That's precisely the reason it stings so much. You were the leader, the trend-setter. Now you are still the leader, but forced to follow the second, the previously eternal follower. In any case I think it speaks in Intel favour the fact that they have finally done it, even hurting so much.
"They were following the standard-setter AMD" would probably sting even more.
However, I bet five to one that the genius that decided to break compatibility in the 64-bit platform is still in Intel's payroll and getting a high check every month.
Yes, but. But why should you consider the idea of "eliminating" the effect of the stock options? It's a expense, even if the rules say it isn't, and Microsoft has proved that it's not a contingency, because if the stock doesn't climb, they'll compensate the workers. So its a common expense, and should be treated as such. Only, probably you wouldn't concentrate all the charge in one quater, but that's part of the trick, of course. You do it that way so it seems like something extraordinary.
while computers and e-mails can carry viruses, fax machines can never be put out of action by a hacker or malicious program code.
Hmmm... Sure o'that ? I reckon' that if you have a look at the faxes firmware, some security holes would appear, at least in some machines. Enough to let you remotely print a fake fax, with wrong number id, or send faxes to other people. A fax virus would be perhaps possible, although unlikely due to the many different brands of firmware out there. Diversity and single-purposedness of faxes is what protects them.
But... Then... (Shaking voice) What are we going to do when there is no more Microsoft ?
In the meantime...
Perhaps is time for shorting the stock. Bill certainly thinks it's, he has been selling stock like crazy. Check this site and ask for a insider report on MSFT (no direct link possible to the report).
As I've been in the same situation for years, I believe that can give a bit of my experience.
First and foremost, lack of human interaction IS a problem, and a big disadvantage of working home. You are ahead of the game, by having recognized it as such. But you seem a bit apologetic about the whole issue, and some joking answers can perhaps increase that point of view. Don't ever. Humans are a social bunch and prolongued lack of society is as damaging to the mind as prolongued lack of water to the body. You need to get yourself society. Period.
The suggestions so far are good. Get out, see friends, walk a dog and talk to other dog-owners, go to a date agency, whatever. Just do it regularly, as a routine. Other good idea is having someone live with you, if possible. Even if she (or he) works out, in my experience the simple fact of her returning home in the evening marks the day differently and changes the structure of working home. If a romantic relationship is involved, so much the better, but don't restrict you to that. You can change your living place to a shared place, for example. (If you share with students, the social problem will probably change in the other direction:) The extreme of this solution is having kids. Those will generate an inmediate desire of locking yourself in your working room and banish all desire of human interaction for literally years. Long-term solution, I call that.
Also if possible you can try to change the nature of your work, and insist in doing customer- oriented work. And don't consider the hours spent in the waiting room like lost. You can always talk with the secretary. That can apply to your situation or not, I don't know, but I know it makes a difference.
In any case, when working home remember the importance of structure in your life. Other peoples' presence adds structure to our lives, and that's also lost when you work home alone. So don't lose your structure. Have a routine, and follow it to the letter. Wake up at the same hour (it can be late, but always the same, that avoids all-nighters that are the root of many evils). Then go out after waking up. Going out is important. It doesn't matter if you go to buy bread, but go always out. That forces you to get a shower and get dressed, and avoids the dangers of working in your pajamas. Then work for some hours, have another break, etc. It's not only society what is lost when you leave the office. It's structure too, don't let that happen to you. Renting and office out of your home helps with this structure problem, but of course do little with the main one, the lack of society.
Tables and chairs made skillful craftmans are actually *MUCH* better to sit on/by.
And live music is usually much better than canned music. Which makes my point. Musicians will end up working for a living (like most of us and of them too) by giving live performances. The canned music bussiness will be no more.
I have another game, where you plant a tree, wait for it to grow, cut it, and use the wood to painstakingly make a table, using your bare hands and a pocket knife. After all your efforts, you find out that tables better than yours are available everywhere for almost nothing, done by machines.
... you should perhaps keep informed of the development of Chandler . It's supposed to address your questions, it's open source and funded. Only problem is it's not out yet, but it should be in a primitive form in a couple of months or so.
I would readily pay for a CD-to-order service. Let me hear a sample of the tracks and order the ones I want in a CD, it can be a CD-R. With sound levels properly normalized and nice cover art, of course. Sent by mail to anyplace (never underestimate the bandwith of a station wagon full of tapes, and so on and so forth).
This of course is more interesting as the volume of the songs database grows, but I guess its a relatively easy to implement, and I for one would like it a lot.
