there are hacks to fix Borland software for example.
Note: at least as of the time I was an intern there, in 1993, the MS Excel team was a major user of the Borland compiler. I have no idea what the current
situation is, but it's possible that this example is actually just another case of MS just doing itself a favor.
By the way, one complaint I've heard (and can see) in the Phillips remote design is the fact that it's too symmetrical front-to-back -- when watching tv in the dark, it's hard to know if you're holding it the right way. Guess they didn't think of turning out the lights when they were doing their ergonomic tests. Whoops!
Ha-hah!
Re:Put more information on your website!
on
KISS
·
· Score: 1
Now for the chumps! Fry's Electronics gets the price here. Every product , yes every product in the store should have a manual on-line on their website.
You know, it would be a vast improvement if they would just list any products on their web site! All they have is stuff for their freakin ISP, and store hours. Why not at least what the sales are today? Jeesh... after that court battle they fought to get the frys.com url, you'd think they'd want to do something useful with it.
Companies based on Open source software are just not going to be as profitable as proprietary software companies with a lock on the market. If they try to be, someone will come along and do it cheaper and just as well.
By that logic:
* Companies based on selling commodity products are just not going to be as profitable as companies selling unique products. If they try to be, someone will come along and do it cheaper and just as well. Which is why Wal-Mart went out of business on...oh, wait.
* Companies based on delivering low-end basic services, like fast-food restaurants, are just not going to be as profitable as companies selling unique services, like fancy restaurants. If they try to be, someone will come along and do it cheaper and just as well. Which is why McDonald's went out of business on...huh, that example didn't work either.
Both of the examples you cite are companies which operate on pretty thin profit margins. Wal*Mart in particular represents perhaps the closest to "free" that commodities can get (and if someone finds a way to get closer, yes they will do so and put Wal*Mart out of business; and Wal*Mart puts plenty of other small shops out of business, I'm sure you know). And I think you can easily say that a fancy restaurant is likely more profitable than McDonald's (just on a different scale).
The difference from software, of course, is that material goods inherently require money to produce, even after the initial design investment has been recovered. So the numbers will never be zero in these cases. But in software, it's possible.
We dropped Japanese, not because it was hard (the product was complete and japanese had been done in previous versions). It was dropped because the salary for QA, support, management, OEM sales chain, advertising, and maintanance were just too high. There was very little reuse of staff due to the language, a QA engineer who does not know Japanese (Hebrew) isn't going to be any help. One more language means one more product in the release schedual, which extends the time it takes to make releases and move on to developing the next new killer feature.
Interesting -- in the context of popular software like OS's or office app's, what you say is a strong argument in favor of OSS over any proprietary solutions. With OSS, if users/customers really want a particular feature, and have the resources, they can just add it in themselves.
If the Israeli govt. was offering a substantial payment to develop the Hebrew code, it stands to reason that they could instead hire enough local talent to handle the extra development, QA, support, etc. that you mention. -- if they had access to the source code. No need for them to be subject to MS's internal cost considerations for the support of the additional language.
Of course, the original code would probably also have to be reasonably clean/organized to make that feasible. So even if MS were to open the source to them, it still might not be an option...
They should spend [the $1B] all on setting up a new MOON mission. And then build an el cheapo telescope there.
You're absolutely right, but for the wrong reason.
With the current state of our space program, we can't launch a mission to a moon for a mere $1B dollars, much less build and maintain a telescope there.
But we *should* by now have had a space program that regularly conducts manned moon missions, possibly with an outpost or two there as well. Instead, we've spend the last 30 years obsessed over a fancy launch vehicle that is hideously over-expensive and delicate *just* so we can land it like an airplane.
So in other words, yes, it should have been possible to build an "el cheapo" telescope on the moon by now, with the ability to maintain it for less than the cost of overcoming the atmospheric disturbances and higher gravity on Earth.
But it's not, so the telescopes proposed are in fact the cheapest alternatives
for their size.
