DataMasher is a bit more cryptic, but much more powerful - I'm worried about people drawing the wrong implications from the simple analyses, but it's interesting in a "data mining, damn the statistics and causality" kind of way. [snip] I'd have a tough time chosing between ThisWeKnow and DataMasher, and I really hope both stick around after the award thing is over.
Thanks! And yes, Datamasher, for one, will be here after the contest is long gone.
We were concerned about appearing statistically valid when we knew very well it wouldn't be in most cases, so we chose to encourage discovery and discussion over rigor. We have ideas of things we'd like to do for it, but it was literally built over a few weekends after hours, limiting what we could do by the contest deadline.
The cool thing about the contest is that all the applications are open source, so if a contestant can't maintain an application you like, the code will still be available for anybody who wants to perpetuate it. I'd encourage people not only to check out and vote on the finalists, but also check out the other entries that didn't make the final round--there were some good ideas in there, too.
Reason 1 - Hype - people are pissed off at those who sound so happy with their apple stuff that they'd fellate the great steve, when technically it's not that special (even if the user experience generally is)
Reason 2 - Hype - the hype is always "It just works". It's virus free and PERFECT out of the box. This is what Macfans use to slag off both MS and Linux. It's delightful to see this falling down.
Reason 3 - Actually, with most mobile phones (see Nokia/LG etc) they do just work and firmware isn't updated.
You're going to hate me then, because I have an iPhone 3G and It Just Works. No dropped calls, no data losses, no unusually low battery life, and I'm on the 2.0.1 update (haven't updated to 2.0.2 yet). Sorry your self esteem is hurt by my lack of misery.
You sneer at user experience, but if the experience helps you get things done, then inevitable technical issues won't bother you as much. I'm also unaware of any Mac users slagging Linux for being virus-ridden.
Dunno why, in order to be happy, you want to see others do badly. I'd love it if MS made reliable stuff with a great user experience that Just Worked. I'd love it if Linux had a great user experience.
The "great steve" actually addressed this attitude back in 1997: "We have to get over this idea that in order for us to succeed, they have to fail."
As someone who manages an open source product, I get notified (despite ample ways for the "researchers" to contact me) because I have Google alerts for our product's name. I have never, not once, been contacted by the discoverer of a vulnerability or the security groups who publicize exploits.
This has left me with a very dim view of the security community, and I sincerely doubt the earnestness of the discoverers. They act more like script kiddies out to tag something with their graffiti rather than someone concerned about the consumer.
Maybe for Apple there are more concerned people out there, but I don't have Apple's resources and would appreciate a couple of weeks to get a fix in and tested before you expose my users to more black hats (as opposed to the black hats who knew about it before).
I WANT TO KNOW. I WANT TO FIX IT. But the experience I've had so far is that I care more about my users than the security companies and script kiddies masquerading as "researchers" do.
The reason why we lawyers get "rich" (I wish!) is because people make the assumption that they know what the laws is and what the consequences are.
This was a resolvable problem with a 5 minute phone call from Virgin Marketing to Virgin Legal
...for which their department would have been charged $200. And what are people without corporate legal departments supposed to do? The law has been (purposefully) made so complex that almost every decision requires the advice of one or more attorneys--and here's the rub--who frequently aren't themselves aware of other law that may apply outside of their specialty, even assuming they know their own specialty sufficiently well.
And these guys are expensive. So you might understand how it's true to say that lawyers are getting rich, even if that set doesn't include you.
You're also a small, homogenous country with massive natural resource income essentially for free. The other Scandinavian countries--in fact all of Europe--have been reducing their welfare states.
Also, you can't expect to be taken seriously if you compare the USA to Stalin's Russia. As terrible as GW is (and he has nothing to do with libertarianism or capitalism), it's still quite possible to dissent from the government's official line without threatening your job or your life.
I do think it would be an incredible experiment to shut down the whole internet for five years and see what sort of art is produced over that span. Right--we did it for ten years, already. It was called the Seventies. It started with the Beatles and ended with Disco, and Elton John helped that transition.
If you can live with one but not the other, what does that say about you?
One you can ask to stop, the other you can't. One is pretty rare, the other almost ubiquitous. And the fact that they can't understand why their ears hurt doesn't make it any nicer for the rest of us.
