So, way down in there you said If they don't play as many political games as possible, their budget won't survive. which is kinda true. This makes it a shame that you started with NASA does environmental and climate research to please a voting constituent [sic] that would otherwise be opposed to space research. which is basically horseshit.
Dude, space scientists have been committed to climate research from before there was a NASA. Do ya know why? Evidently not.
Because agribusiness, oil companies, large contractors, port managers, the military, and lots of others count on accurate weather data.
Remember the Normandy invasion? Before your time. A couple of guys going up a beach while some other guys tried to kill them. The whole thing was scheduled around the weather reports.
Howsabout farms. Heard of those? Bad predictions of climate change over, say, ten to twenty years, means first of all deeply fucked yields, low to zero profit, and, sometimes, as a couple of people in Louisiana, Alabama, and, oh, did I mention six or seven midwestern states have been learning, flooding bad enough to destroy the entire infrastructure. And then there's what climate change is doing to actual grownup, non-hippie concerns like real estate values, the accelerating disintegration of the permafrost-supported highways and oil pipelines and, oh, pretty much everything else north of, say, Alberta.
Now, I could go on about such non-hippie concerns as the possible incipient collapse of several major crops, starting with bananas, or the scrambling going on in the lumber industry or the thousands of deaths a year from mudslides in places like the Philippines and Central America or the very real and immediate problems port facilities around the world are facing from increased storms and rising sea levels or the increases in skin cancers or the military importance of better air and water turbulence data but it would probably just confuse you.
You just go on along and buy yourself some beach real estate in, say, Tuvalu, and when you're drowning during an "anomalous" storm, drop me a line and we can discuss this again.
The definition of 'Race' requires two or more competitors, so no, this would not be another space race.
Dude, you're kidding, right? With China, India and the E.U. each positioned to show NASA's manned space program up for the contractor-dominated, politically-driven bunch of creaky old bureaucrats, hasbeens and wannabes they are, I need not even mention the several multibillion dollar private entities in this particular "race".
Race, hell, with the short-sighted, technologically illiterate, feeble-minded crew we've got in the White House, the ADHD afflicted legislative branch, and Northrop and friends pulling the strings to guarantee maximum costs, we'll be lucky to get a goddamned Cabbage Patch doll up there before the Indians have opened their first moon- based technical college, the Japanese have painted half the craters odd shades of pink and green, and the Chinese have built five Lunar missile bases, three brothels, and a sweatshop.
I hope Rutan's people get moving 'cause the go-alongs in NASA sure as hell won't.
Hey, if this story is on the money, in fifty years we may be half way across this spiral arm.
On a more practical note, with the number of competing vendors and the number of technologies in play, it's not a question of if but of how. Will the laser drives beat the chemical boosters but lose out to the space elevator?
Unless the dimwits with the guns and bombs manage to foobar our entire world, somebody's getting systems running in the next fifteen years or so. As an old L5 member I say, it's about damn time!
And every year that ratio shifts in favor of mass transit in, oh, twenty or thirty U.S. cities, especially where rail is being built, buses get dedicated lanes or population is swiftly increasing.
And, of course, I like to spend my transit time reading so a car wouldn't be very nice to me or others.
Admittedly, I'm biased. A couple of years in Portland, many years in NYC, lots of time in D.C., and enough time sitting in traffic in L.A. have all added up to perhaps, a different view than many. I don't claim that mass transit is perfect or even a solution for everybody. I'm just really f*cking sick of people acting as if there is no real mass transit "west of Chicago". Christ! In L.A. they've got one of the most impressive heavy rail (subway) networks in the world and they're going gangbusters extending it. In fact, it's happening all over but most angelenos still are suffering from a severe absence of clue.
oh, no, the subway? No, that never actually got built. They lost their funding after doing three or four stops worth.
But I'm looking at the map at this very moment, complete with today's schedules.
No, it never actually got built. Those are just planned routes.
I can see pictures here of it in use.
No, you mean drawings. Or maybe they're computer simulations.
No, these are definitely shots of actual commuters on actual trains.
No, it doesn't exist. You must be looking at the site for a different city.
And so on. It's like they're brainwashed. Oh, let's be honest, they are brainwashed. And I'm very sick of it. It's yet more corporate American FUD of a level and effectiveness that Microsoft would be proud to call their own. Typical of what nobody seems ready to admit is stuff like this, from, of all places, USATODAY:
As transit expands further, new projects will follow. The Blue Line light rail that runs south from Union Station has sparked $1 billion in development at Long Beach stations where the route ends. A 5-mile Gold Line extension into densely populated, mostly Latino east L.A. is underway. A 24-mile extension east to San Bernardino County will open rail access to tens of thousands of commuters in the San Gabriel foothills.
But even with that, most folks I talk to say the same deluded horseshit as the post I was responding to. Was my response snarky? Borderline rude? Yes. But I'd say that I have plenty of grounds.
Okay now, it should be pretty obvious to everybody that this is fundamentally a defensive move by Microsoft.
- They've got the anticipatory buzz from the $100 laptop project hemming them in on one side, with early adopters (including me) saying "I've got to get me one of those and I'll gladly pay twice or three times the hundred dollar price".
- On the other hand they've got existing smart phones and increasingly funtional "super"mp3players like the newest iPods that are becoming more multifunction by the year and are now, effectively, PDAs.
- And internet access all over the place now, including devices integrated into seatbacks of high end air carriers along with web-based storage and more and more enterprise apps running on web-based apps anyway.
- Not to mention the tripling or quadrupling of the percentage of hardcore coders and sysadmins who now carry Mac OS laptops. Used to be that maybe one in twenty true geeks at, say, a UNIX conference had Mac OS devices. Now it's what, twenty percent? Twenty-five?
- And, the eight hundred pound gorilla here, all the game platforms BUT MICROSOFT now have mobile devices that are kicking ass and taking names, not to mention companies like Zodiac doing explicitly multipurpose gaming/pda devices.
So what does this add up to for Microsoft? It means high end business users, teens, early adopters, and damn near every highly desirable market is full of people asking themselves the question: "why should I carry my windows box with me?"
And even harsher, some are asking "Do i need a Windows box at all?"
So MS needs an answer to that question. Of course they've been coming out with some mobile platform model every two years or so for almost twenty years, most of which are flat out vaporware or simply garbage. And if this were about effective mobile devices that professionals are demanding, well, hell, there were excellent solutions available for that in 1993.
Of course, history is full of people doing the right thing for the wrong reason and maybe it doesn't matter why MS has brought this about (and make no mistake, this is their baby) if the results are good.
Except that it doesn't work that way in the computer world. If the driver is going the wrong way it doesn't matter how admirable the bus is. MS has long since been shown to retain iron control over their projects and if this is simply yet another round of a semi-vaporware (notice the paucity of shipping devices) meant primarily to make people less certain that they should buy nonMS devices, then MS will, as always, run this as a cynical bit of theatre, with cool anouncements vastly overshadowing actual shipping devices and quiet sabotage of any project that threatans it.
Despite his statements to the contrary, Otto Burkes was chosen to run this project, at least in part, precisely because his credentials would assist in FUD. Mark my words, eventually internal MS documents will come out that reveal that MS higher-ups were very concerned about the viability of this device in reality and as perceived as a counter to the mobile game platforms.
In every sense, Microsoft is trying to game us. After thirty years of deception and documented sabotage, we should know better than to fall for it.
