Well, I think Office is here to stay, if you include the cloud-based office. But I don't see it growing, except as a result of "technically literate world population growth". But that in and of itself isn't really a problem. Look at United Technologies, which most geeks have never heard of but is arguably the world's oldest tech giant, and still doing fine: at a certain point of maturity, cash cows are forever (assuming your business stays internally healthy).
I guess it's the difference between "relevant" and "relevant to the leading edge". The latter is just a means to the former.
What remains to be seen is where Microsoft's push to stay relevant in the consumer space goes (they're pretty much set for decades in the enterprise space, IMO). Will the Xbone be a good smart TV? Will their cloud services be the best? Will they tie the ship to the sinking mobile stuff? Ultimately, I think if they sold a dev platform that let you write once for PC, mobile (including Android), and Xbone they could charge back into the leading edge, but that would be a real mindset change for them. (I would love to be able to write Android apps easily in C#, but I'm not betting it will happen).
Why not instead let people choose insurance that meets their needs? (It's not so much the law as the regulators kicking plans out, and those regulations are still in motion). That's why "if you like your plan you can keep your plan" was so important - it let people opt in to this new untested system.
Instead people are being forced into this system (financially they had to be, it never made sense that you could cover pre-existing conditions without a large bump in premiums), and for the most part they aren't happy. apparently congress will vote Friday on a "keep your plan" bill. If that should pass, it will inevitably mean insurance company bailouts, as you can't change the math on pre-existing conditions. Yay, more bailouts! Won't that be fun!
Always a good plan. But for MS I think this will be "MS 3.0" - Balmer's MS was very different from Gates'. TBD's MS looks like it will be quite different as well, one way or the other.
A bell curve for employees works well across a large enough pool. Given 5 people, it's silly. Given 500 people, you're going to have a bell curve of actual performance. That's not the problem with stack ranking,
It's firing the bottom x% every year that gets you into trouble. The first time you do it, it's probably for the best, but after that if you need to fire that many people you should probably get better at hiring.
And yet both companies will have the same outcome - continuing their long decline into irrelevant mediocrity.
Somehow despite geek opinions, Microsoft's revenue keeps going up. Yahoo is starting to look up as well, though how much of that is Alibaba is hard to say.
All industries eventually mature. Being on top of a mature industry is a good place to be, as long as you occasionally shake things up enough to stay on top.
Maybe both companies should consider looking a little further up the management chain to discover what truly ails them.
You mean like getting a new CEO, which Yahoo did and MS is doing?
It surely needs to. I've said for quite some time that MS is doomed without some radical changes. Well, new CEO, major re-org, end of the reviled stack ranking, sure seems like they're trying! At this point it's clear that MS is re-inventing a different version of itself.
To maintain the ability to earn a living making creative works. Sure, maybe some radically different system might be better, but likely any given one isn't.
There is also the fact that there is an attitude change. The "stone soup" of days past is gone, with only the old guard in place. The younger people want to hear the ka-ching sound when writing code, not the fact that they wrote something to scratch an itch.
Being a skilled Linux kernel hacker is a great career move, though. I routinely get interviewers contacting me for top-tier Linux kernel architect jobs when there's barely a suggestion in my resume that I could actually do that work. Demand far outstrips supply there, even compared to other senior positions.
If you want to attract new people, then you will have to bite the bullet and switch to a language that does RAII or a similar predictable resource management technique. Nobody in his right mind will write those mind-numbing goto constructs, when the compiler can do this. It doesn't have to be C++, it could be some modern form of C with classes or D.
There is a completely irrational hatred and fear of C++ among C kernel hackers. It's so steeped in the culture I'm not sure it can change (though a flux of young people would help). The funny thing is, when I've spent enough time with veteran kernel hackers to show exactly how RAII would work in their code, they were accepting that it actually works and would make life easier, but were still unwilling to change.
I suspect a big part of it is simply that so much of your day-to-day work habits as a good kernel guy get invalidated (because made unnecessary) that it feels like starting over.
It's not at all just RAII, BTW. There are times when "placement new" (and overloading the new operator) and where templates could massively clean up code by moving common stuff into the compiler.
