Well it certainly doesn't literally mean that these creatures would score better on a conventional IQ test than we would. If it's written, they wouldn't even know how to read. If it was verbal, they wouldn't speak english. I suppose the conjecture is that if these creatures were still around and we raised a bunch of them in our culture, they would probably generally score higher than normal humans on IQ tests.
If copyright was 10 or 15 years, I'd be OK with draconian DRM restrictions on the things that are under copyright
For me, you'd have to do more than allow copyrights and DRM to expire within a decade or two. There's also the issue of price. Go to Amazon and search for Dan Brown's new book (picked just because it was a recent popular book that I've heard of), and you'll find that you can buy the hardback for under $10 ($9.99 new or $9.36 used). The Kindle edition is $9.60. In any case it's not much of a difference in price, even though I'm sure it costs more to manufacture the hardcover than it costs to copy the Kindle edition. What's more, I can lend or give the hardcover version to friends, or even resell it if I want to.
Sure, the Kindle version is convenient in that I could buy it anywhere that I have a cell signal, but in return for that convenience, I have to pay hundreds of dollars upfront for the Kindle itself, and then I have to worry about what happens if Amazon closes down their Kindle store and shuts down their activation servers. Besides that, if I decide I like the Nook better and buy one to replace my Kindle, the purchase doesn't transfer over. Ultimately it just doesn't seem like a good value to me.
Unless you're a corporate creep like Vince Flynn, you're not writing books to get rich. You care a lot more about getting your words into peoples' hands than you do about socking away millions and paying off shareholders.
I think this is important to note: people wrote books long before copyright. They wrote because they thought what they were writing was important, or they wrote because they wanted to be famous and admired. Guys wrote to get chicks, because some chicks dig smart creative types. People wrote for all sorts of reasons even when it made them no money whatsoever.
Same with music, really. I frequently try to make this point when people talk about, "If we don't have strict copyrights and DRM, no one will make music anymore!!!" No, people wrote music and performed music before the invention of the copyright. People are musical creatures. They love singing and dancing and performing for each other. It's fun and helps you get laid. The fact is that you could outlaw all musical performances, and what would happen is people would run underground musical speakeasies. People might even protest by singing songs in the street for free, even knowing they'd go to jail. Some people love music that much.
Likewise, if you outlawed writing books, people would still write them and distribute them, and there'd be people who would go to jail for smuggling illegal books. You can't stop people from writing books. I've probably written a books-worth of posts on this site for free, and I'd be pretty annoyed if you tried to stop me.
Look at MP3s, they are now wold with no DRM whatsoever.
I think publishers and movie studios should be looking at what happened with music, and they should be wary of making the same mistakes. In taking so long to get into Internet distribution, the record companies handed that business over to Apple. In insisting on DRM, they gave Apple vendor lock-in, which gave Apple tremendous power over them. When they dropped DRM, it wasn't the nightmare some had imagined: people are still buying music. That's right, people are paying for music even without any kind of DRM to force them into it. They pay to be on the right side of things ethically and legally, but also they pay for convenience. Buying stuff on iTunes or Amazon is generally easier and more convenient than trying to pirate.
What you say sounds pretty smart to me. If we don't understand the simplest of nervous systems, then how could we understand the most complex? On the other hand, it does seem worthwhile to come up with elaborate theories of complex systems.
For one thing, we could analyze a simple system and come to completely incorrect ideas if we don't keep the more complex system in mind. Any theory of simple brains and nervous systems has to offer some room for explanation as to how they can get as complex as our own brains. To take it to the extreme, there's probably a limit to the knowledge that can be gained from analyzing a neuron on its own.
Or thinking of another subject, it's unlikely that Newton would have come up with universal gravitation by looking at the sun's apparent motion. He had to look at the whole universe-- the motion of all the stars and planets as well as looking at the motion of objects here on earth-- and then say, "These motions must all be caused by the same force." Sometimes it's worth looking at the whole complex system.
Besides that, the fact is that we probably care most about our own brains. In a lot of ways, we're studying these simpler brains in order to increase our understanding of our own brains. We want to be able to fix and control some of the problems in our own minds, and we want to replicate our minds. Insofar as that's the goal, it makes sense to constantly be looking at what we understand and what we can accomplish now instead of waiting for complete and perfect knowledge sometime in the future.
Have you ever done any kind of experiment? I remember back in college doing a bunch of relatively simple stuff, like testing the rate of acceleration due to gravity. Half the class got bad data.
Sure, they were just students, but these were really simple experiments, designed with full knowledge of what the results should be, and designed specifically to illustrate scientific principles to students. People were careful, the equipment was adequate, and still they got bad data. Imagine how much harder it would be if you don't really know what your results should be, and you're making up the experiment without even being sure that your experiment will be capable of testing what you want it to test.
I bet people get crap data all the time. If you get data that's all over the place, no apparent pattern, then there isn't necessarily a theory to work out. It probably means that your experiment is bad or you performed it badly. Even if the experiment was good, it means there's probably not a strong connection between the variables your testing and your results, or else there are other variables you're not controlling for. It's kind of back to the drawing board at that point.
Now if the results weren't random, but were consistently showing a trend contrary to the established theory, then scientists shouldn't toss that data. I doubt that's what we're talking about here, though.
the number of Diamon rio's sold during the 2 years they were available was > than the first 2 year period of the Ipod sales.
