I've been the victim of a stolen vehicle before... and I know police really don't give a diddly squat about stolen vehicles.
They won't send the entire police force to look out for it, and generally there is very little evidence to collect at the crime scence, but they'll keep an eye for suspicious looking vehicles and run them by the stolen car database. What else do you expect them to do?
You must not be paid very well. Well paid jobs demand, on occasion, extraordinary efforts. I have no problem putting extra effort in exchange for extraordinary compensation.
But he also set the phone to "sleep mode". Now what do we have to guide us as to what "sleep" mode is? Laptops! Do they do *anything* while on sleep mode? no. So it was reasonable for him to expect that pressing sleep would deactivate the thing.
I concur as well with the poster who said cell phones in general ought to have a "max X dollars" spending mode, but this is more of a request for a new feature than a design bug.
Why is it that nobody even bats an eyelash when a one-trick device like a Whirlpool Clothes Dryer has a 21 page use & care manual?
Could it be that say, I've owned three different models and I've never had to look anything up?
Giving a free pass to designers kept Linux a lot less usable than Windows for about a decade. Fortunately Ubuntuans eventually saw the light stopped blaming the user and finally provided a desktop that is consistent and easy to use. Apple has made a living out of it, though they seem to have goofed with this feature in the iPhone.
Lastly, consumers get to choose how a product ought to behave. If designers do not meet the requirements then consumers will spend their money elsewhere. That is what made the iPhone so popular and the Zune a dud.
The designer's for sure. It is their job that one doesn't have to read a 50 page manual in order to avoid a $4200 bill on a phone that was never used and seemingly asleep.
I've been using Opera for about two years, and since the 9.x it became unbearably slow. I now use firefox or IE instead. Other people have reported the same behaviour and believe it has to do with some nasty interaction with Symantec's AV.
There is an old saying in business schools that incompetent managers when at a loss as to how to fix a company, settle on changing the name or logo instead. I guess we can now add the ticker symbol to the list.
For sure, the EB was already walking dead from the attack of CD-ROM encyclopedias by the time wikipedia appeared to place the last nail in its coffin. The wiki model is not without its flaws, but overall it will produce, on the average, a better article that is more up to date and at a lower cost for the reader.
how Microsoft has succeeded in crushing innovation in personal computers.
There are many people responsible for this. Aside from microsoft, we have a large part of the OSS community which takes the approach that Unix is the word of God, and cannot be improved upon. On top of that we now have some of our best programmers (hackers, in the old sense of the word) busy trying to match what Unix has in the commercial side on the internals and what Windows has on the UI plane, so this leaves darn little time left for innovation. Even so Linux has pushed the state of the art forward in Unix, but ever so slightly. It is time we start dreaming of a better OS than a unix derivative, of a better UI than X11 (that shouldn't be hard), of a better interprocess communication model than sequential pipes with no naming scheme. Sure, the Windows registry sucks rocks, but so does the/etc and.rc model of Unix.
I would like to think that that sort of information would be included in his history.
Only if given proper context: Columbus like everyone else at the time thought of women as being less than human and hence had no problem enslaving a tribe of Amazons in his quest for gold.
Likely, he also thought that women were not 100% people, as most of his contemporaries did and that life appeared spontaneously in a dirt pond thus generating frogs and other life forms. Should you quote the parts in his diary where he makes these prejudices obviously apparent? I think not. The page shouldn't portray CC as some sort of well-meaning guy either, but to highlight his prejudices would have the veiled implication that he was unusual in that way.
To use a different example, the important fact is not that Washington had slaves--like most other wealthy southerners back then. The remarkable fact is that he set them free when he died at a time when those actions were rather uncommon.
In my experience, Encyclopedia Britannica salesmen used high-pressure tactics to sell encyclopedias to poor, uneducated people by telling them that their children needed an encyclopedia to become educated. Educated people knew it was better to go to the library.
Wrong. EB articles were highly respected in the scientific community. Of course if one is an expert in math and wants to lookup something on category theory then one heads to the library. The same math expert, though would use the EB to lookup information on say, the history of aviation. It was a great honor to be invited to write an entry for the EB and most famous scientists readily acceeded. Have a look at the byline for many entries.
you can't exclude applied bio on the one hand and include other applied fields on the other hand.
