However, RF interference is well known and understood, and easy to protect against.
Cosmic radiation is relatively new in regards to how well we understand the substantial impact it may actually have on modern technology. There are also fluctuations over time in the earth's magnetic field and how well it protects us from solar and cosmic radiation. With these two factors combined, we are seeing more and more warnings from scientists that solar and cosmic radiation have the potential to do massive damage to our electronic infrastructure. We've built up a lot of technology in a period of low-interference, and we're potentially headed into a period of high interference. That is certainly going to cause a lot of oddball, if not downright devastating, effects.
As to whether or not cosmic radiation is the cause of Toyota's problems, well, it still sounds like a regular old fuckup to me, not so much a "Oops, didn't think about cosmic radiation!" but a "Oops, didn't think about a kill switch!".
No matter what the cause, I think this is a good indication that we need a real, physical kill switch that will absolutely halt the system if things go awry in these drive-by-wire systems. No software to depend on, because you're breaking a physical connection to do it. It should be easy and noticeable, but not something you're likely to grab by accident.
Have you asked your friends and family. And families friends...and so on.
That's were most of the jobs are. Which is a bit sad.
It's not sad, it's a time-tested way to get good employees. This key here, is to make friends in the industry! That's where all the jobs are. If so-and-so knows about a big project coming up for which they are going to need a new programmer, do you think he's going to mention anything to joe-blow on the street about it? Do you think he's going to suggest to his boss that they should check out joe-blow on the street? Hell no! But he might say something to his D&D buddy, who's a little wet behind the ears but seems smart. If the new project is largely grunt work, they'll probably not even bother with the formal application process and skip right to the interview and hiring process.
Networking is the key to getting any good job. You can do ok with entry level jobs, and you'll occasionally find good jobs in wide open postings, but chances are they've already got someone at the top of the list, and they usually pick the guy at the top of the list - wouldn't it be nice if that someone were you?
It's absolutely fair. It may be a little unfortunate, but it is certainly fair. Think of it from the perspective of the guy who has a stellar track record but lost his job when the company folded, and has been out of work for the last 6 months because of it. Not choosing him even though he is the most qualified applicant would be unfair.
It's just that we tend to have a hard time looking at it from someone elses perspective when we lose, but fair isn't always nice. In fact it's rarely nice to everybody.
My solution.... if you are still in school... get a fricking internship.
Bingo. Work a second job for money (preferably one that doesn't require thinking, or you'll be drained) and intern for free if you have to, anything to get a foot in the door. If you've got free time after both jobs, help out some FOSS projects. Anything you can do to pump your resume, do it. It probably won't be more than a year before you're able to land something that actually pays. Chances are it will be with the company you're interning for too.
But just realize that the manners of people doing the hiring are typically lousy and remember that if you get turned down that you're likely not interested in working for a company that represents itself in such an embarrassing way.
It's not really a manners issue, it's a time issue. If a company has a posting on, say Monster.com, they are going to get thousands, if not tens of thousands, of resumes from around the country.
There is just no practical way to read every resume and respond with a polite rejection. It's going to be a canned response, and they're only going to read the first line or two of your resume. Chances are they are using a system that allows them to click the checkbox for the resumes look interesting, so they can scan through three thousand resumes and find a reasonable subset of candidates in a reasonable amount of time. Once they've whittled the list down to the top 100 or so, then they'll start reading the resume's and pick who they are interested in. Then come the interviews.
The fact is, there are so many candidates, that if yours didn't stand out to begin with you probably aren't all that special, and they won't miss your services. It's a fact of life, perhaps unfortunate but not unreasonable, and it isn't because the screener doesn't have manners. It's because they don't have time to pay you extra consideration when they will ultimately be rejecting you anyway.
The sad fact is GPA and the school you went to really matter a lot when getting past HR.
Not really. A good GPA will help you, but a mediocre GPA won't hurt you if you write your resume well.
The key to getting past HR is to have a resume that gets HR's attention in the first sentence. Usually large job postings are whittled down by keyword searches, so if you are looking for a programming job make sure you actually mention things relevant to programming in your resume. After that point, the HR screener just skims the resumes, looking for the ones that grab his attention. This is likely where the GP is having a problem. Open up the resume, look at the first sentence, and if there isn't anything that screams "Hey! I'm Special!" in the first half of the sentence, you're probably going to be rejected. If the HR guy doesn't have too many to sift through, he may bother to read the whole sentence. He definitely won't read your whole resume at this point.
Another thing to realize, is that most jobs don't follow the "post, interview, then hire" format. For the majority of jobs, a person is found, the company (or department, or whatever) realizes they could use that person in a position, and the person is offered a job. If jobs are posted at all in this case, it's only to satisfy some company policy or a legal requirement, and the person who will get the job has already been chosen. Easily half or more of jobs are gained this way, and you won't stand a chance getting it unless you are spectacularly better than the person they have already chosen. In that case, they'll at least look at you. These jobs are generally much better than publicly posted jobs too. The only way you'll get one is to network. Go find companies you'd like to work for, and start to find out about the company and the people who work there. If the company is big enough, you can just hang out and talk to the receptionist (as long as they aren't very busy) for a portion of the day. There's a good chance you'll get to know someone who has the ability to hire you, and you just might be able to interest them in your services.
