I remember hearing a med student talk about the speed of progress in medicine. He mentioned that if they were allowed to experiment on humans directly, they would cure most of the common diseases within 10 years.
Eventually we will be able to get comparable results from in-silco simulations without the severe consequences.
I suppose we are getting way off topic, but I just wanted to let you know that I like your comments - obviously having been through it you are quite knowledgeable. As a civilian (up here in Canada), I hear things in the news like extending terms of duty, and, quite frankly, it disturbs me that soldiers would be treated that way, although, as you explained in your note, sometimes it is necessary.
Wouldn't the government of China already have access to this same information through other sources? Presumably if they have physical access to the cables, they should be able to sniff out whatever is going through. (or check ISP records).
Also, instead of *moving* the records to the US, why didn't google just stop storing the search records so they wouldn't exist in the first place?
The people who join the military have already made the conscious, intentional decision to become killers.
Really? What about those that they joined so they could get an education that they otherwise couldn't afford?
Simulations and exercises are used merely to teach and reinforce technique
Exactly my point. Most video games contain "techniques" that we should NOT want to teach and reinforce.
No one becomes a trained killer against their will.
So why not let people leave the military whenever they want, at least outside of an operation, without anything other than a financial penalty? I suppose then their wouldn't be enough meat in the grinder. It is ironic that the people charged with protecting freedom have no freedom themselves. Life is precious, soldier's lives are precious too.
Perhaps your comments say more about military brainwashing than I ever could.
The military uses video games to train soldiers, flight simulators have been around for a very long time to train pilots. Obviously these types of technology have an impact on a person's behavior and the video games do too. What are we training are children to do, blow people away?
That said, there is a much bigger problem at work here and that is the glorification of violence: on television, in movies, in comics and by our political leadership.
As an example, I read comic books when I was a child, when, I suppose the previous generation would have already thought they were quite violent. Superman, batman and spiderman were always engaged in violent struggles against "evil-doers". After not reading them for about 20 years, I recently thumbed through a few at our local bookstore. I was appalled by what I saw. They are full of blood and guts and so many people getting killed in each issue, especially in batman, and these are our mainstream comics, and the video games are much worse (or perhaps I am just getting older...).
As one other example, one of my favorite TV characters used to be MacGyver. A hero who was noted for, among other things, his strict stance against guns and against killing people, even "evil-doers". I think the popularity of characters like him would be much lower now (of course, even back in the 80s we did have the opposite extreme in characters like Rambo).
Ultimately I believe this glorification of violence will make our world a much more brutal place to live .
Holloway said that the company has no plans to integrate its search engine into Vista, the new Microsoft Windows operating system set to replace Windows XP later this year or early next year
I tend to think they should integrate it. I would love to have a text entry box along the task bar where I can enter a search term and then have the results pop up in IE. Integrating it would make it easier to search locally too.
Eventually they will have targeted ads on everyone's desktop, which they will (hopefully) use to subsidize the cost of their OS.
Here's a thought. If things get really nasty and these bugs get out of hand, perhaps we will see a "war on bacteria". Imagine what our best and brightest could do with a few hundred billion dollars for antibiotic research?
I have actually read/worked through this book and indeed it was not only one of the first books on Ajax but also one of the better books on Ajax. Some of the portions are now a little outdated, like the discussion on frameworks, but these areas can easily be filled in with a little research on the Internet.
I thought a large portion of google's ranking was based on how many other pages linked to your web page. If this is the case, then just having "original" content and a few key words really should not make that big of a difference in page rankings. Perhaps this article itself was just copied from somewhere and is not accurate?
Does that take into account the expansion of the universe? Is it 400 million light years away now or is that how far away it was when the exposion occurred (presumably it was closer 400 million years ago?)
Up here in Canada we have seen an increase in the number of available positions over the last six months. From what I have seen, the increase has been broadly based, spread over a number of different sectors and in most region across the country. Employers really need to act fast to get the best talent before it is snapped up by other companies. We have not yet returned to the hysteria of the dot com days, but certainly have experienced an upswing.
Microsoft's success on the server side was unavoidable for a number of reasons:
1. They dominate the desktop, which gives them excellent exposure to all the business leaders who actually make the decisions about what software to purchase.
2. Their products are reasonably stable (although individual applications sometimes crash, like Outlook, my desktop, Windows XP Pro, hasn't blue screened in a long time!). All the patches are quite inconvenient too.
3. They have a huge amount of money to put into their development tools and.NET platform. They can acquire alot of smart people who will do good work for them.
4. The huge increases in performance available on a simple "desktop" servers, say compared with 5 years ago, has enabled fairly complex applications to be run on them. (This is also helps linux grow). 5 years ago a person who would have suggested putting Oracle on windows would get laughed at, now at least if people laugh it is not as loud or as long.
