Depends on your working set, doesn't it? Most of the stuff I do during the day is not very processor intensive. Browsing, except on youtube, is not very demanding. If I buy a sufficiently fast multi-core processor, I don't worry about overhead. Where I'm worried about overhead, I run that app on the real iron.
However, I just bought a 64 bit laptop with 2.53 Mhz Duo processor and 4GB of RAM. There isn't much that can't run fine in a virtual machine. Virtualization also allows me to run 32 bit only software on the machine while having the benefits of 64 bit where I need it (largely in massive file compressions).
In any case, I realize the limits to the scalability of this scheme, which is entirely the point of my post... a modern, low footprint operating system makes it more practical.
In any case, chroot while useful is not a security panacea. Processes with root permissions can get out of jail -- always have been. So if you're running software which needs to execute as root at some point (which you might not always have a choice about) you are vulnerable.
I've used chroot, but it is not really an iron clad security solution. For example, if the root is compromised, then the chroot environment is as well. Another example is your idea that (a) the chroot environment is lighteight because it does not duplicate libraries yet (b) the environments are isolated from each other. You can have one or the other.
In any case, chrooting doesn't get you the fast system restore benefits of virtualization. I can keep my personal browsing vm on a keychain, and if it's undermined I just go to a backup and add the security patches. I can back up my work to an external drive as a system, and be up and running instantly after my laptop is destroyed.
Really "lightweight" is in the mind of the beholder. Unless you are doing something really disk intensive, it's better to spend disk space than time.
You are missing the point. The point is to have different self-contained virtual machines which are secure from each other, and are packaged in such a way I could drag one onto a thumb drive and use it on a completely different machine without installing anything other than the virtual machine software.
For example, my personal browsing doesn't really need to be tightly coupled with my development work, so they can go on different machines. When a security hole undermines the browser, it doesn't effect my development work. Or my laptop gets dropped, so pop an external drive with a backup of my work environment onto my desktop and checkout the latest source code without having to install and configure everything. Or I am looking at migrating work between different platform versions, so I make a copy of the virtual machine and upgrade the copy to see what would happen, without touching my production machine.
You could use X windows to make using the machines seamless if you like.
think about the edge of the box. That is where progress happens. An athlete or scholar does not increase the range of his abilities by doing what is easy for him, nor what is impossible. It is the edge of impossibility where we become our best.
With respect to other ays of thinking, you are entirely on target. You can't wish for everyone to think as you do, without making the way you think... conventional. This is really the box-edge theory applied to human relations. There is no stretch in working exclusively with people like you. There is no point in trying to find validity in the perspectives of fascism or racism. But where you can manage to accommodate a different viewpoint, you've stretched your mind that much more.
I run linux distros frequently on virtual machines because I can configure an efficient, low footprint purpose specific "appliance". It seems to me that a modern system specifically designed to run on actual appliances would be even better.
As a developer I use virtual machines for testing (of course) but also to package up certain software services like databases or application servers that I don't need all the time. Rather than install them on a real machine, I make a copy of a generic virtual appliance and install to that.
One thing that I've always thought that would make sense is to confine all one's risky operations, such as web browsing, to a virtual machine. But on most host machines the overhead of an entire virtual machine, both in memory and startup time, make it not quite convenient to do so. A much smaller, but still up to date machine might change this. Android requires as a minimum 32MB of RAM and 32MB of flash. This is small enough overhead to justify a virtual machine for a single process.
Actually, I'd like to use a really minimal operating system as the virtual machine host as well. I'd like to be able organize my entire "workspace" in to severable, portable pieces joined by a virtual network. If I'm ever forced to deal with an issue like incompatible versions of glibc in the future, I could contain that; or if I want to try upgrading a piece of software, I can roll back to a snapshot or keep multiple copies of the virtual appliance around. In that case, I'd like to have the host operating system be as minimal as possible.
If you've been in this business as long as I have, you'll realize that Microsoft's "weird fascination" is not an isolated phenomenon. It's part of a long simmering philosophical division over the design of software that goes back at least to the 1980s and the advent of commercially viable personal computing.
The crux of this debate is this question: exactly how intelligent should software attempt to be on a users behalf? On one end of the spectrum, you have the vision of highly intelligent agents which monitor the world and the user and do things on the user's behalf that the user would do for himself if he would deign to use his valuable attention. The other end of the spectrum isn't quite as easy to characterize, but I'd say it sees the goal of software design as making tools that do exactly what a user asks them to, neither more nor less. We might consider this spectrum as running from proactive or autonomous software on one end to responsive software on the other.
In a nutshell, it's the question of whether we want software agents or software tools that divides designers.
The software agent end of things has always had a kind of futuristic allure, and attracts investment and attention and drives innovation. However, I (being a tools-person) think that making the software do what the user tells it to is a surer path to success. Apple, which I see as mainly a tools oriented design company, coined the term Personal Digital Assistant with the idea that small mobile computers would be agents, but Palm was the company that scored the first success in the PDA market by making a handy device.
Microsoft has always been an agent oriented company. The "Where do you want to go?" slogan has an unexpected facet in that it subtly bodies the software agent philosophy: you specify where you want to be and the agent will take care of the details. Microsoft's design not only hides the details, but often makes the details inaccessible, which means that getting MS software to do what you want often amounts to twiddling poorly or undocumented registry entries.
This isn't about making software intelligent or not, it's about how much initiative you take out of the users' hands.
If you read Tim Berners-Lee's article on the Semantic Web from Scientific American a few years back, you can see that a lot of the benefit envisioned by proponents is in creating intelligent agents that work on users behalf to do things like resolve scheduling conflicts. In the meantime, as Semantic Web technology continues to slowly develop, one of its core functions, searching, has been solved for most uses by better and better "conventional" search technology. Conventional search technology focuses on trying to provide the user the answers he asks for without getting everybody in the world to agree in advance on what the relevant questions might be. It has proved successful beyond what one would have thought a system based on clever indexing rather than an intelligent, semantic understanding of the user's wants could be.
