MS got into anti-trust trouble the first time because the court was willing to accept that "desktop computer operating systems" was a market that could be considered in isolation. At the time, many legal scholars were surprised that the court accepted that argument. Once the court took that position, though, MS was sufficiently dominant in that market that some of their behaviors were no longer acceptable. That is, having a dominant position is not illegal, and product-tying by itself is not illegal, but the combination of a sufficiently dominant position and product tying is illegal. Given the current situation, I see no way they can get into anti-trust problems over tablet operating systems.
If I were going to make up a conspiracy theory over this, it would be that MS has reconsidered their decision about the Courier, and wants a unique vertically integrated product. By imposing this restriction— which no sane chip vendor is likely to accept— MS insures that no other tablet will be running the MS tablet OS. I think there's a corporate tablet market that MS would be uniquely positioned to service.
For certain types of problems, the Linda coordination primitives and shared tuple-space make parallel programming much easier. I used the original C-Linda many, many years ago, and IBM's TSpaces for Java more recently. If you're trying to do little bitty actions on lots of data with tight coordination, the overhead is pretty bad. Looking into PyLinda is on my list of things to do...
Xbox (and follow-ons like Xbox Live) finally have the Entertainment Division showing an operating profit. It is unclear whether those have even begun to cover the enormous losses from previous years. The division has had some spectacular failures: for example, they spent a lot of money trying to build viable set-top box software to sell to the cable companies.
The biggest growth markets these days appear to be gadget-oriented. MS has never done gadgets particularly well. That's not surprising, their original business model was "Let the other people do commodity hardware, as long as it all runs our software." I think they could do well with an industrial-grade tablet, if they committed to the kind of investment they made in building the Xbox, with the intent of selling them to big business by the gross.
There was a bunch of related research done at Bell Labs
(around the same time that UNIX was coming out of the research organization)
about command line interfaces.
The conclusion was that there were two largely incompatible demands.
Beginners wanted verbose languages and menus from which they could pick options.
Experts
(eg, those who had to use the system for hours every day to do their job)
wanted minimalist interfaces that used as few keystrokes as possible.
Many of those early systems were accessed from clunky terminals.
Typing on a Model 33 teletype, for example, is something that one does slooooooowly.
A few extra characters per command typed really does turn into
noticeably less work accomplished per hour or day.
Amazing how long things intended to get around the limitations of the hardware
can persist.
Do you only have one piece of paper on your desk? Actually do you have a desk that is slightly larger than just your monitor? I mean 1 piece of paper is ALL anyone should need to look at at one time right?
Yep, it's not just developers that need more than one monitor.
My last position was as a state legislative budget analyst, and three monitors was just about right:
one for the ridiculously large spreadsheet where all the calculations were being done,
one for the text document I was writing for the committee briefing, and
one for the state statutes that had to be cited.
Sure it's possible to toggle between the three, and that's how it used to be done before the staff was given added monitors,
but at 11:00 at night when you're trying to prepare for a 7:30 AM committee meeting
and you're not tracking all that well anyway,
having all three up all the time saves a lot of effort
(and avoids any number of embarrassing mistakes).
The cashiers actually... know how to bag things to prevent crushing / leaking / melting
And in a reasonable number of bags. I can pack what I get on a typical trip into my two big canvas bags easily, and the bags sit stably on the floor of the car. Let the minimum-wage teenager bag things and they use my canvas bags plus a half-dozen plastic ones, all spilling stuff before I can even get it to the car.
The best bagger I ever saw was a little old lady in a neighborhood store in one of the student ghettos in Austin, Texas. I was always tempted to ask, "Ma'am, don't you know that bin-packing problems are NP-hard?"
Well, lots of them would— that's the deal they cut in order to get their tuition paid.
On the other hand, you're "that close" to bringing up the real point. China puts its engineering graduates to work doing engineering; there's apparently no shortage of projects for them to work on.
The US has done away with an enormous number of engineering jobs.
As we used to say in my field,
whenever another merger/acquisition was announced,
"synergy" is the buzzword that means "We'll be able to fire half the engineering staff."
And then everyone is shocked—
SHOCKED! I say—
that fewer students will do the difficult engineering degree programs.
The classic example is petroleum geology.
