The system relies on tracking a viewer's eyes, so it can only be viewed by more than one person at a time.
If you're viewing by yourself in private at home, why would you care about how you look wearing glasses?
The applications for a no-glasses solo viewing display would seem to be limited. I don't see any use for personal viewing at home.
Advertising in a public area? It has to have so little traffic that no more than one person at a time is likely to be in range, yet enough traffic to justify the cost of installing the system.
Hotel? If there are two beds in a room, they'd better plan on double occupancy. Two TVs?
Arcade games? Seatback entertainment on planes and busses? ZunePads? Can anyone think of anything else?
I have no idea how this plays into the corporate strategic chess game.
For me, it's very simple. I am Apple's customer, and Apple has put a darned nice feature into the web browser that makes the web work more nicely for me. I'm surprised nobody's done it before. I'm glad they've done it now. I'll enjoy it for as long as it works.
One of the things I dislike about Microsoft is that they never act as if I were their customer. I always feel that everything they do has a string attached, a hidden agenda, and they always serve Microsoft's needs first, then those of Dell and HP. I'm not even sure Microsoft regards me as their customer.
Oddly enough, the thing I like best about the "reader" is not that it removes ads, but that it allows me to read something in one window while it flips the pages of some interminably slow multipage article, and then lets me look at the completed article without waiting for new pages to load. I'd like it even if it preserved all the ads.
When was it? They used to advertise heavily on TV. It positioned itself as a search service, and the pitch was that every time you used it for a search, you were automatically getting entered for free into a sweepstakes. The obnoxious ad showed a "plain-folks" lady, presumably at work, asking sotto voce "If I use it at work and I win, does my boss get the money?" and the announcer saying enthusiastically "No, you get the money," and the lady replying "Good to know."
Of course I tried it, and the free sweepstakes feature was marred by the fact that it couldn't find its behind with both hands and a flashlight.
It still exists, but seems to have positioned itself as "Play games! Earn coins! Win prizes." The word "search" does not even appear on its home page, although it is apparently possible to perform a genuine Google search from the site, while, I suppose, accruing infinitesimal chances of obtaining something of value--I'm too lazy to figure it out--at http://www1.iwon.com/home/search/search_simple/
The press is focussing too much on the "what if" and not the "what is."
First of all, how do we even know that the oil is harmful? There haven't been any long-term scientific studies on oil spills of this much oil of this kind. Why, for all we know, it might be beneficial! We shouldn't rush to judgement until this has been properly studied.
Second, let's stop using loaded terms like "pollution." Economists say we should measure the value of something by what people are willing to pay for it. Oil is worth $72 a barrel. The price of enough Instant Ocean to mix up a barrel of seawater is $8.72. So let's stop talking about oil as "polluting" seawater, let's be rational and unemotional and say that the oil is "enriching" the seawater.
Third, hasn't it occurred to anyone that this oil might prevent the harmful sea surges that did so much damage to New Orleans during the Katrina disaster? Let's stop berating BP when all they're really doing is pouring oil on the troubled waters.
People do not appreciate the difference in light level between a seemingly well-lit home (150 lux) or office (500 lux) and daylight (100,000 lux). You need to get within striking distance of daylight to reset circadian rhythms. A perception of "bright lighting" is not good enough.
An iPad screen is not readable in daylight, so it must not be as bright as daylit outdoor surfaces. Daylight fills your entire field of view, approximately 2 steradians. An iPad screen is about 70 square inches, and is held, perhaps 18 inches from your eye, so it fills 70/384 = 0.2 steradians. So an iPad must have less than a tenth the circadian resetting power of daylight.
Yes, we were promised that these machines would have a built-in software fig leaf. Now, of course, at some level it must be possible to turn it off, but if it's trivially easy for ordinary TSA staffers to peek at each other, then it's trivially easy for ordinary TSA staffers to peek at us.
I'm probably being overly pedantic about this, but of course the word "law" in "Moore's Law" is almost tongue-in-cheek. There's no comparison between a simple observation that some trend or another is exponential--most trends are over a limited period of time--and a physical "law." Moore is not the first person to plot an economic trend on semilog paper.
There isn't even any particular basis for calling Moore's Law anything more than an observation. New technologies will not automatically come into being in order to fulfill it. Perhaps you can call it an economic law--people will not bother to go through the disruption of buying a new computer unless it is 30% faster than the previous one, therefore successive product introductions will always be 30% faster, or something like that.
In contrast, something like "Conway's Law"--"organizations which design systems... are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations"--may not be in the same category as Kepler's Laws, but it is more than an observation--it derives from an understanding of how people work in organizations.
