With all of the stories about individual people, labs and companies building supercomputers using clustered commodity hardware with freely available tools, software and information. Why would The Bush Administration with to continue to financially hinder US-based computer manufacturers?
It makes little sense. I mean if Cringley can run off and buy around $6000 to build a supercomputer in his garage. What is stopping someone in Russia, Pakistan or Vietnam from running out and buying tons of old Celeron 333 and slightly faster CPUs and then building a powerful Free *NIX-based supercomputer?
The only thing that would now make those people look at the US-built supercomputers are the fact that they won't have to run out and build their own supercomputer. They can take a pre-made solution and plug it into their computer datacenter and get to work much faster, with hopefully, a lower upkeep cost.
Ever since I first started reading about roll-your-own supercomputers, I have always wondered why the US would continue to ban the export of powerful computer systems.
The malarky about keeping 3rd-tier nations from being able to develop nuclear weapons is rather silly as well. I mean, did the US use powerful 195,000+ MTOP supercomputers to develop Fatboy?...um... NO. They did it with slide rules and human minds.
Maybe they should ban the exportation of nuclear physics majors. Especially since a large number of foreign born physicists came to the US to learn how to do their thing.
I know someone that is leading a team that have been contracted in through one of their suppliers. He is someone that has a high school diploma and has been working in the field for several years.
The contracted help, they are fresh from college, top of their class supposedly. These guys are so well rounded that when they program the application they completely ignore common key combinations for normal tasks. They also change the function of key combinations based upon which window or sub-window you have opened.
I am unfamiliar with the project and application myself. However, I can suggest an excellent example. It would be like using CTRL-X for copy and then when you switch to the next window CTRL-X deletes the data in the screen.
He had hoped to have seasoned programmers on his team. Unfortunately, his contracting vendor didn't see any logic in having grizzled veterans on the team. They felt that young college graduates, still drunk from that final graduation kegger, would be the best people for the job. Now, they are a bit behind and may need to toss out the whole code-base, all because of college trained coders that learned how they were supposed to code.
Basically, my point is you could say that there are terrible programmers that come out of college and there are terrible programmers that never took a college course. There are also excellent programmers with and without degrees. It mostly depends on the person you are talking about.
As for turning out well-rounded people. That is not any college's job. That job belongs to the family that raised the college student. Colleges exist for two things. One, to give people a good base knowledge on a variety of subjects. Two, they are there to make money, which they typically do by demanding courses that have nothing to do with a degree.
While I was growing up, instead of ignoring me and letting me raise myself. My mother, while working two jobs, took myself and my sister to museums and read books with us and showed me some of the things that she was learning in college. Due to her commitment to myself and my sister, we have both ended up being rather well-rounded individuals.
So, when you have children, it is up to you to mold them into well-rounded people. Do not expect or even ask your school system or local college to do that for you. Unless, you want to go around blaming Canada because your kid learned how swear...
Okay, the original post was some bait, but here goes...
Let's just say that you do get away with rooting some cracker's box. What do you do when that cracker sicks the FBI upon you?
He/she could also just sue you in civil court and could likely win.
If you don't think this can happen, ask your legal counsel if the families of criminals have ever sued the pants off of and won in court after their "loved one" got himself or herself shot to death while committing a crime in someone else's home. It has indeed happened and will continue to happen.
If you do go about an end up hacking the hell out of someone else's machine, how can you surely prove that it is the right machine that you are hacking? You may claim that there are no cracker's that know more about cracking then me.
That is total arrogance and idiocy. Nobody should ever claim that they are the be-all and end-all of any subject. There will always be something that you don't know, there will always be someone that knows more or at least more about an little looked at fact.
You could have hacked the system of someone that was rooted by your cracker. What happens if the admin at that site knows someone that looks at the logs and finds your smiling face all over the place? Well, I suppose that you would then be payed a little visit by the FBI and will find yourself in just a wee bit of trouble.
The better thing would be to patch your holes, protect your rear and let the trained government investigators take the risk of looking the fool. You eliminate your chance of going to prison and or facing untold fines.
I am working at a company that is moving off of green screen terminals to windows based systems for communications between franchises and headquarters. Let me tell you something, these franshizees are not interested in learning how to use a computer, they aren't interested in changing from their existing platform and they don't want to spend any money.
