I would bet this is exactly right. Steering MS appears to be like steering a supertanker -- there might even be a Surface 3 in the pipeline which will probably come out just so they have something to talk to the press about. Hell, killing the Kin took so long that the damned thing launched before it died.
The company will need a full top to bottom restructuring. It has the cash to do it, but does it have the sense of urgency? From outside it doesn't look like it. Apple had the same problem: fell in slow motion until, I believe, it had less than one quarter in cash on hand (in 1998, after the NeXT purchase -- but I couldn't find this figure online, so I could be wrong).
Yttrium, you say in your sig that you wrote a book, but not what that book is about. Worse, your URLs are opaque (and aren't links). So there's no incentive for anyone to find out about your book.
Just an FYI, not meaning to harsh on you about this.
Yeah that's also true, but in the case or Music (and cooking, and physics) these terms aren't really incorporated into the language but are treated as domain-specific jargon.
Compare "angst" or "romance" or "pyjamas" to "eigenvector" or "da capo a la fine". The former three are simply words, used in any context and even with meanings that have evolved slightly from their origins. The latter two have specific meaning (even though in German or Italian they have a perfectly straightforward meaning) and in English are only used in one context.
My point is to respond to the claim that English is somehow superior because non-speakers must use it for air traffic control, computer programming and the like.
Exactly: in a free democracy people should be free to speak whatever language they want, and the government, since it works for the people, should make reasonable accomodation.
Of course, this all hinges on what's reasonable: if I am the only one who chooses to use "fleeble" instead of "frog" I really don't think the government should go to any effort to accommodate me. But if enough citizens want to speak spanish/hmong/whatever the government should make an effort to communicate back in the same language in various contexts.
I can't believe the summary mentioned Khalid Sheik Mohammed without mentioning that he's not just any trained engineer -- he designed a classified vacuum cleaner.
Sheesh...and they call this "News for Nerds"....though come to think of it all the true nerds already knew this!
But then I'd have to take my foot off the accelerator....
Although I hear some American driving schools are teaching the kids to use their left foot for the brake, which sounds like educational malpractice to me.
Actually you have hit on an important point. The EZ-pass systems can easily be implemented in a privacy-protecting fashion (allowing you to buy them anonymously and pay cash) but somehow never are. Hmm.
I think we can be pretty sure that however these protocols are designed, privacy and security will not be taken into account.
A similar technique is quite effective for tailgaters. If you want to go faster than me I'm happy to let you pass, but sometimes that can't happen because it's one lane, it's icy, or I just have to get past the even slower guys to my right. You don't need to kiss my car in these situations -- I know you're there!
So in high school I rigged a dashboard switch to the brake lights. If an annoying tailgater decided to touch the back of my car I simply held down the switch...which never failed to open up some space!
Surely illegal (your horns probably aren't), but the statute of limitations must have expired by now.
I think if you hope for the tablet to be an actual replacement for your computer, you'll be doomed to disappointment. I think that's not the intent, even for apps like spreadsheets. I think the goal is "carry the stuff you need to show others in a very light package, plus make it possible to tweak in the field." So you can adjust a cell value in a spreadsheet, delete a slide from a presentation, perhaps plot some data, but for real computing, you'll have to go back to your computer. It's a companion device.
I think a lot of people don't really notice the difference because their computing experience is pretty single threaded (and pretty limited) anyway.
The astonishing thing is that laptops have become so light that for me, the tablet's just not worth it. But I can see people for whom it is: for them, non-condescendingly, the tablet is 100% of their needs, and trying to cram more functionality into it would just get in the way. In fact look at the number of "apps" that are for all intents and purposes URLs -- ways to read a single site. The fact that they are so popular explains the usage model.
I hate to invoke steve jobs (surely it's a kind of adjunct to Godwin's law by now) but he was right in his "truck vs car" analogy. For most people the web browser is almost 100% of their runtime and often with only one window and no tabs open. That and a few simple additional apps is a step up.
In other words you (and I) aren't the target market.
The problem is that Microsoft has put too much focus into pushing their internal business agenda, and not enough on servicing their customers.
This turns out not to be true, which is the real problem for Microsoft. Their major customer has been IT departments. The software is designed to be managed by and for the needs of those departments. They assumed correctly that consumers would buy what was familiar from work: Windows. And they never got feedback that they never really understood the web either: people bought Windows computers and used browsers to do what they want and Microsoft was only peripherally involved.
Nowadays, even ignoring the "BYOD" trend (boy what a stupid buzzword, plus is it even a "trend") people, actual human beings, decide what they want from their computing device. And apart from the XBox, that's not a world Microsoft has learned to understand.
PS: it was hard to avoid the "services the customer like a bull services a cow" joke... so I didn't.
