In private sector, if you do a bad job, you eventually go bankrupt and lose your job
In theory and in the long-run, perhaps, but this can take a very long time, and may never happen if other things outweigh it. I have some second-hand experience with how things work in the oil industry, and procurement there is a mess in part because it really has only a marginal effect on the company's long-term survival, which depends almost entirely on a mixture of oil exploration on the one hand, and geopolitical factors like the price of oil and whether Russia is going to confiscate your mineral rights, on the other hand. Overpaying for Cisco routers is lost in the noise: if a company like Exxon is doing well, it can afford it, and if it's going to go bankrupt, it won't be because of Cisco routers.
If you're hired as a consultant, you're supposedly being paid to attend to the interests of a client, and there is some level of complete disregard of those interests which should rise to the level of fraud.
"Stimulus" and "infrastructure" don't tend to go together well, especially in the U.S., which has a fairly decentralized regulatory system requiring coordination between local, state, and federal agencies, multiple levels of agency review, and the opportunity for nearly anybody in the vicinity to sue over anything from environmental concerns to contracting concerns to NIMBY reasons. That all takes a long time, while the purpose of stimulus spending is to build stuff now. So the way that circle is squared is to put stimulus money towards so-called "shovel-ready" infrastructure projects, those which are already approved and ready to go. On occasion those are real infrastructure projects which just happened to, by stroke of luck, be ready right when the stimulus bill came down. But in a lot of cases they're more boring maintenance stuff rather than long-term infrastructure. In a lot of cities, for example, the majority of the money went to repaving roads.
I don't see it as particularly a public/private difference, but a difference of well-run and poorly-run organizations. That might correlate, but I've seen plenty of examples on the opposite sides as well.
On the private-sector side: have you ever looked at how Enterprise procurement works? Cisco makes a ton of money doing exactly the same thing there. You find some Fortune 100 firm that has a lot of money but no clue about technology, and you recommend a ridiculously over-specced system, which they buy because nobody ever got fired for buying Cisco. Oracle makes their money doing that too.
And on the private-sector side: procurement in Scandinavia is much less of a mess than in the US and UK, which is why building the Copenhagen Metro cost less than 1/10 of the per-mile cost of most U.S. metro construction projects.
That's actually the only reason we got some of my elderly relatives a Nook rather than a Kindle. Their eyesight isn't very good, and ebook readers are a nice way of reading reading books with zoomable text, with much better selection than traditionally available in large-print dead-tree books. But they aren't very skilled with technology either, so feel much more comfortable having a local store they can go to to buy the books, where someone loads them onto the device, rather than having to DIY it over the internet.
If the Nooks don't continue to be connected to the brick-and-mortar stores, it loses that advantage. Perhaps it's too niche to matter, though. Alternately, perhaps they'll keep up some kind of cross-service agreement even if the company is split.
Wouldn't that only be relevant if anyone were proposing to build 86 million wind turbines? What matters, if you want to reduce overall bird mortality, is to go after the biggest sources in absolute numbers. As it currently stands, reducing cat populations by even 1% would save more birds than tearing down every windmill would.
I'd be surprised if the XBox 720 launches for $200. The XBox 360 launched at $300 in 2005, which is $350 if you adjust for inflation. Can they really afford to launch the 720 at barely more than half that?
Good point. I thought the Wii launched in about the same price range, but looks like it was actually $249, which is an inflation-adjusted $282. So the Wii U is priced about 20% higher in real terms.
The instrumental goal underlying a lot of psychology and economics research is "what should we do in the U.S.?" It's all dressed up in basic-science, idealistic language, but ultimately what the penguin taxpayers funding the research most care about is penguin economics and penguin psychology, not so much the rest of the birds...
I don't think there's a universal answer for this one:
Ask any developer if they'd sleep better at night having just hired:
A) somebody from a no-name school with an impressive github profile and side projects B) somebody from an impressive school with no github profile nor side projects
Github profiles and side-projects select for particular kind of developers, mostly software developers, mostly focused on web stuff. That's great for some things, especially if the job is mainly a programming job, although it does also often select for a sort of dilettantism. If you want someone who's solid on engineering fundamentals because you're hiring for an aerospace engineering job, on the other hand, you might have different preferences, and be more interested in their level of formal education than in the Ruby blog software they wrote on the weekends.
Bloomberg's assault on soda is pretty dumb, I'll agree, but it doesn't seem very relevant to a discussion on the sources of terrorism. I don't expect Bloomberg to bomb or shoot me anytime soon, though I could be wrong.
It's odd to call him a liberal, though. Isn't he a Republican from Wall Street?
If you think of it in the French revolutionary context, it actually makes pretty good sense. The "right" was pro-Church, pro-tradition, pro-elites, while the left was secularist, anti-elite, anti-tradition. That maps pretty well to what's going on here.
The U.S. is actually a decent example of a country with a significant Muslim population and general lack of any fatwahs or jihads going on. There are some occasional nuts, but I don't think it's any more prevalent than with any other religious group: an American Muslim is no more likely to try to bomb you than an American Christian is.
