we laugh about how computers from the 80's had HDs that measured in MBs and RAM that measued in KB!
Maybe the joke is on us, though. Maybe it's the software that needs improving, not the hardware. And of course, nobody tells us how we're supposed to back up all this crap.
I didn't RTFA, but it occurs to me that whilst/. has been discussing the obviousness of inventions, perhaps we should take a step back and determine whether some of these things are actually inventions at all.
Software patenting seems to have reached the stage where it's like you can patent the/idea/ of curing cancer, even if you don't know how to do it. Then, if anyone comes along and actually cures it, then you can sue them.
And in fact, we've even reached that low and started digging, because hey, although people have obviously thought of the idea of curing cancer, no-one's actually patented the idea, so let's go ahead and patent it anyway.
> What evidence do you have that "a wizard did it"?
Here's what I liked to ask the Intelligent Designer "theorists": would it be OK to teach the kids that we are all part of The Matrix? And would it be OK to teach Matrix Theory instead of Intelligent Designer Theory?
Logic has no effect on ID'ers. So when they say that God did it, just turn around and say "No, you're wrong, it's the Matrix. (Version 6, according to the movies)". Then, when they start to dispute the theory, just counter with whatever response they would give to the question.
Personally, my vote is on the time cube: http://www.timecube.com/ And don't forget, kids, YOU were educated EVIL, & too dumb to know about Time Cube Creation.
Earnings have less to do with stock prices than earnings growth. You may look at GOOG's P/E ratio and think "holy crap, they're trading at 119 times earnings," but that does not a bubble make. Smart traders look at future earnings, and they determine future earnings based on past earnings trends. Google has shown a phenomenal ability to grow their earnings, and to grow them at an increasing rate. Investors bank on their ability to continue to grow earnings. That is why in an SEC filing, businesses like google talk about trends in revenue not in terms of absolute dollars, but in terms of rates.
Do we humans learn nothing? This sounds exactly like the spiel that nearly always gets trotted out whenever there's a bubble. "This time it's different", the cry goes out. Anyone who's read and internally digested Intelligent Investor by Ben Graham is just not impressed by all this flannel. I unhesitatingly recommend reading this book to anyone who is the least bit interested in investing.
Once technology allowed John Smith to trade stocks in his living room, the stock market changed forever. The stock market is no longer rational people evaluating business; instead it is now the public wagering on the future. And the stakes (and the stocks) are high.
Ironically, all this tech stuff was supposed to allow us to make better-informed decisions.
I disagree on your "no longer rational" argument - the stock market was always irrational, and always will be.
But there is a third category: an informed group can be much more than the sum of its parts. If you need proof, go look up collaborative intelligence in the wikipedia.
No, wait, you've got it the wrong way 'round. See, for example, "Extraordinary Popular Delusions & the Madness of Crowds", which you can buy from Amazon. Or, you can save a few trees and get it free from Project Gutenberg http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/636
Presenting a most wonderful invention for the benefit of all: instead of wasting all that valuable human intellect on weighing up the merits of patent applications, investigating possible prior art, and all the drudgery that this implies, why not just feed patent applications along a conveyor belt? The conveyor belt should have monkeys spaced at equal intervals along its length. Each monkey will have a copious supply of sugar-saturated fizzy pop, and a stamp that says "Patent Granted".
The monkeys, in their highly sugar-charged state, are bound to stamp a lot of patent applications. It may happen that not all of the applications are granted patent status by this miniature army of helper monkeys, but the applications can always be resubmitted. If an application is stamped more than once, then well, why not grant the same application multiple patents.
And if people ask if that actually makes any sense, then we'll just turn around and say "hey, it makes about as much sense as everything else".
knew 'or should have known' it infringed when using the tools to secure credit-card transactions
Of course, common sense dictates that if you didn't know a patented invention existed, but you managed to reinvent it anyway, then it probably wasn't much of an invention in the first place.
Let's just bring in a "not allowed to kill anyone at all" rule.
Alternatively, keep the general population out of it, and just let the leaders who are in dispute fight each other to the death. Two men enter, one man leaves, and all that.