Now, I'm a tools oriented guy, so this is a biased view. I actually think Semantic Web technology is going to be highly useful, but as a way of designing distributed information systems, not as a way of building agents who will fulfill all our information needs because they are intelligent.
Clippy is representative of the agent philosophy. He watches what you do, and offers to take over as much of the task from you as he can. This highlights the central problem with the agent philosophy: we are so far from having technology that understands people that when it tries its just annoying. It's not that agents are useless. The web spidering robots that build search indices are, in a sense, highly specialized software agents, working on a much smaller and manageable problem.
Another solution to the same problem as Clippy is the "wizard". Now I'm not particularly fond of wizards from a design standpoint. For one thing, they are temptations t
Proverbially, the path to wide adoption starts with a killer app and proceeds through early adopters. However a killer app in this situation is a bit of a catch 22. The kind of massive games that take hundreds of man years of art work and coding take investment, and investment is attracted by installed base. I suppose we can use Linux as a counterexample to this idea, but I think Linux is a special case for several reasons. First the basic kernel was not a huge engineering task. Second, the stuff that went around it was already largely done. Third, Linux is a platform and there are a lot of companies interested in not being beholden to a single monopolist for their livelihood.
There are lots of games on Linux, and the best ones aren't very complex, they're just fun to play. And that's the catch 22. A simple game is readily cloned to Windows. Think about Tetris in its many manifestations. It's a fun game, but simple enough to be given as a student programming assignment. On the other hand, really complex games take investment for very little guarantee that you'll get a winner.
I think, however, there is a paradigm, which is the Wii. Wii Sports isn't a terribly complicated game; if it were a killer app then it could readily be cloned on other platforms. However, with Wii sports and the Wii, you had an affordably priced killer bundle.
So, what I'm thinking of is a netbook, with good battery life and fast boot time. The idea is that you'd be to take it out at more or less any time and within thirty seconds to a minute be playing a simple but addictive game. Where the article goes wrong is this: success won't come from exploiting the early adopters willingness to try something different, although that is part of the formula. Success will come from pricing the package affordably enough for an impulse purchase, without making any part of the system seem cheesy. The Wii is well and innovatively designed without necessarily being cutting edge technologically. Buyers get something new and well made at a pretty much no-brainer price for the amount of pleasure they anticipate getting from it.
We're pretty close, I think, to being able to put together that killer package. The EeePC is now sellign in its 512MB version for as little as $219. That's getting into handheld console territory. For a bit more than a hundred more, you can get a netbook with a GB of RAM and a 1024 x 600 display. This tells me the technology is there for the killer package, especially if the battery issues can be resolved. All that's needed is an app that is addictive, from which a $300 machine can get you your fix in under a minute.
I'm conflating things because that's what standards do.
Of course, the FCC could have mandated that CDMA phones take GSM SIM cards, and that would have improved the phone situation. However, that would not have improved the spectrum utilization situation. All CDMA might be better than all GSM, but all GSM is better than a mix of CDMA, GSM and iDEN... especially as carriers merge.
Well, IE is like US cell phone service. It's all about controlling the customer.
I recently bought a Windows smartphone (I have Windows CE apps I need to run). It's a pretty good phone (which is most important), and it wouldn't be a bad platform except that what the product wants to be is grossly distorted by the priorities of the carrier. It's locked down so you have to buy apps through the carrier (although I fixed this with some registry edits). In many other subtle ways, a product that could have been pretty good is undermined by the desire to funnel the user into the carrier's other products.
Things would have been better for the consumer if we'd adopted GSM at the outset like Europe and you could buy any phone and pop your SIM into it. Then the features of phones would be driven by making the best possible phone, not driving additional revenue to the carrier.
It seems to me IE is much the same. It doesn't implement standards very well, because that's bad for Microsoft. MS offers developers a carrot and stick: a nicely interlocked set of development tools that drive products into an MS only stack, and then the stick of incompatibility when you use non-MS software. It's predicated on promoting a world in which MS controls the software ecosystem.
The reason IE has been bad at security is that once MS cut off Netscape's air supply, making the best browser has not been the focus of the development efforts. It's been keeping an MS only product stack the path of least resistance.
that Jobs may be unique in that he has the skills to manage a major company, at the same time he really, really cares about the product. That's what comes across in videos; it's not that his keynotes have a great deal of razzmatazz, it's that they have conviction. That is the source of the famous reality distortion field. At the same time, he also brought classic management common sense to Apple, simplifying their product line to fit a well chosen market position, streamlining the manufacturing end of the business.
I really think this combination is rare. There are lots of entrepreneurs who start businesses, to whom management is something they have to do in order to create products. There are lots of high flying managers for whom, at the end of the day, a company is merely a machine for efficient profit generation. I think Carly Fiorina at HP was an example of the latter. It wasn't that her ideas were, in a generic sense, bad. It's that she didn't have a sense for what was right, and more importantly, unique at HP. People see her as the manager that destroyed HP; that's not quite right. She is the manager who turned HP from an unique institution into just another big company.
I suppose it may be that a more or less standard company is easier to run; you can get generic B school grads employing motherhood and apple pie practices and turn a normal profit, or with luck a tiny bit more. But while the process of converting an unique company into something easier to grasp, there is a spark of imagination and creativity that is lost.
Whatever Jobs faults may have been, you can't say he was an ineffective or inefficient manager, nor can you say he treated the products of the company as merely profit centers. Apple is a company with personality, with a sense of uniqueness and mission, things which business plans give lip service to but usually aren't reflected in reality.
Jobs is a manager for whom the details of a product matter. People snicker about the reality distortion field when the crowd goes wild when Jobs announces the iBook will have a handle, but I don't think they get it. Whether or not a handle is something a laptop ought to have, details matter. I wish other manufacturers had this attitude; they copy stylistic elements from Apple, but while the result may or may not look great, they still miss important details like managing the cord on the power brick, or the power connector itself.
