90% off topic. I am going to Amsterdam at the end of March. What's the best way to convert to Euros from USD? Buy Euros at my bank in the US? Exchange once I get to the Netherlands?
OH! So maybe that's why there's no support in Firefox for mailto links! They're just waiting for the Google synergy;-)
But seriously people, shouldn't it be possible to install Firefox and Thunderbird on your system, and NOT have to copy-paste email addresses from one into the other?
Webmail services are not meant to be checked with a mail reader - but with a browswer. MS has hacked something together to make Outlook work w. Hotmail, but that's an exception. Outlook won't be able to check Yahoo mail or your ISP's webmail (though your ISP probably offers POP, which Outlook will gladly check) except through some 3rd party webmail-to-pop utilities.
If Google wants people to use any reader of their choosing to check their e-mail, they will open POP accounts which no "bug" in XP will keep from being accessible.
If Google follows the pattern that Yahoo has - ie, you only get POP when you pay the subscription fee, otherwise use the webmail interface - then it won't work w. Outlook (or Thunderbird or any of them).
I hope they use SSH or something.. who's to say a future mission..some hax0r doesnt grab control of a space probe and have it send goatse.cx pics back??
Maybe that's what we should do, being it tht goatse.cx got shut down...
I'd say that when you have to wait 20 minutes to see the result of anything you do you're going to have to substantially change your debugging strategy.
Please! Back in the day people would write programs on paper, mail them in an envelope to a computing center somewhere, and get results weeks later.
Because the whole point of a corporation is to limit personal liability?
Like if you open a store which is in your name, and someone falls down in the isle, they can sue and win not only the store, but your own home and personal assets as well.
If you open a store under a corporate name, and someone sues you, they can win, at most, the business. Your person and personal effects are separate from the business.
You may not like it, but the whole purpose of the concept of corporation is to limit liability, as above.
One of your jobs was 2.5 years. That's a decent stint. The other job was shorter, I guess. Why don't you, instead of listing months on a job, list, the years you worked. Like, maybe:
2003 Company 2
1999-2002 Company 1
During interview, you can explain that your projects were terminated. Or whatever. On the resume you can avoid looking suspicious by using the above method.
Don't put "BTW I WASN'T FIRED FOR BEING A BAD GUY" on your resume...
My last college job before graduating and working full time was in a company whose large chunk of sales depended on being easily found for searches on product descriptions. It was my job, to among other things, make sure our rating was as high as possible on Google. I had to become a SEO Expert.
We had a big corelation between the number of internet sales and our google search position for that product type. While going from #3 to #2 for some product may not have been a big deal, being on page 2 of the results for any particular product means we sold virtually none of it.
Google is fairly straight forward in the way it assigns rank. There is the cross-link counter. Basically the more sites link to you the higher "respect" level you get overall. That means that if you and a competitor have the same amount of keyword frequency and whatever, if your site is more "respected" you will be listed higher. This is pretty hard for small businesses. Who's going to link to you?
Having the right domain name helps. If I want to find some general type of product, chances are if the domain name matches the search term, that's gonna rank highly. Check out a google for "car parts" Carparts.com is number one. Try this for any general kind of term.
Why is this important? Because if it makes it more likely the domain specializes in what you're looking for. If you're really looking for car parts, carparts.com is probably better for you than allkindsofmetalthings.com
content is king...
the more content you have and the better organized it is, the better you will do on google.
For example, let's say you sell Tires, Bumpers, and Headlights. 3 categories. In each category you got 300 products. If you are smart, each of those 900 product pages will link back to the categories with the words "Tires" "Bumbers" etc as link text. As far as google knows, this means there are 900 pages linking to your Tires page with the word "tires".. So that page must really be about tires. Of course its even better if someone from another domain links to you saying "tires"
Using this kind of web design and organization, you can give google hints as to which words you really want to be found for. It's not spamming, because your page really IS about tires (or whatever), and what you're doing is organizing your content efficiently.
sorry to digress (I thought it was cool. during my work there, we became number 1 for some of the search terms we really wanted)
The bottom line is that yes, if you want to make a living selling on line, you must be found. Google is by far the best one to focus your energies on because a lot of people use it and a lot of other engine (though fewer now) use it for their searches as well.