In one of the Rama books by Arthur C. Clarke (I think it's the third one), a race of intelligent spiders decided to wage war on the humans. According to the spider's laws, though, any [spider] leader who approved war motions had to subsequently submit themselves for execution. This ensured that wars were only conducted for the direst of needs.
If you've never heard of PPP, basically it's a way of transferring money from the public sector to the pockets of private individuals.
Furthermore, both sides will argue about who is responsible for what. Fairly obviously, companies don't like fixing stuff for free, and will start waving contracts in front of your face as soon as something goes pear-shaped. This is only to be expected. The trouble is, it doesn't actually solve whatever problem is in hand.
Not all that long ago, there was a something in the news about hospitals outsourcing the cleaning of medical instruments to outside contractors. The problem was that the contractors weren't cleaning them well enough. Now seriously: WTF? Hospitals were autoclaving their instruments for decades. I really really don't see the logic of outsourcing stuff like this. Surely hospitals are either wasting money by stuffing profits into private companies, or else they're saving money, but getting a crap service.
The theory is that private companies can do some things more efficiently due to their experience and better commerical skills
The problem with theories such as this is that they are usually mere rationalisations to justify a pre-conceived course of action. I have no particular reason to expect that private companies have more experience than the public bodies. Also, a service department to a public body is, well, a service department, so what does being "commercial" have anything to do with anything? A toilet cleaner cleans toilets. What's "commercial" about that?
I think that what I'm trying to say is that the reason that public bodies are mostly crap is not because of a lack of "experience" or "commercial" skills (whatever that's supposed to mean), but due to bureaucracy, reluctance to make decisions, and lack of incentive to manage them well.
and that they [private companies] can take the risk of the project
Not acceptable! To me as a consumer, it's no furking good to find out that the trains don't work, the hospital instruments are dirty, the roads aren't gritted, etc.. It's up to the public body in question to take responsibility for the quality of the service, not fob us off with excuses about how it's Somebody Else's Problem (TM). No wonder this once great UK nation of ours is rapidly going down the superfically-cleaned toilet.
> Imagine how silly people will feel when they sit down at your keyboard and try to type something.
Actually, a good side-benefit of a blank keyboard is that it stops people fscking about with your computer.
I also find that booting to Linux by default also helps keep their sweaty paws off my computer.
Re:With a hopefully smaller burst of the bubble
on
Another Dot-com Boom?
·
· Score: 1
> "consistently buying these stocks with P/E ratios of 300 and higher"
> I'd rephrase that a bit. It was so crazy back then that any company with an actual P/E was pretty much frowned upon.
For a trip down memory lane... I remember when the tech bubble was in full swing, the FT ran an interview with a tech analyst. The analyst in question wasn't using boring old P/E ratios. No, he was using a model called S.O.A.R., which stood for Subsumed Operating Assets Return, or somesuch nonsense. Can you say "market top"?
I suspect that if we do have a tech bubble, this time 'round it wont be as mental as the last time. Markets have been somewhat flatter over the last few years, so people are less excited (hell, it's been years since the Footsie was at its record high).
I think one problem with poor software is the lack of thinking, planning, and really digging into requirements.
For example, I was once consulted on a bid that my company was working on. One "requirement" related to master and slave databases. Data was entered on a remote site, for subsequent inclusion within the master database. The person responsible for the bid said it would be "nice" if changes could be propagated easily from one database to another, either from slave to master, or vice versa. I tried to dissuade them from this, because I foresaw many many potential problems of synchronisation. Suppose changes conflict? Which one would be right?
A better solution would be where the remote site prepared data, which was submitted for processing by the central business unit, whereupon it was incorporated in the master database, and then released to remote locations. I tried to explain that their original idea was so frought with complications that it would be best if they really tried to hash out what the client needed to do, and make a solution based on that, rather than go for some magical feature-rich application that would probably come out hopelessly buggy and over-budget. But management just didn't get it. No. Generalised synchronisation is neat, so that's what we'll offer.
