Since time immemorial, research has been achieved by strong patronage from the rich. Basic research thrives in extreme affluence as there is no great motivation to make the dollar work. MSFT and GOOG have been so wildly successful and that is great for the current generation as they continue to employ smart people with little pressure to come out with products that sell but are only judged by the quality of their research.
It wont last long with either of these Companies, especially with MSFT losing ground to Google the pressure for survival is growing. I think the next set of Companies/entities doing basic research will come from China. They have a huge war chest of resources and are beginning to establish their monopoly.
job even in this economy. Damn you Steve for making me feel worse. But then I dont have to compete with you for other jobs out there. How lucky for me.
The value of the target i think is the answer. While military as a whole is important, the location of each individual of the military and their communication (and location) isnt nearly as important is the President for our enemies.
well said. true for IITs (Indian Institute of Technology). Getting in was so tough that 2 years of prep lets you float through the 4 years. You may not graduate with flying colors but you will get through
Spreadsheet is great for a lot of things. Most users of spreadsheets dont hit those limits that you talk about.
My car speedometer is calibrated for displaying 140MPH speed but I rarely go above 75 MPH and that is true for most people who use the car. You are like that guy who tries to get the Honda Civic run like formula 1 and then complain that it aint good enough.
It is crazy how scientific community behaves like just any other group where scientific methods are trumped by polls and consensus. It is exactly this herd mentality that prevented the community to look outside string theory for the grand unified theory.
Folks like Garrett Lisi had to resort to virtually getting away from civilization to make progress their own radical new ideas.
Has tapping this as an energy source ever been considered ? i am not a geologist but I am thinking if there is so much geothermal energy right beneath our feet (probably very deep) of such enormous magnitude there could be a way to tap into this.
"With iSuppli's estimated PS3 cost at $448.73, the product retailing in the United States at around $399 and taking into account other expenses, the PS3 may be able to break even in 2009 with further hardware revisions."
I don't know what this statement means. Are they saying that total cost (direct and indirect cost) per unit in 2009 will fall below $399 retail price ? If yes, then that is not breakeven. Also, it seems to me that they have very little idea of other expenses (both direct and indirect)to be able to even make that statement.
In 1999, Sugata Mitra and his colleagues dug a hole in a wall bordering an urban slum in New Delhi, installed an Internet-connected PC, and left it there (with a hidden camera filming the area). What they saw was kids from the slum playing around with the computer and in the process learning how to use it and how to go online, and then teaching each other.
In the following years they replicated the experiment in other parts of India, urban and rural, with similar results, challenging some of the key assumptions of formal education. The "Hole in the Wall" project demonstrates that, even in the absence of any direct input from a teacher, an environment that stimulates curiosity can cause learning through self-instruction and peer-shared knowledge. Mitra, who's now a professor of educational technology at Newcastle University (UK), calls it "minimally invasive education."
You need to think about the statement a little bit. It is sad for whom ?
Stockholders - No if acquisition gets them the best returns then they will be happy.
Employees - No if acquisition ensures that they continue to have their jobs and do good work.
Customers - No if the acquisition means better products and service.
Bystanders like you and I - may be but they are not relevant.
Acquisition is a very real exit goal for a lot of investors and we need that to exist as if that option doesnt exist it can result in "value destruction" as a lot of good things developed get lost.
Frankly, while individuals may make different choices given a circumstance the chance that they will make the right choice, if one can ever ascertain what the right choice is, holds little correlation historically to what majority may feel. For example, lets look at the Iraq decision Assuming Gore was the President during 9/11, how would Gore have reacted ?
1. Gore would have done exactly what Bush did 2. Gore would have not reacted at all 3. Gore would have reacted in a more diffused way and try get our allies together and push for greater understanding in the Muslim world 4. Gore would have..... (myriad of possibilities here)
None of us know Gore well enough to predict what course of action Gore would have taken. So we dont know if we'd have been worse off or better off than where we are today. To take it a step further, we don't even know if the stated premise of invading Iraq, spreading of democracy, is a bad or a good idea. It may seem like a bad idea today but may prove to be good a few years from now. There is no way to predict before hand the chances of failure or success when those terms themselves stop to have little shared meaning.
