I think this also has to do with the maturing of the platform. The low-hanging fruit is essentially gone, and it will get harder and harder for the free-thinking lone wolves to come up with original and compelling software that can compete. Businesses however, have the resources to continue to create more advanced and complicated iPhone versions of their products. They also have the resources to better manage the approval process, both by building carefully to the API, and (for bigger businesses) by having a phone call relationship with Apple.
Hewitt, who is undoubtedly a great and innovative developer, decided to strike out for more open pastures. Who can blame him? But the Facebook app is not going anywhere, and most likely will continue to be developed to a high quality. Over time I expect we'll see a greater mix of apps by existing software businesses, and less duplication in app functionality as more independent developers get frustrated or bored and leave.
Why is the alternative to halving, 3n+1? Why 3? I'm curious. If it were just n+1 it seems like it would converge to 1 pretty quickly (since most non-even numbers become even if you add 1).
10 gives you: 10 5 6 3 4 2 1
100 gives you: 100 50 25 26 13 14 7 8 4 2 1
What if it were 4n+1? Then 10 gives you: 10 5 21 85 341 1365 5461 21845 uh oh
What if it were 5n+1? Then 10 gives you: 10 5 26 13 76 38 19 96 48 24 12 6 3 16 8 4 2 1
Since they are testing people's perceptions this is in part a psychological test. You cannot conduct perceptual tests directly because perception is affected by the conscious mind. Thus if you asked people "do you hear a difference," you are likely to get many false positives since you are predisposing people to seek a difference. Instead you ask people which one sounds better.
"even if they can't tell the difference (something impossible to determine from this design) then they are simply guessing or picking one arbitrarily, and there is no way to determine if or when this occurred."
Actually there is a way to tell if this occurred--you compare the data set to what would result from pure chance, and look for statistically significant differences. If everyone is guessing then in the aggregate the experimental result should match pure chance (50% say one sounds better, 50% say the other sounds better). If a statistically significant percentage say one sounds better than the other, then you have proof that it is possible for some people to detect the differences.
Cookies cannot be read by other domains. And I noticed that you did not address the issue that cookies can easily be refused, reviewed, or deleted by the user at any time (unlike POST data appended to links).
I doubt that I am affected by the proposed regulation. However I jumped into a more general conversation, about the utility of cookies in general. I run Web sites as part of the communications team for a nonprofit--we know enough to run content and community sites using common CMS platforms. We don't have skilled developers sitting around waiting to hack Wordpress and the LAMP stack to get around cookies, even if we wanted to.
Cookies are a Web standard that are useful to both site owners and browsers, and modern browsers empower users to control their own participation. I don't see the problem. If you don't like cookies, feel free to block them. It's not hard to do.
Our testing shows that around 40% of our sessions never report a referrer at all during their session. The referrer field in each request is blank even as cookies show them moving from page to page through the site. Of course we would not know this if we had not tried both ways of tracking and compared them.
Referrer is not required; it is volunteered by the browser, and can be turned off or stripped by a proxy. Since it does not affect the user experience, many corporations do seem to strip it from traffic originating from within their network. But they tend to allow first-party cookies since it can affect the operation of some popular Web sites (their employees would have to continuously re-log-in to newspaper sites for instance, which leads to a lot of complaints).
And you are apparently unable to read the arguments within that discussion well enough to see why those other approaches are either insufficient or not feasible. (No, it is not feasible to rewrite my entire CMS and Web server to append POST date to every single link.)
More to the point, I'm quite sure you're unable to articulate why those approaches are any more palatable than cookies, since you seem to believe they can achieve the same end. How is hidden POST data, which is generated server-side without your consent, BETTER than cookies, which you can easily refuse within the browser of your choice?
You can't have it both ways. Either there are other ways to do the same thing as cookies, in which case there is no reason to restrict cookies specifically. Or, cookies allow tracking that is not feasible to achieve in other ways, in which case those other approaches are not as useful.
It is illegal for any corporation, nonprofit, or union to give money to a politician. Only individuals can give money to politicians. When giving above a certain amount, you must list your employer. It is then possible to create reports that aggregate those numbers by employer, but the money is actually all from individuals.
It is possible to overstate the impact of money in politics. There is a clear money imbalance on the issue of drilling in ANWR for instance (way more on the side of drilling, as you point out), yet we're still not drilling in ANWR.
Who better to inform the elected officials about the impact of the health care bill than the people who are going to be affected by it? Can you show conclusively that what Genentech told them was false? And what of the lobbyists presenting a different, or opposing, point of view? Are they wrong too?
Imagine the subject is not health care, but computer programming. How would you expect elected officials to become educated about computer programming if they never talked to software companies or computer companies or anyone who worked for them?
