So tell me -- what number of internal links is too many?
We debated this a lot internally. On one hand we had a sales team and account managers who wanted to sell ANYTHING that was legal.
On the other we had engineers (and my partner and I come from the engineering side of the business) who wanted no part of it.
We have no issue with creating rich internal link structures.
I can see no argument for the idea that you should limit internal links between pages.
It just so happens, that Google uses internal links in its equation.
But if I have a website selling Apple Pies and I link every instance of the word "Apple Pie" to the front page of the site, how, really, can you have an issue with that?
There is no such thing as a turing test that can't be solved by a human. That's the entire point.
So measuring it against that criteria just makes no sense.
But the truth is, humans solving CAPTCHAs was never as big of problem as good OCR. Most people just do not have the resources to pay people (with cash or porn) to do data entry all day.
The real problem is that CAPTCHAs themselves have advanced the state of OCR to an extent that you can now buy apps to break a CAP and they're really not that expensive.
Our system tries to make "diversion" slightly more difficult by altering the placement of the test questions on the form. But this system is easily defeated by an attacker who targets a specific site using our software. All they have to do is deduce the test questions and divert them to humans.
ReCAPTCHA was a big inspiration for the developer here that invented the system.
You're right that their system does have a nice, material benefit. The one problem I see with their model is that the more sites that use reCAPTCHA, the more benefit is produced by way of digitized texts. But the more sites that use it, the bigger target it will be, and their developers will be constantly struggling to stay ahead of the bots.
And that's something I meant to say in my post: The real reason we did this (as I said) wasn't to save money. The real reason was to ensure that the software is self-perpetuating. Sorta organic in the way that the more times its tests are passed, the more new tests are created to be passed. It ensures its own self-existence as a valuable Turing test mechanism.
See, the system has a little over 100k images in it. As I think I mentioned just a bit ago, 20k new tests have been created this year by test takers. But (and this is a guess) I'd say that right now we only have tests for 50k images in the DB. It's not a 1-Pic : 1-Test relationship. We have "interrogation rules" programmed that follow a simple logic tree to potentially create hundreds of tests for each image.
It's just a matter of following the logic-tree from the top for a given picture and presenting a test and then waiting for it to be confirmed twice. After it is, it gets in the rotation as a new test that was created by a human, for a human.
There's quality control checks later and the system itself is designed to scale to about 50 million tests without any human involvement from here on out.
I have never LOVED making users answer 2 questions. But I think this is such a better premise than CAPTCHA, that it's STILL a better user experience than CAPTCHA ever was. CAPTCHA is just tedious for users. This is more like a picture hunt game on the touchscreen machine at a bar. "What is the address of the 3rd house from the left" or "How many people from the left is the man holding the red flag?"
Anyway, talks of self-perpetuating turing test engines are not usually the in-thing at dinner parties I've been going to lately, so I hope you excuse me for gushing a bit!
A good solution here is to include this as part of the turing test itself.
As I mentioned upthread, I'm a partner in a web dev shop. We do a lot of social networking (of course) and about a year ago we developed a utility to create just this type of turing test. For example, we'll have a picture, and ask the question "What is the color of the 3rd fish from the left?"
What we do, is we pair these tests on a page. We'll include a known test, like the one above. And we'll also show an unclassified image and we might ask "how many people are in this picture?"
There is no wrong answer for that test, and their answer is recorded. Soon, that same question will be asked for that same picture. As soon as its confirmed 2 times, it gets classified as having n people. Soon after it would be displayed again asking "how many females are in this pic?" or "what color shirt is the person on the right wearing?"
When we created the app, the DB had about 5000 turing tests in it. We then attached a DB of about 100,000 images that were pre-classified but not to an extent that would allow us to write a test off it.
Now, after a year in use across a couple dozen moderately trafficked websites, we have nearly 25,000 turing tests. All 20,000 new tests have been created thru the technique I described above.
The real reason we did it wasn't to save on some development costs. We could've hired temp workers and paid them $8 an hour to classify pictures.
We did it because I believe strongly that the key to simple turing tests like this is a large corpus of data. If a bot only encounters the same test once or twice EVER, then the problem becomes difficult to solve. This is like the ANTI-CAPTCHA.
CAPTCHA was all about taking a specific technique to its maximum extent: Challenge a computer system by taking a narrow field (OCR) and pushing it beyond the current state-of-the-art.
These tests are all about a general technique thats broad where CAPTCHA is just deep.
The only way to build a bot to solve each test in our DB would be to give it genuine intelligence. It would have to be capable of determining context, reference, connotation, image ID, etc.
As a programmer, if you say "Here's a captcha, write a program to solve it" I wouldn't know HOW, but I'd at least have an idea of where to begin.
Now, if you show me a picture with the turing test of "What object is in the hands of the 3rd woman from the left"... well... i wouldn't know where to begin.
