Malcolm Gladwell and others say that you are incorrect and that in fact practice is a huge factor. Now, I suspect that a certain level of talent or inclination is necessary for someone to be willing to put in the 10,000 hours necessary to become exceptional. People don't tend to put in that much time if they have no aptitude and show no improvement. But there is a strong indication that you can't rely on talent; you really do have to practice a lot to get to Carnegie Hall. Also read the first comment here.
Now, you can put in a lot of time without any progress. There's a saying that you have dancers who have been dancing for twenty years, and you have dancers who have danced for a year twenty times. One can even refer to the old schoolyard taunt, "Yeah, and I bet Grade 7 was the best 3 years of your life!". Time is not equivalent to effort. The GP referred to one and you confused it with the other.
Sure Craigslist took out the gravy train classifieds. But circulation numbers had been steadily dropping for most major newspapers for the last two decades but really went down in the last one. Losing eyeballs would also affect their ability to sell other advertising.
And I pointed out the 2 misguided, fervently pro-RIAA, briefs his DOJ filed in 2 'RIAA v. End User' cases (if I weren't a professional I would call them "dumbass", but of course I would never use such a term).
Maybe it was deliberate? Perhaps some "politically astute" manager decided to file some briefs in favour of the RIAA, and the underlings he delegated it to were so disgusted that they deliberately sabotaged the results? Because after years of Alberto Gonzales running the place, the career people are probably pretty fed up and ready to do some passive aggressive stuff.
While Joel's got a point that it's possible to over-abstract something, it's interesting to note that Napster is now gone, and it has been replaced by ITunes (which also serves video), multiple other less popular proprietary music/video services, and... generic Bittorrent tracker/search engines. But I think the whole over-abstraction/architecture astronaut is just a special case of the second system effect described in Fred Brooks' Mythical Man-Month. Worth repeating of course, but not an amazing new insight.
Please provide me one example of a free/OSS platform implementation of a commercial product that is inarguably BETTER than the original proprietary version
How many people claimed that waterboarding was not torture, until they actually underwent the procedure and quickly changed their mind? You can be one of the most enlightened white males around and you won't have the same understanding, at a gut-level feeling, of the discrimination that many members of minorities undergo on a regular basis. That was what Sotomayor was saying.
Something that supports this concept is that in past gender discrimination cases that have come before the supreme court, the female members of the court have indicated that some of the male members of the court have been completely oblivious to aspects of the case that were readily apparent to the female members from personal experience.
Would have been nice to see the papers actually cover the run up to the Iraq war, or all the insane voter suppression tactics from 2004,
That, I think is the real reason why papers are in a big hole. They had a job to do and they didn't do it, so why would people continue to pay for substandard work? They've tried to be entertaining but they can't compete with TV for that. By trying to be entertaining instead of being informative, they've alienated their natural customer base. The more they write puff cheerleading pieces on corporate partners like real estate/development firms, which are quickly proven to be false, the more irrelevant they make themselves. If they ever got back to basics and stuck to meaningful, insightful and accurate reporting, then they could at least recover the intelligencia (the unwashed masses will be too busy watching Survivor, The Bachelor, etc.).
If I want to hear he said/she said, I can just read press releases from political parties and corporations. Instead, I want background research to help me decide which party is the most accurate in their claims. I want to know details about multi-million $ Olympic screw-ups before the civic elections. I want information about the securitization of subprime mortgages before it causes a global depression. The companies that figure this out instead of trying to spoon-feed me pap are the ones which will get my money.
For example, if they said "Our software will give you the best possible ERP for this price.", are you really expecting them to scour the world for competing products for you? Probably not.
That statement also doesn't exclude the possibility of a free open source ERP giving all or more of the same functionality for free.
WM is so impompetent[sic], that they need software to manage their company.
Wow, so you think that trying to use software to improve your business processes by automating as many deterministic tasks as possible is a sign of incompetence? So what do you do exactly? If you're a programmer, can we assume that you demonstrate your competence by manually translating all your high-level language programs into machine code by hand?
