How about Congressional term limits? Let them serve, say, only two terms.
What would be nice, too, is if they were required after their two terms to spend at least four years in their home state. You know, get them and their family out of DC. Too much nepotism and cronyism in that city.
Bah, and I bet these same 'experts' say that the toilet is best used for going to the bathroom and nothing else. If it weren't for the bed and toilet, I'd get no 'dead tree' reading done!
Surely the sane way to do things is to have a standard Windows interface for 'please make a menu bar', and then when an innovation like draggable menus or hiding unused menu items comes up, it can apply to all applications consistently. Unfortunately I fear that the Win32 API is too low-level for something like that to work.
I agree that Microsoft's apps should be able to conform to some standard, but it's silly to ask third-party vendors to adhere to this. They want a competitive advantage by having a wing-ding slick, fly out, icon-ladden menu widget thingie, or whatever.
And even in Microsoft, I bet it would be next to impossible to have every group use a standard menu interface. The Office guys say, "Hey, we want feature X." They developers working on Explorer say, "That's to whiz bangy, we've not had that feature ever and we don't want it to be there now." So what can the Office guy do? Either leave the rudimentary menu from Explorer or create their own whiz bangy version. Clearly they've opted for the latter approach!
If I'm not mistaken, the vast, vast majority of Google's revenue comes from advertising (like 95+%, IIRC). Google's main assets are its online "Google OS" through which you use its services, and it's targetting advertising capabilities. Given that, I'd wager Google's main motivation is to capitalize on those markets, rather than switching focus to selling shrink-wrap software.
As a business, why would I use an office suite that requires me to (in effect) give a copy of all of my documents to another corporation, when I have a perfectly good alternative that only costs a few hundred bucks per seat?
You wouldn't. Good things that Fortune 500 companies are not the market audience for Writely. Google, IMO, is trying to market to a very large consumer segment that the other entrenched players aren't interested in (i.e., Microsoft, Apple) - the novice computer user who's computer use does not justify spending the money on an Office suite (or, heck, even a computer). Will Google be able to bring in enough advertising revenue? That remains to seen.
Amazon is whole nother creature. I have not stayed up on them and I have no friends working there, so I really can not comment on them. But from where I sit, they seem to be doing ok. Of course, they probably should do some updating on their website and consider taking on e-bay.
They've tried to take on eBay in the past - remember Amazon auctions? From Greg Linden, a former Amazon employee from the "early days":
In March of 1999, Amazon.com launched an auction site to compete with eBay.... When the site launched, it was technically superior to eBay's, faster, better search, and several new useful features. The inventory was reasonable, but not large.
Over the following months, the site did not grow as rapidly as some at Amazon optimistically projected. Amazon customers turned out to be quite timid about exploring the auction site, fearful of the lack of guarantees and customer service, unattracted to the idea of bidding.
Amazon Auctions stalled. Sellers moved away. Eventually, Amazon just gave up on it. While Amazon Auctions occasionally twitches in its sad resting spot on the current Amazon site, it is all but dead now.
http://glinden.blogspot.com/2006/04/early-amazon-a uctions.html
Sometimes the audience's reaction or singing along improves the song or contributes a certain aire that would be lost on a recording. Perhaps the canonical example is Arlo Guthrie's, "Alice's Restaurant." Can you imagine... I mean, can you imagine what it would sound like if it were recorded in a studio?
How does it work with MTV (or should I say, "How did it work, back when they played music videos")? My assumption was always that MTV got the music video rights for a few pennies per song, like radio stations, clubs, etc. pay. Is this an invalid assumption? Does/did MTV pay big bucks for the right to play those videos?
I was a CS grad student at UCSD from 2001-2003. What they had when I was there was something called CafeBob or something like that. It had the barcode scanner. You'd enter your name, scan the item, and it would "deduct" the cost from your account. You could "credit" your account by putting money in a box and then, from the computer, keying in that you deposited X dollars. Very trusting. It was a "co-op" vending machine/system - students would take money from the box to go buy the sodas, snacks, and so on (IIRC).
I guess now they're taking out the part where you entered your ID and password, and replacing it with a biometric scanner. But, if this is in the same CS grad student lounge, the barcode scanner and basic inventory software has been in place for some time now.
