we could build the same engine on our own. Why aren't we pursuing this?
I want to say "First", but I also want to say that I knew Barry back when he started this whole thing. Congrats on your staying power!
I abandoned Orkut well before the Brazilian invasion due to hideously slow performance. Back then it was because I thought that Google had simply badly under-provisioned a "20%" project. Then I remembered another early social network, Friendster, that also collapsed due to hideously slow performance. Basically, the first social networks failed to take into account the issue of scaling to massive numbers of users... and you *need* massive numbers of users to make the site interesting and to accommodate everyone's six-degrees-of-friends. Facebook figured that out with its fuzzy updates and randomized newsfeeds that hide the fact that an individual's view of the database is almost never consistent.
Actually, my office is right across the street from Uber's Boston HQ. A couple weeks ago I suddenly heard a mad chorus of car horns. Looked out the window and it turns out the Boston cabbies were staging a brief rolling protest by driving by and honking, handing out leaflets, etc. There was police and a news truck.
I don't know what the situation is in Europe, but in many cities in the US the taxi industry is a victim of its own protectionism. Boston, for instance, has issued a fixed number of taxi medallions. If I wanted to start a cab company, I couldn't simply go down to city hall and get a license; they've all been issued. I'd have to persuade an existing player to part with theirs... which they won't do unless I shell out some SERIOUS cash. As in, mid-to-high six figures. The price of the car itself is down in the noise by comparison.
The secondary market in medallions has turned them into major assets. Thus the city can't simply issue more medallions; that would dilute the value of the ones already out there.
In the end, a policy that Seemed Like A Good Idea At The Time has produced a result where there's a fixed supply and growing demand. Until now policymakers just threw up their hands and ignored the issue because there didn't seem to be a good way out of this mess. The introduction of Uber and Lyft suddenly means the issue can't be ignored anymore.
Getty Images makes no bones about asking a lot of money for their images and making sure they get paid. I own a business that among other things produces fine art prints. Some time back a customer asked about a print of a particular Old Master painting that wasn't listed in any publisher's catalog. Tracking down a high-resolution image that I could print myself led me to Getty Images. The minimum royalty for this kind of use was in the $300 range. The rep came right out and said that their royalty structure would not be economical for one-off print like I was seeking.
This, BTW, is for an image that is theoretically in the public domain.
This reminds me of when they were developing the original pilot for the original "Star Trek" series. They wanted to know how the green-skinned Orion slave-girl would look when filmed. They covered her in green makeup and shot some test footage. It came back from the lab with normal pink European flesh tones. So they tried darker makeup. Still pink. They tried the darkest, densest makeup they could find. Still pink. It turned out that the lab was oh-so-helpfully "correcting" the color for them. I think this speaks volumes as to the article's premise...
FiOS deployment is very patchy in the Boston area. I live in a suburb of Boston and I own a retail shop there. My home and shop are about four blocks apart. I had FiOS in both locations since 2008.
Recently I moved my shop to a new location a block and a half away. It is actually between my home and my previous location. No FiOS service, though; I had to settle for DSL.
What's funny is that this sort of "alignment" has been taking place for *years* in dead-tree textbooks.
An example: Back in the 80s I was taking a class in differential equations and was having some trouble. So I went down to the library to see if different textbooks might have different approaches that could help me out. I pulled down four textbooks (different authors) and sat down to read. Turns out EVERY SINGLE ONE of them presented exactly the same concepts in exactly the same order with pretty much the same descriptions. Didn't help me one bit, but it shows how a math professor can make a few extra bucks for very little effort... #include
This article sounds like an arrogant person with a serious case of sour grapes: "Yeah I bombed that test, but look at me! I'm seriously successful and I don't need to use any of the stuff that's on that test anyway! Stupid test!"
I remember when I was a schoolkid other kids would whine things like "Why do I need to learn fractions? I'm never going to use them!"
I understand that "anecdote" is not the singular form of "Data", but here's my story: I've been in the UNIX/Linux internals field for over 25 years. About a year ago, we were scrambling to get a feature into a partner's release, and we were running into one problem after another. The deadline was looming, and the problems were multiplying.
A young-un would probably burn the midnight oil, slave away nights and weekends and death-march themselves right off the deadline cliff (I remember once working with another young programmer who honestly thought he could keep coding right up until the ship date)
I have quite a number of coding and integration marathons under my belt... sometimes we got lucky and things worked, other times we missed the boat, still other times things blew up spectacularly in our faces.
I, took a step back and sized up our situation. I then went to my boss and said, "We need to prepare for the contingency that this feature does NOT make it into the next release"
This, my friends, is the voice of experience.
