I was thinking the same thing. If you pay for it upfront they will include the odds of you never needing the service. In other words exactly as buying insurance.
To illustrate with an example:
The equipment costs $6000 but they know that statistically only one in five customers will need it. Then selling it to 5 customers upfront for $1500 will give you a profit of $1500.
Selling the $6000 equipment for $1500 to you while you need it will incur a loss of $4500
I still think your view of fragmentation is too narrow.
Features in successive models do not always "stay the same or improve".
Making a screen taller or wider or adding and removing hardware buttons is not strictly backwards compatible improvements.
See for example the new Iphone screen. You can work around it with black borders, but if you want to have a native look and feel you need to do some work for each model.
Same with the Ipad screen. Even though it doubled in size so scaling was trivial, that just means it is backwards compatible with the old apps. If you want to create a new app that looks good on both versions you got to do extra work.
It's perfectly ordinary backward and forward compatibility work
By that logic all fragmentation is "perfectly ordinary sideways compatibility work".
To me Iphone 5 and Iphone 4s are products in parallel, since they are used at the same time.
Of course, after a while the old models become obscure and the user base so small that you can ignore them, but even though they were on sale in serial, they will be used in parallel for quite a while.
I guess it all depends on what you mean by "fragmentation". Two models sold in serial, but in use at the same time is the simplest case of fragmentation to me. 20 models sold in parallel is another much worse case of fragmentation.
But probably some people think "Two models is not fragmentation, because that is easy to handle. Its not fragmentation until it becomes a real burden". I just don't agree to that view. Just because it is worse on android does not mean it does not exist on the iProducts
Parallel products does not mean "on sale at the same time", it means "in use at the same time".
Just because they stop selling the old Iphone model it does not mean all the people who bought those will stop downloading apps.
As long as your potential customers are using their old devices they contribute to fragmentation
You are absolutely right that fragmentation is much worse on Android though.
He offered to go to Sweden if they promised not to extradite him to the USA, they refused to guarantee that.
This is because NOBODY in Sweden has the power to make that guarantee.
This is not Ecuador or some other semi-corrupt state where the president can tell the courts something and they listen.
There are procedures to follow if a country requests extradition.
In fact it is illegal for anyone in the government to try to influence the courts.
The only guarantee that exists ( and I believe this applies to the whole of Europe ), is that he will not be extradited to any country if he is at risk off receiving the death penalty.
... they are market makers. They find a willing buyer and a willing seller...
Then they are not making any markets. It's not like the real buyer and seller wouldn't find each other if the HFT was not there. It's just that they would find each other a millisecond later.
All they do here is steal some profit from the real investors. If the buyer is willing to buy at 3 and the seller is willing to sell at 1, they should meet at 2. Not give the difference to the man in the middle who happened to have a shorter network cable in the stock exchange server room.
Since the introduction of high frequency trading, transaction costs have fallen considerably, saving plenty of people a lot of money.
I would say you have confused correlation for causation.
Computers getting faster and cheaper have made transaction costs go down. HFT just happened to grow big at the same time.
Now, let me turn the question around. What is wrong with high frequency trading? Other than people ranting about something they have made no effort whatsoever to understand, I haven't seen a single good argument against it.
Thats exactly what I was thinking about people arguing for it. I have never heard a single good argument for it.
The real investors don't benefit, and the companies don't benefit either. But hey, the man in the middle makes a fortune until he crashes the market, so that's gotta be worth it, right?
HFT was originally blamed for the 2010 "flash crash" but the full investigation found that HFTing actually made is less severe.
I have never heard of this before, but I am very interested in a citation so I can read more about it
If we assume that the immigrants moving in drive down the wages for the native high skilled workers, then this is not surprising.
The high skilled workers can move some place else and make more money.
The low skilled workers won't really be better off if they move, since the immigrants moving in are not competing for their jobs. And if they make minimum wage they have zero chance of having their wage reduced by people moving in to do it for less money.
You are exactly right.
I think most people can easily envision a distant future where nobody has to work, where all work is done by robots.
The problem is how the hell do we make the transition from our society today to that society of tomorrow?
I suppose that by failing to elaborate on how they came up with the value, they invite speculation.
