I've read many Nexus One reviews, and while it's clearly good competition for the iPhone, saying that it's objectively better is just plain silly. There are still many areas where it's lacking.
To clarify, by "the device" I was referring to the hardware. I would stand by my assertion that the N1 is better hardware than the iPhone, by just about any objective measure. Where the iPhone really shines is the OS; it's a little more polished than Android -- and for some people this may trump the hardware and carrier disadvantages -- although IMHO Android is catching up fast (and I could point to a few areas where Android is better).
The N1 has clearly touched a nerve at Apple. And for good reason: Objectively it's just a better device: Thinner, much better display, much faster, better camera, gps navigation, faster browser, not locked, not tied to AT&T's network, and so on. (Disclosure: I own both.) The Apple execs feel the threat, even though I'm sure Android isn't yet making much of a dent in their sales. It's about wanting to be perceived as the innovator. When you don't have the best product in the marketplace, you try to maintain the high ground by accusing the other guys of stealing from you.
Yawn. Haven't we all seen this before? These patent fights never work. Remember when Apple sued Microsoft over their Mac GUI patents? How did that turn out?
In principle patents offer protection and exclusivity, but in practice they do not for these large companies. The USPTO has been granting excessively broad patents for decades, the result being that every major company with a portfolio of (excessively broad) patents can legitimately sue any other for patent infringement. So all of the big companies decide to in effect declare a truce, and cross-license their patent portfolios so that someone can actually release a product. The real loser is the innovative small company, which can't foot the $xxM legal cost of counter-suing, etc. when a big company decides to go after them, or hasn't yet accumulated a portfolio of (excessively broad) patents with which to credibly counter-sue. I don't believe this is the outcome the authors of the Constitution had in mind for the US patent system.
Apple of course understands this reality. This is just marketing and PR.
Tivo has good technology, but got marginalized because they didn't integrate with the wide variety of tuners out there. They needed to somehow negotiate their way onto every device they possibly could. Look at the Netflix streaming service today: It's on Roku boxes, many Blu-Ray players, XBox/PS3/Wii, and now built into many HDTVs. Netflix understands that their relevance is directly tied to how easy and ubiquitous they are, and like YouTube they basically give the technology to anyone who wants to integrate it. Tivo it seems took a more antagonistic approach, which resulted in the cable companies developing their own technologies.
The other thing that Tivo is doing is pricing themselves out of the market. Every other consumer device over the same period of time has fallen significantly in price (HDTVs, DVD players, Blu-Ray players, game consoles), whereas Tivo has gone the other way. The Tivo I bought in ~2001 was much cheaper than the HD Tivo today. Their technology is good, but for me not good enough to justify these prices.
In terms of root cause, it's widely known in the Valley that Tivo has a bad management team. The people I know who worked there do not say good things; basically they don't know what they're trying to do. They accidentally got some great engineers at one point long ago, and are trying to coast on that.
This is going to be the minority view here on Slashdot, but it must be said. I personally wish the marketers had much more information about me, so they wouldn't do such a bad job of targeting. Here are some examples:
Credit card applications, and junk mail in general. I have never once in my life responded to an unsolicited credit card application in the mail, and I never will. If a marketer could figure this out about me, it would save time, money, energy, and trees for everyone.
I never buy Budweiser, or Bud Light. Stop showing me all those TV ads.
When I call the support number for a technical product, in almost every case I should skip level 1 support. Yes, the DSL modem is plugged in. Yes, my computer is on. I know it's an issue with DNS settings, so please forward me to someone with whom I can have a productive conversation. As it is I spend 10-15 minutes patiently answering the easy questions until the level 1 support rep figures out they can't help me.
Upselling at the bank. I keep a lot of cash in my checking account, and every time I talk to a bank teller, etc. for any reason at all, they try to upsell me into a different sort of account. Yes I've looked at them, no I don't want them, please stop pestering me about this at every conceivable opportunity.
My ideal situation would be a public persona that is highly detailed and non-private, plus an ability to step into anonymity if I wanted to. I.e., I'm happy with the grocery store knowing everything about my purchasing behavior because of their loyalty card -- and selling/giving that information to anyone else that could use it to more accurately target me -- but I also like to have the option of purchasing with cash if I choose to.
The overwhelming majority of Americans are employed by small businesses. And what is the enemy of small business? Taxes.
I have a small manufacturing business now, and for me (and everyone else in my industry), the annual cost of liability insurance is 10x the cost of taxes. The bigger retailers like Amazon require several million dollars of liability insurance for each consumer product they sell in our category, the premiums on which are a tremendous drain. I'm not one to say hang the lawyers -- they serve an important role in curbing true negligence on the part of companies. But from where I'm sitting, some type of sensible tort reform would help a lot. A consumer advocate like Ralph Nader could learn a lot running a smaller manufacturing business. (Note if I were running a services business, insurance would be much less expensive. This is one of the ways we discourage manufacturing in the USA.)
