Do you seriously believe that guy's PR? Innovation at scale? Yes, the rage of customers stamping their feet in anger has to measure on the Richter scale before Microsoft makes a change. How much do you want to bet that the next 5 windows mobile devices will try to be a better Iphone?
A lot of the good research about how brains work contains science and statistics that are the basis of this article's misinterpretation.
Here are some real facts that probably led to this opinion Obama has.
a) Brains learn over time and with repetition and focus. Thoughts, patterns of thinking, and skills are basically etched into our brains over time. b) It takes roughly 10,000 hours to reach "mastery" of a skill - and there don't seem to be any shortcuts. c) IQ higher than 120 seems to be enough do Nobel prize level work -- as long as you put in your 10k hours in the same subject and work hard at it. IQ higher than `80 is enough to be a chess grand master if you put in 10k hours.
Kids that focus can learn calculus much, much earlier in their lives than they generally do now simply by spending a lot more time doing math. d) On average, for the average kid - kids in poor schools make almost as much progress as kids in rich schools do each year until the summer time, where they forget a lot of what they learned, causing them to come into each new year as if they lost a few months of the last year's learning, and over time that required catching up time adds up to a huge step behind, which makes them less and prepared for college and a job that requires college level skills.
In other words - if you're below average - you can put in time and get to be average or above average at most mental skills, and if you're slightly above average - given time you can be effectively as good as a genius at most mental skills.
The secretary of education is missing some other key pieces for sucessful learning though. a) Emotional responses and environment have a huge impact - basically if we're under emotional stress or pressure, the logical part of our brain turns off and we think like mammals or lizards, and in those phases, the only way to learn is by mindless senseless repetition. Teenagers are subjected to so much emotional stress and pressure it's cliche.
This is part of the reasoning behind lame school uniforms. b) Culture has a huge impact on what people are good at and what they aren't.
Some asian languages literally require less area in the brain to teach math basics, and this is often wrongly attributed to be genetic. c) Teaching, learning, and persuading only happen with an emotional connection of some sort with the teacher -- respect, likeness, trust.
Part of the reason school is so boring though is that people are only conciously focused about 10% of the time, and the rest of the time they're on autopilot. Multiply that by dozens of kids and you effectively have to assume that they're all on autopilot most of the time and try to teach in a way that gets through autopilot.
Anyway - if you are bored with school, learn on your own -- that's how the most successful people get where they get. Obama's just trying to have less people in prison and more people in the US able to do brain things, because by the time you're out of school kid, there won't be any damn jobs left for people who aren't absoulte badasses at whatever field they decide to go into.
Pointers to books with better explanations and with more pointers in their appedixes to the research they summarize:
To use an IT metaphor; the mainframe has eaten itself, and you're trying to fix it, and you've got to do things that may or may not destroy data, but that have to be done regardless just to get the system running again. Is it productive to listen to all the people who have a stake in the data screaming their uninformed opinions?
To use your analogy: Yes, requisition 700 billion bucks to buy the lowest quality RAMBUS DIMMS that are known to fail repeatedly but overpay for them because "they're worth a lot of money", and their value will recover as soon as we go back to that technology, since it's "technically sound" according to our computer models.
Yes, we can fix the problem by giving the same vendors who sold us this POS the first time more money because the reason the mainframe crashes and loses data is because "we don't believe in it enough", and it's all just a "crisis of confidence".
And when the clueless (l)users who have no idea how a mainframe works complain that things keep crashing and they don't want to spend any more money on your crashing mainframe, ignore them because their expectation that mainframes should not lose data or waste money is silly, and that all opinions we shouldn't buy more RAMBUS is irrational because they're users, and they don't know anything, even when they have PC's at home that they're paying for right now.
Actually, you've got it wrong. Window server popularity is continuting to decline it's just that you can't see it because unlike stock prices - which react to opinion in realtime, purchasing and install happens in bloated corporation time. All these problems will hurt windows sales in two years. Which is why Microsoft is working it's ass off to staunch the bleeding. The problem is that there because of the way it develops software, it has more holes in it's code than in a heroin junkie's arm.
And it's not that they developed it badly. It's just that it's been cost effective to not exhaustively test and not exhaustively design. With these security problems everywhere, and with potential lost sales -- this has to change.