And lastly, is anybody but me noticing the absurd factor that the ONLY reason this device is so heavy/clunky/expensive/battery-hogging is because MS apps and OSes are such resource hogs? Psions and other such devices have done just fine at all of the business tasks needed with a batttery life measured in days, not hours. For that matter, in terms of the features actually used, MS Office itself, circa, say, 1995 should be able to work just fine on a low power ARM or equivalent. I love that the interviewer asks "can you run Photoshop?" I run Photoshop all the time on a 300MHz machine with 198 Mgs of RAM w
SF is about the only city west of Chicago with dense enfough [sic] population for most mass transit to practical.
Say what?
Seems to me that Los Angeles had a thriving lightrail system until the auto industry and their friends came in and sabotaged it. The heavy rail they've put in recently is going gangbusters. Portland has excellent buses and lightrail. Vegas is building a system - already worried that it won't be enough to handle capacity. Seattle has the same issue. San Antonio is building an entire light rail systemright now - they sure disagree. Phoenix is doing the same.
Dallas, Denver, Galveston, Houston, Minneapolis/St. Paul, Sacramento, San Diego, and San Jose all seem to be under the impression that mass transit works for them. They're all planning to add more. Maybe you just need to explain their mistake to them, help 'em out.
Of course I could mention about fifteen more cities that are working to put more mass transit in place or the increasing trend for real estate developers in places like Brentwood (that's in L.A., folks) to build "New Urbanism" oriented housing developments placed with the assumption that their buyers will be mass transit-focused, or how profitable such developments are turning out to be.
Dude, just dropped by your page. You get paid to nuke stuff? To wash plama over it? You must *love* the apples scene from 28 Days. "Ahhhh, irradiated!"
Kin ya get me any of those cool teeny weeny NEN bottles with the lead cases? Lost the last of mine ages ago.
-Rustin
p.s. Mustard on an Italian hero is sacrilege. Evil. Especially brown mustard. At least go with a nice Kosciusko.
And, lessee, you wanted to shop at the same stores you used to but couldn't find them so did your shopping at (expensive) downtown stores, you wanted Texas-style meals so used tourist guides and found that good bar-b-que at a restaurant listed in a tourist guide cost ya forty bucks a plate . . . blah, blah, blabbety, blah.
I have no fucking patience at all for idiots who move to New York, ignore all local assets, then try to live "jes like back home" where real estate costs a tenth a much and service jobs pay half as much and then complain that living in NYC is expensive.
Hey, maybe I'm wrong and you were living in Rochester. Maybe both of your legs are amputated, you have a sales job and need truly a car.
But probably not.
Other than rent and even cheap rent is doable if you know what you're doing, New York is one of the cheapest places to live in the U.S. if you think things through.
"But I went to this bar in Times Square and a beer was seven bucks. Why, at my favorite bar back home in Thimblebrain County the special is . .."
Whatever. First of all, why do idiots like this always insist on comparing the tourist traps in midtown to the low cost hangout in the cheap part of town back home? Secondly, there are plenty of NYC bars with cheap drinks if you PAY ATTENTION to the menu. Third, do none of you understand why most hipster clothing stores sell flasks?
Food? A hundred kinds of takeout, most cheaper and better than just about anywhere.
Entertainment? Please. Pick up any issue of any free paper (we've got about thirty) and you'll find plenty of cheap or free options.
Clothes? Thrift shops with designer originals, same fuckin' Filene's Basement and such as "back home", and about four sample sales a week, not to mention swaps, vintage, etc.
Furniture? See above.
Fuckin' clueless narrow-minded jerks. One more empty-headed, obese, vacant-faced, tourist dumbfuck starts lecturing me on how New York is soooo expensive I'm gonna shove his thirty dollar knockoff NYPD jumbo-sized sweatshirt up his ass 'til it sticks out of his useless mouth.
I doubt the Americans attitude to homosexuality at the time would have been any different.
Um, actually, then and there it was. Keep in mind that Britain was still desperately broke while the U.S. was rolling in cash. Meanwhile Parliment was in the hands of Big Government socialists.
For this and other reasons, doing leading edge computer work in Britain meant working closely under the same sorts of government dimwits who were making him miserable in the first place.
Meanwhile, in the good old U.S.A., much computer development was in the hands of private companies like IBM which, I remind you, kept a vigorous division operating in Nazi Germany until right before the Allies arrived.
I'm not making a moral statement one way or the other (at least not in this here post) but the consequence was that there were jobs in the U.S. available to Turing that would have been backed by the simple desire to have his skills available to increase their bank accounts.
Would he have been square in the sights of McCarthy and his self-hating gay scumbags within a few short years? Maybe. But we'll never know. But we do know that "the Americans" were far from uniform in their attitudes and plenty of them, including plenty with cash and other brilliant computer guys already there, would have welcomed Turing with open arms.
Actually, according to what he wrote in his letters and the memories of his friends, it was not so much the surveillance per se, as the overall inability to get work done or have a satisfying life that left him feeling so hopeless. The hormones did awful things to his body, from reduction in sex drive to growing breasts, the police bullied a street kid into faking the confession that led to Turing's conviction, the funding in England was getting routed around him and his travel was impaired by government restrictions. (This, keep in mind, while the Americans were surging ahead in computer design and would have been delighted to have Turing join them.)
Oh, it was death by a thousand cuts while the nation that owed so much to him mostly looked on and let him be humiliated and kept from his work.
Also keep in mind folks, that Turing, while thought of a theoretician, was arguably even more important as an operations guy. He led the effort to confront Churchill with the initial absurdly low levels of funding at Bletchley Park (the British code-breaking center), he played a key role in getting the staffing figured out and codes to the right places, and so on. IIRC, he was not averse to picking up a soldering iron and stepping into the physical work of *building* the computers.
Of course, this isn't even getting into his late in life interest in things like how to use a computer to replicate patterns in nature like the spots on the side of a cow. Work that was leading him decades ahead of anybody else to the concepts we now know as fractals and chaotic phenomena.
We'll never know what we've lost, but at least we're getting better at admitting who people like him were.
But then, when we've still got stuff like A Beautiful Mind not even mentioning that Nash was mostly gay (the real reason he lost his clearance was not for mental illness but because he was found in bed with a young man) we've clearly got a long way to go.
Can we put GWB on it?
Sure, but only if we use "nucular"-powered rockets to get him there.
Far better would be to put the word out that oil executives looking to donate money were up there. Then maybe we'ld get Rove or Cheney to make the trip.
Well, given that this thred was started by a superconductivity guy, it seems only natural to ask, how about inducing an itty bitty (relatively) current across said asteroid if it is indeed mostly iron (some aren't, ya know) and try to get the induced magnetic field aligned to get it to shift path within the solar system's ambient fields? After all, we're talking about a LONG period of time and a tiny shift in direction. I'm too lazy to do the numbers, but seems to me that rockets of any sort might be a needlessly brute force approach. (And yes, I *did* just reread Flynn's Lodestar.)
I'm betting that with all the "furries" and the decreasing cost of body mods, we'll see real world "fuzzies" (excuse me if I misuse the terminology, I'm not up on this particular enthusiasm) within, say, five years for rough approximations and fifteen for "straight-out-of-anime" conversions, complete with fully functional tails and big eyes. Gonna be weird to live in a world in which Gibson's idea of modern primitives actually exist.
