In my experience, which ia way more than your 10 years, very few folks in IT actually know how to interview and what traits to look for. Being tech folks and not having people skills, they think that some test will tell them what they need to know about a potential applicant. Not true.
A lot of the tests are language lawyer things (knowing about public static final in Java) which doesn't get to what they really need to know. There are lots of folks who know the language lawyer tricks that will be lousy employees. You need folks that are bright, have a demonstrated track record of being able to learn new things and that will fit with your culture/environment.
It would be nice if Stallman were as outspoken about the Web based folks who use GPL software and because of his obsession with Gates and Microsoft, don't have to give back. The free software movement is more threatened by these folks, like Google, than it is by Microsoft. If software and our data move to the cloud and the big Web guys can use GPL but not give us back what they do and a chance to audit it, we're more threatened than we ever were by Microsoft.
If the Internet is only about piracy of property than the Viacom suit does threaten the Internet. But lets face it, Google is worried about Google and their business, not the Internet, you or me. The dominant position of Youtube, which was consciously built on piracy and help lawyers help engineer the business plan, is based on people posting material they don't own. Recent studies show that the most watched videos are music videos that are copyrighted and are posted without the owner's permission. Hence the Viacom suit.
The technology does not exist to allow Youtube to screen each posted video for violation of copyright for at least the music and to take down the clip and not allow it to be posted. Does Google/Youtube do this? No. Why? Because it isn't in their business interest. Google has a long history of putting its business interests above the law and using their money to fight protracted legal battles, hoping to intimidate others into giving up their rights.
I know we all want to mash and do clever things, but until the law changes, taking a whole song and posting it or even a major portion is just plain theft. We've gotten used to theft of music through Napster and P2P networks. And the music companies are such idiots and so greedy that they are easy to hate. But theft is theft. If you don't like the law, change it. If you choose instead to break it, be prepared to suffer the consequences.
The recent announcement about Yahoo testing Adsense for search result advertising just proves that MS is right and that Yahoo is not a viable standalone entity. We need strong and serious competition for Google because the last thing the world needs is a monopoly on the source of revenue for ad properties. Yahoo has now admitted defeat and MS is willing to put up the challenge. Throw in Fox and we could have a real competitor for Google.
Of course, combining 3 "also rans"doesn't mean we get a winner, just that we'll at least likely have a fight!
Parallel programming is simply harder than typical sequential programming. Not only does the design take more time and effort, but the debugging is VERY much harder. tools for parallel programming are poor but debugging tools are basically pathetic. Worse, today's project and development methodologies don't focus on getting something up and hacking, not on careful upfront design that is needed to really parallelize things. We get most of our parallelism from the web server being multi-threaded and the database handling concurrency.
As many have said, large scale parallel systems are not new. Just because we need a solution to the problem doesn't mean that it will appear any time soon. Some problems are very difficult and involve not only new technologies and programing models but major re-educational efforts. There are many topics in physics and mathematics that only a small number of people have the intellectual skill and predilection to handle. Of all the college graduates, what percent complete calculus, let alone take advanced calculus? Pretty small number.
My prediction is that the broad base of programmers will have the tools and be able to do some basic parallelism. A small number of programmers will do the heavy duty parallel programming and this will be focus on very high value problems.
BTW, this Intel guy, while addressing a real issue, seemed to be doing marketing for his toolkit/approach. Sounds like a guy trying to secure his budget and grow it for next year.
This patent is just a sample of the tracking and targeting that Google is doing. They talk about "anonymous" tracking, but give the content and patterns of access they can do a good job figuring out who you are and what you interests are. They are looking at your web surfing, email, chat, bookmarks, etc. Google toolbar and desktop are there so they can spy on you when you are browsing anywhere.
If the government was spying on you like this there would be a revolution. Google is completely unaccountable and as a corporation whose primary and sole motive is profit, no more trustworthy than Enron. When Google says "Do no evil" don't believe them. Ask, "Who defines what evil is?" All they care about is not being exposed for what they are and are doing because it makes the spyware guys look restrained.
Suppose you use your thumb print and some hacker steals whatever form they use to store this in and then figures how to feed the thumb print into other systems. With passwords or cards you get a new one. You can't get a new thumb.
The problem is that we have numerous examples every day that we cannot build really secure systems in a commercial context. There are too many people involved, there are too many vulnerable points in the systems where people can tap into data streams, etc. Despite the mathematical possibility of uncrackable encryption and all the good CS logic, implementation and real world issues make this a great debating point, but not realistic for the next 5-10 years. We should focus some efforts now on building systems that cannot be hacked into, no matter how lazy and slothful the operators are. Once we have that infrastructure, we can consider such systems.
Of course, even then I can just see someone intercepting Bill Gates' thumb print and then organizing a SETI@home like project to crack whatever encryption is used. May take 5 years, but access to his bank account is worth it!
