Giff,
Your point is well taken. The big difference there is that Apple took the time and effort to actually discard most of their old OS and start from a much cleaner base when moving to OSX. (Yes, it was an import of NextStep. Yes, Mach isn't perfect, but now that the OS is sitting on a Unix foundation, it would be far easier to replace the kernel without having to rewrite every single line of code outside the kernel.) Microsoft has been threatening to do the same for years, but I've lost count of the number of Windows releases we've already seen that were originally going to be written from an entirely fresh codebase. Whenever Vista bothers to show up, it will once again be built on the old codebase, Microsoft having abandoned plans to rebuild.
However, with Microsoft having such significant development resources, is the inability to build a new OS from the ground up a reflection of a poor OS architecture to begin with, mismanagement of dev resources, or simply hiring the wrong people for the job? Based on the MS people I've known, I'd venture that it's a combination of the first two.
Of course, the biggest problem with Microsoft is that they seem to have lost track of what most consumers might think of as a better product, therefore they don't really aim to produce such a beast. Windows (and Office) are perfect examples of the sort of product design that doesn't care about user experience, because they don't have to...
-JMP
One of the reasons that MacOS can provide a relatively consistent stable experience is that there is a limited range of hardware on which it is expected to run. Sure, Macs don't always have the very fastest of graphics chipsets (although we'll see what comes with the new PowerMac replacements), but the Apple engineers working on drivers can know exactly what chipsets are out there.
If Microsoft could seriously limit and control the hardware on which Windows would run, they could probably do a lot better with drivers, too.
These days, now that Apple is using more standardized Intel chipsets, they are able to pick a few configurations that are identical to perfectly good PCs out there and develop for those machines. As technology advances, they'll still have a limited group of configurations to develop for. (And yes, they aren't putting out high powered gaming configurations right now, but they will have high powered graphics workstations when the high end desktops come out.) If they had to start supporting everything, they would be opening a Pandora's Box of compatability issues. Dealing with the required driver variants would eat up the same resources they're using to innovate.
Besides, the reason Apple sells OS updates for $99 is that they know that everyone buying a copy has already bought a machine they produced.
-JMP
However, it looks to me like the young girl in the pictures may be somewhat innocent.
She's apparently 16 years old and already a mother. Innocent is not necessarily the word I'd use to describe her. I'd give a pass on naive. I might even suggest that she missed out on having the best role models and guidance in her life. She's not innocent.
An innocent 16 year old girl doesn't have a kid. An innocent 16 year old doesn't get involved with the sort of people who make death threats.
-JMP
There's a restaurant from which my wife and I order food for delivery every so often. I almost always use cash.
One time, I hadn't made it to the ATM recently enough and gave them my Visa number. The following time I ordered from them, I told them I wanted to pay cash. The delivery guy showed up with a credit card slip with my number on it. I called the restaurant and asked why they had stored my number without my permission. They shrugged it off and said they would remove it from their system.
The next time I ordered from them, the same thing happened. I told them I was complaining to Visa, since I had specifically requested that they not retain my card number. They tried to make some excuse, but it hasn't happened since.
This is exactly why I NEVER use a debit card, but will regularly use credit cards. If these guys are storing credit card numbers as a matter of practice, I don't want them to have my debit card number. Credit card agreements have built-in liability protection if the number is stolen. Debit cards leave the account holder dealing with missing money at least until things are sorted out, if not permanently.
-JMP
It will demonstrate which of the following theories is closer to the truth, without being enough to be conclusive. Either:
A) Steve Jobs is a creative genius who controls every bit of design and implementation of his great ideas, allowing the people working on his teams to come up with successfull products.
or...
B) Steve Jobs comes up/recognizes good initial ideas, then micro-manages his team too much, coming up with great products that might be even better if he let his senior team members have slightly more freedom to innovate.
Don't get me wrong. I love my iPod. I really enjoy using OSX. They're great products. I just wonder if Jobs's micro-management gets diminishing returns...
-JMP
While I don't really buy into these rumors with the current information available, if there really is some sort of marriage between Disney and Apple in the works, it might explain the rumors of an iTunes spinoff IPO.
From what I understand, iTunes itself operates as a break-even loss leader to sell more iPods. Granted, lots of people could make lots of money in an iTunes IPO by selling to people who think that any product they like using must be a good investment, but it doesn't really make business sense.
