Nah, he was overly bombastic, but correct. The confusion is solely caused by the attempts to 'sensibly revise' a perfectly sensible binary numbering scheme. It's an attempt to force a decimal hierarchy on a system that is not decimal... attempting to make reality fit bureaucratic dictates, rather than the other way around.
Except that parts of reality aren't binary.
For example, communication protocols (like this one) are specified in powers-of-10 units because they're based on measuring wireless frequencies, which are measured in powers-of-10 hertz -- in this case, I'm sure that 1.5 Gbps means 1.5E9 bits per second. A 14.4 kbps modem transmitted 14,400 bits per second. A T-1 line transmits 1.54 Mbps, meaning 1,540,000 bits per second -- and note that framing and other overhead bits mean that you can't just divide by 8 to get bytes per second.
In addition, hard disk storage has always been base 10, going back to the very first drives in the early 60s -- during which time RAM was also measured in base 10 units because it wasn't, in fact, in powers of 2, so any power-of-2 measurement would have been an approximation. For example, the IBM 1401 maxed out at 16K bytes (though they weren't called bytes), where 16K meant 16,000, not 16,384. Now, of course, we're gradually moving to flash-based storage, which works more like RAM, for which base 2 sizing works better because base 2 addressing works better.
Floppy disk storage is particularly weird in that it started out with base 2 units and progressed to a weird amalgamation of base 2 and base 10. A "360 KB" floppy held exactly 360 * 1024 bytes, but a "1.44 MB" floppy held 1,440 * 1024 = 1,474,560 bytes, which is properly 1.47456 MB or 1.40625 MiB.
There's a mixture of base 2 and base 10 measurements in the computing world, and there always has been. Early on, base 10 dominated. Now, base 2 dominates, so I could argue that your position that the prefixes all mean base 2 is an attempt to rewrite the history of computing -- but even now it's still not ALL base 2. So there's a real need for a way to specify what you mean, exactly, and IMO it's better to say 3 MiB and 3 MB rather than 3 MB-but-this-time-I-mean-binary-megabytes and 3 MB-but-this-time-I-mean-SI-megabytes. Granted that the pronunciation of the base 2 units is a little weird (kibibyte, mebibyte, gibibyte, tebibyte), but when precision matters it's good to have that option.
A friend from church mentioned to me a while ago that Zynga had been trying to recruit his son, a 16 year-old junior in high school. That really made me wonder about the company. The kid's smart, no doubt about it, and a decent coder (his code is functional, but not particularly clean or maintainable -- pretty typical for a bright novice), but I can really only think of one reason why a company would want to hire a 16 year-old, put him up in an apartment in NYC and make him write code full-time: To exploit his willingness to work insane hours for peanuts until he burns out.
If they really thought he was brilliant and a great long-term hire, they'd offer him an internship and help pay for his college education in exchange for some work now and a lot more work after he gets some CS knowledge to go along with his coding skills.
His parents refused to let him go... they didn't like the idea of turning a 16 year-old loose on his own in NYC, for some reason. I'm encouraging him to apply for a summer internship at Google. Most of those go to college students, but I think he's good enough to make the cut, and a summer internship will pay him well for a great learning opportunity without compromising his continuing formal education.
The problem with redefining yourself is, if you can do it once, then you can do it again. Not an argument that inspires confidence in the kind of customers who are worried about fickleness.
OTOH, if Wave is the example, you can trust Google to make sure that you can get your data out of it, and to make the code available so you can host it yourself or find another place to host it for you if you need to.
I'm mostly amazed that it works. I spent some time recently trying to trace a bug through libopenssl and it is some of the most horrible code I've ever had the misfortune to try to read.
Depends on how it's handled, as others have pointed out.
And besides all that, a job with on-call duties is a job that has need of them. That means they either have an unstable system or they aren't staffed properly. It's a huge sign that things are not right, and that company is best avoided.