The only real flaw here is that it can't be multiple choice. Even if you have 50 choices, if a bot can load your page 100 times in a minute, it just becomes a technique to slow bots and not stop them.
And from a technical perspective, it's much harder for the bot. You'd be surprised at how good image ID has become. If you say "which of these 20 pics has a dog" it wouldn't be too hard to program a bot to solve that problem.
I run a mid-sized web development shop. A few years ago we were doing mostly retail sites. Vanilla and boring but we worked it down to a science and had some really great "modules" that made these sites super profitable for us. Of course, everything has its seedy side and with retail it was SEO.
Everybody wanted it. About 80% of our customers were of the "Do whatever, just ideminfy me" stripe. (And these are established companies paying high 5-figures for these sites). We drew our own demarcation about what we would and wouldn't do. (Excessive Internal-link structure is OK, zombie sites are not).
Now most our work is social networking.
We, too, followed the "rise" of CAPTCHA and we've been happy with our results. We always used a custom CAP for each site, and we tried to keep them relatively readable, being of the belief that making it too hard will only keep out Humans: If somebody wants to crack it, they will.
We still use them regularly. I noticed that about a year ago we actually had people begin to request them specifically. (Isn't that what Buffett said about the home mortgage mess? When the regular joe's started flipping houses, he knew it was over?)
Anyhoo, I think the real fault in CAP's is that they worked too well. They became too big of a target. Now, we try to mix and match a number of different techniques to identify humans.
Solutions range from dirt-simple: An input box named, say, "City" that has a label that reads "13 plus 8 equals:" or "What is the 3rd word on this page?"
To the more complex "what is the color of the front-door in this picture?"
We have a simple library we use for these things that pulls the questions (and, if applicable, the pics) from a Database of about 25,000 different turing tests.
The thing is, none of them are too complex. Any mediocre programmer could write an application to crack it. But your bot will probably never see that same exact question again, so it becomes irrelevant.
And, to tie it in to the parent, we chose this technique precicely because of what we learned from CAPs. Before there were software hacks, there was the "porn hack" and the "sweatshop labor hack."
In this case, when a bot the site, it's fairly difficult for it to even detect which item is the turing test. We auto-generate the location and even the name of the form field so it's always a bit different.
Long term health of companies is not important. Why do you think it is? What difference does it make if a company exists for 5 years, or 50? As weak companies fail, stronger ones grow from their ashes.
The only purpose of a corporoation is to make money. They're money making machines. They accept money as input into their machine, and the output should be EVEN MORE MONEY. If that is not the output, the machine is broken. Yahoo is broken. It is not producing value. Yahoo owes it to the people who paid to BUILD the machine to get the best deal they can.
This would be moot if Yahoo was performing well. But they're not. Yahoo will never see $35 a share. They have no "game changer" up their sleeve. It was supposed to be their new ad platform. It fizzled.
I have to assume that you've never owned a business, or been a shareholder in one. That's the only thing that could explain what I'm reading.
The fuunction of a business is NOT to "sustain life." The function of a business is to accept cash as input and produce EVEN MORE CASH as output.
That's it. And there's been LOADS of companies that have liquidated all assets and close down to deliver cash back to the shareholders. And that's the best choice. And there's nothing wrong with that.
And the flaw in that sentence of yours explains the flaw found a few sentences later about selling milk. Again, it's not about just making cash. It's about taking cash as input and returning more cash as output.
For YEARS now, Yahoo has been taking cash as input and producing LESS or just EQUAL cash as output. And that's why their shares are worth less now than they were a year ago, and two, and three, and four, and five.
Among the legally defined duties of a public companies board of directors is to protect shareholders. Nowhere does it say their duty is to "sustain life."
I would add, the real problem isn't even the buzzwords. It's the incompetence in HR departments.
I see this in my own company when I try to hire developers.
I've learned how to navigate this bureacracy now, but it was tough at first. I had candidates with 10 years experience with JavaScript who were given phone screens. They explained they'd used hidden iFrames and tags to retreive server-side interaction since the late 90s, but their resumes were never handed off to me because they never specifically used the XMLHttpRequest object so it wasn't precicely "AJAX" as its currently defined.
This kind of madness just takes so much energy to overcome, for both candidates and hiring managers.
Now, when I create a Req for a new hire, I keep it simple. If we're hiring a web developer, I look for self-described proficiency in Java, ASP.Net, Python, Ruby or PHP. Any will do.
When I hire a windows developer, I look for the same with Java, C#, or C++.
I'm of the belief that if you're been developing web apps with C# for 3 years, you can be an expert in Python and PHP inside 6 months.
You do realize that the shareholders OWN the company, right? It's theirs. They own it.
It's like me saying: You won't let me build my house on your front lawn? Why not? All you care about is "resale value" and "property law." Home ownership has not been good for our culture.
