Everything tends to be overdramatized. Be it doctors, or engineers, or writers, or atheletes. Some will make it very big, some, even with talent and drive, will not make it.
So the issue is not that 90% of those who try is going are going to fail. The issue is if the new model will result in more opportunity and overall quality. WRT the web, the barrier to publishing is reduced, which means that more people have the opportunity to publish. This also means tha the market becomes more crowded, revenue becomes more diluted, and the traditional barriers that kept unprofitable content out of the market place are bypasssed.
It takes more than just putting product out to make money. If you want to generate revenue off art, then the art has to be treated as a revenue generating product, and promoted as such.
On a final note, the comic has not generated money for you, but how much have you spent on equipment, hosting, and tools. Often these articles are written with the intent to generate excitement so would be entrepenuers go out and buy stuff, thus increasing sales of the firms that service the targeted sector.
Another issue is that it is often not that hard. The current situation is that a security risk for a given bug does not exist unless there is working code to exploit the bug. Therefore one has to supply code that exploits the bug if one expects the bug to be fixed. This leads to the zero day exploit in which some kids uses that code, combines it with other code from old exploits, and generates a new problem. It would be better if the powers that be did not require exploit code, but were able to work from the theoretical, but that is not the way it is. This situation leads to the MS nightmare of zero day exploits, which is really the issue that makes MS Windows such a headache, as all systems have security issues, but just not so easy to exploit.
The difference between classical chemistry and nanotechnology is that the properties no longer depend solely on the types of bonds or the valenes of the atoms. It is not simply a matter of introducing catalysts so the reaction rate increases. Nanotech also deals with the study of size dependent properties of known materials. Nanotech will deal with the formation and study of new materials whose sizes and structure would have been difficult to study prior to the characterising technology of the 1980's. It is true that some nano is just regular classic chemistry, but that is just to be expected.
One things that ads to is get consumers to want something that no one has really wanted. Like instant desicated coffee, paper plates with bonus dioxins, or ready made penut butter and jelly sandwich with god knows what else.
Merely getting you to switch brands because one happens to be cheaper right now does not neccesarily build long term growth. However, convincing everyone they need a 3,000 lb personell carrier that gets 10 miles to the gallon, and is subsidized 40% by the American tax payer is golden. And the only reason everyone does not own one is that they do are not yet aware of the full benifts, all they think about is that it takes $50 to fill it up, and only goes 100 miles. Advertising is the exact thing that changes that perception. And in all these cases, the advertisers convinces you that you hate your family if you do not provide these latest advances
If one has fullfiled the terms of the contract, then there is nothing wrong. You can be sure the labels manipulate the situation as much as the artist. It is like the newpapers having to pay additional royalties to writers because the papers did not contract the right to publish on the web.
Furthermore, the contract might not allow the label to keep released music out of certiain venues simply because such a venue would hurt the profit of the labels. The reason that Sony does not want to work with apple is likely that it would hut the label. In all probability, the artist will come out the same due to higher sales, and get the music out to the people in the process.
As has been mentioned, without seeing the contracts we do not know who is in the wrong, if anyone.
The issue is competative pressure to produce an increasingly compelling product at lower costs thus increasing value to the customer. Clearly, most IT firms feel such pressure and attempt to meet changing technology and consumer demand head on. To take your example Apple has done this by providing a five user site license for the complete OS X for less than MS charges for a single full license of XP. Combine this with the fact that XP builds on an outdated OS that was scheduled to be retired by now, and OS X is a state of the art OS that MS is still a year away from matching.
This is the same for MS Office. MS has not really provided compelling value. MS Office is aging technology, and the base price should really be $100 for everyone. The full bloat version can still be $300. We have not seen a real update in 5 years, which, for a flagship product, really indicates the indifference MS has to the market.
I am not really defending or attacking anyone, simply stating that MS is a unique postiona and therefore has unique issues. In the timeframe that we are talking, Apple would not have been a contender. If it had, Google could have just taken darwin, as it did not need the gui. The point has not been proven because the licensing issues with MS stems from a monopoly status, in the same way that IBM once effectively was. Other IT firms, like Sun and SGI were the best in a field, and if one needed it, the price was not too much. Most of the time one was looking to solve a problem, and the licensing was often not the overiding issue. If google specifically needded transparency of source, the Linux is the clear winner as no one else can solve that problem as cheaply.
Correct me if I am wrong, but isn't the game console the ultimate pay to play, no pun intended, platform? Don't the developer pay for the right to produce games? Doesn't a large share of the profit come from not the sale of the console, but royalties from the sale of games, even though the game console maker did nothing or little to produce the games? And, even though the game console's life depends on the availability of games, this has done little to stop the developers from spending millions, and then paying any fee to those that did not invest in development.