That wouldn't be shocking, since the first generation iPods were Mac-only at a time when Macs weren't selling well, OSX was brand new and buggy, and everyone still ran OS9. Nobody was buying MP3 players back then. The Diamond Rio was "widely popular"? Maybe every kid in your high school computer club had one, but there are people who are virtually technophobes with iPods. There are grandmothers and little kids and all kinds of people who own iPods.
the desktop PC in your eyes is explosively popular than net-books because there have been 90,876,998,321 sold ever since pc's existed compared to the number of net-books sold last month.
No, but I wouldn't say something as blatantly incorrect as "As many people bought netbooks last month as have desktops today," either.
Everyone was already downloading and listening to MP3s a good while back before the first iPod was released to the market and iTunes was launched... Apple deserves credit in exploring the "pay to download music files" market, particularly by convincing record companies to authorize a new business model to sell their product. Yet, they didn't changed any habits.
My parents weren't downloading MP3s from Napster in 1999. Neither were my aunts and uncles nor were my siblings. Yes, yes, I'm sure you knew several high school kids who were ahead of the curve on that one, but ultimately Napster wasn't a big deal because everyone was doing it. It was a big deal because record companies realized what would happen to them if everyone started doing it.
It wasn't until iTunes hit the scene that a lot of the downloading turned legit. Now Apple sells more music than Walmart. In my personal (admittedly anecdotal) experience, I know lots of people ranging from 12-70 years old who own iPods and use iTunes as their exclusive source of music. That's not nothing.
If you were a geek in the early 2000's you surely would have owned or coveted a personal mp3 player.
Right, if you were a geek. And the player was probably terrible, held 15 songs, was painful to use, etc. And all the non-geeks thought you were silly for using it instead of getting a CD player like a normal person.
The music industry hated MP3 players pre-itunes
The music industry still hates MP3 players. They've just learned that MP3 players are here to stay, so they may as well make the most of it. Lucky for us, someone had enough sway and negotiating skills to get the major labels to sign on to iTunes.
> Before the iPhone, only a relatively small number of business users had smart phones.
Are you kidding? Blackberries were everywhere before the iPhone.
Right, Blackberry: a relatively small number of business users. Go back in time 4 years, and you didn't see a whole lot of teenagers with Blackberries.
Good point. Wikipedia says 40k people per year die in car accidents. Every year. I'm finding conflicting stats for heart disease, but everyone seems to have it up over 400k per year. Some of that probably isn't preventable, but some of it probably is. I think there's something like 60k deaths per year from flu. That's just the normal flu. Another couple-hundred thousand deaths from tobacco (though that probably overlaps with heart disease, but still...).
While we worry about terrorists and heroin and AIDS and swine flu, we're being killed in much greater numbers by other things. Not that we shouldn't worry about AIDS and the swine flu, but *some* perspective is warranted. It reminds me of the Joker's speech in the hospital in "The Dark Knight":
You know what I noticed? Nobody panics when things go "according to plan," even if the plan is horrifying. If tomorrow I tell the press that, like, a gang-banger will get shot or a truckload of soldiers will be blown up, nobody panics because it's all "part of the plan." But when I say that one little old mayor will die, well then everyone loses their minds!
Not quite the same thing, but nobody gets freaked out about 40k people dying every single year in car accidents because we think it's just supposed to work that way. People still drive around recklessly as though they're playing Need for Speed. Hundreds of thousands can die from preventable diseases every year and we see no problem with it. Calls to regulate the food industry at all are seen as horrible infringements on our freedom. But have a couple thousand people die one year in a freak accident or a terrorist attack, and suddenly everyone loses their minds. Suddenly we should all give up our privacy and our freedoms for counter-terrorist measures. Suddenly we should accept suspensions of habeas corpus.
A lot of people I worked with had the PMP300 in 1999-2000 as many as I know that have ipods today.
There have been over 220 million iPods sold. Are you saying that there were 220 PMP300 sold by the year 2000?
You know, a lot of us were alive in 2000 and remember it. If we didn't remember, we could still read about it. Simply claiming that MP3 players were just as popular before the iPod isn't going to fool us.
You may call it a "crappy store" but it was the first time selling music online ever went anywhere, and to date is far larger than any other online music presence and even most real world stores.
It's actually bigger than all real-world stores. Supposedly the iTunes store is the largest music retailer in the US.
But you're right. Pre-iPod, almost no one had MP3 players. Before iTunes, almost no one bought music online. Before Apple took over online distribution, the record companies had no intention of selling music without DRM. Before the iPhone, only a relatively small number of business users had smart phones. Now, everywhere I go, I see people with iPods and iPhones, listening to the DRM-free music that they bought online.
Also, it's easy to forget the effect Apple had on the desktop/laptop market. Before the iMac, computers were all beige boxes. OSX put Unix on the desktop. You can see Apple's design influence in other manufacturer's hardware and other operating systems. Apple has threatened Windows enough that Microsoft has put out huge ad campaigns just to counter Apple. Apple single-handedly thwarted Microsoft's aims to control media distribution with their Window Media formats and their DRM. If not for movie and TV companies fearing that Apple would own video distribution the way they own music, I wonder whether they would be experimenting with streaming via channels like Hulu and Netflix.
But if a company could make more money by firing a particular employee, if we assume free market capitalism optimize social welfare*, why shouldn't the company fire that employee?
Contrary to what political demagogues might try to lead you to believe, free market capitalism isn't supposed to optimize social welfare by forcing everyone to be motivated solely by profit. Adam Smith didn't argue that people and businesses should, as some kind of weird moral rule, always do whatever is most profitable for themselves. The point of free market capitalism is that you're free to spend money as you wish. If you're a business owner with money to spare, that might include spending money in unprofitable ways.
