Do you think there might be any reason Android, a very small company at the time, was able to quickly build better APIs and architecture than Microsoft, who while MUCH larger, had to work around the underlying Windows OS?
Android Inc spent a few million dollars on development, while Microsoft spent a few billion - roughly a thousand times as much. Android got much better results. You don't think the OS they chose might have had something to do with that?
They buy it because it's better. It's better than Windows Phone (the first, second, theirs, and fourth attempts), it's better than Symbian, it's better than everything else people have tried. Why is it better? Linux is or reason it's better. Even Microsoft is using more and more Linux now. Is that because Microsoft has a religious zealotry for Linux? No, it's because Linux is better. Better than eating their own dog food.
>> Legacy software forcing people into Windows nowadays. > Yeah, more than a billion people.
Yeah, legacy software has a LOT of people (companies, really) still stuck on Windows. Your point is?
Autocorrect / predictive text turned "deter the criminal" to "determine the criminal".
It also occurs to me my post was quite negative, and not without good reason, but I should also acknowledge I've dealt with a couple of very good cops. One in particular in Bryan, Texas went above and beyond when my wife was in crisis. On the other hand, 20 miles away in Caldwell, Texas, a different cop wasn't good at all. He shouldn't be a cop.
> there's nothing to be done UNTIL the crime is COMMITTED.
If they could predict which block was likely to have a spike in crime 3 or 4 days in advance, that would be enough time to finish their donuts an drive a patrol car over there, potentially preventing the crime. If the presence of the patrol car didn't determine the criminal, the cops could actually catch a bad guy in the act for once, rather than taking a report the next day. I know, that's funny. They'll still just be taking reports after the fact.
A basic principle of security is least privilege. If a piece of outdated equipment needs to send udp packets on port 411 to a monitoring station, you set the firewall to allow it to send udp on port 411 to that particular station, and nothing else. If it doesn't need to take to web servers, you don't let it talk to web servers. You allow it to do only exactly what it needs to do.
Not sure what your equipment needs to do? You could check the manual, and otherwise open up Wireshark and set the filter to the IP of the equipment. Have a look at what it is sending and receiving. Then set the firewall to allow only exactly what is needed.
This is also an area where vlans come in very handy. Vlans act like completely separate networks, but they are configured within your switch, so a single 48-port switch can handle a dozen different, totally separate vlans.
Perhaps different parts of your network should be mostly separate, but you need to allow a little bit of specific communication between two vlans. That's when you plug a router or firewall into both vlans and set it to route only specifically allowed traffic between them. This doesn't even require two network ports - the same port can be in multiple vlans and the router can control traffic between vlans issuing a single cat6 cable. This is called "router on a stick".
If some of this went over your head, here's the simple version' Call someone who has a CCNA Security certification or better (CCNP Security or CCIE Security). Tell them you're thinking about segregating different vlans and using an internal firewall to strictly control internal traffic. They'll get you set up.
I'm no CPU expert, but it's my understanding that to increase yields, Intel already disables features or entire cores that don't work right on a particular chip. If HT isn't all that useful on the new chip, and it reduces Spectre-type risks, would it not be rather easy to disable it? It can already be disabled in the BIOS, right, so disabling it doesn't require any changes to the silicon.
Thanks for all of that. We'll definitely try looking for the Galilean moons of Jupiter. My 4yo actually said she saw them, but I didn't see them and didn't know they should be visible, so I thought she was wrong.
This is a weird situation for me - I'm a major nerd, my hobby is studying. Therefore I'm used being "the smartest guy in the room". Finding out my four year old is right I was wrong is weird. She's been doing that lately. She knows all about the dwarf planets. I didn't know there were five of them until she told me, and told me their names. Lol
For for all of that. Your comments on Venus and Mars especially were interesting.
We had our first look at Mars last night, due to her 9:00 PM bed time. It hasn't been visible until late at night. We were a bit disappointed that we didn't see more features, though I knew that since at was near opposition (full moon / full Mars) we wouldn't have the shadows to help us see features. It's good to find out about the dust storm. Maybe we can see more in a month or two.
Speaking of her bed time, that's also interesting about Venus - I've just learned we'd have been better off looking at Venus BEFORE her bedtime rather than AFTER.:)
Speaking of astronomy being interesting to some here at Slashdot, perhaps some here could suggest things in astronomy that would be interesting to look at with a small telescope?
My young daughter is very interested in astronomy so I picked up a 114mm reflector telescope off Craigslist. So far we've seen Saturn's rings (which look like one big ring from our location in the suburbs, with that scope), and seen the discs of the other planets.