Modern civilization is a network. It allows us to gain the benefits of economies of scale by having us specialize. These efficiencies makes modern civilization extremely robust with respect to small to medium sized disasters. Local famine is not even noticed by those portions of society which have the money to draw resources from far away.
On the other hand, a disruption large enough to damage our ability to communicate and transport might actually be worse for us than it would be for a more primitive civilization.
Think of people living, say, five thousand years ago. They may trade materials and items over surprisingly long distances, but they are basically self-sufficient. Life his hard, and a large world wide disaster would make that harder, but anybody living in a place where survival is possibly have a good shot. This disruption of trade has practically no effect.
How, think about the effect of the collapse of trade on your ability to survive. Can you build a shelter? Or even build a fire, once matches run out? Can you hunt, grow, or forage enough food to survive? (It's funny how so many people's first thoughts seem to run to guns. Of course guns are useful, but only over the short term.)
I'd posit that modern civilization is vastly more robust in the face of disruption... up to a point.
I have no patience with inflicting lawyerese on mass market consumers, but these are big boys playing in a big money game. They can afford to hire the best lawyers, especially when they're slinging this kind of money around.
A good lawyer doesn't stand in the way of a business deal, he just makes what you assume about the business relationship explicit. If Sony was surprised by what IBM did, they have nobody to blame but themselves.
Not everything has to be a conspiracy. Aircraft do crash.
True. And people do conspire, and some conspiracies entail assassination.
People misuse the term "conspiracy theory". A "conspiracy theory" isn't just any theory that entails a conspiracy. It's a theory that entails an impractical conspiracy, e.g., one that involves people cooperating who have good reason to distrust each other, or in which impractically large, or which involves people ignoring obvious opportunity costs.
M. de la Villehuchet invested a billion dollars in Mr. Madoff's fund... but not of his own money. It is most likely the M. de la Villehuchet killed himself because of shame. However, his position with respect to Mr. Madoff's fund was similar to that of Mr. Madoff himself -- as long as the fund was making money, he was doing well. When it stopped making money, most of the losses wouldn't have been his. So, it is not at all illogical for him to have been a conspirator.
What is lacking is any specific evidence. If I were investigating, I'd certainly look for evidence. That doesn't mean the evidence exists, only that it might exist. That's the other feature of true conspiracy theories: the confusion of consistency with evidence.
With respect to Mr. Connell, it is most likely that this is just another aviation accident. There are many simpler means of getting rid of people, ones that don't involve teams of trained investigators going over the death site. The simplest of course is just to disappear somebody. Of course, that pretty much tips your hand. A staged suicide, or a fall down a flight of stairs would be simpler. That's yet another aspect of the conspiracy theory: it posits people doing things in complicated ways when simpler, more reliable ones are readily available.
That said, if I were investigating the accident, I'd certainly look for foul play. It's unlikely, but clever people do sometimes do things in a way so clever its stupid.
I'm not a conspiracy theorist. The simplest theory that fits the facts in hand is the most likely. However, it is important to collect more than the facts in hand, because people do conspire to do bad things and do cover them up. It is on that general principle, rather than the specific circumstances, that the possibility of conspiracy has to be entertained.
Well, speaking as a liberal, mere efficiency is not the only measure of a government program. While efficiency is good it's not the only good; given two social programs, a more efficient one is not necessarily better if it doesn't accomplish as much.
Here we have a case in point. These companies might not be much, or any more financially efficient; given the nature of the Shuttle's design and program history, it should be possible for NASA itself to do much, much more financially efficient launches. So why pay private industry almost as much?
Because, presumably, it is nationally important to have a private space launch industry capable of generating its own designs. It amounts to a kind of investment. There are other ways of doing this of course, such as actual financial underwriting. But it seems to me that paying somewhat high prices is the fast track to creating an independent space indusatry. How high? Well, high enough that you get a choice of vendors, but not higher.
Getting free of government control is important, specifically because government is not so concerned with efficiency. Creating completely government controlled markets, as we have in military support services, results in the worst of both possible worlds. The vendors don't care if the services make sense, and the government buyers don't care if the services are financially efficient.
Government should be concerned with things that need to be done, but which are not efficient in and excludable, short term sense. The scope of those activities should be as small as possible consistent with getting the job done. Access to space is something that is commercially valuable; it would be better to let private industry provide it. However that was not, until now, feasible. It is not quite feasible now either. The transition to a more efficient public/private system is not going to be the cheapest way to do the task at hand.
Bell Labs was an arm of a government granted monopoly that essentially taxed its users. You couldn't get phone service except through Bell at the price Bell charged. That price was regulated, and the incentive for a monopoly utility under that regime is to increase costs as far as humanly possible, because they were granted profit as a margin above its costs. Thus we have them doing justifiable but... inefficient things like basic research.
After the monopoly was broken up, telephone calls became very, very cheap. But... no more Bell Labs. Not like it used to be. In the free market, as part of the slow motion financial wreck that is Lucent, Bell Labs is a shadow of its former self. Just this year, Alcatel-Lucent announced it is pulling entirely out of basic research to focus on more product oriented research. This means that weaned of it quasi-public status, the labs will no longer produce fundamental advances in fields like solid state physics.
By the way it's a gross exaggeration to say that Bell's scientific work was "all coming from non-government dollars." Bell received huge amounts of government grant money. Much of its pioneering work in computing was funded by the US DoD.
You're thinking like a programmer, not a business.
Porting costs money for something the majority of your users don't care about and which the minority affected can at this point do nothing. When the market share that competitive products on the Mac amounts to a more money than it costs to do something, they'll do that thing, which will be the cheapest thing they can do to address the problem. Which won't be a complete rewrite.