Of course I can. It is silly to compare life-critical medical expenditures with quests for highly theoretical particulars. Of course the first kind will win every time and that is the way it should be. Now the question is, among non-life critical research how is that funding apportioned and what I showed is that an unjustifiably large percentage goes into the quest of yet another quark flavor.
By what metric?
Number of articles, benefit to humanity, impact within the field, ability of achieve the same results for a lower price (as proven by the LHC-SSC disparity in costs). Pretty much anyone you can name.
So you want to exclude anything applied from biology, yet include engineering.
Of course, because naturally health/medical oriented research will always form the majority of the scientific budget, for obvious reasons. The question is, from non-life critical research how is it apportioned and what are teh benefits. Large accelerators and manned space missions have some of the worst returns for the dollar.
The LHC construction costs are already sunk: it's been built and will go operational shortly.
Not true. Just a month ago or so certain magnets failed increasing the cost the LHC. It will go operational in 2008.
"Research in the life sciences accounted for 52.0% ($27.7 billion) of total federal research dollars in FY 2004 (figure 2). Engineering was a distant second, accounting for 16.6% ($8.9 billion)."
It is wrong. Life sciences includes biomedical applications, which is not included under "biology".
Here's the clause from the constitution: To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.
That is, it recognizes the right to the fruits of my labor as otherwise society would suffer from the lack of it.
That's not even remotely true. The Large Hadron Collider cost about $5 or $6 billion, spread out over a ~10-year period, which is about a half-billion per year
First of all the cost figures are dubious. The original cost for the SSC was $4.4 million which had ballooned to $12 billion by cancellation time. The final estimated cost of the SSC in today's dollars had it been finished was close to $20 billion. Further the LHC is cheaper only because the previous larger projects (SSC) were finally canned.
By contrast, the U.S. government funding for the life sciences in FY2004 alone was $28 billion,
Wrong. The NSF funds for the areas quoted above are (2002 figures):
Biology $418, Engineering $380, Computer Science $389, Math $141=$1,328 or about two years worth of amortized LHC cost, or about four months of SSC amortized cost.
The problem comes when languages got religion. Lisp went from a list based language to list based syntax jihad. Ditto for Pascal and his strictly enforced strongly typed functions and Java and its everything-is-an-object global-variables-are-forbidden jihad.
SGML as well as the newer versions of HTML are in a format-is-100%-orthogonal-to-content jihad.
Notice that all of the principles listed above are good and correct. The problem comes from emforcing them too strictly.
Why should I pay taxes to support a stuffy old elitest Old Boys' institution that I'm never going to benefit from anyway?
I agree, but perhaps the solution is making that priced institution not elitist instead of quashing it. Oh wait, we are talking about England with his infamous casts based on your accent, never you mind...
It's no longer just a restriction on trade.. it's a restriction on private acts and requires intrusive policing to enforce.
Now, those infringed rights have to be weighted against my right to benefit from the fruits of my honest labor and to the detriment in society if all software were free.
Richard has never come to terms with the fact that programmers can make lots of money and he has emsonal crusade to enjoin them from reaping the fruits of their labours. This says more about RMS attitude to personal wealth than about a supposed morality of "free" software.
If Richard had wanted his foundation to be about freedom he would have called Software Freedom Foundation, his not so well hidden agenda has always been to achieve free as in beer software, starting by his purposeful equivocation in naming his foundation "Free Software Foundation".
I'm sure, all-things-being-equal, RMS wouldn't mind having an "artificial limit" placed on the GPL, but that would be assuming a fair and equal playing field.
You are wrong. He is a zealot and he would mind. Compromises of that sort have been suggested by Linus and have been soundly rejected by RMS.
It's stupid because he was mixing up Free (as in Freedom) with free (as in beer). It's a common misconception.
Actually that is just a cop out from Stallman. If you read his texts he is often a proponent of "free beer" software and attacks people who sell software, but when you take him to task the cops out and says "you don't understand I was talking about Free as in Freedom". Bollocks! No he wasn't. In fact most of his fights with Linus are precisely about. Linux is free as in Freedom and this irks Stallman: he wants it to be free as in beer.
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The difference is you live in a civilized country. We are talking about America here.
I've been the victim of a stolen vehicle before... and I know police really don't give a diddly squat about stolen vehicles.