Yang and Filo sold the right to control their precious baby when they took it public. They took on a duty to be a steward for shareholder value. In exchange, they were made instant billionaires.
Now he wants to still treat Yahoo as HIS. It isn't. Shareholders are the owners. End of story.
You start talking about shareholder value. Then you say this: "a CEO could definitely make a case that the company would be better served by staying independent."
This isn't about what would best serve the COMPANY.
It's about what would best serve the shareholders.
Period.
Yahoo has underperformed for years now. Yang has an obligation to the shareholders that made him a billionaire when he decided to go public.
It's not about "short term gains" it's about recouping an investment and giving your shareholders a return. THAT is the covenant you enter-into when you take a company public.
As I mentioned above, this comes down to Time Value of Money.
What PROMISE can you make for tomorrow that will be worth more than cash today?
This is EXACTLY like a company saying that they don't owe you your paycheck. Giving you your paycheck today would only be good for "maximizing short term cash return." If you just forego your salary, the company could "make a case" that they could give you even MORE money later. To heck with the fact that the company has been on a multi-year slide.
You want your cash today. You've earned it. Laws exist to protect employees in these situations. And guess what? Laws exist to protect shareholders, too.
Shareholders are not usually the billionaire couture class.
They're pension funds. Or municipal funds. Or union investors. Or mutual funds. Heath Care trusts. University endowments.
Yang committed himself to protect these peoples investment. He eschewed that responsibility for the same juvenile MS hatred as is witnessed here.
The shareholders of Yahoo are not there because they're tech visionaries or Yahoo loyalists. That's the point of the Icahn lawsuit. Some may be, but institutional investors hold the bulk of Y! shares that aren't held by corporate officers. Mutual funds, pension funds, etc.
These people hold Yahoo for one reason only: to earn a return on their investment.
Microsoft made an offer that was VERY generous. Not just measured on Y!'s latest performance: Microsoft offered a higher value than Yahoo's stock has seen in years.
Yang and Filo made a deal when they took their company public. The deal is simple: You become a billionaire overnight, making more than the top 1% of the top 1%.
In exchange, you must be a good steward for the people giving you all this money. This is not up for interpretation, debate, or discussion.
There's this thing called "time value of money" that, simply, a dollar today is worth FAR more than the promise of a dollar tomorrow.
You can't say that "shareholder value" is subjective because Yahoo MIGHT turn themselves around and they MIGHT be successful and they MIGHT then be worth more in the future than Microsoft offered today.
No way.
Any shareholder would gladly take that large premium, get cash today, and then re-invest.
It doesn't get any more basic than this. Carl Icahn will probably win this lawsuit. Yang passed the employee-severence-poison-pill in a direct response to Microsoft. He wanted his cake and to eat it, too. He doesn't get to treat Yahoo like his private feifdom. It belongs to its shareholders now.
They don't care about stupid microsoft hating like you do. They don't care about the "purity" of a classic internet brand. They care that they have, say, a pension fund to manage, and they are underwater $20MM on Yahoo shares, and they'd have seen a huge return. That's what they care about.
That's a given. The difference, though, is that you seem to be suggesting it's close.
That a DVD frame, with 1/6 the information, can gain enough of that thru available meta-data and looking ahead at the next few frames, that it's passable as HD content on a HDTV.
I, on the other hand, am saying that i have a rather good HDTV, a blueray player, and recently I bought an HD-DVD player on the cheap only for its very good upscaler. I have hundreds of DVDs and i'd like to only buy BR going forward.
The DVD player does a pretty good job. It makes DVD's look better than they did on my previous unit, a Sony with component-output.
But it's simply not comparable to Bluray. And anybody can see that when you see them side-by-side. And the very existence of Bluray will serve to raise peoples expectations about how the TV they just bought should perform.
Of course nobody NEEDS HD. Nobody NEEDS SD, either.
My point about resolution fails in a desktop analogy, because these are two different things.
My point is simply if you have an picture from a sub-1MP camera, say, 720x480 pixels. And if you take that image and enlarge it to, say, 3MP (1920x1080), the result will be a rather poor image.
It will be nowhere near the quality of a picture that was TAKEN at 3MP.
Now, this is not a perfect analogy. A single frame in a DVD does not stand alone. A player has the advantage of information from the 30-90 previous and next frames. As I understand it, it uses this information, as well as meta data from the MPEG decoding stream to produce an image that looks quite a bit better than the standard 720x480 the DVD was designed for.
This is why the DVD scaler chips can work so much better than those in your set. The TV only has access to what's being sent over the HDMI cable, while the player has a lot more information at its disposal.
But any given BR frame holds 6x as many pixels as any given DVD frame.
The best upscaling chipsets developed cannot overcome the limitation that you cannot ADD data after the fact.
My point is simply refuting the claim that an upconverted DVD looks as good as a BR.
