How the stock market index seems to consistently return 11% on investments baffles my simple computer scientist mind.
That one is quite simple to explain: it doesn't. Did you really miss the bubble burst six years ago?
And in Tokyo, the Nikkei 225 peaked at 38957 18(!) years ago. Now it's at 18000. If it had gone up by 11% a year for 18 years it would have stood at 250,000. (I assume that the Nikkei 225 is a price index and thus doesn't include dividends. If so, the real performance is slightly better, but still far, far from 11% per year.)
I'll grant you that it takes slightly longer to button a shirt and don a tie than to put on a t-shirt. However, the huge time sink is the ironing.
Fortunately, there are excellent non iron shirts nowadays. They are no longer your grandfather's nylon shirts, but high quality 100% cotton shirts. In particular, I can recommend Brooks Brothers (a bit more expensive but quite affordable from outlets) and Lands' End. (No links. I'm not that much of a shill...)
My best estimate is that I make 20%-30% more now than what I would have made, had I not dressed reasonably well. And really, with non iron shirts it's actually comfortable and time saving.
Soryy, but that would be cruel and unusual punishment, which isn't legal. However, it is a good idea for Guantanmo Bay! Is the Department of Homeland Security duly noted?
If you eliminated patents, you clearly wouldn't stop the scientists, but you'd put a huge damper on industry and financiers wanting to back the latter part of this process. This would result in far fewer drugs getting through the FDA approval process.
This assumes that the later stages of clinical trials would have to be done the way they are now, i.e. through hideously expensive and large trials that cost billions and take years to complete.
The upside of doing it like that is that most harmful drugs don't hit the market. The downside is that drug development is incredibly expensive and takes a long time. This causes two problems: 1. People actually die waiting for the medication. 2. Only diseases that are fairly common will ever get drugs, because you need a large user base to recoup your investment.
If, instead, the FDA was abolished and replaced by a system where untested drugs could reach the market earlier, drugs would be *a lot* cheaper, and more different types of drugs would be available. Yes, some people would die because of unsafe drugs, but more people would be saved, people who today suffer or die without drugs.
According to the late Milton Friedman, every serious study of this showed that the FDA created a net cost to society. I have never seen a study suggesting that they actually add value. A very quick googling on the subject turned up this link. I know nothing about "The Independent Institue", but the above article summarizes the discussion well, IMHO.
Just another example of how free enterprise and secular science benefit the poor by the innate goodness of their natures...
Well, the problem here isn't that this is some inevitable result of free trade, but that the terrible treatment of the third world by the west is the direct and intended consequences of a lack of free trade.
If the first world countries didn't have the draconian agricultural policies they have, combined with the protectionistic taxes and tarrifs on agricultural (and other) products, most countries in the third world would be perfectly able to feed themselves without any "help" what so ever from us.
As a side effect, taxes in the west would be lower and food would be cheaper.
Just out of curiosity, why do you consider this "cheating"? Referencing stuff where you can find it and keeping your inbox empty is just what the doctor ordered!
At my company, we run the office apps in a hosted Citrix environment, so it's impossible to install anything. Thus, I can't run Google Desktop Search, X1 or anything else, and searching e-mail is virtually impossible. (Outlook's built in search takes two-three minutes, typically, which feels like hours and is completely unusable in practice.) Then filing stuff becomes vital, but today, everyone should really adopt the Google mantra of "search, don't sort". Anything else is just stupid, IMNSHO.
Huh? I think you miss the point on what the 2 minute rule in GTD is.
The 2 minute rule says that when you process your inbox (any inbox, e.g. e-mail, physical, voicemail), and the result is that you should do something (as oppsed to delegate, file for reference or just plain delete), you should do it immediately. If, on the other hand, the action will take longer than 2 minutes, you should file it in your trusted system and continue emptying your inbox.
The 2 minute rule most definitely does *not* say that you should ever be expected to answer any e-mail within 2 minutes, for exactly the reasons you list.
I thought every computer geek worth his salt knew about all about GTD by now, but from your post and the moderation of it, I see that that's not the case.
Blaming the victim is trait that has become more common in the average American.
This isn't even remotely true, as a staggering amount of bizzare, yet successful, law suits will tell you. I'd argue very strongly that the opposite is true.
Pouring hot coffee on your lap while driving? Not your fault. Being raped by some creep you met on MySpace? Clearly MySpace is the one to blame. Some punk shoots some other punk? Clearly violent video games are to blame.
Doesn't the stock market need a healthy supply of gambling fools? The kind of people who buy or sell based on snippits in the morning news are the only reason the market moves. They're the ones that provide opportunities for the rest of us to buy undervalued shares, right?
