And you should realize that those "cash reserves" are retained earnings, profits that were withheld from distribution to the stockholders, for their long term benefit. Any intention to use those funds for anything else, such as keeping up the pretense of being a "going concern" when they are hemorrhaging (what parent post described), would bring about a stockholders' revolt and criminal charges for the Chairman of the Board and the corporate officers. No matter how that played out in the courts, the result would be the end of the Microsoft we all love to hate.
Compared to the Enron follies of yesteryear, or what is going on right now in Detroit, Microsoft's possible collapse under these conditions would not even be that big a deal. I its not like the end of Microsoft would put a whole industry out of work. Businesses would simple speed up their migrations to Linux, the people who worked with Microsoft products would move into similar slots supporting FOSS software, everything would be almost back to normal. Except everyone's budget for software licensing and virus related costs would go down.
You might want to hold on to your doubt for a bit longer.
Carmen Suro-Bredie, who signed the letter rejecting the FOIA request, is a hold-over from the Bush Administration. Could be she never got the memo that things have changed. She actually predates Bush: she was chairing hearings about trade agreements in 1992, and apparently has at least 30 years of Federal Civil Service behind her. She has always kept a very low profile: the only biography of her on the web is remarkable for saying very little and providing no dates at all. These are the hallmarks of a career bureaucrat; the kind of person who works hard, not out of any sense of ideals, or for the good of the team, but to assure that their personal situation will be more comfortable next year than it was last year (no matter who is in charge or what the new goals of the organization are).
Now that she has stumbled into the Internet's spotlight, it will be interesting to see if there is any change in her career. Her style doesn't seem to fit well with Obama's approach. OTOH, she has been working the same small patch of ground for more than 16 years, so she might know too much to be easily shown to the door.
The treaty in question has a long way to go before it is ratified. There will be opportunities for Obama to open up the process; let's see if he takes them.
The key here is "shovel ready". Most road improvements involve long and costly arguments with land owners about the value of the fifty foot long by ten foot wide strip that the city or state needs to acquire before the first construction worker can put on his hard hat. The only income generated during that first phase is what the lawyers make... and as a group lawyers don't stimulate anybody's local economy. But in this situation Microsoft already owns the land involved, so it should be a matter of a few weeks before some guys can step out of the unemployment lines and put on their hard hats.
To put this another way: the stimulus dollars will work best when they are used for "shovel ready" projects. And anyone who has hung around slashdot for a couple of weeks or more knows that there is no corporation that is as ready to shovel it around as Microsoft.
I think this may well be a good project. Provided that it will still retain some value after Microsoft goes tits up.
Microsoft is not going to survive this financial winter in its current form: its skills are all about identifying the next big wave and fighting for the best spot to surf it. That has sometimes involved tipping better surfers off their boards when they get in its way. But those skills do not translate well to the new economy, where the ability to paddle your kayak through an Eskimo roll in freezing waters is a better image for what the successful company needs to know. Redmond needs to ask whether the value of the overpass is going to be worth its half of the investment if Microsoft is no longer as big a part of its tax base three years from now.
I would expect that the project will have some long term benefits, but probably much less than most of the good people of Redmond had hoped for.
Your quote made me realize that it has now been many years since I have trusted the realism of any photos. Aside from photos that I remember from the days before shopping, I know that I will never have any idea of exactly how anyone looks.
Parent post should be modded up. There is something to be said for using a rigorous methodology when comparing the value of different employees, and that will necessarily reduce to numbers at some point.
That being said, TFA is either seriously oversimplifying what its author learned, or the companies it describes are doing it wrong.
TFA is basically describing ways of developing and presenting sociograms. The shape of any sociogram is as dependent on the choice of qualitative tools used to develop it as it is on the reality that it claims to represent. To be brief, any sociogram, no matter how numeric its appearance, is qualitative and not quantitative and has a huge amount of observer bias built into it. It is a tricksy sideshow mirror that reflects an unstated bias and is inherently untrustworthy.
I've been trying to find a way to say more without ending up as tl;dr and I can't do it adequately. So here are some teasers:
The first steps to effective HR management involve developing good job descriptions of the existing roles. Performance measures can be used to determine how well HR has done this work: do those who actually work in or with each role agree with HR's description? The next steps involve reshaping the company as a whole by changing all of those job descriptions to support the new workflows. Some of this can be quantified: your employees represent a pool of very detailed knowledge about how the jobs could be done.
Only after the above is done can you start looking at employee performance, both current and predicted in the new roles. Very little of this is truly quantifiable: about the best you can do is to say "On a scale of 1 to 5, how legible is Mr. Anderson's handwriting?" And even then, recognize that some of the most critical information may be very hard to come by.
An example of the last: Do you know that you have an entry level programmer that everyone goes to as a technical resource because he has twenty-plus years of extensive experience leading development teams, but now he's satisfied with a low pressure day job to pay the bills while he writes his first novel in the evenings? His LOC stats are miserable, because he spends a lot of time with drop-in visitors who are wondering how he would approach this bug, or refactor that monster object, or shed some light on what the hell the guys who wrote this legacy code 15 years ago were thinking about when they used that schubert approach on what is clearly a brahms problem? You probably don't want to lose this guy: he is improving the efficiency of everyone around him. But he is not going to show up favorably on any of your metrics. And in a dirty professional field like software development, he and his kind are legion.
It seems like GNU was not self-defeating, and that the gnu is no longer an obscure animal. Other than that...
Say, what was your point again?
BTW, the meaning of "caustic" to most people doesn't have much importance since most people won't be the direct customers of Caustic Graphics. The name does have a lot of meaning to the company's potential market: caustics are generally the most expensive and often critical part of photorealistic rendering. A company that chooses that word as part of its name has got to be pretty ballsy.
