I wonder how any real hardware geek can have bad feeling about radio shack. Sure the prices are high, sales people are only slightly more clueful than the customers. OTOH, they are the electronics chain, and when one is a kid, it is hard to go to or be taken seriously at the real electronics shop, and circuit city would not know wire markers if one were shoved up thier butt. It is the thing top make fun of them now, but how many people got thier first computer, or thier first laptop, from Radio Shack. Radio Shack sells, or at least makes accesible, products that would not otherwise be accesible.
I see this as a good thing. Radio Shack does a much better job of walking the customer through unfamiliar technology than any of the big box stores. Of course doing this costs more. The thing with the cuecat is that almost anyone who needs a handheld barcode scanner has the resources to locate one. The cuecat was toy, and as such it was ok.
I just find this sad. As a person who struggled through college, and teaches students, I find the biggest problem is that of self reuglation. It is absolutely neccesary for a teacher in elementary school and middle school to monitor every second of the students time, and make sure the student is in on task. This is because the students has not yet developed the skill of self regulation, so part of the teachers job is to teach these skills. By the time the student enter High School, however, the job becomes reinforcing of these skills by reminding the student of proper behavior and enacting appropriate consequences for behaviors that are counter productive. By time the student is a senior, he or she should have the skills to sit in a class, even with cell phones and friends, and complete work.
What is worrying, if what the parent says is true, is that Harvard is treating our future business leaders like children. I mean, a student should be able to regulate and monitor his or her own time by the college time. I certainly had no trouble sitting in a room for an hour and stay on task, even though my natrual tendecy is to zone out. This is even more critical as the professor merely tends to give one a persective on the material, and the student must them spend 4-6 hours learning the material independently.
And what is going to happen when the student has a job. Is 'the boss' going remind the worker to do the job, or merely fire unproductive employees. Is the client going to wait until the consultant finishes the game, or merely find another consultant? If the graduate that cannot properly utilize the computer going to be promoted to VP? I really think we need to train our students to suceed, not lure into useless practices that will lead them to failure.
This whole thread is kind of nonsense, but even the parent misses a key point in the quest to establish parity. Here is my understanding of it, and I am sure someone will correct me.
For the most part, the hooks into the operating system, especially the basic functionality, of which music and web rendering are now a part, are well documented. In fact, in many cases outside of MS the basic code is open sourced. The issue is not what will break and what will not break, but rather if anyone but the developer of the OS has access to the API that will make the OS work. MS has been very protective about it's API from the DOS days, and this protection is what helped it create a monopoly. Therefore, though many would say the monopoly is the issue, I would say the excessive IP is the issue.
Now, since we are talking Apple and MS, we note that in OS X creating a web browser is as simple as dropping a window in XCode. We also not that Webkit is open. We also note that Apple has a ecosystem of browsers based on different redenering engines.
So, in the end the focus on wheather IE could be removed suited MS well. The American courts, in thier inexperienced, focused on it rather the longer running problem of MS hiding hooks from developers. OTOH, the EU seems to be more savvy, forcing MS to open up it's API, if not it's code. In this way, the ruling to force MS to seperate WMP make sense not from a retail perspective, but from a desiegm perspective. MS Now has to design MS WIndows in a modular fashion, which is good for developers.
The offer by morton's steakhouse was indeed generous. However, the steakhouse would not pay for transportation or desert. In addition, the steakhouse demanded the right to use the kids likeness in any fashion Morton's deemed neccesary, including advertising and other promotions.
Therefore it was with great sadness that we had to decline the most selfless offer. At the end of the day we found it better, if we may mix metaphors, to use available resources to teach the kids to fish, rather than allow their explotation for a single meal. It was decided that even improvished kids have some dignity. It was also noted that the kids in question were predominately of the Hindu faith, and perhaps a steak dinner was not the most appropriate meal, especially considering that thier normal ration was a bowl of rice with perhaps some ghee.
I enjoyed scientific american when I was a kid, but as I grew up I knew if for what it was - a popular magazine that occasionally had some good science. It is certainly better than most, but these types of stories is why it is not real science.
A flu pandemic is probably something we will have to face soon, just like a meteor is something we will have to face soon. If we imagine that the last few pandemics form a pattern, then we would expect a pandemic this year or next year, with the likelyhood getting greater as time passes.
What we must realize is that Katrina and Rita spooked us and made us realized how, in our quest for war and immidiate satisfaction, we have ignored the long term planning that keeps us safe from the real threats of global dimensions. What we have to realize tha no one is safe.
What we also have to realize is that the last pandemic did not kill close to a million people, much less 40 million. What we have to realize is that, expecially in the US, the policies over the past several years have focused on funneling tax money to corporations, with no regard to public benifitm i.e. NCLB, Enron, pensions in general, no bid contracts in Iraq. This panic convinently allows us to funnel billions more to Roche(who belongs to groups that lobby congress) and other multinationals, for a product that may not do any good.
We must plan. We must have medicine stockpiled. What we must not do is spend another several billion just to win political points and ganer additional contributions in the next election, at the expense of future generations, some of which will probably survive even the greatest pandemic.
