Not only that but from the article it seems that MS is going after a very different segment then many of the other examples given in the article. The interesting thing is that this seems yet another path MS is trying out.
They are pursuing embedded devices, starting to build hardware (xbox), they are fracturing their OS division even more (server, business, home, and internet appliances), and other pursuits. It seems that diversification is the main goal in Redmond now-a-days. If it is successful then they become the next GE with a finger in everybody's pie. Equally likely, they move away from their core strength and get pecked to death by the thousands of ducks whom they intrude upon. (Compounding matters their toughest people, like Bill and Ballmer, are moving away from the business end and into the operations end.)
The problem is that MS has a pathalogical dependence on stock options. I can't help but think that this sort of stuff is going to hurt their margins which will slow the growth of the stock price. It will be interesting to see how things play out.
It is an academic version of a race condition. You cannot get promoted through the tenure system without lots of publications, but you get little to no credit for doing a review. The result has been that more papers are submitted, but it is harder to get reviewers. Without reviewers it takes longer to get published.
To get through the tenure and promotion system you need grants and lots of publications. I have colleagues who literally could not care less about their students. The Deans and administrative types promote them with a "wink, wink, nudge, nudge," because they bring in money and prestige from a small academic community. I would not send my own kids to a land grant institution and would encourage them to go to a smaller institution.
As far as resources to publish, it does take a lot. For each paper the publishers have to find reviewers. They have to check up on the ones who are late in filing reviews. They have to decide what parts the reviewers got right and what they got wrong. They have to make sure that revisions are sent back to reviewers and broker disputes. The process of putting together and preparing an article is very difficult. If you think my grammar is bad, you should see some of the stuff coming from people just learning to speak this whacked out language.
Completely off topic... but...
rant on
I saw someone on this board saying that MIT should be commended for putting their education materials on the web. MIT is the worst place to go if you are looking for an education. They produce research and create a place for smart students to be together. This is nice, but the last thing they should be commended for is what happens in their classrooms.
Also, they are the place that pioneered ways to take advantage of the Bayh-Dole Act to seek patents and royalties for things created using public money.
The views expressed seemed to concentrate on the need for continued "high quality" publications and access to them. There is another viewpoint. The number of journals and the raw number of publications has skyrocketed over the last two decades.
The academic environment has become so focused on publishing and getting grants that the focus is not on quality but quantity. At the same time resources are stretched so thin that the cost of producing these journals has also gone through the roof, and the prices that libraries are asked to pay is outrageous. Nobody seems to be questioning whether or not the current situation is good for science.
I had dinner a couple of nights ago with a guy who is one of the editors of an entomology journal. He said that it is now so difficult to get reviewers that they have had to reduce the number of reviewers per paper down to two, and it is still hard to find people! The publishers who included statements in the link above can rant all they want about "quality" and "integrity," but they should be asking more fundamental questions.
There is an old joke about a person's work, "Dr. Jones has filled a much needed hole in the literature." This seems to be a common compliment. The people in the academic community really need to rethink what their role in society is. It doesn't feel like the Deans and administrators in american universities care much at all about students and education.
This is intriguing. Your police department cannot conduct a search unless there is a damn good reason, but MS can come in and crawl up your ass because you clicked "yes" on the EULA. I thought the constitution was about personal liberties not about just keeping the government off of our backs.
Side note: when I read the article I got confused because the Alaska airlines example said that MS wanted to charge by machine accessing the server. The description of the different license agreements says that they charge by the number of accesses ignoring where they come from. To clear this up I checked out the licensing options at the MS website and was interested in the academic options.
WHen I went to download a copy of the license it was in an MS propietary format! This strikes me that the mindset is that they are bent on upgrading and not converting. If that is the case they can't expect to see growth in the software business just continued sales to the same folks.
How come so many of these posts concentrate on the bullies? The link that you posted was very interesting, but I think that last example offers the real clue to what the problem is.
The problem is not that there are too many bullies out there, but too many people allow the bullies to get away with it. The vast majority of kids are decent kids but like the rest of society they don't fight against the bullies who pick on the minority. Rather than focusing on the bullies we should try to support the majority who does not confront the bullies.
Another interesting note is that all of the examples come from suburban, middle-class schools. The attorney general of the US would rather spit out out-of-date demagoguery about stereo-typical inner-city violence. I can only imagine that this is easier to swallow in the suburbs and make it easier to keep heads in the sand.
No politician wants to insult his base support. Perhaps the real problem is appointing politicians to such positions.
Thank you for taking your time to come into what must surely look like a lion's den from your perspective. Microsoft's strength is in building products with a very good user interface. Sure, there are quirks, but overall MS is the standard that others are trying to reach.
