Only if the Air Force's money is free. But consider that the Air Force is funded by tax money (which libertarians describe as "taking by force" - and they aren't entirely wrong). Because of this they also have a moral responsibility to spend the money wisely. I don't think giving away free garage door openers counts as wise.
Let's talk about the CEO for a minute. If you're saying that the CEO needs to have tech skills "in order to tell the difference betwen fiction and reality," then you are saying that no techie or middle manager below the CEO can be trusted to provide accurate information. If this is the case, then the CEO needs to re-think his staffing plan. Also, why is this limited to tech? Does the CEO also need to have a detailed understanding of marketing, accounting, human resources, law, etc., in order to avoid being lied to by those departments as well?
So: Direct supervisors of tech staff should have tech skills, but at some level above them in the organization, tech skills give way in importance to management and business skills.
This leads to question #2: What do you mean by survive? No doubt an ambitious manager would like to see a clear promotion path all the way up to the CEO level. I don't think tech skills are a liability to achieving this, but once you cross the threshold from supervisory to executive management, those tech skills are not worth much any more. If you have to spend a lot of energy maintaining the techie side of your brain, you are presumably detracting from the amount of time you can spend polishing your executive skills. And this makes you less promotable than someone without this distraction.
So: Can you survive? Yes, you can do very well as a supervisor of techies, but insisting on a robust set of tech skills may cost you as an executive.
I'll match your nuttery and raise you one moonbat:
1. Microsoft announces pull-out from European market. 2. European businesses scream bloody murder. 3. European governments nationalize Microsoft offices located in Europe and seize their assets. 4. EuroSoft Windows released under GPL. 5.... 6. Profit!
You are certainly correct that there are people within the medical community far more qualified to *understand* issues of medical ethics.
However, with equal certainty, such experts are *not* qualified to make final decisions on these questions. They represent no-one, were elected by no-one, and are accountable to no-one outside their medical specialty.
Whatever you may think of politicians - and believe me, I probably share most of your views - they are nevertheless the only people in a position to make legitimate ethical decisions that bind us as a society. This is almost axiomatically true, because in a democracy, legitimacy comes from the people as represented in the legislature.
So the medical professionals are needed for their expertise, and the politicians are needed for their legitimacy. Medical professionals can't take over this role. What needs to happen is for the two groups to work together.
Whether the U.S. system of government remains structurally capable of allowing this to happen remains an open question, of course.
No, he's right. Essential control infrastructure (SCADA) in nuclear plants and other industrial facilities runs on Windows, Linux, etc., often unpatched, and often with ineffective firewalling or access controls. The industry is trying to work itself up to do something about the security implications, but seems to have little interest in non-"hacker"-related stability and reliability problems (because they are not exciting enough to convene a Congressional panel over).
GP gives an option for "20% fewer employees" and also estimates productivity gains at MINIMUM 20% "but we often see higher." RIF from 5 to 4 employees is well within the spirit of the GP.
I don't need a mathematician, but you need to learn to read. Please go away.
So you're saying that in an IT department with 5 employees, if I fire one of them and give the remaining four dual monitors, we'll get the same amount of work done without any added overtime?
Maybe these students aren't big believers in the ongoing intellectual property land grab. But if the university is going to come down on them every time they play a song in Winamp, every time they look at a textbook, etc, etc. - and then turn around and say "all your essay are belong to us" without the slightest notion of property rights, well, I'd be a little miffed as well.
Why is it not-ok when a student gives a copy of an mp3 to a friend, but perfectly ok for the university to give a copy of a student's essay to an outside contractor?
If you tell businesspeople that good UI is worth doing on its own inherent merits, you'll lose your audience. The reason they are businesspeople is that they like making money. So tell them how to make money with it.
The answer is, brands make money, and good UI makes brands work.
Why is the iPod successful despite other MP3 players being cheaper and having more features? Branding and UI.
Why is (or perhaps: was) the Tivo successful despite other PVRs being cheaper and having more features? Branding and UI.
Why was the Blackberry successful despite other wireless PDAs being cheaper and having more features? Branding and UI.
Do you see a pattern? Good user interface design doesn't make the initial sale, because it is too hard to evaluate in advance of purchase. But it does create loyalty, which is the fuel that drives an effective brand. And the brand drives sales through referrals and cross-selling.
