Reminds me of something that happened to me, waaaay back in the college days.
It was the first day of Advanced Algorithms. I made it to the lecture hall, and had settled into a seat, waiting for the professor. There was something indefinably wrong, but I couldn't put my finger on it.
I waited a few minutes, as no professor showed up, with a growing certainty that something was just a little off.
Then it hit me. There were too many pretty girls in the classroom. I got used to it real fast, mind you.
So imagine my dismay and bitter disappointment when someone came into the hall and announced that the room had been double-booked with...
[...]People go to Starbuck's so they can say they go there. And to be seen there.
Your average coffee drinker does not even realize that most all Starbuck's coffee is over roasted and made of inferior quality beans. The really scary thing; the quality of Dunkin Donuts coffee beans are higher than Starbuck's! I did not know this, but a coffee guru (bean tester and whatnot for major coffee companies) tells me it is true.
Er...
Aren't you just falling into the trap of reverse elitism? You sneer at Starbucks goers because they're going to the popular spot. Note further that you didn't know that Dunkin Donuts had "better" quality until someone told you. Am I missing something important here?
Starbucks is a coffe shop, for God's sake. It's not the symbol of soul-sucking vapid consumerism you would like it to be. It's a place people go when they want to drink coffee. It's popular because whoever runs it has the good sense to open locations in good spots.
I note in passing they make a mean eggnog latte, if a bit dear.
This hypothetical widget maker is playing the wrong game... if they are trying to compete on price alone, then they should partner with WalMart. If they want to be the high-quality "boutique" supplier of widgets, WalMart is the wrong partner. This has happened to many WalMart suppliers -- they want to make their play for the big market, and then act real surprised when they realize that that market plays on ruthless price competition. If you are not ready to play in that arena, stick with selling through MallBoutiqueInc.
Buy decent fans (twin ball bearing or so?)
and monitor them. If noise isn't a concern, this might be a good application for Delta's more extreme fans:)
This is perhaps the most important piece of advice I've seen yet. We use (pretty) cheap Dell servers, which have the lovely characteristic that the CPU, disk, fan (!), power supply, etc ad nauseam all give back status via SNMP query. This can be routed into free/cheap monitoring software (think Nagios), so you don't have to physically check the machines all the time. You'll get a nice email telling you that box 13 is getting hot and needs help. This sort of thing is especially important if you have row upon row of el-cheapo servers load-balanced; if you don't have good monitoring, servers will quietly fail and all you'll see is incremental degredation of service performance. This is good from a five-nines point of view, but you need that extra nudge to actually fix the problem.
I can't speak to other brands of machine, because we only have Dells, but insist on proper monitorability.
They only count when needed to bump up the numbers for demographic reasons.
Heck, once you let Italians in, it opens the door to considering Irish folks as white. Which is clearly bunk; they are Appaloosa at best. Freckles, you know.
The same parents who bitch about our educational system but who won't sit down with their kids and discuss what Johnny learned in school today will continue to scream and scream loudly.
Well and good, parents should indeed keep tabs on what their kids are told in school or see on TV or internet and help them interpret it.
That said, I can see parents getting annoyed when they have to fight a constant rear-guard action against smut, violence, and what-have-you everywhere. Despite what your parents tell you, it is undeniable that what the kids see around them is what they accept as normal. So parents do have a legitimate interest in public debate over what types of material are appropriate for public places / airwaves. And especially over how much of their own social/political philosophy teachers should be allowed to preach in classrooms.
There is an argument to be made between community standards, especially with respect to media which is so easy to see (often impossible not to see), and 1st amendment rights. Speech is protected, but... is venue? Most folks are entirely happy that we don't have cig ads or graphic sex acts or murder or Druidic rituals on open billboards, and are happy to get any tool that helps.
Stallman says Brown deliberately confused the Linux kernel vs the GNU project, although I suspect Brown simply didn't know enough to be able to differentiate between the two."
Methinks Stallman gets similarly confused betimes. Is it time for another Linux v. GNU/Linux war?
"Run our OS and never have to worry again! Just sign your name right here. The fine print doesn't say anything about selling your soul. Nope, not at all. Right there... That's riiiight."
Maybe instead of selling one's soul to one's vendor, one can offer a soul (ahem) "subscription", and they can renew every year, world without end.
