Not following how your approach gets us to a place where these kids can grow up happy to pay a whole lot of money for the right to see or hear a copy of something. If anything, your proposal makes this much less likely. Are you sure you're really taking this seriously?
Funny, there was a news article no more than an hour ago about how virtually everybody who got the flu this last summer had swine flu. Thus, it is proved that naming a strain of a virus does not necessarily ensure that it will kill millions, contrary to popular belief.
Yeah, I guess I'm not, either. If you can't be a decent person in the workplace, then you're going to be ineffective at teamwork, your leadership skills are poor, and you're unprofessional. Everybody gets it wrong sometimes, and having a viable social relationship is what lets people pick up and move on after that happens. If you're an asshole but you get it right 99% of the time, then your colleagues will just be waiting for that 1% opportunity, and when it comes, they'll hang you for it.
Maybe there is a little hero worship among geeks for the asshole genius (probably because everybody thinks it's them), but if you want to be successful, stow that garbage and learn how to work with other people.
Don't worry - they've also developed an awesome bipedal law enforcement robot that has wicked machine guns for arms. If anything goes wrong, we're totally covered.
To be brutally honest, I feel like the only reason you should be entitled to any money is that it will incentivize you to invent in the first place. But the goal (from my perspective) isn't for you to make any money -- that's just a side-effect of the way society is encouraging you to contribute. You're not entitled to any profit at all unless it serves the interests of everybody else (and even then, only to as much profit as necessary to adequately compel you to create).
The point of copyrights and patents isn't to reward anybody or make anybody rich, it's to prime the pump and get great new ideas out into the public domain where they can be of some use to everybody. Of course, I think a lot of that has been lost since people realized they could just turn the system into a cash machine by changing the laws whenever it suits them.
But he's right in spirit. True that larger frequency bands give you more of a particular type of capacity to work with (though it is definitely not the only factor that determines data rate, much less information rate), but broadband the way it's used today is just a marketing or political term. It probably sounds just technical enough to seem modern and hip while being generic enough that providers can throw it around at will. It might as well not mean anything at all now, which I guess is why they seem to be trying to attach some particular data rate to it. You could replace it with "fastiness" and have just as much technical relevance.
Just because I happen to have extra time in my day doesn't mean I want to spend it on somebody's badly-designed parking meter system. You can't defend a bad concept with 'but the exercise will do you good'. Maybe it will, but it doesn't change the fact that it's still a bad concept. The new system is less convenient for people than the old system, and considering the technical advantages available today compared to when the old system was designed, that is pretty sad.
I don't have an XBox, but I do have a PS3. I wouldn't say I play it a whole lot, but it's in a fairly small cabinet in my entertainment center, and we close the glass door when we're not using it. So every once in a while, my wife leaves the remote on the coffee table overnight, and somehow, the cat frequently managed to step on the remote, which for some idiotic reason powers up the PS3. I think at least on 10-20 occasions, it has sat in the cabinet with the door closed all night long. In the morning, it's literally like an oven in the cabinet, and the fans are screaming so loud you can hear them almost through the whole house.
I don't say this because I'm proud of how the poor thing gets treated, but I'll admit I'm amazed every time it happens that it still functions at all. By all rights, it should be dead dozens of times over. I don't have an XBox 360, so I can't really make any comparisons, but the PS3 I have in my entertainment center is no fragile piece of machinery.
If you read the descriptions, a lot of these are awarded based on the most sophisticated and technically interesting security holes found. I'll admit that the SCTP hole was interesting, even though I kind of wonder if there was ever a single instance of it being exploited in the wild. The place where I have to call BS is the RedHat package signing issue and the 'overhyped' Server service hole. There isn't really any evidence that anybody was affected by the signing key breech, so they're just assuming that some ungodly number of people were affected. This is compared to their 'overhyped' MS08-067, which was actually a huge deal and was widely exploited. Maybe Conficker itself was overhyped, but 067 affected Win2k up through 2008 and targeted a service that virtually all Windows hosts are running. There almost couldn't be a bigger security hole. Maybe it wasn't technically interesting, but there's no way it was "overhyped". That pretty much killed their credibility for me.