Yes is the short answer. Most customers that i have dealt with (and I have dealt with 1000s of enterprise customers) and have personally been responsible for rolling out new releases of multiple products. Each product creates its own track record of what is considered a stable release. In our case our customers would always wait for the first service pack for any major release before they'd upgrade.
Version 1.0 was definitely out for us. No customer would have picked it up for their production environment. So the bottom line is that there is nothing Dilbertian about version numbers. Customers want a stable release and version numbers should be based on their perception of what constitutes a stable release.
Slashdotters and engineers may not like it but that is the way it is. If you have trained your customers historically through consistent communciations that release 1.0 is stable and is preceded by long betas (like google) then 1.0 is fine.
Was it just me or most people felt that this was a lame post. Hardly anything to comment on and nothing "fascinating" about the interview. AI being used in "search" at google and DARPA Urban Challenge and in ooooo those "secret places" is supposed to be insightful or what.
Give me a break AI is far more interesting than this c***
sorry for being nasty but we can do better on slashdot.
I propose a ban on IPv6 posts on slashdot. I used to be an IPv6 fanatic at some point but now i am sick and tired of the FUD created elsewhere and on slashdot on the good and bad of it. None of us have frigging clue about anything. The end of days is near where our creations far exceed our ability to control, predict or stop them. Look at the beast called financial market... its a frankenstein that cannot be tamed by us jokers any more. the cat is out of the bag now !! with IPv6 we will again create a system that we will not be able to control and it will have a life of its own. IPv6 and the financial system are 2 beasts that remind of the alien vs predator movie... we will f**** be dead either way.
lets go back to our amish ways..........
for a start i will be turn a blind eye to anything about IPv6
It is an attempt at an explanation, frankly. This is probably one of the longest explanation that I have seen which explains nothing at all and offers excuses that dont even begin to make any sense.
Some of the statements
- "While it is true that he (Gandhi) is the greatest personality among the nominees â" plenty of good things could be said about him â" we should remember that he is not only an apostle for peace; he is first and foremost a patriot. (...) Moreover, we have to bear in mind that Gandhi is not naive. He is an excellent jurist and a lawyer."
"Patriot" was a disqualification here it seems. What was incredibly lost on this self proclaimed great was the immense dignity with which Gandhi led the freedom struggle as a patriot, but more importantly as a human being without once acting inciting or acting violent against brutal oppression. If this is not epitome of human character, then I dont know what is ? There is a great ad by telecom italia which shows the power of the man and his spirit. He faced up to one of the most oppressive regimes in human history with bare hands and bare body with truth and non-violence, as is only tools. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VmdCpQwSeDI
Some argue that he did not fight for blacks in South Africa. Gandhi was not born with all the ideas. He evolved and formed his ideas from the oppression of his own people and his domain of influence expanded as he grew. It is true Gandhi may not have spoken or acted for the oppressed people every where in the world but look at any body in history and name me one person who addressed it for all people (not even Jesus or Lord Ram) - it is just not possible to have a meaningful impact on everyone in the world. It takes a common thread to provide meaningful leadership. When Gandhi was in Africa, it wasn't that he was in favor of black oppression its just that his organizational abilities and his reach were not developed enough to extend his struggle to wider population. I dont even know if he spoke that native language.
Any which way it is measured, Gandhi is in my eyes the most respected leader for his ideas, character and impact in modern history and possibly the history of mankind. Gandhi's legacy will outlast Nobel prize and continues to inspire people across the world in ways that Nobel peace prize cannot even dream of. It is like arguing why Einstein did not get an A in the physics. He may not have but it is definitely not Einstein's loss but I can definitely say that what they are measuring in that physics is not a relevant measure.
Sir, you do have a point. But my comment is in the context of looking at the almost a century long history of Nobel peace prize and not just last 10 years. Although, even in last 10 years non-westerners who have received Nobel Prize, have been viewed more from a western viewpoint and political beliefs (shirin ebadi) and not necessarily the quality and impact of their contribution. I mean it has been more effective, in general, to have appeal to the West than the actual on the ground impact to large populations. A case in point also is Mother Theresa, a noble soul, no question but her impact was comparable to at least 1000s of other working even today in the oppressed places in India.
