it cost them more to have a csr make a 15 minute call
After a long problem with a bank (they hadn't actually registered a mortgage payoff that had taken effect ten years before - it took
six months and 4 faxes of the exact same information to get it handled ), I adopted a
policy that whenever I'm having a problem getting a dispute resolved, I'll make some time and make that 15 minute call a one hour call
and just before we hang up, I'll point that out to them. (I usually have something else to do while the call is going on so the time
is not tossed out - instead it gets punctuated by "Hang on, I need to find my bank statement..." (or whatever)). I do my best to
be polite and cheerful - but insistent on getting the problem resolved.
Of course, nobody wants to grow up to be a checkout clerk.
But kids don't take school seriously (who can blame them, it is a system far from serious) and don't go
to college (or do go to college and major in some nonsense major just cuz it looks easy). Some of
them teach themselves and succeed, many end up with no skills and not much to do. For someone like
this, a good chance of keeping a job for years and working their way up the pay scale is a very good
deal indeed.
It seems quite likely that if Intel were to push the Itanium more and get it used in more systems that
the demand would rise and the price would therefore drop. Of course, this might require a lot of demand, but if the performance is good enough
for the price, the demand will be there.
It might be worthwhile for Intel to find a way to drop the price enough to put these things into more places. Even give them away
to visible web installations (like slashdot, fer'nstance). Get a bit more market penetration, convince some vocal people that its a good buy
and it will start to take off. (I'd be glad to take an Itanium system for free for web service - even though my primary web presence is
anything but big. Even better a couple of them to let my students use for compute bound projects.)
For those missing the signficance of the second link's title, here are the (apt, I think) opening lines
of "Howl" by Allen Ginsburg :
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix
I teach and sometimes use a projector to make the screen of my laptop visible to the class. This is not so much a powerpoint type thing as a way
to show code - and most of my code is built in linux. I use linux normally, but for some reason the projector doesn't seem to like the linux video out. Under Windows the
same resolution seems to work ok. So, I use VMWare to virtualize linux under windows in order to get the projector to play nice. Works just fine.
But in the long run, it is. If you use the right kind of markup, its easy to change styles in TeX/LaTeX/...
quite easily across an entire document. In most WYSIWYG word processors, much of the formatting tends
to be ad-hoc, so needs to be adjusted, brought up to date, in multiple places. Furthermore, indexing
the document on specific terms (for example, dates - there may be a dozen dates in a document all of
which have different meanings - how do you decide which are meaningful and how? Can you automatically
index the document in all these different ways (date written, due date for reply, date for contract
completion...)?), adding in boilerplate and all kinds of other operations become much
more difficult.
I'm not defending TeX/LaTeX here so much as trying to say that the WYSIWYG type of markup tends to waste
peoples energy in the wrong places - authors become document designers, indexers and end up doing all
kinds of jobs that they should not be doing - expending energy making the document look right and not
making the document "mean right" or "work right". Instead of semantic markup which enhances a document
we have syntactic markup which not only does not enhance, but can in many cases actually reduce the
value of the document in the long term. (In many cases, documents need to be stripped of all this
cruft to be useful for other uses.)
Style should be different in most applications from content. WYSIWYG style word processing not only
allows style and content to be intermixed almost randomly - it actually requires it. So, while
TeX/LaTeX/scribe/... can make building that content slightly more difficult (not a lot in most cases, and
in some cases building the content can be made much easier),
it pays off by making the content more useful in the long term.
The problem is that the ignorati have (often at great personal psychological/intellectual expense) all
learned WYSIWYG editing and are seriously afraid of learning something new.
As with most hacks, there will be a few people who actually do the work and lots of people who
use those hacks. In this case, it seems quite likely that the online gambling sites themselves
will find ways around the problems, then distribute software/documentation on how to do just
that (probably as easily as they can manage it). Most interested users will just follow instructions,
do the simple install, or whatever it takes.
By his own words, George Bush is no the speaker for Christians (though he does claim to speak to
God on a regular basic). He is however "The Decider" - and evidently became the decider because
he himself decided to.
If we put as much effort into producing good networks that self-heal, that encrypt (strong encryption, of course) communications, and that adapt to changing conditions in order to reach the rest of the world, we could probably saturate almost every country that the US does not approve of with networked, secure, cheap PC's. This could allow people in various parts of the world to work out their own destinies, rather than having the US determine them for them. ("... Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.")
Then, if American style democracy/free markets/... is as good as some like to think it is, it will eventually take over - by sheer goodness and niceness.
Of course, this is not considered a particularly good way to do things as it might also mean that people settle on ways to govern themselves that
are not quite to the liking of those who run the US.
(I know - unrealistic, idealistic, nonsense. And not something the current US government would support even in the US. But hey, its nice to dream once in a while.)
