Since Atlas Shrugged continues to sell well and is consistently rates as the second most influentual book in the lives of Americans (behind the Bible), I suspect those 40 publishers are kicking themselves pretty hard.
Many people don't like the way she portrayed a black & white sort of world, where you were either an individualist or a collectivist, but I think it makes for good reading. It is interesting to see the potential outcome if people lived the way they supposedly believe. I'll go out on a limb and guess that this sort of extremism is what turns you off, and that makes sense. You might want to elaborate a little on what specifically makes her utopia "deeply flawed" or her "writing suck" or Atlast Shrugged "one of the worst works of literature to ever be popularized." These are pretty heavy statements without many examples, save for the reference to long monologues (in which I'll agree with you).
In reality, there aren't that many javascript exploits occuring these days. There are many very useful features of JavaScript. Sure, I could live without it, but my solution is to use Mozilla. By doing this I prevent sites from opening windows and doing other nasty things.
I heard about a year ago that the value of coca cola in assetts is about 3 billion. By this I mean that if you added up all the property, investments and cash you could sell it for about 3 billion. However, their stock on the market (when I heard this about a year ago) is worth around 150 billion. The brand name and its solidity is worth far more than the company itself.
I agree with the original poster that successful branding is a tremendous commodity.
What you say assumes that the only function of advertising is to make a direct sale, when in fact it is more often to gain mindshare. The public quickly forgets about a product and advertising is used to keep it in the forefront of people's minds. This is why McDonald's still advertises, even though everyone knows who they are and what they do. (as an aside, McDonald's is really in the real estate business, but that isn't pertinent to my point)
Advertising actually does work, but not in a reliable way. A common marketing mantra is "I know half of my advertising budget is wasted, I just don't know why half." Consequently, they try all sorts of thing, akin to throwing mud on the wall and seeing what sticks. Everybody knows it is a crap shoot and the advertisers and media who sells advertising aren't as naive as you make it out to be.
The fact is that there is some return on investment for advertising or else they wouldn't do it. It may be the case that advertising doesn't work too well on you, but they have already factored in this loss.
As an adult I prefer to not have smut affiliated my status. In my opinion, part of being an adult is maturity, and I see very little maturity in someone who panders after their banal instincts. Therefore, I think porn is a good word for it.
You point out the major problem with capitalism, and that is the need to grow. If a growth opportunity is bypassed or overlooked then the competition makes gains on you. Although there are a few exceptions, once the market becomes very saturated the capitalists resort to ever tacky and offensive ways to market their wares. Just look at the television or radio commercials for automobile dealerships as an example.
They haven't done anything to help open source or any communities.
On the contrary, Sun has contributed source code to the Apache group (xml parsers, tomcat and batik). Lets not forget OpenOffice.org, where you can get the source code to StarOffice. Sun has also made various protocols open, like NFS and NIS (for good or bad). Has Sun satisfied everybody all the time? Nope, but I would affirm that they have helped the open source community.
Regarding the article and its assertions, I don't give it much weight. As long as Java programs accomplish the tasks at hand the language is viable. I'm sure some Java programmers will jump ship for C# and others will add C# to their repetoir, but that hardly counts for killing the language.
A kick stand only implies that you want to stand your bike up by itself, nothing more.
As for your off the cuff comment about how other people should spend their money, everybody has their own thing. Some people pay extra for a nicer car even though the basic model works. Some folks pay more for a Macintosh.
A well made bike is a beautiful thing and it is really hard to describe the passion. I took a second job and ate ramen noodles for 4 months in order to purchase my road bike. It costs around $3500, but I love it dearly and ride about 2 hours a day. If a person spends that much time on a bike saddle it makes sense to be choosy. Don't be so quick to call someone a pig for purchasing the right equipment.
Yes, they are more common for race bicycles. I guess it depends on weather you talk about bikes in department stores or bike shops. Since I race bikes competively my view may be a tad scewed.
As for kick stands, you don't need them. Just lean the bike against something. Reducing well over a pound of weight is significant, but even more important is the safety factor. It is too easy for a kick stand to get caught on something and engage.
Your statement about the wheel puzzles me. The pneumatic tire reduces a lot of road vibration and it makes the most difference. There are many styles of wheels and rims that affect handling and ride comfort but I've never heard of a wheel being more or less designed for a titanium frame.
Actually, titanium bicycles are quite common. There are dozens of manufacturers (lightspeed among the most common) who specialize in titanium. It has been done since the early 80s, but it has always had a premium on price.
The reason for this material on a bike frame is to keep weight low and to reduce road vibration. The material is also holds up well in crashes and since it doesn't oxidize it requires no paint and you can ride in the rain without concern.