I do believe increasingly as the economic playground is levelled you'd see greater parity in the spread of these awards but currently it is a highly western view of the universe and the quality of people selected almost always has been based on geo-political expediency of the western world (read rich nations) and that will change as other nations get richer.
It is just the nature of the beast i guess. I just think Nobel peace prize is a lazy process of selection if you really do hard work you will find lots of people who are doing selfless work and not just easy to find people with hardly anything peaceful about them.
Nobel prize, at least for peace, has no credibility to almost all Indians, as Mahatma Gandhi the absolute paragon of peace and non-violence in modern history, was never awarded the prize. In all sincerity, it would have honored the prize and not the person, in this case. Indians are generally highly divided about most issues, but, on Mahatma Gandhi's commitment to peace and non-violence, there is almost unanimous agreement. Please note that, there were dissenters who thought non-violence wasnt the best way to attain freedom, but nobody doubted Mahatma's non-violent credentials.
Nobel prize, like most western institutions, has an enormous western bias and is unable to see beyond the borders of western civilization, for most parts. This is not a complaint, it is just a fact!!
On a different note, as I was reading the copyright law, it mentions that derivative works cannot be created without the explicit permission of the copyright holder. As a musician, I do not understand how one determines that a particular composition is a derived work. Musical compositions across genres can have huge commonalities in structure and along a lot of these dimensions. While the goal may be to prevent blatant plagiarism of musical compositions, I think it is virtually impossible to objectively define what is original work vs what is derived work in music.
Slashdot Mirror
Since time immemorial, research has been achieved by strong patronage from the rich. Basic research thrives in extreme affluence as there is no great motivation to make the dollar work. MSFT and GOOG have been so wildly successful and that is great for the current generation as they continue to employ smart people with little pressure to come out with products that sell but are only judged by the quality of their research.
It wont last long with either of these Companies, especially with MSFT losing ground to Google the pressure for survival is growing. I think the next set of Companies/entities doing basic research will come from China. They have a huge war chest of resources and are beginning to establish their monopoly.
job even in this economy. Damn you Steve for making me feel worse. But then I dont have to compete with you for other jobs out there. How lucky for me.
just wondering if there is a case for suing Bill Gates for terrorizing people and causing psychological trauma.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vivek_Kundra
hmm..
http://www.revaindia.com/
This Company has been in business since 1994.
The value of the target i think is the answer. While military as a whole is important, the location of each individual of the military and their communication (and location) isnt nearly as important is the President for our enemies.
well said. true for IITs (Indian Institute of Technology). Getting in was so tough that 2 years of prep lets you float through the 4 years. You may not graduate with flying colors but you will get through
Dont blame the tool !!!
Spreadsheet is great for a lot of things. Most users of spreadsheets dont hit those limits that you talk about.
My car speedometer is calibrated for displaying 140MPH speed but I rarely go above 75 MPH and that is true for most people who use the car. You are like that guy who tries to get the Honda Civic run like formula 1 and then complain that it aint good enough.
It is crazy how scientific community behaves like just any other group where scientific methods are trumped by polls and consensus. It is exactly this herd mentality that prevented the community to look outside string theory for the grand unified theory.
Folks like Garrett Lisi had to resort to virtually getting away from civilization to make progress their own radical new ideas.
This is MSFT initiative wrongly posted as Google one....
please change your comments accordingly.
inconvenience caused is regretted
Has tapping this as an energy source ever been considered ? i am not a geologist but I am thinking if there is so much geothermal energy right beneath our feet (probably very deep) of such enormous magnitude there could be a way to tap into this.
"With iSuppli's estimated PS3 cost at $448.73, the product retailing in the United States at around $399 and taking into account other expenses, the PS3 may be able to break even in 2009 with further hardware revisions."
I don't know what this statement means. Are they saying that total cost (direct and indirect cost) per unit in 2009 will fall below $399 retail price ? If yes, then that is not breakeven. Also, it seems to me that they have very little idea of other expenses (both direct and indirect)to be able to even make that statement.