So, why is hardware any different. In both cases one is paying for right to interface with a machine. This fee is paid on the presumption that if the machine did not exist, there would be no sales, ignoring the fact that if there were no interfacing products the machine would have no market.
So, I see this hardware locking thing as a given. The irony will be when the XBox model is the MS standard, and everything is closed, the world will be rejoicing at how smart the closed system model is, and how MS invented it, just like we now rejoice at how smart the single vendor concept is.
Froogle is a symptom of the limits of Google 100% bot existance. The technology has been fraying for a few years, and, unfortunately, no one has come out to replace it, unlike when the same happened to Alta Vista.
But Yahoo is not much better. In most of my searches, the low price vendor uses a bait and switch scam to get clicks. The actual price of the product is often not only higher than advertised, but higher than the average. This is true for many of the product search engines.
I find myself going less to search engines, and more to trusted vendors and known sources of reliable information. Google maps is cool, but mapquest still gives more reliable directions. It seems that google is degenerating to a toy. Unfortunately toys do pose threats to those useful entities that just helps you get things done.
It reaaly is worse than that. Get rich schemes will always be popular, and fast talking marketing people will always find people to fool, even sophiticated investors, especially when money is plentiful.
Many of the dot coms had no bussiness plans, and they should have failed. However did have good plans, but failed for the normal reasons of bad management. In this way the coms were no differnt from any other bussiness.
But even after the investors were supposedly 'spooked', companies like Enron and Worldcom were still allowed to function even though we were allegedly being 'more careful'. In 2000 it was not unccommon knowledge around houston that Enron might not have a good a plan to make money as was believed, and could be trouble. But we still had 60 billion gone in a day.
And now people are paying $200K for the exact same property that could be had for $50K in 1999, and they are saying with a straight face that a bubble is not occuring. The growth of real estate and stock are both have rather constant rates of growth over the long run, so, unless you believe in magic, or the invisible hand, which some still do, one expects a crash to compensate for a period of rapid growth.
In the most simplistic form software developers don't want disclosure due to bad publicity, and the security researchers want disclosure for good personal publicity.
But this is all simplistic. I think the reality is that software developers mostly try to make good software, but there is a pressure to add features rather than allocate resources to creating an internally good product. I have seen it, and I have been guilty of this. In this way having an external force pushing the software development process away from bloat and toward quality is a good thing.
As an aside, how many times have we been on the phone trying to report a bug only to be brushed aside. I remember one case where over two weeks I was told that there was no bug, to that I was crazy, It was not until I gave then proof and a fix that the problem was solved.
So yes there are some researchers out there that want to cause mayhem, just like there are some developers and publishers that just want to make money, and don't give a crap about quality control. And just like in most of life, the various forces keep each other in line. Perhpas you do have such down for a month to fix it. But perhaps if you gaver developers the resources to begin with, like time and hiring of competant people rather thatn the cheapest inexperienced freshmen, the problem would have never have surfaced.
The thing that MS did right was position IE not as a simple web browser but as an application interface, or remote terminal, if you will. The benifits were very thin net, relief from DLL hell, simple GUI design, and an elegant solution to the incompatibilities between version of MS windows. The problems were security due to the fact that most sites that users visit are not trusted applications, but random potentially malicious content and sever incompativility with standards based web sites(HTML 2.0 was released in draft form a year prior to IE).
Now, MS is fixing IE and may be able to solve the issues. If they succeed, those that are writing applicaion front ends will likely continue to use IE and continue to deploy MS kit if for no other reason that it is what is known. If MS does not solve these problems, then there may be a major break for another solution. The only variable is if the latest IE is MS Vista only.
But there is a technical problem within all this. Applications over the web are slow. Many years ago, I designed and used database driven applications over LAN. Today, similiar applications are almost unusable except for simple tasks. Some of this is due to the overhead of HTTP, but some of this is due to the designers ignoring the rules developed for database and network and GUI design. My prediction is that these techologies are going to be implemented in silly ways, using bad design, and it will stigmitize the entire technology. MS IE can get away with bad design, becuase most do not know anything else. But doing something better than IE, at least at the application level, is not easy.
OK, let's put it another way. The US is economy is currently dependent upon the ability to seamless integration with Chinese manufacturers. The US is also greatly indebted to the Chinese, and so we must continue to buy if they are going to continue to lend. The US is also hopeful to exploit the chinese market, as it is the only market that will drive significant growth. The chinese are building massive OS operations, and though use MS, mostly because stealing MS is cheaper than legal OSS, this may change.
If MS policies threaten integration with China, then MS will no longer be of use to a large portion of the world.