Or else they have a fairly stable system with high uptime requirements. Stable enough that it doesn't make sense to staff a full-time person around the clock, because that person would be idle most of the time, but with SLAs that demand quick response to problems. Even with fault-tolerant systems which automatically fail over when something goes down, it's often important to quickly diagnose and fix the root problem, because barring a simple hardware failure there's a good chance that whatever caused the first failure is going to take down the standby system eventually.
And the Whole Language Theory roars back to life. I hope that in your daughter's elementary school they are not rigidly fixated on kids reading by 'sight-words".
I've had kids in elementary for the last 15 years or so (my oldest is a senior in HS, youngest is in 4th grade), and it seems that reading instruction has settled into a comfortable mix of phonics and sight reading that maps pretty well to the way most kids learn. The approach basically seems to be to teach phonics, but teach common words with non-phonetic spellings as sight words. Then once kids have a basic level of proficiency they stop teaching "reading" at all and just focus on vocabulary and spelling while doing various things to encourage kids to read plenty of fiction.
Let's see... today in California marijuana is more-or-less legal. It is currently not taxed by the government, although that may change. The selling price is approximately the same as the street price from illegal sources in Chicago.
That just shows that more-or-less legalization doesn't achieve the same effect as full legalization plus regulation. Alcohol is the better comparison point.
(Aside: I should mention that I don't have any stake in this question as a consumer. I don't use pot, or any other illegal drug. I don't even use alcohol or tobacco and I avoid prescription and over-the-counter drugs as much as possible. My interest is solely to stop throwing billions down this rathole and in the process supporting violent criminals.)
I was a Virgin subscriber for less than 28 days the other month. Thankfully I took advantage of their 28 day moneyback guarentee... why? All of their plans, except the most expensive one, capped you from 10Mb+ to 2Mb after 2Gb during 'peak time' (where peak time is a series of 4 hour slots throughout the day).
Are you sure you mean 2 Gb, not 2 GB? The case of that B is significant. Lowercase means "bit", uppercase means "byte".
Legalize drugs, and let their income of blood money vanish.
If you think legalizing drugs will stop their reign of terror, you've got another thing coming. They'll just find some other extremely lucrative (and therefore most likely illegal) market to attempt to corner, and their thuggery will continue.
There is no other market of the same scale available to them. Legalizing drugs will cut off the money supply, and within a few years they'll shrink to a tiny fraction of their current size.
Gaming is the reasing I actually stick with Linux. Everytime I was gaming, I realized that I wasted my time instead of doing something productive. With non Win/Mac-OSes I'm very limted with this and won't be tempted.
Your priorities are screwed up. You do productive stuff in order to get money in order to do things that are completely unproductive but make you happy. Ideally, you wouldn't do anything productive at all, and you'd spend all your time doing entertaining things with your family and friends (and by yourself, because honestly, we all need a break from people).
"Productive" != "Work"
I get enjoyment out of lots of things, but some things provide long-lasting satisfaction and some provide immediate gratification. I find that my life is overall better and happier if I spend more of my free time on the former than the latter. Hacking on some open source code, spending time with my family, reading a good book, learning something new, volunteering for a good cause... these things give me long-lasting value. Some of them are also very enjoyable in the moment, others less so, but they're still worth doing and still "productive".
Watching TV, playing video games, etc. provide little or nothing beyond the moment -- but when you're looking for something to do they're readily-available time sinks and quite attractive because you know that you'll be having fun with little or no effort expended. For sufficiently-disciplined people, who are able to look at their long-term goals and happiness, make decisions about their priorities and time allocation and then stick to their plan, this isn't a problem. For others... deliberately making it difficult for themselves to do something that doesn't contribute to long-term happiness and satisfaction is a good idea.
You indicated a couple of sources of your current dissatisfaction; one was your environment -- especially your bossess -- another was the type of code you're writing. There's really nothing you can do about the former except polish your resume, hone your job-hunting skills and find a new job. But there is something you can do about the latter: Improve the quality of the work you do.