In our experience google text ads when placed correctly (ie for the right kind of categories, rather than the stupid find LINUX WIRELESS HOWTO on Ebay text ads) were worth the money.
I had written this for a different forum (plastic.com). Perhaps you will find it relevant as well.
Here is my theory of outsourcing.
Companies do it because it appears to be more cost efficient. This is important for publically traded companies, because they can say "We've cut our development expenses by 30%" and that looks good on paper.
This neglects the long term health of the company. Will an Indian sub-contractor have the ability to say "shit, this isn't going to work once your portfolio hits more than 10,000 positions" and be heard by management in the US? Or "if we generalize this module a little more it can be used in another application that we haven't considered before?"
Having an unimagenitive, disinterested work force -- that's not to say foreigners are stupid -- is not good for your company's growth. Your Indian workers may be very clever but by the time a design gets down to India there's not going to be much room for someone on the floor to pitch in ideas. Having lower development costs today may look good on paper but it may not be good for your growth.
In the long term, smaller companies may be able to gain competitive advantages against the big firms that have traded away future potential for lower costs today.
It's great that Lehman (btw, I hate Lehman. They only hire jerks.) realizes this for themselves. But it would be OK if they hadn't. Sooner or later other companies, the ones that did not skimp on a quality workforce, would overtake them.
As someone with history of Java, who does C now, I instinctively want case sensitivity. If I did not have to use case, I still would. Ie, all my variables would be myStruct even if I could reffer to it as mySTRUCT and MYstrucT and whatever. So lack of compiler enforced case checking wouldn't make code less readable.
One benefit I would get out of C being case INsensitive is this:
I often link fortran and C objects together. For those of you who don't know, fortran is case insensitive, but when it is compiled, all function symbols are compiled as lower case with an _ attached to the end. So if in my fortran file I have a subroutine called MYstupidFORTRANroutine, and I wanted to call it from C, I would need to extern mystupidfortransubroutine_ (lowercase with the attached ampersand)
Which is fine.
Now here's the problem. When I do a function call from Fortran (something like CaLL MyStuPiDcSUBrouTINE) the compiled code actually calls a function mystupidcsubroutine_ . That means that in C, I must name my function mystupidcsubroutine_ (all lower case with the ampersand) in order to have it callable from fortran.
Now, life would be simpler if all the compiled symbols became standard and case insensitive accross all languages. That would allow us to link objects together and have functions callable from one language to another. Since this one case insensitive name would have to be standardized (eg: always make it lowercase with _) then the language would have to be case insensitive as well, because otherwise myFunction and MYFUNCTION would be different symbols but must share a common name - impossible.
This isn't really a super-strong argument for case insensitivity, but it's a possible one. Personally, I would still keep my code consistent whether I had to or not (when I write fortran code I do it even though I don't have to. it bothers me to see fortran code SHOUTING AT ME) And I would not agree that having variables called FOO Foo and foo in your code refering to different things isn't too good. Though I guess a function taking a string argument "file" and opening the global file pointer FILE to that "file" is kinda reasonable.
The real question that some people have been trying to approach here but missed isn't whether Saudis love Linux and get excited about new video cards. It's no surprise they do. The real question, when it comes to accepting them, is how they feel about us. Are they excited that we (not me personally) love Linux? Or are we still heathen satans who should be destroyed?
If they happen to share their neighbors attitudes toward the west, I really don't care how geeky they are.
Background: I work on a very large, critical finance system. Literally millions of dollars can be lost when out stuff does not work. This is my first job after college, all prior projects I've worked on were smaller (I usually lead them).
Anyway, when I was in school, one of the little concepts I picked up and became enamored with is the idea of a throw away prototype. The idea is simple: plan to throw away your first implementation. That way, you implement it, learn the shortcomings of your design, and make a new design which now encorporates your new experience with this.
The idea is really one that needs to be accepted: you're going to make mistakes during your design. If you plan to throw away your first prototype, it drives you to accept and correct your errors rather than kludging and hacking your original design.
This is fairly accepted and fairly standard practice.
Now, my opinion (based on experience)... When you've been working on a project long enough, you start to feel what the design did and did not anticipate, even if you no longer even know who did the design. You start to know what kinds of changes are easy to make, what kinda changes are hard. You also learn what kind of changes are most often needed, and the ones you have to hack around the most.
