Venture Capitalists know something about business.
I'm not saying this guy sucks and know nothing about business - I actually agree with a lot of what he is saying.
But am I only only one who thinks that having a load of cash doesn't make you right. Generally, people who have lots of money made it in a quick windfall and invested it well - which basically is not that difficult to do. It's like taking advice from a lottery winner.
There are of course many very skilled business who made astute decisions and deals (in would include Bill Gates in there).
But I have occasionally watched programmes like 'Dragon's Den' or that thing with Alan Sugar or now god forbid Jade bloody Goody, and thought what the 'hell do you know' - sure they are entitled to say 'sorry I wouldn't back you' - it's their money. But they have absolutely no right to say 'mate, sorry but you're wrong, and if I say it won't work then give up' - that's just stupid.
Remember, one of these guys said that the Internet would never take off.
Anyway, I'm just using this as excuse for a rant; as I said I liked his 10 myths.
I was thinking to myself while reading this travellers story - and I know from my own experience, these airport security people are much the same everywhere in the world - why do we tolerate security people like this.
It's like Doctors - they are expected to be arrogant, aloof and possessing of a certain air of infallibility. But they're not infalable, we know that and they know that.
Same thing with security people, customs, immigration etc etc. We expect them to be rude and aggressive - but in point of fact they have absolutely no right to be.
When planes blow up etc - the individual security people aren't berated for this. The system maybe - but not the individuals. Also, their lives are not a risk - it is we who travel on the planes that are at risk - and if we can be light-hearted about it, why can't these idiots be? (Gotta love the guy with cocaine).
I think it goes back to the same old thing - give a small man a little power and he will abuse it.
I would like to say that a number of these people are actually very nice and endowed with a decent sense of humour. And you know what - they get the job done just as well.
The future looks scary from the past but when you actually get there it's no big deal really.
When we watched at Star Trek from the 1960's the communicators were amazing - but now everybody has mobile phones, and that's accepted as perfectly normal.
By the time we get to the 2020s things will probably be very different, but because we will gradually move towards that point nobody will mind too much. Though I have to admit I find it hard to see how we will adapt to hunter/killer robots trying to exterminate the human race through a post apocalyptic landscape - but who knows, it might not be all that bad.
Old people will still find the music too loud though - only difference, I'll be one of them.
If you open IE7, type 'firefox sucks' into the address bar - then press the Windows key 4 times, followed by ctrl-alt-tab, the following message appears:
"Help us - we've been kidnapped by Ballmer! They're making us write insecure code and not giving us enough caffeine!"
Then you get to play a flight simulator game...
[To anyone who tries this and complains about it not working - "you are an idiot"].
Well when you think about, something is a moon not because it orbits a planet, but because it exhibits the same behaviour as the moon - which orbits this planet.
So if it stops orbitting this planet - it will still be the moon because that's what it's called. And if it starts exhibiting planet like behaviour then all planets will become moons and moons will become....
As a language Java really isn't that amazing. C on the other hand certainly blew my mind coming from a Pascal background - it is fascinating conceptually.
However, the distinction isn't made in the article between the Java Language and the Java Virtual Machine. The Java language as I said, is not that amazing - it's really just a C++ hydrid (love your description). However, the JVM is far more significant - in its basic concept and in the many optimizing incarnations of it.
I would suggest that this is the idea that TFA is going for. Certainly, if you look at the problem that the JVM is designed to solve.
And yes of course there were many virtual machines for other purposes before the JVM, but it is one of the most successful.
If this is the case then installing these patches in Europe (and other places) would be illegal - or at least would have to be restricted.
Anyone storing data here would have to comply with the Data Protection Acts. If installing these patches opened a back door to US government, then it would be impossible to comply with data protection.
Dammit - talking to all you damned Americans has made me paranoid.... or am I?
When I saw the original pictures (found it eventually), I said to myself "That's not so bad."
But, we can't know what it's really like unless we are physically there - but my guess is that it's pretty horrific. (To a relative extent the same applies in Israel - a dead child is a dead child to every mother/father - the scale only affects the population, not the individual.)
Do we require the media to 'photoshop' our images, just so we care? We've all seen the post-apocalyptic Earths, front-line surgery and the effects of 'smart' (LOL) missiles so many times, so that real human horror must be scaled up to make us care.
Can't say that there is much wrong that - but it does say a lot about the rest of us.
When William Shatner started he played a young James Kirk, then he played a curlier and slight pudgy James Kirk, then he played a heavy James Kirk going back in time as T J Hooker, then he played a fat James Kirk, then he played an old James Kirk, then he played a dead James Kirk.