So, they attempt to network a Windows NT or Windows 2000 machine themselves. They then attempt to install this terrible, terrible software. These people just want to sell their product. They have no desire to become computer geeks or even know how to do more than simply plugin their sales and orders.
Don't even start with, "Why don't they use Windows XP or something." This is a large corporation, if you have never worked in a large corporation, you won't understand. However, it is mandated that they only use those two Operating Systems.
With the way things used to be, the average call time was 5 to 10 minutes. Nowadays, the average support call can stretch into 45 minutes or longer hand-holding someone that has no desire to setup a computer system.
What they should have done to modernize things and through a GUI on top of everything. Was to setup simple thin-clients running a very limited set of applications. A central Linux server with several thin-clients running off of it that only allow the users to access a web browser, perhaps a word processor and maybe one or more other applications.
Most of the franchises have in-house accounting systems that run on some form of UNIX, so they could very easily tie into those and get all the "benefits" of super-slow intranet connection...
Of course, if they did that, then they wouldn't be being fair to their business partner, Microsoft.
...like it is important to have certified software engineers for mission critical commercial applications. Things like nuclear plant control software, sewage treatment plant software and other life-threatening upon failure type work.
However, it makes absolutely no sense whatsoever to make all software developers require that type of certification and title. For instance, a failure in the code of a game is never a life-threatening issue (unless someone has a bizarre example...) and most desktop applications also would not cause death if they fail (again, so me a bizarre example.)
So, it seems to me that developing a true Software Engineer title would do nothing more than possibly benefit mankind. As long as they don't attempt to force this upon all software developers.
If it does become something that all software developers will need, I can see the development of new games and other applications stagnate as the development houses could be forced to charge a larger sum for their software. While this could potentially defray the cost of the new licenses that their developers would need. It just wouldn't make any sense for non-life-critical software to require that Certified Software Engineers be involved in the making of the product.
While this could potentially increase the quality of games and other non-mission critical software, is that really necessary?
Having an MCSE, is indeed a method to become hired into corporate wherever, the other way is to know someone, at least in the USA.
Anyway, I sometimes get to work with some of those MCSE-to-get-a-corporate-job people and to be honest, they are practically useless. The simple technical knowledge they lack is absolutely scary. I correct them, answer the same questions all the time. It is frightening to know that they are the people that are running the corporate network.
So, I am working on getting my MCSE in order to "join" their ranks and fix all the crap that they are doing. It shouldn't take but a few months of self study. If they can pass the tests with their level of knowledge, I should have no problem at all.
So, to recap, getting an MCSE is indeed a way for some people to get in the corporate hiring door. It sucks, but that is how it happens.
Of course, I am just a help desk guy that got in through family connections. I am also a computer hobbiest, which probably helped a bit.
...I posted so that I could expand my knowledge on the subject. I mentioned what I believed to be the truth and then stated that I am no expert on the matter hoping that someone that is more knowledgeable on the subject would post a proper response for me.
...but, the little that I know regarding programming and those languages is that C is much more portable that C++.
I believe that they were thinking towards being able to port their project far easier to other operating systems and architectures.
Of course, I could be wrong and they may have disregarded standard C and went with Operating Environment Specific libraries instead of developed their own easily ported libraries.
If the above is the case, then I agree with you and they should have definately programmed it all in C++.
...don't give me any guff that this is even an acceptable practice...
"We are sorry but because we don't like your (Insert Below Variable Here) we won't be serving you."
Here are some choice examples...
Operating System
Computer Architecture
Web Browser
Political Choice
Skin color
National Origin
Religous Choice
Opinion on the Law
...and so on...
Aren't there laws about discrimination in the US? Oh, wait this is a corporation. They aren't subject to obeying the law anymore.
This is discrimination plain and simple. Sure, it doesn't look to much like that if you are only thinking about such an unimportant thing as a web browser.
I work in a smaller retail computer store for one of my jobs. We have had XP Home installed on a few machines for nearly a month now. Not a RC, but the full blown OEM release.
Anyway, I have tested this version of Windows with several game titles from my collection. While these games and applications work fine in Windows 98 SE, they will not run in XP. Even with the proper "Emulation" setting.
While these are older games, some of them are still full of fun for me. I would recomend awaiting some people running tests with most of the older games that you own prior to running out and buying XP Home/Pro. Personally, I was considering running XP until I found that a few of my older games and apps were unable to run under this new OS.
