"Rushing to fix bugs" is like rushing any other meticulous job. It can't be done.
Bugs are the consequence of rushing the job in the first place. (Taking time, is of course, necessary but not sufficient).
If Microsoft knows a way to "rush" bug fixes without compromising quality, they would have been able to "rush" their development without creating the bugs in the first place.
Sounds like a job for real-time computers
on
Rocket Men
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
It's understandable that in 1961 the pilot needed to fly the rocket belt with only his own reflexes and semicircular canals to guide him.
But even in the late 1960s my aero-and-astro student colleagues told me that even the Boeing 727 was too unstable to be controlled by a human pilot using reflexes alone: it relied on "yaw dampers," servo mechanisms that amounted to electronic analog computers, to tame the raw behavior of the plane.
The Boeing 777 is a completely "fly-by-wire" design.
It seems to me that it ought to be possible to design microprocessor-controlled rocket belts that would be much easier and safer to fly than those of the 1960s. (Including, of course, electronic active noise cancellation in the helmet to provide at least some reduction of the "deafening noise 3 feet three feet from his ear."
Trying to fly the rocket belts described in the strikes me as rather like trying to fly a full-size, exact model of Langley's Aerodrome. It may be possible--for someone with the reflexes of a Santos-Dumont and the nerves of an Evel Knievel--but it's still just a stunt. The Wright Brothers achievement was ''not'' building an aeroplane that could get off the ground; it was building an aeroplane that they ''and others'' could get (relatively!) ''safely'' off the ground.
The Osborne 1 computer died. The IBM Stretch 7030 computer died. The Sony Walkman died. The Studebaker died... and so did the Oldsmobile and the Plymouth. Eleven of the twelve corporations in the original Dow Jones Index died. Elvis Presley died. The Soviet Union died. The United Society of Believers (Shakers) died. The Roman Empire died. Kepler's supernova died.
The iPod will die. So will Windows. So will the Toyota Prius. So will Toyota. So will GE, the sole surviving original Dow Jones Index company. So will the United States of America. So will life on earth. So will the sun. Even Jack LaLanne will eventually die (oh, wait...)
"Google" has no particular referent other than Barney Google, possibly the longest-running comic in history, about a "cigar-smoking, sports-loving, poker-playing, girl-chasing ne'er-do-well" and his hapless horse Spark Plug.
Barney Google was the subject of a hit song of the 1920s:
Baaaaaaarney Google! With his goog-goog-googley eyes! Baaaaaaarney Google! Had a wife three times his size! She sued Barney for divorce-- Now he's living with his horse! Barney Google! With his goog-goog-gooley eyes!
Exxon only works in Chevrolets, and Chrysler owners must seek out Citgo stations.
It's always been that way. That's what made American oil companies and American automakers so successful.
Consumers love being asked to guess which product to buy, knowing that there's only one chance in three they'll be able to use the product five years from now.
"The company said it would retool its product line to shift the very focus of computing away from hardware devices and toward a new generation of Internet-based software allowing people to interact with data and one another whether they are using computers, digital cell phones or interactive televisions. William H. Gates, Microsoft's chairman, portrayed the long-awaited move as 'more ambitious than anything we've done' adding, 'There is no Microsoft product that isn't touched by this activity....'...The strategy will involve repackaging some of the company's core products, like its Office software, as subscription-based services obtained over the Internet."
"Microsoft's new view of computing calls for processing to be done everywhere,... But while he and Mr. Gates insisted that those services would be based on an open Internet standard, enabling users with non-Windows-based platforms like the Palm computer and Apple Computer's Macintosh to take advantage of them, the executives acknowledged that such users would be second-class citizens. Mr. Gates said the "richest" interactions with the new.NET services would require the new Windows.NET operating system."
"Mr. Gates said that the bet on.NET was equivalent to the 100 percent bet the company placed on its shift to the Internet strategy in 1995. Mr. Ballmer said he was confident, but he realized that the strategy was still a gamble. 'It's a bet I feel very confident about,' he said. 'But it's a bet.'"
Chiapaint. A decade old, and more relevant than ever. The only thing out of date is the modem squawk.
