The Shark Tank has certainly done the opposite to that area of San Jose. Lower crime and increased property values. It's one of the reasons why Santa Clara wanted the stadium
It's not so much that they didn't see the potential; it's that they couldn't let go of their legacy business to pursue other avenues while that legacy was so much of their culture and revenue.
DEC saw Unix coming and responded with Ultrix; they saw internet search coming and responded with AltaVista etc etc. In every case DEC saw technology and change and made great products in response.
What they didn't do was really commit to those products.
For DEC it was all about VMS. Especially on VAX and later on Alpha. Other products could exist but the core of effort and marketing always had to go that directions.
It's a story that has played out over and over in tech at Wang, IBM, and even now is playing out at Microsoft.
At this point the only reason a prefer Google search is that I have Firefox configured to remove all advertising from Google. Until it's similarly easy to strip all advertising out of Bing it's just not worth looking at.
I think these stories of pirate parties, or communists, or greens, running and being elected to various governmental office are so titillating to Americans because we find it hard to imagine the vast tolerance of divergent opinions in non-american politics. In the USA we have two center right parties with almost no divergence over core political issues who fight to endlessly promote minor political issues or social wedge issues so as to disguise their complete lock on political power.
In the US you could no more elect a pirate, a communist, or an atheist, than you could elect bear. So in the end for us these stories are dancing bear type stories. No one asks if a dancing bear dances well. We aren't interested all that much in the policies or the questions themselves; we're just kind of amazed that you guys would conceive of electing someone whose opinion diverges so far from your rulers.
Microtransactions ARE how the web is funded currently. The majority of commercial web sites use advertising to monetize their content.. By placing ads on their pages they receive a minuscule sum of money for each unique user who views a page. The cost of the advertising is made up in the price of goods. ie just as in a classic microtransaction system the user puts money into an organization that pays small amounts to the owner of pages they visit.
Imagine if instead ISPs charged slightly more and paid a tiny amount say 1000th of a cent to the owner of websites you visit.
Spain did not know they would gain gold from an undiscovered continent when they funded Columbus. In point of fact they funded this explorer for a different goal (discover a sea route to India) under a flawed assumption (the idea that the earth is much smaller than it really is)
The point being that investing in research and exploration does not always work the way you expect or bring the results you were expecting. However historically nothing has payed off better.
Personally I feel this is the wrong way to frame the discussion. I often feel that Americans live in fear that somewhere someone may be getting more than they deserve and they are especially outraged if this is somehow at their expense.
IMHO the discussion should be about what sort of society do we want to live in. To guarantee that no one ever gets more than what is their right or that they absolutely deserve inherently means that many will not get what they need similar to how the only way we could guarantee that we put every single criminal behind bars would be to accept putting some innocents behind bars.
I prefer to live in a world based on never locking up the innocent and figuring out how to make sure everyone has at least their base needs met. With that in mind we need to decide not if college is a, "right", but whether or not higher education is a necessity in our modern society. We can then decide on what is the best way to either not make it a necessity or to guarantee that everyone has access on terms that don't cause damage to our society.
Actually this is an excellent example of the cultural difference between the US and Europe. In general Americans are risk takers. The big payoffs go to those with luck, fortitude, and who take risks. If you were born hale and hearty you can take the risk of life and limb and go into the military for a small reward. You can take that reward as table stakes into any number of risky endeavors and parlay it into a fortune. There are in general no impediments in America to taking risks and in general the government tries to avoid securing you from risk. Want to take out huge loans with no collateral, live with no health insurance, work the north slope of hell for the big bucks, go ahead. As with casinos the odds are stacked in favor of the house but anyone may play and even the lowest of the low could buy a lottery ticket and be rich beyond the dreams of avarice tomorrow.
In Europe the inverse appears to be the case. Society sees government as a cooperative to guarantee everyone at least a certain base level of risk free decent life at the expense of those who would be willing to take the big risks for the big reward.
The only thing I would point out is that it can be difficult for those who have won at the tables to realize just how much luck played a role in their success and what the real proportion of winenrs and losers is.
