When they wrote the list, they were being impatient. Take Windows 2000, for example...was there ever any DOUBT that there would be another version of NT? The only question is when. I would suggest that the date that the next version of Windows will be released is the date it's released on. Predictions of how long it will take are 100% inaccurate...that's my point. Marketers and business dweebs announce release dates. Developers, at best, announce when they'll be done with the module they're currently working on (only 420 more modules to code! 87% of them are unanalyzed! it'll only take a couple of weeks to do!)
So what do you call someone who believes a professional liar? Particularly when the professional liar is proven to be a liar, year after year after year?
That was point #1...look for software after it's released. Pay no attention to marketers.
Point #2 is more subtle, perhaps. Vaporware is never produced. The term was coined for a Microsoft practice of announcing a product, driving all third-party development away from the niche, and then failing to produce the product. Frankly, none of the item's on Wired's list meet this criterion...Warcraft III will be produced, and Mac games continue to be produced.
My perspective is that the article was a waste of time, a snide little piece intended to make writer appear clever and in-the-know. It had the journalistic quality that I've come to expect from People magazine; a more wretched hive of vapidity you'll never fine.
Have you no charity for an entity so terminally wrong? By your own admission, it's not even in BETA?! If this is somehow proof that's it's not vapor, then it's a strange world you live in...a strange world we ALL live in...
Wired doesn't get it: software development is HARD. I can't really blame them, though, when so-called software developers don't get it. How hard can it be, I say, when I myself have developed several Visual Basic applications? Naturally this doesn't distinguish between doing it and doing it RIGHT. There is the problem of defining requirements; they generally turn out to conflict; then they change every other week. I'll say it again: developing commercial software for general release is HARD. And for the terminally inattentive, I'll spell out the rule of software release:
It is released when it is released. Don't expect it any sooner.
Anyway, here's Wired's (software) Vaporware for the last three years. Consider this year's in light of it...
Vaporware 1998: Windows 2000 It's here now.
Vaporware 1999 9. Ideaworks3d's Vecta3D It's here now.
7. Games for the Mac Not a Mac afficionado; all I know is that there are Mac games, but not many. I'll give them this one.
6. SDMI It's here now, though flawed in both concept and execution...
5. Daikatana It's here now.
4. Diablo II It's here now.
3. Netscape's Communicator 5.0 It's here now (though they secretly incremented the version number while no one was looking).
1. Windows 2000 See 1998's list, above
Vaporware 2000 10: Tribes 2 It's here now.
6: Warcraft III Hey, they finally nailed one!
4: A New Linux kernel (2.4, specifically) It's here now.
3: Black and White It's here now.
2: Duke Nukem Forever This one's not here, but the article itself states there's no scheduled release date! How is this vaporware?
1: Mac OS X It's here now.
So, Wired, in the software category, you called 2 out of 14 (both of which are still under active development). The rest weren't vapor. How, then, should we view this year's software entries?
In place of transistors bad come molecular valves so that even the largest Planetary AC could be put into a space only half the volume of a spaceship.
I'd read this story before, but not since I was about 12. Funny that those molecular valves came about within decades of Asimov's story, rather than the centuries he predicted...
The thing that blows my mind about how big space is would be what you mentioned - two galaxies "colliding". There is so much space between the stars that when galaxies collide, they just pass through each other, nothing colliding.
Foolish mortal...how constrained you are by what your senses show you. Know you not that your entire body is empty space, inhabited here and there by point masses called by your scientists "quarks" and "electrons"? Yet these point masses interact powerfully at short range.
If the man says you need a BS to prove you are intelligent, then the man is wrong
I've been the man and that's not what the man says. What the man says is "I've got 200 resumes. I've got two days to whittle it down to 5 for first interviews. I need some way to filter these..."
If the man has a degree and saw its value, the degree may become a filter. If the man worked for three years in QA/testing, that may become the filter, etc.
Not having a degree proves nothing except that you don't have a degree. Sort of like not having a high school diploma. BTW, if you were the man, and you hired someone, and the turned out to be completely worthless and you had to fire them, and they didn't have a high school diploma, would you really want to have to explain that to your boss? Same goes for a degre...they're useful to have. If you have one
So, I spend a ten years and a billion dollars developing THE word processing application for Chinese writers. I believe that I can sell a copy to every person in China - let's round that to 1 billion people. I sell my software for the paltry sum of $2.00.
Scenario 1. I sell my billion copies, grossing 2 billion dollars. I get back the billion I spent on development. I get back the.5 billion I spent on distribution. I make profits of.5 billion, a return of roughly 5%. Not much, but I plow it back into my business and begin developing THE speech recognition software for Chinese speakers.
Scenario 2. I sell 100,000 copies, grossing $200,000 dollars with distribution costs of $50,000 and total losses over $900,000,000. I chuck further development in disgust and advise all my colleagues not to waste their money developing or marketing to China.
Hopefully you get the point...there is a purpose to seeing to it that if anyone profits from the production of intellectual property, it is the PRODUCERS of intellectual property. It cost much more that $1 billion and ten years to produce Windows XP. Say whatever else you want to about Microsoft - they understand the ITERATIVE nature of software development. You don't merely produce a product - you redo it and redo it and redo it until you've got it perfect. Then you redo it again to take advantage of newer hardware. MS can afford to do this because THEY MAKE A PROFIT. Sorry if that offends you.
