... up to a certain point, that point being where to provide yet more quality will start to cost more than dealing with the negative outcomes of not pursuing quality.
managers (including the poster's) evaluate the costs and benefits of QA. the benefits of not pursuing quality include lower dev costs, and a shorter turnaround on investment. the costs of not pursuing quailty include customer churn, bad image, tech support costs. balancing these costs and benefits and their attendant corporate politics is probably quite tricky, so the manager therefore probably won't be that interested in being told how to do his job by someone who doesn't know how the company works (unless it's a blindingly obvious way to reduce costs - such as reusing old code...).
even if you could keep dogs many apartments are too small to make this practical
even if your apartment let you keep dogs and it was large enough you'd often be in an urban area with no room to exercise them.
so you get places that rent dogs by the hour so you can walk them to a local patch of greenery. apparently these are quite popular. i mentioned the aibo to japanese acquaintences recently, as in 'what's all this about,' rather than thinking it weird they just seemed to think that it was a good idea and another cool appliance from sony (as are all the small viao lappies, also designed for people with small desks in small apartments).
suspect A.I.s will first arise in entertainment computing: either as a robo-toy,
How about SONY's AIBO?
It's an interesting twist on the Turing Test definition of AI. Instead of giving Marvin Minsky 10s of millions of dollars to design machines that can somehow be quantitatively measured to be 'intelligent,' SONY produced a 1500 dollar robot dog that is designed to make you think that it is intelligent. And many people do think so (check out AIBO fan web sites...).
The AI is kinda created client side (i.e. in your brain) rather than in the machine itself.
I saw one in Japan recently, in an electronics storefront. On the left, there was a widescreen tv with a SONY promo video playing. On the right there was a perspex cube about 24" on each side, with an AIBO bumping around inside of it. After watching this for about 5 minutes we began to feel quite sorry for the AIBO.
right. that just about sums it up. i'd add tho that your choice of whether you purchase or license a book might not be so clear cut in the future. while the stories of how licenses being used to control content use can be fairly laughable at the moment -- for instance, the ebook version of 'alice in wonderland' that forbids it being read aloud, although i think this is meant to indicate 'read aloud as performance' rather than read aloud by moving one's lips -- this does not mean that (a) as the license model spreads and is refined, and (b) content and content delivery systems tend to monopolies, that the limited-term license may not become more common and enforceable in the future.
examples: my tickets from ticket master are now licenses that permit me to attend the event provided i do not subsequently broadcast any descriptions of it (i would have thought that telling people about it would be in ticketmaster's interest...); microsoft going after school boards to see if they have illegal copies of word 6 on their computers; and general talk of limited term licenses.
it's all mainly general corporate lawyer blah at the moment (although the ms cases are real) but once people get used to accessing stuff on screen and have not grown up browsing bookshops (new or second hand) they might be less concerned about it than we are, and it will be adopted by default.
this is a radical way in the way we approach information and the public domain, and the answers are not yet clear. if you want a great book about how an earlier communication technology radically changed the ways people think in unexpected ways, try elizabeth eisenstein's 'the printing press as agent of change,' 1979, cambridge university press. it's expensive though, so try 2nd hand...;)
it would be random if all ip addresses were distributed randomly. but are all ip addresses distributed randomly? i was wondering cuz some tlds are more popular, and so the sub-parts of the ip addresses associated with them would also be more popular. with unpopular tlds the lower level parts of the address are also not used to the same extent. perhaps the skewed effect reflects a skewed dist. of ip addresses withion the ip address universe.
in other words, rc is not selecting form a random sample, but a skewed sample. i think.
it's a bit late to post this, but it seems as if it's a recognised syndrome... amongst i.t. managers, at least. i searched goolge for "prima donna programmers" and came up with a bunch similar stuff.