The real theory is that people, in being able to spend money on whatever it is that they value (even if it's not profitable), will fund the things that are valuable and important. So yes, according to proper capitalism, a business can very well keep an employee even if it doesn't help profitability at all. It can even hurt profitability if they're able to cover the loss. It's just that if they're doing it, hopefully they're doing it for a good reason and not a stupid one.
But anyway, I'm not suggesting that companies should take on dead weight and run inefficiently. Please don't misunderstand. I'm just saying that there may be other values. A company might look at the employee himself and note that something as vague as "loyalty" is important. A company might consider its role in the community, or even its role in the world, and decide that they'll value something else enough to give up 0.0001% of profitability. It's possible that the purpose of your company isn't solely to drive profits, and therefore the welfare of the company is not contained in simply optimizing profits.
And yes, part of what I had in mind is the tendency for people to overvalue the short-term. If an employee doesn't add the profitability right now, right this second, he still might be worth keeping on. Maybe the employee is just struggling with something at the moment. Maybe it's a new guy who has lots of potential but hasn't found his footing yet. There are lots of things that you can't know from a set of numbers.
True. My example wasn't meant to list all the ways that an employee can be helpful in a way that's hard to measure, but just to give an idea of the sort of value that might be hard to measure. Another thing that occurs to me is you could have an employee that is out-performed by other 99% of the time, but is the only guy who can really do the job properly that left-over 1% of the time. If that 1% is clutch, then he might be your most valuable employee.
So overall me intent was to say that knowing some statistics in not a replacement for knowing your business. If you want to manage a business, then don't undervalue things like knowing your employees, paying talking to them, paying attention to the work that they're doing, and knowing the details about how they're doing that work. I don't think that sitting alone in an office somewhere and making decisions based on statistics alone is generally the best way to run a business.
profitability(company with employee) - profitability(company without employee)
I'd like to think that wouldn't still capture the entire value of the employee as a person. Is it possible for someone to have some value outside of profitability?
It seems to me that it's probably true that it'd be very hard to come up with good metrics for a programmer, but I think people should be more careful about metrics in general.
Sure, you can measure a bricklayer by how many bricks he can lay in an hour, but is that really how you want to measure him? What about quality? Doesn't it matter if the resulting wall looks good? Doesn't it matter whether the resulting wall will hold together under stress?
But now even those are pretty simple things. Let's get a little more complicated. You're a contractor and you hire 6 bricklayers. One guy doesn't seem to work as quickly as the rest, and they all give you comparable results. You fire the slow guy and suddenly all the other guys slow down. Quality drops. The client is less happy. What happened?
Maybe if you look into the situation, you find that the slow guy was slow because he was spending some of his time communicating with the client. He was spending part of his time overseeing the other bricklayers, keeping them on task, and keeping them from being too sloppy with their work. He's been serving a vital role in your team, but you don't see that just by measuring a couple simple metrics.
Like all statistics, productivity metrics can be useful, but they can also be misleading. You should make sure you really know what they mean before you make too many judgements on them. In evaluating your employees, it's better if you actually know your employees and have a sense for who they are, how they work, and how they fit together as a team. The value of a person just can't be represented in a couple of numbers.
iPhone users, I have no idea how you POP mail works
Works fine.
your BES is essentially a proxy server that solves some problems and gives you an enhanced experience.
What problems? What enhancements? I can browse the Internet on my phone pretty well without any proxy.
Most of us forget that the first single-point-of-failure is probably a cell tower....The next single-point-of-failure is probably a metro area uplink for your carrier....
Yes, there are other points of failure, but that's not really the issue. There are always going to be single-points-of-failure, but you try to minimize the number of them. To add another one unnecessarily is foolish.
I had an argument with someone about this topic a while back. It was a BlackBerry user who was insistent that a lot of value was added by putting RIM in the middle of your conversations... something about being able to email other blackberry users directly, and their Blackberry would get it even if their mail server was down... maybe? I don't know. Didn't make sense to me. And there was the fact that it was encrypted, and that you could have it push emails to your phone instead of your phone querying the mail server. That stuff is available for normal mail servers, too, so it's not much of a win.
I know Verizon also does (or used to do) something similar where Verizon downloads all of your email from your mail server through a desktop redirector, and then Verizon sends the email to your phone. They even encourage (or used to encourage) you to do things that way even if you have a Windows phone connecting to an Exchange server. I never understood the point of that kind of crap. Not only is it a single point of failure among all the Blackberry users, but it's an additional point of failure for each user. If my mail server is down or the carrier is down, RIM isn't making it so I keep getting mail. Plus it's an additional security risk. Why should my (or my company's) email be sent to some third-party's server unless it's absolutely necessary?
Rather, the burden of change should be placed on the populace (parents especially) and media.
Well I hope you realize (you probably do) that it's a lot more complicated than putting the burden somewhere. Who has the power to place the burden on someone anyway? Maybe the populace and media, but then you have to put the burden on them to put the burden on themselves. If you can motivate the populace to place burdens, you may as well just motivate them to produce nerds. (that's what we're asking for, right? producing more nerds?)
Also it's a big problem because, contrary to what some people think, "cool" isn't simply something that the media can go attaching to things willy-nilly. They'd love to have that power, and they try to do it, but it's really pretty hard to do. "Cool" seems to have various ambiguous traits, often including being "against mainstream" and "dangerous". If Malcolm Gladwell is to be believed, "cool" can only be controlled by controlling some highly influential kids that aren't going to be easily controllable. If we really knew how to tackle those sorts of things, we wouldn't have so much teenage drinking, smoking, sex, and drug use.
