Anything else that one can use to try and have a clearer view of its audience?
How about providing a monetary incentive to your audience to describe to you what they think they want, who they think they are, etc?
Something like the side bar menu on Slashdot, where if you click the hidden survey gif button and answer 20 questions about your likes and dislikes OSDL sends you a check for $30.
but look at what portion of the Federal and state budgets go to aid the poor
On average, less than 0.6 cents of every dollar paid out in Social Security benefits goes to pay administrative costs. The expense ratio is right down there with reasonable mutual fund index funds.
But, to be fair, social security benefits don't need to be screened to determine whether beneficiaries truly qualify as poor - we all get social security benefits regardless of how wealthy we are. [Kind of like Permanent Fund Dividend checks - I used to get those too, while I lived in AK.:)]
The hard part is that human nature being what it is, you have to spend some resources before giving money away if you only want to direct it efficiently towards the truly needy. Otherwise, people who are lazy and clever will opt to receive benefits they don't really need, burden taxpayers unnecessarily and promote a unhealthy lifestyle of parasitic dependence. You have to spend some time (or pay someone to spend the time) figuring out if someone is truly needy (and there are plenty of people that are suffering and need help) or whether they're trying to game the system.
Designing an efficient social welfare system that discriminates correctly is probably at least as hard as devising the perfect spam filter.
Bill Gates is one of the largest constributor to non-profit organizations.
Bill Gates has the advantage of owning what amounts to a privately-owned tax and revenue system (Windows monopoly).
I'll credit Bill and Melinda Gates for what they've done to help charitable causes, particularly the childhood immunization programs in Africa.
But, were the government to levy a comparably-sized tax on purchasers of software they'd be able to give a larger fraction of it to the people in need, notwithstanding all the teeth-gnashing anecdotes of government inefficiency and how inherently evil a "tax" happens to be.
[Just like the tax that we all pay to the people sitting on top of the world's petroleum reserves. The OPEC monopoly can create an artificial price far above the cost of production and collect it. But if the government tried to put an extra US$0.25 per gallon tax on gasoline there would be no end of complaining (said as our current pump prices go up).
I slogged through the instruction booklet for a weekend, reading, entering numbers, etc. and agonized went I got diverted into ancillary worksheets hidden in the booklet. Talk about stealth bureaucracy!
But think about the Line by Line process of filling out the tax form. It's just a bunch of notices and instructions which could naturally be recast into any programming language that can print out a descriptive text, accept numerical input values and do simple arithmetic.
Most of the entries could be answered with "This doesn't apply to me - enter zero." as default answers.
In the longer run, releasing a programming language version of the tax form makes sense because the same 1099 forms that are sent to the IRS electronically could be made available to you as you fill out the form (assuming you can identify and authenticate yourself).
No, it shouldn't be SomeVendors closed proprietary solution..
Based on my recent experience I'd say 2 things will kill off DVD:
Rental DVD's get mauled to the point where they aren't viewable very quickly. Both DVDs I rented last weekend had aggravating gaps in them (yes, I did the wash with mild soap & water, isopropyl alcohol rinse, lint-free cloth dry, tried a different DVD player).
HD formats will make DVDs as unappealing as VHS tapes are right now. As soon as the HD-DVD format wars are over, that is.
So, all this prompts me to come up more stupid questions of
what the lower mass limits are, or, more generally,
what does the star mass distribution function look like?
How does that star mass distribution function vary or correlate with star age?
Has anyone come up with theoretical models for energy production in stars that explains the distribution of observed star masses and observed star energy output?
Going public forces the publisher to fix the problem if it hasn't already, and it let's the public know that there's a problem and they should do an update.
I agree, going to the author first with an exploit is good etiquette. And that going public afterwards is important, too, after some decent interval that is as short as possible.
Public disclosure gives the software user a tool to test just how vulnerable he is and whether various stopgap measures provide adequate protection against the exploit. Public disclosure is better than just having exclusive disclosure to black hats and vendors, IMHO.
Here's what came out on the garnome list a few hours ago...
GARNOME 2.10.0
==============
(the 'pink fluffy bunny slippers are in my future' release.)
My God, we made it.
