65 cents is good money in some countries, but you have to speak english, and have a US bank account to use it. If you could put the interface in Elbonian, and create a way to pay them for work, it could really work well, and I'd actually think would be a Good Thing.
I used to work for a "gas" station (service station to antipodeans like me), and I recall the price-setting method. He'd send me in one of the rent-a-trucks (rent-a-utes to antipodeans like me) to survey the local gas (petrol) prices, particularly at a specific station down the road that we were in a price war with. He'd check their prices, and set his either the same or 0.1 cents lower. Not quite a wink and a nod, more stealthy price-checking and undercutting...
The reason this worked was that customers were able and inclined to compare prices between the two, and would choose the lower one. It benefitted customers. The cost of mobile data is not something that people normally base their cell-phone (mobile phone) purchases on, so there's little competition based on price, and people don't generally swap providers based on price.
It's a small market, with consumers who aren't *that* price-sensitive, and aren't particularly mobile. Hence, prices are high.
What I'd like to see is a proper contact management application. It could be AJAX, but the technology doesn't really matter. Something that enables you to link notes, organisations and keywords to contacts, and record details of the conversations you've had with them, and when you next need to contact them and what for.
So you could look at Joe Bloggs, and see you've called him on Tuesday, gave him some details about blah, and need to call him back next week sometime, after you've spoken to John Random. Or when Foo Bar calls, you can refer to your notes on him, realise he's from X Incorporated, and know he was trying to sell you ninja turtles.
And so on.
Ideally, it would integrate with GMail or other mail clients, so you could see all your correspondance (email, phonecall and meeting notes, etc) in one nifty interface. I also think it should be able to sync up with your mobile. ie you connect your mobile, and it loads your recent call list, and propmts you to enter details on who you called and why, for each received and dialed call.
You wouldn't necessarily want it accessible from your mobile -- you can't see the screen and talk at the same time, unless you have a smartphone with handsfree, but even then, the interface would probably limit you somewhat.
If I was a Google employee, I'd use my 20% time to put this into GMail...:-)
Try looking at Czech, Danish, and various other central and eastern european languages. The usage is unusual (certainly in English), but not unique. Also, many authors use punctuation differently for stylistic reasons (James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, etc). Not that I'm suggesting the writer of this blog is in that category, but...
Whenever I see salary surveys, I notice that I am way above the average. This always dissappoints me, because like everyone, I want more. If I was below the average, then it would be (relatively) easy to increase my salary, but when you're near the top, the law of diminishing returns sets in, and there's little I can do to get paid more.
This comes from working for a top investment bank in London, on contract. London is a very expensive city, so salaries reflect that. Investment banks are very competitive, so salaries reflect that. Contracting is less secure than permanent, so salaries reflect that. If I could find what other people in my situation earn, I'd know whether there's any room for me to increase my take-home, or if I'd need to change careers for that.
Frankly, if my salary was down below average, I'd celebrate (as long as I didn't see myself as being below average) as it should be really easy to increase my salary...
Actually, no. I want the mass of code (not C, but that's beside the point). I'm capable of project managing it myself, and wouldn't entrust that to anyone else. I've even done the design work myself, because I know what I want, and I happen to be a better designer than coder. What I want is someone cheaper than me to do the gruntwork.
Specifically because I live and work in a high-income area, and all the coders I know here would normally charge upwards (often well upwards) of $US40 an hour. I'd also rather give each project to a different person, as the sum of the parts is expected to be worth far more than the individual parts, and to be honest, I want to keep the sum for myself at the present:-)
Stocks dropping is not necessarily mindless panic. The FTSE is currently down about 3%. It's a significant amount, but when you consider that it rose by 3% over the past week (http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=%5EFTSE&t=5d&l=on &z=m&q=l&c=), it's not exactly a huge disaster.
An even like this will naturally remove some of the value from stocks, as revenues from many types of companies will fall, though usually only briefly.
To "Maximise Shareholder Value" is the whole point of a corporation. The Shareholders are the owners, who invest money in a company in order to see that money grow. They don't invest in a company in order to make customers happy. The only way that shareholders are able to measure the return on their investment is financially.
As an aside: Google's customers and its users are two different and independant groups...
