I don't know what your criteria for "grant whore" is; scientists have to put bread on the table like anyone else, and that means they have to submit proposals that are, in the judgment of the reviewers, likely to yield useful results. And after surviving decades of spirited debate, a proposal to overturn decades of climate research in one swell foop is going nowhere because nobody seriously believes you can do it with a single one paper or project.
I watched this whole debate play out *before* it became a political cause celebre because my wife is a geophysicist. The AGW hypothesis really started to heat up in the early 80s, and the scientific critics DID pile on with serious criticisms, and time and time again they bounced. They've looked at the question of whether 18th C Royal Navy water temperature records are to be trusted, or whether trends in remote sensing data are some kind of technological artifact. Lots of sound objections were raised, vigorously debated, then set aside as unfounded or irrelevant.
So does that mean you can't challenge AGW? Of course not. There's lots of places to start undermining it. You just aren't going to get a paper published at this late date that looks at one facet of the data and overturns the whole edifice of scientific consensus.
Now like everything else, most science is mediocre. It's conservative, unimaginative, and safe. But what everyone really wants to see is a big shift in scientific consensus. That's exciting and it brings new grant money in. But nobody's betting on an overnight overturning of the global warming consensus, frustrating as that is to some people who'd like to see that. You don't think that a credible line of research that was heading to the conclusion "use as much coal as you want" wouldn't find funding? The problem is that nobody who's actually followed the debate in the decades up to the big political snit is going to expect quick and dramatic results from such a line of research. You've got to start with establishing, "maybe coal isn't such a big concern" then work your way up.
Intellectual honesty isn't about being unbiased. Nobody would be honest because everyone's biased, especially if you define "biased" as "having an opinion".
Intellectual honesty means exposing the basis for your conclusions to criticism; it means doing your best to apply the same criteria to your conclusions and methods that you apply to the people who disagree with you.
It's not rich people destroying our economy. It's undermining the economic security and progress of the vast majority of the people in that economy for the marginal benefit of rich people that's doing it.
There's nothing wrong with rich people accumulating wealth. It's when some of them start buying politicians that the problem starts. It's like my old lefty Uncle Ivan used to say: Kid, there ain't no socialists and there ain't no capitalists. It's socialism for me and capitalism for you.
What you haven't ever seen sibling rivalry before?
You've got older brother Trek who's actually had a rather checkered career but everyone thinks is brilliant. Then young Wars comes along and despite making tons more money doesn't get any respect. Trek shows up for the family reunion and everybody oohs and aahs over his Prius. Then Wars drives up in his Lamborghini and everyone immediately thinks, "loser".
No matter how badly Trek screws up, people still respect him and want to do graduate school theses on his past accomplishments. No matter how much money Wars makes, everyone considers him a lightweight. Frustrated, Wars goes back to his old pieces and tries to spiff them up, but does that earn him what he craves? Of course not. People are more than happy to hand Wars their money but they will never give him their respect. So far as they're concerned, Wars literally can do no right.
I was thinking more of the writers. But yes, we should think of the actors. The vast majority of actors in a movie aren't the Tom Cruise type headliner, they're hard working shlubs who have to be there otherwise Tom looks silly. Sillier.
The rest of us don't take our compensation in royalties, so what the rest of us do has no relevance.
One year copyright term? That might repay investors and top stars, but that totally ignores how most of the people who actually contribute their skills and labor to making a film get paid. A lot of their compensation is in "residuals" -- royalty payments that continue coming from DVD sales and rebroadcasts.
Take an independent scriptwriter. He might write twenty or more scripts in his career, sell a half dozen, and maybe one or two are made into a movie. The residual checks from those movies keep bread on the table while he tries to sell his next script. Even contract script writers can't count on steady work. One year they're "hot", the next year they're looking for work. Likewise actors careers wax and wane; residuals make it easier to find work (they're less expensive up front), and make it easier to get by when work is hard to find.
Kenny Baker, a 3' 8" British actor, is no doubt *still* receiving royalty checks for working the R2D2 robot in the very first Star Wars movie. If you look at his IMDB entry, he's had a long career, but there were many years he had no work at all, or had very minor work. Most of the money he has made surely came from the six Star Wars movies, and most of his present income probably comes from residual checks for those movies. With the twenty-eight year copyright rule, one third of his income sources go away today.
