I know a lobbyist who works for a company that makes connectors. He actively lobbies in Brussels against any standard. That's his daywork, he get's paid to do so. His company has thousands of different connectors in production, and standards would make there business les profitable.
Recently, I've had the privilege to work with people that were preceding both ISO committee's and W3C committee's. What struck me was their tendance to create standards that were on a high academic level. At the same time any pragmatic argument failed to be of any influence on the standard. Although this leads to standards that are a pleasure to those who like the pilosophical aspect of representation of and interaction with information - and I'm certainly one of them - it also leads to standards that will never be used.
In the real world outside ISO and W3C, mundane arguments, like cost of implementation, degree of skill needed to work with those standards, ease of transition, etc, etc. *are* of importance and will influence the standard that will prevail in the end.
Although I can enjoy the academic approach to a new standard, I have to say that as owner of a IT company my hopes are on the pragmatic approach of HTML V5.
BTW: The job i did for those ISO guys (They didnt't work fulltime for ISO) was to map the ISO standard they had developed,to a practical implementation in the organisation they worked for after they had failed to do so themselves, so go figure.
So a match in marital status increases the likelyhood for contact by 1.64 or something, regardless of what the marital status actually is? The other characteristics make sence, but for this one I would expect a significant difference between the likelyhood for increased contact between two married people and two single people. It makes no sense to put them together under one characteristic, namely matching marital status.
It's like putting biological status (dead or alive) up as a characteristic, it kinda makes a difference if you're one or the other. Any statistics for the both combined is useless.
Or am I missing the point here?
Re:Keep Mozilla Simple
on
Marketing Mozilla
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
I agree,
There's a structural flaw somewhere in the brain of many software product marketeer. When asked on how to enlarge market share or how to make more profit, the answer apparently always is: Enlarge functionality, more functions means more market share means more profit.
It's wrong. I always tend to flee away from products when they reach this phase and become bloated. That's why i ran into Firefox in the first place! Because it's light weight. I think a better market strategy would be: Firefox 2 is even more light weight, it runs smoother and faster than anything you've experienced so far. We dumped the features that nobody uses and made it even easier to use.
Isn't this just like Microsoft back in the days. Making their browser compliant to their own 'standard' HTML specification in stead of the W3C specification?
It's smelly if you ask me. If you have this marvelous new innovation for HTML, why not propose a new specification at W3C?
Starting up a bussiness is not and has never been restricted by the cost of setting up an infrastructure. What makes every company (and especially IT companies) expensive to start? EMPLOYEES It's hard to get good people and after you get them together you will spent by far the biggest part of your budget on their salaries. And my guess is that this will always be the case. People want a salary, no matter how many nifty 'Hybrid PDA's' you throw at them.
Every VC will laugh his ass of if he reads this article. It's a load of bull that makes my stomach turn.
Re:LESS viscous liquids are more likely to splash
on
Bang But No Splash
·
· Score: 1
True, but still it says that it's harder to splash water than it is to splash ethanol. And water *is* more viscous than ethanol. But probably water again has a status aparte (H brigdes and such) which make it harder to splash, whilst other more viscous fluids are easier to splash.
LESS viscous liquids are more likely to splash
on
Bang But No Splash
·
· Score: 2, Informative
The posting says: "The results seem to confirm the (perhaps counterintuitive) prediction that more viscous liquids are more likely to splash, not less likely"
While the article says: "Xu tested water splash as well. Water exhibits the same behavior, but its higher surface tension narrows the range of splash-forming impact velocity and creates a much larger margin for experimental error. "It's much harder to splash than ethanol," he said."
"A big part of the motivation for newspapers to charge for their online content is not the revenue it will generate, but the revenue it will save, by slowing the erosion of their print subscriptions"
This is typical for the way mastodonts think. They consider internet as harmful. this kind of defensive behavior is in many ways the same record companies suffer from in respect to online music.
If I was CEO of a newspaper i wouldn't be to afraid of erosion. People will probably always like it better to read text from paper. How nice it is to read a paper in the sun, on a terrace somewhere in the city, enjoying a cup of coffee.
In turn for the little erosion there may be, I get tons of new opportunities to create more revenue.
