Well, I have worked in high-end and low-end establishments, behind the bar and on the floor, and IMHO this is a misapplication of technology.
Truly, it's not that different from walking the floor, noting who needs drinks, and consolidating everything you need for the return trip. The real problem with most places, in my experience, is that at least 90% of servers don't know how to consolidate their orders very well. It doesn't matter if they know everyone who needs a drink, they're still bringing one table's drinks out at a time.
So instead, why not have touchscreens at every table, where the order can be made, paid for, and the drink delivered by whomever is available?
It just seems to me that the mug idea would only work if you were employing 'top 5%'-type servers in your establishment, and even most high-end clubs don't hire for that kind of brain power. 5'9" and curvy, yes, brainy, uh...no.
'Kay--got it. I think we're on the same wavelength, basically.
I get a large amount of flack here because I don't hate MS as much as everybody else. Heh
Coming from someone that's using his HP Win2k box at work instead of his Octane piece of @#$!, I know where you're coming from.;-) I probably do come off as rude here a lot, it's just the ambient around here unfortunately. Anyway, no offense meant. Nice sparring with you.
I think you're missing my point, and it was totally different from yours.
Did you really need to be rude? Seriously, the analogy wasn't that weak.
I wasn't trying to be rude, nor am I trying to prove myself intelligent, but can't you take some valid criticism? Your analogy makes it sound like the recording industry's interest is in blocking fair use situations--the recording industry could care less about fair use situations. I can absolutely buy a CD, put it into another case, and hand it to my neighbor. It won't dissolve. I cannot copy a CD and give it to my neighbor. It should dissolve, I didn't pay for the second copy.
My point was, you're trying to act like it would be ridiculous for coke to try to do something similar to this, and I don't think would be. If there was a similar opportunity for people to 'steal' coke the way they 'steal' music--and don't try to say they don't, read the 15GB of mp3 comment above someplace--then coke would try to put a similarly stringent protection in place. It sucks, it's not fair for those of us who get a lot of good out of 'fair use', and do pay for our music, but it's the way life is and is the fault of the people that abuse it. You can't really compare it to a traditional manufacturing scenario.
It'd be like Coca Cola making their drinks evaporate
No, this is a poor analogy. Coke doesn't care if you sell or give the six pack you just bought to your friends and neighbors.
A better analogy could be made if Coke made their drinks evaporate the moment they enter a chemistry lab, to prevent rivals from copying the formula for manufacture and sale. Right or wrong, this is something they or any other tangible-goods company would do in a second if it wasn't in the realm of SF.
Don't try to make analogies to explain 'fair-use' intellecutal property laws using traditional goods-based economics. It just doesn't hold up.
Before spreading silly uninformed FUD, you might go read the website.
Whack the kid over the head from behind; remove watch at leisure. [etc] The website clearly says that interfering with the device automatically initiates a tracking of the last location of the device and informs the parents.
possible abuses, not by law enforcement, but by psychotic parents Again, RTFM. The parents must specifically request for the child to be tracked--I don't think they're going to sit in front of their computer and on the phone, constantly requesting for child tracking. No doubt this is only used for stress situations, like an alarm company does--my 10 year old was supposed to walk to my neighbor's house, and is nowhere to be found, etc. I don't think any parent's going to be locking these Pikachu-looking devices on a 17 year old's wrist. And if they are, the kid definately has bigger problems to worry about than privacy.
Look, all doubters who love to flame based on Michael's half-baked criticism, just read the damn web pages for these stories before you go on an orgy of digital/children's rights protesting.
Apology accepted. Sorry for flying off the handle. I think any Catholic's a little sensitive, especially since there's so much valid past and present criticism.
I totally agree with how you're defining religion, and I totally agree that CoS is religion. Perhaps a better way of stating this would be 'CoS is a religion that is a scam'? I don't know, off of the top of my head, of a major religion that won't disclose to you its full belief system until you pay hundreds of thousands of dollars. I think CoS is a valid religion--whether it's ridiculous or not is a moot and unrelated point--and if I saw them drop some of their mind control, money-hungry schemes, I would respect them more as such. So it's not really the religion with which I have a problem, but with the organization that administrates it.
...and don't represent what some significant percentage of people think of Catholicism.
