No one is making enough money to do R&D. That will change. Peoplesoft, JD, Seibel, etc are all gonzo within two years.
Microsoft became an OS monopoly, and boy, wasn't it nice? They could then use all that money to spend on R&D that will improve the stability, security and effeciency of their OS.
You are right though about the "undercutting, licensing, sales, lock-in contracts, and everything but innovation that is going on this market." But from previous experience watching the business software space, that will get worse when it's left to 4 companies fighting for market growth.
But if this consolidation happens, here is some advice to make a wise decision from among the proprietary solution vendors.
Signs your business software vendor is no good for you:
They won't provide you complete documentation for their data model
They won't provide you any documentation on their proprietary file formats.
Anything in the contract that implies your data entered into their system is the vendor's proprietary secret
If one or more of these are present in the vendor's user contract, run away! I helped with the data conversion of a company's marketing information into a proprietary sales force automation package. The package suffered from the first two faults mentioned above. Two years later, the company that made the package went under, and my company spent even more money trying to get their data back out.
Believe it or not in the 50s the US auto industry was the envy of the world.
Notice I started the decay clock at the 1950s? Yes, it was the envy, but the US auto industry had begun the policies that would undo the work of the previous 5 decades of industrial auto production.
The first major fly in the ointment was the Edsel, but there were others as documented by consumer advocates during that period (and not just Nader, who's credibility on the El Dorado is pretty controversial). The R&D departments got complacent and didn't really do a lot other than maybe come up with a different bell or whistle. They coasted by with the technology and techniques they'd had for decades while their competitors in Europe and Asia began adopting, adapting and improving. Also, they were more responsive to customer demands. The Big 3 began to feel they could put a dumpster on wheels and get the public to buy it.
Why did they start dropping the things that made them succesful? Because when you have no real serious competition, you begin to cut the budgets to things that have no direct impact on your bottom line, like R&D, intensive quality control, etc. As the old guard started retiring in the 60s and 70s, these things became less and less important. So what if your Monday cars were the worst run of the week? The customer would be still come back to the dealer. They're complaining that it breaks down too much? Buy a new one from us every couple of years; you have no choice anymore! Fuel to expensive? Tough.
The decay that began in the 50s from complacency due to lack of competition finally came to fruition in the meltdown of the Big 3 in the late 70s.
You are the first and only person I've ever read that believed the US auto oligopoly was a good thing for American auto industry.
Once the market cleans out the Boom chaff, look for more interesting apps to come out of the consolidation. This is a market issue, not a technology issue.
No it won't! That's a non sequitor. Using your logic, the consolidation in the 1920s and 1930s of the 20 or so automobile manufacturors and their suppliers into 3 uber-companies (Chrysler, Ford and GM) made the quality and innovativeness of the cars go up!? By the 1950s, the Big 3 had begun their long, slow, painful ride into mediocrity.
An active free-market in fungible
goods with lots of healthy competition is what improves things. Not an oligopoly.
This is the big reason proprietary software is so afraid of OSS. With OSS and the GPL, all software offerings become fungible. You don't like your MRP package? If it's based on an open source project, and the package is popular enough that their competitors created "conversion kits", you can just swap it out. Don't like your e-mail server? If its using a standards-based protocol, you can swap out the server or clients as you see fit.
Blaming the woes of Business Software on too much competition is not only without basis, it flies in the face of the experience of 200+ years of free market capitalism.
Newsflash: Microsoft has gone and made a better Java -- C#, and funnily enough they not only standardized it with recognized standards bodies (which Sun has never done with Java), they've also released their own shared source version and have not at all stood in the way of third parties making their own implementations (dotGNU, Mono, etc).
Newsflash: Microsoft
patented the CRL layer, so all those "third parties" could be toast anytime Microsoft finds them "inonvenient".
One of the major complints about this book is the lack of editting. Thes is just like those people that complain about mispelings on the front page of/.
His complaint was the lack of editing made it almost unreadable. I.e., re-reading a sentence several times to figure out what it said.
Good grammar and spelling aren't "windowdressing". They are essential for easy reading.