No matter how good the upscaling chipset is, it cannot divine information that's not on the disc.
It's like taking a 640x480 picture, stretching it to to 1920x1280 and calling it "nearly as good."
All this talk of "bluray not catching" is just a matter of time. I never gave bluray a second thought until I bought an HDTV. Soon after, I bought a bluray.
And before long, everybody will be buying HDTV's. Many will wait until their existing set bites the dust, but it will happen, just as everybody eventually switched to Color, then to Stereo.
But what strikes me as ignorant in your post is the OTHER HALF of your analogy.
Following your logic, you're saying:
"[Compared to C] none of those C++ features actually helps you write better programs, and a lot of the so-called improvements in C++ just make it a complicated mess."
I'm not a huge C++ fan. I'd rather have my teeth drilled than take apart a C++ template.
But to suggest that C++ was not substantive is, IMO, ignorant.
I think in both cases -- C++ and C# -- you'd benefit from looking at them as standalone languages and analyzing them from that POV.
Re:C# isn't a language...
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Head First C#
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· Score: 3, Insightful
We all stand on the shoulders of giants.
Java was not revolutionary, it was evolutionary. Sun certainly had a lot of 'prior art' to guide them when they developed Java.
I'm sitting here wondering what you think made Java so special that it was, by your logic, in a class unto itself? It wasn't the first OO language, it wasn't the first platform-agnostic language, it didn't expose a new and wild syntax, etc.
Java was successful not because it was groundbreaking: It was successful because it took all the best innovations from the existing languages of the mid-90s and coupled them with a familiar syntax and a large and cruft-free library.
The framework ecosystem gave a further boost by giving C and C++ programmers a route to web development that didn't involve terrible pain (CGI) or the loss of self respect (VB Script).
Actually, both Visa and MasterCard hold banks to the same "Zero Fraud Guarantee" policy for Debit Cards as they do Credit Cards.
In fact, if you search Visa.com for their Consumer Credit Card and Consumer Debit Card pages, you'll see that the Zero Fraud Policy link on both takes you to the same page.
They require that banks put provisional funds back into your account within 5 days of the dispute being made. Most banks do this the same day. I bank at BoA and they do it within hours.
The policy extends to charges incurred as a side-effect of the fraud, like overdrafts.
It does not apply to pin-based transactions, but there are no pin-based transactions on the web anyhow.
This makes sense if you think about it and it has nothing to do with Congress. Many people are transitioning away from cash. I hardly EVER carry cash. I use my Debit card for everything. And Visa has a vested interest in seeing this continue. A HUGE interest.
Besides, there is no difference between "Banks and credit unions" and "credit card companies."
Visa doesn't give out credit. They don't even give out credit-cards. They just provide a clearinghouse network. On their end, a Debit Card transaction (non-pin-based) looks identical to a CC transaction.
Of course, none of this applies if your debit card doesn't carry a Visa or MC logo. But if that's the case, you're not using it online, anyway.
Guess what... 1. I didn't judge you. 2. By "brain zaps" it lends me to think you're talking about an SSRI or MAOI. 3. If that's the case you weren't being treated for mental retardation, you were most likely being treated for a neurosis of some sort. 4. Even if you were being treated for mental retardation, i wasn't judging you. I was defending you. You have to read the entire thread. 5. You experience with a pharma maintenance therapy is not necessarily indicative of everybody elses.
There is a difference between turning a profit and "profiteering" (which has negative connotation, ie "war profiteering").
And I disagree that it hurts people. So you can't afford a drug that didn't exist yesterday anyway? Or if you can't afford gas, don't buy a car?
Don't get me wrong, I think every American should be covered under a nat'l health plan, and I hope we have an economy strong enough to give every one of us a fair shot at good, middle-class life, car included.
But there is no perfect way. France has some incredible social programs. Yet, taxes are ridiculous and unemployment is always double-digits. That hurts people, too.
Capitalism is synonymous with "profit motive." I've always been of the belief that any motivation is good motivation.
Slashdot Mirror
So tell me -- what number of internal links is too many?
We debated this a lot internally. On one hand we had a sales team and account managers who wanted to sell ANYTHING that was legal.
On the other we had engineers (and my partner and I come from the engineering side of the business) who wanted no part of it.
We have no issue with creating rich internal link structures.
I can see no argument for the idea that you should limit internal links between pages.
It just so happens, that Google uses internal links in its equation.
But if I have a website selling Apple Pies and I link every instance of the word "Apple Pie" to the front page of the site, how, really, can you have an issue with that?
Just curious.
There is no such thing as a turing test that can't be solved by a human. That's the entire point.
So measuring it against that criteria just makes no sense.
But the truth is, humans solving CAPTCHAs was never as big of problem as good OCR. Most people just do not have the resources to pay people (with cash or porn) to do data entry all day.
