1. An overload of customers they cannot handle especially right before the coupon is set to expire from it's inflated value.
There isn't a business in this world that has ever (seriously) complained about having too many customers.
2. Coupons are generally used to build customer bases. Because the customers are loyal to Groupon, they aren't interested in the restaurant itself, just the deal they got from Groupon. Thus the advertisement does nothing but give them even less money to make and little to no repeat business.
Anything that gets a customer in the door is a good thing. Every customer that comes through the door is a customer who might become a repeat customer. You could argue over the relative effectiveness of Groupon versus other advertising methods (and advertising is exactly what this is), but to say that Groupon in and of itself has no value (in fact, you imply that it has NEGATIVE value) to a business is ridiculous.
I remember about 10 years ago I was doing a co-op stint at a division of a large company doing a mix of programming and system administration work. At some point, I found myself in the company of the head of the division after having just solved some dinky little problem with his PC. There was another guy in the room at the time and after I worked my magic the division head looks over to the other guy in the room, points to me, and says "Our vo-tech guys really do a great job".
Interesting. I was on vacationing in London 2 years ago and decided to snap some casual photos in the Underground while waiting for my train. A police officer noticed me take the picture and only told me that the use of flash was not permitted. She didn't tell me that I could not take pictures (no tripod was being used).
The type of organizations that want Red Hat Enterprise Linux want it for the support Red Hat offers. Take that away and there's not really any competition.
Which is why any good backup strategy includes moving tapes beyond a certain age off-site. Even so, I don't see your point--are harddrives suddenly impervious to flame?
The number of people who will use linux support as a criterion for deciding which console to buy is going to be so tiny that you're dreaming if you think it's going to have any impact whatsoever.
Trouble is the record companies know this but still keep trying which just makes it harder and more frustrating for the avarage guy/girl who wants to listen to ligit tracks on a mp3 player.
This is true but the problem is that all it takes is ONE knowledgable person to go through the trouble of defeating whatever protection mechanism is in place. After that the cat's out of the bag and all the average Joe's need to do is download. If you think about it, that's really what happens even now. Most of the non-technical people I know would not know how to encode a CD into mp3s but they don't have to because there are more knowledable people out there who do know how and take care of it for them.
I've managed to read slashdot for a good 5 years without making a post like this, but I've had enough. So mod me down! I care not for my karma anyway!
Are you fucking kidding me? Are you so inept and unable to think for yourself that you needed to ask slashdot this question? Do you really have nothing better to do than wonder what the real pen-using pros are using? Are you so stuck in the whole, tired and irritating "geek culture" thing that you need to find a "geek friendly" pen? My god, I'd say it's a slow news day but questions like these have been typical for Ask Slashdot lately.
Oh, what pen do I use? Whatever the hell is on my desk or in the drawer when I need it.
...that would legalize the innocent stumbling upon open wireless networks...
Having not read the article and freely admiting that I could care less about the legality of war-driving (personally I find the concept of going war-driving to be rather pathetic), I have to question the title of this article. I would not define driving around actively seeking open wireless networks and connecting to them as "innocently stumbling upon" them. Guess that's just me.
Useability is something you add on the backend of a product to market it. What they really mean by useability is a nice GUI where you can get a mouse trail going.
No. You obviously know nothing about the subject. Usability is not something you hack onto the backend of a product after all is said and done. If you're serious about designing an application to be highly usable, then the interface becomes a central development point just as important as the actual functionality (perhaps more important because if you can't figure out how to use it and use it well, what good is it?). And to say that usability means just putting together a whizbang fancy GUI is a massive understatement. There is years of research on the human brain and how to best present information to it on which the principles of good GUI design are built. Sure, it's obvious to you now because you've had lots of experience with applications from which you can borrow concepts from, but at some point in the past someone had to ask the question "what is the best way to do this?"
What most people don't realize is that it's not just the "big" things like provide menus at the top of the screen, etc, but also little things that are taken for granted. You probably don't notice them but when they're not there you miss them. Ever used an application that just didn't "feel" right but you couldn't really explain why?
Useability is great in most OSS work, extremely efficient and powerful...it just has a higher learning curve to the uninitiated user
Here you contradict yourself. How can useability be great if the learning curve for a new user is high? Usability is about reducing that learning curve by making the interface intuitive (among other things).