If all you really want, though, is an entry level position, you can always sign up through a contracting service. The jobs tend to suck, but are also often a way companies like to feel out potential new employees who have little or no work experience - it's a lot easier to go through 10 temps until you find a good one worth hiring than it is to hire and fire 10 employees.
Basically Bing spent the whole time trying to emulate Google without really understanding what makes Google so great.
It isn't the clean interface (though that's nice), it isn't the "do no evil" policy (though again, it's nice), none of that peripheral stuff really matters. It's simple really, when you search in Google, you almost always find what you are looking for. Sometimes not, but as a general rule you don't even have to go past the first page of results - what you want is probably there.
This was not the case for Bing, or any of Google's other competitors. That's why they decimated the market. Google could be the most dirtbag evil company in the world and people would still use their search because it is just plain better. It's really nice that they try to be a good company, but that isn't really pertinent.
They had a very fundamental flaw in the way they understood search engines, and they are starting to realize they aren't going to be able to do the same old thing and win, they'll have to do something better or stay on the sidelines.
1. Being too late. Search engines have been around for many years. You can't easily launch a search engine now without a massively improved user experience over what is already available.
There is no such thing as "Too Late" if you provide a better search. It's only "too late" if your search is the same. If it's worse, then you'll never succeed even if you were there first. The reverse, obviously, is that it doesn't matter how long you've been around - if your search is better, people will flock to you.
Google is proof positive of that - there used to be thousands of search engines, with dozens competing for the top spot. Then some guys with a basement full of servers came along and CRUSHED the established market into oblivion. Only two other search engines really survived, MSN and Yahoo, and that was because neither of them did well in search anyway, and they relied on other services or other facets of their business to keep in the search business. Even those two never really counted after Google, and nobody has come up with a better search.
As soon as someone comes up with a better search though, if Google can't find a way to cope they will be history, and it will happen fast. 95% of Google's revenue is generated by their searches, so if that scenario ever comes to pass you can say goodbye to Google as we know it.
2. Not being trusted, I don't want to use Microsoft's search engine as it may subvert the results to promote their wares.
Microsoft is only untrusted as a company by alternative OS proponents (I'm including most of the anti-trust stuff here, which is definitely valid). The vast majority of people who buy Microsoft software don't distrust Microsoft, or they wouldn't be buying it. Their software, well, everybody knows to be careful with it, but not because Microsoft is malicious. This extends to Bing - very few people think Microsoft is intentionally fucking with your search results, they just think they suck and go to a better search engine.
3. Stupid name. Every time I hear "Bing" I think of Ned Ryserson from the film Groundhog Day.
Yeah, the name is dumb, but it is no worse than Yahoo or Google.
4. OTT interface, I don't need a big background when I'm looking for stuff.
One of the major hurdles Google had to overcome when they were first starting was, ironically, the simple interface. People kept waiting for "the rest of it" to load, and were getting frustrated with how "slow" it was because they didn't realized it had finished already - there was nothing more to load. They were used to massive pages full of clutter with a box near the top you entered searches into. Google had to come up with subtle clues to convince users that it really was finished loading and they could start searching.
Bing's search is not cluttered like the searches of old, and I think the rotating picture is kinda nice. It also provides a nice clue that nothing else will be loading, avoiding Google's problem.
Still, pretty or no, Google's search is better, and I use a search engine to search, not look at pretty pictures, so I use Google pretty much exclusively. If something better comes along I'll be switching to it. It can be Microsoft, Google, Apple, some guys in their basement, I don't care. I'm going to use what works the best. Period.
That is why Bing is a failure - it's because it isn't better than Google, plain and simple. No deep analysis necessary. In fact, people would gladly put up with all the crap you mentioned if the search were better.
If you would not be embarrassed about Google releasing the entire contents of your searches over the last two years, I commend you. Also, with IP tracking and the like (which Google does), it is not hard to nail down exactly where you live based on your search information.
Now, they do "anonymize" their records after two years, but someone was recently tracked down using anonymized data from AOL I think it was. Anonymizing is the stripping away of all personal information from the records, so if they can still find you after doing that, you're screwed.
I disagree. The search ain't "just like google", hence TFA.
Not as good, but just as free. That's the point.
I don't think hotmail is as good as gmail either, but it's just as free.
The browser is exactly the same - you might like chrome better (I do), but IE is just as free as Chrome.
It's not fair to intentionally misinterpret someone's point to make a different point of your own. When someone says "X is true", you aren't disagreeing when you say "No, Y is definitely not true" even when you pretend X and Y are the same thing. Now, to refute your Y argument:
The browser ain't "just like google" because Chrome isn't the property of a monopoly trying to squash the only other popular browser in use.