Of course, if Chiapaint doesn't convince you, enjoy, you can go to any number of websites that will cause a cute little picture of a steaming coffee cup to appear in your browser window for about a minute and then crash, misbehave, post error messages, display a grey rectangle, or tell you to update your version of Java.
He says "I think the secret to the future is quantity," he says, and says "I can make 50-60 two-hour movies" for the $200 million cost of a Star Wars epic.
Now, it's possible to make good films on a low budget, but I doubt that it's possible to crank them out _quickly._ I have the idea he is not talking about 50-60 "American Graffittis" or 50-60 "Easy Riders" or 50-60 "CSA: Confederate State of Americas" or 50-60 "Wordplays" or even 50-60 "Kukla, Fran and Ollies."
Somehow I think it will be more like 50-60 "Captain Video and His Video Rangers" or 50-60 "Beverly Hillbillies" or 50-60 made-for-TV "movies." Schlocky junk that scratches the itch in some part of the brain to see shapes moving and hear voices. Junk that is not quite bad enough to motivate you to activate the muscles in the thumb that operate the clicker. Nothing that will stir up emotion... not even the degree of emotion generated by Jar-Jar Binks.
Will he actually make money at this? I don't know. And I certainly don't care.
A SUPERB book on this topic...
on
Why Software Sucks
·
· Score: 2, Informative
...regrettably out of print and, of course, now out of date... was Boris Beizer's The Frozen Keyboard: Living With Bad Software.
It is a classic, and well worth reading. And it does not condescend, and is full of good advice that naive users don't necessarily know. For example, don't type unreasonable values into fields... never enter data when the program appears to be busy doing something even if the program lets you do it... things like that.
Woot! Secret decoder rings! Invisible ink! See-bak-ro-scopes! And that great key to popularity, "Fool your friends!"
And those X-Ray Specs... (do they really see through clothing? Better get a pair, it's the only way to find out! And even if you can't, you always get a reaction by pretending they do...)
Gee whillikers, CEOs must be saying to themselves, now that I'm a big-deal important person, I can send away for ALL that stuff! Boy, will my friends be impressed when they realize my words are so important that other people are trying to overhear them... and that I have the wherewithal to spend tens of thousands on impressive-looking gadgets.
Sounds diabolically clever to me. Short-distance short-time song sharing sounds to me like something that would really get used if you have friends who have Zunes.
A lot depends on just how that three-day limit works. If you give a song to a friend and it expires, can you give it to him/her again?
I think quite a lot of music might get sold on the basis of short-term trials when the music was, in fact, recommended by a friend.
I can also see a lot of social gratification in being the first kid on the block to have paid for and bought a hot new tune, and therefore being the one who's in the position of being able to give trial versions to everyone else. (If Microsoft is smart, you will be able to give fresh trials over and over. Then the kids who haven't bought the music need to repeatedly go to the kid who has, in order to get their new time-limited free copies.) All of this in turn provides powerful reinforcement for wanting to buy the tune and be the go-to kid.
Actually, you want to do it in a hurry. If kid A gives you a free trial version, and you can afford to buy it, you'd want to buy it quickly, so there are still kids whom A hasn't given it to yet—kids for whom you can be the wealthy song-dispensing patron.
Furthermore, if there are a fair number of Zunes in play in a social group, then the kids with iPods are excluded... they see the kids with Zunes trading tunes and they're out of it, even if the kids with Zunes are their personal friends.
And I don't think these kids are going to spend much time stripping DRM from their music or exploiting the analog hole or anything like that.
The big "if" is whether the Zune garners enough critical mass for any of this to happen. If only two kids in school have Zunes and neither of them is interested in being a social patron of the other, it isn't going to work.
Mind you, this isn't what I want from a "wireless" mp3 player. But that doesn't mean it won't be effective.
...Unlike computer, cell phone hardware and firmware are 100% bug-free and reliable, and wireless connections are digital and therefore perfect with no error rate at all. Therefore, we need not contemplate the possibility of false positives ever triggering this feature accidentally.
Heck, why stop at an irritating noise? Have it trip a little relay that will short out the battery and make it explode. That will show them!
OK, helicopter blades are invisible, but they're far from inaudible.
Before radar, the Brits were having fairly good success using big arrays of horns and microphones to hear aircraft approaching from a considerable distance.
