Newspapers in the UK are just as bad. People get accused of something, and before they have gone to trial, their name is mud. Now, alot of the time when they are found innocent, or the paper had a case of mistaken identity, if they even bother to point this out, it's in the tiniest retraction wedged inbetween some columnist and the sports.
And if I were ever to have this problem, the first thing I'd do create a single-page website with the retraction blown up to a full-screen jpeg, put a link to all the publications that had that retraction, and have an self-playing audio background (flash?) of a phone recording of the retractor stating such. I'd also google-bait the hell out of the site so it was the first thing that showed up.
We all have enough sin in our lives so as not be forced to pay for stuff we *didn't* do.
>Regardless of the picture, the School District or college have no right to amend her graduation qualifications, based on a single party photograph.
Good thing no-one in the Bush administration had access to this home video of Secretary Rice @ a college party, otherwise her stellar career might have been derailed like Ms. Snyder's.
Re:They just forgot to do the math
on
Death of the UMPC?
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
> I think the UMPC is a great idea, but as with any mobile PC, there is a limited market.
As soon as I found out about the thing, a $2K PDA, I was reminded of my thoughts when "Ginger" was revealed to be the "Segway". How did Kamen expect to revolutionize transportation when a *real* car can be purchased for the same price? I know what he *said*r about Segway, that it doesn't compete "in the same space" with cars, scooters, bikes or rollerskates, but people with jobs tend to make decisions like that (wheels=transportation/computer=pda|laptop). So even if MS *says* the UMPC wan't competing with a laptop, the masses standing at the counter at BestBuy will look at the device and all think "damn, I can get a that laptop over there for less, or maybe that Treo, or, hell, *both* for less money".
Yes, there *is* a market for $1000 bottles of Crystal, but if I'm trying to break into the wine market, I'm aiming for the larger "screw-top" product space.
>Government is empowered by people who don't know the difference between subsidized and free.
There's no difference? Cool! So where do I get in line to pick up my subsidized college education, subsizided corn and subsidized gasoline all for free?
> Yup again. I am from India,:)
>but couldn't get your price comparison with respect to India. You are not of the notion that Indian's are paid a >pretty hefty salary. Are you?
Really? I was pricing out flats in Madras and the cost was not cheap, in Lahk(-?sp) or US $$. It was like buying a flat in SanFran.
> I keep hearing about providing $100 laptops for poor children in Africa and I think that is the incorrect target as most poor children in the wilds of Africa
I'm guessing the 6,000 or so remaining forest people currently living in the 'wilds' probably aren't filling out applications to get laptops; however that leaves a gross market of over 900M other folk (excluding 1-2M refugees - and I mean the mobile ones in tents not the ones who've immigrated/assimilated into other countries) of which some significant population exists between *forest people* and wealthy urban residents w/ fairly constant electrical power (i.e. like Michigan outside of storm season).
And per another thread; like coffee growers in South America, anyone who deals in commodities (i.e. goat farmers) would be VERY well served by having timely market information.
> Umm.... I'd doubt that an OLPC will survive much bashing either.
I invite you to purchase a LeapFrog-like laptop for any toddler and have him play "tag" with it, then give him the Compaq and the same instructions.
OLPC is built more like the Leapfrog device than the Compaq - a similar situation to cheap euro-cars that have excellent crash protection, and gigantic SUV's that kill everyone onboard if it brakes too quickly.:-)
> Say a government buys 100,000 of these laptops. How many cronies and other undeserving parties will want one
Or, stated in "US" units; say you allocated $120B to an overseas invasion; how much of that $$ will purchase bullet-proof vests and HumVee armor, and how much will end up as f-ing humongous profits to defense contractor officers? Still, we gotta spend the whole pile of money so at least MOST of it will end up actually helping the troops.
> I don't understand why they are not trying to market this for the educational market in developed countries.
Because in "developed" countries we have "developed marketing departments" who's job it is to make sure that the local ed tech buys "only the best" for the kids, even if "the best" is way more capacity than most kids writing papers and watching flash-powered chemistry sims online need.
This situation is not unique to schools:
There's a $200M study to track the effects of pre-school on children - does it *really* take that kind of money to track a bunch of pre-school kids?
We have pretty good roads, but a large segment of the population still thinks you won't be safe on the road unless you drive a $70,000 mil-spec automobile.
If you don't have insurance, you can spend $12,000 just for cracked ribs.
>.. nice Compaq.. Best Buy.. $350
> By the time they get the OLPC out the door, normal low end laptops will be in the $200 range.
