Former Ford CEO - hey at least Ford has been doing well. But does this guy know a wheel from a mouse?
He is literally a rocket scientist. BS and MS degrees in aeronautical and astronautical engineering. When he studied business he did so at MIT. He spent many years at Boeing in their Space and Defense division and in the Commercial Aircraft division.
That said, I share the sentiment that knowing how to make passenger carrying vehicles out of metal and composites qualifies one to run Microsoft.
Mulally would be the best pick, which is why it's not going to be him.
Mulally the best pick? He did an incredible job at Boeing and Ford but why would that experience translate to Microsoft? Microsoft isn't building passenger carrying vehicles out of metal and composites.
Brilliance is domain specific. Being a rocket scientist, and Mulally literally is one, doesn't mean you will excel in any field.
Sometimes products have a strategic motivation, not necessarily a direct revenue source motivation. Perhaps MS wants a foothold in the living room, wants to be the digital media device plugged into the TV, etc.
It was something offered in a presentation that I attended. Friends that I spoke to later seemed to agree. The TV being preferred by their high school aged kids, the tablets by their elementary school aged kids. I asked if this was the older kids being dominate and they didn't think so. The younger kids would use the tablets when the TV was unused and the older kids would be gone for hours (after school sports, etc). Sometimes they would be in the same room as the unused TV watching a movie on the tablet. YMMV.
I think that's only because they control the tablet, and their parents control the TV. I don't see people choosing a tiny screen with terrible audio when they have the means for a better experience.
A tiny screen in your hands may offer a better visual experience than the big screen TV across the room.
A few parents that I mentioned this trend to say that they see it with their younger kids, and the kids use the tablets regardless of whether the TV is in use or not.
A large segment of the market is not watching their movies on the TV in the living room, or any other room for that matter. There is a huge generational shift to kids watching movies on a computer or tablet.
If they were on every corner then you could walk, no driving necessary. Coincidentally mine was actually on my corner. I walked by it often, near daily, sometimes I stopped in.
Others were located in shopping centers that people were driving to or driving by anyway. Over the decades I don't think I made many special trips to the video store. The resources argument seems to be a red herring.
That said, its an obsolete business model. Mine turned into a nice restaurant, something far more useful these days.
at least it's better then theory loaded CS colleges where you learn skills that give a big skills gap on the stuff needed to do the job.
Universities are not vocational schools. If you want to learn the languages and operating systems that are used at a job ***today*** then go to your local junior college (JC) and take the relevant vocational classes. JCs do a fine job in this regard. If you want the theory and background knowledge that is more persistent, that will outlast the programming languages and operating systems that are popular today then you go to the university. In the university you are often expected to learn the programming languages and operating systems of the day on your own time. As you will have to do throughout your career. Even things necessary for class are often on your own time. For example in a compilers class the class time may be mostly spent on compiler theory. You may be offered an optional session led by a TA to introduce you to lex and yacc (used to implement your compiler) but you are expected to learn these mostly on your own. Similar story in AI classes, theory in class, a TA session for LISP or Prolog, but mostly you learn the programming language on your own time. Programming languages and operating systems are implementation details, they change over time. The theory tends to last a bit longer.
I have two books from the early 1980s. A book on programming MS-DOS and Knuth Volume 3: Sorting and Searching. The former is full of what was once useful info for a job and went into the recycle bin when cleaning out the garage recently. The later is theory and is still a valuable and useful reference today and still sits on my bookshelf.
If you have a skills gap after the university you made some sort of mistake. At the university you are surround by people (professors and fellow students) with an incredibly variety of skills and knowledge, you have incredible resources (hardware and software) available, if you are not doing some sort of independent study on your own you are making a mistake. If you are doing nothing other than homework assignment on the default hardware using the default languages you are making a mistake, you are making yourself less attractive to employers. Assuming of course you don't have a job or some other "legitimate" demand on your time.
Open source hobbyist devs are too rebellious to go for contracts
Is this actually true for any of the open source projects that have users?
Doubtful. That is why I ended the sentence with a ";-)". In reality it seems that many successful open source projects are corporate or government funded. Linus Torvalds is not even in the top 100 kernel contributors anymore.