There's a lot of light pollution here in the Dallas suburbs and apparently we have to drive an at least an hour to find significantly darker skies. What else can we look at other than the overall color of the planets, and the banding on Jupiter? Any other objects worth seeing?
--
A funny story related to this. When I took her outside to look at Saturn, she pointed to a different part of the sky and said "daddy I see Jupiter!" She just turned four years old. How the heck a barely four year old recognizes Jupiter with no assistance, I have no idea. I had to use my sky chart app to confirm she was correct, she had indeed correctly identified Jupiter.
Here are 400 current shareholder resolutions, in which shareholders are directing companies to prioritize various social issues, such as environmental issues:
This is 400 cases this year of shareholders explicitly telling executives "we want you to do this socially responsible thing, even if it cuts into profits".
You're absolutely right that, lacking any other information, the default assumption is that investmentors would generally prefer to make money rather than lose money. That's a default assumption when their is no reason to believe otherwise.
On the other hand, it is well known that Ben & Jerry's stockholders wish to support certain social issues: https://www.benjerry.com/whats... The executives at Ben & Jerry's would breach their duty to shareholders if they invested corporate money in an oil company, because there shareholders wouldn't like that - even if it increased profits.
What would you guess is the median net income for US corporations? Just for fun, care to guess the median number of employees?
Would you be surprised to learn that over 80% of US corporations were created primarily to employee specific people? Would your thoughts change if I mention that over 80% employee only one person, or one person and their immediate family? That over 80% of US corporations are people who own their job.
This rule is so often spun, to the point it's almost unrecognizable. People say all kinds of things that just aren't true. It's really not difficult, either. Very simply:
The officers of a company (CEO etc) don't own the company. They work for the people who own the company, mostly people with retirement funds that have the stock. Therefore, the CEO isn't allowed to give himself or his wife money out of the company bank account. Rather, he must use company assets to do things that the shareholders (retirement savers) would want him to do. It's their money, he has to use it the they would want it used. That simple.
There is nothing in Apple's charter about being environmentally friendly, and there doesn't need to be. If most stockholders would want them to do X thing that's good for the environment, they should do it. What they can't do is pay the CEO's cousin $10,000/hour to install solar panels.
In times past, the corporate charter and bylaws often indicated what the corporation was intended to do. For a corporation I sold a few years ago, an old-fashioned charter would have said the purpose of the corporation was to do three things, in this order: Provide jobs for people who had lost them when another company shut down Provide best in class security solutions for web businesses Potentially turn a profit
Nowadays, the charter or articles of incorporation frequently says "conduct business and other lawful activities" because that gives them maximum flexibility.
Here's one that surprises a lot of people, but it's absolutely true. If you think about it for a few minutes, you can probably figure out why:
The purpose for which most corporations are created is to provide jobs, to hire people.
I didn't say that's a common side effect, I said that's the purpose. It's what the shareholders want the corporation to do, as its first priority. I know some readers are about to angrily click the reply button, but think a moment first. That's a fact. You can figure out the details yourself, or you can post an angry reply and then look silly when I explain the details to you.
> you are implying that somehow each engineer deserves $166,000 a year salary for effectively doing very little.
That would neither be their salary, not did I say anything at all about deserving it. If someone costs the company $160K, their salary will be about $100K. Neither health insurance nor office space nor payroll taxes are free. Neither are the computers and other tools they use, nor the networks which connect them all, nor...
> or provide a full scholarships for a solid engineering education at say, the university of Illinois, for two kids.
So youe thinking is having engineers working isn't that valuable, we should instead use the money to make more engineers? Who themselves should remain unemployed so we can use the money to train even more useless engineers, I suppose.
Based on your astute reasoning, I'm going to make a bold inference that you're a Bernie Sanders supporter.
Some people are good at physical sports, like football. Some nerdy types spend their time getting really good at various table or computer games. Some people are really good artists.
I spend my time studying software engineering and law. I can't sing, I can't dance, I can't kick a ball, I CAN design a database.
I'm going to give Google a taste of their own medicine and make my site slow too. CNN is leading the fight in this; their site is super slow in all the major browsers.
My first ~ year as a vegetarian, I liked to point out that bacon is crispy. Meat isn't crispy. If you cook some meat and leave it sitting out on the counter all day, it'll spoil in a few hours. You can cook bacon and leave it out for days, weeks even if you cover it to keep the dust and flies off. Therefore bacon must not be meat, I can eat it, I said.:)
There sure is a lot of speculation about what could have been in the summary. Kinda sounds like what might happen if some astrophysicists got really, really stoned.
