"The US Bureau of Labor Statistics reports there were 138.5m employed Americans in March 2004; eMarketer estimates that 19.2% of these Americans, 26.6m, worked at home in their primary job once a month."
Whoop dee friggin doo. I'd hardly call that progress. I first heard of this concept as a Comp Sci student in the early 70's. There shouldn't even BE and office for me to go to by now. "once a month"? that sounds like sick leave to me. What they are saying is that when you call in sick, automation workers are expected to sign on anyway and try and get something done rather than stay in bed like they should be doing.
My only extensive work-at-home period was when I was a truly independent consultant. My major contract at the time could all be done remotely. Even so, the customer needled me about showing up more often even though there was no place to sit and work available when I showed up. So twice a week I'd make the two hour drive, socialize with the staff and waste their time too, and make sure that the PHBs saw me doing it. Then in the middle of the day I'd drive back home and sign on to actually work.
Sounds like the best way to not have to drive to the office these days is to get your job in India.
"Strangely, we don't expect steam shovels to make other steam shovels. We don't expect cars to run without gasoline. And we certainly don't expect it to all just work without breaking down. But make the robotics very very small, and suddenly magic is supposed to occur."
Yes, it's silly, but not all that unique...
Remember all through the 70's and 80's we were got bombarded with theories about how artificial intelligence would revolutionize our lives. According to some people we should already be interacting with our computers as though they were humans by now.
Two things drive this sort of phenomena. One, we WANT to believe in these things. AI, Cold Fusion, Nanotech, Alien from another planet, etc, all have the potential to revolutionize our lives and change human history. Secondly, our desire to believe is great fodder for anyone trying to sell and idea to venture capitalists. With so many media outlets and ways for people and companies to self publish, is it any wonder that these concepts keep getting floated over and over like a dog chasing it's own tail?
Someday, maybe, some investor(s) will get rich on nanotechnology, but in the mean time much money will be spent and produce no usefull results, and all the while we will continue to ask ourselves "why can't we cure ____, or feed the poor, or bring the price of energy down by ordinary means". Hopefully the funds we devote to far-out possibilities will be in proportion to solutions that are right in front of our face, but lack the pizzazz of these sci-fi concepts.
But even if it was, news about the richest man in the world, who happens to head the biggest software company in the world is still tech news. There were articles here about Martha Stewart for God's sake, does that mean that/. has something against... cooking techniques, or holiday decorations made from old socks?
Same news about Larry Ellison, Scott McNealy, or that incredibly wicked and vile Darl McBride would also be news here, or CNet or the Wall Street Journal.
No need to be so protective of Microsoft, they can take care of themselves.
Funny how this follows on so close to the article about the BBC on-demand video experiment. The issue is the same, people are trying to impose old, outdated print media advertising concepts onto the Internet.
Click-throughs are (IMHO) a better measure of ad effectiveness than are the magazine subscription numbers (or Neilson ratings) by a long shot, but click-throughs are not perfect. What *IS* perfect is to measure how many people actually BUY the product being advertised.
This is conceptually quite easy to do. With each ad needs to come some sort of incentive, either to buy the product right now, while viewing the ad, or some sort of unique coupon number than will (for example) entitle the bearer to a discount when buying the product later. Even the print and TV advertisers figured this one out years ago. The Internet makes it much easier.
Stop measuring click-throughs and start measuring buy-throughs.
My fear for this idea is that the media moguls in Hollywood will view it as another inroad to piracy rather than as a moneymaking opportunity.
For example, we have this entire ad based economy that works off of estimates of how many people see an ad. Estimates, because they know how many people watch a show (the Neilson ratings are accurate enough for that) but they don't know how many people actually watch (and pay attention to) the ads. The same goes for magazines and newspapers, where subscription numbers feed the advertisers fantasy of how many eyeballs they are reaching. Compare that with the Internet, where you can know exactly how many people clicked though to a web paged based on a banner ad. In the latter case you know that someone was interested in your product (or not). You can even know how many people went on to buy the product as a result of the ad. That certainty I think actually hurts Internet advertising, since it gives the seller of the ad very little wiggle room about how much to charge for the ad.
The reality is that most advertising is relatively ineffective. Content on demand dispels the myth, and there are quite a few people who don't want that myth dispelled.
The flip side is this: If we had media on demand everywhere right now, and advertising built into the content, you would select a program, and while watching it see ads, just as you do now. But would you record the program on Tivo in order to watch the program later without the ads? I don't think most people would. The ability to watch something exactly when and where you wanted to would be too compelling to going back to the TV-guide sort of planning process that people do now.
The trick is, finally, to educate people who pay for ads about how valuable those click throughs are compared to a nebulous subscriber count. I don't know if the BBC experiment will do this, but I hope adoption of content on demand elswhere will convice the relatively thick skulled people in Hollywood that they may be missing out on a good thing. That will release a lot of lawyers to do more productive work perhaps.
I like the Knoppix method of installation too. I've used it a couple of times when I just couldn't figure out how to configure a particular network or sound card on my own. Same thing goes for the Lindows (or whatever it's called) installer, and the Suse installer (I haven't tried Red Hat recently).
BUT, when done with those I notice I have a LOT of things I don't want installed and the system takes forever booting up (compared to Debian) as if it's doing a whole series of device detections at each boot.
For me, Debian represents a nice compromise between these totally automatic installers and the cookbook approach taken by Gentoo.
All of these variations have their place though and the nice thing about OSS that doesn't ever change is the variety of options available. The proprietary world will never understand that and will continue trying to produce a single product for the lowest common denominators out there.