I'm all for sane and limited copyright terms, but it's not as simple as paying the people who are in a position to get rich off a movie right away, then putting the movie into the public domain. There are a lot of less fortunate people who depend on residuals to smooth out the bumps in a long show business career. A movie that hasn't paid anybody royalties in a ten years should go right into the public domain, but it's reasonable keep a movie that consistently earns royalties for its creators longer. Maybe forty or fifty years -- enough to support a lifelong career. It's even reasonable to extend that as long as seventy years to provide support for retired actors, writers and technicians, many who would be indigent. But ninety-five years from publication (the current default for new works)? That is beyond any possible justification.
The function of a board is oversight. You can't run a company by committee, and you can't run it with an unaccountable CEO either. More shareholder transparency would be good, but shareholders can't play this role because (a) they have even less time than boards do and (b) competitors could buy a single share of stock and gain access to all of a company's sensitive strategy.
So, boards are actually a pretty good idea. But that doesn't mean the implementation is always good. If you are CEO, you want a weak, uninvolved board.
... Since the powers of cops are a superset of the powers of an individual...
That's not precisely true. Actually it's just not true at all. Not even close.
The powers of police and of some private individual are overlapping sets, but that's not even close to relevant, because what's going on here is an "administrative search". There are rules governing such searches, but they're looser than rules in criminal matters. That's why the TSA (ho aren't cops) can frisk you at the security checkpoint of an airport without a warrant or probable cause.
Other cases of administrative search include:
* Drug testing pilots or subway drivers without any specific reason to suspect the individual. * School administrators searching student lockers. * Health inspection of restaurants. * Safety inspections of nuclear power plants.
I have a feeling that putting a GPS on a private automobile falls outside the normal scope of what an administrative search allows, but that'll probably go to court and who knows what the courts will make of it.
The GPS data seems relevant at least to the purpose of the investigation, which is to find out whether the guy is falsifying his timesheet and travel documents. That said, I know one person who works for a state agency that requires employees to put in signed timecards for the week early on Friday morning, including the time they're going to knock off that afternoon and any time they might end up spending on the weekend. So it's quite common for employees of that agency to falsify their timecards for the next week so they get credit for the time they work.
This guy would be an example of misplaced priorities, even if he didn't get caught. Why perpetuate this *particular* fraud? Surely as frauds go it's not the most financially rewarding.
I think it's because once he got started in the field and got a little taste of respect from other people, he got hooked. Everybody likes getting external validation, but he set the respect of others over his own respect for himself. This man's offense combines hubris (that he wouldn't get caught at such an obvious fraud) and insecurity in a manner that's worth thinking about.
Ironically this man wasn't egotistical enough; at least not in the right way. He didn't value his own artistic integrity over the approval of others. That's an artistic virtue that isn't always attractive or likeable (Picasso springs to mind), but it is an honest attitude that sustains an artist in hard times and doubles the rewards in good times. There's even a kind of pig-headed magnificence to it.
“When I was a child, my mother said to me, 'If you become a soldier, you'll be a general. If you become a monk you'll end up as the pope.' Instead I became a painter and wound up as Picasso.”
-- Picasso
Yeah, that Picasso was an egomaniac who thought he was a creative genius, but he was right, and he could back it up any time he cared to. If anyone claimed he painted the way he did because he didn't have the technical ability of his nineteenth century predecessors he could prove them wrong if he felt like it, which he seldom did because he was secure in his ego. Picasso knew he deserved his success in the way few of us ever do.
When you read a novel with a character who is successful because of plagiarism and gets away with it, that character is always pathetic. In movies or stories with a sympathetic con-man protagonist (e.g. Terry Pratchett's *Going Postal*), they guy is sympathetic because the art of the con is more important than the financial payoff. Plus, he's usually shown plundering rich, undeserving people.
Aside from any question of another human being *deserving* our empathy, our empathy doesn't perform any useful function for *us* unless we're willing to extend it to people who are unsympathetic. For example, consider the following part of the article summary:
He gave economic problems as a reason, but mostly it was about his own unreasonably high demands on himself to be successful,
The reason that this man is a fit object for *empathy* is that unreasonable demands on ourselves to be successful is something we all feel now and then. The reason he is not a fit object for *sympathy* is we don't necessarily do something foolish or unethical because of it. Unrestrained ambition for undeserved position is what did Macbeth in. Combine that with a little hubris and you have the most common formula for stupid, self-destructive behavior there is.