It doesn't matter if you're just writing CRUD day in and day out, there can be a lot of satisfaction to be found in writing the cleanest, most readable, most maintainable and elegant CRUD around. And there's plenty to learn. Buy a few books, read them and start trying to put them into practice. I'd start by looking at Martin Fowler's books on refactoring and Robert Martin's books on clean code and craftsmanship. I'd also recommend learning about test-driven development and starting to put that into practice by writing basic unit tests for the new code you write, and especially for any buggy code you fix. If you have any co-workers whose code you respect, see if they can review and comment on yours. If there are a few other people around who are interested, organize some lunch meetings to study code quality. Try to carve out a little time to refactor ugly parts of the existing codebase. This is easiest when you're touching the code anyway, because it's buggy.
It takes some effort up front, but before long you'll find yourself beginning to create much more beautiful code, and along with that will come greater interest in creating code of the highest quality. Your present bosses may not appreciate it, but you can find greater satisfaction -- and in the process make yourself more marketable so that eventually you can find a job that appreciates your passion and skill.
From what I've seen, sales tax gets collected at the state's basic rate, not at the locality's rate (which is often higher). At least so it's been with stuff I've bought from CA online retailers here in CA.
That would simplify it. However, I don't think it would really make any difference. Tracking sales tax rates for 50 states is sufficiently complex that all but the largest on-line sellers would outsource it anyway, and the economies of scale of the service providers should make the difference between 50 jurisdictions and 5000 negligible from a net cost per transaction perspective.
Not just by county, but they can vary by school districts, or even by city!
Indeed. My wife shops at the grocery store near my home rather than one a few miles down the road because even though the other store has a better selection and lower shelf prices, the other one is on the other side of a city line, and sales tax there is 9% while the nearby store's sales tax is 4%. After you factor in taxes, checkout prices at the nearby store are lower.
However, all this tax variation isn't a problem for on-line retailers. Or, rather, it's a solved problem. There are plenty of on-line retailers who have broad physical presence and so have to collect tax in all states, and to do it correctly by locality, so there are services which will give you the accurate tax rate based on the buyer's address and also help you do the accounting to ensure that you pay all of the taxes to the right entities. For that matter, I think many brick-and-mortar chains use these same services because it's easier to let someone else keep track of the changes in the tax rates all over the country.
Honestly, although I've appreciated the lack of sales taxes on-line and the fact that it has allowed on-line businesses to grow when otherwise the combination of fear of buying online plus shipping costs might have buried them, we're past that point. Having to collect sales tax won't make it impossible for on-line retailers to compete with brick and mortar stores, because of all the other advantages on-line sellers have, and it may well prevent the imminent demise of many brick and mortar industries.
I like not paying sales tax for stuff, but the on-line/brick-and-mortar distinction is unfair. If you really don't want to pay sales tax, move to a state that doesn't have sales tax.
This isn't the same. That was the state issuing the law. This is the Federal government. The problem before has always been a state attempting to tax interstate commerce, something they don't have the authority to do. The Federal government however does.
But does the federal government have the authority to grant states the authority to tax interstate commerce?
Linux-sphere developers don't care about the user anymore, they care about themselves and doing what they want. This is evident in how almost every Linux-oriented project is now run as a dictatorship. Do not question project leaders. They know best. It wasn't always that way, and it needs to go back.
Umm, no, it was always that way. If anything F/LOSS projects are more user-focused than they ever have been. I think that's the problem, actually. Back in the day, open source devs were focused on making something that worked for them -- which meant that it worked. Now, GNOME is focused on making the UI usable by the masses and in the process making it lame for everyone. KDE is trying to compete with Windows and OS X, to create an architecture that will leap ahead of them and be the the most powerful and flexible thing around... but they've bitten off so much that it's been really hard to get working properly.
