Economy of scale is in full swing when it comes to cars. We have a billion or so of them on the roads, it is quite easy to drive down prices at that scale. Do you remember when airbags were expensive extras?
Agree completely, putting that up as a web app wasted most of its potential.
The innovation was merging various protocols together. It's not a massive innovation, but it helps. Have you never had some IM client, some IRC client and an e-mail program open all at the same time? Have you never used SMS, IM/chat and e-mail to send messages to the same person, all interleaved? Wouldn't it be cool to have one stream of communication? That's the problem Wave tried to solve.
And then the geeks found it and added all kinds of bullshit crap into it. Three different types of replies, gadgets, robots all the nonsense. Design lesson: Build a simple, but complete thing first, then add the bells and whistles.
I'll say it again: Wave failed because it was technologically brilliant, and implemented as a laggy piece of crap with a horrible user interface. You can't use it for non-trivial communications because all the interleaving makes it more difficult to follow it than a linear conversation, and the insistance on a web-based frontend means that beyond 50-100 messages it slows down to a crawl. I could literally type a message, then fetch something from the kitchen while it was typing out.
Put the concept into the hands of someone who can make things work for a user, not just a tech dude, and it can still succeed.
Quite frankly, I would leave any carrier that "speeds up" some special content. Why? Because do the math, how can they make it go faster? By raising the speed of light? Maybe they will bury a few thousand miles of fibre, just for Google? Come on! The only way they can make people who paid for the priviledge faster is by slowing everything else down.
They can do that directly (e.g. slow it down unless it is paid for) or indirectly (e.g. by using QOS and other routing tricks), but what happens is that they don't provide the best possible service anymore, unless someone pays extra for it.
Thank you, but no. I'd change to a carrier that provides the best possible service because as a subscriber I am already paying for that. So, Verizon and to all you other marketing monkeys at other carriers thinking about a stunt like that: How about I don't pay you my subscription fee as quickly as I used to, unless of course you book the special "speedy delivery" service? I'm sure my bank would love a piece of the action as well.
What you don't get is the difference between concept and implementation.
"Action Movie" is a cool concept (well, for many people, it may not be your thing, bear with me for example's sake). "Postal" by Uwe Boll is a crappy implemention of that concept.
There are other, better implementations. For Wave, I'm pretty sure there will be.
I really like the concept, so much in fact that I've started to write a simplified version of it for an in-game messaging service.
The problem was with the UI. The interface was crap, and beyond a certain number of postings, waves started to slow down so much it was unbearable.
It needed more way to clean out old crap and make a wave readable and useable even after having been used for a while. Hopefully, someone else will take the concept and the protocol and make it work.
I will be able to read the file I get, but that other person using MS Office won't be able to read the file they receive.
Unless the document is trivial, you will have trouble with the document. Remember that MS doesn't follow its own ISO standard.
Document formats and interchange are more of a problem for MS office users, and not so much for OpenOffice users.
Wrong. As long as they feel they are the majority and you are the odd one out, most MS office users will not even bother with a common format, they will simply expect that their format is "the one". If you have any troubles loading or saving it, they will see it entirely as your problem.
Judaism adjusts for the changing times pretty darned fast,
But you never change the book.
That is where religion differs from the law. Yes, the legal system is also slow at change, and sometimes that is not a bad thing, you don't have to follow every hype.
However, when sleeping with someone else even though you are married stopped being a crime, it was removed from the criminal code. For the religions, practice changes, but the written rules remain. Sure, at least in the west nobody has been stoned for adultery for a few hundred years, but the book still says he should. Which gives ammunition to the minority of fanatics that would love to return to bronze age ethics.
There is a massive cognitive dissonance here. On the one hand, the book is holy and the entire religion is built on it, on the other hand you go about ignoring almost everything that's in it. And you don't even see the problem with that. Having your cake and eating it, too, are we?
Arbitrarily chosen. Once you can't say "the majority of people use this" anymore, you will have to start thinking about document formats and interchange.