BTW, the end result of failing to curb piracy in China will be a dearth of Chinese-language software - why localize for China if the government will let street vendors with CDRWs rip you off? English language versions then infiltrate the society; English speakers become more prevalent; English ideas are more easily transferred. Chinese totalitarianism breaks down. So curbing piracy still may not be a good idea.
So are buggy whip manufacturers given money from the sale of every car? Are opticians given money from every laser keratomy surgery? Are heart surgeons given a cut of the sales from health food stores?
This makes absolutely no sense...communism/socialism is at least logical; those with much should give to those who have little or cannot care for themselves. Capitalism would suggest that if the world has changed and they can no longer earn a living they should starve. Here we have the FILTHY rich being supported because something has come along that might make them merely UNCLEANLY rich.
Ah well. Me waits for an enlightened society which takes the record execs out and humanely shoots them, along with every other shyster and parasite on the economy.
You'd be launching the probe on a tangent to the orbit, not on a perpendicular to the orbit. This would cause the ISS to accelerate along the tangent to the orbit, giving it a higher velocity. You achieve higher orbit by going faster, not by going away from the orbited mass.
Lots of counterintuitive things happen in orbit. For example, if you are chasing a probe and accelerate toward it, it will move farther away - you accelerate, you go into a higher orbit, and your orbital period decreases, so you aren't going around as fast. The probe's orbital period stays the same, so it's now going around faster than you.
I really do not think things are like that. Really? Which part?
- Totalitarian government in China
- Human rights abuses in China
- China recently given MFN trading status
- Ukraine recently penalized for copying content
I don't really care how or why any entity behaves the way they do. All that matters are actions. You believe that it is not the intent of any in the US govt to be evil. I believe that too. IT IS IRRELEVANT. Look only at the actions...from actions you can discern true intent rather than marketing messages. The intent of the US govt is exactly as the previous poster stated.
Also, the article says they can expand capacity 300%. Frankly, that sounds like pretty short-term planning to me. In my experience, it's a rare data store that doesn't double in size every year or two.
You seem to be implying that the physical space required to store data doubles...that doesn't seem reasonable. I've seen top-of-the-line IDE hard drive capacity grow from 2.1GB to 100GB in my 5 years in this industry; I'd think the amount of physical space required to store data could actually shrink over time, even if the amount data is doubling every couple of years.
I am, of course, talking through my hat, as I've never managed a large data store. Let me know if I'm drawing all the wrong conclusions...
If you drive a truck through the plate glass window at the front of my retail shop and kill a couple of customers and trash all my inventory and I look like a complete schmuck, whose fault is it? You seem to be implying that it's mine because I didn't have reinforced steel and concrete posts in front of the shop. After all, everyone KNOWS that glass can't keep out trucks, and everyone KNOWS that there are drunks out there who can't drive (and some of them own trucks), and everyone KNOWS that an 8-inch-diameter steel pipe filled with concrete and rebar can be set in the sidewalk to keep trucks out. Therefore, everything is my fault, right?
Just because there's more that I could do to prevent crime from affecting me doesn't mean that I am at fault when someone else commits a criminal act that I COULD have protected against.
No, this is just a shifted cost. Since you DIDN'T pay to secure your network at the beginning (either through poor-quality admins or by not paying for intrusion detection tools, whatever), you are paying now.
Sorry, but in this case you're wrong. I should have mentioned sooner that my ISP has excellent security policies and procedures. The original poster noted that his friend found a mistake in the permissions. You can have the best security system and policies in the world, but they are administered by people and PEOPLE MAKE MISTAKES. There's nothing you can do about it except deal with it and move on. However, when a breach does occur (and it will)*, it is a good idea to analyze what happened and see how bad the breach is. Is it merely the replacement of an HTML page, or is the page replacement merely a symptom of having been rooted?
We spent good money on our people and our systems. One of them made a mistake, and a skript kiddie took advantage of it before we discovered it (that's the joy of the internet - there are so many skript kiddies you have no margin for error; default installs last, what, four hours before they're hacked?). We spent money recovering from our mistake, and granted it was our mistake, but the fact that someone took advantage of it forced us to spend a lot more money determining exactly what happened.
Is this likely what happened in the original poster's situation? I don't know. It's entirely possible (more likely, in fact) that the situation is as you describe. My point is simply that even a small internet-based business (like an ISP)could easily have costs in the range of $10K-$20K as a direct result of a hack, even one as simple as a web-page defacement, because you don't know if that's all it is until you've paid someone to look at it really carefully.
*No system is completely hackproof. If someone says "System X has never been hacked!" I would interpret that as meaning either the system is very young, or the person talking to me is a moron who can't recognize an intrusion.
Really, you should pay attention to what you reply to...note this quote from the parent post:
Steve Jackson Games was almost put out of business based on a bogus rumor.
Somebody told the Secret Service that SJ's BBS had hacker files on it. They took away the BBS and some vital manuscripts. What if your hacked server actually had illegal material on it? In other words, the poster's point was...a rumor and stupid cops almost shut down a business. What if the rumor were true, and there was illegal information on your web server (put there by a skript kiddie), and the cops were smart?
(1) Obviously, there's a security breach. How widespread is it? We need to audit the network and see how severe the breach is and what hole was unpatched. I've got to put either employees or consultants onto it.
(2) We can't trust any code on our network, so the other copy of the web site on this other server may be bad, too. We'll have to check that against a known good copy, which means looking at our backups. Really, we need a known-good historical copy, too, just to be sure, so we've got to pull our off-site backups of the web site from records management vendor.
