Don't forget to consider unintended consequences. One unintended consequence of making legislators wear a hair shirt in public is that they get paid under the table by somebody else. Countries with really low wages for public officials have higher levels of corruption, not lower.
Here's my fantasy. Pay 'em all a million bucks a year, but in return put them under a microscope so they can't do any favors for their "friends". Hell, pay 'em *ten* million apiece. You'd save money, if you could ensure they were working for the public interest. Buying a congressman is tricky; you have to know how to do it without getting into trouble. But once you've sunk the investment in lobbying know-how, the marginal cost of buying a congressman is scandalously low. It's a terrific deal, cause ten or twenty thousand dollars can steer the course of millions of public dollars.
Java is slow? Compared to what? For what kind of task? Even in the pre JIT compilation days, I thought Java wasn't so bad given what it is.
The biggest problem with Java was a culture of over-engineering that grew up around it. Anybody can write a slow program if they make it complicated enough. The incredibly rich software ecosystem of Java makes it incredibly easy to over-engineer an application by glomming together huge chunks of pre-built functionality. That's why the Java world needs something like OSGI, which is essentially a Service Oriented Architecture framework for stuff running on a single virtual machine.
The legitimate speed complaints about Java as a platform (as opposed to over-engineered apps) were largely addressed by JIT compilation, although there are some problem domains where there is never enough speed. What has bedeviled the Java world since is complexity. It didn't help that that shiny container managed persistence hammer in the J2EE toolbox was hopelessly borked. Sun also badly mismanaged J2ME, trying to make it a success by working with third party implementers, who in turn were offering J2ME to handset manufacturers, who in turn were beholden to mobile carriers, who had all kinds of perverse incentives. This could be seen as another reflection of the cultural acceptance of excessive complexity. It's hard to imagine how J2ME could thrive in such an environment, but apparently Sun thought it could make it work. It took Apple to break the carriers' death grip on mobile technology. Google, riding on Apple's coattails, wisely chose to give Sun's moribund, least-common-denominator J2ME initiative. If they hadn't, they'd never have been able to achieve rough parity with Apple's iOS.
Android is a bright spot in the Java world, but not the only one. A consensus seems to be emerging on how to develop web apps and services in a simpler, less tedious way, without sacrificing some of the things that formerly drove complexity up (e.g. distributed transactions). The timing of Oracle's acquisition of Java is fortuitous (for Oracle), because a lot of good things are happening in the Java world... except perhaps for Oracle's acquisition of Sun's Java IP.
Objectively, a tablet is a laptop without a keyboard or the ability to do a lot of things laptops do, but with a higher price tag
Objectively? Hardly. Speaking as a mobile app designer, you're missing some big points. A few years ago Microsoft built a tablet OS around the very assumption you are making: that a tablet is a laptop without a keyboard. They just added screen input features to a mouse and keyboard oriented user interface. Since I was designing apps for Palm and PocketPC at the time, I watched user reactions as they tried out these early tablets They were initially intrigued, but the more they played with one of these things, the less interested they became.
What does that tell you?
Well, obviously that MS got it wrong. Specifically that MS failed to deliver the experience that on some level the users were imagining.
A modern tablet has two big things which those early tablets lacked. It has a touch screen designed for finger input, and it has a user interface designed from the ground up for tablet use. The result is the sensation of *direct manipulation*. You tap, pinch, drag, etc. and whatever the thingy on the screen is reacts in a predictable way. That's why capacitive screens are almost universal today, unlike the resistive screens used in early attempts. Each technology has its advantage; resistive is more precise; it's better for drawing, handwriting, or entering text in Chinese characters. Capacitive, even with a capacitive stylus, is far inferior at those things, but excels at providing a direct manipulation experience.
Also, in mobile apps, form factor has some surprising requirements. I have a Lenovo IdeaPad that converts to a tablet, but the tablet is thick and heavy. If you provide a full screen app that avoids the really weak attempt to work around the incompatibilities of touch input and mouse in Windows, you could provide the same user interface to the user he'd get on a real tablet. Even so, it simply doesn't work because the device is too thick and heavy, even though it's not particularly thick or heavy by netbook standards.
That's another violation of user expectations. They expect to hold a tablet as if it were a clipboard. I haven't quite figured out *why* thickness is such a turn-off, but a fat tablet just *feels* wrong. That's not to mention that you'd like to be able to slip it in your briefcase like it was a piece of paper. On the other hand, it doesn't take a genius to figure out why *weight* is so critical to user expectations. A typical netbook weighs maybe three pounds. The original IPad, 1.5 pounds. That's a huge difference if you're holding something for half an hour or more watching a video or reading a book. Note the iPad shaves the weight from 1.5 to 1.33 pounds. I suspect that 2.5 oz is probably worth forgoing the $100 rebate on an iPad 1, given the way you're supposed to use the device.
The reason people can't get their brain around why Apple succeeded where MS failed in tablets is that they don't understand that *design* is critical to meeting user expectations. I'd argue it's *more* critical in highly mobile form factors. The original Palm designers carved blocks of wood and experimented with carrying them in their pockets. User have very high usability expectations for the tablet form factor. It has to be comfortable to hold for a long time, provide a responsive direct manipulation experience with no mouse heritage gotchas, pack conveniently into brief cases or portfolios, and have very long battery life. I'd also argue that users have very high expectations for the screen quality. For that reason I'd spring for the $600 tablet rather than going with $300 tablet with an inferior screen.
I think the tablet form factor has legs, because nothing on the market is anywhere near so good that improving it wouldn't make it better. That will keep competition alive at a price point that supports reasonable unit profits. When there's a tablet the size of a pad of writing paper, 6mm thick and under half a pound, with twelve hours of battery life and a screen superior to any monitor on the market today, then there won't be any point in improving the devices any further.
That appears to be true. The iPhone had a problem switching to DST, but apparently Google only has problems turning *back* the clock. Android users will have to wait until October to get theirs.
Well, I'm not freaking, but I'm not happy either. When the hydrogen explosion killed some of the workers on the roof, that was a failure that had been anticipated in the design: the outer building bad blow away panels to limit the damage from a hydrogen explosion. It wasn't the hydrogen explosion per se that bothered me, but the fact they had guys on the roof when there was significant hydrogen gas below them. That made me doubt the operators' ability to assess the state of the situation in real time.
I'm sorry to say that events since then have not improved my estimation of how accurate and timely TEPCO's picture of the situation is. There have been a series of alarming, unexpected events, almost too many to list. Until the situation stops generating nasty surprises, I'd say all bets are off as to how bad this situation *might* get. I say this fully recognizing how effective the defense in depth safety features have been so far at preventing a Chernobyl scale incident. I don't *expect* such an incident to occur, but the unexpected is the characteristic feature of this crisis. If I were a Civil Defense planner, I'd be quietly preparing for a much worse than I'm hoping for.