Both teams are focused on trying to please Joe Sixpack, in different ways, rather than trying to build something they themselves like to use.
The reason we are seeing more forks of major projects than ever before is precisely because of that. "My way or the highway" invariably leads to forks.
What forks? I disagree that we're seeing more forks than we have in the past, and all of the major forks I can think of were a result of organization dysfunction, nothing to do with user focus or lack thereof.
You omitted the last half of that quote: "which will enable us to better protect Android from anti-competitive threats from Microsoft, Apple and other companies." What he was saying was that Google's new patents will increase competition by helping to prevent MS and Apple from shutting Android down, and I think his point is indisputable: Allowing MS and Apple to kill Android would reduce competition, so preserving android increases competition.
Or in other words, precisely what the following two sentences of my post that you snipped said.
I disagree. That's not what you said at all. Perhaps it's what you meant, but it's not what you said.
Its not like you don't have massive advertising, for free, within your reach, lol
Actually, Google doesn't have free advertising within its reach. Not as much as you might think, anyway. Every Google+ ad they show that displaces a paid ad has a very definite and easily-measurable cost. And even ads that don't displace paid ads (Google often chooses not to show ads if nothing particularly relevant is available) have a non-zero cost to Google because they increase "ad blindness" in users.
Think of a scenario ten years from now. For whatever reasons business has been bad for Google and they are laying off people left and right. A new management team is given control, and they realize they could stop the layoffs by starting to monetize on the patents they've got lying around: other companies are making money implementing them after all -- no harm in asking them to license the technology as law requires, or if that's not smart PR-wise, just sell the patents to the highest bidder.
You're absolutely right, of course. There are few guarantees about what a future Google might do, which is why we need legislative fixes -- which Google is lobbying for. I think we do have a little more reason for confidence than you imply, though. The unique structure of Google's voting stock ensures that Larry and Sergey are unlikely to lose control of the company, and their personal wealth has reached proportions that mean that money has ceased to be meaningful to them except as a means to accomplish their goals of changing the world -- or as a way to keep score, which is the trap that most businessmen who become uber-wealthy fall into.
I have never met either of them personally, and probably never will, so I can't really claim to know what goes on inside their heads. However, my perception is that based on the things they say both publicly and internally, they really don't care about keeping score. Sergey's focus is on driverless cars, and it's far from clear how Google will ever make money at that. It's not even clear that Google owns much of the IP for its work on the cars. Larry's focus is on running the company, but when he talks about the great stuff being done at Google money never even comes into it, except at shareholder meetings when he has to talk about money.
You're certainly right that if Google falls on hard times, things could change dramatically, but it would have to be a really dramatic change. At present, Googlers focus primarily on doing great stuff to make the world a better place, and to a large degree trust that as long as they're making stuff that people want to use, the money will come. To the extent that they do focus on the money, it's seen mostly as a means to an end -- you've got to have cash to fund all the cool stuff.
Of course, that view is easy to maintain while the cash keeps pouring in. As are the free gourmet meals, the subsidized massages, and all the rest of the employee perks. It will all be tested eventually when the 30% year-on-year revenue growth slows and belt-tightening begins. But I honestly think the culture is up to it. Though I like my perks and I hope that belt-tightening is many years away:-)
Except they wouldn't be running Android, because someone would just lift the source code, rebadge it as their product and strip out Google's revenue streams to replace with their own.
Umm, someone can already do that. Android is open source (okay, there's the whole Honeycomb thing, but that was a special case).
I've seen this happen numerous times with smart first year students. They are completely used to coasting through school with one cylinder firing because there is no challenge at all for them. Then, when they get to university, they are suddenly faced with material that they cannot master with a quick read through and they literally do not know how to cope.
Heh, I have an interesting anecdote in support of this.
