If you were to actually read about the whole ordeal, you would understand that the program these people are complaining about (called The Books We Really Read) was about bestsellers, not literary fiction. Think James Patterson, Nora Roberts and company. "Literature", meaning serious fiction that is meant to be artistically challenging, was not a part of the program.
I was recently interviewed, and rejected, to work at Google.
I had two one-hour interviews on the phone. Then they flew me to a Google office, where I had a very long interview day.
They did not ask me which was the 27th bit in an IP packet. They did not ask me to crack a RSA-encrypted message using a pair of rocks. Most of everything you ever heard about them is just false, or at least no longer true.
On the contrary, they were interested in computer science fundamentals that make absolute sense in their case. If you are working at Google I bet that knowing the difference between a O(n^2) algorithm and a O(log n) algorithm is often a matter of life and death.
I left the interviews thinking I did really poor. The next day I reviewed the whole interview process in my mind and realized I had made some serious serious blunders that maybe could have been avoided if I wasn't so tired (I live in Brazil, interview in Australia, check how long it takes to get there and how many timezones away that is...) and I could have have solved problems faster than I did (maybe I was even in a worse mood than usual with all the jetlag - it's really hard to judge). I wouldn't have hired myself considering how I did, I thought, and they thought the same. I can hardly complain. Nerd pride hurt, but it's 100% my fault not theirs.
Throughout all this, from the moment a recruiter contacted me until the final rejection, they were professional and fun. There's a bunch of great, smart people there. Do not be put off by what people say about their interview process. I thought it was really solid and yes, that comes form a person who was rejected.
Oh, and the agreement is only about credit and grants, not use in trade, which makes it particularly pointless. None of these countries are major investors in each other, or likely to be anytime soon. Is the Chinese government going to stop building plants in China to start building them in India? Really? >/quote>
Go google the new investments China is making in Brazil and vice-versa. Gasp, it even includes Foxconn factories in Brazil! Really?
I use Vim exclusively. This is not to prove my masculinity. When I started playing with Unix systems, vi (not Vim) was the only thing guaranteed to be on any system. It still is. I used it because it was there. Now I use it because it's what I know.
It's more expensive in terms of processing power, you add latency due to negotiation, you lose caching across sessions, moving the user across servers is not as easy, you lose some amenities like sendfile() support, you have to manage certificates, you have to buy certificates, and in most real-world settings it's a minor security improvement anyway because the biggest security issue is the user's own worm-infested machine.
Dr. Evil: Here's the plan. We get the warhead, and we hold the world ransomed for.....One MILLION DOLLARS!! No.2: Ahem...well, don't you think we should maybe ask for *more* than a million dollars? I mean, a million dollars isn't exactly a lot of money these days. Virtucon alone makes over nine billion dollars a year! Dr. Evil: Really? No.2: Mm-hmm. Dr. Evil: That's a number. Okay then. We hold the world ransom for.....One hundred..BILLION DOLLARS!!
Awesome, instead of cookies we will have ?session_id= parameters. It's like the 1990s all over again! Can we go back to writing CGI scripts in Perl now?
Now seriously, doesn't this mean that tracking will still be available to people who do really large scale behavioral-pattern datamining while us clods will have a hell of a harder time implementing any kind of non-static page?
Look, people die, that's horrible. But Libya's problems are their own internal problem. It's ultimately a healthy thing that Libyans are revolting against their dictator. This is democracy at its finest. If all goes well, this is going to be their 1776.
If the West were to intervene, that would kill all of the legitimacy that this movement has. The West is pro-Kadaffi, just Google a bit and you will find pictures of Kadaffi shaking hands the hands of smiling people like Barack Obama, Gordon Brown and Silvio Berlusconi. The West doesn't give a flying fuck about Libyans as long as their own citizens can buy cheap oil and that is why the West is so embarrassed when a regime they support falls. That is what happened in Egypt, Tunisia and now, possibly, in Libya. That is what happened in a dozen Latin American countries two decades ago. The West is part of the problem here, not the solution. Leave them alone. This could be the blood bath that will end all future blood baths.
Here's a hint: in most parts of the world, Wikileaks is celebrated without "but"s or "if"s . Just because your country in particular is different doesn't mean much in the overall picture. The fact that it Wikileaks generates controversy in your country says more about your country than Wikileaks.
Thanks for nothing Google. What about hosting a Wikileaks mirror or allowing donations to Wikileaks via Google Checkout?
It's so easy to be a revolutionary when you are thousands of miles away from any danger. Twitter is full of Internet revolutionaries sipping coffee at a Starbucks in San Francisco.
Considering that you still take a fixed cut of whatever the price Amazon sells it for, what is the big deal? Amazon's interest in maximizing revenue from that product is as big as yours.
It all comes down to whether Amazon can take better decisions about pricing than the developer. Which truth be told, will probably be the case.
I only see this feature being unacceptable to a certain class of boutique apps where the price is extremely high for no good reason, but where the high price is also a part of the appeal of the product: things like Things and Delicious Library come to mind.