That kind of thing only happens when people who care about the product itself are in charge. It happens in open source. And when it does, it can be frustrating in its own ways. I remember waiting for years for Geotools 2 to be ready, as the developers completely threw out Geotools 1 and redid it the "right way". And the results were great, except that in the meantime I had to use commercial software in my projects because Geotools 1 wasn't enough and Geotools 2 wasn't ready.
Thats the kind of thing a programmer can live with but not a business, which can't let competitors get a toehold.
It's really a kind of brain-dead marketing attitude, as in "there's no such thing as bad publicity". Why does Microsoft go through the trouble of renaming and moving the same old control panels every major release? It's to let you know you got the upgrade you paid for. HP likes to pop up windows to remind you that you have a relationship with them.
Open source is full of sloppy user interface engineering too, but for some reason focus stealing isn't part of the culture. Maybe it's because the software tends to be designed by people who use it.
People as clueless as Mr. Malone are entitled to their opinion, but should not necessarily be entitled to having that opinion published in a national newspaper. Of course that would disqualify the entire WSJ editorial page.
2008 was indeed a disastrous year for IPOs. Here are the figures for the last several years:
Now note: there were 33x as many IPOs in 2007 than 2008. This means that we can't say this was because of SarbOx because we had SarbOx in 2007. It is possible that adjusting to SarbOx was the problem in 2003, the year SarbOx went into effect, but SarbOx can't explain the change from 2008. Still, the writer might not be completely clueless. He knows enough to cherry pick years that were before SarbOx went into effect and which had higher numbers of IPOs than in 2008: 1999 (269), 1996 (272) and 1986 (365). However, it would appear that the years 2004 through 2006 were fairly normal for IPOs, with 2007 being an unusually good year.
So with respect to 2008, I'd venture, without doing any kind of extensive research into this, that something else might happened in the capital markets in 2008. The editors of the WSJ might want to look into it.
It appears to me that you are using "circumstantial evidence" almost as a synonym for "weak evidence". That is not necessarily the case.
Circumstantial evidence is evaluated in light of other assertions, and can be quite convincing with respect to specific assertions. For example, if the defendant asserts he could not have stolen the car because he'd been out of the country during the time the car was stolen, the forensic evidence of the mosquito, along with expert testimony from a mosquito biologist about how long female mosquitoes retain their blood meals, might conclusively discredit that claim.
Well, in poor countries they keep things running longer, so there aren't a huge supply.
One way of thinking about this might be that there are different financial scales of purchasing in rich countries and poor countries. This leads to different qualitative phenomena, e.g., the attitude towards labor and the prevalence of things like personal servants.
In a rich country, a proper neonatal incubator probably costs a considerable amount of money, but not so much that a hospital with a maternity ward would hesitate to buy enough of them to handle the maximum likely demand in their neonatal ward.
In a poor country, a proper neonatal incubator might be more like getting a CAT scan machine -- every hospital probably could use one, but not every hospital can afford one. However, although a used car (or pile of parts) is a considerable expense, it is one that is affordable on their scale of finances. The labor to transform the car into an incubator is negligible.
All countries have rich people. In fact all countries have something of a middle class. So all countries are going to have cars and a considerable infrastructure to supply those cars with parts. So it's quite practical to look at ways transform cars into other things. We did it in this country when cars were new and expensive relative to the median wage: people tranformed model T's into all kinds of machines.
Well, this for once is an occasion for the old saw about "absence of evidence".
Of course personality is not mere repetition, it is a pattern of characteristic responses to specific kinds of situations. As such an animal doesn't even need self-consciousness to have a personality. Nor need it be very intelligent.
Self-consciousness and high intelligence add a considerable wrinkle to personality: part of the "situation" an animal responds to is a a complex internal state that the animal is aware of. Which reminds me of a woman I once worked with. Some days she'd be very personable; occasionally she'd even surprise you by baking you cookies. Other days she'd chew you out if you walked too close to her desk. If she was always one way or the other, you could deal with it, but the thing was, you'd never know whether today was a Good Janet day or an Evil Janet day until you'd had your first interaction with her.
Oddly enough, I don't find the prospect of space tourism.. inspirational.
I'm happy for Scaled, and I admire their use of engineering to bring the cost of manned suborbital down, but I can't say the idea of people going into space so they can gawk and brag to their friends is all that appealing. I'm fine with it, but I'm not going to put them in the same ranks of explorers as Alan Shepard.
Well, while it is true that evil ought to be called out as such, reticence is a wise default policy. When you are angry enough to throw things at people is not the time when your judgement is the most trustworthy. Furthermore, being angry at somebody is like any other habit: the more you practice, the easier and more natural it becomes, and the less you can trust your objectivity.
I don't think this is a simple issue. It may well be the case that evil would never be named if people did sometimes say or do unwise things under the influence of rage. But most things done under the influence of rage aren't good, or rational. And a person feeling rage can't tell the difference.
Here's something to consider. A few years ago a social psychology experiment was reported in Science News, in which a subject was asked to attribute personality traits to a a researcher, after hearing that researcher describe the personality traits of another person. The subjects tended to attribute the traits of the person described to the person doing the describing. This result makes sense in a kind of "bird of a feather" sense. Oh, such and so company is totally incompetent and unprofessional. Then what were you doing working for them?. Those who throw shit tend to get dirty.
The best strategy in most cases is that if you must damn a former employer, to damn them with faint praise. "Well, they didn't rush out a product to meet a deadline." "So the product was good?" "Well, it was better than it would have been if they shipped it on time." "So it was a bad?" "Well, such and such features was good... was a good idea." "So, was the product good or bad?" "Well, they did sell quite a few; I know some customers had overall positive impressions of the product. It certainly could have been worse." "But it could have been better?" "That goes without saying. If they had it to to do over again, I think they would have done some things differently."
This kind of thing sends a stronger message than obvious contempt, one that is less likely to stick to you.
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Depends on your working set, doesn't it? Most of the stuff I do during the day is not very processor intensive. Browsing, except on youtube, is not very demanding. If I buy a sufficiently fast multi-core processor, I don't worry about overhead. Where I'm worried about overhead, I run that app on the real iron.
