Google has millions upon millions of click history on their search results that say what it is people really are looking for, as well as which ones appeared good fodder for first clicking.
No one else has such a large database of what humans have actually picked.
Such a click history and search term history asset is worth even more if it gets correlated with Evil Direct Marketing information from the cookie traders.
Although, it seems possible that large ISPs could also grab and analyze their members Google interactions to figure out people's tastes, assuming such interactions remain unencrypted.
I have to wonder how many companies with static IP addresses have, unbeknownst to them, built up extensive history logs at Google showing their search term preferences and click selections. If I were a technology startup with a hot idea to research I'd be a little more paranoid about something like that.
A TV program a while back highlighted research investigating just why huge indigenous populations of Central America mysteriously disappeared around 800.
Lakebed sediment cores suggested a fairly severe multi-year drought around that time that was linked (through that Atlantic conveyor) to some severe winters in northern Europe. That drought was thought to disrupt agriculture that those cultures relied upon.
GM, Ford and VW are getting hit currently by smaller, nimbler competition from Japanese car makers
They're getting hit because their management was in the style of "increase EPS for next quarter" - let's slash R&D, anything that's a long term benefit short term cost, and crank out a few more nice-looking heavy gas-guzzling SUV's.
That works great until it becomes clear that gasoline is becoming very expensive. Who's done years of R&D into making small fuel-efficient durable cars?
US management needs to buy in to the long term health of their companies. Making most of their compensation stock options that can't be exercise for something like 5 years would be a good start.
Frankly, it wouldn't be a bad start for some worker compensation to be in stock options that can't be exercised for 5 years, either.
We're all in this together, whether we believe or not.
The jarring nature of a RSOD means customers will be more upset and more unhappy if one happens.
MS is gambling that there will be fewer such events because of more careful combing through the code.
I have to give them credit for doing something which they almost never do anymore - putting their neck on the block and sticking up for their product's quality in a meaningful way.
Making the developers man the 1-800 lines the first month after release would be another incentive...
If they have to give their product away for free, they lose the basis for their entire business model.
Not so.
Microsoft could afford and might even be well-advised from a business perspective to actually pay schools to use their software. OK, not so obviously, but give block-grants that include free MS software, some free hardware, some free instructional courses for teachers that needed to learn, etc.
The idea, pioneered by Apple, is that students will tend to use what they have already learned and will become future purchasers of that particular software. They can more than make up the current loss of revenue by the profits on future sales.
The one word cynical label for this approach is crackware.
even threatening to withhold my final paycheck if I don't find a replacement before I leave.
That's obviously his job to do. But since he also neglected the other part of his job - namely to nurture and retain valuable employees (like you), it's indicative that you're making a good move away from an incompetent boss.
Notwithstanding all the screwy crappy behavior, do not bad mouth your company or your boss.
Be nice, wish everyone well, and offer to spend time answering questions and handing off your currently active job responsibilities to anyone that the boss wants to take them over.
You never ever want to burn a bridge. Because you never ever know for sure if you'll need to try to come back over it.
Although it looks as if some folks aren't expecting to need good references in the future to have a chance to work again with John Bolton:)
You know, I have dear friends that veer towards creationism. That's fine, they're basically good people and they're free to believe whatever they want.
By in large, they think of themselves as being relatively tolerant and think that opening up science class to "alternative theories" is a reasonable thing to do. It's not.
Let science class be based on science and keep religion as part of religion (and away from politics, where the two tend to co-corrupt one another).
But here's the beef:
The very same people clammoring for forcing a scientifically-unsupported theory like intelligent design into science classes would have an absolute cow - bigtime - if scientists were to likewise demand equal time at the pulpit in churches to propound evolution and other theories that might be at odds with religious belief.
"Hey! It's just an alternative theory! People have a right to listen to alternative theories!"
They might not be able to see what's coming thru the tunnel
but the authorities are naturally alert for anything resembling a potential covert channel for communication.
Which is why there needs to be a means for stego network traffic over innocuous-looking unencrypted port 80 traffic to what appears to be entertainment news, etc. where the photos contain the real information.
people are always complaining that OpenOffice can't read Word documents correctly
The complaints are still there, still as loud, but fewer in number.
When compatibility was 90%, you had lots of complaints. Compatibility at 99%, still complaints.
There will still be complaints about compatibility even if OpenOffice manages 3 nines of Word files imported successfully.
