I think that this ruse has some value, tough, but in a twisted way; if, after this change, some users COMPLAIN about the browser experience, any firefox problem that they indicate is NOT due to a "IE sucks" mantra, and so it is doubly valuable to the firefox team....On the other hand, I would REALLY love to try this and hear some moron say:"I told you that IE6 solved all problems", and than click ? -about....:-)
.."Golf seems like the most pointless waste of time ever. Like i said, i want to have _fun_, not waste large amounts of cash on useless things that unenlightened middle age people think will make them feel younger again. "
Golf doesn't make you feel younger. it makes you feel mad.
.....timeslices gets smaller. I am 42, married, have two adorable kids (both well versed in pokemon gold, i understand 10% of what they say) play golf, play computer games,have a day job......and the biggest "hits" on my hours are:
1.day job;-) 2.golf 3.family activities.
computer gaming is a group activity, when you have a ten-year old son, and my big problem is to convince HIM to save and come to dinner.
Frankly, I would need a SAVE/RESUME option for my golf game(..well, also a "REPLAY FROM LAST SAVE" would be grEatly appreciated). A round is four hours, more or less, so it really takes away time from something else.
On video games,I found out that I now tend to play "no-brainers" like arkanoid, or quick turn based games like Civilisation. things with steep learning curves, I really cannot afford anymore, and that's irrespective of the type of games, console, PC, or even Gameboy. for example, my kids let me (..!!!) play on their pokemon gold on one condition: "...Daddy, DO NOT SAVE ANYTHING"...
one more thing. I am a compulsive reader (i.e., I've read the whole Pat o'Brian's Jack Aubrey series in a year), but strangely enough reading has the least impact, because I can snatch snippets here and there.
RELATIVE speed is the important parameter, so a car doing 15 mph in a highway where everybody and his uncle who drives a Ford pickup goes at 55 mph has a relative speed of negative 40 mph. Assuming the uncle brakes late, that's 25 mph relative speed at impact with a mass of 6 thousand pounds.
stock option grants do not, in principle, influence cashflows(otherwise it would have been impossible not to expense them). on a practical level, they influence where the cashflows go, i.e., in management's pockets instead of the shareholders'. even when used in a startup they should be reserved against, but I agree that it would be impossible to expense them right away.
one of the key issues, tough, is:
at what strike price options should be granted?
the strike price of an option is the price at which i have the possibility, but not the obligation, to receive the underlying stock. if the stock price is already ahead, the option is "in the money", meaning that if I could exercise it now, i'd make a gain.
since options can be exercised only in future dates, intereest rates come into the picture, but broadly speaking, we can say:
options granted at prices below or close to the going price of the shares = cokmpensation;
options granted at prices higher than the going price of the shares + interest at going rates = incentive.
there was a going joke in the good ol' days: the whole of Enron management goes to a strip joint to celebrate another good year of hard work. one of the ladies, after a bout of pole-vaultin', goes on all fours to one of the guys, looks him in the eye and says " I'll do anything for you. absolutely anything." and quickly, he answers:
"reprice my options"
( repricing is a practice by which companies lower the strike price of the options granted, whereby making them much more valuable)
...remember, it doesn't take a wholesale changeover to kill m$ for good.
Try sneakin' behind a M$ Exec and yell: "Rigid XML standard implementation!"
seriously, folks: what drives Microsoft is not ownership of the desktop in many sectors, or the lock on OEM's. it is the ability to drive file formats. If a user can decide what program to use, and it works on open file formats, it will probably decide on open source, especially in corporate accounts; more so if there's the ability to do it incrementally, since users of different programs can work on the same files.
the key issue here is that there is no definable market left big enough for them. the bread and butter, Windows + Office, has no space for adding value for the customer, since most customers either:
1. bang away on the keyboard in Word, and rely on automatic correction to keep their spelling in check;
2. click aphazardly on the "SUM" button in Excel;
3. do not want to know what an SQL database is.