Given the fact that this document is a 'best practices' sort of thing rather than actually defining some sort of protocol, I find the venue of an RFC (even TFS incorrectly marks this sort of thing as a 'standard) questionable.
The use of RFCs as ways of managing best practices not only has a long and honourable history but is codified in a series of RFCs specifically marked "BCP" (Best current practice). Check it out yourself at RFC-Editor.org
Tie a thread or string to your lapel or sleeve and have the conductor hold the other end. At the right point of the stroke you'll feel a tug -- at which point the conductor can let go anyway.
Cost of materials: a couple of pennies at most resolution: pretty much whatever desired calibration: just practice a couple of times together and you'll have it.
Kindergarten (German for "child's garden") isn't called kindergarten in Germany? I love it!
In Germany, "Kindergarten" refers to what is known as nursery school or preschool in the USA. "Vorschule" is literally "pre school" or "preceeds school" as the first day of the first grade is celebrated as the kid's first day of school.
Interestingly I just read that it was german immigrants to the east coast who introduced the idea of institutionalised learning before 1st grade to US schooling, back in the progressive era (early 20th century).
Frankly a lot of grade school, and even later grades, are filled with make work to keep the kids busy and appear industrious
Yeah, I'm amused when educators and politicians proclaim that current schooling is out of step with the 20th century. They are right, though not for the reason they way (they inevitably mean more "skills" and/or more "Technology" by which they mean electronics -- apparently there are no other technologies). But in fact the current model of schooling is designed to socialise the kids for industrial production (just as the calendar is still structured for an agrarian society).
Regardless, since nobody knows, except at the grossest level, what works and what doesn't, I think almost anything should be on the table.
(and sadly, the one very important lesson your daughter is learning is: sometimes you just have to buckle down and do what The Man says.
Your example shows how hard it is to figure out what works and what doesn't.
Here's a "counter"example (I say "counter" in that that doesn't invalidate yours): my kid went through the German system. German schools rank much higher than US schools on the PISA international comparison. Vorschule (in the US, called kindergarden) was still devoted to playing, socialising, napping etc. His class was not expected to even learn the alphabet until the first day of the first grade. But by the end of the calendar year (about three months in) all the kids could read. In simple German and simple English.
Does it mean these kids are "smarter" or that the school system is better? I don't think so; rather it means that we really have little idea what works or even what "works" means since we don't know what outcome we really want, 20 and 50 years later. Oh, and it shows that international comparisons like PISA are probably impossibly difficult to make, in a large part for the same reasons. People are so different that it's presumably a unique combination of circumstances for each kid that luckily or unluckily combine to give you the outcome you need. Yes, you can see emergent trends, but only at the grossest level.
In Europe, the price tag you see is what you pay. It makes so much sense. I don't care what the before tax price is.
I very much agree that airline ticket and phone contract pricing policies are abusive. But it turns out there is a sensible logic to the US practice of advertising the untaxed price.
There are two important factors. One is that the US does not have a uniform taxing policy; it is even more federated than the BRD. In California where I live the tax vary by county (basically Landkreis) and even by the city you live in. You pay the tax on where you live (technically it's a "sales and use" tax) so, for example, when I bought a car a few towns up, the seller collected the lower tax that applied to where I live. For smaller items the shop will just charge the local tax. I consider having towns able to set their own taxes more democratic.
The second factor is that, by making the tax explicit, people know that they are paying a tax. There have been a couple of studies showing that sales tax regimes are lower than VAT regimes (apologies, can't find the refs easily right now). You can make the argument that US taxes are too low (I happen to think so, at the moment) but it is important that taxes be explicit. Hidden taxes and fees can, and do quietly rise.
...And why does there need to be an NRA and not a NRPGA?
I'm glad you continued your comment after this line. I read "NRPGA" as a merger of the National Rifle Association and the Pro Golfing Association and immediately wondered:
New kind of rifle-skeet (like in The Jimmy Stewart movie "Winchester '73")?
We are running this experiment now and the results aren't good.
We force greater and greater disclosure, to the point of being punitive, on politicians, so they only ones who become politicians are ones who don't care about their privacy. And so when they pass laws they pass ones that have no respect for privacy either.
There are a lot of important reasons for sunshine laws, but seriously, releasing your tax returns???
They didn't want their evil plot revealed. Probably they just did some genetic engineering on the virus to affect the researchers' judgement. There's plenty of evidence the cats have this capability. I used to find stray bird parts and decapitated rats disgusting. Now I consider them "cute".
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I would bet this is exactly right. Steering MS appears to be like steering a supertanker -- there might even be a Surface 3 in the pipeline which will probably come out just so they have something to talk to the press about. Hell, killing the Kin took so long that the damned thing launched before it died.
