And what if you wanted to sell your tickets or give them to a friend. would my friend have to take my cell phone?
Not an issue, nobody wants you to transfer tickets. Customers want to do it all the time (especially if you have season tickets), but the ticket sellers want nothing to do with it (probably something to do with scalpers). So ticket sellers just kind of ignore that transferring of tickets even exists.
The goal is to find a job that you can survive over the long term, but to extract as much money as you can while you're there.
Measure yourself against this.
If you dread getting up every morning, you should probably get a different job. This is true of either job. This level of stress can severely impact on the job performance and personal health. Poor performance and poor health both negatively influence your goals. Don't confuse dread with natural fear.
Find a value for your personal time. This will help you decide how long you want to be at the office each day. Working long hours will help extract money, but won't help survival. And there is a point where working extra hours is actually costing you money because you don't have time for things like cooking or laundry or cleaning or even shopping.
Your annual salary must factor in the amount of time involved in work. If I make 38k working 37.5 hours/week and you make 45k, but have to work 45 hours/week, you're not making more money, you're just being allowed to work more. How good is a promotion if the extra required hours just wipe your hourly increase?
This work time includes transportation time. If your old commute was 1 hour/day and your new commute is 3 hours/day, then your (typical) work week goes from 45 hours/week to 55 hours/week. In a case like this a 20% pay raise just means you're working more, not really getting paid more. Heck you may be losing money if you're driving. And moving is a definite expense.
Work time also includes health time. If one job lets you work out over lunch hour and then eat at your desk, then you've just made a huge time (read monetary) gain. Maybe one job has a subsidised cafeteria which could actually save you time and money when you don't need to prepare your own lunch.
Work time also includes training time. If one job has a bigger training budget, then you're making huge gains. Growing your skill set improves your value to both this company and the next. This increases your survivability and your ability to extract money. Smaller companies generally don't have the budget to train employees or offer pay raises to employees who train themselves, this could cause issues (see next).
Work time also should include time spent finding a job. Finding a job is often time consuming. If you plateau at the PERL job in 2 years, you'll have to find a new job sooner, which is going to cost you time (read money).
Work time includes benefits. You've noted this as similar, but policies like sick days, flex time and vacation increments are all very important. Nobody like being sick, but sick and poor is even worse.
So, figure out what you're really going to make/hour using some of the above concepts. Count all of the time from the moment you leave the house to the moment you get home and add/subtract the work-related time savers. Now you'll have two numbers to compare, this makes the question easy, "what am I sacrificing for X $/hour". This will tell you what your time is really worth.
I'm sure the multi-lingual people out there are laughing at the very concept of "Real-time translation". Unless you're doing something trivial (Italian to Spanish?), this just isn't possible.
Some languages place verbs at the very end of the sentence. Assuming that the computer could understand each of the words, the entire sentence still has to be re-composed in English. For long sentences, the speaker has already moved on.
Other languages, like French, use some crazy sentence structures that effectively do the same thing. A French sentence can be like a string of comma-separated pronouns with the object of the pronoun in the very last bit.
Both of these cases will induce delays and still don't account for some problems of context. In my own personal experience, I've found spots where whole paragraphs really need to be translated if we want to keep the original meaning.
Seriously, I think "Real-time" could be roughly translated:) as within a few seconds.
I'm late to reply, so I won't get modded, but maybe somebody notices.
Linux is not the desktop OS of choice because Linux was not envisioned as such.
Linux is a multi-tool, a swiss-army knife, it a tool "for geek, by geeks". Linux is not the Desktop tool of choice because it was never designed to be. Trying to make Linux into a Desktop tool is classic case of square peg, round hole.
Mac is a great desktop b/c Mac wants to be a great desktop. The major Linux distros do not have such aspirations.
Don't get me wrong, Linux could be a great desktop, but I don't see any push to make it so. Everything in computing is give and take. MS and Apple make specific decision so that they can focus the results. Linux specifically makes multiple decisions (file systems, window managers) and subsequently loses focus. That's OK, that's the purpose of Linux, it's the great multi-tool. But that simply won't fly on the Desktop, things need to be cut, otherwise it's just too expensive.
Until somebody with Vision picks up a distro and makes all of the tough decisions involved in becoming a Desktop, then the world will simply not be ready for Linux.
I think that 1 & 2 would be pretty easy to handle. Storing and displaying information based on clearance should be pretty easy if we can assume a standardized set of clearance levels across departments. Access is pretty much implied by my posting information to the wiki, but there is nothing to stop me from classifying information as "department-specific" and not having it display to other users. These are basic tweaks to a wiki.
The problem with point #3 is that it runs entirely counter to the concept of a wiki. A wiki works on the assumption that there is a "need to know". The whole reason this is in place is b/c people who "needed to know" didn't actually know that they "needed to know".
This whole "need to know" concept inherently assumes that a small body of people "know everything"; we're assuming that the right and left hands are connected somewhere. Obviously this has gotten out of hand (pun) b/c there is simply too much information for any small # of people to fully grasp, so the hands are no longer connected.
A well-designed wiki will increase cohesion. But the wiki doesn't really preclude points 2 & 3, it just gives me a better chance at figuring out "what I need to know". Heck maybe the entry I'm looking for just comes up with a "talk to department X for info", but that's way better than not knowing that anyone was working on it in the first place. At least now I know where I'm going for access.
What you're actually seeing is kind of a "fallacy of management" that they have propogated and maintained. Good tech projects require both Technical Experts and Managerial Experts. Right now, most companies are subscribing to the concept that Managerial Experts will excel regardless of the Technical Expert(s) they are given. So people pay more money for Managers.