I've been running SP1 RTM for a while and Vista since the betas. I find that SP1 has fixed a LOT of the stability issues and BSODs that I had. Speed on some operation is better, but overall, Vista still seems slower than XP.
What I have found is that a lot of issues were caused by sleep/hibernate being broken and that most of the remainder are caused by drivers. The discovery data from the Vista lawsuit shows that MS knew they'd broken lots of drivers and that Intel drivers were pathetic. Vista would have been a step forward for MS if they hadn't thrown out all concern about quality.
A problem that isn't getting solved anytime soon
on
Panic in Multicore Land
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· Score: 2, Insightful
The issue of the lack of progress in creating tools to simplify multithreaded programming has been a topic of discussion for well over a decade. Most programmers just don't make much use of multithreading. They take advantage of multithreading because their Web server and database support it and the Web server runs each request in a separate thread. Even then, some activity is complex and is usually not further parallelized. Operating systems programmers and some realtime programmers tend to be good a multithreading and parallel programming, but this is a small minority of programmers. Heck, look st Rails, one of the most popular Web frameworks - it isn't thread safe!
Look at most people's screens. Even if they have multiple programs running, they tend to have the one they are working on full screen. Studies have shown that people who multitask are less efficient than people who do one job at a time. Perhaps we are not educated to look at problems as solvable in a parallel fashion or perhaps there is some other human based problem. Maybe like many other skills, being able to think and program in a multithreaded fashion is a talent that only a small fraction of the population has.
This "panic" isn't going away and there is NO quick fix on the programming horizon. The hardware designers can stuff more cores in the box, but programmers won't keep up. what can consume the extra CPU power are things like speech recognition, hand writing and gesture recognition and rich media. Each of the can run in its 1-4 cores and help us serial humans interact with those powerful computers more easily.
I downloaded and installed IE8. SOme things that were problems with accessing/. with IE7 are better (but not fixed) and some new things are broken. For example, I lost the box for replying using the new response system and the links at the top of the personal page for firehose, etc are better but still wrong.
There are real issues with displaying normal text (looks jagged), many sites just don't display correctly, etc. Windows Sidebar gadgets (Vista SP1) don't display correctly. Many other issues, but it is *beta*.
2 weeks ago, the head of Softbank gave a speech at the big mobile industry show in Barcelona basically saying this same thing to mobile carriers. Not an original thought, Scott.
I am using Sp1 RC2 which Microsoft says is identical to the released version. I can say that I am *still* seeing BSOD, especially after returning from hibernate or sleep. This was one of the most aggravating issues with Vista and we *never* got an explanation of why this was broken or what they did to fix it. Perhaps we didn't get the "fix" explanation because they haven't.
It is hard to know, because according to MS there are "driver" issues, and the BSOD I see is related to drivers (driver_power_state_failure, 0x9f). What is infuriating is that MS knows which drivers have issues and won't publish a list. They are giving the vendors a chance to get fixes in place before the general release. Of course, MS has the Windows Hardware Quality Lab which is supposed to check out vendor's drivers. So perhaps the issue is that the Lab did a crappy job and they can't blame the vendors without sharing a lot of the blame.
SP1 still doesn't fix many of the performance issues of Vista, including improving desktop search results, which is disappointing but not a killer for me. They still have not cleaned up small annoyances (it detects your network location and sets the firewall stuff but *doesn't* set your default printer for the new location) that could really improve the user experience. It is clear that MS rushed Vista out and even with the additional time between original release and SP1 have not bothered with the things that could really improve the overall user experience and satisfaction. And, I have Vista Ultimate and feel completely cheated because they didn't deliver anything for the extra $$ for Ultimate.
In the end, what we want is honesty and facts. Being honest with your customers builds trust. I've been someone who said good things about Vista - with the caveat about speed and hibernate/resume crashes - but I need MS to be honest, take feedback and demonstrate a roadmap of improvements and then deliver the needed usability and performance improvements in a predictable fashion.
I've heard from a source at a carrier that HTC is planning on launching an Android based phone with T Mobile in the US in Q4 2008 and that the device will be Google branded.
I saw this in the Hitachi booth at CES. Very col device. The PC screen was projected on the special table top. There is some kind of sensor that detects the hand motions. Just like the Surface and iPhone. They used Google Maps satellite images to demo and showed zooming using multi-touch gestures.
The other part is the extra buttons on the surface that work with a PC based white boarding application. You can click a color and then shape and draw a circle ( or text or square, etc) and it overlays on the PC screen. They said you can save the current window image with the overlays.
Electronic health records will be a privacy disaster. It isn't about open standards, it is about the ease of access that will be created and the fact that security is *ALWAYS* an afterthought or cut/put off to "get an initial release out, but we'll fix it later". What we'll have is a hodgepodge of poorly implemented systems with a TON of security holes and NO ONE'S privacy will be safe.
