Jewish law doesn't marginalize women. It holds women up as the spiritual core of the people, and elevates their primary responsibilities in the home to a level of holiness. While from a Western job-oriented mindset, people may see it as marginalized, the three core activities of an observant Jewish home, Shabbat, Kashrut, and Family Purity are commandments that fall primarily on the women. The woman takes priority over her husband regarding Shabbat candles, is primarily responsible for maintaining a Kosher home, and maintaining Family Purity. The "male" responsibilities are to provide income for his family, engage in Torah learning and teach Torah to his children, and participate in public prayer. Those "male" responsibilities are just as important (and seen my non-Jews and non-practicing Jews), but less holy and critical to the family.
Most of the anti-female views in Judeo-Christian beliefs aren't supported by the Bible, they are Roman/Greek customs and things that the early Church picked up when it merged with the Roman Empire. Did the Romans hate women? Well, considering that Roman/Greek societies placed the highest form of love as the love between a man and a young boy...
It was the Romans who decided that sex between a man and a woman was a necessary evil for procreation. This got into the Christian Bible by way of bizarre interpretation. It also slipped into Judaism a bit during the Talmudic era, when Judea was an occupied Roman Province.
If you look at the Biblical basis for marriage, it does nothing to prohibit sexual desires on either party. The only thing that is does is require that if a man lie with a woman, he make her his wife. This means that a man can only lie with as many women as he can support, so it somewhat limits male sexual expression. And pre-birth control combined with the timing effects of Family Purity laws, sex had a decent likelihood of resulting in child bearing. So forcing a man to support the woman he lies with can hardly be seen as sexist in an objective sense.
Most of the ancient tribal customs that remain in some form in traditional Judaism (wrapped in a complex Rabbinic layer) and the Church (wrapped in a Roman layer) only seem sexist looking at them backwards. We redefined the concept of gender relations in the last 100 years, and then call the old way sexist. However, if you look at the Biblical laws as applied to twelve wandering tribes in Egypt going through Arabia and into Canaan, they are extremely progressive. If you look at the restrictions added during the Talmudic era, they are extremely progressive. And if you compare their adaptation by the Church to Roman society, a society that used to encourage the men to ignore their women except to produce heirs, encouraged them to have mistresses to produce more off-spring which they could CHOOSE to legitimize or not (but the mistress got no support, while additional wives in Judaism (banned for over 1000 years now in Western Judaism) AND concubines each had levels of support, and the concubine could choose to end the relationship with no strings), the religious basis of gender relations was PRO-woman.
You can't look from a 21st century view of gender relations and look at Church law and call it backwards. Church law started as a response to the Roman hedonistic culture, that wrapped it's orgies (gay and straight) in a religious veneer. The Church later dealt with gender relations in feudal Europe, where the nobles were marrying and producing legit heirs (with some on the side), and the peasants where gender relations were somewhere between permitted rape and modern dating, and brought marriage out of common law and into general practice.
Religious marriage laws may not have been "equal" in a 21st Century sense, but they were all designed to protect women who were being used by men that were stronger than them, and had no protection under pre-Christian European customs. Those that see female promiscuity (in an era of The Pill) as liberation for women may see the obsession
An old friend of mine used to quote his grandmother (immigrant from Russia) who used to say, "The best government in the world is a good Tsar, The worst government in the world is a bad Tsar."
I think that the other relevant quote was something about Democracy being the worst form of government except for everything else that we tried.
Democracy keeps the best leaders out for trivial reasons, but generally keeps really bad people out.
For all people are howling about Bush (and Putin for that matter), if you compare them to truly awful despots, they look good.
Democracy consistently gets us leaders in the 60%-90% range... Monarchies and dictatorships often get you a random distributions.
As a coder, your job is to take technical requirements and turn them into code that meets those requirements. Those analytical skills will directly translate into management, but a bit of rethinking is required. Instead of needing to make the compiler produce the results you are looking for, you need to make the people produce them.
As far as retraining, see what Universities near you offer evening or weekend executive MBA programs. Unlike the Day programs that are geared for teaching management consultant grunts to be better management consultant grunts, the executive ones offer a lot of things for mid-level people that are actually in management. In an exec MBA program, you should cover Leadership, Financial Accounting, Managerial Accounting, plus basics in other areas like marketing and finance. An MBA, particularly in an executive format that has fewer elective options, tends to focus on "general management," it's like a liberal arts degree, it isn't specialized, but it designed to give you an overview. You won't become the company's expert on accounting or marketing, but you'll understand the jargon and big picture, so you won't be blown away when doing budgets, etc.
Subscribe to the Wall Street Journal, print or online, and try to read it a few days/week. This was what a friend with a technical background that got a job at McKinsey said she did to catch up on business jargon fast. A few weeks/months, and you'll find yourself less lost in business jargon, because you'll be reading things in the current jargon in context.
Some basic tips:
1. Your primary responsibility is to keep "the suits" from interfering with your team. If you have filled your team with good people, they'll get the job done, but if you let the top people meddle in your team, you will fail.
2. Understand boundaries with your staff... you have to balance a line between being "one of the guys" and being the "boss". Err too much on the former and you won't have the respect necessary to make the decisions, they won't appreciate that sometimes you have to make decisions that aren't up for debate... Err too much on the latter, and you won't get the honest feedback that you need to make decisions.
3. Use meetings regularly, usefully, and short. Long meetings annoy people, but you need some meeting time to keep everyone on the same page. Do NOT become the information funnel to avoid meetings. You need to know everything, but not be responsible for relaying messages. It's not the 1950s where everyone's secretary types memos to send up the chain or down the chain.
4. Build cross-functional teams wherever possible. Setting up a monthly meeting with your technical lead, someone from marketing, and someone from customer service to go over features, for example. If you meet with other leaders and get your technical people together, decision making will be stronger and you'll do better things for the company. Those that show leadership are more likely to move up the ladder.
5. Know where your time goes and why it is work. It is sometimes frustrating, because as a "code monkey," when you pulled an 80 hour week, you know what you did. You have some functions/classes/bug-fixes implemented. As a manager, your primary responsibility is keeping track of what is going on and communicating. This seems trivial to technical people, but is a lot of hard work and get be frustrating. If you spend a solid week in meetings with your team, superiors, and colleagues in other departments, it often feels like you did nothing, but that's your job.
6. Informal meetings are a great way to keep abreast of things, but don't disrupt people. Learn to have task lists. One of the worst senior managers I worked with had a tendency to call people whenever he had a question. I was trying to manage a small team AND do some technical work, and he'd blow my concentration constantly with calls e
It isn't so much that web developers suck, it is that there is no consensus on the data store. Even if the data store is stellar, if it is not in an open, agreed-upon standard format and it isn't universally accessible then even the very least-sucky web developer will struggle to give users a seamless social-networking experience.
Wrong. For my websites, I carefully build normalized databases, triggers and stored procedures to maintain "slow" meta data like counts, quick lookup tables/views for constantly accessed data, etc. Inserting data into the database is always consistent, and stores a lot of info. This is true whether I load it from an Excel spreadsheet, a quick RealBASIC/VB app (you'd be amazed how fast you can throw together quick prototype tools with those languages), a web interface, or any other interface. The problem is that most of the web code out there sucks. It's a steaming mess of Perl and/or PHP code with MySQL calls buried in it. So if I want to create another "interface" to the database I can't, because if I don't keep the "5-10 exact steps done to validate the data," I can get bad data and never know why. I don't need an agreed upon standard for "social-networking," at this point, people that want the "keep up with my friends" info are on Facebook, and the "meet other people with similar interests" use MySpace. Both let you make things available, so who cares.
So that is three plug-ins required to achieve a single purpose (basically photo album meta-data). Is that really an ideal end-user experience? Would it not be better to have some base-level of functionality implemented in a standard so that instead of having to deal with Flickr and Shutterfly and iPhoto and whatever-else plugins you just put your photos in one place and have a single "photo album" extension in Facebook (or Myspace or whatever--each could have a single set of tools/plug-ins/extensions for a single set of tasks). This frees developers from having to be "slaves to Facebook", but it also helps makes Facebook's job easier--it wouldn't have to re-invent the wheel to make itself interoperate with every other site, nor would there be a need for users to suffer through a gazillion plugins that do the same thing but connect to different sites.
You're missing my point. My friend uploads 50 pictures a month of her daughter to Shutterfly, that's her photo management, and she can mail us a link. I store all my stuff in iPhoto, managed on my computer, easy to control, and can quickly upload them to Facebook where I show my friends, and Shutterfly for my Inlaws to buy. The why is playing with iWeb, which might give an equally easy way for us to get pictures for them to buy, so who cares.
I haven't done serious photography in years. But for those that do, Flickr, or one of the other tools out there are great. They are all innovative.
The plug-in system works perfectly for integration. If you want to keep your photos in Flickr, you can still display them on your Facebook page, complete with updating the Newsfeed, with a Flickr App for Facebook. That's what's brilliant, anyone that wants to add their functionality to social networking doesn't need to build a platform, it's there.
I think that you haven't played with Facebook's API. It's brilliant what they've done.
The fact is, I can use anybody "website" and webserive if they make a web widget for Facebook.
We're going to be moving away from all these websites with viral marketing and towards web services. We'll all use whatever services we want, and soon have widgets to add to our site. The new iWeb/iLife system is cool. I can shoot the video on my camera, cut down to the scenes I want in iMovie, and quickly export it to Youtube if I want, or export it to a file for upload to Facebook, or generally use whatever Video system I want. I can drag the widgets onto my iWeb site if I want, and have a Youtube video without needing to know any HTML. That's r
My question is, what do you mean by "American"? Do I count, as a naturalized citizen of this wonderful country? Or are you just an "American" if your ancestors came over on the Mayflower? What if your great grandparents were Irish, and immigrated here?
Unclear... critics of nativists like to claim that it is opposition to non-white immigrants... but I think that it is an oversimplification. I think that the anger is directed at "Mexicans" and "Indians" but I don't think its racism... I think that it's more about the lack of cultural assimilation. There is anger at growing Spanish language television stations and newspapers, which they see as evidence of them not learning English. I think that the percentage of 1st generation immigrants that never really acclimate is about the same as ever, but with two-three already established wealthy Hispanic immigrants, they noticed the opportunity to market them.
