[sensible child proofing] It's sensible to do all that when your child is 3. It crosses the border to insanity if you do that when your child is 13.
While I understand and agree with the general point being made, I strongly disagree with the specific example.
One of the worst horrors from my years as a Registered Nurse in an Emergency Room was the grief of the 70 year old grandparents when their 3 year old grandchild drank from the bleach bottle kept under the sink during the first fifteen minutes of the kid's first visit to their home. It had been more than 40 years since they had children in the house and now because they had relaxed their guard, their grandchild was in incredible pain from the esophageal burns and at best faced growing up with frequent corrective surgeries because scar tissue just doesn't adapt to growth the way that normal esophageal tissue does. We got the child stable enough to transfer her to the Pediatric ICU, but this was one case where I did not want to know anything about how she did after that. I've seen a lot of misery of one kind or another, but this was so senseless...
If there is ANY possibility of young children visiting your house, keep up with the child proofing. Think of it as very low cost insurance against having nightmare memories of the worst kind of catastrophe for the rest of your life.
Is there a named cognitive bias (or something similar) for suddenly liking and missing someone who was universally considered a git prior to his passing?
If there is not a name for this, there should be. Maybe call it the Roland Effect, in honor of a man who may well have been less of a git and more important to my world than I had realized before.
Well, no, actually, it isn't. That point of view is at least one level of abstraction beyond the phenomena of climate and weather that are the subject of the discussion.
The climate and weather in my part of the world are in large part generated by the interactions between cold, dry arctic air masses and warm, wet Pacific subtropical air masses. We get the cold blue northerns and we get the pineapple expresses, and sometimes we'll get both in the same week and believe me, its pretty damned obvious that these are different airs separated by boundary effects that can include a 50 F temperature differential.
Any carbon "balancing act" that results in pumping more CO2 into the mother arctic air mass with a corresponding reduction in CO2 in the mother Pacific subtropical air mass is likely to have a very pronounced effect on my climate, even if at the global level this can be considered carbon neutral. I am pretty sure that this is generally true for all other climates as well.
The level of interest is regional, that's where the climate affects us. "Global climate" is a convenient shorthand phrase for "the set of all regional climates" but it is an entirely theoretical construct that is less appropriate in discussions of climate change than a lot of spin doctors would like us to believe.
Could be. Could be that he once bought something else at a Best Buy somewhere and established a customer account at that time. Any non-cash transaction since then would attach to his account; Best Buy would forward to Samsung the info Samsung needs for recalls or upgrades.
I think poster may be confusing the use of a debit card with cold, hard, anonymous cash. If you want to buy something in total anonymity, then hit an ATM first and pay with legal tender rather than an electronic promise.
The thought that M$ could just ride it out until the economy improves is based on the unstated assumption that they will have product that others are interested in buying later on. That might not be the case. The economic downturn is causing a lot of companies to look at MS Office alternatives that might offer them lower TCOs, and even look at alternative OSs. Those are the only 2 products where M$ has been consistently profitable.
Layoffs are unpleasant and the work environment after a layoff typically sucks. The really good employees can see where this is going to go and start looking for better options elsewhere. So even if you target the layoff at the bottom 10%, you lose a number from the upper echelons, too. Then you have to backfill their positions of responsibility from the remaining pool of less capable employees, which adds a whole new negative dynamic to a workplace that where morale is already bad.
If M$ is talking seriously about layoffs, then a whole lot of the better dolphins are rehearsing how to say "So long, and thanks for all the fish" and shopping their resumes.
And the way things are shaping up, M$ should be planning layoffs. Its not as if the only two products that make them any money are recession proof. They've been starting to face real competition in the OS and office suite markets lately, and a downturn is going to favor those competitors.
It could be, that like most lawyers, he doesn't actually believe in the RIAA cause and just wants their money.
Finally an intelligent post about the subject.
A lawyer is a hired gun, and has a duty to fight for his client, whatever his personal opinion. I've got no idea what his opinion of the RIAA is or what his opinion of copyright law is. I know he has been charging the RIAA incredible amounts, the kinds of fees some people charge for work they would really rather not do. I also know this: if I faced an RIAA lawsuit and his services were available and affordable to me, I'd be confident that he would give me a great defence.
Whatever his views of the RIAA and copyright issues, he does know where a lot of the bones are buried. Could be something good will come out of this.
Not saying this is good. Just saying that I don't see enough information here to make a judgment yet.
Yes! Whether distractions are bad depends completely on what you are doing (or how you do it).
For instance, people who use Python need a fair bit of distraction to keep their minds occupied and thus find some kind of satisfaction while working in that highly restrictive environment. But people who program with Perl need a low distraction environment while they exercise their creative potential.
There is so much more to programming than whitespace can contain:-)
Yeah, that kind of screw-up (spurious introduction of false significance) should have been caught by the Cosmos Magazine editors. You just can't hire good help any more.
On a related issue, there are hypotheses that ice ages and mass extinctions may be due to the way solar orbit around galactic center bobs up and down through the denser central plane of the galaxy. IIRC, the mechanisms had to do with disturbances in the Oort cloud shaking loose a lot more comets and such, some of which impact Earth.
So with the new data that the Sun is revolving about galactic core faster, does this rule out the various bobble hypotheses? Or does it strengthen them by showing a stronger correlation between bobs and smacks?
Um, no, not everything can be modeled to a useful degree. Self-modifying systems that rewrite their own rules are extremely difficult to model. When these systems also include self-aware components, they usually cannot be modeled in a satisfactorily efficient way. When some of the self-aware components have attributes whose workings lie outside the realms of physics and mathematics, such as imagination or appreciation of art then they cannot be modeled at all.
