But if you don't do something to get people to drive less, you are going to get sick anyway
physically sick, not just sick and tired. Your befuddled state should be trying to get people to drive less. This ain't the way to do it. Lets count the stupidities here:
The aggrevation you endure,
the unfair dispensation this measure would grant to obscene gas guzzlers like H2 [vs say, Prius, as others have pointed out],
The state needs more money so they would hope you will be driving more not less.
I pay $500 for a gps unit in my car and its not addressible like On-Star. WHO is paying for universal gps installations? the beleagured driver or the cash-strapped state?
The gps companies are the only winners I see here
If your governator has anything to do with this idiotic idea other than vetoes, it will be another rock to throw at him when he pushes his bid to be the nations first fuhrer, er I mean Austrian president, er well, there are a lot of other ammendments we need more than Ahnold's.
...Heavy plate armour is so successful a defense mechanism, you might wonder why many more species don't utilise it.
Glyptodon is an extinct mammal from south america that died out in the pliestocene...I saw one at the Peabody museum at Harvard and good lord was it ever armored. if it simply squatted so its shell rested on the ground, you couldn't hurt it with guns or cars, it bore so massive a shell. And so I had to ask the same question you pose: This looks invincible, a veritable Hummer of a beast, so why the die-off?
My speculation is, that like any SUV or heavily armored vehicle, it needs tons of food just to get through a normal day...any upset to the climate such as cold or drought and it starves to death while the more nimble and adaptable critters get by some how.
whoa! isn't that a clever use of open source!
on
Netscape Reborn?
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Turn your flagging product code over to nameless unwashed masses who chip away at improvements and kick in a few great new features. Then a few years
later, harvest the improved code and restart your
business. I may be cynical. I may be assuming too much about netscape re-appropriating Firefox/Mozilla code. But AOL is NOT the nicest or most deserving entity to receive such a boon from Netscape's
original dicision to open up mozilla code. Our tolerance of AOL must be that we all just hate Microsoft and want somebody to stand up against MS.
...and you have some venerable company in Dan Bricklin. The bad news is,neither of you are likely to get rock-star rich from your spiffy new idea. As for the idea-sewer that the USPTO has become: take advantage of it. The barriers to filing were lowered and you can stake your claim easily enough...just try to make your money before you get sued. The examiners have been forced to leave the real work up to the courts but by the time the process reaches that stage, you should have sold your company and gone on to the next thing. Dan Bricklin would say to
just forget about patents alltogether
given the dismal % yield on most charity soliciting,
getting 15000$ form total strangers is a good showing. This is just an anecdote from the war raging between copyright holders, major labels and file swappers but it does make me think: The size of the market if you include all who file-swap and download must be vastly greater than the market that only counts those who buy CD's or are on the fence about a CD purchase. If a band could get a few pennies/track each from the larger market and nobody was peeing away millions on promotion, it just seems possible they could earn a living by their art and not soak their fans in the process. If downloaders thought of themselves as "supporting the band's future work" rather than "buying this song",which they could just as easily swipe, maybe they'd pay a little and not mind. Is that the paradigmn shift thats gnawing away at the mass marketing of music as we now know it? Given the huge exposure potential of freely available streamed samples, why would you need to spend on poromotion anyway? For years we have had shareware vendors giving away one version of a program in hopes that users would be pleased enough to pay for a better version. How similar is that model to what Wilco is doing?
a language that leaves all the verbs for the end of the sentence? A language that likes the modifiers to follow rather than precede their nouns?...my point is , you have one translation problem in going from high level language to machine language and another going from "natural" language to high level language. But a third problem is finding a culture-neutral natural language OR solving the natural language translation problem...and you have seen how atrocious babelfish results can be...we just aren't there yet folks! The ambiguity that must be dodged in going from normal human speech to a computer program hides in different places depending on the language, especially on which words have multiple meanings. And inflection? What are you going to do? program with emoticons?
I know that natural language is creeping into UI's in specialized search engines. If you know where to look, you will find natural language search features on Fidelity.com and perhaps other financial websites. These are much more carefullly bounded problems than the broad challenge of allowing a user to express a solution or algorithm for an arbitrary problem a computer could be programmed to do in, say C, but using ordinary speech. The article sited is interesting and it might make life better for us programmers but I am not getting my hopes up that more than incremental change to computer languages is around the corner.
the marriage of the hackable and porous OutLook with a technique for rapidly indexing desktop contents will eventually produce an exploit that lets a hacker find things on your computer by remote control of some fashion.