We won't be sending anyone to Mars until China has almost caught up to us technologically and has committed their full resources to sending a communist to mars.
By that time, they may already be ahead of us procedurally -- by that, I mean in their approach/attitude. On their very first manned mission, they've left behind a habitable module in orbit. Later missions will have the goal of docking with it (and perhaps adding to it?). i.e. they're already working on a space station, or at least the technology for it.
This signifies the kind of long-term, methodical approach that the US program has really lacked. Yeah, we had our moon shot, but we didn't do it in anywhere near a sustainable way. And the Shuttle has been a long trek down the wrong path. By the time China has caught up technologically, and also in terms of manned-spaceflight experience, they may well have a continuously-occupied outpost on the moon.
It'll be a bit difficult for the US to catch up to *that*. But we'll be able to take heart in the fact that no one can beat us at putting up military satellites.
Is the zen paradox of "If a tree falls in the woods, and nobody hears it, does it make a sound?" acceptable as a legal argument?
I also wonder if she might use the argument that public nudity laws are stupid/archaic.
I have a feeling she'll be using whatever "defense" drags the case on for as long as possible, or at least until her site's traffic dies down to the point where the lawyer fees aren't worth it.:) Then she'll just say "guilty" and fork over the 500 bucks.
Farscape on the other hand didn't complete their 5 year story arch... we were left at a cliff-hanger awaiting a next season doomed to never come. I caught the BBC download of it, and they basicly said something to the effect of "yea that's it, it's a cliff hanger but no more episodes".
Honestly, by that time, I didn't care. Maybe I was disappointed that they didn't seem to be moving in the "Earth is the Peacekeeper homeworld 1 million years ago" theory I had been nursing, but really, after (and during) the 2nd season, it started feeling *really* tired and aimless. But I kept watching because I was hoping it was going to go *somewhere*. Maybe I was spoiled by B5.
Oh, and I was also sick and tired of every character screaming their head of in every episode. What, did they think that was drama? One must use such tools sparingly...
What I really wish was that I had seen "Firefly" in place of "Farscape" in this article title...
...By contrast, Stewart's stretch at Microsoft paints a far rosier picture...
... a mid-career stint on liason duty with
IBM in Boca Raton, Florida. Clashing corporate cultures in the shared
office space meant that "Microsoft employees racked up more security
violations per day than an IBM employee would have in a year because we
didn't follow the dress code [etc]...
I might know who this is. I did an internship at MS in '93, and remember
a guy who told this story (among quite a few others; he was quite a
character). "Stewart" does sound familiar...
Anwyays, this was on the Excel team. And that could explain this other part:
Stewart's Microsoft story is also one of the more challenging to
Microsoft critics; he describes the Microsoft managers under whom he
worked as supportive, hands-off and efficient, and Microsoft's coders as
anything but sloppy or lazy....
"One of the thing I liked at Microsoft was that most of the
programmers there, in addition to being very bright, cared about
writing quality, robust code....
From what I remember, at that time Excel and Word were pretty much the
"elite" teams within MS. The design teams were extremely well respected
and I think could get whatever they wanted in terms of resources they
thought they needed to get their jobs done. For example, they were still
using a Borland software development platform to develop Excel, at a time
when Borland was a bitter enemy to MS overall.
So Stewart's description may well be accurate for his experience, but
it may not be the typical or even average case.
And of course, since then, I have to wonder if the quality has been maintained. Sure, the actual programmers really gave a damn about quality, and poured their heart and soul into the product, but they still lived a the mercy of -- what were they called -- the "program directors"? These were non-programmers whose job was to hand papers to the developers telling them what features to implement. Doesn't sound like the best long-term prospect for quality, does it? Furthermore, at the time I was there, they were just finishing up the OLE integration -- which my mentor on the Excel team described as "the worst thing that ever happend to Excel"...
Rent it, but fast-forward through the intro until you see a guy wake up in a bathtub.
