Yes; instead it ensures that they learn from apathetic and chronically absent professors. In some Canadian university departments we actually have a system of accountability for lecturers based on students' opinions; in the CS department where I'm doing my undergrad, a Scantron-based survey is incorporated into the decision to give raises. Even tenured bigshots who rake in huge multi-million dollar medical grants are prone. I've seen other departments also send out a round of automated e-mail when considering professors for tenure. The whole system works wonders for preventing the kinds of abuses and irregularities that might occur elsewhere.
Of course we may—if all of humanity's resources were reallocated appropriately, we could have a well-to-do colony on Mars by now. Nothing in 2001 but the monoliths were grossly impossible; not even the date. The issue, which I tried to hint at in my post, is that most people don't dream of a better tomorrow. They dream of retiring to neat little homes and having the simple, manageable lives that our ancestors were hard-wired for. They want this. And in between that and the stars, you have the layers upon layers of half-committal riff-raff; the money-gatherers and the rent-seekers who eternally race to build ant hills, wilfully and perpetually ignorant of their endeavours' futility. Kermidge, it very well may take us eight hundred thousand years to get into space for good; there are still not enough dreamers amongst us. We may have come along way in an amazingly short time, but we have rarely gone in the direction we were hoping. For that, we need to get over ourselves.
Well, for one, the widespread availability of flying cars would imply that society is mature enough to stop panicking about terrorists and drunk teenagers at every opportunity.
You sound like an egregiously concerned parent—drunk adults accounted for 83% of all drunk driving incidents in the US in 2008. I strongly recommend that you follow in the steps of Yakov Smirnoff and get some freedom instead of worrying about bogeymen.
They're really more like metaphorical grandchildren. Sort of like "the World of Tomorrow"—it's not actually coming within 24 hours, but it will eventually. Now extrapolate that time measurement—the duration between when flying cars were first promised and when they finally appeared and achieved widespread adoption, say. If we assume it takes a minimum of twelve years for someone to go from birth to reproductive functionality (to some this is a little harsh, I know, but that's biology for you; just remember that, to others drinking certain Monsanto-enhanced milk, it's three years excessive) then we need at least twenty-four years to get grandchildren.
So after eight thousand, seven hundred and sixty-six "tomorrows", we'll finally get off this rock.
Given that the amount of time involved in a "tomorrow" is already a hundred years and steadily growing, we will probably be a space-faring civilization within the next million years.
Not bad, when you think about it from a solar heat death perspective.
I have some good news for you: everyone is blind in the middle of their field of vision in a dark environment. The centre of the retina is extremely crowded with bright-light/colour vision cones, which is what gives us our excellent ability to see detail. There's just no room for rods left over, so we get a dark spot in our night vision instead.
It's okay. It produces amusing images of stern middle-aged women berating starship admirals and heads of state for the excessive armaments of the fleet.
For the curious, pretty much all plants carry out some degree of chemical warfare between each other and other organisms—from the obvious, like plant seeds full of cyanides, to more subtle things, like conifers acidifying the soil around them with their needles and roots to prevent anything else from growing (and much more subtle things still.) I don't know quite enough about Siberia thirty thousand years ago to make a good statement, but I would guess that it was a little more temperate than it currently is; in that case, it's probable that the plants from that era were chemically more aggressive, as the the availability of resources and the richness of the soil would have been higher.
Then again, one need only take this particular species further south to find out that it might very well be about average for the present day. Unfortunately there isn't enough historical expression information about plants to make a guess at the inflation rate (or deflation rate) over the long-term for plant toxicity in different ecosystems... but it could make a neat thesis topic.
The truth is that by the year 2100, speculative theories will be so advanced and so reliably misguided that we'll be able to calculate anything and solve any social problem simply by asking futurists a question and assuming the opposite.
Replace your current priority-tracking system with a floating point number. Add buttons to the interface that increase or decrease its value by small increments. Next to that, display a z-score, ideally presented offset so that the base priority is higher than zero (to reduce the number of negative numbers shown—or perhaps don't do this if you really want to discourage people from working on low-priority items.)