So, to make money year in, year out, M$ has to either:
- sell the same software to more people; - sell upgrades to the same people that bought it last year
or a combination of the two. this strategy relies on entwining more and more the operating system and the software, a decision forced on programmers by the bean counters. this leads to elongated release times, vulnerabilities, etc.etc.
Make no mistakes: nothwithstanding the fact that it has a HUGE cash pile, M$ invests an incredible amount of money and effort in software. the problem is, the goal is NOT to make it simpler/more efficient/ easy; it is to "lock in" customers in a subscription model or a continous upgrade cycle. do you REALLY think that they could not replicate a linuxlike security model if they wanted, with all the money to spend and the talent it would attract?
"The final part of the show was a Q and A session with the two Nicks, Philip Dawson and Colin Bradford chaired by the aforemention daytime TV horror-show. Eddie Bleasdale of Netproject asked the most insightful question. He talked about a customer of his who had lost data because it was in old Microsoft file formats that couldn't be read by current Microsoft products. This was slickly dealt with by McGrath who suggested that he should get the Microsoft people to talk to him after the show. Barley added that all the current Microsoft Office file formats including their XML schema are published openly. I'm not entirely convinced of that but I don't know enough about XML to make any definitive statements."...their weak point, though, is that they must FRANTICALLY change file formats and HDD formats just to stay in the same place. I have an excel add in that's build by another company, that defaults on excel 5 format. now, if I generate a spreadsheet via the macro, write "hi" in a cell and save, I get a message saying that saving to a previous version might lose some content. Nice,Uh?
Personally, I think that they will consider making a "monolithic" program akin to a Longhorn + office, and state that it wouldn't work otherwise.
... I guess that's because rendering is inherently scaleable, i.e. there is no advantage in building one big, bad ubermachine. Far simpler to parcel out frames between any and odd number of renderfarms, many of which you may not even own.
It is a "make or buy" situation. Given an efficient payment system, I do not see why they should not render using some program similar to Folding@home.
1. computer-modeling an actual car; 2. Spawn a neat million cars, differing only in their electronics (fuel injection parameters, ABS, traction control,etc.) 3. select for desired caracteristic; 4."mix genetics" 5. respawn.
I guess that if you can access your car's electronics, you can do that yourself, but I think it will void any warranty. BTW, i know that here in Italy some outfits offer on the sly to change the electronic parameters of a car, especially turbo diesel, to increase max power and torque.
I do not think so.
Remember, we the consumers have to put up with windows preinstalled in computers, but corporations, in absence of Price/performance improvements, could FORCE on MS the Corel model, i.e. sell old versions of software alongside the new ones, or change model abruptly.
that's why Open office is a threat. it 's not the best of the best, but it is sufficient for 99.9% of users. For a company, that's good enough.
As a European in his mid 40s', I must tell you that while ICBM's may have been designed for a "counterforce" strike, soviet IRBM (intermediate range ballistic missile) in the 80s' were not. the SS-20 ( http://www.fas.org/nuke/guide/russia/theater/rt-21 m.htm ) had a combination of multiple warhead, CEP and flight time that was unsuitable for counterforce. it made sense for a first strike against air bases and such, or as a countercity weapon.
on WHO is doing the hiring. BTW, it is also a good litmus test of an organisation's skill.
Consider this: be they big or small, companies who let dept. heads, instead of HR or else, do their own recruiting have, on average, more distributed responsibilities. After all, it 's acceptable to think that this organizations are driven by results.
Now, people driven by results are less likely to be impressed by neat pieces of paper. they'll start to go into the technical questions earlier, rely more on interviews, do their own questionnaires, etc.
The fun part is, that goes both ways: by the level of the interview, you can get a feel for the company's level of skill and ability that you will not have if you are handled by HR.
