First off, this makes a TON of sense if executed properly; it could yield a centrally-controlled system that is client (and OS)-independent and lightweight on the client side.
The key is to overcome the previous issues with this type of arrangement: It should also run off-line, and act like a local GUI app, e.g., not refresh the screen with each formatting change.
I suspect that this is doable using Java Applets running the sucks-way-less-than-Swing SWT. Sun should definitely be VERY AFRAID.
I've been close to several Siebel installs. Every one was an astoundingly-expensive catastophe - sort of like outsourcing to India, but it costs a lot more and the salesweasels wear nicer clothes.
The goal is probably to get publicity for the surgeon, so he can get more prestige and money from pharmaceutical and device companies. I'll bet anything that the doc has paid a PR firm.
As far as I can tell, you have somewhat less of that in Canada. I suspect it's because Canadian docs don't get into medicine for the money.
For starters, I'm awed that a child's life can be spared.
However, the cost of doing things like this is astonishing, even in countries outside the US where medical treatment is priced more sanely. How many infants and other folks people could be saved by spending this money elsewhere? For example, from today's NY Times:
We switched from Java to C#, and it was a great switch, we're much more productive now:
- C# is a much better language than Java (pre 1.5). - Development tools for doing GUI stuff (web or Windows forms) are much, much better than anything available for Java. - Deployment on.NET is really a breeze.
Yes we're locked into MS products, sort of. If they ever do anything really horrible, we can do a rewrite: rewrites are much easier than first tries. But I've been locked into MS before, and the possible problems generally never turned into real problems. Nobody from Redmond came to grab my code. When their products sucked, e.g., VB4 or Access (data corruption), I switched to something that didn't suck.
However, developing in Java was absolutely a real problem. And we solved it.
That being said, C#/.NET is only as good as it is because of the competition from the Java world. Java 1.5 seems to be a good language, finally. I really hope that Java also gets a good development environment, good (easy to use) servers, and good documentation. I'd love to switch back.
Consulting outfits are in business to take your money; completing your project comes second to billing.
The only way to handle consultants is to have your own very knowledgeable and forceful project manager to drive the consultants. This person needs to know enough about coding so that they cannot be BSed, or needs to have a trusted resource that will keep an eye on things.
I've yet to hear of even a single offshore success story; all of the ones I've heard end with "we were already way past the deadline, and we had to start rewriting from scratch!". Managing a project in your own office is very difficult. Managing one half-way around the globe staffed by people with different language and culture... forget it.
The US spends roughly 15% of GDP on healthcare, while the rest of the first world spends roughly 10%. Docs in the US get paid roughly twice what their counterparts are paid in the rest of the first world. The average doc in the US makes $150k+ per year - after malpractice premiums. In general, malpractice is not a big expense, except for OBs and neurosurgeons.
For this, we get medical outcomes that are not demonstrably better than those in other first world countries. In fact, our outcomes are probably worse: in terms of life expectancy, we're 48th in the world, roughly the same as Cuba. That's sad, considering that our per capita healthcare spending is greater than Cuba's entire per-capita GDP.
The Mars Rover's software crashed in just a few days.
Virtually all software should be designed and tested better than it is.
However, I'm perplexed at why the Mars Rover failure and resurrection is considered a miracle of human inginuity, rather than an indictment of crummy testing.
I'll not excuse the power grid software either; but it seems to work more reliably than the software on the Rover.
We recently switched from Java Servlet development to ASP.NET, and ASP.NET is MUCH faster to develop in. Yes, I know that we're locked in to MS OS and server, but given the incredible productivity increase, this is a small price to pay.
All things being equal, I'd much prefer to stay away from MS. But ASP.NET is far too superior a way to go.
It looks like the new Java release finally makes it roughly as good as C# (or Delphi, after which C# is modeled), but more is needed to for the Java world to be as efficient as the ASP.NET world:
1. A good IDE. In ASP.NET, I can drop components on an HTML form, which bypasses a lot of HTML grief. The entire paradigm is easy-to-use and integrated. In Java, I need to use the comparatively awkward Eclipse or Forte IDEs, muck with Dreamweaver and whatnot - it's a productivity-destroyer.
