Nothing of the kind. The Baroque Cycle is merely needlessly long, poorly plotted, a disingenuous mixture of research and complete fabrication, and worst of all, it is deadly, deadly dull. Stephenson has had some successes but this isn't one of them.
Ah. OK, so in the sense that Pelosi is from San Francisco, she's a left-wing politician from a liberal city. I interpreted your comment to mean that San Francisco politicians have been for these policies, and Nancy Pelosi has never held any office in the city or county of San Francisco. I don't see Nancy Pelosi as being particularly representative of San Francisco politics, myself -- she's merely the only Democratic candidate we have to choose from come election time. She knows how to play the game.
I'd buy that argument, except the left-wing politicians from liberal cities like San Francisco have been supporting this stuff also
Care to support that claim? I don't recall any SF officials speaking out in favor of increased security measures at airports, but last I heard, city politicians didn't have jurisdiction over interstate travel, so it wouldn't really matter whether they "supported this stuff" or not.
Personally I'm making due with my android phone and awaiting the color readers (Hanvon, etc) as I'm really interested in what this could do for the graphic novel/comic industry. For too long it's been dominated by large publishers.
Even the largest publishers in the U.S. comics industry cannot be called "large," unless you mean they are profitable because they are able to spin their characters into movie, TV, and merchandising tie-ins. But comics sales have been declining for at least 20 years, which has given plenty of small publishers opportunities to succeed in the same way as the Disney- or Warner-owned ones (on a relative scale). Look at Scott Pilgrim, Whiteout, 30 Days of Night, etc.
You're an idiot. Low circulation = no one will buy ads in your rag. Circulation numbers and demographic data are the entire business model for magazines.
And where do you think those circulations numbers come from?
Here's a news flash for ya: The majority of magazines that are sold on newsstands are sold on a returnable basis. That is, you ship the retailer a certain number of copies, and if the retailer doesn't sell the copies, it can return them for a refund (or without paying for them in the first place).
Furthermore, because most magazine content is timely, magazine publishers don't really want those unsold copies back (what are they going, to do, sell them three months from now?). So usually how you "return" magazines is you tear the covers off, throw the rest of the magazines in the trash, and just send the covers back to prove that you've returned them (saving some postage). So overall, figuring out how many copies are sold from newsstand sales takes some time, and even then is highly vulnerable to fraud. So most magazines don't really do it -- at least, not with any accuracy.
Circulation numbers are usually calculated from how many magazines the publisher printed, with some adjustments for how many copies are returned, but by and large the most accurate portion of the figure comes from subscription sales -- not newsstand sales.
Furthermore, circulation numbers and demographic data are closely related. Circulation costs money. For some magazines, it occasionally makes sense to reduce circulation -- that's right, out of the blue the magazine says "we used to sell 210,000 copies, now we sell 175,000" -- but to push the demographics as a way to increase ad rates. So the magazine says, "yes, we only sell 175,000 copies, but all of those 175,000 subscribers are exactly the people you want to reach as an advertiser." In other words, the magazine sells fewer copies but charges more for advertising than a competing magazine that sells more copies.
Bottom line: For Apple to refuse to share demographic information with magazine publishers pretty much cuts the business model off at the knees. The actual sales, as "from a kiosk," are far less important than building the demographic relationship with the buyer.
In the Baroque Cycle, the background story is all about a special, heavy form of gold with magical powers.
Amazing that I slogged my way through 900 pages of the Baroque Cycle before deciding I couldn't take any more, and yet I still have no clue about this background story you mention.
Thankfully Anathem was not quite as unbearable, if no less overbearing.
I've played around with it, and my impression is that it is indeed "pretty good," but not necessarily any better than Google Docs or an adequate replacement for the way people do things now.
