In golf, there is a term for golfers that aim to get around the course in three (lost balls) and don't replace divots properly. They're called coarse golfers. "Comments don't matter" is the attitude of a coarse programmer.
Any fool can make a computer do what he wants. Professional programmers are communicating with other programmers via the code. Good comments aid that immeasurably, but because your attitude is prevalent they are also rare.
Before Elop, Nokia's strategy was massive diversification: a phone for every segment in every market. Elop, like Ballmer, became hypnotised by Apple's success in the anglophone markets. Elop decided he had to compete with Apple, in Apple's home market, using Apple's strategy, and that everything had to be sacrificed to this idea. So hypnotised was he that he completely ignored the two most important facts of Nokia's existence: that Nokia Mobile's biggest markets were in Eurasia, and that the big growth markets in mobile are in Asia.
Nokia's mistake was not jumping on a bandwagon. The mistake was abandoning its core strengths in order to fight a perceived enemy on the enemy's own terms in the enemy's home ground.
The problem for Nokia is that they've got almost all of their eggs in the one basket.
Before Elop, Nokia's strategy was massive diversification: a phone for every segment in every market. Elop, like Ballmer, became hypnotised by Apple's success in the anglophone markets. Elop decided he had to compete with Apple, in Apple's home market, using Apple's strategy, and that everything had to be sacrificed to this idea. So hypnotised was he that he completely ignored the two most important facts of Nokia's existence: that Nokia Mobile's biggest markets were in Eurasia, and that the big growth markets in mobile are in Asia.
Thanks to his obsession. Elop has systematically crippled Nokia Mobile's ability to compete in its key markets by removing product lines. Now it's left with S40 dumbphones, Windows 7, and very little else.
None of those things require scientific breakthroughs. The technologies already exist.
What's stopping us doing those simple things? Politics: corruption, caprice, ideology, handouts to special interest groups, denying ownership rights in land, failure to regulate lenders (120% p.a. interest anyone? Become a poor farmer in rural Bihar), failure to make elemetary investments in roads, water management, health and education. Most of the problems are in "third world" countries themselves, but Europe and North America sure don't help.
We could do those five things now, if our political elites possessed enlightened self-interest.
Microsoft's problem is exactly that it has bought into this "threat of the iPhone" meme.
Microsoft and Apple have different markets and different sales channels. By trying to compete with Apple, Microsoft is exchanging a position of dominance in enterprise "productivity" computing for one of abject weakness in consumer/mobile/fashion computing. In so doing, it is alienating its partners and customers even more than usually.
Sure, enterprise computing is a mature market, and it's not possible to continue double-digit growth in it any more. Big deal. Are electricity utilities reinventing themselves as iOS app developers? No; they are making good money in a static to declining market. That's the mature, high-return, low-risk strategy.
Microsoft needs to ignore Apple; if it doesn't, lawyers will be getting fat off aggrieved shareholders.
Ballmer seems to have decided that Microsoft needs to slavishly imitate Apple. Apple's way is the one and only way to prosperity, seems to be the reasoning.
This is truly bizarre. MS and Apple don't have the same markets or channels, the same supply chain, the same products or the same motivations. But Microsoft thinks it can succeed by ignoring backward compatibility, alienating hardware vendors, alienating its resellers, alienating its direct customers (IT departments), and alienating _their_ customers (office workers) with a third UI change in three versions.
The Steve Jobs Reality Distortion Field (released by the death of its owner, I guess) seems to have coalesced around Ballmer. I was particularly impressed by his comment that the impending launch of Windows 8 "feels like 1995". Wow. Just... wow.
I'm seriously wondering these days whether Microsoft will make it through 2022 as an independent company.
I'll believe that Ballmer is serious about innovation when I read that he spent one full, uninterrupted day in an innovation workshop. That he committed 0.5% of his working year to it.
You're looking at it wrong. Ignore the devices; look at what's behind them.
Apple's big innovation was iTunes - making it easy to buy a huge range of media in one place. The iPod was just a good-enough device for this to work.
It was staggeringly brilliant, and I say that as someone who feels claustrophobic just thinking about walled gardens and hates the iTunes ux. For the mass market, Apple's innovation was brilliantly conceived and superbly executed.
Apple replicated iTunes with its App store. Now, they're about out of ideas. There are things they could do, but they require too much investment.
Out of the keyboards of ACs.... this is actually a reasonable question. It's as though teh internets have become a zero-sum game, just at the same time as the "real" economy has. Some thought required here.
Rather than put up with a problem which is mainly caused by a broken way of looking at passwords - as a frowny-face stern-eyebrows thing - why not create a solution?
Here's one: make creating a good password into a game.