And if you ask me, I think that the problem we're confronted with here is much bigger and more widespread than it might seem. It's creeping into all sorts of industries and social groups, and has to do with the fact that we don't really value much of anything anymore. Now "we don't value anything" makes the problem sound worse and more drastic than it is, but bear with me. It's not all bad, but just to give some idea of where I'm going with this, think about how cheap our food is. It's so cheap that most of us are eating far more than we need to eat and still throwing it away. Food isn't always like that. Also our clothes are cheap, are cars are cheap, our computers and cell phones are cheap. Our music and movies and cultural currency is pretty much free since the advent of the Internet. Our workers are even pretty cheap-- not as cheap as the bosses would like and far less expensive than the workers would like, but overall it's pretty cheap. Lots of people work crazy hours doing crazy things for relatively small amounts of money, so much so that we take it for granted.
We take a lot for granted. Most of us (probably) take our safety for granted, our food for granted, our jobs for granted, our families for granted, our employees for granted. It's all kind of cheaply bought and sold. There was a time when, if you bought a tool for your work, you might expect that you'd be passing it down to your grandkids someday. Now you pretty well expect to replace it in 5 years. Nothing lasts. It's not just that we have a disposable culture, but our culture is disposable. We eat through pop stars and cultural icons and creative works like there's an endless supply of them. And you know, there seems to be an endless supply of them.
Like I said, it's not all bad. We have an abundance of all kinds of things, which is good in a lot of ways, but we just don't really value it. I think it's just part of that movement that employers don't value employees and view them as disposable. In such a disposable world, where so much comes so easily, it ends up not seeming worthwhile to most people to work very hard and strive for excellence or achievement. No matter what you do, we assume that you're going to be used up and tossed out. In light of that situation, who can blame the scores of kids who say, "I don't want to be a scientist. That stuff sound hard and boring, and I'm not going to get anything for it anyway."?
I'm ranting, and I'm sure I'm overstating the situation a little. I just thought I'd offer it as something to think about.
Both the Internet and the vast majority of American and European business users elected to stay with the legacy IPv4 network.
Users didn't opt for opting out of IPv6. Large telcos didn't spend enough money soon enough to get the upgrade rolling in a tragedy of the commons kind of situation.
Right. Most users don't know what IPv6 is and are simply using whatever they've been set up to use. In the case of home users, users have been set up to use whatever their ISP has told them to use. In the case of both businesses and individuals, it's hard to say anyone opted for anything since IPv6 usually isn't even a real option. ISPs aren't supporting it. It's possible to do some kind of tunneling to use IPv6, but since it's basically not in use, there isn't a lot of payoff.
To get around the much-predicted Internet IPv4 address famine, people turned to network address translation (NAT) and Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP). With this combination, thousands of corporate PCs can have their own internal IPv4 addresses while using up only a single IP address, as far as the Internet is concerned.
Apart from leaving CIDR out of the picture, the second sentence is simply not true. The upper limit of usability is around 30-50 computers / public ip these days, if those computers are using the internet. NAT breaks so many things...
Well NAT can accomplish a lot, but you're right that it can break a lot of things. The idea of giving everything a non-routable address and then using NAT is sort of adding a level of complexity where it shouldn't be necessary. But ultimately, my firewalls are doing a good enough job at managing it, though, and that's not what bothers me. (Yes, I'm just talking about me personally here. I know NAT is causing problems for others.)
What really bothers me is that there *is* an IPv4 address famine. It's just that the IPv4 addresses are being rationed well enough that we haven't yet reached the point of outright crisis. If you really think that IPv4 addressed are plentiful, then riddle me this: why can't I get a static IP for my home internet connection? In order to get a static IP, I have to upgrade to a "business" account which costs $200/month more and doesn't really offer any improvements other than a static IP. Yup. $200/month for a static IP.
Really it's just another example of ISPs refusing to invest in the upgrades they need in order to provide a modern level of service. They're hoping that they can continue indefinitely giving us dynamic IP addresses, milking DSL and even... *sight*... dial-up. Part of it, we have to realize, is that they don't want the Internet to be a P2P network. They want it to be a broadcast network where they control the broadcast. There's no incentive for them to make your two-way communications easier. They're probably just as happy if you're behind several layers of NAT and can't do anything but download web pages.
The problem is that businesses don't want to pay highly-trained and specialized workers more
Well more generally, businesses don't want to have to pay a decent wage for any worker. You think it's bad that programmers aren't getting paid six figures, but go to a lower rung on the ladder, and you'll find that a lot of people don't make a wage what most of us would consider "a livable wage". Like forget about the new car or big screen TV, and forget about sending your kids to a decent school or paying for college. Some of those people are just hoping to be able to both pay rent and buy groceries this month.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying you're spoiled. I'm not saying you should quit complaining. I suppose I'm just suggesting that you think of your company's janitor or loading dock worker and think about the kind of treatment they get and what their compensation is. It's worth remembering: your company would most likely treat you the exact same way if they could get away with it.
Where do i find still my undergrad degree in computing sciences useful? EVERYWHERE and EVERY DAY!!!
On the other side of things, I was a philosophy major, and I find that stuff useful all the time in my IT work. Specialization is good, but you also need a certain level of cross-polinization. Too great a degree of specialization can make you myopic.
