It has nothing to do with a lack of appreciation for electro-nics, but rather a grasp of why monopoly is one of the better board games for children. I know most will think i am just being silly, but there are a number of skills taught in the paper money monopoly, things like organizing money, budgeting money, protecting money, etc. Many of these skill are not taught with a cash card. Children are not even going to have as much fun with a cash card given there is not concrete representation to signify a variable about of money, just a single card that could mean 0-1000000000000 dollars.
pretty much monopoly is just about perfect. The changing of the board does not affect it significantly. But if the money is gone, there is really no inherent benefit of monopoly over any other random game.
37 percent of the surveyed blogs were reporting on their personal life, 11 percent on political matters, 7 percent on entertainment, and 6 percent on sports
While newspapers are not so skewed to personal life, I would say that this is not unlike the distribution of the average newspaper, which has a news section, a sports sections, and entertainment section, a business section, along with editorial.
The bulk of any newspaper is sports and other entertainment. Usually quite a bit of space is devoted to what are essentially the inane personal movements of people who really don't matter, for some people think they do. The thing is i think most people at a newspaper would consider themselves journalists, even it all they did was report on what Missy Elliot had for dinner last night.
If it is indeed true that 6% of the bloggers are dealing with hard news, and 11% are detailing political points of view, that is a some improvement over newspapers in which 90% if the non-ad paper is consumed with sport scores, celebrity tidbits, local gossip, and pointless editorials. Perhaps the newspaper will have better reporting, but on still has to wade through a lot of crap to find it.
The article seems to decry the use of automated tools to find these flaws. The question to be asked then is, if the automated tools are so easy to use, why do software developers not use them to find flaws?
It is somehow considered "unfair" to use to these tools? Does MS already know of the flaws found by these tools and just chosen not to fix them? Do the OO.org people run these tools agsinst the OO.org suite.
From a practicle point of view, these tools just seem like regression test. Test that we all know we should run, but few take the time to so do. And as solftware developers not running regression tests really puts the responsibility of the falws in the developers lap, not QA or the user.
Precisely. The analogy and review is fatally flawed.
One tends to pay more for a camera to gain improved optics. I know some will go for higher digital zoom, or pure megpaixels, but those are not the ones that are going to necessarily going to understand anything other than a 32X on the memory card. So for quality, the memory card is not going matter. The only time the card will matter is when taking a rapid sequence of pictures,and even then the limit is often camera based, i.e how quickly it can compress the data. OTOH, for raw format a faster card does seem to matter.
Reverse engineering is always ok. Very little happens in technology without a community of development, some of which is poaching other peoples idea. We all like out cheap PCs, which is largely due to the effort of Compaq, and to a lesser extent MS. We all like Linux and BSD, which is in a way a reverse engineered version of Unix, except that the specs were largely published. We all like to use various messenging service, which is only possible because the protocols were discovered. We all like cheap replacement parts for our cars, which are only possible when unauthorized third parties are allowed to produce the parts. Same for printer refills.
Perhaps this has caused skype some problems. Oh well, it happens. Perhaps this has caused Skype users some issue with security. Well, if reverse engineering can break security,then that is what is called bad security. If they want to interface with Skype, that is as good wanting the messaging services to interface. If they want to block it, as much as we may not understand, i think that soveriegnty is something everyone can agree upon. After all, you do not give keys to your house to just anyone, or let just anyone put stuff on you lawn.
Reverse engineer, especially in software, is what is going to save this generation of computing technology. Can you imagine how much a PC would be if Dell did not have support MS 40% profit margin, if Dell were truly free to put whatever software it wished on the computer and charge for the privilege? This will happen when MS is forced to standardize, as is happening with the EU case, and a truly compatible WIndows runtime is present.
Cross contamination
on
Growing Insulin
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Despite what the labs says, we have seen probable cases of cross contamination between licensed seeds and unlicensed seeds. This has lead to hybrid plant, which are not necessarily a problem, and harassment of farmer who have been found in possession of the seeds, harassment because the guilt is assumed.
So one wonders what will happen when 16000 acres of this stuff planted around the world. If cross contamination does occur, will the safe for average human consumption? Will the farmer's be harrased if the licensed seeds or plants are on thier properties?
Certainly like GM food, GM plant for medicine production is a great advancement. I just worry about these things getting into the wild, since the GM companies have had such a devil may care attitude in the past. Despite the statement of work for the public good, profits never seem to be cut in a effort to make the product safer, or the distribution widespread.
I would wager that this vehicle is more like a Lotus Elise, or a Corvette, or even a S2000, all of which can be had for under 50K. Any performance benefits over those sports cars can be attributed to the natural advantage of this car, namely that you can go from 0-60 without switching gears, and it is easier to get it perfectly balanced without an engine. Anyway, The true test of a sports cars, as opposed to just a fast car, is the handling, which was not mentioned in review. Without proper handling, it becomes a Mustang at 30K.
Which is to say we are still in the same world, in which low volumes and other issues cause electric cars to be 50%-100$ higher than traditional cars. All that seems to have happened here is that an electric car has been targeted to the high end market and priced accordingly. It is kind of like taking the hummer, putting a cheap truck base on it, calling it an H2, and pretending that it still has the dubious value of the original.
Oh well, I suppose if they can build a sedan for 35K I would be impressed. We would also have to look at maintenance cost of the vehicle, which would be dominated by the battery replacement. A sports car car easily run 20 cents/mile in maintenance. Knowing that laptop batteries can only handle a couple hundred charge cycles, one can image where the long term maintenance cost could approach three or four time that amount.