Of course, the reality of the situation is very different. But this problem goes back to higher levels of management. In theory, managers are responsible for project success (hence why they get the big paycheque and bonuses). But I have rarely seen or heard management getting the axe for a failed project. It's usually the whole project team (starting with the grunts).
Right now, at least in North America, the whole system is screwed up. The general belief is still that "good management makes a successful project". Grunts are often held just as responsible as managers (and often take the flack) and then a whole cycle of managerial hatred begins. It doesn't help that managers are often taking in a larger portion of the money generated by the grunts. Managers are almost purely project overhead, but they have propagated the image instead that they are the only reasons for project success. This just aggravates existing problems, but companies consistently ignore this fact and continue to overpay (and overstress) managers to the general detriment of entire teams.
The truth is, being technically capable and managerially capable would be ideal; but if you're good at both you might as well be working for yourself:) Until it is realized that Technical Expert is just as important as Managerial Expert (i.e.: they are paid the same), then you will continue to see this cycle of 20-year olds flocking to management and pissing off the guys who do the work.
What I'll never get is having the excessive FBI copyrights on things that were paid for.
For quite some time (here in Canada at least), the previews at the expensive cinemas consistently included this type of warning. In this case a stunt driver tells us about the danger his work entails and how unfair it is that people can just "click a button" and get this media at someone else's expense.
Notice, these are the expensive seats, I just paid the highest price in town to see a first-run movie and then I have to suffer some shill telling me that movie pirating is wrong! Talk about preaching to the choir, I just paid big bucks to come here and eat your over-priced popcorn and now I have to suffer this?
The girlfriend, the friends and I are all fed up. We now go to the second-run "cheap seats". The experience is better and the total cost is less than half (our cheap seats even have roomier seats).
Personally, the copyright warnings and the media-sponsored "stealing is bad" campaign are just insulting.
But hey, at least it's costing them out here. Our big seats upped their price at one point shortly after opening (from $8.50 CDN to $13 CDN). Our cheap seats at this point were charging $1.50 to $3 / ticket with popcorn and 2 drinks under $10. The high price point lasted about 2 months. All but the most clueless or most elite simply stopped going to the big seats. These guys bled for two months before dropping prices again. But it's already too late, the cheap seats made good money, set up a new theatre last year with twice the size and quickly became the talk of budget-conscious and family movie-goers.
So there's my two cents on a few aspects: give people respect and fair prices and you'll thrive.
Ah ha, this is wonderful. It's good to hear informed dissenting opinions (even though the average person would be completely lost in your post:). Personally, I'm your side with this one.
On a small scale, we have an immensely complex eco-system and we're making predictions based on 1% changes. We have no way of knowing if the eco-system can correctly handle the changes. Your concept of feedback is really important here, b/c not only are we assuming that the system has only one feedback mechanism, we're assuming that this feedback would result in global warming (that's two big assumptions).
On a larger scale though, you're really fighting something very fundamental: fear of change. There is a very large camp of people who want the entire eco-system to remain static. Read a National Geographic article on animal migrations (zebra mussels catching a ride in ship ballasts) and you'll see this attitude throughout. There is an intense fear of species extinction and fiscal costs and rise of generalist species (e.g.: rats) without any real insight on the impact within the entire system.
It's like we don't want species to die out now that we're watching them. It's almost like we forget that nature's systems have their own feedback mechanisms (it can "fix itself"). The rainforest is commonly praised for having so many species of trees that you will only find one of each species within a one-mile radius. But why is this better than a forest filled with 6 different species? Maybe it's great for research, but what does it really afford the human populace? What is the optimum number of different species of trees in a given region?
The examples go on, but let's face it. Most humans exhibit a deep-rooted fear of change. In particular, we are afraid of unregulated change. Fighting the fight about "Global Warming" goes beyond logic and science, it's also about fear.
Hello, I'd like to introduce you to a game that generates thousands of dollars in sales daily (if not tens of thousands of dollars in transactions). That game is Magic Online.
Everyone here is commenting about WoW or EQ or AC, but this seems like small potatoes. People spend thousands of dollars to buy Virtual Cards in Magic Online. Of course, a virtual cottage industry has burdgeoned: dealers and independents operate on-line stores, complete with trading bots.
All of these bots effectively operate at a profit, which can net lots of "tix" (one online USD) for the seller. Of course, these tix need to be converted into actual dollars which is where e-bay comes in again.. Tix sell for an average of 90 cents on the dollar (to accomodate ebay and pay-pal fees). Many others offer tix for sale via Paypal directly from within the game, which cuts back on fees, but drastically increases fraud.
Add to this Wizards' "real-life to virtual life" stop-gap. Anyone who collects a complete set of on-line cards can cash in that set of cards for a real set of cards. This was done with good intentions, but dealers can profit from these intentions by converting their virtual card collections into real cards. Collecting a set can be difficult, but dealers can benefit from having a larger scale.
This means that sets sold in cash can go from virtual to pocket completely un-noticed, heck they were never even on the balance sheets.
Add to this that players play tournaments on-line. All of the prize is given out in product. But when winning a big 90-man tourney gets you two boxes of virtual cards (3.69 * 36 * 2 ~ $265), this is not an insignificant amount.
Given the above info that this stuff has cash value, I think that Wizards of the Coast (owned by Hasbro) has done quite well not only dodging the IRS, but also dodging all of the on-line attention. Collecting $600 for a WoW character is nothing compared to some bot-run Magic stores that profit in the hundreds per month.
What you're both missing is that it shouldn't matter that you cannot block your competition. If competitors have my code but not my expertise, then they'll constantly be a step behind me.
