mostly they look at what others are doing and copy it (or buy it).
That's not the problem. The Metro UI is fairly innovative, for example, and not really copying or buying something. The problem is, it's bad.
The problem is that Microsoft has put too much focus into pushing their internal business agenda, and not enough on servicing their customers. Microsoft's development model is about deciding which strategic product they'd like you to buy, and then trying to force you to use it by hook or by crook, except they rarely consider the option of getting you to buy it by making it a great product.
Let them experience how thrilling it is to have their dark glasses taken away, feel what it's like not to be faceless anymore. Then, maybe they'd appreciate privacy a little more.
I'd like to give a hypothetical scenario for any domestic spying that the government does, because there are a lot of people who talk as though the government is doing nothing wrong, because the information being gathered isn't really "private", or else because "if you have nothing to hide, then you have nothing to fear!" So imagine if the system worked like this:
Every person and agency involved in the spying was also subject to the spying, and all of the information gathered would be published to a public database where anyone being spied on could access it. So if the NSA is reading your emails, then you can read all of the NSA's emails. If NSA employees can review your personal phone call metadata, then you can review NSA employee's personal phone call metadata. If the FBI is allowed to have your passwords, then you can have all of the FBI's passwords. What's good for the goose is good for the gander.
I've asked people who support the NSA to imagine that setup, and they say it's a terrible idea. I ask, but why is it a terrible idea? Would the employees object to their phone call metadata being made public on the grounds that it's an invasion of privacy? Would the NSA object to their private communications being made public because that information could be used by the people the NSA considers their enemies? "Well imagine that!" I say, "Apparently it *is* an invasion of privacy, and even if you've done nothing wrong, you might still have something to fear."
Good point. It seems like we must all have the ability to empathize, or else we couldn't understand anyone's motives. We must also have the ability to turn it off, or we would be constantly overwhelmed by empathy, and I would suppose we'd be much less violent.
It seems like, in a general way, we sort of divide people into "us" and "them", feeling empathy for "us" and not so much for "them". Maybe psychopaths are just very restrictive in who they include in "us"?
Well either way, it may just indicate market saturation. When you introduce a new product, nobody has one, and everyone who wants one buys one. After a few years, many of the people who want one already have one, so you sell fewer of them.
Even if they're a novelty that are only used by 10 year-olds, that's still a market, and lots of people were buying them and happy with their purchase.
Then save your appetite for destruction for when the original media is genuinely unreadable. There is no need to hasten that which is only perceived as inevitable.
I can think of some reasons to "hasten that which is... inevitable." First, there's the issue of clutter. There's no need to keep 1000 floppies when the data can all be stored on a single hard drive. If there's sensitive/confidential information on the floppies, having lots of disks is harder to keep track of and therefore potentially less secure. It's technically possible for accessing data on unreliable media to lead to some form of silent data corruption. Perhaps as important as anything else, having the old media may lead to a false sense of security, assuming that you have a good copy when maybe you don't.
They aren't nearly that fragile. Some are subject to manufacturing defects but that's another sort of problem and it's hardly universal.
Well no, that's not another sort of problem. There are many that are subject to manufacturing defects, in that many manufacturers have used cheap dyes that break down within a few years. Therefore, depending on when you bought the CDR and who manufactured it, it may have a very high failure rate. Ultimately that's the same problem as with floppies, and even old hard drives. Though optical media has the strength of having no moving parts that could break, all media is subject to the danger of being part of a "bad batch".
- Blu-Ray players can typically play DVDs and CDs; most people's broadband connections are still not capable of downloading Blu-Ray quality films in any reasonable time; at the current rate of progress this will still be the case for a significant proportion of the market (outside of large towns/cities) in 10 years time.
I think this is the only one of your points that I find compelling.
For clarification, I'm not claiming that all CDs and DVDs will cease to exist within 10 years. I just think the market will by pretty tiny, and most people won't even have equipment to read them. And also, for clarification, I'm talking less about the media as used by home audio/video equipment, and more talking about having drives in computers being used to store data. Already you're seeing more and more computers being built without optical drives. Everything is being distributed by Internet. In 10 years, I think having an optical data drive in your computer will be comparable to having a floppy drive or a parallel port.