I wish we had electric cars. I think the technology is there, and the pricing could be reasonable. But even companies that could be using the electric car to revive themselves, for instance Mazda and Ford, still seem to be married to the antiquated internal combustion engine.
Why does MS sound like some gangster in an old movie. Can't you just see Ballmer in a dim, smokey room telling his thugs "uh, Page 'as taken my whos for the last time. He is stealing food from my family, and ain't no one gonna get away with dat. Go ice him now. I want him swimmin with fishes."
This is a good and interesting analysis, and really demonstrates the physics that most people do not understand. For example, not everything can be blamed on the vehicle. The vehicle is what it is, and the vehicle by itself is not necessarily good or bad. Rather, it is the application of the vehicle that is good or bad. Now the american manufacturers have a good bit of bad on their side as they built many vehicles that do not perform well at high speeds or in the city, but the owners have to take some responsibility and not just whine all the time about how high gas is.
For instance, when driving one has to impart some amount of KE into the car. KE is mv^2. What this means is that a car going 85mph has twice twice the KE as a car going 60mph . Now, if a car is light, like a roadster at 2200 lbs, one could go 85 and not gain any more than a Pilot going 60. And yet every day I see these huge cars going 90 mph, while I am going 70, and all these people complaining about gas consumption? It makes no sense. If they were truly concerned, they would go slower than me!
I really applaud this guy. He really tried to maximize a solution using reasonable constraints. If everyone did the same, instead of whining that they are being crunched by the price of gas, we would be in a much better place.
His recommendations are good. Accelerate slowly, especially if you have a massive car. Any physics or engineering person knows how much this helps in energy expenditure. Keep tires inflated well, and if you car came with improper tires, buy new one. You SUV is not a car, and should not drive like one. Don't drive fast, especially if you make frequent stops. The energy profile will be against you. This is why hybrids are do good for the city. Do not drive fast period. Not only does it waste gas, but if imperils all other drivers.
The day that I see most SUVs in the right two lanes, going 5-10 miles under the speed limit, is the day I believe that gas prices are too high. Right now gas prices are just inconvenient.
There are a couple different variable here. First, powerpoint allows people to do computer based presentations that otherwise couldn't. Powerpoint also automates the bells and whistles so people feel powerful. I personally feel that powerpoint allows us to produce the whiz bang presentations that are useful when we have no useful content, which could be a good or bad thing. I think many people are addicted to it, in the same way they are to the style control in Outlook.
This leads to the second variable, that the web does not give you the control of the presentation. In fact one big problem we had with the web, pre-css, was that the people who wanted to exactly control the presentation of the content developed all these hacks that did real harm to the medium. A lot of people will freak if te presentation is even slightly changed, mostly because the content does not support the presentation. Even with web design tools, the effects are not as interesting or rendered as predictably. The lack of control can make people feel weak.
As a side problem, if the presentation is not public, then putting it on a web server might not be the brightest thing to do.
Just to be clear, I know that there were useless presentation prior to powerpoint. I had to sit though many. OTOH, there was no delusion that somehow a few animations made a boring presentation more intersing.
This is no different than reading something anywhere and then quoting it as fact. The only difference is that wikipedia is not static, and so the errors can change from minute to minute. Therefore this is not a problem with open content, but a problem with dynamic open content.
All of this can be easily solved by fact checking before the distribution of a static content.
I do understand the problem. I can be careless. But when I am I do not blame my carelessness on someone else.
This is the vendor party line, and this is why I disagree with it.
First, this process does not protect the user, it is merely a PR thing for the vendor. While I feel for the vendor, wish to give them adequate time to correct the problem, history tells us that this sympathy backfires. Here is the normal drill. If a venerability gets reported, but there is no exploit "in the wild", then the venerability gets less priority. This is fine because the exploitable code needs to fixed first. But then later on the bug that was ignored does have an exploit. Well then that bug is put to the top of this list, and even though it may have knonw for ages, the vendor gets ages more to fix it. All the while the user is at uneccesary risk.
As a customer the product cycle should take my convenience into account, at least as far as I willing to pay for it. And since MS has margins approaching 40%,and Apple has margins over 20%, I certainly think we are paying enough to both companies not to have to inconvenience ourselves because they can't get to work.
Here is the second thing. The issue either has an exploit or it doesn't. If it has an exploit, then the customer deserves to know so they can protect against it, and often that requires some level of detail. If it makes the problem public, then that is a good thing because then the scrip kiddeies will exploit it, and it will be more of a problem, so then it will be fixed. Instead of having months of small problems, we will simply have a short time of big problems. If the bug has no exploit, then nothing is lost. However, knowing the bug is known does put pressure on the vendor to fix the issue.
As i say, delaying publication is merely to protect the vendor, and does nothing to help the customer. As has been mentioned here often, a properly secured and updated system in any OS is relatively safe. But if we are going to blame the users, then the users must know what the exploits are than we need to defend against. If the exploits are secret, then we are back to the situation where the vendors are withholding material information, and they become liable. It is a very similar situation to the pinto.
One thing that people tend to do is take first approximations and limited domain fits and try to expand them to be a rule of life, the universe, and everything. Then when you try to explain that the chicken is not in fact spherical, they get really mad and call you a liar.
The thing we seem to know from things like process control, is that it takes a finite amount overhead to manage any group, and a very finite amount of resources to bring an outsider into a group. This is Brookes; Law, that says bringing more people onto a late project will only make it later. We see this action around us right now.
What I find most fascinating is how easily people will allow themselves to be deluded by a model, even though the reality is all around them. If we look at something like graph theory we see certain features. For instance, no one has an extremely large number of close friends. Most of us have what can be considered concentric circles of people we know, each group out is usually bigger, but more loosely connected. Communicating with the outer circles are very inefficient. Business are arranged the same way.I think what confused people is that the internet, like the telephone, made geographic distances less important, so it is easier to keep up communications with someone across the world, but that does not mean that the person's ability to relate has been increased.