I, for one, welcome my legislatures' recognition of the irrational in government.
In formal English, the date has always been written out as "...on Saturday the fourteenth of March, two thousand nine, at three o'clock in the afternoon" (as in an invitation). Note that the year is a parenthetical phrase set off by commas. In less formal writing with the slash abbreviation this becomes "...on Sat 3/14, 2009, at 3:00 pm" which is a form that has been in use in the USA before there was a USA. So the further contraction to "3/14/09" simply continued the process.
Now it is becoming common to use the dot abbreviation with European dates, so "3/14/09" and "14.3.09" are understood to be the same. This was becoming somewhat popular in USA communications in the first years of the Internet, but the ISO standard is now gaining favor: "2009-03-14".
A personal favorite in journals and such where I might want to sort entries by date and time, and don't want to fuss with concatenations is "20090314.1500". This fully numeric representation is compact, very sortable, and easy to move between plaintext, spreadsheets, databases.
Next, I would like to see the legislatures recognize the imaginary component in government...
I misread the statement as well, taking it at face value. So I was about to blast the editors for not catching such a blatant transposition of digits. 74% would be about right: 71% open ocean, and roughly 3% in permament lakes and such (I think the biggest of these in surface area is the Amazon River basin, which I have heard described as a slightly tilted, very shallow fresh water sea.)
Editors should be blasted for not catching and clarifying the ambiguity. This is NOT a matter of bad grammar or any mere syntax problem. This is matter of bad semantics.
Does slashdot need a cadre of semantic zealots to go along with all the grammar nazis? Could those two groups coexist?
He either didn't know about the corruption... or he was in on it.
Above post has serious blinders on. Other possibilities:
he cooperated with the FBI investigation
he was informed of the FBI investigation before the arrests
he initiated the FBI investigation
Any of these is quite likely, and the last is, exactly the kind of action I would want to see a CEO take if in the course of his work he became aware that something suspicious was happening in his business. What would be the alternative? "I'm firing you two because I'm pretty sure that you're guilty of crimes in my company's cubicles?" That would be tacky. That would be SO last year.
What say we wait and see what the story is before taking such Olympian long jumps to conclusions that might not actually be a landing place.
While definitely true in many cases, again this is a matter of correlation and does not imply that exercise causes a reduction in asthma. Other possibilities are that some asthmatics who are successful in adopting exercise regimens also change their diet, or start using a different kind of mental discipline, or any of a myriad of other things might be going on that are related to, but independent of, the exercise itself.
I grew up with asthma, hospitalized with it when I was 6, crippled by it until I was about 13. Then I made a conscious choice not to be asthmatic any more. It still definitely affected me, but there was an immediate improvement in the severity of the attacks, and over the next 20 years my asthmatic episodes continued to get milder, of shorter duration, and much less frequent. By my late thirties I was saying that I had outgrown it (though with some denial for some mild problems on rare occasion, usually exercise induced). Then it got worse for a while in my early fifties. But I realized that there was a correlation between asthma attacks and ingestion of High Fructose Corn Syrup, and by avoiding HFCS, I've become nearly asthma free again.
I'm not sure what it is about the HFCS: it did not exist when I was young so it certainly did not cause my asthma. But the increase in asthma in USA children does seem to parallel the increase in consumption of HCFS, so I'm thinking that the stuff might have some influence on the disease. I urge anyone with asthma to consider avoiding HCFS for a few weeks as a trial. It has less nutritive value than pure sugar, so going without isn't going to screw up any diets.
The heart of my real argument though was that most people prefer ambiguity. If someone writes "my love is like a red, red rose"
I suggest
s/ambiguity/metaphor/
in above. And then for the sake of getting somewhere in this discussion, allowing the simile to stand as a metaphor for "metaphor". Call it a metametaphor (and that is a serious piece of humor).
Human language is built strongly on metaphor, which at one level is a kind of regular expression engine that our minds can use to apply familiar modes of evaluation to novel presentations. We obviously do this with explicit metaphors (and similes), where part of the problem we are solving is whether the explicit guide we have been given is sound (Hey wait... can love really be like a blooming flower? Are there any bleeding thorns?) But most of us also do this most of the time when there is no explicit call to our metaphor engines, drawing on our own experience for patterns that look like they might fit the new data. Most of us usually do not take most input completely literally, most of the time.
Given a random sheet of paper torn out of a notebook written in a foreign language, a person might say something like "Gee, this looks sort of like a bookkeeper's balance sheet", and attempt to use that metaphorical framework to pull some kind of meaning from the page. If he fails to make satisfactory sense out of it as balance sheet, he goes back to the regex and substitutes in something else from his previous experience. This is an iterative MUG process: MUG Until Good. It is the common and appropriate way of applying our store of private metaphors to a new experience as we attempt to get to something useful.
In much of our daily life, we are very comfortable working with lots of ambiguity; we rarely need to get to an unambiguous understanding in order to do what we want to do. For instance, when your distant ancestor heard a rustling in the bushes, he was perfectly content to leave the exact nature of the threat, whether a wolf or a bear, ambiguous-- while he quickly sought out the nearest tree that he could climb to safety. I know this because you are reading this: your existence is proof that your ancestor could appropriately handle a great deal of ambiguity, at least until parenthood set in. Similarly, if you step off the curb and suddenly hear the nearby screech of skidding tires, you are comfortable with the ambiguity of whether it is a bus or a truck that you are now throwing yourself out of the path of. (A preposition is a terrble thing to end a sentence with. Except in English, where the rules of Latin don't always apply and the sense of the statement is sometimes emphasized by the unusual syntax.) Back now to the point.