2. Servers that are not obtuse. I can get IIS to do anything in about 5 minutes. It takes hours or days to do anything in Tomcat or Resin and Apache. My time is precious.
The vast bulk of the Linux world doesn't even recognize the truth of what you're saying. Whenever someone complains about Linux useability, they are told that "all you need to do is [poorly-documented two hours of time-suck here], and anyway you're just a M$ troll you swine".
The genius of M$ is that they recognize when things are hard to use, and they make 'em easier. Ten years ago they could see that their screen font rendering sucked - so they made them unsuck. I certainly have issues with M$ - sometimes they dumb things down too much, and they often are untruthful. But, let's face facts, even Windows 95 was a far more useable system for 95+% of computer users than is any current Linux distribution that I've tried.
The sad thing is that there's a lot of room for improvement on Windows. Linux can, in theory, win the battle for the desktop. But if folks don't recognize how terribly deficient it is in day-to-day usability, there's not a prayer for it.
1. I tried an earlier version of Mandrake, it was astonishingly buggy. Have they instituted some sort of QA program?
2. Does it have, out-of-the-box, screen fonts that don't suck, i.e., that are as good as Windows fonts circa 1995? I can't use the nasty pixelated screen fonts that come with most distros, and I don't have time to mess with hacks to get good-looking fonts to appear.
Nobody (except perhaps Ellison and McNealy) wants to see a desktop distro, other than Windows, that is usable by non-misterwizard types.
I've been keeping my eye on Xandros for some time, as I thought that they were the most likely candidate to build a non-sucking desktop distro. Roots are with Corel, a technically superb company that couldn't market. Xandros's focus was on an easy-to-use GUI desktop from the beginning; all of the other distros that I know of either started with a view towards misterwizards or a hatred of Microsoft - not a recipe for success.
The problem is that Xandros needs to capture the hearts of nerds before it can be successful at spreading out to the masses - this has been true of all micro-based hardware and software, and even how Micrsoft became what it is. In the case of Xandros, the average nerd must have it in his head that "Oh, grandpa wants a cheap computer, I'll use Xandros". However, if the average nerd never uses Xandros, Xandros won't gain mindshare. And if one has to shell out cash just to try it, very few nerds will try.
For example, I'd be interested in checking out Xandros to see if it would make a good OS for my non-tech-savvy friends and relatives. It might even be good for my personal use, if it has fonts-that-don't-suck, i.e., fonts that are as good as those that Windows had eight years ago. But am I going to shell out $89, along with my time to test it out?
No.
The only glimmer of hope here is that the Xandros main download page states "Xandros Desktop OS is not currently available as a free download". I suspect that "currently" means that free is Plan B. Since momentum is such a precious thing and so easy to lose, I hope that Plan B takes effect in the very-very-near future, or I fear that Xandros is history.
and do something about it. Are there any open-source voting initiatives out there that are getting critical mass? A quick search on SourceForge and Google didn't turn up anything that's far along - do/. readers know of anything that I overlooked?
At least Democrats squander relatively small amounts of money. The Republicans have blown the Iraq invasion budget by more than $100 billion in order to cater to their special interest groups (big oil... the Bush family et al). At least the Democratic boondoggles only go a few $billion over budget, help that average commuter rather than the already-extraordinarily-wealthy, and have an actual exit strategy.
I believe that Robin Williams said that "Cocaine is God's way of telling you you have too much money."
Move over cocaine: you've been eclipsed!
Re:Driving a Truck Through This One
on
Global Dimming
·
· Score: 1
Interestingly, Google returns 3,180,000 hits for SARS, a disease that killed maybe a few hundred people, and 64,100 hits for "Bubonic Plague", a disease that wiped out many millions.
Perhaps things that occur (or at least which are discussed) more recently are more likely to show up on the 'net, and thus on Google?