Having recently installed Debian on my iBook I can appreciate the desirability for a common installer across all platforms. But I see no reason why others can't produce specialized installers as well. None of these are mutually exclusive.
I think this is a variation on the game theory concept known as "prisoners dilemma" although I don't remember enough about it to explain it properly.
But in terms of the subject at hand: If Mono succeeds in providing an alternative to.Net, then.Net will fail at it's objective (creating another MS monopoly), at which point, both Mono and.Net will fade into history, since MS has shown no interest in continuing support of established standards.
On the other hand if development on Mono stops, that *almost* insures the success of.Net. MS will be the only provider of base.Net technology, which will allow them to pick and choose which applications they want to control, leaving the small stuff to other companies (as they do now).
That leaves two other possibilities:
Abandon Mono and put the labor to work on new innovative things. Michael and crew are very talented group, just imaging what they could do if they weren't working on Mono (like finish Evolution, clean up Gnome, for example, hehe). There *IS* a chance (albeit small) that.Net will fail on its own. Like most things Microsoft, it keeps getting more and more bloated, and may turn out to be every bit as buggy and virus prone as everything else MS does. Given that possibility, there will continue to be a healthy market for people who just don't want to be bothered with the bugs and viruses (examples, the NSA, CIA, Brazil, India, China, Germany....)
Finally, worst case scenario: work continues on Mono but they never produce something that works well enough to make a difference. This is the one that scares me. Given the history, it seems fairly likely too. Continuing the work will help justify.Net, but in the end won't produce a real alternative. If Michael were on the MS payroll (not suggesting he is) this would be the best of all possible outcomes.
I just hope that Novell has the wisdom to either guarantee a finished Mono, or divert the resources to something else soon. Middle ground is a disaster here.
Sounds like someone had trouble coming up with a project worth funding. Or was this just a class project? It's hard to tell. Much ado about nothing. You could draw the same conclusions about loyalty to cars, seating preference on airplanes, or picking the cleaner of two forks offered you in a restarant.
In every case you could simply conclude that a complex selection process went on, that each individual may have had their own criteria, some of which might have been rational, some not (I like the color blue for example). On the other hand, such a study would probably not make the news. Why not ascribe human preference to some sort of totally irrational mechanism that will get a laugh. How about all our choices being controlled by space being in flying saucers? Maybe next years class will conclude that.
Meanwhile, whats with the editing of BBC News? They must be drawing their journalists from the Pennsylvania State University:
"The Penn State team set out to find discover just how far people were prepared to go to maintain a relationship with their favourite PC."
"Any good mechanic will tell you, troubleshooting a problem is troubleshooting a problem. dosent matter if you work on the space shuttle or a toaster. Finding problems and solving them still follows the same basic rules."
Oh, yeah, I'm familiar with that...
Do Forever --- Accept non-functioning car from owner and do paperwork --- Replace component of car not recently replaced --- Drive car around block --- Return car to owner, take money --- Tell owner there may be some break-in period for new part End
"First of all, it is not Clear Channel but National Association of Broadcasters that filed the complaint (contrary to what the original posting says) which Clear Channel is one of many members (as someone pointed out, they only got about 10% of the radio market)."
Are you suggesting that the people who post the original articles should actually read the source article first? HA!
Besides, isn't it fun to watch all the conspiracy people get all worked up over something that wasn't even in the article? I find it very entertaining. Like listening to Coast to Coast AM. *Cue spooky music.*
You haven't heard about the new Intellimouse worm? Does the scroll wheel sometimes act up a bit? Thought so.
(j/k)
Seriously though, I haven't had any trouble opening RTF files with Open Office. In fact, Open Office opens Word files that Word won't even open. I've never needed to resort to Wine for things like that. (although I suspect if there are macros in those documents they won't run in Open Office....on the other hand do you really WANT macros to run in a document when you open it?)
I think the post was a joke, and if so, a very good one. Humor check.
Re:Are there really that many?
on
The Blues for LEDs
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
"Does anyone else have as many blue LEDs around them as thing guy says he does?"
Nope, not me.
Doesn't it seem odd that everything this guy owns has blue LEDs? He must replace his entire collection of electronic devices every month or two. Must be nice. The only thing I have with a blue LED in it is a small flashlight that uses one AA battery and is almost as usefull as a full sized flashlight (except for the slight color distortion). These things are great.
He's right though about manufacturers tending to over-use new technologies. People behind the scenes who market individual components such as this, bluetooth devices, dimmer switches, and on and on, seem to have a disproportionate impact on what finds it's way into our homes than we as consumers do. Do they use focus groups for design issues such as this, or do they just GUESS what will sell?
Whatever they do often doesn't work for me. Which is why I changed from someone who has to have the latest version of everything (like the author of the article apparently) to someone who is quite happy to get last years model, maybe, and if the price is right.
To further pick apart the wording of this summary...
I'd hardly describe them as "plagued". Both landers have been astonishingly successfull. They did suffer what MIGHT be characterized as a minor glitch and that was quickly circumvented.
Really the hardware and software have worked fine. I'd be more interested in seeing some reporter cover the people aspect of the mission, which I don't think has gone perfectly, but maybe with so many smart people involved couldn't have. Consider:
(1) Reporters early on asked how soon Opportunity would leave the crater it landed in to explore other areas. The scientists seemed to be unable to tear themselves away from those rocks and go topside and peek around. Had they done that they would have discovered several other outcrops like that in the area they characterized as flat an uninteresting. They could have always gone back into the crater, but it was almost as if they were afraid the rover would topple over on its way out and didn't want to run any risk. I wish they had been more open about this. Even Spirit spent way too much time hanging around its landing platform IMHO. Spirit had the misfortune of landing in a less interesting place than Opportunity. Still they spent days taking pictures of the lander. I think they could have done better by driving farther, sooner, and they'd bee almost to those hills by now.