Additionally, not everyone, or everything, can competently complete all tasks, and not all processes can be factored to take advantage of all resources. At some point one is paying for overhead that does not deliver any added efficiency. I think this is what we are seeing in many international corporations. The corporation supports non-productive real estate, managers, IT, which forces the productive parts of the company to work harder and be less responsive to market forces.
I would say that that a network initially has a n^2 benefit, but quickly transitions to nlog(n). This is not so. If anything cause the dot com crash, it was not understanding that at some point the overhead begins to be the dominant factor, and efficiency is lost.
The fact that a cow opposes steak houses does not change the fact that the excess of red meat that is served in such places has been repeatedly shown to be not so good for the human body. In other words, it may be selfserving(ha) to want to alter the food choices in the place, but that does not necessarily imply it is the wrong thing to do. After all, enlightened self interest is the basis of the American way.
As far the other points, the teaching styes you mentioned are already in wide use at schools. Bus trips of an hour are only an issue at higher grade levels or rural or suburban schools, which merely prepares them for a commute to work. Most kids in the city have an elementary school with in mile or so of them. Time is seldom an issue, although with budget cuts transportation can be.
As far as socialization is concerned, what are the two most important work skills? One, waking up in the morning, getting ready, and being on time to work. I have worked at home, and worked far away. I have worked odd shifts. I thank the schools for preparing me for the most difficult task of getting to work on time. Skill number two is working thing out in peaceful ways, even with people who are not peaceful, thus avoiding the disgruntled employee. Remember, the kid you keep at home, and never teach how to control themselves, may be the person rampaging through the plant with a shotgun in a few years.
Here is the confusing thing. We know a government is not of magical competency. It is run by regular people, with regular problems, and regular intelligence. Keeping secrets is a difficult thing if more than one person knows that secret. Inevitable someone is going to spill the beans, either accidently or on purpose.
In fact keeping a secret requires a large scale logistics and high level processing. Despite the la la land that most conspiracy theorists live in, it is not just a simple matter of killing everyone involved, especially for a government project. Even if no hard evidence is found, there will always be enough circumstantial evidence to piece the program together.
So given these fact, why would it be easier to keep a secret coverup secret than sending men to the moon. Furthermore, since it was a space race, why would the russians allow the fabrication. For such a program, involving thousands of people, would they not be able to get one mole into the program?
It is funny that people who routinely call the government incompetent attribute characteristics that require the utmost level of competence.
One big reason to question this is because it sounds like the school district is subsidizing the cost of home schooling. Now, some might say that if a person pays taxes, and their child does not go to a public school, then it is only fair to get a rebate to educate their child. But that assumes taxes are paid in exchange for service, which is largely untrue. For example, with that logic, if I do not have children, then I should receive a rebate of those taxes because I do not use the service. No, taxes are used to put programs into effect that are deemed necessary for the good of the country. This is why we pay taxes used to kill people even if we believe killing people is wrong.
The quality of education is another big issue. If a parent chooses to homeschool a child, and goes through the hurdles, then as a society we must respect that choice, and given that the parent has shown some responsibility, the chances are good the education will be adequate. But what about the parent that is just told their kid no longer has to go to school? Is that parent going to work for 7 hours to keep the kid on task? Is that parent going to teach organizational skill. Is that parent going to make sure the kid goes to the library once a week, differentiate problem concepts, learns how to eat at a table? One reason homeschooling has become so popular is that schools increasingly have to teach much more than content, and parents would rather teach those other things themselves. The one benefit of this program is that the child will be subject to NCLB, as opposed to if he or she was at a private or home school.
As this program moves to higher grades, the problems increase. We are already seeing schools setup specifically to manufacture credit for athletes, thus denying them their socially guaranteed education. Todays NYT reported that this practice even has formally infected colleges, as if that is a surprise. There are other kids that the school would want to educate a home, kids that often would do much better with the structure at school. Inevitable this program will be used to move certain students out of the school system.
Virtual schooling will happen, and this experiment will be widely watched. It is not just about saving teaching jobs. It is about making sure that public education does not become more useless than it is. There are innovation within the school that can reduce costs while still allowing teachers to pay adequate attention to students. Likewise there are kids that might do better or equally well at home. However, history tells us that much of the innovation over the past 40 years has been to reverse Brown.
Now, there are currently no unpatched remote exploits or program-runs-crap-by-itself bugs I'm aware of
This is the situation we find ourselves in on most popular OS and broswers. There are no simple ways to remotely install software without at least the user indirectly knowing about it. This is an improvement. As you say, it is now a social problem where someone has to click a link on some spam email. So it is a socail problem. Note, however, that it might be better if the user had to click a link, accept a box that accepted the download, and then another that accepted the install. This seems to be what MS Vista does, and we will see how that goes.
All that aside, the notion that there is not existing problem does not mean that there will no be a future problem. After all, the past problems have largely been caused by well meaning developers trying to gain a market advantage, often by making the user a more attractive target for advertisers or otherwise making it easier to extract money or time from the user. Though we have reached a reasonable medium at the moment, there is every reason to believe this stasis will be broken at some point in future, proabably in 6-12 months, and a significant opportunity will present itself. When that oppotunity does present itself, this rootkit will be ready.
Of course it is only free on the PC. By releasing the virtualization free, they are playing the same game they did with the browser. Insure that MS WIndows is always the base of the PC. There is a big risk with virtualization that some other OS will be the base, and MS Windows will only run as a virtual system, as is happening on the Intel Mac.
