Thank you for taking the time to put together such a thorough response. It's postings like this that make slashdot worthwhile.
Re:For that strategy, it's not Google. Virgin.
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Google's DNA
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· Score: 1
Virgin is the leader with that strategy. Branson has put Virgin into a strange range of businesses. Starting from music, he's expanded into soft drinks (Virgin Cola), air travel (Virgin Atlantic), space travel (Virgin Galactic), railroads (Virgin Trains), cell phones (Virgin Mobile), wine (Virgin Wine), publishing (Virgin Books), Internet services (Virgin.net), and lending (Virgin Money).
Not forgetting Virgin Vodka, Virgin Vie (cosmetics), Virgin Cars, Virgin Student, Virgin Energy, Virgin Travelstore.com, Virgin Blue (Aussie airline), Virgin Active (Health clubs), Virgin Bikes, Virgin Pulse ('lifestyle electronics'), V Music Festival, Virgin fm, Virgin Games, Virgin Lightships (advertising helium airships), Virgin Hotels, Virgin Euromagnetics (PCs), Virgin Management (brand management), Virgin Holidays, Virgin Cinemas, Virgin Bride (bridal wear) and Virgin Vision.
On a similar vein, when Inverness Caledonian Thistle Football Club managed the unlikely feat of beating Celtic 3-1 in February 2000, the Sun headline was:
I find open plan by far the best working environment for concentrating: being part of the environment means that I can let it all pass me by without breaking my concentration. If you hear a thud, you can just glance over, see that one of your colleagues has knocked over the water-cooler, and carry on working without breaking the flow. The buzz of background noise means that no noise really stands out - unlike say a library, where the noise of the person shuffling their papers may lead you to want to kill.
Of course it works the other way as well - if you really needed a break at the point where the water-cooler toppled, what better excuse could you have?
Perhaps you've never worked in a well-planned open-plan environment? I'm used to offices with sufficient space, lots of noise-absorbent material, and laid out so that you never have more than 10-15 people in direct sight.
This article is a bit wanky, but makes some interesting points towards the end about the effectiveness of the environment (BA's headquarters at Waterside, a building I've worked at) being dependent on the motivation of the management team. This article is an interesting review of how office layout can affect your team's effectiveness. Both well worth a read.
Only for small values of impossible - Canada, France, Finland, Russia, China, India, Pakistan, even Iran, are currently working on new reactors, while Argentina, Brazil, Bulgaria, Chile, the Czech Republic, Turkey, Germany, Sweden, Switzerland and the UK are reviewing their positions on nuclear power.
Oral cultures tend to have far better memory in relation to this kind of thing than non-oral cultures (such as ours today) have.
I don't think that this is a very useful argument; you could ask twenty people to tell you the story of Cinderella and they would give you stories that were fairly consistent because Cinderella is part of our tradition, and is a story that has been shaped into one that is easy to pass on. If you were to ask those same people to explain how and why we invaded Iraq, I suspect you'd get twenty different and inconsistent stories.
There are a number of scholarly works that look at the Gospels as historical documents (e.g. Robin Lane Fox's The Unauthorized Version being one). You should have a read of one, as they treat these issues in much more detail than is relevant to a Slashdt comment.
Thanks for this very interesting comment, and also for the link to your post-scarcity software article. While reading that, I was reminding of Avi Bryant's thoughts on how Smalltalk seems to have addressed many of these same areas of concern.
There's also an increasingly interesting set of work related to web development coming out of that the Smalltalk world at the moment such as Seaside and the related tools (e.g. Magritte and Pier), not forgetting of course dabble.
I work in a company of about 1000 people, and our mail servers are unavailable out of hours for backups to run, and are brought down maybe every couple of months for assorted maintenance activities. Not only does Gmail have a much better availability than our in-house service, it would probably be cheaper for us, and be easily accessible when working off-site -- what's not to love?
At a previous job we were looking at a cheap web-based email solution for around 40,000 staff, and I can assure you I'd have looked very closely at Google's offering.
You've not answered my main point, which I assume means you can't.
The author whose words you pointed me to, Joel Richardson, appears to be a fundamentalist christian "last-days" nutcase. Not really an ideal source for unbiased discussion of the muslim faith in my view.
Those remarks would've been made to placate the "kufr" (that's what the Mohammedans call everybody who doesn't believe as they do). I wouldn't be at all surprised if he's singing an entirely different tune down at the local mosque. Try googling for "taqqiya" sometime; you'll find what you come across quite informative.