For an interesting read and one which may challenge your ideas on how to cope with some of the people in these kinds of situations, try this article from the New Yorker which explores some of these issues.
I think there is a great opportunity out there for serious/classical (meaning anything from Bach to Messiaen to Reich to... ) music as well as popular music.
Leaving copyright questions aside for the moment, I'd love to have digital recordings available from college orchestras (or small city bands, or whatever) of such works. In some cases, I'd like to have a pile of recordings of a single piece - just to compare and contrast. (For example, I'd like to hear any recorded performance of Steve Reich's "Music for Eighteen Musicians".) I'd also like to have lots of samples of different composer's works that may not be in the mainstream catalog.
This would be a great way to discover composers, to discover interesting performers and generally to both broaden my musical tastes and deepen my appreciation of pieces I already know.
Actually, this kind of rule has some good logic behind it. It is intended to make it difficult for a person in some position of authority from just hiring friends and relatives - by specifiying duties, required skills and publishing that, you are (in theory at least) making the job open to others. It is also a useful way to help people to move around in an organization.
That bureaucracy and bureaucrats have found a way to use this to do almost exactly what it is intended to prohibit just shows how almost every rule can somehow be perverted - given time and enough people trying.
The parent got modded troll, but without context, it's not clear to me if it is a troll or a srious comment.
"deals with a lot of shit" could be a comment on sexual activity - in which case "troll" is a good mod.
Or it could be a factual comment on what it is like to be gay in a society dominated by a bunch of people
who are sex-phobic, fundamentalists who hate gay people on principle, and homophobes of whatever other
flavor.
Now if they'd built an online version of Improv, or "advance" (if I remember the name correctly), I'd be
more interested and impressed. Why not explore the "spreadsheet space" a bit more - what if it were
built around constraint propagation (so changes would propagate both ways)?
I know, I know. People expect the standard sort of spreadsheet, they know how it works, they've already pushed
past the hump of the learning curve, so they don't want to learn anything different.
While I find the notion of adding more laws to the internet a difficult one, I don't find your
comments all that persuasive.
Since I'm in an area with a single DSL provider (with Comcast also in the broadband market), I pay quite
a bit (don't ask) for DSL and I have to buy a landline (an expensive one at that) as well. I find the
notion that my DSL provider will be allowed to (essentially) raise their prices arbitrarily on either
specific applications or bandwidth uncongenial. Since the content providers also pay for access, I suspect the
network folks are making out quite all right.
I also wonder if this would make content something that the net folks could charge for differentially.
For example, suppose Foo-Mart (a huge corporation) both buy preferential access for itself and at the same time, buy
far less preferential access for Bar-Mart (another huge corporation).
Or could they be in favor of a political candidate and opposed to another and charge one political website more than
the other?
Or perhaps they're opposed to abortion (or gay marriage, or...) so they charge those websites more.
Allowing the corporations to make any decisions that favor one network content provider (or protocol, or...) over another
is likely to lead to them making all kinds of decisions that many of us would find troubling.
And the 3 different OS's thing is definitely important. It may also be worth wondering what these different
servers are doing. If the unix/linux/solaris/... servers are doing things that require lots of work but the windows
servers are not doing anything complicated - or if they're all doing exactly the same thing and can be administered
from a single machine, the evaluation gets way more complex.
"Never ascribe to malice that which may be adequately explained by stupidity."
(/incompetence/ignorance/...)
I don't think Bush lied. I think he is just rather stupid and refused to listen. By all accounts, Bush is
unwilling (or even unable) to listen to people who express views that are contrary to the ones he holds. There
are stories of people getting fired, temper tantrums in Cabinet meetings....
In such an environment, where you are a high level staffer in the White House, and you know that you're likely to lose
your cushy job if you tell the shrubbery something he doesn't want to hear, what are you likely to do? Tell him what
he wants to hear and tell those who report to you that you don't want to hear anything that you might have to pass on
that will piss the boss off. Eventually, everyone who wants to keep their job gets the message and starts sending the
right information up the chain. And many of them, who work in positions that have high level security clearances know that whistleblowing will not be a good thing. So everyone toes the party line (just as in Stalinist Russia, Maoist China, and similar situations). This way, the president never has to lie - everyone else is doing it for him.
Personally, I'd rather have a president who lies about a blowjob than an incompetent - or worse yet an incompetent who refuses to listen to anyone more competent.
But they won't charge $50/month. They'll charge $10/month plus a startup cost (which many users won't see, just as they don't see the fees charged when they buy MS Windows with a new computer - and MS has too much of a good thing going there to ever let go of this income). Clearly, over the lifetime of the machine, this will add up to far more than anyone is paying now, but people will think something like "Only $10, thats nothing." and pay without a problem.