You are absolutely right. And it is not just the level of rigor of the educational offering, its the gumption of the students. I believe Americans have, on average, an increasingly impoverished culture with respect to the value of education, and science/math/engineering in particular. I have 30 years in the software business so I do a fair amount of resume reading and interviewing...green card candidates routinely show in their CV a lot more ambition... not that there
aren't smart hard working Americans, just the proportions are off. Its as if too many Americans get their attitude toward technical subjects and homework from watching Homer Simpson. Raj and Pavel labored but got through differential equations. Jim and Bill just want any Bachelors
degree that will set them up for an MBA.
So in america, "geek" and "nerd" are terms applied to a lot of people known to be technically proficient and assumed by others to be socially marginal...do we have a problem here?
...In case you haven't noticed, the american dollar is going down the tubes and will continue the trend for the forseeable future (with Bush at the helm)...
The point you are making is valid, folks like Rubik and the guy who invented Tetris are two of many examples that Slavs and Russians can originate commercially viable products and ideas. [and , from my perspective as an american sw engineer, that is competition to be scared of]. The point I was making is that there is a perception, not hard to substantiate if you read the news, that eastern europe is a den of theives...I doubt its actaully any worse than other places, just has more talent with stuck with less opportunity for legitimate business. But you didn't read my sig! so here it is twice: if (euro >= (4.0*dollar)) rename("dollar", "bushbuck");
They hold the third largest population of phishers scammers and hackers.
Ukrainian programmers won't be the first to
land fat outsourcing contracts: they are as mob-ridden as Russia and better known for This kind of programmer than India is.
My question was rhetorical. Read the article I linked to...it explains exactly what you said: Jobs is a perfectionist and runs his subordinates ragged in order to get things his way.
As others have suggested, you may already be in
over your head. But even to pick a consultant, you need to have a rough idea of the options and their cost/benefit trade-offs. The large vendors: IBM, Sun, Microsoft etc and some second-tier vendors such
as Netscape and BEA have overviews of the application and architecture of their products on their respective web sites...that will cost you a day of reading and give you a headache from reading
conflicting claims of superiority BUT, you will know the jargon and the current technology. Reading a book or two would't hurt but they tend not to be completely up to date. Also, look up SOA...the buzzword du jour in buiding web-delivered business services. If you have not googled already, you really ought. My first hit was a comparison of the performance of a dozen web servers with clear graphics and concise info on suggested benchmarking techniques.
In addition to hardware [do I need RAID? etc], and OS and web server infrastructure issues, don't forget you implentation language choice...what pool of programming skills will be available to write the code? for instance, here is how Perl stacks up but you have many choices these days. And above all never forget "SH*T HAPPENS": how and how often and what are you backing up in case of crashes, fires etc.
do they still make construx?
This site sells every kind of construction set
currently made AFAIK but I don't see Construx.
I liked construx...it came along when my kids
were the right age...sometimes I let them use it
too. Mechano was the what the budding ubergeeks
used when I was a kid...damn expensive and I
haven't seen it around for about a decade.
The reason [aside from the fact that they suck and really amount to traveling the information super highway with training wheels dragging] we dropped
our AOL subscription was their incessant advertising to get us to upgrade to aol broadband which they have never delivered in my area. Broadband did become available [some neighborhoods get DSL, we have comcast cable internet pretty much throughout my metro area]. Bottom line: Broadband is killing AOL in my part of New England. If Aol is dumping broadband, its going to hurt them badly in the long run. Even if BB service is costly for them to set up...everybody
else [e.g. comcast] raises their rates and gets away with it...breaking even later is better than having no customers.
Isn't the picture on pg 8 of the 1971 edition
actually an IBM 360? I operated one as a student
and this sure looks like a 360 without the
power supply cabinet or tape drives. That would
not have been considered a small system even in
the early 70's. Looks like a 1403 line printer with it too.
Having signaled that I am ancient, I may not surprise a few of you to note that the quaint
and amusing quality of the book in the article
is a misleading offering if you take it as
history. The development of computing is both
a technical and a human story of considerable
depth and much more interesting reading
is available.
Anybody who actually finds this stuff interesting
need not confess. Just quietly make your way to the
libraray and look up Paul Ceruzzi's A History of Computing [MIT PRESS] which gets all the facts and personalities straight as well as properly labeling the pictures. If you are in a hurry to waste time, there are tons of documents on line re the history of computing, for instance such
as this page of links from an IIT prof.
The hindenberg's skin was a bomb all by itself:
I RTFA'ed the "whats to worry about" link and found
"..doped with iron oxide and cellulose acetate butyrate impregnated with aluminium powder..."
Strips of this material would burn like blasting fuse/primer cord. The hydrogen in the hindenberg would not have all gone off practically at once if it's 16 chambers were skinned in something flame retardant.
