I'm glad somebody mentioned the Dogon mystery. It's one of those fascinating things that won't go away. Robert Temple's famous book "The Sirius Mystery" is based mainly on the work of anthropologists Marcel Griaule and Germaine Dieterlen, who lived among the Dogon for more than 30 years starting in 1931. Critics such as Carl Sagan dismissed the conclusions in Temple's book, theorizing that the Dogon had obtained their astronomical information from modern outside sources. Griaule himself was in fact an amateur astronomer. Dieterlen countered these criticisms by displaying Dogon artifacts that dated back hundreds of years.
More recently another team of anthropologists led by Walter Van Beek did a 10-year study of the Dogon, beginning in 1991. Van Beek, who managed to speak to some of the same individuals who had known Griaule and Dieterlen, said these Dogon disagreed completely with each other as to which star was meant. Some said it was an invisible star, others said it was Venus. But all of them agreed that they learned about the star from Griaule.
"This job is WAY easier than working at the laundry (83%), although Leonardo could use a breath mint (9%). Wish he would stop staring at my boobs like that (6%), the lecherous old bastard (2%)."
Controlling how long written information exists is tantamount to un-inventing writing. Written language ceases to be a permanent record and becomes a sort of buffered version of spoken language. The idea that communication, the foundation of civilization itself, would undergo such a giant step backwards for the sake of a business model completely boggles my mind.
1. Get a job at an outsourcing company that does Microsoft contracts. 2. Work on one of those projects. 3. Get converted to Microsoft FTE along with half the project team.
It happens this way ALL THE TIME, and you don't have to beat 5000 other programmers in some contest, you just have to be in the top half of the team you're on.
Giving two weeks notice is exactly the professional thing to do. You can't control how the company reacts. I've quit 4 or 5 programming jobs and have never been abruptly cut off, but I have seen it happen to others. Don't worry about it. You did right thing.
Having worked with a software development group in India for 3 years now, I can honestly say I am not impressed. Many of the engineers there are well educated on paper, but in reality lacked creativity and the ability to work independently. They were definitely cheaper, but the price we paid for that was a huge cut in productivity
Glad to hear this from somebody else. I hesitate to express the same opinion for fear of a knee-jerk racism response. I think it's probably more a matter of how their education system works. Some consistent traits I see among the Indian software engineers and PMs I work with are a tendency to think there is one right answer to a problem, and a much greater deference to authority than is common among Americans. Arguing to consider alternative approaches can be frustratingly difficult, especially if an authority figure in the room appears to approve of one idea already, thereby making it THE correct answer. In working with Indian PMs I have gotten into the habit of saving ideas and bringing them up in a mixed group rather than one-on-one, to avoid the automatic "let's just follow the spec" response.
If Microsoft and other companies believe the road to innovation is paved with cheap labor, that's their business. I just hope they don't mind being in the rear-view mirror.
I agree 100% with the above post, because PromptZero cut and pasted most of it from one of my recent posts on this subject. I guess imitation is flattery.
The article makes some valid points about the Back button and Bookmarks, but these are problems that can be solved pretty easily. Microsoft no doubt would have solved them several years ago, had they seen the potential of the off-channel request technique and acted on it. But as one MS manager told me shortly before IE was released, with Netscape pretty much dead by that time they saw no point in developing IE any further. See how market dominance encourages innovation? I think Firefox now has native support for off-channel httprequests, whereas IE is still using an ActiveX control.
Whether this story is 100% accurate or not, it raises an important point for anybody in business. Do Not Burn Bridges. The guy you just called an asshole on the phone might be in a position to do you an important favor six months from now. Or not. Everybody has feelings, and some people have long memories and will delight in punishing or rewarding you for some little thing from the past.
If the New Orleans city planners are thinking of setting up free WiFi, they certainly aren't going to change their minds and go begging Bell South to please let them use that building. If anything it will just make the city officials less inclined to listen to the offers [cough-bribes-cough] Bell South is probably right now trying to think up to convince them to rethink the thing.
