Have you ever worked for a software vendor? There's a lot more to a product than a collection of features. There's support, planning, marketing, ongoing development... That last thing is especially important if you're considering adopting a product. No matter how good a product is, people will not adopt it if they think it will go away in a year or two. Except, of course, for software dweebs like you and me who get software just because they like using it. But we're not the one who drive software spending.
Which goes double for something like a set-top box. Which has to appeal to dozens of cable companies and millions of cable customers. That means it had better not be just a collection of features! What features it has had all better contribute to the box's usefulness, and not conflict with each other, and be easy to use.
Google shows no sign of being able to do that. They just push out features and apps that appear to be whatever their people feel like working on. Consider Google Map: it's a great piece of software, still one of the best AJAX applications around. But nobody seems to be working on getting rid of the rough edges. When new versions appear, they do fancy things like display street-satellite overlays. Which is terribly cool, but doesn't excuse the fact that they haven't done the basic boring work the Mapquest did in their very first release.
What Google seems to do is hire lots of brilliant people and mostly let them do what they want. So everybody works on the cool stuff, and the boring basics that make for real products get neglected. At any other company that would be a recipe for disaster. (I've worked at places where it was.) Google gets away with it because their AdWord revenue guarantees enough income to keep the lights on, and their weird stock structure guarantees that they can spend money without a lot of investor meddling.
Right now, somebody's saying,"Hey, they're making a lot of money, what's wrong with that?" Not a thing. As long as you remember that the kind of organization they've chosen to be has its limitations. And I think that doing a basic consumer product, like a set-top box, is well beyond those limitations.
Seriously though. Except for their original search engine, Google hasn't done that well bringing new products to market. They keep introducing cool features and web applications. But major new products? Nada.
And no, I'm not forgetting Google Earth or Picasa. Both of which they acquired.
Using HTML 4.01 Transitional is certainly acceptable for this kind of web site -- and probably the best they can do, what with all the third-party content. But if that's the DTD they're going to validate against, that's the DTD they should specify. Unfortunately, the source includes a declaration for HTML 4.01 Strict. Not a major error, but it looks bad.
When you start a web site about a new project , please include a blurb somewhere that says WTF the thing is. And if you forget (as you usually do), please add it when you issue a breathless announcement, so people reading the announcement know WTF you're talking about. And if you forget (as you usually do), hope that the Slashdot editors will think to add it, so the poor readers will know WTF the project is that it's rates front page status. And if you forget (as you always do), well, WTF...
Absolutely correct. Nobody can prove irrefutably that global warming is real. And if you take the attitude that you can't act without irrefutable proof, that's the end of the discussion.
Problem is, by the same you did have irrefutable proof (which might come in the form of megastorms, flooded cities, or even an ice age), it's a little late to do anything about it. According to some models, it's already too late. So we have to act on the evidence we do have.
To me, there's enough evidence to justify a drastic cutback in the use of fossil fuels -- a resource we're about to run out of anyway. Somebody else might point to the economic effects of such a cutback, and insist that it's not justified by my speculative and anecdotal evidence.
Such a person can't prove he's right, any more than I can. He can only go by how he weighs the evidence, just as I do. I can respect a person who does that.
What I can't respect, what I resent is somebody whose ignorance and bigotry causes them to represent all opposing arguments as the result of religious fanaticism. I'm not a Gaiean mystic, just as you're not a follower of the Christian Rightists who say that hurricanes are God's way of telling us to burn gays at the stake. It's intellectually lazy -- and damned unproductive -- to lump everybody who disagrees with you under the same convenient extremist braindeadism.
Which is why serious debate on environmental issues is usually impossible. Each side has totally different base assumptions.
I actually agree with that. Which makes me all the more resentful of your assertion that all global-warming-is-real arguments are based on a "Gaian" religious dogma. That certainly doesn't describe me.
If you don't want to be stereotyped, don't stereotype others.
Two planets is not a very big sample group. Really you need a couple dozen.
Oddly enough, not all science relies on simplistic laboratory models -- and yet they seem to do decent work. The degree of certainty is lower, of course, but still better than saying, "Let's not do anything until the evidence is irrefutable."
Global Warming is basically part of the religious beliefs of the New Age,
Your side is "rational", my side is "religious". That, of course, makes all debate unnecessary.
There's a certain pots-and-kettles irony to your rationalization, since so much conservative and anti-environmental opinion is shaped by the Christian Right, with their "fill the earth and subdue it" agenda.
One year they had a nasty Hurricane Anita that coincided with Anita Bryant being in the news for her anti-Gay Rights initiative. I've heard (probably an urban legend, but who knows) that many people thought there was some connection between the activist and the storm, and sent her hate mail because of it.
They are not inventive enough to develop new names?
No, they just assumed they wouldn't need more than 21 names
Also, why use personal names anyways.
