That may sound like an odd thing to consider, but research has shown differences in brain physiology between homosexual and heterosexual men - specifically, in the interstitial nuclei of the anterior hypothalamus.
There are plenty of other factors around sex, sex preference, and sex-organ related endocrinology that affect physiology and function as well. Polycystic ovarian syndrome comes to mind (affects ~8-10% of women in the US), as do hyper- and hypogonadism, hermaphroditism, etc. Admittedly, those are oddball cases, but then oddball cases sometimes isolate specific mechanisms for better study. Anyone know anything about science being done around these factors?
That doesn't even scratch the surface, the more I think of it... Early exposure to music can affect neurophysiology of the aural centers, there are various factors that affect the proportion of glial cells (Einstein had an abnormal excess of them; babies of alcoholic mothers tend to develop fewer), et cetera ad nauseum.
Anyway, rambling aside, it sounds like there's still a lot to learn here; A gross study of gender-based brain differences is just scratching the surface, and I'd be skeptical of strictly gender-based treatment regimens that took nothing else into account.
If you make an Open Source, 3rd-party port of.NET, they'll just change the underlying protocols in the next version to break it. They do that routinely with their own data formats (MS Word), as well as with open and existing formats and protocols (non-standard Latin-1 encoding that looks shitty in other browsers, broken Kerberos implementation).
If you really want to see a widely-adopted, cross-platform architecture of this sort, fix CORBA, roll your own, or do anything but tilt at this windmill - they'll only move the target on you.
Well, unless this somehow fixes the problem where the chip slows down to half-speed when you run your computer for any useful length of time, my next box will contain an Athlon.
Um... Perhaps you missed my point. No, I'm not suggesting that MS should give money to the Dems. I am suggesting that they may (or to be fair, may not) be expecting a quid pro quo for their largesse.
IIRC, Judge Jackson deliberately made the findings of fact as damning as possible, since they get turned over so infrequently. As they stand, they do cry out for a remedy, and even a judge less partial than Jackson would probably impose something on the company. Unless, of course, he was looking to be appointed to a higher Federal bench and didn't want to tick off a pro-business administration that didn't want to pursue this thing.
Interesting to note how much more soft money Microsoft's been giving to the Republican party lately - they used to be much more even-handed about doling cash out to the parties.
Well, I think we all (or most of us) hoped Napster would kill the major labels (preferably without killing the artists in the process), but I think we all knew that it wouldn't happen by choking off the labels' revenue - in fact, I'm sure we've all seen stories about the studies that say that CD sales may have increased as a result of Napster usage.
But maybe this is how it will happen: As production means get cheaper and cheaper (the price of a blank CD is what now?) and the barriers to product entry have more to do with product awareness and promotion (e.g., huge advertising budgets and back-door payola like the major labels do), Napster can now provide a viable, viral marketing alternative to the media-saturation tactics of the majors. Smaller, lower-overhead operations may soon have a significant advantage over the corporate behemoths.
The government market is one of the largest and most coveted markets in the software business. And besides actual dollars spent, you can count on an insane degree of inertia once something is adopted across a department/agency/other functional grouping. Admittedly, 25000 boxen is nowhere near the totality of government usage, but if it represents any real kind of momentum toward use of open software by The Man, a number of businesses may have to rework their revenue estimates.
First Amendment right to contact me? What pernicious bullshit! IIRC, laws regulating unsolicited advertising to fax machines have withstood First Amendment challenges on the basis that the First Amendment does not give a fax-spammer the right to tie up your phone line and use resources you pay for, like paper and toner.
Similar concerns apply here: Bandwidth, disk space, and my time are all limited resources, and they all cost money. Others don't have the right to co-opt my resources (or those of my ISP or mail host) for their own purposes without my permission.
Interestingly, OpenSecrets.org lists Wyden as having gotten ~$100,000 from the "computer equipment and services industry". Couldn't find any particular evidence beyond that for quid pro quo, though.
I'm making a guess here, but perhaps the business jet market is a wee bit too conservative for their own good.
Well, given that on any normal flight you're transporting between 10 and 400 human lives, yeah, I can see where they'd be conservative. Between that and related regulatory issues, this is one field where conservatism pays more than technofetishist neophilism. I doubt that it's just the marketers and salesmen who are afraid of change - I'm willing to bet that the engineers are of a conservative bent as well.