Moore's Law is barely in the same category as Bode's Law, which says that "the radius of the orbit of planet #N is 0.4 + 0.3 * 2^(N-1) astronomical units, if you call the asteroid belt a planet, pretend that 2^-1 is 0, and, of course, forget Pluto, which we now do anyway."
The fundamental things apply as time goes by: man must have his mate, and man must mark his territory.
But I think they're missing an opportunity. The robot ought to be anatomically correct, and contain a little reservoir of Japanese urine it could spray onto the surface of the moon. There, let's see any human astronauts match that!
Morris Bishop said it well:
OZYMANDIAS REVISITED
I met a traveller from an antique land Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand, Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed. And on the pedestal these words appear: `My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings: Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!'" Also the names of Emory P. Gray, Mr. and Mrs. Dukes, and Oscar Baer of 17 West 4th Street, Oyster Bay.
Who buys 3-1/2" floppies? The same people who buy Polaroid film. OK, not exactly the same people, but in real life, people and companies don't throw out stuff that is working perfectly well, and they keep buying the consumables for a long time after the product is supposedly "obsolete."
There's a consistent, strong tendency to overemphasis the new stuff, because it's how companies make their money, it's what makes for interesting articles in the trade press, and personal career advancement is better served by expertise in Windows 7 than in MS-DOS. But don't think for a minute that MS-DOS is not being used anywhere in your company.
People will say "that's five years old, do we really need to support it?" You point down the hall to the room where some PC-AT is still in use, and the reaction is, "Oh, sure, isn't it awful, I can't believe we have those museum pieces lying around, but that's just because our company is no good. NOBODY ELSE has them." Wrong, everybody does. If there's some manager who thinks they don't, it just means they don't know where it is.
There is still a market for new typewriter ribbons, compact cassette tapes, and vacuum tubes. When a billion dollar market becomes a $10 million dollar market, it doesn't necessarily become unprofitable. Heck, my dad once bought an old cylinder photograph that wasn't working. There was still an outfit that was still making replacement needles and diaphragms and other parts for them.
The idea that the seating arrangement matters much smells to me like Management Fad.
You say "In many offices and departments it increases productivity and makes collaboration easy." Is there a shred of data to back that up?
In Peopleware, DeMarco and Lister concluded that there was only one variable that correlated with programmer productivity: number of square feet of office space per programmer. If so, then to the extent that seating people around a round table puts them closer together, it will reduce productivity.
???? My reply got oddly truncated or garbled despite looking correct in Preview.
Let me try again. Yes, you and others who commented similarly are correct.
In this particular case, it happens that the issue of an exact 2:1 ratio can't arise, though. 136 is less than 2 times 70. 137 is less than 2 times 69. 138, however, is greater than 2 * 68. That's a feeble excuse, though. I should have handled the case of exact equality correctly.
The ratio of 2/3 to 1/3 is 2:1. In order for a measure to pass by a two-thirds vote, the majority must have more than twice as many as the minority. 136 is less than two times 70, so the vote does not pass.
"Onboard storage, however, is not the point, according to Microsoft executives. In fact, both phones serve as a portal to the cloud, storing photos, videos and other data on the network, rather than on the phone. Neither phone, for example, has an SD card slot, executives said. 'Thousands of customers walk into our stores every month and ask us, how do I get photos off this phone?' said John Harrobin, Verizon's vice president of digital media.'"
Oooh, "portal to the cloud." Well, then, that answers all criticism.
The younger generation just totally gets putting their pictures in the cloud. Verizon will transmit and store them for free. The cloud storage will be accessible to, compatible with, and interoperable with with their friends' iPhones. The risque pictures they upload will be secure and private. The concept of storing them in an SD card is way too technical for the target market to comprehend. Not.
How many people had the same impression I had: "Why, this sounds exactly like one of the 'Chaos Manor' columns Jerry Pournelle used to write in BYTE!"
All it needs is a few of Jerry Pournelle's favorite stock phrases. "The disk trundled for a while..." "I tried swapping out the hard disk, but no joy..." "I called up Bill Godbout..."
I recently took part in a collaborative project, resulting in a published book, which was done by means of Google Docs.
I was underwhelmed. I used only the "document" (word processing) tool. There were scores of little clunky things about the user interface, many puzzles and problems involving document exchange and permissions, and the "feature-completeness" of the application was maybe late 1980s.
But what really got me was that the basic editing operations were unreliable. I would insert a 12-point subheading above a 10-point text paragraph and the whole paragraph would change to 12-point text, stuff like that. Two sections might both show normal single-spaced line spacing within the editor, yet the final PDF output would render one of them as single-spaced and the other as double-spaced.