Now, if Apple and Disney are considering something, and they're trying to figure out whether or not there'd be an anti-trust backlash, an iTunes IPO might get rid of any backlash.
Back down to earth and removing my tinfoil hat, what I'd love to see is for Apple and Disney to announce that they're going to allow subscriptions to shows. The one that really comes to mind is a flat weekly/monthly fee for unlimited downloads of the most recent SportsCenter. After all, there's a new one 4 times a day, and plenty of people who always want to see the latest. There's a money maker there...
-JMP
Re:this could be a dangerous IPO
on
Vonage IPO
·
· Score: 1
It gets worse.
Vonage's target market is home users with high speed connectivity. The vast majority of home users with high speed connectivity use either cable or DSL, with a small but increasing number using services like Verizon's FIOS.
Now, anyone who's got DSL doesn't need Vonage for their primary phone service. True, there's a market for second lines, but the big money is in homes with one phone line.
This leaves cable users. I don't know about the rest of the country, but here in NYC, Time Warner Cable is heavily promoting their own VOIP service. While the more tech savvy people I know are flocking to Vonage-like VOIP services to use with their cable modems, plenty of people would much rather buy phone service from a company they already do business with. Yes, even when that company is evil, monopolistic, and incompetent.
The people I know who are most likely to have a continued reason to use Vonage are friends who have moved out of the country. Domestic long distance is cheap enough that moving within the US doesn't really cost that much in phone calls. I have friends in Israel who have Vonage boxes with numbers in their parents' local areas. This is a pretty limited market.
Look for this stock to soar on the first day or two of trading. There are plenty of people who know technology but not business who will assume that a company with a good idea is a good investment. It's probably going to be more like Tivo, which had a great idea but has not managed to make itself enough of a dominant player to turn that idea into profits.
-JMP
The DIY crowd will just record off the analog out, it's really at the "good enough" state anyway.
Not for HDTV. The advantage of cablecard is that it allows the device to directly access the compressed digital signal. Analog out is just fine for recording SDTV. If you want to record unencrypted HDTV, you won't get very much bang for your storage buck...
-JMP
So let's get this straight: If I happened to order pizza from the same place as my friendly neighborhood terror cell, that puts my number on their radar. (Forget it if the local pizza place is owned by Muslim immigrants.) Once I'm on their radar, those handfuls of overseas calls I make probably draw attention to me.
One of these days, someone who has nothing to hide is going to subpoena the NSA for records of whether or not their phone has been observed, and request copies of warrants authorizing said observation...
-JMP
I wonder what the care instructions are like. Do you suppose the electronics are really built to withstand the soapy water, tossing about, and spin cycle of a washing machine? How about the heat of a dryer?
-JMP
Now, unless I misunderstood, it's telling me that if I install said security patch, and it breaks something, I can't hold MS accountable.
There's accountable, and then there's accountable.
Let's say MS releases a patch that ends up causing major problems for mission critical systems at a nonzero number of Fortune 500 companies. The next time those companies are looking at major systems overhauls, do you think they're going to seriously consider MS products?
Sure, MS isn't liable if their products cause major business problems, but it'll certainly hurt their future sales if they let it happen too frequently.
-JMP
The power of Steve Jobs is that he is able to get people to notice what he's doing. Part of that includes his large following of people who hang on his every word. It shouldn't come as a shock to anyone that he works very hard to maintain the effortless appearance of his public persona in order to maintain that following.
Apple makes great products, sometimes jumping into market segments that have other businesses with a head start, makes them slick and easy to use, then markets the hell out of them. The iPod wasn't the first portable mp3 player, but it put the product on the map. If next week's keynote unveils a media-centered Mac Mini with DVR features, it won't be the first such creature (Microsoft's been trying to break into that segment for a while, and Bill Gates just demoed similar features in Vista), but I guarantee that Jobs will unveil products that are much closer to market, and that the proportional effect on Apple's sales will be tremendous...
-JMP
As I recall, Tivo unveiled their first prototype of a cablecard enabled, HDTV capable DVR at CES 2 years ago. I would have been ready to buy such a creature at the time.