Don't get me wrong, Matt Damon is good, but he just doesn't have the repertoire that William Shatner has.
I was interested myself in installing whatever Gmail uses, cos it does feel like the gmail filter works very well. I had an existing (old) spamassassin installation, but the following investigation convinced me to stay with SA and just upgrade.
A while ago I was working on a project to provide IMAP4 servers in a company. And I came across and interesting thread about a university that was doing the same thing.
Most of the comments were positive about IMAP, however, some individuals had had horrific experiences. So the obvious conclusion: IMAP works most of the time well - but when it doesn't it fails horribly.
You'd think...
Thing is, everyone listed their current e-mail client. What do you think those with the problems were using? Yeah, Outlook. "Why can't we all get along?" (says TFA) - more like "Why can't everyone else get along with me?". Lamenting non-compliance to 'anti'-standards makes no sense.
Hopefully, Microsoft will never release a Linux version of that rubbish.
..is about minimising your fixed costs while maximising your variable returns.
Ok - IANAE (economist) and IANAPM (postman) - but this is probably a reasonable simplification.
With the postal service, fixed costs are about delivering a single item, where as high variable returns come from large packages. With the decline of letters and such (due to e-mail etc), and the concurrent increase in parcels (due to online shopping) - how could they not make better returns.
If a postal service is making losses and is in decline (as a number are in Europe), I would suggest that they should stop looking at environmental factors, start modernising their organizations and provide a service that complements the needs of their 21st century customer.
And, equally, I would recommend TFA to you - if you haven't read it then you shouldn't be replying to my post. Try to keep in context instead of showing off that you've read a book.
Alex Bell describes XML as a 'Silver Bullet' - he is alluding to the notion of a Silver Bullet being a technology that can actually solve a significant number of problems, but that is taken up by the ill-informed as being capable of solving all problems. This is not Brooks' original meaning of Silver Bullet, but is one which has come to be a common understanding of the term. This is why he put's the term in quotes.
XML is a great idea but XML is often used badly and XML is heralded by those that don't understand it as 'the solution to all our problems'.
Those are the only points I made - but please, feel free to beat your Strawman to death.
The problem with Silver Bullets is not the bullet itself - but the idiot behind the trigger.
Most of these Silver Bullets are great ideas, but give them to some moron who half knows how they work (and yet claims to be an expert) and they do the exact opposite of what they were intended to do, and because some PHB reads about in the industry pages, they just keep hanging in there like a millstone around our respective necks.
For any technology you can see outstanding implementations. But for every one of those there are ten other complete disasters.
And as the other saying goes - if you don't know who the moron is.....
GWB: Holy schmolians! $40 billion for hunting down bin laden. Who is this bin laden guy?! Shadowy Advisor: Head of the Al-Qaeda international terrorist network. GWB: Never heard of him. Shadowy Advisor: Masterminded the attacks on New York in 2001. GWB: Still not ringin' any bells... Shadowy Advisor: The boogey-man we're using to scare the American people into letting us away with anything we want. GWB: Oh! That bin laden - why didn't you say?
***
They've already thought of your idea - and dismissed it. Bin Laden is never going to be found - and your taxes are never going to go down.
Whether you accept the validity of the Acid Test or not - I would have thought that Microsoft would have recognised the necessity of just passing that one simple test, even if it was even to have a simple 'if(acidtest)- then display this' in the code.
Everyone knows Opera does it and FireFox doesn't - if IE7 did it as well, however it worked, it would have silenced a lot of detractors, at least in the short term. It suggests not just that they are incapable of achieving proper standards compliance - but that in fact they are totally oblivious to the existance of said standards or the tests which prove them.
You should punish these lunatics at the next general election and vote Conservative so you can abhor their reactionary, quasi-populist approach to law enforcement that will ultimately criminalise non-conformists.
Slashdot Mirror
No, it's your fault ...
No, it's your fault
No, it's your fault
No, it's your fault
No, it's your fault
No, it's your fault
How do they know it's broken?
Venture Capitalists know something about business.
I'm not saying this guy sucks and know nothing about business - I actually agree with a lot of what he is saying.
But am I only only one who thinks that having a load of cash doesn't make you right. Generally, people who have lots of money made it in a quick windfall and invested it well - which basically is not that difficult to do. It's like taking advice from a lottery winner.
There are of course many very skilled business who made astute decisions and deals (in would include Bill Gates in there).
But I have occasionally watched programmes like 'Dragon's Den' or that thing with Alan Sugar or now god forbid Jade bloody Goody, and thought what the 'hell do you know' - sure they are entitled to say 'sorry I wouldn't back you' - it's their money. But they have absolutely no right to say 'mate, sorry but you're wrong, and if I say it won't work then give up' - that's just stupid.
