I have had two types of exams at a uni. Some where Exams where you had to bring everything in your head and some where exams where you could bring a whole ref library with you (some where even carried out in a library).
The latter were 10 times more difficult than the former because the prof could actually give you a problem that forces you to think and use what you have learned instead of checking if you have managed to memorise the material.
Software may be making us less patient. I would definitely disagree about the idea that it is making us more stupid.
The basic problem with fiber is that the device sitting on the end of it (the NTE) can run at most for a few hours of a fairly big battery pack. Fiber is not mobile or radio where a device in idle consumes next to nothing.
There are multiple ways to solve this (I have had to design a couple in the past, it is not that difficult), however none of them are part of present NGA designs.
The web has _TWO_ functions: to unite and to reach.
1. Unite - by providing an environment which any device compliant to a relatively easy to implement spec can navigate.
2. Reach - by providing an environment over which a creator of content (or applications) can distribute it without thinking about the exact mechanics of reaching its target audience.
You limit the function to 1, Microsoft has always tried to limit the function to 2 and drop the "unite" bit. Ditto for quite a few other software developers. The truth is it is _BOTH_ 1 and 2.
It is no different from your kid saying that he is going somewhere in the schoolyard. My neighbour two houses down the street from me had that one happen to him a couple of months back. His kid was overly talkative about their vacation plans.
Playing devil's advocate here. Adobe Shockwave is pretty much Winhoze specific and games written in it are very much alive and kicking.
In fact the only reason it is still alive as a runtime is because it is hardware accelerated. So there is a niche for that which means that there will be a niche for a Windoze only browser with hardware accel.
What this did is to show puppeteers. Every enterprise (and not just in the business sense of this word) has a few of those - people who will never commit to anything face to face, who always work through others and most importantly who never ever carry the responsibility for the clusterf*** they orchestrate. They always use somebody else for cannon fodder.
I am all for flushing this lot in the open. They are very bad for company morale. If you are driving decisions in an organisation you also must be responsible for them.
Coming back to the "second gen social apps" - more and more of these will show puppeteers as a side effect. It is a natural result of the social graph being available for analysis. Yeah, it may be creepy, however that it is to be expected - it often takes a creepy method to bring the organisational creeps out in the open.
Not quite, this explains why about 2 years back Google search result quality suddenly went down the drain.
It now had news and key sites in minutes after update so I guess they got more advertising revenue. However the quality of search results on terms not related to news-of-the day actually dropped. Most pundits attributed this to Google losing the war vs blog spam.
Seismic surveys show that there is a very high likelihood that there is oil under East Anglia, Yorkshire and quite a few other places around the UK. None of it is particularly promissng, but it is a prospect of oil none the less.
However, not surprisingly noone wants to get involved with it.
Why did the Egyptian empire fall? Why did Ancient Greece fall? Why did Rome fall?
Slave labour works only _SHORT_ _TERM_. It is not a sustainable manufacturing method and it cannot compete long term against free labour. In a slave labour productivity is low and constant and does not grow over time. In a free labour economy productivity grows over time.
What slave labour does is that switching to it provides a better margin short term. After this short "advantage" has elapsed free labour is guaranteed to outcompete it. However for that free needs to be _REALLY_ free.
History shows that guilds are even worse than slave labour in term of long term economic stagnation. There are quite a few industries where the unions and professional societies are exactly what the guilds of old used to be and it is not surprising that even slave labour can outcompete them.
Gulf oil may run out. Which is good. No more money to sponsor Taleban and Hezbollah.
Other oil? Not so sure. Russians have always been operating a policy of "use 1, save 1". They have a considerable state reserve, so does USA in Alaska. Then there are all the fields that are in the Arctic or other places that are beyond current tech. Then there are all the fields that are not economically viable because of current land prices and environmental regs. Britain has petrol so does Germany, Netherlands, etc. However nobody wants to see an oil well in their backyard. Then there are all the places around the world with high density oil which are too difficult for current drilling processes. I own land on top of one of these fields in Eastern Europe and frankly I am eagerly waiting for oil to "run out". There is also a lot of high density leftovers which were never pumped out from fields that have been declared exhausted in Texas, Caucasus, etc. And so on.