So, if a company is staffed entirely by PHBs', it shows early on, and you can draw your own conclusion. I may be a difficult subject, but when I considered changing jobs, I had to have a final interview with the person responsible for my area of work (Finance)......naturally, if I had to ask..... it was -1 on moderation results!!!!!
after all, I think that Microsoft reps do not think they do corporate business at the county fair, especially given the fact that most of their FUD concerns total cost of ownership, admin costs etc. No corporate buyer in its right mind would go to the higher up to justify buying MS server by saying: "Well, Bill gates said that the alternatives cost too much.".
Linux has come to be known outside the junkies, and THAT is the fact that MS is trying to fend off: Now, even the great unwashed ask: "have you considered Linux?"
So, if MS can measurably change the PERCEPTION of their product, (which now is basically: ms products=problems^users)in RELATIVE terms, they have won time. they cannot change the basic perception of their product, because everybody uses it, and no one is enthusiastic. That would not be a problem for any other monopoly, but the perceived quality for middle users has deteriorated over time, which by itself makes people willing to try an alternative(do you recall excel 4?).
IMHO, the only buyers of this kind of hardware will be corporates, for the desktops. even 2 years old hardware is probably overkill in this case right now, so it is sensible to give bulk buyers what they need, and nothing more. After all, if you buy 25 boxes at a time, you can always throw a monster in (Athlon FX-53, anyone?).
individual buyers are a different matter. I want to keep a box going as long as possible, so it must be expandable and reasonably current; in three years, I want to buy today's games for 5 bucks apiece, and be able to run them.
It is like buying a station wagon. you use it as such 4-5 times a year, but you do not want to hire one each time.
I recall reading about a Robert Heinlein short story, "columbus was a dope", that confronted your very argument with a queasy fact: since people take for granted their PRESENT technological level, they always say "Enough!". it is difficult, and up to a point futile, to explain to my young son that my first personal computer had less power than his Gameboy.
about the subject of the US veto powers, we've all had the experience.
At home. As kids. "Maaaaaamm, I want to go out playing in the mud while it's raining.".
"No. and that's final."
Seriously, guys, in any situation in which a person can get away with saying anything, without paying for the consequences, serious idiocy is involved. there's no incentive not to go nuts. remember, most of the really weird resolutions that are vetoed by the US are there for the nuisance value.
I work in a financial institution and I've been using Excel, in its different version, since Excel 3. I find extremely disturbing that the program tries to force inexperienced users to change document formats with messages like: "you're trying to save this document in a previous version, some formatting might be lost: continue anyway?". Note that this happens even if you simply type "hello" in a cell.
I think that any program used for public procurement, or any document submitted for public uses, should absolutely be provided in an open format, to the exclusion of any proprietary formats.
The problem for Excel users like me is in macro languages: do you think that a standard should be used for that as well? I am a middle of the road user, and I do not want to learn VBA. give me back the excel 4 macro language!!!!!!
the whole point of this array is to increase data density, i.e. each single radar is self-contained, and to some extent indipendent.
What you are saying is surely possible if, under some circumstances, a single radar of these can lock on a f117, possibly through clouds, while the operating freq has been probably optimised to see clouds, and not aircrafts.
mmmmmmmm.
keep in mind that these birds have, according to public sources, cross sections within one square Yard and below.
Probably what you meant was that, provided that any receiver could "listen" to any transmitter, it would be possible to see this aircrafts, but remember, Bistatic Radars are already hard on signal processing; a "multistatic" concept would take, in my humble opinion,.... [insert your favorite beowulf joke here]
Slashdot Mirror
"I know a few guys who would rather land their Jumbo before looking at their wives in lingeree (sp?)."
that's what the PAUSE button is for.
"you have to ask what sort of hot babe is going to end up with a guy who pays attention to their computer that too the half-naked woman in the house."
Well, if you're a wife, and you can pick your competition, a computer is a better option than ANOTHER half naked woman.