That's a ridiculous accusation. Unless you know anything about this man and his past behaviour, you're pre-judging his words based on the fact that he's a Muslim. That puts you in the same position as the idiots burning Danish flags because of cartoon they've never seen.
Taqiyya is a muslim doctrine that argues that it's acceptable to lie when in fear for your life, which sounds remarkably similar to the Western defence of acting under duress.
Re:Thank god it's just audio visual
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IT Crowd On-line
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US pizza is an odd creation -- huge thick slices of greasy, cheesy dough, but strangely unsatisfying -- nothing like eating a slice of pizza from a hole-in-the-wall vendor in Italy.
Unfortunately, with the expection of Pizza Express, the UK is following the US example of how to make pizza...
You're implying (or that's my reading) that this story was plagiarised, but I'm sure that Kathy wrote the story as an homage to Arthur C. Clarke's story, and expected that her readers would recognise it as such (especially as it won a 'retrospective'(?!) Hugo a couple of years ago).
I certainly read the story in that way, and enjoyed the story more for its resonances, and how it played with the original, than I would have done without that understanding. I think that SF is very often clearly "of its time" and responds better than other genres to re-interpretation.
On the topic of cartoonists writing philosophy, the least said the better!
If you have primary sources for this statement, you should correct Wikipedia's entry on the First World
Re:This browser is important
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IE7 Leaked
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In a year or so, this browser will have > 70% of the online browser market share.
I wouldn't bet on it, W3Schools' stats show that they're seeing IE having the lowest share of their traffic for over THREE YEARS - it's been dropping for the past five months.
(Quite where Safari goes in their figures, I'm not sure...)
Researchers keep independently rediscovering hyperspace, but are then encouraged into other lines of research. If they kick back against this, they're let into the secret that it's being suppressed to avoid damaging the morale of Star Trek fans.
I don't see any sign that this bill requires the code to be open source. The bill requires it to be made public, but does it actually require the state to make it available under an open source licence?
The WIS quote only says that "the coding for the software that is used to operate the system on election day and to tally the votes cast is publicly accessible and may be used to independently verify the accuracy and reliability of the operating and tallying procedures to be employed at any election". For them to call this open source is bad enough, but for Slashdot to repeat this misunderstanding of the term is ridiculous.
I got one for Xmas, and have spent most of the last few days playing Megadrive/Genesis games (DrMD is the best emulator on the GP2X at the moment, thanks to Reesy). The other emulators are coming on in leaps and bounds (there are updates every couple of weeks) -- there's a really strong community building up around it -- have a look round the Wiki http://wiki.gp2x.org/wiki/
It's linux under the covers, and there's already a terminal emulator (STerm, typing with a joystick!), and homebrew breakout boxes available. PyGames runs on it, so there's plenty of opportunity for developing your own games easily too.
There's still issues with the firmware (new versions coming out about monthly at the moment) and battery life is still on the low side (3-4 hours), but the buzz round this box is really great. GPH have made a brave decision in giving so much access to the internals of this machine, and I think it's already paying off -- buy one now, I'm sure you'll enjoy it!
it was the first language with reflection designed into its core, and it was the first language to bring OOP, Virtual Machine, and cross-platform capabilities together into a workable package.
Because there has been much more study of exercise and diet than there will ever be of any such magic pill.
Even after 100+ years of its wide-spread use, we still don't know all the side-effects of Aspirin. Why should we expect that any new miracle cure offered by the pharmaceutical industry will offer us a simple, side-effect-free solution to over-eating?
1) Make a list of all the key questions that you will want answered to determine whether you will enjoy a job. 2) Check off all those that are clear to you after reading the provided material. 3) Check off those that become clear during the interview. 4) Ask the remaining questions.
As an interviewer, I have a much better idea than you what the culture in my company is, and what qualities we're looking for in our ideal candidate. If you're trying to pretend to be someone else for an interview, you won't be convincing, and if you are, you may get a job that doesn't make you happy!
If you're using Swing, have a look at Napkin -- it gives you a great 'sketch-style' look-and feel. As the author says 'the idea is to try to develop a look and feel that can be used in Java applications that looks informal and provisional, yet be fully functional for development. Often when people see a GUI mock-up, or a complete GUI without full functionality, they assume that the code behind it is working. While this can be used to sleazy advantage, it can also convince people who ought to know better (like your managers) that you are already done when you have just barely begun, or when only parts are complete.'
Slashdot Mirror
Thank you for taking the time to put together such a thorough response. It's postings like this that make slashdot worthwhile.