However, I just bought a 64 bit laptop with 2.53 Mhz Duo processor and 4GB of RAM. There isn't much that can't run fine in a virtual machine. Virtualization also allows me to run 32 bit only software on the machine while having the benefits of 64 bit where I need it (largely in massive file compressions).
In any case, I realize the limits to the scalability of this scheme, which is entirely the point of my post ... a modern, low footprint operating system makes it more practical.
In any case, chroot while useful is not a security panacea. Processes with root permissions can get out of jail -- always have been. So if you're running software which needs to execute as root at some point (which you might not always have a choice about) you are vulnerable.
I've used chroot, but it is not really an iron clad security solution. For example, if the root is compromised, then the chroot environment is as well. Another example is your idea that (a) the chroot environment is lighteight because it does not duplicate libraries yet (b) the environments are isolated from each other. You can have one or the other.
In any case, chrooting doesn't get you the fast system restore benefits of virtualization. I can keep my personal browsing vm on a keychain, and if it's undermined I just go to a backup and add the security patches. I can back up my work to an external drive as a system, and be up and running instantly after my laptop is destroyed.
Really "lightweight" is in the mind of the beholder. Unless you are doing something really disk intensive, it's better to spend disk space than time.
You are missing the point. The point is to have different self-contained virtual machines which are secure from each other, and are packaged in such a way I could drag one onto a thumb drive and use it on a completely different machine without installing anything other than the virtual machine software.
For example, my personal browsing doesn't really need to be tightly coupled with my development work, so they can go on different machines. When a security hole undermines the browser, it doesn't effect my development work. Or my laptop gets dropped, so pop an external drive with a backup of my work environment onto my desktop and checkout the latest source code without having to install and configure everything. Or I am looking at migrating work between different platform versions, so I make a copy of the virtual machine and upgrade the copy to see what would happen, without touching my production machine.
You could use X windows to make using the machines seamless if you like.
think about the edge of the box. That is where progress happens. An athlete or scholar does not increase the range of his abilities by doing what is easy for him, nor what is impossible. It is the edge of impossibility where we become our best.
With respect to other ays of thinking, you are entirely on target. You can't wish for everyone to think as you do, without making the way you think ... conventional. This is really the box-edge theory applied to human relations. There is no stretch in working exclusively with people like you. There is no point in trying to find validity in the perspectives of fascism or racism. But where you can manage to accommodate a different viewpoint, you've stretched your mind that much more.
I run linux distros frequently on virtual machines because I can configure an efficient, low footprint purpose specific "appliance". It seems to me that a modern system specifically designed to run on actual appliances would be even better.
As a developer I use virtual machines for testing (of course) but also to package up certain software services like databases or application servers that I don't need all the time. Rather than install them on a real machine, I make a copy of a generic virtual appliance and install to that.
One thing that I've always thought that would make sense is to confine all one's risky operations, such as web browsing, to a virtual machine. But on most host machines the overhead of an entire virtual machine, both in memory and startup time, make it not quite convenient to do so. A much smaller, but still up to date machine might change this. Android requires as a minimum 32MB of RAM and 32MB of flash. This is small enough overhead to justify a virtual machine for a single process.
Actually, I'd like to use a really minimal operating system as the virtual machine host as well. I'd like to be able organize my entire "workspace" in to severable, portable pieces joined by a virtual network. If I'm ever forced to deal with an issue like incompatible versions of glibc in the future, I could contain that; or if I want to try upgrading a piece of software, I can roll back to a snapshot or keep multiple copies of the virtual appliance around. In that case, I'd like to have the host operating system be as minimal as possible.
If you've been in this business as long as I have, you'll realize that Microsoft's "weird fascination" is not an isolated phenomenon. It's part of a long simmering philosophical division over the design of software that goes back at least to the 1980s and the advent of commercially viable personal computing.
The crux of this debate is this question: exactly how intelligent should software attempt to be on a users behalf? On one end of the spectrum, you have the vision of highly intelligent agents which monitor the world and the user and do things on the user's behalf that the user would do for himself if he would deign to use his valuable attention. The other end of the spectrum isn't quite as easy to characterize, but I'd say it sees the goal of software design as making tools that do exactly what a user asks them to, neither more nor less. We might consider this spectrum as running from proactive or autonomous software on one end to responsive software on the other.
In a nutshell, it's the question of whether we want software agents or software tools that divides designers.
The software agent end of things has always had a kind of futuristic allure, and attracts investment and attention and drives innovation. However, I (being a tools-person) think that making the software do what the user tells it to is a surer path to success. Apple, which I see as mainly a tools oriented design company, coined the term Personal Digital Assistant with the idea that small mobile computers would be agents, but Palm was the company that scored the first success in the PDA market by making a handy device.
Microsoft has always been an agent oriented company. The "Where do you want to go?" slogan has an unexpected facet in that it subtly bodies the software agent philosophy: you specify where you want to be and the agent will take care of the details. Microsoft's design not only hides the details, but often makes the details inaccessible, which means that getting MS software to do what you want often amounts to twiddling poorly or undocumented registry entries.
This isn't about making software intelligent or not, it's about how much initiative you take out of the users' hands.
If you read Tim Berners-Lee's article on the Semantic Web from Scientific American a few years back, you can see that a lot of the benefit envisioned by proponents is in creating intelligent agents that work on users behalf to do things like resolve scheduling conflicts. In the meantime, as Semantic Web technology continues to slowly develop, one of its core functions, searching, has been solved for most uses by better and better "conventional" search technology. Conventional search technology focuses on trying to provide the user the answers he asks for without getting everybody in the world to agree in advance on what the relevant questions might be. It has proved successful beyond what one would have thought a system based on clever indexing rather than an intelligent, semantic understanding of the user's wants could be.
Now, I'm a tools oriented guy, so this is a biased view. I actually think Semantic Web technology is going to be highly useful, but as a way of designing distributed information systems, not as a way of building agents who will fulfill all our information needs because they are intelligent.