.......unless, obviously, they start trying this: http://www.speech.cs.cmu.edu/sphinx/. My father is an MD, which in italian roughly translates into " his handwriting is a Brownian function", and I know he'd love a good speech recognition program. what hampered its development until now is that it is a resource hog (http://techreport.com/reviews/2004q3/athlon64-350 0/index.x?pg=7
I think that this ruse has some value, tough, but in a twisted way; if, after this change, some users COMPLAIN about the browser experience, any firefox problem that they indicate is NOT due to a "IE sucks" mantra, and so it is doubly valuable to the firefox team. ...On the other hand, I would REALLY love to try this and hear some moron say:"I told you that IE6 solved all problems", and than click ? -about ....:-)
.."Golf seems like the most pointless waste of time ever. Like i said, i want to have _fun_, not waste large amounts of cash on useless things that unenlightened middle age people think will make them feel younger again. " Golf doesn't make you feel younger. it makes you feel mad.
.....timeslices gets smaller. I am 42, married, have two adorable kids (both well versed in pokemon gold, i understand 10% of what they say) play golf, play computer games,have a day job......and the biggest "hits" on my hours are:
1.day job;-)
2.golf
3.family activities.
computer gaming is a group activity, when you have a ten-year old son, and my big problem is to convince HIM to save and come to dinner.
Frankly, I would need a SAVE/RESUME option for my golf game(..well, also a "REPLAY FROM LAST SAVE" would be grEatly appreciated). A round is four hours, more or less, so it really takes away time from something else.
On video games,I found out that I now tend to play "no-brainers" like arkanoid, or quick turn based games like Civilisation. things with steep learning curves, I really cannot afford anymore, and that's irrespective of the type of games, console, PC, or even Gameboy. for example, my kids let me (..!!!) play on their pokemon gold on one condition: "...Daddy, DO NOT SAVE ANYTHING"...
one more thing. I am a compulsive reader (i.e., I've read the whole Pat o'Brian's Jack Aubrey series in a year), but strangely enough reading has the least impact, because I can snatch snippets here and there.
of course it is required.
RELATIVE speed is the important parameter, so a car doing 15 mph in a highway where everybody and his uncle who drives a Ford pickup goes at 55 mph has a relative speed of negative 40 mph. Assuming the uncle brakes late, that's 25 mph relative speed at impact with a mass of 6 thousand pounds.
stock option grants do not, in principle, influence cashflows(otherwise it would have been impossible not to expense them). on a practical level, they influence where the cashflows go, i.e., in management's pockets instead of the shareholders'. even when used in a startup they should be reserved against, but I agree that it would be impossible to expense them right away.
one of the key issues, tough, is:
at what strike price options should be granted?
the strike price of an option is the price at which i have the possibility, but not the obligation, to receive the underlying stock. if the stock price is already ahead, the option is "in the money", meaning that if I could exercise it now, i'd make a gain.
since options can be exercised only in future dates, intereest rates come into the picture, but broadly speaking, we can say:
options granted at prices below or close to the going price of the shares = cokmpensation;
options granted at prices higher than the going price of the shares + interest at going rates = incentive.
there was a going joke in the good ol' days: the whole of Enron management goes to a strip joint to celebrate another good year of hard work. one of the ladies, after a bout of pole-vaultin', goes on all fours to one of the guys, looks him in the eye and says " I'll do anything for you. absolutely anything." and quickly, he answers:
"reprice my options"
( repricing is a practice by which companies lower the strike price of the options granted, whereby making them much more valuable)
...remember, it doesn't take a wholesale changeover to kill m$ for good.
Try sneakin' behind a M$ Exec and yell: "Rigid XML standard implementation!"
seriously, folks: what drives Microsoft is not ownership of the desktop in many sectors, or the lock on OEM's. it is the ability to drive file formats. If a user can decide what program to use, and it works on open file formats, it will probably decide on open source, especially in corporate accounts; more so if there's the ability to do it incrementally, since users of different programs can work on the same files.
interestingly enough, there is a precedent in SAT TV. Apparently, Star tv sold ad time on the basis also of pirated cards.
nowhere fast.
the key issue here is that there is no definable market left big enough for them. the bread and butter, Windows + Office, has no space for adding value for the customer, since most customers either:
1. bang away on the keyboard in Word, and rely on automatic correction to keep their spelling in check;
2. click aphazardly on the "SUM" button in Excel;
3. do not want to know what an SQL database is.
