Depends on the context. If you're asked in a context where you should answer and you leave something out, yes. But if you're not even asked, you don't typcially have an obligation to volunteer information.
Cite? I've looked and other than Alexander's recent statements to Congress, I don't see any lies. It's possible they've been lying in closed-door sessions for years, but we have no evidence of that.
If interviewers are just looking for answers, then I agree they're wasting everyone's time and learning nothing of substance.
And that's where the age bias comes in.
This I can't agree with -- and note that I'm 45. There's no reason experienced programmers can't or shouldn't be up on their mergesort implementation, and shouldn't be just as quick with the academic solution if that's being requested (though if there is an obvious "academic solution", the question isn't a very good one). The fact that an experienced engineer can also offer alternatives that may be better for various circumstances should give them a leg up.
Seriously...if I have to take another test checking my ability to O(N) a problem, I'm gonna scream. I've been living in ginormous game engines for 6 years, and the amount of times I've had to, in the span of a timed half an hour, optimize a routine to make sure it was running in the optimal time has been....zero.
I'm a firm believer in those sorts of interview questions... and they have nothing to do with O(N). They're just a convenient way to see how the candidate responds when given an underspecified, mildly-complex problem to think their way through -- but a problem that can fit within the time constraints of an interview. It's definitely not ideal, but I think it provides a lot more insight into the candidate's problem solving skills, mental agility and the attitude with which they approach problems than anything else short of a two-month trial employment, which neither side can afford.
to the public, when the Snowden documents show they've been lying for years.
Not to argue your fundamental point, but AFAICT they haven't been lying for years they've been saying nothing for years. They have lied recently, though, and internally they've been using carefully-crafted definitions to interpret the law in ways that allowed them to convince themselves they were obeying it. So, in essence they've been fooling themselves for year, but not actually lying to the public because they haven't been saying anything to the public.
So hobbyists in the electronics business have never heard or seen fluke?
Of course not. However, hobbyists in the electronics business likely don't know that Fluke's yellow-and-gray color scheme is trademarked -- for that matter, who would have thought that any multimeter color scheme was trademarked? The damned things almost all look alike anyway; brand names are trademarks, not colors.
And if you think Sparkfun has any interest whatsoever in fooling people that their stuff is made by Fluke or anyone else, you really don't know anything at all about the company. They tried to provide a student-grade digital multimeter at the very lowest price they could, and they picked some reasonable colors for it, full stop.
They knew EXACTLY what they were doing.
You have a rather bizarre way of understanding a statement which says exactly the opposite. The comment you quoted implies, essentially, that Sparkfun made their multimeter yellow because digital multimeters are yellow.
UI? The UI that you know is better than one you don't- always.
Hyperbole much?
The UI you know definitely has an enormous advantage in short-term productivity. Longer-term... it depends on features and workflow.
That's if you're working by yourself. If you're working with others, using the same stuff as your colleagues will likely have an even bigger impact. I just started working on Android and the fact that most of my colleagues are using Android Studio will almost certainly make it a better choice for me even though I've used Eclipse since before IBM released it publicly.
Not to mention I find it nearly IMPOSSIBLE a company that's getting into the multimeter business
I'm guessing you don't know who Sparkfun is, but they're not in the multimeter business. They're in the hobbyist electronics business, or perhaps even more in the hobbyist electronics education business. If you talk to any of them (I know a couple), they very much view themselves as educators and facilitators of education, focused on making electronic engineering widely accessible and fun. Yes, they sell stuff, but that's because without revenue they can't achieve their main goals.
I have no, zero, nada idea what's being discussed here. Am I the only un-enlightened person on/. and it has been the latest craze and buzz and just I'm so far out of the loop that I have never ever heard of it?
Latest craze and buzz? No, Enlightenment was pretty popular about the time you registered your slashdot account. Wayland has been in the works for years now, too.
But if you are big person, like Viacom, or any other multinational 'content creator', you get to be part of a private arrangement with Google, where Google will automatically flag content it thinks belongs to you, and at your option, will take it down or put up ads and give you all the revenue automatically.
That has nothing to do with whether or not you're a "big person". It has to do with the amount of content you own. Unless you own tens of thousands of videos it's just not worth setting up that sort of arrangement.
And if the person complains, you get to decide if the person has a valid complaint.
Cite? AFAIK, if the uploader files a counter-notice, Google puts the video back up and the uploader and notice-filer get to fight it out in court. Granted that individuals are at a serious disadvantage when it comes to fighting multinationals in court, but that's hardly Google's fault.
