A business plan is not necessarily about profit. It's about spelling out what you intend to accomplish, then how you intend to get the resources to accomplish it. With business objectives clearly spelled out, it's much easier to be able to prioritize all the possible things that can happen and decide which ones are good to do and which ones are not feasible. Without clear business objectives it's easy to get bogged down with feature-creep or in details that don't help you actually accomplish the things you want to.
For example, it's one thing to design, develop, and actually commercialize a $100 laptop. But is there a plan to figure out how to get the governments of poor countries to pay for them? What is the plan for working with countries where the government is ambivalent or even hostile to the concept?
Or how much more time and effort should be expended to get the price down to $75 compared to just using those resources to make more at the current price? And is price even the "problem"? Will a $25 lower price lead to more distribution? Or which is more important: using only FLOSS or possibly getting corporate sponsorship that might fund wider distribution?
Is the "plan" that the $100/laptop revenue will fund everything involved in the project? Or is some amount of money from donations required to keep the operation going?
Part of a good business plan is to set out the various objectives and prioritize them - then explain how you're going to get the resources to do those things. Doing so won't guarantee success, but it does serve as an easy way to cut away the kruft that can build up in complex project like this.
That reminds me of an article by Nelson Repenning, "Nobody ever gets credit for fixing problems that never happened". It's quite an interesting read... The guy who "saves the day" during an emergency always seems to get credit and reward, but what about the guy who keeps the emergency from ever happening?
does anyone have a provider that, for the most part, they are happy with?
I generally despise the whole contract-lock-in for service model that seems to prevalent in the US (phones, cable, internet, etc), so I try to avoid it where possible. For many years, I used Virgin Mobile for my phone service. It had pretty good coverage (used Sprint's network) and the monthly costs were reasonable. The biggest downside with them are the teen-oriented phones (and horrible ring tones).
I moved once to a city where only Verizon or AT&T was available, so I took Verizon. The coverage was good and the service was "okay" - they had a tendency to simply shut off the phone if there was any dispute over the billing. One thing I liked was that I could use Bitpim to download and upload my contacts list. Though as soon as the contract was over, I needed a new phone and refused to get a new contract so I switched back to Virgin Mobile.
My VM phone died, so I recently switched to StraightTalk (http://www.straighttalk.com/), which is available through Walmart. They have a handful of nice phones and the service is on Verizon's network (some of the menus and prompts indicate it's connected to Tracfone). $45/month unlimited everything, including a "not bad" internet browser. I got the Samsung R451C and I have enjoyed it a lot. It seems like a quality phone and I like that I can put whatever sounds/mp3s on it I want for ring-tones (they don't even have a way to buy ringtones). My biggest irritation is that I cannot find a way to download/upload the address book.
For me, the lack of a binding contract is a huge "feature" and I'm pleased to have a decent phone and a good price for my service. With this kind of option, I simply cannot imagine locking myself into a contract with Verizon or AT&T just to get a fancier phone.
What I have not been able to do is sit through it a second time, even though I have managed to sit through all of the prequels a second time. That's how bad it is.
I once gave a copy of it to a friend of mine who was in a fraternity. They decided that it would be great hazing to make the pledges watch it. I don't know if they really went through with it, but I imagine the pledges would much rather have eaten live goldfish, had sex with goats, or any of the "normal" fraternity stuff.
As for me, I remember being a kid and excited about the Star Wars Holiday special, but I don't remember actually seeing it. Having seen it as an adult leaves me sad that there is no bleach strong enough to scour the memory of it from my mind. I am forever altered.
Have you ever tried putting some eggs on a pizza just before it goes into the oven?
That might be okay - however, what I got in Paris was a raw egg cracked over the pizza AFTER it came out of the oven. I found that very disappointing. Though the the waiter may have been playing a prank, as he seemed put out that I already knew to ask for a carafe of water (since "I'd like some water" defaults to an expensive bottled water in most places).
At its fundamental level, a decision the selection of one option from among more than one, based on some input information.
A bacteria, taking in information about how many of its own species are nearby, and information about the overall population of all types bacteria, determines if its species is in the majority and if there are enough of them. It uses this information to decide whether to keep reproducing or to become virulent.