This isn't like a new drug that can be reproduced by two lab techs in two weeks. It's not a cotton gin (copied despite Whitney's patent, due to its simplicity). This stuff is so complex that I can give you the code and you may not even be able to make it work, let alone make money off it.
All of this FOSS stuff is completely dependent on having skilled staff and being able to simply apply knowledge that others would need to learn. MySQL is quite vast, I can't just pick up the code and start selling my own "improved distro".
On these big FOSS projects, it would seem to me that not having the IP is a small loss. The most important IP are the bodies who actually know how the system ticks.
I think the problem with the BMI is that it is clearly being misused. The BMI deals very poorly with exceptions: every football player, sprinter, weight lifter is morbidly obese. Marathoners with large builds are prone to being classified as overweight or even obese.
But insurance companies (for example) do not handle exceptions. They deal rotely with raw numbers. I've even heard tell of a marathoner working for a health insurance company that could not insure himself b/c of BMI issues. This stuff is believable b/c the BMI doesn't handle exceptions.
In the health field, a doctor/nurse reading your BMI should just throw it out with one look at you. But health insurers just ask for your BMI. If insurers are giving you trouble it may be worth asking if they'll accept a doctor's note for "excellent health" or something to cancel out the BMI premium.
Well put. I live in Winnipeg, MB, where, in January, the air temps hit -40 (F or C) and the wind drops it lower. We have basically zero dedicated bike routes, but a few of my co-workers still brave the snow almost every day with their mountain bikes and studded tires.
They've signed up with a cheap downtown gym for $20/month, just to use the showers.
I actually grabbed myself a job where I could bike to the gym, then to work and then home. It worked out for the summer until I was shipped out on contract. My co-workers on the contract are the "crazy bikers", but I have sucked out on joining them. The only route (and I mean only route) to work is along a dangerous, major thoroughfare. I've started waking up earlier to go for a run, but running in the dark and snow at 6:30 slowly made me bitter. That said, I'm sure I'll conquer my fear soon enough.
Is is just me, or are most of these ideas pretty anemic? Pathogen detection sounds pretty far out, but much of the rest is questionable. They either want an incremental software upgrade or a monumental leap in the energy field.
Of course you want a li-ion battery with 5 times the power, we all do. R&D labs have been working on it for years, remember li-poly? And your investment? 2M, that's 66k / person for 2 years! And I need PhDs for this kind of work! 2M won't even cover salary and ops expenses for 1 year, let alone startup fees. A new battery is worth billions, not millions, this money is a fraction of what's needed and the 15 underpaid geniuses have to find a way to succeed where other R&D research labs have failed. This looks pretty bad.
FTA: One idea offered $5 million for a deeply qualified 20-person team...commercial version to automakers within three years. That's 86k per person per year, clearly not enough.
As to software, you want a working version of the next MMO, web-based Excel, cell phone search? If I'm that far along, why do I need your money? If I have established a user base in one city or an established user community, what's the difference between your $5M and a $5M loan? Venture Capital is defined as high risk, but if I have working tech and a defined user base, you're basically an investor.
BTW, what's this about the 20 smartest companies to start now? It seems to me that most of these would be bad companies to start now. If you had a working version and really needed the VC, well then here's your hookup. But starting some of these ideas now could be really fatal (i.e. spreadsheet blown away by Google's, NetSuite upgrading their software).
The only way I can see any of these working is for an existing company to gather a team and apply for this VC with hopes of a quick turnaround. Even then, the company will definitely be dumping a chunk of their own money on the project, so I don't see how the VC will get a reasonable cut.
These are not the 20 smartest ideas, just 20 reasonably good ones.
Voodoo PC has name recognition for being the Lexus of gaming machines. Hence their $2,800 starting price. They've been on the leading edge of the curve for several years. So much that Maximum PC has interviewed them a few times about some of their techniques.
They lead the pack with everything from IDE cable folding (before rounded IDE cables) to implementing a gaming rig with no active cooling. And they've constantly pushed to the next level by custom-building parts for next-gen rigs. Some of the stuff that Voodoo PC was doing, you couldn't buy off the shelf.
Even now, when everyone is jumping in to the HTPC field, Voodoo is already one step ahead of the curve. Their HTPC has top of the line parts and no fans.
Seeing these guys get bought out just breaks my heart. It was long my dream to own a Voodoo PC, but that just went down the tubes today.
Several posters have mentioned that most companies can't afford Google's extravagance. Though this may be true, why can't most companies afford at least something?
Programmers are money generators. But they're not like machines, they're quite temperamental. As such programmer productivity is a huge variable in the successful generation of money. Not putting money aside to encourage good development is akin to failing to oil the machine. It's worse actually, good programmers are magnitudes more productive than bad ones. Whereas even well-maintained egines won't deliver 4 times the mileage and performance.
Even my small consulting firm does something. They had special x-mas gifts for a couple of outstanding performers (I was one) and they cut me a recruitment cheque when they hired one of the resumes I brought to them. The cheque wasn't great ($500) and the gift wasn't huge (~$150), but at least they tried. They also make sure to take us out for lunch or beer and food every couple of months. We're drinking domestic beer and eating regular wings (not Google food), but at least we're being treated well.
All of these little things do add up. I wish they had more, I wish we had better PCs and some work time allotted to studying (rather than do it on your own). I wish we had incentive bonuses for renewals on lucrative contracts. But these are wishes, not issues.
Failing to pay your generators and keep them happy is a critical flaw. My bosses are (ex-)programmers and they know this. They can't afford to be Google, but they can afford even less to be cheap.
You've started a good fight, but it's a tough one. A lot of the difficulties with public transportation are rooted deeply in human perception, so your quick comment will not please anybody who owns a car.
So start with the basic truths.