Aside from marking the first time a stable GARNOME release has come out
on the same day that the GNOME release did -- This release incorporates
the full GNOME 2.10 Desktop & Developer Platform, as well as so much
extra, new and improved stuff... it's, it's... it's GARNOMEtastic.
The differences between GARNOME 2.8.x and 2.10.x are huge, but in a
nutshell:
* GNOME 2.10.0 desktop, platform and bindings releases.
* Evolution 2.2.0
* Mono 1.1.x and a bunch of wildly successful apps in their own right.
and yet, there's more -- geektoys (the collection of funkey GNOME apps
that compliment your desktop) now includes:
* Tomboy (the most requested item in GARNOME to date)
* Beagle (all your indexing needs)
* Evince (PDF's and GNOME have never looked as good)
* Monkey Bubble:)
...and a whole lot more.
It should be noted that GARNOME wouldn't be possible without the dedicated
band of testers i've amassed since taking over the project -- thanks to
everyone who has contributed patches, bugreports or comments during the
last release phase -- your support has been invaluable.
If there's anyone in the building trade in that area, they've got a veritable goldmine coming their way.
Not to mention what fine volcanic ash does to cars. I'm not sure if air cleaners will prevent some of the ash from entering the engine and accelerating the erosion of moving parts.
If I lived there I would consider a well-timed vacation to reduce the exposure of my lungs to that stuff, too.
If everything was "put on the net", you wouldn't be able to tell
The journal could actually pay randomly selected reviewers with recognized reputations for technical excellence to rate articles, kind of like/.
Then, too, over time, the number of references to the paper from real works (not Google-bombs) will accumulate and indicate which papers are good.
Generally, instead of charging an arm and a leg for a subscription that only institutions can pay, they should admit advertising like most glossy journals do anyway. Having something affordable or freely viewable is an important element in the dissemination of scientific information and, in the end, will further the pace of scientific advancement and public education.
Given Jeff Gannon-gate and that a blogger was able to get a White House press day pass finally, it seems the courts (blogger not a journalist=> must reveal sources) and executive branch (bloggers are journalists => can justify day passes!) have different views on the matter.
Frankly, I have a certain suspicion that most Americans (perhaps even more than other nationalities) are too busy watching wrestling, praising Jesus, declaring war on abstract nouns, etc., to pay attention to whether the leader of their country is capable of rational discourse, let alone whether a particular wireless protocol is empowering large companies or not.
Which is an myth, pure and simple, propagated by conservatives to spread the gospel of Government inefficiency.
Not a myth. There is a constant downward pressure to reduce budgets in government, so if you don't spend what was given to you at the beginning of the fiscal year, then the conclusions is that you didn't really need the money and won't need that much next year either.
Conservative myths rely upon mythological figures such as the Welfare Queen, Ridiculous Red Tape Wrapper or Scientific Study of Pig Sex.
One or two anecdotes of each of which will go a long way to cutting social welfare benefits to a larger number of honestly disabled beneficiaries or to cutting "burdensome regulation" on an industry that would prefer to externalize the costs of exploiting a public resource or to cutting scientific research budgets so that we can comfortably wallow in our self-satisfied superiority of ignorance.
[TFA] Another great way to target testing is based on actual customer usage.
This is a really good idea.
The crash feedback systems in Mozilla exhibits this model of testing.
I think more of the casual user applications I run on the desktop should be compiled with debugging and a simple transparent mechanism for returning information to the developers about problems.
Nothing mandatory, no hidden information sent back to the mother ship, just a text file showing back traces, etc. that the user can see contains no sensitive information.
Thus all users become beta users that can feedback to the developer which bugs really matter.
Taken to the next step of optimization and UI design, developers can find out which code paths really matter in terms of real life usage if the application is instrumented with profiling turned on and the option for the user to feedback information this way. IIRC, some compilers have options to take advantage of run-time statistics to better compile the second time around.
It takes longer to configure code than to compile it these days,
I disagree.
I've been building and installing open source software for at least 15 years.
In that time I've noticed that UNIX configuration and building is improving, although the complexity of what is trying to be achieved is increasing.
In the bad old days, you would edit the makefile in 8 places before your application would build correctly.
