... the entire industry is stale. Where we go from here I don't know.
The easy and obvious has been conquered. The next set of tasks are orders of magnitude harder. Things like integration of ubiquitous computing, real AI, soft computing, homeostatic systems, interactive, real-time modeling, simulation, planning, and optimization. Not only will this take years of work, but it would provide decades of new advancement and business oportunities. But it will never happen - at least not in the US. Why?
These fundamental technologies will take decades to explore and billions to research. Industrial concerns no longer want to foot the bill for research. And government? Well, they're off funding little geopolitical adventures rather than spending money on things that might turn into lasting competitive advantage for our country. If you want funding for research, you better not look there
The last crop of research seed corn grown during the seventies and eighties has been eaten. The PC and internet eras (together with businesses eating themselves) took the minds and funding from the research labs that might have provided replacement seed. It willl be around twenty years before computers become a hot area again because that's how much time it will take to replenish the supply of new ideas. Of course, by then it will probably be India or China doing this...
Islam has always been a melded church and state, even more so than the Catholics ever did.
All young religions that see the secular state as a threat do so initially. As the religious powers become more corrupted, a reformist movement usually arises that tries to again separate the secular from the holy. Islam is a very young religion (relatively speaking) and is at the height of its merger between state and theos. In addition, its leaders are becoming more corrupt (while all the while trumpeting their virtue). Sometime during the next few hundred years, I expect that a reformist Islamic movement will take hold and the world can get back to relative peacefulness (just in time for the Mormons or Bahai's to cause trouble:-). Of course, in between now and then, especially as we in the secular world give more moral ammunition to the people trying to enhance their pseudo-state (usually by invasion and causing death to their citizens), things will continue to be a bit dicey.
Political forecast for the next century: Cloudy, with a bit of terror...
I'm going to get my picture of me ridin' a real live full-size Jackelope (not the baby one shown here), make me a press release, and get my story on Slashdot!
The day will come (if it hasn't already) where antivirus vendors start releasing homegrown viruses to increase sales. It's already happened in the spyware world.
Right you are! And bits 24-31 were completely disconnected, leading many developers to "creatively" utilize those bits for other purposes (packing Boolean flags and type tags into those areas was a favorite passtime). Of course, when the newer versions of the 68K came along, all of that code needed to be rewritten, but it kept everyone employed and happy. 'Course you young whippersnappers don't have to worry about that what with your fancy 64-bit address spaces and all (Though I've heard that most CPU's only access the lower 48 bits or so of the address lines - time for some more "creative" programming!).
So far, the guy has video working, but his audio stutters and he doesn't have a remote. The article doesn't even mention which MythTV distribution he uses (or if he's rolling his own from the packages). In short, this article should have been titled "Here's Some Stuff I Thought Would Make a Low Noise Box (and I Was Even Wrong About That) That I Could Slap a Couple of Tuner Cards Into and Watch TV With (and Maybe Someday I Will Be Able To, But Until Then, I'm Keeping My Tivo Plugged In)".
This has got to be one of the most disappointing articles I've seen on the subject. You'd do better sticking with the MythTV FAQ's.
Yes, Clarence Thomas, Rhenquist, Scalia, and O'Connor all felt strongly that the government should NOT be allowed to seize your property - whilst all the liberal judges (yes - some of the liberal judges were appointed in compromise by Republican presidents) voted that the government should be allowed to take your property under any circumstances.
This is an amazing misreading of the court's opinion. In general none of the court's members held that it was not OK to buy property for eminent domain use. The statement that some of the court thought it was not OK to sieze property is absolutely untrue and made more untrue by the use of the word seize (and later take) which to the non-legal world implies appropriation without compensation. Also, the only disagreement was with respect to how broad an interpretation the terms "public benefit" was WRT earlier eminent domain cases. The majority ruled that, just as in most cases, the eleceted representatives of the people may make decisions about how much public benefit is entailed in any particular case. Although I sympathise with the owners who are being forced out of their long-time homes and I don't like the fact that the representatives made their decision in favor of a developer vs. the people, I see no alternative to the majority decision. As long as the compensation was sufficient and you don't want to kill eminent domain (or representative democracy) entirely, the court acted wisely and the use of inflamitory rhetoric does nothing to help find a rational solution to these matters.