Are you dismayed that Microsoft hasn't lifted a finger to improve or enhance IE since it buried Netscape's Navigator browser at the dawn of the century?
Some people would label that statement hollow cynicism. But in fact, a Microsoft manager told me straight out when IE 6 was about to be released that it wasn't really going to have any new features, because with Netscape pretty much dead there wasn't much point in developing IE anymore.
Microsoft had already introduced XmlHttpRequest as an ActiveX object with IE5. They had all the pieces in place back then to promote the off-channel request technique and give it a nifty name like "AJAX." Web apps could have been 5 years ahead of where they are today, and MS would have had a huge head start instead of now scrambling to catch up with Google.
I have to wonder about this research from a historical perspective. In late 19th Century America, a person getting less than about 90 minutes of strenuous activity per day was considered "sedentary." Nowadays we talk about getting at least 90 minutes of exercise per week to stay healthy. The theory that couch-potatoism is a genetic trait doesn't offer a mechanism for how it only took the couch-potato genes a few generations to become dominant in such a large, vigorous population.
On the other hand, there is one obvious non-genetic factor that could account for the increase in couch-potatohood: the innumerable processes and gadgets that now make everyday life possible with far less physical work than a century ago. Maybe typical modern Americans don't exert themselves as much as their great grandparents because they don't have to.
If the tendency not to work any harder than necessary is a genetic trait, then my bet is that it's always been there. Evidence goes all the way back to cave people, who took time out from their hunting and gathering to make up songs and draw pictures on the walls (the slackers), because they knew they had already hunted and gathered enough to eat for that week. If we do have couch-potato genes, I think we've always had them. We just didn't always have the luxury of letting them express themselves.
The biggest problem with all the debates about "Intellectual Property" is that it doesn't exist. The concept of Property has been around longer than civilization itself, ever since the first ape picked up a stick and thought, "This is mine." Copyrights and patents are just modern laws. They aren't even rights really. They're restrictions on what people always used to be able to do before the laws were made. For centuries minstrels learned and repeated each other's songs. Storytellers repeated stories, etc. It's what we used to call "culture," before somebody concocted the notion that we should treat ideas like property and fight over them like we fight over property.
Arguing about IP in the context of how we treat property gives an undeserved advantage to the proponents of greater and broader rights enforcement. IP reform isn't about stealing, socialism, or the demise of innovation. It's about giving conscious thought to the cost of enforcing rights vs the benefit of granting them.
Re:I think I buy into this "ajax" thing
on
Ajax in Action
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· Score: 1
I think the value of AJAX is in combining the asynchronous request technique with cross-browser scripting, and of course packaging it neatly as an entity and giving it a name. The technique itself has been around since IE5, when Microsoft introduced the XmlHttpRequest ActiveX object. I've been using it since 1999, but back then it wasn't very well documented and it never got the attention it deserved.
Microsoft could have done a lot to promote this, for example adding native support for it like Mozilla has done. It would have given the rest of the browser world one more thing to catch up with. So why didn't they? A Microsoft manager remarked to me back then that IE6 wasn't going to contain a whole lot of new features, because with Netscape pretty well dead there wasn't much point in developing IE any further. Kind of reminded me of when somebody around the year 1800 suggested closing the patent office because there was nothing left to invent.
Summary of the article: "Somebody in the record business said something."
Record company execs live in their own imaginary world, where music exists only because they're here to own it and sell copies of it. Expecting them to say anything sensible in a PR statement is like asking your dog to explain the Federal Reserve system.
corporate stylist, Melanie Moss, who hosted the event...
"Corporate stylist?" Hey Melanie, when you do something productive with your life and get rid of that ridiculous title, then you can criticize my clothes. Run along now, I have to get back to work.
Making technology useful for anything and everything, thus simplifying life, is really what technology is all about.