I learned to write in cursive years before computers were popular. Sadly, the nation (and I include myself in this) failed abysmally to ever learn to read my cursive. I do blame the schools.
How is it shortsighted asshattery? What are the crazy good benefits of Vista or Win7? Just being a 'solid os' isn't a benefit over XP, because XP is already completely worn in. For a few thousand desktops that perform standard office productivity tasks, what does Win7 do better than XP? And I mean real, measurable things that are actually going to touch the bottom line (because the cost of upgrading is definitely going to touch it).
This is how I see it, too. We have a substantial XP deployment, and our helpdesk staff is used to the problems they see with XP. They know how to do everything on XP. Our users are all used to XP and they can do their jobs using XP.
Where on earth is anybody conjuring up actual savings by upgrading to Vista or Win7? What could the business reason possibly be that justifies the application testing, hardware upgrades, implementation hours, and retraining costs? We aren't in the business of running shiny new operating systems. Even if there really was a just-gotta-have-it feature of Vista or Win7 (there isn't, but say there was), just installing the OS corporate wide is a major undertaking all by itself, and making use of the new feature is a whole separate project that may or may not come to fruition depending on how compatible it really is with how we actually do business.
The imaginary money that Microsoft marketing wants us to think we're getting out of Vista and Win7 is worth far, far less than the actual, bankable dollars we didn't/won't spend on deploying either. Our support team will be happier, our users will be happier, and our bottom line will be happier. The only ones who won't be happier are Microsoft and the hardware vendors who think we need dual quad cores to send email and use word processors.
See if you can trace a specific business need to upgrading the corporate desktop operating system. If you can't, don't.
Yeah.. it's like how nothing makes people pay more attention to the road than a flaming jack-knifed semi in the median. See, it reminds them what happens when you don't drive safely.
This might be true for you, but I can tell you first hand we have a ton of users who had Office 2007 foisted on them, and they have not been more productive. They've had to relearn things they were already doing efficiently. And frankly, if any of them were being held back in their work by the old Office interface, I'd eat my hat, because that argument is ridiculous bullshit. If you took all of the quarter and half-seconds they 'lost' by fighting with the horrible old interface (which they've been using forever and can navigate like the backs of their hands), and added them up over all the years they've worked for the company, you still wouldn't outweigh the time they've lost just in the last three months relearning the new interface (not to even mention the wasted time our support team has spent in helpdesk tickets helping them figure it out).
It was a useless change that we paid for in both licensing and man-hours to implement, and it has cost us budget dollars and productivity that we're never going to get back. It's just that simple.
Man, I bought my wife a mini-disc player six years ago because I thought they were pretty cool. You could put a lot of music on a disc, and although it wasn't quite as big as an iPod, you could always just carry another disc or two because they were pretty small. I thought it was a great balance between size and expandability, and the player was pretty small and easy to carry around. The sound quality was great. I thought, 'I know she asked for an mp3 player, but this is even better than an mp3 player.'
I remember reading a study like this something like 2 years ago. I don't think this is a new idea at all. As I recall, the conclusion of the one I read a while back was that people who are a little bit overweight tend to exercise more frequently than people who are at a normal weight in an effort to lose the extra weight, and the extra exercise gave them bonus health points. Basically, by constantly wanting to lose that extra 10 lbs, you improve your cardiovascular health in a way that far outweighs the negative impacts of carrying an extra 10 lbs.
It makes sense to me that people who are obese don't see the same advantages, because I imagine there is very little interest or incentive in getting out to exercise when you have such a long road to fitness in front of you. It also makes sense for obvious reasons that people who are naturally underweight or at a normal weight have less social pressure to get out and exercise.
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That doesn't really matter in the face of what can only be described as the world's most perfect opportunity for a Dr. Strangelove quote.
Not following how your approach gets us to a place where these kids can grow up happy to pay a whole lot of money for the right to see or hear a copy of something. If anything, your proposal makes this much less likely. Are you sure you're really taking this seriously?