This is still branding. Instead of branding individual products, and incurring the cost of promotion for each product, one brands a retail outlet, and reduce the advertising cost as a percentage of revenue. This is what Walmart does, without any hassles of cards.
Affinity cards are part of this branding. They exist to remind the customer of the shop, and may limit the customer choices due the inconvince of carrying multiple cards. For the purpose of data collection such cards are hardly neccesary, as most of us do not use cash. Sales can be matched to most customer through payment accounts. In fact stores that primarily want to gather personally identifiable information can do so without the need of affinity cards.
In the end customer service is about knowing your customers. What we are talking about here is not really customer service, but customer expansion. That is, knowing what your customers might want, and knowing what those who are not yet your customers want. The megastores provide a service for the consumption hungry person in the west who will drive thier SUV 20 miles and load it up with stuff they don't really need. Those are who the stores want. The customers that don't require service but merely stuff. But they don't really don't do much for the person who just needs to get some food for thier family at a reasonable cost. Those that still value the well stocked but not overwhelming store, helpful people, and competant cashiers.
I am sure that the retailer can identify the goods, but the employees who actually conduct the transaction cannot and really have no incentive to. The employee is making maybe $300 a week, could be fired at any time for any reason, and another mimimum wage job is not impossible to get. So where is the incentive to get into a fight over returned merchandise? And don't give me that liberal crap about doing a good job for the sake of a good job. Executives don't work for nothing either.
Now retailers have used technology and customer incentives to protect stock. Scanners and '$10 off if no recipt' help protect stock. But what can be done about returns? Opening up a package and confronting the customer is often more trouble than it is worth. And if the shrink wrap looks ok, what is an employee to do?
Most technological solutions are not going to work. The best solution is compentant well paid employees with appropriate regulations. Huge stores like WalMart are just going to have to take the hit. The philosophy of cheap labor and cheap prices leaves little room. In any case, the can screw the vendors.
For those who don't know, the 5th circuit is one of the most consertive courts in the country. In fact, few worker rights cases go to court because it is well known that one the case hits the 5th circuit, they will just automatically side with the employer.
So I can just imagine this case. A company with the god given right to make a profit, and the University of Texas. Perhaps if it would have been Texas Southern University, then the spammer would have had a chance. But no one in Texas who wants to live past the morning is going to rule against UT on something like this.
This is another one of those regulations that are in place to cover the employers ass. In a typical situation, it will not be enforced. However, if something goes wrong, or if an employee needs to be fired, this rule will be invoked.
On a serious basis this might protect the employer from sexual harassment suits and the like. For example, a rape that occurs after hours during a 'working' dinner will have occurred as a result of an unauthorized get together.
On a cynical note, this might primarily be used to get rid of people the employer finds troublesome or can no longer afford. Need to get rid of two workers to reduce payroll, well fire the two that hang around too often, with no severance. Need to get rid of the old employee. Perfect opportunity. No benifits.
On a side note, it has been traditional to prohibit a married couple from working too closely, and to discourage such relationships from forming. It is often considered unprofessional to form a serious relationship with a coworker, especially if one is under the other in the chain of command. This rule is kind of retro, but not something new. It is assumed that after high school and college, one has sources for mates outside of the worktime holding area.
I will agree with all your points except one At the time that the codebase of IE was starting, the w3 standards weren't as hyped as they were today. As a result, it's no surprise that Microsoft didn't listen to them.
W3C standards were not hyped, but the standards at the time were well known top anyone interested enoguh to read about it. Just like best coding practices. Now, if one is trying to make a profit, one may have to cut coners. That is understandable. So one borks the standards, and does not prioritize buffer overflows as a problem. I have no issues with that as a bussiness decision.
What I do have a problem with is 20 years later coming out and saying that we did not know, or no one made up do it. I was coding quite a bit in the late 80's and 90's. I read much of the HTML 1.0 standards, and what came after. Those books were very clear on what HTML was, what it wasn't, and where to be careful. MS ignored those warning not because they were not, as you say, 'hyped', but because following the standards made little sense on the bottom line. MS was very late to the game, and all that mattered was getting in, not being complient. Complience mattered not as most would use whatever garbage MS prodced because that was all that most knew.
Today, they have to correct for that decision. It is just like corrected for the 640K issue, which forced so many of us to put hacked hardware and drivers into an otherwise excellent machine. Or having to put all this virus protection crap to protect a badly decisioned network OS, but wonderful standalong OS. They knew. It just did not make sense to do it.
Again, even though some of the best people work for large corporations, and those large corporations have the resources to fund and produce the results, they are not always going to exploit the results. Corporation generally have s core business, and all result will be skewed to helping grow that core. A buggy whip manufacturer might use novel materials, but might not start making steering wheel covers.
