You realize that Married With Children is *fiction*, right? It's only on the TV. It's a script that someone wrote. You can't use it as evidence to build a theory about how human memory works. It only shows that there is a *belief* among some people that new memories overwrite old.
On the other hand there *is* a lot of evidence that memory can be trained to increase capacity (and that factors such as diet and sleep patterns also play a key role in how good the memory is at various tasks).
So it's not a zero-sum game... no matter what Married With Children tells you.
In other news, inability to tell reality and TV apart is now universal in America. Or that's what it says on the news, anyway.
How is having sex with your sister morally wrong? Sure, it's socially and biologically unwise, which is why it tends to be prohibited in most cultures, but it's hard to say how it's *morally* wrong assuming you both want to do it and use a condom.
Sounds to me like the parent post is confusing legality with morality!
The *lack* of hostility from most people is more interesting. This is a guy who was elected to represent the interests of a specific industry (rail) -- an industry for which he worked as a lawyer and a lobbyist.
A guy who, as the GP says, suspended Habeas Corpus and thought nothing of simply closing down newspapers that disagreed with him.
A guy whose job was to levy tariffs on the South to pay for railway pork-barrelling up North, and who was willing to get lots of people killed to protect that source of revenue.
A guy who would have made vast sums of money from the transcontinental railway which -- amazingly! -- was routed right past lands he had recently bought. If he hadn't been assassinated first.
A guy who invented a 'War on Slavery', co-opting what until then had been a moral abolitionist movement and making it into a support plank for the Republican war machine. "If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it."
The surprising thing is not that *some* people don't like the man who devastated half the USA and created a powerful, centralized and brutal Federal government across the whole USA. The surprising thing is that it was successfully spun as being a *GOOD THING*.
There are several much more significant challenges than dust:
* The lack of any kind of spaceship capable of making the return trip * The lack of any kind of system for keeping the crew alive in space for that long * The lack of any serious programme to develop the above * The lack of the money such a programme would require * The lack of the political will to address any of the points above * The lack of public interest in any of the points above *this* point
Overall, I think it's probably not a good idea to burn Earth yet.
So, for example, if you are looking at a Web page, you find a talk that you want to take, an event that you want to go to. The event has a place and has a time and it has some people associated with it. But you have to read the Web page and separately open your calendar to put the information on it. And if you want to find the page on the Web you have to type the address again until the page turns back. If you want the corporate details about people, you have to cut and paste the information from a Web page into your address book, because your address book file and your original data files are not integrated together. And they are not integrated with the data on the Web. So the Semantic Web is about data integration.
When you use an application, you should be able to put data there so that you could configure that data. I should be able to inform my computer: "I'm going to that event." And when I say that, the machine will understand the data.
Hey, a description of the Exchange / Office / Outlook toolchain. I can read a document, it has a link to an appointment, associated with that is a second document that contains embedded video, meanwhile the sender's address is added to my address book and the appointment to my calendar...
Of course, it took MS quite a while to achieve this in the reasonably constrained environment of office automation, and even then it was a huge achievement that many companies failed hideously at. Achieving it for 'stuff' in general, which seems to be the aim of the Semantic Web, is probably flat-out impossible.
What's wrong with selective breeding? It's proven to work, it's without any real drawbacks, it's cheap and it's easy to do.
I don't know where all the people in this thread who believe that have come from. It's incredibly hard to do, involving massive amounts of trial and error. By the time you've created a breed of dog that breeds true (i.e. within a certain range of accepted characteristics -- not necessarily always the exact point you want, though) you've usually introduced anything from hip dysplasia to total psychosis. It took hundreds of years to develop Border Collies and even then as anyone who's tried to use them to herd sheep will tell you only about 1 in 4 is really the way they're supposed to be. There's one on my Uncle's farm that doesn't go uphill. Product of centuries of very dedicated breeding, it is, much more than there's time to do for drug dogs.
So no, selective breeding is not simple or easy either in genetic theory or in practice, and it involves a lot of looking after puppies until you are sure they don't have the features you want and only *then* drowning them.
Sometimes, the simplest solutions are the best ones.
Sometimes, the 'inspirational poster slogan' approach to solving difficult biological problems is stupid. Actually, that's the case pretty often.
Old fashioned breeding produces a much higher result rate (multiple puppies per litter, rather than multiple litters to get a viable puppy).
Old fashioned breeding produces multiple puppies per litter. Some of these puppies will have the attributes you want. Others won't. It will take at least a year to tell which are which. See the problem?
Additionally, the results of breeding will be a lot healthier and long lived than those of cloning.