Sorry, but that's not what technology is all about. That's what geeks want it to be about, but what it's really about is making money, often by convincing otherwise intelligent people that they need more gadgetry to make toast or turn their lights on and off.
Truly useful ubiquitous computing might someday throttle our credit cards instead of our thermostats, or warn us not to buy things we can't afford, or remind us not to eat crap that's going to clog our arteries. We've already got plenty of remote control. What we need now is technology that helps us improve our self control.
I think you hit it on the head, but I also think America is in an irreversible downward slide. A few clever people have hacked the system and now manipulate it with money. Big elections are essentially advertising contests, in which the effect of money is so much larger than any other factor that big elections boil down to fundraising contests. The result is that payoffs for contributions account for more and more laws and policies. Fewer and fewer institutions actually serve the public or do it well.
Eventually so few things will work properly that the government will be unable to control major social unrest, such as is happening right now in France. If a wave of massive, widespread rioting met with a Katrina-like response from the government, we would enter a period of lawlessness that the Union itself might not survive. States or groups of states could break off on their own, and the ball game would be over for the United States of America.
I see this as not just likely but inevitable, and I am not looking forward to it.
I love how the web screws with everything... national borders, taxation and tariffs, censorship, copyright, "local standards" etc. Lots of existing laws are tacitly based on obsolete assumptions about technology, or the way people behaved when their choices were more limited. The ability of anyone to become a publisher is screwing with the notion of publishing, of what a news organization is, and issues such as libel. If you criticize your boss or your company in a letter to your mom it's no big deal, even if she reads it to her neighbors. But if you put the same information on a website it could become a huge deal.
Some people flatly declare that anybody with a website is a publisher, period, and is therefore subject to the same rules and responsibilities as Time Warner, period. That argument would have made sense back in the days when the difficulty of becoming a publisher made it reasonable to presume a certain level of sophistication and awareness of the legal liabilities. But it's a stretch to make those same assumptions today about your aunt when she signs up on BlogSpot and starts posting away. It's far too easy for the average person to step on the wrong toes on the web.
The law should be more like a safety railing than like a minefield. It shouldn't lay traps for plain citizens honestly expressing their personal opinions. It should adjust to people's new capabilities and to the way they naturally act. IANAL and I don't know the legal definition of "damage" from other people's words, but I think it should allow for normal, natural expression on a larger scale than it probably does now, and oblige us to exercise more tolerance toward other people's public statements.
We are going to be seeing more and more cases of one person or entity attacking another in court because of things said on the Web. The outcomes of those cases will have a huge effect on our freedom to use the web to express opinions. I hope the judges and juries have the wisdom to look beyond single cases and think about the bigger picture. I really don't want the web to be a happy hunting ground for legal predators, waiting for me to make a slip and say the wrong thing so they can take away my house.
"We should've been leaders with all our web properties in harnessing the potential of Ajax" [says Ozzie]
Well duh! Microsoft invented "Ajax" (the technology, not the name) when they introduced the XmlHttpRequest ActiveX object with IE5. When I first found out about XmlHttpRequest and started using it in 1999 I thought it would revolutionize web programming. Web pages would become little client/server apps that would just sit there and make requests and update themselves. No more session state crapola from one page to the next.
IE had a huge lead in DHTML capabilities back then. Microsoft had all the pieces in place to give off-channel Http requests a nifty buzzword name and take the lead with it, but apparently nobody there had that inspiration. Or maybe something one MS manager told me when I asked him what kinds of new stuff would be in IE6 says it all. He said there wasn't much point in doing a whole lot with IE anymore because Netscape was pretty much dead. Yep, that's the Voice of Innovation alright!