Is that actually the case? Here in Europe, Islamic terrorism gets a lot of press, and does exist, but I don't believe to has close to majority responsibility. In Spain, for example, there has been one major Islamic terrorist attack (the 2004 Madrid subway bombing), but thousand of ETA terrorist attacks, which have killed several times more people. In the UK, the major perpetrators of terrorist attacks have been Christian paramilitary groups, split between militant Catholic paramilitaries and militant Protestant paramilitaries.
Re:how does it compare to NetBSD as a teaching too
on
Minix 3.2.1 Released
·
· Score: 2
Ah, the classic Slashdot Troll comment, which will here succeed in getting a bite.:) But it will be a short bite: this is exactly how proprietary software works as well. You will despair if you ever see the internals of any of the major proprietary software packages you use regularly.
A lot of newer DSLRs have big buffers, and let you preview/etc. out of the buffer, so SD card speed becomes mostly irrelevant to user experience. It only really becomes an issue if you're doing burst shooting that fills up the buffer, at which point the camera does have to pause to wait for writes to complete, to free up buffer space. Normal single-shot, or even 3-burst bracketing types of shots, should never hit that point, though.
I don't think they have any expectation people will use it as a desktop or server OS. They do seem to have a goal of making it suitable for use by embedded-system developers.
how does it compare to NetBSD as a teaching tool?
on
Minix 3.2.1 Released
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Afaik, NetBSD and Minix are the two most prominent operating systems that advertise clean source code and architecture, suitable for examination by people learning OS principles, as one of their explicit design goals. NetBSD seems more popular as an actual system to use, and is clean architecture has led it to be famously ported everywhere. Does someone have experience with Minix to compare?
That's the case with me as well. The most tight-knit collaboration happens among the subset of people, both local and remote, who idle in an IRC channel we have. Whether someone uses IRC and is reasonably responsive on it is a much better predictor of connectedness to my own projects than when they're local or remote. That said, if they aren't going to use IRC, it's better to be local than remote.
It's started happening in some areas. It's easiest in fields (like mine) where it's already standard for researchers to provide publication-ready final PDFs, usually typeset with LaTeX using a template provided by the journal. In that case, the publisher is not adding much value: they are just shuffling PDFs around, and as academics we are already quite capable of shuffling around our own PDFs.
JMLR, which has displaced Machine Learning to be the top machine-learning journal within only a few years after the latter's editorial board resigned to form it, is one of the success stories.
Slashdot Mirror
In private sector, if you do a bad job, you eventually go bankrupt and lose your job
In theory and in the long-run, perhaps, but this can take a very long time, and may never happen if other things outweigh it. I have some second-hand experience with how things work in the oil industry, and procurement there is a mess in part because it really has only a marginal effect on the company's long-term survival, which depends almost entirely on a mixture of oil exploration on the one hand, and geopolitical factors like the price of oil and whether Russia is going to confiscate your mineral rights, on the other hand. Overpaying for Cisco routers is lost in the noise: if a company like Exxon is doing well, it can afford it, and if it's going to go bankrupt, it won't be because of Cisco routers.
If you're hired as a consultant, you're supposedly being paid to attend to the interests of a client, and there is some level of complete disregard of those interests which should rise to the level of fraud.
"Stimulus" and "infrastructure" don't tend to go together well, especially in the U.S., which has a fairly decentralized regulatory system requiring coordination between local, state, and federal agencies, multiple levels of agency review, and the opportunity for nearly anybody in the vicinity to sue over anything from environmental concerns to contracting concerns to NIMBY reasons. That all takes a long time, while the purpose of stimulus spending is to build stuff now. So the way that circle is squared is to put stimulus money towards so-called "shovel-ready" infrastructure projects, those which are already approved and ready to go. On occasion those are real infrastructure projects which just happened to, by stroke of luck, be ready right when the stimulus bill came down. But in a lot of cases they're more boring maintenance stuff rather than long-term infrastructure. In a lot of cities, for example, the majority of the money went to repaving roads.
I don't see it as particularly a public/private difference, but a difference of well-run and poorly-run organizations. That might correlate, but I've seen plenty of examples on the opposite sides as well.
On the private-sector side: have you ever looked at how Enterprise procurement works? Cisco makes a ton of money doing exactly the same thing there. You find some Fortune 100 firm that has a lot of money but no clue about technology, and you recommend a ridiculously over-specced system, which they buy because nobody ever got fired for buying Cisco. Oracle makes their money doing that too.
And on the private-sector side: procurement in Scandinavia is much less of a mess than in the US and UK, which is why building the Copenhagen Metro cost less than 1/10 of the per-mile cost of most U.S. metro construction projects.
That's actually the only reason we got some of my elderly relatives a Nook rather than a Kindle. Their eyesight isn't very good, and ebook readers are a nice way of reading reading books with zoomable text, with much better selection than traditionally available in large-print dead-tree books. But they aren't very skilled with technology either, so feel much more comfortable having a local store they can go to to buy the books, where someone loads them onto the device, rather than having to DIY it over the internet.