Remember, one of these guys said that the Internet would never take off.
Anyway, I'm just using this as excuse for a rant; as I said I liked his 10 myths.
I was thinking to myself while reading this travellers story - and I know from my own experience, these airport security people are much the same everywhere in the world - why do we tolerate security people like this.
It's like Doctors - they are expected to be arrogant, aloof and possessing of a certain air of infallibility. But they're not infalable, we know that and they know that.
Same thing with security people, customs, immigration etc etc. We expect them to be rude and aggressive - but in point of fact they have absolutely no right to be.
When planes blow up etc - the individual security people aren't berated for this. The system maybe - but not the individuals. Also, their lives are not a risk - it is we who travel on the planes that are at risk - and if we can be light-hearted about it, why can't these idiots be? (Gotta love the guy with cocaine).
I think it goes back to the same old thing - give a small man a little power and he will abuse it.
I would like to say that a number of these people are actually very nice and endowed with a decent sense of humour. And you know what - they get the job done just as well.
The future looks scary from the past but when you actually get there it's no big deal really.
When we watched at Star Trek from the 1960's the communicators were amazing - but now everybody has mobile phones, and that's accepted as perfectly normal.
By the time we get to the 2020s things will probably be very different, but because we will gradually move towards that point nobody will mind too much. Though I have to admit I find it hard to see how we will adapt to hunter/killer robots trying to exterminate the human race through a post apocalyptic landscape - but who knows, it might not be all that bad.
Old people will still find the music too loud though - only difference, I'll be one of them.
There's a substantial difference between Occam's razor and the Holmes method.
By Holmes' conjecture Hawking could have, say, MS, ALS, Parkinson's, MND, ME - but he's not pregnant or going through the Pon Farr.
By Occams' Razor, he has ALS. (Removing the assumption that he is lying).
The world doesn't revolve around you, you know!
Wait... this just in: the IAU have had another vote, and... well, apparently it does. Or does it?
I never trusted CGI... and I never will. I can never forgive for what they did to Star Wars!
Of course you do! Your one of the good boys and girls.
;)
Not like those dirty nasty smelly horrid mozilla developers - they get the 'chair'. (and no coffee)
If you open IE7, type 'firefox sucks' into the address bar - then press the Windows key 4 times, followed by ctrl-alt-tab, the following message appears:
"Help us - we've been kidnapped by Ballmer! They're making us write insecure code and not giving us enough caffeine!"
Then you get to play a flight simulator game...
[To anyone who tries this and complains about it not working - "you are an idiot"].
Or would it.
Well when you think about, something is a moon not because it orbits a planet, but because it exhibits the same behaviour as the moon - which orbits this planet.
So if it stops orbitting this planet - it will still be the moon because that's what it's called. And if it starts exhibiting planet like behaviour then all planets will become moons and moons will become....
Oh! Now I'm confused.
In defense of Java (ish).
As a language Java really isn't that amazing. C on the other hand certainly blew my mind coming from a Pascal background - it is fascinating conceptually.
However, the distinction isn't made in the article between the Java Language and the Java Virtual Machine. The Java language as I said, is not that amazing - it's really just a C++ hydrid (love your description). However, the JVM is far more significant - in its basic concept and in the many optimizing incarnations of it.
I would suggest that this is the idea that TFA is going for. Certainly, if you look at the problem that the JVM is designed to solve.
And yes of course there were many virtual machines for other purposes before the JVM, but it is one of the most successful.
If this is the case then installing these patches in Europe (and other places) would be illegal - or at least would have to be restricted.
Anyone storing data here would have to comply with the Data Protection Acts. If installing these patches opened a back door to US government, then it would be impossible to comply with data protection.
Dammit - talking to all you damned Americans has made me paranoid.... or am I?
When I saw the original pictures (found it eventually), I said to myself "That's not so bad."
But, we can't know what it's really like unless we are physically there - but my guess is that it's pretty horrific. (To a relative extent the same applies in Israel - a dead child is a dead child to every mother/father - the scale only affects the population, not the individual.)
Do we require the media to 'photoshop' our images, just so we care? We've all seen the post-apocalyptic Earths, front-line surgery and the effects of 'smart' (LOL) missiles so many times, so that real human horror must be scaled up to make us care.
Can't say that there is much wrong that - but it does say a lot about the rest of us.
When William Shatner started he played a young James Kirk,
then he played a curlier and slight pudgy James Kirk,
then he played a heavy James Kirk going back in time as T J Hooker,
then he played a fat James Kirk,
then he played an old James Kirk,
then he played a dead James Kirk.
