If the people who want wireless, be they 10%, 51%, or 99%, can pay for the costs of it, a company will be sure to provide it.
Counterexample: I grew up in a sparsely-populated valley that wasn't served by any cable TV company. A cable TV company provided service at either end of the valley, but residents couldn't convince either company to run cable down the valley--even when nearly 100% of the residents offered to pay up front for the costs of it. Even when there was no up-front cost to the provider, each decided refused on the basis of a "customers-per-mile" calculation.
Thirty years later, the valley still doesn't have cable. Since then, DirectTV has benefited from the cable companies' apathy.
So it's not just the value to the prospective customers that affect the availability of the service. It's also the value to the service provider. And if the provider decides you're not worth the effort, you have no recourse.
Yes, but it doesn't work in the doctor's favor. The prices set by insurance companies are usually set much lower than the doctor's "standard" prices.
This is particularly true for some specialties like physical therapy. While a PT can charge an uninsured patient in a reasonable fashion, based on what was required for the visit, insurance companies typically have one set rate.
So it doesn't matter whether the patient's visit was for half an hour of supervised exercise (where a single PT assistant can supervise several patients), or for manual traction (which can require a PT and a PTA to work intensively on a single patient for the same amount of time). The insurance company will only pay that flat amount.
If you think this may have an effect on the quality of care, well, you might be right.
If you put $100,000 in an account that gives you 4.7% interest a year, in 35 years you get 500% return. But you don't get to _use_ that money for those 35 years. You get the use of a house for that time.
If you really want to boil it down to economic terms, you have to add in what _renting_ the house out over those 35 years would bring in. That's a bit more than 4.7%.
But he did die a bit later from an accidental alcohol + pill overdose.
Reminds me of the George Carlin bit, about his dog Tippy: "Tippy committed suicide... well, we don't like to say it that way. We say 'he put himself to sleep'. But he ran out in from of a bakery truck, and that's f...in' suicide!"
You would be correct, if "XML by itself" were anything like what the article stated:
"pure" XML is unpleasant to read and write. The more explicit the nesting becomes in XML, the harder it is for people to make sense of it.
But why should they have to? Why, in the early 21st century, do programmers still insist that their tools have to draw exactly one glyph on the screen for each byte in their source files?
[...]
We believe that next-generation programming systems will most likely store source code as XML, rather than as flat text. Programmers will not see or edit XML tags; instead, their editors will render these models to create human-friendly views, just like Web browsers and other WYSIWYG editors.
I usually like what Joel says just enough to keep reading the essays. This is a pretty good one.
When I'm interviewing a recent college grad, though, I don't look at GPA as much as he does. Too often, high GPA indicates that a student figured out what the professor wanted to hear, and said it in the way the professor wanted to hear it. This is even true in the hard sciences. While you won't get a high GPA without having some grasp of the material, the difference between a 3.0 and a 4.0 is often how much you pander to the professor or TA.
But the seven points of advice are right on, especially "Learn to write" and "Get a good internship". To these, I would add "do something career-related outside your courseload".
There are many recent CS grads who did well in coursework, can write acceptably, and don't stink up the interview. I want one who has enough drive and intellectual curiosity to do something beyond what's required.
If you've got an industry-related blog or website, or you've written a couple of programs out of curiosity or for your own use, then you have a major advantage over your fellow students at interview time, at least if I'm doing the interviewing.
Is there any data out there about per-capita profitability of corporations?
Yes... any research siteworth its salt will give you either explicit earnings-per-employee numbers, or else both the headcount and earnings numbers to calculate it yourself. E/E is a pretty common metric.
No, but I'd be more likely to trust the person who pioneered brain surgery than I would be to trust you, even if he when he did it, they didn't have the modern instrumentation they do now.
Honestly, it wouldn't surprise me if the software companies made it quite easy for a pristine copy to make its way into the hands of someone who will post it all over the place, simply for the press and to get word of mouth going by having people play it and ramp up the hype about it.
I'm not saying this is the case with GTA:SA, but this is something that's been discussed for years:
Alternately, prepare a version that almost works, but shows defects that cause unplayability, oh, about a third of the way through the game (assuming 40 hours of playability). Make the defects such that they could be attributed to either a bad copy or slightly-working DRM, rather than actual code errors.
Leak _that_, get people playing it (and liking it), and then they'll be more likely to buy it once the "failure" happens, if the "real" DRM is good enough to create a disincentive to actual copying.
