I stand corrected. You are right. 40% of the men who ever lived don't have living descendants today is exactly how the talk I was reading about mentioned it. Fault is mine, not the original author's.
I was not the original thinker of such great insight. I will dig the referent and give credit to the one whose article I posted, most likely with some mangling.
I am not your typical Male Chauvinistic Pig and I consider myself quite broad minded. (cut out the snickers, boys, it is not that kind of broad). It is reasonable to expect equal treatment, and equal opportunities in all fields. But it is unreasonable to expect equal outcome.
Men and women are completely different in behavior. First realize that 80% of our ancestors collectively are women. Yes, 40% of males who ever lived died without producing an offspring. The Y chromosomes that survive today did so by using completely different strategy than the X chromosomes. No matter how successful, attractive, dominant, creative a woman is, she can't produce more than 5 or 10 offspring in her lifetime. Very dominant men typically marry more than one wife and produce easily more children. What it means, statistically is, the subdominant Y chromosome does not get to breed.
Upshot of it is, that Y chormosome takes more risk, it produces more variation. On both ends of the spectrum. It produces brilliant mathematicians and horrible criminals.
TBL should ponder on the fact that 85% of our prison population and 85% of the combat troops are also men.
XYs form shallow relationships over a very wide network. XXs form very intense relationships in a much smaller network. Men went out in expeditions and ships and joined the armies and 40% of them died without ever producing an offspring. Men form groups and their hostility is directed outside the group. Females form small cliques and their hostility is directed to other members of the clique. The X chromosome does not have to take that much risk to realize much of the potential maximum of 5 or 10 offspring.
So TBL might rave against unfairly denying opportunities to women or discrimination. But to expect 50% of the nerds to be women, it ain't gonna happen. Much as I would like my daughter to be a scientist or a programmer, she is likely to end up as an academic in a soft science.
All my friends at more than half a mill a year range have very odd working hours (lots of travel or hospital hours). Some of them are already buying video casts at 3$ a pop and audio podcasts at 1$ a pop.
You are right, there are many many people who would balk at paying 40cents for an episode. You can get them to watch your ads for 20 minutes by giving them 40 minutes of "free" content. People who value 20 minutes of their time at less than 40 cents, are likely to be in the lower half of the middle class. Such households typically have 10K to 20K a year to spend after paying mortgage and basic necessities. The doctors, high flying salesmen and top IT consultants have typically 100K to 200K to spend after paying for all the necessities. If you lose the top 10% of the high income viewers, the disposable income of the rest of the viewers will be 66% of the original, if not lower.
You seem to be a nice guy. Just leave the whole damnded cable tv company when you get a chance. Their business model is doomed and they are headed to where radio is. As you correctly point out, in the advertisement supported video content model, the viewers are product, not customers. People with more discretionary income will be quickly cherry picked by internet based content delivery systems. As the high income people drop out of the viewership, you need to get louder and shriller with the ads and that will drive more people out. Once all people who are willing to pay for the content leave, the disposable income of the viewers left in your domain will be very small. You might still have 50% of the current viewers, but disposable income is very unevenly distributed towards the higher end. Your top 20% of the viewers have 80% of the disposable income. It does not take much for the ad supported model to lose 50% or 66% of the value.
Pretty soon Turkministan and Azarbaijan and the little tropical paradise of Tuvalu and the
Little Henderson Atoll will join ISO as full voting members and ratify not just the speed track of OOXML but also the final blessing. So hurry up guys and start wasting your time coding "pagebreak like in Word5, cutesy£ greek character in front ofî everyæ spaceê likeü inï wordstarÑ 1986"
It does not have to win over 50% to make a difference. All it [google or any competition of MsOffice] has to do is to reach a critical mass. Currently people keep buying MsOffice because this is the only product that is guaranteed to be accepted by others they work with. And MsOffice freely changes file formats, look and feel, rendering engines, so that others can't interoperate with it. If there is a critical mass of people who routinely return the doc sent by email saying, "Please save it in pdf/office97/... format and send it back to me". And if they get docs in odf and MsOffice has trouble rendering exactly as intended, people will start thinking about office software.
Once a critical mass is reached, things will very quickly settle down into an common medium.
What that critical mass is, I don't know. I would speculate it is around 10% of the market. That 10% will routinely interact with at least 20% of the MS-office customers.
