This is really disappointing to me as well. I've been a subscriber since its inception, but I'm about to let it drop. I know which end of a soldering gun to hold. I don't have a desire to add a toggle switch to a toy to impress hipsters.
Where are the articles like:
- Build a high quality mass spectrometer (http://old.4hv.org/index.php?board=4;action=display;threadid=1268)
- Convert a cheap Chinese milling machine to CNC (http://www.hossmachine.info/)
- Build a Tesla Turbine and reap geothermal energy.
It went from being "Make useful stuff" to "Make crap to impress dumb people"
As a corporation, Microsoft needs to increase revenue, yet they are saturated in the OS and Office markets. They look to Google profits and want to be Google's competitor.
So Microsoft probably views themselves as Google's biggest competitor, whereas Google perceives them as a has-been.
Microsoft needs desperately to be relevant in the Internet age. Yet their fanatical adherence to maintaining their monopolies restrict them from entering other markets.
Pretend that if an attempt to log into his account fails three times, his account is locked and requires a new password.
Or pretend that your security system notes what IP address such failures comes from, and disables all access from that IP. Or it scores various IP connections, giving more trust to IP addresses that are successful.
Whenever I see the onus forced on users, I see people who haven't learned the wisdom of the following quote:
"I object to doing things that computers can do." - Olin Shivers
Learning a foreign language is sort of like learning Lisp, you may never use it, but the study of it will expand your mind in so many ways.
I am the worst spoken language learner on the planet. I spent four years in high school and a semester in college studying Spanish, but now all I remember are ways to insult your mother (tu chingada madre).
I worked for a French company and had a year of intensive French but all I remember is the phrase for a wet dream (faire une carte de france).
I also took a semester of Mandarin and remember probably nothing, other than how language reflects the history and culture of a people (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gweilo).
I guess I've written a comment that signifies nothing, other than any question of "Should I learn X" should always be answered by "yes."
Yeah, it seems like Evolution copied most of those 'features' of Outlook. The only thing it does better than Outlook is delete messages. It can empty a trash folder with 20k messages in less than two minutes, whereas Outlook takes about four hours.
Both of them are slow and randomly lock up on me. Unfortunately my work uses Exchange without OWA turned on, so those are the only two options I have right now:-(
I completely agree with you. I told Steve Yegge (who was my boss for a short time at Amazon, and is now apparently a recruiting machine for Google), that I would rather work for a company I could sell to Google than actually work for Google. I can cook my own gourmet meals and get plenty of massages from my wife if I don't have to work eighteen hour days.
And if I sell my idea to Google, I get to spend five days a week on a new pet project instead of one.
Think about that. The interest on their LIQUID CASH could pay EIGHTY THOUSAND EMPLOYEES over SEVENTY THOUSAND DOLLARS A YEAR. You obviously haven't shopped for real estate in Seattle lately. 70k is a paupers salary in Seattle. The three bedroom, 1900 sq ft house across the street from me in sleepy Ballard just went for 700k. Which means you need a 140k down payment and a combined income of around 186k to qualify.
But I think the real point is not that Microsoft is going bankrupt any time soon. Simply that they are going the same route as IBM. Once IBM was the 800 pound gorilla and you played their game or got crushed. Then MS played that role for a while.
I don't expect Microsoft to *increase* market in their core profitable businesses (win32, office), and so far they have failed to show an ability to innovate in any new markets (Zune) or be profitable in those markets (XBox).
Even after IBM lost the crown, they were still mostly profitable, and eventually MS will go in the same direction as IBM as a more services oriented business.
But the only innovation that will be seen coming out of Redmond is the steady bleed of the better talent to more lucrative startups.
For any really good programmer in Seattle, the pecking order of where you want to work is:
- Working for a startup that could be sold to Google. - Working for a startup that could be sold to MS. - Working at Google. - Working anywhere. - Working at Amazon. - Working at Real Networks. - Working at Microsoft.
Honestly, you've just described the ultimate weapon for some of the big sites to use against any ISP that tries to shake them down for premium speeds.
Think for a moment that Virgin goes to Google and says "We want money or you'll ride in the bus lane" and Google says "No more Google or Youtube for your customers, and furthermore, all those sites with Google ads are going to start heavily advertising your competitors."
I live in Seattle and the last three months I have been receiving a lot of calls from head hunters staffing for MS looking for people with a strong Unix background. When I first received the job descriptions, my guess was that they were working on something that would allow you to manage Linux/Unix systems from a Windows machine. Reflecting back on the job description, it could have been something like this.
I didn't accept the offers, but here is some free advice:
- Get rid of single letter drive names (you know, the eighties called,...)
- The directory separator is '/', As Seen On Unix and URLs.
