I remember using the HP 150 touch screen monitor in the 1980's. It seemed kind of cool at the time, but since it could be used in that mode only with DOS programs specifically written for it, it remained a non-solution for a non-problem. Also, Zarkonnen's comment about "gorilla arm" is absolutely correct; I found myself using my left hand to hold up my right arm while poking at the stupid screen. It seemed cool for a little while, but it got harder rather than easier to use over time. Even the Word Perfect shortcut keys didn't have that disadvantage.
The only user input device worse than that is that little blue clit between the letters G, H, and B on my laptop. I have, of course, disabled the touchpad that used to send the cursor skittering in every direction.
Google makes a fine product. Here is what it came up with:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milliard
It is the French term for "billion." Apparently, it's common in other languages. A little macaronic pun.
Once again, the US has demonstrated its simple trick for success. We aren't the smartest people on the planet, but we have the best error-handling routine ever devised. All we need is a reliable method for determining that an error in leadership has occurred. We don't have to figure out the error, just remove the faulty leader unit and hot-swap a new one in. Brilliant! The genius of democracy is not that the people are always right, just that they recognize mistakes.
I didn't support Obama, but I think the system worked perfectly.
Neither one of the candidates has any background in economics or finance, unfortunately, and both suffer from the delusion (common in managers) that if they don't know much about it, it nevertheless can't be too complicated. People like that tend to start policy proposals with "Couldn't you just...?" followed by something astonishing in its stupidity. Then they put it into practice.
We will probably see the SEC and the CFTC merged, combining the major regulators over securities and derivatives. Credit default swaps, which greatly exaggerated the market problems, will have central clearing to eliminate or reduce counterparty risk. This is how futures contracts are currently handled. The Basel II accord (bank capitalization) is dead, to be replaced with something closer to Basel I but more stringent. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac will be completely folded into the government. Any kind of social program to give mortgages to low-income people will be a straightforward subsidy or explicit government guarantee (I wish they would just stop, but that's not politically possible.) Most likely, collateralized debt obligations will be a lot less popular, since they have become pretty much illiquid. Anyone who buys a CDO based on new loans, as opposed to loans that have been performing for a couple of years, will be declared legally incompetent.
Whoever gets in will have to pay a lot more attention to leverage in the financial industry. We were supposed to have learned this lesson 10 years ago with Long-Term Capital Management, but those who flunk the exam are doomed to repeat the course.
If they're publicly traded and the software is critical to their business, the independent accountants should have already taken this problem to the Audit Committee (Board of Directors) as an internal control deficiency of some sort. They should be following COSO or COBIT and have a well-documented and robust software development life cycle in place. Not doing so could mean a finding of a material weakness in their internal controls (Sarbanes-Oxley), which investors dislike. That sort of thing is chum in the water for lawyers.
To me, the interesting question is why they are continuing to ignore the problem. See if you can find out whether they've been warned already. In my experience, the companies that blow off this kind of thing tend to be small, and even though they are publicly traded, the founders or other insiders still hold large stakes in the company. If that is the case here, and the "owners" (they always tend to think of themselves that way) don't want to bother, there is no hope of getting it fixed. Keep that resume up to date.
You can use the same trick as in the movie "Speed" by recording yourself looking puzzled and tapping your keyboard, meanwhile doing whatever nefarious things you need to do to pass without the webcam watching. That didn't take long, did it?
I would have to nominate my flash drive. I left it in my pants one time, and it survived a trip through the washer and dryer. I should really have hand-washed it, though: it shrank from 1 gb to 512 mb.
Just a couple of points: 1. All you Bush-haters out there: he is neither the first nor the last dull normal to inhabit the White House. Why do you suppose the next president will be a genius? Think of your own boss entrusted with the powers of government, and try to imagine the magnitude of the screw-ups. 2. ARPANET evolved. It was not planned; certainly not the way it is now. Remember Hayes-compatible 1200 modems? Bulletin boards? Sendmail? The current situation was not planned because it could not have been imagined. HTML was not even a concept at the time. We don't really know yet what we need, but we can figure it out as we go along. 3. IT in general, including infrastructure, is an unbounded problem. Private enterprise is in essence a massively parallel brute-force solution engine. Government programs are linear, more suited to bounded problems. You don't drive nails with your pillow or sleep on your hammer.
Instead of trying to re-create or interpret the conventions of human speech, how about just a better way of representing the search results? I would like to see a visual representation of the search results so that I could spot the most promising semantic branches. There must be a way of grouping results that are closest in meaning, or refer to similar sources, or fall into broad categories of knowledge. Right now, Google just ranks them all in what it believes to be the order of significance, which is no help if the search results have gone in a direction not intended. Maybe the program should let humans resolve the ambiguity as much as possible; we're actually quite good at it. That's what makes Turing tests work.
