Look. It's not like we're not trying. The thing is, politicians are obviously too dense to educate themselves about the core functions of their jobs today - economics, international relations, comparative religions, and ethics. I personally couldn't care less about whether a politician can even push the little button to the right of the green light, as long as he knows what he's doing when it comes to making an economic decision.
The problem is that a large percentage of them don't. I want smarter politicians, but anyone with half a brain knows it's just a mudfest, and doesn't really want to be dragged into it. The problem is more deep seated and insidious than just a lack of tech knowledge; if other industries and communities were more aware of their situations they would be (and often are) just as pissed about the lack of competence on the side of their elected officials.
The only exception, of course, is probably the stock market. I'm pretty sure your average politician could tell you quite a bit about how a 401(k) works, even if they can't tell you the difference between Windows 2000 and Windows XP.
Um.... They're selling the stuff that they're talking about on their site. If you can't find what you're looking for on the site, they want you to call them.
Having a dozen links to your competitors scattered around your webpage sounds mildly ineffective to me, but then I'm a picky kinda guy sometimes.
Network response isn't quite as important as throughput in this case; processing and dumping are centralized, and the programming for caching the chunks needed for high level analysis will become more important but tougher....
Ever heard of a NOC? The reason this guy's wrong has nothing to do with computing power, it's got to do with security.
If you RTFA carefully, he's not talking about removing network operations or centralized communications and data spots. He's talking about downgrading datacenters to the level of a fusebox. The fusebox for a house is in one place, but it's in the garage. The datacenter will be in one place, but not the center of downtown.
One could say that this has already happened quite often with IT outsourcing. You don't have a server farm just about anyone could run located in downtown Manhatten. You have it in Hyderabad or Mumbai or some rural spot in central China. Until the forces of market equalization pan out in ten or a hundred years.
The assumptions I disagree with here are:
1. There will never be the requirement for high-end enough services that the regular 'datacenter' with shiny equipment won't be an excessively useful sales tool.
2. Uptime requires little enough on-site time for the people who really know what they're doing to be far enough away from the servers that they can be located in the middle of nowhere. (This is debatable today. Five years, well, it won't be debatable, it will be a fact that they require this little onsite time.)
3. Off-Siting is easy enough to implement organizationally while retaining flexibility. This is going to be especially true for small companies.
Other than that, though, the skills required for good operations center management are not going to be as available in the middle of nowhere as they are in cities for quite a while yet. The real problem is that the people that are willing to learn enough about the stuff are (and this is a broad and unqualified generalization) generally attracted to cities for the availability of stimulation / excess input.
It's been three or four years; I just remember the perfect score.
The funny part of forgetting that is that I got a 780 on the math side and 1550 points overall.
Basically, to the point where my grades were going to be what mattered. That's the situation anyways; if your grades are good enough, you only need about a 1200+. After that people will consider your application seriously. That's all you really need.
Read the books. Pay attention to the meta-test taking junk. It helps immensely. Latin roots, basic math, and decent grammar will be the only things you really need.
If you can write a good argument you're just fine on the writing. Of course, I majored in philosophy and got a 5/5 on the writing portion of the GRE, so my definition of 'good argument' might differ slightly from yours. But I doubt it, to be honest.
The funny thing is that Linux might actually be more popular with Madden-esque voice overs plugged in as error messages. Like clippy, only openly farsical.
EX:
"OOOoh.... It looks like he's caused a segmentation fault. That's gotta hurt."
"Wow. Now, that there's just some good old fashioned permissions problems. He's gonna need to log as root and run some chmod and chown commands."
"You know, right there's where you really have the option of some good coding. The rehashing of that string with the library function would make your code quite a bit more efficient. Just like in the old days."
And everyone's favorite,
"Boy, that's a good little piece of code, but you could really use a run back to the manual on that one."