I'm going to counter that with another made-up gut reaction: The results of breeding will gradually bite your toes off one by one, whereas the results of cloning will deliver you beautiful roses folded from ancient Mongolian silk every year on your birthday.
I mean for heaven's sake man, buck up and make an effort.
You have access to photos. They have access to an ocean-going nuclear armed navy. From this you conclude that you are in an ever stronger position.
I hope you're right. But the real Rodney King effect is this: it's never been easier to distract people from real danger by making a big fuss over one poor guy getting kicked.
I have 2 windows machines and no Linux machine. But I *use* Linux; my web sites are hosted on linux because the virtualization is better and it's cheaper. My svn server is linux and so is the server that runs wikis, PM systems and the other things I need to have. Why, I couldn't get by without linux! Yet I don't actually have a linux machine and I thus don't add to the ranks of linux users, whereas I *do* add to the ranks of Windows users.
I guess what I'm saying is, it's very hard to evaluate the importance of an OS by a headcount.
the United Kingdom spends eighty billion pounds a year on healthcare
Hm, nominal spending is more than that. Now I don't know much about the NHS (other than that it doesn't work) but I do know a bit about government contracts in the UK, and I would be very surprised indeed if more than about 50-60% of that went on anything of even peripheral value to healthcare.
Here, the Times (rapidly becoming a tabloid but never mind) has something on it:
To put it another way, the UK NHS is like the US DoD; they're both ways to funnel money from the taxpayer to those who position themselves to recieve it. The NHS, however, which is regarded almost with veneration by most British people and which doesn't have to fight actual wars, is far more corrupt; buildings built, bought, sold and knocked down within the space of a few years, and so on. But the NHS long ago passed the point where it's powerful enough to keep going forever -- it's quite a political power broker in fact, which is why you *do* get reasonable free healthcare from it in much of Wales and Scotland.
Meanwhile, in England, health care does cost money -- you pay over the counter for even a basic dental checkup. You don't want to? Then take out some private health insurance. It's a fast growing sector in the UK. Good!
I imagine that there are people who find it hard to afford, though, what with all the taxes they're paying. And that's bad. But what can you do?
Bill Gates is one entrepreneur among many. His products came to a position of prominence in many markets, competing against the likes of NeXT, Apple and Sun whose offerings had weaknesses obvious to anyone who was trying to actually build a company using them. His company, Microsoft, isn't as nice as Ben & Jerry's but then it's a lot nicer than Sun and IBM. Although by offering commoditized, loosely-controlled solutions in an industry previously dominated by massive hardware/software lock-in, he is still small fry compared to the great 19th century monopolists like Vanderbilt and Rockefeller, or even the great 18th century players (Clive of India, anyone?)
He's a guy, with a company, that makes products, that people either buy or don't. He has major market share in a niche which, to be honest, was not very strongly contested, and he has a few OK products in other niches. Microsoft's smaller than Exxon, way smaller than GE, FAR smaller than Standard Oil, and VASTLY less controlling and anti-innovation than old-school IBM. On the other hand, it's not a particularly nice and fluffy company either. None of them are. Get over it. Now, quietly listen to yourself:
For 25 years the world has concerned itself with pittiances like who's president and which country has a despot in charge, while right under our noses the biggest monopoly in human history has effectively brought the globe under the dictatorship of Bill Gates - through the computers.
First, it's 'pittance' and it doesn't mean what you think it means. Second, the above is exactly why basement-dwellers whose whole world is home computers do not wind up in important decision-making roles. And I think we should all be very grateful.
I can well believe that one guy can do the work of 20 outsourcers -- programmer productivity is so variable that it frequenty varies by a factor of 8 or more even among people from similar backgrounds.
The trick isn't to pick Americans versus picking Indians, the trick is to get the top 2% or so of any population. That's more important than 'interest in technology' and other ambient factors -- practically everyone works to make money, wherever they come from. Of course, going to the nearest big Indian outsourcing company isn't a very good way to get that top 2% that.
It's not even hard to tell who's in the top 2% -- you can often tell in a week, maybe a month if the project is sufficiently confus[ed|ing]. The problem is, you *can't* easily tell from a CV or interview. At least I can't.
Well, I can't write. I did my degree before they had word processors (or at least before they were ubiquitous) and for that I learned to handwrite and then immediately forgot. When I want to write 'CAT' I have to think about how I'm going to make the A -- sometimes I make it an upside down U with a line, sometimes it's more like a capital delta. I know I'm not alone(*).
My wife has a much worse problem, though. She was taught to write according to an exact model, with iron-hard discipline and years of training. Every single person who learned to write in her town in that decade uses EXACTLY the same writing.
