Of course you'd have to come up with a more refined thesis, but I was mainly thinking in terms of statistical averages -- do businesses that hire Tata generally outperform or underperform the market? What qualities do each group have?
$2500 in 1977 dollars is like $10,500 in 2017 purchasing power. $2500 in today's money is $650 in 1977 dollars.
Other than buying name-brand server hardware and/or licensing, I'm not sure that I could spend $10,500 on a single computer system without going off the deep end on storage or going for 6 43" 4k displays or something.
Would the SEC consider knowing they had hired Tata insider information?
Has anyone ever done a statistical analysis of Tata's customers to find out if "hiring Tata" is actually some kind of predictor of a company having problems (lost revenue, profit margin, drop in stock price, etc)?
Yeah, but the "integration" is in the individual commands and the binaries behind them, not in shell script syntax or logic.
I get that in PowerShell it's object oriented and you can pipeline objects, which is indeed useful for stuff like Exchange where you actually deal in objects like "mailbox", etc.
But I don't see where there's still not a lot of usefulness for plain-old unix style pipelines and text processing. Powershell is unusually brain damaged in this regard, outright missing many simple Unix text processing utilities or functions or requiring clumsy and wordy syntax to achieve them. Stuff like last, tail, split, grep are all clumsy as fuck to pull off in Powershell.
IMHO, you could easily run PS binaries in a bash environment and do useful work with the output or at least easier day-day info grabs due to the simplicity of Unix's commands.
It never made sense to me why Microsoft didn't just toss in Unix tools at some point, like around Server 2003r2 - 2008r2.
The CLI tools wouldn't have meant less Windows server or server programs sold on its own, it actually would have meant some marginal number of free Unixes not installed because the existing Exchange, IIS or SQL box had the tools to do the job.
I see a lot of Unix installed because native Windows tools are totally brain damaged and while a Unix instance raises support questions, it's also free and solves the crisis. Later more seems to get installed and less Windows instances as admins and bosses get more confident.
If MS just had bash and tools installed natively, the door wouldn't be left open to a whole other operating system.
I wonder how they determine tangible benefit. I've had homeowner's insurance for 20 years and never gotten a dime out of it. You'd think insurance would be some kind of loophole.
If I come up with a newfangled name for a service and provide a 5 page contract that says in very convoluted terms the service doesn't do anything but because of my salesmanship I get you to buy it, is that illegal? Some kind of fraud?
Or is it just considered good salesmanship, and the fact that the sale was consensual and I didn't withhold any material facts make it A-OK?
I'm trying to think of a way that this could be made illegal, or at least greatly discourage companies from doing it. If you sue them for a refund and the judge/jury determine that the service was materially devoid of any value.
They realize they have a mostly captive market so they aren't hurt by making a bunch of unnecessary UI changes that turn out to be disasters.
For Microsoft the upside for Win8 was "we reinvented windows for the tablet and captured the market" and the downside was "some people will bitch about Microsoft". The downside was never "Windows will go away because people quit buying it."
The real problem is that Microsoft sees it as necessary for them to "innovate" or else they will lose business. One of the genius things about Jobs and iOS at Apple is that they figured out how to sell people *an additional* computing experience using a different OS than Windows. They didn't compete against Windows, they had no competitor -- which is why it was so successful.
But Microsoft is still competing against a phantom opponent for some reason. I don't know what it is, some actual fear of being left behind, some kind of personal jealousy or inadequacy complex its executives have for being so smart, so rich and yet somehow not cool or A list because they have boring and safe software which runs half the world.
People will never come to you for hip or cool or new. Ever. Stop being tryhards. Paying Imagine Dragons or movie location scouts or the NFL to shill your tablets will not make you cool, hip or sporty.
I wish Microsoft would wise up and sell people what they really want -- *stability*. The whole world is topsy-turvy and people crave stability, why not sell it to them?
I have HBO Now which I subscribed to via iTunes and they recently did some kind of authorization reset which blanked my access on both of my Apple TVs.
