As an academician, his comments are certainly valid. I was impressed that he hints that he "gets it" from a practical stanpoint as well.
As much as I like Wikipedia and use if fairly often, I do recognize that it is not a definitive source of information. It's a great tool to find out about something quick, but like all reference materials, should be cross-checked and compared to others is you want to get yours facts straight.
But the whole idea of authoritative information is rather obtuse. When I was a kid, we had the World Book like most families. For years, by parents took the "yearbook" updates and once we actually put stickers in the main books to flag updates. But never once when writing a school report did I look in those year books for updated information or corrections--even though I had them at my fingertips. And even if the current update was considered authoritative when written, it might turn out to be wrong five minutes after the book was printed.
I think the ultimate question comes down to how accurate information needs to be for the task at hand, rather than a quest for the perfect answer. After all, using the McHenry's example, if we're looking to get an idea about who Alexander Hamilton was, do we really care about the exact year of his resignation. Very few of us do history for a living, although it is a fun hobby.
Another point: Since the smart card will obviously be able to absolutely identify my as myself, and since obviously nobody else could impersonate me, I'll always be myself.
What a relief! I'm always concerned about whether or not I'm myself on any given day.
Sounds like the wrong member of the Powell family resigned.
And this is the party that claims to get Government off the people's backs? The founding fathers' dust would roll over in their graves, except the FCC probably claims juridiction over that as well!
I've been working with medical research organizations that are having to deal with 21 CFR Part 11 restrictions on restricting access and ensuring data integrity as part of the FDA process for clinical trials. It is a much more strategic approach than the traditional "patch and fix" approach taken by other IT organizations I work with.
When I first saw the FDA requirements, I was horrified, but after thinking about it a while, I started wondering why al systems don't take this kind of approach.
It comes back to the old "when you're up to your ass in alligators..." problem. If you can deal with some issues on a more strategic level, you can try to design many of the day-to-day problems out of the system, allowing sysadmins to spend less time fixing the same problem over and over again.
So we are closer to being able to shot down a missle, that by definition comes with a return address. NORAD watches the entire planet for rocket engine plumes and would know instantly where a missile launch originated.
At the same time, we only inspect a small percentage of the 300,000+ shipping containers that enter this country every year.
Why use a missle when you could Fedex your weapon and be relatively untraceable? Aren't we missing something here?
After all, we're each much more likely to die of heart disease, be killed in a car wreck, or be murdered on the streets than be killed by terrorists or a nuclear bomb...even if we assume that 9/11/is the norm.
I have a ReplayTV box and it definitely sends stuff back to mommy. Since I started having it dial to a Linux box in my house to use my DSL connection, I started capturing all network traffic to and from it when it connects at night. In a typical night, it gets about 150KB of info and sends about 100KB.
The only things that Neilsen can't get like this in knowledge of who in the family is watching and where they fit in the demographic. So a 40-year old like me might gets ads for Britney or Polygrip, when I really want to see "Bob the Enzyte guy".
Also, my bet would be that ReplayTV and Tivo would want more green than the lousy $5 they pay to the public.
I would state that hommoraging money seems to be the American Way. After all, when the War On Terror(tm) started, how was the nation mobilized for war? By being told to go shopping!
Buy some junk, defeat a terrorist...Makes America strong!
In my 20+ years in the IT business, I've seen obscene amounts of money spent on IT with little or no idea of what benefit it would bring or how it would be used. I'm sure that made America strong as well.
DOD and some of the services already run their own "Internets" and have for many years. This is another round of building that great new network that will be the ultimate IT answer for the next few eternities (Note: in reality, 1 eternity unit is roughly about 6 months of human time).
What they haven't addressed is how this great network will be used to better defend the nation or reduce the cost of doing so.
Paul Strassman, a regular columnist for Computerworld, often presents studies of profitability of companies that heavily invest in IT versus those that don't. His studies tend to indicate that comapnies that invest larger percentages of sales tend to have lower profit margins, indicating that perhaps those companies are investing in technology in ways that aren't optimal.
Why should Government be any different? Didn't President Eisenhower warn about the "Defense-Industrial Complex" and the risk of Government buying non-optimal stuff to assist industry profit margins. So why should large-dollar Government-Industry partnerships be any more effiecient than what Paul Strassman sees in the private sector?
Why hasn't anyone noticed before that pay in an area is directly tied to housing costs, and therefore you can save money by moving jobs to rural areas? I guess that's why Dr. White will hopefully make the big bucks!
Now if we can just change a few tax loopholes to make a Government incentive to move to the country instead of over seas? Who knows? We might start another Civil War!