After a while I thought perhaps it was an incompatibility with Safari, although Google does not suggest any such thing, and switched to Firefox. There were still continual problems of this kind, popping up randomly; perhaps not as often and perhaps not exactly the same as under Safari.
If this were running locally under Windows or Mac OS, people would roll on the floor laughing at it. Apple's TextEdit or Microsoft's WordPad would blow it out of the water. If this is the best Web 2.0 can do, local PCs are safe.
The thing is, the press writes about them as if Google Docs were a full-featured, commercial-quality applications... as good a substitute for Word as, say, OpenOffice. It isn't. Under some conditions I guess the collaborative features make it better than nothing (the book got finished).
No doubt the marketers will spin it out endlessly by with continuous frank acknowledgement that whatever is the actual Google Docs you can get now IS a joke, it is the NEXT one that will be desktop-application quality--just as the next version of Windows will be secure and easy to use. We will see. But the current Google Docs, if considered as a serious alternative to a locally-hosted application, is a joke.
The job of creative people is to invent and to assemble a whole that's worth more than the sum of its parts. Then it is possible for a manufacturer to buy those parts for $C, put them together in a pattern, and get something that is worth $C + $X. What happens next is indeterminate. In a perfect buyer's market, the price is forced down to $C, the seller makes no profit, and the buyer is enriched by $X of extra value and is ecstatic. In a seller's market, the price is $C + $X and the buyer gets what he pays for, and is grudgingly satisfied but not thrilled.
The optimum social outcome is what maximizes the product $P times the number of units sold after other positive or negative societal effects are accounted for.
Now, by and large corporations seem to be greedy idiots who simply grab as much of the created value $P as possible. Lock-ins, bundling, bait-and-switch, misleading advertising, broken promises, preannouncements, monopolization--whatever it takes. They forget the costs of making their customers feel angry, or trapped, or betrayed, because they see it as a pure exercise of raw power, not a human transaction where fairness counts.
The problem in thinking about Apple is that Job is both wise and tasteful. He really _does_ care about the end-user's experience, in a way that other company's only give lip-service too. The very name Windows XP was supposed to stand for "customer experience," yet when Vista came along Microsoft was happy to collaborate with Intel and computer makers in marketing "Vista ready machines" that they all knew could never give buyers a good x-perience.
Jobs is willing to share more of the $X with customers. Apple products consistently have good fit and finish, they are nice, they are well-thought out, they work, and are almost free from the sort of errors that suggest that nobody ever tried some feature even once. (Current pet peeve: about 10% of the time, I cannot remove my USB drive from my Windows machine. It claims its in use but won't tell me who's using it. It says "close applications" but according to the Task Manager no applications are open. Eject does nothing. "Safely remove hardware" puts up a dialogue box saying it was waiting for the device to "stop" and never finishes. This has been true with XP forever, across multiple machines, across multiple USB sticks. Last week it happened on a brand new Windows 7 machine. I mean, what is this? Nobody at Microsoft uses USB drives? Nobody in Microsoft SQA has ever seen this? At no time in the past ten years, encompassing a supposed total OS rewrite and a major second release, did anyone ever fix it? This is some obscure problem that only affects me? Come on. Microsoft must know about it, they just don't care.)
It drive people batty that Job's high-handed dictatorial stance can result in very good products. But it does. Whether it's a good thing or not, is hard to say. Almost certainly not, and it's probably not sustainable--wise Emperor Steve Augustus will eventually be succeeded by Caligula. But while it lasts, let's acknowledge that it does produce awfully good results.
This is standard operating procedure for systematics and has been for a century or so. It happens all the time. International codes spell out exactly how it all works. Systematists have agreed long ago that this is the way it should be and scientists take it in stride. These scientific names are created and managed to meet specific needs of working scientists. It should be of no more consequence to nonspecialists than changing "cycles per second" to "Hz" or "carbonic acid" to "carbon dioxide" or changes in IUPAC rules.
The horseshoe crab was Limulus polyphemus, then Xiphosura polyphemus, then Limulus polyphemus again.
In 1962 Theodore Savory wrote, in Naming the Living World: "The second belief, apparently held by many, is that a change of name is a serious, almost a catastrophic occurrence, but in everyday life outside the lab this is simply not true; and a biologist may be reminded that both his mother and his wife have survived the same metamorphosis. The third fallacy is that the possession by an organism of two or three [different scientific] names imposes upon biologists that it is beyond their capacities to carry. This could be true only if zoologists, for example, were expected or needed to be familiar with every animal, whereas nearly all active zoologists today are either physiologists, who do not seem to care about nomenclature, or specialists concerned with only one group, large or small but essentially limited."