Okay. His major purpose in life is to try to get as many people to believe the stuff written in his book of choice, including the magic parts, is the literal truth
Catholics aren't literalists. This bullshit about literal truth is a belief of American Fundamentalists.
... this stunt was horrible and silly and an annoyance. I recently reinstalled my computer, and when I went to Gog.com to redownload Gabriel Knight I got that stupid "zomg we're closing down" message. It feels like something straight out the 1990s, when nobody expected any degree of seriousness from Internet companies - thanks for reminding us how WE SHOUDLN'T TRUST YOU in the future, that's great marketing.
Would you rather have businesses follow government-mandated, reasonable standards or have the "freedom" to "choose" (many restrictions apply) among the members of an oligopoly?
Microsoft's model is to sell the software and have a ton of hardware makers make underwhelming, complicated, ugly, unreliable equipment that runs said software. The software will then make a run to the bottom, trying to work around the limitations of 50+ devices in the wild.
it worked for PCs. It really did. But that was the stone age of computing, where people were rushing to bring prices down to where people could buy the devices.
Right now, everybody recognizes the need for computers. People are willing to pay extra to get stuff that works, because even the "premium" stuff is rather affordable and people perceive investment on good computers to be worth it. We're plugged to these things all day. We need them for everything. Productivity gains beat raw price. And you can't do productivity right while trying to support 50+ bland, broken, bloated devices.
And that is why both Microsoft _AND_ Android will fail in the long run.
You mean how people might be affected by the Arctic Ocean would be open all year and decrease shipping costs?? Or how growing seasons could shift so that some areas that can't grow much food will now have longer growing seasons, and in areas where people live so transportation costs could decrease? Or how winters would be less severe so fewer people might die??
Awesome if you live in a cold country. I live in a tropical country. Can you list some of the advantages that global warming would bring to my country?
You know, I am really happy that global warming will make life easier in Europe and North America at the expense of the entire rest of the world. It's like colonialism all over again, but at an apocalyptic scale.
Slashdot Mirror
If you were to actually read about the whole ordeal, you would understand that the program these people are complaining about (called The Books We Really Read) was about bestsellers, not literary fiction. Think James Patterson, Nora Roberts and company. "Literature", meaning serious fiction that is meant to be artistically challenging, was not a part of the program.
I was recently interviewed, and rejected, to work at Google.
I had two one-hour interviews on the phone. Then they flew me to a Google office, where I had a very long interview day.
They did not ask me which was the 27th bit in an IP packet. They did not ask me to crack a RSA-encrypted message using a pair of rocks. Most of everything you ever heard about them is just false, or at least no longer true.
On the contrary, they were interested in computer science fundamentals that make absolute sense in their case. If you are working at Google I bet that knowing the difference between a O(n^2) algorithm and a O(log n) algorithm is often a matter of life and death.
I left the interviews thinking I did really poor. The next day I reviewed the whole interview process in my mind and realized I had made some serious serious blunders that maybe could have been avoided if I wasn't so tired (I live in Brazil, interview in Australia, check how long it takes to get there and how many timezones away that is...) and I could have have solved problems faster than I did (maybe I was even in a worse mood than usual with all the jetlag - it's really hard to judge). I wouldn't have hired myself considering how I did, I thought, and they thought the same. I can hardly complain. Nerd pride hurt, but it's 100% my fault not theirs.
Throughout all this, from the moment a recruiter contacted me until the final rejection, they were professional and fun. There's a bunch of great, smart people there. Do not be put off by what people say about their interview process. I thought it was really solid and yes, that comes form a person who was rejected.
They'll do the same thing they've been doing for generations now: they'll study what we're doing (e.g. SpaceX), both legally and not-legally
Still beats giving American citizenship to nazis who otherwise should have been hung in Nuremberg like you people did.
Oh, and the agreement is only about credit and grants, not use in trade, which makes it particularly pointless. None of these countries are major investors in each other, or likely to be anytime soon. Is the Chinese government going to stop building plants in China to start building them in India? Really? >/quote>
Go google the new investments China is making in Brazil and vice-versa. Gasp, it even includes Foxconn factories in Brazil! Really?
Valve has been releasing one awesome game after another for the last 12 years. Clearly something is wrong! Valve get your act together!
Considering how badly some protestant sects have raped Christianity, having some control at the clergy level doesn't sound so bad.
It's not like the Catholics are the Christian fundamentalists, you know.
I use Vim exclusively. This is not to prove my masculinity. When I started playing with Unix systems, vi (not Vim) was the only thing guaranteed to be on any system. It still is. I used it because it was there. Now I use it because it's what I know.
It's more expensive in terms of processing power, you add latency due to negotiation, you lose caching across sessions, moving the user across servers is not as easy, you lose some amenities like sendfile() support, you have to manage certificates, you have to buy certificates, and in most real-world settings it's a minor security improvement anyway because the biggest security issue is the user's own worm-infested machine.
Dr. Evil: Here's the plan. We get the warhead, and we hold the world ransomed for.....One MILLION DOLLARS!!