Taxes are less of a financial drain, just somewhat irrational. In California it costs $800 annually to register an LLC, regardless of size, profit, or industry. This doesn't seem to be tied to any cost or service the state provides, they just charge it because they can.
And the biggest reason of all to never use Apple equipment in a company:
0) Vendor lock-in.
No CIO in their right mind would sign up for a platform with only one hardware vendor, when a multi-vendor option exists. You can't competitively bid, you have fewer options on what to buy, and your risk is higher all-around. Apple's clone plan in the 90s was intended to appeal to business, but by then the die was cast (your reason #2).
My analogy is to the car market. There are two kinds of people: Those who love cars, and those who think of cars as a way to get from A to B. The former buy BMW, Mercedes, Tesla, Corvette, etc., and the latter buy Toyota. There is no right answer, just a consumer difference. Apple is the Mercedes-Benz of computing, the only large premium brand left (excepting smaller niche vendors like Alienware). It will never appeal to rational decision-makers who run businesses, for the same reason your company won't let you rent a Corvette when you go on a business trip.
The question is what pointless goal will an AI want and how will it go about achieving it rather than if it will have such a goal.
Yes. The same flaw exists in the concept of Vulcans, devoid of emotion. The problem is, almost every decision in life is underdetermined, without enough hard data to make a logical decision. A lion is threatening the village -- quick, should I (a) fight the lion and potentially win the affections of a cute girl?, or (b) run away and live another day? You can't rationally answer this in real time; you need emotions to give you an ok default response when logical reasoning is too slow or too brittle. Something like a Vulcan could never exist.
With tech companies in particular, the leadership is crucial. The people at the top need to have a love of the product, a point of view, and a passion to change the world. Look at the influence Jobs had after returning to Apple: He shut down the 80% of projects that weren't going anywhere, and instilled some vision and focus into the efforts of his company. A leader can only do this if they have a personal love of technology. It doesn't come from a business school textbook, it's got to be in your blood. People who want to change the world don't have time for infighting.
Balmer is an ok guy, and he's probably pretty good as CEOs go, but he's a businessman through and through, not a good CEO of a tech company. He has no idea what he's trying to do with the technology, other than make money.
It's sad really and NASA is definitely who should get more budget.
To be clear, NASA *is* getting more budget in the proposed plan. It's a matter of what the money will be spent on. This latest move is consistent with the findings of the Augustine commission last fall, which was that the program of returning to the moon had little chance of success by 2020 at current funding levels. If you accept that judgment and are actually looking for forward progress, then either you (a) increase the budget for manned spaceflight, or (b) change your goals. Political forces and the current economy make (a) impossible, so they're going with (b).
A problem with NASA's manned spaceflight program is that the footprint is spread across some very influential states (e.g., TX and FL) and companies (Boeing etc.). All of the complaining in Congress about this proposal is simply about saving jobs and govt subsidy of their local economies. Truthfully a big part of why the Shuttle is such an expensive way to get stuff into orbit is the thousands of ground support personnel needed. The Congressional representatives from these states love expensive spaceflight, and will do what they can to protect it.
If you really want billions of people to change their way of life and reduce their standard of living, you better have something other than a fat politician, flaky models, suspect data, and a piss poor attitude when people question you. You also better go waaay out of your way to answer questions, make things simple, etc, Because you are not just asking people to watch a Nova program about the Big Bang, you are asking them to hand over cold, hard cash.
I agree. In this discussion there are two things that are too often conflated:
What are the consensus findings from climate science?, and
What, if anything, should we practically do about global warming?
My point is that if you disagree with politicians' answers to the latter, the solution is to go after the politicians, not the scientists.
In an ideal world, the first set of questions would be answered in isolation from the second. We would put all of the scientists working on it in a bubble, and not subject them to the raucous public debate about cap and trade, etc. They need to be impartial, not advocates of some particular solution. If there's one thing that worries me about climate science today, it's that some of the individuals involved appear to be strong advocates for specific public actions. This is scientifically distasteful.
If anyone's asking me about global warming (and they aren't), my reading of the situation is that:
The case is pretty strong that humans are causing some impact on global climate. We know the agent (CO2), we know how CO2 is being produced and how much, we can precisely measure (in the lab) CO2's ability to trap heat, and we have good measurements of the increase in atmospheric CO2 over the last few hundred years.
What's less clear is what impact this elevated CO2 has had on the actual climate. Establishing this relationship requires building sophisticated models of the Earth's global climate, and there are many complicating factors we don't understand well. Its plausible to me that warming is occurring, but I wouldn't put much stock in precise numbers until these models have been vetted and shown to have real predictive power.
What's even less clear is what will happen in the future, if CO2 growth continues unchecked. What will happen to the permafrost? How will the biosphere change, and what back-reaction will this have on CO2? Will we cross through some nonlinear tipping point, and become the next Venus? These questions are all very speculative.
What would be the impact of these changes on people? It's easy to see the downsides of warming (disease propagation, more hurricanes, etc.). But it's also plausible there are benefits. Canada and Russia would certainly have more good farmland than today. There will probably be more rainfall, and fresh water available.
