As you grow older, you are more likely to focus on capitalizing on your current skills ("get things done") than on learning new skills. It makes perfect sense from an economic point of view, there are less productive years left to get a return on any investment made in increasing your productivity.
I don't believe it usually is a conscious economic estimation, it is simply build into our brains (with the usual "bell curve" caveat).
If I was 20 again, I would definitely think multi-threading, rather than the client-server approach to multiprocessing which was in vogue at the time.
As it is now, I learn just about enough multi-threading as needed to get my work done. That is, I had to make the GUI a separate thread in order to make the user experience tolerable, but making the actual number crushing multi-threaded will have to wait until there is funding.
The ex-Yugoslavian conflicts, like "The Trouble" in Northern Ireland, and the conflict between Sunnis and Shiites in Iraq, are all more tribal than religious in nature, despite that the grouping has religious names.
In Yugoslavia it would be more correct to characterize the people who committed most of the atrocities as Serbian nationalists than as Orthodox Christian fundamentalists.
The point is that customers should be patrons of businesses, not enemies. Hear! Hear! It is all about the mindset of the business. Here is what "good" and "evil" business ask themselves:
Good: How can we provide our customers with the best possible service, and at the same time make a buck?
Evil: How can we change our service to make customers pay us more money?
Of course, business is about making money, the difference is just that the "good" business believe that the long term key to making money is customer satisfaction, while the "evil" business is more concerned about short term optimization.
A personal example: My current ISP has a convenient on-line facility to switch to a more expensive / higher bandwidth subscription, but you can't use it to switch to cheaper / lower bandwidth subscription. The main competitor allows you to switch both ways. One of the two "hates" their customers. I chose the competitor when I had to connect some family members to the net. I'm sure I would be more inclined to upgrade my own connection, if I know it was easy to downgrade again. Now, I'm more likely to switch provider.
Treating your customers with respect is good for your customer, and it is good for you in the long term. It creates trust and loyalty.
BTW: When Google say "do no Evil" I'm sure it is in this sense, not in the sense of supporting Tibet monks against an oppressive regime. Allowing pop3 access to gmail is a good example of this, it circumvent their source of income, but makes more people inclined to try them out, and they rely on their own interface being good enough to win you over. [ And of course, access to confidential information your mail will help them in their evil plans of world domination, but that is another story. ]
It does sound like a much smarter business strategy than the norm of giving *worse* service to customers than to users of unauthorized copies.
I never make unauthorized copies for a number of reasons, but I hate when I can't find the right CD needed to play a game I already have installed on the harddrive, or I want to play a steam game when I'm not online. Same for DVD's that won't play in my region, or won't allow me to fast forward over boring legalize, or music that can't be transfered to my favorite player.
A business that wants to use Windows or Office is probably not setting aside money in their budget to give to Microsoft if they don't legally have to. They legally have to. The article doesn't advocate making freeware, it is advocating ignoring the people who violate your copyright. It is not quite the same.
In fact, Microsoft mostly follow his advice, Microsoft products traditionally don't come with the annoying control measures of the game industry. "You can only edit word documents of you have the original Office CD loaded."
I don't mean to sound like a copyright hawk (I'm not), but this advice is awful for game makers outside the freeware/shareware model. You are aware that Stardock is neither a freeware, nor a shareware company. He is not an armchair philosopher, he is describing a business model that works.
Surely the professionals selling half a million illegal copies to stores can circumvent the control measurements (especially those "must have cd to play" measurements). I always thought the control measurements were to "keep honest men honest", while those who make a sport (or a business) out of getting illegal copies will manage to find a way.
If you read behind the lines, there are security measures in the network to prevent problems from spreading, and there are networks within the network, so really sensitive information is only available to few people.
It sounds like a superior approach, that probably will only work if you have a superior IT staff. So I'm not sure it is something that will scale to the rest of the industry.
You seem to have dismissed the entire art of literature in one fell swoop. I doubt Clarke will be remembered as a great writer. He will, however, undoubtly be remembered as great science fiction writer. And the core to being a great science fiction writer, is to have great ideas. Making contributions to the "art of literature" is rather far down the list.
