If it's their 'road' then Netflix is a bright, shiny city in the distance. It (and others like it) ARE THE REASON that people are on the road in the first place. Asking them to pay is like charging a city to pay for road usage just because it is a source of traffic. It is inevitable for companies that thrive at one time to decline and give way to others at another. For the system to continue to function, small, new destinations (startups, duh) that are detours from the main road need to be given a fair chance to succeed in an environment in which they can compete with the big players.
Without this process of constant replenishment, when the bright cities become old, dilapidated and defunct, people no longer have the reason to use the road. Everyone loses, except for selfish executive ass-holes who screwed everyone, all but knowing what was going to happen and sailed away with the money on their yachts laughing.
Exactly. But now could you phrase this in a way that blames someone, rubbishes something someone else says, and most importantly appeals to the vested interests of someone influential. Then you might have chance of being heard.
It seems that the missing link between blogging and conventional journalism could be a marketplace that enables bloggers to publish content in the mainstream media. Major media sites commonly link to blogs, and some bloggers do op-eds from time to time, but this cross-pollination seems to be the exception, not the rule. A Google Play-like marketplace in which bloggers sell their written pieces (or make them available for free), and from which news service purchases such pieces would eliminate the distinction between 'freelance journalist' and 'blogger.'
On an unrelated note, the article (outside of the title) doesn't waste much time comparing blogging and conventional journalism.
Using an unknown encoding scheme is obfuscation, not encryption. So you're suggesting using obfuscation as a cheap substitute for encryption. That might be fine in some situations but 1) It really is very, very easy to crack - you don't need human intervention - there are tools that let you compute polynomial mappings between two data sets. 2) You can encrypt the data using a powerful algorithm using off the shelf free tools, so why not just go one baby step further and do it so that even in the unlikely case that one day the stakes to get to your data are high, there's no way to get it.
All good points. Just a quick note about (1): you can encrypt all your email by using a passthrough email address in a domain that you trust. So me@myname.com received all your email, encrypts it and forwards it to gmail or wherever.
While this story is crazy, and MS should be spitballed for it... I don't buy that other companies that let your store your data online don't give access to your data to their employee, if only for "debugging and administrative purposes." If you want to store your data online encrypt it.
It's no surprise that cutting down on sleep has negative effects. The short term effects have been evaluated experimentally - people without sleep are less capable of resisting junk food, irritable and less alert.
The strange thing is that there's *never* been an attempt to characterize the advantages. I saw some notes in the posts above about experimenting with radios, listening to the BBC, etc. which are things that probably hone your mental abilities. If you pull all nighters studying to get into a good school and succeed, then you spend the next 4 years interacting with smart people and good professors.
I lacked information at the time, so I explored a number of fronts. It was clear that shipping and handling was going to be the biggest overhead in the business. Something like - 50 cents / pen, $5 -- $15 for shipping and handling, depending on the route I would take. There was also the question of whether to sell to retailers or to end consumers -- I opted for the latter and simply listed my product on Amazon. Shipping and handling would have been much easier today because nowadays Amazon offers managed plans for merchants. So you ship them boxes of your products, and they'll manage your inventory and pick 'n pack them on the way out. You can even qualify products for Amazon Prime, which as anyone who has Prime will guess is a big purchase incentive. At the time, you had to deal with shipping on your own, even though Amazon would actually reimburse a shipping cost (determined by them based on market rates) from their cut of each product sold. The alternative to Amazon was to make a web page and hook it up with a Paypal account, which would have been equivalent. Remember that the premise of this whole exercise was the hunch that there was going to be a supply shortage of pens. The whole plan was predicated on that hunch - I wasn't planning on trying to make a business out of this through aggressive Adword advertising, branding, or other type of marketing. I was reasonably confident that I would at least make my investment back over the next few years.
In today's world, you would also have the option of using something like easypost.com for managed shipping or shipwire.com for managed warehousing.