People did not really care about the speed at which they could download from the Net.
Take their broadband away and put them back on a 56k dialup connection again for a few days. I'll bet they'll care. It's not that people don't take about download speeds, its just that broadband users take it for granted after awhile.
Game Theory was created by a John Nash because of its maths, it then changed economics BUT that wasn't why he started thinking about it.
While I agree totally with the rest of your post, I have to point out to you that Nash certainly did not create game theory nor was he the first to apply it to economics. Game theory has roots going back thousands of years in fact. If anyone can be creditted with "creating game theory" it is John von Neumann (and his partner Oskar Morganstern) who did the most to develop the theory as a whole as well as apply it to economics in the early-mid 1900s. John Nash simply made a contribution to the theory (albeit a very important one).
There's a nice timeline of the development of game theory here if you're interested.
You've made the mistake of thinking that computer science = "fixing computers" and programming. That's not what computer science is about. Sure you learn to program but its a means to an end. So tell me, how are you going to analyze the runtime of that new algorithm you just wrote or investigate the efficiency of one data structure over another without algebra? These are just some of the things that computer science is concerned with and let me tell you mathematics and CS are very closely related. Functions, graphs, finite-state machines, etc all existed in the world of mathematics before they were used in the CS world. Equating computer science with programming and fixing computers is like equating an automotive engineer to a mechanic.
Re:Wow, if that's not the definition of "loser" .
on
Pay to Play
·
· Score: 1
I've never played UO, but I played Everquest for a year and eventually opened a second account. The reasons? Well I had two characters, one of which was a cleric. When you die in Everquest you lose experience which, at higher levels, can take hours (of mindnumbing exp groups) to regain. Clerics get a line of spells that can be cast on a corpse that will restore to the player a percentage of the experience lost (50%/90%/96% depending on the level of the spell). Now if I die with my other character, I can't get my cleric on to ressurrect me because that would require both characters to be online. So I fought it worth it to spend an extra $10/month to put my cleric on a second account to save myself hours of experience. So there's one reason to have more than one account.
. Linux also lacks some key features that you'd want for a data center such as hot swappable CPUs and memory.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't this a limitation of the x86 architecture? I know, Linux runs on other architectures where this kind of thing is possible but in the context of competiting with MS we're talking about x86 (NT for Alpha, you say? Does anyone even use that?).
The computers have a real operating system on them (GNOME)
I give this review 1 out of 4 stars on technical accuracy. GNOME is not an OS!
Re:Easy enuf..and talk about Denial
on
'Thirteen Days'
·
· Score: 2
Jon,
I absolutely agree with you that a nuclear weapon is more likely to be used today than it was 30 years ago because of the terrorists and the state of the Russian military. However, I don't think the stakes are as high today (but they're still high enough!). During the Cold War, sides were being taken like a sandlot baseball game and the general attitude was in for a penny, in for a pound. Specifically, if a bomb would fall then all the bombs would fall. Back then, a single nuclear attack would have surely triggered world wide destruction. However, today I think most reasonable leaders know that full scale nuclear war is not in their best interest. As such, the greatest nuclear threat comes mostly from terrorists (until China joins the nuclear powers of course). I just don't see a nuclear attack by a terrorist group kicking off a chain reaction towards world destruction. Sure, such an attack would be very tragic and the victim nation woudl surely be after blood, but I don't think you would see a nuclear retaliation. The trump card here is the Pakistan-India situation. They could end up blowing each other or spark a nuclear arms race in the middle east. However, that hasn't happened yet and we'll just have to wait and see on that one. What happens there could change my opinion.
One question, John. Where are you getting this information from? Where are the studies that backup this behavior? Cite some references. Or have you just pulled all of this out of your head because it fits your agenda? My guess is the latter.
Other's have already defined big-Oh so I wont do that. I'll show you (in a simple case) what it means as far as runtime.
Suppose you have:
for (i=0; i<n; i++) // something that takes 1 second to do;
Assume it takes 1 second to complete each iteration. Now if n=1, runtime=1 sec; if n=2, runtime=2 sec; etc. Thus, the runtime is equal to n*1 or more generally, n*(time to complete one iteration). Thus, this algorithm's runtime is O(n).
