Nice of you to say so...
1,709 karma · joined January 23, 2009
I would say people love spreadsheets (Excel just happened to be a particularly well done implementation of a spreadsheet when the GUI became the most popular desktop platform) because:
a) Easy visual data entry - everyone understands a table of data.
b) Non-procedural programming model.
c) Simple analysis tools (batteries included): charts and pivot tables.
There just has not been much imagination applied to improving on this model - there are great gobs of ground for innovation for someone willing to take a stab.
1) Make spreadsheets "functional" - i.e., allow a whole spreadsheet model to be used as a function definition (I was amazed when I first learned spreadsheets and found they lacked this capability).
2) Make it easier to sling large data sets around - and especially share and work with dataset repositories.
3) Better hooks for developers to integrate spreadsheets with more advanced functionality and features. There is too much locked up in the spreadsheet as a monolithic application. I can publish my Python program easily - why can't I do the same for an application developer in "spreadsheet language"?
There has been relatively little thinking about how to organize and manage collections of spreadsheets and models. Most people still deal with one spreadsheet at a time; it's its own little island - largely cut off from the rest of the world. In the era of cloud infrastructure and hosted data, why aren't there better systems in place to manage data and models in the aggregate? What if you married the best of GitHub and Excel together, for example?
Chairman Hersman said that potential causes of the initiating short circuit currently being evaluated include battery charging, the design and construction of the battery, and the possibility of defects introduced during the manufacturing process.
But integrated products (ones that do BOTH X and Y) are necessarily inferior at being the best X or the best Y. A designer must make trade offs in order to make the integration work. In the realm of software, the trade offs can be quite small, and so the integrated whole is quite good. But in a hardware device, integration imposes critical constraints that make integration across functions quite painful; limited screen size, battery life, memory and storage, etc. Perhaps the most insidious is overall UI complexity. Making a device for keyboard and mouse is quite different than making a device with a great touch experience. Having both (and even adding legacy Windows UI) is very challenging.
Microsoft should not have released a "turd" if they could not achieve a great experience within the design constraints. I think most people believe this first attempt has serious flaws and compromises.
Because Apple has shown the world what a great experience a tablet can provide, I think users are unwilling to compromise just so they can occasionally connect a keyboard and mouse to it, or run legacy applications. I'd rather carry two devices than use one (inferior) product.
From an economic argument, data center operators have a profit motive. A profitable enterprise consumes less "resource" than it consumes (as long as they are not subsidized by the government). So it's obvious that they are doing something valuable for the economy regardless of the residual "wasted" resources.
Compare to other human activities, where "waste" can be identified. If you live in a home that has a bedroom that you only use 8 hours a day, do we decry the 66% of waste that the home represents?
How about comparing the total energy costs of buying a physical book in a bookstore to downloading it to a Kindle? I have no doubt the new mode represents a savings of several orders of magnitude less energy consumed. But Mr. Glanz wants us to be outraged that the power distribution network wastes 30% of the minuscule amount of energy required to send it to me over the Internet.
Had he not wanted to write a sensationalized piece, he could have been more helpful in explaining data centers on a human level. How many watts of electricity are being spent in data centers on my behalf? Rather than sensationalize a "300 million watts" number for Google data centers, he could have said Google expends 3 watts per US household...but that number is not going to scare anyone.
Deflation does encourage saving over consumption, yes. But I love the fact that products in the electronics markets have had long term predictable price declines over many decades.
This is a good thing for individual liberty and self determination.
But I would disagree when you propose that the only solution is to prevent the most efficient producers of a good or service from selling as much as they can into their market.
I rather put my hopes on open access and competition; both of which are enhanced by a means of exchange that does not require the friction of a trusted intermediary.
Since CL offers their data freely to "the public", by what theory can they prevent the public from using their own chosen client browser to view it? Why should there be a distinction between software installed in my computer and a cloud-hosted application like Padmapper?
I believe that Padmapper, as an agent acting on behalf of its users, has every right to reformat the information originating on CL as long as it does not purposefully seek to cause confusion about the origin of the data (which they do not as they link to the source).
The model I used in pageforest.com is to enable users to secure their documents as public, private, or shared access with other named users. Some apps don't fit in these neat categories, so a more complex system would be needed to support them.
More problematic, the chance of any collisions is 50% when you have filled just sqrt(space) - known as the birthday paradox.
So, rather than allay fears about his service, I'm left feeling more skeptical about their claims.
I would love hear from people more versed in cryptographic key exchange protocols as to the basis for their claims.
And, seriously, a Michael Scott protocol?
[1] http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec14.html section 14.35.
BTW - 60 Minutes should be retitled "40 Minutes" - from the time codes on my DVR I find that the Musk story was 15 minutes, and the face blindness story was 25 minutes. Is it any wonder people would rather consume video online (rather than watch 20 minutes of Cialis ads).