Metaphor is an excellent tool for rapidly assessing complex new information in a way that isolates what is immediately important from what is best left ambiguous for the moment. Metaphor is related to our ability to rapidly swap different but related problems in and out of our conscious processing, until we find a fit that seems good enough to go with... but an interesting thing is that we also keep strings tied to the metaphors that did not seem to measure up on the first approximation, so we can quickly pull them back in if we need to. For instance, the paragraph above wandered off from discussing metaphor into a seemingly pointless aside about the usage of prepositions, and there is a strong likelihood that most readers would dismiss that as irrelevant to the discussion, other than raising doubts about the writer's wordsmithing abililty. But now most readers will have recognized that the apparent distraction was a set-up for this part of the discussion, and they will use the string they had attached to their initial processing of those parenthetical remarks to pull their thoughts about it back into consciousness for re-evaluation.
Was this an effective writing technique? No, and I would never use it in my fiction: it requires too much work on the part of the reader;
Wow... world view of author of post is SO totally pwned... Give Microsoft mindshare one more point.
Of greater interest, this came to me with 4+ mod points:
the 1 point everybody starts with
a second point because it was authored by someone with a little bit of karma
then two more points because post was from a 'friend of friend' and I add 2 pts to all such posts (so I can skim at 3+ or 4+ and not miss these posts)
So how should I tune my slashdot settings? Drop the 'friend of friend' boost? or prune my list of friends? Seems like I need to spend a few weeks thinking about this.
With a fool no season spend or be counted as his friend.
That's still good advice, but maybe applying it on/. is a bit harsh. Or maybe if more/.ers did this, it would improve the quality of discourse.
So why is everybody complaining about it? Have I missed something?
Uh, for one thing, you are out of touch with the realities of computer usage that most people face. There is a world full of common users who are yelling for a WinXP replacement that will meet their bread and butter needs, and you are saying to them "You should really try this delicious cake."
Yeah, I think you have missed something. Why don't you get in line (metaphorically speaking) behind Marie Antoinette? You seem to be missing the same basic sensibilities that she was missing.
Running WinXP applications under WINE under a Linux distro, and running a WinXP image as a VM under Linux are both becoming increasingly useful options. In business applications there are no significant penalties and the level of security is much higher. The cost of recovery from the various misadventures that business workstations are prone to get into is very much reduced.
I think more than a few businesses will be looking at this approach: Continue with the tried and true processes they have developed under WinXP but run the software within a Linux wrapper.
No Script is about MY having the choice of whether to run an arbitrary program on MY computer. I set up the whitelist, and I decide whether to make an exception.
My ruff & reddy rules of usage:
On first visit to any trustworthy site, add all its javascript sources that I also think are trustworthy to my white list. A one-time overhead of maybe 3 seconds.
When following a/. lead to a site that I don't know anything about, assess whether any useful content is being hidden by a NoScript block
If so, unblock the bolded item in NoScript's list of javascript sources being used on the page. If the page smells worthy of it, I'll add this source to the whitelist, otherwise I'll do the unblock as a one-time thing. Reassess whether useful content is still being hidden, and if so repeat until good.
Else, leave all script sources blocked since I can get what I came for without them, and I'm unlikely to come back.
When mucking about in the web's darker corners, do as above, except never permanently add a javascript source to the whitelist. Do it all as one-time only.
Web pages that are using scripts from three different sources are not uncommon any more. Web pages that are using scripts from 5 or 6 sources are not rare. There are web pages that are using sources that in turn draw on other sources. When running NoScript, I decide not only whether I trust the developer of this web page, but whether I trust his judgment about the scripts that he is importing from elsewhere. I decide how wide I will let the circle of trust get.
It's really a no-brainer. If you recognize the possibility that you might do something of value with the computer you are using, then use NoScript or something like that as a low cost method of protecting that potential. Otherwise, I would appreciate it if you would disconnect your virus infected, zombied machine from the internet, because your negligence is diminishing the common good.
But current physics laws don't allow endless energy for free, so what's the catch with this one?
You would have us rob black holes of their virtual energies? Oh, man, that would be so unkewl.
OTOH, using buckytubes for lossless transmission of electrons or photons is going right down this path. That will be effectively cheating entropy. So, yeah, we prolly are going to be exploiting zero point energy, in some ways. Depending on how you look at it. It is certainly being considered.
The black hole bit: IDKWTFITA, but it has always bothered me that black holes remove matter and energy from our universe without seeming to give back anything in return, other than gravity waves, which don't seem like a fair exchange. You know?
No car analogy here, sorry to say, but I can provide a somewhat more visual description than any I have seen on this thread so far. And I would very much appreciate any critiques by those who know QM (I know of it, and use it in my fiction, but I certainly don't know it. Dammit, I'm a writer, not a quantum mechanic).
First, visualize "quantum foam": virtual particles are constantly springing into existence in "empty" space, mostly to disappear again in very short intervals of time. When working at very small distances and units of time, space is full of these virtual particles, winking in and out. Some are more common than others, but all are present. The total population of these over an interval of time will exhibit QM statistical properties: that is virtual neutrinos will be much more common than virtual electron - positron pairs, which in turn will be very much more common than virtual protons and antiprotons. The sum of all this activity has been called quantum foam [John Wheeler gets credit for this, back in 1955].
Particles are waves, and waves have wavelengths. If you can put a constraint on a location in space so that a particular wavelength cannot exist at that location, then the particle associated with that wavelength cannot exist. The quantum foam in that location is less rich than in other locations. There is now a kind of "pressure gradient" between the quantum foam in the constrained region and the unconstrained regions around it.