One thing that bothered me that I don't think I was adequately able to articulate in the article is that it just doesn't feel as good to be doing all my work "in the cloud," i.e. over an Internet connection, as doing it the old-fashioned way. Sure, you can save a document directly to your SharePoint site from within Microsoft Word. But there's no kind of feedback that acknowledges "hey, I'm attempting to save this over the Internet, and anything could happen between here and the server, so sit tight and we'll try to make this work." Instead it just acts like it's the same thing as saving to your local drive, or even to a local server, which it's not. So every now and then I'd experience some unexplained delay and I'd find myself going to the SharePoint site and refreshing things in my browser to make sure everything worked right. And because I was using the same software I'd use to do things "the old-fashioned way," I kept asking myself, "Why do I have to do this on the stupid 'cloud'? Why can't I just save this to my drive and then copy my final draft to the server?" (Of course you can, but then using a "cloud solution" starts to have diminishing returns.)
I think the biggest advantage of Office 365, like BPOS before it, is not having to maintain your own Exchange server. SharePoint can be pretty useful too, but it seems to me that the learning curve required to get it into a form that your company can actually use productively is pretty high. And as far as using the Web-based versions of the Office apps, I I don't rate them very highly at all; they certainly aren't much better than Google Docs, unless you really, really need a way to view complex Office documents on the Web (as opposed to using Office).
I'm not sure in what sense you mean Saudi Arabia is "vulnerable"... certainly it would be an attractive prize. But for the last few years, Saudi Arabia has ranked third in the world in defense spending as a percentage of GDP, below only Jordan and Oman. In 2007 it spend $35 billion, in 2008 it spent $38 billion. In both years, that was at least twice the defense budget of Israel -- and compared to Israel it has more army regulars but zero reserves, so the money isn't going to salaries. Saudi Arabia might still be vulnerable, but it's hardly toothless, even without nukes.
It's not as if this type of weapon is without precedent. Shrapnel shells were used as anti-personnel weapons as far back as the War of 1812. What's innovative about this weapon is more its portability and accuracy than its method of operation.
Then again, if you and I have a business relationship (the closest thing to a diplomatic relationship that two individuals are likely to have), I probably don't give a crap what you say about me behind my back, so long as you're earnest and respectful to my face. If I know that you can't personally stand me but that you always strive to appear respectful, it shows that I wield power in the relationship.
If that's true then I'd love to see an example of how the U.S. government is fulfilling its responsibilities.
Some guy gets on a plane with a bomb strapped to his body and we only find out about it when he detonates it, injuring no one but himself. Result? The U.S. government takes away more of our privacy and dignity and arguably withdraws freedoms from every citizen, in order to make the claim that it is stopping attacks on U.S. citizens.
Meanwhile, somewhere at an ATM in Oakland, California, a man is hit on the head with an aluminum baseball bat and two young men walk away with his money, ID, and cell phone. The man later dies of complications due to skull fracture. Where was the U.S. government?
Actually, the bigger problem seems to be management up the board. Every article I've read about Microsoft's business culture seems to suggest that on some teams there's a manager for every three employees. An org chart that deep all but guarantees productivity on the individual level will be stifled and good ideas from the lower levels will never percolate up into actual business strategy.
Fry and Laurie co-starred in a sketch comedy show called A Bit of Fry and Laurie, which I thought was brilliant. Particularly in the later seasons they did some wickedly weird gags, somewhere on the Monty Python scale of surrealism combined with brainy wit. I don't know if it's available on DVD in the United States, but you know, it's out there...
I am amazed at how - once again - Novell blundered and lost the opportunity to capitalize on something.
If anything good comes of this it will be because Attachmate has the balls to do what Novell itself never seemed to be able to do: jettison its godawful management and put someone in place who knows what to do with Novell's products.
They might, but if they haven't been seeing the writing on the wall for years they're idiots. If Microsoft can polish up Active Directory with some Novell IP it would only sweeten the pot for the remaining hold-outs, whose phone numbers now all go into Microsoft's little black book as part of the deal, no doubt.
The consensus then was that when the suits read a back cover ad declaring this the 'year of Windows', and the t-shirts get free development tools and the promise of write-once-run-everywhere, even though running your server tools on the client was never a requirement, then NetWare was doomed.
I've got it. We'll run a back-cover ad on all the magazines declaring this the 'year of desktop Linux.'
I noticed that too. Samsung is, of course, the first company to go running after the iPad's market with its Galaxy tablets. So Samsung rep says everybody wants tablets...gotcha.