- Reorganize the file system more like Unix/Linux, and maybe rename 'Program Files' to 'Applications', have a/usr directory tree, etc.
- Ship every copy of the OS with an X server.
- And I still need a compliant shell and C compiler to support the holy invocation './configure && make && sudo make install'.
I agree, this is the scenario I see playing out. If Microsoft wants to become a real Internet player then they need to drop their obsession with maintaining the OS monopoly, which is at complete odds with what it takes to be successful in the iWorld(tm).
I don't think they can let go of that, so they'll just end up turning Yahoo! into another Hotmail.
Washington doesn't have a state income tax. So you're suggesting shifting the burden from profitable companies to average citizens? Nevada doesn't have the largest ferry system in the US or the world's longest floating bridge to maintain. Nor does it provide roads and other transportation services to the 35,000 people employed by Microsoft.
I've always believed the biggest obstacle to any creative endeavor in general is Functional Fixedness, the bias that limits us to sort of only playing by the rules.
I was at a party once and my psychology professor demonstrated it for me with a challenge to everyone at the party that he could drink wine from one of the unopened bottles of wine on the table without damaging the glass or cork in any way. Once everyone had given up guessing how he would do it, he turned the unopened bottle upside down, and poured wine from an opened bottle into the depression in the bottom of the unopened bottle and drank it. Our cognitive bias kept us from thinking outside the box, or bottle as it may be.
Yes, but is that the kind of intelligence you want to model? Furthermore, dogs learn, so they're not just relying on a database of facts, they can add items and update items on their own. My dogs know the word "walk" so I would have to spell it out to my wife, "Do you want to take the dogs on a W-A-L-K?" They eventually learned that this also meant "walk."
"Joe has a degree in CS" may be false today and true at a later time. The ability to update your own database or "opinions" over time may exclude large portions of the human population from the concept of intelligence, but it is not to me the ultimate goal of AI to model them other than possibly a stepping stone to something greater.
An easily duped computer program might be a novelty, and even able to pass the Turing Test (which ironically, is more about duping a human than really creating true intelligence), but hardly useful. A program that started out being easily duped and then learned to be more critical is a real achievement.
But it does show the disagreement we have in defining "intelligence." Is it the ability to learn? Or as you suggest "self awareness?"
Seems to me a program that relied on a large database of unverifiable and sometimes conflicting facts (say Google and Wikipedia), to form correct answers and even synthesize new answers is much closer to intelligence than the approach these two were taking. One would hardly consider a SQL query to be intelligence.
Executives blogging is still marketing. I want a car that starts out at one hundred miles per gallon, is open to hacking, and anyone can manufacture the design. Then you've embraced open source. When your ready to turn your mfg resources into efficient commodities, give me a call.
My pet rant against the Ruby guys is that they use multi-sillable (usually invented) words to describe their own favorite Ruby features, yet when one asks for a specific example where that feature would make a program better in any way, i.e. simpler, or more powerful, or more efficient, etc, they are unable to answer. I'll never make a religion out of a hammer, but I can think of a few Ruby features that I really like. I'll give an example from my own experience which is that classes are always open and new methods can be added at runtime. Pretend for a moment that you are working for a large eCommerce company named Nile, and you've just been asked by the legal department to help them defend against a patent for a "Shopping Cart" and they need to provide full history of many source code files, despite several repo changes and reorganizations, as well as the name "main.cpp" being quite common. You have a couple of CVS repos as well as a couple of Perforce repos checked out at important epochs, and you need to trace revision history of several files across these SCC changes and reorganizations.
You come up with a really good fuzzy matching algorithm, but you need to call it sometimes with a File object and sometimes with a String object as the output of something like "svn print":
def fuzzy_match(item1,item2)... end
Now you could do something ugly like "If item1 is a File, convert it to a string, and it item2 is a File, convert it to a string", but the elegant solution is:
class File
def to_str
self.readlines
end end
The method 'to_str' is called whenever an object is told to act like a string, and this added method to the File class tells it to read the contents of the file and return them as a string. So now my fuzzy_match method can always expect a string and the File object will abide. Duck typing.
May seem like a trivial example, but it 'feels' right, which is what I like about Ruby. I like code that looks good and feels right. How often do you look at your own code six months to a year down the road and still think it rocks?
Of course, I was a Rubyist before Rails. It is a good framework, but the hype even bothers me.
Strangely, I offered Zed a job once, but he was "over working for companies" at the time. I do find it a little stupid to say you are going to stop using a tool because someone you don't like uses the same tool.
Larry and Guido, be nice to Zed or he may trash your language.
Slashdot Mirror
This is really disappointing to me as well. I've been a subscriber since its inception, but I'm about to let it drop. I know which end of a soldering gun to hold. I don't have a desire to add a toggle switch to a toy to impress hipsters.