If I'm wrong, I suspect that it's because you're right, and broadband will still suck in 10 years because the US can't be bothered to build infrastructure. Still, I don't expect that we'll be using optical media so much as flash media, or something newer than that.
As to this point:
- You can still get new, cheap vinyl record players even though CDs have been around for 30+ years. For less than $100 you can even get one which plays 78rpm records, which (essentially) stopped being produced 45 years ago!
I think that records may well outlive CDs. People who like records and care about the physical medium will continue to buy records, but people aren't attached to CD as a physical medium in the same way. It's already digital, and as long as you're getting the same bits, nobody is going to care if it's on a flash drive or a CD or downloaded from the Internet.
Well I'm not sure what to tell you. You've been lucky...?
I've seen plenty go bad. From what I've read on the subject, it supposedly depends on the quality of the manufacture, and the chemicals used in the dye. Though CDs can theoretically last something like a few hundred years, much of what's being sold isn't expected to last more than a few years. Again, that's from what I've read. I know for a fact that I've seen many of my own CDs and DVDs go bad without any physical damage.
I don't know what your goals and requirements are, but I wouldn't bet on old floppies, CDs, or even hard drives lasting for very long. There's an essential problem with old physical media in that the readers are becoming more scarce. You may have a lot of floppies, but how easy is it to find a floppy drive? It's not always easy to find adapters for old IDE or SCSI formats as newer interfaces have been developed. Personally, I don't expect CD/DVD drives to be around in 10 years.
But beyond that, there's an even bigger issue: media goes bad. Of course, how quickly it goes bad depends on quite a few things, including how it was manufactured, and how it's stored. Even if you store a bunch of CDs and floppies under good conditions, I'd expect at least 10% to go bad within 6 years. I'm completely pulling that number out of my ass and I have no science to back me up, but my point is, this stuff is not reliable. I think my 10% number is too low, even, but I'm trying to make sure I don't exaggerate.
However, we don't need fast Internet connectivity... Yes, maybe some cities will get government-built fiber downtown, but the rest of the state will be too busy fighting politics to actually improve any infrastructure.
This logic could be used to claim that we shouldn't treat water, electricity, or sewage as utilities. We don't *need* any of those things, in the strict hunter/gatherer sense.
On the other hand, ISPs have a clear business incentive to improve their speed and capacity.
They also have clear disincentives.
By being faster, they can claim an edge over their competitor in a market.
What competitor?
I say we void all community monopoly agreements
Well there is a bit of a problem in that we can't have people running around digging things up, running cable wherever they want willy-nilly. There's going to have to be some control, which means there won't be real competition. Infrastructure does not do well in the "free market".
and require private ISPs to provide fixed-bandwidth service to a government ISP. The government ISP can be a fallback.
Yeah, I'm sure that will work. Conservatives love having a "public option".
For those who favor the idea of Internet service as a government-run utility, what do you see as the best-case scenario for such a system?
Personally, I'd favor working on some kind of split responsibility. I've said this over and over again: part of our problem is that we have these large companies who are vertically integrated. You have a company like Comcast which builds the infrastructure, acts as the ISP, provides TV and VoIP service, online TV viewing services, and is also tied into the channels and content on their TV service. This creates some obvious opportunities for conflict of interest, e.g. Comcast might not be highly motivated to provide a high level of service for their Internet customers to access Netflix, since it competes with their TV offerings.
The potential for conflicts of interest are exacerbated by the fact that ISPs are generally either a monopoly or part of a duopoly. For example, Time Warner Cable is literally my only option for broadband Internet, unless I want to spend over $1,000/month. If TWC decided to block Netflix, I wouldn't really have an other competing option to switch to.