The real problem is that CAPTCHAs themselves have advanced the state of OCR to an extent that you can now buy apps to break a CAP and they're really not that expensive.
Our system tries to make "diversion" slightly more difficult by altering the placement of the test questions on the form. But this system is easily defeated by an attacker who targets a specific site using our software. All they have to do is deduce the test questions and divert them to humans.
ReCAPTCHA was a big inspiration for the developer here that invented the system.
You're right that their system does have a nice, material benefit. The one problem I see with their model is that the more sites that use reCAPTCHA, the more benefit is produced by way of digitized texts. But the more sites that use it, the bigger target it will be, and their developers will be constantly struggling to stay ahead of the bots.
And that's something I meant to say in my post: The real reason we did this (as I said) wasn't to save money. The real reason was to ensure that the software is self-perpetuating. Sorta organic in the way that the more times its tests are passed, the more new tests are created to be passed. It ensures its own self-existence as a valuable Turing test mechanism.
See, the system has a little over 100k images in it. As I think I mentioned just a bit ago, 20k new tests have been created this year by test takers. But (and this is a guess) I'd say that right now we only have tests for 50k images in the DB. It's not a 1-Pic : 1-Test relationship. We have "interrogation rules" programmed that follow a simple logic tree to potentially create hundreds of tests for each image.
It's just a matter of following the logic-tree from the top for a given picture and presenting a test and then waiting for it to be confirmed twice. After it is, it gets in the rotation as a new test that was created by a human, for a human.
There's quality control checks later and the system itself is designed to scale to about 50 million tests without any human involvement from here on out.
I have never LOVED making users answer 2 questions. But I think this is such a better premise than CAPTCHA, that it's STILL a better user experience than CAPTCHA ever was. CAPTCHA is just tedious for users. This is more like a picture hunt game on the touchscreen machine at a bar. "What is the address of the 3rd house from the left" or "How many people from the left is the man holding the red flag?"
Anyway, talks of self-perpetuating turing test engines are not usually the in-thing at dinner parties I've been going to lately, so I hope you excuse me for gushing a bit!
A good solution here is to include this as part of the turing test itself.
As I mentioned upthread, I'm a partner in a web dev shop. We do a lot of social networking (of course) and about a year ago we developed a utility to create just this type of turing test. For example, we'll have a picture, and ask the question "What is the color of the 3rd fish from the left?"
What we do, is we pair these tests on a page. We'll include a known test, like the one above. And we'll also show an unclassified image and we might ask "how many people are in this picture?"
There is no wrong answer for that test, and their answer is recorded. Soon, that same question will be asked for that same picture. As soon as its confirmed 2 times, it gets classified as having n people. Soon after it would be displayed again asking "how many females are in this pic?" or "what color shirt is the person on the right wearing?"
When we created the app, the DB had about 5000 turing tests in it. We then attached a DB of about 100,000 images that were pre-classified but not to an extent that would allow us to write a test off it.
Now, after a year in use across a couple dozen moderately trafficked websites, we have nearly 25,000 turing tests. All 20,000 new tests have been created thru the technique I described above.
The real reason we did it wasn't to save on some development costs. We could've hired temp workers and paid them $8 an hour to classify pictures.
We did it because I believe strongly that the key to simple turing tests like this is a large corpus of data. If a bot only encounters the same test once or twice EVER, then the problem becomes difficult to solve. This is like the ANTI-CAPTCHA.
CAPTCHA was all about taking a specific technique to its maximum extent: Challenge a computer system by taking a narrow field (OCR) and pushing it beyond the current state-of-the-art.
These tests are all about a general technique thats broad where CAPTCHA is just deep.
The only way to build a bot to solve each test in our DB would be to give it genuine intelligence. It would have to be capable of determining context, reference, connotation, image ID, etc.
As a programmer, if you say "Here's a captcha, write a program to solve it" I wouldn't know HOW, but I'd at least have an idea of where to begin.
Now, if you show me a picture with the turing test of "What object is in the hands of the 3rd woman from the left" ... well... i wouldn't know where to begin.
The only real flaw here is that it can't be multiple choice. Even if you have 50 choices, if a bot can load your page 100 times in a minute, it just becomes a technique to slow bots and not stop them.
And from a technical perspective, it's much harder for the bot. You'd be surprised at how good image ID has become. If you say "which of these 20 pics has a dog" it wouldn't be too hard to program a bot to solve that problem.
Absolutely correct.
I run a mid-sized web development shop. A few years ago we were doing mostly retail sites. Vanilla and boring but we worked it down to a science and had some really great "modules" that made these sites super profitable for us. Of course, everything has its seedy side and with retail it was SEO.
Everybody wanted it. About 80% of our customers were of the "Do whatever, just ideminfy me" stripe. (And these are established companies paying high 5-figures for these sites). We drew our own demarcation about what we would and wouldn't do. (Excessive Internal-link structure is OK, zombie sites are not).