I notice the site doesn't say anything about decibels.
These essays seem to be running about 250 words... about a page.
Jack London was proud of himself for turning out 1000 words every day. George Bernard Shaw set his stint at five pages a day.
And of course a professional writer has been preparing to write those words and thinking about them well in advance. And they are on a topic that the writer has selected him- or herself, and has some knowledge of.
So they hit a _high school student_ cold with a topic the student has never seen before and give him or her twenty-five minutes (how on earth did they come up with that figure? Why not a round half-hour, at least?) to do, unprepared, what takes a professional writer a couple of hours, prepared... and people are surprised at the results?
This isn't a test of writing in any meaningful sense of the word. I don't know what it's testing, but it isn't writing.
I hope McAfee and Symantec were around pushing for the administration to enforce antitrust back when it might have mattered. It's too late now. This is what you get when a company acquires monopoly power.
I remember when water-cooler talk veered from sports to politics to what word processor you liked. (Remember when there was more than one?)
Anyone remember a program called Lotus 1-2-3?
Oh, and what about Stacker? Why, yes, Microsoft stole Stacker's technology, called it DoubleSpace, and drove Stacker out of business despite Stacker's winning their patent infringement lawsuit.
I haven't heard much about GoBack lately, have you? Wildfile GoBack... I mean Adaptec GoBack... I mean Roxio GoBack... I mean Norton GoBack...
Anyone who believes all this was because Microsoft had superior products lives in a logic-tight compartment.
It's too bad that the administration chose not to pursue antitrust in any meaningful way against Microsoft, but they didn't, and these are the consequences. If Microsoft feels like squashing Symantec and McAfee there's nothing you or I or Symantec or McAfee can do about it. Only the feds have enough power, and possibly even they don't have enough any more.
So, let's all hope Microsoft's antivirus component is pretty good, because whether it is or not, in a few years it's all we're going to have.
On the showing of the video, this is more art than science.
We do not expect children to display much sophistication in their emotional behavior or body language, we forgive children lapses in etiquette, and we do not challenge them by expecting more than rote conformance to stock conversational responses. Having Quasi speak in a child's voice (and show juvenile behavior) makes it difficult to judge how successfully it is mimicking real human responsiveness. I notice that Quasi is apt to go off in impressive long monologues, which also have the effect of minimizing the number of human-robot interactions. If all you do is tickle Elmo once, and he spends a full minute rolling around on the floor in laughter, that, too, is impressive... once... as are the mechanized orchestras at The House on the Rock in Wisconsin. It takes repeated interactions to judge whether there's subtlety to the peformance or whether we're seeing an artistic but mechanically repetitive performance.
I get the impression that Quasi is as much an exercise in the disarming artistic presentation of robot "intelligence," emotional or intellectual, as it is a demonstration of real capabillities.
The article says "According to Ford, Armstrong spoke, 'One small step for a man...' in a total of 35 milliseconds, 10 times too fast for the "a" to be audible."
I just checked the video (first one I found... I'm sure there are some that don't have Mahler music in the background, and it takes him a good three seconds to make the statement.
With pure bullshit like that, how can I trust anything else the article says?
The official transcript confirms the mistake, and the lengthy Snopes article (with an embellished recording indicates that Armstrong himself acknowledged and regretted the error. He flubbed his line, and encyclopedias that quote him with as "That's one small step for [a] man" are doing so for courtesy, not historical accuracy.
As so why some of us are so bothered by the whole issue... it is very disturbing to see a perfectly plain, perfectly simple bit of history being distorted within one's own lifetime. I listened to that broadcast as it occurred. There was no static. It took everyone a moment to absorb the fact that he'd obviously made a mistake, and quitely likely some people "heard" what they expected to hear.
If we can see history distorted in a case like this where the only thing at stake is very mild embarrassment to Mr. Armstrong, it certainly makes me feel that we can't trust history in cases where anyone has anything important to gain from distortion.
Year 2000 dot-bomb formulae: --We're going to sell dog food... but... we're going to do it on the WEB! --We're going to sell kid's toys... but... we're going to do it on the WEB! --We're going to sell groceries... but... we're going to do it on the WEB!