Driving a Truck Through This One
on
Global Dimming
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Some datapoints:
1. In general, studies of this type are very difficult to do. One has to take into account:
the non-continuity of the measurements (they're not measuring everywhere, they are probably tending to measure near cities; cities cause definite local effects over time, but they are only a small percentage of Earth's surface area.
astonishingly few "scientists" actually understand how to use instrumentation. (Yeah, flame me - but it's true - I've done a lot of teaching and mentoring in this area). One of the problems of our age is that we all have access to sophisticated equipment, but few actually know what the results mean.
2. It occurs to me that if the Earth's atmosphere were soaking up all of that energy, astronemers (one group that actually does know how to use instrumentation) would have noticed spectral changes years ago. But we haven't heard from them. (They could be part of a vast right-wing conspiracy to prop up the Bush and Cheney crew, I suppose, and are just not telling us.)
3. I haven't done the calculations (has anybody?) but it also occurs to me that if Earth's atmosphere were soaking up all of that energy, there'd be some SERIOUS global warming occuring.
4. In the article, the "discoverer" of our newest Earth-dooming catastrophe seems to indicate that he was amazed to have found this issue in the mid-80's when "there was undeniable evidence that our planet was getting hotter". As some of us will recall, the dominant paradigm in the mid-80's was global cooling. Global cooling in the '80s was as obvious and well-proven as global warming is today. And, actually, diminishing sunlight reaching the Earth would be consistent with global warming (see point 3).
One of the problems with school is that it doesn't last long enough to get much real-world experience. Adding Access will give students a vastly accelerated timeframe for experiencing horrible things. For example, if they were to use PostgreSQL, they'd probably never once experience the thrill of data corruption during their learning experience. Introduce Access, and they'll be exposed to a great deal of it.
As a bonus, perhaps they'll savor the real-world experience of spending $100+ to have Microsoft tech support read the manual to them over the telephone - the same *&%$ manual that they already read and got no useful info from.
My (somewhat vague) recollection is that Kurt Vonnegut's (originally rejected) PhD thesis looked at the plot lines of many books, using the X axis as time and the Y axis as good fortume or bad fortune for the principle character. It turned out that there were only a few graphs that led to best-sellers; any books that tried a different tack were not popular. (Except possibly for Shakespeare; Vonnegut mentioned that he could never figure out what was good- or bad-fortune in a Shakespeare play).
It may simply be that certain things are hard-wired into us, and these criteria must be met for a majority of us to enjoy a literary, musical, or other creative work.
This does not rule out creativity. For example, most everyone inherently loves a 12-bar blues tune, so basing a new song on this is not a bad idea. But the Beatles could do much different things within this "limitation" than could Robert Johnson or The Clash. All were very creative, but many of there songs had commonality.
People complain about Microsoft's flaws, but M$ is lightyears ahead of Symantec when it comes to testing.
I've had two bad experiences with Symantec's "let the end-users test it!" policy. The first was when Win XP first came out. Norton Antivirus (certified for XP) caused chronic swap file corruption. It was particularly amusing because NAV was included with the computer (a Compaq laptop).
A few months later, I (stupidly) tried to install NAV on another computer. It got stuck in an endless loop of demanding that I activate the product, then saying that activation failed. I tried uninstalling then reinstalling, but no joy.
Symantec's response was that one of my NAV registry settings must be bad, and since NAV's uninstaller didn't delete all of NAV's droppings, the solution was for me to manually go through my registry and clean every last trace of NAV, a time-consuming process. Of course, it didn't help.
I switched back to McAfee's VirusScan, and won't touch anything Symantec again. My company is now Symantec-free as well, as are my friends and family who ask for (and take) my advice.
Controlled nuclear fusion would provide unlimited power. Fusion works - for example, the Sun is powered by it, as are thermonuclear bombs. The controlled version is quite safe - unlike the fission reactors used today, fusion's radioactive byproducts decay rapidly, and malfunctions tend to end the process.
Controlled fusion has been "just around the corner" for some time. If I were "in charge", I'd set up a Manhattan Project-like effort to get controlled going - it's that important. Of course, the Bush family and its web of fine compatriots would do whatever they could to stop it. Sigh.
