In case you are wondering, as I was, how you get the acronym "ARRL" out of "National Association for Amateur Radio" but don't want to search the site... one of their pages explains that it stands for American Radio Relay League, founded in 1914.
The reasoning sounds good, but the article doesn't address the fossil record at all. In layers of sediment laid down during magnetic pole reversals, hundreds of fossil species suddenly disappear and new ones appear. At least that's what I've read. Don't actual mass extinctions argue more strongly than theory?
This story was on Fark yesterday. The one about the WWII decoders was on Fark the day before yesterday. I'm not complaining, just wondering if maybe/. submission reviewing is bottlenecked?
That's how business works, folks. It's just like conservation of matter, energy and momentum. When costs go up, the money to pay for them has to come from somewhere, and a corporation's money ALL comes from its customers. It doesn't matter if the reason is material costs, rents, interest rates, criminal fines, whatever.
Look what happened after the great, historic, multi-billion dollar tobacco industry settlement. The price of cigs went up, that's all. After politicians stopped blowing their trumpets of victory, everything was the same except the government was making more money from smokers.
In principle a company loses market when it has to raise prices, but for Microsoft this probably isn't the case any more than it was for Phillip Morris. Millions of people already buy software from Microsoft, even though the equivalent is available for free. Are they going to switch because it gets a little more expensive? Probably not.
This is a good argument for penalizing corporate executives personally for their business decisions instead of letting them hide behind the corporate shield. Think about this when politicians talk about taking the tax burden off the individual and putting it on wealthy corporations. It's a smoke screen. They all get their money from the same place: you.
This reminds me of some of the esoteric social interaction stuff that was being done in MS Research when I worked there as a contractor. Does anybody need a little gizmo to change color when they keep running into the same people at a convention? Or is this a big steaming pile of grant fodder? Maybe I'm missing the point, but maybe not.
Based on the Jehovah's Witness remark and the photo of him laughing, apparently he has a sense of humor. But his comment about alien races possibly being convertible to terrestrial religion is kind of scary. On one hand it evokes images of Starvin' Marvin in a starfighter. On the other hand I see Pat Robertson seriously soliciting contributions to build an XB79 Galactic Cruiser with plasma-warp force shields and laser cannons.
I've always believed that contact with extraterrestrials will be the beginning of the end of many Earthly religions, as people come to grips with the idea that spirituality is just a local effort to cope with unknowns. But the tenacity of religious leaders to cling to doctrine in the face of contradiction, and the willingness of their flocks to do whatever they command, have always been major driving forces in human history that will probably never go away.
Why get the public's consent to tax them, when you can do it invisibly by building taxes into the prices of products through business tax? And many people are dumb enough to cheer you on for taking the tax burden off the individual and putting it on those big corporations.
In my 25 years of programming, mostly as a contractor, I have found that insurance companies and banks are the worst companies to work for, in terms of PHBs, interdepartmental politics and ridiculous, nit-picky rules. Safeco even had a LUNCH BELL. If someone had suggested giving out free soda, the whole top floor probably would have had a group heart attack. I seriously doubt that the types of people who run Canadian insurance companies are all that different.
Some people with narrow skills may get trapped in one field. My brother in law for example is an Oracle Financials expert but can't configure email. But as a sysadmin I would think you are pretty portable. My advice is to try other types of companies before you up and leave the country. Unless you have like, a Canadian girlfriend or something, eh.
Just wanted to point out that the doing something right link isn't the only thing you should look at. The dotcom world is full of impressive stock price graphs that reflect little more than the optimism of investors. The Key Statistics link and other links on the Yahoo page tell more of the story. For example, EBay made a profit of $1.75 Billion last year. To me THAT says they are doing something right.
Hmm, so a nation's economic performance reflects the quality of the economists who live there. This gets better and better. I guess good economists can't come from dirt poor countries then. Whatever.
I agree that most political and economic comments on Slashdot are more like impassioned rants than informed opinions. Recently I submitted an Ask Slashdot, wanting to know of any good online political/economic forums frequented by actual experts, or at least people with qualifications in those fields. It got rejected, but if you know of any such forums please feel free to post links.
There's something inspiring about a lone inventor relentlessly pursuing a goal, even if it seems like more of an obsession.
"Canadian inventor Troy Hurtubise spent 10 years perfecting the Ursus Mark-VI suit of armour."
"Perfecting" might be an exaggeration. Every time he tested any of the suits against an actual bear (unmanned), it was always Bear 1, Suit 0. Still, I have to admire Hurtubise's perseverence.
I don't mind being argued with, but there's no need to be a dick about it. I also don't know how the EU economists calculate national debt, but apparently they think the debt to GDP ratio is more important than you do. The 60% max requirement is written into the Maastricht Treaty. But they're probably just a bunch of unemployable idiots like me.
