I can see we both agree on facts, we just hold a different opinion on them. I'll stop using some words so we can find where we do agree. If you don't agree with any point, please tell me, as you sound smart (your blog confirms that) and I'm interested.
First, it's not the end of the world. We both agree on this. But it could signal the start of a trend that leads to the end of Google as we know it (it could happen, it has happened to other giants before). They need trust, without it people want give them their data.
For example, we can agree that there are a lot of angry people thanks to this feature. You can count them, so it is a fact. You can start with me if you want. For example, I wrote a couple of articles in a medium traffic spanish blog recommending Google Reader. Now I'll have to change it and write a new one. The underlying message will be "I'm sorry I recommended G.R., I don't trust them anymore, use this other product instead". You might disagree on my reasons for doing so, but I am not the only one that feels this way, and just because of this new feature. As Warren Buffett would say "If you lose money I will be understanding, but if you lose reputation I'll be ruthless". There is a lost of Google's reputation here, even if you don't think there should be.
Let's continue with the instructions to stop the unwanted result of this feature avoided. Let's say I follow the instructions we both read and that you just repeated on your post. I'll delete all my previously shared content, I'll re-tag it, I'll change that tag to "public", I'll get a new feed url, I'll write all my friends I previously shared content with and tell them "please, you'll have to delete the old url and add this new one", they will all comply and then everything will work as it was working two weeks ago. It's a lot of effort, but you think it's reasonable, and I won't argue with that for now. But what would happen next?
You see, I followed the instructions and marked a tag as "public". What will stop Google sharing that tag with all my e-mail contacts in the future? Because that's just what they did now. They took something I used one way and they started broadcasting it just because it said "shared". Why won't they use the same arguments for something that says "public"?
Removing everything doesn't sound like an opt-out mechanism, as not using the whole product wouldn't too. An opt-out mechanism should enable you to continue doing things as usual, instead of changing all your habits to adapt to an unwanted feature. Expanded point at another reply.
Fluxrad, you have good/. karma so you should be able to see there are a lot of annoyed people with this feature.
The problem is not that Reader shares content with your friends, it's that it pushes it to all your e-mail contacts. Even to people that had no way to access this information previously.
And kdawson just had to pick the best content available at the moment. It wasn't only his opinion, as now/. has a "democratic" way to push up or down articles. Look at the Firehose.
But the "no opt-out" declaration is true: There is no way to turn off this feature and go back to your usual ways. And they turned it on without even asking you. If you shared with some friends and don't like to push your content to all your contacts you'll have to either delete all your shared stuff or delete all your e-mail contacts. That's no opt-out of this feature.
And the receiver parties can't opt-out of this feature too. They'll have to opt-out of each new contact, but new contacts will keep on coming.
And the interface is dangerous too. The "share" button is everywhere, it's too easy clicking it by mistake or by unawarely mis-typing the keyboard shortcut. You could even be seen as pushing some sick content without you even noticing it! Can you opt-out to prevent this happening? No.
The problem starts the minute Google decides pushing information no one wanted pushed to people that never asked to receive it.
Let's pick something "more public" to improve the example. Maybe you write a blog that not everyone will like. It might be public, but only people that go searching for it will find it and only when they decide to search for it. Even if they don't like it, they won't have to do anything to NOT read it again.
What would happen if Google decides pushing it without your aproval to all your e-mail contacts? Then you would be crossing private space. You would be seen as invading personal space (other people in-boxes) without their explicit request. It would be really annoying, but Google just keeps pushing it without any mechanism to turn it off.
So if you want to stop invading other people private space you can't continue doing things the way you used to. Google gives you 2 choices:
- Stop publishing and delete all your content. In other words, "if you publish a blog we will start sending it to all your e-mail contacts... if you don't like this, delete everything".
- Or, delete all your e-mail contacts!
(and why should those two services even be related to each other?)
So if you are the producer there are only two ways to stop this: Delete all your content, or delete all your contacts. There is no way to continue doing things as you used to. No opt-out.
And if you are the receiver of these unwanted messages? You have to unsubscribe one by one of each "offering". If someone new starts producing content and you don't want to see it in your in-box, you'll have to react again, and again, and again to this "invassion". There is no mechanism for saying "please stop subscribing me to this 'service', I'm not interested". (And that would be very Beacon like, there you could unsubscribe for each company's posts, but you couldn't say "I don't want any unknown company in my profile in the future").