(2) It was announced with great enthusiasm that the rover teams were going to "go to mars time" which meant each person would report to work during the Martian day for the rover they worked with and go home for the corresponding Martian night. Within a couple of weeks they were all complaining about how horrible this was. It's called jet-lag otherwise, but most of the staff seemed unable to cope with it. So why hadn't they experimented with that during the several years it took the rovers to get to Mars? It's almost as if they didn't actually expect both landers to land successfully, so they never bothered with the logistics that would be involved. Now, according to the last press conference they have had to re-invent their planning process so that more can be done during the Earth day and they seem willing to sacrifice some downtime for the rovers activities when the Martian day and Earth day don't coincide. At least that's the way it sounded to me.
(3) Personnel changes: The director of the mission (I forget his name) got promoted several weeks after the landings. Couldn't that have waited a few more months? I rather know how government works, and this promotion thing is just about all they think about, but why shuffle everyone around now? I would think maybe after both rovers had passed the 90 day mark would be a better time for any discretionary staff changes.
(4) Reporting to the public. It really started out great, with live video of the control center during both landings, daily press conferences and a great web interface for making pictures available to the public. But I really don't understand why you get different content if you go to http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/ than when you go to http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/home/index.html Seems clear to me the first one should just point to the second one. Looks like a case of dueling webmasters to me. But my real gripe is how quickly the coverage has scaled back. The press conferences went from daily, to 3 times a week, to once a week to every other week, and then turned away from raw information sharing to more dramatic presentations from the east coast. Other forms of communications rapidly tapered off too. For example the simple two minute long flight directors update is now much less frequent. At least the text based updates are still daily, almost. I've wondered whether this was more a burn-out issue or if public interest has dropped off that fast. In either case, Americans sure have a short attention span these days. You would wonder whether the expected "lifetime" of 90 days for the landers didn't almost
"Frankly, even as a faithful Linux user, I still have to agree with him. Our missile defense systems should not be running the same software as my home PC whether it is a commercial or open-source product."
Funny... I feel just the opposite. Whether it's missile control, voting machines or accounting system 99% of what the operating systems components are doing is the same. I'd want that code tested millions of times if possible. Of course some of the code, unique to that application, can only be tested in place, but the less there is of that the better. For every person who would want to introduce a flaw into such software there are hundreds, more likely thousands, who would want to expose that flaw and fix it. It really doesn't matter if their reasons are patriotic or ego related.
It is closed systems after all that produce voting machines with huge bugs in them, and closed systems that crash vehicles into Mars due to metric to English conversion bugs. It is also closed systems that had laptop computers being used in Afghanistan being subverted by pop-up messages from... well, nobody really knows. The notion that closed systems are superior from the security point of view simply doesn't hold up to any sort of statistical analysis. Heck, it doesn't even hold up to a back of the napkin analysis.
Hello? Oh, hi mom. Yeah, I can help you install a program on your computer. What do you want to install? Oh, cool. Have you downloaded it? Good job. OK, open up a terminal...."
Very funny, and very true.
I learned my lesson the hard way. I GAVE someone an older machine fully configured and ready to go with Debian installed. I did this after they constantly complained to me how their two Windows systems were messed up. I suggested that they use Linux to at least do their web browding and e-mail and save the Windows machines for whatever special applications (preferably non-networked) that they had.
Instead, they reformatted the machine and installed Windows on it, and gave it to someone else. Talk about gratitude. I don't think they even bothered to try it.
Needless to say I don't offer much sympathy for them new when they can't get their CD burner to work or they are getting new pop-ups, or they can't turn their machine off because they are afraid that it won't boot right again (a problem they have regularly). "So sorry" I say. I'm just a simple Linux user who doesn't understand that sophisticated Windows stuff.
My rule now is not to help anybody who does not really want to be helped. Give them the system ready to go. Tell then the root password and advise them to either leave it at that or change it and write it down, put it in their wallet if they have to. I'd also set up an alternate account that I can get into (with their permission) using SSH so that I can avoid the type of conversation in your example.
Of course if they were using Suse and the Yast installer they wouldn't have that problem. Or they could use Debian and Kpackage, Lindows and its equivalent, Mandrake and its equivalent. The Linux installers are getting better and better while the Windows stuff is either standing still or taking steps backwards to thwart exposures.
By and large the Aunt Tillies of this world don't install applications anyway. What they want is an Internet appliance, and Linux pretty much gives them that. I think the jury is still out on whether home users in the future will even need an e-mail client program. I already know many who don't know how to read their mail with anything but a web-based interface like Yahoo, and they've never even heard of newsgroups. If Google follows through on their 1-Gig Inbox concept who know, they might offer several Gigs of online hard-drive next. Given that, I'm not sure the average Internet user even needs a real hard drive in their machine. The true internet appliance may be just around the corner, rendering the OS wars moot.
"You chose to live in a place without accessible transit. Sure, you probably had your reasons..."
No, I think you decided what you had to say before you read his post though: *They moved the route!*
Never the less. I have lived here near DC and have used both public transit and driven to work. About an equal amount of each.
I was inclined to use mass transit when my hours were both fixed, and normal. If your hours are unpredictable, as many are these days, you can get screwed. Parking lots that feed the metro system here in DC fill up between 8AM and 9AM. Shortly after that the busses go into a reduced schedule, then stop running completely in many places except for the morning and afternoon rush. Makes perfect sense doesn't it? Using mass transit with even a slightly shifted schedule here is almost impossible. The system runs at full capacity for a couple hours every morning and afternoon and then dries up almost completely, simply because there is no way to get to it.
