But any company has the interest of it's owner closest to heart. In a public company, the owners are the stock holders and stock holders usually wants continuous growth and year on year profit, which might not be what is best for the company an might not be what is best for the consumer/user.
Actually, Silicon Valley is one of the places where this is *least* true. After the Google IPO, an increasing number of tech companies have gone public with voting structures that deliberately deprive the shareholders of any say in the operation of the company, and with binding IPO statements that specifically warn shareholders that the company does not intend to focus on continuous growth and year on year profit if it conflicts with long-term growth and with the good of their users.
In short, Edison and Tesla were working on the same things, but Tesla was generally smarter and had better ideas. Edison was better at business and showmanship, though, and became hugely wealthy while Tesla died in poverty having accomplished much less than Edison, even though he was a better inventor, scientist and engineer.
Some people think the story shows a flaw in the system. I think it shows a flaw in Tesla. If he wasn't good at the business side, he should have hired someone who was. Kinda like Woz and Jobs (far from a perfect parallel, but you get the idea).
They gather the ideas about the character of their god from TEXT and words of other human beings.
Obviously. To be precise, they get the ideas from those who have closer-than-normal contact with God, AKA prophets, and can then do their own testing to confirm or not.
What's your point? And why would you think that religious people are too "unintelligent" to understand this obvious fact?
Please don't confuse the sort of religious people who would hang out on talk.origins with religious people in general. It would be akin to believing that the atheists who hang out on Church of Euthanasia discussion sites are representative of atheists as a whole.
"Their idea may be right, but their presentation lacks and just drives away people."
Most religious people aren't interested in discussion, they already believe they are right because the confuse how they feel with knowledge. You cant counter someones feelings with facts unless they are honest and intelligent enough to understand how truth works.
In this context, you really can't counter them at all, not if you put aside your assumption that anyone who disagrees with you must be dishonest, stupid, or ignorant of "how truth works".
The problem is that in order to do it you have to convince them that all truth is accessible via the scientific method, that the only knowledge which has value is that which can be objectively tested. If you really think about it, that's a very profound and expansive claim. It's certainly true that the scientific approach has proven itself enormously useful and powerful in exploring many phenomena, but you can't really argue that all useful (in any sense) knowledge can be addressed this way. You can assert it, but there's no way to substantiate your assertion, and if they disagree, then what?
I'm a religious man. I'm also deeply appreciative of science, for all it has given us, and for all that it promises to give us. I see no conflict between those statements. God clearly does not wish His existence to be scientifically testable, but He still has plenty of ways to make His presence and will known to me -- and to you, if you so choose. But, by design, none that I can use to prove any of this to you in a controlled, repeatable fashion. I also don't believe that He has any objection whatsoever to humanity using our collective intelligence to explore this fantastic universe He has created for us, and that includes the mechanisms He used to create the universe and all in it.
Wouldn't you be concerned if the vendor of the OS you're dependent on suddenly comes along and decides to push their own store with it?
Ahem. And Ubuntu seems to be the preferred target by Valve. So why does it matter that Windows 8 has an app store if Ubuntu has one too?
Because on Ubuntu it's trivial to add a new app store -- and in fact it's easy to integrate your store into the Ubuntu store, at least from the user's perspective. Or you can put your own UI on it. Whatever. Running a system with multiple apt repositories has worked just fine for almost 20 years.
But games that come with their own highly-tuned OS on a LiveDVD aren't inconceivable, either. Hehe. It would be funny if we ended up moving to a world where large numbers of people work on Windows and boot into Linux (whether they realize it or not) for gaming.
I expected more flowing lines not something so... blocky. To each his own, I suppose. I still wouldn't turn it down if someone offered it to me, of course:-). I love boats, and something like that would be fantastic. Not that I could afford even the slip fees, much less to start the engines.
I'll believe this when I see them do something on Android that's not in their financial interest. As I've already said, this application is nothing but a tool to pump their services and products and little to do with embracing Android.
Oh, I don't expect them to "embrace" Android. But being willing to interoperate is significant. If this were the only example, I'd dismiss it, but it's not. The pattern, of late, seems to indicate the sort of maturation that I described. Maybe it's just temporary, but I see some reason to be hopeful.