As time passed, application developers that cared about relieving their users of this burden started to distribute their packages with autoconf and later, as binary rpms, ports
Autoconf has made it easier for users to configure and build most applications with a greater burden put on the developers to code to HAVE_FEATURE_H and to construct robust test scripts in sh-m4 land.
Natural evolution will cause configuration and building to become easier. Whether it will be yum or emerge, I don't know, but I do know things are improving.
It's rarely a good idea to ask the fox to guard the hen house. It's fairly typical for CEO's to serve on the boards of different companies. So they "scratch" each others back.
Excellent point.
Most foxes will choose to eat the chicken right away, never mind if the chicken is laying golden eggs.
I've always thought that upper management and the board of directors should be given stock compensation that can't be sold for a minimum period of time, say 5 years. This would help them to focus on the longer term health of the company more than on getting next quarter's EPS to exceed Wall Street analyst's expectations.
Any fool can get EPS to increase in the short term by cutting research, quality control, firing expensive employees and other measures that would be suicidal for the company's long-term viability.
although it makes the point that the IE rendering mode could hurt Firefox in the long-run, because it gives sites an excuse to stick with their old IE-only designs.
So why not have a small popupbar (just like when FF blocks a pop-up) on NS 8 that says something like...
The web page you are browsing does not comply with
W3C standards! Do you wish to email the page author to inform them of this problem?
It should be unobtrusive enough not to annoy the browser users, but get enough users to hit the page authors to change their pages.
While I think it's too hard a problem to solve, if the email not only included the problems with the page but suggested a possible patch to bring the page into compliance, that would be most excellent.
Personally, while I don't surf porn all the time, I don't mind the loss of family-friendly image that will ensue as competitors call Linux the choice of perverts.
Why?
Because exactly the same technologies are useful to dissidents in repressive regimes trying to communicate with the people who are willing to think critically.
The big flaw with the PornOS distro, of course, is that too many of its customers will become accustomed to the Red Carpet methodology for system updating that will bring to Linux big time what exists already on Windows...
Part of the class requires that your work gets accepted into the projects codebase before you get credit.
If someone took and passed a course like this, I would save that resume.
Getting your new work accepted into the code base means you have to demonstrate
technical excellence, code proficiency that all the key decision makers approve of
people skills, so you don't piss off the existing code repository mavens.
I've seen the tragedy of technically proficient people having their contributions end up on the floor in scrap heap because they effectively have an attitude of "Fuck you if you don't appreciate my brilliance."
Likewise, personable people with no technical proficiency can open doors, but have nothing real to bring to the table.
Yes, I have, but less and less over the past 5 years. I fire it up now only if I have to view a ".fm" document that someone started to write several years ago.
Don't get me wrong, Framemaker is a great product. The SGML features introduced a few years ago are really nice.
No one, anywhere, who uses FM for anything remotely serious has changed from FM to Word
I'm not saying Word is as good as Framemaker by any means (I believe the opposite).
What I am saying is that many users of Frame probably didn't qualify as sufficiently "serious" in your book. Well, those users to pay for Frame and liked to use it. Now they don't.
Yes, they suffer from the loss of Frame's nice features. But they lump it and limp along with what's there.
All I'm saying is that Frame has definitely lost customers after Adobe acquired it. Maybe they've gained more by focussing on the PC and Mac marketplace, but I have to question the long-term strategy of any company that offers multiple products with overlapping capabilities, eg., Pagemaker.
Am I a fool for giving up steady work and good pay?
Good advice.
So good, in fact, that it resembles my advice I gave recently to a extremely talented relative who does processing, fabrication, for all kinds of non-Si systems, and is getting stomaches listening to his current management.
I've urged him to take a small bit of time to deliberately arrange his finances, fix up and sell his house, get his SO to get health insurance coverage for them both, etc.
And only then, to talk to his manager about how he's been woefully mistreated, but in a very polite tone. Then, he can leave on good terms - "I feel I've really contributed a lot to this company and its success. And I'd to continue to do so. But in the current situation you're not allowing me to contribute to my full potential, so I'm obligated to leave and I wish you the best of luck. Perhaps if circumstances change we'll work together again in the future."
If you're good at what you do, then you owe it to yourself not to burn any bridges behind you and, in fact, cheerfully sweep the dust off the bridge as bow out.
