"Innovation" -- we keep hearing that word, but I've yet to see it from Microsoft. They do an *excellent* job of taking other people's innovative ideas and packaging them in a way that is Good Enough To Work, and they do an excellent job of buying up little innovative companies and products, but I've yet to see one bit of actual innovation.
Woah, woah. Office is the most popular productivity product because it's good. Complain all you like about Microsoft; they've produced an exceptional set of products in Office. It doesn't have anything to do with mindshare or monopoly power.
It might be good now, but at the time that there was competition, it was definitely inferior to offerings from other companies. Now, Lotus and All-the-various-owners-of-Wordperfect did some pretty stupid things, so it's not all Microsoft's fault, but I don't believe for a minute that MS Office won out on *merit*. They won through bundling, and they won through marketing.
Re:Soderberg's Film a Total Failure
on
Review: Solaris
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· Score: 2
Lem's novel had a science fiction emphasis that revolved around a living "sentient ocean" on the planet Solaris. The focus was on how man would react to a nonanthropomorphic being whose nature and behavior man was unable to comprehend. A romantic (slightly) subplot served the main plot by illustrating a facet of the ocean's behavior-the planet's own reaction to humans that it, in turn, was unable to comprehend.
I think this is an incomplete reading, or a turned-around one. To me, the focus of the book is the difficulty of communication between *humans*. The ocean is a metaphor for this -- as the text says itself, it is really just a mirror. This theme is played out again and again through the whole story.
Solaris" - forget the love story. Is the ocean alive in any sense that humans could understand?
If you ignore the human relations in Solaris, you're missing a lot. At its core, Solaris is about communication between *humans* -- and about mortality and divinity. The contact-with-aliens stuff is just the mechanism through which this is explored.
In Lem's book, the love story is more of a backdrop, and the main theme is indeed the contact (or lack thereof) between humanity and the ocean (Solaris).
The communication between the humanity and the ocean is a backdrop too. The book is largely about the difficulty of *people* communicating with each other, including with themselves (through memory) and with the concept of the divine. The ocean works as a metaphor for this, just as the "love story" is an example of it.
Sounds like Peep, the Network Auralizer, which I learned about from a Slashdot story from almost a year ago. I haven't looked at this Soundwire project much beyond the links above, but from a quick glance, Peep is a lot further along, a lot more flexible, and wider-reaching.
Note that he isn't making money off of spam directly -- he's making money by sending spam for other people. There's no indication that it's actually working for those people.
Nothing is designed from scratch, *especially* when it comes to physics. Planes *do* fly the way birds do; we just were making poor observations about what it was that made birds fly -- all of the flapping is distracting. In fact, the Wright brothers' success came directly from watching birds wings and understanding better exactly what was going on.
It makes total sense that this would happen. In order to keep fields fertile, it's best to rotate which crops get grown each year -- often soy,soy,corn. So it stands to reason that you're going to have some corn "volunteers" the years you grow soy.
the frog joke
on
Science Askew
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· Score: 5, Interesting
Oh come on. That's *totally* a good geek joke. Of course not every geek fits the stereotype, but that doesn't mean there isn't truth to it. You've made it more negative by making the programmer say that he has no need for a girlfriend -- I've often heard it as having no *time* for one. Or that there's plenty of beautiful women in the world already. Either way, the concept of a programmer-geek not acting in the "traditional" manner here is amusing -- much better than that lame geologist joke.
This seems very short sighted to me. Devices that can only display ASCII are becoming rarer and rarer.
And the key thing is: with a good markup language, converting to plain ASCII for those devices is trivial. Or *trivial*. It's a win-win proposition. In fact, the markup language doesn't even have to be that great -- HTML 4 would work fine.
Dammit. Hit ctrl-enter by accident and Mozilla went and submitted the form. Stupid web browser. let me try again:
If an alternative vote / instant runoff system were in place, Al Gore would certainly have won the last election (and Ralph Nader would have gotten a large enough percentage of the vote to receive public clean-election money next time around).
It looks like we may have a similar situation in Massachusetts, with Jill Stein of the Green party able to get enough votes to "swing" the close election between Romney and O'Brian (the extremely ridiculous and childish candidates fielded by the Republicans and Democrats). If O'Brian loses, she'll certainly whine a bit about how Stein "stole" votes from her (how she *deserved* those votes is beyond me), but if this happens enough times, eventually the Democrats *have* to see the light and will support an instant runoff system.
With a major party backing that, we actually have some chance of serious vote reform. For that reason, I highly recommend voting for Stein if you want to see an improvement in the future, no matter what your immediate-term politics are.
And not coincidentally, switching to a instant runoff voting system is one of the issues Stein has been pushing.
This'll also work voting Libertarian in some cases, but in MA I think coming at it from the left is more likely to be effective.
From what I've heard from the Red Hat folks, their Bugzilla is *definitely* the preferred way to send them bug reports. And as a user, I've found them good about responding to those quickly.
Some things may not have bugs because the problems are with the upstream code, not the Red-Hat-specific package.