While simpler, this is essentially the same as groups of neurons in your brain taking information from your stomach, your history of likes and dislikes, and the menu in front of you, to make the decision to tell the waiter you want the chicken sandwich rather than the clam chowder for lunch.
Information comes in, is processed, and a decision comes out.
One might just as well argue that water flowing down hill has made a sophisticated decision.
Actually, the behaviors and communication of groups of bacteria are much more complex than water flowing downhill. Consider that when you get a bacterial infection, the bacteria will typically work in a "growth phase" where they are multiplying but not doing being virulent. When the bacteria reach a certain population size (or density), they all switch on their virulence. Individuals are making decisions that actually manifest as a group decision. Water molecules do not do this.
And actually, it appears Mythbusters did experiments with a flag in a normal atmosphere and in a vacuum. They simulate the initial motions and twisting of planting the flag. The residual motion lasts much longer in the vacuum.
back when I was young (early 2k's) I used to listen to a lot of dance music and go to the occasional rave. When I first started going to these gigs, I asked one of my friends why the DJ's used vinyl instead of CD's.
Many years ago I worked at a radio station with mostly records and "carts" (like 8-track tapes); digital music was just becoming available. One thing I noticed was that it was much easier to mix songs and get the beats to mix using the record players. Being able to touch the media as it turned and subtly slow or speed up the records made it really easy to sync the beats. It was really fun to watch the DJs who were particularly good at it.
One possibility is that men really are smarter, just that IQ tests don't measure the most important aspects of intelligence.
If you're going to back up your statement with the idea that the test methodology MAY be flawed, then you could just as easily argue that the other possibility is that women really are smarter... just that IQ tests don't measure the most important aspects of intelligence.
Anyways, as far as I know, men have done around 95-99% of the inventing. There's a difference between inventing and getting the credit for inventing. I've seen plenty of women rig up ingenious solutions to problems - or "invent solutions". They just don't run off to the patent office with their every "gee whiz" idea.
It sounds to me like you just don't like/value women and this is biasing your perceptions.
Its a silly argument that the article makes. E-Readers can display B&W pages, and gray shades. This is absolutely sufficient for displaying textbooks.
Not if the the book has a chapter on spectroscopy or titration (is the reaction pink or purple?), or shows maps (which shade of grey is water vs land?) or flags of the world. That's just 3 things found in textbooks I can think of that would not work well in grey-scale.
I can see how you're restoring byte 2 when you know it's invalid. But how do you know that in the first place. You XOR your new stuff and get a different parity byte and that tells you that you have a problem. But can it identify which one is the problem? Or is there a risk of restoring the wrong byte to achieve a correct parity byte and ending up with 2 incorrect bytes?
The Commodore Amiga's Intuition filesystem did this better than Microsoft back in 1985 by having forward and backward links in every block which made it possible to repair block pointer damage by searching for a reference to the bad block in the preceding and following block.
Oh wow... that reminds me that many years ago I saved someone's masters thesis that way. I think it was on a PC though - they had their entire thesis on a single floppy (no backups of course) and somehow word-perfect deleted the file or munged it somehow, or maybe a sector was bad. I remember using a Norton sector editor (back when Norton stuff was really good - I learned 80x86 assembly from his books) to go through and figure out the chain of sectors that made up the file and brought most of it back.
I'm trying to remember if the sectors linked to each other like you describe or if it was all in the FAT and I just followed the pattern. I could be confusing my days of playing C64 floppies.
I posted it a few years ago. It happened in 2001. Maybe it's the kind of thing that happens when management types have no idea what people do to get a PhD in Computer Science.
I don't look down on people who fix the office printers or get peoples mail clients working with their AV or whatever... I don't look down on teachers, but it doesn't mean I wanna be one or believe that calling me one is an accurate description.
I once worked at a university (doing "IT" for the engineering school) and during one of the staff meetings, the management suggested that they could save money by having the computer science professors take over all the IT tasks in the school.
Fortunately one of CS profs quickly suggested that the EE professors could fix wiring and changing light bulbs and the Civil Engineering profs could clean bathrooms and unplug toilets. The idea died almost quicker than it was born. But it belies the point of this article. Most people have no idea what "IT" even means and assume that if you can do one thing with a computer then you are automatically able to do all things.