People are always lazy. As long as they have an excuse they believe themselves, they won't change.
Yes, I know. Same for most christians, the majority of them is committing death-penalty sins daily.
And that's exactly the point. You have the holy book, word of god himself, bla bla - and then you pick and choose. Your religion is nothing but arbitrarily selected ethics, but you're too cowardly to stand up to it. Instead it is covered in a layer of superstition.
The problem with that is, of course, that it takes the rules out of adaptive change too much. Yes, the religions change - at the speed of glaciers. Most of the rules on the book now clearly do more damage then good. But no, you can't just replace them. You have to go through all this dishonest ignoring of them.
Frankly, grow some balls. Good rules don't need a religious cover.
What you point out is niche markets for MS. The core business is still office, followed by the OS. The xbox is also coming around slowly, if I remember correctly it is even starting to make back its investment, though at the current rate it'll be a century or two before it breaks even.
When some other office suit tops 50% market share, that is when the Microsoft ship starts sinking. And, as it goes with ships, once it starts sinking, the rest goes fairly quickly. Losing the document format lock-in would put a huge hole in the hull. Browsers, music format, smart phones - all that stuff is just water that's come over the railing. It sucks, but it doesn't endanger the ship.
As for Balmer - MS had already lost its edge when he took over. I'm quite sure he becoming the fallboy was part of the deal. Does anyone here really think Gates stepped down because he didn't like being boss anymore? He stepped down because he knew that the star was fading, and he had to build an image seperate from MS or he'd go down with it. All the good that the Gates Foundation does has the purpose of washing his image clean. Even that idea is stolen from the robber barons. (note that I don't want to diminish the good the foundation does. I just point out it's not pure altruism but has a purpose.)
In Germany, Firefox has a 61% market share, while IE has only 25%.
And a huge part of that is companies that are suffering from Microsoft lock-in. Seriously, when I see people's private computers, be it friends or people at the airport, etc. - it is probably 80% or more Firefox. In most of the companies, however, IE is still the corporate standard, and quite often the only allowed browser.
Judaism doesn't want you to feel horrible or tell you that the world is bad.
Oh yes, the religion that tells its people they are the chosen, everyone else deserves to die, and while we're at it with the conquering of the neighboring tribes, do kill all the men and children and rape the women.
True, it doesn't tell the world is bad. It goes about making sure it becomes bad.
You really want to argue about judaism being good? Spend a sunday compiling a list of offenses that carry the death penalty... oh wait, don't do it on a sunday, that would also be punishable by death.
Is the world bad? Just ask the millions of non-upper-middle-class-white-western-civilization people for whom life most assuredly sucks on a daily basis. You don't need Christianity to prove the world is bad.
Apparently, you do. A lot of those people consider themselves happy, even though they are dirt poor. Happiness is not a function of wealth, not even of freedom.
Of course, exploiting them until they can't feed their families anymore, then teaching them a religion that makes everyone feel like shit and then telling them to not have birth control or prevention against STDs is not really helping...
And when was the last time that happened to you? Oh right, never.
Nice try. Of course the point was never about my or your personal sex life, but about the relation between religion and sex.
I'm not catholic. I don't take the pope seriously. Please stop lumping us all together.
Ok, for non-catholics, replace all mentions of the pope with the bible or your local priest. Same thing.
Contract syphilis and watch your Johnson rot. Now look at the pope and try to take him seriously.
We are talking about the guy who is against condoms which just happen to protect against many STDs, yes?
You seem to think there are only two truths in the world. Fortunately, the real world is a ton more interesting than that. I know a lot of people with very open sexuality who are considerably more aware and conscious of STDs as well as the emotional effects of sex than most of the prudes.
But seriously, it's amusing to me how many bigots out there think that every sermon revolves around shaming people.
Maybe you should try looking deeper than the surface. Priests are trained for several years in the arts of speech and - though it is not called that - manipulation. No other profession on this planet currently enjoys such an extensive training in these arts. Falling for priests is like falling for spam, only on a much higher level.