And whilst my dander is up, permit me to vent my spleen in the direction of Microsoft; and, just for balance, projects like Open Office and Java. Bloated overblown software might be what passes for "engineering" these days, but I think it's a fairly warped perception of engineering. Real engineers tend to look for an economical solution to a problem. They "design" things, which meaning planning, experimenting, adjusting, and keep going back to the drawing board until they get it right.
Really, it's not so much that software "engineering" is an immature profession that's the problem, the problem is that software engineers don't follow established engineering principles.
In the series of the film Terminator, they had to reinvent history in order to account for the fact that human civilisation wasn't actually destroyed in 1997.
I just have this vision of homocidal Terminator deathmachines being controlled by hamsters sucking on tubes.
> This is bullshit. I am never even considering buying a 100W CPU for my desktop, certainly not 1000W.
Yes, 640W ought to be enough for anybody:)
Whilst all this technology is all very fine and dandy, I can't help thinking we're fixing the wrong problem. Perhaps we should looking at ways of designing better OSs and applications that don't need all this fancy stuff.
And it wont help that Bill Gates is looking to keep our CPUs running at 100% utilisation.
> Assuming that it is the attorney's first offense, I'd be surprised if it results in disbarment or even suspension; more likely a reprimand or private cautionary letter.
IANAL, but I did a short course in law once (I'm from England). I can't remember what the case was, but it was from very old colonial days.
Anyway, it was the case where 2 highwaymen fell out with each other, and petitioned the court to resolve a dispute about how their booty should be shared.
Events didn't turn out quite to their liking, however, as it resulted in them both being hanged, and the lawyer being deported to Australia.
Or how about the case of Marconi, in the UK. It was run successfully by Lord Weinstock for years. The company had a large cash balance, but he was ousted by City-friendly management who then went on a high-tech spending spree in the late 90's. And we all know what happened to the tech industry come the turn of the century.
Result? The whole company gets flushed down the toilet, shareholders loose money, and normal employees loose their jobs. The directors, who's decisions led to this disaster in the first place, walk away with Big Cash Prizes.
Slashdot Mirror
we laugh about how computers from the 80's had HDs that measured in MBs and RAM that measued in KB!
Maybe the joke is on us, though. Maybe it's the software that needs improving, not the hardware. And of course, nobody tells us how we're supposed to back up all this crap.
I didn't RTFA, but it occurs to me that whilst /. has been discussing the obviousness of inventions, perhaps we should take a step back and determine whether some of these things are actually inventions at all.
/idea/ of curing cancer, even if you don't know how to do it. Then, if anyone comes along and actually cures it, then you can sue them.
Software patenting seems to have reached the stage where it's like you can patent the
And in fact, we've even reached that low and started digging, because hey, although people have obviously thought of the idea of curing cancer, no-one's actually patented the idea, so let's go ahead and patent it anyway.
> What evidence do you have that "a wizard did it"?
Here's what I liked to ask the Intelligent Designer "theorists": would it be OK to teach the kids that we are all part of The Matrix? And would it be OK to teach Matrix Theory instead of Intelligent Designer Theory?
Logic has no effect on ID'ers. So when they say that God did it, just turn around and say "No, you're wrong, it's the Matrix. (Version 6, according to the movies)". Then, when they start to dispute the theory, just counter with whatever response they would give to the question.
Personally, my vote is on the time cube:
http://www.timecube.com/
And don't forget, kids, YOU were educated EVIL, & too dumb to know about Time Cube Creation.
Do we humans learn nothing? This sounds exactly like the spiel that nearly always gets trotted out whenever there's a bubble. "This time it's different", the cry goes out. Anyone who's read and internally digested Intelligent Investor by Ben Graham is just not impressed by all this flannel. I unhesitatingly recommend reading this book to anyone who is the least bit interested in investing.
Ironically, all this tech stuff was supposed to allow us to make better-informed decisions.
I disagree on your "no longer rational" argument - the stock market was always irrational, and always will be.
But there is a third category: an informed group can be much more than the sum of its parts. If you need proof, go look up collaborative intelligence in the wikipedia.