Leaving his new, shiny, recently minted e-mail address in the open like that, with all the nasty spammers that prowl the wilderness. Poor, poor address. I notice that his "old" address is properly obscured, but the "new" one is not. Sad mistake:o(
That's not to say that there isn't people there with wrist pain, from various sources, but the reification in this case is terribly misleading. There is simply no such sickness, no matter how many pages of nonsense have been written about it. That's it. You are far more likely to develop different aches from stress and general unhappiness than from any use of mouse and keyboard.
If you think that simple negation without proof is not enough, I'll put the burden of proof on the people that affirm that it exists. Check for yourself the evidence, flimsy is too "firm" a workd for it. Usually are those who affirm that something exists the ones that have to prove its existence (with some exceptions, see WMD, Irak).
For a possible (rather reasonable) explanation, read "The descent of woman" by Elaine Morgan. She theorizes that human beings are part acuatic, that part of our evolution happened at sea, or rather at the coast making extensive use of the sea. That explains the biped position (to walk into sea as far as possible), the hairlessness (you drop hair as a thermo insulator and get fat instead if you know what's good for you, when you are at sea), the big nose with downward-pointing holes, the crying (eliminates salt by being more saline than normal fluids), and, although she doesn't mention it, the fact that you cannot run faster than a dog, but sure can you swim faster. She made a convincing argument.
Ever government in the world has "considered" mandating and using open source for everything (usually around the time a MS contract comes up for renegotiation/renewal).
Amen to that. I now propose that no new story about a "switch" be posted till the switch is in implementation stage. Or at least approved and budgeted. Microsoft let the cat out of the bag by saying that if you menace them with Linux they will giver you their software for free. So expect a rising volume of incidents such as this while everybody negotiates them dry. But no real advance there (except of course the fact that MS will have less cash to buy companies with real ideas, good programmers, congressmen, you name it).
Its nothing like psicohistory to me. If I must remember some SF story to match, I would choose "The language of love" (I think) of Rafferty (Im also not sure). In any case it was a story of two archeologists, that found the lost language of love of a dissapeared civilization. That language allowed the users to express their emotions with an almost perfect precision. Of course to do that you first needed to refine your perception of emotions, and your knowledge of the possible emotions, variations and related subtleties. The end result being, that they found that the perfect control of the language meant perfect control of emotions, but also perfect knowledge of the possibilities of the human mind for feeling, and so insatisfaction about never achieving those heights. The story ended with them talking by space-phone or whatever, after many years, and asking about their love lives. One of them tells the other that he was quite happy with his mate, for whom he felt a "moderate attraction". The other one is very jealous because the best he has been able to find was a "strong interest". (I dont remember the exact expressions, but the idea was that).
Well, that seems to be what these investigators are doing, trying to find a better way of expressing emotions than language, in this case mathematics. Lets be real. Language is not a tool made to express emotions, it was only adapted to do so. But its still a bad tool. You speak about fishes, you can transmit something to your partner, even can describe a new fish you happened to find, with reasonable expectations that the image of the fish in the others mind be something like the image in your mind. But kids, dont try this at home with something you feel, because you will end up seriously confused. When you get serious about expressing emotions, you have to resort to images and metaphors, read Shakespeare if you dont believe me.
You speak about love, and this little word encompass everything from the sudden lust you feel for a good-looking neighbour, to the tenderness you experience when you see your just born baby, to the deep and complex relationship you have with your mother. Saying "I love you", therefore, means nothing. We should develop a vocabulary to be able to say something like "I feel physically attracted to you to a moderate extent, nothing like the first years though; enjoy your company a lot, your conversation too except when you are nagging; depend on you tremendously, and miss you but rarely (although its a certainty that Ill miss you when I feel down). Till we are able to express that with a couple of words (technical languages express more complex things with fewer words), but more important, till we are able to make those inner distinctions ourselves, well be destined to bad relationships. I think these studies are a good step forward, but better would be if something like elementary emotional education was mandatory from ten years on, and the final grade then tatooed on ones forehead as a warning to bystanders:o)
Perhaps because its a relatively well-founded open source project trying to fill a gap in the free toolbox (No, Evolution fills not the gap, it doesn't work in Windows), and doing it first with a long time timeframe in mind and second with an idea of paying for itself in the long term. Also, Chandler is meant to be a replacement also for Exchange.
So it's important. If Chandler fails the feasibility of open source as a bussiness model will suffer a dent, contrariwise if it succeeds.