The hardest question of all: How much should we rationally spend now to limit atmospheric CO2? Really this is all guesswork. For my part, I would not advocate taking any action with macroeconomic consequences just yet. That said, the potential for a large negative outcome justifies spending millions or billions on understanding the problem and investigating technological solutions. I just don't think the case is strong enough to justify trillions of dollars on large-scale countermeasures.
I suppose my overall rambling point is that we should keep these questions distinct. I see them blurred together too much in the public debate.
Defy the hive-mind that the majority of slashdotters are part of at your own peril my friend! Other ways to get to -2 are to suggest that you believe in God or voted for a Republican at any point in time -- and God help you if they find out that you don't know how to program, don't like Linux, and don't like Firefly....those crimes are punishable by death around here!
In Soviet Russia, Slashdotters make fun of you!
Reading through the replies to your post, I see the same thing happens here as well.
The general population isn't as stupid as you think you are.
It's a matter of detailed knowledge, not stupidity. I have a PhD in physics, and I have no basis to judge the quality of work that climate scientists do. Hell, I can't even judge the quality of work in slightly different fields of physics. Ask me a simple question, like what are the likeliest sources of systematic error in Fermilab's measurement of the Top quark mass. I have no clue. And if I can't answer a simple question like that, how can I know whether the researchers have properly accounted for the potential systematic errors in their measurements? I can't. I have to rely on particle physicists -- the ones not involved in the experiment -- to understand things and try to poke holes.
I think we all, to varying degrees, suffer from the cognitive bias that we discount the difficulty of fields other than our own. Everything looks easy from the outside. Fact is, understanding the quality of a body of work takes much more than looking for typos in a report. It comes through deep understanding, which in a specialized field of science very few people have.
All of this creates a mess for climate science, because suddenly the whole world is keenly interested in arcane questions like how much CO2 is released when permafrost thaws, and the diffusion rate of CO2 into the deep ocean. Political faultlines form, Joe Sixpack weighs in, and everyone starts yelling insults. I don't envy the researchers involved.
I bet the Chinese Government are buying those shares (and the voting rights attached to them) as fast as they can.
The class B shares that L&S own, which have 10x the voting power of class A (regular) shares, convert to class A shares when they sell. Nobody else can use a sale like this to grab a disproportionate share of control over the company.
Google, on the other hand, is basically interested in scorched-earthing the margins on hardware, software, and connectivity in order to make it cheaper for consumers to look at Adwords.
No, that isn't how the Google founders think, not at all. Their primary interest is to ensure that phones are powerful enough to use Google services on, and relatively open in terms of access to apps and content. None of the above necessarily makes them a direct competitor to Apple. In fact you will note that Google has supported the iPhone at least as well as Android with their own development (although Apple has been a bit lukewarm on apps like Google Voice). Besides, if they were trying to suck the margins out of the phone market, they wouldn't be selling the Nexus One for over $500.
The cyan cartridge is filled with pigments gathered from the beak of the endangered Taiwula bird
This is only part of the story. In fact all of the colors, not just cyan, are derived from the bird, which may be more familiar in its Western name, the Himalayan Gamut. Some of the more brilliant, saturated colors are found in the rare fluids within the tear ducts and feather shafts of the bird. You will often hear photo geeks discuss how much of "the full Gamut" is contained within a given system of inks; the lower quality ink producers commonly leave out these rare portions of the bird, and as a consequence these inks cannot reproduce such vivid colors.
Because if they hadn't stumbled on AdSense, they'd probably have gone broke years ago.
No, AdSense has been relatively unimportant to their overall business model. It's only about 30% of their total revenue, and over 80% of that is paid out to publishers etc. as "Traffic Acquisition Costs". It's AdWords on google.com that is the true golden goose -- Google keeps 100% of that revenue.
You may have accidentally said "AdSense" when you meant "AdWords". If so, well Google didn't "stumble" into AdWords at all, but rather took the idea from Overture (now part of Yahoo!), which invented the pay per click advertising model in 1998, before Google was founded. Google rolled out PPC in 2002. So if they were so late, why did they succeed? I think it was simply because the search technology was better. Back to my original point, technology has always been the big differentiator for them.
In truth, Google is not a technology company. Really. HP, Sun, Oracle, Microsoft, Dell etc are technology companies: people pay them for products which are the fruits of research and development.
Semantics. It's true that Google doesn't make most of its money selling technology as a product. However it's also true that technology has been the most critical factor in their success. Why was Google search better than Altavista, or Gmail better than Hotmail, or Adwords more scalable than Overture, or Google Maps better than Mapquest? It boils down to better technology. So why not consider them a technology company?
Yet didn't Google take market share from Yahoo, etc. with its search business by simply doing it better? Same goes for Gmail (Hotmail) and Google Maps (MapQuest)...
I'm not saying that Google didn't have an effect on those competitors. I'm saying that "market share" isn't a very useful concept for describing what's going on, or defining a sound business strategy, in these areas.