So, to make money year in, year out, M$ has to either:
- sell the same software to more people;
- sell upgrades to the same people that bought it last year
or a combination of the two. this strategy relies on entwining more and more the operating system and the software, a decision forced on programmers by the bean counters. this leads to elongated release times, vulnerabilities, etc.etc.
Make no mistakes: nothwithstanding the fact that it has a HUGE cash pile, M$ invests an incredible amount of money and effort in software. the problem is, the goal is NOT to make it simpler/more efficient/ easy; it is to "lock in" customers in a subscription model or a continous upgrade cycle.
do you REALLY think that they could not replicate a linuxlike security model if they wanted, with all the money to spend and the talent it would attract?
it' Windows(c). if you want it to work, it's Linux.
from the article:
...their weak point, though, is that they must FRANTICALLY change file formats and HDD formats just to stay in the same place. I have an excel add in that's build by another company, that defaults on excel 5 format. now, if I generate a spreadsheet via the macro, write "hi" in a cell and save, I get a message saying that saving to a previous version might lose some content. Nice,Uh?
"The final part of the show was a Q and A session with the two Nicks, Philip Dawson and Colin Bradford chaired by the aforemention daytime TV horror-show. Eddie Bleasdale of Netproject asked the most insightful question. He talked about a customer of his who had lost data because it was in old Microsoft file formats that couldn't be read by current Microsoft products. This was slickly dealt with by McGrath who suggested that he should get the Microsoft people to talk to him after the show. Barley added that all the current Microsoft Office file formats including their XML schema are published openly. I'm not entirely convinced of that but I don't know enough about XML to make any definitive statements."
Personally, I think that they will consider making a "monolithic" program akin to a Longhorn + office, and state that it wouldn't work otherwise.
It is a "make or buy" situation. Given an efficient payment system, I do not see why they should not render using some program similar to Folding@home.
..For example, by:
1. computer-modeling an actual car;
2. Spawn a neat million cars, differing only in their electronics (fuel injection parameters, ABS, traction control,etc.)
3. select for desired caracteristic;
4."mix genetics"
5. respawn.
I guess that if you can access your car's electronics, you can do that yourself, but I think it will void any warranty. BTW, i know that here in Italy some outfits offer on the sly to change the electronic parameters of a car, especially turbo diesel, to increase max power and torque.
I do not think so.
Remember, we the consumers have to put up with windows preinstalled in computers, but corporations, in absence of Price/performance improvements, could FORCE on MS the Corel model, i.e. sell old versions of software alongside the new ones, or change model abruptly.
that's why Open office is a threat. it 's not the best of the best, but it is sufficient for 99.9% of users. For a company, that's good enough.
...Try and guess WHY or HOW it crashes in Mozilla...Got the picture?
As a European in his mid 40s', I must tell you that while ICBM's may have been designed for a "counterforce" strike, soviet IRBM (intermediate range ballistic missile) in the 80s' were not. the SS-20 ( http://www.fas.org/nuke/guide/russia/theater/rt-21 m.htm ) had a combination of multiple warhead, CEP and flight time that was unsuitable for counterforce. it made sense for a first strike against air bases and such, or as a countercity weapon.
on WHO is doing the hiring. BTW, it is also a good litmus test of an organisation's skill.
.....naturally, if I had to ask..... it was -1 on moderation results!!!!!
Consider this: be they big or small, companies who let dept. heads, instead of HR or else, do their own recruiting have, on average, more distributed responsibilities.
After all, it 's acceptable to think that this organizations are driven by results.
Now, people driven by results are less likely to be impressed by neat pieces of paper. they'll start to go into the technical questions earlier, rely more on interviews, do their own questionnaires, etc.
