Having dealt with having to provide estimates on service restoration at work, my experience is that by the time you can figure out what it would take to restore service, it won't be long before service is actually restored.
I'm not saying that providing status updates isn't good practice. However, it is usually rare that you'll get an ETA on something being fixed. Maybe if they discover it is a broken line and they actually have to dig it up and fix it and that will take hours you might get an ETA. Usually root cause analysis is 95% of the work in problem solving.
Reminds me of a story at work when some developers decided to actually try to embrace the outsourcing model that was being pushed by management. They sent a list of bugs to the outsourced development team and asked for estimates to fix them. They replied, "no problem, just tell us which lines of code to modify and how and we'll take care of it." Now, THAT is a value-add!
Having lived with a type-2, I'd never tell you to eat less. It is a LOT harder than people make it out to be. She could probably eat two apples a day and end up with an A1C of 8 on 60 units of Lantus a day.
It seems like there should be some way to change the reservoir without changing the injection set. I'm sure it would involve some care (locks, wiping with alcohol, etc), but if you can plug in an IV line in a hospital without giving somebody sepsis you should be able to change a pump reservoir without having to redo the whole thing.
I think this points to there needing to be a LOT more money spent on the courts.
Courts should have the time/money to give real attention to each case, and lawyers should almost be unnecessary. If your lawyer doesn't bring up a defense it should be the duty of the court to do so for you, and so on. Courts should also have a duty to obtain all the evidence they can, even if not brought forward by either party. By all means dump those costs on the loser in the end. Trails should be about finding the truth and dispensing justice and equity. They should not be a debate club where you reward the person with the best argument and data presentation.
Sure, it would cost more money to run the courts, but it can't be more expensive than bombers. And every trial would get down to root cause. If the root cause is that some sociopath has a job in some industry then the solution is to bar them from working in that industry, or putting them in jail, even if the only matter brought to the court was a lawsuit over some file sharing or whatever. When you go to the court, you'll get justice, and not necessarily the justice you're looking for. That will make people think twice about wasting the court's time.
Is schizophrenia mediated by glutamate or dopamine? We know dopamine antagonists help some people but not too much more.
I think the whole idea is that in the future you won't be diagnosed with schizophrenia. Instead you'll be diagnosed with having too much/little dopamine production, causing symptoms of schizophrenia. The treatment for too much/little dopamine will unsurprisingly be a drug that affects dopamine production.
Coming up with a treatment for schizophrenia is like coming up with a treatment for nausea. Some people with nausea respond really well to coronary stents, and others don't respond at all to this with a few even having alarming side-effects like death. The reason is that you'd have to be an idiot to prescribe heart surgery simply because somebody had nausea, but you wouldn't be an idiot to check their blood oxygenation or check for cardiac enzymes, and if those tests don't turn out well then looking more closely at the heart makes a lot of sense.
Behavioral problems aren't actually the problem - they're just how problems in the brain manifest themselves, just as chest pain or nausea or shortness of breath are how heart problems often manifest themselves.
That said, it will be a while before we the new approach is better than the old. However, it does make a lot of sense to move in this direction with research, in the hopes of coming up with game-changing treatments.
Well, I see two potential problems with transmitting quantum crypto through hubs without trusting them:
1. The signal loss problem. The longer the continuous link without retransmission, the more data loss and the lower effective transmission rate. What you refer to might help with that if it allows signals to be boosted without destroying/recreating the photons.
2. The routing problem. Each packet has to get to the right destination, but if every photon on the line is a quantum encryption bit then you can't read them to determine their destination without disrupting the link. I see two potential solutions here:
2.1. One is to use channels (like the old POTS approach) - you have 10 data lines and a control line to the hub, and you ring up the hub and ask for one of them to be connected to some remote destination. Then the entire network creates a single dedicated channel where photons can traverse untouched.
2.2. The more optimal approach would be packet switching, but you'd need to have packets that include both unencrypted headers (at least a destination field) and encrypted payload, and the timing/etc would have to be such that the switch can pick out only the photons it should intercept and let the rest pass through. For that matter it would require some kind of tap that lets selected photons pass through completely untouched and perfectly captures others, and that this could be switched between both modes VERY quickly.
If you can trust the hubs then you only have point-to-point links and you don't have to mess with any of this stuff. This does rely on owning all the hubs and securing them. For a big company that isn't a problem, but for a consumer you're not going to be able to own all the hubs between yourself and your bank.
This destroys the protection from wiretapping that quantum crypto promised.
Quantum crypto always has had this limitation - it is a point-to-point system only. If you want multiple endpoints then you either need the 2^n connection growth or you need hubs that are trusted.
However, securing the hubs ON YOUR OWN NETWORK isn't that hard if you really care to do it. The problem is that you can't do it on somebody else's network, like the Internet, unless you trust everybody.