And truthfully, I don't mind that a bit - I like having some assurance that I'll leave an airplane alive. OTOH, your point about the technology being proven is well-taken. The fact that the military uses carbon fiber plane parts regularly - the military being a pretty conservative technology consumer who puts a high value on durability and zero failure - ought to provide commerical aircraft manufacturers with some encouragement.
Is anything being done to make GnuCash competitive with Quicken and other products? The tour at the web site depicts a competitive feature set, but there's more to it than auto-incrementing check numbers: I, for one, would rather use the GPL'ed alternative, but most consumers will look for convenience-related features - for example, integration with their favorite online bill-paying service.
Though my question is about GnuCash specifically, I guess it does address the larger issue about how Open Source projects compete for market share and mind share with the products of well-capitalized corporations that can form strategic partnerships that (despite the shortcomings of Closed Source software generally) offer real value to consumers. Any thoughts?
Thanks for taking the time to respond,
- Brad Heintz --
Wow. When even a breed like lawyers oppose something guaranteed to generate litigation, you know it has to be bad in ways you haven't thought of before.
Uh... yeah. You're talking about the difference between fusion and fission, two entirely different nuclear reactions.
The former is how stars do it, putting small nuclei together to form larger ones. The latter is how nuclear power reactors do it, by breaking large nuclei into smaller ones.
The problem with many such services - and it is shared by similarly-structured job search services - is that the useless middlemen the system is trying to bypass are constantly trying to hijack it. So many of the ads are actually spam - they're false listings, or (now and then) real listings provided by a realtor through whom you must go to view the property. Basically, they don't care how much they have to lie in order to keep you from performing an unhindered private transaction with a property owner.
On the upside, there are a fair number of genuine listings - you just have to be willing to wade through the spam, and not give into the temptation to respond to the realtors who are trying to deceive you into paying their fees.
Do you think Gartner Group caved in ethically when Microsoft paid them for this study? That is, do you believe it to be a purchased fabrication? Or might it be an honest mistake, a difference in data analysis, or something less sinister?
This article doesn't do shit to support the idea that alternative media are dead. It makes half a case (and a decent half) that it's hard to make money at it.
It also ignores not-for-profit personal pages and blogs, user-moderated news sites like/. and K5, and other organically-grown phenomena have.
And perhaps that's the key: Suck, Feed, etc. set out to make a profit. Maybe that's the wrong way: Maybe, like hotornot.com, you have to come up with a good idea over beers, and it has to take off on its own before you move to a profit model.
Anyway, that's my US$2e-2 on how to kill big media - it's not going to be Wired or Suck, but hotornot.com that does it.
"What is the value of an MBA to a techie?" MBA's are a huge labor-saver! I like to have them fetch me coffee, pick up my dry-cleaning, that sort of thing. I had one paint my house last weekend. My wife uses one as a valet and butler. When I find out that one has a cute girlfriend or daughter, I will bellow, "BATHE HER AND BRING HER TO ME!", and watch their knees shake...
OK, I'm kidding. More seriously, it's a piece of paper. The piece of paper is supposed to be a token that authenticates you as an individual possessing certain knowledge, but I think we all understand how specious that proposed authentication is.
So I guess my answer is that if you plan to work someplace where they care more about what pieces of paper you possess than your skills (or are too lazy to evaluate your skills and therefore rely on your magic pieces of paper), then go for it. Otherwise, I don't see what there is that you can't learn from buying and reading a bunch of relevant books and actually working at a business and paying attention to what goes on.
This is a problem that the Chinese gov't has realized in the past, and the development of the Pin-Yin phonetic romanization system was originally started with an eye toward phasing out the (admittedly more cumbersome, but significantly more beautiful) ideograms. (Of course, they had no idea about the Unicode issue back then, but I'm speaking of the larger issues that having a huge, ideogrammatic written language, of which the Unicode problem is just a new manifestation.)
I don't know where these plans for conversion to a phonetic written language stand now, though I'm sure it wouldn't be hard to find out.
Slashdot Mirror
That may sound like an odd thing to consider, but research has shown differences in brain physiology between homosexual and heterosexual men - specifically, in the interstitial nuclei of the anterior hypothalamus.
There are plenty of other factors around sex, sex preference, and sex-organ related endocrinology that affect physiology and function as well. Polycystic ovarian syndrome comes to mind (affects ~8-10% of women in the US), as do hyper- and hypogonadism, hermaphroditism, etc. Admittedly, those are oddball cases, but then oddball cases sometimes isolate specific mechanisms for better study. Anyone know anything about science being done around these factors?