Clippy is representative of the agent philosophy. He watches what you do, and offers to take over as much of the task from you as he can. This highlights the central problem with the agent philosophy: we are so far from having technology that understands people that when it tries its just annoying. It's not that agents are useless. The web spidering robots that build search indices are, in a sense, highly specialized software agents, working on a much smaller and manageable problem.
Another solution to the same problem as Clippy is the "wizard". Now I'm not particularly fond of wizards from a design standpoint. For one thing, they are temptations t
I don't think it's quite got it, though.
Proverbially, the path to wide adoption starts with a killer app and proceeds through early adopters. However a killer app in this situation is a bit of a catch 22. The kind of massive games that take hundreds of man years of art work and coding take investment, and investment is attracted by installed base. I suppose we can use Linux as a counterexample to this idea, but I think Linux is a special case for several reasons. First the basic kernel was not a huge engineering task. Second, the stuff that went around it was already largely done. Third, Linux is a platform and there are a lot of companies interested in not being beholden to a single monopolist for their livelihood.
There are lots of games on Linux, and the best ones aren't very complex, they're just fun to play. And that's the catch 22. A simple game is readily cloned to Windows. Think about Tetris in its many manifestations. It's a fun game, but simple enough to be given as a student programming assignment. On the other hand, really complex games take investment for very little guarantee that you'll get a winner.
I think, however, there is a paradigm, which is the Wii. Wii Sports isn't a terribly complicated game; if it were a killer app then it could readily be cloned on other platforms. However, with Wii sports and the Wii, you had an affordably priced killer bundle.
So, what I'm thinking of is a netbook, with good battery life and fast boot time. The idea is that you'd be to take it out at more or less any time and within thirty seconds to a minute be playing a simple but addictive game. Where the article goes wrong is this: success won't come from exploiting the early adopters willingness to try something different, although that is part of the formula. Success will come from pricing the package affordably enough for an impulse purchase, without making any part of the system seem cheesy. The Wii is well and innovatively designed without necessarily being cutting edge technologically. Buyers get something new and well made at a pretty much no-brainer price for the amount of pleasure they anticipate getting from it.
We're pretty close, I think, to being able to put together that killer package. The EeePC is now sellign in its 512MB version for as little as $219. That's getting into handheld console territory. For a bit more than a hundred more, you can get a netbook with a GB of RAM and a 1024 x 600 display. This tells me the technology is there for the killer package, especially if the battery issues can be resolved. All that's needed is an app that is addictive, from which a $300 machine can get you your fix in under a minute.
I'm conflating things because that's what standards do.
Of course, the FCC could have mandated that CDMA phones take GSM SIM cards, and that would have improved the phone situation. However, that would not have improved the spectrum utilization situation. All CDMA might be better than all GSM, but all GSM is better than a mix of CDMA, GSM and iDEN ... especially as carriers merge.
The carriers don't subsidize anything. What they do is give you invisible credit, which you pay back with interest.
Well, IE is like US cell phone service. It's all about controlling the customer.
I recently bought a Windows smartphone (I have Windows CE apps I need to run). It's a pretty good phone (which is most important), and it wouldn't be a bad platform except that what the product wants to be is grossly distorted by the priorities of the carrier. It's locked down so you have to buy apps through the carrier (although I fixed this with some registry edits). In many other subtle ways, a product that could have been pretty good is undermined by the desire to funnel the user into the carrier's other products.
Things would have been better for the consumer if we'd adopted GSM at the outset like Europe and you could buy any phone and pop your SIM into it. Then the features of phones would be driven by making the best possible phone, not driving additional revenue to the carrier.
It seems to me IE is much the same. It doesn't implement standards very well, because that's bad for Microsoft. MS offers developers a carrot and stick: a nicely interlocked set of development tools that drive products into an MS only stack, and then the stick of incompatibility when you use non-MS software. It's predicated on promoting a world in which MS controls the software ecosystem.
The reason IE has been bad at security is that once MS cut off Netscape's air supply, making the best browser has not been the focus of the development efforts. It's been keeping an MS only product stack the path of least resistance.
that Jobs may be unique in that he has the skills to manage a major company, at the same time he really, really cares about the product. That's what comes across in videos; it's not that his keynotes have a great deal of razzmatazz, it's that they have conviction. That is the source of the famous reality distortion field. At the same time, he also brought classic management common sense to Apple, simplifying their product line to fit a well chosen market position, streamlining the manufacturing end of the business.
I really think this combination is rare. There are lots of entrepreneurs who start businesses, to whom management is something they have to do in order to create products. There are lots of high flying managers for whom, at the end of the day, a company is merely a machine for efficient profit generation. I think Carly Fiorina at HP was an example of the latter. It wasn't that her ideas were, in a generic sense, bad. It's that she didn't have a sense for what was right, and more importantly, unique at HP. People see her as the manager that destroyed HP; that's not quite right. She is the manager who turned HP from an unique institution into just another big company.
I suppose it may be that a more or less standard company is easier to run; you can get generic B school grads employing motherhood and apple pie practices and turn a normal profit, or with luck a tiny bit more. But while the process of converting an unique company into something easier to grasp, there is a spark of imagination and creativity that is lost.
Whatever Jobs faults may have been, you can't say he was an ineffective or inefficient manager, nor can you say he treated the products of the company as merely profit centers. Apple is a company with personality, with a sense of uniqueness and mission, things which business plans give lip service to but usually aren't reflected in reality.
Jobs is a manager for whom the details of a product matter. People snicker about the reality distortion field when the crowd goes wild when Jobs announces the iBook will have a handle, but I don't think they get it. Whether or not a handle is something a laptop ought to have, details matter. I wish other manufacturers had this attitude; they copy stylistic elements from Apple, but while the result may or may not look great, they still miss important details like managing the cord on the power brick, or the power connector itself.