The oil companies stopped hiring petroleum geologists in the 1980s.
Today, a large fraction of their petroleum geology staff is about to retire.
And the oil companies have suddenly realized that because they didn't hire PG graduates,
no one studies PG in college any more,
so there aren't any new grads to hire to replace the retirees.
Not only the mix of Germanic and Latin languages, but the oddities created by the London-Oxford-Cambridge trinity that led to "standardization" using spelling from one region and pronunciation from a different region, and the Great Vowel Shift that changed how many vowels were pronounced but was not accompanied by changes in spelling for the most part.
One stone equals 14 avoirdupois pounds. Eight stone equals a hundredweight (112 pounds). Parts of the imperial system were even dumber than the US customary units; at least a US hundredweight is 100 pounds.
Attempting to apply English spelling rules to a German proper name seldom works well:^) One of the nice things about German: if you know how it's spelled you know how to pronounce it, and if someone pronounces it properly for you, you can spell it. English-language spelling bees are largely an exercise in memorization because of the arbitrary differences in how things are pronounced and how they are spelled; do the Germans even have spelling bees?
Even if we dropped imperial units tomorrow, the 2.54mm pin spacing would undoubtedly survive as long as PTH does. It just wouldn't ever be worth the enormous expense to the industry to retool for 2.00mm or even 2.50mm PTH. And as you suggest, you configure the software to deal best with the challenging parts, not the clunky old things.
I've often wondered if PTH (and 2.54mm spacing with it) has survived this long because the industry is reluctant to do away with the packaging that hobbyists can breadboard and easily hand-solder.
Exactly.
In fact,
by the time a patent case gets to court,
there's generally very little question about whether infringement is occurring.
Even when there is,
the patent court has procedures to establish that one way or the other fairly quickly.
Court time is almost always spent on issues like
(1) Should the patent have been granted?
(2) Did plaintiff do something underhanded to get a process for which it holds a patent adopted as a standard?
(3) Is the particular application covered under the patent?
You properly make the point that all the flashy things that people want to do in space (industry, manned missions to other planets, etc) fail over the same dull, dreary, problem: lifting significant mass to LEO remains prohibitively expensive. Make LEO cheap, and the other things are, if not simple, at least relatively straightforward.
I always think it is worth pointing out that the US made an important decision between the time Apollo was announced and when it placed men on the moon: millions of poor and elderly would receive health care paid for by the government. TTBOMK, manned space programs have all started in countries that did not guarantee full-blown modern health care for their poor and elderly. Originally, the US and the Soviet Union. Today, China and India.
Spreadsheets also have the unfortunate characteristic that the code and data are mixed together, with no clear indicator of which cells are which. Granted that they have become better over the years— dialog boxes popping up asking if you really want to overwrite a formula with a fixed value— but I've spent more miserable hours than I care to think about tracking down errors in other people's spreadsheets that turn out to be "Someone overwrote a formula at some point."
I had one of these on my desk while it was being tested in the Labs before the commercial product was released. When you got up after an afternoon staring at all that monochrome green, the rest of the world looked slightly pink:^) Test users had to provide regular feedback. One consequence was that every few weeks they came around and replaced the keyboard with an improved version. The last one was easily the best programmer's keyboard I ever used: all keys in the right place, wonderful touch.
My reading of the bill summary is that the injured party has to make the same parts that are produced using the stolen IT. That is, if some manufacturer (either foreign or domestic) is selling chrome-plated bumpers "made with" stolen IT in Washington state, MS could be an injured party only if they also made chrome-plated bumpers and offered them for sale in Washington state. The AG could choose to file suit on his/her own, without a qualified injured party, but is unlikely to have the resources to pursue very many such cases.
Additionally, the summary says that the court can enter a judgment against a third party (ie, GM for using bumpers made with stolen IT) only after it has entered a judgment against the party using the stolen IT (the bumper maker). If the bill becomes law, and cases are brought against foreign manufacturers, it will be interesting to see if the Washington courts are willing to enter a judgment against a foreign firm. Even in a civil proceeding with a "preponderance of evidence" standard, the courts are going to demand some sort of real evidence that the foreign firm is using stolen IT.
