And here in New Orleans we'd love to have some better levees which could've saved us from billions of dollars worth of flood damage. Unfortunately for both of us, the powers that be aren't particularly interested in sacrificing now for the sake of later.
True enough, but it's a shame that the ones who are going to lose out the most in all this are children, who've had nothing to do with the decision and don't really know any better.
I for one can't wait for google to replace their homepage search bar with a friendly, brightly colored, animated search assistant avatar. It'll be the next revolution in user interfaces!
It's not like they have any other choice. Having a car that runs on biofuels isn't particularly useful to a consumer unless someone has also built the infrastructure to supply biofuels conveniently. If Mercedes were to move exclusively to biofuels but noone created a decent network of biofuel fill-up stations, then no one would buy their cars and the company would die.
If Mercedes waits until every neighborhood has a biofuel station before they make the switch, then they'll either end up with a "chicken-egg" problem, where noone will build out the infrastructure without having vehicles available to use it and vice-versa; or some other car company will make the first leap and then Mercedes will fall behind the curve technology-wise.
The change is going to have to be gradual, there's no way to do it overnight, or even over a few years. It's going to take decades.
I don't think that's a particularly valid argument, exchanging a few packets to download a homepage or a login page isn't really the same as filling out a form with false information and clicking a box that says "I agree to the TOS."
A mildly useful analogy might be holding a cup up to a stranger and saying "hey give me a dollar." That's not illegal (assuming you're standing somewhere where it's allowed), and if the guy gives you a dollar he can't decide that he got ripped off and have you arrested. But if you said to the stranger "hey I'm collecting money for a charity that helps orphans with cancer, would you like to donate a dollar?", and you're not actually collecting the money for said orphans, then that would be fraud.
Basically, the law isn't regulating the movement of ones and zeros across wires, it's regulating the intent of the person who's driving those bits.
It seems far more likely that if they wanted to make a change in that sort of direction, they'd go more along the lines of what Apple did and use something like BSD instead of linux. They'd get most of the same benefits in terms of the underlying structure, but without being tied to the GPL.
It just doesn't seem like it'd be worth the GPL hassles for a company like Microsoft.
If they really need to charge so much to pay for their towers, then why are voice calls so cheap relative to text messages? There's no way I use less data calling up my friend to schedule a lunch than I would if I sent them a couple lines of text. Even low quality audio is going to use way more bits than a few hundred text characters.
If they weren't able to make money with the ridiculous overcharging for text messages, they'd probably be doing everything they could to get customers to use text over voice calls, because it's so much less bandwidth.
PEX is pretty cool stuff, and definitely the way to go for future construction. It's much more durable in the ways you described, and it also has the benefit of being able to curve around bends and such, instead of needing a fixed joint like copper pipes. The issue there is that every connection a plumber has to make is another potential leak. And cutting down the number of connections not only reduces the number of potential leaks, it also saves on labor.
No, I like sometimes having videos in part of the page layout. It's often right next to text information that's relevant to the video, and so my eyes can quickly move back and forth between both and I can compare the two. Having to deal with a separate application and window is just complicating things.
Video is already such an important part of the web now. I'm sure that way back when the WWW first hit the scene there were people complaining that embedding images along with text was a silly idea. Why not just have a link and download the images separately?
Unfortunately, by the time enough bandwith came along to make video feasible, there was big bucks at stake with this whole internet thing, so we've got a big mess of competing video formats, and a hodgepodge of embedding techniques. But in my boundless optimism, I can imagine some of the browser developers getting together and agreeing on a couple standard formats and spending the effort to make in browser playback work better.
Yeah, but don't forget that the "future tech" excuse will never stop being an issue, so eventually you just need to bite the bullet and do the best you can. The fact that better technology is inevitable is just a reality you have to deal with.
And at least with something like solar panels, even an technically obsolete system will still continue to generate power. It's not like the sun is going to get an upgrade that makes it incompatible with existing solar plants.
While there are certainly some crummy things going on in the US government right now, it seems unlikely to me that the military would actively fight on the side of the government against a serious uprising of american citizens. From what I've seen, the sorts of countries where the governments are kept in power purely through military force are places where life is generally so meager that being a soldier is one of the only ways to live any sort of privileged or even adequately supported life. You don't go into the army there because you love your country and you love your government and you want to protect your leader. You go into the army because the alternative is to be destitute.
Basically, the way military dictatorships tend to work, there are no other real social institutions or organizations, and so you're either part of that system or your trampled under it. In the US, most of the wealth exists outside of the military. The soldiers have more to lose than they have to gain by supporting the government against its people.