The marketplace is a cultural and biological phenomenon. Trying to apply maths or physics analogs to its behavior is as absurd as trying to develop a numeric score for rating fine art. In some ways it is worse, because if the market becomes aware that it is being modeled, components within it will attempt to use that modeling to affect the market. (Artists would just laugh their heads off.)
In other words, a calculus capable of modeling market behavior would need to be able to modify its own postulates according to rules that it could re-invent at any time. Such a calculus cannot exist.
How the hell can you apply any kind of probability measure to a self-aware environment like a marketplace?
Bayesian methods or any other are not going to get around the way the very measure of the risk is going to alter the market itself. You can't use physics and math to predict biologic and cultural processes, not when the processes have the same order of complexity as entire ecosystems and a capacity to learn and change that we haven't yet even begun to understand.
Introduce a risk management tool into a real estate market so you can enlarge that market by identifying marginal mortgage situations that are actually safe enough to go with, and you create whole new market segments building new housing to meet this brand new demand. And speculating in old housing; taking out high risk mortgages to flip a house and sell it at a hefty profit in 12 months, rinse and repeat. Watch those new market segments grow, and distort and inflate the entire housing industry.
We been there. We done that. Let's not do it again.
We need to recognise that any predictive market tools like those of risk management can have a profound, immediate, and unpredictable effect on the underlying market the purport to represent.
How is the risk of driving with that airbag in your car compared to a normal one?
This car analogy needs to be boosted to the next higher level of complexity to have any value. The better question is
If all the drivers who are whizzing around you on the freeway think that their air bags are providing them with a safer crash environment than they used to have, how does that alter your real risk of getting into a collision?
I think that quote gets closer to the issue than what I've read so far in NYT Risk Mismanagement article. Or seen printed anywhere else, as yet.
What I don't hear anyone talking about as yet is that VaR and the other fancy new risk management tools failed to account for the way that their deployment would of itself change the underlying dynamics of the economies they were attempting to measure. WRT the housing bubble, for example, VaR measures gave banks the confidence to go with mortgages that they would not have touched in 1985; this enabled whole new industries of speculation in real estate, which in turn shifted the underlying real estate markets in ways that where outside the historical basis the VaRs were built upon. VaR failed to assess the risks of the bubble because VaR was itself indirectly responsible for inflating the bubble. VaR caused a runaway positive feedback system to form.
Basically, a VaR is a future-oriented predictive tool. When used to excess in self-aware environments like markets, you end up with analytical systems with too much feedback from future possibilities altering the current processes... and driving those processes further and further from predicates the predictive tools use.
M$ is an excellent way of disambiguating the abbreviation, which could otherwise cause confusion between Mississippi, Multiple Sclerosis, Manuscript, and so on. It has the added advantage of clearly announcing the author's POV, and for anyone who was paying attention at the time, recalls the bad old days of undocumented DOS, public and private Windows APIs, "embrace and extend", and so on.
Micro$oft has put a lot of effort into refining the behaviors that have earned it the dollar sign in its name. It isn't easy to get all the people in an organization as large as Micro$oft to shed the fetters of their early training in morality, ethics, and playing nicely with the other children. M$'s freedom from the limitations of ethical encumbrances deserves to be recognized.
Public usage of "M$", and "Micro$oft", is perfectly cromulent. This is a company that has gone to great lengths to earn this kind of recognition, and it would be almost criminal not to award it to them.
Give them 20 more years, and they may have "declined" to the size that IBM is now.
I dispute that "fact". Public financial statements of both companies are easily available on the web. By the simplest measure, they show IBM is twice as big as Microsoft (TA of $120.4 billion to $65.1 billion). By more sophisticated measures, IBM's comparative size is very much greater than this while MSFT has just a little tiny multiplier (IBM L/A = 0.76; MSFT L/A = 0.48, etc)
Comparing Microsoft to IBM is like comparing the four hundred pound gorilla to the two and a half ton elephant. Only a ass would see the antics of the ape as somehow making it look like the bigger of the two. Any value in the remainder of parent post is pretty much undermined by the demonstrated ignorance of fact.
My personal guess is that with economies crashing left and right, businesses are going to look hard at where they can pare down costs, and traditional IT departments with their sizeable cost-center structures are going become major targets for right-sizing. Microsoft's future is going to be determined by the shift from purchase-license software to FOSS-with-support business models, and the future for MSFT is bleak. Most of MSFT's skills are in market management and are going to become as obsolete as a fletcher's skills when the infantry adopts firearms. Microsoft's technical skills have been adequate for the commercial grade software of the last millenium, but fall far short of what is now the common level of quality in business grade FOSS products.
Say what you will but Bill Gates' vision was revolutionary for the time. He brought shrink wrapped software to the masses. No one had done it successfully before him.
Revisionist history. When shrinkwrap software was an emerging market, Microsoft was but one software house among many that were producing good product on 5.25" floppies. There were also Borland, WordPerfect, Broderbund, Lotus Development Corp, and dozens of other companies. Microsoft was no leader of the pack back in the day.
Microsoft did prove to be most successfully ruthless dog in the pack, though. It's "embrace and extend (and extinguish)" market strategy is arguably a true innovation, and its use of vaporware to limit the encroachment of better technologies on its market share demonstrated a superb mastery of advertising and marketing skills. It has also demonstrated a truly incredible disdain for the fetters of morality, ethics, and law. Microsoft has never been particularly strong in technical skills, but from the first it has been fantastically good at marketing, including pimping its image.
