For a long time, Microsoft avoided the sort of sclerosis that seemed to affect big companies like IBM, AT&T, and Xerox. People attributed it to things like Microsoft's amazing decentralization of responsibility (in which each VP operates much like the CEO of his or her own startup) to the "Program Manager" role that separated the job of collecting requirements from the job of progamming them. But over the last decade, things seem to have gradually frozen up.
I was at Microsoft at the same time Dick Brass was (and even reported into his organization for a while), so I'm going to beat up on him a little. (He won't mind.) We really wanted Tablet PC to be viable without a keyboard because it made such a difference in weight and size. There are a number of problems with operating such a device that way, but simply logging into it was a bear. Virtual keyboard and handwriting recognition solutions were both miserable, so we looked at biometrics. Now for a Tablet PC, the obvious biometric is signature verification, but one powerful individual in Dick Brass's organization had such a passion for fingerprint verification, that he effectively stopped us from even evaluating signature verification systems. Never mind that the fingerprint systems were extra hardware, stuck out the side, were easy to break off, etc. -- this individual was impervious to reason. Dick could have broken the logjam, but wouldn't get involved. Ultimately, we did nothing, and no serious keyboardless Tablet PCs were ever made (that I know of). This wasn't the only reason, but it was enough by itself.
This pair of problems -- the non-technical guy who kills ideas and can't be reasoned with plus upper management that can't get involved -- seems to have become depressingly common across the whole company. Bright people get discouraged and leave. People who thrive on stifling other people stay.
Where I do disagree with Dick is that I think a VP still has enough autonomy to make his/her own org successful. Microsoft's top management could still fix this problem if it consistently focused on getting and keeping the right VPs and eliminating the bad ones. I think the problem and the solution start and end in the same place.
Note that even China doesn't build many nuclear reactors. The Chinese aren't exactly ecowarriors, so it can't have anything to do with considerations of safety or waste disposal. Nuclear power is a very cool, very complex technology. It's just very expensive to build.
Actually, at least when it comes to Search Engine censorship, China always gave Microsoft a pass. I was responsible for the team inside MSN Search (now Bing) that developed the software to filter "objectionable content". (The "safe search" feature.) In places like the US, customers can turn it off, but in places like Germany and China, where there are laws, the customers cannot. I was uneasily expecting to have to incorporate a list of banned sites from the Chinese government, and while I didn't like it, I didn't see any way around it, and I spoke to our VP privately about it to make sure he understood my position. That my loyalty was to the company and I'd do what had to be done, even if I didn't like it.
Much to my surprise, he was upset with me. He had VERY strong feelings about this issue, and he insisted China wasn't going to make us do it. That was the same month when China's president visited Microsoft before he visited George Bush, and in his speech on campus, he said, "China is a friend of Microsoft because Microsoft has always been a friend of China." Sure enough, whatever China made Google do, they didn't make US do anything special. Germany was a much bigger headache.
So I guess I'd say, that, no, you actually don't have to go by those laws if you're in a country that puts personal relationships above the law. Apparently they really don't think of the law the same way we do, and that was a real eye-opener. For me, anyway.
Or maybe the real truth was that the Chinese government figured out that our poor little search engine couldn't find the objectionable stuff anyway except by accident, and they just felt sorry for us.:-)
Bill Gates made this comment at the new hire party I attended when I joined Microsoft in 1994, so I can vouch for its authenticity. I heard him say it with my own ears. However, it's worth noting that what he said, in full, was "As long as they're pirating software, we want them to be pirating ours. Sooner or later, as their economy develops, they'll switch to paying, and when that happens, ours will be what they'll want to buy."
I think China is developed enough to pay for software now, and I'm very sure Microsoft's anti-piracy efforts are genuine -- even though I haven't worked for Microsoft for two years now.
From TFA (quoting an anonymous administration official) ". . . it's time members of Congress recognize that NASA can't design space programs to create jobs in their districts."
