I bought a car expecting it to go real fast. The reality is that regardless of whether or not it can go real fast, I rarely drive much above the speed limit anyway. I bought a Wii expecting to use it to exercise. The reality is I sit on the couch and play games with wrist flicks. People buy based on expectations, not how they'll actually use it.
People buy based on how products are marketed to them, not how they'll actually use it.
Regular universities don't sell you the knowledge.....
They sell you there resources, connections,network, and reputation. Very difficult to get your foot in the door for a job if all you have is knowledge and skill.
Why? It takes work for companies to actually spend the time and effort to evaluate each potential candidate for a job and figure out the candidate's actual knowledge and skill set.
The easiest thing for an employer to do to filter out resumes/applicants is to trust the brand name. It is the same thing that people do in a grocery store when they want to choose a product that is produced by many companies. It is a heuristic to conserve mental energy and a way of life.
Because legal attacks have worked really, really well against anything that happens on the Internet. Taking down MegaUpload and The Pirate Bay eliminated piracy altogether, never to resurface again. Gone, dead, finished. Burying ad blocking services under lawsuits will totally never make them even more resilient and hard to pin down. No way that'd happen.
You can add napster as another case example. Did the legal battle on music piracy really change anything? No. What ended up happening was a handful of individuals were fined ridiculous amounts of money that they would never would make in their life time.
You know what changed everything? Having a legitimate alternative to being forced to pay $20 for an album with maybe only 2 or 3 descent songs on it. Cue itunes.
Faith and science need not compete with each other.; they can coexist. In other words, people treat the two as a false dichotomy.
A person's faith should not prevent them from believing in science. Conversely, a person's belief in science should prevent them from having faith.
If one could prove one's faith, it wouldn't be called faith, it would be called science.
There are scientific ideas that we believe to be true, but cannot yet prove. A long standing example was fermats last theorem. People had for a long time felt it was true, but until recent time, they were unable to prove it. A modern day example could be NP vs P. Many scientists suspect that an NP complete problem cannot be solved in polynomial time, but no one has a proof.
The main point is that even in science, there are things that we cannot yet prove. There are some things that we may never be able to prove. We have our beliefs about what we feel is true. Our faith in our belief guides us in our attempt to answer the as yet unanswerable questions. The fact that we may not have an answer to a scientific question,but only beliefs about the answer, does not prevent us from being scientific.
Considering the number of Phd's and M.S. graduates that Google employs versus Microsoft, it stands to reason that the average salary would be higher. As others have mentioned, when you factor cost of living, hours worked, and the degree employees hold, 128K doesn't go very far. Also in Washington State (where Microsoft is located), there is no state tax
When the median home price in Mountain View is over a million and the cost for a decent 2 bed/bath apartment is 3k/month, your dollar doesn't go to far.
That problem is solved if cars act as if all the information they can trust is their own, and only add "potential dangerous situations" reported by others to their own list, but never discarding them purely based on another machine's information.
This approach has the same issues that we have in cyber security (i.e. think x509 certificates and Certificate Authorities). How do you know who to trust? Can we always trust them? When should we trust them? If we use a reputation system to manage trust, how do we make it work such that it scales?
This approach has the same issues that we have in cyber security (i.e. think x509 certificates and Certificate Authorities). How do you know who to trust? Can we always trust them? If we use a reputation system to manage trust, how do we make it work such that it scales?
When people mention how autonomous vehicles can share information with each other, they implicitly assume that the vehicles and other entities within the environment will play fair and honest.
What happens if any of those systems are hacked either for nefarious reasons or just so that the driver of the hacked car can gain some advantage by sharing misinformation. ?
In this setup of autonomous vehicles, they become essentially computers on wheels. The issues that are faced in network security can manifest themselves with autonomous vehicles.
One thing that history seems to make clear: the bigger a company is, the more likely it is that it will become unresponsive to market forces, and drop like Goliath with a head wound.
If I had a mod point...I'd mod you up. I think this approach is key. It is what I practice at work myself. You are right when you say that finding the right balance between doing research on random subjects and the project you are tasked to work on can be tricky.,
If your metric is hours, smart people will optimize with respect to hours. If your metric is students passing a standardize test, some teachers will optimize by "helping" the students pass the test.