They won't send the entire police force to look out for it, and generally there is very little evidence to collect at the crime scence, but they'll keep an eye for suspicious looking vehicles and run them by the stolen car database. What else do you expect them to do?
and I certainly wouldn't for work.
You must not be paid very well. Well paid jobs demand, on occasion, extraordinary efforts. I have no problem putting extra effort in exchange for extraordinary compensation.
He went in and turned on automatic mail checking.
But he also set the phone to "sleep mode". Now what do we have to guide us as to what "sleep" mode is? Laptops! Do they do *anything* while on sleep mode? no. So it was reasonable for him to expect that pressing sleep would deactivate the thing.
I concur as well with the poster who said cell phones in general ought to have a "max X dollars" spending mode, but this is more of a request for a new feature than a design bug.
Why is it that nobody even bats an eyelash when a one-trick device like a Whirlpool Clothes Dryer has a 21 page use & care manual?
Could it be that say, I've owned three different models and I've never had to look anything up?
Giving a free pass to designers kept Linux a lot less usable than Windows for about a decade. Fortunately Ubuntuans eventually saw the light stopped blaming the user and finally provided a desktop that is consistent and easy to use. Apple has made a living out of it, though they seem to have goofed with this feature in the iPhone.
Lastly, consumers get to choose how a product ought to behave. If designers do not meet the requirements then consumers will spend their money elsewhere. That is what made the iPhone so popular and the Zune a dud.
And whose fault would you consider it?
The designer's for sure. It is their job that one doesn't have to read a 50 page manual in order to avoid a $4200 bill on a phone that was never used and seemingly asleep.
Think about it.
Typical OSS suporter response crap: blame the user.
And by the way the same problem is there with Avast. I don't know if it also occurs with other AV software.
I've been using Opera for about two years, and since the 9.x it became unbearably slow. I now use firefox or IE instead. Other people have reported the same behaviour and believe it has to do with some nasty interaction with Symantec's AV.
There is an old saying in business schools that incompetent managers when at a loss as to how to fix a company, settle on changing the name or logo instead. I guess we can now add the ticker symbol to the list.
We also need a tag, but with Free as in freedom not Free as in free Beer.
Note that we are both using the past tense.
For sure, the EB was already walking dead from the attack of CD-ROM encyclopedias by the time wikipedia appeared to place the last nail in its coffin. The wiki model is not without its flaws, but overall it will produce, on the average, a better article that is more up to date and at a lower cost for the reader.
how Microsoft has succeeded in crushing innovation in personal computers.
/etc and .rc model of Unix.
There are many people responsible for this. Aside from microsoft, we have a large part of the OSS community which takes the approach that Unix is the word of God, and cannot be improved upon. On top of that we now have some of our best programmers (hackers, in the old sense of the word) busy trying to match what Unix has in the commercial side on the internals and what Windows has on the UI plane, so this leaves darn little time left for innovation. Even so Linux has pushed the state of the art forward in Unix, but ever so slightly. It is time we start dreaming of a better OS than a unix derivative, of a better UI than X11 (that shouldn't be hard), of a better interprocess communication model than sequential pipes with no naming scheme. Sure, the Windows registry sucks rocks, but so does the
I would like to think that that sort of information would be included in his history.
Only if given proper context: Columbus like everyone else at the time thought of women as being less than human and hence had no problem enslaving a tribe of Amazons in his quest for gold.
Likely, he also thought that women were not 100% people, as most of his contemporaries did and that life appeared spontaneously in a dirt pond thus generating frogs and other life forms. Should you quote the parts in his diary where he makes these prejudices obviously apparent? I think not. The page shouldn't portray CC as some sort of well-meaning guy either, but to highlight his prejudices would have the veiled implication that he was unusual in that way.
To use a different example, the important fact is not that Washington had slaves--like most other wealthy southerners back then. The remarkable fact is that he set them free when he died at a time when those actions were rather uncommon.
In my experience, Encyclopedia Britannica salesmen used high-pressure tactics to sell encyclopedias to poor, uneducated people by telling them that their children needed an encyclopedia to become educated. Educated people knew it was better to go to the library.
Wrong. EB articles were highly respected in the scientific community. Of course if one is an expert in math and wants to lookup something on category theory then one heads to the library. The same math expert, though would use the EB to lookup information on say, the history of aviation. It was a great honor to be invited to write an entry for the EB and most famous scientists readily acceeded. Have a look at the byline for many entries.
you can't exclude applied bio on the one hand and include other applied fields on the other hand.