The obvious way out of this is the same way that OPEC oil producers get around US antitrust law, which all of them violate: sell the parts FOB a foreign port. If a Chinese company sells GM the parts and delivers them in Shanghai, they can't be found guilty, at least as I read this bill summary.
It is an ironic contrast to these days where the only time Macs go down is a reboot to install a security patch...
From time to time, my Intel-based Mini "loses" USB peripherals. Unplugging and replugging them doesn't work, but after rebooting, there they are. If I unplug and replug them enough once they've been lost, the whole machine locks up. The problem has gotten better over time, presumably due to improved releases of the OS X USB code.
...perhaps doing as Japan did and cutting down on the number of allowed children...
I suspect you are thinking about China, and the One Child policy.
China is beginning to see the down-side of that policy,
which is a rapidly aging population
(the percentage of the population that is elderly, can't work, and requires care is growing rapidly).
Improved worker productivity—
think increased automation—
is the only way out of that problem short of leaving the elderly to starve or freeze.
But then you have the problem of how to redistribute the goods and services from the workers to the elderly.
The original remark about capitalism failing might simply be an exaggeration of the fact that
capitalism as an economic system struggles to deal with the situation where
a sizable portion of the population is neither
(1) a holder of sufficient capital to generate adequate income nor
(2) capable of providing labor.
Some years ago, an Arby's near where I worked ran a trial with customer-facing touch screens.
Employees from several large tech firms in the area made up a good portion of the lunchtime crowd.
The screens were eventually pulled because too many people complained that they were too slow to use.
It took a ridiculous number of touches to do the equivalent of "#1, small, curly fries, Diet Coke," which was far and away the most common order placed.
My admittedly limited experience with Jack in the Box has been even worse.
The UI counts.
An early iteration of Home Depot's self-checkout software was so bad that
even the trained person tending that area couldn't manage them.
People stood in long lines for the human cashiers rather than struggle through the software.
They have improved things greatly.
The same story holds for the self-checkout at Kroger's grocery chains.
Just my own impression,
but the quick, easy interfaces have displays that assume the customer can read English.
The disastrously bad ones are the ones that try to do it all with pictures.
Interesting to contrast audiophiles and musicians. The audiophiles want you to listen to the difference in some piece as reproduced by two pieces of equipment; the musicians want you to listen to the difference in interpretation in some piece as played by two different people. In my experience, musicians typically have fairly crappy equipment, but enormous amounts of content.
As they say, people listen to the music and audiophiles listen to the noise.
Somewhat longer term, though, there's the question of whether we can continue to afford internal combustion engines with a thermal efficiency around 20%. The same feedstocks and some of the processes for producing synthetic gasoline could also be used to produce methane; methane can power a combined-cycle electric generator at about 60% thermal efficiency. Almost all well-to-wheel (or other source-to-wheel) studies suggest that electric cars provide a 2:1 advantage, plus or minus a bit, in overall energy efficiency compared to most ICEs.
Interesting that one of the things mentioned repeatedly in articles is about using the technology to perform/aid medical diagnosis. Simple rule-based diagnostic software has been created in the past that is consistently better than human diagnosticians. Patients hate them, though, since it sounds like a game of 20 questions after which the software announces that you have disease X. Trained neural net software is significantly better than humans at identifying certain kinds of conditions when reading x-rays. I know of at least one cancer clinic where every x-ray is read by both a human and a piece of software in order to take advantage of the relative strengths of each.
Will IBM be able to make Watson significantly better than the existing, simpler, cheaper software?
When IBM interviewed human champions, they learned that one of the critical tactics is hitting the buzzer before you "know" the answer, but when you believe that there is a good chance you'll get it during the few seconds you can take before you have to give it. I believe one of the write-ups about Watson says that the machine followed the same tactic, using a heuristic of some sort to decide early on in its search the probability that the search would be successful within a fixed amount of time.
Let's see... Not necessarily in exact chronological order. A cachet for carry-around electronic devices (iPod). A system for selling people content in little chunks (iTunes). The decision to sell end-user devices, not components, and take responsibility for the end-user experience. A large development budget (reputed to be around $150M).
Intel (and Microsoft) both appear to want to repeat their success in the PC market as "component" companies. Not the right business model for the phone business (and I suspect not for the tablet business either).
Do you pay yourself a salary that is modest, but still appropriate, for your profession?