On the other hand, screw up the UI and you screw up the brand, and therefore the sales numbers. What happens to your brand if your front-line customer service people are hostile to your users? Answer: The users learn to dislike your brand, and start avoiding it. But your "front-line" CSRs are the *second* line of defense. The vast majority of customer interaction happens with the product itself. So to a reasonable degree of approximation, your UI *is* your customer service.
Can a branding/advertising/selling effort succeed in the face of consistently poor customer service? Not without huge, unnecessary expense. So can a branding effort succeed for a product that has a poor UI? Same answer. If you have the chance to invest in good UI design during product development, that investment will be offset by the money you *don't* later need to spend on vast, marginally effective ad campaigns.
Consider that a cup of coffee and a piece of cake at Starbucks costs about the same as a week's worth of subsistence-level food and water at Kroger or Safeway. I don't know if this justifies the grandparent's coffee acquisition measures, but it too seems a bit extreme.
My personal experience: I bought most of the major game titles, but I had never subscribed to a MMORPG because I couldn't get my head around the monthly cost - until City of Heroes. I played it for a solid year, during which time I didn't buy a single other game. I just didn't have the time for it; in fact, CoH ate into time I probably should have spent on other things.
Then came the nerfs. My character went from uber to puny. I tried to stay interested, but basically, it was no longer possible to play the game I originally bought. Some people liked the changes, and I'm not trying to argue whether they were good or bad, but the nature of the game changed and I liked the old play style. After $200+ (not to mention buying a high end laptop so I could play while on business trips), I was left with a game that I didn't think was fun.
CoH forced me to come face to face with the question of what I get for my money when I buy a game. Ten years after buying it, I still play Total Annihilation every now and then, because it was fun then and it's fun now. CoH stopped being fun and I had no way of opting out of the changes. I paid much more money for CoH but got much less value. In coming to the understanding that CoH was a big waste of my time and money, it was inevitable that I would also realize most other games were a big waste of time and money as well.
I've been to Best Buy since then and walked the gaming aisles, looking for anything that stimulates my interest: And it just doesn't. At one point I even dropped a few bucks on Age of Empires III and Civilization IV, sequels to two of my favorite games. I think I played AoE twice, and Civ hasn't even come out of its box.
Given that a lack of good press is the single most critical factor inhibiting NASA's ability to do interesting projects, I'd say that if "all" they get out of this is good press, then it's money well spent.
Weaving would be impossible in two dimensions. A loom has vertical threads all parallel to each other. The weave is created by passing horizontal threads alternately in front of and behind the vertical threads. In two dimensions, once you had the vertical threads set up, you would not be able to pass any horizontal threads through them because two objects can't occupy the same space at the same time. You need a third dimension for the weave to exist in.
Your post summarizes the thinking of U.S. mobile phone operator CEOs, up to mid 2004. Then Apple came along and sells 4.4 million iPods for $1.3 billion in revenue (Apple fiscal year ending September 2004). Operator CEOs predictably say: $1.3 billion is a lot of money, and we want a share of it next year. So they instruct their product development teams to figure out whatever magic pixie dust iPods have, and put it into their phones.
The secret, of course, is that the iPod magic pixie dust is the same as the Sony Walkman magic pixie dust 20 years earlier: the ability to listen to music you like, on demand, without undue encumbrances.
Enter 2005. The mobile phone product introductions all suck, because they have too much DRM, too little storage, and are more expensive (in terms of recurring cost) than the iPod. Music phones go nowhere. Meanwhile, the iPod, which mobile execs probably assumed was a fad product that peaked in 2004, sells 22.5 million units for $4.5 billion in Apple's fiscal 2005.
What will happen in 2006? Personally I don't think the iPod has peaked yet; I think 2006 figures will be higher than 2005, though not as spectacularly. I don't think any music phones will break the million-unit barrier. Mobile operators will probably give up on the concept of a music phone.
These days, when I can't avoid being dragged into someone's office to "just have a look," their performance problems are *always* spyware or installer-cruft. Invariably, the computer they have is more than fast enough to suit their needs.