The scientific names of organisms serve a number of functions. One is to be sure that scientists working worldwide know what organism is being referred to, and avoiding problems with common names such as "daddy long-legs" or "nightingale..." or, for that matter, "fruit fly" which describes at least two different families of insect.
Another is to reflect the systematic relationships of species as best known. As knowledge evolves, names evolve.
Biologists agreed on the best way to handle this long ago. It's not at all analogous to Pluto. There are less than ten planets, and there are over a million species of animals and plants. If you think scientists can get all of them right and never change any of them, think again.
If you write a scientific paper, you have a choice: call it Sophophora melanogaster or Drosophila melanogaster. If you call it Drosophila, likely someone will insist on correcting it, but maybe not. Either way it is not going to be a problem and is not going to cause "chaos in the literature" because everyone who knows the species by its scientific name will know about the change. Nobody is going to get confused. Automated searches will get cross-references just like card catalog did.
And if you're not doing professional science, just go on calling them "fruit flies." Just like "Baltimore orioles."
Nobody but boring technogeeks are going to understand the importance of the distinction between "strict OOXML" and "transitional OOXML." It's all very well for Alex Brown to say transitional OOXML was "not the format 'approved by ISO/IEC', it is the format that was rejected," but it sure doesn't _sound_ that way.
It wouldn't even take much dishonesty for a salesperson to say "supports OOXML," and the top-level managers who make the purchasing decisions will nod and smile. What are the chances they will know the importance of asking the question "is that transitional OOXML or strict OOXML?" And any top-level manager, approached by some intense young technogeek, is going to wonder if it's really all that important, and whether transitional OOXML isn't really good enough.
Within Microsoft, how many high-level managers are going to think it is urgently important for Office to support "strict OOXML" rather than "transitional OOXML?"
The battle was probably lost when they allowed those names to be used. Now nobody can ever mention the matter to any lay outsider without prefixing it with a couple of minutes of exposition.
That's not hard. What's hard is for the application to be a good citizen of each platform. That is, to run properly and follow the UI customs, idiomatic usages, and meet user expectations on each platform.
If the application is completely self-contained and basically implements its own UI, then, sure, it can appropriately "run unchanged" on multiple platforms.
But for the application to select files properly, with, for example, Mac OS's idiosyncratic world view (with "/Volumes/abc" and "/Volumes/def", all appearing at the same level as/), or Windows' view (with "Desktop" at the top)... or to open files properly across a network... or make "help" respond to the "help" key on a Mac and F1 on Windows... or respond to a USB device... etc... is not so easy.
I'd forgotten they even existed. I just gave 'em another try. I have a slightly obscure search I've had only indifferent results on with Google; about fifty hits, none quite the one I want. I gave Bing a try, and was gratified to find about the same number of hits but far from total overlap, and Bing gave me a few useful results Google hadn't given me.
Hundreds of thousands of people bought Kindles on the basis of their perception of the overall deal. I think most buyers know that the cost of the razor (Kindle) is dominated by the cost of the blades (eBooks). Of course there was no written contract, but those hundreds of thousands of buyers thought they were buying into an ecosystem of $10 eBooks. An eBook delivers less value than a trade paperback, but that was OK because it cost less than a trade paperback.
Now, suddenly, the whole proposition is changed. They're being asked to pay meaningfully more than when they signed on. A big jump. Pretty much all at once. And they're now being asked to pay more than the price of a trade paperback for something that for most readers is less valuable than a trade paperback.
If you don't believe eBooks are less valuable than trade paperbacks, then please name your price for my copy of Bill Bryson's "A Short History of Nearly Everything." It's only six years old, and in mint condition (bits don't rot), and I'll sell it cheap. Oh, did I forget to mention it's a GemStar DRM-protected eBook edition, readable only on one GemStar eBook device in the world--mine--which I'd throw in for free if I hadn't already thrown it out when it crapped out last year. You can't buy a new one because they don't make 'em any more. And if you have a GemStar eBook device, GemStar customer service can't transfer my book to you because they're long since out of business
I believe this price increase, whether it's Amazon's fault or not, and despite the fact that $10 eBooks were merely an expectation set by Amazon, is going to make a lot of Kindle owners angry. Obviously publishers think they hold the balance of power and that it doesn't matter if their customers get angry. Maybe they're right.
Slashdot Mirror
--then a task which rewards those who game the system is certainly a sound approach. :) ---Irony, note smiley.
Seriously, what message does this sort of thing send you employees.
1) We are willing to have people work on things that will never get used.
2) We like to fire people, two out of three in this case.
3) We do not trust any of you.
4) We enjoy imposing pressure that is not intrinsic within the task itself.
5) We do not trust our ability to recognize good programmers. Something to keep in mind at review time.