But that doesn't stop people from saying data-free things like "if more people would just use mass transit, things would be so much better".
Most of these systems run at a loss. They almost all were built on a model that said they could run profitably if ridership were "X" and now in most cases ridership is "2X" or more.
Thats not to mention recent finding that there is little or no preparedness for terrorism in these systems. Guess what? They "forgot" to deal with that issue, and now they will need more money for that. They also "forgot" what they did with millions of dollars in parking fees for the system, and yes, they will need more money(!) to automate their money tracking system better so they don't lose so much money in the future. Maybe.
These systems become huge bureaucratic sinkholes, with nobody really claiming responsibility for anything that happens. In the end, taxpayers anywhere in the vicinity of these systems end up footing the bill for all the waste, and politicians who get chauffeured to work utter platitudes about increasing ridership to solve all problems.
Is the answer for everyone to get a low gas mileage SUV and drive 75 miles to work every day? No. But there are lots of alternatives. Fuel efficient cars. Car pooling. An for the vast majority of information/office workers, simply STAY HOME. Our problems with this are way more cultural than technological. Very few people who work for the federal government can work at home. They have to show up. To see, and be seen by all the other people who show up. Never mind what they accomplish, or fail to accomplish. They were there for roll call, now where is the paycheck?
Many people who live only a few hours from these urban eye-sores drive economy cars, work a few miles away at the hardware store or coffee shop. They don't breath polluted air. They don't drink lead contaminated water (that DC city officials "forgot" to tell anyone about).
The solution to many of these problems is to stop cramming people into high rise buildings where they live and bussing them to high rise building where they work. That model fails to produce quality of life wherever it has been tried worldwide.
Easy. Because with all the vulnerable parts of IE turned off they can't get through the sign-up process for an ID.
Re:slashdotters are very stereotypical..
on
Simputer Available?
·
· Score: 1
We got too big for our britches a long time ago. But I don't think that has anything to do with the reaction to the Simputer.
In fact, when it was first mentioned on Slashdot the Simputer got VERY favorable response. But that was a long time ago, and the product has changed quite a bit from what was envisioned.
It was originally seen as a VERY CHEAP but general purpose computer specifically to allow people in developing countries to catch up with countries like the US where PCs are common. The emphasis was very much on a computer that could be programmed, and there was an emphasis on it being Linux based, so that the programming would probably be portable to other environments (PCs for example).
What the Simputer has turned out to be though is very similar to a Palm Pilot or one of the Pocket PCs vended by HP, Dell, etc. It's also not that much cheaper than those US products, and still beyond the means of anyone who is truly poor. Keep in mind that you can buy a usable full sized computer these days for $200 (US) and they are practically giving away CRT type monitors now too. I am actually working right now on a system that I purchased (used) for $99, which included 17" monitor, 8G hard drive, 128M memory, 400Mhz CPU. The surplus store I got this from (actually I have several) has an endless supply (the US government), and like PCs in general, the price has come down from $150, without monitor, to the present $99, with monitor and better specifications everywhere else too.
My point is, that PCs have become less expensive than almost any other appliance. Comparable now to a VCR. To make the Simputer really exciting, it will have to cost $99 or less, and they need to re-emphasize the generic nature of the thing. I'd like to see someone with a terminal session open, hooked into a remote Linux machine for example, with an x-windows display up, would be even better.
If it were marketted the way it was originally described (more than a year ago) I'd order one in a nano-second. It would take them no time at all to saturate the geek market, and in the process, lower their production cost so that the units could be sold at a loss to the poor people for which it was originally intended.
Anyway, thats my own personal disappointment with the product. Quite the opposite of any pro-US bias, I had expected the people in India to put us and our Palm Pilots to shame with this device. Maybe they can still do that with lower prices, or different marketing. As it stands, this looks like a me-too effort.
I would assume then that all Microsoft ads as well as many of the ads from AMD, Intel, Dell, right down the the condom manufacturers must be banned too.
Since when did anyone assume that most ads don't stretch the truth to the breaking point (pun intended)?
"I know not a single less irrelevant reason for an update than bugfixes. -- Bill Gates, on code stability, from Focus Magazine"
Well, if that's what he actually said then I'd have to agree with him.
Follow closely the multiple negatives in that sentence and you find that it equates to: The most relevant reason for updates to Windows is bug fixes. His thinking is a muddled as his OS.
On the other hand, the only thing I can think of to say about the DOJ is: They must be smoking crack.
"I've contended for years that computing in general has been held back by Microsoft, not pushed forward, and this is an example of just how that has been the case."
Same here. Only now I find people don't argue with me so much. While Intel has done a credible job of advancing the hardware, they probably would have done more had they not relied on the nod-nod-wink-wink relationship with Microsoft.
The true agent of change is the hardware, and now software technology moving off-shore. Sadly, the cost of overcoming the Microsoft bottleneck will be America's loss of dominance in computing. Emerging economies have no desire to pay top dollar for a mediocre operating system, and with fabrication of hardware all going on elsewhere the PC is becoming close to a disposable device which means the OS needs to be that way too.
History will lay a large part of the blame at Bill Gate's feet. Having squandered our technology lead for his own personal gains and ego is a distinction he well deserves.
Slashdot Mirror
You mean by including their schedule on the NASA web page as a web page rather than a downloadable Excel file?
Yeah, good luck.