5. Microsoft knows how to profit from software, whereas many of the unix companies counted on making profits from hardware. Not a good business to be in when cost keeps falling so drastically for a given level of performance.
It has taken them a long time to come this far, I think longer than most people anticipated, but now they have achieved a significant level of success.
But supply was such a joke, they sent combatants that did not even have firearms or sufficient ammo.
I had heard the same thing about lacking weapons, and also that they would use some of these people to walk ahead and "manually" clear the mines. What a horrible waste of life.
I'm quite amused that this image is given so much importance. Sure - Saddam was an ally at one point; a big friend of the US. Heck - he was even given the key of the city of Detroit. But things change. Why someone would be shocked by this is beyond me.
Things do change, but inconsistency is difficult for people to deal with, and changing from one extreme to the other does not sit well psychologically and emotionally, regardless of the factual reasons for a change in policy.
China had just came through years and years war, including civil war, so to me it seems pretty obvious that would have had an experienced army available and ready to go. Also, in terms of supply lines, it sounds like quite a stretch to say that the US would have had better supply lines than China, especially over the
long term.
You are right about nukes though, there the US held a huge advantage. I also agree it is difficult to predict the future, but historically military aggression generally earns a forceful response.
One reclassified document in Mr. Aid's files, for instance, gives the C.I.A.'s assessment on Oct. 12, 1950, that Chinese intervention in the Korean War was "not probable in 1950." Just two weeks later, on Oct. 27, some 300,000 Chinese troops crossed into Korea.
ooops.
I find it surprising just how far off reality the intelligence community can be. I am not sure why this is. So much money is spent, yet the best answers they can come up with are still so often just plain wrong.
I am sure it is very difficult to do, but given the amount of resources thrown into these efforts, it is surprising we don't see better results. Even with the recent Iraq war it really does look like the intelligence was bungled, and, even worse, people who pointed out that the intelligence was bungled were ignored. Perhaps they should outsource their whole intelligence operation.
They want to cover up what was done and said historically in order look better now. I wonder if the handshake between President Saddam Hussein and Donald Rumsfield will be reclassified, or, how long it will take for someone to dig up a photograph of him hugging bin Laden.
I think if the content is good enough, people will pay for it.
The whole notion of "podcasts" has done audio content is huge disservice. Most podcasts I have heard really are not that good. They are filled with uhmms and ahhs, akward pauses, and often appear adhoc, unedited and unprofessional. We need a better name for properly researched, recorded and edited audio recordings which are not too long, and, as I have before, I suggest we call them "audicles" and move away from the "podcast" debacle.
Non-music audio content has a bright future. I believe though the growth will be in audio books. These must be professionally researched and written, and have high quality content, just like any other book on the market. For some interesting audiobook stats, take a look at http://www.simplyaudiobooks.com/processInterfaceAc tion.php?pId=138&rId=3. (I am not affiliated with them in anyway).
For primarily text based books, it is relatively straight forward to create an audiobook from them. Just have someone, maybe or maybe not the author, read the text into a microphone and then do some editing. I listed to Bill Clinton's "My Life" on audiobook and quite enjoyed it, and also to the "War of the Worlds", which was also good. I also tried to listen to the Feynman lectures on audio (my academic background is in Engineering Physics), and this was where I felt the audio medium did not work well. For technical topics, it is very difficult to covert a lecture or a book to an audio only medium; instead, you really need to write from scratch specifically targeting the audio medium.
So, this is what we are currently working on, developing audiobooks for software developers. So far, the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. We are currently allowing people to freely download them, but eventually expect people to pay for them. Many people have said that they would gladly pay for the high quality audio books we are providing. But, saying it is one thing, the ultimate test will be when we actually make the switch from free to pay and see how many sales we have.
Of course Microsoft will keep an eye on open source. I think open source is of huge benefit to large commercial software companies. Here's why.
The open source movement provides a huge ecosystem of software projects which a large company like Microsoft can monitor. When a large company sees a successful open source project, they know there is value to what the project is doing. A level of demand is thus established. Then, they can do some research and try determine whether or not there is a successful business model which can be built around the project, i.e., whether or not the project can be made to generate cash. If it can, then they can decide an appropriate strategy to profit from it, either through purchasing the company or its talent, or simply duplicating the company's work.
There are few other industries where so many talented people are willing to work for free.
Slashdot Mirror
I remember hearing a med student talk about the speed of progress in medicine. He mentioned that if they were allowed to experiment on humans directly, they would cure most of the common diseases within 10 years. Eventually we will be able to get comparable results from in-silco simulations without the severe consequences.
I see cameras by cash registers alot more than I see the "free if not given receipt" note.
