You are incorrect in associating paper with wealth. There is no connection. That dollar bill in your wallet is no more or less money than a digit in a Wells Fargo computer. Both represent a unit of confidence in the issuing body - the US government. That is all they represent. You cannot redeem that dollar bill for a fraction of preciou metal. You cannot redeem the bill for a piece of a brick of a government building. You are not assured of receiving a set unit of a foreign currency for it either. It is a fiat currency. It has no inherent value. The paper bill is simply a physical container for a fractional unit of confidence in the US government, nothing more or less.
Its been obvious for years now that no one is going to rewire the neighborhoods of America. We are waiting for wireless data connections to get fast cheap and plentiful. Until then you have DSL and cable modem at best.
Fiber to the home has never been a serious consideration and in fact only would re-establish the same monopolies we have now - a wire can only have one owner.
Excuse my ignorance, but I was under the impression that in terms of Desktop Managers the choice at present is realistically limited to Gnome or KDE.
What does "realistically limited" mean? If you can type a URL you can locate any number of user environments that suit your needs - E, blackbox, etc.
If you really are all about the highly-configurable do-dad like you say you are, you won't touch any of the luser distros so you needn't concern yourself with the choices they make for defaults.
All the car manufacturers are showing off green vehicle projects, but thats all they are, projects. The car companies are trying to buy some good karma with enviro freaks and government types while they continue to produce gas-guzzling behemoths for the public.
It doesn't help that the President now wants to provide tax incentives for certain types of SUV owners. Face it, beneath the green rhetoric, the US is a society that lives on pig iron and fossil fuels.
I used to dabble in scifi until I started hitting the general fiction/nonfiction shelves and found that in general, the quality of writing is much higher when there isn't a pixie or a dragon or a robot on the book's cover.
Whatgever genre, you can always hit the Amazon editor's picks list (avoid the topsellers lists, its filled with pedestrian crap) or the NY Times book reviews.
The first step to enlightenment is to be a book snob. Stay away from airport crap (John Grisham, Michael Crichton), and try batting out of your league a bit...you might just expand and learn something.
Yes, but its also about financial impact. What was the total cost of 9/11 ? Maybe in the tens of billions at the very minimum in property damage alone. Add in a massive market plummet resulting, wiping out billions in equity. Add in lost time and labor, and employees who cannot rise from the dead, gutting entire firms.
Sure, we'd all like to make it perfect the first time. If there was a tool, methodology, etc that could deliver this, don't you think we would be using it???
When the codebase reaches a certain size and complexity, you are going to be using a debugger, thats why this thread is taking place.
But hang on, Google News only takes the headline and first paragraph -- it doesn't copy entire stories.
And in the long run people will return to Google News, not the news site. Thus rendering the ad space on the news site's top page worthless, and enriching the ad space on Google News's top page. Trust me, people are going to come around to this.
2. The publishers get extra traffic through the Google index and they can leverage that to generate revenue.
As I said in my first post, for small publishers this makes sense. For someone like AOL, that does not need distribution, brand name enhancement, or exposure for sites like SportsIllustrated.com and Time.com, it is a losing proposition, as they compete with Google for ad dollars. Over time content the web will be centralized, and those megacorps will not be sending big bucks on acquisitions just to share and share alike.
Any content provider that tries to charge Google (or any other index) for spidering/linking rights will be attempting to unbalance the value-exchange and they'll ultimately fail.
So the WSJ will fail? So Consumer Reports will fail? Basically you are saying that anyone who charges for content is doomed, yet the numbers show that the sites that charge access are among those that have respectable profitability.
I mean, lets not be naive, content on the web is not getting more free over time. Many major content owners like AOL and Knight Ridder are getting ready to put a price tag on access as soon as they think they can get away with it. If they charge for a magazine or newspaper, why would they not eventually do the same with web content?
Google news links take you directly to the news provider's page (unlike Yahoo, which co-brands almost everything).
BZZZT!!! - Yahoo bought and paid for those feeds. Yahoo has permission to publish them.
In fact, if I had a special-interest paper or magazine, I would even consider paying Google news, a-la AdWords, for right-column listings. For example, the Wall Street Journal would presumably love to show up on all Google news searches for "NASDAQ."
First, the WSJ is zealous about protecting its content. THey already have an established brand - they don't need Google to get the word out. If you want to read the WSJ online, you pay, no exceptions. This is why they are one of the only profitable web publishers.
Now to your earlier point - for a small zine, being in Google would be beneficial, as the distribution and exposure is worth it even if you don't control the browse experience. For a large content owner like AOL, it is definitely not worth it. Google is a competitor to AOL in some regards, particularly for online ad dollars. You don't subsidize your competitors. Since Tme.com and other well known AOL sites don't need the exposure of Google, their inclusion in Google News is almost surely a long term loss for AOL, particularly if they lose surfers to Google News for good.
think your comment is perhaps more applicable to Yahoo. Whatever they pay a newspaper for the feed (or Reuters etc), the content provider isn't getting anything else, except maybe a byline and a logo.
