... that they will find the right palms to grease in a sclerotocracy, considering they succeeded in essentially purchasing ISO back in the day. If you want a definition of an afer-me-the-flood attitude, here you have it.
[...] People who produce content do have some right to keep other people from stealing it. [...]
... aaand there you have the buy-in. Stating opinion as fact. The above statement may be a valid interpretation of the law in many cases and in many jurisdictions - but whether people who make public performances have an ethical right to all aspects of the performance is very much an open question. For me it's a question of living by the sword / dying by the sword. If you want your performance to be in any way protected, then maybe, just maybe, you shouldn't perform it in the open, unprotected public. And if you do, you will have to expect creative minds to take your idea and run with it.
[...] now manufacturers are discovering that simply making a good tablet does not guarantee that it will sell [...]
Maybe they should try making a good product before resorting to statements like these.
[...] to the chagrin of Motorola and its Xoom product [...]
The problem with the Xoom is not that it doesn't have a chain of dedicated stores behind it, but that it isn't finished. It's half-baked goods, that costs significantly more than its main competitor, and can't do half the stuff. ... it does Flash - just not quite yet. ... it does 32 GB of storage - just not quite yet. And when it does, the user has to spend another 70-100 USD to upgrade it. It doesn't do 64 GB of storage, at any price. ... it charges nice and quickly - but you have to have your power supply with you at all times. It doesn't charge over USB at any speed.
It might have competed with the original iPad - it's about as thick and heavy - but that boat has sailed.
Knock off half the price, and people might be willing to put up with an OS that's basically just come out of beta.
[...] it is plain for all to see that Apple's secret weapon is their network of dedicated Apple stores worldwide [...]
Hm. Small lesson in rhetoric: If someone says "it's plain to see", they are probably trying to gloss over the fact that it's no such thing.
[...] it might remain to be an iPad market. But not because they did not build a good product [...]
Nope - the not building a good product is pretty much it. Try again, and try to finish it this time before putting it on the market.
Hum... no. The main difference is that Apple locks down their phones, and then provides timely updates. Motorola locks down their phones, and then provides updates for a minority of devices, for a minority of users (if you're outside the US you basically don't get any), and late.
My business is just me (technically) plus a few contractors. At what point are we and our interests no longer individuals?
You could be on your own, and you and your business would already be separate. The business is a separate legal entity, a "legal person" if you will. You are an agent of the business. If you don't understand that dichotomy, then you are doomed to be frustrated and/or bewildered rather often in the course of your work. Either that or you're a sociopath who actually enjoys telling people what to do:)
Does it not make a difference that in low-level, prophylactic use, the bacteria cultures are not killed outright, whereas in regular use, bacteria cultures are eradicated? So even if more antibiotics are used today in the EU, they actually kill the given strain, rather inadvertently strengthen it?
... they won't only have to continue to teach users what the "any key" is, now they can teach generations of users how to put batteries in, all over again.
Remember, kids: it *always* a good thing if there's more than one way to do something; indeed, the more ways there is to do something, the better (*).
I always appreciate devices that treat me like an idiot, and attempt to do my thinking for me. I'm looking forward to my first device that is missing the [+] and [-] signs in the battery bay, because hey, it says there right on the box that I threw away half a year ago that the batteries can go in any which way. Duh.
Okay, this is probably going to come across a a little weird. I contend that the main thing that MS got wrong with the Kin is the name. You cannot call a device "Kin" without some kind of blowback. "Kin" is a basic anglo-saxon word that essentially has no etymology - it just is. The dreaded four-letter words fall into this category, as do many other very basic words such as water, earth, grass, fire, and so on. Except that "kin" does, as MS correctly identified, have a social connotation. "Kin" is people you're related to by blood or common interest - and by "common interest" I mean savages fighting for the same cause, and not people who like the same kind of literature as you do.
Now - call a device "Kin", and you are basically claiming the you can use it to identify who in "kin" to you. And that is plain too powerful. When I first came across this device the main part of my reaction was to be slightly upset at MS' attempt to co-opt this rather neat word. And that's why I say weird above: basically I'm saying they evoked a concept too powerful for this or any gadget.