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Well it certainly doesn't literally mean that these creatures would score better on a conventional IQ test than we would. If it's written, they wouldn't even know how to read. If it was verbal, they wouldn't speak english. I suppose the conjecture is that if these creatures were still around and we raised a bunch of them in our culture, they would probably generally score higher than normal humans on IQ tests.
If copyright was 10 or 15 years, I'd be OK with draconian DRM restrictions on the things that are under copyright
For me, you'd have to do more than allow copyrights and DRM to expire within a decade or two. There's also the issue of price. Go to Amazon and search for Dan Brown's new book (picked just because it was a recent popular book that I've heard of), and you'll find that you can buy the hardback for under $10 ($9.99 new or $9.36 used). The Kindle edition is $9.60. In any case it's not much of a difference in price, even though I'm sure it costs more to manufacture the hardcover than it costs to copy the Kindle edition. What's more, I can lend or give the hardcover version to friends, or even resell it if I want to.
Sure, the Kindle version is convenient in that I could buy it anywhere that I have a cell signal, but in return for that convenience, I have to pay hundreds of dollars upfront for the Kindle itself, and then I have to worry about what happens if Amazon closes down their Kindle store and shuts down their activation servers. Besides that, if I decide I like the Nook better and buy one to replace my Kindle, the purchase doesn't transfer over. Ultimately it just doesn't seem like a good value to me.
Unless you're a corporate creep like Vince Flynn, you're not writing books to get rich. You care a lot more about getting your words into peoples' hands than you do about socking away millions and paying off shareholders.
I think this is important to note: people wrote books long before copyright. They wrote because they thought what they were writing was important, or they wrote because they wanted to be famous and admired. Guys wrote to get chicks, because some chicks dig smart creative types. People wrote for all sorts of reasons even when it made them no money whatsoever.
Same with music, really. I frequently try to make this point when people talk about, "If we don't have strict copyrights and DRM, no one will make music anymore!!!" No, people wrote music and performed music before the invention of the copyright. People are musical creatures. They love singing and dancing and performing for each other. It's fun and helps you get laid. The fact is that you could outlaw all musical performances, and what would happen is people would run underground musical speakeasies. People might even protest by singing songs in the street for free, even knowing they'd go to jail. Some people love music that much.
Likewise, if you outlawed writing books, people would still write them and distribute them, and there'd be people who would go to jail for smuggling illegal books. You can't stop people from writing books. I've probably written a books-worth of posts on this site for free, and I'd be pretty annoyed if you tried to stop me.
Look at MP3s, they are now wold with no DRM whatsoever.
I think publishers and movie studios should be looking at what happened with music, and they should be wary of making the same mistakes. In taking so long to get into Internet distribution, the record companies handed that business over to Apple. In insisting on DRM, they gave Apple vendor lock-in, which gave Apple tremendous power over them. When they dropped DRM, it wasn't the nightmare some had imagined: people are still buying music. That's right, people are paying for music even without any kind of DRM to force them into it. They pay to be on the right side of things ethically and legally, but also they pay for convenience. Buying stuff on iTunes or Amazon is generally easier and more convenient than trying to pirate.
What you say sounds pretty smart to me. If we don't understand the simplest of nervous systems, then how could we understand the most complex? On the other hand, it does seem worthwhile to come up with elaborate theories of complex systems.
For one thing, we could analyze a simple system and come to completely incorrect ideas if we don't keep the more complex system in mind. Any theory of simple brains and nervous systems has to offer some room for explanation as to how they can get as complex as our own brains. To take it to the extreme, there's probably a limit to the knowledge that can be gained from analyzing a neuron on its own.
Or thinking of another subject, it's unlikely that Newton would have come up with universal gravitation by looking at the sun's apparent motion. He had to look at the whole universe-- the motion of all the stars and planets as well as looking at the motion of objects here on earth-- and then say, "These motions must all be caused by the same force." Sometimes it's worth looking at the whole complex system.
Besides that, the fact is that we probably care most about our own brains. In a lot of ways, we're studying these simpler brains in order to increase our understanding of our own brains. We want to be able to fix and control some of the problems in our own minds, and we want to replicate our minds. Insofar as that's the goal, it makes sense to constantly be looking at what we understand and what we can accomplish now instead of waiting for complete and perfect knowledge sometime in the future.
Have you ever done any kind of experiment? I remember back in college doing a bunch of relatively simple stuff, like testing the rate of acceleration due to gravity. Half the class got bad data.
Sure, they were just students, but these were really simple experiments, designed with full knowledge of what the results should be, and designed specifically to illustrate scientific principles to students. People were careful, the equipment was adequate, and still they got bad data. Imagine how much harder it would be if you don't really know what your results should be, and you're making up the experiment without even being sure that your experiment will be capable of testing what you want it to test.
I bet people get crap data all the time. If you get data that's all over the place, no apparent pattern, then there isn't necessarily a theory to work out. It probably means that your experiment is bad or you performed it badly. Even if the experiment was good, it means there's probably not a strong connection between the variables your testing and your results, or else there are other variables you're not controlling for. It's kind of back to the drawing board at that point.
Now if the results weren't random, but were consistently showing a trend contrary to the established theory, then scientists shouldn't toss that data. I doubt that's what we're talking about here, though.
the number of Diamon rio's sold during the 2 years they were available was > than the first 2 year period of the Ipod sales.