Everyone hates lobbyists until it's their lobbyists...but of course then they are activists or representatives or organizers or issue experts or [insert more innocuous name here]. I guarantee that for any touchy political subject, your idea of objective education of an elected official would strike someone else as inappropriate lobbying.
Thinking strategically starts with knowing and focusing on your desired end goal. So for whom was Psystar's business model a desired end goal? I can't think of anyone but Psystar. Microsoft is not aided in any way by weakened EULAs or weakened software copyrights. Even if Psystar won this case, Apple would be under no duty to support these installs of OS X, and Dell, HP, and other system manufacturers are not going to install an OS on their computers unless they have commercial support for it. Not to mention the reaction they would receive from Microsoft if they started pushing PCs with OS X instead of Windows.
Even if I accept everything else you wrote about strategery, I still don't buy it in this case, because I don't see what a hand in the puppet would gain (unless it were Psystar and its investors).
Without using cookies you cannot distinguish between business users, because most large businesses use proxies and NAT and thus all employees record the same requesting IP in your server logs.
The target audience for our sites are business employees when they are at work. Without cookies there is no way we could do any path analysis to see how individual people are using our site.
I disagree with Fuller. It seems to me that keeping it from flying away would just be a matter of building in sufficient venting--like a hot air balloon that wants to come down. I think preventing a collapse would be a much bigger problem since it tends to be easier to design systems that safely release pressure quickly, than systems that safely create pressure quickly.
I find it ironic that you are asking for a logically constructed argument, considering the thread's subject of science vs. philosophy. Philosophy is concerned with constructing convincing arguments; science is concerned with empirical evidence.
The proof against protectionist tariffs is empirical not theoretical--when tariffs are dropped, standards of living rise. Over the past 50 years tariffs worldwide have fallen dramatically, and simultaneously living standards around the world have improved dramatically. There is no reason to argue in a vacuum about tariffs when there are decades of economic data to explore.
The problem with asking for a "convincing argument" is that it presupposes such an argument can be constructed from some collection of universally-agreed-upon first principles. But the result is emergent; we simply see it in the data. There may be tremendous arguments about why, but that does not mean it didn't happen.
Sorry, you're wrong. You should read your own post -- "As you will notice I get a significant increase in efficiency between city and highway driving, as all IC cars do."
At any speed at which your IC car is most efficient, the Prius will be even more efficient because in the worst case it is simply an IC car with a smaller engine and lower drag profile. Any boost from the battery obviously improves the efficiency even more. BTW the battery in a Prius only weighs about 110 lbs--hardly a big factor in the overall load on the engine.
Presumably, there were some studies done showing that the dumb kids get a lot out of being with the average and smart kids. Of course, the smart kids don't get anything out of it, but we have to be fair...
I can say from experience that smart kids can get a benefit out of working with kids who are less advanced than they are. But, they have to be forced to interact with them. Tutoring a subject is a great way to really get good at it--you have to understand something very well in order to help someone else learn it. It can also train high-performing people to work constructively with lower-performing people--a skill that is hard to test for, but will be very valuable throughout life.
His company originally coded their software in VBScript. Ok, fine, it was "back then." But over time, rather than refactor on a modern platform (and despite praising.Net to high heaven), they instead extended VBScript to create their own proprietary programming language. All this to run some bug tracking software BTW.
He scores high on the geek cred and he's a good writer, but I don't understand how he is taken seriously as a major authority on software development. There must hundreds of companies out there producing products on the level of things like Fog Bugz or Copilot. They just don't have a founder who obsessively blogs about everything.
1) The store manager is typically the first person you need to hire to open a store. They'll then hire the rest of the staff. 2) Retail management skills are very transferable. The principles of managing a Barnes and Noble are not that different from managing a hardware store or an Apple store. You need to hire great staff, train them, schedule them, manage inventory, track and set sales goals, and keep an eye on payroll. 3) Experienced managers will know good salespeople in the area who they can poach for the new jobs.
Apple is famously good at retail, so it stands to reason that their current store managers are probably pretty good (presumably the bad ones have been fired already). They might bring some good ideas from Apple that MS could steal, but that really depends on Microsoft's willingness to learn. Often in retail the upper management is much more interested in pushing down initiatives and plans than on learning from their store managers.
Slashdot Mirror
I think this also has to do with the maturing of the platform. The low-hanging fruit is essentially gone, and it will get harder and harder for the free-thinking lone wolves to come up with original and compelling software that can compete. Businesses however, have the resources to continue to create more advanced and complicated iPhone versions of their products. They also have the resources to better manage the approval process, both by building carefully to the API, and (for bigger businesses) by having a phone call relationship with Apple.
Hewitt, who is undoubtedly a great and innovative developer, decided to strike out for more open pastures. Who can blame him? But the Facebook app is not going anywhere, and most likely will continue to be developed to a high quality. Over time I expect we'll see a greater mix of apps by existing software businesses, and less duplication in app functionality as more independent developers get frustrated or bored and leave.
Why is the alternative to halving, 3n+1? Why 3? I'm curious. If it were just n+1 it seems like it would converge to 1 pretty quickly (since most non-even numbers become even if you add 1).
10 gives you:
10 5 6 3 4 2 1
100 gives you:
100 50 25 26 13 14 7 8 4 2 1
What if it were 4n+1? Then 10 gives you:
10 5 21 85 341 1365 5461 21845 uh oh
What if it were 5n+1? Then 10 gives you:
10 5 26 13 76 38 19 96 48 24 12 6 3 16 8 4 2 1
Since they are testing people's perceptions this is in part a psychological test. You cannot conduct perceptual tests directly because perception is affected by the conscious mind. Thus if you asked people "do you hear a difference," you are likely to get many false positives since you are predisposing people to seek a difference. Instead you ask people which one sounds better.
"even if they can't tell the difference (something impossible to determine from this design) then they are simply guessing or picking one arbitrarily, and there is no way to determine if or when this occurred."
Actually there is a way to tell if this occurred--you compare the data set to what would result from pure chance, and look for statistically significant differences. If everyone is guessing then in the aggregate the experimental result should match pure chance (50% say one sounds better, 50% say the other sounds better). If a statistically significant percentage say one sounds better than the other, then you have proof that it is possible for some people to detect the differences.
Cookies cannot be read by other domains. And I noticed that you did not address the issue that cookies can easily be refused, reviewed, or deleted by the user at any time (unlike POST data appended to links).
I doubt that I am affected by the proposed regulation. However I jumped into a more general conversation, about the utility of cookies in general. I run Web sites as part of the communications team for a nonprofit--we know enough to run content and community sites using common CMS platforms. We don't have skilled developers sitting around waiting to hack Wordpress and the LAMP stack to get around cookies, even if we wanted to.
Cookies are a Web standard that are useful to both site owners and browsers, and modern browsers empower users to control their own participation. I don't see the problem. If you don't like cookies, feel free to block them. It's not hard to do.
Our testing shows that around 40% of our sessions never report a referrer at all during their session. The referrer field in each request is blank even as cookies show them moving from page to page through the site. Of course we would not know this if we had not tried both ways of tracking and compared them.
Referrer is not required; it is volunteered by the browser, and can be turned off or stripped by a proxy. Since it does not affect the user experience, many corporations do seem to strip it from traffic originating from within their network. But they tend to allow first-party cookies since it can affect the operation of some popular Web sites (their employees would have to continuously re-log-in to newspaper sites for instance, which leads to a lot of complaints).
And you are apparently unable to read the arguments within that discussion well enough to see why those other approaches are either insufficient or not feasible. (No, it is not feasible to rewrite my entire CMS and Web server to append POST date to every single link.)
More to the point, I'm quite sure you're unable to articulate why those approaches are any more palatable than cookies, since you seem to believe they can achieve the same end. How is hidden POST data, which is generated server-side without your consent, BETTER than cookies, which you can easily refuse within the browser of your choice?
You can't have it both ways. Either there are other ways to do the same thing as cookies, in which case there is no reason to restrict cookies specifically. Or, cookies allow tracking that is not feasible to achieve in other ways, in which case those other approaches are not as useful.
It is illegal for any corporation, nonprofit, or union to give money to a politician. Only individuals can give money to politicians. When giving above a certain amount, you must list your employer. It is then possible to create reports that aggregate those numbers by employer, but the money is actually all from individuals.
It is possible to overstate the impact of money in politics. There is a clear money imbalance on the issue of drilling in ANWR for instance (way more on the side of drilling, as you point out), yet we're still not drilling in ANWR.
Who better to inform the elected officials about the impact of the health care bill than the people who are going to be affected by it? Can you show conclusively that what Genentech told them was false? And what of the lobbyists presenting a different, or opposing, point of view? Are they wrong too?
Imagine the subject is not health care, but computer programming. How would you expect elected officials to become educated about computer programming if they never talked to software companies or computer companies or anyone who worked for them?
Everyone hates lobbyists until it's their lobbyists...but of course then they are activists or representatives or organizers or issue experts or [insert more innocuous name here]. I guarantee that for any touchy political subject, your idea of objective education of an elected official would strike someone else as inappropriate lobbying.