Xerox is a classic example. it is in business to sell toner. this is how it makes the money, and everything else is secondary to that goal. The usability stuff is important because the copiers have to be usable. Look at the interface today and 30 years ago. Moderns copiers are marvel of embedded technology. Xerox was not in a position to fully exploit the technology, because nifty computers are not necessarily going to sell toner. Even though they had the smart people to innovate, and the resources to deploy, it wasn't going to happen. It took a small company that was flexible enough to reorient the core business to make use of the new technologies. If Xerox wanted to be in the computer business, they maybe could have bought Apple.
In terms of another discussion, intellectual property rights are not supposed to be used to hide technology. Patents and copyright require either enough description so that a person skilled in the art can recreate the product, or the product itself. This is what is wrong with software patents. They hide technology by protecting something that really doesn't exist, thereby hurting innovation. Apple had a much better case against MS than Xerox did against Apple becuase Apple acutally created a useable product.
I don't know if the book needs large amounts of storage, per se. Really we have had most of the technology for this book for many years. The only thing that is missing is the Sub Etha Net. As long as we can get online, we hav the book. A nice titanium enclosure, homepage H2G2, and worldwide wireles.
From the story, the graphics were very small, text was breif, and one only retrieved a page at a time. The bandwidth would not even need to be that much. And localization was never a feature. In fact localization is just another word for push ads. Can you imagine the damn contraption telling you every two minutes 'I see you are driving by a starbucks. Why not have a drink?" Now that would have the movie funny. Oh, and while we are at it, lets give if GPP.
Correct, but most kids will learn a reasonable sexual reality, expecially if one gender is not socially deemed inferior to another. In fact it is not the hardcore portrayal of one women serving 3 rude men that causes the problem, as this is not the predominate message that kids see. It is the everyday actions in which women are treated as servant that causes the problems.
Contrast this to violence, in which many kids won't learn the reality, as they will not be caught in a those situations.
I think it is about idioms. There are standard ways to copy, iterate, and count. These standard not only make the code more readable, but also provides time tested methods to make the code reliable. Also using these idioms when writing code speeds up the process. There was a time when I could at sketch out a solution to a moderately complex problem in a day, flesh it out in another day or two, and then spend the rest of the time debugging and clarifying.
When we moved to OOP, new idioms were needed. We kept many of the old ones, and the OOP made complying with some rules, such as the separation of data, presentations, and manipulation, simpler. This is what design patterns does. It provides a set of idioms that can be applied to classes of problems. Once these are learned, one should be able to quickly develop a robust solution.
Take for example the singlet. It is a simple construct used when only one instance of an object is allowed. This happens more than one might imagine. I could sit down and think hard for a while and implement singlet, and then redesign, and debug, and after months of work come up with a good solution. Or I could just use the design pattern and in 20 minutes implement my singlet class.
The second part of you question is more complex. I, like most programmer, created crude versions of the design patterns on my own before reading this book. I even saw I enforced some OO concepts on my structured programming. Once I read the book I quickly saw the uefulness and began to use the patterns in my professional work. OTOH, when I was coding some math stuff over the summer, I did not use the patterns because the work was not so suited to the patterns. If i were to publish the work, I might go back and rework to fit the idiom. OTOH I know that the book is used widely and knowing the basics are useful. So if you are coding for fun, it might not help that much. If you are coding to show others, it would help to put the code in a form people will recognize.
I, as a plantation owner, do not engage in slave trade. I merely work with a headhunter to engage on site staff, and then feed and clothe said staff in exchange for labor. In fact, my headhunter assure me that most of the men and women on my plantation come of thier own free will in exchange for a payment to thier family. My staff are saints, giving of themselves so their family will not starve! Am I to stop in this legal practice, and let the families starve? Anyway, we give them all they need. Money would do them no good and hurt my profits. And if I cut them loose, how are they to eat? Where will they live?
I am a simple retailer. I contract with a service to supply custodians. I make the service promise to use only legal labor, and comply with all laws. If they don't, there is a process to investigate the matter, and if the allegations are true, help the contractor comply. I certainly understand that the demand for undocmented workers crete dangerous conditions for those workers,and may well further expose the country to terrorist threats. However, i can't really afford to pay any more for custodial staff than I already do, and cannot be held liable for the documentaiotn of the staff, because, as I said, i contract that out. The documentation of such staff does not affect the stock price, so we don't worry about it.
Notice the discussion is not over because I never mentioned that the holocaust was a way to maximize jobs for proper looking people.
Actually it is. That is why we have to create a series of complex laws that abridge those right. The justification is the only way to insure that the creator has a reasonable chance of protiting from the work.
