Except if it is done correctly it means that average joe user who doesn't need advanced services or a lot of things that are installed/configured on a power user edition can buy a cheaper version of Windows. This breeds goodwill and loyalty and the possibility of that user upgrading to the full-price package later once they understand the additional features that it offers.
It is called "getting them hooked" by offering low-cost feature-reduced versions to get users to buy-in to the software.
However, when it is done badly (ie. Vista) then yes it is the wrong choice because all of a sudden the low-cost feature-reduced version becomes one of many options and breeds confusion and uncertainty in the consumer as to what they want to get. Confusion and uncertainty lead to fear that they will choose incorrectly and as a result waste money on something that will not meet their needs.
In a simple hook system if a user is not sure if the reduced-price version will have everything they need, there is usually a cheap (cost differential plus a token amount) upgrade path to the full-price version or the user may splurge and simply buy the full-price version anyway. If this is done badly, users may not know what upgrade paths they can take, or which version is the full-featured version. This compounds uncertainty, especially if they have multiple needs that are satisfied with different versions, or a worst-case scenario if there is NO version that satisfies all their needs (mutual exclusion between version features).
This is in part why the XP scheme of Home vs Profession editions was such a success, and why Vista's was such an utter failure. I am a software developer by trade, build my own computers, and am well versed in software in general... and I was confused as hell about what was in which version of Vista (except that apparently Ultimate was the good one...) and never upgraded.
No, no there won't. I'm sorry but oil is not *that* valuable, just look at the Alberta Tarsands. Anything below $60 a barrel means that they are operating at a loss and start slowing down production. Imagine how much it would cost to get oil from mars, or heck to make the argument easier lets suppose there is oil on the moon.
How many billions of dollars would it cost to set up drilling, refining, liftoff, descent, and recovery operations? How many trillions? You will not only need to get equipment there, you need to get hundreds of men there to perform setup. Refining needs to be done because the more volume reduction that we can do the better. Then how do you package and shield a damn tanker that will not only survive escape from the moon, but also re-entry to earth?
When oil reaches $500 million/barrel then I will take your proposal seriously.
Re:Among insiders this is a well-known phenomenon.
on
The Unmanned Air Force
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Or, you know, be able to put 3 unmanned airborne weapon platforms in the air for the same cost as a single manned jet-fighter and develop sophisticated enough auto-pilot that a human controller is only required during tactical maneuvers and blow the hell out of any human pilot opponents because: 1) You outnumber them 2) Your cost of casualties is far less because a single lost plane is 1/3 the price and no human casualties as a result 3) Your ability to maneuver is much greater because you don't have to worry about physical limits on human pilots 4) You have much better judgment and information at hand for the controller because they aren't being shot at, they can have support staff in the room with them, and important decisions can be more easily confirmed or double-checked (such as "are those actually enemies"? stupid friendly fire that killed 4 Canadian in Afghanistan...)
I think the benefits and advantages of unmanned aircraft far outweigh manned aircraft at this point. The exception being instances where you need humans to be present (ie. troop transport, search and rescue, etc.)
And it's not crap, it's metered. You don't get free all-you-can-eat electricity or petrol or food each month - why should Internet capacity be different?
Because internet capacity is not a finite resource, bandwidth is. The problem is that they advertise as having more bandwidth per user then they actually have. So 6MBPS "Unlimited" access is 1555GB per month potential is what 6MBPS is over 30 days. What they have decided to provide is 250GB or 0.8MBPS averaged over 30 days with a 'burst' speed capacity of 6MBPS.
However, if they were actually able to supply 6MBPS to every residence on their network, they would not have to artificially limit it to 250GB per month because a user who downloads 20GB vs a user who downloads 1000GB causes no difference in cost to the company!
I say, if your company can only provide 0.8MBPS to me and maintain a stable network, then tell me that is what you are going to provide! Throttle during peak loads down to 0.8MBPS if you need to, but don't advertise 6MBPS then cut me off after 4 days of using it to full capacity because I've crossed an arbitrary barrier.
I would be happy if a company gave me a guaranteed speed, the minimum rate that I would see if the network was saturated because everyone was using it to capacity. And then allowed any currently unused bandwidth to be shared amongst the active connections. Then the company would have managed it's finite resources well. But if I gobble up 250GB of data using bandwidth during time that it is not being used by others on a network, then I haven't exhausted anything by doing so, and should not be penalized for it!
We do the same in Canada, and results are always available the same night (or early morning for people on the east coast). The only problem we have is that when the first results from the east start trickling in, the west still has 4 hours left to vote.
You say Google is reducing your desire to learn because you can just look it up at any moment.
