The wind isn't blowing that way just because you think it is.
Of course not, but in all of these things you're guessing what people will do in the future. As I say above, neither my boss (networking/distributed systems/games nor myself (AI/games/previously graphics) have been asked for anything to be done in LaTeX in 4 years, but we have been asked in about half our cases for documents to be "Word" documents. 5 years ago I definitely was doing stuff in LaTeX for siggraph and other places, but by now most places seem to be content with Word Docs.
Even if we were asked to produce a LaTeX document now, we'd probably do most of it in google docs or, if we had the money, a sharepoint collaborative word editing environment and then copy it into LaTeX for final formatting.
Even simple things such as anchoring floats at the tops and bottoms of pages has always been an inconsistent nightmare in Word. Both MathType and the Microsoft equation editor produce crappy looking regular equations, and the inline results are unspeakably horrendous.
Visually you can't distinguish between the equations I create in word (in either case) from those done in LaTeX, if setup properly. By default they do have their own distinct style I agree. As to your first point, about anchoring floats I agree, word doesn't handle it consistently, nor does it cope gracefully with changing between A4 and letter paper sizes on the same document, or a lot of other things. But my suspicion is that is why we're being asked for word docs more and more, people are shifting to MS publisher and grab the word doc, and reformat it to their liking for publication. Not that I've ever seriously used publisher to have any sense of how good or bad an idea that is, my suspicion is that people are fleeing InDesign or whatever the adobe equivalent is. Again, I'm not sure that's a good plan, that's just what we've been seeing the last few years.
At this point even the ACM is providing word document templates http://www.acm.org/publications/submissions, though I think siggraph is still only providing some word templates, it seems to be trending in the direction of Office docs. But in another couple of years this whole discussion may be mooted by things like google docs.
if you're using the built in MS equation editor, and used to it LaTeX is only marginally better. I just helped typeset a book in Word full of equations, and made a several hundred powerpoint slides using the same equation editor and it's not great but it's not bad. If you care to invest in a decent equation editor for word it makes the process much better, and in the end it's not really much harder than Latex.
Waterloo (I'm not affiliated with waterloo) had a great guide a number of years ago on how to do your thesis in Word, with guides for all of the equations etc. From that point on it seemed to be pretty clear the way the wind was blowing.
CS, and publishing in fact in CS. I don't think me or my boss have been asked for LaTeX in 4 years (he and I publish in different fields) so we gave up trying to do anything in LaTeX.
He's networking distributed systems stuff, but migrating to video games, I'm full on AI/Games/Graphics stuff.
Um... 3.4 million for a blackberry enterprise server, phone plans, 175 phones, SEC approved monitoring equipment (monitoring them as though they were employees) and graduate student salaries. Paying the participants for yearly meetings, data hosting and backups.
And remember, this was on phone plans set up several years ago too.
Sure, that works out to about 5000 dollars per phone per year for 4 years. But it's hard to know just how many people are being paid on the backend for all of these things, what percentage the university takes, if they have to pay even one professor level person out of this for 4 years you're sucking up a LOT of cash on that, and as it even says, they have to hand process all of the texts (or even machine edit, you still need to pay for that software).
What's without their knowledge? Every year they have to discuss exactly how this goes, and they are using the tracking tools that are legally used on employees as per SEC rules. It's in TFA.
LIkely this went through layers of reviews of what exactly can and can't be done with and to the data, and explicitly spelling out to the people getting the phones just what they've agreed to.
You can't get this kind of data without 'violating' privacy in some way or another (I use quotes because as long as they've spelled out what exactly they're doing it's not technically a violate0. But that's also what makes it valuable research, you can't know what people are actually using the devices for without asking them to fully tell you. That real information about how devices are actually use is tremendously valuable to all sorts of different groups of people, from the technical side of things to the sociology and history people.
From TFA they seemed to have based their data gathering on SEC rules for gathering data on employee communications and use the same technology. Essentially the students are being given cell phones the way your employer would give you one, and monitored and data aggregated accordingly. They are yearly paid 50 bucks for visits, sign yearly consent forms and are fully aware of what exactly is being tracked, which, admittedly, produces certain biases in the data. They know they're being monitored and that data will be stored forever, but they may not be entirely aware of what that means, but I guess that's the tricky balance, the data isn't any good if they don't behave normally, but then they might not behave normally if you for every text message you insert one reminding them this call is all being recorded.
As per TFA "Underwood got a Federal Certificate of Confidentiality from the NIH, exempting the researchers from having to report any discussion of crimes to authorities. But her team is required to monitor the database for talk of suicide or abuse. On a weekly basis, they do a search with a long list of words, including rape, kill myself, or older man. They’ve had to intervene fewer than 5 times, says Underwood."
Now obviously the researcher in question is a bit naive about just what a public dump of the data could reveal, but then you'd never know any of the stuff this data can tell you without being able to get it.
This is it. Lots of people had behavioural understanding of how to use the old menu system, and it had 2 decades of inertia behind it. But that didn't make it a good way to do things. For all the new users (3rd world, and high school kids learning) the old system didn't really click with their understanding of how computers behaved. It very much represented things as layers of types of computer operations, not types of tasks you want to perform.
They've taken some time to get it improved, and there are certainly areas for improvement, but the user experience, and the learning curve for the ribbon are vastly preferable to the old system.
PDF is good for the final version of a document, but not for collaborative editing. Whether or not MS gets its shit together for Skydrive/sharepoint and lets us edit documents as conveniently as google docs does remains to be seen, but that would be very appealing in a corporate setting.
We tried that and have a few people who still think like that, but now that journals outside of physics have moved away from LaTeX it's pretty much dead for us. None of our students know it when they come in, they're capable enough MS office users that they can do any of the formatting needed in office, so what does LaTeX get you? Marginally better equation editing, and a lot more work fighting with the document preparation than the actual writing. And then you're asked to submit documents in office format anyway for most internal or government documents because you don't seriously think the secretarial staff have any clue what to do with a latex document.