Seriously, though, this may not be too out of line for what corporations want. Vendor lock-in does have an upside, which is that -- assuming a good vendor, heh -- Stuff Just Works. Clearly this is not appropriate for hobbyists, or a technology shop, but a business for whom IT's role is to support actual business operations may well benefit from an integrated solution from IBM or Sun or whomever. It may be cheaper or sexier to implement a teetering stack of free, semi-free, in-house, and propriety middleware, but it is also a huge pain in the rear.
I can see a market for people who say "I want a payroll system and I want it now and b'God it better work and have a warm, cuddly IBM technician a mere phone-call away! And if that rat bastard Tommy from Accounting leaks any more confidential memos, wouldn't it be cool if those Reuters jackals can't even open the sucker! AAAAH HA HA HA HAAAAAA"
Everyone's so stuck on trying to find a 'green' replacement for the spectacular amounts of energy we use that they don't realise that the energy gluttony itself isn't green.
Let us not forget that politics is "the art of the possible".
It is perhaps unrealistic to ask America to unilaterally cut energy usage in the face of energy-gobbling competition from other countries. It simply is not feasible.
Hence the drive to find large earth-friendly energy sources. Imagine, if you will, the Very Strangest Bedfellows:
-- Greens, who don't like fossil carbon getting into the air
-- Heavy Industry, which realizes that a viable challenge to oil means the price of oil and the alternative both go down.
-- Entrepeneurs, who slaver at the thought of a new ground floor to get in on
-- Politicians, who can "take credit" for Saving Da Oith.
-- Nationalists, who dislike dependence on foreign supply of oil.
Dell and MS are leeches, and as such they work. Now, without any hosts, leeches die.
That's a funny way to look at the free market and public domain. Companies that want to innovate do so, or try to do so, and their R&D costs are reflected in the cost of their products.
This is where intellectual-property protections come in. In the absence of any such, some copycat would soon (this "soon" will be important later) undercut the innovator and destroy him in the market. But in markets where there is protection for the innovator (specifically patents), the innovator gets a 17 year monopoly which he can use to rake in the dough and recoup his investment.
Some things are not patentable, and go directly into the public domain. The aspects of UI design which MS battled Apple over turned out (per a judge) to be so. The feature list of a word processing program (many of these features, yes, innovated by MS) is the same. Woe betide Open Office were it not so, eh? Are they parasites? Certainly not in the way you suggest above. For these non-protected features, the only protection the innovator has is time-to-market, and reputation. This is often sufficient.
MS and Dell are not leeches. It's more like "standing on the shoulders of giants".
There is room in the market for innovators and for commodotizers. Are you, personally, willing to pay more for identical non-Dell products? Is your company? Do note that Dell has valid, paid-for licenses for all the (relevant) technology they use. The "innovators" Dell is "leeching" off of don't seem to be concerned.
The biggest threat to the USA in the future is terrorism. Terrorism is defeated with bombs, although the chimps currently in the White House seem to think it is.
Let us not forget that it is the US relentless weapons development that makes it possible for terrorism to "step up" and become the biggest threat... that is, the only way to engage the US with any hope of success is terrorism. The US armed forces are so overwhelming in the field that the biggest combat risk is faulty IFF. I'd like to keep it that way.
Terrorism is just a symptom of a disease - hatred within society. For every terrorist, there will be a hundred people in the same society that feel very strongly about the same issues, but not enough to become a terrorist. That is, until you drop a bomb on their children. To defeat terrorism in the long term, you've got to tackle the strong feelings within the society that produced it.
There are some more factors here. Arab governments gleefully blame America (and our masters, the Jews) for every possible problem, cheaply diverting dissent which would otherwise come down on their own fannies.
You mention the need to "tackle the strong feelings". Oddly enough, that is, for better or for worse, the entire purpose of the "Bush doctrine"... to install modern liberal secular democracy in the Middle East. The theory being that this will (a) improve the lives of the masses, (b) raise their living standards, (c) discredit the poor management of dictatorial or Islamist regimes nearby. [We lightly skip over (d) create a 'jihadi sink' in Iraq where we combat fanatics way over there instead of in the continental US]
Whether this will work is certainly open to question. But do note that it is an attempt to address the real real root causes (poverty, societal failure) of terrorism, as much as any foreign aid donation.