Funny, I don't remember there being anything before the bathtub part. Well I guess that shows how much impact it has.:)
If you have the DVD, what you *really* need to do is watch it a second time with the Rodger Ebert commentary track on. He does an excellent job of exploring every nook and cranny of the movie; he obviously prepared for days before sitting down to record the commentary.
One further note: *do* watch the trailer *before* you see it for the first time. Unlike most trailers, it really doesn't give anything away, and it's so well balanced, without dialoge but with a great soundtrack, that it really sets the mood for the film.
Oh, and *don't* bother with the stupid treasure hunt in the DVD menus. The payoff is so lame, it detracts from the movie itself.
I would also create a whitelist of people (friends, clients, mailing lists, and a few select businesses) who are automatically exempted.
Well, once you start putting in filtering options like that, I have to wonder if it's really all that better than current ideas.
What does a micropayment really serve that a message sent back to the sender requiring an intelligent reply does not? I find it doubtful a spammer will be able to program bots that will be able to parse all possible request-for-confirmation replies they get back after sending out a batch.
I suspect that, were it not for communism, the level of totalitarianism that exists in China today would be.... exactly the same.
This is something that is a product of millenia of emperor-led feudalism. Communist thinking certainly didn't help matters, but note that the early "capitalist" presidents, after the last emperor fell, behaved exactly as if they were emperors themselves. And so did Mao, Deng Xiaoping, and even Xiang Zemin (sp??), although he's having to do it less blatantly. And the same kind of behavior pervades all levels of government, perhaps most so at the lowest levels, in the rural areas. Corruption is rampant throughout the system -- anyone who goes into govt wanting to make things better, winds up having to play the dirty games in order to not get ousted, or perhaps even killed.
I'ts a mess. And I don't think there's any quick fix. But I suspect it's trending in the right direction. The people are getting long-term exosure, if at a low level, to ideas from the rest of the world. It's a glacial change, but they probably will finally come to the point when they adopt free-speech and related protections in their constitution -- but only after it has become the de facto standard already.
Your argument lost its momentum when I got to your sig.
...
1. If what my.sig says is offensive to you, does that diminsh the reason behind everything else I may argue? Can you really not separate the two?
I don't think it's something that would be offensive to anyone -- it's just that it's so closely associated with all the other whacko conspiracy theories out there that its assertion tends to greatly diminsh the credibility of the author.
I mean, it's like saying "The E==Mc^2 hypothesis is the biggest physics fraud in human history. Fusion bombs don't exist -- those explosions in Japan were caused by,... uhh, other things..."
It's not that I know that these bombs exist, through my personal observation, but there is enough information out there from experts in history, physics, etc. that it is enough for me to trust that it is correct.
Yes, trust. I do trust that, given my understanding of human nature, in a society as free as ours, that there are going to be enough scientists who really are more concerned with scientific truth than with whatever some conspiracy theorist says their motives must be, that I can trust what they say.
In fact, one of the major motivations of up-and-coming young scientists is always going to be to overturn the "accepted truths" of the day. But they have to do it within the scientific method, which means they have to have real evidence to back them up. And note that the news media will also have a motivation to cover establishment-contradicting stories, as it will get them more ratings when they can bring the news of a major theory being overturned.
And don't give me any of that "they're all in a big conspiracy, or they're all ignorant" nonsense. With this sort of thing, given the motivations I outlined above, it only takes a few cracks to bring a big, blatantly wrong theory all tumbling down.
So the fact that it hasn't been big news in the respected media (especially in scientific publications) that HIV is being questioned as the source of AIDS indicates to me that there really isn't any credible evidence to back it up. And so I accept the HIV==AIDS hypothesis.
You wouldn't have to worry about retrofits, upgrades, wear and tear, etc.
Yes, exactly -- spaceflight requires an extremely high level of confidence in the hardware -- far more so than your average aircraft, automobile, etc. This by itself will always make a reusable craft much more expensive than a disposable one.
