Maybe the word 'quietly' is what's microsoftish. But actually Microsoft is quite vocal about end-of-life announcements hoping to spur new sales of the latest product suites. Actually, the poster really should reference Oracle, whom is the master of desupport notices; often on the order of 'this product will self-destruct in ten..nine..'.
I guess Red Hat is being microsoftish by trying to make a profit (maybe someday), or trying to keep the majority of it's users somewhere in the middle of the bell-curve (you spend 90% of your time supporting 10% of your users who refuse to upgrade), or maybe it's the windowsupdate.com like ability to patch over the web.
I think they're more Microsoftish than you may think, and I say 'right on!'.
I liked Stephenson's idea of information as a virus. The "tipping point" was when the virus had reached a critical mass and became part of the basic store of information. Some info-virii, like Ford is better than Chevy doesn't infect enough people to tip society one way or the other. Other virii like the Earth revoles around the Sun, has infected basically the entire planet, and as such is passed from generation to generation.
I really don't think there isn't much complexity that can't be explained by the mere fact that we are all actually living on top of a Giant's head
"...has come to a point where it's nearly impossible to restrict. That's a good thing, in my opinion."
Dear Sir,
From your comment I can only surmise that you have not had access to what is colloquially called "the net" for any reasonable length of time. Any quick purusal of archived news stories will return a littany of stories involving net cencorship, freedom of speech issues, lawsuits over trademarks, DMCA, etc, etc, etc. So "impossible to restrict, is unfortunately, quite "possible". Secondly, whether it's a "good thing" that "restriction is impossible", I could think of "bad things" in my opinion that restriction would curb. Of course, your argument is understood, if say, one is a child-pornographer.
The internet is quite possible to restrict, see China, Iran, Arkansas.
Can someone remind me again who and where are these "Canadians", my geography is awful.
While you may or may not agree with the "secrets" part of the article, I have to take some umbrage with the author's intent on closed vs. open source as to it's securability.
"There is probably some truth to the notion that giving programmers access to a piece of software doesn't guarantee they will study it carefully. But there is a group of programmers who can be expected to care deeply: Those who either use the software personally or work for an enterprise that depends on it.
But that's the problem with the argument, because study does not equal security. To use the automobile analogy further: many people bought and drive Ford Explorers with Firestone tires, many of whom were probably automobile experts, safety experts, physicists; but the "vulnerability" of a tire blow out causing a fatal crash was never revealed by the consumer. In what organization does anyone look at the code and understand it, but furthermore find the vulnerabilities? That argument seems to crop up as the first few paragraphs in security / technical articles and just never seems to pass muster.
Well if I must say something, it' this: that's really going to put a fancy how-do-you-do in the knickers of all those pay-per-processor software types. I mean Oracle, for heaven's sake, is going to have to go absolutely bonkers trying to figure out how to screw the light-bulb into that buffalo (if you pardon my french). I mean what's a meglomanic to do? I mean I've got expenses! I've got tricarbonfiberalloy yacht hulls to pay for! Can have people going around trying to process code in a processor without us getting some slice of that monkey, I'll tell you right here and now sir! No sir! Maybe it's your not patriotic enough. Trying to cut corners, eh gov'nor? Now I'm gonna have to go and rewrite all the contracts stating explicitly that "processor" is defined as a virtual space for processing. Yes that ought to do it. But I'll still have to have the lawyers check it, just to make sure they aren't any loopies. Drats those laywers! Taking all my money too!
I think I remember reading an article that.NET was supposed to harken to, mentally, to a domain name extension. Such that.com is the extension for all commerical sites,.org for organization, so.net was going to be the "branded" starting point for all microsoft products. So I think they were trying to put all their products into some sort of directory tree. So.NET would be the root, and all languages would be.net, and the servers would be serverx.net, and products would be office.net, etc, etc. etc. However, where this really failed, for me anyway, is that.net is a misnomer, they should have created a new made-up extension. Secondly, I don't seriously think Microsoft had a good launch of this, they never could contain the marketing very well, you heard bits and pieces from all over the place, and never understood their direction from the top down.