When my friends complain that people in Miami aren't learning English, I try to politely remind them that Spanish was spoken in La Florida long before English was.:) The same is true in Texas, California, and the South west.
Yeah, sure, you might be simply talking about people coming over here with student visas, but have you ever thought about why these people came over here to learn in the first place? Or what about the fact that the vast majority of people who work/study/immigrate/hop a fence over here do so because they want better opportunities? These actions, whether the people are conscious of it or not, carry an implicit compliment towards the United States; do we want to drive away these people with such a hostile attitude?
Might as well steal the best and brightest from the rest of the world. There are only 300 million or so Americas. There are 1.2 billion Indians and 1.6 billion Chinese? If you assume that the "brainpower" that powers "intellectual property" driven industries comes from the top 0.1% of people, there are 300,000 Americans, 1.2 million Indians, and 1.6 million Chinese? If we can steal 10% of India and China's "top talent," you're talking another 120,000 Indians and 160,000 Chinese, so another 280,000 to your home grown 300,000?
Basically, if you look at demographic charts, distribution of children by education, and assume that education is a rough correlation to brainpower (it's not perfect, but there is probably a decent 60%-75% correlation, and it's the best we have), we're artificially getting lower brain power locally, might as well steal it.
If you need oil, you have to buy it from the Middle East or Venezuela, you can't just complain that American educatators aren't creating oil.:) Lumberyards need trees. Intellectual Property industries need brains. Since brains seem to be pretty randomly distributed amongst the 6 or 7 billion people on this planet, I figure we might as well bring them in from elsewhere... I don't work that "foreign oil" is taking "refining space" away from domestic oil. The modern economy is an impressive beast, and it needs all sorts of inputs or it will stall out.
Also, American "science types" tend to excel more in creativity, Asian "science types" more in grinding out and implementing. This has nothing to do with genetic differences, and probably very little to do with culture... In America, we judge people on their economic successes, which tends to reward creativity and risk taking here, so people that take risks tend to do better in America. Most other academic cultures punish failure more than rewarding success. The test-happy European and Asian school systems with series of weed-outs, testing = admissions, and degree=economic success has caused the degree to correlate with risk adverse study-aholics, so that's what you get.
Want to get engineers that will work cheap and grind out the process without much creative thought? You'll find that China and India CRANK them out by the hundreds o
Facebook has made it possible for people to build the applications that people want and tie them into Facebook. A Web 2.0 site could accept log-ins, or allow Facebook users to simply add the application, adding them as users. Conceivably, Myspace will add a similar feature before going bust. The article's author gives a lot of non-sense about developers not wanting to be slaves to facebook, but they have it backwards.
I subscribe to Netflix. I added a Netflix app to Facebook, it let's my friend's see my queue... yawn... It also let's my Facebook friends, if they get Netflix, quickly add me as a Netflix friend (subject to my approval). The Netflix app mirrors some of Netflix's UI, but not everything. I still go to Netflix to manage Queue's and add movies, but I can see what's going on quickly on Facebook.
The problem is that most Web Developers suck. If your data store for your web-app is good, then you can EASILY create a Facebook front end. If your front-end has all your database calls (no stored procedures in the database, not even a DB functions file in Perl/PHP/whatever you coded in), then you see it as "be a Facebook App OR a website."
The promise of HAVi in the AV world was that we would connect our equipment via Firewire, and they would export a front-end in Java that our TV or Receiver would render for us. The data in MPEG-2 with fixed compression caused content producers to go ape-shit, but the idea is valid on the web.
If you want to process information, you need to collect it and do something with it. The days of a "single HTML interface" are now over. You need a mobile version, an iPhone version (possibly, we'll see adoption rates), and now a Facebook version.
I collect my photos in iPhoto on my Mac. I upload them to Facebook via an iPhoto plug-in to show my friends. I upload them to Shutterfly via an Export Plugin (well, did until they haven't supported iPhoto '08 yet), so my extended relatives can buy pictures.
I have other friends that are into photography, they use Flickr. However, there is a Flickr "interface" for Facebook, so their Flickr Albums are viewable on Facebook. Sure, if they have pictures that they want the Facebook features (tag a friend), they need to upload to Facebook, but if they want Flickr sharing (tags, etc.), they upload to Flickr and put it on the Flickr App on Facebook.
Open APIs will let US aggregate OUR data, not have one site steal it from others.
Sony got longer tapes out in the 80s, but in the late 70s, VHS had a 4 hour machine. Sony added the ability to record longer times at reduced quality later.
The Wikipedia article on Betamax has a good run through of the iterations. Basically, Beta recorded 1 hour, a B-II mode 2 hours, B-III 3 hours.
VHS recorded 2 hours out of the gate, Beta recorded 60 or 90 minutes. With a VHS deck, you could record a movie, with a Beta, you could not. Further, VHs has the longer play modes that looked horrible but recorded 4 or 6 hours on a tape.
When tapes were expensive, that made the difference.
But the biggest issue is that for what people wanted, recording 120 minute movies, VHS fit the bill, while Beta did not. The pornography angle is cute, and might have made a difference, but the biggest thing was recording time.
Lesson, uses of the technology trumps quality. Hence SA-CD and DAD-A died on the vine (high quality) was MP3s succeeded (convenient travel).
Novell has shown themselves consistently to try to do the right thing 1) for their customers, 2) for open source in general, and 3) for their shareholders.
They are constantly harassed by not being a "pure" open source company, but they have shown a tremendous dedication to working with the community on their Free Software. Their "deal" with Microsoft was an attempt to offer their customers something unique, the indemnification/license to protect them from Microsoft.
They were attacked, because private citizens felt that nobody should offer that, that's silly. That was Novell working to offer a unique value proposition.
When SCO turned on Linux, they COULD have hung other companies out to dry and claimed that as a unique advantage to Novell. They didn't. They defended the Free Software world against SCO.
I think that Novell has been a remarkably good citizens in short order, and should be given more slack when they announce a program that is good for their customers but isn't hurting the general movement.
If the Novell/MS deal gave Novell an edge than its because Linux IS infringing. If Linux isn't infringing, then their deal was nothing more than my promising not to sue you for using city roads, a meaningless offer. The attacks on them seemed unfair.
The CD medium is in general, "better" than vinyl. When converted back from digital to analog, the CD produces a more reliable sound than vinyl. However, audiophiles insist that vinyl sounds "warmer" or better... and it does... but not because of information on the disc.
Vinyl is a physical medium, and when you master for vinyl, you need to balance the sound or the needle will skip. There are physical restrictions on how you can encode data in vinyl, and that limits the use of the medium.
CDs, storing binary data, will happily store whatever you throw at them. From a technical perspective, that makes it "better," but it also allows crappy mastering.
However, as other posters mentioned, the Loudness War effect has created the problem. Since on first listen, the loudest mix sounds best, and the loudest mix stands out on the radio, in order to get work as mastering engineerings, they have to mix the noise loud. So while the audio on a CD is theoretically 16-bits, by cranking all the sources up, you ignore all the quieter capabilities that add depth.
This essentially means that while vinyl tracks were mixed across a wide range (a requirement of the medium), the CDs that are produced normally compress the audio into a small range. This loses the details, but sounds "better" when aiming for catchy tunes on the radio.
So when people say that vinyl sounds better, they are correct. If a track is being released on CD and vinyl, it will often be mastered separately for each medium. While the CD will produce the studio's "desired" loud version exactly, the vinyl version may be mastered with a more dynamic range.
MP3 is criticized for ditching these details, because it is lossy in terms of ditching the sounds that you "don't hear." Well, one of the reasons that people can't tell in an A/B comparison... there ARE no details. The details of the recording was already destroyed in the mastering engineer's Pro Tools setup when they compressed the sound and made it "loud."
The music industry has made ZERO effort to product dynamic audio projects. SA-CD and DVD-A offered the increased capacity to product detailed tracks that could still sound "loud," as well as create a product that would be MUCH better than MP3 could offer. But instead, they tried to raise prices on CDs to $18 and price the SA-CD/DVD-A versions at $25 or $30. Had they adopted SA-CD and produced all hybrid CDs at the same price point as CDs were selling at before, they might have gotten an adoption of SA-CD... If they had ignored Napster (1997 was their peak sales, and the year they shut Napster down, post-Napster their sales have never recovered) and encouraged people to keep trading low quality MP3s while selling SA-CD with CD versions for compatibility, SA-CD might have taken off.
Look at the movie industry... while they are concerned about piracy and have engineered all sorts of options to protect them (down-resing analog, etc.) if the future works out one way, they are doing HiDef transfers for the movie stations, have embraced HD reasonably well, and are releasing their content on HD-DVD and BluRay... The better quality they offer, the more inferior getting compressed files off Torrents seem.
The home theatre is becoming increasingly common in upper middle class homes... The fact that the music industry hasn't been able to capitalize on this is pathetic... SA-CD and DVD-A BOTH offered 5-channel options.... but the studios wanted to "prevent piracy" so required people to use 7 audio cables to connect instead of a digital format, and dragged their heals on a digital path to the receiver. They didn't want hybrid discs in the belief that they would make more money selling each disc twice... etc., etc.
If I get a big phone bill, I want the detailed bill to figure out why. With T-mobile Fav5, I want to track who gets calls, to update the 5 if necessary. However, I don't want a whole bunch of "data 0" lines. The problem that I had with Cingular is that I couldn't ever figure out WHY my bills were really high, because I'd have to go through 50 pages of garbage looking for it.
The data dump of the detailed billing obscures what you want, which is charges.
What people WANT is a summary, X minutes in calls to number Y, to understand charges. Instead, we get dumped with a tree's worth of detail of 0.00 charges.
You are correct, you can get detailed billing turned off, but then you get no information. It's normally safer to get the detailed bill and shred it each month, then not have it if you need it. If they offered a summary bill with the option to get detailed or simplified, that would be great. But if you want info, you need to get EVERYTHING.
The biggest trick would be to start building new nuclear plants that have built in breeder reactors "next door" or equivalent. The problem in the Carter era was that the nuclear plants were built (not many more by then, none since, or early 80s, but its been a while), so the talk was building new breeder reactors...
In the 1970s, that meant, A) alienating his base that thinks nuclear=bad, no new plants. B) locating the new plants, relatively far from old ones because of NIMBY, and C) transporting the spent fuel rods to the new plant on trucks.