Question for you: Have you spent an hour or two looking up and reading about things that you previously never have bothered to take the time and effort to discover?
If you answered 'yes', Google is not reducing your desire to learn, but simply facilitating your ability to learn so that you can pursue topics that interest you that you would not otherwise consider.
Example: One day I spent several hours learning about British Royalty between the 15th and 20th centuries by looking at an overview, then delving deeply into certain areas (the Tudor period in particular was of great interest to me). Now, I cannot retain all the information I learned during that time, but I do have a much greater appreciation for it and I can recall a good number of the highlights of my searching. In the end I know much more about the British Monarchy than I would have if I were stuck reading in libraries about it, because I would never have bothered to go to the library in the first place!.
I can't say that I'm a fan of extremely long prison terms except in extreme circumstances (Robert Pickton I'm talking about you). However I would overlook that for the present considering that the US still practices capital punishment and Reiser could very well face death if convicted of 1st degree murder.
Add on top of that the US supporting indefinite imprisonment without trial in military prisons such as Guantanamo Bay, and I think that alternatives to 25 years are much, much worse.
The composer gives you structure, the maestro gives it style. Regardless of the amount of notation, simply playing what is on the page without a sense of musicianship is terrible. Now at the professional level I am confident that the players know how to balance themselves and what to listen for... but it is impossible to hear exactly what you sound like down in the pit or on the stage. That is what the conductor is for, to listen to the sound and tell you what corrections to make while you play... something a robot is incapable of doing.
And then you have composers/conductors like John Philip Sousa, and the widely known Sousa-marches. Very technical pieces of work, fast, and they can be hard to play. In addition to that, the score that is written on the page is wrong. I mean, literally Sousa wrote down a lot of notes that you are not supposed to play! Sousa himself knew which parts to play and which to ignore, but others didn't... which is why a Sousa march was never as good unless Sousa himself was conducting it. Only a skilled and attentive conductor would be able to listen to how he actually conducts it and reverse engineer the mistakes that he intentionally made in the score.
Welcome to the world of modern music. A robot can keep time... but so can a metronome. Give me someone who can hear and give me the cues I need to play with the rest of the orchestra while I am busy being deafened by the trumpets.
I have not watched the trailer, the movie, or seen any of the backlash it has caused.
That being said, if the movie does espouse a hard-line creationist/ID shall I say revolution? Attempting to spur the masses on to make a stand to support creationism and ID and seeks to marginalize true scientific input.
I have a VERY hard time believing this wasn't done with tongue firmly planted in cheek. Ben Stein probably has the driest wit of anyone I've seen. Truth be told I would be very surprised if this wasn't an attempt to force the issue for the purposes of being able to destroy the arguments made by the ID people, and that a lot of people are making a mistake believing it to be actually supporting ID.
None of the multi-million dollar prizes are enough to cover the budget of any of these attempts, whether it be the Ansari X-prize or Google's "shoot the moon".
The real prize is the prestige of winning it, or even just competing. The actual monetary prize is just a token.
Why is it so hard to find good jobs doing embedded programming?
I've done the coursework, and been trained in embedded programming. I'd be a junior at it, and would need experience but I could be one pretty easily.
But like the parent said, are you going to pay me for it? I get a good salary working in high-level languages that let me create things that *do* so much more, unless I was overwhelmingly interested in embedded systems what motivation do I have to do it?
Hmm, please clarify... You met your wife on-line, in 1981? What form of the term 'on-line' are you referring to? Somehow "my youth... friends I met online" and "met my wife online 27 years ago" don't resolve in my head.
And Galileo was put under house arrest for the latter part of his life for his research and advocacy of heliocentrism.
Mary Shelley was a fine writer, and spawned from a ghost-story writing contest came the idea of a construct made from human corpses and brought to life was a frightening one, in part from a paper that described the movement of a frog's leg when touched by an electric spark.
Fuel for the imagination? Perhaps. But without the research began by Copernicus and continued by Galileo we would never have reached the moon. With the research performed by Luigi Galvani and Alessandro Volta we would not have the pacemaker or the ability to create thought-controlled prosthetics. Without research done on the very makeup of human cells and how they can be used, what wonderous things will we not have in 100 or 200 years time?
Ignorance and Fear are things to guard against, not laud. Calls to cease all activity in understanding the unknown, to ban research into the very subject are the same things that we have been battling for centuries. Should we proceed with caution? Of course, we must always guard against the likes of Josef Mengele. But to embrace our ignorance is to be traitorous to our very nature, our nature of seeking answers to the unknown.
