I've seen Gates interviewed a few times, and the interviewers have been pretty soft on him. There's no point in asking him why his software sucks or why he's bent on world domination, at least not directly, but some of the questions I hope are asked include:
What are three of Microsoft's most important innovations? That is, groundbreaking ideas or technologies developed at Microsoft that have had a positive impact on the way people use computers.
What do you consider to be an acceptable level of reliability for personal computers? How frequently should users be prepared to tolerate BSODs, crashes and data loss as a part of normal system operation?
At what point are the benefits of frequent software upgrades outweighed by the costs of retraining, reinstallation and file format incompatibilities? How would you like to be remembered 100 years from now? How do you think you will be remembered 100 years from now?
Microsoft uses UNIX servers for a number of important Web serving operations, such as Hotmail. At the same time, a recent test performed by Mindcraft shows the speed with which Windows NT serves Web pages to be nothing short of pheonomenal. With such impressive performance as a Web server, why does Microsoft not use its own NT technology exclusively for all of its Web activities instead of relying on UNIX products produced by other vendors?
Speaking of Mindcraft, isn't the speed issue about as important as the "IIS can serve up more static HTML pages on a psycho server with triple 100Mbps Ethernet cards than Apache can" benchmark? At some point, typing speed is fast enough and adding more words per minute doesn't actually increase overall productivity.
The QWERTY keyboard is fast enough. In the days when typists copied handwritten notes onto typewritten pages being able to type faster was important. But how many people do lots of copy typing today? Especially on a computer, where the electronic manipulation of documents via a few succinct commands has replaced printing, editing and retyping lines and lines of text?
I learned touch typing on an IBM selectric, and while I won't win any typing championships, I can type probably somewhere between 60-80wpm on a computer (less on a typewriter, since the strategy is different when using a machine that isn't forgiving to typos). That's much faster than I can compose anything worth saying. Even writing this, I am frequently pausing and going back and changing words and phrases here and there because I can write much faster than I can develop a well-phrased, cogent argument.
Maybe if keyboards were deliberately designed to slow the typist down to a crawl, Usenet wouldn't be so full of crap.
Infanticide is nothing new; it's an age-old practice that has been condemned in some cultures and accepted in others, but practiced in pretty much all of them.
Some points that are worth considering, though:
First, we need to understand that we have rights by virtue of the fact that we have granted ourselves those rights and have accepted the corresponding duty of protecting those rights. There's really no such thing as a natural right to life or anything else (nature hardly seems to care whether anything in particular lives or dies).
We can certainly decree that infants do not have the right to life, but by doing so, we also endanger ourselves. We could even justify this on the grounds that a severely disabled child might likely have a painful and short life if allowed to grow up, and infants don't have a sense of self anyway, so it's not like killing an adult who has already formed a sense of themselves and has developed hopes, dreams, aspirations and so forth.
However, by making a concrete committment to value the life of every human being, and to protect the lives of those who cannot speak for thsmselves no matter what, we offer ourselves a certain degree of protection. If we start to say that such-and-such a type of human being does not have the right to live, it is easier for others to make the same argument about other types of people, and each of us risk falling into one of those categories someday. By treating all human beings as having the right to life, we steer clear of the slippery slope.
It's also worth questioning peoples' real motives. Some people would see infanticide as a caring act meant to prevent the suffering of the child. Others, however, would undoubtedly see it as a means to erradicate a parental, social, tax or other burden foisted on themselves.
I won't draw any conclusions here, though this is one subject that isn't going to go away, especially as genetic and biological research advances. Not discussing the issues now might lead to an unfortunate situation down the road.
There are a couple of problems with this kind of classification. First, both the Dewey Decimal Classifcation system and the LC Classification system are designed to produce a classified arrangement so that items of a similar subject and nature are found close to one another on the shelf. They're based on the idea that a book (or other item) can only be physically located in one place at any given time, so if something is about ten different subjects, you have to pick the one thing that it's most about and classify it so that it sits with the other items of its kind. Because the Internet doesn't have shelves and documents don't have to exist somewhere in particular, this sort of classification scheme is really limiting. Subject headings such as the Library of Congress Subject Headings are more appropriate. These allow multiple subject classifications to be assigned to a single document.