Placing two sheets of metal closer together than the longer wavelengths of light prevent some of those virtual photons from manifesting. (My understanding is that this would only block the ones whose wavelengths are constrained by the plates, which suggests a kind of polarizing effect, but for now we can ignore that.) The Casimir effect is the force exerted on each of these plates by the pressure gradient of the quantum foam from one side of the plate to the other.
I'm thinking that we are going to have an increased need to develop effective ways of visualizing this as we start doing more with nanomaterials. For instance, I'm guessing that some of the transmission properties of buckytubes are related to constraints on the quantum foam in the inside of the tube. That a tube of the right diameter would prevent any real electron or real photon introduced at one end from doing anything other than exiting at the other end; that the geometry would force the wave to propagate only down the center of the tube.
I'm also thinking that Casimir effects might explain the attachment and release of neurotransmitters in the synaptic gap (not that the gap is necessarily involved: the synaptic cleft is around 20 nm across and that is an order of magnitude too large I think). However the surface geometries of the binding proteins are definitely in the range of Casimir effects, and it is possible that these are changing shapes in ways that release or attach the neurotransmitters. Also, I just now came across some stuff on electrical synapses where the gap is less than 4 nm and there are transmission structures with lumens of 1.2 nm diameter, which I think does mean that Casimir effects are going to be present. (But that does not mean that they are being used. Then again, as a rule, life takes advantage of every condition and edge case it can.)
I'm hoping to see some useful comments from the QM guys. Also materials engineers, anesthesiologists, and neurologists.
It has been several decades since I lived in Chicago. One of the duties of the Cook County Sheriff back then was to create an "organized crime" diversion whenever things were getting a little too hot for any of the fair-haired boys of the Democratic political machine in that city and state. This looks very similar.
My guess is that this will go away as the hoo-hoo-rah over Senator Burris' lies about his relationship with the ex-Governor Blagojevich fade into obscurity. (Burris was seated in the US Senate after testifying that he had no contacts with Blagojevich's people and had not been involved in raising money for Blagojevich after he sought be appointed Senator, but he has since recanted on both points when confronted with evidence that he had in fact been doing both.) There was a move to have a special election to replace Burris in the Illinois legislature; I understand that died earlier today.
I tip my hat to you; a more excellent reply. (The most excellent reply will of course go to that which is the fairest of them all.)
I've only now just noticed the kallistei references in the Disney rendition of Snow White. That is most interesting. Were the the Disney artists followers of the Sacred Chao? That would explain a few things.
Our moon is called a moon because the gravitational center of the two objects is under the Earth's surface.
That is not an argument, it is merely a rationale for preserving an irrational attachment to an outmoded world view. It is also a very weak rationale. You can turn it around:
The Earth - Moon system is a double planet whose barycenter is 73% of the distance between the Earth's core and its surface. That is deep in the mantle, but a very long way above the core. From the point of view of an observer on the Earth's surface, the barycenter sweeps under his feet once each day, moving at roughly 1,000 m/s, at a depth of 1,700 km. This is, however, a very parochial point of view.
From a system perspective, the Earth's core orbits around the barycenter once every 28 days, while any spot on the Earth's surface has a significant change in its angular relationship to the barycenter on an hourly basis due to the Earth's rotation. This results in significant tides, that are most easily seen in the constantly shifting boundaries between the atmosphere, hydrosphere and lithosphere along the coast lines where those three come together. The chaotic conditions at these boundaries literally keep stirring up a complex, highly reactive, chemical soup that contains portions of atmosphere, hydrosphere, and lithosphere mixing together in a manner that tends to maximize the reactive surface areas of each bubble or particle in the foamy, briney, brownish broth.
This life-sustaining (and possibly life-giving) situation is the signature feature of the Earth, and occurs precisely because the Earth is part of a double planet system whose barycenter resides a significant distance away from the Earth's core. If the Moon had no more influence on the Earth's orbit than any of the true moons of the other planets had on their primaries, there would be no tides and very much less intermixing of hydrosphere, atmosphere, and lithosphere, and probably much less life on the planet. The Earth is the way it is because it cannot be defined separately from the Moon: the two are married together in a very intimate way. This is a very different kind of relationship than any other moon has with its primary.
Argument for Pluto as a double or quintuple system stands unchanged. Taken together, that system has a planetary amount of mass, AND it is likely to have regional differences that could be interesting and would warrant investigation on an initial survey of the solar system. As opposed to Kuiper objects or other planetoids that do not appear to be very dynamic or particularly interesting (relative to other things that are available for study).
It is past time to recognize that the prototypical example we naively chose for the "moon" category was an incorrect example. Earth's Moon is not a typical moon, as any passing astrogator from another sun would be quick to point out.
A sensible alternate listing of solar system objects, as would be constructed by a visiting survey team, would look something like this:
The categorization is determined by these criteria:
Planets are big enough that they probably are not homogeneous but have different regions, some of which might be very interesting on their own (significant mineral resources, or unique, stable climates, etc). Any initial assessment of a solar system needs to include at least a cursory inspection of all the planets.
Double planets have significant gravitational effects on each other that need to be taken into account when working up an orbital approach, or with regard to choosing landing sites (to avoid unpleasantries like tidal slosh).
A moon is gravitationally bonded to a primary but is too small to have an appreciable affect on the primary. Other than collision avoidance, there is no need to consider moons when working up an orbital approach to the primary. An orbiting object is a moon if it is astrogationally useful (easily seen in a stable orbit such that a useful ephemeris could be constructed).
Other usefully named objects are a mix of moonlets, dwarf planets, comets, asteroids, and artifacts that are astrogationally useful.
It might be useful for Earth's astronomers to begin thinking along these lines. We need a better taxonomy right now, before we start to get overwhelmed with exoplanet data. Adopting the kind of pragmatic taxonomy that a survey party from a distant place would likely use would be good for the short term; it could be replaced in a few dozen decades with something better when we have enough data to support an empirically derived "Periodic Table of the Planets". But let's drop the pretense that we could do such a table at this time.