What is needed is an initial focus on the security of the systems, access rules defined, complete auditing of all actions, unforgeable/unmodifiable logs of the actions, sever criminal penalties for leaking any health records WITHOUT a press shield, etc. And we need a separate organization to create tests, hacks, etc to audit the implementations and make sure the security is correctly done.
But all of this won't happen. Politicians are making promises of great efficiency and other benefits. There will be political pressure to rush something out. Software vendors and the systems integrators will reassure everyone that things will be OK because they will see a HUGE opportunity for years to come and will want to reduce fears and concerns, all the while knowing better, etc.
And, we all know that projects of this scale and scope take a long time to build and get right. The specs are never right and there is incessant haggling over the specs, the tests, the contracts, who pays, etc. The Big Dig will look like a well managed project and of high quality compared to a national EHR system in its first decade or so of life.
This is a train wreck waiting to happen. The political types are too ignorant to know what to do. The industry types want the money. You will be the victim.
Every study of programmer productivity shows that private office are the best for programmers. Programmers need to concentrate and not be disturbed. Open schemes are full of distractions and those distractions interrupt the thought process and concentration. Once disrupted in the middle of a train of thought, a programmer may need to literally go back to the beginning and think through bug or problem again.
What open schemes are good for is reducing costs. Small, closed workspaces with real walls and doors and the common spaces are the best. The common spaces allow for impromptu meetings, brainstorming, etc.
After being a longtime FF user, I couldn't take it any more and switched back to IE. I loved FF tab handling, ued many extensions and thelike. What I *HATED* was the crashes, mmory leaks killing my machine and the slow page loading. I switched back to IE and added IE7Pro, which gave me Firefox like tab handling, inline search (with highlighting), ad blocking and GreaseMonkey scripting! I've found that IE7 is faster in displaying most of the sites I visit and have not had memory leaks, system slowdowns or the like.
I'm encouraged to see this reviw, but echcrunch had a brief note that says tha FF3 is *still* a memory hog. They need to getthis right. Ie7 with IE7ro is quite good and I expect IE7Pro to kee etting better and maing IE7 better.
I started using books on my PDA in 2001. The problem for ebook success isn't the devices, but the way content is priced and the restrictions. I found that the price for a hard cover and a ebook were the same. This is ridiculous! A hard cover has to be printed, shipped, stored, stocked, returns need to be handled, there is inventory risk, etc. I know that a ebook is cheaper, likely by several dollars than a hardcover, yet they price them the same. I don't do ebooks because I resent being ripped off.
Add to the the same lousy implementation of DRM that we see in music, and an ebook is a really bad buy. I can't share with my wife, give to my sister, have the kids read the book.
New devices won't make ebooks popular. Rationale pricing and usable DRM (or no DRM) are the keys.
The truth is that all ISPs rely on the fact that if they are selling 5Mbps t 10 people they don't have to have 50Mbps of available backbone. They assume that web applications are using the connections intermittently or that if you have a long running connection it doesn't matter if it slows down from time to time. If everyone on their 5Mpbs lines was downloading large files the best they'd each get would be something like 500Kbps assuming a 10-1 contention rate and most ISPs are are 20-1 or 50-1. P2P traffic will slow down if there is a lot of it or if there is other long running traffic, without Comcast doing anything.
The bigger issue is that our connections are a shared resource. I it fair for you to get all of the bandwidth and leave me with slower response for my web traffic just because you want to download movies. Should we all get an equal slice. The only way for the ISP to do this is traffic shape - limiting the amount of total available bandwidth available for high use protocols like P2P traffic. Ding this means that when I try to load my web page or shoot a dragon in my MMOG there is some bandwidth left to give me a decent response.
Now, you could say that all the ISPs should have enough backbone to supply each of us with full time use of the bandwidth that the ISP talks about providing. The problem is that this would cost a HUGE amount of money and your bill would up 10-50 times what you now pay (depending on your ISPs contention factor).
The so called "net neutrality" debate is mis-named. The question is who pays for the cost of infrastructure and who makes the profits?
IN the Business Section of the same issue of the Times there is an article about the NFL trying to get the cable guys to carry their channel as part of the "basic" service. What this means is that everyone gets the service and the cable company has to pay for every user. The NFL wants $0.70 per subscriber, whether or not the subscriber cares about the channel. This will translate into something like a $1.00 increase in cable bills.
The cable folks said "No", which is very pro-consumer. The NFL is lobbying Congress and the FCC. This is the kind of crap that raises you bills. Cable guys have to have ESPN and Disney keeps raising prices and forcing cable to take other channels and pay.
The FCC can't just address the access without dealing with they "baisc" channels issue or we'll wind up with some arbitrator somewhere deciding that the Tibetian Snow Channel is worthwhile and we ought to all pay $0.20/month for this, even if only 10 people watch it. In the end cable and the FCC's vision represents taxation of the many to pay for channels for the few.