I suppose we are getting way off topic, but I just wanted to let you know that I like your comments - obviously having been through it you are quite knowledgeable. As a civilian (up here in Canada), I hear things in the news like extending terms of duty, and, quite frankly, it disturbs me that soldiers would be treated that way, although, as you explained in your note, sometimes it is necessary.
Wouldn't the government of China already have access to this same information through other sources? Presumably if they have physical access to the cables, they should be able to sniff out whatever is going through. (or check ISP records).
Also, instead of *moving* the records to the US, why didn't google just stop storing the search records so they wouldn't exist in the first place?
The people who join the military have already made the conscious, intentional decision to become killers.
Really? What about those that they joined so they could get an education that they otherwise couldn't afford?
Simulations and exercises are used merely to teach and reinforce technique
Exactly my point. Most video games contain "techniques" that we should NOT want to teach and reinforce.
No one becomes a trained killer against their will.
So why not let people leave the military whenever they want, at least outside of an operation, without anything other than a financial penalty? I suppose then their wouldn't be enough meat in the grinder. It is ironic that the people charged with protecting freedom have no freedom themselves. Life is precious, soldier's lives are precious too.
Perhaps your comments say more about military brainwashing than I ever could.
The military uses video games to train soldiers, flight simulators have been around for a very long time to train pilots. Obviously these types of technology have an impact on a person's behavior and the video games do too. What are we training are children to do, blow people away?
That said, there is a much bigger problem at work here and that is the glorification of violence: on television, in movies, in comics and by our political leadership.
As an example, I read comic books when I was a child, when, I suppose the previous generation would have already thought they were quite violent. Superman, batman and spiderman were always engaged in violent struggles against "evil-doers". After not reading them for about 20 years, I recently thumbed through a few at our local bookstore. I was appalled by what I saw. They are full of blood and guts and so many people getting killed in each issue, especially in batman, and these are our mainstream comics, and the video games are much worse (or perhaps I am just getting older...).
As one other example, one of my favorite TV characters used to be MacGyver. A hero who was noted for, among other things, his strict stance against guns and against killing people, even "evil-doers". I think the popularity of characters like him would be much lower now (of course, even back in the 80s we did have the opposite extreme in characters like Rambo).
Ultimately I believe this glorification of violence will make our world a much more brutal place to live .
Holloway said that the company has no plans to integrate its search engine into Vista, the new Microsoft Windows operating system set to replace Windows XP later this year or early next year
I tend to think they should integrate it. I would love to have a text entry box along the task bar where I can enter a search term and then have the results pop up in IE. Integrating it would make it easier to search locally too.
Eventually they will have targeted ads on everyone's desktop, which they will (hopefully) use to subsidize the cost of their OS.
Here's a thought. If things get really nasty and these bugs get out of hand, perhaps we will see a "war on bacteria". Imagine what our best and brightest could do with a few hundred billion dollars for antibiotic research?
I have actually read/worked through this book and indeed it was not only one of the first books on Ajax but also one of the better books on Ajax. Some of the portions are now a little outdated, like the discussion on frameworks, but these areas can easily be filled in with a little research on the Internet.
I thought a large portion of google's ranking was based on how many other pages linked to your web page. If this is the case, then just having "original" content and a few key words really should not make that big of a difference in page rankings. Perhaps this article itself was just copied from somewhere and is not accurate?
I think the best plan is to have variety in the machines you expose your students too. Keep some on windows and the others on Linux.
For such a huge milestone, that's kind of a lame prize. Why don't they do something like give him free downloads for life?
Does that take into account the expansion of the universe? Is it 400 million light years away now or is that how far away it was when the exposion occurred (presumably it was closer 400 million years ago?)
Up here in Canada we have seen an increase in the number of available positions over the last six months. From what I have seen, the increase has been broadly based, spread over a number of different sectors and in most region across the country. Employers really need to act fast to get the best talent before it is snapped up by other companies. We have not yet returned to the hysteria of the dot com days, but certainly have experienced an upswing.
But iPods are also distracting Apple from its focus on computing, he said, and the company might be better served by spinning off the business.
Given the huge success of the iPod, perhaps a better strategy would be to spin off the computing business.
Even Apple is starting to run its OS on "commodity" hardware (Intel).
I think though you are right about their personal entertainment hardware, especially the iPod has been such a huge, profitable success for them.
Microsoft's success on the server side was unavoidable for a number of reasons:
.NET platform. They can acquire alot of smart people who will do good work for them.
1. They dominate the desktop, which gives them excellent exposure to all the business leaders who actually make the decisions about what software to purchase.
2. Their products are reasonably stable (although individual applications sometimes crash, like Outlook, my desktop, Windows XP Pro, hasn't blue screened in a long time!). All the patches are quite inconvenient too.