I just remembered, a little while back I went into far more detail about the differences between geeks and one of the look-alike fen species. As a man who used to live in a twelve bedroom, semi-communal gamer household, I got to know the differences all too well.
All of which leaves me curious, how many of you would consider a non-techie but accomplished fan (for example, Kevin Smith) to be a geek? Sure, there are the Wil Wheatons and Penn Jilettes who can describe Red Dwarf episodes and recompile their DiVX app, but what about the pure fans who have taken their fandom and raised their obsession to the level of analysis and creation?
Nope, sorry, language has moved on. AFAICT, "geek" now refers to those of us who are systems thinkers about, increasingly, any subject. You can now find people, as the article mentions, saying that they are "geeking out" about anything from auto repair to barbeque.
"nerd" now denotes the tape-on-the-glasses weakling.
Personally, I think that this separation was inevitable since:
A.) Society will never maintain contempt for any class of people who make lots of money and get lots of power.
A'.) Any class with lots of money and power will achieve at least a passable baseline of nookie.
and more interestingly
B.) Real geeks are, by nature, hackers of our environment and, increasingly of ourselves. Sure, some techies seem to sincerely think that they can transcend their social cluelessness and isolation by becoming experts in yet another obscure subject (beer-making, cpu customization, wargaming) but most of us long since figured out that we can apply our skills at analysis and redesign to ourselves. I look at my friends on/. and while most of us may have looked like, and been, pasty-faced social isolates at the age of ten, we now do martial arts, ride and rebuild motorcycles, can at the least effectively simulate the patter and behavior required to do well at parties, and, well, we get laid.
I am a geek. I am seriously fucking proud of that. I know that I am not only smarter and more capable in several dozen ways then just about anybody I have ever met, I am also more honest, ethical, and self-aware. All are geek traits. I have also done more bed-hopping then many a guy.
Sure, we start out as "losers" but at what iteration?.
I'm thirty-seven. Old enough to now see what is happening to my age cohort well beyond the baselines provided by genetics, family, and cultural mores. Most guys my age are getting sloppy, flabby, passive, and sloppy about their appearance and even their careers. I look at the geeks my age and we are all more self-assured, all working on our health, mostly getting stronger and more physically capable, and generally on the way up while those around us go down. We are stronger, fiercer, and more formidible then our non-geek equivalents and the gap is widening.
As far as I'm concerned, being a geek is defined by what I call "two and a half" variables. Firstly, being a systems-oriented thinker, seeing the world not as a random set of causeless phenomena but as overlapping groups of editable, comprehensible events. Secondly, having a brain that doesn't turn off. In other words, living with a default setting of starting to figure out "why" as soon as one is provided with the data on "what".
The "half" is that nobody becomes that passionate about understanding the world just because they felt like it. That level of involvement *always* is a consequence of something serious having been wrong when one was a child. After all, if the world gives you everything you want, then you don't question it too deeply. So all of us, each of us, were striving for something and were smart enough that we found that thinking and understanding got us closer to get what we strove for. Kids develop the tool that gets them what they want. We developed the habit of thinking. Of making sense of things.
But that "malformation" is only the starting point, not necessarily a permanent state..
Where do computers fit into all of this? Only as easy ways to make a living that are best handled by us. Built by geeks, specc'ed in part by geeks (Vannevar, we call to you!), they are logic machines, however faulty. So a lot of us have drifted there. Whatever. It's only a local and temporary anomaly. In the eighteen-fifties we would have been in the railroad business.
As for the "make-believe" thing, I call bullshit on that. I have repeatedly had to endure crowds of dim bulbs on their way to Yankees games recently and these halfwits were far more involv
Doing A Hundred Jobs - All Badly
on
USB Swiss Army Knife
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· Score: 1, Flamebait
And this sort of foolishness is why I'm a Wenger man. Those other folks have turned the Swiss Army knife into a joke.
"Hey, let's add a file cabinet!"
"Even better, a thermos!"
"How about one with a bedroll the size of an ant, complete with bedside reading in one point type!" "Yeah! that's the ticket!"
Clowns.
When I buy a pocket knife, I don't want a gimmick. I want a tool. Admit it folks, most of you would do far better to have a box cutter, one good pair of pliers, and a driver set with compact head. You're gonna carry the Minimag anyway.
Me? These days I carry a P-48 on my keyring, an LED flashlight in my bag, and *maybe* a mini set of screwdriver bits and compact rachet head. Add in the fifties heavy steel compact stapler I always have and I guarantee that I'm better equipped for the real world then almost any of these gadget-happy ninnies.
Three inch thick pocket knives are for wannabes. Real geeks use real tools.
I wish I could remember the brand name, but there is a special spray that you can apply to the rollers in a printer or copier that give them back their "stickiness". Many time the problem with paper feed is the rollers, not the mechanism. As the former tech below pointed out, the basic mechanism is great on those beasts. It's the little, and fixable stuff that gives first.
Lastly, there are still plenty of makers of 24 pin dot matrix printers. Some less high end then the check printers you mentioned. They're just no longer advertised in office supply catalogs. Go to Processor.com, or, even better, get the dead tree edition, and you'll find plenty of references and, even better, ads.
I don't know if the [real linguistics behind the design] can be said for those who created Klingon...
Just ask the folks at the Klingon Language Institute. Klingon as we know it was created initially (pretty much, I'm giving the short form here) by Marc Okrand, a real linguistics professor. Since then, and especially in the past ten years or so, Klingon has been taken up as a project by quite a few people with formal linguistics training as well as many enthusiaists. Enough to make possible an annual convention which at least takes a viable shot at being Klingon-only. People write letters in Klingon, have translated Shakespeare into Klingon, IM in Klingon, and have registered a number of domains based on Klingon words.
Personally, as I have said elsewhere, it has been my experience that most of these people have a terrrrrible signal to noise ratio in terms of actually living by a Klingon philosophy, while the folks who dabble in Elvish openly admit that it's just a game. But as for the issue of the Klingon language's "legitimacy", well even aside from the query by Oregon's mental health department to have a Klingon translator available in case they ever need one, yes and getting more real by the day.
By the way, folks, let's keep in mind that modern Hebrew is also in large part a synthetic language. Back when the zionists decided to start using Hebrew as their language for daily life, it had nowhere near the vocabulary or range needed to serve that role. Ask Chachem or Interrobang or any of the other folks here on/. who have looked at the problem. There is nothing shameful about a language being synthetic. Every language started that way at some point. Maybe we can build some now that make a bit more sense.
As for the issue of studying, creating, or enhancing such languages being "wasteful", as far as I'm concerned, we are well ahead every time we get options that are NOBODY'S heritage. Each step on that path is one away from the kind of ethnic identity pathologies that have made Bosnia, Rwanda, and so many other arbitrary hatreds viable.
My semi-old-fartedness [same age] and non-fortune1000-ladder experiences corroborate yours. I even resorted to rooftop garden projects myself, so chill. But, but, but, I was having so much fun being semi-gratuitiously vitriolic. No fair being reasonable in response!
Sorry. I truly didn't catch that you were kidding. I'm a bit slow about things like that sometimes. Comes of hearing too much like that spoken in sincerity. Well, that and my borderline Asperger's social skills.
Again, sorry. And yes, you touched a very sore nerve (I wasn't kidding about the rather harsh dinner a while back, or any of the rest for that matter) and I guess I was a bit too eager to have a chance to vent.
My apologies. If you're ever in NYC I'll buy you a beer. (Make it two.)
