That doesn't address the problem. What's going on here is a bit like stage hypnotism. Everyone knows what's going on, but we go along with the pretense, even though it's so absurd that it makes us look like jackasses to anyone with a sober mind. Everyone knows that huge multi-national corporations buy congressmen at a price that would be an insult to a common thief. It's the machinery of making bribery legal that's expensive. The actual bribes are a bargain.
As for the people involved, they're like people who sell "bath salts" to customers who shoot it into their veins. We all know that lobbyists sell "access" but their customers are buying legislation and fat slabs of public money. Does *anybody* doubt that?
So it's not what we don't know that's our problem. It's what we know but don't act upon.
We all know darn well the politicians are jerking us around. We bellyache about it all the time, but when the time comes to *act*, we go along with the ridiculous pretense that these guys are honest public servants. Why? Because *everyone else around us is doing it too*. It's what's expected, and what's expected of us is a far more reliable motivator of action than personal conviction. People have a deep-seated aversion to sticking out from the crowd by doing something unexpected, even if we have a strong belief that that would be the right thing to do.
There's probably more people in the US who'd be willing to rush a machine-gun nest than there are people who are willing to risk standing up and being the *only* person in a crowd who looks foolish. But we obviously don't mind being one fool in a whole mob of fools.
by acknowledging that big time donors are paying for legislation, rather than pretending they get nothing for their investment.
Now people want Dodd investigated. For what? For being candid for once about what *everyone* in *both* parties does?
Fine, but don't stop with Dodd, or the message becomes clear: pretend nobody does it, and be treated like you don't do it. Or tell the truth, and be treated like you're the *only one* doing it.
Cloud services aren't the problem. Free cloud services where you are hoping that someone else picks up the tab for paying for development, maintenance and infrastructure are the problem.
Actually, free cloud services where you are hoping that someone else picks up the tab for development aren't the problem. It's not having a plan to keep things running when you need to move away from *any* product or service you depend upon.
Take Amazon's S3 service. It's not likely to go away, but it's quite possible that one day you'll decide S3 doesn't meet your needs any longer. Maybe the price for your usage tier went up, or maybe another vendor has a more attractive service. *Even if you don't expect a service to go away, you need to make provisions for moving away*.
That isn't just for the cloud. It's for proprietary platforms and libraries where the vendor can decide to get out of the business or send the price way up. The need to make provisions to move away from something even applies to *open source*. Take Hibernate. If JBoss stopped supporting it, somebody else would surely pick up maintenance, but Hibernate might not meet your needs at some point in the future. That means you ought to think long and hard about freely using hard-coded HQL throughout the system.
As a designer it's your responsibility to imagine how things might change for the client. If you aren't thinking about the future you aren't designing, you're *doodling*.
Well, there's always using the cloud *and* having a backup. I'm more concerned about *disclosure* and misuse of sensitive data in the cloud than actually *losing it*. Sure the cloud service could be shut down by the gummint but so could your Internet access or your colocated server or your DNS. In fact a script kiddy with a new and spiffy tool can easily do you in, like what happened to HBGary. As long as whoever wants to get you is patient, time is on his side. Your job is to limit his success.
Every architecture and platform has some horrible failure scenarios, and its up to you to be prepared. It's easy to put too much stock is put in technologies as opposed to strategy, and then when the tech fails you are thoroughly screwed.
In the case of what we're talking about, it's easy to preserve your data; you uploaded it in the first place. The trick is getting things working again. Suppose you had an app that depended on data stored in Amazon S3. Sure, you can *mine* the data you have there and transform it into something a bit more normal, but unless you've given careful thought to an architectural abstraction layer, you could find it difficult to bring your app back up using a different cloud service.
The issue of the risk of cloud services is not exactly a new one. It's what everyone has been asking all along. However, as "cloud technology" gets hot, I suspect a lot of people of using fish-schooling logic to assess their exposure to risk. "A lot of people are doing this, so it must be safe..." It seems incredible, but a lot of people *do* make decisions that way. What you ought to do is some serious thinking about what your vulnerabilities are and what you have to do to limit your exposure. That goes for traditional deployment strategies like running your own server on your premises, or co-location. There's always stuff that can go wrong, and you ought to be prepared.
Back then I worked for a small company that was involved with public health technology consulting, and of course there was the anthrax scare shortly after 9/11. Oh, yes, and there was West Nile Virus. The legislative response to those things was a bonanza for big-time contractors and small-time ones willing to sell their soul. There were huge money bombs being set off all over the place.
Forget bureaucratic empire building -- there wasn't time for that. The money was flying out the door faster than anyone could possibly control. Often it was spent on total vaporware projects; you didn't have to have a product or experience to grab a pile of dough, as long as you had a lobbyist with legislative connections.
The lobbying thing wasn't new, of course, but I don't think it was so open and brazen before that. I saw a lot of post 9/11 projects, but I can't think of *one* of them that had any value at all. Now I know a lot of state and federal bureaucrats in public health, and they're honest people who believe in the mission and do valuable, practical work. But *they* didn't get any money bombs dropped on them (possibly they'd have inconveniently independent ideas about what to do with it). For example the West Nile money was largely spent through the CDC's Atlanta HQ, even though Ft. Collins does all the mosquito borne disease stuff.
On the local level the money didn't go to state agencies that had significant capabilities to put it to use in fieldwork; in fact they got practically none of the money so far as I could see. The money went to state agencies that didn't know how to spend the money, and they couldn't learn because they had to spend the money *immediately* or lose it. The vendors with connections in Atlanta were standing by to take the money off their hands.
A cynical person would look at a situation like that and conclude the system was rigged to maximize the money going to vendors by preventing its application to useful things.
Then I thought about it. Everyone's surprised when they learn that those things take so much time, then it becomes accepted wisdom. But it's not some kind of law of physics; it's a result of a particular building process in which you frame out the house and then run utilities through the frame. Just to be wildly speculative, you could imagine a world in which people built a framework of utility distribution conduits, then *framed the house around the utilities*. Then utilities would go up in a few days, and *framing* would take forever.
So let's imagine a process in which the structure of the house and it's utilities are built in parallel. You'd pause the 3D printing process when you'd laid out channels for the horizontal distribution of plumbing and wiring. That would be very quick because you don't have to mess with the frame. You'd also put voids in the walls as you built them for vertical distribution, leaving an access hatch at the points where vertical distribution meets horizontal. Then when you're ready to put in the next horizontal distribution network, you run your pipes and wires down through the void to the junction below.
We can go further, and imagine *printing* some of the time consuming stuff. It's not that hard to imagine printing plumbing, although provisions for maintaining that plumbing will be a problem. On the plus side, there's no marginal cost to bringing plumbing into every room in the house.