I saw this advertisement in the paper, I could get 13 cds for only a penny; of course, you have to buy 3 more at the "regular" membership prices. Should I average the cost or only include the ones I paid full price for, when submitting my claim?
So utterly disappointing...
on
Assorted CES Gizmos
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I think we've hit a plateau culturally. This is the cutting-edge, next generation of technological advancements: a wristwatch? Where's the great leap of technology? Are we that stagnant?
And yet, I realize that this is somewhat inherent in our marketing trade shows. Since the early World's Fairs, we marveled at a picture of a future we could only dream of, now we marvel at item-rehash, and spins of the same-old-technology. It reminds me of the car shows, where a beautiful new designer car is rolled out under the bump-bump music, ballons, and half-naked girls, and yet, it's a car, whose technology innards were invented in the 1950s.
So whose to blame for all this crap? I blame patents (and their extension thereof). But what good is it to complain about something without at least looking at solutions. My solution is thus: patents should only extend as far as a multiple of the current technological turnover.
Let's assume a late victorian-era inventor who invents some new whirly-gig. The invention is no small feat: precise forging and machining of parts, new alloys, highly-specialized techniques; all not to be repeated anytime soon due to the flow of information, barriers to entry, etc. Let's say the whirly-gig is a product of immense mass-appeal. The market loves whirly-gigs! How long should our inventor be able to keep a right to that intellectual property? Let's say, just for grins, 20 years. Now let's say that during that 20 years, the whirly-gig is refined, better, faster, cheaper, smaller, more features, an instruction manual in chinese; all the things associated with progress. However, at the 20 year mark, a new inventor, inspired by the whirly-gig's mass appeal, and astitute to it's inner workings, takes part of this design, and makes a toodle-doo. The toodle-doo is the first truly global product. Germans, French, English, Australians, they all love it. It spawns new products, new trade, international cooperation. But what if the patent had been granted for 40 years? Well we could assume at some point that the whirly-gig would become so cheap and affordable that it would be like selling some sort of commodity product like pencils. At some point, the manufacturing costs would become burdensome for a product at the end of it's life cycle and we'd see for perhaps say the last eight years of the patent, the same old product again and again and again. Change the colors, add some bells and whistles, but beneath it all, just a plain old tired whirly-gig.
I believe in the patent process, I believe it's made us a great country, and yet I fear we are now in the business of protecting whirly-gigs for at least a generation more to come. When I see the latest slew of gadgets, I wonder to myself: 'Will our posterity sit in some future tradeshow and watch Bill jr. show off a neato-wristwatch?'
Okay I work for a company on the list. And it's sorta rigged...well sort of. Okay, one thing they want to know is 'How much money is spent per capita at the employee store?'. The point is that companies that sell lot's of company-logo golf balls must be a great place to work. Well since every company know this is coming, they make departments buy like normal, everyday stuff like paper-clips and toner from the company store. This inflates the company store reciepts and no one is the wiser. This game is played over and over again to varying degrees in all aspects of this little adventure, like Enron with GAAP.
Ah, I get it now. I kept thinking why the Neo project would stop working after producing a client they themselves created? Make sense now, I had to keep reading, and re-reading, and re-reading...
Wouldn't R.A.C.H.A.L (Reduce Annoying Computer Heat And Loudness) really be RACHL, such as the United States of America isn't USOA? Aren't Ands, ors, thes, all not supposed to be used in an acronym?
Is it just me, or does any computer really make that much noise?
An all-or-nothing pay-scheme works, but it's called a bookstore. Secondly, I have a problem with pay-as-you-go pricing, because typically, on the internet, I'm never sure where I'm going.
To clarify, in my view, an ISP charges you for general access to hardware, i. e. the cost to view a web-site in say Australia is the same cost you would pay to see content at usatoday. The micro- or macro-pay schemes don't eleminiate a hardware charge, so I would essentially pay MORE for LESS. The real problem is the 'AOL Mindset', that once I pay this connect charge I have the internet to myself, unless a site requires a credit-card (ahem). Look at Salon.com, it's obvious that no one site has a lock on insight and editorial content (well, maybe slashdot), but with all the freely available content on the net, it's hard to put up a door charge.
