This "open letter" was published using a throwaway Medium account called "@EmployeesOfMicrosoft." There is zero evidence that any actual Microsoft employees were involved. You don't write an open petition to your CEO, and then forget to include the list of names! Employees at companies like Microsoft and Google regularly question their company's direction without fear of repercussions, or need for anonymity.
Any random troll could have produced this "open letter," and there are reasonable motives why they might do that.
It's simpleminded to assume "Thank you" *caused* the result. People who say thank you probably write more politely in general throughout their communications.
Unless the experiment controlled for this (e.g. by asking participants to add/remove "thank you" after having already composed their email), there is no implication that saying "thank you" will give you the same result.
It might be a good idea, but this study doesn't demonstrate that in any scientific way.
This is a valid question. I skimmed the actual study, but I don't have time right now to dig through the jargon and see how much these results are likely to be due to confirmation bias.
How would that happen exactly? The results are calculated using an SVM classifier algorithm, not a human "interpreting" the results. Basically they train the classifier on 50 sessions, and then test in on maybe 7 sessions. Each session involves asking the person 20 questions.
Here's the actual study. Does someone who knows more about these sorts of measurements want to sort out whether or not there were adequate procedural constraints to prevent confirmation bias?
The most likely bias in this scenario would be sampling bias, not conformation bias. It would include mistakes like this:
- Testing a bunch of different subjects, but only counting the favorable ones as your sample set (i.e. "he didn't have ESP")
- Doing a bunch of trials, but eliminating the ones with unfavorable outcomes (i.e. "the equipment wasn't working right that time")
- Choosing to stop the trials at the point where a favorable result is obtained (i.e. after the random walk went where you wanted)
The Discussion session seems to address these concerns:
Four patients in CLIS communicated with frontocentral cortical oxygenation-based BCI with an above-chance-level correct response rate over 70% during a period of several weeks. The performance of the binary SVM classifier across all the patients, except a few training sessions of patient B, was above chance level. None of the sessions were eliminated in the analysis, and only very few sessions had to be interrupted because of life-saving measures such as sucking saliva; thus, no bias for selecting âoesuccessfulâ sessions incriminates the results.
So the main question is really just about the sample size itself. 20 questions x 4 people x around 5 sessions = 400 coin tosses. Is that enough to get excited about 70%?
In pure mathematics, yes, but experiments can be corrupted in all sorts of ways. (What if the research assistant simply talked louder when he was saying a "true" question?) It would be great at least to see the results replicated by other groups.
Snap circuits are neat - but I'm not a huge fan. They are generally fairly very "high level, complex" building blocks. Even most of the definitions of what the pins (of the modules) do aren't described, nor referenced in any instructional way.
I agree 100%. I had exactly the same disappointment when my son started playing with Snap Circuits. It doesn't really try to teach any concepts, and the manual is is written like a boring lab textbook ("OBJECTIVE: To show how a resistor and LED are wired to emit light") and not at all geared towards creativity or exploration.
Those terms seem perfectly reasonable to me. If you want to cling to your patents, don't use their code. We could do with a few less patents in the world.
Agreed, but if I understand correctly this is not the actual legal effect of those the terms. When they say "any [...] other action alleging [...] indirect [...] infringement to any patent [...] against any party relating to the software" the trigger is ridiculously broad. Even saying something bad about Facebook because *they* sued *you* could qualify.
Before this was introduced, the ReactJS library originally was licensed under Apache 2.0 which includes a "your license is terminated if you bring a patent lawsuit against us" clause, but the same lawyers are totally fine with Apache 2.0. Facebook is doing something different here.
A friend of mine works at a company where the lawyers reviewed Facebook's "open source" licensing terms (surreptitiously buried in a text file entitled "Additional Grant of Patent Rights") and concluded that it isn't safe. They issued a company-wide order that all projects must immediately remove any Facebook open source with these license terms. The terms basically allow Facebook to unilaterally terminate the open source license if you take "any action" against their patent claims. The exact wording is:
"The license granted hereunder will terminate, automatically and without notice, if you (or any of your subsidiaries, corporate affiliates or agents) initiate directly or indirectly, or take a direct financial interest in, any Patent Assertion: (i) against Facebook or any of its subsidiaries or corporate affiliates, (ii) against any party if such Patent Assertion arises in whole or in part from any software, technology, product or service of Facebook or any of its subsidiaries or corporate affiliates, or (iii) against any party relating to the Software."