The US Manned Space Program has been in sad shape for decades. The reusable shuttle that costs 3x as much per pound of payload as an expendable. (Why? The salaries of the staff needed to prepare it for each trip dominate the costs.) The ISS is the most expensive thing every constructed by man (by far), yet it produces little or no real science. (Why? Design tradeoffs again. Vibrates too much, too noisy, etc.) Given these programs have failed so badly, why weren't they cancelled ten or twenty years ago? Because of all the jobs they provide in countless congressional districts around the country.
We have thus arrived at a situation where most of NASA's money is spent on manned programs that just don't work, with just a pittance allocated to unmanned programs that do virtually all of the real science. That's a shame, because there are things people (and only people) can do. For example, a manned base on Phobos operating unmanned probes on the surface would be vastly cheaper than a manned mission to the surface of Mars, but vastly more productive than trying to operate probes from Earth. (With due respect to the fantastic accomplishments of the two Mars Rovers.) Scientists don't have to go to the sea floor to study it, but they do have to get their feet wet.
So I'm all for killing the current manned program, perhaps entirely, provided some planning is made to replace it with something sensible. I've long feared that if Congress cut the manned program, rather than give more money to unmanned missions, they'd probably cut those too. I'm still waiting to hear what the sensible replacement would be. The Augustine report was a step in the right direction, but I think it tried too hard to work inside the existing framework.
--Greg (the best thing about hitting yourself in the head with a hammer is that it feels so good when you stop)
As others have mentioned, the Wall Street Journal makes money even requiring people to pay for online access. So does the Economist. I think the real issue here is the quality of the content.
Read a regular newpaper story in an area where you're an expert. Notice how sloppy they are? How careless with the facts? People have complained about this for ages, but there wasn't much you could do about it. Most communities only had one or two papers to choose from.
Today, though, there's a huge market in online news, and, for the most part, the market seems to have set the price at "free." (That's free as in beer, of course.) It is difficult for me to believe that the market has got the price wrong. (Again, with a few exceptions.)
It's just the electronic equivalent of a "Mystic Writing Pad," those children's toys with a plastic sheet over a wax-coated cardboard tablet. You use a plastic stylus to write on the plastic and letters appear. Then you lift the pad (with a very satisfying crackling sound) and, like magic, the writing disappears. Great for passing notes in elementary school.
No battery at all, and the cost was just pennies. Back then, anyway.:-)
Yeah, I guess we really need a way to let people mark their own stuff as funny or not. Then the mods can give ratings like "not very funny" "didn't get the joke" etc. In this case, lacking a smiley, it's hard to see how most people would guess it was a joke.
--Greg (No, I'm not one of the folks who moderated it!)
You're right. Oops. That still leaves us wondering what a one-dimensional model of the solar system is like, though. Likewise, one could expect better results over time as people do work out how to do three-dimensional models for longer periods.
According to Science Daily this was the result of a computer simulation which was designed based on a paper, published last year http://arxiv.org/abs/0909.4552 . The simulation was "one-dimensional," which seems curious, and they could only afford to simulate 1,000 years out of the estimated 1,000,000 such a disk is expected to last.
So look for more reports of this sort over the next few years. Still, it looks like a big jump forward for our early-solar-system models.
They're being extremely conservative here, double-checking every claimed discovery using grround-based telescopes. That's a very sensible way to begin; they'd hate to announce some planets and then have to retract a few later!
As they get more verified examples under their belts, I expect they'll get a bit bolder. I certainly hope so, anyway. Earth-sized planets will be hard to double-check (Hubble could do it, but nothing on the ground), and large outer planets can't be double-checked at all, since they just make one pass and the next could be decades away.
A lot of the reliance on neodymium has been because it was cheap. Apparently there was a big switch to it from cobalt some years ago because cobalt had got expensive due to unreliable suppliers.
There are plenty of prospective or former mines around the world; it's just that China was so much cheaper that it made little or no sense to exploit those sites until now.
The real trouble here is the sudden change in price, but at the rate demand for it has been going up, it seems inevitable that engineers are going to need to find alternatives to it -- regardless of what China does.