Deciding on what metric to evaluate people is a very challenging problem that surfaces in any situation where you need to manage people. The best approach that is supported by Jim Collins, author of Good to Great is to create a culture on your team/company/etc.. that has the values that you as a manager want. This culture will then weed out the people who don't "fit in". Of course, creating this culture may take some time and so is suited for managers looking for long-term reward. Unfortunately, some managers are looking at things in the short-term.
Main point: Centralized power source vs decentralized power source. Centralized power sources (i.e. Electric vehicles) can benefit immediately from improvements to technology/efficiencies at the power plant.
Electric vehicles can do more than this by allowing for a centralized power source. Think about traditional gas powered cars. Changes in technology that allow for increased power efficiencies (i.e. better mpg) mostly impact the newer cars. Cars that were produced 10-15 years ago are less efficient, but they are still driven by a good chunk of the population.
Improvements in technology at the power plant can have an immediate impact on all Electric vehicles.
Microsoft freely admits it, and when everyone jumps on the TypeScript bandwagon, the carpet will be pulled out from under you.
This seems reminiscent of the Excel vs Lotus 123 war and how Microsoft won. Joel Spolsky has a great article describing the tactics M$ used to win the war.
The basic idea was to eliminate barriers that would keep people from switching from Lotus 123. Below are some exerts from the article. I think there are some interesting parallels to Typescript and javascript.
Barrier:They have to convert their existing spreadsheets from 123 to Excel
Solution:Give Excel the capability to read 123 spreadsheets
Barrier:They have to learn a new user interface
Solution:Give Excel the ability to understand Lotus keystrokes, in case you were used to the old way of doing things
Why are they expending money on new versions of the scanners when not all airports have the first version?
Even if one assumed that the scanners could detect everything (which they can't), it would make since to at least have a version 1 scanner at all the airports.
So TSA purchases version 2 scanners that go into some airports. Terrorists just go to airports that have version 1. Oh wait, they can just go to airports that don't have any scanners. Weakest link principle.
This dynamic pricing idea is an extension of something that have been practiced by merchants for a very long time. Dynamic pricing is just price discrimination among different types of customers.
One method to discriminate is in favor of the most loyal customers. Airlines and hotels are examples of businesses that provide loyalty reward points that can be redeemed for discounts and fringe benefits.
Another method is to discriminate in favor of least loyal or new customers. Cable companies like Comcast do this. Here is how. They offer ridiculously low discounts for their cable packages for first time customers for the first x amount of months. The customers that threaten to leave, which would be the least loyal customers, are offered discounts on their current plans and packages if they stay. The people who don't get any discount are the most loyal. In fact, they can expect their cable bill to increase each month for channels/services that they don't really need or want.
The entire reason I loved my blackberry was its keyboard-centeredness. Why the heck do I want a business phone that has a crappy touch keyboard? Theres android and iPhone for that.
I guess we still get the BES stuff, but which users are actually going to want a blackberry? If youre going to mandate a business phone, why mandate one that sucks at being a business phone?
I mean, I guess what they had wasnt selling phones, and their market share was shrinking-- seems logical to make a change, right? Except they just killed 80% of what made blackberry so popular to begin with. Being just another touch-device clone isnt really the way to claw your way back into the game.
This is the classic innovator's dilemma. It is how once great companies can miss the boat on new markets. They are constrained and encumbered by the demands and wants of their current customer base, which are responsible for the huge profits. Satisfying current customer demands can result in not allocating enough resources needed to develop technologies for emerging/new markets. It is easy to ignore new markets as they do not initially provide the profit opportunities that the companies current market provides.
Although I applaud the initiative of Estonia, I think that using the lego mindstorm would be a better first step to introducing your kids to programming. Here is why. (By the way, I am a grad student who is working with kids at a local middle school with the mindstorm)
1) Motivation: Many kids are naturally excited about seeing stuff move and do stuff, and therefore robotics is a very nice programming application for kids.
2) Logic: Mindstorm GUI has a nice interface that is easy for kids to use because the GUI uses visual logic blocks. It is pretty much like flow diagram that the kids can build to represent the logic. This flow diagram is of course is compiled into real code behind the scenes.
3) Problem solving skills: Kids can do really neat experiments with the mindstorm such line following and wall following. These experiments are fun and allow the kids to really fine-tune their problem solving skills.
