Say for example that this 'god' changed the size of the nuclear force 2 bill years ago. That would change the ratio of different chemical elements compared to what we would expect to see.
Of course theists would simply argue that, since God is eternal and timeless, he didn't change his mind "at time x." He simply changed his mind, and that's the way things are inside his created universe at all points in time.
To assume that god changing his mind would have to occur at "some point in time" inside our universe assumes that god is subject to the concept and perceptions of time and space, which religion posits that he created. As an all power being, he is not "bound" in any sense by the things he's created. He can change them on a whim at any time.
The problem is, you cannot argue this sort of logic as proof against god - there's always 'Turtles all the way down' to fall back on when you start arguing specific points like this.
They have discovered something important, but failed to communicate it properly.
How have they failed to communicate it properly? They were able to embed biologically active molecules in optics made of silk protein. They found that the silk protein is able to be processed using water (rather than harsh chemicals) at room temperature (rather than at very high or low temperatures). What this means is, the conditions required for production of these silk optics will not destroy the biologically active molecules that have been embedded into the structure. Something that, as outlined in the article, has been difficult to do with other devices which require far more chemical processing.
If they have something - why chose chose such a bad as bad food? No explanation is presented. Power Source? Needed at all? Processor? etc.
They chose "bad food," I would guess probably as a very clear way of highlighting the possible benefits of this research to the general public here in the US, who has been subjected to stories of "don't eat those tomatoes! no it's the peppers! no it's the tomatoes! no it's the peppers!" for about 2 months now due to an outbreak of foodborne illness that proved exceedingly difficult to track to its source. Wouldn't it be nice, they're saying, if a device in your bag of tomatoes could warn you that there was some sort of contamination before you eat them?
There might some more interesting applications for this stuff, think of translucent cloth.
Yes, because when I read about a novel method for creating silk films that could incorporate biologically active elements, the first thing I think is, "Man think of what the strippers could do with this!"
Sure, the exact implementation seen in the video was shit (no text, didn't capture the radial position of the cursor)
So you agree with my point. Thank you, I'm flattered.
but research done on real pie menus shows that they're much better for a contextual menu that always has the same amount of elements.
And as we've both agreed, what was shown were not "real" pie menus. They were crappy mockups of a half-assed solution to a problem that doesn't really exist.
I watched the video, and I have to agree on this point. It's a solution in search of a problem, from what I can see. They decided to build web browsing, screen sharing, instant messaging, voice chat, excel charting, desktop widgets/gadgets, and some level of search into the browser. If the functions they demo'ed in that video are the web of the future, then the future is here today - there is no real new functionality pointed out, it's just a bunch of today's technology packaged up to look pretty. For some definition, somewhere, of "pretty".
I saw a cluttered, confusing, visually overwhelming UI.
I saw interface controls around all edges of the screen, which, while mousing around to all of them might be great exercise for the arm, frankly sucks from a usability perspective, especially as screens get bigger; even more frustrating is the simple fact that they seemed to be pitching the "menubars" on all sides of the screen as dynamic, tracking "whatever you've dropped there" on the right, "history" on the left, "all active windows" at the bottom, and "frequently used" stuff at the top. So you mean, nothing's ever in the same place? great, thanks for slowing me down.
I also saw some really shit concepts for context menus. That cloverleaf design and the animation is very cool and sci-fi looking ("ooh, it's like I'm piloting a starship with my cool fan-fold context menus with swooshy click animation noises!"), but it's going to slow you down and make finding anything a pain in the ass on the context menu. *PERHAPS* these could work somehow with a touch screen, but with traditional mouse movements & clicks, they're going to drive users insane.
You have to remember, this system works for the original design specification. The only reason there is a problem is that the fiscal situation dropped a requirements bomb onto the IT organization. This would be a problem if the thing was running on Java/Oracle or whatever your favorite brand of system sugar is.
In what universe is it possible that nobody's ever been given a pay cut, or issued back pay? I understand that having a major system requirement changed on you midstream is disruptive. But to claim that it's impossible to predict those two fairly routine scenarios, I'm sorry, but that's piss-poor design trying to pin the blame incomplete or changed requirements. I could understand "We can do it, but we'll need to hire 20 or 30 data entry people for a few weeks because we can't batch this particular operation." But to say "Sorry, we can't adjust pay rates without recoding the whole system?" Bullshit.
The story reads to me as if it's politicking by the state controller who's using the payroll system as a club to further his own agenda, or gross negligence on the part of the state government for not updating its payroll system to a more modern & maintainable infrastructure. Either way, they'd be better served by outsourcing it to an organization that specializes in these sorts of systems and understands that back pay and pay cuts might actually be use cases that need to be supported in a payroll system.
Honestly though an Oracle RAC solution isn't going to go out of date in 30 years nor are the laws of the land going to change dramatically enough for modern payroll systems to not keep up. In 30 years they won't be looking for java coders to manage their payroll changes because the providers of said software would have done it for them long ago if the laws of the land were changing in that direction that is.
I agree with most of what you wrote, except this. 30 years ago, the decision was probably made that a proprietary system written in COBOL certainly wouldn't go out of date, or would have been upgraded in a timely, conscientious, and gradual fashion so that it was always "mostly" up to date with current technologies, as well. Government agencies concerned with justifying their existence in the next election cycle aren't thinking 30 years out. They *should* be, as responsible stewards of the public trust, but there is no payoff to them in forecasting 30 years out - by then, it'll be someone else's problem to deal with. And really, "we need that $20 million to fund this other vital program today so we can endear ourselves to another 5% of the voters. The payroll system has been working fine for 30 years, so it can wait another year, surely there'll be money for that next year."