The net effect was that you had weapons grade nuclear fuel traveling around on trucks. If someone hijacked a truck, they could get material for making a crude bomb.
One of Bush's efforts was to get us back in building nuclear plants. Similarly to the wireline/wireless situation, the US's early technology advantage in capital intensive areas meant that later adopters were able to leap frog our technology, because the incumbent players have these massive infrastructures that are "free" for them to use (sunk costs).
However, a new two-stage nuclear plant would be the way to go. The trick is, we are so at capacity you can't take the old plants down for 3-5 years while you build a new one, and it's going to be next to impossible to get people to let you place new ones anywhere near civilization. There are a LOT of changes in the energy industry right now, breeder reactors will probably play a role, but the renewable areas are really neat. My house's roof is getting due for replacement, and looking into the solar roof tile options... neat stuff... not a huge premium over concrete tiles (because concrete prices have exploded and solar is coming down)... eventually, all new roofs will be solar, which would give us renewable energy sources without the downsides... the "land" is free, because I need a roof anyway, no land to buy and zone... just the panels and the system.
High energy prices will do more to get us off fossil fuels than all the do-gooder ideas in the world... especially when the do-gooders suggest we change our lifestyle and get accompanied to an inferior lifestyle... we don't want sacrifice, we want solutions.
In the dark ages, it was decided that too many people were wrongly convicted, so the only want to punish people was if they confessed. This seems like a good idea, but the implementation was such that people were tortured to extract confessions... However, everyone punished had confessed.
Now, we make the series of laws increasing complex, so anyone can be convicted of 5-10 things, each carrying 1+ year as a sentence. Net effect, if the cops think that they have evidence that you committed a petty crime (carrying a 2-4 year sentence), but are concerned that they can't prove it beyond a reasonable doubt, no big deal. The prosecutor piles on 5-15 charges, so that if convicted, you'd fact 25-50 years in prison, but offers you a "deal" of 1 year in prison to "plead guilty."
Net effect? Cases never go to trial, and everyone confesses... we've traded our right to a jury trial to our ability to "negotiate" a deal with the prosecutor... The alledged perp might go to court to fight a 2-4 year sentence, but if the choice is sign for 1 year, or fight and risk 50 years... well, everyone takes the plea bargain and "gets off easy."
.....iTunes is not a reason to stay on Mac/Windows.....
iTunes was a BIG part of why I bought a Mac... My wife (not at the time) got an iBook for her senior year of school. She was taking mostly music classes, and previously was spending hours in the music library listening to the CDs there for class. She got an iBook, and the wireless worked flawless, and she could go into the library, grab the CDs, pop them in the computer, and auto-magically they were on her laptop in a few minutes. I got her one of the first iPods (when the wheel spun) as a gift, and she loved it. During the commute to class on the subway, she did her listening. It made her a HUGE Mac fan.
At the time, my work involved SSH'ing into Linux servers and editing in emacs. When it was time to replace my dying Compaq Laptop, I bought a Powerbook, in large part because of iTunes. I listened to music all day, and I had always used WinAMP and directories to manage my music. EVERY jukebox program that I had used sucked donkey balls, and hated them. I LIKED iTunes, it was simple, it was clean, it was elegant. Since my work computer needed to be a laptop for remote access, needed to run an SSH program (at the time, SecureCRT), and play music, the Powerbook was a reasonable option.
I since then have slowly fell in love with all the neat things that I can do so easily on the Mac.
Sure, I could do them all on a PC, but managing my digital media is so simple, I actually do it. We take pictures of the kid, plug the camera in, and iPhoto loads up and imports the pictures. Pick the ones I like, make an Album, and hit Export, and the pictures upload to Shutterfly and Facebook (people made free plug-ins for iPhoto). Wanted to send my grandmother a book of her first visit with her first great grandchild? Dragged some pictures in, hit "buy book" and it showed up at her house a week or so later.
All these things are COMPLETELY doable on the PC. But on the Mac, it's so painless, it's fun.
So much free or inexpensive amazing software. OmniGraffle is NOT NEARLY as powerful as Visio, but it's SO MUCH FASTER to use, it's really pleasant. I downloaded a few stencils for things that I diagram constantly, and away we go. BBEdit is an awesome text editor, and the built-in SCP/SFTP access is much smoother than anything I used on Windows.
Don't get me wrong, the Linux desktops offer some amazing power user features... but the Mac's aren't bad either. Tiger added a lot of polish and cleaned up some things that were missing (WebDAV not supporting SSL or Kerberos, etc.), and each release gets better and better.
Do I pay a price premium? Absolutely, because when I buy my Mac I buy a more functional machine than I would on the Windows side... but guess what, all those Firewire ports that I wouldn't have on a Windows machine... plus the camcorder in and suck out the videos PAINLESSLY. iLike is just plain fun. I've done a LOT of things on my Mac that I wouldn't have thought possible. Recorded someone's voice with a pitch, and we decided to put a slideshow in front of them. Built the slides, timed the transitions to match, exported to Quicktime, copied over the audio, and re-exported... no muss or fuss... didn't need to outsource it to a video guy, just got it up and running. Decided that we didn't want it in Quicktime, wanted it in Flash, bought a quick Quicktime -> Flash Exporter, quickly re-exported the files and uploaded them to the server.
None of these tasks would be impossible to accomplish on Windows or Linux with the right software, but on the Mac, it was all really easy, and the computer never got in my way. I plug a USB device in, and it works almost instantaneously. My Windows machines seem to want to pop up bubbles to chat with me about how they found a USB device and are figuring it out. I don't really care, do you know what it is or not? I ignore my Mac, it's in the background, and I focus on the application/task. The Windows machine always wan
Market capitalization is "trading price" * shares outstanding. However, only a small percentage of shares might be traded.
Hypothetical company Acme Web company. It has 10m shares outstanding, 7m of which are held by insiders, etc. If the shares are trading at $20, the company is worth $200m. Shareholders have "$200m" in wealth on paper. If the 30k shares that are trading each day get hot, maybe the price goes to $25... making the company worth $250m... but only 1000 shares traded hands at $25... it's all theoretical.
If the company tanks, and sells in liquidation for $1/share, the company is worth $10m. In that case, $240m in "value" was lost. But wasn't it sold on the way down? Probably not, 7m of the shares are still held by insiders, and most of the other 3m didn't sell as well. Only a small percentage of shares are bought and sold.
The reality is, if the shares were all being sold rapidly to "get that value" then the price would crater. The stock price is ONLY maintainable at current levels if the shares floating in the market is relatively stable.
It isn't like all the shares are changing hands... When GM's stock is quoted, it's often for a trade of 100 or 500 shares... valuing all of GM based on that small trade. GM has 586m shares outstanding, 22m of which are trading at any given day. The other 564m shares are based upon the trades of those 22m shares... if those 564m shares came on the market tomorrow looking to sell, they couldn't collect $32.73/share.
During the dot-com era, you couldn't raise a dime for anything not web based. Trying to fund a more traditional IT business (was shopping a Linux based office business plan, that a few years later would have been hot) was impossible. Even friends and family money was impossible, because with the bubble in the market, people were getting 30%+/year in returns in the market, why risk anything on a real company.
Also, remember tech salaries. The dot-com's were flush with cash and raided everyone else. Salaries either had to explode in tech, or companies were robbed of their talent. That made IT much more expensive to maintain.
The artificial bubble had HUGE ripple effects, because the artificial influx of cash was warping all sorts of other markets.
Depends on the accounts you are aiming for. If you want to compete for government contracts that specify Unix, than yes, it is worth it. However, the amount of the revenue for the Linux software is kind of trivial. All the Unix vendors have traditionally sold the Unix workstations... hardware and software. It's high margin business, because the barriers to entry are high.
Microsoft has a POSIX subsystem... it's never really been useful, but for bidding on projects where one of the requirements is POSIX compatibility, it served it's purpose. Microsoft couldn't sell NT as a Unix system, but it could compete if the specifications were more vague and called for POSIX compatibility, because NT had it.
Is Ubuntu going to fight for those accounts? Is it worth it without the hardware bundle? The most likely scenario would be if a company like Dell wanted to compete in the workstation market, where they could create a Dell Linux, get it certified Unix on their workstations, and sell into the Workstation market. My guess is that none of the PC Makers want to alienate Microsoft by creating a Linux-based Workstation, and none of the Linux vendors want to get into the hardware business.
I never understood why Penguin Computing or any of the other Linux-hardware guys tried this approach... but selling into specified contracts doesn't mean throwing up a website, it means a sales force focused on that channel, and I don't know if they had the capital to set up the team to get it to market.
Myth on the backend is impressive and wonderful, offers all the media serving goodness that we could want. But as a UI for the family, the front-end blows.
AppleTV is an impressive v1.0 front end for media serving, and iTunes + QuickTime CAN serve up whatever you want. However, limited Codec's on AppleTV's part is a limiting factor.
Fix the codec problem, and get your shows into iTunes, or reverse-engineer the protocol so that MythTV can share out as an iTunes server, and you have a great solution for media serving.
Apple won't solve your problems entirely, they are tied into the media companies. But with Codec's fixed, the ability to record shows OTA or off cable, plus buy the episode or two you miss (or if you get into a show a few weeks in) makes a great option.
Hell, if Apple got the real content deals, I'd ditch Cable/Satellite, record my shows OTA in HD from the networks, and happily spend $50/month with Apple on shows...
What you are describing is Keynesian Economics. To my knowledge (IANAEconomist), the Keynesian theory has no explanation for the Panamanian economy.
Their currency is completely market driven, has no Central Bank, and the government cannot print fiat currency. Their currency must be backed by "hard" goods or services, purchased at prices tied to the USD. This has led to an extremely stable economy, which hasn't suffered a major financial collapse since their independence in 1904.
I gave a basic Macro Econ 101 rundown. I think that the US faced unique economic situations. In the case of Panama, you mention that they have no central bank, no fiat currency, and everything is purchases at priced tied to the USD.
They don't have a "currency" economically, they have a pegged currency. The tying to the dollar essentially ties them to the Fed for policy matters. For most Central and South American emerging markets, that's a good thing, as any benefit they would get from a local reserve bank is made up for by the fact that the BIGGEST problem in the US economically is 1%-2% GDP swings, while the BIGGEST problem in emerging markets is systematic corruption.