It was stupid and frustrating on many levels:
1) HBO web site wouldn't process the authorization code using my iPhone as the browser. I had to drag my laptop out to the living room to do it. Really? I would guess that HBO subscription and iPhone ownership are highly correlated. How do this not "just work"?
2) Why would I lose access on my AppleTV when I subscribed through my iTunes account (and IIRC, ON my AppleTV originally)? You're telling me an app on my AppleTV can't cross-reference my access based on my iTunes subscription? And how about a little of that "AI" I hear about -- my home Internet has a static IP address, the AppleTVs are the same devices as I've always used with the subscription, etc.
3) A few days later, trying to authorize my second Apple TV from the same laptop I used for the living room, all I get is the new account signup page. Despite my laptop being "logged in" to HBONow and able to watch content via a browser.
I know I've heard actual economists describe Quantitative Easing as beneficial to people heavily invested in the stock market, but I never quite connected the dots that way.
I wonder if there's any way to correlate money created by central banks through special programs like QE and the increase in even just cash holdings by large corporations.
It's like they're printing money trying to stimulate demand in a consumer economy, but it gets snatched away by corporations before it ever gets to consumers.
I really like this theory and I have thought so myself. I feel like a lot of economic activity that does take place isn't real economic activity, either.
My question for you is, do you have any credible information that outlines this as a valid theory, ideally by someone with decent economics credentials? I've mentioned it to people with more economics understanding than I have and they poo-poo it.
What's funny is that while your example is great, I see a couple of amphibious cars every summer out on the lake I boat on.
So despite few being made and a long time ago, there's some weird value to them that keeps them going and turning up in places you'd least expect them (like a lake in the Midwest).
The credit scoring industry is always eager to find one more factor they can include in calculating credit risk and they seem fond of high-correlation variables unrelated to actual loan performance, like driving record. I'm mostly convinced this is just to find a way to charge a premium to good credit risks.
But there is only so much money good credit risks will borrow (which is partly why they're good credit risks, it's a kind of self-selective behavior) and lenders would like to loan more money in order to make more money. So they start looking for alternative credit scoring variables they can correlate to good loan risks, independent of past or no credit history.
So you wind up with variables that turn out to be reasonable predictors of credit performance that are race-blind but wind up to coincidentally highly correlated with race, like zipcode. Happen to live in a majority black neighborhood? Based on broad economic measures, blacks probably are worse credit risks just because they're overall poorer, so just sharing the neighborhood makes you disadvantaged by a "blind" variable like zipcode, even if you're not black. If you are, it is indistinguishable from racial discrimination.
Don't get me wrong, I don't disagree with your larger point. The problem really seems to be that "innovators" wind up using variables that seem neutral but are actually heavily biased. They should probably check for high levels of racial correlation when developing their algorithms and toss those that wind up correlating on race, or at least do so if it means preventing access to something.
I think it's not just that the Federal government has banned it, I think the mere presence of that ban is having a chilling effect. I know a guy who works for a fuel supplier to an energy utility and they are being told to rip out all Kaspersky products by the utility and supposedly the utility is being told this by the Feds.
Even if this is only partly true, I'd guess its being repeated in other areas. Eventually even if still buying their products isn't illegal or officially banned for anyone other than Federal agencies, this will fan out and ruin its reputation.
I'm of mixed opinions on this. I don't think Kaspersky was proactively engaged in a conspiracy to commit espionage, but I think they are uniquely positioned to be influenced by the FSB in ways that creates an existential risk.
My guess is Eugene Kaspersky thought he could retain Russia as a major office (good talent, a market unto itself, etc) and be a global software player without those two things being in conflict. Turns out maybe he should have relocated and left Russia behind.
Even without taking into consideration the notion of aliens, flying saucers or any similar phenomena, this program makes sense if it helps sort out problems in radar imaging, remote sensing or pilot training/target identification.
Even if you think this $22 million was wasted "because UFOs don't exist", you have to admit that a military program to explain simultaneous failure of radar systems is money well spent if some natural or other phenomenon can be identified as tricking both sensing networks and pilots.
Even without that kind of hard-headed practical purpose, why *not* have some kind of office to investigate weird aerial incidents, especially if they are backed by pilot testimony, radar data, FLIR imagery, etc. It's not like it would take a ton of money, especially measured in military scales.