Well, if the tribe in the story were getting mutations from sitting on a pile of "old" nuclear weapons, they would have a lot more people getting sick with cancer or from other genetic damage than they would be likely to get "smarter" humans. Because if they were smarter humans, you would think they might clue in that moving away from the "cursed" location that's making so many of them sick would be a good idea.
Ah well, L. Ron wasn't the only SF writer to base stories on wildly wrong interpretations of evolution and radiation. I remember at least one other from the 40's by Edmund Hamilton, which would lead you to believe that that's when most of BE would have been written. By the 1980's, when BE was purportedly written, knowledge of DNA, radiation, and how the two resulted in mutation was much better understood. If those types of stories are what has been informing the general public's perception of evolution, it's no wonder that so much of the public can be confused enough to consider it on the same level as Creationism/Intelligent Design.
Yep. Unfortunately I was wrong. Miller Lite at one point contained several ingredients not normally found in beer, including manufactured chemical additives. "The Center for Science in the Public Interest is a Non-profit organization watchdog journalism and consumer advocacy group headquartered in Washington, D.C....
reported in 1982 that Miller Lite contained
Propylene glycol,
alginate (a seaweed extract), water, barley malt, corn syrup, chemically modified hops extracts, yeast, amyloglucosidase, carbon dioxide, papain enzyme, liquid sugar, potassium metabisulfite, and Emka malt (a food coloring). Today, the company claims their beverage contains water, corn syrup, malted barley, and hops."
Apparently I must have gotten it confused with Budweiser or Miller Genuine Draft.
Have you got any evidence for your statement that the corrective optics only recover a fraction of the light gathering capacity.
I remember reading it in a book around 10 years ago. I can't seem to find it on my bookshelf anymore. I think it might have been this one.
And what is this about getting a 'visible light replacement space telescope'? Since when has anyone planned a replacement visible light space telescope?
Because the lens was incorrectly ground due to an error in the software that ran the grinding process. The "corrective optics" only recover a fraction of the light gathering capacity Hubble was supposed to be capable of. Hubble is finally old enough that it can be retired without people screaming about the waste of money (along with the people who were responsible allowing that error to pass in the first place). People made do with Hubble because it blew decades' worth of budget allocation. Hopefully now we'll get a visible light replacement space telescope that isn't crippled out of the gate.
Yeah, having Dick Cheney as a spokesman really hurt them. Potential customers confuse "extensible data types for queries" with "enhanced interrogation techniques".
According to the other posts earlier in this thread, the critical thing about this phone is that the firmware is a flashable ROM that can be easily reprogrammed. So the critical thing is that you can easily get this phone to lie, about the phone account used, and about anything else that would be transmitted over the standard GSM protocols. So the GP is correct: locking out the phone type - assuming it was possible, wouldn't do any good because the phone could be reprogrammed to impersonate something else.
It is extremely unlikely that the existing cell tower/receiver infrastructure could be used to determine that a phone is an 1100 impersonating some other model (or even upgraded to do so). It would be better to spend the development costs on revamping GSM to use a secure handshake protocol with large asymmetric key sizes and non-removable private keys, and securing OOB control channels with AES. Good luck getting police forces and spook agencies to roll over for that one though.
Well if you live in a condo with more than 8 units in your building, you could convince the condo/strata association to get a T1 or E10 and share it among the association members. If you make it part of the strata fees and have enough members, you would get something that's competitive with either cable or DSL (especially when you take into account typical ISP over-subscription). I would expect that's how residential buildings marketed as "wired" deal with it. If you're a private homeowner, you're stuck.
True enough. I started getting cable service with Rogers before they did a service area swap with Shaw at the beginning of the decade. I frequently had problems with service levels both for connection reliability and server-based functions under Rogers. While Shaw aren't perfect, service levels improved significantly after the switchover.
Well I for one am more than willing to believe that your motivation is as stated in your second paragraph, and that you have an unwillingness to face how your continued insistence on the status quo is going to lead to even greater privations for everyone later. But, hey maybe you'll get lucky and you'll die of old age before water shortages and violent storms force lots of Central Americans to come across the border and take your water by force. Or you could always hope that in your ripe old age you'll have the strength to lift an assault rifle, and move north to do the same to the Canadians. You might have to walk too, as fuel for that truck of yours might be a little scarce and expensive for a fixed income by then.