A personal vehicle is the most expensive (common) form of transportation.
The total cost of a personal vehicle effectively decreases with each additional rider. (say family members)
The total cost of public transportation increases with each additional rider (again, family members)
Living far away from places is you frequent is increase the transportation expense.
With public transportation, this increase usually happens in a small number of small increases (to a limit).
With a personal vehicle this increase is generally linear relative to distance travelled.
A personal vehicle offers certain benefits for large carriage not offered by public transportation.
Other methods of transportation (taxi, car rental) can be substituted for special needs.
So there are many balancing points to this whole equation. A family with 3 kids will generally own a vehicle because of #2, #4 & #5. Even where good transportation access is available, it is reasonable to operate a car paying for 5 metro passes every month.
OTOH, a young couple living together, could not make this justification unless the additional time spent on a bus did not balance the additional cost of owning a car. If my girlfriend and I are living together (at say age 25), then we'd be best to acquire an apartment close to a metro route and close to where we work. As long as one (or both) of us maintain a driver's licence (generally cheap) we can rent cars on odd weekends and take taxis where necessary.
A retired couple who have difficulty walking long distances will be better served by a car.
The truth is it's all lifestyle and decisions. I'll be the first to agree that I have met many 20-somethings who make expensive lifestyle decisions without even understanding what they've done, but it's no reason to wave around "MetroSuperiority".
Personally, I live less than 1/2 mile from all my basic amenities and my local bus stop. As a bachelor with a girlfriend (we both have bus passes), we find that we can bus most places or get together at a good neutral location. When I really need a car, I'll rent one for the weekend, or I'll arrange to cab in emergencies or late nights. Our combined transportation costs are well under $200 / month and it works for us.
People who see my $800 cell phone are suprised that I don't own a car. I just tell them that I can afford the phone expressly because I'm not running a car:)
The first time I connected on Skype (from Shaw in Manitoba to Telus in Alberta), the voice quality was amazing. My father instantly noted that I sounded like I was "right there". Just like watching HD for the first time, other phones (especially mobiles) sound so much worse since we've started runing Skype.
Doogie Howser or no, this is quite the feat in North America. Most high schools don't allow for AP credits, let alone 72. And most Universities would never let a student sign up for this many courses at once, so a big hurrah for finding the sweet spot.
In terms of being a genius, I would not discount this man's intelligence, but let's bear in mind some other realities. As a math TA I worked with several Russian & Ukrainian students who had mastered Calculus (Derivatives and Integrals) by the end of 10th grade. They had done Physics in 8th grade well beyond anything I had done in 12th. So this is not some inhuman stretch of mental talent, though it is an inhuman amount of work.
Now, where I live, nobody learns calculus in 10th grade unless you skip a few grades (generally frowned upon for social reasons). This is not b/c 10th graders can't learn calculus, it's simply that the schools are not big enough to actually split out classes and accelerate those are capable. Add to this that some high school math teachers incapable of teaching calculus. So out here, nobody does this. Not b/c they aren't capable, but b/c they're not allowed.
Despite/. protests, this is feat of both this individual and the (normally restrictive) education system. This man has a degree, no debt and now he's being paid to be in school, sounds like a pretty good deal. He's ahead of the game with a good 3 years of full-time fraternizing available:)
CC #s were stored in DB and logs using clear text. Client information could be attached to Orders so one could retrieve enough information to impersonate. One client yelled at the boss for printing the full CC # on the receipt, which was against the client's state law.
I yelled at the boss for numerous such transgressions. But he didn't care enough to use Foreign Keys in a 100+ table database; so why would he care that CCs were unencrypted? What could I really do? I left (for a long list of reasons).
Though I still ponder my own moral obligations about telling the clients that their system is weak. I'm still unclear about the legal repurcussions or even how I feel about who is truly reponsible. If the vendor doesn't care and the client doesn't know (or care) then where do I stand?
Is this really true? Is it mentally better to read the latest Nora Roberts over watching a top-notch, challenging film? As far as I can see, shitty books are really no better than bad sitcoms, they just take longer to process.
It's like Vista. It has no killer features. It has few, if any compelling features. It does not have a compelling price point. The esthetics are poor-quality rip-off of a previous generation of iPod.
This thing is not beautiful, it's not revolutionary and it has "worse than Apple" DRM written all over it. I mean, this is MS, they could've done something different something better. Instead, they've again decided to clone, and this one is going to cost them. It will be flop, they won't make any money, shareholders will be angry and team members will leave for jobs at Google.
And there will be no wonder (from Slashdot at least) as to why the whole thing failed: Poor execution.
Who remembers the UMPC (Ultra-Mobile PC). These things were supposed to have the power of a small laptop in a kit the size of a paperback and cost less than 1k. At least they get points for revolutionary thinking (size, thumb inputs), but then they suffer from Poor execution. The units cost much more than 1k. The two that lauched had average esthetics and poor design: one of the two had a flimsy stand, both had so-so battery life, ports were poorly laid out and important ones were missing (no video out?). The weren't light or terribly thin, so thumb-typing can be impossible for some. Plus, the size of the thumb buttons doesn't scale, so people with smaller thumbs couldn't ask the system to "make a smaller keyboard".
The Zune has all of the makings of something even worse than the UMPC, and that's pretty bad.
OK, you're missing something here: the registry is not for users it is for the system and the system's programmers.
The registry was never meant to be edited with a text editor. Windows APIs provide programming interfaces for populating and storing usable values in the registry. This ranges from functions to store user application settings all the way to functions for storing Unique identifiers for objects.
Key names like the one you've listed are actually GUIDs (Globally Unique IDentifiers). This key is intended to be a unique identifier for a programming object, a DLL, a class, an executable, etc. This key is used for lookup by the Operating System, it was never intended for general use.