But that's absurd. Why should medical care be a social service? There are serious problems (mostly known) with the current system, how about we fix those with minimum government involvement? Or is totalitarianism your goal?
Some people can't afford care? Fine, we can and should fix that. Huge administrative burden because every insurance company's paperwork is different? Fine we can and should fix that. Those problems simply don't requires government takeover of a significant portion of the economy to fix!
It's trivial to check that a phone number is inoffensive before going with it (and clearly now it's known), much like it's easy to check that a website actually works at all (forget corner cases) before going live. Those are things that you do when you care at all about your customers.
Not even talking about the ACA here. This whole healthcare.gov site was just a massive "fuck you" to the people who legally need it. It's not like you can argue that 3 motivated devs couldn't get the basics up and working in the first month!
Utter management incompetence at this level of spectacular failure can either mean (1) utter management incompetence all the way to the top, or (2) lack of caring. Seriously, we know the problem domain just isn't that hard, which leaves us with incompetence or indifference.
I really see no need in having long lasting copyright either, all works have a significant input from society, that created them and as long as you are limiting them in some way you are limiting their distribution and derivations.
Just in general, any time there's a spectrum of ways to do things, and you find yourself arguing for one extreme end of the spectrum because the other extreme end of the spectrum is bad, you should stop and reconsider.
. No one needs to be paid for the rest of their life for a creation that took a couple of hours to create
Depends how impressive it was. But most works worth discussing are a year's work, by one or a vast team of people.
Do you then think that if a mother smokes or drinks and the child becomes handicapped as a result that the mother should be put in jail for child abuse?
Isn't that already the case? If it's not, give the left time and it will be. Certainly most people would agree such behavior is irresponsible.
2) How about if the fetus develops in such a way that it is a life threatening danger to the mother. Is the mother committing murder if she aborts the fetus to save her own life? Or should the mother commit suicide to save the life of the fetus so that she does not commit "murder"?
Doctors sometimes make hard choices when two lives are at risk and at most one can be saved. I think it's important to have some sort of medical review board in such cases - leave it to the doctors, but insist they do police themselves.
6) If a child is born prematurely because of some action of the mother and dies during the birth is the mother guilty of murder?
Deliberate action? That should be a serious crime. But intent matters, as it usually does when someone gets hurt.
Ultimately, there are only 2 irrational positions to take about when life/personhood begins: "at birth" and "at conception". After the first trimester, it's very hard to rationally argue that "I'm 100% certain that's not a person", given our uncertainty about everything metaphysical in general, and so an abortion after the first trimester has to be seen as having some risk of being murder. We have a good legal basis for handling actions that pose some risk of killing someone - and many exceptions in which they're permissible.
"emergency contraception" is abortion, there's no two ways about it, and we shouldn't hide behind euphemisms. There's also no rational reason to oppose it, as it requires some really poorly thought through theology to even begin to mount a defense. I think you'll find that the only opposition here comes from very orthodox Catholics, stuck to a church policy designed to ensure maximum population growth among Catholics at any cost (something I find outright evil, myself, and most Catholics in the world are fine with birth control whatever they hear at church).
We're already seeing the American healthcare system split into cash-only "boutique" doctors and people stuck in the insurance-based system. The former system is surprisingly affordable, you might be amazed at how reasonable most things are.
What's needed isn't some gigantic bureaucracy here, but simply the ability to pay cash-up-front (no surprise billing afterward by 20 different providers you didn't even know ere involved) plus catastrophic insurance. You know, actual insurance against rare large expenses they same way you insure your house against burning down. The way it all used to work once. Those are the very plans outlawed by the ACA.
So what you're saying is "it's not your money, you greedy capitalist, it's the peoples money, and you should be grateful for any of it the people let you keep"?
Setting aside the definition of insurance you just made up, how about we agree that charity is something needed by the poor, and when the government subsidizes the middle class it's just a power grab?
Great work, BTW. Both in providing a valuable service to people who are really quite screwed right now, and in showing America what we really got for the many millions spent developing Healthcare.gov (we got many millions in the pockets of campaign contributors, instead of a web site that works).