There's no question that Thorium has lots of advantages over Uranium, but it's much harder to make it work at all. Check out the list of disadvantages in the Wikipedia article "Thorium fuel cycle." It adds all kinds of engineering challenges that Uranium doesn't have.
Of course, if we're going to tackle the problems of the 21st Century, we have to be willing to solve hard engineering problems, but it makes perfect sense to tackle the easier ones first. Especially when it takes years to build and test a reactor, so developing anything really new is apt to take a decade or two before it can actually make money. So far, it has always seemed easier to tweak the existing, mature Uranium technology to deal with its remaining problems.
Personally, I'd love to see a sustained government effort to develop commercially viable Thorium power plants. (I have thought this since the 1970s.) But the reason that hasn't happened yet is Thorium just has too many unsolved problems -- it's not because of some industry conspiracy.
In thirty years of programming, I've heard one person after another argue about how to comment and how much to comment, but what I've never seen is any kind of serious study attempting to measure what actually works best. I personally like to make comments paragraphs, not lines, and generally end up with code that's 1/3 to 1/2 comment lines, but the most I can claim is "it works for me."
I do think good commenting has to be a key part of software engineering (when it finally becomes a real engineering discipline), and I know software engineering is a hot topic these days, so perhaps there's a paper on this that I just haven't seen yet. If not, someone really ought to do a serious study. And then start teaching people something that's actually known to work.
Slashdot Mirror
--Greg
I was at Microsoft at the same time Dick Brass was (and even reported into his organization for a while), so I'm going to beat up on him a little. (He won't mind.) We really wanted Tablet PC to be viable without a keyboard because it made such a difference in weight and size. There are a number of problems with operating such a device that way, but simply logging into it was a bear. Virtual keyboard and handwriting recognition solutions were both miserable, so we looked at biometrics. Now for a Tablet PC, the obvious biometric is signature verification, but one powerful individual in Dick Brass's organization had such a passion for fingerprint verification, that he effectively stopped us from even evaluating signature verification systems. Never mind that the fingerprint systems were extra hardware, stuck out the side, were easy to break off, etc. -- this individual was impervious to reason. Dick could have broken the logjam, but wouldn't get involved. Ultimately, we did nothing, and no serious keyboardless Tablet PCs were ever made (that I know of). This wasn't the only reason, but it was enough by itself.
This pair of problems -- the non-technical guy who kills ideas and can't be reasoned with plus upper management that can't get involved -- seems to have become depressingly common across the whole company. Bright people get discouraged and leave. People who thrive on stifling other people stay.
Where I do disagree with Dick is that I think a VP still has enough autonomy to make his/her own org successful. Microsoft's top management could still fix this problem if it consistently focused on getting and keeping the right VPs and eliminating the bad ones. I think the problem and the solution start and end in the same place.
--Greg
Of course, advanced technology might cut that to as little as ten-thousand years . . .
--Greg (Why I lost interest in terraforming)
--Greg
The right and wrong on this one is very muddy.
--Greg
Much to my surprise, he was upset with me. He had VERY strong feelings about this issue, and he insisted China wasn't going to make us do it. That was the same month when China's president visited Microsoft before he visited George Bush, and in his speech on campus, he said, "China is a friend of Microsoft because Microsoft has always been a friend of China." Sure enough, whatever China made Google do, they didn't make US do anything special. Germany was a much bigger headache.
So I guess I'd say, that, no, you actually don't have to go by those laws if you're in a country that puts personal relationships above the law. Apparently they really don't think of the law the same way we do, and that was a real eye-opener. For me, anyway.
Or maybe the real truth was that the Chinese government figured out that our poor little search engine couldn't find the objectionable stuff anyway except by accident, and they just felt sorry for us. :-)
--Greg (happily retired from it all now)
I think China is developed enough to pay for software now, and I'm very sure Microsoft's anti-piracy efforts are genuine -- even though I haven't worked for Microsoft for two years now.