I agree with the other comments that it is much easier to get the user up to speed than to make search criteria easy for naive users. Remember Ask Jeeves? That implementation of natural language queries gave results that were not much better than random. Serious users quickly catch on to the tricks of word order, quotes, +/-, etc. Really, it's not much harder than typing a sentence and gives more predictable results.
Sorry, I spoke too soon and without getting up to date. I last used Opera many years ago, when you had to pay to get rid of the ads. I see they have a full free version and that it supports CSS better than the old versions. Good. If they want it make a browser for smaller devices, that would be a compelling reason for Opera to exist. Otherwise, what is the point? For most PC users, the incremental value over Firefox seems pretty small. It is still not open source, either. If there were a real business case for Opera, we would have seen much more market acceptance over the years. Instead, it remains a niche player. Suing MS is not going to change that. Describing Opera as "up-and-coming" is ridiculous.
IE's many shortcomings are a separate issue. They were the reason Firefox gained a substantial share. Opera may also help users get past IE's limitations, but that hasn't led to many more people using it. One more "me-too" browser without significant advantages is just needless complication.
Up and coming since 1994? How far and how slowly do they have to climb? No offense, but Opera's chief mission in life seems to be making it slightly more complicated to write HTML, CSS, and JavaScript for cross-browser performance.
The missing factor is the spin. A Venus day is nearly as long as a Venus year. Earth's relatively rapid spin, acting upon its molten iron core, generates a powerful magnetic field which blocks the effect of the solar wind. We were lucky enough to have been sideswiped early in our planetary history with a large object, with the broken-off bits coalescing into the moon and the planet itself given a rapid spin.
So really, it's the absence of spin rather than the presence of carbon dioxide that made the outcomes so different. On the other hand, the moon's tidal effect is acting as a brake on our rotation. Some billions of years from now, the Earth will constantly present the same side to the moon, just as the moon does to us now. Whatever is around at that time will be in big trouble.
We can expect the climate alarmists to provide additional spin, but it's probably not going to be enough.
I ran into sort of the same thing, except in my case, I also wound up having to take first- and second-year calculus in my 40's as prerequisites for an IT class I wanted. (My situation was a little different, having a master's, but I was a newborn baby as far as math is concerned.) I found I could not remember the trigonometric functions to save my life and got a C- on the first exam. Finally, it occurred to me to code a "scientific calculator" in javascript with all the trig functions on it. Having coded them, I could remember them long enough to get through the next exam. Moral: Make the math relate to your life.
If you get as far as calculus, I recommend Calculus Made Easy by Silvanus Thompson. Alas, in my case, as the teacher remarked, "But not easy enough, huh?"
To the commenters who espouse the labor theory of value, your economics are out of date. Both Adam Smith and Karl Marx tried to make this work, but it simply fails to explain how goods and services are exchanged. Think about it: if it was labor that made something valuable, I should be able to order all the parts for a Ford truck, laboriously assemble it in my garage, and sell it for 100 times what the car dealer down the street is asking. Things don't work that way. The search for a theory of inherent value based on the input of capital, labor, or raw materials is over.
The best fit of theory and reality is currently a combination of marginal utility, opportunity cost, and the Austrian theory of price as information. Put simply, something is worth what people are willing to pay for it. If the price in the market for something seems good to you, you either buy it (price is low compared to what else you could do with your money) or produce it (price is high compared to alternative uses for your labor or capital).
Exploitation of labor? Give me a break. People flock to cities for work because it beats working on a farm. You need massive amounts of capital to acquire good farmland, equipment, and supplies. Alternatively, you can scratch out a living on a small patch and watch your children starve in a bad year.
If accumulation of capital is a result of the exploitation of labor, why are workers in the highly-developed capitalist countries the most well-off? And please, don't go all Paul Baran on me (the idea that the immiseration of the proletariat has simply been off-shored). The countries most enmeshed with Western capitalism are precisely the ones that have improved their living standards, GDP, life expectancy, and almost any other available quality-of-life metric.
The author seems to have missed the whole point of innovation. Adopting a new technology and successfully integrating it into a business model is what drives capitalism. The capitalist who can do this avoids the situation of producing a commodity. He gains a competitive advantage, either in distribution (Wal-Mart vs. K-Mart), production efficiency (Toyota vs. GM, US farms vs. 3rd world subsistence farmers), or by product differentiation (Intel's CPU business vs. the RAM business it abandoned). When the competition starts to close the gap, you need to do it again. In the aggregate, people produce more stuff with less raw material.
