Now that they've been awarded a patent for page-rank, it's required for them to make it public so that people can license it. You can't patent a trade secret and still have it be secret. People now have the opportunity to build new methods and innovate with Pagerank as a basis for that innovation. (Real innovation, not MS innovation.)
Actually, they are required to disclose it, but not to license it. The patent gives them a 17 year legal monopoly to do whatever they want with it (use it, license it, bury it, etc.). As an example, Capri Sun never licensed their patented "juice bag" technology, forcing others to use inferior "drink boxes" to deliver product. Now that the patent is expired, other "drink bags" are on the market.
More worrying is that software patents are sometimes granted using such general language that the entity getting the patent *doesn't* really have to disclose anything, enabling them to get both protection while keeping their invention secret, which is exactlty the opposite effect of what patents were intended for -- to get duplicable knowledge into the public domain after a period of protection for the original inventor.
Get over it. The Free Press had a poll about 15 years ago that ran for like and entire YEAR about Michigander vs. Michiganian and Michigander won by a mile. Michigander is cool. Michiganian is lame (as is the loathesome Michiganite -- it sounds like a stone, and we all know the Michigan state stone (well, fossil) is the might Petoskie Stone!). Like many of the best nicknames (including "Yankee") it started out as insult by some Presidential candidate to another, I believe (the Freep article was a long time ago). Kind of cool, actually.
Oh well, I don't live in MI anymore, but I still miss it -- coneys anwyay.
You have to figure that, from Bill Gate's perspective, there are no bugs in Microsoft software. If he finds a bug, someone gets a nasty email, the bug is fixed, so what's the problem?
In some sense, Microsoft's products are probably tailor-made to please Bill Gates; certainly all of the features he was personally interested were implemented years ago. Therefore, it's probably tough for him to "grok" the notion that many people are deeply unsatisfied with WORD, say. To me, the whole way it works with images is totally stupid. To him, it's probably exactly the way it should work. Certainly I've seen Word docs that look great; I just need to use Quark to get the same results. The fact that it took me about ten minutes to learn to use Quark, and after five years I still can't design pages well with Word is, from Bill's perspective, not really Microsoft's problem.
Here's the trick. Go home. Clean your bathroom till you can eat off the floor. Now throw away or hide the following:
big screen TV
surround sound set up
alphabetical anime DVD collection
any pr0n
Do not:
mention sports
mention computers in any depth greater than "I work with computers" or to recommend the purchase of a Dell or a Macintosh
mention how women find you unattractive
Do:
ask questions about her
listen to them
sympathise with her plights
be ready to provide technical support with making derisive comments about technical skills (right: "ok, that ought to do it." wrong: "you have two System folders! What the fuck did you do, you retard?")
Assuming you have an ok job and hygene, you are now officially interesting to single girls older than 24. Whether or not the trade off is worth it is up to you, though it's worth mentioning that once you land the girl, you can slowly bring out the sports/computers/home electronics talk (keep the Anime well hidden...).
Also, if you only can do one of the above things, keep your bathroom immaculate. That is the #1 criteria by which you are measured by girls. In fact, casually dropping the fact that you can eat off the floor of your bathroom will probably get girls to ask you out.
I agree. What the article (which was very good) missed, IMO, was the key difference between nerds and geeks (which other people may define with different labels, but which I believe is very real).
Geeks are very smart, and very interested in brainy things (computers, biology, science, chess, etc.) that have an intrinsicly motivating appeal for those who understand them (this should be a feeling familiar to most/. readers). In general they have a somewhat better grasp of social skills than nerds.p>
Nerds are into generally unpopular but still very interesting things (D&D, anime, sci-fi, videogames, comics), and seem to be into those things as much for the escape from the real world that they offer, as for their intrinsicly motivating appeal. Those things also don't necessarily require a great deal of intelligence to be into, or succeed at.
It's kind of a subtle difference, and certainly there's a lot of overlap in the Venn diagram of the two groups (lots of geeky nerds, nerdy geeks, etc), but it's not complete.
I knew plenty of really smart kids who were pretty geeky, but still far above the nerds on the social scale -- I mean AP physics, blow the curve smart. I also knew nerds who were borderline cretins in intelligence. Just idiots who happened to be really into comics, say.