Chrome is the property of a monopoly trying to squash the only other search engine in use. What's the difference? It's a competitive market, and Google is doing the exact same thing to Bing that Microsoft is trying to do to Chrome. It's competition, and its healthiest when you have three or more competitors. The search market really only has two, and one of those is far more dominant than the other.
Again I say, what's the difference between the two? Both give away tons of free tools (though targeted to different markets), both give away their most visible services for free or virtually for free, both charge significant premiums for their high-end services, and both have a near monopoly in their primary market.
The only real difference between the two, is Google is newer, smaller, and hasn't tried nearly as many dirty tricks as Microsoft has. That's it. Whether Google will grow up to be as bad as Microsoft, time will tell. But I'll tell you this much - the bigger they get, the more likely it is they will become another Microsoft. Principles become harder and harder to stick to when you have more and more people who need to follow them. Google in China is a perfect example of that - it took China fucking with their servers before they decided to actually follow their "Do no evil" pledge in China. The Google of 8 years ago would have stood on that pledge to begin with and refused to do business in China if it meant censoring their searches.
Most people who would try, would fail. MS gets their stuff working consistently (99% of the time anyway), then gives you a basic tool, an API, and any libraries and documentation you may need to build your own tool off of their technology.
No, they aren't giving away their code, but they are giving you everything you need to use their code however you wish to use it.
Seriously, when I got into administering MS servers, I was shocked at how much they give away for free. There are literally hundreds of very useful tools in dozens of different categories, many of which have an API for incorporating into your own code.
Some of them are so good, MS has to gimp them so companies that a free tool competes with don't go under, but you are usually free to build a better tool based on it.
I'm not saying I like Microsoft better than Google, Google is much more focused on the average user (including linux hobbyists). Microsoft is focused on businesses, and they do very well by IT professionals servicing their software. The consumer market, big as it is, is just a side market for Microsoft - an offshoot created by their business market. So yeah, they aren't nearly as generous to the average user - though you can still get all the free tools if you look for them.
I still use Google out of habit, but if Bing or some other search ever starts producing significantly better results, I have no loyalty to Google at all.
I feel the same way, the only reason I use Google is because it is the best search engine I've ever used - back in the day I used search aggregates like Search Hound because I got more (though not better) results to sift through. In 99% of cases, Google finds exactly what I want on the first page. Only rarely can I not find something with Google, and in those cases I've never been able to find it with any of the other search engines either.
I've never been able to use Bing extensively, because every time I try it I'm just like "Well that sucked." Then I google it and find what I'm looking for on the first page.
If someone else can do better than Google, or if Google can do better, I don't care - I'll be happy as a clam.
It's more like there is a small beep on the radio when the users changes radio station while turning the ignition, but only if the park break is on. Very strange, and definitely a bug, but it affects an extremely small number of people and does not affect them in any significant way.
If the engine blew up, that would be different, but it's just a beep on the radio - who cares?
When the cost of fixing the bug is very low, it should be a no-brainer to do it.
For large programs especially, but with any program really, there is a minimum cost to fix any bug. Most of them involve time, but there are other costs as well. Because of this, there are bugs that are small enough that never make sense fixing, unless you are already fixing a larger bug and fixing the small bug at the same time adds minimal extra cost. If there are no more large bugs to defray the cost of fixing the small bugs, it may never make sense to fix the small bugs if they are small enough.
"If I do X, Y, then Z, and sometime in the next 5 seconds do A, B,C, followed by ctrl-shift-A, I get an error message."
If you've got a million customers, there are maybe 50 who are going to hit that sequence, and all it does is give them an error message without stopping their work in any way. The effect on the user is practically nill.
Now, same bug, but for some reason you've buried significant functionality in this sequence that 10% of your users are going to want to use, it's more important but still a minor bug that doesn't really affect the user's ability to use your software. It does make your software seem less professional, so maybe you fix it at the next major update.
One more time, same basic bug, but this time instead of just throwing an error message and continuing like nothing bad happened, it throws an error and then crashes your program. Worse if it corrupts any saved data. That's a serious bug, and you want to fix that ASAP and push out a free patch to all your customers as soon as you possibly can. That's like, work-around-the-clock-to-fix it important, because there is a very good chance you will lose 10% or more of your customers over it.
Well, sure, except that this assumes that you are PERFECT in your ability to predict the effect of a bug.
For 99% of bugs that you come across before the release, you know exactly how it will affect your customers and exactly how important it is to fix. Those 1% are the ones that come out of the blue, they are rare, and they usually don't affect a lot of people. But sometimes they do.
However, once you know about a bug (what it is and what it does) it's very easy to determine how it impacts your customers. What you are thinking of are bugs that you think you understand, but really don't. That's different, and falls into that rare 1%. It's almost like you've found Bug 1, it's common enough that it is something to be a little concerned about, but it doesn't actually do anything so you ship anyway. What you did not know is that there is a subset of Bug 1, called Bug 1a, which with additional conditions (making it even rarer than Bug 1 itself) is absolutely devastating to your program.