10 years ago when I was an undergrad it was still a critical part of the experience to know how to use LaTeX. Now it's like forcing people to use IE6, there are some people still clinging to it for various reasons that are hard to change, but for everyone else office tools get the job done. Of course if your office training at the highschool level is bad you probably aren't any better off either way.
That would be puerto rico, also illegally seized from Spain in the same war. But the Philippines was independent from the US since 1946. Which also means they have very strong ties with the US, having just been on the allied side in WW2.
It's a fair point to complain about the US government say training chinese or indians to some degree. Although there is a legitimate place for development aid, whatever you may call it. China and India are after all strategic competitors to the US (along with Russia, Brazil, Indonesia and the EU, even if they are only regio), but the Philippines remains very much a staunch US ally against china, a US friend (insofar as the US has any of those left in the world), and a potentially expanded market for US sales.
isn't that why they're selling? The premium for IBM quality isn't justified or isn't sufficiently profitable anymore, and IBM wants the IBM brand to remain premium. So you sell off any non premium divisions to other people.
From the perspective of IBM no one should ever be fired for buying an IBM. That may mean you have an 80% markup on some things to make sure it's going to work and you can support it if it doesn't. But it damn well better work. If you can't justify that price or can't make it work sell the business and move on to something else.
The problem is microsoft doesn't have anything to say that makes windows phones obviously better, there's no killer app. Whether you think its better or not is another matter, but google can point to 'we're more open than those guys' (and have more diverse hardware). What does MS have? Yes, it's a different experience, but no one is saying 'see this thing WP7.5 does that none of the others do? We want that'. Google and sony are cannibalizing themselves with semi competing PS vita and android phones, and the fractured tegra zone and everything else. Apple is such a well walled off garden you can't have a lot of fun without technical know how.
Windows phones could (and should) offer you something, office documents, integration with windows 7/windows 8, in a way people actually care about. It seems like MS gets this, with skydrive, Xbox, windows 8 etc. But they don't seem to have delivered yet. Which is bad for Nokia, and might be too late. It might also be that the integration will suck balls and end up a disaster.
Windows on a slate (tablet, iPad like device, whatever lingo you choose) makes a lot of sense on the productivity side. The phone is a harder argument. If Nokia had somehow gone with an x86 CPU with a WP7.5 that could run any windows app, just with a different skin than regular windows 7 (even at 1024x768) that would have been interesting. As it is they have a very different approach to icons/tiles... and uh... a minuscule app store? Customers need something to say 'I want that device because __________" and right now MS hasn't got that. I would have thought they would have realized this was their DS/PSP/Blackberry/iPhone all in one moment. But apparently if they got that, they did so quite late.
They usually are trolls. But sometimes that's where the most insight comes from. He's saying you shouldn't need it because you *can* do everything in the google cloud. But that doesn't actually help all different users. He probably correctly surmizes that the cloud will replace certain user modes of the device, but not everyone realizes how diverse users and requirements really can be.
Google music is not available in my region. And yes, I have a memory card in my phone. But it's not 'in the cloud'. In fact I have a great deal more data on my computer than will fit on 32 GB memory card (videos and music for example).
Nor is ICS OTA. Which is sort of my point about fragmentation, if you're on Sprint, yay I guess? If you're not, you're stuck with either installing your own firmware or hoping your carrier agrees to roll it out in a timely fashion (and with what bugs?).
The PC serves as the base for the phone. Where are you storing 10 gigs of music legally in the 'cloud'? How do you sync that with other music? Is this a paid service? How easy is it to make sure you're not pushing that huge volume of data over your dataplan rather than wireless?
E-mail has very much used phones as just another terminal to talk to the server. That's not unique to phones, phones just happen to benefit from it. Calendering and contacts behave basically the same way. You can use the PC as a server, or you can use some service as the server.
How did you get updates onto the phone? I have a galaxy S2, unless you live in like russia, sweden, finland or luxemburg you aren't getting OTA ICS right now, so if you want that on your own... guess what you're plugging into the PC. Now this is where android and wp7 fail at something they should excel at, which is much easier deployment of updates, OTA or otherwise (and I'd rather not OTA, given the networking costs and risks of failure). Odin isn't exactly a user friendly way to update your firmware, and it's a decidedly desktop product.
A wire can only add so much, faster or more reliable transmission than wireless, sure. Everything is moving to the 'cloud' (even if your own desktop is the server everything else is still talking to that server), but you still need some way to manage what goes where. That can be done on the phone itself or on the server. I tend to prefer managing deployments, even for my own devices, from the desktop. It's much easier to mark these 500 things (phones apps contacts whatever) with a mouse and keyboard to be pushed to the phone than to mark the same 500 things with your thumb and pull them from a desktop.
You may also be old enough, or understand enough basic things about how directories work that 'managing' files is something you just do already. Probably that applies to most of us on/.. The idea that a directory can be inside a directory, inside a directory isn't complicated or confusing, and you can name directories in a way that conveys something you can understand to find what you want. That's not a trivial problem for most users though. And for them trying to manage a 12000 song library (which can't even fit on a phone), + audio books + videos requires better visualization tools than ls -R or windows folders is going to ever get you.
For me, my phone is more like a mobile terminal device. If I can use my desktop that's vastly preferable, bigger screen better input devices etc. But I can access my content on the phone as well. In a situation like that how your desktop is managed determines how your phone behaves. If you drink the google kool-aid and hand over everything to them you plug into their servers in lieu of a PC. If you drink the microsoft kool-aid you're still bound by wires to most of their services (although skydrive might change that), and apple is the same boat (with kool-aid and iCloud), MS and Apple aren't there yet, and may not want to be, and it's still easier to manage those devices with the desktop suites.