So my opinion has long been that there should be laws to control this effect by classifying the companies who own/build/maintain the infrastructure, and barring them from providing service over that infrastructure. My reasoning is that it often won't be practical to build many competing networks to every area that needs Internet, so competition between Internet infrastructure companies is unlikely. If you want to have a free market for Internet providers, there should be a relatively open/public network infrastructure created and maintained by an uninterested party (uninterested because they're barred from providing service over their own network).
To some degree, this is already happening. If you get an internet connection from a company like Speakeasy/Megapath or XO, they are actually providing internet access over Verizon's infrastructure. However, they are also competing with Verizon, who is also competing with (and colluding with) TWC, Comcast, and other vertically integrated providers. As a result, the only people who want faster Internet speeds are customers, who have no other option, and Netflix, who the ISPs would like to see fail.
You're right, but I think my analogy kind of covers that. In my analogy, I'm not giving Facebook the access (in the analogy, the keys to my house) because I want to share my private life with them. I do it because it's unfortunately necessary for me to use the service they offer. That is, if I want to use the house-cleaning service, I need to let them into my house. If I want to use Facebook to share with my friends and family, I have to upload what I'm sharing to Facebook.
And I think it works because you provide a cleaning service access to your house, knowing that they could rifle through your underwear drawer, but hoping that they won't. Similarly, I know that if I upload a bunch of information to a service like Facebook, they can mine that data in all kinds of creepy ways. I just hope that they won't get too creepy about it. Part of the reason I don't like Facebook is that I know they data mine the info in creepy ways.
But as much as I might dislike Facebook for creepy data mining, that doesn't excuse the NSA for data mining in ways that are even creepier.
I'm not sure I do trust Facebook more than I trust the government, but there's one key difference here: We're giving our data to Facebook voluntarily.
Facebook is like handing the keys of your house over to a relative stranger-- let's say a cleaning service-- knowing there's a possibility that they'll snoop around and go through your stuff. It might be a bad idea, but you want the service being provided. You choose to hand over access by choice, knowing what you're getting into. What the NSA is doing, to extend this analogy, is like someone breaking into your house and snooping around, going through your stuff, and doing it in secret so you never even knew they were in there.
Which is why you are not now, nor ever will be, running Dell or HP.
Well apparently with HP, the main reason I won't run that company is their recent CEOs have already driven it into the ground.
The amount of money, people and time you'd need to invest to compete with Windows would be enormous and you'd start at 0% market share and 0 applications.
Yeah, that's why you'd need to be a moron to start from scratch. If Dell and HP don't already have some R&D and marketing research spent on developing their own version of either Linux or BSD, then their management is grossly incompetent.
But even if the data is not corrupted or polluted, there's an even more basic problem: people misunderstand statistics. Even statisticians will frequently misunderstand statistics. Good statistical analysis often runs contrary to our natural sense of understanding, and statistics, by its nature, does not provide certainties.
Man shocked when putting all eggs in one basket is a bad idea. Solution: put all eggs in another basket.
I see it as an example of the cliché of "trying to solve last year's problem". Your server room gets wrecked by a car, so you try to figure out how to protect your servers from getting hit by cars. Never mind other potential problems.
now why on earth would I go and buy another product with a microsoft label again? right, I wouldn't, I didn't and I'm pretty sure I won't for quite some time...
Well part of the problem here is that Microsoft is not used to having people buy their products by choice. You know, they aren't used to the whole thing of having to be "better than the competition", or having to "appeal to their customers", or even "make a useful product". They're used to operating in the market that has made them successful. They're used to being able to say, "Buy the products we tell you to buy because otherwise you can't run the applications your business needs to run, and you can't play the games you want to play."
I was surprised. It was a strange and bold move for Microsoft to stab all the OEMs in the back by releasing their own computer hardware. Sure, they sell game consoles, but they don't also release the XBox OS to commodity hardware vendors.
I know that if I were running Dell or HP, as soon as I saw the Surface, I'd be investing extra money into R&D for my own desktop OS. If Microsoft wants to go the route of Apple and function as a systems integrator instead of an OS vendor, they're going to screw over a lot of their partners.