That wouldn't be shocking, since the first generation iPods were Mac-only at a time when Macs weren't selling well, OSX was brand new and buggy, and everyone still ran OS9. Nobody was buying MP3 players back then. The Diamond Rio was "widely popular"? Maybe every kid in your high school computer club had one, but there are people who are virtually technophobes with iPods. There are grandmothers and little kids and all kinds of people who own iPods.
the desktop PC in your eyes is explosively popular than net-books because there have been 90,876,998,321 sold ever since pc's existed compared to the number of net-books sold last month.
No, but I wouldn't say something as blatantly incorrect as "As many people bought netbooks last month as have desktops today," either.
You installed OO on a machine that wouldn't even run Office, then complained about start up times.
In fairness, OpenOffice is slow to load. Sorry, but yeah, it is. They're working on it, and it's supposed to be much improved in 3.2.
Everyone was already downloading and listening to MP3s a good while back before the first iPod was released to the market and iTunes was launched... Apple deserves credit in exploring the "pay to download music files" market, particularly by convincing record companies to authorize a new business model to sell their product. Yet, they didn't changed any habits.
My parents weren't downloading MP3s from Napster in 1999. Neither were my aunts and uncles nor were my siblings. Yes, yes, I'm sure you knew several high school kids who were ahead of the curve on that one, but ultimately Napster wasn't a big deal because everyone was doing it. It was a big deal because record companies realized what would happen to them if everyone started doing it.
It wasn't until iTunes hit the scene that a lot of the downloading turned legit. Now Apple sells more music than Walmart. In my personal (admittedly anecdotal) experience, I know lots of people ranging from 12-70 years old who own iPods and use iTunes as their exclusive source of music. That's not nothing.
If you were a geek in the early 2000's you surely would have owned or coveted a personal mp3 player.
Right, if you were a geek. And the player was probably terrible, held 15 songs, was painful to use, etc. And all the non-geeks thought you were silly for using it instead of getting a CD player like a normal person.
The music industry hated MP3 players pre-itunes
The music industry still hates MP3 players. They've just learned that MP3 players are here to stay, so they may as well make the most of it. Lucky for us, someone had enough sway and negotiating skills to get the major labels to sign on to iTunes.
> Before the iPhone, only a relatively small number of business users had smart phones.
Are you kidding? Blackberries were everywhere before the iPhone.
Right, Blackberry: a relatively small number of business users. Go back in time 4 years, and you didn't see a whole lot of teenagers with Blackberries.
Good point. Wikipedia says 40k people per year die in car accidents. Every year. I'm finding conflicting stats for heart disease, but everyone seems to have it up over 400k per year. Some of that probably isn't preventable, but some of it probably is. I think there's something like 60k deaths per year from flu. That's just the normal flu. Another couple-hundred thousand deaths from tobacco (though that probably overlaps with heart disease, but still...).
While we worry about terrorists and heroin and AIDS and swine flu, we're being killed in much greater numbers by other things. Not that we shouldn't worry about AIDS and the swine flu, but *some* perspective is warranted. It reminds me of the Joker's speech in the hospital in "The Dark Knight":
You know what I noticed? Nobody panics when things go "according to plan," even if the plan is horrifying. If tomorrow I tell the press that, like, a gang-banger will get shot or a truckload of soldiers will be blown up, nobody panics because it's all "part of the plan." But when I say that one little old mayor will die, well then everyone loses their minds!
Not quite the same thing, but nobody gets freaked out about 40k people dying every single year in car accidents because we think it's just supposed to work that way. People still drive around recklessly as though they're playing Need for Speed. Hundreds of thousands can die from preventable diseases every year and we see no problem with it. Calls to regulate the food industry at all are seen as horrible infringements on our freedom. But have a couple thousand people die one year in a freak accident or a terrorist attack, and suddenly everyone loses their minds. Suddenly we should all give up our privacy and our freedoms for counter-terrorist measures. Suddenly we should accept suspensions of habeas corpus.
A lot of people I worked with had the PMP300 in 1999-2000 as many as I know that have ipods today.
There have been over 220 million iPods sold. Are you saying that there were 220 PMP300 sold by the year 2000?
You know, a lot of us were alive in 2000 and remember it. If we didn't remember, we could still read about it. Simply claiming that MP3 players were just as popular before the iPod isn't going to fool us.
You may call it a "crappy store" but it was the first time selling music online ever went anywhere, and to date is far larger than any other online music presence and even most real world stores.
It's actually bigger than all real-world stores. Supposedly the iTunes store is the largest music retailer in the US.
But you're right. Pre-iPod, almost no one had MP3 players. Before iTunes, almost no one bought music online. Before Apple took over online distribution, the record companies had no intention of selling music without DRM. Before the iPhone, only a relatively small number of business users had smart phones. Now, everywhere I go, I see people with iPods and iPhones, listening to the DRM-free music that they bought online.
Also, it's easy to forget the effect Apple had on the desktop/laptop market. Before the iMac, computers were all beige boxes. OSX put Unix on the desktop. You can see Apple's design influence in other manufacturer's hardware and other operating systems. Apple has threatened Windows enough that Microsoft has put out huge ad campaigns just to counter Apple. Apple single-handedly thwarted Microsoft's aims to control media distribution with their Window Media formats and their DRM. If not for movie and TV companies fearing that Apple would own video distribution the way they own music, I wonder whether they would be experimenting with streaming via channels like Hulu and Netflix.
But if a company could make more money by firing a particular employee, if we assume free market capitalism optimize social welfare*, why shouldn't the company fire that employee?
