Which leads one to wonder how useful these numbers actually are to either the advertiser or the website owner. We've already established that they're just made-up numbers that happen to correspond to some log entries (not people). I'd pay an advertiser for their time and for any material they created (posters, brochures, website graphics, etc.) and for their reputation. If I wanted to check up on them, I'd do a customer service survey to find out how many of my customers became customers because they saw an ad. But to actually pay someone to bring traffic to your website and then count something stupid like page hits as success is just asking for someone to write you a distributed link-clicker bot. I'm pretty sure there's already a few out there.
My take on the whole thing is basically a composite of your argument that Google is not building a gigantic AI to watch videos, and an above comment that says Google is only doing this as due dilligence. I agree: trying to make this more complicated than a simple automated tool allowing Google to quickly verify whether a video is infringing or not seems like a bad business move on Google's part. They really only need to be able to say that they are taking some steps to prevent YouTube from becoming a giant pirate network, but the copyright holder must still be ultimately responsible for protecting their own copyright. Besides, an AI that could watch videos wouldn't have time to do anything else.
Moving emphasis away from programming proficiency was a key... Which is hilarious, since there's already no emphasis on programming proficiency. At the risk of only being allowed to reproduce in vitro, I'd just like to say that I'm only interested in meeting women in CS if they are actual computer geeks. At this point in my life, I've met one geeky woman that would hack it in a CS programme, and far too many geeky guys. Besides, having test-tube babies is a perfectly valid alternative if women hate you.
Oh darn. An audience that varies from day to day that is very large to begin with is difficult to count. Find a metric that everyone is happy with it, realize it isn't reality any more than any other metric, and move on with actually being a BA. The worst problem with most BAs is that they are constantly inventing reasons that something has to be analyzed again. Accurately counting television viewers, sports event attendees (as opposed to ticket holders) raindrops and grains of sand might keep you entertained, but it's unlikely you'll ever get the correct answer. Besides, does it really matter if your website had 1 million visitors as opposed to 1.5 million? What would you do differently with the extra 500,000 visitors?
They really aren't that stupid. It's really tough to strike a balance between "human can read it on the first try" and "computer program written by 8-year-old can't read it". I wouldn't open a website up to the public today without a CAPTCHA though.
Funny part is, it's just a hallucination. Spoken like a true asshole. It's easy to discount someone as delusional when they don't fit in. Perhaps it's that tendency in society which causes people to commit violent, forceful acts to convince people that their reality does, in fact, exist. I doubt anybody would try and tell us that this tragedy is still "just a hallucination". The "funny" part is that we never realize how disturbed someone is until they snap. Luckily that usually just leads to a non-problematic suicide. However, there's a lot of press now pushing those that would have settled for suicide to go out with a bang.
Of course, we should never get that far in the first place. The fact that a healthy adult can be made to feel so isolated as to not seek help for their violent delusions until it's too late is the real problem. And it's not like there aren't symptoms for years before such a break. Excessive anti-social behaviour is present, always. That doesn't mean everyone who exhibits such behaviour will snap, but it certainly means something should be done.
I've seen kids who were badly abused by their parents, even to the extent of showing physical scars from their beatings, who never received the help they needed. Every one of those people has since had serious social problems. Promiscuity, drugs, alcohol, gambling. All too common, and all too preventable. But, as usual, it's not my problem. No one ever reached out to any of those kids and got them to a counselor, or in some cases a psychiatrist. If those kids were treated when they were 12, they would have grown up much healthier, realizing that weaknesses in character are natural, and that people generally have enough goodwill to reach out to those in need. But that doesn't happen. Usually, they just sink into whatever hell has been prepared for them and no one talks about their issues until something happens. That's inevitably going to be far too late.
And for those who are younger, or who have parents: for God's sake do something! If someone bullies your child, go to the principal or the bully's parents. If it continues to be a problem, get some family counselling for you and your bullied child. If your child is a bully, then find ways to discourage such behaviour. Our society has lost these social niceities; everything either ends up in a courtroom or it's perfectly acceptable behaviour. If there were some middle ground where people actually treated each other as humans, we'd probably find far fewer anti-social kids in the first place.