It wouldn't matter if users just followed best practices for password selection.
True, but that is only part of the story. There is also the email address used with Adobe. Users also need to exercise caution with links and attachments.
Last week I started to receive phishing emails on the unique email address that I had used with Adobe.
it's not a bribe, it's a contract. how is this news?
Its not news its marketing. Open source hobbyist devs are too rebellious to go for contracts, bribes are more appealing to their inner pirate.;-) Its a way to make minimum wage pay for software development sound cool.
The other anonymous coward most likely refers to survival tricks that start out simplistic using sticks, stones and cloth.
And where do these survival tricks using primitive materials come from? They often come from the indigenous people of the region. For example the technique of filtering water through sand, plant materials, charcoal, etc is thousands of years old. These people don't necessarily need the internet to explain such things, a tribal elder of the region explaining how his grandfather used to purify water, what different plants were used for, etc may do a far better job. Well, at least for the people living in rural areas. For those in urban areas the techniques using primitive materials may not scale up.
You are ignoring time frames. I referred to the first week or two of the administration. You are referring to events that came much later. In the first week or two the democratic party leadership killed any chance at bipartisanship and the White House let it happen. You merely narrate how the Republicans responded to this f-em-we-have-the-votes attitude of the democratic leadership.
The most important time-frame of all is the meeting the GOP held the day after inauguration where they decided they would stymie absolutely everything the President proposed, regardless of what it was...
The journalist who broke this "story" writes that 6 members of the House and 5 members of the Senate were at this meeting. The journalist also points out that the Republican leadership was not there, and that the leadership was on bad terms with these members. So that left 36 Republican Senators and 196 Republican Members of the House, include the Republican leaders in the Senate and the House, for the Democrats to deal with. If only the Democratic leadership had made an attempt and/or the White House stepped in to encourage an open, transparent and bipartisan process.
Three simple facts remain. (1) The Democratic leadership could have worked in the open and with transparency with our without a single Republican. (2) The White House could have insisted that the Democratic leadership do so, as it had promised. (3) Even in the hyper partisan atmosphere that followed the Democrats were occasionally able to peel off some Republicans to their side. Image how many more of those 36 Senators and 196 Representatives could have been peeled off by an open and transparent process with seats at the table waiting for them. The Democrats were in total control of the process, not the 11 Republicans you refer to. I watched CSPAN one night during this process. In this Democrat controlled committee Republicans were in fact participating and offering reasonable amendments. The Democratic majority immediately voted down each and every suggestion without debate or further consideration. Apparently the particular portion of the bill being worked on had been decided upon behind closed doors by the Democrats and no changes were going to be allowed, not even reasonable changes. That is the reality of Democrats attempts at bipartisanship for this bill.
The President and the majority as near to bent-over-backwards to satisfy the GOP as they could and got zero votes for their trouble from a party that had pre-decided to go lockstep against anything Obama put on the table.
Concessions made during the process were largely to get wayward moderate and conservative Democrats on board. The true effort made by the Democratic leadership to reach out to Republicans is well illustrated in the committee work mentioned above. The true effort of the White House is illustrated by its failure to call for the open and transparent process that it had promised, its willingness to let the Democratic leadership do as it pleases.
If I'm shopping for something, I want to know how much it costs. I don't care what the list price was before the discount, I want to know how much I have to write on the check.
You would have. After your comparison shopping. When you were handed off to the insurance company offering the plan selected. As you describe, insurance companies like Kaiser seem to be able to manage this quite well.
It's perfectly reasonable for Healthcare.gov to give both the unadjusted price together with the premium after the subsidy. That's the way I, as a user, would want it. And it shouldn't be a major programming task, since the Kaiser Foundation did it on their web site. http://kff.org/interactive/subsidy-calculator/
That is probably what the administration officials were thinking too. History proves otherwise.
There are a lot of reasons why Healthcare.gov fell apart, but I don't think there's any evidence that this was one of the problems, and if there is evidence I'd like to see it.
Read the transcripts of the contractors who just testified before congress. They clearly state that the gov't was ordering changes as late as two weeks before launch. For example requiring registration rather than anonymous plan browsing.