...
A "Patent Assertion" is any lawsuit or other action alleging direct, indirect, or contributory infringement or inducement to infringe any patent, including a cross-claim or counterclaim.
In this thread, a Google employee says that their lawyers came to the same conclusion:
For a small-to-medium team that has easy access to a centralized server, choosing Subversion instead of Git could save you a TON of time. In my experience, Git has a constant overhead of messed up merges, "brown bag" discussions to educate new devs about various gotchas, and ongoing debates about the right usage strategy (merging versus rebasing, branch management, how to keep histories from growing too large, etc).
By contrast, I've also worked at several different companies that used Subversion, and basically you just show new devs how to sync and commit, and they figure out the rest themselves. The reason is that having a single always-up-to-date master is an order of magnitude simpler than Git's model of working-copy/branch/master on your local PC and then also branch/master on a remote PC and push/pull/fetch/merge between them.
With Subversion you still have to manage branches sometimes, but there is typically a maintainer person who handles that. Whereas the model of Git is that every dev is doing merge algebra from day 1.
It's a question without a good answer. There doesn't appear to be a "permanently prevent Windows 10 upgrade" switch anywhere.
If someone made a tool that lets me use Windows 10 with security updates but without spying or cloud or unwanted upgrades, I would pay for that. I don't see any technical reason why a 3rd party can't provide that. When Windows 8 messed up the start menu, tools like Classic Shell stepped in to fill the gaps, with huge popularity, and I think those download statistics were actually persuasive to the "data driven" business strategizers at MS.
For me the killer feature is USB redirection. I can use a VM to install stuff like questionable device drivers, ancient apps, bloatware like iTunes or Zune, etc. and then attach the USB device to the host PC and use it within the VM (without polluting the host PC's OS). Hyper-V can't do that.
> So it only took about a year of screaming from the users > and slashdotters before Microsquishy paid attention and > brought back the MENU instead of that god damned > useless start screen.
No, what it took was a new CEO. Don't flatter yourself. What you have observed is merely the surface of a significant shift that is happening. The fact that these effects are already visible in the first 6 months is pretty telling.
If Microsoft can have those people wait for Windows 9 and Windows 9 is an improvement of any sort, they stand a better chance of keeping the customers.
Really? MS didn't change much in Win8.1, and they are making Win7 really hard to buy. It implies they really believe Win8 isn't a disaster.
The head of the Windows division got fired shortly after Win8 shipped, and the whole company seems to be treading water while the board hunts for a new CEO.
It's unrealistic to expect any changes to the Windows 8 vision until that shakes out. But when it does, you can bet the Surface/metro thing will get ripped apart, and Julie Larson-Green will be replaced by someone who isn't just keeping a seat warm. Whether that's for better or worse really depends on who the CEO is.
.NET also has a managed C++ model, which as allows C++ objects to be tightly bound to C# including garbage collection in an extremely natural way, while still having inline assembly language and all the performance of C++. And for managed languages (C#, VB, PowerShell, Python, etc) you get very deep integration that is probably the best that could be hoped fo. The F# mutability example is unreasonable, given the radical difference between these languages. And for all of this integration you get to use a single IDE with a visual debugger that shows you a single callstack with thr different languages mixed together.
Microsoft solved this problem so thoroughly, you couldn't ask for much else, except that none of it works on any OS other than Windows.
You refer to the audience as "senior management," but then you have framed this entire discussion around you -- the enlightened one -- trying to "teach" the bumbling, ignorant executives while tiptoeing around their childlike attention spans. A quick look at your pay grade should reveal the exact opposite. You each have a specialty, but/yours/ is the narrower mindset with the smaller impact on the organization. And they may be bored by technical details, but when it comes to the operational and strategic details that drive the day-to-day success or failure of your company,/your/ attention span is the childlike one. Want to see a bunch of snoozing engineers? Put them in a training session about how to extract more money from customers.:-)
In order to be truly successful with your goal here, you need to step out of your world of IT and let your audience teach you something. What were they doing before they came to the class? What are the problems facing the company right now? Why are they requesting the training? If there is an optimal outcome -- publicly congratulating you and asking to do a follow-up training -- what would that look like? (In other words, what was a similar past event that everyone remembers as being a great success?) Sometimes these questions have hidden answers, like people not wanting to be made to feel stupid, or wanting to learn a few simple tricks that will impress others, or merely needing to fulfill a mandate from higher up with the least effort heheh. To be really successful, you need to give them exactly what they want, not what you think they need.