It drives me nuts ....
http://www.internetnews.com/infra/article.php/3679026
In 1999, Sugata Mitra and his colleagues dug a hole in a wall bordering an urban slum in New Delhi, installed an Internet-connected PC, and left it there (with a hidden camera filming the area). What they saw was kids from the slum playing around with the computer and in the process learning how to use it and how to go online, and then teaching each other.
In the following years they replicated the experiment in other parts of India, urban and rural, with similar results, challenging some of the key assumptions of formal education. The "Hole in the Wall" project demonstrates that, even in the absence of any direct input from a teacher, an environment that stimulates curiosity can cause learning through self-instruction and peer-shared knowledge. Mitra, who's now a professor of educational technology at Newcastle University (UK), calls it "minimally invasive education."
Listen to this presentation from Ted Talks
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/sugata_mitra_shows_how_kids_teach_themselves.html
You need to think about the statement a little bit. It is sad for whom ?
Stockholders - No if acquisition gets them the best returns then they will be happy.
Employees - No if acquisition ensures that they continue to have their jobs and do good work.
Customers - No if the acquisition means better products and service.
Bystanders like you and I - may be but they are not relevant.
Acquisition is a very real exit goal for a lot of investors and we need that to exist as if that option doesnt exist it can result in "value destruction" as a lot of good things developed get lost.
http://diagonalslash.blogspot.com/search/label/US%20politics
Frankly, while individuals may make different choices given a circumstance the chance that they will make the right choice, if one can ever ascertain what the right choice is, holds little correlation historically to what majority may feel. For example, lets look at the Iraq decision
Assuming Gore was the President during 9/11, how would Gore have reacted ?
1. Gore would have done exactly what Bush did
2. Gore would have not reacted at all
3. Gore would have reacted in a more diffused way and try get our allies together and push for greater understanding in the Muslim world
4. Gore would have..... (myriad of possibilities here)
None of us know Gore well enough to predict what course of action Gore would have taken. So we dont know if we'd have been worse off or better off than where we are today. To take it a step further, we don't even know if the stated premise of invading Iraq, spreading of democracy, is a bad or a good idea. It may seem like a bad idea today but may prove to be good a few years from now. There is no way to predict before hand the chances of failure or success when those terms themselves stop to have little shared meaning.
and so on.....
$ 80 M - budget for the Chandrayaan - India's moon mission. So 30M can get you a lot if used properly.
Yes is the short answer. Most customers that i have dealt with (and I have dealt with 1000s of enterprise customers) and have personally been responsible for rolling out new releases of multiple products. Each product creates its own track record of what is considered a stable release. In our case our customers would always wait for the first service pack for any major release before they'd upgrade.
Version 1.0 was definitely out for us. No customer would have picked it up for their production environment. So the bottom line is that there is nothing Dilbertian about version numbers. Customers want a stable release and version numbers should be based on their perception of what constitutes a stable release.
Slashdotters and engineers may not like it but that is the way it is. If you have trained your customers historically through consistent communciations that release 1.0 is stable and is preceded by long betas (like google) then 1.0 is fine.
Was it just me or most people felt that this was a lame post. Hardly anything to comment on and nothing "fascinating" about the interview. AI being used in "search" at google and DARPA Urban Challenge and in ooooo those "secret places" is supposed to be insightful or what.
Give me a break AI is far more interesting than this c***
sorry for being nasty but we can do better on slashdot.
I propose a ban on IPv6 posts on slashdot. I used to be an IPv6 fanatic at some point but now i am sick and tired of the FUD created elsewhere and on slashdot on the good and bad of it. None of us have frigging clue about anything. The end of days is near where our creations far exceed our ability to control, predict or stop them. Look at the beast called financial market... its a frankenstein that cannot be tamed by us jokers any more. the cat is out of the bag now !! with IPv6 we will again create a system that we will not be able to control and it will have a life of its own. IPv6 and the financial system are 2 beasts that remind of the alien vs predator movie... we will f**** be dead either way.
lets go back to our amish ways..........
for a start i will be turn a blind eye to anything about IPv6
with no love for any of this
frustrated but enlightened
Imemyself
It is an attempt at an explanation, frankly. This is probably one of the longest explanation that I have seen which explains nothing at all and offers excuses that dont even begin to make any sense.
