As I understood it, the point of "the wisdom of crowds" was not that *everyone* contributes value, but that by opening the forum you improve the likelihood that *someone* will contribute value.
Am I missing something or did Drew's knock over his beer again?
Anyone found any similar useful hacks with them newfangled radio water meters?
My city put 'em in last year and this dude comes out to the house to install it and I'm like, "...so this let you drive past the house and pick up the meter reading without coming to the side of the house, right?" And the dude is like, "No. This radios your water usage directly to the central office every twelve hours."
Every twelve hours.
I know slashdot makes you paranoid, but this bothers me. I simply cannot imagine how it could be useful to monitoring this frequently when they still bill my usage monthly. Plus, any dude with access to the database can hack together an SQL query to find out which houses have a total water usage under a gallon over the past three days and know who's not home.
No, no, no! You don't put the beer in the fridge, you put the fridge in the beer!
Take that disk thingy Guinness uses in their cans to make it all foamy and add the refrigerator to that!
Take it off the shelf, pop it open, wait two minutes and Voila! -- it's ice cold AND foamy!
Brilliant!
You know what's missing? The mom and pop broadband market like we had with dialup in the 90's. We should do communications like we do roads.
We won't ever have actual competition in any of the broadband or communications markets because pulling physical cables is expensive and difficult. (Wireless *might* be an exception if it pans out...) There are permits, zoning rules, capacity/buildout planning and all kinds of "who really wants five cables from five different providers running into their house?!" issues that give communication markets exceptionally high natural barriers to entry. The problem is that all these services share a common cable that should be centralized.
If local government were to seize ownership and operation of the physical network layer -- the cabling and routing -- from the phone and cable companies under eminent domain, then any company that wanted to sell ISP, VOIP or TVIP service could do so by paying the city a simple access fee to use the public network infrastructure. We could stop wasting money running redundant cables to everyone's house, we could stop letting service providers leverage their networks to strongarm customers with unfair policies, and we could stop letting them use their existing regional monopolies to lock out competition and cherry pick their customers.
BONUS: Since the service providers would be freed of the burden of being a 'dumb wire' (I'm looking at you, TWC!), they could instead focus on providing stellar competitive services.
For those of you concerned about "government efficiency", consider that your city government could contract out the network management and maintenance if they didn't want to do it themselves; we just wouldn't let them sell ownership. Besides, this is exactly how we handle most of the other infrastructure we depend on anyway. Are roads that everyone uses really that big a problem? If we did roads the way we do data, you'd need to sign a five year contract and agree to have the roads around your house torn up and rebuilt to shop at Target instead of Walmart.
Meh... I think the problem is that about fifteen-some-odd years ago, Microsoft decided against all convention that storing auto-executable code and scripts inside data files was a great idea.
Looking over your list, not only have they been doing this forever, they are also remarkably inept at it.
You'd think they'd have figgered out that they have no business making up their own formats by now, not only because it's sociopathic, but because it makes them look like asses.
I agree that the FCC is not seeing the real problem here, but I have a better solution.
Video=Voice=Data. It's all bits. Barring (maybe) wireless we will not ever have actual competition in the current system because the market has a naturally high barrier to entry: the high cost and difficulty of pulling physical cables. (permits, zoning rules, capacity/buildout planning, "who really wants five cables from five different providers running into their house?!", etc...) That's why there is no mom and pop broadband market.
So, let's allow local government to seize ownership (eminent domain) and operation of the physical layer from the phone and cable companies, and lease access to anyone that wants to provide voice, video or data service. We stop running redundant cables, we stop letting service providers leverage their networks to strongarm their customers, and we stop letting them use their existing regional monopolies to lock out competition.
If we did roads the way we do data, you'd need to sign a five year contract and agree to have the roads around your house torn up and rebuilt to shop at Target instead of Walmart.
I don't think technology has much to do with it beyond making "the watchers" more efficient. Do you think there would be a problem if the police were following you around all day manually? If subby's summary is accurate, this judge's perspective is out of whack.