When Steve Jobs gave his first iPhone demo, I had my doubts when he claimed that you didn't need stylus pens with touch screens. Seeing the frenzy with which people wanted iPhones in the coming months, I decided to make an investment and buying a large quantity of stylus pens, whose price I expected would rise. I approached several vendors on Alibaba. The process was surprisingly smooth - most of the vendors seemed to have communication reps who were nice to talk to/interact with and knew their stuff very well. The prices were insane. I could buy pens that could be purchased for $30 in the US for 10 cents a piece, if I bought then in bulk. For another 5 cents I could brand them, and for another 10 I could customize them. So I ended up buying 100k of them and having them shipped to a warehouse in Philadelphia, where I rented some space out for ~$50/month. My most memorable feeling from this experience was not the profit I made (not that much, it looks like a lot of other people had the same idea as I did...) but realizing how easy it was to get something custom-manufactured half way across the world, have 100s of thousands of pieces hauled across on boats to a few miles from where I live. Something Marco Polo would have marveled at... Alibaba is only the front end to an unbelievable system of proxy manufacturing.
My first reaction to this comment was "certainly not, not in a competently executed experiment..." But looking at the methodology these guys use, their SPANE test thing grades people by general happiness, rather than a temporary state that they are steered into. So yeah, you cannot rule a general correlation between the two things, or even more generally that the problem solvers report their SPANE scores higher (which doesn't strictly mean that they are happier...)
Most good experiments that deal with emotional state rule out such associations by deliberately steering multiple control groups into a 'happy' or 'unhappy' state.
For example, in one experiments, people were brought together and asked to participate in a general group discussion. They were then told that they would be interacting in pairs, and had to anonymously write down the name of their preferred partner on a chit of paper. The experimenters collected these chits in a box, and quietly took them to the back and DISCARDED THEM in the garbage.
They then took each individual aside one by one, and for one half of the group, told the individual that he had been chosen by every other person but was the odd man out and had to work alone. For the other half, the person was told that nobody chose him and so he had to work alone. All of the participants were given logic puzzles to solve.
The experimenters found out that the 'happier' group of people who thought that they were cool and popular generally performed better, and even more ostensibly were less likely to binge on the cookie jar placed next to them while doing the puzzles. The dejected group of supposedly unpopular people ate twice as many cookies and generally fared worse at the puzzles.
Studies that make this conclusion (happiness => more productive) are pretty common.
And the crappiest part is that you are perpetually around people who are pissed. Husbands mad at their wives, companies mad at other companies for getting sued, people mad at each other respectively for making the other guy look stupid. What a life...
I disagree with your analogy in which you compare stealing a car with patent grabbing. The person stealing the car has no perceived threat from the car's owner. By stealing it, the only effect is his own gain. In the corporate world, everyone is perpetually under threat from everyone else.
This also makes up my response to your comment. Even if Apple were to have freed every one of their smartphone inventions, there would still be lawyers arguing that those inventions are not comprehensive, that their client has patents that fall between the gaps.
Under such attack, being able to dismiss the vast majority of your antagonist's lawsuits is not good enough - even one or two slipping through might cause a lot of damage. Having your own patents though with which you can fire back can provide enough of a disincentive. So the analogy here is a defense system vs having weapons of your own.
All this, of course, is just insane... Companies should compete by making good products and improving people's lives, not by throwing patent bombs at each other. But to return to the original point, you can't blame one company for doing it in a world in which everyone has the bomb.
Apple is not the problem. The patent system is. The patent system was invented in an age in which manufacturing and distributing products would take a lot of time and involve multitudes of logistical hardships. So people had to be protected because they would be exposed for the duration that it took them to turn their ideas into products, which was more than enough for an established player to steal their innovation. In today's world you can do the same things in a matter of days though crowdsourcing, App Stores, web services, Alibaba, click-and-control warehousing and supply chains. Investments are also much more accessible through the likes of Kickstarter and VCs with online office hours. People no longer need the same level of protection because they can move much faster than before. Big companies don't need protection - if they come up with an idea, they get the early starter advantage (Apple did) and need to capitalize on it (which Apple did also). If they don't, they're incompetent, and too bad for them.
Given that the patent system is stupid and encourages armament and heavy warfare, you cannot blame Apple for watching out for themselves. Offense is also a good defense - although admittedly it would be generous to give Apple that benefit.