(3) One of our business clients saw the defaced web page and decided that they didn't trust us to protect their data. They will no longer do business with us. We have lost all of the income they would have provided forever.
(4) As part of our immediate security response, we had to shut down briefly. If someone had hacked our server, they might be trying to punch through to our client machines. Not a huge deal, but we had to issue a month's credit to everyone who complained about being unable to connect.
Add together 1-4, and I think you could easily come up with $17,000. Think about 2-3 net admins + 1 security consultant doing security cleanup for a week.
So does that mean when someone DoS's my workstation and I can't access apache from home for more than 15 minutes I've lost $1062.50? No, because you are not a business concern. Note that the four hour downtime doesn't mean that all the costs were incurred in that four-hour timeframe. The ongoing security audit that becomes necessary in the event of a hacked server could have gone on for a week.
Are the figures inflated? Possibly. Did the idiot cost the business money? Certainly. Is the FBI playing hardball with the idiot who did it? Undoubtedly. You seem to be missing the point that your friend shouldn't have done it; instead, you are whining that the FBI talked mean to your friend.
I learned to read in kindergarten too...without computers. Me too. Hmm...if what's in the past will work now, too, why stop at 20 years ago, with no computers? 200 years ago, no pencils, no pens, no erasers, no slates. Not too many books teaching five-year-olds to read, for that matter. 2000 years ago, not much of anything. Not too many were literate, in fact, yet society seemed to function just fine (we're still here, right? descended from people who lived then?)
So, if I understand you correctly, you don't want anything better for your children than what you had? You think that children can learn nothing from computers? You think that a computer can't present EXACTLY the same material as a teacher? You think a computer can't present questions for a pupil to answer, then adjust future material presentation based on responses? You, sir, are completely ignorant and I will respond no further.
NEWS FLASH! The written English language is based on the way words sound! Each sound is represented by a (non-unique) letter. Pedagogical techniques for teaching children to read should include phonics; lots of practice reading permits you to move on to memorizing how words look. If you haven't moved on, I'd suggest you're either fairly young or have a learning disability of some kind. I was taught only phonics but I can tell at a glance what a word is.
The reason for using phonics is that most people who learn to read already know the language. They don't need to learn it again. They merely need to know how to translate what they hear and say into writing and vice versa.
Whole language reading is useful but not all encompassing. The same is true for phonics. Both have their place; you can't advance as a reader (as you point out) if you continue to be dependent on phonics, but you can't leverage years of experience with the English language unless you use phonics. A mixed approach is highly effective.
One teacher is worth infinitely more than 20 computers. Yes. Let me suggest an analogy...one combat soldier costs about as much as 20 rifles and ammunition loads. But would you rather have 20 soldiers with rifles, ammo, and grenades, or 21 soldiers? Weapon systems force multipliers - they make your people more effective. I would suggest that the same is true of teachers and computers.
COMPUTERS ARE NOT TEACHERS, period. They are also not typists, but they make typists more effective. They are not accountants, but they make accountants more effective. They are not lawyers, but they make lawyers more effective. They are not network administrators, but they make the admins more effective (ever pore through a stack of hardcopy logs? Ever do a search for a single IP address?)You see my point?
My point was not that computers could replace teachers (they can't), but that they were a cost-effective method of augmenting existing teachers. A teacher with several computers can accomplish more than a teacher alone. 1 teacher + 4 computers = 5 threads of instruction. You couldn't get a teachers aide for the cost of 4 computers (amortize over three years).
teachers are paid way too little No offense, but I disagree. I believe that most teachers are paid...exactly what they're worth. I observed very little excellence in the teachers I've taught with (I did mention I'm a former teacher, right?) Many taught because they got summers off, or they weren't good enough to do anything else, or they didn't have the ambition or imagination to do anything else - the only careers they saw growing up were teaching and whatever their parents did. Of course, many teach for love of the students and the subject; sadly, these are a minority. I left teaching and am making more now, five years later, than I ever could have as a teacher - and I would have needed three more years of school and 25 years of experience to max out the pay scale and come close to what I'm making now. I think if pay scales were higher, the schools would be able to weed out the poor-quality teachers and retain better ones. I don't include myself in the latter category, BTW; I was a lousy teacher - I had no classroom control (ie discipline) skills and didn't want to make a go of it after the first year.
As for your earthquake example...I'd estimate that it'd take an entire class period to do one or two simulations. We spent half an hour on it and did about six. We had the seismograph readings on screen. We had to measure the different types of waves, determine when they arrived, and calculate the distance from that station to the epicenter. We didn't need manual dexterity; the computer did the plotting. We didn't need good arithmetic skills; the computer did the calculations (there are pros and cons to this, I'll grant, but it can be useful to permit the person who is lousy at math to be successful at something else; success at science can lead to a love of science which can lead to motivation to learn the math that science requires, while frustration in math AND science produces nothing). We were able to focus on the objective: studying how seismologists pinpoint earthquakes. Furthermore, the computer was able to generate a unique problem for each student, so it was impossible to copy off of someone else; this had the side benefit that no one was pressured to give someone else the answer. Overall, I'd have to conclude that it was an effective use of the technology, and it was better than the low-tech way of doing it. You really should trust my opinion on this, because I was there and you weren't.
Yup. (More bragging ahead). I had my son adding at three, and I'd started to teach him phonics when I re-evaluated what I was doing. I don't believe that you learn everything you need to know in school; they teach you reading, writing, arithmetic, and some other stuff, but there are other important things to learn. I decided to concentrate on those other things. I did not want him to be too far ahead of other students and get bored; I had that problem. School was easy for me, and thus it was not good preparation for life, which is not easy. I decided that it would be easy enough for him anyway without my adding to his problems.