Slashdot Mirror
Anything else that one can use to try and have a clearer view of its audience?
How about providing a monetary incentive to your audience to describe to you what they think they want, who they think they are, etc?
Something like the side bar menu on Slashdot, where if you click the hidden survey gif button and answer 20 questions about your likes and dislikes OSDL sends you a check for $30.
I can see the problem with this right away - if anybody uses this their license fees will go through the roof!
but look at what portion of the Federal and state budgets go to aid the poor
On average, less than 0.6 cents of every dollar paid out in Social Security benefits goes to pay administrative costs. The expense ratio is right down there with reasonable mutual fund index funds.
But, to be fair, social security benefits don't need to be screened to determine whether beneficiaries truly qualify as poor - we all get social security benefits regardless of how wealthy we are. [Kind of like Permanent Fund Dividend checks - I used to get those too, while I lived in AK.:)]
The hard part is that human nature being what it is, you have to spend some resources before giving money away if you only want to direct it efficiently towards the truly needy. Otherwise, people who are lazy and clever will opt to receive benefits they don't really need, burden taxpayers unnecessarily and promote a unhealthy lifestyle of parasitic dependence. You have to spend some time (or pay someone to spend the time) figuring out if someone is truly needy (and there are plenty of people that are suffering and need help) or whether they're trying to game the system.
Designing an efficient social welfare system that discriminates correctly is probably at least as hard as devising the perfect spam filter.
Bill Gates is one of the largest constributor to non-profit organizations.
Bill Gates has the advantage of owning what amounts to a privately-owned tax and revenue system (Windows monopoly).
I'll credit Bill and Melinda Gates for what they've done to help charitable causes, particularly the childhood immunization programs in Africa.
But, were the government to levy a comparably-sized tax on purchasers of software they'd be able to give a larger fraction of it to the people in need, notwithstanding all the teeth-gnashing anecdotes of government inefficiency and how inherently evil a "tax" happens to be.
[Just like the tax that we all pay to the people sitting on top of the world's petroleum reserves. The OPEC monopoly can create an artificial price far above the cost of production and collect it. But if the government tried to put an extra US$0.25 per gallon tax on gasoline there would be no end of complaining (said as our current pump prices go up).
but first you need to convince me why a cell phone needs a hard drive to begin with.
Because taking pictures with the 7 megapixel camera on your phone will exhaust the flash drive too quickly?
I slogged through the instruction booklet for a weekend, reading, entering numbers, etc. and agonized went I got diverted into ancillary worksheets hidden in the booklet. Talk about stealth bureaucracy!
But think about the Line by Line process of filling out the tax form. It's just a bunch of notices and instructions which could naturally be recast into any programming language that can print out a descriptive text, accept numerical input values and do simple arithmetic.
Most of the entries could be answered with "This doesn't apply to me - enter zero." as default answers.
In the longer run, releasing a programming language version of the tax form makes sense because the same 1099 forms that are sent to the IRS electronically could be made available to you as you fill out the form (assuming you can identify and authenticate yourself).
No, it shouldn't be SomeVendors closed proprietary solution..
The IRS should release the 1040 form in XML.
Based on my recent experience I'd say 2 things will kill off DVD:
That 150 solar mass limit is not a hard limit.
Bottom of TFA also cautions that.
So, all this prompts me to come up more stupid questions of
OK, I'll stop asking questions now.
Going public forces the publisher to fix the problem if it hasn't already, and it let's the public know that there's a problem and they should do an update.
I agree, going to the author first with an exploit is good etiquette. And that going public afterwards is important, too, after some decent interval that is as short as possible.
Public disclosure gives the software user a tool to test just how vulnerable he is and whether various stopgap measures provide adequate protection against the exploit. Public disclosure is better than just having exclusive disclosure to black hats and vendors, IMHO.
Oh, and why wasn't a garnome link posted?
Here's what came out on the garnome list a few hours ago...
GARNOME 2.10.0
==============
(the 'pink fluffy bunny slippers are in my future' release.)
My God, we made it.
Aside from marking the first time a stable GARNOME release has come out on the same day that the GNOME release did -- This release incorporates the full GNOME 2.10 Desktop & Developer Platform, as well as so much extra, new and improved stuff
The differences between GARNOME 2.8.x and 2.10.x are huge, but in a nutshell:
* GNOME 2.10.0 desktop, platform and bindings releases.