Personally I think that carbon fiber is the ultimate material for bicycle frames, but variety is good.
Although this discussion centers around employees, many of us do contracting. If you think you aren't affected by this stuff, think again. Often times a contract will come with a non-compete clause which will prevent you from doing business with the company's clients. It will frequently refer to future clients as well, which is simply absurd.
An easy way to derail this is to request a list of all their present and future clients so you can make sure that you aren't already in violation. Odds are they can't or won't provide it. At this point it is pretty easy to claim that you have a non-enforcable clause in the contract, so strike it.
Part of what you describe is an old issue. Have you ever seen the keyboard that come with the original IBM PCs? The things clicked with every keypress. It drives me nuts, but the reason was that secretaries were disoriented by not having the audio feedback from a typewriter. Silly, but true.
So.. in the way that the example I give is silly, I think that we can all get used to it pretty easily. I would love to try out a virtual keyboard.
As an owner of a dot com business (or rather a.net if you will) I would like to state for the record that the news of my death has been greatly exaggerated.
I agree, however this causes a problem if the proposed technology isn't widely known. Mind you, I'm a fan of several obscure technologies, but the PHB has to consider the code maintenance in the long term. Standardization tends to make for slow adoption of new things, but it is the tradeoff.
Personally, I would really like to see a J2EE book that isn't written like a doctoral thesis nor like a primer for manager's who don't code. The ideal J2EE book would have install guides for setting up Tomcat, Jboss and Postgresql. These are tools anyone can freely obtain and use. The books I've seen thus far have left me dizzy, not entirely sure how to apply the knowledge, and I've been programming in Java for over 7 years. Go figure?
Personally I don't want to muck up my email with a bunch of unrelated things, like calendars. It probably appeals to the PHB sort, but I can't the use in this stuff. I like my email the good old way, plain text.
I agree with your points, however I think it illustrates more about the willingness of people to learn rather than the effectiveness of entrenched geeks to teach. It should go without saying that someone who can't set the clock on a VCR will have problems with any operating system. No amount of teaching will change this, because this is the sort of person who will never benefit from that famous Chinese saying about teaching a man to fish.
Your statements are helpful in one respect though. It is imperative for people to understand the competency of the audience. In my opinion that is the primary way that we fail to communicate technical information.
prognosticate?
on
Future Of IDS
·
· Score: 1, Offtopic
Heh... I thought he made that word up, but it appears to be in the dictionary. (popup ad warning)
The article mentions the doping scandal in the 1998 edition of the Tour de France and claims that 20 cyclists have died of EPO abuse. In truth there is really only one EPO abuse death that has been documented and I'm not sure where they got this figure. I've been an avid cyclist for years and have never heard such a high figure.
The international cycling union prohibits EPO usage (like many other sport unions) in order to make the sport more fair. This stuff costs a lot of money. Even if there were no risk of personal harm, if everyone has to dope in order to compete it just means that the average speed increases and the financial costs as an athlete also increase. Objectively it would be more prudent for everyone not to dope, but some will try for an unnearned edge so they need to test and occassionally a scandal erupts.
(As a side note, cycling often gets a bad rap for drug problems, but it is because the officials are more serious about rooting out the problem. For example, in major races they conduct random drug inspections and keep samples for 6 months afterwards should a more refined test method be developed. In cycling, if you hemocrit level is over 50% you are automatically disallowed from the major races. Other sports are much more relaxed and in effect turn a blind eye to the problem because it produces bad press.)
Genetic modification is a more tricky topic. We could all generally agree that this would be good if we could reduce heart disease. It is a short step to conclude that genetic modifications to allow for a higher oxygen capacity for blood would be good. This is what some drugs like EPO do.
The bottom line is that any elite athlete is a very specialized person. For example, when Lance Armstrong wins the Tour de France he sacrifices many other pursuits in order to train 6 hours a day on the bike. He lives like a monk in order to win. Incidentally, he is quite gifted genetically.
I'm an avid cyclist and an amateur racer, but I'll never ride like Armstrong. A pity, but true. If someone could be engineered to beat a natural elite athlete it would be a tad pale. I tend to think that many of us have the ability to be great at something, we just need to discover it. Athletes have done this. For the most part they learned about themselves and chose to maximize their talent. What does this say of someone who would be engineered to be a great cyclist?
I'm no luddite and I think genetic engineering will yeild great things, but in the realm of sport the real beauty isn't in the records broken. The beauty is seeing someone who discovered his or her best acheivement. How that I wish we could all do that.