Emerging markets are inherently higher growth, for many reasons. Technology gets paid for by developed markets, and then trickles down to emerging markets. Same things with business practices. They get everything a bit older very cheaply, combined with a cheaper rate of labor, they can get a better return on their capital. Buying P2 computers wouldn't help American businesses compete, but would help a small business using a paper ledger in an emerging market. When the Pentium computers were rolling out in the US, dirt cheap 80386 machines were giving the emerging market its first efforts at automating many tasks.
To maintain the American style of living, we eek out incremental benefits. If you were moving from a ledger system -> computerized accounting on a 386 -> a reasonable system on a Pentium II -> modern system, you probably get most of the benefit 60% for automation one, another 30% at step to, and the last 10% with step three. That's why emerging markets can excel, the base is so small.
Countries tied to the US in the Americas benefit more by tying their currency to the greenback than doing it on their own. It keeps corruption out. Panama avoids collapse because corruption causes most of the collapses.
1. Satellite is competing with entrenched monopolies... exclusive content (previously the hundreds of digital channels not available until digital cable came out) is HOW they compete. 2. DirecTV CREATED the out-of-market option to buy the games, because they were a nationwide distributor that needs to use expensive satellites and receivers to compete with a city granted monopoly. These packages were created exclusively for them, but when the contracts ran out, they only renewed one exclusively, because everyone else wanted a fortune for the exclusive deal. 3. You CAN buy Sunday Ticket (the NFL Package) from DirecTV WITHOUT getting DirecTV, you only pay for Sunday Ticket... I assume that it how the NFL agreed to let it stay exclusive. During the football run-up, they often offer 3-4 months of free service if you get Sunday Ticket... that way, nobody thinks to get Sunday Ticket only, and DirecTV gets the subscribers. 4. Without differentiation, the companies are perfectly competitive and prices plummet... good for consumers, not good for investors putting up the money for expensive satellites. Companies need a way to differentiate themselves. 5. The owner of the pipes isn't dictating, they are paying content providers. The content providers find out if they can make more money selling to everyone, or selling exclusively through one source.
Now, when the local television station, the team owner, and the local cable monopoly are the same, you can show an example of a monopoly... They are using one monopoly (the only legal MLB team in the market) to protect another market (cable subscribers) by exclusive deals for the television channel... that's arguably a trust problem, but DirecTV and the NFL, that is an arm's length transaction, settled in the marketplace.
If inflation is 0% (stable pricing), then I am indifferent between buying something now or in a year, as my money is worth the same. If there is a small amount of deflation, I have an incentive to sit on my money, because it will be worth more in a year... If I get 2% by putting it in my coffee can, why not wait when things are cheaper. With small inflation (2%-4%), there is a reason to spend now (money becomes worth less in a year).
Basically, small inflation forces people to either spend their money, or save it in interest returning investments, or invest it... you can't sit on it. Small deflation causes people to sit on their money. If you look at the cyclical nature of the computer industry, the fact that the computer industry is deflationary has caused all those hiccups. For consumer goods, the built up supply chains of distribution work fine... doesn't matter if it takes 3-4 weeks to get the shampoo from the factory to the store to your home, nobody loses money... recently companies have gotten so good at just-in-time manufacturing, that they decided to worry about this, NOT because of deflation and collecting less money at the end, but because the finance department realized that the "inventory" that they are shipping around uses working capital (if I carry $20m in inventory, that is $20m that I am either borrowing or not investing, so there is a "cost" of the inventory). However, in the computer industry, Dell was the first to move to just-in-time, and decimated everyone... not because of carrying costs which are small, but computers deflate at 2% a month or so, so if it took two months to get the product there, they lost 4% of the value in the channel.
Basically, small inflation is devastating, because it means that the "real" risk free rate is negative. If expected inflation is 3%, and people expect a 2% rate of return for 0-risk, then the nominal interest rate for treasury bills is 5%. If inflation rises to 4%, then the interest rate foes to 6%, with no major change. If instead we get 3% deflation, then the "interest rate" SHOULD become -1% (-3% deflation + 2% required rate of return = -1%)... Now, who would buy a bond for -1%? Instead the money sits in the mattress. As a result, you might see an interest rate of 1% or 2%, but that means that the real interest rate is 4%.
A higher real interest rate means that people require a higher return for "risk," which means that bond yields go up (making it more expensive for companies to borrow money, which means that they don't invest as much in growth. It means that stock prices go down, because stock price today = NPV(future returns), and the higher the interest rate, the lower the NPV.
Basically, deflation => higher REAL interest rates => slower economic growth, plus deflation => lower expenditures while people hoard cash => slower economic growth. Deflation is VERY bad. Look at Japan's long recession, they couldn't get out of the cycle, because once you lower the interest rates to 0%, there is nowhere to go. When the US economy went into recession, the Fed was able to lower rates from 5.25% to 1%, which sped up the economy. The reason they moved it up so fast, they were scared that if another attack happened or something else slowed the economy, they had nowhere to move, they COULDN'T lower interest rates more, which meant severe recession or depression to fix things.
The Fed's ability to affect rates lets them tweak the economy. The tweaking works fine in normal conditions (moving between 3% and 5% GDP growth is manageable, once you get outside that range, the interest rate can't control it). The American people like to know that each year they will generally be a little better off. In the late 90s, you had red hot growth, which everyone enjoyed, but when the economy slowed to absorb those gains, people decided that a mild recession was a severe depression.
Look at the housing market, people expected 4%-5% growth, inflation + 1%, and while they enjoyed the 10%-20% growth while it lasted, it forced people into doing stupid moves to get ahead of the game... Now prices drop 2%-4% in a year, a minor fluctuation, and people are talking about a market collapse.
Going a step further, those "words" aren't words in any language.
The formal words are mother and father, though mommy and daddy seem a reasonable informal way of saying my mother and my father. Mom and Dad are derived from the informal. However, kids master the ma and da syllables quickly, so doubling it up and calling it a word makes it easy.
A friend relayed a story to me... someone asked him why his child called him Abba, which he said was the Hebrew word for daddy. The person protested, "but that's the first noise children make." He smiled back, "I know, and that's why we made it the word for daddy." Evolutionarily, this makes sense, mastering dada before mama makes sense as well... mothers are MUCH more wired for unconditional love than fathers, because of the hormonal bonding from delivery and nursing (those that don't do those steps don't get the hormone dump helping them, doesn't affect their being good mothers, but probably makes it rougher on them)...
Each language has a "simplified" informal and a baby equivalent. Hebrew: Father = Av, Mother = Em, My Father = Abi, My Mother = Imi, yet the informal is Abba and Ima, which officially are tied to Aramaic, but probably evolved as simplified forms for children. Like mama and dada, papa, etc.
It would serve a TREMENDOUS biological edge two quickly master words for parents, and therefore a selected characteristic. It's amazing how not upset you get with a terror of a child when they call out your "name."
Well, first off, congratulations on your first child. Having a now almost one year old (birthday next week), that started "talking" in useful words at 9 months, I think that you're not understanding what baby talk is. The first noise that our son made was "un-gah" but it wasn't talking, it was from day one and was his "I'm hungry" noise. Later he developed a "I'm dirty" grunt. At a few months of age, he was able to say "eh" pretty reliable, and was quite pleased with himself when he added "eeh" and "oh." We never talked in baby talk, but the baby has to first master the syllables.
Those of us that always talk to our children seem to have them mastering language a bit, but you can't skip the baby talk all together. Regardless of what you do, your child isn't going to go straight to full communication without mastering vowels.
Every analyst figured out that MP3-player Cel Phones were a threat to the iPod, obviously Apple knew that as well. The iPhone no doubt started simply as an iPod/Phone combo, and some basic Internet features probably evolved into the beautiful little device that you see now.
There negotiations with Cingular/AT&T probably focused on getting iTunes activation, and AT&T focused on controlling the feature set.. The first phone I had with an AIM client was back in 2001, it's not a rare feature, but Apple probably yielded on iChat because AT&T was yielding on WiFi and didn't want people to avoid paying SMS fees.
I think that Apple wanted to move product first, then aim for smartphone competition. If they move millions, then Apple, not AT&T, has the power in a renegotiation. Apple wanted to get the iPod-Phone out there and prove demand, then they can go after the pocket computer market.
Hitler and his cohorts were not ordering the murdering millions of Jews to force subservience out of conquered populations, or to destroy political rivalries.
Precisely, and this is what I pointed out: what, inherently, makes Hitler's killing worse than Stalin's? Why do you believe that killing a particular ethnic group is more heinous than killing political prisoners? Stalin created his own institutionalized machine, he was just remarkably less adept at keeping records than Hitler. Why does Hitler's professionalism somehow make his acts worse? Why are we conditioned to believe that some types of slaughter are worse than others? It's an absurd and insulting statement.
Because it challenges the assumptions of the west. Tyrant comes into office and kills his enemies is of the dog-bites-man variety. Every tyrant did it. Stalin happened to grab a large country so he killed a lot of people. On a moral plane, it's just as bad at Hitler, killing people is bad. However, it's the same reason people get on Israel's case for shelling Palestinian terrorist holed up in civilian areas and causing collateral damage, but nobody said anything when Lebanon did it a few weeks ago. Enlightened civilizations are NOT SUPPOSED to kill civilians, petty third world tyrants are EXPECTED to act like tyrants.
In Germany, the Jews were largely assimilated. In their modern western society, Jews were treated as Germans whose religion was Judaism, no different than Germans whose religion was Catholicism of Lutheranism. What stuns the west TO THIS DAY is how an enlightened country of "one of them" could pull out a segment of their society, call them "other" and get everyone to persecute them. When Saddam Hussein gassed the Kurds, it wasn't unusual, dictators DO THAT ALL THE TIME. If France went and gassed a Muslim suburb, the world would be outraged. It wouldn't make France's behavior morally worse on an absolute scale, but it would be more newsworthy and attention grabbing.