I do think we're in fundamental agreement - contracting it to a company that specializes in performing that job, and who is also being paid to keep its infrastructure modern and up to date would be the best solution; the government has to pay for payroll services, so it makes it close-to-impossible for politicians to start 'reallocating' money earmarked for these infrastructure improvements to fund other programs that are more likely to affect the vote count next election - the improvements are built into the cost of service. Certainly privatizing everything isn't the solution, but payroll services are such a mundane part of corporate life these days that it's ridiculous that the government wouldn't use one of the many alternatives available on the market and instead insist on maintaining their own system.
Or, even easier, contract with a payroll outsourcing company to provide payroll services, just like huge swaths of private industry do, and stop worrying about paying the ~170 million dollars the article references to upgrade a custom payroll system to a *new* *custom* payroll service that you'll read the same frigging article about 30 years from now, detailing how California can't find Java programmers anymore to upgrade their 100,000 lines of payroll code.
This is not a unique problem for an organization to have. Why would you reinvent the wheel when you could let a company thatspecializesinpayrolloutsourcing handle the problem for you at a cost that's probably signifcantly lower than the cost of doing it yourself? I find it terribly hard to believe that the State of California pays people in such a byzantine way that they need to roll their own solution and maintain the entire infrastructure themselves.
According to the 2006 US Census of State Employment, California employed 474,660 full & part time employees. That $177,000,000 referenced as the cost of upgrading could certainly be better spent negotiating a good contract for payroll services. Considering ~22,000 of the people listed in that census fall into the category of "Financial Administration," I bet the outsourcing would also save the state some non-trivial amount of money in the form of salaries that no longer have to be paid, saving the state even more money.
A cursory search using google shows that "small businesses" can expect to pay about $10 to $12 dollars per employee per month for outsourced payroll services. Assuming this is the best rate California could get, that 177 million dollars in upgrade costs would pay for about 2.5 years of service. Consider that they'd undoubtedly get a discount for such a significant volume of business, and the money they'd save by not having to owning, operating, staffing, and supporting their own data centers to perform this function for half a million employees, and I think there's a very good chance that outsourcing their payroll services would be a big money saver for the state.
Of course, this is all based on the (perhaps faulty) premise that any government wants to provide the most fiscally responsible solution to its taxpayers...
Dear Epic Fail, thank you for playing. Next time, you might want to spell it 'plasmoid' rather than 'plasmid'... and if you're going to quote, you might want to consider spelling the words in the quote properly... or maybe even cutting & pasting, since, you know, it's an electronic format. Plasmid and Plasmoid are entirely different terms, and have entirely different meanings.
A plasmoid is a coherent structure of plasma and magnetic fields. Plasmoids have been proposed to explain natural phenomena such as ball lightning,[1] magnetic bubbles in the magnetosphere,[2] and objects in cometary tails,[3] in the solar wind,[4][5] in the solar atmosphere,[6] and in the heliospheric current sheet. Plasmoids produced in the laboratory include Field-Reversed Configurations, Spheromaks, and the dense plasma focus.
A plasmid is an extra-chromosomal DNA molecule separate from the chromosomal DNA which is capable of replicating independently of the chromosomal DNA.[1] In many cases, it is circular and double-stranded. Plasmids usually occur naturally in bacteria, but are sometimes found in eukaryotic organisms (e.g., the 2-micrometre-ring in Saccharomyces cerevisiae).
So you say that it's a requirement to build freeways, airports and parking lots. We have to pollute and destroy the natural habitat of animals to survive? Clear cut logging is a necessity of life?
I asked you to define "mess with nature," because really, everything we do is "messing" with nature, unless you're willing to state that we should revert back to primitive hunter-gatherers, living off the land. The moment you start plowing a field to plant a crop, you're "messing with nature". The moment you start building shelters, instead of hiding in caves, you're "messing with nature." THAT is one of the defining characteristics of humankind - we adapt our surroundings to our needs through the application of reason.
This should by no means be construed as a defense of "anything at any cost" - as I noted in my original response, the fact that we alter our surroundings to suit or desires does not mean we cannot and should not learn to "mess with nature" in less destructive ways. But yes, it's a requirement to build freeways; it's a requirement to build airports; it's a requirement to build parking lots; some animals will die & some animals' habitats will be disrupted as part of this. Our challenge as a species is to learn how to do things in the least-destructive / most sustainable way. The solution is most certainly not continuing to indulge in these childlike fantasies many environmentalists seem to have of nature as this happy, shiny place where deer and tigers and bunnies and wolves all cuddle together in a field full of flowers & sunshine because the evil-bad-nasty humans aren't around to destroy things.
but there should be a limit.
So I'll ask you again to please define what you mean by "stop messing with nature?" You state that you do not want to live in the stone age. That's wonderful, and I'm glad to hear it - we have a basis for rational discussion. In keeping with that statement, please outline for me exactly what the limits are that you're proposing.
You seem to have some sort of problem with highways & airports & clear cutting... so is the limit that we can't have highways or air travel - everybody walks, rides a horse, or rows a boat? We can't have timber products of any sort? No housing materials, no paper, no stable for your horse, no fence to keep your horse from wandering away...?
Or would you agree with me, instead, that applying our capacity to reason and solve problems by learning how to cut timber in a sustainable fashion, and learning how to build better transit systems would be the best solution?