If the Nooks don't continue to be connected to the brick-and-mortar stores, it loses that advantage. Perhaps it's too niche to matter, though. Alternately, perhaps they'll keep up some kind of cross-service agreement even if the company is split.
It doesn't lead with the "fleeing windows" angle, but here is yesterday's /. discussion on the tablet, which I'm going to guess covers a lot of what we're about to discuss here...
Wouldn't that only be relevant if anyone were proposing to build 86 million wind turbines? What matters, if you want to reduce overall bird mortality, is to go after the biggest sources in absolute numbers. As it currently stands, reducing cat populations by even 1% would save more birds than tearing down every windmill would.
There's a nice little summary table towards the right here.
Windmills don't kill anywhere near as many birds annually as cats or plate-glass windows do, and I don't see anyone moving to get rid of those...
I'd be surprised if the XBox 720 launches for $200. The XBox 360 launched at $300 in 2005, which is $350 if you adjust for inflation. Can they really afford to launch the 720 at barely more than half that?
Good point. I thought the Wii launched in about the same price range, but looks like it was actually $249, which is an inflation-adjusted $282. So the Wii U is priced about 20% higher in real terms.
The instrumental goal underlying a lot of psychology and economics research is "what should we do in the U.S.?" It's all dressed up in basic-science, idealistic language, but ultimately what the penguin taxpayers funding the research most care about is penguin economics and penguin psychology, not so much the rest of the birds...
I don't think there's a universal answer for this one:
Github profiles and side-projects select for particular kind of developers, mostly software developers, mostly focused on web stuff. That's great for some things, especially if the job is mainly a programming job, although it does also often select for a sort of dilettantism. If you want someone who's solid on engineering fundamentals because you're hiring for an aerospace engineering job, on the other hand, you might have different preferences, and be more interested in their level of formal education than in the Ruby blog software they wrote on the weekends.
Bloomberg's assault on soda is pretty dumb, I'll agree, but it doesn't seem very relevant to a discussion on the sources of terrorism. I don't expect Bloomberg to bomb or shoot me anytime soon, though I could be wrong.
It's odd to call him a liberal, though. Isn't he a Republican from Wall Street?
The Americans I'm personally most worried about are militia types, myself.
If you think of it in the French revolutionary context, it actually makes pretty good sense. The "right" was pro-Church, pro-tradition, pro-elites, while the left was secularist, anti-elite, anti-tradition. That maps pretty well to what's going on here.
The U.S. is actually a decent example of a country with a significant Muslim population and general lack of any fatwahs or jihads going on. There are some occasional nuts, but I don't think it's any more prevalent than with any other religious group: an American Muslim is no more likely to try to bomb you than an American Christian is.
Is that actually the case? Here in Europe, Islamic terrorism gets a lot of press, and does exist, but I don't believe to has close to majority responsibility. In Spain, for example, there has been one major Islamic terrorist attack (the 2004 Madrid subway bombing), but thousand of ETA terrorist attacks, which have killed several times more people. In the UK, the major perpetrators of terrorist attacks have been Christian paramilitary groups, split between militant Catholic paramilitaries and militant Protestant paramilitaries.
Ah, the classic Slashdot Troll comment, which will here succeed in getting a bite. :) But it will be a short bite: this is exactly how proprietary software works as well. You will despair if you ever see the internals of any of the major proprietary software packages you use regularly.
A lot of newer DSLRs have big buffers, and let you preview/etc. out of the buffer, so SD card speed becomes mostly irrelevant to user experience. It only really becomes an issue if you're doing burst shooting that fills up the buffer, at which point the camera does have to pause to wait for writes to complete, to free up buffer space. Normal single-shot, or even 3-burst bracketing types of shots, should never hit that point, though.
I don't think they have any expectation people will use it as a desktop or server OS. They do seem to have a goal of making it suitable for use by embedded-system developers.
Afaik, NetBSD and Minix are the two most prominent operating systems that advertise clean source code and architecture, suitable for examination by people learning OS principles, as one of their explicit design goals. NetBSD seems more popular as an actual system to use, and is clean architecture has led it to be famously ported everywhere. Does someone have experience with Minix to compare?
That's the case with me as well. The most tight-knit collaboration happens among the subset of people, both local and remote, who idle in an IRC channel we have. Whether someone uses IRC and is reasonably responsive on it is a much better predictor of connectedness to my own projects than when they're local or remote. That said, if they aren't going to use IRC, it's better to be local than remote.
Apply it to private-sector companies who receive funding, and their patents as well, imo.
It's started happening in some areas. It's easiest in fields (like mine) where it's already standard for researchers to provide publication-ready final PDFs, usually typeset with LaTeX using a template provided by the journal. In that case, the publisher is not adding much value: they are just shuffling PDFs around, and as academics we are already quite capable of shuffling around our own PDFs.
JMLR, which has displaced Machine Learning to be the top machine-learning journal within only a few years after the latter's editorial board resigned to form it, is one of the success stories.