Obviously, the current model looks leaps and bounds ahead of what they originally put forth. I love the display on the front that shows what both tuners are recording. (Although no more sneaking recordings of shows my wife doesn't know I watch, and doesn't think I have time for.) However, I can't help but think that they missed out on a significant piece of the market as people have resigned themselves to using cable company provided DVRs for HDTV. It doesn't help that cablecard implementation at most cable companies is still pretty buggy, and not used widely enough to get debugged thoroughly too quickly.
My bet is that this unit will succeed or fail (and the company with it) depending on how much marketing muscle Comcast puts behind it as part of their alliance with Tivo. Of course, I'm still likely to buy one, as the HD-DVR Time Warner provides for me is horribly buggy...
-JMP
I always thought I'd give them the benefit of the doubt and have certain areas (such as the major shopping areas, Rockefeller Center, Times Square) where there's a fence down the middle of the sidewalk. Only people with permits will be allowed on one side, as long as they walk at a speed of at least 3mph without sudden stops. The other side of the fence would be for tourists.
This thought came to me after a single week during the Christmas tourist season when I had business meetings at both 30 Rockefeller Plaza (the RCA building, right behind the big tree) and 1515 Broadway during TRL. In both cases, walking the last 100 feet to get to building security took 15 minutes...
-JMP
This may very well be the last straw, forcing pedestrian-oriented places like New York City to require pedestrian licenses. It's already a major hassle to get around during tourist season...
-JMP
My old boss gave me an invite to a party he threw back in the go-go days of the late 1990s. He was worse in person.
I would occassionally look at his magazine when waiting for a meeting with someone (but I would never pay for it). I did subscribe to his daily e-mail alerts, but seldom read them. The whole thing was purely a product of the bubble, and he was most definitely a creature of the bubble.
In an era when people were making huge investments based on fads rather than business plans, Jason Calacanis positioned himself as the arbiter of all dot-com related fads. He threw parties that were a bunch of people congratulating each other for how thoroughly their soon-to-be-bankrupt companies would change the world. The parties would also serve as prime places for people working for companies that were about to run out of money to connect with people who just got venture capital funding. At the one of these parties that I went to, someone actually tried to hire me with the pickup line of "my partner and I have started 20 companies between us." When I asked, he sheepishly admitted that the one they'd started that week was the only one that wasn't bankrupt.
I can't blame Calacanis. After all, if he hadn't taken up the role, someone else would have. I can't say that I miss the days of having to wonder how long my next employer will stay in business...
-JMP
Even Apollo 11 had to fill out a customs declaration. I'm sure the same rules would apply to commercial space travel that involves a stop somewhere outside of the US. (Say, on a privately run space station, which is likely to happen in the long run if commercial spaceflight is a success.)
-JMP
Commodity pricing is based on the idea that supplies are limited. Likewise with stocks, as there are a finite number of shares of any given company in circulation. Even if every person with a computer on planet Earth bought a copy of the same song, it would not be in short supply.
That's not to say that there isn't value in a variable pricing scheme, but it wouldn't really be commodity pricing, or a "digital music stock market."
-JMP
Regardless, my point is, this is not "just like any contract between individuals". It is an agreement between a private institution of higher education and a student enrolling there. Despite what some might have you think, students are not merely customers to the corporations of education.
No, but in the free market for education, this is one of many factors potential students will consider when choosing a school. While the primary criteria used by most students (in varying combinations) to select schools include things like academic standing, tuition & financial aid, school size, geography, and quality of student life. Reputation for academic freedom is just another factor in that equation. Schools that regularly restrict academic freedom will eventually find it harder to attract the sort of top students every school wants.
The invisible hand can work. We just need to let it.
-JMP
It's only a matter of time before the bandwidth gets reclaimed for something more lucrative. The only question is whether or not the Feds will reclaim first it so they can raise money from an auction.
If they do, it'll mean that the spectrum only goes to established companies who can afford it in auction. If they don't either the current media conglomorates that own most radio stations will sell the spectrum for more than the radio stations are worth, or they'll liquidate it at rock bottom prices as unprofitable until someone innovates in the space.
Knowing the current administration, I'd bet that the conglomorates will strike it even richer than they already are.
-JMP
Two parties to a contract have a right to set the terms under which their business is conducted. Those restrictions can be enforced legally, even if they might constitute a restriction of speech in other circumstances. The Eagles can write into their player contracts that their players must adhere to a code of conduct, and can restrict speech in that code. A university can tell its students that if they don't want to adhere to a code of conduct, they can find another university. No one forces an individual to go to a specific university. Once you select one, you agree to play according to their rules.