Hang on folks, the entire state isn't trying to do this, just one jerk: Senator Ford. It hasn't been passed yet, and (even in South Carolina) it very likely won't if for no other reason than that it is obviously UNconstitutional.
Wasn't this the original concept for OfficeXP back when they announced the.NET platform, like, almost **EIGHT** **YEARS** ago? I honestly thought they had given up on this! What a shame. I cannot imagine there is any sort of compelling market for this approach that isn't already tickled silly with the useful (if limited) Google Docs.
This sounds like a research paper written by an MBA.
0) The scientific method is a little more complicated than "trying things and observing what happens".
1) Procedures are scientific, not explanations or conclusions.
2) In science, repeatability trumps everything, and ALL RESEARCH ULTIMATELY HAS TO PASS THE REPEATABILITY TEST. If your results cannot be repeated, something was wrong with it.
3) The commercial medical field in particular has a history of forwarding the first round of research results straight through the marketing department instead of treating it as opportunities for further investigation.
-G.
P.S. No, I didn't RTFA. P.P.S....I'm not going to, either. P.P.P.S....On principle! P.P.P.P.S....SCIENTIFIC principle! P.P.P.P.P.S....Not gonna explain what I mean, either! P.P.P.P.P.P.S.... shoulda went with////slashies!////, 'P.'s are hard to type!
I really thought someone would beat me to this, but this is a rebranding of the same Amazon "Unbox" service that's been around for a couple of years. There may be some service changes, but I don't think (recalling the press release) there is much that's different other than the name.
My new Asus P5Q Pro has a feature called ExpressGate that lets you boot a thin BIOS OS (Linux?) with Firefox, Email, etc. The installer runs from Windows, and it may or may not use data from the hard disk, but you enable/disable the feature in the BIOS.
Strange. IBM got out of the PC/desktop business around three years ago & sold it to Lenovo. The fearful among their customers worry they may be playing with the idea of getting out of the server market as well, evidenced by their recent decision to license certain low-end servers to be built & sold by - you guessed it - Lenovo.
Interesting idea - very similar to a goofy idea I came up with a few years back after the phone companies successfully overturned the rules requiring them to lease their wires to competitors.
Basically, I thought maybe we should run the comm networks like we our other infrastructure: local municipalities should declare emininent domain over the copper, fiber and coax and take direct control of the communications networks from private companies.
Then, they contract with an operator (or hire their own network staff) to manage and maintain the physical layer and lease access to layer 3 and up for any company that wants to come in and provide phone/cable/ISP services.
PROs: * Competition removes single-vendor lock-in * No more bandwidth bullying by asshat mega-corporate ISPs * With the right people in charge, capacity planning should be less whiny
CONs: * Getting the right people in charge * Do you really want city hall responsible for figuring out where to add capacity? * Where do you go for service when they won't stop raising TAXES?!
I am currently working on financing a new home-built PC to replace my 5 year old Shuttle Athlon XP, and I am seriously considering Vista Ultimate, not because I actually want to run Vista, but because the OEM license can be downgraded to either XP-64 (which is what I actually want to run, but fear driver support problems) *or* XP-32, which is what I will probably end up running.
At work, there is no way we can support Vista in its current form, the hardware requirements are simply too high and there isn't enough benefit to warrant the expense we would to do the upgrade. The only realistic way to deploy Vista across an enterprise would be by attrition - replacing XP PC's with Vista in the normal upgrade cycle, but then you are dual-platformed for about three years while that all plays out.
I attended a Norex.net conference back in February and of the 50 or so organizations represented, fewer than five expected to have a significant Vista deployment in place by the end of next year (2009).
Here's what I think MS needs to do to fix Windows:
* Rename Windows 7 to "Windows Clean" and use that principle to guide its design.
* Follow the Apple pricing model: One version $89 for everyone with no upgrades, ultimates or basics.