I certainly know that games can frighten. Playing Metroid on my NES in a dark room at midnight finally getting to the Mother Brain freaked me out. 'Course I was ten, but still, that was scary
I've never experienced a game where I ever felt sorrow or loss or sadness, but I have definitely felt afraid. HalfLife 1, alone, lights out, on a stormy night...
Although I think the greatest emotion I've ever felt is in sports games when playing against others. Nothing quite as exciting as having a well-fought game come down to a last second play, especially if there's a roomfull of others watching and cheering along...
I remember the original Leisure Suit Larry game had a unique age verification system. Before it would let you play, it would ask you three multiple choice questions that had to do with pop culture, politics, and whatnot from the 70s, something a ten year old in the late 80s would likely know nothing about.:-)
Unrelatedly, I heard a random statistic that said that some asinine percentage of the net's streaming video traffic was due to Myspace. I brushed it off, as, well, that's a sortof silly thing to take to heart, but I wonder if there's any truth to it.
Serve 1.5 billion page views per day with craptacular homepages rife with videos and you're very likely to have a significant percentage of the streaming video traffic.
Well, let's think about that. Pick any 100 year span in history. I would bet that, at the end of any 100 year span, most of humanity is merely surviving in really adverse and sucky conditions. A small fraction of the whole of humanity actually thrives. That is as true today as ever.
Ah, you are, like Hawkings, a pessimist, I see. Me, I'm more optimistic. I think that today, the majority of people are far better off on average than 100 years ago, and better off than 100 years before that. Yes, there are plenty of people today who are in nations that are ridden with civil war or genocide, and while the implements of destruction used in such campaigns are more awesome today, I think there is more civil peace today than, say, 1,000 years ago.
Moreover, I think humanity is more 'civilized' today than in times past. Yes, there are still atrocities committed in war zones, but I think overall we're a more tame and kind society. Whereas in the past people were quickly put to death for what today are considered minor infractions (if infractions at all), that people were killed merely as a spectator sport, that not paying ones debts could get him flogged, that speaking out against the rulers in a nation could get one killed, and so on... (And, sure, there are places and situations today where these happen, but they are reviled and not nearly as wide-spread as they once were.)
And technology is better. 2,000 years ago, a large percentage of babies didn't live past a year old. Disease was more rampant. Just look at things like the Plauge, which wiped out (IIRC) more than half of the population of Europe. Sure, such things might happen today, but you can't tell me that the average person today is less healthy than the average person 500 years ago. Things are better, and while there are those today who have it a lot worse than the top-crust, I'd content that the worst off today are head and shoulders above the worst off of the past.
It would take a massive nuclear weapons campaign to wipe out the human race. There could be hundreds of nukes launched and detonated, and, sure, 95% of humanity might die, and the 5% left might wish they were dead, but I wouldn't be surprised if enough people survived to keep the species going. Ditto biological agents. While disease might knock out the vast, vast majority of people, there are surely those who can survive, naturally or luckily, the strain that would be released.
I'll grant you that the technology we have this past century has increased the capability that mankind's demise could come from non-natural sources, but I still think that even in the face of a very serious disaster, enough of humanity would eek by to keep the species going. Moreover, I think that the probability of a doomsday scenario is, while more possible today, still very unlikely. I think my grandchildren will be more likely to die by getting hit by lightning than by experiencing global thermonuclear war. But then again, I'm an optimist (unlike Dr. Hawkings, obviously).
How often do you see a seller set a cash price lower than the credit price?
The gas station right down the street has different prices if you pay with cash vs. a credit card. Heck, Arco won't even take credit cards.
And while many small businesses won't have two prices - a cash price and a credit price - many will knock something off if you pay in cash (especially smaller businesses where the cash can be taken "under the table", so to speak). The cash benefit / cost savings for the consumer increases and the beauracracy increases. So for credit cards, the cash bonus isn't going to be extremely high, but cash in lieu of dealing with insurance at a dentist or clinic? You can save some serious money that way (assuming you have a high deductible plan where you're not going to have the insurer covering the majority of the costs).
private industry just would not have the resources and coordination to pull it off. Nor the motivation.