It'll only make sense to have reusable spacecraft when our level of technology is such that we can be essentially guaranteed that there is no appreciable wear and tear between flights. This means self-healing technology. Take the example from an earlier post, of an inflatable boat punctured by a cat walking on it. When the technology is available to make something as cheap as a rubber boat be able to detect such a leak and repair itself, then it'll be a no-brainer to have reusable spacecraft. Not before.
i like the fact that because i run linux, i have more capability than the average windows joe.
You don't have extra capability merely because you run linus -- you have it because you *know* stuff. This would be true even if 100% of computers ran linux. Your average joe would just stick with all the default settings and whatever window manager does the most babysitting. Anyone who bothers to look behind the scenes, use the more advanced-but-estoteric interfaces, etc. will still be among the "l33t".
(This assumes your hard disk isn't doing its own slightly dishonest buffering, of course.)
Actually, that makes me think: if the HD uncludes enough of its own cache RAM to let the OS disable its own caching, and also its own little power supply backup, it could just dump its cache out to disk as soon as it detects its "official" power has gone off, and the OS -- and the user -- don't have to worry about a damn thing. It could be marketed as the "non-corruptible" hard disk...
Slashdot Mirror
Note: at least as of the time I was an intern there, in 1993, the MS Excel team was a major user of the Borland compiler. I have no idea what the current situation is, but it's possible that this example is actually just another case of MS just doing itself a favor.
I did. My first instinct was to use one "L", but then I thought, "err... that doesn't look right."
Hey, it had been a long day. :P
By the way, one complaint I've heard (and can see) in the Phillips remote design is the fact that it's too symmetrical front-to-back -- when watching tv in the dark, it's hard to know if you're holding it the right way. Guess they didn't think of turning out the lights when they were doing their ergonomic tests. Whoops!
Ha-hah!
You know, it would be a vast improvement if they would just list any products on their web site! All they have is stuff for their freakin ISP, and store hours. Why not at least what the sales are today? Jeesh... after that court battle they fought to get the frys.com url, you'd think they'd want to do something useful with it.
* Companies based on selling commodity products are just not going to be as profitable as companies selling unique products. If they try to be, someone will come along and do it cheaper and just as well. Which is why Wal-Mart went out of business on...oh, wait.
* Companies based on delivering low-end basic services, like fast-food restaurants, are just not going to be as profitable as companies selling unique services, like fancy restaurants. If they try to be, someone will come along and do it cheaper and just as well. Which is why McDonald's went out of business on...huh, that example didn't work either.
Both of the examples you cite are companies which operate on pretty thin profit margins. Wal*Mart in particular represents perhaps the closest to "free" that commodities can get (and if someone finds a way to get closer, yes they will do so and put Wal*Mart out of business; and Wal*Mart puts plenty of other small shops out of business, I'm sure you know). And I think you can easily say that a fancy restaurant is likely more profitable than McDonald's (just on a different scale).
The difference from software, of course, is that material goods inherently require money to produce, even after the initial design investment has been recovered. So the numbers will never be zero in these cases. But in software, it's possible.
Interesting -- in the context of popular software like OS's or office app's, what you say is a strong argument in favor of OSS over any proprietary solutions. With OSS, if users/customers really want a particular feature, and have the resources, they can just add it in themselves.
If the Israeli govt. was offering a substantial payment to develop the Hebrew code, it stands to reason that they could instead hire enough local talent to handle the extra development, QA, support, etc. that you mention. -- if they had access to the source code. No need for them to be subject to MS's internal cost considerations for the support of the additional language.
Of course, the original code would probably also have to be reasonably clean/organized to make that feasible. So even if MS were to open the source to them, it still might not be an option...
And I believe the assertive form has the suffix "my eggo".
Sorry, just had to say it.
You're absolutely right, but for the wrong reason.