Most of the geeks I knew (including myself) were also nerds, but there were people who were one or the other, but not both. In general I believe nerdiness had a much greater degree of population correlation than geekiness.
Anyway the other thing the article gets right is the age range when this matters. By the time I was a senior in high school, even the jocks would talk to me in class. In college (in my experience) no one gave a shit how smart you were or not, or what you did in your spare time (comics, D&D, videogames), as long as you could aquire beer and were a generally amusing person to be around.
Ok, that BBS went down about 15 years ago, but still...
I credit early days BBSing with my typing skills, helping my writing skills, and even my socialization skills (uh, you know, on the war boards...). If you missed those days you missed out; it was so much more "underground" than the Internet ever was, and consequently, a lot more enjoyable, especially for geeks. You could come home from your boring school filled with stupid jocks and just enter a totally different world.
I'm definitely still nostalgic for the 80 column greenscreen and carrier tone.
Either in the book reviewed, or Downfall (mentioned earlier in this thread), there is a great line, to the effect of 'by 1945, we (the American people, Allies, etc) were so sick of the inhumanity of war, that we were willing to tolerate any inhumanity to make it end sooner.' (The actual quote is much more eloquent, and comes with great supporting material.)
Based on my more than casual reading level about WWII and its end, I'd say that sums it up. The direct consequnces (lots of dead enemy civilians) seemed less bad than the potential consequences of inaction (a war that dragged on another three years in Japan, millions of Japanese and US casualties, etc.).
It's really difficult, 60 years later, to fathom the effects of four or five years of total war on the decision making process.
Downfall does make it clear, however, that a US invasion of Japan would have been a disaster in terms of Allied casualties, and Japanese civilian deaths. All of Japan's remaining defenses were targeted at the exact point where the US invasion would have hit, and further, the strategy of bombing cities was to be turned to bombing railheads, which would have totally destroyed the food distribution system in Japan, likely causing the starvation of much of the population.
If they had known the Shuttle was doomed, in this case, they may have been able to scramble Atlantis, send it up with a minimum of pre-flight checks and a crew of 2, and rescue the Colombia crew. Atlantis wasn't on the crawler, but pretty close.
But it seems like from what I've read of their simulations with the foam (I believe they simmed it as filled with ice and moving twice as fast as it was) that they honestly believed that it would be fine.
Re:This has to be tough for familes to hear...
on
Latest Columbia News
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I disagree. First, even if the science is "2nd rate" it's fantastic PR for science. Second, this mission was doing some really vital science (like the low G fire experiments) that will come in handy if we ever want to get off this planet for any sustained amount of time.
Re:I'm more amazed....
on
Baked Apple
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· Score: 1
Yeah, that was my thought. I can easily see a kid hiding the Mac, a mom or whoever pre-heating the over for dinner, and then discovering, to her horror...
My son has all these (non-working) computers at his preschool that he wails on all day; then he gets upset when I freak out when he starts trying to "check email" by slamming his fists on my keyboard...
I feel bad that you (and others) interpreted my post to be sour grapes. My point was really that doing what you love shouldn't take years to figure out, and when you do figure it out, you don't deserve a cookie, or a book written about you. Learning that money doesn't buy happiness may be something to be proud of, but it's not something that's like this major achievement, unless you started out as a shallow idiot to begin with, who thought that the *money* was the goal, not the challenge of being a really good lawyer, or stockbroker, or coder or whatever.
I may be biased, because I figured out what I wanted to do early, did it, continue to do it, and enjoy it.
As for people making $200K a year and survival skills, try asking one to do a household budget. It's a riot ("well, we need the house cleaner twice a week at $110 a pop... then there's the yard people..."). After several years of never checking prices and constantly aquiring any good or service desired, it's a harsh reality check to worry about the unit cost of groceries, and I find that most ex-rich people don't discover that until too late (I'm speaking from observational, not personal, experience).
Actually, I'm incredibly satisfied in my career path -- not to say that I couldn't be more successful, or that there isn't a lot of stress day to day, but I fucking love every stupid minute of it. I haven't shipped Quake yet, but the struggle to make every stupid game I do better than the last one is still pretty satisfying. Maybe that's why I can't relate to stupid escapist fantasies. I never had any illusions that success would be easy, so when I hit adversity, I'm not like "this sucks, I need to live in a shed on the tundra!" I'm like "this sucks, I need to work harder to ship this" or whatever.