Almost correct. The stock market need the gambling fools to trade, because that generates the fees they live off ("they" now being the stock exchanges and the investment bankers and brokers, not "the market", which is everyone).
Roughly half the money from retail investors that feed the bankers come from trading, clearing and settlement fees. The other half come from "management fees" for mutual funds. As other posters have pointed out, buying and holding index funds is incredibly much better, at least in the medium and long run.
Stock markets work, and they fulfil a very important role in modern society. Unfortunately, they also feed a lot of people who really doesn't add value to their clients ("Where are the customers' yachts?"). Even so, the net value is clearly positive.
No, the (state) lotteries are far worse. They are more heavily advertised, they are designed specifically to allure to poor people and they do fool many, many more people. State lotteries are nothing but a terrible (but shockingly effective) tax on people with poor math skills. This correlates pretty well with just plain poor people, unsurprisingly.
My theory is that nobody realizes that recursive queries would solve their problems, so nobody asks for them, so nobody ever discovers them, so nobody ever realizes that recursive queries would solve their problem.
It used to be that execution plans in Oracle were retreived from the plan table via a recursive query. Since even the tiniest application will need a minimum amount of tuning, and since all db tuning should start by looking at the execution plans, everyone should have run into recursive queries sooner rather than later.
My theory is instead that too few developers are properly trained. They simply don't know what they are doing or how it should be done. During my years as a consultant, I spent a lot of time improving db performance, and never even once did I run into in-house people who even knew what en execution plan was, let alone how to interpret it. (And, to be honest, not all of my consultant colleagues knew either...)
Software development is a job that requires the training of a surgeon, but it's staffed by people who are trained to be janitors or, worse, economists. (I realise that this isn't true at all for the/. crowd. I'm talking about all the others all of us has run into on every job we have had.)
Search that works. Have you ever tried the built-in search in Outlook? I am quite a fan of Outlook because I have been subjected to Notes, which is simply the worst piece of crap ever invented. And the integration between e-mail, calendar and addres book in Outlook is way better than both Gmail and Notes. But searching is too slow and too complicated. And too sucky!
Searching in Outlook works reasonably well through Google Desktop or other similar products. But it's really pathetic that other products should be needed.
Finally, the spam system, while not an "innovation", works very well, which is great.
Nevertheless, I'm not a big fan of giant mailboxes -- it simply gives you an excuse not to use your brain and sort out the emails you have, and dispose of those that you really don't need.
This works very well if you are a psychic, and know before the fact which e-mails you are going to need. But, pray tell, if you are a psychic, why bother with e-mail anyway?
On a more serious note, how do you know which e-mails you will need? I do grant you that 90% of all e-mails I get I will never look again, but it's really incredibly difficult to correctly guess what 10% you will need. And potentially expensive if you fail! Why bother even trying to do that?
When I first started with Gmail, I tried to delete all my Sent Mail and accidentally ended up deleting every message from any person I had ever replied to.
Just out of curiosity, why would you want to delete all mails you sent?
Imsdal's Corporate Survival Tip(TM): Both at my current and former job, I seem to be the only person who save all my e-mails. I also send e-mails with understandings, working notes, comments etc. frequently (as do a lot of other people). Since I save my e-mail, I can very often go back and document why things happened the way they did. And since other people don't save their e-mails, they can't point failures at me, should there be old e-mails indicating that I should have done things differently. This ends an incredible number of arguments very early. Also, people very seldom question my version of history because of the risk that I will produce e-mails indicating that I am indeed right.
I'd bet you could play minesweeper or solitare faster with a touchscreen than a mouse.
You'd lose that bet (for minesweeper, but you will maybe win it for solitaire). Fingers are pretty crude, so each button that is supposed to be pressed by a finger will have to be a lot larger than what minesweeper buttons normally are. And much bigger buttons would mean a much bigger area to move your arm. That would take too much time.
There are people who solve the biggest setting in under 90 seconds. You don't do that with your fingers!
Finally, minesweeper requires "modal" clicking. Usually clicking an unmarked spot is "flag for possible bomb", but you also sometimes have to click an unmarked spot in order to "open" it. But maybe that can be solved by using the other hand in some clever way?
well who are they paying for those airwaves? it certaintly isn't me...
It certainy is you (assuming that you are a US citizen)! The frequencies are auctioned to the highest bidder (but also subject to a bunch of restraints, most or all of which makes at least some sense), and the money goes to the government. Now, you may of course complain that that money isn't well spent, but that is a whole different issue. There is no difference between money raised from auctioning the EM spectrum and "normal" taxes.
