Disqus - Friends of miselaineeous

Re: Tech jobs vaporized as patent war goes nuclear

Michael Tiemann — Thu, 18 Aug 2011 07:11:40 -0000

Very well said. The analogy to medical malpractice is one I had not previously considered, but it's very apt. The patent system as practiced today replaces innovation with litigation...bad for everybody but the lawyers and the bankers.

Re: Meet Bill Gates, the Man Who Changed Open Source Software

Michael Tiemann — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 12:41:58 -0000

Um. I think Bill Gates is the Man Who Was Changed By Open Source Software.

Re: The Target Isn’t Hollywood, MPAA, RIAA, Or MAFIAA: It’s The Policymakers

Michael Tiemann — Sun, 05 Feb 2012 17:15:33 -0000

Right on!

Re: DOMA Has Been Ruled Unconstitutional - National - The Atlantic Wire

Michael Tiemann — Thu, 23 Feb 2012 05:48:14 -0000

I read with interest all 43 pages of this ruling. It is heartening to see judges take such care of the law and their duty to it. I particularly liked his quotation of Chief Justice John Roberts in his closing remarks:

"As Supreme Court Chief Justice John G. Roberts said during his confirmation hearings: “Judges are like umpires. Umpires don’t make the rules, they apply them. ... it’s [the judge’s] job to call balls and strikes, and not to pitch or bat.” Confirmation Hearing on the Nomination of John G. Roberts, Jr. to be Chief Justice of the United States: Hearing Before the S. Comm. on the Judiciary, 109th Cong. 56 (2005) (statement of John G. Roberts, Jr., Nominee)."

Judge White calls 'em like he sees 'em, fairly and objectively. Good for him, good for the parties in this case, and good for America.

Re: Yes, Mr. Smith, Goldman Sachs Is All About Making Money: View

Michael Tiemann — Wed, 14 Mar 2012 19:46:49 -0000

It is difficult to say what is more preposterous: the content of this opinion piece, or the fact that it was essentially published anonymously. If this is the view of a specific editor or editors, the least they could do is to sign their names.

The point of Mr. Smith's letter is that what goes around comes around. The editors seem to think that Goldman Sachs is somehow exempt from reality, and that they can stop time and warp space sufficiently to ensure that whatever wrongs they do to their clients (whether profitable or not) will never come back to bite them, and indeed should be treated as a good thing as long as the harm is profitable in the immediate term. That may have been true when it came to the bailout and subsequent legislation following the US financial crisis, but cannot be true forever.

Today the market rendered its own opinion: when CitiBank failed the Fed's stress test, the market took them down 3.4%. At the same time, Goldman Sachs passed the Fed's stress test but they failed Greg Smith's common-sense ethics test, and that sent their shares down 3.35%. Surely an organization as pro-market as Bloomberg would see that the all-knowing market graded the two events as virtually equivalent.

Bloomberg's total repudiation of Mr. Smith's letter shows just how the disease that is eating away the soul of Goldman Sachs has already metastatisized inside the editorial brains of Bloomberg View.

Re: Red Hat Becomes Open Source's First $1 Billion Baby | Wired Enterprise | Wired.com

Michael Tiemann — Thu, 29 Mar 2012 05:52:33 -0000

Back in 1989 was so certain that free software could be the basis of a $1B enterprise, I started one just to prove it (http://en.wikipedia.org/wik....
It took longer than I expected, for a reason I didn't really appreciate
at the time. In the 10+ years we have been selling Red Hat Enterprise
Linux, I have found that for every $1 Red Hat sells, we have to displace
$10 of proprietary junk that never really worked in the first place.
Rationally, it sounds easy. Indeed, this 10:1 value proposition was
precisely what enabled Cygnus Support to bootstrap from an initial $6000
in capital to $20M in revenues in less than 10 years. But practically,
it's not easy, because in the mainstream old habits die hard. (Ever
notice how difficult it has been for the US to change its energy,
healthcare, or tax policies despite widespread agreement that we
should?)

Red Hat's success, therefore, is not merely reaching a
$1B milestone, but the remediation of $10B of problematic and
unsustainable proprietary IT. That is the result I am most proud of.