Practically, though, to succeed OO.o just has to exceed the level of compatibility that Word has with older version, other platforms of itself, because it, too, suffers from compatibility complaints.
Already a lot of people who don't need to work with others in.doc land find OO.o to be a satisfactory solution. People who demand relatively simple functionality of MS Word find interaction with others at least possible now using OO.o.
After all these years of experience with word processors that change brands, change versions, documents that look different after computers upgrade or if your friend looks at them on a different computer, and paying good money for these word processors
why don't governments and large companies insist that any word processor purchased and used in their organization be able to automatically write a standard, free, open format like this?
The earlier versions 1 and 2 had a reputation for bugginess.
Basically, Fedora Core 2 was a beta for RHEL 3, which besides being much more tested, stable, supported, also includes the various semi-proprietary doodads that make life nice under Linux.
But I've been pretty happy with Fedora Core 3. YMMV.
the places where algorithm efficiency makes a difference are far outweighed by those places that don't.
Amen.
Most places achieve increased efficiency through maintainable code that is easy for programmers to read, understand and fix.
I'd all love to drive a Ferrari to work every day, but I'm not prepared to put in what it takes to learn how to work on them.
A good friend wrote a very efficient routine for specialized matrix solves that we all loved to use because it was 40% faster than anything else available. But his code was obtuse, hard to understand. As a result, if we found any problems with it, we would go to him for the fix rather than confront that tight block of code. In the longer run, as he went on to other jobs, there was less willingness to use something that - when it ever broke - cost too much to fix in terms of peering at code and figuring out WTF he was doing.
it may be desirable for the price-fixers to undercut the price to corner the market.
That would suggest in the current situation of FOSS competing against Microsoft, a convicted monopolist, that MS would simply need to pay people to use their software.
And that will cause the remaining IE-users to switch.
And the killer feature of interpreting proprietary video codecs using TCPA-locked software on Windows and displaying through Internet Explorer will work the process in the other direction:(
Science and (known) religions are not equivalent. Ever.
They are if you are looking at the issue from a fairly dispassionate viewpoint: religion and the scientific method are just programming that human brains use to help them interpret reality.
Science has a lot more long term potential IMHO because it always leaves open the questions and answers to more consistent logical explanations of perceived evidence (eg, moving from Galilean mechanics to Lorentzian). So, science can grow and adapt to explain more and more. But people are uncomfortable at an emotional level with questions that science does not answer. We humans are basically very upset at a visceral level about our own mortality and at the mortality of those whom we care about.
Religions provide people with pat answers to difficult questions that are comfortable, complete (they satisfy closure if you adopt their point of view which is based on faith and not logic) and a curtailed view of events. Relgious frameworks resist change - indeed they typically impose strict guidelines to prevent them from changing and their immutability is part of their comfort and appeal.
Once in a while (eg, consider the metamorphosis from Judaism to Christianity to Islam, not to mention later branches like the Latter Days Saints and the Jehovah's Witnesses), they do change and seem to provide adherents with something they may have found wanting in the previous belief framework.
Christianity doesn't deny reality. It just provides a way of interpreting it. Eg, that catastrophic event that killed a loved one is part of a larger scheme by God and you can still feel safe because He's still in control and cares about you. It satisfies a deep-seated emotional need of the human animal. If you're uncomfortable with Christian reliance on faith substituting for logic, well, that's your level of comfort with your programming. If you want to believe in your senses and what you call logic - well, go for it. Science's mission is not to comfort us, mere piles of biochemically active protoplasm.
Science doesn't provide that kind of comfort to the human animal. But it provides a belief in sensory perception and a belief that logic can be used to understand how an independent reality functions and, ultimately, how we can alter that reality. Things aren't good or bad, nor is any resort made to extra-sensory or supernatural explanations. Evidence and reproducible experiments have value. Questions are allowed to be unanswered until the preponderance of evidence and logic are sufficient (yes, the preponderance is there already for some of the issues like geology and evolutionary biology - scientists are satisfied that current theories are based on evidence and logic).
One of the interesting things is how the scientific method arose out of these other more restrictive memes.