Bear with me why I provide a little background to the question in the subject:
I worked for IBM for better than a decade, from the late 90s to just a couple of years ago. During that time, the general sentiment inside of IBM was that trying to lock customers in was a bad idea, that in the long term what was good for business was open, cross-platform widely-compatible solutions. That's not to say that none of IBM's product divisions ever tried to lock customers in, but it was the exception, and a fairly rare exception, and most of the rest of the company thought they were being stupid.
Obviously, the IBM I worked for was radically different in that respect from the IBM of the 60s, 70s and early 80s, when interoperability was a dirty word and IBM was able to gouge customers for obscene profits by locking them into "pure Blue" solutions. The anti-trust lawsuit and resulting consent decree was the start of the transformation, but the bigger force, IMO, was the fact that customers started distrusting IBM. In the late 90s when I started working for IBM Global Services, it was fairly standard practice in the consulting arm to actively *avoid* recommending IBM products unless they were clearly and undeniably the best solution available. A few years later practice shifted to pushing "blue" solutions more... but by then all of the solutions themselves had become not only interoperability-enabled, but most of them were entirely about interoperability, as IBM made the shift to a middleware and services company.
The fact is that open architectures and interoperable solutions really are better business in the long run. In the short term, lock-in allows the extraction of monopoly rents, but you don't build strong customer relationships that way, and good relations with your customers is how you continue raking in the bucks year after year, decade after decade. This is especially true for companies like IBM whose primary clients are businesses, but it's also true for companies that straddle the business and consumer markets, like Microsoft.
A number of things that have happened over the last few years make me think that Microsoft, even though they didn't get slapped around by the government the way IBM did, and really haven't ever gone through the sort of bloodletting that IBM did, has begun to turn the corner, to lose its institutional arrogance and its startup mentality of total domination at all costs, and matured into a company that understands you don't have to win everything to be successful, and that cooperation is sometimes more effective than competition.
I'd have said they'd never make that change while Ballmer is in charge, but maybe I was too pessimistic.
I'll reserve judgment for a few more years and see where they go. But I'm beginning to have hope that a new, less-evil Microsoft is emerging. They may need another serious failure or three to get all the way there, though. A major Windows 8 flop would probably be good for therm (culturally).
Thanks. I've looked at their systems, and unfortunately they don't have anything for sliding windows, which is what I'd prefer. They do appear to be the only solution on the market.
In fact the cost to create enough weather bouys and pay their on-going failure/replacement rate would greatly exceed the cost of a single weather satellite covering the same territory.
Satellites and weather balloons (I'm guessing that's what you meant by "buoys") gather different, and complementary, kinds of information. Neither is a replacement for the other.
This is an idea I've been wanting to find a way to implement for years, so this post is as much to see if anyone will give me suggestions on how to do it as to share the idea.
Where I live, even in the hottest part of the summer there is typically a portion of the night where the outside temperature is lower than the indoor temperature, and during spring and fall there are lots of times when achieving a more comfortable indoor temperature is as simple as opening the windows... except that opening the windows requires me to notice when I should open them, when I should close them, and to actually go and do both things. And even when I do, I never do them at the optimal times.
So, I want an automated house climate control system that has control over the heat, A/C and can also operate the windows automatically. Couple that with a control system that knows the required comfort curve (cooler at night, don't care during the day when no one is home, tighter comfort range in the morning and evening) and perhaps even knows not only current interior and exterior temperatures but also the expected outside temperatures over the next 24 hours (Internet weather reports can provide hourly predictions) and the thermal mass of the home and the rate at which it can be heated/cooled by the furnace, A/C and windows, and the result could conceivably be extremely efficient even with a home which isn't really optimized for energy efficiency.
Oh, weather reports would also be useful for figuring out when the system should close the window because of rain or wind.
I have a thermostat with Wifi connectivity and which provides a RESTful API for monitoring state and changing current settings, and I've begun fiddling with trying to build my control system. Now if only I could incorporate the windows...
