When you lower the cost of complementary products that you sell, you increase demand for your product. This is how IBM makes money giving Eclipse away from free. This is sound financial / economic sense.
I read the sample chapter of the book and was astonished at how bad it was. It starts out quoting some prominent XP people who have made postings to Usenet where they have misspellings, peppering their quotes with "sic" (to try to make their post look stupid), then follows up with a shotgun blast from "an anonymous XPer". How is anyone supposed to take this book seriously?
I've worked on XP projects and it works really well for certain types of projects, notably business systems that are speculative in nature. And the proponents of XP do not say that XP is right for developing air traffic control systems.
Refactoring XP is not a serious study, it's a biased example of pseudo-scolarship at its best, or out-and-out character assassination at its worst. I read the Pete McBreen book and I think that one was a more balanced view of where XP doesn't make sense.
Make the students write code in class, on a test or a quiz. You don't need rules like GT has if you do that. The ones turning in their homework assignments from cut and paste code will fail the class if you count homework as no more than 50% of the class.
Why doesn't Java have Functions? This has to be one of the silliest questions ever posed about Java. Personally, having package identity to me is better than the crappy #include. It makes Java inherently more grokable.
Your judeo-cristian epistimology is really broken. The god described in the bible's old testament (where you got the quote about us having dominion), is a being independent from and yet creator of the universe. This, by definition, describes a being that will not interfere with creation which is seperate from it even if it wanted to. Intereference with its own creation in the sense of intercession, like saving the Dodo, would mean that there is no longer any relation, but merely that we and it are one and the same being and creation. There would be no point in intercession then.
Put another way:
The having dominion means exactly as you say: we are free to contaminate our beds until we suffocate in our own stink. You are either part of the problem or part of the solution. God won't help you / me. That would make god's creation pointless. So get with the program.
I just want to say a friend of mine who protested at an animal genetics conference who was carrying a tupperware of rotten tahini sauce was charged with, and I kid you not, "possession of a weapon of mass destruction". I guess some reeeeeaaaaly paranoid FBI agent thought she was carrying some kind of bioweapon. Now it's on her record.
You cannot legislate away "violent speech" without undercutting the basic tenets of free speech. This is what the guy's point is. You are missing the critical point. If "The critical point is that somehing that is violent in nature is prohibited" is right, you would negate the French and American revolutions, both of which critically (most would say positively) shaped the modern world.
Re:Improved software engineering through genocide
on
ArsDigita Shut Down
·
· Score: 1, Troll
Who are you now? The Roger Ebert cum Anita Bryant in regulating taste in engineering discussions?
The human mind is built for metaphores. Because some of those metaphores are of bad taste doesn't mean that the mind behind them isn't contributing to something good. Philip has a degree and a background in engineering, not public relations.
BIND is a horrible project. It is such a piece of dewdew, I can't believe it hasn't been replaced yet. There are alternatives to BIND on Unix, (DJDNS for one) but they are new and as yet not as flexible.
Oh, really? What would you call it when they produce a mail client app with a Turing-complete language embedded in it, which has full access to both the outgoing mail queue and the file system, and which happily executes any code found in incoming messages?
Amen brutha. That about sums it up. Making an OS secure doesn't sell, and if you're in it for the money (Microsoft), instead of in it for solving problems (The Open Source World), security takes a back seat. As a result everybody loves to use Windows because they do such a great job making it easy to use, everybody complains Linux and BSD is "too hard" and that they need to "get with the program".
Please, BSD people, Linux people do not "get with the program". The different emphasis is why you exist! Duh!
Brilliant. I think you've got it: hit the nail on the head. It's a tactic to prevent the long term efforts in "full disclosure" which would undermine their hegemony. I concurr with you observation.
"Those who would give up a bit of security for a bit of freedom are in greater danger of losing both, for only in the protection of freedom can saftey be ensured" -- Sidney Crooke, American Abolitionist
I read the book. I was very interested in Nash's early work: he showed tremedous promise. The illness is a trajedy, and it looks like his youngest son is going to live a similar life, edging toward the same illness and possibly no less brilliant.
According to the book, what Nash did get around to accomplishing was important but as a person, he's something of an eliteist snob, something of a racist, something of an out-of-tune-with-his-own-emotions man of the post war era. In other words, he's human, like all of us.
In this sense the story was about an ordinary man with an extraordinary gift and an extraordinary illness. I thank god I'm only an ordinary man because the price is too much to pay otherwise.
Confusing Technology with Sociology
on
Browsing Alone
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I think Katz and Putnam are confusing a concrete example for a primary anticedent. They assume that TV and the net is the reason for social community decline. They are symptoms, not causes.
