Not because of what it is, but because of what it was made out to be.
How long do you think it takes to change the world? It's not like overnight there's a billion of the things on the streets. Takes time to rebuild cities.
I'm serious. Take one of his other inventions, the iBot. Or the portable dialysis machine. Don't you think that both were clunkier and more expensive than existing solutions? Both could be said to change the world for the people who need them. But not overnight. Not until they become so popular that they become the *only* thing, instead of just the next big thing. Once a person in a wheelchair has navigated a street curb or flight of stairs, or looked a standing person in the eye, do you think they could ever go back? I want everyone who compares Segway to a scooter or a bicycle to use a Segway for a month or so and then your opinion will matter.
Look for Segways to gain popularity overseas first, where population (and hence, pollution and traffic) are bigger problems. In a few years people will be whining that we're behind the times on the whole Segway thing.
Had we only known Steve Jobs' initial reaction, I think the let down may have been softer and the backlash much easier.
Actually now that Codename: Ginger is out, it paints a much different picture. The story is told of how Jobs wouldn't get off and let other people ride, and when Dean made him, he sat impatiently by before grabbing it away and telling the person "Ok, get off now" so he could ride it again.
Jobs' big contribution was to say "You'll never own this market, Asia will kill you. Put it in the public domain and slap a $100 royalty on every one built." But Dean wasn't having that.
There are also some excellent stories about Jobs basically trying to buy the whole thing. Dean was trying to raise $50million in capital and Jobs basically showed up late, after most of it had been raised, and practically offered the whole figure by himself. Said that unless he was the main investor he didn't want to play at all.
I'm not finished with the book yet so I'm not sure how much he finally bought in for.:)
Easy. Source distribution should be optional. If I recommend a free piece of software to somebody in the windows world I want it to come in one downloadable file, with an installer with lots of dialogue boxes.
We had a group news server, but management decided that if important things were going to be posted on it that an email should go out saying that there were new news postings. True story.
Then we actually ran a MUD for a little while on the theory that it could always be running and somebody would always be around to talk to. But the old timers kept killing the interns.
I tried setting up a Jabber server but this was right at the time when AOL was deliberately blocking the plugin so nobody wanted to use it.
The problem we had with the standard IMs was that nobody wanted to give up their own client, so you had half Yahoo and half AIM (screw MSN). But the other problem was the impossibility of getting an accurate buddy list, since everybody got to pic their own name.
I have to say that I've been tolerant of their poor coverage, primarily because the rest of plan is so simple. I've been with them for ages (Omnipoint->Voicestream->TMobile) and never wanted to give up my phone number. My wife had Verizon, but when her contract was up we put her on TMobile too in order to get the family plan. But scores like this, coupled with the new legislation to let us take our phone numbers elsewhere, will probably have me switching in the near future.
These predictions sound similar to Ray Kurzweil's "Age of Spiritual Machines." Most of these "...in 50 years" predictions have to take a stand on Moore's Law. Will it continue indefinitely? Will it flatten out? Or will it grow expotentially? Kurzweil took the latter position, that Moore's law has been in place since long before Moore said it, and it's actually getting faster.
I was never big into the coffee thing but I used to put away up to 5 20oz bottles of Diet Pepsi in a workday. I would tell people, "I'm not addicted to the caffeine, I'm addicted to the phenylalanine."
Then it dawned on me that when the rest of the crew went to get their *Free* afternoon coffee or water, I was paying $1.25/bottle for mine.
I wish I could remember the company, but during the colorful months of the dotcom boom there was a memo posted on f*ckedcompany.com, presumably from one of the big chiefs of this unknown company, that said "The other day we had a very important client in the office for the tour. Upstairs near the back I detected a very noticeable smell. Luckily, the customer did not. Guys! It was 10am!" As if to say that the most important things were that the customer did not smell the marijuana, and that perhaps blazing up at 10am was not cool, NOT the fact that they were lighting up in the first place.
Fair enough. I was actually searching for something more along the lines of "arial font history", which does give me lots of "history" pages that have arial in them. Just searching Arial by itself only brings back pages that are relevant to arial. True.