So they are presented with a choice: Have someone spend two or three hours at $100+/hr reinstalling Windows and/or cleaing crap off their machine, or wander down to the local megastore and buy the cheapest machine they have, which is usually $250 and ten times faster then they need (as opposed to the "junk" machine, which is only three times faster).
This seems bubble-like to me. But what do I know, I'm only halfway through my MBA. They haven't got to the part about selling people crap they don't need yet.
Not sure if you're trolling or serious, but nothing the GP wrote was in the passive voice. The GP provided a clear subject, object and predicate in each sentence.
If he had been using the passive voice, he would have written: "It was said she had no technical knowledge, but is a lawyer. The impression was given that she needs to be replaced by someone more capable." Your criticism would then be valid.
As it stands, the GP clearly stated an opinion, and stated the basis for that opinion: He watched the show and formed an impression based on the remarks of Ms. Baker.
All that aside, I would also like to know what the GP meant by "socially unsophisticated."
How does it feel when you button the collor of your shirt? Is it comfortable or confining?
The way to wear a tie comfortably is to make sure your shirt collars are the right size. You should be able to get two or three fingers under the collar without difficulty, while it is buttoned. With a collar like this, your tie will fit snugly against the collar, but will not be choking you.
I felt the same way you do about suits and ties, until I went on a trip to Hong Kong and, on a lark, had a suit custom made for me. Suits that *actually fit right* are the last word in comfort - much more comfortable than jeans and a T-shirt, particularly if you want pockets.
In a purely democratic society with no other guiding principles, your neighbors, customers, suppliers, etc., would vote on the price you should charge. You would then be obliged to follow that decision, regardless of whether you agree with it.
In a purely capitalist society with no other guiding principles, you would be free to decide on any price you want, assuming you could actually make snow cones, which you couldn't, because the long-established snow cone cartel has restricted the supply of snow cone makers as a barrier to entry to preserve their monopoly.
In a purely communist society with no other guiding principles, you would be assigned a snow cone maker and a production quota. Citizens would exchange food tokens for snow cones; no money would change hands.
In a purely authoritarian society with no other guiding principles, you would steal a snow cone maker and set up for business, charging ruinous prices; however, you would give snow cones for free to members of the junta, so that (a) your theft of the snow cone maker would go uninvestigated, and (b) they would hopefully choose not to shoot you today.
None of these situations are acceptable - certainly you would not describe any of these as "free." For a society to be free, there must be rule of law, and the laws must be set up in such a way as to prevent any of these extreme outcomes.
You're dividing the total world supply by the demand in America. Have you considered that non-Americans might also want to use a few cubic feet now and then?
1. A hypothesis (or "model") exists which is consistent with all previously observed facts and, to the extent possible, makes correct predictions about the universe.
2. We do not currently know this hypothesis, but we would like to. We have a general preference for obtaining this knowledge sooner rather than later.
3. This hypothesis might be very simple or very complex (where complex means "requiring us to solve hard math problems"). We don't know its complexity, because we don't know what the hypothesis is (see #2).
In the space of all possible hypotheses, some are simple and some are complex. We can investigate and disprove simple hypotheses much faster than complex ones. Therefore, a strategy to minimize the time required to arrive at a correct hypothesis would be to investigate all possible "candidate" hypotheses, ordered by increasing complexity. In the time required to investigate (say) half of all possible hypotheses, we can investigate far more than half if we start with the ones we can understand.
The true nature of the universe may be described by a model more complex than the human mind is theoretically capable of understanding. If so, then we will never find it. In the unfounded hope (e.g. faith) that this might not be the case, we might as well search the ones we can understand.
Are you insane? It gets from NYC to Tokyo in 6 hours instead of 16. Add in your 2 hour security and baggage time and you've still saved 8 hours. Have you ever been on a super-long flight like this? I'd pay a hefty premium to avoid overnighting on the plane, particularly in coach class.
And by the way: you would have to go through airport security either way. What were you going to do, drive to Tokyo?
Slashdot Mirror
Only if the Air Force's money is free. But consider that the Air Force is funded by tax money (which libertarians describe as "taking by force" - and they aren't entirely wrong). Because of this they also have a moral responsibility to spend the money wisely. I don't think giving away free garage door openers counts as wise.
