doesn't anyone realize that reinventing the wheel is sometimes a good thing? Goodyear does it all the time, makes millions on the results, and for good reason: they're solving different problems. if you need to get to the corner store and back, sure, what they've been producing for decades will do you, but if you're driving an Formula1, or IndyCar, or military HMMV, you have different constraints and want different results.
sure, they could take some existing distro and package good cyrillic fonts and some customized skins and admin utilities. but what would that do for their local software industry? how would that make them significant to the rest of the world?
i don't care whether we're talking about Bush, Cheney, Obama, or anyone else: in America, it's vital that the President not be more powerful than congress. three main reasons.
first, and most importantly, the Constitution says so. our government is designed so that the three branches of government check each other in roughly equal measure (although totally different ways, so it's hard to get exactly equal). while it doesn't have to be that way, it's the way our particular system is designed, and it's important that we operate within those parameters. to do otherwise would be unconstitutional, which for US Federal Government, is the cardinal sin. second, philosophically, if you're going to have on branch of government be more powerful than the others, the president's the worst choice. he's already the Commander in Chief of the military, which is a very dangerous combination to make with the other powers of the Executive we've set up (Commander in Chief was a lot less of a big deal one or two centuries ago). it's important that the primary governing principle be The Rule of Law, and the legislature is the branch making the laws, so that'd be a better place to put any unequal power. and entirely practical; look at Japan or the United Kingdom for examples of legislative power trumping executive power in entirely functional ways. finally, the president is just one guy. it's a lot easier for him to go bonkers than all of congress. and while yes, i agree that congress was horridly deficient at their jobs for most of the last 8 years (including at least the first year+ of the new Democratic-controlled congress), we can replace them piecemeal, and the deficiency in even one or two hundred members of congress does less damage than the same degree in the president. the structure of congress makes it hard for them to do anything, and that's actually a good thing.
my primary reason for voting for Obama was that i think he's more likely (if only incrementally) to restore some of this balance. i think not as much as i'd like (it's hard to give up personal power, and the structure's been getting out of whack for decades longer than one president could fix, anyway), but it's a start. respect for the Constitution needs to be the primary consideration for a president.
that seems like it'd be a silly waste of time; don't they have more important things to be doing once they're actually in charge? a few minutes with google couldn't turn up any exact dates for previous official portraits. do you actually know this isn't an official portrait, or are you just talking out of your arse?
and the Office of the President Elect is, well, the President-Elect's office. what are you confused about?
...the hope that comes with any new administration.
there's something much more specific going on than that. the "hope" in 2000, at least for me and most of the folks i know, was simply that the incoming president wouldn't do too much damage (well, it was a nice thought). maybe "compassionate conservative" wasn't just marketing, and we'd see an administration that was actually guided by it, and we'd just have to deal with the wrong-headedness of applying modern "conservative" principles where they aren't appropriate (again, sadly, that didn't work out). nobody actually expected government to do much good. hey, Reagan told us government basically couldn't, and these guys all look to him like the second coming, so even Bush's supporters largely had this idea that government would mostly get out of the way, not actually do good. with Obama, you have a lot of people, even some former opponents, actually hoping government can do good, and believing it might just happen. it's still politics, and there's still compromises, and there's still going to be decisions individuals think are outright wrong (i had the same reaction to FISA as you), but it's a very different sense of thing from eight years ago.
the term is not new. the Presidential Transition Act of 1963 establishes explicitly that the president-elect (and vice-president-elect) has an "office". you're correct that the office, like Obama himself right now, doesn't have any real power in government, but it is not a new creation. even the particular phrasing "Office of the President-Elect" can be found in 1992. we're just hearing so much more about it now because people are paying more attention to Obama than previous presidents-elect, and even former opponents say the transition is being run so well.
that's the readers comments. here's my rendition of the analysts comments, with about as much information, validity, and utility as those in the article: 10) maybe. put on watch list. 9) unlikely. 8) unlikely. 7) unlikely. 6) unlikely. 5) unlikely. 4) unlikely. 3) unlikely. 2) unlikely. 1) unlikely. you're welcome. your "readers comments" are, as always, free. i'll take my analysts' paycheck now.
that bit, overall. totally worthless. just one interesting comment in the entire thing, and i think it's only interesting because of how exactly backwards they got it:
Despite its alliance with Microsoft, Novell hasn't been able to rekindle the fortune of its glory days.