I graduated from high school without learning how to study, but I got a crash course in good study habits from -- of all places -- the US Air Force's Security Police Academy. I joined the Air Force Reserves right after graduation and spent the summer in training before going to college. Although SP has to be one of the easiest specialties in the Air Force, it really challenged me because the classroom material was so booorrring. Page upon page of trivial facts about security policies and procedures... I could barely keep my eyes open, and the stuff just didn't stick! But I had serious motivation because I wanted to go home and I was afraid of being required to retake the course (I later found out there wasn't really much chance of that, but that's not how it looked at the time).
So, I learned how to really study, how to put in the hours and make myself learn, even when I wasn't interested in it.
I credit the USAF SP Academy with the 4.0 I achieved the first couple of semesters of my college career, after graduating from high school with a 2.7. I credit the later decline in my college grades to my own laziness (though they didn't decline very far).
Tim Porter may be a nice guy and all, but if it was Google with all those so-called bogus/lax patents he'd be up there talking about how the patent system is fine and the problem really is more that the enforcement process depends on endless litigation and how the determination of infringement needs to be more streamlined.
He's a lawyer, his job is to be an advocate/mouthpiece for his employer's interests.
They (and most companies) play both sides of the fence. At the same time as saying how bad patents are for impinging on their products, they are buying as many companies with far-reaching patents as they can get their hands on -- "Our acquisition of Motorola will increase competition by strengthening Google’s patent portfolio", Larry Page.
You omitted the last half of that quote: "which will enable us to better protect Android from anti-competitive threats from Microsoft, Apple and other companies." What he was saying was that Google's new patents will increase competition by helping to prevent MS and Apple from shutting Android down, and I think his point is indisputable: Allowing MS and Apple to kill Android would reduce competition, so preserving android increases competition.
I truly don't think Google plays both sides of this fence; everything I've ever seen from Google's leadership decries the patent mess as a problem, and explains Google's own focus on acquiring and growing patents as a necessary evil. AFAIK (and I have paid attention), Google has never asserted any patents against anyone, except defensively.
I think Google really would prefer to change patent law and get rid of all these crap software patents -- or even all software patents, period. I think this is as much reflection of Google's arrogance as Google's altruism -- Google believes that given a level field they can beat the competition in any area they focus on. But I think there is actually a large dose of "good for society" thinking as well. You have to remember that fully half of Google's employees and nearly all of Google's management are software engineers, and the vast majority of software engineers think that software patents are bad for innovation, and software engineers love cool new technology. Google's engineers are no different all the way up to and including Sergey and Larry.
(Disclaimer: I'm a Google engineer, but all of the above is based on public information plus my perception of general attitudes within the company.)
These systems depend on notaries, why do I trust them any more than the CAs?
Individually, you don't. However, if a set of them give you the same answer, then you have reason to trust them more. And if one of them gives you a different answer, you don't trust any of them at all.
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Nah, he was overly bombastic, but correct. The confusion is solely caused by the attempts to 'sensibly revise' a perfectly sensible binary numbering scheme. It's an attempt to force a decimal hierarchy on a system that is not decimal... attempting to make reality fit bureaucratic dictates, rather than the other way around.
Except that parts of reality aren't binary.
For example, communication protocols (like this one) are specified in powers-of-10 units because they're based on measuring wireless frequencies, which are measured in powers-of-10 hertz -- in this case, I'm sure that 1.5 Gbps means 1.5E9 bits per second. A 14.4 kbps modem transmitted 14,400 bits per second. A T-1 line transmits 1.54 Mbps, meaning 1,540,000 bits per second -- and note that framing and other overhead bits mean that you can't just divide by 8 to get bytes per second.
In addition, hard disk storage has always been base 10, going back to the very first drives in the early 60s -- during which time RAM was also measured in base 10 units because it wasn't, in fact, in powers of 2, so any power-of-2 measurement would have been an approximation. For example, the IBM 1401 maxed out at 16K bytes (though they weren't called bytes), where 16K meant 16,000, not 16,384. Now, of course, we're gradually moving to flash-based storage, which works more like RAM, for which base 2 sizing works better because base 2 addressing works better.
