> I think that learning-via-the-internet is a "killer app" for rural areas.
It's also a killer app for rare or esoteric subjects. My wife teaches on-line courses in Medical Ethics. She has maybe 15 students per quarter from all over the US. There aren't enough students close enough to each other (and her) to justify offering the class physically. Her class literaly owes its existance to distance learning.
"This is a report from experience, from reviewing roughly three dozen projects and methodologies over 20 years."
What I find striking about these projects is that they show:
Almost any methodology can be made to work on some project.
Any methodology can manage to fail on some project.
Heavy processes can be successful.
Light processes are more often successful, and more importantly, the people on those projects credit the success to the lightness of the methodology.
When I interview a project, I always ask what caused them to succeed in the end. The single most common answer I receive is, "A few good people stepped in at key moments and did whatever was needed to get the job done."
There is a lot more about the characteristics of good programmers, and how to find them and manage them successfully. I think this is a must read for any project manager.
Jews survived the black plague singularly well because they adhered to the `silly' rules in the books of Deuteronomy and Numbers, while their Catholic neighbours didn't.
Actually, because jewish people didn't get sick, their bigotted neighbors assumed they were somehow connected with the Black Death, and killed them. In greater numbers than plauge would have.
I worked as a consultant for 5 years, mostly in-house webapps. I always saw my job as one of talking to the users to learn how they think and building a web interface that matched their ideas.
Example: I wrote a workflow app for accounting. During inital roll-out, the logs indicated a lot of 'change foo from Pending to Approved' followed by 'Cant apporve foo'. I tracked down the user and saw that she was double clicking the submit button, resulting in two submits for approval. I changed the code to check status against requested new status and if they matched, fall through to display, rather than generating the extra 'Cant approve foo' error message.
IIRC, one of the reasons mail orders are not taxed is that the people who would be taxed do not live in the state and thus have no representation. Same with internet sales.
She also coined the term "bug" after she found a moth shorting out a circuit in an early vaccum tube computer. From then on, whenever there was a problem with the system, the engineers would say "must be a bug in the system"
I saw her on the David Letterman show once. She handed him a piece of string about a foot long: "Here, have a nanosecond" the string was one light-nanosecond long.
From the paper:
OZ was specifically designed to reduce, if not
eliminate, the need to scan separate and fundamentally different flight instruments.
[...] OZ presents information in a graphical fashion. As such, information is processed by the human visual system at speeds it uses to process images, speeds faster than those required to foveate and read dials and gauges and integrate numerical data. We are currently designing studies to measure the rate at which OZ transfers information to a pilot.
[...]we have recently found that trained pilots can simultaneously fly two simulators (each simulator with its own OZ display) executing different maneuvers, under severe turbulence conditions. This demonstration strongly suggests that OZ can be considered to be a single instrument that integrates all the information needed to fly the aircraft.
By Robert A. Hettinga
Founder, Philodox Financial Technology Evangelism
About 3 years ago, after it was apparent that it was failing, I started thinking about what was wrong with the business model for DigiCash, David Chaum's company for marketing his blind-signature digital cash protocol. Actually, it was the underwriting model that Mark Twain Bank, DigiCash's first customer, was using for their ecash product that struck me as the heart of the problem.
It has become increasingly apparent to me ever since that nobody is paying attention to the way bearer instruments have been issued historically, much less why that model was successful.
The business model below shows how to implement the underwriting of digital bearer financial instruments in light of that long tradition, this time using the new financial cryptographic techniques on a ubiquitous geodesic global internetwork.
Agreed. Right now patent examiners are paid by how many patents they approve. I think that's a great motivater for management, but they should be fined/punished for every patent that gets overturned.
In short, create a Karma system for the patent office and tie bonus/raises to it.
If I recall, what the borg mostly have going for them is machine mediated telepathy. That power does not have to lead to evil. It was the Borg Queen who set herself up apart from the collective and made them evil. Like the kid used to say "It wasn't the Great Brain's superior brain that made him bad, it was his money lovin' heart"
Multiple programs that just do one thing well and can interoperate with each other are a good way to build modular functionality. A GUI should reflect the user's model of how they work and what they want to do, in this case communicate with others. The GUI framework should take care of interoperating with the functional code.