Find twin 2nd graders; give one the Compaq and one a OLPC to use for one semester. At the end of the school year, one machine will come back useable, one will be poured out from a paper bag.
> I don't wan't to download dubious 3rd party libraries that may or may not work.
Tho your example may be more security minded, it made me think immediately of Delphi, the most productive app development system I ever used. My favorite feature was the visual form inheritance; with it I was able to visually generate data-aware interfaces in minutes. The only weak link in Delphi for me was the 3rd parties; Borland would release a new version with must-have upgrades and I some important 3rd party widget (chart-generator, validator, etc) would be incompatible, with the vendor promising an update "real soon now". It's just that experience that makes my java (and now GWT) development so much slower; I now encapsulate EVERYTHING in my own wrappers to isolate core services and GUIs from these external libraries' idiosyncrasies.
> How much worse would things be if now, in addition to those, you've got people high on ecstasy or marijuana?
I'm guessing not much, as doped out people tend to stay put, opposed to imbibers who believe alcohol improves their driving.
> , the only question legalizing illegal drugs answers is "how can we destroy our society?"
No, the only question is WTF did we learn from Prohibition?
> How would you suggest that musicians who record music get paid?
According to this artist's Senate testimony from 2002, by selling t-shirts.
Therefore, most artists go into debt to make albums. In twelve years of making records, I have never recouped or received a royalty check, even though many of my records have gone into profit.
I discovered early on that there's little money to be made from recording albums, and I learned to place my musical aspirations alongside more practical realities in order to supplement my income. No matter what royalty arrangement I made with a record label or even when I produced my own recordings, I never made a livable income from my recording projects alone. So I wrote songs for other artists, toured extensively, sang as a background singer and instrumentalist for other artists, and marketed merchandise. How ironic that, after years of developing my skills and honing my creativity, I generate greater profits selling T-shirts.
> Ninety percent of their business is in the Middle East and Asia
.. in the form of US taxpayer-funded contracts?
Re:Becuase People don't know what they want!
on
Why Software is Hard
·
· Score: 1
I've been involved in $250 million dollar s/w project flops and then the $5 million dollar successful project to replace it.....The second try was done by a group assigned the responsibility for fixing the first screw-up.
So you're saying you were involved in one $255M project that produced a working product? You're the envy of the FBI.
People like to expect programming to go like engineering or architecture.
Imagine if I sent a request to an Architect asking for a "Structure that will be used by people." and gave no other information. I really doubt I would get a call back.
Actually, I think it depends on the architect. If you happed to come an architect that has some vision that he's been wanting to try out, or has a deep source of inspiration from another design, you'll probably get a design that you would never have imagined, but you might actually like (and buy). W/ software, if you're dealing with someone who's only gone thru a C/S program studying compiler design and fifty ways to do recursion, there's no way he's going to come back with "a program that does payroll" by himself. Yet, a 10yr HR person who's seen how sucky the payroll programs are and then decides to study a few programming courses might actually, with the same instructions, return a darn good payroll app.
Now, did I say "The world's greatest payroll app"? No, but with seasoned "pros" producing some pretty spectacular failures, I'm sure some users are ready to break out the bubbly when they get something back that "just works pretty good", at least for the short term.
> Who was the moron that thought $149 million dollars was a good idea?
I;ve been wondering this for *years*. There are many examples of movies that would be absolute money-makers if the producers (i.e. purse-handlers) would exercise just the tiniest bit of restraint on their directors ("no- having the fountains spout Perrier rather than tap does NOT make the scene more 'authentic'") and make the movies CHEAPER. Hell, don't these guys check a director's RESUME? "Let's see, your last three movies were all 200% over budget. Umm, y'know, we'll call you if something opens up."
I guess that's why I'm not in the movie biz; I thought blue screens and CGI were there to make the process *cheaper*.
Slashdot Mirror
>have a look at Planetes,
*Highly* recommended. Also, there's the whole "2001" series, tho they do strongly suggest (but never show) aliens.
Newspapers in the UK are just as bad. People get accused of something, and before they have gone to trial, their name is mud. Now, alot of the time when they are found innocent, or the paper had a case of mistaken identity, if they even bother to point this out, it's in the tiniest retraction wedged inbetween some columnist and the sports.
And if I were ever to have this problem, the first thing I'd do create a single-page website with the retraction blown up to a full-screen jpeg, put a link to all the publications that had that retraction, and have an self-playing audio background (flash?) of a phone recording of the retractor stating such. I'd also google-bait the hell out of the site so it was the first thing that showed up.