Microsoft guy wins turing award. Nerds snicker and claim bribery.
Nerds referred to LaTex, which he wrote. Heads asplode.
He also wrote numerous papers that provide the foundations for much of the sophisticated distributed computing infrastructure we have today. For example, he created the Paxos algorithm, which describes an effective and fairly efficient approach for achieving a consensus view of shared state among a network of distributed processes. The concepts from Paxos -- and AFAIK the actual algorithm family -- is the technology underlying all of the massively-scalable distributed databases. It provides the mechanism for achieving eventual consistency while not stopping the world to synchronize.
In particular, huge chunks of fundamental system architecture at Google are based on Paxos. Not all NoSQL data stores take this approach, but all that don't have some fundamental limitations on scalability because without a distributed consensus protocol they have to introduce bottlenecks.
Of course, I think most of his really influential work was done before he went to Microsoft.
Some of us remember when storage manufacturers still used the correct definition of kilobytes and megabytes.
No, you don't.
The earliest mass storage devices all used powers of 10 definitions, just like hard drives do today. With very few exceptions that was the consistent approach up until the introduction of the floppy disk. When 8" floppies hit the market, IBM stuck with powers of 10, but DEC began using powers of two. When 5.25" floppies showed up all of the manufacturers -- including IBM -- had shifted to powers of two. This made sense because they all had sector sizes that were powers of two.
But then came 3.5" floppies. The double density disks stuck with nice powers of two -- 320 KB, 640 KB and 720 KB were 320*1024, 640*1024 and 720*1024, respectively. But then came high density, starting with the "1.44 MB" disk, which actually had 1.44 * 1000 * 1024 bytes. The 2.88 MB disk followed this same bizarre pattern.
Meanwhile, hard disk drives continued consistently using powers of 10, though almost always with a little rounding.
So, no, you don't remember when storage manufacturers used "the correct definition", unless by "correct definition" you mean the same one used today, and you're talking specifically about HDDs.
BTW, RAM wasn't always consistently measured with powers of two either. Various manufacturers made different choices. They eventually all settled on powers of two because otherwise they couldn't fully utilize the address lines. If you have 1000 words of memory you still need 10 address lines to address them all, so you might as well have 1024 words. The same applies to chip-based storage like flash and EEPROM, but not to the mechanical systems of spinning disks.
they are tied to a country which government can require them to put backdoors in software and hardware, and not to tell anyone about that
Can they? I haven't seen, or even heard of, any provision of the PATRIOT act, Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, Electronic Communications Privacy Act, Fair Credit Reporting Act or Financial Privacy Act (the latter three all authorize use of NSLs), or any other law that would enable the government to demand back doors. The law does require companies to hand over specific user data when requested through the appropriate process, and depending on the law used and the procedure followed can also include a gag order, but that's an after-the-fact thing. The Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act requires telecommunications carriers to build infrastructure for wiretaps, but I don't see anything in there that would affect anyone other than carriers and ISPs.
I'm not going to say that the legal authority you're claiming doesn't exist, or that the government might not be able to leverage contracts or other relationships to force it regardless of actual legal authority, but I also wouldn't just blandly assert it the way you do. It's an open question what the government can and cannot make companies do.
Going into debt for college is EASY. There's no need to "figure out a way to do it". You sign the loan papers and take the classes.
On the other hand it's not actually that hard to go to college without going into debt. Yeah, you'll probably have to go to a smaller, less well-known school, and you'll probably have to take an extra year or so to get your degree because you'll need to reduce your hours a bit so you can hold down a part time job. And that's if you aren't capable of getting a scholarship -- and they're actually not that hard to come by.
Personally, I went to a podunk school, worked part time in various jobs (mostly at the university, because they were more flexible), kept my grades up so I could get year-at-a-time tuition waivers and joined the US Air Force Reserves so I could get GI Bill money. By the time I graduated I had saved up a few thousand dollars and bought a car. Could I have been more successful in some way if I'd buried myself in debt to attend Stanford? Possibly. But it's worked out fine, and I haven't had a huge bill hanging over my head. It's a better approach.
Yeah, it was more a case of trying to attack a weak spot. They knew MS was doing all kinds of anticompetitive stuff, but thought the browser bit was an easy target. In actuality, I think the bundling prosecution poisoned the well for the possibility of prosecuting for the real problems.