Uhhh, you don't know how Reuters works. That is their business - providing data to end user services. Every newspaper, radio station, website, etc. uses Reuters and AP to get their national and international news.
How do you figure that Google New is stealing content? All it is doing is listing links to articles all over the internet.
Lets say you run TheFooBarTimes.com. You publish stories that are linked in Google news. Over time your users start using Google News instead of logging in to TheFooBarTimes.com top page. You are no longer in control of the browsing experience - in fact your browsing in mixed in with every other news site and managed by Google.
Added to which, the ad space on your index page/top page is now worthless as no one goes there anymore. Ad space on the top page of Google News continues to sell briskly, thanks to your hard work in generating all of the free content which they copy and control.
Google's main advantage so far is that most content ownership on the web is still dispersed among small splayers who benefit from being in a popular index.
Over time that will change. As content ownership consolidates, these companies will be loathe to subsidize Google's ad business by providing them with free content. Look at Google News. Really, how long can they expect their crawler to be allowed to copy content? In this sense all Google is doing is stealing content someone somewhere paid for, Reuters feeds aren't free folks. For now thats fine, the stakes are low. As soon as Google News actually competes as a news site, their crawler won't be allowed in.
I would not be surprised to see major content owners to charge access to crawlers in the future. Why not? If users are charged, so should crawlers. In fact the crawler should be charged more, as they are basically getting a copy to redistribute it to many users, not just to be viewed by one.
In the next few years, as ownership and access to content become critical issues for the bottom line, Google may find itself facing a toll both instead of a robots.txt file.
Content will only be given out for free in order to build userbase. Once a critical mass has been built and the service seen as "sticky" (meaning inertia will have set in and people will not exit en masse upon changes), the charges will start.
In three or four years I would not be surprised if site access fees amount ot roughly the same as people pay for cable and/or cell phone services on a monthly basis.
Also, once access to content is charged, crawlers like Google can forget about mirroring sites for free, unless the webmaster sees it in their best interest, which it won't be for the biggest players who don't like their competition mirroring their content.
Taken to its logical extreme, it appears that these guys would create a de facto x86 OSX. What would be missing? Obviously the OSX UI (could easily be cloned)...and some multimedia stuff. What else?
I get 91 distinct include files alone from just wanting to use simple strings.
Maybe you get those sorts of dependencies in the code you write; I don't.
No, what you get is a nonstandard, substandard string implementation class (assuming you are actually using C++ and not just using char arrays).
What is the change in the resulting binary? Thats all that matters. Over time, as you code in more and more of the standard string class into your own class (and doing so poorly), you will end up with a larger, more inefficient version of what you could have used from day one for free.
Or, even if you have crafted the ultimate string package with no flaws at all (doubtful), it cost someone somewhere something for you to do this, and the added value to the final product was probably zilch. If it was just about keeping the binary small you would have never used C++ in the first place.
Well, I wasn't necessarily making the point that people should hire people who know only the concepts but not the languages, but that they shouldn't do the reverse(hire people who know the languages but not the concepts)
Who are these people? I don't know anyone who is a language guru who is not otherwise intelligent and versed in at least some of the conceptual stuff. For example, to be an STL guru you will have to dabble into some complexity analysis. I think you concerns are misplaced.
And the reason is that most programmers couldn't re-implement a library routine if their life depended on it.
Ah yes, I meet guys like you all the time. Convinced they can recode the STL better themselves, the lower bounds proofs not withstanding.
Out of incompetence, they pull in a megabyte of library code, deal with dozens of bugs in "standard" library code, and try to keep several APIs in sync for something that could easily be done in a few dozen lines of code.
Now you're using a straw man. What are these multi-megabyte libraries? You are referring to cross dependencies that pull in unnecessary code - these sympton usually appear more in hairy locally-crafted libs, and rarely appear in standard libs. This is but another reason people use standard libs.
And, right there, you have an explanation of why most software teams fail, most commercial software products suck, and so many people keep buying junk development tools: software teams in industry don't have a clue what they are doing.
You're right- there is too much focus on mumbo jumbo theory and little emphasis on knowing tools. If everyone reused the standard APIs in an intelligent way instead of redesigning them incorrectly, they might actually get some code out the door.
I have two candidates, one guy who knows language X pretty well, but only language X, and has a year or so work experience. I have another guy with 5 years experience, knows W, Y, and Z. I'll probably take the second.