Oil is not running out any time soon. It will just become more and more expensive. 200$ a barrel and 4-5$ per litre (not per gallon) at the pump are coming this way within the next 10 years and there is little we can do about that.
On the other hand MS Office as software is very bloated and inelegant.
So is Symbian.
And as someone else noted it enjoys ridiculous market share. Once again - so does Symbian.
So from a modern management perspective where managing Boston Chickin is more important than knowing the industry you manage the man is spot on for the job.
USA may actually have more CCTV then UK especially in the big cities. However, In USA you need a proper court order to actually do surveilance, go through tapes, etc. While Bush eroded a lot of that most of the necessary safeguards remain. It is not usable to do surveilance on an individual without a court order.
In the UK the lowliest council clerk can abuse RIPA to satisfy his big brother desires monitoring if you are emptying your bin as you should or if you are taking your kid to the school where you are supposed to. That is actually an improvement on the original RIPA statutes which intended to give private companies like Consignia access along with a list of 197 (IIRC, do not quote me on that number) other bodies. The difference between this and USA is parsecs and between this and the rest of the EU is light years.
So going back to EU surveilance. Ya know what - I would take surveilance executed under _CURRENT_ german privacy safeguards and laws any day. Ditto for most other continental European countries. As Google and Co have recently found out when they are talking privacy they actually mean business.
For the WiFi Broadcom has had working closed source drivers for a very long time. One of my machines is a Lenovo S10e which I bought in March 2009, defenestrated it and installed Debian day one. It has been using the closed source Linux driver from Broadcom website. The original 2009 release had some problems with WPA which they fixed. After that it just worked - hibernate, resume, everything.
As pointed elsewhere on this thread Broadcom is every second wireless enabled embedded device with Linux. So its closed source driver gets some very heavy testing on a variety of CPUs and architectures. As a result it is of very reasonable quality. If they have forked this closed source one or have released a parallel development open source one I would not be so sure that it will achieve higher code quality because it will be getting LESS eyeballs, not more. I guess I need to have a look at what exactly did they opensource here.
Example: I have both UK and Bulgarian citizenship. Bulgaria has had:
1. Unique ID and national ID register - more than 40 years now 2. Biometric passports with fingerprints - a few years now (mine should become biometric on next renewal) 3. Digital ID, publicaly accessible over the Internet national digital ID register in a LDAP format, smartcard generated cryptographic signatures as a valid means to sign a contract and valid authentication for services (both gov and private) 4. Fines down to a mere parking ticket paid through the tax register and a mandatory tax-clean status to be able to sell anything that requires a formal contract. You do not pay your parking ticket, well tough it shows up when you try to sell your house or your car and you cannot do it. 5. You can have your ID or passport pulled out of the database and reissued in as little as a day (if you pay) in most of the bigger city police offices. 6 and so on and so forth
Basically BG is classic "database nation" in the way UK and USA geeks keep scaremongering about. And you know what - my privacy there is infringed LESS than in the UK or USA. Much LESS.
Also, it is India we are talking about. Does anyone around here believe that a database of this size written in India will work? I do not. I know quite a few people in Eastern Europe who make a great living by picking up outsourcing projects which are supposedly being done by 2000 FTEs in India, doing them with 20 people and giving them back to the Indians so they present them as "their work". Everyone is happy - the outsourcer can happily do a Satyam and does not even need to falsify the books, the Eastern Europeans get a pay for the service that exceeds a UK/US salary and the clueless person who outsourced it in the first place thinks that he is getting value for the money.
I recall only one male student (out of around 30) in my class/major at the Uni who could not cook. At least 3-4 could cook better (and healthier) than let's say Nigella or Worall Thomson. That is without counting myself (I definitely can cook a X-mas duck or carp better than either one of these "kill by cholesterol overdose" TV characters).
Granted, I graduated with Chemistry before turning to the dark side and doing software, sysadmin and networks so my class probably does not constitute a representative sample.