On the technical side, however, there are some implementations that are.. well, inelegant. For example, windows clients seem to be very chatty and put out a lot of unnecessary communication on the network. Password encryption and implementations have been spotty. Open standards such as kerberos and others do not seem to be adhered to.
How come there is this perceived disparity? Can you comment on the structures in place on how software is tested and developed? What kind of balance do you have to achieve when looking at the interface and what is happening under the hood?
My work is in numerical analysis and scientific computing, and I have taught many sections of numerical analysis. The people who are good in this field come from all over. I have had some exceptional students from the CS department, the physics dept, the math departments, and others. Good talent is all over the place.
The hard part is recognizing it. The current educational system does a poor job of rewarding people who can do original work. It is a shame that the way we assign grades and the way grades are perceived has twisted the way people view education.
The biggest question that students have is how can they find places like the one mentioned. There are almost no ads that say "looking for computational mathematician" (except maybe at the www.siam.org site). It is very difficult for young people to figure out how to sell themselves and let potential employers know what their talents are.
Some managers seem to understand this and are able to "steal" away good people. My feeling has been that there are a lot of managers who do not have open minds about these sorts of things and are really missing out on a lot of talented people.
According to the article the monk used a 2D plane and worked through the points in the plane. The algorithm he used is very close to the algorithm which looks much nicer using complex numbers. (By the way Leonhard Euler first proposed the use of \sqrt(-1) in 1777.) It certainly looks like the Julia set.
The algorithm to find the set was thought to have been proposed by Gaston Julia. In the early sixties (me thinks) several meterologists actually toyed with the algorithm not knowing what Julia had done. (For some reason I thing that Lorentz was one of these people.) They even printed out pictures of it using fortran programs that went through a grid literally marking the converging points with an '*'. (Just think we can now do this using excel in half the time!:-)
Later, Mandelbrot looked at the same thing and was able to use the technology developed at IBM to make decent pictures of it. He went on to make many conjectures which were all proved by other people. I went to a talk by Mandelbrot, and he is basically a monster ego with feet and a bifg mouth.
The guy lucked out in my opinion. He had an interest in something already known and other people developed the technology for him to take the credit. The sad thing is that this is worse than patent law since Mandelbrot will always get way more credit than he deserves.
To the best of my knowledge he never acknowledged the work done by the meterologists. When I saw him he also claimed the results of the conjectures as his own and went out of his way to disparage the people who did the real work.
From my experience working with math teachers in K12 this is far from the norm. Many of the teachers I have worked with panic at the thought of changing from their old trusty, rusty macs. Others know just a couple of packages for windows (geometer sketchpad for instance) and refuse to use anything else.
This is a noble effort, but the real focus of efforts should not be at administrators. As much as I like linux for my box at home, it still is not quite ready for prime time. The first time a teacher tries to plug in a new piece of hardware only to find that it isn't supported that box is heading for the closet.
Moreover, my biggest gripe about computers/internet in the classroom is that these poor educators have no training and no resources to help them deal with this stuff. We need more than access to linux. We need access to good quality educational software and resources to help train the teachers on how to incorporate the stuff into real learning experiences. It is bad enough that we expect people to deal with 30 kids and low pay; we also expect them to be able to redesign the curriculum in their spare time and use technology that they were never trained to use! (Some of you might be surprised to learn that for some folks this stuff is not intuitively obvious.)
I've checked things out over at sourceforge and there are some good projects going on. It is very difficult to sort them all out, and there is little or no help for teachers trying to incorporate these things into the curriculum.
Phew... I've become a real crab. Now where did I put that sliderule...
We've really gone a long way to reduce the rights of public officials in this country. In the not so distant future it will be incredibly difficult for historians and jounalists to try to figure out why people do what they do.
On the other hand, we have reached an age where we know way too much about our public officials and what they do. I find it somewhat ironic that Bush Sr. pardoned Caspar Weinberg who was indicted because he said that he knew nothing of the Iran-Contra scandal, but when he submitted his private journal to the library of congress it clearly stated he was in meetings with Bush Sr. discussing what was going on!!! We now have Jr. making a conscious effort to avoid any and all public discosure of what he does.
Public officials should be able to act without worry that things they do or say will be taken out of context. At the same time, I want to know what they are doing. There has to be a way to document the actions of public officials. I really don't like the idea that from Clinton on, our president will be making decisions and doing things with little or no documentation.
The Marines are really pushing this "non-lethal" weapons stuff hard. They have budgeted a severe amount of money for this kind of stuff. I've been to briefings that they sponsor, and they feel that this is the next big thing.
