Given that software companies tend to provide high-end jobs and generally non-polluting production to a city, you would think that you would want MORE of this industry in a city, and would structure the tax code to encourage them to set up shop in your city. At least some of the legislators appear to be aware of this fact.
Microsoft pissed me off royally a while ago, in what I'm sure they would have called a "feature" but was probably, in reality, a way to counter Java somehow (even though this relates to JavaScript), or Netscape, or somebody. All it ended up doing for me was causing me unnecessary work.
Several years ago I was responsible for creating the website for my Dad's company. Just a small business thing, a source for information on their products, manuals, etc. After a while we started thinking that it would be great to have something that could help his customers choose which model best met their needs (a procedure my dad would spend 15 minutes on the phone to do), so I coded up what I considered a very nice little JavaScript program to do that. Worked great and without problems for about 2 years or so until the "latest and greatest" version of IE came out which "just happened" to have changed some of the JS commands around, and the program no longer worked for IE users. The day I discovered that probleam was the day I downloaded IEradicator and I haven't missed it since. And, coincidently, my dad sold his business and I didn't have to be bothered by that problem anymore.
Having been (in the last year) through Konqueror, Galleon, Netscape (4.whatever), and Mozilla on a Mandrake box, I've found that Mozilla's the only one that consistantly displays pages correctly. The other 3 I found would often screw up font sizes and leave side bars unreadable.
MS has a will to succeed which rivals any other corporate or non-coporate entity out there. True, the future might show that they don't hold the sway that they currently do, but predicting the demise of MS seems foolhardy to me. MS has always done whatever it takes (legal or illegal) to keep themselves up. I imagine that their coporate structure and culture will keep them that way for quite awhile, regardless as to the price of the devices their software runs on. I'd argue that their lack of penetration into the low-end handheld market has more to do with their inability to shrink their code than the price of the device it runs on.
There are a whole slew of different environmental problems between developed economies and non-developed and developing ones. Remember the problem with the Great Lakes 30 years ago? I belive the worst was Lake Superior, which was polluted so bad it was considered unsafe to swim in. Now its full of pleasure boaters and fishermen on the weekends, thanks to a massive enviormental clean up of the factories along its shores. This is part of the transition from a middle-industrialized to a modern industrialized economy.
Now, however, the Great Lakes are facing more subtle problems, like rising temperatures from suburban sprawl runoff, causing certain species of fish to move deeper in the lake, cutting off food supplies for other fish, etc. etc. This is mroe of a modernized economics problem, extremely difficult to find a solution, but also not as outright dangerous (at least in the short term) as the problem of old.
As the world becomes more developed (and I'm an optimist, I firmly belive that eventually Africa, South America, and parts of Asia will finally begin to advance to our current standards of 1st world coutnries), we will probably face less of these outright dangerous problems, and more of the "long-term potentially dangerous but we dont know what the effect will be and we don't even know how bad it really is sort".
The question then becomes are we going to be honest about the dangers, and what we know about them. Do we have the courage to say "We really don't know if global warming is occuring, and if it is, we really don't know what that means. Given the best of our information, here's what we can say...". Kudos to the Skeptical Environmentalist for being brave enough to face down the status quo and introduce some much-needed uncertainty and honesty.
Definately. You have to wonder whether or not Metallica and Dr. Dre realize how much of their labor goes into the pockets of the suits. Then again, you have to wonder whether they realize that the suits are the ones who create their popularity. It seems quite rare these days that a band "makes it" by slowly building a loyal following and touring,etc. The really big groups (Britney, NSYNC,etc) are created or chosen by suits looking for the next big thing.
Ever notice how entertainers often champion the anti-corporate causes out there, or at least bemoan the politicos who support the big "traditional" corporations like oil, steal, chemicals, etc. I'm talking about Alec Baldwin, Barbara Streisand, Rob Reiner, etc.
Don't you think its funny that, in terms of basic business ethics, their industries are about the most atrocious as far as supressing individual rights?