The most US-centric report about the idea that the United States is filled with gun-toting violent crazies still fails to exonerate the United States entirely. The key column here is Firearm Homicide. The rest are just there to confuse you, pointing out that violent deaths don't always involve guns. Duh. While it's true that Estonia, Brazil, Mexico and Northern Ireland have higher Firearm Homicide rates than the US; Canada, Germany, Singapore, Japan, England, Australia, Norway, Ireland, Israel and Spain have only 25-50% of the Firearm Homicide rate per 100,000. OK, so there's more violent people out there, but even statistics that are attempting to prove your point have a difficult reality to overcome.
Here's the other side of the coin, which is what most people think of when they think of the United States and their gun problem. The numbers aren't substantially different, but the presentation sure is. Gotta love statistics -- I had to read these two articles for 30 minutes before posting to be sure I didn't put my foot in my mouth.
Everyone ignores him for being a crackpot, but he probably documented almost every part of what leads to a tragedy like this. Maybe American leaders should stop discounting the "left-wing radicals" and realize that no society is worth having a headline like this. Let alone more than once.
Minor correction: Flash doesn't support your primary OS. You got insightful for that pointless semantic quibbling? Both are equally correct and state the same problem: Macrodobe has created a piece of proprietary software which they have not released for certain platforms, nor has the reverse engineering on said platforms reached a point where an alternative can be created. The parent had it right to begin with, why be pedantic when you're both trying to say the same thing?
We would have the web of the early 90s, where a web page was just a bunch of text, pictures and links. Making a blanket statement like "web applications don't need to be stateful to be useful" (I took the liberty of translating it into programmer-speak for you) shows me that you have no concept of the difficulty in creating applications that are stateful using a protocol that is not. Sure, fine, turn off your cookies if you want; all the web browsers out there let you. Just don't tell me it's my fault that my web application doesn't work for you. In many cases the cookie is not meant to track you, specifically. It's just meant to distinguish your anonymous cookie from the dozens of other anonymous cookies.
A Troll? I don't think so. At least an insightful troll anyway.
There's plenty of evil that can be done once you don't have to record your resource consumption. OK, I doubt Google is going to become the largest marijuana grow-op in the United States, but anything that leaves accounting to the imagination will inevitably end up considering evil since there's no fear of being caught.
I agree with most of the rest of your post, but I do think this line is unfair. It's easier (and probably more correct) to attribute Microsoft missteps to incompetence rather than malice on the part of Bill Gates. Certainly not more correct. How can Microsoft be simultaneously lead by a marketing genius and be incompetent? And the early days of Microsoft were filled with malicious activity: broken or shady business deals, stolen code, infiltration of government agencies to protect their monopoly... I'll agree that Mr. Gates has made some steps to show society he's not just the world's most evil man, but he has a lot of sins to repent before he has any credibility in my book.
I think the fact that many are buying Cedega and other Windows environment programs to play Windows games under Linux shows that there is a need for Linux native games. And I think that all of us who remember Loki Games know that this will not work. Transgaming allows a project to put a business face on some deals that desperately need to be made to support gaming on Linux. Cedega works with game companies to provide an API that works equally well on Windows and Linux. This approach is better, since what happens is that game companies continue to develop games on Windows where most of their market is, without causing any extra work for the Linux side. Admittedly those who develop to the WINElib API will get the same benefits without the devilish business dealings, but who develops games on Windows that's that enlightened?
A rewrite as a port is generally too much work to be profitable, especially when the target market is at best one tenth of the original market. There's been some very rare exceptions to this, such as the Linux Neverwinter Nights client and some id games, but in those cases there's almost as many Linux people who play as Windows gamers. The drive to synchronize the higher-level APIs has a better chance of overall success (where success is defined as any DirectX 9 or previous game will run on Linux) in the long run, IMO. Whether transgaming.com is actually required is certainly worth debating. I'm still giving them my $5 every month even though I'm not using it right now.
eventually Wine will have a full implementation of windows on unix where new games (and anything else) will run.. (emphasis mine)
Not if the WINE devs won't get involved with platforms other than Linux. Look at this WINE dev's comments regarding WINE on FreeBSD (#18). Dammit! I want to play D2 on FreeBSD. It's been out for over 5 years. Why such a big deal? NVIDIA has drivers, too...