I am assuming that just like their foam gun and wheel shooting equipment that this thing will also come out looking bad. According to the article they are going to shoot this thing from up to 750 meters? From that distance the energy is going to be distributed over the entire body of the victim... err target. That means it will damage eye's, the skin around your ears, and if you are a card carrying member of the Y-chromosone club your going to get your testes roasted.
Think about that last one for a minute there, boys.
The more I listen to this stuff the more skeptical I become. This whole project seems more like an excuse to just dump money on a few companies and academics.
For more info check out
this and this and maybe
this.
The people that I've known who got a patent are not so concerned about suing as they are crowing. A patent is a great source of pride a way for the bullies to keep something to themselves and not share. The mentality is more about keeping things to yourself and not let the other kids play with it.
The article reminded me of Cooley and Tookey. I've heard them talk about the race to publish the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT). They had heard that some others had discovered it and wanted to patent it. They said that there paper was rushed in order to get it to the publisher as fast as possible.
Think about this. The FFT is the most important mathematical technique in use today. It is so ubiquitus that we completely take it for granted, yet it is in a part of nearly every gadget on my desk. It is something that literally changed the world and impacts us everday. It was nearly the property of some jerk as if it were a piece of land.
I've lived in places like Indiana, North Carolina, Rhode Island, and Utah, which are seen as being very parochial. I have to say that Utah/Idaho represents a discontinuity from the rest of the country. All of these places have their quirks and have good and bad sides.
Certainly in terms of geology, wide open vistas, and the outdoor activities the intermountain west is simply amazing. The people who tamed this land are also amazing, and right now 75% of the people are part of the LDS church. The unique history here means that the separation between church and state is blurred.
*NO* politician gets elected who is not LDS. The church owns the major newspapers (through the Deseret news). All of the media outlets have a heavy LDS influence. Everywhere you look you see religious symbols. (Ex: smack in the middle of the state seal is a bee-hive, a religious symbol which is also seen on *every* roadsign!) The names on the sides of buildings have LDS connections. The governor walks around with a nu skin umbrella! (Sorry I couldn't resist, but most outsiders won't get that one.) Heck, those of us outside the dominant culture are called "gentiles."
While the liquor laws here are a bit weird, they are not awful. It is possible to get alchohol. What makes things annoying is that when anyone suggests any sort of change a bizarre circus erupts in which the full religous zeal of the dominant culture rears its head. It is a breath-taking spectacle to behold. It can also be a bit tiresome.
The frustration voiced by the CEO of iomega is one that I often heard voiced by many gentiles. I don't think that things are as bad as he let on, and certainly the Salt Lake Tribune loves to play on any kind of anti-mormon sentiment. But it still seems to me that Utah is something quite out of the ordinary.
Okay I've rambled on long enough... time to hit the slopes, suckers! (That's something I didn't do in Indiana:-)
This is no longer an issue. In fact the government encourages publically funded projects to result in something that is marketable. This change was brought about by the Bayh-Dole act.
In fact, I am on a couple of projects funded by the NSF, and they really encourage people to spin off commercial projects. They think that it makes it easier to convince congress that they are doing good things.
Check this out to see how the scientific community is reacting.
What about the opposite problem? Suppose that MS decides to circumvent your scenario and releases all of its code under a standard copyright. If a code fragment from MS ends up in a GPL code does it then become closed? Who would their lawyers go after?
Then again, whose gonna wade through the whole windows code set....
Slashdot Mirror
They are pursuing embedded devices, starting to build hardware (xbox), they are fracturing their OS division even more (server, business, home, and internet appliances), and other pursuits. It seems that diversification is the main goal in Redmond now-a-days. If it is successful then they become the next GE with a finger in everybody's pie. Equally likely, they move away from their core strength and get pecked to death by the thousands of ducks whom they intrude upon. (Compounding matters their toughest people, like Bill and Ballmer, are moving away from the business end and into the operations end.)
The problem is that MS has a pathalogical dependence on stock options. I can't help but think that this sort of stuff is going to hurt their margins which will slow the growth of the stock price. It will be interesting to see how things play out.
To get through the tenure and promotion system you need grants and lots of publications. I have colleagues who literally could not care less about their students. The Deans and administrative types promote them with a "wink, wink, nudge, nudge," because they bring in money and prestige from a small academic community. I would not send my own kids to a land grant institution and would encourage them to go to a smaller institution.