Consider for a moment that many small business don't have dedicated IT staff
Sure, but TFA is about the Swedish Social Democratic Party. I can assure you that there is nothing small about them what so ever. (Except of course their IT skills. And common sense. And... But you get the point...)
The left party changed their name for a reason, they stopped advocating communist ideas.
Not true. They stopped calling themselves communists because they found that doing that would allow them to gain a large chunk of the leftmost votes from the Social Democrats. They were indeed correct about that. When they called themselves communists, they just barely got 4% of the vote (the level required to stay in parliament). Since the change, they have more or less doubled in size.
Just last year, the party leader publicly declared that he would stop referring to himself as a communist "because people would misunderstand that" (i.e. think about Stalin, Mao and the other mass murderers.). Please not that he specifically did *not* say that he was no longer a communist. The very clear message was that he still is, but doesn't want to repel some voters.
In fairness, it should be said that there is a power struggle in the party between the traditionalists and the "renewers". A few years ago, it looked like the renewers would win, in which case it would be unfair to call the a communist party. However, lately, the traditionalists have more or less taken over the party. These are the exact same people who gladly acccepted money from the Soviet Union 30-40 years ago.
Those will go a long way to competing, even if they don't have as many features.
This reads like a joke but from the tone of the rest of the post, you sound serious. If so, I pity you and the coworkers you select applications for, if there are any. (Somehow, i doubt that.) Features are the very reason you buy stuff. Not all features are valuable to everyone, of course, but a complete lack of features is useless to everyone.
You also talk about the reliability of web services. I wish you were right, but you are dead wrong. We have a hosted solution at work, meaning that when internet access is down, no one can do *anything*. And that happens at least once a month. We also travel a lot, so we all have laptops. Unfortunately, we can't use them for anything productive, since we can't access the hosted environment while actually travelling. (But hey, I am now supremely skilled at Freecell...)
And finally, the FUD about MS changing file formats every two years is just flat out wrong. How often have they changed formats in the last ten years? Five times? I don't think so.
I knew you were being funny, but the fact of the matter is that while a bunch of applications in the Office suite sucks, Excel is just incredibly great. It does a million different things, some of them outstandingly well, most very well and almost nothing in an awful way.
Excel is so incredibly versatile, which is a blessing (when you are the user solving that particular ad hoc problem) and a curse (when you are the IT person trying to put all of your company's data in proper databases). Excel has a gazillion users, and will never be replaced unless at least all of these features are implemented: macros, graphs, all of the hundreds of predefined functions, pivot tables, easy data connectivity, an extraordinary GUI with hundreds of clever shortcuts and time savers...
And, doubtless, dozens of other things as well. Suggesting that one should use another software instead that lacks even one of these features is ignorant at best, arrogant at worst.
Replacing any other Office app should be pretty easy. For instance, Frame Maker for unix was better 15 years ago than Word is today. Power Point is nothing special. Access is a reasonable rapid prototyping UI builder on top of the worst "database" the world has ever seen. Visio is good but a memory hog and not used by too many people anyway. I have almost never used InfoPath, OneNote, Publisher and the rest but don't think I've missed out on anything there.
To summarize this thread: It's Excel, stupid! And MS Office aint going away any time soon because of it.
Slashdot Mirror
Because Gates' wealth isn't based on the stock market?
It's lingOnberries, even though Wikipedia strangely calls the article Vaccinium vitis-idaea. Strange; blueberries are found under "Blueberry"
That one is quite simple to explain: it doesn't. Did you really miss the bubble burst six years ago?
And in Tokyo, the Nikkei 225 peaked at 38957 18(!) years ago. Now it's at 18000. If it had gone up by 11% a year for 18 years it would have stood at 250,000. (I assume that the Nikkei 225 is a price index and thus doesn't include dividends. If so, the real performance is slightly better, but still far, far from 11% per year.)
Fortunately, there are excellent non iron shirts nowadays. They are no longer your grandfather's nylon shirts, but high quality 100% cotton shirts. In particular, I can recommend Brooks Brothers (a bit more expensive but quite affordable from outlets) and Lands' End. (No links. I'm not that much of a shill...)
My best estimate is that I make 20%-30% more now than what I would have made, had I not dressed reasonably well. And really, with non iron shirts it's actually comfortable and time saving.
Soryy, but that would be cruel and unusual punishment, which isn't legal. However, it is a good idea for Guantanmo Bay! Is the Department of Homeland Security duly noted?
This assumes that the later stages of clinical trials would have to be done the way they are now, i.e. through hideously expensive and large trials that cost billions and take years to complete.