Yes, I've asked business people about this, and I've gotten funny looks, because "everyone knows" that Microsoft is part of IBM. If you try going into an explanation of why this isn't technically true, you merely find yourself dismissed as a geek trying to confuse them with Too Much Information. They don't need to know the details of the arrangement; they just know that "computer" and "IBM machine" are and always have been synonyms, and the small ones run Microsoft software, so Microsoft is IBM's small-computer software developer.
Which business people have you been talking to? Montgomery Burns?
Actually, scratch that. Montgomery Burns would associate IBM with OS/360 and AS/400. You, on the other hand, appear to have been talking to someone who got trapped in a cave sometime around 1983 and only emerged last year.
FWIW, IBM hasn't made PCs or laptops since 2005 at least, and even then they were losing money on the PC business hand over fist. Maybe you're thinking of Compaq? (They're part of HP now, BTW.)
Yeah but what "market" are we talking about here? I've walked around a lot of enterprises and I haven't seen many tablets, Windows or otherwise. My understanding has always been that except for individual enthusiasts, the markets (plural) for Windows Tablets have traditionally been verticals -- healthcare, oil and gas, things like that. These aren't Compaq tablets that you order from Tiger Direct, either; they tend to be purpose-built, ruggedized devices. I don't really see the iPad worming its way into those markets with any great speed.
And even if iPad has "stolen the entire market" -- a statement I choose to interpret as saying that people who have bought iPads are happy with them and have no plans to switch to something else -- how big is that market really? I hear vague statements about iPad sales. I live in the City of San Francisco and I've maybe seen 2-3 iPads out in the wild. Maybe most people keep theirs at home, I don't know -- but you would think that if mobility is such a big factor in why people are buying these things, I'd see more of them around town. By comparison, I feel safe to assume that just about every single person I pass on the street has access to a laptop, or at the very least a desktop PC or Mac. The iPad's true market presence does not seem very significant by comparison.
obviously I was talking about equality of chances and not about relevance, as you can see in the text that you quoted from me. But never mind, you are 4 insightful but you didn't understood your own quote. Thanks moders!
Where did I use the word "relevance"? What I said was that we live in the real world and you do not have equality of chances. You don't get to win the World Series just because you decide to form a baseball team. You don't get top ranking in Google just because you start a Web page. You strike me as one of these small-time Web opportunists who spends his whole day wringing his hands about SEO and how Google is robbing you of your livelihood. Google -- and the world -- doesn't owe you anything.
Fact: Google expanded rapidly also because they claim that every website is equal, you all have a chance just make a good website.
I don't recall Google ever suggesting that every Web site is equal. In fact, the whole point of the PageRank algorithm is that every site is not equal, and most people are going to want to go to the site that everybody else goes to. This puts an automatic bias toward established players -- if someone else has the best XYZ site today, and you start a "good" XYZ site, you have very little chance of bumping the other guy's site out of first place. Your site will have to be significantly better than the other guy's site, which is kind of how it works in real life, most of the time.
As far as competing directly with Google, Google's services are largely information-based. The weather, medical advice, stock prices... these are the kind of things a reference librarian could point you to, which are arguably the sort of things that a good information search engine should provide. If all your site is providing is factoids that can be screen scraped from someone else's site (like the National Weather Service), then you're doing it wrong, and you shouldn't expect to get top ranking on Google anyway.
And it's worth noting that if I go to Google.com, type in "cancer" and click "I'm Feeling Lucky," the page that comes up is... the American Cancer Society. Not Google Health. If I do the same for "sore throat" I get MedicineNet.com. If I do it for "AAPL" I get Yahoo Finance (no joke, try it).
On the other hand, people who specifically ask for a page of search results from a specific search engine shouldn't be surprised if the search engine tries to offer information instead of just URLs. It's just part of the ongoing evolution of what a search engine can/should be.
Slashdot Mirror
Nothing of the kind. The Baroque Cycle is merely needlessly long, poorly plotted, a disingenuous mixture of research and complete fabrication, and worst of all, it is deadly, deadly dull. Stephenson has had some successes but this isn't one of them.