Basically Microsoft has gotten to the top by being the most successful slut on the street corner, knowing when to give the chauffeurs driving the rich guy's limousines a free ride, and knowing how to sidle up close enough to the competition to take a razor blade to her pretty face.
Where in this idiot scheme is the originality that would make this patentable? There is nothing here that is patentable. Taking capabilities away from prior art doesn't make what's left behind into something new and patentable. Adding those capabilities back at extra cost doesn't make it patentable. Renting technology that was available earlier for purchase doesn't make the technology patentable. Maybe the MS strategy is to simply buy off the USPO. In some ways they seem to have more expertise in black politics operations than they do in technology development.
As to the business model proposed in this patent-- in the short term its one of the better things that could happen for Linux and OpenOffice. Just having Microsoft talk about possibly doing this right now is going to increase interest in migration from their products to FOSS and FOSS-based service models. In the long term, maybe this won't be so good since it hasn't yet been demonstrated that FOSS would continue to innovate and improve without some competition from commercial products.
512 MB ram is probably enough for SUSE in an office setting.
As my second computer, I'm running Ubuntu on an older and slower Compaq that has only 384 MB ram. I use this for general office work (OOo, Firefox, Thunderbird, etc) when I've got my primary computer tied up with a 10 hour photorealistic ray trace rendering. I don't notice any performance difference with office type tasks between these:
Above are reported by cat/proc/cpuinfo rounded to 2 sigfigs
I've never tried to use the Compaq for a tough job like rendering. I expect it would not be a pleasant experience. But its good with word processing, spreadsheets, working up presentations, and so forth.
The Soviet Union's collapse actually began in 1953, when Stalin died. Krushchev (1953-1964) had neither the personal charisma nor the cold blooded ruthlessness, nor (in retrospect) the egomania that was needed to hold together the empire that Stalin had built. K inherited an incredibly powerful imperial structure, that Stalin had built with what history will deem as the largest and possibly the bloodiest slave labor state the world has ever seen. Ghengis Khan's hordes pale in comparison. It was such a well crafted totalitarian state that it survived despite Kruhschev's failing to be the pure bastard that was needed to run such an organization, and it continued to wilt only slowly under Brezhnev.
Gorbachov recognized that it was no longer possible to maintain the tight controls on communications a totalitarian state requires, and began making it easier to get licenses for things like typewriters, copiers, and fax machines. For the Soviet economy to survive, it had to start trading on an equal footing with the rest of the world, and for that to happen, lateral communication had to be allowed to augment the star-only channels of totalitarianism. But Glasnost could not happen fast enough; the center could not hold.
Glasnost could possibly have worked, if the rest of the world had stayed with 1970s communications technology. But in the 1980s, cheap personal computers gave even small businesses in Europe and the Americas trading and manufacturing advantages that Russia could not compete with. For the Soviet Union to have met that challenge would have required it to acquire and install the entire annual worldwide production of PCs for several years in row. It just couldn't happen.
Every other condition that obtained during the 1980s is something that the Soviet Union could have managed. The reason why it failed during the USA Alzheimer President's watch rather stumbling along for a few more decades was the introduction of the personal computer into every economy the Soviet Union was involved with, except its own.
It really did all have to do with Lotus 1.2.3, PeachTree Accounting, and Word Star, which enabled western institutions and businesses to do things like 'Just In Time' inventory systems and effective cost accounting management practices. This had nothing at all to do with capitalism versus communism; this was entirely about pragmatic computer usage versus totalitarian strictures on communications.
What is with the entitlement mentality within government?
Well, you just named it.
The USA along with many other western countries adopted the highly successful British Civil Service model (you know, the one that made it so that "the Sun never sets on the British Empire"?). The adoption was deliberate and happened more than 100 years ago.
The BCS model involves paying civil servants peanuts but offering incredibly rich benefits, retirement plans, insurance, etc, etc, etc, including early retirement possibilities. The level of perks is high enough to assure a huge pool of applicants. You can then use all kinds of screening processes to pare this down to a smaller pool of candidates, who you can string along for weeks or months, before selecting the new hires. The process naturally favors people who are very much into maximizing their personal long term potential and will work hard to assure that they don't get into trouble with the bosses.
So yeah, the basic problem is an entitlement scheme that leads to a very different kind of employee than those you find in most of the USA private sector. Civil servants are oriented differently, are more of the dog soldier type (trusting higher levels of management handle messy problems like ethics, etc), tend to have a weird kind of long term view where they base their actions on the probable effects on their jobs five years in the future more than any other criteria.
People with this kind of orientation are not going to be good choices for managing emerging technologies, such as NASA. That's been proven by the abject failure of the Shuttle Program (it has come nowhere close to fulfilling its original specs) and asshole decisions like using a pure oxygen environment in an Apollo capsule to avoid the Mickey Mouse sound of an oxy-helium mix.
But the system does work well for a lot of the permanent government. You know, the White House cooks, and the Senate janitorial staff, and all the Administrative Assistants who turn the handwritten notes of elected officials into Word documents, and so forth.
It always amazes me the mistakes people make because they don't study history, or blatantly choose to ignore it.
The USA defeated the communist Soviet Union by outspending them in the specific industry of aerospace technology.
The USA did not defeat the communist Soviet Union through outspending on any type of technology. The Soviet Union came apart because that kind of intensely centralized control of information could not withstand the subversive nature of widespread use of personal computers... and at the same time adoption of personal computers became absolutely necessary to maintain the Soviet economy.
