I would assume that the money in it doesn't match the cost(except, perhaps, for engineering/survey firms, like the one wytcld mentions, who combine document-search functions with 'guy-on-the-ground-actually-ensuring-the-conduit-is-where-it-ought-to-be' services who do document search for their own convenience; but would be of minimal use without the local boots on the ground feature).
In terms of difficulty, I'd imagine that it's an order of magnitude worse than, say, Google's book-digitization project(high-speed scanning machinery isn't exactly free, and OCR is still kind of crap, though the machinery amortizes reasonably well over time and storing raw TIFFS so that future advances in OCR can be painlessly applied isn't hard; but the world's better libraries already have well organized, cataloged, and reasonably good condition copies of a great many of the world's books ready to roll). By contrast, utility/easement records are said to be in fairly dreadful shape, and are scattered across who-knows-how-many municipal and utility records sites, probably in formats ranging from crumbling 1900 hand-drafted paper to horrible proprietary 70's databases, to a mess of contemporary bespoke GIS nightmares(and, for extra credit, US utility history isn't exactly free of mergers/splits/renames/transfers and similar things that tend to disrupt documents). Then you run into whining about 'security'(side note: at least until fairly recently, PG&E wouldn't tell the fire department where their gas mains where located...)
After all that, who is your audience, to apply their precious eyeballs to your ads? A few researchers and the merely curious, probably. Developers/contractors/etc. who plan to dig and build based on these data? They might use you as a cheap starting point; but they'll still have to verify before they do something dangerous or expensive, so you are really just doing a lot of work to make their jobs easier.
Based on the tragifarical records-management story that unfolded after that PG&E pipeline exploded in California a while back(scurrying temp armies plowing through pallets of mouldering paper, letters sent to all current and former employees, asking if they might happen to have any useful records at home, nontrivial sections simply missing, etc, etc.) I imagine that even the utility operators often don't know, even if they feel like being helpful. And the PG&E thing was for safety-critical high volume gas lines in fairly heavily populated areas, not POTS copper or coax or anything similarly dull...
This isn't, unfortunately for you, a 'just fucking google it' sort of project; but the data should exist in some form.
Most municipalities have, as some appendage of their government(whether zoning and planning, some independent office, some weird outgrowth of the IT shop, whatever) a GIS service of some flavor(Newark, NJ purely for example. What you can get online varies widely, and may or may not be utter shit; but it can generally put you in touch with somebody who actually knows something about the available GIS records for the area. No guarantee that they won't assume that anybody who cares about utility locations is a terrorist, or that inquiries are billed at $.25/poorly photocopied page; but it exists.
Similarly clunky; but also sometimes useful, would be the utility easement information that is(sometimes) recorded on property deeds, which are also a matter of (not necessarily well cataloged and easily searchable) public record.
Another option, in the states that they cover, would be to have a friendly chat with the folks at http://www.digsafe.com/ . This is some sort of public/private industry consortium thing designed to keep backhoes away from their natural food sources, namely fiber lines and gas mains. Since their entire purpose in life is locating vulnerable underground utility fixtures before somebody fucks them up, they should have a decent idea of where (underground only) utility lines run. I don't know how much persuading they would require to release information to somebody who doesn't fit their usual "Hi, I want to dig a big hole at 123 main St, is that a problem?" customer profile, though...
As for the way it is read, it immediately led me to the assumption that MS has a code monkey in the shop who still giggles at the words he can show by holding his calculator upside-down...
Even if you accept language-barriers in programming as a real problem, it isn't at all clear that translating the built-in keywords, even arbitrarily well, is going to help anybody except the very most inexperienced student programmers.
Much of a real-world program's language-specific content isn't going to be built-in keywords; but references to objects, libraries, and chunks of code that consist heavily of some other syntax, dictated by what the program needs to be able to query and modify(ie. a lot of javascript is built to spend its life chewing on HTML and CSS, and throwing together HTTP requests. Unless your localized Javascript is accompanied by a localized everything else, it isn't going to help the foreign-language user much.)