Or in simpler terms: Of course they put it in the way the congregation wants to hear it. It's their job to do that.
You don't need much to waste a civil servant's time. Just thousand of false positives and images with cars in it.
They apparently have the time to manually go through all the photos looking for the license plate numbers. How much additional time does it take to sort out the obvious fakes? One second each?
If it's really a vast majority, it will be neither quick nor easy to deal with.
Understanding references and contexts is not something they teach anymore, do they?
The vast majority of something may be quite small if the population size is small. If there are 50 fakes, 48 of them would be "the vast majority". Likewise, if there are 6 fakes, 5 of them. Or if there are 5000 fakes, 4800 of them. "Majority" is a relative size, not an absolute.
How many people with really good photoshop skills would it take to seriously screw up the system? For that matter, how many people with really bad photoshop skills does it take to seriously screw up the system?
If they have the manpower to go through the photos reading licence plates, then they have the manpower to sort out the obvious photoshopped ones.
As for the others - we already have a court system that can deal with things like that. Do you really think no eye witness ever misremembers a license plate? Or no license plate was ever dirty in a way that made it look like a different number (say, the W looked like a V)?
These things happen. With large enough base numbers (and India is pretty large, four times the population of the USA) the unlikely becomes common.
It doesn't take photoshop to create imperfections, you know?
Aside from the funny part, that is closer to the truth than you like.
Most of our current mainstream religions, i.e. the monotheistic, abrahamic ones, basically need you to feel horrible because their story says the world is bad and the afterlife can be good if (and only if) you follow their teachings.
It's hard to feel like shit after a good night with a lover. Your desire for spiritual salvation is quite a bit low after a hot threesome. Your belief that this world is all bad and evil and only the afterlife counts is kind of weak in the middle of getting your brains fucked out.
Look at the pope and try to take him seriously. Now fuck for an hour and then look at the pope and try to take him seriously. You'll notice a considerable difference.
Because everything is bad if there is the theoretical possibility that it could potentially be abused?
So, logically, you should shut down your firewall and disable the virus scanner. There's a chance they might not help. And they diminish the performance. Someone could even abuse them.
Look, this is what the court system is for. Yes, there will probably be a few abuse cases. The vast majority will be found out quickly and easily, very few people have really good photoshop skills.
Ads are one of the places where we clearly see the rise of corporatism. Cyberpunk was right in the general direction, that corporations would become more important and then more powerful than governments, but wrong in how it would manifest. There will be no corporate wars (they're not profitable). The enemy of a corporation is not another corporation - it's the consumer. Wolves kill rabbits a lot more often than they kill other wolves. Amongst your peers, threats and displays of power work a lot better to establish hierarchy and territory than actual battle does. It's the prey that you hunt and kill, not your competitors.
We will be seeing a lot more like this. Consumer rights are being erroded all around the world, while corporate rights are being strengthened.
And I don't even consider myself a leftist - for you americans, if you read your actual history you'll find that several of the founding fathers wanted to outlaw corporations entirely, and the original compromise was to grant them temporary existence. Funny how the conservatives should be up in arms a lot more than the leftists are.
Putting the stuff up faster doesn't mean the students will learn more of it. Almost always to the contrary. You need time to digest knowledge, and the teacher writing it up on the blackboard gives you that time.
This is really, really old stuff. When overhead projectes were invented in the 1940s, do you really think it took long until someone thought about using it for training? The army had some success with it, but for stuff that required contemplation and understanding, it quickly turned out that increasing information input does not increase information retain.
We geeks routinely overestimate the importance of technology.
The purpose of teaching is to get knowledge into people. There are various ways to do it, but the major advantages in the field have not been technologically, but psychologically and pedagogic.
So, how about focussing on what works, instead of what sounds cool?
Slashdot Mirror
WARNING: You are a paranoid idiot who is trying to cover up his fear of change by attempts at being witty
The problem is that safety costs money.
Economy of scale is in full swing when it comes to cars. We have a billion or so of them on the roads, it is quite easy to drive down prices at that scale. Do you remember when airbags were expensive extras?