It is absolutely true that compared to the tsunami, the Fukushima reactor situation has been relatively minor, but that's not exactly the benchmark I'd want to set for nuclear power safety (don't have an accident as bad as a magnitude 9 quake followed by a coast length 10m high tsunami). There is a potential for a one-two-three punch here: quake, tsunami, radiological disaster. Japan is on the ropes. It's people are valiant, but they are vulnerable. In this situation a radiological disaster wouldn't have to be anywhere near as bad as Chernobyl to be psychologically and economically crushing.
I'm not anti-nuclear by any stretch of the imagination. The problems in this situation are (a) the obsolete design of the reactors and (b) TEPCO management. It is clear that the combination of these two has produced a situation of such complexity that nobody can say with any certainty what is going on, or what is going to happen. You don't have to be an anti-nuclear fanatic to see this. This system continues to behave in *majorly* unexpected ways. Yes, even in an acceptably safe design there are surprises, but the surprises appear to be cascading, and that shouldn't happen in an acceptably safe design. There's really no way of getting around that. This design isn't good enough, this company wasn't good enough, and the regulation of these reactors' operation wasn't good enough.
The article claims that Bell stifled innovation by choosing not to bring an invention made by a company employee to market, in this case magnetic tape audio recording. That's such an overblown reading of the event that it's laughable. Companies create ideas all the time they decide not to productize because they're not really in their core business, because they fear (rightly or wrongly) that they'll will have a negative impact on that core business. In this case it was both.
In any case, magnetic audio tape was invented in Germany in the prior decade, and magnetic wire recording technology had existed since the 1890s and was widely commercialized in the 1920s.
On the other hand, in Ma Bell's tenure we had the development of Unix, computer networking, and satellite telephony, in which the company paid key roles. The break-up of the Bell System was motivated in part by the hypothesis that competition would bring new technologies like digital telephony (in this case ISDN) to market faster. While nobody can say what would have happened without the break up, on that goal at least the break up could not be called a success.
The result of the break-up wasn't rapid technological innovation; it was price competition. That was a good thing. By in large the AT&T monopoly worked very well, within the expected limitations of any such regulated monopoly. We had *excellent* telephone service for the era, but it was much more expensive than it might have been. Under the covers it was quite technologically advanced. Ma Bell designed the multiplexed digital transmission system (the T Carrier system) that is still used in North America today back in the 1950s, and did early deployments as early as 1961. The commercial adoption of the Internet occurred a decade after the break up of the Bell System in 1984, but it was based on the T Carrier system and its refinements, all designed and implemented by the Bell system in the 60s and 70s, *before* the break-up.
Which is not to say that monopolies are necessarily a good thing. It was good that the break up lowered long distance prices. Nor are such monopolies always technical successes (BT comes to mind). It is even possible that the columnist is right, and that the Bell System *did* somehow stifle innovation, despite the historical fact of all the innovations it brought to market as a monopoly. The problem is his argument, which is pure, ignorant BS.
I'm not saying Avi Nelson is a hypocrite. I don't know what his position is on the fairness doctrine, and if he were against it, well, I think it's OK for people to change their mind about something. Even though it *looks* hypocritical, people do learn things as they grow older. Even where people are just being inconsistent, it does not necessarily mean they are hypocrites. It's just easier to see the intended consequences of our actions and preferred policies than their unintended consequences, and that applies across the board to liberals and conservatives both. It's hard to be as objective and fair-minded as we think we are.
I don't think charges of hypocrisy have any place in a debate like this. Even if you *did* catch somebody in outright hypocrisy, it has no bearing on whether his *opinion* is right or wrong. It just brings a debate about principle down to the level of a personal conflict.
I brought the conservative use of the Fairness Doctrine up to point out that the pendulum does sometimes swing left, and conservatives who are against the doctrine should pay serious attention to its potential positive benefits. Recognizing that is a valid point mean you necessarily have to think it is a *net* good idea. Even if you think the idea has net positive social utility, you could still oppose it on moral grounds. I can see how there'd be utility in killing people who contract cancer, or who have serious genetic diseases like Huntington's or cystic fibrosis. I understand that killing sick people would save resources that could keep health people healthy. That doesn't mean I think that's a good idea.
I think we get a better, more productive debate if people consider each others points seriously. I for one take the libertarian notion that the Fairness Doctrine necessarily infringes on property owners' rights; I don't agree with it, but I understand its a serious point worth considering. I don't take the notion that the Fairness Doctrine drowns out the ability of media owners to express their opinions seriously, because it's historically counter-factual. However, I'm open to a reasoned argument that the situation has changed in the last forty years.
It's actually much more important to balance the net present value of the future energy against the up front investment costs, than to have efficiency at any cost. That's why the majority of solar cells are plain jane silicon cells chugging along at 6% efficiency, no the exotic designs that get more than six times that.
A radically cheaper solar cell that had just a hair less efficiency than the common silicon cells would be a tremendous economic success.
the next thing is that the brilliant doctor would be kidnapped by the evil Fu-Ling, who would use the invention to down airplanes by inhibiting their internal combustion engines. Fortunately the hero's plane is atomic powered.
Well, I don't know if you can blame everything on the southern strategy and the religious right.
I think the more general strategy is fear-mongering. Fear is especially useful to a politician because it removes any need to be consistent. One can use fear of foreign terrorists to lead people by the nose into foreign entanglements then soon after use fear of foreign entanglements to lead them in a completely inconsistent direction. Fear focuses people on a single outcome, not the big picture. The big picture is that rising medical costs are going to strangle our economy. Various fears can be used to stymie effective action against rising costs, even though rising costs will *also* produce each one of the feared scenarios (reduced choices, lack of access to elective procedure, cost-driven end of life treatment decisions).
When a politician uses words calculated to evoke panic and hysteria, you're being manipulated. Like the recent meme that the US is "broke". What does that mean? It's a *suggestive* term; it's indeed *evocative*, which is the entire point. But what *precisely* does the word "broke" mean when applied to a national economy, or even the federal budget? It's a phrase that has consciously been injected into the national debate with the intention that it provoke hysteria, and with the assumption that it will not be examined critically. That's not to say that the national economy or the federal budget doesn't have serious problems to be solved, but saying "we're broke" is something people have pulled out of their hindquarters with the intent of provoking a panic reaction.
Well, been there, done that. I'm generally happy with the results. I thought I'd address the issue with playing videos, then make a few remarks about the advisability of rooting your Nook.
I have not had a problem with playing videos I transcoded from DVD, but it took a little fiddling to get the transcoding details right. Thus far I've had pretty good results with the following (on Linux);
(1) Rip the DVD program to a file like so:
mplayer dvd://1 -dumpstream -dumpfile myfile
This takes the first program (dvd://1) on the DVD, dumps the video and audio (-dumpstream) to a file you specify (myfile). I do this so I can muck around with the transcoding.