It depends on how you calculate the benefits... you never know how it might play out. If all spam had a "one day" label on it, people might be tempted to read more of it than they do at the moment. Again in organisational contexts, it's also of benefit to the organisation -- it's their servers that back up the e-mail, for instance. And if you saved a minute everytime you had to scan your inbox for something, multiply that by all employees x the number of times they use e-mail per day x number of days in the year, etc., perhaps that's worth it for the organisation too...
I guess this is getting discussed elsewhere too, but for me the problem lies in the lack of a legally defined standard. sad but true. companies will only do s/thing about this if they think that they could dragged to court. i found lawrence lessig's 'code' and richard ellis smith's 'ben franklin's web site' to be good intros to this discussion.
Also, i know truste get hammered a lot, but i've been researching both truste and truste validated sites, and part of the problem is that there are many ways for truste validated sites to change their code in little hidden places (web bugs, 3rd party cookies etc.) w/out telling truste about it. it's very possible that the people doing the changes also do not know that the site that they are designing for is a truste licensee.
A bit o-t, but related to this, can anyone explain to me the advantages of (a) loading GIFs and (b) running cookie scripts between/BODY and/HTML tags. i know that the page does not load the gif, although it does cache it, but how does this affect cookies and the cookie warnings that you are supposed to get, if cookie warnings are turned on? (if it affects them at all)
Seriously though MS probably read this Salon article six days before the/. story. Or this Register story with a somewhat similar headline posted earlier on the 3rd.
I know this is an important issue so I'm not knocking the poster, but a few useful links in the original story would have helped.
And while it may be unpopular to say this here, MS's Privacy Policy is pretty good compared to others. It's a lot more specific and informative than a lot of other privacy policies carrying the TRUSTe mark... There's other TRUSTe certified sites out there that have worse policies. Whether having a better TRUSTe privacy policy actually does anything is another q., though.
My 0.02.
fff
Apple delivers "A Work in Progress," says MS(NBC)
on
Another Look At OS X
·
· Score: 1
Heh. Well, they should know.
The story includes a screen shot of the HTML editor. Looks like it has a built in validator, which is pretty neat.
The problem is also that people expect search engines to do their thinking for them (an expectation admittedly encouraged by search engines themselves). Search engines are algorithms. The content generated is a transformation of what you put in. If you know jack about what you are looking for this will often show in the results. If you know something to start with, your searches are likely to be more successful. Of course, you can always begin to intuite the workings of particular search alogorithms -- that's how people get used to or get proficient with one engine but can't use others...
As far as I understand it, the FCC will have the the tv bandwidth (aka UHF) back, as long as the tv broadcasters have switched the vast majority of their analog output to digital. I think the aribitrary figure is set at 95% or so. I'm not sure, if analog broadcasters don't achieve this percentage, whether or not the FCC can retrieve the bandwidth. Thus by denying hdtv access to cable, the FCC might in some ways be supporting the broadcasting companies, in that if hdtv has nowhere else to go, broadcasters will claim that they have to persist with analog broadcasts, which are then unlikely to be kicked off UHF altogether.
However, as noted, UHF is also well suited for 3G wireless phones (gets inside buildings better, etc.). There will be thus also be considerable pressure from cell phone companies on the broadcasters, and the FCC, to figure out some kind of compromise on access to UHF. In other words, UHF is prime real estate at the moment and all these manouevers are not just beauraucratic foul-ups, but probably evidence of deeper strategies by various parties aimed at getting a foothold on it. At the moment it looks like tv broadcasters are winning, in a roundabout way. However, it's interesting to think that if the FCC is switching alliegance from the cable industry to cellphones/wireless web -- as it will probably have to do at some point -- hell, the telecom people will probably just buy broadcast tv companies, probably for an exorbitant price -- it's an intriguing indicator of who's money really speaks in Washington these days.
There's an interesting parallel in Victorian England, when newer railroad companies were competing with older canal companies for freight transport revenue. The canal companies would buy up long thin stretches of land, that were useless for canals, but which would prevent railways being built along certain routes.