I don't like to reduce these things to the absurd, but these EULA are silly, and the music EULAs doubly so. Typcially in software they had some justification as they, at least at first, limited the liability of the producer, although in an extremely clumsy way. As time went on, these things have gotten more insane, and frankly make software of so little value that I tend to limit what I use and buy.
But at least most software producers understands the relationship between the paying customer and the company that depends on those customers. Even MS has gotten some sense by allowing copies of software to be stored on multiple devices. This is in sharp constrast to the music industry that seems to belive they could exist without customers. I mean deleting music off a harddisk is not that big a deal, but why force the situation. I mean, sure, if one sells a CD one should delete all copies, but why make a victim pay twice? I mean if you just lost all your possesions, except for the few items that were with you, is the music industry going to begrudge you a few copies. If all your money it tied up rebuilding a life after being violated, are they really going to sue you for damages?
It is so absurd, it is hard to properly reduce. Perhaps asking a women who raped at a dance to pay for the repairs for the dress she rented. Which might happen, but it would be a pretty heartless company.
One of the biggest problems in coding is the exponential increase in relationships as one adds staff, as described in the grandaddy of of development management books The Mythical Man Month
A second problem with code is avoiding the exponential growth of relatioships between data and the proliferation of rules that must be painstakingly reconciled. The is discussed in another grandaddy, Composite Structured Design
During the 90's many people, including MS did much work and wrote many books to explore solutions to these problems. Models that seperated data, controllers, and views. Models that isolated functionality into descrete well known funcions. Assertions that made sure inputs and outputs were within specification. Hiding data structure. I have written a significant amount of code using these techniques, code that seems to work well. The basis seems to be lmit the relationships in the system, and as a consequence the proliferation of knowledge.
I think that 40+ years of experience in computers has taught us this is the way to write good code. MS, Apple, IBM, all the big players work on this model to some degree. About the only new thing is tools to represent the entire system without intimate detail, and other tools to translate these representations into data types.
So this is what troubles me. Writing code is only a small part of the process. Defining boundries and interconnects, and bebugging, tend to the larger part. Once I know what the window manager will act like, I don't need to know anything else. The higher level code I write, the less I need to know and should know about the subsystems.
And I am not sure how XP fits into this. A group needs to meet to define functions and interconnects. Everything else should be handled through assertions and regression testing. We, as the engineers we want to emulate, need to code to the design. The problem seems to be that many are still living in a world where computer resources are limited, a world many never experienced. Or perhaps MS is just trying to keep an advantage by continuing to sacrifice speed over reliability. It might be useful to have meeting to gain authorization to link deeply into the subsystem, but hardly smart.
for this to work, you would have to oraly relate the story to a sequence of serveral dozen people, have the last one down the chain write the story from memory, then have other people translate it through a sequence of various languages, with often ambiguous words and a shortage of vowels.
At that point on could probably have enough credibility to get to get the desperate masses to believe anything.
Long held theories that are based on solid emperical evidence are not expected to be disproved. They will be refined, or thier domain limited, but the basic model these theories provide tend to be of continued use. For instance, the earth is not flat, but we continue to use dowel lines to build houses. Classical mechanics fails at high speeds, but we continue to model most of our world using it. Classical optics is also an approximation, but it is still very useful in predicting optical effects. Young and Einstien proved that light is niether quite a particle, nor quite a wave, but can behave as both, yet we often model it as one or the other, even though it is likely niether.
Now, QM started with the idea that energy is quantized, a rejection of the previous assumption that energy is continuous. This new assumption solved certain troublesome problems, and lead to a powerful framework on which our current view of the atomic and sub-atomic world is built. QM has stood up to many test, and has proven it's fortitude by allowing us to build many useful toys. QM will continue to be useful, just as CM continues to be useful.
To see what might happen with QM, we can look to the past. Past theories have failed because they overgeneralize local effect, either assuming that attributes in one or a few locations are universal, or effects under one set of conditions are universal. Scientists tend to carefuly investigate these areas of accepted theory, the outliers, the previously ignored locations, to find the holes in the standards. However, basic artifacts are generally left alone. For instance, we may not be able to say that energy is always quantized, but if it is not, then one is also making specific statements about the stability of atoms, and perhaps even protons and nuetrons. If one rejects QM outright, then one must come up with an equal framework to explain exisiting observations.
It is really not about right or wrong. QM may be 'wrong', but is has proven incredibly useful. There may be a 'right' way to explain the world, but perhaps it is impracticle. It is likely that this guy is just one of many trying to build the new generation of perpetual motion machines. We are now sophiticated enough to know we can't get something for nothing, but there are still plenty of people out there who believe they can get alot for almost nothing.
Many years ago Walmart was a bit cheaper. They now are often much cheaper as they now have the power to pressure suppliers and rent factories to produce thier own branded products. This is a defacto national brand that competes with other national brands through the advantage of not having to run seperate ad campaigns.
However, like other companies that started on the bottom rung by being cheap, they now need to learn a new trick or become irrelevent. Walmart needs customers with money, customers that are not going to shop at a cheap place that depends on illigal immigrants and desperate mothers. Shoppers that are going to value reasonable working conditions over wide aisles.