Not that my opinion counts for much, but I felt like the surface was bad. Not that the hardware was so terrible, but I find the Windows 8 UI infuriating, even on (or especially on) tablets. When I tried to use one for an hour, I couldn't figure out how to make anything work. And I'm a guy with 20 years of professional IT experience, who has used various desktop environments (Windows, MacOS, OSX, Gnome, KDE, etc.) and many different device interfaces (Palm, iOS, Android, Blackberry, Windows CE, etc).
Now, maybe there are lots of secret gestures and things that make it usable, and I just needed some initial instruction. Or an hour is too short of a time to get used to the UI. However, from the standpoint of just trying to pick a device up and use it for an hour, with no instruction, I have never encountered a UI that was such a confusing mess.
I can understand how that statement would sound strange, since the UI is so simple. It's all flat design with almost no buttons, so what could be confusing? The problem is, all the functionality is obscured by hidden menus that are conjured with undisclosed gestures. My response was like, "Ok, I'm reading an email. This is very nice and simple. But wait, how the hell do I create a new email? Oh, so in the mail application, if you slide your finger from this edge of the screen, you get a menu that has some hidden options? Ok. Why is creating a new email a hidden option?"
I don't remember if it was the button for creating a new email that was hidden, or some other obvious function, but the point is: Whose bright idea was it to put major functionality into multiple different hidden menus, and have those hidden menus change in every application?
Reading the article, I'm not sure if the scientist made the claim:
That life could have even come from another planet, like Mars. "At this point we cannot actually disprove or disregard this type of extreme scenario," he says.
So it seems like maybe the reporter posits that it came from Mars, and the scientist said, "Well we can't disprove that right now."
I have to say, I enjoy Gladwell's books. They're interesting and thought provoking. However, I've noticed a sort of pattern. He gives lots of examples of his theories, and the examples always sound compelling, but whenever I know about the example he's using in detail, his analysis is generally wrong. They're not patently provably wrong, but just wrong enough to make me uneasy and think, "This is a really weak argument here. If I knew about his other examples in detail, would they be equally weak?"
I wouldn't say that the Xbox was "done right". It still had massive technical problems, forcing recalls. Since announcing the Xbox One, they've reversed many of the decisions that they had made, since those decisions had angered their target audience. Even with those things fixed, I still won't be buying one, even though I'm just the kind of person who buys expensive consoles.
If you have a hardass above you in the chain of command that not only insists on being unreasonable, but threatens to fire anyone who even SUGGESTS doing things differently, how do you handle that?
Politely. With guile.
I don't know what you expect me to say. I've had to convince some hardass bosses of various things, and either I convinced them, or they convinced me, or I lived with it, or I quit. There's no magical answer here.
The question seemed to be, in effect, "Everyone expects things to be done in an unreasonable way. What technical thing can you do to meet the unreasonable demands?"
So my answer would be, "If their expectations are actually unreasonable, you won't meet them, so instead try to change them."
I'm not a developer, so take what I say with a grain of salt, but I *do* manage technical projects on a regular basis. I try to stick to the rule that deadlines are dependent on requirements. If you ask for something to be added to the project, then the deadline (and budget) must be reviewed and altered to account for the changes. It only makes sense.
But if you're trying to make a regular release schedule, then I'd suggest that you basically stop accepting new requests for each release some number of days ahead of time.
The key sentence in your post is, "But we still have to deal with constant incoming feature changes and requests that are expected to be included in this week's package." Change that expectation. Maybe tell people that all requested changes for Friday's release must be submitted at least a week in advance, and then set the task on Monday morning to review those requests and set them on a realistic schedule.
Of course, I might be talking out of my ass because I don't program and I don't really understand what Agile development is.
For one thing, Chrome doesn't really advertise new versions at all. I'm suprised to even see it noted that we're at v28. My Chrome is running Version 28 already, but if you had asked me what version I was running, I would have guessed 26.
In each upgrade, nothing breaks. There are almost no visual changes. You might just notice something new and go, "When did that happen?"
Slashdot Mirror
mostly they look at what others are doing and copy it (or buy it).