Except the competition is not just against another insurance plan, but also no plan at all. The vast majority of people buying insurance on the exchange currently have no insurance. A person, seeing the unsubsidized number, might be misled and think they cannot afford the insurance, and then go on to simply eat the extra tax fee next year instead of getting insurance.
That assumes the person is unaware that the gov't will be offering subsidies and also assumes that displayed prices will not be brightly adorned with reminders that this is the price before your gov't subsidies are subtracted. I expect that it will be a rare incident where a person going through the entire process is completely unaware that subsidies will be available.
It just does not make sense that no one considered the scenario you offer in the last three years. A political motivation seems more likely. Perhaps the administration does not want people comparing what they have now to what the gov't exchange compliant plans are offering. The new plans are going to be more expensive for some and these people may think why couldn't the gov't just subsidize my old insurance plan, why did they have to mandate these new plans? The news media might run too many such stories.
Nothing really new here, other than re-labeling a decades old practice as open source. Schematics and source coming with a computer or board is nothing new. Sometimes these were finished products where it was left to 3rd parties to do additional hardware and software. Sometimes these were reference designs that were created with the intention of being a foundation for further development by 3rd parties.
Such things are good, but lets not pretend this is something new.
"so f' the Republicans we'll do whatever we want."
So the fact that they changed the original bill dozens of times to respond to Republican requests, effectively neutering much of the real reform that was in the bill, that equates to a "Fuck 'em" attitude now?
You are ignoring the time frames. What I referred to was in the first week or two. What you refer to came later. It is this first week or two of the administration and the democratic leadership that set the tone for all that followed. The current hyper partisan atmosphere is a creation of both the Republicans and the Democrats.
The changes in the drafts that came later had more to do with **Democrats** thinking that the plan was going too far, not so much to do with a newfound appreciation of bipartisanship. The Democratic Party leadership eventually discovered that not all Democrats were going to accept the leadership's plan. Again, this was long after those first weeks where the tone on bipartisanship was set.
Its not clear that longer life expectancy, lower infant mortality, etc are simply a result of Canada's health care system. Canada may simply be a healthier environment to live in. Perhaps its less crowding, less pollution, healthier lifestyles, etc? I tempted to wonder if a better education system is another factor.
So, you are complaining that the White House decided that the website shouldn't be misleading?
It is not misleading. A plan that costs $25 more before subsidy will cost $25 more after subsidy. The unsubsidized costs are accurate for comparison shopping, for seeing what additional benefits you get for that $25.
Also, you seem to be ignoring the phrase "last minute change". If the design change had been made 3 years ago it may not have been a problem. That the administration ordered the change 3 months ago is the problem.
So how do you figure out what your subsidy is going to be? If you're a single person with an income of $27,000 a year, how much is your subsidy?
I don't know, my point is that the subsidy is not needed to pick a plan. When browsing the exchange and comparing one plan against another you do not need to know your subsidy. A plan that costs $25 more before subsidy will cost $25 more after subsidy. The gov't website was originally designed with the intention that the subsidy would be computed **after** comparison shopping. The project seems to have fallen apart when the subsidy calculation was moved from the back end sign-up stage to the front end comparison shopping stage.
Again, if the change had been make 3 years ago things may have been OK. However its being reported that this change was made 3 months ago.
If we had the open, transparent, and bipartisan (seats at the table for Republicans) process promised then things would have gone quite different.
Now who's being revisionist? We tried that: Every time the GOP was invited to participate they howled about death panels. Every time they were asked for an alternate plan they babbled incoherently about a "Free market system" without illuminating us as to how to implement such a thing in real life. I'm not sure how many opportunities they should have been extended.
You are ignoring time frames. I referred to the first week or two of the administration. You are referring to events that came much later. In the first week or two the democratic party leadership killed any chance at bipartisanship and the White House let it happen. You merely narrate how the Republicans responded to this f-em-we-have-the-votes attitude of the democratic leadership.
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Former Ford CEO - hey at least Ford has been doing well. But does this guy know a wheel from a mouse?
He is literally a rocket scientist. BS and MS degrees in aeronautical and astronautical engineering. When he studied business he did so at MIT. He spent many years at Boeing in their Space and Defense division and in the Commercial Aircraft division.