(2) Transcode the file into H264 baseline profile like so:
ffmpeg -i myfile -threads 0 -vcodec libx264 -acodec aac -strict experimental -ab 128k -vpre hq -vpre baseline -b 600k myVideo.mp4
Your distro may require "-acodec libaac" instead, and you might want to double the audio bit rate ("-ab 256k") if you really care about the sound. Expect the transcoding to take several hours.
The results are very good, more than acceptable as far as the video is concerned. The picture has snap and is for the most part motion is smooth. Dark scenes with continuous variations in tone tend to get blotchy, but not as bad as I've had trancoding DVDs to MPEG-4 for my iPod. If there is a lot of busy action in a dark scene you lose some detail. The aspect ratio doesn't match the Nook screen, and for some reason the video does not quite scale to the full width of the screen, although that hardly matters.
The audio is OK out of the speakers (considering) but sounds distorted through headphones -- at least a good pair. This is probably the fault of the experimental aac codec on Ubuntu 10.10 64-bit. You could try encoding to MP3 with LAME instead; I think that should work and should sound good enough for most mortal ears. Alternatively you could go to 256K AAC audio encoding with "-ac 256" and see if the sound's a bit cleaner. I haven't got around to messing with that, but if I can get the audio just right I'd be delighted with the Nook for playing transcoded DVDs.
In any case, I figured this out just out of cussedness. If playing video is really important to you, perhaps you should get a real, more expensive tablet. The main reason I rooted my Nook was to get access to my Kindle library. I found that computer books on the Kindle sucked. This is largely a matter of sloppy conversion, but source code and tables are often provided as images rather than text, and even where provided as text source code is often unreadable on the Kindle. Ironically, I found the iPhone app to be better for reading Kindle computer books than the Kindle. The Nook's screen is a little more fatiguing for long reading sessions than the Kindle, but it's much easier to see diagrams, especially color, but not *just* color. Text tables are a lot easier to make out.
One fault of the Nook reader app is that you can't zoom in on images (although they're more usable than on the Kindle even though you *can* zoom in on that). But if you read your *Kindle* books on the Nook, the Kindle reader for Android allows you to zoom in. So again, Kindle books that rely on illustrations are more usable in the Kindle app running on a rooted Nook than they are either on the Kindle itself or in the Nook reader, which is too bad. I'm trying to support B&N by buying books through the Nook store.
The only other minor issue with using a rooted Nook as a tablet is that unless the method you choose installs a custom tablet UI, you're going to deal with the fact that the Nook lacks the hardware buttons Android 2.x expects a phone to have (search,menu,home, back). The hack I used installed a small on-screen button that brings up a soft menu version of these. It works, but it is not elegant.
My summary: I wouldn't buy the Nook color with the intention of rooting it and using it as a tablet. In a tablet I'd bluetooth and some kind of provision for A/V out. However it's a darn good eReader, and if you have it you might as well root it and be able to use it as a tablet and a Kindle reader too.
It is not my intention to be disingenuous. Naturally, any generalization about people will exclude some people it should (e.g. conservatives who are for the fairness doctrine), but I thought that goes without saying. As for names, well, Avi Nelson for one is one whom I remember hearing giving the conservative counterpoint in fairness doctrine spots.
What about those who thought it was a bad idea at the time?
Well, you're asking me to prove a negative. It's not even a negative I subscribe to. I assume there were individual conservatives who were against the fairness doctrine in the 1970s. Mark Fowler, for one, may have held his principled position against the fairness doctrine some time before he was in a position to start enacting it. I don't have any evidence but I'm sure if he was asked that's what he'd say and I'd have no reason to doubt his word, because he was ahead of the curve on this. By his own account, his anti-fairness doctrine position was by no means universally accepted, even within the Reagan administration. It wasn't until much later that the anti-fairness doctrine became one of the standard litmus tests for conservatism, well after it clearly favored the Republicans.
Maybe you meant to say something insightful, but your post comes off as very superficial.
I never mean to say anything insightful, I just say what I think, without beating around the bush or using weasely circumlocutions to say something inflammatory while simultaneously trying to distance myself from it.;-)
If you're going to have an open records law then you don't get to make exceptions for political reasons.
But as you yourself point out, you *do* get to make exceptions based on operational or functional reasons. You go on to say:
Exceptions may only exist when the exception is required to protect the well-being of a private citizen, and they must exist for only as long as that protection is required.
That's a different kettle of fish. Sometimes, as Dick Cheney pointed out in the brouhaha about his energy advisory committee, officials have to be able to deliberate privately. Cheney wasn't wrong in principle, he was just wrong in application. You have to balance that need with the public need to know who is influencing policy and how. But it's perfectly true that public employees can and do deliberate without revealing everything they say. It is simply not possible to think critically with a Zampolit, actual or virutal, looking over your shoulder.
For example if you are evaluating a contract bid, you might bring up the question of whether a bidder has the capacity to do what he says. You bring this up *before* you have justification, because the purpose is to explore that question. If that were public, it would immediately cause a stink and if the bidder was politically connected your investigation of that matter would be promptly quashed. When it comes time to make a formal decision, you lay out the basis for that decision, not necessarily bringing up doubts that after examination did not turn out to be warranted. The basis for your decision is made fully public, not every concern that you considered. If you get it wrong, the loser sue.
While this way of doing things is not perfect, and there is potential for abuse, there is actually more potential for abuse if powerful, interested parties can monitor the process in detail, steering it away from places they don't want it to go.
The role of the professor in open-minded contemplation / testing ideas / free academic discourse / blah is irrelevant.
In the words of the immortal Samuel J. Snodgrass, that's what *you* say. There are arguments for academic freedom that are worth considering before dismissing them out of hand as "blah blah".
life would be even worse if only certain classes of people are exempted on account of being allowed to "think more freely" than others, or something.
You are under the mistaken impression that public employees are not allowed to "think freely". They *are* allowed to think freely, *and privately*. What they are not allowed to do is actually set policy or make decisions about spending money or labor privately.
Er... The media is supposed to be liberal, isn't it? So the fairness doctrine, rather than silencing conservatives, should ensure they have a voice in the public debate, despite the media's liberal bias.
I remember the post-Vietnam era when "conservative" was a dirty word. Broadcasters, whatever their political position, didn't want to present unpopular positions associated with Vietnam and Watergate, so the only place you heard conservatives was on fairness doctrine mandated segments. I remember a number of local conservative radio personalities that I first heard giving their opinions in one of those times set aside for crackpots under the fairness doctrine. These segments were pretty amateurish affairs; the stations didn't have to help these guys with production values, but these guys learned. The fairness launched some conservative media careers that later proved to be influential.