Microsoft decides they need an ad campaign like Apple has to show people are switching the other way too. Calls marteters and requests they find someone who has switched and create an ad highlighting them.
I'd be very surprised if that's what their call said. I bet they said: We need an ad campaign with stories from people switching, too. And the ad agency went right ahead and made some. Now Microsoft is acting all shocked that this happened, and that's just plain silly.
Wow, so you think that a company with thousands upon thousands of employees that not one of them takes a easy way out?
Not at all. I figure Microsoft said: We need a testimonial story about a user switching from Mac to MS Windows. The ad agency said "okay", and made one. Nowhere anywhere along the line did anyone say "oh, and find a *real* person with a real testimonial". Fake first person praise is a staple of advertising, and the person assigned to do the job wasn't doing anything even slightly abnormal or out of the way -- or even dishonest, from an ad agency point of view.
I *highly* doubt that Microsoft ever said "find us a real person" -- they just ordered some ad copy, and they got it.
Ok, no one else has said this yet, so I will: this whole stance Microsoft is taking of blaming the consultant is the most laughable thing I've heard in a long time. Why on earth would some random low-level ad person lie to help Microsoft? Is she an evil, conniving, "not entirely straightforward" person? Answer: no, of course not. She did it because Microsoft told her to do it, and paid her.
At the best (or worst, depending on the angle you're looking from) she came up with the concept and it was okayed by her superiors -- it did end up on the Microsoft site, after all, and from the article she wrote, I seriously doubt she has the technical skills to hack in and put it there herself.
Microsoft's claim that they're the innocent victims of the manipulations of some ad agency schemer is so obviously ridiculous and transparent I can't believe they're even trying it.
They don't break module compatibility out of spite -- they just reserve the right to do so in the course of improving things. This makes things easier for the *kernel developers*, which hopefully eventually comes down to making a better kernel for the end users. They don't have to waste their time making sure every change is still compatible with every proprietary module out there -- and that's a good thing.
We've been Zipcar members in Boston for more than a year, and we're incredibly happy with it. It helps that there's a car that lives right in the parking lot of our apartment complex, but there's other nearby convenient ones too. We've had no problem getting the car when we need it, but it also seems to be gone often enough that we know we're not the only users. The technology they use is great -- works in a way that is almost indistinguishable from magic. And the people are nice and responsive, as are the cars, for that matter. Really, I can't recommend it enough for city-dwellers.
The only problem is that I lie in bed at night worrying that they'll go the way of Kozmo.
Slashdot Mirror
"Innovation" -- we keep hearing that word, but I've yet to see it from Microsoft. They do an *excellent* job of taking other people's innovative ideas and packaging them in a way that is Good Enough To Work, and they do an excellent job of buying up little innovative companies and products, but I've yet to see one bit of actual innovation.
Woah, woah. Office is the most popular productivity product because it's good. Complain all you like about Microsoft; they've produced an exceptional set of products in Office. It doesn't have anything to do with mindshare or monopoly power.
It might be good now, but at the time that there was competition, it was definitely inferior to offerings from other companies. Now, Lotus and All-the-various-owners-of-Wordperfect did some pretty stupid things, so it's not all Microsoft's fault, but I don't believe for a minute that MS Office won out on *merit*. They won through bundling, and they won through marketing.
Badly. How are you networking all of these? And powering 'em, for that matter?
Yeah, exactly.
Lem's novel had a science fiction emphasis that revolved around a living "sentient ocean" on the planet Solaris. The focus was on how man would react to a nonanthropomorphic being whose nature and behavior man was unable to comprehend. A romantic (slightly) subplot served the main plot by illustrating a facet of the ocean's behavior-the planet's own reaction to humans that it, in turn, was unable to comprehend.
I think this is an incomplete reading, or a turned-around one. To me, the focus of the book is the difficulty of communication between *humans*. The ocean is a metaphor for this -- as the text says itself, it is really just a mirror. This theme is played out again and again through the whole story.
Solaris" - forget the love story. Is the ocean alive in any sense that humans could understand?
If you ignore the human relations in Solaris, you're missing a lot. At its core, Solaris is about communication between *humans* -- and about mortality and divinity. The contact-with-aliens stuff is just the mechanism through which this is explored.
In Lem's book, the love story is more of a backdrop, and the main theme is indeed the contact (or lack thereof) between humanity and the ocean (Solaris).
The communication between the humanity and the ocean is a backdrop too. The book is largely about the difficulty of *people* communicating with each other, including with themselves (through memory) and with the concept of the divine. The ocean works as a metaphor for this, just as the "love story" is an example of it.
Sounds like Peep, the Network Auralizer, which I learned about from a Slashdot story from almost a year ago. I haven't looked at this Soundwire project much beyond the links above, but from a quick glance, Peep is a lot further along, a lot more flexible, and wider-reaching.
Note that he isn't making money off of spam directly -- he's making money by sending spam for other people. There's no indication that it's actually working for those people.
Well, the birds don't use jet fuel, but the principles are the same.