Uh... some companies will continue to make game engines, others will make games?
Camera companies, whatever will you do when all your cameras can do colour, high res, steady camed shots with the minimum of glare?
Crytek is a technology and tools company, that makes a game on the side to show off what can be done with their tools, to some degree gamebryo. Epic does something similar, as does gamebase (gamebryo aka Oblivion, Fallout 3, Fallout NV, Civ4, WAR). You can argue on the quality of the games they produce, but the products they have are technology projects. Don't think for a moment that the content creation side of things isn't hugely important. How quickly you can generate worlds, water, ground, buildings etc depends very much on the quality and usability of the tools. And I don't just mean procedurally generate, although that too, I mean that you're building all of these level design tools for a bunch of artists and non- programmers (and not computer scientists, not engineers, they are tradeschool level people) who actually build most of the game. Making it so they can actually use the tools, understand what they do etc is a big challenge. Crytek (and Epic) both work collaboratively with their own teams and anyone they licence too to improve the tools, but ultimately the first title produced is being made while the tools are being made. Game engines since DX9 have gotten to the point that that isn't a huge problem. But they're still building tools primarily around workflow, build integrity, management etc.
All of the development happening is happening to support people who actually make games.
Seriously, developers, what are you going to do when EVERYONE can play games with ALL this crap in them? It's not as far in the future as you seem to think. And just what will you do then?
Dance for joy? Focus on actually making games and not fighting a technology battle with deciding what features we cut based on what percentage of the market will support whatever we're doing. Tell stories. Build worlds. That's the whole point. Go play Skyim. This comment will still be here after you've played a while. Say 80 hours worth. That's what we're trying to do. Build the tools that make an experience believable, and grandiose. Oblivion and Morrowind (elderscrolls 4 and 3 respectively) had great technology for their time, but compared to skyrim, they look like student projects. Now that you've played skyrim for 80 or so hours you'll also realize how far we have to go in actually building worlds. As cool as it is to see a horse that has a fur mane that waves around, or armour that has fur protruding out of it, swords that look like real metal, animals that look sort of like real animals, there's a long, long way to go. People like you will have said the same thing 10 years ago, and on one hand, you're kind of right. Since directx 9 and the ability to make arbitrary 3D worlds there's a lot less pressure on graphics, and a lot more on building the world. On the other hand, if you wanted to make a game today at the quality of morrowind (directx 8) or oblivion (still directx 9 with skyrim) you would be compared to skyrim, and found very much wanting. If you *can* do the graphics, whether that is weather, bricks, lizard men, or whatever, the better it looks the more believable it can be, the better the experience for the player. The easier it is to build those worlds, the more we'll make them. But even from the day we can produce photorealistic images in real time on desktop hardware (and we are no where near that) we will still have work to do, to make the content creation easier, to make more exotic objects and materials and optical physics effects. And as people below have talked about, there's a lot more to games than just visual quality, there's animation, sound, AI etc. And some of those problems are a lot farther away than photorealistic images. But a lot of them don't play as nice with videos either.
I expect we're going to transition to a home server with an online backup model, where people may have fast or slow (depending on needs) heterogenous terminals with local irrelevant fast storage (SSD's, only saving things that can be reacquired easily from disk, or the web). The real data will be in a more specialized networking device that will share files for everyone in the household.
The other issue that I'm not sure they quite get is that people have certain tolerances for how technology behaves. As much as it's a pain in the arse that it takes so many seconds for an app to load up, if I can move 4x as much data, I can now cram 4x as much stuff into the same time, so I do.
And some technology, notably hard drive technology hit a brick wall for a while, but SSD's are going to radically change how hard disks perform. Probably they will end up with some sort of hybrid drive, where you have a couple of terabytes of local storage, SSD cache (this has the added benefit that the computer can still function if part of the drive has failed too, which means it can tell you the hard drive is failed). All of which will have your actual user created data backed up somewhere.
BIOS tech is also one of those things that's becoming tricky, although like HDD there are faster solutions they're just not as widespread as they could be, yet.
Have you ever been to Delhi (As in the Capital of India, and not the new, cow free half of the city)? Right. Go there. The think long and hard about whether or not you can have cows in central park, or times square for all it matters.
This is china. The communist party leadership are protecting themselves (and their own people, but mostly themselves) from the risks of a free flow of information. They feel no guilt, and see it as their duty to protect themselves (and sometimes the people) against these 'malicious rumours'.
In a way china shot itself in the foot a long time ago, and doesn't have an easy way out.
There are people in the 'press' who report anything, censorship or not in china. Just as currency controls could always be undone by a shady guy offering you a better exchange rate. You can try and clamp down on free markets and free ideas all you want, they'll still leak out around you. The problem china is into is that there's so much limited literacy, people who can read and write, but don't know truth from fiction (think fox news viewers, but people who aren't intentionally deluding themselves). They are used to hearing 'truth' from unofficial sources, and another truth from official sources. If you just open the proverbial floodgates now, which they should have when people were still mostly illiterate, you'll get a deluge of patently fraudulent material designed to advance various agendas, and people will believe, but if you wait you further give credibility to the free press who are oppressed, so people will believe even more crazy things when it is free open and honest. There's no good way out at this point. Any 'free' press will be full of lies (about chinese medicine, american imperialism, corruption, coups, conspiracy theories in general, think birther and 'the US government caused 9/11' sort of nonsense), but without any mainstream believable press for people to fall back on.
They almost need to set xinhua free, but government sponsored (think BBC), at arms length, and leave it that way for a decade, before letting everyone else be free. Because otherwise they're going to inundate people with information they aren't prepared to understand, and of course people aren't prepared to understand it, because the government has been fucking this up for the last 60 years. And the longer it goes on, the harder it becomes, because more and more free speech will leech through the censorship cracks, and people won't know when it's bait to get them arrested for being against the harmony of the state, truth, or just malcontents stirring up shit.