Then again, bad practices by the music/movie industry probably never killed anyone, whereas Union Carbide has a death count worse than Ted Bundy. Then again, its easy to point to the sludge in your backyard and say "The Exxon plant next door put this here" and get a positive public reaction than "The RIAA won't let me share my music online."
And if none of the replicas work, then suddenly we realize the original flight was a fake, and there's no such thing as aviation, and then all the planes that have been flying under the power of make-believe all along fall out of the sky. Or something like that.
Poor Sherman has no reading materials, perhaps they should give him a copy of Atlas Shrugged or Eat the Rich.
Fortunately, they're only dropping the charge of posting explosives information (which is a crock, and definately a violation of his free speech rights), but hopefully they'll still send him up the river for his defacement of corporate websites. If I spray paint "Flander's sucks" on my neighbors house, I'm either going to pay a fine or go to jail. Same goes for someone's website. Of course, I wouldn't expect a "self-described" anarchist to give a damn about individual property rights.
Carver Mead (the driving force behind foveon) is one of the few true modern visionaries out there. He was not only the pioneer of AVLSI, and therefore responsible for the microchip boom in the 1970's, but also one of the first people to start seriously looking at making electronics more like biology.
The fact that they're adding a whole "stage show" where they're periodically removing and re-introducing the robots to their environment says to me there's essentially zero scientific usefulness to this project. It would be like trying to study the predator-prey dynamics of Lions and Gezelles at your local zoo.
I've encountered about a half-dozen scientists in my time who seem to be more interested in public acclaim than actually doing useful work. They appear in Discover, Omni, etc., get spots on national news during slow weeks, and millions of people go "wow! what cool stuff these scientists are doing!". Problem is their work is never used by other scientists, and doesn't help to advance the field on iota.
This quote from the article is probably the most important piece of information. The last decade has seen so massive advancements in our understanding of nonlinear dynamics and how they can be applied to engineered systems. Problems with traditionaly engineering approaches are that we often have to assume nonlinear systems (i.e. everything in the real world) are "linear about a point". While this is fine for some problems, like automobile suspension systems, it's just not sufficient for tasks like control complex airflow, predicting weather patterns, or driving robots across uneven systems.
As nonlinear analysis techniques become more and more prominent in engineering design, we'll start to see more and more of these technologies which can accomplish extremely difficult technical challenges.
Give patents for all naturally occuring DNA sequences to God. Then assume he allows free, open development on his intellectual property. If this bothers God, he can take people to court.
If only every company that tanked (no offense to the good folks at Loki, I loved your work and am sorry to see you go) kept a record of what went on during the birth, life, and death of the company. What a resource for budding entrepreneurs that would be- especially if the timeline was cross-refernced with earnings, stock price, etc.
I'm sure much of this information can be found out there via old shareholder's reports, etc, but compiling and centralizing it is a great idea.
This has already been done with people.
on
Think And Click
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As glad as I am to hear that a big company like Oracle is making the move to Linux, I think that without the "core" Linux community remaining vigilant, it could result in problems down the road.
On one hand, having a larger user base is definately a GOOD THING. Proving that Linux can provide the infrastructure for one of the world's top companies is a GOOD THING.
Problems arise in the mid to long term possibilities. Will Sun ultimately lose so much business that they're driven out of the software market? Despite the fact that they seem to be sunsetting, they're still a software/OS player, and the more players in the field, the better the products (my belief is that Linux has achieved so much partly because it had Sun, SGI, Be, MS to prove itself against) all around. Its not like MS can provide Linux with any great technical challenges to overcome...
And am I alone in worrying that having so many big companies like IBM, Oracle, God forbid AOL/TW using Linux may end up with them pushing development away from the needs of the average user? Sorof like getting a loan from the Mafia, you never know when or how you're going to pay up.
Bioinformatics is probably the biggest challenge facing the biological sciences in the next few years. Its becomming more and more apparent that even slight changes in very small elements of a system (i.e., a small sequence of a protein, the behavior of a single neuron within a group of 10,000) can have a drastic effect on the behavior of the entire system. As a result, to really study the problem, you have to aquire massive amounts of data.