In fact, free copying is a critical part of process of innovation and marketing. There was a time when school children went and copies the great works. The major entertainment conglormerate copy past work, make slight changes, and sell it as somethin new. They then want the new product protected into perpetutiy. The popularity of many things hinge of the free distribution of the product.
We have to be careful about rights. In the US we believe that everyone has the right to the pursuit of happiness, not the right to happiness. That often translates into everyone having the right to try to make a profit, or perhaps the opportunity to increase my happiness by copying other peoples stuff. OTOH, everyone in the US has the right to life and liberty. Take that as you wish.
I think it tell us that the people we pay to write critical systems are not doing their job properly. This is going to affect very few systems. Most things will check the system clock, and most properly written systems are set up to automatically check some central time server. There are notable exceptions to this, and those exceptions tend to also be poorly written.
Second, we are talking about a leap second, which happens once every year or so. Not often, but not never. This change is far outweighed by the normal timekeeping error, which for the average watch is like 3 minutes a year. The clock of a computer is not necessarily better. Also, we are only taking about clocks that need to keep track of the time, and not jut the passage of time.
As such we are really talking about a select set of software that much keep up with the time and not depend on a time server. If good techniques are used, the code to handle the leap second is one place, and good regression testing can check many different scenarios to insure that the code will work and changes do not break it. I am not saying it is trivail, but certain not prohibitively difficult. Since we are talking about network critical devices and specific military hardware, I do not see the problem with funding this development. What is really sounds like is that some people took government money for a project, and now want to changes the specs because they cannot do it.
The only other thing i can think of is that these apps are 20 years old and no one want to update them. There is some wisdom to letting working system run, but these are obviously not working. Next legislation will the pi=3, and francium will now be known as freedium.
I think this is not a true assesment. First, there are few things that Google does that are truly revolutionary, and the number of truly exeptional people that come with those few ideas, are, few. Many of those 500 hires, or how ever many, are probably spending most of thier time doing commodity work, such working out overall architecture and finding bugs. Hard work, but nothing that 10% of the population could not do with proper training over thier normal education. In fact, like many corporations, the best hope for growth is buy out someone with more flexibity.
Second, not everyone who is smart is going to work for Google/Yahoo. In fact those that can really turn over the apple cart are sitting somewhere that they can have more freedom and control over thier work. As much freedom as Google claims to give developers, ultimately your work is controlled by your boss. IMHO, the people who will tend to go to a corporation will be tend to be less creative and more likely to value high incomes over innovation.
So the question is what encouragement does the US give to those that want to tip the apple cart. The party line of tipping the apple cart within a corporate structure can only provide do much innovation. Google will want to provide direted advertisements. MS will want to maintain and extend the monopoly. Apple will want to sell functional cool product. Where is the social impetus to do something different? Go off on your own and hope to bought out, i guess.
And any, a VP hardly does anything innovative anyway. Every VP I know spends all day interfacing between mid level managers and the rest of the corporate structure. Not actualy reading papers to get ideas for new product.
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So the issue is not that 90% of those who try is going are going to fail. The issue is if the new model will result in more opportunity and overall quality. WRT the web, the barrier to publishing is reduced, which means that more people have the opportunity to publish. This also means tha the market becomes more crowded, revenue becomes more diluted, and the traditional barriers that kept unprofitable content out of the market place are bypasssed.
It takes more than just putting product out to make money. If you want to generate revenue off art, then the art has to be treated as a revenue generating product, and promoted as such.
On a final note, the comic has not generated money for you, but how much have you spent on equipment, hosting, and tools. Often these articles are written with the intent to generate excitement so would be entrepenuers go out and buy stuff, thus increasing sales of the firms that service the targeted sector.
Another issue is that it is often not that hard. The current situation is that a security risk for a given bug does not exist unless there is working code to exploit the bug. Therefore one has to supply code that exploits the bug if one expects the bug to be fixed. This leads to the zero day exploit in which some kids uses that code, combines it with other code from old exploits, and generates a new problem. It would be better if the powers that be did not require exploit code, but were able to work from the theoretical, but that is not the way it is. This situation leads to the MS nightmare of zero day exploits, which is really the issue that makes MS Windows such a headache, as all systems have security issues, but just not so easy to exploit.
The difference between classical chemistry and nanotechnology is that the properties no longer depend solely on the types of bonds or the valenes of the atoms. It is not simply a matter of introducing catalysts so the reaction rate increases. Nanotech also deals with the study of size dependent properties of known materials. Nanotech will deal with the formation and study of new materials whose sizes and structure would have been difficult to study prior to the characterising technology of the 1980's. It is true that some nano is just regular classic chemistry, but that is just to be expected.