Virgin is the leader with that strategy. Branson has put Virgin into a strange range of businesses. Starting from music, he's expanded into soft drinks (Virgin Cola), air travel (Virgin Atlantic), space travel (Virgin Galactic), railroads (Virgin Trains), cell phones (Virgin Mobile), wine (Virgin Wine), publishing (Virgin Books), Internet services (Virgin.net), and lending (Virgin Money).
Not forgetting Virgin Vodka, Virgin Vie (cosmetics), Virgin Cars, Virgin Student, Virgin Energy, Virgin Travelstore.com, Virgin Blue (Aussie airline), Virgin Active (Health clubs), Virgin Bikes, Virgin Pulse ('lifestyle electronics'), V Music Festival, Virgin fm, Virgin Games, Virgin Lightships (advertising helium airships), Virgin Hotels, Virgin Euromagnetics (PCs), Virgin Management (brand management), Virgin Holidays, Virgin Cinemas, Virgin Bride (bridal wear) and Virgin Vision.
Dear God, does the man ever sleep?
On a similar vein, when Inverness Caledonian Thistle Football Club managed the unlikely feat of beating Celtic 3-1 in February 2000, the Sun headline was:
Super Caley go ballistic, Celtic are atrocious
I find open plan by far the best working environment for concentrating: being part of the environment means that I can let it all pass me by without breaking my concentration. If you hear a thud, you can just glance over, see that one of your colleagues has knocked over the water-cooler, and carry on working without breaking the flow. The buzz of background noise means that no noise really stands out - unlike say a library, where the noise of the person shuffling their papers may lead you to want to kill.
Of course it works the other way as well - if you really needed a break at the point where the water-cooler toppled, what better excuse could you have?
Perhaps you've never worked in a well-planned open-plan environment? I'm used to offices with sufficient space, lots of noise-absorbent material, and laid out so that you never have more than 10-15 people in direct sight.
This article is a bit wanky, but makes some interesting points towards the end about the effectiveness of the environment (BA's headquarters at Waterside, a building I've worked at) being dependent on the motivation of the management team. This article is an interesting review of how office layout can affect your team's effectiveness. Both well worth a read.
Cheers, Mike
Only for small values of impossible - Canada, France, Finland, Russia, China, India, Pakistan, even Iran, are currently working on new reactors, while Argentina, Brazil, Bulgaria, Chile, the Czech Republic, Turkey, Germany, Sweden, Switzerland and the UK are reviewing their positions on nuclear power.
Oral cultures tend to have far better memory in relation to this kind of thing than non-oral cultures (such as ours today) have.
I don't think that this is a very useful argument; you could ask twenty people to tell you the story of Cinderella and they would give you stories that were fairly consistent because Cinderella is part of our tradition, and is a story that has been shaped into one that is easy to pass on. If you were to ask those same people to explain how and why we invaded Iraq, I suspect you'd get twenty different and inconsistent stories.
Your comments on the JFK assassination don't help your case -- it's a well-known fact that eye-witness accounts are notoriously unreliable.
There are a number of scholarly works that look at the Gospels as historical documents (e.g. Robin Lane Fox's The Unauthorized Version being one). You should have a read of one, as they treat these issues in much more detail than is relevant to a Slashdt comment.
Thanks for this very interesting comment, and also for the link to your post-scarcity software article. While reading that, I was reminding of Avi Bryant's thoughts on how Smalltalk seems to have addressed many of these same areas of concern.
There's also an increasingly interesting set of work related to web development coming out of that the Smalltalk world at the moment such as Seaside and the related tools (e.g. Magritte and Pier), not forgetting of course dabble.
http://www.google.com/search?q=gammas+are+the+best .class
I work in a company of about 1000 people, and our mail servers are unavailable out of hours for backups to run, and are brought down maybe every couple of months for assorted maintenance activities. Not only does Gmail have a much better availability than our in-house service, it would probably be cheaper for us, and be easily accessible when working off-site -- what's not to love?
At a previous job we were looking at a cheap web-based email solution for around 40,000 staff, and I can assure you I'd have looked very closely at Google's offering.
You've not answered my main point, which I assume means you can't.
The author whose words you pointed me to, Joel Richardson, appears to be a fundamentalist christian "last-days" nutcase. Not really an ideal source for unbiased discussion of the muslim faith in my view.
That's a ridiculous accusation. Unless you know anything about this man and his past behaviour, you're pre-judging his words based on the fact that he's a Muslim. That puts you in the same position as the idiots burning Danish flags because of cartoon they've never seen.
Taqiyya is a muslim doctrine that argues that it's acceptable to lie when in fear for your life, which sounds remarkably similar to the Western defence of acting under duress.