And remember, if you need telephone assistance with Healthcare.gov, call the help line at 1-800-F1UCKYO. That's really the number - they're not even hiding how much they care.
American soldiers who received lethal doses of radiation from DU munitions
It always amazes me how people who make up whackjob conspiracy theories can't even be bothered to stay within the laws of physics. At least the entirely made up "100k innocent casualties" is part of an entertaining story and could possibly be true. But when you start making physically impossible claims, you're just being an ass. Stop that.
Lyrics site are renown far and wide as the primary distributers of drive-by malware and general bad hygiene. No one would go to lyrics sites of there were an official alternative. The sites ad value by making the lyrics available, and they can only do that because neither the bands nor the labels bother. More power to them; hope they all make millions.
There's no need to have a short copyright term (though the recent extensions are silly), instead we need to change what copyright means, so that you can't restrict the distribution or prevent derivative works. I see no problem with the creator continuing to profit for a long time from some creative work, and that was never really the problem (except with children who demand all things for free). The problem comes when copyright blocks further creative progress, and that is fixed by mandatory FRAND licensing.
That's the norm on YouTube today, but we should give it legislative force to eliminate the entire concept of "takedown" for all but quite recent works.
Or easier yet, cut the cord to the gmail mothership! There are other webmail products (I'm in the midst of switching to outlook.com). Yahoo and MS may have serve ads, but it's vastly less intrusive than googles omni-present tracking
I fear you're right. Netflix just keeps dropping older stuff, both from streaming and from DVD. I just don't get it.
I don't want to torrent anything! It's just crazy that no one will take my money to stream me the vast back catalog of titles that have entered the digital domain.
It's time for mandatory licensing of older works. You know what - I'm OK with 100 year copyright if after 10 works fall under some FRAND scheme and all the Netflix's of the world get to stream them for a nominal fee.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, I think Office is here to stay, if you include the cloud-based office. But I don't see it growing, except as a result of "technically literate world population growth". But that in and of itself isn't really a problem. Look at United Technologies, which most geeks have never heard of but is arguably the world's oldest tech giant, and still doing fine: at a certain point of maturity, cash cows are forever (assuming your business stays internally healthy).
I guess it's the difference between "relevant" and "relevant to the leading edge". The latter is just a means to the former.
What remains to be seen is where Microsoft's push to stay relevant in the consumer space goes (they're pretty much set for decades in the enterprise space, IMO). Will the Xbone be a good smart TV? Will their cloud services be the best? Will they tie the ship to the sinking mobile stuff? Ultimately, I think if they sold a dev platform that let you write once for PC, mobile (including Android), and Xbone they could charge back into the leading edge, but that would be a real mindset change for them. (I would love to be able to write Android apps easily in C#, but I'm not betting it will happen).
Awesome!
Why not instead let people choose insurance that meets their needs? (It's not so much the law as the regulators kicking plans out, and those regulations are still in motion). That's why "if you like your plan you can keep your plan" was so important - it let people opt in to this new untested system.
Instead people are being forced into this system (financially they had to be, it never made sense that you could cover pre-existing conditions without a large bump in premiums), and for the most part they aren't happy. apparently congress will vote Friday on a "keep your plan" bill. If that should pass, it will inevitably mean insurance company bailouts, as you can't change the math on pre-existing conditions. Yay, more bailouts! Won't that be fun!
Always a good plan. But for MS I think this will be "MS 3.0" - Balmer's MS was very different from Gates'. TBD's MS looks like it will be quite different as well, one way or the other.
A bell curve for employees works well across a large enough pool. Given 5 people, it's silly. Given 500 people, you're going to have a bell curve of actual performance. That's not the problem with stack ranking,
It's firing the bottom x% every year that gets you into trouble. The first time you do it, it's probably for the best, but after that if you need to fire that many people you should probably get better at hiring.
And yet both companies will have the same outcome - continuing their long decline into irrelevant mediocrity.
Somehow despite geek opinions, Microsoft's revenue keeps going up. Yahoo is starting to look up as well, though how much of that is Alibaba is hard to say.
