First, Norway is only on that list because oil prices are soaring. Productivity per hour is GDP divided by hours. Their GDP is a lot higher now than it was a few years ago, which is why Norway climbed TEN SPOTS. But more importantly, Norway DOESN'T HAVE A 35 HOUR WORK WEEK. So the fact that it's a European country is irrelevent. This thread has been about a 35 hour week vs. a 40 hour week. Of course, you know you're on thin ice so you're grasping at whatever you can find to back you up. You tried to dress up your opinion and make it look like fact, but you just weren't bright enough to pull it off.:( sorry.
Second, your opinion has been that a 35 hour week will make us more productive. France has had a 35 hour week for over a decade now. By your own admission, workers in the US are more productive per hour than those in France. You somehow take pleasure in France being directly behind the US, which shows just how desperate you are. They're LESS PRODUCTIVE PER HOUR. I don't care if it's CLOSE, they're still LESS PRODUCTIVE.
Third, and this is where it gets really good.... When France adopted the 35 hour work week they didn't see an increase in productivity-per-hour.... yeah, i know, it burns a little. I'm sorry. But the truth sometimes hurts. And still, closing in on 20 years later, France is not more productive per hour than they were before they abbreviated their work week.
I could do this all day. You're so smug and self assured that I take a great deal of pleasure in schooling you. These are hard numbers, bro. Facts. They're non-negotiable. If you'd have said in your post "I think I'd be more productive w/ a 35 hour week." or "I bet people would work harder to get all their work done in 35 hours" that would be perfectly fine.... but you had to TRY to sound sooo smart and tried to act like what you were saying is a fact. It's not. It's just BS. You know it but now there's nothing you can do. Except, of course, just get slightly embarrassed and hit that "back" button and act like this never happened.
Sorry to make you look so stupid. It wasn't my intention, but if it walks like a duck and talks like a duck....
Are you a moron or did you just not read that article? We are the most productive nation on an OUTPUT-PER-HOUR basis.
Of course you won't reply to this because you don't have any actual FACTS to offer to the discussion, just insults and misdirection.
Nice try. Take your low karma having ass and debate some other retard on a topic that you actually know a thing or two about. You're out of your depth, son, and it shows.
First, You have absolutely no concept of monetary policy.
Second, let's be serious... look at the lack of productivity in the last hour of the workday. This has, obviously, a lot to do with the last part of that hour as people pack up and wind down and chat with their co-workers. Unless you work on an assembly line it's not as if a bell sounds and you lay your tools down exactly at the top of the hour.
And all that would still happen in a 7 hour work-week. It's not making up stats, it's being obvious. Will the 7th hour of a 7hour day be more productive than the 8th hour of an 8 hour day? I don't know. But i DEFINITELY know that it'll be more productive than the 7th hour of an 8hour day.
Third, Back to monetary policy. Do you understand what a fiat currency is? A countries currency is not based on anything in particular, including productivity. Productivity, along with about 99 other things, each make up a couple percent of the equation. Things like public debt, monetary policy (prime rates, discount rates), current consumer strength, and a lot of prospection. It's like any other market.
Luckily, there are direct statistics to measure productivity. And the US--and has been for a long time--the most productive nation in the world: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/04/business/worldbusiness/04output.html
First, if you cut the day to 7 hours, the last hour will still be the least productive hour. And it will be LESS productive than the 7th hour currently is in an 8 hour day.
Second, you getting to eat dinner one hour earlier has no aggregate effect on the nation. You getting to put your feet up one hour earlier does not contribute to any measurable statistic of our economy. At first it will improve quality of life. You'd see those metrics rise. But soon you'll get used to it and it'll feel every bit the slog that it does now.
Third, it would remove 50bn man years from the work-place each year compared to a 40 hour week for 200MM workers. That's the equivalent of 24MM man years. That would CERTAINLY have an effect on the metrics we use to measure our economy.
Fourth, many people are hourly workers. This MAY decrease unemployment b/c employers will have to hire those 25MM man years back into the workforce. But it will decrease these hourly workers pay by 12.5%. That'll have a BIG impact on individual lives AND the economy as a whole, not to mention government tax receipts.
Yes. 5 hours times 50 weeks = 250 hours extra per person per year. Times that by a conservative 200m person workforce and that's 50,000,000,000 extra hours. Divide by 2080 and you get the equivilant of 24MM man years.
So cutting 5 hours from our work week across the board would be like cutting 25MM people from our workforce.
Because do you SERIOUSLY think that if we cut the work day to 7 hours instead of 8 you'll save all your/., sleeping, etc, for after work? No, you'll still do it during work.
That extra 5 hours a week is THAT noticible to YOUR personal life?
But in aggregate, 5 hours a week times 50 weeks a year times the 200million+ workers in the US is a LOT of extra productivity.
I wouldn't look to France as a model for how it should be done. Their way has some benefits, but certainly their fair share of problems. The same could be said about the US and EVERY OTHER ECONOMIC POWER.
You know, this has been a common complaint. And it's been covered and re-covered.
Complain about the ribbon, about the loss of productivity, whatever, but don't complain about screen real-estate: In 2007 there is SLIGHTLY more pixels devoted to the document you're working on than in the previous version(s) of Office.
I remember the office Dev team addressed this early in the beta. Search and ye shall find.
So nowadays, the mere act of RAISING your own children is "overprotection?"
I agree, children should have social outlets. A morning pre-school for 3 and 4 year-olds is probably a good idea. But your notion that all day childcare is somehow > stay-at-home mom is a little silly to me.