Ranking countries by GDP without looking at National Debt is like ranking people by house value without asking how much of the house is actually paid for. Read this article (some math required) for a discussion of the EU's policy on public debt. Nearly all EU countries maintain a national debt 60% or less of GDP. The US national debt is more than 70%. That difference puts the EU ahead of the US in terms of true wealth/productivity.
Several years ago I read an article asserting that Microsoft was essentially behaving like a middle-aged adult hanging onto adolescence. This article might have been on the Motley Fool site, I forget. The gist of it was this:
Companies typically innovate and take huge risks when they are young, because they have to in order to survive against their entrenched competition. Once a company becomes profitable and has a solid product line, it goes into the very different mode of repeating what it already knows how to do and improving itself. The focus is then on expanding market share, improving efficiency, making better financial deals and so forth. A company that succeeds at this phase accumulates a store of cash and starts focusing on things like mergers and acquisitions. By this time a company has evolved a complex management structure and a lot of rules and processes, which make everything the company does slower and more deliberate than before. These mature companies are much better at investing in other companies and leaving them to do the actual innovation.
Microsoft, the article said, had already entered the mature stage and yet was still trying to act like a startup. That was a couple years ago. Today I think we are seeing this view of Microsoft vindicated. Anything it does now is on a much vaster scale than when Windows 3.0 was released in 1990. Every big release now involves thousands of developers and millions of customers around the world. With a multi-year release cycle, Microsoft can't possibly respond to the market; they can only try to dictate to it. Everything they release was planned several years ago.
The statement that Microsoft has enough money to survive 5 years without any sales is an interesting bit of arithmetic, but that scenario is never going to happen. MS is a public company with thousands of stockholders, many of them large financial institutions. If Ballmer announced that Longhorn won't be ready until 2009 and will cost $30 billion, I doubt that the stockholders would let him or the existing board stay in place. There might even be talk of using that cash to buy a whole bunch of other companies and move away from doing actual development. Not that there's anything wrong with that. It would just mean Microsoft was finally acting its age.
Most of the world's problems are caused by the behavior of assholes.
I think people convicted of crimes should be indentured afterwards to pay the social cost. For example, burglars should pay part of their income into a fund to provide everybody with locks and burglar alarms. Spammers should pay for part of my bandwidth, and spyware makers should pay for free tech support. It's not about an eye for an eye, it's about behaving like a grownup and cleaning up your own mess.
The problem here is that it's empirical evidence of a bad trend. As actual terrorist attacks in America increase (which they undoubtedly will), people who are not even remotely terrorists are going to be harassed more and more for completely innocent activities. The increasingly wary FBI will become increasingly heavy handed. They'll do things like questioning your employers (thereby labelling you as Trouble), taking you "downtown" for questioning, detaining you overnight or longer. I'm sure the KGB started out the same way, with the noble intention of protecting The People from dangerous subversives.
Eventually, normal citizens with nothing to hide will be afraid to do anything that might trigger an investigation, just as many people today don't take legitimate tax deductions which tax advisors warn them are likely to trigger an audit.
In fact, why did you even read this article unless you are a terrorist wanting to learn how the system works so you can beat it? Why do you encrypt your email? Why do you want any privacy at all unless you are hiding something?
The American public is a docile flock of sheep, whose goals in life are to be comfortable and avoid trouble. As long as they don't go hungry and can use credit cards to buy crap they see on tv, everything is okie-dokie. Baaaaa, baaaaaaa!
Remember feudalism? When a few people owned all the land and everybody paid rent to be on it? That's the future of digital content. Next step in the evolution of the web: some sort of permit required to originate content, like a building permit in the real world. It will probably be introduced under the banner of national security, with attached and approval structure. The system has to be set up so that a few people can control it and pretend that it couldn't exist without them. After a while everybody will believe it couldn't exist otherwise.
I wish I could get excited about XAML, because I like the idea of a complete overhaul of HTML. This is the first I've heard of XAML. If you follow the links and look at the material on it, it looks pretty cool. What bothers me about it is that if and when it becomes dominant it will stop evolving, just like IE and every other dominant MS product. Its goal is not to change the world or fix the web, but to capture market share and make competition more difficult.
Having said that, why isn't there an far-reaching OSS project to replace HTML? For one thing I guess it's a lot easier to impose a standard on the world when you have the dominant platform. Will Microsoft convert the web into a network of C# apps? I hope not.
Slashdot Mirror
In case you are wondering, as I was, how you get the acronym "ARRL" out of "National Association for Amateur Radio" but don't want to search the site... one of their pages explains that it stands for American Radio Relay League, founded in 1914.