It would be hilarious if Dorian were to be reversing Newsweek's tactics on them. Newsweek - "We have evidence - here, and that's good enough to thrown open the curtain on this guy." Dorian (via credible source of Bitcoin news, which he has control over) - You want evidence? We're the biggest authority on Bitcoin - we know this dude is not the inventor - in fact he was probably using loose language - go ask him again. Dorian to reporters "I was just using loose language, nope, I was talking about general computer stuff, not Bitcoin."
Nice First sentence:"I'm right, period. I don't need to state an argument. Why should I, since everyone knows I'm right to begin with." Second sentence:"Building on the rigor of my first point consider this comparison involving an undetermined quantum of information, backed up by documentation too obvious to cite."
Powerpoint is good when the visual material you have is auxiliary. Usually, when the presenter is engaging and articulate, you end up not paying much attention to the slides. The slides then become like index cards for the speaker - they help with the design. They also help 'burn' the content into the audience by keeping points in their field of view long after they were covered verbally.
Chalkboards/Whiteboards are the better choice when visual material is not a supplement but a component of the presentation. What they help do is to turn static content into a narrative. Seeing a hand circle the 'x' in 3x+5=20 makes a stronger impression than to see it circled to begin with.
Comcast has a monopoly in our area. I have had conversations resembling the one in the article with Comcast reps. About a year ago, a rep put me on a promotion that lowered my bill while also adding a phone service, which I didn't have at the time. The rep said I would have to call back after 9 months and ask to be put on a different promotion if I didn't want my bill to go up. 9 months later I called again and the rep in question claimed that I was going to be on the promotion for another year. After arguing with her and getting her to recheck the account about thrice... she finally conceded that I was due for a rate change that month and figured out a way to let me keep the rate in place.
Then a strange thing happened 5 months ago. I stopped being able to access my billing information online - the system denied me access "for my own protection" and asked for a PIN that I could only request over mail, by calling tech support (long waits...). I have requested it twice but not received it yet. This is one of the things that *nearly* had me convinced that the second rep was right - because I didn't have a way to check the info myself. The only reason I kept pestering the rep was that my wife, who was sitting next to me kept insisting I stay put... good thing I listened.
It is a disgraceful way of making money, like the author concluded in his post.
If you post a story in which you strongly insinuate that a reviewer is biased, then it's a good idea to either not be biased yourself, or to try to conceal that bias. There are several indications of bias in the post, I only mentioned one, which was to round off the price tag advertised in the review ($89,500) all the way to $100,000, instead of say, to $90,000. The exaggeration obviously helps advance the case further, since $100,000 seems significantly more than $89,500 than $90,000.
I left too much to be inferred there. I agree with your point, and disagree with the article. I was stating the gist of the message, according to me. Beyond the message summarize in that one line, the author laments about how horrible it is when you actually start using awful shit... but that goes without saying, and like you said there's an endless supply of it on the web.
There's a reason that "if it ain't broken don't fix it" continues to be the holy grail of engineering. It's because any value function you come up with to evaluate a new opportunity and compare it to an existing, good arrangement is bound to be incomplete. So Value = f(salary, benefits, exciting work) is one part of the story. What about the potential of a Dilbert-like management culture, processes that you don't know yet that you would find out after a year of working at the new place - at which point it would be too late to turn back.
A good job, like a system that works just fine, reflects on a good balance of a large number of variables, many of which one doesn't understand and takes for granted, until one moves out and breaks the balance.
Having said that, I have broken the rule a number of times, because discomfort is not necessarily a bad thing. Necessity is the mother of invention, so if you're healthy, robust, and not too much in debt (or have an ARM mortgage that's going to explode around the corner...) then it couldn't hurt to challenge yourself by leaving your comfort zone, every now and then:-)
It's unfortunate that the USPTO's new director and the White House are not taking aim at patent trolls specifically, but rather trying to deal with them by revamping the criteria for patentability in general. Patent trolls are bad enough that they ought to be treated as a first class problem. Even if it became next to impossible to patent prior art, trolls would still end up getting such patents and prevent companies from building things until they pay up. Maybe something like "You can't file a patent lawsuit unless you have a legitimate product based on the inventions described in the patent."