The question is whether you trust that Microsoft will have the best interests of Open Source in their mind.
If you suspect that sometimes the interest of Microsoft may not align well with the interest of the open source community, you definitely don't want to put them on the board of directors for the organization that defined the term open source, and is still considered the most authoritative source of what is and isn't open source.
Google hasn't invited Steve Ballmer on their board of directors, either.
Wait until DNF is released. My first mental "expansion" of DNF was the term used in result listings in athletics when a runner abandon the race: "Did Not Finish".
On second thought, from context it seems that you meant Duke-Nuke'em Forever.
Then again, maybe the two meanings of DNF aren't that different.
Most likely it's stuff like SuperFetch in Vista doing what it's designed to do in fact. Most likely SuperFetch is what made my Vista machine over time go from intolerable slow to tolerable sluggish. Still much less responsive than my old laptop comparing side by side.
Believe me, Vista is faster if you have the memory. I would believe your word if I hadn't personally experienced otherwise. My X60s has 4 GiB ram, of which Vista acknowledge the 3 GiB (it would have been polite of Lenovo to tell me that the crippled alpha release quality toy OS I was buying could not use all the RAM I was buying). My old X40 with XP has only 1 GiB, and was still far more responsive.
Maybe it is different usage patterns, you starting and stopping many small applications, where I just run a few large applications for weeks.
I still believe the "filled with crap" explanation more, XP never felt slow to me on the old computer.
especially with SP1 which i've been running for a couple of weeks now - it's the Vista that should've shipped. I hope you are right so my new computer will finally fell like an upgrade, also when I'm not compiling ("make -j 3" rules on the Core 2 Duo, compared to the Pentium-M).
Having bought a new Dell laptop with Vista on that's lower spec than my work machine (policy is to update desktops later this year), my laptop almost always feels far more responsive. Most likely, your old machine had accumulated crap over time, and resinstalling XP would have given an even larger speedup. Vista is far less responsive on my Thinkpad X61s than XP was on my Thinkpad X40, comparing them side by side. Only the cpu bound tasks like compiling are faster, due to the faster hardware.
"I see something real bad happened; do you mind if I see if there's a solution online?". Yeah, whenever my own programs crash I get that one. It doesn't find any solutions though, I still have to debug my own code.
It did once claim to have found a solution to system crash, pointing to a Lenovo page that did not exists.
UAC is top too; I like to know when a program is gonna try and change my system (some try that you'd never think would - denied). That is the one thing I like about Vista. I think of it as the Microsoft answer to "sudo". It was annoying at the beginning, where you had to press yes so many times. Makes me worry about whether it will have the intended affect, or simply teach people to press "yes" whenever they see a pop-up.
It's an upgrade without a doubt. Most people at my work who have "accidentally" ordered new PC's with Vista have ended up asking the it support guys "downgrade" them to XP. I have been stubborn though, waiting to see if it gets better with time. It does, but nowhere near enough to compensate for the initial drop in productivity.
The Wikipedia search button doesn't work very well, I can't be the only one who find relevant Wikipedia articles easier from Google than from within Wikipedia.
So instead of the home made Search button, auction it out. How much do you think Yahoo, MSN or Google would pay to provide search for Wikpedia (and get the results on their site, with their advertisements)? Far more than the US$ 4.6M. Mozilla gets most of their money from directing search to Google, and they have a much larger budget.
So the result would be 1) better search results, 2) still no ads on Wikipedia itself, 3) full funding of Wikipedia, and 4) we would get rid of those annying fund raisers.
If you read the blog rather than the (as always) misleading summary, it is a very good match to global warming denial. There is the underdog with some alternate explanation (volcanic activity, cosmic radiation, whatever) against the huge global climate change establishment.
It is a good story, that merely ignores how science works.