The upside of doing it like that is that most harmful drugs don't hit the market. The downside is that drug development is incredibly expensive and takes a long time. This causes two problems: 1. People actually die waiting for the medication. 2. Only diseases that are fairly common will ever get drugs, because you need a large user base to recoup your investment.
If, instead, the FDA was abolished and replaced by a system where untested drugs could reach the market earlier, drugs would be *a lot* cheaper, and more different types of drugs would be available. Yes, some people would die because of unsafe drugs, but more people would be saved, people who today suffer or die without drugs.
According to the late Milton Friedman, every serious study of this showed that the FDA created a net cost to society. I have never seen a study suggesting that they actually add value. A very quick googling on the subject turned up this link. I know nothing about "The Independent Institue", but the above article summarizes the discussion well, IMHO.
Well, the problem here isn't that this is some inevitable result of free trade, but that the terrible treatment of the third world by the west is the direct and intended consequences of a lack of free trade.
If the first world countries didn't have the draconian agricultural policies they have, combined with the protectionistic taxes and tarrifs on agricultural (and other) products, most countries in the third world would be perfectly able to feed themselves without any "help" what so ever from us.
As a side effect, taxes in the west would be lower and food would be cheaper.
At my company, we run the office apps in a hosted Citrix environment, so it's impossible to install anything. Thus, I can't run Google Desktop Search, X1 or anything else, and searching e-mail is virtually impossible. (Outlook's built in search takes two-three minutes, typically, which feels like hours and is completely unusable in practice.) Then filing stuff becomes vital, but today, everyone should really adopt the Google mantra of "search, don't sort". Anything else is just stupid, IMNSHO.
The 2 minute rule says that when you process your inbox (any inbox, e.g. e-mail, physical, voicemail), and the result is that you should do something (as oppsed to delegate, file for reference or just plain delete), you should do it immediately. If, on the other hand, the action will take longer than 2 minutes, you should file it in your trusted system and continue emptying your inbox.
The 2 minute rule most definitely does *not* say that you should ever be expected to answer any e-mail within 2 minutes, for exactly the reasons you list.
I thought every computer geek worth his salt knew about all about GTD by now, but from your post and the moderation of it, I see that that's not the case.
This isn't even remotely true, as a staggering amount of bizzare, yet successful, law suits will tell you. I'd argue very strongly that the opposite is true.
Pouring hot coffee on your lap while driving? Not your fault. Being raped by some creep you met on MySpace? Clearly MySpace is the one to blame. Some punk shoots some other punk? Clearly violent video games are to blame.
Almost correct. The stock market need the gambling fools to trade, because that generates the fees they live off ("they" now being the stock exchanges and the investment bankers and brokers, not "the market", which is everyone).
Roughly half the money from retail investors that feed the bankers come from trading, clearing and settlement fees. The other half come from "management fees" for mutual funds. As other posters have pointed out, buying and holding index funds is incredibly much better, at least in the medium and long run.
Stock markets work, and they fulfil a very important role in modern society. Unfortunately, they also feed a lot of people who really doesn't add value to their clients ("Where are the customers' yachts?"). Even so, the net value is clearly positive.
No, the (state) lotteries are far worse. They are more heavily advertised, they are designed specifically to allure to poor people and they do fool many, many more people. State lotteries are nothing but a terrible (but shockingly effective) tax on people with poor math skills. This correlates pretty well with just plain poor people, unsurprisingly.
It used to be that execution plans in Oracle were retreived from the plan table via a recursive query. Since even the tiniest application will need a minimum amount of tuning, and since all db tuning should start by looking at the execution plans, everyone should have run into recursive queries sooner rather than later.
My theory is instead that too few developers are properly trained. They simply don't know what they are doing or how it should be done. During my years as a consultant, I spent a lot of time improving db performance, and never even once did I run into in-house people who even knew what en execution plan was, let alone how to interpret it. (And, to be honest, not all of my consultant colleagues knew either...)
Software development is a job that requires the training of a surgeon, but it's staffed by people who are trained to be janitors or, worse, economists. (I realise that this isn't true at all for the
Searching in Outlook works reasonably well through Google Desktop or other similar products. But it's really pathetic that other products should be needed.
Finally, the spam system, while not an "innovation", works very well, which is great.
This works very well if you are a psychic, and know before the fact which e-mails you are going to need. But, pray tell, if you are a psychic, why bother with e-mail anyway?
On a more serious note, how do you know which e-mails you will need? I do grant you that 90% of all e-mails I get I will never look again, but it's really incredibly difficult to correctly guess what 10% you will need. And potentially expensive if you fail! Why bother even trying to do that?