I'd love to see the whiteboard-enabled screen on my code sometimes, and have someone who knew what they were doing scribble out what was wrong with it, but maybe that's just me.
Look. You're both right and you're both wrong. And you should be smart enough to realize that. It's nice to see some honest dissent, but you both should learn to tone it down about four notches before you consider conversing. Fearmongering is a short-term tool. It doesn't work forever. Reality is slowly catching up to the political / economic system, and there are a lot of factors in it. All that really needs to happen at this point is a fair playing ground, so off to Black Box Voting for both of you.
Oh, and if you didn't shoot spittle at every conservative you spoke to, you would have a better chance of convincing them. I know I do.
I am strictly an outsider. I've never written a single line of OSS code, mainly because I don't think I'm a good enough coder. But if you think that OSS code is worse than corporate code, well, you've got another think coming. I can't imagine it's anywhere near as weird or self indulgent in any of the ways some of the crap I see is. Not in the slightest. I've considered writing damning or blessing e-mails in response to the way people code, but quite often there's no way to get a hold of them and/ or they don't care.
Code is like science fiction. 90% of it is crap. But since OSS is so big and old, the 10% sliver has become a larger percentage of what people actually run.
Of course not. We don't really do anything with computers except let them run our lives mindlessly. Noone would ever do anything new if we couldn't make a buck on forcing other people to buy it only from us.
Um.... OSS Sucks, and yet you still use it? Um.... Look. You're using the most user-unfriendly chunk of OSS there is. You're complaining it's user-unfriendly. I've installed both Ubuntu and the old Mandrake, I've done it for myself and non-techies, it was easy, I'm actually pretty happy overall. I'm not a demon-monster-coder. I can code enough to do it for a living.
Your continual 'OSS Sucks' comments are mildly offensive, seeing as you're judging an entire community based upon your experience with a small piece of it. They show you personally lack in certain areas of consideration.
OSS doesn't have any real problems, it's individuals within the system. The system / movement / whatever you want to call it itself mutates all the time. It's a software project that has lasted and lived in the same area for over ten or fifteen years, and managed to keep up with modern technology. There aren't a whole lot of codebases like that out there.
I'm sorry you think OSS sucks as a whole. But I don't agree and flaming the crap out of all the people that don't is just trolling.
That's the situation NOW, but give it ten years and we may have all the bandwidth necessary to stream hi-res. The technology's still in its infancy, really.
And so, like the Xbox before it, the Zune gains market share due to the very people who hate Microsoft and want to stiff them hacking their hardware drivers. If people start cracking the Zune security, and then M$ isn't to blame, I'm going to laugh incredibly hard when version two of the Zune is much much harder to crack open. This means M$ has acquired a portion of the market at the expense of the very people who really wanted to lock it down. It's funnier every time it happens, except that Redmond retains control.
I understand it and I'm not to happy about it. In addition to making small companies capable of handling quite a bit more data, computers have allowed big companies to grow to a point never before seen. Before computers came around, there really was a point where a company got so big and incompetent it fell over on itself. Now they get so big that they can change the very rules of the environment within which they live in the name of more efficient survival. Don't tell me I don't understand at all what has been done for me by computers, I see it and I'm pissed, because I'd rather work for (or own) a small business and be buried in paperwork than see that small businesses are slowly getting hammered into oblivion because they cannot compete for all the tiny scraps left at the bottom of the economic pool.
I'd personally call Python easier to learn than BASIC. But there's not a whole lot of motivation. I mean, the first thing most people programmed was games. Um..... How long would it take you to make a competitive game then, and how long would it take you now? I mean, NetHack, Moria, Adventure.... These games all could be approached on a graphic level within a few weeks of learning to code. Take a look at a modern game recently? How accessible are the libraries to make a game like it? How easy is it to replicate?