The reasoning sounds good, but the article doesn't address the fossil record at all. In layers of sediment laid down during magnetic pole reversals, hundreds of fossil species suddenly disappear and new ones appear. At least that's what I've read. Don't actual mass extinctions argue more strongly than theory?
This story was on Fark yesterday. The one about the WWII decoders was on Fark the day before yesterday. I'm not complaining, just wondering if maybe /. submission reviewing is bottlenecked?
That's how business works, folks. It's just like conservation of matter, energy and momentum. When costs go up, the money to pay for them has to come from somewhere, and a corporation's money ALL comes from its customers. It doesn't matter if the reason is material costs, rents, interest rates, criminal fines, whatever.
Look what happened after the great, historic, multi-billion dollar tobacco industry settlement. The price of cigs went up, that's all. After politicians stopped blowing their trumpets of victory, everything was the same except the government was making more money from smokers.
In principle a company loses market when it has to raise prices, but for Microsoft this probably isn't the case any more than it was for Phillip Morris. Millions of people already buy software from Microsoft, even though the equivalent is available for free. Are they going to switch because it gets a little more expensive? Probably not.
This is a good argument for penalizing corporate executives personally for their business decisions instead of letting them hide behind the corporate shield. Think about this when politicians talk about taking the tax burden off the individual and putting it on wealthy corporations. It's a smoke screen. They all get their money from the same place: you.
This reminds me of some of the esoteric social interaction stuff that was being done in MS Research when I worked there as a contractor. Does anybody need a little gizmo to change color when they keep running into the same people at a convention? Or is this a big steaming pile of grant fodder? Maybe I'm missing the point, but maybe not.
I noticed that too. Freudian slip or typo? With enough grant money I'm sure someone can find out.
Based on the Jehovah's Witness remark and the photo of him laughing, apparently he has a sense of humor. But his comment about alien races possibly being convertible to terrestrial religion is kind of scary. On one hand it evokes images of Starvin' Marvin in a starfighter. On the other hand I see Pat Robertson seriously soliciting contributions to build an XB79 Galactic Cruiser with plasma-warp force shields and laser cannons.
I've always believed that contact with extraterrestrials will be the beginning of the end of many Earthly religions, as people come to grips with the idea that spirituality is just a local effort to cope with unknowns. But the tenacity of religious leaders to cling to doctrine in the face of contradiction, and the willingness of their flocks to do whatever they command, have always been major driving forces in human history that will probably never go away.
lighter and faster than a conventional ship and almost invisible to enemy detection.
As long as the enemy isn't in an airplane looking out the window.
Why get the public's consent to tax them, when you can do it invisibly by building taxes into the prices of products through business tax? And many people are dumb enough to cheer you on for taking the tax burden off the individual and putting it on those big corporations.
And pro wrestling is real too, by the way.
On the file sharing networks I use, it only takes one search to download Abbey Road.
In my 25 years of programming, mostly as a contractor, I have found that insurance companies and banks are the worst companies to work for, in terms of PHBs, interdepartmental politics and ridiculous, nit-picky rules. Safeco even had a LUNCH BELL. If someone had suggested giving out free soda, the whole top floor probably would have had a group heart attack. I seriously doubt that the types of people who run Canadian insurance companies are all that different.
Some people with narrow skills may get trapped in one field. My brother in law for example is an Oracle Financials expert but can't configure email. But as a sysadmin I would think you are pretty portable. My advice is to try other types of companies before you up and leave the country. Unless you have like, a Canadian girlfriend or something, eh.
Just wanted to point out that the doing something right link isn't the only thing you should look at. The dotcom world is full of impressive stock price graphs that reflect little more than the optimism of investors. The Key Statistics link and other links on the Yahoo page tell more of the story. For example, EBay made a profit of $1.75 Billion last year. To me THAT says they are doing something right.
Hmm, so a nation's economic performance reflects the quality of the economists who live there. This gets better and better. I guess good economists can't come from dirt poor countries then. Whatever.
I agree that most political and economic comments on Slashdot are more like impassioned rants than informed opinions. Recently I submitted an Ask Slashdot, wanting to know of any good online political/economic forums frequented by actual experts, or at least people with qualifications in those fields. It got rejected, but if you know of any such forums please feel free to post links.
There's something inspiring about a lone inventor relentlessly pursuing a goal, even if it seems like more of an obsession.
"Canadian inventor Troy Hurtubise spent 10 years perfecting the Ursus Mark-VI suit of armour."
"Perfecting" might be an exaggeration. Every time he tested any of the suits against an actual bear (unmanned), it was always Bear 1, Suit 0. Still, I have to admire Hurtubise's perseverence.