I think you know where I am going with this...
At some point, you start learning the same types of lessons from working on your code that you're supposed to learn from your throw-away prototype. At some point you start to keenly feel where the shortcomings are.
So logically, if you understand how to improve your program through a rewrite, you should do it. But only once you really understand the old code enough to learn how to genuinely improve it for the practical considerations.
This is where object oriented or at least modular, design pays off. If you can do a rewrite (or redesign) of your whole program without really having to rewrite some chunks (that you know are good), you're really ahead.
Who is the collective "us" that you're so upset about?
If you're a high-level IT guy, then you would have made your decision a long time ago and this wouldn't be an issue for you. If you're a low-level IT guy then you work within a framework and this isn't a personal problem for you.
Otherwise, who exactly are you that this should be "good for you"?
You're not a Win98 user, are you? Presumably, it's for them....
You download a 60 minute mpg, watch 5 minutes of it... then download a different one tomorrow and watch 5 minutes of that...
Just keep watching the same one starting in 5 min increments till you reach the end. This way you'll feel like you're in a relationship and the bandwidth cops won't be after you.
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks. But since I am going to Amsterdam I'll figure I'd need some cash as well. Although something like this would make a great ad:
5 grams of hash 60 Euros
Mushroom Caps 12 euros, each
Prostitute, Blonde 100 euros for half hour
Having a trip to amsterdam you only remember from your creditcard statements: priceless
Some things, money can't buy. For everything else, there's MasterCard. Accepted everywhere. Even Rasta Baby's.
Does it handle mailto tags or what?
90% off topic. I am going to Amsterdam at the end of March. What's the best way to convert to Euros from USD? Buy Euros at my bank in the US? Exchange once I get to the Netherlands?
;-)
Thanks in advance, and sorry again for off-topic.
PS: Any fun ideas/lodging suggestions, plz msg
If they'll provide POP or IMAP access without having to pay for it like Yahoo!, I'm sure it will be quite succesfull.
That's not a good idea from the business point of view. If people are popping their mail, they're not seeing text adds. What's the point?
OH! So maybe that's why there's no support in Firefox for mailto links! They're just waiting for the Google synergy ;-)
But seriously people, shouldn't it be possible to install Firefox and Thunderbird on your system, and NOT have to copy-paste email addresses from one into the other?
I am not sure how "insightful" this is.
;-)
Webmail services are not meant to be checked with a mail reader - but with a browswer. MS has hacked something together to make Outlook work w. Hotmail, but that's an exception. Outlook won't be able to check Yahoo mail or your ISP's webmail (though your ISP probably offers POP, which Outlook will gladly check) except through some 3rd party webmail-to-pop utilities.
If Google wants people to use any reader of their choosing to check their e-mail, they will open POP accounts which no "bug" in XP will keep from being accessible.
If Google follows the pattern that Yahoo has - ie, you only get POP when you pay the subscription fee, otherwise use the webmail interface - then it won't work w. Outlook (or Thunderbird or any of them).
Hope this clarifies the magic of e-mail a bit.
I hope they use SSH or something .. who's to say a future mission ..some hax0r doesnt grab control of a space probe and have it send goatse.cx pics back??
Maybe that's what we should do, being it tht goatse.cx got shut down...
I'd say that when you have to wait 20 minutes to see the result of anything you do you're going to have to substantially change your debugging strategy.
Please! Back in the day people would write programs on paper, mail them in an envelope to a computing center somewhere, and get results weeks later.
THAT was pressure not to fuck up.
Who's "we"? Are you the woman in the story?
Because the whole point of a corporation is to limit personal liability?
Like if you open a store which is in your name, and someone falls down in the isle, they can sue and win not only the store, but your own home and personal assets as well.
If you open a store under a corporate name, and someone sues you, they can win, at most, the business. Your person and personal effects are separate from the business.
You may not like it, but the whole purpose of the concept of corporation is to limit liability, as above.
One of your jobs was 2.5 years. That's a decent stint. The other job was shorter, I guess. Why don't you, instead of listing months on a job, list, the years you worked. Like, maybe:
2003 Company 2
1999-2002 Company 1
During interview, you can explain that your projects were terminated. Or whatever. On the resume you can avoid looking suspicious by using the above method.
