S/O changed the way that revenue was recognized when a vendor sold product and services to implement. Basically, you had to wait until the implementation services were completed to recognize product revenue. Time to complete services could be multi-year and customer dependent.
I don't interpret Joel as saying 'never do architecture'. I interpret him as saying something more like:
- If your goal is to create great new architecture, that's fine, go for it.
- But if your goal is to ship a product to customers, on a tight schedule – say, you are a startup trying to get an MVP out the door before the end of your runway – then you should probably not be doing more than a fairly minimal amount of architecture, and you should beware of the temptation to do so.
Note that both your examples were created by people employed by large, wealthy organizations (MIT and AT&T respectively) that could afford to give them plenty of time to explore interesting new ideas. That's a great situation to be in, the world would be a better place if we put more people in that situation, and if you are in it, then you should take advantage of it. But if you are unfortunately not in it, then you should be aware of that fact.
Could it be that ASP (native to x86) was using x87 floating point in its default 80-bit mode, whereas Java (trying to get results more consistent cross-platform), had switched it to 64-bit mode?
Now I'm curious: why? Not that I don't believe you, but I'm wondering what is the reason? It's not intuitively clear why gloves would make it more dangerous, even knowing that it is.
If a glove comes into contact with a spinning blade, there is a good chance it will pull the rest of the glove, and the hand within it, right into the path of the blade.
> I suggested that perhaps this is because the famous people are the only ones who are fast enough to actually do everything you're "supposed to do" and still be productive.
Conjecture: it is instead or also because famous people are the only ones who are given enough slack to be able to take the time to actually do everything you're supposed to do.
Proposed test to distinguish between the conjectures: do famous mathematicians become famous by finding gaps, or find gaps after becoming famous?
Some of the famous people just have knack for asking the right questions and then answering them.
I am reminded of a joke that goes something like, if you hit a roadblock in your math problem, the best way to solve it is to get Terry Tao interested in it.
Traditionally, part of what made it worth paying IBM prices was reliably top-notch service, but perhaps that changed over time. What were your experiences? And which decade?
Are the cold viruses impossible to vaccinate against? I always assumed they were the same as flu – possible, but you need new vaccines every year because the strains keep shifting – it's just that the severity of colds is low enough that we don't bother. Is that not the case?
A lot of people blame Banach-Tarski on the axiom of choice. I disagree. I think it's in essence just a variant of the Hilbert hotel, with the axiom of choice merely serving as part of the machinery for this manifestation. In other words, it's just a counterintuitive but true consequence of the nature of infinity. As such, I think any mathematical system that acknowledges infinity, is going to have such counterintuitive results.
There is a sense in which it was: out of all the games that have ever been designed, or that it would be logically possible to design, humans selected Go as one of the relatively few to receive sustained attention, in part because it is particularly well suited to the deep neural network that is the visual cortex. So it is not a coincidence that it is also well suited to artificial deep neural networks.