You can ask these questions directly at the start of your session, but a better approach is to talk informally with some key people beforehand. Show them the material you plan to present, and ask for suggestions and feedback. Make them feel like you will implement their advice, so they have a personal interest in the outcome of your event. Technology is absolutely not the point of IT, don't let the conversation dwell on that. Instead, ask about the bigger picture, and try to understand the human perspective and reward mechanisms.
Above all, recognize that you have a blind spot that is twice as large as any executive's blind spot for technology. Accept it, develop some techniques to help yourself work around it, and you will find yourself light years ahead of your IT peers.
I use five different operating systems. (Osx , ios, linux, windows, android ) name one keychain program that can be used across them all and keep that program easily sync'd?
However, from searching Google News (e.g. "china counterfeit honey"), the results are merely people's blogs that link to the same Food Safety News article. I'm sure FSN is providing a helpful service of raising awareness, but they are not an impartial group who we can expect to conduct a reliable investigation. Where are the confirming sources?
Their article references the FDA, the Department of Commerce, and the Department of Agriculture -- but I can't find anything on those sites to support the article's opening claim that "A third or more of all the honey consumed in the U.S. is likely to have been smuggled in from China."
If I were renting storage space in a building and said "this is 1200 sqft" and only made 500sqft available because I installed electrical and environmental equipment in there, I would be rightfully challenged by my customer(s).
Real estate square footages are usually measured from the building exterior and include areas inside the walls, chimney, etc.:-)
Seems to me to be a perfect balance between high enough to deter people and low enough not to bankrupt people over an activity in which no one could be injured, no property can be destroyed, no one is harassed and economic damage is negligible.
"Anything with altered genes must be bad for your" is not an irrational fear of some new device or technology, it is a reasonable default position when considering a potentially irreversible change to the ecosystem and gene pool. Genetic engineering is not equivalent to selective breeding, because it can instantaneously produce radical changes that would normally take centuries to achieve. In many cases, the science is empirical, like a hacker making risky changes to a large code base because he "understands" the tiny fragment of code that he's changing, even though there may be unforeseen systemic effects. And what is the urgent problem that we are solving here? You're going to solve world hunger by creating more food? Isn't there an inherent flaw in that idea?
I lug you some rocks, then I will be entitled to some kind of favor from you tomorrow. Maybe you'd give me a feast with a whole chicken. But I wasn't in the mood for a chicken that time, so I decided to put off receiving favor from you. After two years, I expect to still be entitled to that feast of whole chicken.
But if you had to choose between a chicken today, versus a chicken two years from now, you would certainly prefer to receive it today. So don't forget that the value of a chicken decreases over time, inflation or not.
Slashdot Mirror
This "open letter" was published using a throwaway Medium account called "@EmployeesOfMicrosoft." There is zero evidence that any actual Microsoft employees were involved. You don't write an open petition to your CEO, and then forget to include the list of names! Employees at companies like Microsoft and Google regularly question their company's direction without fear of repercussions, or need for anonymity.
Any random troll could have produced this "open letter," and there are reasonable motives why they might do that.
It's simpleminded to assume "Thank you" *caused* the result. People who say thank you probably write more politely in general throughout their communications.
Unless the experiment controlled for this (e.g. by asking participants to add/remove "thank you" after having already composed their email), there is no implication that saying "thank you" will give you the same result.
It might be a good idea, but this study doesn't demonstrate that in any scientific way.
This is a valid question. I skimmed the actual study, but I don't have time right now to dig through the jargon and see how much these results are likely to be due to confirmation bias.
How would that happen exactly? The results are calculated using an SVM classifier algorithm, not a human "interpreting" the results. Basically they train the classifier on 50 sessions, and then test in on maybe 7 sessions. Each session involves asking the person 20 questions.
Here's the actual study. Does someone who knows more about these sorts of measurements want to sort out whether or not there were adequate procedural constraints to prevent confirmation bias?