Based on what you're saying, it seems very possible to me that there are ranges at which the transponder signal can be receive but the skin paint has not.
Signals in both directions will attenuate according to the normal square-of-distance law. Suppose that the aircraft is at a distance from the radar such that the signal is attenuated to just below the detection threshold. That is the radar can not get a skin paint -- but barely. However, the strength of the radar signal that strikes the aircraft at that range is 4X (in an ideal world; in reality its probably even higher) the strength of the signal that arrives back at the radar receiver. This is because doubling the distance (which assumes perfect reflection; in reality it's not quite that good) will quarter the power.
Therefore, the transponder can very likely detect the incoming radar signal -- and respond to it -- at ranges beyond which the radar can get a skin paint, since it receives 4X as much power.
The question, then, is whether the transponder replies with greater energy than the reflection at those long ranges. If so, then there is a zone in which the transponder signal can be detected but the skin paint cannot. Turning off the transponder in that zone would make the plane instantly and completely disappear from radar.
It has been "in progress" for so long that stationary might be a better term.
Did you look at the link? The last update was in January, and described the current status as depending only on one other piece to be ready for launch.
I see. I wouldn't be surprised if this is the root of the problem. They have conflated a web-browser with an OS. No good will come from it except an unfocussed bloated browser and an anaemic OS.
i) They don't fix the appalling font rendering issues on Windows promptly and as a priority. Most of Google's own web fonts are unusable in production because of this.
I haven't used Windows since about 2000, so I have no comment on this. I will point out that it appears work is in progress: https://code.google.com/p/chro...
ii) They don't follow standard most-recently-used order when ctrl-tab between tabs and they don't see the problem and close any bug report as won't fix.
I disagree with this one. The Chrome tab ordering is better. most-recently-used sucks when you have 20 tabs and have bounced around between them somewhat randomly (as is normal). It makes ctrl-tab completely unpredictable unless you're just jumping back one or two levels. The Chrome way is better.
iii) They start adding animations to html elements you can't restyle with CSS e.g. the zoom ease-in they added to select elements in a recent Chrome.
Got a link to more information? I'm not sure what you're referring to.
There were wide-spread issues on their recent releases. You can only auto-update if you are rock-solid.
Link? I certainly never noticed any issues, but perhaps that's -- again -- because I don't use Windows.
v) They fork from the web-kit project, a once high-point in cross company collaboration for the betterment of the web. Now... beginning of the end.
Nonsense. There is still cross-collaboration between Blink and Webkit, and Google isn't the only company working on Blink.
I also fundamentally disagree with the common/. meme that forks are bad. There is this mistaken notion that having all of the developers interested in a certain space collaborating on one implementation will improve the pace of development, but that view ignores the fact that software engineering isn't like ditch-digging; with software there are definitely diminishing returns on larger and larger collaborative groups, particularly if the software isn't of a sort that lends itself to crisp, well-separated modules. In practice, we tend to find that with sufficiently-important spaces (e.g. web browsers) the ecosystem is better-served by friendly competition among open source projects. That reduces the amount of inter-group communication needed to reach consensus on approaches and therefore increases the speed of iteration. The fact that all are open source means that when one project implements a great new idea the others can see the details of the implementation and more easily incorporate the idea, even if they can't actually use the implementation.
I think the "we should all work on one implementation" theory has basically the same merits as the old Soviet one-gigantic-factory model for production of goods. On the face of it one would think that producing many different designs for one type of product and then building all of them in separate production facilities, distributed through different distribution networks, etc., is very inefficient. One design, one huge factory to maximize economies of scale should be better, right? But history showed that the opposite is true, that a competitive market produces more goods, better goods and does it at a lower cost. The issues in software are different, but at a high level the emergent properties are similar.
vi) And now they are going to spend their time re-implementing a cross-platform widget toolkit.
They already implemented it. It's been used in ChromeOS for a while. My guess is that they've decided it will take less engineer effort to port and maintain Aura than to keep up with Gtk+. I also wouldn't be surprised if a goal isn't to remove some unused cruft from Chrome on platforms (like Windows) that don't tend to have Gtk+ libs lying around. I doubt Chrome uses more than a tiny fraction of the Gtk+ functionality.
Investing money in securities is typically about as useful to the economy as stuffing it in a mattress.
Umm, no.