A good old example of this is the EBCDIC vs ASCII battle. Old IBM mainframes and their teminals used to use Extended binary coded decimal Isomething Csomething and IBM used to sell these terminals, tape drives, modems etc at a nice premium. The non-proprietary open standard ASCII languished for a long long time. Then when the things turned around, IBM had to adopt ASCII eventually and the EBCDIC peripheral market, if it still exists, is nowhere near the ASCII in terms of marketshare.
OMG I am telling the whole world, how old I am. People think I am posting it while waiting for Social security checks at the post office!!!
As others post suggested and contradicted, IBM may or may not be trusted by corporations. Its execution could be very much ham handed or not. The ISO might yet fast track OOXML in Feb08, or not. Despite all that, the high profile discussions about the issue of file format compatibility, interoperability, archival endurance, upgrade treadmill, vendor lock etc itself will have some amount of good effect on the software world.
It could be that OpenOffice clearly lacks features. But that could be the effect not the cause. Because it does
not have enough traction, not enough people are working on it to add features. Further one of MSFT's strategy is to bloat MS-Office with features mainly to claim this point. One must-have feature by one person in an important
position is enough to thwart the adoption or stymie the feasibility studies of alternatives to MS-Office. With big names signing up and with corporations creating a second-source policy will put money on the table. That will attract developers and the lack features in the alternative office software will be remedied in time.
People know what happened when IE was left alone with no competition. The user base is more aware now a days.
Further most developers have stopped trying to come up with the next killer application on the Windows platform. If they really come up with a real run away hit, MSFT will create a me-too app in the next release and usurp the market. So where is the incentive to create killer applications or run-away hits? That is one of the reasons why people looking to hit home runs look at the web not the stand alone PC.
This is precisely the problem with the youth of today compared to my Great Generation. Just one gamer kicks the bucket and 100 others run away from the scene scared. Come on guys, show some courage. Show some sticktoitiveness.
You think it is a troll? You will find a few columnists draw attention to the fact that the pesky Europeans are acting against an American company. You might even see a few congressmen say that. That effect is real. You will find in this very thread who will see MSFT a victim of bullying by foreign governments.
You work with MS-Office and my secretary uses OpenOffice. Complete and perfect exchange of documents possible? Why the file formats keep changing in MSFT? Why it works extra hard to make sure other systems don't interoperate with it? Why is it possible to mount Unix/Linux filesystems easily as network shares in a PC but it is practically impossible to mount a PC file system in Linux? Why can't a dual boot pc read/write partitions that can be used by the "other" system? Why can't MSFT and Linux produce a common ext3/ntfs file system read/write by both? Why can't email/calender applications of linux universe and windows universe can't interoperate? It is exactly same as Samsung TV refusing to play anything other than a Samsung DVD player. Customers would reject it immediately. Corporate suits buy and install and switch over to MSFT exchange server and then run on the upgrade treadmill all their lives. Why?
Big as it is, 600 m$ is chump change for MSFT and it would shrug and treat it as cost of doing business. Further this creates a "rally around our flag" effect kind of support of MSFT. Many Americans would go, "The damned Europeans, the gall they have punishing a Red White an Blue company..".
What I would really like to see is that the customers of MSFT see that it is in their best interest in having an alternative to MSFT in the desktop, server, office documentation products arena that will benefit by perfect 100% compatible interoperability. No customer would buy a Samsung TV that can play only Samsung DVD player. But why these corporations don't demand such compatibility?
One answer is that, MSFT tax is not very big. Just 40 billion dollars a year max. For most companies, payroll, medical insurance, office rent, furniture, liability insurance, transportation, travel etc cost more than office PC/laptop. So they are not looking for savings here.
Second, companies only focus on the differentials with their competitor. Stated differently, Coke does not care how much it spends on pc/laptops and office software as long as its competitor, Pepsi, is not spending a significantly lower amount on the same category. This explains the herd like behavior of the corporations. No body looked to outsource to India till about year 2000. One did. Showed some possible cost savings. Whether or not the savings were real, that first company's investment in India is real. Suddenly every suit is asking, "what if it pays off big time for them? What if we get left behind. Let us play it safe, hedge our bets and let us also have a presence in India."