Electricity could be distributed through fat bus bars printed from conductive epoxy. Conductive epoxy isn't conductive as copper wiring, so you make those bus bars *extremely fat*. Alternatively the robot could have spools of wire it lays down at the appropriate time. Either way, electricity should be easier than plumbing.
Paint? That's the easiest of all. You have pigment reservoirs in the robot and mix the pigment with the building material. The homeowner would never have to paint again unless he wanted to. You could make the outer layers of the house extra hard so it can be periodically polished.
Trim would be printed in place, or could be fabricated using the same technology in exactly fitting pieces that snap into place. You could print the wall surfaces separately to snap into place, like drywall but without having to screw it down. That'd allow the homeowner to change the color of his walls or add more electrical outlets.
If you're going to imagine something as radical as printing the structure of a house, you ought to throw out the methods developed to add features to a fully built stick frame.
You know, that's actually an interesting point about SOPA.
What this guy is doing is illegal under the RICO act, The problem is mechanism: how exactly would you use RICO to shut him down?
Well, you'd start with an investigation. Unless the guy is a money laundering genius, you should be able to trace back from the infrastructure he uses (DNS, Internet access, server hosting) back to some kind of bank transaction that will reveal his identity.
So what happens when you run into a block like a DNS service that keeps domains' admin and technical contacts secret? That's one of the things SOPA is supposed to address. Well, you get a court order. It's not really that difficult. The modicum of difficulty a warrant presents is a good thing. It discourages draconian actions based on frivolous claims.
But what if the trail of evidence leads to another country? Then we're stuck.
Still, we don't need a massive expansion of government regulatory powers or an attempt to impose our laws over foreign territories to deal with that. What we *really* need is some kind of cyber-crime treaty. It'd work like this: Country A detects somebody in country B that is illegal in both countries. The authorities in A contact the authorities in B, and B agrees to pursue the matter, taking regulatory and criminal law actions to shut down any enterprise that *is illegal according to its own laws*. This preserves the due-process barrier to frivolous claims.
So what if B is not a signatory to the treaty? Then we *do* need to have a law which allows us to do some of the things outlined in SOPA, *subject to due process* and with a right of appeal.
IANAL, but I think this thread is a bit off track when it argues over who owns *the* copyright. There are two possibilities here. The first is that only the photographer has a copyright to anything. The second is that both the photographer and the subject have copyrights, but to *different things*.
Suppose you take a picture of somebody jogging in the park. You own the copyright to the picture free and clear because copyright pertains to creative expression and jogging doesn't count. But suppose you photograph the same person giving a performance. You and the performer *both* have copyrights; the performer to his performance and you to your photo. However *you* aren't permitted to obtain commercial benefit from your copyright because it is a derivative work. The photo is in commercial limbo until you and the performer come to an agreement.
You can take a picture of a celebrity walking down the street and sell it to a tabloid. You can't take a picture of a celebrity *performing* and sell it. The difference is in whether the celebrity is doing something that is arguably creative. Copyright protects *creative* acts.
Speeches and sermons are peculiar in that normally the speaker intends to sway thought and does not intend to make commercial use of his work. Since the speaker has no intention of obtaining direct financial gain from his performance, you don't damage his interests by disseminating his performance; in fact you are advancing his interests. Usually you can do anything that advances the speaker's ideas and you won't get into trouble. But, it ain't necessarily so. Suppose the performer is a motivational speaker who makes money from giving talks and selling recordings of those talks. You are definitely infringing on his economic interests if you publish your own recording of his performance.
Dr.King clearly intended for his words to sway as many people as possible. For that reason I think a moral argument could be putting them in the public domain is most consistent with his intent. However Dr. King never *said* he intended to do this, and since his family is in a better position to say what his intent was, I have no doubt the law is on their side even though it is patently unjust.
Of course, if we had the 19 year copyright term that prevailed in the early days of the US, this problem wouldn't arise, and Dr. King's family would probably be happier people. It's ironic that copyright has done no favors to Dr. King's children, to say nothing of his legacy.
Is it *really* impossible to answer the question "i.e. show me all the hospitals within a 20km radius of this cluster of immigrants" in MySQL?
This is an exercise in clarify requirements first, comparing them to the platforms *specific capabilities*. The requirements aren't things you can get from an "Ask Slashdot" article; you need to figure out what your use-cases actually demand. For example does the question posed above mean
(1) Finding all the hospitals within 20km of some point (e.g. centroid) used to represent the cluster? (1b) Finding all hospitals within 20km of any point in the cluster.
(2) Finding all the hospitals that fall within a 20km buffer built around a polygon (e.g. the convex hull of points) representing the cluster of immigrants as a whole.
(3) Any of the above with *true geometry* as opposed to Cartesian approximations on some tangent plane.
Items 1 and 1b are trivial to do even without spatial extensions, although performance won't be what you'd wish. Any database that implements a reasonable subset of the OpenGIS standard should handle these neatly.
Item 2: last time I looked MySQL doesn't implement "Buffer", although this could be handled by a Web Feature Server (WFS).
Item 3: Most spatial extensions to database systems won't do this (possibly Oracle does); and I haven't checked, but it's likely most open source GIS libraries don't do this. The good news is that your app surely don't need to do this. An example of an application that would might be enforcing a no-fly zone over a large country. If you are contemplating shooting down aircraft, you need to have *very* precise answers on a geographic scale too big to approximate with Cartesian coordinates.
My guess is that you want either 1b or 2. If you want to know whether any of the immigrants in the cluster had access to a hospital, you'd use 1b. If you wanted to know whether the set of immigrants on the whole had access to a hospital, you'd choose 2.
Here's a technical issue to consider. Is the database tier the right architectural tier to address this? A Web Feature Server (WFS) could handle this too. In some ways its simpler to get started by doing things in the database layer, but a WFS has certain advantages. You can bring together multiple data sources, including some that might be on-line elsewhere. You can provide services to other (authorized) users. You can support desktop GIS for researchers and Web Map Servers (WMS). The big disadvantage is that you've got an unfamiliar interface to deal with (submit query URLs and receive XML responses which have to be un-marshalled).
The main advantage of doing all your spatial stuff in the database tier is that database servers usually have plenty of spare CPU bandwidth, it's one less complex software system to install, configure and maintain, and it uses a familiar programming interface (whatever you use to connect to the database). The biggest disadvantages of the database tier relative to a WFS is that your system is bound to be tightly bound to the peculiarities of the DBMS platform you choose. If you decide you just can't use MySQL any longer, you're going to rewrite a lot of query code. The WFS would abstract a lot of that.
I'm semi-retired now, but I do a little pro-bono consulting for non-profits and have some experience with GIS in public health apps. If you'd like help feel free to contact me. My yahoo mail user name is grumpynerd. I'm a bit rusty in the web mapping area, but I could probably help you make some of your architectural and product choices.
The only "new" in all of this is the instantaneous aspect of transmitting information.