Remember that the U.S. only got its space act together because of perceived Soviet superiority and the fear they would dominate space militarily. Now, probably, China and the E.U. will provide the competition that pushes the U.S. back into space in the next couple of decades.
For what? I know the reasons why a return to space would probably beneficial and you know them, but the people sitting in Congress would have to have a damn good reason for allocating funds to this (and, quite frankly, the current deficit exacerbated by the wondrous Y2K+1 tax cuts don't make this any easier). Mars is too far away to be percevied as any sort of miltary threat (we'd see what rivals were doing too soon and nuke them from the ground if they tried anything) and, as for technological advances, low-grav orbital is probably a better bet. I don't see any particular reason why we'd get into another space race nor why Mars is better than the Moon or just putting stuff in orbit other than the pure science aspect (and God knows the Congress isn't into spending money on that these days).
"...what matters is the temperature normalized by the density of the particles"
Does this mean that a star's core might be superconducting given a low enough temperature and a high enough density? From a relativistic standpoint, what happens as you shove more mass in? The mass/energy is getting greater, but does the normalized value of the temperature start decreasing? I think that this finding is going to be interesting for more reasons than just superconductivity. Of course, not being a physicist, I might be (heck, am probably) wrong.
Only the last couple of generations of Americans are so self-involved that they cannot see the DUTY, the OBLIGATION for every American to repay the debt and serve at least a 2-year commitment their own country.
You're right. The debt is too high. We should pay it down by outsourcing.
The point here is that while I very much appreciate the sacrifice that the men and women serving now are making, their leaders seem to be doing everything in their power to make sure that their service will tarnished by their (the leaders', not the soldiers') lies and moral turptude, just as was the service of those in Vietnam.
If you want to see what we're involved in, look at the UK in Northern Ireland from ca. 1965-2000. Belfast or Baghdad, it makes no difference. And think about how that fight ended (is still ending?) - a political settlement that saved face for all but the folks who tried to keep everyone from killing each other. You cannot destroy a terrorist movement by military means. The best you can do is to try to keep a tenuous peace long enough that cooler heads will prevail, allowing parts of the terrorist group to form a legitimate political group, and then negotiate it into a stable govenment. And, as the British situation showed, this takes decades. You can see this process repeating again between Israel and the PLO/PA as we speak.
We're past the point where a clear military victory can be achieved. Our choices now are threefold:
Prop up the Iraqi regime until they can "defend themselves" and then find a Nixonian "Peace With Honor", leaving the insurgents to continue destabilization, probably escalating to a civil war, after we leave;
Hang out for thirty to forty years getting our people killed until the people there get tired of fighting;
Get out now and let the chips fall where they may.
It's not clear to me that there's a whole lot of difference between the first and third option at this point and I, for one, am not willing to let my fellow countrymen die for decades while we wait for this to happen. At this point, I believe the best way to support our troops is to do everything in my power to get them the hell out of Iraq as quickly as possible - even if that means getting out without a clean "win".
And these should be made by people who actually know something about coding.
And the sad thing is that they probably were.
All of the big enterprise suites are highly customizable. The companies who deploy these apps pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to customize them. They are designed to be skinned and the javascript used in them can be tweaked to within an inch of its life. And, believe it or not, the companies providing and/or implementing these apps don't go out of their way to hire idiots. Most of the time, the coders who do the implementation are driven toward bad design because the companies who buy the app don't want to pay for the extra time it takes to make these systems standards compliant. For the deploying company, it's cheaper to put an underpowered PC on each Mac user's desk than to pay for the design necessary to support Safari. Nor does the company that supplies the app want to eat the cost of making the app portable - it's cheaper to convince the customer that making it IE-only is just fine (though to be fair, a lot of them actually are flexible enough to work on any browser if the customer is willing to pay). The company doing the implementation has generally won its bid based on a fixed functionality, fixed-price contract, so it would be suicidal to have their page monkeys do anything that's not specified in the contract.