With the current state of our space program, we can't launch a mission to a moon for a mere $1B dollars, much less build and maintain a telescope there. But we *should* by now have had a space program that regularly conducts manned moon missions, possibly with an outpost or two there as well. Instead, we've spend the last 30 years obsessed over a fancy launch vehicle that is hideously over-expensive and delicate *just* so we can land it like an airplane.
So in other words, yes, it should have been possible to build an "el cheapo" telescope on the moon by now, with the ability to maintain it for less than the cost of overcoming the atmospheric disturbances and higher gravity on Earth.
But it's not, so the telescopes proposed are in fact the cheapest alternatives for their size.
By that time, they may already be ahead of us procedurally -- by that, I mean in their approach/attitude. On their very first manned mission, they've left behind a habitable module in orbit. Later missions will have the goal of docking with it (and perhaps adding to it?). i.e. they're already working on a space station, or at least the technology for it.
This signifies the kind of long-term, methodical approach that the US program has really lacked. Yeah, we had our moon shot, but we didn't do it in anywhere near a sustainable way. And the Shuttle has been a long trek down the wrong path. By the time China has caught up technologically, and also in terms of manned-spaceflight experience, they may well have a continuously-occupied outpost on the moon.
It'll be a bit difficult for the US to catch up to *that*. But we'll be able to take heart in the fact that no one can beat us at putting up military satellites.
I also wonder if she might use the argument that public nudity laws are stupid/archaic.
I have a feeling she'll be using whatever "defense" drags the case on for as long as possible, or at least until her site's traffic dies down to the point where the lawyer fees aren't worth it. :) Then she'll just say "guilty" and fork over the 500 bucks.
Honestly, by that time, I didn't care. Maybe I was disappointed that they didn't seem to be moving in the "Earth is the Peacekeeper homeworld 1 million years ago" theory I had been nursing, but really, after (and during) the 2nd season, it started feeling *really* tired and aimless. But I kept watching because I was hoping it was going to go *somewhere*. Maybe I was spoiled by B5.
Oh, and I was also sick and tired of every character screaming their head of in every episode. What, did they think that was drama? One must use such tools sparingly...
What I really wish was that I had seen "Firefly" in place of "Farscape" in this article title...
Duh! Like this!
Anwyays, this was on the Excel team. And that could explain this other part:
From what I remember, at that time Excel and Word were pretty much the "elite" teams within MS. The design teams were extremely well respected and I think could get whatever they wanted in terms of resources they thought they needed to get their jobs done. For example, they were still using a Borland software development platform to develop Excel, at a time when Borland was a bitter enemy to MS overall.So Stewart's description may well be accurate for his experience, but it may not be the typical or even average case.
And of course, since then, I have to wonder if the quality has been maintained. Sure, the actual programmers really gave a damn about quality, and poured their heart and soul into the product, but they still lived a the mercy of -- what were they called -- the "program directors"? These were non-programmers whose job was to hand papers to the developers telling them what features to implement. Doesn't sound like the best long-term prospect for quality, does it? Furthermore, at the time I was there, they were just finishing up the OLE integration -- which my mentor on the Excel team described as "the worst thing that ever happend to Excel"...
Hello -- it makes your finger vibrate. Think about it!
Funny, I don't remember there being anything before the bathtub part. Well I guess that shows how much impact it has. :)
If you have the DVD, what you *really* need to do is watch it a second time with the Rodger Ebert commentary track on. He does an excellent job of exploring every nook and cranny of the movie; he obviously prepared for days before sitting down to record the commentary.
One further note: *do* watch the trailer *before* you see it for the first time. Unlike most trailers, it really doesn't give anything away, and it's so well balanced, without dialoge but with a great soundtrack, that it really sets the mood for the film.
Oh, and *don't* bother with the stupid treasure hunt in the DVD menus. The payoff is so lame, it detracts from the movie itself.
Well, once you start putting in filtering options like that, I have to wonder if it's really all that better than current ideas.
What does a micropayment really serve that a message sent back to the sender requiring an intelligent reply does not? I find it doubtful a spammer will be able to program bots that will be able to parse all possible request-for-confirmation replies they get back after sending out a batch.