> CmdrTaco made this site huge while he was still in school, and > less than half of my coworkers in programming had a degree from a college. > We're not exactly blue collar, and we're making a hell of a lot more than the national average.
This is something of a red herring. While it is true that during the 89s and 90s it was relatively easy to break into the tech industry without a college degree it has been getting substantially harder and I would expect it to be nearly impossible within the next decade for someone without a degree to obtain an entry level tech position. Managers simply are unwilling to take the risk.
While there will always be a few, "self made men", the age where anyone who knew how to spell, 'ls', could get a sysadmin or programming job is pretty much over.
> I can understand antipathy towards modern day politics. > What I can't understand are the great number of people who have become convinced that > governance is somebody else's problem.
I personally feel that is not a very hard one to understand. As America has shifted from rural to manufacturing to a service based economy the amount of influence individual citizens have over the conditions of their every day lives has diminished.
Take the basic family farmer back in the day. Almost every aspect of that persons life was intimately under their control. They by and large produced their own food, clothing, and goods from the resources available using their own skills.
Move up to basic industrialization. Now you have a boss and little control over most aspects of work. However you are still dealing with the people in control. One can speak to the bank manager or owner of the shop or business you are dealing with. WHile direct control has diminished there is still a good degree of access and most power is local.
Now move to the modern world. What good does it do to argue with a bank teller, clerk at a store, phone support for cable etc etc. It is nearly impossible to connect with anyone who has the power to change or do anything. Power is secreted away in a corporate boardroom, somewhere. Even in work one can complain to one's boss however that boos is more likely than not a mid level manager who has policy dictated to them from above and is tasked with implementing, not changing, developing or enhancing the policy.
Why would someone who has lived their entire life with little to no appreciable input into the way things are run be likely to feel ownership for the process. By and large governance does appear to the average modern citizen to be something outside their sphere.
True, cable and for that matter such channels as HBO were totally destroyed due to ABC, CBS, and NBC broadcasting their content free across the air.
Same thing happened with music. No one purchased records and tapes due to all that music broadcast over that free medium of radio.
What trumps everything is the basic building block of a business: customer value.
Companies that figure this out grow.
--- check it out thousands of video podcasts on your phone: www.mywaves.com ---
The problem is that people get riled up so to speak over the wrong, "injustice".
The injustice here isn't RIAA or lawsuits. The problem is that media consolidation has lead to a point where the amount of control is vested in a vanishingly small number of people.
If there were dozens of record labels they would never be able to agree on a common font let alone to all band together to sue customers.
It is unlikely that a large group could co-ordinate their interests enough to buy off a dog catcher let alone congress.
But once you condense this down to a group of a half dozen or less and put all that money, which in our society is equal to power, into their hands well then they can figure out how to do things
When you ask a question like this on Slashdot you are going to obtain two answers. The people who invested massively in their education, grade etc will tell you that grades and education and going to a good school are critical. Those who learned to program themselves and worked their way up with little or no formal CS education will tell you that education is a waste of time leave school as soon as possible and enter the workforce.
Both are right. Depending on who you are, how you learn, how you set goals and work towards them either path may be fine or one path may work and the other would fail.
What advice I would give is that you should not look at this issue from the point of view of others success and failure but rather from what your heart and mind tells you. At that point ignore all pressure and advice from others and decide for yourself what course to take.
Even if it ends up being the wron answer at least you own the decision.
When has there ever been a single OSS variant of anything?
Linux: There is no single OSS Linux OS instead dozens of distros with no two people meaning quite the same thing when they say, "Linux". Heck some won't even say it preferring instead to run, "gnu/linux."
Editors: Emacs vs Vi, and don't even get me started about ed man, "it's the standard editor."
Even the term OSS is fraught with peril. To some OSS is fighting words. They believe in Free software and will fight to their last breath for it.
Speaking as a mobile developer, www.mywaves.com I would love to see a truly open platform for phone development. So far though most of the,"Linux", based phones I have seen have been locked up pretty tight by the carriers. While I guess it is a moral victory that the locked down inaccessible one of ROM in that phone is build on the Linux kernel instead of say Motorola's latest it is a pyrrhic victory at best and has little impact on me the developer.