Slashdot Mirror
I'm glad somebody mentioned the Dogon mystery. It's one of those fascinating things that won't go away. Robert Temple's famous book "The Sirius Mystery" is based mainly on the work of anthropologists Marcel Griaule and Germaine Dieterlen, who lived among the Dogon for more than 30 years starting in 1931. Critics such as Carl Sagan dismissed the conclusions in Temple's book, theorizing that the Dogon had obtained their astronomical information from modern outside sources. Griaule himself was in fact an amateur astronomer. Dieterlen countered these criticisms by displaying Dogon artifacts that dated back hundreds of years.
More recently another team of anthropologists led by Walter Van Beek did a 10-year study of the Dogon, beginning in 1991. Van Beek, who managed to speak to some of the same individuals who had known Griaule and Dieterlen, said these Dogon disagreed completely with each other as to which star was meant. Some said it was an invisible star, others said it was Venus. But all of them agreed that they learned about the star from Griaule.
What was she thinking?
"This job is WAY easier than working at the laundry (83%), although Leonardo could use a breath mint (9%). Wish he would stop staring at my boobs like that (6%), the lecherous old bastard (2%)."
Controlling how long written information exists is tantamount to un-inventing writing. Written language ceases to be a permanent record and becomes a sort of buffered version of spoken language. The idea that communication, the foundation of civilization itself, would undergo such a giant step backwards for the sake of a business model completely boggles my mind.
1. Get a job at an outsourcing company that does Microsoft contracts.
2. Work on one of those projects.
3. Get converted to Microsoft FTE along with half the project team.
It happens this way ALL THE TIME, and you don't have to beat 5000 other programmers in some contest, you just have to be in the top half of the team you're on.
Giving two weeks notice is exactly the professional thing to do. You can't control how the company reacts. I've quit 4 or 5 programming jobs and have never been abruptly cut off, but I have seen it happen to others. Don't worry about it. You did right thing.
Having worked with a software development group in India for 3 years now, I can honestly say I am not impressed. Many of the engineers there are well educated on paper, but in reality lacked creativity and the ability to work independently. They were definitely cheaper, but the price we paid for that was a huge cut in productivity
Glad to hear this from somebody else. I hesitate to express the same opinion for fear of a knee-jerk racism response. I think it's probably more a matter of how their education system works. Some consistent traits I see among the Indian software engineers and PMs I work with are a tendency to think there is one right answer to a problem, and a much greater deference to authority than is common among Americans. Arguing to consider alternative approaches can be frustratingly difficult, especially if an authority figure in the room appears to approve of one idea already, thereby making it THE correct answer. In working with Indian PMs I have gotten into the habit of saving ideas and bringing them up in a mixed group rather than one-on-one, to avoid the automatic "let's just follow the spec" response.
If Microsoft and other companies believe the road to innovation is paved with cheap labor, that's their business. I just hope they don't mind being in the rear-view mirror.
I agree 100% with the above post, because PromptZero cut and pasted most of it from one of my recent posts on this subject. I guess imitation is flattery.
The article makes some valid points about the Back button and Bookmarks, but these are problems that can be solved pretty easily. Microsoft no doubt would have solved them several years ago, had they seen the potential of the off-channel request technique and acted on it. But as one MS manager told me shortly before IE was released, with Netscape pretty much dead by that time they saw no point in developing IE any further. See how market dominance encourages innovation? I think Firefox now has native support for off-channel httprequests, whereas IE is still using an ActiveX control.
Whether this story is 100% accurate or not, it raises an important point for anybody in business. Do Not Burn Bridges. The guy you just called an asshole on the phone might be in a position to do you an important favor six months from now. Or not. Everybody has feelings, and some people have long memories and will delight in punishing or rewarding you for some little thing from the past.
If the New Orleans city planners are thinking of setting up free WiFi, they certainly aren't going to change their minds and go begging Bell South to please let them use that building. If anything it will just make the city officials less inclined to listen to the offers [cough-bribes-cough] Bell South is probably right now trying to think up to convince them to rethink the thing.
Are you dismayed that Microsoft hasn't lifted a finger to improve or enhance IE since it buried Netscape's Navigator browser at the dawn of the century?