Compare that composition with bomb and thermite formlations such as you find at Thermite Incendiaries and Formulas:
iron scale (Fe3O4).Rust
will work but you may want to adjust the mixture to about 77% rust.
The aluminum is usually coarse powder to help slow down the burning rate.
...I don't think a fair, logical discussion of the issues would work (for long) on network television
Well, we are going to find out: this little network is struggling for finances to become the CSPAN of science If you don't like most mass media science coverage? Give these guys a look [if and when they get a little air time on a cable near you:-(
I am grateful. This is an analysis I could not
write myself but with which I entirely agree and which I welcom and will pass on to teachers and co-workers in science.
It is worth re-emphasizing that not ALL journalism screws its readers with warped perspectives and fried formats. The journals in which scientists find news of each others advances [and mistakes] are mostly peer reviewed and edited by scientifically informed journalists. They do not often fall prey to the lousy reporting that you get when you assume you will have no audiance unless you keep the length to 8 to 10 seconds, have dramatic video or stills and don't use big words or, god forbid, an equation. Moving down-market to Science News, a weekly review of
science developments generally based on news in
more scholarly pubs, you can see how they avoid
over-emphasizing or underplaying the importance of the news they report. There are always quotes from other researchers in the specialty, not associated with the work or publication being reported, in which the alternatives or perspective
are presented. One imagines the writers at Science News all have a huge rollodex organzied by scientific topics that allows them to double check the significance of any story with other researhers in the field. Why the hell can't mass media do the same?
I was going to post the following article but I guess I should get up earlier. There was a lot of commentary in the press on how MS would impact Google's business. [Not much impact if you ask me]
not traffic cops. just keep the infrastructure
working guys. when somebody breaks a law using
the roadways, the same cops go after them that would chase the crook who walked away from the bank.
The blurring of borders is a byproduct of transportaion as much as of information flow. That blurring is a problem for the cops...they need to reach the level of agreement that the worlds telco's and backbones already achieve and stay the heck out of technology questions.
oops. I don't follow hockey very closely but I
shouldda googled the name to make sure.
Sorry Curt!
RTFA is kinda hard for that long page of links but I found a few 404 errors. Papers that have gone missing can sometimes be dreded up via google.
e.g. the cute pdf explaining inertia tensors [which you need if you are going to hurl a hummer across the field and want it to tumble realistically through the air] is at http://baba.astro.cornell.edu/inertiatensor.pdf
Slashdot Mirror
-
The aggrevation you endure,
- the unfair dispensation this measure would grant to obscene gas guzzlers like H2 [vs say, Prius, as others have pointed out]
, -
The state needs more money so they would hope you will be driving more not less.
- I pay $500 for a gps unit in my car and its not addressible like On-Star. WHO is paying for universal gps installations? the beleagured driver or the cash-strapped state?
- The gps companies are the only winners I see here
If your governator has anything to do with this idiotic idea other than vetoes, it will be another rock to throw at him when he pushes his bid to be the nations first fuhrer, er I mean Austrian president, er well, there are a lot of other ammendments we need more than Ahnold's....Heavy plate armour is so successful a defense mechanism, you might wonder why many more species don't utilise it.
Glyptodon is an extinct mammal from south america that died out in the pliestocene...I saw one at the Peabody museum at Harvard and good lord was it ever armored. if it simply squatted so its shell rested on the ground, you couldn't hurt it with guns or cars, it bore so massive a shell. And so I had to ask the same question you pose: This looks invincible, a veritable Hummer of a beast, so why the die-off? My speculation is, that like any SUV or heavily armored vehicle, it needs tons of food just to get through a normal day...any upset to the climate such as cold or drought and it starves to death while the more nimble and adaptable critters get by some how.
Turn your flagging product code over to nameless unwashed masses who chip away at improvements and kick in a few great new features. Then a few years later, harvest the improved code and restart your business. I may be cynical. I may be assuming too much about netscape re-appropriating Firefox/Mozilla code. But AOL is NOT the nicest or most deserving entity to receive such a boon from Netscape's original dicision to open up mozilla code. Our tolerance of AOL must be that we all just hate Microsoft and want somebody to stand up against MS.