No.2: Ahem...well, don't you think we should maybe ask for *more* than a million dollars? I mean, a million dollars isn't exactly a lot of money these days. Virtucon alone makes over nine billion dollars a year!
Dr. Evil: Really?
No.2: Mm-hmm.
Dr. Evil: That's a number. Okay then. We hold the world ransom for.....One hundred..BILLION DOLLARS!!
Awesome, instead of cookies we will have ?session_id= parameters. It's like the 1990s all over again! Can we go back to writing CGI scripts in Perl now?
Now seriously, doesn't this mean that tracking will still be available to people who do really large scale behavioral-pattern datamining while us clods will have a hell of a harder time implementing any kind of non-static page?
Look, people die, that's horrible. But Libya's problems are their own internal problem. It's ultimately a healthy thing that Libyans are revolting against their dictator. This is democracy at its finest. If all goes well, this is going to be their 1776.
If the West were to intervene, that would kill all of the legitimacy that this movement has. The West is pro-Kadaffi, just Google a bit and you will find pictures of Kadaffi shaking hands the hands of smiling people like Barack Obama, Gordon Brown and Silvio Berlusconi. The West doesn't give a flying fuck about Libyans as long as their own citizens can buy cheap oil and that is why the West is so embarrassed when a regime they support falls. That is what happened in Egypt, Tunisia and now, possibly, in Libya. That is what happened in a dozen Latin American countries two decades ago. The West is part of the problem here, not the solution. Leave them alone. This could be the blood bath that will end all future blood baths.
Here's a hint: in most parts of the world, Wikileaks is celebrated without "but"s or "if"s . Just because your country in particular is different doesn't mean much in the overall picture. The fact that it Wikileaks generates controversy in your country says more about your country than Wikileaks.
Thanks for nothing Google. What about hosting a Wikileaks mirror or allowing donations to Wikileaks via Google Checkout?
It's so easy to be a revolutionary when you are thousands of miles away from any danger. Twitter is full of Internet revolutionaries sipping coffee at a Starbucks in San Francisco.
Slashdot users debunk this scheme as stupid in 5... 4... 3...
Considering that you still take a fixed cut of whatever the price Amazon sells it for, what is the big deal? Amazon's interest in maximizing revenue from that product is as big as yours.
It all comes down to whether Amazon can take better decisions about pricing than the developer. Which truth be told, will probably be the case.
I only see this feature being unacceptable to a certain class of boutique apps where the price is extremely high for no good reason, but where the high price is also a part of the appeal of the product: things like Things and Delicious Library come to mind.
That's a bit like saying Aristotlian thought is the basis of Western society.
That game had framerate issues, game killing bugs, mediocre combat and poorly thought out puzzles
Get the Gamecube version if you had problems with bugs.
Okay. His major purpose in life is to try to get as many people to believe the stuff written in his book of choice, including the magic parts, is the literal truth
Catholics aren't literalists. This bullshit about literal truth is a belief of American Fundamentalists.
Catholics are bad, but not THAT bad.
... this stunt was horrible and silly and an annoyance. I recently reinstalled my computer, and when I went to Gog.com to redownload Gabriel Knight I got that stupid "zomg we're closing down" message. It feels like something straight out the 1990s, when nobody expected any degree of seriousness from Internet companies - thanks for reminding us how WE SHOUDLN'T TRUST YOU in the future, that's great marketing.
+6 Insightful
Would you rather have businesses follow government-mandated, reasonable standards or have the "freedom" to "choose" (many restrictions apply) among the members of an oligopoly?
Wow, does that even mean anything? It's like a metaphor of a metaphor.
Microsoft's model is to sell the software and have a ton of hardware makers make underwhelming, complicated, ugly, unreliable equipment that runs said software. The software will then make a run to the bottom, trying to work around the limitations of 50+ devices in the wild.
it worked for PCs. It really did. But that was the stone age of computing, where people were rushing to bring prices down to where people could buy the devices.
Right now, everybody recognizes the need for computers. People are willing to pay extra to get stuff that works, because even the "premium" stuff is rather affordable and people perceive investment on good computers to be worth it. We're plugged to these things all day. We need them for everything. Productivity gains beat raw price. And you can't do productivity right while trying to support 50+ bland, broken, bloated devices.
And that is why both Microsoft _AND_ Android will fail in the long run.
You mean how people might be affected by the Arctic Ocean would be open all year and decrease shipping costs?? Or how growing seasons could shift so that some areas that can't grow much food will now have longer growing seasons, and in areas where people live so transportation costs could decrease? Or how winters would be less severe so fewer people might die??
Awesome if you live in a cold country. I live in a tropical country. Can you list some of the advantages that global warming would bring to my country?
You know, I am really happy that global warming will make life easier in Europe and North America at the expense of the entire rest of the world. It's like colonialism all over again, but at an apocalyptic scale.
If IBM can't disallow the use of z/OS under an emulator, does it also mean that Apple can't disallow OS X on Hackintoshes?