That's an interesting argument, but I'm definitely taking it with a grain of salt, considering that the recommended stories at the bottom of that page were "Crawling with Aliens: The REAL Reason Why They Haven't Been Back to the Moon" and "Very Bizarre Sea creature Explodes!".
Anyway, I think the premise of the argument is faulty, though. The growth of the economy this year depends on fundamentals that were in place 1-5 years ago, not to mention the business cycle in general. Correlating the economy with whoever is in office today is a lost cause, because you'll never completely disentangle all the variables that led to it.
Having said that, I think it's no surprise that Wall Street likes a divided government. Congressional gridlock means more opportunities for companies to make money when nobody is paying attention.
Now we're going to have to endure stupid TV ads that incorporate Everest:
Verizon: The largest and TALLEST 3G network!
ATT: The fastest and HIGHEST 3G network!
Then the lawyers will file suit, and we'll have interviews on CNN with a bunch of middle-American jury candidate idiots trying to decide whether highest == tallest ("well, ya see, ah looked it up een mah dictionary, and ah guess who eyver wrote English decided the two words ahr diff-rent, so they must nawt be the same!")
Meanwhile, T-Mobile will remind everyone that "Stick Together" is good advice for mountaineering, especially since they don't have coverage there. Verizon will eventually phase out "Rule the Air" to "Rule the Entire Atmosphere!"
Eventually, Apple will release a new iPhone or something and people will move on to talk about that instead and still not be able to find Everest on a map.
Listen! And understand! Zuckerborg is out there. He can't be bargained with! He can't be reasoned with! He doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And he absolutely will not stop, ever, until your privacy has been violated!
This comes the same day that users report the new MacBook Air doesn't have Flash preinstalled; and while you can install it yourself, Safari doesn't prompt you to do so (just displays a generic "missing plugin" over Flash content and ads).
Call it a smart business move, a deluded fantasy, or anything in between, but Apple seems to have decided to play hardball with middleware developers. Clearly they think they support all the standards and APIs anyone could ever need, and with the opening of the Mac App Store on the horizon (which will, in all likelihood, provide apps that duplicate a lot of the lightweight functionality that Java apps tend to do now) don't feel the need to do Adobe and Oracle's work anymore.
Strategic partnership, sure, but outright purchase? No way. Sure, it's temping to consider the ways Facebook could interface with iOS, but Facebook is valued somewhere in the neighborhood of $30-35B, and Apple only has $50B cash on hand. Facebook is too expensive for what it is -- a neatly designed hack for people to make their own web pages and connect with others. The value of the company lies in the number of active accounts, not the technology itself. And for Apple, a technology company which already has an accomplished marketing department and more publicity than it can ever use, the purchase just doesn't have enough value.
Besides, Facebook has already displaced Google in the areas the two compete in. There would be nothing to add to that particular rat race, but the danger that Google could focus on a single enemy instead of several. Yhe only reason to buy a company is to harness the potential innovation and future success when integrated with your own. Buying a fully-fledge corporation relying on something as fickle as consumer taste is a terrible idea.
No matter who loses, the lawyers win
on
Motorola Sues Apple
·
· Score: 5, Informative
A diagram in the Guardian from last week nicely illustrates the insanity that is the mobile phone litigation business. With the vortex of lawsuits surrounding both hardware and software, it's amazing that anybody is able to innovate at all.
Are they living in a vacuum? How many times do you have to get suckered before you change your system? Their business must really be going down the tubes. It blows me away.
I dunno about that. We really dodged a bullet with the Reston strain. There's no reason it could mutate again and become airborne and lethal.
Indeed. And Reston may have been airborne, too. The disease managed to spread to every room in the monkey facility, though it's still unclear exactly how (as I recall, at the time the Army was a bit too preoccupied trying to prevent an epidemic to stop and conduct an experiment).
So few people realize just how closely we dodged the bullet with Reston. Two researchers at one point smelled an open test tube of the stuff, the animal handlers in the monkey facility were uninformed and contaminated with it, the company almost didn't let the Army in to contain the building because of publicity concerns. Had it been human-to-human airborne, we may well have been screwed.