The FSF excludes Debian because of its non-free repo. Debian without non-free would be approved by the FSF -- and AFAIK that's exactly what the distro they were handing out is... Ubuntu with all of the non-free bits removed.
I didn't say that. I just pointed out that the topic at hand is operations, not research. Reading comprehension is your friend.
Is it really? Satellites are only used for operations, not research?
Obviously, operations and research go hand in hand; both use the same data sources, experience from operational weather prediction provides input for research and research provides new tools for operations. I don't think you can divide them quite so neatly. My friends at NCAR would agree, and so would the folks who operate MADIS -- which in fact integrates data of exactly the sort I suggest in to the data sets used for operational weather prediction.
As such it made more sense to leave it consistent with everything else and make a new prefix for the binary numbers.
In the context of storage sizes they were well-established with the binary-based definitions, so changing them to be decimal-based isn't "leaving" anything.
Not true. In the context of storage sizes they were well-established to be base-10 definitions from the dawn of the computer age up until the 1980s or so. Only in the last 30 years or so have we started using powers of two units, and then only for RAM. Up until then, RAM was measured in powers-of-10 words, and in disk-based storage base 10 was and still is the norm. Network data rates likewise are and always have been in powers-of-10 units.
This is why it's useful to be careful to use the proper prefix. 10 petabytes is approximately 8.8 pebibytes. See? No confusion.
NCAR of course isn't in the business of weather forecasting... which renders their opinion irrelevant to some degree. Useful for research isn't the same thing as useful for operations.
Because research has no effect on operations. Right.
I'll answer your complaints point by point because it's fun, but there's really a single-"word" answer to nearly everything you said:
CWOP. Google it.
Please try talking to vendors and find one, just one mind you, that is willing to deliver thousands of sensor suites in say a year. When you find one that won't charge a premium for your order call me I'll buy a thousand.
You don't understand how volume purchasing works. You go to a vendor and commit to buy several thousand units per year and you will get a discount. Guaranteed high-volume contracts are extremely valuable to manufacturers.
You mean when a bird builds a nest under the transmitter/receiver head on an ultrasonic anemometer the manufacturer will come out an clean out the nest? Maybe you mean when spiders build a dense web across the mouth of the rain gauge the manufacturer will come out and clean it?
Is there some reason I couldn't do that myself?
Better yet as the RH sensor degrades due to pollution you will accept as realistic the RH the sensor reports.
I might, but I'm sure the NWS knows how to compensate for such issues.
Your private network has a level of robustness that it won't fail to transmit your data, when several thousands of people hit your server to suck the data down?
Bah, that's an easy problem to solve, and there are a hundred different viable approaches. If you want a really simple one... host your server on Google AppEngine. It'll scale just as far and as fast as you need it to.
July 2006 when 500,000 Ameren customers were without power for two weeks and 500 watt generators were going for $5000 you could insure your network stayed up, transmitting data and allowing others to pull data from your sensors
Obviously distibuted sensor networks are going to become unavailable in the event of network or power outages. Duh. Does a once-per-decade extended outage in one region make the rest of the data useless?
Go back to solving problems you can handle say like writing a clock app for WindowsRT
LOL. Did you look at my profile and see where I work? The first thing you have to learn if you want to be able to solve really hard problems is not to let yourself be dissuaded by the first difficulties that come up. The second thing you have to learn is that perfection is often impossible... but it's usually not actually necessary.
> The key is that block level indentation should be done only with tabs, and any extra indentation beyond the block level should be done only with spaces.
You say it, as if it were fact. Its you coding style, nothing more.
No, I'm saying that if you do it that way, you can actually make the code always line up no matter what the tab size is. Think about it, or try it.
I don't use it as my coding style, and I don't recommend it because it's too much effort to maintain the necessary mix of tabs and spaces. My point is just that it does in fact work.
Slashdot Mirror
But any company has the interest of it's owner closest to heart. In a public company, the owners are the stock holders and stock holders usually wants continuous growth and year on year profit, which might not be what is best for the company an might not be what is best for the consumer/user.