A dozen replies to this post and nobody pointed out the obvious fallacy: The US dollar never fluctuates vs. the Yuan.
The Chinese artificially peg the Yuan to the Dollar. Dollar goes up, yuan goes up, so on.
This is one of the big contentions in US/Chinese economic relations.
Also, if the US defaulted on its debt, a worldwide economic collapse would occur. All of a sudden, the trillions of us T-Bills on the books of investors large and small become significantly less valuable, or even worthless. So, if you have a net worth of $50,000,000, what do you think you'll do if you wake up the next day and only have $25,000,000. Chances are, you're going to pull-back a large chunk of at-risk assets, such as any stocks and bonds, back into more concrete securities (like the Euro, for example).
This would cause a massive drop in worldwide markets, precipitating more pullback, and so on.
It's not really something that we could EVER let happen. The government will (have to) cut social security and medicare before they could stop servicing the debt.
Some say this is exactly what the GOP is after by running up these huge deficits.
I LOVE how many people misunderstand what UAC is and what it will accomplish.
I recently opined on this subject and I'd rather not retype it, so here's the copy/paste from a few weeks ago. Please excuse the parts that are obvious retorts and don't really apply here....
1. I wasn't bashing Linux or OSX or anything else for being insecure. Well, I suppose you could say I was, but if you do, you'd have to acknowledge that I was bashing them all equally. And I certainly gave them credit for being more secure than Windows (the fence analogy, 9 feet vs 6 feet). As desperately as you want me to be, I'm not a windows fanboy or a microsoft apologist. If I were you could dismiss me. I'm a realist. Just that simple.
2. If you think that UAC is "security by annoyance" than you are not seeing the big picture! As more and more people buy new computers with Vista (which is a predetermined reality. A truly bad OS could hurt MSFT, but not in one product cycle.), anyway, as people buy these computers, and load up their software, you're going to see--I believe--darwin-like natural selection occur. You're going to see Vista-friendly apps "selected" in the wild, making them more popular, which makes them more selected, and a positive feedback loop occurs.
In a roundabout way--in a way much less destructive than your "break compatability" suggestion--the "annoyance" of UAC has driven users to more secure software. It's actually an inspired piece of psychology meeting software. They tried to make users care about security. They've promoted things like running only at the PowerUser level or below, running with aggressive IE security settings, etc. But users just don't care. A computer to them is a tool and nothing more and that's that. They want to just do what they want to do. So by creating UAC prompts for bad-actors and non-secure apps, it aligns the users interest with the interest of us security-minded folks. Not brilliant, but, perhaps, inspired.
3. Only in the beatnik granola eating linux world (sorry for the stereotype) can anyone take seriously your suggestion for just breaking compatibility with every app that today throws a UAC. It's just not REALISTIC. It's not even utopian. It's an under-thought solution that suggests that there's no other way to solve the problem than to throw away BILLIONS AND BILLIONS of dollars worth of labor.
Windows is a powerful brand. But again, most users see a PC as a tool and Windows is maybe like the toolbox. A good toolbox can make your life easier. Your suggestion is to make a toolbox that none of the users existing tools will fit into. But that would cause them to just throw out that toolbox. And they'd keep using the insecure software. What Microsoft is trying to do is point out in an in-your-face way that "the tool you just picked up is not safe to use." Over time, I find it likely that they'll replace their unsafe tools. People deep down WANT to conform, they WANT to meet expectations, they WANT to be responsible. But VERY few would just be cool with throwing out all their tools and never using them and replacing them all at once because their new toolbox said the tools were unsafe and wouldn't let them use them anymore.
4. My point, for reiteration, is REALISM. We have a real problem. It's not just Microsofts problem. It's the entire software industry. Very few companies are concerned with making secure software. In all fairness, this wasn't an issue until the advent of the ubiquitous high speed internet connection, which hit critical mass no more than 7 years ago.
We have to accept that this problem exists. And we have to accept reality:
- Microsoft is not going away. Windows is not going away. Even if Microsoft never sold another copy of windows it would STILL be on hundreds of millions of computers for YEARS and YEARS to come.
- Tens--even hundreds--of billions of dollars of software exists (both in-house and commercial) that relies on Administrator privs or otherwise insecure techniques. All of this software, every last byt
Somebody else addressed what you missed about the ESOP at PG&E.
So I'll skip over that and correct one more thing:
The stock market is NOT a zero sum game. The notion of a ZSG is that your gain is somebody else's loss. If I buy shares in XXXX for $100 and sell them next month an investor at $120, I made money, and he didn't LOSE anything -- those shares are WORTH $120.
The difference is that wealth is created in the stock market when companies appreciate in value, not when you out-maneuver somebody else. A poker tournament is a ZSG: There is, say, $10,000 in value at the beginning of the tourney, spread out over 100 people, and $10,000 in value at the end of the tourney, spread over, say, 10. In the stock market, that's not the case.
It may APPEAR ZSG if you look at one isolated trade, but that's deceptive.
I really think you should educate yourself. Maybe then you wouldn't say such stupid and offensive things. There are about 2 dozen books written about the Enron collapse but if you can't be bothered to actually READ you should at least pick up the Documentary Enron: The smartest guys in the room.
First, there was a lot of corporate pressure for Employees to invest all their 401k allocation in company stock. This was pushed by the HR department as well as the C-level managers at corporate pep rallies. Second, Enron stock was GOING THRU THE ROOF. It was EXPLODING. You're sitting there, in the middle of the 90s boom, and you're seeing your co-workers dumping the max federal limit into their 401k's, every dime of it into company stock, you see the internal view of the company, flush with cash and growing like crazy, and you see those co-workers becoming MILLIONAIRES before your eyes. So you invest your 401k into Enron stock and get your boarding pass to the gravy train.