Merely getting you to switch brands because one happens to be cheaper right now does not neccesarily build long term growth. However, convincing everyone they need a 3,000 lb personell carrier that gets 10 miles to the gallon, and is subsidized 40% by the American tax payer is golden. And the only reason everyone does not own one is that they do are not yet aware of the full benifts, all they think about is that it takes $50 to fill it up, and only goes 100 miles. Advertising is the exact thing that changes that perception. And in all these cases, the advertisers convinces you that you hate your family if you do not provide these latest advances
Furthermore, the contract might not allow the label to keep released music out of certiain venues simply because such a venue would hurt the profit of the labels. The reason that Sony does not want to work with apple is likely that it would hut the label. In all probability, the artist will come out the same due to higher sales, and get the music out to the people in the process.
As has been mentioned, without seeing the contracts we do not know who is in the wrong, if anyone.
This is the same for MS Office. MS has not really provided compelling value. MS Office is aging technology, and the base price should really be $100 for everyone. The full bloat version can still be $300. We have not seen a real update in 5 years, which, for a flagship product, really indicates the indifference MS has to the market.
I am not really defending or attacking anyone, simply stating that MS is a unique postiona and therefore has unique issues. In the timeframe that we are talking, Apple would not have been a contender. If it had, Google could have just taken darwin, as it did not need the gui. The point has not been proven because the licensing issues with MS stems from a monopoly status, in the same way that IBM once effectively was. Other IT firms, like Sun and SGI were the best in a field, and if one needed it, the price was not too much. Most of the time one was looking to solve a problem, and the licensing was often not the overiding issue. If google specifically needded transparency of source, the Linux is the clear winner as no one else can solve that problem as cheaply.
So, why is hardware any different. In both cases one is paying for right to interface with a machine. This fee is paid on the presumption that if the machine did not exist, there would be no sales, ignoring the fact that if there were no interfacing products the machine would have no market.
So, I see this hardware locking thing as a given. The irony will be when the XBox model is the MS standard, and everything is closed, the world will be rejoicing at how smart the closed system model is, and how MS invented it, just like we now rejoice at how smart the single vendor concept is.
But Yahoo is not much better. In most of my searches, the low price vendor uses a bait and switch scam to get clicks. The actual price of the product is often not only higher than advertised, but higher than the average. This is true for many of the product search engines.
I find myself going less to search engines, and more to trusted vendors and known sources of reliable information. Google maps is cool, but mapquest still gives more reliable directions. It seems that google is degenerating to a toy. Unfortunately toys do pose threats to those useful entities that just helps you get things done.
Many of the dot coms had no bussiness plans, and they should have failed. However did have good plans, but failed for the normal reasons of bad management. In this way the coms were no differnt from any other bussiness.
But even after the investors were supposedly 'spooked', companies like Enron and Worldcom were still allowed to function even though we were allegedly being 'more careful'. In 2000 it was not unccommon knowledge around houston that Enron might not have a good a plan to make money as was believed, and could be trouble. But we still had 60 billion gone in a day.
And now people are paying $200K for the exact same property that could be had for $50K in 1999, and they are saying with a straight face that a bubble is not occuring. The growth of real estate and stock are both have rather constant rates of growth over the long run, so, unless you believe in magic, or the invisible hand, which some still do, one expects a crash to compensate for a period of rapid growth.
But this is all simplistic. I think the reality is that software developers mostly try to make good software, but there is a pressure to add features rather than allocate resources to creating an internally good product. I have seen it, and I have been guilty of this. In this way having an external force pushing the software development process away from bloat and toward quality is a good thing.
As an aside, how many times have we been on the phone trying to report a bug only to be brushed aside. I remember one case where over two weeks I was told that there was no bug, to that I was crazy, It was not until I gave then proof and a fix that the problem was solved.
So yes there are some researchers out there that want to cause mayhem, just like there are some developers and publishers that just want to make money, and don't give a crap about quality control. And just like in most of life, the various forces keep each other in line. Perhpas you do have such down for a month to fix it. But perhaps if you gaver developers the resources to begin with, like time and hiring of competant people rather thatn the cheapest inexperienced freshmen, the problem would have never have surfaced.
Now, MS is fixing IE and may be able to solve the issues. If they succeed, those that are writing applicaion front ends will likely continue to use IE and continue to deploy MS kit if for no other reason that it is what is known. If MS does not solve these problems, then there may be a major break for another solution. The only variable is if the latest IE is MS Vista only.