NYCL, to my mind, qualifies as as a proto-Geek or semi-Geek at this point. Full Geekdom is not conferred until he finds a way to tie the alleged presence of water on Mars to his particular area of expertise.
For instance, some of us slashdotters are concerned about Martian water rights issues. NYCL could do us a marvelously geeky service by explaining the implications that Martian water rights will have for further NASA explorations and possible settlements. For instance, in what jurisdiction will conflicting claims to water rights be resolved? For that matter, what constitutes "first use" of a water resource on Mars?
Slashdot Mirror
And you should realize that those "cash reserves" are retained earnings, profits that were withheld from distribution to the stockholders, for their long term benefit. Any intention to use those funds for anything else, such as keeping up the pretense of being a "going concern" when they are hemorrhaging (what parent post described), would bring about a stockholders' revolt and criminal charges for the Chairman of the Board and the corporate officers. No matter how that played out in the courts, the result would be the end of the Microsoft we all love to hate.
Compared to the Enron follies of yesteryear, or what is going on right now in Detroit, Microsoft's possible collapse under these conditions would not even be that big a deal. I its not like the end of Microsoft would put a whole industry out of work. Businesses would simple speed up their migrations to Linux, the people who worked with Microsoft products would move into similar slots supporting FOSS software, everything would be almost back to normal. Except everyone's budget for software licensing and virus related costs would go down.
You might want to hold on to your doubt for a bit longer.
Carmen Suro-Bredie, who signed the letter rejecting the FOIA request, is a hold-over from the Bush Administration. Could be she never got the memo that things have changed. She actually predates Bush: she was chairing hearings about trade agreements in 1992, and apparently has at least 30 years of Federal Civil Service behind her. She has always kept a very low profile: the only biography of her on the web is remarkable for saying very little and providing no dates at all. These are the hallmarks of a career bureaucrat; the kind of person who works hard, not out of any sense of ideals, or for the good of the team, but to assure that their personal situation will be more comfortable next year than it was last year (no matter who is in charge or what the new goals of the organization are).
Now that she has stumbled into the Internet's spotlight, it will be interesting to see if there is any change in her career. Her style doesn't seem to fit well with Obama's approach. OTOH, she has been working the same small patch of ground for more than 16 years, so she might know too much to be easily shown to the door.
The treaty in question has a long way to go before it is ratified. There will be opportunities for Obama to open up the process; let's see if he takes them.
The key here is "shovel ready". Most road improvements involve long and costly arguments with land owners about the value of the fifty foot long by ten foot wide strip that the city or state needs to acquire before the first construction worker can put on his hard hat. The only income generated during that first phase is what the lawyers make... and as a group lawyers don't stimulate anybody's local economy. But in this situation Microsoft already owns the land involved, so it should be a matter of a few weeks before some guys can step out of the unemployment lines and put on their hard hats.
To put this another way: the stimulus dollars will work best when they are used for "shovel ready" projects. And anyone who has hung around slashdot for a couple of weeks or more knows that there is no corporation that is as ready to shovel it around as Microsoft.
I think this may well be a good project. Provided that it will still retain some value after Microsoft goes tits up.
Microsoft is not going to survive this financial winter in its current form: its skills are all about identifying the next big wave and fighting for the best spot to surf it. That has sometimes involved tipping better surfers off their boards when they get in its way. But those skills do not translate well to the new economy, where the ability to paddle your kayak through an Eskimo roll in freezing waters is a better image for what the successful company needs to know. Redmond needs to ask whether the value of the overpass is going to be worth its half of the investment if Microsoft is no longer as big a part of its tax base three years from now.
I would expect that the project will have some long term benefits, but probably much less than most of the good people of Redmond had hoped for.
Your quote made me realize that it has now been many years since I have trusted the realism of any photos. Aside from photos that I remember from the days before shopping, I know that I will never have any idea of exactly how anyone looks.
PS: I love the GIMP.
Parent post should be modded up. There is something to be said for using a rigorous methodology when comparing the value of different employees, and that will necessarily reduce to numbers at some point.
That being said, TFA is either seriously oversimplifying what its author learned, or the companies it describes are doing it wrong.
TFA is basically describing ways of developing and presenting sociograms. The shape of any sociogram is as dependent on the choice of qualitative tools used to develop it as it is on the reality that it claims to represent. To be brief, any sociogram, no matter how numeric its appearance, is qualitative and not quantitative and has a huge amount of observer bias built into it. It is a tricksy sideshow mirror that reflects an unstated bias and is inherently untrustworthy.
I've been trying to find a way to say more without ending up as tl;dr and I can't do it adequately. So here are some teasers:
The first steps to effective HR management involve developing good job descriptions of the existing roles. Performance measures can be used to determine how well HR has done this work: do those who actually work in or with each role agree with HR's description? The next steps involve reshaping the company as a whole by changing all of those job descriptions to support the new workflows. Some of this can be quantified: your employees represent a pool of very detailed knowledge about how the jobs could be done.
Only after the above is done can you start looking at employee performance, both current and predicted in the new roles. Very little of this is truly quantifiable: about the best you can do is to say "On a scale of 1 to 5, how legible is Mr. Anderson's handwriting?" And even then, recognize that some of the most critical information may be very hard to come by.