6) We judge by "results," meaning we do not judge the fundamental underpinnings of those results.
The system relies on tracking a viewer's eyes, so it can only be viewed by more than one person at a time.
If you're viewing by yourself in private at home, why would you care about how you look wearing glasses?
The applications for a no-glasses solo viewing display would seem to be limited. I don't see any use for personal viewing at home.
Advertising in a public area? It has to have so little traffic that no more than one person at a time is likely to be in range, yet enough traffic to justify the cost of installing the system.
Hotel? If there are two beds in a room, they'd better plan on double occupancy. Two TVs?
Arcade games? Seatback entertainment on planes and busses? ZunePads? Can anyone think of anything else?
I have no idea how this plays into the corporate strategic chess game.
For me, it's very simple. I am Apple's customer, and Apple has put a darned nice feature into the web browser that makes the web work more nicely for me. I'm surprised nobody's done it before. I'm glad they've done it now. I'll enjoy it for as long as it works.
One of the things I dislike about Microsoft is that they never act as if I were their customer. I always feel that everything they do has a string attached, a hidden agenda, and they always serve Microsoft's needs first, then those of Dell and HP. I'm not even sure Microsoft regards me as their customer.
Oddly enough, the thing I like best about the "reader" is not that it removes ads, but that it allows me to read something in one window while it flips the pages of some interminably slow multipage article, and then lets me look at the completed article without waiting for new pages to load. I'd like it even if it preserved all the ads.
When was it? They used to advertise heavily on TV. It positioned itself as a search service, and the pitch was that every time you used it for a search, you were automatically getting entered for free into a sweepstakes. The obnoxious ad showed a "plain-folks" lady, presumably at work, asking sotto voce "If I use it at work and I win, does my boss get the money?" and the announcer saying enthusiastically "No, you get the money," and the lady replying "Good to know."
Of course I tried it, and the free sweepstakes feature was marred by the fact that it couldn't find its behind with both hands and a flashlight.
It still exists, but seems to have positioned itself as "Play games! Earn coins! Win prizes." The word "search" does not even appear on its home page, although it is apparently possible to perform a genuine Google search from the site, while, I suppose, accruing infinitesimal chances of obtaining something of value--I'm too lazy to figure it out--at http://www1.iwon.com/home/search/search_simple/
Sorry if the humor wasn't broad enough. (Or, perhaps not funny enough?)
The press is focussing too much on the "what if" and not the "what is."
First of all, how do we even know that the oil is harmful? There haven't been any long-term scientific studies on oil spills of this much oil of this kind. Why, for all we know, it might be beneficial! We shouldn't rush to judgement until this has been properly studied.
Second, let's stop using loaded terms like "pollution." Economists say we should measure the value of something by what people are willing to pay for it. Oil is worth $72 a barrel. The price of enough Instant Ocean to mix up a barrel of seawater is $8.72. So let's stop talking about oil as "polluting" seawater, let's be rational and unemotional and say that the oil is "enriching" the seawater.
Third, hasn't it occurred to anyone that this oil might prevent the harmful sea surges that did so much damage to New Orleans during the Katrina disaster? Let's stop berating BP when all they're really doing is pouring oil on the troubled waters.
People do not appreciate the difference in light level between a seemingly well-lit home (150 lux) or office (500 lux) and daylight (100,000 lux). You need to get within striking distance of daylight to reset circadian rhythms. A perception of "bright lighting" is not good enough.
An iPad screen is not readable in daylight, so it must not be as bright as daylit outdoor surfaces. Daylight fills your entire field of view, approximately 2 steradians. An iPad screen is about 70 square inches, and is held, perhaps 18 inches from your eye, so it fills 70/384 = 0.2 steradians. So an iPad must have less than a tenth the circadian resetting power of daylight.
Yes, we were promised that these machines would have a built-in software fig leaf. Now, of course, at some level it must be possible to turn it off, but if it's trivially easy for ordinary TSA staffers to peek at each other, then it's trivially easy for ordinary TSA staffers to peek at us.
I'm probably being overly pedantic about this, but of course the word "law" in "Moore's Law" is almost tongue-in-cheek. There's no comparison between a simple observation that some trend or another is exponential--most trends are over a limited period of time--and a physical "law." Moore is not the first person to plot an economic trend on semilog paper.
There isn't even any particular basis for calling Moore's Law anything more than an observation. New technologies will not automatically come into being in order to fulfill it. Perhaps you can call it an economic law--people will not bother to go through the disruption of buying a new computer unless it is 30% faster than the previous one, therefore successive product introductions will always be 30% faster, or something like that.
In contrast, something like "Conway's Law"--"organizations which design systems ... are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations"--may not be in the same category as Kepler's Laws, but it is more than an observation--it derives from an understanding of how people work in organizations.