I heard about a guy who robbed banks years ago before they had cameras. He would wear plain clothes, but have a garrish colored necktie. After slipping the cashier a note informing that this was a holdup and that he had a pistol in his pocket, he walked right out with the money. Afterwards when police would ask what he looked like, few could remember. All they remembered was that he wore a very loud necktie.
Well... it wouldn't help much in the age of cameras, but blending in to the surroundings or getting overshadowed by something more interesting can be a good way of avoiding detection. Not perfect, but it helps.
That is the same rationale for why old IBM keyboards click when you press the keys. People who used typewriters for years couldn't stand the quiet behavior of typing on a computer, so they added a click for the user feedback. Voila, the typists were happy again.
I don't know if this technology will take off, but for those willing to unlearn some old habits and learn new ones, it could be very cool. Consider that our current typing makes use of very trained gestures. We can learn new gestures, right?
It gives plenty. Watch on old movie sometime and you may notice that people can be killed or be passionate without ever seeing blood or frontal nudity. How did they do it? They used imagination and good acting and (correctly in my opinion) concluded that the graphic details were subordinate to the story.
I'm eager for a better way to make money for providing content, but I have concluded that it is elusive. I've spent time writing for and managing various rags before the www and it was the same back then. You work your arse off and make no money, but you do it because you love it. For some reason people think that transmitting documents over http magically overturns this situation. It is hard to make money publishing anything.
That said, I have some issues with the penny-per-page idea. Namely, the system simply needs to allow for variable pricing as apposed to a one size fits all approach. Consider the act of inflation itself and ask yourself about the value of $5 now versus 10 years ago. The same applies to the value of a penny when you are racking them up in the thousands. Furthermore, the concept is terribly US-centric and I fear that the American Internet would become a closed network if people in other countries couldn't interface to our billing system.
Personally I'm still of the mind that the web doesn't exist to make money for someone. It wasn't developed by a marketing committee and it doesn't have a mission statement. The best thing about it is that it is data-agnostic, and I get a bit offended when some whipper snapper comes along with a plan to totally revamp the underbelly of the web so that people can make money. No thank you.
Of course, I'll confess that I wish that we could revamp our mail agents so that it would cost a penny (or something like it) for every message we send. Putting the onus of the expense for email on the sender would do wonders against spam.
Slashdot Mirror
Since Atlas Shrugged continues to sell well and is consistently rates as the second most influentual book in the lives of Americans (behind the Bible), I suspect those 40 publishers are kicking themselves pretty hard.
Many people don't like the way she portrayed a black & white sort of world, where you were either an individualist or a collectivist, but I think it makes for good reading. It is interesting to see the potential outcome if people lived the way they supposedly believe. I'll go out on a limb and guess that this sort of extremism is what turns you off, and that makes sense. You might want to elaborate a little on what specifically makes her utopia "deeply flawed" or her "writing suck" or Atlast Shrugged "one of the worst works of literature to ever be popularized." These are pretty heavy statements without many examples, save for the reference to long monologues (in which I'll agree with you).
Mozilla. I use it on OS X and it works quite well, at least until more sites start requiring the pop up to load.
In reality, there aren't that many javascript exploits occuring these days. There are many very useful features of JavaScript. Sure, I could live without it, but my solution is to use Mozilla. By doing this I prevent sites from opening windows and doing other nasty things.
I heard about a year ago that the value of coca cola in assetts is about 3 billion. By this I mean that if you added up all the property, investments and cash you could sell it for about 3 billion. However, their stock on the market (when I heard this about a year ago) is worth around 150 billion. The brand name and its solidity is worth far more than the company itself.
I agree with the original poster that successful branding is a tremendous commodity.
What you say assumes that the only function of advertising is to make a direct sale, when in fact it is more often to gain mindshare. The public quickly forgets about a product and advertising is used to keep it in the forefront of people's minds. This is why McDonald's still advertises, even though everyone knows who they are and what they do. (as an aside, McDonald's is really in the real estate business, but that isn't pertinent to my point)
Advertising actually does work, but not in a reliable way. A common marketing mantra is "I know half of my advertising budget is wasted, I just don't know why half." Consequently, they try all sorts of thing, akin to throwing mud on the wall and seeing what sticks. Everybody knows it is a crap shoot and the advertisers and media who sells advertising aren't as naive as you make it out to be.
The fact is that there is some return on investment for advertising or else they wouldn't do it. It may be the case that advertising doesn't work too well on you, but they have already factored in this loss.
As an adult I prefer to not have smut affiliated my status. In my opinion, part of being an adult is maturity, and I see very little maturity in someone who panders after their banal instincts. Therefore, I think porn is a good word for it.