An example of the last: Do you know that you have an entry level programmer that everyone goes to as a technical resource because he has twenty-plus years of extensive experience leading development teams, but now he's satisfied with a low pressure day job to pay the bills while he writes his first novel in the evenings? His LOC stats are miserable, because he spends a lot of time with drop-in visitors who are wondering how he would approach this bug, or refactor that monster object, or shed some light on what the hell the guys who wrote this legacy code 15 years ago were thinking about when they used that schubert approach on what is clearly a brahms problem? You probably don't want to lose this guy: he is improving the efficiency of everyone around him. But he is not going to show up favorably on any of your metrics. And in a dirty professional field like software development, he and his kind are legion.
It seems like GNU was not self-defeating, and that the gnu is no longer an obscure animal. Other than that...
Say, what was your point again?
BTW, the meaning of "caustic" to most people doesn't have much importance since most people won't be the direct customers of Caustic Graphics. The name does have a lot of meaning to the company's potential market: caustics are generally the most expensive and often critical part of photorealistic rendering. A company that chooses that word as part of its name has got to be pretty ballsy.
Um,. well, it doesn't. Should have been the other form, "March Fourteenth".
If there is justice on slashdot my karma should now be reduced from "Excellent" to merely "Very, very good".
Need more coffee....
I, for one, welcome my legislatures' recognition of the irrational in government.
In formal English, the date has always been written out as "...on Saturday the fourteenth of March, two thousand nine, at three o'clock in the afternoon" (as in an invitation). Note that the year is a parenthetical phrase set off by commas. In less formal writing with the slash abbreviation this becomes "...on Sat 3/14, 2009, at 3:00 pm" which is a form that has been in use in the USA before there was a USA. So the further contraction to "3/14/09" simply continued the process.
Now it is becoming common to use the dot abbreviation with European dates, so "3/14/09" and "14.3.09" are understood to be the same. This was becoming somewhat popular in USA communications in the first years of the Internet, but the ISO standard is now gaining favor: "2009-03-14".
A personal favorite in journals and such where I might want to sort entries by date and time, and don't want to fuss with concatenations is "20090314.1500". This fully numeric representation is compact, very sortable, and easy to move between plaintext, spreadsheets, databases.
Next, I would like to see the legislatures recognize the imaginary component in government...
I misread the statement as well, taking it at face value. So I was about to blast the editors for not catching such a blatant transposition of digits. 74% would be about right: 71% open ocean, and roughly 3% in permament lakes and such (I think the biggest of these in surface area is the Amazon River basin, which I have heard described as a slightly tilted, very shallow fresh water sea.)
Editors should be blasted for not catching and clarifying the ambiguity. This is NOT a matter of bad grammar or any mere syntax problem. This is matter of bad semantics.
Does slashdot need a cadre of semantic zealots to go along with all the grammar nazis? Could those two groups coexist?
He either didn't know about the corruption... or he was in on it.
Above post has serious blinders on. Other possibilities:
Any of these is quite likely, and the last is, exactly the kind of action I would want to see a CEO take if in the course of his work he became aware that something suspicious was happening in his business. What would be the alternative? "I'm firing you two because I'm pretty sure that you're guilty of crimes in my company's cubicles?" That would be tacky. That would be SO last year.
What say we wait and see what the story is before taking such Olympian long jumps to conclusions that might not actually be a landing place.
While definitely true in many cases, again this is a matter of correlation and does not imply that exercise causes a reduction in asthma. Other possibilities are that some asthmatics who are successful in adopting exercise regimens also change their diet, or start using a different kind of mental discipline, or any of a myriad of other things might be going on that are related to, but independent of, the exercise itself.
I grew up with asthma, hospitalized with it when I was 6, crippled by it until I was about 13. Then I made a conscious choice not to be asthmatic any more. It still definitely affected me, but there was an immediate improvement in the severity of the attacks, and over the next 20 years my asthmatic episodes continued to get milder, of shorter duration, and much less frequent. By my late thirties I was saying that I had outgrown it (though with some denial for some mild problems on rare occasion, usually exercise induced). Then it got worse for a while in my early fifties. But I realized that there was a correlation between asthma attacks and ingestion of High Fructose Corn Syrup, and by avoiding HFCS, I've become nearly asthma free again.
I'm not sure what it is about the HFCS: it did not exist when I was young so it certainly did not cause my asthma. But the increase in asthma in USA children does seem to parallel the increase in consumption of HCFS, so I'm thinking that the stuff might have some influence on the disease. I urge anyone with asthma to consider avoiding HCFS for a few weeks as a trial. It has less nutritive value than pure sugar, so going without isn't going to screw up any diets.
Q: "Is 'no' the answer to this question?"
A: "Meh."
Q: "Explain, please?"
A: "That was Zen. This is Tao."
The heart of my real argument though was that most people prefer ambiguity. If someone writes "my love is like a red, red rose"
I suggest
s/ambiguity/metaphor/
in above. And then for the sake of getting somewhere in this discussion, allowing the simile to stand as a metaphor for "metaphor". Call it a metametaphor (and that is a serious piece of humor).
Human language is built strongly on metaphor, which at one level is a kind of regular expression engine that our minds can use to apply familiar modes of evaluation to novel presentations. We obviously do this with explicit metaphors (and similes), where part of the problem we are solving is whether the explicit guide we have been given is sound (Hey wait... can love really be like a blooming flower? Are there any bleeding thorns?) But most of us also do this most of the time when there is no explicit call to our metaphor engines, drawing on our own experience for patterns that look like they might fit the new data. Most of us usually do not take most input completely literally, most of the time.
Given a random sheet of paper torn out of a notebook written in a foreign language, a person might say something like "Gee, this looks sort of like a bookkeeper's balance sheet", and attempt to use that metaphorical framework to pull some kind of meaning from the page. If he fails to make satisfactory sense out of it as balance sheet, he goes back to the regex and substitutes in something else from his previous experience. This is an iterative MUG process: MUG Until Good. It is the common and appropriate way of applying our store of private metaphors to a new experience as we attempt to get to something useful.