As far as resources to publish, it does take a lot. For each paper the publishers have to find reviewers. They have to check up on the ones who are late in filing reviews. They have to decide what parts the reviewers got right and what they got wrong. They have to make sure that revisions are sent back to reviewers and broker disputes. The process of putting together and preparing an article is very difficult. If you think my grammar is bad, you should see some of the stuff coming from people just learning to speak this whacked out language.
Completely off topic... but...
rant on
I saw someone on this board saying that MIT should be commended for putting their education materials on the web. MIT is the worst place to go if you are looking for an education. They produce research and create a place for smart students to be together. This is nice, but the last thing they should be commended for is what happens in their classrooms.
Also, they are the place that pioneered ways to take advantage of the Bayh-Dole Act to seek patents and royalties for things created using public money.
rant off
The academic environment has become so focused on publishing and getting grants that the focus is not on quality but quantity. At the same time resources are stretched so thin that the cost of producing these journals has also gone through the roof, and the prices that libraries are asked to pay is outrageous. Nobody seems to be questioning whether or not the current situation is good for science.
I had dinner a couple of nights ago with a guy who is one of the editors of an entomology journal. He said that it is now so difficult to get reviewers that they have had to reduce the number of reviewers per paper down to two, and it is still hard to find people! The publishers who included statements in the link above can rant all they want about "quality" and "integrity," but they should be asking more fundamental questions.
There is an old joke about a person's work, "Dr. Jones has filled a much needed hole in the literature." This seems to be a common compliment. The people in the academic community really need to rethink what their role in society is. It doesn't feel like the Deans and administrators in american universities care much at all about students and education.
Side note: when I read the article I got confused because the Alaska airlines example said that MS wanted to charge by machine accessing the server. The description of the different license agreements says that they charge by the number of accesses ignoring where they come from. To clear this up I checked out the licensing options at the MS website and was interested in the academic options.
WHen I went to download a copy of the license it was in an MS propietary format! This strikes me that the mindset is that they are bent on upgrading and not converting. If that is the case they can't expect to see growth in the software business just continued sales to the same folks.
The problem is not that there are too many bullies out there, but too many people allow the bullies to get away with it. The vast majority of kids are decent kids but like the rest of society they don't fight against the bullies who pick on the minority. Rather than focusing on the bullies we should try to support the majority who does not confront the bullies.
Another interesting note is that all of the examples come from suburban, middle-class schools. The attorney general of the US would rather spit out out-of-date demagoguery about stereo-typical inner-city violence. I can only imagine that this is easier to swallow in the suburbs and make it easier to keep heads in the sand.
No politician wants to insult his base support. Perhaps the real problem is appointing politicians to such positions.
Hello,
Thank you for taking your time to come into what must surely look like a lion's den from your perspective. Microsoft's strength is in building products with a very good user interface. Sure, there are quirks, but overall MS is the standard that others are trying to reach.
On the technical side, however, there are some implementations that are.. well, inelegant. For example, windows clients seem to be very chatty and put out a lot of unnecessary communication on the network. Password encryption and implementations have been spotty. Open standards such as kerberos and others do not seem to be adhered to.
How come there is this perceived disparity? Can you comment on the structures in place on how software is tested and developed? What kind of balance do you have to achieve when looking at the interface and what is happening under the hood?
The hard part is recognizing it. The current educational system does a poor job of rewarding people who can do original work. It is a shame that the way we assign grades and the way grades are perceived has twisted the way people view education.
The biggest question that students have is how can they find places like the one mentioned. There are almost no ads that say "looking for computational mathematician" (except maybe at the www.siam.org site). It is very difficult for young people to figure out how to sell themselves and let potential employers know what their talents are.
Some managers seem to understand this and are able to "steal" away good people. My feeling has been that there are a lot of managers who do not have open minds about these sorts of things and are really missing out on a lot of talented people.
The algorithm to find the set was thought to have been proposed by Gaston Julia. In the early sixties (me thinks) several meterologists actually toyed with the algorithm not knowing what Julia had done. (For some reason I thing that Lorentz was one of these people.) They even printed out pictures of it using fortran programs that went through a grid literally marking the converging points with an '*'. (Just think we can now do this using excel in half the time! :-)
Later, Mandelbrot looked at the same thing and was able to use the technology developed at IBM to make decent pictures of it. He went on to make many conjectures which were all proved by other people. I went to a talk by Mandelbrot, and he is basically a monster ego with feet and a bifg mouth.
The guy lucked out in my opinion. He had an interest in something already known and other people developed the technology for him to take the credit. The sad thing is that this is worse than patent law since Mandelbrot will always get way more credit than he deserves.