The "friendly article" is about a specific narrative, "the establishment and the underdog", not about bias. The submitter got (as always on/.) it wrong. I have no idea whether the submission is an example of stupidity, bias, or maybe a different narrative. The "they are biased" narrative is very popular on/. for some reason.
And while journalists of course have bias as everybody else, what characterize the profession is not bias (in fact, they are probably better than average at hiding it), but the search for narratives. Without a narrative, news stories will get boring, and they will lose readers (or viewers, or listeners). The term they themselves uses for a narrative is "an angle". Unlike with bias, journalists just want an angle (or narrative) in order to tell their story, they do not (in general) particularly care about what the angle is.
They have not verified Hawking radiation. A verification consist of comparing the predictions made with one formalism with the predictions made with another (presumably more trusted) formalism, and see that they match.
A validation consist of comparing the predictions made with one formalism with actual measurements, and see that they match.
Verifications are not as strong as validations, but none the less quite useful. Typically it works the other way around though, we verify a numerical model against one or more analytical solutions. If they match, we gain trust in that the numerical model also can make correct predictions for the cases where no analytical solution can be found. Of course, we would like to eventually add actual validations. But that might be much more time consuming and/or expensive. I work in agricultural science, an experiment takes a year. We would like to sort out as many bad models as possible before starting that, hence we always use verification as the first step. [I shouldn't complain, the people in forestry are much worse of. ]
like you or I might observe the existence of Martians by looking at the right Bugs Bunny cartoon Bugs Bunny cartoons are not a very strong formalism. If they predicted Hawking radiation by hawing a Bugs Bunny cartoonist draw what he would think it might look like, that would not lend much credibility to the theory.
If they used independent formalism to get Hawking radiation, then it's a good sign, and shows that their theory is consistent with Hawking's (and perhaps later someone will link the two).
In either case, they did not produce any evidence. If they have correctly use an independent formalism to verify Hawking radiation, they may not technically have "produced" any new evidence, but it means that all the existing evidence that backs the independent formalism, now also counts as evidence towards Hawking radiation.
In the Panopticon the people in power can watch the people without power, but not the other way around. That way, the surveillance strengthens the existing power structure.
In the transparent society (which is what the Google services move us towards), everybody can watch (figuratively, it can be in the form of a web based profiles, not necessarily cameras) everybody. This works the opposite way, while the people with power can watch the powerless, the powerless can also watch the people with power. And the people with power have more to lose, so the effect is towards equalization. Who watches the watchmen? In the transparent society, the answer is that the citizens (everybody) watches the watchmen.
In the US, one of the major concerns for the transparent society is oppression based on the puritan ideals that are especially strong there./. have, from time to time, stories about people getting fired for silly stuff like having fun at a party. But the puritans tend to be the people with most to hide, witness the "moral majority" leaders involved in sex scandals, or the anti-gay senators who attempts to buy sexual services from male air port personnel.
So while some people might suffer from puritan suppression who might have "got away with it" in a less transparent society, the major thing being under threat from the transparency is the puritan ideals themselves. The only thing that allows puritanism to survive is hypocrisy. Without the possibility of hypocrisy, there won't be any puritanism.
Much of Europe was destroyed, millions was murdered or fell in war, and the eastern half of Europe had to suffer half a century more under communist dictatorships, all as a result of the Nazi movement.
While I agree that it is less than perfect from a free speech point of view, I do believe it is inefficient but understandable that some of the countries in the parts of Europe that suffered most have forbidden the symbols of that movement.
I agree that the symbols should be legal (it is easy for me to do so, I come from a country that aligned with Germany in the beginning, but cleverly switched sides when the tides of the war turned, and thus came out on the winning side without actually having to do anything[1]), I would like to see a little more understanding for the other side from here.
Hate speech is another issue, made complex because the concept is ill-defined. I see it as an extension of libel law to cover some grouping. In Denmark, specifically groups defined by nationality, race, religion or sexual orientation. But not e.g. occupation. So while I'm not allowed to call a specific lawyer a lying scumbag, I'm allowed to call all lawyers for lying scumbags. But just like I'm not allowed to call a specific Norwegian for a "mountain monkey", I'm not allowed to call all Norwegians for "mountain monkeys" either.
