I doubt Google is preventing the Begian newspapers from advertising on Google AdWords. The newspapers can pay with either content or Adword$, but they shouldn't expect free advertising.
All the stuff we buy from China proves we have more than enough money to finance one. Theirs.
Two points.
The U.S. chooses to finance wars instead of space.
The space shuttle, while "cool" and inspiring to the public, demonstrated that government involvement in space exploration has moved beyond helping -- especially in terms of corralling financial resources -- and into hindering. The political compromises in the space shuttle design ended up with a $1.5b/launch cost and a crew cabin mounted laterally to the fuel instead of on top of it, directly causing two fatal catastrophes. It's not just a soundbite -- it's time for the private sector to take over.
YouTube has a lot of recordings of 8-bit videogames played to completion and 8-bit audio/video demos.
And contrary to the summary, there are a lot of old tech magazines online, especially the ones aimed toward 8-bit computers and even the programmable calculators before them, such as the TI-59. <flamebait>Magazines from the "Pentium Pro" era wouldn't be considered "classic computing" so that may be why those aren't online.</flamebait>
I don't know whether private companies outperform public companies or not. Your linked chart does not demonstrate it one way or the other. It just shows that there are more public companies, which could just as well be due to incentives for private company owners to go public.
Most engineers know next to nothing about marketing and sales... to the degree that they actually despise interacting with customers.
Agree. Putting the engineers in charge would just lead to gold-plating, as the reward for engineers is a "job well done" rather than maximizing profits.
The problem with MBA's isn't that they maximize profits, it's that they maximize next quarter's profits. And that isn't the MBA's fault -- it's usually the fault of being a publicly traded corporation, which leads to separation of ownership and control.
Just as anti-corporatists bemoan the immortality and geographical reach of corporations, to add to that it is worth considering limiting the number of owners of a corporation and perhaps also setting a minimum period of ownership.
I love the snippets "After all, he explained, SQL was created decades ago before the web, mobile devices and sensors forever changed how and how often databases are accessed" from the article and "We’ve been using stonge age technology to solve problems that didn’t exist 30 years ago." Yes, the problems existed 30 years ago, such as (land-line) telephone billing. I don't know how those problems were solved -- probably with a mainframe and a custom non-SQL database and not a PC running a SQL-based server -- but they were solved.
Are geeks upset because their term has been co-opted? Isn't that an IP violation? Are geeks now in favor of IP protection?
BTW, the same thing happened with Ron Paul and the Tea Party movement. After raising $6m on Dec. 16, 2007, the anniversary of the Tea Party, neocon radio show hosts in early 2008 started trumpeting a war-supporting "Tea Party" (but somehow "small government", presumably in domestic affairs but not military ones). The neocons leveraged the $6m investment from individual Ron Paul donors (small donations) and turned it to work for them. There is of course no legal IP claim to the 2007 use of "Tea Party", but I sure do feel like my $500 donation in 2007 was stolen by the neocons and that it was an IP theft.
You should trust someone who has been around long enough to know that e-mail predates the web and that domain names are for the Internet and not the web.
Currently, dead trees are be used as a poor-man's (or, more accurately, 20th-century man's) cryptographic signature to the authenticity of electronic books. If it exists in paper, then it can be forensically examined to determine if it is a forgery (the first being the sniff test -- are the pages yellowed and does it smell moldy?). How long can this last? How long will it be until we have the TNG replicator of books that can produce an authentic-looking but slightly altered version of a book on demand? Probably not long enough to make a physical archive worthwhile.
Someone needs to invent a cryptographic scheme that provides a digital signature anchored in time -- one that is impossible to produce at a future date. It seems impossible, of course, but then both public key encryption and anonymous digital cash (the latter originally invented by David Chaum but now manifested in BitCoin) are counterintuitive yet both exist.
No surprise from the paper that brought us Judith Miller's Iraq reporting, but in this article the New York Times utilizes the same irrationality and deception that the article claims to be describing as controversial.
The article claims to draw a distinction between rationality (or reasoning) and irrationality in the first paragraph and then proceeds to conflate the two, calling argumentation "reason":
What is revolutionary about argumentative theory is that it presumes that since reason has a different purpose — to win over an opposing group — flawed reasoning is an adaptation in itself, useful for bolstering debating skills.
The above paragraph would make more sense if you replaced the word "reason" with "argumentation" and be even more clear if "flawed reasoning" were replaced with "flawed reasoning and deception".
It reinforces the common meme of "reason is bad". An example of that meme is the recent popularity of a word that irritates me just as much as "cloud" and "mashup" do: "narrative". Whenever someone lays out a series of arguments, the media, politicians and spokepeople have recently especially within the past year referred to that as a "narrative". A narrative is what you find in a novel. It's not a series of arguments laid out in the open to be picked apart and contested by the opposition. By using the word "narrative", it denigrates the role of reason and debate (and becomes itself a tool of irrationality and deception to avoid and implicitly win a debate).