If so, it seems much less likely that you would get into trouble with the IRS.
This guy's problem wasn't that he was paying himself a "modest" salary,
he was paying himself a ridiculously low one.
No one can hire a full-time CPA for anything close to $24K per year.
Slashdot Mirror
MS got into anti-trust trouble the first time because the court was willing to accept that "desktop computer operating systems" was a market that could be considered in isolation. At the time, many legal scholars were surprised that the court accepted that argument. Once the court took that position, though, MS was sufficiently dominant in that market that some of their behaviors were no longer acceptable. That is, having a dominant position is not illegal, and product-tying by itself is not illegal, but the combination of a sufficiently dominant position and product tying is illegal. Given the current situation, I see no way they can get into anti-trust problems over tablet operating systems.
If I were going to make up a conspiracy theory over this, it would be that MS has reconsidered their decision about the Courier, and wants a unique vertically integrated product. By imposing this restriction— which no sane chip vendor is likely to accept— MS insures that no other tablet will be running the MS tablet OS. I think there's a corporate tablet market that MS would be uniquely positioned to service.
For certain types of problems, the Linda coordination primitives and shared tuple-space make parallel programming much easier. I used the original C-Linda many, many years ago, and IBM's TSpaces for Java more recently. If you're trying to do little bitty actions on lots of data with tight coordination, the overhead is pretty bad. Looking into PyLinda is on my list of things to do...
Xbox (and follow-ons like Xbox Live) finally have the Entertainment Division showing an operating profit. It is unclear whether those have even begun to cover the enormous losses from previous years. The division has had some spectacular failures: for example, they spent a lot of money trying to build viable set-top box software to sell to the cable companies.
The biggest growth markets these days appear to be gadget-oriented. MS has never done gadgets particularly well. That's not surprising, their original business model was "Let the other people do commodity hardware, as long as it all runs our software." I think they could do well with an industrial-grade tablet, if they committed to the kind of investment they made in building the Xbox, with the intent of selling them to big business by the gross.
Two historical thoughts:
There was a bunch of related research done at Bell Labs (around the same time that UNIX was coming out of the research organization) about command line interfaces. The conclusion was that there were two largely incompatible demands. Beginners wanted verbose languages and menus from which they could pick options. Experts (eg, those who had to use the system for hours every day to do their job) wanted minimalist interfaces that used as few keystrokes as possible.
Many of those early systems were accessed from clunky terminals. Typing on a Model 33 teletype, for example, is something that one does slooooooowly. A few extra characters per command typed really does turn into noticeably less work accomplished per hour or day. Amazing how long things intended to get around the limitations of the hardware can persist.
Yep, it's not just developers that need more than one monitor. My last position was as a state legislative budget analyst, and three monitors was just about right: one for the ridiculously large spreadsheet where all the calculations were being done, one for the text document I was writing for the committee briefing, and one for the state statutes that had to be cited. Sure it's possible to toggle between the three, and that's how it used to be done before the staff was given added monitors, but at 11:00 at night when you're trying to prepare for a 7:30 AM committee meeting and you're not tracking all that well anyway, having all three up all the time saves a lot of effort (and avoids any number of embarrassing mistakes).
And in a reasonable number of bags. I can pack what I get on a typical trip into my two big canvas bags easily, and the bags sit stably on the floor of the car. Let the minimum-wage teenager bag things and they use my canvas bags plus a half-dozen plastic ones, all spilling stuff before I can even get it to the car.
The best bagger I ever saw was a little old lady in a neighborhood store in one of the student ghettos in Austin, Texas. I was always tempted to ask, "Ma'am, don't you know that bin-packing problems are NP-hard?"
Well, lots of them would— that's the deal they cut in order to get their tuition paid.
On the other hand, you're "that close" to bringing up the real point. China puts its engineering graduates to work doing engineering; there's apparently no shortage of projects for them to work on. The US has done away with an enormous number of engineering jobs. As we used to say in my field, whenever another merger/acquisition was announced, "synergy" is the buzzword that means "We'll be able to fire half the engineering staff." And then everyone is shocked— SHOCKED! I say— that fewer students will do the difficult engineering degree programs.