Empathy guides are sympathy to those who deserve it, and enables us to learn from the examples of those who don't.
That doesn't seem so unreasonable to me. Apollo, after all, was about showing the non-aligned nations that communism wasn't the wave of the future.
There's a word for this. It's "spin-off". Nobody is saying don't do research, make nice with the Muslims. It's look for an opportunity to give the taxpayers more bang for their buck. And if you don't think that's possible, we've spent a lot of money over the last decade in Iraq and Afghanistan for geopolitical purposes. A tiny marginal improvement the efficacy of those efforts would be worth a lot of dough.
The problem is that the whole "value proposition" of sticking with windows is keeping your existing investment in desktop apps. That's been true since the days Lotus 1-2-3 was the killer app.
The main problem with Windows 7 tablets (I have one, in addition to an iPad and a hacked Nook Color), aside from the bulky form factor, is that there aren't enough tablet oriented apps to make them worth using. While you can operate desktop apps on the the thing the experience is excruciatingly bad. That's because it violates user expectations. What users expect when they use a tablet is a direct manipulation experience; you interact with the widgets onscreen with your finger. When that app is a desktop app you get something different; you're using your finger to push the cursor around like a really tiny and awkward tool.
While there may be advantages to MS to having a greater commonality within all its various offerings, that doesn't translate to the user. A desktop app and a tablet app are very different animals, so he's buying and learning a whole different set of software. That mean that the fact he can run the same OS on his tablet and on his laptop doesn't mean anything to him. There might be some advantage in gaining penetration in corporate environments because of the management infrastructure for windows, but I predict user experiences will be so bad Windows tablets won't succeed in the corporate marketplace. This won't be because of Windows per se, but because people will be naively running desktop apps or using badly reskinned desktop apps from developers with no mobile experience.
Wrong scenario. It's more like this one I actually was in where I was asked to estimate the cost of responding to an RFP and came up with 150K. Boss asked me whether it could be done for 100K, and I told him by cutting our profits to the bone and taking the narrowest possible interpretation of the RFP, it was possible, but the risk was unacceptably high. Two weeks later signed a contract to do it for 50K. When I asked him why, he said he could spread the cost by selling it to more customers. I told him that only diluted our focus on the project and that to productize it would cost us almost a quarter of a million.
The upshot is that we couldn't afford to undertake the project except with slack resources. By the time we were done we had functional software, but it cost us the equivalent of 200K (which we couldn't charge). It took us so long to finish that we never got even the 50K from the customer, because management had turned over twice in the meantime and had no idea what the project was about. Then the boss sold the "product" to a second customer (over my objections) for 50K and that cost us another 200K, and we never saw that money either.
Fiscal responsibility isn't just not spending money on things you don't need. It's also not committing yourself to projects you aren't willing to pay to do a proper job on. Spending less than what it would reasonably take to do a project is like flushing cash down the toilet.
I once worked for a company that was sort of in that position. We were supposed to become Oracle reseller and we'd gone through all the steps of becoming a reseller but one: taking the exam on Oracle licensing policies.
Nobody on the sales team wanted to take the exam, but everyone assumed that because they *intended* to give Oracle the money *eventually*, it would be OK to go ahead and sell the product. Technicians were going onto customer sites with CDs or Oracle products they'd burned and were installing it assuming everything would be OK.
Since I was the only person who didn't think everything would be OK, I stepped in and took the exam. First I had to watch about four hours of "training videos" (this is not an exaggeration). These were films of the extremely un-charismatic Oracle licensing committee members sitting around a conference table discussing (in a monotone) all the things that you weren't allowed to do. There was no other option because there was no written documentation of the policies available for those of us who like to read. It wasn't hard to ace the exam, though. You could figure out most of the things by remembering that Oracle's philosophy is to never give a sucker a break.
There's an antenna guy who put up designs for a parabolic wi-fi reflector that had the correct geometry for reflecting and focusing wi-fi signals. You printed it out on card stock, cut, folded, glued and covered the reflective surface with foil. The part which held the reflector in the correct shape had a hole you used to slip it over the access point's antenna that would position the reflector just right. The effect of this thing was quite dramatic.