Moore's Law is barely in the same category as Bode's Law, which says that "the radius of the orbit of planet #N is 0.4 + 0.3 * 2^(N-1) astronomical units, if you call the asteroid belt a planet, pretend that 2^-1 is 0, and, of course, forget Pluto, which we now do anyway."
The fundamental things apply as time goes by: man must have his mate, and man must mark his territory.
But I think they're missing an opportunity. The robot ought to be anatomically correct, and contain a little reservoir of Japanese urine it could spray onto the surface of the moon. There, let's see any human astronauts match that!
Morris Bishop said it well:
OZYMANDIAS REVISITED
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
`My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!'"
Also the names of Emory P. Gray,
Mr. and Mrs. Dukes, and Oscar Baer
of 17 West 4th Street, Oyster Bay.
Who buys 3-1/2" floppies? The same people who buy Polaroid film. OK, not exactly the same people, but in real life, people and companies don't throw out stuff that is working perfectly well, and they keep buying the consumables for a long time after the product is supposedly "obsolete."
There's a consistent, strong tendency to overemphasis the new stuff, because it's how companies make their money, it's what makes for interesting articles in the trade press, and personal career advancement is better served by expertise in Windows 7 than in MS-DOS. But don't think for a minute that MS-DOS is not being used anywhere in your company.
People will say "that's five years old, do we really need to support it?" You point down the hall to the room where some PC-AT is still in use, and the reaction is, "Oh, sure, isn't it awful, I can't believe we have those museum pieces lying around, but that's just because our company is no good. NOBODY ELSE has them." Wrong, everybody does. If there's some manager who thinks they don't, it just means they don't know where it is.
There is still a market for new typewriter ribbons, compact cassette tapes, and vacuum tubes. When a billion dollar market becomes a $10 million dollar market, it doesn't necessarily become unprofitable. Heck, my dad once bought an old cylinder photograph that wasn't working. There was still an outfit that was still making replacement needles and diaphragms and other parts for them.
The idea that the seating arrangement matters much smells to me like Management Fad.
You say "In many offices and departments it increases productivity and makes collaboration easy." Is there a shred of data to back that up?
In Peopleware, DeMarco and Lister concluded that there was only one variable that correlated with programmer productivity: number of square feet of office space per programmer. If so, then to the extent that seating people around a round table puts them closer together, it will reduce productivity.
???? My reply got oddly truncated or garbled despite looking correct in Preview.
Let me try again. Yes, you and others who commented similarly are correct.
In this particular case, it happens that the issue of an exact 2:1 ratio can't arise, though. 136 is less than 2 times 70. 137 is less than 2 times 69. 138, however, is greater than 2 * 68. That's a feeble excuse, though. I should have handled the case of exact equality correctly.
Yes, you and others who commented similarly are correct. I get 2 * 68, so the case of an exact 2:1 ratio isn't possible here.
The ratio of 2/3 to 1/3 is 2:1. In order for a measure to pass by a two-thirds vote, the majority must have more than twice as many as the minority. 136 is less than two times 70, so the vote does not pass.
"Onboard storage, however, is not the point, according to Microsoft executives. In fact, both phones serve as a portal to the cloud, storing photos, videos and other data on the network, rather than on the phone. Neither phone, for example, has an SD card slot, executives said. 'Thousands of customers walk into our stores every month and ask us, how do I get photos off this phone?' said John Harrobin, Verizon's vice president of digital media.'"
Oooh, "portal to the cloud." Well, then, that answers all criticism.
The younger generation just totally gets putting their pictures in the cloud. Verizon will transmit and store them for free. The cloud storage will be accessible to, compatible with, and interoperable with with their friends' iPhones. The risque pictures they upload will be secure and private. The concept of storing them in an SD card is way too technical for the target market to comprehend. Not.
How many people had the same impression I had: "Why, this sounds exactly like one of the 'Chaos Manor' columns Jerry Pournelle used to write in BYTE!"
All it needs is a few of Jerry Pournelle's favorite stock phrases. "The disk trundled for a while..." "I tried swapping out the hard disk, but no joy..." "I called up Bill Godbout..."
I recently took part in a collaborative project, resulting in a published book, which was done by means of Google Docs.
I was underwhelmed. I used only the "document" (word processing) tool. There were scores of little clunky things about the user interface, many puzzles and problems involving document exchange and permissions, and the "feature-completeness" of the application was maybe late 1980s.
But what really got me was that the basic editing operations were unreliable. I would insert a 12-point subheading above a 10-point text paragraph and the whole paragraph would change to 12-point text, stuff like that. Two sections might both show normal single-spaced line spacing within the editor, yet the final PDF output would render one of them as single-spaced and the other as double-spaced.