* Evolution 2.2.0
* Mono 1.1.x and a bunch of wildly successful apps in their own right.
and yet, there's more -- geektoys (the collection of funkey GNOME apps that compliment your desktop) now includes:
* Tomboy (the most requested item in GARNOME to date)
* Beagle (all your indexing needs)
* Evince (PDF's and GNOME have never looked as good)
* Monkey Bubble
It should be noted that GARNOME wouldn't be possible without the dedicated band of testers i've amassed since taking over the project -- thanks to everyone who has contributed patches, bugreports or comments during the last release phase -- your support has been invaluable.
Tarball: ftp://cipherfunk.org/etc....
MD5: 255f984b5f438b0851fd50ae2ef14772
Onward and Outward to 2.next,
Paul
If there's anyone in the building trade in that area, they've got a veritable goldmine coming their way.
Not to mention what fine volcanic ash does to cars. I'm not sure if air cleaners will prevent some of the ash from entering the engine and accelerating the erosion of moving parts.
If I lived there I would consider a well-timed vacation to reduce the exposure of my lungs to that stuff, too.
If everything was "put on the net", you wouldn't be able to tell
The journal could actually pay randomly selected reviewers with recognized reputations for technical excellence to rate articles, kind of like /.
Then, too, over time, the number of references to the paper from real works (not Google-bombs) will accumulate and indicate which papers are good.
Generally, instead of charging an arm and a leg for a subscription that only institutions can pay, they should admit advertising like most glossy journals do anyway. Having something affordable or freely viewable is an important element in the dissemination of scientific information and, in the end, will further the pace of scientific advancement and public education.
Pick any system for which the source code is available, eg .tar.bz2
Anything else is gambling.
I still gamble, but only that a C compiler will exist in the future.
court's decision that Web journalists don't count
Given Jeff Gannon-gate and that a blogger was able to get a White House press day pass finally, it seems the courts (blogger not a journalist=> must reveal sources) and executive branch (bloggers are journalists => can justify day passes!) have different views on the matter.
Or perhaps the same view
Amen.
Which is an myth, pure and simple, propagated by conservatives to spread the gospel of Government inefficiency.
Not a myth. There is a constant downward pressure to reduce budgets in government, so if you don't spend what was given to you at the beginning of the fiscal year, then the conclusions is that you didn't really need the money and won't need that much next year either.
Conservative myths rely upon mythological figures such as the Welfare Queen, Ridiculous Red Tape Wrapper or Scientific Study of Pig Sex.
One or two anecdotes of each of which will go a long way to cutting social welfare benefits to a larger number of honestly disabled beneficiaries or to cutting "burdensome regulation" on an industry that would prefer to externalize the costs of exploiting a public resource or to cutting scientific research budgets so that we can comfortably wallow in our self-satisfied superiority of ignorance.
[TFA] Another great way to target testing is based on actual customer usage.
This is a really good idea.
The crash feedback systems in Mozilla exhibits this model of testing.
I think more of the casual user applications I run on the desktop should be compiled with debugging and a simple transparent mechanism for returning information to the developers about problems.
Nothing mandatory, no hidden information sent back to the mother ship, just a text file showing back traces, etc. that the user can see contains no sensitive information.
Thus all users become beta users that can feedback to the developer which bugs really matter.
Taken to the next step of optimization and UI design, developers can find out which code paths really matter in terms of real life usage if the application is instrumented with profiling turned on and the option for the user to feedback information this way. IIRC, some compilers have options to take advantage of run-time statistics to better compile the second time around.
It takes longer to configure code than to compile it these days,
I disagree.
I've been building and installing open source software for at least 15 years.
In that time I've noticed that UNIX configuration and building is improving, although the complexity of what is trying to be achieved is increasing.
In the bad old days, you would edit the makefile in 8 places before your application would build correctly.
As time passed, application developers that cared about relieving their users of this burden started to distribute their packages with autoconf and later, as binary rpms, ports
Autoconf has made it easier for users to configure and build most applications with a greater burden put on the developers to code to HAVE_FEATURE_H and to construct robust test scripts in sh-m4 land.