If I cared about money, I wouldn't be doing what I do. Maybe my point was that I have no sympathy for people who discover too late that money isn't all there is, and I'm much more impressed with my unemployed friend who is holding bake sales to fund a proposed community radio station, than I am with some asshole who sells his Lexus to buy a country store in Montana.
When I hear about someone who makes $200,000 a year, has a nice house, nice cars, and a nice family, and then decides that it isn't enough, or they hate the job now, all I want to say to them is "shut the fuck up, you have it better than 99.999% of humanity, and your whining makes you sound like a total asshole."
I just have no sympathy for whiny, rich people who are desperate to "find themselves," which is the meme it seems that this book is enamored with.
I guess it's cool if you're rich to do something you like, but don't try to convince me that you're somehow more noble for having done it. There are lots of people who are poor or middle class who do work at what they enjoy, or have satisfying lives, but they don't make a giant federal case out of it.
As to the person who chucks the $200,000 job to open the general store in Montana, they just strike me as being selfish and immature. It's a rustic, escapist fantasy, and they force their family to live through the unpleasant reality with them. It's very unlikely that someone making $200K a year will ever be able to develop the survival skills needed to live at $50K (gross).
Actually, the Palm Zire is under $100 for roughly a Palm III feature set (which is about four or five years old now, IIRC). Check it out at http://www.palm.com/products/handhelds/zire/.
The 2MB memory (which I think is non-expandable) sucks, but it's a pretty small unit. And actually 2MB isn't terrible. My battered 2MB Palm III, which is an upgraded Palm Pro (I think... it was the first one with the backlight) still performs really well, so I have to say I'm pleased -- probably too pleased for Palm's sake, because other than Geek Lust, I have no reason to upgrade...
eMusic.com isn't stealing. It's a $10/month service that lets you *legally* download.mp3s from probably thousands of albums in dozens of categories.
Like you, I also refuse to steal music, but I enthusiastically signed up for, and use, eMusic.com, especially since it has deals with a lot of the independent labels whose music I like the most (Lookout, Taang, etc.)
Artists get paid, labels get paid, emusic gets paid, and I get to listen to way more different stuff than I ever would have otherwise.
In the future, before you get sanctimonious on the original poster, and start calling others theives, it would probably be a good idea to make sure you're clear on the facts.
The killer with fridges is that new ones rule, from an efficieny standpoint. But when people get new ones, they put the old one downstairs, and thus add to the problem so that they can have a fridge they use very rarely. Old fridges should be destroyed! (Actually PG&E in the SF Bay Area will pay you $75 to take away a working, old, fridge, although the program is only sporadically funded.)
The problem is that *no* alternative to oil will enable people to live with the same wasteful energy useage that oil does. The EROI (energy return on investment) for oil is just way, way higher than for geo, wind, solar, etc.
So even a "Manhattan Project" style affair will be worthless unless we also make a concerted effort to dramatically improve the energy efficiency of our society -- our cars, our appliances, our homes, etc.
With not much effort, by not a huge percent of the population, California was able to fairly significantly reduce its energy needs during the whole Enron-initiated "power crisis." Not to sound polyannaish, but just imagine what would happen if we all actually did some simple, painless, things that saved energy.
The problem is that most people need a real incentive -- dramatically higher costs -- before they will conserve.
The best way to get a trophy at a Pinewood Derby race is to forget about speed, and work on winning one of the "style" or looks trophies. (At least my Pack always had that category, YMMV.)
I grew up near Detroit, and while my dad worked for a car company, he wasn't an engineer. He figured, correctly, that many of the cars in our Pack would actually be built at the GM Tech Center by engineer fathers. We went with looks, adding fins and (at the time, unusual) flouresent orange and green paint and won second place in looks. (1st place went to a fantastic rendition of Mr. Rourke's open-air station wagon from Fantasy Island.)
What school you went to (or whether or not you got a degree) matters until approximately four seconds after you get your first job. Then it's all about your performance (including, under performance, your ability to play office politics (and including, under your ability to play office politics, your ability to act as professional as the job requires)). Many of these things can be shaped at college, but whether your degree says Harvard or Oakland University matters not one shit once you've gotten a job in your chosen career track. I've been in the workforce 10 years and no one has asked what school I've been to since my first job interview, even then, it was my ability to intern for free for three months that got me the gig, not the fact that I went to some school on the east coast.