After a while I thought perhaps it was an incompatibility with Safari, although Google does not suggest any such thing, and switched to Firefox. There were still continual problems of this kind, popping up randomly; perhaps not as often and perhaps not exactly the same as under Safari.
If this were running locally under Windows or Mac OS, people would roll on the floor laughing at it. Apple's TextEdit or Microsoft's WordPad would blow it out of the water. If this is the best Web 2.0 can do, local PCs are safe.
The thing is, the press writes about them as if Google Docs were a full-featured, commercial-quality applications... as good a substitute for Word as, say, OpenOffice. It isn't. Under some conditions I guess the collaborative features make it better than nothing (the book got finished).
No doubt the marketers will spin it out endlessly by with continuous frank acknowledgement that whatever is the actual Google Docs you can get now IS a joke, it is the NEXT one that will be desktop-application quality--just as the next version of Windows will be secure and easy to use. We will see. But the current Google Docs, if considered as a serious alternative to a locally-hosted application, is a joke.
The job of creative people is to invent and to assemble a whole that's worth more than the sum of its parts. Then it is possible for a manufacturer to buy those parts for $C, put them together in a pattern, and get something that is worth $C + $X. What happens next is indeterminate. In a perfect buyer's market, the price is forced down to $C, the seller makes no profit, and the buyer is enriched by $X of extra value and is ecstatic. In a seller's market, the price is $C + $X and the buyer gets what he pays for, and is grudgingly satisfied but not thrilled.
The optimum social outcome is what maximizes the product $P times the number of units sold after other positive or negative societal effects are accounted for.
Now, by and large corporations seem to be greedy idiots who simply grab as much of the created value $P as possible. Lock-ins, bundling, bait-and-switch, misleading advertising, broken promises, preannouncements, monopolization--whatever it takes. They forget the costs of making their customers feel angry, or trapped, or betrayed, because they see it as a pure exercise of raw power, not a human transaction where fairness counts.
The problem in thinking about Apple is that Job is both wise and tasteful. He really _does_ care about the end-user's experience, in a way that other company's only give lip-service too. The very name Windows XP was supposed to stand for "customer experience," yet when Vista came along Microsoft was happy to collaborate with Intel and computer makers in marketing "Vista ready machines" that they all knew could never give buyers a good x-perience.
Jobs is willing to share more of the $X with customers. Apple products consistently have good fit and finish, they are nice, they are well-thought out, they work, and are almost free from the sort of errors that suggest that nobody ever tried some feature even once. (Current pet peeve: about 10% of the time, I cannot remove my USB drive from my Windows machine. It claims its in use but won't tell me who's using it. It says "close applications" but according to the Task Manager no applications are open. Eject does nothing. "Safely remove hardware" puts up a dialogue box saying it was waiting for the device to "stop" and never finishes. This has been true with XP forever, across multiple machines, across multiple USB sticks. Last week it happened on a brand new Windows 7 machine. I mean, what is this? Nobody at Microsoft uses USB drives? Nobody in Microsoft SQA has ever seen this? At no time in the past ten years, encompassing a supposed total OS rewrite and a major second release, did anyone ever fix it? This is some obscure problem that only affects me? Come on. Microsoft must know about it, they just don't care.)
It drive people batty that Job's high-handed dictatorial stance can result in very good products. But it does. Whether it's a good thing or not, is hard to say. Almost certainly not, and it's probably not sustainable--wise Emperor Steve Augustus will eventually be succeeded by Caligula. But while it lasts, let's acknowledge that it does produce awfully good results.
This is standard operating procedure for systematics and has been for a century or so. It happens all the time. International codes spell out exactly how it all works. Systematists have agreed long ago that this is the way it should be and scientists take it in stride. These scientific names are created and managed to meet specific needs of working scientists. It should be of no more consequence to nonspecialists than changing "cycles per second" to "Hz" or "carbonic acid" to "carbon dioxide" or changes in IUPAC rules.
The horseshoe crab was Limulus polyphemus, then Xiphosura polyphemus, then Limulus polyphemus again.
In 1962 Theodore Savory wrote, in Naming the Living World: "The second belief, apparently held by many, is that a change of name is a serious, almost a catastrophic occurrence, but in everyday life outside the lab this is simply not true; and a biologist may be reminded that both his mother and his wife have survived the same metamorphosis. The third fallacy is that the possession by an organism of two or three [different scientific] names imposes upon biologists that it is beyond their capacities to carry. This could be true only if zoologists, for example, were expected or needed to be familiar with every animal, whereas nearly all active zoologists today are either physiologists, who do not seem to care about nomenclature, or specialists concerned with only one group, large or small but essentially limited."