Calendar: accepts appointments, can be queried for appointments.
Contacts: ditto for contact information
EmailSend: inject messages to outgoing queue
EmailRecv: monitor inbox for new messages
GUI: present user oriented conceptual representations of the 'real' programs.
>>and his wife, who is seven months pregnant and >>confined to bed, " > >Why on Earth is a seven month pregnant woman >confined to bed? 6 months is when it starts to >show, and the women are quite capable of moving >under their own power even 9 months pregnant and >overdue.
Previous history of loss is one reason. Also, being at high risk of pre-eclampsia (high blood pressure, twins, family history) may cause some physicians to play it safe. That's what happened when my wife had to stop working at 6 months.
All worked out for the best: We have 2 2 month old boys now.
But I would add one other requirement: contributions from eligible voters only. Not only would this eliminate the foreign funding scandals that are arisen in the US, but it would also eliminate corporate funding of campaigns.
Amen to that! If you can't vote, you shouldn't fund. And a conviction of monopoly tactics should be counted as a felony that strips voting and funding rights
But you can't return buggy software for a refund. If the package is opened, it's assumed you have copied the software already. Companies won't take responsibility for their product until they know they will get all revenues from the product.
With OSS projects, you can file a bug report and hope. Or you can wade in and fix it yourself. But what about my parents and my wife? They can't fix it themselves. They would have to rely on me. And I will do my best for them because I love them and I want them to have a good experience.
Maybe writing good software is about community. I want to write good software. I want the love and admiration of my community.
How does all this fit into capitalism? How do you map a collection of bits which can be copied endlessly into a world view that seeks to apportion scarce resources?
I remember reading somewhere that NASA was perplexed by reports from Astronauts about seeing "little white streaks" out of the corners of their eyes while in orbit. Eventually somebody realized they were seeing Cerenkov radiation from the cosmic rays sleeting through their eyeballs. Now that's a Happy Thought!
Slashdot Mirror
Slogan: He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense.
If MS sold directly to consumers, more consumers would have a case against them the next time they get busted for monopoly practices.
> I think that learning-via-the-internet is a "killer app" for rural areas.
It's also a killer app for rare or esoteric subjects. My wife teaches on-line courses in Medical Ethics. She has maybe 15 students per quarter from all over the US. There aren't enough students close enough to each other (and her) to justify offering the class physically. Her class literaly owes its existance to distance learning.
So instead of putting sugar in my fuel tank to kill the engine, you would put gasoline?
[Looks at glow from your pocket]
Has the Dow spiked again or are you just happy to see me?
Actually, because jewish people didn't get sick, their bigotted neighbors assumed they were somehow connected with the Black Death, and killed them. In greater numbers than plauge would have.
I worked as a consultant for 5 years, mostly in-house webapps. I always saw my job as one of talking to the users to learn how they think and building a web interface that matched their ideas.
Example: I wrote a workflow app for accounting. During inital roll-out, the logs indicated a lot of 'change foo from Pending to Approved' followed by 'Cant apporve foo'. I tracked down the user and saw that she was double clicking the submit button, resulting in two submits for approval. I changed the code to check status against requested new status and if they matched, fall through to display, rather than generating the extra 'Cant approve foo' error message.
> 2. vote in people who will repeal the tax laws
IIRC, one of the reasons mail orders are not taxed is that the people who would be taxed do not live in the state and thus have no representation. Same with internet sales.
She also coined the term "bug" after she found a moth shorting out a circuit in an early vaccum tube computer. From then on, whenever there was a problem with the system, the engineers would say "must be a bug in the system"
I saw her on the David Letterman show once. She handed him a piece of string about a foot long: "Here, have a nanosecond" the string was one light-nanosecond long.