All industries eventually mature. Being on top of a mature industry is a good place to be, as long as you occasionally shake things up enough to stay on top.
Maybe both companies should consider looking a little further up the management chain to discover what truly ails them.
You mean like getting a new CEO, which Yahoo did and MS is doing?
It surely needs to. I've said for quite some time that MS is doomed without some radical changes. Well, new CEO, major re-org, end of the reviled stack ranking, sure seems like they're trying! At this point it's clear that MS is re-inventing a different version of itself.
To maintain the ability to earn a living making creative works. Sure, maybe some radically different system might be better, but likely any given one isn't.
There is also the fact that there is an attitude change. The "stone soup" of days past is gone, with only the old guard in place. The younger people want to hear the ka-ching sound when writing code, not the fact that they wrote something to scratch an itch.
Being a skilled Linux kernel hacker is a great career move, though. I routinely get interviewers contacting me for top-tier Linux kernel architect jobs when there's barely a suggestion in my resume that I could actually do that work. Demand far outstrips supply there, even compared to other senior positions.
If you want to attract new people, then you will have to bite the bullet and switch to a language that does RAII or a similar predictable resource management technique. Nobody in his right mind will write those mind-numbing goto constructs, when the compiler can do this. It doesn't have to be C++, it could be some modern form of C with classes or D.
There is a completely irrational hatred and fear of C++ among C kernel hackers. It's so steeped in the culture I'm not sure it can change (though a flux of young people would help). The funny thing is, when I've spent enough time with veteran kernel hackers to show exactly how RAII would work in their code, they were accepting that it actually works and would make life easier, but were still unwilling to change.
I suspect a big part of it is simply that so much of your day-to-day work habits as a good kernel guy get invalidated (because made unnecessary) that it feels like starting over.
It's not at all just RAII, BTW. There are times when "placement new" (and overloading the new operator) and where templates could massively clean up code by moving common stuff into the compiler.
Yes, exactly. You're aborting a zygote. The words "abortion" and "zygote" are both the correct words to use.
But that's absurd. Why should medical care be a social service? There are serious problems (mostly known) with the current system, how about we fix those with minimum government involvement? Or is totalitarianism your goal?
Some people can't afford care? Fine, we can and should fix that. Huge administrative burden because every insurance company's paperwork is different? Fine we can and should fix that. Those problems simply don't requires government takeover of a significant portion of the economy to fix!
It's trivial to check that a phone number is inoffensive before going with it (and clearly now it's known), much like it's easy to check that a website actually works at all (forget corner cases) before going live. Those are things that you do when you care at all about your customers.
Not even talking about the ACA here. This whole healthcare.gov site was just a massive "fuck you" to the people who legally need it. It's not like you can argue that 3 motivated devs couldn't get the basics up and working in the first month!
Utter management incompetence at this level of spectacular failure can either mean (1) utter management incompetence all the way to the top, or (2) lack of caring. Seriously, we know the problem domain just isn't that hard, which leaves us with incompetence or indifference.
I really see no need in having long lasting copyright either, all works have a significant input from society, that created them and as long as you are limiting them in some way you are limiting their distribution and derivations.
Just in general, any time there's a spectrum of ways to do things, and you find yourself arguing for one extreme end of the spectrum because the other extreme end of the spectrum is bad, you should stop and reconsider.
. No one needs to be paid for the rest of their life for a creation that took a couple of hours to create
Depends how impressive it was. But most works worth discussing are a year's work, by one or a vast team of people.
Not the OP, but this is interesting.
Do you then think that if a mother smokes or drinks and the child becomes handicapped as a result that the mother should be put in jail for child abuse?
Isn't that already the case? If it's not, give the left time and it will be. Certainly most people would agree such behavior is irresponsible.
2) How about if the fetus develops in such a way that it is a life threatening danger to the mother. Is the mother committing murder if she aborts the fetus to save her own life? Or should the mother commit suicide to save the life of the fetus so that she does not commit "murder"?
Doctors sometimes make hard choices when two lives are at risk and at most one can be saved. I think it's important to have some sort of medical review board in such cases - leave it to the doctors, but insist they do police themselves.