Don't have the link still but people could probably still Google it. It was a lot easier to build than this beer can thing and I'll bet it works better too.
No it doesn't. It appears to implement a decentralized certificate architecture its authors consider a better than the standard, and in many use cases they're probably right.
It's really a mixed bag with either architecture. Let's take the scenario where a corporate network has serious problems and it carved into separate islands disconnected from each other and the Internet. Both architectures fail, throwing the user back on his judgment, but in different ways.
My thought is that it's probably impossible to patch the architecture of the certificate system in such a way that it:
a) reliably rejects revoked certificates
b) is transparent to users, performing quickly on valid certificates and never or very seldom rejecting them.
c) covers all the use cases the certificate system is supposed cover
d) doesn't require the user to understand the the certificate system and make sound judgments about when it can safely be bypassed.
Covering the substantial majority of users in nearly all use cases it what makes this hard. If you could trust users to make sound decisions in unusual or borderline cases, a lot of things in technology would be a lot easier. But even if you take a screw-the-users-who-are-ignorant attitude, the damage that they can do isn't confined to *themselves*.
So the short answer is: sometimes whacking a problem with the Big Ugly Hammer is the closest thing to an elegant solution you're ever going to find.
I don't see how's this one a step forward in the "job creation" direction (not says that is not, just saying that I need some explanations. Somebody care to explain?).
I'll jump on the 'i don't get it' bandwagon too.
Then I'll *patent* jumping on the 'i don't get it' bandwagon.
Young people (mostly) didn't know shit about tech back in The Day either
That's because we were busy. HIV hadn't entered the human population and all the STDs you could reasonably expect to catch were cured by standard antibiotics. It was a golden age... even geeks were getting some.
Slashdot Mirror
Blame it on the Titans.
I don't know what your criteria for "grant whore" is; scientists have to put bread on the table like anyone else, and that means they have to submit proposals that are, in the judgment of the reviewers, likely to yield useful results. And after surviving decades of spirited debate, a proposal to overturn decades of climate research in one swell foop is going nowhere because nobody seriously believes you can do it with a single one paper or project.
I watched this whole debate play out *before* it became a political cause celebre because my wife is a geophysicist. The AGW hypothesis really started to heat up in the early 80s, and the scientific critics DID pile on with serious criticisms, and time and time again they bounced. They've looked at the question of whether 18th C Royal Navy water temperature records are to be trusted, or whether trends in remote sensing data are some kind of technological artifact. Lots of sound objections were raised, vigorously debated, then set aside as unfounded or irrelevant.
So does that mean you can't challenge AGW? Of course not. There's lots of places to start undermining it. You just aren't going to get a paper published at this late date that looks at one facet of the data and overturns the whole edifice of scientific consensus.
Now like everything else, most science is mediocre. It's conservative, unimaginative, and safe. But what everyone really wants to see is a big shift in scientific consensus. That's exciting and it brings new grant money in. But nobody's betting on an overnight overturning of the global warming consensus, frustrating as that is to some people who'd like to see that. You don't think that a credible line of research that was heading to the conclusion "use as much coal as you want" wouldn't find funding? The problem is that nobody who's actually followed the debate in the decades up to the big political snit is going to expect quick and dramatic results from such a line of research. You've got to start with establishing, "maybe coal isn't such a big concern" then work your way up.
Intellectual honesty isn't about being unbiased. Nobody would be honest because everyone's biased, especially if you define "biased" as "having an opinion".
Intellectual honesty means exposing the basis for your conclusions to criticism; it means doing your best to apply the same criteria to your conclusions and methods that you apply to the people who disagree with you.
It's not rich people destroying our economy. It's undermining the economic security and progress of the vast majority of the people in that economy for the marginal benefit of rich people that's doing it.
There's nothing wrong with rich people accumulating wealth. It's when some of them start buying politicians that the problem starts. It's like my old lefty Uncle Ivan used to say: Kid, there ain't no socialists and there ain't no capitalists. It's socialism for me and capitalism for you.
What you haven't ever seen sibling rivalry before?