From the looks of it, I would guess that MS is going to the same thing they did with VFP. First, move the interesting bits to a new products, as they have already effectively done with VPC, and then end support on the competing platform.
If virtualization is really the future, I cannot see why people would put up with all the extra crap in MS Windows, when all they need is a base OS on which to virtualize. Wouldn't a costumized *nix be better at the bottom, wih MS Windows only running as needed? I mean you are not going to playing games at the server level, are you?
One of the problems with being a global mega corporation in this well connected post-nafta, post-EU, post-APEC world is that it is no longer suffecient to merely worry about the advertising effect in one region. Any piece of advertising, any action whatever, is likely to leak worldwide very quickly. The very things that make the international mega corporation possible is the thing that makes the inadvertant blunders escalate to international levels.
As many will quickly realize, this makes the advertising of the international mega corportation very banal. Which is only to be expected because in order to market to such a disparate group, many of the products must also be banal. But that is the compromise. In order to support the overhead and ineffeciencies inherent in the mega-corporation, a company like sony has to sell to nearly every person in the developed world. Sony's success depend on not pissing any of us off too much, so we will at least buyt something. And at least some of the products have to be generic enough so we can buy it. This does not mean that risks cannot be taken, but they must be careful.
Unlike many here, Sony seems to realize this and took the appropriate action. It is unlikely that any harm was intended. They saw an international problem, and solved it. Good for them. As far as those who feel sorry for sony, it is thier choice. If they were local, they would not have to deal with the international community. But they want the money, so they must make the deals, and live with the consequences.
Not all control is bad. For example, when you go to the local cineplex, do you want to see the movie that everyone else is seeing, or do you want the cineplex edit. For example, the cineplex might not want to show any movie over 100 minutes. Star wars has to be cut by 21 or 25 minutes.
Some control is to control the quality of the product to the consumer. It is when this is overstepped that there is a problem. Again, when you buy a video do you want to have to read every video to see what editing is done. We already has this issue, and it forms a barrier to effecient commerce.
The issue is when a product is advertised as a certain thing, for instance a certain movie by a certain director starring certain people, or a certain handbag, or a certain car, we as consumers must have some confidence that the product is as advertised. Simply making it Star War instead of Star Wars, or Prata instead of Prada, or Fard instead of Ford may not be enough. I cannot believe I am taking this side, but I think this is where the issue is. The films that these people are hacking are obvious of some worth because no one is going to spend $10 on a CDR that is crap. So the pirates^w, i mean editors are basing thier income on the work of someone else, and only added a miniscule amount of added value. If there were a glut of quality appropriate entertainment, it seems that they would set up a production house and make it.
Since this has somewhat become an issue of religion, let me add a counter example. Let's say I went to this site and linked to all the sermons. The reaons for this was that I wanted to help them get listeners by arranging the sermons differently, say by content of racism, sexism, violence, hatred, and created a more attractive design. I propererly attributed the sermons to the person and back to the original site. However, for some sermon I also supply several different versions, to appeal to other constiuencies. In some I bleep out the word god. In others I might replace with another discriptor, such as universal power, dictator, master, lord, oppressor. Now, I link and maybe supply. the orignal, I clearly mark the changes, and I clearly supply all attributions. Do anyone think this is legitimate? I am not even charging. I am just editing someone elses words, and, in some cases, making them say something they never intended. Certainly covered under fair use.
I think this is like the perpetual motion machine. Everyone hopes they can circumvent the laws of the universe and create profit from nothing. The dot com philosophy was the unoriginal "we make up for in sales what we don't make in profit." Enron was an outshoot of this, and eventually though it had "sales", it ran out of money. The jury is still out on Amazon. It is scary to think that each order steals a few cents from investors.
Apple on the other hand is so clearly old line. Make quality and useful products targeted to an audience willing to pay for the products. Charge enough for the product to create a good profit. Give good service before, during, and after the sale. Charge enough so that at the end one has enough to pay for fixed costs, manufactureing, service, overhead, and research and development. Do not be afraid to change the product to meet demands, and throw in a bit of flash. This probably had not changed since Ford innovated the car in on color Black, with evolved into the mustang of many colors. I think the old Ford put some big dogs out of bussiness as well.
I understand what the article is saying, but the article is talking about established firm. Apple, as an established firm, did exactly what it was supposed to do. That is fixed itself. Apple has been, and is, a major manufacturer of consumer and proffesional intergrated computer solution. So is Dell. MS only supplies software. Apple is and will continue to be, at least in the near future, a to manufacuturer of high tech solutions. The have proven that they will adjust to meet new needs, just as old bussiness says they should. The article cites IBM, which also did what it needed to do. Refocus on the customer, develop customer oriented products that provided real value. They talk about how the iPod is unique, but how many new catagories of product did IBM help create? The selectric, the PC, SQL, GML, etc.
It is ludicrous to think that anything other than good products or services matter, or that creating new products is something new. IBM exists because it started creating products and focused on customers.
As far as google, that is a story yet to be wrote. They have an Enron like grasp on the ad market, unregulated, not transparent, unpredicatable. The success may be last remant of the dot com boom, or they may be able to leverage advertisers in the same way that TV did. If they are succesful, it will be nothing but bussiness as usual. Create a product, namely adwords, charge enough for it to generate a profit, and use some of the cash to innovate.