As another aside: stock buy-backs are not an artificial way of increasing the value of stock. It's a company saying that they have cash, and they think that the best use of that cash is in purchasing their own shares. ie they've invested all they can justify, and can't gain any real benefit from investing any more. It benefits shareholders by increasing the "size" of each share. Sure, watching the stock price increase during a buyback doesn't necessarily represent the company growing in total value, but it *does* represent increasing shareholder value...
I know that if the four women who work opposite me were to leave, productivity in this office would increase markedly. This is despite them being some of the more productive people here. The amount of time invested by the men in the office in chatting them up, checking them out and generally trying to be around them is quite astonishing, at all levels of the organisation. I'm convinced, in fact, that they use their bodies to distract their competition and hence, further their careers.
Of course, I'd rather have the view than the extra productivity...;-)
Who said we have a truly competitive market? The reality is precisely the opposite -- the market is full of intreague and backstabbing. This is why business and marketing types do this stuff, and us techoes don't.
To be a programmer, you need to be able to understand and solve technical problems. To be a project manager, you need to be able to understand resourcing, management and in some sense, sales problems. Project managers are stuck between the techs, who want to do things technically as well as they can, and managers who need to do things cheaply and make the best profit, and sales types who need a project that is sellable.
You need to compromise your desire for technical perfection to be able to relate to all the concerned parties. You need to see it from their point of view as well as from the tech's point of view. Just like it's sub-optimal having a non-technical project manager (at least, from the tech's point of view), it's also sub-optimal to have a purely techo project manager...
I have never seen a more pointless demonstration of a product than the Flash demo ("experiment") of why an ergonomic system is better than a non-ergonomic one.
It consists of a series of questions, with possible answers arranged in a 3*3 square. You use the cursor-key like controls on the left to highlight the right answer, then click on select to submit your answer.
The demo comes in two parts - the non-ergonomic version, where the cursor keys are randomly laid out, and the ergonomic version, where the cursor keys are conventional. You go through ten or so BMW-related trivial pursuit style questions, non of which are particularly hard, but all of which require _some_ thought. When you go through it the second time, ergonomically, the same questions are asked, but the answers are in different positions. The demo then comes up with the elapsed time you took for each section (which happenned to be wrong for me).
The problems with this are obvious:
Firstly, it's biased -- the first time through, you are spending time thinking about the questions. Second time through you know the answers.
Secondly, it's got nothing to do with iDrive. It could be a good demo of the value of good ergonomics, but rather than demonstrating the good ergonomics of the iDrive, it asserts that the iDrive has good ergonomics.
Thirdly, the two interfaces offered are not neccessarily any more ergonomic than any other interface -- they are just more familiar. Given that I am used to using different navigational interfaces (az for up/down,,. for left/right, or the vi keys, etc), the difference didn't make that much difference to me.
Finally, given that I was interacting through the use of a mouse, the interfaces weren't that different to me anyway...
Why can't they speed things up a little by moving unstable to testing at the same time as they move testing to stable? ie -- there would always be the following three distros:
stable -- current stable release testing -- almost feature-complete next release unstable -- new features get added here
Then, as soon as testing is declared stable, unstable moves to testing, and a new unstable is created...
Maybe that would make things a little faster, as it's basically biting off less at a time... unless of course, they already do that...
We now have Mac OS X and Windows XP (and Office XP, Athlon XP, etc). It seems that every new release of software has an X in it. Why? I suggest it's because of Linux.
Linux grew from UN*X, which has X Windows... Linux is the flavour of the month atm, and I suggest that MS and Apple want to gain some sort of goodwill from dumb consumers by using the "X" to create some sort of subconcious link.
Slashdot Mirror
65 cents is good money in some countries, but you have to speak english, and have a US bank account to use it. If you could put the interface in Elbonian, and create a way to pay them for work, it could really work well, and I'd actually think would be a Good Thing.
I used to work for a "gas" station (service station to antipodeans like me), and I recall the price-setting method. He'd send me in one of the rent-a-trucks (rent-a-utes to antipodeans like me) to survey the local gas (petrol) prices, particularly at a specific station down the road that we were in a price war with. He'd check their prices, and set his either the same or 0.1 cents lower. Not quite a wink and a nod, more stealthy price-checking and undercutting...