...and you have some venerable company in Dan Bricklin. ,neither of you are likely to get rock-star rich from your spiffy new idea. As for the idea-sewer that the USPTO has become: take advantage of it. The barriers to filing were lowered and you can stake your claim easily enough...just try to make your money before you get sued. The examiners have been forced to leave the real work up to the courts but by the time the process reaches that stage, you should have sold your company and gone on to the next thing. Dan Bricklin would say to
just forget about patents alltogether
The bad news is
given the dismal % yield on most charity soliciting, getting 15000$ form total strangers is a good showing. This is just an anecdote from the war raging between copyright holders, major labels and file swappers but it does make me think: The size of the market if you include all who file-swap and download must be vastly greater than the market that only counts those who buy CD's or are on the fence about a CD purchase. If a band could get a few pennies/track each from the larger market and nobody was peeing away millions on promotion, it just seems possible they could earn a living by their art and not soak their fans in the process. If downloaders thought of themselves as "supporting the band's future work" rather than "buying this song" ,which they could just as easily swipe, maybe they'd pay a little and not mind. Is that the paradigmn shift thats gnawing away at the mass marketing of music as we now know it? Given the huge exposure potential of freely available streamed samples, why would you need to spend on poromotion anyway? For years we have had shareware vendors giving away one version of a program in hopes that users would be pleased enough to pay for a better version. How similar is that model to what Wilco is doing?
a language that leaves all the verbs for the end of the sentence? A language that likes the modifiers to follow rather than precede their nouns?...my point is , you have one translation problem in going from high level language to machine language and another going from "natural" language to high level language. But a third problem is finding a culture-neutral natural language OR solving the natural language translation problem...and you have seen how atrocious babelfish results can be...we just aren't there yet folks! The ambiguity that must be dodged in going from normal human speech to a computer program hides in different places depending on the language, especially on which words have multiple meanings. And inflection? What are you going to do? program with emoticons?
I know that natural language is creeping into UI's in specialized search engines. If you know where to look, you will find natural language search features on Fidelity.com and perhaps other financial websites. These are much more carefullly bounded problems than the broad challenge of allowing a user to express a solution or algorithm for an arbitrary problem a computer could be programmed to do in, say C, but using ordinary speech. The article sited is interesting and it might make life better for us programmers but I am not getting my hopes up that more than incremental change to computer languages is around the corner.
the marriage of the hackable and porous OutLook with a technique for rapidly indexing desktop contents will eventually produce an exploit that lets a hacker find things on your computer by remote control of some fashion.
You are absolutely right. And it is not just the level of rigor of the educational offering, its the gumption of the students. I believe Americans have, on average, an increasingly impoverished culture with respect to the value of education, and science/math/engineering in particular. I have 30 years in the software business so I do a fair amount of resume reading and interviewing...green card candidates routinely show in their CV a lot more ambition ... not that there
aren't smart hard working Americans, just the proportions are off. Its as if too many Americans get their attitude toward technical subjects and homework from watching Homer Simpson. Raj and Pavel labored but got through differential equations. Jim and Bill just want any Bachelors
degree that will set them up for an MBA.
So in america, "geek" and "nerd" are terms applied to a lot of people known to be technically proficient and assumed by others to be socially marginal...do we have a problem here?
...In case you haven't noticed, the american dollar is going down the tubes and will continue the trend for the forseeable future (with Bush at the helm)...
The point you are making is valid, folks like Rubik and the guy who invented Tetris are two of many examples that Slavs and Russians can originate commercially viable products and ideas. [and , from my perspective as an american sw engineer, that is competition to be scared of]. The point I was making is that there is a perception, not hard to substantiate if you read the news, that eastern europe is a den of theives...I doubt its actaully any worse than other places, just has more talent with stuck with less opportunity for legitimate business.
But you didn't read my sig! so here it is twice:
if (euro >= (4.0*dollar)) rename("dollar", "bushbuck");
They hold the third largest population of phishers scammers and hackers.
Ukrainian programmers won't be the first to land fat outsourcing contracts: they are as mob-ridden as Russia and better known for This kind of programmer than India is.
My question was rhetorical. Read the article I linked to...it explains exactly what you said: Jobs is a perfectionist and runs his subordinates ragged in order to get things his way.
As others have suggested, you may already be in over your head. But even to pick a consultant, you need to have a rough idea of the options and their cost/benefit trade-offs. The large vendors: IBM, Sun, Microsoft etc and some second-tier vendors such as Netscape and BEA have overviews of the application and architecture of their products on their respective web sites...that will cost you a day of reading and give you a headache from reading conflicting claims of superiority BUT, you will know the jargon and the current technology. Reading a book or two would't hurt but they tend not to be completely up to date. Also, look up SOA...the buzzword du jour in buiding web-delivered business services. If you have not googled already, you really ought. My first hit was a comparison of the performance of a dozen web servers with clear graphics and concise info on suggested benchmarking techniques.