For example, in our lab we routinely collect data from 64 channels of 16-bit data (monitoring neuron firing in culture) at 1KHz, in addition, we're simultaneously taking calcium imaging video at 100fps at 256x256 (at 256 colors). This results in about 200 MB of data gathered every second. Considering we run tests for over 10 minutes, just aquiring and storing this data is a challenge, but finding useful methods to analyze it is even more difficult.
Its refreshing to see texts being written on how to bridge the gap between comp. sci. and biology. I've been working in the area for about 4 years now, and its really great to see the field growing and getting more mainstream attention.
Right, the most important thing we can bring to a portable wireless device is video. That way, you won't just have to be distracted by talking on your phone while driving, you can be watching it instead of the road.
Do you ever get the feeling that many companies aren't really thinking about whether something is a good idea before they release it? Something tells me that marketing was behind this bold corporate strategy.
This is a HELL of a lot of money. In 1995, Tuvalu had only 10,000 people, meanin this averages out to $4500 a person. At a similar per-person rate,.us should go for around $1.35e12, which would just about take care of half the national debt..cn could be bought for 10% of the world's entire GDP
for 2000.
In every talk I've attended given by Media Lab personnel, I've been given a very distinct impression that its home to a large number of extremely intelligent people who like to sit around a think a lot, and aren't particularly motivated to doing much actual hands-on research. This is both a good and bad thing on the whole, but when times get tight, the doers are more likely to survive than the thinkers.
On another note, does anyone think they'll need to tighten their
lego budget?
There was an article in Scientific American about three years ago regarding the advances in public transportation made in Curitibo, Brazil. Their basic idea was to redesign all their roads from the standpoiont of getting people around. They placed seperate bus lanes on each road (seperate physically from the other lanes), and people paid to enter the bus stop instead of the bus. This meant people quickly entered the bus at each stop, without anyone digging around for change when entering the bus, etc. And the seperate lanes meant the buses went from place to place without much hinderance from car traffic. Also, their roads were all laid out with a great deal of thought, resembling a darts target with circular and radiating routes. The system worked remarkably well, and most people used public transit to get around.
Its amazing what can be accomplished when someone actually puts real thought into the system they're developing.
In my experience, things tend to work better when you go with the standard, which I would say is VHDL.
Last year, I was in a FPGA-based hardware design class, and during the early course of our group's project, we thought that maybe we'd be better served by switching to something easier to use. Long story short, we wasted three weeks trying to learn the "simpler" method which nobody at our school used, while the other groups plowed through VHDL, which everyone at the the school used, and they ended up with a better result.
I'm not saying "Because its the most popular it must be the best," but user base realy is a major decision when trying to go a particular route.
Wasn't Oracle harping to provide the database infrastructure for a proposed national ID card?
Of course, if this ever gets to legislation, a non-tech Senator or Congressman will probably remember seeing the "Unbreakable" campaign somewhere and think, "Oh... their systems are unbreakable, sounds good for everyone's private information."
Can't wait for every bored teenager in the world to know about my tax returns...
Judging by your post, and your AC status, I going to hazard a guess you're a disgruntled undergrad who feels a TA screwed you over at some point. "Passing CompSci 305" is never the basis for becomming a TA, its usually more like 1) Performing at the top of the class in CompSci 305, 2) Demonstrating a real interest in the material beyond "I want a CS degree so I can make money".
Also, I know several TA's who are better teachers of material than the prof, and more understanding of undergraduate life. They generally more likely to know the students by name than the prof, they're more likely to spend time one on one with students than the prof, and they're more likely to care about their reviews than a tenured professor.
Finally, it is absolutely necessary for many courses for the grading to be done by TA's, a prof who has to 1)perform original research, 2)write grants, 3)write papers, 3) sit on 3-4 school or department committees, 4)advise graduate students, 5)plan and deliver 2-3 lectures a week,and 6) write questions for homework and tests simply does not have the time to individually grade 300 assignments.