That's not the problem. The Metro UI is fairly innovative, for example, and not really copying or buying something. The problem is, it's bad.
The problem is that Microsoft has put too much focus into pushing their internal business agenda, and not enough on servicing their customers. Microsoft's development model is about deciding which strategic product they'd like you to buy, and then trying to force you to use it by hook or by crook, except they rarely consider the option of getting you to buy it by making it a great product.
Let them experience how thrilling it is to have their dark glasses taken away, feel what it's like not to be faceless anymore. Then, maybe they'd appreciate privacy a little more.
I'd like to give a hypothetical scenario for any domestic spying that the government does, because there are a lot of people who talk as though the government is doing nothing wrong, because the information being gathered isn't really "private", or else because "if you have nothing to hide, then you have nothing to fear!" So imagine if the system worked like this:
Every person and agency involved in the spying was also subject to the spying, and all of the information gathered would be published to a public database where anyone being spied on could access it. So if the NSA is reading your emails, then you can read all of the NSA's emails. If NSA employees can review your personal phone call metadata, then you can review NSA employee's personal phone call metadata. If the FBI is allowed to have your passwords, then you can have all of the FBI's passwords. What's good for the goose is good for the gander.
I've asked people who support the NSA to imagine that setup, and they say it's a terrible idea. I ask, but why is it a terrible idea? Would the employees object to their phone call metadata being made public on the grounds that it's an invasion of privacy? Would the NSA object to their private communications being made public because that information could be used by the people the NSA considers their enemies? "Well imagine that!" I say, "Apparently it *is* an invasion of privacy, and even if you've done nothing wrong, you might still have something to fear."
Good point. It seems like we must all have the ability to empathize, or else we couldn't understand anyone's motives. We must also have the ability to turn it off, or we would be constantly overwhelmed by empathy, and I would suppose we'd be much less violent.
It seems like, in a general way, we sort of divide people into "us" and "them", feeling empathy for "us" and not so much for "them". Maybe psychopaths are just very restrictive in who they include in "us"?
Well either way, it may just indicate market saturation. When you introduce a new product, nobody has one, and everyone who wants one buys one. After a few years, many of the people who want one already have one, so you sell fewer of them.
Even if they're a novelty that are only used by 10 year-olds, that's still a market, and lots of people were buying them and happy with their purchase.
Then save your appetite for destruction for when the original media is genuinely unreadable. There is no need to hasten that which is only perceived as inevitable.
I can think of some reasons to "hasten that which is... inevitable." First, there's the issue of clutter. There's no need to keep 1000 floppies when the data can all be stored on a single hard drive. If there's sensitive/confidential information on the floppies, having lots of disks is harder to keep track of and therefore potentially less secure. It's technically possible for accessing data on unreliable media to lead to some form of silent data corruption. Perhaps as important as anything else, having the old media may lead to a false sense of security, assuming that you have a good copy when maybe you don't.
They aren't nearly that fragile. Some are subject to manufacturing defects but that's another sort of problem and it's hardly universal.
Well no, that's not another sort of problem. There are many that are subject to manufacturing defects, in that many manufacturers have used cheap dyes that break down within a few years. Therefore, depending on when you bought the CDR and who manufactured it, it may have a very high failure rate. Ultimately that's the same problem as with floppies, and even old hard drives. Though optical media has the strength of having no moving parts that could break, all media is subject to the danger of being part of a "bad batch".
- Blu-Ray players can typically play DVDs and CDs; most people's broadband connections are still not capable of downloading Blu-Ray quality films in any reasonable time; at the current rate of progress this will still be the case for a significant proportion of the market (outside of large towns/cities) in 10 years time.
I think this is the only one of your points that I find compelling.
For clarification, I'm not claiming that all CDs and DVDs will cease to exist within 10 years. I just think the market will by pretty tiny, and most people won't even have equipment to read them. And also, for clarification, I'm talking less about the media as used by home audio/video equipment, and more talking about having drives in computers being used to store data. Already you're seeing more and more computers being built without optical drives. Everything is being distributed by Internet. In 10 years, I think having an optical data drive in your computer will be comparable to having a floppy drive or a parallel port.