It's really just a sneakier way to market a demo, because its "forbidden" nature makes it more irresistable, it allows the company to generate more press then "yet another demo" would, and also continues the story arc of "woe is us due to piracy".
[Incidentally, some homegrown DRM schemes in published games have done exactly this for actual illegal copies. When a copy is detected, it doesn't stop play immediately; it only makes it impossible to play the game through to completion, either by subtly "breaking" the gameplay or else by waiting until a specific point in the game and then letting the player know explicitly that the copy has been detected, and the game won't be finishable. Deferring notification of detection turns the game into a very effective crippled demo. If I recall correctly, Spyro or Spyro 2 did this, from reading a development team post-mortem, and I remember there was a game back in the black-and-white Mac days that would play normally for a time, then display the message "Piracy is a very serious offense." and exit.)
Of course. We've been doing it for decades. But you're not going to do it programming in VB. You're going to have to learn how a computer works.
Historically, most of the late 8-bit machines had graphical environments available, even if they were rather primitive. The C64 had GEOS, the Atari 800 had (I think) GEM, and the Apple IIc had ProDOS (although it naturally worked better on the 16-bit IIgs). So yes, they did it even back then.
[As an aside, eight bits gets you 65k, not 1MB, naïvely. You can do bank-switching to get, oh, 512k or so.]
But that's way more than enough. You can easily fit a TCP/IP stack in a few k. You can easily have a graphical environment that doesn't require a massive screenbuffer (IIRC, the C64 screen buffer took 1000 BYTES... less than 1K. It's all in the encoding...).
Modern 8-bit mavens have the excellent Contiki project, which gives you an astounding amount of functionality in an 8-bit package, including everything you mention.
Sales numbers don't lie. And it's fairly well publicized information in industry press. That doesn't mean that American mass market beer is better. Far from it. What it means is that European youth are getting almost as stupid as the American consumer.
I was with you until the last sentence.
It's not that European youth are getting stupider; it's that the corporations are now bringing the same well-planned, psychologically-backed advertising and marketing to Europe now. It's easy to say "stupid consumer", but you should see the amount of research that goes into predicting and modelling consumer behavior in order to build these campaigns.
It's not that the American or European consumers are inherently stupid. The people who create marketing campaigns have done enough research to find the weaknesses in the general population's psychological makeup (everyone has them), and are hitting it with everything they've got.
What scares me is that the politicians are noticing.
And boards take wood and either a wood plane, which takes stone blades or a carpentry shop for iron blades. And nails require iron, which requires iron ore and charcoal (God, no, not more charcoal). And canvas, linen, and rope require twine, thread, and twine respectively; twine requires tow and thread requires lint, both of which require rotten flax, which requires fresh flax, which requires flax seeds, which requires just a trip to the local school!
Whew.
So anyway...
This is the tent that Ehud built.
This is the construction site that stood in for the tent that Ehud build.
This is the canvas that covered the construction site that stood in for the tent that Ehud built.
This is the twine that I wove into canvas that covered the construction site that stood in for the tent that Ehud built.
This is the tow I spun into twine that I wove into canvas that covered the construction site that stood in for the tent that Ehud built.
This is the flax, all rotten and black, I hackled for tow that I spun into twine that I wove into canvas that covered the construction site that stood in for the tent that Ehud built.
This is the flax, rehpic silver I think, I rotted downriver, that I hackled for for tow that I spun into twine that I wove into canvas that covered the construction site that stood in for the tent that Ehud built.
These are the seeds, and the water in jugs, that grew into the flax that I rotted downriver that I hackled for tow that I pun into twine that I wove into canvas that covered the construction site that stood in for the tent that Ehud built.
This is the School of Art in O.E., that gave me the seeds, that grew into the flax that I rotted downriver that I hackled for tow that I pun into twine that I wove into canvas that covered the construction site that stood in for the tent that Ehud built.
The fact that it runs on.NET is less a problem than just its behavior. It's doing more, all the time (the live context-sensitive help is a major CPU sucker).
This isn't anything new, by the way... it's been heading down this road since Visual C++ 5. IMHO, Visual C++ 4.2 was the last "lean" IDE--5 and 6 were a major slowdown.
It's not nearly as big a deal as open-sourcing, say, Solaris, simply because it's not going to wreck a primary revenue stream for Java.
I've wondered for a while where Sun makes money from Java, particularly enough to recoup what they spend on it. I can't imagine it affects sales of Solaris boxes that much.