But really, as jobs move to rural areas, housing prices will increase there, and tech jobs will probably wind up moving from town to town, just as textile jobs used to when I was a kid in Alabama. A town would offer little better deal and the company would move a few miles to take advantage of it. I don't think anybody won in that game, except the lawyers of course.
They founded a business model on taking BSD Unix, customizing and taking it proprietary, then selling the devil out of it. Without Open Source, Sun wouldn't have an OS to sell!
Does a technology reviewer ever say that "this really sucks and it's a waste of time to consider it"? They always say that every product is the next big thing, or at least that it's promising. A real shame hearing this from Walt Mossberg since I generally enjoy his reviews.
Will it beat out Google? I seem to remember that Altavista was once the primo search engine before Google came along. M$ may win, but if they do, someone will knock them off in the future.
In the mean time, maybe it means that we get better and better search tools for free! Or at least as free as it can get with advertisers and markets in your face and tacking your surfing behavior (speaking of which, where are we all surfing that causes us to get all this "herbal viagra" spam?).
While both products are ingenious in their own right, neither represents a giant step in its respective field.
We have a robotic vacuum that, by all reviews, doesn't clean worth a damn versus a transport device that achieves a fast walk pace for a limited distance at a cost of several thousand dollars.
My guess is that the stories behind the devices is more interesting than the devices themselves.
Re:Doesn't seem like a Ham approach
on
Wi-Fi Toys
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I'll give you that one, but let's see someone build their own WIFI radio from junkbox parts.
I think about the cats building robotic devices--slightly more to it than the Pringles Can antenna.
Doesn't seem like a Ham approach
on
Wi-Fi Toys
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· Score: 3, Interesting
While the Web page doesn't say so, I just don't see them giving schematics and a list of parts to go find. Instead, it seems more like "look what you can do with these commercial products".
Fine if your into that, but if you really want to tinker, user scrougeable WIFI parts seem few and far between...
When I was in grad school (1990), I read the book "Megamistakes" by Steven Schnaars, Professor of Marketing at the City University of New York. An amazingly interesting book that can be read cover to cover in a few hours.
Professor Schaar's book talks about science and technology forecasting and how wildly wrong such forecasts almost always are. He then goes on to talk about why forecasts go wrong.
The uptake of the book is that even the "best of the best" forecasters are only right one prediction in nine. The record falls off sadly as you move away from that top tier.
So while hearing visionaries talk is fun and can be enlightening, they seldom represent anything likely to actually happen. After all, isn't Popular Science still telling us about how we'll drive personal aircraft instead of cars in a few years?
Could this be the end of only unique content on each Web page on the Internet? We've had to suffer all these years with no duplication of content and not a single case of recursive linking between web pages.
It's almost refreshing to see that the Internet may well be catching up to television...Media maturity at last!
He may be a jerk and is certainly making many lives miserable, but somehow you have to admire the genius of coming up with a way to turn a worthless company into a pile of cash (either by winning or being bought out)...maybe he also owns SCO's law firm!
It should have been over a year ago, when Novell said that they still retained the original AT&T Unix rights. Why did it take so long for them so shoot this bullet??!?
So after hearing for decades about how wind power can save our future, then hearing citizens groups griping about the eyesore they create on the horizon, someone tells us it's bad for the climate.
Maybe we should just hold our breath and sufficate. That would solve the whole problem...
Whoopee! Even without Bit Rot, now you can have 500GB of unindexed junk on one disc to match the hard disks in your computer and the paper files in your desk.
It seems to me that if we're going to keep expanding capacity, we need file systems that automatically and fully index data as it's written. Otherwise, we just give Fibber McGee a bigger closet. http://home.t-online.de/home/toni.goeller/idiom_wm/id203.htm
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As much as I like Wikipedia and use if fairly often, I do recognize that it is not a definitive source of information. It's a great tool to find out about something quick, but like all reference materials, should be cross-checked and compared to others is you want to get yours facts straight.
But the whole idea of authoritative information is rather obtuse. When I was a kid, we had the World Book like most families. For years, by parents took the "yearbook" updates and once we actually put stickers in the main books to flag updates. But never once when writing a school report did I look in those year books for updated information or corrections--even though I had them at my fingertips. And even if the current update was considered authoritative when written, it might turn out to be wrong five minutes after the book was printed.
I think the ultimate question comes down to how accurate information needs to be for the task at hand, rather than a quest for the perfect answer. After all, using the McHenry's example, if we're looking to get an idea about who Alexander Hamilton was, do we really care about the exact year of his resignation. Very few of us do history for a living, although it is a fun hobby.
What a relief! I'm always concerned about whether or not I'm myself on any given day.
I always had trouble remembering the damn thing anyway. Now that I don't have to type it anymore, my life is complete.
And this is the party that claims to get Government off the people's backs? The founding fathers' dust would roll over in their graves, except the FCC probably claims juridiction over that as well!