Unfortunately for Bill, >90% of his net worth is tied to stock. As anyone who has stock or watches the stock market knows, stock worth is directly impacted by hype and buzz. And bad news. And basic economic principles like supply and demand. Stock is a funny thing. If you have a whole monster lot of it and you're a really important person, say Chairman of the Board (or Evil Genius in charge), and you sell it all, you 1) decrease it's worth because if Bill's selling a lot he knows something Wall Street doesn't. Bill cashing out with make the stock 1/4 of it's current value. Hell people who own M$FT stock would be jumping out of Windows. And to the ground, not BSD.;-) 2) decrease it's worth via simple supply and demand -- only so many people want to buy so much M$ stock at a time and 3) if you sell it after holding it a year and a half the government gets 20% of the growth in value since you first got it. Since Bill's a founder of the company, when he got the stock it was worth $00.000000001 or something ridiculously small -- the government would take a very large amount of his money. So his potential power and wealth is HUGE. His actual wealth is much more limited. But he's still a very cautious and very conservative donor.
Everyone is talking like AI doesn't already exist. What if it does? How would we even know? I work in the computing industry, and all I do all day is interact with a computer. It seems to me that I've already been enslaved by a "higher" intelligence. What if all our CEO's, world leaders, and the like were just figureheads, figureheads that didn't even know they were figureheads because there was an AI somewhere feeding them the numbers and the data and the reports that it wants to feed them? Numbers, reports, focus groups all affect human decisions that in turn affect the world. I think most of the slashdot community thinks we as humans are smarter, more resourceful, and more independent than we are individually. We're all sheep stuck in suburban farms where they "grow" us to be good consumers who drink Coke, watch TV, surf the net, buy pop music, wear Gap clothing, have sex, and drink beer. 99.999999999% of the damn world doesn't care if humanity is the most superior "species" on the planet. We want our beer, our cable, our fast computers, our families, and our fast cars.
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Not finding a bug like that would have gotten a tester put on a PIP at Microsoft in 2000.
In my former SDET opinion, It shows that Apple doesnâ(TM)t do enough professional testing.
Do you seriously believe that guy's PR? Innovation at scale? Yes, the rage of customers stamping their feet in anger has to measure on the Richter scale before Microsoft makes a change. How much do you want to bet that the next 5 windows mobile devices will try to be a better Iphone?
A lot of the good research about how brains work contains science and statistics that are the basis of this article's misinterpretation.
Here are some real facts that probably led to this opinion Obama has.
a) Brains learn over time and with repetition and focus. Thoughts, patterns of thinking, and skills are basically etched into our brains over time.
b) It takes roughly 10,000 hours to reach "mastery" of a skill - and there don't seem to be any shortcuts.
c) IQ higher than 120 seems to be enough do Nobel prize level work -- as long as you put in your 10k hours in the same subject and work hard at it. IQ higher than `80 is enough to be a chess grand master if you put in 10k hours.
Kids that focus can learn calculus much, much earlier in their lives than they generally do now simply by spending a lot more time doing math.
d) On average, for the average kid - kids in poor schools make almost as much progress as kids in rich schools do each year until the summer time, where they forget a lot of what they learned, causing them to come into each new year as if they lost a few months of the last year's learning, and over time that required catching up time adds up to a huge step behind, which makes them less and prepared for college and a job that requires college level skills.
In other words - if you're below average - you can put in time and get to be average or above average at most mental skills, and if you're slightly above average - given time you can be effectively as good as a genius at most mental skills.
The secretary of education is missing some other key pieces for sucessful learning though.
a) Emotional responses and environment have a huge impact - basically if we're under emotional stress or pressure, the logical part of our brain turns off and we think like mammals or lizards, and in those phases, the only way to learn is by mindless senseless repetition. Teenagers are subjected to so much emotional stress and pressure it's cliche.
This is part of the reasoning behind lame school uniforms.
b) Culture has a huge impact on what people are good at and what they aren't.
Some asian languages literally require less area in the brain to teach math basics, and this is often wrongly attributed to be genetic.
c) Teaching, learning, and persuading only happen with an emotional connection of some sort with the teacher -- respect, likeness, trust.
Part of the reason school is so boring though is that people are only conciously focused about 10% of the time, and the rest of the time they're on autopilot.