Ebola only occurs in one part of the world unlike malaria, so you could stockpile them with an NGO like WHO to take with them when an outbreak occurs.
Slight correction: Ebola originates in one part of the world. Unfortunately, since there's a 7-10 day incubation period, it's too easy for someone to hop on a plane and be in any other corner of the world when they actually fall ill. Lots of the original case studies were like that: people visiting Kitum cave, the monkeys infected in the Reston outbreak near DC, etc.
On the flip side, that does mean the physical location of the stockpile becomes less important when it's possible to get it anywhere in the world in 24 hours. Since Ebola is at least several days between onset and death, a 24 hour delay is tolerable. It's certainly better than supportive care.
There's a difference between a standstill traffic jam and a "still moving, just really slowly" traffic jam. Even though the summary implies the first, it seems clear from the article and picture that cars are moving, just slowly. Otherwise, you'd see people out of their vehicles, rioting in the streets, etc. Still it calls into question at what point should the road just be closed (or more likely, heavily restricted) until the construction is done. At the very least, it's indicative of some poor urban planning on somebody's part.
It's so interesting to watch China struggle with these issues. The whole country really just resembles, IMO, the annoying 13-year old kid at the family reunion who desperately wants to sit at the adult table instead of with the younger kids, yet really hasn't learned the proper manners or social skills to be able to succeed. So he tries to get what he wants by slapping, hitting, or kicking the other people at the table. And completely offends everyone else in the process.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying western culture is the epitome of goodness, but I can't remember the last time my government ignored a 100km traffic jam whilst busying itself issuing news blackouts to CNN.
It is not obvious to someone replacing the backup tape whether the backup is appended to the previous backup or replaces the previous one entirely. The former was not all that uncommon back when backup tapes had decent sizes. These days where you need 4 tapes to backup a single drive no one appends.
Yeah, it's not clear from TFA whether she thought there was enough space, or was just clueless. Regardless, though, when you have mission critical data on a single drive you shut it down, put in a fire safe until you're ready to restore, whatever. But you don't just casually keep using it. And who backs up a test database install anyway?
It's just interesting that the first story in the article was a technical problem (poor network design/admin) being blamed on user error (unauthorized wireless AP/network cable plugged into wrong switch), while the second story was procedural user error (do the backup every day, no matter what) being blamed on a technical problem (the backup system).
Article also needs fixin' in the lessons learned from the incidents described. Look, I'm sorry, but if your hospital network was inadvertently taken down by a "rogue wireless access point", the lesson to be learned isn't that "human errors account for more problems than technical errors" -- it's that your network design is fundamentally flawed.
Or the woman who backed up the office database, reinstalled SQL server, and backed up the new (empty) server on the same tape. Yeah, a new tape would have solved that problem. Or, you know, not being a mindless automaton. Reminds me of a quote one of my high school teachers was fond of: "Life is hard. But life is really hard if you're stupid."
The answer to the wireless question fascinates me in the way that only marketing/PR doublespeak can. The first part boils down to "wireless is such limited capacity and high competition that imposing regulations would stall the market", while the second part states that high capacity wireless networks are going to be open anyway, so they don't need regulation. So which is it? And how many sectors of our economy have to collapse/implode before we accept that a combination of oversight/transparency is necessary in all industries?
As any intro Psych student can tell you, competition also increases the stakes of cheating. If Comcast is my only local broadband provider, what incentive do they have to cut a deal with Google? None, they've already got exclusivity. But what prevents Google from teaming with Verizon to offer some "Google Apps by V-CAST" premium service on the wireless side? And of course, Google will throttle back Apps for all other wireless providers, with their limited capacity and all. So thoughtful of them.
Putting aside the lack of clarity about how this proposal would actually work in practice (especially since it seems to require the cooperation of the FCC, who are understandably pissed at both Verizon and Google at the moment), what's up with the wholesale exclusion of wireless networks?
In the age of 4G providers like Clear that are readying themselves to feast upon the marketshare of the DSL and cable broadband providers, does anyone really think the future of the internet lies in burying more landline cable in more rural areas? While it's true that backbone fiber isn't exactly going out of style, a cell tower is certainly a much more elegant solution for the "last mile" problem that's plagued wired broadband providers for years. Now that the price of wireless chipsets has dropped substantially, the only real obstacle is building more towers.