And it is going to be hard for Walmart to keep prices low, unless they start looking at ineffeciencies in management and other overhead. These ineffeciencies, according to Forbes, is why Costco is a better company. And these ineffeciencies are why Walmart is vunerable even at the brick and mortor level. Historically a firm that competes just on price, or just on style, are not good long term prospects.There are a few national chains, like Target, that are competeing heavily on quality of life issues, and those chains will likely do better as Walmart is forced to sacrifice price to attact the more affluent customer.
Walmart has already shown no dedication to a particular community. There are empty husks of building all over the country left as Walmart moved 10 miles up the road to cheaper land. With the price of gas, we may again be reaching a point where a 5 mile trip to the safeway is better than a 10 mile trip to the walmart.
Companies whose primary innovations is low price are not stable firms. Look at how easily Walmart took out Kmart. Cheaper prices, less ghetto, more customers. Walmart did much good in lower prices through a better supply chain, just like Dell, then continued by cutting off any supplier that did not provide deep disccounts, or, even better, just contract the factory. Now, in desperation, walmart is resorting to illegal employee pracitices, like illegal aliens, withholding wages, and the like. At some point, keepping prices low will result in signficant executive reductions, and will result in the problems we have seen with other big retailers.
What Walmart and Dell share is lack of growth prospects. In the US all the people with no choice already shop, and the only others that shop at Walmart are the very rich looking for some chic trash for their third home. Walmart is not finding much success in finding new lands, and the foriegn market has not been success, as Walmart cannot meet local needs. The problem them becomes supporting the huge infrastructure. The very existance of the computer networks, warehouses, and trucking liabilities is what makes Walmart such a juicy target. Anything as large as walmart is inherently ineffecient, and must at some time collapse under the weight of it own excess.
On the other hands, firms of more reasonable size,that can more easily changes in market conditions, are more likely to work out. Look at how Target was able to redevelop it's image and capture the very customers that Walmarts now covets, but are unlikely to shop at a store whose main purpose to push cheap products.
Science in a method inquiry. Teching intelegent design is teaching another method of inquiry, and specifically not teaching the scientific method as it now accepted in the western world, developed over the past few hundred years. This method of inquiry often has at it's base a belief in god, but it also has a flexibility to know that soemtimes god just let's thing go, and but understanding how things go, we understand the nature of god. That is, things happen not neccearily because god did it, but because sometime in the pat god let it be so. In this state, the literal version of the bible, the one that says that a wife shoudl be submissive to her husband, is less important that the fact that god gave us the bounty of the earth.
So, let take a simple example to illustrate the point. In mainstream science standards, as well as math for that matter, students are taught to observe, discover, and apply past knowledge to make conjectures and model new situations. On popular example is a plant that is doing well, starts to die when protected from the sun. A student does not have to name 'photosynthesis' or anything like that. All he or she has to know is that the plant uses the sun to live, and, by cause and effect, removing the sun endangers the plant. This is inquiry directed by the scientific method. Perhaps God got mad at the plant, or someone damaged the soil, or the plant just coincidentally became unhappy, but the most reasonable solution, at least at the first approximation, it to put the plant back in the sun.
Now, intellegent design has an extra contraint in that our inquire must asuume the existance of a god, and most of the time a chrisitan beleif system. In this system even though all research, and genetic mapping, and our own experience, point to the fact that all creatures change over time, and creatures that are more suited to the environment tend to live and procreate, we now have to ignore those finding and assume that God created man, and the animals, and presumable that it is ok for a husband to demand anything from his wife as well. Now, there is nothing wrong with this, except for how to we test it. If we are in intellegent design, and we remove the plant from the sun, the logical answer is that we or the plant if being punished for violating gods will. God created the plant to be in the sun, and we are sinners for removing it. On all science tests, we must now have two correct answers, one for the scientific method, and one for the intellegent design.
Really, it all goes back to the light switch. I am all for assuming that when I flip a switch I am asking god to turn on the light, and throug his greatness and compassion, the light is let to be. But such faith does little if the light bulb burns out.
I would have to agree with this. If we look at the situation honestly, most activism is directed at making one own place in society more secure. Fortunately, much of the time making ones own life more secure has positive impacts on others as well, the downside being that there are often negative impacts, sometimes even to one's own life.
For instance, in the prior to the US Civil War, the North found it was cheaper to hire labor than to keep slaves, and slavery negatively affected their business model. The south did not understand this cost savings, or perhaps thought that allowing a person who works for you to go hungry and freeze was inhuman, so a war was fought. Even though the war was fought for the confort of a chosen few, and many were mutilated or dead, the fact that slavery ended is considered a good thing. Likewise, cancer research is generally driven by those directly affected by cancer, and the huge amounts of funds most direcly help those person who have cancer, at least sometimes. But the fact remains that the research has lead to conclusions that help all of us, even if it could be argued that the money might be better spent elsewhere.
Even a hippie wanna be like myself must admit that my action, though considered admirable by many, are mostly driven by my desire to have the United States remain strong, and my ability to roam the street at night without a gun. Apart from the gun thing, not much different from what motivates the standard conservative.
The problem with the US being the richest, baddest, country in the world, that everyone wants to come to, and everyone wants to sell to, is that it is all based on borrowed money, and we are reaching our limit. As if this were not bad enough, we are increasingly becoming a country of shopkeeppers, but we can't manufacture our own products.