So that's the problem, pushing unwanted content from unwilling pushers.
If I have differences with someone I can pick not sending him content he won't agree. I have the choice to avoid conflicts and continue sharing with people that will enjoy my POV. Google took away that freedom, and the only choices they give me are deleting all content or all contacts. Not nice, really.
There are more conflicts around this "feature", but does this make the ruined Christmas example clearer?
Fh
Ps: Again, in other words. There is no way to permanently opt-out of sending content (other than erasing everything) and no way to permanently opt-out of receiving it (you'll have to react each time Google decides to start pushing you a new feed).
So this guy starts doing unauthorized activities in your servers, not with malicious purposes, but just to do the job he was hired for in a more efficient way. Meanwhile your job is to keep the servers running and secure, so people as this guy may do their job effectively while the company assets and goodwill are safe from malicious interests.
Your concern is that that this guy compromised your servers security, and I agree with you, he shouldn't. But he shouldn't had felt the need to do so, because it was your job to provide him with a productive enviroment. I know you have to balance his needs with your security responsibilities, but if this guy could install a VPN and SSH keys without you noticing, he didn't compromise security, because there was no security there to start with. How can you claim your servers where secure if you were not auditing them and you couldn't notice these activities in a timely way? If that was the case you were not doing either of your jobs, because you did not provide a productive enviroment, nor you had a secure one. So this guy went outside his circle of responsabilites and stepped in yours just to do his job, and he felt the need to do that, and was able to, because you weren't doing yours.
In other words:
- Remember, the sysadmin area has a support role in the company. You keep the servers running so other people can keep making products that will be sold for money, and that money will pay your salary too. If you want to keep the money flowing , provide a productive environment for the producers. If you become a roadblock, you will be a liability to your company.
- There is no security without auditing. If someone does something unauthorized in your servers, you should know it inmediatly and you should have the necessary systems in place to be able to notice it. It could be an irresponsible developer, but it could be an outsider trying to harm your company, and you won't be able to deal with him a month later with amonestations or "you're fired" threats.
Fh
Ps: Hiro, I don't know you or your company, maybe you are doing your job flawlessly, and I hope you agree with the principles I tried to put across in this post.
The biggest gripe I have is they (as a company) are coming out somehow as hypocrites: Every time I search something they add a big image banner at the bottom of the page telling me to download their toolbar. Why are they doing this? I have no use for their bar, I've already got Firefox.
This would be normal at any other place, there will always be someone from marketing trying to promote their stuff that doesn't care about adding more senseless noise, but Google was supposed to be different. What happened to them? They were the guys that told the world "Enough with the senseless crap! People are annoyed by unrelated banners (and blind to them)! Whenever we do ads, we will do text ads that people will find interesting because they will be related to their task!".
And I thought they were right. They provided an alternative to the search portals alternatives we had 10 years ago, and they did great. Everything had meaning, magically every detail worked just as I felt it should work. But now? Now their customers have to invest efforts in products like CustomizeGoogle or Greasemonkey to bring back Google to a comfortable point. I just hope they don't start a cease&desist rampage against them.
You don't "unit test" web applications, the unit test concept refers to testing units of code, not whole applications. If you want to assert that a whole application is working as intended, the concept you are talking about is "functional testing".
Anyway, a great tool for testing web applications is Selenium. Look for the link in another response to your post.
If 40-hour weeks offer the most reasonable long-term arrangement for maximizing output, can we expect to get short-term gains from short periods of longer workdays or extended workweeks?
In a word, briefly. You can get more work out of more hours for several days to a couple of months, depending upon how much longer the workday is.
It is intuitively obvious that a worker who produces one widget per hour during an eight-hour day can produce somewhere between eight and 16 widgets during a 16-hour day. As we've seen, that's the essential logic behind Crunch Mode's otherwise inexplicable popularity. But worker productivity is largely dependent upon recent history. From the Executive Summary of Scheduled Overtime Effect on Construction Projects, published by The Business Roundtable in 1980:
Where a work schedule of 60 or more hours per week is continued longer than about two months, the cumulative effect of decreased productivity will cause a delay in the completion date beyond that which could have been realized with the same crew size on a 40-hour week.