My guess is there were design documents worth about 25 bucks, but then he accidentally copied 2 mp3 files containing the music for Fords next tv commercial. That copyright infringement is making up the rest of the $50 million
Is it really "seeing around corners" if it needs something that the light can bounce off? With a mirror in the right place I can also "see around corners"
I'm sure it's still a great engineering accomplishment, but I wouldn't call it seeing around corners
I agree. Git and mercurial supposedly makes branching much easier. What they don't tell you is that they only make the simple part easier. The simple part would here be to actually move a piece of code from one branch to another branch.
The real difficult part is when two branches start to deviate. When you make a fix in one branch and need to fix the same issue in the other branch that looks quite different. What should the code look like in the other branch given the code change in the first branch.
This is what is hard about merging. This is still hard no matter what version control system you use.
Stop saying bandwidth hogs will destroy the internet.
If you want more bandwidth in the backbone you connect another one of the already laid out fibers or you put a few more fibers into the ground.
Torrents didn't destroy the internet, and neither did youtube or any other of the previous high bandwidth services. This is not a problem.
You do realize that it is possible to understand the expected payout and still think it is worth it?
Lets say you buy a ticket for $1 and the expected payout is $0.80. If you value the excitement of possibly becoming a millionaire at more than 20 cents it would be rational to buy that ticket.
You also have to factor in that most people spend very little money on the lottery. So little that it has no effect at all on their financial status even if they lose every time during their whole life. The dream is of course to hit the jackpot that would change their life big time.
It really comes down to the fact that not only the average is important. The variance is also highly important. Nobody would play a lottery with $1 tickets where you either "win" $0.99 or you "win" $0.95. That would yield an expected payout of 97% which is certainly higher than any real lottery. The logical conclusion is that this is better than the lottery where you could win a million but the expected return is only 80%, and still nobody would want to play it.
You could even extend this to payouts above 100%. Lets say you are given one dollar with the condition that you must buy a lottery ticket and you can only do it once. One has a payout of 150%. You either get your dollar back or you get two dollars back with equal probability. The other has an expected payout of 80% but when you do win you win a million dollars. Most people earn so much that winning 1 dollar with 50% chance is pointless. Thus you choose the chance to become a millionaire.
I agree completely. A lot of the math we learn in school is not that useful in everyday life. When was the last time you had use of the fact that the three angles in a triangle sum up to 180 degrees?.
On the other hand, understanding logic and knowing the total cost of buying a TV with one payment per month for two years versus saving up first and buying it later is something almost everyone would benefit from knowing.
I love math and don't regret a single math course i took in university, but I can still recognize that some of the math people learn in school have no practical application to most people.
The emotional, rhetoric-laden argument style that humanities teaches doesn't hold water in the legal profession, because judges are usually very sharp and aren't going to fall for that shit.
The loss of faith was a long time ago. Now they just don't want to pay the members fee any more.
A similar site in Sweden http://www.uturkyrkan.se/ was the thing that actually got me to leave the Swedish church. I have been atheist as long as I can remember, but since I have been a member since birth I never really thought about it. Until you get a job and start paying taxes it does not matter at all. It has no impact on my life at all that I am a member. Then a site like this comes along and points out how you do it and how easy it is to leave the church. Then I started thinking, "This is not something I should pay any money to, since I do not believe in it.".
That is what got me to do it and I would guess it is the same for a lot of people. Sweden (and Finland also I suppose) is so secular that a majority of members of the church are not religious at all, and are only members out of habit since birth. These are the people that are now leaving
I am not going to argue that this is or is not a working free market, but I'd like to point out that the selling price not only covers the manufacturing cost. The selling price must also make up for R&D costs.
Notice how the summary does NOT say all Facebook users are narcissist or have low self-esteem.
Causality. Sometimes it is important...
FTFA:
The study doesn't go so far as to say that all heavy users of Facebook are narcissists or people with very low self-esteem, but that both those with a strong and weak sense of self use Facebook to assert their best view of themselves.
But this is not that important in a theater. You can't really move around in the theater except for moving your head a few centimeters to each side. I would think most people don't move their heads around to any significant degree while watching movies.
Also, the screen is really far away and few objects are so close that moving your head would show anything useful.
What degraded the 3D effect for me is when stuff floating in the air move off screen. Its like when you look through a window. Stuff behind the window your brain expect to disappear but things in front of the window are expected to move in front of the window frame. This is the reason I think 3D-TV will not be that good. Your "window" is very small so this effect will be much worse.