Don't get me wrong, Matt Damon is good, but he just doesn't have the repertoire that William Shatner has.
I was interested myself in installing whatever Gmail uses, cos it does feel like the gmail filter works very well. I had an existing (old) spamassassin installation, but the following investigation convinced me to stay with SA and just upgrade.
http://taint.org/2004/04/15/033025a.html
Whether it holds statistical value or not, is debatable.
Still, Gmail impresses. (And can only get better).
Nice summary :-)
A while ago I was working on a project to provide IMAP4 servers in a company. And I came across and interesting thread about a university that was doing the same thing.
Most of the comments were positive about IMAP, however, some individuals had had horrific experiences. So the obvious conclusion: IMAP works most of the time well - but when it doesn't it fails horribly.
You'd think...
Thing is, everyone listed their current e-mail client. What do you think those with the problems were using? Yeah, Outlook. "Why can't we all get along?" (says TFA) - more like "Why can't everyone else get along with me?". Lamenting non-compliance to 'anti'-standards makes no sense.
Hopefully, Microsoft will never release a Linux version of that rubbish.
..is about minimising your fixed costs while maximising your variable returns.
Ok - IANAE (economist) and IANAPM (postman) - but this is probably a reasonable simplification.
With the postal service, fixed costs are about delivering a single item, where as high variable returns come from large packages. With the decline of letters and such (due to e-mail etc), and the concurrent increase in parcels (due to online shopping) - how could they not make better returns.
If a postal service is making losses and is in decline (as a number are in Europe), I would suggest that they should stop looking at environmental factors, start modernising their organizations and provide a service that complements the needs of their 21st century customer.
I don't know - I bust my heart and soul, day in, day out over a hot irony (sic) - and it's totally wasted on you.
;-)
It doesn't grow on trees you know!
And, equally, I would recommend TFA to you - if you haven't read it then you shouldn't be replying to my post. Try to keep in context instead of showing off that you've read a book.
Alex Bell describes XML as a 'Silver Bullet' - he is alluding to the notion of a Silver Bullet being a technology that can actually solve a significant number of problems, but that is taken up by the ill-informed as being capable of solving all problems. This is not Brooks' original meaning of Silver Bullet, but is one which has come to be a common understanding of the term. This is why he put's the term in quotes.
XML is a great idea but XML is often used badly and XML is heralded by those that don't understand it as 'the solution to all our problems'.
Those are the only points I made - but please, feel free to beat your Strawman to death.
... - As the saying goes.
The problem with Silver Bullets is not the bullet itself - but the idiot behind the trigger.
Most of these Silver Bullets are great ideas, but give them to some moron who half knows how they work (and yet claims to be an expert) and they do the exact opposite of what they were intended to do, and because some PHB reads about in the industry pages, they just keep hanging in there like a millstone around our respective necks.
For any technology you can see outstanding implementations. But for every one of those there are ten other complete disasters.
And as the other saying goes - if you don't know who the moron is.....
Scene from the White House:-
GWB: Holy schmolians! $40 billion for hunting down bin laden. Who is this bin laden guy?!
Shadowy Advisor: Head of the Al-Qaeda international terrorist network.
GWB: Never heard of him.
Shadowy Advisor: Masterminded the attacks on New York in 2001.
GWB: Still not ringin' any bells...
Shadowy Advisor: The boogey-man we're using to scare the American people into letting us away with anything we want.
GWB: Oh! That bin laden - why didn't you say?
***
They've already thought of your idea - and dismissed it. Bin Laden is never going to be found - and your taxes are never going to go down.
There's an engine available for it, if you don't like toolbars.
t y&sherlock=yes&opensearch=&submitform=Search
http://mycroft.mozdev.org/download.html?name=clus
Ok... I was looking for something yesterday on Google, but couldn't find it.
Tried out the clusty solution, and found what I was looking for very rapidly. TFA is correct it feels like a cross between Google and eBay.
There something to that. I can see Google copying it.
I didn't try the others because they looked like too much hassle. One of the original appeals of Google was the simplicity.
Whether you accept the validity of the Acid Test or not - I would have thought that Microsoft would have recognised the necessity of just passing that one simple test, even if it was even to have a simple 'if(acidtest)- then display this' in the code.
Everyone knows Opera does it and FireFox doesn't - if IE7 did it as well, however it worked, it would have silenced a lot of detractors, at least in the short term. It suggests not just that they are incapable of achieving proper standards compliance - but that in fact they are totally oblivious to the existance of said standards or the tests which prove them.
You should punish these lunatics at the next general election and vote Conservative so you can abhor their reactionary, quasi-populist approach to law enforcement that will ultimately criminalise non-conformists.
Tough choice...