Productivity drops when working 60-hour weeks compared with 40-hour weeks. Initially, the extra 20 hours a week makes up for the lost productivity and total output increases. But the Business Roundtable study states that construction productivity starts to drop very quickly upon the transition to 60-hour weeks. The fall-off can be seen within days, is obvious within a week...and just keeps sliding from there. In about two months, the cumulative productivity loss has declined to the point where the project would actually be farther ahead if you'd just stuck to 40-hour weeks all along.
That might be funny, until you realize that answer was posted 9 years later, well after the XFL first (and last) season. And guess what, the "XFL guy" used Google Groups to answer to such an old post.
Have you considered changing its name? If for most people a name like "MailList King" sounds like an evil spammer's tool (it does for me, that was my first impression) maybe it's time to change that name. You know, if you want your product to be successful, you should pay attention to marketing issues.
A portion of the authentication key is sent to you, and it will be necessary for someone you have entrusted to activate your account after you pass away. The Last Email administrator will not have the ability to access your emails because three pieces of information are required to access the account, your username; password; and your authentication key. You are the only person who ever has access to all of this information.
Later he realized that he misunderstood generics in java, and he added this to his post:
(Previous rant removed). So generics are really "autocasting." That's the way of the Java world, and we are going to miss out on latent typing (it's actually possible to simulate latent typing using reflection, as I do once or twice in Thinking in Java, but it's messy and much less elegant). I was shocked at first, but now I'm over it and at least it's clear that this is the way things are going to happen. C# also doesn't support latent typing, and although it has a better generics model than Java (since they went ahead and changed the underlying IL so that, for example, a static field in a class will be different between class and class). So if you want latent typing you'll have to use C++ or D (or Python, Smalltalk, Ruby, etc.).
So C# is not as different as Java 1.5 (Java 5?) as he thought.
Slashdot Mirror
Typo: They need trust, without it people won't give them their data.
Viraptor,
I can see we both agree on facts, we just hold a different opinion on them. I'll stop using some words so we can find where we do agree. If you don't agree with any point, please tell me, as you sound smart (your blog confirms that) and I'm interested.
First, it's not the end of the world. We both agree on this. But it could signal the start of a trend that leads to the end of Google as we know it (it could happen, it has happened to other giants before). They need trust, without it people want give them their data.
For example, we can agree that there are a lot of angry people thanks to this feature. You can count them, so it is a fact. You can start with me if you want. For example, I wrote a couple of articles in a medium traffic spanish blog recommending Google Reader. Now I'll have to change it and write a new one. The underlying message will be "I'm sorry I recommended G.R., I don't trust them anymore, use this other product instead". You might disagree on my reasons for doing so, but I am not the only one that feels this way, and just because of this new feature. As Warren Buffett would say "If you lose money I will be understanding, but if you lose reputation I'll be ruthless". There is a lost of Google's reputation here, even if you don't think there should be.
Let's continue with the instructions to stop the unwanted result of this feature avoided. Let's say I follow the instructions we both read and that you just repeated on your post. I'll delete all my previously shared content, I'll re-tag it, I'll change that tag to "public", I'll get a new feed url, I'll write all my friends I previously shared content with and tell them "please, you'll have to delete the old url and add this new one", they will all comply and then everything will work as it was working two weeks ago. It's a lot of effort, but you think it's reasonable, and I won't argue with that for now. But what would happen next?
You see, I followed the instructions and marked a tag as "public". What will stop Google sharing that tag with all my e-mail contacts in the future? Because that's just what they did now. They took something I used one way and they started broadcasting it just because it said "shared". Why won't they use the same arguments for something that says "public"?
Removing everything doesn't sound like an opt-out mechanism, as not using the whole product wouldn't too. An opt-out mechanism should enable you to continue doing things as usual, instead of changing all your habits to adapt to an unwanted feature. Expanded point at another reply.
Fluxrad, you have good /. karma so you should be able to see there are a lot of annoyed people with this feature.
/. has a "democratic" way to push up or down articles. Look at the Firehose.
The problem is not that Reader shares content with your friends, it's that it pushes it to all your e-mail contacts. Even to people that had no way to access this information previously.
And kdawson just had to pick the best content available at the moment. It wasn't only his opinion, as now
Fh
Yes, the summary isn't clear enough.