I'm not sure why individual insults are generally outlawed, while group insults are allowed.
[1] Apart from the rescue of the Jews, which was possible due to some cooperation from the local German command, but still carried out by the people, and both a brave and decent thing to do.
And is that the answer to everything is it? No, it is the answer to the very specific question of when "tying" is not acceptable.
They can do anything that they feel like purely because they are not the dominant player... That is an incredible stupid opinion that must be attributed solely to you, as it was neither stated not implied by the original poster. As an extreme example of the monumentally stupidity of your stated position, sending out assassins against your competitors is both illegal and unethical quite independtly on your market position.
so all of Microsoft's underhanded playing early on when they weren't the dominant player is all excusable too is it? If they had been tying their screen saver and their basic interpreter that would have been stupid, but mainly hurting themselves. Just like it would be stupid for Apple to make it harder for third party browsers to run on their platform, but mainly hurting Apple itself.
It was not stupid for Microsoft to put the competitors to MS Office at a disadvantage on MS Windows 95, it was the second most brilliant business decision they have ever made. [ The most brilliant being their cheap non-exclusive license of QDOS to IBM. ] But it was, or should have been, illegal.
It's ridiculous to try and use this insane rationale in regards to any company that's not Microsoft. At what point do you then start going 'well, actually I've decided they have enough market share now, NOW they should be ethical'
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As you grow older, you are more likely to focus on capitalizing on your current skills ("get things done") than on learning new skills. It makes perfect sense from an economic point of view, there are less productive years left to get a return on any investment made in increasing your productivity.
I don't believe it usually is a conscious economic estimation, it is simply build into our brains (with the usual "bell curve" caveat).
If I was 20 again, I would definitely think multi-threading, rather than the client-server approach to multiprocessing which was in vogue at the time.
As it is now, I learn just about enough multi-threading as needed to get my work done. That is, I had to make the GUI a separate thread in order to make the user experience tolerable, but making the actual number crushing multi-threaded will have to wait until there is funding.
The ex-Yugoslavian conflicts, like "The Trouble" in Northern Ireland, and the conflict between Sunnis and Shiites in Iraq, are all more tribal than religious in nature, despite that the grouping has religious names.
In Yugoslavia it would be more correct to characterize the people who committed most of the atrocities as Serbian nationalists than as Orthodox Christian fundamentalists.
Good: How can we provide our customers with the best possible service, and at the same time make a buck?
Evil: How can we change our service to make customers pay us more money?
Of course, business is about making money, the difference is just that the "good" business believe that the long term key to making money is customer satisfaction, while the "evil" business is more concerned about short term optimization.
A personal example: My current ISP has a convenient on-line facility to switch to a more expensive / higher bandwidth subscription, but you can't use it to switch to cheaper / lower bandwidth subscription. The main competitor allows you to switch both ways. One of the two "hates" their customers. I chose the competitor when I had to connect some family members to the net. I'm sure I would be more inclined to upgrade my own connection, if I know it was easy to downgrade again. Now, I'm more likely to switch provider.
Treating your customers with respect is good for your customer, and it is good for you in the long term. It creates trust and loyalty.
BTW: When Google say "do no Evil" I'm sure it is in this sense, not in the sense of supporting Tibet monks against an oppressive regime. Allowing pop3 access to gmail is a good example of this, it circumvent their source of income, but makes more people inclined to try them out, and they rely on their own interface being good enough to win you over. [ And of course, access to confidential information your mail will help them in their evil plans of world domination, but that is another story. ]
It does sound like a much smarter business strategy than the norm of giving *worse* service to customers than to users of unauthorized copies.
I never make unauthorized copies for a number of reasons, but I hate when I can't find the right CD needed to play a game I already have installed on the harddrive, or I want to play a steam game when I'm not online. Same for DVD's that won't play in my region, or won't allow me to fast forward over boring legalize, or music that can't be transfered to my favorite player.