We all have enough sin in our lives so as not be forced to pay for stuff we *didn't* do.
>Regardless of the picture, the School District or college have no right to amend her graduation qualifications, based on a single party photograph.
Good thing no-one in the Bush administration had access to this home video of Secretary Rice @ a college party, otherwise her stellar career might have been derailed like Ms. Snyder's.
> I think the UMPC is a great idea, but as with any mobile PC, there is a limited market.
As soon as I found out about the thing, a $2K PDA, I was reminded of my thoughts when "Ginger" was revealed to be the "Segway". How did Kamen expect to revolutionize transportation when a *real* car can be purchased for the same price? I know what he *said*r about Segway, that it doesn't compete "in the same space" with cars, scooters, bikes or rollerskates, but people with jobs tend to make decisions like that (wheels=transportation/computer=pda|laptop). So even if MS *says* the UMPC wan't competing with a laptop, the masses standing at the counter at BestBuy will look at the device and all think "damn, I can get a that laptop over there for less, or maybe that Treo, or, hell, *both* for less money".
Yes, there *is* a market for $1000 bottles of Crystal, but if I'm trying to break into the wine market, I'm aiming for the larger "screw-top" product space.
>Government is empowered by people who don't know the difference between subsidized and free.
There's no difference? Cool! So where do I get in line to pick up my subsidized college education, subsizided corn and subsidized gasoline all for free?
> Just like the States should spend it's budget on education and health care before invading another country.
Dammit! Where are my mod points? Can somebody PLEASE dump a mountain of mod points on this comment?
+2^10^10 should about do it.
> t takes far more people with guns to kill/hurt that many.
Tho events in Rwanda, Serbia and Darfur clearly demonstrated you don't *really* need that many guns, anyway.
> Pull me from my car?
Being post 9/11, I'm not sure if you're refering to rioters or Homeland Security officers.
> Yup again. I am from India, :)
>but couldn't get your price comparison with respect to India. You are not of the notion that Indian's are paid a >pretty hefty salary. Are you?
Really? I was pricing out flats in Madras and the cost was not cheap, in Lahk(-?sp) or US $$. It was like buying a flat in SanFran.
>By the time it was released, it was overpriced and underwhelming
Yeah, you think people'd know better by now: Paul Allen's $2000 PDA
Oh wait, they do: $100 OLPC for education
> I keep hearing about providing $100 laptops for poor children in Africa and I think that is the incorrect target as most poor children in the wilds of Africa
I'm guessing the 6,000 or so remaining forest people currently living in the 'wilds' probably aren't filling out applications to get laptops; however that leaves a gross market of over 900M other folk (excluding 1-2M refugees - and I mean the mobile ones in tents not the ones who've immigrated/assimilated into other countries) of which some significant population exists between *forest people* and wealthy urban residents w/ fairly constant electrical power (i.e. like Michigan outside of storm season).
And per another thread; like coffee growers in South America, anyone who deals in commodities (i.e. goat farmers) would be VERY well served by having timely market information.
> what if they use it to meet online predators?
What if they use it to get enough education to avoid offline predators?
> Umm.... I'd doubt that an OLPC will survive much bashing either.
:-)
I invite you to purchase a LeapFrog-like laptop for any toddler and have him play "tag" with it, then give him the Compaq and the same instructions.
OLPC is built more like the Leapfrog device than the Compaq - a similar situation to cheap euro-cars that have excellent crash protection, and gigantic SUV's that kill everyone onboard if it brakes too quickly.
> My copy of Eclipse is currently running at 267MB. The install directory is over 1 GB
My high school programming students used Blue-J with great success building web apps.
> Say a government buys 100,000 of these laptops. How many cronies and other undeserving parties will want one
Or, stated in "US" units; say you allocated $120B to an overseas invasion; how much of that $$ will purchase bullet-proof vests and HumVee armor, and how much will end up as f-ing humongous profits to defense contractor officers? Still, we gotta spend the whole pile of money so at least MOST of it will end up actually helping the troops.
> I don't understand why they are not trying to market this for the educational market in developed countries.
Because in "developed" countries we have "developed marketing departments" who's job it is to make sure that the local ed tech buys "only the best" for the kids, even if "the best" is way more capacity than most kids writing papers and watching flash-powered chemistry sims online need.
This situation is not unique to schools:
There's a $200M study to track the effects of pre-school on children - does it *really* take that kind of money to track a bunch of pre-school kids?