Put another way, they want to avoid the US situation, where reality is determined by what gets the most viewers, not necessarily what is factually correct (or more often merely what is relevant and gets air time, the latest fashion faux pas or a hundred people being murdered in syria). But the chinese live in giant reality distortion bubble where it's not ever clear what is or isn't true, and there's no easy way out of the bubble when 20% of the population can't even read.
The arabs are moving to solve this with something like al jazeera and the various arab language outlets from other countries, but that hasn't exactly worked perfectly, so one would hope there is a better way. I'm not sure china has religious fundamentalists we're worried about, so much as having stern imperialists (who want to drum up the threat of the united states).
Maybe a better way of looking at your problem is that they need to set taxes they can collect. Put another way, they need taxes that aren't so easy to dodge, or so expensive to enforce.
If the inability to enforce the existing tax laws is intentional (which it is, because politicians use this to shuffle their own money out of the country) then you need new taxes.
Only about 50% of the population works at any given time (these days). That should be a good clue that there are a lot of people who don't pay taxes because they aren't taxable.
As you correctly point out, the largest blocks of culprits are the (officially as counted) unemployed, students and the retired. The unemployed may still pay taxes if they have employment insurance remaining, but students from children to grad students pay no taxes, and a lot of retired people have fallen below tax levels, and there are a lot of people in that age group where one spouse may not have a pension at all. Leading the charge for rest of us, but I digress.
Income tax has a cutoff because even in 'more equal' countries, it's still not worth taking the relatively poor portion of the population. They spend all their income already, so you'd just be worsening their lifestyle and if you look at total wealth distribution (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distribution_of_wealth) about 20% of the US population owns 93% of the wealth. It's hard to see how you'd get much from taxing literally the bottom 80% of the population. The way that is split is the top 1% (345k/year or more) have 43% of all moneies, the next 19% of the population control 50%. And then everyone else, who, as we say, include the half the population who don't work (too young, too old etc. etc. ). Those statistics are somewhat inflamatory but in comparison to everywhere else they're not as dramatically different as politicians in an election year portray them. Sure, the US is particularly bad for no good reason. But most everyone has a similar situation to varying degrees.
How are they 'overtaxed' exactly? It's hard for me (a non portugese speaker) to get accurate numbers, but their federal budget is about 37% of GDP according to wikipedia, but they're spending is more like 43%. So they're under taxed by almost 16% (they would have to raise taxes by 16% to balance the budget).
Alternatively the could lay people off to try and cut spending by the 16%. Which would shrink the economy by about 3% of GDP (about 5 billion euro's), and leave the government not much better off for a year as they have to pay severances and unemployment for people who are no longer working, and since there are no new jobs being created on the iberian penninsula they'd be basically kicking them out of the workforce for the forseeable future, portugese unemployement would go from 13% to 17 or 18%, and revenues next year would be lower due to a smaller economy and tax base. This is the spiral of stupidity that greece is in essentially.
Obviously the tax rate and taxes people pay don't always align, or even come close to aligning, which certainly hurts greece. What effect it is having on portugal I don't know, but they may have more success catching tax cheats than raising tax rates. But they may need to do both.
as with most taxes they are best as a percent of the value of something.
The problem with the music and video sort of taxes is that the idea was on 'how many songs could you typically load'. Even if that works out to a cost per megabyte it may still change with changing file formats and the correct observation that far more than just music is on a lot of these devices now.
Jutland was don't overload your ship with cordite, and that radio communications allow you to sail out and intercept on your own terms. It was also a chance to realize just badly coordinated the various battle fleets were compared to their german counterparts. This was salvaged by significantly outnumbering them, but it still didn't work as well as it could have.
And yes, once titanic hit an iceberg things were going to go badly. The issue is more of a 'given what tools they had much more could have been done with those resources to save more people'. Sure, the disaster in total was multi causal, but it also led to people trying to not be dipshits in a lot more areas than radio that just seems like one relatively interesting area. Pay attention to icebergs seemed to be another. Though obviously cruise ships still have issues.
In a way they were though. British shipping was the *the* shipping around the world. When you moved thousand upon thousands of people by ships (think modern airplanes) people care very much that they're safe, that was after all, how people emigrated by the hundreds of thousands. The "RMS" part was Royal mail ship, as in they expected any ship with RMS in its name to meet government standards for how quickly it got to destinations and got things loaded for the royal mail service. These were all really big deals before aircraft and modern radio communications got the job done mostly better.
I'll grant you that the navy, especially at this point the Royal Navy, which was larger than the next two largest navies combined (and those were france and germany) and operated over the whole world, all the time cared very much about communication. But even as the article points out, they had the technology on the ship at this point. What they needed was to understand how to use that effectively.
The Titanic highlighted what *could* have been done, given the technology (including technology on the ship) if there had been systems and procedures in place. Which is much like aircraft, if someone breaks into a cockpit and crashes a plane, everyone wonders why we don't have reinforced cockpits, why we have gps on aircraft etc etc, because an airliner landing at the wrong airport, or an airliner crashing due to bad weather that could be dealt with by automated systems very much drives adoptoin. . Ocean liners that carried thousands people, vital food supplies and the masses of the public (rich and poor) were very much in the consciousness of people wondering about moving overseas or having their families from europe follow them. The military, the royal navy in particular, had functioned for 300 years without radio, and had systems and procedures in place to act on their own initiative without orders from London, and to act in the best interest of the crown. But the titanic highlights what was, at the time, all of the things that could have been done with what they knew then, but weren't using effectively. They didn't try (and fail) to build the ship as unsinkable, or with a radio because they didn't vaguely appreciate that these were good things. They just didn't understand quite how to use them at that point. The navy got its lessons at Tsushima and Jutland, the army its lessons in the boer war.
Slashdot Mirror
The wind isn't blowing that way just because you think it is.