Maybe I'm wrong, and all our soldiers are just blood-thirsty drones, but most of the individuals that I've met have been reasonably intelligent and decent people. It'd take some really serious injustices to get any sizeable portion of our citizenry to take to the streets with guns, and I think that whatever argument led to that would be just as convincing to most of our military.
There's nothing wrong with picking on a software company that's caused so many headaches for so many of us for many years. It's kind of funny because even a guy with billions of dollars in the bank can get insanely frustrated by the same piddly stuff that drives a poor college kid crazy. And it's kind of sad that the biggest software company in the world, with more resources than most of us could ever imagine, and even with the head honcho being aware and upset about the problems...they still can't get their act together and solve even the obvious issues.
These sorts of emails need to be sent out before products ship, and the problems need to be fixed before the end-users get stuck with them. The fact that a company with decades of experience, a huge position in their industry, and lots of money and high-paid employees can't get it right is pretty funny.
Yeah, it's easy to criticize, and much harder to actually solve problems. Finding the issues and bringing them to light is only the first step. There are a bunch of different ways to accomplish the rest of the steps, but Gates and MS don't seem to be able to figure out any of them with much consistency.
I don't find it impossible or even unlikely that a CEO that cared about his company at all might try to use the company's products in a way similar to how their customers would experience it. Sure, it's unlikely that they'll get a 100% "authentic" experience, but they could certainly go and jump through some of the hoops they make customers go through, just to see what the experience was like.
I don't think Gates was looking for a copy of Windows moviemaker because he had some video of his last vacation that he wanted to pretty up, he was trying to understand the product that MS had actually released, with the hopes that it could be improved. It's sometimes called "eating your own dog food", and it's not some obscure or exotic management technique. It's a really valid way for a company to evaluate their products, and CEO's that don't at least attempt it probably should.
Whether or not there's any sort of illegal aspect to the administration's position aside, it's a pretty darn childish and embarrassing stance to take. These clowns have long since abandoned any sense of shame for their deeds. I guess that shame instead gets to fall on everyday Americans.
I fully agree. I'm not suggesting sandboxing my browser out of my files, that'd be far too limiting. I was only attempting to explain to the grandparent post why malware doesn't need root access to be problematic. I guess that wasn't really clear from my original comment.
Yes, that's the response, because that's reality. I'm not saying it to crush their hopes and dreams, I'm saying it because that's life and they need to ready for it. I have a cousin who's about two years our of school, and has left at least three jobs already because "they were making her do work she didn't want to do." She's an interior designer, and she was always upset that these companies that she's worked for wouldn't let her sit with paper and colored pencils and sketch restaurants and hotel lobbies all day. Instead they have the gall to make her do boring things like draft in CAD and calculate square footages and stuff like that.
Never mind that 90% of the work that needs to be done to get a restaurant designed is "stuff like that". You have to do it on every project, and it sucks every time, but it has to get done and someone has to do it. It's not a particular quirk of any industry, pretty much every job is like that. Especially when you're just starting out.
The working world is not like college, and to convince yourself or someone else otherwise is not helping them, it's just setting them up for inevitable disappointment, and time wasted while they get over their denial and figure it out. My cousin seems to have accepted that reality, and is hopefully willing to put in the time and work necessary to work her way up the food chain until she can set her own job description. But she's a couple years behind on that track than she would've been if someone had been honest with her and not pretended like life was going to be all sunshine and rainbows.
Also, to me as a user, the single most important thing on my computer would be all my documents, which are accessible from my account. Sure, it's not great for my machine to be turned into an spam zombie or whatever, but reinstalling my OS isn't the worst thing in the world. It'd take me a couple hours at most. But recreating all the documents/photos/movies that I've got saved under my account would take much longer, and in many cases be impossible.
I know that's what backups are for, and I've got backups of my important stuff, but the world is an imperfect place and not everything gets backed up.
Agreed. Although manual labor can certainly suck at times, at the end of most days I could find something that didn't exist in the morning, but does now, because I built it (I worked construction). Now I sit in front of a computer all day designing buildings, and I just don't get that same sense of satisfaction from the screen-full of drawings that I did when I actually hammered stuff together.
Also a couple weeks ago the A/C in the office was out, and if I'm going to be subjected to 90 degree weather, I'd much rather prefer to be doing something active in those conditions than trying to sit at a desk and focus on a computer screen.