Just last night I was looking for information on whether the Arial font is trademarked by Microsoft (its not). Just try putting a font name into google. I hit on every page that had a font name="Arial" tag in it!
Somewhere kicking around I've got the Girlfriend Rules for 8-Ball, but they all still apply. Girlfriends are allowed as many "do overs" as required to get a move right. And when the girlfriend makes a good move, she is allowed to celebrate, sing, dance, taunt, and basically do whatever she wants - but when boyfriend makes a good move he is not allowed to make so much as eye contact.:)
I've found that the one thing that makes new players get all glassy eyed is if they don't immediately grasp the goal of the game. They'll understand the rules better in the context of the goal.
The two best examples I know are Go and Chess (I just had this conversation recently after trying to teach my wife Go). Take Chess first. Beginners are taught that the goal of the game is Checkmate. This immediately causes most of them to always go after "Check" thinking that it is "almost there." And if you ever suggest to them a draw, or that they surrender, they think you're nuts. The concept of the game being over before somebody is in checkmate is lost on them. This was clearly shown during that experiment when Kasparov played the world over the net. The expert advisors recommended a draw at a particular move, but the masses said oh hell no, we want to win.
Go has the problem that, for beginners, the ending is very difficult to understand. You are probably NOT going to play until the board is full. THe game ends by mutual agreement. But a beginner doesnt really understand what goes into that agreement. So they insist on playing on.
When I was in frickin high school, call it about 1983, our physics teacher and resident hacker Steve Kremer told me, "There's no such thing as games, only simulations." Man shoulda written a book.
High school, circa 198x. I'm "lab monitor", and I'm out one day. I come back and a teacher very nicely explains to me that one of the keyboards fell off the counter, and that they put it all back together, only they lost the "b" key.
As if this was ok?! I sat down at the machine, pulled up another keyboard, and began touching all the keys to make sure they had been put back properly. Space bar wouldn't go down. Sure enough, B key was stuck under the spacebar.
We used Mirror Image where I'm at. For awhile they were competing with Akamai for our business. During one tech evaluation the engineer started using Linux *against* Akamai, and calling it shareware. I started yelling at her, screaming that she was wasting her time with that line of reasoning, that everybody in the room knew it was ridiculous, and she was losing points with me fast.
The account manager stepped in quickly.:)
Ah, the good old days. We did pick Mirror Image, and were quite happy with them. One important trick was to write a master switch into our software that could turn URL rewriting on/off at will. So some mornings if there was trouble with an MI location we could just flip the switch and have no troubles.
You know, I actually entered one of those once. I was so disappointed to watch everybody whip out their cheat books before the contest for some last minute studying. Stupid me had entered it without ever reading one of those books. Needless to say I didn't win.
I'll always remember the "stage mother" of the kid next to me at the table. When the judge explained that you would hand your cube to the player to your right to scramble, the mother was all "He's gonna get that back, right? He's got it just the way he needs it."
For me, there was something about seeing the code listings in a magazine (Rainbow Magazine for the TRS-80 Color Computer). Needing to type in every line, check for errors and so on, made it far more personal than I could have ever gotten by simply loading it from a disk. You type a line like "maxshots=3", run the game, and it dawns on you that you can only have 3 bullets in the air at once. So you change it to maxshots=10 to see what happens, and presto, 10 bullets! But if you'd just loaded it from disk, you don't really hae any idea what's in there, and it looks so imposing you don't really know where to start.
obviously this isn't practical for all languages and programs these days. But it doesnt mean it has to be abandoned completely. I'm just saying that given the choice between something that requires them to type some code, and something that just requires dragging and dropping and bumping up widget coutners in a dialog box, I'll take the former any day.
Memory Lane: "More BASIC Computer Games" by David Ahl. Wonderful stuff. Eliza, Wumpus, all the classics.
Also, consider one of the multitude of "program this tank in language X" games out there. I learned C via C-Robots (Tom Poindexter). Great stuff, and the same principle applies -- you're given the scope with which to look at problem solving, rather than just syntax.
Of course, that's only fun for multiplayer so maybe that's not what you want.
We used Documentum for years, long before they got into the web publishing business. Our first iteration literally had a production content server and we used a proprietary API to query it dynamically (yikes). It got much better with the introduction of their WebCache product, which was basically a glorified XML-Export tool.