Having to present opposing opinions doesn't mean you are silenced, unless your position is so weak that merely hearing an opposing viewpoint will obliterate it in your audience's mind. In the old days in which conservatives had to scrape fairness doctrine time to be heard, they didn't get anything like parity in time; they just got a few minutes now and then preceded by a disclaimer that the station had nothing to do with this nut. The fairness doctrine didn't sweep away the editorial power of the stations. It did keep opposition to the public's prevailing political mood alive.
Conservatives have done very well by the fairness doctrine, but now that the shoe is on the other foot they've discovered a whole new set of libertarian principles they didn't have when they needed the fairness doctrine to keep their viewpoint from being silenced.
Well, the broadcast license is limited to non-commercial uses with only limited exceptions. You can watch a movie in your home, but you can't open up a theater, put it up on a broadcast screen, and charge for tickets.
This applies to playing broadcast music in restaurants too. Check out section (5)(A)(B) here:http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap1.html . There's an exception carved out for establishments of less than 2000 sq feet. That's not based on any fundamental intellectual property rights principle, it's pragmatic marketing. The industry probably makes more profit shaking down restaurants and bars who want to expand or add more than the allowed number of speakers than it would going after every tiny little greasy spoon in the land. Faced with the loss of music in a growing establishment, you're likely to shell out for a commercial music service like Musak. Faced with paying from the get-go, you might find out you don't even need music.
This is a general marketing principle we see over and over again: divide markets to maximize revenue. Vendors make more money by dividing the market up into segments and charging each segment the price where falling volume meets rising unit price to maximize gross revenue. That's why we have DVD region, which do zero to prevent piracy, but allow the industry to sell in poor countries without undercutting its own prices in rich countries. If you're selling a boxed set for $50 in America and $20 in China, it'd be worth somebody's while to buy a container-load of them at $10 wholesale, put them on the ship then sell them at $40 a pop in the US.
The exception for the mom-and-pop restaurant or bar falls into this pattern. While the exception may result from the competing interests of broadcasters, it arguably benefits music labels too, or at least doesn't hurt them too much. There's no incentive for the music labels to cut truckers any break, so if they can manage to shake them down, they will. It's hard to see that it's really worth their while in the long term though. I suppose it's a sign of a dying industry; they're squeezing all the cash out of it while the squeezing's still good.
Well, I understand there's supposedly no such thing as bad publicity, but I think this is the exception. If you want to attract top talent you don't want to look like an idiot.
Quinto was very good, but Karl Urban as Bones stole most of the scenes he was in. I also thought he had better chemistry with Chris Pine than DeForest Kelley had with Shatner. Their friendship had a plausible basis in the script too; Starfleet is just a place for Bones to go; like Kirk he's not so enamored of it. On the other hand he's older and been through the emotional mill, and so is a kind of mentor to Kirk. That was very well done, I thought.
We're much more used to ensemble casting today, but back in the day TV shows were more like star vehicles. Having two strong characters flanking the star really helped the show stand out. I wonder if that might behind some of the bad feelings of some of the cast towards Shatner. Nimoy regularly got pretty good scripts for somebody who wasn't a star, and Kelley had a few. It's easy to imagine terrific scripts for any of the regular characters, but while the show made use of minor characters for color and humor, the really good scripts stop at the big three. Later Star Trek shows went further with spreading the stories around; I wonder if that isn't why the star characters are perceived by some fans as less dynamic.
Anyhow, happy birthday to Leonard Nimoy, who took what might have been a silly part and turned it into something special. Not many actors fashion an enduring cultural legacy, but he did it in a mere three TV seasons -- 79 performances in all.
Recently I was thinking about methodologies, and all the methodologies I've tried over the years. They all worked for me, but eventually fell out of style because they didn't work for enough people.
Now I think I know why.
Methodologies are like... er... analogies. They're both models of a sort. A really pithy model so seductive that its users can lose sight of the actual problems they're trying to solve or describe. Businesses and products are complex things, and you can't boil them down too far before you miss some important point or other.
Take the above, entirely accurate and pithy model of Google's business. It's about getting paid for eyeballs. But it misses a very important point about *any* business, which is competition. Google isn't just picking up eyeballs lying around that nobody wants. It's got bitter, well-funded rivals who want those same eyeballs and fear what will happen to them if Google gains a monopoly on those eyeballs.
Google's position is extremely precarious for two reasons. First, there isn't anything that prevents the majority of its users from switching to a rival search engine. Second, the vast majority of its users cannot reach its services except by using Microsoft products. Therefore Microsoft is trying to leverage its monopoly position on the desktop and in IT to nudge people away from Google toward Bing. Really, what Google is up to isn't that different from what Microsoft has done to protect its monopoly over the years. The browser and PDA business was never that great for Microsoft, but they didn't want anyone getting a foothold that could nibble away at its core business, so it set out to crush Netscape and Palm. MS feared anyone's ownership of a class of platforms, because it knew all to well the power that conveys.
So the castle metaphor captures something important about Google's business that the basic revenue model does not.
It is critical, absolutely critical, to hire the very best people you can find. The output difference in going from a bad to competent to good to great in a developer is exponential, but the difference in cost is merely logarithmic. Only a fool lets his personal prejudices stand in the way of finding talent, whether that prejudice is about race, religion, sexual orientation... even development languages and platforms.
Maybe the candidate developed in dotNet because that's what he was asked to do by his boss. Maybe he thought C# was interesting, or would get him the job he wanted. Maybe he just *thinks* differently than you do, and so prefers dotNet to Java, Python, Ruby or whatever rings *your* bell.
What you are looking for is somebody whose talent ideally transcends languages and platforms. Somebody you could ask to write something in x86 assembler, and he'd learn it and turn out something pretty good, maybe not as fast as the average assembler programmer could, but the second time around he'd be on par in getting the job done and by the third he'd leave the average programmer in the dust. You want a creative problem solver, a deep thinker, a team player who knows when to take initiative, somebody with real grit and dedication to the success of the project.
What you want is all of that. But you'll never get it. That means *right from the get-go* you're talking about compromises. And this guy's thinking about blackballing applicants because they have experience he doesn't? Jackass.
You mean... all those ads with attractive people who are suffering vague but apparently uncomfortable maladies, then they talk to their doctor about some pill and afterward enjoy a happy active lifestyle... They're *staged*?
That's impossible. The pharmaceutical companies would have to want people to pester their doctors for medications they don't need to do something like that.
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Don't forget to consider unintended consequences. One unintended consequence of making legislators wear a hair shirt in public is that they get paid under the table by somebody else. Countries with really low wages for public officials have higher levels of corruption, not lower.