Still, I can level with you that personal greed (however understandable) is what put them in that position. However, there's a whole lot of people who never really had a choice. PG&E was bought on the cheap and integrated them with the rest of the Enron West Cost energy assets. PG&E had an internal stock ownership program: employees were granted shares of the company. Lifelong employees had loads of stock in a company that had been local, with a solid business, for decades. This was their nest egg.
When Enron bought them, they swapped PG&E shares for Enron shares. No doubt many of these employees were excited to see that, considering how Enrons stock was still going strong. But these are people who never really had a choice. They lost everything. And the very worst part of that story is that a Federal Bankruptcy Judge injuncted those employees from selling the stock. Enrons share price didn't collapse overnight. It took some time to unpeel that onion. At the same time, executives like Lou Pai were selling millions (even Hundreds of Millions) of dollars in Enron stock, these poor bastards who worked 40 years as linemen or plant operators were forced to just sit by and watch the stock price plunge.
This was an absolute tragedy. These people were just bent over and fucked over and over by the company AND the government. You really should educate yourself before you speak.
"Somehow, I'm doubting that they make that much off of it."
Well, "that much" is subjective, wouldn't you say?
Your point is that for GOOG to make ONE BILLION a year, they'd have to have 100MM accounts with $99.99 in them.
Not at all likely, for obvious reasons.
However, wouldn't you think that, oh, ONE HUNDRED MILLION would surpass "not that much"?
If so, they'd only need 20MM users with an average of $50 in the account.
That's still not all that likely, but it's certainly doable. And we're talking $275,000 a day in revenue (well, cap gains to be specific) for absolutely NOTHING in return.
And I don't get your point about needing to keep the amount "close to liquid." Do you think they create a special little box for each users money and when it hits $100 they take the money out of the box and send it out? That's just silly. Much like a bank, they'd keep, MAYBE, 10% of the cash in liquid assets. But really, I don't see why they'd need ANY of it liquid. When a check is written, it can come out of their "general fund." Just because it's coded into the AdSense GL account doesn't mean it would have to come out of a segregated bank account.
1. I wasn't bashing Linux or OSX or anything else for being insecure. Well, I suppose you could say I was, but if you do, you'd have to acknowledge that I was bashing them all equally. And I certainly gave them credit for being more secure than Windows (the fence analogy, 9 feet vs 6 feet). As desperately as you want me to be, I'm not a windows fanboy or a microsoft apologist. If I were you could dismiss me. I'm a realist. Just that simple.
2. If you think that UAC is "security by annoyance" than you are not seeing the big picture! As more and more people buy new computers with Vista (which is a predetermined reality. A truly bad OS could hurt MSFT, but not in one product cycle.), anyway, as people buy these computers, and load up their software, you're going to see--I believe--darwin-like natural selection occur. You're going to see Vista-friendly apps "selected" in the wild, making them more popular, which makes them more selected, and a positive feedback loop occurs.
In a roundabout way--in a way much less destructive than your "break compatability" suggestion--the "annoyance" of UAC has driven users to more secure software. It's actually an inspired piece of psychology meeting software. They tried to make users care about security. They've promoted things like running only at the PowerUser level or below, running with aggressive IE security settings, etc. But users just don't care. A computer to them is a tool and nothing more and that's that. They want to just do what they want to do. So by creating UAC prompts for bad-actors and non-secure apps, it aligns the users interest with the interest of us security-minded folks. Not brilliant, but, perhaps, inspired.
3. Only in the beatnik granola eating linux world (sorry for the stereotype) can anyone take seriously your suggestion for just breaking compatibility with every app that today throws a UAC. It's just not REALISTIC. It's not even utopian. It's an under-thought solution that suggests that there's no other way to solve the problem than to throw away BILLIONS AND BILLIONS of dollars worth of labor.
Windows is a powerful brand. But again, most users see a PC as a tool and Windows is maybe like the toolbox. A good toolbox can make your life easier. Your suggestion is to make a toolbox that none of the users existing tools will fit into. But that would cause them to just throw out that toolbox. And they'd keep using the insecure software. What Microsoft is trying to do is point out in an in-your-face way that "the tool you just picked up is not safe to use." Over time, I find it likely that they'll replace their unsafe tools. People deep down WANT to conform, they WANT to meet expectations, they WANT to be responsible. But VERY few would just be cool with throwing out all their tools and never using them and replacing them all at once because their new toolbox said the tools were unsafe and wouldn't let them use them anymore.
4. My point, for reiteration, is REALISM. We have a real problem. It's not just Microsofts problem. It's the entire software industry. Very few companies are concerned with making secure software. In all fairness, this wasn't an issue until the advent of the ubiquitous high speed internet connection, which hit critical mass no more than 7 years ago.
We have to accept that this problem exists. And we have to accept reality:
- Microsoft is not going away. Windows is not going away. Even if Microsoft never sold another copy of windows it would STILL be on hundreds of millions of computers for YEARS and YEARS to come.
- Tens--even hundreds--of billions of dollars of software exists (both in-house and commercial) that relies on Administrator privs or otherwise insecure techniques. All of this software, every last byte, has been the product of an investment. The software isn't going anywhere. Y2K shed a light on the true life expectancy of software. As any software developer will tell you -- myself included -- software is expensive. I can't tell you how many times I've given formal and off-the-cu
"Until Microsoft deploys a fundamentally more secure OS or people simply stop using Windows to any great extent, there is nothing we can do"
Ok, I call Bullshit.