At a state university this means that he's essentially running a small side business which feeds off of his normal job at the expense of the public. While I understand that this is standard operating procedure for universities of all kinds, it still makes me slightly uneasy. I would much prefer that the university pay for recording all his lectures (if they aren't already) and then podcast them.... Seems that somewhere along the line, "For the good of the whole" exited the philosophy of public university in the US.
Um.... It doesn't have to, it just does by design. The problem is that consumers aren't quite fed up with their privacy being invaded yet. It's possible they never will be, but if they are expect to see a backlash.
Our main result is that in the absence of cost asymmetries and as long as Windows has a first-mover advantage (a larger installed base at time zero), Linux never displaces Windows of its leadership position.
So, um.... If Linux weren't free, it would never beat out M$. Duh. Hello OS/2. OS X too. HOWEVER, that doesn't include a lot of motivation when it comes to a big company spending millions on seat licenses.
Another tidbit: We found that in countries where piracy is highest, Linux has the lowest penetration rate.
This is an interesting one. The more a country pirates, the less the people operating there are likely to want the free version. BUT there's one last tidbit that kinda shows how little people from Harvard really understand about the tech market.
By lowering the price of Windows, the demand for Linux shrinks to the point where Linux is not a threat to the survival of Windows.
Um. No? The thing is that this study apparrently assumes that Microsoft will be able to survive lowering the price of Windows. Microsoft's real staying power has come from the fact that it is a giant money machine. When the machine starts to break down, things might change a little bit. Predicting the tech industry is like voodoo anyways.
Additionally, this study does not seem to accommodate for the fact that software quality may not be a continuous line. It may be asymptotic to some extent, or at least have issues of increasing demands as far as quality as a result of effort goes. It may also have reached the end of its first renaissance where extreme advances to usability and usefulness are created year over year. At least on the desktop, this seems to be coming true.
This article, at the end, seems to have this point of view to me: "Yeah, we aren't FUD, but we certainly do agree with Microsoft. For completely UnMicrosoft reasons! A monopoly is good, too! Yeah, don't look at the overall statements we're making, or our arguments, because we're going to need them to defend M$ in court soon. No, we're not going to disclose what we're going to get paid." I'm going to have a hard time listening to anyone from HBS seriously ever again.
It hadn't even occurred to me that a cell phone provider would gimp their phones. The flat-out unreliability I have run into - in the glass shop, before I started working in the glass shop, out of the glass shop, whatever - is what I'm not happy with. The ringtone junk is just icing on the cake. Battery life is comparatively short, yes, but the problems I have are mostly related to me having to screw around with the phone once every day or two to get away from the blackscreening. And rebooting it because I can't get it to dial. And and and. I haven't mistreated this phone at all; in fact I've been pretty kind to it overall. The glassblowing is an example, and it's not like I put the stupid thing in the flames and say, "Heh heh. Ring now, bish." No, I take pretty good care of the phone and it has rewarded me with calls that don't ring for some odd reason, short battery life, two day late messages, and other general unreliabilities. I don't particularly want to RMA it, because then I get a refurbed one back. It's a cool LOOKING phone, but I wouldn't buy a second one at this point.... Of course, I've only owned it for six months, so it might get better. Who knows.
I'm sorry if I seemed a bit personal earlier. This phone annoys me, and life in general is mildly annoying at the moment. Some genius at a bank to go unnamed decided long ago that releasing software at 4:00 AM on Saturdays was a good idea and I've gotten roped into testing it.
Blah. You've purposefully misread much of what I've written. Not really interested in answering most of it, but uh... You're Wrong. It's nowhere near the phone my last one was, and that has nothing to do with how I'm treating it.
Ringtones and uploading are disabled by default with Verizon's phones. I don't want to flash a new bios into my phone, so I'm apparently SOL. Work for Motorola?
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If you lived next to 300 million Americans, you'd want off this stupid rock too.
Look. It's not like we're not trying. The thing is, politicians are obviously too dense to educate themselves about the core functions of their jobs today - economics, international relations, comparative religions, and ethics. I personally couldn't care less about whether a politician can even push the little button to the right of the green light, as long as he knows what he's doing when it comes to making an economic decision.