So don't blame the page designers (who generally do know enough to design good, standards compliant pages and who have very little say in the matter) - blame the companies who are too cheap to pay for them to do a good job.
You can also blame companies who deploy customer-facing web applications that don't work on non-IE browsers. They should know better (or they do know better and have specifically chosen to alienate a potential customer segment). And the best way to get the message accross is to complain frequently and loudly and to vote with your wallet.
Google is snatching up a myriad of the brightest minds around, and I think that over time this will prove to be their most important assent in the "search engine race".
Google is not about the "search engine race". It is about leveraging and connecting people to the information discovered from human-mediated networks. And no, I'm not making a joke about standard boom-era buzzwords. Let me explain...
Many companies who are successful in a given niche often have skills and abilities that can be used in a broader arena. In a lot of cases these companies don't see opportunities because they place artificial boundaries on what they will attempt to do because of their comfort in that niche. For instance, a friend of mine a few years ago did a contract with a large oil company. The company's actual expertise was in moving flamable liquids from point a to point b. As such, they were able to dump their exploration arm, build more pipelines and now make a much larger profit by moving oil than by trying to find and market it. By thinkinking of themselves as an oil company, they neglected their core competancy.
The point of all of this is that a good organization will understand to invest in and promote various products based on their core competancies - not necessarily looking at themselves as an X, Y, or Z company, where X, Y, and Z are the classes of their successful products. The fact that Google can see themselves as having its core competancy in exploiting human-mediated networks (and from their acquisitions and products they seem to understand this, at least at an instictive level) and are promoting a corporate strategy around this notion means that Google will be much more than "search engine" or "advertising" company.
They actually will be one of the first core companies of the third information era (first:1950-90: basic technology in storage and manipulaton; second: 1990-2000: connectivity infrastructure (ISPs) and analogs to old systems (e.g., Amazon); third: 2000-??: discovery and use of meta-information from connected information base, new services and models based on same).
What the difference between a programme and a schedule is I'll never know.
A programme is a strategic concept, outlining conceptual goals and milestones that are required to bring about a certain outcome. A schedule is a tactical document used for assigning specific resources to concrete tasks used for tracking progress in order to implement a portion of said programme. It may take many schedules to implement a programme using a given set of resources.
Take off the phrase "by popular opinion" and then you're right. Facts can be determined. Perceptions can be collected and specified. Truth is far too open to interpretations of these items and their connections to be universally agreed upon.
Apple is to me quite the enigma. The company gets far more press and adulation relative to its size than any other company I can think of.
In many ways Apple's products are less performant speed-wise, but they are more elegant and polished. Think of it in terms of the auto world. People have always been willing to pay more for what they see as a more stylish alternative, especially when they don't have to get out and crank the motor to start it. The fact that they are able to provide these products while having only "the same level of problems as Dell" (something I dispute, but note that in any case Apple's customer support is much better) is why they're seen as the equivalent of a BMW and not an Alfa Romeo. Their style is the reason they're not seen as a Buick.
More importantly, style is hard to create, but easy to show - and to sell. Apple's ability to create a sense of style consistently gives it a tangible competitive advantage. Remember that Apple almost died when it tried to become another platinum corporate box in the early nineties. They started to forget their core advantages - style, elegance, ease of use, and polish.
China may have the legal right to do whatever it wants with its citizens, no matter what that is, but it doesn't mean that it's morally OK for them to do it.
The question is whether you want to give China (or other entities) the power to decide whether your set of "rights" is morally correct. According to our current government's notions, for instance, our citizens do not have a "right" to health care. Many countries believe the opposite. Some governments believe males have the "right" to multiple wives based on their own moral strictures. If you feel enough moral superiority to judge others' determination of rights, you must allow your own set to be similarly judged.