To the best of my knowledge he never acknowledged the work done by the meterologists. When I saw him he also claimed the results of the conjectures as his own and went out of his way to disparage the people who did the real work.
This is a noble effort, but the real focus of efforts should not be at administrators. As much as I like linux for my box at home, it still is not quite ready for prime time. The first time a teacher tries to plug in a new piece of hardware only to find that it isn't supported that box is heading for the closet.
Moreover, my biggest gripe about computers/internet in the classroom is that these poor educators have no training and no resources to help them deal with this stuff. We need more than access to linux. We need access to good quality educational software and resources to help train the teachers on how to incorporate the stuff into real learning experiences. It is bad enough that we expect people to deal with 30 kids and low pay; we also expect them to be able to redesign the curriculum in their spare time and use technology that they were never trained to use! (Some of you might be surprised to learn that for some folks this stuff is not intuitively obvious.)
I've checked things out over at sourceforge and there are some good projects going on. It is very difficult to sort them all out, and there is little or no help for teachers trying to incorporate these things into the curriculum.
Phew... I've become a real crab. Now where did I put that sliderule...
On the other hand, we have reached an age where we know way too much about our public officials and what they do. I find it somewhat ironic that Bush Sr. pardoned Caspar Weinberg who was indicted because he said that he knew nothing of the Iran-Contra scandal, but when he submitted his private journal to the library of congress it clearly stated he was in meetings with Bush Sr. discussing what was going on!!! We now have Jr. making a conscious effort to avoid any and all public discosure of what he does.
Public officials should be able to act without worry that things they do or say will be taken out of context. At the same time, I want to know what they are doing. There has to be a way to document the actions of public officials. I really don't like the idea that from Clinton on, our president will be making decisions and doing things with little or no documentation.
I am assuming that just like their foam gun and wheel shooting equipment that this thing will also come out looking bad. According to the article they are going to shoot this thing from up to 750 meters? From that distance the energy is going to be distributed over the entire body of the victim... err target. That means it will damage eye's, the skin around your ears, and if you are a card carrying member of the Y-chromosone club your going to get your testes roasted.
Think about that last one for a minute there, boys.
The more I listen to this stuff the more skeptical I become. This whole project seems more like an excuse to just dump money on a few companies and academics.
For more info check out this and this and maybe this.
The article reminded me of Cooley and Tookey. I've heard them talk about the race to publish the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT). They had heard that some others had discovered it and wanted to patent it. They said that there paper was rushed in order to get it to the publisher as fast as possible.
Think about this. The FFT is the most important mathematical technique in use today. It is so ubiquitus that we completely take it for granted, yet it is in a part of nearly every gadget on my desk. It is something that literally changed the world and impacts us everday. It was nearly the property of some jerk as if it were a piece of land.
Certainly in terms of geology, wide open vistas, and the outdoor activities the intermountain west is simply amazing. The people who tamed this land are also amazing, and right now 75% of the people are part of the LDS church. The unique history here means that the separation between church and state is blurred.
*NO* politician gets elected who is not LDS. The church owns the major newspapers (through the Deseret news). All of the media outlets have a heavy LDS influence. Everywhere you look you see religious symbols. (Ex: smack in the middle of the state seal is a bee-hive, a religious symbol which is also seen on *every* roadsign!) The names on the sides of buildings have LDS connections. The governor walks around with a nu skin umbrella! (Sorry I couldn't resist, but most outsiders won't get that one.) Heck, those of us outside the dominant culture are called "gentiles."
While the liquor laws here are a bit weird, they are not awful. It is possible to get alchohol. What makes things annoying is that when anyone suggests any sort of change a bizarre circus erupts in which the full religous zeal of the dominant culture rears its head. It is a breath-taking spectacle to behold. It can also be a bit tiresome.
The frustration voiced by the CEO of iomega is one that I often heard voiced by many gentiles. I don't think that things are as bad as he let on, and certainly the Salt Lake Tribune loves to play on any kind of anti-mormon sentiment. But it still seems to me that Utah is something quite out of the ordinary.
Okay I've rambled on long enough... time to hit the slopes, suckers! (That's something I didn't do in Indiana :-)
Doesn't this seem a little like unringing a bell once it has been rung.
In fact, I am on a couple of projects funded by the NSF, and they really encourage people to spin off commercial projects. They think that it makes it easier to convince congress that they are doing good things.
Check this out to see how the scientific community is reacting.
What about the opposite problem? Suppose that MS decides to circumvent your scenario and releases all of its code under a standard copyright. If a code fragment from MS ends up in a GPL code does it then become closed? Who would their lawyers go after? Then again, whose gonna wade through the whole windows code set....