The scientific names of organisms serve a number of functions. One is to be sure that scientists working worldwide know what organism is being referred to, and avoiding problems with common names such as "daddy long-legs" or "nightingale..." or, for that matter, "fruit fly" which describes at least two different families of insect.
Another is to reflect the systematic relationships of species as best known. As knowledge evolves, names evolve.
Biologists agreed on the best way to handle this long ago. It's not at all analogous to Pluto. There are less than ten planets, and there are over a million species of animals and plants. If you think scientists can get all of them right and never change any of them, think again.
If you write a scientific paper, you have a choice: call it Sophophora melanogaster or Drosophila melanogaster. If you call it Drosophila, likely someone will insist on correcting it, but maybe not. Either way it is not going to be a problem and is not going to cause "chaos in the literature" because everyone who knows the species by its scientific name will know about the change. Nobody is going to get confused. Automated searches will get cross-references just like card catalog did.
And if you're not doing professional science, just go on calling them "fruit flies." Just like "Baltimore orioles."
Nobody but boring technogeeks are going to understand the importance of the distinction between "strict OOXML" and "transitional OOXML." It's all very well for Alex Brown to say transitional OOXML was "not the format 'approved by ISO/IEC', it is the format that was rejected," but it sure doesn't _sound_ that way.
It wouldn't even take much dishonesty for a salesperson to say "supports OOXML," and the top-level managers who make the purchasing decisions will nod and smile. What are the chances they will know the importance of asking the question "is that transitional OOXML or strict OOXML?" And any top-level manager, approached by some intense young technogeek, is going to wonder if it's really all that important, and whether transitional OOXML isn't really good enough.
Within Microsoft, how many high-level managers are going to think it is urgently important for Office to support "strict OOXML" rather than "transitional OOXML?"
The battle was probably lost when they allowed those names to be used. Now nobody can ever mention the matter to any lay outsider without prefixing it with a couple of minutes of exposition.
That's not hard. What's hard is for the application to be a good citizen of each platform. That is, to run properly and follow the UI customs, idiomatic usages, and meet user expectations on each platform.
If the application is completely self-contained and basically implements its own UI, then, sure, it can appropriately "run unchanged" on multiple platforms.
But for the application to select files properly, with, for example, Mac OS's idiosyncratic world view (with "/Volumes/abc" and "/Volumes/def", all appearing at the same level as /), or Windows' view (with "Desktop" at the top)... or to open files properly across a network... or make "help" respond to the "help" key on a Mac and F1 on Windows... or respond to a USB device... etc... is not so easy.
I'd forgotten they even existed. I just gave 'em another try. I have a slightly obscure search I've had only indifferent results on with Google; about fifty hits, none quite the one I want. I gave Bing a try, and was gratified to find about the same number of hits but far from total overlap, and Bing gave me a few useful results Google hadn't given me.
Cuil? Zero hits, zip, none, nada.
Hundreds of thousands of people bought Kindles on the basis of their perception of the overall deal. I think most buyers know that the cost of the razor (Kindle) is dominated by the cost of the blades (eBooks). Of course there was no written contract, but those hundreds of thousands of buyers thought they were buying into an ecosystem of $10 eBooks. An eBook delivers less value than a trade paperback, but that was OK because it cost less than a trade paperback.
Now, suddenly, the whole proposition is changed. They're being asked to pay meaningfully more than when they signed on. A big jump. Pretty much all at once. And they're now being asked to pay more than the price of a trade paperback for something that for most readers is less valuable than a trade paperback.
If you don't believe eBooks are less valuable than trade paperbacks, then please name your price for my copy of Bill Bryson's "A Short History of Nearly Everything." It's only six years old, and in mint condition (bits don't rot), and I'll sell it cheap. Oh, did I forget to mention it's a GemStar DRM-protected eBook edition, readable only on one GemStar eBook device in the world--mine--which I'd throw in for free if I hadn't already thrown it out when it crapped out last year. You can't buy a new one because they don't make 'em any more. And if you have a GemStar eBook device, GemStar customer service can't transfer my book to you because they're long since out of business
I believe this price increase, whether it's Amazon's fault or not, and despite the fact that $10 eBooks were merely an expectation set by Amazon, is going to make a lot of Kindle owners angry. Obviously publishers think they hold the balance of power and that it doesn't matter if their customers get angry. Maybe they're right.
How quickly we forget. John Sculley was showing demoware of the Knowledge Navigator all over the place in the late 1980s.
Here's a picture of it, bowtie and all.
It has gone to whatever Valhalla OpenDoc, Cyberdog, and QuickDraw GX dwell in.