The problem is that a large percentage of them don't. I want smarter politicians, but anyone with half a brain knows it's just a mudfest, and doesn't really want to be dragged into it. The problem is more deep seated and insidious than just a lack of tech knowledge; if other industries and communities were more aware of their situations they would be (and often are) just as pissed about the lack of competence on the side of their elected officials.
The only exception, of course, is probably the stock market. I'm pretty sure your average politician could tell you quite a bit about how a 401(k) works, even if they can't tell you the difference between Windows 2000 and Windows XP.
There has to be such a thing as good grammar first. English evolves directly away therefrom.
Um.... They're selling the stuff that they're talking about on their site. If you can't find what you're looking for on the site, they want you to call them.
Having a dozen links to your competitors scattered around your webpage sounds mildly ineffective to me, but then I'm a picky kinda guy sometimes.
Network response isn't quite as important as throughput in this case; processing and dumping are centralized, and the programming for caching the chunks needed for high level analysis will become more important but tougher....
Um.
Ever heard of a NOC? The reason this guy's wrong has nothing to do with computing power, it's got to do with security.
If you RTFA carefully, he's not talking about removing network operations or centralized communications and data spots. He's talking about downgrading datacenters to the level of a fusebox. The fusebox for a house is in one place, but it's in the garage. The datacenter will be in one place, but not the center of downtown.
One could say that this has already happened quite often with IT outsourcing. You don't have a server farm just about anyone could run located in downtown Manhatten. You have it in Hyderabad or Mumbai or some rural spot in central China. Until the forces of market equalization pan out in ten or a hundred years.
The assumptions I disagree with here are:
1. There will never be the requirement for high-end enough services that the regular 'datacenter' with shiny equipment won't be an excessively useful sales tool.
2. Uptime requires little enough on-site time for the people who really know what they're doing to be far enough away from the servers that they can be located in the middle of nowhere. (This is debatable today. Five years, well, it won't be debatable, it will be a fact that they require this little onsite time.)
3. Off-Siting is easy enough to implement organizationally while retaining flexibility. This is going to be especially true for small companies.
Other than that, though, the skills required for good operations center management are not going to be as available in the middle of nowhere as they are in cities for quite a while yet. The real problem is that the people that are willing to learn enough about the stuff are (and this is a broad and unqualified generalization) generally attracted to cities for the availability of stimulation / excess input.
Feeding bandwidth to a horde of internerds is not cheap. Damming revenue streams is not something you do when you have them available.
It's been three or four years; I just remember the perfect score.
The funny part of forgetting that is that I got a 780 on the math side and 1550 points overall.
Basically, to the point where my grades were going to be what mattered. That's the situation anyways; if your grades are good enough, you only need about a 1200+. After that people will consider your application seriously. That's all you really need.
Read the books. Pay attention to the meta-test taking junk. It helps immensely. Latin roots, basic math, and decent grammar will be the only things you really need.
If you can write a good argument you're just fine on the writing. Of course, I majored in philosophy and got a 5/5 on the writing portion of the GRE, so my definition of 'good argument' might differ slightly from yours. But I doubt it, to be honest.
The funny thing is that Linux might actually be more popular with Madden-esque voice overs plugged in as error messages. Like clippy, only openly farsical.
EX:
"OOOoh.... It looks like he's caused a segmentation fault. That's gotta hurt."
"Wow. Now, that there's just some good old fashioned permissions problems. He's gonna need to log as root and run some chmod and chown commands."
"You know, right there's where you really have the option of some good coding. The rehashing of that string with the library function would make your code quite a bit more efficient. Just like in the old days."
And everyone's favorite,
"Boy, that's a good little piece of code, but you could really use a run back to the manual on that one."