Let the market decide. The only thing the FCC could do is possibly force unbundling of content and having consumers choose what they want. This would take the cable guys time to implement but then the folks who want NFL cna pay and NFL will have to convince the consumer that the channel is worth what they want to charge.
I think the article author has mis-stated 2 key cases. The suit against Google by authors is because Google had initially wanted to make the scanned materials available online with much more than th simple 2 line snippet. It is one thing to have a brief teaser and another to show lots of the content. Google argument was that it was "too hard" to ask each owner for permission to use their content, as the LAW requires, and so the owners needed to opt out. I don't think Google should get to arbitrarily get to redefine laws just because they find them inconvenient or becuase they can't make money following the laws.
The YouTube example pre-supposes that UGC is *really* UGC but there is a *lot* of UGC that is simply a ripped off video or other clearly infringing material. YouTube argues that it isn't practical to police this stuff. Again the argument is tha "I have a great idea but I can't make money if I follow the law, so I'll ignore it". YouTube carefully uses the "safe harbor" provision but there is real argument about that and once they start to monetize they start stepping outside of the safe harbor.
Just because technology makes it possible to do something doesn't make it right. If we had a technology that allowed you to steal any object from anyone's home and not be detected would using it be right? Of course not. But things like BitTorrent, Limewire and YouTube allow us to take that which belongs to others and steal it anonymously. Yes, the media companies are charging us outrageous prices, and yes they have stupid business models that are anti-consumer and that their customers hate. We can go on and on about how despicable they are, but none of that gives us the right to take that which they own. The answer isn't stealing their property, the answer is not buying or using their product at all.
Once you take a copy and use it you are admitting the product has value and you lose any moral legitimacy in making arguments about the behavior of the media companies. Imagine letting rapists and pedophiles be the ones defining the sex crimes laws. You righfully shudder at the thought. But because intellectual property theft seems anonymous and victimless we rationalize that we're not doing anything wrong. Taking that which isn't ours, no matter how despicable is wrong, no matter how unreasonable or repugnant the owner is. We're not talking about things like taking food for starving children, we're talking about taking things just because we want to be amused.
What bothers me is the argument about technology. This isn't about technology, but instead is about people who want to take and use someone else's work for free. The person who puts in the sweat and creativity should own the fruits of their labor. If they choose to make their work available for free, so be it. But just interesting and don't like he terms that the owner sets doesn't give you the right to take it and we shouldn't change the laws to legalize theft just becuase technology makes it easier to steal. YouTube has some legitimate user generaed content but it also has a whole lot of stolen content that is owned b others. YouTube and Google avoided monetizing so they'd avoid liability under the Safe Harbor provision. They knew full well that a LOT of the content was stolen, but as long as they could build value they didn't care about someone else's ownership rights.
Yes, he content owners have gone too far in fighting fair use, but they are (over)reacting to rampant and widespread theft and the fact that supposedly serious people are making excuses for theft. Look at the BitTorrent nets and you'll see pirated movies, TV shows, software, etc. Lots of it. None of this is fair use.
We need to get rid of stupid DRM schemes that limit the number of devices in my house that I can play something on. We need to allow indexing but NOT full content storage / retrieval from "caches" without the copyright owners permission. We should allow some level of sharing but not on a scale like YouTube where things are so generally available we wind up taking away the ability of the owner to have any say in the use of their works or effectively make money from those works. We need to define "fair use" in an understandable and possibly quantifiable way.
The author has a lot of reforms but the suggestions aren't balanced. We need to restore balance and not have the government confiscate one set of property, just becuase it is somewhat "intangible". People work hard to create great music, movies, software, books and the like and deserve recognition of their efforts and rights.
It isn't a surprise, becuase if people understood how much is tracked and what companies like Google know about them, there would be outrage. No one should have the level of detailed information about a consumer that Google gathers. They know who you email and IM with and about what, what sites you visit, what you buy, what your interests are, where you are and with whom, your stick market interests and investments and more. Even the Soviet era KGB would envy Google data collection and audacity.
Some (GOogle) will say that the privacy policy explains all this. Humbug! First you have to follow a link to find the policy. Second the lawyers and marketeers have obfuscated what is really being done. Further, they can change the policy without notice. When they change you have to know they have changed and then go and read the new policy. How one is supposed to know when no notice is provided is a mystery.
All in all, Google is doing a lot of evil if you believe in personal privacy. They are an invasive collector of personal data and they hide the extent and nature of what they are doing. Google makes Microsoft bashful in their business practices.
over the years we've seen all kinds of industry consortia that never resulted in products and delivered more hype than what was promised. Since each vendor and then the carriers are likely to have the final say in what gets shipped and what level of openness is available, discount the hype here and wait for results. For example, the 2 Japanese carriers listed are also part of a different mobile Linux consortium. They may only be concerned about compatibility of the Linux kernels and libraries and have no interest in the rest of the stack.