"Despite"? I think they misspelled "Because of". note to the entire industry: getting in bed with Microsoft will kill you! there's simply no protection strong enough for whatever they're carrying.
you might be surprised how far the service providers are willing to go to avoid dealing with IPv6. i worked on some of the WiMAX standardization work for a while, and was amazed. suggesting that they even consider or discuss it was a good way to get yourself branded as some kind of techie weirdo and ignored for the rest of the meeting.
you're right overall, but this particular comparison brings up the one technical point about the XO i never really understood: why x86? in terms of watt/performance, ARM does much better, it's cheap, and is a common enough architecture that anything learned on it would be transferable to lots of other places.
i hate to say it, but it makes me wonder if Negroponte had windows in mind all along.
...I think Negroponte has underestimed the the will of its competitors...
that is not what happened. yeah, there was competition, but i don't think it presented itself in any unexpected ways. nobody offered a real compelling alternative to what OLPC had. intel and microsoft didn't rise to the challenge of making a great product. and OLPC has been doing at least reasonably well at landing contracts.
what killed OLPC was getting in bed with Microsoft. i don't know enough about Negroponte's mental processes to say why that looked like a good idea to him (cynically, i think he saw an end-run to becoming the largest windows distributor or some nonsense like that), but it never actually is. every company who tries it gets run over and ground up (aside from those that get bought, who have a related but different set of problems). while Windows and Linux were both options, i still held out hope that Negroponte was really a much shrewder business guy than i am, understood things i didn't, and was playing it for marketing effect, or to appease certain potential customers. i hoped, but didn't really believe. now the hope is gone.
I'd like to see the poor using free software, but in the end i'd prefer them to have food in their bellies and using commercial software than having free software and going hungry with a bankrupt OLPC.
confused phrasing aside, you miss the point. it's not "free software and no food" vs. "commercial software and food". it's "education or no", and "free or no". nobody has ever advocated handing these to kids instead of food. there's hundreds of millions of kids out there who're at subsistence level: they'll survive, but prospects for improving their future are dim. education is the best way to address that. and that's why OLPC was always an education project, not a laptop project.
Errrrr.... Kurzweil is one of the people producing the software.
right: i should have said "like most/all the other people producing such software" or something to that effect. my point is that this IMHO misplaced focus is much broader than just kurzweil. from my perspective, it looks like just another iteration of the mismatch between the people producing the technology hoping it'll find a problem, and the application-focused people.
the speech thing is really interesting. kurzweil, like the people producing the software, focus on dictation-style system. this is bad for two reasons. first, it's a much harder problem, technically: you need both better signal processing and confidence on your recognition, and you need vastly smarter software to resolve ambiguities based on context (and likely other factors). second, it's a less well-defined use case, which dilutes market demand. saying "use your computer like you do today, but talk to it!" just isn't compelling for most people. the new capabilities should offer new modes of interaction, or new functionality, not just another way to do the same old thing.
the link is "bad" in that it's not a direct link to the 140.05, true, but it's still a good link to find it from, which was my intent. i also like the fact that the results from asking that link for 140.05 gives you easy access to all of 140. which brings us to your second point... my point was that 140.00 defines all the terms you need (lacking explicit specific (re)definition, words have their regular english meaning). 140.00 tells you who's licensed or privileged. the area the photographer was in is (from the accounts available to us) open to the public; as in not-access-restricted. you're right that it's unclear who is an "authorized person" to ask him to leave, but that's certainly not relevant here, as nobody claims he defied anyone's order to leave.
assume it's true that the NY/NJ PA has a no-photos policy on property they own and operate; assume Amtrak (or whoever else you like outside of the relevant legislatures) has similar policies. and assume they're unambiguous that you're violating them. taking photos is still not illegal because - and this is important - none of these organizations make law. the photographer in this incident was charged with Trespass, as per NY State Penal Code Part 3, Title I, Article 140.05. go read it - the entire 140's a relatively easily-comprehensible piece of law. the photographer had a legal license to be on the where he was, and while a violation of the PA's, Amtrak, or whoever's rules might give them good grounds to ask him to leave, there is simply no trespass until he refuses such a lawfully given request.
remember, always: laws, in democracies, are made by those with legislative authority, not policing authority or private individuals or organizations. neither airlines, nor amtrak, nor the police, may make or redefine laws.
yes. volume is high enough that the smallest, single line of google ads (for example) would still yield good revenue, despite being the lowest yield per ad. they can be made unobtrusive, and the better ad networks really can often provide genuinely relevant ads these days.