You missed Bug 1a going out the door, even though you caught Bug 1 but decided it wasn't worth fixing at this time. Now you have to determine how many people Bug 1a affects, if it is just a handful you can put it off - it isn't worth fixing. If it's a significant number of people then you'd better think about fixing it soon.
It's not a difficult process to figure out how much a bug affects your users, but you are definitely not going to catch all the bugs, and that's true for serious bugs that are subsets of minor bugs.
All of those bits, and you don't even bother thinking about shoving them through your processor, which has a 32 bit register. Now I need to figure out how many chunks I'm going to divide up a megabyte into to shove it through that 32 bit register. Well, I have 2^23 (a byte is 2^3) bits to go through there, and 32 bits is 2^5, so I'll have to send 2^5 chunks 2^18 times. There is no point in changing this to decimal, because it goes through in binary. 2^18 in binary is 100 0000 0000 0000 0000.
I did that in my head. The math is easy with a 1024 bit kilobyte. Try doing that in your head if your megabyte is 1,000,000 bits instead of 2^20 bits. It's a lot frickin harder.
That's why communications equipment uses bits and memory uses bytes. They are different, and everybody understands it except the people who have been confused by hard drive manufacturer salesmen, who used a completely different metric specifically in order to confuse customers and make them think they were buying a bigger hard drive than they actually were.
What's truly ridiculous is they use standard kilobytes when referring to the internals of the hard drive. 512kb clusters - think that means 512,000 byte clusters? Well, it doesn't, it means 524,288 byte clusters, because when actually working with a binary system (which a hard drive is) it just makes a hell of a lot more sense.
Using SI units is nothing more than a marketing gimmick, and it's the Linux community of all people falling for some corporate tool ripping them off.
Bps = bits transmitted per second, it's a different unit with no fundamental relationship with binary except for the original relationship of one baud to one bit. That changed decades ago as modulation improved. The bits could be hexadecimal and it wouldn't change the bits per second (though they'd probably stop calling them bits). It's like feet per second, it doesn't matter. There is nothing fundamental to the measure.
Kilobytes, megabytes, and gigabytes, etc are intrinsically linked to base 2 math. Except for helping hard drive manufacturers make their hard drives look bigger, it makes absolutely no sense to change it, because it makes everything else having to do with a computer more difficult to understand and work with.
Memory sizes are directly linked to register sizes, which is directly linked to the bit-level of the processors, which, if you didn't notice, are all based on binary, because they all operate on transistors.
Your modem, however, is tied to the baud rate, which originally was exactly the same as the bit rate a modem could send. A 9600 baud modem could send 9600 bits per second because the baud rate and bit rate were identical. If your 9600bps (an ambiguous abbreviation of either baud per second or bits per second that has carried forward, it should be Bd or bit/s) modem uses 64Quam modulation, however, the bit rate would be 57.6 kbit/s.
If you'll notice, communications companies do not mix bytes and bits when talking about speed - they always refer to bits. It's never a 5 mb/s modem, it's a 5 mbit/s (or mbps) modem. Sata is 1.5 gigabit, gbit/s, or gbps.
They do NOT abuse kilobyte, megabyte, gigabyte, and terabyte the way hard drive manufacturers do.
That's the way the conversion works, and as you can see, it's very simple to go from there straight into binary. I can automatically convert the bytes into bits in my head too, wanna see?
1.44(2^23)
Come on, you took algebra right? You've dealt with this stuff before, right? You know how to work this, yeah?
You can do very complex calculations this way, it's pretty easy. The only time you might need to whip out your calculator is if you actually need to see the final figure in decimal, instead of using the prefixed byte. You can carry that 2^20 through the whole equation, and when you have occasion to meet another 2^X you are prepared to do the math easily. Otherwise you get absurd numbers when mixing binary and decimal, math gets hard, and computers do a lot of math.
Kbps is misleading, it should be referred to as either KBd for the baud rate, or kbit/s for the bit rate. It's some strange combination of both usages, but generally means kbit/s. Kbps should be kilobytes per second, but kilobytes per second is always referred to as kb/s.
Another example of salesmen trying to screw over their customers, because the kbps figure they give is significantly higher than the kb/s would be, which is what everyone cares about. To be fair though, the OS and protocol have a lot to do with the final kb/s transfer rate - kbit/s is an accurate description of the maximum bitrate. These days the baud rate would be even farther off still (baud rate and bit rate were originally identical). Bps is just confusing and there is no reason it should be used at all.
Why does the rest of the world even care then? As you said, they don't need to actually use it, so they obviously don't understand how goddamned hard a base 10 metric is on a base 2 system.
It's been like this for 50 years (longer than the SI standard has been around, btw), why change it now to make some fricking salesmen happy?
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However, RF interference is well known and understood, and easy to protect against.
Cosmic radiation is relatively new in regards to how well we understand the substantial impact it may actually have on modern technology. There are also fluctuations over time in the earth's magnetic field and how well it protects us from solar and cosmic radiation. With these two factors combined, we are seeing more and more warnings from scientists that solar and cosmic radiation have the potential to do massive damage to our electronic infrastructure. We've built up a lot of technology in a period of low-interference, and we're potentially headed into a period of high interference. That is certainly going to cause a lot of oddball, if not downright devastating, effects.