Whether you consider yourself a Keynesian, or in the old-clasical camp of economists, I somehow tremble at some industries inability to make a profit.
The registration of domain names seems fairly staid, and yet, common-sense would dictate that little or no profit could really be meagered from such a one-point sale business. Wal-Mart on the other attempts multiple low-cost sales, with a wide variety of products. Though I'm not sure of the ROI for Verisign, I have a feeling, once all said and done, it's less than ten-percent. As a another inidicator, airlines make five to eight percent return on their money (though probably that number is worse as of late).
So the question I pose is thus: if a business or industry barely breaks even, and that industry or business is crucial to the welfare of our nation-state, shouldn't the government monopolize that business for the sake of our well-being? The answer, unfortunately, is NO. Because no matter how badly a business is run in the free-market, the government would only do worse.
So when it comes to privatization of airlines, oil, or domain names (the free flow of information is becoming more central to our security), I applaud a business trying to be more competitive, trying to evolve, trying to find a better way to manage customers, even if they stumble in doing so.
In the projects I've worked, I often find that the DBAs are older men or women and the developers are young. So the friction lies in the fact that the young-guns are doing.NET or Java or XML queing and so the DBA is really at a loss to help "the developer think of things he may have not thought about". Of course, on the table-design side, this maybe true. Secondly, due to the age-difference, "popping over the cube" is also difficult as the DBAs (being more mature shall I say) are less likely to be excited about a new paradigm.
Case in point, when I read in an Oracle PL/SQL book about Nested Tables, the light bulb in my head went off (or lit up, or whatever). Basically, these nested tables were objects with methods (code behind them), however, could be queried like tables. So, instead of selecting say a person's name, birthdate, and calculating an age, I could select name, birthdate, and age (the age column had code behind it automatically calculating the age). Now the beauty of this is for derived quantities that are only used once, but would be burdensome to store, this was a godsend. However, my DBA completely rejected this idea as too untried and new-fangeled.
This may sound very arrogant, but I think the developer should manage the DBA, often the DBA is a lone-wolf with too much power. Often the poor programmer has to submit changes with about as much hope they'll get done as one might have submitting universe changes to God Almighty.
I think every major corporation has some sort of data-mining, and I find that there is a gap between the data (even scrubbed) and the person who needs to make the decisions. Also, the article suggests, that CRM is a subset of data-mining. In reality, it's the other way around, or completely unrelated, or both, unless I read that sentence wrong.
I'm not a huge advocate of Linux on the desktop (yet), but the server side, while HP-UX rules my world currently, a SIMILAR product without the cost is attractive. Of corporation's want 24-7 support framed like HP, EDS, or IBM.
Actually, Walt Disney would argue that Mickey Mouse is a trademark, so no, not anyone could use Mickey Mouse to market their product. However, they could show for profit the Steamboat Willie cartoon without compensating, informing, or otherwise asking for permission from Walt Disney.
Kudos, I've been to Burma (same part of world), and in many places things have not changed since the 5th century. Men and women ply their work in the rice fields, all implements are handmade, their mode of transportation is the water-buffalo.
The average salary per day worldwide is less than a dollar. With that investment, you could feed a person for nearly 70 years.
Concerning your acronym: You use You're in the first part, and you all in the second. In English, we like parallelism, however, for marketing purposes, we will forgo this like: To boldly go, which of course, is a split infinitive. Go Boldly sounds stupid.
I would suggest, "Ya'll are a bunch of idiots, and I hate you." The second, you all is redundant. You will need to change the acronym accordingly. Otherwise, I completely agree.
I really think the winner is the SCIENTIFIC METHOD, and in such, that no matter how much you falsify and market your claims, i.e. fusion in coca-cola, cloned humans, flying pigs, altering gravity, you eventually have to publish and MORE IMPORTANTLY you have to have someone be able to REPRODUCE your results.