Further, my great-grandfather's service to the Kaiser during "The Great War" and his member of the social elite as a business owner didn't change the fact that to the Nazis, he was a Jew. That is what stuns the world, the someone would go through their own culture, pull out a segment that nobody recognized, and designate them. Further, the Nazis further justified their attempt to capture the world as a way of wiping out the Jews. Plenty of would-be dictators tried to take over the world, that's pretty normal. Plenty of people tried to wipe out the Jews in their midsts. It's the fact that he tried to take over the world TO KILL THE JEWS that stuns people. The fact that when his army needed trains to move troops around to try to capture the world, and his SS needed trains to wipe out the Jews in an area, he would favor the later. He would give up territory solely to kill more Jews.
The US sent Indians to Oklahoma because it wanted their land. Many died. The US wasn't TRYING to kill Indians, it was trying to steal land, we understand that. What people don't understand is how he rounded up the Jews and put them in work camps as slaves, and still wanted to kill them. The systematic destruction stuns people. In most cases, people have been killed as people pursue rational goals (albeit immorally), this was unique in that nobody understood it. The Spanish Inquisition was launched to steal Jewish property, they were happy to let the Jews leave and take their stuff. The Germans wanted to kill them MORE than wanted to take their stuff, that's what is SO disturbing.
There is also the historical aspect of the Holocaust; of over a thousand years of abuse of Jews, of countless demagogues calling for violence and even murder against Jews, against the entire culture of Christendom having in its foundation a hatred of the Jews. Stalin's madness is more an outgrowth of the French Revolution, of men who believed that sacrifices o
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Jewish law doesn't marginalize women. It holds women up as the spiritual core of the people, and elevates their primary responsibilities in the home to a level of holiness. While from a Western job-oriented mindset, people may see it as marginalized, the three core activities of an observant Jewish home, Shabbat, Kashrut, and Family Purity are commandments that fall primarily on the women. The woman takes priority over her husband regarding Shabbat candles, is primarily responsible for maintaining a Kosher home, and maintaining Family Purity. The "male" responsibilities are to provide income for his family, engage in Torah learning and teach Torah to his children, and participate in public prayer. Those "male" responsibilities are just as important (and seen my non-Jews and non-practicing Jews), but less holy and critical to the family.
Most of the anti-female views in Judeo-Christian beliefs aren't supported by the Bible, they are Roman/Greek customs and things that the early Church picked up when it merged with the Roman Empire. Did the Romans hate women? Well, considering that Roman/Greek societies placed the highest form of love as the love between a man and a young boy...
It was the Romans who decided that sex between a man and a woman was a necessary evil for procreation. This got into the Christian Bible by way of bizarre interpretation. It also slipped into Judaism a bit during the Talmudic era, when Judea was an occupied Roman Province.
If you look at the Biblical basis for marriage, it does nothing to prohibit sexual desires on either party. The only thing that is does is require that if a man lie with a woman, he make her his wife. This means that a man can only lie with as many women as he can support, so it somewhat limits male sexual expression. And pre-birth control combined with the timing effects of Family Purity laws, sex had a decent likelihood of resulting in child bearing. So forcing a man to support the woman he lies with can hardly be seen as sexist in an objective sense.
Most of the ancient tribal customs that remain in some form in traditional Judaism (wrapped in a complex Rabbinic layer) and the Church (wrapped in a Roman layer) only seem sexist looking at them backwards. We redefined the concept of gender relations in the last 100 years, and then call the old way sexist. However, if you look at the Biblical laws as applied to twelve wandering tribes in Egypt going through Arabia and into Canaan, they are extremely progressive. If you look at the restrictions added during the Talmudic era, they are extremely progressive. And if you compare their adaptation by the Church to Roman society, a society that used to encourage the men to ignore their women except to produce heirs, encouraged them to have mistresses to produce more off-spring which they could CHOOSE to legitimize or not (but the mistress got no support, while additional wives in Judaism (banned for over 1000 years now in Western Judaism) AND concubines each had levels of support, and the concubine could choose to end the relationship with no strings), the religious basis of gender relations was PRO-woman.
You can't look from a 21st century view of gender relations and look at Church law and call it backwards. Church law started as a response to the Roman hedonistic culture, that wrapped it's orgies (gay and straight) in a religious veneer. The Church later dealt with gender relations in feudal Europe, where the nobles were marrying and producing legit heirs (with some on the side), and the peasants where gender relations were somewhere between permitted rape and modern dating, and brought marriage out of common law and into general practice.
Religious marriage laws may not have been "equal" in a 21st Century sense, but they were all designed to protect women who were being used by men that were stronger than them, and had no protection under pre-Christian European customs. Those that see female promiscuity (in an era of The Pill) as liberation for women may see the obsession
An old friend of mine used to quote his grandmother (immigrant from Russia) who used to say,
"The best government in the world is a good Tsar,
The worst government in the world is a bad Tsar."
I think that the other relevant quote was something about Democracy being the worst form of government except for everything else that we tried.
Democracy keeps the best leaders out for trivial reasons, but generally keeps really bad people out.
For all people are howling about Bush (and Putin for that matter), if you compare them to truly awful despots, they look good.
Democracy consistently gets us leaders in the 60%-90% range... Monarchies and dictatorships often get you a random distributions.
As a coder, your job is to take technical requirements and turn them into code that meets those requirements. Those analytical skills will directly translate into management, but a bit of rethinking is required. Instead of needing to make the compiler produce the results you are looking for, you need to make the people produce them.
As far as retraining, see what Universities near you offer evening or weekend executive MBA programs. Unlike the Day programs that are geared for teaching management consultant grunts to be better management consultant grunts, the executive ones offer a lot of things for mid-level people that are actually in management. In an exec MBA program, you should cover Leadership, Financial Accounting, Managerial Accounting, plus basics in other areas like marketing and finance. An MBA, particularly in an executive format that has fewer elective options, tends to focus on "general management," it's like a liberal arts degree, it isn't specialized, but it designed to give you an overview. You won't become the company's expert on accounting or marketing, but you'll understand the jargon and big picture, so you won't be blown away when doing budgets, etc.
Subscribe to the Wall Street Journal, print or online, and try to read it a few days/week. This was what a friend with a technical background that got a job at McKinsey said she did to catch up on business jargon fast. A few weeks/months, and you'll find yourself less lost in business jargon, because you'll be reading things in the current jargon in context.
Some basic tips:
1. Your primary responsibility is to keep "the suits" from interfering with your team. If you have filled your team with good people, they'll get the job done, but if you let the top people meddle in your team, you will fail.
2. Understand boundaries with your staff... you have to balance a line between being "one of the guys" and being the "boss". Err too much on the former and you won't have the respect necessary to make the decisions, they won't appreciate that sometimes you have to make decisions that aren't up for debate... Err too much on the latter, and you won't get the honest feedback that you need to make decisions.
3. Use meetings regularly, usefully, and short. Long meetings annoy people, but you need some meeting time to keep everyone on the same page. Do NOT become the information funnel to avoid meetings. You need to know everything, but not be responsible for relaying messages. It's not the 1950s where everyone's secretary types memos to send up the chain or down the chain.
4. Build cross-functional teams wherever possible. Setting up a monthly meeting with your technical lead, someone from marketing, and someone from customer service to go over features, for example. If you meet with other leaders and get your technical people together, decision making will be stronger and you'll do better things for the company. Those that show leadership are more likely to move up the ladder.
5. Know where your time goes and why it is work. It is sometimes frustrating, because as a "code monkey," when you pulled an 80 hour week, you know what you did. You have some functions/classes/bug-fixes implemented. As a manager, your primary responsibility is keeping track of what is going on and communicating. This seems trivial to technical people, but is a lot of hard work and get be frustrating. If you spend a solid week in meetings with your team, superiors, and colleagues in other departments, it often feels like you did nothing, but that's your job.
6. Informal meetings are a great way to keep abreast of things, but don't disrupt people. Learn to have task lists. One of the worst senior managers I worked with had a tendency to call people whenever he had a question. I was trying to manage a small team AND do some technical work, and he'd blow my concentration constantly with calls e
Wrong. For my websites, I carefully build normalized databases, triggers and stored procedures to maintain "slow" meta data like counts, quick lookup tables/views for constantly accessed data, etc. Inserting data into the database is always consistent, and stores a lot of info. This is true whether I load it from an Excel spreadsheet, a quick RealBASIC/VB app (you'd be amazed how fast you can throw together quick prototype tools with those languages), a web interface, or any other interface. The problem is that most of the web code out there sucks. It's a steaming mess of Perl and/or PHP code with MySQL calls buried in it. So if I want to create another "interface" to the database I can't, because if I don't keep the "5-10 exact steps done to validate the data," I can get bad data and never know why. I don't need an agreed upon standard for "social-networking," at this point, people that want the "keep up with my friends" info are on Facebook, and the "meet other people with similar interests" use MySpace. Both let you make things available, so who cares.
You're missing my point. My friend uploads 50 pictures a month of her daughter to Shutterfly, that's her photo management, and she can mail us a link. I store all my stuff in iPhoto, managed on my computer, easy to control, and can quickly upload them to Facebook where I show my friends, and Shutterfly for my Inlaws to buy. The why is playing with iWeb, which might give an equally easy way for us to get pictures for them to buy, so who cares.
I haven't done serious photography in years. But for those that do, Flickr, or one of the other tools out there are great. They are all innovative.
The plug-in system works perfectly for integration. If you want to keep your photos in Flickr, you can still display them on your Facebook page, complete with updating the Newsfeed, with a Flickr App for Facebook. That's what's brilliant, anyone that wants to add their functionality to social networking doesn't need to build a platform, it's there.
I think that you haven't played with Facebook's API. It's brilliant what they've done.
The fact is, I can use anybody "website" and webserive if they make a web widget for Facebook.
We're going to be moving away from all these websites with viral marketing and towards web services. We'll all use whatever services we want, and soon have widgets to add to our site. The new iWeb/iLife system is cool. I can shoot the video on my camera, cut down to the scenes I want in iMovie, and quickly export it to Youtube if I want, or export it to a file for upload to Facebook, or generally use whatever Video system I want. I can drag the widgets onto my iWeb site if I want, and have a Youtube video without needing to know any HTML. That's r
Unclear... critics of nativists like to claim that it is opposition to non-white immigrants... but I think that it is an oversimplification. I think that the anger is directed at "Mexicans" and "Indians" but I don't think its racism... I think that it's more about the lack of cultural assimilation. There is anger at growing Spanish language television stations and newspapers, which they see as evidence of them not learning English. I think that the percentage of 1st generation immigrants that never really acclimate is about the same as ever, but with two-three already established wealthy Hispanic immigrants, they noticed the opportunity to market them.