Umm... you do realize that it's not compulsory to listen to people whose views irritate you?
Modern civilization is a network. It allows us to gain the benefits of economies of scale by having us specialize. These efficiencies makes modern civilization extremely robust with respect to small to medium sized disasters. Local famine is not even noticed by those portions of society which have the money to draw resources from far away.
On the other hand, a disruption large enough to damage our ability to communicate and transport might actually be worse for us than it would be for a more primitive civilization.
Think of people living, say, five thousand years ago. They may trade materials and items over surprisingly long distances, but they are basically self-sufficient. Life his hard, and a large world wide disaster would make that harder, but anybody living in a place where survival is possibly have a good shot. This disruption of trade has practically no effect.
How, think about the effect of the collapse of trade on your ability to survive. Can you build a shelter? Or even build a fire, once matches run out? Can you hunt, grow, or forage enough food to survive? (It's funny how so many people's first thoughts seem to run to guns. Of course guns are useful, but only over the short term.)
I'd posit that modern civilization is vastly more robust in the face of disruption ... up to a point.
I have no patience with inflicting lawyerese on mass market consumers, but these are big boys playing in a big money game. They can afford to hire the best lawyers, especially when they're slinging this kind of money around.
A good lawyer doesn't stand in the way of a business deal, he just makes what you assume about the business relationship explicit. If Sony was surprised by what IBM did, they have nobody to blame but themselves.
Not everything has to be a conspiracy. Aircraft do crash.
True. And people do conspire, and some conspiracies entail assassination.
People misuse the term "conspiracy theory". A "conspiracy theory" isn't just any theory that entails a conspiracy. It's a theory that entails an impractical conspiracy, e.g., one that involves people cooperating who have good reason to distrust each other, or in which impractically large, or which involves people ignoring obvious opportunity costs.
M. de la Villehuchet invested a billion dollars in Mr. Madoff's fund ... but not of his own money. It is most likely the M. de la Villehuchet killed himself because of shame. However, his position with respect to Mr. Madoff's fund was similar to that of Mr. Madoff himself -- as long as the fund was making money, he was doing well. When it stopped making money, most of the losses wouldn't have been his. So, it is not at all illogical for him to have been a conspirator.
What is lacking is any specific evidence. If I were investigating, I'd certainly look for evidence. That doesn't mean the evidence exists, only that it might exist. That's the other feature of true conspiracy theories: the confusion of consistency with evidence.
With respect to Mr. Connell, it is most likely that this is just another aviation accident. There are many simpler means of getting rid of people, ones that don't involve teams of trained investigators going over the death site. The simplest of course is just to disappear somebody. Of course, that pretty much tips your hand. A staged suicide, or a fall down a flight of stairs would be simpler. That's yet another aspect of the conspiracy theory: it posits people doing things in complicated ways when simpler, more reliable ones are readily available.
That said, if I were investigating the accident, I'd certainly look for foul play. It's unlikely, but clever people do sometimes do things in a way so clever its stupid.
I'm not a conspiracy theorist. The simplest theory that fits the facts in hand is the most likely. However, it is important to collect more than the facts in hand, because people do conspire to do bad things and do cover them up. It is on that general principle, rather than the specific circumstances, that the possibility of conspiracy has to be entertained.
Well, speaking as a liberal, mere efficiency is not the only measure of a government program. While efficiency is good it's not the only good; given two social programs, a more efficient one is not necessarily better if it doesn't accomplish as much.
Here we have a case in point. These companies might not be much, or any more financially efficient; given the nature of the Shuttle's design and program history, it should be possible for NASA itself to do much, much more financially efficient launches. So why pay private industry almost as much?
Because, presumably, it is nationally important to have a private space launch industry capable of generating its own designs. It amounts to a kind of investment. There are other ways of doing this of course, such as actual financial underwriting. But it seems to me that paying somewhat high prices is the fast track to creating an independent space indusatry. How high? Well, high enough that you get a choice of vendors, but not higher.
Getting free of government control is important, specifically because government is not so concerned with efficiency. Creating completely government controlled markets, as we have in military support services, results in the worst of both possible worlds. The vendors don't care if the services make sense, and the government buyers don't care if the services are financially efficient.
Government should be concerned with things that need to be done, but which are not efficient in and excludable, short term sense. The scope of those activities should be as small as possible consistent with getting the job done. Access to space is something that is commercially valuable; it would be better to let private industry provide it. However that was not, until now, feasible. It is not quite feasible now either. The transition to a more efficient public/private system is not going to be the cheapest way to do the task at hand.
Bell Labs was an arm of a government granted monopoly that essentially taxed its users. You couldn't get phone service except through Bell at the price Bell charged. That price was regulated, and the incentive for a monopoly utility under that regime is to increase costs as far as humanly possible, because they were granted profit as a margin above its costs. Thus we have them doing justifiable but ... inefficient things like basic research.
After the monopoly was broken up, telephone calls became very, very cheap. But ... no more Bell Labs. Not like it used to be. In the free market, as part of the slow motion financial wreck that is Lucent, Bell Labs is a shadow of its former self. Just this year, Alcatel-Lucent announced it is pulling entirely out of basic research to focus on more product oriented research. This means that weaned of it quasi-public status, the labs will no longer produce fundamental advances in fields like solid state physics.
By the way it's a gross exaggeration to say that Bell's scientific work was "all coming from non-government dollars." Bell received huge amounts of government grant money. Much of its pioneering work in computing was funded by the US DoD.
You're thinking like a programmer, not a business.
Porting costs money for something the majority of your users don't care about and which the minority affected can at this point do nothing. When the market share that competitive products on the Mac amounts to a more money than it costs to do something, they'll do that thing, which will be the cheapest thing they can do to address the problem. Which won't be a complete rewrite.