Selling directly to business at first wouldn't have been necessary. Home adoption has been shown to drive business adoption when it comes to portable devices. We've seen that now very obviously with the messy IT shifts around people bringing their mobiles and iPads in to work; if this dynamic were not so, the Blackberry would still dominate. If the Courier had been released when it was ready, even if it didn't launch with super-strong business oriented features, it would have been positioned well to be part of that flow. Instead of one or two company-bought Couriers in the graphics/marketing departments, everyone in those departments who could afford one would have one out of their own pockets, just like graphics designers insisted on bringing their Macs to work even before OS X had good enterprise network support.
Your reasoning recapitulates the mistake Gates made: expecting everything to be done on day one. Considering that it's not as if Microsoft doesn't have experience, staff, or willpower to make a product work in a business setting, the Courier could have been very low-risk: launch the product so that the bleeding-edge adopters get their chance at it (in a low-volume production run), make sure the product's core formula is strong enough to survive in the creative market, then release a major OS update that adds whatever the enterprise wants. They would've had the product out the door fast enough to siphon away a substantial number of iPad buyers (who really wanted the features of the Courier more and just didn't know it) and, after the patches, Apple's flagship tablet product would have been left behind as a portable television for drooling infants.
I've got VMs for Rhapsody and OpenStep, but alas no real black hardware. I was aware of all those features, and I so totally miss them. I really hope Étoilé comes out in a usable form soon.
Courier was much more than a clever vision. The team, which had more than 130 Microsoft employees contributing to it, had created several prototypes that gave a clear sense about the type of experience users would get. There were still tough hardware and software issues to resolve when Microsoft pulled the plug. But an employee who worked on Courier said the project was far enough along that the remaining work could have been completed in months if the company had added more people to the team. Microsoft's Shaw disputes that.
"There was extensive work done on the business, the technology and the experience," said a member of the Courier team. "It was very complete, not a whim."
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Yes; instead it ensures that they learn from apathetic and chronically absent professors. In some Canadian university departments we actually have a system of accountability for lecturers based on students' opinions; in the CS department where I'm doing my undergrad, a Scantron-based survey is incorporated into the decision to give raises. Even tenured bigshots who rake in huge multi-million dollar medical grants are prone. I've seen other departments also send out a round of automated e-mail when considering professors for tenure. The whole system works wonders for preventing the kinds of abuses and irregularities that might occur elsewhere.
Personally, I'd settle for finding that out first hand.
Yes. Any questions?
Right routine! Slightly later joke. Something about trouble at dinner parties. I suspect you know the one.
It was really more of a generic stand-in than anything. Personally I'm holding out for fishbowl space helmets and slow-light ray guns.
Of course we may—if all of humanity's resources were reallocated appropriately, we could have a well-to-do colony on Mars by now. Nothing in 2001 but the monoliths were grossly impossible; not even the date. The issue, which I tried to hint at in my post, is that most people don't dream of a better tomorrow. They dream of retiring to neat little homes and having the simple, manageable lives that our ancestors were hard-wired for. They want this. And in between that and the stars, you have the layers upon layers of half-committal riff-raff; the money-gatherers and the rent-seekers who eternally race to build ant hills, wilfully and perpetually ignorant of their endeavours' futility. Kermidge, it very well may take us eight hundred thousand years to get into space for good; there are still not enough dreamers amongst us. We may have come along way in an amazingly short time, but we have rarely gone in the direction we were hoping. For that, we need to get over ourselves.
Well, for one, the widespread availability of flying cars would imply that society is mature enough to stop panicking about terrorists and drunk teenagers at every opportunity.
You sound like an egregiously concerned parent—drunk adults accounted for 83% of all drunk driving incidents in the US in 2008. I strongly recommend that you follow in the steps of Yakov Smirnoff and get some freedom instead of worrying about bogeymen.
They're really more like metaphorical grandchildren. Sort of like "the World of Tomorrow"—it's not actually coming within 24 hours, but it will eventually. Now extrapolate that time measurement—the duration between when flying cars were first promised and when they finally appeared and achieved widespread adoption, say. If we assume it takes a minimum of twelve years for someone to go from birth to reproductive functionality (to some this is a little harsh, I know, but that's biology for you; just remember that, to others drinking certain Monsanto-enhanced milk, it's three years excessive) then we need at least twenty-four years to get grandchildren.