You're totally right, even if LeMay wanted to bomb only industry, he would have torched many, many civilian establishments (especially since factories, as you point out, tended to be in the middle of residential areas). But it seems clear that LeMay's strategy was the deliberate firebombing of population centers, without, as was the case in Europe, even nominal moves towards avoiding civilians.
In the book referenced above, Franks makes an excellent point, which was that the American people were so sick, by 1944, of the inhumanity of war, that they were willing to tolerate and support any inhumanity, no matter how big, to get it over with faster. Given that, and given the enormous number of US casualties we would have taken to invade Japan, I find it pretty hard to argue with *any* of the US strategy in pressing the war against Japan.
Not quite. The fear of a German bomb was what got Einstein to write a very influential letter supporting the nuclear weapons program to FDR, and that was certainly a supporting reason, but we ultimately developed it for the same reasons the Germans wanted to -- to make a really big bomb.
As for dropping it on Japan, I suggest anyone interested in the subject at all check out a book called Downfall: The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire by Richard B Frank. He examines original source material and lets the reader decide whether or not it was good idea.
Some of the interesting things he reveals: the Japanese plan, to fight the US to a bloody standstill on the beaches and then sue for a negotiated peace, would certainly have been bloody. The Japanese were massing *all* their remaining forces exactly where the US was planning to strike.
Certainly there would have been tens if not hundreds of thousands of Allied and Japanese casualties. But, it wouldn't have mattered in the long run, because most of the Japanese population would have starved to death shortly after, anyway.
See, Since the cities were totally bombed out, General LeMay's next targets were the rail-heads. After two weeks of bombing them Japan would have been totally unable to ship food around the counry, resulting in mass starvation, regardless of their surrender. (It's unclear if LeMay knew this would be the result, but since he spent the months before fire-bombing civilian areas, it seems likely that he probably didn't care that much.)
Anyway, it's a pretty fascinating book...
It's really an open question as to what would have happened if we hadn't dropped the bomb -- people in the US were so sick of war Japan may have been able to get a negotiated peace (just before they all starved to death).
Slashdot Mirror
More worrying is that software patents are sometimes granted using such general language that the entity getting the patent *doesn't* really have to disclose anything, enabling them to get both protection while keeping their invention secret, which is exactlty the opposite effect of what patents were intended for -- to get duplicable knowledge into the public domain after a period of protection for the original inventor.
Oh well, I don't live in MI anymore, but I still miss it -- coneys anwyay.
In some sense, Microsoft's products are probably tailor-made to please Bill Gates; certainly all of the features he was personally interested were implemented years ago. Therefore, it's probably tough for him to "grok" the notion that many people are deeply unsatisfied with WORD, say. To me, the whole way it works with images is totally stupid. To him, it's probably exactly the way it should work. Certainly I've seen Word docs that look great; I just need to use Quark to get the same results. The fact that it took me about ten minutes to learn to use Quark, and after five years I still can't design pages well with Word is, from Bill's perspective, not really Microsoft's problem.
big screen TV
surround sound set up
alphabetical anime DVD collection
any pr0n
Do not:
mention sports
mention computers in any depth greater than "I work with computers" or to recommend the purchase of a Dell or a Macintosh
mention how women find you unattractive
Do:
ask questions about her
listen to them
sympathise with her plights
be ready to provide technical support with making derisive comments about technical skills (right: "ok, that ought to do it." wrong: "you have two System folders! What the fuck did you do, you retard?")
Assuming you have an ok job and hygene, you are now officially interesting to single girls older than 24. Whether or not the trade off is worth it is up to you, though it's worth mentioning that once you land the girl, you can slowly bring out the sports/computers/home electronics talk (keep the Anime well hidden...).
Also, if you only can do one of the above things, keep your bathroom immaculate. That is the #1 criteria by which you are measured by girls. In fact, casually dropping the fact that you can eat off the floor of your bathroom will probably get girls to ask you out.