Slashdot Mirror
First off, this makes a TON of sense if executed properly; it could yield a centrally-controlled system that is client (and OS)-independent and lightweight on the client side.
The key is to overcome the previous issues with this type of arrangement: It should also run off-line, and act like a local GUI app, e.g., not refresh the screen with each formatting change.
I suspect that this is doable using Java Applets running the sucks-way-less-than-Swing SWT. Sun should definitely be VERY AFRAID.
Are ther any good Siebel stories? I'm curious!
Well said, thank you.
The goal is probably to get publicity for the surgeon, so he can get more prestige and money from pharmaceutical and device companies. I'll bet anything that the doc has paid a PR firm.
As far as I can tell, you have somewhat less of that in Canada. I suspect it's because Canadian docs don't get into medicine for the money.
However, the cost of doing things like this is astonishing, even in countries outside the US where medical treatment is priced more sanely. How many infants and other folks people could be saved by spending this money elsewhere? For example, from today's NY Times:
Terror of Childbirth
Sorry, but I disagree.
.NET is really a breeze.
We switched from Java to C#, and it was a great switch, we're much more productive now:
- C# is a much better language than Java (pre 1.5).
- Development tools for doing GUI stuff (web or Windows forms) are much, much better than anything available for Java.
- Deployment on
Yes we're locked into MS products, sort of. If they ever do anything really horrible, we can do a rewrite: rewrites are much easier than first tries. But I've been locked into MS before, and the possible problems generally never turned into real problems. Nobody from Redmond came to grab my code. When their products sucked, e.g., VB4 or Access (data corruption), I switched to something that didn't suck.
However, developing in Java was absolutely a real problem. And we solved it.
That being said, C#/.NET is only as good as it is because of the competition from the Java world. Java 1.5 seems to be a good language, finally. I really hope that Java also gets a good development environment, good (easy to use) servers, and good documentation. I'd love to switch back.
Consulting outfits are in business to take your money; completing your project comes second to billing.
The only way to handle consultants is to have your own very knowledgeable and forceful project manager to drive the consultants. This person needs to know enough about coding so that they cannot be BSed, or needs to have a trusted resource that will keep an eye on things.
I've yet to hear of even a single offshore success story; all of the ones I've heard end with "we were already way past the deadline, and we had to start rewriting from scratch!". Managing a project in your own office is very difficult. Managing one half-way around the globe staffed by people with different language and culture... forget it.
Good luck!
The US spends roughly 15% of GDP on healthcare, while the rest of the first world spends roughly 10%. Docs in the US get paid roughly twice what their counterparts are paid in the rest of the first world. The average doc in the US makes $150k+ per year - after malpractice premiums. In general, malpractice is not a big expense, except for OBs and neurosurgeons.
For this, we get medical outcomes that are not demonstrably better than those in other first world countries. In fact, our outcomes are probably worse: in terms of life expectancy, we're 48th in the world, roughly the same as Cuba. That's sad, considering that our per capita healthcare spending is greater than Cuba's entire per-capita GDP.
In all fairness...
The Mars Rover's software crashed in just a few days.
Virtually all software should be designed and tested better than it is.
However, I'm perplexed at why the Mars Rover failure and resurrection is considered a miracle of human inginuity, rather than an indictment of crummy testing.
I'll not excuse the power grid software either; but it seems to work more reliably than the software on the Rover.
We recently switched from Java Servlet development to ASP.NET, and ASP.NET is MUCH faster to develop in. Yes, I know that we're locked in to MS OS and server, but given the incredible productivity increase, this is a small price to pay.
All things being equal, I'd much prefer to stay away from MS. But ASP.NET is far too superior a way to go.
It looks like the new Java release finally makes it roughly as good as C# (or Delphi, after which C# is modeled), but more is needed to for the Java world to be as efficient as the ASP.NET world:
1. A good IDE. In ASP.NET, I can drop components on an HTML form, which bypasses a lot of HTML grief. The entire paradigm is easy-to-use and integrated. In Java, I need to use the comparatively awkward Eclipse or Forte IDEs, muck with Dreamweaver and whatnot - it's a productivity-destroyer.