Slashdot Mirror
If it's their 'road' then Netflix is a bright, shiny city in the distance. It (and others like it) ARE THE REASON that people are on the road in the first place. Asking them to pay is like charging a city to pay for road usage just because it is a source of traffic. It is inevitable for companies that thrive at one time to decline and give way to others at another. For the system to continue to function, small, new destinations (startups, duh) that are detours from the main road need to be given a fair chance to succeed in an environment in which they can compete with the big players.
Without this process of constant replenishment, when the bright cities become old, dilapidated and defunct, people no longer have the reason to use the road. Everyone loses, except for selfish executive ass-holes who screwed everyone, all but knowing what was going to happen and sailed away with the money on their yachts laughing.
Exactly. But now could you phrase this in a way that blames someone, rubbishes something someone else says, and most importantly appeals to the vested interests of someone influential. Then you might have chance of being heard.
It seems that the missing link between blogging and conventional journalism could be a marketplace that enables bloggers to publish content in the mainstream media. Major media sites commonly link to blogs, and some bloggers do op-eds from time to time, but this cross-pollination seems to be the exception, not the rule. A Google Play-like marketplace in which bloggers sell their written pieces (or make them available for free), and from which news service purchases such pieces would eliminate the distinction between 'freelance journalist' and 'blogger.'
On an unrelated note, the article (outside of the title) doesn't waste much time comparing blogging and conventional journalism.
Using an unknown encoding scheme is obfuscation, not encryption. So you're suggesting using obfuscation as a cheap substitute for encryption. That might be fine in some situations but 1) It really is very, very easy to crack - you don't need human intervention - there are tools that let you compute polynomial mappings between two data sets. 2) You can encrypt the data using a powerful algorithm using off the shelf free tools, so why not just go one baby step further and do it so that even in the unlikely case that one day the stakes to get to your data are high, there's no way to get it.
All good points. Just a quick note about (1): you can encrypt all your email by using a passthrough email address in a domain that you trust. So me@myname.com received all your email, encrypts it and forwards it to gmail or wherever.
While this story is crazy, and MS should be spitballed for it... I don't buy that other companies that let your store your data online don't give access to your data to their employee, if only for "debugging and administrative purposes." If you want to store your data online encrypt it.
It's no surprise that cutting down on sleep has negative effects. The short term effects have been evaluated experimentally - people without sleep are less capable of resisting junk food, irritable and less alert.
The strange thing is that there's *never* been an attempt to characterize the advantages. I saw some notes in the posts above about experimenting with radios, listening to the BBC, etc. which are things that probably hone your mental abilities. If you pull all nighters studying to get into a good school and succeed, then you spend the next 4 years interacting with smart people and good professors.
I lacked information at the time, so I explored a number of fronts. It was clear that shipping and handling was going to be the biggest overhead in the business. Something like - 50 cents / pen, $5 -- $15 for shipping and handling, depending on the route I would take. There was also the question of whether to sell to retailers or to end consumers -- I opted for the latter and simply listed my product on Amazon. Shipping and handling would have been much easier today because nowadays Amazon offers managed plans for merchants. So you ship them boxes of your products, and they'll manage your inventory and pick 'n pack them on the way out. You can even qualify products for Amazon Prime, which as anyone who has Prime will guess is a big purchase incentive. At the time, you had to deal with shipping on your own, even though Amazon would actually reimburse a shipping cost (determined by them based on market rates) from their cut of each product sold. The alternative to Amazon was to make a web page and hook it up with a Paypal account, which would have been equivalent. Remember that the premise of this whole exercise was the hunch that there was going to be a supply shortage of pens. The whole plan was predicated on that hunch - I wasn't planning on trying to make a business out of this through aggressive Adword advertising, branding, or other type of marketing. I was reasonably confident that I would at least make my investment back over the next few years.
In today's world, you would also have the option of using something like easypost.com for managed shipping or shipwire.com for managed warehousing.