Now lets say you have this:
for (i=0; i<n; i++)
for(j=0; j<n; j++) //something that takes 1 second to do;
Let's look at the inner j-loop first. Notice that its identical to the above example that we know to be O(n). However, its enclosed within another loop that iterates n times. So the runtime is (outter loop iterations) * (inner loop iterations) * (time to complete inner loop iteration), thus n * n * 1 which is (n^2) * 1. Thus, this algorithm's runtime is O(n^2).
The important thing to take out of this is how each algorithm's runtime increases as n (or the amount of work) increases. For O(n^2) algorithms even small increases in workload can mean pretty nasty performance hits. Of course, it's even worse for cubic (O(n^3)) algorithms, etc, etc.
I'd love to have a clock like this on my desk at work but I'm not very good at building electronics. Anyone know where I could buy something like this?
Yes, it is a case of free speech. As far as I can tell, ISONews does not distribute any illegal games themserlves. They simply report on what's out there. This is not and should not be a crime. If someone comes up to me on the street and asks if I know where he might find some crack and I tell him that the crackhouse down the street might be a good place to start should I be arrested as a drug dealer?
Warez fascinates me I guess, because people that wouldn't steal anything material - ie wouldn't walk into a shop and steal one of these games, feel totally justified in
downloading them.
Agreed.
don't want to start a fight, I'd just really like to see some other opinions on this. Is it ethical?
It may not be ethical but "ethical" and "legal" are two very different things.
Anyway, the next time you are stressed at work take three deep breaths, hold in the last one and imagine you are behind the counter at McDonalds or perhaps your job is
cleaning the porta-pottys at construction site. Next haul out your last paystub (or whatever) and exhale while reading it. If you still don't feel better, start shopping around
for an organization that will treat you better...
In my experience (and I'm sure many would agree with me), the stress in IT doesn't come from back-breaking work or someone shouting at you for something all day long but from the fact that the stakes are much higher. I worked for a few years as a cook myself and many days when I'm frustrated with a particular project I long for the time when my only work-related worries were sending out a steak medium when the customer ordered a medium-rare. Obviously, the stakes (no pun intended) are higher if you're the head chef in a five-star restaurant, but those positions are rare compared to the number of line cooks in the mom-and-pop restaurants.
Slashdot Mirror
There isn't a business in this world that has ever (seriously) complained about having too many customers.
Anything that gets a customer in the door is a good thing. Every customer that comes through the door is a customer who might become a repeat customer. You could argue over the relative effectiveness of Groupon versus other advertising methods (and advertising is exactly what this is), but to say that Groupon in and of itself has no value (in fact, you imply that it has NEGATIVE value) to a business is ridiculous.
I've got a 2004 Mazda3 and I can tell you that it doesn't have a line-in. I wish.
I remember about 10 years ago I was doing a co-op stint at a division of a large company doing a mix of programming and system administration work. At some point, I found myself in the company of the head of the division after having just solved some dinky little problem with his PC. There was another guy in the room at the time and after I worked my magic the division head looks over to the other guy in the room, points to me, and says "Our vo-tech guys really do a great job".
Interesting. I was on vacationing in London 2 years ago and decided to snap some casual photos in the Underground while waiting for my train. A police officer noticed me take the picture and only told me that the use of flash was not permitted. She didn't tell me that I could not take pictures (no tripod was being used).
Here's to hoping that they don't let Raph Koster anywhere near this game. In fact, can we get a restraining order against him for the entire dev team?
The type of organizations that want Red Hat Enterprise Linux want it for the support Red Hat offers. Take that away and there's not really any competition.
...and I couldn't care less. =)
Which is why any good backup strategy includes moving tapes beyond a certain age off-site. Even so, I don't see your point--are harddrives suddenly impervious to flame?
The number of people who will use linux support as a criterion for deciding which console to buy is going to be so tiny that you're dreaming if you think it's going to have any impact whatsoever.
Trouble is the record companies know this but still keep trying which just makes it harder and more frustrating for the avarage guy/girl who wants to listen to ligit tracks on a mp3 player.
This is true but the problem is that all it takes is ONE knowledgable person to go through the trouble of defeating whatever protection mechanism is in place. After that the cat's out of the bag and all the average Joe's need to do is download. If you think about it, that's really what happens even now. Most of the non-technical people I know would not know how to encode a CD into mp3s but they don't have to because there are more knowledable people out there who do know how and take care of it for them.