Funny, there was a news article no more than an hour ago about how virtually everybody who got the flu this last summer had swine flu. Thus, it is proved that naming a strain of a virus does not necessarily ensure that it will kill millions, contrary to popular belief.
So worthy of the mod points I'm fresh out of. That's a perfect description of what leadership (and management) should be.
Yeah, I guess I'm not, either. If you can't be a decent person in the workplace, then you're going to be ineffective at teamwork, your leadership skills are poor, and you're unprofessional. Everybody gets it wrong sometimes, and having a viable social relationship is what lets people pick up and move on after that happens. If you're an asshole but you get it right 99% of the time, then your colleagues will just be waiting for that 1% opportunity, and when it comes, they'll hang you for it.
Maybe there is a little hero worship among geeks for the asshole genius (probably because everybody thinks it's them), but if you want to be successful, stow that garbage and learn how to work with other people.
Don't worry - they've also developed an awesome bipedal law enforcement robot that has wicked machine guns for arms. If anything goes wrong, we're totally covered.
To be brutally honest, I feel like the only reason you should be entitled to any money is that it will incentivize you to invent in the first place. But the goal (from my perspective) isn't for you to make any money -- that's just a side-effect of the way society is encouraging you to contribute. You're not entitled to any profit at all unless it serves the interests of everybody else (and even then, only to as much profit as necessary to adequately compel you to create).
The point of copyrights and patents isn't to reward anybody or make anybody rich, it's to prime the pump and get great new ideas out into the public domain where they can be of some use to everybody. Of course, I think a lot of that has been lost since people realized they could just turn the system into a cash machine by changing the laws whenever it suits them.
But he's right in spirit. True that larger frequency bands give you more of a particular type of capacity to work with (though it is definitely not the only factor that determines data rate, much less information rate), but broadband the way it's used today is just a marketing or political term. It probably sounds just technical enough to seem modern and hip while being generic enough that providers can throw it around at will. It might as well not mean anything at all now, which I guess is why they seem to be trying to attach some particular data rate to it. You could replace it with "fastiness" and have just as much technical relevance.
Sure, you think that now, but try reading it after naptime.
Just because I happen to have extra time in my day doesn't mean I want to spend it on somebody's badly-designed parking meter system. You can't defend a bad concept with 'but the exercise will do you good'. Maybe it will, but it doesn't change the fact that it's still a bad concept. The new system is less convenient for people than the old system, and considering the technical advantages available today compared to when the old system was designed, that is pretty sad.
Just as soon as companies figure out how to monetize scriptable socks, we are going to see some serious IPv6 action.
I don't have an XBox, but I do have a PS3. I wouldn't say I play it a whole lot, but it's in a fairly small cabinet in my entertainment center, and we close the glass door when we're not using it. So every once in a while, my wife leaves the remote on the coffee table overnight, and somehow, the cat frequently managed to step on the remote, which for some idiotic reason powers up the PS3. I think at least on 10-20 occasions, it has sat in the cabinet with the door closed all night long. In the morning, it's literally like an oven in the cabinet, and the fans are screaming so loud you can hear them almost through the whole house.
I don't say this because I'm proud of how the poor thing gets treated, but I'll admit I'm amazed every time it happens that it still functions at all. By all rights, it should be dead dozens of times over. I don't have an XBox 360, so I can't really make any comparisons, but the PS3 I have in my entertainment center is no fragile piece of machinery.
If you read the descriptions, a lot of these are awarded based on the most sophisticated and technically interesting security holes found. I'll admit that the SCTP hole was interesting, even though I kind of wonder if there was ever a single instance of it being exploited in the wild. The place where I have to call BS is the RedHat package signing issue and the 'overhyped' Server service hole. There isn't really any evidence that anybody was affected by the signing key breech, so they're just assuming that some ungodly number of people were affected. This is compared to their 'overhyped' MS08-067, which was actually a huge deal and was widely exploited. Maybe Conficker itself was overhyped, but 067 affected Win2k up through 2008 and targeted a service that virtually all Windows hosts are running. There almost couldn't be a bigger security hole. Maybe it wasn't technically interesting, but there's no way it was "overhyped". That pretty much killed their credibility for me.