I use Windows Media Player with Wine to watch my...uh...Multimedia Presentations. It really does a decent job with AVI files. I have only tested it with the older non-"themeable" release of Media Player.
The only problem that I have seen is that sometimes the colors will get messed up. It doesn't always do it with the same file. So, it is not like a perpetual bad coloration from the same file.
The system I described above is brand spanking new and thus has a 1 year hardware warranty and 90 days of labor coverage. Also, if a part fails it is a little bit easier to locate replacements for these days. It is getting harder and harder to locate socket-7 mainboards, PCI video cards (If needed) and other venerable hardware devices.
One of the companies I work for has a mini-tower system for $499. Decked out with 128MB of RAM, 20 Gig HD, 800 Mzh Celeron:(, and Windows XP Home. Drop the OS then you have a machine for just over 400 bucks. Drop the HD and install an old one you have laying about and you are just over 300 bucks.
That is where you find those sub 400 dollar machines. I would post the place, only thing is, I don't believe that that is appropriate on Slashdot.
That is amazing, my boss didn't even know the value of a GREAT shape 45U Rack that the company tossed out, into my pick-up truck, until after I took it home and then let him know what I could get for it.
I will be sure to ask him the value of an old PDP. Especially since he is already planning on giving me a fully functional AS/400 with a pair of terminals.
While this will more than likely be labled as flamebait. I must say that this was one of the most interesting things written from Microsoft.
If you took the time to read the piece it didn't attack any other operating systems or companies, even though it did include Linux.
In a few ways, the piece is right. The patches for those exploits had been available for quite some time and if they had been patched, the exploits would never have happened.
I can also agree that it is important that all OS vendors/developers work towards creating more secure and easily patchable systems. This was simply pointing out the fact that most all vendors have issues with supplying patches to ther products.
Personally, I use Windows, Linux and have been toying with the idea of using *BSD as well as Solaris. I can say that the distros of Linux, that I have used, are equally and sometimes far more dificult to patch and keep up to date than Windows is.
One distro I use, has actually developed a very usefull updating system, similiar to how Microsoft has developed their Windows Update utility. This has made managing Linux a much easier task. In case you are wondering, I am speaking of Mandrake Linux and their Mandrake Update utility.
The one thing that truly amazes me, about this paper, was that Microsoft is suggesting that we all work together towards creating a more secure computing environment. I just find that to be a very unusual thing to come from the mouth of "The Beast". I would have expected them to say something like, "Microsoft intends on providing the only true secure computing platform in existense."
Obviously you don't work in or are blissfully unaware of how things work in The Corporate Environment. CTO/CIO biases are indeed the one main factor in what OS/equipment architecture is used in virtually every company. Now, in some places there are actually CTO/CIOs that are into Linux/UNIX and Macs.
Unfortunately, most of them only look at the Microsoft option as that is what most vendors push as a solution. It makes no sense to me. However, that is not yet my job.
If it was, I would look at as many options as possible. Then I still might end up choosing Windows on the desktop, Unix for the back-end and DB Servers and a few MS Windows Exchange servers. Of course that depends on the needs of the company.
Some companies actually have no use for those extra features in Exchange server. Others cannot live without those Exchange features. If the OSS movement were to develop their own Exchange-like system. I would probably choose that. The only thing is, that is not important to OSS developers. If it was, then it would already be a project.
I believe that every platform has and indeed serves its own purpose. I also believe that if someone says, "Hey, I just don't like Macs, I wanna use a Commodore-64!." Then by all means they can figure out how to use a Commodore-64 to get their job done.
It is a matter of personal preference moreso than what is the best at a job. If he is uncomfortable with Macs, or for socio-political reasons, like myeself, chooses to stay away from Macs. Then that is really his choice.
I will choose my OS and desktop of choice for socio-political reasons. If Apple will go after people simply attempting to extend their product. People that are FREELY giving away their time and energy. Then they simply do not deserve my business until they alter that stance.
You also took that sentence out of context. What I am saying is that Apple is being hipocritical about their "Think Diferent" marketing campaign. If they really wanted people to do that, then why stop people from doing what that desktop theme group was doing? Isn't what they were doing, "Thinking Diferent"?