So: They should have called it the "Microsoft Social Management Device" or something similarly inane. Then it would have been accepted more as "good first fling, looking forward where they're going to take this", rather than "this is what they want to sell us as the epitome of social interaction? You have *got* to be kidding me". Unfinished devices are fine; the first iPhone didn't have copy-paste, and that was OK.
Finally: I would have liked to like the device. A Blackberry keyboard on a social device? Cool. Perfect present for your 11-year-old niece. Welcome to the social; finally. Backed by a company that will maintain it for years to co... oop, where'd it go?
I think a -1 (fail) would be better than just a plain -1 (wrong). It's like, I dunno, claiming Poland has no coast or something similarly insane. But thank you for the heads-up.
There are two points I take exception to: (1) The title of this post, which should read "I Took a Big Vendor To Small Claims and Won". The product isn't named. The OS isn't named. The instructions from tech support aren't given. All it really says is "Oh yay it isn't easy and you have to be precise." You have to bring ample evidence to court and make yourself aware of how it will be interpreted? Oh my. (2) The penultimate sentence: "Needless to say, I have not bought any other Adobe products. Even opening a PDF makes me nervous!" Now I'm not exactly the grand proselytizer of Adobe products - but I am aware that a large number of people are using their products professionally day in day out. This blanket statement implying that "Adobe == shit" just casts, to me, a rather dark shadow on the not-being-a-lame-brain bit further up.
Not going into all the rest, but IBM's "foray"? Just off the top of my head, IBM more or less invented the "Personal Computer" as such, as the smaller version of mainframes and minicomputers (hence the term "microcomputer". Note: Altair, Apple IIe, etc. were "hobbyist/home computers" in their day). Microsoft originally supplied exclusively to IBM, and Intel was a spin-off, too. And this is consistent with IBM's strategy throughout the last decades: as soon as something looks as if it's heading in the direction of becoming a commodity, they drop it. Hard disks, for example. And they always do it early. IBM drops PCs - enter Dell; IBM drops hard disks - enter SSDs; always quite a few years down the line. IBM appears not the be interested in playing the margin game with n different competitors. OK, now back to the rest: bullshit. Disregarding core competencies is a necessary part of progress. The Newton was closer to Apple's core competence that the iPod, when they came out, and we know which failed and which succeeded. Or the iPhone - damn, was that a saturated market when they started out, never having built a phone before.
... engineering is based on science. Science is all about observation, i.e., how things play out when left well alone. Engineering is all about stacking the odds, i.e., setting things up in such a way that they play out to be "useful" - play out according to the rules observed during the "science" stage.
Now to nuclear fusion: there are just two types of nuclear fusion that have been observed by humans that result in a net output of energy: stars, and hydrogen bombs. The first is pure science, no engineering involved. And kind of hard to reproduce, as the required heat and pressure has the tendency to turn into plasma anything that is close, for example a vessel. Indeed, this is what happens in the "bomb" thing - very useful, but of equally limited applicability.
Most of the fruits of engineering are devices that do not occur in nature (although they universally follow the rules of nature). For example: Mix gasoline vapour and air, chuck a spark through it, and you get a net energy output. Do this in a confined space, and you get an explosion. Do this in a rather intricately designed confined space that can expand (and re-contract) within well-defined parameters, and you get an internal combustion engine (well... skipping a few steps there). This is all according to the rules of nature - but that doesn't mean that you can expect to find an internal combustion engine that just fell into place anywhere in the universe.
As for nuclear fusion: although only the "hot" variant has been observed in nature up until now, that doesn't mean that if there is a cold variant, that it will be anything that is immediately obvious. Indeed, if such a beast be born, it will be "obvious" only in retrospect. Initially, it is likely to be some mechanism based on some fringe effect that has been observed in nature, but hasn't found application in any machine yet.
And any upside would be quite revolutionary - so to anyone who's still seriously tinkering with this tuff even after the train wreck that was Pons and Fleischmann - bully to you.