But the "no opt-out" declaration is true: There is no way to turn off this feature and go back to your usual ways. And they turned it on without even asking you. If you shared with some friends and don't like to push your content to all your contacts you'll have to either delete all your shared stuff or delete all your e-mail contacts. That's no opt-out of this feature.
And the receiver parties can't opt-out of this feature too. They'll have to opt-out of each new contact, but new contacts will keep on coming.
And the interface is dangerous too. The "share" button is everywhere, it's too easy clicking it by mistake or by unawarely mis-typing the keyboard shortcut. You could even be seen as pushing some sick content without you even noticing it! Can you opt-out to prevent this happening? No.
Fh
I agree the summary should be clearer. At least it would had made the point stronger, but everything is detailed in the thread and in the extended summary of the thread.
The problem starts the minute Google decides pushing information no one wanted pushed to people that never asked to receive it.
Let's pick something "more public" to improve the example. Maybe you write a blog that not everyone will like. It might be public, but only people that go searching for it will find it and only when they decide to search for it. Even if they don't like it, they won't have to do anything to NOT read it again.
What would happen if Google decides pushing it without your aproval to all your e-mail contacts? Then you would be crossing private space. You would be seen as invading personal space (other people in-boxes) without their explicit request. It would be really annoying, but Google just keeps pushing it without any mechanism to turn it off.
So if you want to stop invading other people private space you can't continue doing things the way you used to. Google gives you 2 choices:
- Stop publishing and delete all your content. In other words, "if you publish a blog we will start sending it to all your e-mail contacts... if you don't like this, delete everything".
- Or, delete all your e-mail contacts!
(and why should those two services even be related to each other?)
So if you are the producer there are only two ways to stop this: Delete all your content, or delete all your contacts. There is no way to continue doing things as you used to. No opt-out.
And if you are the receiver of these unwanted messages? You have to unsubscribe one by one of each "offering". If someone new starts producing content and you don't want to see it in your in-box, you'll have to react again, and again, and again to this "invassion". There is no mechanism for saying "please stop subscribing me to this 'service', I'm not interested". (And that would be very Beacon like, there you could unsubscribe for each company's posts, but you couldn't say "I don't want any unknown company in my profile in the future").
So that's the problem, pushing unwanted content from unwilling pushers.
If I have differences with someone I can pick not sending him content he won't agree. I have the choice to avoid conflicts and continue sharing with people that will enjoy my POV. Google took away that freedom, and the only choices they give me are deleting all content or all contacts. Not nice, really.
There are more conflicts around this "feature", but does this make the ruined Christmas example clearer?
Fh
Ps: Again, in other words. There is no way to permanently opt-out of sending content (other than erasing everything) and no way to permanently opt-out of receiving it (you'll have to react each time Google decides to start pushing you a new feed).
In about:config change browser.link.open_newwindow.restriction default value 2 for a 0.
I don't like Firefox developers decision, but at least you can change it back to 0.
Fh
Google is losing small, and at the profit of foreign people?
So this guy starts doing unauthorized activities in your servers, not with malicious purposes, but just to do the job he was hired for in a more efficient way. Meanwhile your job is to keep the servers running and secure, so people as this guy may do their job effectively while the company assets and goodwill are safe from malicious interests.
Your concern is that that this guy compromised your servers security, and I agree with you, he shouldn't. But he shouldn't had felt the need to do so, because it was your job to provide him with a productive enviroment. I know you have to balance his needs with your security responsibilities, but if this guy could install a VPN and SSH keys without you noticing, he didn't compromise security, because there was no security there to start with. How can you claim your servers where secure if you were not auditing them and you couldn't notice these activities in a timely way? If that was the case you were not doing either of your jobs, because you did not provide a productive enviroment, nor you had a secure one. So this guy went outside his circle of responsabilites and stepped in yours just to do his job, and he felt the need to do that, and was able to, because you weren't doing yours.
In other words:
- Remember, the sysadmin area has a support role in the company. You keep the servers running so other people can keep making products that will be sold for money, and that money will pay your salary too. If you want to keep the money flowing , provide a productive environment for the producers. If you become a roadblock, you will be a liability to your company.
- There is no security without auditing. If someone does something unauthorized in your servers, you should know it inmediatly and you should have the necessary systems in place to be able to notice it. It could be an irresponsible developer, but it could be an outsider trying to harm your company, and you won't be able to deal with him a month later with amonestations or "you're fired" threats.