Nowadays: --We're going to broadcast sports... but... we're going to do it on CELL PHONES! --We're going to bombard you with advertising... but... we're going to do it on CELL PHONES!... and, of course...
--We're going to let you browse the Web (and buy dog food, kids' toys, and groceries)... but... we're going to do it on CELL PHONES!
The "components" snake oil has been around ever since Eli Whitney duped Congress with a faked demo in 1808. "No one realized it then, but Whitney was faking it. He'd carefully hand-crafted each part so they'd fit together. Whitney sold the government a huge contract for four thousand muskets. He took eight years to deliver them and then the parts weren't interchangeable after all."
But, you will say, they eventually did get it to work. True. But "software components" have been advertised as the cure for what ails software development since about 1989, and I haven't seen any evidence of a vigorous market in useful software components.
Is your company's mission-critical software written in VB using ActiveX controls obtained from a dozen different vendors? I don't think so.
Even as basic a component as the standard C library can't be trusted. Circa 1998 we had our product, shipping for four years, suddenly develop a very obscure bug. It turned out that the vendor's C library had a faulty implementation of strcmp. It was optimized in an oh-so-clever way that was intended to insure that as much of the comparison as possible was made four bytes at a time, with bunches of special cases for various string lengths and memory alignments. It had worked properly until some code changes put the strings to be compared at different memory locations than they had formerly been, and then under some particular cases if the non-matching characters happened to be a certain memory locations modulo 4, strcmp would return -1 when it should have been returning +1. I reported it to the vendor, but we had to ship--and so, well, I wrote my own implementation of strcmp. A dead-simple implementation that did the byte-by-byte comparison in the obvous way. And lived happily ever after.
I call BS on that sentence: "As a result, the presence of microbes contributes to the spread of pneumonia, the flu, pink eye and strep throat, among other extremely contagious viruses." Funny that no evidence is cited. Skin contains natural antimicrobial agents and skin is not a particularly friendly place for bacteria. Dry surfaces are even less friendly.
Touching the dry, smooth surface of a mouse that someone else has touched has got to be less dangerous than shaking hands with them.
All this "Lysol kills germs" and "Keyboards have more microbes than the toilet" strikes me as an attempt to see useless products through FUD. They never cite any epidemiology that shows that it is an important route for the communication of real, actual human diseases.
This is not to say that you shouldn't wash your hands after you've engaged in, um, activity that might transfer colon bacteria to them, and it's well-established that colds are transmitted by shaking hands. (But just trying saying to someone, "Excuse me for not shaking hands, I have a cold" and see what reaction you get...) Or that hospitals don't need to clean their environmental surfaces.
But, really, your average serving of yogurt probably has more live microbes in it than your toilet and your keyboard combined.
"As with our colleges, so with a hundred 'modern improvements'; there is an illusion about them; there is not always a positive advance. The devil goes on exacting compound interest to the last for his early share and numerous succeeding investments in them. Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end, an end which it was already but too easy to arrive at; as railroads lead to Boston or New York. We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate. Either is in such a predicament as the man who was earnest to be introduced to a distinguished deaf woman, but when he was presented, and one end of her ear trumpet was put into his hand, had nothing to say. As if the main object were to talk fast and not to talk sensibly. We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the Old World some weeks nearer to the New; but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad, flapping American ear will be that the Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough."
Thoreau, of course, was a technologist and business entrepreneur whose process for combining clay with graphite was a breakthrough in the development of pencil "lead..."
The legal soap opera is interesting, but the real question is whether anyone profited from that stock bulge... and if so who and how much... and whether anyone intends to go after them for securities fraud. If not, then the whole charade may have been immensely worthwhile for SCO's insiders. IBM wins a pyrrhic victory, SCO goes bankrupt, thanks to the concept of a corporation the officers have no personal liability, and if they owned SCO stock and managed to sell it in 2004 they could well be laughing all the way to the bank.
Slashdot Mirror
"Rushing to fix bugs" is like rushing any other meticulous job. It can't be done.
Bugs are the consequence of rushing the job in the first place. (Taking time, is of course, necessary but not sufficient).
If Microsoft knows a way to "rush" bug fixes without compromising quality, they would have been able to "rush" their development without creating the bugs in the first place.