From the article:
"The US Bureau of Labor Statistics reports there were 138.5m employed Americans in March 2004; eMarketer estimates that 19.2% of these Americans, 26.6m, worked at home in their primary job once a month."
Whoop dee friggin doo. I'd hardly call that progress. I first heard of this concept as a Comp Sci student in the early 70's. There shouldn't even BE and office for me to go to by now. "once a month"? that sounds like sick leave to me. What they are saying is that when you call in sick, automation workers are expected to sign on anyway and try and get something done rather than stay in bed like they should be doing.
My only extensive work-at-home period was when I was a truly independent consultant. My major contract at the time could all be done remotely. Even so, the customer needled me about showing up more often even though there was no place to sit and work available when I showed up. So twice a week I'd make the two hour drive, socialize with the staff and waste their time too, and make sure that the PHBs saw me doing it. Then in the middle of the day I'd drive back home and sign on to actually work.
Sounds like the best way to not have to drive to the office these days is to get your job in India.
"Strangely, we don't expect steam shovels to make other steam shovels. We don't expect cars to run without gasoline. And we certainly don't expect it to all just work without breaking down. But make the robotics very very small, and suddenly magic is supposed to occur."
Yes, it's silly, but not all that unique...
Remember all through the 70's and 80's we were got bombarded with theories about how artificial intelligence would revolutionize our lives. According to some people we should already be interacting with our computers as though they were humans by now.
Two things drive this sort of phenomena. One, we WANT to believe in these things. AI, Cold Fusion, Nanotech, Alien from another planet, etc, all have the potential to revolutionize our lives and change human history. Secondly, our desire to believe is great fodder for anyone trying to sell and idea to venture capitalists. With so many media outlets and ways for people and companies to self publish, is it any wonder that these concepts keep getting floated over and over like a dog chasing it's own tail?
Someday, maybe, some investor(s) will get rich on nanotechnology, but in the mean time much money will be spent and produce no usefull results, and all the while we will continue to ask ourselves "why can't we cure ____, or feed the poor, or bring the price of energy down by ordinary means". Hopefully the funds we devote to far-out possibilities will be in proportion to solutions that are right in front of our face, but lack the pizzazz of these sci-fi concepts.
Not all news on /. is tech news.
/. has something against... cooking techniques, or holiday decorations made from old socks?
But even if it was, news about the richest man in the world, who happens to head the biggest software company in the world is still tech news. There were articles here about Martha Stewart for God's sake, does that mean that
Same news about Larry Ellison, Scott McNealy, or that incredibly wicked and vile Darl McBride would also be news here, or CNet or the Wall Street Journal.
No need to be so protective of Microsoft, they can take care of themselves.
EXACTLY!
Funny how this follows on so close to the article about the BBC on-demand video experiment. The issue is the same, people are trying to impose old, outdated print media advertising concepts onto the Internet.
Click-throughs are (IMHO) a better measure of ad effectiveness than are the magazine subscription numbers (or Neilson ratings) by a long shot, but click-throughs are not perfect. What *IS* perfect is to measure how many people actually BUY the product being advertised.
This is conceptually quite easy to do. With each ad needs to come some sort of incentive, either to buy the product right now, while viewing the ad, or some sort of unique coupon number than will (for example) entitle the bearer to a discount when buying the product later. Even the print and TV advertisers figured this one out years ago. The Internet makes it much easier.
Stop measuring click-throughs and start measuring buy-throughs.
My fear for this idea is that the media moguls in Hollywood will view it as another inroad to piracy rather than as a moneymaking opportunity.
For example, we have this entire ad based economy that works off of estimates of how many people see an ad. Estimates, because they know how many people watch a show (the Neilson ratings are accurate enough for that) but they don't know how many people actually watch (and pay attention to) the ads. The same goes for magazines and newspapers, where subscription numbers feed the advertisers fantasy of how many eyeballs they are reaching. Compare that with the Internet, where you can know exactly how many people clicked though to a web paged based on a banner ad. In the latter case you know that someone was interested in your product (or not). You can even know how many people went on to buy the product as a result of the ad. That certainty I think actually hurts Internet advertising, since it gives the seller of the ad very little wiggle room about how much to charge for the ad.
The reality is that most advertising is relatively ineffective. Content on demand dispels the myth, and there are quite a few people who don't want that myth dispelled.
The flip side is this: If we had media on demand everywhere right now, and advertising built into the content, you would select a program, and while watching it see ads, just as you do now. But would you record the program on Tivo in order to watch the program later without the ads? I don't think most people would. The ability to watch something exactly when and where you wanted to would be too compelling to going back to the TV-guide sort of planning process that people do now.
The trick is, finally, to educate people who pay for ads about how valuable those click throughs are compared to a nebulous subscriber count. I don't know if the BBC experiment will do this, but I hope adoption of content on demand elswhere will convice the relatively thick skulled people in Hollywood that they may be missing out on a good thing. That will release a lot of lawyers to do more productive work perhaps.
I like the Knoppix method of installation too. I've used it a couple of times when I just couldn't figure out how to configure a particular network or sound card on my own. Same thing goes for the Lindows (or whatever it's called) installer, and the Suse installer (I haven't tried Red Hat recently).
BUT, when done with those I notice I have a LOT of things I don't want installed and the system takes forever booting up (compared to Debian) as if it's doing a whole series of device detections at each boot.
For me, Debian represents a nice compromise between these totally automatic installers and the cookbook approach taken by Gentoo.
All of these variations have their place though and the nice thing about OSS that doesn't ever change is the variety of options available. The proprietary world will never understand that and will continue trying to produce a single product for the lowest common denominators out there.