One final note before we go back to normal programming... the way in which foreign aid is given out really, really sucks. We give cash to governments, where it is promptly wasted, stolen, or otherwise prevented from helping anyone. What we really need to do is get some massive helicopters and airlift technical and vocational schools to trouble spots. Or say something like, "Okay, 3 billion in foreign aid? Hmm... we'll give that 3 billion to Bechtel or (gulp) Halliburton, and have them build you something useful and train you in its maintenance". Sadly, my invitation to the smoke-filled room was lost in the mail.
Don't believe for a moment that the US has any intention of letting Third World countries grow their economies to the point where they become serious competition in any way.
I have to disagree wildly with you here. The US is desperate for other countries to grow their economies. Economy grows, standard of living and salaries rise, and bammo, US goods are more competitive.
You might make a case that this makes a dent in standard US policy of using foreign aid as a blunt instrument to get favors, bases, whatnot from these poor countries, but I'll argue that a happy, well-economied nation will find itself with less of the issues (famine, danger of Communist or Islamist extremists, or extreme trade barriers) which the US foreign-aid regime is bent toward combatting anyway.
But then again, I've missed the last few sessions in the smoke-filled room and may be behind the times.
Europe is coming up fast... not to mention China and India. The days of the US as the economic superpoer of the wolrd are numbered by just abount any metric you use.
Well thank God we don't use the metric system here. Dodged a bullet on that one.
As long as Linux application developers continue to copy Microsoft, in a vain attempt to be "compatible," Microsoft will always have the edge. They will always set the pace for others to follow.
If you want to make a better product, you can't "embrace and extend." You have to make a better product. By providing file-reading compatibility, you only re-enforce the proliferation of closed file formats. [...]
I think you may be neglecting an important point here: why would anyone want to switch away from Excel? Excel is a great app, and essentially ubiquitous.
Your point about needing to be better is well-taken, but if you want people to risk a switch, you have to make it easy for them to switch, and -- most importantly -- easy for them to switch back. For this reason, you really have to support Excel file formats for import and export.
That done, you have a chance to do in the spreadsheet arena what Apache did in the web server arena: commoditize the product to the point where there is really no point in having a commercial closed app.
To my knowledge this has not been done successfully with any business application, but it's worth a try.
I believe that this minority is actually a pretty conforming group. Sort of like the followers of Brian in The Life of Brian where in response to Brian's plea, "but you are all individuals!" the cultists all reply in unison, "yes we are all individuals" Rejecting tradition seems to be a tradition in and of itself.
I will never forget this moment.
I was at a Pink Floyd concert at the Oakland Coliseum, some years ago. As is custom, people like to sing along with the songs.
So imagine, the band wails "we don't need no education", then 40,000 Floyd fans drone out:
You ain't seen nothing till you see a child lugging around a briefcase everywhere and when asked to explain he says "its an upgrade for my brain cache"
Your modern child already carries around a brain-cache upgrade. He calls it a notebook.
The more advanced (creepy alphas, we don't hang around with them) carry PDAs.
Of course, an aid can become a crutch. I recall a story told me by a friend of mine. Her grandmother, an unlettered immigrant from Lithuania, has, perforce, a phenomenal memory, never needs shopping lists, etc. She rails against this new generation that has to write everything down.
Similarly, during classical times, there were widely practiced memory techniques that we modern barbarians have largely forgotten. See here.
[Iraq gets punished by U.S. for naughtyness, China doesn't] Am I the only one that sees a double standard here?
Not so much a double-standard, but a realization of what is possible. When the US sees drastic human-rights abuses in country X, certain questions have to be asked before any intervention is made:
1. Should we intervene? That is, are the Xites being really, really offensive?
2. Can we intervene? That is, does X have a massive nuclear arsenal? (Note: China does, Iraq didn't but wanted one)
3. Is our interest being served? That is, does attacking X serve national strategic goals? Does X have it in for us in some way?
Your mileage may vary on how to answer these questions for Iraq and China, but my readings suggest that the US executive branch does think this way.
In a Platonic world of Good Smiting Evil, question #1 and #2 would be the only ones considered. But in our world question #3 must also be considered. Note also that the extent to which #3 outweighs #1 is the distance we are into the Gray Area (tm).
Does anybody know how they go about blocking "unwanted" internet site from the public? I am sure there is a way around it.
It works like this:
1. Set up massive block-lists and update them fervently. This discourages random websurfing from casual users from accessing "corrupting" information.