Take the first issue of borrowed money. Our current GDP is around 12 trillion. Our current public debt is around 8 trillion. Our GDP is around 11 trillion. Somewhere around 40% is held by foreign countries. From what I have read, about a third of that is japan, with the next two biggest holder being China and GB. Only around half the foreign held debts seems to be held by foriegn govermebts. What this means is that we are increasingly dependent on loans from foriegn entities for our lifestyle. At some point the customer, no matter how good of a customer, reaches their credit limit. What is happening right now is that Asia is lending us money to buy thier goods, just like Ford loans customers money to buy thier cars. This only works as long as the customers can pay the note. I know in the current world, with massive credit card debt, and massive republican spending, debt means nothing. But the piper must be paid.
Now for the second point, retailing without manufacturing. Foreign entities are lending us money to buy thier goods, and local entities are reselling those goods. This means that we are not only dependent on foreign entities for the money to buy the goods, but also to supply the goods. What happens if Wal*mart can no longer get the cheap stuff from Asia? What happens to Dell or Apple if they can't get the cheap stuff from Asia? Asia will suffer, but what about the US exectation for cheap products? And if we no longer are buying thier goods, will they lend us money?
The unfortunate reality is that the US can ill afford to annoy certain parties. Europe, yes. The middle east, yes. Asia, no. Why do you think we are invading Iraq while N Korea taunts us with real WMD. Why do you think we turn a blind eye to everything China does, and the bigotry that is Japan, while we whine that we need to invade Iran? For the answers look at who is funding the US lifestyle.
The reason that the link to Asia is so important is not because the US is such a good customer base, it is becuase the US cannot live with Asia. The current argument over the Internet is another in a long list of administrations follies, which pits the xenophogic fear of the extremist, against the economic good sense of the moderate.
As we learned in the US over the past few months, there are a few people who will take advantage of those in trouble. These people will take advantage of the situation to extort money from victims, steal money from government, and simple run rampant.
Now many racist people blamed these problems on the fact that persons were not American, or not white, or not whatever. This, of course, is hogwash. Criminals and evil come in all colors, as is shown in this case. Tamiflu may or may not work in all cases. There has already been one Tamiflu resistant case. So we have no idea wheather Tamiflu will do any good. OTOH, the world is scared, and looking for any solution, and Roche can ask for whatever it wishes, if they choose to do so.
Now I am not one to say that drug prices are too high. Companies should be compensated at whatever the market will bear, when the market is in a normal state. The Tamiflu market is not normal. We are buying something that might never be used, and likely won't be used in the process of normal market visits, but must be stockpiled to protect national interests.
So what is Roche going to do. Protect the fiction that Tamiflu can only be manufacted by roche, even though Asia has shown technical expertise at manufacturing all sort of medical products. If they do so, will they build a plant that will manfufacture the drug for government use, and give discounts for the mass order. Or will they do what they are doing now, which is taking advantage of desperate situation. Many would say this is exactly what we expect from an industry that allows thousands to die of AIDS in an effort to protect patent rights.
At some point we must demand that the massive government subsidize pay for something. Roche can profit greatly from this scare, and win a great deal of public support, if it plays the hand correctly. They are likly to recieve a billion+ dollar order from the US alone. Cutting the price to cover only fixed costs might be indicated.
Presumable one would build an array of LEDs onto an array, presumably with an integrated diffuser. One could create the actual devices in clusters, of say N leds, and then array the clustered. Each array would have the logic to turn on 0-N leds based on input voltage.
The problem is that flourescents are not popular enough, even with the new cofigurations. There are no decorative florescents. The light from flourescents is sterile. With LEDS one could theortically tune the light to match the applications, and configure enclosures to arbitrary shapes. LEDS may not be better from a consumption point of view, may be more enviromentally destructive to manufacture, and cost more, but that will balanced against a much more versitile device that has an extremely long MTBF.
The cost is key. Flourescents tend to be expensive, and even though one can recoup the cost on longevity and power savings, and for large installation labor costs, for the common person the stickeer shocks pushes us back to incadescents. Combine with the 'institutional' reputation of flourescents, and the lack of pretty shapes, and one sees that the market for alternative lighting will be small.
There may be one saving grace. If LED lights are available, then new houses might be designed with the indirect lighting that has been theorized since before Heinlein crafted his first tome. And if the lighting lasted the normal lifetime of the electrics, say a MTBF of 10K hours, then it could be considered a durable item that is just replaced by a profesional. And the house will have a better energy rating, as the lighting will consume less power and generate less heat per lumen.
I don't know if 2% of revenue is swimming. I think about 2% of my revenue. On a weekly basis, it is pocket money. It is enough that I would miss it, but still within a tolerable "cost of doing bidness".
And what else might be done with 2%. An small increase in R&D. Perhaps retail prices would magically decrease 2%. Or drug abuse might marginally increase.
If software companies at a number 3, I think this shows how the entire lawsuit thing has been overblow, and how most of the players are two faced. Even the republican party owes the ambulance chasers. It was they that got all the cig money for texas, which allowed Bush to balance the texas budget while cutting taxes, and helped him get elected to the big house. of course he thanked these lawyer by suing them for excessive billing, even though the billing had been agreed to, and they developed these cases with thier own money in the true spirit of entrepenurism, unlike other people we could mention.