The classic example is petroleum geology. The oil companies stopped hiring petroleum geologists in the 1980s. Today, a large fraction of their petroleum geology staff is about to retire. And the oil companies have suddenly realized that because they didn't hire PG graduates, no one studies PG in college any more, so there aren't any new grads to hire to replace the retirees.
Not only the mix of Germanic and Latin languages, but the oddities created by the London-Oxford-Cambridge trinity that led to "standardization" using spelling from one region and pronunciation from a different region, and the Great Vowel Shift that changed how many vowels were pronounced but was not accompanied by changes in spelling for the most part.
One stone equals 14 avoirdupois pounds. Eight stone equals a hundredweight (112 pounds). Parts of the imperial system were even dumber than the US customary units; at least a US hundredweight is 100 pounds.
Attempting to apply English spelling rules to a German proper name seldom works well :^) One of the nice things about German: if you know how it's spelled you know how to pronounce it, and if someone pronounces it properly for you, you can spell it. English-language spelling bees are largely an exercise in memorization because of the arbitrary differences in how things are pronounced and how they are spelled; do the Germans even have spelling bees?
Even if we dropped imperial units tomorrow, the 2.54mm pin spacing would undoubtedly survive as long as PTH does. It just wouldn't ever be worth the enormous expense to the industry to retool for 2.00mm or even 2.50mm PTH. And as you suggest, you configure the software to deal best with the challenging parts, not the clunky old things.
I've often wondered if PTH (and 2.54mm spacing with it) has survived this long because the industry is reluctant to do away with the packaging that hobbyists can breadboard and easily hand-solder.
Exactly. In fact, by the time a patent case gets to court, there's generally very little question about whether infringement is occurring. Even when there is, the patent court has procedures to establish that one way or the other fairly quickly. Court time is almost always spent on issues like (1) Should the patent have been granted? (2) Did plaintiff do something underhanded to get a process for which it holds a patent adopted as a standard? (3) Is the particular application covered under the patent?
You properly make the point that all the flashy things that people want to do in space (industry, manned missions to other planets, etc) fail over the same dull, dreary, problem: lifting significant mass to LEO remains prohibitively expensive. Make LEO cheap, and the other things are, if not simple, at least relatively straightforward.
I always think it is worth pointing out that the US made an important decision between the time Apollo was announced and when it placed men on the moon: millions of poor and elderly would receive health care paid for by the government. TTBOMK, manned space programs have all started in countries that did not guarantee full-blown modern health care for their poor and elderly. Originally, the US and the Soviet Union. Today, China and India.
Spreadsheets also have the unfortunate characteristic that the code and data are mixed together, with no clear indicator of which cells are which. Granted that they have become better over the years— dialog boxes popping up asking if you really want to overwrite a formula with a fixed value— but I've spent more miserable hours than I care to think about tracking down errors in other people's spreadsheets that turn out to be "Someone overwrote a formula at some point."
I had one of these on my desk while it was being tested in the Labs before the commercial product was released. When you got up after an afternoon staring at all that monochrome green, the rest of the world looked slightly pink :^) Test users had to provide regular feedback. One consequence was that every few weeks they came around and replaced the keyboard with an improved version. The last one was easily the best programmer's keyboard I ever used: all keys in the right place, wonderful touch.
My reading of the bill summary is that the injured party has to make the same parts that are produced using the stolen IT. That is, if some manufacturer (either foreign or domestic) is selling chrome-plated bumpers "made with" stolen IT in Washington state, MS could be an injured party only if they also made chrome-plated bumpers and offered them for sale in Washington state. The AG could choose to file suit on his/her own, without a qualified injured party, but is unlikely to have the resources to pursue very many such cases.
Additionally, the summary says that the court can enter a judgment against a third party (ie, GM for using bumpers made with stolen IT) only after it has entered a judgment against the party using the stolen IT (the bumper maker). If the bill becomes law, and cases are brought against foreign manufacturers, it will be interesting to see if the Washington courts are willing to enter a judgment against a foreign firm. Even in a civil proceeding with a "preponderance of evidence" standard, the courts are going to demand some sort of real evidence that the foreign firm is using stolen IT.
The obvious way out of this is the same way that OPEC oil producers get around US antitrust law, which all of them violate: sell the parts FOB a foreign port. If a Chinese company sells GM the parts and delivers them in Shanghai, they can't be found guilty, at least as I read this bill summary.