Although agreeing w/ the point that power shortages are largely a product of badly thought out political strategies, the fact remains that we also use a lot of power (US, w/ approx. 5% of world's population, produces approx. 25% of world's greenhouse emmissions). And if that power is used for information technology, it can cause local bottlenecks. For instance, it is planned to rewire the library here at CU -- Norlin -- primarily to support ever larger numbers of computers and printers. This will involve mega$ to run fatter wires through existing or new conduits, while the library continues to operate (translate: scaffolding, wrecked sheetrock, stripy black and yellow tape, and hammering noises, for about three years).
-fff-
right. as far as i understand it, before he won, he made it clear that if he did win, then he would not accept. so people voted for him in the expectation that he would step down, which is what he did.
so people voted for who they wanted to, the person with the most votes won, and then that person did what he had promised to do if he was elected.
i don't see what peoples' problem is with this. it's not as if he was elected and then reneged on his promises (i.e. what happens 99.99% of the time).
and i'm happy that the school board now looks like a complete bunch of jerks in front of the whole nation (world?)
This was PRECISELY my first thought when I read these pieces: this is a staged event for some reason as yet to be revealed.
Indeed. Let me offer two interpretations -- toally opposed, of course.
(A) Perhaps they do want to go open source, a la "Halloween," but to do it without losing face to their investors (one of the objections to Halloween was that the investors would not buy it as a business plan).
Or:
(B) Or, as you say, they will use it as a way to beat down open source. This latter strategy is sometimes known as "the strategy of tension." Some interesting examples being the bombing of Bologna railway station in Italy by extreme right wing groups connected w/ the govt, passed off as a left-wing bombing, in order to precipitate a crackdown on left-wing groups; or the British govt. setting up security force controlled, fake terrorist gangs in Northern Ireland, in order to increase their security powers there.
You need: white bread, string.
Take pieces of white bread and roll into small balls.
Take long piece of string and tie one end around the ball of white bread.
Put ball of bread on ground and wait for seagull heh heh heh.
Seagull swallows bread, swallows string - et voila!
If done for instance on the back of a moving boat you can then tie the string to the railing at the back of the boat, and build up quite a collction.
If you want I could also do the exploding seagull, too.
-fff-
Re:Stanislaw Lem is SF best kept secret
on
Solaris
·
· Score: 1
Yup, dynamic, and (ideally) down to -1. There's a lot of interesting AC stuff at 0 which does not make it, particularly in longer debates. IMHO, the way people talk about things amongst each other is often as interesting as what they are talking about, trolls and all. Some of the articles (e.g. Napster, DeCSS) are discussing what could be pivotal and historical moments. Preserving what people said about them at the time is crucial insurance against a future when they will be rewritten by historians with the benefit of hindsight... Anyway, these are meant to be discussions, so why not archive them as such?
Hmmm, a bit late in the day (or early in mine) to reply to this, but, I was just thinking that the Dyson quote above is not necessarily negative. The interpretation of it is, but Dyson herself (vapid as she can be) should be familiar enough with viral models of growth in cybernetics/systems theory/self organising systems, etc. to be aware of the context in which she is using the term.
I think the perception of the scam and the duplicity of the defending parties also plays a role. But you're right; dying lung cancer patients look a lot better on the witness stand than joe average music punter whining about how they were ripped off $3 on an Eminem disk ("Serve them right," the judge will probably think).
Now, if the record companies could be shown to thumbing their noses at the feds (e.g. by having avoided taxes), that might be another matter entirely, as it could be seen as being an attack on the state (rather than being an attack on the public who elect the state to supposedly represent them)...