Don't put "BTW I WASN'T FIRED FOR BEING A BAD GUY" on your resume...
Have you ever heard of the big mac index? the idea that different markets mustpay different prices for the same product is prety fundamental.
My last college job before graduating and working full time was in a company whose large chunk of sales depended on being easily found for searches on product descriptions. It was my job, to among other things, make sure our rating was as high as possible on Google. I had to become a SEO Expert.
We had a big corelation between the number of internet sales and our google search position for that product type. While going from #3 to #2 for some product may not have been a big deal, being on page 2 of the results for any particular product means we sold virtually none of it.
Google is fairly straight forward in the way it assigns rank. There is the cross-link counter. Basically the more sites link to you the higher "respect" level you get overall. That means that if you and a competitor have the same amount of keyword frequency and whatever, if your site is more "respected" you will be listed higher. This is pretty hard for small businesses. Who's going to link to you?
Having the right domain name helps. If I want to find some general type of product, chances are if the domain name matches the search term, that's gonna rank highly. Check out a google for "car parts" Carparts.com is number one. Try this for any general kind of term.
Why is this important? Because if it makes it more likely the domain specializes in what you're looking for. If you're really looking for car parts, carparts.com is probably better for you than allkindsofmetalthings.com
content is king...
the more content you have and the better organized it is, the better you will do on google.
For example, let's say you sell Tires, Bumpers, and Headlights. 3 categories. In each category you got 300 products. If you are smart, each of those 900 product pages will link back to the categories with the words "Tires" "Bumbers" etc as link text. As far as google knows, this means there are 900 pages linking to your Tires page with the word "tires".. So that page must really be about tires. Of course its even better if someone from another domain links to you saying "tires"
Using this kind of web design and organization, you can give google hints as to which words you really want to be found for. It's not spamming, because your page really IS about tires (or whatever), and what you're doing is organizing your content efficiently.
sorry to digress (I thought it was cool. during my work there, we became number 1 for some of the search terms we really wanted)
The bottom line is that yes, if you want to make a living selling on line, you must be found. Google is by far the best one to focus your energies on because a lot of people use it and a lot of other engine (though fewer now) use it for their searches as well.
In our experience google text ads when placed correctly (ie for the right kind of categories, rather than the stupid find LINUX WIRELESS HOWTO on Ebay text ads) were worth the money.
I had written this for a different forum (plastic.com). Perhaps you will find it relevant as well.
Here is my theory of outsourcing.
Companies do it because it appears to be more cost efficient. This is important for publically traded companies, because they can say "We've cut our development expenses by 30%" and that looks good on paper.
This neglects the long term health of the company. Will an Indian sub-contractor have the ability to say "shit, this isn't going to work once your portfolio hits more than 10,000 positions" and be heard by management in the US? Or "if we generalize this module a little more it can be used in another application that we haven't considered before?"
Having an unimagenitive, disinterested work force -- that's not to say foreigners are stupid -- is not good for your company's growth. Your Indian workers may be very clever but by the time a design gets down to India there's not going to be much room for someone on the floor to pitch in ideas. Having lower development costs today may look good on paper but it may not be good for your growth.
In the long term, smaller companies may be able to gain competitive advantages against the big firms that have traded away future potential for lower costs today.
It's great that Lehman (btw, I hate Lehman. They only hire jerks.) realizes this for themselves. But it would be OK if they hadn't. Sooner or later other companies, the ones that did not skimp on a quality workforce, would overtake them.
That's my theory, anyway.
Things like www.froogle.com become impossible as retailers begin copyrighting their inventory and price databases.
Froogle is opt-in. Businesses feed their prices to Froogle. Participation is free.
I have built a froogle feed for an employer while I was in college.
As someone with history of Java, who does C now, I instinctively want case sensitivity. If I did not have to use case, I still would. Ie, all my variables would be myStruct even if I could reffer to it as mySTRUCT and MYstrucT and whatever. So lack of compiler enforced case checking wouldn't make code less readable.