What is innovative shouldn't be relative in theory, but in practice it almost always is.
When people use the word innovative to describe something, it is based on their prior knowledge and insight. Joe-average may see some technology or device as innovative and requiring huge intellectual leaps, while Joe-tech may see the same technology as a minor incremental improvement or perhaps obvious.
The difference is that Joe-tech may have domain expertise in areas related to that technology and is aware of similar technologies that others in the field have created. Joe-tech may also see that the intellectual leaps needed to create this technology are really very small steps based on prior art and the fact that joe-tech is also skilled in the art.
The patent system is broken. The real question is should the patents that Apple claims Samsung infringed upon been granted. Imagine if this happened in the car industry. Only the first car company to put anti-lock brakes on their cars would ever be allowed to use the technology. Good ideas get copied. That is what is called progress. Only the specific implementation of that idea should be patented.
In the case of Apple, it's clear that Samsung was directly copying Apple on many fronts - hell, look at their Samsung Stores or their power adapters. This case however, will immediately be appealed and this is nowhere near the last we'll hear of it.
Copying happens in every industry (i.e. fashion, auto industry, etc...). It is what smart companies do. The real question is are the patents really valid.
The patent system is broken. The real question is should the patents that Apple claims Samsung infringed upon been granted. Imagine if this happened in the car industry. Only the first car company to put anti-lock brakes on their cars would ever be allowed to use the technology. Good ideas get copied. That is what is called progress. Only the specific implementation of that idea should be patented.
"The Georgia Tech version sounds like a 'me too' thing"
Georgia Tech released its beta version in May. See the FTA or http://www.gatech.edu/newsroom/release.html?nid=132601
"I don't know that I'd trust a university to ensure the functional privacy of something"
Titan is run by GTRI, which is a non-profit entity. I think that a non-profit entity at a University is more likely to be considerate of privacy issues than a for profit startup, CrowdRE, who has to report to investors that have invested 26 million dollars in venture capital.
Slashdot Mirror
I bought a car expecting it to go real fast. The reality is that regardless of whether or not it can go real fast, I rarely drive much above the speed limit anyway. I bought a Wii expecting to use it to exercise. The reality is I sit on the couch and play games with wrist flicks. People buy based on expectations, not how they'll actually use it.
People buy based on how products are marketed to them, not how they'll actually use it.
Regular universities don't sell you the knowledge.....
They sell you there resources, connections,network, and reputation. Very difficult to get your foot in the door for a job if all you have is knowledge and skill.
Why? It takes work for companies to actually spend the time and effort to evaluate each potential candidate for a job and figure out the candidate's actual knowledge and skill set.
The easiest thing for an employer to do to filter out resumes/applicants is to trust the brand name. It is the same thing that people do in a grocery store when they want to choose a product that is produced by many companies. It is a heuristic to conserve mental energy and a way of life.
Because legal attacks have worked really, really well against anything that happens on the Internet. Taking down MegaUpload and The Pirate Bay eliminated piracy altogether, never to resurface again. Gone, dead, finished. Burying ad blocking services under lawsuits will totally never make them even more resilient and hard to pin down. No way that'd happen.
You can add napster as another case example. Did the legal battle on music piracy really change anything? No. What ended up happening was a handful of individuals were fined ridiculous amounts of money that they would never would make in their life time.
You know what changed everything? Having a legitimate alternative to being forced to pay $20 for an album with maybe only 2 or 3 descent songs on it. Cue itunes.
mod up
Faith and science need not compete with each other.; they can coexist. In other words, people treat the two as a false dichotomy.
A person's faith should not prevent them from believing in science. Conversely, a person's belief in science should prevent them from having faith.
If one could prove one's faith, it wouldn't be called faith, it would be called science.
There are scientific ideas that we believe to be true, but cannot yet prove. A long standing example was fermats last theorem. People had for a long time felt it was true, but until recent time, they were unable to prove it. A modern day example could be NP vs P. Many scientists suspect that an NP complete problem cannot be solved in polynomial time, but no one has a proof.
The main point is that even in science, there are things that we cannot yet prove. There are some things that we may never be able to prove. We have our beliefs about what we feel is true. Our faith in our belief guides us in our attempt to answer the as yet unanswerable questions. The fact that we may not have an answer to a scientific question,but only beliefs about the answer, does not prevent us from being scientific.