It will look all the less as MS will then be able to up the price for a permanent license for their OS (or Office or whatever) to $500 or more, so everyone will think they're really saving money.
And of course, with patented Office file formats, a new MS image format and all, nobody will want to risk losing their data by not continuing to pay the monthly fees. Even better, with WinFS, it may be hard to even copy any file to another OS without losing data.
J.D.Power and associates looks to me like a group that will happily craft a survey to show whatever
you like - at least thats the conclusion I come to from seeing their results on TV ads over the
years. Which makes me wonder : who paid for this survey?
Slashdot Mirror
Of course, nobody wants to grow up to be a checkout clerk.
But kids don't take school seriously (who can blame them, it is a system far from serious) and don't go to college (or do go to college and major in some nonsense major just cuz it looks easy). Some of them teach themselves and succeed, many end up with no skills and not much to do. For someone like this, a good chance of keeping a job for years and working their way up the pay scale is a very good deal indeed.
It might be worthwhile for Intel to find a way to drop the price enough to put these things into more places. Even give them away to visible web installations (like slashdot, fer'nstance). Get a bit more market penetration, convince some vocal people that its a good buy and it will start to take off. (I'd be glad to take an Itanium system for free for web service - even though my primary web presence is anything but big. Even better a couple of them to let my students use for compute bound projects.)
I teach and sometimes use a projector to make the screen of my laptop visible to the class. This is not so much a powerpoint type thing as a way to show code - and most of my code is built in linux. I use linux normally, but for some reason the projector doesn't seem to like the linux video out. Under Windows the same resolution seems to work ok. So, I use VMWare to virtualize linux under windows in order to get the projector to play nice. Works just fine.
(Unless McAfee has already done so since another poster notes they do something similar.)
But in the long run, it is. If you use the right kind of markup, its easy to change styles in TeX/LaTeX/... quite easily across an entire document. In most WYSIWYG word processors, much of the formatting tends to be ad-hoc, so needs to be adjusted, brought up to date, in multiple places. Furthermore, indexing the document on specific terms (for example, dates - there may be a dozen dates in a document all of which have different meanings - how do you decide which are meaningful and how? Can you automatically index the document in all these different ways (date written, due date for reply, date for contract completion...)?), adding in boilerplate and all kinds of other operations become much more difficult.
I'm not defending TeX/LaTeX here so much as trying to say that the WYSIWYG type of markup tends to waste peoples energy in the wrong places - authors become document designers, indexers and end up doing all kinds of jobs that they should not be doing - expending energy making the document look right and not making the document "mean right" or "work right". Instead of semantic markup which enhances a document we have syntactic markup which not only does not enhance, but can in many cases actually reduce the value of the document in the long term. (In many cases, documents need to be stripped of all this cruft to be useful for other uses.)
Style should be different in most applications from content. WYSIWYG style word processing not only allows style and content to be intermixed almost randomly - it actually requires it. So, while TeX/LaTeX/scribe/... can make building that content slightly more difficult (not a lot in most cases, and in some cases building the content can be made much easier), it pays off by making the content more useful in the long term.
The problem is that the ignorati have (often at great personal psychological/intellectual expense) all learned WYSIWYG editing and are seriously afraid of learning something new.
Ah, but who will actually do the workarounds?
As with most hacks, there will be a few people who actually do the work and lots of people who use those hacks. In this case, it seems quite likely that the online gambling sites themselves will find ways around the problems, then distribute software/documentation on how to do just that (probably as easily as they can manage it). Most interested users will just follow instructions, do the simple install, or whatever it takes.
(Not According To The FA)
The article says that the Cornell GPS group tried to get the information but failed, as did several other groups - so :
does not seem to apply. Furthermore, there are other parts of the article that hint that the signal encryption used is indeed the definitive one.Now, as to the satellite/receiver firmware being updated - that is certainly always a possibility and nothing in the article contraindicates that.
How about FAQ?
Scrabble needs "faq".
By his own words, George Bush is no the speaker for Christians (though he does claim to speak to God on a regular basic). He is however "The Decider" - and evidently became the decider because he himself decided to.
Then, if American style democracy/free markets/... is as good as some like to think it is, it will eventually take over - by sheer goodness and niceness.
Of course, this is not considered a particularly good way to do things as it might also mean that people settle on ways to govern themselves that are not quite to the liking of those who run the US.
(I know - unrealistic, idealistic, nonsense. And not something the current US government would support even in the US. But hey, its nice to dream once in a while.)
But if you add : :
D) Videotape them
then you can also add
E) Get arrested.
For an interesting read and one which may challenge your ideas on how to cope with some of the people in these kinds of situations, try this article from the New Yorker which explores some of these issues.