Based on the last few analyses I've seen, it appears that occurrences of real "new" viruses, meaning ones made from whole cloth that "advance the state of the art", as it were, haven't really been up that much.
What does seem to be up are "copycat" viruses--viruses that seem to be made from the new viruses. Either people are getting hold of the source to viruses, making a few modifications (to 'set their thumbprint' on them), and releasing them, or else just reverse-engineering the viruses. These "copycat" viruses do appear to be on the upswing. On the other hand, from all reports, the copycats tend to be poorly written and have flaws that either limit their spread or else limit their effectiveness.
The real innovators, though, are definitely getting better every year.
Is anyone doing that kind of analysis: rate of increase of "innovative", more dangerous viruses vs. random, garbage mods of existing ones? That would be an interesting glimpse into the state of the virus "industry".
The broadcast media industry have a history of opposing technology that has a hair of a chance of affecting their signal--whether or not the science is on their side.
For example, the National Associaton of Broadcasters (and even National Public Radio) opposed extending licenses for low-power radio on the grounds that it would interfere with existing licensed signal--even though most people who really understand this know that it's not the case.
The real issue in these cases is usually not technical--it's about control over the airwaves.
I'm an American, but I wish the world would run on GMT, you insensitive clod!
To me, time zones are evil. I wish I had a dollar for every time something at work went awry because of "Oh, you meant 3:00 _my time_?"
Kill all the timezones, that's the first thing we'll do. And while you're at it, abolish AM and PM as well. I'd much rather make the minor mental adjustment that I now wake up at 11:00 instead of 6:00, than have to continually make adjustments all day when I'm talking to people across the country or elsewhere in the world.
That's one reason I like the British so much. They're one of the only countries in the world who have dropped the parochial "local time" nonsense and switched to GMT.
Slashdot Mirror
If the people who want wireless, be they 10%, 51%, or 99%, can pay for the costs of it, a company will be sure to provide it.
Counterexample: I grew up in a sparsely-populated valley that wasn't served by any cable TV company. A cable TV company provided service at either end of the valley, but residents couldn't convince either company to run cable down the valley--even when nearly 100% of the residents offered to pay up front for the costs of it. Even when there was no up-front cost to the provider, each decided refused on the basis of a "customers-per-mile" calculation.
Thirty years later, the valley still doesn't have cable. Since then, DirectTV has benefited from the cable companies' apathy.
So it's not just the value to the prospective customers that affect the availability of the service. It's also the value to the service provider. And if the provider decides you're not worth the effort, you have no recourse.
Yes, but it doesn't work in the doctor's favor. The prices set by insurance companies are usually set much lower than the doctor's "standard" prices.
This is particularly true for some specialties like physical therapy. While a PT can charge an uninsured patient in a reasonable fashion, based on what was required for the visit, insurance companies typically have one set rate.
So it doesn't matter whether the patient's visit was for half an hour of supervised exercise (where a single PT assistant can supervise several patients), or for manual traction (which can require a PT and a PTA to work intensively on a single patient for the same amount of time). The insurance company will only pay that flat amount.
If you think this may have an effect on the quality of care, well, you might be right.
1) BSD makes a lousy desktop. I would thus want to use something different on my laptop, like Fedora Core. This increases administration overhead.
FC has better laptop support?
Funny... that's why I switched from Fedora Core 3 to FreeBSD.
As always, your mileage may vary.
In other words, they're just like software engineers.
In reality, it's far, far more than that.
If you put $100,000 in an account that gives you 4.7% interest a year, in 35 years you get 500% return. But you don't get to _use_ that money for those 35 years. You get the use of a house for that time.
If you really want to boil it down to economic terms, you have to add in what _renting_ the house out over those 35 years would bring in. That's a bit more than 4.7%.
But he did die a bit later from an accidental alcohol + pill overdose.
Reminds me of the George Carlin bit, about his dog Tippy: "Tippy committed suicide... well, we don't like to say it that way. We say 'he put himself to sleep'. But he ran out in from of a bakery truck, and that's f...in' suicide!"
You would be correct, if "XML by itself" were anything like what the article stated:
"pure" XML is unpleasant to read and write. The more explicit the nesting becomes in XML, the harder it is for people to make sense of it.
But why should they have to? Why, in the early 21st century, do programmers still insist that their tools have to draw exactly one glyph on the screen for each byte in their source files?
[...]