I think what happened, especially in the 70's and 80's, was the sense of entitlement of the big corporations. That somehow Americans were obligated to purchase the products no matter how horrible they were. In a perverse way, they were applying the soviet model to capitalism, where the people had to buy what they state supplied, except in out case capatilism provided such an oversupply that we had the illusion of choice. This was illustated with the government bailout of chrysler. In fact, some of the few comapnies that haven't leared thier lesson are in the auto industry. Chrsyler has so given up and is running ads featuring it German owner. In the end what we may be seeing is not new rules of bussiness, but the return to the basics. Make a product, sell a product at a fair price, and realize the consumer is the boss.
The holdup, he says, is due to constant revisions due to beta tester feedback
He continues: It is not our fault, the beta testers keep causing problems, which we then have to fix.
One wonders how all the other software developers manage to get any product out at all. MS Vista is what, two years late. I can understand them saying that the process is crap and we have to retrofit and refactor to make things work. Or the EU requirements mean we actually, for the first time, understand the API. But blaming delays on beta-test? This software was overdue long before the beta testers hit it.
The sad thing is that MS had some ability to produce in the 90's. They wrote some of the best books in the industry. In the span of 10 years they have gotten to the point when they can't even push out an OS, even when all the major features have been removed. Pitiful.
Repeat after me. Wikipedia is not an encyclopaedia. It is not brittanica. In some ways it may be better than brittanica, but it is a different beast. Comparing the two is like comparing the britannica and the NYT. It should not be done. One is semi-static repository of the consensus best knowledge at the time of publication, the other is a snapshot of what people think is true at the moment.
The only problem is that people do not have the ability to filter or look for sources of confimation. For instance if Fox news says that Stalin is still alive and about to launch a secret arsenal of nuclear missles, many would believe it. It is the same thing with Wikipedea, and google just makes it worse. If enough people say it, and enough people link to it, then the truly stupid will believe it without any physical evidence.
As far as I know, wikipedia has already set procedures to limit these edit wars. I don't see what else can be done. Wikipedia does not set itself up as the arbiter of all truths. Probably answers.com need to do a better job of stating the content from wikipedia is heresay. But Ken Lay committing suicide? That is what we all think. I am no conspiracy theorist, but since he was never sentenced he is not a criminal. His death probably saved his hiers from relative poverty. it is very convinent. Sometimes peopl in ill health just will themselves to die.
You see, I just wrote something. Don't make it true. It is not my fault if some daft people believe it. Perhpas you do believe it is my fault, and perhaps, in the words of Eminem, you belive I can "load a gun up for you, and cock it too," just with the magic of mind. Boo!
It seems that if a company makes something that is simple and works, it sells. MS had much success when it made an OS that just worked, and only got into trouble when it started added random features instead of targeted functionility. The xBox, a simple console, has some significant success. It is unclear whether they can once again take the conservative approach to software and hardware that has proven so benificial. MS Vista is in trouble because everthing is just thrown in. Everyone is going to have major issues with the consoles because they are trying to use them to win the livingroom, instead of just the gameroom.
From the description it sounds like this device is just going to be a revamped oragami with a xBox OS. We have yet to a viable Oragami. Even with MS Cell phones are not taking the market by storm. I actually think MS has a good chance of wining the music player market if it leverages the xBox platform instead of MS Windows. I realize that it will hard not to use the desktop monopoly to push the product, but do we really want a game/music machine with outllook?
as they no long have to build a new landfill just for AOL cds and packaging. As least with the disks I could use them. How much more would CD-RW have cost?
Slashdot Mirror
pretty much monopoly is just about perfect. The changing of the board does not affect it significantly. But if the money is gone, there is really no inherent benefit of monopoly over any other random game.
While newspapers are not so skewed to personal life, I would say that this is not unlike the distribution of the average newspaper, which has a news section, a sports sections, and entertainment section, a business section, along with editorial.
The bulk of any newspaper is sports and other entertainment. Usually quite a bit of space is devoted to what are essentially the inane personal movements of people who really don't matter, for some people think they do. The thing is i think most people at a newspaper would consider themselves journalists, even it all they did was report on what Missy Elliot had for dinner last night.
If it is indeed true that 6% of the bloggers are dealing with hard news, and 11% are detailing political points of view, that is a some improvement over newspapers in which 90% if the non-ad paper is consumed with sport scores, celebrity tidbits, local gossip, and pointless editorials. Perhaps the newspaper will have better reporting, but on still has to wade through a lot of crap to find it.
It is somehow considered "unfair" to use to these tools? Does MS already know of the flaws found by these tools and just chosen not to fix them? Do the OO.org people run these tools agsinst the OO.org suite.
From a practicle point of view, these tools just seem like regression test. Test that we all know we should run, but few take the time to so do. And as solftware developers not running regression tests really puts the responsibility of the falws in the developers lap, not QA or the user.
One tends to pay more for a camera to gain improved optics. I know some will go for higher digital zoom, or pure megpaixels, but those are not the ones that are going to necessarily going to understand anything other than a 32X on the memory card. So for quality, the memory card is not going matter. The only time the card will matter is when taking a rapid sequence of pictures,and even then the limit is often camera based, i.e how quickly it can compress the data. OTOH, for raw format a faster card does seem to matter.
Perhaps this has caused skype some problems. Oh well, it happens. Perhaps this has caused Skype users some issue with security. Well, if reverse engineering can break security,then that is what is called bad security. If they want to interface with Skype, that is as good wanting the messaging services to interface. If they want to block it, as much as we may not understand, i think that soveriegnty is something everyone can agree upon. After all, you do not give keys to your house to just anyone, or let just anyone put stuff on you lawn.
Reverse engineer, especially in software, is what is going to save this generation of computing technology. Can you imagine how much a PC would be if Dell did not have support MS 40% profit margin, if Dell were truly free to put whatever software it wished on the computer and charge for the privilege? This will happen when MS is forced to standardize, as is happening with the EU case, and a truly compatible WIndows runtime is present.