-JMP
The US Constitution guarentees that you will not suffer the consequences of censorship nor retaliation for what you say - that is freedom of speech.
Where do you see that in the Constitution? All I see is the bit in the First Amendment saying that "Congress shall make no law...abridging the freedom of speech, or the press..." It says nothing about a private institution reserving the right to determine the terms under which it will do business with an individual.
Now, you don't have to like it, but if a university accepts a student's tuition on the condition that they adhere to a policy of conduct, the university has every right to enforce that policy. It's just like any contract between individuals. I could hire you to work for me, and include in the conditions of your employment that you don't disagree with me in public. I could then fire you with cause if you violate that contract, and the government would back me up on enforcing the contract. No one forced this student to choose Marquette as opposed to any other school.
-JMP
Re:No one notices a well done security job...
on
Security's Shaky State
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
I was going to moderate this thread until I saw your post. There's no option for "needs hug" and you sure deserve it.
Thanks, but I did gain an important bit of wisdom working there. The company brought in a supposedly hot shit developer to build systems. In departmental meetings where we went over our current projects, he was never interested in hearing about anyone else's project, but more importantly he got defensive when asked questions about how he dealt with various potential pitfalls. It turned out that he usually simply didn't deal with the pitfalls.
It's no wonder that the project managers dreaded having their projects assigned to him, as they would not only take longer to get to launch, but he would rush things past testing because he presumed himself to be infallible. His projects therefore always launched with bugs. (We're talking basic things here, like web apps for thousands of concurrent users that couldn't handle concurrent requests.)
Not only did I come away understanding the importance of bouncing ideas off others, but ever since that experience, I'm overly self-conscious about making sure to listen carefully to questions asked by people who aren't immersed in my projects. I find that those questions can often save me great deals of aggrivation later in the dev process. I don't want to be a master-of-the-universe hot shit developer. I want to build things that work.
-JMP
Slashdot Mirror
Giff,
Your point is well taken. The big difference there is that Apple took the time and effort to actually discard most of their old OS and start from a much cleaner base when moving to OSX. (Yes, it was an import of NextStep. Yes, Mach isn't perfect, but now that the OS is sitting on a Unix foundation, it would be far easier to replace the kernel without having to rewrite every single line of code outside the kernel.) Microsoft has been threatening to do the same for years, but I've lost count of the number of Windows releases we've already seen that were originally going to be written from an entirely fresh codebase. Whenever Vista bothers to show up, it will once again be built on the old codebase, Microsoft having abandoned plans to rebuild.
However, with Microsoft having such significant development resources, is the inability to build a new OS from the ground up a reflection of a poor OS architecture to begin with, mismanagement of dev resources, or simply hiring the wrong people for the job? Based on the MS people I've known, I'd venture that it's a combination of the first two.
Of course, the biggest problem with Microsoft is that they seem to have lost track of what most consumers might think of as a better product, therefore they don't really aim to produce such a beast. Windows (and Office) are perfect examples of the sort of product design that doesn't care about user experience, because they don't have to...
-JMP
One of the reasons that MacOS can provide a relatively consistent stable experience is that there is a limited range of hardware on which it is expected to run. Sure, Macs don't always have the very fastest of graphics chipsets (although we'll see what comes with the new PowerMac replacements), but the Apple engineers working on drivers can know exactly what chipsets are out there.
If Microsoft could seriously limit and control the hardware on which Windows would run, they could probably do a lot better with drivers, too.
These days, now that Apple is using more standardized Intel chipsets, they are able to pick a few configurations that are identical to perfectly good PCs out there and develop for those machines. As technology advances, they'll still have a limited group of configurations to develop for. (And yes, they aren't putting out high powered gaming configurations right now, but they will have high powered graphics workstations when the high end desktops come out.) If they had to start supporting everything, they would be opening a Pandora's Box of compatability issues. Dealing with the required driver variants would eat up the same resources they're using to innovate.
Besides, the reason Apple sells OS updates for $99 is that they know that everyone buying a copy has already bought a machine they produced.