Here's my fantasy. Pay 'em all a million bucks a year, but in return put them under a microscope so they can't do any favors for their "friends". Hell, pay 'em *ten* million apiece. You'd save money, if you could ensure they were working for the public interest. Buying a congressman is tricky; you have to know how to do it without getting into trouble. But once you've sunk the investment in lobbying know-how, the marginal cost of buying a congressman is scandalously low. It's a terrific deal, cause ten or twenty thousand dollars can steer the course of millions of public dollars.
What's different this version as opposed to others that only 20 apps are considered 'real'?
What's different is that it scares some people who'd prefer that you buy an iPad.
Java is slow? Compared to what? For what kind of task? Even in the pre JIT compilation days, I thought Java wasn't so bad given what it is.
The biggest problem with Java was a culture of over-engineering that grew up around it. Anybody can write a slow program if they make it complicated enough. The incredibly rich software ecosystem of Java makes it incredibly easy to over-engineer an application by glomming together huge chunks of pre-built functionality. That's why the Java world needs something like OSGI, which is essentially a Service Oriented Architecture framework for stuff running on a single virtual machine.
The legitimate speed complaints about Java as a platform (as opposed to over-engineered apps) were largely addressed by JIT compilation, although there are some problem domains where there is never enough speed. What has bedeviled the Java world since is complexity. It didn't help that that shiny container managed persistence hammer in the J2EE toolbox was hopelessly borked. Sun also badly mismanaged J2ME, trying to make it a success by working with third party implementers, who in turn were offering J2ME to handset manufacturers, who in turn were beholden to mobile carriers, who had all kinds of perverse incentives. This could be seen as another reflection of the cultural acceptance of excessive complexity. It's hard to imagine how J2ME could thrive in such an environment, but apparently Sun thought it could make it work. It took Apple to break the carriers' death grip on mobile technology. Google, riding on Apple's coattails, wisely chose to give Sun's moribund, least-common-denominator J2ME initiative. If they hadn't, they'd never have been able to achieve rough parity with Apple's iOS.
Android is a bright spot in the Java world, but not the only one. A consensus seems to be emerging on how to develop web apps and services in a simpler, less tedious way, without sacrificing some of the things that formerly drove complexity up (e.g. distributed transactions). The timing of Oracle's acquisition of Java is fortuitous (for Oracle), because a lot of good things are happening in the Java world ... except perhaps for Oracle's acquisition of Sun's Java IP.
Hmm... Fiber in Kansas... for some reason I have "Somewhere over the Rainbow" going through my head....
That's odd, because I was thinking that they had crazy little women there and Google was going to them some.
Hey, I think I saw that one. That's the one where the ugly garbage cleaning robot and the elegant, nimble robot fall in love.
Objectively, a tablet is a laptop without a keyboard or the ability to do a lot of things laptops do, but with a higher price tag
Objectively? Hardly. Speaking as a mobile app designer, you're missing some big points. A few years ago Microsoft built a tablet OS around the very assumption you are making: that a tablet is a laptop without a keyboard. They just added screen input features to a mouse and keyboard oriented user interface. Since I was designing apps for Palm and PocketPC at the time, I watched user reactions as they tried out these early tablets They were initially intrigued, but the more they played with one of these things, the less interested they became.
What does that tell you?
Well, obviously that MS got it wrong. Specifically that MS failed to deliver the experience that on some level the users were imagining.
A modern tablet has two big things which those early tablets lacked. It has a touch screen designed for finger input, and it has a user interface designed from the ground up for tablet use. The result is the sensation of *direct manipulation*. You tap, pinch, drag, etc. and whatever the thingy on the screen is reacts in a predictable way. That's why capacitive screens are almost universal today, unlike the resistive screens used in early attempts. Each technology has its advantage; resistive is more precise; it's better for drawing, handwriting, or entering text in Chinese characters. Capacitive, even with a capacitive stylus, is far inferior at those things, but excels at providing a direct manipulation experience.
Also, in mobile apps, form factor has some surprising requirements. I have a Lenovo IdeaPad that converts to a tablet, but the tablet is thick and heavy. If you provide a full screen app that avoids the really weak attempt to work around the incompatibilities of touch input and mouse in Windows, you could provide the same user interface to the user he'd get on a real tablet. Even so, it simply doesn't work because the device is too thick and heavy, even though it's not particularly thick or heavy by netbook standards.
That's another violation of user expectations. They expect to hold a tablet as if it were a clipboard. I haven't quite figured out *why* thickness is such a turn-off, but a fat tablet just *feels* wrong. That's not to mention that you'd like to be able to slip it in your briefcase like it was a piece of paper. On the other hand, it doesn't take a genius to figure out why *weight* is so critical to user expectations. A typical netbook weighs maybe three pounds. The original IPad, 1.5 pounds. That's a huge difference if you're holding something for half an hour or more watching a video or reading a book. Note the iPad shaves the weight from 1.5 to 1.33 pounds. I suspect that 2.5 oz is probably worth forgoing the $100 rebate on an iPad 1, given the way you're supposed to use the device.
The reason people can't get their brain around why Apple succeeded where MS failed in tablets is that they don't understand that *design* is critical to meeting user expectations. I'd argue it's *more* critical in highly mobile form factors. The original Palm designers carved blocks of wood and experimented with carrying them in their pockets. User have very high usability expectations for the tablet form factor. It has to be comfortable to hold for a long time, provide a responsive direct manipulation experience with no mouse heritage gotchas, pack conveniently into brief cases or portfolios, and have very long battery life. I'd also argue that users have very high expectations for the screen quality. For that reason I'd spring for the $600 tablet rather than going with $300 tablet with an inferior screen.
I think the tablet form factor has legs, because nothing on the market is anywhere near so good that improving it wouldn't make it better. That will keep competition alive at a price point that supports reasonable unit profits. When there's a tablet the size of a pad of writing paper, 6mm thick and under half a pound, with twelve hours of battery life and a screen superior to any monitor on the market today, then there won't be any point in improving the devices any further.
Nope. Google's still playing catchup with Apple..
That appears to be true. The iPhone had a problem switching to DST, but apparently Google only has problems turning *back* the clock. Android users will have to wait until October to get theirs.
Well, I'm not freaking, but I'm not happy either. When the hydrogen explosion killed some of the workers on the roof, that was a failure that had been anticipated in the design: the outer building bad blow away panels to limit the damage from a hydrogen explosion. It wasn't the hydrogen explosion per se that bothered me, but the fact they had guys on the roof when there was significant hydrogen gas below them. That made me doubt the operators' ability to assess the state of the situation in real time.
I'm sorry to say that events since then have not improved my estimation of how accurate and timely TEPCO's picture of the situation is. There have been a series of alarming, unexpected events, almost too many to list. Until the situation stops generating nasty surprises, I'd say all bets are off as to how bad this situation *might* get. I say this fully recognizing how effective the defense in depth safety features have been so far at preventing a Chernobyl scale incident. I don't *expect* such an incident to occur, but the unexpected is the characteristic feature of this crisis. If I were a Civil Defense planner, I'd be quietly preparing for a much worse than I'm hoping for.