That said: > This phase is no better then philosophy, where it is just logical thinking of things. I don't call this science
Einstein's work on relativity was mostly logical thinking of things. We didn't have the technology to test most of it until decades later.
I suppose there is a difference in that Einstein had more "logical thinking" and less wild speculation. He eliminated many possibilities and came up with a lot of "if X is true, then Y must also be true, which in turn implies Z through the blahblah theorem".
On the other hand, Ford's R&D each year builds on all the R&D they've done over the last 115 years.
Elon Musk said their production was slowed because they are trying to figure out how to run an assembly line. They bought machines that were slower than doing it by hand, so they had to throw the machines away. Tesla is trying to figure out how you organize a line to produce 5,000 cars / week, Ford was doing that in 1913. Which puts Ford 105 years ahead of Tesla on the "how to make cars" thing, which is kinda important for a car company.
I see the Bolt is Motor Trend's car of the year. I also notice it's currently outselling Tesla. I think this article is about autonomous vehicles, though.
A billion per year will get them about 6,000 engineers and coders in the area.
Let's assume they aren't great at hiring, so 20% of the engineers don't do anything more useful than filling out change forms and other paperwork for the decent engineers.
Assume 30% of them can do fairly simple tasks competently, such as writing a module according the requirements written by a more experienced person. That's 2,000 engineers doing the grunt work, basically competent coders, but don't deserve the "engineer" title.
35% know how to write requirements for a user story and can code it up.
10% come up with good approaches to interesting, but not terribly difficult, problems.
5%, or 300 of them, are very good. These are the people who come up with really good ideas that significantly improve the project.
Give me that team for five years and we'll come up with something pretty darn cool.
Looking at it another way, given 100 years to work on it, I could do it. 100 years is a long time. A hundred years of my time would cost them $15 million. They're spending $4 billion. They need to achieve 0.3% efficiency to pull it off.
Slashdot Mirror
Do you think there might be any reason Android, a very small company at the time, was able to quickly build better APIs and architecture than Microsoft, who while MUCH larger, had to work around the underlying Windows OS?
Android Inc spent a few million dollars on development, while Microsoft spent a few billion - roughly a thousand times as much. Android got much better results. You don't think the OS they chose might have had something to do with that?
They buy it because it's better. It's better than Windows Phone (the first, second, theirs, and fourth attempts), it's better than Symbian, it's better than everything else people have tried. Why is it better? Linux is or reason it's better. Even Microsoft is using more and more Linux now. Is that because Microsoft has a religious zealotry for Linux? No, it's because Linux is better. Better than eating their own dog food.
>> Legacy software forcing people into Windows nowadays.
> Yeah, more than a billion people.
Yeah, legacy software has a LOT of people (companies, really) still stuck on Windows. Your point is?
Agreed, alarming on a change in traffic makes sense, as does keeping a drive image of the system.
Thanks again. I just showed my 4yo the Galilean moons and she was super excited. Even my wife got into it this time.
Kiddo corrected herself after first identifying one of the moons as Titan. :)
Autocorrect / predictive text turned "deter the criminal" to "determine the criminal".
It also occurs to me my post was quite negative, and not without good reason, but I should also acknowledge I've dealt with a couple of very good cops. One in particular in Bryan, Texas went above and beyond when my wife was in crisis. On the other hand, 20 miles away in Caldwell, Texas, a different cop wasn't good at all. He shouldn't be a cop.
> there's nothing to be done UNTIL the crime is COMMITTED.
If they could predict which block was likely to have a spike in crime 3 or 4 days in advance, that would be enough time to finish their donuts an drive a patrol car over there, potentially preventing the crime. If the presence of the patrol car didn't determine the criminal, the cops could actually catch a bad guy in the act for once, rather than taking a report the next day. I know, that's funny. They'll still just be taking reports after the fact.
A basic principle of security is least privilege. If a piece of outdated equipment needs to send udp packets on port 411 to a monitoring station, you set the firewall to allow it to send udp on port 411 to that particular station, and nothing else. If it doesn't need to take to web servers, you don't let it talk to web servers. You allow it to do only exactly what it needs to do.
Not sure what your equipment needs to do? You could check the manual, and otherwise open up Wireshark and set the filter to the IP of the equipment. Have a look at what it is sending and receiving. Then set the firewall to allow only exactly what is needed.
This is also an area where vlans come in very handy. Vlans act like completely separate networks, but they are configured within your switch, so a single 48-port switch can handle a dozen different, totally separate vlans.