Go back and read Joseph Schumpeter on creative destruction. There's a reason we're better off than our peasant ancestors.
Slashdot Mirror
I remember using the HP 150 touch screen monitor in the 1980's. It seemed kind of cool at the time, but since it could be used in that mode only with DOS programs specifically written for it, it remained a non-solution for a non-problem. Also, Zarkonnen's comment about "gorilla arm" is absolutely correct; I found myself using my left hand to hold up my right arm while poking at the stupid screen. It seemed cool for a little while, but it got harder rather than easier to use over time. Even the Word Perfect shortcut keys didn't have that disadvantage.
The only user input device worse than that is that little blue clit between the letters G, H, and B on my laptop. I have, of course, disabled the touchpad that used to send the cursor skittering in every direction.
Google makes a fine product. Here is what it came up with: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milliard It is the French term for "billion." Apparently, it's common in other languages. A little macaronic pun.
Once again, the US has demonstrated its simple trick for success. We aren't the smartest people on the planet, but we have the best error-handling routine ever devised. All we need is a reliable method for determining that an error in leadership has occurred. We don't have to figure out the error, just remove the faulty leader unit and hot-swap a new one in. Brilliant! The genius of democracy is not that the people are always right, just that they recognize mistakes.
I didn't support Obama, but I think the system worked perfectly.
We will probably see the SEC and the CFTC merged, combining the major regulators over securities and derivatives. Credit default swaps, which greatly exaggerated the market problems, will have central clearing to eliminate or reduce counterparty risk. This is how futures contracts are currently handled. The Basel II accord (bank capitalization) is dead, to be replaced with something closer to Basel I but more stringent. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac will be completely folded into the government. Any kind of social program to give mortgages to low-income people will be a straightforward subsidy or explicit government guarantee (I wish they would just stop, but that's not politically possible.) Most likely, collateralized debt obligations will be a lot less popular, since they have become pretty much illiquid. Anyone who buys a CDO based on new loans, as opposed to loans that have been performing for a couple of years, will be declared legally incompetent. Whoever gets in will have to pay a lot more attention to leverage in the financial industry. We were supposed to have learned this lesson 10 years ago with Long-Term Capital Management, but those who flunk the exam are doomed to repeat the course.
Water is far too valuable as a solvent to use as a beverage.
If they're publicly traded and the software is critical to their business, the independent accountants should have already taken this problem to the Audit Committee (Board of Directors) as an internal control deficiency of some sort. They should be following COSO or COBIT and have a well-documented and robust software development life cycle in place. Not doing so could mean a finding of a material weakness in their internal controls (Sarbanes-Oxley), which investors dislike. That sort of thing is chum in the water for lawyers.
To me, the interesting question is why they are continuing to ignore the problem. See if you can find out whether they've been warned already. In my experience, the companies that blow off this kind of thing tend to be small, and even though they are publicly traded, the founders or other insiders still hold large stakes in the company. If that is the case here, and the "owners" (they always tend to think of themselves that way) don't want to bother, there is no hope of getting it fixed. Keep that resume up to date.
You can use the same trick as in the movie "Speed" by recording yourself looking puzzled and tapping your keyboard, meanwhile doing whatever nefarious things you need to do to pass without the webcam watching. That didn't take long, did it?
I would have to nominate my flash drive. I left it in my pants one time, and it survived a trip through the washer and dryer. I should really have hand-washed it, though: it shrank from 1 gb to 512 mb.
Just a couple of points:
1. All you Bush-haters out there: he is neither the first nor the last dull normal to inhabit the White House. Why do you suppose the next president will be a genius? Think of your own boss entrusted with the powers of government, and try to imagine the magnitude of the screw-ups.
2. ARPANET evolved. It was not planned; certainly not the way it is now. Remember Hayes-compatible 1200 modems? Bulletin boards? Sendmail? The current situation was not planned because it could not have been imagined. HTML was not even a concept at the time. We don't really know yet what we need, but we can figure it out as we go along.
3. IT in general, including infrastructure, is an unbounded problem. Private enterprise is in essence a massively parallel brute-force solution engine. Government programs are linear, more suited to bounded problems. You don't drive nails with your pillow or sleep on your hammer.
Instead of trying to re-create or interpret the conventions of human speech, how about just a better way of representing the search results? I would like to see a visual representation of the search results so that I could spot the most promising semantic branches. There must be a way of grouping results that are closest in meaning, or refer to similar sources, or fall into broad categories of knowledge. Right now, Google just ranks them all in what it believes to be the order of significance, which is no help if the search results have gone in a direction not intended. Maybe the program should let humans resolve the ambiguity as much as possible; we're actually quite good at it. That's what makes Turing tests work.