Actually, Silicon Valley is one of the places where this is *least* true. After the Google IPO, an increasing number of tech companies have gone public with voting structures that deliberately deprive the shareholders of any say in the operation of the company, and with binding IPO statements that specifically warn shareholders that the company does not intend to focus on continuous growth and year on year profit if it conflicts with long-term growth and with the good of their users.
In short, Edison and Tesla were working on the same things, but Tesla was generally smarter and had better ideas. Edison was better at business and showmanship, though, and became hugely wealthy while Tesla died in poverty having accomplished much less than Edison, even though he was a better inventor, scientist and engineer.
Some people think the story shows a flaw in the system. I think it shows a flaw in Tesla. If he wasn't good at the business side, he should have hired someone who was. Kinda like Woz and Jobs (far from a perfect parallel, but you get the idea).
They gather the ideas about the character of their god from TEXT and words of other human beings.
Obviously. To be precise, they get the ideas from those who have closer-than-normal contact with God, AKA prophets, and can then do their own testing to confirm or not.
What's your point? And why would you think that religious people are too "unintelligent" to understand this obvious fact?
So... what should we call them when they are unthinking, ignorant, brainwashed, and delusional?
That statement says far more about you than it does about us.
Please don't confuse the sort of religious people who would hang out on talk.origins with religious people in general. It would be akin to believing that the atheists who hang out on Church of Euthanasia discussion sites are representative of atheists as a whole.
"Their idea may be right, but their presentation lacks and just drives away people."
Most religious people aren't interested in discussion, they already believe they are right because the confuse how they feel with knowledge. You cant counter someones feelings with facts unless they are honest and intelligent enough to understand how truth works.
In this context, you really can't counter them at all, not if you put aside your assumption that anyone who disagrees with you must be dishonest, stupid, or ignorant of "how truth works".
The problem is that in order to do it you have to convince them that all truth is accessible via the scientific method, that the only knowledge which has value is that which can be objectively tested. If you really think about it, that's a very profound and expansive claim. It's certainly true that the scientific approach has proven itself enormously useful and powerful in exploring many phenomena, but you can't really argue that all useful (in any sense) knowledge can be addressed this way. You can assert it, but there's no way to substantiate your assertion, and if they disagree, then what?
I'm a religious man. I'm also deeply appreciative of science, for all it has given us, and for all that it promises to give us. I see no conflict between those statements. God clearly does not wish His existence to be scientifically testable, but He still has plenty of ways to make His presence and will known to me -- and to you, if you so choose. But, by design, none that I can use to prove any of this to you in a controlled, repeatable fashion. I also don't believe that He has any objection whatsoever to humanity using our collective intelligence to explore this fantastic universe He has created for us, and that includes the mechanisms He used to create the universe and all in it.
Pssst. The man's name is Steve. He probably wishes he was Bill, though.
From Valve's perspective, they have the freedom to integrate with Ubuntu's store or add their own. Either will work fine.
Wouldn't you be concerned if the vendor of the OS you're dependent on suddenly comes along and decides to push their own store with it?
Ahem. And Ubuntu seems to be the preferred target by Valve. So why does it matter that Windows 8 has an app store if Ubuntu has one too?
Because on Ubuntu it's trivial to add a new app store -- and in fact it's easy to integrate your store into the Ubuntu store, at least from the user's perspective. Or you can put your own UI on it. Whatever. Running a system with multiple apt repositories has worked just fine for almost 20 years.
But games that come with their own highly-tuned OS on a LiveDVD aren't inconceivable, either. Hehe. It would be funny if we ended up moving to a world where large numbers of people work on Windows and boot into Linux (whether they realize it or not) for gaming.
Good point!
I expected more flowing lines not something so... blocky. To each his own, I suppose. I still wouldn't turn it down if someone offered it to me, of course :-). I love boats, and something like that would be fantastic. Not that I could afford even the slip fees, much less to start the engines.
I'll believe this when I see them do something on Android that's not in their financial interest. As I've already said, this application is nothing but a tool to pump their services and products and little to do with embracing Android.