Should contributors be financially rewarded?
no. it's a nice idea, but in any work with unverified quality, you'd end up rewarding quality only. alternately, you'd have to invent a QA regime, which is entirely doable, but costs money and would be a huge cultural mismatch with Wikepedia. even then, finding a fair compensation scheme is very difficult in a multi-author work where the authors can revise each other; with the number of authors involved in wikipedia, it may well just be impossible, and would certainly be a huge time sink.
in the US (at least), "to table" something means to come back to it later. say you're in a meeting and a particular point is proving difficult to get through. you might table that topic so you can address other business. in GB (at least), it means pretty much exactly the opposite. when you want to discuss a new point in the same meeting, you would table that point. i happen to think the British usage makes much more sense, but it's bizarre sitting in a meeting with an American and a Brit both wanting to "table" some point and getting irritated when the other doesn't.
i'm not sure what in my post is triggering the "entitlement" claim. i don't think the shutdown was handled in a way respectful of what others have (had, i guess) brought to the community. i don't think of myself as entitled to anything more than the courtesy of allowing me to grab some of my contributions or make some notes on things others have said that i wanted to look into more later.
in case you missed it, i explicitly thanked Bruce for his work. i think it was, for the most part, great what he created there. but that doesn't mean the shutdown wasn't poorly handled.
While I do realize that the internet precludes the need for us geeks to travel farther than our desks...
international travel would be a great way to realize how incredibly false this is. more likely than not, at some point you're going to end up doing something other than simply coding widgets from a spec (or from imagination). as soon as that happens, you need the experience that comes from getting away from your desk; preferably far away from your desk. on the mundane level, you'll almost certainly have to do something like turn customer requirements into specs and/or code; understanding the mindset of the person you're talking to is crucial there. or you might find yourself working with engineers in, or educated in, another country; again, understanding their mindset will make that go much better. beyond that, there's lots of good suggestions here. personally, i like the ones that take you outside your standard course work, even if it costs you an extra semester or two, but if you're bound and determined to do it all in an academic context, just ask your school; any sizable US school will have administration folks who can tell you what your best options are.
lived and worked in London for just over a year; this was not my experience. talking about subways and (street) blocks got me no end of odd looks. not to mention the confusion over what it meant to table something. at least one friend got herself into a rather awkward situation upon announcing to a random guy in a bar that she didn't like to wear pants (she preferred skirts). the confusion was entirely bi-directional: it took me quite a while to figure out what a skip was, and was reduced to a stammer when a female co-worker asked me for a rubber (i eventually handed her an elastic band).
i like Bruce, but this is very poorly done. if the primary concern is financial, there's ways to mitigate that. if he wasn't happy asking for donations (which i can certainly respect, even if i wouldn't have that problem myself), you can look at both revenue and expenses independent of that. on expenses: it's never been clear to me what the "professional editorial staff" actually did, besides stick a comment on some stories - a comment which wasn't reliably better than any other on the site. for revenue, using the ad hoc advertising was also probably a poor choice compared to using something like google's service. and if the issues was primarily the creepy community, there's ways to deal with that, too: moderation systems, or even (at the size it's at) just kickban individual users (after talking to and/or warning them).
and if you've given up on all that, the shutdown itself was not well done. no notice? that's kinda disrespectful to the people who've put in work to build what's there. i would've loved a few days to copy some of the comments i've made there, or links others have posted, or discuss where to go from here. and that last one, of course, could have included handing the community - or even the site, wholesale - off to another host. that last part in particular stings; it kinda feels like "if i can't have it - on my terms - nobody can".
Bruce, if you're out there, look: thanks for all the work you've done. it was great. i'd really like to keep it going. let me know if we can talk about options.
sigh. xkcd is so amazing. i think it ought to be a new mandatory part of every slashdot story submission that you pick which xkcd comic goes with the story.