Certainly like GM food, GM plant for medicine production is a great advancement. I just worry about these things getting into the wild, since the GM companies have had such a devil may care attitude in the past. Despite the statement of work for the public good, profits never seem to be cut in a effort to make the product safer, or the distribution widespread.
Which is to say we are still in the same world, in which low volumes and other issues cause electric cars to be 50%-100$ higher than traditional cars. All that seems to have happened here is that an electric car has been targeted to the high end market and priced accordingly. It is kind of like taking the hummer, putting a cheap truck base on it, calling it an H2, and pretending that it still has the dubious value of the original.
Oh well, I suppose if they can build a sedan for 35K I would be impressed. We would also have to look at maintenance cost of the vehicle, which would be dominated by the battery replacement. A sports car car easily run 20 cents/mile in maintenance. Knowing that laptop batteries can only handle a couple hundred charge cycles, one can image where the long term maintenance cost could approach three or four time that amount.
I wish we had electric cars. I think the technology is there, and the pricing could be reasonable. But even companies that could be using the electric car to revive themselves, for instance Mazda and Ford, still seem to be married to the antiquated internal combustion engine.
Why does MS sound like some gangster in an old movie. Can't you just see Ballmer in a dim, smokey room telling his thugs "uh, Page 'as taken my whos for the last time. He is stealing food from my family, and ain't no one gonna get away with dat. Go ice him now. I want him swimmin with fishes."
For instance, when driving one has to impart some amount of KE into the car. KE is mv^2. What this means is that a car going 85mph has twice twice the KE as a car going 60mph . Now, if a car is light, like a roadster at 2200 lbs, one could go 85 and not gain any more than a Pilot going 60. And yet every day I see these huge cars going 90 mph, while I am going 70, and all these people complaining about gas consumption? It makes no sense. If they were truly concerned, they would go slower than me!
I really applaud this guy. He really tried to maximize a solution using reasonable constraints. If everyone did the same, instead of whining that they are being crunched by the price of gas, we would be in a much better place.
His recommendations are good. Accelerate slowly, especially if you have a massive car. Any physics or engineering person knows how much this helps in energy expenditure. Keep tires inflated well, and if you car came with improper tires, buy new one. You SUV is not a car, and should not drive like one. Don't drive fast, especially if you make frequent stops. The energy profile will be against you. This is why hybrids are do good for the city. Do not drive fast period. Not only does it waste gas, but if imperils all other drivers.
The day that I see most SUVs in the right two lanes, going 5-10 miles under the speed limit, is the day I believe that gas prices are too high. Right now gas prices are just inconvenient.
This leads to the second variable, that the web does not give you the control of the presentation. In fact one big problem we had with the web, pre-css, was that the people who wanted to exactly control the presentation of the content developed all these hacks that did real harm to the medium. A lot of people will freak if te presentation is even slightly changed, mostly because the content does not support the presentation. Even with web design tools, the effects are not as interesting or rendered as predictably. The lack of control can make people feel weak.
As a side problem, if the presentation is not public, then putting it on a web server might not be the brightest thing to do.
Just to be clear, I know that there were useless presentation prior to powerpoint. I had to sit though many. OTOH, there was no delusion that somehow a few animations made a boring presentation more intersing.
All of this can be easily solved by fact checking before the distribution of a static content.
I do understand the problem. I can be careless. But when I am I do not blame my carelessness on someone else.
First, this process does not protect the user, it is merely a PR thing for the vendor. While I feel for the vendor, wish to give them adequate time to correct the problem, history tells us that this sympathy backfires. Here is the normal drill. If a venerability gets reported, but there is no exploit "in the wild", then the venerability gets less priority. This is fine because the exploitable code needs to fixed first. But then later on the bug that was ignored does have an exploit. Well then that bug is put to the top of this list, and even though it may have knonw for ages, the vendor gets ages more to fix it. All the while the user is at uneccesary risk.
As a customer the product cycle should take my convenience into account, at least as far as I willing to pay for it. And since MS has margins approaching 40%,and Apple has margins over 20%, I certainly think we are paying enough to both companies not to have to inconvenience ourselves because they can't get to work.
Here is the second thing. The issue either has an exploit or it doesn't. If it has an exploit, then the customer deserves to know so they can protect against it, and often that requires some level of detail. If it makes the problem public, then that is a good thing because then the scrip kiddeies will exploit it, and it will be more of a problem, so then it will be fixed. Instead of having months of small problems, we will simply have a short time of big problems. If the bug has no exploit, then nothing is lost. However, knowing the bug is known does put pressure on the vendor to fix the issue.
As i say, delaying publication is merely to protect the vendor, and does nothing to help the customer. As has been mentioned here often, a properly secured and updated system in any OS is relatively safe. But if we are going to blame the users, then the users must know what the exploits are than we need to defend against. If the exploits are secret, then we are back to the situation where the vendors are withholding material information, and they become liable. It is a very similar situation to the pinto.
The thing we seem to know from things like process control, is that it takes a finite amount overhead to manage any group, and a very finite amount of resources to bring an outsider into a group. This is Brookes; Law, that says bringing more people onto a late project will only make it later. We see this action around us right now.
What I find most fascinating is how easily people will allow themselves to be deluded by a model, even though the reality is all around them. If we look at something like graph theory we see certain features. For instance, no one has an extremely large number of close friends. Most of us have what can be considered concentric circles of people we know, each group out is usually bigger, but more loosely connected. Communicating with the outer circles are very inefficient. Business are arranged the same way.I think what confused people is that the internet, like the telephone, made geographic distances less important, so it is easier to keep up communications with someone across the world, but that does not mean that the person's ability to relate has been increased.