And keep in mind that we're talking about INTRODUCTORY courses here, where individual weeding-out is important. Jr. and Sr. level courses base much more emphasis on group projects, etc.
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Given that software companies tend to provide high-end jobs and generally non-polluting production to a city, you would think that you would want MORE of this industry in a city, and would structure the tax code to encourage them to set up shop in your city. At least some of the legislators appear to be aware of this fact.
Microsoft pissed me off royally a while ago, in what I'm sure they would have called a "feature" but was probably, in reality, a way to counter Java somehow (even though this relates to JavaScript), or Netscape, or somebody. All it ended up doing for me was causing me unnecessary work.
Several years ago I was responsible for creating the website for my Dad's company. Just a small business thing, a source for information on their products, manuals, etc. After a while we started thinking that it would be great to have something that could help his customers choose which model best met their needs (a procedure my dad would spend 15 minutes on the phone to do), so I coded up what I considered a very nice little JavaScript program to do that. Worked great and without problems for about 2 years or so until the "latest and greatest" version of IE came out which "just happened" to have changed some of the JS commands around, and the program no longer worked for IE users. The day I discovered that probleam was the day I downloaded IEradicator and I haven't missed it since. And, coincidently, my dad sold his business and I didn't have to be bothered by that problem anymore.
Having been (in the last year) through Konqueror, Galleon, Netscape (4.whatever), and Mozilla on a Mandrake box, I've found that Mozilla's the only one that consistantly displays pages correctly. The other 3 I found would often screw up font sizes and leave side bars unreadable.
MS has a will to succeed which rivals any other corporate or non-coporate entity out there. True, the future might show that they don't hold the sway that they currently do, but predicting the demise of MS seems foolhardy to me. MS has always done whatever it takes (legal or illegal) to keep themselves up. I imagine that their coporate structure and culture will keep them that way for quite awhile, regardless as to the price of the devices their software runs on. I'd argue that their lack of penetration into the low-end handheld market has more to do with their inability to shrink their code than the price of the device it runs on.
There are a whole slew of different environmental problems between developed economies and non-developed and developing ones. Remember the problem with the Great Lakes 30 years ago? I belive the worst was Lake Superior, which was polluted so bad it was considered unsafe to swim in. Now its full of pleasure boaters and fishermen on the weekends, thanks to a massive enviormental clean up of the factories along its shores. This is part of the transition from a middle-industrialized to a modern industrialized economy.
Now, however, the Great Lakes are facing more subtle problems, like rising temperatures from suburban sprawl runoff, causing certain species of fish to move deeper in the lake, cutting off food supplies for other fish, etc. etc. This is mroe of a modernized economics problem, extremely difficult to find a solution, but also not as outright dangerous (at least in the short term) as the problem of old.
As the world becomes more developed (and I'm an optimist, I firmly belive that eventually Africa, South America, and parts of Asia will finally begin to advance to our current standards of 1st world coutnries), we will probably face less of these outright dangerous problems, and more of the "long-term potentially dangerous but we dont know what the effect will be and we don't even know how bad it really is sort".
The question then becomes are we going to be honest about the dangers, and what we know about them. Do we have the courage to say "We really don't know if global warming is occuring, and if it is, we really don't know what that means. Given the best of our information, here's what we can say...". Kudos to the Skeptical Environmentalist for being brave enough to face down the status quo and introduce some much-needed uncertainty and honesty.
Definately. You have to wonder whether or not Metallica and Dr. Dre realize how much of their labor goes into the pockets of the suits. Then again, you have to wonder whether they realize that the suits are the ones who create their popularity. It seems quite rare these days that a band "makes it" by slowly building a loyal following and touring ,etc. The really big groups (Britney, NSYNC,etc) are created or chosen by suits looking for the next big thing.
Ever notice how entertainers often champion the anti-corporate causes out there, or at least bemoan the politicos who support the big "traditional" corporations like oil, steal, chemicals, etc. I'm talking about Alec Baldwin, Barbara Streisand, Rob Reiner, etc.
Don't you think its funny that, in terms of basic business ethics, their industries are about the most atrocious as far as supressing individual rights?