Don't get me wrong... I do not apologize for those nations of the world who trample on what I see as the rights that any human should be accorded. But I understand that what I see as a right might be called a privilege in another state.
I'd like nothing better to see the nations of the world get together and agree on... oh, let's say a Universal Declaration of Human Rights and I'd like it even better if the folks who got together to make one up would actually follow it. But until that day comes, remember that any time you point the finger of rights at one country, you're pointing three back at yourself.
Slashdot Mirror
So you want me to eat the dog instead? Or by your use of past tense can I assume you wanted to save Mr. Bun-bun for yourself?
The easy and obvious has been conquered. The next set of tasks are orders of magnitude harder. Things like integration of ubiquitous computing, real AI, soft computing, homeostatic systems, interactive, real-time modeling, simulation, planning, and optimization. Not only will this take years of work, but it would provide decades of new advancement and business oportunities. But it will never happen - at least not in the US. Why?
These fundamental technologies will take decades to explore and billions to research. Industrial concerns no longer want to foot the bill for research. And government? Well, they're off funding little geopolitical adventures rather than spending money on things that might turn into lasting competitive advantage for our country. If you want funding for research, you better not look there
The last crop of research seed corn grown during the seventies and eighties has been eaten. The PC and internet eras (together with businesses eating themselves) took the minds and funding from the research labs that might have provided replacement seed. It willl be around twenty years before computers become a hot area again because that's how much time it will take to replenish the supply of new ideas. Of course, by then it will probably be India or China doing this...
All young religions that see the secular state as a threat do so initially. As the religious powers become more corrupted, a reformist movement usually arises that tries to again separate the secular from the holy. Islam is a very young religion (relatively speaking) and is at the height of its merger between state and theos. In addition, its leaders are becoming more corrupt (while all the while trumpeting their virtue). Sometime during the next few hundred years, I expect that a reformist Islamic movement will take hold and the world can get back to relative peacefulness (just in time for the Mormons or Bahai's to cause trouble :-). Of course, in between now and then, especially as we in the secular world give more moral ammunition to the people trying to enhance their pseudo-state (usually by invasion and causing death to their citizens), things will continue to be a bit dicey.
Political forecast for the next century: Cloudy, with a bit of terror...
Sounds like a description of your average Slashdot reader...
Hey! I only have one good eye, you insensitive clod!
I'm going to get my picture of me ridin' a real live full-size Jackelope (not the baby one shown here), make me a press release, and get my story on Slashdot!
Why is it that I don't doubt that any more?
So what you're saying is that people who are stupid use perl?
And being from Georgia doesn't help, either.
Right you are! And bits 24-31 were completely disconnected, leading many developers to "creatively" utilize those bits for other purposes (packing Boolean flags and type tags into those areas was a favorite passtime). Of course, when the newer versions of the 68K came along, all of that code needed to be rewritten, but it kept everyone employed and happy. 'Course you young whippersnappers don't have to worry about that what with your fancy 64-bit address spaces and all (Though I've heard that most CPU's only access the lower 48 bits or so of the address lines - time for some more "creative" programming!).
So far, the guy has video working, but his audio stutters and he doesn't have a remote. The article doesn't even mention which MythTV distribution he uses (or if he's rolling his own from the packages). In short, this article should have been titled "Here's Some Stuff I Thought Would Make a Low Noise Box (and I Was Even Wrong About That) That I Could Slap a Couple of Tuner Cards Into and Watch TV With (and Maybe Someday I Will Be Able To, But Until Then, I'm Keeping My Tivo Plugged In)".
This has got to be one of the most disappointing articles I've seen on the subject. You'd do better sticking with the MythTV FAQ's.