In related musings, there is no pleasing the/. crowd. If they release early, they are rushing to market, and hacking an unfinished desing. If they release late, they are Just Another Vaporware Application (TM). Releasing early was included from the first, as a mean to get feedback from the community.
I suppose the Nokia people aren't even trying to market to the people who are old enough to have muscle memory of the old traditional dials. In fact, they have probably designed it the other way around so that the cool guy that flashes its new phone around can't be put down by some old timer crack about how things come all the way round and end up in the same place. They surely try to differentiate themselves as much as possible from the old dial phones association, probably. After all, it's not a sure bet that they are old enough to be hip now. And hip is the question. Phones are now, specially for early adopters, a fashion item. The sooner we get used to that, the better.
Let's put it this way: When you as a poor lone terrorist have the power of easily doing something in your backyard, the goverment with much more structure, people and money can always do the "next-level-of-complexity" thing, that usually (although that is of course not guaranteed) can provide protection from what you can do.
So, what technology protects us from nukes, exactly?
Good point. Yes, my argument is a little bit lame, in that sense. But the fact remains that nukes are complex devices, difficult to manufacture by one individual. One could argue that when you could set up a nuke in your backyard, some ways could be available to control the explosions. It's the point of the article that technology with great destruction potential is soon to be accesible to little-prepared individuals. I think that's overblown. Of course one could imagine some technology that exploded like a nuke but could be easily manufactured with common soap. It could happen, but I think it's rather unlikely. And then the decission should be made of what to do with that info. But in the meantime, technologies with great destruction potential are complex, and complexity needs a big infrastructure. When the technology becomes simple enough for fools use, then its potential is not so big. Or at least less than the potential dangers of restricting information flow. That's what I think.
In the wonderful world of ideas, there is a kind of ecology. In that ecology, the idea of an intelligent kitchen is bound the way of the videophone. That is, well yes, perhaps for niche applications, but not mainstream. I'm not aware of any kind of pent-up demand for smart appliances. I mean, most of the people that expend a lot of time in kitchems are hardly nuclear physicists. "Real" appliance manufacturers (the ones that really sell their wares to the usual kitchen) spend a lot of time thinking about how to simplify the use of the things.
You want a killer new appliance? I'll give you one, free of charge: an automatic vacuum-cleaner, that cleans the house unattended. That would sell.
The fact that we can do a thing doesn't mean that we should do it.
By the time a "Do your own genome" kit is available to to public, tools will be in the hands of goverments to reduce the menace of it. The article makes the error of extrapolating only a part of reality to the future, while keeping the rest of it at today's lever. I mean, by the time the terrorists have a "Do your own Ebola virus - NOW Improved, it kills faster!" kit, the goverments will have a "Make your own antibody - ALL antigens - guaranteed!" kit that will make all attemps to spread an epidemic seem moot.
As far as I can imagine, the same rationale applies to other areas of science. It's not the lone terrorist that should worry us, it's big organizations (like goverments) that have the means and the people to be at the cutting edge. I mean, really, when you compare in history the damage made by terrorism or small organizations with the damage made by goverments, you can easily detect a pattern.
If we can choose the sex of a baby, it's moral to do it? What about the color of the eyes?
If we can know the probable lifespan of a person by looking at its DNA, should we allow an insurance policy based on it? Even if it's presented as a "discount" for sturdier people?
If we can exterminate an entire species, are we morally allowed to do it? Well we did it (almost) with the variola virus, but you could argue if a virus is alive. We'll soon be able to do it with mosquitoes, the tse-tse fly. Those are pests, but should they be erased from the face of earth? What about rats?
Some day in the not too distant future, all nations of earth will have an infectious pathogen agent with 98% fatality rate, six weeks of incubation (of which three in contagious state), and a safe vaccine for their own population. The nuclear arms race will look positively sedate in comparation. Should we (whoever this "we" is, soon it will be everybody) strike first?
Slashdot Mirror
That's precisely the reason it stings so much. You were the leader, the trend-setter. Now you are still the leader, but forced to follow the second, the previously eternal follower. In any case I think it speaks in Intel favour the fact that they have finally done it, even hurting so much.
THEY WERE COPYING AND FOLLOWING AMD
"They were following the standard-setter AMD" would probably sting even more.
However, I bet five to one that the genius that decided to break compatibility in the 64-bit platform is still in Intel's payroll and getting a high check every month.
Yes, but. But why should you consider the idea of "eliminating" the effect of the stock options? It's a expense, even if the rules say it isn't, and Microsoft has proved that it's not a contingency, because if the stock doesn't climb, they'll compensate the workers. So its a common expense, and should be treated as such. Only, probably you wouldn't concentrate all the charge in one quater, but that's part of the trick, of course. You do it that way so it seems like something extraordinary.