You need to find a way to do just your academic work, or seriously, find another job. What they're doing to you will stifle you until you really just want to die.
It's not worth it.
I'm in a similar boat. I showed a capability to do databases in my current job and have been doing that more than the job on my title, and have built quite an interesting system that does a certain job really well. Now we actually want backup and I see why they were content having me do it. Our IT dept is finally providing 2 people to do the job, but both are paid far more than I am (I even got/had to interview one of them). It's one thing to be praised and told I'm one of the smartest people in the company (even in front of other people), but really, I'd like to be paid like I'm one of the smartest people in the company.
Luckily for me, a very interesting job just came up in the system and I've been working all weekend on my resume (instead of that database).
Good luck. You deserve better, but you'll have to demand better and be willing to leave for another job. They'll pay you as little as possible and shit on you as much as you'll let them.
The problem is, there are a ton of articles. The point of a summary is to provide enough information to help me decide if I want to bother RTFA. Having an interesting headline and a bad summary is just irritating. If the Slashdot editors want to make money selling ads, then they need to make the site useful and compelling. Irritating their readers is a bad business model.
This reminds me of an old science fiction story I just read, A Canticle for Leibowitz. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Canticle_for_Leibowitz) It's set in a post-apocalyptic world where what remains of the Catholic church tries to preserve as much knowledge as possible. Everyone else, hating the people who caused the "Flame Deluge", were trying to destroy all the books they could find.
Re:This doesn't prove ants can count
on
Ants That Can Count
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
It's still not counting, though it can reproduce the effects. A calculator doesn't actually count (it's just bit switching), but it reproduces the effect. Granted it means that whatever it's doing can simulate the effect of basic counting, but it in no way represents the understanding of numbers
Well, this is science. These researchers had a hypothesis that ants can count and devised an experiment to test the hypothesis. Based on their assumptions, the evidence from the experiments support their hypothesis.
Your hypothesis is that it's not counting but something else. It seems the next step is for you to devise a way to isolate counting from doing a counting-like behavior in ants and do an experiment to test your hypothesis.
However in a way, you're just playing with the definition. What does "understanding of numbers" mean? And is it really integral to counting? If you use pacecounter beads (Ranger beads: http://www.instructables.com/id/Army-Ranger-Beads/), you are "counting" on a piece of string but not actually keeping numbers in your head. In fact, the whole point of those is that you don't have to keep track of numbers because it's hard to do when you're exhausted and have all the other soldier-things to keep track of. You could use these beads to go out some distance, turn around and come back the same distance. You wouldn't have to use numbers in your head, but counting is still being done.
If the ant has no way to tell where it's located at, how can it run the straight way "home"? Hence the ant knows exactly where "home" is
Some ants use a type of sense of smell to know where they've been (if they leave a chemical trail) and where the nest is. I expect the scent from the nest diffuses in the environment, so they just have to head "uphill" in the scent gradient to get to the nest. This, at least, is how I've seen ant simulations programmed.
I don't know how this applies to the experiments here, since the ants with extra long legs went past the nest. It could be that there aren't enough ants in the nest to produce a strong enough scent gradient.
The idea that they can count is interesting. However, I wonder what happens when the ants must take different routes too and from the nest. I wonder what would happen in these experiments if for some of the ants they increase the distance to the nest without actually altering the ants themselves.
I was just reading Freakonomics and they make the case that part of that decline was also because of Row vs. Wade and the greater availability of abortion. They say the evidence supports the idea that Row vs. Wade made abortion available to women in poverty and that their aborted children were among the group that would have been most likely to become violent criminals. They do quite a few comparisons between states that legalized abortion at different times and other factors to show this.
I'm not sure I accept it, but it's an interesting argument.
Slashdot Mirror
to implement a business plan
BTW, They are a nonprofit organization.
A business plan is not necessarily about profit. It's about spelling out what you intend to accomplish, then how you intend to get the resources to accomplish it. With business objectives clearly spelled out, it's much easier to be able to prioritize all the possible things that can happen and decide which ones are good to do and which ones are not feasible. Without clear business objectives it's easy to get bogged down with feature-creep or in details that don't help you actually accomplish the things you want to.