I can give my readers a broad range of services that bring them back to my site on a daily basis. I can tell what they like and what they don't like, based on website statistics, and change strategy accorcingly. (Try that with a print edition!) I can turn my paper into more of a community like slashdot, where my readers submit news. The editors can make use of the online discussions to get a feel of what's going on. Cross selling and up selling opportunities. Etc. etc. etc.
The USA has been behind in the uptake of mobile, compared to Europe, mainly due to the fact that the different mobile phone standards used payment schemes where the receiver payed for incomming calls. Consumers thought twice before purchasing a mobile phone because they didn't want to pay for incomming BS calls from direct marketing companies. In Europe, not bothered by strange payment models, mobile was nothing short of a small revolution. This in turn resulted in differences between mobile phoning behavior.
The lack of a dense, highly used mobile network like Europe has is considered to be a strong driving force behind WiFi though. Therefor agencies like Forrester think that WiFi will develop quicker and bigger in the states, although there isn't much of a proof, yet.
The article puts two techniques next to eachother, as if it were alternatives for the same problem. This is false. The proposed system with plasmonic covering reduces the scattering of light. The lightwaves pass by the object as were the object very small, smaller than it actually is. Hence it only works with objects that are allready very small, because otherwise the object would cast a shadow. (Light passes by, not through) The system with light detectors and emitters mimics the scene that is behind (bigger) objects with respect to the viewer. You could actualy say that it fills in the shadow cast by the object.
So were the first system reduces the shadow effect, the second replaces the shadow alltogether. I could actualy see these two systems used along side eachother rather than instead of eachother.
Apart from possible debate about being an innovation of the last 25 years, (the program started on january 5, 1972, yet the first launch was on april 12, 1981) I would like to argue that it belongs on this list.
It's on the list because of the fact that it has 'brought to life concepts formerly reserved for science-fiction writers', but if - *if* - that would be true, the space shuttle didn't do that, but Yuri Gagarin did.
Even more so the space shuttle doesn't follow the criteria set by CNN for this list: 'non-medically related technological innovations that have become widely used since 1980'
I don't know for you/.ers, but I wouldn't speak of the space shuttle as being widely used.
No it's certainly not nanotech but it is MEMS, wich is also on the list and hence the confusion.
accelerometers cause airbag deployment, and these are MEMS devices.
UML is useful to communicate with client
on
How Do You Use UML?
·
· Score: 1
As an PM I tend to use UML as a way of communicating with the client. Use cases are a great tool for explainig what a system will do and how someone will use it. Together with some schematic screen lay-outs it speeds up the process of designing and getting the design accepted by the client.
Further in the process the role of UML decreases, mainly because of 2 reasons:
- All UML tools I know are too cumbersome. (Rational Rose, Visio)
- Growing insight amongst the developers always leads to little (or not so little) changes in the way the design gets implemented. As far as I know it's impossible to update the design according to these changes without investing fast amounts of effort, resources and money. Reverse engineering certainly isn't the solution to this.
I wouldn't say this guy makes business by dealing with spammers. For all you know het takes part in various anti-spam initiatives. I haven't used his software but I could imagine it takes care of subscribers and unsubscribers following netiquette, actually helping to target those ppl that realy want the info sent to them. There are plenty of legit reasons to have a mailinglist, so there are plenty of legit reasons to make a mailinglist program. There's need for good anti-spam software and there's need for good mailinglist software and maybe this guy thinks he can make a difference. All the best to him.
From the moment that his business model would depend on the illegal use of his product, he would be wrong and I wouldn't be sorry too. But I think you are too quick to judge.
It's not remote controlled at all, it's being controlled by a farmer using his secret cloaking device. You can see the seat right through him!
Making it remote controlled would be way too difficult.
recall time longer than memorizing time
on
The Memory Masters
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I was checking out the rules for memorizing binary numbers and stumbled over something odd. You get 30 min to memorize it, but 60 min to recall it.
You would think that it would take more time to memorize it, than to recall it. But maybe the speed of recalling is tampered by the speed of writing down 1's and 0's?