I think the reality is that "doing it for a living" is a good way to drain the fun out of almost anything. I enjoy building things out of wood. For about a year or so, I made custom furniture for people, and that's how I got the money I needed to eat. I did not enjoy woodworking all that much for that year. Now that I've been working in a different field for a few years, I've spent a good portion of my disposable income on building up a decent woodshop, and it's once again a hobby I enjoy. *shrug*
Except that that philosophy is a bit more problematic when you've got such a significant hardware component as part of your master plan. Maybe it's not impossible to figure it out, but asking people to put down money to buy an unfinished phone and carry it around with them is different than asking a bunch of computer geeks to download some free software and screw around with it to find bugs.
That's all well and good, but they should have waited until they had their act together a little more before they announced anything. If you're going to create hype you need to make sure you're in a position to live up to it.
I'm a couple years into my architecture career, and I've been working at a firm where there's basically zero organization. What that means is that everyone gets put in charge of their own projects and is basically left to fend for themselves (even the summer interns.) It's a very inefficient and strange way to run things, but somehow the guy running the firm has run it that way for decades and still manages to get tons of work, so he'll probably never change.
But I'm not going to refute your point, my experiences actually reinforce it. The first project that I was in charge of (started less than 6 months into my architectural career)was an absolute nightmare for me. The biggest problem that I had was in terms of understanding the process. That's something that you can't just sit down and figure out, no matter how many hours you put into it, it's something that can only really be learned through experience. I think it's even more of an issue for architecture than it is for something like your average software project, because there are a lot of very specific hoops that a building design has to go through in terms of government regulations/building codes/etc. Lots of little things that aren't necessarily hard to deal with, but if you don't know that they're an issue and don't deal with them at the appropriate time, you're going to have some serious headaches somewhere down the line.
It was a ridiculously stressful experience for me, and while I learned a lot, I feel like I learned more about how not to do things, instead of how to do things. That's bad, because while there might only be a few or even one right way to do something, there's usually thousands of wrong ways to do it. So I'll just make a bunch of different mistakes next time.
The other thing that you're spot on about is the ability to make assertive decisions based on experience. Lacking in experience, I was very reluctant to make decisions on many issues, and you can be sure that the contractor could tell I didn't know what I was doing. Many more headaches resulted from that.
I've read articles and interviews of college kids where they say that they were hoping to get a job as a consultant. I can't imagine why anyone would want to consult with someone who just got out of college.
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And here in New Orleans we'd love to have some better levees which could've saved us from billions of dollars worth of flood damage. Unfortunately for both of us, the powers that be aren't particularly interested in sacrificing now for the sake of later.
Yeah, it's a total piece of cake to give up your job and your home and all your friends and just move away. Hardly an bump in the road.
True enough, but it's a shame that the ones who are going to lose out the most in all this are children, who've had nothing to do with the decision and don't really know any better.
I for one can't wait for google to replace their homepage search bar with a friendly, brightly colored, animated search assistant avatar. It'll be the next revolution in user interfaces!
It's not like they have any other choice. Having a car that runs on biofuels isn't particularly useful to a consumer unless someone has also built the infrastructure to supply biofuels conveniently. If Mercedes were to move exclusively to biofuels but noone created a decent network of biofuel fill-up stations, then no one would buy their cars and the company would die.
If Mercedes waits until every neighborhood has a biofuel station before they make the switch, then they'll either end up with a "chicken-egg" problem, where noone will build out the infrastructure without having vehicles available to use it and vice-versa; or some other car company will make the first leap and then Mercedes will fall behind the curve technology-wise.
The change is going to have to be gradual, there's no way to do it overnight, or even over a few years. It's going to take decades.
I don't think that's a particularly valid argument, exchanging a few packets to download a homepage or a login page isn't really the same as filling out a form with false information and clicking a box that says "I agree to the TOS."
A mildly useful analogy might be holding a cup up to a stranger and saying "hey give me a dollar." That's not illegal (assuming you're standing somewhere where it's allowed), and if the guy gives you a dollar he can't decide that he got ripped off and have you arrested. But if you said to the stranger "hey I'm collecting money for a charity that helps orphans with cancer, would you like to donate a dollar?", and you're not actually collecting the money for said orphans, then that would be fraud.
Basically, the law isn't regulating the movement of ones and zeros across wires, it's regulating the intent of the person who's driving those bits.
It seems far more likely that if they wanted to make a change in that sort of direction, they'd go more along the lines of what Apple did and use something like BSD instead of linux. They'd get most of the same benefits in terms of the underlying structure, but without being tied to the GPL.
It just doesn't seem like it'd be worth the GPL hassles for a company like Microsoft.
If they really need to charge so much to pay for their towers, then why are voice calls so cheap relative to text messages? There's no way I use less data calling up my friend to schedule a lunch than I would if I sent them a couple lines of text. Even low quality audio is going to use way more bits than a few hundred text characters.