It is absolutely true that compared to the tsunami, the Fukushima reactor situation has been relatively minor, but that's not exactly the benchmark I'd want to set for nuclear power safety (don't have an accident as bad as a magnitude 9 quake followed by a coast length 10m high tsunami). There is a potential for a one-two-three punch here: quake, tsunami, radiological disaster. Japan is on the ropes. It's people are valiant, but they are vulnerable. In this situation a radiological disaster wouldn't have to be anywhere near as bad as Chernobyl to be psychologically and economically crushing.
I'm not anti-nuclear by any stretch of the imagination. The problems in this situation are (a) the obsolete design of the reactors and (b) TEPCO management. It is clear that the combination of these two has produced a situation of such complexity that nobody can say with any certainty what is going on, or what is going to happen. You don't have to be an anti-nuclear fanatic to see this. This system continues to behave in *majorly* unexpected ways. Yes, even in an acceptably safe design there are surprises, but the surprises appear to be cascading, and that shouldn't happen in an acceptably safe design. There's really no way of getting around that. This design isn't good enough, this company wasn't good enough, and the regulation of these reactors' operation wasn't good enough.
And you expect a non-monopoly to be more open about its technology?
The article claims that Bell stifled innovation by choosing not to bring an invention made by a company employee to market, in this case magnetic tape audio recording. That's such an overblown reading of the event that it's laughable. Companies create ideas all the time they decide not to productize because they're not really in their core business, because they fear (rightly or wrongly) that they'll will have a negative impact on that core business. In this case it was both.
In any case, magnetic audio tape was invented in Germany in the prior decade, and magnetic wire recording technology had existed since the 1890s and was widely commercialized in the 1920s.
On the other hand, in Ma Bell's tenure we had the development of Unix, computer networking, and satellite telephony, in which the company paid key roles. The break-up of the Bell System was motivated in part by the hypothesis that competition would bring new technologies like digital telephony (in this case ISDN) to market faster. While nobody can say what would have happened without the break up, on that goal at least the break up could not be called a success.
The result of the break-up wasn't rapid technological innovation; it was price competition. That was a good thing. By in large the AT&T monopoly worked very well, within the expected limitations of any such regulated monopoly. We had *excellent* telephone service for the era, but it was much more expensive than it might have been. Under the covers it was quite technologically advanced. Ma Bell designed the multiplexed digital transmission system (the T Carrier system) that is still used in North America today back in the 1950s, and did early deployments as early as 1961. The commercial adoption of the Internet occurred a decade after the break up of the Bell System in 1984, but it was based on the T Carrier system and its refinements, all designed and implemented by the Bell system in the 60s and 70s, *before* the break-up.
Which is not to say that monopolies are necessarily a good thing. It was good that the break up lowered long distance prices. Nor are such monopolies always technical successes (BT comes to mind). It is even possible that the columnist is right, and that the Bell System *did* somehow stifle innovation, despite the historical fact of all the innovations it brought to market as a monopoly. The problem is his argument, which is pure, ignorant BS.
I'm not saying Avi Nelson is a hypocrite. I don't know what his position is on the fairness doctrine, and if he were against it, well, I think it's OK for people to change their mind about something. Even though it *looks* hypocritical, people do learn things as they grow older. Even where people are just being inconsistent, it does not necessarily mean they are hypocrites. It's just easier to see the intended consequences of our actions and preferred policies than their unintended consequences, and that applies across the board to liberals and conservatives both. It's hard to be as objective and fair-minded as we think we are.
I don't think charges of hypocrisy have any place in a debate like this. Even if you *did* catch somebody in outright hypocrisy, it has no bearing on whether his *opinion* is right or wrong. It just brings a debate about principle down to the level of a personal conflict.
I brought the conservative use of the Fairness Doctrine up to point out that the pendulum does sometimes swing left, and conservatives who are against the doctrine should pay serious attention to its potential positive benefits. Recognizing that is a valid point mean you necessarily have to think it is a *net* good idea. Even if you think the idea has net positive social utility, you could still oppose it on moral grounds. I can see how there'd be utility in killing people who contract cancer, or who have serious genetic diseases like Huntington's or cystic fibrosis. I understand that killing sick people would save resources that could keep health people healthy. That doesn't mean I think that's a good idea.
I think we get a better, more productive debate if people consider each others points seriously. I for one take the libertarian notion that the Fairness Doctrine necessarily infringes on property owners' rights; I don't agree with it, but I understand its a serious point worth considering. I don't take the notion that the Fairness Doctrine drowns out the ability of media owners to express their opinions seriously, because it's historically counter-factual. However, I'm open to a reasoned argument that the situation has changed in the last forty years.
It's actually much more important to balance the net present value of the future energy against the up front investment costs, than to have efficiency at any cost. That's why the majority of solar cells are plain jane silicon cells chugging along at 6% efficiency, no the exotic designs that get more than six times that.
A radically cheaper solar cell that had just a hair less efficiency than the common silicon cells would be a tremendous economic success.
the next thing is that the brilliant doctor would be kidnapped by the evil Fu-Ling, who would use the invention to down airplanes by inhibiting their internal combustion engines. Fortunately the hero's plane is atomic powered.
Pfft. Real hackers write TECO macros that write their programs for them as they pursue galactic domination in Netrek.
Well, I don't know if you can blame everything on the southern strategy and the religious right.
I think the more general strategy is fear-mongering. Fear is especially useful to a politician because it removes any need to be consistent. One can use fear of foreign terrorists to lead people by the nose into foreign entanglements then soon after use fear of foreign entanglements to lead them in a completely inconsistent direction. Fear focuses people on a single outcome, not the big picture. The big picture is that rising medical costs are going to strangle our economy. Various fears can be used to stymie effective action against rising costs, even though rising costs will *also* produce each one of the feared scenarios (reduced choices, lack of access to elective procedure, cost-driven end of life treatment decisions).
When a politician uses words calculated to evoke panic and hysteria, you're being manipulated. Like the recent meme that the US is "broke". What does that mean? It's a *suggestive* term; it's indeed *evocative*, which is the entire point. But what *precisely* does the word "broke" mean when applied to a national economy, or even the federal budget? It's a phrase that has consciously been injected into the national debate with the intention that it provoke hysteria, and with the assumption that it will not be examined critically. That's not to say that the national economy or the federal budget doesn't have serious problems to be solved, but saying "we're broke" is something people have pulled out of their hindquarters with the intent of provoking a panic reaction.
Well, been there, done that. I'm generally happy with the results. I thought I'd address the issue with playing videos, then make a few remarks about the advisability of rooting your Nook.