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In my experience, which ia way more than your 10 years, very few folks in IT actually know how to interview and what traits to look for. Being tech folks and not having people skills, they think that some test will tell them what they need to know about a potential applicant. Not true.
A lot of the tests are language lawyer things (knowing about public static final in Java) which doesn't get to what they really need to know. There are lots of folks who know the language lawyer tricks that will be lousy employees. You need folks that are bright, have a demonstrated track record of being able to learn new things and that will fit with your culture/environment.
It would be nice if Stallman were as outspoken about the Web based folks who use GPL software and because of his obsession with Gates and Microsoft, don't have to give back. The free software movement is more threatened by these folks, like Google, than it is by Microsoft. If software and our data move to the cloud and the big Web guys can use GPL but not give us back what they do and a chance to audit it, we're more threatened than we ever were by Microsoft.
If the Internet is only about piracy of property than the Viacom suit does threaten the Internet. But lets face it, Google is worried about Google and their business, not the Internet, you or me. The dominant position of Youtube, which was consciously built on piracy and help lawyers help engineer the business plan, is based on people posting material they don't own. Recent studies show that the most watched videos are music videos that are copyrighted and are posted without the owner's permission. Hence the Viacom suit.
The technology does not exist to allow Youtube to screen each posted video for violation of copyright for at least the music and to take down the clip and not allow it to be posted. Does Google/Youtube do this? No. Why? Because it isn't in their business interest. Google has a long history of putting its business interests above the law and using their money to fight protracted legal battles, hoping to intimidate others into giving up their rights.
I know we all want to mash and do clever things, but until the law changes, taking a whole song and posting it or even a major portion is just plain theft. We've gotten used to theft of music through Napster and P2P networks. And the music companies are such idiots and so greedy that they are easy to hate. But theft is theft. If you don't like the law, change it. If you choose instead to break it, be prepared to suffer the consequences.
The recent announcement about Yahoo testing Adsense for search result advertising just proves that MS is right and that Yahoo is not a viable standalone entity. We need strong and serious competition for Google because the last thing the world needs is a monopoly on the source of revenue for ad properties. Yahoo has now admitted defeat and MS is willing to put up the challenge. Throw in Fox and we could have a real competitor for Google.
Of course, combining 3 "also rans"doesn't mean we get a winner, just that we'll at least likely have a fight!
I guess the slogan needs to change from "Do no evil" to "Do nothing about the evil".
Parallel programming is simply harder than typical sequential programming. Not only does the design take more time and effort, but the debugging is VERY much harder. tools for parallel programming are poor but debugging tools are basically pathetic. Worse, today's project and development methodologies don't focus on getting something up and hacking, not on careful upfront design that is needed to really parallelize things. We get most of our parallelism from the web server being multi-threaded and the database handling concurrency.
As many have said, large scale parallel systems are not new. Just because we need a solution to the problem doesn't mean that it will appear any time soon. Some problems are very difficult and involve not only new technologies and programing models but major re-educational efforts. There are many topics in physics and mathematics that only a small number of people have the intellectual skill and predilection to handle. Of all the college graduates, what percent complete calculus, let alone take advanced calculus? Pretty small number.
My prediction is that the broad base of programmers will have the tools and be able to do some basic parallelism. A small number of programmers will do the heavy duty parallel programming and this will be focus on very high value problems.
BTW, this Intel guy, while addressing a real issue, seemed to be doing marketing for his toolkit/approach. Sounds like a guy trying to secure his budget and grow it for next year.
This patent is just a sample of the tracking and targeting that Google is doing. They talk about "anonymous" tracking, but give the content and patterns of access they can do a good job figuring out who you are and what you interests are. They are looking at your web surfing, email, chat, bookmarks, etc. Google toolbar and desktop are there so they can spy on you when you are browsing anywhere.
If the government was spying on you like this there would be a revolution. Google is completely unaccountable and as a corporation whose primary and sole motive is profit, no more trustworthy than Enron. When Google says "Do no evil" don't believe them. Ask, "Who defines what evil is?" All they care about is not being exposed for what they are and are doing because it makes the spyware guys look restrained.
Suppose you use your thumb print and some hacker steals whatever form they use to store this in and then figures how to feed the thumb print into other systems. With passwords or cards you get a new one. You can't get a new thumb.
The problem is that we have numerous examples every day that we cannot build really secure systems in a commercial context. There are too many people involved, there are too many vulnerable points in the systems where people can tap into data streams, etc. Despite the mathematical possibility of uncrackable encryption and all the good CS logic, implementation and real world issues make this a great debating point, but not realistic for the next 5-10 years. We should focus some efforts now on building systems that cannot be hacked into, no matter how lazy and slothful the operators are. Once we have that infrastructure, we can consider such systems.
Of course, even then I can just see someone intercepting Bill Gates' thumb print and then organizing a SETI@home like project to crack whatever encryption is used. May take 5 years, but access to his bank account is worth it!