I'd love to see the whiteboard-enabled screen on my code sometimes, and have someone who knew what they were doing scribble out what was wrong with it, but maybe that's just me.
Look. You're both right and you're both wrong. And you should be smart enough to realize that. It's nice to see some honest dissent, but you both should learn to tone it down about four notches before you consider conversing. Fearmongering is a short-term tool. It doesn't work forever. Reality is slowly catching up to the political / economic system, and there are a lot of factors in it. All that really needs to happen at this point is a fair playing ground, so off to Black Box Voting for both of you.
Oh, and if you didn't shoot spittle at every conservative you spoke to, you would have a better chance of convincing them. I know I do.
I am strictly an outsider. I've never written a single line of OSS code, mainly because I don't think I'm a good enough coder. But if you think that OSS code is worse than corporate code, well, you've got another think coming. I can't imagine it's anywhere near as weird or self indulgent in any of the ways some of the crap I see is. Not in the slightest. I've considered writing damning or blessing e-mails in response to the way people code, but quite often there's no way to get a hold of them and/ or they don't care.
Code is like science fiction. 90% of it is crap. But since OSS is so big and old, the 10% sliver has become a larger percentage of what people actually run.
Of course not. We don't really do anything with computers except let them run our lives mindlessly. Noone would ever do anything new if we couldn't make a buck on forcing other people to buy it only from us.
Um.... OSS Sucks, and yet you still use it? Um.... Look. You're using the most user-unfriendly chunk of OSS there is. You're complaining it's user-unfriendly. I've installed both Ubuntu and the old Mandrake, I've done it for myself and non-techies, it was easy, I'm actually pretty happy overall. I'm not a demon-monster-coder. I can code enough to do it for a living.
Your continual 'OSS Sucks' comments are mildly offensive, seeing as you're judging an entire community based upon your experience with a small piece of it. They show you personally lack in certain areas of consideration.
OSS doesn't have any real problems, it's individuals within the system. The system / movement / whatever you want to call it itself mutates all the time. It's a software project that has lasted and lived in the same area for over ten or fifteen years, and managed to keep up with modern technology. There aren't a whole lot of codebases like that out there.
I'm sorry you think OSS sucks as a whole. But I don't agree and flaming the crap out of all the people that don't is just trolling.
That's the situation NOW, but give it ten years and we may have all the bandwidth necessary to stream hi-res. The technology's still in its infancy, really.
And so, like the Xbox before it, the Zune gains market share due to the very people who hate Microsoft and want to stiff them hacking their hardware drivers. If people start cracking the Zune security, and then M$ isn't to blame, I'm going to laugh incredibly hard when version two of the Zune is much much harder to crack open. This means M$ has acquired a portion of the market at the expense of the very people who really wanted to lock it down. It's funnier every time it happens, except that Redmond retains control.
(I'm on my way to work or I'd watch my grammar better. She tends to get out and rough up the neighborhood with her walker.)
I understand it and I'm not to happy about it. In addition to making small companies capable of handling quite a bit more data, computers have allowed big companies to grow to a point never before seen. Before computers came around, there really was a point where a company got so big and incompetent it fell over on itself. Now they get so big that they can change the very rules of the environment within which they live in the name of more efficient survival. Don't tell me I don't understand at all what has been done for me by computers, I see it and I'm pissed, because I'd rather work for (or own) a small business and be buried in paperwork than see that small businesses are slowly getting hammered into oblivion because they cannot compete for all the tiny scraps left at the bottom of the economic pool.
He's gotten his 87 grand cut, he's happy, it's solved.
I'd personally call Python easier to learn than BASIC. But there's not a whole lot of motivation. I mean, the first thing most people programmed was games. Um..... How long would it take you to make a competitive game then, and how long would it take you now? I mean, NetHack, Moria, Adventure.... These games all could be approached on a graphic level within a few weeks of learning to code. Take a look at a modern game recently? How accessible are the libraries to make a game like it? How easy is it to replicate?