You are correct, the Pope's words would be just as utterly distasteful and ignorant if they came from the Dalai Lama, a Harvard Professor, or my mother. I have no issue with it being the Pope saying the words, but rather the very fact that people object to entire area of science because of an objection to a particular possible future use to technology that may come out of it, in an area that we still have a poor understanding!
It's called a thin-wedge fallacy and is often combined with a straw-man to make monsters out of the unknown.
Agreed, I'm in the same position except with 2.5 years working in the industry (graduated April '05). You have to be able to work with people and have a good rapport with them on a professional level, and be able to do so whether you like them or not (and vice versa).
If you work in a small shop, communication is vital and it pays off to be able to do a little bit of everything even if you're specialized in another area.
As for purely technical skills, it depends on what level you're interested in working at but if you're doing modern application development and any work with the web then having good Java skills will pay off in most of the country. If you're in Alberta, and especially Calgary, then brush up on your.NET because 90% of the positions available will be looking for it.
It is irrelevant to the problem. Turing Machines in general, and simple Universal Turing machines especially require exponential space/time to solve problems that have quicker solutions on more advanced machines.
Usually no consideration is paid to how efficiently a Turing Machine works, as long as it is finite. There is no optimization that goes into the Machine to solve real-world problems, only proof that they could be solved. In your example a plausible answer for the amount of tape necessary could range anywhere from n^2 (the minimum length required to write the answer) to O(2^n) (the amount of tape required to write out the equivalent of 1+1+1+1... p*q times (Where p is the first number, and q is the second).
Why on earth would we? We make a ton of money by exporting our goods to the US. Being the largest consumer market in the world (in terms of total goods consumed, not population) why would we choose to cut out such a rich market?
The only reason I could possibly see is if the US dollar were to become worthless, and better profits can be made elsewhere. But until that happens, there is no worry about countries deciding to *not* ship to the US.
Can you imagine getting on a "soft-key" elevator? I think it would be cool at first, then really annoying. I have a hard-key elevator that screws up. If both elevators arrive at the same time, the elevator won't recognize it when you press a button for a floor (although it lights up) and won't move until after the doors are closed and you press the floor button a second time.
I would be quite happy with a soft-key elevator as long as it worked.
I am an IT person, and I feel much the same way. Perks are nice, but I'd rather take fewer perks in order to have a good company, good people, good work, and a sense of accomplishment.
Slashdot Mirror
Except if it is done correctly it means that average joe user who doesn't need advanced services or a lot of things that are installed/configured on a power user edition can buy a cheaper version of Windows. This breeds goodwill and loyalty and the possibility of that user upgrading to the full-price package later once they understand the additional features that it offers.
It is called "getting them hooked" by offering low-cost feature-reduced versions to get users to buy-in to the software.
However, when it is done badly (ie. Vista) then yes it is the wrong choice because all of a sudden the low-cost feature-reduced version becomes one of many options and breeds confusion and uncertainty in the consumer as to what they want to get. Confusion and uncertainty lead to fear that they will choose incorrectly and as a result waste money on something that will not meet their needs.
In a simple hook system if a user is not sure if the reduced-price version will have everything they need, there is usually a cheap (cost differential plus a token amount) upgrade path to the full-price version or the user may splurge and simply buy the full-price version anyway. If this is done badly, users may not know what upgrade paths they can take, or which version is the full-featured version. This compounds uncertainty, especially if they have multiple needs that are satisfied with different versions, or a worst-case scenario if there is NO version that satisfies all their needs (mutual exclusion between version features).
This is in part why the XP scheme of Home vs Profession editions was such a success, and why Vista's was such an utter failure. I am a software developer by trade, build my own computers, and am well versed in software in general... and I was confused as hell about what was in which version of Vista (except that apparently Ultimate was the good one...) and never upgraded.
No, no there won't. I'm sorry but oil is not *that* valuable, just look at the Alberta Tarsands. Anything below $60 a barrel means that they are operating at a loss and start slowing down production. Imagine how much it would cost to get oil from mars, or heck to make the argument easier lets suppose there is oil on the moon.
How many billions of dollars would it cost to set up drilling, refining, liftoff, descent, and recovery operations? How many trillions? You will not only need to get equipment there, you need to get hundreds of men there to perform setup. Refining needs to be done because the more volume reduction that we can do the better. Then how do you package and shield a damn tanker that will not only survive escape from the moon, but also re-entry to earth?
When oil reaches $500 million/barrel then I will take your proposal seriously.