I've been running SP1 RTM for a while and Vista since the betas. I find that SP1 has fixed a LOT of the stability issues and BSODs that I had. Speed on some operation is better, but overall, Vista still seems slower than XP.
What I have found is that a lot of issues were caused by sleep/hibernate being broken and that most of the remainder are caused by drivers. The discovery data from the Vista lawsuit shows that MS knew they'd broken lots of drivers and that Intel drivers were pathetic. Vista would have been a step forward for MS if they hadn't thrown out all concern about quality.
The issue of the lack of progress in creating tools to simplify multithreaded programming has been a topic of discussion for well over a decade. Most programmers just don't make much use of multithreading. They take advantage of multithreading because their Web server and database support it and the Web server runs each request in a separate thread. Even then, some activity is complex and is usually not further parallelized. Operating systems programmers and some realtime programmers tend to be good a multithreading and parallel programming, but this is a small minority of programmers. Heck, look st Rails, one of the most popular Web frameworks - it isn't thread safe!
Look at most people's screens. Even if they have multiple programs running, they tend to have the one they are working on full screen. Studies have shown that people who multitask are less efficient than people who do one job at a time. Perhaps we are not educated to look at problems as solvable in a parallel fashion or perhaps there is some other human based problem. Maybe like many other skills, being able to think and program in a multithreaded fashion is a talent that only a small fraction of the population has.
This "panic" isn't going away and there is NO quick fix on the programming horizon. The hardware designers can stuff more cores in the box, but programmers won't keep up. what can consume the extra CPU power are things like speech recognition, hand writing and gesture recognition and rich media. Each of the can run in its 1-4 cores and help us serial humans interact with those powerful computers more easily.
I downloaded and installed IE8. SOme things that were problems with accessing /. with IE7 are better (but not fixed) and some new things are broken. For example, I lost the box for replying using the new response system and the links at the top of the personal page for firehose, etc are better but still wrong.
There are real issues with displaying normal text (looks jagged), many sites just don't display correctly, etc. Windows Sidebar gadgets (Vista SP1) don't display correctly. Many other issues, but it is *beta*.
2 weeks ago, the head of Softbank gave a speech at the big mobile industry show in Barcelona basically saying this same thing to mobile carriers. Not an original thought, Scott.
I am using Sp1 RC2 which Microsoft says is identical to the released version. I can say that I am *still* seeing BSOD, especially after returning from hibernate or sleep. This was one of the most aggravating issues with Vista and we *never* got an explanation of why this was broken or what they did to fix it. Perhaps we didn't get the "fix" explanation because they haven't.
It is hard to know, because according to MS there are "driver" issues, and the BSOD I see is related to drivers (driver_power_state_failure, 0x9f). What is infuriating is that MS knows which drivers have issues and won't publish a list. They are giving the vendors a chance to get fixes in place before the general release. Of course, MS has the Windows Hardware Quality Lab which is supposed to check out vendor's drivers. So perhaps the issue is that the Lab did a crappy job and they can't blame the vendors without sharing a lot of the blame.
SP1 still doesn't fix many of the performance issues of Vista, including improving desktop search results, which is disappointing but not a killer for me. They still have not cleaned up small annoyances (it detects your network location and sets the firewall stuff but *doesn't* set your default printer for the new location) that could really improve the user experience. It is clear that MS rushed Vista out and even with the additional time between original release and SP1 have not bothered with the things that could really improve the overall user experience and satisfaction. And, I have Vista Ultimate and feel completely cheated because they didn't deliver anything for the extra $$ for Ultimate.
In the end, what we want is honesty and facts. Being honest with your customers builds trust. I've been someone who said good things about Vista - with the caveat about speed and hibernate/resume crashes - but I need MS to be honest, take feedback and demonstrate a roadmap of improvements and then deliver the needed usability and performance improvements in a predictable fashion.
I've heard from a source at a carrier that HTC is planning on launching an Android based phone with T Mobile in the US in Q4 2008 and that the device will be Google branded.
I saw this in the Hitachi booth at CES. Very col device. The PC screen was projected on the special table top. There is some kind of sensor that detects the hand motions. Just like the Surface and iPhone. They used Google Maps satellite images to demo and showed zooming using multi-touch gestures.
The other part is the extra buttons on the surface that work with a PC based white boarding application. You can click a color and then shape and draw a circle ( or text or square, etc) and it overlays on the PC screen. They said you can save the current window image with the overlays.
Very cool demo. No one discussed pricing.
Electronic health records will be a privacy disaster. It isn't about open standards, it is about the ease of access that will be created and the fact that security is *ALWAYS* an afterthought or cut/put off to "get an initial release out, but we'll fix it later". What we'll have is a hodgepodge of poorly implemented systems with a TON of security holes and NO ONE'S privacy will be safe.