By all means -- get pissed. Tell the anti-capitalists (or however you want to describe them) that you think they're full of it. Ask for proof....Those who think that businesses need heavy regulation and huge taxes don't usually understand how it all works (well, I don't either -- but I still think that those folks are full of it)
Yup. That's a reason-based, fact-based analysis.
Hate to break it to ya, son (no, I don't) But many of us "leftists" have been engaging in hundreds of pages of journal entries and posts positively overflowing with facts for years now. Go for it, look at my post above. Facts. Examples. Analysis. I mean, if you think you are up for it, I can take down my entire FUCKIN WALL WORTH of textbooks, case studies, adult business magazines (stuff like Institutional Investor, not dumbed-down cheerleading like Inc. or Fortune) and I'll be more then glad to sit down over the next few days and tear you a new one. You have access to my email address. Try me. I'll have a journal entry up good and proper and we can determine who is qualfied to discuss what. "fail to understand"? Listen, you may not have your facts in order or studied the theories but I and others here have. I've been there, done that, printed the goddamned t-shirt and wrote the fucking manual. But then, maybe that's why the families of millionaires hire me to help manage their affairs and not you. Just guessing here.
No, turkey, we don't oppose this sort of crap because of some mushy-minded anti-capitalism. In fact, chances are I live a far more purely capitalist life then you ever will. Run my own business, as it happens; have for years. We oppose this sort of crap because we *have* studied it, we *do* understand it, and, in some cases, precisely because we're good at it, we've spent far too much of our lives cleaning up the damage done by corporate pinheads and are really and truly sick of it.
Following me here? Keeping up okay? I'll make it simple for ya. We oppose corporate shenanigans because we oppose muddle-headed thinking. Because we want our world to make sense.
So the next time you feel like making clueless and scurrilous accusations, how about you turn down Rush or Fox News (sic) or WWF whatever your head-filler of choise is for a minute first and think about just what you're about to say.
Hey, who called MBA's evil? I just said semi-mockingly that they have a secret, or at least get exposed to a taboo: that enhancing shareholder value is the foundation of any ethics at a publicly-held company. Or haven't you got to that stage of synthesizing your studies yet? That statement is utter and complete horseshit. I don't want to begin to think how many times I've heard smug, ignorant, self-serving executives hide behind that particular bit of jargon. One that has about as much to do with their actions as "fiscal responsibility" has to do with the actions of the Bush administration.
The closest most MBAs and other hollow suits I've dealt with come is maximizing short-term share price by sacrificing long-term growth and company effectiveness to short-term flash and dazzle.
Not that I'm biased or anything, as both a former IT director in Time/Warner during the AOL merger who opposed the several hundred million dollar mistake of switching all internal mail to AOLmail and an acting IT director in another huge company you'ld have heard of as they ignored market demand, cheapened their product, and put a company insider at the top of the firm who was well known to be borderline incompetent.
Take a look at the SAP implementation at Pierson and come back and try again.
MBAs are not acculturated or trained to maximize anything but their own compensation. As is displayed above, those of us who have held operational responsibility know full well who's behind the moves to replace working systems with gimmicky bullshit because it will create the right bits of stagecraft and grease the right palms. We know who has refused to look at real TCO data for years while insisting on Micro$oft trash becoming the "single source solution". We know who used Andersen Consulting to promote the dimwitted and complex over the simple and sane. We know how Booz-Allen is still doing it today.
You can talk all the Fortune Magazine eyewash you want to the great empty-headed sheep out there but don't try peddling it here on/. where quite a few of us make our livings as real systems optimizers. We know better.
In fact, just to lay my cards on the table, I just had a long, unpleasant dinner last week with an old friend of mine who *has* an MBA from a top school who spent quite a long time expressing his discomfort at how modern business has made it (his words) "impossible to rise to the top except by being amoral". Christ! I dated an MBA from another top school for a while and even when I loved her, which I did, she still appalled me with her combination of bowing to conventional wisdom over independant analysis while speaking the jargon of "hard-headed objectivity".
But, then again, maybe my opinion comes from having another friend who is a lawyer working the Adelphia case who has made me sit through chapter and verse on just what idiots the top people were (all money routed through one set of accounts? Good Gawd!) all the while the mass of MBA types (including MBAs I knew in telecommuncations) were trumpeting them as brilliant. After all, the Wall Street Journal loved them ans the stock price was soaring. It must be true.
Sure, I've know a few exceptions. A certain comptroller of a high profile arts institution comes to mind. But it is probably significant that she worked in and then managed businesses (restauraunts, in fact) years before stepping into her first MBA classroom.
I majored in economics in college. I have been to lectures at Columbia, NYU, and half a dozen other "top" univerities and colleges. I was raised on stock market analysis, had issues of Value Line sitting around when I was a kid, and was reading John Stewart Mill before most people in this discussion were born. And I can say with utter assurance that we do indeed have wonderful training available these days in industrial organization, systems optimization, decisonmaking, and so on (my short list would include Milgram, Thaler, Garson, and Cyert) but those are not the things
Go ahead and try it in NYC though, you'll only do it once, from then on whoever pushes your wheelchair for you will wait until the light changes.
Yeah, right.
You clearly are not a New Yorker. I've been crossing THROUGH midtown traffic for over twenty years and the only thing I ever ran into was a cake I stepped on while damn near jogging *backwards* through midtown to impress a girl (hey, I was fourteen).
Real New Yorkers do not wait for lights. We wait for gaps among the oncoming cars. Frogger indeed. Stand at any major intersection with several lanes (the corner of 96th and Amsterdam a block from here will do nicely) and you'll periodically see somebody, maybe even me, stride purposely between the cars in the middle of rush hour and then wait, standing on the yellow line as the cars, buses and trucks go rushing by two inches away, until a clear spot opens up to cross the rest of the way.
The rush feels good. Nothin' like regular literal brushes with death (as the wind from the passing trucks pulls my jacket taut) to keep me awake and aware. Occasionally I'll be on a yellow line with several others who took the same risk, so we all have to squeeze onto the line until a space opens up in traffic or the light changes. Happens to me on East Houston on a regular basis. Gotta say that is one time that even I am not conversational.
But baby, if you can't handle the pace you should stay in the suburbs where you belong.
I think that's the point--they're targetting small camera applications: mobile phones, PDAs, keychain digital cameras, clandestine surveillance cameras and such.
Prolly not. The real issue is that the smaller the lenses, the more of a role surface tension takes towards creating a uniform surface. Boundary layers between fluids always have a tendency to bow out in one direction or the other. But that "skin" is just half the thickness of one molecule plus it's range of interaction with the surrounding ones. For water, remember your Van Der Waals forces, kids. In a one centimeter wide tube filled with water, this phenomenon is obvious and dominates the behavior of the interface. In a one *meter* wide tube, everything from little wavelets from vibration (!) to any impurities to, oh, btw GRAVITY[1], will tend to randomize the shape of the interface.
In udda woids, the bigger the surface area, the more random, or at least nonuniform the shape of the "lens".
Getcherself a copy of good ol' Prandtl&Tietjens (Fundamentals of Hydro&Aerodynamics). Your life will never be the same.
[1] It blows my mind that *nobody* on this thread has yet commented on the tendency of gravity to deform such lenses. Gack! Have *any* of you done the thought experiment instead of just believing what you read? The Phillips device has a second fluid. I would assume in part this is to address that. Betcha that the indices of refraction are very different but the densities are exactly the same.