While the convenience of having a language's built-in keywords possess some degree of mnemonic value in your language certainly can't be denied, the built-ins are not very numerous, and are most likely to be used frequently and better documented than just about any other aspect of the project, both factors that work in your favor even if the keywords might as well be arbitrary symbols.
As for the secrecy, I agree that athletes would likely continue to keep their secret sauce of choice a secret from their competitors. However, it would be my hope that, were it licit, they would be more likely to dope with the assistance of a doctor, who(while keeping their regimen confidential, as with any medical record) would be in a position to gather data in aggregate form, track adverse events, and so on. Given the relatively short careers of most pro athletes, and the fact that our current knowledge of a lot of these techniques is virtually nothing, even delayed, aggregated, or anonymized reporting somewhat along the lines of actual medical study would be an improvement.
As for risk, I certainly don't share the risk-tolerance of such athletes(and I have strong reservations about certain practices regarding child athletes and risk disclosure issues in some pro areas, as with the NBA/traumatic brain injury stuff); but I am, basically, OK with the idea that some people are downright enthusiastic about going out in a blaze of glory.
My intention was not to say that the comparison is invalid; but to note that if your question is "Does Google understand the importance of packaging" rather than "How good is Google's packaging", you have to take budget into account in order to try to distinguish between bad/inelegant design and adequate or even good design that generates some failures in the field because it depends on tolerances that production cannot always support.
If, for example, you want some sort of slider mechanism, the difference between a slide that sticks when you try to remove it, and is nearly impossible to shove back into place, and a slide that simply falls out is only a few mm. The greater your ability to breath down your vendor's neck about manufacturing tolerances, the fewer units will end up shipping too tight or too loose. (Of course, some might argue that part of the essence of good design is to create designs that work within the dimensional tolerances that you can reasonably expect to accomplish, not the dimensional tolerances you might want or wish to accomplish at a later time...)
Second term presidents do better than first term ones... Is that because they showed the right stuff and got re-elected or is it because they no longer worry about re-election and instead worry about their legacy beyond their term of office and start making decisions that have implications farther than a year or two away?
see: economic booms during the later Reagan, Clinton, and W. Bush years...
One other possibility: 1st term presidents probably want to avoid doing anything that will blow up in their face during their possible second term, 2nd term presidents don't have to worry about harming their third term, since they can't have one.
Given that Google has been treading the path of relative minimalism in the packaging for their assorted flagships, I see three basic possibilities:
1. Cargo-cult: Google's cardboard box guru is smart enough to know that Apple makes good cardboard boxes, and has successfully emulated certain elements of them(lack of tacky carrier branding, minimalist design, though usually on a black field rather than a white one, and so forth); but has failed to understand the entire set of variables that go into making a good package, resulting in a close visual reproduction without the functional qualities.
2. Somebody fucked up in production. The design that, indeed, worked perfectly in CAD and in low-volume mockups turned out to have somewhat sloppy tolerances that erred on the side of 'too tight' when X thousand of them showed up in the containers from the pacific rim, at which point it was a bit late to do anything about it. This happens regardless of 'understanding' of the importance of packaging. The acrylic crazing/cracking problems of the old G4 cube, for example, were not caused by the fact that somebody half-assed the aesthetics of the unit; but by inadequate production techniques.
3.(Related to 2) At $200, Google isn't exactly making gigantic margins here, which curtails their ability to do costly things in order to achieve superior results. Preventing #2 type problems can, to a degree, be achieved by throwing more money, scrutiny, and willingness to send it back and have them do it right this time. If one lacks the luxury of money and time, though, one has to accept more limited control and the necessity of sometimes shipping 'good enough' in order to meet deadline. Since irksome packaging isn't a major issue by the standards of what can go wrong with complex electronics, it isn't an unlikely thing to suffer if corners need cutting...
There is a free world-market for multinationals but still a higly localized and bordered market for consumers buying the products from the multinationals. It's about time this gets fixed.