The product is not, and I dont think ever will be, a purely web content solution. It's intended to enterprise document management. The tools to do that are outstanding. Much better than, say, the version of Interwoven that we looked at which was specifically web publishing but little more than a bunch of Perl scripts.
If you're a massive enterprise that needs both internal document and web content management, Documentum is probably a good choice. But if you want to deal strictly with web assets, there are probably smaller-scoped choices that are better.
Irony - we bought Documentum for web content management. Years later we needed internal doc management so we leveraged Documentum - by creating another installation?! Naturally the day came to put those internal documents onto the intranet, and we hit the roadblock of figuring out whether to web-enable them where they were or move them to the web installation (which would change their whole security, etc..) Pain in the neck.
I was the lead geek for our web platform for 5 years before the company was bought (we used Documentum, a very expensive commercial product, which exports to XML). The new buyers subjected us to an interminable number of "rebranding" meetings where we figured out what we legally had to change, by when, with respect to the web sites. I thought this exchange was particularly priceless:
Buyer: All the old logos will need to be identified and changed.
Guy from our company (on a competing team): We'll have to examine every page on every site to make sure we get them all. I estimate 3 weeks.
Guy from my team: Or we could go to the Compliance cabinet where those things are kept, find the Logo.gif file, and change it there. I estimate 3 minutes.
Guy #1: What if not all of the logos came from that cabinet?
Guy #2: So your people haven't been following the branding guidelines? The ones that are in place for exactly situations like this?
I just learned that in September, the Dalai Lama is coming to MIT to participate in a Life Sciences seminar that appears to be on exactly this topic. He's then speaking at the Fleet Center. I've already got my tickets.
Nonono, write book, *then* post to slashdot, thus satisfying the requirement of having a link to clickthru. For kicks and giggles be sure to send the link back through your own Amazon affiliate so you really squeeze the christ out of every penny.
To me, this is telling. Replace the word "robot" with "human" and you've essentially described the training process for infants and young children.
Ummm....wellll.....apples and oranges. he's not talking about training a robot to walk through a door. he's talking about a supposedly deterministic machine whose only goal in life is to walk through the door. If it fails to do so, then it fails in its mission. It never learns. The point Minsky was trying to make was that whether it succeeds or fails you've really learned nothing about your original premise because it could have failed for a million physical factors (everything from slippery floors to bad soldering) that you can't anticipate.
Lots of people are telling me this (make the job search a fulltime job). But what does that mean, exactly? Get up and leave the house at 8, bring a lunch, dont come back til 5? What are you finding to occupy your 40 hours? I check the web boards daily, send out my applications, keep up on the emails and "checking in" with contacts. When there's an event I try to network. But what else?
Paraphrased, but the spirit is there: "And when a robot actually does succeed and walk down the hall and through the door, or whatever it's supposed to do, you've learned absolutely nothing because it may not do it again the next time. This is why mechanical engineers love their videos so much. With video they can say 'See, it really worked once!'"
Slashdot Mirror
How long do you think it takes to change the world? It's not like overnight there's a billion of the things on the streets. Takes time to rebuild cities.
I'm serious. Take one of his other inventions, the iBot. Or the portable dialysis machine. Don't you think that both were clunkier and more expensive than existing solutions? Both could be said to change the world for the people who need them. But not overnight. Not until they become so popular that they become the *only* thing, instead of just the next big thing. Once a person in a wheelchair has navigated a street curb or flight of stairs, or looked a standing person in the eye, do you think they could ever go back? I want everyone who compares Segway to a scooter or a bicycle to use a Segway for a month or so and then your opinion will matter.
Look for Segways to gain popularity overseas first, where population (and hence, pollution and traffic) are bigger problems. In a few years people will be whining that we're behind the times on the whole Segway thing.
Had we only known Steve Jobs' initial reaction, I think the let down may have been softer and the backlash much easier.
Actually now that Codename: Ginger is out, it paints a much different picture. The story is told of how Jobs wouldn't get off and let other people ride, and when Dean made him, he sat impatiently by before grabbing it away and telling the person "Ok, get off now" so he could ride it again.