:) The same is true in Texas, California, and the South west.
When my friends complain that people in Miami aren't learning English, I try to politely remind them that Spanish was spoken in La Florida long before English was.
Might as well steal the best and brightest from the rest of the world. There are only 300 million or so Americas. There are 1.2 billion Indians and 1.6 billion Chinese? If you assume that the "brainpower" that powers "intellectual property" driven industries comes from the top 0.1% of people, there are 300,000 Americans, 1.2 million Indians, and 1.6 million Chinese? If we can steal 10% of India and China's "top talent," you're talking another 120,000 Indians and 160,000 Chinese, so another 280,000 to your home grown 300,000?
:) Lumberyards need trees. Intellectual Property industries need brains. Since brains seem to be pretty randomly distributed amongst the 6 or 7 billion people on this planet, I figure we might as well bring them in from elsewhere... I don't work that "foreign oil" is taking "refining space" away from domestic oil. The modern economy is an impressive beast, and it needs all sorts of inputs or it will stall out.
Basically, if you look at demographic charts, distribution of children by education, and assume that education is a rough correlation to brainpower (it's not perfect, but there is probably a decent 60%-75% correlation, and it's the best we have), we're artificially getting lower brain power locally, might as well steal it.
If you need oil, you have to buy it from the Middle East or Venezuela, you can't just complain that American educatators aren't creating oil.
Also, American "science types" tend to excel more in creativity, Asian "science types" more in grinding out and implementing. This has nothing to do with genetic differences, and probably very little to do with culture... In America, we judge people on their economic successes, which tends to reward creativity and risk taking here, so people that take risks tend to do better in America. Most other academic cultures punish failure more than rewarding success. The test-happy European and Asian school systems with series of weed-outs, testing = admissions, and degree=economic success has caused the degree to correlate with risk adverse study-aholics, so that's what you get.
Want to get engineers that will work cheap and grind out the process without much creative thought? You'll find that China and India CRANK them out by the hundreds o
Facebook has made it possible for people to build the applications that people want and tie them into Facebook. A Web 2.0 site could accept log-ins, or allow Facebook users to simply add the application, adding them as users. Conceivably, Myspace will add a similar feature before going bust. The article's author gives a lot of non-sense about developers not wanting to be slaves to facebook, but they have it backwards.
I subscribe to Netflix. I added a Netflix app to Facebook, it let's my friend's see my queue... yawn... It also let's my Facebook friends, if they get Netflix, quickly add me as a Netflix friend (subject to my approval). The Netflix app mirrors some of Netflix's UI, but not everything. I still go to Netflix to manage Queue's and add movies, but I can see what's going on quickly on Facebook.
The problem is that most Web Developers suck. If your data store for your web-app is good, then you can EASILY create a Facebook front end. If your front-end has all your database calls (no stored procedures in the database, not even a DB functions file in Perl/PHP/whatever you coded in), then you see it as "be a Facebook App OR a website."
The promise of HAVi in the AV world was that we would connect our equipment via Firewire, and they would export a front-end in Java that our TV or Receiver would render for us. The data in MPEG-2 with fixed compression caused content producers to go ape-shit, but the idea is valid on the web.
If you want to process information, you need to collect it and do something with it. The days of a "single HTML interface" are now over. You need a mobile version, an iPhone version (possibly, we'll see adoption rates), and now a Facebook version.
I collect my photos in iPhoto on my Mac. I upload them to Facebook via an iPhoto plug-in to show my friends. I upload them to Shutterfly via an Export Plugin (well, did until they haven't supported iPhoto '08 yet), so my extended relatives can buy pictures.
I have other friends that are into photography, they use Flickr. However, there is a Flickr "interface" for Facebook, so their Flickr Albums are viewable on Facebook. Sure, if they have pictures that they want the Facebook features (tag a friend), they need to upload to Facebook, but if they want Flickr sharing (tags, etc.), they upload to Flickr and put it on the Flickr App on Facebook.
Open APIs will let US aggregate OUR data, not have one site steal it from others.
Sony got longer tapes out in the 80s, but in the late 70s, VHS had a 4 hour machine. Sony added the ability to record longer times at reduced quality later.
The Wikipedia article on Betamax has a good run through of the iterations. Basically, Beta recorded 1 hour, a B-II mode 2 hours, B-III 3 hours.
VHS recorded 2 hours out of the gate, Beta recorded 60 or 90 minutes. With a VHS deck, you could record a movie, with a Beta, you could not. Further, VHs has the longer play modes that looked horrible but recorded 4 or 6 hours on a tape.
When tapes were expensive, that made the difference.
But the biggest issue is that for what people wanted, recording 120 minute movies, VHS fit the bill, while Beta did not. The pornography angle is cute, and might have made a difference, but the biggest thing was recording time.
Lesson, uses of the technology trumps quality. Hence SA-CD and DAD-A died on the vine (high quality) was MP3s succeeded (convenient travel).
Novell has shown themselves consistently to try to do the right thing 1) for their customers, 2) for open source in general, and 3) for their shareholders.
They are constantly harassed by not being a "pure" open source company, but they have shown a tremendous dedication to working with the community on their Free Software. Their "deal" with Microsoft was an attempt to offer their customers something unique, the indemnification/license to protect them from Microsoft.
They were attacked, because private citizens felt that nobody should offer that, that's silly. That was Novell working to offer a unique value proposition.
When SCO turned on Linux, they COULD have hung other companies out to dry and claimed that as a unique advantage to Novell. They didn't. They defended the Free Software world against SCO.
I think that Novell has been a remarkably good citizens in short order, and should be given more slack when they announce a program that is good for their customers but isn't hurting the general movement.
If the Novell/MS deal gave Novell an edge than its because Linux IS infringing. If Linux isn't infringing, then their deal was nothing more than my promising not to sue you for using city roads, a meaningless offer. The attacks on them seemed unfair.
The CD medium is in general, "better" than vinyl. When converted back from digital to analog, the CD produces a more reliable sound than vinyl. However, audiophiles insist that vinyl sounds "warmer" or better... and it does... but not because of information on the disc.
Vinyl is a physical medium, and when you master for vinyl, you need to balance the sound or the needle will skip. There are physical restrictions on how you can encode data in vinyl, and that limits the use of the medium.
CDs, storing binary data, will happily store whatever you throw at them. From a technical perspective, that makes it "better," but it also allows crappy mastering.
However, as other posters mentioned, the Loudness War effect has created the problem. Since on first listen, the loudest mix sounds best, and the loudest mix stands out on the radio, in order to get work as mastering engineerings, they have to mix the noise loud. So while the audio on a CD is theoretically 16-bits, by cranking all the sources up, you ignore all the quieter capabilities that add depth.
This essentially means that while vinyl tracks were mixed across a wide range (a requirement of the medium), the CDs that are produced normally compress the audio into a small range. This loses the details, but sounds "better" when aiming for catchy tunes on the radio.
So when people say that vinyl sounds better, they are correct. If a track is being released on CD and vinyl, it will often be mastered separately for each medium. While the CD will produce the studio's "desired" loud version exactly, the vinyl version may be mastered with a more dynamic range.
MP3 is criticized for ditching these details, because it is lossy in terms of ditching the sounds that you "don't hear." Well, one of the reasons that people can't tell in an A/B comparison... there ARE no details. The details of the recording was already destroyed in the mastering engineer's Pro Tools setup when they compressed the sound and made it "loud."
The music industry has made ZERO effort to product dynamic audio projects. SA-CD and DVD-A offered the increased capacity to product detailed tracks that could still sound "loud," as well as create a product that would be MUCH better than MP3 could offer. But instead, they tried to raise prices on CDs to $18 and price the SA-CD/DVD-A versions at $25 or $30. Had they adopted SA-CD and produced all hybrid CDs at the same price point as CDs were selling at before, they might have gotten an adoption of SA-CD... If they had ignored Napster (1997 was their peak sales, and the year they shut Napster down, post-Napster their sales have never recovered) and encouraged people to keep trading low quality MP3s while selling SA-CD with CD versions for compatibility, SA-CD might have taken off.
Look at the movie industry... while they are concerned about piracy and have engineered all sorts of options to protect them (down-resing analog, etc.) if the future works out one way, they are doing HiDef transfers for the movie stations, have embraced HD reasonably well, and are releasing their content on HD-DVD and BluRay... The better quality they offer, the more inferior getting compressed files off Torrents seem.
The home theatre is becoming increasingly common in upper middle class homes... The fact that the music industry hasn't been able to capitalize on this is pathetic... SA-CD and DVD-A BOTH offered 5-channel options.... but the studios wanted to "prevent piracy" so required people to use 7 audio cables to connect instead of a digital format, and dragged their heals on a digital path to the receiver. They didn't want hybrid discs in the belief that they would make more money selling each disc twice... etc., etc.
They shot themselves in the foot.
If I get a big phone bill, I want the detailed bill to figure out why. With T-mobile Fav5, I want to track who gets calls, to update the 5 if necessary. However, I don't want a whole bunch of "data 0" lines. The problem that I had with Cingular is that I couldn't ever figure out WHY my bills were really high, because I'd have to go through 50 pages of garbage looking for it.
The data dump of the detailed billing obscures what you want, which is charges.
What people WANT is a summary, X minutes in calls to number Y, to understand charges. Instead, we get dumped with a tree's worth of detail of 0.00 charges.
You are correct, you can get detailed billing turned off, but then you get no information. It's normally safer to get the detailed bill and shred it each month, then not have it if you need it. If they offered a summary bill with the option to get detailed or simplified, that would be great. But if you want info, you need to get EVERYTHING.
Alex
The biggest trick would be to start building new nuclear plants that have built in breeder reactors "next door" or equivalent. The problem in the Carter era was that the nuclear plants were built (not many more by then, none since, or early 80s, but its been a while), so the talk was building new breeder reactors...
In the 1970s, that meant, A) alienating his base that thinks nuclear=bad, no new plants. B) locating the new plants, relatively far from old ones because of NIMBY, and C) transporting the spent fuel rods to the new plant on trucks.