Is it natural to create and provide the material comforts we enjoy every day of our lives? Would you prefer we devolve into a society of pre-industrial hunter-gatherers like we were in our "natural" state? Or would you prefer the nihilistic approach and simply vote for mass-extinction of the species? If that's the case, here's a sharpened stick, you go first.
Humans have a primary tool of survival - our brains. Our ability to think, to reason, and to adapt our environment to our needs. Drop a naked, lobotomized human in the middle of a New England winter, and he won't survive for more than the hour or so that it takes for hypothermia to kill him. And yet, we have thriving cities & millions of humans in these areas. Why? Becuase we "mess with nature."
So the solution isn't to "stop messing with nature" - it's what we do, and it's a particular requirement for our survival as a species. The key is, learning from our mistakes, and learning to "mess with nature" in ways that are less destructive & poisonous in the long term to our habitat. We can learn to "mess" in less destructive ways.
The problem however is that most free criticism sucks. I mean, look around, most of the criticism towards distros is that there are too many of them, arguing that instead There Should Be Only One(tm), ala MacOSX, completely missing the point of Free Software.
And perhaps Free Software is missing the point of the user criticism, too?
When your users are complaining, they're telling you something. I always tell the people I work with - "don't give them strictly what they ask for, figure out what they *need*, and give that to them." To do that, you have to listen to what they're saying, and understand what they're trying to tell you. Spend a few minutes with them, listen to their problem, ask them for more details - it's empathy, pure and simple. See the problem from their standpoint.
If you can't make software that's accessible to your users, someone else will, and that other piece of software will eat your market share. If you enjoy coding for the sake of coding and don't care about having users, don't accept bug reports. If you accept bug reports, listen to your users, and use that feedback to make your software better. 10 enthusiastic users > 100 indifferent users who only use your software because it's the least shitty alternative and just can't wait for something better to come along.
Given that development teams are prone to infighting, politics and code-forking if they disagree with the direction a project is taking, a project leader has to be very careful not to offend the immature and unprofessional elements in the team - otherwise they may simply go off in a sulk.
Getting the immature & unprofessional asshats off of a development team, volunteer or paid, is one of the best things a project manager can do to increase his team's productivity & effectiveness. I don't care how brilliant a single coder is, if he's poisoning the atmosphere for your other volunteers, you've got a problem - coddling the antisocial primadonnas will simply guarantee your project will languish in obscurity and die a slow death caused by user neglect.
Fish, and more accurately, fish eggs need a fairly steady Ph to live. If the Ph drops below about 6 then fish eggs won't hatch and if it goes too high the adults start to die off as well. 6-8 is the best range and we propose to change the Ph is what is already natures delicate balance!! Will we never learn?
I don't know about you, but about 10 years ago, in basic chemistry, I learned that acidification, which is currently happening to the oceans, *lowers* the pH of the water (lower pH = more acidic). Adding lime will raise the pH of the oceans (higher pH = more alkaline). In other words... this might actually make the pH of the water *more* friendly to the fish eggs you're so concerned about...
Only if you download it yourself, and spend no time installing and configuring it, or maintaining it in the long term with upgrades and tweaks and fixes and patches. The time spent installing & configuring Linux is certainly a "cost" of Linux, as it is a "cost" of any other operating system, unless you place no value on your time. In my experience with Linux, I spent far more time learning how to keep things running & tweaking settings than I have with either Windows or Mac OS X. So until Linux can offer a better value proposition & user experience at "free" than Mac OS X can at "$119 per retail copy," Linux will not make much headway against Windows or Mac OS.
The hardware linux can be run on is more varied than the Mac. People can leverage their investment in other hardware.
Yes, they can. But then, this is pretty much a non-issue for the vast majority of computer buyers - most people do not buy & assemble a bunch of components into a functioning system. They call dell, or apple, or sony, or acer, or lenovo, and they order a prebuilt system.
That depends on lots of things. If you chose the right platform, it is not much harder to code something for Win-lin-mac than it is to just port to the mac.
And as my sainted grandmother used to say, "If If's and buts were candy and nuts, we'd all have a wonderful christmas." What it boils down to is, Linux is a small segment of the market. If you are going to spend a significant amount of time and effort porting & testing on Linux, there needs to be a reasonable assumption that that money can be recouped, and by and large, the costs of porting to Linux will not be worth the returns. Because you will see: 1) Linux users bitching that the company didn't support their pet distro; 2) a remarkable lack of interest in buying a piece of software when there's a 'mostly functional' open source replacement for it.
Also, "cloud" computing is having an effect. The more things that run in the browser, the less concern there is over what OS is under the browser.
Which is not, I might point out, a strong incentive for choosing Linux. "Choose Linux, because it doesn't matter what browser you use!"? What about the rest of the stuff that doesn't live in the browser?
It is not all a bed of roses over there on the mac. Adobe has already stopped development on the Mac. If you want to run the next version of photoshop, you had better bootcamp over to XP.
Citation, please? Perhaps you meant to say that Photoshop CS4 will be 32-bit only on Mac OSX, because Apple decided to not support 64-bit Carbon apps - while 32-bit Carbon API is what Photoshop is written with? And perhaps you also meant to include that Adobe has already announced plans for the 64-bit Cocoa port of Photoshop in their CS5 release?
I just would not count out people who like free software and run Linux.