The other issue is how many of these are squabbled over IP, and how many are individual get rich quick schemes. I also have no sympathy for the drug companies. Roche is about to make a killing on Tamiflu, probably several billion in the next few years, much of it direct profit from licensing. Will they have to set some of it aside for lawsuit resulting from charges of gauging and the like. Probably. But if they would sell it to certain countries at cut rate, and deduct the good will, they might be able to save the lawyer fees. But they apparently have made the choice.
In addition to all the other issues with no firewire...Apple support for USB is not that great, USB cannot boot, USB is slower than firewire 800, there is one other big issue.
USB will not charge over the port unless the computer and device is on. That means if the device battery is dead, or you want your let the computer sleep, the device must be charged by an external charger. One of the greatest things about the iPod was I was able to just leave it hooked up the Firewire hub and have it charged, then have it synched. A single cable. The shuffle is not such a big deal becuase the battery lasts so long, and does not take long to recharge.
I think I will buy an older iPod with firewire, or perhpas another mini, and just use these until they die. This and the scratch issue makes the nono and new iPod a very unattractive option. Let others buy the cheap consumer tech.
My take on this is that perhaps windows should try to make computers that can be used by by the less-qualified consumers, rather than computers that can only be used by MSCE trained technicians. Many homes, and even publishers and firms, do not have such a technician, and must make do on personal intuition and a limited budget for technical service calls.
This is fact true for Linux also. I have been able to use everything that has been put in front of me, but I grew up on the CLI. Linux is competing with MS, and might win, because both depend on the existance of amatuer admins who will work cheap, since not everyone can affford the trained technician.
So I suppose what you mean is that the price of a product has little to do with the resources needed to produce it. In fact the retail price is often set by the what the consumers sees as the percieved value. I aqree on that.
However, comparing the reltive equity in price between music CDs and movie DVDs cannot be used to prove this point. A music CD is often a first run body of work. The CD is sold to pay for costs associated with that work, and hopefully generate a profit. OTOH, a movie DVD, in most cases, is not a first run body of work. The movie has been presented in movie theatres, PPV, and subscription cable. And while there might be some first run content on the DVD, the DVD is primarily a profit center. Mosts costs are usually paid by the previous releases.In this sense, movies should costs less on DVD than music on CDs, as the movies are just profit, and the added content on the DVD is mostly a carrot to get consumers to accept the stick of DRM and amatuer menus.
As far as ringtones and full tracks are concerned, the base cost is the same. The value added with ringtones is the editing and coding for the phone, which is simple to do, if you have the equipment, but the consumer has the choice to purchase the ringtone and save some time. Tracks are not sold leangth, say at $0.005 per second, but on an entity basis.
The polite formulation of this is that one doctor operating on three patient, however the doctor only has 2 pairs of gloves. How can the doctor work while minimizing the chance of cross contanimation. It also works with three doctors and one patient, thought the glove changes get messier.
The impolite formulation involves three college guys, who can only afford two condoms and the paid services of one person.
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I see this as a good thing. Radio Shack does a much better job of walking the customer through unfamiliar technology than any of the big box stores. Of course doing this costs more. The thing with the cuecat is that almost anyone who needs a handheld barcode scanner has the resources to locate one. The cuecat was toy, and as such it was ok.
There is always room for self reflection and improvement.
What is worrying, if what the parent says is true, is that Harvard is treating our future business leaders like children. I mean, a student should be able to regulate and monitor his or her own time by the college time. I certainly had no trouble sitting in a room for an hour and stay on task, even though my natrual tendecy is to zone out. This is even more critical as the professor merely tends to give one a persective on the material, and the student must them spend 4-6 hours learning the material independently.
And what is going to happen when the student has a job. Is 'the boss' going remind the worker to do the job, or merely fire unproductive employees. Is the client going to wait until the consultant finishes the game, or merely find another consultant? If the graduate that cannot properly utilize the computer going to be promoted to VP? I really think we need to train our students to suceed, not lure into useless practices that will lead them to failure.
For the most part, the hooks into the operating system, especially the basic functionality, of which music and web rendering are now a part, are well documented. In fact, in many cases outside of MS the basic code is open sourced. The issue is not what will break and what will not break, but rather if anyone but the developer of the OS has access to the API that will make the OS work. MS has been very protective about it's API from the DOS days, and this protection is what helped it create a monopoly. Therefore, though many would say the monopoly is the issue, I would say the excessive IP is the issue.
Now, since we are talking Apple and MS, we note that in OS X creating a web browser is as simple as dropping a window in XCode. We also not that Webkit is open. We also note that Apple has a ecosystem of browsers based on different redenering engines.
So, in the end the focus on wheather IE could be removed suited MS well. The American courts, in thier inexperienced, focused on it rather the longer running problem of MS hiding hooks from developers. OTOH, the EU seems to be more savvy, forcing MS to open up it's API, if not it's code. In this way, the ruling to force MS to seperate WMP make sense not from a retail perspective, but from a desiegm perspective. MS Now has to design MS WIndows in a modular fashion, which is good for developers.