However, both subject classification and call numbering (and the assignment of keywords and descriptors from controlled vocabularies) are not easy things to do. I've taken three master's level courses on cataloguing, classification and indexing, and I won't call myself an expert; I don't expect the average Web or Usenet author to put even a fraction of that amount of time and effor into it.
Cataloguers often spend quite a bit of time learning a classification system and how to apply it correctly (meaning consistently with the way everyone else does it, among other things), and for the most part, cataloguers specialize in a particular subject area. Even then, it's rarely a five minute job to properly classify something.
The inherent problem is that we have the single largest repository of information (using the term loosely) and we're essentially leaving it up to people who by and large have no cataloguing, indexing or abstracting skills to independently look after their own small corner of the mess and hope that somehow a universally workable system emerges. Ultimately, both Usenet and the Web will probably prove to be unorganizable in any universal way, and the best way to find material that you find useful is to determine what other people like you found useful.
It's bad because it lets parents abdicate their own responsibilities in favour of a shrink-wrapped child-rearing solution that doesn't work anyway. Meanwhile, once censorship gets its foot in the door, it starts to threaten adults too.
At some point, kids are going to be exposed to sex, violence and all of the other things that blue-haired people think will lead them to become serial killers. As a parent, you can either let them sneak around behind your back and discover and learn how to deal with these things on their own, or you can be the one to introduce it to them and help them put it into context.
If a kid really wants to see South Park, all the V chips in the world aren't likely to stop him/her. But if the parent takes the time to watch South Park *with* their kids and helps them put the content into some context, they'll most likely be ok.
When you think about it, if the censors are right about certain movies and TV shows influencing people's behaviour, nobody should be more depraved than the censors themselves. After all, they get to watch all the stuff that is too dangerous to let the general public see.
Well, maybe to get around the Microsoft problem they could amend the license:
* 3a. No one shall include any software code * written by U.C. Berkely or any of its * contributors in any software program * intended to be used primarily for evil * purposes including but not limited * to the wearing out of RGB monitors * through the excessive illumination of blue * phosphor dots.
At a net worth of $80 Billion or so, Bill Gates still won't pay more than $5 for a haircut. What makes you think he'd pay millions for a whole new head?
Slashdot Mirror
I've seen Gates interviewed a few times, and the interviewers have been pretty soft on him. There's no point in asking him why his software sucks or why he's bent on world domination, at least not directly, but some of the questions I hope are asked include:
What are three of Microsoft's most important innovations? That is, groundbreaking ideas or technologies developed at Microsoft that have had a positive impact on the way people use computers.
What do you consider to be an acceptable level of reliability for personal computers? How frequently should users be prepared to tolerate BSODs, crashes and data loss as a part of normal system operation?
At what point are the benefits of frequent software upgrades outweighed by the costs of retraining, reinstallation and file format incompatibilities?
How would you like to be remembered 100 years from now? How do you think you will be remembered 100 years from now?
Microsoft uses UNIX servers for a number of important Web serving operations, such as Hotmail. At the same time, a recent test performed by Mindcraft shows the speed with which Windows NT serves Web pages to be nothing short of pheonomenal. With such impressive performance as a Web server, why does Microsoft not use its own NT technology exclusively for all of its Web activities instead of relying on UNIX products produced by other vendors?
Speaking of Mindcraft, isn't the speed issue about as important as the "IIS can serve up more static HTML pages on a psycho server with triple 100Mbps Ethernet cards than Apache can" benchmark? At some point, typing speed is fast enough and adding more words per minute doesn't actually increase overall productivity.
The QWERTY keyboard is fast enough. In the days when typists copied handwritten notes onto typewritten pages being able to type faster was important. But how many people do lots of copy typing today? Especially on a computer, where the electronic manipulation of documents via a few succinct commands has replaced printing, editing and retyping lines and lines of text?
I learned touch typing on an IBM selectric, and while I won't win any typing championships, I can type probably somewhere between 60-80wpm on a computer (less on a typewriter, since the strategy is different when using a machine that isn't forgiving to typos). That's much faster than I can compose anything worth saying. Even writing this, I am frequently pausing and going back and changing words and phrases here and there because I can write much faster than I can develop a well-phrased, cogent argument.
Maybe if keyboards were deliberately designed to slow the typist down to a crawl, Usenet wouldn't be so full of crap.
Infanticide is nothing new; it's an age-old practice that has been condemned in some cultures and accepted in others, but practiced in pretty much all of them.