But there is a technical problem within all this. Applications over the web are slow. Many years ago, I designed and used database driven applications over LAN. Today, similiar applications are almost unusable except for simple tasks. Some of this is due to the overhead of HTTP, but some of this is due to the designers ignoring the rules developed for database and network and GUI design. My prediction is that these techologies are going to be implemented in silly ways, using bad design, and it will stigmitize the entire technology. MS IE can get away with bad design, becuase most do not know anything else. But doing something better than IE, at least at the application level, is not easy.
If MS policies threaten integration with China, then MS will no longer be of use to a large portion of the world.
Affinity cards are part of this branding. They exist to remind the customer of the shop, and may limit the customer choices due the inconvince of carrying multiple cards. For the purpose of data collection such cards are hardly neccesary, as most of us do not use cash. Sales can be matched to most customer through payment accounts. In fact stores that primarily want to gather personally identifiable information can do so without the need of affinity cards.
In the end customer service is about knowing your customers. What we are talking about here is not really customer service, but customer expansion. That is, knowing what your customers might want, and knowing what those who are not yet your customers want. The megastores provide a service for the consumption hungry person in the west who will drive thier SUV 20 miles and load it up with stuff they don't really need. Those are who the stores want. The customers that don't require service but merely stuff. But they don't really don't do much for the person who just needs to get some food for thier family at a reasonable cost. Those that still value the well stocked but not overwhelming store, helpful people, and competant cashiers.
Now retailers have used technology and customer incentives to protect stock. Scanners and '$10 off if no recipt' help protect stock. But what can be done about returns? Opening up a package and confronting the customer is often more trouble than it is worth. And if the shrink wrap looks ok, what is an employee to do?
Most technological solutions are not going to work. The best solution is compentant well paid employees with appropriate regulations. Huge stores like WalMart are just going to have to take the hit. The philosophy of cheap labor and cheap prices leaves little room. In any case, the can screw the vendors.
So I can just imagine this case. A company with the god given right to make a profit, and the University of Texas. Perhaps if it would have been Texas Southern University, then the spammer would have had a chance. But no one in Texas who wants to live past the morning is going to rule against UT on something like this.
On a serious basis this might protect the employer from sexual harassment suits and the like. For example, a rape that occurs after hours during a 'working' dinner will have occurred as a result of an unauthorized get together.
On a cynical note, this might primarily be used to get rid of people the employer finds troublesome or can no longer afford. Need to get rid of two workers to reduce payroll, well fire the two that hang around too often, with no severance. Need to get rid of the old employee. Perfect opportunity. No benifits.
On a side note, it has been traditional to prohibit a married couple from working too closely, and to discourage such relationships from forming. It is often considered unprofessional to form a serious relationship with a coworker, especially if one is under the other in the chain of command. This rule is kind of retro, but not something new. It is assumed that after high school and college, one has sources for mates outside of the worktime holding area.
At the time that the codebase of IE was starting, the w3 standards weren't as hyped as they were today. As a result, it's no surprise that Microsoft didn't listen to them.
W3C standards were not hyped, but the standards at the time were well known top anyone interested enoguh to read about it. Just like best coding practices. Now, if one is trying to make a profit, one may have to cut coners. That is understandable. So one borks the standards, and does not prioritize buffer overflows as a problem. I have no issues with that as a bussiness decision.
What I do have a problem with is 20 years later coming out and saying that we did not know, or no one made up do it. I was coding quite a bit in the late 80's and 90's. I read much of the HTML 1.0 standards, and what came after. Those books were very clear on what HTML was, what it wasn't, and where to be careful. MS ignored those warning not because they were not, as you say, 'hyped', but because following the standards made little sense on the bottom line. MS was very late to the game, and all that mattered was getting in, not being complient. Complience mattered not as most would use whatever garbage MS prodced because that was all that most knew.
Today, they have to correct for that decision. It is just like corrected for the 640K issue, which forced so many of us to put hacked hardware and drivers into an otherwise excellent machine. Or having to put all this virus protection crap to protect a badly decisioned network OS, but wonderful standalong OS. They knew. It just did not make sense to do it.
Xerox is a classic example. it is in business to sell toner. this is how it makes the money, and everything else is secondary to that goal. The usability stuff is important because the copiers have to be usable. Look at the interface today and 30 years ago. Moderns copiers are marvel of embedded technology. Xerox was not in a position to fully exploit the technology, because nifty computers are not necessarily going to sell toner. Even though they had the smart people to innovate, and the resources to deploy, it wasn't going to happen. It took a small company that was flexible enough to reorient the core business to make use of the new technologies. If Xerox wanted to be in the computer business, they maybe could have bought Apple.
In terms of another discussion, intellectual property rights are not supposed to be used to hide technology. Patents and copyright require either enough description so that a person skilled in the art can recreate the product, or the product itself. This is what is wrong with software patents. They hide technology by protecting something that really doesn't exist, thereby hurting innovation. Apple had a much better case against MS than Xerox did against Apple becuase Apple acutally created a useable product.