That's the *point*, as you'd know if you read the summary more carefully. It's not like the speed, scope and sensory richness of information transmission is some obscure and irrelevant factor. It allows mass reactions to coalesce around minor events. Immediacy matters. Millions of people can have their opinions changed by a photo that is taken out of context, *and everywhere they look* their reaction is validated and reinforced.
In a nutshell, information technology hasn't made war any more horrific. It's made it harder to bring a war to a conclusive *stop*.
it's about a homeless person succeeding due to their own will. This means that they have been empowered out of homelessness.
Personally, I have my doubts about your interpretation of the phrase "empowered out of homelessness". I prefer a stricter interpretation which entails having a place to live. Furthermore, I'd say that an instance of someone "succeeding due to their will" yet not having a place to live means that either (1) our definition of "success" is broken or (2) our society rewards something *other* than success.
But perhaps you were lead astray by the headline "Samantha Garvey's story: From homeless shelter to Intel semifinalist". It should read "Samantha Garvey's story: From homeless shelter to Intel semifinalist, then back to the homeless shelter. Oh yes and they're going to euthanize her dog, too."
That's irrelevant. Oracle is suing a company with the cash to fight back. That makes it a "big" case, and I suspect big cases get better judges.
In any case crazy damage claims are part of the "shock and awe" campaign by the *AA's. It's the "no bad publicity" principle. If they don't win those damages, the *claim* makes news. If they're awarded what they claim and it's overturned on appeal, they get *two* bites of the publicity apple.
if we didn't use antibiotics, then the simplest infection would be "Totally Drug-Resistant".
While I agree with your overall point, this particular argument doesn't hold. You could still treat TB with drugs which strengthen and stimulate the immune system. Before the development of streptomycin strengthening the immune system through rest (sometimes deliberately collapsing one of the patient's lungs). Also, it is conceivable that effective therapeutic vaccines could be developed.
In any case most "anti-antibiotic" people aren't against anti-biotics per se, but treatment regimens that make improper use of antibiotics, e.g., using antibiotics for prophylaxis, or when a course of treatment is too short. The chief concern is maintaining the effectiveness of antibiotics. A secondary argument against the routine, non-therapeutic use of antibiotics in meat production is that it is a poor or inhumane substitute for proper husbandry.
7 in the evening is the normal time when work stops in almost entire private sector.
To be fair, our materialism has a lot to do with that. We have to work harder for marginal gains *and* we're more insecure because we're overextended. It means our employers can push us around and our politicians can manipulate us with fear that we will be overwhelmed by financial strain all the junk we almost never use puts on our life.
I'm 50 now. When I turned 30 I noticed something. A lot of guys I knew bought nice kayaks and mountain bikes and badass looking offroad trucks, *but they didn't have time to do all that outdoor stuff because they were working so hard paying for all that junk*. Not to mention the extra huge houses they needed to put it all in. I saw a TED talk recently in which the speaker mentioned that the self-storage industry now grosses twenty-two *billion* dollars in the US. There are three self-storage facilities within a mile or so of my house -- one of them is a *huge* six story affair that covers over three acres.
Thirty years ago there were a *few* small self-storage places around, but nothing like today. I knew a few people who rented out garages so they could work on rebuilding cars and such. Now lots of people I know have self-storage bays, but *nobody* I know has time to mess around with stuff like that.
As far as vacation, one of the valuable points of vacation is that you don't just get away from paying for all your stuff, you get away from all the stuff itself: the bike you never have time to ride, or the boat you have to keep cleaning every spring but never get around to putting in the water. All that stuff is oppressive. What you do on vacation is spend a couple of weeks pretending you don't have to worry about managing and paying for all that stuff.
If people do something you don't like, you say that they are in "deep shit" with you.
Pretty much. As supervisor, I have the whole team to think about and I *don't like* a developer creating pointless work for other people on the team by not checking his code in regularly. I *don't like* people who don't get their work done by when they promise, and don't tell me until its too late to do anything about it. I *don't like* employees falsifying their work. Do any of those things and yes, you are in deep shit with me.
I basically care about three things: quality results, achieving budget and schedule targets, and fairness to the other team members. Outside of that I keep my likes and dislikes to myself.
it sounds equally likely that you piss off the professionals who work with you to the point that they don't care about the work
Just let me point out: a *professional* doesn't stop doing his work professionally because he's pissed off at the boss. But then, a professional programmer wouldn't have to be told to do frequent commits; or he certainly wouldn't have to be told *twice*. No professional would be pissed off by the insistence he check in his code regularly and submit to source code review. That's bare minimum kind of stuff, and anyone who'd get pissed of by that isn't going to be happy working for me, because flexible as I may be those things are non-negotiable.
Ultimately, being professional isn't about what you *know*, or what you can *do*. It's about being responsible, honest and open. I can take bad news without shooting the messenger, but if he's held that news back until there's a crisis I *will* hold him responsible. And if anyone turns in *faked* work (which believe it or not happens), when I discover that they've got bigger problems than feeling alienated by my reaction.
Well, sales is a tough job. Salesmen don't get to work with logical rules, like programmers do, or at least consistent rules, like engineers do. They have to work with customers, who are free to do things like demand something they don't really want, then not buy it after you go through the trouble of having it made.
Being a salesman sucks. I had this epiphany when I was reading an in-flight magazine and noticed all the advertisements pitched at salesmen: nose hair trimmers, and shoe inserts that increased your height or (allegedly) your energy levels. As a salesman, you're only valued as much as your last quarter. If you're a programmer and you have a rough sprint, well, the problem was tough, so let's put some more resources on those problems. If you're a salesman who has a bad month, you're obviously not valuable, so let's cut your pay. If you want to eat you'd better pull yourself the hell up by your bootstraps.
Still, it is possible to be a salesman with dignity and integrity; like being good at anything else, it takes brains. When my dad had a heart attack, my late, older brother dropped out of engineering school to keep the family business running. By the time my dad was ready to work again, my brother was married with a kid on the way and couldn't afford to go back to school, so he became a salesman. He was one of these guys who could make a sale to anyone, but his secret was that he knew that he had different kinds of customers. Some people wanted the best, so he sold them his "Mercedes" line. Some were pragmatists looking for value, so he'd sell them his "Honda" line. And others were cheapskates; he'd sell them his crap line, *emphasizing* what garbage it was; and they'd snap it up because they were looking for garbage.
Of course he was a manufacturer's rep so he had the luxury of carrying three lines, one for each kind of customer. Imagine the poor bastard in your software company's sales department. He suspects your product is crap, but it's all he's got to sell. No wonder he goes out and buys a nose-hair trimmer to give himself a little confidence boost. Maybe if your work were a little better, he wouldn't be so pathetic.
Now as for the boss asking for the code, speaking as a former software development leader if your code isn't checked into the source control system just about every day you're in deep shit with me. If you then *refuse* to give me access to the code, you're in *really* deep shit.
