Politics aside, are we seeing a separation of State and Corporations, just like we saw the separation of State and Church centuries ago?
Then there is psychology. How would we feel if Sony HQ moves from Tokyo to LA, or Philips from Amsterdam to Boston? What if Google HQ moves from Mountain View to Beijing or even Microsoft from Redmond to Bangladesh? Do we as Americans feel more important when companies do more business here? Do we feel threatened as companies move offshore, even if tax revenue is still paid to US?
Halliburton is the focus of the news because of its government relations. If a corporation is not banking on government contracts for business, is it more justified to move anywhere it likes?
The preloaded crap for HP is Microsoft Works, which is enough for people really but expires in 30 days. Yet almost everyone I know asked to install Office over Works, despite the fact that Office more bloated and expensive. It also has license conflict with existing Works.
What this proves is that the non-Slashdot hoi polloi like the name 'Office' better than 'Works'. And the same is true for 'Microsoft' over 'Open'. These are the prime customers for Microsoft, and I consider it adverse selection anyways.
I've been using OO for years, and nobody I collaborated with ever complained of format problems.
I have clients in East Asia, and I live in a 9PM-5AM world, catch a nap, and start dealing with the work on the US side. Now I'm going 10PM-6AM, breakfast, and back to work. Most of the world don't change clocks, unlike us.
Americans love traditions, no matter how idiotic it is.
Consider NASA's recent budget cut, I suggest they give the congressmen more souvenirs before planning some cool inflatable lunar base. Someone's political life is at risk.
There's also the fact that a lot of Baby Boomers grew up with Star Trek, not B5 or BSG. The market is obviously catering to the psychological need to reminisce back to the fetal good days - by resurrecting those good 60's feelings being on top of the world after WWII and economic prosperity. Unfortunately this is already alienating many younger viewers, whose views on life are not as cheerful as their older generations. The only other thing good about prequels is a younger cast, which appeals to younger adults. I'm sure it will still draw crowds, but our younger audiences will not watch those happy shows forever - they eventually grow up and face a crueler world of global competition and conflicts. And sadly, nor will our older ones - they eventually succomb to Alzheimer's and can't even tell what they are watching.
The rumor of banning probably made the ad more popular. I find it unique but still... bland.
So there's our lessons learned: if your ad is offensive to someone, milk it, use it, fan it for awareness. If it's not borderline offensive yet, engineer some into it.
One word: bandwidth. As ugly as MySpace is, it was faster than competitors. You can build the most reliable web encyclopedia to challenge Wikipedia, but I'm not using it if I can't load it under 3 seconds. Deal.
Laudable attempt; lame execution. Letting silicons sort out how they should connect in the first place is something mother nature would not do. Back-propagation? You must believe that only Purkinje cells exist in the brain. Please do not confuse researches of large scale/quantity with genuinely brilliant ideas.
In one hypothesis, our world population is directly proportional to the amount of energy it can harvest. Would you prefer a drastic shrinking of population, thus reverse the ecological depletion, the energy uncertainty, the urban sprawl, the increasing socioeconomic gap, the unemployment, the global outsourcing, the war on terror, and practically every self-afflicted wound by humankind?
No single altruistic individual can save the world. Deal.
You're exactly right. After my military tour and moving around the country some, I still have data in different states with unfamiliar DOB's, simultaneous overlapping residential address in multiple states, blanks in employment and financial records, etc. I'm just glad the records for anything illegal were clean.
Chances are, your civil authority got elected/appointed for a charming smile, not his/her ability to deal with emergencies. The rare times that the real world exposes them for the cowards they are, they usually come back with other agendas to cover their obvious blundering hysteria.
I'll be a troll and hypothesize that's what started the Iraq business too. We just haven't seen similar results after Katrina because the guy in charge was fired immediately.
Someone should create a microbe that turns any living creature to diesel fuel. Imagine the increase in productivity when you load the microbe in a gun and shoot that blubbering idiot in the office. It boosts morale, increases fuel reserve, and decreases competing consumer by one. Or you drive down the street and your tank is low. You wave a bum over. Voila! You find fuel for your car.