Slightly o/t, it reminds me of a story I may have read here (or somewhere else) re. the Microsoft trial. Somebody made the point that when other corporations are dragged to court by the feds, they immediately hire lobbyists to go to Washington to "sort it out" via a series of meetings and well-placed donations. What really pissed the Justice Dept. off about Microsoft was that MS refused to play the game, and said f-you to the JD. (Well, Gates is wealthier than most governments on the surface of the planet, so I guess he can act like one too). It was Gates'/MS's refusal to play the game as much as anything else which eventually brought them to trial.
The record companies will probably play it differently. As one of the parents of these threads pointed out, this legal move could very well fizzle out, after a number of meetings, lavish expense-account lunches, and donations to the right parties, into an out-of-court slap on the wrist for the record companies.
Oh god, I'm rambling. It's been a long day...
-fff-
Note that in these circumstances, "virus" is not necessarily a term which carries negative connotations. Witness the fascination with "viral marketing" (you go, Mahir...). Nevertheless once the term leaks of the group espouses this particular usage, it can become negative.
... are absolutely right. And another reason why the pols will probably not pursue this is that the prospect of states (and their attorneys) versus RIAA (and all their attorneys) is a very time-and-money-consuming one indeed (c.f. tobacco).
Nevertheless, if it did actually come to court, in front of a jury of ordinary folks who're also the consumers ripped off by the miserable cartel the RIAA is, there is a possibility that the RIAA could be hammered half way to hell and back. Maybe not as much as the tobacco industries, but it would be the same kind of judgement, which boils down to "You lied to us and ripped us off, now it's payback time."
But, as you say, the RIAA have probably spread around a fair amount of cash to ensure that things do not get to that point.
Slashdot Mirror
managers (including the poster's) evaluate the costs and benefits of QA. the benefits of not pursuing quality include lower dev costs, and a shorter turnaround on investment. the costs of not pursuing quailty include customer churn, bad image, tech support costs. balancing these costs and benefits and their attendant corporate politics is probably quite tricky, so the manager therefore probably won't be that interested in being told how to do his job by someone who doesn't know how the company works (unless it's a blindingly obvious way to reduce costs - such as reusing old code ...).
so you get places that rent dogs by the hour so you can walk them to a local patch of greenery. apparently these are quite popular. i mentioned the aibo to japanese acquaintences recently, as in 'what's all this about,' rather than thinking it weird they just seemed to think that it was a good idea and another cool appliance from sony (as are all the small viao lappies, also designed for people with small desks in small apartments).
How about SONY's AIBO?
It's an interesting twist on the Turing Test definition of AI. Instead of giving Marvin Minsky 10s of millions of dollars to design machines that can somehow be quantitatively measured to be 'intelligent,' SONY produced a 1500 dollar robot dog that is designed to make you think that it is intelligent. And many people do think so (check out AIBO fan web sites ...).
The AI is kinda created client side (i.e. in your brain) rather than in the machine itself.
I saw one in Japan recently, in an electronics storefront. On the left, there was a widescreen tv with a SONY promo video playing. On the right there was a perspex cube about 24" on each side, with an AIBO bumping around inside of it. After watching this for about 5 minutes we began to feel quite sorry for the AIBO.
examples: my tickets from ticket master are now licenses that permit me to attend the event provided i do not subsequently broadcast any descriptions of it (i would have thought that telling people about it would be in ticketmaster's interest ...); microsoft going after school boards to see if they have illegal copies of word 6 on their computers; and general talk of limited term licenses.
it's all mainly general corporate lawyer blah at the moment (although the ms cases are real) but once people get used to accessing stuff on screen and have not grown up browsing bookshops (new or second hand) they might be less concerned about it than we are, and it will be adopted by default.
this is a radical way in the way we approach information and the public domain, and the answers are not yet clear. if you want a great book about how an earlier communication technology radically changed the ways people think in unexpected ways, try elizabeth eisenstein's 'the printing press as agent of change,' 1979, cambridge university press. it's expensive though, so try 2nd hand ... ;)
my usd 0.02 ...
in other words, rc is not selecting form a random sample, but a skewed sample. i think.
Search here.