Also the shorter distance to the TV will increase the 3D effect you expect when moving your head around.
A side note for us who get subtitles on the movies. The subs are placed "on the screen", with no 3D effect. When there are 3D objects in front of the screen, the subs are still on top of the objects which completely destroys the 3D feeling. If they would have closer objects partially cover the subs, that would be awesome for the 3D effect.
There are already two filters in place before it reaches/.
First of all, the clear cut patents will not even go as far as a lawsuit.
If it then is really unclear who is right it may have very low news value because "its just another lawsuit". There are probably a lot of these lawsuits. Depending on the company involved these lawsuits may have news value though.
Then there are the "Holy crap WTF are they thinking" lawsuits. They will probably reach the newspapers and then maybe end up here on/.
As with all other professions the quality of recruiters varies greatly. I have talked with a few different recruiters and some of them know exactly nothing about what is a good programmer. They are generic HR people that can do little more than check the bullet points on the CV. To get past these recruiters generally require more bullshit and less actual knowledge.
On the other hand I have also talked with some really skilled recruiters that are dedicated to finding people for tech jobs. One guy had worked as a programmer himself for 15 years before he decided he should do something else. He asked good questions and I am sure he would sort out the people that exaggerate their CVs
Sadly, most recruiters belong to the first category.
Haven't you learned yet that when it comes to broadband you should always look to see what we socialist bastards in Sweden have done:-)
Here it is mandatory to advertise speed intervals that show what you can reasonably expect. One of the biggest DSL providers (Telia) currently sell three packages: 1.5-2 Mbit, 6-8 Mbit and 12-24 Mbit.
That being said, it is of course a problem to correctly advertise speeds that greatly depend on factors that are out of the ISPs control. If we are talking DSL the quality of the copper cable and also the length of the cable (the location of your house) are huge factors in determining the maximum speed you can get.
I also think a general increase in technology awareness has made most people aware that just because they advertise 12-24 Mbit, it does not mean you can actually buy that subscription. If your house is in a remote area maybe you can only get the 6-8 Mbit package.
Slashdot Mirror
It's only a crap shoot if you suck at hiring people.
But then obviously it is going to be a crap shoot no matter what age they are...
I was thinking the same thing. If you pay for it upfront they will include the odds of you never needing the service. In other words exactly as buying insurance.
To illustrate with an example:
The equipment costs $6000 but they know that statistically only one in five customers will need it. Then selling it to 5 customers upfront for $1500 will give you a profit of $1500.
Selling the $6000 equipment for $1500 to you while you need it will incur a loss of $4500
Features in successive models do not always "stay the same or improve".
Making a screen taller or wider or adding and removing hardware buttons is not strictly backwards compatible improvements.
See for example the new Iphone screen. You can work around it with black borders, but if you want to have a native look and feel you need to do some work for each model.
Same with the Ipad screen. Even though it doubled in size so scaling was trivial, that just means it is backwards compatible with the old apps. If you want to create a new app that looks good on both versions you got to do extra work.
It's perfectly ordinary backward and forward compatibility work
By that logic all fragmentation is "perfectly ordinary sideways compatibility work".
To me Iphone 5 and Iphone 4s are products in parallel, since they are used at the same time.
Of course, after a while the old models become obscure and the user base so small that you can ignore them, but even though they were on sale in serial, they will be used in parallel for quite a while.
I guess it all depends on what you mean by "fragmentation". Two models sold in serial, but in use at the same time is the simplest case of fragmentation to me. 20 models sold in parallel is another much worse case of fragmentation.
But probably some people think "Two models is not fragmentation, because that is easy to handle. Its not fragmentation until it becomes a real burden". I just don't agree to that view. Just because it is worse on android does not mean it does not exist on the iProducts
I'm not sure you understand fragmentation either.
Parallel products does not mean "on sale at the same time", it means "in use at the same time".
Just because they stop selling the old Iphone model it does not mean all the people who bought those will stop downloading apps.
As long as your potential customers are using their old devices they contribute to fragmentation
You are absolutely right that fragmentation is much worse on Android though.
He offered to go to Sweden if they promised not to extradite him to the USA, they refused to guarantee that.
This is because NOBODY in Sweden has the power to make that guarantee.
This is not Ecuador or some other semi-corrupt state where the president can tell the courts something and they listen.