No, wait, you've got it the wrong way 'round. See, for example, "Extraordinary Popular Delusions & the Madness of Crowds", which you can buy from Amazon. Or, you can save a few trees and get it free from Project Gutenberg http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/636
Presenting a most wonderful invention for the benefit of all: instead of wasting all that valuable human intellect on weighing up the merits of patent applications, investigating possible prior art, and all the drudgery that this implies, why not just feed patent applications along a conveyor belt? The conveyor belt should have monkeys spaced at equal intervals along its length. Each monkey will have a copious supply of sugar-saturated fizzy pop, and a stamp that says "Patent Granted".
The monkeys, in their highly sugar-charged state, are bound to stamp a lot of patent applications. It may happen that not all of the applications are granted patent status by this miniature army of helper monkeys, but the applications can always be resubmitted. If an application is stamped more than once, then well, why not grant the same application multiple patents.
And if people ask if that actually makes any sense, then we'll just turn around and say "hey, it makes about as much sense as everything else".
Of course, common sense dictates that if you didn't know a patented invention existed, but you managed to reinvent it anyway, then it probably wasn't much of an invention in the first place.
Let's just bring in a "not allowed to kill anyone at all" rule.
Alternatively, keep the general population out of it, and just let the leaders who are in dispute fight each other to the death. Two men enter, one man leaves, and all that.
In one of the Rama books by Arthur C. Clarke (I think it's the third one), a race of intelligent spiders decided to wage war on the humans. According to the spider's laws, though, any [spider] leader who approved war motions had to subsequently submit themselves for execution. This ensured that wars were only conducted for the direst of needs.
Furthermore, both sides will argue about who is responsible for what. Fairly obviously, companies don't like fixing stuff for free, and will start waving contracts in front of your face as soon as something goes pear-shaped. This is only to be expected. The trouble is, it doesn't actually solve whatever problem is in hand.
Not all that long ago, there was a something in the news about hospitals outsourcing the cleaning of medical instruments to outside contractors. The problem was that the contractors weren't cleaning them well enough. Now seriously: WTF? Hospitals were autoclaving their instruments for decades. I really really don't see the logic of outsourcing stuff like this. Surely hospitals are either wasting money by stuffing profits into private companies, or else they're saving money, but getting a crap service.
The theory is that private companies can do some things more efficiently due to their experience and better commerical skills
The problem with theories such as this is that they are usually mere rationalisations to justify a pre-conceived course of action. I have no particular reason to expect that private companies have more experience than the public bodies. Also, a service department to a public body is, well, a service department, so what does being "commercial" have anything to do with anything? A toilet cleaner cleans toilets. What's "commercial" about that?
I think that what I'm trying to say is that the reason that public bodies are mostly crap is not because of a lack of "experience" or "commercial" skills (whatever that's supposed to mean), but due to bureaucracy, reluctance to make decisions, and lack of incentive to manage them well.
and that they [private companies] can take the risk of the project
Not acceptable! To me as a consumer, it's no furking good to find out that the trains don't work, the hospital instruments are dirty, the roads aren't gritted, etc.. It's up to the public body in question to take responsibility for the quality of the service, not fob us off with excuses about how it's Somebody Else's Problem (TM). No wonder this once great UK nation of ours is rapidly going down the superfically-cleaned toilet.
> Imagine how silly people will feel when they sit down at your keyboard and try to type something.
Actually, a good side-benefit of a blank keyboard is that it stops people fscking about with your computer.
I also find that booting to Linux by default also helps keep their sweaty paws off my computer.
> "consistently buying these stocks with P/E ratios of 300 and higher"
... I remember when the tech bubble was in full swing, the FT ran an interview with a tech analyst. The analyst in question wasn't using boring old P/E ratios. No, he was using a model called S.O.A.R., which stood for Subsumed Operating Assets Return, or somesuch nonsense. Can you say "market top"?
> I'd rephrase that a bit. It was so crazy back then that any company with an actual P/E was pretty much frowned upon.
For a trip down memory lane
I suspect that if we do have a tech bubble, this time 'round it wont be as mental as the last time. Markets have been somewhat flatter over the last few years, so people are less excited (hell, it's been years since the Footsie was at its record high).