That doesn't even scratch the surface, the more I think of it... Early exposure to music can affect neurophysiology of the aural centers, there are various factors that affect the proportion of glial cells (Einstein had an abnormal excess of them; babies of alcoholic mothers tend to develop fewer), et cetera ad nauseum.
Anyway, rambling aside, it sounds like there's still a lot to learn here; A gross study of gender-based brain differences is just scratching the surface, and I'd be skeptical of strictly gender-based treatment regimens that took nothing else into account.
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If you really want to see a widely-adopted, cross-platform architecture of this sort, fix CORBA, roll your own, or do anything but tilt at this windmill - they'll only move the target on you.
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Is that clearer to you now?
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Anyway, all numbers aside, cool article.
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Interesting to note how much more soft money Microsoft's been giving to the Republican party lately - they used to be much more even-handed about doling cash out to the parties.
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Must... preview... posts... Argh!
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If the objects were 1/80 of the mass of the Earth - that's pretty much asteroid-sized - I doubt they could have been detected as microlensing events.
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But maybe this is how it will happen: As production means get cheaper and cheaper (the price of a blank CD is what now?) and the barriers to product entry have more to do with product awareness and promotion (e.g., huge advertising budgets and back-door payola like the major labels do), Napster can now provide a viable, viral marketing alternative to the media-saturation tactics of the majors. Smaller, lower-overhead operations may soon have a significant advantage over the corporate behemoths.
Samizdat killed the radio star, babe.
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Similar concerns apply here: Bandwidth, disk space, and my time are all limited resources, and they all cost money. Others don't have the right to co-opt my resources (or those of my ISP or mail host) for their own purposes without my permission.
Interestingly, OpenSecrets.org lists Wyden as having gotten ~$100,000 from the "computer equipment and services industry". Couldn't find any particular evidence beyond that for quid pro quo, though.
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Well, given that on any normal flight you're transporting between 10 and 400 human lives, yeah, I can see where they'd be conservative. Between that and related regulatory issues, this is one field where conservatism pays more than technofetishist neophilism. I doubt that it's just the marketers and salesmen who are afraid of change - I'm willing to bet that the engineers are of a conservative bent as well.
And truthfully, I don't mind that a bit - I like having some assurance that I'll leave an airplane alive. OTOH, your point about the technology being proven is well-taken. The fact that the military uses carbon fiber plane parts regularly - the military being a pretty conservative technology consumer who puts a high value on durability and zero failure - ought to provide commerical aircraft manufacturers with some encouragement.
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Though my question is about GnuCash specifically, I guess it does address the larger issue about how Open Source projects compete for market share and mind share with the products of well-capitalized corporations that can form strategic partnerships that (despite the shortcomings of Closed Source software generally) offer real value to consumers. Any thoughts?
Thanks for taking the time to respond,
- Brad Heintz
--
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The former is how stars do it, putting small nuclei together to form larger ones. The latter is how nuclear power reactors do it, by breaking large nuclei into smaller ones.
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On the upside, there are a fair number of genuine listings - you just have to be willing to wade through the spam, and not give into the temptation to respond to the realtors who are trying to deceive you into paying their fees.
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Thanks for your time,
- Brad Heintz
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It also ignores not-for-profit personal pages and blogs, user-moderated news sites like /. and K5, and other organically-grown phenomena have.
And perhaps that's the key: Suck, Feed, etc. set out to make a profit. Maybe that's the wrong way: Maybe, like hotornot.com, you have to come up with a good idea over beers, and it has to take off on its own before you move to a profit model.
Anyway, that's my US$2e-2 on how to kill big media - it's not going to be Wired or Suck, but hotornot.com that does it.
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Nah...
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OK, I'm kidding. More seriously, it's a piece of paper. The piece of paper is supposed to be a token that authenticates you as an individual possessing certain knowledge, but I think we all understand how specious that proposed authentication is.
So I guess my answer is that if you plan to work someplace where they care more about what pieces of paper you possess than your skills (or are too lazy to evaluate your skills and therefore rely on your magic pieces of paper), then go for it. Otherwise, I don't see what there is that you can't learn from buying and reading a bunch of relevant books and actually working at a business and paying attention to what goes on.
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Maybe they mixed up Linus with Guido?
More likely, the writer's kid brother (who the writer consults on all matters geekish) mixed them up.
Anyway, that's the tech press for you.
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I don't know where these plans for conversion to a phonetic written language stand now, though I'm sure it wouldn't be hard to find out.
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