I don't believe I have. I've simply stated that companies & people who are advocates of Linux need to take Mac OS as a very serious competitor to Linux. Linux has generally been viewed through a "Microsoft versus the Penguin" lens, and all the while, Apple has been gaining market share. All those people switching away from Microsoft to Apple are doing so because Linux did not provide them with a suitable alternative. If (and a large "if", I'll concede) Linux advocates want Linux to achieve the "mainstream" success that the Mac has, then distro producers should consider what Apple is doing that's allowing them to gain market share against Microsoft. I think it's more than marketing, buzz, and the Reality Distortion Field, but even if that's all there is to it, they're clearly doing *somethin
No microsoft doesn't make video cards, however when I want to change my PC entirely it's usually pretty cheap for me to do, and there's always windows drivers for the hardware I buy.
Overwhelmingly shitty, buggy drivers. But hey, a bad computing experience is better than no computing experience right?
In fact one of Microsoft's big problems is that any old asshole can go about releasing hardware with bad drivers for their OS. Compare that to Apple however you want the bottom line is that it is indicative of a "my way or the highway" approach to computing.
What you call a "my way or the highway" approach, I (and others) might call a "rigorous attention to detail & quality, and an insistence on delivering a product that works well." I'm okay with that sort of an approach, because to the extent I'm able to choose, I prefer appropriate, well-made tools for any job I'm doing.
But, different strokes right? I prefer using my computer to actually get things done, while you seem to prefer the masturbatory thrill of mucking around with drivers & hardware upgrades. That's cool, I can dig it. Some people get off on that, they're just not in the mainstream of the computer-buying public.
Wow, talk about a strange corollary. Linux desktop adoption has nothing at all to do with Mac market share.
Agreed - I tried Linux because I wanted a desktop that had similar capabilities as the systems I administer at work - Solaris, AIX, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux. I went and bought a Mac because I was sick of constantly tweaking my Fedora install to keep it running. If Linux supporters think MacOS is anything but a direct competitor to Linux on the desktop, you're fooling yourself.
And for all the people postulating that somehow MacOS' increased market share will lead to an "increased awareness of cross-platform portability," don't hold your breath. What you will be far more likely to see is that more software vendors will port their major products to Mac OS, and stop there. Where's the ROI in pouring an additional couple million dollars of development & testing effort into a version of your software that will be greeted in the 1-2% of the market that could use it with this: "Pff. Proprietary is not teh Open Source. I'll just download an open source version which is also Free!"
I dind't say I would do it, just that I'd likely have had a breakdown. I also did say I'd use legal action, not criminal.
Actually, what you said was (emphasis mine):
with the access I had there, it's very likely I would have caused a lot of problems, the least of which would have been a lawsuit. I didn't have admin level access, but I did have access to a few key systems through test accounts they forgot to disable. I could have easily brought down their helpdesk system, possibly their phones.
Explain to me again - I must have missed it - how the access you had there being enough to bring down their helpdesk system & phones has anything to do with non-criminal activity & "just filing a lawsuit"?
This is a cost of doing business. Failure to pay that cost can cost a LOT more.
I refuse to even grant this statement the legitimacy of calling it a different point of view - what you've proposed is that businesses should routinely plan for extortion by ex-employees, and buy them off to prevent this unethical & illegal behavior.
Severance packages are of course a wonderful thing, and when laying ANY people off, companies should always try to grant reasonable severance in order to ease the transition. But your original point, singling out "employees with critical knowledge and any form of system admin," implies that these employees are somehow more deserving of severance packages because they could cause a lot of damage if they decide to be unethical sociopaths when they're terminated or laid off.
Perhaps that's not what you meant, but it *is* what you said. Running your business under the assumption that everybody who works for you is going to turn out to be lazy, unethical, and criminal-minded is a surefire way to end up with only the lazy, unethical, and criminal-minded people working for you.
Had I been fired without that package, I'd have likely lost all sense of reason. I'd just moved cities a month before, was paying for an apartment and a house, and had a baby due in 3 weeks...
Yes, because acting like an antisocial, unethical prick is a great example to set for your baby. And let's consider for a moment how wonderful growing up with a father who's in jail or unemployable would be for that baby, and your (i presume) wife.
The phrase is "life, liberty, and the *pursuit* of happiness." Nowhere is there a *guarantee* of perpetual happiness. Shit is going to happen to you in your life. Sometimes really bad shit. You don't fuck over the *rest* of your life because of some (admittedly major) setbacks, if you've chosen to be a mature and responsible adult.
For employees with critical knowledge and any form of system admin, look into adding them to your HR process! A typical package is 2 months pay plus 2 weeks for each year beyond 3 they've been with the company. Well worth it compared to the risks.
So you'd advocate that companies should pay protection money to make sure their sysadmins don't fuck them over when they're terminated or laid off? You, sir, should take a refresher course in professional ethics. I can just see the medical profession operating under these rules:
Well sir, you have appendicitis, and your appendix will have to be removed. I can do the operation tonight. I'm also need a suturing fee to make sure I don't nick your hepatic artery while I'm in there. You wouldn't want to bleed out all over the OR, would you?
Then again, politicians have always known how to spin things for the masses.
There, fixed that for you.
Let's not pretend that Democrats are any more innocent of worrying about preserving & extending their hold on power than the Republicans are. It's not about "doing what's right for the people," it's about "me, being in charge," for both parties.
Now that Reagan did away with that, Rush Limbaugh and his ilk filled that void and now are allowed to spew crap unabated.
In fairness, the only reason it's on the radio is because enough people tune in to listen. If he didn't have an audience, he wouldn't sell ad time. If he didn't sell ad time, no radio station or syndication network on the planet would touch him.
I'm not a particular fan of Mr. Limbaugh either, but the scenario is really quite simple: It costs money to operate a radio station. That cost is paid for by advertising. If a broadcaster does not sell enough ads to pay the bills, they cannot continue operating. What the successful radio hosts (liberal or conservative) do is sell drama. This, in turn, keeps people tuned in and listening - "to see what they're going to say next."