In much of our daily life, we are very comfortable working with lots of ambiguity; we rarely need to get to an unambiguous understanding in order to do what we want to do. For instance, when your distant ancestor heard a rustling in the bushes, he was perfectly content to leave the exact nature of the threat, whether a wolf or a bear, ambiguous-- while he quickly sought out the nearest tree that he could climb to safety. I know this because you are reading this: your existence is proof that your ancestor could appropriately handle a great deal of ambiguity, at least until parenthood set in. Similarly, if you step off the curb and suddenly hear the nearby screech of skidding tires, you are comfortable with the ambiguity of whether it is a bus or a truck that you are now throwing yourself out of the path of. (A preposition is a terrble thing to end a sentence with. Except in English, where the rules of Latin don't always apply and the sense of the statement is sometimes emphasized by the unusual syntax.) Back now to the point.
Metaphor is an excellent tool for rapidly assessing complex new information in a way that isolates what is immediately important from what is best left ambiguous for the moment. Metaphor is related to our ability to rapidly swap different but related problems in and out of our conscious processing, until we find a fit that seems good enough to go with... but an interesting thing is that we also keep strings tied to the metaphors that did not seem to measure up on the first approximation, so we can quickly pull them back in if we need to. For instance, the paragraph above wandered off from discussing metaphor into a seemingly pointless aside about the usage of prepositions, and there is a strong likelihood that most readers would dismiss that as irrelevant to the discussion, other than raising doubts about the writer's wordsmithing abililty. But now most readers will have recognized that the apparent distraction was a set-up for this part of the discussion, and they will use the string they had attached to their initial processing of those parenthetical remarks to pull their thoughts about it back into consciousness for re-evaluation.
Was this an effective writing technique? No, and I would never use it in my fiction: it requires too much work on the part of the reader;
Wow... world view of author of post is SO totally pwned... Give Microsoft mindshare one more point.
Of greater interest, this came to me with 4+ mod points:
So how should I tune my slashdot settings? Drop the 'friend of friend' boost? or prune my list of friends? Seems like I need to spend a few weeks thinking about this.
That's still good advice, but maybe applying it on /. is a bit harsh. Or maybe if more /.ers did this, it would improve the quality of discourse.
So why is everybody complaining about it? Have I missed something?
Uh, for one thing, you are out of touch with the realities of computer usage that most people face. There is a world full of common users who are yelling for a WinXP replacement that will meet their bread and butter needs, and you are saying to them "You should really try this delicious cake."
Yeah, I think you have missed something. Why don't you get in line (metaphorically speaking) behind Marie Antoinette? You seem to be missing the same basic sensibilities that she was missing.
Running WinXP applications under WINE under a Linux distro, and running a WinXP image as a VM under Linux are both becoming increasingly useful options. In business applications there are no significant penalties and the level of security is much higher. The cost of recovery from the various misadventures that business workstations are prone to get into is very much reduced.
I think more than a few businesses will be looking at this approach: Continue with the tried and true processes they have developed under WinXP but run the software within a Linux wrapper.
You don't know anything of what you speak.
No Script is about MY having the choice of whether to run an arbitrary program on MY computer. I set up the whitelist, and I decide whether to make an exception.
My ruff & reddy rules of usage:
Web pages that are using scripts from three different sources are not uncommon any more. Web pages that are using scripts from 5 or 6 sources are not rare. There are web pages that are using sources that in turn draw on other sources. When running NoScript, I decide not only whether I trust the developer of this web page, but whether I trust his judgment about the scripts that he is importing from elsewhere. I decide how wide I will let the circle of trust get.
It's really a no-brainer. If you recognize the possibility that you might do something of value with the computer you are using, then use NoScript or something like that as a low cost method of protecting that potential. Otherwise, I would appreciate it if you would disconnect your virus infected, zombied machine from the internet, because your negligence is diminishing the common good.
But current physics laws don't allow endless energy for free, so what's the catch with this one?
You would have us rob black holes of their virtual energies? Oh, man, that would be so unkewl.
OTOH, using buckytubes for lossless transmission of electrons or photons is going right down this path. That will be effectively cheating entropy. So, yeah, we prolly are going to be exploiting zero point energy, in some ways. Depending on how you look at it. It is certainly being considered.
The black hole bit: IDKWTFITA, but it has always bothered me that black holes remove matter and energy from our universe without seeming to give back anything in return, other than gravity waves, which don't seem like a fair exchange. You know?
No car analogy here, sorry to say, but I can provide a somewhat more visual description than any I have seen on this thread so far. And I would very much appreciate any critiques by those who know QM (I know of it, and use it in my fiction, but I certainly don't know it. Dammit, I'm a writer, not a quantum mechanic).
First, visualize "quantum foam": virtual particles are constantly springing into existence in "empty" space, mostly to disappear again in very short intervals of time. When working at very small distances and units of time, space is full of these virtual particles, winking in and out. Some are more common than others, but all are present. The total population of these over an interval of time will exhibit QM statistical properties: that is virtual neutrinos will be much more common than virtual electron - positron pairs, which in turn will be very much more common than virtual protons and antiprotons. The sum of all this activity has been called quantum foam [John Wheeler gets credit for this, back in 1955].
Particles are waves, and waves have wavelengths. If you can put a constraint on a location in space so that a particular wavelength cannot exist at that location, then the particle associated with that wavelength cannot exist. The quantum foam in that location is less rich than in other locations. There is now a kind of "pressure gradient" between the quantum foam in the constrained region and the unconstrained regions around it.