Based on own 'research' i concluded that with normal speed you can write 90-110 1's 0's per minute. The world champion of 2003 had scribbled down 3009 1's and 0's. So that would've taken him between 27-33 minutes. He memorized them in 30 (or less) minutes, meaning this guy can memorize binary numbers faster than i can write them down! But then again, why did he get 60 min to write them down? Do they use special recalling techniques in which you don't continuesly write those numbers?
I think this IS surprising. The USA has been behind in the uptake of mobile, compared to Europe, mainly due to the fact that the standards used where not so much competitive, but all used a payment scheme where the receiver payed for incomming calls. Consumers thought twice before purchasing a mobile phone because they didn't want to pay for incomming BS calls from direct marketing companies. In Europe, not bothered by strange payment models, mobile was nothing short of a small revolution.
The lack of a dense, highly used mobile network like Europe has right now was considered to be a strong driving force behind WiFi. Therefor agencies like Forrester thought WiFi would develop quicker and bigger in the states. apparently that isn't the case. I think that's surprising.
The it-doesn't-cost-any-effort attitude behind distributed computing projects like seti@home is wrong in principle. Not only does it cost a small but undeterminable amount of money because of a computer being used and an electricity bill that has to be paid. You also spent some time on installing the program and probably even more on following the results.
It's all about engagement.
You decide to install the client because you are intriged by the concept of SETI or for whatever other reason you might have. If you consider the extra CPU cycles a liability for your system or your personal financial position than probably your engagement isn't what it's supposed to be.
I never quite understood why there aren't laptops with a built in transmitter/receiver for my cordless mouse and keyboard. I work with my laptop all day long so I use a (cordless) natural keyboard and a mouse instead of the laptop keyboard and the touchpad. So each time I have to plug in my Illogitech receiver/transmitter. That doesn't make sense. You would have thought that Dell would have come up with such a thing.
Slashdot Mirror
I know a lobbyist who works for a company that makes connectors. He actively lobbies in Brussels against any standard. That's his daywork, he get's paid to do so. His company has thousands of different connectors in production, and standards would make there business les profitable.
Recently, I've had the privilege to work with people that were preceding both ISO committee's and W3C committee's. What struck me was their tendance to create standards that were on a high academic level. At the same time any pragmatic argument failed to be of any influence on the standard.
Although this leads to standards that are a pleasure to those who like the pilosophical aspect of representation of and interaction with information - and I'm certainly one of them - it also leads to standards that will never be used.
In the real world outside ISO and W3C, mundane arguments, like cost of implementation, degree of skill needed to work with those standards, ease of transition, etc, etc. *are* of importance and will influence the standard that will prevail in the end.
Although I can enjoy the academic approach to a new standard, I have to say that as owner of a IT company my hopes are on the pragmatic approach of HTML V5.
BTW: The job i did for those ISO guys (They didnt't work fulltime for ISO) was to map the ISO standard they had developed,to a practical implementation in the organisation they worked for after they had failed to do so themselves, so go figure.
So a match in marital status increases the likelyhood for contact by 1.64 or something, regardless of what the marital status actually is?
The other characteristics make sence, but for this one I would expect a significant difference between the likelyhood for increased contact between two married people and two single people. It makes no sense to put them together under one characteristic, namely matching marital status.
It's like putting biological status (dead or alive) up as a characteristic, it kinda makes a difference if you're one or the other. Any statistics for the both combined is useless.
Or am I missing the point here?
I agree,
There's a structural flaw somewhere in the brain of many software product marketeer. When asked on how to enlarge market share or how to make more profit, the answer apparently always is: Enlarge functionality, more functions means more market share means more profit.
It's wrong. I always tend to flee away from products when they reach this phase and become bloated. That's why i ran into Firefox in the first place! Because it's light weight. I think a better market strategy would be: Firefox 2 is even more light weight, it runs smoother and faster than anything you've experienced so far. We dumped the features that nobody uses and made it even easier to use.
That would make my parents happy, I'll tell you.
And, if i may add another reason:
- PostgreSQL backwards compatibility is problematic to say the least. Try to migrate from 7 to 8 and you'll know what I mean.
Isn't this just like Microsoft back in the days. Making their browser compliant to their own 'standard' HTML specification in stead of the W3C specification?