Contrary to what political demagogues might try to lead you to believe, free market capitalism isn't supposed to optimize social welfare by forcing everyone to be motivated solely by profit. Adam Smith didn't argue that people and businesses should, as some kind of weird moral rule, always do whatever is most profitable for themselves. The point of free market capitalism is that you're free to spend money as you wish. If you're a business owner with money to spare, that might include spending money in unprofitable ways.
The real theory is that people, in being able to spend money on whatever it is that they value (even if it's not profitable), will fund the things that are valuable and important. So yes, according to proper capitalism, a business can very well keep an employee even if it doesn't help profitability at all. It can even hurt profitability if they're able to cover the loss. It's just that if they're doing it, hopefully they're doing it for a good reason and not a stupid one.
But anyway, I'm not suggesting that companies should take on dead weight and run inefficiently. Please don't misunderstand. I'm just saying that there may be other values. A company might look at the employee himself and note that something as vague as "loyalty" is important. A company might consider its role in the community, or even its role in the world, and decide that they'll value something else enough to give up 0.0001% of profitability. It's possible that the purpose of your company isn't solely to drive profits, and therefore the welfare of the company is not contained in simply optimizing profits.
And yes, part of what I had in mind is the tendency for people to overvalue the short-term. If an employee doesn't add the profitability right now, right this second, he still might be worth keeping on. Maybe the employee is just struggling with something at the moment. Maybe it's a new guy who has lots of potential but hasn't found his footing yet. There are lots of things that you can't know from a set of numbers.
True. My example wasn't meant to list all the ways that an employee can be helpful in a way that's hard to measure, but just to give an idea of the sort of value that might be hard to measure. Another thing that occurs to me is you could have an employee that is out-performed by other 99% of the time, but is the only guy who can really do the job properly that left-over 1% of the time. If that 1% is clutch, then he might be your most valuable employee.
So overall me intent was to say that knowing some statistics in not a replacement for knowing your business. If you want to manage a business, then don't undervalue things like knowing your employees, paying talking to them, paying attention to the work that they're doing, and knowing the details about how they're doing that work. I don't think that sitting alone in an office somewhere and making decisions based on statistics alone is generally the best way to run a business.
profitability(company with employee) - profitability(company without employee)
I'd like to think that wouldn't still capture the entire value of the employee as a person. Is it possible for someone to have some value outside of profitability?
It seems to me that it's probably true that it'd be very hard to come up with good metrics for a programmer, but I think people should be more careful about metrics in general.
Sure, you can measure a bricklayer by how many bricks he can lay in an hour, but is that really how you want to measure him? What about quality? Doesn't it matter if the resulting wall looks good? Doesn't it matter whether the resulting wall will hold together under stress?
But now even those are pretty simple things. Let's get a little more complicated. You're a contractor and you hire 6 bricklayers. One guy doesn't seem to work as quickly as the rest, and they all give you comparable results. You fire the slow guy and suddenly all the other guys slow down. Quality drops. The client is less happy. What happened?
Maybe if you look into the situation, you find that the slow guy was slow because he was spending some of his time communicating with the client. He was spending part of his time overseeing the other bricklayers, keeping them on task, and keeping them from being too sloppy with their work. He's been serving a vital role in your team, but you don't see that just by measuring a couple simple metrics.
Like all statistics, productivity metrics can be useful, but they can also be misleading. You should make sure you really know what they mean before you make too many judgements on them. In evaluating your employees, it's better if you actually know your employees and have a sense for who they are, how they work, and how they fit together as a team. The value of a person just can't be represented in a couple of numbers.
iPhone users, I have no idea how you POP mail works
Works fine.
your BES is essentially a proxy server that solves some problems and gives you an enhanced experience.
What problems? What enhancements? I can browse the Internet on my phone pretty well without any proxy.
Most of us forget that the first single-point-of-failure is probably a cell tower....The next single-point-of-failure is probably a metro area uplink for your carrier....
Yes, there are other points of failure, but that's not really the issue. There are always going to be single-points-of-failure, but you try to minimize the number of them. To add another one unnecessarily is foolish.
I don't know about disabling cameras, but iPhones and Windows phones should be able to enforce strong passwords and use VPN.
I had an argument with someone about this topic a while back. It was a BlackBerry user who was insistent that a lot of value was added by putting RIM in the middle of your conversations... something about being able to email other blackberry users directly, and their Blackberry would get it even if their mail server was down... maybe? I don't know. Didn't make sense to me. And there was the fact that it was encrypted, and that you could have it push emails to your phone instead of your phone querying the mail server. That stuff is available for normal mail servers, too, so it's not much of a win.
I know Verizon also does (or used to do) something similar where Verizon downloads all of your email from your mail server through a desktop redirector, and then Verizon sends the email to your phone. They even encourage (or used to encourage) you to do things that way even if you have a Windows phone connecting to an Exchange server. I never understood the point of that kind of crap. Not only is it a single point of failure among all the Blackberry users, but it's an additional point of failure for each user. If my mail server is down or the carrier is down, RIM isn't making it so I keep getting mail. Plus it's an additional security risk. Why should my (or my company's) email be sent to some third-party's server unless it's absolutely necessary?
Rather, the burden of change should be placed on the populace (parents especially) and media.
Well I hope you realize (you probably do) that it's a lot more complicated than putting the burden somewhere. Who has the power to place the burden on someone anyway? Maybe the populace and media, but then you have to put the burden on them to put the burden on themselves. If you can motivate the populace to place burdens, you may as well just motivate them to produce nerds. (that's what we're asking for, right? producing more nerds?)