If they weren't able to make money with the ridiculous overcharging for text messages, they'd probably be doing everything they could to get customers to use text over voice calls, because it's so much less bandwidth.
PEX is pretty cool stuff, and definitely the way to go for future construction. It's much more durable in the ways you described, and it also has the benefit of being able to curve around bends and such, instead of needing a fixed joint like copper pipes. The issue there is that every connection a plumber has to make is another potential leak. And cutting down the number of connections not only reduces the number of potential leaks, it also saves on labor.
No, I like sometimes having videos in part of the page layout. It's often right next to text information that's relevant to the video, and so my eyes can quickly move back and forth between both and I can compare the two. Having to deal with a separate application and window is just complicating things.
Video is already such an important part of the web now. I'm sure that way back when the WWW first hit the scene there were people complaining that embedding images along with text was a silly idea. Why not just have a link and download the images separately?
Unfortunately, by the time enough bandwith came along to make video feasible, there was big bucks at stake with this whole internet thing, so we've got a big mess of competing video formats, and a hodgepodge of embedding techniques. But in my boundless optimism, I can imagine some of the browser developers getting together and agreeing on a couple standard formats and spending the effort to make in browser playback work better.
I think the sort of social circles where more RAM is "cool" is the same circle where everybody would just buy and install their own RAM separately.
Yeah, but don't forget that the "future tech" excuse will never stop being an issue, so eventually you just need to bite the bullet and do the best you can. The fact that better technology is inevitable is just a reality you have to deal with.
And at least with something like solar panels, even an technically obsolete system will still continue to generate power. It's not like the sun is going to get an upgrade that makes it incompatible with existing solar plants.
While there are certainly some crummy things going on in the US government right now, it seems unlikely to me that the military would actively fight on the side of the government against a serious uprising of american citizens. From what I've seen, the sorts of countries where the governments are kept in power purely through military force are places where life is generally so meager that being a soldier is one of the only ways to live any sort of privileged or even adequately supported life. You don't go into the army there because you love your country and you love your government and you want to protect your leader. You go into the army because the alternative is to be destitute.
Basically, the way military dictatorships tend to work, there are no other real social institutions or organizations, and so you're either part of that system or your trampled under it. In the US, most of the wealth exists outside of the military. The soldiers have more to lose than they have to gain by supporting the government against its people.
Maybe I'm wrong, and all our soldiers are just blood-thirsty drones, but most of the individuals that I've met have been reasonably intelligent and decent people. It'd take some really serious injustices to get any sizeable portion of our citizenry to take to the streets with guns, and I think that whatever argument led to that would be just as convincing to most of our military.
There's nothing wrong with picking on a software company that's caused so many headaches for so many of us for many years. It's kind of funny because even a guy with billions of dollars in the bank can get insanely frustrated by the same piddly stuff that drives a poor college kid crazy. And it's kind of sad that the biggest software company in the world, with more resources than most of us could ever imagine, and even with the head honcho being aware and upset about the problems...they still can't get their act together and solve even the obvious issues.
These sorts of emails need to be sent out before products ship, and the problems need to be fixed before the end-users get stuck with them. The fact that a company with decades of experience, a huge position in their industry, and lots of money and high-paid employees can't get it right is pretty funny.
Yeah, it's easy to criticize, and much harder to actually solve problems. Finding the issues and bringing them to light is only the first step. There are a bunch of different ways to accomplish the rest of the steps, but Gates and MS don't seem to be able to figure out any of them with much consistency.
I don't find it impossible or even unlikely that a CEO that cared about his company at all might try to use the company's products in a way similar to how their customers would experience it. Sure, it's unlikely that they'll get a 100% "authentic" experience, but they could certainly go and jump through some of the hoops they make customers go through, just to see what the experience was like.
I don't think Gates was looking for a copy of Windows moviemaker because he had some video of his last vacation that he wanted to pretty up, he was trying to understand the product that MS had actually released, with the hopes that it could be improved. It's sometimes called "eating your own dog food", and it's not some obscure or exotic management technique. It's a really valid way for a company to evaluate their products, and CEO's that don't at least attempt it probably should.
Whether or not there's any sort of illegal aspect to the administration's position aside, it's a pretty darn childish and embarrassing stance to take. These clowns have long since abandoned any sense of shame for their deeds. I guess that shame instead gets to fall on everyday Americans.
I fully agree. I'm not suggesting sandboxing my browser out of my files, that'd be far too limiting. I was only attempting to explain to the grandparent post why malware doesn't need root access to be problematic. I guess that wasn't really clear from my original comment.