* Adopt a philosophy that the CPU cycles belong to the user, not third party marketers and eliminate preloaders, updaters, ride-alongs and alerters. Strangely, many of the problems with Windows now are caused by third-party companies that won't keep their grubby hands off my CPU cycles. Software should only be running while the user is using it! Corporate rudeness must not be tolerated! Etc. ETc. Etc.
* Along the same line, Adobe, Apple, Real and HP should be banninated from writing non-application software.;)
* "Modularity" should mean that the base install is clean, but offers the additional (free) component modules (enterprise networking, Media Center, UI Enhancements, etc...) from the install DVD.
* Abandon DRM support - it is anti-user and invasive. SCREW THE xxAA's! It's my PC, not theirs!
* Provide an EXPERT MODE that turns off UI handholding (...stupid Windows XP search dog!). Apps should obey this, too.
* Help (especially from third-party vendors) must be more FAQ-like and informative, especially with fundamental descriptive informationlike "What does this app do?", "Who put it there?", "What depends on it?", "What impact is it having on my system?", "How do I remove/disable parts I'm not using?" Too may help files were written by marketroids.
* Microsoft standardized printer support with Windows in the 90's, they should do the same for licensing (EULA) agreements now. I should be able to view the license agreements for every piece of software on my system and look at the conditions in a table for term-by-term comparison. It would provide an amazing amount of warm fuzzies and goodwill if Microsoft was willing to lead the way away from lawyer-ese and toward a simplicity that INCLUDES the customer, rather than alienating them.
Ok, sorry I turned this into a bitch session. Besides, there's NO WAY IN HELL they're every gonna listen to me!
Slashdot Mirror
That's what I'm hearing here....
...but of course I totally get his point that more people also means more morons.
As I understood it, the point of "the wisdom of crowds" was not that *everyone* contributes value, but that by opening the forum you improve the likelihood that *someone* will contribute value.
Am I missing something or did Drew's knock over his beer again?
Anyone found any similar useful hacks with them newfangled radio water meters?
My city put 'em in last year and this dude comes out to the house to install it and I'm like, "...so this let you drive past the house and pick up the meter reading without coming to the side of the house, right?" And the dude is like, "No. This radios your water usage directly to the central office every twelve hours."
Every twelve hours.
I know slashdot makes you paranoid, but this bothers me. I simply cannot imagine how it could be useful to monitoring this frequently when they still bill my usage monthly. Plus, any dude with access to the database can hack together an SQL query to find out which houses have a total water usage under a gallon over the past three days and know who's not home.
Don't buy your first point. PRICE is affected by scarcity, not value. Air is valuable and free.
No, no, no! You don't put the beer in the fridge, you put the fridge in the beer! Take that disk thingy Guinness uses in their cans to make it all foamy and add the refrigerator to that! Take it off the shelf, pop it open, wait two minutes and Voila! -- it's ice cold AND foamy! Brilliant!
The only real point to this is keeping their cable TV business viable. (IMHO, of course.)
...30 years ago you were lucky to have a display capable of 640x480...
Heh, heh... 30 years ago, you were lucky to have **GRAPHICS** and a keyboard that typed in lower-case.
You know what's missing? The mom and pop broadband market like we had with dialup in the 90's. We should do communications like we do roads.
We won't ever have actual competition in any of the broadband or communications markets because pulling physical cables is expensive and difficult. (Wireless *might* be an exception if it pans out...) There are permits, zoning rules, capacity/buildout planning and all kinds of "who really wants five cables from five different providers running into their house?!" issues that give communication markets exceptionally high natural barriers to entry. The problem is that all these services share a common cable that should be centralized.
If local government were to seize ownership and operation of the physical network layer -- the cabling and routing -- from the phone and cable companies under eminent domain, then any company that wanted to sell ISP, VOIP or TVIP service could do so by paying the city a simple access fee to use the public network infrastructure. We could stop wasting money running redundant cables to everyone's house, we could stop letting service providers leverage their networks to strongarm customers with unfair policies, and we could stop letting them use their existing regional monopolies to lock out competition and cherry pick their customers.
BONUS: Since the service providers would be freed of the burden of being a 'dumb wire' (I'm looking at you, TWC!), they could instead focus on providing stellar competitive services.