For example, it's one thing to design, develop, and actually commercialize a $100 laptop. But is there a plan to figure out how to get the governments of poor countries to pay for them? What is the plan for working with countries where the government is ambivalent or even hostile to the concept?
Or how much more time and effort should be expended to get the price down to $75 compared to just using those resources to make more at the current price? And is price even the "problem"? Will a $25 lower price lead to more distribution? Or which is more important: using only FLOSS or possibly getting corporate sponsorship that might fund wider distribution?
Is the "plan" that the $100/laptop revenue will fund everything involved in the project? Or is some amount of money from donations required to keep the operation going?
Part of a good business plan is to set out the various objectives and prioritize them - then explain how you're going to get the resources to do those things. Doing so won't guarantee success, but it does serve as an easy way to cut away the kruft that can build up in complex project like this.
Instead of the Space Shuttle/Moon Landing/Space Program the U.S. could've had gobs more of:
* iPod-like devices
* Personal Entertainment Electronics
* Multi-Stage Sex Toys
* Video Game Consoles
Yeah... and as great as all those things are, they're even better IN SPACE!!!
Or at least I hope so.
That reminds me of an article by Nelson Repenning, "Nobody ever gets credit for fixing problems that never happened". It's quite an interesting read... The guy who "saves the day" during an emergency always seems to get credit and reward, but what about the guy who keeps the emergency from ever happening?
does anyone have a provider that, for the most part, they are happy with?
I generally despise the whole contract-lock-in for service model that seems to prevalent in the US (phones, cable, internet, etc), so I try to avoid it where possible. For many years, I used Virgin Mobile for my phone service. It had pretty good coverage (used Sprint's network) and the monthly costs were reasonable. The biggest downside with them are the teen-oriented phones (and horrible ring tones).
I moved once to a city where only Verizon or AT&T was available, so I took Verizon. The coverage was good and the service was "okay" - they had a tendency to simply shut off the phone if there was any dispute over the billing. One thing I liked was that I could use Bitpim to download and upload my contacts list. Though as soon as the contract was over, I needed a new phone and refused to get a new contract so I switched back to Virgin Mobile.
My VM phone died, so I recently switched to StraightTalk (http://www.straighttalk.com/), which is available through Walmart. They have a handful of nice phones and the service is on Verizon's network (some of the menus and prompts indicate it's connected to Tracfone). $45/month unlimited everything, including a "not bad" internet browser. I got the Samsung R451C and I have enjoyed it a lot. It seems like a quality phone and I like that I can put whatever sounds/mp3s on it I want for ring-tones (they don't even have a way to buy ringtones). My biggest irritation is that I cannot find a way to download/upload the address book.
For me, the lack of a binding contract is a huge "feature" and I'm pleased to have a decent phone and a good price for my service. With this kind of option, I simply cannot imagine locking myself into a contract with Verizon or AT&T just to get a fancier phone.
What I have not been able to do is sit through it a second time, even though I have managed to sit through all of the prequels a second time. That's how bad it is.
I once gave a copy of it to a friend of mine who was in a fraternity. They decided that it would be great hazing to make the pledges watch it. I don't know if they really went through with it, but I imagine the pledges would much rather have eaten live goldfish, had sex with goats, or any of the "normal" fraternity stuff.
As for me, I remember being a kid and excited about the Star Wars Holiday special, but I don't remember actually seeing it. Having seen it as an adult leaves me sad that there is no bleach strong enough to scour the memory of it from my mind. I am forever altered.
Have you ever tried putting some eggs on a pizza just before it goes into the oven?
That might be okay - however, what I got in Paris was a raw egg cracked over the pizza AFTER it came out of the oven. I found that very disappointing. Though the the waiter may have been playing a prank, as he seemed put out that I already knew to ask for a carafe of water (since "I'd like some water" defaults to an expensive bottled water in most places).
There is no "decision" being made. Period.
Well, then what do you mean by "decision"?
At its fundamental level, a decision the selection of one option from among more than one, based on some input information.
A bacteria, taking in information about how many of its own species are nearby, and information about the overall population of all types bacteria, determines if its species is in the majority and if there are enough of them. It uses this information to decide whether to keep reproducing or to become virulent.