-JMP
However, it looks to me like the young girl in the pictures may be somewhat innocent. She's apparently 16 years old and already a mother. Innocent is not necessarily the word I'd use to describe her. I'd give a pass on naive. I might even suggest that she missed out on having the best role models and guidance in her life. She's not innocent. An innocent 16 year old girl doesn't have a kid. An innocent 16 year old doesn't get involved with the sort of people who make death threats. -JMP
There's a restaurant from which my wife and I order food for delivery every so often. I almost always use cash.
One time, I hadn't made it to the ATM recently enough and gave them my Visa number. The following time I ordered from them, I told them I wanted to pay cash. The delivery guy showed up with a credit card slip with my number on it. I called the restaurant and asked why they had stored my number without my permission. They shrugged it off and said they would remove it from their system.
The next time I ordered from them, the same thing happened. I told them I was complaining to Visa, since I had specifically requested that they not retain my card number. They tried to make some excuse, but it hasn't happened since.
This is exactly why I NEVER use a debit card, but will regularly use credit cards. If these guys are storing credit card numbers as a matter of practice, I don't want them to have my debit card number. Credit card agreements have built-in liability protection if the number is stolen. Debit cards leave the account holder dealing with missing money at least until things are sorted out, if not permanently.
-JMP
It will demonstrate which of the following theories is closer to the truth, without being enough to be conclusive. Either:
A) Steve Jobs is a creative genius who controls every bit of design and implementation of his great ideas, allowing the people working on his teams to come up with successfull products.
or...
B) Steve Jobs comes up/recognizes good initial ideas, then micro-manages his team too much, coming up with great products that might be even better if he let his senior team members have slightly more freedom to innovate.
Don't get me wrong. I love my iPod. I really enjoy using OSX. They're great products. I just wonder if Jobs's micro-management gets diminishing returns...
-JMP
While I don't really buy into these rumors with the current information available, if there really is some sort of marriage between Disney and Apple in the works, it might explain the rumors of an iTunes spinoff IPO.
From what I understand, iTunes itself operates as a break-even loss leader to sell more iPods. Granted, lots of people could make lots of money in an iTunes IPO by selling to people who think that any product they like using must be a good investment, but it doesn't really make business sense.
Now, if Apple and Disney are considering something, and they're trying to figure out whether or not there'd be an anti-trust backlash, an iTunes IPO might get rid of any backlash.
Back down to earth and removing my tinfoil hat, what I'd love to see is for Apple and Disney to announce that they're going to allow subscriptions to shows. The one that really comes to mind is a flat weekly/monthly fee for unlimited downloads of the most recent SportsCenter. After all, there's a new one 4 times a day, and plenty of people who always want to see the latest. There's a money maker there...
-JMP
It gets worse.
Vonage's target market is home users with high speed connectivity. The vast majority of home users with high speed connectivity use either cable or DSL, with a small but increasing number using services like Verizon's FIOS.
Now, anyone who's got DSL doesn't need Vonage for their primary phone service. True, there's a market for second lines, but the big money is in homes with one phone line.
This leaves cable users. I don't know about the rest of the country, but here in NYC, Time Warner Cable is heavily promoting their own VOIP service. While the more tech savvy people I know are flocking to Vonage-like VOIP services to use with their cable modems, plenty of people would much rather buy phone service from a company they already do business with. Yes, even when that company is evil, monopolistic, and incompetent.
The people I know who are most likely to have a continued reason to use Vonage are friends who have moved out of the country. Domestic long distance is cheap enough that moving within the US doesn't really cost that much in phone calls. I have friends in Israel who have Vonage boxes with numbers in their parents' local areas. This is a pretty limited market.
Look for this stock to soar on the first day or two of trading. There are plenty of people who know technology but not business who will assume that a company with a good idea is a good investment. It's probably going to be more like Tivo, which had a great idea but has not managed to make itself enough of a dominant player to turn that idea into profits.
-JMP
The DIY crowd will just record off the analog out, it's really at the "good enough" state anyway.
Not for HDTV. The advantage of cablecard is that it allows the device to directly access the compressed digital signal. Analog out is just fine for recording SDTV. If you want to record unencrypted HDTV, you won't get very much bang for your storage buck...
-JMP
So let's get this straight: If I happened to order pizza from the same place as my friendly neighborhood terror cell, that puts my number on their radar. (Forget it if the local pizza place is owned by Muslim immigrants.) Once I'm on their radar, those handfuls of overseas calls I make probably draw attention to me.