Oh yeah. In my ANSI Common Lisp book. Something about the real power of Lisp being that everything, including the program itself is just a tree structure.
As a Slashdot thread on a programming language progresses, the probability of someone claiming that "Lisp already does that" approaches unity.
If this movie works, it'll invite people to go back and watch the original animated series and manga, and that's good enough for me.
No, it won't. I have two "friends" (now ex-friends) who believe the LotR movies are much better than the book.
Movies like this just encourages lazy thinking and superficiality in the general population. Especially when you realise Eva isn't about the Angels: it's about these characters and the personal traumas that make them tick: Shinji's troubled relationship with his father, Asuka's memories of her mother that torment her until it finally destroys her, Misato's really f---ed up and lonely life. That's what made Eva great; it wasn't the angels or the fight scenes.
All this movie will do is give us fight scenes and SFX porn[*]. That can be cool entertainment in its own right, but it does a great disservice to one of the best written anime series of all time.
[*] SFX Porn = Gratuitous Special Effects used in a movie just to be gratuitous special effects.
Apologies to the on-line movie critic who coined the term and whose name I can't recall right now.
You're not a real Canadian! A real Canadian takes secret glee in any article or story (no matter how obscure) that makes Canada look better than the U.S.
Please report to the Canadian Cultural Assimilation Centre to have your Canadian Content checked, eh?
Please, before moving to Canada, can I ask you all to please register to vote and actually *vote*!?
Register for the primaries too and vote against the encumbants who support the PATRIOT act (I & II), the Iraqi misadventure and other pieces of legislation you love to hate. Remember, a lot of Democrats also voted for the above.
Considering America's low participation in its own democracy, you shouldn't be surprised the American government is acting against its citizens' own best interests.
Greenspan is saying everything that has been said on Slashdot and other venues: the laws are unbalanced towards hyper-regulation, and there's an "untamed" frontier trampling IP rights totally unaffected by the hyper-regulation.
Although said in the usual Econo-speak, one of his themes is that trying to use the court system to tame this frontier is a waste of time, and ultimately useless. Other markets don't need constant lawsuits and court intervention because everyone understands and respects the rules and have no desire to cross them. The rules seem fair and the market prices things at an appropriate level so there's little desire to break the rules by most participants.
That's Greenspans way of saying the DMCA and the Lawyer Heavy tactics are going to stunt growth. He's really suggesting that IP rules be re-written so everyone can respect them and live by them, and implicitly, the IP vendors should try learning to live in a true free market where their prices come down due to competition.
In fact, some of the big ones do come together from time to time for that purpose (usually to band together against the monopoly in their industry, but that's a good thing).
I remember GM and the companies that supported them did that to get a bunch of their IT vendors to conform to an interoperability standard. Anyone know of any others?
To get around Sony's patents on Beta, JVC with a few other companies created the VHS standard and made it free to everyone to implement. This is a potential nightmare scenario for Microsoft if the companies quickly reach an agreement and stick to it.
The only threats to this commoditization are the companies involved falling out with each other and Microsoft quickly poisoning the market for this commodity TV/Internet box. I wonder if Microsoft can handle this many threats to its business model (the Office monopoly cracking, the licensing schemes being rejected by its customers, etc.) at the same time?
The other home entertainment companies don't have much to worry about because they make their money from hardware, so they can just adopt this if it ever comes together. The other group to crap its collective pants is the cable industry. They fear the PVR already, and this gives the Baby Bells an easy road in for pay-per-view and other previously cable-only franchises.
If these Japanese companies can get it to market and adopted in Japan, this could be the beginning of something interesting.
This was courtesy of ROT13 JavaScript coder/decoder [geht.net]
Pfft! Real USENET old timers can read ROT13 without a fancy, shmancy Javascript applet. Or if we need to turn it into normal, we know the vi/ex command sequence that will do it.
For the lazy, we cut and past it into Vim and type g?G and use Vim's ROT13 function.
You certainly are not. It says it's a specific method for selecting advertisements to present to a user. It's not patenting the idea of selecting advertisements to present to a user. You can still put ads on your web-page, but you can't use an auction-style selection algorithm, which is what Amazon is patenting.