Additionally, not everyone, or everything, can competently complete all tasks, and not all processes can be factored to take advantage of all resources. At some point one is paying for overhead that does not deliver any added efficiency. I think this is what we are seeing in many international corporations. The corporation supports non-productive real estate, managers, IT, which forces the productive parts of the company to work harder and be less responsive to market forces.
I would say that that a network initially has a n^2 benefit, but quickly transitions to nlog(n). This is not so. If anything cause the dot com crash, it was not understanding that at some point the overhead begins to be the dominant factor, and efficiency is lost.
As far the other points, the teaching styes you mentioned are already in wide use at schools. Bus trips of an hour are only an issue at higher grade levels or rural or suburban schools, which merely prepares them for a commute to work. Most kids in the city have an elementary school with in mile or so of them. Time is seldom an issue, although with budget cuts transportation can be.
As far as socialization is concerned, what are the two most important work skills? One, waking up in the morning, getting ready, and being on time to work. I have worked at home, and worked far away. I have worked odd shifts. I thank the schools for preparing me for the most difficult task of getting to work on time. Skill number two is working thing out in peaceful ways, even with people who are not peaceful, thus avoiding the disgruntled employee. Remember, the kid you keep at home, and never teach how to control themselves, may be the person rampaging through the plant with a shotgun in a few years.
In fact keeping a secret requires a large scale logistics and high level processing. Despite the la la land that most conspiracy theorists live in, it is not just a simple matter of killing everyone involved, especially for a government project. Even if no hard evidence is found, there will always be enough circumstantial evidence to piece the program together.
So given these fact, why would it be easier to keep a secret coverup secret than sending men to the moon. Furthermore, since it was a space race, why would the russians allow the fabrication. For such a program, involving thousands of people, would they not be able to get one mole into the program?
It is funny that people who routinely call the government incompetent attribute characteristics that require the utmost level of competence.
The quality of education is another big issue. If a parent chooses to homeschool a child, and goes through the hurdles, then as a society we must respect that choice, and given that the parent has shown some responsibility, the chances are good the education will be adequate. But what about the parent that is just told their kid no longer has to go to school? Is that parent going to work for 7 hours to keep the kid on task? Is that parent going to teach organizational skill. Is that parent going to make sure the kid goes to the library once a week, differentiate problem concepts, learns how to eat at a table? One reason homeschooling has become so popular is that schools increasingly have to teach much more than content, and parents would rather teach those other things themselves. The one benefit of this program is that the child will be subject to NCLB, as opposed to if he or she was at a private or home school.
As this program moves to higher grades, the problems increase. We are already seeing schools setup specifically to manufacture credit for athletes, thus denying them their socially guaranteed education. Todays NYT reported that this practice even has formally infected colleges, as if that is a surprise. There are other kids that the school would want to educate a home, kids that often would do much better with the structure at school. Inevitable this program will be used to move certain students out of the school system.
Virtual schooling will happen, and this experiment will be widely watched. It is not just about saving teaching jobs. It is about making sure that public education does not become more useless than it is. There are innovation within the school that can reduce costs while still allowing teachers to pay adequate attention to students. Likewise there are kids that might do better or equally well at home. However, history tells us that much of the innovation over the past 40 years has been to reverse Brown.
This is the situation we find ourselves in on most popular OS and broswers. There are no simple ways to remotely install software without at least the user indirectly knowing about it. This is an improvement. As you say, it is now a social problem where someone has to click a link on some spam email. So it is a socail problem. Note, however, that it might be better if the user had to click a link, accept a box that accepted the download, and then another that accepted the install. This seems to be what MS Vista does, and we will see how that goes.
All that aside, the notion that there is not existing problem does not mean that there will no be a future problem. After all, the past problems have largely been caused by well meaning developers trying to gain a market advantage, often by making the user a more attractive target for advertisers or otherwise making it easier to extract money or time from the user. Though we have reached a reasonable medium at the moment, there is every reason to believe this stasis will be broken at some point in future, proabably in 6-12 months, and a significant opportunity will present itself. When that oppotunity does present itself, this rootkit will be ready.
From the looks of it, I would guess that MS is going to the same thing they did with VFP. First, move the interesting bits to a new products, as they have already effectively done with VPC, and then end support on the competing platform.
If virtualization is really the future, I cannot see why people would put up with all the extra crap in MS Windows, when all they need is a base OS on which to virtualize. Wouldn't a costumized *nix be better at the bottom, wih MS Windows only running as needed? I mean you are not going to playing games at the server level, are you?
As many will quickly realize, this makes the advertising of the international mega corportation very banal. Which is only to be expected because in order to market to such a disparate group, many of the products must also be banal. But that is the compromise. In order to support the overhead and ineffeciencies inherent in the mega-corporation, a company like sony has to sell to nearly every person in the developed world. Sony's success depend on not pissing any of us off too much, so we will at least buyt something. And at least some of the products have to be generic enough so we can buy it. This does not mean that risks cannot be taken, but they must be careful.
Unlike many here, Sony seems to realize this and took the appropriate action. It is unlikely that any harm was intended. They saw an international problem, and solved it. Good for them. As far as those who feel sorry for sony, it is thier choice. If they were local, they would not have to deal with the international community. But they want the money, so they must make the deals, and live with the consequences.
Some control is to control the quality of the product to the consumer. It is when this is overstepped that there is a problem. Again, when you buy a video do you want to have to read every video to see what editing is done. We already has this issue, and it forms a barrier to effecient commerce.