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Yeah, there's newer Intel design models that go back to 80486 BC.
Malcolm Gladwell and others say that you are incorrect and that in fact practice is a huge factor. Now, I suspect that a certain level of talent or inclination is necessary for someone to be willing to put in the 10,000 hours necessary to become exceptional. People don't tend to put in that much time if they have no aptitude and show no improvement. But there is a strong indication that you can't rely on talent; you really do have to practice a lot to get to Carnegie Hall. Also read the first comment here.
Now, you can put in a lot of time without any progress. There's a saying that you have dancers who have been dancing for twenty years, and you have dancers who have danced for a year twenty times. One can even refer to the old schoolyard taunt, "Yeah, and I bet Grade 7 was the best 3 years of your life!". Time is not equivalent to effort. The GP referred to one and you confused it with the other.
Sure Craigslist took out the gravy train classifieds. But circulation numbers had been steadily dropping for most major newspapers for the last two decades but really went down in the last one. Losing eyeballs would also affect their ability to sell other advertising.
Maybe it was deliberate? Perhaps some "politically astute" manager decided to file some briefs in favour of the RIAA, and the underlings he delegated it to were so disgusted that they deliberately sabotaged the results? Because after years of Alberto Gonzales running the place, the career people are probably pretty fed up and ready to do some passive aggressive stuff.
While Joel's got a point that it's possible to over-abstract something, it's interesting to note that Napster is now gone, and it has been replaced by ITunes (which also serves video), multiple other less popular proprietary music/video services, and... generic Bittorrent tracker/search engines. But I think the whole over-abstraction/architecture astronaut is just a special case of the second system effect described in Fred Brooks' Mythical Man-Month. Worth repeating of course, but not an amazing new insight.
Please provide me one example of a free/OSS platform implementation of a commercial product that is inarguably BETTER than the original proprietary version
GTK | KDE/QT > Motif | CDE ?
That's got to make a lot of physicists and quantum chemists very happy.
Microsoft IE and Netscape jumping through hoops to allow poorly formed HTML, thus setting the bar in a vertical position.
How many people claimed that waterboarding was not torture, until they actually underwent the procedure and quickly changed their mind? You can be one of the most enlightened white males around and you won't have the same understanding, at a gut-level feeling, of the discrimination that many members of minorities undergo on a regular basis. That was what Sotomayor was saying.
Something that supports this concept is that in past gender discrimination cases that have come before the supreme court, the female members of the court have indicated that some of the male members of the court have been completely oblivious to aspects of the case that were readily apparent to the female members from personal experience.
That, I think is the real reason why papers are in a big hole. They had a job to do and they didn't do it, so why would people continue to pay for substandard work? They've tried to be entertaining but they can't compete with TV for that. By trying to be entertaining instead of being informative, they've alienated their natural customer base. The more they write puff cheerleading pieces on corporate partners like real estate/development firms, which are quickly proven to be false, the more irrelevant they make themselves. If they ever got back to basics and stuck to meaningful, insightful and accurate reporting, then they could at least recover the intelligencia (the unwashed masses will be too busy watching Survivor, The Bachelor, etc.).
If I want to hear he said/she said, I can just read press releases from political parties and corporations. Instead, I want background research to help me decide which party is the most accurate in their claims. I want to know details about multi-million $ Olympic screw-ups before the civic elections. I want information about the securitization of subprime mortgages before it causes a global depression. The companies that figure this out instead of trying to spoon-feed me pap are the ones which will get my money.
Wow, so you think that trying to use software to improve your business processes by automating as many deterministic tasks as possible is a sign of incompetence? So what do you do exactly? If you're a programmer, can we assume that you demonstrate your competence by manually translating all your high-level language programs into machine code by hand?
Nah. Bing and Bob have to be separate products. Microsoft needs to promote them together with a road show.
Well, if the tribe in the story were getting mutations from sitting on a pile of "old" nuclear weapons, they would have a lot more people getting sick with cancer or from other genetic damage than they would be likely to get "smarter" humans. Because if they were smarter humans, you would think they might clue in that moving away from the "cursed" location that's making so many of them sick would be a good idea.