WINE is for Linux and Macs. I don't think that's going to change, so the future is equally bleak for both projects, IMO. I'm still paying my $5/mo. though, in hopes that a full DirectX 9 implementation will be available for at least one of the named projects, if not portable across multiple i386 Unices. Of course, that would require Microsoft's cooperation or some other miracle.
It doesn't, at least it didn't for me. Direct3D locked up the PC within 30 minutes of launching WoW, and OpenGL is an ugly, ugly hack. Results are still best with Cedega+NVIDIA. In some ways, the performance is better too, though on the Windows platform it seems that there is more of a balance between network and graphical performace (higher latency, better framerates) than on Linux+Cedega.
Yes, but it's also a great way for one guy to gain all the "Intellectual Property" of the company he worked for. This is an old argument, but it's worth considering. There are hidden costs associated with a Single Point of Failure. How long and how much when someone offers the one-man show a better deal? Can you salvage anything once your star programmer has left? How about security? Is $80k/yr. enough to prevent the one guy who has access to the code base from doing anything malicious, like leaving a back-door or selling the code to a competitor? Does your business stop running when he calls in sick?
Likewise, the population of people trained to be a one-man Project-Manager-Kickass-Developer-CSR-Tech-Writer all rolled into one is dwindling; it's a profession that emerged when business computing emerged. Now universities and technical colleges concentrate on a team approach. I've witnessed first-hand how this approach is better for business, even though it's easily the 500% more expensive than you mention.
The CHAOS Report, though rapidly falling out-of-date, shows the height of the star developer, and look at how many software projects failed. Many of the reasons are not directly related to the developer's effort or talent, but overall this method of developing software has a terrible tendency to avoid showing it's work (sort of like a math test where you don't show your work and get no partial credit because you just put down the wrong answer). What I've experienced with the team approach is that a software project is much more robust. A developer who wants to negotiate a higher salary by withholding his talent has much less leverage, since the technical writer and architect have been working in a parallel stream producing UML diagrams of use cases, packaging, flowcharts, etc. What this means is that you can wave goodbye to the opportunistic developer, because he is no longer the sole source of knowledge about how the software works. Another developer will read and understand the supporting documenation and will be trained on the new project in days instead of weeks or months.
This approach definitely pays off on the larger projects, where it is (or at least was) common for a company to go through 5 or more consultants to do the same project. Usually those consultants would duplicate his predecessor's work to no small extent due to the lack of any documentation or diagrams which would show the new developer what part of the old project was useful. Most importantly, at least to an executive, no one person on your team can turn around and deliver your corporate secrets in their entirety to another company.
Finally, the elitism that comes from being the guy is impossible to deal with. Business people have almost no recourse to an unethical developer who consistently holds a project hostage or bills for hours he didn't work. It is to the overall advantage to the business community to remove themselves from under that guy's thumb, as it will set an example that other businesses will follow. There's nothing wrong with working in a software team. If you were the guy (I was until I burned out), then you'll find your job is a lot easier once you figure out how to get along with everyone else. If you weren't, then the field of software development is now open to you as more roles appear that require more creative thinking and less ubertechie skills. You as the developer shouldn't worry about it; the business community is clearly willing to pay for the extra resources. In your example, there actually is a cost savings: about $40k/yr. by my reckoning (the difference between a 40k/yr and 20k/yr) provided the off-shore developers can earn their keep. And, I'd wager that there's a good 90% chance that the project will be completed in the first pass as opposed to numbers that resemble the CHAOS report.
Maaaan are you getting ripped off for over-the-limit. TELUS only charge $1.95/Gb on their business DSL connections. Monthly is usually about 20Gb or so, depending on how often I've been on the top of my ISPs leech list (not usually). I won't talk much about my ISP since they just resell TELUS service, but TELUS business DSL seems a not bad deal if you're not looking for insane amounts of downstream bandwidth.