Nothing is designed from scratch, *especially* when it comes to physics. Planes *do* fly the way birds do; we just were making poor observations about what it was that made birds fly -- all of the flapping is distracting. In fact, the Wright brothers' success came directly from watching birds wings and understanding better exactly what was going on.
Point of correction: The airplane wing is less a product of nature than physics.
Since when is physics supernatural?
It makes total sense that this would happen. In order to keep fields fertile, it's best to rotate which crops get grown each year -- often soy,soy,corn. So it stands to reason that you're going to have some corn "volunteers" the years you grow soy.
Oh come on. That's *totally* a good geek joke. Of course not every geek fits the stereotype, but that doesn't mean there isn't truth to it. You've made it more negative by making the programmer say that he has no need for a girlfriend -- I've often heard it as having no *time* for one. Or that there's plenty of beautiful women in the world already. Either way, the concept of a programmer-geek not acting in the "traditional" manner here is amusing -- much better than that lame geologist joke.
This seems very short sighted to me. Devices that can only display ASCII are becoming rarer and rarer.
And the key thing is: with a good markup language, converting to plain ASCII for those devices is trivial. Or *trivial*. It's a win-win proposition. In fact, the markup language doesn't even have to be that great -- HTML 4 would work fine.
Dammit. Hit ctrl-enter by accident and Mozilla went and submitted the form. Stupid web browser. let me try again:
If an alternative vote / instant runoff system were in place, Al Gore would certainly have won the last election (and Ralph Nader would have gotten a large enough percentage of the vote to receive public clean-election money next time around).
It looks like we may have a similar situation in Massachusetts, with Jill Stein of the Green party able to get enough votes to "swing" the close election between Romney and O'Brian (the extremely ridiculous and childish candidates fielded by the Republicans and Democrats). If O'Brian loses, she'll certainly whine a bit about how Stein "stole" votes from her (how she *deserved* those votes is beyond me), but if this happens enough times, eventually the Democrats *have* to see the light and will support an instant runoff system.
With a major party backing that, we actually have some chance of serious vote reform. For that reason, I highly recommend voting for Stein if you want to see an improvement in the future, no matter what your immediate-term politics are.
And not coincidentally, switching to a instant runoff voting system is one of the issues Stein has been pushing.
This'll also work voting Libertarian in some cases, but in MA I think coming at it from the left is more likely to be effective.
If an alternative vote / instant runoff system
From what I've heard from the Red Hat folks, their Bugzilla is *definitely* the preferred way to send them bug reports. And as a user, I've found them good about responding to those quickly.
Some things may not have bugs because the problems are with the upstream code, not the Red-Hat-specific package.
Others just need more people to file reports.
Hmm; it's based on the mathematical properties of dice, and it sounds almost random. Hmmm.
Microsoft decides they need an ad campaign like Apple has to show people are switching the other way too. Calls marteters and requests they find someone who has switched and create an ad highlighting them.
I'd be very surprised if that's what their call said. I bet they said: We need an ad campaign with stories from people switching, too. And the ad agency went right ahead and made some. Now Microsoft is acting all shocked that this happened, and that's just plain silly.
Wow, so you think that a company with thousands upon thousands of employees that not one of them takes a easy way out?
Not at all. I figure Microsoft said: We need a testimonial story about a user switching from Mac to MS Windows. The ad agency said "okay", and made one. Nowhere anywhere along the line did anyone say "oh, and find a *real* person with a real testimonial". Fake first person praise is a staple of advertising, and the person assigned to do the job wasn't doing anything even slightly abnormal or out of the way -- or even dishonest, from an ad agency point of view.
I *highly* doubt that Microsoft ever said "find us a real person" -- they just ordered some ad copy, and they got it.
Hmmm; the maps of Boston seem just about as good for getting around here as any I've seen at a bookstore recently....
At the best (or worst, depending on the angle you're looking from) she came up with the concept and it was okayed by her superiors -- it did end up on the Microsoft site, after all, and from the article she wrote, I seriously doubt she has the technical skills to hack in and put it there herself.
Microsoft's claim that they're the innocent victims of the manipulations of some ad agency schemer is so obviously ridiculous and transparent I can't believe they're even trying it.
They don't break module compatibility out of spite -- they just reserve the right to do so in the course of improving things. This makes things easier for the *kernel developers*, which hopefully eventually comes down to making a better kernel for the end users. They don't have to waste their time making sure every change is still compatible with every proprietary module out there -- and that's a good thing.
We've been Zipcar members in Boston for more than a year, and we're incredibly happy with it. It helps that there's a car that lives right in the parking lot of our apartment complex, but there's other nearby convenient ones too. We've had no problem getting the car when we need it, but it also seems to be gone often enough that we know we're not the only users. The technology they use is great -- works in a way that is almost indistinguishable from magic. And the people are nice and responsive, as are the cars, for that matter. Really, I can't recommend it enough for city-dwellers.
The only problem is that I lie in bed at night worrying that they'll go the way of Kozmo.