I don't see an equipment list anywhere. I would imagine that you'd be pretty limited in a small lab. I'm not sure what kinds of chemicals they plan to have access to as well (I saw what looked like a vertical gel box in the video but could not listen to audio where I was at, so presumably they'll need at least salts and acids/bases for making buffers).
Then again, I'm a biochemist, not a biologist, so maybe there is a fair bit of stuff you can do in a "biology" lab. However, the last time I was in a modern university lab that was focused on what I'd consider biology they were doing a fair amount of molecular biology, working with animals and cell lines, etc. That requires quite a bit of expensive equipment, and ongoing care/expense (freezers, even LN2 freezers, cages full of mice, etc).
I couldn't much on their website - it seems like all the content is in the video which I can't listen to at the moment.
Agree on your point, but I think making Office work on any tablet is a much bigger challenge than most appreciate. The UI will be the biggest problem.
A SIMPLIFIED office suite would be quite doable, as already demonstrated by Google Docs. However, compare the menu options available in Google Docs vs MS Office sometime. Oh, and don't forget to dive into VBA and look at all the stuff there as well. Making all of that stuff work with a Tablet UI is going to be a real challenge.
By all means argue that typical users don't need all of that stuff, but that's just arguing that they don't need Office in the first place. I'd agree for casual consumers, but in a business setting a LOT of people use those features. Granted, even of Office some of the fancier features can be quite difficult to work with (just try using outline numbering in a document that multiple people have edited over time - Office really needs a "Reveal Codes" option like WordPerfect had).
Not sure about that. I spend about 8 hours a day producing content at work, and fewer than 8 hours a day consuming content in my free time.
I have to agree. Granted, much of that workplace "content" isn't always created using PCs. How many people do their work using cash registers? Could a tablet replace a cash register and omni-directional scanner? Absolutely - you could write a "Walmart Register" app for Android and it could do anything a Walmart cash register could do, and be portable as well. However, back in high school I worked retail and I could probably ring up 40 items in a minute with the scanner, or if I had to hand-type prices I could probably ring up maybe 10 per minute (including fumbling around looking for price tags). Good luck doing that with a tablet. A place like Walmart completely optimizes the entire design of their checkout station and buys expensive equipment specialized for the task that is being done at VERY large scales.
Even somebody like a receptionist is often using fairly specialized software, printers, document scanners, and so on. They likely couldn't be as effective using a tablet and a bluetooth keyboard.
So your argument is that a tablet with mouse and keyboard is not a tablet? How is a tablet with a keyboard, mouse, and external monitor different from a PC with the same?
For starters you're using a mouse and keyboard with a UI designed for a touchscreen. That means that you're moving the mouse a lot more - a touchscreen UI will have big buttons spread out so that they're easy to hit with a finger. Your mouse can hit a target only a few pixels wide, so you're wasting real-estate. Web browsers have been steadily losing the toolbar over the last few years because most don't need it. Now imagine the toolbar is back and it takes up half your screen. Or you have a menu button, which pops up a big scrolling menu - who loves scrolling menus with a mouse, especially when only 6 menu items fit on a screen and they literally obscure the entire screen while they're at it?
Of course, MS doesn't get it either - they're moving to exactly this model on their desktop version of win8. I've got nothing against tablet OSes. I've used WinXP on pen tablets and it is a lot less convenient than a touchscreen with something like Android or iOS unless you're sitting down leaning over it.
Also, consider feature-completeness. Look at how many options your typical Android/iOS photo editor has, and the feature list for Photoshop. Could you imagine a tablet OS app with all the tools/menu-options in Photoshop? You'd have to scroll through 14 layers of screens to find anything. A windows/OSX application with 100 menu entries and a toolbar with 50 10x10 pixel toolbar icons isn't a big deal - imagine that on a tablet. Part of why the tablet UI works is because it tends to be used with minimal apps. The minimal apps work because 70% of the time that's all you need, and when you need more you just don't use the tablet. When you want to use that tablet UI for everything, it breaks down.
Clearly whoever has authorized the purchases of these devices has had a business case made.
Uh, sure. The business case is that they have a $50M annual budget, and an iPad costs $600, so I'll go ahead and buy one. At my workplace at least they've tended to proliferate first at the senior levels of management, and I doubt that senior executives spend time typing up business cases before they go spend $1000 on something. Business cases are things that people making $75k/yr need in order to buy some tool completely essential for their work, not for executives whose job it is to read business cases and decide if they should make the person writing it jump through more hoops.
But, I'll tend to agree that a tablet makes more sense for the people who tend to go to conferences. They tend to be managers, and that means that for the most part they are data consumers, not data producers. At my work the typical manager reads 300 word emails and replies with 10 word emails, they read 14-page slide decks and reply with one sentence comments, they read 14-page business cases and reply with go ahead, or more often just don't reply. They're given 75-page documents to review, and then they hit the approve button. The type of work they do lends itself to tablets fairly well.