I knew a friend who photoshopped an eyeglasses prescription that had expired.
I'm pretty sure you might even be able to fake a prescription entirely if you knew the correct values/terms to put in. There's no way any third party glasses provider will actually check.
Until not that long ago it was extremely dangerous and expensive to travel more than 100 miles from home and in many places it still is. With that kind of logic, humans would never have left their village let alone their continent.
Yet to this very day there are people who take incredibly perilous journeys willingly even though they know that where they are going life will (at least initially) be very hard and the environment will be hostile, perhaps even fatal.
I think the biggest value of the manned space program isn't the space travel, really, but the sense of inspiration it provides, the notion that humanity is actually going somewhere and somehow progressing in the process.
Yeah, but I bet a lot of the people with giant glasses aren't actively engaging in "oenophilia", they're just people trying to signal their sophistication.
I went to a real wine tasting once put on by someone from a winery and I was pretty impressed with what they knew and the whole process, so I know it's real.
But my guess is overall it's no different than Slashdot -- people "know" the real reasons for CPU cooling and certain aspects of hardware for computing performance, but most of them figure the more LEDs it has, the better it must be.
I'm guess I'm well aware of the practical rationale for the various wine glasses (nose, aeration, etc etc).
The funny thing is, if you're ever around an old-world wine drinker, they often just use a juice glass. My sense is that for 99% of the population for most of history, wine was just a beverage, not something with a huge amount of snobbery associated with it.
The Romans regularly diluted it with water to make it less alcoholic, something that would make your ordinary wine snob have a stroke.
I've been to a couple of wine tastings and there's always a few minutes spent on the variety of wineglasses in use and on display.
A part of wine snobbery seems to be sloshing around the wine in the glass. OK, I know this has some practical purpose if you're way into wine. But it also seems to lead to ever larger glasses as a kind of way of demonstrating you (or some restaurant you're eating in) is super serious about wine.
This seems to me to lead to a wine glass arms race, as everyone gets more eager to make money selling overpriced bottles of wine, they put out ever larger wine glasses to show how serious their wine is. Now we're in this position where the wine glasses are fish bowl in scale. I'm in a restaurant and I think my wine glass is a reaction chamber for a chemistry experiment.
If wine snobbery never became a thing, would we still be drinking out of smaller glasses?
It seems like a thinly veiled attempt to win points by "proving" something unpopular should be even more unpopular because it consumes energy. Would porn be more OK for the author if it defied the laws of thermodynamics and actually produced more energy than it consumed?
I'd go out on a limb and guess that any given year of porn in the VHS distribution era consumed more energy and resources than the last 3 years of porn streamed online. The video cassettes, the packaging, the shipping, the trips in the car to the rental place -- the energy consumption was huge.
This is an idiotic study, an almost perfect example of content-free virtue signaling. Please the feminists by finding a heretofore unique criticism of pornography. Please the anti-technology environmentalists that the Internet is a source of valueless energy consumption. The only thing the author didn't do was customize the study to somehow demonstrate to conservatives a way to be environmentalists by blaming gay porn for wasting energy.
I'll admit that it's a fairly novel way to create a new way to exploit environmentalism as politics -- simply do some math on the energy consumption of your enemy and decry their waste of natural resources.
I can't help but think it's corrupted our economy somehow. Like corporations have gotten society on this planned obsolescence treadmill and deliberate expiration and dropped support are just gimmicks to keep selling us the same shit over and over again.
I also worry that it's a sign that we've kind of run out of ideas, nothing new is really coming, just some rehash of what's already been done.
Do asteroids or comets have "tails' outside of the atmosphere in the vacuum of space -- ie, plumes of particulates given off? Are they "burning"?
Or is this just what happens when they cross into an atmosphere and experience friction?
I guess maybe I could see solar heating causing them to erode, but at the same time is there enough solar heating much outside Earth's orbital distance?
Slashdot Mirror
Of course you'd have to come up with a more refined thesis, but I was mainly thinking in terms of statistical averages -- do businesses that hire Tata generally outperform or underperform the market? What qualities do each group have?