Jobs' big contribution was to say "You'll never own this market, Asia will kill you. Put it in the public domain and slap a $100 royalty on every one built." But Dean wasn't having that.
There are also some excellent stories about Jobs basically trying to buy the whole thing. Dean was trying to raise $50million in capital and Jobs basically showed up late, after most of it had been raised, and practically offered the whole figure by himself. Said that unless he was the main investor he didn't want to play at all.
I'm not finished with the book yet so I'm not sure how much he finally bought in for. :)
Easy. Source distribution should be optional. If I recommend a free piece of software to somebody in the windows world I want it to come in one downloadable file, with an installer with lots of dialogue boxes.
Then we actually ran a MUD for a little while on the theory that it could always be running and somebody would always be around to talk to. But the old timers kept killing the interns.
I tried setting up a Jabber server but this was right at the time when AOL was deliberately blocking the plugin so nobody wanted to use it.
The problem we had with the standard IMs was that nobody wanted to give up their own client, so you had half Yahoo and half AIM (screw MSN). But the other problem was the impossibility of getting an accurate buddy list, since everybody got to pic their own name.
I have to say that I've been tolerant of their poor coverage, primarily because the rest of plan is so simple. I've been with them for ages (Omnipoint->Voicestream->TMobile) and never wanted to give up my phone number. My wife had Verizon, but when her contract was up we put her on TMobile too in order to get the family plan. But scores like this, coupled with the new legislation to let us take our phone numbers elsewhere, will probably have me switching in the near future.
Yet again, this is hardly a new issue. Weren't ethical / moral decision points strewn throughout the entire Ultima series?
These predictions sound similar to Ray Kurzweil's "Age of Spiritual Machines." Most of these "...in 50 years" predictions have to take a stand on Moore's Law. Will it continue indefinitely? Will it flatten out? Or will it grow expotentially? Kurzweil took the latter position, that Moore's law has been in place since long before Moore said it, and it's actually getting faster.
Then it dawned on me that when the rest of the crew went to get their *Free* afternoon coffee or water, I was paying $1.25/bottle for mine.
I wish I could remember the company, but during the colorful months of the dotcom boom there was a memo posted on f*ckedcompany.com, presumably from one of the big chiefs of this unknown company, that said "The other day we had a very important client in the office for the tour. Upstairs near the back I detected a very noticeable smell. Luckily, the customer did not. Guys! It was 10am!" As if to say that the most important things were that the customer did not smell the marijuana, and that perhaps blazing up at 10am was not cool, NOT the fact that they were lighting up in the first place.
Fair enough. I was actually searching for something more along the lines of "arial font history", which does give me lots of "history" pages that have arial in them. Just searching Arial by itself only brings back pages that are relevant to arial. True.
Just last night I was looking for information on whether the Arial font is trademarked by Microsoft (its not). Just try putting a font name into google. I hit on every page that had a font name="Arial" tag in it!
Somewhere kicking around I've got the Girlfriend Rules for 8-Ball, but they all still apply. Girlfriends are allowed as many "do overs" as required to get a move right. And when the girlfriend makes a good move, she is allowed to celebrate, sing, dance, taunt, and basically do whatever she wants - but when boyfriend makes a good move he is not allowed to make so much as eye contact. :)
The two best examples I know are Go and Chess (I just had this conversation recently after trying to teach my wife Go). Take Chess first. Beginners are taught that the goal of the game is Checkmate. This immediately causes most of them to always go after "Check" thinking that it is "almost there." And if you ever suggest to them a draw, or that they surrender, they think you're nuts. The concept of the game being over before somebody is in checkmate is lost on them. This was clearly shown during that experiment when Kasparov played the world over the net. The expert advisors recommended a draw at a particular move, but the masses said oh hell no, we want to win.
Go has the problem that, for beginners, the ending is very difficult to understand. You are probably NOT going to play until the board is full. THe game ends by mutual agreement. But a beginner doesnt really understand what goes into that agreement. So they insist on playing on.
When I was in frickin high school, call it about 1983, our physics teacher and resident hacker Steve Kremer told me, "There's no such thing as games, only simulations." Man shoulda written a book.