Of course not, but in all of these things you're guessing what people will do in the future. As I say above, neither my boss (networking/distributed systems/games nor myself (AI/games/previously graphics) have been asked for anything to be done in LaTeX in 4 years, but we have been asked in about half our cases for documents to be "Word" documents. 5 years ago I definitely was doing stuff in LaTeX for siggraph and other places, but by now most places seem to be content with Word Docs.
Even if we were asked to produce a LaTeX document now, we'd probably do most of it in google docs or, if we had the money, a sharepoint collaborative word editing environment and then copy it into LaTeX for final formatting.
Even simple things such as anchoring floats at the tops and bottoms of pages has always been an inconsistent nightmare in Word. Both MathType and the Microsoft equation editor produce crappy looking regular equations, and the inline results are unspeakably horrendous.
Visually you can't distinguish between the equations I create in word (in either case) from those done in LaTeX, if setup properly. By default they do have their own distinct style I agree. As to your first point, about anchoring floats I agree, word doesn't handle it consistently, nor does it cope gracefully with changing between A4 and letter paper sizes on the same document, or a lot of other things. But my suspicion is that is why we're being asked for word docs more and more, people are shifting to MS publisher and grab the word doc, and reformat it to their liking for publication. Not that I've ever seriously used publisher to have any sense of how good or bad an idea that is, my suspicion is that people are fleeing InDesign or whatever the adobe equivalent is. Again, I'm not sure that's a good plan, that's just what we've been seeing the last few years.
At this point even the ACM is providing word document templates http://www.acm.org/publications/submissions, though I think siggraph is still only providing some word templates, it seems to be trending in the direction of Office docs. But in another couple of years this whole discussion may be mooted by things like google docs.
if you're using the built in MS equation editor, and used to it LaTeX is only marginally better. I just helped typeset a book in Word full of equations, and made a several hundred powerpoint slides using the same equation editor and it's not great but it's not bad. If you care to invest in a decent equation editor for word it makes the process much better, and in the end it's not really much harder than Latex.
Waterloo (I'm not affiliated with waterloo) had a great guide a number of years ago on how to do your thesis in Word, with guides for all of the equations etc. From that point on it seemed to be pretty clear the way the wind was blowing.
CS, and publishing in fact in CS. I don't think me or my boss have been asked for LaTeX in 4 years (he and I publish in different fields) so we gave up trying to do anything in LaTeX.
He's networking distributed systems stuff, but migrating to video games, I'm full on AI/Games/Graphics stuff.
Um... 3.4 million for a blackberry enterprise server, phone plans, 175 phones, SEC approved monitoring equipment (monitoring them as though they were employees) and graduate student salaries. Paying the participants for yearly meetings, data hosting and backups.
And remember, this was on phone plans set up several years ago too.
Sure, that works out to about 5000 dollars per phone per year for 4 years. But it's hard to know just how many people are being paid on the backend for all of these things, what percentage the university takes, if they have to pay even one professor level person out of this for 4 years you're sucking up a LOT of cash on that, and as it even says, they have to hand process all of the texts (or even machine edit, you still need to pay for that software).
What's without their knowledge? Every year they have to discuss exactly how this goes, and they are using the tracking tools that are legally used on employees as per SEC rules. It's in TFA.
LIkely this went through layers of reviews of what exactly can and can't be done with and to the data, and explicitly spelling out to the people getting the phones just what they've agreed to.
You can't get this kind of data without 'violating' privacy in some way or another (I use quotes because as long as they've spelled out what exactly they're doing it's not technically a violate0. But that's also what makes it valuable research, you can't know what people are actually using the devices for without asking them to fully tell you. That real information about how devices are actually use is tremendously valuable to all sorts of different groups of people, from the technical side of things to the sociology and history people.
From TFA they seemed to have based their data gathering on SEC rules for gathering data on employee communications and use the same technology. Essentially the students are being given cell phones the way your employer would give you one, and monitored and data aggregated accordingly. They are yearly paid 50 bucks for visits, sign yearly consent forms and are fully aware of what exactly is being tracked, which, admittedly, produces certain biases in the data. They know they're being monitored and that data will be stored forever, but they may not be entirely aware of what that means, but I guess that's the tricky balance, the data isn't any good if they don't behave normally, but then they might not behave normally if you for every text message you insert one reminding them this call is all being recorded.
As per TFA "Underwood got a Federal Certificate of Confidentiality from the NIH, exempting the researchers from having to report any discussion of crimes to authorities. But her team is required to monitor the database for talk of suicide or abuse. On a weekly basis, they do a search with a long list of words, including rape, kill myself, or older man. They’ve had to intervene fewer than 5 times, says Underwood."
Now obviously the researcher in question is a bit naive about just what a public dump of the data could reveal, but then you'd never know any of the stuff this data can tell you without being able to get it.
This is it. Lots of people had behavioural understanding of how to use the old menu system, and it had 2 decades of inertia behind it. But that didn't make it a good way to do things. For all the new users (3rd world, and high school kids learning) the old system didn't really click with their understanding of how computers behaved. It very much represented things as layers of types of computer operations, not types of tasks you want to perform.
They've taken some time to get it improved, and there are certainly areas for improvement, but the user experience, and the learning curve for the ribbon are vastly preferable to the old system.
Because the standard MS uses is now public.
PDF is good for the final version of a document, but not for collaborative editing. Whether or not MS gets its shit together for Skydrive/sharepoint and lets us edit documents as conveniently as google docs does remains to be seen, but that would be very appealing in a corporate setting.
We tried that and have a few people who still think like that, but now that journals outside of physics have moved away from LaTeX it's pretty much dead for us. None of our students know it when they come in, they're capable enough MS office users that they can do any of the formatting needed in office, so what does LaTeX get you? Marginally better equation editing, and a lot more work fighting with the document preparation than the actual writing. And then you're asked to submit documents in office format anyway for most internal or government documents because you don't seriously think the secretarial staff have any clue what to do with a latex document.