Some people would label that statement hollow cynicism. But in fact, a Microsoft manager told me straight out when IE 6 was about to be released that it wasn't really going to have any new features, because with Netscape pretty much dead there wasn't much point in developing IE anymore.
Microsoft had already introduced XmlHttpRequest as an ActiveX object with IE5. They had all the pieces in place back then to promote the off-channel request technique and give it a nifty name like "AJAX." Web apps could have been 5 years ahead of where they are today, and MS would have had a huge head start instead of now scrambling to catch up with Google.
I have to wonder about this research from a historical perspective. In late 19th Century America, a person getting less than about 90 minutes of strenuous activity per day was considered "sedentary." Nowadays we talk about getting at least 90 minutes of exercise per week to stay healthy. The theory that couch-potatoism is a genetic trait doesn't offer a mechanism for how it only took the couch-potato genes a few generations to become dominant in such a large, vigorous population.
On the other hand, there is one obvious non-genetic factor that could account for the increase in couch-potatohood: the innumerable processes and gadgets that now make everyday life possible with far less physical work than a century ago. Maybe typical modern Americans don't exert themselves as much as their great grandparents because they don't have to.
If the tendency not to work any harder than necessary is a genetic trait, then my bet is that it's always been there. Evidence goes all the way back to cave people, who took time out from their hunting and gathering to make up songs and draw pictures on the walls (the slackers), because they knew they had already hunted and gathered enough to eat for that week. If we do have couch-potato genes, I think we've always had them. We just didn't always have the luxury of letting them express themselves.
Of course religion can help control alcoholism.
Just like a heroin addict can be converted to a methadone addict.
Air guitar that goes to Eleven.
At least no one from /.
Speak for yourself.
The biggest problem with all the debates about "Intellectual Property" is that it doesn't exist. The concept of Property has been around longer than civilization itself, ever since the first ape picked up a stick and thought, "This is mine." Copyrights and patents are just modern laws. They aren't even rights really. They're restrictions on what people always used to be able to do before the laws were made. For centuries minstrels learned and repeated each other's songs. Storytellers repeated stories, etc. It's what we used to call "culture," before somebody concocted the notion that we should treat ideas like property and fight over them like we fight over property.
Arguing about IP in the context of how we treat property gives an undeserved advantage to the proponents of greater and broader rights enforcement. IP reform isn't about stealing, socialism, or the demise of innovation. It's about giving conscious thought to the cost of enforcing rights vs the benefit of granting them.
I think the value of AJAX is in combining the asynchronous request technique with cross-browser scripting, and of course packaging it neatly as an entity and giving it a name. The technique itself has been around since IE5, when Microsoft introduced the XmlHttpRequest ActiveX object. I've been using it since 1999, but back then it wasn't very well documented and it never got the attention it deserved.
Microsoft could have done a lot to promote this, for example adding native support for it like Mozilla has done. It would have given the rest of the browser world one more thing to catch up with. So why didn't they? A Microsoft manager remarked to me back then that IE6 wasn't going to contain a whole lot of new features, because with Netscape pretty well dead there wasn't much point in developing IE any further. Kind of reminded me of when somebody around the year 1800 suggested closing the patent office because there was nothing left to invent.
It's a shame trivial grammatical comments get over-modded instead of ignored.
Summary of the article: "Somebody in the record business said something."
Record company execs live in their own imaginary world, where music exists only because they're here to own it and sell copies of it. Expecting them to say anything sensible in a PR statement is like asking your dog to explain the Federal Reserve system.
corporate stylist, Melanie Moss, who hosted the event...
"Corporate stylist?" Hey Melanie, when you do something productive with your life and get rid of that ridiculous title, then you can criticize my clothes. Run along now, I have to get back to work.
Making technology useful for anything and everything, thus simplifying life, is really what technology is all about.