The company will need a full top to bottom restructuring. It has the cash to do it, but does it have the sense of urgency? From outside it doesn't look like it. Apple had the same problem: fell in slow motion until, I believe, it had less than one quarter in cash on hand (in 1998, after the NeXT purchase -- but I couldn't find this figure online, so I could be wrong).
Yes, that makes more sense.
You need to have a civil liberties officer to keep an eagle eye out to make sure there aren't any civil liberties escaping into the wild.
Yttrium, you say in your sig that you wrote a book, but not what that book is about. Worse, your URLs are opaque (and aren't links). So there's no incentive for anyone to find out about your book.
Just an FYI, not meaning to harsh on you about this.
Yeah that's also true, but in the case or Music (and cooking, and physics) these terms aren't really incorporated into the language but are treated as domain-specific jargon.
Compare "angst" or "romance" or "pyjamas" to "eigenvector" or "da capo a la fine". The former three are simply words, used in any context and even with meanings that have evolved slightly from their origins. The latter two have specific meaning (even though in German or Italian they have a perfectly straightforward meaning) and in English are only used in one context.
My point is to respond to the claim that English is somehow superior because non-speakers must use it for air traffic control, computer programming and the like.
We do the same in English: does it really bother anyone to use an Italian vocabulary when talking about music?
Exactly: in a free democracy people should be free to speak whatever language they want, and the government, since it works for the people, should make reasonable accomodation.
Of course, this all hinges on what's reasonable: if I am the only one who chooses to use "fleeble" instead of "frog" I really don't think the government should go to any effort to accommodate me. But if enough citizens want to speak spanish/hmong/whatever the government should make an effort to communicate back in the same language in various contexts.
Then again:are there free democracies any more?
I can't believe the summary mentioned Khalid Sheik Mohammed without mentioning that he's not just any trained engineer -- he designed a classified vacuum cleaner .
Sheesh...and they call this "News for Nerds"....though come to think of it all the true nerds already knew this!
But then I'd have to take my foot off the accelerator....
Although I hear some American driving schools are teaching the kids to use their left foot for the brake, which sounds like educational malpractice to me.
Actually you have hit on an important point. The EZ-pass systems can easily be implemented in a privacy-protecting fashion (allowing you to buy them anonymously and pay cash) but somehow never are. Hmm.
I think we can be pretty sure that however these protocols are designed, privacy and security will not be taken into account.
A similar technique is quite effective for tailgaters. If you want to go faster than me I'm happy to let you pass, but sometimes that can't happen because it's one lane, it's icy, or I just have to get past the even slower guys to my right. You don't need to kiss my car in these situations -- I know you're there!
So in high school I rigged a dashboard switch to the brake lights. If an annoying tailgater decided to touch the back of my car I simply held down the switch...which never failed to open up some space!
Surely illegal (your horns probably aren't), but the statute of limitations must have expired by now.
I think if you hope for the tablet to be an actual replacement for your computer, you'll be doomed to disappointment. I think that's not the intent, even for apps like spreadsheets. I think the goal is "carry the stuff you need to show others in a very light package, plus make it possible to tweak in the field." So you can adjust a cell value in a spreadsheet, delete a slide from a presentation, perhaps plot some data, but for real computing, you'll have to go back to your computer. It's a companion device.
I think a lot of people don't really notice the difference because their computing experience is pretty single threaded (and pretty limited) anyway.
The astonishing thing is that laptops have become so light that for me, the tablet's just not worth it. But I can see people for whom it is: for them, non-condescendingly, the tablet is 100% of their needs, and trying to cram more functionality into it would just get in the way. In fact look at the number of "apps" that are for all intents and purposes URLs -- ways to read a single site. The fact that they are so popular explains the usage model.
I hate to invoke steve jobs (surely it's a kind of adjunct to Godwin's law by now) but he was right in his "truck vs car" analogy. For most people the web browser is almost 100% of their runtime and often with only one window and no tabs open. That and a few simple additional apps is a step up.
In other words you (and I) aren't the target market.
The problem is that Microsoft has put too much focus into pushing their internal business agenda, and not enough on servicing their customers.
This turns out not to be true, which is the real problem for Microsoft. Their major customer has been IT departments. The software is designed to be managed by and for the needs of those departments. They assumed correctly that consumers would buy what was familiar from work: Windows. And they never got feedback that they never really understood the web either: people bought Windows computers and used browsers to do what they want and Microsoft was only peripherally involved.
Nowadays, even ignoring the "BYOD" trend (boy what a stupid buzzword, plus is it even a "trend") people, actual human beings, decide what they want from their computing device. And apart from the XBox, that's not a world Microsoft has learned to understand.
PS: it was hard to avoid the "services the customer like a bull services a cow" joke... so I didn't.
If they learned to harness bullshit 8,000 years ago, than surely corporate bureaucracy must be that old as well!