Apple doesn't forbid you from providing your own upgrades. Anyone that has been around Macs for more than a few months knows where to order the exact memory sticks that they use for each model, at a fraction of the cost.
You're right - what's amusing to me about this entire discussion of Apple's "price gouging" is this: when I took my mac mini which had failed into the Apple Store to have it looked at, the "Mac Genius" I spoke with there actually told me something along the lines of:
"The hard drive has failed; We can put in an order for a new part & repair it for you, and that would be about $400 total for parts & service, since you're out of warranty. But, if you look up name of local Apple certified repair service and take it to them, they'll probably do it for about $200 to $250, so you'd probably be better off taking it there."
Total cost was somewhere in the vicinity of $220 for a new drive which they were kind enough to install, and also take the time to reinstall the OS on for me. I could have done all of this work myself for a much cheaper monetary cost, but I chose to spend more money and save myself the time required figuring out what drive to buy, learning how to take apart the system, replacing the drive, putting it all back together without extra screws left over, and reinstalling the OS. To me, that time saved to do other things that I find more enjoyable was worth more than $100 or so in labor costs I could have saved.
Then there is the argument that laptops are bad for a student's behavioral and academic outcomes. I'd have to strongly disagree.[...]
I swear this is not a troll. I am asking this question earnestly hoping for a real answer, so please, read it in that spirit.
I understand, and agree, with your characterization of computers as assistive technology for children with disabilities. My mother worked as a speech pathologist in a public school system, and I got to see some of the technology she was using with some of the disabled children she worked with, and it was really amazing to see how much of an improvement the technology made in the education of these kids.
My question, however, is this: have there been any studies or research done on the educational outcomes for average children (i.e., without disabilities), to show that giving them a laptop somehow enhances their education? If so, do you have any references to them? I've had no success in finding anything that really answers the question for me.
I'm hard-pressed to believe that handing kids laptops is somehow a panacea that will ensure they all get great educations, because it seems to me like saying handing someone a paintbrush will allow them to paint like Rembrandt. I think for the "geeky" kids, who are inclined to like technology, math, science, etc., having ready access to a computer could be a wondrous thing. But I would think for the other kids, it'd be just another distraction, and I've yet to see this question addressed fully in any discussion of the OLPC (and similar) program(s).
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Of course theists would simply argue that, since God is eternal and timeless, he didn't change his mind "at time x." He simply changed his mind, and that's the way things are inside his created universe at all points in time.
To assume that god changing his mind would have to occur at "some point in time" inside our universe assumes that god is subject to the concept and perceptions of time and space, which religion posits that he created. As an all power being, he is not "bound" in any sense by the things he's created. He can change them on a whim at any time.
The problem is, you cannot argue this sort of logic as proof against god - there's always 'Turtles all the way down' to fall back on when you start arguing specific points like this.
How have they failed to communicate it properly? They were able to embed biologically active molecules in optics made of silk protein. They found that the silk protein is able to be processed using water (rather than harsh chemicals) at room temperature (rather than at very high or low temperatures). What this means is, the conditions required for production of these silk optics will not destroy the biologically active molecules that have been embedded into the structure. Something that, as outlined in the article, has been difficult to do with other devices which require far more chemical processing.
They chose "bad food," I would guess probably as a very clear way of highlighting the possible benefits of this research to the general public here in the US, who has been subjected to stories of "don't eat those tomatoes! no it's the peppers! no it's the tomatoes! no it's the peppers!" for about 2 months now due to an outbreak of foodborne illness that proved exceedingly difficult to track to its source. Wouldn't it be nice, they're saying, if a device in your bag of tomatoes could warn you that there was some sort of contamination before you eat them?
Yes, because when I read about a novel method for creating silk films that could incorporate biologically active elements, the first thing I think is, "Man think of what the strippers could do with this!"
I have.
So you agree with my point. Thank you, I'm flattered.
And as we've both agreed, what was shown were not "real" pie menus. They were crappy mockups of a half-assed solution to a problem that doesn't really exist.
I watched the video, and I have to agree on this point. It's a solution in search of a problem, from what I can see. They decided to build web browsing, screen sharing, instant messaging, voice chat, excel charting, desktop widgets/gadgets, and some level of search into the browser. If the functions they demo'ed in that video are the web of the future, then the future is here today - there is no real new functionality pointed out, it's just a bunch of today's technology packaged up to look pretty. For some definition, somewhere, of "pretty".
I saw a cluttered, confusing, visually overwhelming UI.
I saw interface controls around all edges of the screen, which, while mousing around to all of them might be great exercise for the arm, frankly sucks from a usability perspective, especially as screens get bigger; even more frustrating is the simple fact that they seemed to be pitching the "menubars" on all sides of the screen as dynamic, tracking "whatever you've dropped there" on the right, "history" on the left, "all active windows" at the bottom, and "frequently used" stuff at the top. So you mean, nothing's ever in the same place? great, thanks for slowing me down.
I also saw some really shit concepts for context menus. That cloverleaf design and the animation is very cool and sci-fi looking ("ooh, it's like I'm piloting a starship with my cool fan-fold context menus with swooshy click animation noises!"), but it's going to slow you down and make finding anything a pain in the ass on the context menu. *PERHAPS* these could work somehow with a touch screen, but with traditional mouse movements & clicks, they're going to drive users insane.