The fun part is, that goes both ways: by the level of the interview, you can get a feel for the company's level of skill and ability that you will not have if you are handled by HR.
So, if a company is staffed entirely by PHBs', it shows early on, and you can draw your own conclusion. I may be a difficult subject, but when I considered changing jobs, I had to have a final interview with the person responsible for my area of work (Finance).
This is not a technical tour.
after all, I think that Microsoft reps do not think they do corporate business at the county fair, especially given the fact that most of their FUD concerns total cost of ownership, admin costs etc.
No corporate buyer in its right mind would go to the higher up to justify buying MS server by saying: "Well, Bill gates said that the alternatives cost too much.".
Linux has come to be known outside the junkies, and THAT is the fact that MS is trying to fend off: Now, even the great unwashed ask: "have you considered Linux?"
So, if MS can measurably change the PERCEPTION of their product, (which now is basically: ms products=problems^users)in RELATIVE terms, they have won time. they cannot change the basic perception of their product, because everybody uses it, and no one is enthusiastic. That would not be a problem for any other monopoly, but the perceived quality for middle users has deteriorated over time, which by itself makes people willing to try an alternative(do you recall excel 4?).
IMHO, the only buyers of this kind of hardware will be corporates, for the desktops. even 2 years old hardware is probably overkill in this case right now, so it is sensible to give bulk buyers what they need, and nothing more. After all, if you buy 25 boxes at a time, you can always throw a monster in (Athlon FX-53, anyone?).
individual buyers are a different matter. I want to keep a box going as long as possible, so it must be expandable and reasonably current; in three years, I want to buy today's games for 5 bucks apiece, and be able to run them.
It is like buying a station wagon. you use it as such 4-5 times a year, but you do not want to hire one each time.
I recall reading about a Robert Heinlein short story, "columbus was a dope", that confronted your very argument with a queasy fact: since people take for granted their PRESENT technological level, they always say "Enough!". it is difficult, and up to a point futile, to explain to my young son that my first personal computer had less power than his Gameboy.
about the subject of the US veto powers, we've all had the experience.
.
At home. As kids. "Maaaaaamm, I want to go out playing in the mud while it's raining."
"No. and that's final."
Seriously, guys, in any situation in which a person can get away with saying anything, without paying for the consequences, serious idiocy is involved. there's no incentive not to go nuts. remember, most of the really weird resolutions that are vetoed by the US are there for the nuisance value.
I'm personally awed by these guy's gallantry, but I cannot help but remember Patton's dictum:
"Your job is not to die for your country; it is to make the poor bastard die for his."
I Fully agree with that.
I work in a financial institution and I've been using Excel, in its different version, since Excel 3. I find extremely disturbing that the program tries to force inexperienced users to change document formats with messages like: "you're trying to save this document in a previous version, some formatting might be lost: continue anyway?". Note that this happens even if you simply type "hello" in a cell.
I think that any program used for public procurement, or any document submitted for public uses, should absolutely be provided in an open format, to the exclusion of any proprietary formats.
The problem for Excel users like me is in macro languages: do you think that a standard should be used for that as well? I am a middle of the road user, and I do not want to learn VBA. give me back the excel 4 macro language!!!!!!
alas (or luckily), this is unlikely.
the whole point of this array is to increase data density, i.e. each single radar is self-contained, and to some extent indipendent.
What you are saying is surely possible if, under some circumstances, a single radar of these can lock on a f117, possibly through clouds, while the operating freq has been probably optimised to see clouds, and not aircrafts.
mmmmmmmm.
keep in mind that these birds have, according to public sources, cross sections within one square Yard and below.
Probably what you meant was that, provided that any receiver could "listen" to any transmitter, it would be possible to see this aircrafts, but remember, Bistatic Radars are already hard on signal processing; a "multistatic" concept would take, in my humble opinion,.... [insert your favorite beowulf joke here]