It's understandable that in 1961 the pilot needed to fly the rocket belt with only his own reflexes and semicircular canals to guide him.
But even in the late 1960s my aero-and-astro student colleagues told me that even the Boeing 727 was too unstable to be controlled by a human pilot using reflexes alone: it relied on "yaw dampers," servo mechanisms that amounted to electronic analog computers, to tame the raw behavior of the plane.
The Boeing 777 is a completely "fly-by-wire" design.
It seems to me that it ought to be possible to design microprocessor-controlled rocket belts that would be much easier and safer to fly than those of the 1960s. (Including, of course, electronic active noise cancellation in the helmet to provide at least some reduction of the "deafening noise 3 feet three feet from his ear."
Trying to fly the rocket belts described in the strikes me as rather like trying to fly a full-size, exact model of Langley's Aerodrome. It may be possible--for someone with the reflexes of a Santos-Dumont and the nerves of an Evel Knievel--but it's still just a stunt. The Wright Brothers achievement was ''not'' building an aeroplane that could get off the ground; it was building an aeroplane that they ''and others'' could get (relatively!) ''safely'' off the ground.
The Osborne 1 computer died. The IBM Stretch 7030 computer died. The Sony Walkman died. The Studebaker died... and so did the Oldsmobile and the Plymouth. Eleven of the twelve corporations in the original Dow Jones Index died. Elvis Presley died. The Soviet Union died. The United Society of Believers (Shakers) died. The Roman Empire died. Kepler's supernova died.
The iPod will die. So will Windows. So will the Toyota Prius. So will Toyota. So will GE, the sole surviving original Dow Jones Index company. So will the United States of America. So will life on earth. So will the sun. Even Jack LaLanne will eventually die (oh, wait...)
And your point is?
...for the comic strip, Barney Google.
One-to-the-hundredth power is a "googol."
"Google" has no particular referent other than Barney Google, possibly the longest-running comic in history, about a "cigar-smoking, sports-loving, poker-playing, girl-chasing ne'er-do-well" and his hapless horse Spark Plug.
Barney Google was the subject of a hit song of the 1920s:
Baaaaaaarney Google! With his goog-goog-googley eyes!
Baaaaaaarney Google! Had a wife three times his size!
She sued Barney for divorce--
Now he's living with his horse!
Barney Google! With his goog-goog-gooley eyes!
Exxon only works in Chevrolets, and Chrysler owners must seek out Citgo stations.
It's always been that way. That's what made American oil companies and American automakers so successful.
Consumers love being asked to guess which product to buy, knowing that there's only one chance in three they'll be able to use the product five years from now.
New York Times, June 23, 2000, John Markoff:
...The strategy will involve repackaging some of the company's core products, like its Office software, as subscription-based services obtained over the Internet."
... But while he and Mr. Gates insisted that those services would be based on an open Internet standard, enabling users with non-Windows-based platforms like the Palm computer and Apple Computer's Macintosh to take advantage of them, the executives acknowledged that such users would be second-class citizens. Mr. Gates said the "richest" interactions with the new .NET services would require the new Windows.NET operating system."
.NET was equivalent to the 100 percent bet the company placed on its shift to the Internet strategy in 1995. Mr. Ballmer said he was confident, but he realized that the strategy was still a gamble. 'It's a bet I feel very confident about,' he said. 'But it's a bet.'"
"The company said it would retool its product line to shift the very focus of computing away from hardware devices and toward a new generation of Internet-based software allowing people to interact with data and one another whether they are using computers, digital cell phones or interactive televisions. William H. Gates, Microsoft's chairman, portrayed the long-awaited move as 'more ambitious than anything we've done' adding, 'There is no Microsoft product that isn't touched by this activity....'
"Microsoft's new view of computing calls for processing to be done everywhere,
"Mr. Gates said that the bet on
Chiapaint. A decade old, and more relevant than ever. The only thing out of date is the modem squawk.
Of course, if Chiapaint doesn't convince you, enjoy, you can go to any number of websites that will cause a cute little picture of a steaming coffee cup to appear in your browser window for about a minute and then crash, misbehave, post error messages, display a grey rectangle, or tell you to update your version of Java.