High school, circa 198x. I'm "lab monitor", and I'm out one day. I come back and a teacher very nicely explains to me that one of the keyboards fell off the counter, and that they put it all back together, only they lost the "b" key. As if this was ok?! I sat down at the machine, pulled up another keyboard, and began touching all the keys to make sure they had been put back properly. Space bar wouldn't go down. Sure enough, B key was stuck under the spacebar.
The account manager stepped in quickly. :)
Ah, the good old days. We did pick Mirror Image, and were quite happy with them. One important trick was to write a master switch into our software that could turn URL rewriting on/off at will. So some mornings if there was trouble with an MI location we could just flip the switch and have no troubles.
I'll always remember the "stage mother" of the kid next to me at the table. When the judge explained that you would hand your cube to the player to your right to scramble, the mother was all "He's gonna get that back, right? He's got it just the way he needs it."
obviously this isn't practical for all languages and programs these days. But it doesnt mean it has to be abandoned completely. I'm just saying that given the choice between something that requires them to type some code, and something that just requires dragging and dropping and bumping up widget coutners in a dialog box, I'll take the former any day.
Memory Lane: "More BASIC Computer Games" by David Ahl. Wonderful stuff. Eliza, Wumpus, all the classics.
Also, consider one of the multitude of "program this tank in language X" games out there. I learned C via C-Robots (Tom Poindexter). Great stuff, and the same principle applies -- you're given the scope with which to look at problem solving, rather than just syntax. Of course, that's only fun for multiplayer so maybe that's not what you want.
The product is not, and I dont think ever will be, a purely web content solution. It's intended to enterprise document management. The tools to do that are outstanding. Much better than, say, the version of Interwoven that we looked at which was specifically web publishing but little more than a bunch of Perl scripts.
If you're a massive enterprise that needs both internal document and web content management, Documentum is probably a good choice. But if you want to deal strictly with web assets, there are probably smaller-scoped choices that are better.
Irony - we bought Documentum for web content management. Years later we needed internal doc management so we leveraged Documentum - by creating another installation?! Naturally the day came to put those internal documents onto the intranet, and we hit the roadblock of figuring out whether to web-enable them where they were or move them to the web installation (which would change their whole security, etc..) Pain in the neck.
Buyer: All the old logos will need to be identified and changed.
Guy from our company (on a competing team): We'll have to examine every page on every site to make sure we get them all. I estimate 3 weeks.
Guy from my team: Or we could go to the Compliance cabinet where those things are kept, find the Logo.gif file, and change it there. I estimate 3 minutes.
Guy #1: What if not all of the logos came from that cabinet?
Guy #2: So your people haven't been following the branding guidelines? The ones that are in place for exactly situations like this?
Guy #1: No, we've been following them.
Guy #2: Ok then. Next.
I just learned that in September, the Dalai Lama is coming to MIT to participate in a Life Sciences seminar that appears to be on exactly this topic. He's then speaking at the Fleet Center. I've already got my tickets.
They hiring? I can't find any Career/Jobs section on their web site.
Nonono, write book, *then* post to slashdot, thus satisfying the requirement of having a link to clickthru. For kicks and giggles be sure to send the link back through your own Amazon affiliate so you really squeeze the christ out of every penny.
Ummm....wellll.....apples and oranges. he's not talking about training a robot to walk through a door. he's talking about a supposedly deterministic machine whose only goal in life is to walk through the door. If it fails to do so, then it fails in its mission. It never learns. The point Minsky was trying to make was that whether it succeeds or fails you've really learned nothing about your original premise because it could have failed for a million physical factors (everything from slippery floors to bad soldering) that you can't anticipate.
Lots of people are telling me this (make the job search a fulltime job). But what does that mean, exactly? Get up and leave the house at 8, bring a lunch, dont come back til 5? What are you finding to occupy your 40 hours? I check the web boards daily, send out my applications, keep up on the emails and "checking in" with contacts. When there's an event I try to network. But what else?
Paraphrased, but the spirit is there: "And when a robot actually does succeed and walk down the hall and through the door, or whatever it's supposed to do, you've learned absolutely nothing because it may not do it again the next time. This is why mechanical engineers love their videos so much. With video they can say 'See, it really worked once!'"