Having recently installed Debian on my iBook I can appreciate the desirability for a common installer across all platforms. But I see no reason why others can't produce specialized installers as well. None of these are mutually exclusive.
I think this is a variation on the game theory concept known as "prisoners dilemma" although I don't remember enough about it to explain it properly.
.Net, then .Net will fail at it's objective (creating another MS monopoly), at which point, both Mono and .Net will fade into history, since MS has shown no interest in continuing support of established standards.
.Net. MS will be the only provider of base .Net technology, which will allow them to pick and choose which applications they want to control, leaving the small stuff to other companies (as they do now).
.Net will fail on its own. Like most things Microsoft, it keeps getting more and more bloated, and may turn out to be every bit as buggy and virus prone as everything else MS does. Given that possibility, there will continue to be a healthy market for people who just don't want to be bothered with the bugs and viruses (examples, the NSA, CIA, Brazil, India, China, Germany....)
.Net, but in the end won't produce a real alternative. If Michael were on the MS payroll (not suggesting he is) this would be the best of all possible outcomes.
But in terms of the subject at hand: If Mono succeeds in providing an alternative to
On the other hand if development on Mono stops, that *almost* insures the success of
That leaves two other possibilities:
Abandon Mono and put the labor to work on new innovative things. Michael and crew are very talented group, just imaging what they could do if they weren't working on Mono (like finish Evolution, clean up Gnome, for example, hehe). There *IS* a chance (albeit small) that
Finally, worst case scenario: work continues on Mono but they never produce something that works well enough to make a difference. This is the one that scares me. Given the history, it seems fairly likely too. Continuing the work will help justify
I just hope that Novell has the wisdom to either guarantee a finished Mono, or divert the resources to something else soon. Middle ground is a disaster here.
Sounds like someone had trouble coming up with a project worth funding. Or was this just a class project? It's hard to tell. Much ado about nothing. You could draw the same conclusions about loyalty to cars, seating preference on airplanes, or picking the cleaner of two forks offered you in a restarant.
In every case you could simply conclude that a complex selection process went on, that each individual may have had their own criteria, some of which might have been rational, some not (I like the color blue for example). On the other hand, such a study would probably not make the news. Why not ascribe human preference to some sort of totally irrational mechanism that will get a laugh. How about all our choices being controlled by space being in flying saucers? Maybe next years class will conclude that.
Meanwhile, whats with the editing of BBC News? They must be drawing their journalists from the Pennsylvania State University:
"The Penn State team set out to find discover just how far people were prepared to go to maintain a relationship with their favourite PC."
"Any good mechanic will tell you, troubleshooting a problem is troubleshooting a problem. dosent matter if you work on the space shuttle or a toaster. Finding problems and solving them still follows the same basic rules."
Oh, yeah, I'm familiar with that...
Do Forever
--- Accept non-functioning car from owner and do paperwork
--- Replace component of car not recently replaced
--- Drive car around block
--- Return car to owner, take money
--- Tell owner there may be some break-in period for new part
End
"First of all, it is not Clear Channel but National Association of Broadcasters that filed the complaint (contrary to what the original posting says) which Clear Channel is one of many members (as someone pointed out, they only got about 10% of the radio market)."
Are you suggesting that the people who post the original articles should actually read the source article first? HA!
Besides, isn't it fun to watch all the conspiracy people get all worked up over something that wasn't even in the article? I find it very entertaining. Like listening to Coast to Coast AM. *Cue spooky music.*
You haven't heard about the new Intellimouse worm? Does the scroll wheel sometimes act up a bit? Thought so.
(j/k)
Seriously though, I haven't had any trouble opening RTF files with Open Office. In fact, Open Office opens Word files that Word won't even open. I've never needed to resort to Wine for things like that. (although I suspect if there are macros in those documents they won't run in Open Office....on the other hand do you really WANT macros to run in a document when you open it?)
Your link no workee.
I find these systems interesting though:
http://mini-itx.com/
Hoping if and when I feel the need for a new computer I'll get one of these with an old enough processor that I can do with little or no fan.
I think the post was a joke, and if so, a very good one. Humor check.
"Does anyone else have as many blue LEDs around them as thing guy says he does?"
Nope, not me.
Doesn't it seem odd that everything this guy owns has blue LEDs? He must replace his entire collection of electronic devices every month or two. Must be nice. The only thing I have with a blue LED in it is a small flashlight that uses one AA battery and is almost as usefull as a full sized flashlight (except for the slight color distortion). These things are great.
He's right though about manufacturers tending to over-use new technologies. People behind the scenes who market individual components such as this, bluetooth devices, dimmer switches, and on and on, seem to have a disproportionate impact on what finds it's way into our homes than we as consumers do. Do they use focus groups for design issues such as this, or do they just GUESS what will sell?
Whatever they do often doesn't work for me. Which is why I changed from someone who has to have the latest version of everything (like the author of the article apparently) to someone who is quite happy to get last years model, maybe, and if the price is right.
To further pick apart the wording of this summary...
I'd hardly describe them as "plagued". Both landers have been astonishingly successfull. They did suffer what MIGHT be characterized as a minor glitch and that was quickly circumvented.
Really the hardware and software have worked fine. I'd be more interested in seeing some reporter cover the people aspect of the mission, which I don't think has gone perfectly, but maybe with so many smart people involved couldn't have. Consider:
(1) Reporters early on asked how soon Opportunity would leave the crater it landed in to explore other areas. The scientists seemed to be unable to tear themselves away from those rocks and go topside and peek around. Had they done that they would have discovered several other outcrops like that in the area they characterized as flat an uninteresting. They could have always gone back into the crater, but it was almost as if they were afraid the rover would topple over on its way out and didn't want to run any risk. I wish they had been more open about this. Even Spirit spent way too much time hanging around its landing platform IMHO. Spirit had the misfortune of landing in a less interesting place than Opportunity. Still they spent days taking pictures of the lander. I think they could have done better by driving farther, sooner, and they'd bee almost to those hills by now.
