stargeek
which side of the Laffer Curve we're onwhich side of the Laffer Curve we're onwhich side of the Laffer Curve we're on 05/05/2004 02:38 AM revenues are increasing washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A64130-2004May3.htmltrack this site | 4 links This is a GrokNews Entry: (what is grok?)which side of the Laffer Curve we're onGrok Headline matches for which side of the Laffer Curve we're onOther side of the curveOther side of the curve 06/28/2004 01:50 AM USA Today Jun 28 2004 6:19AM GMT Castor and Pollux walking naked, side by
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 The Idea: What do you do if you need or want to collaborate, but you can't do so in person? What purposes are best served by weblogs, wikis, and other types of online collaboration tools, spaces and media? Collaboration entails finding the right group of people (skills, personalities, knowledge, work-styles, and chemistry), ensuring they share commitment to the collaboration task at hand, and providing them with an environment, tools, knowledge, training, process and facilitation to ensure they work together effectively. This is challenging enough face-to-face in real-time. It's doubly difficult virtually and asynchronously. But there are examples of great music, literature, invention, scientific discovery and problem-solving that have come from such handicapped collaboration. How did they do it, and can you improve the likelihood of brilliant virtual collaboration by using the right tools and media? Let's take a look at some of the alternatives:
There are three levels of collaboration based on duration of contact:
Once you've found the right person to converse with, if they're close and inexpensive to talk to in person, that's likely what you'll do. But what if they aren't? How do you quickly provide your Conversation Collaborators with the context they need to converse with you effectively when you can't put a chart or a piece of paper in front of them and brief them? Organizations have found that if the person you want to converse with face-to-face is more than two minutes walk (or elevator ride) away, the probability of you making the effort to converse with them in person drops precipitously. If you have a blog, an audience, and a little time, your blog can serve this need well. Ask a question on a popular blog and you'll probably get an informed answer quite quickly (thank you readers!) Most businesses, alas, have few established blogs and even less time. Preferred conversation tools in business, when face-to-face is impossible, are now IM and the telephone -- with IM trumping the phone for its self-documentation, its suitability to multi-tasking, and because it's easier to browse than voice-mail, and the phone trumping IM if a lot of iteration is needed to provide context. White-boarding and document-sharing applications, awkward as they are, can be helpful additions to IM and telephone conversations if the participants are savvy enough to use them properly (most aren't) and if documents and graphics are needed to provide more context. E-mail is the increasingly unpopular fall-back. Discussion forums are the ultimate tool of last resort for conversations, because of the disadvantages listed above. In most of the companies I am familiar with, they are only sporadically used and quickly grow stale. A variety of tools have been developed for more enduring project collaborations and alliance collaborations. Because they tend to involve more participants than conversations do, the logistics get tougher and the effectiveness of these tools gets more challenging. And the threshold point for giving up on the viability of in-person collaboration rises dramatically. I think this is an absolutely critical point. It is the reason large corporations, with the internal resources (people and money) to sequester, have the capacity to collaborate more effectively than small corporations and loose, unfunded collaborative groups (though whether they use that capacity to advantage is another question entirely). Open Source project teams and alliances have pioneered low-budget, virtual, asynchronous collaboration, and are the role model to follow. But is the reason for this perhaps that Open Source collaborations are generally undertaken by exceptionally tech-savvy groups, very agile at using and even inventing their own collaborative tools to get the job done? They usually have a good GUI for the non-techie, but wade into the material and collaboration technology behind a lot of these groups and your head will start spinning. What about the other 95% of the population? If I want to set up a virtual collaboration team to design a model intentional community (with people I might end up spending the rest of the my life with) or to invent a post-capitalist economy (a large project if there ever was one), what tools and media should I use? Wikis are one place to start -- a bit nerdy and physically inelegant but functional and not that hard to learn once you take the plunge. They are, however, asynchronous tools, which is a significant barrier to true collaboration. There are some more robust collaborative 'spaces' for communities of interest and communities of practice to adopt, but some of the best 'groupware' (like Groove and Exchange and eRooms) costs money and requires considerable learning to use its different tools effectively. These tools generally also require a coordinator to invest a lot of time to setting up and managing the 'space'. There are a variety of document-sharing technologies in the market, which allow several people to see a document at once and to 'take control' each in turn to change that document. Ideally, using a combination of
I am confident that, as bandwidth and processing power continue to expand, we will soon see:
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Here is a particularly useful information on ASP.NET: Application Instances, Application Events, and Application State in ASP.NET. This is the line that surprised me:
The ASP.NET runtime creates as many instances of application classes as needed to process requests simultaneously. ... Application instances are used in a thread-safe manner, that is, one request at a time.
Gee, thanks for that curve ball. If you didn't know this before, now you know why application instance variables were behaving weirdly. Yes, you were sleeping with her twin sister, so to speak.
Here is another one, this time from Dr. GUI: Am I Losing Memory?
A key reason that the Application object exists in ASP.NET is for compatibility with classic ASP code ... consider storing data in static members of the application class rather than in the Application object.
This begs the question “Why limit oneself to 'static members of the application class' instead of just 'static members'?” That's just a good way to add unnecessary dependencies.
BTW, it's funny how many pure ASP.NET applications are using HttpApplicationState. Old habits die hard.
Driving back and forth to Nashua, NH yesterday I listened to The Bell Curve as an abridged book on tape (picked it up for $5 in a used bookstore in San Diego). This book created quite a stir in 1994 because of its discussion of average IQ differences among races but I had never read it. It turns out that even if you leave out all the controversial stuff about race the book is potentially very relevant to our times.
The Bell Curve starts out by talking about how we live in an era where people get sorted by cognitive ability into socioeconomic classes. In 14th century England if you were a peasant with a high IQ or a noble with a low IQ it didn't affect your life, reproductive potential, or income very much. In our more meritocratic and vastly more sophisticated economy a smart kid from a lower middle class might make it to the top of a big company (cf. Jack Welch, who paid himself $680 million as CEO of GE) or at least into a $300,000/year job as a radiologist. For the authors of the Bell Curve the increasing disparity in income in the U.S. is primarly due to the fact that employees with high IQs are worth a lot more than employees with low IQs. They note that we have an incredibly complex legal system and criminal justice system. So you'd expect people with poor cognitive ability to fail to figure out what is a crime, which crimes are actually likely to be punished, etc., and end up in jail. (A Google search brought up a report on juvenile justice in North Carolina; the average offender had an IQ of 79.) If they stay out of jail through dumb (literally) luck, there is no way that they are ever going to be able to start a small business; the legal and administrative hoops through which one must jump in order to employ even one other person are impenetrable obstacles to those with below-average intelligence.
The trend that the decade-old Bell Curve book misses is telecom and outsourcing. The authors assume that an American with high IQ will have a higher income and better standard of living than an American with low IQ. That's the sorting function of an advanced economy. They don't get into the question of whether it is sustainable that an American with low IQ should have a higher income than someone in India or China with a high IQ. Statistically you'd have to expect that there are more really smart people in India and China than the total population of the U.S. If the sorting-by-IQ process were efficient across international borders you'd expect that an American with an IQ of 100 should be making less than an Indian with an IQ of 120. Given that a lot of brilliant well-educated people in India are getting paid less than $5,000 per year, this is a bit worrisome those of us here who are fat, dumb, and happy. [Imagine that you were running a company. Would you rather employ a local high school graduate with an IQ of 90 or an Indian college grad with an IQ of 130 via Internet link?]
For us oldsters, one unexpected piece of cheerful news from this book is that younger Americans are getting genetically dumber every year. Even if you ignore the racial and immigrant angles of the book that created so much controversy back in 1994 it is hard to argue with the authors' assertion that smart women tend to choose higher education and careers rather than cranking out lots of babies. As a middle-aged (40) guy whose own cognitive abilities are beginning to fade due to neuron death I felt sure that there would be no place me for in the America of 2050. Our population is predicted to reach 450 million or so, i.e., the same as India had back when we were kids and our mothers told us about this starving and overpopulated country. An individual person's labor in India has negligible economic value--the American firm Office Tiger gets 1500 applicants, many of whom are very well qualified, on a good day in Chennai. It would seem that no enterprise would need an old guy's skills in a country of 450 million; why bother when there are so many energetic young people around? And how would we be able to afford a house or apartment if there are 450 million smart young people out there earning big bucks and putting pressure on real estate prices? But if the book is right most of those young people will be dumb as bricks.
powerlineblog.com/archives/007909.php
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Noah
Acres, the man behind Bigha, who manufactures the unlikely combo of
bikes and lasers, has told us he has spun the lasers out into a new
company, called Lucky Duck. They've got a new $160 laser, called the
'Curve,' which has not only an ergonomic shape in five colors, but
features a built-in chip that keeps the laser tuned as close to the
5mw legal limit as possible, meaning you'll get as bright of a laser
as possible for as long as possible.
Just don't shine the Jaspers or Curves into airline pilots' eyes, or you'll be up for 20 years in a Patriot Act violation. For real.
Product Page [LuckyDuck]
What Linux trends are you seeing with BEA software?Huge adoption curve climbing very fast for BEA over the last six to nine months. A lot of focus in the financial services marketplace, where there's a lot of experimentation and initial deployment going on with Linux on Intel. And I think the motivation in that arena is simplification and cost reduction, so they are looking to buy significantly less expensive hardware.
What's the breakdown of platforms on which BEA software is running?
About 50% is on Sun, and about 23%, 24% is on Hewlett-Packard. Hewlett-Packard has both Intel and non-Intel platforms in there. And then it drops off pretty quick. IBM hardware, I think, is 5% or 7%. In some countries, we sell a lot of IBM's hardware.
What about the Linux operating system?
Linux is around the 15% to 20% range, which has climbed pretty quickly.
medienkritik.typepad.com/blog/2003/12/germanys_peace_.h
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The following phrases have been identified by the grok system as matching this entry:
Laffer is a Web-based instant messenger client.
It supports ICQ, MSN, AOL, Yahoo, Jabber, and
other messenger networks. Laffer is written in
HTML and JavaScript, and it uses DOM 1.2 and PHP.
Laffer is capable of exchanging text messages,
contact list visualization, presence status
visualization, and getting information about the
user. No file, audio, or video exchange is
supported at the moment.