In the Judeo-Christian heritage, the Book of Job has provided a message of "Don't go assuming what God's will is." People still tend to short circuit lines of questioning by purporting to present God's will as an end to any line of questioning. But the theme of ignorance and errors committed by kings is perhaps enough of a thread to suggest that a more Greek-like pursuit of questioning is a better way to go. Especially considering how often the early nation of Isreal was afflicted by false prophets proclaiming "Thus saith the Lord..."
"Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful."
-- Seneca the Younger
Science has not proven to be as useful in molding public opinion as has religion. Or functionally equivalent institutions, such as patriotic fervor. People that take their religion seriously regard patriotism (promoted by many politicians), materialism (capitalism, advertising themes), egotism as idol worship that distract people from God.
Looks to me like a long-time successful meme (Christianity, 2k years old) competing with a new competitor (scientific method, 400 years old, but not recognized as a competitor until more recently.
Basically, these systems are competing for core memory in the individuals and in societies.
Both of them create a way of interpreting reality that provides different costs and different benefits to their adherents.
It will be interesting to see how this plays out. It will become very intense in the next few decades, I think, as the progress of science enables knowledge and technology to do things that were unimaginable even a hundred years ago.
I love the concept of SVG and look forward to it becoming commonplace, giving me infinite resolution graphics anywhere on the web. I want SVG to replace Flash, and Powerpoint, and all the kludges people have created to put quality 2D graphics onto the web.
But I've always been put off a little by the complexity of the specification - it looks like it was designed by a committee that opted for the easy way out of taking the union of members demands rather than hashing through a nice minimal orthogonal set of that represents the intersecting sets of needed capabilities.
Slashdot Mirror
Google has millions upon millions of click history on their search results that say what it is people really are looking for, as well as which ones appeared good fodder for first clicking.
No one else has such a large database of what humans have actually picked.
Such a click history and search term history asset is worth even more if it gets correlated with Evil Direct Marketing information from the cookie traders.
Although, it seems possible that large ISPs could also grab and analyze their members Google interactions to figure out people's tastes, assuming such interactions remain unencrypted.
I have to wonder how many companies with static IP addresses have, unbeknownst to them, built up extensive history logs at Google showing their search term preferences and click selections. If I were a technology startup with a hot idea to research I'd be a little more paranoid about something like that.
A TV program a while back highlighted research investigating just why huge indigenous populations of Central America mysteriously disappeared around 800.
Lakebed sediment cores suggested a fairly severe multi-year drought around that time that was linked (through that Atlantic conveyor) to some severe winters in northern Europe. That drought was thought to disrupt agriculture that those cultures relied upon.
HTML is just fine
...until you have a detailed technical drawing with specifically-located text labels in it.
And you want to zoom in without hitting some blocky aliasing artifacts from a bitmap.
SVG, easily rendered and easily created and edited with free tools is what is required to obsolete PDF.
GM, Ford and VW are getting hit currently by smaller, nimbler competition from Japanese car makers
They're getting hit because their management was in the style of "increase EPS for next quarter" - let's slash R&D, anything that's a long term benefit short term cost, and crank out a few more nice-looking heavy gas-guzzling SUV's.
That works great until it becomes clear that gasoline is becoming very expensive. Who's done years of R&D into making small fuel-efficient durable cars?
US management needs to buy in to the long term health of their companies. Making most of their compensation stock options that can't be exercise for something like 5 years would be a good start.
Frankly, it wouldn't be a bad start for some worker compensation to be in stock options that can't be exercised for 5 years, either.
We're all in this together, whether we believe or not.
The jarring nature of a RSOD means customers will be more upset and more unhappy if one happens.
MS is gambling that there will be fewer such events because of more careful combing through the code.
I have to give them credit for doing something which they almost never do anymore - putting their neck on the block and sticking up for their product's quality in a meaningful way.
Making the developers man the 1-800 lines the first month after release would be another incentive...
If they have to give their product away for free, they lose the basis for their entire business model.
Not so.
Microsoft could afford and might even be well-advised from a business perspective to actually pay schools to use their software. OK, not so obviously, but give block-grants that include free MS software, some free hardware, some free instructional courses for teachers that needed to learn, etc.
The idea, pioneered by Apple, is that students will tend to use what they have already learned and will become future purchasers of that particular software. They can more than make up the current loss of revenue by the profits on future sales.
The one word cynical label for this approach is crackware.
Your first hit is free.
even threatening to withhold my final paycheck if I don't find a replacement before I leave.