I don't know when it will happen. But at some point some big company would make it a priority to have a second vendor in the office software arena, and invest a sum to show it is serious. Like a herd every suit who was asking, "What is our India strategy?" would be asking "What is our second vendor for office strategy?". Of course, not without some serious kicking and screaming and "Total cost of ownership" studies funded by MSFT. But when the corporate pendulum swings, it swings inexorably and usually it will go well past what is reasonable reach the other irrational extreme, corporations investing so much on "second vendor" strategy that the saving don't justify the investment. But that won't deter these suits, It never has.
Why would MSFT fix a security hole? They never bothered about security holes. The fix proposed by Samba would work both in MSFT solution and the open source solution. That is a definite no-no.
MSFT will take a while to come up with a fix to that security hole that is covered by some patent or something. That way only the MSFT implementation would be free of that hole while samba team would be handicapped. I am tempted to say MSFT intentionally created the hole in protocol, but they it is not likely. Security holes are never seen by MSFT and finally when others spot it, they use the fix as an excuse to create more hurdles for other platforms.
Well, the logical conclusion is that everything became possible because the Australopithecus Africanus discovered that the stones could be used as projectiles and gradually learned to use it as a tool. From there it is just a short skip and jump to the taming of fire, the domestication of dog, invention of agriculture, domestication of other animals, the invention of wheel, invention of script, invention of paper, invention of the printing press..
Next thing you know another Boreopithecus Redmondanus is throwing chairs instead of stones.
But don't say anything about people who sold them the brain dead computer that will allow drive by downloads. Protect companies that sold insecure software. But these damn phishermen, lock them away in prison. These blokes probably get better food in a German prison than in their farm in Ukraine. But that is not the issue. And there could be more phishermen from where they come from, but that is not an issue.
Let us say people park their cars without locks in a high crime neighborhood and the car gets stolen. May be the police should just shrug and say, "whatd'ya expect?" That will teach the losers security, automobile or computers, is at least partly their responsibility.
bah! Humbug!!. Most lawyers can't program even in VCR+ And we can code using C++ Ergo we are way smarter than the lawyers. If lawyers are so smart why aren't they posting in slashdot? Explain that smarty pants.
I posted the GP too. Let me amend my question:
What makes you think you have an inalienable right to accurate and safe making instructions on the internet?
One good thing about all these things is that, pretty soon people will be so horrified by
the user experience in the Windows, they will be pushed into adopting Linux. After all it
is the well integrated pop-up blocker that created the initial mass of downloads for
Firefox.
How do you know these guys did not have a virus or a trojan? Why immediately and jump MSFT? One of the first things a trojan would do now a days is to disable windows update or protect itself from update. So first prove it is not a virus and something emerging from Redmond before you blame MSFT.
The way inkjets work, they heat a micro droplet of the ink so much so that it emerges from the nozzle explosively and hits the paper. I wonder how much of the potency of the delicate drugs would remain after they have been subjected to so much of pressure and heat. Would they react with the metal/plastic in the nozzle?
I should have known better than to cut and paste whole postings from the jihadi discussion fora to rebut them point by point. Now if that software can't tell from semantic structure, what I said and what I quoted, I can expect some visitors, look like. May be I will post in Slashdot and display some esoteric knowledge like the plural for forum is fora and may be that will throw a monkey's wrench into their Beysian filters. Ha ha ha.
Slashdot Mirror
Technically you are correct, but I would have preferred if you have not used the term "ripped off". I mentioned my source and posted a link too.
I stand corrected. You are right. 40% of the men who ever lived don't have living descendants today is exactly how the talk I was reading about mentioned it. Fault is mine, not the original author's.
Is There Anything Good About Men? by Roy F. Baumeister is the original author whose ideas I tried to paraphrase. Forgive my errors.
I was not the original thinker of such great insight. I will dig the referent and give credit to the one whose article I posted, most likely with some mangling.
Men and women are completely different in behavior. First realize that 80% of our ancestors collectively are women. Yes, 40% of males who ever lived died without producing an offspring. The Y chromosomes that survive today did so by using completely different strategy than the X chromosomes. No matter how successful, attractive, dominant, creative a woman is, she can't produce more than 5 or 10 offspring in her lifetime. Very dominant men typically marry more than one wife and produce easily more children. What it means, statistically is, the subdominant Y chromosome does not get to breed.