To put it another way, Verizon Wireless is a $50 billion company, while it's (55%) parent Verizon Communications is a $100 billion company. So the proposal is excluding anywhere from a quarter to nearly half (depending on how you count) of "Verizon", before you even account for future growth.
The thing I find so interesting is just how much negativity is out there over the iPad. While I respect Doctorow's well-written analysis, most of it (not just on Slashdot) is far less intelligent and coherent. David Pogue's initial review (which was pretty thoughtful and balanced) got slammed with comments on everything from "I already have a laptop and now I'm supposed to buy an iPad?" to "how am I supposed to do anything without USB" to "how many kids could you help in Haiti instead of buying your stupid toy".
Honestly, you'd think people are being forced to buy an iPad. The only thing I can think of is that a certain segment of the population just rebels against anything that's mainstream.
The funniest comments (to me) are where Apple is compared to being the "new Microsoft". Yeah, because a company that got and maintained its riches only because of its half-baked operating system and word processor is so much like a company that goes out on a limb (over and over again) to invent a new category of consumer device. And then the commentators are somehow surprised when that pays off.
Yeah, all that good editing would be the reason GE selling half a company they previously owned 100% of* gets reported as "GE goes after 49%" of NBC, eh? Quite the hostile takeover, there.
Yeah, I'm new here.:)
(*Yeah, I know prior to Dec 1, GE owned only 80%.)
Saw this on Wired this morning. I thought it sounded kind of neat. I noticed they're at Michigan, where I work. I noticed they have a concert next week, and thought that might be interesting to attend.
Then I watched the video. My goodness. I don't know that I've experienced music quite so awful since I accidentally made an errant mouse click and bought a Miley Cyrus album. I'm not sure what I was expecting... maybe emulation of real orchestral instruments... but what I can only describe as post-modern atonal ambient droning is definitely not something I'm going to be adding to my iTunes library anytime soon.
Seriously, this was on the front page of every news outlet... almost two days ago. I know that there's a bit of a lag time to get things on Slashdot, but honestly, is it asking that much to post big stories the same day they happen?
As someone who travels by car to go backpacking/skiing/kayaking on the weekends, my trusty Garmin Streetpilot 2610 will not be replaced by any kind of device requiring a data link for a long time to come. Why? Because when you're driving to a remote location that you've never been to before, your iPhone/Android device's signal is likely to crap out just when you need it most -- which is, the last couple of miles to your destination after getting off the interstate. Google Maps can't help you when you're 20 miles from the nearest cell tower. Maybe this would be feasible in European countries where cell coverage is approaching 100%, but here in the US I often can't get decent cell coverage in my office, let alone the Adirondacks.
As someone who needs to carry a laptop for work purposes, and having had my car broken into and my laptop stolen (albeit in separate incidents), this would be the end of going to see movies in the theater for me. Now, I don't claim to be representative of the population in general, and for most people I could see how this wouldn't be a big deal. But at least for me, years of practice has taught me that the best way to maintain security on my laptop (and more importantly, my data) is to never let it out of my sight unless it's in my home or office. And if dropping my laptop off at home becomes the necessary prerequisite to going to see a movie, it's likely that I just won't bother.
Plus, at home I can watch in Blu-ray @1080p and pause anytime I like, and the popcorn and soda are free.
Having said that, I'd have to admit that I'm very much opposed to disclosing information about any company at the expense of one's personal health privacy. That has the potential for setting all sorts of uncomfortable precedents at "for profit" corporations.
Let's face it, Wall Street isn't exactly a model for ethical behavior. I'd have a hard time being convinced that the SEC or shareholders should be involved in anyone's personal health at anything more than the actuarial statistics level.
Slashdot Mirror
Historically, the economy has always done well with a Republican congress and a Democrat president...
http://beforeitsnews.com/story/245/982/Divided_we_make_money:_Why_the_stock_market_wants_a_Republican_victory.html
That's an interesting argument, but I'm definitely taking it with a grain of salt, considering that the recommended stories at the bottom of that page were "Crawling with Aliens: The REAL Reason Why They Haven't Been Back to the Moon" and "Very Bizarre Sea creature Explodes!".