One benefit I would get out of C being case INsensitive is this:
I often link fortran and C objects together. For those of you who don't know, fortran is case insensitive, but when it is compiled, all function symbols are compiled as lower case with an _ attached to the end. So if in my fortran file I have a subroutine called MYstupidFORTRANroutine, and I wanted to call it from C, I would need to extern mystupidfortransubroutine_ (lowercase with the attached ampersand)
Which is fine.
Now here's the problem. When I do a function call from Fortran (something like CaLL MyStuPiDcSUBrouTINE) the compiled code actually calls a function mystupidcsubroutine_ . That means that in C, I must name my function mystupidcsubroutine_ (all lower case with the ampersand) in order to have it callable from fortran.
Now, life would be simpler if all the compiled symbols became standard and case insensitive accross all languages. That would allow us to link objects together and have functions callable from one language to another. Since this one case insensitive name would have to be standardized (eg: always make it lowercase with _) then the language would have to be case insensitive as well, because otherwise myFunction and MYFUNCTION would be different symbols but must share a common name - impossible.
This isn't really a super-strong argument for case insensitivity, but it's a possible one. Personally, I would still keep my code consistent whether I had to or not (when I write fortran code I do it even though I don't have to. it bothers me to see fortran code SHOUTING AT ME) And I would not agree that having variables called FOO Foo and foo in your code refering to different things isn't too good. Though I guess a function taking a string argument "file" and opening the global file pointer FILE to that "file" is kinda reasonable.
The real question that some people have been trying to approach here but missed isn't whether Saudis love Linux and get excited about new video cards. It's no surprise they do. The real question, when it comes to accepting them, is how they feel about us. Are they excited that we (not me personally) love Linux? Or are we still heathen satans who should be destroyed?
If they happen to share their neighbors attitudes toward the west, I really don't care how geeky they are.
Maybe. Except this story is about too much rewriting of code, not the inability to do it because a sales guy is ready to market the current version.
Presumably a suit doesn't force you to rewrite code.
And if the source were available.... you know this runs on Windows, right?
Background: I work on a very large, critical finance system. Literally millions of dollars can be lost when out stuff does not work. This is my first job after college, all prior projects I've worked on were smaller (I usually lead them).
Anyway, when I was in school, one of the little concepts I picked up and became enamored with is the idea of a throw away prototype. The idea is simple: plan to throw away your first implementation. That way, you implement it, learn the shortcomings of your design, and make a new design which now encorporates your new experience with this.
The idea is really one that needs to be accepted: you're going to make mistakes during your design. If you plan to throw away your first prototype, it drives you to accept and correct your errors rather than kludging and hacking your original design.
This is fairly accepted and fairly standard practice.
Now, my opinion (based on experience)... When you've been working on a project long enough, you start to feel what the design did and did not anticipate, even if you no longer even know who did the design. You start to know what kinds of changes are easy to make, what kinda changes are hard. You also learn what kind of changes are most often needed, and the ones you have to hack around the most.
I think you know where I am going with this...
At some point, you start learning the same types of lessons from working on your code that you're supposed to learn from your throw-away prototype. At some point you start to keenly feel where the shortcomings are.
So logically, if you understand how to improve your program through a rewrite, you should do it. But only once you really understand the old code enough to learn how to genuinely improve it for the practical considerations.
This is where object oriented or at least modular, design pays off. If you can do a rewrite (or redesign) of your whole program without really having to rewrite some chunks (that you know are good), you're really ahead.
A primarily unemployed population could mean big trouble
;-)
That's a pretty bold claim there, professor
Who is the collective "us" that you're so upset about?
If you're a high-level IT guy, then you would have made your decision a long time ago and this wouldn't be an issue for you. If you're a low-level IT guy then you work within a framework and this isn't a personal problem for you.
Otherwise, who exactly are you that this should be "good for you"?
You're not a Win98 user, are you? Presumably, it's for them....
It just made me chuckle. The head of SCO's UNITEDLINUX BUSINESS OPS is named Ransom.... Ransom H. Love.
What a name...
You download a 60 minute mpg, watch 5 minutes of it... then download a different one tomorrow and watch 5 minutes of that...
Just keep watching the same one starting in 5 min increments till you reach the end. This way you'll feel like you're in a relationship and the bandwidth cops won't be after you.
Good! The little bastard is a spammer in training. Now he'll see what the reprocussions are of unsolicited e-mail and other broadcasts.