There are procedures to follow if a country requests extradition.
In fact it is illegal for anyone in the government to try to influence the courts.
The only guarantee that exists ( and I believe this applies to the whole of Europe ), is that he will not be extradited to any country if he is at risk off receiving the death penalty.
... they are market makers. They find a willing buyer and a willing seller ...
Then they are not making any markets. It's not like the real buyer and seller wouldn't find each other if the HFT was not there. It's just that they would find each other a millisecond later.
All they do here is steal some profit from the real investors. If the buyer is willing to buy at 3 and the seller is willing to sell at 1, they should meet at 2. Not give the difference to the man in the middle who happened to have a shorter network cable in the stock exchange server room.
Since the introduction of high frequency trading, transaction costs have fallen considerably, saving plenty of people a lot of money.
I would say you have confused correlation for causation.
Computers getting faster and cheaper have made transaction costs go down. HFT just happened to grow big at the same time.
Now, let me turn the question around. What is wrong with high frequency trading? Other than people ranting about something they have made no effort whatsoever to understand, I haven't seen a single good argument against it.
Thats exactly what I was thinking about people arguing for it. I have never heard a single good argument for it.
The real investors don't benefit, and the companies don't benefit either. But hey, the man in the middle makes a fortune until he crashes the market, so that's gotta be worth it, right?
HFT was originally blamed for the 2010 "flash crash" but the full investigation found that HFTing actually made is less severe.
I have never heard of this before, but I am very interested in a citation so I can read more about it
If we assume that the immigrants moving in drive down the wages for the native high skilled workers, then this is not surprising.
The high skilled workers can move some place else and make more money.
The low skilled workers won't really be better off if they move, since the immigrants moving in are not competing for their jobs. And if they make minimum wage they have zero chance of having their wage reduced by people moving in to do it for less money.
Wait, you're telling me that anecdotal evidence isn't the best kind of evidence?
You are exactly right.
I think most people can easily envision a distant future where nobody has to work, where all work is done by robots.
The problem is how the hell do we make the transition from our society today to that society of tomorrow?
I suppose that by failing to elaborate on how they came up with the value, they invite speculation.
My guess is there were design documents worth about 25 bucks, but then he accidentally copied 2 mp3 files containing the music for Fords next tv commercial. That copyright infringement is making up the rest of the $50 million
Is it really "seeing around corners" if it needs something that the light can bounce off? With a mirror in the right place I can also "see around corners"
I'm sure it's still a great engineering accomplishment, but I wouldn't call it seeing around corners
My divorce attorney
30 minutes later:
My bankrupcy attorney
I agree. Git and mercurial supposedly makes branching much easier. What they don't tell you is that they only make the simple part easier. The simple part would here be to actually move a piece of code from one branch to another branch.
The real difficult part is when two branches start to deviate. When you make a fix in one branch and need to fix the same issue in the other branch that looks quite different. What should the code look like in the other branch given the code change in the first branch. This is what is hard about merging. This is still hard no matter what version control system you use.
Stop saying bandwidth hogs will destroy the internet.
If you want more bandwidth in the backbone you connect another one of the already laid out fibers or you put a few more fibers into the ground.
Torrents didn't destroy the internet, and neither did youtube or any other of the previous high bandwidth services. This is not a problem.
You do realize that it is possible to understand the expected payout and still think it is worth it?
Lets say you buy a ticket for $1 and the expected payout is $0.80. If you value the excitement of possibly becoming a millionaire at more than 20 cents it would be rational to buy that ticket.
You also have to factor in that most people spend very little money on the lottery. So little that it has no effect at all on their financial status even if they lose every time during their whole life. The dream is of course to hit the jackpot that would change their life big time.
It really comes down to the fact that not only the average is important. The variance is also highly important. Nobody would play a lottery with $1 tickets where you either "win" $0.99 or you "win" $0.95. That would yield an expected payout of 97% which is certainly higher than any real lottery. The logical conclusion is that this is better than the lottery where you could win a million but the expected return is only 80%, and still nobody would want to play it.
You could even extend this to payouts above 100%. Lets say you are given one dollar with the condition that you must buy a lottery ticket and you can only do it once. One has a payout of 150%. You either get your dollar back or you get two dollars back with equal probability. The other has an expected payout of 80% but when you do win you win a million dollars. Most people earn so much that winning 1 dollar with 50% chance is pointless. Thus you choose the chance to become a millionaire.