To wit, I think those good-old boys who spent many a Saturday night figuring out how to get atoms to realize "damn it's cold" and stop and all huddle together at the bottom of a beaker -- well that takes the prize for me. Because it's little breakthroughs like this which fork into other areas of research and discovery. You take all the others and rip up the Noble Prize submission form, this one takes the cake.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe the word 'quietly' is what's microsoftish. But actually Microsoft is quite vocal about end-of-life announcements hoping to spur new sales of the latest product suites. Actually, the poster really should reference Oracle, whom is the master of desupport notices; often on the order of 'this product will self-destruct in ten..nine..'.
I guess Red Hat is being microsoftish by trying to make a profit (maybe someday), or trying to keep the majority of it's users somewhere in the middle of the bell-curve (you spend 90% of your time supporting 10% of your users who refuse to upgrade), or maybe it's the windowsupdate.com like ability to patch over the web.
I think they're more Microsoftish than you may think, and I say 'right on!'.
I liked Stephenson's idea of information as a virus. The "tipping point" was when the virus had reached a critical mass and became part of the basic store of information. Some info-virii, like Ford is better than Chevy doesn't infect enough people to tip society one way or the other. Other virii like the Earth revoles around the Sun, has infected basically the entire planet, and as such is passed from generation to generation.
I really don't think there isn't much complexity that can't be explained by the mere fact that we are all actually living on top of a Giant's head
"...has come to a point where it's nearly impossible to restrict. That's a good thing, in my opinion."
Dear Sir,
From your comment I can only surmise that you have not had access to what is colloquially called "the net" for any reasonable length of time. Any quick purusal of archived news stories will return a littany of stories involving net cencorship, freedom of speech issues, lawsuits over trademarks, DMCA, etc, etc, etc. So "impossible to restrict, is unfortunately, quite "possible". Secondly, whether it's a "good thing" that "restriction is impossible", I could think of "bad things" in my opinion that restriction would curb. Of course, your argument is understood, if say, one is a child-pornographer.
The internet is quite possible to restrict, see China, Iran, Arkansas.
Can someone remind me again who and where are these "Canadians", my geography is awful.
Sincerely,
Airrage.
The nethack.org site has a willwheaton link. It always seems every slashdot story has 6 degrees separation between the article and willwheaton.com. ;)
okay THAT's a good one.
Slashdot must have a very large varchar size on the comment_txt field in their db, or are they just saving as a blob?
Well if I must say something, it' this: that's really going to put a fancy how-do-you-do in the knickers of all those pay-per-processor software types. I mean Oracle, for heaven's sake, is going to have to go absolutely bonkers trying to figure out how to screw the light-bulb into that buffalo (if you pardon my french). I mean what's a meglomanic to do? I mean I've got expenses! I've got tricarbonfiberalloy yacht hulls to pay for! Can have people going around trying to process code in a processor without us getting some slice of that monkey, I'll tell you right here and now sir! No sir! Maybe it's your not patriotic enough. Trying to cut corners, eh gov'nor? Now I'm gonna have to go and rewrite all the contracts stating explicitly that "processor" is defined as a virtual space for processing. Yes that ought to do it. But I'll still have to have the lawyers check it, just to make sure they aren't any loopies. Drats those laywers! Taking all my money too!
I think I remember reading an article that .NET was supposed to harken to, mentally, to a domain name extension. Such that .com is the extension for all commerical sites, .org for organization, so .net was going to be the "branded" starting point for all microsoft products. So I think they were trying to put all their products into some sort of directory tree. So .NET would be the root, and all languages would be .net, and the servers would be serverx.net, and products would be office.net, etc, etc. etc. However, where this really failed, for me anyway, is that .net is a misnomer, they should have created a new made-up extension. Secondly, I don't seriously think Microsoft had a good launch of this, they never could contain the marketing very well, you heard bits and pieces from all over the place, and never understood their direction from the top down.
I saw this advertisement in the paper, I could get 13 cds for only a penny; of course, you have to buy 3 more at the "regular" membership prices. Should I average the cost or only include the ones I paid full price for, when submitting my claim?
I think we've hit a plateau culturally. This is the cutting-edge, next generation of technological advancements: a wristwatch? Where's the great leap of technology? Are we that stagnant?