Let's talk about the CEO for a minute. If you're saying that the CEO needs to have tech skills "in order to tell the difference betwen fiction and reality," then you are saying that no techie or middle manager below the CEO can be trusted to provide accurate information. If this is the case, then the CEO needs to re-think his staffing plan. Also, why is this limited to tech? Does the CEO also need to have a detailed understanding of marketing, accounting, human resources, law, etc., in order to avoid being lied to by those departments as well?
So: Direct supervisors of tech staff should have tech skills, but at some level above them in the organization, tech skills give way in importance to management and business skills.
This leads to question #2: What do you mean by survive? No doubt an ambitious manager would like to see a clear promotion path all the way up to the CEO level. I don't think tech skills are a liability to achieving this, but once you cross the threshold from supervisory to executive management, those tech skills are not worth much any more. If you have to spend a lot of energy maintaining the techie side of your brain, you are presumably detracting from the amount of time you can spend polishing your executive skills. And this makes you less promotable than someone without this distraction.
So: Can you survive? Yes, you can do very well as a supervisor of techies, but insisting on a robust set of tech skills may cost you as an executive.
-Graham
I'll match your nuttery and raise you one moonbat:
...
1. Microsoft announces pull-out from European market.
2. European businesses scream bloody murder.
3. European governments nationalize Microsoft offices located in Europe and seize their assets.
4. EuroSoft Windows released under GPL.
5.
6. Profit!
You are certainly correct that there are people within the medical community far more qualified to *understand* issues of medical ethics.
However, with equal certainty, such experts are *not* qualified to make final decisions on these questions. They represent no-one, were elected by no-one, and are accountable to no-one outside their medical specialty.
Whatever you may think of politicians - and believe me, I probably share most of your views - they are nevertheless the only people in a position to make legitimate ethical decisions that bind us as a society. This is almost axiomatically true, because in a democracy, legitimacy comes from the people as represented in the legislature.
So the medical professionals are needed for their expertise, and the politicians are needed for their legitimacy. Medical professionals can't take over this role. What needs to happen is for the two groups to work together.
Whether the U.S. system of government remains structurally capable of allowing this to happen remains an open question, of course.
-Graham
No, he's right. Essential control infrastructure (SCADA) in nuclear plants and other industrial facilities runs on Windows, Linux, etc., often unpatched, and often with ineffective firewalling or access controls. The industry is trying to work itself up to do something about the security implications, but seems to have little interest in non-"hacker"-related stability and reliability problems (because they are not exciting enough to convene a Congressional panel over).
-Graham
GP gives an option for "20% fewer employees" and also estimates productivity gains at MINIMUM 20% "but we often see higher." RIF from 5 to 4 employees is well within the spirit of the GP.
I don't need a mathematician, but you need to learn to read. Please go away.
-Graham
Err ...
So you're saying that in an IT department with 5 employees, if I fire one of them and give the remaining four dual monitors, we'll get the same amount of work done without any added overtime?
-Graham
Maybe these students aren't big believers in the ongoing intellectual property land grab. But if the university is going to come down on them every time they play a song in Winamp, every time they look at a textbook, etc, etc. - and then turn around and say "all your essay are belong to us" without the slightest notion of property rights, well, I'd be a little miffed as well.
Why is it not-ok when a student gives a copy of an mp3 to a friend, but perfectly ok for the university to give a copy of a student's essay to an outside contractor?
-Graham
If you tell businesspeople that good UI is worth doing on its own inherent merits, you'll lose your audience. The reason they are businesspeople is that they like making money. So tell them how to make money with it.
The answer is, brands make money, and good UI makes brands work.
Why is the iPod successful despite other MP3 players being cheaper and having more features? Branding and UI.
Why is (or perhaps: was) the Tivo successful despite other PVRs being cheaper and having more features? Branding and UI.
Why was the Blackberry successful despite other wireless PDAs being cheaper and having more features? Branding and UI.
Do you see a pattern? Good user interface design doesn't make the initial sale, because it is too hard to evaluate in advance of purchase. But it does create loyalty, which is the fuel that drives an effective brand. And the brand drives sales through referrals and cross-selling.
On the other hand, screw up the UI and you screw up the brand, and therefore the sales numbers. What happens to your brand if your front-line customer service people are hostile to your users? Answer: The users learn to dislike your brand, and start avoiding it. But your "front-line" CSRs are the *second* line of defense. The vast majority of customer interaction happens with the product itself. So to a reasonable degree of approximation, your UI *is* your customer service.