In what universe is it possible that nobody's ever been given a pay cut, or issued back pay? I understand that having a major system requirement changed on you midstream is disruptive. But to claim that it's impossible to predict those two fairly routine scenarios, I'm sorry, but that's piss-poor design trying to pin the blame incomplete or changed requirements. I could understand "We can do it, but we'll need to hire 20 or 30 data entry people for a few weeks because we can't batch this particular operation." But to say "Sorry, we can't adjust pay rates without recoding the whole system?" Bullshit.
The story reads to me as if it's politicking by the state controller who's using the payroll system as a club to further his own agenda, or gross negligence on the part of the state government for not updating its payroll system to a more modern & maintainable infrastructure. Either way, they'd be better served by outsourcing it to an organization that specializes in these sorts of systems and understands that back pay and pay cuts might actually be use cases that need to be supported in a payroll system.
I agree with most of what you wrote, except this. 30 years ago, the decision was probably made that a proprietary system written in COBOL certainly wouldn't go out of date, or would have been upgraded in a timely, conscientious, and gradual fashion so that it was always "mostly" up to date with current technologies, as well. Government agencies concerned with justifying their existence in the next election cycle aren't thinking 30 years out. They *should* be, as responsible stewards of the public trust, but there is no payoff to them in forecasting 30 years out - by then, it'll be someone else's problem to deal with. And really, "we need that $20 million to fund this other vital program today so we can endear ourselves to another 5% of the voters. The payroll system has been working fine for 30 years, so it can wait another year, surely there'll be money for that next year."
I do think we're in fundamental agreement - contracting it to a company that specializes in performing that job, and who is also being paid to keep its infrastructure modern and up to date would be the best solution; the government has to pay for payroll services, so it makes it close-to-impossible for politicians to start 'reallocating' money earmarked for these infrastructure improvements to fund other programs that are more likely to affect the vote count next election - the improvements are built into the cost of service. Certainly privatizing everything isn't the solution, but payroll services are such a mundane part of corporate life these days that it's ridiculous that the government wouldn't use one of the many alternatives available on the market and instead insist on maintaining their own system.
Or, even easier, contract with a payroll outsourcing company to provide payroll services, just like huge swaths of private industry do, and stop worrying about paying the ~170 million dollars the article references to upgrade a custom payroll system to a *new* *custom* payroll service that you'll read the same frigging article about 30 years from now, detailing how California can't find Java programmers anymore to upgrade their 100,000 lines of payroll code.
This is not a unique problem for an organization to have. Why would you reinvent the wheel when you could let a company that specializes in payroll outsourcing handle the problem for you at a cost that's probably signifcantly lower than the cost of doing it yourself? I find it terribly hard to believe that the State of California pays people in such a byzantine way that they need to roll their own solution and maintain the entire infrastructure themselves.
According to the 2006 US Census of State Employment, California employed 474,660 full & part time employees. That $177,000,000 referenced as the cost of upgrading could certainly be better spent negotiating a good contract for payroll services. Considering ~22,000 of the people listed in that census fall into the category of "Financial Administration," I bet the outsourcing would also save the state some non-trivial amount of money in the form of salaries that no longer have to be paid, saving the state even more money.
A cursory search using google shows that "small businesses" can expect to pay about $10 to $12 dollars per employee per month for outsourced payroll services. Assuming this is the best rate California could get, that 177 million dollars in upgrade costs would pay for about 2.5 years of service. Consider that they'd undoubtedly get a discount for such a significant volume of business, and the money they'd save by not having to owning, operating, staffing, and supporting their own data centers to perform this function for half a million employees, and I think there's a very good chance that outsourcing their payroll services would be a big money saver for the state.
Of course, this is all based on the (perhaps faulty) premise that any government wants to provide the most fiscally responsible solution to its taxpayers...
From PlasmOid:
From Plasmid:
I asked you to define "mess with nature," because really, everything we do is "messing" with nature, unless you're willing to state that we should revert back to primitive hunter-gatherers, living off the land. The moment you start plowing a field to plant a crop, you're "messing with nature". The moment you start building shelters, instead of hiding in caves, you're "messing with nature." THAT is one of the defining characteristics of humankind - we adapt our surroundings to our needs through the application of reason.
This should by no means be construed as a defense of "anything at any cost" - as I noted in my original response, the fact that we alter our surroundings to suit or desires does not mean we cannot and should not learn to "mess with nature" in less destructive ways. But yes, it's a requirement to build freeways; it's a requirement to build airports; it's a requirement to build parking lots; some animals will die & some animals' habitats will be disrupted as part of this. Our challenge as a species is to learn how to do things in the least-destructive / most sustainable way. The solution is most certainly not continuing to indulge in these childlike fantasies many environmentalists seem to have of nature as this happy, shiny place where deer and tigers and bunnies and wolves all cuddle together in a field full of flowers & sunshine because the evil-bad-nasty humans aren't around to destroy things.
So I'll ask you again to please define what you mean by "stop messing with nature?" You state that you do not want to live in the stone age. That's wonderful, and I'm glad to hear it - we have a basis for rational discussion. In keeping with that statement, please outline for me exactly what the limits are that you're proposing.
You seem to have some sort of problem with highways & airports & clear cutting... so is the limit that we can't have highways or air travel - everybody walks, rides a horse, or rows a boat? We can't have timber products of any sort? No housing materials, no paper, no stable for your horse, no fence to keep your horse from wandering away...?
Or would you agree with me, instead, that applying our capacity to reason and solve problems by learning how to cut timber in a sustainable fashion, and learning how to build better transit systems would be the best solution?