$2500 in 1977 dollars is like $10,500 in 2017 purchasing power. $2500 in today's money is $650 in 1977 dollars.
Other than buying name-brand server hardware and/or licensing, I'm not sure that I could spend $10,500 on a single computer system without going off the deep end on storage or going for 6 43" 4k displays or something.
Would the SEC consider knowing they had hired Tata insider information?
Has anyone ever done a statistical analysis of Tata's customers to find out if "hiring Tata" is actually some kind of predictor of a company having problems (lost revenue, profit margin, drop in stock price, etc)?
Yeah, but the "integration" is in the individual commands and the binaries behind them, not in shell script syntax or logic.
I get that in PowerShell it's object oriented and you can pipeline objects, which is indeed useful for stuff like Exchange where you actually deal in objects like "mailbox", etc.
But I don't see where there's still not a lot of usefulness for plain-old unix style pipelines and text processing. Powershell is unusually brain damaged in this regard, outright missing many simple Unix text processing utilities or functions or requiring clumsy and wordy syntax to achieve them. Stuff like last, tail, split, grep are all clumsy as fuck to pull off in Powershell.
IMHO, you could easily run PS binaries in a bash environment and do useful work with the output or at least easier day-day info grabs due to the simplicity of Unix's commands.
It never made sense to me why Microsoft didn't just toss in Unix tools at some point, like around Server 2003r2 - 2008r2.
The CLI tools wouldn't have meant less Windows server or server programs sold on its own, it actually would have meant some marginal number of free Unixes not installed because the existing Exchange, IIS or SQL box had the tools to do the job.
I see a lot of Unix installed because native Windows tools are totally brain damaged and while a Unix instance raises support questions, it's also free and solves the crisis. Later more seems to get installed and less Windows instances as admins and bosses get more confident.
If MS just had bash and tools installed natively, the door wouldn't be left open to a whole other operating system.
I wonder how they determine tangible benefit. I've had homeowner's insurance for 20 years and never gotten a dime out of it. You'd think insurance would be some kind of loophole.
If I come up with a newfangled name for a service and provide a 5 page contract that says in very convoluted terms the service doesn't do anything but because of my salesmanship I get you to buy it, is that illegal? Some kind of fraud?
Or is it just considered good salesmanship, and the fact that the sale was consensual and I didn't withhold any material facts make it A-OK?
I'm trying to think of a way that this could be made illegal, or at least greatly discourage companies from doing it. If you sue them for a refund and the judge/jury determine that the service was materially devoid of any value.
They realize they have a mostly captive market so they aren't hurt by making a bunch of unnecessary UI changes that turn out to be disasters.
For Microsoft the upside for Win8 was "we reinvented windows for the tablet and captured the market" and the downside was "some people will bitch about Microsoft". The downside was never "Windows will go away because people quit buying it."
The real problem is that Microsoft sees it as necessary for them to "innovate" or else they will lose business. One of the genius things about Jobs and iOS at Apple is that they figured out how to sell people *an additional* computing experience using a different OS than Windows. They didn't compete against Windows, they had no competitor -- which is why it was so successful.
But Microsoft is still competing against a phantom opponent for some reason. I don't know what it is, some actual fear of being left behind, some kind of personal jealousy or inadequacy complex its executives have for being so smart, so rich and yet somehow not cool or A list because they have boring and safe software which runs half the world.
People will never come to you for hip or cool or new. Ever. Stop being tryhards. Paying Imagine Dragons or movie location scouts or the NFL to shill your tablets will not make you cool, hip or sporty.
I wish Microsoft would wise up and sell people what they really want -- *stability*. The whole world is topsy-turvy and people crave stability, why not sell it to them?
I have HBO Now which I subscribed to via iTunes and they recently did some kind of authorization reset which blanked my access on both of my Apple TVs.
It was stupid and frustrating on many levels:
1) HBO web site wouldn't process the authorization code using my iPhone as the browser. I had to drag my laptop out to the living room to do it. Really? I would guess that HBO subscription and iPhone ownership are highly correlated. How do this not "just work"?