These key names are not "human-readable", because "human-readable" doesn't make for a very good key. Again, these are not for you, they are for the system.
My office place (a government institution), just rolled out SP2 in March. As a dev, my "high-end" machine has a 17" TFT and 512 MB of RAM. The "average machine" in my organization cannot support Vista. Some users have just recently been upgraded to XP from their existing NT environment.
Given the cost of Vista-enabled PCs, my organization won't be updating for "many seasons", I would guess 2009 if not 2010 before our machines are all Vista. And even then we'd need a good reason to switch. Our machines don't really come with an OS pre-installed (we image them, using our volume license), so it's not like we're going to be "sucked in".
It's not quite boycotting, but it's also a long way from bandwagon-jumping. That type of time gives competitors a definite opportunity to make inroads.
Slashdot Mirror
And what if you wanted to sell your tickets or give them to a friend. would my friend have to take my cell phone?
Not an issue, nobody wants you to transfer tickets. Customers want to do it all the time (especially if you have season tickets), but the ticket sellers want nothing to do with it (probably something to do with scalpers). So ticket sellers just kind of ignore that transferring of tickets even exists.
Some tools already require 2GB or more per workstation to do enterprise development -- those requirements will only increase under Vista.
Now if only the people I worked for recognized that this was the case, *sigh*.
OK, here's the straight stuff.
The goal is to find a job that you can survive over the long term, but to extract as much money as you can while you're there.
Measure yourself against this.
So, figure out what you're really going to make/hour using some of the above concepts. Count all of the time from the moment you leave the house to the moment you get home and add/subtract the work-related time savers. Now you'll have two numbers to compare, this makes the question easy, "what am I sacrificing for X $/hour". This will tell you what your time is really worth.
I'm sure the multi-lingual people out there are laughing at the very concept of "Real-time translation". Unless you're doing something trivial (Italian to Spanish?), this just isn't possible.
Some languages place verbs at the very end of the sentence. Assuming that the computer could understand each of the words, the entire sentence still has to be re-composed in English. For long sentences, the speaker has already moved on.
Other languages, like French, use some crazy sentence structures that effectively do the same thing. A French sentence can be like a string of comma-separated pronouns with the object of the pronoun in the very last bit.
Both of these cases will induce delays and still don't account for some problems of context. In my own personal experience, I've found spots where whole paragraphs really need to be translated if we want to keep the original meaning.
Seriously, I think "Real-time" could be roughly translated :) as within a few seconds.
I'm late to reply, so I won't get modded, but maybe somebody notices.
Linux is not the desktop OS of choice because Linux was not envisioned as such.
Linux is a multi-tool, a swiss-army knife, it a tool "for geek, by geeks". Linux is not the Desktop tool of choice because it was never designed to be. Trying to make Linux into a Desktop tool is classic case of square peg, round hole.
Mac is a great desktop b/c Mac wants to be a great desktop. The major Linux distros do not have such aspirations.
Don't get me wrong, Linux could be a great desktop, but I don't see any push to make it so. Everything in computing is give and take. MS and Apple make specific decision so that they can focus the results. Linux specifically makes multiple decisions (file systems, window managers) and subsequently loses focus. That's OK, that's the purpose of Linux, it's the great multi-tool. But that simply won't fly on the Desktop, things need to be cut, otherwise it's just too expensive.
Until somebody with Vision picks up a distro and makes all of the tough decisions involved in becoming a Desktop, then the world will simply not be ready for Linux.
I think that 1 & 2 would be pretty easy to handle. Storing and displaying information based on clearance should be pretty easy if we can assume a standardized set of clearance levels across departments. Access is pretty much implied by my posting information to the wiki, but there is nothing to stop me from classifying information as "department-specific" and not having it display to other users. These are basic tweaks to a wiki.
The problem with point #3 is that it runs entirely counter to the concept of a wiki. A wiki works on the assumption that there is a "need to know". The whole reason this is in place is b/c people who "needed to know" didn't actually know that they "needed to know".
This whole "need to know" concept inherently assumes that a small body of people "know everything"; we're assuming that the right and left hands are connected somewhere. Obviously this has gotten out of hand (pun) b/c there is simply too much information for any small # of people to fully grasp, so the hands are no longer connected.
A well-designed wiki will increase cohesion. But the wiki doesn't really preclude points 2 & 3, it just gives me a better chance at figuring out "what I need to know". Heck maybe the entry I'm looking for just comes up with a "talk to department X for info", but that's way better than not knowing that anyone was working on it in the first place. At least now I know where I'm going for access.
What you're actually seeing is kind of a "fallacy of management" that they have propogated and maintained. Good tech projects require both Technical Experts and Managerial Experts. Right now, most companies are subscribing to the concept that Managerial Experts will excel regardless of the Technical Expert(s) they are given. So people pay more money for Managers.
Of course, the reality of the situation is very different. But this problem goes back to higher levels of management. In theory, managers are responsible for project success (hence why they get the big paycheque and bonuses). But I have rarely seen or heard management getting the axe for a failed project. It's usually the whole project team (starting with the grunts).
Right now, at least in North America, the whole system is screwed up. The general belief is still that "good management makes a successful project". Grunts are often held just as responsible as managers (and often take the flack) and then a whole cycle of managerial hatred begins. It doesn't help that managers are often taking in a larger portion of the money generated by the grunts. Managers are almost purely project overhead, but they have propagated the image instead that they are the only reasons for project success. This just aggravates existing problems, but companies consistently ignore this fact and continue to overpay (and overstress) managers to the general detriment of entire teams.