We have pretty good roads, but a large segment of the population still thinks you won't be safe on the road unless you drive a $70,000 mil-spec automobile.
If you don't have insurance, you can spend $12,000 just for cracked ribs.
We'll spend $100M/mile on a ROAD.
We have so much $$ in the US ($3 TRILLON FY2007 Fed Budget) we seem to believe that there are no cheap problems.
> .. nice Compaq .. Best Buy .. $350
> By the time they get the OLPC out the door, normal low end laptops will be in the $200 range.
Find twin 2nd graders; give one the Compaq and one a OLPC to use for one semester. At the end of the school year, one machine will come back useable, one will be poured out from a paper bag.
> I don't wan't to download dubious 3rd party libraries that may or may not work.
Tho your example may be more security minded, it made me think immediately of Delphi, the most productive app development system I ever used. My favorite feature was the visual form inheritance; with it I was able to visually generate data-aware interfaces in minutes. The only weak link in Delphi for me was the 3rd parties; Borland would release a new version with must-have upgrades and I some important 3rd party widget (chart-generator, validator, etc) would be incompatible, with the vendor promising an update "real soon now". It's just that experience that makes my java (and now GWT) development so much slower; I now encapsulate EVERYTHING in my own wrappers to isolate core services and GUIs from these external libraries' idiosyncrasies.
> How much worse would things be if now, in addition to those, you've got people high on ecstasy or marijuana?
I'm guessing not much, as doped out people tend to stay put, opposed to imbibers who believe alcohol improves their driving.
> , the only question legalizing illegal drugs answers is "how can we destroy our society?"
No, the only question is WTF did we learn from Prohibition?
Wait for it...
Not a damned thing.
> How would you suggest that musicians who record music get paid?
According to this artist's Senate testimony from 2002, by selling t-shirts.
Therefore, most artists go into debt to make albums. In twelve years of making records, I have never recouped or received a royalty check, even though many of my records have gone into profit. I discovered early on that there's little money to be made from recording albums, and I learned to place my musical aspirations alongside more practical realities in order to supplement my income. No matter what royalty arrangement I made with a record label or even when I produced my own recordings, I never made a livable income from my recording projects alone. So I wrote songs for other artists, toured extensively, sang as a background singer and instrumentalist for other artists, and marketed merchandise. How ironic that, after years of developing my skills and honing my creativity, I generate greater profits selling T-shirts.
> Ninety percent of their business is in the Middle East and Asia
.. in the form of US taxpayer-funded contracts?
I've been involved in $250 million dollar s/w project flops and then the $5 million dollar successful project to replace it.....The second try was done by a group assigned the responsibility for fixing the first screw-up.
So you're saying you were involved in one $255M project that produced a working product? You're the envy of the FBI.
People like to expect programming to go like engineering or architecture. Imagine if I sent a request to an Architect asking for a "Structure that will be used by people." and gave no other information. I really doubt I would get a call back.
Actually, I think it depends on the architect. If you happed to come an architect that has some vision that he's been wanting to try out, or has a deep source of inspiration from another design, you'll probably get a design that you would never have imagined, but you might actually like (and buy). W/ software, if you're dealing with someone who's only gone thru a C/S program studying compiler design and fifty ways to do recursion, there's no way he's going to come back with "a program that does payroll" by himself. Yet, a 10yr HR person who's seen how sucky the payroll programs are and then decides to study a few programming courses might actually, with the same instructions, return a darn good payroll app.
Now, did I say "The world's greatest payroll app"? No, but with seasoned "pros" producing some pretty spectacular failures, I'm sure some users are ready to break out the bubbly when they get something back that "just works pretty good", at least for the short term.
> Who was the moron that thought $149 million dollars was a good idea?
I;ve been wondering this for *years*. There are many examples of movies that would be absolute money-makers if the producers (i.e. purse-handlers) would exercise just the tiniest bit of restraint on their directors ("no- having the fountains spout Perrier rather than tap does NOT make the scene more 'authentic'") and make the movies CHEAPER. Hell, don't these guys check a director's RESUME? "Let's see, your last three movies were all 200% over budget. Umm, y'know, we'll call you if something opens up."
I guess that's why I'm not in the movie biz; I thought blue screens and CGI were there to make the process *cheaper*.
> Would you like to see your sister in one of those movies? What about your daughter..your mom?
I don't want my sister, mom or daughters to vote republican nor become personal injury lawyers, but I would hate to have a ban on any of these folks.
okay, maybe the injury lawyers, but they'd probably sue me...