It's smelly if you ask me. If you have this marvelous new innovation for HTML, why not propose a new specification at W3C?
Starting up a bussiness is not and has never been restricted by the cost of setting up an infrastructure.
What makes every company (and especially IT companies) expensive to start?
EMPLOYEES
It's hard to get good people and after you get them together you will spent by far the biggest part of your budget on their salaries.
And my guess is that this will always be the case. People want a salary, no matter how many nifty 'Hybrid PDA's' you throw at them.
Every VC will laugh his ass of if he reads this article. It's a load of bull that makes my stomach turn.
True, but still it says that it's harder to splash water than it is to splash ethanol.
And water *is* more viscous than ethanol.
But probably water again has a status aparte (H brigdes and such) which make it harder to splash, whilst other more viscous fluids are easier to splash.
The posting says:
"The results seem to confirm the (perhaps counterintuitive) prediction that more viscous liquids are more likely to splash, not less likely"
While the article says:
"Xu tested water splash as well. Water exhibits the same behavior, but its higher surface tension narrows the range of splash-forming impact velocity and creates a much larger margin for experimental error.
"It's much harder to splash than ethanol," he said."
Is say, this is a classic RTFA
"A big part of the motivation for newspapers to charge for their online content is not the revenue it will generate, but the revenue it will save, by slowing the erosion of their print subscriptions"
This is typical for the way mastodonts think. They consider internet as harmful. this kind of defensive behavior is in many ways the same record companies suffer from in respect to online music.
If I was CEO of a newspaper i wouldn't be to afraid of erosion. People will probably always like it better to read text from paper. How nice it is to read a paper in the sun, on a terrace somewhere in the city, enjoying a cup of coffee.
In turn for the little erosion there may be, I get tons of new opportunities to create more revenue.
I can give my readers a broad range of services that bring them back to my site on a daily basis. I can tell what they like and what they don't like, based on website statistics, and change strategy accorcingly. (Try that with a print edition!)
I can turn my paper into more of a community like slashdot, where my readers submit news.
The editors can make use of the online discussions to get a feel of what's going on.
Cross selling and up selling opportunities.
Etc. etc. etc.
Think offensive, not defensive
The USA has been behind in the uptake of mobile, compared to Europe, mainly due to the fact that the different mobile phone standards used payment schemes where the receiver payed for incomming calls. Consumers thought twice before purchasing a mobile phone because they didn't want to pay for incomming BS calls from direct marketing companies.
In Europe, not bothered by strange payment models, mobile was nothing short of a small revolution. This in turn resulted in differences between mobile phoning behavior.
The lack of a dense, highly used mobile network like Europe has is considered to be a strong driving force behind WiFi though. Therefor agencies like Forrester think that WiFi will develop quicker and bigger in the states, although there isn't much of a proof, yet.
The article puts two techniques next to eachother, as if it were alternatives for the same problem. This is false.
The proposed system with plasmonic covering reduces the scattering of light. The lightwaves pass by the object as were the object very small, smaller than it actually is. Hence it only works with objects that are allready very small, because otherwise the object would cast a shadow. (Light passes by, not through)
The system with light detectors and emitters mimics the scene that is behind (bigger) objects with respect to the viewer. You could actualy say that it fills in the shadow cast by the object.
So were the first system reduces the shadow effect, the second replaces the shadow alltogether. I could actualy see these two systems used along side eachother rather than instead of eachother.
I take pride in the fact that i didn't understand a word of this post.
What else is new? We knew that allready, and why would the gaming industry be different?
Take a look at MTV and you see exactly the same thing, lots of barely clothed chicks.
And women don't get massively offended by it. Apparently sex sells regardless of the comsumer's gender.
women see something they wanna look similar to and men see something they want.
Apart from possible debate about being an innovation of the last 25 years, (the program started on january 5, 1972, yet the first launch was on april 12, 1981) I would like to argue that it belongs on this list. /.ers, but I wouldn't speak of the space shuttle as being widely used.
It's on the list because of the fact that it has 'brought to life concepts formerly reserved for science-fiction writers', but if - *if* - that would be true, the space shuttle didn't do that, but Yuri Gagarin did.