Now most our work is social networking.
We, too, followed the "rise" of CAPTCHA and we've been happy with our results. We always used a custom CAP for each site, and we tried to keep them relatively readable, being of the belief that making it too hard will only keep out Humans: If somebody wants to crack it, they will.
We still use them regularly. I noticed that about a year ago we actually had people begin to request them specifically. (Isn't that what Buffett said about the home mortgage mess? When the regular joe's started flipping houses, he knew it was over?)
Anyhoo, I think the real fault in CAP's is that they worked too well. They became too big of a target. Now, we try to mix and match a number of different techniques to identify humans.
Solutions range from dirt-simple: An input box named, say, "City" that has a label that reads "13 plus 8 equals:" or "What is the 3rd word on this page?"
To the more complex "what is the color of the front-door in this picture?"
We have a simple library we use for these things that pulls the questions (and, if applicable, the pics) from a Database of about 25,000 different turing tests.
The thing is, none of them are too complex. Any mediocre programmer could write an application to crack it. But your bot will probably never see that same exact question again, so it becomes irrelevant.
And, to tie it in to the parent, we chose this technique precicely because of what we learned from CAPs. Before there were software hacks, there was the "porn hack" and the "sweatshop labor hack."
In this case, when a bot the site, it's fairly difficult for it to even detect which item is the turing test. We auto-generate the location and even the name of the form field so it's always a bit different.
No, we're just screwing around. Get over it.
You figured it out: it's all in the programming.
Multi-threading is difficult, and until just recently, it was a niche market. Most people just didn't have dual processors.
That'll change. Until then, you're still benefiting by running OS and background processes on one core and the foreground process on another.
Long term health of companies is not important. Why do you think it is? What difference does it make if a company exists for 5 years, or 50? As weak companies fail, stronger ones grow from their ashes.
The only purpose of a corporoation is to make money. They're money making machines. They accept money as input into their machine, and the output should be EVEN MORE MONEY. If that is not the output, the machine is broken. Yahoo is broken. It is not producing value. Yahoo owes it to the people who paid to BUILD the machine to get the best deal they can.
This would be moot if Yahoo was performing well. But they're not. Yahoo will never see $35 a share. They have no "game changer" up their sleeve. It was supposed to be their new ad platform. It fizzled.
I have to assume that you've never owned a business, or been a shareholder in one. That's the only thing that could explain what I'm reading.
The fuunction of a business is NOT to "sustain life." The function of a business is to accept cash as input and produce EVEN MORE CASH as output.
That's it. And there's been LOADS of companies that have liquidated all assets and close down to deliver cash back to the shareholders. And that's the best choice. And there's nothing wrong with that.
And the flaw in that sentence of yours explains the flaw found a few sentences later about selling milk. Again, it's not about just making cash. It's about taking cash as input and returning more cash as output.
For YEARS now, Yahoo has been taking cash as input and producing LESS or just EQUAL cash as output. And that's why their shares are worth less now than they were a year ago, and two, and three, and four, and five.
Among the legally defined duties of a public companies board of directors is to protect shareholders. Nowhere does it say their duty is to "sustain life."
Exactly.
I would add, the real problem isn't even the buzzwords. It's the incompetence in HR departments.
I see this in my own company when I try to hire developers.
I've learned how to navigate this bureacracy now, but it was tough at first. I had candidates with 10 years experience with JavaScript who were given phone screens. They explained they'd used hidden iFrames and tags to retreive server-side interaction since the late 90s, but their resumes were never handed off to me because they never specifically used the XMLHttpRequest object so it wasn't precicely "AJAX" as its currently defined.
This kind of madness just takes so much energy to overcome, for both candidates and hiring managers.
Now, when I create a Req for a new hire, I keep it simple. If we're hiring a web developer, I look for self-described proficiency in Java, ASP.Net, Python, Ruby or PHP. Any will do.
When I hire a windows developer, I look for the same with Java, C#, or C++.
I'm of the belief that if you're been developing web apps with C# for 3 years, you can be an expert in Python and PHP inside 6 months.
So far, this has worked great.
You do realize that the shareholders OWN the company, right? It's theirs. They own it.
It's like me saying: You won't let me build my house on your front lawn? Why not? All you care about is "resale value" and "property law." Home ownership has not been good for our culture.
Yang and Filo sold the right to control their precious baby when they took it public. They took on a duty to be a steward for shareholder value. In exchange, they were made instant billionaires.
Now he wants to still treat Yahoo as HIS. It isn't. Shareholders are the owners. End of story.
Oy Vey.
You are confusing things here. For example:
You start talking about shareholder value. Then you say this: "a CEO could definitely make a case that the company would be better served by staying independent."
This isn't about what would best serve the COMPANY.
It's about what would best serve the shareholders.