Considering the number of Phd's and M.S. graduates that Google employs versus Microsoft, it stands to reason that the average salary would be higher. As others have mentioned, when you factor cost of living, hours worked, and the degree employees hold, 128K doesn't go very far. Also in Washington State (where Microsoft is located), there is no state tax
When the median home price in Mountain View is over a million and the cost for a decent 2 bed/bath apartment is 3k/month, your dollar doesn't go to far.
That problem is solved if cars act as if all the information they can trust is their own, and only add "potential dangerous situations" reported by others to their own list, but never discarding them purely based on another machine's information.
This approach has the same issues that we have in cyber security (i.e. think x509 certificates and Certificate Authorities). How do you know who to trust? Can we always trust them? When should we trust them? If we use a reputation system to manage trust, how do we make it work such that it scales?
Brad Templeton proposed a solution many years ago... The school of fish test. http://www.templetons.com/brad/robocars/fish-test.html
This approach has the same issues that we have in cyber security (i.e. think x509 certificates and Certificate Authorities). How do you know who to trust? Can we always trust them? If we use a reputation system to manage trust, how do we make it work such that it scales?
When people mention how autonomous vehicles can share information with each other, they implicitly assume that the vehicles and other entities within the environment will play fair and honest.
What happens if any of those systems are hacked either for nefarious reasons or just so that the driver of the hacked car can gain some advantage by sharing misinformation. ?
In this setup of autonomous vehicles, they become essentially computers on wheels. The issues that are faced in network security can manifest themselves with autonomous vehicles.
One thing that history seems to make clear: the bigger a company is, the more likely it is that it will become unresponsive to market forces, and drop like Goliath with a head wound.
IBM said hello.
If I had a mod point...I'd mod you up. I think this approach is key. It is what I practice at work myself. You are right when you say that finding the right balance between doing research on random subjects and the project you are tasked to work on can be tricky.,
If your metric is hours, smart people will optimize with respect to hours. If your metric is students passing a standardize test, some teachers will optimize by "helping" the students pass the test.
Deciding on what metric to evaluate people is a very challenging problem that surfaces in any situation where you need to manage people. The best approach that is supported by Jim Collins, author of Good to Great is to create a culture on your team/company/etc.. that has the values that you as a manager want. This culture will then weed out the people who don't "fit in". Of course, creating this culture may take some time and so is suited for managers looking for long-term reward. Unfortunately, some managers are looking at things in the short-term.
Main point: Centralized power source vs decentralized power source. Centralized power sources (i.e. Electric vehicles) can benefit immediately from improvements to technology/efficiencies at the power plant.
Electric vehicles can do more than this by allowing for a centralized power source. Think about traditional gas powered cars. Changes in technology that allow for increased power efficiencies (i.e. better mpg) mostly impact the newer cars. Cars that were produced 10-15 years ago are less efficient, but they are still driven by a good chunk of the population.
Improvements in technology at the power plant can have an immediate impact on all Electric vehicles.
Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.
Microsoft freely admits it, and when everyone jumps on the TypeScript bandwagon, the carpet will be pulled out from under you.
This seems reminiscent of the Excel vs Lotus 123 war and how Microsoft won. Joel Spolsky has a great article describing the tactics M$ used to win the war.
The basic idea was to eliminate barriers that would keep people from switching from Lotus 123. Below are some exerts from the article. I think there are some interesting parallels to Typescript and javascript.
Barrier:They have to convert their existing spreadsheets from 123 to Excel
Solution:Give Excel the capability to read 123 spreadsheets
Barrier:They have to learn a new user interface
Solution:Give Excel the ability to understand Lotus keystrokes, in case you were used to the old way of doing things
Why are they expending money on new versions of the scanners when not all airports have the first version?
Even if one assumed that the scanners could detect everything (which they can't), it would make since to at least have a version 1 scanner at all the airports.
So TSA purchases version 2 scanners that go into some airports. Terrorists just go to airports that have version 1. Oh wait, they can just go to airports that don't have any scanners. Weakest link principle.
This dynamic pricing idea is an extension of something that have been practiced by merchants for a very long time. Dynamic pricing is just price discrimination among different types of customers.