1. Microsoft DID come out with this "more secure" OS. Like it or not, Vista is a major improvement. But it gets SLAMMED by the average/.'er for the UAC prompts. However, the user is only shown a prompt when an application is doing things that people in this thread are saying applications should not be allowed to do. No, UAC is not an elegant solution. But the problem is that an entire ecosystem of software exists that was not written with an eye on security. These apps are doing things that apps should not be doing, often time just to make things easier on the programmer.. Microsoft needs to throw a UAC when this happens. In time, more and more apps will play by the rules and not throw prompts.
This is a tangent, but still to the point: MSFT is dammed if they do, dammed if they don't.
2. Linux/OSX/Whatever isn't perfect. BY FAR. Right now, the reward is SO GREAT for hacking on windows boxes. You only have to scale a 6 foot fence to gain access to multi-millions of users. In, say, linux, or OSX you have to scale a 9 foot fence to gain access to a fraction of that. Right now, cracking Windows just makes sense for crackers. But you (and others) seem to think that botnets would just go away forever if only Microsoft gets their act together. That's insane. People are getting RICH off botnets. You think they're just going to stop because the game got a bit tougher? No way... As the reward factor of Windows diffuses down to the level of the other mainstream OS's, you'll see they'll get attacked more, too.
3. Microsoft isn't going anywhere. This is the nature of the game, people! So sitting around here talking about "When everyone switches" or whatever is just silly. It's childish. You think you're part of the solution b/c you run an alternative OS? You're not. If you want to be part of the solution, start thinking about how to defeat these people in a way that doesn't involve bashing Windows.
Your approach is a LOT like saying "Terrorism won't be a problem once everyone switches to Christianity."
The reason the fiber is not lit is simple economics....
A lot of this was laid in the late 90's by companies like Global Crossing and USWest/Qwest.
When you're running a single fiber line, the cost is minimal to run additional lines thru the same conduit. Especially when compared to running them later.
The cost of the networking equipment, however, is significant, and it makes no sense to light fiber that you don't need.
Of course, I'm probably just feeding a troll, but it's better to do that than let people actually believe your nonsense.
Huh? So, because there is only one master it is unlikely to fail?
Yes. If you take that sentence in context, the answer is "Yes." Compared to the likelihood that one of the thousands of worker-machines will fail during any given job, it IS unlikely that the single Master will fail. Moreover, while any given job may take hours to run, it also seems that many take just moments. Furthermore, just because a job may take hours to run doesn't mean it's CRITICAL that it be completed in hours. And, at times when a job IS critical, that scenario is addressed in the preceeding sentence: It is easy for a caller to make the master write periodic checkpoints that the caller can use to restart a job on a different cluster on the off-chance that a Master fails.
If a job is NOT critical, the master fails, the caller determines the failure by checking for the abort-condition, and then restarts the job on a new cluster.
It's not a logical fallacy, nor is it a bad design.
For the benefit of anyone reading thru, here is the parapgraph in question. It follows a detailed section on how the MapReduce library copes with failures in the worker machines.
It is easy to make the master write periodic checkpoints
of the master data structures described above. If the master
task dies, a new copy can be started from the last
checkpointed state. However, given that there is only a
single master, its failure is unlikely; therefore our current
implementation aborts the MapReduce computation
if the master fails. Clients can check for this condition
and retry the MapReduce operation if they desire.
Obviously wireless spectrum is going to be an end-user product. Allowing a nationwide wireless network similar to what Google paid for in the bay area recently.
But the dark fibre...
Yes, no doubt, perhaps used to connect wireless broadcasting centers to each other, but also, my speculation is that it's going to be used for television. Google is an advertising company. For the forseeable future, there is no bigger advertising medium than Television. True, the major networks upfronts were lower this year than in the past, but that's only because the rise of original content on cable networks has created more premium content for advertisers to buy into.
Google is going to need massive bandwidth to build a next-gen network for TV advertising. Perhaps even one day using the Overlay technology it's deploying on YouTube. Time shifting is here to stay. Advertising is here to stay. I suspect the latter will adapt to the former, and overlays seem a pretty likely candidate.
Who has the technology, bandwidth, ad sales teams, and capital to make it all work?.... Good question.... maybe somebody should Google it...
Not to be condescending, but do you aware of AdBlockPlus? It's basically AdBlock, but it downloads filter lists from a central server that you "subscribe" to.
It's far more useful than standard AdBlock and I highly recommend it. Considering I see so incredibly few ads I don't see how your Opera filters could be much more effective.
This is far more efficient, by the way, than my old IE based solution of adhering post-it notes to the monitor to cover up the undesirable places.
"She blamed "the vast right wing conspiracy" instead of her husband."
I didn't read much more past this sentence, as it says everything one needs to know about where your own personal bias lies, but I figured I'd take the time to point something out:
She blamed this "conspiracy" before Clinton told anybody the truth, even his wife. He assured Hillary over and again that it was just a load a B.S. and slander. And yes, Clinton had been known to sleep around, but nobody can deny that the Republicans had been known to slander.
All things being equal, she gave her husband the benefit of the doubt. Not such an egregious crime as you make it out to be.
Slashdot Mirror
I love mopping the floor with your type.
:( sorry.