As to whether or not cosmic radiation is the cause of Toyota's problems, well, it still sounds like a regular old fuckup to me, not so much a "Oops, didn't think about cosmic radiation!" but a "Oops, didn't think about a kill switch!".
No matter what the cause, I think this is a good indication that we need a real, physical kill switch that will absolutely halt the system if things go awry in these drive-by-wire systems. No software to depend on, because you're breaking a physical connection to do it. It should be easy and noticeable, but not something you're likely to grab by accident.
Have you asked your friends and family. And families friends...and so on.
That's were most of the jobs are. Which is a bit sad.
It's not sad, it's a time-tested way to get good employees. This key here, is to make friends in the industry! That's where all the jobs are. If so-and-so knows about a big project coming up for which they are going to need a new programmer, do you think he's going to mention anything to joe-blow on the street about it? Do you think he's going to suggest to his boss that they should check out joe-blow on the street? Hell no! But he might say something to his D&D buddy, who's a little wet behind the ears but seems smart. If the new project is largely grunt work, they'll probably not even bother with the formal application process and skip right to the interview and hiring process.
Networking is the key to getting any good job. You can do ok with entry level jobs, and you'll occasionally find good jobs in wide open postings, but chances are they've already got someone at the top of the list, and they usually pick the guy at the top of the list - wouldn't it be nice if that someone were you?
Is it fair?
It's absolutely fair. It may be a little unfortunate, but it is certainly fair. Think of it from the perspective of the guy who has a stellar track record but lost his job when the company folded, and has been out of work for the last 6 months because of it. Not choosing him even though he is the most qualified applicant would be unfair.
It's just that we tend to have a hard time looking at it from someone elses perspective when we lose, but fair isn't always nice. In fact it's rarely nice to everybody.
My solution.... if you are still in school... get a fricking internship.
Bingo. Work a second job for money (preferably one that doesn't require thinking, or you'll be drained) and intern for free if you have to, anything to get a foot in the door. If you've got free time after both jobs, help out some FOSS projects. Anything you can do to pump your resume, do it. It probably won't be more than a year before you're able to land something that actually pays. Chances are it will be with the company you're interning for too.
But just realize that the manners of people doing the hiring are typically lousy and remember that if you get turned down that you're likely not interested in working for a company that represents itself in such an embarrassing way.
It's not really a manners issue, it's a time issue. If a company has a posting on, say Monster.com, they are going to get thousands, if not tens of thousands, of resumes from around the country.
There is just no practical way to read every resume and respond with a polite rejection. It's going to be a canned response, and they're only going to read the first line or two of your resume. Chances are they are using a system that allows them to click the checkbox for the resumes look interesting, so they can scan through three thousand resumes and find a reasonable subset of candidates in a reasonable amount of time. Once they've whittled the list down to the top 100 or so, then they'll start reading the resume's and pick who they are interested in. Then come the interviews.
The fact is, there are so many candidates, that if yours didn't stand out to begin with you probably aren't all that special, and they won't miss your services. It's a fact of life, perhaps unfortunate but not unreasonable, and it isn't because the screener doesn't have manners. It's because they don't have time to pay you extra consideration when they will ultimately be rejecting you anyway.
The sad fact is GPA and the school you went to really matter a lot when getting past HR.
Not really. A good GPA will help you, but a mediocre GPA won't hurt you if you write your resume well.
The key to getting past HR is to have a resume that gets HR's attention in the first sentence. Usually large job postings are whittled down by keyword searches, so if you are looking for a programming job make sure you actually mention things relevant to programming in your resume. After that point, the HR screener just skims the resumes, looking for the ones that grab his attention. This is likely where the GP is having a problem. Open up the resume, look at the first sentence, and if there isn't anything that screams "Hey! I'm Special!" in the first half of the sentence, you're probably going to be rejected. If the HR guy doesn't have too many to sift through, he may bother to read the whole sentence. He definitely won't read your whole resume at this point.
Another thing to realize, is that most jobs don't follow the "post, interview, then hire" format. For the majority of jobs, a person is found, the company (or department, or whatever) realizes they could use that person in a position, and the person is offered a job. If jobs are posted at all in this case, it's only to satisfy some company policy or a legal requirement, and the person who will get the job has already been chosen. Easily half or more of jobs are gained this way, and you won't stand a chance getting it unless you are spectacularly better than the person they have already chosen. In that case, they'll at least look at you. These jobs are generally much better than publicly posted jobs too. The only way you'll get one is to network. Go find companies you'd like to work for, and start to find out about the company and the people who work there. If the company is big enough, you can just hang out and talk to the receptionist (as long as they aren't very busy) for a portion of the day. There's a good chance you'll get to know someone who has the ability to hire you, and you just might be able to interest them in your services.
If all you really want, though, is an entry level position, you can always sign up through a contracting service. The jobs tend to suck, but are also often a way companies like to feel out potential new employees who have little or no work experience - it's a lot easier to go through 10 temps until you find a good one worth hiring than it is to hire and fire 10 employees.