And yet, I realize that this is somewhat inherent in our marketing trade shows. Since the early World's Fairs, we marveled at a picture of a future we could only dream of, now we marvel at item-rehash, and spins of the same-old-technology. It reminds me of the car shows, where a beautiful new designer car is rolled out under the bump-bump music, ballons, and half-naked girls, and yet, it's a car, whose technology innards were invented in the 1950s.
So whose to blame for all this crap? I blame patents (and their extension thereof). But what good is it to complain about something without at least looking at solutions. My solution is thus: patents should only extend as far as a multiple of the current technological turnover.
Let's assume a late victorian-era inventor who invents some new whirly-gig. The invention is no small feat: precise forging and machining of parts, new alloys, highly-specialized techniques; all not to be repeated anytime soon due to the flow of information, barriers to entry, etc. Let's say the whirly-gig is a product of immense mass-appeal. The market loves whirly-gigs! How long should our inventor be able to keep a right to that intellectual property? Let's say, just for grins, 20 years. Now let's say that during that 20 years, the whirly-gig is refined, better, faster, cheaper, smaller, more features, an instruction manual in chinese; all the things associated with progress. However, at the 20 year mark, a new inventor, inspired by the whirly-gig's mass appeal, and astitute to it's inner workings, takes part of this design, and makes a toodle-doo. The toodle-doo is the first truly global product. Germans, French, English, Australians, they all love it. It spawns new products, new trade, international cooperation. But what if the patent had been granted for 40 years? Well we could assume at some point that the whirly-gig would become so cheap and affordable that it would be like selling some sort of commodity product like pencils. At some point, the manufacturing costs would become burdensome for a product at the end of it's life cycle and we'd see for perhaps say the last eight years of the patent, the same old product again and again and again. Change the colors, add some bells and whistles, but beneath it all, just a plain old tired whirly-gig.
I believe in the patent process, I believe it's made us a great country, and yet I fear we are now in the business of protecting whirly-gigs for at least a generation more to come. When I see the latest slew of gadgets, I wonder to myself: 'Will our posterity sit in some future tradeshow and watch Bill jr. show off a neato-wristwatch?'
Okay I work for a company on the list. And it's sorta rigged...well sort of. Okay, one thing they want to know is 'How much money is spent per capita at the employee store?'. The point is that companies that sell lot's of company-logo golf balls must be a great place to work. Well since every company know this is coming, they make departments buy like normal, everyday stuff like paper-clips and toner from the company store. This inflates the company store reciepts and no one is the wiser. This game is played over and over again to varying degrees in all aspects of this little adventure, like Enron with GAAP.
Ah, I get it now. I kept thinking why the Neo project would stop working after producing a client they themselves created? Make sense now, I had to keep reading, and re-reading, and re-reading...
Somehow the design sets me off, it reminds me of the first cellular handhelds, blocky, and unwieldy. But just my opinion...
Wouldn't R.A.C.H.A.L (Reduce Annoying Computer Heat And Loudness) really be RACHL, such as the United States of America isn't USOA? Aren't Ands, ors, thes, all not supposed to be used in an acronym?
Is it just me, or does any computer really make that much noise?
An all-or-nothing pay-scheme works, but it's called a bookstore. Secondly, I have a problem with pay-as-you-go pricing, because typically, on the internet, I'm never sure where I'm going.
To clarify, in my view, an ISP charges you for general access to hardware, i. e. the cost to view a web-site in say Australia is the same cost you would pay to see content at usatoday. The micro- or macro-pay schemes don't eleminiate a hardware charge, so I would essentially pay MORE for LESS. The real problem is the 'AOL Mindset', that once I pay this connect charge I have the internet to myself, unless a site requires a credit-card (ahem). Look at Salon.com, it's obvious that no one site has a lock on insight and editorial content (well, maybe slashdot), but with all the freely available content on the net, it's hard to put up a door charge.
Whether you consider yourself a Keynesian, or in the old-clasical camp of economists, I somehow tremble at some industries inability to make a profit.