On the other hand, the people who create all that stuff that the managers read are almost certainly doing that work on typical PCs.
I think the issue is that managers are decision-makers and they assume that because a tablet makes sense for them that it will make sense for everybody. That isn't necessarily true.
Disagree. No matter what language you pick to do your dirty work, you're still having a certain amount of lock-in.
Yeah, but do you want your database server hosting databases for 2000 applications to be held back on an important upgrade because one of those applications uses a stored procedure that isn't ready for the next version? Virtualizing databases is usually a lot harder than virtualizing applications (well, if you want decent performance per dollar/etc). A build system that relies on GCC 3.0 is much less of a liability than an application that only runs on Oracle 8i.
Most people are NOT on the pump though - they are still using multiple daily injections of long acting and short acting insulin.
I don't get that. A pump is a motor attached to a syringe of sorts, some tubing, and an IV-like device that adheres to the skin, a few buttons, an LCD display, a battery compartment, and a 75-cent microcontroller. It might cost a bit more than a cheap watch to manufacture, but not all that much more. Sure, there is a bunch of cost in the engineering, and that is critical due to its intended use. However, there are a LOT of type-1's (and insulin-dependent type-2's) out there. You'd think the first world nations of the world could get together and place an order for a pump with a given set of requirements and get them for $100 each and just hand them out for free to anybody who uses insulin. By all means allow private companies to still innovate and make new ones and offer them for sale, but buying them would be on the patient unless they can demonstrate a medical need for more than the basic pump.
Of course, what would really happen would be that the government-supplied pump would be made artificially limited to maintain a market for private pumps and we would get little of the benefit. It just drives me nuts to hear that most type 1's are still using multiple injections which are less convenient, provide less sugar control, and likely worse health outcomes that all of us have to pay for in the end. But, we can't even get the IRS to send out pre-completed tax forms (just check, sign, and return) when this would be inexpensive to do because it would bankrupt the tax preparation industry aside from CPAs and such doing business returns.
You're paying for Google and Google Docs via ads. I really don't want ads in my Photoshop.
You'll pay for Photoshop with cash - I doubt they'll stick ads in it. You can get Google Apps and not have any ads at all. I doubt Adobe would get what they wanted from ads anyway if they're charging $20-50/mo for a subscription.
An online application doesn't HAVE to contain ads.
Because at least some of the people who use photoshop like to take photos in remote locations of mountains, animals and so on. Those sorts of places tend not to have internet connections available.
I didn't say that it would make the software more usable - only that it would make it very difficult to pirate. You don't see people editing Google Docs on a plane either.
Also, it isn't like you need to use Photoshop to take pictures in the wilderness. All you need is a camera and SD card, and if you're going into the wilderness it is probably easier to haul a few spare batteries and SD cards than a laptop and a week's worth of batteries for it or a generator and 50 gallons of fuel. You get a LOT more mileage out of a camera battery than a laptop battery.
if your front end changes or you have multiple interfaces that hit the same database then why write (and maintain) that functionality in separate areas when the single stored procedure will do it?
Simple - you do that on the server, not on the database. If you have 14 front-ends, they all talk to a single (perhaps scaled in parallel) back-end which implements all application logic, and that talks to the database. The back-end also enforces data integrity (beyond FKs). I'd be interested in an example of what you consider "data integrity" other than a foreign key or unique/non-null constraint.
The front-end should never have access to the database anyway. Sure, give it some ability to do simple input validation to improve responsiveness, but that validation should be repeated on the back side (ideally you use a framework where the back-side just passes the validation rules to the front-side so you aren't coding them twice - I'm talking simple stuff like field lengths, field types, etc).
Business rules should be implemented on the back end as well - once per rule, not once per UI. If there are 14 ways to change the salary field, then there is only one validation rule that ensures the change was approved before being made effective, and so on.
I'm not entirely opposed to the concept of data integrity enforced by the DB, but I'm not quite sure how you're using this term. Every stored procedure that you write is going to make it harder to change database implementations in the future, and it will also make your DB that much harder to upgrade if your vendor changes something. I will say that applications should generally have a layer in-between the presentation layer and the database.
If I can do all this, why would I want to remain a tester? Why wouldn't I get into development?
Believe it or not, some people actually like testing. I don't understand these people, but it takes all types.
Agreed. I've resisted the pressure at work to move into a project/finance-management role in order to get promoted, and I'll tell you that you run right up against a lot of mindsets that value one role above another. I have worked with some fairly skilled people in almost every role in the software development process and I can vouch that there is plenty of room for growth and benefits to the organization from people who have experienced the growth.
Organizations that link roles to salary/experience levels are short-changing themselves. The test or support team does not need to be composed of all the people who couldn't get a promotion out of that team. If a job is worth doing, it is usually worth doing well. By all means control your investments in areas that don't add as much to the top-line, but you don't have to do that by hiring the least qualified people you can find.