Taking maps as an example, what Google has done there is so much beyond what MapQuest did, it dramatically expands the number of use cases people have for the product. For example with Google Maps one can consult a topo map to gauge the difficulty of a hike planned for this weekend, or get a street view of a restaurant to help locate it. This is definitely not a zero-sum market: Google grew the pie, if you will, by innovating. I assert that in a fluid market, figuring out how to grow the pie is a more useful way of formulating a business strategy than envisioning a fixed market and aiming to thwart your competitors.
Other examples would be what Nintendo did with the Wii, or Apple did with the iPhone. Neither took on their competitors head-on, but identified ways to expand the market and in so doing leapfrog the competition.
Any business strategy that boils down to "kill off competitor X" is fundamentally unsound in this type of open market. Michael Wolff, in his recent Vanity Fair article on Rupert Murdoch's troubles succeeding on the internet, stated the issue well:
Murdoch is not a modern marketer. He runs his business not on the basis of giving the consumer what he wants but through more old-fashioned methods of structural market domination. His world, and training ground, is the world of the newspaper war—a zero-sum game, where you wrestle market share from the other guy.
To view any of Google's markets as zero-sum is fundamentally myopic, and plays to Google's advantage. Any competitor is better served identifying something that Google doesn't do well for the customer, and focusing on that instead of taking market share away from Google. Of course, this requires real work and innovation.
In both OS X and Linux if you attempt to do something that requries elevated permissions you will be prompted with a GUI thing. Can you please explain why this is different than the patent?
You weren't asking me, but I'll take a stab at this. Patent claim #1:
1. One or more computer-readable media having computer-readable instructions therein that, when executed by a computing device, cause the computing device to present a user interface in response to a task being prohibited based on a user's current account not having a right to permit the task, the user interface comprising: information indicating the task and an entity that attempted the task; a selectable help graphic wherein responsive to receiving selection of the selectable help graphic, the computer-readable instructions further cause the computing device to present the information; identifiers, each of the identifiers identifying other accounts having a right to permit the task, wherein the identifiers presented are based on criteria comprising: frequency of use; association with the user; and indication of sufficient but not unlimited rights; one of the identifiers identifies a higher-rights account having a right to permit the task, wherein the one of the identifiers comprises: a graphic identifying the higher-rights accounts associated with the user; and a name of the higher-rights account; an authenticator region capable of receiving, from the user, an authenticator usable to authenticate the higher-rights account having the right to permit the task, wherein: the authenticator comprises a password, and the authenticator region comprises a data-entry field configured to receive the password.
I've marked in bold the components that are not present in the OS X functionality at least (I'm not as familiar with Linux behavior). Under OS X there is no "selectable help graphic", nor is there a listing of accounts that may be "of sufficient but not unlimited rights" (on the contrary, OS X only allows you to authenticate as an administrator).
This is obviously a highly-specific patent in its claims. As such it isn't very useful in practice -- it would be pretty easy to avoid infringing by building similar functionality that leaves out one small part of the above claim. This patent most certainly does not cover sudo or its variants. I'm surprised the commentator on Groklaw got confused by this, the patent is quite easy to read.
Sudo etc. do not constitute prior art that would invalidate the claim above, since the claim contains elements not possessed by these earlier inventions. That alone however does not justify a patent. One must also argue that the invention is sufficiently novel -- in other words, that it is "unobvious" to a practitioner in the art, and that the additional elements over prior art add real value. Novelty is frankly where a lot of software patents get shaky since it's a judgment call (is Amazon 1-click "obvious to a practitioner of the art"?). I never thought of this exact kind of functionality before (in particular, showing a list of user accounts, rather than just an administrator account). But then I'm not an experienced practitioner in computer security.
Overall this reads to me as not too bad of a patent, although not a very valuable one since it would be so easy to design around. Maybe they hand out bonuses at Microsoft for each patent you successfully file.
There's a good reason why C++ is still in wide and very popular use: precisely because it does have explicit memory management and pointer arithmetic. C++ is a static, explicit language. Go is not. It will not replace C++, and no language will until that is understood.
Why do you say Go is not a statically typed language? It says quite directly in the language spec that it is, and that type safety was an important design goal.
The lack of explicit memory management is clearly one of the big things here, and in the video at golang.org they explain their rationale. Part is the volume of bugs that explicit memory management creates, especially in threaded code. Another part is the belief that modern GC technology is efficient enough to not impose much of a performance penalty. Yet another part is that modern compilers are good enough at optimizing array indexing that there isn't any longer much efficiency benefit from pointer arithmetic.
The lack of pointer arithmetic seems to be a requirement in a language that supports garbage collection, if there is to be any guarantee of safety. Otherwise an object might be marked for deletion by the GC because no references to it exist, but then later you may come along and "recreate" a reference through pointer arithmetic from a reference to a nearby object. This combination would be inherently unsafe.
The other interesting feature here is the "interfaces" idea, in particular how you don't have to explicitly declare that type X implements interface Y. It does so automatically, if you have defined the methods required by Y. I think this could reduce some of the subclassing shenanigans and huge type hierarchies you can get into with C++, and do it in a type-safe way.