The reason this worked was that customers were able and inclined to compare prices between the two, and would choose the lower one. It benefitted customers. The cost of mobile data is not something that people normally base their cell-phone (mobile phone) purchases on, so there's little competition based on price, and people don't generally swap providers based on price.
It's a small market, with consumers who aren't *that* price-sensitive, and aren't particularly mobile. Hence, prices are high.
What I'd like to see is a proper contact management application. It could be AJAX, but the technology doesn't really matter. Something that enables you to link notes, organisations and keywords to contacts, and record details of the conversations you've had with them, and when you next need to contact them and what for.
:-)
So you could look at Joe Bloggs, and see you've called him on Tuesday, gave him some details about blah, and need to call him back next week sometime, after you've spoken to John Random. Or when Foo Bar calls, you can refer to your notes on him, realise he's from X Incorporated, and know he was trying to sell you ninja turtles.
And so on.
Ideally, it would integrate with GMail or other mail clients, so you could see all your correspondance (email, phonecall and meeting notes, etc) in one nifty interface. I also think it should be able to sync up with your mobile. ie you connect your mobile, and it loads your recent call list, and propmts you to enter details on who you called and why, for each received and dialed call.
You wouldn't necessarily want it accessible from your mobile -- you can't see the screen and talk at the same time, unless you have a smartphone with handsfree, but even then, the interface would probably limit you somewhat.
If I was a Google employee, I'd use my 20% time to put this into GMail...
Try looking at Czech, Danish, and various other central and eastern european languages. The usage is unusual (certainly in English), but not unique. Also, many authors use punctuation differently for stylistic reasons (James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, etc). Not that I'm suggesting the writer of this blog is in that category, but...
Whenever I see salary surveys, I notice that I am way above the average. This always dissappoints me, because like everyone, I want more. If I was below the average, then it would be (relatively) easy to increase my salary, but when you're near the top, the law of diminishing returns sets in, and there's little I can do to get paid more.
This comes from working for a top investment bank in London, on contract. London is a very expensive city, so salaries reflect that. Investment banks are very competitive, so salaries reflect that. Contracting is less secure than permanent, so salaries reflect that. If I could find what other people in my situation earn, I'd know whether there's any room for me to increase my take-home, or if I'd need to change careers for that.
Frankly, if my salary was down below average, I'd celebrate (as long as I didn't see myself as being below average) as it should be really easy to increase my salary...
amazon.co.uk has been doing this for a while now. It works quite well.
Actually, no. I want the mass of code (not C, but that's beside the point). I'm capable of project managing it myself, and wouldn't entrust that to anyone else. I've even done the design work myself, because I know what I want, and I happen to be a better designer than coder. What I want is someone cheaper than me to do the gruntwork.
Specifically because I live and work in a high-income area, and all the coders I know here would normally charge upwards (often well upwards) of $US40 an hour. I'd also rather give each project to a different person, as the sum of the parts is expected to be worth far more than the individual parts, and to be honest, I want to keep the sum for myself at the present :-)
Stocks dropping is not necessarily mindless panic. The FTSE is currently down about 3%. It's a significant amount, but when you consider that it rose by 3% over the past week (http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=%5EFTSE&t=5d&l=on &z=m&q=l&c=), it's not exactly a huge disaster.
An even like this will naturally remove some of the value from stocks, as revenues from many types of companies will fall, though usually only briefly.
Just because their BMI went down, doesn't mean they lost weight. They could have grown.
I have a wonderful visual image of a band of swedish chefs rising up and saying "De hurdy gurdy patriot acten is badden-flaggen" ...
Or did you mean "kooks"? http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=kooks
To "Maximise Shareholder Value" is the whole point of a corporation. The Shareholders are the owners, who invest money in a company in order to see that money grow. They don't invest in a company in order to make customers happy. The only way that shareholders are able to measure the return on their investment is financially.
As an aside: Google's customers and its users are two different and independant groups...