Where are the articles like:
- Build a high quality mass spectrometer (http://old.4hv.org/index.php?board=4;action=display;threadid=1268)
- Convert a cheap Chinese milling machine to CNC (http://www.hossmachine.info/)
- Build a Tesla Turbine and reap geothermal energy.
It went from being "Make useful stuff" to "Make crap to impress dumb people"
As a corporation, Microsoft needs to increase revenue, yet they are saturated in the OS and Office markets. They look to Google profits and want to be Google's competitor.
So Microsoft probably views themselves as Google's biggest competitor, whereas Google perceives them as a has-been.
Microsoft needs desperately to be relevant in the Internet age. Yet their fanatical adherence to maintaining their monopolies restrict them from entering other markets.
Textbook case of 'The Innovator's Dilemma':
http://www.amazon.com/Innovators-Dilemma-Revolutionary-Business-Essentials/dp/0060521996
Pretend that if an attempt to log into his account fails three times, his account is locked and requires a new password.
Or pretend that your security system notes what IP address such failures comes from, and disables all access from that IP. Or it scores various IP connections, giving more trust to IP addresses that are successful.
Whenever I see the onus forced on users, I see people who haven't learned the wisdom of the following quote:
"I object to doing things that computers can do." - Olin Shivers
Trust me, having Google or Amazon on the resume means a lot more the having Microsoft on the resume.
The former two guarantee you know something about scaling (insane scaling), the later only guarantees you know how to develop for Windows.
The former two haven't drowned themselves in bureaucracy. The later has.
The former two still have managers with technical chops. The later has MBA's for managers.
But they don't call it the Civil War, rather "The War of Northern Aggression," which apparently was fought for "States Rights."
Karl, is that you?
But I just learned it:
http://www.coboloncogs.org/COGS.HTM
Learning a foreign language is sort of like learning Lisp, you may never use it, but the study of it will expand your mind in so many ways.
I am the worst spoken language learner on the planet. I spent four years in high school and a semester in college studying Spanish, but now all I remember are ways to insult your mother (tu chingada madre).
I worked for a French company and had a year of intensive French but all I remember is the phrase for a wet dream (faire une carte de france).
I also took a semester of Mandarin and remember probably nothing, other than how language reflects the history and culture of a people (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gweilo).
I guess I've written a comment that signifies nothing, other than any question of "Should I learn X" should always be answered by "yes."
Yeah, it seems like Evolution copied most of those 'features' of Outlook. The only thing it does better than Outlook is delete messages. It can empty a trash folder with 20k messages in less than two minutes, whereas Outlook takes about four hours.
Both of them are slow and randomly lock up on me. Unfortunately my work uses Exchange without OWA turned on, so those are the only two options I have right now
I seem to be missing any PDF's by this guy?
I completely agree with you. I told Steve Yegge (who was my boss for a short time at Amazon, and is now apparently a recruiting machine for Google), that I would rather work for a company I could sell to Google than actually work for Google. I can cook my own gourmet meals and get plenty of massages from my wife if I don't have to work eighteen hour days.
And if I sell my idea to Google, I get to spend five days a week on a new pet project instead of one.
But I think the real point is not that Microsoft is going bankrupt any time soon. Simply that they are going the same route as IBM. Once IBM was the 800 pound gorilla and you played their game or got crushed. Then MS played that role for a while.
I don't expect Microsoft to *increase* market in their core profitable businesses (win32, office), and so far they have failed to show an ability to innovate in any new markets (Zune) or be profitable in those markets (XBox).
Even after IBM lost the crown, they were still mostly profitable, and eventually MS will go in the same direction as IBM as a more services oriented business.
But the only innovation that will be seen coming out of Redmond is the steady bleed of the better talent to more lucrative startups.
For any really good programmer in Seattle, the pecking order of where you want to work is:
- Working for a startup that could be sold to Google.
- Working for a startup that could be sold to MS.
- Working at Google.
- Working anywhere.
- Working at Amazon.
- Working at Real Networks.
- Working at Microsoft.
Somehow that reminds me of the scene from Brazil where they are pulling on the shared desk through the wall.
Ultimately, corporations reduce us all to idiots.
Perhaps an "Ask Slashdot" would be a better way to get an answer rather than asking in a thread about cubes?
When I worked there they found that if they shrunk our cubes by a couple of feet they could get X more programmers in the building.
Nothing like having your restricted little world reduced by two feet. I even had to give up my red stapler.
...don't journal wife killing evidence.
Until a language comes along that can outperform C or C++, there will always be a use for them.
It's still right-tool-for-the-job. I don't use Ruby to write audio DSP plugins, and I don't use C/C++ to code a web application.