Is there an English translation of those names? I can understand most of them, but Frankrik?
It's not that hard. Frankrike = the nation of the Franks, i.e. France.
Ah. OK, so in the sense that Pelosi is from San Francisco, she's a left-wing politician from a liberal city. I interpreted your comment to mean that San Francisco politicians have been for these policies, and Nancy Pelosi has never held any office in the city or county of San Francisco. I don't see Nancy Pelosi as being particularly representative of San Francisco politics, myself -- she's merely the only Democratic candidate we have to choose from come election time. She knows how to play the game.
I'd buy that argument, except the left-wing politicians from liberal cities like San Francisco have been supporting this stuff also
Care to support that claim? I don't recall any SF officials speaking out in favor of increased security measures at airports, but last I heard, city politicians didn't have jurisdiction over interstate travel, so it wouldn't really matter whether they "supported this stuff" or not.
And you're not reading the papers. Michael Chertoff's consulting company, the Chertoff Group, represents OSI Systems.
Personally I'm making due with my android phone and awaiting the color readers (Hanvon, etc) as I'm really interested in what this could do for the graphic novel/comic industry. For too long it's been dominated by large publishers.
Even the largest publishers in the U.S. comics industry cannot be called "large," unless you mean they are profitable because they are able to spin their characters into movie, TV, and merchandising tie-ins. But comics sales have been declining for at least 20 years, which has given plenty of small publishers opportunities to succeed in the same way as the Disney- or Warner-owned ones (on a relative scale). Look at Scott Pilgrim, Whiteout, 30 Days of Night, etc.
You're an idiot.
Low circulation = no one will buy ads in your rag.
Circulation numbers and demographic data are the entire business model for magazines.
And where do you think those circulations numbers come from?
Here's a news flash for ya: The majority of magazines that are sold on newsstands are sold on a returnable basis. That is, you ship the retailer a certain number of copies, and if the retailer doesn't sell the copies, it can return them for a refund (or without paying for them in the first place).
Furthermore, because most magazine content is timely, magazine publishers don't really want those unsold copies back (what are they going, to do, sell them three months from now?). So usually how you "return" magazines is you tear the covers off, throw the rest of the magazines in the trash, and just send the covers back to prove that you've returned them (saving some postage). So overall, figuring out how many copies are sold from newsstand sales takes some time, and even then is highly vulnerable to fraud. So most magazines don't really do it -- at least, not with any accuracy.
Circulation numbers are usually calculated from how many magazines the publisher printed, with some adjustments for how many copies are returned, but by and large the most accurate portion of the figure comes from subscription sales -- not newsstand sales.
Furthermore, circulation numbers and demographic data are closely related. Circulation costs money. For some magazines, it occasionally makes sense to reduce circulation -- that's right, out of the blue the magazine says "we used to sell 210,000 copies, now we sell 175,000" -- but to push the demographics as a way to increase ad rates. So the magazine says, "yes, we only sell 175,000 copies, but all of those 175,000 subscribers are exactly the people you want to reach as an advertiser." In other words, the magazine sells fewer copies but charges more for advertising than a competing magazine that sells more copies.
Bottom line: For Apple to refuse to share demographic information with magazine publishers pretty much cuts the business model off at the knees. The actual sales, as "from a kiosk," are far less important than building the demographic relationship with the buyer.
Where did I say I was confused?
In the Baroque Cycle, the background story is all about a special, heavy form of gold with magical powers.
Amazing that I slogged my way through 900 pages of the Baroque Cycle before deciding I couldn't take any more, and yet I still have no clue about this background story you mention.
Thankfully Anathem was not quite as unbearable, if no less overbearing.
Has anyone tried Office 365? Is it any good?
I've played around with it, and my impression is that it is indeed "pretty good," but not necessarily any better than Google Docs or an adequate replacement for the way people do things now.