More than any other single cause, the destruction of the Soviet Union came about because of the self-serving efforts of Mr Bill Gates, MS-DOS, and the explosion of business related personal computer software in the 1980s.
Or maybe it wasn't Gates. It might have been the effect of Mr. Dan Bricklin's VisaCalc on the Soviet penchant for Five Year Plans. Gotta think about that.
Should also think about the way a lot of rocket scientists end up managing to become highly trained and influential persons without getting up any actual education anywhere along the way. There should be a Public Health epidemiological study done. This phenomenon seems all too common any more, and it tends to break all kinds of societal structures, producing unhealthy situations that, if approached from a Public Health point of view, could and should be managed. The same way that Public Health is involved in quality control of sewer systems.
Okay, that last paragraph was prolly over the top, maybe even to the point of seeming paranoid delusional. Please forgive me, for not yet have I ingested sufficient caffeine for this day.
Hmm. On rereading this, I think I'm trying to out troll a troll. Oh well. I've got karma to burn and I haven't seen mod points in 5 years so WTF. Mebbe this'll amuse somebody.
I think Javascript would be an excellent choice, especially on Firefox 3.1+, with a well chosen set of extensions (the Web Developer for one, and the spell checker active). You'd also need to standardize on a good text editor. I'm assuming this will be taught in the Windows environment, so I'd recommend PSPad Editor. It supports syntax highlighting, tabbed editing, and search and replace across multiple files. There are several other good ones, and frankly I don't recall what it was about PSPad that caused me to choose it over the others when I was setting up a similar course in an adult education milieu a couple of years ago.
This package would get them started with a tool set they will not outgrow for the next five to ten years, no matter where they take their education. The tools are all FOSS so you and the school would be free from worrying about the students violating copyright licenses. There are portable versions of these that fit very nicely on a 1 GB thumb drive with plenty of room left for the student's work: if the budget supports it, you could outfit each student with a portable development environment for under 10USD. You can use Firefox bookmarks to provide them with access to on-line tutorials and reference materials.
Javascript is excellent in its support of all the facets of programming that can be fitted into a first year introductory course. And there are a couple of big but maybe not so obvious advantages in teaching an intro course with Javascript:
From the beginning the student is shown in a very pragmatic way the differences between a declarative language like HTML markup and a procedural language like Javascript. Teachers of college level programming courses will thank you for that!
The student necessarily learns how to use code libraries appropriately and how to treat imported functions as black boxes. Courses in Basic and Pascal have the unfortunate side effect of teaching the student that he has to re-invent the wheel every time he wants something to roll. Students who first start with these languages tend to have problems with ego involvement in their code later on. But students whose first experiences in programming involve borrowing code that others have written seem better prepared to join collaborative teams.
Or of course you could teach them Basic, which is adequate for a structured programming approach, and would prepare them for an excellent 1980s educational experience.:-)
I'm glad that the argument that "they do it for the glory" worked for your dad. But I think in general it is a weak argument that doesn't really explain much and may be mostly fictitious. For instance, the Spread Firefox contingent make a seriously important contribution to the larger Firefox community, but none of them are in it for the glory, or are using programmer's skills for that matter.
[I know I'm preaching to the choir here. Please think about how you might be able to use the following in your efforts to convince those around you that FOSS is an important phenomenon that is significantly reshaping our world. Consider this a part of my contribution back to the open source communities that are giving me so much: Ubuntu, OpenOffice, Blender, Apache, GnuCash, and the list goes on and on...]
Here's a core truth about successful FOSS projects: it really is all about the community.
These projects come together like an Amish community that decides it needs a new meeting house, or an Inuit community that decides it needs a new whaling canoe.
Community members gather to mutually develop a plan, then each contributes a bit of their labor in their free time for the common good. In the Amish community, those with carpentry skills measure the boards and do the hammering; those with lesser skills work the saws and fetch and carry the boards. Others with different skills prepare the meals. Everyone contributes to the building and in a Saturday's time, hundreds of man hours, including that of skilled craftsmen, cause a new meeting house to be raised.
Everyone involved benefits: any member of the community can use the building. No one person owns the result, but everyone involved is wealthier for having access to the new asset. And it all comes together with incredible speed, and (by capitalistic standards) an impossibly low cost of production.
This is a very ancient way of getting big projects done. The internet makes it easy to go back to these ancient ways for software production. The internet makes it possible for worldwide communities to form around different ideas that would benefit everybody (an office suite with fully shareable data files-- OpenOffice.org; a superior 3D modeling and animation package-- Blender; an accounting package that even a mon'n'pop grocery store could afford to use-- GnuCash). Given sufficient interest, a production team of thousands can self-assemble and create in a very short time a piece of complex software that matches or exceeds the quality that any closed shop could afford to produce.
Since there is no cost involved in sharing the results of these community efforts even with people who are outside of the community, it makes sense to just make them completely open for anyone to use. For one thing, it is easier to do that than to come up with any kind of exclusionary scheme. Any more, these products are generally copyrighted by some representative of the community, but the licensing is used to protect the community's long term interests in its jointly owned property, and not as means to play zero sum profit games. The wealth that the community builders wanted is there, and is undiminished by sharing it with everyone. To not so share it would actually be harder to do and would add an impossible cost.
A Christian might see this as a loaves and fishes thing. What would have happened at that assembly if some guy in the middle of the crowd decided that he was not going to hand the basket on unless the fellow next to him paid him a coin or two. Well, the other baskets being passed about would route around him, wouldn't they? And that is what the FOSS concept is turning the world of software into: a gigantic loaves and fishes meeting where nobody is going to go hungry.