Of course it will be pirated. Was this ever in dispute? How would you make software that CAN'T be pirated?
Try to pirate Google, or Google Docs.
You make software that can't be pirated by not actually distributing the software. I'm not sure how well that would fly for Photoshop though - their software is both RAM and CPU intensive, which would make the servers expensive. Then again, they're offering this service for video now, so why not photos?
The check happens monthly, and IIRC has a grace period of a few days before it locks things up. So you're only stuck if the internet goes down RIGHT WHEN the license check happens to come around. Otherwise, you can use it offline just as with all previous versions.
If it is capable of running offline, then it WILL be pirated. Those key checks can be removed.
The only way to make pirating hard is to put some of the functionality on a cloud server. Sure, stick the most CPU-intensive stuff on the workstation, but make a few critical functions send their data to the cloud and back. Then to pirate it you actually have to re-implement that functionality against a decompiled product (not fun).
Many of the issues with sugar management are somewhat-alleviated by a pump, which I imagine most Type 1's use these days. Continuous glucose monitors also help out. If you plan for exercise and then skip it, you just reset your basal rate to normal (instead of dropping it), or whatever (I'm not actually a diabetic - I'm sure anyone who is could tell you exactly how they handle it).
However, I'll certainly agree that this shot sounds a heck of a lot better than a pump. I wonder if it would work for insulin-dependent Type-2's? They'd probably consume quite a bit more of it.
Are there many high carbohydrate (especially high starch) foods which are not the product of agriculture?
Well, fruit probably qualifies, though obviously an orange isn't as carb-rich as a potato. Potatoes might also be eaten by hunter-gatherers, but I'm not sure how often that happened. I'm not sure if there was much rice-consumption in pre-agriculture Asia.
But yes, in general an evolutionary diet is likely fairly low in carbohydrate content compared to a modern diet.
I'm using "agriculture" above in the sense of farming - planting lots of something and then digging it up. If you define "agriculture" as anything that comes out of the dirt then half the animals on the planet consume agricultural products. So, a caveman grabbing a pear off of a tree is hunter-gathering unless he planted the tree with the intent to have pears.
I love the bit in the Fox News article about needing to renew the undetectable firearms act so that people won't bring plastic guns on planes.
Would-be hijacker: "Here it is - a plastic gun that will enable us to take over a plane and crash it into a building." Partner: "Whoa, buddy! I'm fine with burning myself up in an enormous explosion, but that gun could get me 5 years in prison for carrying an undetectable firearm. We should use real guns instead so that we get caught at the security checkpoint."
I think most consumers are sheep - they rarely investigate their options thoroughly before making a buying decision.
Now, B2B sales are an entirely different matter. I'm sure some small business owners make foolish choices, but when you deal with larger companies then chances are there is going to be a lot of due diligence at work, and marketing is necessary to jump through the various hoops. Marketing also helps direct money into the features that sophisticated buyers need.
Having been involved in multi-million-dollar RFP/RFQs I can assure you that there is PLENTY of marketing involved.
Just responding to an RFP takes many man hours - if you want somebody to actually take you seriously. I've read RFP responses that just had the word "Yes" copy/pasted 100x, and they aren't taken nearly as seriously as responses that actually suggest that the vendor gave them some thought.
When selling expensive products, even technical ones, there is usually sales support involved. Sure, the purchaser might be an engineer, but that doesn't mean that they truly know everything there is to know about pumps. Sure, they're going to be more educated than a typical consumer, but if you want to sell a higher-end product you need to help them to understand when it is appropriate to use. A manufacturer typically understands their products better than the purchasers do.
If it is every used in a trial, chain of custody and 4th amendment issues like the exclusionary rule will suppress the evidence since it was obtained without a warrant. The only thing that stands in the way of the NSA and fully implementing 1984 is the 4th amendment.
Two issues with that:
1. Most of the people this stuff is used against won't ever get trials. 2. The government can still use this against people who get trials without disclosing that it was used.
How does #2 work? Suppose I am monitoring all the communications in the world without a warrant. Suppose my computers find out that you're running a drug lab in your basement. That evidence could never be used against you, per se. However, suppose a police officer happens to walk past your house and notice that you have a Dandelion protruding more than 6" above the ground, which is in violation of a local lawn maintenance ordinance (I kid you not - you'd be amazed at what is on your local law books but not enforced). They knock on your door to point it out to you so that you don't get fined, and when you open the door they smell chemicals and "happen to see" a wad of cash on your table. They come back that night with a warrant and a SWAT team and tear your house apart and send you to prison. At trial the only evidence offered is that which was legal to obtain, and it is sufficient to convict you.
If you know how the guilty party is, coming up with enough evidence to sustain an arrest isn't that hard, especially when national security is at stake. When they don't bother it is because they plan to just use process #1.