When I buy $100 in Google stock, that money just vanishes as far as the economy is concerned (well, modulo the 30% broker fee, of course)
Again, this is wrong. For one thing, note that broker fees are on the order of fractions of a percent, not 30%.
When you buy Google stock from Google (i.e. during an IPO or subsequent public offering), that money goes to the company so that it can invest the cash in growth -- that means buying equipment, facilities, real estate, hiring and paying employees, etc. That money is most definitely in circulation.
Of course Google isn't selling stock right now because it has plenty of cash to fund growth and doesn't need to raise capital. So if you buy Google stock right now, you're buying it from someone else who bought it from Google (or from someone who did; the chain can be arbitrarily long). But the point is that you're buying it from someone. As it happens, I just sold a non-trivial (for me) chunk of Google stock; there's a check waiting at home for me which I'm going to spend on building a house (well, on covering some of the early incidentals; I'll get a loan for the bulk of it). That money will buy building materials, pay constructor workers, etc. That money is also definitely in circulation.
But what if you buy your stock from a big investment firm rather than from someone like me? Is it out of circulation then? Nope. The investment bank will take your cash and put it into something else... something, in fact, that it believes will be more productive than Google. At least that's true of the value-investing portion of the investment industry, obviously there are other segments that focus on arbitrage. The money managed by those segments is more debatable, but they do contribute significantly to liquidity, which translates to your ability to buy or sell Google stock on a whim.
There are some issues with the velocity of money in the US, which is a measure of how quickly it circulates. It's at the lowest point in decades. The fed has been pumping massive amounts of new money into the system, and it's not helping. I'm not enough of an economist to really understand the issues here, but the most sensible explanation I've seen is that circulation is reduced because people are using the money to pay down debt. We had a massive explosion of velocity fueled by an extravagant credit boom, but it was unsustainable. That unsustainability was a big part of the housing crash and the recession, but we still have excessive debt and the correction isn't over yet, so velocity stays low.
Slashdot Mirror
Lying by omission is still lying.
Depends on the context. If you're asked in a context where you should answer and you leave something out, yes. But if you're not even asked, you don't typcially have an obligation to volunteer information.
um, no. Actually they have been lying for years.
Cite? I've looked and other than Alexander's recent statements to Congress, I don't see any lies. It's possible they've been lying in closed-door sessions for years, but we have no evidence of that.
If interviewers are just looking for answers, then I agree they're wasting everyone's time and learning nothing of substance.
And that's where the age bias comes in.
This I can't agree with -- and note that I'm 45. There's no reason experienced programmers can't or shouldn't be up on their mergesort implementation, and shouldn't be just as quick with the academic solution if that's being requested (though if there is an obvious "academic solution", the question isn't a very good one). The fact that an experienced engineer can also offer alternatives that may be better for various circumstances should give them a leg up.
Seriously...if I have to take another test checking my ability to O(N) a problem, I'm gonna scream. I've been living in ginormous game engines for 6 years, and the amount of times I've had to, in the span of a timed half an hour, optimize a routine to make sure it was running in the optimal time has been....zero.
I'm a firm believer in those sorts of interview questions... and they have nothing to do with O(N). They're just a convenient way to see how the candidate responds when given an underspecified, mildly-complex problem to think their way through -- but a problem that can fit within the time constraints of an interview. It's definitely not ideal, but I think it provides a lot more insight into the candidate's problem solving skills, mental agility and the attitude with which they approach problems than anything else short of a two-month trial employment, which neither side can afford.
to the public, when the Snowden documents show they've been lying for years.
Not to argue your fundamental point, but AFAICT they haven't been lying for years they've been saying nothing for years. They have lied recently, though, and internally they've been using carefully-crafted definitions to interpret the law in ways that allowed them to convince themselves they were obeying it. So, in essence they've been fooling themselves for year, but not actually lying to the public because they haven't been saying anything to the public.
So hobbyists in the electronics business have never heard or seen fluke?
Of course not. However, hobbyists in the electronics business likely don't know that Fluke's yellow-and-gray color scheme is trademarked -- for that matter, who would have thought that any multimeter color scheme was trademarked? The damned things almost all look alike anyway; brand names are trademarks, not colors.
And if you think Sparkfun has any interest whatsoever in fooling people that their stuff is made by Fluke or anyone else, you really don't know anything at all about the company. They tried to provide a student-grade digital multimeter at the very lowest price they could, and they picked some reasonable colors for it, full stop.
They knew EXACTLY what they were doing.