Ah well, L. Ron wasn't the only SF writer to base stories on wildly wrong interpretations of evolution and radiation. I remember at least one other from the 40's by Edmund Hamilton, which would lead you to believe that that's when most of BE would have been written. By the 1980's, when BE was purportedly written, knowledge of DNA, radiation, and how the two resulted in mutation was much better understood. If those types of stories are what has been informing the general public's perception of evolution, it's no wonder that so much of the public can be confused enough to consider it on the same level as Creationism/Intelligent Design.
Yep. Unfortunately I was wrong. Miller Lite at one point contained several ingredients not normally found in beer, including manufactured chemical additives. "The Center for Science in the Public Interest is a Non-profit organization watchdog journalism and consumer advocacy group headquartered in Washington, D.C.... reported in 1982 that Miller Lite contained Propylene glycol, alginate (a seaweed extract), water, barley malt, corn syrup, chemically modified hops extracts, yeast, amyloglucosidase, carbon dioxide, papain enzyme, liquid sugar, potassium metabisulfite, and Emka malt (a food coloring). Today, the company claims their beverage contains water, corn syrup, malted barley, and hops." Apparently I must have gotten it confused with Budweiser or Miller Genuine Draft.
Well, yeah. Apparently everybody but you seems to know that Miller Lite is mostly rice based, not wheat and barley.
I remember reading it in a book around 10 years ago. I can't seem to find it on my bookshelf anymore. I think it might have been this one.
ATLAS, the Advanced Technology Large-Aperture Space Telescope.
Because the lens was incorrectly ground due to an error in the software that ran the grinding process. The "corrective optics" only recover a fraction of the light gathering capacity Hubble was supposed to be capable of. Hubble is finally old enough that it can be retired without people screaming about the waste of money (along with the people who were responsible allowing that error to pass in the first place). People made do with Hubble because it blew decades' worth of budget allocation. Hopefully now we'll get a visible light replacement space telescope that isn't crippled out of the gate.
Not when it comes to security vulnerabilities.
Yeah, having Dick Cheney as a spokesman really hurt them. Potential customers confuse "extensible data types for queries" with "enhanced interrogation techniques".
According to the other posts earlier in this thread, the critical thing about this phone is that the firmware is a flashable ROM that can be easily reprogrammed. So the critical thing is that you can easily get this phone to lie, about the phone account used, and about anything else that would be transmitted over the standard GSM protocols. So the GP is correct: locking out the phone type - assuming it was possible, wouldn't do any good because the phone could be reprogrammed to impersonate something else.
It is extremely unlikely that the existing cell tower/receiver infrastructure could be used to determine that a phone is an 1100 impersonating some other model (or even upgraded to do so). It would be better to spend the development costs on revamping GSM to use a secure handshake protocol with large asymmetric key sizes and non-removable private keys, and securing OOB control channels with AES. Good luck getting police forces and spook agencies to roll over for that one though.
Oh, sure! Blame Heinlein!
Well if you live in a condo with more than 8 units in your building, you could convince the condo/strata association to get a T1 or E10 and share it among the association members. If you make it part of the strata fees and have enough members, you would get something that's competitive with either cable or DSL (especially when you take into account typical ISP over-subscription). I would expect that's how residential buildings marketed as "wired" deal with it. If you're a private homeowner, you're stuck.
True enough. I started getting cable service with Rogers before they did a service area swap with Shaw at the beginning of the decade. I frequently had problems with service levels both for connection reliability and server-based functions under Rogers. While Shaw aren't perfect, service levels improved significantly after the switchover.
Well I for one am more than willing to believe that your motivation is as stated in your second paragraph, and that you have an unwillingness to face how your continued insistence on the status quo is going to lead to even greater privations for everyone later. But, hey maybe you'll get lucky and you'll die of old age before water shortages and violent storms force lots of Central Americans to come across the border and take your water by force. Or you could always hope that in your ripe old age you'll have the strength to lift an assault rifle, and move north to do the same to the Canadians. You might have to walk too, as fuel for that truck of yours might be a little scarce and expensive for a fixed income by then.