IMHO it's too early to form a judgment here, but I appreciate the fact that the designers have a restrained design aesthetic. C++ is frankly an ungodly mess at this point, on par with Perl. The success of Python shows that these things matter. Also the fact that Google is backing it means it could see enough development to become usable as a production language (clearly it's got some way to go).
"I was six years old when my parents told me that there was a small, dark jewel inside my skull, learning to be me.
Microscopic spiders had woven a fine gold web through my brain, so that the jewel's teacher could listen to the whisper of my thoughts. The jewel itself eavesdropped on my senses, and read the chemical messages carried in my bloodstream; it saw, heard, smelt, tasted and felt the world exactly as I did, while the teacher monitored its thoughts and compared them with my own. Whenever the jewel's thoughts were wrong, the teacher—faster than thought—rebuilt the jewel slightly, altering it this way and that, seeking out the changes that would make its thoughts correct.
Why? So that when I could no longer be me, the jewel would do it for me."
I agree. Trains for long-distance travel between two point destinations make no sense for the typical traveler, compared with an airline. In other words we could build it, but the people would not come. Long-distance trains have been popular in Europe, but that popularity is declining quickly since the introduction of low-cost airline flights there (which the US has had for some time, but Europe has had only recently).
The REAL transportation problem to solve is metro commuting. This is where all the man-hours are wasted. For example, extending BART into the South Bay would be a much higher-impact use of the money.
Google has made absolutely ZERO attempt to ascertain the identity or whereabouts of the rightsholders of these "orphan" works. I'm one of them. I have been notified by Google about each of my in-print books (five in all), but NONE of my parents' books, even though they were published by HarperCollins, who used to send me royalty checks for those books and would no doubt be happy to tell Google how to reach me.
This about this rationally for a bit. Google is trying to scan every book that's ever been created, by their published estimates over 100 million in all. So far they've scanned 10 million. Exactly how are they supposed to track down rights holders for 10 million works, let alone 100 million? There are no existing databases, and it's a very laborious job to figure out that your parents had children (you), exactly where those children live today, and whether those rights were passed to the children or to someone else. This would cost you $1000 per book to do all this investigative work.
So the answer is: They can't do this. Nobody can, realistically. From a practical standpoint, these 100 million works will remain ownerless, and thus in a cultural black hole.
Now given that reality, you can go one of two ways:
The copyright law is the copyright law, and these 100 million works should fade into obscurity, or
It's in the best interests of humanity to make these works available, even if it means changing (or reinterpreting) copyright law as it currently exists
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To clarify, by "the device" I was referring to the hardware. I would stand by my assertion that the N1 is better hardware than the iPhone, by just about any objective measure. Where the iPhone really shines is the OS; it's a little more polished than Android -- and for some people this may trump the hardware and carrier disadvantages -- although IMHO Android is catching up fast (and I could point to a few areas where Android is better).
The N1 has clearly touched a nerve at Apple. And for good reason: Objectively it's just a better device: Thinner, much better display, much faster, better camera, gps navigation, faster browser, not locked, not tied to AT&T's network, and so on. (Disclosure: I own both.) The Apple execs feel the threat, even though I'm sure Android isn't yet making much of a dent in their sales. It's about wanting to be perceived as the innovator. When you don't have the best product in the marketplace, you try to maintain the high ground by accusing the other guys of stealing from you.
Yawn. Haven't we all seen this before? These patent fights never work. Remember when Apple sued Microsoft over their Mac GUI patents? How did that turn out?
In principle patents offer protection and exclusivity, but in practice they do not for these large companies. The USPTO has been granting excessively broad patents for decades, the result being that every major company with a portfolio of (excessively broad) patents can legitimately sue any other for patent infringement. So all of the big companies decide to in effect declare a truce, and cross-license their patent portfolios so that someone can actually release a product. The real loser is the innovative small company, which can't foot the $xxM legal cost of counter-suing, etc. when a big company decides to go after them, or hasn't yet accumulated a portfolio of (excessively broad) patents with which to credibly counter-sue. I don't believe this is the outcome the authors of the Constitution had in mind for the US patent system.
Apple of course understands this reality. This is just marketing and PR.
Tivo has good technology, but got marginalized because they didn't integrate with the wide variety of tuners out there. They needed to somehow negotiate their way onto every device they possibly could. Look at the Netflix streaming service today: It's on Roku boxes, many Blu-Ray players, XBox/PS3/Wii, and now built into many HDTVs. Netflix understands that their relevance is directly tied to how easy and ubiquitous they are, and like YouTube they basically give the technology to anyone who wants to integrate it. Tivo it seems took a more antagonistic approach, which resulted in the cable companies developing their own technologies.
The other thing that Tivo is doing is pricing themselves out of the market. Every other consumer device over the same period of time has fallen significantly in price (HDTVs, DVD players, Blu-Ray players, game consoles), whereas Tivo has gone the other way. The Tivo I bought in ~2001 was much cheaper than the HD Tivo today. Their technology is good, but for me not good enough to justify these prices.