Well, sorry to repeat myself but no, I'ld guess that the biggest problem for eyewear is that every time the wearer moves the lens deforms.
Picture trying to do something as simple as walking quickly with them on.
Boing-boing-boing goes your focal length and center of mass.
Slashdot Mirror
This makes it a shame that you started with NASA does environmental and climate research to please a voting constituent [sic] that would otherwise be opposed to space research. which is basically horseshit.
Dude, space scientists have been committed to climate research from before there was a NASA. Do ya know why?
Evidently not.
Because agribusiness, oil companies, large contractors, port managers, the military, and lots of others count on accurate weather data.
Remember the Normandy invasion? Before your time. A couple of guys going up a beach while some other guys tried to kill them. The whole thing was scheduled around the weather reports.
Howsabout farms. Heard of those? Bad predictions of climate change over, say, ten to twenty years, means first of all deeply fucked yields, low to zero profit, and, sometimes, as a couple of people in Louisiana, Alabama, and, oh, did I mention six or seven midwestern states have been learning, flooding bad enough to destroy the entire infrastructure. And then there's what climate change is doing to actual grownup, non-hippie concerns like real estate values, the accelerating disintegration of the permafrost-supported highways and oil pipelines and, oh, pretty much everything else north of, say, Alberta.
Now, I could go on about such non-hippie concerns as the possible incipient collapse of several major crops, starting with bananas, or the scrambling going on in the lumber industry or the thousands of deaths a year from mudslides in places like the Philippines and Central America or the very real and immediate problems port facilities around the world are facing from increased storms and rising sea levels or the increases in skin cancers or the military importance of better air and water turbulence data but it would probably just confuse you.
You just go on along and buy yourself some beach real estate in, say, Tuvalu, and when you're drowning during an "anomalous" storm, drop me a line and we can discuss this again.
Rustin
Dude, you're kidding, right? With China, India and the E.U. each positioned to show NASA's manned space program up for the contractor-dominated, politically-driven bunch of creaky old bureaucrats, hasbeens and wannabes they are, I need not even mention the several multibillion dollar private entities in this particular "race".
Race, hell, with the short-sighted, technologically illiterate, feeble-minded crew we've got in the White House, the ADHD afflicted legislative branch, and Northrop and friends pulling the strings to guarantee maximum costs, we'll be lucky to get a goddamned Cabbage Patch doll up there before the Indians have opened their first moon- based technical college, the Japanese have painted half the craters odd shades of pink and green, and the Chinese have built five Lunar missile bases, three brothels, and a sweatshop.
I hope Rutan's people get moving 'cause the go-alongs in NASA sure as hell won't.
-Rustin
On a more practical note, with the number of competing vendors and the number of technologies in play, it's not a question of if but of how. Will the laser drives beat the chemical boosters but lose out to the space elevator?
Unless the dimwits with the guns and bombs manage to foobar our entire world, somebody's getting systems running in the next fifteen years or so. As an old L5 member I say, it's about damn time!
-Rustin
And, of course, I like to spend my transit time reading so a car wouldn't be very nice to me or others.
Admittedly, I'm biased. A couple of years in Portland, many years in NYC, lots of time in D.C., and enough time sitting in traffic in L.A. have all added up to perhaps, a different view than many. I don't claim that mass transit is perfect or even a solution for everybody. I'm just really f*cking sick of people acting as if there is no real mass transit "west of Chicago". Christ! In L.A. they've got one of the most impressive heavy rail (subway) networks in the world and they're going gangbusters extending it. In fact, it's happening all over but most angelenos still are suffering from a severe absence of clue.
oh, no, the subway? No, that never actually got built. They lost their funding after doing three or four stops worth.
But I'm looking at the map at this very moment, complete with today's schedules.
No, it never actually got built. Those are just planned routes.
I can see pictures here of it in use.
No, you mean drawings. Or maybe they're computer simulations.
No, these are definitely shots of actual commuters on actual trains.
No, it doesn't exist. You must be looking at the site for a different city.
And so on. It's like they're brainwashed. Oh, let's be honest, they are brainwashed. And I'm very sick of it. It's yet more corporate American FUD of a level and effectiveness that Microsoft would be proud to call their own. Typical of what nobody seems ready to admit is stuff like this, from, of all places, USATODAY:
But even with that, most folks I talk to say the same deluded horseshit as the post I was responding to. Was my response snarky? Borderline rude? Yes. But I'd say that I have plenty of grounds.
-Rustin
Okay now, it should be pretty obvious to everybody that this is fundamentally a defensive move by Microsoft.
- They've got the anticipatory buzz from the $100 laptop project hemming them in on one side, with early adopters (including me) saying "I've got to get me one of those and I'll gladly pay twice or three times the hundred dollar price".
- On the other hand they've got existing smart phones and increasingly funtional "super"mp3players like the newest iPods that are becoming more multifunction by the year and are now, effectively, PDAs.
- And internet access all over the place now, including devices integrated into seatbacks of high end air carriers along with web-based storage and more and more enterprise apps running on web-based apps anyway.
- Not to mention the tripling or quadrupling of the percentage of hardcore coders and sysadmins who now carry Mac OS laptops. Used to be that maybe one in twenty true geeks at, say, a UNIX conference had Mac OS devices. Now it's what, twenty percent? Twenty-five?
- And, the eight hundred pound gorilla here, all the game platforms BUT MICROSOFT now have mobile devices that are kicking ass and taking names, not to mention companies like Zodiac doing explicitly multipurpose gaming/pda devices.
So what does this add up to for Microsoft? It means high end business users, teens, early adopters, and damn near every highly desirable market is full of people asking themselves the question: "why should I carry my windows box with me?"
And even harsher, some are asking "Do i need a Windows box at all?"
So MS needs an answer to that question. Of course they've been coming out with some mobile platform model every two years or so for almost twenty years, most of which are flat out vaporware or simply garbage. And if this were about effective mobile devices that professionals are demanding, well, hell, there were excellent solutions available for that in 1993.
Of course, history is full of people doing the right thing for the wrong reason and maybe it doesn't matter why MS has brought this about (and make no mistake, this is their baby) if the results are good.
Except that it doesn't work that way in the computer world. If the driver is going the wrong way it doesn't matter how admirable the bus is. MS has long since been shown to retain iron control over their projects and if this is simply yet another round of a semi-vaporware (notice the paucity of shipping devices) meant primarily to make people less certain that they should buy nonMS devices, then MS will, as always, run this as a cynical bit of theatre, with cool anouncements vastly overshadowing actual shipping devices and quiet sabotage of any project that threatans it.
Despite his statements to the contrary, Otto Burkes was chosen to run this project, at least in part, precisely because his credentials would assist in FUD. Mark my words, eventually internal MS documents will come out that reveal that MS higher-ups were very concerned about the viability of this device in reality and as perceived as a counter to the mobile game platforms.
In every sense, Microsoft is trying to game us. After thirty years of deception and documented sabotage, we should know better than to fall for it.
And lastly, is anybody but me noticing the absurd factor that the ONLY reason this device is so heavy/clunky/expensive/battery-hogging is because MS apps and OSes are such resource hogs? Psions and other such devices have done just fine at all of the business tasks needed with a batttery life measured in days, not hours. For that matter, in terms of the features actually used, MS Office itself, circa, say, 1995 should be able to work just fine on a low power ARM or equivalent. I love that the interviewer asks "can you run Photoshop?" I run Photoshop all the time on a 300MHz machine with 198 Mgs of RAM w
Say what?