If you'd read TFA, you'd know it's a tradition that goes back centuries. It might make sense to dispense with this tradition -- but if they changed now, they'd be accused of covering up the increase in storms!
Interesting that a columnist for the "Free Republic" would be given the same weight as "Science" magazine.
Actually, when I submitted the story, my first thought was to just say something sarcastic, like "Of course, this has no connection with global warming." Then I decided that it would be more effective to link to one of the stident GW-deniers and let them speak for themselves.
So fine, astronomical data can go directly from the astronomers to scientific web sites, to Wikipedia, with no dead trees in between, But there's more to writing about astronomy than collecting figures. To say nothing about "softer" disciplines.
Perhaps my POV is skewed by the time I spent participating in Wikipedia "Votes for Deletion" discussions. This is where people try to figure out whether an article has enough general reference value to remain in the encyclopedia. The only criteria most participants seem to have is "how many Google hits does this subject have?" If a subject hasn't attracted a lot of attention on the web, people don't seem to know or care about it. Then again, I suspect that people who participate in VfD discussions are not representative Wikipedians.
But one very real possibility is that this sort of satirical effort is what will eventually do in the religious fundies' attacks on the teaching of science.
In what universe? Whose mind will it change? Fundamentalists will look at the FSM as a disrespectful joke in dubious taste. People with a Darwinian bent will maybe get the joke -- but they're already on the no-God-in-the-classroom track.
Like most political jokes, the LSM fable is a joke people who already agree with each other tell each other. If you think it's going to have any effect on policy or public opinion, you're fooling yourself.
And I'll tell you one feature your spreadsheet is never going to have: a button that syncs your data with your bank, your investment firms, credit cards, etc.
Well, never say never -- I'm sure I could program an Excel or OO plugin to do that. But basically, you're right: that's a complex feature that's well worth buying software for. So I withdraw the "user friendly" assertion.
Well, yeah, if I had access to all the online resources you do, I might not go to a library either, except to check out best sellers and other light fiction. Indeed, I wouldn't have had to bother my Canadian friend -- I could have just looked up the sources on Canadian time zones myself.
But I don't have any academic affiliations, so I have to pay for all my online databases myself. (Except for a few that I access courtesy of my public library!) And I'm dead broke. So I often have to look things up the old fashioned way.
And from what I know of that Canadian dude, he doesn't have that much more access than me. He just can't be bothered to research anything that he can't find on the public web.
And indeed, I think you'll find that at least 50% of the content on Wikipedia is just abstracted from other web sources. Possibly much more than that. Hard to tell, since few contributors bother to give sources -- which is the #1 problem with Wikipedia.
True -- reinventing pre-invented wheels is usually a waste of time.
On the other hand, if you want tax tables and stock quotes, and don't want to be dependent on Quicken for them, you do need to get more flexible. That means using a more open-ended solution, where you or some other open-source person can hack in new data sources.
If you want a big, fancy pre-packaged financial management system, with pain-free data updates, you're not going to find one that runs natively on Linux. (Though it might well run under Wine on Linux.) Developing such a system is expensive, and the Linux user base is still too small to pay back the investment.
That guy must have done a lot of fancy VBA coding, and be pretty good at it. By contrast, the macros you needs to implement a checkbook in Excel are pretty minor, and within reach of a novice.
I implied no such thing. I've used Quicken myself. My only point was that a spreadsheet is a reasonable alternative if you're on a platform where Quicken -- or a similar tool -- isn't available.
Slashdot Mirror
Which goes double for something like a set-top box. Which has to appeal to dozens of cable companies and millions of cable customers. That means it had better not be just a collection of features! What features it has had all better contribute to the box's usefulness, and not conflict with each other, and be easy to use.
Google shows no sign of being able to do that. They just push out features and apps that appear to be whatever their people feel like working on. Consider Google Map: it's a great piece of software, still one of the best AJAX applications around. But nobody seems to be working on getting rid of the rough edges. When new versions appear, they do fancy things like display street-satellite overlays. Which is terribly cool, but doesn't excuse the fact that they haven't done the basic boring work the Mapquest did in their very first release.
What Google seems to do is hire lots of brilliant people and mostly let them do what they want. So everybody works on the cool stuff, and the boring basics that make for real products get neglected. At any other company that would be a recipe for disaster. (I've worked at places where it was.) Google gets away with it because their AdWord revenue guarantees enough income to keep the lights on, and their weird stock structure guarantees that they can spend money without a lot of investor meddling.
Right now, somebody's saying,"Hey, they're making a lot of money, what's wrong with that?" Not a thing. As long as you remember that the kind of organization they've chosen to be has its limitations. And I think that doing a basic consumer product, like a set-top box, is well beyond those limitations.
Seriously though. Except for their original search engine, Google hasn't done that well bringing new products to market. They keep introducing cool features and web applications. But major new products? Nada.