So yes, you got one thing right: you are not a lawyer.
Rodgers wrote a follow up article about 10 years ago updating his 1971 thesis. Unlike this Salon article, Rodgers properly explains the physics and actual applications of "wide and quiet" broadcasting (a.k.a. wideband, widecasting). Alas, I cannot find it on the web (work connection too slow). Can someone else who knows what I'm talking about provide a link?
... but they are the most important people on the game team. When I was a developer at a game company that will remain anonymous, we tried a new team arrangement of having the key people from other departments in the same room. I was from tools & sound and worked a lot with our game's lead tester.
They work very hard. Harder than you imagine a game tester would. They would stay they until the early hours of the morning to help a programmer find that one bug that would prevent your game from shipping. Sony et al have a policy that if they encounter one, just ONE, crash bug in your game, it won't ship. And Sony tests the hell out of the games for their console. (that's why major crashes are extremely rare in games published for a Sony platform).
I was having a sound bug that would happen once in maybe 8 hours that would garble the sound sample. The game testers spent hours upon hours helping me isolate and verify if it finally went away or not. They spent very alte hours playing a not-very-fun game over and over again to help me find it.
They also come up with tests a programmer would never think of. I remember one tester testing the LAN play of our game. He then, on a whim, just typed a bunch of garbage on the keyboard. Game crashed hard. Buffer overflow. It had not occured to any of us programmers to check for buffer overflow in the multi-player chat code. That probably saved us getting the game to our publisher because that is one of the things they tested for: buffer overflows.
So please stow your bitching that "Game testers have a job that's so easy..." I'd rather flip burgers at McDonald's than be a game tester. The pay's better, you get more free time and you get more respect from your co-workers and other people.
Not by much. The closest anyone has gotten to ocean mining is DeBeers and their diamond trawler off Namibia which scrapes the bottom of the ocean floor.
Ocean based mining is still a hideously expensive way to mine, but there's one big problem standing in the way of mining the Ocean floor:
Law of the Seas
Try Ruby, then. Ruby is dynamically typed, but has strong (but not static) typing available (as an extension). Ruby is very modular and a joy to use.
I keep meaning too, but I don't have the time to really learn it. I suspect Ruby was hamstrung because it started in Japan, and without English documentation or support, there was no way to help it make it mainstream. From what little I've seen of it, it looked pretty interesting.
Slashdot Mirror
To make money from the people who still haven't learned it! In fact, I'm writing a book for them. :-P
Microsoft became an OS monopoly, and boy, wasn't it nice? They could then use all that money to spend on R&D that will improve the stability, security and effeciency of their OS.
You are right though about the "undercutting, licensing, sales, lock-in contracts, and everything but innovation that is going on this market." But from previous experience watching the business software space, that will get worse when it's left to 4 companies fighting for market growth.
But if this consolidation happens, here is some advice to make a wise decision from among the proprietary solution vendors.
Signs your business software vendor is no good for you:
If one or more of these are present in the vendor's user contract, run away! I helped with the data conversion of a company's marketing information into a proprietary sales force automation package. The package suffered from the first two faults mentioned above. Two years later, the company that made the package went under, and my company spent even more money trying to get their data back out.
Notice I started the decay clock at the 1950s? Yes, it was the envy, but the US auto industry had begun the policies that would undo the work of the previous 5 decades of industrial auto production.
The first major fly in the ointment was the Edsel, but there were others as documented by consumer advocates during that period (and not just Nader, who's credibility on the El Dorado is pretty controversial). The R&D departments got complacent and didn't really do a lot other than maybe come up with a different bell or whistle. They coasted by with the technology and techniques they'd had for decades while their competitors in Europe and Asia began adopting, adapting and improving. Also, they were more responsive to customer demands. The Big 3 began to feel they could put a dumpster on wheels and get the public to buy it.