3. They have a huge amount of money to put into their development tools and
4. The huge increases in performance available on a simple "desktop" servers, say compared with 5 years ago, has enabled fairly complex applications to be run on them. (This is also helps linux grow). 5 years ago a person who would have suggested putting Oracle on windows would get laughed at, now at least if people laugh it is not as loud or as long.
5. Microsoft knows how to profit from software, whereas many of the unix companies counted on making profits from hardware. Not a good business to be in when cost keeps falling so drastically for a given level of performance.
It has taken them a long time to come this far, I think longer than most people anticipated, but now they have achieved a significant level of success.
... is change from within. This is wonderful news.
But supply was such a joke, they sent combatants that did not even have firearms or sufficient ammo.
I had heard the same thing about lacking weapons, and also that they would use some of these people to walk ahead and "manually" clear the mines. What a horrible waste of life.
I'm quite amused that this image is given so much importance. Sure - Saddam was an ally at one point; a big friend of the US. Heck - he was even given the key of the city of Detroit. But things change. Why someone would be shocked by this is beyond me.
Things do change, but inconsistency is difficult for people to deal with, and changing from one extreme to the other does not sit well psychologically and emotionally, regardless of the factual reasons for a change in policy.
China had just came through years and years war, including civil war, so to me it seems pretty obvious that would have had an experienced army available and ready to go. Also, in terms of supply lines, it sounds like quite a stretch to say that the US would have had better supply lines than China, especially over the long term.
You are right about nukes though, there the US held a huge advantage. I also agree it is difficult to predict the future, but historically military aggression generally earns a forceful response.
What about Microsoft or Google, do they have the same sort of list?
One reclassified document in Mr. Aid's files, for instance, gives the C.I.A.'s assessment on Oct. 12, 1950, that Chinese intervention in the Korean War was "not probable in 1950." Just two weeks later, on Oct. 27, some 300,000 Chinese troops crossed into Korea. ooops.
I find it surprising just how far off reality the intelligence community can be. I am not sure why this is. So much money is spent, yet the best answers they can come up with are still so often just plain wrong.
I am sure it is very difficult to do, but given the amount of resources thrown into these efforts, it is surprising we don't see better results. Even with the recent Iraq war it really does look like the intelligence was bungled, and, even worse, people who pointed out that the intelligence was bungled were ignored. Perhaps they should outsource their whole intelligence operation.
They want to cover up what was done and said historically in order look better now. I wonder if the handshake between President Saddam Hussein and Donald Rumsfield will be reclassified, or, how long it will take for someone to dig up a photograph of him hugging bin Laden.
I think if the content is good enough, people will pay for it.
c tion.php?pId=138&rId=3. (I am not affiliated with them in anyway).
The whole notion of "podcasts" has done audio content is huge disservice. Most podcasts I have heard really are not that good. They are filled with uhmms and ahhs, akward pauses, and often appear adhoc, unedited and unprofessional. We need a better name for properly researched, recorded and edited audio recordings which are not too long, and, as I have before, I suggest we call them "audicles" and move away from the "podcast" debacle.
Non-music audio content has a bright future. I believe though the growth will be in audio books. These must be professionally researched and written, and have high quality content, just like any other book on the market. For some interesting audiobook stats, take a look at http://www.simplyaudiobooks.com/processInterfaceA
For primarily text based books, it is relatively straight forward to create an audiobook from them. Just have someone, maybe or maybe not the author, read the text into a microphone and then do some editing. I listed to Bill Clinton's "My Life" on audiobook and quite enjoyed it, and also to the "War of the Worlds", which was also good. I also tried to listen to the Feynman lectures on audio (my academic background is in Engineering Physics), and this was where I felt the audio medium did not work well. For technical topics, it is very difficult to covert a lecture or a book to an audio only medium; instead, you really need to write from scratch specifically targeting the audio medium.
So, this is what we are currently working on, developing audiobooks for software developers. So far, the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. We are currently allowing people to freely download them, but eventually expect people to pay for them. Many people have said that they would gladly pay for the high quality audio books we are providing. But, saying it is one thing, the ultimate test will be when we actually make the switch from free to pay and see how many sales we have.
Of course Microsoft will keep an eye on open source. I think open source is of huge benefit to large commercial software companies. Here's why.
The open source movement provides a huge ecosystem of software projects which a large company like Microsoft can monitor. When a large company sees a successful open source project, they know there is value to what the project is doing. A level of demand is thus established. Then, they can do some research and try determine whether or not there is a successful business model which can be built around the project, i.e., whether or not the project can be made to generate cash. If it can, then they can decide an appropriate strategy to profit from it, either through purchasing the company or its talent, or simply duplicating the company's work.
There are few other industries where so many talented people are willing to work for free.