Yeah, you'd definitely want to be careful in that respect. As much as I <3 my computers, I'm not entirely keen on the idea of directly implanting them in my nervous system. I'm sure there's plenty of use to be gained from computing technology without giving the computer that much control of my physiology. Cyborg is a rather broad-reaching term. We can certainly afford to be conservative on the human end of that spectrum.
Well, I guess you aren't as attuned to daylight as I am. The difference between sunset @ 3:30pm and 4:30pm is significant, as it means I am coming home at dusk rather than nighttime. Also, the extra hour of sleep during the summer is important too. It's darned hard to sleep when it's still bright outside.
No wonder the rest of the world hates you. Try considering a country other than your own for a change.
BTW, the pancakes and maple syrup will be blasted at you from the Chicken Cannon. After that we will taunt you. Then the guy with a C-8 sitting a thousand yards from you will put a hole in your head. Just because we won't win doesn't mean I won't take as many of you fuckers with me as I can.
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The scary thing is that I've gotten really good at writing drivel like this. It's nice to see that some people can still correctly translate it.
Please say you're joking. It's so hard to think that anything regarding American military action is a joke. (-1, humornotappreciated)
Which leads one to wonder how useful these numbers actually are to either the advertiser or the website owner. We've already established that they're just made-up numbers that happen to correspond to some log entries (not people). I'd pay an advertiser for their time and for any material they created (posters, brochures, website graphics, etc.) and for their reputation. If I wanted to check up on them, I'd do a customer service survey to find out how many of my customers became customers because they saw an ad. But to actually pay someone to bring traffic to your website and then count something stupid like page hits as success is just asking for someone to write you a distributed link-clicker bot. I'm pretty sure there's already a few out there.
My take on the whole thing is basically a composite of your argument that Google is not building a gigantic AI to watch videos, and an above comment that says Google is only doing this as due dilligence. I agree: trying to make this more complicated than a simple automated tool allowing Google to quickly verify whether a video is infringing or not seems like a bad business move on Google's part. They really only need to be able to say that they are taking some steps to prevent YouTube from becoming a giant pirate network, but the copyright holder must still be ultimately responsible for protecting their own copyright. Besides, an AI that could watch videos wouldn't have time to do anything else.
Oh darn. An audience that varies from day to day that is very large to begin with is difficult to count. Find a metric that everyone is happy with it, realize it isn't reality any more than any other metric, and move on with actually being a BA. The worst problem with most BAs is that they are constantly inventing reasons that something has to be analyzed again. Accurately counting television viewers, sports event attendees (as opposed to ticket holders) raindrops and grains of sand might keep you entertained, but it's unlikely you'll ever get the correct answer. Besides, does it really matter if your website had 1 million visitors as opposed to 1.5 million? What would you do differently with the extra 500,000 visitors?
They really aren't that stupid. It's really tough to strike a balance between "human can read it on the first try" and "computer program written by 8-year-old can't read it". I wouldn't open a website up to the public today without a CAPTCHA though.
Of course, we should never get that far in the first place. The fact that a healthy adult can be made to feel so isolated as to not seek help for their violent delusions until it's too late is the real problem. And it's not like there aren't symptoms for years before such a break. Excessive anti-social behaviour is present, always. That doesn't mean everyone who exhibits such behaviour will snap, but it certainly means something should be done.
I've seen kids who were badly abused by their parents, even to the extent of showing physical scars from their beatings, who never received the help they needed. Every one of those people has since had serious social problems. Promiscuity, drugs, alcohol, gambling. All too common, and all too preventable. But, as usual, it's not my problem. No one ever reached out to any of those kids and got them to a counselor, or in some cases a psychiatrist. If those kids were treated when they were 12, they would have grown up much healthier, realizing that weaknesses in character are natural, and that people generally have enough goodwill to reach out to those in need. But that doesn't happen. Usually, they just sink into whatever hell has been prepared for them and no one talks about their issues until something happens. That's inevitably going to be far too late.