He says "I think the secret to the future is quantity," he says, and says "I can make 50-60 two-hour movies" for the $200 million cost of a Star Wars epic.
Now, it's possible to make good films on a low budget, but I doubt that it's possible to crank them out _quickly._ I have the idea he is not talking about 50-60 "American Graffittis" or 50-60 "Easy Riders" or 50-60 "CSA: Confederate State of Americas" or 50-60 "Wordplays" or even 50-60 "Kukla, Fran and Ollies."
Somehow I think it will be more like 50-60 "Captain Video and His Video Rangers" or 50-60 "Beverly Hillbillies" or 50-60 made-for-TV "movies." Schlocky junk that scratches the itch in some part of the brain to see shapes moving and hear voices. Junk that is not quite bad enough to motivate you to activate the muscles in the thumb that operate the clicker. Nothing that will stir up emotion... not even the degree of emotion generated by Jar-Jar Binks.
Will he actually make money at this? I don't know. And I certainly don't care.
...regrettably out of print and, of course, now out of date... was Boris Beizer's The Frozen Keyboard: Living With Bad Software.
It is a classic, and well worth reading. And it does not condescend, and is full of good advice that naive users don't necessarily know. For example, don't type unreasonable values into fields... never enter data when the program appears to be busy doing something even if the program lets you do it... things like that.
Woot! Secret decoder rings! Invisible ink! See-bak-ro-scopes! And that great key to popularity, "Fool your friends!"
And those X-Ray Specs... (do they really see through clothing? Better get a pair, it's the only way to find out! And even if you can't, you always get a reaction by pretending they do...)
Gee whillikers, CEOs must be saying to themselves, now that I'm a big-deal important person, I can send away for ALL that stuff! Boy, will my friends be impressed when they realize my words are so important that other people are trying to overhear them... and that I have the wherewithal to spend tens of thousands on impressive-looking gadgets.
Sounds diabolically clever to me. Short-distance short-time song sharing sounds to me like something that would really get used if you have friends who have Zunes.
A lot depends on just how that three-day limit works. If you give a song to a friend and it expires, can you give it to him/her again?
I think quite a lot of music might get sold on the basis of short-term trials when the music was, in fact, recommended by a friend.
I can also see a lot of social gratification in being the first kid on the block to have paid for and bought a hot new tune, and therefore being the one who's in the position of being able to give trial versions to everyone else. (If Microsoft is smart, you will be able to give fresh trials over and over. Then the kids who haven't bought the music need to repeatedly go to the kid who has, in order to get their new time-limited free copies.) All of this in turn provides powerful reinforcement for wanting to buy the tune and be the go-to kid.
Actually, you want to do it in a hurry. If kid A gives you a free trial version, and you can afford to buy it, you'd want to buy it quickly, so there are still kids whom A hasn't given it to yet—kids for whom you can be the wealthy song-dispensing patron.
Furthermore, if there are a fair number of Zunes in play in a social group, then the kids with iPods are excluded... they see the kids with Zunes trading tunes and they're out of it, even if the kids with Zunes are their personal friends.
And I don't think these kids are going to spend much time stripping DRM from their music or exploiting the analog hole or anything like that.
The big "if" is whether the Zune garners enough critical mass for any of this to happen. If only two kids in school have Zunes and neither of them is interested in being a social patron of the other, it isn't going to work.
Mind you, this isn't what I want from a "wireless" mp3 player. But that doesn't mean it won't be effective.
...Unlike computer, cell phone hardware and firmware are 100% bug-free and reliable, and wireless connections are digital and therefore perfect with no error rate at all. Therefore, we need not contemplate the possibility of false positives ever triggering this feature accidentally.
Heck, why stop at an irritating noise? Have it trip a little relay that will short out the battery and make it explode. That will show them!
OK, helicopter blades are invisible, but they're far from inaudible.
Before radar, the Brits were having fairly good success using big arrays of horns and microphones to hear aircraft approaching from a considerable distance.
I notice the site doesn't say anything about decibels.
--Robert Louis Stevenson
These essays seem to be running about 250 words... about a page.
Jack London was proud of himself for turning out 1000 words every day. George Bernard Shaw set his stint at five pages a day.