One thing that bothered me that I don't think I was adequately able to articulate in the article is that it just doesn't feel as good to be doing all my work "in the cloud," i.e. over an Internet connection, as doing it the old-fashioned way. Sure, you can save a document directly to your SharePoint site from within Microsoft Word. But there's no kind of feedback that acknowledges "hey, I'm attempting to save this over the Internet, and anything could happen between here and the server, so sit tight and we'll try to make this work." Instead it just acts like it's the same thing as saving to your local drive, or even to a local server, which it's not. So every now and then I'd experience some unexplained delay and I'd find myself going to the SharePoint site and refreshing things in my browser to make sure everything worked right. And because I was using the same software I'd use to do things "the old-fashioned way," I kept asking myself, "Why do I have to do this on the stupid 'cloud'? Why can't I just save this to my drive and then copy my final draft to the server?" (Of course you can, but then using a "cloud solution" starts to have diminishing returns.)
I think the biggest advantage of Office 365, like BPOS before it, is not having to maintain your own Exchange server. SharePoint can be pretty useful too, but it seems to me that the learning curve required to get it into a form that your company can actually use productively is pretty high. And as far as using the Web-based versions of the Office apps, I I don't rate them very highly at all; they certainly aren't much better than Google Docs, unless you really, really need a way to view complex Office documents on the Web (as opposed to using Office).
"Fool me once" policy, maybe.
I'm not sure in what sense you mean Saudi Arabia is "vulnerable" ... certainly it would be an attractive prize. But for the last few years, Saudi Arabia has ranked third in the world in defense spending as a percentage of GDP, below only Jordan and Oman. In 2007 it spend $35 billion, in 2008 it spent $38 billion. In both years, that was at least twice the defense budget of Israel -- and compared to Israel it has more army regulars but zero reserves, so the money isn't going to salaries. Saudi Arabia might still be vulnerable, but it's hardly toothless, even without nukes.
It's not as if this type of weapon is without precedent. Shrapnel shells were used as anti-personnel weapons as far back as the War of 1812. What's innovative about this weapon is more its portability and accuracy than its method of operation.
Then again, if you and I have a business relationship (the closest thing to a diplomatic relationship that two individuals are likely to have), I probably don't give a crap what you say about me behind my back, so long as you're earnest and respectful to my face. If I know that you can't personally stand me but that you always strive to appear respectful, it shows that I wield power in the relationship.
If that's true then I'd love to see an example of how the U.S. government is fulfilling its responsibilities.
Some guy gets on a plane with a bomb strapped to his body and we only find out about it when he detonates it, injuring no one but himself. Result? The U.S. government takes away more of our privacy and dignity and arguably withdraws freedoms from every citizen, in order to make the claim that it is stopping attacks on U.S. citizens.
Meanwhile, somewhere at an ATM in Oakland, California, a man is hit on the head with an aluminum baseball bat and two young men walk away with his money, ID, and cell phone. The man later dies of complications due to skull fracture. Where was the U.S. government?
Actually, the bigger problem seems to be management up the board. Every article I've read about Microsoft's business culture seems to suggest that on some teams there's a manager for every three employees. An org chart that deep all but guarantees productivity on the individual level will be stifled and good ideas from the lower levels will never percolate up into actual business strategy.
Fry and Laurie co-starred in a sketch comedy show called A Bit of Fry and Laurie, which I thought was brilliant. Particularly in the later seasons they did some wickedly weird gags, somewhere on the Monty Python scale of surrealism combined with brainy wit. I don't know if it's available on DVD in the United States, but you know, it's out there...
I am amazed at how - once again - Novell blundered and lost the opportunity to capitalize on something.
If anything good comes of this it will be because Attachmate has the balls to do what Novell itself never seemed to be able to do: jettison its godawful management and put someone in place who knows what to do with Novell's products.
They might, but if they haven't been seeing the writing on the wall for years they're idiots. If Microsoft can polish up Active Directory with some Novell IP it would only sweeten the pot for the remaining hold-outs, whose phone numbers now all go into Microsoft's little black book as part of the deal, no doubt.
The consensus then was that when the suits read a back cover ad declaring this the 'year of Windows', and the t-shirts get free development tools and the promise of write-once-run-everywhere, even though running your server tools on the client was never a requirement, then NetWare was doomed.