This is an amazing misreading of the court's opinion. In general none of the court's members held that it was not OK to buy property for eminent domain use. The statement that some of the court thought it was not OK to sieze property is absolutely untrue and made more untrue by the use of the word seize (and later take) which to the non-legal world implies appropriation without compensation. Also, the only disagreement was with respect to how broad an interpretation the terms "public benefit" was WRT earlier eminent domain cases. The majority ruled that, just as in most cases, the eleceted representatives of the people may make decisions about how much public benefit is entailed in any particular case. Although I sympathise with the owners who are being forced out of their long-time homes and I don't like the fact that the representatives made their decision in favor of a developer vs. the people, I see no alternative to the majority decision. As long as the compensation was sufficient and you don't want to kill eminent domain (or representative democracy) entirely, the court acted wisely and the use of inflamitory rhetoric does nothing to help find a rational solution to these matters.
For what? I know the reasons why a return to space would probably beneficial and you know them, but the people sitting in Congress would have to have a damn good reason for allocating funds to this (and, quite frankly, the current deficit exacerbated by the wondrous Y2K+1 tax cuts don't make this any easier). Mars is too far away to be percevied as any sort of miltary threat (we'd see what rivals were doing too soon and nuke them from the ground if they tried anything) and, as for technological advances, low-grav orbital is probably a better bet. I don't see any particular reason why we'd get into another space race nor why Mars is better than the Moon or just putting stuff in orbit other than the pure science aspect (and God knows the Congress isn't into spending money on that these days).
Does this mean that a star's core might be superconducting given a low enough temperature and a high enough density? From a relativistic standpoint, what happens as you shove more mass in? The mass/energy is getting greater, but does the normalized value of the temperature start decreasing? I think that this finding is going to be interesting for more reasons than just superconductivity. Of course, not being a physicist, I might be (heck, am probably) wrong.
'Nuff said...
You're right. The debt is too high. We should pay it down by outsourcing.
The point here is that while I very much appreciate the sacrifice that the men and women serving now are making, their leaders seem to be doing everything in their power to make sure that their service will tarnished by their (the leaders', not the soldiers') lies and moral turptude, just as was the service of those in Vietnam.
If you want to see what we're involved in, look at the UK in Northern Ireland from ca. 1965-2000. Belfast or Baghdad, it makes no difference. And think about how that fight ended (is still ending?) - a political settlement that saved face for all but the folks who tried to keep everyone from killing each other. You cannot destroy a terrorist movement by military means. The best you can do is to try to keep a tenuous peace long enough that cooler heads will prevail, allowing parts of the terrorist group to form a legitimate political group, and then negotiate it into a stable govenment. And, as the British situation showed, this takes decades. You can see this process repeating again between Israel and the PLO/PA as we speak.
We're past the point where a clear military victory can be achieved. Our choices now are threefold:
It's not clear to me that there's a whole lot of difference between the first and third option at this point and I, for one, am not willing to let my fellow countrymen die for decades while we wait for this to happen. At this point, I believe the best way to support our troops is to do everything in my power to get them the hell out of Iraq as quickly as possible - even if that means getting out without a clean "win".
And the sad thing is that they probably were.
All of the big enterprise suites are highly customizable. The companies who deploy these apps pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to customize them. They are designed to be skinned and the javascript used in them can be tweaked to within an inch of its life. And, believe it or not, the companies providing and/or implementing these apps don't go out of their way to hire idiots. Most of the time, the coders who do the implementation are driven toward bad design because the companies who buy the app don't want to pay for the extra time it takes to make these systems standards compliant. For the deploying company, it's cheaper to put an underpowered PC on each Mac user's desk than to pay for the design necessary to support Safari. Nor does the company that supplies the app want to eat the cost of making the app portable - it's cheaper to convince the customer that making it IE-only is just fine (though to be fair, a lot of them actually are flexible enough to work on any browser if the customer is willing to pay). The company doing the implementation has generally won its bid based on a fixed functionality, fixed-price contract, so it would be suicidal to have their page monkeys do anything that's not specified in the contract.