Something probably hit the producers that year and there were 3 movies with similar topics. Out of them only Deep Impact is more or less worth watching on all accounts. It is tolerable in terms of scientific accuracy, it is also reasonably good in terms of acting, directing, cast and special effects.
Hard rock, western cosmetics and western films have done more for the demise of USSR style Communism than all efforts of western governments and all "dissidents" combined.
Well, same can be said about the whole USA visa system.
It specifically discriminates in favour of conservative countries which treat women as house-slaves and discriminate against civil partnerships. Check the visa conditions on H2,L2 and other visas issued to dependents. They speak volumes about the thinking of USA legislature.
In that case they would be the first technical company to remember the very few simple maxima:
1. A manager delivers through his subordinates. Screw them once, twice, thrice and at the end the result is that you are no longer able to deliver. 2. If staff is considered a "resource" than the manager is doubly so.
To be honest, I find that difficult to believe in. If that is indeed the case in HP some deep drilling is on order. It should be possible to counteract global warming by pumping heat into the frozen depth of Hell.
Regulation in some markets kicks in long before a monopoly. You can be considered to have significant market power at around 30-40% or so especially if you have it multiple markets. In the UK this may be as low as 25% in some cases (regulated industries).
Google is long past that threshold on search, video streaming, internet advertising and approaching it on Internet based email and "classic ISP apps". While not being a monopoly it is already a subject to antitrust laws.
Because of its market share as per EU and USA law it is a mandatory subject to regulator scrutiny on all mergers and aquisitions in the areas mentioned above. Additionally, any attempt to leverage this market share to enter new markets will also result in similar scrutiny. All it takes is for one company to complain and the regulator is obliged to review it. The regulators will also review it proactively.
However, Google has stellar lobbying, legal and regulatory department so it is managing to outmaneuver Steelie Neelie and Co so far. If it continues however to use SMP in one market to enter another one, sooner or later it will get a seriouos whack.
This by the way was what got MSFT in the end a decade ago before Bush government effectively "forgave them". It was not their desktop near-monopoly or their position in the office space. It was the usage of SMP in one area to enter and reach SMP in another. More specifically it was the use of OS SMP to excercise anticompetitive behaviour in the browser space, ditto for using OS SMP to monopolise productivity markets.
In order for antitrust laws to take effect a company does not need to be a monopoly. It needs to have significant market power. The definition depends on regulator and leeway depends on regulator as well.
For example regulators in the EU (except UK) and USA allow natural monopolies based around inventions and in new markets. If you invent something new and you use it to create a market or enter an existing market most regulators (except UK) will allow you to grow your company until you have SMP and sometimes even to a full monopoly provided that you stay within your market. However, if you try to leverage this monopoly to enter a new market you will get whacked on short order. Same if you try to leverage it to prevent other players from entering the market you have created.
Coming back to Google. Google has SMP (and is not in the UK) which is achieved by natural growth and this is one of the reasons why it does not get whacked straight away. Google also is clearly leveraging its SMP position in search space to enter other markets - applications, navigation, etc. This is a different story compared to search space. There, the regulators are obliged to investigate it by law. In fact it is surprising that it is under so little scrutiny. This says volumes about their lobbying and legal arm. Actually looking at the list of job ads they dump on linkedin around here and doing some stats on the ratio of lobby, pr, legal vs engineering makes this considerably less surprising. Not surprising at all in fact.
BUUUUUUUUUUDGET as you say does not necessarily mean ugly. Politically correct however often does. In fact it usually does, as for jobs where there is a perception of a "good look requirement" recruitment ends up in positive discrimination territory just in case.
The guy mentioned entourage. If he is running MacOS he can run any of these on MacOS.
This solves the "storage" problem. However, this does not solve the search/index/etc problem. I have 9G+ and growing IMAP store going back to 1999 with several hundred of folders in it so I am facing a similar problem. Using Thunderbird search and even grepping it on the server just does not cut it any more.
Slashdot Mirror
Physics professor who cannot build a Faraday cage? Bwahahaha...
Exactly.
I have had two types of exams at a uni. Some where Exams where you had to bring everything in your head and some where exams where you could bring a whole ref library with you (some where even carried out in a library).