The registration of domain names seems fairly staid, and yet, common-sense would dictate that little or no profit could really be meagered from such a one-point sale business. Wal-Mart on the other attempts multiple low-cost sales, with a wide variety of products. Though I'm not sure of the ROI for Verisign, I have a feeling, once all said and done, it's less than ten-percent. As a another inidicator, airlines make five to eight percent return on their money (though probably that number is worse as of late).
So the question I pose is thus: if a business or industry barely breaks even, and that industry or business is crucial to the welfare of our nation-state, shouldn't the government monopolize that business for the sake of our well-being? The answer, unfortunately, is NO. Because no matter how badly a business is run in the free-market, the government would only do worse.
So when it comes to privatization of airlines, oil, or domain names (the free flow of information is becoming more central to our security), I applaud a business trying to be more competitive, trying to evolve, trying to find a better way to manage customers, even if they stumble in doing so.
In the projects I've worked, I often find that the DBAs are older men or women and the developers are young. So the friction lies in the fact that the young-guns are doing .NET or Java or XML queing and so the DBA is really at a loss to help "the developer think of things he may have not thought about". Of course, on the table-design side, this maybe true. Secondly, due to the age-difference, "popping over the cube" is also difficult as the DBAs (being more mature shall I say) are less likely to be excited about a new paradigm.
Case in point, when I read in an Oracle PL/SQL book about Nested Tables, the light bulb in my head went off (or lit up, or whatever). Basically, these nested tables were objects with methods (code behind them), however, could be queried like tables. So, instead of selecting say a person's name, birthdate, and calculating an age, I could select name, birthdate, and age (the age column had code behind it automatically calculating the age). Now the beauty of this is for derived quantities that are only used once, but would be burdensome to store, this was a godsend. However, my DBA completely rejected this idea as too untried and new-fangeled.
This may sound very arrogant, but I think the developer should manage the DBA, often the DBA is a lone-wolf with too much power. Often the poor programmer has to submit changes with about as much hope they'll get done as one might have submitting universe changes to God Almighty.
I think every major corporation has some sort of data-mining, and I find that there is a gap between the data (even scrubbed) and the person who needs to make the decisions. Also, the article suggests, that CRM is a subset of data-mining. In reality, it's the other way around, or completely unrelated, or both, unless I read that sentence wrong.
Chao
I'm not a huge advocate of Linux on the desktop (yet), but the server side, while HP-UX rules my world currently, a SIMILAR product without the cost is attractive. Of corporation's want 24-7 support framed like HP, EDS, or IBM.
Actually, Walt Disney would argue that Mickey Mouse is a trademark, so no, not anyone could use Mickey Mouse to market their product. However, they could show for profit the Steamboat Willie cartoon without compensating, informing, or otherwise asking for permission from Walt Disney.
I wanna be a slashdot fact-checker ... how do you get that job?
Kudos, I've been to Burma (same part of world), and in many places things have not changed since the 5th century. Men and women ply their work in the rice fields, all implements are handmade, their mode of transportation is the water-buffalo.
The average salary per day worldwide is less than a dollar. With that investment, you could feed a person for nearly 70 years.
Concerning your acronym: You use You're in the first part, and you all in the second. In English, we like parallelism, however, for marketing purposes, we will forgo this like: To boldly go, which of course, is a split infinitive. Go Boldly sounds stupid.
I would suggest, "Ya'll are a bunch of idiots, and I hate you." The second, you all is redundant. You will need to change the acronym accordingly. Otherwise, I completely agree.
I really think the winner is the SCIENTIFIC METHOD, and in such, that no matter how much you falsify and market your claims, i.e. fusion in coca-cola, cloned humans, flying pigs, altering gravity, you eventually have to publish and MORE IMPORTANTLY you have to have someone be able to REPRODUCE your results.
To wit, I think those good-old boys who spent many a Saturday night figuring out how to get atoms to realize "damn it's cold" and stop and all huddle together at the bottom of a beaker -- well that takes the prize for me. Because it's little breakthroughs like this which fork into other areas of research and discovery. You take all the others and rip up the Noble Prize submission form, this one takes the cake.