It depends on how you calculate the benefits ... you never know how it might play out. If all spam had a "one day" label on it, people might be tempted to read more of it than they do at the moment. Again in organisational contexts, it's also of benefit to the organisation -- it's their servers that back up the e-mail, for instance. And if you saved a minute everytime you had to scan your inbox for something, multiply that by all employees x the number of times they use e-mail per day x number of days in the year, etc., perhaps that's worth it for the organisation too ...
While this might work for organisations, can't see spammers adopting it though :)
fff
I guess this is getting discussed elsewhere too, but for me the problem lies in the lack of a legally defined standard. sad but true. companies will only do s/thing about this if they think that they could dragged to court. i found lawrence lessig's 'code' and richard ellis smith's 'ben franklin's web site' to be good intros to this discussion.
Also, i know truste get hammered a lot, but i've been researching both truste and truste validated sites, and part of the problem is that there are many ways for truste validated sites to change their code in little hidden places (web bugs, 3rd party cookies etc.) w/out telling truste about it. it's very possible that the people doing the changes also do not know that the site that they are designing for is a truste licensee.
A bit o-t, but related to this, can anyone explain to me the advantages of (a) loading GIFs and (b) running cookie scripts between /BODY and /HTML tags. i know that the page does not load the gif, although it does cache it, but how does this affect cookies and the cookie warnings that you are supposed to get, if cookie warnings are turned on? (if it affects them at all)
Seriously though MS probably read this Salon article six days before the /. story. Or this Register story with a somewhat similar headline posted earlier on the 3rd.
I know this is an important issue so I'm not knocking the poster, but a few useful links in the original story would have helped.
And while it may be unpopular to say this here, MS's Privacy Policy is pretty good compared to others. It's a lot more specific and informative than a lot of other privacy policies carrying the TRUSTe mark ... There's other TRUSTe certified sites out there that have worse policies. Whether having a better TRUSTe privacy policy actually does anything is another q., though.
My 0.02.
fff
The story includes a screen shot of the HTML editor. Looks like it has a built in validator, which is pretty neat.
The problem is also that people expect search engines to do their thinking for them (an expectation admittedly encouraged by search engines themselves). Search engines are algorithms. The content generated is a transformation of what you put in. If you know jack about what you are looking for this will often show in the results. If you know something to start with, your searches are likely to be more successful. Of course, you can always begin to intuite the workings of particular search alogorithms -- that's how people get used to or get proficient with one engine but can't use others ...
However, as noted, UHF is also well suited for 3G wireless phones (gets inside buildings better, etc.). There will be thus also be considerable pressure from cell phone companies on the broadcasters, and the FCC, to figure out some kind of compromise on access to UHF. In other words, UHF is prime real estate at the moment and all these manouevers are not just beauraucratic foul-ups, but probably evidence of deeper strategies by various parties aimed at getting a foothold on it. At the moment it looks like tv broadcasters are winning, in a roundabout way. However, it's interesting to think that if the FCC is switching alliegance from the cable industry to cellphones/wireless web -- as it will probably have to do at some point -- hell, the telecom people will probably just buy broadcast tv companies, probably for an exorbitant price -- it's an intriguing indicator of who's money really speaks in Washington these days.
There's an interesting parallel in Victorian England, when newer railroad companies were competing with older canal companies for freight transport revenue. The canal companies would buy up long thin stretches of land, that were useless for canals, but which would prevent railways being built along certain routes.
Although agreeing w/ the point that power shortages are largely a product of badly thought out political strategies, the fact remains that we also use a lot of power (US, w/ approx. 5% of world's population, produces approx. 25% of world's greenhouse emmissions). And if that power is used for information technology, it can cause local bottlenecks. For instance, it is planned to rewire the library here at CU -- Norlin -- primarily to support ever larger numbers of computers and printers. This will involve mega$ to run fatter wires through existing or new conduits, while the library continues to operate (translate: scaffolding, wrecked sheetrock, stripy black and yellow tape, and hammering noises, for about three years). -fff-
so people voted for who they wanted to, the person with the most votes won, and then that person did what he had promised to do if he was elected.
i don't see what peoples' problem is with this. it's not as if he was elected and then reneged on his promises (i.e. what happens 99.99% of the time).
and i'm happy that the school board now looks like a complete bunch of jerks in front of the whole nation (world?)