From the story, the graphics were very small, text was breif, and one only retrieved a page at a time. The bandwidth would not even need to be that much. And localization was never a feature. In fact localization is just another word for push ads. Can you imagine the damn contraption telling you every two minutes 'I see you are driving by a starbucks. Why not have a drink?" Now that would have the movie funny. Oh, and while we are at it, lets give if GPP.
Contrast this to violence, in which many kids won't learn the reality, as they will not be caught in a those situations.
When we moved to OOP, new idioms were needed. We kept many of the old ones, and the OOP made complying with some rules, such as the separation of data, presentations, and manipulation, simpler. This is what design patterns does. It provides a set of idioms that can be applied to classes of problems. Once these are learned, one should be able to quickly develop a robust solution.
Take for example the singlet. It is a simple construct used when only one instance of an object is allowed. This happens more than one might imagine. I could sit down and think hard for a while and implement singlet, and then redesign, and debug, and after months of work come up with a good solution. Or I could just use the design pattern and in 20 minutes implement my singlet class.
The second part of you question is more complex. I, like most programmer, created crude versions of the design patterns on my own before reading this book. I even saw I enforced some OO concepts on my structured programming. Once I read the book I quickly saw the uefulness and began to use the patterns in my professional work. OTOH, when I was coding some math stuff over the summer, I did not use the patterns because the work was not so suited to the patterns. If i were to publish the work, I might go back and rework to fit the idiom. OTOH I know that the book is used widely and knowing the basics are useful. So if you are coding for fun, it might not help that much. If you are coding to show others, it would help to put the code in a form people will recognize.
I am a simple retailer. I contract with a service to supply custodians. I make the service promise to use only legal labor, and comply with all laws. If they don't, there is a process to investigate the matter, and if the allegations are true, help the contractor comply. I certainly understand that the demand for undocmented workers crete dangerous conditions for those workers,and may well further expose the country to terrorist threats. However, i can't really afford to pay any more for custodial staff than I already do, and cannot be held liable for the documentaiotn of the staff, because, as I said, i contract that out. The documentation of such staff does not affect the stock price, so we don't worry about it.
Notice the discussion is not over because I never mentioned that the holocaust was a way to maximize jobs for proper looking people.
In fact, free copying is a critical part of process of innovation and marketing. There was a time when school children went and copies the great works. The major entertainment conglormerate copy past work, make slight changes, and sell it as somethin new. They then want the new product protected into perpetutiy. The popularity of many things hinge of the free distribution of the product.
We have to be careful about rights. In the US we believe that everyone has the right to the pursuit of happiness, not the right to happiness. That often translates into everyone having the right to try to make a profit, or perhaps the opportunity to increase my happiness by copying other peoples stuff. OTOH, everyone in the US has the right to life and liberty. Take that as you wish.
Second, we are talking about a leap second, which happens once every year or so. Not often, but not never. This change is far outweighed by the normal timekeeping error, which for the average watch is like 3 minutes a year. The clock of a computer is not necessarily better. Also, we are only taking about clocks that need to keep track of the time, and not jut the passage of time.
As such we are really talking about a select set of software that much keep up with the time and not depend on a time server. If good techniques are used, the code to handle the leap second is one place, and good regression testing can check many different scenarios to insure that the code will work and changes do not break it. I am not saying it is trivail, but certain not prohibitively difficult. Since we are talking about network critical devices and specific military hardware, I do not see the problem with funding this development. What is really sounds like is that some people took government money for a project, and now want to changes the specs because they cannot do it.
The only other thing i can think of is that these apps are 20 years old and no one want to update them. There is some wisdom to letting working system run, but these are obviously not working. Next legislation will the pi=3, and francium will now be known as freedium.
Second, not everyone who is smart is going to work for Google/Yahoo. In fact those that can really turn over the apple cart are sitting somewhere that they can have more freedom and control over thier work. As much freedom as Google claims to give developers, ultimately your work is controlled by your boss. IMHO, the people who will tend to go to a corporation will be tend to be less creative and more likely to value high incomes over innovation.
So the question is what encouragement does the US give to those that want to tip the apple cart. The party line of tipping the apple cart within a corporate structure can only provide do much innovation. Google will want to provide direted advertisements. MS will want to maintain and extend the monopoly. Apple will want to sell functional cool product. Where is the social impetus to do something different? Go off on your own and hope to bought out, i guess.
And any, a VP hardly does anything innovative anyway. Every VP I know spends all day interfacing between mid level managers and the rest of the corporate structure. Not actualy reading papers to get ideas for new product.