First, how much money will Mocrosoft make from this?
Secondly, if the goal is to keep valuable information for future generation, your scheme will require a massive duplication of all the data trash we accumulated today. This is a big waste of resources (hardware and energy) that people often envision as the solution. Are we going to build all kinds of data warehouses cooled by running rivers in order to store this massively duplicated data? We better pray we don't run out of electricity, if that is the choice we make.
Ray Kurzweil's First Law said, the destruction of information is the first sign of intelligence. We are very good at collecting information - we have cardiogram data from millions of patients everyday, traffic cameras on major highways in near-real-time, and weather satellite feed all over the world. Most likely we don't keep the information; we overwrite the memory once it is no longer critically important. This is equally true for blogs that contain links to other blogs with links to other random odd news that few will be interested in a month from now.
Maybe we feel the need to keep every piece of information intact, since we are the ones who crafted the zesty blogs and posted the witty comments. Realistically this is pointless. Human brains are designed to sleep and forget, so that unnecessary data does not clog the system and degrade performance. Those who don't usually suffer from attention deficit and random memory dump. (Wonder how this coincide with the Microsoft experience.) Most people have tons of data on their PCs that subconsciously they know they will never read again. They just keep them because a) it took a long time to create, b) it has entertainment or sentimental values, c) it may become useful one day, d) the hard drive is big enough. This is equivalent to a garage or an attic full of assorted junk... except all the junk is digital and easily duplicated, and thus has even less resale value than that kayak collecting dust in the corner.
Does it really make sense to make them immortal?
To collect is an evolutionary trait - our ancestors gathered and kept things for times of need. Our 20th century affluence has overcome much of the material poverty, but the human nature hardly changed. This resulted in a twisted culture of anti-utilitarianism. We even arrogantly think our future generations will one day benefit from our collective wisdom - and we are willing to waste precious computing power to prove it.
Est ubi gloria Babylonia? I'm not saying there is nothing we need to keep from our culture, but the idea that Microsoft can engineer the 'immortality' of anything is just blasphemy.
The two choices here are broad and ambiguous. For 'thinkers', do we mean people who can initiate new problems to solve? People who can clearly define the problems to solve? People who can find an optimal solution to the problem? People who can cross-pollinate and bring different insights to the problem? People who can turn solutions into profit? People who can master diverse disciplines of designs? People who can delineate the process and facilitate the problem-solving? People who can retain and recall the cumulative lessons learned over the lifespan of projects?
And what about 'doers'? Do we mean people who can complete the milestone assigned? People who can fast-prototype a solution (but not necessarily see it to fruition)? People who can memorize the design rules and syntax to be useful when we need quick fixes? People who know the best tools to use for a specific task, and are quick to learn the tool and make it productive? People who can give a rough solution fine touch before close-ups? People who can spend ungodly hours finding the critical faults in a system and correct/debug them? Highly specialized technicians? Mass producers (quality not accounted for)? General multitasked interns?
The truth is, the industry really wants munchkins, but most engineers can never be all the above sans the deficiencies. (Those who can - well, they come at premiums that the industry is usually unwilling to pay for.) Unlike management, legal or medical disciplines, engineering schools do not crank out people knowing what they will be used for, so they created Lego blocks and play-doh. This is exactly how an engineer would approach the problem: unit design that is probably not very useful at the factory shipping dock. In fact, most graduates in engineering are bewildered about the paths they will take afterwards, and this inherent insecurity is no small cause to the career choice of our younger generations.
What an engineering graduate finds is not two roads in a wood, not 'thinker' or 'doer', but a plethora of companies that want munchkins with low pays. It is easy to be overwhelmed by the HR mandate of '10+ years in C++, DSP, FPGA, plus 5+ years in communication devices design', or 'Experience working with F-22 engine design and Mil-Spec X'.
In a sense there is indeed a disconnect of the engineer schools providing books and not practical skills. An increasing number of graduates had only one course in theoretical structural design before they headed into workplace. A graduate might have taken the basics of every field in his/her major, e.g., aerodynamics, robotics, CFD, biomechanics, etc., but this only improves employability of the newly minted grad and hardly makes anybody useful. In other words, the graduates have maximized their utility to best cope with an industry that is too diverse for the education system.