In terms of root cause, it's widely known in the Valley that Tivo has a bad management team. The people I know who worked there do not say good things; basically they don't know what they're trying to do. They accidentally got some great engineers at one point long ago, and are trying to coast on that.
This is going to be the minority view here on Slashdot, but it must be said. I personally wish the marketers had much more information about me, so they wouldn't do such a bad job of targeting. Here are some examples:
My ideal situation would be a public persona that is highly detailed and non-private, plus an ability to step into anonymity if I wanted to. I.e., I'm happy with the grocery store knowing everything about my purchasing behavior because of their loyalty card -- and selling/giving that information to anyone else that could use it to more accurately target me -- but I also like to have the option of purchasing with cash if I choose to.
I have a small manufacturing business now, and for me (and everyone else in my industry), the annual cost of liability insurance is 10x the cost of taxes. The bigger retailers like Amazon require several million dollars of liability insurance for each consumer product they sell in our category, the premiums on which are a tremendous drain. I'm not one to say hang the lawyers -- they serve an important role in curbing true negligence on the part of companies. But from where I'm sitting, some type of sensible tort reform would help a lot. A consumer advocate like Ralph Nader could learn a lot running a smaller manufacturing business. (Note if I were running a services business, insurance would be much less expensive. This is one of the ways we discourage manufacturing in the USA.)
Taxes are less of a financial drain, just somewhat irrational. In California it costs $800 annually to register an LLC, regardless of size, profit, or industry. This doesn't seem to be tied to any cost or service the state provides, they just charge it because they can.
And the biggest reason of all to never use Apple equipment in a company:
0) Vendor lock-in.
No CIO in their right mind would sign up for a platform with only one hardware vendor, when a multi-vendor option exists. You can't competitively bid, you have fewer options on what to buy, and your risk is higher all-around. Apple's clone plan in the 90s was intended to appeal to business, but by then the die was cast (your reason #2).
My analogy is to the car market. There are two kinds of people: Those who love cars, and those who think of cars as a way to get from A to B. The former buy BMW, Mercedes, Tesla, Corvette, etc., and the latter buy Toyota. There is no right answer, just a consumer difference. Apple is the Mercedes-Benz of computing, the only large premium brand left (excepting smaller niche vendors like Alienware). It will never appeal to rational decision-makers who run businesses, for the same reason your company won't let you rent a Corvette when you go on a business trip.
Yes. The same flaw exists in the concept of Vulcans, devoid of emotion. The problem is, almost every decision in life is underdetermined, without enough hard data to make a logical decision. A lion is threatening the village -- quick, should I (a) fight the lion and potentially win the affections of a cute girl?, or (b) run away and live another day? You can't rationally answer this in real time; you need emotions to give you an ok default response when logical reasoning is too slow or too brittle. Something like a Vulcan could never exist.
With tech companies in particular, the leadership is crucial. The people at the top need to have a love of the product, a point of view, and a passion to change the world. Look at the influence Jobs had after returning to Apple: He shut down the 80% of projects that weren't going anywhere, and instilled some vision and focus into the efforts of his company. A leader can only do this if they have a personal love of technology. It doesn't come from a business school textbook, it's got to be in your blood. People who want to change the world don't have time for infighting.
Balmer is an ok guy, and he's probably pretty good as CEOs go, but he's a businessman through and through, not a good CEO of a tech company. He has no idea what he's trying to do with the technology, other than make money.
It's sad really and NASA is definitely who should get more budget.
To be clear, NASA *is* getting more budget in the proposed plan. It's a matter of what the money will be spent on. This latest move is consistent with the findings of the Augustine commission last fall, which was that the program of returning to the moon had little chance of success by 2020 at current funding levels. If you accept that judgment and are actually looking for forward progress, then either you (a) increase the budget for manned spaceflight, or (b) change your goals. Political forces and the current economy make (a) impossible, so they're going with (b).
A problem with NASA's manned spaceflight program is that the footprint is spread across some very influential states (e.g., TX and FL) and companies (Boeing etc.). All of the complaining in Congress about this proposal is simply about saving jobs and govt subsidy of their local economies. Truthfully a big part of why the Shuttle is such an expensive way to get stuff into orbit is the thousands of ground support personnel needed. The Congressional representatives from these states love expensive spaceflight, and will do what they can to protect it.
I agree. In this discussion there are two things that are too often conflated:
My point is that if you disagree with politicians' answers to the latter, the solution is to go after the politicians, not the scientists.
In an ideal world, the first set of questions would be answered in isolation from the second. We would put all of the scientists working on it in a bubble, and not subject them to the raucous public debate about cap and trade, etc. They need to be impartial, not advocates of some particular solution. If there's one thing that worries me about climate science today, it's that some of the individuals involved appear to be strong advocates for specific public actions. This is scientifically distasteful.
If anyone's asking me about global warming (and they aren't), my reading of the situation is that:
I suppose my overall rambling point is that we should keep these questions distinct. I see them blurred together too much in the public debate.