If trousers are less expensive in the US, why is it illegal for me to import them to the EU and sell them in masses?
Because if God wanted you to have rights, he would have made you a financial instrument, not a puny flesh pod.
Luckily, all human languages are isomorphic, so we can just draw up an unambiguous list of localized equivalents to each keyword, allow automated localization of javascript code without any possible ambiguity! What could possibly go wrong or undermine this glorious scheme?
(Other than comments, variable names, and the fact that languages are far from isomorphic?)
I'm pretty sure that, aside from its dependence on Latin characters(which is, all in all, a good thing, Unicode would probably allow it to achieve malign sentience), TECO has no basis whatsoever in any human language.
We probably won't have to make the choice ourselves.
Just maintain the status quo until JC Denton infiltrates the WADA HQ and, with superhuman precision, assassinates the entire Executive Committee and Foundation Board. At that point, we'll know that it's time to hand the Paralympic Games over to the unaugmented humans and leave the serious competition to the cyborgs....
Unless they want to die at 35 of a cancer or something, I wouldn't advise it.
One of the reason those kind of things are banned is because they are dangerous
On the other hand, the present regulatory state(where even using the ones that are legal by prescription can get you tossed right out of the sport) has unfortunate side effects of its own: since development of assays for novel drugs tends to lag behind, but not too far behind, development of novel drugs, there is a strong incentive for people to move away from drugs with the most testing and data available and toward novel ones with poorly characterized risks, to avoid being caught. Also, because the doping is largely clandestine, society at large is denied a valuable source of information about the effects and risks of performance enhancing drugs.
The point of sport is exercising your body for the fun and health benefits. What is the point to kill yourself with drugs and supplements?
Even in magical fairy-land where nobody is shooting god-knows-what in the locker room, that statement is basically nonsense at the pro level. A bit of amateur physical activity of some flavor or another? Sure, you might get a scrape or something; but it'll stave off the cardiac larditis.
High level athletics, though, tends to trash the players pretty badly in one or more ways depending on sport.
In some sense, basically all political activities(save only the occasional throwing-your-career-on-the-grenade 'giving them what they need not what they want' ones) are 'election ploys'.
However, simply by virtue of that, stating the fact becomes nearly irrelevant to evaluating any politician's suggested program(doing so would be roughly analogous with replacing all reviews of consumer products with 'this is just a ploy to make money', which is pointless; because we want to know about how good they are, not the obvious fact that the seller hopes to profit).
There are electoral ploys to get votes that also happen to be good ideas(if we are very lucky indeed, they even get votes because they are good ideas...) There are other electoral ploys to get votes that are outright terrible ideas, from essentially every perspective except vote-getting, and then some that consist of taking a side between two irreconcilable interests that have pretty clear upsides for one side and downsides for the other.
So that leaves us with the more interesting(and difficult) question of whether this program is actually a good one.
Because pissing people off is an effective way to get them to leave you alone.
A visit from 4chan is unlikely to do much about the 'currently at a training camp in hellholistan learning to use RPGs' crowd; but suitably competent trolling can reduce an online community to little more than flame wars and tumbleweeds fairly quickly.
It might annoy the wannabes enough that they give up and just go look at porn or something instead. People aren't known for their dedication or attention spans on the internet.
Slashdot Mirror
Our magnet crazed Floridians have a 45 tesla magnet that can operate for short periods without destroying itself and the most powerful 'destructive pulsed electromagnets' can reach ~1000 tesla, for their quite brief operational lives. (.flv of such a magnet giving its life for science)
It isn't the primary definition; but 'vindicate' can mean 'to assert/maintain/defend'.
Could just be a curious choice, could also be that the Latin root 'vindicatus/vindicare' can mean 'to lay claim to' in a legal context...
I would assume that the money in it doesn't match the cost(except, perhaps, for engineering/survey firms, like the one wytcld mentions, who combine document-search functions with 'guy-on-the-ground-actually-ensuring-the-conduit-is-where-it-ought-to-be' services who do document search for their own convenience; but would be of minimal use without the local boots on the ground feature).