One method to discriminate is in favor of the most loyal customers. Airlines and hotels are examples of businesses that provide loyalty reward points that can be redeemed for discounts and fringe benefits.
Another method is to discriminate in favor of least loyal or new customers. Cable companies like Comcast do this. Here is how. They offer ridiculously low discounts for their cable packages for first time customers for the first x amount of months. The customers that threaten to leave, which would be the least loyal customers, are offered discounts on their current plans and packages if they stay. The people who don't get any discount are the most loyal. In fact, they can expect their cable bill to increase each month for channels/services that they don't really need or want.
The entire reason I loved my blackberry was its keyboard-centeredness. Why the heck do I want a business phone that has a crappy touch keyboard? Theres android and iPhone for that.
I guess we still get the BES stuff, but which users are actually going to want a blackberry? If youre going to mandate a business phone, why mandate one that sucks at being a business phone?
I mean, I guess what they had wasnt selling phones, and their market share was shrinking-- seems logical to make a change, right? Except they just killed 80% of what made blackberry so popular to begin with. Being just another touch-device clone isnt really the way to claw your way back into the game.
This is the classic innovator's dilemma. It is how once great companies can miss the boat on new markets. They are constrained and encumbered by the demands and wants of their current customer base, which are responsible for the huge profits. Satisfying current customer demands can result in not allocating enough resources needed to develop technologies for emerging/new markets. It is easy to ignore new markets as they do not initially provide the profit opportunities that the companies current market provides.
Of course, mindstorm costs a bit more than the Raspberry pi
Although I applaud the initiative of Estonia, I think that using the lego mindstorm would be a better first step to introducing your kids to programming. Here is why. (By the way, I am a grad student who is working with kids at a local middle school with the mindstorm)
1) Motivation: Many kids are naturally excited about seeing stuff move and do stuff, and therefore robotics is a very nice programming application for kids.
2) Logic: Mindstorm GUI has a nice interface that is easy for kids to use because the GUI uses visual logic blocks. It is pretty much like flow diagram that the kids can build to represent the logic. This flow diagram is of course is compiled into real code behind the scenes.
3) Problem solving skills: Kids can do really neat experiments with the mindstorm such line following and wall following. These experiments are fun and allow the kids to really fine-tune their problem solving skills.
What is innovative shouldn't be relative in theory, but in practice it almost always is.
When people use the word innovative to describe something, it is based on their prior knowledge and insight. Joe-average may see some technology or device as innovative and requiring huge intellectual leaps, while Joe-tech may see the same technology as a minor incremental improvement or perhaps obvious.
The difference is that Joe-tech may have domain expertise in areas related to that technology and is aware of similar technologies that others in the field have created. Joe-tech may also see that the intellectual leaps needed to create this technology are really very small steps based on prior art and the fact that joe-tech is also skilled in the art.
Posted as AC. Forgot I wasn't logged in.
The patent system is broken. The real question is should the patents that Apple claims Samsung infringed upon been granted. Imagine if this happened in the car industry. Only the first car company to put anti-lock brakes on their cars would ever be allowed to use the technology. Good ideas get copied. That is what is called progress. Only the specific implementation of that idea should be patented.
Thanks Timothy... not.
In the case of Apple, it's clear that Samsung was directly copying Apple on many fronts - hell, look at their Samsung Stores or their power adapters. This case however, will immediately be appealed and this is nowhere near the last we'll hear of it.
Copying happens in every industry (i.e. fashion, auto industry, etc...). It is what smart companies do. The real question is are the patents really valid.
The patent system is broken. The real question is should the patents that Apple claims Samsung infringed upon been granted. Imagine if this happened in the car industry. Only the first car company to put anti-lock brakes on their cars would ever be allowed to use the technology. Good ideas get copied. That is what is called progress. Only the specific implementation of that idea should be patented.
"The Georgia Tech version sounds like a 'me too' thing" Georgia Tech released its beta version in May. See the FTA or http://www.gatech.edu/newsroom/release.html?nid=132601 "I don't know that I'd trust a university to ensure the functional privacy of something" Titan is run by GTRI, which is a non-profit entity. I think that a non-profit entity at a University is more likely to be considerate of privacy issues than a for profit startup, CrowdRE, who has to report to investors that have invested 26 million dollars in venture capital.