Thinking strategically starts with knowing and focusing on your desired end goal. So for whom was Psystar's business model a desired end goal? I can't think of anyone but Psystar. Microsoft is not aided in any way by weakened EULAs or weakened software copyrights. Even if Psystar won this case, Apple would be under no duty to support these installs of OS X, and Dell, HP, and other system manufacturers are not going to install an OS on their computers unless they have commercial support for it. Not to mention the reaction they would receive from Microsoft if they started pushing PCs with OS X instead of Windows.
Even if I accept everything else you wrote about strategery, I still don't buy it in this case, because I don't see what a hand in the puppet would gain (unless it were Psystar and its investors).
Without using cookies you cannot distinguish between business users, because most large businesses use proxies and NAT and thus all employees record the same requesting IP in your server logs.
The target audience for our sites are business employees when they are at work. Without cookies there is no way we could do any path analysis to see how individual people are using our site.
Not that many of the things encountered in domestic daily U.S. life are made in China. Perhaps you just better remember the ones that are.
Right, because manufacturing outsourcing caused a domestic real estate financial crisis.
Venting is not that hard to design.
I disagree with Fuller. It seems to me that keeping it from flying away would just be a matter of building in sufficient venting--like a hot air balloon that wants to come down. I think preventing a collapse would be a much bigger problem since it tends to be easier to design systems that safely release pressure quickly, than systems that safely create pressure quickly.
I find it ironic that you are asking for a logically constructed argument, considering the thread's subject of science vs. philosophy. Philosophy is concerned with constructing convincing arguments; science is concerned with empirical evidence.
The proof against protectionist tariffs is empirical not theoretical--when tariffs are dropped, standards of living rise. Over the past 50 years tariffs worldwide have fallen dramatically, and simultaneously living standards around the world have improved dramatically. There is no reason to argue in a vacuum about tariffs when there are decades of economic data to explore.
The problem with asking for a "convincing argument" is that it presupposes such an argument can be constructed from some collection of universally-agreed-upon first principles. But the result is emergent; we simply see it in the data. There may be tremendous arguments about why, but that does not mean it didn't happen.
I don't know, do you?
I'm Ron Burgundy?
I'm waiting for OSX 10.14 ("Common Housecat").
Not me, I'm holding out for OS X 10.15 "Snow Common Housecat".
Sorry, you're wrong. You should read your own post -- "As you will notice I get a significant increase in efficiency between city and highway driving, as all IC cars do."
At any speed at which your IC car is most efficient, the Prius will be even more efficient because in the worst case it is simply an IC car with a smaller engine and lower drag profile. Any boost from the battery obviously improves the efficiency even more. BTW the battery in a Prius only weighs about 110 lbs--hardly a big factor in the overall load on the engine.
Presumably, there were some studies done showing that the dumb kids get a lot out of being with the average and smart kids. Of course, the smart kids don't get anything out of it, but we have to be fair...
I can say from experience that smart kids can get a benefit out of working with kids who are less advanced than they are. But, they have to be forced to interact with them. Tutoring a subject is a great way to really get good at it--you have to understand something very well in order to help someone else learn it. It can also train high-performing people to work constructively with lower-performing people--a skill that is hard to test for, but will be very valuable throughout life.
His company originally coded their software in VBScript. Ok, fine, it was "back then." But over time, rather than refactor on a modern platform (and despite praising .Net to high heaven), they instead extended VBScript to create their own proprietary programming language. All this to run some bug tracking software BTW.
He scores high on the geek cred and he's a good writer, but I don't understand how he is taken seriously as a major authority on software development. There must hundreds of companies out there producing products on the level of things like Fog Bugz or Copilot. They just don't have a founder who obsessively blogs about everything.
That's fine, as long as you don't worry why no one else uses your software.
Many people do worry why their open-source software isn't used more--hence this discussion.
This works for a small set of users who know each other and can communicate offline easily and comfortably.
In a big company though I might not know who $user$ is, and might not care. I just need to do my work and screw that guy, he can start over.
Isn't this what Al-Queda has done to the US?
Al Qaeda ran Lehman Brothers and AIG? :-)
This is the year of Linux in the storefront!!
1) The store manager is typically the first person you need to hire to open a store. They'll then hire the rest of the staff.
2) Retail management skills are very transferable. The principles of managing a Barnes and Noble are not that different from managing a hardware store or an Apple store. You need to hire great staff, train them, schedule them, manage inventory, track and set sales goals, and keep an eye on payroll.
3) Experienced managers will know good salespeople in the area who they can poach for the new jobs.
Apple is famously good at retail, so it stands to reason that their current store managers are probably pretty good (presumably the bad ones have been fired already). They might bring some good ideas from Apple that MS could steal, but that really depends on Microsoft's willingness to learn. Often in retail the upper management is much more interested in pushing down initiatives and plans than on learning from their store managers.