Agree completely, putting that up as a web app wasted most of its potential.
The innovation was merging various protocols together. It's not a massive innovation, but it helps. Have you never had some IM client, some IRC client and an e-mail program open all at the same time? Have you never used SMS, IM/chat and e-mail to send messages to the same person, all interleaved? Wouldn't it be cool to have one stream of communication? That's the problem Wave tried to solve.
And then the geeks found it and added all kinds of bullshit crap into it. Three different types of replies, gadgets, robots all the nonsense. Design lesson: Build a simple, but complete thing first, then add the bells and whistles.
I'll say it again: Wave failed because it was technologically brilliant, and implemented as a laggy piece of crap with a horrible user interface. You can't use it for non-trivial communications because all the interleaving makes it more difficult to follow it than a linear conversation, and the insistance on a web-based frontend means that beyond 50-100 messages it slows down to a crawl. I could literally type a message, then fetch something from the kitchen while it was typing out.
Put the concept into the hands of someone who can make things work for a user, not just a tech dude, and it can still succeed.
Quite frankly, I would leave any carrier that "speeds up" some special content. Why? Because do the math, how can they make it go faster? By raising the speed of light? Maybe they will bury a few thousand miles of fibre, just for Google? Come on! The only way they can make people who paid for the priviledge faster is by slowing everything else down.
They can do that directly (e.g. slow it down unless it is paid for) or indirectly (e.g. by using QOS and other routing tricks), but what happens is that they don't provide the best possible service anymore, unless someone pays extra for it.
Thank you, but no. I'd change to a carrier that provides the best possible service because as a subscriber I am already paying for that. So, Verizon and to all you other marketing monkeys at other carriers thinking about a stunt like that: How about I don't pay you my subscription fee as quickly as I used to, unless of course you book the special "speedy delivery" service? I'm sure my bank would love a piece of the action as well.
What you don't get is the difference between concept and implementation.
"Action Movie" is a cool concept (well, for many people, it may not be your thing, bear with me for example's sake).
"Postal" by Uwe Boll is a crappy implemention of that concept.
There are other, better implementations. For Wave, I'm pretty sure there will be.
I really like the concept, so much in fact that I've started to write a simplified version of it for an in-game messaging service.
The problem was with the UI. The interface was crap, and beyond a certain number of postings, waves started to slow down so much it was unbearable.
It needed more way to clean out old crap and make a wave readable and useable even after having been used for a while. Hopefully, someone else will take the concept and the protocol and make it work.
I will be able to read the file I get, but that other person using MS Office won't be able to read the file they receive.
Unless the document is trivial, you will have trouble with the document. Remember that MS doesn't follow its own ISO standard.
Document formats and interchange are more of a problem for MS office users, and not so much for OpenOffice users.
Wrong. As long as they feel they are the majority and you are the odd one out, most MS office users will not even bother with a common format, they will simply expect that their format is "the one". If you have any troubles loading or saving it, they will see it entirely as your problem.
Judaism adjusts for the changing times pretty darned fast,
But you never change the book.
That is where religion differs from the law. Yes, the legal system is also slow at change, and sometimes that is not a bad thing, you don't have to follow every hype.
However, when sleeping with someone else even though you are married stopped being a crime, it was removed from the criminal code. For the religions, practice changes, but the written rules remain. Sure, at least in the west nobody has been stoned for adultery for a few hundred years, but the book still says he should. Which gives ammunition to the minority of fanatics that would love to return to bronze age ethics.
There is a massive cognitive dissonance here. On the one hand, the book is holy and the entire religion is built on it, on the other hand you go about ignoring almost everything that's in it. And you don't even see the problem with that. Having your cake and eating it, too, are we?
Why 50%?
Arbitrarily chosen. Once you can't say "the majority of people use this" anymore, you will have to start thinking about document formats and interchange.
People are always lazy. As long as they have an excuse they believe themselves, they won't change.
And yet when I eat bacon I'm not killed.