I use Notes every day... indeed, I develop in Notes. So, mea culpa.
I do see two main problems with Notes: (1) It's unconventional, especially the user interface. (2) It's easy to develop stuff in Notes
The main root cause for (1) is that it was very early if not first at quite a few things. For example the "brackets" (top left, bottom right) that denote a text-entry field. No-one else uses these, but NO-ONE. But at the time they were invented, you couldn't just look at HTML forms and make it look the same, because they didn't exist yet. So they came up with something on their own, and it wasn't good enough to be copied by everyone else - but they were stuck with it.
The main problem with (2) is that since it's so easy, everyone is a Notes developer. Take for example the spectrum of web pages. It's wide: everything from "weee-I-just-discovered-Frontpage-OMG-background-images!", to super clean XHTML-with-CSS that take into account that some users want to use Lynx or screen readers. The spectrum in Notes is wider. So if some Notes apps are bad - blame the IT department for hosting them, much like a bad intranet page - but don't blame the platform.
OK, I severely doubt that. AFAIK, it hasn't happened yet that someone has fired up their pico-dremel, dipped it in a pool of amino acids, and spun a new life form. And if that were the case, that particular item would be the headline-cum-Nobel-prize, and not anything specific you could actually do with it.
So... - Maybe it was bred. Perhaps using something sexy like DNA splicing. - More likely it was newly discovered. - Most likely, it was identified from one of the nigh endless lists of prior discoveries of beasties that might do something useful, and refined by breeding.
OK, so not created.
Then, going on, it all sounds rather silver bullety. So just some sane basics:
- It's a method for gathering sunlight, like many others. As stated between the lines of TFA, there is a certain amount of sunlight that might be gathered that makes it through the atmosphere and hits earth. This is a good thing... but considering the amount of energy we as a species use today, mainly in form of oil, sunlight is limited. Or put differently: there's no way we're going to bait-and-switch the sun into doing the job oil does today.
- It's in a lab. A lab is in general a very clean place. The great outside, on the other hand, is a murderous place. Throughout the biosphere, from 11km down to about 6km up, any niche that any beasty might inhabit is fought over, and the winner takes the lion's share. So nice as it is that a beasty has been identified that might be the methadone for our oil, it's going to take same maintenance work for it to thrive. Work... that is, energy. I'm not saying it's impossible, it just cuts into the efficiency. And at this point, no-one can tell us by how much. Think giant vats of goo that need to be kept lab-clean not to be taken over by the next-better contestant for the given yummy environmental niche. Think lots of people / robots / driving around, using lots of energy maintaining the vats.
Anyhow. Good news, good job, my car is still running on refined crude until further notice. Wake me up when this stuff is at the pumps at two bucks a gallon.
[...] Sure in the US most of these diseases are not going to kill your kid (unless they're born prematurely), but outside the US these childhood diseases are much more serious. [...]
Dude... you need to get outside the US once. It wouldn't, you know, kill you or anything.
Wouldn't they get a clue if you walked into their main office breathing and all?
Occam's razor has a bureaucratic counterpart: "All things being equal, the solution that means I don't have to do any extra work tends to be the best one."
>> >> According to the article, Google does an incomplete job of anonymizing this data while Microsoft does not record IP addresses for anonymous search.
>> Unless Microsoft is just lying. How can they be trusted, with their track record?
Basically: "Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity".... you know... unless it's Microsoft;)
Slashdot Mirror
... that they will find the right palms to grease in a sclerotocracy, considering they succeeded in essentially purchasing ISO back in the day. If you want a definition of an afer-me-the-flood attitude, here you have it.
... he's about the only person alive who could be a believable successor to Steve Jobs. So he's got that going for him :)
[...] People who produce content do have some right to keep other people from stealing it. [...]
... aaand there you have the buy-in. Stating opinion as fact. The above statement may be a valid interpretation of the law in many cases and in many jurisdictions - but whether people who make public performances have an ethical right to all aspects of the performance is very much an open question. For me it's a question of living by the sword / dying by the sword. If you want your performance to be in any way protected, then maybe, just maybe, you shouldn't perform it in the open, unprotected public. And if you do, you will have to expect creative minds to take your idea and run with it.