Floppy disk storage is particularly weird in that it started out with base 2 units and progressed to a weird amalgamation of base 2 and base 10. A "360 KB" floppy held exactly 360 * 1024 bytes, but a "1.44 MB" floppy held 1,440 * 1024 = 1,474,560 bytes, which is properly 1.47456 MB or 1.40625 MiB.
There's a mixture of base 2 and base 10 measurements in the computing world, and there always has been. Early on, base 10 dominated. Now, base 2 dominates, so I could argue that your position that the prefixes all mean base 2 is an attempt to rewrite the history of computing -- but even now it's still not ALL base 2. So there's a real need for a way to specify what you mean, exactly, and IMO it's better to say 3 MiB and 3 MB rather than 3 MB-but-this-time-I-mean-binary-megabytes and 3 MB-but-this-time-I-mean-SI-megabytes. Granted that the pronunciation of the base 2 units is a little weird (kibibyte, mebibyte, gibibyte, tebibyte), but when precision matters it's good to have that option.
A friend from church mentioned to me a while ago that Zynga had been trying to recruit his son, a 16 year-old junior in high school. That really made me wonder about the company. The kid's smart, no doubt about it, and a decent coder (his code is functional, but not particularly clean or maintainable -- pretty typical for a bright novice), but I can really only think of one reason why a company would want to hire a 16 year-old, put him up in an apartment in NYC and make him write code full-time: To exploit his willingness to work insane hours for peanuts until he burns out.
If they really thought he was brilliant and a great long-term hire, they'd offer him an internship and help pay for his college education in exchange for some work now and a lot more work after he gets some CS knowledge to go along with his coding skills.
His parents refused to let him go... they didn't like the idea of turning a 16 year-old loose on his own in NYC, for some reason. I'm encouraging him to apply for a summer internship at Google. Most of those go to college students, but I think he's good enough to make the cut, and a summer internship will pay him well for a great learning opportunity without compromising his continuing formal education.
I hope you don't consider the relationship of a 4 year old to a parent a good metaphor for your relationship with your government.
The relevant question is whether the government considers the metaphor to be a good one. And I think it does.
The problem with redefining yourself is, if you can do it once, then you can do it again. Not an argument that inspires confidence in the kind of customers who are worried about fickleness.
OTOH, if Wave is the example, you can trust Google to make sure that you can get your data out of it, and to make the code available so you can host it yourself or find another place to host it for you if you need to.
OpenSSH? Amazing.
I'm mostly amazed that it works. I spent some time recently trying to trace a bug through libopenssl and it is some of the most horrible code I've ever had the misfortune to try to read.
Depends on how it's handled, as others have pointed out.
And besides all that, a job with on-call duties is a job that has need of them. That means they either have an unstable system or they aren't staffed properly. It's a huge sign that things are not right, and that company is best avoided.
Or else they have a fairly stable system with high uptime requirements. Stable enough that it doesn't make sense to staff a full-time person around the clock, because that person would be idle most of the time, but with SLAs that demand quick response to problems. Even with fault-tolerant systems which automatically fail over when something goes down, it's often important to quickly diagnose and fix the root problem, because barring a simple hardware failure there's a good chance that whatever caused the first failure is going to take down the standby system eventually.
Being right and being crazy aren't mutually exclusive.
Being occasionally right and being crazy aren't mutually exclusive. Being consistently right and being crazy are, though.
And the Whole Language Theory roars back to life. I hope that in your daughter's elementary school they are not rigidly fixated on kids reading by 'sight-words".
I've had kids in elementary for the last 15 years or so (my oldest is a senior in HS, youngest is in 4th grade), and it seems that reading instruction has settled into a comfortable mix of phonics and sight reading that maps pretty well to the way most kids learn. The approach basically seems to be to teach phonics, but teach common words with non-phonetic spellings as sight words. Then once kids have a basic level of proficiency they stop teaching "reading" at all and just focus on vocabulary and spelling while doing various things to encourage kids to read plenty of fiction.