Why did they start dropping the things that made them succesful? Because when you have no real serious competition, you begin to cut the budgets to things that have no direct impact on your bottom line, like R&D, intensive quality control, etc. As the old guard started retiring in the 60s and 70s, these things became less and less important. So what if your Monday cars were the worst run of the week? The customer would be still come back to the dealer. They're complaining that it breaks down too much? Buy a new one from us every couple of years; you have no choice anymore! Fuel to expensive? Tough.
The decay that began in the 50s from complacency due to lack of competition finally came to fruition in the meltdown of the Big 3 in the late 70s.
You are the first and only person I've ever read that believed the US auto oligopoly was a good thing for American auto industry.
No it won't! That's a non sequitor. Using your logic, the consolidation in the 1920s and 1930s of the 20 or so automobile manufacturors and their suppliers into 3 uber-companies (Chrysler, Ford and GM) made the quality and innovativeness of the cars go up!? By the 1950s, the Big 3 had begun their long, slow, painful ride into mediocrity.
An active free-market in fungible goods with lots of healthy competition is what improves things. Not an oligopoly.
This is the big reason proprietary software is so afraid of OSS. With OSS and the GPL, all software offerings become fungible. You don't like your MRP package? If it's based on an open source project, and the package is popular enough that their competitors created "conversion kits", you can just swap it out. Don't like your e-mail server? If its using a standards-based protocol, you can swap out the server or clients as you see fit.
Blaming the woes of Business Software on too much competition is not only without basis, it flies in the face of the experience of 200+ years of free market capitalism.
Newsflash: Microsoft patented the CRL layer, so all those "third parties" could be toast anytime Microsoft finds them "inonvenient".
His complaint was the lack of editing made it almost unreadable. I.e., re-reading a sentence several times to figure out what it said.
Good grammar and spelling aren't "windowdressing". They are essential for easy reading.
As a Slashdot thread on a programming language progresses, the probability of someone claiming that "Lisp already does that" approaches unity.
No, it won't. I have two "friends" (now ex-friends) who believe the LotR movies are much better than the book.
Movies like this just encourages lazy thinking and superficiality in the general population. Especially when you realise Eva isn't about the Angels: it's about these characters and the personal traumas that make them tick: Shinji's troubled relationship with his father, Asuka's memories of her mother that torment her until it finally destroys her, Misato's really f---ed up and lonely life. That's what made Eva great; it wasn't the angels or the fight scenes.
All this movie will do is give us fight scenes and SFX porn[*]. That can be cool entertainment in its own right, but it does a great disservice to one of the best written anime series of all time.
[*] SFX Porn = Gratuitous Special Effects used in a movie just to be gratuitous special effects.
Apologies to the on-line movie critic who coined the term and whose name I can't recall right now.
No, he might mean Republicans (and Repulicans) because there ain't any rich chimpanzees.
"Uncle Filbert! What are you doing in the cucumbers?"
Yeah, but we don't have Tecumsah this time around...
You mean like the fact that President Madison campaigned on stealing Canadian land and giving it to American farmers?
And yes, it was Canadian land because that was the name of the colony even if we weren't a nation yet.
Also, did you forget that almost every Indian tribed aligned with England against the U.S. invasion?
You're not a real Canadian! A real Canadian takes secret glee in any article or story (no matter how obscure) that makes Canada look better than the U.S.
Please report to the Canadian Cultural Assimilation Centre to have your Canadian Content checked, eh?
Please, before moving to Canada, can I ask you all to please register to vote and actually *vote*!?
Register for the primaries too and vote against the encumbants who support the PATRIOT act (I & II), the Iraqi misadventure and other pieces of legislation you love to hate. Remember, a lot of Democrats also voted for the above.
Considering America's low participation in its own democracy, you shouldn't be surprised the American government is acting against its citizens' own best interests.
Greenspan is saying everything that has been said on Slashdot and other venues: the laws are unbalanced towards hyper-regulation, and there's an "untamed" frontier trampling IP rights totally unaffected by the hyper-regulation.
Although said in the usual Econo-speak, one of his themes is that trying to use the court system to tame this frontier is a waste of time, and ultimately useless. Other markets don't need constant lawsuits and court intervention because everyone understands and respects the rules and have no desire to cross them. The rules seem fair and the market prices things at an appropriate level so there's little desire to break the rules by most participants.