Seems to me that Los Angeles had a thriving lightrail system until the auto industry and their friends came in and sabotaged it. The heavy rail they've put in recently is going gangbusters. Portland has excellent buses and lightrail. Vegas is building a system - already worried that it won't be enough to handle capacity. Seattle has the same issue. San Antonio is building an entire light rail systemright now - they sure disagree. Phoenix is doing the same.
Dallas, Denver, Galveston, Houston, Minneapolis/St. Paul, Sacramento, San Diego, and San Jose all seem to be under the impression that mass transit works for them. They're all planning to add more. Maybe you just need to explain their mistake to them, help 'em out.
Of course I could mention about fifteen more cities that are working to put more mass transit in place or the increasing trend for real estate developers in places like Brentwood (that's in L.A., folks) to build "New Urbanism" oriented housing developments placed with the assumption that their buyers will be mass transit-focused, or how profitable such developments are turning out to be.
But that would be crass. Snarky, even.
I'd never do that.
-Rustin
Kin ya get me any of those cool teeny weeny NEN bottles with the lead cases? Lost the last of mine ages ago.
-Rustin
p.s. Mustard on an Italian hero is sacrilege. Evil. Especially brown mustard. At least go with a nice Kosciusko.
And, lessee, you wanted to shop at the same stores you used to but couldn't find them so did your shopping at (expensive) downtown stores, you wanted Texas-style meals so used tourist guides and found that good bar-b-que at a restaurant listed in a tourist guide cost ya forty bucks a plate . . . blah, blah, blabbety, blah.
I have no fucking patience at all for idiots who move to New York, ignore all local assets, then try to live "jes like back home" where real estate costs a tenth a much and service jobs pay half as much and then complain that living in NYC is expensive.
Hey, maybe I'm wrong and you were living in Rochester. Maybe both of your legs are amputated, you have a sales job and need truly a car.
But probably not.
.
Other than rent and even cheap rent is doable if you know what you're doing, New York is one of the cheapest places to live in the U.S. if you think things through
"But I went to this bar in Times Square and a beer was seven bucks. Why, at my favorite bar back home in Thimblebrain County the special is . . ."
Whatever. First of all, why do idiots like this always insist on comparing the tourist traps in midtown to the low cost hangout in the cheap part of town back home? Secondly, there are plenty of NYC bars with cheap drinks if you PAY ATTENTION to the menu. Third, do none of you understand why most hipster clothing stores sell flasks?
Food? A hundred kinds of takeout, most cheaper and better than just about anywhere.
Entertainment? Please. Pick up any issue of any free paper (we've got about thirty) and you'll find plenty of cheap or free options.
Clothes? Thrift shops with designer originals, same fuckin' Filene's Basement and such as "back home", and about four sample sales a week, not to mention swaps, vintage, etc.
Furniture? See above.
Fuckin' clueless narrow-minded jerks. One more empty-headed, obese, vacant-faced, tourist dumbfuck starts lecturing me on how New York is soooo expensive I'm gonna shove his thirty dollar knockoff NYPD jumbo-sized sweatshirt up his ass 'til it sticks out of his useless mouth.
Do I make myself clear?
-Rustin
I doubt the Americans attitude to homosexuality at the time would have been any different.
Um, actually, then and there it was. Keep in mind that Britain was still desperately broke while the U.S. was rolling in cash. Meanwhile Parliment was in the hands of Big Government socialists.
For this and other reasons, doing leading edge computer work in Britain meant working closely under the same sorts of government dimwits who were making him miserable in the first place.
Meanwhile, in the good old U.S.A., much computer development was in the hands of private companies like IBM which, I remind you, kept a vigorous division operating in Nazi Germany until right before the Allies arrived.
I'm not making a moral statement one way or the other (at least not in this here post) but the consequence was that there were jobs in the U.S. available to Turing that would have been backed by the simple desire to have his skills available to increase their bank accounts.
Would he have been square in the sights of McCarthy and his self-hating gay scumbags within a few short years? Maybe. But we'll never know. But we do know that "the Americans" were far from uniform in their attitudes and plenty of them, including plenty with cash and other brilliant computer guys already there, would have welcomed Turing with open arms.
Rustin
Actually, according to what he wrote in his letters and the memories of his friends, it was not so much the surveillance per se, as the overall inability to get work done or have a satisfying life that left him feeling so hopeless. The hormones did awful things to his body, from reduction in sex drive to growing breasts, the police bullied a street kid into faking the confession that led to Turing's conviction, the funding in England was getting routed around him and his travel was impaired by government restrictions. (This, keep in mind, while the Americans were surging ahead in computer design and would have been delighted to have Turing join them.)
Oh, it was death by a thousand cuts while the nation that owed so much to him mostly looked on and let him be humiliated and kept from his work.
Also keep in mind folks, that Turing, while thought of a theoretician, was arguably even more important as an operations guy. He led the effort to confront Churchill with the initial absurdly low levels of funding at Bletchley Park (the British code-breaking center), he played a key role in getting the staffing figured out and codes to the right places, and so on. IIRC, he was not averse to picking up a soldering iron and stepping into the physical work of *building* the computers.
Of course, this isn't even getting into his late in life interest in things like how to use a computer to replicate patterns in nature like the spots on the side of a cow. Work that was leading him decades ahead of anybody else to the concepts we now know as fractals and chaotic phenomena.
We'll never know what we've lost, but at least we're getting better at admitting who people like him were.
But then, when we've still got stuff like A Beautiful Mind not even mentioning that Nash was mostly gay (the real reason he lost his clearance was not for mental illness but because he was found in bed with a young man) we've clearly got a long way to go.
Rustin
Can we put GWB on it?
Sure, but only if we use "nucular"-powered rockets to get him there.
Far better would be to put the word out that oil executives looking to donate money were up there. Then maybe we'ld get Rove or Cheney to make the trip.
Well, given that this thred was started by a superconductivity guy, it seems only natural to ask, how about inducing an itty bitty (relatively) current across said asteroid if it is indeed mostly iron (some aren't, ya know) and try to get the induced magnetic field aligned to get it to shift path within the solar system's ambient fields? After all, we're talking about a LONG period of time and a tiny shift in direction. I'm too lazy to do the numbers, but seems to me that rockets of any sort might be a needlessly brute force approach. (And yes, I *did* just reread Flynn's Lodestar .)
Rustin
You're a sick man. Good to have you aboard.
Furry vixens are real? Hot damn!
Give it time, give it time.
I'm betting that with all the "furries" and the decreasing cost of body mods, we'll see real world "fuzzies" (excuse me if I misuse the terminology, I'm not up on this particular enthusiasm) within, say, five years for rough approximations and fifteen for "straight-out-of-anime" conversions, complete with fully functional tails and big eyes.
Gonna be weird to live in a world in which Gibson's idea of modern primitives actually exist.
Life is never dull.
Rustin
I just remembered, a little while back I went into far more detail about the differences between geeks and one of the look-alike fen species. As a man who used to live in a twelve bedroom, semi-communal gamer household, I got to know the differences all too well.
All of which leaves me curious, how many of you would consider a non-techie but accomplished fan (for example, Kevin Smith) to be a geek?
Sure, there are the Wil Wheatons and Penn Jilettes who can describe Red Dwarf episodes and recompile their DiVX app, but what about the pure fans who have taken their fandom and raised their obsession to the level of analysis and creation?