The truth is, being technically capable and managerially capable would be ideal; but if you're good at both you might as well be working for yourself :) Until it is realized that Technical Expert is just as important as Managerial Expert (i.e.: they are paid the same), then you will continue to see this cycle of 20-year olds flocking to management and pissing off the guys who do the work.
What I'll never get is having the excessive FBI copyrights on things that were paid for.
For quite some time (here in Canada at least), the previews at the expensive cinemas consistently included this type of warning. In this case a stunt driver tells us about the danger his work entails and how unfair it is that people can just "click a button" and get this media at someone else's expense.
Notice, these are the expensive seats, I just paid the highest price in town to see a first-run movie and then I have to suffer some shill telling me that movie pirating is wrong! Talk about preaching to the choir, I just paid big bucks to come here and eat your over-priced popcorn and now I have to suffer this?
The girlfriend, the friends and I are all fed up. We now go to the second-run "cheap seats". The experience is better and the total cost is less than half (our cheap seats even have roomier seats).
Personally, the copyright warnings and the media-sponsored "stealing is bad" campaign are just insulting.
But hey, at least it's costing them out here. Our big seats upped their price at one point shortly after opening (from $8.50 CDN to $13 CDN). Our cheap seats at this point were charging $1.50 to $3 / ticket with popcorn and 2 drinks under $10. The high price point lasted about 2 months. All but the most clueless or most elite simply stopped going to the big seats. These guys bled for two months before dropping prices again. But it's already too late, the cheap seats made good money, set up a new theatre last year with twice the size and quickly became the talk of budget-conscious and family movie-goers.
So there's my two cents on a few aspects: give people respect and fair prices and you'll thrive.
Ah ha, this is wonderful. It's good to hear informed dissenting opinions (even though the average person would be completely lost in your post :). Personally, I'm your side with this one.
On a small scale, we have an immensely complex eco-system and we're making predictions based on 1% changes. We have no way of knowing if the eco-system can correctly handle the changes. Your concept of feedback is really important here, b/c not only are we assuming that the system has only one feedback mechanism, we're assuming that this feedback would result in global warming (that's two big assumptions).
On a larger scale though, you're really fighting something very fundamental: fear of change. There is a very large camp of people who want the entire eco-system to remain static. Read a National Geographic article on animal migrations (zebra mussels catching a ride in ship ballasts) and you'll see this attitude throughout. There is an intense fear of species extinction and fiscal costs and rise of generalist species (e.g.: rats) without any real insight on the impact within the entire system.
It's like we don't want species to die out now that we're watching them. It's almost like we forget that nature's systems have their own feedback mechanisms (it can "fix itself"). The rainforest is commonly praised for having so many species of trees that you will only find one of each species within a one-mile radius. But why is this better than a forest filled with 6 different species? Maybe it's great for research, but what does it really afford the human populace? What is the optimum number of different species of trees in a given region?
The examples go on, but let's face it. Most humans exhibit a deep-rooted fear of change. In particular, we are afraid of unregulated change. Fighting the fight about "Global Warming" goes beyond logic and science, it's also about fear.
Hello, I'd like to introduce you to a game that generates thousands of dollars in sales daily (if not tens of thousands of dollars in transactions). That game is Magic Online.
Everyone here is commenting about WoW or EQ or AC, but this seems like small potatoes. People spend thousands of dollars to buy Virtual Cards in Magic Online. Of course, a virtual cottage industry has burdgeoned: dealers and independents operate on-line stores, complete with trading bots.
All of these bots effectively operate at a profit, which can net lots of "tix" (one online USD) for the seller. Of course, these tix need to be converted into actual dollars which is where e-bay comes in again.. Tix sell for an average of 90 cents on the dollar (to accomodate ebay and pay-pal fees). Many others offer tix for sale via Paypal directly from within the game, which cuts back on fees, but drastically increases fraud.
Add to this Wizards' "real-life to virtual life" stop-gap. Anyone who collects a complete set of on-line cards can cash in that set of cards for a real set of cards. This was done with good intentions, but dealers can profit from these intentions by converting their virtual card collections into real cards. Collecting a set can be difficult, but dealers can benefit from having a larger scale.
This means that sets sold in cash can go from virtual to pocket completely un-noticed, heck they were never even on the balance sheets.
Add to this that players play tournaments on-line. All of the prize is given out in product. But when winning a big 90-man tourney gets you two boxes of virtual cards (3.69 * 36 * 2 ~ $265), this is not an insignificant amount.
Given the above info that this stuff has cash value, I think that Wizards of the Coast (owned by Hasbro) has done quite well not only dodging the IRS, but also dodging all of the on-line attention. Collecting $600 for a WoW character is nothing compared to some bot-run Magic stores that profit in the hundreds per month.
What you're both missing is that it shouldn't matter that you cannot block your competition. If competitors have my code but not my expertise, then they'll constantly be a step behind me.
This isn't like a new drug that can be reproduced by two lab techs in two weeks. It's not a cotton gin (copied despite Whitney's patent, due to its simplicity). This stuff is so complex that I can give you the code and you may not even be able to make it work, let alone make money off it.
All of this FOSS stuff is completely dependent on having skilled staff and being able to simply apply knowledge that others would need to learn. MySQL is quite vast, I can't just pick up the code and start selling my own "improved distro".
On these big FOSS projects, it would seem to me that not having the IP is a small loss. The most important IP are the bodies who actually know how the system ticks.
I think the problem with the BMI is that it is clearly being misused. The BMI deals very poorly with exceptions: every football player, sprinter, weight lifter is morbidly obese. Marathoners with large builds are prone to being classified as overweight or even obese.