Download and print the Diceware wordlist and instructions, and buy five dice. Package the list, instructions and dice in a box - say, a shoe-box. Stick a nice "game-y" cover on the box. Set aside a desk in IT (one immediately in front of a blank wall) as the "password desk". Instruct locked-out users that they have to come to IT and play the password game to get their next password. A user uses the Diceware method to generate a password, types it on a typewriter ten times to memorise it, and then shreds the paper (a bit of security theater that might actually be useful).
(In bigger organisations, make up a password game box for each unit manager or each floor of the building(s). Sourcing enough typewriters and shredders might be a problem, so type-and-shred might have to be write-and-eat - on rice paper, of course.)
If you really have to - BOFH habits are hard to overcome - you can still use a stick: a policy that says "if your account is hacked and you were not using a password from the game, you're sacked. Instantly. And billed for costs. If you were using a password from the game, then you're fine, unless we find you wrote your password or messsaged it to someone else."
There are KeePass apps for Android and iOS.* I use apps on both, as well as KeePassX and Windows KeePass, all with the one password file stored on DropBox. If I don't "know" my passwords, it's because I don't need them. (No, Virginia; if the keepass password file is insecure on DropBox, it's nearly as insecure on one of my PCs or a thumb drive, and a lot less usable.)
(Hint: in DropBox for Android and iOS, be sure to mark the KeePass password file as a "favorite", so it is stored on the phone/device, and not merely downloaded when you try to open it.)
* For BlackBerry too; Symbian, bada, Windows Mobile and Windows Phone users are out of luck, I think.
Most importantly of all, they need to know that the materials and tools they buy to fix things won't be confiscated by corrupt elites, and that the elites won't try to extract economic rents out of the infrastructure. Otherwise maintenance won't even be attempted.
What Africa needs first and foremost is an honest, meritocratic, transparent bureaucracy supported by an honest, meritocratic, and transparent military.
But it doesn't really matter so long as we have some patience.
But if we have patience, then we can put this on the back burner for a while, so that we can deal with more pressing problems.
Like the loss of topsoil at 1% per year. Like imminent depletion of low-recharge aquifers. Like particulate pollution from mining and burning coal and oil. Like the loss of biodiversity and overfishing and overpopulation and and and...
Tell you what, let's schedule a review of the "capture an asteroid" project for April 2112.
Raw materials that aren't at the bottom of a gravity well.
Explain why these raw materials would useful to an investor here at the bottom of a gravity well with access to cheaper raw materials to hand and no prospect of setting up a processing plant outside the gravity well.
The modern lecture format originated in medieval Northern Italy, and hasn't changed significantly. The rationale for the lecture as a method of transmitting knowledge and skill was that books were extremely costly, due to the cost of scribes.
Since Gutenberg the rationale for lectures has disappeared.
Rather than moronically scaling up lectures in a TV-like way, we need some R&D done on better methods of teaching. This has finally been realised and academics are - with great trepidation - starting to measure themselves and experiment with different methods. I expect that this century will see the death of the lecture.
The point is: Do we really need that many teachers around the world? Wouldn't be much more productive to have them working on their respective fields and do either research or at least development and innovation.
The saying goes, "the best way to learn something is to teach it."
There's a famous anecdote by Richard Feynman about himself. He was working on some knotty area of quantum physics with colleagues. After some time, the group felt it had a good understanding of the topic and could move on. Feynman said, "OK, just let me write it up as a freshman lecture to test our understanding." A week later he went back and said, "You know, I couldn't do it. I couldn't write that lecture. We need to study this some more."
So, no to the second question. If we want good solid research done, we need our researchers to be teachers.
At grade school level, what's needed is individual tuition by tutors smart enough to adapt their methods to each student. Expert systems hold out the promise of that, but we're a couple of decades away at least. Meanwhile, the world needs more teachers. Yes to the first question.
I had 52 three-and-a-half inch floppies in a box. Five years after storing them, I got them out to look for something (the manifest was incomplete). Six of them worked. I don't have them any more.
I have a friend with a collection of Zip disks. They're in an unknown state, because no-one we know has a reader.
If you think that CDs or DVDs burnt on a consumer-grade burner are going to last more than three years - well, you _might_ be lucky. I wasn't.
Merely possessing the media isn't enough. You have to devote time to curating your collection - checking that the media still work, making fresh copies every couple of years, and migrating to newer (less obsolescent) physical media. Once you've built up enough data, it's just easier and quicker to do this when everything is stored on hard disks.
Slashdot Mirror
Comments don't do anything.
In golf, there is a term for golfers that aim to get around the course in three (lost balls) and don't replace divots properly. They're called coarse golfers. "Comments don't matter" is the attitude of a coarse programmer.
Any fool can make a computer do what he wants. Professional programmers are communicating with other programmers via the code. Good comments aid that immeasurably, but because your attitude is prevalent they are also rare.