Also it's a big problem because, contrary to what some people think, "cool" isn't simply something that the media can go attaching to things willy-nilly. They'd love to have that power, and they try to do it, but it's really pretty hard to do. "Cool" seems to have various ambiguous traits, often including being "against mainstream" and "dangerous". If Malcolm Gladwell is to be believed, "cool" can only be controlled by controlling some highly influential kids that aren't going to be easily controllable. If we really knew how to tackle those sorts of things, we wouldn't have so much teenage drinking, smoking, sex, and drug use.
And if you ask me, I think that the problem we're confronted with here is much bigger and more widespread than it might seem. It's creeping into all sorts of industries and social groups, and has to do with the fact that we don't really value much of anything anymore. Now "we don't value anything" makes the problem sound worse and more drastic than it is, but bear with me. It's not all bad, but just to give some idea of where I'm going with this, think about how cheap our food is. It's so cheap that most of us are eating far more than we need to eat and still throwing it away. Food isn't always like that. Also our clothes are cheap, are cars are cheap, our computers and cell phones are cheap. Our music and movies and cultural currency is pretty much free since the advent of the Internet. Our workers are even pretty cheap-- not as cheap as the bosses would like and far less expensive than the workers would like, but overall it's pretty cheap. Lots of people work crazy hours doing crazy things for relatively small amounts of money, so much so that we take it for granted.
We take a lot for granted. Most of us (probably) take our safety for granted, our food for granted, our jobs for granted, our families for granted, our employees for granted. It's all kind of cheaply bought and sold. There was a time when, if you bought a tool for your work, you might expect that you'd be passing it down to your grandkids someday. Now you pretty well expect to replace it in 5 years. Nothing lasts. It's not just that we have a disposable culture, but our culture is disposable. We eat through pop stars and cultural icons and creative works like there's an endless supply of them. And you know, there seems to be an endless supply of them.
Like I said, it's not all bad. We have an abundance of all kinds of things, which is good in a lot of ways, but we just don't really value it. I think it's just part of that movement that employers don't value employees and view them as disposable. In such a disposable world, where so much comes so easily, it ends up not seeming worthwhile to most people to work very hard and strive for excellence or achievement. No matter what you do, we assume that you're going to be used up and tossed out. In light of that situation, who can blame the scores of kids who say, "I don't want to be a scientist. That stuff sound hard and boring, and I'm not going to get anything for it anyway."?
I'm ranting, and I'm sure I'm overstating the situation a little. I just thought I'd offer it as something to think about.
Users didn't opt for opting out of IPv6. Large telcos didn't spend enough money soon enough to get the upgrade rolling in a tragedy of the commons kind of situation.
Right. Most users don't know what IPv6 is and are simply using whatever they've been set up to use. In the case of home users, users have been set up to use whatever their ISP has told them to use. In the case of both businesses and individuals, it's hard to say anyone opted for anything since IPv6 usually isn't even a real option. ISPs aren't supporting it. It's possible to do some kind of tunneling to use IPv6, but since it's basically not in use, there isn't a lot of payoff.
Apart from leaving CIDR out of the picture, the second sentence is simply not true. The upper limit of usability is around 30-50 computers / public ip these days, if those computers are using the internet. NAT breaks so many things...
Well NAT can accomplish a lot, but you're right that it can break a lot of things. The idea of giving everything a non-routable address and then using NAT is sort of adding a level of complexity where it shouldn't be necessary. But ultimately, my firewalls are doing a good enough job at managing it, though, and that's not what bothers me. (Yes, I'm just talking about me personally here. I know NAT is causing problems for others.)
What really bothers me is that there *is* an IPv4 address famine. It's just that the IPv4 addresses are being rationed well enough that we haven't yet reached the point of outright crisis. If you really think that IPv4 addressed are plentiful, then riddle me this: why can't I get a static IP for my home internet connection? In order to get a static IP, I have to upgrade to a "business" account which costs $200/month more and doesn't really offer any improvements other than a static IP. Yup. $200/month for a static IP.
Really it's just another example of ISPs refusing to invest in the upgrades they need in order to provide a modern level of service. They're hoping that they can continue indefinitely giving us dynamic IP addresses, milking DSL and even... *sight*... dial-up. Part of it, we have to realize, is that they don't want the Internet to be a P2P network. They want it to be a broadcast network where they control the broadcast. There's no incentive for them to make your two-way communications easier. They're probably just as happy if you're behind several layers of NAT and can't do anything but download web pages.
The problem is that businesses don't want to pay highly-trained and specialized workers more
Well more generally, businesses don't want to have to pay a decent wage for any worker. You think it's bad that programmers aren't getting paid six figures, but go to a lower rung on the ladder, and you'll find that a lot of people don't make a wage what most of us would consider "a livable wage". Like forget about the new car or big screen TV, and forget about sending your kids to a decent school or paying for college. Some of those people are just hoping to be able to both pay rent and buy groceries this month.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying you're spoiled. I'm not saying you should quit complaining. I suppose I'm just suggesting that you think of your company's janitor or loading dock worker and think about the kind of treatment they get and what their compensation is. It's worth remembering: your company would most likely treat you the exact same way if they could get away with it.
Where do i find still my undergrad degree in computing sciences useful? EVERYWHERE and EVERY DAY!!!
On the other side of things, I was a philosophy major, and I find that stuff useful all the time in my IT work. Specialization is good, but you also need a certain level of cross-polinization. Too great a degree of specialization can make you myopic.