Some of the statements
- "While it is true that he (Gandhi) is the greatest personality among the nominees â" plenty of good things could be said about him â" we should remember that he is not only an apostle for peace; he is first and foremost a patriot. (...) Moreover, we have to bear in mind that Gandhi is not naive. He is an excellent jurist and a lawyer."
"Patriot" was a disqualification here it seems. What was incredibly lost on this self proclaimed great was the immense dignity with which Gandhi led the freedom struggle as a patriot, but more importantly as a human being without once acting inciting or acting violent against brutal oppression. If this is not epitome of human character, then I dont know what is ? There is a great ad by telecom italia which shows the power of the man and his spirit. He faced up to one of the most oppressive regimes in human history with bare hands and bare body with truth and non-violence, as is only tools. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VmdCpQwSeDI
Some argue that he did not fight for blacks in South Africa. Gandhi was not born with all the ideas. He evolved and formed his ideas from the oppression of his own people and his domain of influence expanded as he grew. It is true Gandhi may not have spoken or acted for the oppressed people every where in the world but look at any body in history and name me one person who addressed it for all people (not even Jesus or Lord Ram) - it is just not possible to have a meaningful impact on everyone in the world. It takes a common thread to provide meaningful leadership. When Gandhi was in Africa, it wasn't that he was in favor of black oppression its just that his organizational abilities and his reach were not developed enough to extend his struggle to wider population. I dont even know if he spoke that native language.
Any which way it is measured, Gandhi is in my eyes the most respected leader for his ideas, character and impact in modern history and possibly the history of mankind. Gandhi's legacy will outlast Nobel prize and continues to inspire people across the world in ways that Nobel peace prize cannot even dream of. It is like arguing why Einstein did not get an A in the physics. He may not have but it is definitely not Einstein's loss but I can definitely say that what they are measuring in that physics is not a relevant measure.
Sir, you do have a point. But my comment is in the context of looking at the almost a century long history of Nobel peace prize and not just last 10 years. Although, even in last 10 years non-westerners who have received Nobel Prize, have been viewed more from a western viewpoint and political beliefs (shirin ebadi) and not necessarily the quality and impact of their contribution. I mean it has been more effective, in general, to have appeal to the West than the actual on the ground impact to large populations. A case in point also is Mother Theresa, a noble soul, no question but her impact was comparable to at least 1000s of other working even today in the oppressed places in India.
I do believe increasingly as the economic playground is levelled you'd see greater parity in the spread of these awards but currently it is a highly western view of the universe and the quality of people selected almost always has been based on geo-political expediency of the western world (read rich nations) and that will change as other nations get richer.
It is just the nature of the beast i guess. I just think Nobel peace prize is a lazy process of selection if you really do hard work you will find lots of people who are doing selfless work and not just easy to find people with hardly anything peaceful about them.
But so
Nobel prize, at least for peace, has no credibility to almost all Indians, as Mahatma Gandhi the absolute paragon of peace and non-violence in modern history, was never awarded the prize. In all sincerity, it would have honored the prize and not the person, in this case. Indians are generally highly divided about most issues, but, on Mahatma Gandhi's commitment to peace and non-violence, there is almost unanimous agreement. Please note that, there were dissenters who thought non-violence wasnt the best way to attain freedom, but nobody doubted Mahatma's non-violent credentials.
Nobel prize, like most western institutions, has an enormous western bias and is unable to see beyond the borders of western civilization, for most parts. This is not a complaint, it is just a fact!!
On a different note, as I was reading the copyright law, it mentions that derivative works cannot be created without the explicit permission of the copyright holder. As a musician, I do not understand how one determines that a particular composition is a derived work. Musical compositions across genres can have huge commonalities in structure and along a lot of these dimensions. While the goal may be to prevent blatant plagiarism of musical compositions, I think it is virtually impossible to objectively define what is original work vs what is derived work in music.
Vijay
http://diagonalslash.blogspot.com/