10 years ago when I was an undergrad it was still a critical part of the experience to know how to use LaTeX. Now it's like forcing people to use IE6, there are some people still clinging to it for various reasons that are hard to change, but for everyone else office tools get the job done. Of course if your office training at the highschool level is bad you probably aren't any better off either way.
That would be puerto rico, also illegally seized from Spain in the same war. But the Philippines was independent from the US since 1946. Which also means they have very strong ties with the US, having just been on the allied side in WW2.
It's a fair point to complain about the US government say training chinese or indians to some degree. Although there is a legitimate place for development aid, whatever you may call it. China and India are after all strategic competitors to the US (along with Russia, Brazil, Indonesia and the EU, even if they are only regio), but the Philippines remains very much a staunch US ally against china, a US friend (insofar as the US has any of those left in the world), and a potentially expanded market for US sales.
isn't that why they're selling? The premium for IBM quality isn't justified or isn't sufficiently profitable anymore, and IBM wants the IBM brand to remain premium. So you sell off any non premium divisions to other people.
From the perspective of IBM no one should ever be fired for buying an IBM. That may mean you have an 80% markup on some things to make sure it's going to work and you can support it if it doesn't. But it damn well better work. If you can't justify that price or can't make it work sell the business and move on to something else.
The problem is microsoft doesn't have anything to say that makes windows phones obviously better, there's no killer app. Whether you think its better or not is another matter, but google can point to 'we're more open than those guys' (and have more diverse hardware). What does MS have? Yes, it's a different experience, but no one is saying 'see this thing WP7.5 does that none of the others do? We want that'. Google and sony are cannibalizing themselves with semi competing PS vita and android phones, and the fractured tegra zone and everything else. Apple is such a well walled off garden you can't have a lot of fun without technical know how.
Windows phones could (and should) offer you something, office documents, integration with windows 7/windows 8, in a way people actually care about. It seems like MS gets this, with skydrive, Xbox, windows 8 etc. But they don't seem to have delivered yet. Which is bad for Nokia, and might be too late. It might also be that the integration will suck balls and end up a disaster.
Windows on a slate (tablet, iPad like device, whatever lingo you choose) makes a lot of sense on the productivity side. The phone is a harder argument. If Nokia had somehow gone with an x86 CPU with a WP7.5 that could run any windows app, just with a different skin than regular windows 7 (even at 1024x768) that would have been interesting. As it is they have a very different approach to icons/tiles... and uh... a minuscule app store? Customers need something to say 'I want that device because __________" and right now MS hasn't got that. I would have thought they would have realized this was their DS/PSP/Blackberry/iPhone all in one moment. But apparently if they got that, they did so quite late.
They usually are trolls. But sometimes that's where the most insight comes from. He's saying you shouldn't need it because you *can* do everything in the google cloud. But that doesn't actually help all different users. He probably correctly surmizes that the cloud will replace certain user modes of the device, but not everyone realizes how diverse users and requirements really can be.
Google music is not available in my region. And yes, I have a memory card in my phone. But it's not 'in the cloud'. In fact I have a great deal more data on my computer than will fit on 32 GB memory card (videos and music for example).
Nor is ICS OTA. Which is sort of my point about fragmentation, if you're on Sprint, yay I guess? If you're not, you're stuck with either installing your own firmware or hoping your carrier agrees to roll it out in a timely fashion (and with what bugs?).
The PC serves as the base for the phone. Where are you storing 10 gigs of music legally in the 'cloud'? How do you sync that with other music? Is this a paid service? How easy is it to make sure you're not pushing that huge volume of data over your dataplan rather than wireless?
E-mail has very much used phones as just another terminal to talk to the server. That's not unique to phones, phones just happen to benefit from it. Calendering and contacts behave basically the same way. You can use the PC as a server, or you can use some service as the server.
How did you get updates onto the phone? I have a galaxy S2, unless you live in like russia, sweden, finland or luxemburg you aren't getting OTA ICS right now, so if you want that on your own... guess what you're plugging into the PC. Now this is where android and wp7 fail at something they should excel at, which is much easier deployment of updates, OTA or otherwise (and I'd rather not OTA, given the networking costs and risks of failure). Odin isn't exactly a user friendly way to update your firmware, and it's a decidedly desktop product.
A wire can only add so much, faster or more reliable transmission than wireless, sure. Everything is moving to the 'cloud' (even if your own desktop is the server everything else is still talking to that server), but you still need some way to manage what goes where. That can be done on the phone itself or on the server. I tend to prefer managing deployments, even for my own devices, from the desktop. It's much easier to mark these 500 things (phones apps contacts whatever) with a mouse and keyboard to be pushed to the phone than to mark the same 500 things with your thumb and pull them from a desktop.
You may also be old enough, or understand enough basic things about how directories work that 'managing' files is something you just do already. Probably that applies to most of us on /.. The idea that a directory can be inside a directory, inside a directory isn't complicated or confusing, and you can name directories in a way that conveys something you can understand to find what you want. That's not a trivial problem for most users though. And for them trying to manage a 12000 song library (which can't even fit on a phone), + audio books + videos requires better visualization tools than ls -R or windows folders is going to ever get you.
For me, my phone is more like a mobile terminal device. If I can use my desktop that's vastly preferable, bigger screen better input devices etc. But I can access my content on the phone as well. In a situation like that how your desktop is managed determines how your phone behaves. If you drink the google kool-aid and hand over everything to them you plug into their servers in lieu of a PC. If you drink the microsoft kool-aid you're still bound by wires to most of their services (although skydrive might change that), and apple is the same boat (with kool-aid and iCloud), MS and Apple aren't there yet, and may not want to be, and it's still easier to manage those devices with the desktop suites.