That said, I share the sentiment that knowing how to make passenger carrying vehicles out of metal and composites qualifies one to run Microsoft.
Mulally would be the best pick, which is why it's not going to be him.
Mulally the best pick? He did an incredible job at Boeing and Ford but why would that experience translate to Microsoft? Microsoft isn't building passenger carrying vehicles out of metal and composites.
Brilliance is domain specific. Being a rocket scientist, and Mulally literally is one, doesn't mean you will excel in any field.
Sometimes products have a strategic motivation, not necessarily a direct revenue source motivation. Perhaps MS wants a foothold in the living room, wants to be the digital media device plugged into the TV, etc.
Maybe they are thinking beyond the short term?
Got any citations for this generational shift?
It was something offered in a presentation that I attended. Friends that I spoke to later seemed to agree. The TV being preferred by their high school aged kids, the tablets by their elementary school aged kids. I asked if this was the older kids being dominate and they didn't think so. The younger kids would use the tablets when the TV was unused and the older kids would be gone for hours (after school sports, etc). Sometimes they would be in the same room as the unused TV watching a movie on the tablet. YMMV.
I think that's only because they control the tablet, and their parents control the TV. I don't see people choosing a tiny screen with terrible audio when they have the means for a better experience.
A tiny screen in your hands may offer a better visual experience than the big screen TV across the room.
A few parents that I mentioned this trend to say that they see it with their younger kids, and the kids use the tablets regardless of whether the TV is in use or not.
A large segment of the market is not watching their movies on the TV in the living room, or any other room for that matter. There is a huge generational shift to kids watching movies on a computer or tablet.
If they were on every corner then you could walk, no driving necessary. Coincidentally mine was actually on my corner. I walked by it often, near daily, sometimes I stopped in.
Others were located in shopping centers that people were driving to or driving by anyway. Over the decades I don't think I made many special trips to the video store. The resources argument seems to be a red herring.
That said, its an obsolete business model. Mine turned into a nice restaurant, something far more useful these days.
Mine only closed about a year ago. It was replaced by a nice restaurant. Here's hoping everyone else gets a nice replacement.
at least it's better then theory loaded CS colleges where you learn skills that give a big skills gap on the stuff needed to do the job.
Universities are not vocational schools. If you want to learn the languages and operating systems that are used at a job ***today*** then go to your local junior college (JC) and take the relevant vocational classes. JCs do a fine job in this regard. If you want the theory and background knowledge that is more persistent, that will outlast the programming languages and operating systems that are popular today then you go to the university. In the university you are often expected to learn the programming languages and operating systems of the day on your own time. As you will have to do throughout your career. Even things necessary for class are often on your own time. For example in a compilers class the class time may be mostly spent on compiler theory. You may be offered an optional session led by a TA to introduce you to lex and yacc (used to implement your compiler) but you are expected to learn these mostly on your own. Similar story in AI classes, theory in class, a TA session for LISP or Prolog, but mostly you learn the programming language on your own time. Programming languages and operating systems are implementation details, they change over time. The theory tends to last a bit longer.
I have two books from the early 1980s. A book on programming MS-DOS and Knuth Volume 3: Sorting and Searching. The former is full of what was once useful info for a job and went into the recycle bin when cleaning out the garage recently. The later is theory and is still a valuable and useful reference today and still sits on my bookshelf.
If you have a skills gap after the university you made some sort of mistake. At the university you are surround by people (professors and fellow students) with an incredibly variety of skills and knowledge, you have incredible resources (hardware and software) available, if you are not doing some sort of independent study on your own you are making a mistake. If you are doing nothing other than homework assignment on the default hardware using the default languages you are making a mistake, you are making yourself less attractive to employers. Assuming of course you don't have a job or some other "legitimate" demand on your time.
Open source hobbyist devs are too rebellious to go for contracts
Is this actually true for any of the open source projects that have users?
Doubtful. That is why I ended the sentence with a ";-)". In reality it seems that many successful open source projects are corporate or government funded. Linus Torvalds is not even in the top 100 kernel contributors anymore.
It wouldn't matter if users just followed best practices for password selection.