(2) It was announced with great enthusiasm that the rover teams were going to "go to mars time" which meant each person would report to work during the Martian day for the rover they worked with and go home for the corresponding Martian night. Within a couple of weeks they were all complaining about how horrible this was. It's called jet-lag otherwise, but most of the staff seemed unable to cope with it. So why hadn't they experimented with that during the several years it took the rovers to get to Mars? It's almost as if they didn't actually expect both landers to land successfully, so they never bothered with the logistics that would be involved. Now, according to the last press conference they have had to re-invent their planning process so that more can be done during the Earth day and they seem willing to sacrifice some downtime for the rovers activities when the Martian day and Earth day don't coincide. At least that's the way it sounded to me.
(3) Personnel changes: The director of the mission (I forget his name) got promoted several weeks after the landings. Couldn't that have waited a few more months? I rather know how government works, and this promotion thing is just about all they think about, but why shuffle everyone around now? I would think maybe after both rovers had passed the 90 day mark would be a better time for any discretionary staff changes.
(4) Reporting to the public. It really started out great, with live video of the control center during both landings, daily press conferences and a great web interface for making pictures available to the public. But I really don't understand why you get different content if you go to http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/ than when you go to http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/home/index.html Seems clear to me the first one should just point to the second one. Looks like a case of dueling webmasters to me. But my real gripe is how quickly the coverage has scaled back. The press conferences went from daily, to 3 times a week, to once a week to every other week, and then turned away from raw information sharing to more dramatic presentations from the east coast. Other forms of communications rapidly tapered off too. For example the simple two minute long flight directors update is now much less frequent. At least the text based updates are still daily, almost. I've wondered whether this was more a burn-out issue or if public interest has dropped off that fast. In either case, Americans sure have a short attention span these days. You would wonder whether the expected "lifetime" of 90 days for the landers didn't almost
"Frankly, even as a faithful Linux user, I still have to agree with him. Our missile defense systems should not be running the same software as my home PC whether it is a commercial or open-source product."
... well, nobody really knows. The notion that closed systems are superior from the security point of view simply doesn't hold up to any sort of statistical analysis. Heck, it doesn't even hold up to a back of the napkin analysis.
Funny... I feel just the opposite. Whether it's missile control, voting machines or accounting system 99% of what the operating systems components are doing is the same. I'd want that code tested millions of times if possible. Of course some of the code, unique to that application, can only be tested in place, but the less there is of that the better. For every person who would want to introduce a flaw into such software there are hundreds, more likely thousands, who would want to expose that flaw and fix it. It really doesn't matter if their reasons are patriotic or ego related.
It is closed systems after all that produce voting machines with huge bugs in them, and closed systems that crash vehicles into Mars due to metric to English conversion bugs. It is also closed systems that had laptop computers being used in Afghanistan being subverted by pop-up messages from
"Somewhere in Linux-land, a phone rings....
Hello? Oh, hi mom. Yeah, I can help you install a program on your computer. What do you want to install? Oh, cool. Have you downloaded it? Good job. OK, open up a terminal...."
Very funny, and very true.
I learned my lesson the hard way. I GAVE someone an older machine fully configured and ready to go with Debian installed. I did this after they constantly complained to me how their two Windows systems were messed up. I suggested that they use Linux to at least do their web browding and e-mail and save the Windows machines for whatever special applications (preferably non-networked) that they had.
Instead, they reformatted the machine and installed Windows on it, and gave it to someone else. Talk about gratitude. I don't think they even bothered to try it.
Needless to say I don't offer much sympathy for them new when they can't get their CD burner to work or they are getting new pop-ups, or they can't turn their machine off because they are afraid that it won't boot right again (a problem they have regularly). "So sorry" I say. I'm just a simple Linux user who doesn't understand that sophisticated Windows stuff.
My rule now is not to help anybody who does not really want to be helped. Give them the system ready to go. Tell then the root password and advise them to either leave it at that or change it and write it down, put it in their wallet if they have to. I'd also set up an alternate account that I can get into (with their permission) using SSH so that I can avoid the type of conversation in your example.
Of course if they were using Suse and the Yast installer they wouldn't have that problem. Or they could use Debian and Kpackage, Lindows and its equivalent, Mandrake and its equivalent. The Linux installers are getting better and better while the Windows stuff is either standing still or taking steps backwards to thwart exposures.
By and large the Aunt Tillies of this world don't install applications anyway. What they want is an Internet appliance, and Linux pretty much gives them that. I think the jury is still out on whether home users in the future will even need an e-mail client program. I already know many who don't know how to read their mail with anything but a web-based interface like Yahoo, and they've never even heard of newsgroups. If Google follows through on their 1-Gig Inbox concept who know, they might offer several Gigs of online hard-drive next. Given that, I'm not sure the average Internet user even needs a real hard drive in their machine. The true internet appliance may be just around the corner, rendering the OS wars moot.
I think they should just call it "Gates". Would be funny as hell and hard for MS to come up with an excuse to sue for.
"You chose to live in a place without accessible transit. Sure, you probably had your reasons..."
No, I think you decided what you had to say before you read his post though: *They moved the route!*
Never the less. I have lived here near DC and have used both public transit and driven to work. About an equal amount of each.