That's obviously his job to do. But since he also neglected the other part of his job - namely to nurture and retain valuable employees (like you), it's indicative that you're making a good move away from an incompetent boss.
Notwithstanding all the screwy crappy behavior, do not bad mouth your company or your boss.
Be nice, wish everyone well, and offer to spend time answering questions and handing off your currently active job responsibilities to anyone that the boss wants to take them over.
You never ever want to burn a bridge. Because you never ever know for sure if you'll need to try to come back over it.
Although it looks as if some folks aren't expecting to need good references in the future to have a chance to work again with John Bolton:)
You know, I have dear friends that veer towards creationism. That's fine, they're basically good people and they're free to believe whatever they want.
By in large, they think of themselves as being relatively tolerant and think that opening up science class to "alternative theories" is a reasonable thing to do. It's not.
Let science class be based on science and keep religion as part of religion (and away from politics, where the two tend to co-corrupt one another).
But here's the beef:
"Hey! It's just an alternative theory! People have a right to listen to alternative theories!"
The budget has to buy software, hardware and setup labor.
Damn. That kind of benchmark starts to sound eerily like real life!
Next thing you know you'll be asking not just about performance for price, but things like maintenance, uptime, 3am remote maintenance!
If you keep up, you'll put a lot of hardworking marketers out of work who had been convincing us that using their product increased our virility.
Absolutely.
The acoustic effects, resonance against the air, of light sabers slicing through the air ought to be enough for anyone to figure how how they work.
They're just big organ pipes.
They might not be able to see what's coming thru the tunnel
but the authorities are naturally alert for anything resembling a potential covert channel for communication.
Which is why there needs to be a means for stego network traffic over innocuous-looking unencrypted port 80 traffic to what appears to be entertainment news, etc. where the photos contain the real information.
Hardly do anything and I assure you that you will lose your job.
Upper levels of government provide a counterexample to this thesis.
As do beneficiaries of inherited wealth whose job is "stockholder".
But, then, I'm overcounting some.
Over here.
Does bar charts.
people are always complaining that OpenOffice can't read Word documents correctly
The complaints are still there, still as loud, but fewer in number.
When compatibility was 90%, you had lots of complaints. Compatibility at 99%, still complaints.
There will still be complaints about compatibility even if OpenOffice manages 3 nines of Word files imported successfully.
Practically, though, to succeed OO.o just has to exceed the level of compatibility that Word has with older version, other platforms of itself, because it, too, suffers from compatibility complaints.
Already a lot of people who don't need to work with others in .doc land find OO.o to be a satisfactory solution. People who demand relatively simple functionality of MS Word find interaction with others at least possible now using OO.o.
After all these years of experience with word processors that change brands, change versions, documents that look different after computers upgrade or if your friend looks at them on a different computer, and paying good money for these word processors
why don't governments and large companies insist that any word processor purchased and used in their organization be able to automatically write a standard, free, open format like this?
The earlier versions 1 and 2 had a reputation for bugginess.
Basically, Fedora Core 2 was a beta for RHEL 3, which besides being much more tested, stable, supported, also includes the various semi-proprietary doodads that make life nice under Linux.
But I've been pretty happy with Fedora Core 3. YMMV.
Amen.
Most places achieve increased efficiency through maintainable code that is easy for programmers to read, understand and fix.
I'd all love to drive a Ferrari to work every day, but I'm not prepared to put in what it takes to learn how to work on them.
A good friend wrote a very efficient routine for specialized matrix solves that we all loved to use because it was 40% faster than anything else available. But his code was obtuse, hard to understand. As a result, if we found any problems with it, we would go to him for the fix rather than confront that tight block of code. In the longer run, as he went on to other jobs, there was less willingness to use something that - when it ever broke - cost too much to fix in terms of peering at code and figuring out WTF he was doing.
it may be desirable for the price-fixers to undercut the price to corner the market.
That would suggest in the current situation of FOSS competing against Microsoft, a convicted monopolist, that MS would simply need to pay people to use their software.
And that will cause the remaining IE-users to switch.
And the killer feature of interpreting proprietary video codecs using TCPA-locked software on Windows and displaying through Internet Explorer will work the process in the other direction:(
Sounds like a great PR department to me.
No, there are other dynamics at play here.
Like sheer unadulterated dominance of the desktop computing market, for one.
If you're powerful and collect a lot of money without much argument, then it doesn't matter if people think you suck.