The latter were 10 times more difficult than the former because the prof could actually give you a problem that forces you to think and use what you have learned instead of checking if you have managed to memorise the material.
Software may be making us less patient. I would definitely disagree about the idea that it is making us more stupid.
Not quite so.
The basic problem with fiber is that the device sitting on the end of it (the NTE) can run at most for a few hours of a fairly big battery pack. Fiber is not mobile or radio where a device in idle consumes next to nothing.
There are multiple ways to solve this (I have had to design a couple in the past, it is not that difficult), however none of them are part of present NGA designs.
And your point is?
The web has _TWO_ functions: to unite and to reach.
1. Unite - by providing an environment which any device compliant to a relatively easy to implement spec can navigate.
2. Reach - by providing an environment over which a creator of content (or applications) can distribute it without thinking about the exact mechanics of reaching its target audience.
You limit the function to 1, Microsoft has always tried to limit the function to 2 and drop the "unite" bit. Ditto for quite a few other software developers. The truth is it is _BOTH_ 1 and 2.
Wrong analogy.
It is no different from your kid saying that he is going somewhere in the schoolyard. My neighbour two houses down the street from me had that one happen to him a couple of months back. His kid was overly talkative about their vacation plans.
Playing devil's advocate here. Adobe Shockwave is pretty much Winhoze specific and games written in it are very much alive and kicking.
In fact the only reason it is still alive as a runtime is because it is hardware accelerated. So there is a niche for that which means that there will be a niche for a Windoze only browser with hardware accel.
Not quite.
What this did is to show puppeteers. Every enterprise (and not just in the business sense of this word) has a few of those - people who will never commit to anything face to face, who always work through others and most importantly who never ever carry the responsibility for the clusterf*** they orchestrate. They always use somebody else for cannon fodder.
I am all for flushing this lot in the open. They are very bad for company morale. If you are driving decisions in an organisation you also must be responsible for them.
Coming back to the "second gen social apps" - more and more of these will show puppeteers as a side effect. It is a natural result of the social graph being available for analysis. Yeah, it may be creepy, however that it is to be expected - it often takes a creepy method to bring the organisational creeps out in the open.
Not quite, this explains why about 2 years back Google search result quality suddenly went down the drain.
It now had news and key sites in minutes after update so I guess they got more advertising revenue. However the quality of search results on terms not related to news-of-the day actually dropped. Most pundits attributed this to Google losing the war vs blog spam.
I am not referring to the North Sea.
Seismic surveys show that there is a very high likelihood that there is oil under East Anglia, Yorkshire and quite a few other places around the UK. None of it is particularly promissng, but it is a prospect of oil none the less.
However, not surprisingly noone wants to get involved with it.
Why did the Egyptian empire fall? Why did Ancient Greece fall? Why did Rome fall?
Slave labour works only _SHORT_ _TERM_. It is not a sustainable manufacturing method and it cannot compete long term against free labour. In a slave labour productivity is low and constant and does not grow over time. In a free labour economy productivity grows over time.
What slave labour does is that switching to it provides a better margin short term. After this short "advantage" has elapsed free labour is guaranteed to outcompete it. However for that free needs to be _REALLY_ free.
History shows that guilds are even worse than slave labour in term of long term economic stagnation. There are quite a few industries where the unions and professional societies are exactly what the guilds of old used to be and it is not surprising that even slave labour can outcompete them.
Gulf oil may run out. Which is good. No more money to sponsor Taleban and Hezbollah.
Other oil? Not so sure. Russians have always been operating a policy of "use 1, save 1". They have a considerable state reserve, so does USA in Alaska. Then there are all the fields that are in the Arctic or other places that are beyond current tech. Then there are all the fields that are not economically viable because of current land prices and environmental regs. Britain has petrol so does Germany, Netherlands, etc. However nobody wants to see an oil well in their backyard. Then there are all the places around the world with high density oil which are too difficult for current drilling processes. I own land on top of one of these fields in Eastern Europe and frankly I am eagerly waiting for oil to "run out". There is also a lot of high density leftovers which were never pumped out from fields that have been declared exhausted in Texas, Caucasus, etc. And so on.