What's really going on in a situation where the boss is sending you the message he can do your job better than you is an ego conflict, grounded in insecurity. A lot of guys who felt confident as coders climb the ladder to a point where they're responsible for things they don't feel so confident about. Did they send your boss to management classes so he could learn how to supervise, budget, and plan? Or did they expect him to somehow *know* how to do it because he'd seen it being done?
Personally, as a team leader I found nothing so delightful as handing an assignment to someone and knowing they'd get it done when they said it'd be done. With some guys it was like having a wishing lamp. The work would show up on time or little early and it would be everything I could hope it would be. There were other guys who talked a good game, but delivered late and if you looked into their stuff they often *faked* getting the work done. I ran into a situation like that as a young programmer asked to take over a project that was supposedly a few weeks from completion. When I looked at the departing programmer's code, I realized that he had *hard coded the data outputs* so that he could give a carefully scripted demo.
Now here's the funny thing. When I became a team leader I found that the wishing-lamp developers weren't reluctant to ask for my help or advice. They didn't have any problem with taking orders, but they didn't hesitate to voice any doubts they had. They weren't shy about asking for more time, although often it turned out they didn't need it. The *fakers* always told
Well, Elsevier is a Dutch company, and the Netherlands has a GINI quotient of 0.650 against the USA's 0.801. Which reminds me of what my old Bolshie Uncle Ivan used to say. He said, "Kid, nobody believes in socialism. Nobody believes in capitalism either. It's socialism for *me*, capitalism for *you*."
Anyhow, to be fair, Rep. Maloney was only helping out a constituent [1].
----- 1: constituent: n. A person, firm or other entity which pays for or hires the services of an elected official.
I dunno. I took a cursory look at the Project Jigsaw page, and comparing it to OSGi seems a bit like apples and oranges.
From what I can see, Project Jigsaw addresses the problem of identifying dependencies between modules, so that you can package a framework into small, tightly coupled pieces that could be loaded as needed.
OSGi appears to me to be something more like an in-memory service oriented architecture framework. That necessarily covers some of the same ground of identifying dependencies, but it'd be overkill for most projects. However as far as not "fullling its promises", OSGi is widely used in container-ish projects that have to host an open ended set of modules and extensions: extensible IDEs like Netbeans and Eclipse, or Web/app containers like Tomcat or Glassfish. I haven't heard that OSGi has been a serious problem for those kinds of projects, although maybe that's because I'm not listening to the chatter.
I wouldn't be surprised if people tried to use OSGi for simpler problems and were put off by the complexity, but that's been a problem that's bedeviled the Java world for years: trying to drive tiny nails with Enormous Shiny Hammers. The problems that creates isn't always the fault of the ESH, sometimes it just means we need a smaller hammer. The attitude that we must protect the ESH at the cost of denying users a tack hammer is counterproductive. So is demanding that people driving railroad spikes do it with a 5 oz. tack hammer.
Real work? Depends on what you mean. A new tool often *redefines* what "real" work is, although we'll have to wait and see. I certainly see tablets taking over much of the information *consumption* tasks done on a desktop computer.
This is how it has always worked. We didn't stop using mainframes when minicomputers came along; some of the tasks that used to be done in major datacenters were moved out to smaller installations and big iron actually bifurcated into two new market segments, each larger than the parent: high performance computing for weather prediction and such, and mainframes for moving vast volumes of data around ultra-reliably.
When PCs came along people stopped doing most interactive work directly on mini-computers via dumb terminals. We renamed "minicomputers" "servers" and focused them on providing data services to personal computers. The market for servers is certainly far larger than the mini-computer market was in 1981 when IBM introduced the PC (or in 1977 when Apple introduced the Apple II).
What happens when a new product category is created is that it becomes an area of fast growth, which sucks *attention*, but not necessarily profit from the old ones. It may in some cases spur growth, as desktops spurred the growth of the server business. The days of almost guaranteed exponential growth are long gone in the PC business, but it is possible that tablets rather than cannibalizing the PC business, will re-focus it.
At least probably. Predicting the future is hard, especially since we're dealing with *two* emergent techologies: really capable mobile devices and cloud services over ubiquitous networks. But *historically* when a class of smaller, cheaper, more convenient computing devices is created, what *had* been the low end segment doesn't really suffer. On the other hand individual firms (like DEC or Wang) *do* suffer when they fail to adapt to changes in the markets they were successful in.
Pretty much what I was going to say. Gassee isn't talking about anything that *has* happened, or is *starting* to happen. He's talking about something that *might* happen. There's *some* value is discussing this, of course; just as it's valuable to consider what would happen if China invaded Taiwan. But there's a huge difference between that being a possibility worth considering, and the PLA shelling Taipei. It's worth considering what would happen if the Samsung/Google relationship went seriously sour, but if that happened it certainly wouldn't be the way Gassee envisions.
As far as I can see, Google has no reason to care very much if Samsung wants to fork Android -- otherwise why would Google open it? What Google would really care is if Samsung forked Android and moved all it's users away from Google services to a competitor like Microsoft. That's a serious concern, but it wouldn't be as easy as Gassbag^H^H^ee seems to think, for the very reason he seems to think makes it easy: Samsung's installed Android base. If an existing Samsung handset user discovers he can't use Google search, mail, calendar and the Android app store on new Samsung handsets, he'll just buy a different handset *and get the exact same user experience he's used to*. It's incredibly easy for a user to move from one Android phone vendor to another.
I'd guess the most likely way for this to go sour (other than a patent dispute) would be for Samsung to try to move its customer base away from Android and toward Windows. In marketing terms that's a bit like spitting into the wind, but it's certainly more feasible than selling New Coke while there are plenty of other vendors still selling Coke Classic.
Apart from the award money, being nominated by C.S. Lewis would mean a hell of a lot more to me than the opinion of Anders Österlin. I'm sure Anders Österlin was a fine painter and a man of literate tastes, but Lewis was a gifted essayist, critic, and a particularly fine English prose stylist. Reading Lewis' critiques made me a better reader, because he doesn't divide the literary world into perfection and swill. He is open both to the virtues of books he disliked, and to the faults of works he loved -- including Tolkien's.
I'll give my own opinion here. I think Tolkien's skill grew as he wrote LotR. The early parts of "Fellowship of the Ring" are cluttered and uneven, and if a self-consciously "literary" critic gave up at Tom Bombadil, I would not particularly blame him. But if he missed how wonderfully written the scene where Frodo departs from Bag End was, then I'd call that critic a blockhead.
Slashdot Mirror
That doesn't address the problem. What's going on here is a bit like stage hypnotism. Everyone knows what's going on, but we go along with the pretense, even though it's so absurd that it makes us look like jackasses to anyone with a sober mind. Everyone knows that huge multi-national corporations buy congressmen at a price that would be an insult to a common thief. It's the machinery of making bribery legal that's expensive. The actual bribes are a bargain.