... protesters don't have sunglasses? Well that's all right then.
Microsoft killed the start button because Mac OS doesn't have one, and they're successful amirite? The wonder is that it took them so long.
[...] now manufacturers are discovering that simply making a good tablet does not guarantee that it will sell [...]
... it does Flash - just not quite yet.
... it does 32 GB of storage - just not quite yet. And when it does, the user has to spend another 70-100 USD to upgrade it. It doesn't do 64 GB of storage, at any price.
... it charges nice and quickly - but you have to have your power supply with you at all times. It doesn't charge over USB at any speed.
Maybe they should try making a good product before resorting to statements like these.
[...] to the chagrin of Motorola and its Xoom product [...]
The problem with the Xoom is not that it doesn't have a chain of dedicated stores behind it, but that it isn't finished. It's half-baked goods, that costs significantly more than its main competitor, and can't do half the stuff.
It might have competed with the original iPad - it's about as thick and heavy - but that boat has sailed.
Knock off half the price, and people might be willing to put up with an OS that's basically just come out of beta.
[...] it is plain for all to see that Apple's secret weapon is their network of dedicated Apple stores worldwide [...]
Hm. Small lesson in rhetoric: If someone says "it's plain to see", they are probably trying to gloss over the fact that it's no such thing.
[...] it might remain to be an iPad market. But not because they did not build a good product [...]
Nope - the not building a good product is pretty much it. Try again, and try to finish it this time before putting it on the market.
Apple have this exact attitude [...]
Hum ... no. The main difference is that Apple locks down their phones, and then provides timely updates. Motorola locks down their phones, and then provides updates for a minority of devices, for a minority of users (if you're outside the US you basically don't get any), and late.
Couldn't they at least have come up with a decent car metaphor, if they're going to mistake the map for the terrain anyway?
My business is just me (technically) plus a few contractors. At what point are we and our interests no longer individuals?
:)
You could be on your own, and you and your business would already be separate. The business is a separate legal entity, a "legal person" if you will. You are an agent of the business. If you don't understand that dichotomy, then you are doomed to be frustrated and/or bewildered rather often in the course of your work. Either that or you're a sociopath who actually enjoys telling people what to do
Does it not make a difference that in low-level, prophylactic use, the bacteria cultures are not killed outright, whereas in regular use, bacteria cultures are eradicated? So even if more antibiotics are used today in the EU, they actually kill the given strain, rather inadvertently strengthen it?
... they won't only have to continue to teach users what the "any key" is, now they can teach generations of users how to put batteries in, all over again.
Remember, kids: it *always* a good thing if there's more than one way to do something; indeed, the more ways there is to do something, the better (*).
I always appreciate devices that treat me like an idiot, and attempt to do my thinking for me. I'm looking forward to my first device that is missing the [+] and [-] signs in the battery bay, because hey, it says there right on the box that I threw away half a year ago that the batteries can go in any which way. Duh.
(*) alert: sarcasm
Okay, this is probably going to come across a a little weird. I contend that the main thing that MS got wrong with the Kin is the name. You cannot call a device "Kin" without some kind of blowback. "Kin" is a basic anglo-saxon word that essentially has no etymology - it just is. The dreaded four-letter words fall into this category, as do many other very basic words such as water, earth, grass, fire, and so on. Except that "kin" does, as MS correctly identified, have a social connotation. "Kin" is people you're related to by blood or common interest - and by "common interest" I mean savages fighting for the same cause, and not people who like the same kind of literature as you do.
Now - call a device "Kin", and you are basically claiming the you can use it to identify who in "kin" to you. And that is plain too powerful. When I first came across this device the main part of my reaction was to be slightly upset at MS' attempt to co-opt this rather neat word. And that's why I say weird above: basically I'm saying they evoked a concept too powerful for this or any gadget.