Funny, that's the first thing I thought, too. I hope the friggin' Meklars aren't playing.
As long as you can see whales through it, that's really all we need. Don't over-engineer things so much.
I learned to write in cursive years before computers were popular. Sadly, the nation (and I include myself in this) failed abysmally to ever learn to read my cursive. I do blame the schools.
They Fahrenheit 451'd Animal Farm and 1984!
How is it shortsighted asshattery? What are the crazy good benefits of Vista or Win7? Just being a 'solid os' isn't a benefit over XP, because XP is already completely worn in. For a few thousand desktops that perform standard office productivity tasks, what does Win7 do better than XP? And I mean real, measurable things that are actually going to touch the bottom line (because the cost of upgrading is definitely going to touch it).
This is how I see it, too. We have a substantial XP deployment, and our helpdesk staff is used to the problems they see with XP. They know how to do everything on XP. Our users are all used to XP and they can do their jobs using XP.
Where on earth is anybody conjuring up actual savings by upgrading to Vista or Win7? What could the business reason possibly be that justifies the application testing, hardware upgrades, implementation hours, and retraining costs? We aren't in the business of running shiny new operating systems. Even if there really was a just-gotta-have-it feature of Vista or Win7 (there isn't, but say there was), just installing the OS corporate wide is a major undertaking all by itself, and making use of the new feature is a whole separate project that may or may not come to fruition depending on how compatible it really is with how we actually do business.
The imaginary money that Microsoft marketing wants us to think we're getting out of Vista and Win7 is worth far, far less than the actual, bankable dollars we didn't/won't spend on deploying either. Our support team will be happier, our users will be happier, and our bottom line will be happier. The only ones who won't be happier are Microsoft and the hardware vendors who think we need dual quad cores to send email and use word processors.
See if you can trace a specific business need to upgrading the corporate desktop operating system. If you can't, don't.
A-HEM... trying to get a little efense-day unding-fay here. Do you mind??
Yeah.. it's like how nothing makes people pay more attention to the road than a flaming jack-knifed semi in the median. See, it reminds them what happens when you don't drive safely.
When they saw the breadth of their domain, they wept, for there were no more worlds to conquer.
This might be true for you, but I can tell you first hand we have a ton of users who had Office 2007 foisted on them, and they have not been more productive. They've had to relearn things they were already doing efficiently. And frankly, if any of them were being held back in their work by the old Office interface, I'd eat my hat, because that argument is ridiculous bullshit. If you took all of the quarter and half-seconds they 'lost' by fighting with the horrible old interface (which they've been using forever and can navigate like the backs of their hands), and added them up over all the years they've worked for the company, you still wouldn't outweigh the time they've lost just in the last three months relearning the new interface (not to even mention the wasted time our support team has spent in helpdesk tickets helping them figure it out).
It was a useless change that we paid for in both licensing and man-hours to implement, and it has cost us budget dollars and productivity that we're never going to get back. It's just that simple.
Man, I bought my wife a mini-disc player six years ago because I thought they were pretty cool. You could put a lot of music on a disc, and although it wasn't quite as big as an iPod, you could always just carry another disc or two because they were pretty small. I thought it was a great balance between size and expandability, and the player was pretty small and easy to carry around. The sound quality was great. I thought, 'I know she asked for an mp3 player, but this is even better than an mp3 player.'
It went over very badly. Live and learn, I guess.
I remember reading a study like this something like 2 years ago. I don't think this is a new idea at all. As I recall, the conclusion of the one I read a while back was that people who are a little bit overweight tend to exercise more frequently than people who are at a normal weight in an effort to lose the extra weight, and the extra exercise gave them bonus health points. Basically, by constantly wanting to lose that extra 10 lbs, you improve your cardiovascular health in a way that far outweighs the negative impacts of carrying an extra 10 lbs.
It makes sense to me that people who are obese don't see the same advantages, because I imagine there is very little interest or incentive in getting out to exercise when you have such a long road to fitness in front of you. It also makes sense for obvious reasons that people who are naturally underweight or at a normal weight have less social pressure to get out and exercise.