True, but that is only part of the story. There is also the email address used with Adobe. Users also need to exercise caution with links and attachments.
Last week I started to receive phishing emails on the unique email address that I had used with Adobe.
Have you picked out a color for that minivan yet? :-)
it's not a bribe, it's a contract. how is this news?
Its not news its marketing. Open source hobbyist devs are too rebellious to go for contracts, bribes are more appealing to their inner pirate. ;-) Its a way to make minimum wage pay for software development sound cool.
What will we do ? Its not like a few developers can get together and create a voice-over-IP service themselves. Oh ... wait a minute.
Build them out of what? Using what tools?
The other anonymous coward most likely refers to survival tricks that start out simplistic using sticks, stones and cloth.
And where do these survival tricks using primitive materials come from? They often come from the indigenous people of the region. For example the technique of filtering water through sand, plant materials, charcoal, etc is thousands of years old. These people don't necessarily need the internet to explain such things, a tribal elder of the region explaining how his grandfather used to purify water, what different plants were used for, etc may do a far better job. Well, at least for the people living in rural areas. For those in urban areas the techniques using primitive materials may not scale up.
How the airgapped computer got infected in the first place is the real issue here...
It came that way from the factory. It happens.
You are ignoring time frames. I referred to the first week or two of the administration. You are referring to events that came much later. In the first week or two the democratic party leadership killed any chance at bipartisanship and the White House let it happen. You merely narrate how the Republicans responded to this f-em-we-have-the-votes attitude of the democratic leadership.
The most important time-frame of all is the meeting the GOP held the day after inauguration where they decided they would stymie absolutely everything the President proposed, regardless of what it was ...
The journalist who broke this "story" writes that 6 members of the House and 5 members of the Senate were at this meeting. The journalist also points out that the Republican leadership was not there, and that the leadership was on bad terms with these members. So that left 36 Republican Senators and 196 Republican Members of the House, include the Republican leaders in the Senate and the House, for the Democrats to deal with. If only the Democratic leadership had made an attempt and/or the White House stepped in to encourage an open, transparent and bipartisan process.
Three simple facts remain. (1) The Democratic leadership could have worked in the open and with transparency with our without a single Republican. (2) The White House could have insisted that the Democratic leadership do so, as it had promised. (3) Even in the hyper partisan atmosphere that followed the Democrats were occasionally able to peel off some Republicans to their side. Image how many more of those 36 Senators and 196 Representatives could have been peeled off by an open and transparent process with seats at the table waiting for them. The Democrats were in total control of the process, not the 11 Republicans you refer to. I watched CSPAN one night during this process. In this Democrat controlled committee Republicans were in fact participating and offering reasonable amendments. The Democratic majority immediately voted down each and every suggestion without debate or further consideration. Apparently the particular portion of the bill being worked on had been decided upon behind closed doors by the Democrats and no changes were going to be allowed, not even reasonable changes. That is the reality of Democrats attempts at bipartisanship for this bill.
The President and the majority as near to bent-over-backwards to satisfy the GOP as they could and got zero votes for their trouble from a party that had pre-decided to go lockstep against anything Obama put on the table.
Concessions made during the process were largely to get wayward moderate and conservative Democrats on board. The true effort made by the Democratic leadership to reach out to Republicans is well illustrated in the committee work mentioned above. The true effort of the White House is illustrated by its failure to call for the open and transparent process that it had promised, its willingness to let the Democratic leadership do as it pleases.
If I'm shopping for something, I want to know how much it costs. I don't care what the list price was before the discount, I want to know how much I have to write on the check.
You would have. After your comparison shopping. When you were handed off to the insurance company offering the plan selected. As you describe, insurance companies like Kaiser seem to be able to manage this quite well.
It's perfectly reasonable for Healthcare.gov to give both the unadjusted price together with the premium after the subsidy. That's the way I, as a user, would want it. And it shouldn't be a major programming task, since the Kaiser Foundation did it on their web site. http://kff.org/interactive/subsidy-calculator/
That is probably what the administration officials were thinking too. History proves otherwise.
There are a lot of reasons why Healthcare.gov fell apart, but I don't think there's any evidence that this was one of the problems, and if there is evidence I'd like to see it.