Between 1900-1930's US labor was more or less at war with US industry. The war culminated in the depression. This is when the Captains of Industry were caught with their hands in the cookie jar, not unlike what we are seeing with Enron today and it's miriad offshore partnerships to hide debt, only on an even larger scale.
Anyway, that war was fueled by some of the most backward labor practices in the western world. Ask your 90 year olds out there what "woking for a living" was like in those days if you can find any. They worked and lived like dogs and fought for every crumb they could get. This was the ingredients of organized labor before Industry got smart about it.
The depression and the following world war set the stage for an social mileu that was heavily invested in diverting attention from an organized labor force of the rank and file. And people were tired: WWII was the costliest war in the history of the world. The rank and file went into a meat grinder. They came out the other end content with less and having GI bill to help them forget the bad old days of organized labor. It was around this point that the Public Relations Industry was born. PR was initially conceived as a way for Industry to control labor from within. There's a whole history of it.
Madge: "You're soaking in it!".
Finally, here's a quote defending electronic community:
"If you still feel that physical communities must always be superior to electronically linked communities, let me ask you to ponder three words: junior high school.
Junior high school throws people together who have nothing in common besides parents who chose to locate in a particular neighborhood. Unless you're very adaptable, it is tough to find good friends. High school is more or less the same idea, but the pool of people is usually larger so it is more probable that kids with uncommon interests will find soulmates. In college, not only is the pool larger but there can be a concentration by personality type. Nerds find each other at Caltech and MIT; hippies find each other at Bard and Reed; snobs find each other at Harvard and Princeton; skiers find each other at state schools in Colorado and Vermont. When students graduate and go to work, they usually don't make as many friends. They aren't meeting as many people and the common thread of "do not want to starve in street" doesn't tie them very tightly to other workers."
-Never confuse size with impact
-Never confuse impact with profitability
-Never confuse profitability with significance
You can have a large company doing very little making mounds of profit. That company will be forgotten in 50 years. A teeny company can change the world with a little program. That teeny company can disappear in a heartbeat and not make a dime.
Financial people will never understand the concept of the Corporation, because they see corporations as "things that make profit". They are sometimes right, because sometimes they do, which compounds the issue.
Corporations exist to bring value to their customers. Period. Money is a by-product. A company makes shoes. Maybe that company makes money. Money isn't the true measure, though: the value of what the company does is.
A scenario: You find that Indonesia has 100 billion dollars worth of rare hardwoods growing in its jungles. You cut them down. You sell them. You now have 50 billion dollars (you flooded the market bringing the price of rare hardwoods down). But you have made an entire nation uninhabitable in the process. Massive errosion takes place, the islands become a saline desert. Everyone either dies or leaves. You have this money, but you have irrevocably unmade part of the world. What value is that money now? It's of negative value to the world and the people in it.
By the way, this isn't my original thinking, this is teachings of Peter Drucker, the godfather of modern business management theory.
Ooops! my numbers are screwy. The 900 mil is right though and the 80-120 mil is also right. A rather small market with weak buying power overall.
As far as manufacturing is concerned, yes, absolutely. The Chinese are fanatical nationalists, more so than even the Americans. They will kill themselves for the idea of China, do or die, right or wrong, making America's "manifest destiny" look like a mere prelude.
Everyone thinks they are the biggest market in the world, but here are some facts about china's "market".
Out of 3 billion people, 900 million of them are rural peasants who don't have a pot to pee in. These are people that are so poor that they go for months without even seeing currency, let alone using it.
100 million of them are rural farm workers who may sometimes receive a "paycheck", but who are not employed for long periods of time. These people make a fraction of what a McDonalds grill cook makes in the US.
Of the remaining 2 billion, you have a tiny elite of maybe 120-80 million people who make money in a range that is remotely similar to the west. Of all the people who receive somewhere in a living wage range, maybe 500 million of them, save 40% of their income and use 60% to live. They do this because their economy is fragile and they are subject to losing their incomes rather easily. Compare that to Americans where 4% of people's income (on average) is saved.
The Chinese do not have descretionary income to spend on software. This is what Adobe is really coming to grips with. If it were made to be incapable of stealing the software, they would just go without!
Companies that make money in China are like Coke-a-Cola, Pepsi, Marlboro. These are companies that make 80-90% of their money outside the US anyway. The rest of the companies (like Adobe) tread water for years and never turn the corner. This is the reality of the Chinese market: they are an export economy with a weak domestic economy. A place where slavery was "abolished" in 1929. A place where children participate in forced labor programs to pay for their educations. Where you recieve the death penalty for selling a fossil you dug up in your own backyard to a non-Chinese buyer.