So don't blame the page designers (who generally do know enough to design good, standards compliant pages and who have very little say in the matter) - blame the companies who are too cheap to pay for them to do a good job.
You can also blame companies who deploy customer-facing web applications that don't work on non-IE browsers. They should know better (or they do know better and have specifically chosen to alienate a potential customer segment). And the best way to get the message accross is to complain frequently and loudly and to vote with your wallet.
But which was it? Goatse or tubgirl?
Google is not about the "search engine race". It is about leveraging and connecting people to the information discovered from human-mediated networks. And no, I'm not making a joke about standard boom-era buzzwords. Let me explain...
Many companies who are successful in a given niche often have skills and abilities that can be used in a broader arena. In a lot of cases these companies don't see opportunities because they place artificial boundaries on what they will attempt to do because of their comfort in that niche. For instance, a friend of mine a few years ago did a contract with a large oil company. The company's actual expertise was in moving flamable liquids from point a to point b. As such, they were able to dump their exploration arm, build more pipelines and now make a much larger profit by moving oil than by trying to find and market it. By thinkinking of themselves as an oil company, they neglected their core competancy.
The point of all of this is that a good organization will understand to invest in and promote various products based on their core competancies - not necessarily looking at themselves as an X, Y, or Z company, where X, Y, and Z are the classes of their successful products. The fact that Google can see themselves as having its core competancy in exploiting human-mediated networks (and from their acquisitions and products they seem to understand this, at least at an instictive level) and are promoting a corporate strategy around this notion means that Google will be much more than "search engine" or "advertising" company.
They actually will be one of the first core companies of the third information era (first:1950-90: basic technology in storage and manipulaton; second: 1990-2000: connectivity infrastructure (ISPs) and analogs to old systems (e.g., Amazon); third: 2000-??: discovery and use of meta-information from connected information base, new services and models based on same).
It's not ironic.
It's hypocritical.
Get the terminology right, people...
A programme is a strategic concept, outlining conceptual goals and milestones that are required to bring about a certain outcome. A schedule is a tactical document used for assigning specific resources to concrete tasks used for tracking progress in order to implement a portion of said programme. It may take many schedules to implement a programme using a given set of resources.
Take off the phrase "by popular opinion" and then you're right. Facts can be determined. Perceptions can be collected and specified. Truth is far too open to interpretations of these items and their connections to be universally agreed upon.
In many ways Apple's products are less performant speed-wise, but they are more elegant and polished. Think of it in terms of the auto world. People have always been willing to pay more for what they see as a more stylish alternative, especially when they don't have to get out and crank the motor to start it. The fact that they are able to provide these products while having only "the same level of problems as Dell" (something I dispute, but note that in any case Apple's customer support is much better) is why they're seen as the equivalent of a BMW and not an Alfa Romeo. Their style is the reason they're not seen as a Buick.
More importantly, style is hard to create, but easy to show - and to sell. Apple's ability to create a sense of style consistently gives it a tangible competitive advantage. Remember that Apple almost died when it tried to become another platinum corporate box in the early nineties. They started to forget their core advantages - style, elegance, ease of use, and polish.
The question is whether you want to give China (or other entities) the power to decide whether your set of "rights" is morally correct. According to our current government's notions, for instance, our citizens do not have a "right" to health care. Many countries believe the opposite. Some governments believe males have the "right" to multiple wives based on their own moral strictures. If you feel enough moral superiority to judge others' determination of rights, you must allow your own set to be similarly judged.
Don't get me wrong... I do not apologize for those nations of the world who trample on what I see as the rights that any human should be accorded. But I understand that what I see as a right might be called a privilege in another state.
I'd like nothing better to see the nations of the world get together and agree on... oh, let's say a Universal Declaration of Human Rights and I'd like it even better if the folks who got together to make one up would actually follow it. But until that day comes, remember that any time you point the finger of rights at one country, you're pointing three back at yourself.
Best. Quote. Ever.