As I explained two years ago (http://opensource.com/busin...,
the world spends more than $1.5T on enterprise IT, wasting $500B on
applications that never go into production, or if they do, go into
production late, missing key functionality, or brokenness that impacts
operational capabilities. But the economic losses of bad IT are far
worse than $500B: the ROI of all that spending was supposed to deliver
between $6-$8 for every $1 spent, meaning that wasting $500B per year
translates to $3.5T of value that was promised but never actually
delivered by IT. Putting our results into that perspective, Red Hat's
$1B in sales has removed $10B from the $500B problem (or at least the
$1.5T overall enterprise IT spend). Moreover, our customers have, by
and large, seen the expected $7B in ROI value instead (as evidenced by
the numerous #1 rankings Red Hat has received in delivering IT value).
By removing $10B of problematic IT from the system, we can take credit
for reducing the $3.5T IT value gap by between $28B and $77B (the former
if we merely take out "average" IT spend, and the latter if we really
are replacing the worst-performing IT with the best). That's a lot of
work to do for $1B. But it's worth it!

Re: The DIY 'Maker Movement' Meets the VCs

Michael Tiemann — Sun, 13 May 2012 05:56:41 -0000

Reading this article reminds me of the discussions I had with VCs back in the 1980s. What they didn't understand then about software, and what they seem to not understand now about hardware, is that the open source model, well-practiced, is a sustainable competitive advantage. Secrecy is the thing that's not sustainable.

Red Hat has clearly built a successful business based on open source, and any VC who doesn't understand what Red Hat has done is probably not going to understand how to value 21st century companies.

Re: Nostalgia Gaming: Frogger Helps Teach Kids Computer Science

Michael Tiemann — Sun, 20 May 2012 20:11:47 -0000

I was lucky enough to learn programming when I was 10, back in 1974. That made a *huge* difference for me, and made it possible to literally write my future as a programmer in the 1980s. It is great to see such fearlessness among 4th graders!

Re: First Look: ARRI L7 LED Fresnel Lights

Michael Tiemann — Tue, 22 May 2012 07:37:14 -0000

The photometric data suggests that on a pure footcandle basis, these lights land between the 300W and 650W ARRI Fresnel Plus instruments. Under what circumstances can the L7-C really be considered the equivalent of a 1000W instrument? At 10000K?

Re: Financing open projects

Michael Tiemann — Fri, 16 Nov 2012 15:21:24 -0000

I saw the trailer for "Tube" and immediately decided to fund their kickstarter project at a high level: http://www.kickstarter.com/...

Blender is one of the more successful mixtures of creative ambition and solid financial funding, but the Tube Open Movie shows that they are not the only one, and that there could be 100s or 1000s if there were that many great teams with great stories ready to tell.

Re: Pioneering Jazz Musician Dave Brubeck Dies

Michael Tiemann — Thu, 06 Dec 2012 06:58:46 -0000

PRI has made a most ironic selection in choosing how best to honor Dave Brubeck and his quartet's most iconic composition: Take Five. Val Bennett's Ska cover exemplifies how *not* to play Take Five, falling out of the 3-2 feel into a 2-2-2 feel immediately after the three bar introduction (at 4:31 in the soundcloud file). This is perhaps the most common mistake one would expect from a middle-school band class playing the piece for the first time, but not something that their band teacher should ever let them play in concert, and certainly not something that should be played as the final eulogy for the great innovator of rhythm in jazz, Dave Brubeck.

Re: The Lazy Man’s WordPress Photo Gallery with Dropbox

Michael Tiemann — Sat, 05 Jan 2013 22:21:07 -0000

Thanks! I'll have to try that.

Re: Tech advocate encourages open-source programs

Michael Tiemann — Fri, 18 Jan 2013 06:34:24 -0000

I was quite surprised to read the title of this article, because Stallman famously promotes free software, not open source software. The article appears to be perfectly accurate--it comports with everything I have seen and know about Stallman's topics and antics. However, nowhere in the article is open source mentioned. Why then put open source in the title? Is it because open source is a bigger draw for eyeballs than free software? Is it because the term "free software" might make people think it's a marketing gimmick? I ask honestly because the article itself makes a great case for the cause of software freedom, but the decision on how to title the article is where the real story lies.

Re: Listen: Aaron Swartz On Chicago Public Radio In 2001

Michael Tiemann — Sat, 19 Jan 2013 08:12:09 -0000

What a blast from the past. Host Lew Koch mentions the Cypherpunks, and they first met and organized in the conference rooms of Cygnus Support in Mountain View California. The Internet really is a Global Village, both then and now. We will miss you, Aaron.

Re: Flex4K, RED Dragon & More Added to AbelCine’s FoV Comparison Tool

Michael Tiemann — Sat, 01 Mar 2014 07:04:03 -0000

Hooray!

Re: Driving Down a Dream (Part 1) — Groovebox Studios

Michael Tiemann — Sat, 19 Apr 2014 13:10:21 -0000

Great to have you all down here, and looking forward to your next visit!

Re: Open Source Chief at Redhat Hit With Bogus Copyright Claims

Michael Tiemann — Thu, 29 May 2014 12:45:09 -0000

This is my channel: https://www.youtube.com/use...

And here is the playlist that contains the videos: https://www.youtube.com/pla...

Re: Walter Isaacson on The Imitation Game and Making Alan Turing Famous

Michael Tiemann — Sun, 04 Jan 2015 18:34:59 -0000

Walter, you should profile Richard Stallman and the birth of the free software/open source movements. Linus Torvalds made free software popular through Linux. Red Hat made Linux profitable enough to be credible in the mainstream business communities. But Richard Stallman is the one who had a vision of "teamwork" that far transcended anything any corporation had perviously imagined. Linus's Law was merely a pithy reduction of what the free software community knew well in the 1980s.

Of all the changes in the software landscape in the past 30 years, open source software is perhaps the most significant. Indeed, even Microsoft recognizes that they need to be more open source!

BTW, WIRED magazine did indeed treat the subject back in its very first issue. Time for a refresh...

Re: Walter Isaacson on The Imitation Game and Making Alan Turing Famous

Michael Tiemann — Wed, 07 Jan 2015 15:35:26 -0000

*>BLUSH<* Well then...I will have to read the book! Thanks for writing back.

Re: The MOM (Matter Over Mind) Philosophy

Michael Tiemann — Sat, 17 Jan 2015 07:02:55 -0000

"In order to be commanded, Nature must first be obeyed." -- Francis Bacon

Re: Chaos theory

Michael Tiemann — Sun, 18 Jan 2015 09:38:53 -0000

A recent essay from my friend (and MIT Media Lab director) Joi Ito says this:

"We are descending not into chaos, as many believe, but into complexity. At the same time that the Internet connects everything outside of us into a vast, seemingly unmanageable system, we find an almost infinite amount of complexity as we dig deeper inside our own biology. Much as we're convinced that our brains run the show, all while our microbiomes alter our drives, desires, and behaviors to support their own reproduction and evolution, it may never be clear who's in charge—us, or our machines. But maybe we've done more damage by believing that humans are special than we possibly could by embracing a more humble relationship with the other creatures, objects, and machines around us." [http://edge.org/response-de...]

Related?

Re: A Horrific Building Collapse in New York

Michael Tiemann — Thu, 26 Mar 2015 16:34:55 -0000

The book "Why Buildings Fall Down" has some pretty amazing story about how bad design leads to catastrophic failure, including a case where a faulty steam valve caused a boiler to become a missle, rupture a gas main, and take down a whole building: http://smile.amazon.com/Why...

Re: From 1,000,000 to Graham’s Number

Michael Tiemann — Sat, 04 Jul 2015 12:02:06 -0000

An extremely weak lower bound for TREE(3), is A(A(...A(1)...)), where the number of As is A(187196). A(n) = Ackerman(n,n).

A(1) = 3
A(A(1)) = A(3) = 61
A(A(A(1))) = A(61) < A(64) ~ G64

Clearly A(A(61)) > A(64)
So TREE(3) ~ a nesting of A(A(A(...(G64)...))) that's (A(187196) - 4) deep.

But that is again insignificant compared to SSCG(3), where SSCG is Friedman's Simple Sub-Cubic Graph function. That number can be at least a deep nesting of TREE(TREE(...(TREE(3))...)). I don't know exactly how deep, but possibly TREE(3) deep.

Re: Why Do Teachers Quit?

Michael Tiemann — Sun, 17 Apr 2016 06:02:33 -0000

I would be interested to know at least two other slices of the data: public school vs. private school turnover, and Montessori school vs. non-Montessori school turnover. In the case of public school vs. private school teachers, a factor analysis is really needed to see whether turnover is more related to economics, enthusiasm, agency, etc. By looking at the balance of the various factors at the point of maximum turnovers, by age, gender, income, and overall school performance levels, one might tease out how public schools succeed or fail relative to private schools in this arena.

In the case of Montessori vs. non-Montessori, I suspect turnover is lower in Montessori because the whole construct of the prepared environment does away with the fantasy that teachers teach, replacing it with the paradigm than children learn, and that they learn best when self-motivated in an appropriately challenging and constructive environment.

Re: Charlotte Mayor Jennifer Roberts on Why Urban and Rural Areas Need Different Rules - The Atlantic

Michael Tiemann — Fri, 17 Jun 2016 07:56:41 -0000

Great interview, and great insights! This piece deserves to make The Atlantic's Top 10 list for the year.