Placing two sheets of metal closer together than the longer wavelengths of light prevent some of those virtual photons from manifesting. (My understanding is that this would only block the ones whose wavelengths are constrained by the plates, which suggests a kind of polarizing effect, but for now we can ignore that.) The Casimir effect is the force exerted on each of these plates by the pressure gradient of the quantum foam from one side of the plate to the other.
I'm thinking that we are going to have an increased need to develop effective ways of visualizing this as we start doing more with nanomaterials. For instance, I'm guessing that some of the transmission properties of buckytubes are related to constraints on the quantum foam in the inside of the tube. That a tube of the right diameter would prevent any real electron or real photon introduced at one end from doing anything other than exiting at the other end; that the geometry would force the wave to propagate only down the center of the tube.
I'm also thinking that Casimir effects might explain the attachment and release of neurotransmitters in the synaptic gap (not that the gap is necessarily involved: the synaptic cleft is around 20 nm across and that is an order of magnitude too large I think). However the surface geometries of the binding proteins are definitely in the range of Casimir effects, and it is possible that these are changing shapes in ways that release or attach the neurotransmitters. Also, I just now came across some stuff on electrical synapses where the gap is less than 4 nm and there are transmission structures with lumens of 1.2 nm diameter, which I think does mean that Casimir effects are going to be present. (But that does not mean that they are being used. Then again, as a rule, life takes advantage of every condition and edge case it can.)
I'm hoping to see some useful comments from the QM guys. Also materials engineers, anesthesiologists, and neurologists.
It has been several decades since I lived in Chicago. One of the duties of the Cook County Sheriff back then was to create an "organized crime" diversion whenever things were getting a little too hot for any of the fair-haired boys of the Democratic political machine in that city and state. This looks very similar.
My guess is that this will go away as the hoo-hoo-rah over Senator Burris' lies about his relationship with the ex-Governor Blagojevich fade into obscurity. (Burris was seated in the US Senate after testifying that he had no contacts with Blagojevich's people and had not been involved in raising money for Blagojevich after he sought be appointed Senator, but he has since recanted on both points when confronted with evidence that he had in fact been doing both.) There was a move to have a special election to replace Burris in the Illinois legislature; I understand that died earlier today.
I tip my hat to you; a more excellent reply. (The most excellent reply will of course go to that which is the fairest of them all.)
I've only now just noticed the kallistei references in the Disney rendition of Snow White. That is most interesting. Were the the Disney artists followers of the Sacred Chao? That would explain a few things.
Our moon is called a moon because the gravitational center of the two objects is under the Earth's surface.
That is not an argument, it is merely a rationale for preserving an irrational attachment to an outmoded world view. It is also a very weak rationale. You can turn it around:
The Earth - Moon system is a double planet whose barycenter is 73% of the distance between the Earth's core and its surface. That is deep in the mantle, but a very long way above the core. From the point of view of an observer on the Earth's surface, the barycenter sweeps under his feet once each day, moving at roughly 1,000 m/s, at a depth of 1,700 km. This is, however, a very parochial point of view.
From a system perspective, the Earth's core orbits around the barycenter once every 28 days, while any spot on the Earth's surface has a significant change in its angular relationship to the barycenter on an hourly basis due to the Earth's rotation. This results in significant tides, that are most easily seen in the constantly shifting boundaries between the atmosphere, hydrosphere and lithosphere along the coast lines where those three come together. The chaotic conditions at these boundaries literally keep stirring up a complex, highly reactive, chemical soup that contains portions of atmosphere, hydrosphere, and lithosphere mixing together in a manner that tends to maximize the reactive surface areas of each bubble or particle in the foamy, briney, brownish broth.
This life-sustaining (and possibly life-giving) situation is the signature feature of the Earth, and occurs precisely because the Earth is part of a double planet system whose barycenter resides a significant distance away from the Earth's core. If the Moon had no more influence on the Earth's orbit than any of the true moons of the other planets had on their primaries, there would be no tides and very much less intermixing of hydrosphere, atmosphere, and lithosphere, and probably much less life on the planet. The Earth is the way it is because it cannot be defined separately from the Moon: the two are married together in a very intimate way. This is a very different kind of relationship than any other moon has with its primary.
Argument for Pluto as a double or quintuple system stands unchanged. Taken together, that system has a planetary amount of mass, AND it is likely to have regional differences that could be interesting and would warrant investigation on an initial survey of the solar system. As opposed to Kuiper objects or other planetoids that do not appear to be very dynamic or particularly interesting (relative to other things that are available for study).
Eris should be called a planet.
If you don't invite her to the party, there will be hell to pay.
It is past time to recognize that the prototypical example we naively chose for the "moon" category was an incorrect example. Earth's Moon is not a typical moon, as any passing astrogator from another sun would be quick to point out.
A sensible alternate listing of solar system objects, as would be constructed by a visiting survey team, would look something like this:
The categorization is determined by these criteria:
It might be useful for Earth's astronomers to begin thinking along these lines. We need a better taxonomy right now, before we start to get overwhelmed with exoplanet data. Adopting the kind of pragmatic taxonomy that a survey party from a distant place would likely use would be good for the short term; it could be replaced in a few dozen decades with something better when we have enough data to support an empirically derived "Periodic Table of the Planets". But let's drop the pretense that we could do such a table at this time.
NYCL, to my mind, qualifies as as a proto-Geek or semi-Geek at this point. Full Geekdom is not conferred until he finds a way to tie the alleged presence of water on Mars to his particular area of expertise.
For instance, some of us slashdotters are concerned about Martian water rights issues. NYCL could do us a marvelously geeky service by explaining the implications that Martian water rights will have for further NASA explorations and possible settlements. For instance, in what jurisdiction will conflicting claims to water rights be resolved? For that matter, what constitutes "first use" of a water resource on Mars?