Anyway, I think the premise of the argument is faulty, though. The growth of the economy this year depends on fundamentals that were in place 1-5 years ago, not to mention the business cycle in general. Correlating the economy with whoever is in office today is a lost cause, because you'll never completely disentangle all the variables that led to it.
Having said that, I think it's no surprise that Wall Street likes a divided government. Congressional gridlock means more opportunities for companies to make money when nobody is paying attention.
Now we're going to have to endure stupid TV ads that incorporate Everest:
Verizon: The largest and TALLEST 3G network!
ATT: The fastest and HIGHEST 3G network!
Then the lawyers will file suit, and we'll have interviews on CNN with a bunch of middle-American jury candidate idiots trying to decide whether highest == tallest ("well, ya see, ah looked it up een mah dictionary, and ah guess who eyver wrote English decided the two words ahr diff-rent, so they must nawt be the same!")
Meanwhile, T-Mobile will remind everyone that "Stick Together" is good advice for mountaineering, especially since they don't have coverage there. Verizon will eventually phase out "Rule the Air" to "Rule the Entire Atmosphere!"
Eventually, Apple will release a new iPhone or something and people will move on to talk about that instead and still not be able to find Everest on a map.
Listen! And understand! Zuckerborg is out there. He can't be bargained with! He can't be reasoned with! He doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And he absolutely will not stop, ever, until your privacy has been violated!
This comes the same day that users report the new MacBook Air doesn't have Flash preinstalled; and while you can install it yourself, Safari doesn't prompt you to do so (just displays a generic "missing plugin" over Flash content and ads).
Call it a smart business move, a deluded fantasy, or anything in between, but Apple seems to have decided to play hardball with middleware developers. Clearly they think they support all the standards and APIs anyone could ever need, and with the opening of the Mac App Store on the horizon (which will, in all likelihood, provide apps that duplicate a lot of the lightweight functionality that Java apps tend to do now) don't feel the need to do Adobe and Oracle's work anymore.
Strategic partnership, sure, but outright purchase? No way. Sure, it's temping to consider the ways Facebook could interface with iOS, but Facebook is valued somewhere in the neighborhood of $30-35B, and Apple only has $50B cash on hand. Facebook is too expensive for what it is -- a neatly designed hack for people to make their own web pages and connect with others. The value of the company lies in the number of active accounts, not the technology itself. And for Apple, a technology company which already has an accomplished marketing department and more publicity than it can ever use, the purchase just doesn't have enough value.
Besides, Facebook has already displaced Google in the areas the two compete in. There would be nothing to add to that particular rat race, but the danger that Google could focus on a single enemy instead of several. Yhe only reason to buy a company is to harness the potential innovation and future success when integrated with your own. Buying a fully-fledge corporation relying on something as fickle as consumer taste is a terrible idea.
A diagram in the Guardian from last week nicely illustrates the insanity that is the mobile phone litigation business. With the vortex of lawsuits surrounding both hardware and software, it's amazing that anybody is able to innovate at all.
And conveniently these days you can borrow movies from most local libraries.... free.
Only if you're not paying your taxes. I read this morning that the average property owner in my town pays over $100/year for library services.
Don't get me wrong, I think libraries are a fantastic public service. But nothing in life is free.
Are they living in a vacuum? How many times do you have to get suckered before you change your system? Their business must really be going down the tubes. It blows me away.
(I'm just cleaning up today... :)
I dunno about that. We really dodged a bullet with the Reston strain. There's no reason it could mutate again and become airborne and lethal.
Indeed. And Reston may have been airborne, too. The disease managed to spread to every room in the monkey facility, though it's still unclear exactly how (as I recall, at the time the Army was a bit too preoccupied trying to prevent an epidemic to stop and conduct an experiment).
So few people realize just how closely we dodged the bullet with Reston. Two researchers at one point smelled an open test tube of the stuff, the animal handlers in the monkey facility were uninformed and contaminated with it, the company almost didn't let the Army in to contain the building because of publicity concerns. Had it been human-to-human airborne, we may well have been screwed.
Ebola only occurs in one part of the world unlike malaria, so you could stockpile them with an NGO like WHO to take with them when an outbreak occurs.