As for the people involved, they're like people who sell "bath salts" to customers who shoot it into their veins. We all know that lobbyists sell "access" but their customers are buying legislation and fat slabs of public money. Does *anybody* doubt that?
So it's not what we don't know that's our problem. It's what we know but don't act upon.
We all know darn well the politicians are jerking us around. We bellyache about it all the time, but when the time comes to *act*, we go along with the ridiculous pretense that these guys are honest public servants. Why? Because *everyone else around us is doing it too*. It's what's expected, and what's expected of us is a far more reliable motivator of action than personal conviction. People have a deep-seated aversion to sticking out from the crowd by doing something unexpected, even if we have a strong belief that that would be the right thing to do.
There's probably more people in the US who'd be willing to rush a machine-gun nest than there are people who are willing to risk standing up and being the *only* person in a crowd who looks foolish. But we obviously don't mind being one fool in a whole mob of fools.
by acknowledging that big time donors are paying for legislation, rather than pretending they get nothing for their investment.
Now people want Dodd investigated. For what? For being candid for once about what *everyone* in *both* parties does?
Fine, but don't stop with Dodd, or the message becomes clear: pretend nobody does it, and be treated like you don't do it. Or tell the truth, and be treated like you're the *only one* doing it.
Cloud services aren't the problem. Free cloud services where you are hoping that someone else picks up the tab for paying for development, maintenance and infrastructure are the problem.
Actually, free cloud services where you are hoping that someone else picks up the tab for development aren't the problem. It's not having a plan to keep things running when you need to move away from *any* product or service you depend upon.
Take Amazon's S3 service. It's not likely to go away, but it's quite possible that one day you'll decide S3 doesn't meet your needs any longer. Maybe the price for your usage tier went up, or maybe another vendor has a more attractive service. *Even if you don't expect a service to go away, you need to make provisions for moving away*.
That isn't just for the cloud. It's for proprietary platforms and libraries where the vendor can decide to get out of the business or send the price way up. The need to make provisions to move away from something even applies to *open source*. Take Hibernate. If JBoss stopped supporting it, somebody else would surely pick up maintenance, but Hibernate might not meet your needs at some point in the future. That means you ought to think long and hard about freely using hard-coded HQL throughout the system.
As a designer it's your responsibility to imagine how things might change for the client. If you aren't thinking about the future you aren't designing, you're *doodling*.
Well, there's always using the cloud *and* having a backup. I'm more concerned about *disclosure* and misuse of sensitive data in the cloud than actually *losing it*. Sure the cloud service could be shut down by the gummint but so could your Internet access or your colocated server or your DNS. In fact a script kiddy with a new and spiffy tool can easily do you in, like what happened to HBGary. As long as whoever wants to get you is patient, time is on his side. Your job is to limit his success.
Every architecture and platform has some horrible failure scenarios, and its up to you to be prepared. It's easy to put too much stock is put in technologies as opposed to strategy, and then when the tech fails you are thoroughly screwed.
In the case of what we're talking about, it's easy to preserve your data; you uploaded it in the first place. The trick is getting things working again. Suppose you had an app that depended on data stored in Amazon S3. Sure, you can *mine* the data you have there and transform it into something a bit more normal, but unless you've given careful thought to an architectural abstraction layer, you could find it difficult to bring your app back up using a different cloud service.
The issue of the risk of cloud services is not exactly a new one. It's what everyone has been asking all along. However, as "cloud technology" gets hot, I suspect a lot of people of using fish-schooling logic to assess their exposure to risk. "A lot of people are doing this, so it must be safe..." It seems incredible, but a lot of people *do* make decisions that way. What you ought to do is some serious thinking about what your vulnerabilities are and what you have to do to limit your exposure. That goes for traditional deployment strategies like running your own server on your premises, or co-location. There's always stuff that can go wrong, and you ought to be prepared.
Back then I worked for a small company that was involved with public health technology consulting, and of course there was the anthrax scare shortly after 9/11. Oh, yes, and there was West Nile Virus. The legislative response to those things was a bonanza for big-time contractors and small-time ones willing to sell their soul. There were huge money bombs being set off all over the place.
Forget bureaucratic empire building -- there wasn't time for that. The money was flying out the door faster than anyone could possibly control. Often it was spent on total vaporware projects; you didn't have to have a product or experience to grab a pile of dough, as long as you had a lobbyist with legislative connections.
The lobbying thing wasn't new, of course, but I don't think it was so open and brazen before that. I saw a lot of post 9/11 projects, but I can't think of *one* of them that had any value at all. Now I know a lot of state and federal bureaucrats in public health, and they're honest people who believe in the mission and do valuable, practical work. But *they* didn't get any money bombs dropped on them (possibly they'd have inconveniently independent ideas about what to do with it). For example the West Nile money was largely spent through the CDC's Atlanta HQ, even though Ft. Collins does all the mosquito borne disease stuff.
On the local level the money didn't go to state agencies that had significant capabilities to put it to use in fieldwork; in fact they got practically none of the money so far as I could see. The money went to state agencies that didn't know how to spend the money, and they couldn't learn because they had to spend the money *immediately* or lose it. The vendors with connections in Atlanta were standing by to take the money off their hands.
A cynical person would look at a situation like that and conclude the system was rigged to maximize the money going to vendors by preventing its application to useful things.
I never claimed it would be a *good* bridge.
It would take me a while to fasion a life size bridge out of Lego - it doesn't mean it would be stronger than a real bridge.
Semantics nazi here.
If you built a life size bridge out of Lego it would *be* a real bridge.
That is all.
My first reaction, exactly.
Then I thought about it. Everyone's surprised when they learn that those things take so much time, then it becomes accepted wisdom. But it's not some kind of law of physics; it's a result of a particular building process in which you frame out the house and then run utilities through the frame. Just to be wildly speculative, you could imagine a world in which people built a framework of utility distribution conduits, then *framed the house around the utilities*. Then utilities would go up in a few days, and *framing* would take forever.
So let's imagine a process in which the structure of the house and it's utilities are built in parallel. You'd pause the 3D printing process when you'd laid out channels for the horizontal distribution of plumbing and wiring. That would be very quick because you don't have to mess with the frame. You'd also put voids in the walls as you built them for vertical distribution, leaving an access hatch at the points where vertical distribution meets horizontal. Then when you're ready to put in the next horizontal distribution network, you run your pipes and wires down through the void to the junction below.
We can go further, and imagine *printing* some of the time consuming stuff. It's not that hard to imagine printing plumbing, although provisions for maintaining that plumbing will be a problem. On the plus side, there's no marginal cost to bringing plumbing into every room in the house.