From the paper:
OZ was specifically designed to reduce, if not eliminate, the need to scan separate and fundamentally different flight instruments. [...] OZ presents information in a graphical fashion. As such, information is processed by the human visual system at speeds it uses to process images, speeds faster than those required to foveate and read dials and gauges and integrate numerical data. We are currently designing studies to measure the rate at which OZ transfers information to a pilot.
[...]we have recently found that trained pilots can simultaneously fly two simulators (each simulator with its own OZ display) executing different maneuvers, under severe turbulence conditions. This demonstration strongly suggests that OZ can be considered to be a single instrument that integrates all the information needed to fly the aircraft.
That's just oral stimulation.
My autistic 3yr old chews on any/everything as a means of self regulation.
By Robert A. Hettinga
Founder, Philodox Financial Technology Evangelism
About 3 years ago, after it was apparent that it was failing, I started thinking about what was wrong with the business model for DigiCash, David Chaum's company for marketing his blind-signature digital cash protocol. Actually, it was the underwriting model that Mark Twain Bank, DigiCash's first customer, was using for their ecash product that struck me as the heart of the problem.
It has become increasingly apparent to me ever since that nobody is paying attention to the way bearer instruments have been issued historically, much less why that model was successful.
The business model below shows how to implement the underwriting of digital bearer financial instruments in light of that long tradition, this time using the new financial cryptographic techniques on a ubiquitous geodesic global internetwork.
Agreed. Right now patent examiners are paid by how many patents they approve. I think that's a great motivater for management, but they should be fined/punished for every patent that gets overturned.
In short, create a Karma system for the patent office and tie bonus/raises to it.
Trespassing: people being where they shouldn't
Didn't NeXT OS do this?
IIRC, postscript was the underlying graphics transport for screens, so they had WYSIWYG everywhere.
If I recall, what the borg mostly have going for them is machine mediated telepathy. That power does not have to lead to evil. It was the Borg Queen who set herself up apart from the collective and made them evil. Like the kid used to say "It wasn't the Great Brain's superior brain that made him bad, it was his money lovin' heart"
Scott McLoud has a comic/essay on this at: http://www.thecomicreader.com/html/icst/icst-5/ics t-5.html
You seem to have rebutted the non-technical criticisms. Could you address the technical ones?
http://www.hpl.hp.com/cambridge/projects/Dynamo/do cs.htm
Dynamo as a Virtual Machine Accelerator (PDF)
The Dynamo team has been at it since 1997 and the writeup is dated June 1999, does anyone know what HP is doing with it?
>>and his wife, who is seven months pregnant and >>confined to bed, "
>
>Why on Earth is a seven month pregnant woman >confined to bed? 6 months is when it starts to >show, and the women are quite capable of moving >under their own power even 9 months pregnant and >overdue.
Previous history of loss is one reason. Also, being at high risk of pre-eclampsia (high blood pressure, twins, family history) may cause some physicians to play it safe. That's what happened when my wife had to stop working at 6 months.
All worked out for the best: We have 2 2 month old boys now.
Amen to that! If you can't vote, you shouldn't fund. And a conviction of monopoly tactics should be counted as a felony that strips voting and funding rights
But you can't return buggy software for a refund. If the package is opened, it's assumed you have copied the software already. Companies won't take responsibility for their product until they know they will get all revenues from the product.
With OSS projects, you can file a bug report and hope. Or you can wade in and fix it yourself.
But what about my parents and my wife? They can't fix it themselves. They would have to rely on me. And I will do my best for them because I love them and I want them to have a good experience.
Maybe writing good software is about community. I want to write good software. I want the love and admiration of my community.
How does all this fit into capitalism? How do you map a collection of bits which can be copied endlessly into a world view that seeks to apportion scarce resources?
Devin
I remember reading somewhere that NASA was perplexed by reports from Astronauts about seeing "little white streaks" out of the corners of their eyes while in orbit. Eventually somebody realized they were seeing Cerenkov radiation from the cosmic rays sleeting through their eyeballs. Now that's a Happy Thought!