But in any case, NOBODY, public or private, wants to do mega-projects anymore. Complacency is the word of the day.
Someone needs to tell that to these guys, who are planning on building a massive travel corridor stretching from the West coast of southern Mexico to as far as Montreal and Vancouver.
It is a hard call to make. But consider this - what if Bill Gates's foundation has saved 50,000 lives (just pulled that number out of the air) that, had the charity been halved in size, would have died. That is, 50,000 human beings are alive today and we can someone know without doubt that they would not have been had the Gates Foundation not been at "full strength." Now, would is more "valuable" or worthwhile to society? Netscape in tact, or those 50,000 lives?
Yes, I know things aren't that black and white, but jobs and technology is one thing, human beings are another. That's why, to me, the scales are so tipped to the good side of things in Bill Gates's case.
we should not forget that what makes the world a better place in the long term is wealth creation, not redistribution
I agree with this sentiment on a macroscopic point of view, but it's hard to tell that kid living in a third-world country that she won't get a polio shot because that money would be better invested training so and so to be a more efficient farmer (or whatever). But, in theory, your point is spot on - the whole give a man a fish, teach a man to fish thing.
Sadly this sums up why a lot of the rich Barons give away their wealth when they get old. They know that they have screwed over people to get where they are. They know they can't take it with them. They try to pay penance before they die.
Erm, for every evil rich person who volunarily gives away their life's earnings, there are dozens who don't, who pass it down to their hiers, allowing them (if they choose so) to live a meaningless, non-contributing life, e.g. Paris Hilton.
To me, there is a scale of evil and a scale of good. Bill's business practices, to me, don't rate very high on the evil scale, while his philantrophy rates very high on the good scale. If I had a magic wand, and could remove Microsoft's anti-competitive behaviors, but at the expense of, say, halving the donations made by the Gates Foundation, I would no wave that wand.
BUT, he did give away 85% of his net worth and he didn't have to. He could have passed it all on to his progeny. He could have spent 85% in one weekend flying around the world non-stop in a privately chartered Concorde jet with very, very, very expensive hookers and booze... he could have done ANYTHING, but he decided to give it away. Personally, I think the man derseves some applause for making that decision, even if he's still left himself a large sum at the moment...
Erm, on the web side,.NET has had some serious traction for years now. Many websites - intranets and publically-facing Internet sites - use ASP.NET. And for those who want to hate Microsoft, you can use this for ammunition - MySpace uses ASP.NET to power those pretty, accessible, user-friendly web pages.
Agreed, I think a lot of Google products are fire and motion tactics.
The one problem with this, though, is that if the products they release are so-so to begin with (it's Beta!), but then don't improve over time, it disaffects those customers using those products. Google Calendar looks nice, but I can't/won't use it regularly until it has two-way Outlook Calendar syncing (which I'm not holding my breath for, either).
Also, Google Reader is rather bleh IMO compared to other online aggregating options. For me, the only really impressive, stable, I'd-recommend-it-to-others offerrings from Google are:
After listing that, I guess that is a decent number of services that are recommend-worthy... perhaps it's just a few products that are souring me on Google's approach, overall.... Hopefully they don't let the Calendar or Spreadsheet program be just fire and motion, but actually make it a useful app that I will want to use and encourage others to as well.
Slashdot Mirror
What would be nice, too, is if they were required after their two terms to spend at least four years in their home state. You know, get them and their family out of DC. Too much nepotism and cronyism in that city.
There's a great blog entry about the automated testing done by the ASP.NET Team at Redmond....
Bah, and I bet these same 'experts' say that the toilet is best used for going to the bathroom and nothing else. If it weren't for the bed and toilet, I'd get no 'dead tree' reading done!
Surely the sane way to do things is to have a standard Windows interface for 'please make a menu bar', and then when an innovation like draggable menus or hiding unused menu items comes up, it can apply to all applications consistently. Unfortunately I fear that the Win32 API is too low-level for something like that to work.
I agree that Microsoft's apps should be able to conform to some standard, but it's silly to ask third-party vendors to adhere to this. They want a competitive advantage by having a wing-ding slick, fly out, icon-ladden menu widget thingie, or whatever.