I agree with the other comments that it is much easier to get the user up to speed than to make search criteria easy for naive users. Remember Ask Jeeves? That implementation of natural language queries gave results that were not much better than random. Serious users quickly catch on to the tricks of word order, quotes, +/-, etc. Really, it's not much harder than typing a sentence and gives more predictable results.
Sorry, I spoke too soon and without getting up to date. I last used Opera many years ago, when you had to pay to get rid of the ads. I see they have a full free version and that it supports CSS better than the old versions. Good. If they want it make a browser for smaller devices, that would be a compelling reason for Opera to exist. Otherwise, what is the point? For most PC users, the incremental value over Firefox seems pretty small. It is still not open source, either. If there were a real business case for Opera, we would have seen much more market acceptance over the years. Instead, it remains a niche player. Suing MS is not going to change that. Describing Opera as "up-and-coming" is ridiculous. IE's many shortcomings are a separate issue. They were the reason Firefox gained a substantial share. Opera may also help users get past IE's limitations, but that hasn't led to many more people using it. One more "me-too" browser without significant advantages is just needless complication.
Up and coming since 1994? How far and how slowly do they have to climb? No offense, but Opera's chief mission in life seems to be making it slightly more complicated to write HTML, CSS, and JavaScript for cross-browser performance.
The missing factor is the spin. A Venus day is nearly as long as a Venus year. Earth's relatively rapid spin, acting upon its molten iron core, generates a powerful magnetic field which blocks the effect of the solar wind. We were lucky enough to have been sideswiped early in our planetary history with a large object, with the broken-off bits coalescing into the moon and the planet itself given a rapid spin. So really, it's the absence of spin rather than the presence of carbon dioxide that made the outcomes so different. On the other hand, the moon's tidal effect is acting as a brake on our rotation. Some billions of years from now, the Earth will constantly present the same side to the moon, just as the moon does to us now. Whatever is around at that time will be in big trouble. We can expect the climate alarmists to provide additional spin, but it's probably not going to be enough.
I ran into sort of the same thing, except in my case, I also wound up having to take first- and second-year calculus in my 40's as prerequisites for an IT class I wanted. (My situation was a little different, having a master's, but I was a newborn baby as far as math is concerned.) I found I could not remember the trigonometric functions to save my life and got a C- on the first exam. Finally, it occurred to me to code a "scientific calculator" in javascript with all the trig functions on it. Having coded them, I could remember them long enough to get through the next exam. Moral: Make the math relate to your life.
If you get as far as calculus, I recommend Calculus Made Easy by Silvanus Thompson. Alas, in my case, as the teacher remarked, "But not easy enough, huh?"
To the commenters who espouse the labor theory of value, your economics are out of date. Both Adam Smith and Karl Marx tried to make this work, but it simply fails to explain how goods and services are exchanged. Think about it: if it was labor that made something valuable, I should be able to order all the parts for a Ford truck, laboriously assemble it in my garage, and sell it for 100 times what the car dealer down the street is asking. Things don't work that way. The search for a theory of inherent value based on the input of capital, labor, or raw materials is over.
The best fit of theory and reality is currently a combination of marginal utility, opportunity cost, and the Austrian theory of price as information. Put simply, something is worth what people are willing to pay for it. If the price in the market for something seems good to you, you either buy it (price is low compared to what else you could do with your money) or produce it (price is high compared to alternative uses for your labor or capital).
Exploitation of labor? Give me a break. People flock to cities for work because it beats working on a farm. You need massive amounts of capital to acquire good farmland, equipment, and supplies. Alternatively, you can scratch out a living on a small patch and watch your children starve in a bad year.
If accumulation of capital is a result of the exploitation of labor, why are workers in the highly-developed capitalist countries the most well-off? And please, don't go all Paul Baran on me (the idea that the immiseration of the proletariat has simply been off-shored). The countries most enmeshed with Western capitalism are precisely the ones that have improved their living standards, GDP, life expectancy, and almost any other available quality-of-life metric.
Marxism is religion in flimsy disguise.
The author seems to have missed the whole point of innovation. Adopting a new technology and successfully integrating it into a business model is what drives capitalism. The capitalist who can do this avoids the situation of producing a commodity. He gains a competitive advantage, either in distribution (Wal-Mart vs. K-Mart), production efficiency (Toyota vs. GM, US farms vs. 3rd world subsistence farmers), or by product differentiation (Intel's CPU business vs. the RAM business it abandoned). When the competition starts to close the gap, you need to do it again. In the aggregate, people produce more stuff with less raw material. Go back and read Joseph Schumpeter on creative destruction. There's a reason we're better off than our peasant ancestors.