In addition to hardware [do I need RAID? etc], and OS and web server infrastructure issues, don't forget you implentation language choice...what pool of programming skills will be available to write the code? for instance, here is how Perl stacks up but you have many choices these days.
And above all never forget "SH*T HAPPENS": how and how often and what are you backing up in case of crashes, fires etc.
How hard would it be for Apple to choose a product from one of Steve Job's old companies?
do they still make construx? This site sells every kind of construction set currently made AFAIK but I don't see Construx. I liked construx...it came along when my kids were the right age...sometimes I let them use it too. Mechano was the what the budding ubergeeks used when I was a kid...damn expensive and I haven't seen it around for about a decade.
The reason [aside from the fact that they suck and really amount to traveling the information super highway with training wheels dragging] we dropped our AOL subscription was their incessant advertising to get us to upgrade to aol broadband which they have never delivered in my area. Broadband did become available [some neighborhoods get DSL, we have comcast cable internet pretty much throughout my metro area]. Bottom line: Broadband is killing AOL in my part of New England. If Aol is dumping broadband, its going to hurt them badly in the long run. Even if BB service is costly for them to set up...everybody else [e.g. comcast] raises their rates and gets away with it...breaking even later is better than having no customers.
A local store Massachusetts has a bewildering variety of construction toys...Forget yer kids: Buy these things for yourself and let them see you having a great time with them!
it will cost you a cookie but Webb's Filter is good at rounding up media reactions: /. story on Mozilla.org pondering addition of search tools to its arsenal should be considered in light of [and sheds a different light on ] development of Microsoft's plans.
In her usual thorough fashion Cynthia Webb of the Washington Post has summarized the punditry concerning the impact Microsoft's pending search service will have on Google's business . Most of the analysis says MS has a weak product and miles to go to overtake Google...but thats the position they were in vs Netscape once upon a time. The
Isn't the picture on pg 8 of the 1971 edition actually an IBM 360? I operated one as a student and this sure looks like a 360 without the power supply cabinet or tape drives. That would not have been considered a small system even in the early 70's. Looks like a 1403 line printer with it too.
Having signaled that I am ancient, I may not surprise a few of you to note that the quaint and amusing quality of the book in the article is a misleading offering if you take it as history. The development of computing is both a technical and a human story of considerable depth and much more interesting reading is available.
Anybody who actually finds this stuff interesting need not confess. Just quietly make your way to the libraray and look up Paul Ceruzzi's A History of Computing [MIT PRESS] which gets all the facts and personalities straight as well as properly labeling the pictures. If you are in a hurry to waste time, there are tons of documents on line re the history of computing, for instance such as this page of links from an IIT prof.
...I don't think a fair, logical discussion of the issues would work (for long) on network television :-(
Well, we are going to find out: this little network is struggling for finances to become the CSPAN of science
If you don't like most mass media science coverage? Give these guys a look [if and when they get a little air time on a cable near you
I am grateful. This is an analysis I could not write myself but with which I entirely agree and which I welcom and will pass on to teachers and co-workers in science. It is worth re-emphasizing that not ALL journalism screws its readers with warped perspectives and fried formats. The journals in which scientists find news of each others advances [and mistakes] are mostly peer reviewed and edited by scientifically informed journalists. They do not often fall prey to the lousy reporting that you get when you assume you will have no audiance unless you keep the length to 8 to 10 seconds, have dramatic video or stills and don't use big words or, god forbid, an equation. Moving down-market to Science News, a weekly review of science developments generally based on news in more scholarly pubs, you can see how they avoid over-emphasizing or underplaying the importance of the news they report. There are always quotes from other researchers in the specialty, not associated with the work or publication being reported, in which the alternatives or perspective are presented. One imagines the writers at Science News all have a huge rollodex organzied by scientific topics that allows them to double check the significance of any story with other researhers in the field. Why the hell can't mass media do the same?
not traffic cops. just keep the infrastructure working guys. when somebody breaks a law using the roadways, the same cops go after them that would chase the crook who walked away from the bank. The blurring of borders is a byproduct of transportaion as much as of information flow. That blurring is a problem for the cops...they need to reach the level of agreement that the worlds telco's and backbones already achieve and stay the heck out of technology questions.
i forgot the ";?)"
oops. I don't follow hockey very closely but I shouldda googled the name to make sure. Sorry Curt! RTFA is kinda hard for that long page of links but I found a few 404 errors. Papers that have gone missing can sometimes be dreded up via google. e.g. the cute pdf explaining inertia tensors [which you need if you are going to hurl a hummer across the field and want it to tumble realistically through the air] is at http://baba.astro.cornell.edu/inertiatensor.pdf