Therefore it was with great sadness that we had to decline the most selfless offer. At the end of the day we found it better, if we may mix metaphors, to use available resources to teach the kids to fish, rather than allow their explotation for a single meal. It was decided that even improvished kids have some dignity. It was also noted that the kids in question were predominately of the Hindu faith, and perhaps a steak dinner was not the most appropriate meal, especially considering that thier normal ration was a bowl of rice with perhaps some ghee.
A flu pandemic is probably something we will have to face soon, just like a meteor is something we will have to face soon. If we imagine that the last few pandemics form a pattern, then we would expect a pandemic this year or next year, with the likelyhood getting greater as time passes.
What we must realize is that Katrina and Rita spooked us and made us realized how, in our quest for war and immidiate satisfaction, we have ignored the long term planning that keeps us safe from the real threats of global dimensions. What we have to realize tha no one is safe.
What we also have to realize is that the last pandemic did not kill close to a million people, much less 40 million. What we have to realize is that, expecially in the US, the policies over the past several years have focused on funneling tax money to corporations, with no regard to public benifitm i.e. NCLB, Enron, pensions in general, no bid contracts in Iraq. This panic convinently allows us to funnel billions more to Roche(who belongs to groups that lobby congress) and other multinationals, for a product that may not do any good.
We must plan. We must have medicine stockpiled. What we must not do is spend another several billion just to win political points and ganer additional contributions in the next election, at the expense of future generations, some of which will probably survive even the greatest pandemic.
But at least most software producers understands the relationship between the paying customer and the company that depends on those customers. Even MS has gotten some sense by allowing copies of software to be stored on multiple devices. This is in sharp constrast to the music industry that seems to belive they could exist without customers. I mean deleting music off a harddisk is not that big a deal, but why force the situation. I mean, sure, if one sells a CD one should delete all copies, but why make a victim pay twice? I mean if you just lost all your possesions, except for the few items that were with you, is the music industry going to begrudge you a few copies. If all your money it tied up rebuilding a life after being violated, are they really going to sue you for damages?
It is so absurd, it is hard to properly reduce. Perhaps asking a women who raped at a dance to pay for the repairs for the dress she rented. Which might happen, but it would be a pretty heartless company.
A second problem with code is avoiding the exponential growth of relatioships between data and the proliferation of rules that must be painstakingly reconciled. The is discussed in another grandaddy, Composite Structured Design
During the 90's many people, including MS did much work and wrote many books to explore solutions to these problems. Models that seperated data, controllers, and views. Models that isolated functionality into descrete well known funcions. Assertions that made sure inputs and outputs were within specification. Hiding data structure. I have written a significant amount of code using these techniques, code that seems to work well. The basis seems to be lmit the relationships in the system, and as a consequence the proliferation of knowledge.
I think that 40+ years of experience in computers has taught us this is the way to write good code. MS, Apple, IBM, all the big players work on this model to some degree. About the only new thing is tools to represent the entire system without intimate detail, and other tools to translate these representations into data types.
So this is what troubles me. Writing code is only a small part of the process. Defining boundries and interconnects, and bebugging, tend to the larger part. Once I know what the window manager will act like, I don't need to know anything else. The higher level code I write, the less I need to know and should know about the subsystems.
And I am not sure how XP fits into this. A group needs to meet to define functions and interconnects. Everything else should be handled through assertions and regression testing. We, as the engineers we want to emulate, need to code to the design. The problem seems to be that many are still living in a world where computer resources are limited, a world many never experienced. Or perhaps MS is just trying to keep an advantage by continuing to sacrifice speed over reliability. It might be useful to have meeting to gain authorization to link deeply into the subsystem, but hardly smart.
At that point on could probably have enough credibility to get to get the desperate masses to believe anything.
Sir, it is turtles all the way down.
infected with DRM
infected wtih DRM
infected wtih DRM
infected wtih DRM
not to mention infected with flash
Now, QM started with the idea that energy is quantized, a rejection of the previous assumption that energy is continuous. This new assumption solved certain troublesome problems, and lead to a powerful framework on which our current view of the atomic and sub-atomic world is built. QM has stood up to many test, and has proven it's fortitude by allowing us to build many useful toys. QM will continue to be useful, just as CM continues to be useful.
To see what might happen with QM, we can look to the past. Past theories have failed because they overgeneralize local effect, either assuming that attributes in one or a few locations are universal, or effects under one set of conditions are universal. Scientists tend to carefuly investigate these areas of accepted theory, the outliers, the previously ignored locations, to find the holes in the standards. However, basic artifacts are generally left alone. For instance, we may not be able to say that energy is always quantized, but if it is not, then one is also making specific statements about the stability of atoms, and perhaps even protons and nuetrons. If one rejects QM outright, then one must come up with an equal framework to explain exisiting observations.
It is really not about right or wrong. QM may be 'wrong', but is has proven incredibly useful. There may be a 'right' way to explain the world, but perhaps it is impracticle. It is likely that this guy is just one of many trying to build the new generation of perpetual motion machines. We are now sophiticated enough to know we can't get something for nothing, but there are still plenty of people out there who believe they can get alot for almost nothing.
However, like other companies that started on the bottom rung by being cheap, they now need to learn a new trick or become irrelevent. Walmart needs customers with money, customers that are not going to shop at a cheap place that depends on illigal immigrants and desperate mothers. Shoppers that are going to value reasonable working conditions over wide aisles.