Yes, I know. Same for most christians, the majority of them is committing death-penalty sins daily.
And that's exactly the point. You have the holy book, word of god himself, bla bla - and then you pick and choose. Your religion is nothing but arbitrarily selected ethics, but you're too cowardly to stand up to it. Instead it is covered in a layer of superstition.
The problem with that is, of course, that it takes the rules out of adaptive change too much. Yes, the religions change - at the speed of glaciers. Most of the rules on the book now clearly do more damage then good. But no, you can't just replace them. You have to go through all this dishonest ignoring of them.
Frankly, grow some balls. Good rules don't need a religious cover.
What you point out is niche markets for MS. The core business is still office, followed by the OS. The xbox is also coming around slowly, if I remember correctly it is even starting to make back its investment, though at the current rate it'll be a century or two before it breaks even.
When some other office suit tops 50% market share, that is when the Microsoft ship starts sinking. And, as it goes with ships, once it starts sinking, the rest goes fairly quickly. Losing the document format lock-in would put a huge hole in the hull. Browsers, music format, smart phones - all that stuff is just water that's come over the railing. It sucks, but it doesn't endanger the ship.
As for Balmer - MS had already lost its edge when he took over. I'm quite sure he becoming the fallboy was part of the deal. Does anyone here really think Gates stepped down because he didn't like being boss anymore? He stepped down because he knew that the star was fading, and he had to build an image seperate from MS or he'd go down with it. All the good that the Gates Foundation does has the purpose of washing his image clean. Even that idea is stolen from the robber barons. (note that I don't want to diminish the good the foundation does. I just point out it's not pure altruism but has a purpose.)
In Germany, Firefox has a 61% market share, while IE has only 25%.
And a huge part of that is companies that are suffering from Microsoft lock-in. Seriously, when I see people's private computers, be it friends or people at the airport, etc. - it is probably 80% or more Firefox. In most of the companies, however, IE is still the corporate standard, and quite often the only allowed browser.
Judaism doesn't want you to feel horrible or tell you that the world is bad.
Oh yes, the religion that tells its people they are the chosen, everyone else deserves to die, and while we're at it with the conquering of the neighboring tribes, do kill all the men and children and rape the women.
True, it doesn't tell the world is bad. It goes about making sure it becomes bad.
You really want to argue about judaism being good? Spend a sunday compiling a list of offenses that carry the death penalty... oh wait, don't do it on a sunday, that would also be punishable by death.
Is the world bad? Just ask the millions of non-upper-middle-class-white-western-civilization people for whom life most assuredly sucks on a daily basis. You don't need Christianity to prove the world is bad.
Apparently, you do. A lot of those people consider themselves happy, even though they are dirt poor. Happiness is not a function of wealth, not even of freedom.
Of course, exploiting them until they can't feed their families anymore, then teaching them a religion that makes everyone feel like shit and then telling them to not have birth control or prevention against STDs is not really helping...
And when was the last time that happened to you? Oh right, never.
Nice try. Of course the point was never about my or your personal sex life, but about the relation between religion and sex.
I'm not catholic. I don't take the pope seriously. Please stop lumping us all together.
Ok, for non-catholics, replace all mentions of the pope with the bible or your local priest. Same thing.
Contract syphilis and watch your Johnson rot. Now look at the pope and try to take him seriously.
We are talking about the guy who is against condoms which just happen to protect against many STDs, yes?
You seem to think there are only two truths in the world. Fortunately, the real world is a ton more interesting than that. I know a lot of people with very open sexuality who are considerably more aware and conscious of STDs as well as the emotional effects of sex than most of the prudes.
But seriously, it's amusing to me how many bigots out there think that every sermon revolves around shaming people.
Maybe you should try looking deeper than the surface. Priests are trained for several years in the arts of speech and - though it is not called that - manipulation. No other profession on this planet currently enjoys such an extensive training in these arts. Falling for priests is like falling for spam, only on a much higher level.
Or in simpler terms: Of course they put it in the way the congregation wants to hear it. It's their job to do that.