Perhaps different parts of your network should be mostly separate, but you need to allow a little bit of specific communication between two vlans. That's when you plug a router or firewall into both vlans and set it to route only specifically allowed traffic between them. This doesn't even require two network ports - the same port can be in multiple vlans and the router can control traffic between vlans issuing a single cat6 cable. This is called "router on a stick".
If some of this went over your head, here's the simple version'
Call someone who has a CCNA Security certification or better (CCNP Security or CCIE Security). Tell them you're thinking about segregating different vlans and using an internal firewall to strictly control internal traffic. They'll get you set up.
I'm no CPU expert, but it's my understanding that to increase yields, Intel already disables features or entire cores that don't work right on a particular chip. If HT isn't all that useful on the new chip, and it reduces Spectre-type risks, would it not be rather easy to disable it? It can already be disabled in the BIOS, right, so disabling it doesn't require any changes to the silicon.
Thanks for all of that. We'll definitely try looking for the Galilean moons of Jupiter. My 4yo actually said she saw them, but I didn't see them and didn't know they should be visible, so I thought she was wrong.
This is a weird situation for me - I'm a major nerd, my hobby is studying. Therefore I'm used being "the smartest guy in the room". Finding out my four year old is right I was wrong is weird. She's been doing that lately. She knows all about the dwarf planets. I didn't know there were five of them until she told me, and told me their names. Lol
For for all of that. Your comments on Venus and Mars especially were interesting.
We had our first look at Mars last night, due to her 9:00 PM bed time. It hasn't been visible until late at night. We were a bit disappointed that we didn't see more features, though I knew that since at was near opposition (full moon / full Mars) we wouldn't have the shadows to help us see features. It's good to find out about the dust storm. Maybe we can see more in a month or two.
Speaking of her bed time, that's also interesting about Venus - I've just learned we'd have been better off looking at Venus BEFORE her bedtime rather than AFTER. :)
Speaking of astronomy being interesting to some here at Slashdot, perhaps some here could suggest things in astronomy that would be interesting to look at with a small telescope?
My young daughter is very interested in astronomy so I picked up a 114mm reflector telescope off Craigslist. So far we've seen Saturn's rings (which look like one big ring from our location in the suburbs, with that scope), and seen the discs of the other planets.
There's a lot of light pollution here in the Dallas suburbs and apparently we have to drive an at least an hour to find significantly darker skies. What else can we look at other than the overall color of the planets, and the banding on Jupiter? Any other objects worth seeing?
--
A funny story related to this. When I took her outside to look at Saturn, she pointed to a different part of the sky and said "daddy I see Jupiter!" She just turned four years old. How the heck a barely four year old recognizes Jupiter with no assistance, I have no idea. I had to use my sky chart app to confirm she was correct, she had indeed correctly identified Jupiter.
> only reason Ford was able to keep attract enough replacement workers was by paying them well above industry average salaries
On Payscale.com I see that Tesla pays above industry average. :)
Here are 400 current shareholder resolutions, in which shareholders are directing companies to prioritize various social issues, such as environmental issues:
https://www.greenamerica.org/s...
This is 400 cases this year of shareholders explicitly telling executives "we want you to do this socially responsible thing, even if it cuts into profits".
You're absolutely right that, lacking any other information, the default assumption is that investmentors would generally prefer to make money rather than lose money. That's a default assumption when their is no reason to believe otherwise.
On the other hand, it is well known that Ben & Jerry's stockholders wish to support certain social issues:
https://www.benjerry.com/whats...
The executives at Ben & Jerry's would breach their duty to shareholders if they invested corporate money in an oil company, because there shareholders wouldn't like that - even if it increased profits.
Interesting post.
What would you guess is the median net income for US corporations? Just for fun, care to guess the median number of employees?
Would you be surprised to learn that over 80% of US corporations were created primarily to employee specific people? Would your thoughts change if I mention that over 80% employee only one person, or one person and their immediate family? That over 80% of US corporations are people who own their job.
This rule is so often spun, to the point it's almost unrecognizable. People say all kinds of things that just aren't true. It's really not difficult, either. Very simply:
The officers of a company (CEO etc) don't own the company. They work for the people who own the company, mostly people with retirement funds that have the stock. Therefore, the CEO isn't allowed to give himself or his wife money out of the company bank account. Rather, he must use company assets to do things that the shareholders (retirement savers) would want him to do. It's their money, he has to use it the they would want it used. That simple.