You've got older brother Trek who's actually had a rather checkered career but everyone thinks is brilliant. Then young Wars comes along and despite making tons more money doesn't get any respect. Trek shows up for the family reunion and everybody oohs and aahs over his Prius. Then Wars drives up in his Lamborghini and everyone immediately thinks, "loser".
No matter how badly Trek screws up, people still respect him and want to do graduate school theses on his past accomplishments. No matter how much money Wars makes, everyone considers him a lightweight. Frustrated, Wars goes back to his old pieces and tries to spiff them up, but does that earn him what he craves? Of course not. People are more than happy to hand Wars their money but they will never give him their respect. So far as they're concerned, Wars literally can do no right.
I was thinking more of the writers. But yes, we should think of the actors. The vast majority of actors in a movie aren't the Tom Cruise type headliner, they're hard working shlubs who have to be there otherwise Tom looks silly. Sillier.
The rest of us don't take our compensation in royalties, so what the rest of us do has no relevance.
One year copyright term? That might repay investors and top stars, but that totally ignores how most of the people who actually contribute their skills and labor to making a film get paid. A lot of their compensation is in "residuals" -- royalty payments that continue coming from DVD sales and rebroadcasts.
Take an independent scriptwriter. He might write twenty or more scripts in his career, sell a half dozen, and maybe one or two are made into a movie. The residual checks from those movies keep bread on the table while he tries to sell his next script. Even contract script writers can't count on steady work. One year they're "hot", the next year they're looking for work. Likewise actors careers wax and wane; residuals make it easier to find work (they're less expensive up front), and make it easier to get by when work is hard to find.
Kenny Baker, a 3' 8" British actor, is no doubt *still* receiving royalty checks for working the R2D2 robot in the very first Star Wars movie. If you look at his IMDB entry, he's had a long career, but there were many years he had no work at all, or had very minor work. Most of the money he has made surely came from the six Star Wars movies, and most of his present income probably comes from residual checks for those movies. With the twenty-eight year copyright rule, one third of his income sources go away today.
I'm all for sane and limited copyright terms, but it's not as simple as paying the people who are in a position to get rich off a movie right away, then putting the movie into the public domain. There are a lot of less fortunate people who depend on residuals to smooth out the bumps in a long show business career. A movie that hasn't paid anybody royalties in a ten years should go right into the public domain, but it's reasonable keep a movie that consistently earns royalties for its creators longer. Maybe forty or fifty years -- enough to support a lifelong career. It's even reasonable to extend that as long as seventy years to provide support for retired actors, writers and technicians, many who would be indigent. But ninety-five years from publication (the current default for new works)? That is beyond any possible justification.
The BBC took in board the criticism and gave the fans (you know, the ones paying) what they wanted.
That's... that's... that's... That's un-American.
The function of a board is oversight. You can't run a company by committee, and you can't run it with an unaccountable CEO either. More shareholder transparency would be good, but shareholders can't play this role because (a) they have even less time than boards do and (b) competitors could buy a single share of stock and gain access to all of a company's sensitive strategy.
So, boards are actually a pretty good idea. But that doesn't mean the implementation is always good. If you are CEO, you want a weak, uninvolved board.
... Since the powers of cops are a superset of the powers of an individual ...
That's not precisely true. Actually it's just not true at all. Not even close.
The powers of police and of some private individual are overlapping sets, but that's not even close to relevant, because what's going on here is an "administrative search". There are rules governing such searches, but they're looser than rules in criminal matters. That's why the TSA (ho aren't cops) can frisk you at the security checkpoint of an airport without a warrant or probable cause.
Other cases of administrative search include:
* Drug testing pilots or subway drivers without any specific reason to suspect the individual.
* School administrators searching student lockers.
* Health inspection of restaurants.
* Safety inspections of nuclear power plants.
I have a feeling that putting a GPS on a private automobile falls outside the normal scope of what an administrative search allows, but that'll probably go to court and who knows what the courts will make of it.
The GPS data seems relevant at least to the purpose of the investigation, which is to find out whether the guy is falsifying his timesheet and travel documents. That said, I know one person who works for a state agency that requires employees to put in signed timecards for the week early on Friday morning, including the time they're going to knock off that afternoon and any time they might end up spending on the weekend. So it's quite common for employees of that agency to falsify their timecards for the next week so they get credit for the time they work.