You don't need much to waste a civil servant's time. Just thousand of false positives and images with cars in it.
They apparently have the time to manually go through all the photos looking for the license plate numbers. How much additional time does it take to sort out the obvious fakes? One second each?
If it's really a vast majority, it will be neither quick nor easy to deal with.
Understanding references and contexts is not something they teach anymore, do they?
The vast majority of something may be quite small if the population size is small. If there are 50 fakes, 48 of them would be "the vast majority". Likewise, if there are 6 fakes, 5 of them. Or if there are 5000 fakes, 4800 of them. "Majority" is a relative size, not an absolute.
How many people with really good photoshop skills would it take to seriously screw up the system? For that matter, how many people with really bad photoshop skills does it take to seriously screw up the system?
If they have the manpower to go through the photos reading licence plates, then they have the manpower to sort out the obvious photoshopped ones.
As for the others - we already have a court system that can deal with things like that. Do you really think no eye witness ever misremembers a license plate? Or no license plate was ever dirty in a way that made it look like a different number (say, the W looked like a V)?
These things happen. With large enough base numbers (and India is pretty large, four times the population of the USA) the unlikely becomes common.
It doesn't take photoshop to create imperfections, you know?
Aside from the funny part, that is closer to the truth than you like.
Most of our current mainstream religions, i.e. the monotheistic, abrahamic ones, basically need you to feel horrible because their story says the world is bad and the afterlife can be good if (and only if) you follow their teachings.
It's hard to feel like shit after a good night with a lover. Your desire for spiritual salvation is quite a bit low after a hot threesome. Your belief that this world is all bad and evil and only the afterlife counts is kind of weak in the middle of getting your brains fucked out.
Look at the pope and try to take him seriously.
Now fuck for an hour and then look at the pope and try to take him seriously.
You'll notice a considerable difference.
Hard to tell the line between governments and corporations.
Not really. I don't recall "USA" being a stock ticker symbol.
Because everything is bad if there is the theoretical possibility that it could potentially be abused?
So, logically, you should shut down your firewall and disable the virus scanner. There's a chance they might not help. And they diminish the performance. Someone could even abuse them.
Look, this is what the court system is for. Yes, there will probably be a few abuse cases. The vast majority will be found out quickly and easily, very few people have really good photoshop skills.
Ads are one of the places where we clearly see the rise of corporatism. Cyberpunk was right in the general direction, that corporations would become more important and then more powerful than governments, but wrong in how it would manifest. There will be no corporate wars (they're not profitable). The enemy of a corporation is not another corporation - it's the consumer. Wolves kill rabbits a lot more often than they kill other wolves. Amongst your peers, threats and displays of power work a lot better to establish hierarchy and territory than actual battle does. It's the prey that you hunt and kill, not your competitors.
We will be seeing a lot more like this. Consumer rights are being erroded all around the world, while corporate rights are being strengthened.
And I don't even consider myself a leftist - for you americans, if you read your actual history you'll find that several of the founding fathers wanted to outlaw corporations entirely, and the original compromise was to grant them temporary existence. Funny how the conservatives should be up in arms a lot more than the leftists are.
Speed != Efficiency != Quality
Putting the stuff up faster doesn't mean the students will learn more of it. Almost always to the contrary. You need time to digest knowledge, and the teacher writing it up on the blackboard gives you that time.
This is really, really old stuff. When overhead projectes were invented in the 1940s, do you really think it took long until someone thought about using it for training? The army had some success with it, but for stuff that required contemplation and understanding, it quickly turned out that increasing information input does not increase information retain.
We geeks routinely overestimate the importance of technology.
The purpose of teaching is to get knowledge into people. There are various ways to do it, but the major advantages in the field have not been technologically, but psychologically and pedagogic.
So, how about focussing on what works, instead of what sounds cool?
Hiring policies based on religion are illegal in the USA. As they very well should be.
Oh, also - let's continue that discussion when the churches start hiring atheists for their higher-up positions...