But insurance companies (for example) do not handle exceptions. They deal rotely with raw numbers. I've even heard tell of a marathoner working for a health insurance company that could not insure himself b/c of BMI issues. This stuff is believable b/c the BMI doesn't handle exceptions.
In the health field, a doctor/nurse reading your BMI should just throw it out with one look at you. But health insurers just ask for your BMI. If insurers are giving you trouble it may be worth asking if they'll accept a doctor's note for "excellent health" or something to cancel out the BMI premium.
Well put. I live in Winnipeg, MB, where, in January, the air temps hit -40 (F or C) and the wind drops it lower. We have basically zero dedicated bike routes, but a few of my co-workers still brave the snow almost every day with their mountain bikes and studded tires.
They've signed up with a cheap downtown gym for $20/month, just to use the showers.
I actually grabbed myself a job where I could bike to the gym, then to work and then home. It worked out for the summer until I was shipped out on contract. My co-workers on the contract are the "crazy bikers", but I have sucked out on joining them. The only route (and I mean only route) to work is along a dangerous, major thoroughfare. I've started waking up earlier to go for a run, but running in the dark and snow at 6:30 slowly made me bitter. That said, I'm sure I'll conquer my fear soon enough.
Is is just me, or are most of these ideas pretty anemic? Pathogen detection sounds pretty far out, but much of the rest is questionable. They either want an incremental software upgrade or a monumental leap in the energy field.
Of course you want a li-ion battery with 5 times the power, we all do. R&D labs have been working on it for years, remember li-poly? And your investment? 2M, that's 66k / person for 2 years! And I need PhDs for this kind of work! 2M won't even cover salary and ops expenses for 1 year, let alone startup fees. A new battery is worth billions, not millions, this money is a fraction of what's needed and the 15 underpaid geniuses have to find a way to succeed where other R&D research labs have failed. This looks pretty bad.
FTA: One idea offered $5 million for a deeply qualified 20-person team...commercial version to automakers within three years. That's 86k per person per year, clearly not enough.
As to software, you want a working version of the next MMO, web-based Excel, cell phone search? If I'm that far along, why do I need your money? If I have established a user base in one city or an established user community, what's the difference between your $5M and a $5M loan? Venture Capital is defined as high risk, but if I have working tech and a defined user base, you're basically an investor.
BTW, what's this about the 20 smartest companies to start now? It seems to me that most of these would be bad companies to start now. If you had a working version and really needed the VC, well then here's your hookup. But starting some of these ideas now could be really fatal (i.e. spreadsheet blown away by Google's, NetSuite upgrading their software).
The only way I can see any of these working is for an existing company to gather a team and apply for this VC with hopes of a quick turnaround. Even then, the company will definitely be dumping a chunk of their own money on the project, so I don't see how the VC will get a reasonable cut.
These are not the 20 smartest ideas, just 20 reasonably good ones.
Voodoo PC has name recognition for being the Lexus of gaming machines. Hence their $2,800 starting price. They've been on the leading edge of the curve for several years. So much that Maximum PC has interviewed them a few times about some of their techniques.
They lead the pack with everything from IDE cable folding (before rounded IDE cables) to implementing a gaming rig with no active cooling. And they've constantly pushed to the next level by custom-building parts for next-gen rigs. Some of the stuff that Voodoo PC was doing, you couldn't buy off the shelf.
Voodoo has been reviewed in everything from PC Mag to Playboy, Photo Pro and Cigar Aficianado. Buying a Voodoo PC is for the people who can suffer the excess of a custom name-plate on their PC.
Even now, when everyone is jumping in to the HTPC field, Voodoo is already one step ahead of the curve. Their HTPC has top of the line parts and no fans.
Seeing these guys get bought out just breaks my heart. It was long my dream to own a Voodoo PC, but that just went down the tubes today.
Several posters have mentioned that most companies can't afford Google's extravagance. Though this may be true, why can't most companies afford at least something?
Programmers are money generators. But they're not like machines, they're quite temperamental. As such programmer productivity is a huge variable in the successful generation of money. Not putting money aside to encourage good development is akin to failing to oil the machine. It's worse actually, good programmers are magnitudes more productive than bad ones. Whereas even well-maintained egines won't deliver 4 times the mileage and performance.
Even my small consulting firm does something. They had special x-mas gifts for a couple of outstanding performers (I was one) and they cut me a recruitment cheque when they hired one of the resumes I brought to them. The cheque wasn't great ($500) and the gift wasn't huge (~$150), but at least they tried. They also make sure to take us out for lunch or beer and food every couple of months. We're drinking domestic beer and eating regular wings (not Google food), but at least we're being treated well.
All of these little things do add up. I wish they had more, I wish we had better PCs and some work time allotted to studying (rather than do it on your own). I wish we had incentive bonuses for renewals on lucrative contracts. But these are wishes, not issues.
Failing to pay your generators and keep them happy is a critical flaw. My bosses are (ex-)programmers and they know this. They can't afford to be Google, but they can afford even less to be cheap.
You've started a good fight, but it's a tough one. A lot of the difficulties with public transportation are rooted deeply in human perception, so your quick comment will not please anybody who owns a car.
So start with the basic truths.
So there are many balancing points to this whole equation. A family with 3 kids will generally own a vehicle because of #2, #4 & #5. Even where good transportation access is available, it is reasonable to operate a car paying for 5 metro passes every month.
OTOH, a young couple living together, could not make this justification unless the additional time spent on a bus did not balance the additional cost of owning a car. If my girlfriend and I are living together (at say age 25), then we'd be best to acquire an apartment close to a metro route and close to where we work. As long as one (or both) of us maintain a driver's licence (generally cheap) we can rent cars on odd weekends and take taxis where necessary.