One of these days, someone who has nothing to hide is going to subpoena the NSA for records of whether or not their phone has been observed, and request copies of warrants authorizing said observation...
-JMP
I wonder what the care instructions are like. Do you suppose the electronics are really built to withstand the soapy water, tossing about, and spin cycle of a washing machine? How about the heat of a dryer?
-JMP
Now, unless I misunderstood, it's telling me that if I install said security patch, and it breaks something, I can't hold MS accountable.
There's accountable, and then there's accountable.
Let's say MS releases a patch that ends up causing major problems for mission critical systems at a nonzero number of Fortune 500 companies. The next time those companies are looking at major systems overhauls, do you think they're going to seriously consider MS products?
Sure, MS isn't liable if their products cause major business problems, but it'll certainly hurt their future sales if they let it happen too frequently.
-JMP
That ought to teach Microsoft not to get rid of a publication they owned for a while...
-JMP
The power of Steve Jobs is that he is able to get people to notice what he's doing. Part of that includes his large following of people who hang on his every word. It shouldn't come as a shock to anyone that he works very hard to maintain the effortless appearance of his public persona in order to maintain that following.
Apple makes great products, sometimes jumping into market segments that have other businesses with a head start, makes them slick and easy to use, then markets the hell out of them. The iPod wasn't the first portable mp3 player, but it put the product on the map. If next week's keynote unveils a media-centered Mac Mini with DVR features, it won't be the first such creature (Microsoft's been trying to break into that segment for a while, and Bill Gates just demoed similar features in Vista), but I guarantee that Jobs will unveil products that are much closer to market, and that the proportional effect on Apple's sales will be tremendous...
-JMP
As I recall, Tivo unveiled their first prototype of a cablecard enabled, HDTV capable DVR at CES 2 years ago. I would have been ready to buy such a creature at the time.
Obviously, the current model looks leaps and bounds ahead of what they originally put forth. I love the display on the front that shows what both tuners are recording. (Although no more sneaking recordings of shows my wife doesn't know I watch, and doesn't think I have time for.) However, I can't help but think that they missed out on a significant piece of the market as people have resigned themselves to using cable company provided DVRs for HDTV. It doesn't help that cablecard implementation at most cable companies is still pretty buggy, and not used widely enough to get debugged thoroughly too quickly.
My bet is that this unit will succeed or fail (and the company with it) depending on how much marketing muscle Comcast puts behind it as part of their alliance with Tivo. Of course, I'm still likely to buy one, as the HD-DVR Time Warner provides for me is horribly buggy...
-JMP
I always thought I'd give them the benefit of the doubt and have certain areas (such as the major shopping areas, Rockefeller Center, Times Square) where there's a fence down the middle of the sidewalk. Only people with permits will be allowed on one side, as long as they walk at a speed of at least 3mph without sudden stops. The other side of the fence would be for tourists.
This thought came to me after a single week during the Christmas tourist season when I had business meetings at both 30 Rockefeller Plaza (the RCA building, right behind the big tree) and 1515 Broadway during TRL. In both cases, walking the last 100 feet to get to building security took 15 minutes...
-JMP
This may very well be the last straw, forcing pedestrian-oriented places like New York City to require pedestrian licenses. It's already a major hassle to get around during tourist season...
-JMP
My old boss gave me an invite to a party he threw back in the go-go days of the late 1990s. He was worse in person.
I would occassionally look at his magazine when waiting for a meeting with someone (but I would never pay for it). I did subscribe to his daily e-mail alerts, but seldom read them. The whole thing was purely a product of the bubble, and he was most definitely a creature of the bubble.
In an era when people were making huge investments based on fads rather than business plans, Jason Calacanis positioned himself as the arbiter of all dot-com related fads. He threw parties that were a bunch of people congratulating each other for how thoroughly their soon-to-be-bankrupt companies would change the world. The parties would also serve as prime places for people working for companies that were about to run out of money to connect with people who just got venture capital funding. At the one of these parties that I went to, someone actually tried to hire me with the pickup line of "my partner and I have started 20 companies between us." When I asked, he sheepishly admitted that the one they'd started that week was the only one that wasn't bankrupt.