Slashdot Mirror
With all of the stories about individual people, labs and companies building supercomputers using clustered commodity hardware with freely available tools, software and information. Why would The Bush Administration with to continue to financially hinder US-based computer manufacturers?
It makes little sense. I mean if Cringley can run off and buy around $6000 to build a supercomputer in his garage. What is stopping someone in Russia, Pakistan or Vietnam from running out and buying tons of old Celeron 333 and slightly faster CPUs and then building a powerful Free *NIX-based supercomputer?
The only thing that would now make those people look at the US-built supercomputers are the fact that they won't have to run out and build their own supercomputer. They can take a pre-made solution and plug it into their computer datacenter and get to work much faster, with hopefully, a lower upkeep cost.
Ever since I first started reading about roll-your-own supercomputers, I have always wondered why the US would continue to ban the export of powerful computer systems.
The malarky about keeping 3rd-tier nations from being able to develop nuclear weapons is rather silly as well. I mean, did the US use powerful 195,000+ MTOP supercomputers to develop Fatboy?
Maybe they should ban the exportation of nuclear physics majors. Especially since a large number of foreign born physicists came to the US to learn how to do their thing.
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Here is a great example of this...
I know someone that is leading a team that have been contracted in through one of their suppliers. He is someone that has a high school diploma and has been working in the field for several years.
The contracted help, they are fresh from college, top of their class supposedly. These guys are so well rounded that when they program the application they completely ignore common key combinations for normal tasks. They also change the function of key combinations based upon which window or sub-window you have opened.
I am unfamiliar with the project and application myself. However, I can suggest an excellent example. It would be like using CTRL-X for copy and then when you switch to the next window CTRL-X deletes the data in the screen.
He had hoped to have seasoned programmers on his team. Unfortunately, his contracting vendor didn't see any logic in having grizzled veterans on the team. They felt that young college graduates, still drunk from that final graduation kegger, would be the best people for the job. Now, they are a bit behind and may need to toss out the whole code-base, all because of college trained coders that learned how they were supposed to code.
Basically, my point is you could say that there are terrible programmers that come out of college and there are terrible programmers that never took a college course. There are also excellent programmers with and without degrees. It mostly depends on the person you are talking about.
As for turning out well-rounded people. That is not any college's job. That job belongs to the family that raised the college student. Colleges exist for two things. One, to give people a good base knowledge on a variety of subjects. Two, they are there to make money, which they typically do by demanding courses that have nothing to do with a degree.
While I was growing up, instead of ignoring me and letting me raise myself. My mother, while working two jobs, took myself and my sister to museums and read books with us and showed me some of the things that she was learning in college. Due to her commitment to myself and my sister, we have both ended up being rather well-rounded individuals.
So, when you have children, it is up to you to mold them into well-rounded people. Do not expect or even ask your school system or local college to do that for you. Unless, you want to go around blaming Canada because your kid learned how swear...
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Okay, the original post was some bait, but here goes...
Let's just say that you do get away with rooting some cracker's box. What do you do when that cracker sicks the FBI upon you?
He/she could also just sue you in civil court and could likely win.
If you don't think this can happen, ask your legal counsel if the families of criminals have ever sued the pants off of and won in court after their "loved one" got himself or herself shot to death while committing a crime in someone else's home. It has indeed happened and will continue to happen.
If you do go about an end up hacking the hell out of someone else's machine, how can you surely prove that it is the right machine that you are hacking? You may claim that there are no cracker's that know more about cracking then me.
That is total arrogance and idiocy. Nobody should ever claim that they are the be-all and end-all of any subject. There will always be something that you don't know, there will always be someone that knows more or at least more about an little looked at fact.
You could have hacked the system of someone that was rooted by your cracker. What happens if the admin at that site knows someone that looks at the logs and finds your smiling face all over the place? Well, I suppose that you would then be payed a little visit by the FBI and will find yourself in just a wee bit of trouble.
The better thing would be to patch your holes, protect your rear and let the trained government investigators take the risk of looking the fool. You eliminate your chance of going to prison and or facing untold fines.
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Star Wars - A New Hope
Star Wars - The Empire Strikes Back
Star Wars - Return of the Jedi
Star Wars - The Jar-Jar Binks Chronicles... er...The Phantom Menace
Star Wars - Jar-Jar Strikes back...eh...Attack of the Clones
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I am working at a company that is moving off of green screen terminals to windows based systems for communications between franchises and headquarters. Let me tell you something, these franshizees are not interested in learning how to use a computer, they aren't interested in changing from their existing platform and they don't want to spend any money.