Exhibit A: US federal government.
Science and (known) religions are not equivalent. Ever.
They are if you are looking at the issue from a fairly dispassionate viewpoint: religion and the scientific method are just programming that human brains use to help them interpret reality.
Science has a lot more long term potential IMHO because it always leaves open the questions and answers to more consistent logical explanations of perceived evidence (eg, moving from Galilean mechanics to Lorentzian). So, science can grow and adapt to explain more and more. But people are uncomfortable at an emotional level with questions that science does not answer. We humans are basically very upset at a visceral level about our own mortality and at the mortality of those whom we care about.
Religions provide people with pat answers to difficult questions that are comfortable, complete (they satisfy closure if you adopt their point of view which is based on faith and not logic) and a curtailed view of events. Relgious frameworks resist change - indeed they typically impose strict guidelines to prevent them from changing and their immutability is part of their comfort and appeal.
Once in a while (eg, consider the metamorphosis from Judaism to Christianity to Islam, not to mention later branches like the Latter Days Saints and the Jehovah's Witnesses), they do change and seem to provide adherents with something they may have found wanting in the previous belief framework.
Christianity doesn't deny reality. It just provides a way of interpreting it. Eg, that catastrophic event that killed a loved one is part of a larger scheme by God and you can still feel safe because He's still in control and cares about you. It satisfies a deep-seated emotional need of the human animal. If you're uncomfortable with Christian reliance on faith substituting for logic, well, that's your level of comfort with your programming. If you want to believe in your senses and what you call logic - well, go for it. Science's mission is not to comfort us, mere piles of biochemically active protoplasm.
Science doesn't provide that kind of comfort to the human animal. But it provides a belief in sensory perception and a belief that logic can be used to understand how an independent reality functions and, ultimately, how we can alter that reality. Things aren't good or bad, nor is any resort made to extra-sensory or supernatural explanations. Evidence and reproducible experiments have value. Questions are allowed to be unanswered until the preponderance of evidence and logic are sufficient (yes, the preponderance is there already for some of the issues like geology and evolutionary biology - scientists are satisfied that current theories are based on evidence and logic).
One of the interesting things is how the scientific method arose out of these other more restrictive memes.
In the Judeo-Christian heritage, the Book of Job has provided a message of "Don't go assuming what God's will is." People still tend to short circuit lines of questioning by purporting to present God's will as an end to any line of questioning. But the theme of ignorance and errors committed by kings is perhaps enough of a thread to suggest that a more Greek-like pursuit of questioning is a better way to go. Especially considering how often the early nation of Isreal was afflicted by false prophets proclaiming "Thus saith the Lord..."
-- Seneca the YoungerScience has not proven to be as useful in molding public opinion as has religion. Or functionally equivalent institutions, such as patriotic fervor. People that take their religion seriously regard patriotism (promoted by many politicians), materialism (capitalism, advertising themes), egotism as idol worship that distract people from God.
Besides do you really want to buy more chineese stuff and fund the chineese army?
You didn't know?
Defense of capitalism is being out-sourced to China since the government of the USA is becoming too bankrupt to handle it.
Since leading officials of the PRC are major stockholders in the world's fastest growing economy, they're buying into the idea.
Looks to me like a long-time successful meme (Christianity, 2k years old) competing with a new competitor (scientific method, 400 years old, but not recognized as a competitor until more recently.
Basically, these systems are competing for core memory in the individuals and in societies.
Both of them create a way of interpreting reality that provides different costs and different benefits to their adherents.
It will be interesting to see how this plays out. It will become very intense in the next few decades, I think, as the progress of science enables knowledge and technology to do things that were unimaginable even a hundred years ago.
I see a nice, obvious, XML format.
Is it that nice and that obvious?
I love the concept of SVG and look forward to it becoming commonplace, giving me infinite resolution graphics anywhere on the web. I want SVG to replace Flash, and Powerpoint, and all the kludges people have created to put quality 2D graphics onto the web.
But I've always been put off a little by the complexity of the specification - it looks like it was designed by a committee that opted for the easy way out of taking the union of members demands rather than hashing through a nice minimal orthogonal set of that represents the intersecting sets of needed capabilities.
Someone please tell me I'm wrong.
with menu offerings ``maybe a notch above hospital and school cafeterias.''
Yep, I'm so right there.
Please stop torturing me.