I have not had a problem with playing videos I transcoded from DVD, but it took a little fiddling to get the transcoding details right. Thus far I've had pretty good results with the following (on Linux);
(1) Rip the DVD program to a file like so:
mplayer dvd://1 -dumpstream -dumpfile myfile
This takes the first program (dvd://1) on the DVD, dumps the video and audio (-dumpstream) to a file you specify (myfile). I do this so I can muck around with the transcoding.
(2) Transcode the file into H264 baseline profile like so:
ffmpeg -i myfile -threads 0 -vcodec libx264 -acodec aac -strict experimental -ab 128k -vpre hq -vpre baseline -b 600k myVideo.mp4
Your distro may require "-acodec libaac" instead, and you might want to double the audio bit rate ("-ab 256k") if you really care about the sound. Expect the transcoding to take several hours.
The results are very good, more than acceptable as far as the video is concerned. The picture has snap and is for the most part motion is smooth. Dark scenes with continuous variations in tone tend to get blotchy, but not as bad as I've had trancoding DVDs to MPEG-4 for my iPod. If there is a lot of busy action in a dark scene you lose some detail. The aspect ratio doesn't match the Nook screen, and for some reason the video does not quite scale to the full width of the screen, although that hardly matters.
The audio is OK out of the speakers (considering) but sounds distorted through headphones -- at least a good pair. This is probably the fault of the experimental aac codec on Ubuntu 10.10 64-bit. You could try encoding to MP3 with LAME instead; I think that should work and should sound good enough for most mortal ears. Alternatively you could go to 256K AAC audio encoding with "-ac 256" and see if the sound's a bit cleaner. I haven't got around to messing with that, but if I can get the audio just right I'd be delighted with the Nook for playing transcoded DVDs.
In any case, I figured this out just out of cussedness. If playing video is really important to you, perhaps you should get a real, more expensive tablet. The main reason I rooted my Nook was to get access to my Kindle library. I found that computer books on the Kindle sucked. This is largely a matter of sloppy conversion, but source code and tables are often provided as images rather than text, and even where provided as text source code is often unreadable on the Kindle. Ironically, I found the iPhone app to be better for reading Kindle computer books than the Kindle. The Nook's screen is a little more fatiguing for long reading sessions than the Kindle, but it's much easier to see diagrams, especially color, but not *just* color. Text tables are a lot easier to make out.
One fault of the Nook reader app is that you can't zoom in on images (although they're more usable than on the Kindle even though you *can* zoom in on that). But if you read your *Kindle* books on the Nook, the Kindle reader for Android allows you to zoom in. So again, Kindle books that rely on illustrations are more usable in the Kindle app running on a rooted Nook than they are either on the Kindle itself or in the Nook reader, which is too bad. I'm trying to support B&N by buying books through the Nook store.
The only other minor issue with using a rooted Nook as a tablet is that unless the method you choose installs a custom tablet UI, you're going to deal with the fact that the Nook lacks the hardware buttons Android 2.x expects a phone to have (search,menu,home, back). The hack I used installed a small on-screen button that brings up a soft menu version of these. It works, but it is not elegant.
My summary: I wouldn't buy the Nook color with the intention of rooting it and using it as a tablet. In a tablet I'd bluetooth and some kind of provision for A/V out. However it's a darn good eReader, and if you have it you might as well root it and be able to use it as a tablet and a Kindle reader too.
It is not my intention to be disingenuous. Naturally, any generalization about people will exclude some people it should (e.g. conservatives who are for the fairness doctrine), but I thought that goes without saying. As for names, well, Avi Nelson for one is one whom I remember hearing giving the conservative counterpoint in fairness doctrine spots.
What about those who thought it was a bad idea at the time?
Well, you're asking me to prove a negative. It's not even a negative I subscribe to. I assume there were individual conservatives who were against the fairness doctrine in the 1970s. Mark Fowler, for one, may have held his principled position against the fairness doctrine some time before he was in a position to start enacting it. I don't have any evidence but I'm sure if he was asked that's what he'd say and I'd have no reason to doubt his word, because he was ahead of the curve on this. By his own account, his anti-fairness doctrine position was by no means universally accepted, even within the Reagan administration. It wasn't until much later that the anti-fairness doctrine became one of the standard litmus tests for conservatism, well after it clearly favored the Republicans.
Maybe you meant to say something insightful, but your post comes off as very superficial.
I never mean to say anything insightful, I just say what I think, without beating around the bush or using weasely circumlocutions to say something inflammatory while simultaneously trying to distance myself from it. ;-)
If you're going to have an open records law then you don't get to make exceptions for political reasons.
But as you yourself point out, you *do* get to make exceptions based on operational or functional reasons. You go on to say:
Exceptions may only exist when the exception is required to protect the well-being of a private citizen, and they must exist for only as long as that protection is required.
That's a different kettle of fish. Sometimes, as Dick Cheney pointed out in the brouhaha about his energy advisory committee, officials have to be able to deliberate privately. Cheney wasn't wrong in principle, he was just wrong in application. You have to balance that need with the public need to know who is influencing policy and how. But it's perfectly true that public employees can and do deliberate without revealing everything they say. It is simply not possible to think critically with a Zampolit, actual or virutal, looking over your shoulder.
For example if you are evaluating a contract bid, you might bring up the question of whether a bidder has the capacity to do what he says. You bring this up *before* you have justification, because the purpose is to explore that question. If that were public, it would immediately cause a stink and if the bidder was politically connected your investigation of that matter would be promptly quashed. When it comes time to make a formal decision, you lay out the basis for that decision, not necessarily bringing up doubts that after examination did not turn out to be warranted. The basis for your decision is made fully public, not every concern that you considered. If you get it wrong, the loser sue.
While this way of doing things is not perfect, and there is potential for abuse, there is actually more potential for abuse if powerful, interested parties can monitor the process in detail, steering it away from places they don't want it to go.
The role of the professor in open-minded contemplation / testing ideas / free academic discourse / blah is irrelevant.
In the words of the immortal Samuel J. Snodgrass, that's what *you* say. There are arguments for academic freedom that are worth considering before dismissing them out of hand as "blah blah".
life would be even worse if only certain classes of people are exempted on account of being allowed to "think more freely" than others, or something.
You are under the mistaken impression that public employees are not allowed to "think freely". They *are* allowed to think freely, *and privately*. What they are not allowed to do is actually set policy or make decisions about spending money or labor privately.
Er... The media is supposed to be liberal, isn't it? So the fairness doctrine, rather than silencing conservatives, should ensure they have a voice in the public debate, despite the media's liberal bias.