What is needed is an initial focus on the security of the systems, access rules defined, complete auditing of all actions, unforgeable/unmodifiable logs of the actions, sever criminal penalties for leaking any health records WITHOUT a press shield, etc. And we need a separate organization to create tests, hacks, etc to audit the implementations and make sure the security is correctly done.
But all of this won't happen. Politicians are making promises of great efficiency and other benefits. There will be political pressure to rush something out. Software vendors and the systems integrators will reassure everyone that things will be OK because they will see a HUGE opportunity for years to come and will want to reduce fears and concerns, all the while knowing better, etc.
And, we all know that projects of this scale and scope take a long time to build and get right. The specs are never right and there is incessant haggling over the specs, the tests, the contracts, who pays, etc. The Big Dig will look like a well managed project and of high quality compared to a national EHR system in its first decade or so of life.
This is a train wreck waiting to happen. The political types are too ignorant to know what to do. The industry types want the money. You will be the victim.
Every study of programmer productivity shows that private office are the best for programmers. Programmers need to concentrate and not be disturbed. Open schemes are full of distractions and those distractions interrupt the thought process and concentration. Once disrupted in the middle of a train of thought, a programmer may need to literally go back to the beginning and think through bug or problem again.
What open schemes are good for is reducing costs. Small, closed workspaces with real walls and doors and the common spaces are the best. The common spaces allow for impromptu meetings, brainstorming, etc.
After being a longtime FF user, I couldn't take it any more and switched back to IE. I loved FF tab handling, ued many extensions and thelike. What I *HATED* was the crashes, mmory leaks killing my machine and the slow page loading. I switched back to IE and added IE7Pro, which gave me Firefox like tab handling, inline search (with highlighting), ad blocking and GreaseMonkey scripting! I've found that IE7 is faster in displaying most of the sites I visit and have not had memory leaks, system slowdowns or the like.
I'm encouraged to see this reviw, but echcrunch had a brief note that says tha FF3 is *still* a memory hog. They need to getthis right. Ie7 with IE7ro is quite good and I expect IE7Pro to kee etting better and maing IE7 better.
I started using books on my PDA in 2001. The problem for ebook success isn't the devices, but the way content is priced and the restrictions. I found that the price for a hard cover and a ebook were the same. This is ridiculous! A hard cover has to be printed, shipped, stored, stocked, returns need to be handled, there is inventory risk, etc. I know that a ebook is cheaper, likely by several dollars than a hardcover, yet they price them the same. I don't do ebooks because I resent being ripped off.
Add to the the same lousy implementation of DRM that we see in music, and an ebook is a really bad buy. I can't share with my wife, give to my sister, have the kids read the book.
New devices won't make ebooks popular. Rationale pricing and usable DRM (or no DRM) are the keys.
The truth is that all ISPs rely on the fact that if they are selling 5Mbps t 10 people they don't have to have 50Mbps of available backbone. They assume that web applications are using the connections intermittently or that if you have a long running connection it doesn't matter if it slows down from time to time. If everyone on their 5Mpbs lines was downloading large files the best they'd each get would be something like 500Kbps assuming a 10-1 contention rate and most ISPs are are 20-1 or 50-1.
P2P traffic will slow down if there is a lot of it or if there is other long running traffic, without Comcast doing anything.
The bigger issue is that our connections are a shared resource. I it fair for you to get all of the bandwidth and leave me with slower response for my web traffic just because you want to download movies. Should we all get an equal slice. The only way for the ISP to do this is traffic shape - limiting the amount of total available bandwidth available for high use protocols like P2P traffic. Ding this means that when I try to load my web page or shoot a dragon in my MMOG there is some bandwidth left to give me a decent response.
Now, you could say that all the ISPs should have enough backbone to supply each of us with full time use of the bandwidth that the ISP talks about providing. The problem is that this would cost a HUGE amount of money and your bill would up 10-50 times what you now pay (depending on your ISPs contention factor).
The so called "net neutrality" debate is mis-named. The question is who pays for the cost of infrastructure and who makes the profits?
IN the Business Section of the same issue of the Times there is an article about the NFL trying to get the cable guys to carry their channel as part of the "basic" service. What this means is that everyone gets the service and the cable company has to pay for every user. The NFL wants $0.70 per subscriber, whether or not the subscriber cares about the channel. This will translate into something like a $1.00 increase in cable bills.
The cable folks said "No", which is very pro-consumer. The NFL is lobbying Congress and the FCC. This is the kind of crap that raises you bills. Cable guys have to have ESPN and Disney keeps raising prices and forcing cable to take other channels and pay.
The FCC can't just address the access without dealing with they "baisc" channels issue or we'll wind up with some arbitrator somewhere deciding that the Tibetian Snow Channel is worthwhile and we ought to all pay $0.20/month for this, even if only 10 people watch it. In the end cable and the FCC's vision represents taxation of the many to pay for channels for the few.