If I'm wrong, I suspect that it's because you're right, and broadband will still suck in 10 years because the US can't be bothered to build infrastructure. Still, I don't expect that we'll be using optical media so much as flash media, or something newer than that.
As to this point:
- You can still get new, cheap vinyl record players even though CDs have been around for 30+ years. For less than $100 you can even get one which plays 78rpm records, which (essentially) stopped being produced 45 years ago!
I think that records may well outlive CDs. People who like records and care about the physical medium will continue to buy records, but people aren't attached to CD as a physical medium in the same way. It's already digital, and as long as you're getting the same bits, nobody is going to care if it's on a flash drive or a CD or downloaded from the Internet.
Well I'm not sure what to tell you. You've been lucky...?
I've seen plenty go bad. From what I've read on the subject, it supposedly depends on the quality of the manufacture, and the chemicals used in the dye. Though CDs can theoretically last something like a few hundred years, much of what's being sold isn't expected to last more than a few years. Again, that's from what I've read. I know for a fact that I've seen many of my own CDs and DVDs go bad without any physical damage.
I don't know what your goals and requirements are, but I wouldn't bet on old floppies, CDs, or even hard drives lasting for very long. There's an essential problem with old physical media in that the readers are becoming more scarce. You may have a lot of floppies, but how easy is it to find a floppy drive? It's not always easy to find adapters for old IDE or SCSI formats as newer interfaces have been developed. Personally, I don't expect CD/DVD drives to be around in 10 years.
But beyond that, there's an even bigger issue: media goes bad. Of course, how quickly it goes bad depends on quite a few things, including how it was manufactured, and how it's stored. Even if you store a bunch of CDs and floppies under good conditions, I'd expect at least 10% to go bad within 6 years. I'm completely pulling that number out of my ass and I have no science to back me up, but my point is, this stuff is not reliable. I think my 10% number is too low, even, but I'm trying to make sure I don't exaggerate.
However, we don't need fast Internet connectivity... Yes, maybe some cities will get government-built fiber downtown, but the rest of the state will be too busy fighting politics to actually improve any infrastructure.
This logic could be used to claim that we shouldn't treat water, electricity, or sewage as utilities. We don't *need* any of those things, in the strict hunter/gatherer sense.
On the other hand, ISPs have a clear business incentive to improve their speed and capacity.
They also have clear disincentives.
By being faster, they can claim an edge over their competitor in a market.
What competitor?
I say we void all community monopoly agreements
Well there is a bit of a problem in that we can't have people running around digging things up, running cable wherever they want willy-nilly. There's going to have to be some control, which means there won't be real competition. Infrastructure does not do well in the "free market".
and require private ISPs to provide fixed-bandwidth service to a government ISP. The government ISP can be a fallback.
Yeah, I'm sure that will work. Conservatives love having a "public option".
For those who favor the idea of Internet service as a government-run utility, what do you see as the best-case scenario for such a system?
Personally, I'd favor working on some kind of split responsibility. I've said this over and over again: part of our problem is that we have these large companies who are vertically integrated. You have a company like Comcast which builds the infrastructure, acts as the ISP, provides TV and VoIP service, online TV viewing services, and is also tied into the channels and content on their TV service. This creates some obvious opportunities for conflict of interest, e.g. Comcast might not be highly motivated to provide a high level of service for their Internet customers to access Netflix, since it competes with their TV offerings.
The potential for conflicts of interest are exacerbated by the fact that ISPs are generally either a monopoly or part of a duopoly. For example, Time Warner Cable is literally my only option for broadband Internet, unless I want to spend over $1,000/month. If TWC decided to block Netflix, I wouldn't really have an other competing option to switch to.
So my opinion has long been that there should be laws to control this effect by classifying the companies who own/build/maintain the infrastructure, and barring them from providing service over that infrastructure. My reasoning is that it often won't be practical to build many competing networks to every area that needs Internet, so competition between Internet infrastructure companies is unlikely. If you want to have a free market for Internet providers, there should be a relatively open/public network infrastructure created and maintained by an uninterested party (uninterested because they're barred from providing service over their own network).