> We are against the idea of being forced to identify ourselves, being forced to carry id cards
I know that by mentioning Nazis I automatically loose my argument, but sheez, id cards really are the slippery slope to a Police State.
I, for one, am happy to put a link to no2id on my website.
I think one problem with poor software is the lack of thinking, planning, and really digging into requirements.
For example, I was once consulted on a bid that my company was working on. One "requirement" related to master and slave databases. Data was entered on a remote site, for subsequent inclusion within the master database. The person responsible for the bid said it would be "nice" if changes could be propagated easily from one database to another, either from slave to master, or vice versa. I tried to dissuade them from this, because I foresaw many many potential problems of synchronisation. Suppose changes conflict? Which one would be right?
A better solution would be where the remote site prepared data, which was submitted for processing by the central business unit, whereupon it was incorporated in the master database, and then released to remote locations. I tried to explain that their original idea was so frought with complications that it would be best if they really tried to hash out what the client needed to do, and make a solution based on that, rather than go for some magical feature-rich application that would probably come out hopelessly buggy and over-budget. But management just didn't get it. No. Generalised synchronisation is neat, so that's what we'll offer.
And whilst my dander is up, permit me to vent my spleen in the direction of Microsoft; and, just for balance, projects like Open Office and Java. Bloated overblown software might be what passes for "engineering" these days, but I think it's a fairly warped perception of engineering. Real engineers tend to look for an economical solution to a problem. They "design" things, which meaning planning, experimenting, adjusting, and keep going back to the drawing board until they get it right.
Really, it's not so much that software "engineering" is an immature profession that's the problem, the problem is that software engineers don't follow established engineering principles.
What, you mean like Microsoft?
And let's be clear, Microsoft have actually been found guilty of commiting a crime.
Forget outsourcing to India ... cockroaches are where it's at.
Sure, the quality of tech support will go down, but think of the cost savings!
> piloted, perhaps, by kittens
In the series of the film Terminator, they had to reinvent history in order to account for the fact that human civilisation wasn't actually destroyed in 1997.
I just have this vision of homocidal Terminator deathmachines being controlled by hamsters sucking on tubes.
Interesting little factoid: Venus is the only planet in our solar system whose day is longer than it's year. http://www.jas.org.jo/cont3a.html
"BBC News is reporting about a new PC that's powered via a network cable rather than through a wall socket."
Not all that long ago I heard of talk about delivering network content through the power lines. Seriously.
Kind of reminds me about that Steve Wright joke: I put a humidifier and dehumidifier in a room, and let them battle it out.
> This is bullshit. I am never even considering buying a 100W CPU for my desktop, certainly not 1000W.
:)
Yes, 640W ought to be enough for anybody
Whilst all this technology is all very fine and dandy, I can't help thinking we're fixing the wrong problem. Perhaps we should looking at ways of designing better OSs and applications that don't need all this fancy stuff.
And it wont help that Bill Gates is looking to keep our CPUs running at 100% utilisation.
> Assuming that it is the attorney's first offense, I'd be surprised if it results in disbarment or even suspension; more likely a reprimand or private cautionary letter.
IANAL, but I did a short course in law once (I'm from England). I can't remember what the case was, but it was from very old colonial days.
Anyway, it was the case where 2 highwaymen fell out with each other, and petitioned the court to resolve a dispute about how their booty should be shared.
Events didn't turn out quite to their liking, however, as it resulted in them both being hanged, and the lawyer being deported to Australia.
Now that's the way to cut through all the crap!
Or how about the case of Marconi, in the UK. It was run successfully by Lord Weinstock for years. The company had a large cash balance, but he was ousted by City-friendly management who then went on a high-tech spending spree in the late 90's. And we all know what happened to the tech industry come the turn of the century.
Result? The whole company gets flushed down the toilet, shareholders loose money, and normal employees loose their jobs. The directors, who's decisions led to this disaster in the first place, walk away with Big Cash Prizes.
Ugly face of capitalism, or what?
In Glasgow, Scotland, you can get pizza over the internet at http://www.pizzamagic.com/. It's been going for years.