Can a branding/advertising/selling effort succeed in the face of consistently poor customer service? Not without huge, unnecessary expense. So can a branding effort succeed for a product that has a poor UI? Same answer. If you have the chance to invest in good UI design during product development, that investment will be offset by the money you *don't* later need to spend on vast, marginally effective ad campaigns.
Or at least, I'd argue it over a beer.
-Graham
Consider that a cup of coffee and a piece of cake at Starbucks costs about the same as a week's worth of subsistence-level food and water at Kroger or Safeway. I don't know if this justifies the grandparent's coffee acquisition measures, but it too seems a bit extreme.
-Graham
My personal experience: I bought most of the major game titles, but I had never subscribed to a MMORPG because I couldn't get my head around the monthly cost - until City of Heroes. I played it for a solid year, during which time I didn't buy a single other game. I just didn't have the time for it; in fact, CoH ate into time I probably should have spent on other things.
Then came the nerfs. My character went from uber to puny. I tried to stay interested, but basically, it was no longer possible to play the game I originally bought. Some people liked the changes, and I'm not trying to argue whether they were good or bad, but the nature of the game changed and I liked the old play style. After $200+ (not to mention buying a high end laptop so I could play while on business trips), I was left with a game that I didn't think was fun.
CoH forced me to come face to face with the question of what I get for my money when I buy a game. Ten years after buying it, I still play Total Annihilation every now and then, because it was fun then and it's fun now. CoH stopped being fun and I had no way of opting out of the changes. I paid much more money for CoH but got much less value. In coming to the understanding that CoH was a big waste of my time and money, it was inevitable that I would also realize most other games were a big waste of time and money as well.
I've been to Best Buy since then and walked the gaming aisles, looking for anything that stimulates my interest: And it just doesn't. At one point I even dropped a few bucks on Age of Empires III and Civilization IV, sequels to two of my favorite games. I think I played AoE twice, and Civ hasn't even come out of its box.
CoH broke me of gaming.
-Graham
Given that a lack of good press is the single most critical factor inhibiting NASA's ability to do interesting projects, I'd say that if "all" they get out of this is good press, then it's money well spent.
Weaving would be impossible in two dimensions. A loom has vertical threads all parallel to each other. The weave is created by passing horizontal threads alternately in front of and behind the vertical threads. In two dimensions, once you had the vertical threads set up, you would not be able to pass any horizontal threads through them because two objects can't occupy the same space at the same time. You need a third dimension for the weave to exist in.
There's a big difference between "flat" and "2d."
-Graham
Your post summarizes the thinking of U.S. mobile phone operator CEOs, up to mid 2004. Then Apple came along and sells 4.4 million iPods for $1.3 billion in revenue (Apple fiscal year ending September 2004). Operator CEOs predictably say: $1.3 billion is a lot of money, and we want a share of it next year. So they instruct their product development teams to figure out whatever magic pixie dust iPods have, and put it into their phones.
The secret, of course, is that the iPod magic pixie dust is the same as the Sony Walkman magic pixie dust 20 years earlier: the ability to listen to music you like, on demand, without undue encumbrances.
Enter 2005. The mobile phone product introductions all suck, because they have too much DRM, too little storage, and are more expensive (in terms of recurring cost) than the iPod. Music phones go nowhere. Meanwhile, the iPod, which mobile execs probably assumed was a fad product that peaked in 2004, sells 22.5 million units for $4.5 billion in Apple's fiscal 2005.
What will happen in 2006? Personally I don't think the iPod has peaked yet; I think 2006 figures will be higher than 2005, though not as spectacularly. I don't think any music phones will break the million-unit barrier. Mobile operators will probably give up on the concept of a music phone.
-Graham
Yep.
These days, when I can't avoid being dragged into someone's office to "just have a look," their performance problems are *always* spyware or installer-cruft. Invariably, the computer they have is more than fast enough to suit their needs.
So they are presented with a choice: Have someone spend two or three hours at $100+/hr reinstalling Windows and/or cleaing crap off their machine, or wander down to the local megastore and buy the cheapest machine they have, which is usually $250 and ten times faster then they need (as opposed to the "junk" machine, which is only three times faster).