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[sensible child proofing] It's sensible to do all that when your child is 3. It crosses the border to insanity if you do that when your child is 13.
While I understand and agree with the general point being made, I strongly disagree with the specific example.
One of the worst horrors from my years as a Registered Nurse in an Emergency Room was the grief of the 70 year old grandparents when their 3 year old grandchild drank from the bleach bottle kept under the sink during the first fifteen minutes of the kid's first visit to their home. It had been more than 40 years since they had children in the house and now because they had relaxed their guard, their grandchild was in incredible pain from the esophageal burns and at best faced growing up with frequent corrective surgeries because scar tissue just doesn't adapt to growth the way that normal esophageal tissue does. We got the child stable enough to transfer her to the Pediatric ICU, but this was one case where I did not want to know anything about how she did after that. I've seen a lot of misery of one kind or another, but this was so senseless...
If there is ANY possibility of young children visiting your house, keep up with the child proofing. Think of it as very low cost insurance against having nightmare memories of the worst kind of catastrophe for the rest of your life.
Yeah, parent post sums up my feelings.
Is there a named cognitive bias (or something similar) for suddenly liking and missing someone who was universally considered a git prior to his passing?
If there is not a name for this, there should be. Maybe call it the Roland Effect, in honor of a man who may well have been less of a git and more important to my world than I had realized before.
...all the air is connected
Well, no, actually, it isn't. That point of view is at least one level of abstraction beyond the phenomena of climate and weather that are the subject of the discussion.
The climate and weather in my part of the world are in large part generated by the interactions between cold, dry arctic air masses and warm, wet Pacific subtropical air masses. We get the cold blue northerns and we get the pineapple expresses, and sometimes we'll get both in the same week and believe me, its pretty damned obvious that these are different airs separated by boundary effects that can include a 50 F temperature differential.
Any carbon "balancing act" that results in pumping more CO2 into the mother arctic air mass with a corresponding reduction in CO2 in the mother Pacific subtropical air mass is likely to have a very pronounced effect on my climate, even if at the global level this can be considered carbon neutral. I am pretty sure that this is generally true for all other climates as well.
The level of interest is regional, that's where the climate affects us. "Global climate" is a convenient shorthand phrase for "the set of all regional climates" but it is an entirely theoretical construct that is less appropriate in discussions of climate change than a lot of spin doctors would like us to believe.
Could be. Could be that he once bought something else at a Best Buy somewhere and established a customer account at that time. Any non-cash transaction since then would attach to his account; Best Buy would forward to Samsung the info Samsung needs for recalls or upgrades.
I think poster may be confusing the use of a debit card with cold, hard, anonymous cash. If you want to buy something in total anonymity, then hit an ATM first and pay with legal tender rather than an electronic promise.
The thought that M$ could just ride it out until the economy improves is based on the unstated assumption that they will have product that others are interested in buying later on. That might not be the case. The economic downturn is causing a lot of companies to look at MS Office alternatives that might offer them lower TCOs, and even look at alternative OSs. Those are the only 2 products where M$ has been consistently profitable.
Parent post raises a good point.
Layoffs are unpleasant and the work environment after a layoff typically sucks. The really good employees can see where this is going to go and start looking for better options elsewhere. So even if you target the layoff at the bottom 10%, you lose a number from the upper echelons, too. Then you have to backfill their positions of responsibility from the remaining pool of less capable employees, which adds a whole new negative dynamic to a workplace that where morale is already bad.
If M$ is talking seriously about layoffs, then a whole lot of the better dolphins are rehearsing how to say "So long, and thanks for all the fish" and shopping their resumes.
And the way things are shaping up, M$ should be planning layoffs. Its not as if the only two products that make them any money are recession proof. They've been starting to face real competition in the OS and office suite markets lately, and a downturn is going to favor those competitors.
It could be, that like most lawyers, he doesn't actually believe in the RIAA cause and just wants their money.
Finally an intelligent post about the subject.
A lawyer is a hired gun, and has a duty to fight for his client, whatever his personal opinion. I've got no idea what his opinion of the RIAA is or what his opinion of copyright law is. I know he has been charging the RIAA incredible amounts, the kinds of fees some people charge for work they would really rather not do. I also know this: if I faced an RIAA lawsuit and his services were available and affordable to me, I'd be confident that he would give me a great defence.
Whatever his views of the RIAA and copyright issues, he does know where a lot of the bones are buried. Could be something good will come out of this.
Not saying this is good. Just saying that I don't see enough information here to make a judgment yet.
Yes! Whether distractions are bad depends completely on what you are doing (or how you do it).
For instance, people who use Python need a fair bit of distraction to keep their minds occupied and thus find some kind of satisfaction while working in that highly restrictive environment. But people who program with Perl need a low distraction environment while they exercise their creative potential.
There is so much more to programming than whitespace can contain :-)
Yeah, that kind of screw-up (spurious introduction of false significance) should have been caught by the Cosmos Magazine editors. You just can't hire good help any more.
On a related issue, there are hypotheses that ice ages and mass extinctions may be due to the way solar orbit around galactic center bobs up and down through the denser central plane of the galaxy. IIRC, the mechanisms had to do with disturbances in the Oort cloud shaking loose a lot more comets and such, some of which impact Earth.
So with the new data that the Sun is revolving about galactic core faster, does this rule out the various bobble hypotheses? Or does it strengthen them by showing a stronger correlation between bobs and smacks?
Um, no, not everything can be modeled to a useful degree. Self-modifying systems that rewrite their own rules are extremely difficult to model. When these systems also include self-aware components, they usually cannot be modeled in a satisfactorily efficient way. When some of the self-aware components have attributes whose workings lie outside the realms of physics and mathematics, such as imagination or appreciation of art then they cannot be modeled at all.