While simpler, this is essentially the same as groups of neurons in your brain taking information from your stomach, your history of likes and dislikes, and the menu in front of you, to make the decision to tell the waiter you want the chicken sandwich rather than the clam chowder for lunch.
Information comes in, is processed, and a decision comes out.
One might just as well argue that water flowing down hill has made a sophisticated decision.
Actually, the behaviors and communication of groups of bacteria are much more complex than water flowing downhill. Consider that when you get a bacterial infection, the bacteria will typically work in a "growth phase" where they are multiplying but not doing being virulent. When the bacteria reach a certain population size (or density), they all switch on their virulence. Individuals are making decisions that actually manifest as a group decision. Water molecules do not do this.
A very interesting lecture on this is at:
http://www.ted.com/talks/bonnie_bassler_on_how_bacteria_communicate.html
And actually, it appears Mythbusters did experiments with a flag in a normal atmosphere and in a vacuum. They simulate the initial motions and twisting of planting the flag. The residual motion lasts much longer in the vacuum.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cCPIchZDSr4
You can tell that from a picture? I'd need several frames to infer that.
There's actually video that is referred to by the moon-landing deniers.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n1UEv2PIzl4
I couldn't help but think of Asimov's story, Nightfall. In it, a planet is in a 6-star system and is never dark. Interesting things happen.
Maybe it should be:
Life will suck at least as much as you let it. I may suck more due to things beyond your control.
back when I was young (early 2k's) I used to listen to a lot of dance music and go to the occasional rave. When I first started going to these gigs, I asked one of my friends why the DJ's used vinyl instead of CD's.
Many years ago I worked at a radio station with mostly records and "carts" (like 8-track tapes); digital music was just becoming available. One thing I noticed was that it was much easier to mix songs and get the beats to mix using the record players. Being able to touch the media as it turned and subtly slow or speed up the records made it really easy to sync the beats. It was really fun to watch the DJs who were particularly good at it.
One possibility is that men really are smarter, just that IQ tests don't measure the most important aspects of intelligence.
If you're going to back up your statement with the idea that the test methodology MAY be flawed, then you could just as easily argue that the other possibility is that women really are smarter... just that IQ tests don't measure the most important aspects of intelligence.
Anyways, as far as I know, men have done around 95-99% of the inventing.
There's a difference between inventing and getting the credit for inventing. I've seen plenty of women rig up ingenious solutions to problems - or "invent solutions". They just don't run off to the patent office with their every "gee whiz" idea.
It sounds to me like you just don't like/value women and this is biasing your perceptions.
Its a silly argument that the article makes. E-Readers can display B&W pages, and gray shades. This is absolutely sufficient for displaying textbooks.
Not if the the book has a chapter on spectroscopy or titration (is the reaction pink or purple?), or shows maps (which shade of grey is water vs land?) or flags of the world. That's just 3 things found in textbooks I can think of that would not work well in grey-scale.
I can see how you're restoring byte 2 when you know it's invalid. But how do you know that in the first place. You XOR your new stuff and get a different parity byte and that tells you that you have a problem. But can it identify which one is the problem? Or is there a risk of restoring the wrong byte to achieve a correct parity byte and ending up with 2 incorrect bytes?
The Commodore Amiga's Intuition filesystem did this better than Microsoft back in 1985 by having forward and backward links in every block which made it possible to repair block pointer damage by searching for a reference to the bad block in the preceding and following block.
Oh wow... that reminds me that many years ago I saved someone's masters thesis that way. I think it was on a PC though - they had their entire thesis on a single floppy (no backups of course) and somehow word-perfect deleted the file or munged it somehow, or maybe a sector was bad. I remember using a Norton sector editor (back when Norton stuff was really good - I learned 80x86 assembly from his books) to go through and figure out the chain of sectors that made up the file and brought most of it back.
I'm trying to remember if the sectors linked to each other like you describe or if it was all in the FAT and I just followed the pattern. I could be confusing my days of playing C64 floppies.
And now for a story that's even more pointless...
I posted it a few years ago. It happened in 2001. Maybe it's the kind of thing that happens when management types have no idea what people do to get a PhD in Computer Science.
I don't look down on people who fix the office printers or get peoples mail clients working with their AV or whatever... I don't look down on teachers, but it doesn't mean I wanna be one or believe that calling me one is an accurate description.