Some points that are worth considering, though:
First, we need to understand that we have rights by virtue of the fact that we have granted ourselves those rights and have accepted the corresponding duty of protecting those rights. There's really no such thing as a natural right to life or anything else (nature hardly seems to care whether anything in particular lives or dies).
We can certainly decree that infants do not have the right to life, but by doing so, we also endanger ourselves. We could even justify this on the grounds that a severely disabled child might likely have a painful and short life if allowed to grow up, and infants don't have a sense of self anyway, so it's not like killing an adult who has already formed a sense of themselves and has developed hopes, dreams, aspirations and so forth.
However, by making a concrete committment to value the life of every human being, and to protect the lives of those who cannot speak for thsmselves no matter what, we offer ourselves a certain degree of protection. If we start to say that such-and-such a type of human being does not have the right to live, it is easier for others to make the same argument about other types of people, and each of us risk falling into one of those categories someday. By treating all human beings as having the right to life, we steer clear of the slippery slope.
It's also worth questioning peoples' real motives. Some people would see infanticide as a caring act meant to prevent the suffering of the child. Others, however, would undoubtedly see it as a means to erradicate a parental, social, tax or other burden foisted on themselves.
I won't draw any conclusions here, though this is one subject that isn't going to go away, especially as genetic and biological research advances. Not discussing the issues now might lead to an unfortunate situation down the road.
There are a couple of problems with this kind of classification. First, both the Dewey Decimal Classifcation system and the LC Classification system are designed to produce a classified arrangement so that items of a similar subject and nature are found close to one another on the shelf. They're based on the idea that a book (or other item) can only be physically located in one place at any given time, so if something is about ten different subjects, you have to pick the one thing that it's most about and classify it so that it sits with the other items of its kind. Because the Internet doesn't have shelves and documents don't have to exist somewhere in particular, this sort of classification scheme is really limiting. Subject headings such as the Library of Congress Subject Headings are more appropriate. These allow multiple subject classifications to be assigned to a single document.
However, both subject classification and call numbering (and the assignment of keywords and descriptors from controlled vocabularies) are not easy things to do. I've taken three master's level courses on cataloguing, classification and indexing, and I won't call myself an expert; I don't expect the average Web or Usenet author to put even a fraction of that amount of time and effor into it.
Cataloguers often spend quite a bit of time learning a classification system and how to apply it correctly (meaning consistently with the way everyone else does it, among other things), and for the most part, cataloguers specialize in a particular subject area. Even then, it's rarely a five minute job to properly classify something.
The inherent problem is that we have the single largest repository of information (using the term loosely) and we're essentially leaving it up to people who by and large have no cataloguing, indexing or abstracting skills to independently look after their own small corner of the mess and hope that somehow a universally workable system emerges. Ultimately, both Usenet and the Web will probably prove to be unorganizable in any universal way, and the best way to find material that you find useful is to determine what other people like you found useful.
Soon. In the About Google section there is a notice that advertising will soon be accepted.
Bah.
In Lynx, nobody can see you advertise.
It's bad because it lets parents abdicate their own responsibilities in favour of a shrink-wrapped child-rearing solution that doesn't work anyway. Meanwhile, once censorship gets its foot in the door, it starts to threaten adults too.
At some point, kids are going to be exposed to sex, violence and all of the other things that blue-haired people think will lead them to become serial killers. As a parent, you can either let them sneak around behind your back and discover and learn how to deal with these things on their own, or you can be the one to introduce it to them and help them put it into context.
If a kid really wants to see South Park, all the V chips in the world aren't likely to stop him/her. But if the parent takes the time to watch South Park *with* their kids and helps them put the content into some context, they'll most likely be ok.
When you think about it, if the censors are right about certain movies and TV shows influencing people's behaviour, nobody should be more depraved than the censors themselves. After all, they get to watch all the stuff that is too dangerous to let the general public see.
Well, maybe to get around the Microsoft problem they could amend the license:
* 3a. No one shall include any software code
* written by U.C. Berkely or any of its
* contributors in any software program
* intended to be used primarily for evil
* purposes including but not limited
* to the wearing out of RGB monitors
* through the excessive illumination of blue
* phosphor dots.
At a net worth of $80 Billion or so, Bill Gates still won't pay more than $5 for a haircut. What makes you think he'd pay millions for a whole new head?