Uh? You mean blank CD's? 2 Pounds apiece seems an awful lot. Is there any other kind of CD's?
while computers and e-mails can carry viruses, fax machines can never be put out of action by a hacker or malicious program code.
Hmmm... Sure o'that ? I reckon' that if you have a look at the faxes firmware, some security holes would appear, at least in some machines. Enough to let you remotely print a fake fax, with wrong number id, or send faxes to other people. A fax virus would be perhaps possible, although unlikely due to the many different brands of firmware out there. Diversity and single-purposedness of faxes is what protects them.
But... Then... (Shaking voice) What are we going to do when there is no more Microsoft ?
In the meantime...
Perhaps is time for shorting the stock. Bill certainly thinks it's, he has been selling stock like crazy. Check this site and ask for a insider report on MSFT (no direct link possible to the report).
In fact, under an old contract with IBM, they own exclusive rights to CICS/MVS.
As I've been in the same situation for years, I believe that can give a bit of my experience.
:)
First and foremost, lack of human interaction IS a problem, and a big disadvantage of working home. You are ahead of
the game, by having recognized it as such. But you seem a bit apologetic about the whole issue,
and some joking answers can perhaps increase that point of view. Don't ever. Humans are a
social bunch and prolongued lack of society is as damaging to the mind as prolongued lack of
water to the body. You need to get yourself society. Period.
The suggestions so far are good. Get out, see friends, walk a dog and talk to other dog-owners,
go to a date agency, whatever. Just do it regularly, as a routine. Other good idea is having
someone live with you, if possible. Even if she (or he) works out, in my experience the simple fact of her returning home in the
evening marks the day differently and changes the structure of working home.
If a romantic relationship is involved, so much the better,
but don't restrict you to that. You can change your living place to a shared place, for example.
(If you share with students, the social problem will probably change in the other direction
The extreme of this solution is having kids. Those will generate an inmediate desire of locking
yourself in your working room and banish all desire of human interaction for literally years.
Long-term solution, I call that.
Also if possible you can try to change the nature of your work, and insist in doing customer-
oriented work. And don't consider the hours spent in the waiting room like lost. You can
always talk with the secretary. That can apply to your situation or not, I don't know, but
I know it makes a difference.
In any case, when working home remember the importance of structure in your life. Other
peoples' presence adds structure to our lives, and that's also lost when you work home alone.
So don't lose your structure. Have a routine, and follow it to the letter. Wake up at the
same hour (it can be late, but always the same, that avoids all-nighters that are the root
of many evils). Then go out after waking up. Going out is important. It doesn't matter if
you go to buy bread, but go always out. That forces you to get a shower and get dressed, and
avoids the dangers of working in your pajamas. Then work for some hours, have another break,
etc. It's not only society what is lost when you leave the office. It's structure too, don't
let that happen to you. Renting and office out of your home helps with this structure problem,
but of course do little with the main one, the lack of society.
Good luck and my best wishes.
Tables and chairs made skillful craftmans are actually *MUCH* better to sit on/by.
And live music is usually much better than canned music. Which makes my point. Musicians will end up working for a living (like most of us and of them too) by giving live performances. The canned music bussiness will be no more.
I have another game, where you plant a tree, wait for it to grow, cut it, and use the wood to painstakingly make a table, using your bare hands and a pocket knife. After all your efforts, you find out that tables better than yours are available everywhere for almost nothing, done by machines.
So you stop making tables. Big deal.
If I punch people in the face, can I call that a service, too?"
No. But if you punch people in the face and remove their wallets, then you can call it a service. "Lightening of valuables" comes to mind as a name.
This of course is more interesting as the volume of the songs database grows, but I guess its a relatively easy to implement, and I for one would like it a lot.
That's not to say that there isn't people there with wrist pain, from various sources, but the reification in this case is terribly misleading. There is simply no such sickness, no matter how many pages of nonsense have been written about it. That's it. You are far more likely to develop different aches from stress and general unhappiness than from any use of mouse and keyboard.
If you think that simple negation without proof is not enough, I'll put the burden of proof on the people that affirm that it exists. Check for yourself the evidence, flimsy is too "firm" a workd for it. Usually are those who affirm that something exists the ones that have to prove its existence (with some exceptions, see WMD, Irak).