To some degree, this is already happening. If you get an internet connection from a company like Speakeasy/Megapath or XO, they are actually providing internet access over Verizon's infrastructure. However, they are also competing with Verizon, who is also competing with (and colluding with) TWC, Comcast, and other vertically integrated providers. As a result, the only people who want faster Internet speeds are customers, who have no other option, and Netflix, who the ISPs would like to see fail.
You're right, but I think my analogy kind of covers that. In my analogy, I'm not giving Facebook the access (in the analogy, the keys to my house) because I want to share my private life with them. I do it because it's unfortunately necessary for me to use the service they offer. That is, if I want to use the house-cleaning service, I need to let them into my house. If I want to use Facebook to share with my friends and family, I have to upload what I'm sharing to Facebook.
And I think it works because you provide a cleaning service access to your house, knowing that they could rifle through your underwear drawer, but hoping that they won't. Similarly, I know that if I upload a bunch of information to a service like Facebook, they can mine that data in all kinds of creepy ways. I just hope that they won't get too creepy about it. Part of the reason I don't like Facebook is that I know they data mine the info in creepy ways.
But as much as I might dislike Facebook for creepy data mining, that doesn't excuse the NSA for data mining in ways that are even creepier.
I'm not sure I do trust Facebook more than I trust the government, but there's one key difference here: We're giving our data to Facebook voluntarily.
Facebook is like handing the keys of your house over to a relative stranger-- let's say a cleaning service-- knowing there's a possibility that they'll snoop around and go through your stuff. It might be a bad idea, but you want the service being provided. You choose to hand over access by choice, knowing what you're getting into. What the NSA is doing, to extend this analogy, is like someone breaking into your house and snooping around, going through your stuff, and doing it in secret so you never even knew they were in there.
Which is why you are not now, nor ever will be, running Dell or HP.
Well apparently with HP, the main reason I won't run that company is their recent CEOs have already driven it into the ground.
The amount of money, people and time you'd need to invest to compete with Windows would be enormous and you'd start at 0% market share and 0 applications.
Yeah, that's why you'd need to be a moron to start from scratch. If Dell and HP don't already have some R&D and marketing research spent on developing their own version of either Linux or BSD, then their management is grossly incompetent.
But even if the data is not corrupted or polluted, there's an even more basic problem: people misunderstand statistics. Even statisticians will frequently misunderstand statistics. Good statistical analysis often runs contrary to our natural sense of understanding, and statistics, by its nature, does not provide certainties.
Man shocked when putting all eggs in one basket is a bad idea. Solution: put all eggs in another basket.
I see it as an example of the cliché of "trying to solve last year's problem". Your server room gets wrecked by a car, so you try to figure out how to protect your servers from getting hit by cars. Never mind other potential problems.
now why on earth would I go and buy another product with a microsoft label again? right, I wouldn't, I didn't and I'm pretty sure I won't for quite some time...
Well part of the problem here is that Microsoft is not used to having people buy their products by choice. You know, they aren't used to the whole thing of having to be "better than the competition", or having to "appeal to their customers", or even "make a useful product". They're used to operating in the market that has made them successful. They're used to being able to say, "Buy the products we tell you to buy because otherwise you can't run the applications your business needs to run, and you can't play the games you want to play."
I was surprised. It was a strange and bold move for Microsoft to stab all the OEMs in the back by releasing their own computer hardware. Sure, they sell game consoles, but they don't also release the XBox OS to commodity hardware vendors.
I know that if I were running Dell or HP, as soon as I saw the Surface, I'd be investing extra money into R&D for my own desktop OS. If Microsoft wants to go the route of Apple and function as a systems integrator instead of an OS vendor, they're going to screw over a lot of their partners.