Rustin
Nope, sorry, language has moved on. AFAICT, "geek" now refers to those of us who are systems thinkers about, increasingly, any subject. You can now find people, as the article mentions, saying that they are "geeking out" about anything from auto repair to barbeque.
/. and while most of us may have looked like, and been, pasty-faced social isolates at the age of ten, we now do martial arts, ride and rebuild motorcycles, can at the least effectively simulate the patter and behavior required to do well at parties, and, well, we get laid.
.
.
"nerd" now denotes the tape-on-the-glasses weakling.
Personally, I think that this separation was inevitable since:
A.) Society will never maintain contempt for any class of people who make lots of money and get lots of power.
A'.) Any class with lots of money and power will achieve at least a passable baseline of nookie.
and more interestingly
B.) Real geeks are, by nature, hackers of our environment and, increasingly of ourselves. Sure, some techies seem to sincerely think that they can transcend their social cluelessness and isolation by becoming experts in yet another obscure subject (beer-making, cpu customization, wargaming) but most of us long since figured out that we can apply our skills at analysis and redesign to ourselves.
I look at my friends on
I am a geek. I am seriously fucking proud of that. I know that I am not only smarter and more capable in several dozen ways then just about anybody I have ever met, I am also more honest, ethical, and self-aware. All are geek traits.
I have also done more bed-hopping then many a guy.
Sure, we start out as "losers" but at what iteration?
I'm thirty-seven. Old enough to now see what is happening to my age cohort well beyond the baselines provided by genetics, family, and cultural mores. Most guys my age are getting sloppy, flabby, passive, and sloppy about their appearance and even their careers. I look at the geeks my age and we are all more self-assured, all working on our health, mostly getting stronger and more physically capable, and generally on the way up while those around us go down. We are stronger, fiercer, and more formidible then our non-geek equivalents and the gap is widening.
As far as I'm concerned, being a geek is defined by what I call "two and a half" variables. Firstly, being a systems-oriented thinker, seeing the world not as a random set of causeless phenomena but as overlapping groups of editable, comprehensible events. Secondly, having a brain that doesn't turn off. In other words, living with a default setting of starting to figure out "why" as soon as one is provided with the data on "what".
The "half" is that nobody becomes that passionate about understanding the world just because they felt like it. That level of involvement *always* is a consequence of something serious having been wrong when one was a child. After all, if the world gives you everything you want, then you don't question it too deeply. So all of us, each of us, were striving for something and were smart enough that we found that thinking and understanding got us closer to get what we strove for. Kids develop the tool that gets them what they want. We developed the habit of thinking. Of making sense of things.
But that "malformation" is only the starting point, not necessarily a permanent state.
Where do computers fit into all of this? Only as easy ways to make a living that are best handled by us. Built by geeks, specc'ed in part by geeks (Vannevar, we call to you!), they are logic machines, however faulty. So a lot of us have drifted there. Whatever. It's only a local and temporary anomaly. In the eighteen-fifties we would have been in the railroad business.
As for the "make-believe" thing, I call bullshit on that. I have repeatedly had to endure crowds of dim bulbs on their way to Yankees games recently and these halfwits were far more involv
And this sort of foolishness is why I'm a Wenger man. Those other folks have turned the Swiss Army knife into a joke.
"Hey, let's add a file cabinet!"
"Even better, a thermos!"
"How about one with a bedroll the size of an ant, complete with bedside reading in one point type!"
"Yeah! that's the ticket!"
Clowns.
When I buy a pocket knife, I don't want a gimmick. I want a tool. Admit it folks, most of you would do far better to have a box cutter, one good pair of pliers, and a driver set with compact head.
You're gonna carry the Minimag anyway.
Me? These days I carry a P-48 on my keyring, an LED flashlight in my bag, and *maybe* a mini set of screwdriver bits and compact rachet head. Add in the fifties heavy steel compact stapler I always have and I guarantee that I'm better equipped for the real world then almost any of these gadget-happy ninnies.
Three inch thick pocket knives are for wannabes. Real geeks use real tools.
Rustin
I wish I could remember the brand name, but there is a special spray that you can apply to the rollers in a printer or copier that give them back their "stickiness". Many time the problem with paper feed is the rollers, not the mechanism. As the former tech below pointed out, the basic mechanism is great on those beasts. It's the little, and fixable stuff that gives first.
Lastly, there are still plenty of makers of 24 pin dot matrix printers. Some less high end then the check printers you mentioned. They're just no longer advertised in office supply catalogs. Go to Processor.com, or, even better, get the dead tree edition, and you'll find plenty of references and, even better, ads.
-Rustin
I don't know if the [real linguistics behind the design] can be said for those who created Klingon...
/. who have looked at the problem. There is nothing shameful about a language being synthetic. Every language started that way at some point. Maybe we can build some now that make a bit more sense.
Just ask the folks at the Klingon Language Institute. Klingon as we know it was created initially (pretty much, I'm giving the short form here) by Marc Okrand, a real linguistics professor. Since then, and especially in the past ten years or so, Klingon has been taken up as a project by quite a few people with formal linguistics training as well as many enthusiaists. Enough to make possible an annual convention which at least takes a viable shot at being Klingon-only.
People write letters in Klingon, have translated Shakespeare into Klingon, IM in Klingon, and have registered a number of domains based on Klingon words.
Personally, as I have said elsewhere, it has been my experience that most of these people have a terrrrrible signal to noise ratio in terms of actually living by a Klingon philosophy, while the folks who dabble in Elvish openly admit that it's just a game. But as for the issue of the Klingon language's "legitimacy", well even aside from the query by Oregon's mental health department to have a Klingon translator available in case they ever need one, yes and getting more real by the day.
By the way, folks, let's keep in mind that modern Hebrew is also in large part a synthetic language. Back when the zionists decided to start using Hebrew as their language for daily life, it had nowhere near the vocabulary or range needed to serve that role. Ask Chachem or Interrobang or any of the other folks here on
As for the issue of studying, creating, or enhancing such languages being "wasteful", as far as I'm concerned, we are well ahead every time we get options that are NOBODY'S heritage.
Each step on that path is one away from the kind of ethnic identity pathologies that have made Bosnia, Rwanda, and so many other arbitrary hatreds viable.
Rustin
My semi-old-fartedness [same age] and non-fortune1000-ladder experiences corroborate yours. I even resorted to rooftop garden projects myself, so chill.
But, but, but, I was having so much fun being semi-gratuitiously vitriolic. No fair being reasonable in response!
Sorry. I truly didn't catch that you were kidding. I'm a bit slow about things like that sometimes. Comes of hearing too much like that spoken in sincerity. Well, that and my borderline Asperger's social skills.
Again, sorry. And yes, you touched a very sore nerve (I wasn't kidding about the rather harsh dinner a while back, or any of the rest for that matter) and I guess I was a bit too eager to have a chance to vent.
My apologies. If you're ever in NYC I'll buy you a beer. (Make it two.)
Rustin
By all means -- get pissed. Tell the anti-capitalists (or however you want to describe them) that you think they're full of it. Ask for proof....Those who think that businesses need heavy regulation and huge taxes don't usually understand how it all works (well, I don't either -- but I still think that those folks are full of it)
Yup. That's a reason-based, fact-based analysis.