You have a rather bizarre way of understanding a statement which says exactly the opposite. The comment you quoted implies, essentially, that Sparkfun made their multimeter yellow because digital multimeters are yellow.
UI? The UI that you know is better than one you don't- always.
Hyperbole much?
The UI you know definitely has an enormous advantage in short-term productivity. Longer-term... it depends on features and workflow.
That's if you're working by yourself. If you're working with others, using the same stuff as your colleagues will likely have an even bigger impact. I just started working on Android and the fact that most of my colleagues are using Android Studio will almost certainly make it a better choice for me even though I've used Eclipse since before IBM released it publicly.
Not to mention I find it nearly IMPOSSIBLE a company that's getting into the multimeter business
I'm guessing you don't know who Sparkfun is, but they're not in the multimeter business. They're in the hobbyist electronics business, or perhaps even more in the hobbyist electronics education business. If you talk to any of them (I know a couple), they very much view themselves as educators and facilitators of education, focused on making electronic engineering widely accessible and fun. Yes, they sell stuff, but that's because without revenue they can't achieve their main goals.
Enlightenment was all the rage when I register MY slashdot account.
Well, that was only a couple of years before Opportunist registered his.
I have no, zero, nada idea what's being discussed here. Am I the only un-enlightened person on /. and it has been the latest craze and buzz and just I'm so far out of the loop that I have never ever heard of it?
Latest craze and buzz? No, Enlightenment was pretty popular about the time you registered your slashdot account. Wayland has been in the works for years now, too.
But if you are big person, like Viacom, or any other multinational 'content creator', you get to be part of a private arrangement with Google, where Google will automatically flag content it thinks belongs to you, and at your option, will take it down or put up ads and give you all the revenue automatically.
That has nothing to do with whether or not you're a "big person". It has to do with the amount of content you own. Unless you own tens of thousands of videos it's just not worth setting up that sort of arrangement.
And if the person complains, you get to decide if the person has a valid complaint.
Cite? AFAIK, if the uploader files a counter-notice, Google puts the video back up and the uploader and notice-filer get to fight it out in court. Granted that individuals are at a serious disadvantage when it comes to fighting multinationals in court, but that's hardly Google's fault.
Microsoft guy wins turing award. Nerds snicker and claim bribery.
Nerds referred to LaTex, which he wrote. Heads asplode.
He also wrote numerous papers that provide the foundations for much of the sophisticated distributed computing infrastructure we have today. For example, he created the Paxos algorithm, which describes an effective and fairly efficient approach for achieving a consensus view of shared state among a network of distributed processes. The concepts from Paxos -- and AFAIK the actual algorithm family -- is the technology underlying all of the massively-scalable distributed databases. It provides the mechanism for achieving eventual consistency while not stopping the world to synchronize.
In particular, huge chunks of fundamental system architecture at Google are based on Paxos. Not all NoSQL data stores take this approach, but all that don't have some fundamental limitations on scalability because without a distributed consensus protocol they have to introduce bottlenecks.
Of course, I think most of his really influential work was done before he went to Microsoft.
I am working on a 80 000 lines long Java web application in the last 15 years.
So... a part-time task for a single developer. It's not surprising a trivial app has few problems.
Some of us remember when storage manufacturers still used the correct definition of kilobytes and megabytes.
No, you don't.
The earliest mass storage devices all used powers of 10 definitions, just like hard drives do today. With very few exceptions that was the consistent approach up until the introduction of the floppy disk. When 8" floppies hit the market, IBM stuck with powers of 10, but DEC began using powers of two. When 5.25" floppies showed up all of the manufacturers -- including IBM -- had shifted to powers of two. This made sense because they all had sector sizes that were powers of two.
But then came 3.5" floppies. The double density disks stuck with nice powers of two -- 320 KB, 640 KB and 720 KB were 320*1024, 640*1024 and 720*1024, respectively. But then came high density, starting with the "1.44 MB" disk, which actually had 1.44 * 1000 * 1024 bytes. The 2.88 MB disk followed this same bizarre pattern.
Meanwhile, hard disk drives continued consistently using powers of 10, though almost always with a little rounding.
So, no, you don't remember when storage manufacturers used "the correct definition", unless by "correct definition" you mean the same one used today, and you're talking specifically about HDDs.