Oh, I don't expect them to "embrace" Android. But being willing to interoperate is significant. If this were the only example, I'd dismiss it, but it's not. The pattern, of late, seems to indicate the sort of maturation that I described. Maybe it's just temporary, but I see some reason to be hopeful.
Bear with me why I provide
Oh, that's annoying. s/why/while/
Damn fingers.
Bear with me why I provide a little background to the question in the subject:
I worked for IBM for better than a decade, from the late 90s to just a couple of years ago. During that time, the general sentiment inside of IBM was that trying to lock customers in was a bad idea, that in the long term what was good for business was open, cross-platform widely-compatible solutions. That's not to say that none of IBM's product divisions ever tried to lock customers in, but it was the exception, and a fairly rare exception, and most of the rest of the company thought they were being stupid.
Obviously, the IBM I worked for was radically different in that respect from the IBM of the 60s, 70s and early 80s, when interoperability was a dirty word and IBM was able to gouge customers for obscene profits by locking them into "pure Blue" solutions. The anti-trust lawsuit and resulting consent decree was the start of the transformation, but the bigger force, IMO, was the fact that customers started distrusting IBM. In the late 90s when I started working for IBM Global Services, it was fairly standard practice in the consulting arm to actively *avoid* recommending IBM products unless they were clearly and undeniably the best solution available. A few years later practice shifted to pushing "blue" solutions more... but by then all of the solutions themselves had become not only interoperability-enabled, but most of them were entirely about interoperability, as IBM made the shift to a middleware and services company.
The fact is that open architectures and interoperable solutions really are better business in the long run. In the short term, lock-in allows the extraction of monopoly rents, but you don't build strong customer relationships that way, and good relations with your customers is how you continue raking in the bucks year after year, decade after decade. This is especially true for companies like IBM whose primary clients are businesses, but it's also true for companies that straddle the business and consumer markets, like Microsoft.
A number of things that have happened over the last few years make me think that Microsoft, even though they didn't get slapped around by the government the way IBM did, and really haven't ever gone through the sort of bloodletting that IBM did, has begun to turn the corner, to lose its institutional arrogance and its startup mentality of total domination at all costs, and matured into a company that understands you don't have to win everything to be successful, and that cooperation is sometimes more effective than competition.
I'd have said they'd never make that change while Ballmer is in charge, but maybe I was too pessimistic.
I'll reserve judgment for a few more years and see where they go. But I'm beginning to have hope that a new, less-evil Microsoft is emerging. They may need another serious failure or three to get all the way there, though. A major Windows 8 flop would probably be good for therm (culturally).
Thanks. I've looked at their systems, and unfortunately they don't have anything for sliding windows, which is what I'd prefer. They do appear to be the only solution on the market.
In fact the cost to create enough weather bouys and pay their on-going failure/replacement rate would greatly exceed the cost of a single weather satellite covering the same territory.
Satellites and weather balloons (I'm guessing that's what you meant by "buoys") gather different, and complementary, kinds of information. Neither is a replacement for the other.
This is an idea I've been wanting to find a way to implement for years, so this post is as much to see if anyone will give me suggestions on how to do it as to share the idea.
Where I live, even in the hottest part of the summer there is typically a portion of the night where the outside temperature is lower than the indoor temperature, and during spring and fall there are lots of times when achieving a more comfortable indoor temperature is as simple as opening the windows... except that opening the windows requires me to notice when I should open them, when I should close them, and to actually go and do both things. And even when I do, I never do them at the optimal times.
So, I want an automated house climate control system that has control over the heat, A/C and can also operate the windows automatically. Couple that with a control system that knows the required comfort curve (cooler at night, don't care during the day when no one is home, tighter comfort range in the morning and evening) and perhaps even knows not only current interior and exterior temperatures but also the expected outside temperatures over the next 24 hours (Internet weather reports can provide hourly predictions) and the thermal mass of the home and the rate at which it can be heated/cooled by the furnace, A/C and windows, and the result could conceivably be extremely efficient even with a home which isn't really optimized for energy efficiency.
Oh, weather reports would also be useful for figuring out when the system should close the window because of rain or wind.