First, Norway is only on that list because oil prices are soaring. Productivity per hour is GDP divided by hours. Their GDP is a lot higher now than it was a few years ago, which is why Norway climbed TEN SPOTS. But more importantly, Norway DOESN'T HAVE A 35 HOUR WORK WEEK. So the fact that it's a European country is irrelevent. This thread has been about a 35 hour week vs. a 40 hour week. Of course, you know you're on thin ice so you're grasping at whatever you can find to back you up. You tried to dress up your opinion and make it look like fact, but you just weren't bright enough to pull it off.
Second, your opinion has been that a 35 hour week will make us more productive. France has had a 35 hour week for over a decade now. By your own admission, workers in the US are more productive per hour than those in France. You somehow take pleasure in France being directly behind the US, which shows just how desperate you are. They're LESS PRODUCTIVE PER HOUR. I don't care if it's CLOSE, they're still LESS PRODUCTIVE.
Third, and this is where it gets really good.... When France adopted the 35 hour work week they didn't see an increase in productivity-per-hour.... yeah, i know, it burns a little. I'm sorry. But the truth sometimes hurts. And still, closing in on 20 years later, France is not more productive per hour than they were before they abbreviated their work week.
I could do this all day. You're so smug and self assured that I take a great deal of pleasure in schooling you. These are hard numbers, bro. Facts. They're non-negotiable. If you'd have said in your post "I think I'd be more productive w/ a 35 hour week." or "I bet people would work harder to get all their work done in 35 hours" that would be perfectly fine.... but you had to TRY to sound sooo smart and tried to act like what you were saying is a fact. It's not. It's just BS. You know it but now there's nothing you can do. Except, of course, just get slightly embarrassed and hit that "back" button and act like this never happened.
Sorry to make you look so stupid. It wasn't my intention, but if it walks like a duck and talks like a duck....
Are you a moron or did you just not read that article? We are the most productive nation on an OUTPUT-PER-HOUR basis.
Of course you won't reply to this because you don't have any actual FACTS to offer to the discussion, just insults and misdirection.
Nice try. Take your low karma having ass and debate some other retard on a topic that you actually know a thing or two about. You're out of your depth, son, and it shows.
The last hour of a 7 hour day would not be productive, either. So what's your point?
Uhh..
First, You have absolutely no concept of monetary policy.
Second, let's be serious... look at the lack of productivity in the last hour of the workday. This has, obviously, a lot to do with the last part of that hour as people pack up and wind down and chat with their co-workers. Unless you work on an assembly line it's not as if a bell sounds and you lay your tools down exactly at the top of the hour.
And all that would still happen in a 7 hour work-week. It's not making up stats, it's being obvious. Will the 7th hour of a 7hour day be more productive than the 8th hour of an 8 hour day? I don't know. But i DEFINITELY know that it'll be more productive than the 7th hour of an 8hour day.
Third, Back to monetary policy. Do you understand what a fiat currency is? A countries currency is not based on anything in particular, including productivity. Productivity, along with about 99 other things, each make up a couple percent of the equation. Things like public debt, monetary policy (prime rates, discount rates), current consumer strength, and a lot of prospection. It's like any other market.
Luckily, there are direct statistics to measure productivity. And the US--and has been for a long time--the most productive nation in the world: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/04/business/worldbusiness/04output.html
You're a moron.
First, if you cut the day to 7 hours, the last hour will still be the least productive hour. And it will be LESS productive than the 7th hour currently is in an 8 hour day.
Second, you getting to eat dinner one hour earlier has no aggregate effect on the nation. You getting to put your feet up one hour earlier does not contribute to any measurable statistic of our economy. At first it will improve quality of life. You'd see those metrics rise. But soon you'll get used to it and it'll feel every bit the slog that it does now.
Third, it would remove 50bn man years from the work-place each year compared to a 40 hour week for 200MM workers. That's the equivalent of 24MM man years. That would CERTAINLY have an effect on the metrics we use to measure our economy.
Fourth, many people are hourly workers. This MAY decrease unemployment b/c employers will have to hire those 25MM man years back into the workforce. But it will decrease these hourly workers pay by 12.5%. That'll have a BIG impact on individual lives AND the economy as a whole, not to mention government tax receipts.
Yes. 5 hours times 50 weeks = 250 hours extra per person per year. Times that by a conservative 200m person workforce and that's 50,000,000,000 extra hours. Divide by 2080 and you get the equivilant of 24MM man years.
/., sleeping, etc, for after work? No, you'll still do it during work.
So cutting 5 hours from our work week across the board would be like cutting 25MM people from our workforce.
Because do you SERIOUSLY think that if we cut the work day to 7 hours instead of 8 you'll save all your
But 35 hrs does?
Seriously?
That extra 5 hours a week is THAT noticible to YOUR personal life?
But in aggregate, 5 hours a week times 50 weeks a year times the 200million+ workers in the US is a LOT of extra productivity.
I wouldn't look to France as a model for how it should be done. Their way has some benefits, but certainly their fair share of problems. The same could be said about the US and EVERY OTHER ECONOMIC POWER.
You know, this has been a common complaint. And it's been covered and re-covered.
Complain about the ribbon, about the loss of productivity, whatever, but don't complain about screen real-estate: In 2007 there is SLIGHTLY more pixels devoted to the document you're working on than in the previous version(s) of Office.
I remember the office Dev team addressed this early in the beta. Search and ye shall find.
Wow, what backwards thinking.
So nowadays, the mere act of RAISING your own children is "overprotection?"
I agree, children should have social outlets. A morning pre-school for 3 and 4 year-olds is probably a good idea. But your notion that all day childcare is somehow > stay-at-home mom is a little silly to me.