I've managed to read slashdot for a good 5 years without making a post like this, but I've had enough. So mod me down! I care not for my karma anyway!
Are you fucking kidding me? Are you so inept and unable to think for yourself that you needed to ask slashdot this question? Do you really have nothing better to do than wonder what the real pen-using pros are using? Are you so stuck in the whole, tired and irritating "geek culture" thing that you need to find a "geek friendly" pen? My god, I'd say it's a slow news day but questions like these have been typical for Ask Slashdot lately.
Oh, what pen do I use? Whatever the hell is on my desk or in the drawer when I need it.
...that would legalize the innocent stumbling upon open wireless networks...
Having not read the article and freely admiting that I could care less about the legality of war-driving (personally I find the concept of going war-driving to be rather pathetic), I have to question the title of this article. I would not define driving around actively seeking open wireless networks and connecting to them as "innocently stumbling upon" them. Guess that's just me.
I suspect this is a troll but i'll bite...
Useability is something you add on the backend of a product to market it. What they really mean by useability is a nice GUI where you can get a mouse trail going.
No. You obviously know nothing about the subject. Usability is not something you hack onto the backend of a product after all is said and done. If you're serious about designing an application to be highly usable, then the interface becomes a central development point just as important as the actual functionality (perhaps more important because if you can't figure out how to use it and use it well, what good is it?). And to say that usability means just putting together a whizbang fancy GUI is a massive understatement. There is years of research on the human brain and how to best present information to it on which the principles of good GUI design are built. Sure, it's obvious to you now because you've had lots of experience with applications from which you can borrow concepts from, but at some point in the past someone had to ask the question "what is the best way to do this?"
What most people don't realize is that it's not just the "big" things like provide menus at the top of the screen, etc, but also little things that are taken for granted. You probably don't notice them but when they're not there you miss them. Ever used an application that just didn't "feel" right but you couldn't really explain why?
Useability is great in most OSS work, extremely efficient and powerful...it just has a higher learning curve to the uninitiated user
Here you contradict yourself. How can useability be great if the learning curve for a new user is high? Usability is about reducing that learning curve by making the interface intuitive (among other things).
People did not really care about the speed at which they could download from the Net.
Take their broadband away and put them back on a 56k dialup connection again for a few days. I'll bet they'll care. It's not that people don't take about download speeds, its just that broadband users take it for granted after awhile.
Game Theory was created by a John Nash because of its maths, it then changed economics BUT that wasn't why he started thinking about it.
While I agree totally with the rest of your post, I have to point out to you that Nash certainly did not create game theory nor was he the first to apply it to economics. Game theory has roots going back thousands of years in fact. If anyone can be creditted with "creating game theory" it is John von Neumann (and his partner Oskar Morganstern) who did the most to develop the theory as a whole as well as apply it to economics in the early-mid 1900s. John Nash simply made a contribution to the theory (albeit a very important one).
There's a nice timeline of the development of game theory here if you're interested.
You've made the mistake of thinking that computer science = "fixing computers" and programming. That's not what computer science is about. Sure you learn to program but its a means to an end. So tell me, how are you going to analyze the runtime of that new algorithm you just wrote or investigate the efficiency of one data structure over another without algebra? These are just some of the things that computer science is concerned with and let me tell you mathematics and CS are very closely related. Functions, graphs, finite-state machines, etc all existed in the world of mathematics before they were used in the CS world. Equating computer science with programming and fixing computers is like equating an automotive engineer to a mechanic.
I've never played UO, but I played Everquest for a year and eventually opened a second account. The reasons? Well I had two characters, one of which was a cleric. When you die in Everquest you lose experience which, at higher levels, can take hours (of mindnumbing exp groups) to regain. Clerics get a line of spells that can be cast on a corpse that will restore to the player a percentage of the experience lost (50%/90%/96% depending on the level of the spell). Now if I die with my other character, I can't get my cleric on to ressurrect me because that would require both characters to be online. So I fought it worth it to spend an extra $10/month to put my cleric on a second account to save myself hours of experience. So there's one reason to have more than one account.
From the article...