When Steve Jobs gave his first iPhone demo, I had my doubts when he claimed that you didn't need stylus pens with touch screens. Seeing the frenzy with which people wanted iPhones in the coming months, I decided to make an investment and buying a large quantity of stylus pens, whose price I expected would rise. I approached several vendors on Alibaba. The process was surprisingly smooth - most of the vendors seemed to have communication reps who were nice to talk to/interact with and knew their stuff very well. The prices were insane. I could buy pens that could be purchased for $30 in the US for 10 cents a piece, if I bought then in bulk. For another 5 cents I could brand them, and for another 10 I could customize them. So I ended up buying 100k of them and having them shipped to a warehouse in Philadelphia, where I rented some space out for ~$50/month. My most memorable feeling from this experience was not the profit I made (not that much, it looks like a lot of other people had the same idea as I did...) but realizing how easy it was to get something custom-manufactured half way across the world, have 100s of thousands of pieces hauled across on boats to a few miles from where I live. Something Marco Polo would have marveled at... Alibaba is only the front end to an unbelievable system of proxy manufacturing.
> it turns into a "my way or the highway" situation
Ah, I see, so THAT was the hidden message in the cover of the "Road Ahead" - http://upload.wikimedia.org/wi...
My first reaction to this comment was "certainly not, not in a competently executed experiment..." But looking at the methodology these guys use, their SPANE test thing grades people by general happiness, rather than a temporary state that they are steered into. So yeah, you cannot rule a general correlation between the two things, or even more generally that the problem solvers report their SPANE scores higher (which doesn't strictly mean that they are happier...)
Most good experiments that deal with emotional state rule out such associations by deliberately steering multiple control groups into a 'happy' or 'unhappy' state.
For example, in one experiments, people were brought together and asked to participate in a general group discussion. They were then told that they would be interacting in pairs, and had to anonymously write down the name of their preferred partner on a chit of paper. The experimenters collected these chits in a box, and quietly took them to the back and DISCARDED THEM in the garbage.
They then took each individual aside one by one, and for one half of the group, told the individual that he had been chosen by every other person but was the odd man out and had to work alone. For the other half, the person was told that nobody chose him and so he had to work alone. All of the participants were given logic puzzles to solve.
The experimenters found out that the 'happier' group of people who thought that they were cool and popular generally performed better, and even more ostensibly were less likely to binge on the cookie jar placed next to them while doing the puzzles. The dejected group of supposedly unpopular people ate twice as many cookies and generally fared worse at the puzzles.
Studies that make this conclusion (happiness => more productive) are pretty common.
And the crappiest part is that you are perpetually around people who are pissed. Husbands mad at their wives, companies mad at other companies for getting sued, people mad at each other respectively for making the other guy look stupid. What a life...
I disagree with your analogy in which you compare stealing a car with patent grabbing. The person stealing the car has no perceived threat from the car's owner. By stealing it, the only effect is his own gain. In the corporate world, everyone is perpetually under threat from everyone else.
This also makes up my response to your comment. Even if Apple were to have freed every one of their smartphone inventions, there would still be lawyers arguing that those inventions are not comprehensive, that their client has patents that fall between the gaps.
Under such attack, being able to dismiss the vast majority of your antagonist's lawsuits is not good enough - even one or two slipping through might cause a lot of damage. Having your own patents though with which you can fire back can provide enough of a disincentive. So the analogy here is a defense system vs having weapons of your own.
All this, of course, is just insane... Companies should compete by making good products and improving people's lives, not by throwing patent bombs at each other. But to return to the original point, you can't blame one company for doing it in a world in which everyone has the bomb.
Apple is not the problem. The patent system is. The patent system was invented in an age in which manufacturing and distributing products would take a lot of time and involve multitudes of logistical hardships. So people had to be protected because they would be exposed for the duration that it took them to turn their ideas into products, which was more than enough for an established player to steal their innovation. In today's world you can do the same things in a matter of days though crowdsourcing, App Stores, web services, Alibaba, click-and-control warehousing and supply chains. Investments are also much more accessible through the likes of Kickstarter and VCs with online office hours. People no longer need the same level of protection because they can move much faster than before. Big companies don't need protection - if they come up with an idea, they get the early starter advantage (Apple did) and need to capitalize on it (which Apple did also). If they don't, they're incompetent, and too bad for them.
Given that the patent system is stupid and encourages armament and heavy warfare, you cannot blame Apple for watching out for themselves. Offense is also a good defense - although admittedly it would be generous to give Apple that benefit.