Nope, no tithe required. In fact, many churches don't even pass the plate anymore; there's a box you walk by when you enter and leave. Drop some money in if you want.
As a matter of face, most Catholic schools (primary and secondary) won't force you to pay tuition if you can't afford it. Do some school-related community service, and get your sometimes $5000+/yr tuition waived.
You go do some more research. Next time don't make foolish conjectures about the modern Church based on the actions of the madmen of centuries passed. I'll be the first person to admit that the Catholic church has hosted many evil happenings in the past, and there are certainly some ridiculous policies today that are impossible to change to make a billion worshippers happy, but to compare the church today to Co$ is just plain ignorant.
This is true. And SGI certainly doesn't even have a large share of the MCAD market. Mostly Sun and HP/UX. SGI is a valid option, but doesn't touch the other two in terms of performance.
As for PCs, NOBODY's doing large model work on them. Small shops might use them because they're economical, but no one would use a PC to work with multi-thousand surface/100k+ element geometry/FEM. Perhaps this is a Windows limitation, not hardware architecture; it's hard to tell because most of the big 4 (Catia/ProE/Unigraphics/Ideas) don't have a Linux port yet, AFAIK.
I'm cognizant of your error...
on
Google Juice
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· Score: 1
Remember...it has to be words google knows--'cogniscient' is not a word, AFAIK, so I think you just got lucky that someone misspelled it the same way. I believe 'cognizant banana' is what you were looking for: 1050 hits.
Yeah, I understand. I kinda figured you did, but it wasn't perfectly clear (to me, anyway) from your post. I just ended up reemphasizing your post and spinning it a little differently.
Mine wasn't meant as a flame, but after rereading it, it did indeed come off as a little flame-ish. No offense meant!
Personally, I find this rather insulting. Government, once again, proposes to know better than the parents know what's best for the kids.
Although I'm not the first in line to promote government regulation, I think it's absurd that you would find fault in this. Children, no matter how much parents would like to imagine they don't, should and do have rights independent of their parents' wishes. If we didn't somewhat regulate how parents would home-school their children, can you imagine how this might be, and is, abused, or how the brightest child of some otherwise tepid gene pool might be smothered?
Children certainly have a right to a good education, and they there are too many parents out there now who think that they can provide it. Many parents (read, the ignorant side of fundamentalist Christianity) would rather kids never even be exposed to the possibility of any truth but the one that they expouse. I, for one, think we're obligated to make sure kids have more options than this.
I agree with you--to a point. It is truly ignorant to say that marketing and sales should be the first to be clipped. But... a bad product with good marketing will have a much better chance of its company surviving that a company with a good product but lousy marketing. As a techie who's the son of a marketing guru, I can assure you this is simply untrue. If it were true, I'd be buying high schooler-coded projects and $10 million dollar marketing teams. One of the first tenets of marketing is that nothing kills a bad product faster than good marketing. Similarly, nothing bolsters a good product faster than good marketing. These two entities, marketing and development, are codependent. If there's a scaleback, intelligent convention dictates that both be scaled back equally (that's how our company handled its most recent round of layoffs).
Gee, you could use that same argument for DVDs, and they've sold a few of those...even to Joe Sixpack.
TiVo is one of those convergent technologies that most people just don't understand. DVDs have an easy analogy...'they're just like a VCR, except you don't have to rewind, and the picture's even better!' DVR's a pretty tough concept to those that aren't techoliterate. If you think that all Tivo does is "essentially replicates their VCR", you don't really get it either. Most really new innovations are misunderstood like this--after all, VCRs took, what, fifteen years to really penetrate the consumer market? (JoeSix's first impression of VCR: 'Why the hell do I need a VCR when I can just watch it on TV or go to the theater?')
Zeus Wireless is already a wireless-device company, almost bankrupt before it was bought by Young Design, Inc. I wonder if "Wheels of Zeus" will be close enough a concept to warrant a lawsuit...
Kudos to India! I was behind on that figure. Not to be argumentative, but there are 15 _known_ organizations in the US. This isn't 'surprisingly few' in my estimation. Also, keep in mind that the SEI protects domestic organizations(read: military) that don't want to be listed. I suspect we're still behind, but the figure is much closer than you might think.
Mass electrification might be extremely arguable--Michael Faraday, British, did most of the foundation work to make this possible. It is not 'adoption by the masses' that I was saying, though, but 'delivered to the masses' that was significant. The technology to create regional power grids is highly heady in nature, and can be attributed almost solely to American engineers.
I totally get your point, though, and will definately check out the book. Thanks!
C'mon, I don't think many clear thinking YouEssAyans say that even most important inventions were created here by our citizens, but denying that many inventions were done here by Americans or expatriates of other countries who happen to thrive here is just plain wrong. This is about understanding history, not perpetuating cultural memes.
Sure hand-made code will always have its panache, just like hand-made cars do. How many manufacturers still make cars by hand?
This is a bad analogy. Making cars is equivalent to burning CDs--it doesn't take much expertise, just follow the template, pop the rivet, answer the wizard.
The creation of a car starts and ends short of the manufacturing line with the expert manipulations of engineers and designers. Nothing has dumbed down these guys work, if anything, it's gotten more and more complex, and more in demand, as have the tools (CAD/CAM/CAE). Saying that the phase-out of assembly programming will eventually progress to 'easy' programming is like saying the phase-out of drawing boards by CAD will someday make for 'easy' car/skyscraper/cell phone design. I don't see mechanical engineers becoming paint-by-numbers morons by 2015, so how can you apply this idea to an equally complex engineering discipline?
That is because I am not making a reference to software. I am making a reference to the standard definition of CPU performance.
CPU performance is _great_ for more polygons and faster DBs, but explain to me again how CPU performance is going to create heuristics that rid me of my job?
Thats why I said 2015
Do you read the journals? Will you point me towards the one that's even developing the theoretical framework for the tools you're talking about? If anything, the theorists are currently trying to prove why this _isn't_ possible. I just think you need some background for this point, beyond just a wild guess, if you think these things will exist in 13 years--think about it, Linux was written a little less than that long ago, and it hasn't made equivalently large leaps in technology like you're talking about, even with huge resource.
My point is, for the kind of tech advance you're talking about, it will require an innovation in technology that is immeasurable in time.
Your reference to Moore's Law, I don't see this being applicable to software at all--the density (perhaps rated as complexity?) of code has not doubled every 18 months. In fact, I could postulate that the sophistication of software hasn't doubled since the 1970s, depending on what metric you'd use. The kinds of tools you're talking about, smart, extreme-CASE tools, 4+GLs, etc., are years and years away, and will still have to be conceptualized, created, and maintained by good software guys, most of which (no matter the nationality) are here. Keep in mind we still have more SEI CMM Level 5 companies here than anywhere else in the world.
If you haven't read them already, I would recommend Yourdon's Decline and Fall of the American Programmer and Rise and Resurrection of the American Programmer. The first was penned in the early nineties, and is a pessimistic portrait much like what you describe, outsourced coding jobs much like the automotive industry has done with blue-collar jobs. The second was written a couple of years ago, and asserts that innovation and openness to change will keep the American programmer on top for years.
BTW, this isn't a slam on our overseas bretheren, I'm not saying "US software guys are _always_ tops." (Think Torvalds and Cox!) I'm speaking in generalities: with a majority of the good engineering schools and big software companies being here, the US is a magnet for good software guys.
I think a significant change would be to have the comment automatically modded up to +5 after a certain number of moderations have been done to it, a la the parent post.
Anything that has 34 mods (at the time of this post) has earned respect enough for anyone to read, for the controversy generated by the moderators alone. If thirty people can't agree on whether it's a good, relevant post or not, it's probably a good, relevant post.
Thanks for all of the Mac info; I was aware of very little of this.
Again, though, I have to ask: Why can't I create and sell a Mac compatible computer, using an IBM PPC mobo, Motorola PPC G4, and IBM chipset, and preload it with an authorized copy of OSX? I suspect the latter is why--you can't get authorization to sell a computer preinstalled, or with the intent to sell and install--an Apple OS. Again, I could be wrong here, but if I'm not, this is more along the lines of how I'm using 'proprietary'.
Or am I wrong here, can I buy off the shelf components from any # of manufacturers you've mentioned to put together a Mac-like box, load OSX, and sell it to you for a profit?