I'll quote myself:
Before Elop, Nokia's strategy was massive diversification: a phone for every segment in every market. Elop, like Ballmer, became hypnotised by Apple's success in the anglophone markets. Elop decided he had to compete with Apple, in Apple's home market, using Apple's strategy, and that everything had to be sacrificed to this idea. So hypnotised was he that he completely ignored the two most important facts of Nokia's existence: that Nokia Mobile's biggest markets were in Eurasia, and that the big growth markets in mobile are in Asia.
Nokia's mistake was not jumping on a bandwagon. The mistake was abandoning its core strengths in order to fight a perceived enemy on the enemy's own terms in the enemy's home ground.
Almost right.
The problem for Nokia is that they've got almost all of their eggs in the one basket.
Before Elop, Nokia's strategy was massive diversification: a phone for every segment in every market. Elop, like Ballmer, became hypnotised by Apple's success in the anglophone markets. Elop decided he had to compete with Apple, in Apple's home market, using Apple's strategy, and that everything had to be sacrificed to this idea. So hypnotised was he that he completely ignored the two most important facts of Nokia's existence: that Nokia Mobile's biggest markets were in Eurasia, and that the big growth markets in mobile are in Asia.
Thanks to his obsession. Elop has systematically crippled Nokia Mobile's ability to compete in its key markets by removing product lines. Now it's left with S40 dumbphones, Windows 7, and very little else.
None of those things require scientific breakthroughs. The technologies already exist.
What's stopping us doing those simple things? Politics: corruption, caprice, ideology, handouts to special interest groups, denying ownership rights in land, failure to regulate lenders (120% p.a. interest anyone? Become a poor farmer in rural Bihar), failure to make elemetary investments in roads, water management, health and education. Most of the problems are in "third world" countries themselves, but Europe and North America sure don't help.
We could do those five things now, if our political elites possessed enlightened self-interest.
Now there would be a breakthrough.
Occasionally, an AC says something sensible. Yes! Reform the )(*@#(* patent system!
Meh, what's second prize?
Microsoft's problem is exactly that it has bought into this "threat of the iPhone" meme.
Microsoft and Apple have different markets and different sales channels. By trying to compete with Apple, Microsoft is exchanging a position of dominance in enterprise "productivity" computing for one of abject weakness in consumer/mobile/fashion computing. In so doing, it is alienating its partners and customers even more than usually.
Sure, enterprise computing is a mature market, and it's not possible to continue double-digit growth in it any more. Big deal. Are electricity utilities reinventing themselves as iOS app developers? No; they are making good money in a static to declining market. That's the mature, high-return, low-risk strategy.
Microsoft needs to ignore Apple; if it doesn't, lawyers will be getting fat off aggrieved shareholders.
Time was when Microsoft's gross profit ratio was about two thirds, not one third. Hmm.
> WebOS and even in fact WP7
Riffing off Oscar Wilde: supporting one of those is an accident. Supporting both shows poor taste.
> Most OS X programs ....
This.
Ballmer seems to have decided that Microsoft needs to slavishly imitate Apple. Apple's way is the one and only way to prosperity, seems to be the reasoning.
This is truly bizarre. MS and Apple don't have the same markets or channels, the same supply chain, the same products or the same motivations. But Microsoft thinks it can succeed by ignoring backward compatibility, alienating hardware vendors, alienating its resellers, alienating its direct customers (IT departments), and alienating _their_ customers (office workers) with a third UI change in three versions.
The Steve Jobs Reality Distortion Field (released by the death of its owner, I guess) seems to have coalesced around Ballmer. I was particularly impressed by his comment that the impending launch of Windows 8 "feels like 1995". Wow. Just ... wow.
I'm seriously wondering these days whether Microsoft will make it through 2022 as an independent company.
I'll believe that Ballmer is serious about innovation when I read that he spent one full, uninterrupted day in an innovation workshop. That he committed 0.5% of his working year to it.
Well, I laughed when I saw it. If you hadn't posted as AC you might have got a mod point.
You're looking at it wrong. Ignore the devices; look at what's behind them.
Apple's big innovation was iTunes - making it easy to buy a huge range of media in one place. The iPod was just a good-enough device for this to work.
It was staggeringly brilliant, and I say that as someone who feels claustrophobic just thinking about walled gardens and hates the iTunes ux. For the mass market, Apple's innovation was brilliantly conceived and superbly executed.
Apple replicated iTunes with its App store. Now, they're about out of ideas. There are things they could do, but they require too much investment.
Out of the keyboards of ACs .... this is actually a reasonable question. It's as though teh internets have become a zero-sum game, just at the same time as the "real" economy has. Some thought required here.
Unfortunately it turns out that the "excerpt" is satire. Very funny satire.
Rather than put up with a problem which is mainly caused by a broken way of looking at passwords - as a frowny-face stern-eyebrows thing - why not create a solution?