So: They should have called it the "Microsoft Social Management Device" or something similarly inane. Then it would have been accepted more as "good first fling, looking forward where they're going to take this", rather than "this is what they want to sell us as the epitome of social interaction? You have *got* to be kidding me". Unfinished devices are fine; the first iPhone didn't have copy-paste, and that was OK.
Finally: I would have liked to like the device. A Blackberry keyboard on a social device? Cool. Perfect present for your 11-year-old niece. Welcome to the social; finally. Backed by a company that will maintain it for years to co... oop, where'd it go?
I think a -1 (fail) would be better than just a plain -1 (wrong). It's like, I dunno, claiming Poland has no coast or something similarly insane. But thank you for the heads-up.
Ouch. I need to lay off ... something, and improve my reading skills. Ta for the heads-up.
Caffeine takes up nearly 100 million gigabytes of storage in one database
A million gigabytes is what we call a petabyte.
And by "we" you mean "us who don't mind being off by a factor of 100 or so"?
There are two points I take exception to:
(1) The title of this post, which should read "I Took a Big Vendor To Small Claims and Won". The product isn't named. The OS isn't named. The instructions from tech support aren't given. All it really says is "Oh yay it isn't easy and you have to be precise." You have to bring ample evidence to court and make yourself aware of how it will be interpreted? Oh my.
(2) The penultimate sentence: "Needless to say, I have not bought any other Adobe products. Even opening a PDF makes me nervous!" Now I'm not exactly the grand proselytizer of Adobe products - but I am aware that a large number of people are using their products professionally day in day out. This blanket statement implying that "Adobe == shit" just casts, to me, a rather dark shadow on the not-being-a-lame-brain bit further up.
Not going into all the rest, but IBM's "foray"? Just off the top of my head, IBM more or less invented the "Personal Computer" as such, as the smaller version of mainframes and minicomputers (hence the term "microcomputer". Note: Altair, Apple IIe, etc. were "hobbyist/home computers" in their day). Microsoft originally supplied exclusively to IBM, and Intel was a spin-off, too. And this is consistent with IBM's strategy throughout the last decades: as soon as something looks as if it's heading in the direction of becoming a commodity, they drop it. Hard disks, for example. And they always do it early. IBM drops PCs - enter Dell; IBM drops hard disks - enter SSDs; always quite a few years down the line. IBM appears not the be interested in playing the margin game with n different competitors.
OK, now back to the rest: bullshit. Disregarding core competencies is a necessary part of progress. The Newton was closer to Apple's core competence that the iPod, when they came out, and we know which failed and which succeeded. Or the iPhone - damn, was that a saturated market when they started out, never having built a phone before.
... now we'll have robots lording over us from random vertical surfaces?
I, for one, am not sure I welcome the idea.
... engineering is based on science.
... skipping a few steps there). This is all according to the rules of nature - but that doesn't mean that you can expect to find an internal combustion engine that just fell into place anywhere in the universe.
Science is all about observation, i.e., how things play out when left well alone.
Engineering is all about stacking the odds, i.e., setting things up in such a way that they play out to be "useful" - play out according to the rules observed during the "science" stage.
Now to nuclear fusion: there are just two types of nuclear fusion that have been observed by humans that result in a net output of energy: stars, and hydrogen bombs.
The first is pure science, no engineering involved. And kind of hard to reproduce, as the required heat and pressure has the tendency to turn into plasma anything that is close, for example a vessel. Indeed, this is what happens in the "bomb" thing - very useful, but of equally limited applicability.
Most of the fruits of engineering are devices that do not occur in nature (although they universally follow the rules of nature). For example: Mix gasoline vapour and air, chuck a spark through it, and you get a net energy output. Do this in a confined space, and you get an explosion. Do this in a rather intricately designed confined space that can expand (and re-contract) within well-defined parameters, and you get an internal combustion engine (well
As for nuclear fusion: although only the "hot" variant has been observed in nature up until now, that doesn't mean that if there is a cold variant, that it will be anything that is immediately obvious. Indeed, if such a beast be born, it will be "obvious" only in retrospect. Initially, it is likely to be some mechanism based on some fringe effect that has been observed in nature, but hasn't found application in any machine yet.