2) Why would I lose access on my AppleTV when I subscribed through my iTunes account (and IIRC, ON my AppleTV originally)? You're telling me an app on my AppleTV can't cross-reference my access based on my iTunes subscription? And how about a little of that "AI" I hear about -- my home Internet has a static IP address, the AppleTVs are the same devices as I've always used with the subscription, etc.
3) A few days later, trying to authorize my second Apple TV from the same laptop I used for the living room, all I get is the new account signup page. Despite my laptop being "logged in" to HBONow and able to watch content via a browser.
I know I've heard actual economists describe Quantitative Easing as beneficial to people heavily invested in the stock market, but I never quite connected the dots that way.
I wonder if there's any way to correlate money created by central banks through special programs like QE and the increase in even just cash holdings by large corporations.
It's like they're printing money trying to stimulate demand in a consumer economy, but it gets snatched away by corporations before it ever gets to consumers.
I really like this theory and I have thought so myself. I feel like a lot of economic activity that does take place isn't real economic activity, either.
My question for you is, do you have any credible information that outlines this as a valid theory, ideally by someone with decent economics credentials? I've mentioned it to people with more economics understanding than I have and they poo-poo it.
What's funny is that while your example is great, I see a couple of amphibious cars every summer out on the lake I boat on.
So despite few being made and a long time ago, there's some weird value to them that keeps them going and turning up in places you'd least expect them (like a lake in the Midwest).
The credit scoring industry is always eager to find one more factor they can include in calculating credit risk and they seem fond of high-correlation variables unrelated to actual loan performance, like driving record. I'm mostly convinced this is just to find a way to charge a premium to good credit risks.
But there is only so much money good credit risks will borrow (which is partly why they're good credit risks, it's a kind of self-selective behavior) and lenders would like to loan more money in order to make more money. So they start looking for alternative credit scoring variables they can correlate to good loan risks, independent of past or no credit history.
So you wind up with variables that turn out to be reasonable predictors of credit performance that are race-blind but wind up to coincidentally highly correlated with race, like zipcode. Happen to live in a majority black neighborhood? Based on broad economic measures, blacks probably are worse credit risks just because they're overall poorer, so just sharing the neighborhood makes you disadvantaged by a "blind" variable like zipcode, even if you're not black. If you are, it is indistinguishable from racial discrimination.
Don't get me wrong, I don't disagree with your larger point. The problem really seems to be that "innovators" wind up using variables that seem neutral but are actually heavily biased. They should probably check for high levels of racial correlation when developing their algorithms and toss those that wind up correlating on race, or at least do so if it means preventing access to something.
I think it's not just that the Federal government has banned it, I think the mere presence of that ban is having a chilling effect. I know a guy who works for a fuel supplier to an energy utility and they are being told to rip out all Kaspersky products by the utility and supposedly the utility is being told this by the Feds.
Even if this is only partly true, I'd guess its being repeated in other areas. Eventually even if still buying their products isn't illegal or officially banned for anyone other than Federal agencies, this will fan out and ruin its reputation.
I'm of mixed opinions on this. I don't think Kaspersky was proactively engaged in a conspiracy to commit espionage, but I think they are uniquely positioned to be influenced by the FSB in ways that creates an existential risk.
My guess is Eugene Kaspersky thought he could retain Russia as a major office (good talent, a market unto itself, etc) and be a global software player without those two things being in conflict. Turns out maybe he should have relocated and left Russia behind.
Even without taking into consideration the notion of aliens, flying saucers or any similar phenomena, this program makes sense if it helps sort out problems in radar imaging, remote sensing or pilot training/target identification.
Even if you think this $22 million was wasted "because UFOs don't exist", you have to admit that a military program to explain simultaneous failure of radar systems is money well spent if some natural or other phenomenon can be identified as tricking both sensing networks and pilots.
Even without that kind of hard-headed practical purpose, why *not* have some kind of office to investigate weird aerial incidents, especially if they are backed by pilot testimony, radar data, FLIR imagery, etc. It's not like it would take a ton of money, especially measured in military scales.