A dozen replies to this post and nobody pointed out the obvious fallacy: The US dollar never fluctuates vs. the Yuan.
The Chinese artificially peg the Yuan to the Dollar. Dollar goes up, yuan goes up, so on.
This is one of the big contentions in US/Chinese economic relations.
Also, if the US defaulted on its debt, a worldwide economic collapse would occur. All of a sudden, the trillions of us T-Bills on the books of investors large and small become significantly less valuable, or even worthless. So, if you have a net worth of $50,000,000, what do you think you'll do if you wake up the next day and only have $25,000,000. Chances are, you're going to pull-back a large chunk of at-risk assets, such as any stocks and bonds, back into more concrete securities (like the Euro, for example).
This would cause a massive drop in worldwide markets, precipitating more pullback, and so on.
It's not really something that we could EVER let happen. The government will (have to) cut social security and medicare before they could stop servicing the debt.
Some say this is exactly what the GOP is after by running up these huge deficits.
I LOVE how many people misunderstand what UAC is and what it will accomplish.
I recently opined on this subject and I'd rather not retype it, so here's the copy/paste from a few weeks ago. Please excuse the parts that are obvious retorts and don't really apply here....
1. I wasn't bashing Linux or OSX or anything else for being insecure. Well, I suppose you could say I was, but if you do, you'd have to acknowledge that I was bashing them all equally. And I certainly gave them credit for being more secure than Windows (the fence analogy, 9 feet vs 6 feet). As desperately as you want me to be, I'm not a windows fanboy or a microsoft apologist. If I were you could dismiss me. I'm a realist. Just that simple.
2. If you think that UAC is "security by annoyance" than you are not seeing the big picture! As more and more people buy new computers with Vista (which is a predetermined reality. A truly bad OS could hurt MSFT, but not in one product cycle.), anyway, as people buy these computers, and load up their software, you're going to see--I believe--darwin-like natural selection occur. You're going to see Vista-friendly apps "selected" in the wild, making them more popular, which makes them more selected, and a positive feedback loop occurs.
In a roundabout way--in a way much less destructive than your "break compatability" suggestion--the "annoyance" of UAC has driven users to more secure software. It's actually an inspired piece of psychology meeting software. They tried to make users care about security. They've promoted things like running only at the PowerUser level or below, running with aggressive IE security settings, etc. But users just don't care. A computer to them is a tool and nothing more and that's that. They want to just do what they want to do. So by creating UAC prompts for bad-actors and non-secure apps, it aligns the users interest with the interest of us security-minded folks. Not brilliant, but, perhaps, inspired.
3. Only in the beatnik granola eating linux world (sorry for the stereotype) can anyone take seriously your suggestion for just breaking compatibility with every app that today throws a UAC. It's just not REALISTIC. It's not even utopian. It's an under-thought solution that suggests that there's no other way to solve the problem than to throw away BILLIONS AND BILLIONS of dollars worth of labor.
Windows is a powerful brand. But again, most users see a PC as a tool and Windows is maybe like the toolbox. A good toolbox can make your life easier. Your suggestion is to make a toolbox that none of the users existing tools will fit into. But that would cause them to just throw out that toolbox. And they'd keep using the insecure software. What Microsoft is trying to do is point out in an in-your-face way that "the tool you just picked up is not safe to use." Over time, I find it likely that they'll replace their unsafe tools. People deep down WANT to conform, they WANT to meet expectations, they WANT to be responsible. But VERY few would just be cool with throwing out all their tools and never using them and replacing them all at once because their new toolbox said the tools were unsafe and wouldn't let them use them anymore.
4. My point, for reiteration, is REALISM. We have a real problem. It's not just Microsofts problem. It's the entire software industry. Very few companies are concerned with making secure software. In all fairness, this wasn't an issue until the advent of the ubiquitous high speed internet connection, which hit critical mass no more than 7 years ago.
We have to accept that this problem exists. And we have to accept reality:
- Microsoft is not going away. Windows is not going away. Even if Microsoft never sold another copy of windows it would STILL be on hundreds of millions of computers for YEARS and YEARS to come.
- Tens--even hundreds--of billions of dollars of software exists (both in-house and commercial) that relies on Administrator privs or otherwise insecure techniques. All of this software, every last byt
Somebody else addressed what you missed about the ESOP at PG&E.
So I'll skip over that and correct one more thing:
The stock market is NOT a zero sum game. The notion of a ZSG is that your gain is somebody else's loss. If I buy shares in XXXX for $100 and sell them next month an investor at $120, I made money, and he didn't LOSE anything -- those shares are WORTH $120.
The difference is that wealth is created in the stock market when companies appreciate in value, not when you out-maneuver somebody else. A poker tournament is a ZSG: There is, say, $10,000 in value at the beginning of the tourney, spread out over 100 people, and $10,000 in value at the end of the tourney, spread over, say, 10. In the stock market, that's not the case.
It may APPEAR ZSG if you look at one isolated trade, but that's deceptive.
I really think you should educate yourself. Maybe then you wouldn't say such stupid and offensive things. There are about 2 dozen books written about the Enron collapse but if you can't be bothered to actually READ you should at least pick up the Documentary Enron: The smartest guys in the room.
First, there was a lot of corporate pressure for Employees to invest all their 401k allocation in company stock. This was pushed by the HR department as well as the C-level managers at corporate pep rallies. Second, Enron stock was GOING THRU THE ROOF. It was EXPLODING. You're sitting there, in the middle of the 90s boom, and you're seeing your co-workers dumping the max federal limit into their 401k's, every dime of it into company stock, you see the internal view of the company, flush with cash and growing like crazy, and you see those co-workers becoming MILLIONAIRES before your eyes. So you invest your 401k into Enron stock and get your boarding pass to the gravy train.