(I have no idea why we have a normalized trade relationship with this country and yet Cuba is still under an embargo)
It's very simple. I want to sell something on the net to anyone who wants to buy it. Taxation laws state that I have to be ready to number-crunch 50 possible tax-nexuses. That's not a problem, I just add 50 rows to my online tax database table. Woah, wait a minute, there are 50 states, but within those states are hundreds of little tax nexuses. Comprising a total of about 7000 tax nexuses nationwide. Well, that's not too bad: I just add 7000 rows to that table.
Wait a minute! You mean I gotta write 7000 checks and mail them per month, reporting to those tax nexuses! I've incurred an enormous barrier to entry for the little guy!
Taxes are theft? So you think you should pay a toll to use any road or sidestreet in America? You think only those who can afford private school should get an education? And if you are injured and can't pay for it, tough luck? If so you have the intellegence of 1000 melted ice cubes.
Geography aside, most geeks I know, no matter how much techncial acumen they may have, have an infantile view of politics. This is because we live in a society where politics, real politics (not DeCSS, which is an almost meaningless side show) and knowledge thereof is de-emphasized. How many people who read Slashdot know what the GATT treaty is all about? I would say less than 1%. Yet GATT will affect each person visiting this website PROFOUNDLY over the next 10 years. <p> Basically, the threads on this issue I'm reading are sounding like Winston (in the Orwell Book, 1984) saying "If there is any hope, it is in the Proles...", ie, pointing to some bland hope of a grassroots correction. well, I got news for you all. If you don't understand where REAL power lies in your own community, how are you going to affect it? How do you think you are going to influence even your local state representatives if he doesn't even know YOUR NAME.;) <p> Dream on. But don't forget that even now, it's just dreaming and you're not changing anything unless you are sustained in your involvment and committment to understanding.
Exactly. Nowhere does this article mention that long term memory is improved. In fact, it says the opposite, and I quote:
"Subjects had fewer correct answers and omitted more responses when sleepy than when rested"
So in now way does the study support this statement:
WRONG "Research found students to have better recollection after long periods of sleep deprivation" WRONG
All they said is that when subjects are sleepy, they noted a slightly greater activity in the porietal lobe, which is associated with long term memory, that's all.
Slashdot Mirror
When you lower the cost of complementary products that you sell, you increase demand for your product. This is how IBM makes money giving Eclipse away from free. This is sound financial / economic sense.
I read the sample chapter of the book and was astonished at how bad it was. It starts out quoting some prominent XP people who have made postings to Usenet where they have misspellings, peppering their quotes with "sic" (to try to make their post look stupid), then follows up with a shotgun blast from "an anonymous XPer". How is anyone supposed to take this book seriously?
I've worked on XP projects and it works really well for certain types of projects, notably business systems that are speculative in nature. And the proponents of XP do not say that XP is right for developing air traffic control systems.
Refactoring XP is not a serious study, it's a biased example of pseudo-scolarship at its best, or out-and-out character assassination at its worst. I read the Pete McBreen book and I think that one was a more balanced view of where XP doesn't make sense.
Make the students write code in class, on a test or a quiz. You don't need rules like GT has if you do that. The ones turning in their homework assignments from cut and paste code will fail the class if you count homework as no more than 50% of the class.
Why doesn't Java have Functions? This has to be one of the silliest questions ever posed about Java. Personally, having package identity to me is better than the crappy #include. It makes Java inherently more grokable.
What is it you have a problem with?
double t = Math.random();
vs.
#include
...
double t = random();
I heard that Linux Kernal doesn't use CVS, they use a simple tree. Linus has his tree, Cox has his. They share their diffs. Very Zen.
Your judeo-cristian epistimology is really broken. The god described in the bible's old testament (where you got the quote about us having dominion), is a being independent from and yet creator of the universe. This, by definition, describes a being that will not interfere with creation which is seperate from it even if it wanted to. Intereference with its own creation in the sense of intercession, like saving the Dodo, would mean that there is no longer any relation, but merely that we and it are one and the same being and creation. There would be no point in intercession then.
Put another way:
The having dominion means exactly as you say: we are free to contaminate our beds until we suffocate in our own stink. You are either part of the problem or part of the solution. God won't help you / me. That would make god's creation pointless. So get with the program.
BASF was doing this in 1995
I thought the highest grossing celebs were already synthetic? Anyone think Brittney or Pamala have real breasts?