Slight correction: Ebola originates in one part of the world. Unfortunately, since there's a 7-10 day incubation period, it's too easy for someone to hop on a plane and be in any other corner of the world when they actually fall ill. Lots of the original case studies were like that: people visiting Kitum cave, the monkeys infected in the Reston outbreak near DC, etc.
On the flip side, that does mean the physical location of the stockpile becomes less important when it's possible to get it anywhere in the world in 24 hours. Since Ebola is at least several days between onset and death, a 24 hour delay is tolerable. It's certainly better than supportive care.
Nine days?? I think I would walk home.
There's a difference between a standstill traffic jam and a "still moving, just really slowly" traffic jam. Even though the summary implies the first, it seems clear from the article and picture that cars are moving, just slowly. Otherwise, you'd see people out of their vehicles, rioting in the streets, etc. Still it calls into question at what point should the road just be closed (or more likely, heavily restricted) until the construction is done. At the very least, it's indicative of some poor urban planning on somebody's part.
It's so interesting to watch China struggle with these issues. The whole country really just resembles, IMO, the annoying 13-year old kid at the family reunion who desperately wants to sit at the adult table instead of with the younger kids, yet really hasn't learned the proper manners or social skills to be able to succeed. So he tries to get what he wants by slapping, hitting, or kicking the other people at the table. And completely offends everyone else in the process.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying western culture is the epitome of goodness, but I can't remember the last time my government ignored a 100km traffic jam whilst busying itself issuing news blackouts to CNN.
It is not obvious to someone replacing the backup tape whether the backup is appended to the previous backup or replaces the previous one entirely. The former was not all that uncommon back when backup tapes had decent sizes. These days where you need 4 tapes to backup a single drive no one appends.
Yeah, it's not clear from TFA whether she thought there was enough space, or was just clueless. Regardless, though, when you have mission critical data on a single drive you shut it down, put in a fire safe until you're ready to restore, whatever. But you don't just casually keep using it. And who backs up a test database install anyway?
It's just interesting that the first story in the article was a technical problem (poor network design/admin) being blamed on user error (unauthorized wireless AP/network cable plugged into wrong switch), while the second story was procedural user error (do the backup every day, no matter what) being blamed on a technical problem (the backup system).
Article also needs fixin' in the lessons learned from the incidents described. Look, I'm sorry, but if your hospital network was inadvertently taken down by a "rogue wireless access point", the lesson to be learned isn't that "human errors account for more problems than technical errors" -- it's that your network design is fundamentally flawed.
Or the woman who backed up the office database, reinstalled SQL server, and backed up the new (empty) server on the same tape. Yeah, a new tape would have solved that problem. Or, you know, not being a mindless automaton. Reminds me of a quote one of my high school teachers was fond of: "Life is hard. But life is really hard if you're stupid."
The answer to the wireless question fascinates me in the way that only marketing/PR doublespeak can. The first part boils down to "wireless is such limited capacity and high competition that imposing regulations would stall the market", while the second part states that high capacity wireless networks are going to be open anyway, so they don't need regulation. So which is it? And how many sectors of our economy have to collapse/implode before we accept that a combination of oversight/transparency is necessary in all industries?
As any intro Psych student can tell you, competition also increases the stakes of cheating. If Comcast is my only local broadband provider, what incentive do they have to cut a deal with Google? None, they've already got exclusivity. But what prevents Google from teaming with Verizon to offer some "Google Apps by V-CAST" premium service on the wireless side? And of course, Google will throttle back Apps for all other wireless providers, with their limited capacity and all. So thoughtful of them.
Putting aside the lack of clarity about how this proposal would actually work in practice (especially since it seems to require the cooperation of the FCC, who are understandably pissed at both Verizon and Google at the moment), what's up with the wholesale exclusion of wireless networks?
In the age of 4G providers like Clear that are readying themselves to feast upon the marketshare of the DSL and cable broadband providers, does anyone really think the future of the internet lies in burying more landline cable in more rural areas? While it's true that backbone fiber isn't exactly going out of style, a cell tower is certainly a much more elegant solution for the "last mile" problem that's plagued wired broadband providers for years. Now that the price of wireless chipsets has dropped substantially, the only real obstacle is building more towers.