And of course a professional writer has been preparing to write those words and thinking about them well in advance. And they are on a topic that the writer has selected him- or herself, and has some knowledge of.
So they hit a _high school student_ cold with a topic the student has never seen before and give him or her twenty-five minutes (how on earth did they come up with that figure? Why not a round half-hour, at least?) to do, unprepared, what takes a professional writer a couple of hours, prepared... and people are surprised at the results?
This isn't a test of writing in any meaningful sense of the word. I don't know what it's testing, but it isn't writing.
I hope McAfee and Symantec were around pushing for the administration to enforce antitrust back when it might have mattered. It's too late now. This is what you get when a company acquires monopoly power.
I remember when water-cooler talk veered from sports to politics to what word processor you liked. (Remember when there was more than one?)
Anyone remember a program called Lotus 1-2-3?
Oh, and what about Stacker? Why, yes, Microsoft stole Stacker's technology, called it DoubleSpace, and drove Stacker out of business despite Stacker's winning their patent infringement lawsuit.
I haven't heard much about GoBack lately, have you? Wildfile GoBack... I mean Adaptec GoBack... I mean Roxio GoBack... I mean Norton GoBack...
Anyone who believes all this was because Microsoft had superior products lives in a logic-tight compartment.
It's too bad that the administration chose not to pursue antitrust in any meaningful way against Microsoft, but they didn't, and these are the consequences. If Microsoft feels like squashing Symantec and McAfee there's nothing you or I or Symantec or McAfee can do about it. Only the feds have enough power, and possibly even they don't have enough any more.
So, let's all hope Microsoft's antivirus component is pretty good, because whether it is or not, in a few years it's all we're going to have.
(Besides ClamAV, of course...)
...I meant, of course, a tricked-up Maelzel's chess player.
On the showing of the video, this is more art than science.
We do not expect children to display much sophistication in their emotional behavior or body language, we forgive children lapses in etiquette, and we do not challenge them by expecting more than rote conformance to stock conversational responses. Having Quasi speak in a child's voice (and show juvenile behavior) makes it difficult to judge how successfully it is mimicking real human responsiveness. I notice that Quasi is apt to go off in impressive long monologues, which also have the effect of minimizing the number of human-robot interactions. If all you do is tickle Elmo once, and he spends a full minute rolling around on the floor in laughter, that, too, is impressive... once... as are the mechanized orchestras at The House on the Rock in Wisconsin. It takes repeated interactions to judge whether there's subtlety to the peformance or whether we're seeing an artistic but mechanically repetitive performance.
I get the impression that Quasi is as much an exercise in the disarming artistic presentation of robot "intelligence," emotional or intellectual, as it is a demonstration of real capabillities.
The article says "According to Ford, Armstrong spoke, 'One small step for a man ...' in a total of 35 milliseconds, 10 times too fast for the "a" to be audible."
I just checked the video (first one I found... I'm sure there are some that don't have Mahler music in the background, and it takes him a good three seconds to make the statement.
With pure bullshit like that, how can I trust anything else the article says?
The official transcript confirms the mistake, and the lengthy Snopes article (with an embellished recording indicates that Armstrong himself acknowledged and regretted the error. He flubbed his line, and encyclopedias that quote him with as "That's one small step for [a] man" are doing so for courtesy, not historical accuracy.
As so why some of us are so bothered by the whole issue... it is very disturbing to see a perfectly plain, perfectly simple bit of history being distorted within one's own lifetime. I listened to that broadcast as it occurred. There was no static. It took everyone a moment to absorb the fact that he'd obviously made a mistake, and quitely likely some people "heard" what they expected to hear.
If we can see history distorted in a case like this where the only thing at stake is very mild embarrassment to Mr. Armstrong, it certainly makes me feel that we can't trust history in cases where anyone has anything important to gain from distortion.
Year 2000 dot-bomb formulae:
... and, of course...
--We're going to sell dog food... but... we're going to do it on the WEB!
--We're going to sell kid's toys... but... we're going to do it on the WEB!
--We're going to sell groceries... but... we're going to do it on the WEB!
Nowadays:
--We're going to broadcast sports... but... we're going to do it on CELL PHONES!
