They didn't turn the Internet over for the common good. It was dragged from their bleeding hands by thousands of BBS sysops turned ISP and their subscribers. Aided by rogue backbone networks like UUNet and whipped into action by Jack Rickard, we tore up the Internet Acceptable Use Provisions and stopped paying the outrageous amounts they charged for admission to their exclusive little club. Since then the Internet has been ours, not the government's or that of the government-funded academic and research groups that we took it from.
Internet 2 is a way for them to get back control. So is Net Neutrality. If you think the telecoms are a problem and government management would be an improvement, you need to find a friend who'll lend you a few grey cells.
What bugs me most is that I'm on my third Tungsten|E2 and it's already older than the previous two and I need to be ready when it fails, but I haven't found anything to replace it.
I was among the first buyers of the original USR Palm Pilot and I've been using the Palm Desktop and Palm (or Handspring) devices ever since. That's a big investment. The PDA and Desktop are loaded with information, Cloak (er--Turbo Passwords) manages my passwords, and I can write graffiti as fast as I can write on paper. I shudder to think of the training involved if I have to switch to the bad to horrid handwriting recognition on a "more advanced" product. Switching also means switching to Outlook from the Palm Desktop; what moral transgression deserves that kind of Hell?
To make life more difficult, I have no interest in a PDA that thinks it's a phone.
Am I annoyed with Palm for making the best device of its kind, hooking me on it and then "Oh look! A butterfly!" abandoning it to make mediocre devices for an already crowded market? Yes.
If it's part of an ongoing professional development program and you factor the new skills into compensation, it's not a problem.
If you need skilled people, training your current staff gives you the most bang for your buck; it's not an excuse to underpay them. A good program would be based on "We'll pay for the training: acquire these skills and get these certificates and we'll boost your pay by this much."
That's how it works in the military and at least one Canadian Government department that I know of. It works very well.
This may seem like an odd suggestion, but get the relevant "for Dummies" books.
Wiley puts a lot of effort into ensuring the quality of these books (they aren't really for dummies). They are peer-reviewed, fact-checked and edited. The results are better than any text books and a lot less expensive. As well, the "for Dummies" label gives them permission to use lots of pictures, comfortable fonts, and an informal tone--no pretentious, migraine-inducing tomage.
I have a half-dozen stats books on my shelf; "Statistics for Dummies" is the only one getting used.
Not only that. We've recently discovered that our stomaches have taste buds. They taste something sweet, including fake sugar, they send the pancreas a message to start up the insulin engine and prepare for a glucose flood.
Since it's the insulin that kills you, fake sugar isn't a solution. Snack on cheese and pepperoni sticks.
You stayed fat because it was a poorly controlled experiment. Your problem is that starches (potatoes, bread, pasta) are immediately broken down into glucose, fructose and galactose.
You cut back on HFCS and replaced it with its equivalent in other "white stuff."
You want a proper experiment? Eat like a carnivore--about half and half protein and fat. Don't eat what food eats. Remove both the starches and sugars from your diet. Eat the top of the pizza, leave the pasta behind.
Do it quietly, though. In America alone, there's a $380 billion dollar industry dedicated to feeding you starches and sugars. They have the means to silence you if you irritate them. Besides, lean mania has depressed prices on the good stuff--nicely marbled meat, ribs with the fat left on, etc. If everybody starts eating like this, prices will go up.
If they weren't on Windows, they'd be on a few dozen variants of Linux, Unix, and SunOS. Their problem's a lack of discipline, not proprietary infrastructure. (Germans with a lack of discipline; hoodathunkit?)
The Open Office team (if such a thing exists) is going to have to grapple with VBA sooner or later. There are millions of apps running as VBA extensions to Word and Excel. I have more than a few myself and I'm not about to give them up.
Open office is always in catch-up mode. The next play in the game is in "quantitative analysis for the middle manager". The Excel-compatible tools and extensions are already in use while Open Office is still fixing layout bugs.
Back again--it turns out 9% is in the ballpark, making a few assumptions.
Interesting that per-capita GDP is the same in both countries. Only ten years ago, the US' was substantially greater than Canada's. Creative accounting?
If US spending on Health care is already inflated, what will be the effect of adding another 10% of the population to the rolls, given that one of the reasons they are currently off is that they are expensive to maintain?
We keep seeing that number, but it's never been supported by data and no one takes responsibility for it. It's hard to figure out how over half of average family income going to health care can only add up to 9% of GDP.
The folk who do embedded code can easily do the high level stuff; the converse is not true.
The one problem with programmers who've been working close to the metal is that when they do have something to do at a high level (in bash, for instance) they tend to spend too much time getting it just right.
That initial 11kB is pretty fat. MarcsForth, a bloated version of Forth 83 without any attempt at optimization uses 11.1kB (including the word headers, which is like keeping the whole symbol table in the executable). On the other hand, the reference manual tips the scales at 310kB.