I can't blame Calacanis. After all, if he hadn't taken up the role, someone else would have. I can't say that I miss the days of having to wonder how long my next employer will stay in business...
-JMP
But this one is so much different. It beats the posters to the punch by admitting to being a dupe up front.
;-)
Is it okay for dupes if the poster is up front about it being a dupe? Perhaps there should be a new category just for dupes.
-JMP
Even Apollo 11 had to fill out a customs declaration. I'm sure the same rules would apply to commercial space travel that involves a stop somewhere outside of the US. (Say, on a privately run space station, which is likely to happen in the long run if commercial spaceflight is a success.)
-JMP
Commodity pricing is based on the idea that supplies are limited. Likewise with stocks, as there are a finite number of shares of any given company in circulation. Even if every person with a computer on planet Earth bought a copy of the same song, it would not be in short supply.
That's not to say that there isn't value in a variable pricing scheme, but it wouldn't really be commodity pricing, or a "digital music stock market."
-JMP
Regardless, my point is, this is not "just like any contract between individuals". It is an agreement between a private institution of higher education and a student enrolling there. Despite what some might have you think, students are not merely customers to the corporations of education.
No, but in the free market for education, this is one of many factors potential students will consider when choosing a school. While the primary criteria used by most students (in varying combinations) to select schools include things like academic standing, tuition & financial aid, school size, geography, and quality of student life. Reputation for academic freedom is just another factor in that equation. Schools that regularly restrict academic freedom will eventually find it harder to attract the sort of top students every school wants.
The invisible hand can work. We just need to let it.
-JMP
It's only a matter of time before the bandwidth gets reclaimed for something more lucrative. The only question is whether or not the Feds will reclaim first it so they can raise money from an auction.
If they do, it'll mean that the spectrum only goes to established companies who can afford it in auction. If they don't either the current media conglomorates that own most radio stations will sell the spectrum for more than the radio stations are worth, or they'll liquidate it at rock bottom prices as unprofitable until someone innovates in the space.
Knowing the current administration, I'd bet that the conglomorates will strike it even richer than they already are.
-JMP
Two parties to a contract have a right to set the terms under which their business is conducted. Those restrictions can be enforced legally, even if they might constitute a restriction of speech in other circumstances. The Eagles can write into their player contracts that their players must adhere to a code of conduct, and can restrict speech in that code. A university can tell its students that if they don't want to adhere to a code of conduct, they can find another university. No one forces an individual to go to a specific university. Once you select one, you agree to play according to their rules.
-JMP
The US Constitution guarentees that you will not suffer the consequences of censorship nor retaliation for what you say - that is freedom of speech.
Where do you see that in the Constitution? All I see is the bit in the First Amendment saying that "Congress shall make no law...abridging the freedom of speech, or the press..." It says nothing about a private institution reserving the right to determine the terms under which it will do business with an individual.
Now, you don't have to like it, but if a university accepts a student's tuition on the condition that they adhere to a policy of conduct, the university has every right to enforce that policy. It's just like any contract between individuals. I could hire you to work for me, and include in the conditions of your employment that you don't disagree with me in public. I could then fire you with cause if you violate that contract, and the government would back me up on enforcing the contract. No one forced this student to choose Marquette as opposed to any other school.
-JMP
I was going to moderate this thread until I saw your post. There's no option for "needs hug" and you sure deserve it.
Thanks, but I did gain an important bit of wisdom working there. The company brought in a supposedly hot shit developer to build systems. In departmental meetings where we went over our current projects, he was never interested in hearing about anyone else's project, but more importantly he got defensive when asked questions about how he dealt with various potential pitfalls. It turned out that he usually simply didn't deal with the pitfalls.
It's no wonder that the project managers dreaded having their projects assigned to him, as they would not only take longer to get to launch, but he would rush things past testing because he presumed himself to be infallible. His projects therefore always launched with bugs. (We're talking basic things here, like web apps for thousands of concurrent users that couldn't handle concurrent requests.)
Not only did I come away understanding the importance of bouncing ideas off others, but ever since that experience, I'm overly self-conscious about making sure to listen carefully to questions asked by people who aren't immersed in my projects. I find that those questions can often save me great deals of aggrivation later in the dev process. I don't want to be a master-of-the-universe hot shit developer. I want to build things that work.
-JMP