BTW, RAM wasn't always consistently measured with powers of two either. Various manufacturers made different choices. They eventually all settled on powers of two because otherwise they couldn't fully utilize the address lines. If you have 1000 words of memory you still need 10 address lines to address them all, so you might as well have 1024 words. The same applies to chip-based storage like flash and EEPROM, but not to the mechanical systems of spinning disks.
they are tied to a country which government can require them to put backdoors in software and hardware, and not to tell anyone about that
Can they? I haven't seen, or even heard of, any provision of the PATRIOT act, Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, Electronic Communications Privacy Act, Fair Credit Reporting Act or Financial Privacy Act (the latter three all authorize use of NSLs), or any other law that would enable the government to demand back doors. The law does require companies to hand over specific user data when requested through the appropriate process, and depending on the law used and the procedure followed can also include a gag order, but that's an after-the-fact thing. The Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act requires telecommunications carriers to build infrastructure for wiretaps, but I don't see anything in there that would affect anyone other than carriers and ISPs.
I'm not going to say that the legal authority you're claiming doesn't exist, or that the government might not be able to leverage contracts or other relationships to force it regardless of actual legal authority, but I also wouldn't just blandly assert it the way you do. It's an open question what the government can and cannot make companies do.
Going into debt for college is EASY. There's no need to "figure out a way to do it". You sign the loan papers and take the classes.
On the other hand it's not actually that hard to go to college without going into debt. Yeah, you'll probably have to go to a smaller, less well-known school, and you'll probably have to take an extra year or so to get your degree because you'll need to reduce your hours a bit so you can hold down a part time job. And that's if you aren't capable of getting a scholarship -- and they're actually not that hard to come by.
Personally, I went to a podunk school, worked part time in various jobs (mostly at the university, because they were more flexible), kept my grades up so I could get year-at-a-time tuition waivers and joined the US Air Force Reserves so I could get GI Bill money. By the time I graduated I had saved up a few thousand dollars and bought a car. Could I have been more successful in some way if I'd buried myself in debt to attend Stanford? Possibly. But it's worked out fine, and I haven't had a huge bill hanging over my head. It's a better approach.
That makes sense.
Yeah, it was more a case of trying to attack a weak spot. They knew MS was doing all kinds of anticompetitive stuff, but thought the browser bit was an easy target. In actuality, I think the bundling prosecution poisoned the well for the possibility of prosecuting for the real problems.
Based on what you're saying, it seems very possible to me that there are ranges at which the transponder signal can be receive but the skin paint has not.
Signals in both directions will attenuate according to the normal square-of-distance law. Suppose that the aircraft is at a distance from the radar such that the signal is attenuated to just below the detection threshold. That is the radar can not get a skin paint -- but barely. However, the strength of the radar signal that strikes the aircraft at that range is 4X (in an ideal world; in reality its probably even higher) the strength of the signal that arrives back at the radar receiver. This is because doubling the distance (which assumes perfect reflection; in reality it's not quite that good) will quarter the power.
Therefore, the transponder can very likely detect the incoming radar signal -- and respond to it -- at ranges beyond which the radar can get a skin paint, since it receives 4X as much power.
The question, then, is whether the transponder replies with greater energy than the reflection at those long ranges. If so, then there is a zone in which the transponder signal can be detected but the skin paint cannot. Turning off the transponder in that zone would make the plane instantly and completely disappear from radar.
So the transponder doesn't use aircraft power to increase the strength of the response?
It has been "in progress" for so long that stationary might be a better term.
Did you look at the link? The last update was in January, and described the current status as depending only on one other piece to be ready for launch.
I see. I wouldn't be surprised if this is the root of the problem. They have conflated a web-browser with an OS. No good will come from it except an unfocussed bloated browser and an anaemic OS.
I can see you've never used it.
i) They don't fix the appalling font rendering issues on Windows promptly and as a priority. Most of Google's own web fonts are unusable in production because of this.
I haven't used Windows since about 2000, so I have no comment on this. I will point out that it appears work is in progress: https://code.google.com/p/chro...
ii) They don't follow standard most-recently-used order when ctrl-tab between tabs and they don't see the problem and close any bug report as won't fix.
I disagree with this one. The Chrome tab ordering is better. most-recently-used sucks when you have 20 tabs and have bounced around between them somewhat randomly (as is normal). It makes ctrl-tab completely unpredictable unless you're just jumping back one or two levels. The Chrome way is better.
iii) They start adding animations to html elements you can't restyle with CSS e.g. the zoom ease-in they added to select elements in a recent Chrome.