Oil is not running out any time soon. It will just become more and more expensive. 200$ a barrel and 4-5$ per litre (not per gallon) at the pump are coming this way within the next 10 years and there is little we can do about that.
On the other hand MS Office as software is very bloated and inelegant.
So is Symbian.
And as someone else noted it enjoys ridiculous market share. Once again - so does Symbian.
So from a modern management perspective where managing Boston Chickin is more important than knowing the industry you manage the man is spot on for the job.
You slightly missed the point here.
USA may actually have more CCTV then UK especially in the big cities. However, In USA you need a proper court order to actually do surveilance, go through tapes, etc. While Bush eroded a lot of that most of the necessary safeguards remain. It is not usable to do surveilance on an individual without a court order.
In the UK the lowliest council clerk can abuse RIPA to satisfy his big brother desires monitoring if you are emptying your bin as you should or if you are taking your kid to the school where you are supposed to. That is actually an improvement on the original RIPA statutes which intended to give private companies like Consignia access along with a list of 197 (IIRC, do not quote me on that number) other bodies. The difference between this and USA is parsecs and between this and the rest of the EU is light years.
So going back to EU surveilance. Ya know what - I would take surveilance executed under _CURRENT_ german privacy safeguards and laws any day. Ditto for most other continental European countries. As Google and Co have recently found out when they are talking privacy they actually mean business.
You can, however you have to play with cables. Cables != dock. Geek != consumer.
For the WiFi Broadcom has had working closed source drivers for a very long time. One of my machines is a Lenovo S10e which I bought in March 2009, defenestrated it and installed Debian day one. It has been using the closed source Linux driver from Broadcom website. The original 2009 release had some problems with WPA which they fixed. After that it just worked - hibernate, resume, everything.
As pointed elsewhere on this thread Broadcom is every second wireless enabled embedded device with Linux. So its closed source driver gets some very heavy testing on a variety of CPUs and architectures. As a result it is of very reasonable quality. If they have forked this closed source one or have released a parallel development open source one I would not be so sure that it will achieve higher code quality because it will be getting LESS eyeballs, not more. I guess I need to have a look at what exactly did they opensource here.
What's so scary about that?
Example: I have both UK and Bulgarian citizenship. Bulgaria has had:
1. Unique ID and national ID register - more than 40 years now
2. Biometric passports with fingerprints - a few years now (mine should become biometric on next renewal)
3. Digital ID, publicaly accessible over the Internet national digital ID register in a LDAP format, smartcard generated cryptographic signatures as a valid means to sign a contract and valid authentication for services (both gov and private)
4. Fines down to a mere parking ticket paid through the tax register and a mandatory tax-clean status to be able to sell anything that requires a formal contract. You do not pay your parking ticket, well tough it shows up when you try to sell your house or your car and you cannot do it.
5. You can have your ID or passport pulled out of the database and reissued in as little as a day (if you pay) in most of the bigger city police offices.
6 and so on and so forth
Basically BG is classic "database nation" in the way UK and USA geeks keep scaremongering about. And you know what - my privacy there is infringed LESS than in the UK or USA. Much LESS.
Also, it is India we are talking about. Does anyone around here believe that a database of this size written in India will work? I do not. I know quite a few people in Eastern Europe who make a great living by picking up outsourcing projects which are supposedly being done by 2000 FTEs in India, doing them with 20 people and giving them back to the Indians so they present them as "their work". Everyone is happy - the outsourcer can happily do a Satyam and does not even need to falsify the books, the Eastern Europeans get a pay for the service that exceeds a UK/US salary and the clueless person who outsourced it in the first place thinks that he is getting value for the money.
Exactly.
I recall only one male student (out of around 30) in my class/major at the Uni who could not cook. At least 3-4 could cook better (and healthier) than let's say Nigella or Worall Thomson. That is without counting myself (I definitely can cook a X-mas duck or carp better than either one of these "kill by cholesterol overdose" TV characters).