On the other hand, if we'd decided
But also don't think the computer is some magic cure to the ills of our educational system Correct. However, let me take an analogy from carpentry. Circular saws don't build houses. Pneumatic nailers do not build houses. They make it much easier and faster to do so, though. Neither will make up for a stupid carpenter; in fact, they can make the final product worse.
Computers are a TOOL, a useful and powerful one. They are not a magic fixall and we should not put them in schools because we think they are. But neither should we remove them from schools, or prevent their deployment there, because we know they are not magic fixalls.
Um yourself. Perahsp you missed the point of my example? Or do you know some magical way by which libraries help kids who don't know what sound "k" makes?:)
Moving on to your point, though - pacing older kids. I'd assume that you, like I, learned a lot by reading books from libraries, and that the reading and fun of learning was motivation enough. News flash - not everyone is like you and me. How do you motivate someone to learn who does not have an intrinsic desire to learn? How do you reward them for learning? Computer games are a great way. There was once a little girl (about 9, I think) who created a Logo program to make a very complicated geometric figure. It took her a while to make it look just the way she wanted. A visitor asked her what she thought of math class. "I hate math," she replied, while the turtle went through its geometric gyrations. She thought she was playing with an immense toy; she had no idea that she was learning "math" - but she was.
The equipment was not damaged, just your ability to see what you expect in both scenarios.
So you experience no financial harm if I erase every bit on your hard drives, CD-ROMs, DVDs, floppies, and video tapes? Yes, a good disaster recovery plan will incorporate backups to restore data, but it takes time. Here's the equation:
Loss of data = loss of time = loss of money
For computer, yes, it's trivial compared to a building. For millions it can be comparable.
I would further suggest that the cost of recreating a software installation and configuration, as well as restoration of data, will be comparable to the cost of setting up the system in the first place - maybe a little more, maybe a little less, but in the same ballpark. I think the same is true of rebuilding a building. There is no permanent damage to the computer - granted. But there is no permanent damage to the building when you blow a hole in the side, either - the damage can be repaired. Just because the damage is "virtual" rather than physical doesn't make it any less costly. And frankly, the only two types of damage suffered in a terrorist attack are human suffering/death financial losses. I fail to see why wiping 1 million hard drives is necessarily qualitatively different from demolishing one building.
The written language is considered the "high language". But we're discussing voice recognition...I'm talking not simply about word choice, grammar, and other issues that are common to both spoken and written language. I'm referring to how phonemes are pronounced. For example, my cousin, a southerner, pronounces "are" and "air" the same, although he knows how to write them and use them. He is well-educated, and writes with great skill, but his pronunciation differs from mine. A system trained to recognize my accent would choke on his.
That said, I yield to your obviously superior experience in the matter of German language education.:)
Terrorism doesn't necessarily imply killing people. The classical terrorist (ie, the one that exists mainly in poli-sci courses) blows up generators, water plants, radio towers, etc in an effort to destroy the public's trust in the government's ability to protect them. Someone who targets civilian infrastructure meets the threshold for being a terrorists. There's obviously a gradation; those who target large numbers of civilians are also terrorists (duh) but that doesn't mean that someone who blows up an empty building isn't a terrorist.
Furthermore, I would argue that you don't need to have political objectives to be classified as a terrorist. If I blew up a generator station because I think it'd be cool to see, I think it would be valid to classify me as a terrorist. This gets kind of tricky, because it'd be easy to categorize an arsonist as a terrorist, or a vandal, but I digress.
Anyway, the obvious analogy is that someone who targets information infrastructure (ie worm writers targeting email servers) is a terrorist. And don't argue that the analogy doesn't hold simply because there's no no permanent damage simply because it can be repaired. That's like arguing pulverizing every cubic inch of a building isn't permanent damage because it can be rebuilt. Don't argue that there's no real costs associated with worm attacks - do you think net admins work for free? (If so, I've got a job for you:) I'll grant that most costs are overrated.
Counterpoint - if blowing up a building is terrorism, why not burning it down? Should arson be considered terrorism? What about insurance fraud - if I burn down my old barn for the insurance money am I a terrorist? What about vandals? There's a continuum of crimes against property, as well as crimes against people; where do we put "terrorism" on that continuum? We must be cautious in verbiage used to define "terrorism"
in the law, lest the crime be placed further down the continuum than we want.
Counter-counter-point - arsonists rarely burn down every building on the internet; worm-writers at the very least have in their minds the idea that they could take out every email server on the internet (basically a DOS attack) or every workstation with the targeted OS(s) by wiping their drives after re-launching.
Amazing, isn't it, how many Linux projects are simply clones of existing Microsoft software.
Need a word processor? Get a Word clone. Need a flowchart tool? Get a Visio clone. Need a vector illustrator? Get an Illustrator clone.
Interesting non-sequitur. Word is the only Microsoft product. Visio was fully developed and owned its market share; Microsoft couldn't compete, so they bought it. Illustrator is not an MS product, unless they've bought Adobe when I wasn't looking.
I would point out that if you want to take over the desktop market, you've got to make it easy for people, and that seems to entail cloning the market-leading software packages. Never mind the fact that for programming and serving information there's no MS software to emulate, since Unix pretty much rules there...