Upshot of it is, that Y chormosome takes more risk, it produces more variation. On both ends of the spectrum. It produces brilliant mathematicians and horrible criminals. TBL should ponder on the fact that 85% of our prison population and 85% of the combat troops are also men. XYs form shallow relationships over a very wide network. XXs form very intense relationships in a much smaller network. Men went out in expeditions and ships and joined the armies and 40% of them died without ever producing an offspring. Men form groups and their hostility is directed outside the group. Females form small cliques and their hostility is directed to other members of the clique. The X chromosome does not have to take that much risk to realize much of the potential maximum of 5 or 10 offspring.
So TBL might rave against unfairly denying opportunities to women or discrimination. But to expect 50% of the nerds to be women, it ain't gonna happen. Much as I would like my daughter to be a scientist or a programmer, she is likely to end up as an academic in a soft science.
You are right, there are many many people who would balk at paying 40cents for an episode. You can get them to watch your ads for 20 minutes by giving them 40 minutes of "free" content. People who value 20 minutes of their time at less than 40 cents, are likely to be in the lower half of the middle class. Such households typically have 10K to 20K a year to spend after paying mortgage and basic necessities. The doctors, high flying salesmen and top IT consultants have typically 100K to 200K to spend after paying for all the necessities. If you lose the top 10% of the high income viewers, the disposable income of the rest of the viewers will be 66% of the original, if not lower.
You seem to be a nice guy. Just leave the whole damnded cable tv company when you get a chance. Their business model is doomed and they are headed to where radio is. As you correctly point out, in the advertisement supported video content model, the viewers are product, not customers. People with more discretionary income will be quickly cherry picked by internet based content delivery systems. As the high income people drop out of the viewership, you need to get louder and shriller with the ads and that will drive more people out. Once all people who are willing to pay for the content leave, the disposable income of the viewers left in your domain will be very small. You might still have 50% of the current viewers, but disposable income is very unevenly distributed towards the higher end. Your top 20% of the viewers have 80% of the disposable income. It does not take much for the ad supported model to lose 50% or 66% of the value.
[ducks and runs away and hides]
It is called gcc. Write your own damned code buddy.
What that critical mass is, I don't know. I would speculate it is around 10% of the market. That 10% will routinely interact with at least 20% of the MS-office customers.
A good old example of this is the EBCDIC vs ASCII battle. Old IBM mainframes and their teminals used to use Extended binary coded decimal Isomething Csomething and IBM used to sell these terminals, tape drives, modems etc at a nice premium. The non-proprietary open standard ASCII languished for a long long time. Then when the things turned around, IBM had to adopt ASCII eventually and the EBCDIC peripheral market, if it still exists, is nowhere near the ASCII in terms of marketshare.
OMG I am telling the whole world, how old I am. People think I am posting it while waiting for Social security checks at the post office!!!
It could be that OpenOffice clearly lacks features. But that could be the effect not the cause. Because it does not have enough traction, not enough people are working on it to add features. Further one of MSFT's strategy is to bloat MS-Office with features mainly to claim this point. One must-have feature by one person in an important position is enough to thwart the adoption or stymie the feasibility studies of alternatives to MS-Office. With big names signing up and with corporations creating a second-source policy will put money on the table. That will attract developers and the lack features in the alternative office software will be remedied in time.
People know what happened when IE was left alone with no competition. The user base is more aware now a days. Further most developers have stopped trying to come up with the next killer application on the Windows platform. If they really come up with a real run away hit, MSFT will create a me-too app in the next release and usurp the market. So where is the incentive to create killer applications or run-away hits? That is one of the reasons why people looking to hit home runs look at the web not the stand alone PC.
This is precisely the problem with the youth of today compared to my Great Generation. Just one gamer kicks the bucket and 100 others run away from the scene scared. Come on guys, show some courage. Show some sticktoitiveness.
... the lead paint on the game controller.
You think it is a troll? You will find a few columnists draw attention to the fact that the pesky Europeans are acting against an American company. You might even see a few congressmen say that. That effect is real. You will find in this very thread who will see MSFT a victim of bullying by foreign governments.