--Greg
--Greg
The US Manned Space Program has been in sad shape for decades. The reusable shuttle that costs 3x as much per pound of payload as an expendable. (Why? The salaries of the staff needed to prepare it for each trip dominate the costs.) The ISS is the most expensive thing every constructed by man (by far), yet it produces little or no real science. (Why? Design tradeoffs again. Vibrates too much, too noisy, etc.) Given these programs have failed so badly, why weren't they cancelled ten or twenty years ago? Because of all the jobs they provide in countless congressional districts around the country.
We have thus arrived at a situation where most of NASA's money is spent on manned programs that just don't work, with just a pittance allocated to unmanned programs that do virtually all of the real science. That's a shame, because there are things people (and only people) can do. For example, a manned base on Phobos operating unmanned probes on the surface would be vastly cheaper than a manned mission to the surface of Mars, but vastly more productive than trying to operate probes from Earth. (With due respect to the fantastic accomplishments of the two Mars Rovers.) Scientists don't have to go to the sea floor to study it, but they do have to get their feet wet.
So I'm all for killing the current manned program, perhaps entirely, provided some planning is made to replace it with something sensible. I've long feared that if Congress cut the manned program, rather than give more money to unmanned missions, they'd probably cut those too. I'm still waiting to hear what the sensible replacement would be. The Augustine report was a step in the right direction, but I think it tried too hard to work inside the existing framework.
--Greg (the best thing about hitting yourself in the head with a hammer is that it feels so good when you stop)
Read a regular newpaper story in an area where you're an expert. Notice how sloppy they are? How careless with the facts? People have complained about this for ages, but there wasn't much you could do about it. Most communities only had one or two papers to choose from.
Today, though, there's a huge market in online news, and, for the most part, the market seems to have set the price at "free." (That's free as in beer, of course.) It is difficult for me to believe that the market has got the price wrong. (Again, with a few exceptions.)
--Greg
--Greg :-)
--Greg :-)
Seriously, it really does make a lot more sense. How could anyone at Google still be running IE 6?
--Greg (Now I just need to find something to make me feel better about our government)
No battery at all, and the cost was just pennies. Back then, anyway. :-)
--Greg
--Greg (No, I'm not one of the folks who moderated it!)
Good catch. Thanks.
--Greg
So look for more reports of this sort over the next few years. Still, it looks like a big jump forward for our early-solar-system models.
--Greg
--Greg
--Greg
As they get more verified examples under their belts, I expect they'll get a bit bolder. I certainly hope so, anyway. Earth-sized planets will be hard to double-check (Hubble could do it, but nothing on the ground), and large outer planets can't be double-checked at all, since they just make one pass and the next could be decades away.
--Greg
--Greg
http://www.choruscars.com/Chorus_NEO_WhitePaper.pdf
There are plenty of prospective or former mines around the world; it's just that China was so much cheaper that it made little or no sense to exploit those sites until now.
The real trouble here is the sudden change in price, but at the rate demand for it has been going up, it seems inevitable that engineers are going to need to find alternatives to it -- regardless of what China does.
--Greg
--Greg (Or maybe Alabama) :-)
Of course, if we're going to tackle the problems of the 21st Century, we have to be willing to solve hard engineering problems, but it makes perfect sense to tackle the easier ones first. Especially when it takes years to build and test a reactor, so developing anything really new is apt to take a decade or two before it can actually make money. So far, it has always seemed easier to tweak the existing, mature Uranium technology to deal with its remaining problems.
Personally, I'd love to see a sustained government effort to develop commercially viable Thorium power plants. (I have thought this since the 1970s.) But the reason that hasn't happened yet is Thorium just has too many unsolved problems -- it's not because of some industry conspiracy.
--Greg
I do think good commenting has to be a key part of software engineering (when it finally becomes a real engineering discipline), and I know software engineering is a hot topic these days, so perhaps there's a paper on this that I just haven't seen yet. If not, someone really ought to do a serious study. And then start teaching people something that's actually known to work.
--Greg