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When they wrote the list, they were being impatient. Take Windows 2000, for example...was there ever any DOUBT that there would be another version of NT? The only question is when. I would suggest that the date that the next version of Windows will be released is the date it's released on. Predictions of how long it will take are 100% inaccurate...that's my point. Marketers and business dweebs announce release dates. Developers, at best, announce when they'll be done with the module they're currently working on (only 420 more modules to code! 87% of them are unanalyzed! it'll only take a couple of weeks to do!)
So what do you call someone who believes a professional liar? Particularly when the professional liar is proven to be a liar, year after year after year?
That was point #1...look for software after it's released. Pay no attention to marketers.
Point #2 is more subtle, perhaps. Vaporware is never produced. The term was coined for a Microsoft practice of announcing a product, driving all third-party development away from the niche, and then failing to produce the product. Frankly, none of the item's on Wired's list meet this criterion...Warcraft III will be produced, and Mac games continue to be produced.
My perspective is that the article was a waste of time, a snide little piece intended to make writer appear clever and in-the-know. It had the journalistic quality that I've come to expect from People magazine; a more wretched hive of vapidity you'll never fine.
Have you no charity for an entity so terminally wrong? By your own admission, it's not even in BETA?! If this is somehow proof that's it's not vapor, then it's a strange world you live in...a strange world we ALL live in...
Wired doesn't get it: software development is HARD. I can't really blame them, though, when so-called software developers don't get it. How hard can it be, I say, when I myself have developed several Visual Basic applications? Naturally this doesn't distinguish between doing it and doing it RIGHT. There is the problem of defining requirements; they generally turn out to conflict; then they change every other week. I'll say it again: developing commercial software for general release is HARD. And for the terminally inattentive, I'll spell out the rule of software release:
It is released when it is released. Don't expect it any sooner.
Anyway, here's Wired's (software) Vaporware for the last three years. Consider this year's in light of it...
Vaporware 1998: Windows 2000
It's here now.
Vaporware 1999
9. Ideaworks3d's Vecta3D
It's here now.
7. Games for the Mac
Not a Mac afficionado; all I know is that there are Mac games, but not many. I'll give them this one.
6. SDMI
It's here now, though flawed in both concept and execution...
5. Daikatana
It's here now.
4. Diablo II
It's here now.
3. Netscape's Communicator 5.0
It's here now (though they secretly incremented the version number while no one was looking).
1. Windows 2000
See 1998's list, above
Vaporware 2000
10: Tribes 2
It's here now.
6: Warcraft III
Hey, they finally nailed one!
4: A New Linux kernel (2.4, specifically)
It's here now.
3: Black and White
It's here now.
2: Duke Nukem Forever
This one's not here, but the article itself states there's no scheduled release date! How is this vaporware?
1: Mac OS X
It's here now.
So, Wired, in the software category, you called 2 out of 14 (both of which are still under active development). The rest weren't vapor. How, then, should we view this year's software entries?
In place of transistors bad come molecular valves so that even the largest Planetary AC could be put into a space only half the volume of a spaceship.
I'd read this story before, but not since I was about 12. Funny that those molecular valves came about within decades of Asimov's story, rather than the centuries he predicted...
The thing that blows my mind about how big space is would be what you mentioned - two galaxies "colliding". There is so much space between the stars that when galaxies collide, they just pass through each other, nothing colliding.
Foolish mortal...how constrained you are by what your senses show you. Know you not that your entire body is empty space, inhabited here and there by point masses called by your scientists "quarks" and "electrons"? Yet these point masses interact powerfully at short range.
If the man says you need a BS to prove you are intelligent, then the man is wrong
I've been the man and that's not what the man says. What the man says is "I've got 200 resumes. I've got two days to whittle it down to 5 for first interviews. I need some way to filter these..."
If the man has a degree and saw its value, the degree may become a filter. If the man worked for three years in QA/testing, that may become the filter, etc.
Not having a degree proves nothing except that you don't have a degree. Sort of like not having a high school diploma. BTW, if you were the man, and you hired someone, and the turned out to be completely worthless and you had to fire them, and they didn't have a high school diploma, would you really want to have to explain that to your boss? Same goes for a degre...they're useful to have. If you have one
So, I spend a ten years and a billion dollars developing THE word processing application for Chinese writers. I believe that I can sell a copy to every person in China - let's round that to 1 billion people. I sell my software for the paltry sum of $2.00.
.5 billion I spent on distribution. I make profits of .5 billion, a return of roughly 5%. Not much, but I plow it back into my business and begin developing THE speech recognition software for Chinese speakers.
Scenario 1. I sell my billion copies, grossing 2 billion dollars. I get back the billion I spent on development. I get back the
Scenario 2. I sell 100,000 copies, grossing $200,000 dollars with distribution costs of $50,000 and total losses over $900,000,000. I chuck further development in disgust and advise all my colleagues not to waste their money developing or marketing to China.
Hopefully you get the point...there is a purpose to seeing to it that if anyone profits from the production of intellectual property, it is the PRODUCERS of intellectual property. It cost much more that $1 billion and ten years to produce Windows XP. Say whatever else you want to about Microsoft - they understand the ITERATIVE nature of software development. You don't merely produce a product - you redo it and redo it and redo it until you've got it perfect. Then you redo it again to take advantage of newer hardware. MS can afford to do this because THEY MAKE A PROFIT. Sorry if that offends you.