The article's bid to further destroy math education at the end of the article demonsrates the New York Times' continued commitment to destroy independent thought:
...children may have an easier time learning abstract topics in mathematics or physics if they are put into a group and allowed to reason through a problem together.
The lack of good math education is why the populace is so gullible, and this would only make it worse. John Taylor Gatto holds up the ideal form of education as one-on-one tutoring, pointing to the U.S. founding fathers as examples of having received this type of education. That's great if you can afford it; otherwise, compromises have to be taken. The best compromise is limiting the amount of time spent in one-on-one tutoring to make it affordable, even the U.S. founding fathers spent only 2-3 years in tutoring. The compromise conventional education has taken, in contrast, is the didactic classroom with a teacher facing a group of students. While this may work for a history class or even basic grammar (if it's drawn out long enough to allow everyone to learn in sync), it cannot develop the reason or teach math because quick confirmation of correctness and quick correction of mistakes -- i.e. one-on-one coaching -- is necessary. Compounding this problem, of course, is that most teachers are bad at math. Compounding that problem is that math is a subject that builds on itself, so any one bad teacher in the chain dooms the student to a lifetime of math and logic illiteracy. Compounding that is the generational decay of logic and reasoning skills as the problems perpetuate themselves.
Now on top of all of that, the scientist quoted (unquestionably) by the New York Times wants to take math education even further away from the ideal coaching scenario by forcing students to stop working and thinking independently. Of course argumentation skills are refined by testing them with a group, but developing reason and logic is inherently a solitary activity. It would be like throwing a group of students on Mt. Everest without each one first individually practicing the use of camming devices.
The New York Time has deceptively advanced the meme that all "reason" is mere deception and has even thrown out a bone to ensure that schools churn out gullible New York Times readers for the long term.
They should put it in a double-wide and get 140 MPH rating. Seriously, 90 MPH is nothing. That's just a bad thunderstorm. I just can't even envision what sort of construction would not be able to withstand 90 MPH except for possibly an un-anchored camping tent.
Before my time, but I'm assuming Radio Shack got its start servicing radio amateurs.
During my time (80's), radios were a "solved problem," but there were at least three new markets. First, in the pre-IBM PC days, everyone had to make their own RS-232 and printer cables because every computer had a different pin-out. Even if a commercial one was available, it was often more expensive (like $30) compared to the parts (like $10). Remember, this was the 80's, so multiply those prices by 3. ($90 for a pre-made cable vs. $30 for making it yourself). Second, terrestrial TV was still huge and Radio Shack was the most convenient place to get TV antennas, both indoor and out, and all the associated cabling and accessories, including rotators, bulk cable and crimpers. Third, for those of us early early adopters of home theater, Radio Shack was the place to get A/V patch cables.
So what should Radio Shack be selling now?
Well, computer and A/V cables are "solved problems" and available at Wal-Mart. Radio Shack should be focusing on the next bleeding edge consumer technologies -- the ones that are still sold in pieces and parts instead of all-in-one solutions. They could catch the tail end of home video security. There are a lot of cheap turn-key solutions, but there's still some special applications that call for pieces & parts: wide-angle, night-vision, motion detection, high-end PC capture cards, etc.
They could serve the homebrew robotics market. Right now, Asia is dominating advances in robotics -- we need some robot tinkerers in the U.S. just as the U.S. had for automobiles a century ago.
Finally, Radio Shack desperately needs to update its inventory for electronics tinkerers rather than using SKUs from 1980. Over the past 30 years, oscilloscope prices have fallen through the floor and are now well within Radio Shack price ranges. The world has moved beyond hex-AND chips. Radio Shack should be selling FPGA starter kits.
It may be that a metropolitan area can't support more than one or two such Radio Shacks that serve tinkerers. Perhaps Radio Shack needs to have a limited number of "Super Radio Shacks". But as with Micro Center, there are times where same-day pick-up is needed and even overnight delivery from the Internet is not fast enough.
Don't buy an overpriced spray-and-pray blotter printer. Get a real laser printer.
It is indeed possible to buy a color laser for only $229.99 new (or $309.99 if you want reasonably priced consumables), but the colors are not as brilliant as an inkjet's. The brilliancy of color laser tonor works for almost all applications, but there are some applications where you want the extra oomph of brilliancy from an inkjet.
Dye sublimation is almost as brilliant as inkjet and of course much better resolution, but is expensive for full 8.5"x11" (although it's very cheap for photo size, evidently due to mass production; I still don't know why dye sub hasn't caught on enough for mass production after 20 years for 8.5"x11").
Slashdot Mirror
Almost as complex as Apollo 11 supposedly was. Maybe someday we'll make it to the moon.
Users are great, but posts are the lifeblood. I've not seen any posts in my Google Plus circles that weren't either meta or cross-posted to Facebook.
They sold too many web development books in the 90's to Amazon employees.
I doubt Google is preventing the Begian newspapers from advertising on Google AdWords. The newspapers can pay with either content or Adword$, but they shouldn't expect free advertising.
Two points.
So it'll be 15 years for XP embedded compared to 18 years for 3.x embedded.
Windows 3.x was release in 1990, and Microsoft only stopped selling it November 1, 2008.
YouTube has a lot of recordings of 8-bit videogames played to completion and 8-bit audio/video demos.
And contrary to the summary, there are a lot of old tech magazines online, especially the ones aimed toward 8-bit computers and even the programmable calculators before them, such as the TI-59. <flamebait>Magazines from the "Pentium Pro" era wouldn't be considered "classic computing" so that may be why those aren't online.</flamebait>
"If memory serves, there was a dubious flirtation with mercury-filled light bulbs resulting in toxic side effects"
I don't know whether private companies outperform public companies or not. Your linked chart does not demonstrate it one way or the other. It just shows that there are more public companies, which could just as well be due to incentives for private company owners to go public.
Agree. Putting the engineers in charge would just lead to gold-plating, as the reward for engineers is a "job well done" rather than maximizing profits.
The problem with MBA's isn't that they maximize profits, it's that they maximize next quarter's profits. And that isn't the MBA's fault -- it's usually the fault of being a publicly traded corporation, which leads to separation of ownership and control.
Just as anti-corporatists bemoan the immortality and geographical reach of corporations, to add to that it is worth considering limiting the number of owners of a corporation and perhaps also setting a minimum period of ownership.
I love the snippets "After all, he explained, SQL was created decades ago before the web, mobile devices and sensors forever changed how and how often databases are accessed" from the article and "We’ve been using stonge age technology to solve problems that didn’t exist 30 years ago." Yes, the problems existed 30 years ago, such as (land-line) telephone billing. I don't know how those problems were solved -- probably with a mainframe and a custom non-SQL database and not a PC running a SQL-based server -- but they were solved.
It's approximately the agricultural GDP of Rhode Island.
Are geeks upset because their term has been co-opted? Isn't that an IP violation? Are geeks now in favor of IP protection?
BTW, the same thing happened with Ron Paul and the Tea Party movement. After raising $6m on Dec. 16, 2007, the anniversary of the Tea Party, neocon radio show hosts in early 2008 started trumpeting a war-supporting "Tea Party" (but somehow "small government", presumably in domestic affairs but not military ones). The neocons leveraged the $6m investment from individual Ron Paul donors (small donations) and turned it to work for them. There is of course no legal IP claim to the 2007 use of "Tea Party", but I sure do feel like my $500 donation in 2007 was stolen by the neocons and that it was an IP theft.
You should trust someone who has been around long enough to know that e-mail predates the web and that domain names are for the Internet and not the web.
Currently, dead trees are be used as a poor-man's (or, more accurately, 20th-century man's) cryptographic signature to the authenticity of electronic books. If it exists in paper, then it can be forensically examined to determine if it is a forgery (the first being the sniff test -- are the pages yellowed and does it smell moldy?). How long can this last? How long will it be until we have the TNG replicator of books that can produce an authentic-looking but slightly altered version of a book on demand? Probably not long enough to make a physical archive worthwhile.
Someone needs to invent a cryptographic scheme that provides a digital signature anchored in time -- one that is impossible to produce at a future date. It seems impossible, of course, but then both public key encryption and anonymous digital cash (the latter originally invented by David Chaum but now manifested in BitCoin) are counterintuitive yet both exist.
No, Altair and IMSAI were the Norwegians, Apple II and TRS-80 were Columbus, and IBM was the Mayflower.
No surprise from the paper that brought us Judith Miller's Iraq reporting, but in this article the New York Times utilizes the same irrationality and deception that the article claims to be describing as controversial.
The article claims to draw a distinction between rationality (or reasoning) and irrationality in the first paragraph and then proceeds to conflate the two, calling argumentation "reason":
The above paragraph would make more sense if you replaced the word "reason" with "argumentation" and be even more clear if "flawed reasoning" were replaced with "flawed reasoning and deception".
It reinforces the common meme of "reason is bad". An example of that meme is the recent popularity of a word that irritates me just as much as "cloud" and "mashup" do: "narrative". Whenever someone lays out a series of arguments, the media, politicians and spokepeople have recently especially within the past year referred to that as a "narrative". A narrative is what you find in a novel. It's not a series of arguments laid out in the open to be picked apart and contested by the opposition. By using the word "narrative", it denigrates the role of reason and debate (and becomes itself a tool of irrationality and deception to avoid and implicitly win a debate).
The article's bid to further destroy math education at the end of the article demonsrates the New York Times' continued commitment to destroy independent thought:
The lack of good math education is why the populace is so gullible, and this would only make it worse. John Taylor Gatto holds up the ideal form of education as one-on-one tutoring, pointing to the U.S. founding fathers as examples of having received this type of education. That's great if you can afford it; otherwise, compromises have to be taken. The best compromise is limiting the amount of time spent in one-on-one tutoring to make it affordable, even the U.S. founding fathers spent only 2-3 years in tutoring. The compromise conventional education has taken, in contrast, is the didactic classroom with a teacher facing a group of students. While this may work for a history class or even basic grammar (if it's drawn out long enough to allow everyone to learn in sync), it cannot develop the reason or teach math because quick confirmation of correctness and quick correction of mistakes -- i.e. one-on-one coaching -- is necessary. Compounding this problem, of course, is that most teachers are bad at math. Compounding that problem is that math is a subject that builds on itself, so any one bad teacher in the chain dooms the student to a lifetime of math and logic illiteracy. Compounding that is the generational decay of logic and reasoning skills as the problems perpetuate themselves.
Now on top of all of that, the scientist quoted (unquestionably) by the New York Times wants to take math education even further away from the ideal coaching scenario by forcing students to stop working and thinking independently. Of course argumentation skills are refined by testing them with a group, but developing reason and logic is inherently a solitary activity. It would be like throwing a group of students on Mt. Everest without each one first individually practicing the use of camming devices.
The New York Time has deceptively advanced the meme that all "reason" is mere deception and has even thrown out a bone to ensure that schools churn out gullible New York Times readers for the long term.
Indeed, my first response to the summary as written was, "What is Microsoft going to replace desktop and server-side C# with, C++? Yeah, right."
Form 637:
Just the first hit I got off Google.
They should put it in a double-wide and get 140 MPH rating. Seriously, 90 MPH is nothing. That's just a bad thunderstorm. I just can't even envision what sort of construction would not be able to withstand 90 MPH except for possibly an un-anchored camping tent.
Getting a new job and retaining a pre-bust job are two different things.
comp.risks is alive and well.
Before my time, but I'm assuming Radio Shack got its start servicing radio amateurs.
During my time (80's), radios were a "solved problem," but there were at least three new markets. First, in the pre-IBM PC days, everyone had to make their own RS-232 and printer cables because every computer had a different pin-out. Even if a commercial one was available, it was often more expensive (like $30) compared to the parts (like $10). Remember, this was the 80's, so multiply those prices by 3. ($90 for a pre-made cable vs. $30 for making it yourself). Second, terrestrial TV was still huge and Radio Shack was the most convenient place to get TV antennas, both indoor and out, and all the associated cabling and accessories, including rotators, bulk cable and crimpers. Third, for those of us early early adopters of home theater, Radio Shack was the place to get A/V patch cables.
So what should Radio Shack be selling now?
Well, computer and A/V cables are "solved problems" and available at Wal-Mart. Radio Shack should be focusing on the next bleeding edge consumer technologies -- the ones that are still sold in pieces and parts instead of all-in-one solutions. They could catch the tail end of home video security. There are a lot of cheap turn-key solutions, but there's still some special applications that call for pieces & parts: wide-angle, night-vision, motion detection, high-end PC capture cards, etc.
They could serve the homebrew robotics market. Right now, Asia is dominating advances in robotics -- we need some robot tinkerers in the U.S. just as the U.S. had for automobiles a century ago.
Finally, Radio Shack desperately needs to update its inventory for electronics tinkerers rather than using SKUs from 1980. Over the past 30 years, oscilloscope prices have fallen through the floor and are now well within Radio Shack price ranges. The world has moved beyond hex-AND chips. Radio Shack should be selling FPGA starter kits.
It may be that a metropolitan area can't support more than one or two such Radio Shacks that serve tinkerers. Perhaps Radio Shack needs to have a limited number of "Super Radio Shacks". But as with Micro Center, there are times where same-day pick-up is needed and even overnight delivery from the Internet is not fast enough.
It is indeed possible to buy a color laser for only $229.99 new (or $309.99 if you want reasonably priced consumables), but the colors are not as brilliant as an inkjet's. The brilliancy of color laser tonor works for almost all applications, but there are some applications where you want the extra oomph of brilliancy from an inkjet.
Dye sublimation is almost as brilliant as inkjet and of course much better resolution, but is expensive for full 8.5"x11" (although it's very cheap for photo size, evidently due to mass production; I still don't know why dye sub hasn't caught on enough for mass production after 20 years for 8.5"x11").