Got a link to more information? I'm not sure what you're referring to.
There were wide-spread issues on their recent releases. You can only auto-update if you are rock-solid.
Link? I certainly never noticed any issues, but perhaps that's -- again -- because I don't use Windows.
v) They fork from the web-kit project, a once high-point in cross company collaboration for the betterment of the web. Now... beginning of the end.
Nonsense. There is still cross-collaboration between Blink and Webkit, and Google isn't the only company working on Blink.
I also fundamentally disagree with the common /. meme that forks are bad. There is this mistaken notion that having all of the developers interested in a certain space collaborating on one implementation will improve the pace of development, but that view ignores the fact that software engineering isn't like ditch-digging; with software there are definitely diminishing returns on larger and larger collaborative groups, particularly if the software isn't of a sort that lends itself to crisp, well-separated modules. In practice, we tend to find that with sufficiently-important spaces (e.g. web browsers) the ecosystem is better-served by friendly competition among open source projects. That reduces the amount of inter-group communication needed to reach consensus on approaches and therefore increases the speed of iteration. The fact that all are open source means that when one project implements a great new idea the others can see the details of the implementation and more easily incorporate the idea, even if they can't actually use the implementation.
I think the "we should all work on one implementation" theory has basically the same merits as the old Soviet one-gigantic-factory model for production of goods. On the face of it one would think that producing many different designs for one type of product and then building all of them in separate production facilities, distributed through different distribution networks, etc., is very inefficient. One design, one huge factory to maximize economies of scale should be better, right? But history showed that the opposite is true, that a competitive market produces more goods, better goods and does it at a lower cost. The issues in software are different, but at a high level the emergent properties are similar.
vi) And now they are going to spend their time re-implementing a cross-platform widget toolkit.
They already implemented it. It's been used in ChromeOS for a while. My guess is that they've decided it will take less engineer effort to port and maintain Aura than to keep up with Gtk+. I also wouldn't be surprised if a goal isn't to remove some unused cruft from Chrome on platforms (like Windows) that don't tend to have Gtk+ libs lying around. I doubt Chrome uses more than a tiny fraction of the Gtk+ functionality.
The whole browser argument was a red herring. Microsoft's real anti-competitive practices were in its OEM contracts.
- why don't we just let the free market do what it always does, eliminates bad products.
Yeah, that really worked well with Microsoft.
It is working. A decade or two slower than would be ideal, but it is working.
Investing money in securities is typically about as useful to the economy as stuffing it in a mattress.
Umm, no.
When I buy $100 in Google stock, that money just vanishes as far as the economy is concerned (well, modulo the 30% broker fee, of course)
Again, this is wrong. For one thing, note that broker fees are on the order of fractions of a percent, not 30%.
When you buy Google stock from Google (i.e. during an IPO or subsequent public offering), that money goes to the company so that it can invest the cash in growth -- that means buying equipment, facilities, real estate, hiring and paying employees, etc. That money is most definitely in circulation.
Of course Google isn't selling stock right now because it has plenty of cash to fund growth and doesn't need to raise capital. So if you buy Google stock right now, you're buying it from someone else who bought it from Google (or from someone who did; the chain can be arbitrarily long). But the point is that you're buying it from someone. As it happens, I just sold a non-trivial (for me) chunk of Google stock; there's a check waiting at home for me which I'm going to spend on building a house (well, on covering some of the early incidentals; I'll get a loan for the bulk of it). That money will buy building materials, pay constructor workers, etc. That money is also definitely in circulation.
But what if you buy your stock from a big investment firm rather than from someone like me? Is it out of circulation then? Nope. The investment bank will take your cash and put it into something else... something, in fact, that it believes will be more productive than Google. At least that's true of the value-investing portion of the investment industry, obviously there are other segments that focus on arbitrage. The money managed by those segments is more debatable, but they do contribute significantly to liquidity, which translates to your ability to buy or sell Google stock on a whim.
There are some issues with the velocity of money in the US, which is a measure of how quickly it circulates. It's at the lowest point in decades. The fed has been pumping massive amounts of new money into the system, and it's not helping. I'm not enough of an economist to really understand the issues here, but the most sensible explanation I've seen is that circulation is reduced because people are using the money to pay down debt. We had a massive explosion of velocity fueled by an extravagant credit boom, but it was unsustainable. That unsustainability was a big part of the housing crash and the recession, but we still have excessive debt and the correction isn't over yet, so velocity stays low.