-fff-
Indeed. Let me offer two interpretations -- toally opposed, of course.
(A) Perhaps they do want to go open source, a la "Halloween," but to do it without losing face to their investors (one of the objections to Halloween was that the investors would not buy it as a business plan).
Or:
(B) Or, as you say, they will use it as a way to beat down open source. This latter strategy is sometimes known as "the strategy of tension." Some interesting examples being the bombing of Bologna railway station in Italy by extreme right wing groups connected w/ the govt, passed off as a left-wing bombing, in order to precipitate a crackdown on left-wing groups; or the British govt. setting up security force controlled, fake terrorist gangs in Northern Ireland, in order to increase their security powers there.
Take pieces of white bread and roll into small balls.
Take long piece of string and tie one end around the ball of white bread.
Put ball of bread on ground and wait for seagull heh heh heh.
Seagull swallows bread, swallows string - et voila!
If done for instance on the back of a moving boat you can then tie the string to the railing at the back of the boat, and build up quite a collction.
If you want I could also do the exploding seagull, too.
-fff-
J. G. Ballard.
i.e. 99% of consumers.
Yup, dynamic, and (ideally) down to -1. There's a lot of interesting AC stuff at 0 which does not make it, particularly in longer debates. IMHO, the way people talk about things amongst each other is often as interesting as what they are talking about, trolls and all. Some of the articles (e.g. Napster, DeCSS) are discussing what could be pivotal and historical moments. Preserving what people said about them at the time is crucial insurance against a future when they will be rewritten by historians with the benefit of hindsight ... Anyway, these are meant to be discussions, so why not archive them as such?
Hmmm, a bit late in the day (or early in mine) to reply to this, but, I was just thinking that the Dyson quote above is not necessarily negative. The interpretation of it is, but Dyson herself (vapid as she can be) should be familiar enough with viral models of growth in cybernetics/systems theory/self organising systems, etc. to be aware of the context in which she is using the term.
Now, if the record companies could be shown to thumbing their noses at the feds (e.g. by having avoided taxes), that might be another matter entirely, as it could be seen as being an attack on the state (rather than being an attack on the public who elect the state to supposedly represent them) ...
Slightly o/t, it reminds me of a story I may have read here (or somewhere else) re. the Microsoft trial. Somebody made the point that when other corporations are dragged to court by the feds, they immediately hire lobbyists to go to Washington to "sort it out" via a series of meetings and well-placed donations. What really pissed the Justice Dept. off about Microsoft was that MS refused to play the game, and said f-you to the JD. (Well, Gates is wealthier than most governments on the surface of the planet, so I guess he can act like one too). It was Gates'/MS's refusal to play the game as much as anything else which eventually brought them to trial.
The record companies will probably play it differently. As one of the parents of these threads pointed out, this legal move could very well fizzle out, after a number of meetings, lavish expense-account lunches, and donations to the right parties, into an out-of-court slap on the wrist for the record companies.
Oh god, I'm rambling. It's been a long day ...
-fff-
-fff-
Nevertheless, if it did actually come to court, in front of a jury of ordinary folks who're also the consumers ripped off by the miserable cartel the RIAA is, there is a possibility that the RIAA could be hammered half way to hell and back. Maybe not as much as the tobacco industries, but it would be the same kind of judgement, which boils down to "You lied to us and ripped us off, now it's payback time."
But, as you say, the RIAA have probably spread around a fair amount of cash to ensure that things do not get to that point.
-fff-
-fff-