Uh... some companies will continue to make game engines, others will make games?
Camera companies, whatever will you do when all your cameras can do colour, high res, steady camed shots with the minimum of glare?
Crytek is a technology and tools company, that makes a game on the side to show off what can be done with their tools, to some degree gamebryo. Epic does something similar, as does gamebase (gamebryo aka Oblivion, Fallout 3, Fallout NV, Civ4, WAR). You can argue on the quality of the games they produce, but the products they have are technology projects. Don't think for a moment that the content creation side of things isn't hugely important. How quickly you can generate worlds, water, ground, buildings etc depends very much on the quality and usability of the tools. And I don't just mean procedurally generate, although that too, I mean that you're building all of these level design tools for a bunch of artists and non- programmers (and not computer scientists, not engineers, they are tradeschool level people) who actually build most of the game. Making it so they can actually use the tools, understand what they do etc is a big challenge. Crytek (and Epic) both work collaboratively with their own teams and anyone they licence too to improve the tools, but ultimately the first title produced is being made while the tools are being made. Game engines since DX9 have gotten to the point that that isn't a huge problem. But they're still building tools primarily around workflow, build integrity, management etc.
All of the development happening is happening to support people who actually make games.
Seriously, developers, what are you going to do when EVERYONE can play games with ALL this crap in them? It's not as far in the future as you seem to think. And just what will you do then?
Dance for joy? Focus on actually making games and not fighting a technology battle with deciding what features we cut based on what percentage of the market will support whatever we're doing. Tell stories. Build worlds. That's the whole point. Go play Skyim. This comment will still be here after you've played a while. Say 80 hours worth. That's what we're trying to do. Build the tools that make an experience believable, and grandiose. Oblivion and Morrowind (elderscrolls 4 and 3 respectively) had great technology for their time, but compared to skyrim, they look like student projects. Now that you've played skyrim for 80 or so hours you'll also realize how far we have to go in actually building worlds. As cool as it is to see a horse that has a fur mane that waves around, or armour that has fur protruding out of it, swords that look like real metal, animals that look sort of like real animals, there's a long, long way to go. People like you will have said the same thing 10 years ago, and on one hand, you're kind of right. Since directx 9 and the ability to make arbitrary 3D worlds there's a lot less pressure on graphics, and a lot more on building the world. On the other hand, if you wanted to make a game today at the quality of morrowind (directx 8) or oblivion (still directx 9 with skyrim) you would be compared to skyrim, and found very much wanting. If you *can* do the graphics, whether that is weather, bricks, lizard men, or whatever, the better it looks the more believable it can be, the better the experience for the player. The easier it is to build those worlds, the more we'll make them. But even from the day we can produce photorealistic images in real time on desktop hardware (and we are no where near that) we will still have work to do, to make the content creation easier, to make more exotic objects and materials and optical physics effects. And as people below have talked about, there's a lot more to games than just visual quality, there's animation, sound, AI etc. And some of those problems are a lot farther away than photorealistic images. But a lot of them don't play as nice with videos either.
Caveat: I'm not sure how skyrim loo
I expect we're going to transition to a home server with an online backup model, where people may have fast or slow (depending on needs) heterogenous terminals with local irrelevant fast storage (SSD's, only saving things that can be reacquired easily from disk, or the web). The real data will be in a more specialized networking device that will share files for everyone in the household.
The other issue that I'm not sure they quite get is that people have certain tolerances for how technology behaves. As much as it's a pain in the arse that it takes so many seconds for an app to load up, if I can move 4x as much data, I can now cram 4x as much stuff into the same time, so I do.
And some technology, notably hard drive technology hit a brick wall for a while, but SSD's are going to radically change how hard disks perform. Probably they will end up with some sort of hybrid drive, where you have a couple of terabytes of local storage, SSD cache (this has the added benefit that the computer can still function if part of the drive has failed too, which means it can tell you the hard drive is failed). All of which will have your actual user created data backed up somewhere.
BIOS tech is also one of those things that's becoming tricky, although like HDD there are faster solutions they're just not as widespread as they could be, yet.
Have you ever been to Delhi (As in the Capital of India, and not the new, cow free half of the city)? Right. Go there. The think long and hard about whether or not you can have cows in central park, or times square for all it matters.
This is china. The communist party leadership are protecting themselves (and their own people, but mostly themselves) from the risks of a free flow of information. They feel no guilt, and see it as their duty to protect themselves (and sometimes the people) against these 'malicious rumours'.
In a way china shot itself in the foot a long time ago, and doesn't have an easy way out.
There are people in the 'press' who report anything, censorship or not in china. Just as currency controls could always be undone by a shady guy offering you a better exchange rate. You can try and clamp down on free markets and free ideas all you want, they'll still leak out around you. The problem china is into is that there's so much limited literacy, people who can read and write, but don't know truth from fiction (think fox news viewers, but people who aren't intentionally deluding themselves). They are used to hearing 'truth' from unofficial sources, and another truth from official sources. If you just open the proverbial floodgates now, which they should have when people were still mostly illiterate, you'll get a deluge of patently fraudulent material designed to advance various agendas, and people will believe, but if you wait you further give credibility to the free press who are oppressed, so people will believe even more crazy things when it is free open and honest. There's no good way out at this point. Any 'free' press will be full of lies (about chinese medicine, american imperialism, corruption, coups, conspiracy theories in general, think birther and 'the US government caused 9/11' sort of nonsense), but without any mainstream believable press for people to fall back on.
They almost need to set xinhua free, but government sponsored (think BBC), at arms length, and leave it that way for a decade, before letting everyone else be free. Because otherwise they're going to inundate people with information they aren't prepared to understand, and of course people aren't prepared to understand it, because the government has been fucking this up for the last 60 years. And the longer it goes on, the harder it becomes, because more and more free speech will leech through the censorship cracks, and people won't know when it's bait to get them arrested for being against the harmony of the state, truth, or just malcontents stirring up shit.