When I first saw the FDA requirements, I was horrified, but after thinking about it a while, I started wondering why al systems don't take this kind of approach.
It comes back to the old "when you're up to your ass in alligators..." problem. If you can deal with some issues on a more strategic level, you can try to design many of the day-to-day problems out of the system, allowing sysadmins to spend less time fixing the same problem over and over again.
At the same time, we only inspect a small percentage of the 300,000+ shipping containers that enter this country every year.
Why use a missle when you could Fedex your weapon and be relatively untraceable? Aren't we missing something here?
After all, we're each much more likely to die of heart disease, be killed in a car wreck, or be murdered on the streets than be killed by terrorists or a nuclear bomb...even if we assume that 9/11/is the norm.
The only things that Neilsen can't get like this in knowledge of who in the family is watching and where they fit in the demographic. So a 40-year old like me might gets ads for Britney or Polygrip, when I really want to see "Bob the Enzyte guy".
Also, my bet would be that ReplayTV and Tivo would want more green than the lousy $5 they pay to the public.
Buy some junk, defeat a terrorist...Makes America strong!
In my 20+ years in the IT business, I've seen obscene amounts of money spent on IT with little or no idea of what benefit it would bring or how it would be used. I'm sure that made America strong as well.
What they haven't addressed is how this great network will be used to better defend the nation or reduce the cost of doing so.
Paul Strassman, a regular columnist for Computerworld, often presents studies of profitability of companies that heavily invest in IT versus those that don't. His studies tend to indicate that comapnies that invest larger percentages of sales tend to have lower profit margins, indicating that perhaps those companies are investing in technology in ways that aren't optimal.
Why should Government be any different? Didn't President Eisenhower warn about the "Defense-Industrial Complex" and the risk of Government buying non-optimal stuff to assist industry profit margins. So why should large-dollar Government-Industry partnerships be any more effiecient than what Paul Strassman sees in the private sector?
My printer and mouse have been sneaking into the kitchen and checking out the ice cream supply for years.
Now if we can just change a few tax loopholes to make a Government incentive to move to the country instead of over seas? Who knows? We might start another Civil War!
But really, as jobs move to rural areas, housing prices will increase there, and tech jobs will probably wind up moving from town to town, just as textile jobs used to when I was a kid in Alabama. A town would offer little better deal and the company would move a few miles to take advantage of it. I don't think anybody won in that game, except the lawyers of course.
Just make a hologram of your food, then throw the food away. Look at the hologram instead of eating and lose weight.
Of course, many third world countries have perfected alternatives to this diet without the requirment for lasers...
They founded a business model on taking BSD Unix, customizing and taking it proprietary, then selling the devil out of it. Without Open Source, Sun wouldn't have an OS to sell!
Damn! I had almost enough to reside my house! I was counting on the AOL "Disk of the week" club to get me there.
Will it beat out Google? I seem to remember that Altavista was once the primo search engine before Google came along. M$ may win, but if they do, someone will knock them off in the future.
In the mean time, maybe it means that we get better and better search tools for free! Or at least as free as it can get with advertisers and markets in your face and tacking your surfing behavior (speaking of which, where are we all surfing that causes us to get all this "herbal viagra" spam?).
We have a robotic vacuum that, by all reviews, doesn't clean worth a damn versus a transport device that achieves a fast walk pace for a limited distance at a cost of several thousand dollars.
My guess is that the stories behind the devices is more interesting than the devices themselves.
I think about the cats building robotic devices--slightly more to it than the Pringles Can antenna.
Fine if your into that, but if you really want to tinker, user scrougeable WIFI parts seem few and far between...
This guy has a future in politics...
The uptake of the book is that even the "best of the best" forecasters are only right one prediction in nine. The record falls off sadly as you move away from that top tier.
So while hearing visionaries talk is fun and can be enlightening, they seldom represent anything likely to actually happen. After all, isn't Popular Science still telling us about how we'll drive personal aircraft instead of cars in a few years?
It's almost refreshing to see that the Internet may well be catching up to television...Media maturity at last!
He may be a jerk and is certainly making many lives miserable, but somehow you have to admire the genius of coming up with a way to turn a worthless company into a pile of cash (either by winning or being bought out)...maybe he also owns SCO's law firm!
It should have been over a year ago, when Novell said that they still retained the original AT&T Unix rights. Why did it take so long for them so shoot this bullet??!?
Maybe we should just hold our breath and sufficate. That would solve the whole problem...
It seems to me that if we're going to keep expanding capacity, we need file systems that automatically and fully index data as it's written. Otherwise, we just give Fibber McGee a bigger closet. http://home.t-online.de/home/toni.goeller/idiom_wm /id203.htm