There is nothing in Apple's charter about being environmentally friendly, and there doesn't need to be. If most stockholders would want them to do X thing that's good for the environment, they should do it. What they can't do is pay the CEO's cousin $10,000/hour to install solar panels.
In times past, the corporate charter and bylaws often indicated what the corporation was intended to do. For a corporation I sold a few years ago, an old-fashioned charter would have said the purpose of the corporation was to do three things, in this order:
Provide jobs for people who had lost them when another company shut down
Provide best in class security solutions for web businesses
Potentially turn a profit
Nowadays, the charter or articles of incorporation frequently says "conduct business and other lawful activities" because that gives them maximum flexibility.
Here's one that surprises a lot of people, but it's absolutely true. If you think about it for a few minutes, you can probably figure out why:
The purpose for which most corporations are created is to provide jobs, to hire people.
I didn't say that's a common side effect, I said that's the purpose. It's what the shareholders want the corporation to do, as its first priority. I know some readers are about to angrily click the reply button, but think a moment first. That's a fact. You can figure out the details yourself, or you can post an angry reply and then look silly when I explain the details to you.
> you are implying that somehow each engineer deserves $166,000 a year salary for effectively doing very little.
That would neither be their salary, not did I say anything at all about deserving it. If someone costs the company $160K, their salary will be about $100K. Neither health insurance nor office space nor payroll taxes are free. Neither are the computers and other tools they use, nor the networks which connect them all, nor ...
> or provide a full scholarships for a solid engineering education at say, the university of Illinois, for two kids.
So youe thinking is having engineers working isn't that valuable, we should instead use the money to make more engineers? Who themselves should remain unemployed so we can use the money to train even more useless engineers, I suppose.
Based on your astute reasoning, I'm going to make a bold inference that you're a Bernie Sanders supporter.
Btw, I'm also old. I've been studying information systems for 30 years.
Some people are good at physical sports, like football.
Some nerdy types spend their time getting really good at various table or computer games. Some people are really good artists.
I spend my time studying software engineering and law. I can't sing, I can't dance, I can't kick a ball, I CAN design a database.
I'm going to give Google a taste of their own medicine and make my site slow too. CNN is leading the fight in this; their site is super slow in all the major browsers.
Yep, bacon is the gateway drug.
My first ~ year as a vegetarian, I liked to point out that bacon is crispy. Meat isn't crispy. If you cook some meat and leave it sitting out on the counter all day, it'll spoil in a few hours. You can cook bacon and leave it out for days, weeks even if you cover it to keep the dust and flies off. Therefore bacon must not be meat, I can eat it, I said. :)
There sure is a lot of speculation about what could have been in the summary. Kinda sounds like what might happen if some astrophysicists got really, really stoned.
That said:
> This phase is no better then philosophy, where it is just logical thinking of things. I don't call this science
Einstein's work on relativity was mostly logical thinking of things. We didn't have the technology to test most of it until decades later.
I suppose there is a difference in that Einstein had more "logical thinking" and less wild speculation. He eliminated many possibilities and came up with a lot of "if X is true, then Y must also be true, which in turn implies Z through the blahblah theorem".
My numbers figure for this kind of work, half the day expense is salaries.
On the other hand, Ford's R&D each year builds on all the R&D they've done over the last 115 years.
Elon Musk said their production was slowed because they are trying to figure out how to run an assembly line. They bought machines that were slower than doing it by hand, so they had to throw the machines away. Tesla is trying to figure out how you organize a line to produce 5,000 cars / week, Ford was doing that in 1913. Which puts Ford 105 years ahead of Tesla on the "how to make cars" thing, which is kinda important for a car company.
I see the Bolt is Motor Trend's car of the year. I also notice it's currently outselling Tesla. I think this article is about autonomous vehicles, though.
A billion per year will get them about 6,000 engineers and coders in the area.
Let's assume they aren't great at hiring, so 20% of the engineers don't do anything more useful than filling out change forms and other paperwork for the decent engineers.
Assume 30% of them can do fairly simple tasks competently, such as writing a module according the requirements written by a more experienced person. That's 2,000 engineers doing the grunt work, basically competent coders, but don't deserve the "engineer" title.
35% know how to write requirements for a user story and can code it up.
10% come up with good approaches to interesting, but not terribly difficult, problems.
5%, or 300 of them, are very good. These are the people who come up with really good ideas that significantly improve the project.
Give me that team for five years and we'll come up with something pretty darn cool.
Looking at it another way, given 100 years to work on it, I could do it. 100 years is a long time. A hundred years of my time would cost them $15 million. They're spending $4 billion. They need to achieve 0.3% efficiency to pull it off.