At a state university this means that he's essentially running a small side business which feeds off of his normal job at the expense of the public. While I understand that this is standard operating procedure for universities of all kinds, it still makes me slightly uneasy. I would much prefer that the university pay for recording all his lectures (if they aren't already) and then podcast them.... Seems that somewhere along the line, "For the good of the whole" exited the philosophy of public university in the US.
Um.... It doesn't have to, it just does by design. The problem is that consumers aren't quite fed up with their privacy being invaded yet. It's possible they never will be, but if they are expect to see a backlash.
Line straight out of TFA:
Our main result is that in the absence of cost asymmetries and as long as Windows has a first-mover advantage (a larger installed base at time zero), Linux never displaces Windows of its leadership position.
So, um.... If Linux weren't free, it would never beat out M$. Duh. Hello OS/2. OS X too. HOWEVER, that doesn't include a lot of motivation when it comes to a big company spending millions on seat licenses.
Another tidbit: We found that in countries where piracy is highest, Linux has the lowest penetration rate.
This is an interesting one. The more a country pirates, the less the people operating there are likely to want the free version. BUT there's one last tidbit that kinda shows how little people from Harvard really understand about the tech market.
By lowering the price of Windows, the demand for Linux shrinks to the point where Linux is not a threat to the survival of Windows.
Um. No? The thing is that this study apparrently assumes that Microsoft will be able to survive lowering the price of Windows. Microsoft's real staying power has come from the fact that it is a giant money machine. When the machine starts to break down, things might change a little bit. Predicting the tech industry is like voodoo anyways.
Additionally, this study does not seem to accommodate for the fact that software quality may not be a continuous line. It may be asymptotic to some extent, or at least have issues of increasing demands as far as quality as a result of effort goes. It may also have reached the end of its first renaissance where extreme advances to usability and usefulness are created year over year. At least on the desktop, this seems to be coming true.
This article, at the end, seems to have this point of view to me: "Yeah, we aren't FUD, but we certainly do agree with Microsoft. For completely UnMicrosoft reasons! A monopoly is good, too! Yeah, don't look at the overall statements we're making, or our arguments, because we're going to need them to defend M$ in court soon. No, we're not going to disclose what we're going to get paid." I'm going to have a hard time listening to anyone from HBS seriously ever again.
It hadn't even occurred to me that a cell phone provider would gimp their phones. The flat-out unreliability I have run into - in the glass shop, before I started working in the glass shop, out of the glass shop, whatever - is what I'm not happy with. The ringtone junk is just icing on the cake. Battery life is comparatively short, yes, but the problems I have are mostly related to me having to screw around with the phone once every day or two to get away from the blackscreening. And rebooting it because I can't get it to dial. And and and. I haven't mistreated this phone at all; in fact I've been pretty kind to it overall. The glassblowing is an example, and it's not like I put the stupid thing in the flames and say, "Heh heh. Ring now, bish." No, I take pretty good care of the phone and it has rewarded me with calls that don't ring for some odd reason, short battery life, two day late messages, and other general unreliabilities. I don't particularly want to RMA it, because then I get a refurbed one back. It's a cool LOOKING phone, but I wouldn't buy a second one at this point.... Of course, I've only owned it for six months, so it might get better. Who knows.
I'm sorry if I seemed a bit personal earlier. This phone annoys me, and life in general is mildly annoying at the moment. Some genius at a bank to go unnamed decided long ago that releasing software at 4:00 AM on Saturdays was a good idea and I've gotten roped into testing it.
Blah. You've purposefully misread much of what I've written. Not really interested in answering most of it, but uh... You're Wrong. It's nowhere near the phone my last one was, and that has nothing to do with how I'm treating it.
Ringtones and uploading are disabled by default with Verizon's phones. I don't want to flash a new bios into my phone, so I'm apparently SOL. Work for Motorola?