Little penguins all around the world are waiting for Penguin-Master Linus Torvalds to deliver some Glogg inspired Xmas cheer in the form of the new 2.6.28 kernel.
wow. i've often looked at linux and thought the programmers must've been drunk while writing it. now we know.
Slashdot Mirror
doesn't anyone realize that reinventing the wheel is sometimes a good thing? Goodyear does it all the time, makes millions on the results, and for good reason: they're solving different problems. if you need to get to the corner store and back, sure, what they've been producing for decades will do you, but if you're driving an Formula1, or IndyCar, or military HMMV, you have different constraints and want different results.
sure, they could take some existing distro and package good cyrillic fonts and some customized skins and admin utilities. but what would that do for their local software industry? how would that make them significant to the rest of the world?
i don't care whether we're talking about Bush, Cheney, Obama, or anyone else: in America, it's vital that the President not be more powerful than congress. three main reasons.
first, and most importantly, the Constitution says so. our government is designed so that the three branches of government check each other in roughly equal measure (although totally different ways, so it's hard to get exactly equal). while it doesn't have to be that way, it's the way our particular system is designed, and it's important that we operate within those parameters. to do otherwise would be unconstitutional, which for US Federal Government, is the cardinal sin.
second, philosophically, if you're going to have on branch of government be more powerful than the others, the president's the worst choice. he's already the Commander in Chief of the military, which is a very dangerous combination to make with the other powers of the Executive we've set up (Commander in Chief was a lot less of a big deal one or two centuries ago). it's important that the primary governing principle be The Rule of Law, and the legislature is the branch making the laws, so that'd be a better place to put any unequal power. and entirely practical; look at Japan or the United Kingdom for examples of legislative power trumping executive power in entirely functional ways.
finally, the president is just one guy. it's a lot easier for him to go bonkers than all of congress. and while yes, i agree that congress was horridly deficient at their jobs for most of the last 8 years (including at least the first year+ of the new Democratic-controlled congress), we can replace them piecemeal, and the deficiency in even one or two hundred members of congress does less damage than the same degree in the president. the structure of congress makes it hard for them to do anything, and that's actually a good thing.
my primary reason for voting for Obama was that i think he's more likely (if only incrementally) to restore some of this balance. i think not as much as i'd like (it's hard to give up personal power, and the structure's been getting out of whack for decades longer than one president could fix, anyway), but it's a start. respect for the Constitution needs to be the primary consideration for a president.
ah. man, that movie rocked. why don't they make them that good any more? instead of that abomination of a remake, just re-release this one.
that seems like it'd be a silly waste of time; don't they have more important things to be doing once they're actually in charge? a few minutes with google couldn't turn up any exact dates for previous official portraits. do you actually know this isn't an official portrait, or are you just talking out of your arse?
and the Office of the President Elect is, well, the President-Elect's office. what are you confused about?
there's something much more specific going on than that. the "hope" in 2000, at least for me and most of the folks i know, was simply that the incoming president wouldn't do too much damage (well, it was a nice thought). maybe "compassionate conservative" wasn't just marketing, and we'd see an administration that was actually guided by it, and we'd just have to deal with the wrong-headedness of applying modern "conservative" principles where they aren't appropriate (again, sadly, that didn't work out). nobody actually expected government to do much good. hey, Reagan told us government basically couldn't, and these guys all look to him like the second coming, so even Bush's supporters largely had this idea that government would mostly get out of the way, not actually do good.
with Obama, you have a lot of people, even some former opponents, actually hoping government can do good, and believing it might just happen. it's still politics, and there's still compromises, and there's still going to be decisions individuals think are outright wrong (i had the same reaction to FISA as you), but it's a very different sense of thing from eight years ago.
the term is not new. the Presidential Transition Act of 1963 establishes explicitly that the president-elect (and vice-president-elect) has an "office". you're correct that the office, like Obama himself right now, doesn't have any real power in government, but it is not a new creation. even the particular phrasing "Office of the President-Elect" can be found in 1992. we're just hearing so much more about it now because people are paying more attention to Obama than previous presidents-elect, and even former opponents say the transition is being run so well.
that's the readers comments. here's my rendition of the analysts comments, with about as much information, validity, and utility as those in the article:
10) maybe. put on watch list.