While we're at it, consider takeout instead of a nice restaurant for the next five years, m'kay?
Conversely, you'll never know the benefits you've forsaken on the off chance that all the standard tests for safety are wrong. The Precautionary Principle is the environmental equivalent of the legal principle that advises a company who sells baseballs to never come out with a baseball that will harm fewer people because they might get sued for their previous, less-safe balls. In other words, to prevent one type of possible and unlikely harm, you're forgoing probable benefits.
The Precautionary Principle is also logically fallacious, because it is impossible to prove a negative. Prove you aren't an alien life form. Go on, prove it. I can create objections to each and every argument you give based on untested (and untestable) possibilities.
Furthermore, it is a blind alley for environmental activism. There are many known hazardous substances with less-harmful alternatives in wide use today. Preemptively banning new AIDS drugs to prevent another Thalidomide will only distract from real health and ecological improvements.
So have you refuted every argument put forth by the Discovery Institute on why evolution is bunk? Or after the first few stupid things get debunked, do you learn to consider the source until Nature comes out with the announcement that it's all been a big mistake?
After Kennedy re-hashed tired and long-disproven arguments about vaccines causing autism, I learned to consider the source and will wait for somebody more credible to make the argument before I bother trying to support or refute it.
IANAP, but my dad is. You ignore the most devastating part of the parent post's critique, which is the use (and re-use) of other people's tests and handy grading schemes. My dad does in fact write his own tests and grades them himself.
I don't know about the parent post, but I'm not asking you to write your own textbook. I'm asking you to write your own testing material since your job is both to explain the material and assess students' mastery of it.
And before you accuse, I never, not once, cheated in college or grad school.
I've had run-ins with this guy before. He'll go to any blog, no matter how small, to push the idea that cellphones are the future, and anything else is just a mistake.
He claims the market is ginormous for music downloads outside the US, and compares it to iTunes Music Store sales. However, he also lists several countries in which there is no iTunes Music Store available, so his numbers are meaningless.
If the process is so open, easy, and welcoming, why do you think the sentiment expressed elsewhere in the comments exists? Why are alternate forums opening up?
Is your argument that it's simply a bad public that doesn't deserve a better set of standards, or are there any systemic problems with the W3C that you think contribute to the dissatisfaction being shown, fairly or unfairly?
They also say Tomczak is legally liable for their fees if they lose the court case against Apple.
So you say:...a loser-pays court system is the only reasonable way, like in the UK.
So...in America, you can have a lawyer misrepresent your status with them, sue, lose, and have to pay your lawyer's fees. Whereas in the superior British system, you can have a solicitor misrepresent your status with them, sue, lose, and have to pay both sets of legal fees. And this is supposed to help the little guy, because he loses twice the money in the British case.
Sigh. Despite what Seth Finkelstein would like to think, Al Gore said "I took the initiative to create the Internet," which to mere mortals is indeed a synonym for "invent." Even if you try to spin that to mean the enabling legislation that released the Internet from government-only hands, a) he was only one of several hundred co-sponsors, and b) the thing pre-existed his service in Congress or the Senate. Even in the narrow legislative sense, it was egregious self-aggrandizement by Gore.
Outsourcing is good, it funds new businesses, offshoring is bad
Why does an imaginary line in the sand make outsourcing to Joe White 3000 miles away on the opposite coast but under the same government OK, but not to Miguel Brown 200 miles away under a different government?
Suggestion to author: Try toning down your ego, treat IT department with respect, give them credit and appreciate their work. They are the ones who save your ass when you type "rm -rf/". And ocassionaly buy them beer and lunch and see those 9 months turn to 9 seconds!
A professional turns around a job in the same amount of time, regardless of his opinion of the other person. Sounds like you're saying the IT department there at best isn't very professional.
If the IT department is having a problem with the author, then they should be bringing it up with his supervisor. I have asshat coworkers as well. I bitch about them mightily, but I don't refuse to do my job just to spite them. Then I'm in the wrong and have no room to complain.
Not to join on the crass promoting and further splintering of the market, but SyntaxCMS handles both modules and a tree structure by default, and even lets developers embed modules within a tree node (site sections in SyntaxCMS parlance).
That being said, this is more of a web content management platform than a ready-made CMS with comments, registration, etc. out of the box.