And for those who are younger, or who have parents: for God's sake do something! If someone bullies your child, go to the principal or the bully's parents. If it continues to be a problem, get some family counselling for you and your bullied child. If your child is a bully, then find ways to discourage such behaviour. Our society has lost these social niceities; everything either ends up in a courtroom or it's perfectly acceptable behaviour. If there were some middle ground where people actually treated each other as humans, we'd probably find far fewer anti-social kids in the first place.
The most US-centric report about the idea that the United States is filled with gun-toting violent crazies still fails to exonerate the United States entirely. The key column here is Firearm Homicide. The rest are just there to confuse you, pointing out that violent deaths don't always involve guns. Duh. While it's true that Estonia, Brazil, Mexico and Northern Ireland have higher Firearm Homicide rates than the US; Canada, Germany, Singapore, Japan, England, Australia, Norway, Ireland, Israel and Spain have only 25-50% of the Firearm Homicide rate per 100,000. OK, so there's more violent people out there, but even statistics that are attempting to prove your point have a difficult reality to overcome.
Here's the other side of the coin, which is what most people think of when they think of the United States and their gun problem. The numbers aren't substantially different, but the presentation sure is. Gotta love statistics -- I had to read these two articles for 30 minutes before posting to be sure I didn't put my foot in my mouth.
Everyone ignores him for being a crackpot, but he probably documented almost every part of what leads to a tragedy like this. Maybe American leaders should stop discounting the "left-wing radicals" and realize that no society is worth having a headline like this. Let alone more than once.
We would have the web of the early 90s, where a web page was just a bunch of text, pictures and links. Making a blanket statement like "web applications don't need to be stateful to be useful" (I took the liberty of translating it into programmer-speak for you) shows me that you have no concept of the difficulty in creating applications that are stateful using a protocol that is not. Sure, fine, turn off your cookies if you want; all the web browsers out there let you. Just don't tell me it's my fault that my web application doesn't work for you. In many cases the cookie is not meant to track you, specifically. It's just meant to distinguish your anonymous cookie from the dozens of other anonymous cookies.
A Troll? I don't think so. At least an insightful troll anyway.
There's plenty of evil that can be done once you don't have to record your resource consumption. OK, I doubt Google is going to become the largest marijuana grow-op in the United States, but anything that leaves accounting to the imagination will inevitably end up considering evil since there's no fear of being caught.
First thing, let's kill all the American politicians.
With apologies to Shakespeare.
Bah. The single-player CRPG is not dead, and it never will be. I've only ascended 3 of the total classes, now working on Monk :)
A rewrite as a port is generally too much work to be profitable, especially when the target market is at best one tenth of the original market. There's been some very rare exceptions to this, such as the Linux Neverwinter Nights client and some id games, but in those cases there's almost as many Linux people who play as Windows gamers. The drive to synchronize the higher-level APIs has a better chance of overall success (where success is defined as any DirectX 9 or previous game will run on Linux) in the long run, IMO. Whether transgaming.com is actually required is certainly worth debating. I'm still giving them my $5 every month even though I'm not using it right now.
Not if the WINE devs won't get involved with platforms other than Linux. Look at this WINE dev's comments regarding WINE on FreeBSD (#18). Dammit! I want to play D2 on FreeBSD. It's been out for over 5 years. Why such a big deal? NVIDIA has drivers, too...
WINE is for Linux and Macs. I don't think that's going to change, so the future is equally bleak for both projects, IMO. I'm still paying my $5/mo. though, in hopes that a full DirectX 9 implementation will be available for at least one of the named projects, if not portable across multiple i386 Unices. Of course, that would require Microsoft's cooperation or some other miracle.
Just be sure the Hackers aren't responsible for or have production access to the audit data :/
It doesn't, at least it didn't for me. Direct3D locked up the PC within 30 minutes of launching WoW, and OpenGL is an ugly, ugly hack. Results are still best with Cedega+NVIDIA. In some ways, the performance is better too, though on the Windows platform it seems that there is more of a balance between network and graphical performace (higher latency, better framerates) than on Linux+Cedega.