In terms of difficulty, I'd imagine that it's an order of magnitude worse than, say, Google's book-digitization project(high-speed scanning machinery isn't exactly free, and OCR is still kind of crap, though the machinery amortizes reasonably well over time and storing raw TIFFS so that future advances in OCR can be painlessly applied isn't hard; but the world's better libraries already have well organized, cataloged, and reasonably good condition copies of a great many of the world's books ready to roll). By contrast, utility/easement records are said to be in fairly dreadful shape, and are scattered across who-knows-how-many municipal and utility records sites, probably in formats ranging from crumbling 1900 hand-drafted paper to horrible proprietary 70's databases, to a mess of contemporary bespoke GIS nightmares(and, for extra credit, US utility history isn't exactly free of mergers/splits/renames/transfers and similar things that tend to disrupt documents). Then you run into whining about 'security'(side note: at least until fairly recently, PG&E wouldn't tell the fire department where their gas mains where located...)
After all that, who is your audience, to apply their precious eyeballs to your ads? A few researchers and the merely curious, probably. Developers/contractors/etc. who plan to dig and build based on these data? They might use you as a cheap starting point; but they'll still have to verify before they do something dangerous or expensive, so you are really just doing a lot of work to make their jobs easier.
We've managed to reinvent the Lettre de cachet!
Based on the tragifarical records-management story that unfolded after that PG&E pipeline exploded in California a while back(scurrying temp armies plowing through pallets of mouldering paper, letters sent to all current and former employees, asking if they might happen to have any useful records at home, nontrivial sections simply missing, etc, etc.) I imagine that even the utility operators often don't know, even if they feel like being helpful. And the PG&E thing was for safety-critical high volume gas lines in fairly heavily populated areas, not POTS copper or coax or anything similarly dull...
This isn't, unfortunately for you, a 'just fucking google it' sort of project; but the data should exist in some form.
Most municipalities have, as some appendage of their government(whether zoning and planning, some independent office, some weird outgrowth of the IT shop, whatever) a GIS service of some flavor(Newark, NJ purely for example. What you can get online varies widely, and may or may not be utter shit; but it can generally put you in touch with somebody who actually knows something about the available GIS records for the area. No guarantee that they won't assume that anybody who cares about utility locations is a terrorist, or that inquiries are billed at $.25/poorly photocopied page; but it exists.
Similarly clunky; but also sometimes useful, would be the utility easement information that is(sometimes) recorded on property deeds, which are also a matter of (not necessarily well cataloged and easily searchable) public record.
Another option, in the states that they cover, would be to have a friendly chat with the folks at http://www.digsafe.com/ . This is some sort of public/private industry consortium thing designed to keep backhoes away from their natural food sources, namely fiber lines and gas mains. Since their entire purpose in life is locating vulnerable underground utility fixtures before somebody fucks them up, they should have a decent idea of where (underground only) utility lines run. I don't know how much persuading they would require to release information to somebody who doesn't fit their usual "Hi, I want to dig a big hole at 123 main St, is that a problem?" customer profile, though...
Very slowly. With your tongue. On the super-grimy keyboard from the public kiosk in the lobby.
So why don't you just make things easier for everybody and log in before Mr. Nibbles gets hungry? *display bolt cutters*
As for the way it is read, it immediately led me to the assumption that MS has a code monkey in the shop who still giggles at the words he can show by holding his calculator upside-down...
Even if you accept language-barriers in programming as a real problem, it isn't at all clear that translating the built-in keywords, even arbitrarily well, is going to help anybody except the very most inexperienced student programmers.
Much of a real-world program's language-specific content isn't going to be built-in keywords; but references to objects, libraries, and chunks of code that consist heavily of some other syntax, dictated by what the program needs to be able to query and modify(ie. a lot of javascript is built to spend its life chewing on HTML and CSS, and throwing together HTTP requests. Unless your localized Javascript is accompanied by a localized everything else, it isn't going to help the foreign-language user much.)