This guy would be an example of misplaced priorities, even if he didn't get caught. Why perpetuate this *particular* fraud? Surely as frauds go it's not the most financially rewarding.
I think it's because once he got started in the field and got a little taste of respect from other people, he got hooked. Everybody likes getting external validation, but he set the respect of others over his own respect for himself. This man's offense combines hubris (that he wouldn't get caught at such an obvious fraud) and insecurity in a manner that's worth thinking about.
Ironically this man wasn't egotistical enough; at least not in the right way. He didn't value his own artistic integrity over the approval of others. That's an artistic virtue that isn't always attractive or likeable (Picasso springs to mind), but it is an honest attitude that sustains an artist in hard times and doubles the rewards in good times. There's even a kind of pig-headed magnificence to it.
“When I was a child, my mother said to me, 'If you become a soldier, you'll be a general. If you become a monk you'll end up as the pope.' Instead I became a painter and wound up as Picasso.”
-- Picasso
Yeah, that Picasso was an egomaniac who thought he was a creative genius, but he was right, and he could back it up any time he cared to. If anyone claimed he painted the way he did because he didn't have the technical ability of his nineteenth century predecessors he could prove them wrong if he felt like it, which he seldom did because he was secure in his ego. Picasso knew he deserved his success in the way few of us ever do.
When you read a novel with a character who is successful because of plagiarism and gets away with it, that character is always pathetic. In movies or stories with a sympathetic con-man protagonist (e.g. Terry Pratchett's *Going Postal*), they guy is sympathetic because the art of the con is more important than the financial payoff. Plus, he's usually shown plundering rich, undeserving people.
Aside from any question of another human being *deserving* our empathy, our empathy doesn't perform any useful function for *us* unless we're willing to extend it to people who are unsympathetic. For example, consider the following part of the article summary:
He gave economic problems as a reason, but mostly it was about his own unreasonably high demands on himself to be successful,
The reason that this man is a fit object for *empathy* is that unreasonable demands on ourselves to be successful is something we all feel now and then. The reason he is not a fit object for *sympathy* is we don't necessarily do something foolish or unethical because of it. Unrestrained ambition for undeserved position is what did Macbeth in. Combine that with a little hubris and you have the most common formula for stupid, self-destructive behavior there is.
Empathy guides are sympathy to those who deserve it, and enables us to learn from the examples of those who don't.
Privatizing the screening will not end government control. Only ending the government mandate to screen will do that.
Anything the government can't understand or control is a security threat.
You mean the government views "Rachel, with Cardholder Services" as a national security threat? Sweet.
That doesn't seem so unreasonable to me. Apollo, after all, was about showing the non-aligned nations that communism wasn't the wave of the future.
There's a word for this. It's "spin-off". Nobody is saying don't do research, make nice with the Muslims. It's look for an opportunity to give the taxpayers more bang for their buck. And if you don't think that's possible, we've spent a lot of money over the last decade in Iraq and Afghanistan for geopolitical purposes. A tiny marginal improvement the efficacy of those efforts would be worth a lot of dough.
The problem is that the whole "value proposition" of sticking with windows is keeping your existing investment in desktop apps. That's been true since the days Lotus 1-2-3 was the killer app.
The main problem with Windows 7 tablets (I have one, in addition to an iPad and a hacked Nook Color), aside from the bulky form factor, is that there aren't enough tablet oriented apps to make them worth using. While you can operate desktop apps on the the thing the experience is excruciatingly bad. That's because it violates user expectations. What users expect when they use a tablet is a direct manipulation experience; you interact with the widgets onscreen with your finger. When that app is a desktop app you get something different; you're using your finger to push the cursor around like a really tiny and awkward tool.
While there may be advantages to MS to having a greater commonality within all its various offerings, that doesn't translate to the user. A desktop app and a tablet app are very different animals, so he's buying and learning a whole different set of software. That mean that the fact he can run the same OS on his tablet and on his laptop doesn't mean anything to him. There might be some advantage in gaining penetration in corporate environments because of the management infrastructure for windows, but I predict user experiences will be so bad Windows tablets won't succeed in the corporate marketplace. This won't be because of Windows per se, but because people will be naively running desktop apps or using badly reskinned desktop apps from developers with no mobile experience.