In Soviet Russia, Slashdotters make fun of you!
Reading through the replies to your post, I see the same thing happens here as well.
It's a matter of detailed knowledge, not stupidity. I have a PhD in physics, and I have no basis to judge the quality of work that climate scientists do. Hell, I can't even judge the quality of work in slightly different fields of physics. Ask me a simple question, like what are the likeliest sources of systematic error in Fermilab's measurement of the Top quark mass. I have no clue. And if I can't answer a simple question like that, how can I know whether the researchers have properly accounted for the potential systematic errors in their measurements? I can't. I have to rely on particle physicists -- the ones not involved in the experiment -- to understand things and try to poke holes.
I think we all, to varying degrees, suffer from the cognitive bias that we discount the difficulty of fields other than our own. Everything looks easy from the outside. Fact is, understanding the quality of a body of work takes much more than looking for typos in a report. It comes through deep understanding, which in a specialized field of science very few people have.
All of this creates a mess for climate science, because suddenly the whole world is keenly interested in arcane questions like how much CO2 is released when permafrost thaws, and the diffusion rate of CO2 into the deep ocean. Political faultlines form, Joe Sixpack weighs in, and everyone starts yelling insults. I don't envy the researchers involved.
The class B shares that L&S own, which have 10x the voting power of class A (regular) shares, convert to class A shares when they sell. Nobody else can use a sale like this to grab a disproportionate share of control over the company.
Google, on the other hand, is basically interested in scorched-earthing the margins on hardware, software, and connectivity in order to make it cheaper for consumers to look at Adwords.
No, that isn't how the Google founders think, not at all. Their primary interest is to ensure that phones are powerful enough to use Google services on, and relatively open in terms of access to apps and content. None of the above necessarily makes them a direct competitor to Apple. In fact you will note that Google has supported the iPhone at least as well as Android with their own development (although Apple has been a bit lukewarm on apps like Google Voice). Besides, if they were trying to suck the margins out of the phone market, they wouldn't be selling the Nexus One for over $500.
This is only part of the story. In fact all of the colors, not just cyan, are derived from the bird, which may be more familiar in its Western name, the Himalayan Gamut. Some of the more brilliant, saturated colors are found in the rare fluids within the tear ducts and feather shafts of the bird. You will often hear photo geeks discuss how much of "the full Gamut" is contained within a given system of inks; the lower quality ink producers commonly leave out these rare portions of the bird, and as a consequence these inks cannot reproduce such vivid colors.
No, AdSense has been relatively unimportant to their overall business model. It's only about 30% of their total revenue, and over 80% of that is paid out to publishers etc. as "Traffic Acquisition Costs". It's AdWords on google.com that is the true golden goose -- Google keeps 100% of that revenue.
You may have accidentally said "AdSense" when you meant "AdWords". If so, well Google didn't "stumble" into AdWords at all, but rather took the idea from Overture (now part of Yahoo!), which invented the pay per click advertising model in 1998, before Google was founded. Google rolled out PPC in 2002. So if they were so late, why did they succeed? I think it was simply because the search technology was better. Back to my original point, technology has always been the big differentiator for them.
Semantics. It's true that Google doesn't make most of its money selling technology as a product. However it's also true that technology has been the most critical factor in their success. Why was Google search better than Altavista, or Gmail better than Hotmail, or Adwords more scalable than Overture, or Google Maps better than Mapquest? It boils down to better technology. So why not consider them a technology company?
I'm not saying that Google didn't have an effect on those competitors. I'm saying that "market share" isn't a very useful concept for describing what's going on, or defining a sound business strategy, in these areas.
Taking maps as an example, what Google has done there is so much beyond what MapQuest did, it dramatically expands the number of use cases people have for the product. For example with Google Maps one can consult a topo map to gauge the difficulty of a hike planned for this weekend, or get a street view of a restaurant to help locate it. This is definitely not a zero-sum market: Google grew the pie, if you will, by innovating. I assert that in a fluid market, figuring out how to grow the pie is a more useful way of formulating a business strategy than envisioning a fixed market and aiming to thwart your competitors.
Other examples would be what Nintendo did with the Wii, or Apple did with the iPhone. Neither took on their competitors head-on, but identified ways to expand the market and in so doing leapfrog the competition.
Any business strategy that boils down to "kill off competitor X" is fundamentally unsound in this type of open market. Michael Wolff, in his recent Vanity Fair article on Rupert Murdoch's troubles succeeding on the internet, stated the issue well:
To view any of Google's markets as zero-sum is fundamentally myopic, and plays to Google's advantage. Any competitor is better served identifying something that Google doesn't do well for the customer, and focusing on that instead of taking market share away from Google. Of course, this requires real work and innovation.
In both OS X and Linux if you attempt to do something that requries elevated permissions you will be prompted with a GUI thing. Can you please explain why this is different than the patent?
You weren't asking me, but I'll take a stab at this. Patent claim #1:
I've marked in bold the components that are not present in the OS X functionality at least (I'm not as familiar with Linux behavior). Under OS X there is no "selectable help graphic", nor is there a listing of accounts that may be "of sufficient but not unlimited rights" (on the contrary, OS X only allows you to authenticate as an administrator).