Or, you know, be able to put 3 unmanned airborne weapon platforms in the air for the same cost as a single manned jet-fighter and develop sophisticated enough auto-pilot that a human controller is only required during tactical maneuvers and blow the hell out of any human pilot opponents because:
1) You outnumber them
2) Your cost of casualties is far less because a single lost plane is 1/3 the price and no human casualties as a result
3) Your ability to maneuver is much greater because you don't have to worry about physical limits on human pilots
4) You have much better judgment and information at hand for the controller because they aren't being shot at, they can have support staff in the room with them, and important decisions can be more easily confirmed or double-checked (such as "are those actually enemies"? stupid friendly fire that killed 4 Canadian in Afghanistan...)
I think the benefits and advantages of unmanned aircraft far outweigh manned aircraft at this point. The exception being instances where you need humans to be present (ie. troop transport, search and rescue, etc.)
And it's not crap, it's metered. You don't get free all-you-can-eat electricity or petrol or food each month - why should Internet capacity be different?
Because internet capacity is not a finite resource, bandwidth is. The problem is that they advertise as having more bandwidth per user then they actually have. So 6MBPS "Unlimited" access is 1555GB per month potential is what 6MBPS is over 30 days. What they have decided to provide is 250GB or 0.8MBPS averaged over 30 days with a 'burst' speed capacity of 6MBPS.
However, if they were actually able to supply 6MBPS to every residence on their network, they would not have to artificially limit it to 250GB per month because a user who downloads 20GB vs a user who downloads 1000GB causes no difference in cost to the company!
I say, if your company can only provide 0.8MBPS to me and maintain a stable network, then tell me that is what you are going to provide! Throttle during peak loads down to 0.8MBPS if you need to, but don't advertise 6MBPS then cut me off after 4 days of using it to full capacity because I've crossed an arbitrary barrier.
I would be happy if a company gave me a guaranteed speed, the minimum rate that I would see if the network was saturated because everyone was using it to capacity. And then allowed any currently unused bandwidth to be shared amongst the active connections. Then the company would have managed it's finite resources well. But if I gobble up 250GB of data using bandwidth during time that it is not being used by others on a network, then I haven't exhausted anything by doing so, and should not be penalized for it!
Oblg.
http://xkcd.com/435/
We do the same in Canada, and results are always available the same night (or early morning for people on the east coast). The only problem we have is that when the first results from the east start trickling in, the west still has 4 hours left to vote.
You say Google is reducing your desire to learn because you can just look it up at any moment.
Question for you: Have you spent an hour or two looking up and reading about things that you previously never have bothered to take the time and effort to discover?
If you answered 'yes', Google is not reducing your desire to learn, but simply facilitating your ability to learn so that you can pursue topics that interest you that you would not otherwise consider.
Example: One day I spent several hours learning about British Royalty between the 15th and 20th centuries by looking at an overview, then delving deeply into certain areas (the Tudor period in particular was of great interest to me). Now, I cannot retain all the information I learned during that time, but I do have a much greater appreciation for it and I can recall a good number of the highlights of my searching. In the end I know much more about the British Monarchy than I would have if I were stuck reading in libraries about it, because I would never have bothered to go to the library in the first place!.
I can't say that I'm a fan of extremely long prison terms except in extreme circumstances (Robert Pickton I'm talking about you). However I would overlook that for the present considering that the US still practices capital punishment and Reiser could very well face death if convicted of 1st degree murder.
Add on top of that the US supporting indefinite imprisonment without trial in military prisons such as Guantanamo Bay, and I think that alternatives to 25 years are much, much worse.
The composer gives you structure, the maestro gives it style. Regardless of the amount of notation, simply playing what is on the page without a sense of musicianship is terrible. Now at the professional level I am confident that the players know how to balance themselves and what to listen for... but it is impossible to hear exactly what you sound like down in the pit or on the stage. That is what the conductor is for, to listen to the sound and tell you what corrections to make while you play... something a robot is incapable of doing.
And then you have composers/conductors like John Philip Sousa, and the widely known Sousa-marches. Very technical pieces of work, fast, and they can be hard to play. In addition to that, the score that is written on the page is wrong. I mean, literally Sousa wrote down a lot of notes that you are not supposed to play! Sousa himself knew which parts to play and which to ignore, but others didn't... which is why a Sousa march was never as good unless Sousa himself was conducting it. Only a skilled and attentive conductor would be able to listen to how he actually conducts it and reverse engineer the mistakes that he intentionally made in the score.
Welcome to the world of modern music. A robot can keep time... but so can a metronome. Give me someone who can hear and give me the cues I need to play with the rest of the orchestra while I am busy being deafened by the trumpets.
- From an amateur but active Flautist
Yeah, pity they only decided to pick one.
I have not watched the trailer, the movie, or seen any of the backlash it has caused.