Sorry, but that's not what technology is all about. That's what geeks want it to be about, but what it's really about is making money, often by convincing otherwise intelligent people that they need more gadgetry to make toast or turn their lights on and off.
Truly useful ubiquitous computing might someday throttle our credit cards instead of our thermostats, or warn us not to buy things we can't afford, or remind us not to eat crap that's going to clog our arteries. We've already got plenty of remote control. What we need now is technology that helps us improve our self control.
Could individuals who bought these CDs sue Sony for not including the LGPL source? Imagine a beowulf cluster of such lawsuits.
Doesn't all this only apply to publishing/performing for money? Or is there a copyright issue if you whistle or sing while walking around in public?
All Your Base Are Belong To Google Maps.
I think you hit it on the head, but I also think America is in an irreversible downward slide. A few clever people have hacked the system and now manipulate it with money. Big elections are essentially advertising contests, in which the effect of money is so much larger than any other factor that big elections boil down to fundraising contests. The result is that payoffs for contributions account for more and more laws and policies. Fewer and fewer institutions actually serve the public or do it well.
Eventually so few things will work properly that the government will be unable to control major social unrest, such as is happening right now in France. If a wave of massive, widespread rioting met with a Katrina-like response from the government, we would enter a period of lawlessness that the Union itself might not survive. States or groups of states could break off on their own, and the ball game would be over for the United States of America.
I see this as not just likely but inevitable, and I am not looking forward to it.
I love how the web screws with everything... national borders, taxation and tariffs, censorship, copyright, "local standards" etc. Lots of existing laws are tacitly based on obsolete assumptions about technology, or the way people behaved when their choices were more limited. The ability of anyone to become a publisher is screwing with the notion of publishing, of what a news organization is, and issues such as libel. If you criticize your boss or your company in a letter to your mom it's no big deal, even if she reads it to her neighbors. But if you put the same information on a website it could become a huge deal.
Some people flatly declare that anybody with a website is a publisher, period, and is therefore subject to the same rules and responsibilities as Time Warner, period. That argument would have made sense back in the days when the difficulty of becoming a publisher made it reasonable to presume a certain level of sophistication and awareness of the legal liabilities. But it's a stretch to make those same assumptions today about your aunt when she signs up on BlogSpot and starts posting away. It's far too easy for the average person to step on the wrong toes on the web.
The law should be more like a safety railing than like a minefield. It shouldn't lay traps for plain citizens honestly expressing their personal opinions. It should adjust to people's new capabilities and to the way they naturally act. IANAL and I don't know the legal definition of "damage" from other people's words, but I think it should allow for normal, natural expression on a larger scale than it probably does now, and oblige us to exercise more tolerance toward other people's public statements.
We are going to be seeing more and more cases of one person or entity attacking another in court because of things said on the Web. The outcomes of those cases will have a huge effect on our freedom to use the web to express opinions. I hope the judges and juries have the wisdom to look beyond single cases and think about the bigger picture. I really don't want the web to be a happy hunting ground for legal predators, waiting for me to make a slip and say the wrong thing so they can take away my house.
"We should've been leaders with all our web properties in harnessing the potential of Ajax" [says Ozzie]
Well duh! Microsoft invented "Ajax" (the technology, not the name) when they introduced the XmlHttpRequest ActiveX object with IE5. When I first found out about XmlHttpRequest and started using it in 1999 I thought it would revolutionize web programming. Web pages would become little client/server apps that would just sit there and make requests and update themselves. No more session state crapola from one page to the next.
IE had a huge lead in DHTML capabilities back then. Microsoft had all the pieces in place to give off-channel Http requests a nifty buzzword name and take the lead with it, but apparently nobody there had that inspiration. Or maybe something one MS manager told me when I asked him what kinds of new stuff would be in IE6 says it all. He said there wasn't much point in doing a whole lot with IE anymore because Netscape was pretty much dead. Yep, that's the Voice of Innovation alright!