And no, I'm not forgetting Google Earth or Picasa. Both of which they acquired.
Curiously, the new code allows you to use some character entities in HTML comments, (¦©¼ÏÐ, so there!) but many are still filtered out. It's nice that I can now use a nice em dash instead of a tawdry double-hyphen — but why can't I use a Greek letter if I really need to?
Using HTML 4.01 Transitional is certainly acceptable for this kind of web site -- and probably the best they can do, what with all the third-party content. But if that's the DTD they're going to validate against, that's the DTD they should specify. Unfortunately, the source includes a declaration for HTML 4.01 Strict. Not a major error, but it looks bad.
When you start a web site about a new project , please include a blurb somewhere that says WTF the thing is. And if you forget (as you usually do), please add it when you issue a breathless announcement, so people reading the announcement know WTF you're talking about. And if you forget (as you usually do), hope that the Slashdot editors will think to add it, so the poor readers will know WTF the project is that it's rates front page status. And if you forget (as you always do), well, WTF...
Problem is, by the same you did have irrefutable proof (which might come in the form of megastorms, flooded cities, or even an ice age), it's a little late to do anything about it. According to some models, it's already too late. So we have to act on the evidence we do have.
To me, there's enough evidence to justify a drastic cutback in the use of fossil fuels -- a resource we're about to run out of anyway. Somebody else might point to the economic effects of such a cutback, and insist that it's not justified by my speculative and anecdotal evidence.
Such a person can't prove he's right, any more than I can. He can only go by how he weighs the evidence, just as I do. I can respect a person who does that.
What I can't respect, what I resent is somebody whose ignorance and bigotry causes them to represent all opposing arguments as the result of religious fanaticism. I'm not a Gaiean mystic, just as you're not a follower of the Christian Rightists who say that hurricanes are God's way of telling us to burn gays at the stake. It's intellectually lazy -- and damned unproductive -- to lump everybody who disagrees with you under the same convenient extremist braindeadism.
If you don't want to be stereotyped, don't stereotype others.
So they should have given the storms last names?
Oddly enough, not all science relies on simplistic laboratory models -- and yet they seem to do decent work. The degree of certainty is lower, of course, but still better than saying, "Let's not do anything until the evidence is irrefutable."
There's a certain pots-and-kettles irony to your rationalization, since so much conservative and anti-environmental opinion is shaped by the Christian Right, with their "fill the earth and subdue it" agenda.
One year they had a nasty Hurricane Anita that coincided with Anita Bryant being in the news for her anti-Gay Rights initiative. I've heard (probably an urban legend, but who knows) that many people thought there was some connection between the activist and the storm, and sent her hate mail because of it.
If we have 50 major storms, I think the connotations of the latest storm name will be the least of anybody's worries.
If you look at his recent posts, I think you'll find that Moofie mostly wants to tell people how stupid they are.
Perhaps my POV is skewed by the time I spent participating in Wikipedia "Votes for Deletion" discussions. This is where people try to figure out whether an article has enough general reference value to remain in the encyclopedia. The only criteria most participants seem to have is "how many Google hits does this subject have?" If a subject hasn't attracted a lot of attention on the web, people don't seem to know or care about it. Then again, I suspect that people who participate in VfD discussions are not representative Wikipedians.
Like most political jokes, the LSM fable is a joke people who already agree with each other tell each other. If you think it's going to have any effect on policy or public opinion, you're fooling yourself.
You do realize that stalking me removes what little credibility you ever had?
But I don't have any academic affiliations, so I have to pay for all my online databases myself. (Except for a few that I access courtesy of my public library!) And I'm dead broke. So I often have to look things up the old fashioned way.
And from what I know of that Canadian dude, he doesn't have that much more access than me. He just can't be bothered to research anything that he can't find on the public web.
And indeed, I think you'll find that at least 50% of the content on Wikipedia is just abstracted from other web sources. Possibly much more than that. Hard to tell, since few contributors bother to give sources -- which is the #1 problem with Wikipedia.
On the other hand, if you want tax tables and stock quotes, and don't want to be dependent on Quicken for them, you do need to get more flexible. That means using a more open-ended solution, where you or some other open-source person can hack in new data sources.
If you want a big, fancy pre-packaged financial management system, with pain-free data updates, you're not going to find one that runs natively on Linux. (Though it might well run under Wine on Linux.) Developing such a system is expensive, and the Linux user base is still too small to pay back the investment.
Not on our first date, fella.
Sure, user-friendliness is a feature. But when all you doing is maintaining a list of financial transactions, it's not a big feature.
That guy must have done a lot of fancy VBA coding, and be pretty good at it. By contrast, the macros you needs to implement a checkbook in Excel are pretty minor, and within reach of a novice.
I implied no such thing. I've used Quicken myself. My only point was that a spreadsheet is a reasonable alternative if you're on a platform where Quicken -- or a similar tool -- isn't available.