Read the transcripts of the contractors who just testified before congress. They clearly state that the gov't was ordering changes as late as two weeks before launch. For example requiring registration rather than anonymous plan browsing.
Except the competition is not just against another insurance plan, but also no plan at all. The vast majority of people buying insurance on the exchange currently have no insurance. A person, seeing the unsubsidized number, might be misled and think they cannot afford the insurance, and then go on to simply eat the extra tax fee next year instead of getting insurance.
That assumes the person is unaware that the gov't will be offering subsidies and also assumes that displayed prices will not be brightly adorned with reminders that this is the price before your gov't subsidies are subtracted. I expect that it will be a rare incident where a person going through the entire process is completely unaware that subsidies will be available.
It just does not make sense that no one considered the scenario you offer in the last three years. A political motivation seems more likely. Perhaps the administration does not want people comparing what they have now to what the gov't exchange compliant plans are offering. The new plans are going to be more expensive for some and these people may think why couldn't the gov't just subsidize my old insurance plan, why did they have to mandate these new plans? The news media might run too many such stories.
Nothing really new here, other than re-labeling a decades old practice as open source. Schematics and source coming with a computer or board is nothing new. Sometimes these were finished products where it was left to 3rd parties to do additional hardware and software. Sometimes these were reference designs that were created with the intention of being a foundation for further development by 3rd parties.
Such things are good, but lets not pretend this is something new.
"so f' the Republicans we'll do whatever we want."
So the fact that they changed the original bill dozens of times to respond to Republican requests, effectively neutering much of the real reform that was in the bill, that equates to a "Fuck 'em" attitude now?
You are ignoring the time frames. What I referred to was in the first week or two. What you refer to came later. It is this first week or two of the administration and the democratic leadership that set the tone for all that followed. The current hyper partisan atmosphere is a creation of both the Republicans and the Democrats.
The changes in the drafts that came later had more to do with **Democrats** thinking that the plan was going too far, not so much to do with a newfound appreciation of bipartisanship. The Democratic Party leadership eventually discovered that not all Democrats were going to accept the leadership's plan. Again, this was long after those first weeks where the tone on bipartisanship was set.
Its not clear that longer life expectancy, lower infant mortality, etc are simply a result of Canada's health care system. Canada may simply be a healthier environment to live in. Perhaps its less crowding, less pollution, healthier lifestyles, etc? I tempted to wonder if a better education system is another factor.
So, you are complaining that the White House decided that the website shouldn't be misleading?
It is not misleading. A plan that costs $25 more before subsidy will cost $25 more after subsidy. The unsubsidized costs are accurate for comparison shopping, for seeing what additional benefits you get for that $25.
Also, you seem to be ignoring the phrase "last minute change". If the design change had been made 3 years ago it may not have been a problem. That the administration ordered the change 3 months ago is the problem.
So how do you figure out what your subsidy is going to be? If you're a single person with an income of $27,000 a year, how much is your subsidy?
I don't know, my point is that the subsidy is not needed to pick a plan. When browsing the exchange and comparing one plan against another you do not need to know your subsidy. A plan that costs $25 more before subsidy will cost $25 more after subsidy. The gov't website was originally designed with the intention that the subsidy would be computed **after** comparison shopping. The project seems to have fallen apart when the subsidy calculation was moved from the back end sign-up stage to the front end comparison shopping stage.
Again, if the change had been make 3 years ago things may have been OK. However its being reported that this change was made 3 months ago.
If we had the open, transparent, and bipartisan (seats at the table for Republicans) process promised then things would have gone quite different.
Now who's being revisionist? We tried that: Every time the GOP was invited to participate they howled about death panels. Every time they were asked for an alternate plan they babbled incoherently about a "Free market system" without illuminating us as to how to implement such a thing in real life. I'm not sure how many opportunities they should have been extended.
You are ignoring time frames. I referred to the first week or two of the administration. You are referring to events that came much later. In the first week or two the democratic party leadership killed any chance at bipartisanship and the White House let it happen. You merely narrate how the Republicans responded to this f-em-we-have-the-votes attitude of the democratic leadership.