I suspect that, were it not for communism, the level of totalitarianism that exists in China today would be.... exactly the same.
This is something that is a product of millenia of emperor-led feudalism. Communist thinking certainly didn't help matters, but note that the early "capitalist" presidents, after the last emperor fell, behaved exactly as if they were emperors themselves. And so did Mao, Deng Xiaoping, and even Xiang Zemin (sp??), although he's having to do it less blatantly. And the same kind of behavior pervades all levels of government, perhaps most so at the lowest levels, in the rural areas. Corruption is rampant throughout the system -- anyone who goes into govt wanting to make things better, winds up having to play the dirty games in order to not get ousted, or perhaps even killed.
I'ts a mess. And I don't think there's any quick fix. But I suspect it's trending in the right direction. The people are getting long-term exosure, if at a low level, to ideas from the rest of the world. It's a glacial change, but they probably will finally come to the point when they adopt free-speech and related protections in their constitution -- but only after it has become the de facto standard already.
1. If what my .sig says is offensive to you, does that diminsh the reason behind everything else I may argue? Can you really not separate the two?
I don't think it's something that would be offensive to anyone -- it's just that it's so closely associated with all the other whacko conspiracy theories out there that its assertion tends to greatly diminsh the credibility of the author.
I mean, it's like saying "The E==Mc^2 hypothesis is the biggest physics fraud in human history. Fusion bombs don't exist -- those explosions in Japan were caused by, ... uhh, other things..."
It's not that I know that these bombs exist, through my personal observation, but there is enough information out there from experts in history, physics, etc. that it is enough for me to trust that it is correct.
Yes, trust. I do trust that, given my understanding of human nature, in a society as free as ours, that there are going to be enough scientists who really are more concerned with scientific truth than with whatever some conspiracy theorist says their motives must be, that I can trust what they say.
In fact, one of the major motivations of up-and-coming young scientists is always going to be to overturn the "accepted truths" of the day. But they have to do it within the scientific method, which means they have to have real evidence to back them up. And note that the news media will also have a motivation to cover establishment-contradicting stories, as it will get them more ratings when they can bring the news of a major theory being overturned.
And don't give me any of that "they're all in a big conspiracy, or they're all ignorant" nonsense. With this sort of thing, given the motivations I outlined above, it only takes a few cracks to bring a big, blatantly wrong theory all tumbling down.
So the fact that it hasn't been big news in the respected media (especially in scientific publications) that HIV is being questioned as the source of AIDS indicates to me that there really isn't any credible evidence to back it up. And so I accept the HIV==AIDS hypothesis.
Yes, exactly -- spaceflight requires an extremely high level of confidence in the hardware -- far more so than your average aircraft, automobile, etc. This by itself will always make a reusable craft much more expensive than a disposable one.
It'll only make sense to have reusable spacecraft when our level of technology is such that we can be essentially guaranteed that there is no appreciable wear and tear between flights. This means self-healing technology. Take the example from an earlier post, of an inflatable boat punctured by a cat walking on it. When the technology is available to make something as cheap as a rubber boat be able to detect such a leak and repair itself, then it'll be a no-brainer to have reusable spacecraft. Not before.
Hello people... this is obviously a sarcastic remark, as it would apply to any aircraft. Jeez...
You don't have extra capability merely because you run linus -- you have it because you *know* stuff. This would be true even if 100% of computers ran linux. Your average joe would just stick with all the default settings and whatever window manager does the most babysitting. Anyone who bothers to look behind the scenes, use the more advanced-but-estoteric interfaces, etc. will still be among the "l33t".
Actually, that makes me think: if the HD uncludes enough of its own cache RAM to let the OS disable its own caching, and also its own little power supply backup, it could just dump its cache out to disk as soon as it detects its "official" power has gone off, and the OS -- and the user -- don't have to worry about a damn thing. It could be marketed as the "non-corruptible" hard disk...