Hate to break it to ya, son (no, I don't) But many of us "leftists" have been engaging in hundreds of pages of journal entries and posts positively overflowing with facts for years now. Go for it, look at my post above. Facts. Examples. Analysis.
I mean, if you think you are up for it, I can take down my entire FUCKIN WALL WORTH of textbooks, case studies, adult business magazines (stuff like Institutional Investor, not dumbed-down cheerleading like Inc. or Fortune) and I'll be more then glad to sit down over the next few days and tear you a new one. You have access to my email address. Try me. I'll have a journal entry up good and proper and we can determine who is qualfied to discuss what.
"fail to understand"? Listen, you may not have your facts in order or studied the theories but I and others here have. I've been there, done that, printed the goddamned t-shirt and wrote the fucking manual.
But then, maybe that's why the families of millionaires hire me to help manage their affairs and not you. Just guessing here.
No, turkey, we don't oppose this sort of crap because of some mushy-minded anti-capitalism. In fact, chances are I live a far more purely capitalist life then you ever will. Run my own business, as it happens; have for years.
We oppose this sort of crap because we *have* studied it, we *do* understand it, and, in some cases, precisely because we're good at it, we've spent far too much of our lives cleaning up the damage done by corporate pinheads and are really and truly sick of it.
Following me here? Keeping up okay? I'll make it simple for ya. We oppose corporate shenanigans because we oppose muddle-headed thinking. Because we want our world to make sense.
So the next time you feel like making clueless and scurrilous accusations, how about you turn down Rush or Fox News (sic) or WWF whatever your head-filler of choise is for a minute first and think about just what you're about to say.
Hmmmmm?
Rustin
Hey, who called MBA's evil? I just said semi-mockingly that they have a secret, or at least get exposed to a taboo: that enhancing shareholder value is the foundation of any ethics at a publicly-held company. Or haven't you got to that stage of synthesizing your studies yet?
/. where quite a few of us make our livings as real systems optimizers. We know better.
That statement is utter and complete horseshit. I don't want to begin to think how many times I've heard smug, ignorant, self-serving executives hide behind that particular bit of jargon. One that has about as much to do with their actions as "fiscal responsibility" has to do with the actions of the Bush administration.
The closest most MBAs and other hollow suits I've dealt with come is maximizing short-term share price by sacrificing long-term growth and company effectiveness to short-term flash and dazzle.
Not that I'm biased or anything, as both a former IT director in Time/Warner during the AOL merger who opposed the several hundred million dollar mistake of switching all internal mail to AOLmail and an acting IT director in another huge company you'ld have heard of as they ignored market demand, cheapened their product, and put a company insider at the top of the firm who was well known to be borderline incompetent.
Take a look at the SAP implementation at Pierson and come back and try again.
MBAs are not acculturated or trained to maximize anything but their own compensation. As is displayed above, those of us who have held operational responsibility know full well who's behind the moves to replace working systems with gimmicky bullshit because it will create the right bits of stagecraft and grease the right palms. We know who has refused to look at real TCO data for years while insisting on Micro$oft trash becoming the "single source solution". We know who used Andersen Consulting to promote the dimwitted and complex over the simple and sane. We know how Booz-Allen is still doing it today.
You can talk all the Fortune Magazine eyewash you want to the great empty-headed sheep out there but don't try peddling it here on
In fact, just to lay my cards on the table, I just had a long, unpleasant dinner last week with an old friend of mine who *has* an MBA from a top school who spent quite a long time expressing his discomfort at how modern business has made it (his words) "impossible to rise to the top except by being amoral". Christ! I dated an MBA from another top school for a while and even when I loved her, which I did, she still appalled me with her combination of bowing to conventional wisdom over independant analysis while speaking the jargon of "hard-headed objectivity".
But, then again, maybe my opinion comes from having another friend who is a lawyer working the Adelphia case who has made me sit through chapter and verse on just what idiots the top people were (all money routed through one set of accounts? Good Gawd!) all the while the mass of MBA types (including MBAs I knew in telecommuncations) were trumpeting them as brilliant. After all, the Wall Street Journal loved them ans the stock price was soaring. It must be true.
Sure, I've know a few exceptions. A certain comptroller of a high profile arts institution comes to mind. But it is probably significant that she worked in and then managed businesses (restauraunts, in fact) years before stepping into her first MBA classroom.
I majored in economics in college. I have been to lectures at Columbia, NYU, and half a dozen other "top" univerities and colleges. I was raised on stock market analysis, had issues of Value Line sitting around when I was a kid, and was reading John Stewart Mill before most people in this discussion were born. And I can say with utter assurance that we do indeed have wonderful training available these days in industrial organization, systems optimization, decisonmaking, and so on (my short list would include Milgram, Thaler, Garson, and Cyert) but those are not the things
Go ahead and try it in NYC though, you'll only do it once, from then on whoever pushes your wheelchair for you will wait until the light changes.
Yeah, right.
You clearly are not a New Yorker. I've been crossing THROUGH midtown traffic for over twenty years and the only thing I ever ran into was a cake I stepped on while damn near jogging *backwards* through midtown to impress a girl (hey, I was fourteen).
Real New Yorkers do not wait for lights. We wait for gaps among the oncoming cars. Frogger indeed. Stand at any major intersection with several lanes (the corner of 96th and Amsterdam a block from here will do nicely) and you'll periodically see somebody, maybe even me, stride purposely between the cars in the middle of rush hour and then wait, standing on the yellow line as the cars, buses and trucks go rushing by two inches away, until a clear spot opens up to cross the rest of the way.
The rush feels good. Nothin' like regular literal brushes with death (as the wind from the passing trucks pulls my jacket taut) to keep me awake and aware.
Occasionally I'll be on a yellow line with several others who took the same risk, so we all have to squeeze onto the line until a space opens up in traffic or the light changes. Happens to me on East Houston on a regular basis. Gotta say that is one time that even I am not conversational.
But baby, if you can't handle the pace you should stay in the suburbs where you belong.
Rustin
I think that's the point--they're targetting small camera applications: mobile phones, PDAs, keychain digital cameras, clandestine surveillance cameras and such.
Prolly not. The real issue is that the smaller the lenses, the more of a role surface tension takes towards creating a uniform surface. Boundary layers between fluids always have a tendency to bow out in one direction or the other. But that "skin" is just half the thickness of one molecule plus it's range of interaction with the surrounding ones. For water, remember your Van Der Waals forces, kids.
In a one centimeter wide tube filled with water, this phenomenon is obvious and dominates the behavior of the interface. In a one *meter* wide tube, everything from little wavelets from vibration (!) to any impurities to, oh, btw GRAVITY[1], will tend to randomize the shape of the interface.
In udda woids, the bigger the surface area, the more random, or at least nonuniform the shape of the "lens".
Getcherself a copy of good ol' Prandtl&Tietjens (Fundamentals of Hydro&Aerodynamics). Your life will never be the same.
[1] It blows my mind that *nobody* on this thread has yet commented on the tendency of gravity to deform such lenses. Gack! Have *any* of you done the thought experiment instead of just believing what you read?
The Phillips device has a second fluid. I would assume in part this is to address that. Betcha that the indices of refraction are very different but the densities are exactly the same.
Rustin
Well, sorry to repeat myself but no, I'ld guess that the biggest problem for eyewear is that every time the wearer moves the lens deforms.
Picture trying to do something as simple as walking quickly with them on.
Boing-boing-boing goes your focal length and center of mass.
Rustin