Classical economists tend to mis-analyze oil. The price is related to cost of extraction, which is low. Until demand exceeds supply. But throwing more money at search and extraction doesn't yield much more supply.
Um, no on several levels.
First, classical economists take into account scarcity, not just extraction, and the alternative to scarcity is not more extraction (at least using existing methods). Substitution, efficiency, and hitherto too-expensive extraction methods are all on the table.
Second, price and demand are related, even in oil. It is far from perfectly inelastic. With higher prices comes a reduction in demand. China may be willing to dump a ton of oil into its inefficient factories at $70/barrel, but probably not nearly as much at $140/barrel. They will either substitute, become more efficient, or go out of business (yaaaay, go the protectionists, booo, go the development types).
Third, an extraction technology that would yield the equivalent of Gawar at $400/barrel (say, shale oil) would suddenly become much more plausible when oil reaches $400/barrel because traditional pumping methods aren't producing enough. So it will be there, but it will only be something that people who really want it would buy.
Nobody is saying the transition will be pain-free, but they are saying we won't run out because we'll stop using it so much or we'll be using it drastically differently. That's far from simply saying that more money will go into extraction and discovery.
The question of a future mechanism, the question of oversight, and the paradigm of co-operation amongst all stakeholders.
In other words, vague, poorly-understood, out-of-context buzzwords are the "heart of the matter." I can only conclude that the "themes" he was deriding were so vague as to be inexpressible in human languages.
Congratulations, you have now been promoted from useless bureaucrat to management consultant. It's a lateral move.
Re:Good thing I don't live in the States...
on
RIAA Sues a Child
·
· Score: 1
And where do you live that IP law doesn't exist? The Palestinian Authority? As far as I know, it exists everywhere. It just has varying degrees of nastiness and varying degrees of enforcement.
But if China wants to enforce the laws it nominally has on the books, it won't just sue somebody, it'll shoot a few hundred as an example.
I would agree if the app was being developed against a non-changing set of technologies.
Every technology IE 6 supports is older than IE 6. IE 6 was released years ago, and hasn't upgraded its support for internet technologies, nor has it added new ones. So really, the argument that "IE 6 is vulnerable because it supports changing technologies" is hogwash. IE 6 is an unchanging application with multiple years available for fixing vulnerabilities.
Slashdot Mirror
DataMasher is a bit more cryptic, but much more powerful - I'm worried about people drawing the wrong implications from the simple analyses, but it's interesting in a "data mining, damn the statistics and causality" kind of way. [snip] I'd have a tough time chosing between ThisWeKnow and DataMasher, and I really hope both stick around after the award thing is over.
Thanks! And yes, Datamasher, for one, will be here after the contest is long gone.
We were concerned about appearing statistically valid when we knew very well it wouldn't be in most cases, so we chose to encourage discovery and discussion over rigor. We have ideas of things we'd like to do for it, but it was literally built over a few weekends after hours, limiting what we could do by the contest deadline.
The cool thing about the contest is that all the applications are open source, so if a contestant can't maintain an application you like, the code will still be available for anybody who wants to perpetuate it. I'd encourage people not only to check out and vote on the finalists, but also check out the other entries that didn't make the final round--there were some good ideas in there, too.
Reason 1 - Hype - people are pissed off at those who sound so happy with their apple stuff that they'd fellate the great steve, when technically it's not that special (even if the user experience generally is)
Reason 2 - Hype - the hype is always "It just works". It's virus free and PERFECT out of the box. This is what Macfans use to slag off both MS and Linux. It's delightful to see this falling down.
Reason 3 - Actually, with most mobile phones (see Nokia/LG etc) they do just work and firmware isn't updated.
You're going to hate me then, because I have an iPhone 3G and It Just Works. No dropped calls, no data losses, no unusually low battery life, and I'm on the 2.0.1 update (haven't updated to 2.0.2 yet). Sorry your self esteem is hurt by my lack of misery.
You sneer at user experience, but if the experience helps you get things done, then inevitable technical issues won't bother you as much. I'm also unaware of any Mac users slagging Linux for being virus-ridden.
Dunno why, in order to be happy, you want to see others do badly. I'd love it if MS made reliable stuff with a great user experience that Just Worked. I'd love it if Linux had a great user experience.