That being said, if the movie does espouse a hard-line creationist/ID shall I say revolution? Attempting to spur the masses on to make a stand to support creationism and ID and seeks to marginalize true scientific input.
I have a VERY hard time believing this wasn't done with tongue firmly planted in cheek. Ben Stein probably has the driest wit of anyone I've seen. Truth be told I would be very surprised if this wasn't an attempt to force the issue for the purposes of being able to destroy the arguments made by the ID people, and that a lot of people are making a mistake believing it to be actually supporting ID.
But then, I haven't seen it for myself.
No kidding! Plus then they can sue the judge for unauthorized public performance!
Easy, there are more than enough law, entertainment industry, war, bureaucracy, propaganda, savvy human beings in congress already.
The techies of the nation want representation too.
None of the multi-million dollar prizes are enough to cover the budget of any of these attempts, whether it be the Ansari X-prize or Google's "shoot the moon".
The real prize is the prestige of winning it, or even just competing. The actual monetary prize is just a token.
Why is it so hard to find good jobs doing embedded programming?
I've done the coursework, and been trained in embedded programming. I'd be a junior at it, and would need experience but I could be one pretty easily.
But like the parent said, are you going to pay me for it? I get a good salary working in high-level languages that let me create things that *do* so much more, unless I was overwhelmingly interested in embedded systems what motivation do I have to do it?
Hmm, please clarify... You met your wife on-line, in 1981? What form of the term 'on-line' are you referring to? Somehow "my youth... friends I met online" and "met my wife online 27 years ago" don't resolve in my head.
And Galileo was put under house arrest for the latter part of his life for his research and advocacy of heliocentrism.
Mary Shelley was a fine writer, and spawned from a ghost-story writing contest came the idea of a construct made from human corpses and brought to life was a frightening one, in part from a paper that described the movement of a frog's leg when touched by an electric spark.
Fuel for the imagination? Perhaps. But without the research began by Copernicus and continued by Galileo we would never have reached the moon. With the research performed by Luigi Galvani and Alessandro Volta we would not have the pacemaker or the ability to create thought-controlled prosthetics. Without research done on the very makeup of human cells and how they can be used, what wonderous things will we not have in 100 or 200 years time?
Ignorance and Fear are things to guard against, not laud. Calls to cease all activity in understanding the unknown, to ban research into the very subject are the same things that we have been battling for centuries. Should we proceed with caution? Of course, we must always guard against the likes of Josef Mengele. But to embrace our ignorance is to be traitorous to our very nature, our nature of seeking answers to the unknown.
You are correct, the Pope's words would be just as utterly distasteful and ignorant if they came from the Dalai Lama, a Harvard Professor, or my mother. I have no issue with it being the Pope saying the words, but rather the very fact that people object to entire area of science because of an objection to a particular possible future use to technology that may come out of it, in an area that we still have a poor understanding!
It's called a thin-wedge fallacy and is often combined with a straw-man to make monsters out of the unknown.
Agreed, I'm in the same position except with 2.5 years working in the industry (graduated April '05). You have to be able to work with people and have a good rapport with them on a professional level, and be able to do so whether you like them or not (and vice versa).
.NET because 90% of the positions available will be looking for it.
If you work in a small shop, communication is vital and it pays off to be able to do a little bit of everything even if you're specialized in another area.
As for purely technical skills, it depends on what level you're interested in working at but if you're doing modern application development and any work with the web then having good Java skills will pay off in most of the country. If you're in Alberta, and especially Calgary, then brush up on your
Yes, except you have that backwards.
If they survive decompression, they must be guilty! If not, they're innocent.
It is irrelevant to the problem. Turing Machines in general, and simple Universal Turing machines especially require exponential space/time to solve problems that have quicker solutions on more advanced machines.
Usually no consideration is paid to how efficiently a Turing Machine works, as long as it is finite. There is no optimization that goes into the Machine to solve real-world problems, only proof that they could be solved. In your example a plausible answer for the amount of tape necessary could range anywhere from n^2 (the minimum length required to write the answer) to O(2^n) (the amount of tape required to write out the equivalent of 1+1+1+1... p*q times (Where p is the first number, and q is the second).
Why on earth would we? We make a ton of money by exporting our goods to the US. Being the largest consumer market in the world (in terms of total goods consumed, not population) why would we choose to cut out such a rich market?
The only reason I could possibly see is if the US dollar were to become worthless, and better profits can be made elsewhere. But until that happens, there is no worry about countries deciding to *not* ship to the US.
I would be quite happy with a soft-key elevator as long as it worked.
I am an IT person, and I feel much the same way. Perks are nice, but I'd rather take fewer perks in order to have a good company, good people, good work, and a sense of accomplishment.