The marketplace is a cultural and biological phenomenon. Trying to apply maths or physics analogs to its behavior is as absurd as trying to develop a numeric score for rating fine art. In some ways it is worse, because if the market becomes aware that it is being modeled, components within it will attempt to use that modeling to affect the market. (Artists would just laugh their heads off.)
In other words, a calculus capable of modeling market behavior would need to be able to modify its own postulates according to rules that it could re-invent at any time. Such a calculus cannot exist.
How the hell can you apply any kind of probability measure to a self-aware environment like a marketplace?
Bayesian methods or any other are not going to get around the way the very measure of the risk is going to alter the market itself. You can't use physics and math to predict biologic and cultural processes, not when the processes have the same order of complexity as entire ecosystems and a capacity to learn and change that we haven't yet even begun to understand.
Introduce a risk management tool into a real estate market so you can enlarge that market by identifying marginal mortgage situations that are actually safe enough to go with, and you create whole new market segments building new housing to meet this brand new demand. And speculating in old housing; taking out high risk mortgages to flip a house and sell it at a hefty profit in 12 months, rinse and repeat. Watch those new market segments grow, and distort and inflate the entire housing industry.
We been there. We done that. Let's not do it again.
We need to recognise that any predictive market tools like those of risk management can have a profound, immediate, and unpredictable effect on the underlying market the purport to represent.
How is the risk of driving with that airbag in your car compared to a normal one?
This car analogy needs to be boosted to the next higher level of complexity to have any value. The better question is
If all the drivers who are whizzing around you on the freeway think that their air bags are providing them with a safer crash environment than they used to have, how does that alter your real risk of getting into a collision?
So what's the VaR of using VaR? :)
I think that quote gets closer to the issue than what I've read so far in NYT Risk Mismanagement article. Or seen printed anywhere else, as yet.
What I don't hear anyone talking about as yet is that VaR and the other fancy new risk management tools failed to account for the way that their deployment would of itself change the underlying dynamics of the economies they were attempting to measure. WRT the housing bubble, for example, VaR measures gave banks the confidence to go with mortgages that they would not have touched in 1985; this enabled whole new industries of speculation in real estate, which in turn shifted the underlying real estate markets in ways that where outside the historical basis the VaRs were built upon. VaR failed to assess the risks of the bubble because VaR was itself indirectly responsible for inflating the bubble. VaR caused a runaway positive feedback system to form.
Basically, a VaR is a future-oriented predictive tool. When used to excess in self-aware environments like markets, you end up with analytical systems with too much feedback from future possibilities altering the current processes... and driving those processes further and further from predicates the predictive tools use.
M$ is an excellent way of disambiguating the abbreviation, which could otherwise cause confusion between Mississippi, Multiple Sclerosis, Manuscript, and so on. It has the added advantage of clearly announcing the author's POV, and for anyone who was paying attention at the time, recalls the bad old days of undocumented DOS, public and private Windows APIs, "embrace and extend", and so on.
Micro$oft has put a lot of effort into refining the behaviors that have earned it the dollar sign in its name. It isn't easy to get all the people in an organization as large as Micro$oft to shed the fetters of their early training in morality, ethics, and playing nicely with the other children. M$'s freedom from the limitations of ethical encumbrances deserves to be recognized.
Public usage of "M$", and "Micro$oft", is perfectly cromulent. This is a company that has gone to great lengths to earn this kind of recognition, and it would be almost criminal not to award it to them.
The real year of the linux desktop began in October, 2007, ushered in by Gutsy Gibbon and followed by a multitude of variants.
Don't feel too bad that you missed it. A lot of people did.
Give them 20 more years, and they may have "declined" to the size that IBM is now.
I dispute that "fact". Public financial statements of both companies are easily available on the web. By the simplest measure, they show IBM is twice as big as Microsoft (TA of $120.4 billion to $65.1 billion). By more sophisticated measures, IBM's comparative size is very much greater than this while MSFT has just a little tiny multiplier (IBM L/A = 0.76; MSFT L/A = 0.48, etc)
Comparing Microsoft to IBM is like comparing the four hundred pound gorilla to the two and a half ton elephant. Only a ass would see the antics of the ape as somehow making it look like the bigger of the two. Any value in the remainder of parent post is pretty much undermined by the demonstrated ignorance of fact.
My personal guess is that with economies crashing left and right, businesses are going to look hard at where they can pare down costs, and traditional IT departments with their sizeable cost-center structures are going become major targets for right-sizing. Microsoft's future is going to be determined by the shift from purchase-license software to FOSS-with-support business models, and the future for MSFT is bleak. Most of MSFT's skills are in market management and are going to become as obsolete as a fletcher's skills when the infantry adopts firearms. Microsoft's technical skills have been adequate for the commercial grade software of the last millenium, but fall far short of what is now the common level of quality in business grade FOSS products.
Say what you will but Bill Gates' vision was revolutionary for the time. He brought shrink wrapped software to the masses. No one had done it successfully before him.
Revisionist history. When shrinkwrap software was an emerging market, Microsoft was but one software house among many that were producing good product on 5.25" floppies. There were also Borland, WordPerfect, Broderbund, Lotus Development Corp, and dozens of other companies. Microsoft was no leader of the pack back in the day.