So after eight thousand, seven hundred and sixty-six "tomorrows", we'll finally get off this rock.
Given that the amount of time involved in a "tomorrow" is already a hundred years and steadily growing, we will probably be a space-faring civilization within the next million years.
Not bad, when you think about it from a solar heat death perspective.
Yes; probably NSA people. They're here right now, listening, if you want to send them a message directly.
Actually, it turns out that's not the only Seattle-related health problem. Time to move, maybe?
I have some good news for you: everyone is blind in the middle of their field of vision in a dark environment. The centre of the retina is extremely crowded with bright-light/colour vision cones, which is what gives us our excellent ability to see detail. There's just no room for rods left over, so we get a dark spot in our night vision instead.
It's okay. It produces amusing images of stern middle-aged women berating starship admirals and heads of state for the excessive armaments of the fleet.
For the curious, pretty much all plants carry out some degree of chemical warfare between each other and other organisms—from the obvious, like plant seeds full of cyanides, to more subtle things, like conifers acidifying the soil around them with their needles and roots to prevent anything else from growing (and much more subtle things still.) I don't know quite enough about Siberia thirty thousand years ago to make a good statement, but I would guess that it was a little more temperate than it currently is; in that case, it's probable that the plants from that era were chemically more aggressive, as the the availability of resources and the richness of the soil would have been higher.
Then again, one need only take this particular species further south to find out that it might very well be about average for the present day. Unfortunately there isn't enough historical expression information about plants to make a guess at the inflation rate (or deflation rate) over the long-term for plant toxicity in different ecosystems... but it could make a neat thesis topic.
In the early sixties. It stopped in the early eighties and has been sort of loafing about the place ever since, spending more time reminiscing about "the good old days" than anything else, and barely paying the rent. (I've been keeping score.) Nevertheless there are some signs it may actually be proceeding at a breakneck pace while we're not looking...
The truth is that by the year 2100, speculative theories will be so advanced and so reliably misguided that we'll be able to calculate anything and solve any social problem simply by asking futurists a question and assuming the opposite.
I didn't hear him clam anything like that! Don't be so shellfish by dragging things off topic.
MADD: Mutually Assured Drunk Driving? :)
Replace your current priority-tracking system with a floating point number. Add buttons to the interface that increase or decrease its value by small increments. Next to that, display a z-score, ideally presented offset so that the base priority is higher than zero (to reduce the number of negative numbers shown—or perhaps don't do this if you really want to discourage people from working on low-priority items.)
Statistics: fun for the whole family.
Eh. That's tuition for you.
...and the related privacy violation.
If it helps any, I'm going to U of T next year for my graduate work and intend to be as much of a pain as possible about the fee thing.
Unfortunately, $27.50 is a drop in the bucket compared to tuition, and hence not likely to affect much of anything.
Selling directly to business at first wouldn't have been necessary. Home adoption has been shown to drive business adoption when it comes to portable devices. We've seen that now very obviously with the messy IT shifts around people bringing their mobiles and iPads in to work; if this dynamic were not so, the Blackberry would still dominate. If the Courier had been released when it was ready, even if it didn't launch with super-strong business oriented features, it would have been positioned well to be part of that flow. Instead of one or two company-bought Couriers in the graphics/marketing departments, everyone in those departments who could afford one would have one out of their own pockets, just like graphics designers insisted on bringing their Macs to work even before OS X had good enterprise network support.
Your reasoning recapitulates the mistake Gates made: expecting everything to be done on day one. Considering that it's not as if Microsoft doesn't have experience, staff, or willpower to make a product work in a business setting, the Courier could have been very low-risk: launch the product so that the bleeding-edge adopters get their chance at it (in a low-volume production run), make sure the product's core formula is strong enough to survive in the creative market, then release a major OS update that adds whatever the enterprise wants. They would've had the product out the door fast enough to siphon away a substantial number of iPad buyers (who really wanted the features of the Courier more and just didn't know it) and, after the patches, Apple's flagship tablet product would have been left behind as a portable television for drooling infants.
I've got VMs for Rhapsody and OpenStep, but alas no real black hardware. I was aware of all those features, and I so totally miss them. I really hope Étoilé comes out in a usable form soon.
If it's on Android, don't you think there's already a Java port in the works? :)