I have a thermostat with Wifi connectivity and which provides a RESTful API for monitoring state and changing current settings, and I've begun fiddling with trying to build my control system. Now if only I could incorporate the windows...
The FSF excludes Debian because of its non-free repo. Debian without non-free would be approved by the FSF -- and AFAIK that's exactly what the distro they were handing out is... Ubuntu with all of the non-free bits removed.
I didn't say that. I just pointed out that the topic at hand is operations, not research. Reading comprehension is your friend.
Is it really? Satellites are only used for operations, not research?
Obviously, operations and research go hand in hand; both use the same data sources, experience from operational weather prediction provides input for research and research provides new tools for operations. I don't think you can divide them quite so neatly. My friends at NCAR would agree, and so would the folks who operate MADIS -- which in fact integrates data of exactly the sort I suggest in to the data sets used for operational weather prediction.
After the precedent established in Italy, any seismologists who failed to predict this quake had better pack some bags.
As such it made more sense to leave it consistent with everything else and make a new prefix for the binary numbers.
In the context of storage sizes they were well-established with the binary-based definitions, so changing them to be decimal-based isn't "leaving" anything.
Not true. In the context of storage sizes they were well-established to be base-10 definitions from the dawn of the computer age up until the 1980s or so. Only in the last 30 years or so have we started using powers of two units, and then only for RAM. Up until then, RAM was measured in powers-of-10 words, and in disk-based storage base 10 was and still is the norm. Network data rates likewise are and always have been in powers-of-10 units.
This is why it's useful to be careful to use the proper prefix. 10 petabytes is approximately 8.8 pebibytes. See? No confusion.
NCAR of course isn't in the business of weather forecasting... which renders their opinion irrelevant to some degree. Useful for research isn't the same thing as useful for operations.
Because research has no effect on operations. Right.
I'll answer your complaints point by point because it's fun, but there's really a single-"word" answer to nearly everything you said:
CWOP. Google it.
Please try talking to vendors and find one, just one mind you, that is willing to deliver thousands of sensor suites in say a year. When you find one that won't charge a premium for your order call me I'll buy a thousand.
You don't understand how volume purchasing works. You go to a vendor and commit to buy several thousand units per year and you will get a discount. Guaranteed high-volume contracts are extremely valuable to manufacturers.
You mean when a bird builds a nest under the transmitter/receiver head on an ultrasonic anemometer the manufacturer will come out an clean out the nest? Maybe you mean when spiders build a dense web across the mouth of the rain gauge the manufacturer will come out and clean it?
Is there some reason I couldn't do that myself?
Better yet as the RH sensor degrades due to pollution you will accept as realistic the RH the sensor reports.
I might, but I'm sure the NWS knows how to compensate for such issues.
Your private network has a level of robustness that it won't fail to transmit your data, when several thousands of people hit your server to suck the data down?
Bah, that's an easy problem to solve, and there are a hundred different viable approaches. If you want a really simple one... host your server on Google AppEngine. It'll scale just as far and as fast as you need it to.
July 2006 when 500,000 Ameren customers were without power for two weeks and 500 watt generators were going for $5000 you could insure your network stayed up, transmitting data and allowing others to pull data from your sensors
Obviously distibuted sensor networks are going to become unavailable in the event of network or power outages. Duh. Does a once-per-decade extended outage in one region make the rest of the data useless?
Go back to solving problems you can handle say like writing a clock app for WindowsRT
LOL. Did you look at my profile and see where I work? The first thing you have to learn if you want to be able to solve really hard problems is not to let yourself be dissuaded by the first difficulties that come up. The second thing you have to learn is that perfection is often impossible... but it's usually not actually necessary.
> The key is that block level indentation should be done only with tabs, and any extra indentation beyond the block level should be done only with spaces. You say it, as if it were fact. Its you coding style, nothing more.
No, I'm saying that if you do it that way, you can actually make the code always line up no matter what the tab size is. Think about it, or try it.
I don't use it as my coding style, and I don't recommend it because it's too much effort to maintain the necessary mix of tabs and spaces. My point is just that it does in fact work.