Strange as it sounds, "Windows Mobile", may be the most open platform out there for phone development and that is a sad commentary on the state of affairs in the mobile world if ever there was one.
If I could guarantee that an absolute monarch would always be wise, never evil...would absolute monarchy still be distasteful? Or how about slavery?
The point is you are still surrendering control against your trust of a corporations promise. For many people it doesn't matter how many guarantees you give they will be unwilling to give up ownership and control to someone else.
No, bad journalist will tell you he is impartial, even though humans can nearly never be. A good journalist will fairly and accurately represent what they saw and perceived and tell you what presuppositions they bring to the table. Rob did exactly that. I personally prefer that to a false attempt at impartiality.
That is not what is meant by the phrase, "unlocking a phone". In general what that does is allow a phone to utilize a sim card on any network. Unlocked phones still have whatever signing and certificate restrictions were built into their Java system.
Even worse, many phones sold as, "unlocked", through Amazon are unable to utilize even correctly countersigned binaries from the carriers since the phone lacks the correct carrier root certificate.
The point of camera phones isn't high quality archival photos. The point is more about casual ephemeral moments. The time you are walking down the street and notice a cool new store display or a sticker on a car. The time you are out at lunch and a friend builds a tower of quarters. Just bits of life that are fun for you and maybe a few others.
As a geek it is hard for me to get over the desire to have everything be high quality high fidelity 30 billion twiga pixel multiple tla perfection. On the other hand my phone is always in my purse and I rarely plan, "OMG you gotta see this", moments.
Slashdot Mirror
"who haven't talked to the opposite sex in five or six years.'"
Really? Is calling people it doesn't like gay really the governments new tactic?
The Shark Tank has certainly done the opposite to that area of San Jose. Lower crime and increased property values. It's one of the reasons why Santa Clara wanted the stadium
It's not so much that they didn't see the potential; it's that they couldn't let go of their legacy business to pursue other avenues while that legacy was so much of their culture and revenue.
DEC saw Unix coming and responded with Ultrix; they saw internet search coming and responded with AltaVista etc etc. In every case DEC saw technology and change and made great products in response.
What they didn't do was really commit to those products.
For DEC it was all about VMS. Especially on VAX and later on Alpha. Other products could exist but the core of effort and marketing always had to go that directions.
It's a story that has played out over and over in tech at Wang, IBM, and even now is playing out at Microsoft.
At this point the only reason a prefer Google search is that I have Firefox configured to remove all advertising from Google. Until it's similarly easy to strip all advertising out of Bing it's just not worth looking at.
I think these stories of pirate parties, or communists, or greens, running and being elected to various governmental office are so titillating to Americans because we find it hard to imagine the vast tolerance of divergent opinions in non-american politics. In the USA we have two center right parties with almost no divergence over core political issues who fight to endlessly promote minor political issues or social wedge issues so as to disguise their complete lock on political power.
In the US you could no more elect a pirate, a communist, or an atheist, than you could elect bear. So in the end for us these stories are dancing bear type stories. No one asks if a dancing bear dances well. We aren't interested all that much in the policies or the questions themselves; we're just kind of amazed that you guys would conceive of electing someone whose opinion diverges so far from your rulers.
Microtransactions ARE how the web is funded currently. The majority of commercial web sites use advertising to monetize their content.. By placing ads on their pages they receive a minuscule sum of money for each unique user who views a page. The cost of the advertising is made up in the price of goods. ie just as in a classic microtransaction system the user puts money into an organization that pays small amounts to the owner of pages they visit.
Imagine if instead ISPs charged slightly more and paid a tiny amount say 1000th of a cent to the owner of websites you visit.
Which is more important to you; that our culture expand into the internet and continue to grow or that $50 billion dollar blockbuster movies get made?
Spain did not know they would gain gold from an undiscovered continent when they funded Columbus. In point of fact they funded this explorer for a different goal (discover a sea route to India) under a flawed assumption (the idea that the earth is much smaller than it really is)
The point being that investing in research and exploration does not always work the way you expect or bring the results you were expecting. However historically nothing has payed off better.