Gee, a wrong language, use this other one post on Slashdot. What a surprise.
I knew a friend who photoshopped an eyeglasses prescription that had expired.
I'm pretty sure you might even be able to fake a prescription entirely if you knew the correct values/terms to put in. There's no way any third party glasses provider will actually check.
Please tell me you made that up, it's the funniest thing I've read in a while.
I'm especially going to use the "But you know what happened next? Shut up, I'm telling you what happened" in all the stories I tell.
Until not that long ago it was extremely dangerous and expensive to travel more than 100 miles from home and in many places it still is. With that kind of logic, humans would never have left their village let alone their continent.
Yet to this very day there are people who take incredibly perilous journeys willingly even though they know that where they are going life will (at least initially) be very hard and the environment will be hostile, perhaps even fatal.
I think the biggest value of the manned space program isn't the space travel, really, but the sense of inspiration it provides, the notion that humanity is actually going somewhere and somehow progressing in the process.
Yeah, but I bet a lot of the people with giant glasses aren't actively engaging in "oenophilia", they're just people trying to signal their sophistication.
I went to a real wine tasting once put on by someone from a winery and I was pretty impressed with what they knew and the whole process, so I know it's real.
But my guess is overall it's no different than Slashdot -- people "know" the real reasons for CPU cooling and certain aspects of hardware for computing performance, but most of them figure the more LEDs it has, the better it must be.
I'm guess I'm well aware of the practical rationale for the various wine glasses (nose, aeration, etc etc).
The funny thing is, if you're ever around an old-world wine drinker, they often just use a juice glass. My sense is that for 99% of the population for most of history, wine was just a beverage, not something with a huge amount of snobbery associated with it.
The Romans regularly diluted it with water to make it less alcoholic, something that would make your ordinary wine snob have a stroke.
I've been to a couple of wine tastings and there's always a few minutes spent on the variety of wineglasses in use and on display.
A part of wine snobbery seems to be sloshing around the wine in the glass. OK, I know this has some practical purpose if you're way into wine. But it also seems to lead to ever larger glasses as a kind of way of demonstrating you (or some restaurant you're eating in) is super serious about wine.
This seems to me to lead to a wine glass arms race, as everyone gets more eager to make money selling overpriced bottles of wine, they put out ever larger wine glasses to show how serious their wine is. Now we're in this position where the wine glasses are fish bowl in scale. I'm in a restaurant and I think my wine glass is a reaction chamber for a chemistry experiment.
If wine snobbery never became a thing, would we still be drinking out of smaller glasses?
It seems like a thinly veiled attempt to win points by "proving" something unpopular should be even more unpopular because it consumes energy. Would porn be more OK for the author if it defied the laws of thermodynamics and actually produced more energy than it consumed?
I'd go out on a limb and guess that any given year of porn in the VHS distribution era consumed more energy and resources than the last 3 years of porn streamed online. The video cassettes, the packaging, the shipping, the trips in the car to the rental place -- the energy consumption was huge.
This is an idiotic study, an almost perfect example of content-free virtue signaling. Please the feminists by finding a heretofore unique criticism of pornography. Please the anti-technology environmentalists that the Internet is a source of valueless energy consumption. The only thing the author didn't do was customize the study to somehow demonstrate to conservatives a way to be environmentalists by blaming gay porn for wasting energy.
I'll admit that it's a fairly novel way to create a new way to exploit environmentalism as politics -- simply do some math on the energy consumption of your enemy and decry their waste of natural resources.
I can't help but think it's corrupted our economy somehow. Like corporations have gotten society on this planned obsolescence treadmill and deliberate expiration and dropped support are just gimmicks to keep selling us the same shit over and over again.
I also worry that it's a sign that we've kind of run out of ideas, nothing new is really coming, just some rehash of what's already been done.
Do asteroids or comets have "tails' outside of the atmosphere in the vacuum of space -- ie, plumes of particulates given off? Are they "burning"?
Or is this just what happens when they cross into an atmosphere and experience friction?
I guess maybe I could see solar heating causing them to erode, but at the same time is there enough solar heating much outside Earth's orbital distance?