Geeks are very smart, and very interested in brainy things (computers, biology, science, chess, etc.) that have an intrinsicly motivating appeal for those who understand them (this should be a feeling familiar to most /. readers). In general they have a somewhat better grasp of social skills than nerds.p>
Nerds are into generally unpopular but still very interesting things (D&D, anime, sci-fi, videogames, comics), and seem to be into those things as much for the escape from the real world that they offer, as for their intrinsicly motivating appeal. Those things also don't necessarily require a great deal of intelligence to be into, or succeed at.
It's kind of a subtle difference, and certainly there's a lot of overlap in the Venn diagram of the two groups (lots of geeky nerds, nerdy geeks, etc), but it's not complete.
I knew plenty of really smart kids who were pretty geeky, but still far above the nerds on the social scale -- I mean AP physics, blow the curve smart. I also knew nerds who were borderline cretins in intelligence. Just idiots who happened to be really into comics, say.
Most of the geeks I knew (including myself) were also nerds, but there were people who were one or the other, but not both. In general I believe nerdiness had a much greater degree of population correlation than geekiness.
Anyway the other thing the article gets right is the age range when this matters. By the time I was a senior in high school, even the jocks would talk to me in class. In college (in my experience) no one gave a shit how smart you were or not, or what you did in your spare time (comics, D&D, videogames), as long as you could aquire beer and were a generally amusing person to be around.
All aliens use AppleTalk...
I credit early days BBSing with my typing skills, helping my writing skills, and even my socialization skills (uh, you know, on the war boards...). If you missed those days you missed out; it was so much more "underground" than the Internet ever was, and consequently, a lot more enjoyable, especially for geeks. You could come home from your boring school filled with stupid jocks and just enter a totally different world.
I'm definitely still nostalgic for the 80 column greenscreen and carrier tone.
-iocat -uif -immortal
Based on my more than casual reading level about WWII and its end, I'd say that sums it up. The direct consequnces (lots of dead enemy civilians) seemed less bad than the potential consequences of inaction (a war that dragged on another three years in Japan, millions of Japanese and US casualties, etc.).
It's really difficult, 60 years later, to fathom the effects of four or five years of total war on the decision making process.
Downfall does make it clear, however, that a US invasion of Japan would have been a disaster in terms of Allied casualties, and Japanese civilian deaths. All of Japan's remaining defenses were targeted at the exact point where the US invasion would have hit, and further, the strategy of bombing cities was to be turned to bombing railheads, which would have totally destroyed the food distribution system in Japan, likely causing the starvation of much of the population.
Arcade
Macintosh
PC
straight-DVD
Colecovision
Coleco Adam
Commodore 64
Game Coy Color (!)
3DO
Super Nintendo
Sega CD
various euro-micros
CD-i
I don't know if there's any time since it was released that you haven't been able to purchase some version of Dragon's Lair!
None, sir, that appears to be a hardware problem.
Oh man, that slayed them back in the good old days at Spinnaker...
But it seems like from what I've read of their simulations with the foam (I believe they simmed it as filled with ice and moving twice as fast as it was) that they honestly believed that it would be fine.
My son has all these (non-working) computers at his preschool that he wails on all day; then he gets upset when I freak out when he starts trying to "check email" by slamming his fists on my keyboard...
I may be biased, because I figured out what I wanted to do early, did it, continue to do it, and enjoy it.
As for people making $200K a year and survival skills, try asking one to do a household budget. It's a riot ("well, we need the house cleaner twice a week at $110 a pop... then there's the yard people..."). After several years of never checking prices and constantly aquiring any good or service desired, it's a harsh reality check to worry about the unit cost of groceries, and I find that most ex-rich people don't discover that until too late (I'm speaking from observational, not personal, experience).
If I cared about money, I wouldn't be doing what I do. Maybe my point was that I have no sympathy for people who discover too late that money isn't all there is, and I'm much more impressed with my unemployed friend who is holding bake sales to fund a proposed community radio station, than I am with some asshole who sells his Lexus to buy a country store in Montana.
I just have no sympathy for whiny, rich people who are desperate to "find themselves," which is the meme it seems that this book is enamored with.
I guess it's cool if you're rich to do something you like, but don't try to convince me that you're somehow more noble for having done it. There are lots of people who are poor or middle class who do work at what they enjoy, or have satisfying lives, but they don't make a giant federal case out of it.