> This is the 2nd space station
Salyut
Skylab
Mir
ISS
I can understand being provincial and not recalling that the Russians were first but how could anyone at NASA forget Skylab?
> no one says college is a right.
Personally I feel this is the wrong way to frame the discussion. I often feel that Americans live in fear that somewhere someone may be getting more than they deserve and they are especially outraged if this is somehow at their expense.
IMHO the discussion should be about what sort of society do we want to live in. To guarantee that no one ever gets more than what is their right or that they absolutely deserve inherently means that many will not get what they need similar to how the only way we could guarantee that we put every single criminal behind bars would be to accept putting some innocents behind bars.
I prefer to live in a world based on never locking up the innocent and figuring out how to make sure everyone has at least their base needs met. With that in mind we need to decide not if college is a, "right", but whether or not higher education is a necessity in our modern society. We can then decide on what is the best way to either not make it a necessity or to guarantee that everyone has access on terms that don't cause damage to our society.
Actually this is an excellent example of the cultural difference between the US and Europe. In general Americans are risk takers. The big payoffs go to those with luck, fortitude, and who take risks. If you were born hale and hearty you can take the risk of life and limb and go into the military for a small reward. You can take that reward as table stakes into any number of risky endeavors and parlay it into a fortune. There are in general no impediments in America to taking risks and in general the government tries to avoid securing you from risk. Want to take out huge loans with no collateral, live with no health insurance, work the north slope of hell for the big bucks, go ahead. As with casinos the odds are stacked in favor of the house but anyone may play and even the lowest of the low could buy a lottery ticket and be rich beyond the dreams of avarice tomorrow.
In Europe the inverse appears to be the case. Society sees government as a cooperative to guarantee everyone at least a certain base level of risk free decent life at the expense of those who would be willing to take the big risks for the big reward.
The only thing I would point out is that it can be difficult for those who have won at the tables to realize just how much luck played a role in their success and what the real proportion of winenrs and losers is.
> CmdrTaco made this site huge while he was still in school, and
> less than half of my coworkers in programming had a degree from a college.
> We're not exactly blue collar, and we're making a hell of a lot more than the national average.
This is something of a red herring. While it is true that during the 89s and 90s it was relatively easy to break into the tech industry without a college degree it has been getting substantially harder and I would expect it to be nearly impossible within the next decade for someone without a degree to obtain an entry level tech position. Managers simply are unwilling to take the risk.
While there will always be a few, "self made men", the age where anyone who knew how to spell, 'ls', could get a sysadmin or programming job is pretty much over.
> I can understand antipathy towards modern day politics.
> What I can't understand are the great number of people who have become convinced that
> governance is somebody else's problem.
I personally feel that is not a very hard one to understand. As America has shifted from rural to manufacturing to a service based economy the amount of influence individual citizens have over the conditions of their every day lives has diminished.
Take the basic family farmer back in the day. Almost every aspect of that persons life was intimately under their control. They by and large produced their own food, clothing, and goods from the resources available using their own skills.
Move up to basic industrialization. Now you have a boss and little control over most aspects of work. However you are still dealing with the people in control. One can speak to the bank manager or owner of the shop or business you are dealing with. WHile direct control has diminished there is still a good degree of access and most power is local.
Now move to the modern world. What good does it do to argue with a bank teller, clerk at a store, phone support for cable etc etc. It is nearly impossible to connect with anyone who has the power to change or do anything. Power is secreted away in a corporate boardroom, somewhere. Even in work one can complain to one's boss however that boos is more likely than not a mid level manager who has policy dictated to them from above and is tasked with implementing, not changing, developing or enhancing the policy.
Why would someone who has lived their entire life with little to no appreciable input into the way things are run be likely to feel ownership for the process. By and large governance does appear to the average modern citizen to be something outside their sphere.
True, cable and for that matter such channels as HBO were totally destroyed due to ABC, CBS, and NBC broadcasting their content free across the air.