I think this is a tragedy. By turning the engineering schools into a talent search, the industry forces the schools to become trade schools that offer JAVA and web design courses. By graduating students who are novices of all trades, the schools leaves the real education to the industry. Companies that once expected to find qualified graduates are now cautious in examining candidate profiles - because there are those who took microprocessing courses and never even programmed one. The engineering schools in turn provides even more specialized courses that are geared toward industry, e.g., medical imaging or high frequency microelectronic devices, so that the graduates are better qualified for HR scrutiny. Here is a vicious cycle that the schools and the industry jointly created.
And the results for the students are: 1) an abundance of courses to confuse a freshman engineering student, 2) a need for students to spread butter thin, 3) a sacrifice of enthusiasm for industrial advantage. I fear #3 is the worst of the outcomes, because beyond 'thinker' and 'doer', an engineer really needs a spark, a curiosity, a fervor to dive into a spe
Physics and chemistry before 1950s were mainly conducted in developed countries under very supportive atmosphere. Physics and chemistry today are conducted near everywhere in university labs, mostly insufficiently funded, overshadowed by other technological developments such as stem cells and nano-transistors. The PhDs either work in fields totally irrelevant to their studies (on Wall St. or in booming high tech) or get their lives squeezed out of them by constant pressure to publish and the tenureship rat-race. If we measure their lifespan after 1950s we may get headlines like 'Science shortens your lifespan by 10 years' etc etc.
No statistics was used to back up this hypothesis.
According to international space convention, outer space is considered like Antarctica and not supposed to be used for military or economic self-interest. Spying satellites do not truly comply with this convention, and firing a laser from the ground would indeed be self-preservation.
I also notice military news generated more buzz when China was the subject.
No. 3rd party apps also have greater likelihood of breaking the system.
Apple can probably adopt a 2.5th party policy - 3rd party submit, Apple tests, Dedicated user group approves. It beats the headache of frustrating user support.
... the future is probably in near-free downloads of low-cost production entertainment. How they ever make profit is anyone's guess, but even when you reduce/remove the plot, the professional editing, the unionized actors, the marketing department, and the copyright lawyers, the customers weren't complaining anyways.
And face it, how many people want to provide evidence of their pleasure-sampling? Having an HD-DVD just increases the risk unless you watch it on a tiny screen in the secluded basement.
Software has pseudocode, and I rarely see people use this concept when they write their spaghetti. The pseudocode is also rarely passed down with the final product, thereby obliterating any possibility of future expansion and maintenance. Even when they are, they are handled by the wrong people who never read them. In the low probability cases where people have access to the pseudocode, the complexity makes any effort to understand the project moot. Smart programmers usually say, "What the heck!" and start coding everything from scratch, thus repeating the cycle.
Raising children is another typical case where people expect too much too soon. The different is that most parents are just disappointed when the children don't turn out as they wanted. In software development there are status and salary on the line for everyone, so we don't want to accept failure.
Maybe we'll be disillusioned once we look beyond our cubicles and see that other projects had problems too. But unlike biology, failed software projects cannot maintain themselves and bring forth future generations that may be more successful than they are. In other words, built-in resilience is not a trait for failed engineering projects.
Fifteen minutes of fame gone, the author tries to justify existence by announcing publicly his farewell. Nothing he mentioned in TFA is worth the time readers spent reading; the metaphor sux for both plagiarism and extrapolation ad absurdum. Plus, his futurism was just a regurgitation of what/. people knew for a long time.
They said the toughest challenge for a hero is knowing when to die. Doubly so for a writer.
Some traps are quite innovative, with no strings attached. Cell phone activation, infrared (TV remote), even proximity sensor circuits are available in electronic handbooks. Silly Strings are no cure against these types of danger.
Slashdot Mirror
If one paper out of fifty said the GM good showed toxicity in rats, guess which paper Greenpeace would quote?
Selective evidence doesn't make cases impartial. Sadly, the more they do it, the more people think Greenpeace is a bunch of hypocritical phonies.