You point out the major problem with capitalism, and that is the need to grow. If a growth opportunity is bypassed or overlooked then the competition makes gains on you. Although there are a few exceptions, once the market becomes very saturated the capitalists resort to ever tacky and offensive ways to market their wares. Just look at the television or radio commercials for automobile dealerships as an example.
They haven't done anything to help open source or any communities.
On the contrary, Sun has contributed source code to the Apache group (xml parsers, tomcat and batik). Lets not forget OpenOffice.org, where you can get the source code to StarOffice. Sun has also made various protocols open, like NFS and NIS (for good or bad). Has Sun satisfied everybody all the time? Nope, but I would affirm that they have helped the open source community.
Regarding the article and its assertions, I don't give it much weight. As long as Java programs accomplish the tasks at hand the language is viable. I'm sure some Java programmers will jump ship for C# and others will add C# to their repetoir, but that hardly counts for killing the language.
A kick stand only implies that you want to stand your bike up by itself, nothing more.
As for your off the cuff comment about how other people should spend their money, everybody has their own thing. Some people pay extra for a nicer car even though the basic model works. Some folks pay more for a Macintosh.
A well made bike is a beautiful thing and it is really hard to describe the passion. I took a second job and ate ramen noodles for 4 months in order to purchase my road bike. It costs around $3500, but I love it dearly and ride about 2 hours a day. If a person spends that much time on a bike saddle it makes sense to be choosy. Don't be so quick to call someone a pig for purchasing the right equipment.
Yes, they are more common for race bicycles. I guess it depends on weather you talk about bikes in department stores or bike shops. Since I race bikes competively my view may be a tad scewed.
As for kick stands, you don't need them. Just lean the bike against something. Reducing well over a pound of weight is significant, but even more important is the safety factor. It is too easy for a kick stand to get caught on something and engage.
Your statement about the wheel puzzles me. The pneumatic tire reduces a lot of road vibration and it makes the most difference. There are many styles of wheels and rims that affect handling and ride comfort but I've never heard of a wheel being more or less designed for a titanium frame.
Actually, titanium bicycles are quite common. There are dozens of manufacturers (lightspeed among the most common) who specialize in titanium. It has been done since the early 80s, but it has always had a premium on price.
The reason for this material on a bike frame is to keep weight low and to reduce road vibration. The material is also holds up well in crashes and since it doesn't oxidize it requires no paint and you can ride in the rain without concern.
Personally I think that carbon fiber is the ultimate material for bicycle frames, but variety is good.
Although this discussion centers around employees, many of us do contracting. If you think you aren't affected by this stuff, think again. Often times a contract will come with a non-compete clause which will prevent you from doing business with the company's clients. It will frequently refer to future clients as well, which is simply absurd.
An easy way to derail this is to request a list of all their present and future clients so you can make sure that you aren't already in violation. Odds are they can't or won't provide it. At this point it is pretty easy to claim that you have a non-enforcable clause in the contract, so strike it.
Part of what you describe is an old issue. Have you ever seen the keyboard that come with the original IBM PCs? The things clicked with every keypress. It drives me nuts, but the reason was that secretaries were disoriented by not having the audio feedback from a typewriter. Silly, but true.
So.. in the way that the example I give is silly, I think that we can all get used to it pretty easily. I would love to try out a virtual keyboard.
As an owner of a dot com business (or rather a .net if you will) I would like to state for the record that the news of my death has been greatly exaggerated.
I agree, however this causes a problem if the proposed technology isn't widely known. Mind you, I'm a fan of several obscure technologies, but the PHB has to consider the code maintenance in the long term. Standardization tends to make for slow adoption of new things, but it is the tradeoff.
Personally, I would really like to see a J2EE book that isn't written like a doctoral thesis nor like a primer for manager's who don't code. The ideal J2EE book would have install guides for setting up Tomcat, Jboss and Postgresql. These are tools anyone can freely obtain and use. The books I've seen thus far have left me dizzy, not entirely sure how to apply the knowledge, and I've been programming in Java for over 7 years. Go figure?
The Java Cookbook sounds like what you are looking for. I own it and really enjoy it.
Personally I don't want to muck up my email with a bunch of unrelated things, like calendars. It probably appeals to the PHB sort, but I can't the use in this stuff. I like my email the good old way, plain text.
I agree with your points, however I think it illustrates more about the willingness of people to learn rather than the effectiveness of entrenched geeks to teach. It should go without saying that someone who can't set the clock on a VCR will have problems with any operating system. No amount of teaching will change this, because this is the sort of person who will never benefit from that famous Chinese saying about teaching a man to fish.