Just as interesting: it was finished in 1987 and runs without a glitch under Windows XP.
The argument that the hearing aid market is too small for mass manufacturing doesn't hold water.
There are around 30 million americans with total hearing loss and only 25% of them have hearing aids (www.hearingcentral.com/HearingAidOpportunities.ppt).
The causes indicated are:
“Mom and Pop” distribution system (9000+/- Audiologists, 3000+/- Dispensers)
Stigma of wearing a hearing aid(will change as more people age and need a hearing aid)
High Cost ($1500 - $3000 ea.)
Most are not covered by private insurance
No Medicare/ Medicaid Coverage (VA does)
Barriers to entry
In any case, market size does not justify the premium prices.
half had 66 or more programs from 22 or more different vendors on their machines.
Is that all? Sounds like a pretty routine state of affairs. My wife, who is seriously non-technical has 134 apps on her machine, not counting the stuff in the Windows directory. We patch no more than once a month, just before running the trial versions of a few AVs, if I remember to do it. In more years than I care to count, the AVs have only found suspicious cookies and emails. We get more false positives than anything else.
This may be a black swan, but my use of PCs goes back to DOS 1 (I was an OEM). For a while I ran a 40-user BBS and I've never had fewer than 3 PC's hooked up to whatever the current network technology allowed (can you say PCboard? Fido? uucp?) In all that time and with all those machines, I've only had one infection--an isolated laptop that I mistakenly hooked to the internet via dialup with the firewall disabled. It took Blaster about 5 seconds to hit and it took about an hour to clean up the mess. Not bad for 25 years of exposure.
Risk management has two sides: cost and benefit. The rational thing is to keep the cost lower than the benefit. That's why the people who live by ITSec only do qualitative risk analysis; they don't want their clients to know that they are spending more than the protection is worth.
This can't be a coincidence. "Alex" was the name of a Videotext dumb terminal service, a copy of the French Minitel, fielded by Bell Canada back in the 80's.
Like this "Alex" the target market was ordinary people who didn't know anything about computers and didn't want to. It failed miserably.
Maybe I just think slow, but for me Graffiti is fast enough that it's not on the critical path.
I can type (on a normal keyboard, not virtual) in bursts faster than I can write Graffiti, but it's wasted speed. My slowest input is the virtual keyboard on any device.
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They didn't turn the Internet over for the common good. It was dragged from their bleeding hands by thousands of BBS sysops turned ISP and their subscribers. Aided by rogue backbone networks like UUNet and whipped into action by Jack Rickard, we tore up the Internet Acceptable Use Provisions and stopped paying the outrageous amounts they charged for admission to their exclusive little club. Since then the Internet has been ours, not the government's or that of the government-funded academic and research groups that we took it from. Internet 2 is a way for them to get back control. So is Net Neutrality. If you think the telecoms are a problem and government management would be an improvement, you need to find a friend who'll lend you a few grey cells.
Some people think "troll" means "disagree".
Those companies aren't in the business of selling data. Google is.
Yah, yah, great product. But what information is Google collecting as you browse?
What bugs me most is that I'm on my third Tungsten|E2 and it's already older than the previous two and I need to be ready when it fails, but I haven't found anything to replace it.
I was among the first buyers of the original USR Palm Pilot and I've been using the Palm Desktop and Palm (or Handspring) devices ever since. That's a big investment. The PDA and Desktop are loaded with information, Cloak (er--Turbo Passwords) manages my passwords, and I can write graffiti as fast as I can write on paper. I shudder to think of the training involved if I have to switch to the bad to horrid handwriting recognition on a "more advanced" product. Switching also means switching to Outlook from the Palm Desktop; what moral transgression deserves that kind of Hell?
To make life more difficult, I have no interest in a PDA that thinks it's a phone.
Am I annoyed with Palm for making the best device of its kind, hooking me on it and then "Oh look! A butterfly!" abandoning it to make mediocre devices for an already crowded market? Yes.
Mechanics bring their own tools, as do many business analysts.
If it's a one-shot affair, you don't.
If it's part of an ongoing professional development program and you factor the new skills into compensation, it's not a problem.
If you need skilled people, training your current staff gives you the most bang for your buck; it's not an excuse to underpay them. A good program would be based on "We'll pay for the training: acquire these skills and get these certificates and we'll boost your pay by this much."
That's how it works in the military and at least one Canadian Government department that I know of. It works very well.
This may seem like an odd suggestion, but get the relevant "for Dummies" books. Wiley puts a lot of effort into ensuring the quality of these books (they aren't really for dummies). They are peer-reviewed, fact-checked and edited. The results are better than any text books and a lot less expensive. As well, the "for Dummies" label gives them permission to use lots of pictures, comfortable fonts, and an informal tone--no pretentious, migraine-inducing tomage. I have a half-dozen stats books on my shelf; "Statistics for Dummies" is the only one getting used.
Why let the facts get in the way of a good story?