2. Impose jail sentences on those who try really hard to get around your restrictions. It's not a game they're playing, where they just cut off your internet access. This discourages the less-than-rabidly-disgruntled.
... which launches the attack against its own servers for years and years, until the US version makes it stop. (Yeah yeah, it didn't stop to ask the UN version if it was okay)
Slashdot Mirror
It was the first day of Advanced Algorithms. I made it to the lecture hall, and had settled into a seat, waiting for the professor. There was something indefinably wrong, but I couldn't put my finger on it.
I waited a few minutes, as no professor showed up, with a growing certainty that something was just a little off.
Then it hit me. There were too many pretty girls in the classroom. I got used to it real fast, mind you.
So imagine my dismay and bitter disappointment when someone came into the hall and announced that the room had been double-booked with...
ahem...
Poli Sci 101.
It is to weep.
I believe, without proof, that free/open-source software is superior to closed-source, and will eventually "take over".
Aren't you just falling into the trap of reverse elitism? You sneer at Starbucks goers because they're going to the popular spot. Note further that you didn't know that Dunkin Donuts had "better" quality until someone told you. Am I missing something important here?
Starbucks is a coffe shop, for God's sake. It's not the symbol of soul-sucking vapid consumerism you would like it to be. It's a place people go when they want to drink coffee. It's popular because whoever runs it has the good sense to open locations in good spots.
I note in passing they make a mean eggnog latte, if a bit dear.
This hypothetical widget maker is playing the wrong game ... if they are trying to compete on price alone, then they should partner with WalMart. If they want to be the high-quality "boutique" supplier of widgets, WalMart is the wrong partner. This has happened to many WalMart suppliers -- they want to make their play for the big market, and then act real surprised when they realize that that market plays on ruthless price competition. If you are not ready to play in that arena, stick with selling through MallBoutiqueInc.
I can't speak to other brands of machine, because we only have Dells, but insist on proper monitorability.
... she actually is asking for a *boy-toy*, which is something quite different.
Advise caution.
Heck, once you let Italians in, it opens the door to considering Irish folks as white. Which is clearly bunk; they are Appaloosa at best. Freckles, you know.
70% of virus infections in my neighbourhood
... buffer.
are caused by just one woman.
I heard the reason is that one can open her ports
in promiscuous mode...
Yeah, if you want some fast physical I/O and you
have insufficient cache, just
That said, I can see parents getting annoyed when they have to fight a constant rear-guard action against smut, violence, and what-have-you everywhere. Despite what your parents tell you, it is undeniable that what the kids see around them is what they accept as normal. So parents do have a legitimate interest in public debate over what types of material are appropriate for public places / airwaves. And especially over how much of their own social/political philosophy teachers should be allowed to preach in classrooms.
There is an argument to be made between community standards, especially with respect to media which is so easy to see (often impossible not to see), and 1st amendment rights. Speech is protected, but
Seriously, though, this may not be too out of line for what corporations want. Vendor lock-in does have an upside, which is that -- assuming a good vendor, heh -- Stuff Just Works. Clearly this is not appropriate for hobbyists, or a technology shop, but a business for whom IT's role is to support actual business operations may well benefit from an integrated solution from IBM or Sun or whomever. It may be cheaper or sexier to implement a teetering stack of free, semi-free, in-house, and propriety middleware, but it is also a huge pain in the rear.
I can see a market for people who say "I want a payroll system and I want it now and b'God it better work and have a warm, cuddly IBM technician a mere phone-call away! And if that rat bastard Tommy from Accounting leaks any more confidential memos, wouldn't it be cool if those Reuters jackals can't even open the sucker! AAAAH HA HA HA HAAAAAA"
Well, you know what I mean.
It is perhaps unrealistic to ask America to unilaterally cut energy usage in the face of energy-gobbling competition from other countries. It simply is not feasible.
Hence the drive to find large earth-friendly energy sources. Imagine, if you will, the Very Strangest Bedfellows:
-- Greens, who don't like fossil carbon getting into the air
-- Heavy Industry, which realizes that a viable challenge to oil means the price of oil and the alternative both go down.
-- Entrepeneurs, who slaver at the thought of a new ground floor to get in on
-- Politicians, who can "take credit" for Saving Da Oith.
-- Nationalists, who dislike dependence on foreign supply of oil.
The mind boggles.