Fh
Ps: Hiro, I don't know you or your company, maybe you are doing your job flawlessly, and I hope you agree with the principles I tried to put across in this post.
The biggest gripe I have is they (as a company) are coming out somehow as hypocrites: Every time I search something they add a big image banner at the bottom of the page telling me to download their toolbar. Why are they doing this? I have no use for their bar, I've already got Firefox.
This would be normal at any other place, there will always be someone from marketing trying to promote their stuff that doesn't care about adding more senseless noise, but Google was supposed to be different. What happened to them? They were the guys that told the world "Enough with the senseless crap! People are annoyed by unrelated banners (and blind to them)! Whenever we do ads, we will do text ads that people will find interesting because they will be related to their task!".
And I thought they were right. They provided an alternative to the search portals alternatives we had 10 years ago, and they did great. Everything had meaning, magically every detail worked just as I felt it should work. But now? Now their customers have to invest efforts in products like CustomizeGoogle or Greasemonkey to bring back Google to a comfortable point. I just hope they don't start a cease&desist rampage against them.
Fh
You don't "unit test" web applications, the unit test concept refers to testing units of code, not whole applications. If you want to assert that a whole application is working as intended, the concept you are talking about is "functional testing".
Anyway, a great tool for testing web applications is Selenium. Look for the link in another response to your post.
Fh
Why Crunch Mode Doesn't Work: 6 Lessons
If 40-hour weeks offer the most reasonable long-term arrangement for maximizing output, can we expect to get short-term gains from short periods of longer workdays or extended workweeks?
In a word, briefly. You can get more work out of more hours for several days to a couple of months, depending upon how much longer the workday is.
It is intuitively obvious that a worker who produces one widget per hour during an eight-hour day can produce somewhere between eight and 16 widgets during a 16-hour day. As we've seen, that's the essential logic behind Crunch Mode's otherwise inexplicable popularity. But worker productivity is largely dependent upon recent history. From the Executive Summary of Scheduled Overtime Effect on Construction Projects, published by The Business Roundtable in 1980:
Where a work schedule of 60 or more hours per week is continued longer than about two months, the cumulative effect of decreased productivity will cause a delay in the completion date beyond that which could have been realized with the same crew size on a 40-hour week.
Productivity drops when working 60-hour weeks compared with 40-hour weeks. Initially, the extra 20 hours a week makes up for the lost productivity and total output increases. But the Business Roundtable study states that construction productivity starts to drop very quickly upon the transition to 60-hour weeks. The fall-off can be seen within days, is obvious within a week...and just keeps sliding from there. In about two months, the cumulative productivity loss has declined to the point where the project would actually be farther ahead if you'd just stuck to 40-hour weeks all along.
Nope, that's already patented.
"Don't bother telling me about subversion." -- Linus Torvalds today.
That might be funny, until you realize that answer was posted 9 years later, well after the XFL first (and last) season. And guess what, the "XFL guy" used Google Groups to answer to such an old post.
full post
XFL
Fh
Quick! Patent that up!
Have you considered changing its name? If for most people a name like "MailList King" sounds like an evil spammer's tool (it does for me, that was my first impression) maybe it's time to change that name. You know, if you want your product to be successful, you should pay attention to marketing issues.
Fh
MP.. why?
Fh
Read the FAQ:
A portion of the authentication key is sent to you, and it will be necessary for someone you have entrusted to activate your account after you pass away. The Last Email administrator will not have the ability to access your emails because three pieces of information are required to access the account, your username; password; and your authentication key. You are the only person who ever has access to all of this information.
Not that I really care, but anyway...
Fh
If someone steals three pounds of cocaine, who can the robbed one complain to?
Fh
Later he realized that he misunderstood generics in java, and he added this to his post:
So C# is not as different as Java 1.5 (Java 5?) as he thought.
Fh
http://www.google.com/search?q=SteveBurbeck%20once %20told%20me%20this%20AlanKay%20story%20from%20his %20days%20at%20Apple
I don't get it, but one of the official Eclipse projects is a COBOL IDE, including its debugger.
http://www.eclipse.org/cobol/
If you want it, go fetch it, its open source.
Fh
Did you consider that ETs might already have the cure for cancer?
Go SETI!
Fh