The "great steve" actually addressed this attitude back in 1997: "We have to get over this idea that in order for us to succeed, they have to fail."
As someone who manages an open source product, I get notified (despite ample ways for the "researchers" to contact me) because I have Google alerts for our product's name. I have never, not once, been contacted by the discoverer of a vulnerability or the security groups who publicize exploits.
This has left me with a very dim view of the security community, and I sincerely doubt the earnestness of the discoverers. They act more like script kiddies out to tag something with their graffiti rather than someone concerned about the consumer.
Maybe for Apple there are more concerned people out there, but I don't have Apple's resources and would appreciate a couple of weeks to get a fix in and tested before you expose my users to more black hats (as opposed to the black hats who knew about it before).
I WANT TO KNOW. I WANT TO FIX IT. But the experience I've had so far is that I care more about my users than the security companies and script kiddies masquerading as "researchers" do.
Whew. I can still get hired. That was a close one.
And these guys are expensive. So you might understand how it's true to say that lawyers are getting rich, even if that set doesn't include you.
You're also a small, homogenous country with massive natural resource income essentially for free. The other Scandinavian countries--in fact all of Europe--have been reducing their welfare states.
Also, you can't expect to be taken seriously if you compare the USA to Stalin's Russia. As terrible as GW is (and he has nothing to do with libertarianism or capitalism), it's still quite possible to dissent from the government's official line without threatening your job or your life.
Let's just all be quiet and hope he goes away.
If you can live with one but not the other, what does that say about you?
One you can ask to stop, the other you can't. One is pretty rare, the other almost ubiquitous. And the fact that they can't understand why their ears hurt doesn't make it any nicer for the rest of us.
While we're at it, consider takeout instead of a nice restaurant for the next five years, m'kay?
Conversely, you'll never know the benefits you've forsaken on the off chance that all the standard tests for safety are wrong. The Precautionary Principle is the environmental equivalent of the legal principle that advises a company who sells baseballs to never come out with a baseball that will harm fewer people because they might get sued for their previous, less-safe balls. In other words, to prevent one type of possible and unlikely harm, you're forgoing probable benefits.
The Precautionary Principle is also logically fallacious, because it is impossible to prove a negative. Prove you aren't an alien life form. Go on, prove it. I can create objections to each and every argument you give based on untested (and untestable) possibilities.
Furthermore, it is a blind alley for environmental activism. There are many known hazardous substances with less-harmful alternatives in wide use today. Preemptively banning new AIDS drugs to prevent another Thalidomide will only distract from real health and ecological improvements.
So have you refuted every argument put forth by the Discovery Institute on why evolution is bunk? Or after the first few stupid things get debunked, do you learn to consider the source until Nature comes out with the announcement that it's all been a big mistake?
After Kennedy re-hashed tired and long-disproven arguments about vaccines causing autism, I learned to consider the source and will wait for somebody more credible to make the argument before I bother trying to support or refute it.
IANAP, but my dad is. You ignore the most devastating part of the parent post's critique, which is the use (and re-use) of other people's tests and handy grading schemes. My dad does in fact write his own tests and grades them himself.
I don't know about the parent post, but I'm not asking you to write your own textbook. I'm asking you to write your own testing material since your job is both to explain the material and assess students' mastery of it.
And before you accuse, I never, not once, cheated in college or grad school.
I've had run-ins with this guy before. He'll go to any blog, no matter how small, to push the idea that cellphones are the future, and anything else is just a mistake.
He claims the market is ginormous for music downloads outside the US, and compares it to iTunes Music Store sales. However, he also lists several countries in which there is no iTunes Music Store available, so his numbers are meaningless.
If the process is so open, easy, and welcoming, why do you think the sentiment expressed elsewhere in the comments exists? Why are alternate forums opening up?
Is your argument that it's simply a bad public that doesn't deserve a better set of standards, or are there any systemic problems with the W3C that you think contribute to the dissatisfaction being shown, fairly or unfairly?
price constraints (usually referred to as "wife")
Oh, is that what we're calling the dot com crash now? Clever. Explains the lower salaries since the dot com crash and gets your mom off your back.
Now, do we call the computers "grandkids"?
They also say Tomczak is legally liable for their fees if they lose the court case against Apple.
...a loser-pays court system is the only reasonable way, like in the UK.