Not only that. We've recently discovered that our stomaches have taste buds. They taste something sweet, including fake sugar, they send the pancreas a message to start up the insulin engine and prepare for a glucose flood. Since it's the insulin that kills you, fake sugar isn't a solution. Snack on cheese and pepperoni sticks.
You stayed fat because it was a poorly controlled experiment. Your problem is that starches (potatoes, bread, pasta) are immediately broken down into glucose, fructose and galactose.
You cut back on HFCS and replaced it with its equivalent in other "white stuff."
You want a proper experiment? Eat like a carnivore--about half and half protein and fat. Don't eat what food eats. Remove both the starches and sugars from your diet. Eat the top of the pizza, leave the pasta behind.
Do it quietly, though. In America alone, there's a $380 billion dollar industry dedicated to feeding you starches and sugars. They have the means to silence you if you irritate them. Besides, lean mania has depressed prices on the good stuff--nicely marbled meat, ribs with the fat left on, etc. If everybody starts eating like this, prices will go up.
Not just to anything, but from anything.
If they weren't on Windows, they'd be on a few dozen variants of Linux, Unix, and SunOS. Their problem's a lack of discipline, not proprietary infrastructure. (Germans with a lack of discipline; hoodathunkit?)
The Open Office team (if such a thing exists) is going to have to grapple with VBA sooner or later. There are millions of apps running as VBA extensions to Word and Excel. I have more than a few myself and I'm not about to give them up.
Open office is always in catch-up mode. The next play in the game is in "quantitative analysis for the middle manager". The Excel-compatible tools and extensions are already in use while Open Office is still fixing layout bugs.
Back again--it turns out 9% is in the ballpark, making a few assumptions.
Interesting that per-capita GDP is the same in both countries. Only ten years ago, the US' was substantially greater than Canada's. Creative accounting?
If US spending on Health care is already inflated, what will be the effect of adding another 10% of the population to the rolls, given that one of the reasons they are currently off is that they are expensive to maintain?
We keep seeing that number, but it's never been supported by data and no one takes responsibility for it. It's hard to figure out how over half of average family income going to health care can only add up to 9% of GDP.
Canada's health care bill is over $5,000 per man, woman, or child.
Anything else you'd like to know?
The folk who do embedded code can easily do the high level stuff; the converse is not true.
The one problem with programmers who've been working close to the metal is that when they do have something to do at a high level (in bash, for instance) they tend to spend too much time getting it just right.
That initial 11kB is pretty fat. MarcsForth, a bloated version of Forth 83 without any attempt at optimization uses 11.1kB (including the word headers, which is like keeping the whole symbol table in the executable). On the other hand, the reference manual tips the scales at 310kB.
Just as interesting: it was finished in 1987 and runs without a glitch under Windows XP.
Comparing Version 1 of one product with version 10 of another?
It's comforting to see that /. can still get sucked in by a well-crafted strawman.
The argument that the hearing aid market is too small for mass manufacturing doesn't hold water.
There are around 30 million americans with total hearing loss and only 25% of them have hearing aids (www.hearingcentral.com/HearingAidOpportunities.ppt).
The causes indicated are:
In any case, market size does not justify the premium prices.
half had 66 or more programs from 22 or more different vendors on their machines.
Is that all? Sounds like a pretty routine state of affairs. My wife, who is seriously non-technical has 134 apps on her machine, not counting the stuff in the Windows directory. We patch no more than once a month, just before running the trial versions of a few AVs, if I remember to do it. In more years than I care to count, the AVs have only found suspicious cookies and emails. We get more false positives than anything else.
This may be a black swan, but my use of PCs goes back to DOS 1 (I was an OEM). For a while I ran a 40-user BBS and I've never had fewer than 3 PC's hooked up to whatever the current network technology allowed (can you say PCboard? Fido? uucp?) In all that time and with all those machines, I've only had one infection--an isolated laptop that I mistakenly hooked to the internet via dialup with the firewall disabled. It took Blaster about 5 seconds to hit and it took about an hour to clean up the mess. Not bad for 25 years of exposure.
Risk management has two sides: cost and benefit. The rational thing is to keep the cost lower than the benefit. That's why the people who live by ITSec only do qualitative risk analysis; they don't want their clients to know that they are spending more than the protection is worth.
This can't be a coincidence. "Alex" was the name of a Videotext dumb terminal service, a copy of the French Minitel, fielded by Bell Canada back in the 80's.
Like this "Alex" the target market was ordinary people who didn't know anything about computers and didn't want to. It failed miserably.
If you want to know why, read Outliers. It turns out that success in nerdland is closely tied to what year you were born in.
In the meantime, this will lose them
Maybe I just think slow, but for me Graffiti is fast enough that it's not on the critical path.
I can type (on a normal keyboard, not virtual) in bursts faster than I can write Graffiti, but it's wasted speed. My slowest input is the virtual keyboard on any device.