Here's one: make creating a good password into a game.
Download and print the Diceware wordlist and instructions, and buy five dice. Package the list, instructions and dice in a box - say, a shoe-box. Stick a nice "game-y" cover on the box. Set aside a desk in IT (one immediately in front of a blank wall) as the "password desk". Instruct locked-out users that they have to come to IT and play the password game to get their next password. A user uses the Diceware method to generate a password, types it on a typewriter ten times to memorise it, and then shreds the paper (a bit of security theater that might actually be useful).
(In bigger organisations, make up a password game box for each unit manager or each floor of the building(s). Sourcing enough typewriters and shredders might be a problem, so type-and-shred might have to be write-and-eat - on rice paper, of course.)
If you really have to - BOFH habits are hard to overcome - you can still use a stick: a policy that says "if your account is hacked and you were not using a password from the game, you're sacked. Instantly. And billed for costs. If you were using a password from the game, then you're fine, unless we find you wrote your password or messsaged it to someone else."
There are KeePass apps for Android and iOS.* I use apps on both, as well as KeePassX and Windows KeePass, all with the one password file stored on DropBox. If I don't "know" my passwords, it's because I don't need them. (No, Virginia; if the keepass password file is insecure on DropBox, it's nearly as insecure on one of my PCs or a thumb drive, and a lot less usable.)
(Hint: in DropBox for Android and iOS, be sure to mark the KeePass password file as a "favorite", so it is stored on the phone/device, and not merely downloaded when you try to open it.)
* For BlackBerry too; Symbian, bada, Windows Mobile and Windows Phone users are out of luck, I think.
Let's see: Windows cipher, $180,000 password cracker: "Remember the lepton-jet meeting at 8am" has time to crack of 1876294336154520 centuries.
Windows cipher, average graphics card based cracker: "Rtl-jm@8am" has time to crack of 1 month, 10 days.
You've converted a strong password into a very weak one.
I mean this as a gentle, polite hint: try learning something about passwords. Google "diceware" for one beginner's starting point.
Most importantly of all, they need to know that the materials and tools they buy to fix things won't be confiscated by corrupt elites, and that the elites won't try to extract economic rents out of the infrastructure. Otherwise maintenance won't even be attempted.
What Africa needs first and foremost is an honest, meritocratic, transparent bureaucracy supported by an honest, meritocratic, and transparent military.
Oh, and a pony.
But if we have patience, then we can put this on the back burner for a while, so that we can deal with more pressing problems.
Like the loss of topsoil at 1% per year. Like imminent depletion of low-recharge aquifers. Like particulate pollution from mining and burning coal and oil. Like the loss of biodiversity and overfishing and overpopulation and and and ...
Tell you what, let's schedule a review of the "capture an asteroid" project for April 2112.
And how much Rhodium do we need, here on the surface of the earth?
Explain why these raw materials would useful to an investor here at the bottom of a gravity well with access to cheaper raw materials to hand and no prospect of setting up a processing plant outside the gravity well.
The modern lecture format originated in medieval Northern Italy, and hasn't changed significantly. The rationale for the lecture as a method of transmitting knowledge and skill was that books were extremely costly, due to the cost of scribes.
Since Gutenberg the rationale for lectures has disappeared.
Rather than moronically scaling up lectures in a TV-like way, we need some R&D done on better methods of teaching. This has finally been realised and academics are - with great trepidation - starting to measure themselves and experiment with different methods. I expect that this century will see the death of the lecture.
The saying goes, "the best way to learn something is to teach it."
There's a famous anecdote by Richard Feynman about himself. He was working on some knotty area of quantum physics with colleagues. After some time, the group felt it had a good understanding of the topic and could move on. Feynman said, "OK, just let me write it up as a freshman lecture to test our understanding." A week later he went back and said, "You know, I couldn't do it. I couldn't write that lecture. We need to study this some more."
So, no to the second question. If we want good solid research done, we need our researchers to be teachers.
At grade school level, what's needed is individual tuition by tutors smart enough to adapt their methods to each student. Expert systems hold out the promise of that, but we're a couple of decades away at least. Meanwhile, the world needs more teachers. Yes to the first question.
I had 52 three-and-a-half inch floppies in a box. Five years after storing them, I got them out to look for something (the manifest was incomplete). Six of them worked. I don't have them any more.
I have a friend with a collection of Zip disks. They're in an unknown state, because no-one we know has a reader.
If you think that CDs or DVDs burnt on a consumer-grade burner are going to last more than three years - well, you _might_ be lucky. I wasn't.
Merely possessing the media isn't enough. You have to devote time to curating your collection - checking that the media still work, making fresh copies every couple of years, and migrating to newer (less obsolescent) physical media. Once you've built up enough data, it's just easier and quicker to do this when everything is stored on hard disks.