For those of you concerned about "government efficiency", consider that your city government could contract out the network management and maintenance if they didn't want to do it themselves; we just wouldn't let them sell ownership. Besides, this is exactly how we handle most of the other infrastructure we depend on anyway. Are roads that everyone uses really that big a problem? If we did roads the way we do data, you'd need to sign a five year contract and agree to have the roads around your house torn up and rebuilt to shop at Target instead of Walmart.
Meh... I think the problem is that about fifteen-some-odd years ago, Microsoft decided against all convention that storing auto-executable code and scripts inside data files was a great idea.
Ha-ha!
Looking over your list, not only have they been doing this forever, they are also remarkably inept at it.
You'd think they'd have figgered out that they have no business making up their own formats by now, not only because it's sociopathic, but because it makes them look like asses.
-G
I agree that the FCC is not seeing the real problem here, but I have a better solution.
Video=Voice=Data. It's all bits. Barring (maybe) wireless we will not ever have actual competition in the current system because the market has a naturally high barrier to entry: the high cost and difficulty of pulling physical cables. (permits, zoning rules, capacity/buildout planning, "who really wants five cables from five different providers running into their house?!", etc...) That's why there is no mom and pop broadband market.
So, let's allow local government to seize ownership (eminent domain) and operation of the physical layer from the phone and cable companies, and lease access to anyone that wants to provide voice, video or data service. We stop running redundant cables, we stop letting service providers leverage their networks to strongarm their customers, and we stop letting them use their existing regional monopolies to lock out competition.
If we did roads the way we do data, you'd need to sign a five year contract and agree to have the roads around your house torn up and rebuilt to shop at Target instead of Walmart.
Yep, you have to choose your distractions. I've even been known to take the phone off the hook and close Outlook when I'm under deadlines.
All music downloading is stealing?!
What about trampling all over the registered trademarks of Hewlett-Packard and CNN?!
(*sigh*)
Oh, and I think we should just switch the whole language to acronyms, KWIM?
I don't think technology has much to do with it beyond making "the watchers" more efficient. Do you think there would be a problem if the police were following you around all day manually? If subby's summary is accurate, this judge's perspective is out of whack.
Hang on folks, the entire state isn't trying to do this, just one jerk: Senator Ford. It hasn't been passed yet, and (even in South Carolina) it very likely won't if for no other reason than that it is obviously UNconstitutional.
P.S. Oh, and I call CRACKPOT ALERT!
Wasn't this the original concept for OfficeXP back when they announced the .NET platform, like, almost **EIGHT** **YEARS** ago? I honestly thought they had given up on this! What a shame. I cannot imagine there is any sort of compelling market for this approach that isn't already tickled silly with the useful (if limited) Google Docs.
-GSA
Halliday & Resnick - It's the standard 1yr majors (w/calculus) undergrad intro to Physics. Any old used edition should be fine.
This sounds like a research paper written by an MBA.
0) The scientific method is a little more complicated than "trying things and observing what happens".
1) Procedures are scientific, not explanations or conclusions.
2) In science, repeatability trumps everything, and ALL RESEARCH ULTIMATELY HAS TO PASS THE REPEATABILITY TEST. If your results cannot be repeated, something was wrong with it.
3) The commercial medical field in particular has a history of forwarding the first round of research results straight through the marketing department instead of treating it as opportunities for further investigation.
-G.
P.S. No, I didn't RTFA. ...I'm not going to, either. ...On principle! ...SCIENTIFIC principle! ...Not gonna explain what I mean, either! ... shoulda went with ////slashies!////, 'P.'s are hard to type!
P.P.S.
P.P.P.S.
P.P.P.P.S.
P.P.P.P.P.S.
P.P.P.P.P.P.S.
I really thought someone would beat me to this, but this is a rebranding of the same Amazon "Unbox" service that's been around for a couple of years. There may be some service changes, but I don't think (recalling the press release) there is much that's different other than the name.