Even more so the space shuttle doesn't follow the criteria set by CNN for this list: 'non-medically related technological innovations that have become widely used since 1980'
I don't know for you
No it's certainly not nanotech but it is MEMS, wich is also on the list and hence the confusion. accelerometers cause airbag deployment, and these are MEMS devices.
As an PM I tend to use UML as a way of communicating with the client. Use cases are a great tool for explainig what a system will do and how someone will use it. Together with some schematic screen lay-outs it speeds up the process of designing and getting the design accepted by the client.
Further in the process the role of UML decreases, mainly because of 2 reasons:
- All UML tools I know are too cumbersome. (Rational Rose, Visio)
- Growing insight amongst the developers always leads to little (or not so little) changes in the way the design gets implemented. As far as I know it's impossible to update the design according to these changes without investing fast amounts of effort, resources and money. Reverse engineering certainly isn't the solution to this.
I wouldn't say this guy makes business by dealing with spammers. For all you know het takes part in various anti-spam initiatives.
I haven't used his software but I could imagine it takes care of subscribers and unsubscribers following netiquette, actually helping to target those ppl that realy want the info sent to them. There are plenty of legit reasons to have a mailinglist, so there are plenty of legit reasons to make a mailinglist program.
There's need for good anti-spam software and there's need for good mailinglist software and maybe this guy thinks he can make a difference. All the best to him.
From the moment that his business model would depend on the illegal use of his product, he would be wrong and I wouldn't be sorry too. But I think you are too quick to judge.
- chainsaws are used by serial killers?
- binoculars are used by stalkers?
- cars are used for drive-by shootings?
The fact that some products can be used for illegal purposes doesn't make producing the products wrong.
Every website wich collects e-mail adresses (so that's pretty much *every* website) has need for a tool to maintain their mailing list.
It's not remote controlled at all, it's being controlled by a farmer using his secret cloaking device. You can see the seat right through him!
Making it remote controlled would be way too difficult.
I was checking out the rules for memorizing binary numbers and stumbled over something odd.
You get 30 min to memorize it, but 60 min to recall it.
You would think that it would take more time to memorize it, than to recall it. But maybe the speed of recalling is tampered by the speed of writing down 1's and 0's?
Based on own 'research' i concluded that with normal speed you can write 90-110 1's 0's per minute. The world champion of 2003 had scribbled down 3009 1's and 0's. So that would've taken him between 27-33 minutes. He memorized them in 30 (or less) minutes, meaning this guy can memorize binary numbers faster than i can write them down! But then again, why did he get 60 min to write them down? Do they use special recalling techniques in which you don't continuesly write those numbers?
I think this IS surprising. The USA has been behind in the uptake of mobile, compared to Europe, mainly due to the fact that the standards used where not so much competitive, but all used a payment scheme where the receiver payed for incomming calls. Consumers thought twice before purchasing a mobile phone because they didn't want to pay for incomming BS calls from direct marketing companies.
In Europe, not bothered by strange payment models, mobile was nothing short of a small revolution.
The lack of a dense, highly used mobile network like Europe has right now was considered to be a strong driving force behind WiFi. Therefor agencies like Forrester thought WiFi would develop quicker and bigger in the states. apparently that isn't the case. I think that's surprising.
The it-doesn't-cost-any-effort attitude behind distributed computing projects like seti@home is wrong in principle.
Not only does it cost a small but undeterminable amount of money because of a computer being used and an electricity bill that has to be paid.
You also spent some time on installing the program and probably even more on following the results.
It's all about engagement.
You decide to install the client because you are intriged by the concept of SETI or for whatever other reason you might have. If you consider the extra CPU cycles a liability for your system or your personal financial position than probably your engagement isn't what it's supposed to be.
I never quite understood why there aren't laptops with a built in transmitter/receiver for my cordless mouse and keyboard.
I work with my laptop all day long so I use a (cordless) natural keyboard and a mouse instead of the laptop keyboard and the touchpad. So each time I have to plug in my Illogitech receiver/transmitter. That doesn't make sense.
You would have thought that Dell would have come up with such a thing.