It would be hilarious if Dorian were to be reversing Newsweek's tactics on them. Newsweek - "We have evidence - here, and that's good enough to thrown open the curtain on this guy." Dorian (via credible source of Bitcoin news, which he has control over) - You want evidence? We're the biggest authority on Bitcoin - we know this dude is not the inventor - in fact he was probably using loose language - go ask him again. Dorian to reporters "I was just using loose language, nope, I was talking about general computer stuff, not Bitcoin."
Nice
First sentence:"I'm right, period. I don't need to state an argument. Why should I, since everyone knows I'm right to begin with."
Second sentence:"Building on the rigor of my first point consider this comparison involving an undetermined quantum of information, backed up by documentation too obvious to cite."
Powerpoint is good when the visual material you have is auxiliary. Usually, when the presenter is engaging and articulate, you end up not paying much attention to the slides. The slides then become like index cards for the speaker - they help with the design. They also help 'burn' the content into the audience by keeping points in their field of view long after they were covered verbally.
Chalkboards/Whiteboards are the better choice when visual material is not a supplement but a component of the presentation. What they help do is to turn static content into a narrative. Seeing a hand circle the 'x' in 3x+5=20 makes a stronger impression than to see it circled to begin with.
Comcast has a monopoly in our area. I have had conversations resembling the one in the article with Comcast reps. About a year ago, a rep put me on a promotion that lowered my bill while also adding a phone service, which I didn't have at the time. The rep said I would have to call back after 9 months and ask to be put on a different promotion if I didn't want my bill to go up. 9 months later I called again and the rep in question claimed that I was going to be on the promotion for another year. After arguing with her and getting her to recheck the account about thrice... she finally conceded that I was due for a rate change that month and figured out a way to let me keep the rate in place.
Then a strange thing happened 5 months ago. I stopped being able to access my billing information online - the system denied me access "for my own protection" and asked for a PIN that I could only request over mail, by calling tech support (long waits...). I have requested it twice but not received it yet. This is one of the things that *nearly* had me convinced that the second rep was right - because I didn't have a way to check the info myself. The only reason I kept pestering the rep was that my wife, who was sitting next to me kept insisting I stay put... good thing I listened.
It is a disgraceful way of making money, like the author concluded in his post.
If you post a story in which you strongly insinuate that a reviewer is biased, then it's a good idea to either not be biased yourself, or to try to conceal that bias. There are several indications of bias in the post, I only mentioned one, which was to round off the price tag advertised in the review ($89,500) all the way to $100,000, instead of say, to $90,000. The exaggeration obviously helps advance the case further, since $100,000 seems significantly more than $89,500 than $90,000.
I left too much to be inferred there. I agree with your point, and disagree with the article. I was stating the gist of the message, according to me. Beyond the message summarize in that one line, the author laments about how horrible it is when you actually start using awful shit... but that goes without saying, and like you said there's an endless supply of it on the web.
And the submitter isn't
"choose an electric car that costs nearly $100,000"
$89,500 is nearly $100,000.
Mobile developers, don't make awful shit. Please.
There's a reason that "if it ain't broken don't fix it" continues to be the holy grail of engineering. It's because any value function you come up with to evaluate a new opportunity and compare it to an existing, good arrangement is bound to be incomplete. So Value = f(salary, benefits, exciting work) is one part of the story. What about the potential of a Dilbert-like management culture, processes that you don't know yet that you would find out after a year of working at the new place - at which point it would be too late to turn back.
A good job, like a system that works just fine, reflects on a good balance of a large number of variables, many of which one doesn't understand and takes for granted, until one moves out and breaks the balance.
Having said that, I have broken the rule a number of times, because discomfort is not necessarily a bad thing. Necessity is the mother of invention, so if you're healthy, robust, and not too much in debt (or have an ARM mortgage that's going to explode around the corner...) then it couldn't hurt to challenge yourself by leaving your comfort zone, every now and then :-)
So, I love NYC and am considering going there to work. What was it about it that turned you off, that one don't see as a visitor?
It's unfortunate that the USPTO's new director and the White House are not taking aim at patent trolls specifically, but rather trying to deal with them by revamping the criteria for patentability in general. Patent trolls are bad enough that they ought to be treated as a first class problem. Even if it became next to impossible to patent prior art, trolls would still end up getting such patents and prevent companies from building things until they pay up. Maybe something like "You can't file a patent lawsuit unless you have a legitimate product based on the inventions described in the patent."