Natural evolution will cause configuration and building to become easier. Whether it will be yum or emerge, I don't know, but I do know things are improving.
It's rarely a good idea to ask the fox to guard the hen house. It's fairly typical for CEO's to serve on the boards of different companies. So they "scratch" each others back.
Excellent point.
Most foxes will choose to eat the chicken right away, never mind if the chicken is laying golden eggs.
I've always thought that upper management and the board of directors should be given stock compensation that can't be sold for a minimum period of time, say 5 years. This would help them to focus on the longer term health of the company more than on getting next quarter's EPS to exceed Wall Street analyst's expectations.
Any fool can get EPS to increase in the short term by cutting research, quality control, firing expensive employees and other measures that would be suicidal for the company's long-term viability.
although it makes the point that the IE rendering mode could hurt Firefox in the long-run, because it gives sites an excuse to stick with their old IE-only designs.
So why not have a small popupbar (just like when FF blocks a pop-up) on NS 8 that says something like...
It should be unobtrusive enough not to annoy the browser users, but get enough users to hit the page authors to change their pages.While I think it's too hard a problem to solve, if the email not only included the problems with the page but suggested a possible patch to bring the page into compliance, that would be most excellent.
Beware what you wish for.
Personally, while I don't surf porn all the time, I don't mind the loss of family-friendly image that will ensue as competitors call Linux the choice of perverts.
Why?
Because exactly the same technologies are useful to dissidents in repressive regimes trying to communicate with the people who are willing to think critically.
The big flaw with the PornOS distro, of course, is that too many of its customers will become accustomed to the Red Carpet methodology for system updating that will bring to Linux big time what exists already on Windows...
Just in case redigitizing the S-Video isn't good enough, there's Yet Another Standard looming out there,
And not to forget these intriguing modded receiver boxes that provide Firewire output from various satellite and cable receivers (that do cost, however)...
Part of the class requires that your work gets accepted into the projects codebase before you get credit.
If someone took and passed a course like this, I would save that resume.
Getting your new work accepted into the code base means you have to demonstrate
- technical excellence, code proficiency that all the key decision makers approve of
- people skills, so you don't piss off the existing code repository mavens.
I've seen the tragedy of technically proficient people having their contributions end up on the floor in scrap heap because they effectively have an attitude of "Fuck you if you don't appreciate my brilliance."Likewise, personable people with no technical proficiency can open doors, but have nothing real to bring to the table.
Someone with both skills is valuable.
Have you ever used FrameMaker
Yes, I have, but less and less over the past 5 years. I fire it up now only if I have to view a ".fm" document that someone started to write several years ago.
Don't get me wrong, Framemaker is a great product. The SGML features introduced a few years ago are really nice.
No one, anywhere, who uses FM for anything remotely serious has changed from FM to WordI'm not saying Word is as good as Framemaker by any means (I believe the opposite).
What I am saying is that many users of Frame probably didn't qualify as sufficiently "serious" in your book. Well, those users to pay for Frame and liked to use it. Now they don't.
Yes, they suffer from the loss of Frame's nice features. But they lump it and limp along with what's there.
All I'm saying is that Frame has definitely lost customers after Adobe acquired it. Maybe they've gained more by focussing on the PC and Mac marketplace, but I have to question the long-term strategy of any company that offers multiple products with overlapping capabilities, eg., Pagemaker.
Am I a fool for giving up steady work and good pay?
Good advice.
So good, in fact, that it resembles my advice I gave recently to a extremely talented relative who does processing, fabrication, for all kinds of non-Si systems, and is getting stomaches listening to his current management.
I've urged him to take a small bit of time to deliberately arrange his finances, fix up and sell his house, get his SO to get health insurance coverage for them both, etc.
And only then, to talk to his manager about how he's been woefully mistreated, but in a very polite tone. Then, he can leave on good terms - "I feel I've really contributed a lot to this company and its success. And I'd to continue to do so. But in the current situation you're not allowing me to contribute to my full potential, so I'm obligated to leave and I wish you the best of luck. Perhaps if circumstances change we'll work together again in the future."
If you're good at what you do, then you owe it to yourself not to burn any bridges behind you and, in fact, cheerfully sweep the dust off the bridge as bow out.