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Having dealt with having to provide estimates on service restoration at work, my experience is that by the time you can figure out what it would take to restore service, it won't be long before service is actually restored.
I'm not saying that providing status updates isn't good practice. However, it is usually rare that you'll get an ETA on something being fixed. Maybe if they discover it is a broken line and they actually have to dig it up and fix it and that will take hours you might get an ETA. Usually root cause analysis is 95% of the work in problem solving.
Reminds me of a story at work when some developers decided to actually try to embrace the outsourcing model that was being pushed by management. They sent a list of bugs to the outsourced development team and asked for estimates to fix them. They replied, "no problem, just tell us which lines of code to modify and how and we'll take care of it." Now, THAT is a value-add!
Having lived with a type-2, I'd never tell you to eat less. It is a LOT harder than people make it out to be. She could probably eat two apples a day and end up with an A1C of 8 on 60 units of Lantus a day.
It seems like there should be some way to change the reservoir without changing the injection set. I'm sure it would involve some care (locks, wiping with alcohol, etc), but if you can plug in an IV line in a hospital without giving somebody sepsis you should be able to change a pump reservoir without having to redo the whole thing.
I think this points to there needing to be a LOT more money spent on the courts.
Courts should have the time/money to give real attention to each case, and lawyers should almost be unnecessary. If your lawyer doesn't bring up a defense it should be the duty of the court to do so for you, and so on. Courts should also have a duty to obtain all the evidence they can, even if not brought forward by either party. By all means dump those costs on the loser in the end. Trails should be about finding the truth and dispensing justice and equity. They should not be a debate club where you reward the person with the best argument and data presentation.
Sure, it would cost more money to run the courts, but it can't be more expensive than bombers. And every trial would get down to root cause. If the root cause is that some sociopath has a job in some industry then the solution is to bar them from working in that industry, or putting them in jail, even if the only matter brought to the court was a lawsuit over some file sharing or whatever. When you go to the court, you'll get justice, and not necessarily the justice you're looking for. That will make people think twice about wasting the court's time.
Is schizophrenia mediated by glutamate or dopamine? We know dopamine antagonists help some people but not too much more.
I think the whole idea is that in the future you won't be diagnosed with schizophrenia. Instead you'll be diagnosed with having too much/little dopamine production, causing symptoms of schizophrenia. The treatment for too much/little dopamine will unsurprisingly be a drug that affects dopamine production.
Coming up with a treatment for schizophrenia is like coming up with a treatment for nausea. Some people with nausea respond really well to coronary stents, and others don't respond at all to this with a few even having alarming side-effects like death. The reason is that you'd have to be an idiot to prescribe heart surgery simply because somebody had nausea, but you wouldn't be an idiot to check their blood oxygenation or check for cardiac enzymes, and if those tests don't turn out well then looking more closely at the heart makes a lot of sense.
Behavioral problems aren't actually the problem - they're just how problems in the brain manifest themselves, just as chest pain or nausea or shortness of breath are how heart problems often manifest themselves.
That said, it will be a while before we the new approach is better than the old. However, it does make a lot of sense to move in this direction with research, in the hopes of coming up with game-changing treatments.
Well, I see two potential problems with transmitting quantum crypto through hubs without trusting them:
1. The signal loss problem. The longer the continuous link without retransmission, the more data loss and the lower effective transmission rate. What you refer to might help with that if it allows signals to be boosted without destroying/recreating the photons.
2. The routing problem. Each packet has to get to the right destination, but if every photon on the line is a quantum encryption bit then you can't read them to determine their destination without disrupting the link. I see two potential solutions here:
2.1. One is to use channels (like the old POTS approach) - you have 10 data lines and a control line to the hub, and you ring up the hub and ask for one of them to be connected to some remote destination. Then the entire network creates a single dedicated channel where photons can traverse untouched.
2.2. The more optimal approach would be packet switching, but you'd need to have packets that include both unencrypted headers (at least a destination field) and encrypted payload, and the timing/etc would have to be such that the switch can pick out only the photons it should intercept and let the rest pass through. For that matter it would require some kind of tap that lets selected photons pass through completely untouched and perfectly captures others, and that this could be switched between both modes VERY quickly.
If you can trust the hubs then you only have point-to-point links and you don't have to mess with any of this stuff. This does rely on owning all the hubs and securing them. For a big company that isn't a problem, but for a consumer you're not going to be able to own all the hubs between yourself and your bank.
This destroys the protection from wiretapping that quantum crypto promised.
Quantum crypto always has had this limitation - it is a point-to-point system only. If you want multiple endpoints then you either need the 2^n connection growth or you need hubs that are trusted.
However, securing the hubs ON YOUR OWN NETWORK isn't that hard if you really care to do it. The problem is that you can't do it on somebody else's network, like the Internet, unless you trust everybody.