Yes, that's the response, because that's reality. I'm not saying it to crush their hopes and dreams, I'm saying it because that's life and they need to ready for it. I have a cousin who's about two years our of school, and has left at least three jobs already because "they were making her do work she didn't want to do." She's an interior designer, and she was always upset that these companies that she's worked for wouldn't let her sit with paper and colored pencils and sketch restaurants and hotel lobbies all day. Instead they have the gall to make her do boring things like draft in CAD and calculate square footages and stuff like that.
Never mind that 90% of the work that needs to be done to get a restaurant designed is "stuff like that". You have to do it on every project, and it sucks every time, but it has to get done and someone has to do it. It's not a particular quirk of any industry, pretty much every job is like that. Especially when you're just starting out.
The working world is not like college, and to convince yourself or someone else otherwise is not helping them, it's just setting them up for inevitable disappointment, and time wasted while they get over their denial and figure it out. My cousin seems to have accepted that reality, and is hopefully willing to put in the time and work necessary to work her way up the food chain until she can set her own job description. But she's a couple years behind on that track than she would've been if someone had been honest with her and not pretended like life was going to be all sunshine and rainbows.
Also, to me as a user, the single most important thing on my computer would be all my documents, which are accessible from my account. Sure, it's not great for my machine to be turned into an spam zombie or whatever, but reinstalling my OS isn't the worst thing in the world. It'd take me a couple hours at most. But recreating all the documents/photos/movies that I've got saved under my account would take much longer, and in many cases be impossible.
I know that's what backups are for, and I've got backups of my important stuff, but the world is an imperfect place and not everything gets backed up.
Agreed. Although manual labor can certainly suck at times, at the end of most days I could find something that didn't exist in the morning, but does now, because I built it (I worked construction). Now I sit in front of a computer all day designing buildings, and I just don't get that same sense of satisfaction from the screen-full of drawings that I did when I actually hammered stuff together.
Also a couple weeks ago the A/C in the office was out, and if I'm going to be subjected to 90 degree weather, I'd much rather prefer to be doing something active in those conditions than trying to sit at a desk and focus on a computer screen.
I think the reality is that "doing it for a living" is a good way to drain the fun out of almost anything. I enjoy building things out of wood. For about a year or so, I made custom furniture for people, and that's how I got the money I needed to eat. I did not enjoy woodworking all that much for that year. Now that I've been working in a different field for a few years, I've spent a good portion of my disposable income on building up a decent woodshop, and it's once again a hobby I enjoy. *shrug*
Except that that philosophy is a bit more problematic when you've got such a significant hardware component as part of your master plan. Maybe it's not impossible to figure it out, but asking people to put down money to buy an unfinished phone and carry it around with them is different than asking a bunch of computer geeks to download some free software and screw around with it to find bugs.
That's all well and good, but they should have waited until they had their act together a little more before they announced anything. If you're going to create hype you need to make sure you're in a position to live up to it.
I'm a couple years into my architecture career, and I've been working at a firm where there's basically zero organization. What that means is that everyone gets put in charge of their own projects and is basically left to fend for themselves (even the summer interns.) It's a very inefficient and strange way to run things, but somehow the guy running the firm has run it that way for decades and still manages to get tons of work, so he'll probably never change.
But I'm not going to refute your point, my experiences actually reinforce it. The first project that I was in charge of (started less than 6 months into my architectural career)was an absolute nightmare for me. The biggest problem that I had was in terms of understanding the process. That's something that you can't just sit down and figure out, no matter how many hours you put into it, it's something that can only really be learned through experience. I think it's even more of an issue for architecture than it is for something like your average software project, because there are a lot of very specific hoops that a building design has to go through in terms of government regulations/building codes/etc. Lots of little things that aren't necessarily hard to deal with, but if you don't know that they're an issue and don't deal with them at the appropriate time, you're going to have some serious headaches somewhere down the line.
It was a ridiculously stressful experience for me, and while I learned a lot, I feel like I learned more about how not to do things, instead of how to do things. That's bad, because while there might only be a few or even one right way to do something, there's usually thousands of wrong ways to do it. So I'll just make a bunch of different mistakes next time.
The other thing that you're spot on about is the ability to make assertive decisions based on experience. Lacking in experience, I was very reluctant to make decisions on many issues, and you can be sure that the contractor could tell I didn't know what I was doing. Many more headaches resulted from that.
I've read articles and interviews of college kids where they say that they were hoping to get a job as a consultant. I can't imagine why anyone would want to consult with someone who just got out of college.