Let the market decide. The only thing the FCC could do is possibly force unbundling of content and having consumers choose what they want. This would take the cable guys time to implement but then the folks who want NFL cna pay and NFL will have to convince the consumer that the channel is worth what they want to charge.
I think the article author has mis-stated 2 key cases. The suit against Google by authors is because Google had initially wanted to make the scanned materials available online with much more than th simple 2 line snippet. It is one thing to have a brief teaser and another to show lots of the content. Google argument was that it was "too hard" to ask each owner for permission to use their content, as the LAW requires, and so the owners needed to opt out. I don't think Google should get to arbitrarily get to redefine laws just because they find them inconvenient or becuase they can't make money following the laws.
The YouTube example pre-supposes that UGC is *really* UGC but there is a *lot* of UGC that is simply a ripped off video or other clearly infringing material. YouTube argues that it isn't practical to police this stuff. Again the argument is tha "I have a great idea but I can't make money if I follow the law, so I'll ignore it". YouTube carefully uses the "safe harbor" provision but there is real argument about that and once they start to monetize they start stepping outside of the safe harbor.
Just because technology makes it possible to do something doesn't make it right. If we had a technology that allowed you to steal any object from anyone's home and not be detected would using it be right? Of course not. But things like BitTorrent, Limewire and YouTube allow us to take that which belongs to others and steal it anonymously. Yes, the media companies are charging us outrageous prices, and yes they have stupid business models that are anti-consumer and that their customers hate. We can go on and on about how despicable they are, but none of that gives us the right to take that which they own. The answer isn't stealing their property, the answer is not buying or using their product at all.
Once you take a copy and use it you are admitting the product has value and you lose any moral legitimacy in making arguments about the behavior of the media companies. Imagine letting rapists and pedophiles be the ones defining the sex crimes laws. You righfully shudder at the thought. But because intellectual property theft seems anonymous and victimless we rationalize that we're not doing anything wrong. Taking that which isn't ours, no matter how despicable is wrong, no matter how unreasonable or repugnant the owner is. We're not talking about things like taking food for starving children, we're talking about taking things just because we want to be amused.
What bothers me is the argument about technology. This isn't about technology, but instead is about people who want to take and use someone else's work for free. The person who puts in the sweat and creativity should own the fruits of their labor. If they choose to make their work available for free, so be it. But just interesting and don't like he terms that the owner sets doesn't give you the right to take it and we shouldn't change the laws to legalize theft just becuase technology makes it easier to steal. YouTube has some legitimate user generaed content but it also has a whole lot of stolen content that is owned b others. YouTube and Google avoided monetizing so they'd avoid liability under the Safe Harbor provision. They knew full well that a LOT of the content was stolen, but as long as they could build value they didn't care about someone else's ownership rights.
Yes, he content owners have gone too far in fighting fair use, but they are (over)reacting to rampant and widespread theft and the fact that supposedly serious people are making excuses for theft. Look at the BitTorrent nets and you'll see pirated movies, TV shows, software, etc. Lots of it. None of this is fair use.
We need to get rid of stupid DRM schemes that limit the number of devices in my house that I can play something on. We need to allow indexing but NOT full content storage / retrieval from "caches" without the copyright owners permission. We should allow some level of sharing but not on a scale like YouTube where things are so generally available we wind up taking away the ability of the owner to have any say in the use of their works or effectively make money from those works. We need to define "fair use" in an understandable and possibly quantifiable way.
The author has a lot of reforms but the suggestions aren't balanced. We need to restore balance and not have the government confiscate one set of property, just becuase it is somewhat "intangible". People work hard to create great music, movies, software, books and the like and deserve recognition of their efforts and rights.
It isn't a surprise, becuase if people understood how much is tracked and what companies like Google know about them, there would be outrage. No one should have the level of detailed information about a consumer that Google gathers. They know who you email and IM with and about what, what sites you visit, what you buy, what your interests are, where you are and with whom, your stick market interests and investments and more. Even the Soviet era KGB would envy Google data collection and audacity.
Some (GOogle) will say that the privacy policy explains all this. Humbug! First you have to follow a link to find the policy. Second the lawyers and marketeers have obfuscated what is really being done. Further, they can change the policy without notice. When they change you have to know they have changed and then go and read the new policy. How one is supposed to know when no notice is provided is a mystery.
All in all, Google is doing a lot of evil if you believe in personal privacy. They are an invasive collector of personal data and they hide the extent and nature of what they are doing. Google makes Microsoft bashful in their business practices.
over the years we've seen all kinds of industry consortia that never resulted in products and delivered more hype than what was promised. Since each vendor and then the carriers are likely to have the final say in what gets shipped and what level of openness is available, discount the hype here and wait for results. For example, the 2 Japanese carriers listed are also part of a different mobile Linux consortium. They may only be concerned about compatibility of the Linux kernels and libraries and have no interest in the rest of the stack.
Ignore hype and wait for real results.