US pizza is an odd creation -- huge thick slices of greasy, cheesy dough, but strangely unsatisfying -- nothing like eating a slice of pizza from a hole-in-the-wall vendor in Italy.
Unfortunately, with the expection of Pizza Express, the UK is following the US example of how to make pizza...
You're implying (or that's my reading) that this story was plagiarised, but I'm sure that Kathy wrote the story as an homage to Arthur C. Clarke's story, and expected that her readers would recognise it as such (especially as it won a 'retrospective'(?!) Hugo a couple of years ago).
I certainly read the story in that way, and enjoyed the story more for its resonances, and how it played with the original, than I would have done without that understanding. I think that SF is very often clearly "of its time" and responds better than other genres to re-interpretation.
On the topic of cartoonists writing philosophy, the least said the better!
If you have primary sources for this statement, you should correct Wikipedia's entry on the First World
In a year or so, this browser will have > 70% of the online browser market share.
I wouldn't bet on it, W3Schools' stats show that they're seeing IE having the lowest share of their traffic for over THREE YEARS - it's been dropping for the past five months.
(Quite where Safari goes in their figures, I'm not sure...)
Where did you get this figure? The Manx 2001 Census reports it very differently:
u s/reportvolume1.pdf via wikipedia)
Total Resident Population: 76315
Those born in South Africa: 388
(from http://www.gov.im/lib/docs/treasury/economic/cens
You're in luck - all the Grammar Nazis are busy at the top of this thread!
At least it would be fast. If I was going to go, I'd rather die quick but messy than trapped in a mine, or like this.
"FTA"(=Faster Than Ants) by George R.R. Martin.
Researchers keep independently rediscovering hyperspace, but are then encouraged into other lines of research. If they kick back against this, they're let into the secret that it's being suppressed to avoid damaging the morale of Star Trek fans.
I don't see any sign that this bill requires the code to be open source. The bill requires it to be made public, but does it actually require the state to make it available under an open source licence?
The WIS quote only says that "the coding for the software that is used to operate the system on election day and to tally the votes cast is publicly accessible and may be used to independently verify the accuracy and reliability of the operating and tallying procedures to be employed at any election". For them to call this open source is bad enough, but for Slashdot to repeat this misunderstanding of the term is ridiculous.
Don't forget that's it's still early days.
I got one for Xmas, and have spent most of the last few days playing Megadrive/Genesis games (DrMD is the best emulator on the GP2X at the moment, thanks to Reesy). The other emulators are coming on in leaps and bounds (there are updates every couple of weeks) -- there's a really strong community building up around it -- have a look round the Wiki http://wiki.gp2x.org/wiki/
It's linux under the covers, and there's already a terminal emulator (STerm, typing with a joystick!), and homebrew breakout boxes available. PyGames runs on it, so there's plenty of opportunity for developing your own games easily too.
There's still issues with the firmware (new versions coming out about monthly at the moment) and battery life is still on the low side (3-4 hours), but the buzz round this box is really great. GPH have made a brave decision in giving so much access to the internals of this machine, and I think it's already paying off -- buy one now, I'm sure you'll enjoy it!
it was the first language with reflection designed into its core, and it was the first language to bring OOP, Virtual Machine, and cross-platform capabilities together into a workable package.
As long as you don't count Smalltalk...
Because there has been much more study of exercise and diet than there will ever be of any such magic pill.
Even after 100+ years of its wide-spread use, we still don't know all the side-effects of Aspirin. Why should we expect that any new miracle cure offered by the pharmaceutical industry will offer us a simple, side-effect-free solution to over-eating?
1) Make a list of all the key questions that you will want answered to determine whether you will enjoy a job.
2) Check off all those that are clear to you after reading the provided material.
3) Check off those that become clear during the interview.
4) Ask the remaining questions.
As an interviewer, I have a much better idea than you what the culture in my company is, and what qualities we're looking for in our ideal candidate. If you're trying to pretend to be someone else for an interview, you won't be convincing, and if you are, you may get a job that doesn't make you happy!
If you're using Swing, have a look at Napkin -- it gives you a great 'sketch-style' look-and feel. As the author says 'the idea is to try to develop a look and feel that can be used in Java applications that looks informal and provisional, yet be fully functional for development. Often when people see a GUI mock-up, or a complete GUI without full functionality, they assume that the code behind it is working. While this can be used to sleazy advantage, it can also convince people who ought to know better (like your managers) that you are already done when you have just barely begun, or when only parts are complete.'