Given the fact that this document is a 'best practices' sort of thing rather than actually defining some sort of protocol, I find the venue of an RFC (even TFS incorrectly marks this sort of thing as a 'standard) questionable.
The use of RFCs as ways of managing best practices not only has a long and honourable history but is codified in a series of RFCs specifically marked "BCP" (Best current practice). Check it out yourself at RFC-Editor.org
accelerometers and audible cues: bah!
Tie a thread or string to your lapel or sleeve and have the conductor hold the other end. At the right point of the stroke you'll feel a tug -- at which point the conductor can let go anyway.
Cost of materials: a couple of pennies at most
resolution: pretty much whatever desired
calibration: just practice a couple of times together and you'll have it.
Actually, Google bought the original Google Maps too.
How about like the french. We reprocess what we can, and bury what we can't. Safe and Effective.
It appears the French are reproducing faster than you can reprocess or bury them. So I'm not convinced you have a good strategy.
Kindergarten (German for "child's garden") isn't called kindergarten in Germany? I love it!
In Germany, "Kindergarten" refers to what is known as nursery school or preschool in the USA. "Vorschule" is literally "pre school" or "preceeds school" as the first day of the first grade is celebrated as the kid's first day of school.
Interestingly I just read that it was german immigrants to the east coast who introduced the idea of institutionalised learning before 1st grade to US schooling, back in the progressive era (early 20th century).
Frankly a lot of grade school, and even later grades, are filled with make work to keep the kids busy and appear industrious
Yeah, I'm amused when educators and politicians proclaim that current schooling is out of step with the 20th century. They are right, though not for the reason they way (they inevitably mean more "skills" and/or more "Technology" by which they mean electronics -- apparently there are no other technologies). But in fact the current model of schooling is designed to socialise the kids for industrial production (just as the calendar is still structured for an agrarian society).
Regardless, since nobody knows, except at the grossest level, what works and what doesn't, I think almost anything should be on the table.
(and sadly, the one very important lesson your daughter is learning is: sometimes you just have to buckle down and do what The Man says.
Your example shows how hard it is to figure out what works and what doesn't.
Here's a "counter"example (I say "counter" in that that doesn't invalidate yours): my kid went through the German system. German schools rank much higher than US schools on the PISA international comparison. Vorschule (in the US, called kindergarden) was still devoted to playing, socialising, napping etc. His class was not expected to even learn the alphabet until the first day of the first grade. But by the end of the calendar year (about three months in) all the kids could read. In simple German and simple English.
Does it mean these kids are "smarter" or that the school system is better? I don't think so; rather it means that we really have little idea what works or even what "works" means since we don't know what outcome we really want, 20 and 50 years later. Oh, and it shows that international comparisons like PISA are probably impossibly difficult to make, in a large part for the same reasons. People are so different that it's presumably a unique combination of circumstances for each kid that luckily or unluckily combine to give you the outcome you need. Yes, you can see emergent trends, but only at the grossest level.
In Europe, the price tag you see is what you pay. It makes so much sense. I don't care what the before tax price is.
I very much agree that airline ticket and phone contract pricing policies are abusive. But it turns out there is a sensible logic to the US practice of advertising the untaxed price.
There are two important factors. One is that the US does not have a uniform taxing policy; it is even more federated than the BRD. In California where I live the tax vary by county (basically Landkreis) and even by the city you live in. You pay the tax on where you live (technically it's a "sales and use" tax) so, for example, when I bought a car a few towns up, the seller collected the lower tax that applied to where I live. For smaller items the shop will just charge the local tax. I consider having towns able to set their own taxes more democratic.
The second factor is that, by making the tax explicit, people know that they are paying a tax. There have been a couple of studies showing that sales tax regimes are lower than VAT regimes (apologies, can't find the refs easily right now). You can make the argument that US taxes are too low (I happen to think so, at the moment) but it is important that taxes be explicit. Hidden taxes and fees can, and do quietly rise.
...And why does there need to be an NRA and not a NRPGA?
I'm glad you continued your comment after this line. I read "NRPGA" as a merger of the National Rifle Association and the Pro Golfing Association and immediately wondered:
The possibilities are fantastic!
But your hell would be to be forced to listen to people like him!
His heaven would presumably being able to perpetually proselytise to people like you!
We are running this experiment now and the results aren't good.
We force greater and greater disclosure, to the point of being punitive, on politicians, so they only ones who become politicians are ones who don't care about their privacy. And so when they pass laws they pass ones that have no respect for privacy either.
There are a lot of important reasons for sunshine laws, but seriously, releasing your tax returns???
They didn't want their evil plot revealed. Probably they just did some genetic engineering on the virus to affect the researchers' judgement. There's plenty of evidence the cats have this capability. I used to find stray bird parts and decapitated rats disgusting. Now I consider them "cute".