These indivduals are at different skill, and hence, WAGE levels. You pay for talent. So you wouldn't be an employer for very long, because your strategy appears to be that wage is not an issue.
Also, if the work is tedious, your highly skilled multi-talented engineer will likely leave or become insanely bored and actually produce less.
This isn't a troll. I have found again and again working in industry that it is far more important to be very very good in the language of your code than to have a general grasp of concepts. Chances are your team will not be switching to a new language midstream, or trying to create a sorting routine faster than quicksort. Really, when is the last time you coded up new algorithms of a nontrivial nature? Often knowing the libraries is more important.
Becoming a language guru will inevitably involve deeper issues anyway, as true language gurus often delve into the implementation tools (compilers, VMs) for their given language.
"Big thinkers" on the other hand, tend to be just that. Lots of talk and little action. The bottom line is that you are trying to push out code to make money.
Slashdot Mirror
You are incorrect in associating paper with wealth. There is no connection. That dollar bill in your wallet is no more or less money than a digit in a Wells Fargo computer. Both represent a unit of confidence in the issuing body - the US government. That is all they represent. You cannot redeem that dollar bill for a fraction of preciou metal. You cannot redeem the bill for a piece of a brick of a government building. You are not assured of receiving a set unit of a foreign currency for it either. It is a fiat currency. It has no inherent value. The paper bill is simply a physical container for a fractional unit of confidence in the US government, nothing more or less.
Fiber to the home has never been a serious consideration and in fact only would re-establish the same monopolies we have now - a wire can only have one owner.
What does "realistically limited" mean? If you can type a URL you can locate any number of user environments that suit your needs - E, blackbox, etc.
If you really are all about the highly-configurable do-dad like you say you are, you won't touch any of the luser distros so you needn't concern yourself with the choices they make for defaults.
CPU power. Software. Labor. There is one prevailing trend in IT - commodity solutions. The high-margin players are toast.
While the W3 continues to push Schema, they are also forming working groups for RELAX after pressure from XML luminaries such as James Clark.
It doesn't help that the President now wants to provide tax incentives for certain types of SUV owners. Face it, beneath the green rhetoric, the US is a society that lives on pig iron and fossil fuels.
Whatgever genre, you can always hit the Amazon editor's picks list (avoid the topsellers lists, its filled with pedestrian crap) or the NY Times book reviews.
The first step to enlightenment is to be a book snob. Stay away from airport crap (John Grisham, Michael Crichton), and try batting out of your league a bit...you might just expand and learn something.
Yes, but its also about financial impact. What was the total cost of 9/11 ? Maybe in the tens of billions at the very minimum in property damage alone. Add in a massive market plummet resulting, wiping out billions in equity. Add in lost time and labor, and employees who cannot rise from the dead, gutting entire firms.
There is risk everywhere. How many Indian business parks have been the target of jetliner-missiles?
Classic xenophobia cannot deflect the brutal truth: foreign companies are producing equal quality for less cost.
Yes Japan is mired in a deep recession, but Japanese companies sell the top-selling sedan in America and dominate consumer electronics.
When the codebase reaches a certain size and complexity, you are going to be using a debugger, thats why this thread is taking place.
And in the long run people will return to Google News, not the news site. Thus rendering the ad space on the news site's top page worthless, and enriching the ad space on Google News's top page. Trust me, people are going to come around to this.
2. The publishers get extra traffic through the Google index and they can leverage that to generate revenue.
As I said in my first post, for small publishers this makes sense. For someone like AOL, that does not need distribution, brand name enhancement, or exposure for sites like SportsIllustrated.com and Time.com, it is a losing proposition, as they compete with Google for ad dollars. Over time content the web will be centralized, and those megacorps will not be sending big bucks on acquisitions just to share and share alike.
Any content provider that tries to charge Google (or any other index) for spidering/linking rights will be attempting to unbalance the value-exchange and they'll ultimately fail.
So the WSJ will fail? So Consumer Reports will fail? Basically you are saying that anyone who charges for content is doomed, yet the numbers show that the sites that charge access are among those that have respectable profitability.
I mean, lets not be naive, content on the web is not getting more free over time. Many major content owners like AOL and Knight Ridder are getting ready to put a price tag on access as soon as they think they can get away with it. If they charge for a magazine or newspaper, why would they not eventually do the same with web content?
BZZZT!!! - Yahoo bought and paid for those feeds. Yahoo has permission to publish them.
In fact, if I had a special-interest paper or magazine, I would even consider paying Google news, a-la AdWords, for right-column listings. For example, the Wall Street Journal would presumably love to show up on all Google news searches for "NASDAQ."
First, the WSJ is zealous about protecting its content. THey already have an established brand - they don't need Google to get the word out. If you want to read the WSJ online, you pay, no exceptions. This is why they are one of the only profitable web publishers.