So, they attempt to network a Windows NT or Windows 2000 machine themselves. They then attempt to install this terrible, terrible software. These people just want to sell their product. They have no desire to become computer geeks or even know how to do more than simply plugin their sales and orders.
Don't even start with, "Why don't they use Windows XP or something." This is a large corporation, if you have never worked in a large corporation, you won't understand. However, it is mandated that they only use those two Operating Systems.
With the way things used to be, the average call time was 5 to 10 minutes. Nowadays, the average support call can stretch into 45 minutes or longer hand-holding someone that has no desire to setup a computer system.
What they should have done to modernize things and through a GUI on top of everything. Was to setup simple thin-clients running a very limited set of applications. A central Linux server with several thin-clients running off of it that only allow the users to access a web browser, perhaps a word processor and maybe one or more other applications.
Most of the franchises have in-house accounting systems that run on some form of UNIX, so they could very easily tie into those and get all the "benefits" of super-slow intranet connection...
Of course, if they did that, then they wouldn't be being fair to their business partner, Microsoft.
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However, it makes absolutely no sense whatsoever to make all software developers require that type of certification and title. For instance, a failure in the code of a game is never a life-threatening issue (unless someone has a bizarre example...) and most desktop applications also would not cause death if they fail (again, so me a bizarre example.)
So, it seems to me that developing a true Software Engineer title would do nothing more than possibly benefit mankind. As long as they don't attempt to force this upon all software developers.
If it does become something that all software developers will need, I can see the development of new games and other applications stagnate as the development houses could be forced to charge a larger sum for their software. While this could potentially defray the cost of the new licenses that their developers would need. It just wouldn't make any sense for non-life-critical software to require that Certified Software Engineers be involved in the making of the product.
While this could potentially increase the quality of games and other non-mission critical software, is that really necessary?
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Having an MCSE, is indeed a method to become hired into corporate wherever, the other way is to know someone, at least in the USA.
Anyway, I sometimes get to work with some of those MCSE-to-get-a-corporate-job people and to be honest, they are practically useless. The simple technical knowledge they lack is absolutely scary. I correct them, answer the same questions all the time. It is frightening to know that they are the people that are running the corporate network.
So, I am working on getting my MCSE in order to "join" their ranks and fix all the crap that they are doing. It shouldn't take but a few months of self study. If they can pass the tests with their level of knowledge, I should have no problem at all.
So, to recap, getting an MCSE is indeed a way for some people to get in the corporate hiring door. It sucks, but that is how it happens.
Of course, I am just a help desk guy that got in through family connections. I am also a computer hobbiest, which probably helped a bit.
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They did.
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Mind you, I have only begun to simply dabble with programming. I have no professional training on the matter.
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I believe that they were thinking towards being able to port their project far easier to other operating systems and architectures.
Of course, I could be wrong and they may have disregarded standard C and went with Operating Environment Specific libraries instead of developed their own easily ported libraries.
If the above is the case, then I agree with you and they should have definately programmed it all in C++.
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"We are sorry but because we don't like your (Insert Below Variable Here) we won't be serving you."
Here are some choice examples...
Operating System
Computer Architecture
Web Browser
Political Choice
Skin color
National Origin
Religous Choice
Opinion on the Law
Aren't there laws about discrimination in the US? Oh, wait this is a corporation. They aren't subject to obeying the law anymore.
This is discrimination plain and simple. Sure, it doesn't look to much like that if you are only thinking about such an unimportant thing as a web browser.
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I work in a smaller retail computer store for one of my jobs. We have had XP Home installed on a few machines for nearly a month now. Not a RC, but the full blown OEM release.
Anyway, I have tested this version of Windows with several game titles from my collection. While these games and applications work fine in Windows 98 SE, they will not run in XP. Even with the proper "Emulation" setting.
While these are older games, some of them are still full of fun for me. I would recomend awaiting some people running tests with most of the older games that you own prior to running out and buying XP Home/Pro. Personally, I was considering running XP until I found that a few of my older games and apps were unable to run under this new OS.
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I use Windows Media Player with Wine to watch my...uh...Multimedia Presentations. It really does a decent job with AVI files. I have only tested it with the older non-"themeable" release of Media Player.