Still, I can level with you that personal greed (however understandable) is what put them in that position. However, there's a whole lot of people who never really had a choice. PG&E was bought on the cheap and integrated them with the rest of the Enron West Cost energy assets. PG&E had an internal stock ownership program: employees were granted shares of the company. Lifelong employees had loads of stock in a company that had been local, with a solid business, for decades. This was their nest egg.
When Enron bought them, they swapped PG&E shares for Enron shares. No doubt many of these employees were excited to see that, considering how Enrons stock was still going strong. But these are people who never really had a choice. They lost everything. And the very worst part of that story is that a Federal Bankruptcy Judge injuncted those employees from selling the stock. Enrons share price didn't collapse overnight. It took some time to unpeel that onion. At the same time, executives like Lou Pai were selling millions (even Hundreds of Millions) of dollars in Enron stock, these poor bastards who worked 40 years as linemen or plant operators were forced to just sit by and watch the stock price plunge.
This was an absolute tragedy. These people were just bent over and fucked over and over by the company AND the government. You really should educate yourself before you speak.
Volumes Faster? nice pun...
"Somehow, I'm doubting that they make that much off of it."
Well, "that much" is subjective, wouldn't you say?
Your point is that for GOOG to make ONE BILLION a year, they'd have to have 100MM accounts with $99.99 in them.
Not at all likely, for obvious reasons.
However, wouldn't you think that, oh, ONE HUNDRED MILLION would surpass "not that much"?
If so, they'd only need 20MM users with an average of $50 in the account.
That's still not all that likely, but it's certainly doable. And we're talking $275,000 a day in revenue (well, cap gains to be specific) for absolutely NOTHING in return.
And I don't get your point about needing to keep the amount "close to liquid." Do you think they create a special little box for each users money and when it hits $100 they take the money out of the box and send it out? That's just silly. Much like a bank, they'd keep, MAYBE, 10% of the cash in liquid assets. But really, I don't see why they'd need ANY of it liquid. When a check is written, it can come out of their "general fund." Just because it's coded into the AdSense GL account doesn't mean it would have to come out of a segregated bank account.
1. I wasn't bashing Linux or OSX or anything else for being insecure. Well, I suppose you could say I was, but if you do, you'd have to acknowledge that I was bashing them all equally. And I certainly gave them credit for being more secure than Windows (the fence analogy, 9 feet vs 6 feet). As desperately as you want me to be, I'm not a windows fanboy or a microsoft apologist. If I were you could dismiss me. I'm a realist. Just that simple.
2. If you think that UAC is "security by annoyance" than you are not seeing the big picture! As more and more people buy new computers with Vista (which is a predetermined reality. A truly bad OS could hurt MSFT, but not in one product cycle.), anyway, as people buy these computers, and load up their software, you're going to see--I believe--darwin-like natural selection occur. You're going to see Vista-friendly apps "selected" in the wild, making them more popular, which makes them more selected, and a positive feedback loop occurs.
In a roundabout way--in a way much less destructive than your "break compatability" suggestion--the "annoyance" of UAC has driven users to more secure software. It's actually an inspired piece of psychology meeting software. They tried to make users care about security. They've promoted things like running only at the PowerUser level or below, running with aggressive IE security settings, etc. But users just don't care. A computer to them is a tool and nothing more and that's that. They want to just do what they want to do. So by creating UAC prompts for bad-actors and non-secure apps, it aligns the users interest with the interest of us security-minded folks. Not brilliant, but, perhaps, inspired.
3. Only in the beatnik granola eating linux world (sorry for the stereotype) can anyone take seriously your suggestion for just breaking compatibility with every app that today throws a UAC. It's just not REALISTIC. It's not even utopian. It's an under-thought solution that suggests that there's no other way to solve the problem than to throw away BILLIONS AND BILLIONS of dollars worth of labor.
Windows is a powerful brand. But again, most users see a PC as a tool and Windows is maybe like the toolbox. A good toolbox can make your life easier. Your suggestion is to make a toolbox that none of the users existing tools will fit into. But that would cause them to just throw out that toolbox. And they'd keep using the insecure software. What Microsoft is trying to do is point out in an in-your-face way that "the tool you just picked up is not safe to use." Over time, I find it likely that they'll replace their unsafe tools. People deep down WANT to conform, they WANT to meet expectations, they WANT to be responsible. But VERY few would just be cool with throwing out all their tools and never using them and replacing them all at once because their new toolbox said the tools were unsafe and wouldn't let them use them anymore.
4. My point, for reiteration, is REALISM. We have a real problem. It's not just Microsofts problem. It's the entire software industry. Very few companies are concerned with making secure software. In all fairness, this wasn't an issue until the advent of the ubiquitous high speed internet connection, which hit critical mass no more than 7 years ago.
We have to accept that this problem exists. And we have to accept reality:
- Microsoft is not going away. Windows is not going away. Even if Microsoft never sold another copy of windows it would STILL be on hundreds of millions of computers for YEARS and YEARS to come.