BTW, the end result of failing to curb piracy in China will be a dearth of Chinese-language software - why localize for China if the government will let street vendors with CDRWs rip you off? English language versions then infiltrate the society; English speakers become more prevalent; English ideas are more easily transferred. Chinese totalitarianism breaks down. So curbing piracy still may not be a good idea.
So are buggy whip manufacturers given money from the sale of every car? Are opticians given money from every laser keratomy surgery? Are heart surgeons given a cut of the sales from health food stores?
This makes absolutely no sense...communism/socialism is at least logical; those with much should give to those who have little or cannot care for themselves. Capitalism would suggest that if the world has changed and they can no longer earn a living they should starve. Here we have the FILTHY rich being supported because something has come along that might make them merely UNCLEANLY rich.
Ah well. Me waits for an enlightened society which takes the record execs out and humanely shoots them, along with every other shyster and parasite on the economy.
You'd be launching the probe on a tangent to the orbit, not on a perpendicular to the orbit. This would cause the ISS to accelerate along the tangent to the orbit, giving it a higher velocity. You achieve higher orbit by going faster, not by going away from the orbited mass.
Lots of counterintuitive things happen in orbit. For example, if you are chasing a probe and accelerate toward it, it will move farther away - you accelerate, you go into a higher orbit, and your orbital period decreases, so you aren't going around as fast. The probe's orbital period stays the same, so it's now going around faster than you.
I really do not think things are like that.
Really? Which part?
- Totalitarian government in China
- Human rights abuses in China
- China recently given MFN trading status
- Ukraine recently penalized for copying content
I don't really care how or why any entity behaves the way they do. All that matters are actions. You believe that it is not the intent of any in the US govt to be evil. I believe that too. IT IS IRRELEVANT. Look only at the actions...from actions you can discern true intent rather than marketing messages. The intent of the US govt is exactly as the previous poster stated.
Also, the article says they can expand capacity 300%. Frankly, that sounds like pretty short-term planning to me. In my experience, it's a rare data store that doesn't double in size every year or two.
You seem to be implying that the physical space required to store data doubles...that doesn't seem reasonable. I've seen top-of-the-line IDE hard drive capacity grow from 2.1GB to 100GB in my 5 years in this industry; I'd think the amount of physical space required to store data could actually shrink over time, even if the amount data is doubling every couple of years.
I am, of course, talking through my hat, as I've never managed a large data store. Let me know if I'm drawing all the wrong conclusions...
If you drive a truck through the plate glass window at the front of my retail shop and kill a couple of customers and trash all my inventory and I look like a complete schmuck, whose fault is it? You seem to be implying that it's mine because I didn't have reinforced steel and concrete posts in front of the shop. After all, everyone KNOWS that glass can't keep out trucks, and everyone KNOWS that there are drunks out there who can't drive (and some of them own trucks), and everyone KNOWS that an 8-inch-diameter steel pipe filled with concrete and rebar can be set in the sidewalk to keep trucks out. Therefore, everything is my fault, right?
Just because there's more that I could do to prevent crime from affecting me doesn't mean that I am at fault when someone else commits a criminal act that I COULD have protected against.
No, this is just a shifted cost. Since you DIDN'T pay to secure your network at the beginning (either through poor-quality admins or by not paying for intrusion detection tools, whatever), you are paying now.
Sorry, but in this case you're wrong. I should have mentioned sooner that my ISP has excellent security policies and procedures. The original poster noted that his friend found a mistake in the permissions. You can have the best security system and policies in the world, but they are administered by people and PEOPLE MAKE MISTAKES. There's nothing you can do about it except deal with it and move on. However, when a breach does occur (and it will)*, it is a good idea to analyze what happened and see how bad the breach is. Is it merely the replacement of an HTML page, or is the page replacement merely a symptom of having been rooted?
We spent good money on our people and our systems. One of them made a mistake, and a skript kiddie took advantage of it before we discovered it (that's the joy of the internet - there are so many skript kiddies you have no margin for error; default installs last, what, four hours before they're hacked?). We spent money recovering from our mistake, and granted it was our mistake, but the fact that someone took advantage of it forced us to spend a lot more money determining exactly what happened.
Is this likely what happened in the original poster's situation? I don't know. It's entirely possible (more likely, in fact) that the situation is as you describe. My point is simply that even a small internet-based business (like an ISP)could easily have costs in the range of $10K-$20K as a direct result of a hack, even one as simple as a web-page defacement, because you don't know if that's all it is until you've paid someone to look at it really carefully.
*No system is completely hackproof. If someone says "System X has never been hacked!" I would interpret that as meaning either the system is very young, or the person talking to me is a moron who can't recognize an intrusion.
Really, you should pay attention to what you reply to...note this quote from the parent post:
Steve Jackson Games was almost put out of business based on a bogus rumor.
Somebody told the Secret Service that SJ's BBS had hacker files on it. They took away the BBS and some vital manuscripts. What if your hacked server actually had illegal material on it? In other words, the poster's point was...a rumor and stupid cops almost shut down a business. What if the rumor were true, and there was illegal information on your web server (put there by a skript kiddie), and the cops were smart?
My ISP business website has been defaced.
(1) Obviously, there's a security breach. How widespread is it? We need to audit the network and see how severe the breach is and what hole was unpatched. I've got to put either employees or consultants onto it.
(2) We can't trust any code on our network, so the other copy of the web site on this other server may be bad, too. We'll have to check that against a known good copy, which means looking at our backups. Really, we need a known-good historical copy, too, just to be sure, so we've got to pull our off-site backups of the web site from records management vendor.