And it is going to be hard for Walmart to keep prices low, unless they start looking at ineffeciencies in management and other overhead. These ineffeciencies, according to Forbes, is why Costco is a better company. And these ineffeciencies are why Walmart is vunerable even at the brick and mortor level. Historically a firm that competes just on price, or just on style, are not good long term prospects.There are a few national chains, like Target, that are competeing heavily on quality of life issues, and those chains will likely do better as Walmart is forced to sacrifice price to attact the more affluent customer.
Walmart has already shown no dedication to a particular community. There are empty husks of building all over the country left as Walmart moved 10 miles up the road to cheaper land. With the price of gas, we may again be reaching a point where a 5 mile trip to the safeway is better than a 10 mile trip to the walmart.
What Walmart and Dell share is lack of growth prospects. In the US all the people with no choice already shop, and the only others that shop at Walmart are the very rich looking for some chic trash for their third home. Walmart is not finding much success in finding new lands, and the foriegn market has not been success, as Walmart cannot meet local needs. The problem them becomes supporting the huge infrastructure. The very existance of the computer networks, warehouses, and trucking liabilities is what makes Walmart such a juicy target. Anything as large as walmart is inherently ineffecient, and must at some time collapse under the weight of it own excess.
On the other hands, firms of more reasonable size,that can more easily changes in market conditions, are more likely to work out. Look at how Target was able to redevelop it's image and capture the very customers that Walmarts now covets, but are unlikely to shop at a store whose main purpose to push cheap products.
So, let take a simple example to illustrate the point. In mainstream science standards, as well as math for that matter, students are taught to observe, discover, and apply past knowledge to make conjectures and model new situations. On popular example is a plant that is doing well, starts to die when protected from the sun. A student does not have to name 'photosynthesis' or anything like that. All he or she has to know is that the plant uses the sun to live, and, by cause and effect, removing the sun endangers the plant. This is inquiry directed by the scientific method. Perhaps God got mad at the plant, or someone damaged the soil, or the plant just coincidentally became unhappy, but the most reasonable solution, at least at the first approximation, it to put the plant back in the sun.
Now, intellegent design has an extra contraint in that our inquire must asuume the existance of a god, and most of the time a chrisitan beleif system. In this system even though all research, and genetic mapping, and our own experience, point to the fact that all creatures change over time, and creatures that are more suited to the environment tend to live and procreate, we now have to ignore those finding and assume that God created man, and the animals, and presumable that it is ok for a husband to demand anything from his wife as well. Now, there is nothing wrong with this, except for how to we test it. If we are in intellegent design, and we remove the plant from the sun, the logical answer is that we or the plant if being punished for violating gods will. God created the plant to be in the sun, and we are sinners for removing it. On all science tests, we must now have two correct answers, one for the scientific method, and one for the intellegent design.
Really, it all goes back to the light switch. I am all for assuming that when I flip a switch I am asking god to turn on the light, and throug his greatness and compassion, the light is let to be. But such faith does little if the light bulb burns out.
For instance, in the prior to the US Civil War, the North found it was cheaper to hire labor than to keep slaves, and slavery negatively affected their business model. The south did not understand this cost savings, or perhaps thought that allowing a person who works for you to go hungry and freeze was inhuman, so a war was fought. Even though the war was fought for the confort of a chosen few, and many were mutilated or dead, the fact that slavery ended is considered a good thing. Likewise, cancer research is generally driven by those directly affected by cancer, and the huge amounts of funds most direcly help those person who have cancer, at least sometimes. But the fact remains that the research has lead to conclusions that help all of us, even if it could be argued that the money might be better spent elsewhere.
Even a hippie wanna be like myself must admit that my action, though considered admirable by many, are mostly driven by my desire to have the United States remain strong, and my ability to roam the street at night without a gun. Apart from the gun thing, not much different from what motivates the standard conservative.
Take the first issue of borrowed money. Our current GDP is around 12 trillion. Our current public debt is around 8 trillion. Our GDP is around 11 trillion. Somewhere around 40% is held by foreign countries. From what I have read, about a third of that is japan, with the next two biggest holder being China and GB. Only around half the foreign held debts seems to be held by foriegn govermebts. What this means is that we are increasingly dependent on loans from foriegn entities for our lifestyle. At some point the customer, no matter how good of a customer, reaches their credit limit. What is happening right now is that Asia is lending us money to buy thier goods, just like Ford loans customers money to buy thier cars. This only works as long as the customers can pay the note. I know in the current world, with massive credit card debt, and massive republican spending, debt means nothing. But the piper must be paid.
Now for the second point, retailing without manufacturing. Foreign entities are lending us money to buy thier goods, and local entities are reselling those goods. This means that we are not only dependent on foreign entities for the money to buy the goods, but also to supply the goods. What happens if Wal*mart can no longer get the cheap stuff from Asia? What happens to Dell or Apple if they can't get the cheap stuff from Asia? Asia will suffer, but what about the US exectation for cheap products? And if we no longer are buying thier goods, will they lend us money?
The unfortunate reality is that the US can ill afford to annoy certain parties. Europe, yes. The middle east, yes. Asia, no. Why do you think we are invading Iraq while N Korea taunts us with real WMD. Why do you think we turn a blind eye to everything China does, and the bigotry that is Japan, while we whine that we need to invade Iran? For the answers look at who is funding the US lifestyle.