While the convenience of having a language's built-in keywords possess some degree of mnemonic value in your language certainly can't be denied, the built-ins are not very numerous, and are most likely to be used frequently and better documented than just about any other aspect of the project, both factors that work in your favor even if the keywords might as well be arbitrary symbols.
I see your court order and raise you one national security handwave...
As for the secrecy, I agree that athletes would likely continue to keep their secret sauce of choice a secret from their competitors. However, it would be my hope that, were it licit, they would be more likely to dope with the assistance of a doctor, who(while keeping their regimen confidential, as with any medical record) would be in a position to gather data in aggregate form, track adverse events, and so on. Given the relatively short careers of most pro athletes, and the fact that our current knowledge of a lot of these techniques is virtually nothing, even delayed, aggregated, or anonymized reporting somewhat along the lines of actual medical study would be an improvement.
As for risk, I certainly don't share the risk-tolerance of such athletes(and I have strong reservations about certain practices regarding child athletes and risk disclosure issues in some pro areas, as with the NBA/traumatic brain injury stuff); but I am, basically, OK with the idea that some people are downright enthusiastic about going out in a blaze of glory.
My intention was not to say that the comparison is invalid; but to note that if your question is "Does Google understand the importance of packaging" rather than "How good is Google's packaging", you have to take budget into account in order to try to distinguish between bad/inelegant design and adequate or even good design that generates some failures in the field because it depends on tolerances that production cannot always support.
If, for example, you want some sort of slider mechanism, the difference between a slide that sticks when you try to remove it, and is nearly impossible to shove back into place, and a slide that simply falls out is only a few mm. The greater your ability to breath down your vendor's neck about manufacturing tolerances, the fewer units will end up shipping too tight or too loose. (Of course, some might argue that part of the essence of good design is to create designs that work within the dimensional tolerances that you can reasonably expect to accomplish, not the dimensional tolerances you might want or wish to accomplish at a later time...)
Second term presidents do better than first term ones... Is that because they showed the right stuff and got re-elected or is it because they no longer worry about re-election and instead worry about their legacy beyond their term of office and start making decisions that have implications farther than a year or two away?
see: economic booms during the later Reagan, Clinton, and W. Bush years...
One other possibility: 1st term presidents probably want to avoid doing anything that will blow up in their face during their possible second term, 2nd term presidents don't have to worry about harming their third term, since they can't have one.
But learning TECO allows you to write a brainfuck interpreter and get into a state where writing in brainfuck feels like a blessing at the same time!
Given that Google has been treading the path of relative minimalism in the packaging for their assorted flagships, I see three basic possibilities:
1. Cargo-cult: Google's cardboard box guru is smart enough to know that Apple makes good cardboard boxes, and has successfully emulated certain elements of them(lack of tacky carrier branding, minimalist design, though usually on a black field rather than a white one, and so forth); but has failed to understand the entire set of variables that go into making a good package, resulting in a close visual reproduction without the functional qualities.
2. Somebody fucked up in production. The design that, indeed, worked perfectly in CAD and in low-volume mockups turned out to have somewhat sloppy tolerances that erred on the side of 'too tight' when X thousand of them showed up in the containers from the pacific rim, at which point it was a bit late to do anything about it. This happens regardless of 'understanding' of the importance of packaging. The acrylic crazing/cracking problems of the old G4 cube, for example, were not caused by the fact that somebody half-assed the aesthetics of the unit; but by inadequate production techniques.
3.(Related to 2) At $200, Google isn't exactly making gigantic margins here, which curtails their ability to do costly things in order to achieve superior results. Preventing #2 type problems can, to a degree, be achieved by throwing more money, scrutiny, and willingness to send it back and have them do it right this time. If one lacks the luxury of money and time, though, one has to accept more limited control and the necessity of sometimes shipping 'good enough' in order to meet deadline. Since irksome packaging isn't a major issue by the standards of what can go wrong with complex electronics, it isn't an unlikely thing to suffer if corners need cutting...