My new Asus P5Q Pro has a feature called ExpressGate that lets you boot a thin BIOS OS (Linux?) with Firefox, Email, etc. The installer runs from Windows, and it may or may not use data from the hard disk, but you enable/disable the feature in the BIOS.
Strange. IBM got out of the PC/desktop business around three years ago & sold it to Lenovo. The fearful among their customers worry they may be playing with the idea of getting out of the server market as well, evidenced by their recent decision to license certain low-end servers to be built & sold by - you guessed it - Lenovo.
Interesting idea - very similar to a goofy idea I came up with a few years back after the phone companies successfully overturned the rules requiring them to lease their wires to competitors.
Basically, I thought maybe we should run the comm networks like we our other infrastructure: local municipalities should declare emininent domain over the copper, fiber and coax and take direct control of the communications networks from private companies.
Then, they contract with an operator (or hire their own network staff) to manage and maintain the physical layer and lease access to layer 3 and up for any company that wants to come in and provide phone/cable/ISP services.
PROs:
* Competition removes single-vendor lock-in
* No more bandwidth bullying by asshat mega-corporate ISPs
* With the right people in charge, capacity planning should be less whiny
CONs:
* Getting the right people in charge
* Do you really want city hall responsible for figuring out where to add capacity?
* Where do you go for service when they won't stop raising TAXES?!
I am currently working on financing a new home-built PC to replace my 5 year old Shuttle Athlon XP, and I am seriously considering Vista Ultimate, not because I actually want to run Vista, but because the OEM license can be downgraded to either XP-64 (which is what I actually want to run, but fear driver support problems) *or* XP-32, which is what I will probably end up running.
;)
At work, there is no way we can support Vista in its current form, the hardware requirements are simply too high and there isn't enough benefit to warrant the expense we would to do the upgrade. The only realistic way to deploy Vista across an enterprise would be by attrition - replacing XP PC's with Vista in the normal upgrade cycle, but then you are dual-platformed for about three years while that all plays out.
I attended a Norex.net conference back in February and of the 50 or so organizations represented, fewer than five expected to have a significant Vista deployment in place by the end of next year (2009).
Here's what I think MS needs to do to fix Windows:
* Rename Windows 7 to "Windows Clean" and use that principle to guide its design.
* Follow the Apple pricing model: One version $89 for everyone with no upgrades, ultimates or basics.
* Adopt a philosophy that the CPU cycles belong to the user, not third party marketers and eliminate preloaders, updaters, ride-alongs and alerters. Strangely, many of the problems with Windows now are caused by third-party companies that won't keep their grubby hands off my CPU cycles. Software should only be running while the user is using it! Corporate rudeness must not be tolerated! Etc. ETc. Etc.
* Along the same line, Adobe, Apple, Real and HP should be banninated from writing non-application software.
* "Modularity" should mean that the base install is clean, but offers the additional (free) component modules (enterprise networking, Media Center, UI Enhancements, etc...) from the install DVD.
* Abandon DRM support - it is anti-user and invasive. SCREW THE xxAA's! It's my PC, not theirs!
* Provide an EXPERT MODE that turns off UI handholding (...stupid Windows XP search dog!). Apps should obey this, too.
* Help (especially from third-party vendors) must be more FAQ-like and informative, especially with fundamental descriptive informationlike "What does this app do?", "Who put it there?", "What depends on it?", "What impact is it having on my system?", "How do I remove/disable parts I'm not using?" Too may help files were written by marketroids.
* Microsoft standardized printer support with Windows in the 90's, they should do the same for licensing (EULA) agreements now. I should be able to view the license agreements for every piece of software on my system and look at the conditions in a table for term-by-term comparison. It would provide an amazing amount of warm fuzzies and goodwill if Microsoft was willing to lead the way away from lawyer-ese and toward a simplicity that INCLUDES the customer, rather than alienating them.
Ok, sorry I turned this into a bitch session. Besides, there's NO WAY IN HELL they're every gonna listen to me!
[/soapbox=off.]
I'll buy *that* for a dollar!