9) unlikely.
8) unlikely.
7) unlikely.
6) unlikely.
5) unlikely.
4) unlikely.
3) unlikely.
2) unlikely.
1) unlikely.
you're welcome. your "readers comments" are, as always, free. i'll take my analysts' paycheck now.
"Despite"? I think they misspelled "Because of". note to the entire industry: getting in bed with Microsoft will kill you! there's simply no protection strong enough for whatever they're carrying.
FreeBSD.
you might be surprised how far the service providers are willing to go to avoid dealing with IPv6. i worked on some of the WiMAX standardization work for a while, and was amazed. suggesting that they even consider or discuss it was a good way to get yourself branded as some kind of techie weirdo and ignored for the rest of the meeting.
you're right overall, but this particular comparison brings up the one technical point about the XO i never really understood: why x86? in terms of watt/performance, ARM does much better, it's cheap, and is a common enough architecture that anything learned on it would be transferable to lots of other places.
i hate to say it, but it makes me wonder if Negroponte had windows in mind all along.
that is not what happened. yeah, there was competition, but i don't think it presented itself in any unexpected ways. nobody offered a real compelling alternative to what OLPC had. intel and microsoft didn't rise to the challenge of making a great product. and OLPC has been doing at least reasonably well at landing contracts.
what killed OLPC was getting in bed with Microsoft. i don't know enough about Negroponte's mental processes to say why that looked like a good idea to him (cynically, i think he saw an end-run to becoming the largest windows distributor or some nonsense like that), but it never actually is. every company who tries it gets run over and ground up (aside from those that get bought, who have a related but different set of problems).
while Windows and Linux were both options, i still held out hope that Negroponte was really a much shrewder business guy than i am, understood things i didn't, and was playing it for marketing effect, or to appease certain potential customers. i hoped, but didn't really believe. now the hope is gone.
confused phrasing aside, you miss the point. it's not "free software and no food" vs. "commercial software and food". it's "education or no", and "free or no". nobody has ever advocated handing these to kids instead of food. there's hundreds of millions of kids out there who're at subsistence level: they'll survive, but prospects for improving their future are dim. education is the best way to address that. and that's why OLPC was always an education project, not a laptop project.
right: i should have said "like most/all the other people producing such software" or something to that effect. my point is that this IMHO misplaced focus is much broader than just kurzweil. from my perspective, it looks like just another iteration of the mismatch between the people producing the technology hoping it'll find a problem, and the application-focused people.
hi!
also, be more polite.
the speech thing is really interesting. kurzweil, like the people producing the software, focus on dictation-style system. this is bad for two reasons. first, it's a much harder problem, technically: you need both better signal processing and confidence on your recognition, and you need vastly smarter software to resolve ambiguities based on context (and likely other factors). second, it's a less well-defined use case, which dilutes market demand. saying "use your computer like you do today, but talk to it!" just isn't compelling for most people. the new capabilities should offer new modes of interaction, or new functionality, not just another way to do the same old thing.
wait, they consider that a bug? i always assumed it was one of their primary design goals.
the link is "bad" in that it's not a direct link to the 140.05, true, but it's still a good link to find it from, which was my intent. i also like the fact that the results from asking that link for 140.05 gives you easy access to all of 140. which brings us to your second point...
my point was that 140.00 defines all the terms you need (lacking explicit specific (re)definition, words have their regular english meaning). 140.00 tells you who's licensed or privileged. the area the photographer was in is (from the accounts available to us) open to the public; as in not-access-restricted. you're right that it's unclear who is an "authorized person" to ask him to leave, but that's certainly not relevant here, as nobody claims he defied anyone's order to leave.
assume it's true that the NY/NJ PA has a no-photos policy on property they own and operate; assume Amtrak (or whoever else you like outside of the relevant legislatures) has similar policies. and assume they're unambiguous that you're violating them. taking photos is still not illegal because - and this is important - none of these organizations make law. the photographer in this incident was charged with Trespass, as per NY State Penal Code Part 3, Title I, Article 140.05. go read it - the entire 140's a relatively easily-comprehensible piece of law. the photographer had a legal license to be on the where he was, and while a violation of the PA's, Amtrak, or whoever's rules might give them good grounds to ask him to leave, there is simply no trespass until he refuses such a lawfully given request.