I think there is a great opportunity out there for serious/classical (meaning anything from Bach to Messiaen to Reich to... ) music as well as popular music.
Leaving copyright questions aside for the moment, I'd love to have digital recordings available from college orchestras (or small city bands, or whatever) of such works. In some cases, I'd like to have a pile of recordings of a single piece - just to compare and contrast. (For example, I'd like to hear any recorded performance of Steve Reich's "Music for Eighteen Musicians".) I'd also like to have lots of samples of different composer's works that may not be in the mainstream catalog.
This would be a great way to discover composers, to discover interesting performers and generally to both broaden my musical tastes and deepen my appreciation of pieces I already know.
Actually, this kind of rule has some good logic behind it. It is intended to make it difficult for a person in some position of authority from just hiring friends and relatives - by specifiying duties, required skills and publishing that, you are (in theory at least) making the job open to others. It is also a useful way to help people to move around in an organization.
That bureaucracy and bureaucrats have found a way to use this to do almost exactly what it is intended to prohibit just shows how almost every rule can somehow be perverted - given time and enough people trying.
"deals with a lot of shit" could be a comment on sexual activity - in which case "troll" is a good mod.
Or it could be a factual comment on what it is like to be gay in a society dominated by a bunch of people who are sex-phobic, fundamentalists who hate gay people on principle, and homophobes of whatever other flavor.
Instead of just "Record the dates..." you might also try the "record the call" and post it to the web thing that worked so well against AOL.
But if he hangs himself, won't he be considered a terrorist using an act of "asymmetric warfare"?
Wheee!
Now if they'd built an online version of Improv, or "advance" (if I remember the name correctly), I'd be more interested and impressed. Why not explore the "spreadsheet space" a bit more - what if it were built around constraint propagation (so changes would propagate both ways)?
I know, I know. People expect the standard sort of spreadsheet, they know how it works, they've already pushed past the hump of the learning curve, so they don't want to learn anything different.
While I find the notion of adding more laws to the internet a difficult one, I don't find your comments all that persuasive.
Since I'm in an area with a single DSL provider (with Comcast also in the broadband market), I pay quite a bit (don't ask) for DSL and I have to buy a landline (an expensive one at that) as well. I find the notion that my DSL provider will be allowed to (essentially) raise their prices arbitrarily on either specific applications or bandwidth uncongenial. Since the content providers also pay for access, I suspect the network folks are making out quite all right.
I also wonder if this would make content something that the net folks could charge for differentially. For example, suppose Foo-Mart (a huge corporation) both buy preferential access for itself and at the same time, buy far less preferential access for Bar-Mart (another huge corporation). Or could they be in favor of a political candidate and opposed to another and charge one political website more than the other? Or perhaps they're opposed to abortion (or gay marriage, or ...) so they charge those websites more.
Allowing the corporations to make any decisions that favor one network content provider (or protocol, or ...) over another
is likely to lead to them making all kinds of decisions that many of us would find troubling.
And the 3 different OS's thing is definitely important. It may also be worth wondering what these different servers are doing. If the unix/linux/solaris/... servers are doing things that require lots of work but the windows servers are not doing anything complicated - or if they're all doing exactly the same thing and can be administered from a single machine, the evaluation gets way more complex.
(/incompetence/ignorance/...)
I don't think Bush lied. I think he is just rather stupid and refused to listen. By all accounts, Bush is unwilling (or even unable) to listen to people who express views that are contrary to the ones he holds. There are stories of people getting fired, temper tantrums in Cabinet meetings....
In such an environment, where you are a high level staffer in the White House, and you know that you're likely to lose your cushy job if you tell the shrubbery something he doesn't want to hear, what are you likely to do? Tell him what he wants to hear and tell those who report to you that you don't want to hear anything that you might have to pass on that will piss the boss off. Eventually, everyone who wants to keep their job gets the message and starts sending the right information up the chain. And many of them, who work in positions that have high level security clearances know that whistleblowing will not be a good thing. So everyone toes the party line (just as in Stalinist Russia, Maoist China, and similar situations). This way, the president never has to lie - everyone else is doing it for him.
Personally, I'd rather have a president who lies about a blowjob than an incompetent - or worse yet an incompetent who refuses to listen to anyone more competent.
It will look all the less as MS will then be able to up the price for a permanent license for their OS (or Office or whatever) to $500 or more, so everyone will think they're really saving money.
And of course, with patented Office file formats, a new MS image format and all, nobody will want to risk losing their data by not continuing to pay the monthly fees. Even better, with WinFS, it may be hard to even copy any file to another OS without losing data.
J.D.Power and associates looks to me like a group that will happily craft a survey to show whatever you like - at least thats the conclusion I come to from seeing their results on TV ads over the years. Which makes me wonder : who paid for this survey?