(3) One of our business clients saw the defaced web page and decided that they didn't trust us to protect their data. They will no longer do business with us. We have lost all of the income they would have provided forever.
(4) As part of our immediate security response, we had to shut down briefly. If someone had hacked our server, they might be trying to punch through to our client machines. Not a huge deal, but we had to issue a month's credit to everyone who complained about being unable to connect.
Add together 1-4, and I think you could easily come up with $17,000. Think about 2-3 net admins + 1 security consultant doing security cleanup for a week.
So does that mean when someone DoS's my workstation and I can't access apache from home for more than 15 minutes I've lost $1062.50?
No, because you are not a business concern. Note that the four hour downtime doesn't mean that all the costs were incurred in that four-hour timeframe. The ongoing security audit that becomes necessary in the event of a hacked server could have gone on for a week.
Are the figures inflated? Possibly. Did the idiot cost the business money? Certainly. Is the FBI playing hardball with the idiot who did it? Undoubtedly. You seem to be missing the point that your friend shouldn't have done it; instead, you are whining that the FBI talked mean to your friend.
I learned to read in kindergarten too...without computers.
Me too. Hmm...if what's in the past will work now, too, why stop at 20 years ago, with no computers? 200 years ago, no pencils, no pens, no erasers, no slates. Not too many books teaching five-year-olds to read, for that matter. 2000 years ago, not much of anything. Not too many were literate, in fact, yet society seemed to function just fine (we're still here, right? descended from people who lived then?)
So, if I understand you correctly, you don't want anything better for your children than what you had? You think that children can learn nothing from computers? You think that a computer can't present EXACTLY the same material as a teacher? You think a computer can't present questions for a pupil to answer, then adjust future material presentation based on responses? You, sir, are completely ignorant and I will respond no further.
NEWS FLASH! The written English language is based on the way words sound! Each sound is represented by a (non-unique) letter. Pedagogical techniques for teaching children to read should include phonics; lots of practice reading permits you to move on to memorizing how words look. If you haven't moved on, I'd suggest you're either fairly young or have a learning disability of some kind. I was taught only phonics but I can tell at a glance what a word is.
The reason for using phonics is that most people who learn to read already know the language. They don't need to learn it again. They merely need to know how to translate what they hear and say into writing and vice versa.
Whole language reading is useful but not all encompassing. The same is true for phonics. Both have their place; you can't advance as a reader (as you point out) if you continue to be dependent on phonics, but you can't leverage years of experience with the English language unless you use phonics. A mixed approach is highly effective.
One teacher is worth infinitely more than 20 computers.
Yes. Let me suggest an analogy...one combat soldier costs about as much as 20 rifles and ammunition loads. But would you rather have 20 soldiers with rifles, ammo, and grenades, or 21 soldiers? Weapon systems force multipliers - they make your people more effective. I would suggest that the same is true of teachers and computers.
COMPUTERS ARE NOT TEACHERS, period.
They are also not typists, but they make typists more effective. They are not accountants, but they make accountants more effective. They are not lawyers, but they make lawyers more effective. They are not network administrators, but they make the admins more effective (ever pore through a stack of hardcopy logs? Ever do a search for a single IP address?)You see my point?
My point was not that computers could replace teachers (they can't), but that they were a cost-effective method of augmenting existing teachers. A teacher with several computers can accomplish more than a teacher alone. 1 teacher + 4 computers = 5 threads of instruction. You couldn't get a teachers aide for the cost of 4 computers (amortize over three years).
teachers are paid way too little
No offense, but I disagree. I believe that most teachers are paid...exactly what they're worth. I observed very little excellence in the teachers I've taught with (I did mention I'm a former teacher, right?) Many taught because they got summers off, or they weren't good enough to do anything else, or they didn't have the ambition or imagination to do anything else - the only careers they saw growing up were teaching and whatever their parents did. Of course, many teach for love of the students and the subject; sadly, these are a minority. I left teaching and am making more now, five years later, than I ever could have as a teacher - and I would have needed three more years of school and 25 years of experience to max out the pay scale and come close to what I'm making now. I think if pay scales were higher, the schools would be able to weed out the poor-quality teachers and retain better ones. I don't include myself in the latter category, BTW; I was a lousy teacher - I had no classroom control (ie discipline) skills and didn't want to make a go of it after the first year.
As for your earthquake example...I'd estimate that it'd take an entire class period to do one or two simulations. We spent half an hour on it and did about six. We had the seismograph readings on screen. We had to measure the different types of waves, determine when they arrived, and calculate the distance from that station to the epicenter. We didn't need manual dexterity; the computer did the plotting. We didn't need good arithmetic skills; the computer did the calculations (there are pros and cons to this, I'll grant, but it can be useful to permit the person who is lousy at math to be successful at something else; success at science can lead to a love of science which can lead to motivation to learn the math that science requires, while frustration in math AND science produces nothing). We were able to focus on the objective: studying how seismologists pinpoint earthquakes. Furthermore, the computer was able to generate a unique problem for each student, so it was impossible to copy off of someone else; this had the side benefit that no one was pressured to give someone else the answer. Overall, I'd have to conclude that it was an effective use of the technology, and it was better than the low-tech way of doing it. You really should trust my opinion on this, because I was there and you weren't.
Yup. (More bragging ahead). I had my son adding at three, and I'd started to teach him phonics when I re-evaluated what I was doing. I don't believe that you learn everything you need to know in school; they teach you reading, writing, arithmetic, and some other stuff, but there are other important things to learn. I decided to concentrate on those other things. I did not want him to be too far ahead of other students and get bored; I had that problem. School was easy for me, and thus it was not good preparation for life, which is not easy. I decided that it would be easy enough for him anyway without my adding to his problems.