In fact, Microsoft mostly follow his advice, Microsoft products traditionally don't come with the annoying control measures of the game industry. "You can only edit word documents of you have the original Office CD loaded."
Surely the professionals selling half a million illegal copies to stores can circumvent the control measurements (especially those "must have cd to play" measurements). I always thought the control measurements were to "keep honest men honest", while those who make a sport (or a business) out of getting illegal copies will manage to find a way.
So now we will get jet lag from driving a car at night?
If you read behind the lines, there are security measures in the network to prevent problems from spreading, and there are networks within the network, so really sensitive information is only available to few people.
It sounds like a superior approach, that probably will only work if you have a superior IT staff. So I'm not sure it is something that will scale to the rest of the industry.
But know going in that 95% of the time you see coauthors on anything other than a university text, the famous coauthor did 0% of the work,
Actually, this is also common for academic papers.The question is whether you trust that Microsoft will have the best interests of Open Source in their mind.
If you suspect that sometimes the interest of Microsoft may not align well with the interest of the open source community, you definitely don't want to put them on the board of directors for the organization that defined the term open source, and is still considered the most authoritative source of what is and isn't open source.
Google hasn't invited Steve Ballmer on their board of directors, either.
If ever any scientific breakthrough have deserved to kept secret for the good of mankind, this is it.
On second thought, from context it seems that you meant Duke-Nuke'em Forever.
Then again, maybe the two meanings of DNF aren't that different.
Maybe it is different usage patterns, you starting and stopping many small applications, where I just run a few large applications for weeks.
I still believe the "filled with crap" explanation more, XP never felt slow to me on the old computer. especially with SP1 which i've been running for a couple of weeks now - it's the Vista that should've shipped. I hope you are right so my new computer will finally fell like an upgrade, also when I'm not compiling ("make -j 3" rules on the Core 2 Duo, compared to the Pentium-M).
It did once claim to have found a solution to system crash, pointing to a Lenovo page that did not exists. UAC is top too; I like to know when a program is gonna try and change my system (some try that you'd never think would - denied). That is the one thing I like about Vista. I think of it as the Microsoft answer to "sudo". It was annoying at the beginning, where you had to press yes so many times. Makes me worry about whether it will have the intended affect, or simply teach people to press "yes" whenever they see a pop-up. It's an upgrade without a doubt. Most people at my work who have "accidentally" ordered new PC's with Vista have ended up asking the it support guys "downgrade" them to XP. I have been stubborn though, waiting to see if it gets better with time. It does, but nowhere near enough to compensate for the initial drop in productivity.
The Wikipedia search button doesn't work very well, I can't be the only one who find relevant Wikipedia articles easier from Google than from within Wikipedia.
So instead of the home made Search button, auction it out. How much do you think Yahoo, MSN or Google would pay to provide search for Wikpedia (and get the results on their site, with their advertisements)? Far more than the US$ 4.6M. Mozilla gets most of their money from directing search to Google, and they have a much larger budget.
So the result would be 1) better search results, 2) still no ads on Wikipedia itself, 3) full funding of Wikipedia, and 4) we would get rid of those annying fund raisers.
If you read the blog rather than the (as always) misleading summary, it is a very good match to global warming denial. There is the underdog with some alternate explanation (volcanic activity, cosmic radiation, whatever) against the huge global climate change establishment.
It is a good story, that merely ignores how science works.
The "friendly article" is about a specific narrative, "the establishment and the underdog", not about bias. The submitter got (as always on /.) it wrong. I have no idea whether the submission is an example of stupidity, bias, or maybe a different narrative. The "they are biased" narrative is very popular on /. for some reason.
And while journalists of course have bias as everybody else, what characterize the profession is not bias (in fact, they are probably better than average at hiding it), but the search for narratives. Without a narrative, news stories will get boring, and they will lose readers (or viewers, or listeners). The term they themselves uses for a narrative is "an angle". Unlike with bias, journalists just want an angle (or narrative) in order to tell their story, they do not (in general) particularly care about what the angle is.