Yes, but it's also a great way for one guy to gain all the "Intellectual Property" of the company he worked for. This is an old argument, but it's worth considering. There are hidden costs associated with a Single Point of Failure. How long and how much when someone offers the one-man show a better deal? Can you salvage anything once your star programmer has left? How about security? Is $80k/yr. enough to prevent the one guy who has access to the code base from doing anything malicious, like leaving a back-door or selling the code to a competitor? Does your business stop running when he calls in sick?
Likewise, the population of people trained to be a one-man Project-Manager-Kickass-Developer-CSR-Tech-Writer all rolled into one is dwindling; it's a profession that emerged when business computing emerged. Now universities and technical colleges concentrate on a team approach. I've witnessed first-hand how this approach is better for business, even though it's easily the 500% more expensive than you mention.
The CHAOS Report, though rapidly falling out-of-date, shows the height of the star developer, and look at how many software projects failed. Many of the reasons are not directly related to the developer's effort or talent, but overall this method of developing software has a terrible tendency to avoid showing it's work (sort of like a math test where you don't show your work and get no partial credit because you just put down the wrong answer). What I've experienced with the team approach is that a software project is much more robust. A developer who wants to negotiate a higher salary by withholding his talent has much less leverage, since the technical writer and architect have been working in a parallel stream producing UML diagrams of use cases, packaging, flowcharts, etc. What this means is that you can wave goodbye to the opportunistic developer, because he is no longer the sole source of knowledge about how the software works. Another developer will read and understand the supporting documenation and will be trained on the new project in days instead of weeks or months.
This approach definitely pays off on the larger projects, where it is (or at least was) common for a company to go through 5 or more consultants to do the same project. Usually those consultants would duplicate his predecessor's work to no small extent due to the lack of any documentation or diagrams which would show the new developer what part of the old project was useful. Most importantly, at least to an executive, no one person on your team can turn around and deliver your corporate secrets in their entirety to another company.
Finally, the elitism that comes from being the guy is impossible to deal with. Business people have almost no recourse to an unethical developer who consistently holds a project hostage or bills for hours he didn't work. It is to the overall advantage to the business community to remove themselves from under that guy's thumb, as it will set an example that other businesses will follow. There's nothing wrong with working in a software team. If you were the guy (I was until I burned out), then you'll find your job is a lot easier once you figure out how to get along with everyone else. If you weren't, then the field of software development is now open to you as more roles appear that require more creative thinking and less ubertechie skills. You as the developer shouldn't worry about it; the business community is clearly willing to pay for the extra resources. In your example, there actually is a cost savings: about $40k/yr. by my reckoning (the difference between a 40k/yr and 20k/yr) provided the off-shore developers can earn their keep. And, I'd wager that there's a good 90% chance that the project will be completed in the first pass as opposed to numbers that resemble the CHAOS report.
Maaaan are you getting ripped off for over-the-limit. TELUS only charge $1.95/Gb on their business DSL connections. Monthly is usually about 20Gb or so, depending on how often I've been on the top of my ISPs leech list (not usually). I won't talk much about my ISP since they just resell TELUS service, but TELUS business DSL seems a not bad deal if you're not looking for insane amounts of downstream bandwidth.
Yeah, you'd definitely want to be careful in that respect. As much as I <3 my computers, I'm not entirely keen on the idea of directly implanting them in my nervous system. I'm sure there's plenty of use to be gained from computing technology without giving the computer that much control of my physiology. Cyborg is a rather broad-reaching term. We can certainly afford to be conservative on the human end of that spectrum.
Well, I guess you aren't as attuned to daylight as I am. The difference between sunset @ 3:30pm and 4:30pm is significant, as it means I am coming home at dusk rather than nighttime. Also, the extra hour of sleep during the summer is important too. It's darned hard to sleep when it's still bright outside.
No wonder the rest of the world hates you. Try considering a country other than your own for a change.
BTW, the pancakes and maple syrup will be blasted at you from the Chicken Cannon. After that we will taunt you. Then the guy with a C-8 sitting a thousand yards from you will put a hole in your head. Just because we won't win doesn't mean I won't take as many of you fuckers with me as I can.