Microsoft did prove to be most successfully ruthless dog in the pack, though. It's "embrace and extend (and extinguish)" market strategy is arguably a true innovation, and its use of vaporware to limit the encroachment of better technologies on its market share demonstrated a superb mastery of advertising and marketing skills. It has also demonstrated a truly incredible disdain for the fetters of morality, ethics, and law. Microsoft has never been particularly strong in technical skills, but from the first it has been fantastically good at marketing, including pimping its image.
Basically Microsoft has gotten to the top by being the most successful slut on the street corner, knowing when to give the chauffeurs driving the rich guy's limousines a free ride, and knowing how to sidle up close enough to the competition to take a razor blade to her pretty face.
Where in this idiot scheme is the originality that would make this patentable? There is nothing here that is patentable. Taking capabilities away from prior art doesn't make what's left behind into something new and patentable. Adding those capabilities back at extra cost doesn't make it patentable. Renting technology that was available earlier for purchase doesn't make the technology patentable. Maybe the MS strategy is to simply buy off the USPO. In some ways they seem to have more expertise in black politics operations than they do in technology development.
As to the business model proposed in this patent-- in the short term its one of the better things that could happen for Linux and OpenOffice. Just having Microsoft talk about possibly doing this right now is going to increase interest in migration from their products to FOSS and FOSS-based service models. In the long term, maybe this won't be so good since it hasn't yet been demonstrated that FOSS would continue to innovate and improve without some competition from commercial products.
It makes me think of an interesting theory proposed by scientists - that intelligence is partly social.
There's a word for this, originally from South Africa but it is now gaining traction in the global technology community.
Ubuntu.
Sort of like "a human is a human through his interactions with other humans."
Atendea-quel winya!
512 MB ram is probably enough for SUSE in an office setting.
As my second computer, I'm running Ubuntu on an older and slower Compaq that has only 384 MB ram. I use this for general office work (OOo, Firefox, Thunderbird, etc) when I've got my primary computer tied up with a 10 hour photorealistic ray trace rendering. I don't notice any performance difference with office type tasks between these:
Above are reported by cat /proc/cpuinfo rounded to 2 sigfigs
I've never tried to use the Compaq for a tough job like rendering. I expect it would not be a pleasant experience. But its good with word processing, spreadsheets, working up presentations, and so forth.
The Soviet Union's collapse actually began in 1953, when Stalin died. Krushchev (1953-1964) had neither the personal charisma nor the cold blooded ruthlessness, nor (in retrospect) the egomania that was needed to hold together the empire that Stalin had built. K inherited an incredibly powerful imperial structure, that Stalin had built with what history will deem as the largest and possibly the bloodiest slave labor state the world has ever seen. Ghengis Khan's hordes pale in comparison. It was such a well crafted totalitarian state that it survived despite Kruhschev's failing to be the pure bastard that was needed to run such an organization, and it continued to wilt only slowly under Brezhnev.
Gorbachov recognized that it was no longer possible to maintain the tight controls on communications a totalitarian state requires, and began making it easier to get licenses for things like typewriters, copiers, and fax machines. For the Soviet economy to survive, it had to start trading on an equal footing with the rest of the world, and for that to happen, lateral communication had to be allowed to augment the star-only channels of totalitarianism. But Glasnost could not happen fast enough; the center could not hold.
Glasnost could possibly have worked, if the rest of the world had stayed with 1970s communications technology. But in the 1980s, cheap personal computers gave even small businesses in Europe and the Americas trading and manufacturing advantages that Russia could not compete with. For the Soviet Union to have met that challenge would have required it to acquire and install the entire annual worldwide production of PCs for several years in row. It just couldn't happen.
Every other condition that obtained during the 1980s is something that the Soviet Union could have managed. The reason why it failed during the USA Alzheimer President's watch rather stumbling along for a few more decades was the introduction of the personal computer into every economy the Soviet Union was involved with, except its own.
It really did all have to do with Lotus 1.2.3, PeachTree Accounting, and Word Star, which enabled western institutions and businesses to do things like 'Just In Time' inventory systems and effective cost accounting management practices. This had nothing at all to do with capitalism versus communism; this was entirely about pragmatic computer usage versus totalitarian strictures on communications.
What is with the entitlement mentality within government?
Well, you just named it.
The USA along with many other western countries adopted the highly successful British Civil Service model (you know, the one that made it so that "the Sun never sets on the British Empire"?). The adoption was deliberate and happened more than 100 years ago.
The BCS model involves paying civil servants peanuts but offering incredibly rich benefits, retirement plans, insurance, etc, etc, etc, including early retirement possibilities. The level of perks is high enough to assure a huge pool of applicants. You can then use all kinds of screening processes to pare this down to a smaller pool of candidates, who you can string along for weeks or months, before selecting the new hires. The process naturally favors people who are very much into maximizing their personal long term potential and will work hard to assure that they don't get into trouble with the bosses.
So yeah, the basic problem is an entitlement scheme that leads to a very different kind of employee than those you find in most of the USA private sector. Civil servants are oriented differently, are more of the dog soldier type (trusting higher levels of management handle messy problems like ethics, etc), tend to have a weird kind of long term view where they base their actions on the probable effects on their jobs five years in the future more than any other criteria.
People with this kind of orientation are not going to be good choices for managing emerging technologies, such as NASA. That's been proven by the abject failure of the Shuttle Program (it has come nowhere close to fulfilling its original specs) and asshole decisions like using a pure oxygen environment in an Apollo capsule to avoid the Mickey Mouse sound of an oxy-helium mix.
But the system does work well for a lot of the permanent government. You know, the White House cooks, and the Senate janitorial staff, and all the Administrative Assistants who turn the handwritten notes of elected officials into Word documents, and so forth.