I once worked at a university (doing "IT" for the engineering school) and during one of the staff meetings, the management suggested that they could save money by having the computer science professors take over all the IT tasks in the school.
Fortunately one of CS profs quickly suggested that the EE professors could fix wiring and changing light bulbs and the Civil Engineering profs could clean bathrooms and unplug toilets. The idea died almost quicker than it was born. But it belies the point of this article. Most people have no idea what "IT" even means and assume that if you can do one thing with a computer then you are automatically able to do all things.
Your situation sucks.
You need to find a way to do just your academic work, or seriously, find another job. What they're doing to you will stifle you until you really just want to die.
It's not worth it.
I'm in a similar boat. I showed a capability to do databases in my current job and have been doing that more than the job on my title, and have built quite an interesting system that does a certain job really well. Now we actually want backup and I see why they were content having me do it. Our IT dept is finally providing 2 people to do the job, but both are paid far more than I am (I even got/had to interview one of them). It's one thing to be praised and told I'm one of the smartest people in the company (even in front of other people), but really, I'd like to be paid like I'm one of the smartest people in the company.
Luckily for me, a very interesting job just came up in the system and I've been working all weekend on my resume (instead of that database).
Good luck. You deserve better, but you'll have to demand better and be willing to leave for another job. They'll pay you as little as possible and shit on you as much as you'll let them.
The problem is, there are a ton of articles. The point of a summary is to provide enough information to help me decide if I want to bother RTFA. Having an interesting headline and a bad summary is just irritating. If the Slashdot editors want to make money selling ads, then they need to make the site useful and compelling. Irritating their readers is a bad business model.
This reminds me of an old science fiction story I just read, A Canticle for Leibowitz. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Canticle_for_Leibowitz) It's set in a post-apocalyptic world where what remains of the Catholic church tries to preserve as much knowledge as possible. Everyone else, hating the people who caused the "Flame Deluge", were trying to destroy all the books they could find.
It's still not counting, though it can reproduce the effects. A calculator doesn't actually count (it's just bit switching), but it reproduces the effect. Granted it means that whatever it's doing can simulate the effect of basic counting, but it in no way represents the understanding of numbers
Well, this is science. These researchers had a hypothesis that ants can count and devised an experiment to test the hypothesis. Based on their assumptions, the evidence from the experiments support their hypothesis.
Your hypothesis is that it's not counting but something else. It seems the next step is for you to devise a way to isolate counting from doing a counting-like behavior in ants and do an experiment to test your hypothesis.
However in a way, you're just playing with the definition. What does "understanding of numbers" mean? And is it really integral to counting? If you use pacecounter beads (Ranger beads: http://www.instructables.com/id/Army-Ranger-Beads/), you are "counting" on a piece of string but not actually keeping numbers in your head. In fact, the whole point of those is that you don't have to keep track of numbers because it's hard to do when you're exhausted and have all the other soldier-things to keep track of. You could use these beads to go out some distance, turn around and come back the same distance. You wouldn't have to use numbers in your head, but counting is still being done.
If the ant has no way to tell where it's located at, how can it run the straight way "home"? Hence the ant knows exactly where "home" is
Some ants use a type of sense of smell to know where they've been (if they leave a chemical trail) and where the nest is. I expect the scent from the nest diffuses in the environment, so they just have to head "uphill" in the scent gradient to get to the nest. This, at least, is how I've seen ant simulations programmed.
I don't know how this applies to the experiments here, since the ants with extra long legs went past the nest. It could be that there aren't enough ants in the nest to produce a strong enough scent gradient.
The idea that they can count is interesting. However, I wonder what happens when the ants must take different routes too and from the nest. I wonder what would happen in these experiments if for some of the ants they increase the distance to the nest without actually altering the ants themselves.
I was just reading Freakonomics and they make the case that part of that decline was also because of Row vs. Wade and the greater availability of abortion. They say the evidence supports the idea that Row vs. Wade made abortion available to women in poverty and that their aborted children were among the group that would have been most likely to become violent criminals. They do quite a few comparisons between states that legalized abortion at different times and other factors to show this.
I'm not sure I accept it, but it's an interesting argument.