And even in Microsoft, I bet it would be next to impossible to have every group use a standard menu interface. The Office guys say, "Hey, we want feature X." They developers working on Explorer say, "That's to whiz bangy, we've not had that feature ever and we don't want it to be there now." So what can the Office guy do? Either leave the rudimentary menu from Explorer or create their own whiz bangy version. Clearly they've opted for the latter approach!
If I'm not mistaken, the vast, vast majority of Google's revenue comes from advertising (like 95+%, IIRC). Google's main assets are its online "Google OS" through which you use its services, and it's targetting advertising capabilities. Given that, I'd wager Google's main motivation is to capitalize on those markets, rather than switching focus to selling shrink-wrap software.
As a business, why would I use an office suite that requires me to (in effect) give a copy of all of my documents to another corporation, when I have a perfectly good alternative that only costs a few hundred bucks per seat?
You wouldn't. Good things that Fortune 500 companies are not the market audience for Writely. Google, IMO, is trying to market to a very large consumer segment that the other entrenched players aren't interested in (i.e., Microsoft, Apple) - the novice computer user who's computer use does not justify spending the money on an Office suite (or, heck, even a computer). Will Google be able to bring in enough advertising revenue? That remains to seen.
Amazon is whole nother creature. I have not stayed up on them and I have no friends working there, so I really can not comment on them. But from where I sit, they seem to be doing ok. Of course, they probably should do some updating on their website and consider taking on e-bay.
They've tried to take on eBay in the past - remember Amazon auctions? From Greg Linden, a former Amazon employee from the "early days":
Sometimes the audience's reaction or singing along improves the song or contributes a certain aire that would be lost on a recording. Perhaps the canonical example is Arlo Guthrie's, "Alice's Restaurant." Can you imagine... I mean, can you imagine what it would sound like if it were recorded in a studio?
Already there.
How does it work with MTV (or should I say, "How did it work, back when they played music videos")? My assumption was always that MTV got the music video rights for a few pennies per song, like radio stations, clubs, etc. pay. Is this an invalid assumption? Does/did MTV pay big bucks for the right to play those videos?
I guess now they're taking out the part where you entered your ID and password, and replacing it with a biometric scanner. But, if this is in the same CS grad student lounge, the barcode scanner and basic inventory software has been in place for some time now.
I certainly know that games can frighten. Playing Metroid on my NES in a dark room at midnight finally getting to the Mother Brain freaked me out. 'Course I was ten, but still, that was scary
I've never experienced a game where I ever felt sorrow or loss or sadness, but I have definitely felt afraid. HalfLife 1, alone, lights out, on a stormy night...
Although I think the greatest emotion I've ever felt is in sports games when playing against others. Nothing quite as exciting as having a well-fought game come down to a last second play, especially if there's a roomfull of others watching and cheering along...
I remember the original Leisure Suit Larry game had a unique age verification system. Before it would let you play, it would ask you three multiple choice questions that had to do with pop culture, politics, and whatnot from the 70s, something a ten year old in the late 80s would likely know nothing about. :-)
Unrelatedly, I heard a random statistic that said that some asinine percentage of the net's streaming video traffic was due to Myspace. I brushed it off, as, well, that's a sortof silly thing to take to heart, but I wonder if there's any truth to it.
Serve 1.5 billion page views per day with craptacular homepages rife with videos and you're very likely to have a significant percentage of the streaming video traffic.
Ah, you are, like Hawkings, a pessimist, I see. Me, I'm more optimistic. I think that today, the majority of people are far better off on average than 100 years ago, and better off than 100 years before that. Yes, there are plenty of people today who are in nations that are ridden with civil war or genocide, and while the implements of destruction used in such campaigns are more awesome today, I think there is more civil peace today than, say, 1,000 years ago.
Moreover, I think humanity is more 'civilized' today than in times past. Yes, there are still atrocities committed in war zones, but I think overall we're a more tame and kind society. Whereas in the past people were quickly put to death for what today are considered minor infractions (if infractions at all), that people were killed merely as a spectator sport, that not paying ones debts could get him flogged, that speaking out against the rulers in a nation could get one killed, and so on... (And, sure, there are places and situations today where these happen, but they are reviled and not nearly as wide-spread as they once were.)