This is where intellectual-property protections come in. In the absence of any such, some copycat would soon (this "soon" will be important later) undercut the innovator and destroy him in the market. But in markets where there is protection for the innovator (specifically patents), the innovator gets a 17 year monopoly which he can use to rake in the dough and recoup his investment.
Some things are not patentable, and go directly into the public domain. The aspects of UI design which MS battled Apple over turned out (per a judge) to be so. The feature list of a word processing program (many of these features, yes, innovated by MS) is the same. Woe betide Open Office were it not so, eh? Are they parasites? Certainly not in the way you suggest above. For these non-protected features, the only protection the innovator has is time-to-market, and reputation. This is often sufficient.
MS and Dell are not leeches. It's more like "standing on the shoulders of giants".
There is room in the market for innovators and for commodotizers. Are you, personally, willing to pay more for identical non-Dell products? Is your company? Do note that Dell has valid, paid-for licenses for all the (relevant) technology they use. The "innovators" Dell is "leeching" off of don't seem to be concerned.
There are some more factors here. Arab governments gleefully blame America (and our masters, the Jews) for every possible problem, cheaply diverting dissent which would otherwise come down on their own fannies.
You mention the need to "tackle the strong feelings". Oddly enough, that is, for better or for worse, the entire purpose of the "Bush doctrine"
Whether this will work is certainly open to question. But do note that it is an attempt to address the real real root causes (poverty, societal failure) of terrorism, as much as any foreign aid donation.
One final note before we go back to normal programming... the way in which foreign aid is given out really, really sucks. We give cash to governments, where it is promptly wasted, stolen, or otherwise prevented from helping anyone. What we really need to do is get some massive helicopters and airlift technical and vocational schools to trouble spots. Or say something like, "Okay, 3 billion in foreign aid? Hmm
(gasp) Okay, I'm done.
You might make a case that this makes a dent in standard US policy of using foreign aid as a blunt instrument to get favors, bases, whatnot from these poor countries, but I'll argue that a happy, well-economied nation will find itself with less of the issues (famine, danger of Communist or Islamist extremists, or extreme trade barriers) which the US foreign-aid regime is bent toward combatting anyway.
But then again, I've missed the last few sessions in the smoke-filled room and may be behind the times.
Your point about needing to be better is well-taken, but if you want people to risk a switch, you have to make it easy for them to switch, and -- most importantly -- easy for them to switch back. For this reason, you really have to support Excel file formats for import and export.
That done, you have a chance to do in the spreadsheet arena what Apache did in the web server arena: commoditize the product to the point where there is really no point in having a commercial closed app.
To my knowledge this has not been done successfully with any business application, but it's worth a try.
I was at a Pink Floyd concert at the Oakland Coliseum, some years ago. As is custom, people like to sing along with the songs.
So imagine, the band wails "we don't need no education", then 40,000 Floyd fans drone out:
we don't need no thought control
In. Perfect. Unison.
The mind boggles.
The more advanced (creepy alphas, we don't hang around with them) carry PDAs.
Of course, an aid can become a crutch. I recall a story told me by a friend of mine. Her grandmother, an unlettered immigrant from Lithuania, has, perforce, a phenomenal memory, never needs shopping lists, etc. She rails against this new generation that has to write everything down.
Similarly, during classical times, there were widely practiced memory techniques that we modern barbarians have largely forgotten. See here.
1. Should we intervene? That is, are the Xites being really, really offensive?
2. Can we intervene? That is, does X have a massive nuclear arsenal? (Note: China does, Iraq didn't but wanted one)
3. Is our interest being served? That is, does attacking X serve national strategic goals? Does X have it in for us in some way?
Your mileage may vary on how to answer these questions for Iraq and China, but my readings suggest that the US executive branch does think this way.
In a Platonic world of Good Smiting Evil, question #1 and #2 would be the only ones considered. But in our world question #3 must also be considered. Note also that the extent to which #3 outweighs #1 is the distance we are into the Gray Area (tm).
1. Set up massive block-lists and update them fervently. This discourages random websurfing from casual users from accessing "corrupting" information.
2. Impose jail sentences on those who try really hard to get around your restrictions. It's not a game they're playing, where they just cut off your internet access. This discourages the less-than-rabidly-disgruntled.
... which launches the attack against its own servers for years and years, until the US version makes it stop. (Yeah yeah, it didn't stop to ask the UN version if it was okay)