As another aside: stock buy-backs are not an artificial way of increasing the value of stock. It's a company saying that they have cash, and they think that the best use of that cash is in purchasing their own shares. ie they've invested all they can justify, and can't gain any real benefit from investing any more. It benefits shareholders by increasing the "size" of each share. Sure, watching the stock price increase during a buyback doesn't necessarily represent the company growing in total value, but it *does* represent increasing shareholder value...
I know that if the four women who work opposite me were to leave, productivity in this office would increase markedly. This is despite them being some of the more productive people here. The amount of time invested by the men in the office in chatting them up, checking them out and generally trying to be around them is quite astonishing, at all levels of the organisation. I'm convinced, in fact, that they use their bodies to distract their competition and hence, further their careers.
;-)
Of course, I'd rather have the view than the extra productivity...
Does this mean the end of the googlewhack? Or the beginning of a whole new googlewhacky world?
Who said we have a truly competitive market? The reality is precisely the opposite -- the market is full of intreague and backstabbing. This is why business and marketing types do this stuff, and us techoes don't.
To be a programmer, you need to be able to understand and solve technical problems. To be a project manager, you need to be able to understand resourcing, management and in some sense, sales problems. Project managers are stuck between the techs, who want to do things technically as well as they can, and managers who need to do things cheaply and make the best profit, and sales types who need a project that is sellable.
You need to compromise your desire for technical perfection to be able to relate to all the concerned parties. You need to see it from their point of view as well as from the tech's point of view. Just like it's sub-optimal having a non-technical project manager (at least, from the tech's point of view), it's also sub-optimal to have a purely techo project manager...
rr
I have never seen a more pointless demonstration of a product than the Flash demo ("experiment") of why an ergonomic system is better than a non-ergonomic one.
,. for left/right, or the vi keys, etc), the difference didn't make that much difference to me.
It consists of a series of questions, with possible answers arranged in a 3*3 square. You use the cursor-key like controls on the left to highlight the right answer, then click on select to submit your answer.
The demo comes in two parts - the non-ergonomic version, where the cursor keys are randomly laid out, and the ergonomic version, where the cursor keys are conventional. You go through ten or so BMW-related trivial pursuit style questions, non of which are particularly hard, but all of which require _some_ thought. When you go through it the second time, ergonomically, the same questions are asked, but the answers are in different positions. The demo then comes up with the elapsed time you took for each section (which happenned to be wrong for me).
The problems with this are obvious:
Firstly, it's biased -- the first time through, you are spending time thinking about the questions. Second time through you know the answers.
Secondly, it's got nothing to do with iDrive. It could be a good demo of the value of good ergonomics, but rather than demonstrating the good ergonomics of the iDrive, it asserts that the iDrive has good ergonomics.
Thirdly, the two interfaces offered are not neccessarily any more ergonomic than any other interface -- they are just more familiar. Given that I am used to using different navigational interfaces (az for up/down,
Finally, given that I was interacting through the use of a mouse, the interfaces weren't that different to me anyway...
BMW has lost its way. Bring back the early 90s.
Wouldn't it depend on whether the fetus was in a transparant womb?
Why can't they speed things up a little by moving unstable to testing at the same time as they move testing to stable? ie -- there would always be the following three distros:
stable -- current stable release
testing -- almost feature-complete next release
unstable -- new features get added here
Then, as soon as testing is declared stable, unstable moves to testing, and a new unstable is created...
Maybe that would make things a little faster, as it's basically biting off less at a time... unless of course, they already do that...
rr
Just change the ModeLines line in your XF86Config to a series of random numbers...
rr
Then chips on cards in boxes in cabinets in rooms.
and then... ?
salt on chips on cards in boxes in cabinets in rooms?
hmmm
Go on, look it up on google... maybe it means something different in the USA to what it means here, but I thought it was funny... :)
We now have Mac OS X and Windows XP (and Office XP, Athlon XP, etc). It seems that every new release of software has an X in it. Why? I suggest it's because of Linux.
Linux grew from UN*X, which has X Windows... Linux is the flavour of the month atm, and I suggest that MS and Apple want to gain some sort of goodwill from dumb consumers by using the "X" to create some sort of subconcious link.
It's my theory and I'm sticking with it!
It's about half-past 5 in the afternoon here... Remember that the US /= the world... Seems to be a problem that you yanks have...