Then again, bad practices by the music/movie industry probably never killed anyone, whereas Union Carbide has a death count worse than Ted Bundy. Then again, its easy to point to the sludge in your backyard and say "The Exxon plant next door put this here" and get a positive public reaction than "The RIAA won't let me share my music online."
And if none of the replicas work, then suddenly we realize the original flight was a fake, and there's no such thing as aviation, and then all the planes that have been flying under the power of make-believe all along fall out of the sky. Or something like that.
Poor Sherman has no reading materials, perhaps they should give him a copy of Atlas Shrugged or Eat the Rich.
Fortunately, they're only dropping the charge of posting explosives information (which is a crock, and definately a violation of his free speech rights), but hopefully they'll still send him up the river for his defacement of corporate websites. If I spray paint "Flander's sucks" on my neighbors house, I'm either going to pay a fine or go to jail. Same goes for someone's website. Of course, I wouldn't expect a "self-described" anarchist to give a damn about individual property rights.
Carver Mead (the driving force behind foveon) is one of the few true modern visionaries out there. He was not only the pioneer of AVLSI, and therefore responsible for the microchip boom in the 1970's, but also one of the first people to start seriously looking at making electronics more like biology.
The fact that they're adding a whole "stage show" where they're periodically removing and re-introducing the robots to their environment says to me there's essentially zero scientific usefulness to this project. It would be like trying to study the predator-prey dynamics of Lions and Gezelles at your local zoo.
I've encountered about a half-dozen scientists in my time who seem to be more interested in public acclaim than actually doing useful work. They appear in Discover, Omni, etc., get spots on national news during slow weeks, and millions of people go "wow! what cool stuff these scientists are doing!". Problem is their work is never used by other scientists, and doesn't help to advance the field on iota.
This quote from the article is probably the most important piece of information. The last decade has seen so massive advancements in our understanding of nonlinear dynamics and how they can be applied to engineered systems. Problems with traditionaly engineering approaches are that we often have to assume nonlinear systems (i.e. everything in the real world) are "linear about a point". While this is fine for some problems, like automobile suspension systems, it's just not sufficient for tasks like control complex airflow, predicting weather patterns, or driving robots across uneven systems.
As nonlinear analysis techniques become more and more prominent in engineering design, we'll start to see more and more of these technologies which can accomplish extremely difficult technical challenges.
Give patents for all naturally occuring DNA sequences to God. Then assume he allows free, open development on his intellectual property. If this bothers God, he can take people to court.
If only every company that tanked (no offense to the good folks at Loki, I loved your work and am sorry to see you go) kept a record of what went on during the birth, life, and death of the company. What a resource for budding entrepreneurs that would be- especially if the timeline was cross-refernced with earnings, stock price, etc.
I'm sure much of this information can be found out there via old shareholder's reports, etc, but compiling and centralizing it is a great idea.
One of the wonderful things about being part of the scientific community is seeing how stories get recycled and rehashed by major news outlets. Similar work has already been done with people:
As glad as I am to hear that a big company like Oracle is making the move to Linux, I think that without the "core" Linux community remaining vigilant, it could result in problems down the road.
On one hand, having a larger user base is definately a GOOD THING. Proving that Linux can provide the infrastructure for one of the world's top companies is a GOOD THING.
Problems arise in the mid to long term possibilities. Will Sun ultimately lose so much business that they're driven out of the software market? Despite the fact that they seem to be sunsetting, they're still a software/OS player, and the more players in the field, the better the products (my belief is that Linux has achieved so much partly because it had Sun, SGI, Be, MS to prove itself against) all around. Its not like MS can provide Linux with any great technical challenges to overcome...
And am I alone in worrying that having so many big companies like IBM, Oracle, God forbid AOL/TW using Linux may end up with them pushing development away from the needs of the average user? Sorof like getting a loan from the Mafia, you never know when or how you're going to pay up.