. Linux also lacks some key features that you'd want for a data center such as hot swappable CPUs and memory.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't this a limitation of the x86 architecture? I know, Linux runs on other architectures where this kind of thing is possible but in the context of competiting with MS we're talking about x86 (NT for Alpha, you say? Does anyone even use that?).
The computers have a real operating system on them (GNOME)
I give this review 1 out of 4 stars on technical accuracy. GNOME is not an OS!
Jon, I absolutely agree with you that a nuclear weapon is more likely to be used today than it was 30 years ago because of the terrorists and the state of the Russian military. However, I don't think the stakes are as high today (but they're still high enough!). During the Cold War, sides were being taken like a sandlot baseball game and the general attitude was in for a penny, in for a pound. Specifically, if a bomb would fall then all the bombs would fall. Back then, a single nuclear attack would have surely triggered world wide destruction. However, today I think most reasonable leaders know that full scale nuclear war is not in their best interest. As such, the greatest nuclear threat comes mostly from terrorists (until China joins the nuclear powers of course). I just don't see a nuclear attack by a terrorist group kicking off a chain reaction towards world destruction. Sure, such an attack would be very tragic and the victim nation woudl surely be after blood, but I don't think you would see a nuclear retaliation. The trump card here is the Pakistan-India situation. They could end up blowing each other or spark a nuclear arms race in the middle east. However, that hasn't happened yet and we'll just have to wait and see on that one. What happens there could change my opinion.
One question, John. Where are you getting this information from? Where are the studies that backup this behavior? Cite some references. Or have you just pulled all of this out of your head because it fits your agenda? My guess is the latter.
Other's have already defined big-Oh so I wont do that. I'll show you (in a simple case) what it means as far as runtime.
// something that takes 1 second to do;
//something that takes 1 second to do;
Suppose you have:
for (i=0; i<n; i++)
Assume it takes 1 second to complete each iteration. Now if n=1, runtime=1 sec; if n=2, runtime=2 sec; etc. Thus, the runtime is equal to n*1 or more generally, n*(time to complete one iteration). Thus, this algorithm's runtime is O(n).
Now lets say you have this:
for (i=0; i<n; i++)
for(j=0; j<n; j++)
Let's look at the inner j-loop first. Notice that its identical to the above example that we know to be O(n). However, its enclosed within another loop that iterates n times. So the runtime is (outter loop iterations) * (inner loop iterations) * (time to complete inner loop iteration), thus n * n * 1 which is (n^2) * 1. Thus, this algorithm's runtime is O(n^2).
The important thing to take out of this is how each algorithm's runtime increases as n (or the amount of work) increases. For O(n^2) algorithms even small increases in workload can mean pretty nasty performance hits. Of course, it's even worse for cubic (O(n^3)) algorithms, etc, etc.
I'd love to have a clock like this on my desk at work but I'm not very good at building electronics. Anyone know where I could buy something like this?
Question: is it really a case of "free speech"?
Yes, it is a case of free speech. As far as I can tell, ISONews does not distribute any illegal games themserlves. They simply report on what's out there. This is not and should not be a crime. If someone comes up to me on the street and asks if I know where he might find some crack and I tell him that the crackhouse down the street might be a good place to start should I be arrested as a drug dealer?
Warez fascinates me I guess, because people that wouldn't steal anything material - ie wouldn't walk into a shop and steal one of these games, feel totally justified in downloading them.
Agreed.
don't want to start a fight, I'd just really like to see some other opinions on this. Is it ethical?
It may not be ethical but "ethical" and "legal" are two very different things.
Anyway, the next time you are stressed at work take three deep breaths, hold in the last one and imagine you are behind the counter at McDonalds or perhaps your job is cleaning the porta-pottys at construction site. Next haul out your last paystub (or whatever) and exhale while reading it. If you still don't feel better, start shopping around for an organization that will treat you better...
In my experience (and I'm sure many would agree with me), the stress in IT doesn't come from back-breaking work or someone shouting at you for something all day long but from the fact that the stakes are much higher. I worked for a few years as a cook myself and many days when I'm frustrated with a particular project I long for the time when my only work-related worries were sending out a steak medium when the customer ordered a medium-rare. Obviously, the stakes (no pun intended) are higher if you're the head chef in a five-star restaurant, but those positions are rare compared to the number of line cooks in the mom-and-pop restaurants.