--We're going to bombard you with advertising... but... we're going to do it on CELL PHONES!
--We're going to let you browse the Web (and buy dog food, kids' toys, and groceries)... but... we're going to do it on CELL PHONES!
The "components" snake oil has been around ever since Eli Whitney duped Congress with a faked demo in 1808. "No one realized it then, but Whitney was faking it. He'd carefully hand-crafted each part so they'd fit together. Whitney sold the government a huge contract for four thousand muskets. He took eight years to deliver them and then the parts weren't interchangeable after all."
But, you will say, they eventually did get it to work. True. But "software components" have been advertised as the cure for what ails software development since about 1989, and I haven't seen any evidence of a vigorous market in useful software components.
Is your company's mission-critical software written in VB using ActiveX controls obtained from a dozen different vendors? I don't think so.
Even as basic a component as the standard C library can't be trusted. Circa 1998 we had our product, shipping for four years, suddenly develop a very obscure bug. It turned out that the vendor's C library had a faulty implementation of strcmp. It was optimized in an oh-so-clever way that was intended to insure that as much of the comparison as possible was made four bytes at a time, with bunches of special cases for various string lengths and memory alignments. It had worked properly until some code changes put the strings to be compared at different memory locations than they had formerly been, and then under some particular cases if the non-matching characters happened to be a certain memory locations modulo 4, strcmp would return -1 when it should have been returning +1. I reported it to the vendor, but we had to ship--and so, well, I wrote my own implementation of strcmp. A dead-simple implementation that did the byte-by-byte comparison in the obvous way. And lived happily ever after.
The vendor never did fix strcmp, by the way.
I call BS on that sentence: "As a result, the presence of microbes contributes to the spread of pneumonia, the flu, pink eye and strep throat, among other extremely contagious viruses." Funny that no evidence is cited. Skin contains natural antimicrobial agents and skin is not a particularly friendly place for bacteria. Dry surfaces are even less friendly.
Touching the dry, smooth surface of a mouse that someone else has touched has got to be less dangerous than shaking hands with them.
All this "Lysol kills germs" and "Keyboards have more microbes than the toilet" strikes me as an attempt to see useless products through FUD. They never cite any epidemiology that shows that it is an important route for the communication of real, actual human diseases.
This is not to say that you shouldn't wash your hands after you've engaged in, um, activity that might transfer colon bacteria to them, and it's well-established that colds are transmitted by shaking hands. (But just trying saying to someone, "Excuse me for not shaking hands, I have a cold" and see what reaction you get...) Or that hospitals don't need to clean their environmental surfaces.
But, really, your average serving of yogurt probably has more live microbes in it than your toilet and your keyboard combined.
"As with our colleges, so with a hundred 'modern improvements'; there is an illusion about them; there is not always a positive advance. The devil goes on exacting compound interest to the last for his early share and numerous succeeding investments in them. Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end, an end which it was already but too easy to arrive at; as railroads lead to Boston or New York. We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate. Either is in such a predicament as the man who was earnest to be introduced to a distinguished deaf woman, but when he was presented, and one end of her ear trumpet was put into his hand, had nothing to say. As if the main object were to talk fast and not to talk sensibly. We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the Old World some weeks nearer to the New; but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad, flapping American ear will be that the Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough."
Thoreau, of course, was a technologist and business entrepreneur whose process for combining clay with graphite was a breakthrough in the development of pencil "lead..."
You're right. I should have said "hollow victory" or "meaningless victory." And Pyrrhic should be capitalized.
I could always claim that I meant "a victory with two short or unaccented syllables" but someone would probably call me on that, too...
All well and good, but the whole business certainly produced an impressive bulge in plenty of time for SCOX shareholders to line their pockets by selling stock that had been practically worthless the year before.
The legal soap opera is interesting, but the real question is whether anyone profited from that stock bulge... and if so who and how much... and whether anyone intends to go after them for securities fraud. If not, then the whole charade may have been immensely worthwhile for SCO's insiders. IBM wins a pyrrhic victory, SCO goes bankrupt, thanks to the concept of a corporation the officers have no personal liability, and if they owned SCO stock and managed to sell it in 2004 they could well be laughing all the way to the bank.