And any upside would be quite revolutionary - so to anyone who's still seriously tinkering with this tuff even after the train wreck that was Pons and Fleischmann - bully to you.
I use Notes every day ... indeed, I develop in Notes. So, mea culpa.
I do see two main problems with Notes:
(1) It's unconventional, especially the user interface.
(2) It's easy to develop stuff in Notes
The main root cause for (1) is that it was very early if not first at quite a few things. For example the "brackets" (top left, bottom right) that denote a text-entry field. No-one else uses these, but NO-ONE. But at the time they were invented, you couldn't just look at HTML forms and make it look the same, because they didn't exist yet. So they came up with something on their own, and it wasn't good enough to be copied by everyone else - but they were stuck with it.
The main problem with (2) is that since it's so easy, everyone is a Notes developer. Take for example the spectrum of web pages. It's wide: everything from "weee-I-just-discovered-Frontpage-OMG-background-images!", to super clean XHTML-with-CSS that take into account that some users want to use Lynx or screen readers. The spectrum in Notes is wider. So if some Notes apps are bad - blame the IT department for hosting them, much like a bad intranet page - but don't blame the platform.
Most likely, it was identified from [...] prior discoveries [...] and refined by breeding [...] using something sexy like DNA splicing
...
... compared to
[...] made the new cyanobacteria [...] by giving them a set of [...] genes from [...] Acetobacter xylinum [...]
Cool. That's the first time I didn't RTFA and got it spot-on anyway.
Starts out well ...
...
... but considering the amount of energy we as a species use today, mainly in form of oil, sunlight is limited. Or put differently: there's no way we're going to bait-and-switch the sun into doing the job oil does today.
... that is, energy. I'm not saying it's impossible, it just cuts into the efficiency. And at this point, no-one can tell us by how much. Think giant vats of goo that need to be kept lab-clean not to be taken over by the next-better contestant for the given yummy environmental niche. Think lots of people / robots / driving around, using lots of energy maintaining the vats.
AUSTIN, Texas -- A newly created microbe [...]
OK, I severely doubt that. AFAIK, it hasn't happened yet that someone has fired up their pico-dremel, dipped it in a pool of amino acids, and spun a new life form. And if that were the case, that particular item would be the headline-cum-Nobel-prize, and not anything specific you could actually do with it.
So
- Maybe it was bred. Perhaps using something sexy like DNA splicing.
- More likely it was newly discovered.
- Most likely, it was identified from one of the nigh endless lists of prior discoveries of beasties that might do something useful, and refined by breeding.
OK, so not created.
Then, going on, it all sounds rather silver bullety. So just some sane basics:
- It's a method for gathering sunlight, like many others. As stated between the lines of TFA, there is a certain amount of sunlight that might be gathered that makes it through the atmosphere and hits earth. This is a good thing
- It's in a lab. A lab is in general a very clean place. The great outside, on the other hand, is a murderous place. Throughout the biosphere, from 11km down to about 6km up, any niche that any beasty might inhabit is fought over, and the winner takes the lion's share. So nice as it is that a beasty has been identified that might be the methadone for our oil, it's going to take same maintenance work for it to thrive. Work
Anyhow. Good news, good job, my car is still running on refined crude until further notice. Wake me up when this stuff is at the pumps at two bucks a gallon.
[no, I'm always this grumpy, thanks for asking]
[...] Sure in the US most of these diseases are not going to kill your kid (unless they're born prematurely), but outside the US these childhood diseases are much more serious. [...]
... you need to get outside the US once. It wouldn't, you know, kill you or anything.
Dude
Wouldn't they get a clue if you walked into their main office breathing and all?
Occam's razor has a bureaucratic counterpart: "All things being equal, the solution that means I don't have to do any extra work tends to be the best one."
You're still dead, friend.
>> >> According to the article, Google does an incomplete job of anonymizing this data while Microsoft does not record IP addresses for anonymous search.
... you know ... unless it's Microsoft ;)
>> Unless Microsoft is just lying. How can they be trusted, with their track record?
Basically: "Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity".