Fact is, we have WAAAAAY too many people in jail as it is
That reminds me of a funny headline in the NYTimes. Paraphrased it said:
Jails overflowing despite record low crime rates!"
I doubled over laughing. The Times brainiacs actually didn't understand how the jails could have so many people in them when crime was down so much. Obviously, they deduced, this proved that the Bush administration was locking up innocent people. In reality they were actually too stupid (or blinded by their biases) to realize that crime was down BECAUSE the jails were full. Cause and affect. Go figure.
IMO, it is currently very difficult to make a profit selling software (or indeed anything distributed digitally) in the Chinese market. Protections against illicit copying (which is rampant) are rarely enforced, and black-market copies are ubiquitious (this goes for Windows, DVDs, music CDs, other software titles). As China evolves these protections will have to be developed and enforced; they'll need them to protect their own content-creators, not just foreign ones. Only then will it make sense for Microsoft to aggressively pursue the Chinese market. Until then, "co-existing" with Linux is the smart strategy to adopt.
Interesting analogy (and couched as yet another shameless plug for OSS). So then, following your lead, if I make a shoddy car, all I have to do is publish the design drawings and I'm covered? How about pharmaceuticals (here's the molecular structure, feel free to discover and fix any fatal side affects)?
Large software companies have more in common with factories than they do with law firms or medical practices
Actually, this is true... witness outsourcing. When's the last time you saw law firms outsource?
BTW, how is this going to work if the programmer is a citizen of India? Are US prosecutors going to extradite him or her for inadvertant buffer overflows?
"the former White House cybersecurity adviser, argued at a seminar in London that programmers should be held responsible for flaws in code they write."
OK. And to make it fair, let's let lawmakers be responsible for all the unintended consequences their legislation brings about.
I agree the models are different. One model treats the customer like, well, a customer. The other treats a customer more like an inconvenience. And my library already networks with lots of libraries in the region (including at least one very large city). The problem is, this is apparently a very popular book (1776). To be fair, they did locate and obtain another book (in much less demand) for me awhile back and it only took them about 2 weeks.
My comments were more of a general nature, though when you brought up the library example it illustrated very nicely what I was trying to say. I have observed that the likelihood that I will be disappointed with a particular "service rendered" is much, much higher if that "service" was provided by the government (choose one, local, state, federal). Very rarely do I find myself pleasantly surprised when I interact with a government agency or official. Almost always it's the opposite. Conversely, occassionally a company or private business upsets or dissappoints me, but the general rule is that they don't. And further, oftentimes I am pleasantly surprised. Perhaps your experiences have been different. Or perhaps you never really thought about it.
I have to disagree. That was the same line people used regarding Apple back in the day. All the kids have Apples. All the schools have Apples. Wait til that group enters corporate America, then Apple will shine (pun intended). Well guess what, never happened. Apple "enjoys" the same lousy single digit marketshare they had back in the 80s.
Amazingly, Intel seems to have forgotten what got them dominance. It's all about the binaries. People will buy new processors if they run their old binaries faster. Period. They won't buy based on the promise of running some new, as yet non-existent, binariese faster in the future. AMD understood this when they came up with the Athlon64 architecture. Not only did it extend the instruction set to add 64-bit instructions, but it also sped up 32-bit applications. Intel completely dropped the ball with the Itanium debacle. It looks to me, from this latest announcement, that they still don't know where the ball is.
Funny, the same can be said for Microsoft, only they still get it. New OS's must be binary compatible with old OS's. If they aren't, people stay away in droves (phrase credit: Yogi Berra), This is the main weakness, in my opinion, of the whole FOSS movement. Most people don't want to "simply recompile".
There is compelling evidence that the outreach potential for human space exploration can be a strong positive influence on the interests and educational choices of children.
That is the reason for manned spaceflight. It inspires! It isn't just about the money. It's not just about "bang for the buck" or other accounting principals. It isn't purely about scientific knowledge. It's fundamentally about the human spirit.
I had a single executable that ran on PPC 2002, Windows Mobile 2003, Smartphone 2002 and Smartphone 2003. If you just take the time to query the provided and documented APIs you can determine what platform you are running on and make the appropriate runtime decisions. Symbian did not provide these query functions, which forced us to make customer EXEs for every model. And yes, all the tools I used to release commmercial products were free downloads from Microsoft.
Actually, this is from Massachusetts - the one-party state where nothing gets done without the appropriate level of bribes and graft. I think they said what they meant and are hoping nobody will catch it. Either that or it was a freudian slip.
As a (former) mobile software developer, I think this is fantastic. Symbian and Windows Mobile are currently the two mainstay "open" platforms for developers. Java is making inroads, but no two phone's Java VMs are the same, making it a nightmare for developers (write once, debug everywhere). Symbian suffers a bit from this malady as well - each phone model resulted in a some tweaks to the software, and more often than not, a special executable. It should come as no big surprise that the best platform today for mobile developers is from Microsoft. The tools are quite good (and free), and the various instances of the platform (Smartphone, Pocket PCs) are sufficiently similar from an application's persective that only 1 source tree is needed. Further, the same executable will run on every device as long as it is a compatible CPU like the ARM - which is what almost all of them are. Linux in the mobile space would be a great thing - especially if a decent set of tools (and libraries and FOSS applications) were available to accelerate the process.
Thanks for the pointer. Unfortunately I am still waiting (2 months and counting) for another book to become available at my government-run library. Maybe I should just go to Barnes & Noble - when they don't have a book I want they get it for me within the week. Funny, that.
This could bring the obesity problem to a whole new level. Congratulations - you've reached level 4! You can go up to the counter and pick up your FREE icecream sundae! Level 5 wins a free value meal. Level 6 is a large softdrink.
I will always trust corporations to be more responsive than government because corporations (yes, even Microsoft) have competitors that keep them honest. Conversely, if you don't like waiting in line for 2 hours at the DMV only to be told, rudely, that you need to wait in a different line, what are you going to do, wait 3 years until election day and cast your vote against the troll who happened to have been in office at the time? Or, you could fire off an angry letter to be read by an uncaring beaurocrat. Unfortunately, your vote is usually swamped by the hundreds of votes bought by incumbents handing out your hard-earned tax dollars to relatives, friends, public unions and sycophants. No thanks. I'd rather vote with my wallet and shun the products of companies that I don't want to associate with, for whatever reasons I might have. If enough people share those perceptions, that company will either die or change. The very same oft-criticized attribute of companies, their accute attention to the short-term bottom line, is the same characteristic that makes them so responsive to the market. Your strengths are your weaknesses.
Perhaps it would be better to go back to the old days when everybody was shuffling paper. That way they could send their money to the papermills and the pencilmakers instead.
Though I agree that the patent system in the US is a big problem, I sincerely doubt that American kids are turning away from careers in science because of the IP situation.
Kid 1: "What do you want to be?"
Kid 2: "Umm, well, I like science and stuff, but I am really concerned about the ridiculous patent system in the US."
I can't really agree with the statement "the hours are long". I have a relative who went into teaching high school math after 25 years in a technical field. He said, after completing his second year teaching, "I could never go back to working full time again. The money in teaching is not so great, but you can't beat the hours and all the time off."
The usual knee-jerk response to the eduacation problem is to throw money at it. Nevermind that study after study shows that spending per pupil correlates very poorly with student performance. No, the kids require parental involvement. They require parents who value education and push them to achieve. They require parents who stay on top of the schools, and make their voices heard when they don't like what's happening. These are all cultural things, and though they don't exactly match my initial post (which concentrated more on popular culture), they fall into the same category. It's all about how people value and perceive academic achievement and learning.
I'll finish with an interesting story that demonstrates exactly what I mean. My mother (in her 70s) was watching TV with a friend of hers. This friend had a 40 year-old son who was basically a drain on society, if you know what I mean. Anyhow, the local high school quiz show came on. And this friend said to my mother, "Look at those nerds. Don't they look ridiculous." I think that illustrates my point quite nicely. The typical reaction to "smart people" is one of derision. And since popular culture is so heavily influenced by (and reflective of) entertainment, one really effective way to turn this around would be for the producers of that entertainment to drop the portrayal of most intelligent, math-oriented types as nerdy, antisocial geeks and instead paint them positively.
In American society, being good at math or science is generally regarded as geeky or nerdy and is roundly disparraged. Small wonder American kids want nothing to do with it. Look at the popular TV shows - many are about lawyers, doctors, and law enforcement types. If there is a technically saavy person, they are made fun of and treated as quaint. Until this changes we can throw all the money we want at the problem, but it won't change much. Back in the 60's it was cool to be into science - largely thanks to the space race (and to a lesser degree the cold war). There was even a TV personality (Fred MacMurray in My Three Sons) who played an aeronautical engineer, and he was actually portrayed in a positive light! That's impossible to imagine in today's culture. Maybe if we had something akin to the space program, say a race to energy indepenence, we could once again make it cool to pursue a career in science, math, physics or engineering.
I mean really. It's a phone. Have it recognize my voice. Why have it recognize my walk? But this does give me an idea - why not a pair of shoes that cause blisters if they don't recognize my voice? You have to keep talking to them or they tighten up on you. Maxwell Smart (rest his soul) was on to something I think.
I disagree. Watching video is predominantly a "foreground" activity. It's not something you do while multi-tasking. Yes, you might have the news or a ball game on in the background, but for things like watching movies or TV programs, most often you devote your entire attention to it. For this reason, mobile video, in my opinion, will always be a niche, and has no potential for displacing TIVO (or more correctly PVRs). I think they can however be a complimentary technology - let me copy that TV show from my TIVO to my iPod because I'll be stuck on the train for half an hour on the way to work. But for really enjoying a good movie, sporting event or TV show, I'll always opt for my recliner, my bigscreen and 500 Watts of surround sound anytime over a 3" screen and earbuds.
Slashdot Mirror
Fact is, we have WAAAAAY too many people in jail as it is
That reminds me of a funny headline in the NYTimes. Paraphrased it said:
Jails overflowing despite record low crime rates!"
I doubled over laughing. The Times brainiacs actually didn't understand how the jails could have so many people in them when crime was down so much. Obviously, they deduced, this proved that the Bush administration was locking up innocent people. In reality they were actually too stupid (or blinded by their biases) to realize that crime was down BECAUSE the jails were full. Cause and affect. Go figure.
IMO, it is currently very difficult to make a profit selling software (or indeed anything distributed digitally) in the Chinese market. Protections against illicit copying (which is rampant) are rarely enforced, and black-market copies are ubiquitious (this goes for Windows, DVDs, music CDs, other software titles). As China evolves these protections will have to be developed and enforced; they'll need them to protect their own content-creators, not just foreign ones. Only then will it make sense for Microsoft to aggressively pursue the Chinese market. Until then, "co-existing" with Linux is the smart strategy to adopt.
Interesting analogy (and couched as yet another shameless plug for OSS). So then, following your lead, if I make a shoddy car, all I have to do is publish the design drawings and I'm covered? How about pharmaceuticals (here's the molecular structure, feel free to discover and fix any fatal side affects)?
Large software companies have more in common with factories than they do with law firms or medical practices
... witness outsourcing. When's the last time you saw law firms outsource?
Actually, this is true
BTW, how is this going to work if the programmer is a citizen of India? Are US prosecutors going to extradite him or her for inadvertant buffer overflows?
"the former White House cybersecurity adviser, argued at a seminar in London that programmers should be held responsible for flaws in code they write."
OK. And to make it fair, let's let lawmakers be responsible for all the unintended consequences their legislation brings about.
No, "1776", by David McCullough.
3 226712/qid=1129841990/sr=2-1/ref=pd_bbs_b_2_1/104- 6981505-9258325?v=glance&s=books
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/074
I agree the models are different. One model treats the customer like, well, a customer. The other treats a customer more like an inconvenience. And my library already networks with lots of libraries in the region (including at least one very large city). The problem is, this is apparently a very popular book (1776). To be fair, they did locate and obtain another book (in much less demand) for me awhile back and it only took them about 2 weeks.
My comments were more of a general nature, though when you brought up the library example it illustrated very nicely what I was trying to say. I have observed that the likelihood that I will be disappointed with a particular "service rendered" is much, much higher if that "service" was provided by the government (choose one, local, state, federal). Very rarely do I find myself pleasantly surprised when I interact with a government agency or official. Almost always it's the opposite. Conversely, occassionally a company or private business upsets or dissappoints me, but the general rule is that they don't. And further, oftentimes I am pleasantly surprised. Perhaps your experiences have been different. Or perhaps you never really thought about it.
I have to disagree. That was the same line people used regarding Apple back in the day. All the kids have Apples. All the schools have Apples. Wait til that group enters corporate America, then Apple will shine (pun intended). Well guess what, never happened. Apple "enjoys" the same lousy single digit marketshare they had back in the 80s.
Amazingly, Intel seems to have forgotten what got them dominance. It's all about the binaries. People will buy new processors if they run their old binaries faster. Period. They won't buy based on the promise of running some new, as yet non-existent, binariese faster in the future. AMD understood this when they came up with the Athlon64 architecture. Not only did it extend the instruction set to add 64-bit instructions, but it also sped up 32-bit applications. Intel completely dropped the ball with the Itanium debacle. It looks to me, from this latest announcement, that they still don't know where the ball is.
Funny, the same can be said for Microsoft, only they still get it. New OS's must be binary compatible with old OS's. If they aren't, people stay away in droves (phrase credit: Yogi Berra), This is the main weakness, in my opinion, of the whole FOSS movement. Most people don't want to "simply recompile".
It's the binaries, stupid!
There it is:
There is compelling evidence that the outreach potential for human space exploration can be a strong positive influence on the interests and educational choices of children.
That is the reason for manned spaceflight. It inspires! It isn't just about the money. It's not just about "bang for the buck" or other accounting principals. It isn't purely about scientific knowledge. It's fundamentally about the human spirit.
I had a single executable that ran on PPC 2002, Windows Mobile 2003, Smartphone 2002 and Smartphone 2003. If you just take the time to query the provided and documented APIs you can determine what platform you are running on and make the appropriate runtime decisions. Symbian did not provide these query functions, which forced us to make customer EXEs for every model. And yes, all the tools I used to release commmercial products were free downloads from Microsoft.
Hmmm, maybe Mars was Earth version 1. Then the designer addressed the defects and came out with version 2.
Actually, this is from Massachusetts - the one-party state where nothing gets done without the appropriate level of bribes and graft. I think they said what they meant and are hoping nobody will catch it. Either that or it was a freudian slip.
As a (former) mobile software developer, I think this is fantastic. Symbian and Windows Mobile are currently the two mainstay "open" platforms for developers. Java is making inroads, but no two phone's Java VMs are the same, making it a nightmare for developers (write once, debug everywhere). Symbian suffers a bit from this malady as well - each phone model resulted in a some tweaks to the software, and more often than not, a special executable. It should come as no big surprise that the best platform today for mobile developers is from Microsoft. The tools are quite good (and free), and the various instances of the platform (Smartphone, Pocket PCs) are sufficiently similar from an application's persective that only 1 source tree is needed. Further, the same executable will run on every device as long as it is a compatible CPU like the ARM - which is what almost all of them are. Linux in the mobile space would be a great thing - especially if a decent set of tools (and libraries and FOSS applications) were available to accelerate the process.
Thanks for the pointer. Unfortunately I am still waiting (2 months and counting) for another book to become available at my government-run library. Maybe I should just go to Barnes & Noble - when they don't have a book I want they get it for me within the week. Funny, that.
This could bring the obesity problem to a whole new level. Congratulations - you've reached level 4! You can go up to the counter and pick up your FREE icecream sundae! Level 5 wins a free value meal. Level 6 is a large softdrink.
I will always trust corporations to be more responsive than government because corporations (yes, even Microsoft) have competitors that keep them honest. Conversely, if you don't like waiting in line for 2 hours at the DMV only to be told, rudely, that you need to wait in a different line, what are you going to do, wait 3 years until election day and cast your vote against the troll who happened to have been in office at the time? Or, you could fire off an angry letter to be read by an uncaring beaurocrat. Unfortunately, your vote is usually swamped by the hundreds of votes bought by incumbents handing out your hard-earned tax dollars to relatives, friends, public unions and sycophants. No thanks. I'd rather vote with my wallet and shun the products of companies that I don't want to associate with, for whatever reasons I might have. If enough people share those perceptions, that company will either die or change. The very same oft-criticized attribute of companies, their accute attention to the short-term bottom line, is the same characteristic that makes them so responsive to the market. Your strengths are your weaknesses.
Perhaps it would be better to go back to the old days when everybody was shuffling paper. That way they could send their money to the papermills and the pencilmakers instead.
Though I agree that the patent system in the US is a big problem, I sincerely doubt that American kids are turning away from careers in science because of the IP situation.
Kid 1: "What do you want to be?"
Kid 2: "Umm, well, I like science and stuff, but I am really concerned about the ridiculous patent system in the US."
I can't really agree with the statement "the hours are long". I have a relative who went into teaching high school math after 25 years in a technical field. He said, after completing his second year teaching, "I could never go back to working full time again. The money in teaching is not so great, but you can't beat the hours and all the time off."
The usual knee-jerk response to the eduacation problem is to throw money at it. Nevermind that study after study shows that spending per pupil correlates very poorly with student performance. No, the kids require parental involvement. They require parents who value education and push them to achieve. They require parents who stay on top of the schools, and make their voices heard when they don't like what's happening. These are all cultural things, and though they don't exactly match my initial post (which concentrated more on popular culture), they fall into the same category. It's all about how people value and perceive academic achievement and learning.
I'll finish with an interesting story that demonstrates exactly what I mean. My mother (in her 70s) was watching TV with a friend of hers. This friend had a 40 year-old son who was basically a drain on society, if you know what I mean. Anyhow, the local high school quiz show came on. And this friend said to my mother, "Look at those nerds. Don't they look ridiculous." I think that illustrates my point quite nicely. The typical reaction to "smart people" is one of derision. And since popular culture is so heavily influenced by (and reflective of) entertainment, one really effective way to turn this around would be for the producers of that entertainment to drop the portrayal of most intelligent, math-oriented types as nerdy, antisocial geeks and instead paint them positively.
In American society, being good at math or science is generally regarded as geeky or nerdy and is roundly disparraged. Small wonder American kids want nothing to do with it. Look at the popular TV shows - many are about lawyers, doctors, and law enforcement types. If there is a technically saavy person, they are made fun of and treated as quaint. Until this changes we can throw all the money we want at the problem, but it won't change much. Back in the 60's it was cool to be into science - largely thanks to the space race (and to a lesser degree the cold war). There was even a TV personality (Fred MacMurray in My Three Sons) who played an aeronautical engineer, and he was actually portrayed in a positive light! That's impossible to imagine in today's culture. Maybe if we had something akin to the space program, say a race to energy indepenence, we could once again make it cool to pursue a career in science, math, physics or engineering.
cruise missiles are going to have to pull over and ask for directions?
I mean really. It's a phone. Have it recognize my voice. Why have it recognize my walk? But this does give me an idea - why not a pair of shoes that cause blisters if they don't recognize my voice? You have to keep talking to them or they tighten up on you. Maxwell Smart (rest his soul) was on to something I think.
I disagree. Watching video is predominantly a "foreground" activity. It's not something you do while multi-tasking. Yes, you might have the news or a ball game on in the background, but for things like watching movies or TV programs, most often you devote your entire attention to it. For this reason, mobile video, in my opinion, will always be a niche, and has no potential for displacing TIVO (or more correctly PVRs). I think they can however be a complimentary technology - let me copy that TV show from my TIVO to my iPod because I'll be stuck on the train for half an hour on the way to work. But for really enjoying a good movie, sporting event or TV show, I'll always opt for my recliner, my bigscreen and 500 Watts of surround sound anytime over a 3" screen and earbuds.
If you have enough money you can *buy* a scientific background.