We believe that next-generation programming systems will most likely store source code as XML, rather than as flat text. Programmers will not see or edit XML tags; instead, their editors will render these models to create human-friendly views, just like Web browsers and other WYSIWYG editors.
I usually like what Joel says just enough to keep reading the essays. This is a pretty good one.
When I'm interviewing a recent college grad, though, I don't look at GPA as much as he does. Too often, high GPA indicates that a student figured out what the professor wanted to hear, and said it in the way the professor wanted to hear it. This is even true in the hard sciences. While you won't get a high GPA without having some grasp of the material, the difference between a 3.0 and a 4.0 is often how much you pander to the professor or TA.
But the seven points of advice are right on, especially "Learn to write" and "Get a good internship". To these, I would add "do something career-related outside your courseload".
There are many recent CS grads who did well in coursework, can write acceptably, and don't stink up the interview. I want one who has enough drive and intellectual curiosity to do something beyond what's required.
If you've got an industry-related blog or website, or you've written a couple of programs out of curiosity or for your own use, then you have a major advantage over your fellow students at interview time, at least if I'm doing the interviewing.
Actually, he's correct. The existence of early adopters doesn't mean that making changes to the system wouldn't help attract the laggards.
For a good introduction to this concept, see the book Crossing the Chasm.
Is there any data out there about per-capita profitability of corporations?
Yes... any research siteworth its salt will give you either explicit earnings-per-employee numbers, or else both the headcount and earnings numbers to calculate it yourself. E/E is a pretty common metric.
No, but I'd be more likely to trust the person who pioneered brain surgery than I would be to trust you, even if he when he did it, they didn't have the modern instrumentation they do now.
I'm not saying this is the case with GTA:SA, but this is something that's been discussed for years:
Alternately, prepare a version that almost works, but shows defects that cause unplayability, oh, about a third of the way through the game (assuming 40 hours of playability). Make the defects such that they could be attributed to either a bad copy or slightly-working DRM, rather than actual code errors.
Leak _that_, get people playing it (and liking it), and then they'll be more likely to buy it once the "failure" happens, if the "real" DRM is good enough to create a disincentive to actual copying.
It's really just a sneakier way to market a demo, because its "forbidden" nature makes it more irresistable, it allows the company to generate more press then "yet another demo" would, and also continues the story arc of "woe is us due to piracy".
[Incidentally, some homegrown DRM schemes in published games have done exactly this for actual illegal copies. When a copy is detected, it doesn't stop play immediately; it only makes it impossible to play the game through to completion, either by subtly "breaking" the gameplay or else by waiting until a specific point in the game and then letting the player know explicitly that the copy has been detected, and the game won't be finishable. Deferring notification of detection turns the game into a very effective crippled demo. If I recall correctly, Spyro or Spyro 2 did this, from reading a development team post-mortem, and I remember there was a game back in the black-and-white Mac days that would play normally for a time, then display the message "Piracy is a very serious offense." and exit.)
Of course. We've been doing it for decades. But you're not going to do it programming in VB. You're going to have to learn how a computer works.
Historically, most of the late 8-bit machines had graphical environments available, even if they were rather primitive. The C64 had GEOS, the Atari 800 had (I think) GEM, and the Apple IIc had ProDOS (although it naturally worked better on the 16-bit IIgs). So yes, they did it even back then.
[As an aside, eight bits gets you 65k, not 1MB, naïvely. You can do bank-switching to get, oh, 512k or so.]
But that's way more than enough. You can easily fit a TCP/IP stack in a few k. You can easily have a graphical environment that doesn't require a massive screenbuffer (IIRC, the C64 screen buffer took 1000 BYTES... less than 1K. It's all in the encoding...).
Modern 8-bit mavens have the excellent Contiki project, which gives you an astounding amount of functionality in an 8-bit package, including everything you mention.
Sales numbers don't lie. And it's fairly well publicized information in industry press. That doesn't mean that American mass market beer is better. Far from it. What it means is that European youth are getting almost as stupid as the American consumer.
I was with you until the last sentence.
It's not that European youth are getting stupider; it's that the corporations are now bringing the same well-planned, psychologically-backed advertising and marketing to Europe now. It's easy to say "stupid consumer", but you should see the amount of research that goes into predicting and modelling consumer behavior in order to build these campaigns.
It's not that the American or European consumers are inherently stupid. The people who create marketing campaigns have done enough research to find the weaknesses in the general population's psychological makeup (everyone has them), and are hitting it with everything they've got.
What scares me is that the politicians are noticing.