The net effect was that you had weapons grade nuclear fuel traveling around on trucks. If someone hijacked a truck, they could get material for making a crude bomb.
One of Bush's efforts was to get us back in building nuclear plants. Similarly to the wireline/wireless situation, the US's early technology advantage in capital intensive areas meant that later adopters were able to leap frog our technology, because the incumbent players have these massive infrastructures that are "free" for them to use (sunk costs).
However, a new two-stage nuclear plant would be the way to go. The trick is, we are so at capacity you can't take the old plants down for 3-5 years while you build a new one, and it's going to be next to impossible to get people to let you place new ones anywhere near civilization. There are a LOT of changes in the energy industry right now, breeder reactors will probably play a role, but the renewable areas are really neat. My house's roof is getting due for replacement, and looking into the solar roof tile options... neat stuff... not a huge premium over concrete tiles (because concrete prices have exploded and solar is coming down)... eventually, all new roofs will be solar, which would give us renewable energy sources without the downsides... the "land" is free, because I need a roof anyway, no land to buy and zone... just the panels and the system.
High energy prices will do more to get us off fossil fuels than all the do-gooder ideas in the world... especially when the do-gooders suggest we change our lifestyle and get accompanied to an inferior lifestyle... we don't want sacrifice, we want solutions.
In the dark ages, it was decided that too many people were wrongly convicted, so the only want to punish people was if they confessed. This seems like a good idea, but the implementation was such that people were tortured to extract confessions... However, everyone punished had confessed.
Now, we make the series of laws increasing complex, so anyone can be convicted of 5-10 things, each carrying 1+ year as a sentence. Net effect, if the cops think that they have evidence that you committed a petty crime (carrying a 2-4 year sentence), but are concerned that they can't prove it beyond a reasonable doubt, no big deal. The prosecutor piles on 5-15 charges, so that if convicted, you'd fact 25-50 years in prison, but offers you a "deal" of 1 year in prison to "plead guilty."
Net effect? Cases never go to trial, and everyone confesses... we've traded our right to a jury trial to our ability to "negotiate" a deal with the prosecutor... The alledged perp might go to court to fight a 2-4 year sentence, but if the choice is sign for 1 year, or fight and risk 50 years... well, everyone takes the plea bargain and "gets off easy."
iTunes was a BIG part of why I bought a Mac... My wife (not at the time) got an iBook for her senior year of school. She was taking mostly music classes, and previously was spending hours in the music library listening to the CDs there for class. She got an iBook, and the wireless worked flawless, and she could go into the library, grab the CDs, pop them in the computer, and auto-magically they were on her laptop in a few minutes. I got her one of the first iPods (when the wheel spun) as a gift, and she loved it. During the commute to class on the subway, she did her listening. It made her a HUGE Mac fan.
At the time, my work involved SSH'ing into Linux servers and editing in emacs. When it was time to replace my dying Compaq Laptop, I bought a Powerbook, in large part because of iTunes. I listened to music all day, and I had always used WinAMP and directories to manage my music. EVERY jukebox program that I had used sucked donkey balls, and hated them. I LIKED iTunes, it was simple, it was clean, it was elegant. Since my work computer needed to be a laptop for remote access, needed to run an SSH program (at the time, SecureCRT), and play music, the Powerbook was a reasonable option.
I since then have slowly fell in love with all the neat things that I can do so easily on the Mac.
Sure, I could do them all on a PC, but managing my digital media is so simple, I actually do it. We take pictures of the kid, plug the camera in, and iPhoto loads up and imports the pictures. Pick the ones I like, make an Album, and hit Export, and the pictures upload to Shutterfly and Facebook (people made free plug-ins for iPhoto). Wanted to send my grandmother a book of her first visit with her first great grandchild? Dragged some pictures in, hit "buy book" and it showed up at her house a week or so later.
All these things are COMPLETELY doable on the PC. But on the Mac, it's so painless, it's fun.
So much free or inexpensive amazing software. OmniGraffle is NOT NEARLY as powerful as Visio, but it's SO MUCH FASTER to use, it's really pleasant. I downloaded a few stencils for things that I diagram constantly, and away we go. BBEdit is an awesome text editor, and the built-in SCP/SFTP access is much smoother than anything I used on Windows.
Don't get me wrong, the Linux desktops offer some amazing power user features... but the Mac's aren't bad either. Tiger added a lot of polish and cleaned up some things that were missing (WebDAV not supporting SSL or Kerberos, etc.), and each release gets better and better.
Do I pay a price premium? Absolutely, because when I buy my Mac I buy a more functional machine than I would on the Windows side... but guess what, all those Firewire ports that I wouldn't have on a Windows machine... plus the camcorder in and suck out the videos PAINLESSLY. iLike is just plain fun. I've done a LOT of things on my Mac that I wouldn't have thought possible. Recorded someone's voice with a pitch, and we decided to put a slideshow in front of them. Built the slides, timed the transitions to match, exported to Quicktime, copied over the audio, and re-exported... no muss or fuss... didn't need to outsource it to a video guy, just got it up and running. Decided that we didn't want it in Quicktime, wanted it in Flash, bought a quick Quicktime -> Flash Exporter, quickly re-exported the files and uploaded them to the server.
None of these tasks would be impossible to accomplish on Windows or Linux with the right software, but on the Mac, it was all really easy, and the computer never got in my way. I plug a USB device in, and it works almost instantaneously. My Windows machines seem to want to pop up bubbles to chat with me about how they found a USB device and are figuring it out. I don't really care, do you know what it is or not? I ignore my Mac, it's in the background, and I focus on the application/task. The Windows machine always wan
Market capitalization is "trading price" * shares outstanding. However, only a small percentage of shares might be traded.
Hypothetical company Acme Web company. It has 10m shares outstanding, 7m of which are held by insiders, etc. If the shares are trading at $20, the company is worth $200m. Shareholders have "$200m" in wealth on paper. If the 30k shares that are trading each day get hot, maybe the price goes to $25... making the company worth $250m... but only 1000 shares traded hands at $25... it's all theoretical.
If the company tanks, and sells in liquidation for $1/share, the company is worth $10m. In that case, $240m in "value" was lost. But wasn't it sold on the way down? Probably not, 7m of the shares are still held by insiders, and most of the other 3m didn't sell as well. Only a small percentage of shares are bought and sold.
The reality is, if the shares were all being sold rapidly to "get that value" then the price would crater. The stock price is ONLY maintainable at current levels if the shares floating in the market is relatively stable.
It isn't like all the shares are changing hands... When GM's stock is quoted, it's often for a trade of 100 or 500 shares... valuing all of GM based on that small trade. GM has 586m shares outstanding, 22m of which are trading at any given day. The other 564m shares are based upon the trades of those 22m shares... if those 564m shares came on the market tomorrow looking to sell, they couldn't collect $32.73/share.
During the dot-com era, you couldn't raise a dime for anything not web based. Trying to fund a more traditional IT business (was shopping a Linux based office business plan, that a few years later would have been hot) was impossible. Even friends and family money was impossible, because with the bubble in the market, people were getting 30%+/year in returns in the market, why risk anything on a real company.
Also, remember tech salaries. The dot-com's were flush with cash and raided everyone else. Salaries either had to explode in tech, or companies were robbed of their talent. That made IT much more expensive to maintain.
The artificial bubble had HUGE ripple effects, because the artificial influx of cash was warping all sorts of other markets.
Depends on the accounts you are aiming for. If you want to compete for government contracts that specify Unix, than yes, it is worth it. However, the amount of the revenue for the Linux software is kind of trivial. All the Unix vendors have traditionally sold the Unix workstations... hardware and software. It's high margin business, because the barriers to entry are high.
Microsoft has a POSIX subsystem... it's never really been useful, but for bidding on projects where one of the requirements is POSIX compatibility, it served it's purpose. Microsoft couldn't sell NT as a Unix system, but it could compete if the specifications were more vague and called for POSIX compatibility, because NT had it.
Is Ubuntu going to fight for those accounts? Is it worth it without the hardware bundle? The most likely scenario would be if a company like Dell wanted to compete in the workstation market, where they could create a Dell Linux, get it certified Unix on their workstations, and sell into the Workstation market. My guess is that none of the PC Makers want to alienate Microsoft by creating a Linux-based Workstation, and none of the Linux vendors want to get into the hardware business.
I never understood why Penguin Computing or any of the other Linux-hardware guys tried this approach... but selling into specified contracts doesn't mean throwing up a website, it means a sales force focused on that channel, and I don't know if they had the capital to set up the team to get it to market.
Alex
Myth on the backend is impressive and wonderful, offers all the media serving goodness that we could want. But as a UI for the family, the front-end blows.
AppleTV is an impressive v1.0 front end for media serving, and iTunes + QuickTime CAN serve up whatever you want. However, limited Codec's on AppleTV's part is a limiting factor.
Fix the codec problem, and get your shows into iTunes, or reverse-engineer the protocol so that MythTV can share out as an iTunes server, and you have a great solution for media serving.
Apple won't solve your problems entirely, they are tied into the media companies. But with Codec's fixed, the ability to record shows OTA or off cable, plus buy the episode or two you miss (or if you get into a show a few weeks in) makes a great option.
Hell, if Apple got the real content deals, I'd ditch Cable/Satellite, record my shows OTA in HD from the networks, and happily spend $50/month with Apple on shows...
I gave a basic Macro Econ 101 rundown. I think that the US faced unique economic situations. In the case of Panama, you mention that they have no central bank, no fiat currency, and everything is purchases at priced tied to the USD.
They don't have a "currency" economically, they have a pegged currency. The tying to the dollar essentially ties them to the Fed for policy matters. For most Central and South American emerging markets, that's a good thing, as any benefit they would get from a local reserve bank is made up for by the fact that the BIGGEST problem in the US economically is 1%-2% GDP swings, while the BIGGEST problem in emerging markets is systematic corruption.
Emerging markets are inherently higher growth, for many reasons. Technology gets paid for by developed markets, and then trickles down to emerging markets. Same things with business practices. They get everything a bit older very cheaply, combined with a cheaper rate of labor, they can get a better return on their capital. Buying P2 computers wouldn't help American businesses compete, but would help a small business using a paper ledger in an emerging market. When the Pentium computers were rolling out in the US, dirt cheap 80386 machines were giving the emerging market its first efforts at automating many tasks.