This seems bubble-like to me. But what do I know, I'm only halfway through my MBA. They haven't got to the part about selling people crap they don't need yet.
-Graham
Not sure if you're trolling or serious, but nothing the GP wrote was in the passive voice. The GP provided a clear subject, object and predicate in each sentence.
If he had been using the passive voice, he would have written: "It was said she had no technical knowledge, but is a lawyer. The impression was given that she needs to be replaced by someone more capable." Your criticism would then be valid.
As it stands, the GP clearly stated an opinion, and stated the basis for that opinion: He watched the show and formed an impression based on the remarks of Ms. Baker.
All that aside, I would also like to know what the GP meant by "socially unsophisticated."
-Graham
I would have thought Veronica, not Gopher, would be the conceptual equivalent of Google.
-Graham
tsia
How does it feel when you button the collor of your shirt? Is it comfortable or confining?
The way to wear a tie comfortably is to make sure your shirt collars are the right size. You should be able to get two or three fingers under the collar without difficulty, while it is buttoned. With a collar like this, your tie will fit snugly against the collar, but will not be choking you.
I felt the same way you do about suits and ties, until I went on a trip to Hong Kong and, on a lark, had a suit custom made for me. Suits that *actually fit right* are the last word in comfort - much more comfortable than jeans and a T-shirt, particularly if you want pockets.
-Graham
In a purely democratic society with no other guiding principles, your neighbors, customers, suppliers, etc., would vote on the price you should charge. You would then be obliged to follow that decision, regardless of whether you agree with it.
In a purely capitalist society with no other guiding principles, you would be free to decide on any price you want, assuming you could actually make snow cones, which you couldn't, because the long-established snow cone cartel has restricted the supply of snow cone makers as a barrier to entry to preserve their monopoly.
In a purely communist society with no other guiding principles, you would be assigned a snow cone maker and a production quota. Citizens would exchange food tokens for snow cones; no money would change hands.
In a purely authoritarian society with no other guiding principles, you would steal a snow cone maker and set up for business, charging ruinous prices; however, you would give snow cones for free to members of the junta, so that (a) your theft of the snow cone maker would go uninvestigated, and (b) they would hopefully choose not to shoot you today.
None of these situations are acceptable - certainly you would not describe any of these as "free." For a society to be free, there must be rule of law, and the laws must be set up in such a way as to prevent any of these extreme outcomes.
-Graham
You're dividing the total world supply by the demand in America. Have you considered that non-Americans might also want to use a few cubic feet now and then?
-Graham
I used to have a matter duplicator in my basement, but unfortunately it was destroyed in a fire. It was the only copy.
-Graham
Make the following assumptions.
1. A hypothesis (or "model") exists which is consistent with all previously observed facts and, to the extent possible, makes correct predictions about the universe.
2. We do not currently know this hypothesis, but we would like to. We have a general preference for obtaining this knowledge sooner rather than later.
3. This hypothesis might be very simple or very complex (where complex means "requiring us to solve hard math problems"). We don't know its complexity, because we don't know what the hypothesis is (see #2).
In the space of all possible hypotheses, some are simple and some are complex. We can investigate and disprove simple hypotheses much faster than complex ones. Therefore, a strategy to minimize the time required to arrive at a correct hypothesis would be to investigate all possible "candidate" hypotheses, ordered by increasing complexity. In the time required to investigate (say) half of all possible hypotheses, we can investigate far more than half if we start with the ones we can understand.
The true nature of the universe may be described by a model more complex than the human mind is theoretically capable of understanding. If so, then we will never find it. In the unfounded hope (e.g. faith) that this might not be the case, we might as well search the ones we can understand.
-Graham
Duh! The resting mass of a photon changed when the Age of Miracles ended. Anyone who has correctly read the Book of Revelation should know that.
-Graham
Are you insane? It gets from NYC to Tokyo in 6 hours instead of 16. Add in your 2 hour security and baggage time and you've still saved 8 hours. Have you ever been on a super-long flight like this? I'd pay a hefty premium to avoid overnighting on the plane, particularly in coach class.
And by the way: you would have to go through airport security either way. What were you going to do, drive to Tokyo?
-Graham