Electricity could be distributed through fat bus bars printed from conductive epoxy. Conductive epoxy isn't conductive as copper wiring, so you make those bus bars *extremely fat*. Alternatively the robot could have spools of wire it lays down at the appropriate time. Either way, electricity should be easier than plumbing.
Paint? That's the easiest of all. You have pigment reservoirs in the robot and mix the pigment with the building material. The homeowner would never have to paint again unless he wanted to. You could make the outer layers of the house extra hard so it can be periodically polished.
Trim would be printed in place, or could be fabricated using the same technology in exactly fitting pieces that snap into place. You could print the wall surfaces separately to snap into place, like drywall but without having to screw it down. That'd allow the homeowner to change the color of his walls or add more electrical outlets.
If you're going to imagine something as radical as printing the structure of a house, you ought to throw out the methods developed to add features to a fully built stick frame.
You know, that's actually an interesting point about SOPA.
What this guy is doing is illegal under the RICO act, The problem is mechanism: how exactly would you use RICO to shut him down?
Well, you'd start with an investigation. Unless the guy is a money laundering genius, you should be able to trace back from the infrastructure he uses (DNS, Internet access, server hosting) back to some kind of bank transaction that will reveal his identity.
So what happens when you run into a block like a DNS service that keeps domains' admin and technical contacts secret? That's one of the things SOPA is supposed to address. Well, you get a court order. It's not really that difficult. The modicum of difficulty a warrant presents is a good thing. It discourages draconian actions based on frivolous claims.
But what if the trail of evidence leads to another country? Then we're stuck.
Still, we don't need a massive expansion of government regulatory powers or an attempt to impose our laws over foreign territories to deal with that. What we *really* need is some kind of cyber-crime treaty. It'd work like this: Country A detects somebody in country B that is illegal in both countries. The authorities in A contact the authorities in B, and B agrees to pursue the matter, taking regulatory and criminal law actions to shut down any enterprise that *is illegal according to its own laws*. This preserves the due-process barrier to frivolous claims.
So what if B is not a signatory to the treaty? Then we *do* need to have a law which allows us to do some of the things outlined in SOPA, *subject to due process* and with a right of appeal.
IANAL, but I think this thread is a bit off track when it argues over who owns *the* copyright. There are two possibilities here. The first is that only the photographer has a copyright to anything. The second is that both the photographer and the subject have copyrights, but to *different things*.
Suppose you take a picture of somebody jogging in the park. You own the copyright to the picture free and clear because copyright pertains to creative expression and jogging doesn't count. But suppose you photograph the same person giving a performance. You and the performer *both* have copyrights; the performer to his performance and you to your photo. However *you* aren't permitted to obtain commercial benefit from your copyright because it is a derivative work. The photo is in commercial limbo until you and the performer come to an agreement.
You can take a picture of a celebrity walking down the street and sell it to a tabloid. You can't take a picture of a celebrity *performing* and sell it. The difference is in whether the celebrity is doing something that is arguably creative. Copyright protects *creative* acts.
Speeches and sermons are peculiar in that normally the speaker intends to sway thought and does not intend to make commercial use of his work. Since the speaker has no intention of obtaining direct financial gain from his performance, you don't damage his interests by disseminating his performance; in fact you are advancing his interests. Usually you can do anything that advances the speaker's ideas and you won't get into trouble. But, it ain't necessarily so. Suppose the performer is a motivational speaker who makes money from giving talks and selling recordings of those talks. You are definitely infringing on his economic interests if you publish your own recording of his performance.
Dr.King clearly intended for his words to sway as many people as possible. For that reason I think a moral argument could be putting them in the public domain is most consistent with his intent. However Dr. King never *said* he intended to do this, and since his family is in a better position to say what his intent was, I have no doubt the law is on their side even though it is patently unjust.
Of course, if we had the 19 year copyright term that prevailed in the early days of the US, this problem wouldn't arise, and Dr. King's family would probably be happier people. It's ironic that copyright has done no favors to Dr. King's children, to say nothing of his legacy.
Is it *really* impossible to answer the question "i.e. show me all the hospitals within a 20km radius of this cluster of immigrants" in MySQL?
This is an exercise in clarify requirements first, comparing them to the platforms *specific capabilities*. The requirements aren't things you can get from an "Ask Slashdot" article; you need to figure out what your use-cases actually demand. For example does the question posed above mean
(1) Finding all the hospitals within 20km of some point (e.g. centroid) used to represent the cluster?
(1b) Finding all hospitals within 20km of any point in the cluster.
(2) Finding all the hospitals that fall within a 20km buffer built around a polygon (e.g. the convex hull of points) representing the cluster of immigrants as a whole.
(3) Any of the above with *true geometry* as opposed to Cartesian approximations on some tangent plane.
Items 1 and 1b are trivial to do even without spatial extensions, although performance won't be what you'd wish. Any database that implements a reasonable subset of the OpenGIS standard should handle these neatly.
Item 2: last time I looked MySQL doesn't implement "Buffer", although this could be handled by a Web Feature Server (WFS).
Item 3: Most spatial extensions to database systems won't do this (possibly Oracle does); and I haven't checked, but it's likely most open source GIS libraries don't do this. The good news is that your app surely don't need to do this. An example of an application that would might be enforcing a no-fly zone over a large country. If you are contemplating shooting down aircraft, you need to have *very* precise answers on a geographic scale too big to approximate with Cartesian coordinates.
My guess is that you want either 1b or 2. If you want to know whether any of the immigrants in the cluster had access to a hospital, you'd use 1b. If you wanted to know whether the set of immigrants on the whole had access to a hospital, you'd choose 2.
Here's a technical issue to consider. Is the database tier the right architectural tier to address this? A Web Feature Server (WFS) could handle this too. In some ways its simpler to get started by doing things in the database layer, but a WFS has certain advantages. You can bring together multiple data sources, including some that might be on-line elsewhere. You can provide services to other (authorized) users. You can support desktop GIS for researchers and Web Map Servers (WMS). The big disadvantage is that you've got an unfamiliar interface to deal with (submit query URLs and receive XML responses which have to be un-marshalled).
The main advantage of doing all your spatial stuff in the database tier is that database servers usually have plenty of spare CPU bandwidth, it's one less complex software system to install, configure and maintain, and it uses a familiar programming interface (whatever you use to connect to the database). The biggest disadvantages of the database tier relative to a WFS is that your system is bound to be tightly bound to the peculiarities of the DBMS platform you choose. If you decide you just can't use MySQL any longer, you're going to rewrite a lot of query code. The WFS would abstract a lot of that.
I'm semi-retired now, but I do a little pro-bono consulting for non-profits and have some experience with GIS in public health apps. If you'd like help feel free to contact me. My yahoo mail user name is grumpynerd. I'm a bit rusty in the web mapping area, but I could probably help you make some of your architectural and product choices.