Define "mess with nature".
Is it natural to create and provide the material comforts we enjoy every day of our lives? Would you prefer we devolve into a society of pre-industrial hunter-gatherers like we were in our "natural" state? Or would you prefer the nihilistic approach and simply vote for mass-extinction of the species? If that's the case, here's a sharpened stick, you go first.
Humans have a primary tool of survival - our brains. Our ability to think, to reason, and to adapt our environment to our needs. Drop a naked, lobotomized human in the middle of a New England winter, and he won't survive for more than the hour or so that it takes for hypothermia to kill him. And yet, we have thriving cities & millions of humans in these areas. Why? Becuase we "mess with nature."
So the solution isn't to "stop messing with nature" - it's what we do, and it's a particular requirement for our survival as a species. The key is, learning from our mistakes, and learning to "mess with nature" in ways that are less destructive & poisonous in the long term to our habitat. We can learn to "mess" in less destructive ways.
And perhaps Free Software is missing the point of the user criticism, too?
When your users are complaining, they're telling you something. I always tell the people I work with - "don't give them strictly what they ask for, figure out what they *need*, and give that to them." To do that, you have to listen to what they're saying, and understand what they're trying to tell you. Spend a few minutes with them, listen to their problem, ask them for more details - it's empathy, pure and simple. See the problem from their standpoint.
If you can't make software that's accessible to your users, someone else will, and that other piece of software will eat your market share. If you enjoy coding for the sake of coding and don't care about having users, don't accept bug reports. If you accept bug reports, listen to your users, and use that feedback to make your software better. 10 enthusiastic users > 100 indifferent users who only use your software because it's the least shitty alternative and just can't wait for something better to come along.
Getting the immature & unprofessional asshats off of a development team, volunteer or paid, is one of the best things a project manager can do to increase his team's productivity & effectiveness. I don't care how brilliant a single coder is, if he's poisoning the atmosphere for your other volunteers, you've got a problem - coddling the antisocial primadonnas will simply guarantee your project will languish in obscurity and die a slow death caused by user neglect.
?? I think you meant to say:
I don't know about you, but about 10 years ago, in basic chemistry, I learned that acidification, which is currently happening to the oceans, *lowers* the pH of the water (lower pH = more acidic). Adding lime will raise the pH of the oceans (higher pH = more alkaline). In other words... this might actually make the pH of the water *more* friendly to the fish eggs you're so concerned about...
Of course, nature "adjusting" doesn't rule out near-extinction of humanity due to environmental disasters, plague & famine...
Only if you download it yourself, and spend no time installing and configuring it, or maintaining it in the long term with upgrades and tweaks and fixes and patches. The time spent installing & configuring Linux is certainly a "cost" of Linux, as it is a "cost" of any other operating system, unless you place no value on your time. In my experience with Linux, I spent far more time learning how to keep things running & tweaking settings than I have with either Windows or Mac OS X. So until Linux can offer a better value proposition & user experience at "free" than Mac OS X can at "$119 per retail copy," Linux will not make much headway against Windows or Mac OS.
Yes, they can. But then, this is pretty much a non-issue for the vast majority of computer buyers - most people do not buy & assemble a bunch of components into a functioning system. They call dell, or apple, or sony, or acer, or lenovo, and they order a prebuilt system.
And as my sainted grandmother used to say, "If If's and buts were candy and nuts, we'd all have a wonderful christmas." What it boils down to is, Linux is a small segment of the market. If you are going to spend a significant amount of time and effort porting & testing on Linux, there needs to be a reasonable assumption that that money can be recouped, and by and large, the costs of porting to Linux will not be worth the returns. Because you will see: 1) Linux users bitching that the company didn't support their pet distro; 2) a remarkable lack of interest in buying a piece of software when there's a 'mostly functional' open source replacement for it.
Which is not, I might point out, a strong incentive for choosing Linux. "Choose Linux, because it doesn't matter what browser you use!"? What about the rest of the stuff that doesn't live in the browser?
Citation, please? Perhaps you meant to say that Photoshop CS4 will be 32-bit only on Mac OSX, because Apple decided to not support 64-bit Carbon apps - while 32-bit Carbon API is what Photoshop is written with? And perhaps you also meant to include that Adobe has already announced plans for the 64-bit Cocoa port of Photoshop in their CS5 release?
I don't believe I have. I've simply stated that companies & people who are advocates of Linux need to take Mac OS as a very serious competitor to Linux. Linux has generally been viewed through a "Microsoft versus the Penguin" lens, and all the while, Apple has been gaining market share. All those people switching away from Microsoft to Apple are doing so because Linux did not provide them with a suitable alternative. If (and a large "if", I'll concede) Linux advocates want Linux to achieve the "mainstream" success that the Mac has, then distro producers should consider what Apple is doing that's allowing them to gain market share against Microsoft. I think it's more than marketing, buzz, and the Reality Distortion Field, but even if that's all there is to it, they're clearly doing *somethin
Overwhelmingly shitty, buggy drivers. But hey, a bad computing experience is better than no computing experience right?
What you call a "my way or the highway" approach, I (and others) might call a "rigorous attention to detail & quality, and an insistence on delivering a product that works well." I'm okay with that sort of an approach, because to the extent I'm able to choose, I prefer appropriate, well-made tools for any job I'm doing.
But, different strokes right? I prefer using my computer to actually get things done, while you seem to prefer the masturbatory thrill of mucking around with drivers & hardware upgrades. That's cool, I can dig it. Some people get off on that, they're just not in the mainstream of the computer-buying public.