The issue is when a product is advertised as a certain thing, for instance a certain movie by a certain director starring certain people, or a certain handbag, or a certain car, we as consumers must have some confidence that the product is as advertised. Simply making it Star War instead of Star Wars, or Prata instead of Prada, or Fard instead of Ford may not be enough. I cannot believe I am taking this side, but I think this is where the issue is. The films that these people are hacking are obvious of some worth because no one is going to spend $10 on a CDR that is crap. So the pirates^w, i mean editors are basing thier income on the work of someone else, and only added a miniscule amount of added value. If there were a glut of quality appropriate entertainment, it seems that they would set up a production house and make it.
Since this has somewhat become an issue of religion, let me add a counter example. Let's say I went to this site and linked to all the sermons. The reaons for this was that I wanted to help them get listeners by arranging the sermons differently, say by content of racism, sexism, violence, hatred, and created a more attractive design. I propererly attributed the sermons to the person and back to the original site. However, for some sermon I also supply several different versions, to appeal to other constiuencies. In some I bleep out the word god. In others I might replace with another discriptor, such as universal power, dictator, master, lord, oppressor. Now, I link and maybe supply. the orignal, I clearly mark the changes, and I clearly supply all attributions. Do anyone think this is legitimate? I am not even charging. I am just editing someone elses words, and, in some cases, making them say something they never intended. Certainly covered under fair use.
Apple on the other hand is so clearly old line. Make quality and useful products targeted to an audience willing to pay for the products. Charge enough for the product to create a good profit. Give good service before, during, and after the sale. Charge enough so that at the end one has enough to pay for fixed costs, manufactureing, service, overhead, and research and development. Do not be afraid to change the product to meet demands, and throw in a bit of flash. This probably had not changed since Ford innovated the car in on color Black, with evolved into the mustang of many colors. I think the old Ford put some big dogs out of bussiness as well.
I understand what the article is saying, but the article is talking about established firm. Apple, as an established firm, did exactly what it was supposed to do. That is fixed itself. Apple has been, and is, a major manufacturer of consumer and proffesional intergrated computer solution. So is Dell. MS only supplies software. Apple is and will continue to be, at least in the near future, a to manufacuturer of high tech solutions. The have proven that they will adjust to meet new needs, just as old bussiness says they should. The article cites IBM, which also did what it needed to do. Refocus on the customer, develop customer oriented products that provided real value. They talk about how the iPod is unique, but how many new catagories of product did IBM help create? The selectric, the PC, SQL, GML, etc.
It is ludicrous to think that anything other than good products or services matter, or that creating new products is something new. IBM exists because it started creating products and focused on customers.
As far as google, that is a story yet to be wrote. They have an Enron like grasp on the ad market, unregulated, not transparent, unpredicatable. The success may be last remant of the dot com boom, or they may be able to leverage advertisers in the same way that TV did. If they are succesful, it will be nothing but bussiness as usual. Create a product, namely adwords, charge enough for it to generate a profit, and use some of the cash to innovate.
I think what happened, especially in the 70's and 80's, was the sense of entitlement of the big corporations. That somehow Americans were obligated to purchase the products no matter how horrible they were. In a perverse way, they were applying the soviet model to capitalism, where the people had to buy what they state supplied, except in out case capatilism provided such an oversupply that we had the illusion of choice. This was illustated with the government bailout of chrysler. In fact, some of the few comapnies that haven't leared thier lesson are in the auto industry. Chrsyler has so given up and is running ads featuring it German owner. In the end what we may be seeing is not new rules of bussiness, but the return to the basics. Make a product, sell a product at a fair price, and realize the consumer is the boss.
He continues: It is not our fault, the beta testers keep causing problems, which we then have to fix.
One wonders how all the other software developers manage to get any product out at all. MS Vista is what, two years late. I can understand them saying that the process is crap and we have to retrofit and refactor to make things work. Or the EU requirements mean we actually, for the first time, understand the API. But blaming delays on beta-test? This software was overdue long before the beta testers hit it.
The sad thing is that MS had some ability to produce in the 90's. They wrote some of the best books in the industry. In the span of 10 years they have gotten to the point when they can't even push out an OS, even when all the major features have been removed. Pitiful.
The only problem is that people do not have the ability to filter or look for sources of confimation. For instance if Fox news says that Stalin is still alive and about to launch a secret arsenal of nuclear missles, many would believe it. It is the same thing with Wikipedea, and google just makes it worse. If enough people say it, and enough people link to it, then the truly stupid will believe it without any physical evidence.
As far as I know, wikipedia has already set procedures to limit these edit wars. I don't see what else can be done. Wikipedia does not set itself up as the arbiter of all truths. Probably answers.com need to do a better job of stating the content from wikipedia is heresay. But Ken Lay committing suicide? That is what we all think. I am no conspiracy theorist, but since he was never sentenced he is not a criminal. His death probably saved his hiers from relative poverty. it is very convinent. Sometimes peopl in ill health just will themselves to die.
You see, I just wrote something. Don't make it true. It is not my fault if some daft people believe it. Perhpas you do believe it is my fault, and perhaps, in the words of Eminem, you belive I can "load a gun up for you, and cock it too," just with the magic of mind. Boo!
From the description it sounds like this device is just going to be a revamped oragami with a xBox OS. We have yet to a viable Oragami. Even with MS Cell phones are not taking the market by storm. I actually think MS has a good chance of wining the music player market if it leverages the xBox platform instead of MS Windows. I realize that it will hard not to use the desktop monopoly to push the product, but do we really want a game/music machine with outllook?
as they no long have to build a new landfill just for AOL cds and packaging. As least with the disks I could use them. How much more would CD-RW have cost?