Period.
Yahoo has underperformed for years now. Yang has an obligation to the shareholders that made him a billionaire when he decided to go public.
It's not about "short term gains" it's about recouping an investment and giving your shareholders a return. THAT is the covenant you enter-into when you take a company public.
As I mentioned above, this comes down to Time Value of Money.
What PROMISE can you make for tomorrow that will be worth more than cash today?
This is EXACTLY like a company saying that they don't owe you your paycheck. Giving you your paycheck today would only be good for "maximizing short term cash return." If you just forego your salary, the company could "make a case" that they could give you even MORE money later. To heck with the fact that the company has been on a multi-year slide.
You want your cash today. You've earned it. Laws exist to protect employees in these situations. And guess what? Laws exist to protect shareholders, too.
Shareholders are not usually the billionaire couture class.
They're pension funds. Or municipal funds. Or union investors. Or mutual funds. Heath Care trusts. University endowments.
Yang committed himself to protect these peoples investment. He eschewed that responsibility for the same juvenile MS hatred as is witnessed here.
The shareholders of Yahoo are not there because they're tech visionaries or Yahoo loyalists. That's the point of the Icahn lawsuit. Some may be, but institutional investors hold the bulk of Y! shares that aren't held by corporate officers. Mutual funds, pension funds, etc.
These people hold Yahoo for one reason only: to earn a return on their investment.
Microsoft made an offer that was VERY generous. Not just measured on Y!'s latest performance: Microsoft offered a higher value than Yahoo's stock has seen in years.
Yang and Filo made a deal when they took their company public. The deal is simple: You become a billionaire overnight, making more than the top 1% of the top 1%.
In exchange, you must be a good steward for the people giving you all this money. This is not up for interpretation, debate, or discussion.
There's this thing called "time value of money" that, simply, a dollar today is worth FAR more than the promise of a dollar tomorrow.
You can't say that "shareholder value" is subjective because Yahoo MIGHT turn themselves around and they MIGHT be successful and they MIGHT then be worth more in the future than Microsoft offered today.
No way.
Any shareholder would gladly take that large premium, get cash today, and then re-invest.
It doesn't get any more basic than this. Carl Icahn will probably win this lawsuit. Yang passed the employee-severence-poison-pill in a direct response to Microsoft. He wanted his cake and to eat it, too. He doesn't get to treat Yahoo like his private feifdom. It belongs to its shareholders now.
They don't care about stupid microsoft hating like you do. They don't care about the "purity" of a classic internet brand. They care that they have, say, a pension fund to manage, and they are underwater $20MM on Yahoo shares, and they'd have seen a huge return. That's what they care about.
And the law happens to be on their side.
My feelings exactly.
When "your point" is that people don't "need" something like HD service, it's a little hard to take you seriously.
People don't "need" most the things we buy. But they still buy them. And so far, that's including a few million BluRay players and counting...
That's a given. The difference, though, is that you seem to be suggesting it's close.
That a DVD frame, with 1/6 the information, can gain enough of that thru available meta-data and looking ahead at the next few frames, that it's passable as HD content on a HDTV.
I, on the other hand, am saying that i have a rather good HDTV, a blueray player, and recently I bought an HD-DVD player on the cheap only for its very good upscaler. I have hundreds of DVDs and i'd like to only buy BR going forward.
The DVD player does a pretty good job. It makes DVD's look better than they did on my previous unit, a Sony with component-output.
But it's simply not comparable to Bluray. And anybody can see that when you see them side-by-side. And the very existence of Bluray will serve to raise peoples expectations about how the TV they just bought should perform.
Of course nobody NEEDS HD. Nobody NEEDS SD, either.
My point about resolution fails in a desktop analogy, because these are two different things.
My point is simply if you have an picture from a sub-1MP camera, say, 720x480 pixels. And if you take that image and enlarge it to, say, 3MP (1920x1080), the result will be a rather poor image.
It will be nowhere near the quality of a picture that was TAKEN at 3MP.
Now, this is not a perfect analogy. A single frame in a DVD does not stand alone. A player has the advantage of information from the 30-90 previous and next frames. As I understand it, it uses this information, as well as meta data from the MPEG decoding stream to produce an image that looks quite a bit better than the standard 720x480 the DVD was designed for.
This is why the DVD scaler chips can work so much better than those in your set. The TV only has access to what's being sent over the HDMI cable, while the player has a lot more information at its disposal.
But any given BR frame holds 6x as many pixels as any given DVD frame.
The best upscaling chipsets developed cannot overcome the limitation that you cannot ADD data after the fact.
My point is simply refuting the claim that an upconverted DVD looks as good as a BR.
It doesn't. It never will.
You're right. The image analogy was imperfect, like just about every analogy ever analogized.
But you're a bit wrong on your numbers. DVD is 720x480. Somewhere around 300,000 pixels.