Put another way, they want to avoid the US situation, where reality is determined by what gets the most viewers, not necessarily what is factually correct (or more often merely what is relevant and gets air time, the latest fashion faux pas or a hundred people being murdered in syria). But the chinese live in giant reality distortion bubble where it's not ever clear what is or isn't true, and there's no easy way out of the bubble when 20% of the population can't even read.
The arabs are moving to solve this with something like al jazeera and the various arab language outlets from other countries, but that hasn't exactly worked perfectly, so one would hope there is a better way. I'm not sure china has religious fundamentalists we're worried about, so much as having stern imperialists (who want to drum up the threat of the united states).
Maybe a better way of looking at your problem is that they need to set taxes they can collect. Put another way, they need taxes that aren't so easy to dodge, or so expensive to enforce.
If the inability to enforce the existing tax laws is intentional (which it is, because politicians use this to shuffle their own money out of the country) then you need new taxes.
Only about 50% of the population works at any given time (these days). That should be a good clue that there are a lot of people who don't pay taxes because they aren't taxable.
As you correctly point out, the largest blocks of culprits are the (officially as counted) unemployed, students and the retired. The unemployed may still pay taxes if they have employment insurance remaining, but students from children to grad students pay no taxes, and a lot of retired people have fallen below tax levels, and there are a lot of people in that age group where one spouse may not have a pension at all. Leading the charge for rest of us, but I digress.
Income tax has a cutoff because even in 'more equal' countries, it's still not worth taking the relatively poor portion of the population. They spend all their income already, so you'd just be worsening their lifestyle and if you look at total wealth distribution (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distribution_of_wealth) about 20% of the US population owns 93% of the wealth. It's hard to see how you'd get much from taxing literally the bottom 80% of the population. The way that is split is the top 1% (345k/year or more) have 43% of all moneies, the next 19% of the population control 50%. And then everyone else, who, as we say, include the half the population who don't work (too young, too old etc. etc. ). Those statistics are somewhat inflamatory but in comparison to everywhere else they're not as dramatically different as politicians in an election year portray them. Sure, the US is particularly bad for no good reason. But most everyone has a similar situation to varying degrees.
How are they 'overtaxed' exactly? It's hard for me (a non portugese speaker) to get accurate numbers, but their federal budget is about 37% of GDP according to wikipedia, but they're spending is more like 43%. So they're under taxed by almost 16% (they would have to raise taxes by 16% to balance the budget).
Alternatively the could lay people off to try and cut spending by the 16%. Which would shrink the economy by about 3% of GDP (about 5 billion euro's), and leave the government not much better off for a year as they have to pay severances and unemployment for people who are no longer working, and since there are no new jobs being created on the iberian penninsula they'd be basically kicking them out of the workforce for the forseeable future, portugese unemployement would go from 13% to 17 or 18%, and revenues next year would be lower due to a smaller economy and tax base. This is the spiral of stupidity that greece is in essentially.
Obviously the tax rate and taxes people pay don't always align, or even come close to aligning, which certainly hurts greece. What effect it is having on portugal I don't know, but they may have more success catching tax cheats than raising tax rates. But they may need to do both.
as with most taxes they are best as a percent of the value of something.
The problem with the music and video sort of taxes is that the idea was on 'how many songs could you typically load'. Even if that works out to a cost per megabyte it may still change with changing file formats and the correct observation that far more than just music is on a lot of these devices now.
Jutland was don't overload your ship with cordite, and that radio communications allow you to sail out and intercept on your own terms. It was also a chance to realize just badly coordinated the various battle fleets were compared to their german counterparts. This was salvaged by significantly outnumbering them, but it still didn't work as well as it could have.
And yes, once titanic hit an iceberg things were going to go badly. The issue is more of a 'given what tools they had much more could have been done with those resources to save more people'. Sure, the disaster in total was multi causal, but it also led to people trying to not be dipshits in a lot more areas than radio that just seems like one relatively interesting area. Pay attention to icebergs seemed to be another. Though obviously cruise ships still have issues.
In a way they were though. British shipping was the *the* shipping around the world. When you moved thousand upon thousands of people by ships (think modern airplanes) people care very much that they're safe, that was after all, how people emigrated by the hundreds of thousands. The "RMS" part was Royal mail ship, as in they expected any ship with RMS in its name to meet government standards for how quickly it got to destinations and got things loaded for the royal mail service. These were all really big deals before aircraft and modern radio communications got the job done mostly better.
I'll grant you that the navy, especially at this point the Royal Navy, which was larger than the next two largest navies combined (and those were france and germany) and operated over the whole world, all the time cared very much about communication. But even as the article points out, they had the technology on the ship at this point. What they needed was to understand how to use that effectively.
The Titanic highlighted what *could* have been done, given the technology (including technology on the ship) if there had been systems and procedures in place. Which is much like aircraft, if someone breaks into a cockpit and crashes a plane, everyone wonders why we don't have reinforced cockpits, why we have gps on aircraft etc etc, because an airliner landing at the wrong airport, or an airliner crashing due to bad weather that could be dealt with by automated systems very much drives adoptoin. . Ocean liners that carried thousands people, vital food supplies and the masses of the public (rich and poor) were very much in the consciousness of people wondering about moving overseas or having their families from europe follow them. The military, the royal navy in particular, had functioned for 300 years without radio, and had systems and procedures in place to act on their own initiative without orders from London, and to act in the best interest of the crown. But the titanic highlights what was, at the time, all of the things that could have been done with what they knew then, but weren't using effectively. They didn't try (and fail) to build the ship as unsinkable, or with a radio because they didn't vaguely appreciate that these were good things. They just didn't understand quite how to use them at that point. The navy got its lessons at Tsushima and Jutland, the army its lessons in the boer war.