Your statements are helpful in one respect though. It is imperative for people to understand the competency of the audience. In my opinion that is the primary way that we fail to communicate technical information.
Heh... I thought he made that word up, but it appears to be in the dictionary. (popup ad warning)
The article mentions the doping scandal in the 1998 edition of the Tour de France and claims that 20 cyclists have died of EPO abuse. In truth there is really only one EPO abuse death that has been documented and I'm not sure where they got this figure. I've been an avid cyclist for years and have never heard such a high figure.
The international cycling union prohibits EPO usage (like many other sport unions) in order to make the sport more fair. This stuff costs a lot of money. Even if there were no risk of personal harm, if everyone has to dope in order to compete it just means that the average speed increases and the financial costs as an athlete also increase. Objectively it would be more prudent for everyone not to dope, but some will try for an unnearned edge so they need to test and occassionally a scandal erupts.
(As a side note, cycling often gets a bad rap for drug problems, but it is because the officials are more serious about rooting out the problem. For example, in major races they conduct random drug inspections and keep samples for 6 months afterwards should a more refined test method be developed. In cycling, if you hemocrit level is over 50% you are automatically disallowed from the major races. Other sports are much more relaxed and in effect turn a blind eye to the problem because it produces bad press.)
Genetic modification is a more tricky topic. We could all generally agree that this would be good if we could reduce heart disease. It is a short step to conclude that genetic modifications to allow for a higher oxygen capacity for blood would be good. This is what some drugs like EPO do.
The bottom line is that any elite athlete is a very specialized person. For example, when Lance Armstrong wins the Tour de France he sacrifices many other pursuits in order to train 6 hours a day on the bike. He lives like a monk in order to win. Incidentally, he is quite gifted genetically.
I'm an avid cyclist and an amateur racer, but I'll never ride like Armstrong. A pity, but true. If someone could be engineered to beat a natural elite athlete it would be a tad pale. I tend to think that many of us have the ability to be great at something, we just need to discover it. Athletes have done this. For the most part they learned about themselves and chose to maximize their talent. What does this say of someone who would be engineered to be a great cyclist?
I'm no luddite and I think genetic engineering will yeild great things, but in the realm of sport the real beauty isn't in the records broken. The beauty is seeing someone who discovered his or her best acheivement. How that I wish we could all do that.
I heard about a guy who robbed banks years ago before they had cameras. He would wear plain clothes, but have a garrish colored necktie. After slipping the cashier a note informing that this was a holdup and that he had a pistol in his pocket, he walked right out with the money. Afterwards when police would ask what he looked like, few could remember. All they remembered was that he wore a very loud necktie.
Well... it wouldn't help much in the age of cameras, but blending in to the surroundings or getting overshadowed by something more interesting can be a good way of avoiding detection. Not perfect, but it helps.
That is the same rationale for why old IBM keyboards click when you press the keys. People who used typewriters for years couldn't stand the quiet behavior of typing on a computer, so they added a click for the user feedback. Voila, the typists were happy again.
I don't know if this technology will take off, but for those willing to unlearn some old habits and learn new ones, it could be very cool. Consider that our current typing makes use of very trained gestures. We can learn new gestures, right?
It gives plenty. Watch on old movie sometime and you may notice that people can be killed or be passionate without ever seeing blood or frontal nudity. How did they do it? They used imagination and good acting and (correctly in my opinion) concluded that the graphic details were subordinate to the story.
I'm eager for a better way to make money for providing content, but I have concluded that it is elusive. I've spent time writing for and managing various rags before the www and it was the same back then. You work your arse off and make no money, but you do it because you love it. For some reason people think that transmitting documents over http magically overturns this situation. It is hard to make money publishing anything.
That said, I have some issues with the penny-per-page idea. Namely, the system simply needs to allow for variable pricing as apposed to a one size fits all approach. Consider the act of inflation itself and ask yourself about the value of $5 now versus 10 years ago. The same applies to the value of a penny when you are racking them up in the thousands. Furthermore, the concept is terribly US-centric and I fear that the American Internet would become a closed network if people in other countries couldn't interface to our billing system.
Personally I'm still of the mind that the web doesn't exist to make money for someone. It wasn't developed by a marketing committee and it doesn't have a mission statement. The best thing about it is that it is data-agnostic, and I get a bit offended when some whipper snapper comes along with a plan to totally revamp the underbelly of the web so that people can make money. No thank you.
Of course, I'll confess that I wish that we could revamp our mail agents so that it would cost a penny (or something like it) for every message we send. Putting the onus of the expense for email on the sender would do wonders against spam.