Wrong scenario. It's more like this one I actually was in where I was asked to estimate the cost of responding to an RFP and came up with 150K. Boss asked me whether it could be done for 100K, and I told him by cutting our profits to the bone and taking the narrowest possible interpretation of the RFP, it was possible, but the risk was unacceptably high. Two weeks later signed a contract to do it for 50K. When I asked him why, he said he could spread the cost by selling it to more customers. I told him that only diluted our focus on the project and that to productize it would cost us almost a quarter of a million.
The upshot is that we couldn't afford to undertake the project except with slack resources. By the time we were done we had functional software, but it cost us the equivalent of 200K (which we couldn't charge). It took us so long to finish that we never got even the 50K from the customer, because management had turned over twice in the meantime and had no idea what the project was about. Then the boss sold the "product" to a second customer (over my objections) for 50K and that cost us another 200K, and we never saw that money either.
Fiscal responsibility isn't just not spending money on things you don't need. It's also not committing yourself to projects you aren't willing to pay to do a proper job on. Spending less than what it would reasonably take to do a project is like flushing cash down the toilet.
I once worked for a company that was sort of in that position. We were supposed to become Oracle reseller and we'd gone through all the steps of becoming a reseller but one: taking the exam on Oracle licensing policies.
Nobody on the sales team wanted to take the exam, but everyone assumed that because they *intended* to give Oracle the money *eventually*, it would be OK to go ahead and sell the product. Technicians were going onto customer sites with CDs or Oracle products they'd burned and were installing it assuming everything would be OK.
Since I was the only person who didn't think everything would be OK, I stepped in and took the exam. First I had to watch about four hours of "training videos" (this is not an exaggeration). These were films of the extremely un-charismatic Oracle licensing committee members sitting around a conference table discussing (in a monotone) all the things that you weren't allowed to do. There was no other option because there was no written documentation of the policies available for those of us who like to read. It wasn't hard to ace the exam, though. You could figure out most of the things by remembering that Oracle's philosophy is to never give a sucker a break.
There's an antenna guy who put up designs for a parabolic wi-fi reflector that had the correct geometry for reflecting and focusing wi-fi signals. You printed it out on card stock, cut, folded, glued and covered the reflective surface with foil. The part which held the reflector in the correct shape had a hole you used to slip it over the access point's antenna that would position the reflector just right. The effect of this thing was quite dramatic.
Don't have the link still but people could probably still Google it. It was a lot easier to build than this beer can thing and I'll bet it works better too.
No it doesn't. It appears to implement a decentralized certificate architecture its authors consider a better than the standard, and in many use cases they're probably right.
It's really a mixed bag with either architecture. Let's take the scenario where a corporate network has serious problems and it carved into separate islands disconnected from each other and the Internet. Both architectures fail, throwing the user back on his judgment, but in different ways.
My thought is that it's probably impossible to patch the architecture of the certificate system in such a way that it:
a) reliably rejects revoked certificates
b) is transparent to users, performing quickly on valid certificates and never or very seldom rejecting them.
c) covers all the use cases the certificate system is supposed cover
d) doesn't require the user to understand the the certificate system and make sound judgments about when it can safely be bypassed.
Covering the substantial majority of users in nearly all use cases it what makes this hard. If you could trust users to make sound decisions in unusual or borderline cases, a lot of things in technology would be a lot easier. But even if you take a screw-the-users-who-are-ignorant attitude, the damage that they can do isn't confined to *themselves*.
So the short answer is: sometimes whacking a problem with the Big Ugly Hammer is the closest thing to an elegant solution you're ever going to find.
by defending Steve Ballmer's use of oxygen.
I don't see how's this one a step forward in the "job creation" direction (not says that is not, just saying that I need some explanations. Somebody care to explain?).
I'll jump on the 'i don't get it' bandwagon too.
Then I'll *patent* jumping on the 'i don't get it' bandwagon.
Young people (mostly) didn't know shit about tech back in The Day either
That's because we were busy. HIV hadn't entered the human population and all the STDs you could reasonably expect to catch were cured by standard antibiotics. It was a golden age ... even geeks were getting some.
Er... You *did* get the memo, didn't you?
Does the judge even know who Larry Ellison *is*? A normal person's first reaction would be to throttle the man for the good of humanity.