2. Servers that are not obtuse. I can get IIS to do anything in about 5 minutes. It takes hours or days to do anything in Tomcat or Resin and Apache. My time is precious.
- lowers risk of getting diabetes by 40% or so
- lowers risk of getting Parkinson's disease by more than 50%
- lowers risk of getting colon cancer
and other positive effects. See, for example, this article, for example.Your analogy is dead on, Mr. Silver.
But it's worse:
The vast bulk of the Linux world doesn't even recognize the truth of what you're saying. Whenever someone complains about Linux useability, they are told that "all you need to do is [poorly-documented two hours of time-suck here], and anyway you're just a M$ troll you swine".
The genius of M$ is that they recognize when things are hard to use, and they make 'em easier. Ten years ago they could see that their screen font rendering sucked - so they made them unsuck. I certainly have issues with M$ - sometimes they dumb things down too much, and they often are untruthful. But, let's face facts, even Windows 95 was a far more useable system for 95+% of computer users than is any current Linux distribution that I've tried.
The sad thing is that there's a lot of room for improvement on Windows. Linux can, in theory, win the battle for the desktop. But if folks don't recognize how terribly deficient it is in day-to-day usability, there's not a prayer for it.
Great idea, but two questions:
1. I tried an earlier version of Mandrake, it was astonishingly buggy. Have they instituted some sort of QA program?
2. Does it have, out-of-the-box, screen fonts that don't suck, i.e., that are as good as Windows fonts circa 1995? I can't use the nasty pixelated screen fonts that come with most distros, and I don't have time to mess with hacks to get good-looking fonts to appear.
Hey!
Certainly PL/I was no Delphi, but for its time, it was quite nice!
Where?
Don't see it on the site.
Nobody (except perhaps Ellison and McNealy) wants to see a desktop distro, other than Windows, that is usable by non-misterwizard types.
I've been keeping my eye on Xandros for some time, as I thought that they were the most likely candidate to build a non-sucking desktop distro. Roots are with Corel, a technically superb company that couldn't market. Xandros's focus was on an easy-to-use GUI desktop from the beginning; all of the other distros that I know of either started with a view towards misterwizards or a hatred of Microsoft - not a recipe for success.
The problem is that Xandros needs to capture the hearts of nerds before it can be successful at spreading out to the masses - this has been true of all micro-based hardware and software, and even how Micrsoft became what it is. In the case of Xandros, the average nerd must have it in his head that "Oh, grandpa wants a cheap computer, I'll use Xandros". However, if the average nerd never uses Xandros, Xandros won't gain mindshare. And if one has to shell out cash just to try it, very few nerds will try.
For example, I'd be interested in checking out Xandros to see if it would make a good OS for my non-tech-savvy friends and relatives. It might even be good for my personal use, if it has fonts-that-don't-suck, i.e., fonts that are as good as those that Windows had eight years ago. But am I going to shell out $89, along with my time to test it out?
No.
The only glimmer of hope here is that the Xandros main download page states "Xandros Desktop OS is not currently available as a free download". I suspect that "currently" means that free is Plan B. Since momentum is such a precious thing and so easy to lose, I hope that Plan B takes effect in the very-very-near future, or I fear that Xandros is history.
A shame, and a big blow to Linux on the desktop.
and do something about it. Are there any open-source voting initiatives out there that are getting critical mass? A quick search on SourceForge and Google didn't turn up anything that's far along - do /. readers know of anything that I overlooked?
At least Democrats squander relatively small amounts of money. The Republicans have blown the Iraq invasion budget by more than $100 billion in order to cater to their special interest groups (big oil... the Bush family et al). At least the Democratic boondoggles only go a few $billion over budget, help that average commuter rather than the already-extraordinarily-wealthy, and have an actual exit strategy.
I believe that Robin Williams said that "Cocaine is God's way of telling you you have too much money."
Move over cocaine: you've been eclipsed!
Interestingly, Google returns 3,180,000 hits for SARS, a disease that killed maybe a few hundred people, and 64,100 hits for "Bubonic Plague", a disease that wiped out many millions.