It always amazes me the mistakes people make because they don't study history, or blatantly choose to ignore it.
The USA defeated the communist Soviet Union by outspending them in the specific industry of aerospace technology.
The USA did not defeat the communist Soviet Union through outspending on any type of technology. The Soviet Union came apart because that kind of intensely centralized control of information could not withstand the subversive nature of widespread use of personal computers... and at the same time adoption of personal computers became absolutely necessary to maintain the Soviet economy.
More than any other single cause, the destruction of the Soviet Union came about because of the self-serving efforts of Mr Bill Gates, MS-DOS, and the explosion of business related personal computer software in the 1980s.
Or maybe it wasn't Gates. It might have been the effect of Mr. Dan Bricklin's VisaCalc on the Soviet penchant for Five Year Plans. Gotta think about that.
Should also think about the way a lot of rocket scientists end up managing to become highly trained and influential persons without getting up any actual education anywhere along the way. There should be a Public Health epidemiological study done. This phenomenon seems all too common any more, and it tends to break all kinds of societal structures, producing unhealthy situations that, if approached from a Public Health point of view, could and should be managed. The same way that Public Health is involved in quality control of sewer systems.
Okay, that last paragraph was prolly over the top, maybe even to the point of seeming paranoid delusional. Please forgive me, for not yet have I ingested sufficient caffeine for this day.
Hmm. On rereading this, I think I'm trying to out troll a troll. Oh well. I've got karma to burn and I haven't seen mod points in 5 years so WTF. Mebbe this'll amuse somebody.
I think Javascript would be an excellent choice, especially on Firefox 3.1+, with a well chosen set of extensions (the Web Developer for one, and the spell checker active). You'd also need to standardize on a good text editor. I'm assuming this will be taught in the Windows environment, so I'd recommend PSPad Editor. It supports syntax highlighting, tabbed editing, and search and replace across multiple files. There are several other good ones, and frankly I don't recall what it was about PSPad that caused me to choose it over the others when I was setting up a similar course in an adult education milieu a couple of years ago.
This package would get them started with a tool set they will not outgrow for the next five to ten years, no matter where they take their education. The tools are all FOSS so you and the school would be free from worrying about the students violating copyright licenses. There are portable versions of these that fit very nicely on a 1 GB thumb drive with plenty of room left for the student's work: if the budget supports it, you could outfit each student with a portable development environment for under 10USD. You can use Firefox bookmarks to provide them with access to on-line tutorials and reference materials.
Javascript is excellent in its support of all the facets of programming that can be fitted into a first year introductory course. And there are a couple of big but maybe not so obvious advantages in teaching an intro course with Javascript:
Or of course you could teach them Basic, which is adequate for a structured programming approach, and would prepare them for an excellent 1980s educational experience. :-)
I'm glad that the argument that "they do it for the glory" worked for your dad. But I think in general it is a weak argument that doesn't really explain much and may be mostly fictitious. For instance, the Spread Firefox contingent make a seriously important contribution to the larger Firefox community, but none of them are in it for the glory, or are using programmer's skills for that matter.
[I know I'm preaching to the choir here. Please think about how you might be able to use the following in your efforts to convince those around you that FOSS is an important phenomenon that is significantly reshaping our world. Consider this a part of my contribution back to the open source communities that are giving me so much: Ubuntu, OpenOffice, Blender, Apache, GnuCash, and the list goes on and on...]
Here's a core truth about successful FOSS projects: it really is all about the community.
These projects come together like an Amish community that decides it needs a new meeting house, or an Inuit community that decides it needs a new whaling canoe.
Community members gather to mutually develop a plan, then each contributes a bit of their labor in their free time for the common good. In the Amish community, those with carpentry skills measure the boards and do the hammering; those with lesser skills work the saws and fetch and carry the boards. Others with different skills prepare the meals. Everyone contributes to the building and in a Saturday's time, hundreds of man hours, including that of skilled craftsmen, cause a new meeting house to be raised.
Everyone involved benefits: any member of the community can use the building. No one person owns the result, but everyone involved is wealthier for having access to the new asset. And it all comes together with incredible speed, and (by capitalistic standards) an impossibly low cost of production.
This is a very ancient way of getting big projects done. The internet makes it easy to go back to these ancient ways for software production. The internet makes it possible for worldwide communities to form around different ideas that would benefit everybody (an office suite with fully shareable data files-- OpenOffice.org; a superior 3D modeling and animation package-- Blender; an accounting package that even a mon'n'pop grocery store could afford to use-- GnuCash). Given sufficient interest, a production team of thousands can self-assemble and create in a very short time a piece of complex software that matches or exceeds the quality that any closed shop could afford to produce.
Since there is no cost involved in sharing the results of these community efforts even with people who are outside of the community, it makes sense to just make them completely open for anyone to use. For one thing, it is easier to do that than to come up with any kind of exclusionary scheme. Any more, these products are generally copyrighted by some representative of the community, but the licensing is used to protect the community's long term interests in its jointly owned property, and not as means to play zero sum profit games. The wealth that the community builders wanted is there, and is undiminished by sharing it with everyone. To not so share it would actually be harder to do and would add an impossible cost.
A Christian might see this as a loaves and fishes thing. What would have happened at that assembly if some guy in the middle of the crowd decided that he was not going to hand the basket on unless the fellow next to him paid him a coin or two. Well, the other baskets being passed about would route around him, wouldn't they? And that is what the FOSS concept is turning the world of software into: a gigantic loaves and fishes meeting where nobody is going to go hungry.
[Thank you for reading this rant.]