From time to time, my Intel-based Mini "loses" USB peripherals. Unplugging and replugging them doesn't work, but after rebooting, there they are. If I unplug and replug them enough once they've been lost, the whole machine locks up. The problem has gotten better over time, presumably due to improved releases of the OS X USB code.
I suspect you are thinking about China, and the One Child policy. China is beginning to see the down-side of that policy, which is a rapidly aging population (the percentage of the population that is elderly, can't work, and requires care is growing rapidly). Improved worker productivity— think increased automation— is the only way out of that problem short of leaving the elderly to starve or freeze. But then you have the problem of how to redistribute the goods and services from the workers to the elderly.
The original remark about capitalism failing might simply be an exaggeration of the fact that capitalism as an economic system struggles to deal with the situation where a sizable portion of the population is neither (1) a holder of sufficient capital to generate adequate income nor (2) capable of providing labor.
Some years ago, an Arby's near where I worked ran a trial with customer-facing touch screens. Employees from several large tech firms in the area made up a good portion of the lunchtime crowd. The screens were eventually pulled because too many people complained that they were too slow to use. It took a ridiculous number of touches to do the equivalent of "#1, small, curly fries, Diet Coke," which was far and away the most common order placed. My admittedly limited experience with Jack in the Box has been even worse.
The UI counts. An early iteration of Home Depot's self-checkout software was so bad that even the trained person tending that area couldn't manage them. People stood in long lines for the human cashiers rather than struggle through the software. They have improved things greatly. The same story holds for the self-checkout at Kroger's grocery chains. Just my own impression, but the quick, easy interfaces have displays that assume the customer can read English. The disastrously bad ones are the ones that try to do it all with pictures.
Interesting to contrast audiophiles and musicians. The audiophiles want you to listen to the difference in some piece as reproduced by two pieces of equipment; the musicians want you to listen to the difference in interpretation in some piece as played by two different people. In my experience, musicians typically have fairly crappy equipment, but enormous amounts of content.
As they say, people listen to the music and audiophiles listen to the noise.
Somewhat longer term, though, there's the question of whether we can continue to afford internal combustion engines with a thermal efficiency around 20%. The same feedstocks and some of the processes for producing synthetic gasoline could also be used to produce methane; methane can power a combined-cycle electric generator at about 60% thermal efficiency. Almost all well-to-wheel (or other source-to-wheel) studies suggest that electric cars provide a 2:1 advantage, plus or minus a bit, in overall energy efficiency compared to most ICEs.
Interesting that one of the things mentioned repeatedly in articles is about using the technology to perform/aid medical diagnosis. Simple rule-based diagnostic software has been created in the past that is consistently better than human diagnosticians. Patients hate them, though, since it sounds like a game of 20 questions after which the software announces that you have disease X. Trained neural net software is significantly better than humans at identifying certain kinds of conditions when reading x-rays. I know of at least one cancer clinic where every x-ray is read by both a human and a piece of software in order to take advantage of the relative strengths of each.
Will IBM be able to make Watson significantly better than the existing, simpler, cheaper software?
When IBM interviewed human champions, they learned that one of the critical tactics is hitting the buzzer before you "know" the answer, but when you believe that there is a good chance you'll get it during the few seconds you can take before you have to give it. I believe one of the write-ups about Watson says that the machine followed the same tactic, using a heuristic of some sort to decide early on in its search the probability that the search would be successful within a fixed amount of time.
Let's see... Not necessarily in exact chronological order. A cachet for carry-around electronic devices (iPod). A system for selling people content in little chunks (iTunes). The decision to sell end-user devices, not components, and take responsibility for the end-user experience. A large development budget (reputed to be around $150M).
Intel (and Microsoft) both appear to want to repeat their success in the PC market as "component" companies. Not the right business model for the phone business (and I suspect not for the tablet business either).
Do you pay yourself a salary that is modest, but still appropriate, for your profession? If so, it seems much less likely that you would get into trouble with the IRS. This guy's problem wasn't that he was paying himself a "modest" salary, he was paying himself a ridiculously low one. No one can hire a full-time CPA for anything close to $24K per year.