To put it another way, Verizon Wireless is a $50 billion company, while it's (55%) parent Verizon Communications is a $100 billion company. So the proposal is excluding anywhere from a quarter to nearly half (depending on how you count) of "Verizon", before you even account for future growth.
It's predicting exactly WHEN future events will occur that's the real trick.
The thing I find so interesting is just how much negativity is out there over the iPad. While I respect Doctorow's well-written analysis, most of it (not just on Slashdot) is far less intelligent and coherent. David Pogue's initial review (which was pretty thoughtful and balanced) got slammed with comments on everything from "I already have a laptop and now I'm supposed to buy an iPad?" to "how am I supposed to do anything without USB" to "how many kids could you help in Haiti instead of buying your stupid toy".
Honestly, you'd think people are being forced to buy an iPad. The only thing I can think of is that a certain segment of the population just rebels against anything that's mainstream.
The funniest comments (to me) are where Apple is compared to being the "new Microsoft". Yeah, because a company that got and maintained its riches only because of its half-baked operating system and word processor is so much like a company that goes out on a limb (over and over again) to invent a new category of consumer device. And then the commentators are somehow surprised when that pays off.
Yeah, all that good editing would be the reason GE selling half a company they previously owned 100% of * gets reported as "GE goes after 49%" of NBC, eh? Quite the hostile takeover, there.
Yeah, I'm new here. :)
(*Yeah, I know prior to Dec 1, GE owned only 80%.)
Quote: Skiff gives periodical publishers tools to maintain their distinct visual identities, build and extend relationships with subscribers
Translation: Skiff gives periodical publishers tools to mix advertisements within content and to shove said ads down the throats of their subscribers.
I agree that the Kindle is far from perfect, but I can't say I'm too excited for this Skiff thing either.
Saw this on Wired this morning. I thought it sounded kind of neat. I noticed they're at Michigan, where I work. I noticed they have a concert next week, and thought that might be interesting to attend.
Then I watched the video. My goodness. I don't know that I've experienced music quite so awful since I accidentally made an errant mouse click and bought a Miley Cyrus album. I'm not sure what I was expecting... maybe emulation of real orchestral instruments... but what I can only describe as post-modern atonal ambient droning is definitely not something I'm going to be adding to my iTunes library anytime soon.
Seriously, this was on the front page of every news outlet... almost two days ago. I know that there's a bit of a lag time to get things on Slashdot, but honestly, is it asking that much to post big stories the same day they happen?
As someone who travels by car to go backpacking/skiing/kayaking on the weekends, my trusty Garmin Streetpilot 2610 will not be replaced by any kind of device requiring a data link for a long time to come. Why? Because when you're driving to a remote location that you've never been to before, your iPhone/Android device's signal is likely to crap out just when you need it most -- which is, the last couple of miles to your destination after getting off the interstate. Google Maps can't help you when you're 20 miles from the nearest cell tower. Maybe this would be feasible in European countries where cell coverage is approaching 100%, but here in the US I often can't get decent cell coverage in my office, let alone the Adirondacks.
As someone who needs to carry a laptop for work purposes, and having had my car broken into and my laptop stolen (albeit in separate incidents), this would be the end of going to see movies in the theater for me. Now, I don't claim to be representative of the population in general, and for most people I could see how this wouldn't be a big deal. But at least for me, years of practice has taught me that the best way to maintain security on my laptop (and more importantly, my data) is to never let it out of my sight unless it's in my home or office. And if dropping my laptop off at home becomes the necessary prerequisite to going to see a movie, it's likely that I just won't bother.
Plus, at home I can watch in Blu-ray @1080p and pause anytime I like, and the popcorn and soda are free.
Having said that, I'd have to admit that I'm very much opposed to disclosing information about any company at the expense of one's personal health privacy. That has the potential for setting all sorts of uncomfortable precedents at "for profit" corporations.
Let's face it, Wall Street isn't exactly a model for ethical behavior. I'd have a hard time being convinced that the SEC or shareholders should be involved in anyone's personal health at anything more than the actuarial statistics level.
But luckily, unlike Taco, you do get a spelling checker!