Multiply that by dozens of kids and you effectively have to assume that they're all on autopilot most of the time and try to teach in a way that gets through autopilot.
Anyway - if you are bored with school, learn on your own -- that's how the most successful people get where they get. Obama's just trying to have less people in prison and more people in the US able to do brain things, because by the time you're out of school kid, there won't be any damn jobs left for people who aren't absoulte badasses at whatever field they decide to go into.
Pointers to books with better explanations and with more pointers in their appedixes to the research they summarize:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outliers_(book)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_General_Theory_of_Love
http://www.amazon.com/Influence-Psychology-Persuasion-Business-Essentials/dp/006124189X/ref=pd_sim_b_7
To use an IT metaphor; the mainframe has eaten itself, and you're trying to fix it, and you've got to do things that may or may not destroy data, but that have to be done regardless just to get the system running again. Is it productive to listen to all the people who have a stake in the data screaming their uninformed opinions?
To use your analogy: Yes, requisition 700 billion bucks to buy the lowest quality RAMBUS DIMMS that are known to fail repeatedly but overpay for them because "they're worth a lot of money", and their value will recover as soon as we go back to that technology, since it's "technically sound" according to our computer models.
Yes, we can fix the problem by giving the same vendors who sold us this POS the first time more money because the reason the mainframe crashes and loses data is because "we don't believe in it enough", and it's all just a "crisis of confidence".
And when the clueless (l)users who have no idea how a mainframe works complain that things keep crashing and they don't want to spend any more money on your crashing mainframe, ignore them because their expectation that mainframes should not lose data or waste money is silly, and that all opinions we shouldn't buy more RAMBUS is irrational because they're users, and they don't know anything, even when they have PC's at home that they're paying for right now.
Actually, you've got it wrong. Window server popularity is continuting to decline it's just that you can't see it because unlike stock prices - which react to opinion in realtime, purchasing and install happens in bloated corporation time. All these problems will hurt windows sales in two years. Which is why Microsoft is working it's ass off to staunch the bleeding. The problem is that there because of the way it develops software, it has more holes in it's code than in a heroin junkie's arm.
And it's not that they developed it badly. It's just that it's been cost effective to not exhaustively test and not exhaustively design. With these security problems everywhere, and with potential lost sales -- this has to change.
Microsoft makes money off a site liscence for passport. So it would still make money off a competitor using it's services.
Unfortunately for Bill, >90% of his net worth is tied to stock. As anyone who has stock or watches the stock market knows, stock worth is directly impacted by hype and buzz. And bad news. And basic economic principles like supply and demand. Stock is a funny thing. If you have a whole monster lot of it and you're a really important person, say Chairman of the Board (or Evil Genius in charge), and you sell it all, you 1) decrease it's worth because if Bill's selling a lot he knows something Wall Street doesn't. Bill cashing out with make the stock 1/4 of it's current value. Hell people who own M$FT stock would be jumping out of Windows. And to the ground, not BSD. ;-) 2) decrease it's worth via simple supply and demand -- only so many people want to buy so much M$ stock at a time and 3) if you sell it after holding it a year and a half the government gets 20% of the growth in value since you first got it. Since Bill's a founder of the company, when he got the stock it was worth $00.000000001 or something ridiculously small -- the government would take a very large amount of his money. So his potential power and wealth is HUGE. His actual wealth is much more limited. But he's still a very cautious and very conservative donor.
Everyone is talking like AI doesn't already exist. What if it does? How would we even know? I work in the computing industry, and all I do all day is interact with a computer. It seems to me that I've already been enslaved by a "higher" intelligence. What if all our CEO's, world leaders, and the like were just figureheads, figureheads that didn't even know they were figureheads because there was an AI somewhere feeding them the numbers and the data and the reports that it wants to feed them? Numbers, reports, focus groups all affect human decisions that in turn affect the world. I think most of the slashdot community thinks we as humans are smarter, more resourceful, and more independent than we are individually. We're all sheep stuck in suburban farms where they "grow" us to be good consumers who drink Coke, watch TV, surf the net, buy pop music, wear Gap clothing, have sex, and drink beer. 99.999999999% of the damn world doesn't care if humanity is the most superior "species" on the planet. We want our beer, our cable, our fast computers, our families, and our fast cars.