I'll keep both in my tool box, along with lisp,
Honestly, you've just described the ultimate weapon for some of the big sites to use against any ISP that tries to shake them down for premium speeds.
Think for a moment that Virgin goes to Google and says "We want money or you'll ride in the bus lane" and Google says "No more Google or Youtube for your customers, and furthermore, all those sites with Google ads are going to start heavily advertising your competitors."
I live in Seattle and the last three months I have been receiving a lot of calls from head hunters staffing for MS looking for people with a strong Unix background. When I first received the job descriptions, my guess was that they were working on something that would allow you to manage Linux/Unix systems from a Windows machine. Reflecting back on the job description, it could have been something like this.
...)
/usr directory tree, etc.
I didn't accept the offers, but here is some free advice:
- Get rid of single letter drive names (you know, the eighties called,
- The directory separator is '/', As Seen On Unix and URLs.
- Reorganize the file system more like Unix/Linux, and maybe rename 'Program Files' to 'Applications', have a
- Ship every copy of the OS with an X server.
- And I still need a compliant shell and C compiler to support the holy invocation './configure && make && sudo make install'.
I agree, this is the scenario I see playing out. If Microsoft wants to become a real Internet player then they need to drop their obsession with maintaining the OS monopoly, which is at complete odds with what it takes to be successful in the iWorld(tm).
I don't think they can let go of that, so they'll just end up turning Yahoo! into another Hotmail.
Apparently, FakeSteveJobs also agrees
Washington doesn't have a state income tax. So you're suggesting shifting the burden from profitable companies to average citizens? Nevada doesn't have the largest ferry system in the US or the world's longest floating bridge to maintain. Nor does it provide roads and other transportation services to the 35,000 people employed by Microsoft.
I've always believed the biggest obstacle to any creative endeavor in general is Functional Fixedness, the bias that limits us to sort of only playing by the rules. I was at a party once and my psychology professor demonstrated it for me with a challenge to everyone at the party that he could drink wine from one of the unopened bottles of wine on the table without damaging the glass or cork in any way. Once everyone had given up guessing how he would do it, he turned the unopened bottle upside down, and poured wine from an opened bottle into the depression in the bottom of the unopened bottle and drank it. Our cognitive bias kept us from thinking outside the box, or bottle as it may be.
Yes, but is that the kind of intelligence you want to model? Furthermore, dogs learn, so they're not just relying on a database of facts, they can add items and update items on their own. My dogs know the word "walk" so I would have to spell it out to my wife, "Do you want to take the dogs on a W-A-L-K?" They eventually learned that this also meant "walk."
"Joe has a degree in CS" may be false today and true at a later time. The ability to update your own database or "opinions" over time may exclude large portions of the human population from the concept of intelligence, but it is not to me the ultimate goal of AI to model them other than possibly a stepping stone to something greater.
An easily duped computer program might be a novelty, and even able to pass the Turing Test (which ironically, is more about duping a human than really creating true intelligence), but hardly useful. A program that started out being easily duped and then learned to be more critical is a real achievement.
But it does show the disagreement we have in defining "intelligence." Is it the ability to learn? Or as you suggest "self awareness?"
Seems to me a program that relied on a large database of unverifiable and sometimes conflicting facts (say Google and Wikipedia), to form correct answers and even synthesize new answers is much closer to intelligence than the approach these two were taking. One would hardly consider a SQL query to be intelligence.
Executives blogging is still marketing. I want a car that starts out at one hundred miles per gallon, is open to hacking, and anyone can manufacture the design. Then you've embraced open source. When your ready to turn your mfg resources into efficient commodities, give me a call.
You come up with a really good fuzzy matching algorithm, but you need to call it sometimes with a File object and sometimes with a String object as the output of something like "svn print":
def fuzzy_match(item1,item2)
end
Now you could do something ugly like "If item1 is a File, convert it to a string, and it item2 is a File, convert it to a string", but the elegant solution is:
class File
def to_str
self.readlines
end
end
The method 'to_str' is called whenever an object is told to act like a string, and this added method to the File class tells it to read the contents of the file and return them as a string. So now my fuzzy_match method can always expect a string and the File object will abide. Duck typing.
May seem like a trivial example, but it 'feels' right, which is what I like about Ruby. I like code that looks good and feels right. How often do you look at your own code six months to a year down the road and still think it rocks?
Of course, I was a Rubyist before Rails. It is a good framework, but the hype even bothers me.
Strangely, I offered Zed a job once, but he was "over working for companies" at the time. I do find it a little stupid to say you are going to stop using a tool because someone you don't like uses the same tool.
Larry and Guido, be nice to Zed or he may trash your language.