So you say:
So...in America, you can have a lawyer misrepresent your status with them, sue, lose, and have to pay your lawyer's fees. Whereas in the superior British system, you can have a solicitor misrepresent your status with them, sue, lose, and have to pay both sets of legal fees. And this is supposed to help the little guy, because he loses twice the money in the British case.
Sigh. Despite what Seth Finkelstein would like to think, Al Gore said "I took the initiative to create the Internet," which to mere mortals is indeed a synonym for "invent." Even if you try to spin that to mean the enabling legislation that released the Internet from government-only hands, a) he was only one of several hundred co-sponsors, and b) the thing pre-existed his service in Congress or the Senate. Even in the narrow legislative sense, it was egregious self-aggrandizement by Gore.
You misspelled "Dated Wisdom from a Hollywood Hack."
Outsourcing is good, it funds new businesses, offshoring is bad
Why does an imaginary line in the sand make outsourcing to Joe White 3000 miles away on the opposite coast but under the same government OK, but not to Miguel Brown 200 miles away under a different government?
Suggestion to author: Try toning down your ego, treat IT department with respect, give them credit and appreciate their work. They are the ones who save your ass when you type "rm -rf /". And ocassionaly buy them beer and lunch and see those 9 months turn to 9 seconds!
A professional turns around a job in the same amount of time, regardless of his opinion of the other person. Sounds like you're saying the IT department there at best isn't very professional.
If the IT department is having a problem with the author, then they should be bringing it up with his supervisor. I have asshat coworkers as well. I bitch about them mightily, but I don't refuse to do my job just to spite them. Then I'm in the wrong and have no room to complain.
Not to join on the crass promoting and further splintering of the market, but SyntaxCMS handles both modules and a tree structure by default, and even lets developers embed modules within a tree node (site sections in SyntaxCMS parlance).
That being said, this is more of a web content management platform than a ready-made CMS with comments, registration, etc. out of the box.
Classical economists tend to mis-analyze oil. The price is related to cost of extraction, which is low. Until demand exceeds supply. But throwing more money at search and extraction doesn't yield much more supply.
Um, no on several levels.
First, classical economists take into account scarcity, not just extraction, and the alternative to scarcity is not more extraction (at least using existing methods). Substitution, efficiency, and hitherto too-expensive extraction methods are all on the table.
Second, price and demand are related, even in oil. It is far from perfectly inelastic. With higher prices comes a reduction in demand. China may be willing to dump a ton of oil into its inefficient factories at $70/barrel, but probably not nearly as much at $140/barrel. They will either substitute, become more efficient, or go out of business (yaaaay, go the protectionists, booo, go the development types).
Third, an extraction technology that would yield the equivalent of Gawar at $400/barrel (say, shale oil) would suddenly become much more plausible when oil reaches $400/barrel because traditional pumping methods aren't producing enough. So it will be there, but it will only be something that people who really want it would buy.
Nobody is saying the transition will be pain-free, but they are saying we won't run out because we'll stop using it so much or we'll be using it drastically differently. That's far from simply saying that more money will go into extraction and discovery.
Don't forget his take on it:
The question of a future mechanism, the question of oversight, and the paradigm of co-operation amongst all stakeholders.
In other words, vague, poorly-understood, out-of-context buzzwords are the "heart of the matter." I can only conclude that the "themes" he was deriding were so vague as to be inexpressible in human languages.
Congratulations, you have now been promoted from useless bureaucrat to management consultant. It's a lateral move.
And where do you live that IP law doesn't exist? The Palestinian Authority? As far as I know, it exists everywhere. It just has varying degrees of nastiness and varying degrees of enforcement.
But if China wants to enforce the laws it nominally has on the books, it won't just sue somebody, it'll shoot a few hundred as an example.
Apparently, nobody over there saw Class of 1999.
Once again, Malcolm McDowell--and a killer robot--has shown us the way.
I would agree if the app was being developed against a non-changing set of technologies.
Every technology IE 6 supports is older than IE 6. IE 6 was released years ago, and hasn't upgraded its support for internet technologies, nor has it added new ones. So really, the argument that "IE 6 is vulnerable because it supports changing technologies" is hogwash. IE 6 is an unchanging application with multiple years available for fixing vulnerabilities.