And boards take wood and either a wood plane, which takes stone blades or a carpentry shop for iron blades. And nails require iron, which requires iron ore and charcoal (God, no, not more charcoal). And canvas, linen, and rope require twine, thread, and twine respectively; twine requires tow and thread requires lint, both of which require rotten flax, which requires fresh flax, which requires flax seeds, which requires just a trip to the local school!
Whew.
So anyway...
This is the tent that Ehud built.
This is the construction site that stood in for the tent that Ehud build.
This is the canvas that covered the construction site that stood in for the tent that Ehud built.
This is the twine that I wove into canvas that covered the construction site that stood in for the tent that Ehud built.
This is the tow I spun into twine that I wove into canvas that covered the construction site that stood in for the tent that Ehud built.
This is the flax, all rotten and black, I hackled for tow that I spun into twine that I wove into canvas that covered the construction site that stood in for the tent that Ehud built.
This is the flax, rehpic silver I think, I rotted downriver, that I hackled for for tow that I spun into twine that I wove into canvas that covered the construction site that stood in for the tent that Ehud built.
These are the seeds, and the water in jugs, that grew into the flax that I rotted downriver that I hackled for tow that I pun into twine that I wove into canvas that covered the construction site that stood in for the tent that Ehud built.
This is the School of Art in O.E., that gave me the seeds, that grew into the flax that I rotted downriver that I hackled for tow that I pun into twine that I wove into canvas that covered the construction site that stood in for the tent that Ehud built.
Doh! Time for Tale 2...
The fact that it runs on .NET is less a problem than just its behavior. It's doing more, all the time (the live context-sensitive help is a major CPU sucker).
This isn't anything new, by the way... it's been heading down this road since Visual C++ 5. IMHO, Visual C++ 4.2 was the last "lean" IDE--5 and 6 were a major slowdown.
It's not nearly as big a deal as open-sourcing, say, Solaris, simply because it's not going to wreck a primary revenue stream for Java.
I've wondered for a while where Sun makes money from Java, particularly enough to recoup what they spend on it. I can't imagine it affects sales of Solaris boxes that much.
Based on the last few analyses I've seen, it appears that occurrences of real "new" viruses, meaning ones made from whole cloth that "advance the state of the art", as it were, haven't really been up that much.
What does seem to be up are "copycat" viruses--viruses that seem to be made from the new viruses. Either people are getting hold of the source to viruses, making a few modifications (to 'set their thumbprint' on them), and releasing them, or else just reverse-engineering the viruses. These "copycat" viruses do appear to be on the upswing. On the other hand, from all reports, the copycats tend to be poorly written and have flaws that either limit their spread or else limit their effectiveness.
The real innovators, though, are definitely getting better every year.
Is anyone doing that kind of analysis: rate of increase of "innovative", more dangerous viruses vs. random, garbage mods of existing ones? That would be an interesting glimpse into the state of the virus "industry".
Is it just me, or does that have the same ring as "fuel/air explosive-based cigarette lighter"?
The ones using Fedora do. The ones using Debian can't quite figure out what the fuss is all about.
"What part of 'apt dist-upgrade' don't you understand, Fedora?"
The broadcast media industry have a history of opposing technology that has a hair of a chance of affecting their signal--whether or not the science is on their side.
For example, the National Associaton of Broadcasters (and even National Public Radio) opposed extending licenses for low-power radio on the grounds that it would interfere with existing licensed signal--even though most people who really understand this know that it's not the case.
The real issue in these cases is usually not technical--it's about control over the airwaves.
I would have replied, but you pretty much said what I would have.
I dislike DST less than I dislike time zones, but it would be rather small collateral damage to make it obsolete as well.
I wasn't "going for" modpoints, but yes, I intended that line as humor.
:-)
And to the folks that corrected my terminology: yes, I know "Z" or "UTC" is the more correct term, but old habits die hard.
I'm an American, but I wish the world would run on GMT, you insensitive clod!
To me, time zones are evil. I wish I had a dollar for every time something at work went awry because of "Oh, you meant 3:00 _my time_?"
Kill all the timezones, that's the first thing we'll do. And while you're at it, abolish AM and PM as well. I'd much rather make the minor mental adjustment that I now wake up at 11:00 instead of 6:00, than have to continually make adjustments all day when I'm talking to people across the country or elsewhere in the world.
That's one reason I like the British so much. They're one of the only countries in the world who have dropped the parochial "local time" nonsense and switched to GMT.