BluRay is 1920x1080. Any given frame of BluRay movie holds 6x the information a DVD holds.
Upconverting makes a DVD look just ACCEPTABLE on a 1080 screen. BluRay is a dramatically better experience.
I myself was a recent HD adopter. Just in the last few months. So I don't look down my nose at people for something as silly as this.
But making a claim that upconverting a DVD achieves BluRay quality is just false. These things can be measured, and it's just false.
This, frankly, is rubbish.
No matter how good the upscaling chipset is, it cannot divine information that's not on the disc.
It's like taking a 640x480 picture, stretching it to to 1920x1280 and calling it "nearly as good."
All this talk of "bluray not catching" is just a matter of time. I never gave bluray a second thought until I bought an HDTV. Soon after, I bought a bluray.
And before long, everybody will be buying HDTV's. Many will wait until their existing set bites the dust, but it will happen, just as everybody eventually switched to Color, then to Stereo.
But what strikes me as ignorant in your post is the OTHER HALF of your analogy.
Following your logic, you're saying:
"[Compared to C] none of those C++ features actually helps you write better programs, and a lot of the so-called improvements in C++ just make it a complicated mess."
I'm not a huge C++ fan. I'd rather have my teeth drilled than take apart a C++ template.
But to suggest that C++ was not substantive is, IMO, ignorant.
I think in both cases -- C++ and C# -- you'd benefit from looking at them as standalone languages and analyzing them from that POV.
We all stand on the shoulders of giants.
Java was not revolutionary, it was evolutionary. Sun certainly had a lot of 'prior art' to guide them when they developed Java.
I'm sitting here wondering what you think made Java so special that it was, by your logic, in a class unto itself? It wasn't the first OO language, it wasn't the first platform-agnostic language, it didn't expose a new and wild syntax, etc.
Java was successful not because it was groundbreaking: It was successful because it took all the best innovations from the existing languages of the mid-90s and coupled them with a familiar syntax and a large and cruft-free library.
The framework ecosystem gave a further boost by giving C and C++ programmers a route to web development that didn't involve terrible pain (CGI) or the loss of self respect (VB Script).
I imagine Anders had similar goals for C#.
Actually, both Visa and MasterCard hold banks to the same "Zero Fraud Guarantee" policy for Debit Cards as they do Credit Cards.
In fact, if you search Visa.com for their Consumer Credit Card and Consumer Debit Card pages, you'll see that the Zero Fraud Policy link on both takes you to the same page.
They require that banks put provisional funds back into your account within 5 days of the dispute being made. Most banks do this the same day. I bank at BoA and they do it within hours.
The policy extends to charges incurred as a side-effect of the fraud, like overdrafts.
It does not apply to pin-based transactions, but there are no pin-based transactions on the web anyhow.
This makes sense if you think about it and it has nothing to do with Congress. Many people are transitioning away from cash. I hardly EVER carry cash. I use my Debit card for everything. And Visa has a vested interest in seeing this continue. A HUGE interest.
Besides, there is no difference between "Banks and credit unions" and "credit card companies."
Visa doesn't give out credit. They don't even give out credit-cards. They just provide a clearinghouse network. On their end, a Debit Card transaction (non-pin-based) looks identical to a CC transaction.
Of course, none of this applies if your debit card doesn't carry a Visa or MC logo. But if that's the case, you're not using it online, anyway.
This isn't API documentation, this is file format specification. Very different.
More imporantly, people need to understand the basics of Office formats: They are essentially FAT filesystems unto themselves.
They contain a "root" with any number of nodes, which themselves may contain nodes, etc.
And this is why you can create a spreadsheet, embed a word document, and then embed that into a powerpoint.
When you think of it from this POV, needing 1000 pages to document a filesystem isn't unreasonable.
Guess what...
1. I didn't judge you.
2. By "brain zaps" it lends me to think you're talking about an SSRI or MAOI.
3. If that's the case you weren't being treated for mental retardation, you were most likely being treated for a neurosis of some sort.
4. Even if you were being treated for mental retardation, i wasn't judging you. I was defending you. You have to read the entire thread.
5. You experience with a pharma maintenance therapy is not necessarily indicative of everybody elses.
There is a difference between turning a profit and "profiteering" (which has negative connotation, ie "war profiteering").
And I disagree that it hurts people. So you can't afford a drug that didn't exist yesterday anyway? Or if you can't afford gas, don't buy a car?
Don't get me wrong, I think every American should be covered under a nat'l health plan, and I hope we have an economy strong enough to give every one of us a fair shot at good, middle-class life, car included.
But there is no perfect way. France has some incredible social programs. Yet, taxes are ridiculous and unemployment is always double-digits. That hurts people, too.
Capitalism is synonymous with "profit motive." I've always been of the belief that any motivation is good motivation.
But I agree with everything else you said.