The only "new" in all of this is the instantaneous aspect of transmitting information.
That's the *point*, as you'd know if you read the summary more carefully. It's not like the speed, scope and sensory richness of information transmission is some obscure and irrelevant factor. It allows mass reactions to coalesce around minor events. Immediacy matters. Millions of people can have their opinions changed by a photo that is taken out of context, *and everywhere they look* their reaction is validated and reinforced.
In a nutshell, information technology hasn't made war any more horrific. It's made it harder to bring a war to a conclusive *stop*.
it's about a homeless person succeeding due to their own will. This means that they have been empowered out of homelessness.
Personally, I have my doubts about your interpretation of the phrase "empowered out of homelessness". I prefer a stricter interpretation which entails having a place to live. Furthermore, I'd say that an instance of someone "succeeding due to their will" yet not having a place to live means that either (1) our definition of "success" is broken or (2) our society rewards something *other* than success.
But perhaps you were lead astray by the headline "Samantha Garvey's story: From homeless shelter to Intel semifinalist". It should read "Samantha Garvey's story: From homeless shelter to Intel semifinalist, then back to the homeless shelter. Oh yes and they're going to euthanize her dog, too."
That's irrelevant. Oracle is suing a company with the cash to fight back. That makes it a "big" case, and I suspect big cases get better judges.
In any case crazy damage claims are part of the "shock and awe" campaign by the *AA's. It's the "no bad publicity" principle. If they don't win those damages, the *claim* makes news. If they're awarded what they claim and it's overturned on appeal, they get *two* bites of the publicity apple.
if we didn't use antibiotics, then the simplest infection would be "Totally Drug-Resistant".
While I agree with your overall point, this particular argument doesn't hold. You could still treat TB with drugs which strengthen and stimulate the immune system. Before the development of streptomycin strengthening the immune system through rest (sometimes deliberately collapsing one of the patient's lungs). Also, it is conceivable that effective therapeutic vaccines could be developed.
In any case most "anti-antibiotic" people aren't against anti-biotics per se, but treatment regimens that make improper use of antibiotics, e.g., using antibiotics for prophylaxis, or when a course of treatment is too short. The chief concern is maintaining the effectiveness of antibiotics. A secondary argument against the routine, non-therapeutic use of antibiotics in meat production is that it is a poor or inhumane substitute for proper husbandry.
7 in the evening is the normal time when work stops in almost entire private sector.
To be fair, our materialism has a lot to do with that. We have to work harder for marginal gains *and* we're more insecure because we're overextended. It means our employers can push us around and our politicians can manipulate us with fear that we will be overwhelmed by financial strain all the junk we almost never use puts on our life.
I'm 50 now. When I turned 30 I noticed something. A lot of guys I knew bought nice kayaks and mountain bikes and badass looking offroad trucks, *but they didn't have time to do all that outdoor stuff because they were working so hard paying for all that junk*. Not to mention the extra huge houses they needed to put it all in. I saw a TED talk recently in which the speaker mentioned that the self-storage industry now grosses twenty-two *billion* dollars in the US. There are three self-storage facilities within a mile or so of my house -- one of them is a *huge* six story affair that covers over three acres.
Thirty years ago there were a *few* small self-storage places around, but nothing like today. I knew a few people who rented out garages so they could work on rebuilding cars and such. Now lots of people I know have self-storage bays, but *nobody* I know has time to mess around with stuff like that.
As far as vacation, one of the valuable points of vacation is that you don't just get away from paying for all your stuff, you get away from all the stuff itself: the bike you never have time to ride, or the boat you have to keep cleaning every spring but never get around to putting in the water. All that stuff is oppressive. What you do on vacation is spend a couple of weeks pretending you don't have to worry about managing and paying for all that stuff.
Wait a minute ... you're saying getting paid for choosing to do more work than you have to is being oppressed?
Nice try, AC, but you're obviously a fellow American.
If people do something you don't like, you say that they are in "deep shit" with you.
Pretty much. As supervisor, I have the whole team to think about and I *don't like* a developer creating pointless work for other people on the team by not checking his code in regularly. I *don't like* people who don't get their work done by when they promise, and don't tell me until its too late to do anything about it. I *don't like* employees falsifying their work. Do any of those things and yes, you are in deep shit with me.
I basically care about three things: quality results, achieving budget and schedule targets, and fairness to the other team members. Outside of that I keep my likes and dislikes to myself.
it sounds equally likely that you piss off the professionals who work with you to the point that they don't care about the work
Just let me point out: a *professional* doesn't stop doing his work professionally because he's pissed off at the boss. But then, a professional programmer wouldn't have to be told to do frequent commits; or he certainly wouldn't have to be told *twice*. No professional would be pissed off by the insistence he check in his code regularly and submit to source code review. That's bare minimum kind of stuff, and anyone who'd get pissed of by that isn't going to be happy working for me, because flexible as I may be those things are non-negotiable.
Ultimately, being professional isn't about what you *know*, or what you can *do*. It's about being responsible, honest and open. I can take bad news without shooting the messenger, but if he's held that news back until there's a crisis I *will* hold him responsible. And if anyone turns in *faked* work (which believe it or not happens), when I discover that they've got bigger problems than feeling alienated by my reaction.
Well, sales is a tough job. Salesmen don't get to work with logical rules, like programmers do, or at least consistent rules, like engineers do. They have to work with customers, who are free to do things like demand something they don't really want, then not buy it after you go through the trouble of having it made.
Being a salesman sucks. I had this epiphany when I was reading an in-flight magazine and noticed all the advertisements pitched at salesmen: nose hair trimmers, and shoe inserts that increased your height or (allegedly) your energy levels. As a salesman, you're only valued as much as your last quarter. If you're a programmer and you have a rough sprint, well, the problem was tough, so let's put some more resources on those problems. If you're a salesman who has a bad month, you're obviously not valuable, so let's cut your pay. If you want to eat you'd better pull yourself the hell up by your bootstraps.
Still, it is possible to be a salesman with dignity and integrity; like being good at anything else, it takes brains. When my dad had a heart attack, my late, older brother dropped out of engineering school to keep the family business running. By the time my dad was ready to work again, my brother was married with a kid on the way and couldn't afford to go back to school, so he became a salesman. He was one of these guys who could make a sale to anyone, but his secret was that he knew that he had different kinds of customers. Some people wanted the best, so he sold them his "Mercedes" line. Some were pragmatists looking for value, so he'd sell them his "Honda" line. And others were cheapskates; he'd sell them his crap line, *emphasizing* what garbage it was; and they'd snap it up because they were looking for garbage.
Of course he was a manufacturer's rep so he had the luxury of carrying three lines, one for each kind of customer. Imagine the poor bastard in your software company's sales department. He suspects your product is crap, but it's all he's got to sell. No wonder he goes out and buys a nose-hair trimmer to give himself a little confidence boost. Maybe if your work were a little better, he wouldn't be so pathetic.