Politics aside, are we seeing a separation of State and Corporations, just like we saw the separation of State and Church centuries ago?
Then there is psychology. How would we feel if Sony HQ moves from Tokyo to LA, or Philips from Amsterdam to Boston? What if Google HQ moves from Mountain View to Beijing or even Microsoft from Redmond to Bangladesh? Do we as Americans feel more important when companies do more business here? Do we feel threatened as companies move offshore, even if tax revenue is still paid to US?
Halliburton is the focus of the news because of its government relations. If a corporation is not banking on government contracts for business, is it more justified to move anywhere it likes?
For Microsoft to openly announce this, they must be hurting in PR.
The preloaded crap for HP is Microsoft Works, which is enough for people really but expires in 30 days. Yet almost everyone I know asked to install Office over Works, despite the fact that Office more bloated and expensive. It also has license conflict with existing Works.
What this proves is that the non-Slashdot hoi polloi like the name 'Office' better than 'Works'. And the same is true for 'Microsoft' over 'Open'. These are the prime customers for Microsoft, and I consider it adverse selection anyways.
I've been using OO for years, and nobody I collaborated with ever complained of format problems.
I have clients in East Asia, and I live in a 9PM-5AM world, catch a nap, and start dealing with the work on the US side. Now I'm going 10PM-6AM, breakfast, and back to work. Most of the world don't change clocks, unlike us.
Americans love traditions, no matter how idiotic it is.
Consider NASA's recent budget cut, I suggest they give the congressmen more souvenirs before planning some cool inflatable lunar base. Someone's political life is at risk.
There's also the fact that a lot of Baby Boomers grew up with Star Trek, not B5 or BSG. The market is obviously catering to the psychological need to reminisce back to the fetal good days - by resurrecting those good 60's feelings being on top of the world after WWII and economic prosperity. Unfortunately this is already alienating many younger viewers, whose views on life are not as cheerful as their older generations. The only other thing good about prequels is a younger cast, which appeals to younger adults. I'm sure it will still draw crowds, but our younger audiences will not watch those happy shows forever - they eventually grow up and face a crueler world of global competition and conflicts. And sadly, nor will our older ones - they eventually succomb to Alzheimer's and can't even tell what they are watching.
The rumor of banning probably made the ad more popular. I find it unique but still... bland.
So there's our lessons learned: if your ad is offensive to someone, milk it, use it, fan it for awareness. If it's not borderline offensive yet, engineer some into it.
One word: bandwidth. As ugly as MySpace is, it was faster than competitors. You can build the most reliable web encyclopedia to challenge Wikipedia, but I'm not using it if I can't load it under 3 seconds. Deal.
Laudable attempt; lame execution. Letting silicons sort out how they should connect in the first place is something mother nature would not do. Back-propagation? You must believe that only Purkinje cells exist in the brain. Please do not confuse researches of large scale/quantity with genuinely brilliant ideas.
In one hypothesis, our world population is directly proportional to the amount of energy it can harvest. Would you prefer a drastic shrinking of population, thus reverse the ecological depletion, the energy uncertainty, the urban sprawl, the increasing socioeconomic gap, the unemployment, the global outsourcing, the war on terror, and practically every self-afflicted wound by humankind?
No single altruistic individual can save the world. Deal.
You're exactly right. After my military tour and moving around the country some, I still have data in different states with unfamiliar DOB's, simultaneous overlapping residential address in multiple states, blanks in employment and financial records, etc. I'm just glad the records for anything illegal were clean.
Chances are, your civil authority got elected/appointed for a charming smile, not his/her ability to deal with emergencies. The rare times that the real world exposes them for the cowards they are, they usually come back with other agendas to cover their obvious blundering hysteria.
I'll be a troll and hypothesize that's what started the Iraq business too. We just haven't seen similar results after Katrina because the guy in charge was fired immediately.
Someone should create a microbe that turns any living creature to diesel fuel. Imagine the increase in productivity when you load the microbe in a gun and shoot that blubbering idiot in the office. It boosts morale, increases fuel reserve, and decreases competing consumer by one. Or you drive down the street and your tank is low. You wave a bum over. Voila! You find fuel for your car.