I should have spent my keystrokes showing my contempt for others, I suppose that belongs at slashdot more than my anecdote.
FINALLY, someone gets it!
Oh wait, was that sarcasm? ;)
Basically Bing spent the whole time trying to emulate Google without really understanding what makes Google so great.
It isn't the clean interface (though that's nice), it isn't the "do no evil" policy (though again, it's nice), none of that peripheral stuff really matters. It's simple really, when you search in Google, you almost always find what you are looking for. Sometimes not, but as a general rule you don't even have to go past the first page of results - what you want is probably there.
This was not the case for Bing, or any of Google's other competitors. That's why they decimated the market. Google could be the most dirtbag evil company in the world and people would still use their search because it is just plain better. It's really nice that they try to be a good company, but that isn't really pertinent.
They had a very fundamental flaw in the way they understood search engines, and they are starting to realize they aren't going to be able to do the same old thing and win, they'll have to do something better or stay on the sidelines.
1. Being too late. Search engines have been around for many years. You can't easily launch a search engine now without a massively improved user experience over what is already available.
There is no such thing as "Too Late" if you provide a better search. It's only "too late" if your search is the same. If it's worse, then you'll never succeed even if you were there first. The reverse, obviously, is that it doesn't matter how long you've been around - if your search is better, people will flock to you.
Google is proof positive of that - there used to be thousands of search engines, with dozens competing for the top spot. Then some guys with a basement full of servers came along and CRUSHED the established market into oblivion. Only two other search engines really survived, MSN and Yahoo, and that was because neither of them did well in search anyway, and they relied on other services or other facets of their business to keep in the search business. Even those two never really counted after Google, and nobody has come up with a better search.
As soon as someone comes up with a better search though, if Google can't find a way to cope they will be history, and it will happen fast. 95% of Google's revenue is generated by their searches, so if that scenario ever comes to pass you can say goodbye to Google as we know it.
2. Not being trusted, I don't want to use Microsoft's search engine as it may subvert the results to promote their wares.
Microsoft is only untrusted as a company by alternative OS proponents (I'm including most of the anti-trust stuff here, which is definitely valid). The vast majority of people who buy Microsoft software don't distrust Microsoft, or they wouldn't be buying it. Their software, well, everybody knows to be careful with it, but not because Microsoft is malicious. This extends to Bing - very few people think Microsoft is intentionally fucking with your search results, they just think they suck and go to a better search engine.
3. Stupid name. Every time I hear "Bing" I think of Ned Ryserson from the film Groundhog Day.
Yeah, the name is dumb, but it is no worse than Yahoo or Google.
4. OTT interface, I don't need a big background when I'm looking for stuff.
One of the major hurdles Google had to overcome when they were first starting was, ironically, the simple interface. People kept waiting for "the rest of it" to load, and were getting frustrated with how "slow" it was because they didn't realized it had finished already - there was nothing more to load. They were used to massive pages full of clutter with a box near the top you entered searches into. Google had to come up with subtle clues to convince users that it really was finished loading and they could start searching.
Bing's search is not cluttered like the searches of old, and I think the rotating picture is kinda nice. It also provides a nice clue that nothing else will be loading, avoiding Google's problem.
Still, pretty or no, Google's search is better, and I use a search engine to search, not look at pretty pictures, so I use Google pretty much exclusively. If something better comes along I'll be switching to it. It can be Microsoft, Google, Apple, some guys in their basement, I don't care. I'm going to use what works the best. Period.
That is why Bing is a failure - it's because it isn't better than Google, plain and simple. No deep analysis necessary. In fact, people would gladly put up with all the crap you mentioned if the search were better.
Is that like head cheese?
Curse you! Now I'm going to be thinking about smegma all afternoon! ARRRRRGGHHH!!!
Yeah, they did that, but they used Yahoo instead of Google. Yeah, not so great.
If you would not be embarrassed about Google releasing the entire contents of your searches over the last two years, I commend you. Also, with IP tracking and the like (which Google does), it is not hard to nail down exactly where you live based on your search information.
Now, they do "anonymize" their records after two years, but someone was recently tracked down using anonymized data from AOL I think it was. Anonymizing is the stripping away of all personal information from the records, so if they can still find you after doing that, you're screwed.
I disagree. The search ain't "just like google", hence TFA.
Not as good, but just as free. That's the point.
I don't think hotmail is as good as gmail either, but it's just as free.
The browser is exactly the same - you might like chrome better (I do), but IE is just as free as Chrome.
It's not fair to intentionally misinterpret someone's point to make a different point of your own. When someone says "X is true", you aren't disagreeing when you say "No, Y is definitely not true" even when you pretend X and Y are the same thing. Now, to refute your Y argument:
The browser ain't "just like google" because Chrome isn't the property of a monopoly trying to squash the only other popular browser in use.