This is obviously a highly-specific patent in its claims. As such it isn't very useful in practice -- it would be pretty easy to avoid infringing by building similar functionality that leaves out one small part of the above claim. This patent most certainly does not cover sudo or its variants. I'm surprised the commentator on Groklaw got confused by this, the patent is quite easy to read.
Sudo etc. do not constitute prior art that would invalidate the claim above, since the claim contains elements not possessed by these earlier inventions. That alone however does not justify a patent. One must also argue that the invention is sufficiently novel -- in other words, that it is "unobvious" to a practitioner in the art, and that the additional elements over prior art add real value. Novelty is frankly where a lot of software patents get shaky since it's a judgment call (is Amazon 1-click "obvious to a practitioner of the art"?). I never thought of this exact kind of functionality before (in particular, showing a list of user accounts, rather than just an administrator account). But then I'm not an experienced practitioner in computer security.
Overall this reads to me as not too bad of a patent, although not a very valuable one since it would be so easy to design around. Maybe they hand out bonuses at Microsoft for each patent you successfully file.
There's a good reason why C++ is still in wide and very popular use: precisely because it does have explicit memory management and pointer arithmetic. C++ is a static, explicit language. Go is not. It will not replace C++, and no language will until that is understood.
Why do you say Go is not a statically typed language? It says quite directly in the language spec that it is, and that type safety was an important design goal.
The lack of explicit memory management is clearly one of the big things here, and in the video at golang.org they explain their rationale. Part is the volume of bugs that explicit memory management creates, especially in threaded code. Another part is the belief that modern GC technology is efficient enough to not impose much of a performance penalty. Yet another part is that modern compilers are good enough at optimizing array indexing that there isn't any longer much efficiency benefit from pointer arithmetic.
The lack of pointer arithmetic seems to be a requirement in a language that supports garbage collection, if there is to be any guarantee of safety. Otherwise an object might be marked for deletion by the GC because no references to it exist, but then later you may come along and "recreate" a reference through pointer arithmetic from a reference to a nearby object. This combination would be inherently unsafe.
The other interesting feature here is the "interfaces" idea, in particular how you don't have to explicitly declare that type X implements interface Y. It does so automatically, if you have defined the methods required by Y. I think this could reduce some of the subclassing shenanigans and huge type hierarchies you can get into with C++, and do it in a type-safe way.
IMHO it's too early to form a judgment here, but I appreciate the fact that the designers have a restrained design aesthetic. C++ is frankly an ungodly mess at this point, on par with Perl. The success of Python shows that these things matter. Also the fact that Google is backing it means it could see enough development to become usable as a production language (clearly it's got some way to go).
"I was six years old when my parents told me that there was a small, dark jewel inside my skull, learning to be me.
Microscopic spiders had woven a fine gold web through my brain, so that the jewel's teacher could listen to the whisper of my thoughts. The jewel itself eavesdropped on my senses, and read the chemical messages carried in my bloodstream; it saw, heard, smelt, tasted and felt the world exactly as I did, while the teacher monitored its thoughts and compared them with my own. Whenever the jewel's thoughts were wrong, the teacher—faster than thought—rebuilt the jewel slightly, altering it this way and that, seeking out the changes that would make its thoughts correct.
Why? So that when I could no longer be me, the jewel would do it for me."
Greg Egan, "Learning to be Me" (1990)
C) taking legible pictures of whiteboard notes/drawings after meetings, so I don't have to sit there and transcribe everything to my computer
(my #1 use case)
I agree. Trains for long-distance travel between two point destinations make no sense for the typical traveler, compared with an airline. In other words we could build it, but the people would not come. Long-distance trains have been popular in Europe, but that popularity is declining quickly since the introduction of low-cost airline flights there (which the US has had for some time, but Europe has had only recently).
The REAL transportation problem to solve is metro commuting. This is where all the man-hours are wasted. For example, extending BART into the South Bay would be a much higher-impact use of the money.
Google has made absolutely ZERO attempt to ascertain the identity or whereabouts of the rightsholders of these "orphan" works. I'm one of them. I have been notified by Google about each of my in-print books (five in all), but NONE of my parents' books, even though they were published by HarperCollins, who used to send me royalty checks for those books and would no doubt be happy to tell Google how to reach me.
This about this rationally for a bit. Google is trying to scan every book that's ever been created, by their published estimates over 100 million in all. So far they've scanned 10 million. Exactly how are they supposed to track down rights holders for 10 million works, let alone 100 million? There are no existing databases, and it's a very laborious job to figure out that your parents had children (you), exactly where those children live today, and whether those rights were passed to the children or to someone else. This would cost you $1000 per book to do all this investigative work.
So the answer is: They can't do this. Nobody can, realistically. From a practical standpoint, these 100 million works will remain ownerless, and thus in a cultural black hole.
Now given that reality, you can go one of two ways: