Ron Lindeboom
2
COW Coins
Forum Replies Created
-
Maybe you guys missed this one, yeah? Surgery performed by robots without doctors at the controls — from the Newsweek article reporting from Children’s National Health System (CNHS) and Johns Hopkins University…
“Humans make mistakes. Even surgeons, who train intensively for years and adhere to exacting protocols, are not infallible. But what if these doctors could pool their knowledge and experiences together and create an optimal surgical standard of care, to be carried out by machines? Computers, after all, make precise calculations effortlessly and consistent motions without tiring. That’s the idea behind surgical robots, which may soon perform most surgeries, from sewing up tiny wounds to executing heart procedures. Many of these operations are, in fact, already accomplished with the assistance of robots, with machines like the da Vinci Surgical System mimicking every move a surgeon makes as she controls the tools from afar. But a recent test conducted by researchers at Children’s National Health System (CNHS) and Johns Hopkins University suggests that robots in the operating room may soon go a step further, performing on soft tissue completely on their own, from start to finish. The surgeons, meanwhile, would simply stand by and watch. The Smart Tissue Autonomous Robot, or simply STAR, successfully completed open bowel surgery in pigs, leaving the animals healthy and without complications.”
https://www.newsweek.com/2016/05/20/robot-soft-tissue-surgery-pig-bowels-455765.html
It’s only going to speed up and become more common in the days ahead but we can all pretend otherwise.
Best regards,
Ronald Lindeboom
CEO, Creative COW LLCCreativity is a process wherein the student and the teacher are located in the same individual.
-
[Bill Davis] “The debate isn’t easy when you don’t have ACTUAL data to back up your ideas. And the only way to GET such data is to develop models, run real-world trials, and test, test, test with real people. “
By the time that the figures are in, the changes will already be done and the naysayers will be a thing of the past. Already robots are replacing jobs across a wide range of occupations and I was just reading an article about robots that are doing surgery. Maybe that will be enough data to prove to you that the times they are a changing.
I find it funny that the forward thinking shown at the introduction of FCPX a decade ago and which has been argued relentlessly since, is so quickly displaced by the same reticence to change that you bristled at, Bill. If you had waited for empirical quantified statistics before buying in, you’d have not been in the position you were so willing to assume.
Best regards,
Ronald Lindeboom
CEO, Creative COW LLCCreativity is a process wherein the student and the teacher are located in the same individual.
-
[Mike Cohen] “However the notion that a computer and robot might replace a doctor or lawyer seems like science fiction. “
Already there are robots that are doing surgery. So the idea may not be as outlandish as it might first appear.
Best regards,
Ronald Lindeboom
CEO, Creative COW LLCCreativity is a process wherein the student and the teacher are located in the same individual.
-
No, we are NOT burning the boats, Mark.
The posts and the addresses for them will survive into the new system. It’s taken a lot of work to figure out a migration from one system to the next and do it keeping the same addressing but we have it figured out.
That will help those who have certain things saved in an archive of links, etc.
I hope that helps.
Best regards,
Ronald Lindeboom
CEO, Creative COW LLCCreativity is a process wherein the student and the teacher are located in the same individual.
-
Having grown up on a dairy and having bought my first car in high school by selling manure to the new homeowners moving into Orange County displacing the farms that had been there before them, I know a thing or three about both the awkwardness and clumsiness of cows and the amount of manure produced around them.
Tim is spot on when he points to our own awkwardness and clumsiness but one thing that many do not consider when they enter in with their response to what we present or say, is that we are in a no-win position coming out of the gate: we will always be at odds with a significant portion of the people who come here because we are dealing with over a million people a month who enter these corrals. So there is no way to avoid pissing someone off, no matter what we say or do there will always be aggressively dissenting voices — and because it’s the internet, those voices will often be like drivers on the Los Angeles freeway who do things in their freeway anonymity that they would never do if they had to deal with you face to face. Sometimes, we have been known to be like those drivers, depending on your point of view.
Ronny Courtens points to the departure of many who no longer come here. That is both a bad and a good thing. Tim points out that some do indeed still come but do so irregularly or only when the Google search engine brings them to something they need right now. But I would point out that this phenomenon has been core to the COW since we were the WWUG long ago and we began building a team whose roster always changed as people grew in their positions and often left to start their own resources. It would take me hours to point out the names and resources that exist today that are headed by former COWs or WWUGsters, as we called them back then. As Tim Wilson likes to say, “The fields of the internet are rife with those who built their reputations at the COW and moved on.” We are proud of that fact. We do not see it as a failure but as something we always knew would happen because we are dealing with highly creative people who are thoroughbreds. I can remember when I first saw Andrew Kramer online and I told Kathlyn and Tim, “I do not know how long he will stay with us because this guy is destined to be a rockstar in this industry, but for as long as we can walk the path together, I’d love to help Andrew Kramer while he can help the COW community.” That he went on to be the graphics supervisor at Bad Robot and has worked on Star Wars and Star Trek is no surprise to me. I could go on for days with one story like that after another. Even the most directly competing and comparatively miniscule site in this particular niche, came out of the COW.
We have always said and have always know that we work on the value-for-value exchange principle. Our people bring value and we bring value. When we start, we hold the greater value and when they grow to the point that they no longer need us, much like parents who raise children that grow up, they move on when they see their own value increase. Some pretend it was all them. We know better, but we are also mature enough to know it has never been all us either. One of the secret ingredients of the COW is that not Kathlyn, Tim nor I have ever wanted to be the stars here. We like to say between ourselves that “the real power is in the invisible.” But most of competitors, even the ones that grew out of our own system, want to be the star. That is both good and bad and will always have its limits.
All this said, Tim is far nicer than me and he is much more concerned about how people see him and his place in this market. I came into all this knowing full well over 20 years ago that if we were to succeed, one of us would have to wear the black hat and I told this to Kathlyn in the very beginning. “If no one is willing to wear the black hat, the community will collapse under the weight of the most aggressive personalities manhandling [and I use that word purposely] the gentler souls in the room. So one of us is going to have to be the bastard and that isn’t going to be you, Kathlyn.” It isn’t Tim, either. He is made of gentler stuff, too. But I grew up in and survived a house that destroyed the lives of both my brothers who died young, both at their own hands. I know how tough and ugly life can get and I am unwilling to let this site degrade into the kind of ugliness that I have found coming back to it after being gone for six or seven years.
Yes, I am clumsy and I am regularly too direct for my own good. But the fact that in 2020 we will be celebrating 25 years of building sites for media professionals is a testament to the fact that what we have done has worked and proven itself over the last quarter century.
We have not given up on our goal to build the most productive, positive and helpful site of its kind for media professionals. And when our critics get anywhere close to our tenure or our track record and results, then I will worry more about their criticism than I do at the moment.
Ever wearing the black hat,
Best regards,
Ronald Lindeboom
CEO, Creative COW LLCCreativity is a process wherein the student and the teacher are located in the same individual.
-
[Michael Gissing] “I think the Cow has been extremely tolerant of this forum and I and other regulars who have stayed the distance would not want it to be detrimental to the Cow which has been an absolutely vital resource to our industry. It’s saved our hides many times and we have generously supped from the teats of its collective knowledge. None of us want this forum put out to pasture so if we seem reluctant to be herded into our new paddock we bear no ill will to our benevolent farmer. Hopefully the grass will be greener and our neighbors will complain less about the midnight mooing.”
Michael, Tim Wilson would tell you and the other members of this site that the COW is nearing the point where it is almost half females in the site. Yet, for the life of me, I cannot think of a single woman who posts in this forum. Back when we first started this site and Kathlyn was running it, the boys were much better behaved and they were far less abusive and as Kathlyn often said: “When you are in my house, you will treat my friends with courtesy and me with respect.” And for the most part, that was the sense of decorum in this site.
But that changed due largely to the ugliness that was spawned in the Discreet Edit forum. It introduced a forum that Kathlyn wanted no part of and the only woman who ever graced its doors was Marisu Fronc. Some of the members of that forum were so ugly that in their volatile rabidity they lost sight of the fact that Kathlyn and I refused advertising for years from the manufacturer who wanted that forum killed for years because it was an embarrassment to them. But no one seemed in their short-sighted vitriol to understand that we refused money for years to protect the community. We even gave the forum head 12 thousand dollars when he couldn’t pay his phone, lights and heat in a Chicago winter, and made sure he had the money and sponsorship to upgrade his equipment when Edit was EOL’d — Tim would tell you that was money we could have desperately used at the time but we knew he needed it more. But people in that forum appreciated little what we were doing for them and Chris Wright and others were so ugly that one day when my son and grandson were killed in a car wreck and not one of the people in the Edit forum could offer a word of condolence, I looked at Kathlyn and said, “I have had enough. We have cut our own throats for these people and have defended them against our advertisers — even giving the head of that forum a LOT of money and not a damned one of them can say that they are sorry in this tragedy — not one.” So I killed the forum. I am delighted they are gone…ugliness breeds more of itself when the door to it remains open.
I appreciate your attitude and hope that some of the others will catch up quick as I tend to make decisions quickly and change them, if at all, very slowly. I am loyal to a fault, but I am not a fool and I do not suffer fools forever. I have been far too tolerant but the very next time that Chris Wright breaks my nuts in this site is going to be the last time he will ever darken its doors. Those who follow his example will find themselves ushered out the same door.
There is far too much ugliness in this site in its current iteration and I have no interest in allowing it to continue. All of the bullying, talking down to people, mocking them because they are new, or 100 other reasons people seem to find to mock others, is going to stop.
If people cannot get it through their stubborn heads that this site was started by a woman and we have no interest in turning it into a boy’s gym, then they will find their accounts closed and they will be shown the door. The belligerent and condescending attitudes are going to stop as I have no interest in condoning them any longer. I am done. If I have to rebuild this site, then I am going to rebuild it our way and that does not include room for men acting like spouse abusers or bullies. We are fed up with it and we are tired of getting the letters from women and even men who write about some of the treatment they have received in this site — of which this very forum receives the brunt of, though it is not alone.
I was on the phone with Tim Wilson today and I explained exactly how Kathlyn and I feel about all this and he agreed, the time is long past when this should have been dealt with. The mean-spiritedness and bully spirits are going to cease or they can find a new home. We are done. This is our final warning.
Thank you for understanding that we have tried. We appreciate you noticing. Hopefully others will join you in your sightedness. If not, there is plenty of room left elsewhere on the internet.
Best regards,
Ronald Lindeboom
CEO, Creative COW LLCCreativity is a process wherein the student and the teacher are located in the same individual.
-
Here’s an excellent hotel/resort theme that works with the free Brizy pagebuilder.
Best regards,
Ronald Lindeboom
CEO, Creative COW LLCCreativity is a process wherein the student and the teacher are located in the same individual.
-
If it were me, I’d start with a WordPress backbone and use one of the free pagebuilders like Elementor or Brizy. Both are very intuitive and do a LOT of the heavy code for you. (With your coding skills you can use the pagebuilders and then add whatever code hooks you want to to make the work truly custom and yours.) You can subscribe to a web hosting company like Siteground.com who will install the WordPress engine for you free and will give you an SSL certificate as part of the service. Did I mention they are very cheap also? ????
Best regards,
Ronald Lindeboom
CEO, Creative COW LLCCreativity is a process wherein the student and the teacher are located in the same individual.
-
You are welcome to call me anytime, Andrew. I think the web has certain advantages and just as many distinct disadvantages to communication.
You have my number, I believe.
Best regards,
Ronald Lindeboom
CEO, Creative COW LLCCreativity is a process wherein the student and the teacher are located in the same individual.
-
My apologies that you did not receive an answer sooner but I just came back to this site after a years-long illness and I just saw this. Where are you at in your process today?
Best regards,
Ronald Lindeboom
CEO, Creative COW LLCCreativity is a process wherein the student and the teacher are located in the same individual.