I was inclined to use mass transit when my hours were both fixed, and normal. If your hours are unpredictable, as many are these days, you can get screwed. Parking lots that feed the metro system here in DC fill up between 8AM and 9AM. Shortly after that the busses go into a reduced schedule, then stop running completely in many places except for the morning and afternoon rush. Makes perfect sense doesn't it? Using mass transit with even a slightly shifted schedule here is almost impossible. The system runs at full capacity for a couple hours every morning and afternoon and then dries up almost completely, simply because there is no way to get to it.
But that doesn't stop people from saying data-free things like "if more people would just use mass transit, things would be so much better".
Most of these systems run at a loss. They almost all were built on a model that said they could run profitably if ridership were "X" and now in most cases ridership is "2X" or more.
Thats not to mention recent finding that there is little or no preparedness for terrorism in these systems. Guess what? They "forgot" to deal with that issue, and now they will need more money for that. They also "forgot" what they did with millions of dollars in parking fees for the system, and yes, they will need more money(!) to automate their money tracking system better so they don't lose so much money in the future. Maybe.
These systems become huge bureaucratic sinkholes, with nobody really claiming responsibility for anything that happens. In the end, taxpayers anywhere in the vicinity of these systems end up footing the bill for all the waste, and politicians who get chauffeured to work utter platitudes about increasing ridership to solve all problems.
Is the answer for everyone to get a low gas mileage SUV and drive 75 miles to work every day? No. But there are lots of alternatives. Fuel efficient cars. Car pooling. An for the vast majority of information/office workers, simply STAY HOME. Our problems with this are way more cultural than technological. Very few people who work for the federal government can work at home. They have to show up. To see, and be seen by all the other people who show up. Never mind what they accomplish, or fail to accomplish. They were there for roll call, now where is the paycheck?
Many people who live only a few hours from these urban eye-sores drive economy cars, work a few miles away at the hardware store or coffee shop. They don't breath polluted air. They don't drink lead contaminated water (that DC city officials "forgot" to tell anyone about).
The solution to many of these problems is to stop cramming people into high rise buildings where they live and bussing them to high rise building where they work. That model fails to produce quality of life wherever it has been tried worldwide.
Easy. Because with all the vulnerable parts of IE turned off they can't get through the sign-up process for an ID.
We got too big for our britches a long time ago. But I don't think that has anything to do with the reaction to the Simputer.
In fact, when it was first mentioned on Slashdot the Simputer got VERY favorable response. But that was a long time ago, and the product has changed quite a bit from what was envisioned.
It was originally seen as a VERY CHEAP but general purpose computer specifically to allow people in developing countries to catch up with countries like the US where PCs are common. The emphasis was very much on a computer that could be programmed, and there was an emphasis on it being Linux based, so that the programming would probably be portable to other environments (PCs for example).
What the Simputer has turned out to be though is very similar to a Palm Pilot or one of the Pocket PCs vended by HP, Dell, etc. It's also not that much cheaper than those US products, and still beyond the means of anyone who is truly poor. Keep in mind that you can buy a usable full sized computer these days for $200 (US) and they are practically giving away CRT type monitors now too. I am actually working right now on a system that I purchased (used) for $99, which included 17" monitor, 8G hard drive, 128M memory, 400Mhz CPU. The surplus store I got this from (actually I have several) has an endless supply (the US government), and like PCs in general, the price has come down from $150, without monitor, to the present $99, with monitor and better specifications everywhere else too.
My point is, that PCs have become less expensive than almost any other appliance. Comparable now to a VCR. To make the Simputer really exciting, it will have to cost $99 or less, and they need to re-emphasize the generic nature of the thing. I'd like to see someone with a terminal session open, hooked into a remote Linux machine for example, with an x-windows display up, would be even better.
If it were marketted the way it was originally described (more than a year ago) I'd order one in a nano-second. It would take them no time at all to saturate the geek market, and in the process, lower their production cost so that the units could be sold at a loss to the poor people for which it was originally intended.
Anyway, thats my own personal disappointment with the product. Quite the opposite of any pro-US bias, I had expected the people in India to put us and our Palm Pilots to shame with this device. Maybe they can still do that with lower prices, or different marketing. As it stands, this looks like a me-too effort.
I would assume then that all Microsoft ads as well as many of the ads from AMD, Intel, Dell, right down the the condom manufacturers must be banned too.
Since when did anyone assume that most ads don't stretch the truth to the breaking point (pun intended)?
"I know not a single less irrelevant reason for an update than bugfixes. -- Bill Gates, on code stability, from Focus Magazine"
Well, if that's what he actually said then I'd have to agree with him.
Follow closely the multiple negatives in that sentence and you find that it equates to: The most relevant reason for updates to Windows is bug fixes. His thinking is a muddled as his OS.
On the other hand, the only thing I can think of to say about the DOJ is: They must be smoking crack.
"I've contended for years that computing in general has been held back by Microsoft, not pushed forward, and this is an example of just how that has been the case."
Same here. Only now I find people don't argue with me so much. While Intel has done a credible job of advancing the hardware, they probably would have done more had they not relied on the nod-nod-wink-wink relationship with Microsoft.
The true agent of change is the hardware, and now software technology moving off-shore. Sadly, the cost of overcoming the Microsoft bottleneck will be America's loss of dominance in computing. Emerging economies have no desire to pay top dollar for a mediocre operating system, and with fabrication of hardware all going on elsewhere the PC is becoming close to a disposable device which means the OS needs to be that way too.
History will lay a large part of the blame at Bill Gate's feet. Having squandered our technology lead for his own personal gains and ego is a distinction he well deserves.