Just out of curiosity, why would you want to delete all mails you sent?
Imsdal's Corporate Survival Tip(TM): Both at my current and former job, I seem to be the only person who save all my e-mails. I also send e-mails with understandings, working notes, comments etc. frequently (as do a lot of other people). Since I save my e-mail, I can very often go back and document why things happened the way they did. And since other people don't save their e-mails, they can't point failures at me, should there be old e-mails indicating that I should have done things differently. This ends an incredible number of arguments very early. Also, people very seldom question my version of history because of the risk that I will produce e-mails indicating that I am indeed right.
Just out of curiosity, why was it considered unconstitutional?
You'd lose that bet (for minesweeper, but you will maybe win it for solitaire). Fingers are pretty crude, so each button that is supposed to be pressed by a finger will have to be a lot larger than what minesweeper buttons normally are. And much bigger buttons would mean a much bigger area to move your arm. That would take too much time.
There are people who solve the biggest setting in under 90 seconds. You don't do that with your fingers!
Finally, minesweeper requires "modal" clicking. Usually clicking an unmarked spot is "flag for possible bomb", but you also sometimes have to click an unmarked spot in order to "open" it. But maybe that can be solved by using the other hand in some clever way?
It certainy is you (assuming that you are a US citizen)! The frequencies are auctioned to the highest bidder (but also subject to a bunch of restraints, most or all of which makes at least some sense), and the money goes to the government. Now, you may of course complain that that money isn't well spent, but that is a whole different issue. There is no difference between money raised from auctioning the EM spectrum and "normal" taxes.
Not true. They stopped calling themselves communists because they found that doing that would allow them to gain a large chunk of the leftmost votes from the Social Democrats. They were indeed correct about that. When they called themselves communists, they just barely got 4% of the vote (the level required to stay in parliament). Since the change, they have more or less doubled in size.
Just last year, the party leader publicly declared that he would stop referring to himself as a communist "because people would misunderstand that" (i.e. think about Stalin, Mao and the other mass murderers.). Please not that he specifically did *not* say that he was no longer a communist. The very clear message was that he still is, but doesn't want to repel some voters.
In fairness, it should be said that there is a power struggle in the party between the traditionalists and the "renewers". A few years ago, it looked like the renewers would win, in which case it would be unfair to call the a communist party. However, lately, the traditionalists have more or less taken over the party. These are the exact same people who gladly acccepted money from the Soviet Union 30-40 years ago.
"will" is vastly different from the more correct "could possibly"
Don't hold your breath waiting for that, though.
This reads like a joke but from the tone of the rest of the post, you sound serious. If so, I pity you and the coworkers you select applications for, if there are any. (Somehow, i doubt that.) Features are the very reason you buy stuff. Not all features are valuable to everyone, of course, but a complete lack of features is useless to everyone.
You also talk about the reliability of web services. I wish you were right, but you are dead wrong. We have a hosted solution at work, meaning that when internet access is down, no one can do *anything*. And that happens at least once a month. We also travel a lot, so we all have laptops. Unfortunately, we can't use them for anything productive, since we can't access the hosted environment while actually travelling. (But hey, I am now supremely skilled at Freecell...)
And finally, the FUD about MS changing file formats every two years is just flat out wrong. How often have they changed formats in the last ten years? Five times? I don't think so.
I knew you were being funny, but the fact of the matter is that while a bunch of applications in the Office suite sucks, Excel is just incredibly great. It does a million different things, some of them outstandingly well, most very well and almost nothing in an awful way.
Excel is so incredibly versatile, which is a blessing (when you are the user solving that particular ad hoc problem) and a curse (when you are the IT person trying to put all of your company's data in proper databases). Excel has a gazillion users, and will never be replaced unless at least all of these features are implemented: macros, graphs, all of the hundreds of predefined functions, pivot tables, easy data connectivity, an extraordinary GUI with hundreds of clever shortcuts and time savers...
And, doubtless, dozens of other things as well. Suggesting that one should use another software instead that lacks even one of these features is ignorant at best, arrogant at worst.
Replacing any other Office app should be pretty easy. For instance, Frame Maker for unix was better 15 years ago than Word is today. Power Point is nothing special. Access is a reasonable rapid prototyping UI builder on top of the worst "database" the world has ever seen. Visio is good but a memory hog and not used by too many people anyway. I have almost never used InfoPath, OneNote, Publisher and the rest but don't think I've missed out on anything there.
To summarize this thread: It's Excel, stupid! And MS Office aint going away any time soon because of it.