The most likely bias in this scenario would be sampling bias, not conformation bias. It would include mistakes like this: - Testing a bunch of different subjects, but only counting the favorable ones as your sample set (i.e. "he didn't have ESP") - Doing a bunch of trials, but eliminating the ones with unfavorable outcomes (i.e. "the equipment wasn't working right that time") - Choosing to stop the trials at the point where a favorable result is obtained (i.e. after the random walk went where you wanted) The Discussion session seems to address these concerns:
Four patients in CLIS communicated with frontocentral cortical oxygenation-based BCI with an above-chance-level correct response rate over 70% during a period of several weeks. The performance of the binary SVM classifier across all the patients, except a few training sessions of patient B, was above chance level. None of the sessions were eliminated in the analysis, and only very few sessions had to be interrupted because of life-saving measures such as sucking saliva; thus, no bias for selecting âoesuccessfulâ sessions incriminates the results.
So the main question is really just about the sample size itself. 20 questions x 4 people x around 5 sessions = 400 coin tosses. Is that enough to get excited about 70%? In pure mathematics, yes, but experiments can be corrupted in all sorts of ways. (What if the research assistant simply talked louder when he was saying a "true" question?) It would be great at least to see the results replicated by other groups.
Apparently Intel patented their fix on Oct 31, 2013... the exact same day that Nexus 5 shipped in the US:
https://www.google.com/patents...
Glad to see the industry came together to protect consumers!
Well said!
+1
I agree 100%. I had exactly the same disappointment when my son started playing with Snap Circuits. It doesn't really try to teach any concepts, and the manual is is written like a boring lab textbook ("OBJECTIVE: To show how a resistor and LED are wired to emit light") and not at all geared towards creativity or exploration.
Agreed, but if I understand correctly this is not the actual legal effect of those the terms. When they say "any [...] other action alleging [...] indirect [...] infringement to any patent [...] against any party relating to the software" the trigger is ridiculously broad. Even saying something bad about Facebook because *they* sued *you* could qualify.
Before this was introduced, the ReactJS library originally was licensed under Apache 2.0 which includes a "your license is terminated if you bring a patent lawsuit against us" clause, but the same lawyers are totally fine with Apache 2.0. Facebook is doing something different here.
A friend of mine works at a company where the lawyers reviewed Facebook's "open source" licensing terms (surreptitiously buried in a text file entitled "Additional Grant of Patent Rights") and concluded that it isn't safe. They issued a company-wide order that all projects must immediately remove any Facebook open source with these license terms. The terms basically allow Facebook to unilaterally terminate the open source license if you take "any action" against their patent claims. The exact wording is:
In this thread, a Google employee says that their lawyers came to the same conclusion:
https://news.ycombinator.com/i...
If so, why would Facebook do this? Why isn't it more widely discussed?
For a small-to-medium team that has easy access to a centralized server, choosing Subversion instead of Git could save you a TON of time. In my experience, Git has a constant overhead of messed up merges, "brown bag" discussions to educate new devs about various gotchas, and ongoing debates about the right usage strategy (merging versus rebasing, branch management, how to keep histories from growing too large, etc).
By contrast, I've also worked at several different companies that used Subversion, and basically you just show new devs how to sync and commit, and they figure out the rest themselves. The reason is that having a single always-up-to-date master is an order of magnitude simpler than Git's model of working-copy/branch/master on your local PC and then also branch/master on a remote PC and push/pull/fetch/merge between them.
With Subversion you still have to manage branches sometimes, but there is typically a maintainer person who handles that. Whereas the model of Git is that every dev is doing merge algebra from day 1.
If someone made a tool that lets me use Windows 10 with security updates but without spying or cloud or unwanted upgrades, I would pay for that. I don't see any technical reason why a 3rd party can't provide that. When Windows 8 messed up the start menu, tools like Classic Shell stepped in to fill the gaps, with huge popularity, and I think those download statistics were actually persuasive to the "data driven" business strategizers at MS.
Mod parent up!
For me the killer feature is USB redirection. I can use a VM to install stuff like questionable device drivers, ancient apps, bloatware like iTunes or Zune, etc. and then attach the USB device to the host PC and use it within the VM (without polluting the host PC's OS). Hyper-V can't do that.
> So it only took about a year of screaming from the users
> and slashdotters before Microsquishy paid attention and
> brought back the MENU instead of that god damned
> useless start screen.
No, what it took was a new CEO. Don't flatter yourself. What you have observed is merely the surface of a significant shift that is happening. The fact that these effects are already visible in the first 6 months is pretty telling.
If Microsoft can have those people wait for Windows 9 and Windows 9 is an improvement of any sort, they stand a better chance of keeping the customers.