- Tens--even hundreds--of billions of dollars of software exists (both in-house and commercial) that relies on Administrator privs or otherwise insecure techniques. All of this software, every last byte, has been the product of an investment. The software isn't going anywhere. Y2K shed a light on the true life expectancy of software. As any software developer will tell you -- myself included -- software is expensive. I can't tell you how many times I've given formal and off-the-cu
"Until Microsoft deploys a fundamentally more secure OS or people simply stop using Windows to any great extent, there is nothing we can do"
/.'er for the UAC prompts. However, the user is only shown a prompt when an application is doing things that people in this thread are saying applications should not be allowed to do. No, UAC is not an elegant solution. But the problem is that an entire ecosystem of software exists that was not written with an eye on security. These apps are doing things that apps should not be doing, often time just to make things easier on the programmer.. Microsoft needs to throw a UAC when this happens. In time, more and more apps will play by the rules and not throw prompts.
Ok, I call Bullshit.
1. Microsoft DID come out with this "more secure" OS. Like it or not, Vista is a major improvement. But it gets SLAMMED by the average
This is a tangent, but still to the point: MSFT is dammed if they do, dammed if they don't.
2. Linux/OSX/Whatever isn't perfect. BY FAR. Right now, the reward is SO GREAT for hacking on windows boxes. You only have to scale a 6 foot fence to gain access to multi-millions of users. In, say, linux, or OSX you have to scale a 9 foot fence to gain access to a fraction of that. Right now, cracking Windows just makes sense for crackers. But you (and others) seem to think that botnets would just go away forever if only Microsoft gets their act together. That's insane. People are getting RICH off botnets. You think they're just going to stop because the game got a bit tougher? No way... As the reward factor of Windows diffuses down to the level of the other mainstream OS's, you'll see they'll get attacked more, too.
3. Microsoft isn't going anywhere. This is the nature of the game, people! So sitting around here talking about "When everyone switches" or whatever is just silly. It's childish. You think you're part of the solution b/c you run an alternative OS? You're not. If you want to be part of the solution, start thinking about how to defeat these people in a way that doesn't involve bashing Windows.
Your approach is a LOT like saying "Terrorism won't be a problem once everyone switches to Christianity."
Unfortunatley for us Americans, the sales tax story does not end with state sanctioned rates.
It's common for counties to tack on a percentage point or two to the state sanctioned amount.
Still not close to VAT levels, but it all adds up nonetheless.
The reason the fiber is not lit is simple economics....
A lot of this was laid in the late 90's by companies like Global Crossing and USWest/Qwest.
When you're running a single fiber line, the cost is minimal to run additional lines thru the same conduit. Especially when compared to running them later.
The cost of the networking equipment, however, is significant, and it makes no sense to light fiber that you don't need.
Of course, I'm probably just feeding a troll, but it's better to do that than let people actually believe your nonsense.
Yes. If you take that sentence in context, the answer is "Yes." Compared to the likelihood that one of the thousands of worker-machines will fail during any given job, it IS unlikely that the single Master will fail. Moreover, while any given job may take hours to run, it also seems that many take just moments. Furthermore, just because a job may take hours to run doesn't mean it's CRITICAL that it be completed in hours. And, at times when a job IS critical, that scenario is addressed in the preceeding sentence: It is easy for a caller to make the master write periodic checkpoints that the caller can use to restart a job on a different cluster on the off-chance that a Master fails.
If a job is NOT critical, the master fails, the caller determines the failure by checking for the abort-condition, and then restarts the job on a new cluster.
It's not a logical fallacy, nor is it a bad design.
For the benefit of anyone reading thru, here is the parapgraph in question. It follows a detailed section on how the MapReduce library copes with failures in the worker machines.
Obviously wireless spectrum is going to be an end-user product. Allowing a nationwide wireless network similar to what Google paid for in the bay area recently.
.... Good question .... maybe somebody should Google it...
But the dark fibre...
Yes, no doubt, perhaps used to connect wireless broadcasting centers to each other, but also, my speculation is that it's going to be used for television. Google is an advertising company. For the forseeable future, there is no bigger advertising medium than Television. True, the major networks upfronts were lower this year than in the past, but that's only because the rise of original content on cable networks has created more premium content for advertisers to buy into.
Google is going to need massive bandwidth to build a next-gen network for TV advertising. Perhaps even one day using the Overlay technology it's deploying on YouTube. Time shifting is here to stay. Advertising is here to stay. I suspect the latter will adapt to the former, and overlays seem a pretty likely candidate.
Who has the technology, bandwidth, ad sales teams, and capital to make it all work?
This is a great idea. It's treating the network like roads.
Imagine trying to start a taxi business if you had to build all your own roads first!
Not to be condescending, but do you aware of AdBlockPlus? It's basically AdBlock, but it downloads filter lists from a central server that you "subscribe" to.
It's far more useful than standard AdBlock and I highly recommend it. Considering I see so incredibly few ads I don't see how your Opera filters could be much more effective.
This is far more efficient, by the way, than my old IE based solution of adhering post-it notes to the monitor to cover up the undesirable places.
"You could even be legally responsible if a virus happened to alter the file"
I love the smell of FUD in the morning...
Seriously. Watermarks are progress. You disagree, that's fine, but lets debate it on its merits and not base our opinions on fear-mongering and FUD.
"She blamed "the vast right wing conspiracy" instead of her husband."
I didn't read much more past this sentence, as it says everything one needs to know about where your own personal bias lies, but I figured I'd take the time to point something out:
She blamed this "conspiracy" before Clinton told anybody the truth, even his wife. He assured Hillary over and again that it was just a load a B.S. and slander. And yes, Clinton had been known to sleep around, but nobody can deny that the Republicans had been known to slander.
All things being equal, she gave her husband the benefit of the doubt. Not such an egregious crime as you make it out to be.