Agreed - I tried Linux because I wanted a desktop that had similar capabilities as the systems I administer at work - Solaris, AIX, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux. I went and bought a Mac because I was sick of constantly tweaking my Fedora install to keep it running. If Linux supporters think MacOS is anything but a direct competitor to Linux on the desktop, you're fooling yourself.
And for all the people postulating that somehow MacOS' increased market share will lead to an "increased awareness of cross-platform portability," don't hold your breath. What you will be far more likely to see is that more software vendors will port their major products to Mac OS, and stop there. Where's the ROI in pouring an additional couple million dollars of development & testing effort into a version of your software that will be greeted in the 1-2% of the market that could use it with this: "Pff. Proprietary is not teh Open Source. I'll just download an open source version which is also Free!"
Actually, what you said was ( emphasis mine ):
Explain to me again - I must have missed it - how the access you had there being enough to bring down their helpdesk system & phones has anything to do with non-criminal activity & "just filing a lawsuit"?
I refuse to even grant this statement the legitimacy of calling it a different point of view - what you've proposed is that businesses should routinely plan for extortion by ex-employees, and buy them off to prevent this unethical & illegal behavior.
Severance packages are of course a wonderful thing, and when laying ANY people off, companies should always try to grant reasonable severance in order to ease the transition. But your original point, singling out "employees with critical knowledge and any form of system admin," implies that these employees are somehow more deserving of severance packages because they could cause a lot of damage if they decide to be unethical sociopaths when they're terminated or laid off.
Perhaps that's not what you meant, but it *is* what you said. Running your business under the assumption that everybody who works for you is going to turn out to be lazy, unethical, and criminal-minded is a surefire way to end up with only the lazy, unethical, and criminal-minded people working for you.
Yes, because acting like an antisocial, unethical prick is a great example to set for your baby. And let's consider for a moment how wonderful growing up with a father who's in jail or unemployable would be for that baby, and your (i presume) wife.
The phrase is "life, liberty, and the *pursuit* of happiness." Nowhere is there a *guarantee* of perpetual happiness. Shit is going to happen to you in your life. Sometimes really bad shit. You don't fuck over the *rest* of your life because of some (admittedly major) setbacks, if you've chosen to be a mature and responsible adult.
So you'd advocate that companies should pay protection money to make sure their sysadmins don't fuck them over when they're terminated or laid off? You, sir, should take a refresher course in professional ethics. I can just see the medical profession operating under these rules:
Well sir, you have appendicitis, and your appendix will have to be removed. I can do the operation tonight. I'm also need a suturing fee to make sure I don't nick your hepatic artery while I'm in there. You wouldn't want to bleed out all over the OR, would you?
Then again, politicians have always known how to spin things for the masses.
There, fixed that for you.
Let's not pretend that Democrats are any more innocent of worrying about preserving & extending their hold on power than the Republicans are. It's not about "doing what's right for the people," it's about "me, being in charge," for both parties.
Now that Reagan did away with that, Rush Limbaugh and his ilk filled that void and now are allowed to spew crap unabated.
In fairness, the only reason it's on the radio is because enough people tune in to listen. If he didn't have an audience, he wouldn't sell ad time. If he didn't sell ad time, no radio station or syndication network on the planet would touch him.
I'm not a particular fan of Mr. Limbaugh either, but the scenario is really quite simple: It costs money to operate a radio station. That cost is paid for by advertising. If a broadcaster does not sell enough ads to pay the bills, they cannot continue operating. What the successful radio hosts (liberal or conservative) do is sell drama. This, in turn, keeps people tuned in and listening - "to see what they're going to say next."
Yeah, Nazis like you would have us believe that there's nothing else to live for... but you'd be forgetting Natalie Portman.
You're right - what's amusing to me about this entire discussion of Apple's "price gouging" is this: when I took my mac mini which had failed into the Apple Store to have it looked at, the "Mac Genius" I spoke with there actually told me something along the lines of:
"The hard drive has failed; We can put in an order for a new part & repair it for you, and that would be about $400 total for parts & service, since you're out of warranty. But, if you look up name of local Apple certified repair service and take it to them, they'll probably do it for about $200 to $250, so you'd probably be better off taking it there."
Total cost was somewhere in the vicinity of $220 for a new drive which they were kind enough to install, and also take the time to reinstall the OS on for me. I could have done all of this work myself for a much cheaper monetary cost, but I chose to spend more money and save myself the time required figuring out what drive to buy, learning how to take apart the system, replacing the drive, putting it all back together without extra screws left over, and reinstalling the OS. To me, that time saved to do other things that I find more enjoyable was worth more than $100 or so in labor costs I could have saved.
I understand, and agree, with your characterization of computers as assistive technology for children with disabilities. My mother worked as a speech pathologist in a public school system, and I got to see some of the technology she was using with some of the disabled children she worked with, and it was really amazing to see how much of an improvement the technology made in the education of these kids.
My question, however, is this: have there been any studies or research done on the educational outcomes for average children (i.e., without disabilities), to show that giving them a laptop somehow enhances their education? If so, do you have any references to them? I've had no success in finding anything that really answers the question for me.
I'm hard-pressed to believe that handing kids laptops is somehow a panacea that will ensure they all get great educations, because it seems to me like saying handing someone a paintbrush will allow them to paint like Rembrandt. I think for the "geeky" kids, who are inclined to like technology, math, science, etc., having ready access to a computer could be a wondrous thing. But I would think for the other kids, it'd be just another distraction, and I've yet to see this question addressed fully in any discussion of the OLPC (and similar) program(s).