There is a free world-market for multinationals but still a higly localized and bordered market for consumers buying the products from the multinationals. It's about time this gets fixed.
If trousers are less expensive in the US, why is it illegal for me to import them to the EU and sell them in masses?
Because if God wanted you to have rights, he would have made you a financial instrument, not a puny flesh pod.
Luckily, all human languages are isomorphic, so we can just draw up an unambiguous list of localized equivalents to each keyword, allow automated localization of javascript code without any possible ambiguity! What could possibly go wrong or undermine this glorious scheme?
(Other than comments, variable names, and the fact that languages are far from isomorphic?)
I'm pretty sure that, aside from its dependence on Latin characters(which is, all in all, a good thing, Unicode would probably allow it to achieve malign sentience), TECO has no basis whatsoever in any human language.
GZ0J\UNQN"E 40UN ' BUH BUV HK /HKEX$$
QN
QQ/10UT QH+QT+48UW QW-58"E 48UW %V ' QV"N QV^T ' QWUV QQ-(QT*10)UH >
QV^T @^A/
We probably won't have to make the choice ourselves.
Just maintain the status quo until JC Denton infiltrates the WADA HQ and, with superhuman precision, assassinates the entire Executive Committee and Foundation Board. At that point, we'll know that it's time to hand the Paralympic Games over to the unaugmented humans and leave the serious competition to the cyborgs....
Unless they want to die at 35 of a cancer or something, I wouldn't advise it. One of the reason those kind of things are banned is because they are dangerous
On the other hand, the present regulatory state(where even using the ones that are legal by prescription can get you tossed right out of the sport) has unfortunate side effects of its own: since development of assays for novel drugs tends to lag behind, but not too far behind, development of novel drugs, there is a strong incentive for people to move away from drugs with the most testing and data available and toward novel ones with poorly characterized risks, to avoid being caught. Also, because the doping is largely clandestine, society at large is denied a valuable source of information about the effects and risks of performance enhancing drugs.
The point of sport is exercising your body for the fun and health benefits. What is the point to kill yourself with drugs and supplements?
Even in magical fairy-land where nobody is shooting god-knows-what in the locker room, that statement is basically nonsense at the pro level. A bit of amateur physical activity of some flavor or another? Sure, you might get a scrape or something; but it'll stave off the cardiac larditis.
High level athletics, though, tends to trash the players pretty badly in one or more ways depending on sport.
In some sense, basically all political activities(save only the occasional throwing-your-career-on-the-grenade 'giving them what they need not what they want' ones) are 'election ploys'.
However, simply by virtue of that, stating the fact becomes nearly irrelevant to evaluating any politician's suggested program(doing so would be roughly analogous with replacing all reviews of consumer products with 'this is just a ploy to make money', which is pointless; because we want to know about how good they are, not the obvious fact that the seller hopes to profit).
There are electoral ploys to get votes that also happen to be good ideas(if we are very lucky indeed, they even get votes because they are good ideas...) There are other electoral ploys to get votes that are outright terrible ideas, from essentially every perspective except vote-getting, and then some that consist of taking a side between two irreconcilable interests that have pretty clear upsides for one side and downsides for the other.
So that leaves us with the more interesting(and difficult) question of whether this program is actually a good one.
Because pissing people off is an effective way to get them to leave you alone.
A visit from 4chan is unlikely to do much about the 'currently at a training camp in hellholistan learning to use RPGs' crowd; but suitably competent trolling can reduce an online community to little more than flame wars and tumbleweeds fairly quickly.
It might annoy the wannabes enough that they give up and just go look at porn or something instead. People aren't known for their dedication or attention spans on the internet.
If the wheel of karmic retribution has placed you upon this vale of tears as a Sharepoint developer, you probably won't know the difference...
Nvidia, dickish on providing specs? Impossible!