That kind of thing only happens when people who care about the product itself are in charge. It happens in open source. And when it does, it can be frustrating in its own ways. I remember waiting for years for Geotools 2 to be ready, as the developers completely threw out Geotools 1 and redid it the "right way". And the results were great, except that in the meantime I had to use commercial software in my projects because Geotools 1 wasn't enough and Geotools 2 wasn't ready.
Thats the kind of thing a programmer can live with but not a business, which can't let competitors get a toehold.
It's really a kind of brain-dead marketing attitude, as in "there's no such thing as bad publicity". Why does Microsoft go through the trouble of renaming and moving the same old control panels every major release? It's to let you know you got the upgrade you paid for. HP likes to pop up windows to remind you that you have a relationship with them.
Open source is full of sloppy user interface engineering too, but for some reason focus stealing isn't part of the culture. Maybe it's because the software tends to be designed by people who use it.
People as clueless as Mr. Malone are entitled to their opinion, but should not necessarily be entitled to having that opinion published in a national newspaper. Of course that would disqualify the entire WSJ editorial page.
2008 was indeed a disastrous year for IPOs. Here are the figures for the last several years:
2008: 43 IPOs (not 8)
2007: 272
2006: 221
2005: 214
2004: 217
2003: 70
(source: http://www.ipohome.com/ipohome/Review/2008main.aspx and several other places)
Now note: there were 33x as many IPOs in 2007 than 2008. This means that we can't say this was because of SarbOx because we had SarbOx in 2007. It is possible that adjusting to SarbOx was the problem in 2003, the year SarbOx went into effect, but SarbOx can't explain the change from 2008. Still, the writer might not be completely clueless. He knows enough to cherry pick years that were before SarbOx went into effect and which had higher numbers of IPOs than in 2008: 1999 (269), 1996 (272) and 1986 (365). However, it would appear that the years 2004 through 2006 were fairly normal for IPOs, with 2007 being an unusually good year.
So with respect to 2008, I'd venture, without doing any kind of extensive research into this, that something else might happened in the capital markets in 2008. The editors of the WSJ might want to look into it.
It appears to me that you are using "circumstantial evidence" almost as a synonym for "weak evidence". That is not necessarily the case.
Circumstantial evidence is evaluated in light of other assertions, and can be quite convincing with respect to specific assertions. For example, if the defendant asserts he could not have stolen the car because he'd been out of the country during the time the car was stolen, the forensic evidence of the mosquito, along with expert testimony from a mosquito biologist about how long female mosquitoes retain their blood meals, might conclusively discredit that claim.
Well, in poor countries they keep things running longer, so there aren't a huge supply.
One way of thinking about this might be that there are different financial scales of purchasing in rich countries and poor countries. This leads to different qualitative phenomena, e.g., the attitude towards labor and the prevalence of things like personal servants.
In a rich country, a proper neonatal incubator probably costs a considerable amount of money, but not so much that a hospital with a maternity ward would hesitate to buy enough of them to handle the maximum likely demand in their neonatal ward.
In a poor country, a proper neonatal incubator might be more like getting a CAT scan machine -- every hospital probably could use one, but not every hospital can afford one. However, although a used car (or pile of parts) is a considerable expense, it is one that is affordable on their scale of finances. The labor to transform the car into an incubator is negligible.
All countries have rich people. In fact all countries have something of a middle class. So all countries are going to have cars and a considerable infrastructure to supply those cars with parts. So it's quite practical to look at ways transform cars into other things. We did it in this country when cars were new and expensive relative to the median wage: people tranformed model T's into all kinds of machines.
Well, this for once is an occasion for the old saw about "absence of evidence".
Of course personality is not mere repetition, it is a pattern of characteristic responses to specific kinds of situations. As such an animal doesn't even need self-consciousness to have a personality. Nor need it be very intelligent.
Self-consciousness and high intelligence add a considerable wrinkle to personality: part of the "situation" an animal responds to is a a complex internal state that the animal is aware of. Which reminds me of a woman I once worked with. Some days she'd be very personable; occasionally she'd even surprise you by baking you cookies. Other days she'd chew you out if you walked too close to her desk. If she was always one way or the other, you could deal with it, but the thing was, you'd never know whether today was a Good Janet day or an Evil Janet day until you'd had your first interaction with her.
Oddly enough, I don't find the prospect of space tourism .. inspirational.
I'm happy for Scaled, and I admire their use of engineering to bring the cost of manned suborbital down, but I can't say the idea of people going into space so they can gawk and brag to their friends is all that appealing. I'm fine with it, but I'm not going to put them in the same ranks of explorers as Alan Shepard.
Well, while it is true that evil ought to be called out as such, reticence is a wise default policy. When you are angry enough to throw things at people is not the time when your judgement is the most trustworthy. Furthermore, being angry at somebody is like any other habit: the more you practice, the easier and more natural it becomes, and the less you can trust your objectivity.
I don't think this is a simple issue. It may well be the case that evil would never be named if people did sometimes say or do unwise things under the influence of rage. But most things done under the influence of rage aren't good, or rational. And a person feeling rage can't tell the difference.
Here's something to consider. A few years ago a social psychology experiment was reported in Science News, in which a subject was asked to attribute personality traits to a a researcher, after hearing that researcher describe the personality traits of another person. The subjects tended to attribute the traits of the person described to the person doing the describing. This result makes sense in a kind of "bird of a feather" sense. Oh, such and so company is totally incompetent and unprofessional. Then what were you doing working for them?. Those who throw shit tend to get dirty.
The best strategy in most cases is that if you must damn a former employer, to damn them with faint praise. "Well, they didn't rush out a product to meet a deadline." "So the product was good?" "Well, it was better than it would have been if they shipped it on time." "So it was a bad?" "Well, such and such features was good... was a good idea." "So, was the product good or bad?" "Well, they did sell quite a few; I know some customers had overall positive impressions of the product. It certainly could have been worse." "But it could have been better?" "That goes without saying. If they had it to to do over again, I think they would have done some things differently."
This kind of thing sends a stronger message than obvious contempt, one that is less likely to stick to you.