Of course I can. It is silly to compare life-critical medical expenditures with quests for highly theoretical particulars. Of course the first kind will win every time and that is the way it should be. Now the question is, among non-life critical research how is that funding apportioned and what I showed is that an unjustifiably large percentage goes into the quest of yet another quark flavor.
By what metric?
Number of articles, benefit to humanity, impact within the field, ability of achieve the same results for a lower price (as proven by the LHC-SSC disparity in costs). Pretty much anyone you can name.
So you want to exclude anything applied from biology, yet include engineering.
Of course, because naturally health/medical oriented research will always form the majority of the scientific budget, for obvious reasons. The question is, from non-life critical research how is it apportioned and what are teh benefits. Large accelerators and manned space missions have some of the worst returns for the dollar.
The LHC construction costs are already sunk: it's been built and will go operational shortly.
Not true. Just a month ago or so certain magnets failed increasing the cost the LHC. It will go operational in 2008.
"Research in the life sciences accounted for 52.0% ($27.7 billion) of total federal research dollars in FY 2004 (figure 2). Engineering was a distant second, accounting for 16.6% ($8.9 billion)."
It is wrong. Life sciences includes biomedical applications, which is not included under "biology".
Here's the clause from the constitution: To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.
That is, it recognizes the right to the fruits of my labor as otherwise society would suffer from the lack of it.
That's not even remotely true. The Large Hadron Collider cost about $5 or $6 billion, spread out over a ~10-year period, which is about a half-billion per year
First of all the cost figures are dubious. The original cost for the SSC was $4.4 million which had ballooned to $12 billion by cancellation time. The final estimated cost of the SSC in today's dollars had it been finished was close to $20 billion. Further the LHC is cheaper only because the previous larger projects (SSC) were finally canned.
By contrast, the U.S. government funding for the life sciences in FY2004 alone was $28 billion,
Wrong. The NSF funds for the areas quoted above are (2002 figures):
Biology $418, Engineering $380, Computer Science $389, Math $141=$1,328 or about two years worth of amortized LHC cost, or about four months of SSC amortized cost.
The problem comes when languages got religion. Lisp went from a list based language to list based syntax jihad. Ditto for Pascal and his strictly enforced strongly typed functions and Java and its everything-is-an-object global-variables-are-forbidden jihad.
SGML as well as the newer versions of HTML are in a format-is-100%-orthogonal-to-content jihad.
Notice that all of the principles listed above are good and correct. The problem comes from emforcing them too strictly.
Why should I pay taxes to support a stuffy old elitest Old Boys' institution that I'm never going to benefit from anyway?
I agree, but perhaps the solution is making that priced institution not elitist instead of quashing it. Oh wait, we are talking about England with his infamous casts based on your accent, never you mind...
It's no longer just a restriction on trade.. it's a restriction on private acts and requires intrusive policing to enforce.
Now, those infringed rights have to be weighted against my right to benefit from the fruits of my honest labor and to the detriment in society if all software were free.
Richard has never come to terms with the fact that programmers can make lots of money and he has emsonal crusade to enjoin them from reaping the fruits of their labours. This says more about RMS attitude to personal wealth than about a supposed morality of "free" software.
If Richard had wanted his foundation to be about freedom he would have called Software Freedom Foundation, his not so well hidden agenda has always been to achieve free as in beer software, starting by his purposeful equivocation in naming his foundation "Free Software Foundation".
I'm sure, all-things-being-equal, RMS wouldn't mind having an "artificial limit" placed on the GPL, but that would be assuming a fair and equal playing field.
You are wrong. He is a zealot and he would mind. Compromises of that sort have been suggested by Linus and have been soundly rejected by RMS.
It's stupid because he was mixing up Free (as in Freedom) with free (as in beer). It's a common misconception.
Actually that is just a cop out from Stallman. If you read his texts he is often a proponent of "free beer" software and attacks people who sell software, but when you take him to task the cops out and says "you don't understand I was talking about Free as in Freedom". Bollocks! No he wasn't. In fact most of his fights with Linus are precisely about. Linux is free as in Freedom and this irks Stallman: he wants it to be free as in beer.