The only problem that I have seen is that sometimes the colors will get messed up. It doesn't always do it with the same file. So, it is not like a perpetual bad coloration from the same file.
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While what you said is true...
The system I described above is brand spanking new and thus has a 1 year hardware warranty and 90 days of labor coverage. Also, if a part fails it is a little bit easier to locate replacements for these days. It is getting harder and harder to locate socket-7 mainboards, PCI video cards (If needed) and other venerable hardware devices.
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One of the companies I work for has a mini-tower system for $499. Decked out with 128MB of RAM, 20 Gig HD, 800 Mzh Celeron
That is where you find those sub 400 dollar machines. I would post the place, only thing is, I don't believe that that is appropriate on Slashdot.
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Most people know the value of a second hand PDP?
That is amazing, my boss didn't even know the value of a GREAT shape 45U Rack that the company tossed out, into my pick-up truck, until after I took it home and then let him know what I could get for it.
I will be sure to ask him the value of an old PDP. Especially since he is already planning on giving me a fully functional AS/400 with a pair of terminals.
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I just said that someone out there might pay you to take it away.
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Now that would be an awesome toy to hack on. You could make some pretty durable robots with that.
Add some extra hardware to allow it to understand simple commands, then you could almost make a usable home robot.
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While this will more than likely be labled as flamebait. I must say that this was one of the most interesting things written from Microsoft.
If you took the time to read the piece it didn't attack any other operating systems or companies, even though it did include Linux.
In a few ways, the piece is right. The patches for those exploits had been available for quite some time and if they had been patched, the exploits would never have happened.
I can also agree that it is important that all OS vendors/developers work towards creating more secure and easily patchable systems. This was simply pointing out the fact that most all vendors have issues with supplying patches to ther products.
Personally, I use Windows, Linux and have been toying with the idea of using *BSD as well as Solaris. I can say that the distros of Linux, that I have used, are equally and sometimes far more dificult to patch and keep up to date than Windows is.
One distro I use, has actually developed a very usefull updating system, similiar to how Microsoft has developed their Windows Update utility. This has made managing Linux a much easier task. In case you are wondering, I am speaking of Mandrake Linux and their Mandrake Update utility.
The one thing that truly amazes me, about this paper, was that Microsoft is suggesting that we all work together towards creating a more secure computing environment. I just find that to be a very unusual thing to come from the mouth of "The Beast". I would have expected them to say something like, "Microsoft intends on providing the only true secure computing platform in existense."
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Obviously you don't work in or are blissfully unaware of how things work in The Corporate Environment. CTO/CIO biases are indeed the one main factor in what OS/equipment architecture is used in virtually every company. Now, in some places there are actually CTO/CIOs that are into Linux/UNIX and Macs.
Unfortunately, most of them only look at the Microsoft option as that is what most vendors push as a solution. It makes no sense to me. However, that is not yet my job.
If it was, I would look at as many options as possible. Then I still might end up choosing Windows on the desktop, Unix for the back-end and DB Servers and a few MS Windows Exchange servers. Of course that depends on the needs of the company.
Some companies actually have no use for those extra features in Exchange server. Others cannot live without those Exchange features. If the OSS movement were to develop their own Exchange-like system. I would probably choose that. The only thing is, that is not important to OSS developers. If it was, then it would already be a project.
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Sounds like your average program development team. Don't they all get "locked away" for some long period of time?
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Thanks for the compliment.
I believe that every platform has and indeed serves its own purpose. I also believe that if someone says, "Hey, I just don't like Macs, I wanna use a Commodore-64!." Then by all means they can figure out how to use a Commodore-64 to get their job done.
It is a matter of personal preference moreso than what is the best at a job. If he is uncomfortable with Macs, or for socio-political reasons, like myeself, chooses to stay away from Macs. Then that is really his choice.
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I will choose my OS and desktop of choice for socio-political reasons. If Apple will go after people simply attempting to extend their product. People that are FREELY giving away their time and energy. Then they simply do not deserve my business until they alter that stance.
You also took that sentence out of context. What I am saying is that Apple is being hipocritical about their "Think Diferent" marketing campaign. If they really wanted people to do that, then why stop people from doing what that desktop theme group was doing? Isn't what they were doing, "Thinking Diferent"?