I agree completely. A lot of the math we learn in school is not that useful in everyday life. When was the last time you had use of the fact that the three angles in a triangle sum up to 180 degrees?.
On the other hand, understanding logic and knowing the total cost of buying a TV with one payment per month for two years versus saving up first and buying it later is something almost everyone would benefit from knowing.
I love math and don't regret a single math course i took in university, but I can still recognize that some of the math people learn in school have no practical application to most people.
The emotional, rhetoric-laden argument style that humanities teaches doesn't hold water in the legal profession, because judges are usually very sharp and aren't going to fall for that shit.
Is that claim also valid for the jury?
You must not have seen The IT Crowd then.
You are supposed to answer the phone with "IT, have you tried turning it off and on again?"
The loss of faith was a long time ago. Now they just don't want to pay the members fee any more.
A similar site in Sweden http://www.uturkyrkan.se/ was the thing that actually got me to leave the Swedish church. I have been atheist as long as I can remember, but since I have been a member since birth I never really thought about it. Until you get a job and start paying taxes it does not matter at all. It has no impact on my life at all that I am a member. Then a site like this comes along and points out how you do it and how easy it is to leave the church. Then I started thinking, "This is not something I should pay any money to, since I do not believe in it.".
That is what got me to do it and I would guess it is the same for a lot of people. Sweden (and Finland also I suppose) is so secular that a majority of members of the church are not religious at all, and are only members out of habit since birth. These are the people that are now leaving
I am not going to argue that this is or is not a working free market, but I'd like to point out that the selling price not only covers the manufacturing cost. The selling price must also make up for R&D costs.
Causality. Sometimes it is important...
FTFA:
But this is not that important in a theater. You can't really move around in the theater except for moving your head a few centimeters to each side. I would think most people don't move their heads around to any significant degree while watching movies.
Also, the screen is really far away and few objects are so close that moving your head would show anything useful.
What degraded the 3D effect for me is when stuff floating in the air move off screen. Its like when you look through a window. Stuff behind the window your brain expect to disappear but things in front of the window are expected to move in front of the window frame. This is the reason I think 3D-TV will not be that good. Your "window" is very small so this effect will be much worse. Also the shorter distance to the TV will increase the 3D effect you expect when moving your head around.
A side note for us who get subtitles on the movies. The subs are placed "on the screen", with no 3D effect. When there are 3D objects in front of the screen, the subs are still on top of the objects which completely destroys the 3D feeling. If they would have closer objects partially cover the subs, that would be awesome for the 3D effect.
There are already two filters in place before it reaches /.
/.
First of all, the clear cut patents will not even go as far as a lawsuit.
If it then is really unclear who is right it may have very low news value because "its just another lawsuit". There are probably a lot of these lawsuits. Depending on the company involved these lawsuits may have news value though.
Then there are the "Holy crap WTF are they thinking" lawsuits. They will probably reach the newspapers and then maybe end up here on
So sample bias seems very likely IMO.
As with all other professions the quality of recruiters varies greatly. I have talked with a few different recruiters and some of them know exactly nothing about what is a good programmer. They are generic HR people that can do little more than check the bullet points on the CV. To get past these recruiters generally require more bullshit and less actual knowledge.
On the other hand I have also talked with some really skilled recruiters that are dedicated to finding people for tech jobs. One guy had worked as a programmer himself for 15 years before he decided he should do something else. He asked good questions and I am sure he would sort out the people that exaggerate their CVs
Sadly, most recruiters belong to the first category.
Haven't you learned yet that when it comes to broadband you should always look to see what we socialist bastards in Sweden have done :-)
Here it is mandatory to advertise speed intervals that show what you can reasonably expect. One of the biggest DSL providers (Telia) currently sell three packages: 1.5-2 Mbit, 6-8 Mbit and 12-24 Mbit.
That being said, it is of course a problem to correctly advertise speeds that greatly depend on factors that are out of the ISPs control. If we are talking DSL the quality of the copper cable and also the length of the cable (the location of your house) are huge factors in determining the maximum speed you can get.
I also think a general increase in technology awareness has made most people aware that just because they advertise 12-24 Mbit, it does not mean you can actually buy that subscription. If your house is in a remote area maybe you can only get the 6-8 Mbit package.