remember, always: laws, in democracies, are made by those with legislative authority, not policing authority or private individuals or organizations. neither airlines, nor amtrak, nor the police, may make or redefine laws.
yes. volume is high enough that the smallest, single line of google ads (for example) would still yield good revenue, despite being the lowest yield per ad. they can be made unobtrusive, and the better ad networks really can often provide genuinely relevant ads these days.
no. it's a nice idea, but in any work with unverified quality, you'd end up rewarding quality only. alternately, you'd have to invent a QA regime, which is entirely doable, but costs money and would be a huge cultural mismatch with Wikepedia. even then, finding a fair compensation scheme is very difficult in a multi-author work where the authors can revise each other; with the number of authors involved in wikipedia, it may well just be impossible, and would certainly be a huge time sink.
in the US (at least), "to table" something means to come back to it later. say you're in a meeting and a particular point is proving difficult to get through. you might table that topic so you can address other business.
in GB (at least), it means pretty much exactly the opposite. when you want to discuss a new point in the same meeting, you would table that point.
i happen to think the British usage makes much more sense, but it's bizarre sitting in a meeting with an American and a Brit both wanting to "table" some point and getting irritated when the other doesn't.
i'm not sure what in my post is triggering the "entitlement" claim. i don't think the shutdown was handled in a way respectful of what others have (had, i guess) brought to the community. i don't think of myself as entitled to anything more than the courtesy of allowing me to grab some of my contributions or make some notes on things others have said that i wanted to look into more later.
in case you missed it, i explicitly thanked Bruce for his work. i think it was, for the most part, great what he created there. but that doesn't mean the shutdown wasn't poorly handled.
international travel would be a great way to realize how incredibly false this is. more likely than not, at some point you're going to end up doing something other than simply coding widgets from a spec (or from imagination). as soon as that happens, you need the experience that comes from getting away from your desk; preferably far away from your desk. on the mundane level, you'll almost certainly have to do something like turn customer requirements into specs and/or code; understanding the mindset of the person you're talking to is crucial there. or you might find yourself working with engineers in, or educated in, another country; again, understanding their mindset will make that go much better.
beyond that, there's lots of good suggestions here. personally, i like the ones that take you outside your standard course work, even if it costs you an extra semester or two, but if you're bound and determined to do it all in an academic context, just ask your school; any sizable US school will have administration folks who can tell you what your best options are.
lived and worked in London for just over a year; this was not my experience. talking about subways and (street) blocks got me no end of odd looks. not to mention the confusion over what it meant to table something. at least one friend got herself into a rather awkward situation upon announcing to a random guy in a bar that she didn't like to wear pants (she preferred skirts). the confusion was entirely bi-directional: it took me quite a while to figure out what a skip was, and was reduced to a stammer when a female co-worker asked me for a rubber (i eventually handed her an elastic band).
speaking as a relatively frequent poster: wtf?
i like Bruce, but this is very poorly done. if the primary concern is financial, there's ways to mitigate that. if he wasn't happy asking for donations (which i can certainly respect, even if i wouldn't have that problem myself), you can look at both revenue and expenses independent of that. on expenses: it's never been clear to me what the "professional editorial staff" actually did, besides stick a comment on some stories - a comment which wasn't reliably better than any other on the site. for revenue, using the ad hoc advertising was also probably a poor choice compared to using something like google's service. and if the issues was primarily the creepy community, there's ways to deal with that, too: moderation systems, or even (at the size it's at) just kickban individual users (after talking to and/or warning them).
and if you've given up on all that, the shutdown itself was not well done. no notice? that's kinda disrespectful to the people who've put in work to build what's there. i would've loved a few days to copy some of the comments i've made there, or links others have posted, or discuss where to go from here. and that last one, of course, could have included handing the community - or even the site, wholesale - off to another host. that last part in particular stings; it kinda feels like "if i can't have it - on my terms - nobody can".
Bruce, if you're out there, look: thanks for all the work you've done. it was great. i'd really like to keep it going. let me know if we can talk about options.
sigh. xkcd is so amazing. i think it ought to be a new mandatory part of every slashdot story submission that you pick which xkcd comic goes with the story.
wow. i've often looked at linux and thought the programmers must've been drunk while writing it. now we know.