The reason that the link to Asia is so important is not because the US is such a good customer base, it is becuase the US cannot live with Asia. The current argument over the Internet is another in a long list of administrations follies, which pits the xenophogic fear of the extremist, against the economic good sense of the moderate.
Now many racist people blamed these problems on the fact that persons were not American, or not white, or not whatever. This, of course, is hogwash. Criminals and evil come in all colors, as is shown in this case. Tamiflu may or may not work in all cases. There has already been one Tamiflu resistant case. So we have no idea wheather Tamiflu will do any good. OTOH, the world is scared, and looking for any solution, and Roche can ask for whatever it wishes, if they choose to do so.
Now I am not one to say that drug prices are too high. Companies should be compensated at whatever the market will bear, when the market is in a normal state. The Tamiflu market is not normal. We are buying something that might never be used, and likely won't be used in the process of normal market visits, but must be stockpiled to protect national interests.
So what is Roche going to do. Protect the fiction that Tamiflu can only be manufacted by roche, even though Asia has shown technical expertise at manufacturing all sort of medical products. If they do so, will they build a plant that will manfufacture the drug for government use, and give discounts for the mass order. Or will they do what they are doing now, which is taking advantage of desperate situation. Many would say this is exactly what we expect from an industry that allows thousands to die of AIDS in an effort to protect patent rights.
At some point we must demand that the massive government subsidize pay for something. Roche can profit greatly from this scare, and win a great deal of public support, if it plays the hand correctly. They are likly to recieve a billion+ dollar order from the US alone. Cutting the price to cover only fixed costs might be indicated.
The problem is that flourescents are not popular enough, even with the new cofigurations. There are no decorative florescents. The light from flourescents is sterile. With LEDS one could theortically tune the light to match the applications, and configure enclosures to arbitrary shapes. LEDS may not be better from a consumption point of view, may be more enviromentally destructive to manufacture, and cost more, but that will balanced against a much more versitile device that has an extremely long MTBF.
There may be one saving grace. If LED lights are available, then new houses might be designed with the indirect lighting that has been theorized since before Heinlein crafted his first tome. And if the lighting lasted the normal lifetime of the electrics, say a MTBF of 10K hours, then it could be considered a durable item that is just replaced by a profesional. And the house will have a better energy rating, as the lighting will consume less power and generate less heat per lumen.
And what else might be done with 2%. An small increase in R&D. Perhaps retail prices would magically decrease 2%. Or drug abuse might marginally increase.
If software companies at a number 3, I think this shows how the entire lawsuit thing has been overblow, and how most of the players are two faced. Even the republican party owes the ambulance chasers. It was they that got all the cig money for texas, which allowed Bush to balance the texas budget while cutting taxes, and helped him get elected to the big house. of course he thanked these lawyer by suing them for excessive billing, even though the billing had been agreed to, and they developed these cases with thier own money in the true spirit of entrepenurism, unlike other people we could mention.
The other issue is how many of these are squabbled over IP, and how many are individual get rich quick schemes. I also have no sympathy for the drug companies. Roche is about to make a killing on Tamiflu, probably several billion in the next few years, much of it direct profit from licensing. Will they have to set some of it aside for lawsuit resulting from charges of gauging and the like. Probably. But if they would sell it to certain countries at cut rate, and deduct the good will, they might be able to save the lawyer fees. But they apparently have made the choice.
USB will not charge over the port unless the computer and device is on. That means if the device battery is dead, or you want your let the computer sleep, the device must be charged by an external charger. One of the greatest things about the iPod was I was able to just leave it hooked up the Firewire hub and have it charged, then have it synched. A single cable. The shuffle is not such a big deal becuase the battery lasts so long, and does not take long to recharge.
I think I will buy an older iPod with firewire, or perhpas another mini, and just use these until they die. This and the scratch issue makes the nono and new iPod a very unattractive option. Let others buy the cheap consumer tech.
This is fact true for Linux also. I have been able to use everything that has been put in front of me, but I grew up on the CLI. Linux is competing with MS, and might win, because both depend on the existance of amatuer admins who will work cheap, since not everyone can affford the trained technician.
However, comparing the reltive equity in price between music CDs and movie DVDs cannot be used to prove this point. A music CD is often a first run body of work. The CD is sold to pay for costs associated with that work, and hopefully generate a profit. OTOH, a movie DVD, in most cases, is not a first run body of work. The movie has been presented in movie theatres, PPV, and subscription cable. And while there might be some first run content on the DVD, the DVD is primarily a profit center. Mosts costs are usually paid by the previous releases.In this sense, movies should costs less on DVD than music on CDs, as the movies are just profit, and the added content on the DVD is mostly a carrot to get consumers to accept the stick of DRM and amatuer menus.
As far as ringtones and full tracks are concerned, the base cost is the same. The value added with ringtones is the editing and coding for the phone, which is simple to do, if you have the equipment, but the consumer has the choice to purchase the ringtone and save some time. Tracks are not sold leangth, say at $0.005 per second, but on an entity basis.
The impolite formulation involves three college guys, who can only afford two condoms and the paid services of one person.