You work with MS-Office and my secretary uses OpenOffice. Complete and perfect exchange of documents possible? Why the file formats keep changing in MSFT? Why it works extra hard to make sure other systems don't interoperate with it? Why is it possible to mount Unix/Linux filesystems easily as network shares in a PC but it is practically impossible to mount a PC file system in Linux? Why can't a dual boot pc read/write partitions that can be used by the "other" system? Why can't MSFT and Linux produce a common ext3/ntfs file system read/write by both? Why can't email/calender applications of linux universe and windows universe can't interoperate? It is exactly same as Samsung TV refusing to play anything other than a Samsung DVD player. Customers would reject it immediately. Corporate suits buy and install and switch over to MSFT exchange server and then run on the upgrade treadmill all their lives. Why?
What I would really like to see is that the customers of MSFT see that it is in their best interest in having an alternative to MSFT in the desktop, server, office documentation products arena that will benefit by perfect 100% compatible interoperability. No customer would buy a Samsung TV that can play only Samsung DVD player. But why these corporations don't demand such compatibility?
One answer is that, MSFT tax is not very big. Just 40 billion dollars a year max. For most companies, payroll, medical insurance, office rent, furniture, liability insurance, transportation, travel etc cost more than office PC/laptop. So they are not looking for savings here.
Second, companies only focus on the differentials with their competitor. Stated differently, Coke does not care how much it spends on pc/laptops and office software as long as its competitor, Pepsi, is not spending a significantly lower amount on the same category. This explains the herd like behavior of the corporations. No body looked to outsource to India till about year 2000. One did. Showed some possible cost savings. Whether or not the savings were real, that first company's investment in India is real. Suddenly every suit is asking, "what if it pays off big time for them? What if we get left behind. Let us play it safe, hedge our bets and let us also have a presence in India."
I don't know when it will happen. But at some point some big company would make it a priority to have a second vendor in the office software arena, and invest a sum to show it is serious. Like a herd every suit who was asking, "What is our India strategy?" would be asking "What is our second vendor for office strategy?". Of course, not without some serious kicking and screaming and "Total cost of ownership" studies funded by MSFT. But when the corporate pendulum swings, it swings inexorably and usually it will go well past what is reasonable reach the other irrational extreme, corporations investing so much on "second vendor" strategy that the saving don't justify the investment. But that won't deter these suits, It never has.
MSFT will take a while to come up with a fix to that security hole that is covered by some patent or something. That way only the MSFT implementation would be free of that hole while samba team would be handicapped. I am tempted to say MSFT intentionally created the hole in protocol, but they it is not likely. Security holes are never seen by MSFT and finally when others spot it, they use the fix as an excuse to create more hurdles for other platforms.
Next thing you know another Boreopithecus Redmondanus is throwing chairs instead of stones.
Let us say people park their cars without locks in a high crime neighborhood and the car gets stolen. May be the police should just shrug and say, "whatd'ya expect?" That will teach the losers security, automobile or computers, is at least partly their responsibility.
bah! Humbug!!. Most lawyers can't program even in VCR+ And we can code using C++ Ergo we are way smarter than the lawyers. If lawyers are so smart why aren't they posting in slashdot? Explain that smarty pants.
I posted the GP too. Let me amend my question: What makes you think you have an inalienable right to accurate and safe making instructions on the internet?
One good thing about all these things is that, pretty soon people will be so horrified by the user experience in the Windows, they will be pushed into adopting Linux. After all it is the well integrated pop-up blocker that created the initial mass of downloads for Firefox.
How do you know these guys did not have a virus or a trojan? Why immediately and jump MSFT? One of the first things a trojan would do now a days is to disable windows update or protect itself from update. So first prove it is not a virus and something emerging from Redmond before you blame MSFT.
The way inkjets work, they heat a micro droplet of the ink so much so that it emerges from the nozzle explosively and hits the paper. I wonder how much of the potency of the delicate drugs would remain after they have been subjected to so much of pressure and heat. Would they react with the metal/plastic in the nozzle?
I should have known better than to cut and paste whole postings from the jihadi discussion fora to rebut them point by point. Now if that software can't tell from semantic structure, what I said and what I quoted, I can expect some visitors, look like. May be I will post in Slashdot and display some esoteric knowledge like the plural for forum is fora and may be that will throw a monkey's wrench into their Beysian filters. Ha ha ha.