To maintain the American style of living, we eek out incremental benefits. If you were moving from a ledger system -> computerized accounting on a 386 -> a reasonable system on a Pentium II -> modern system, you probably get most of the benefit 60% for automation one, another 30% at step to, and the last 10% with step three. That's why emerging markets can excel, the base is so small.
Countries tied to the US in the Americas benefit more by tying their currency to the greenback than doing it on their own. It keeps corruption out. Panama avoids collapse because corruption causes most of the collapses.
1. Satellite is competing with entrenched monopolies... exclusive content (previously the hundreds of digital channels not available until digital cable came out) is HOW they compete.
2. DirecTV CREATED the out-of-market option to buy the games, because they were a nationwide distributor that needs to use expensive satellites and receivers to compete with a city granted monopoly. These packages were created exclusively for them, but when the contracts ran out, they only renewed one exclusively, because everyone else wanted a fortune for the exclusive deal.
3. You CAN buy Sunday Ticket (the NFL Package) from DirecTV WITHOUT getting DirecTV, you only pay for Sunday Ticket... I assume that it how the NFL agreed to let it stay exclusive. During the football run-up, they often offer 3-4 months of free service if you get Sunday Ticket... that way, nobody thinks to get Sunday Ticket only, and DirecTV gets the subscribers.
4. Without differentiation, the companies are perfectly competitive and prices plummet... good for consumers, not good for investors putting up the money for expensive satellites. Companies need a way to differentiate themselves.
5. The owner of the pipes isn't dictating, they are paying content providers. The content providers find out if they can make more money selling to everyone, or selling exclusively through one source.
Now, when the local television station, the team owner, and the local cable monopoly are the same, you can show an example of a monopoly... They are using one monopoly (the only legal MLB team in the market) to protect another market (cable subscribers) by exclusive deals for the television channel... that's arguably a trust problem, but DirecTV and the NFL, that is an arm's length transaction, settled in the marketplace.
If inflation is 0% (stable pricing), then I am indifferent between buying something now or in a year, as my money is worth the same. If there is a small amount of deflation, I have an incentive to sit on my money, because it will be worth more in a year... If I get 2% by putting it in my coffee can, why not wait when things are cheaper. With small inflation (2%-4%), there is a reason to spend now (money becomes worth less in a year).
Basically, small inflation forces people to either spend their money, or save it in interest returning investments, or invest it... you can't sit on it. Small deflation causes people to sit on their money. If you look at the cyclical nature of the computer industry, the fact that the computer industry is deflationary has caused all those hiccups. For consumer goods, the built up supply chains of distribution work fine... doesn't matter if it takes 3-4 weeks to get the shampoo from the factory to the store to your home, nobody loses money... recently companies have gotten so good at just-in-time manufacturing, that they decided to worry about this, NOT because of deflation and collecting less money at the end, but because the finance department realized that the "inventory" that they are shipping around uses working capital (if I carry $20m in inventory, that is $20m that I am either borrowing or not investing, so there is a "cost" of the inventory). However, in the computer industry, Dell was the first to move to just-in-time, and decimated everyone... not because of carrying costs which are small, but computers deflate at 2% a month or so, so if it took two months to get the product there, they lost 4% of the value in the channel.
Basically, small inflation is devastating, because it means that the "real" risk free rate is negative. If expected inflation is 3%, and people expect a 2% rate of return for 0-risk, then the nominal interest rate for treasury bills is 5%. If inflation rises to 4%, then the interest rate foes to 6%, with no major change. If instead we get 3% deflation, then the "interest rate" SHOULD become -1% (-3% deflation + 2% required rate of return = -1%)... Now, who would buy a bond for -1%? Instead the money sits in the mattress. As a result, you might see an interest rate of 1% or 2%, but that means that the real interest rate is 4%.
A higher real interest rate means that people require a higher return for "risk," which means that bond yields go up (making it more expensive for companies to borrow money, which means that they don't invest as much in growth. It means that stock prices go down, because stock price today = NPV(future returns), and the higher the interest rate, the lower the NPV.
Basically, deflation => higher REAL interest rates => slower economic growth, plus deflation => lower expenditures while people hoard cash => slower economic growth. Deflation is VERY bad. Look at Japan's long recession, they couldn't get out of the cycle, because once you lower the interest rates to 0%, there is nowhere to go. When the US economy went into recession, the Fed was able to lower rates from 5.25% to 1%, which sped up the economy. The reason they moved it up so fast, they were scared that if another attack happened or something else slowed the economy, they had nowhere to move, they COULDN'T lower interest rates more, which meant severe recession or depression to fix things.
The Fed's ability to affect rates lets them tweak the economy. The tweaking works fine in normal conditions (moving between 3% and 5% GDP growth is manageable, once you get outside that range, the interest rate can't control it). The American people like to know that each year they will generally be a little better off. In the late 90s, you had red hot growth, which everyone enjoyed, but when the economy slowed to absorb those gains, people decided that a mild recession was a severe depression.
Look at the housing market, people expected 4%-5% growth, inflation + 1%, and while they enjoyed the 10%-20% growth while it lasted, it forced people into doing stupid moves to get ahead of the game... Now prices drop 2%-4% in a year, a minor fluctuation, and people are talking about a market collapse.
Going a step further, those "words" aren't words in any language.
The formal words are mother and father, though mommy and daddy seem a reasonable informal way of saying my mother and my father. Mom and Dad are derived from the informal. However, kids master the ma and da syllables quickly, so doubling it up and calling it a word makes it easy.
A friend relayed a story to me... someone asked him why his child called him Abba, which he said was the Hebrew word for daddy. The person protested, "but that's the first noise children make." He smiled back, "I know, and that's why we made it the word for daddy." Evolutionarily, this makes sense, mastering dada before mama makes sense as well... mothers are MUCH more wired for unconditional love than fathers, because of the hormonal bonding from delivery and nursing (those that don't do those steps don't get the hormone dump helping them, doesn't affect their being good mothers, but probably makes it rougher on them)...
Each language has a "simplified" informal and a baby equivalent. Hebrew: Father = Av, Mother = Em, My Father = Abi, My Mother = Imi, yet the informal is Abba and Ima, which officially are tied to Aramaic, but probably evolved as simplified forms for children. Like mama and dada, papa, etc.
It would serve a TREMENDOUS biological edge two quickly master words for parents, and therefore a selected characteristic. It's amazing how not upset you get with a terror of a child when they call out your "name."
Well, first off, congratulations on your first child. Having a now almost one year old (birthday next week), that started "talking" in useful words at 9 months, I think that you're not understanding what baby talk is. The first noise that our son made was "un-gah" but it wasn't talking, it was from day one and was his "I'm hungry" noise. Later he developed a "I'm dirty" grunt. At a few months of age, he was able to say "eh" pretty reliable, and was quite pleased with himself when he added "eeh" and "oh." We never talked in baby talk, but the baby has to first master the syllables.
Those of us that always talk to our children seem to have them mastering language a bit, but you can't skip the baby talk all together. Regardless of what you do, your child isn't going to go straight to full communication without mastering vowels.
Every analyst figured out that MP3-player Cel Phones were a threat to the iPod, obviously Apple knew that as well. The iPhone no doubt started simply as an iPod/Phone combo, and some basic Internet features probably evolved into the beautiful little device that you see now.
There negotiations with Cingular/AT&T probably focused on getting iTunes activation, and AT&T focused on controlling the feature set.. The first phone I had with an AIM client was back in 2001, it's not a rare feature, but Apple probably yielded on iChat because AT&T was yielding on WiFi and didn't want people to avoid paying SMS fees.
I think that Apple wanted to move product first, then aim for smartphone competition. If they move millions, then Apple, not AT&T, has the power in a renegotiation. Apple wanted to get the iPod-Phone out there and prove demand, then they can go after the pocket computer market.
Because it challenges the assumptions of the west. Tyrant comes into office and kills his enemies is of the dog-bites-man variety. Every tyrant did it. Stalin happened to grab a large country so he killed a lot of people. On a moral plane, it's just as bad at Hitler, killing people is bad. However, it's the same reason people get on Israel's case for shelling Palestinian terrorist holed up in civilian areas and causing collateral damage, but nobody said anything when Lebanon did it a few weeks ago. Enlightened civilizations are NOT SUPPOSED to kill civilians, petty third world tyrants are EXPECTED to act like tyrants.
In Germany, the Jews were largely assimilated. In their modern western society, Jews were treated as Germans whose religion was Judaism, no different than Germans whose religion was Catholicism of Lutheranism. What stuns the west TO THIS DAY is how an enlightened country of "one of them" could pull out a segment of their society, call them "other" and get everyone to persecute them. When Saddam Hussein gassed the Kurds, it wasn't unusual, dictators DO THAT ALL THE TIME. If France went and gassed a Muslim suburb, the world would be outraged. It wouldn't make France's behavior morally worse on an absolute scale, but it would be more newsworthy and attention grabbing.
Further, my great-grandfather's service to the Kaiser during "The Great War" and his member of the social elite as a business owner didn't change the fact that to the Nazis, he was a Jew. That is what stuns the world, the someone would go through their own culture, pull out a segment that nobody recognized, and designate them. Further, the Nazis further justified their attempt to capture the world as a way of wiping out the Jews. Plenty of would-be dictators tried to take over the world, that's pretty normal. Plenty of people tried to wipe out the Jews in their midsts. It's the fact that he tried to take over the world TO KILL THE JEWS that stuns people. The fact that when his army needed trains to move troops around to try to capture the world, and his SS needed trains to wipe out the Jews in an area, he would favor the later. He would give up territory solely to kill more Jews.
The US sent Indians to Oklahoma because it wanted their land. Many died. The US wasn't TRYING to kill Indians, it was trying to steal land, we understand that. What people don't understand is how he rounded up the Jews and put them in work camps as slaves, and still wanted to kill them. The systematic destruction stuns people. In most cases, people have been killed as people pursue rational goals (albeit immorally), this was unique in that nobody understood it. The Spanish Inquisition was launched to steal Jewish property, they were happy to let the Jews leave and take their stuff. The Germans wanted to kill them MORE than wanted to take their stuff, that's what is SO disturbing.