I remember the post-Vietnam era when "conservative" was a dirty word. Broadcasters, whatever their political position, didn't want to present unpopular positions associated with Vietnam and Watergate, so the only place you heard conservatives was on fairness doctrine mandated segments. I remember a number of local conservative radio personalities that I first heard giving their opinions in one of those times set aside for crackpots under the fairness doctrine. These segments were pretty amateurish affairs; the stations didn't have to help these guys with production values, but these guys learned. The fairness launched some conservative media careers that later proved to be influential.
Having to present opposing opinions doesn't mean you are silenced, unless your position is so weak that merely hearing an opposing viewpoint will obliterate it in your audience's mind. In the old days in which conservatives had to scrape fairness doctrine time to be heard, they didn't get anything like parity in time; they just got a few minutes now and then preceded by a disclaimer that the station had nothing to do with this nut. The fairness doctrine didn't sweep away the editorial power of the stations. It did keep opposition to the public's prevailing political mood alive.
Conservatives have done very well by the fairness doctrine, but now that the shoe is on the other foot they've discovered a whole new set of libertarian principles they didn't have when they needed the fairness doctrine to keep their viewpoint from being silenced.
Well, the broadcast license is limited to non-commercial uses with only limited exceptions. You can watch a movie in your home, but you can't open up a theater, put it up on a broadcast screen, and charge for tickets.
This applies to playing broadcast music in restaurants too. Check out section (5)(A)(B) here:http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap1.html . There's an exception carved out for establishments of less than 2000 sq feet. That's not based on any fundamental intellectual property rights principle, it's pragmatic marketing. The industry probably makes more profit shaking down restaurants and bars who want to expand or add more than the allowed number of speakers than it would going after every tiny little greasy spoon in the land. Faced with the loss of music in a growing establishment, you're likely to shell out for a commercial music service like Musak. Faced with paying from the get-go, you might find out you don't even need music.
This is a general marketing principle we see over and over again: divide markets to maximize revenue. Vendors make more money by dividing the market up into segments and charging each segment the price where falling volume meets rising unit price to maximize gross revenue. That's why we have DVD region, which do zero to prevent piracy, but allow the industry to sell in poor countries without undercutting its own prices in rich countries. If you're selling a boxed set for $50 in America and $20 in China, it'd be worth somebody's while to buy a container-load of them at $10 wholesale, put them on the ship then sell them at $40 a pop in the US.
The exception for the mom-and-pop restaurant or bar falls into this pattern. While the exception may result from the competing interests of broadcasters, it arguably benefits music labels too, or at least doesn't hurt them too much. There's no incentive for the music labels to cut truckers any break, so if they can manage to shake them down, they will. It's hard to see that it's really worth their while in the long term though. I suppose it's a sign of a dying industry; they're squeezing all the cash out of it while the squeezing's still good.
Well, I understand there's supposedly no such thing as bad publicity, but I think this is the exception. If you want to attract top talent you don't want to look like an idiot.
Quinto was very good, but Karl Urban as Bones stole most of the scenes he was in. I also thought he had better chemistry with Chris Pine than DeForest Kelley had with Shatner. Their friendship had a plausible basis in the script too; Starfleet is just a place for Bones to go; like Kirk he's not so enamored of it. On the other hand he's older and been through the emotional mill, and so is a kind of mentor to Kirk. That was very well done, I thought.
We're much more used to ensemble casting today, but back in the day TV shows were more like star vehicles. Having two strong characters flanking the star really helped the show stand out. I wonder if that might behind some of the bad feelings of some of the cast towards Shatner. Nimoy regularly got pretty good scripts for somebody who wasn't a star, and Kelley had a few. It's easy to imagine terrific scripts for any of the regular characters, but while the show made use of minor characters for color and humor, the really good scripts stop at the big three. Later Star Trek shows went further with spreading the stories around; I wonder if that isn't why the star characters are perceived by some fans as less dynamic.
Anyhow, happy birthday to Leonard Nimoy, who took what might have been a silly part and turned it into something special. Not many actors fashion an enduring cultural legacy, but he did it in a mere three TV seasons -- 79 performances in all.
Recently I was thinking about methodologies, and all the methodologies I've tried over the years. They all worked for me, but eventually fell out of style because they didn't work for enough people.
Now I think I know why.
Methodologies are like ... er ... analogies. They're both models of a sort. A really pithy model so seductive that its users can lose sight of the actual problems they're trying to solve or describe. Businesses and products are complex things, and you can't boil them down too far before you miss some important point or other.
Take the above, entirely accurate and pithy model of Google's business. It's about getting paid for eyeballs. But it misses a very important point about *any* business, which is competition. Google isn't just picking up eyeballs lying around that nobody wants. It's got bitter, well-funded rivals who want those same eyeballs and fear what will happen to them if Google gains a monopoly on those eyeballs.
Google's position is extremely precarious for two reasons. First, there isn't anything that prevents the majority of its users from switching to a rival search engine. Second, the vast majority of its users cannot reach its services except by using Microsoft products. Therefore Microsoft is trying to leverage its monopoly position on the desktop and in IT to nudge people away from Google toward Bing. Really, what Google is up to isn't that different from what Microsoft has done to protect its monopoly over the years. The browser and PDA business was never that great for Microsoft, but they didn't want anyone getting a foothold that could nibble away at its core business, so it set out to crush Netscape and Palm. MS feared anyone's ownership of a class of platforms, because it knew all to well the power that conveys.
So the castle metaphor captures something important about Google's business that the basic revenue model does not.
It is critical, absolutely critical, to hire the very best people you can find. The output difference in going from a bad to competent to good to great in a developer is exponential, but the difference in cost is merely logarithmic. Only a fool lets his personal prejudices stand in the way of finding talent, whether that prejudice is about race, religion, sexual orientation ... even development languages and platforms.
Maybe the candidate developed in dotNet because that's what he was asked to do by his boss. Maybe he thought C# was interesting, or would get him the job he wanted. Maybe he just *thinks* differently than you do, and so prefers dotNet to Java, Python, Ruby or whatever rings *your* bell.
What you are looking for is somebody whose talent ideally transcends languages and platforms. Somebody you could ask to write something in x86 assembler, and he'd learn it and turn out something pretty good, maybe not as fast as the average assembler programmer could, but the second time around he'd be on par in getting the job done and by the third he'd leave the average programmer in the dust. You want a creative problem solver, a deep thinker, a team player who knows when to take initiative, somebody with real grit and dedication to the success of the project.
What you want is all of that. But you'll never get it. That means *right from the get-go* you're talking about compromises. And this guy's thinking about blackballing applicants because they have experience he doesn't? Jackass.
You mean ... all those ads with attractive people who are suffering vague but apparently uncomfortable maladies, then they talk to their doctor about some pill and afterward enjoy a happy active lifestyle ... They're *staged*?
That's impossible. The pharmaceutical companies would have to want people to pester their doctors for medications they don't need to do something like that.