I don't see an equipment list anywhere. I would imagine that you'd be pretty limited in a small lab. I'm not sure what kinds of chemicals they plan to have access to as well (I saw what looked like a vertical gel box in the video but could not listen to audio where I was at, so presumably they'll need at least salts and acids/bases for making buffers).
Then again, I'm a biochemist, not a biologist, so maybe there is a fair bit of stuff you can do in a "biology" lab. However, the last time I was in a modern university lab that was focused on what I'd consider biology they were doing a fair amount of molecular biology, working with animals and cell lines, etc. That requires quite a bit of expensive equipment, and ongoing care/expense (freezers, even LN2 freezers, cages full of mice, etc).
I couldn't much on their website - it seems like all the content is in the video which I can't listen to at the moment.
Microsoft is a software company, right?
Agree on your point, but I think making Office work on any tablet is a much bigger challenge than most appreciate. The UI will be the biggest problem.
A SIMPLIFIED office suite would be quite doable, as already demonstrated by Google Docs. However, compare the menu options available in Google Docs vs MS Office sometime. Oh, and don't forget to dive into VBA and look at all the stuff there as well. Making all of that stuff work with a Tablet UI is going to be a real challenge.
By all means argue that typical users don't need all of that stuff, but that's just arguing that they don't need Office in the first place. I'd agree for casual consumers, but in a business setting a LOT of people use those features. Granted, even of Office some of the fancier features can be quite difficult to work with (just try using outline numbering in a document that multiple people have edited over time - Office really needs a "Reveal Codes" option like WordPerfect had).
Not sure about that. I spend about 8 hours a day producing content at work, and fewer than 8 hours a day consuming content in my free time.
I have to agree. Granted, much of that workplace "content" isn't always created using PCs. How many people do their work using cash registers? Could a tablet replace a cash register and omni-directional scanner? Absolutely - you could write a "Walmart Register" app for Android and it could do anything a Walmart cash register could do, and be portable as well. However, back in high school I worked retail and I could probably ring up 40 items in a minute with the scanner, or if I had to hand-type prices I could probably ring up maybe 10 per minute (including fumbling around looking for price tags). Good luck doing that with a tablet. A place like Walmart completely optimizes the entire design of their checkout station and buys expensive equipment specialized for the task that is being done at VERY large scales.
Even somebody like a receptionist is often using fairly specialized software, printers, document scanners, and so on. They likely couldn't be as effective using a tablet and a bluetooth keyboard.
So your argument is that a tablet with mouse and keyboard is not a tablet? How is a tablet with a keyboard, mouse, and external monitor different from a PC with the same?
For starters you're using a mouse and keyboard with a UI designed for a touchscreen. That means that you're moving the mouse a lot more - a touchscreen UI will have big buttons spread out so that they're easy to hit with a finger. Your mouse can hit a target only a few pixels wide, so you're wasting real-estate. Web browsers have been steadily losing the toolbar over the last few years because most don't need it. Now imagine the toolbar is back and it takes up half your screen. Or you have a menu button, which pops up a big scrolling menu - who loves scrolling menus with a mouse, especially when only 6 menu items fit on a screen and they literally obscure the entire screen while they're at it?
Of course, MS doesn't get it either - they're moving to exactly this model on their desktop version of win8. I've got nothing against tablet OSes. I've used WinXP on pen tablets and it is a lot less convenient than a touchscreen with something like Android or iOS unless you're sitting down leaning over it.
Also, consider feature-completeness. Look at how many options your typical Android/iOS photo editor has, and the feature list for Photoshop. Could you imagine a tablet OS app with all the tools/menu-options in Photoshop? You'd have to scroll through 14 layers of screens to find anything. A windows/OSX application with 100 menu entries and a toolbar with 50 10x10 pixel toolbar icons isn't a big deal - imagine that on a tablet. Part of why the tablet UI works is because it tends to be used with minimal apps. The minimal apps work because 70% of the time that's all you need, and when you need more you just don't use the tablet. When you want to use that tablet UI for everything, it breaks down.
Clearly whoever has authorized the purchases of these devices has had a business case made.
Uh, sure. The business case is that they have a $50M annual budget, and an iPad costs $600, so I'll go ahead and buy one. At my workplace at least they've tended to proliferate first at the senior levels of management, and I doubt that senior executives spend time typing up business cases before they go spend $1000 on something. Business cases are things that people making $75k/yr need in order to buy some tool completely essential for their work, not for executives whose job it is to read business cases and decide if they should make the person writing it jump through more hoops.
But, I'll tend to agree that a tablet makes more sense for the people who tend to go to conferences. They tend to be managers, and that means that for the most part they are data consumers, not data producers. At my work the typical manager reads 300 word emails and replies with 10 word emails, they read 14-page slide decks and reply with one sentence comments, they read 14-page business cases and reply with go ahead, or more often just don't reply. They're given 75-page documents to review, and then they hit the approve button. The type of work they do lends itself to tablets fairly well.