Chrome is the property of a monopoly trying to squash the only other search engine in use. What's the difference? It's a competitive market, and Google is doing the exact same thing to Bing that Microsoft is trying to do to Chrome. It's competition, and its healthiest when you have three or more competitors. The search market really only has two, and one of those is far more dominant than the other.
Again I say, what's the difference between the two? Both give away tons of free tools (though targeted to different markets), both give away their most visible services for free or virtually for free, both charge significant premiums for their high-end services, and both have a near monopoly in their primary market.
The only real difference between the two, is Google is newer, smaller, and hasn't tried nearly as many dirty tricks as Microsoft has. That's it. Whether Google will grow up to be as bad as Microsoft, time will tell. But I'll tell you this much - the bigger they get, the more likely it is they will become another Microsoft. Principles become harder and harder to stick to when you have more and more people who need to follow them. Google in China is a perfect example of that - it took China fucking with their servers before they decided to actually follow their "Do no evil" pledge in China. The Google of 8 years ago would have stood on that pledge to begin with and refused to do business in China if it meant censoring their searches.
Try taking some MS code, and improving on it.
Most people who would try, would fail. MS gets their stuff working consistently (99% of the time anyway), then gives you a basic tool, an API, and any libraries and documentation you may need to build your own tool off of their technology.
No, they aren't giving away their code, but they are giving you everything you need to use their code however you wish to use it.
Seriously, when I got into administering MS servers, I was shocked at how much they give away for free. There are literally hundreds of very useful tools in dozens of different categories, many of which have an API for incorporating into your own code.
Some of them are so good, MS has to gimp them so companies that a free tool competes with don't go under, but you are usually free to build a better tool based on it.
I'm not saying I like Microsoft better than Google, Google is much more focused on the average user (including linux hobbyists). Microsoft is focused on businesses, and they do very well by IT professionals servicing their software. The consumer market, big as it is, is just a side market for Microsoft - an offshoot created by their business market. So yeah, they aren't nearly as generous to the average user - though you can still get all the free tools if you look for them.
I still use Google out of habit, but if Bing or some other search ever starts producing significantly better results, I have no loyalty to Google at all.
I feel the same way, the only reason I use Google is because it is the best search engine I've ever used - back in the day I used search aggregates like Search Hound because I got more (though not better) results to sift through. In 99% of cases, Google finds exactly what I want on the first page. Only rarely can I not find something with Google, and in those cases I've never been able to find it with any of the other search engines either.
I've never been able to use Bing extensively, because every time I try it I'm just like "Well that sucked." Then I google it and find what I'm looking for on the first page.
If someone else can do better than Google, or if Google can do better, I don't care - I'll be happy as a clam.
It's more like there is a small beep on the radio when the users changes radio station while turning the ignition, but only if the park break is on. Very strange, and definitely a bug, but it affects an extremely small number of people and does not affect them in any significant way.
If the engine blew up, that would be different, but it's just a beep on the radio - who cares?
When the cost of fixing the bug is very low, it should be a no-brainer to do it.
For large programs especially, but with any program really, there is a minimum cost to fix any bug. Most of them involve time, but there are other costs as well. Because of this, there are bugs that are small enough that never make sense fixing, unless you are already fixing a larger bug and fixing the small bug at the same time adds minimal extra cost. If there are no more large bugs to defray the cost of fixing the small bugs, it may never make sense to fix the small bugs if they are small enough.
Not if it is some obscure functionality that hardly anybody is going to need. If you have a lot of features, that's the only way to do it.
Sure, you could make your program do less, but why the hell would you want to do that?
It's not hard.
Bug Report:
"If I do X, Y, then Z, and sometime in the next 5 seconds do A, B,C, followed by ctrl-shift-A, I get an error message."
If you've got a million customers, there are maybe 50 who are going to hit that sequence, and all it does is give them an error message without stopping their work in any way. The effect on the user is practically nill.
Now, same bug, but for some reason you've buried significant functionality in this sequence that 10% of your users are going to want to use, it's more important but still a minor bug that doesn't really affect the user's ability to use your software. It does make your software seem less professional, so maybe you fix it at the next major update.
One more time, same basic bug, but this time instead of just throwing an error message and continuing like nothing bad happened, it throws an error and then crashes your program. Worse if it corrupts any saved data. That's a serious bug, and you want to fix that ASAP and push out a free patch to all your customers as soon as you possibly can. That's like, work-around-the-clock-to-fix it important, because there is a very good chance you will lose 10% or more of your customers over it.
Well, sure, except that this assumes that you are PERFECT in your ability to predict the effect of a bug.
For 99% of bugs that you come across before the release, you know exactly how it will affect your customers and exactly how important it is to fix. Those 1% are the ones that come out of the blue, they are rare, and they usually don't affect a lot of people. But sometimes they do.
However, once you know about a bug (what it is and what it does) it's very easy to determine how it impacts your customers. What you are thinking of are bugs that you think you understand, but really don't. That's different, and falls into that rare 1%. It's almost like you've found Bug 1, it's common enough that it is something to be a little concerned about, but it doesn't actually do anything so you ship anyway. What you did not know is that there is a subset of Bug 1, called Bug 1a, which with additional conditions (making it even rarer than Bug 1 itself) is absolutely devastating to your program.