A validation consist of comparing the predictions made with one formalism with actual measurements, and see that they match.
Verifications are not as strong as validations, but none the less quite useful. Typically it works the other way around though, we verify a numerical model against one or more analytical solutions. If they match, we gain trust in that the numerical model also can make correct predictions for the cases where no analytical solution can be found. Of course, we would like to eventually add actual validations. But that might be much more time consuming and/or expensive. I work in agricultural science, an experiment takes a year. We would like to sort out as many bad models as possible before starting that, hence we always use verification as the first step. [I shouldn't complain, the people in forestry are much worse of. ] like you or I might observe the existence of Martians by looking at the right Bugs Bunny cartoon Bugs Bunny cartoons are not a very strong formalism. If they predicted Hawking radiation by hawing a Bugs Bunny cartoonist draw what he would think it might look like, that would not lend much credibility to the theory.
It all depends on the formalisms used.
In either case, they did not produce any evidence. If they have correctly use an independent formalism to verify Hawking radiation, they may not technically have "produced" any new evidence, but it means that all the existing evidence that backs the independent formalism, now also counts as evidence towards Hawking radiation.
[ I haven't read the fine article either. ]
In the Panopticon the people in power can watch the people without power, but not the other way around. That way, the surveillance strengthens the existing power structure.
/. have, from time to time, stories about people getting fired for silly stuff like having fun at a party. But the puritans tend to be the people with most to hide, witness the "moral majority" leaders involved in sex scandals, or the anti-gay senators who attempts to buy sexual services from male air port personnel.
In the transparent society (which is what the Google services move us towards), everybody can watch (figuratively, it can be in the form of a web based profiles, not necessarily cameras) everybody. This works the opposite way, while the people with power can watch the powerless, the powerless can also watch the people with power. And the people with power have more to lose, so the effect is towards equalization. Who watches the watchmen? In the transparent society, the answer is that the citizens (everybody) watches the watchmen.
In the US, one of the major concerns for the transparent society is oppression based on the puritan ideals that are especially strong there.
So while some people might suffer from puritan suppression who might have "got away with it" in a less transparent society, the major thing being under threat from the transparency is the puritan ideals themselves. The only thing that allows puritanism to survive is hypocrisy. Without the possibility of hypocrisy, there won't be any puritanism.
Much of Europe was destroyed, millions was murdered or fell in war, and the eastern half of Europe had to suffer half a century more under communist dictatorships, all as a result of the Nazi movement.
While I agree that it is less than perfect from a free speech point of view, I do believe it is inefficient but understandable that some of the countries in the parts of Europe that suffered most have forbidden the symbols of that movement.
I agree that the symbols should be legal (it is easy for me to do so, I come from a country that aligned with Germany in the beginning, but cleverly switched sides when the tides of the war turned, and thus came out on the winning side without actually having to do anything[1]), I would like to see a little more understanding for the other side from here.
Hate speech is another issue, made complex because the concept is ill-defined. I see it as an extension of libel law to cover some grouping. In Denmark, specifically groups defined by nationality, race, religion or sexual orientation. But not e.g. occupation. So while I'm not allowed to call a specific lawyer a lying scumbag, I'm allowed to call all lawyers for lying scumbags. But just like I'm not allowed to call a specific Norwegian for a "mountain monkey", I'm not allowed to call all Norwegians for "mountain monkeys" either.
I'm not sure why individual insults are generally outlawed, while group insults are allowed.
[1] Apart from the rescue of the Jews, which was possible due to some cooperation from the local German command, but still carried out by the people, and both a brave and decent thing to do.
It was not stupid for Microsoft to put the competitors to MS Office at a disadvantage on MS Windows 95, it was the second most brilliant business decision they have ever made. [ The most brilliant being their cheap non-exclusive license of QDOS to IBM. ]
But it was, or should have been, illegal.
It's ridiculous to try and use this insane rationale in regards to any company that's not Microsoft. At what point do you then start going 'well, actually I've decided they have enough market share now, NOW they should be ethical'