On the other hand, the people who create all that stuff that the managers read are almost certainly doing that work on typical PCs.
I think the issue is that managers are decision-makers and they assume that because a tablet makes sense for them that it will make sense for everybody. That isn't necessarily true.
Disagree. No matter what language you pick to do your dirty work, you're still having a certain amount of lock-in.
Yeah, but do you want your database server hosting databases for 2000 applications to be held back on an important upgrade because one of those applications uses a stored procedure that isn't ready for the next version? Virtualizing databases is usually a lot harder than virtualizing applications (well, if you want decent performance per dollar/etc). A build system that relies on GCC 3.0 is much less of a liability than an application that only runs on Oracle 8i.
Most people are NOT on the pump though - they are still using multiple daily injections of long acting and short acting insulin.
I don't get that. A pump is a motor attached to a syringe of sorts, some tubing, and an IV-like device that adheres to the skin, a few buttons, an LCD display, a battery compartment, and a 75-cent microcontroller. It might cost a bit more than a cheap watch to manufacture, but not all that much more. Sure, there is a bunch of cost in the engineering, and that is critical due to its intended use. However, there are a LOT of type-1's (and insulin-dependent type-2's) out there. You'd think the first world nations of the world could get together and place an order for a pump with a given set of requirements and get them for $100 each and just hand them out for free to anybody who uses insulin. By all means allow private companies to still innovate and make new ones and offer them for sale, but buying them would be on the patient unless they can demonstrate a medical need for more than the basic pump.
Of course, what would really happen would be that the government-supplied pump would be made artificially limited to maintain a market for private pumps and we would get little of the benefit. It just drives me nuts to hear that most type 1's are still using multiple injections which are less convenient, provide less sugar control, and likely worse health outcomes that all of us have to pay for in the end. But, we can't even get the IRS to send out pre-completed tax forms (just check, sign, and return) when this would be inexpensive to do because it would bankrupt the tax preparation industry aside from CPAs and such doing business returns.
You're paying for Google and Google Docs via ads. I really don't want ads in my Photoshop.
You'll pay for Photoshop with cash - I doubt they'll stick ads in it. You can get Google Apps and not have any ads at all. I doubt Adobe would get what they wanted from ads anyway if they're charging $20-50/mo for a subscription.
An online application doesn't HAVE to contain ads.
Because at least some of the people who use photoshop like to take photos in remote locations of mountains, animals and so on. Those sorts of places tend not to have internet connections available.
I didn't say that it would make the software more usable - only that it would make it very difficult to pirate. You don't see people editing Google Docs on a plane either.
Also, it isn't like you need to use Photoshop to take pictures in the wilderness. All you need is a camera and SD card, and if you're going into the wilderness it is probably easier to haul a few spare batteries and SD cards than a laptop and a week's worth of batteries for it or a generator and 50 gallons of fuel. You get a LOT more mileage out of a camera battery than a laptop battery.
if your front end changes or you have multiple interfaces that hit the same database then why write (and maintain) that functionality in separate areas when the single stored procedure will do it?
Simple - you do that on the server, not on the database. If you have 14 front-ends, they all talk to a single (perhaps scaled in parallel) back-end which implements all application logic, and that talks to the database. The back-end also enforces data integrity (beyond FKs). I'd be interested in an example of what you consider "data integrity" other than a foreign key or unique/non-null constraint.
The front-end should never have access to the database anyway. Sure, give it some ability to do simple input validation to improve responsiveness, but that validation should be repeated on the back side (ideally you use a framework where the back-side just passes the validation rules to the front-side so you aren't coding them twice - I'm talking simple stuff like field lengths, field types, etc).
Business rules should be implemented on the back end as well - once per rule, not once per UI. If there are 14 ways to change the salary field, then there is only one validation rule that ensures the change was approved before being made effective, and so on.
I'm not entirely opposed to the concept of data integrity enforced by the DB, but I'm not quite sure how you're using this term. Every stored procedure that you write is going to make it harder to change database implementations in the future, and it will also make your DB that much harder to upgrade if your vendor changes something. I will say that applications should generally have a layer in-between the presentation layer and the database.
If I can do all this, why would I want to remain a tester? Why wouldn't I get into development?
Believe it or not, some people actually like testing. I don't understand these people, but it takes all types.
Agreed. I've resisted the pressure at work to move into a project/finance-management role in order to get promoted, and I'll tell you that you run right up against a lot of mindsets that value one role above another. I have worked with some fairly skilled people in almost every role in the software development process and I can vouch that there is plenty of room for growth and benefits to the organization from people who have experienced the growth.
Organizations that link roles to salary/experience levels are short-changing themselves. The test or support team does not need to be composed of all the people who couldn't get a promotion out of that team. If a job is worth doing, it is usually worth doing well. By all means control your investments in areas that don't add as much to the top-line, but you don't have to do that by hiring the least qualified people you can find.