That's Greenspans way of saying the DMCA and the Lawyer Heavy tactics are going to stunt growth. He's really suggesting that IP rules be re-written so everyone can respect them and live by them, and implicitly, the IP vendors should try learning to live in a true free market where their prices come down due to competition.
That's one of his themes.
I remember GM and the companies that supported them did that to get a bunch of their IT vendors to conform to an interoperability standard. Anyone know of any others?
To get around Sony's patents on Beta, JVC with a few other companies created the VHS standard and made it free to everyone to implement. This is a potential nightmare scenario for Microsoft if the companies quickly reach an agreement and stick to it.
The only threats to this commoditization are the companies involved falling out with each other and Microsoft quickly poisoning the market for this commodity TV/Internet box. I wonder if Microsoft can handle this many threats to its business model (the Office monopoly cracking, the licensing schemes being rejected by its customers, etc.) at the same time?
The other home entertainment companies don't have much to worry about because they make their money from hardware, so they can just adopt this if it ever comes together. The other group to crap its collective pants is the cable industry. They fear the PVR already, and this gives the Baby Bells an easy road in for pay-per-view and other previously cable-only franchises.
If these Japanese companies can get it to market and adopted in Japan, this could be the beginning of something interesting.
Pfft! Real USENET old timers can read ROT13 without a fancy, shmancy Javascript applet. Or if we need to turn it into normal, we know the vi/ex command sequence that will do it.
For the lazy, we cut and past it into Vim and type g?G and use Vim's ROT13 function.
Here at
The Japan Times
You certainly are not. It says it's a specific method for selecting advertisements to present to a user. It's not patenting the idea of selecting advertisements to present to a user. You can still put ads on your web-page, but you can't use an auction-style selection algorithm, which is what Amazon is patenting.
So yes, you got one thing right: you are not a lawyer.
I'm going teach a chimp to drive and use cruise control!
Hoi-claven!
Rodgers wrote a follow up article about 10 years ago updating his 1971 thesis. Unlike this Salon article, Rodgers properly explains the physics and actual applications of "wide and quiet" broadcasting (a.k.a. wideband, widecasting). Alas, I cannot find it on the web (work connection too slow). Can someone else who knows what I'm talking about provide a link?
... but they are the most important people on the game team. When I was a developer at a game company that will remain anonymous, we tried a new team arrangement of having the key people from other departments in the same room. I was from tools & sound and worked a lot with our game's lead tester.
They work very hard. Harder than you imagine a game tester would. They would stay they until the early hours of the morning to help a programmer find that one bug that would prevent your game from shipping. Sony et al have a policy that if they encounter one, just ONE, crash bug in your game, it won't ship. And Sony tests the hell out of the games for their console. (that's why major crashes are extremely rare in games published for a Sony platform).
I was having a sound bug that would happen once in maybe 8 hours that would garble the sound sample. The game testers spent hours upon hours helping me isolate and verify if it finally went away or not. They spent very alte hours playing a not-very-fun game over and over again to help me find it.
They also come up with tests a programmer would never think of. I remember one tester testing the LAN play of our game. He then, on a whim, just typed a bunch of garbage on the keyboard. Game crashed hard. Buffer overflow. It had not occured to any of us programmers to check for buffer overflow in the multi-player chat code. That probably saved us getting the game to our publisher because that is one of the things they tested for: buffer overflows.
So please stow your bitching that "Game testers have a job that's so easy..." I'd rather flip burgers at McDonald's than be a game tester. The pay's better, you get more free time and you get more respect from your co-workers and other people.
Not by much. The closest anyone has gotten to ocean mining is DeBeers and their diamond trawler off Namibia which scrapes the bottom of the ocean floor.
Ocean based mining is still a hideously expensive way to mine, but there's one big problem standing in the way of mining the Ocean floor: Law of the Seas
More Details:
I keep meaning too, but I don't have the time to really learn it. I suspect Ruby was hamstrung because it started in Japan, and without English documentation or support, there was no way to help it make it mainstream. From what little I've seen of it, it looked pretty interesting.