Now as for the boss asking for the code, speaking as a former software development leader if your code isn't checked into the source control system just about every day you're in deep shit with me. If you then *refuse* to give me access to the code, you're in *really* deep shit.
What's really going on in a situation where the boss is sending you the message he can do your job better than you is an ego conflict, grounded in insecurity. A lot of guys who felt confident as coders climb the ladder to a point where they're responsible for things they don't feel so confident about. Did they send your boss to management classes so he could learn how to supervise, budget, and plan? Or did they expect him to somehow *know* how to do it because he'd seen it being done?
Personally, as a team leader I found nothing so delightful as handing an assignment to someone and knowing they'd get it done when they said it'd be done. With some guys it was like having a wishing lamp. The work would show up on time or little early and it would be everything I could hope it would be. There were other guys who talked a good game, but delivered late and if you looked into their stuff they often *faked* getting the work done. I ran into a situation like that as a young programmer asked to take over a project that was supposedly a few weeks from completion. When I looked at the departing programmer's code, I realized that he had *hard coded the data outputs* so that he could give a carefully scripted demo.
Now here's the funny thing. When I became a team leader I found that the wishing-lamp developers weren't reluctant to ask for my help or advice. They didn't have any problem with taking orders, but they didn't hesitate to voice any doubts they had. They weren't shy about asking for more time, although often it turned out they didn't need it. The *fakers* always told
we now know now much it costs to buy a congressman: $5,500.
Well, Elsevier is a Dutch company, and the Netherlands has a GINI quotient of 0.650 against the USA's 0.801. Which reminds me of what my old Bolshie Uncle Ivan used to say. He said, "Kid, nobody believes in socialism. Nobody believes in capitalism either. It's socialism for *me*, capitalism for *you*."
Anyhow, to be fair, Rep. Maloney was only helping out a constituent [1].
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1: constituent: n. A person, firm or other entity which pays for or hires the services of an elected official.
I dunno. I took a cursory look at the Project Jigsaw page, and comparing it to OSGi seems a bit like apples and oranges.
From what I can see, Project Jigsaw addresses the problem of identifying dependencies between modules, so that you can package a framework into small, tightly coupled pieces that could be loaded as needed.
OSGi appears to me to be something more like an in-memory service oriented architecture framework. That necessarily covers some of the same ground of identifying dependencies, but it'd be overkill for most projects. However as far as not "fullling its promises", OSGi is widely used in container-ish projects that have to host an open ended set of modules and extensions: extensible IDEs like Netbeans and Eclipse, or Web/app containers like Tomcat or Glassfish. I haven't heard that OSGi has been a serious problem for those kinds of projects, although maybe that's because I'm not listening to the chatter.
I wouldn't be surprised if people tried to use OSGi for simpler problems and were put off by the complexity, but that's been a problem that's bedeviled the Java world for years: trying to drive tiny nails with Enormous Shiny Hammers. The problems that creates isn't always the fault of the ESH, sometimes it just means we need a smaller hammer. The attitude that we must protect the ESH at the cost of denying users a tack hammer is counterproductive. So is demanding that people driving railroad spikes do it with a 5 oz. tack hammer.
Real work? Depends on what you mean. A new tool often *redefines* what "real" work is, although we'll have to wait and see. I certainly see tablets taking over much of the information *consumption* tasks done on a desktop computer.
This is how it has always worked. We didn't stop using mainframes when minicomputers came along; some of the tasks that used to be done in major datacenters were moved out to smaller installations and big iron actually bifurcated into two new market segments, each larger than the parent: high performance computing for weather prediction and such, and mainframes for moving vast volumes of data around ultra-reliably.
When PCs came along people stopped doing most interactive work directly on mini-computers via dumb terminals. We renamed "minicomputers" "servers" and focused them on providing data services to personal computers. The market for servers is certainly far larger than the mini-computer market was in 1981 when IBM introduced the PC (or in 1977 when Apple introduced the Apple II).
What happens when a new product category is created is that it becomes an area of fast growth, which sucks *attention*, but not necessarily profit from the old ones. It may in some cases spur growth, as desktops spurred the growth of the server business. The days of almost guaranteed exponential growth are long gone in the PC business, but it is possible that tablets rather than cannibalizing the PC business, will re-focus it.
At least probably. Predicting the future is hard, especially since we're dealing with *two* emergent techologies: really capable mobile devices and cloud services over ubiquitous networks. But *historically* when a class of smaller, cheaper, more convenient computing devices is created, what *had* been the low end segment doesn't really suffer. On the other hand individual firms (like DEC or Wang) *do* suffer when they fail to adapt to changes in the markets they were successful in.
Pretty much what I was going to say. Gassee isn't talking about anything that *has* happened, or is *starting* to happen. He's talking about something that *might* happen. There's *some* value is discussing this, of course; just as it's valuable to consider what would happen if China invaded Taiwan. But there's a huge difference between that being a possibility worth considering, and the PLA shelling Taipei. It's worth considering what would happen if the Samsung/Google relationship went seriously sour, but if that happened it certainly wouldn't be the way Gassee envisions.
As far as I can see, Google has no reason to care very much if Samsung wants to fork Android -- otherwise why would Google open it? What Google would really care is if Samsung forked Android and moved all it's users away from Google services to a competitor like Microsoft. That's a serious concern, but it wouldn't be as easy as Gassbag^H^H^ee seems to think, for the very reason he seems to think makes it easy: Samsung's installed Android base. If an existing Samsung handset user discovers he can't use Google search, mail, calendar and the Android app store on new Samsung handsets, he'll just buy a different handset *and get the exact same user experience he's used to*. It's incredibly easy for a user to move from one Android phone vendor to another.
I'd guess the most likely way for this to go sour (other than a patent dispute) would be for Samsung to try to move its customer base away from Android and toward Windows. In marketing terms that's a bit like spitting into the wind, but it's certainly more feasible than selling New Coke while there are plenty of other vendors still selling Coke Classic.
Apart from the award money, being nominated by C.S. Lewis would mean a hell of a lot more to me than the opinion of Anders Österlin. I'm sure Anders Österlin was a fine painter and a man of literate tastes, but Lewis was a gifted essayist, critic, and a particularly fine English prose stylist. Reading Lewis' critiques made me a better reader, because he doesn't divide the literary world into perfection and swill. He is open both to the virtues of books he disliked, and to the faults of works he loved -- including Tolkien's.
I'll give my own opinion here. I think Tolkien's skill grew as he wrote LotR. The early parts of "Fellowship of the Ring" are cluttered and uneven, and if a self-consciously "literary" critic gave up at Tom Bombadil, I would not particularly blame him. But if he missed how wonderfully written the scene where Frodo departs from Bag End was, then I'd call that critic a blockhead.