I just want to say a friend of mine who protested at an animal genetics conference who was carrying a tupperware of rotten tahini sauce was charged with, and I kid you not, "possession of a weapon of mass destruction". I guess some reeeeeaaaaly paranoid FBI agent thought she was carrying some kind of bioweapon. Now it's on her record.
It's all gone too far.
You cannot legislate away "violent speech" without undercutting the basic tenets of free speech. This is what the guy's point is. You are missing the critical point. If "The critical point is that somehing that is violent in nature is prohibited" is right, you would negate the French and American revolutions, both of which critically (most would say positively) shaped the modern world.
Who are you now? The Roger Ebert cum Anita Bryant in regulating taste in engineering discussions?
The human mind is built for metaphores. Because some of those metaphores are of bad taste doesn't mean that the mind behind them isn't contributing to something good. Philip has a degree and a background in engineering, not public relations.
BIND is a horrible project. It is such a piece of dewdew, I can't believe it hasn't been replaced yet. There are alternatives to BIND on Unix, (DJDNS for one) but they are new and as yet not as flexible.
Amen brutha. That about sums it up. Making an OS secure doesn't sell, and if you're in it for the money (Microsoft), instead of in it for solving problems (The Open Source World), security takes a back seat. As a result everybody loves to use Windows because they do such a great job making it easy to use, everybody complains Linux and BSD is "too hard" and that they need to "get with the program".
Please, BSD people, Linux people do not "get with the program". The different emphasis is why you exist! Duh!
And that Win98 machine with recognize all that hardware right before it crashes. Heck, yeah, that's far superior to Linux!
Brilliant. I think you've got it: hit the nail on the head. It's a tactic to prevent the long term efforts in "full disclosure" which would undermine their hegemony. I concurr with you observation.
Better yet:
"Those who would give up a bit of security for a bit of freedom are in greater danger of losing both, for only in the protection of freedom can saftey be ensured" -- Sidney Crooke, American Abolitionist
The movie was highly highly fictionalized.
I read the book. I was very interested in Nash's early work: he showed tremedous promise. The illness is a trajedy, and it looks like his youngest son is going to live a similar life, edging toward the same illness and possibly no less brilliant.
According to the book, what Nash did get around to accomplishing was important but as a person, he's something of an eliteist snob, something of a racist, something of an out-of-tune-with-his-own-emotions man of the post war era. In other words, he's human, like all of us.
In this sense the story was about an ordinary man with an extraordinary gift and an extraordinary illness. I thank god I'm only an ordinary man because the price is too much to pay otherwise.
I think Katz and Putnam are confusing a concrete example for a primary anticedent. They assume that TV and the net is the reason for social community decline. They are symptoms, not causes.
Between 1900-1930's US labor was more or less at war with US industry. The war culminated in the depression. This is when the Captains of Industry were caught with their hands in the cookie jar, not unlike what we are seeing with Enron today and it's miriad offshore partnerships to hide debt, only on an even larger scale.
Anyway, that war was fueled by some of the most backward labor practices in the western world. Ask your 90 year olds out there what "woking for a living" was like in those days if you can find any. They worked and lived like dogs and fought for every crumb they could get. This was the ingredients of organized labor before Industry got smart about it.
The depression and the following world war set the stage for an social mileu that was heavily invested in diverting attention from an organized labor force of the rank and file. And people were tired: WWII was the costliest war in the history of the world. The rank and file went into a meat grinder. They came out the other end content with less and having GI bill to help them forget the bad old days of organized labor. It was around this point that the Public Relations Industry was born. PR was initially conceived as a way for Industry to control labor from within. There's a whole history of it.
Madge: "You're soaking in it!".
Finally, here's a quote defending electronic community:
"If you still feel that physical communities must always be superior to electronically linked communities, let me ask you to ponder three words: junior high school.
Junior high school throws people together who have nothing in common besides parents who chose to locate in a particular neighborhood. Unless you're very adaptable, it is tough to find good friends. High school is more or less the same idea, but the pool of people is usually larger so it is more probable that kids with uncommon interests will find soulmates. In college, not only is the pool larger but there can be a concentration by personality type. Nerds find each other at Caltech and MIT; hippies find each other at Bard and Reed; snobs find each other at Harvard and Princeton; skiers find each other at state schools in Colorado and Vermont. When students graduate and go to work, they usually don't make as many friends. They aren't meeting as many people and the common thread of "do not want to starve in street" doesn't tie them very tightly to other workers."
Quoted From:
http://www.arsdigita.com/books/panda/community
Regarding money and it's measure of the world:
-Never confuse size with impact
-Never confuse impact with profitability
-Never confuse profitability with significance
You can have a large company doing very little making mounds of profit. That company will be forgotten in 50 years. A teeny company can change the world with a little program. That teeny company can disappear in a heartbeat and not make a dime.