It's not clear from the original article... is this an internal helpdesk or a customer-facing helpdesk? If you're in a customer-facing position I agree that a look that reinforces your "brand" is good business. If your "customers" are all internal, though, then I have to wonder about management's motivations. Either they're trying to send a subtle message about your current mode of dress, or else they're scheming to get more attention (and resources) from upper management ("We want to make sure they KNOW who helped them out come budget time!")
A more-flexible and less-costly alternative to shirts, though, might be special "help-desk" *badges* that you wear when you're on the clock. These serve the same branding function, but you only have to buy one per employee (if they expect you to wear the shirts four days a week, they damned well better issue at least four shirts per employee!)
You mean, "Ah, vouz direz-je maman"?
Hmmm... I'd say that Sunbelt doesn't have a thing to worry about. RetroCoder obviously doesn't have a lawyer worth a damn, if indeed they have one at all. No lawyer in their right mind would allow their client to keep digging themselves into a hole like this.
Then again, maybe that says something about their legal team... maybe the SCO lawyers are moonlighting?
A few years back, I read an early "leaked" script for the movie "Star Trek: Generations" that had been circulated on the Net. Early on in the movie, before Kirk appears on the Enterprise-B, the script describe a scene of Kirk engaging in "orbital sky-diving", with Scotty and Chekov waiting for him at the landing zone. Since the rest of the script was dead-on compared to the movie, this scene *must* have been part of the original concept. Whether it was actually filmed is another story...
To invoke a USAn example: when sorting my snail-mail box, anything bearing full first-class postage gets my immediate, undivided attention -- it is most likely a personal, one-to-one communication that is highly relevant and of interest to me (the electronic analogue would be work-related email from a colleague).
Next down the list would be matter bearing "presorted first-class" postage. It was likely sent out in a large batch but still not at "carpet-bombing" rates; it is likely to be of significant interest to a class of people that includes me. An electronic example of this would be a newsletter from a company that I regularly do business with.
On the bottom of the heap is mail bearing bulk-rate postage. This is the physical equivalent of spam, and I can almost certainly dispose of it unread without adverse consequences. If it's a slow mail day, I might give some of it a glance; otherwise, into the recycle bin it goes.
What's important here are two things: first, the postal monopoly imposes strict, standardized labeling requirements on the mail to indicate how it was paid for. Second, the rates themselves are set so that there is a strong economic incentive to use bulk-rate mail despite the fact that it basically has to bear a great big "SPAM" label.
By contrast, the nature of email is such that there is no economic incentive to label a mass-market spam as such. Thus, it costs about the same to send a personal email to one's best friend as it does to send a piece of spam. Worse, the nature of "labeling" email allows for deceptive labeling that cannot be filtered. A few years back, it was all the rage among junk snail-mailers to send their pitches in envelopes that were made to look as much as possible like the envelopes that government checks were mailed in. Fortunately for the public, the tell-tale bulk-rate indicia still had to be there.
History does have a sickening way of repeating itself...
I was working for Digital (remember them?) when they were bought by Compaq. I remember all the same justifications being touted back then -- "The combined company will be the #2 computer maker after IBM" and all that.
After a while, the truth of the matter became abundantly clear: the "synergy" was that Digital was hurting bigtime, while Compaq's CEO was facing serious questions as to his effectiveness. Hey presto! Let's merge the two companies! Doing so bought time for those parts of Digital that survived, and also bought time for Eckerd Pfeiffer. Any problems that the combined company faced could be attributed to the turmoil of the merger.
After about three years, though, the merger stopped being a viable excuse. Compaq faced increasing problems with profitablility and market share... kind of like Digital a few years earlier. Along comes H-P, whose CEO is facing serious questions as to her effectiveness... sound familiar?
I bailed out of Compaq shortly after the merger was announced. For my part, having gone through one round of merger turmoil, I was not eager to go through another (though said turmoil would have been a great excuse to slack off and do jack for a couple more years).
It's unfortnate, but it turns out that mediocrity is often the business optimization point for a given product or service. Investment in quality beyond this yields diminshing returns. Microsoft, among others, discovered this a long time ago.
If you really want to emphasize *quality* in your products, you're going to have to do a realignment of your business strategy. Right now you probably crank out websites alongside thousands of also-rans, all of whom produce sites of about the same mediocre level of quality. If you could somehow turn quality into your *unique value proposition* and sell THAT to your customers, you might have a story you can take to the bank. It will be a bit of a sell-job, though. The basic message you're selling is that "Yes, it costs more, but it won't go down when you need it most, it won't lose orders, it won't have security holes, etc. etc."
I was on the team that developed Freeport Express. That was a few years ago, when Sun was making the transition from SunOS to Solaris. Currently Freeport Express only works on SunOS executables, and there are currently no plans to re-target it for Solaris. In other words, it is of limited utility today.