Now to your earlier point - for a small zine, being in Google would be beneficial, as the distribution and exposure is worth it even if you don't control the browse experience. For a large content owner like AOL, it is definitely not worth it. Google is a competitor to AOL in some regards, particularly for online ad dollars. You don't subsidize your competitors. Since Tme.com and other well known AOL sites don't need the exposure of Google, their inclusion in Google News is almost surely a long term loss for AOL, particularly if they lose surfers to Google News for good.
think your comment is perhaps more applicable to Yahoo. Whatever they pay a newspaper for the feed (or Reuters etc), the content provider isn't getting anything else, except maybe a byline and a logo.
Uhhh, you don't know how Reuters works. That is their business - providing data to end user services. Every newspaper, radio station, website, etc. uses Reuters and AP to get their national and international news.
Lets say you run TheFooBarTimes.com. You publish stories that are linked in Google news. Over time your users start using Google News instead of logging in to TheFooBarTimes.com top page. You are no longer in control of the browsing experience - in fact your browsing in mixed in with every other news site and managed by Google.
Added to which, the ad space on your index page/top page is now worthless as no one goes there anymore. Ad space on the top page of Google News continues to sell briskly, thanks to your hard work in generating all of the free content which they copy and control.
Over time that will change. As content ownership consolidates, these companies will be loathe to subsidize Google's ad business by providing them with free content. Look at Google News. Really, how long can they expect their crawler to be allowed to copy content? In this sense all Google is doing is stealing content someone somewhere paid for, Reuters feeds aren't free folks. For now thats fine, the stakes are low. As soon as Google News actually competes as a news site, their crawler won't be allowed in.
I would not be surprised to see major content owners to charge access to crawlers in the future. Why not? If users are charged, so should crawlers. In fact the crawler should be charged more, as they are basically getting a copy to redistribute it to many users, not just to be viewed by one.
In the next few years, as ownership and access to content become critical issues for the bottom line, Google may find itself facing a toll both instead of a robots.txt file.
In three or four years I would not be surprised if site access fees amount ot roughly the same as people pay for cable and/or cell phone services on a monthly basis.
Also, once access to content is charged, crawlers like Google can forget about mirroring sites for free, unless the webmaster sees it in their best interest, which it won't be for the biggest players who don't like their competition mirroring their content.
(No need for a hundred other people to tell me it is not an emulator)
Taken to its logical extreme, it appears that these guys would create a de facto x86 OSX. What would be missing? Obviously the OSX UI (could easily be cloned)...and some multimedia stuff. What else?
Maybe you get those sorts of dependencies in the code you write; I don't.
No, what you get is a nonstandard, substandard string implementation class (assuming you are actually using C++ and not just using char arrays).
What is the change in the resulting binary? Thats all that matters. Over time, as you code in more and more of the standard string class into your own class (and doing so poorly), you will end up with a larger, more inefficient version of what you could have used from day one for free.
Or, even if you have crafted the ultimate string package with no flaws at all (doubtful), it cost someone somewhere something for you to do this, and the added value to the final product was probably zilch. If it was just about keeping the binary small you would have never used C++ in the first place.
Who are these people? I don't know anyone who is a language guru who is not otherwise intelligent and versed in at least some of the conceptual stuff. For example, to be an STL guru you will have to dabble into some complexity analysis. I think you concerns are misplaced.
Ah yes, I meet guys like you all the time. Convinced they can recode the STL better themselves, the lower bounds proofs not withstanding.
Out of incompetence, they pull in a megabyte of library code, deal with dozens of bugs in "standard" library code, and try to keep several APIs in sync for something that could easily be done in a few dozen lines of code.
Now you're using a straw man. What are these multi-megabyte libraries? You are referring to cross dependencies that pull in unnecessary code - these sympton usually appear more in hairy locally-crafted libs, and rarely appear in standard libs. This is but another reason people use standard libs.
You're right- there is too much focus on mumbo jumbo theory and little emphasis on knowing tools. If everyone reused the standard APIs in an intelligent way instead of redesigning them incorrectly, they might actually get some code out the door.
These indivduals are at different skill, and hence, WAGE levels. You pay for talent. So you wouldn't be an employer for very long, because your strategy appears to be that wage is not an issue.
Also, if the work is tedious, your highly skilled multi-talented engineer will likely leave or become insanely bored and actually produce less.
In any case, you are vastly oversimplifying.
Becoming a language guru will inevitably involve deeper issues anyway, as true language gurus often delve into the implementation tools (compilers, VMs) for their given language.
"Big thinkers" on the other hand, tend to be just that. Lots of talk and little action. The bottom line is that you are trying to push out code to make money.