A retired couple who have difficulty walking long distances will be better served by a car.
The truth is it's all lifestyle and decisions. I'll be the first to agree that I have met many 20-somethings who make expensive lifestyle decisions without even understanding what they've done, but it's no reason to wave around "MetroSuperiority".
Personally, I live less than 1/2 mile from all my basic amenities and my local bus stop. As a bachelor with a girlfriend (we both have bus passes), we find that we can bus most places or get together at a good neutral location. When I really need a car, I'll rent one for the weekend, or I'll arrange to cab in emergencies or late nights. Our combined transportation costs are well under $200 / month and it works for us.
People who see my $800 cell phone are suprised that I don't own a car. I just tell them that I can afford the phone expressly because I'm not running a car :)
The first time I connected on Skype (from Shaw in Manitoba to Telus in Alberta), the voice quality was amazing. My father instantly noted that I sounded like I was "right there". Just like watching HD for the first time, other phones (especially mobiles) sound so much worse since we've started runing Skype.
Doogie Howser or no, this is quite the feat in North America. Most high schools don't allow for AP credits, let alone 72. And most Universities would never let a student sign up for this many courses at once, so a big hurrah for finding the sweet spot.
In terms of being a genius, I would not discount this man's intelligence, but let's bear in mind some other realities. As a math TA I worked with several Russian & Ukrainian students who had mastered Calculus (Derivatives and Integrals) by the end of 10th grade. They had done Physics in 8th grade well beyond anything I had done in 12th. So this is not some inhuman stretch of mental talent, though it is an inhuman amount of work.
Now, where I live, nobody learns calculus in 10th grade unless you skip a few grades (generally frowned upon for social reasons). This is not b/c 10th graders can't learn calculus, it's simply that the schools are not big enough to actually split out classes and accelerate those are capable. Add to this that some high school math teachers incapable of teaching calculus. So out here, nobody does this. Not b/c they aren't capable, but b/c they're not allowed.
Despite /. protests, this is feat of both this individual and the (normally restrictive) education system. This man has a degree, no debt and now he's being paid to be in school, sounds like a pretty good deal. He's ahead of the game with a good 3 years of full-time fraternizing available :)
CC #s were stored in DB and logs using clear text. Client information could be attached to Orders so one could retrieve enough information to impersonate. One client yelled at the boss for printing the full CC # on the receipt, which was against the client's state law.
I yelled at the boss for numerous such transgressions. But he didn't care enough to use Foreign Keys in a 100+ table database; so why would he care that CCs were unencrypted? What could I really do? I left (for a long list of reasons).
Though I still ponder my own moral obligations about telling the clients that their system is weak. I'm still unclear about the legal repurcussions or even how I feel about who is truly reponsible. If the vendor doesn't care and the client doesn't know (or care) then where do I stand?
Is this really true? Is it mentally better to read the latest Nora Roberts over watching a top-notch, challenging film? As far as I can see, shitty books are really no better than bad sitcoms, they just take longer to process.
Let's face it, this machine is sub-par.
It's like Vista. It has no killer features. It has few, if any compelling features. It does not have a compelling price point. The esthetics are poor-quality rip-off of a previous generation of iPod.
This thing is not beautiful, it's not revolutionary and it has "worse than Apple" DRM written all over it. I mean, this is MS, they could've done something different something better. Instead, they've again decided to clone, and this one is going to cost them. It will be flop, they won't make any money, shareholders will be angry and team members will leave for jobs at Google.
And there will be no wonder (from Slashdot at least) as to why the whole thing failed: Poor execution.
Who remembers the UMPC (Ultra-Mobile PC). These things were supposed to have the power of a small laptop in a kit the size of a paperback and cost less than 1k. At least they get points for revolutionary thinking (size, thumb inputs), but then they suffer from Poor execution. The units cost much more than 1k. The two that lauched had average esthetics and poor design: one of the two had a flimsy stand, both had so-so battery life, ports were poorly laid out and important ones were missing (no video out?). The weren't light or terribly thin, so thumb-typing can be impossible for some. Plus, the size of the thumb buttons doesn't scale, so people with smaller thumbs couldn't ask the system to "make a smaller keyboard".
The Zune has all of the makings of something even worse than the UMPC, and that's pretty bad.
OK, you're missing something here: the registry is not for users it is for the system and the system's programmers.
The registry was never meant to be edited with a text editor. Windows APIs provide programming interfaces for populating and storing usable values in the registry. This ranges from functions to store user application settings all the way to functions for storing Unique identifiers for objects.
Key names like the one you've listed are actually GUIDs (Globally Unique IDentifiers). This key is intended to be a unique identifier for a programming object, a DLL, a class, an executable, etc. This key is used for lookup by the Operating System, it was never intended for general use.
These key names are not "human-readable", because "human-readable" doesn't make for a very good key. Again, these are not for you, they are for the system.
Plus Apple just came out with a 24" iMac. It costs twice as much, but it comes complete with a computer, all for the same size :)
Boycotting Vista is not really a big leap.
My office place (a government institution), just rolled out SP2 in March. As a dev, my "high-end" machine has a 17" TFT and 512 MB of RAM. The "average machine" in my organization cannot support Vista. Some users have just recently been upgraded to XP from their existing NT environment.
Given the cost of Vista-enabled PCs, my organization won't be updating for "many seasons", I would guess 2009 if not 2010 before our machines are all Vista. And even then we'd need a good reason to switch. Our machines don't really come with an OS pre-installed (we image them, using our volume license), so it's not like we're going to be "sucked in".
It's not quite boycotting, but it's also a long way from bandwagon-jumping. That type of time gives competitors a definite opportunity to make inroads.