Amen to that. I now propose that no new story about a "switch" be posted till the switch is in implementation stage. Or at least approved and budgeted. Microsoft let the cat out of the bag by saying that if you menace them with Linux they will giver you their software for free. So expect a rising volume of incidents such as this while everybody negotiates them dry. But no real advance there (except of course the fact that MS will have less cash to buy companies with real ideas, good programmers, congressmen, you name it).
Well, that seems to be what these investigators are doing, trying to find a better way of expressing emotions than language, in this case mathematics. Lets be real. Language is not a tool made to express emotions, it was only adapted to do so. But its still a bad tool. You speak about fishes, you can transmit something to your partner, even can describe a new fish you happened to find, with reasonable expectations that the image of the fish in the others mind be something like the image in your mind. But kids, dont try this at home with something you feel, because you will end up seriously confused. When you get serious about expressing emotions, you have to resort to images and metaphors, read Shakespeare if you dont believe me.
You speak about love, and this little word encompass everything from the sudden lust you feel for a good-looking neighbour, to the tenderness you experience when you see your just born baby, to the deep and complex relationship you have with your mother. Saying "I love you", therefore, means nothing. We should develop a vocabulary to be able to say something like "I feel physically attracted to you to a moderate extent, nothing like the first years though; enjoy your company a lot, your conversation too except when you are nagging; depend on you tremendously, and miss you but rarely (although its a certainty that Ill miss you when I feel down). Till we are able to express that with a couple of words (technical languages express more complex things with fewer words), but more important, till we are able to make those inner distinctions ourselves, well be destined to bad relationships. I think these studies are a good step forward, but better would be if something like elementary emotional education was mandatory from ten years on, and the final grade then tatooed on ones forehead as a warning to bystanders
Perhaps because its a relatively well-founded open source project trying to fill a gap in the free toolbox (No, Evolution fills not the gap, it doesn't work in Windows), and doing it first with a long time timeframe in mind and second with an idea of paying for itself in the long term. Also, Chandler is meant to be a replacement also for Exchange.
So it's important. If Chandler fails the feasibility of open source as a bussiness model will suffer a dent, contrariwise if it succeeds.
In related musings, there is no pleasing the
I suppose the Nokia people aren't even trying to market to the people who are old enough to have muscle memory of the old traditional dials. In fact, they have probably designed it the other way around so that the cool guy that flashes its new phone around can't be put down by some old timer crack about how things come all the way round and end up in the same place. They surely try to differentiate themselves as much as possible from the old dial phones association, probably. After all, it's not a sure bet that they are old enough to be hip now. And hip is the question. Phones are now, specially for early adopters, a fashion item. The sooner we get used to that, the better.
Good point. Yes, my argument is a little bit lame, in that sense. But the fact remains that nukes are complex devices, difficult to manufacture by one individual. One could argue that when you could set up a nuke in your backyard, some ways could be available to control the explosions. It's the point of the article that technology with great destruction potential is soon to be accesible to little-prepared individuals. I think that's overblown. Of course one could imagine some technology that exploded like a nuke but could be easily manufactured with common soap. It could happen, but I think it's rather unlikely. And then the decission should be made of what to do with that info. But in the meantime, technologies with great destruction potential are complex, and complexity needs a big infrastructure. When the technology becomes simple enough for fools use, then its potential is not so big. Or at least less than the potential dangers of restricting information flow. That's what I think.
You want a killer new appliance? I'll give you one, free of charge: an automatic vacuum-cleaner, that cleans the house unattended. That would sell.
The fact that we can do a thing doesn't mean that we should do it.
As far as I can imagine, the same rationale applies to other areas of science. It's not the lone terrorist that should worry us, it's big organizations (like goverments) that have the means and the people to be at the cutting edge. I mean, really, when you compare in history the damage made by terrorism or small organizations with the damage made by goverments, you can easily detect a pattern.
If we can choose the sex of a baby, it's moral to do it? What about the color of the eyes?
If we can know the probable lifespan of a person by looking at its DNA, should we allow an insurance policy based on it? Even if it's presented as a "discount" for sturdier people?
If we can exterminate an entire species, are we morally allowed to do it? Well we did it (almost) with the variola virus, but you could argue if a virus is alive. We'll soon be able to do it with mosquitoes, the tse-tse fly. Those are pests, but should they be erased from the face of earth? What about rats?
Some day in the not too distant future, all nations of earth will have an infectious pathogen agent with 98% fatality rate, six weeks of incubation (of which three in contagious state), and a safe vaccine for their own population. The nuclear arms race will look positively sedate in comparation. Should we (whoever this "we" is, soon it will be everybody) strike first?