Financial people will never understand the concept of the Corporation, because they see corporations as "things that make profit". They are sometimes right, because sometimes they do, which compounds the issue.
Corporations exist to bring value to their customers. Period. Money is a by-product. A company makes shoes. Maybe that company makes money. Money isn't the true measure, though: the value of what the company does is.
A scenario: You find that Indonesia has 100 billion dollars worth of rare hardwoods growing in its jungles. You cut them down. You sell them. You now have 50 billion dollars (you flooded the market bringing the price of rare hardwoods down). But you have made an entire nation uninhabitable in the process. Massive errosion takes place, the islands become a saline desert. Everyone either dies or leaves. You have this money, but you have irrevocably unmade part of the world. What value is that money now? It's of negative value to the world and the people in it.
By the way, this isn't my original thinking, this is teachings of Peter Drucker, the godfather of modern business management theory.
Ooops! my numbers are screwy. The 900 mil is right though and the 80-120 mil is also right. A rather small market with weak buying power overall.
As far as manufacturing is concerned, yes, absolutely. The Chinese are fanatical nationalists, more so than even the Americans. They will kill themselves for the idea of China, do or die, right or wrong, making America's "manifest destiny" look like a mere prelude.
Everyone thinks they are the biggest market in the world, but here are some facts about china's "market".
Out of 3 billion people, 900 million of them are rural peasants who don't have a pot to pee in. These are people that are so poor that they go for months without even seeing currency, let alone using it.
100 million of them are rural farm workers who may sometimes receive a "paycheck", but who are not employed for long periods of time. These people make a fraction of what a McDonalds grill cook makes in the US.
Of the remaining 2 billion, you have a tiny elite of maybe 120-80 million people who make money in a range that is remotely similar to the west. Of all the people who receive somewhere in a living wage range, maybe 500 million of them, save 40% of their income and use 60% to live. They do this because their economy is fragile and they are subject to losing their incomes rather easily. Compare that to Americans where 4% of people's income (on average) is saved.
The Chinese do not have descretionary income to spend on software. This is what Adobe is really coming to grips with. If it were made to be incapable of stealing the software, they would just go without!
Companies that make money in China are like Coke-a-Cola, Pepsi, Marlboro. These are companies that make 80-90% of their money outside the US anyway. The rest of the companies (like Adobe) tread water for years and never turn the corner. This is the reality of the Chinese market: they are an export economy with a weak domestic economy. A place where slavery was "abolished" in 1929. A place where children participate in forced labor programs to pay for their educations. Where you recieve the death penalty for selling a fossil you dug up in your own backyard to a non-Chinese buyer.
(I have no idea why we have a normalized trade relationship with this country and yet Cuba is still under an embargo)
Wait a minute! You mean I gotta write 7000 checks and mail them per month, reporting to those tax nexuses! I've incurred an enormous barrier to entry for the little guy!
Not so simple anymore, heh?
Taxes are theft? So you think you should pay a toll to use any road or sidestreet in America? You think only those who can afford private school should get an education? And if you are injured and can't pay for it, tough luck? If so you have the intellegence of 1000 melted ice cubes.
Geography aside, most geeks I know, no matter how much techncial acumen they may have, have an infantile view of politics. This is because we live in a society where politics, real politics (not DeCSS, which is an almost meaningless side show) and knowledge thereof is de-emphasized. How many people who read Slashdot know what the GATT treaty is all about? I would say less than 1%. Yet GATT will affect each person visiting this website PROFOUNDLY over the next 10 years. ;)
<p>
Basically, the threads on this issue I'm reading are sounding like Winston (in the Orwell Book, 1984) saying "If there is any hope, it is in the Proles...", ie, pointing to some bland hope of a grassroots correction. well, I got news for you all. If you don't understand where REAL power lies in your own community, how are you going to affect it? How do you think you are going to influence even your local state representatives if he doesn't even know YOUR NAME.
<p>
Dream on. But don't forget that even now, it's just dreaming and you're not changing anything unless you are sustained in your involvment and committment to understanding.
So in now way does the study support this statement:
All they said is that when subjects are sleepy, they noted a slightly greater activity in the porietal lobe, which is associated with long term memory, that's all.
Here: look at this image.
http://health.ucsd.edu/news/images/gillanNeuroRepo rt.jpg
TOP: Activity of a rested brain doing subtraction BOTTOM: Activity of a sleep-deprived brain doing subtraction
Which would you rather be?