Of course it will be pirated. Was this ever in dispute? How would you make software that CAN'T be pirated?
Try to pirate Google, or Google Docs.
You make software that can't be pirated by not actually distributing the software. I'm not sure how well that would fly for Photoshop though - their software is both RAM and CPU intensive, which would make the servers expensive. Then again, they're offering this service for video now, so why not photos?
The check happens monthly, and IIRC has a grace period of a few days before it locks things up. So you're only stuck if the internet goes down RIGHT WHEN the license check happens to come around. Otherwise, you can use it offline just as with all previous versions.
If it is capable of running offline, then it WILL be pirated. Those key checks can be removed.
The only way to make pirating hard is to put some of the functionality on a cloud server. Sure, stick the most CPU-intensive stuff on the workstation, but make a few critical functions send their data to the cloud and back. Then to pirate it you actually have to re-implement that functionality against a decompiled product (not fun).
Many of the issues with sugar management are somewhat-alleviated by a pump, which I imagine most Type 1's use these days. Continuous glucose monitors also help out. If you plan for exercise and then skip it, you just reset your basal rate to normal (instead of dropping it), or whatever (I'm not actually a diabetic - I'm sure anyone who is could tell you exactly how they handle it).
However, I'll certainly agree that this shot sounds a heck of a lot better than a pump. I wonder if it would work for insulin-dependent Type-2's? They'd probably consume quite a bit more of it.
Are there many high carbohydrate (especially high starch) foods which are not the product of agriculture?
Well, fruit probably qualifies, though obviously an orange isn't as carb-rich as a potato. Potatoes might also be eaten by hunter-gatherers, but I'm not sure how often that happened. I'm not sure if there was much rice-consumption in pre-agriculture Asia.
But yes, in general an evolutionary diet is likely fairly low in carbohydrate content compared to a modern diet.
I'm using "agriculture" above in the sense of farming - planting lots of something and then digging it up. If you define "agriculture" as anything that comes out of the dirt then half the animals on the planet consume agricultural products. So, a caveman grabbing a pear off of a tree is hunter-gathering unless he planted the tree with the intent to have pears.
I love the bit in the Fox News article about needing to renew the undetectable firearms act so that people won't bring plastic guns on planes.
Would-be hijacker: "Here it is - a plastic gun that will enable us to take over a plane and crash it into a building."
Partner: "Whoa, buddy! I'm fine with burning myself up in an enormous explosion, but that gun could get me 5 years in prison for carrying an undetectable firearm. We should use real guns instead so that we get caught at the security checkpoint."
I think most consumers are sheep - they rarely investigate their options thoroughly before making a buying decision.
Now, B2B sales are an entirely different matter. I'm sure some small business owners make foolish choices, but when you deal with larger companies then chances are there is going to be a lot of due diligence at work, and marketing is necessary to jump through the various hoops. Marketing also helps direct money into the features that sophisticated buyers need.
Having been involved in multi-million-dollar RFP/RFQs I can assure you that there is PLENTY of marketing involved.
Just responding to an RFP takes many man hours - if you want somebody to actually take you seriously. I've read RFP responses that just had the word "Yes" copy/pasted 100x, and they aren't taken nearly as seriously as responses that actually suggest that the vendor gave them some thought.
When selling expensive products, even technical ones, there is usually sales support involved. Sure, the purchaser might be an engineer, but that doesn't mean that they truly know everything there is to know about pumps. Sure, they're going to be more educated than a typical consumer, but if you want to sell a higher-end product you need to help them to understand when it is appropriate to use. A manufacturer typically understands their products better than the purchasers do.
If it is every used in a trial, chain of custody and 4th amendment issues like the exclusionary rule will suppress the evidence since it was obtained without a warrant. The only thing that stands in the way of the NSA and fully implementing 1984 is the 4th amendment.
Two issues with that:
1. Most of the people this stuff is used against won't ever get trials.
2. The government can still use this against people who get trials without disclosing that it was used.
How does #2 work? Suppose I am monitoring all the communications in the world without a warrant. Suppose my computers find out that you're running a drug lab in your basement. That evidence could never be used against you, per se. However, suppose a police officer happens to walk past your house and notice that you have a Dandelion protruding more than 6" above the ground, which is in violation of a local lawn maintenance ordinance (I kid you not - you'd be amazed at what is on your local law books but not enforced). They knock on your door to point it out to you so that you don't get fined, and when you open the door they smell chemicals and "happen to see" a wad of cash on your table. They come back that night with a warrant and a SWAT team and tear your house apart and send you to prison. At trial the only evidence offered is that which was legal to obtain, and it is sufficient to convict you.
If you know how the guilty party is, coming up with enough evidence to sustain an arrest isn't that hard, especially when national security is at stake. When they don't bother it is because they plan to just use process #1.