On the other hand, if we'd decided
But also don't think the computer is some magic cure to the ills of our educational system
Correct. However, let me take an analogy from carpentry. Circular saws don't build houses. Pneumatic nailers do not build houses. They make it much easier and faster to do so, though. Neither will make up for a stupid carpenter; in fact, they can make the final product worse.
Computers are a TOOL, a useful and powerful one. They are not a magic fixall and we should not put them in schools because we think they are. But neither should we remove them from schools, or prevent their deployment there, because we know they are not magic fixalls.
Um yourself. Perahsp you missed the point of my example? Or do you know some magical way by which libraries help kids who don't know what sound "k" makes? :)
Moving on to your point, though - pacing older kids. I'd assume that you, like I, learned a lot by reading books from libraries, and that the reading and fun of learning was motivation enough. News flash - not everyone is like you and me. How do you motivate someone to learn who does not have an intrinsic desire to learn? How do you reward them for learning? Computer games are a great way. There was once a little girl (about 9, I think) who created a Logo program to make a very complicated geometric figure. It took her a while to make it look just the way she wanted. A visitor asked her what she thought of math class. "I hate math," she replied, while the turtle went through its geometric gyrations. She thought she was playing with an immense toy; she had no idea that she was learning "math" - but she was.
The equipment was not damaged, just your ability to see what you expect in both scenarios.
So you experience no financial harm if I erase every bit on your hard drives, CD-ROMs, DVDs, floppies, and video tapes? Yes, a good disaster recovery plan will incorporate backups to restore data, but it takes time. Here's the equation:
Loss of data = loss of time = loss of money
For computer, yes, it's trivial compared to a building. For millions it can be comparable.
I would further suggest that the cost of recreating a software installation and configuration, as well as restoration of data, will be comparable to the cost of setting up the system in the first place - maybe a little more, maybe a little less, but in the same ballpark. I think the same is true of rebuilding a building. There is no permanent damage to the computer - granted. But there is no permanent damage to the building when you blow a hole in the side, either - the damage can be repaired. Just because the damage is "virtual" rather than physical doesn't make it any less costly. And frankly, the only two types of damage suffered in a terrorist attack are human suffering/death financial losses. I fail to see why wiping 1 million hard drives is necessarily qualitatively different from demolishing one building.
The written language is considered the "high language".
:)
But we're discussing voice recognition...I'm talking not simply about word choice, grammar, and other issues that are common to both spoken and written language. I'm referring to how phonemes are pronounced. For example, my cousin, a southerner, pronounces "are" and "air" the same, although he knows how to write them and use them. He is well-educated, and writes with great skill, but his pronunciation differs from mine. A system trained to recognize my accent would choke on his.
That said, I yield to your obviously superior experience in the matter of German language education.
Terrorism doesn't necessarily imply killing people. The classical terrorist (ie, the one that exists mainly in poli-sci courses) blows up generators, water plants, radio towers, etc in an effort to destroy the public's trust in the government's ability to protect them. Someone who targets civilian infrastructure meets the threshold for being a terrorists. There's obviously a gradation; those who target large numbers of civilians are also terrorists (duh) but that doesn't mean that someone who blows up an empty building isn't a terrorist.
:) I'll grant that most costs are overrated.
Furthermore, I would argue that you don't need to have political objectives to be classified as a terrorist. If I blew up a generator station because I think it'd be cool to see, I think it would be valid to classify me as a terrorist. This gets kind of tricky, because it'd be easy to categorize an arsonist as a terrorist, or a vandal, but I digress.
Anyway, the obvious analogy is that someone who targets information infrastructure (ie worm writers targeting email servers) is a terrorist. And don't argue that the analogy doesn't hold simply because there's no no permanent damage simply because it can be repaired. That's like arguing pulverizing every cubic inch of a building isn't permanent damage because it can be rebuilt. Don't argue that there's no real costs associated with worm attacks - do you think net admins work for free? (If so, I've got a job for you
Counterpoint - if blowing up a building is terrorism, why not burning it down? Should arson be considered terrorism? What about insurance fraud - if I burn down my old barn for the insurance money am I a terrorist? What about vandals? There's a continuum of crimes against property, as well as crimes against people; where do we put "terrorism" on that continuum? We must be cautious in verbiage used to define "terrorism"
in the law, lest the crime be placed further down the continuum than we want.
Counter-counter-point - arsonists rarely burn down every building on the internet; worm-writers at the very least have in their minds the idea that they could take out every email server on the internet (basically a DOS attack) or every workstation with the targeted OS(s) by wiping their drives after re-launching.
C
Amazing, isn't it, how many Linux projects are simply clones of existing Microsoft software.
Need a word processor? Get a Word clone. Need a flowchart tool? Get a Visio clone. Need a vector illustrator? Get an Illustrator clone.
Interesting non-sequitur. Word is the only Microsoft product. Visio was fully developed and owned its market share; Microsoft couldn't compete, so they bought it. Illustrator is not an MS product, unless they've bought Adobe when I wasn't looking.
I would point out that if you want to take over the desktop market, you've got to make it easy for people, and that seems to entail cloning the market-leading software packages. Never mind the fact that for programming and serving information there's no MS software to emulate, since Unix pretty much rules there...
Ah, yes...the MSNBCNN disease...