I've got it. We'll run a back-cover ad on all the magazines declaring this the 'year of desktop Linux.'
I noticed that too. Samsung is, of course, the first company to go running after the iPad's market with its Galaxy tablets. So Samsung rep says everybody wants tablets...gotcha.
Yes, I've asked business people about this, and I've gotten funny looks, because "everyone knows" that Microsoft is part of IBM. If you try going into an explanation of why this isn't technically true, you merely find yourself dismissed as a geek trying to confuse them with Too Much Information. They don't need to know the details of the arrangement; they just know that "computer" and "IBM machine" are and always have been synonyms, and the small ones run Microsoft software, so Microsoft is IBM's small-computer software developer.
Which business people have you been talking to? Montgomery Burns?
Actually, scratch that. Montgomery Burns would associate IBM with OS/360 and AS/400. You, on the other hand, appear to have been talking to someone who got trapped in a cave sometime around 1983 and only emerged last year.
FWIW, IBM hasn't made PCs or laptops since 2005 at least, and even then they were losing money on the PC business hand over fist. Maybe you're thinking of Compaq? (They're part of HP now, BTW.)
Yeah but what "market" are we talking about here? I've walked around a lot of enterprises and I haven't seen many tablets, Windows or otherwise. My understanding has always been that except for individual enthusiasts, the markets (plural) for Windows Tablets have traditionally been verticals -- healthcare, oil and gas, things like that. These aren't Compaq tablets that you order from Tiger Direct, either; they tend to be purpose-built, ruggedized devices. I don't really see the iPad worming its way into those markets with any great speed.
And even if iPad has "stolen the entire market" -- a statement I choose to interpret as saying that people who have bought iPads are happy with them and have no plans to switch to something else -- how big is that market really? I hear vague statements about iPad sales. I live in the City of San Francisco and I've maybe seen 2-3 iPads out in the wild. Maybe most people keep theirs at home, I don't know -- but you would think that if mobility is such a big factor in why people are buying these things, I'd see more of them around town. By comparison, I feel safe to assume that just about every single person I pass on the street has access to a laptop, or at the very least a desktop PC or Mac. The iPad's true market presence does not seem very significant by comparison.
obviously I was talking about equality of chances and not about relevance, as you can see in the text that you quoted from me. But never mind, you are 4 insightful but you didn't understood your own quote. Thanks moders!
Where did I use the word "relevance"? What I said was that we live in the real world and you do not have equality of chances. You don't get to win the World Series just because you decide to form a baseball team. You don't get top ranking in Google just because you start a Web page. You strike me as one of these small-time Web opportunists who spends his whole day wringing his hands about SEO and how Google is robbing you of your livelihood. Google -- and the world -- doesn't owe you anything.
Fact: Google expanded rapidly also because they claim that every website is equal, you all have a chance just make a good website.
I don't recall Google ever suggesting that every Web site is equal. In fact, the whole point of the PageRank algorithm is that every site is not equal, and most people are going to want to go to the site that everybody else goes to. This puts an automatic bias toward established players -- if someone else has the best XYZ site today, and you start a "good" XYZ site, you have very little chance of bumping the other guy's site out of first place. Your site will have to be significantly better than the other guy's site, which is kind of how it works in real life, most of the time.
As far as competing directly with Google, Google's services are largely information-based. The weather, medical advice, stock prices ... these are the kind of things a reference librarian could point you to, which are arguably the sort of things that a good information search engine should provide. If all your site is providing is factoids that can be screen scraped from someone else's site (like the National Weather Service), then you're doing it wrong, and you shouldn't expect to get top ranking on Google anyway.
And it's worth noting that if I go to Google.com, type in "cancer" and click "I'm Feeling Lucky," the page that comes up is ... the American Cancer Society. Not Google Health. If I do the same for "sore throat" I get MedicineNet.com. If I do it for "AAPL" I get Yahoo Finance (no joke, try it).
On the other hand, people who specifically ask for a page of search results from a specific search engine shouldn't be surprised if the search engine tries to offer information instead of just URLs. It's just part of the ongoing evolution of what a search engine can/should be.