Really? MS didn't change much in Win8.1, and they are making Win7 really hard to buy. It implies they really believe Win8 isn't a disaster.
The head of the Windows division got fired shortly after Win8 shipped, and the whole company seems to be treading water while the board hunts for a new CEO.
It's unrealistic to expect any changes to the Windows 8 vision until that shakes out. But when it does, you can bet the Surface/metro thing will get ripped apart, and Julie Larson-Green will be replaced by someone who isn't just keeping a seat warm. Whether that's for better or worse really depends on who the CEO is.
.NET also has a managed C++ model, which as allows C++ objects to be tightly bound to C# including garbage collection in an extremely natural way, while still having inline assembly language and all the performance of C++. And for managed languages (C#, VB, PowerShell, Python, etc) you get very deep integration that is probably the best that could be hoped fo. The F# mutability example is unreasonable, given the radical difference between these languages. And for all of this integration you get to use a single IDE with a visual debugger that shows you a single callstack with thr different languages mixed together.
Microsoft solved this problem so thoroughly, you couldn't ask for much else, except that none of it works on any OS other than Windows.
Nay, naaay!
You refer to the audience as "senior management," but then you have framed this entire discussion around you -- the enlightened one -- trying to "teach" the bumbling, ignorant executives while tiptoeing around their childlike attention spans. A quick look at your pay grade should reveal the exact opposite. You each have a specialty, but /yours/ is the narrower mindset with the smaller impact on the organization. And they may be bored by technical details, but when it comes to the operational and strategic details that drive the day-to-day success or failure of your company, /your/ attention span is the childlike one. Want to see a bunch of snoozing engineers? Put them in a training session about how to extract more money from customers. :-)
In order to be truly successful with your goal here, you need to step out of your world of IT and let your audience teach you something. What were they doing before they came to the class? What are the problems facing the company right now? Why are they requesting the training? If there is an optimal outcome -- publicly congratulating you and asking to do a follow-up training -- what would that look like? (In other words, what was a similar past event that everyone remembers as being a great success?) Sometimes these questions have hidden answers, like people not wanting to be made to feel stupid, or wanting to learn a few simple tricks that will impress others, or merely needing to fulfill a mandate from higher up with the least effort heheh. To be really successful, you need to give them exactly what they want, not what you think they need.
You can ask these questions directly at the start of your session, but a better approach is to talk informally with some key people beforehand. Show them the material you plan to present, and ask for suggestions and feedback. Make them feel like you will implement their advice, so they have a personal interest in the outcome of your event. Technology is absolutely not the point of IT, don't let the conversation dwell on that. Instead, ask about the bigger picture, and try to understand the human perspective and reward mechanisms.
Above all, recognize that you have a blind spot that is twice as large as any executive's blind spot for technology. Accept it, develop some techniques to help yourself work around it, and you will find yourself light years ahead of your IT peers.
http://lastpass.com/
Here is the original self-promoting story from Food Safety News:
http://www.foodsafetynews.com/2011/08/honey-laundering
However, from searching Google News (e.g. "china counterfeit honey"), the results are merely people's blogs that link to the same Food Safety News article. I'm sure FSN is providing a helpful service of raising awareness, but they are not an impartial group who we can expect to conduct a reliable investigation. Where are the confirming sources?
Their article references the FDA, the Department of Commerce, and the Department of Agriculture -- but I can't find anything on those sites to support the article's opening claim that "A third or more of all the honey consumed in the U.S. is likely to have been smuggled in from China."
Can anybody provide a citation?
Real estate square footages are usually measured from the building exterior and include areas inside the walls, chimney, etc. :-)
What if he had downloaded 10,000 songs?
"Anything with altered genes must be bad for your" is not an irrational fear of some new device or technology, it is a reasonable default position when considering a potentially irreversible change to the ecosystem and gene pool. Genetic engineering is not equivalent to selective breeding, because it can instantaneously produce radical changes that would normally take centuries to achieve. In many cases, the science is empirical, like a hacker making risky changes to a large code base because he "understands" the tiny fragment of code that he's changing, even though there may be unforeseen systemic effects. And what is the urgent problem that we are solving here? You're going to solve world hunger by creating more food? Isn't there an inherent flaw in that idea?
But if you had to choose between a chicken today, versus a chicken two years from now, you would certainly prefer to receive it today. So don't forget that the value of a chicken decreases over time, inflation or not.