Just another modest proposal.
First, how much money will Mocrosoft make from this?
Secondly, if the goal is to keep valuable information for future generation, your scheme will require a massive duplication of all the data trash we accumulated today. This is a big waste of resources (hardware and energy) that people often envision as the solution. Are we going to build all kinds of data warehouses cooled by running rivers in order to store this massively duplicated data? We better pray we don't run out of electricity, if that is the choice we make.
Ray Kurzweil's First Law said, the destruction of information is the first sign of intelligence. We are very good at collecting information - we have cardiogram data from millions of patients everyday, traffic cameras on major highways in near-real-time, and weather satellite feed all over the world. Most likely we don't keep the information; we overwrite the memory once it is no longer critically important. This is equally true for blogs that contain links to other blogs with links to other random odd news that few will be interested in a month from now.
Maybe we feel the need to keep every piece of information intact, since we are the ones who crafted the zesty blogs and posted the witty comments. Realistically this is pointless. Human brains are designed to sleep and forget, so that unnecessary data does not clog the system and degrade performance. Those who don't usually suffer from attention deficit and random memory dump. (Wonder how this coincide with the Microsoft experience.) Most people have tons of data on their PCs that subconsciously they know they will never read again. They just keep them because a) it took a long time to create, b) it has entertainment or sentimental values, c) it may become useful one day, d) the hard drive is big enough. This is equivalent to a garage or an attic full of assorted junk... except all the junk is digital and easily duplicated, and thus has even less resale value than that kayak collecting dust in the corner.
Does it really make sense to make them immortal?
To collect is an evolutionary trait - our ancestors gathered and kept things for times of need. Our 20th century affluence has overcome much of the material poverty, but the human nature hardly changed. This resulted in a twisted culture of anti-utilitarianism. We even arrogantly think our future generations will one day benefit from our collective wisdom - and we are willing to waste precious computing power to prove it.
Est ubi gloria Babylonia? I'm not saying there is nothing we need to keep from our culture, but the idea that Microsoft can engineer the 'immortality' of anything is just blasphemy.
The two choices here are broad and ambiguous. For 'thinkers', do we mean people who can initiate new problems to solve? People who can clearly define the problems to solve? People who can find an optimal solution to the problem? People who can cross-pollinate and bring different insights to the problem? People who can turn solutions into profit? People who can master diverse disciplines of designs? People who can delineate the process and facilitate the problem-solving? People who can retain and recall the cumulative lessons learned over the lifespan of projects?
And what about 'doers'? Do we mean people who can complete the milestone assigned? People who can fast-prototype a solution (but not necessarily see it to fruition)? People who can memorize the design rules and syntax to be useful when we need quick fixes? People who know the best tools to use for a specific task, and are quick to learn the tool and make it productive? People who can give a rough solution fine touch before close-ups? People who can spend ungodly hours finding the critical faults in a system and correct/debug them? Highly specialized technicians? Mass producers (quality not accounted for)? General multitasked interns?
The truth is, the industry really wants munchkins, but most engineers can never be all the above sans the deficiencies. (Those who can - well, they come at premiums that the industry is usually unwilling to pay for.) Unlike management, legal or medical disciplines, engineering schools do not crank out people knowing what they will be used for, so they created Lego blocks and play-doh. This is exactly how an engineer would approach the problem: unit design that is probably not very useful at the factory shipping dock. In fact, most graduates in engineering are bewildered about the paths they will take afterwards, and this inherent insecurity is no small cause to the career choice of our younger generations.
What an engineering graduate finds is not two roads in a wood, not 'thinker' or 'doer', but a plethora of companies that want munchkins with low pays. It is easy to be overwhelmed by the HR mandate of '10+ years in C++, DSP, FPGA, plus 5+ years in communication devices design', or 'Experience working with F-22 engine design and Mil-Spec X'.
In a sense there is indeed a disconnect of the engineer schools providing books and not practical skills. An increasing number of graduates had only one course in theoretical structural design before they headed into workplace. A graduate might have taken the basics of every field in his/her major, e.g., aerodynamics, robotics, CFD, biomechanics, etc., but this only improves employability of the newly minted grad and hardly makes anybody useful. In other words, the graduates have maximized their utility to best cope with an industry that is too diverse for the education system.
I think this is a tragedy. By turning the engineering schools into a talent search, the industry forces the schools to become trade schools that offer JAVA and web design courses. By graduating students who are novices of all trades, the schools leaves the real education to the industry. Companies that once expected to find qualified graduates are now cautious in examining candidate profiles - because there are those who took microprocessing courses and never even programmed one. The engineering schools in turn provides even more specialized courses that are geared toward industry, e.g., medical imaging or high frequency microelectronic devices, so that the graduates are better qualified for HR scrutiny. Here is a vicious cycle that the schools and the industry jointly created.
And the results for the students are: 1) an abundance of courses to confuse a freshman engineering student, 2) a need for students to spread butter thin, 3) a sacrifice of enthusiasm for industrial advantage. I fear #3 is the worst of the outcomes, because beyond 'thinker' and 'doer', an engineer really needs a spark, a curiosity, a fervor to dive into a spe
Physics and chemistry before 1950s were mainly conducted in developed countries under very supportive atmosphere. Physics and chemistry today are conducted near everywhere in university labs, mostly insufficiently funded, overshadowed by other technological developments such as stem cells and nano-transistors. The PhDs either work in fields totally irrelevant to their studies (on Wall St. or in booming high tech) or get their lives squeezed out of them by constant pressure to publish and the tenureship rat-race. If we measure their lifespan after 1950s we may get headlines like 'Science shortens your lifespan by 10 years' etc etc.
No statistics was used to back up this hypothesis.
According to international space convention, outer space is considered like Antarctica and not supposed to be used for military or economic self-interest. Spying satellites do not truly comply with this convention, and firing a laser from the ground would indeed be self-preservation.
I also notice military news generated more buzz when China was the subject.
No. 3rd party apps also have greater likelihood of breaking the system.
Apple can probably adopt a 2.5th party policy - 3rd party submit, Apple tests, Dedicated user group approves. It beats the headache of frustrating user support.
... the future is probably in near-free downloads of low-cost production entertainment. How they ever make profit is anyone's guess, but even when you reduce/remove the plot, the professional editing, the unionized actors, the marketing department, and the copyright lawyers, the customers weren't complaining anyways.
And face it, how many people want to provide evidence of their pleasure-sampling? Having an HD-DVD just increases the risk unless you watch it on a tiny screen in the secluded basement.
Software has pseudocode, and I rarely see people use this concept when they write their spaghetti. The pseudocode is also rarely passed down with the final product, thereby obliterating any possibility of future expansion and maintenance. Even when they are, they are handled by the wrong people who never read them. In the low probability cases where people have access to the pseudocode, the complexity makes any effort to understand the project moot. Smart programmers usually say, "What the heck!" and start coding everything from scratch, thus repeating the cycle.
Raising children is another typical case where people expect too much too soon. The different is that most parents are just disappointed when the children don't turn out as they wanted. In software development there are status and salary on the line for everyone, so we don't want to accept failure.
Maybe we'll be disillusioned once we look beyond our cubicles and see that other projects had problems too. But unlike biology, failed software projects cannot maintain themselves and bring forth future generations that may be more successful than they are. In other words, built-in resilience is not a trait for failed engineering projects.
Cosi triste...
Fifteen minutes of fame gone, the author tries to justify existence by announcing publicly his farewell. Nothing he mentioned in TFA is worth the time readers spent reading; the metaphor sux for both plagiarism and extrapolation ad absurdum. Plus, his futurism was just a regurgitation of what /. people knew for a long time.
They said the toughest challenge for a hero is knowing when to die. Doubly so for a writer.
Some traps are quite innovative, with no strings attached. Cell phone activation, infrared (TV remote), even proximity sensor circuits are available in electronic handbooks. Silly Strings are no cure against these types of danger.
Patriotism is sentimental; strategy isn't.
Giles Slade's book, Made to Break: Technology and Obsolescence in America is a good read on the designed obsolescence and market force.