Same thing happened with music. No one purchased records and tapes due to all that music broadcast over that free medium of radio.
What trumps everything is the basic building block of a business: customer value.
Companies that figure this out grow.
--- check it out thousands of video podcasts on your phone: www.mywaves.com ---
The problem is that people get riled up so to speak over the wrong, "injustice".
The injustice here isn't RIAA or lawsuits. The problem is that media consolidation has lead to a point where the amount of control is vested in a vanishingly small number of people.
If there were dozens of record labels they would never be able to agree on a common font let alone to all band together to sue customers.
It is unlikely that a large group could co-ordinate their interests enough to buy off a dog catcher let alone congress.
But once you condense this down to a group of a half dozen or less and put all that money, which in our society is equal to power, into their hands well then they can figure out how to do things
When you ask a question like this on Slashdot you are going to obtain two answers. The people who invested massively in their education, grade etc will tell you that grades and education and going to a good school are critical. Those who learned to program themselves and worked their way up with little or no formal CS education will tell you that education is a waste of time leave school as soon as possible and enter the workforce.
Both are right. Depending on who you are, how you learn, how you set goals and work towards them either path may be fine or one path may work and the other would fail.
What advice I would give is that you should not look at this issue from the point of view of others success and failure but rather from what your heart and mind tells you. At that point ignore all pressure and advice from others and decide for yourself what course to take.
Even if it ends up being the wron answer at least you own the decision.
> It's the most complex machine ever made.
I keep reading this in different places and wonder what precisely the metric is.
I can certainly believe it was the most complex manned space craft built in the 70s. Beyond that though I wonder.
are you sure you are an American? I thought the countries whole ethos was self destruction.
When has there ever been a single OSS variant of anything?
,"Linux", based phones I have seen have been locked up pretty tight by the carriers. While I guess it is a moral victory that the locked down inaccessible one of ROM in that phone is build on the Linux kernel instead of say Motorola's latest it is a pyrrhic victory at best and has little impact on me the developer.
Linux: There is no single OSS Linux OS instead dozens of distros with no two people meaning quite the same thing when they say, "Linux". Heck some won't even say it preferring instead to run, "gnu/linux."
Editors: Emacs vs Vi, and don't even get me started about ed man, "it's the standard editor."
Even the term OSS is fraught with peril. To some OSS is fighting words. They believe in Free software and will fight to their last breath for it.
Speaking as a mobile developer, www.mywaves.com I would love to see a truly open platform for phone development. So far though most of the
Strange as it sounds, "Windows Mobile", may be the most open platform out there for phone development and that is a sad commentary on the state of affairs in the mobile world if ever there was one.
I for one welcome our open source neocortical robot overlords...
If I could guarantee that an absolute monarch would always be wise, never evil...would absolute monarchy still be distasteful? Or how about slavery?
The point is you are still surrendering control against your trust of a corporations promise. For many people it doesn't matter how many guarantees you give they will be unwilling to give up ownership and control to someone else.
No, bad journalist will tell you he is impartial, even though humans can nearly never be. A good journalist will fairly and accurately represent what they saw and perceived and tell you what presuppositions they bring to the table. Rob did exactly that. I personally prefer that to a false attempt at impartiality.
That is not what is meant by the phrase, "unlocking a phone". In general what that does is allow a phone to utilize a sim card on any network. Unlocked phones still have whatever signing and certificate restrictions were built into their Java system.
Even worse, many phones sold as, "unlocked", through Amazon are unable to utilize even correctly countersigned binaries from the carriers since the phone lacks the correct carrier root certificate.
www.mywaves.com
The point of camera phones isn't high quality archival photos. The point is more about casual ephemeral moments. The time you are walking down the street and notice a cool new store display or a sticker on a car. The time you are out at lunch and a friend builds a tower of quarters. Just bits of life that are fun for you and maybe a few others.
As a geek it is hard for me to get over the desire to have everything be high quality high fidelity 30 billion twiga pixel multiple tla perfection. On the other hand my phone is always in my purse and I rarely plan, "OMG you gotta see this", moments.