I don't mind being argued with, but there's no need to be a dick about it. I also don't know how the EU economists calculate national debt, but apparently they think the debt to GDP ratio is more important than you do. The 60% max requirement is written into the Maastricht Treaty. But they're probably just a bunch of unemployable idiots like me.
Ranking countries by GDP without looking at National Debt is like ranking people by house value without asking how much of the house is actually paid for. Read this article (some math required) for a discussion of the EU's policy on public debt. Nearly all EU countries maintain a national debt 60% or less of GDP. The US national debt is more than 70%. That difference puts the EU ahead of the US in terms of true wealth/productivity.
If it ever gets earthquake damaged, how will we know?
Several years ago I read an article asserting that Microsoft was essentially behaving like a middle-aged adult hanging onto adolescence. This article might have been on the Motley Fool site, I forget. The gist of it was this:
Companies typically innovate and take huge risks when they are young, because they have to in order to survive against their entrenched competition. Once a company becomes profitable and has a solid product line, it goes into the very different mode of repeating what it already knows how to do and improving itself. The focus is then on expanding market share, improving efficiency, making better financial deals and so forth. A company that succeeds at this phase accumulates a store of cash and starts focusing on things like mergers and acquisitions. By this time a company has evolved a complex management structure and a lot of rules and processes, which make everything the company does slower and more deliberate than before. These mature companies are much better at investing in other companies and leaving them to do the actual innovation.
Microsoft, the article said, had already entered the mature stage and yet was still trying to act like a startup. That was a couple years ago. Today I think we are seeing this view of Microsoft vindicated. Anything it does now is on a much vaster scale than when Windows 3.0 was released in 1990. Every big release now involves thousands of developers and millions of customers around the world. With a multi-year release cycle, Microsoft can't possibly respond to the market; they can only try to dictate to it. Everything they release was planned several years ago.
The statement that Microsoft has enough money to survive 5 years without any sales is an interesting bit of arithmetic, but that scenario is never going to happen. MS is a public company with thousands of stockholders, many of them large financial institutions. If Ballmer announced that Longhorn won't be ready until 2009 and will cost $30 billion, I doubt that the stockholders would let him or the existing board stay in place. There might even be talk of using that cash to buy a whole bunch of other companies and move away from doing actual development. Not that there's anything wrong with that. It would just mean Microsoft was finally acting its age.
Most of the world's problems are caused by the behavior of assholes.
I think people convicted of crimes should be indentured afterwards to pay the social cost. For example, burglars should pay part of their income into a fund to provide everybody with locks and burglar alarms. Spammers should pay for part of my bandwidth, and spyware makers should pay for free tech support. It's not about an eye for an eye, it's about behaving like a grownup and cleaning up your own mess.
The problem here is that it's empirical evidence of a bad trend. As actual terrorist attacks in America increase (which they undoubtedly will), people who are not even remotely terrorists are going to be harassed more and more for completely innocent activities. The increasingly wary FBI will become increasingly heavy handed. They'll do things like questioning your employers (thereby labelling you as Trouble), taking you "downtown" for questioning, detaining you overnight or longer. I'm sure the KGB started out the same way, with the noble intention of protecting The People from dangerous subversives.
Eventually, normal citizens with nothing to hide will be afraid to do anything that might trigger an investigation, just as many people today don't take legitimate tax deductions which tax advisors warn them are likely to trigger an audit.
In fact, why did you even read this article unless you are a terrorist wanting to learn how the system works so you can beat it? Why do you encrypt your email? Why do you want any privacy at all unless you are hiding something?
It's just mostly zero.
The American public is a docile flock of sheep, whose goals in life are to be comfortable and avoid trouble. As long as they don't go hungry and can use credit cards to buy crap they see on tv, everything is okie-dokie.
Baaaaa, baaaaaaa!
Remember feudalism? When a few people owned all the land and everybody paid rent to be on it? That's the future of digital content. Next step in the evolution of the web: some sort of permit required to originate content, like a building permit in the real world. It will probably be introduced under the banner of national security, with attached and approval structure. The system has to be set up so that a few people can control it and pretend that it couldn't exist without them. After a while everybody will believe it couldn't exist otherwise.
Our copyright and patent enforcement laws are YEARS ahead of the rest of the world!
I wish I could get excited about XAML, because I like the idea of a complete overhaul of HTML. This is the first I've heard of XAML. If you follow the links and look at the material on it, it looks pretty cool. What bothers me about it is that if and when it becomes dominant it will stop evolving, just like IE and every other dominant MS product. Its goal is not to change the world or fix the web, but to capture market share and make competition more difficult.
Having said that, why isn't there an far-reaching OSS project to replace HTML? For one thing I guess it's a lot easier to impose a standard on the world when you have the dominant platform. Will Microsoft convert the web into a network of C# apps? I hope not.