You missed Bug 1a going out the door, even though you caught Bug 1 but decided it wasn't worth fixing at this time. Now you have to determine how many people Bug 1a affects, if it is just a handful you can put it off - it isn't worth fixing. If it's a significant number of people then you'd better think about fixing it soon.
It's not a difficult process to figure out how much a bug affects your users, but you are definitely not going to catch all the bugs, and that's true for serious bugs that are subsets of minor bugs.
All of those bits, and you don't even bother thinking about shoving them through your processor, which has a 32 bit register. Now I need to figure out how many chunks I'm going to divide up a megabyte into to shove it through that 32 bit register. Well, I have 2^23 (a byte is 2^3) bits to go through there, and 32 bits is 2^5, so I'll have to send 2^5 chunks 2^18 times. There is no point in changing this to decimal, because it goes through in binary. 2^18 in binary is 100 0000 0000 0000 0000.
I did that in my head. The math is easy with a 1024 bit kilobyte. Try doing that in your head if your megabyte is 1,000,000 bits instead of 2^20 bits. It's a lot frickin harder.
That's why communications equipment uses bits and memory uses bytes. They are different, and everybody understands it except the people who have been confused by hard drive manufacturer salesmen, who used a completely different metric specifically in order to confuse customers and make them think they were buying a bigger hard drive than they actually were.
What's truly ridiculous is they use standard kilobytes when referring to the internals of the hard drive. 512kb clusters - think that means 512,000 byte clusters? Well, it doesn't, it means 524,288 byte clusters, because when actually working with a binary system (which a hard drive is) it just makes a hell of a lot more sense.
Using SI units is nothing more than a marketing gimmick, and it's the Linux community of all people falling for some corporate tool ripping them off.
Wrong, it has 74.4 G i B (Giga binary bytes), and 79.9 GB.
Only unemployed Linux dweebs use gibibytes.
*runs* ;)
Bps = bits transmitted per second, it's a different unit with no fundamental relationship with binary except for the original relationship of one baud to one bit. That changed decades ago as modulation improved. The bits could be hexadecimal and it wouldn't change the bits per second (though they'd probably stop calling them bits). It's like feet per second, it doesn't matter. There is nothing fundamental to the measure.
Kilobytes, megabytes, and gigabytes, etc are intrinsically linked to base 2 math. Except for helping hard drive manufacturers make their hard drives look bigger, it makes absolutely no sense to change it, because it makes everything else having to do with a computer more difficult to understand and work with.
Memory sizes are directly linked to register sizes, which is directly linked to the bit-level of the processors, which, if you didn't notice, are all based on binary, because they all operate on transistors.
Your modem, however, is tied to the baud rate, which originally was exactly the same as the bit rate a modem could send. A 9600 baud modem could send 9600 bits per second because the baud rate and bit rate were identical. If your 9600bps (an ambiguous abbreviation of either baud per second or bits per second that has carried forward, it should be Bd or bit/s) modem uses 64Quam modulation, however, the bit rate would be 57.6 kbit/s.
If you'll notice, communications companies do not mix bytes and bits when talking about speed - they always refer to bits. It's never a 5 mb/s modem, it's a 5 mbit/s (or mbps) modem. Sata is 1.5 gigabit, gbit/s, or gbps.
They do NOT abuse kilobyte, megabyte, gigabyte, and terabyte the way hard drive manufacturers do.
The easy way: 1.44(2^20).
That's the way the conversion works, and as you can see, it's very simple to go from there straight into binary. I can automatically convert the bytes into bits in my head too, wanna see?
1.44(2^23)
Come on, you took algebra right? You've dealt with this stuff before, right? You know how to work this, yeah?
You can do very complex calculations this way, it's pretty easy. The only time you might need to whip out your calculator is if you actually need to see the final figure in decimal, instead of using the prefixed byte. You can carry that 2^20 through the whole equation, and when you have occasion to meet another 2^X you are prepared to do the math easily. Otherwise you get absurd numbers when mixing binary and decimal, math gets hard, and computers do a lot of math.
Kbps is misleading, it should be referred to as either KBd for the baud rate, or kbit/s for the bit rate. It's some strange combination of both usages, but generally means kbit/s. Kbps should be kilobytes per second, but kilobytes per second is always referred to as kb/s.
Another example of salesmen trying to screw over their customers, because the kbps figure they give is significantly higher than the kb/s would be, which is what everyone cares about. To be fair though, the OS and protocol have a lot to do with the final kb/s transfer rate - kbit/s is an accurate description of the maximum bitrate. These days the baud rate would be even farther off still (baud rate and bit rate were originally identical). Bps is just confusing and there is no reason it should be used at all.
Why does the rest of the world even care then? As you said, they don't need to actually use it, so they obviously don't understand how goddamned hard a base 10 metric is on a base 2 system.
It's been like this for 50 years (longer than the SI standard has been around, btw), why change it now to make some fricking salesmen happy?