And technology is better. 2,000 years ago, a large percentage of babies didn't live past a year old. Disease was more rampant. Just look at things like the Plauge, which wiped out (IIRC) more than half of the population of Europe. Sure, such things might happen today, but you can't tell me that the average person today is less healthy than the average person 500 years ago. Things are better, and while there are those today who have it a lot worse than the top-crust, I'd content that the worst off today are head and shoulders above the worst off of the past.
I'll grant you that the technology we have this past century has increased the capability that mankind's demise could come from non-natural sources, but I still think that even in the face of a very serious disaster, enough of humanity would eek by to keep the species going. Moreover, I think that the probability of a doomsday scenario is, while more possible today, still very unlikely. I think my grandchildren will be more likely to die by getting hit by lightning than by experiencing global thermonuclear war. But then again, I'm an optimist (unlike Dr. Hawkings, obviously).
Cripes! I take it you've not seen those ads with people wearing dinosaur heads? That convinced my team to upgrade.
The gas station right down the street has different prices if you pay with cash vs. a credit card. Heck, Arco won't even take credit cards.
And while many small businesses won't have two prices - a cash price and a credit price - many will knock something off if you pay in cash (especially smaller businesses where the cash can be taken "under the table", so to speak). The cash benefit / cost savings for the consumer increases and the beauracracy increases. So for credit cards, the cash bonus isn't going to be extremely high, but cash in lieu of dealing with insurance at a dentist or clinic? You can save some serious money that way (assuming you have a high deductible plan where you're not going to have the insurer covering the majority of the costs).
Someone needs to tell that to these guys, who are planning on building a massive travel corridor stretching from the West coast of southern Mexico to as far as Montreal and Vancouver.
Yes, I know things aren't that black and white, but jobs and technology is one thing, human beings are another. That's why, to me, the scales are so tipped to the good side of things in Bill Gates's case.
I agree with this sentiment on a macroscopic point of view, but it's hard to tell that kid living in a third-world country that she won't get a polio shot because that money would be better invested training so and so to be a more efficient farmer (or whatever). But, in theory, your point is spot on - the whole give a man a fish, teach a man to fish thing.
Erm, for every evil rich person who volunarily gives away their life's earnings, there are dozens who don't, who pass it down to their hiers, allowing them (if they choose so) to live a meaningless, non-contributing life, e.g. Paris Hilton.
To me, there is a scale of evil and a scale of good. Bill's business practices, to me, don't rate very high on the evil scale, while his philantrophy rates very high on the good scale. If I had a magic wand, and could remove Microsoft's anti-competitive behaviors, but at the expense of, say, halving the donations made by the Gates Foundation, I would no wave that wand.
BUT, he did give away 85% of his net worth and he didn't have to. He could have passed it all on to his progeny. He could have spent 85% in one weekend flying around the world non-stop in a privately chartered Concorde jet with very, very, very expensive hookers and booze... he could have done ANYTHING, but he decided to give it away. Personally, I think the man derseves some applause for making that decision, even if he's still left himself a large sum at the moment...
Erm, on the web side, .NET has had some serious traction for years now. Many websites - intranets and publically-facing Internet sites - use ASP.NET. And for those who want to hate Microsoft, you can use this for ammunition - MySpace uses ASP.NET to power those pretty, accessible, user-friendly web pages.
The one problem with this, though, is that if the products they release are so-so to begin with (it's Beta!), but then don't improve over time, it disaffects those customers using those products. Google Calendar looks nice, but I can't/won't use it regularly until it has two-way Outlook Calendar syncing (which I'm not holding my breath for, either).
Also, Google Reader is rather bleh IMO compared to other online aggregating options. For me, the only really impressive, stable, I'd-recommend-it-to-others offerrings from Google are:
- Search
- Toolbar (although not for FireFox)
- Google Desktop Search
- GMail
- Google Maps
After listing that, I guess that is a decent number of services that are recommend-worthy... perhaps it's just a few products that are souring me on Google's approach, overall.... Hopefully they don't let the Calendar or Spreadsheet program be just fire and motion, but actually make it a useful app that I will want to use and encourage others to as well.