Perhaps things that occur (or at least which are discussed) more recently are more likely to show up on the 'net, and thus on Google?
1. In general, studies of this type are very difficult to do. One has to take into account:
-
the non-continuity of the measurements (they're not measuring everywhere, they are probably tending to measure near cities; cities cause definite local effects over time, but they are only a small percentage of Earth's surface area.
- astonishingly few "scientists" actually understand how to use instrumentation. (Yeah, flame me - but it's true - I've done a lot of teaching and mentoring in this area). One of the problems of our age is that we all have access to sophisticated equipment, but few actually know what the results mean.
2. It occurs to me that if the Earth's atmosphere were soaking up all of that energy, astronemers (one group that actually does know how to use instrumentation) would have noticed spectral changes years ago. But we haven't heard from them. (They could be part of a vast right-wing conspiracy to prop up the Bush and Cheney crew, I suppose, and are just not telling us.)3. I haven't done the calculations (has anybody?) but it also occurs to me that if Earth's atmosphere were soaking up all of that energy, there'd be some SERIOUS global warming occuring.
4. In the article, the "discoverer" of our newest Earth-dooming catastrophe seems to indicate that he was amazed to have found this issue in the mid-80's when "there was undeniable evidence that our planet was getting hotter". As some of us will recall, the dominant paradigm in the mid-80's was global cooling. Global cooling in the '80s was as obvious and well-proven as global warming is today. And, actually, diminishing sunlight reaching the Earth would be consistent with global warming (see point 3).
One of the problems with school is that it doesn't last long enough to get much real-world experience. Adding Access will give students a vastly accelerated timeframe for experiencing horrible things. For example, if they were to use PostgreSQL, they'd probably never once experience the thrill of data corruption during their learning experience. Introduce Access, and they'll be exposed to a great deal of it.
As a bonus, perhaps they'll savor the real-world experience of spending $100+ to have Microsoft tech support read the manual to them over the telephone - the same *&%$ manual that they already read and got no useful info from.
Brilliant! Brilliant!
My (somewhat vague) recollection is that Kurt Vonnegut's (originally rejected) PhD thesis looked at the plot lines of many books, using the X axis as time and the Y axis as good fortume or bad fortune for the principle character. It turned out that there were only a few graphs that led to best-sellers; any books that tried a different tack were not popular. (Except possibly for Shakespeare; Vonnegut mentioned that he could never figure out what was good- or bad-fortune in a Shakespeare play).
It may simply be that certain things are hard-wired into us, and these criteria must be met for a majority of us to enjoy a literary, musical, or other creative work.
This does not rule out creativity. For example, most everyone inherently loves a 12-bar blues tune, so basing a new song on this is not a bad idea. But the Beatles could do much different things within this "limitation" than could Robert Johnson or The Clash. All were very creative, but many of there songs had commonality.
And now this!
Perhaps I will try Symantec again!
People complain about Microsoft's flaws, but M$ is lightyears ahead of Symantec when it comes to testing.
I've had two bad experiences with Symantec's "let the end-users test it!" policy. The first was when Win XP first came out. Norton Antivirus (certified for XP) caused chronic swap file corruption. It was particularly amusing because NAV was included with the computer (a Compaq laptop).
A few months later, I (stupidly) tried to install NAV on another computer. It got stuck in an endless loop of demanding that I activate the product, then saying that activation failed. I tried uninstalling then reinstalling, but no joy.
Symantec's response was that one of my NAV registry settings must be bad, and since NAV's uninstaller didn't delete all of NAV's droppings, the solution was for me to manually go through my registry and clean every last trace of NAV, a time-consuming process. Of course, it didn't help.
I switched back to McAfee's VirusScan, and won't touch anything Symantec again. My company is now Symantec-free as well, as are my friends and family who ask for (and take) my advice.
Controlled fusion has been "just around the corner" for some time. If I were "in charge", I'd set up a Manhattan Project-like effort to get controlled going - it's that important. Of course, the Bush family and its web of fine compatriots would do whatever they could to stop it. Sigh.