If you read my message, nowhere did I say that Apple should build x86 systems. I was saying that people can't build PPC G4 systems to run OSX unless they're buying the hardware from Apple. Your logic is a fallacy.
From my point of view, I can't obtain, with intent to sell, a piece of system hardware that will run the OSX operating system unless I have specific licensing from Apple Computer. This licensing, which makes the system architecture of the Macintosh proprietary, drove the Mac compatible market out of business.
The PC architecture was originally made from a calculator CPU and a chipset that was copied from IBM, by the grace of God winning its day in court, or the IBM/PC architecture would also be prorietary--licensed from IBM.
Instead, we have a plethora of manufacturers who can make $499 pentium IV-class machines because of plentiful, off-the-shelf parts. I'm aware that some of the Mac architecture (bus is all I can name off hand) has opened up, but that all important system architecture is, AFAIK, all theirs.
I guess I could throw this one back at you, you're saying they are in no meaningful way proprietary, so please illustrate your point; I could certainly have part/all of this wrong.
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I'd say that the Land Rover is the real workhorse of OR driving. Entering SA with a Japanese car? Pish.
(teasing all my friends who own _very_ well made Toyota SUVs ;-) )
DP
97 Disco
94 D90
Truly, it's not that different from walking the floor, noting who needs drinks, and consolidating everything you need for the return trip. The real problem with most places, in my experience, is that at least 90% of servers don't know how to consolidate their orders very well. It doesn't matter if they know everyone who needs a drink, they're still bringing one table's drinks out at a time.
So instead, why not have touchscreens at every table, where the order can be made, paid for, and the drink delivered by whomever is available?
It just seems to me that the mug idea would only work if you were employing 'top 5%'-type servers in your establishment, and even most high-end clubs don't hire for that kind of brain power. 5'9" and curvy, yes, brainy, uh...no.
I get a large amount of flack here because I don't hate MS as much as everybody else. Heh
Coming from someone that's using his HP Win2k box at work instead of his Octane piece of @#$!, I know where you're coming from. ;-) I probably do come off as rude here a lot, it's just the ambient around here unfortunately. Anyway, no offense meant. Nice sparring with you.
Did you really need to be rude? Seriously, the analogy wasn't that weak.
I wasn't trying to be rude, nor am I trying to prove myself intelligent, but can't you take some valid criticism? Your analogy makes it sound like the recording industry's interest is in blocking fair use situations--the recording industry could care less about fair use situations. I can absolutely buy a CD, put it into another case, and hand it to my neighbor. It won't dissolve. I cannot copy a CD and give it to my neighbor. It should dissolve, I didn't pay for the second copy.
My point was, you're trying to act like it would be ridiculous for coke to try to do something similar to this, and I don't think would be. If there was a similar opportunity for people to 'steal' coke the way they 'steal' music--and don't try to say they don't, read the 15GB of mp3 comment above someplace--then coke would try to put a similarly stringent protection in place. It sucks, it's not fair for those of us who get a lot of good out of 'fair use', and do pay for our music, but it's the way life is and is the fault of the people that abuse it. You can't really compare it to a traditional manufacturing scenario.
No, this is a poor analogy. Coke doesn't care if you sell or give the six pack you just bought to your friends and neighbors.
A better analogy could be made if Coke made their drinks evaporate the moment they enter a chemistry lab, to prevent rivals from copying the formula for manufacture and sale. Right or wrong, this is something they or any other tangible-goods company would do in a second if it wasn't in the realm of SF.
Don't try to make analogies to explain 'fair-use' intellecutal property laws using traditional goods-based economics. It just doesn't hold up.
Whack the kid over the head from behind; remove watch at leisure. [etc]
The website clearly says that interfering with the device automatically initiates a tracking of the last location of the device and informs the parents.
possible abuses, not by law enforcement, but by psychotic parents
Again, RTFM. The parents must specifically request for the child to be tracked--I don't think they're going to sit in front of their computer and on the phone, constantly requesting for child tracking. No doubt this is only used for stress situations, like an alarm company does--my 10 year old was supposed to walk to my neighbor's house, and is nowhere to be found, etc. I don't think any parent's going to be locking these Pikachu-looking devices on a 17 year old's wrist. And if they are, the kid definately has bigger problems to worry about than privacy.
Look, all doubters who love to flame based on Michael's half-baked criticism, just read the damn web pages for these stories before you go on an orgy of digital/children's rights protesting.
I totally agree with how you're defining religion, and I totally agree that CoS is religion. Perhaps a better way of stating this would be 'CoS is a religion that is a scam'? I don't know, off of the top of my head, of a major religion that won't disclose to you its full belief system until you pay hundreds of thousands of dollars. I think CoS is a valid religion--whether it's ridiculous or not is a moot and unrelated point--and if I saw them drop some of their mind control, money-hungry schemes, I would respect them more as such. So it's not really the religion with which I have a problem, but with the organization that administrates it.
Nope, no tithe required. In fact, many churches don't even pass the plate anymore; there's a box you walk by when you enter and leave. Drop some money in if you want.
As a matter of face, most Catholic schools (primary and secondary) won't force you to pay tuition if you can't afford it. Do some school-related community service, and get your sometimes $5000+/yr tuition waived.
You go do some more research. Next time don't make foolish conjectures about the modern Church based on the actions of the madmen of centuries passed. I'll be the first person to admit that the Catholic church has hosted many evil happenings in the past, and there are certainly some ridiculous policies today that are impossible to change to make a billion worshippers happy, but to compare the church today to Co$ is just plain ignorant.
As for PCs, NOBODY's doing large model work on them. Small shops might use them because they're economical, but no one would use a PC to work with multi-thousand surface/100k+ element geometry/FEM. Perhaps this is a Windows limitation, not hardware architecture; it's hard to tell because most of the big 4 (Catia/ProE/Unigraphics/Ideas) don't have a Linux port yet, AFAIK.
Mine wasn't meant as a flame, but after rereading it, it did indeed come off as a little flame-ish. No offense meant!
Although I'm not the first in line to promote government regulation, I think it's absurd that you would find fault in this. Children, no matter how much parents would like to imagine they don't, should and do have rights independent of their parents' wishes. If we didn't somewhat regulate how parents would home-school their children, can you imagine how this might be, and is, abused, or how the brightest child of some otherwise tepid gene pool might be smothered?
Children certainly have a right to a good education, and they there are too many parents out there now who think that they can provide it. Many parents (read, the ignorant side of fundamentalist Christianity) would rather kids never even be exposed to the possibility of any truth but the one that they expouse. I, for one, think we're obligated to make sure kids have more options than this.
a bad product with good marketing will have a much better chance of its company surviving that a company with a good product but lousy marketing. As a techie who's the son of a marketing guru, I can assure you this is simply untrue. If it were true, I'd be buying high schooler-coded projects and $10 million dollar marketing teams. One of the first tenets of marketing is that nothing kills a bad product faster than good marketing. Similarly, nothing bolsters a good product faster than good marketing. These two entities, marketing and development, are codependent. If there's a scaleback, intelligent convention dictates that both be scaled back equally (that's how our company handled its most recent round of layoffs).
TiVo is one of those convergent technologies that most people just don't understand. DVDs have an easy analogy...'they're just like a VCR, except you don't have to rewind, and the picture's even better!' DVR's a pretty tough concept to those that aren't techoliterate. If you think that all Tivo does is "essentially replicates their VCR", you don't really get it either. Most really new innovations are misunderstood like this--after all, VCRs took, what, fifteen years to really penetrate the consumer market? (JoeSix's first impression of VCR: 'Why the hell do I need a VCR when I can just watch it on TV or go to the theater?')
Kudos to India! I was behind on that figure. Not to be argumentative, but there are 15 _known_ organizations in the US. This isn't 'surprisingly few' in my estimation. Also, keep in mind that the SEI protects domestic organizations(read: military) that don't want to be listed. I suspect we're still behind, but the figure is much closer than you might think.
I totally get your point, though, and will definately check out the book. Thanks!
Examples to the contrary?
Here are some of the ones I think of, invented by Americans, with a brief explanation of proof:
1. Mass electrification, done by the REA in the early 20th, headed by an American and executed by American engineers
2. Planes--inarguably the Wright Bros., with great theoretical help from Canute, an American. Otto Lilienthal only worked with gliders.
3. Transistor--Shockley, et al.--Americans.
4. Air Conditioning--Carrier--American
5. Internet--Gore--oops-JCR Licklider, ARPA, American.
C'mon, I don't think many clear thinking YouEssAyans say that even most important inventions were created here by our citizens, but denying that many inventions were done here by Americans or expatriates of other countries who happen to thrive here is just plain wrong. This is about understanding history, not perpetuating cultural memes.
This is a bad analogy. Making cars is equivalent to burning CDs--it doesn't take much expertise, just follow the template, pop the rivet, answer the wizard.
The creation of a car starts and ends short of the manufacturing line with the expert manipulations of engineers and designers. Nothing has dumbed down these guys work, if anything, it's gotten more and more complex, and more in demand, as have the tools (CAD/CAM/CAE). Saying that the phase-out of assembly programming will eventually progress to 'easy' programming is like saying the phase-out of drawing boards by CAD will someday make for 'easy' car/skyscraper/cell phone design. I don't see mechanical engineers becoming paint-by-numbers morons by 2015, so how can you apply this idea to an equally complex engineering discipline?
CPU performance is _great_ for more polygons and faster DBs, but explain to me again how CPU performance is going to create heuristics that rid me of my job?
Thats why I said 2015
Do you read the journals? Will you point me towards the one that's even developing the theoretical framework for the tools you're talking about? If anything, the theorists are currently trying to prove why this _isn't_ possible. I just think you need some background for this point, beyond just a wild guess, if you think these things will exist in 13 years--think about it, Linux was written a little less than that long ago, and it hasn't made equivalently large leaps in technology like you're talking about, even with huge resource.
My point is, for the kind of tech advance you're talking about, it will require an innovation in technology that is immeasurable in time.
Your reference to Moore's Law, I don't see this being applicable to software at all--the density (perhaps rated as complexity?) of code has not doubled every 18 months. In fact, I could postulate that the sophistication of software hasn't doubled since the 1970s, depending on what metric you'd use. The kinds of tools you're talking about, smart, extreme-CASE tools, 4+GLs, etc., are years and years away, and will still have to be conceptualized, created, and maintained by good software guys, most of which (no matter the nationality) are here. Keep in mind we still have more SEI CMM Level 5 companies here than anywhere else in the world.
If you haven't read them already, I would recommend Yourdon's Decline and Fall of the American Programmer and Rise and Resurrection of the American Programmer. The first was penned in the early nineties, and is a pessimistic portrait much like what you describe, outsourced coding jobs much like the automotive industry has done with blue-collar jobs. The second was written a couple of years ago, and asserts that innovation and openness to change will keep the American programmer on top for years.
BTW, this isn't a slam on our overseas bretheren, I'm not saying "US software guys are _always_ tops." (Think Torvalds and Cox!) I'm speaking in generalities: with a majority of the good engineering schools and big software companies being here, the US is a magnet for good software guys.
Anything that has 34 mods (at the time of this post) has earned respect enough for anyone to read, for the controversy generated by the moderators alone. If thirty people can't agree on whether it's a good, relevant post or not, it's probably a good, relevant post.
Again, though, I have to ask: Why can't I create and sell a Mac compatible computer, using an IBM PPC mobo, Motorola PPC G4, and IBM chipset, and preload it with an authorized copy of OSX? I suspect the latter is why--you can't get authorization to sell a computer preinstalled, or with the intent to sell and install--an Apple OS. Again, I could be wrong here, but if I'm not, this is more along the lines of how I'm using 'proprietary'.
Or am I wrong here, can I buy off the shelf components from any # of manufacturers you've mentioned to put together a Mac-like box, load OSX, and sell it to you for a profit?
Stupid really.
The PC architecture was originally made from a calculator CPU and a chipset that was copied from IBM, by the grace of God winning its day in court, or the IBM/PC architecture would also be prorietary--licensed from IBM.
Instead, we have a plethora of manufacturers who can make $499 pentium IV-class machines because of plentiful, off-the-shelf parts. I'm aware that some of the Mac architecture (bus is all I can name off hand) has opened up, but that all important system architecture is, AFAIK, all theirs.
I guess I could throw this one back at you, you're saying they are in no meaningful way proprietary, so please illustrate your point; I could certainly have part/all of this wrong.