6) If a child is born prematurely because of some action of the mother and dies during the birth is the mother guilty of murder?
Deliberate action? That should be a serious crime. But intent matters, as it usually does when someone gets hurt.
Ultimately, there are only 2 irrational positions to take about when life/personhood begins: "at birth" and "at conception". After the first trimester, it's very hard to rationally argue that "I'm 100% certain that's not a person", given our uncertainty about everything metaphysical in general, and so an abortion after the first trimester has to be seen as having some risk of being murder. We have a good legal basis for handling actions that pose some risk of killing someone - and many exceptions in which they're permissible.
"emergency contraception" is abortion, there's no two ways about it, and we shouldn't hide behind euphemisms. There's also no rational reason to oppose it, as it requires some really poorly thought through theology to even begin to mount a defense. I think you'll find that the only opposition here comes from very orthodox Catholics, stuck to a church policy designed to ensure maximum population growth among Catholics at any cost (something I find outright evil, myself, and most Catholics in the world are fine with birth control whatever they hear at church).
We're already seeing the American healthcare system split into cash-only "boutique" doctors and people stuck in the insurance-based system. The former system is surprisingly affordable, you might be amazed at how reasonable most things are.
What's needed isn't some gigantic bureaucracy here, but simply the ability to pay cash-up-front (no surprise billing afterward by 20 different providers you didn't even know ere involved) plus catastrophic insurance. You know, actual insurance against rare large expenses they same way you insure your house against burning down. The way it all used to work once. Those are the very plans outlawed by the ACA.
So what you're saying is "it's not your money, you greedy capitalist, it's the peoples money, and you should be grateful for any of it the people let you keep"?
Setting aside the definition of insurance you just made up, how about we agree that charity is something needed by the poor, and when the government subsidizes the middle class it's just a power grab?
Great work, BTW. Both in providing a valuable service to people who are really quite screwed right now, and in showing America what we really got for the many millions spent developing Healthcare.gov (we got many millions in the pockets of campaign contributors, instead of a web site that works).
And remember, if you need telephone assistance with Healthcare.gov, call the help line at 1-800-F1UCKYO. That's really the number - they're not even hiding how much they care.
My attempt showed me only plans to have my soul devoured by demons, but I think I accidently typed a negative ZIP code.
American soldiers who received lethal doses of radiation from DU munitions
It always amazes me how people who make up whackjob conspiracy theories can't even be bothered to stay within the laws of physics. At least the entirely made up "100k innocent casualties" is part of an entertaining story and could possibly be true. But when you start making physically impossible claims, you're just being an ass. Stop that.
Why is it even relevant?
Lyrics site are renown far and wide as the primary distributers of drive-by malware and general bad hygiene. No one would go to lyrics sites of there were an official alternative. The sites ad value by making the lyrics available, and they can only do that because neither the bands nor the labels bother. More power to them; hope they all make millions.
Life moves faster now
Things every generation ever has said.
There's no need to have a short copyright term (though the recent extensions are silly), instead we need to change what copyright means, so that you can't restrict the distribution or prevent derivative works. I see no problem with the creator continuing to profit for a long time from some creative work, and that was never really the problem (except with children who demand all things for free). The problem comes when copyright blocks further creative progress, and that is fixed by mandatory FRAND licensing.
That's the norm on YouTube today, but we should give it legislative force to eliminate the entire concept of "takedown" for all but quite recent works.
Or easier yet, cut the cord to the gmail mothership! There are other webmail products (I'm in the midst of switching to outlook.com). Yahoo and MS may have serve ads, but it's vastly less intrusive than googles omni-present tracking
I fear you're right. Netflix just keeps dropping older stuff, both from streaming and from DVD. I just don't get it.
I don't want to torrent anything! It's just crazy that no one will take my money to stream me the vast back catalog of titles that have entered the digital domain.
It's time for mandatory licensing of older works. You know what - I'm OK with 100 year copyright if after 10 works fall under some FRAND scheme and all the Netflix's of the world get to stream them for a nominal fee.