Granted, I graduated with Chemistry before turning to the dark side and doing software, sysadmin and networks so my class probably does not constitute a representative sample.
Something probably hit the producers that year and there were 3 movies with similar topics. Out of them only Deep Impact is more or less worth watching on all accounts.
It is tolerable in terms of scientific accuracy, it is also reasonably good in terms of acting, directing, cast and special effects.
Spot on
Hard rock, western cosmetics and western films have done more for the demise of USSR style Communism than all efforts of western governments and all "dissidents" combined.
Well, same can be said about the whole USA visa system.
It specifically discriminates in favour of conservative countries which treat women as house-slaves and discriminate against civil partnerships. Check the visa conditions on H2,L2 and other visas issued to dependents. They speak volumes about the thinking of USA legislature.
In that case they would be the first technical company to remember the very few simple maxima:
1. A manager delivers through his subordinates. Screw them once, twice, thrice and at the end the result is that you are no longer able to deliver.
2. If staff is considered a "resource" than the manager is doubly so.
To be honest, I find that difficult to believe in. If that is indeed the case in HP some deep drilling is on order. It should be possible to counteract global warming by pumping heat into the frozen depth of Hell.
Regulation in some markets kicks in long before a monopoly. You can be considered to have significant market power at around 30-40% or so especially if you have it multiple markets. In the UK this may be as low as 25% in some cases (regulated industries).
Google is long past that threshold on search, video streaming, internet advertising and approaching it on Internet based email and "classic ISP apps". While not being a monopoly it is already a subject to antitrust laws.
Because of its market share as per EU and USA law it is a mandatory subject to regulator scrutiny on all mergers and aquisitions in the areas mentioned above. Additionally, any attempt to leverage this market share to enter new markets will also result in similar scrutiny. All it takes is for one company to complain and the regulator is obliged to review it. The regulators will also review it proactively.
However, Google has stellar lobbying, legal and regulatory department so it is managing to outmaneuver Steelie Neelie and Co so far. If it continues however to use SMP in one market to enter another one, sooner or later it will get a seriouos whack.
This by the way was what got MSFT in the end a decade ago before Bush government effectively "forgave them". It was not their desktop near-monopoly or their position in the office space. It was the usage of SMP in one area to enter and reach SMP in another. More specifically it was the use of OS SMP to excercise anticompetitive behaviour in the browser space, ditto for using OS SMP to monopolise productivity markets.
You misunderstand the concept of antitrust laws.
In order for antitrust laws to take effect a company does not need to be a monopoly. It needs to have significant market power. The definition depends on regulator and leeway depends on regulator as well.
For example regulators in the EU (except UK) and USA allow natural monopolies based around inventions and in new markets. If you invent something new and you use it to create a market or enter an existing market most regulators (except UK) will allow you to grow your company until you have SMP and sometimes even to a full monopoly provided that you stay within your market. However, if you try to leverage this monopoly to enter a new market you will get whacked on short order. Same if you try to leverage it to prevent other players from entering the market you have created.
Coming back to Google. Google has SMP (and is not in the UK) which is achieved by natural growth and this is one of the reasons why it does not get whacked straight away. Google also is clearly leveraging its SMP position in search space to enter other markets - applications, navigation, etc. This is a different story compared to search space. There, the regulators are obliged to investigate it by law. In fact it is surprising that it is under so little scrutiny. This says volumes about their lobbying and legal arm. Actually looking at the list of job ads they dump on linkedin around here and doing some stats on the ratio of lobby, pr, legal vs engineering makes this considerably less surprising. Not surprising at all in fact.
No, think Politically Correct.
BUUUUUUUUUUDGET as you say does not necessarily mean ugly. Politically correct however often does. In fact it usually does, as for jobs where there is a perception of a "good look requirement" recruitment ends up in positive discrimination territory just in case.
The guy mentioned entourage. If he is running MacOS he can run any of these on MacOS.
This solves the "storage" problem. However, this does not solve the search/index/etc problem. I have 9G+ and growing IMAP store going back to 1999 with several hundred of folders in it so I am facing a similar problem. Using Thunderbird search and even grepping it on the server just does not cut it any more.