Bioinformatics is probably the biggest challenge facing the biological sciences in the next few years. Its becomming more and more apparent that even slight changes in very small elements of a system (i.e., a small sequence of a protein, the behavior of a single neuron within a group of 10,000) can have a drastic effect on the behavior of the entire system. As a result, to really study the problem, you have to aquire massive amounts of data. For example, in our lab we routinely collect data from 64 channels of 16-bit data (monitoring neuron firing in culture) at 1KHz, in addition, we're simultaneously taking calcium imaging video at 100fps at 256x256 (at 256 colors). This results in about 200 MB of data gathered every second. Considering we run tests for over 10 minutes, just aquiring and storing this data is a challenge, but finding useful methods to analyze it is even more difficult. Its refreshing to see texts being written on how to bridge the gap between comp. sci. and biology. I've been working in the area for about 4 years now, and its really great to see the field growing and getting more mainstream attention.
Right, the most important thing we can bring to a portable wireless device is video. That way, you won't just have to be distracted by talking on your phone while driving, you can be watching it instead of the road.
Do you ever get the feeling that many companies aren't really thinking about whether something is a good idea before they release it? Something tells me that marketing was behind this bold corporate strategy.
This is a HELL of a lot of money. In 1995, Tuvalu had only 10,000 people, meanin this averages out to $4500 a person. At a similar per-person rate, .us should go for around $1.35e12, which would just about take care of half the national debt. .cn could be bought for 10% of the world's entire GDP
for 2000.
Numbers are fun.
On another note, does anyone think they'll need to tighten their lego budget?
There was an article in Scientific American about three years ago regarding the advances in public transportation made in Curitibo, Brazil. Their basic idea was to redesign all their roads from the standpoiont of getting people around. They placed seperate bus lanes on each road (seperate physically from the other lanes), and people paid to enter the bus stop instead of the bus. This meant people quickly entered the bus at each stop, without anyone digging around for change when entering the bus, etc. And the seperate lanes meant the buses went from place to place without much hinderance from car traffic. Also, their roads were all laid out with a great deal of thought, resembling a darts target with circular and radiating routes. The system worked remarkably well, and most people used public transit to get around.
Its amazing what can be accomplished when someone actually puts real thought into the system they're developing.
In my experience, things tend to work better when you go with the standard, which I would say is VHDL.
Last year, I was in a FPGA-based hardware design class, and during the early course of our group's project, we thought that maybe we'd be better served by switching to something easier to use. Long story short, we wasted three weeks trying to learn the "simpler" method which nobody at our school used, while the other groups plowed through VHDL, which everyone at the the school used, and they ended up with a better result.
I'm not saying "Because its the most popular it must be the best," but user base realy is a major decision when trying to go a particular route.
Wasn't Oracle harping to provide the database infrastructure for a proposed national ID card?
Of course, if this ever gets to legislation, a non-tech Senator or Congressman will probably remember seeing the "Unbreakable" campaign somewhere and think, "Oh... their systems are unbreakable, sounds good for everyone's private information."
Can't wait for every bored teenager in the world to know about my tax returns...
Judging by your post, and your AC status, I going to hazard a guess you're a disgruntled undergrad who feels a TA screwed you over at some point. "Passing CompSci 305" is never the basis for becomming a TA, its usually more like 1) Performing at the top of the class in CompSci 305, 2) Demonstrating a real interest in the material beyond "I want a CS degree so I can make money".
Also, I know several TA's who are better teachers of material than the prof, and more understanding of undergraduate life. They generally more likely to know the students by name than the prof, they're more likely to spend time one on one with students than the prof, and they're more likely to care about their reviews than a tenured professor.
Finally, it is absolutely necessary for many courses for the grading to be done by TA's, a prof who has to 1)perform original research, 2)write grants, 3)write papers, 3) sit on 3-4 school or department committees, 4)advise graduate students, 5)plan and deliver 2-3 lectures a week,and 6) write questions for homework and tests simply does not have the time to individually grade 300 assignments.
And keep in mind that we're talking about INTRODUCTORY courses here, where individual weeding-out is important. Jr. and Sr. level courses base much more emphasis on group projects, etc.