As to the person who chucks the $200,000 job to open the general store in Montana, they just strike me as being selfish and immature. It's a rustic, escapist fantasy, and they force their family to live through the unpleasant reality with them. It's very unlikely that someone making $200K a year will ever be able to develop the survival skills needed to live at $50K (gross).
The 2MB memory (which I think is non-expandable) sucks, but it's a pretty small unit. And actually 2MB isn't terrible. My battered 2MB Palm III, which is an upgraded Palm Pro (I think... it was the first one with the backlight) still performs really well, so I have to say I'm pleased -- probably too pleased for Palm's sake, because other than Geek Lust, I have no reason to upgrade...
As with Jaguar, reliability of the Range Rovers went up dramatically after their aquisition by Ford!
Like you, I also refuse to steal music, but I enthusiastically signed up for, and use, eMusic.com, especially since it has deals with a lot of the independent labels whose music I like the most (Lookout, Taang, etc.)
Artists get paid, labels get paid, emusic gets paid, and I get to listen to way more different stuff than I ever would have otherwise.
In the future, before you get sanctimonious on the original poster, and start calling others theives, it would probably be a good idea to make sure you're clear on the facts.
The killer with fridges is that new ones rule, from an efficieny standpoint. But when people get new ones, they put the old one downstairs, and thus add to the problem so that they can have a fridge they use very rarely. Old fridges should be destroyed! (Actually PG&E in the SF Bay Area will pay you $75 to take away a working, old, fridge, although the program is only sporadically funded.)
So even a "Manhattan Project" style affair will be worthless unless we also make a concerted effort to dramatically improve the energy efficiency of our society -- our cars, our appliances, our homes, etc.
With not much effort, by not a huge percent of the population, California was able to fairly significantly reduce its energy needs during the whole Enron-initiated "power crisis." Not to sound polyannaish, but just imagine what would happen if we all actually did some simple, painless, things that saved energy.
The problem is that most people need a real incentive -- dramatically higher costs -- before they will conserve.
I grew up near Detroit, and while my dad worked for a car company, he wasn't an engineer. He figured, correctly, that many of the cars in our Pack would actually be built at the GM Tech Center by engineer fathers. We went with looks, adding fins and (at the time, unusual) flouresent orange and green paint and won second place in looks. (1st place went to a fantastic rendition of Mr. Rourke's open-air station wagon from Fantasy Island.)
What school you went to (or whether or not you got a degree) matters until approximately four seconds after you get your first job. Then it's all about your performance (including, under performance, your ability to play office politics (and including, under your ability to play office politics, your ability to act as professional as the job requires)). Many of these things can be shaped at college, but whether your degree says Harvard or Oakland University matters not one shit once you've gotten a job in your chosen career track. I've been in the workforce 10 years and no one has asked what school I've been to since my first job interview, even then, it was my ability to intern for free for three months that got me the gig, not the fact that I went to some school on the east coast.
In the book referenced above, Franks makes an excellent point, which was that the American people were so sick, by 1944, of the inhumanity of war, that they were willing to tolerate and support any inhumanity, no matter how big, to get it over with faster. Given that, and given the enormous number of US casualties we would have taken to invade Japan, I find it pretty hard to argue with *any* of the US strategy in pressing the war against Japan.
As for dropping it on Japan, I suggest anyone interested in the subject at all check out a book called Downfall: The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire by Richard B Frank. He examines original source material and lets the reader decide whether or not it was good idea.
Some of the interesting things he reveals: the Japanese plan, to fight the US to a bloody standstill on the beaches and then sue for a negotiated peace, would certainly have been bloody. The Japanese were massing *all* their remaining forces exactly where the US was planning to strike.
Certainly there would have been tens if not hundreds of thousands of Allied and Japanese casualties. But, it wouldn't have mattered in the long run, because most of the Japanese population would have starved to death shortly after, anyway.
See, Since the cities were totally bombed out, General LeMay's next targets were the rail-heads. After two weeks of bombing them Japan would have been totally unable to ship food around the counry, resulting in mass starvation, regardless of their surrender. (It's unclear if LeMay knew this would be the result, but since he spent the months before fire-bombing civilian areas, it seems likely that he probably didn't care that much.)
Anyway, it's a pretty fascinating book...
It's really an open question as to what would have happened if we hadn't dropped the bomb -- people in the US were so sick of war Japan may have been able to get a negotiated peace (just before they all starved to death).