If only there were some way to authenticate based not on something which changes even when you don't want it to (like how you write), nor on something that can't be changed even when you need to (like your fingertips). If only we could use some kind of mental trace that the user is aware of but that nobody else can perceive -- maybe a word or other sequence of symbols stored in the actual brain itself.
That'd rock. But the technology is probably decades away.
(*)In terms of handwriting. Spiritually, I may well be alone... so very very alone... *bursts into tears at desk*
It's true -- not because of technological limitations, but because of the nature of the problem.
The problem is:
"People keep subverting or working around the technical infrastruture of this environment."
The solution can never be:
"Change the technical infractructure of this environment."...because they'll keep right on subverting it.
I'll tell you whut, though -- before they nered the whole system into another 'run round and shoot everything and get bored' game, there was a working solution for Day of Defeat.
That solution was:
"Involve only people who will *not* subvert the technical infrastructure of this environment, because they are interested in playing the game, not in being u|3er l33t."
So when this became commonplace in Japan, it wasn't news. And then when it became commonplace in Korea and Singapore, it still wasn't news. And then when it became commonplace in Europe, it still wasn't news. And then when it became common in Latin America (at least cities I've been to), it still wasn't news. But now... the USA is catching up! And that's *news* folks!
And quite rightly. There weren't any barriers to the adoption of techs like this in asia etc., whereas in the US there has been a powerful, entrenched telecoms industry with no impetus to compete or change. If that barrier is becoming less effective then that could have important implications.
The question is, is it just 'technological osmosis', or is there an actual change in the balance of power...
Disclaimer: I don't even have a mobile (that works), so it's possible the barrier to progress is actually me.
I agree that it wasn't about slavery. The Mercantilists simply got together a 'war on slavery' like the 'war on terror' we have now.
However, I'd say it was about specific commercial interest. Lincoln was backed specifically by the railroad lobby, to build railroads in the north, with tariffs levied mainly in the South. The south got sick of this, but the north correctly estimated that it had a bigger population and industial base, and voila -- a war to protect revenues.
Tomato harvesting was partly mechanized back in the 1960s.
Yeah, great, that's why there's no point buying American tomatoes now.
A tougher tomato plus appropriate machinery did the job.
Right, so 'tomato harvesting' wasn't mechanized -- instead, and alternative problem was solved, whereby a tough, tasteless, easy-to-harvest tomato would be harvested mechanically and actual tomatoes would become pretty much unknown (in participating countries).
Cost borne by: The consumer of tomaotes. Savings go to: Agribusiness.
Yay progress. I think we can all feel justly proud.
Having said that, of course it is worth trying to automate tasks, and the US/UK's reliance on swarms of cheap, often illegal migrant labor is very unhealthy in many many way. Tomato picking has been a success story only for those owning the tomato farm and the cost (wooden tomatoes) has gone to everyone else involved.
Well, I didn't really mean 'xenophobic' in the KKK sense so much as in the 'Not Invented Here' sense. I really don't think/. is the place to go into agonizing detail, especially as I am kind of about to eat now. However generally at the time I was thinking of (late 90s) I found there were some disheartening things about Ruby as a project (rather than as a language):
-- Only a very small core of Japanese people who knew Matz really got to commit anything. Not in that core? No matter how great the value of what you try to commit, you might as well gived up.
-- Unicode? That's an evil anti-Japanese conspiracy. We must wait until suitable Japanese standards like konjaku mojikyo are mature enough to support. Until then Ruby has built-in support for specific Japanese encodings and the rest of the world doesn't matter. This endlessly-repeated debate partly inspired my page about Japanese attitudes to Unicode.
-- Matz used (and still uses AFAIK) Unix only. If it's part of unix (eg fork()) it's in Ruby. If it's not (eg proper threading) it's not in Ruby. Similarly, Matz is used to old-style C with global static vars all over the place, and therefore that's how Ruby is always gonna be. Having been an IT manager in Japan on occasion, I'd say it's a cultural thing that there's no point fighting. Sure, Ruby 2 is right around the corner. Sure.
-- Documentation is hobbyist-grade. I admit that while writing this post I googled a bit to check if my memories were still valid. I found that there is a project devoted to deducing the Ruby standard by experimenting with the Ruby implementation. If you can't see the problem with that...:)
Of course back in the late 90s, Ruby 2 was just around the corner and it took a long time for it to become clear that these were systemic, rather than temporary, failings. The current wikipedia page basically sums up everything I just said under 'criticism'. What it fails to mention is that these failings were a conscious decision.
Disclaimer: I was 100% observer in this process so I'm not a bitter rejected contributor. However, at that time I had high hopes that Ruby might become an industrial-strength language with threading and i18n and a proper spec and so on, and if very slowly and painfully became clear that that would never happen, which was kind of depressing.
I don't want to bash Ruby. I like ruby. I still write ruby programs. The fact is, though, ruby contains what Matz like to live with, and Matz lives in a relatively old-school world of fork()-ing single-threaded ASCII-piping unix processes with ad-hoc documentation. And any attempt (I didn't make any but I saw plenty made) to change that will be politely and apologetically totally ignored.
Now I feel a bit dirty for having made my first ever Internet post that is critical of a software project. I would like to say again that I like Ruby and it has it's place and if I were able to use ruby 'industrially' I would want a book such as the one reviewed.
Look, I've never been a troll but I still hate to see it done this badly. At least s/python/ruby/g or something.
I have this image of the poster just being beaten up for his lunch money again and again until finally he can take no more and he takes ACTION! He dials up SLASHDOT! He pastes his TROLL POST in! He ain't quite sure what all the words in it mean, but hey, it's a bona fide TROLL! That'll show them! Then as he turns to leave the sixth graders beat him up again.
It's pathetic. But trolls are supposed to be inflammatory, inciteful, disturbing, even thought-provoking -- not pathetic.
As someone who just bought a paper copy of the Unicode 5 standard, with annexes and code charts and all, weight 10lb or so, even though it's all downloadable for free, I am really getting a kick out of these replies.
So why did I buy it? Why not read the PDFs that are thoughtfully provided free by the Unicode Consortium?
1 -- I can flip through a book in front of the TV. Not so a PDF. Yes, I have a tablet PC. 2 -- As a book, the size of the different sections is much more real to me. I know this sounds wierd but with the book I can have insights like 'boy, the addition of Cuneiform bulked out Plane 0 by *this much* that I wouldn't have with PDFs. It helps with situational awareness, I guess. 3 -- When I want to show it to someone, I go "Hey, look at this bit here in annex 15!" And they look. If I go "Hey, when we get near some wireless access, go to this site and click 'annexes' and then number 15 and it's section 13.7 near the bottom!" they ain't gonna look. 4 -- Same applies when the 'someone' is me. 5 -- I see the book, with its myriad post-it notes and bookmarks and marginalia and apprehend it as a whole. This does not happen with a website. With a website I don't even know if I've read it all. 6 -- etc etc etc ad nauseam.
Now I don't even like Ruby -- I was a big Ruby fan back in about 1998 and like many other first-generation Ruby fans I learned a harsh lesson about what happens when the whole project is dictated by one xenophobic Japanese guy. Plus as you can deduce from the above I kind of need multilingualization! But if I were still into Ruby this is just what I'd want -- a book I can just pick up off the table in front of the TV, and get an idea, and show the page to someone else, maybe even cite it later. Not a website that changes and that I have to have a computer to read and that requires instructions like 'go to this URL, click on this'. A book! That's why we have them!
No, it doesn't. It does a bit here and there but it has no effective overall strategy.
I swear, we as Americans are so freaking self-righteous!
You misspelled either 'complacent' or 'doomed' but I don't know which; either would make sense.
You speak of "the spread of propaganda" & the use of "deception, disinformation & influence" by the Chinese yet we, as Americans, have been doing it for MUCH longer!
No, you haven't. You want to think you have, but you haven't. There has never been an American propaganda initiative that was 5% as effective as the Chinese PR machine for their attack on India. You wish you could do it (and then you'd have fun feeling all guilty about it) but you can't. Do you think the Iraq strategy would be in such a mess if you could do what the Chinese did in 1962?
I know of what I speak. So can you, if you read Xinhua every day. Just read it. After a few months, you will start to believe. It is a whole other history, a whole other way of looking at the world. America has nothing like it. That is why America is losing; that is why America is cast as the bad guy when they invade one lousy country for oil or whatever, and China gets to flatten the whole of central Asia, northeast Asia, and half Africa as far as I can see by this point, and yet remain Teh Cool.
You lost already. Going "oh but we are so bad for employing these elite evil technologies and techniques, teehee, oh wicked wicked us for being so kickass" does not help. Watch Fox, watch CNN, watch Al-Jazeera, even watch the BBC if you have to, and you will see different spins, different biases, different points of view. Watch Xinhua even in English and you will see a different reality. "Tibetan People Bask In Glow Of Rosy Future". When you can come up with a headline like that and have 1/3 of the world take it as truth, THEN you will be making progess.
Slashdot Mirror
You realize that Married With Children is *fiction*, right? It's only on the TV. It's a script that someone wrote. You can't use it as evidence to build a theory about how human memory works. It only shows that there is a *belief* among some people that new memories overwrite old.
On the other hand there *is* a lot of evidence that memory can be trained to increase capacity (and that factors such as diet and sleep patterns also play a key role in how good the memory is at various tasks).
So it's not a zero-sum game... no matter what Married With Children tells you.
In other news, inability to tell reality and TV apart is now universal in America. Or that's what it says on the news, anyway.
How is having sex with your sister morally wrong? Sure, it's socially and biologically unwise, which is why it tends to be prohibited in most cultures, but it's hard to say how it's *morally* wrong assuming you both want to do it and use a condom.
Sounds to me like the parent post is confusing legality with morality!
I'd sa¥ th¥ app£id onsidrabl pr$$ur.
Look, ma! It's a guy who still believes US security forces need a judge's permission before they start wiretapping! Can I throw rocks at him, ma?
G'wan, pleeeease?
Aw, shucks.
The *lack* of hostility from most people is more interesting. This is a guy who was elected to represent the interests of a specific industry (rail) -- an industry for which he worked as a lawyer and a lobbyist.
A guy who, as the GP says, suspended Habeas Corpus and thought nothing of simply closing down newspapers that disagreed with him.
A guy whose job was to levy tariffs on the South to pay for railway pork-barrelling up North, and who was willing to get lots of people killed to protect that source of revenue.
A guy who would have made vast sums of money from the transcontinental railway which -- amazingly! -- was routed right past lands he had recently bought. If he hadn't been assassinated first.
A guy who invented a 'War on Slavery', co-opting what until then had been a moral abolitionist movement and making it into a support plank for the Republican war machine. "If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it."
The surprising thing is not that *some* people don't like the man who devastated half the USA and created a powerful, centralized and brutal Federal government across the whole USA. The surprising thing is that it was successfully spun as being a *GOOD THING*.
There are several much more significant challenges than dust:
* The lack of any kind of spaceship capable of making the return trip
* The lack of any kind of system for keeping the crew alive in space for that long
* The lack of any serious programme to develop the above
* The lack of the money such a programme would require
* The lack of the political will to address any of the points above
* The lack of public interest in any of the points above *this* point
Overall, I think it's probably not a good idea to burn Earth yet.
From TFA:
So, for example, if you are looking at a Web page, you find a talk that you want to take, an event that you want to go to. The event has a place and has a time and it has some people associated with it. But you have to read the Web page and separately open your calendar to put the information on it. And if you want to find the page on the Web you have to type the address again until the page turns back. If you want the corporate details about people, you have to cut and paste the information from a Web page into your address book, because your address book file and your original data files are not integrated together. And they are not integrated with the data on the Web. So the Semantic Web is about data integration.
When you use an application, you should be able to put data there so that you could configure that data. I should be able to inform my computer: "I'm going to that event." And when I say that, the machine will understand the data.
Hey, a description of the Exchange / Office / Outlook toolchain. I can read a document, it has a link to an appointment, associated with that is a second document that contains embedded video, meanwhile the sender's address is added to my address book and the appointment to my calendar...
Of course, it took MS quite a while to achieve this in the reasonably constrained environment of office automation, and even then it was a huge achievement that many companies failed hideously at. Achieving it for 'stuff' in general, which seems to be the aim of the Semantic Web, is probably flat-out impossible.
What's wrong with selective breeding? It's proven to work, it's without any real drawbacks, it's cheap and it's easy to do.
I don't know where all the people in this thread who believe that have come from. It's incredibly hard to do, involving massive amounts of trial and error. By the time you've created a breed of dog that breeds true (i.e. within a certain range of accepted characteristics -- not necessarily always the exact point you want, though) you've usually introduced anything from hip dysplasia to total psychosis. It took hundreds of years to develop Border Collies and even then as anyone who's tried to use them to herd sheep will tell you only about 1 in 4 is really the way they're supposed to be. There's one on my Uncle's farm that doesn't go uphill. Product of centuries of very dedicated breeding, it is, much more than there's time to do for drug dogs.
So no, selective breeding is not simple or easy either in genetic theory or in practice, and it involves a lot of looking after puppies until you are sure they don't have the features you want and only *then* drowning them.
Sometimes, the simplest solutions are the best ones.
Sometimes, the 'inspirational poster slogan' approach to solving difficult biological problems is stupid. Actually, that's the case pretty often.
factually? Allow me.
Old fashioned breeding produces a much higher result rate (multiple puppies per litter, rather than multiple litters to get a viable puppy).
Old fashioned breeding produces multiple puppies per litter. Some of these puppies will have the attributes you want. Others won't. It will take at least a year to tell which are which. See the problem?
Additionally, the results of breeding will be a lot healthier and long lived than those of cloning.
I'm going to counter that with another made-up gut reaction: The results of breeding will gradually bite your toes off one by one, whereas the results of cloning will deliver you beautiful roses folded from ancient Mongolian silk every year on your birthday.
I mean for heaven's sake man, buck up and make an effort.
Hm, to recap:
You have access to photos.
They have access to an ocean-going nuclear armed navy.
From this you conclude that you are in an ever stronger position.
I hope you're right. But the real Rodney King effect is this: it's never been easier to distract people from real danger by making a big fuss over one poor guy getting kicked.
I have 2 windows machines and no Linux machine. But I *use* Linux; my web sites are hosted on linux because the virtualization is better and it's cheaper. My svn server is linux and so is the server that runs wikis, PM systems and the other things I need to have. Why, I couldn't get by without linux! Yet I don't actually have a linux machine and I thus don't add to the ranks of linux users, whereas I *do* add to the ranks of Windows users.
I guess what I'm saying is, it's very hard to evaluate the importance of an OS by a headcount.
the United Kingdom spends eighty billion pounds a year on healthcare
Hm, nominal spending is more than that. Now I don't know much about the NHS (other than that it doesn't work) but I do know a bit about government contracts in the UK, and I would be very surprised indeed if more than about 50-60% of that went on anything of even peripheral value to healthcare.
Here, the Times (rapidly becoming a tabloid but never mind) has something on it:
Annoyingly chatty but probably basically correct article.
To put it another way, the UK NHS is like the US DoD; they're both ways to funnel money from the taxpayer to those who position themselves to recieve it. The NHS, however, which is regarded almost with veneration by most British people and which doesn't have to fight actual wars, is far more corrupt; buildings built, bought, sold and knocked down within the space of a few years, and so on. But the NHS long ago passed the point where it's powerful enough to keep going forever -- it's quite a political power broker in fact, which is why you *do* get reasonable free healthcare from it in much of Wales and Scotland.
Meanwhile, in England, health care does cost money -- you pay over the counter for even a basic dental checkup. You don't want to? Then take out some private health insurance. It's a fast growing sector in the UK. Good!
I imagine that there are people who find it hard to afford, though, what with all the taxes they're paying. And that's bad. But what can you do?
Bill Gates is one entrepreneur among many. His products came to a position of prominence in many markets, competing against the likes of NeXT, Apple and Sun whose offerings had weaknesses obvious to anyone who was trying to actually build a company using them. His company, Microsoft, isn't as nice as Ben & Jerry's but then it's a lot nicer than Sun and IBM. Although by offering commoditized, loosely-controlled solutions in an industry previously dominated by massive hardware/software lock-in, he is still small fry compared to the great 19th century monopolists like Vanderbilt and Rockefeller, or even the great 18th century players (Clive of India, anyone?)
He's a guy, with a company, that makes products, that people either buy or don't. He has major market share in a niche which, to be honest, was not very strongly contested, and he has a few OK products in other niches. Microsoft's smaller than Exxon, way smaller than GE, FAR smaller than Standard Oil, and VASTLY less controlling and anti-innovation than old-school IBM. On the other hand, it's not a particularly nice and fluffy company either. None of them are. Get over it. Now, quietly listen to yourself:
For 25 years the world has concerned itself with pittiances like who's president and which country has a despot in charge, while right under our noses the biggest monopoly in human history has effectively brought the globe under the dictatorship of Bill Gates - through the computers.
First, it's 'pittance' and it doesn't mean what you think it means.
Second, the above is exactly why basement-dwellers whose whole world is home computers do not wind up in important decision-making roles. And I think we should all be very grateful.
I can well believe that one guy can do the work of 20 outsourcers -- programmer productivity is so variable that it frequenty varies by a factor of 8 or more even among people from similar backgrounds.
The trick isn't to pick Americans versus picking Indians, the trick is to get the top 2% or so of any population. That's more important than 'interest in technology' and other ambient factors -- practically everyone works to make money, wherever they come from. Of course, going to the nearest big Indian outsourcing company isn't a very good way to get that top 2% that.
It's not even hard to tell who's in the top 2% -- you can often tell in a week, maybe a month if the project is sufficiently confus[ed|ing]. The problem is, you *can't* easily tell from a CV or interview. At least I can't.
Well, I can't write. I did my degree before they had word processors (or at least before they were ubiquitous) and for that I learned to handwrite and then immediately forgot. When I want to write 'CAT' I have to think about how I'm going to make the A -- sometimes I make it an upside down U with a line, sometimes it's more like a capital delta. I know I'm not alone(*).
My wife has a much worse problem, though. She was taught to write according to an exact model, with iron-hard discipline and years of training. Every single person who learned to write in her town in that decade uses EXACTLY the same writing.
If only there were some way to authenticate based not on something which changes even when you don't want it to (like how you write), nor on something that can't be changed even when you need to (like your fingertips). If only we could use some kind of mental trace that the user is aware of but that nobody else can perceive -- maybe a word or other sequence of symbols stored in the actual brain itself.
That'd rock. But the technology is probably decades away.
(*)In terms of handwriting. Spiritually, I may well be alone... so very very alone... *bursts into tears at desk*
It's true -- not because of technological limitations, but because of the nature of the problem.
The problem is:
"People keep subverting or working around the technical infrastruture of this environment."
The solution can never be:
"Change the technical infractructure of this environment."
I'll tell you whut, though -- before they nered the whole system into another 'run round and shoot everything and get bored' game, there was a working solution for Day of Defeat.
That solution was:
"Involve only people who will *not* subvert the technical infrastructure of this environment, because they are interested in playing the game, not in being u|3er l33t."
I realize there's no point responding on /. weeks after the original article has left the front page but... thank you for your interesting comments.
So when this became commonplace in Japan, it wasn't news.
And then when it became commonplace in Korea and Singapore, it still wasn't news.
And then when it became commonplace in Europe, it still wasn't news.
And then when it became common in Latin America (at least cities I've been to), it still wasn't news.
But now... the USA is catching up! And that's *news* folks!
And quite rightly. There weren't any barriers to the adoption of techs like this in asia etc., whereas in the US there has been a powerful, entrenched telecoms industry with no impetus to compete or change. If that barrier is becoming less effective then that could have important implications.
The question is, is it just 'technological osmosis', or is there an actual change in the balance of power...
Disclaimer: I don't even have a mobile (that works), so it's possible the barrier to progress is actually me.
I agree that it wasn't about slavery. The Mercantilists simply got together a 'war on slavery' like the 'war on terror' we have now.
However, I'd say it was about specific commercial interest. Lincoln was backed specifically by the railroad lobby, to build railroads in the north, with tariffs levied mainly in the South. The south got sick of this, but the north correctly estimated that it had a bigger population and industial base, and voila -- a war to protect revenues.
Comparisons with Iraq are invited.
Tomato harvesting was partly mechanized back in the 1960s.
Yeah, great, that's why there's no point buying American tomatoes now.
A tougher tomato plus appropriate machinery did the job.
Right, so 'tomato harvesting' wasn't mechanized -- instead, and alternative problem was solved, whereby a tough, tasteless, easy-to-harvest tomato would be harvested mechanically and actual tomatoes would become pretty much unknown (in participating countries).
Cost borne by: The consumer of tomaotes.
Savings go to: Agribusiness.
Yay progress. I think we can all feel justly proud.
Having said that, of course it is worth trying to automate tasks, and the US/UK's reliance on swarms of cheap, often illegal migrant labor is very unhealthy in many many way. Tomato picking has been a success story only for those owning the tomato farm and the cost (wooden tomatoes) has gone to everyone else involved.
You're right, I'm wrong, I surrender.
Well, I didn't really mean 'xenophobic' in the KKK sense so much as in the 'Not Invented Here' sense. I really don't think
-- Only a very small core of Japanese people who knew Matz really got to commit anything. Not in that core? No matter how great the value of what you try to commit, you might as well gived up.
-- Unicode? That's an evil anti-Japanese conspiracy. We must wait until suitable Japanese standards like konjaku mojikyo are mature enough to support. Until then Ruby has built-in support for specific Japanese encodings and the rest of the world doesn't matter. This endlessly-repeated debate partly inspired my page about Japanese attitudes to Unicode.
-- Matz used (and still uses AFAIK) Unix only. If it's part of unix (eg fork()) it's in Ruby. If it's not (eg proper threading) it's not in Ruby. Similarly, Matz is used to old-style C with global static vars all over the place, and therefore that's how Ruby is always gonna be. Having been an IT manager in Japan on occasion, I'd say it's a cultural thing that there's no point fighting. Sure, Ruby 2 is right around the corner. Sure.
-- Documentation is hobbyist-grade. I admit that while writing this post I googled a bit to check if my memories were still valid. I found that there is a project devoted to deducing the Ruby standard by experimenting with the Ruby implementation. If you can't see the problem with that...
Of course back in the late 90s, Ruby 2 was just around the corner and it took a long time for it to become clear that these were systemic, rather than temporary, failings. The current wikipedia page basically sums up everything I just said under 'criticism'. What it fails to mention is that these failings were a conscious decision.
Disclaimer: I was 100% observer in this process so I'm not a bitter rejected contributor. However, at that time I had high hopes that Ruby might become an industrial-strength language with threading and i18n and a proper spec and so on, and if very slowly and painfully became clear that that would never happen, which was kind of depressing.
I don't want to bash Ruby. I like ruby. I still write ruby programs. The fact is, though, ruby contains what Matz like to live with, and Matz lives in a relatively old-school world of fork()-ing single-threaded ASCII-piping unix processes with ad-hoc documentation. And any attempt (I didn't make any but I saw plenty made) to change that will be politely and apologetically totally ignored.
Now I feel a bit dirty for having made my first ever Internet post that is critical of a software project. I would like to say again that I like Ruby and it has it's place and if I were able to use ruby 'industrially' I would want a book such as the one reviewed.
Look, I've never been a troll but I still hate to see it done this badly. At least s/python/ruby/g or something.
I have this image of the poster just being beaten up for his lunch money again and again until finally he can take no more and he takes ACTION! He dials up SLASHDOT! He pastes his TROLL POST in! He ain't quite sure what all the words in it mean, but hey, it's a bona fide TROLL! That'll show them! Then as he turns to leave the sixth graders beat him up again.
It's pathetic. But trolls are supposed to be inflammatory, inciteful, disturbing, even thought-provoking -- not pathetic.
As someone who just bought a paper copy of the Unicode 5 standard, with annexes and code charts and all, weight 10lb or so, even though it's all downloadable for free, I am really getting a kick out of these replies.
So why did I buy it? Why not read the PDFs that are thoughtfully provided free by the Unicode Consortium?
1 -- I can flip through a book in front of the TV. Not so a PDF. Yes, I have a tablet PC.
2 -- As a book, the size of the different sections is much more real to me. I know this sounds wierd but with the book I can have insights like 'boy, the addition of Cuneiform bulked out Plane 0 by *this much* that I wouldn't have with PDFs. It helps with situational awareness, I guess.
3 -- When I want to show it to someone, I go "Hey, look at this bit here in annex 15!" And they look. If I go "Hey, when we get near some wireless access, go to this site and click 'annexes' and then number 15 and it's section 13.7 near the bottom!" they ain't gonna look.
4 -- Same applies when the 'someone' is me.
5 -- I see the book, with its myriad post-it notes and bookmarks and marginalia and apprehend it as a whole. This does not happen with a website. With a website I don't even know if I've read it all.
6 -- etc etc etc ad nauseam.
Now I don't even like Ruby -- I was a big Ruby fan back in about 1998 and like many other first-generation Ruby fans I learned a harsh lesson about what happens when the whole project is dictated by one xenophobic Japanese guy. Plus as you can deduce from the above I kind of need multilingualization! But if I were still into Ruby this is just what I'd want -- a book I can just pick up off the table in front of the TV, and get an idea, and show the page to someone else, maybe even cite it later. Not a website that changes and that I have to have a computer to read and that requires instructions like 'go to this URL, click on this'. A book! That's why we have them!
It's what's for breakfast!
& the U.S. doesn't do any of this?
No, it doesn't. It does a bit here and there but it has no effective overall strategy.
I swear, we as Americans are so freaking self-righteous!
You misspelled either 'complacent' or 'doomed' but I don't know which; either would make sense.
You speak of "the spread of propaganda" & the use of "deception, disinformation & influence" by the Chinese yet we, as Americans, have been doing it for MUCH longer!
No, you haven't. You want to think you have, but you haven't. There has never been an American propaganda initiative that was 5% as effective as the Chinese PR machine for their attack on India. You wish you could do it (and then you'd have fun feeling all guilty about it) but you can't. Do you think the Iraq strategy would be in such a mess if you could do what the Chinese did in 1962?
I know of what I speak. So can you, if you read Xinhua every day. Just read it. After a few months, you will start to believe. It is a whole other history, a whole other way of looking at the world. America has nothing like it. That is why America is losing; that is why America is cast as the bad guy when they invade one lousy country for oil or whatever, and China gets to flatten the whole of central Asia, northeast Asia, and half Africa as far as I can see by this point, and yet remain Teh Cool.
You lost already. Going "oh but we are so bad for employing these elite evil technologies and techniques, teehee, oh wicked wicked us for being so kickass" does not help. Watch Fox, watch CNN, watch Al-Jazeera, even watch the BBC if you have to, and you will see different spins, different biases, different points of view. Watch Xinhua even in English and you will see a different reality. "Tibetan People Bask In Glow Of Rosy Future". When you can come up with a headline like that and have 1/3 of the world take it as truth, THEN you will be making progess.