Not that my opinion counts for much, but I felt like the surface was bad. Not that the hardware was so terrible, but I find the Windows 8 UI infuriating, even on (or especially on) tablets. When I tried to use one for an hour, I couldn't figure out how to make anything work. And I'm a guy with 20 years of professional IT experience, who has used various desktop environments (Windows, MacOS, OSX, Gnome, KDE, etc.) and many different device interfaces (Palm, iOS, Android, Blackberry, Windows CE, etc).
Now, maybe there are lots of secret gestures and things that make it usable, and I just needed some initial instruction. Or an hour is too short of a time to get used to the UI. However, from the standpoint of just trying to pick a device up and use it for an hour, with no instruction, I have never encountered a UI that was such a confusing mess.
I can understand how that statement would sound strange, since the UI is so simple. It's all flat design with almost no buttons, so what could be confusing? The problem is, all the functionality is obscured by hidden menus that are conjured with undisclosed gestures. My response was like, "Ok, I'm reading an email. This is very nice and simple. But wait, how the hell do I create a new email? Oh, so in the mail application, if you slide your finger from this edge of the screen, you get a menu that has some hidden options? Ok. Why is creating a new email a hidden option?"
I don't remember if it was the button for creating a new email that was hidden, or some other obvious function, but the point is: Whose bright idea was it to put major functionality into multiple different hidden menus, and have those hidden menus change in every application?
Reading the article, I'm not sure if the scientist made the claim:
That life could have even come from another planet, like Mars. "At this point we cannot actually disprove or disregard this type of extreme scenario," he says.
So it seems like maybe the reporter posits that it came from Mars, and the scientist said, "Well we can't disprove that right now."
I have to say, I enjoy Gladwell's books. They're interesting and thought provoking. However, I've noticed a sort of pattern. He gives lots of examples of his theories, and the examples always sound compelling, but whenever I know about the example he's using in detail, his analysis is generally wrong. They're not patently provably wrong, but just wrong enough to make me uneasy and think, "This is a really weak argument here. If I knew about his other examples in detail, would they be equally weak?"
I wouldn't say that the Xbox was "done right". It still had massive technical problems, forcing recalls. Since announcing the Xbox One, they've reversed many of the decisions that they had made, since those decisions had angered their target audience. Even with those things fixed, I still won't be buying one, even though I'm just the kind of person who buys expensive consoles.
The way in which Apple and Microsoft worked towards abstracting the process of printing was a quite different thing.
And a poorly executing thing, at that. I mean, really, printing is still a mess. What makes Microsoft think they can handle 3D printing?
If you have a hardass above you in the chain of command that not only insists on being unreasonable, but threatens to fire anyone who even SUGGESTS doing things differently, how do you handle that?
Politely. With guile.
I don't know what you expect me to say. I've had to convince some hardass bosses of various things, and either I convinced them, or they convinced me, or I lived with it, or I quit. There's no magical answer here.
The question seemed to be, in effect, "Everyone expects things to be done in an unreasonable way. What technical thing can you do to meet the unreasonable demands?"
So my answer would be, "If their expectations are actually unreasonable, you won't meet them, so instead try to change them."
I'm not a developer, so take what I say with a grain of salt, but I *do* manage technical projects on a regular basis. I try to stick to the rule that deadlines are dependent on requirements. If you ask for something to be added to the project, then the deadline (and budget) must be reviewed and altered to account for the changes. It only makes sense.
But if you're trying to make a regular release schedule, then I'd suggest that you basically stop accepting new requests for each release some number of days ahead of time.
The key sentence in your post is, "But we still have to deal with constant incoming feature changes and requests that are expected to be included in this week's package." Change that expectation. Maybe tell people that all requested changes for Friday's release must be submitted at least a week in advance, and then set the task on Monday morning to review those requests and set them on a realistic schedule.
Of course, I might be talking out of my ass because I don't program and I don't really understand what Agile development is.
For one thing, Chrome doesn't really advertise new versions at all. I'm suprised to even see it noted that we're at v28. My Chrome is running Version 28 already, but if you had asked me what version I was running, I would have guessed 26.
In each upgrade, nothing breaks. There are almost no visual changes. You might just notice something new and go, "When did that happen?"