Let's see... today in California marijuana is more-or-less legal. It is currently not taxed by the government, although that may change. The selling price is approximately the same as the street price from illegal sources in Chicago.
That just shows that more-or-less legalization doesn't achieve the same effect as full legalization plus regulation. Alcohol is the better comparison point.
(Aside: I should mention that I don't have any stake in this question as a consumer. I don't use pot, or any other illegal drug. I don't even use alcohol or tobacco and I avoid prescription and over-the-counter drugs as much as possible. My interest is solely to stop throwing billions down this rathole and in the process supporting violent criminals.)
I was a Virgin subscriber for less than 28 days the other month. Thankfully I took advantage of their 28 day moneyback guarentee... why? All of their plans, except the most expensive one, capped you from 10Mb+ to 2Mb after 2Gb during 'peak time' (where peak time is a series of 4 hour slots throughout the day).
Are you sure you mean 2 Gb, not 2 GB? The case of that B is significant. Lowercase means "bit", uppercase means "byte".
Legalize drugs, and let their income of blood money vanish.
If you think legalizing drugs will stop their reign of terror, you've got another thing coming. They'll just find some other extremely lucrative (and therefore most likely illegal) market to attempt to corner, and their thuggery will continue.
There is no other market of the same scale available to them. Legalizing drugs will cut off the money supply, and within a few years they'll shrink to a tiny fraction of their current size.
Gaming is the reasing I actually stick with Linux. Everytime I was gaming, I realized that I wasted my time instead of doing something productive. With non Win/Mac-OSes I'm very limted with this and won't be tempted.
Your priorities are screwed up. You do productive stuff in order to get money in order to do things that are completely unproductive but make you happy. Ideally, you wouldn't do anything productive at all, and you'd spend all your time doing entertaining things with your family and friends (and by yourself, because honestly, we all need a break from people).
"Productive" != "Work"
I get enjoyment out of lots of things, but some things provide long-lasting satisfaction and some provide immediate gratification. I find that my life is overall better and happier if I spend more of my free time on the former than the latter. Hacking on some open source code, spending time with my family, reading a good book, learning something new, volunteering for a good cause... these things give me long-lasting value. Some of them are also very enjoyable in the moment, others less so, but they're still worth doing and still "productive".
Watching TV, playing video games, etc. provide little or nothing beyond the moment -- but when you're looking for something to do they're readily-available time sinks and quite attractive because you know that you'll be having fun with little or no effort expended. For sufficiently-disciplined people, who are able to look at their long-term goals and happiness, make decisions about their priorities and time allocation and then stick to their plan, this isn't a problem. For others... deliberately making it difficult for themselves to do something that doesn't contribute to long-term happiness and satisfaction is a good idea.
For example, I really should block slashdot...
You indicated a couple of sources of your current dissatisfaction; one was your environment -- especially your bossess -- another was the type of code you're writing. There's really nothing you can do about the former except polish your resume, hone your job-hunting skills and find a new job. But there is something you can do about the latter: Improve the quality of the work you do.
It doesn't matter if you're just writing CRUD day in and day out, there can be a lot of satisfaction to be found in writing the cleanest, most readable, most maintainable and elegant CRUD around. And there's plenty to learn. Buy a few books, read them and start trying to put them into practice. I'd start by looking at Martin Fowler's books on refactoring and Robert Martin's books on clean code and craftsmanship. I'd also recommend learning about test-driven development and starting to put that into practice by writing basic unit tests for the new code you write, and especially for any buggy code you fix. If you have any co-workers whose code you respect, see if they can review and comment on yours. If there are a few other people around who are interested, organize some lunch meetings to study code quality. Try to carve out a little time to refactor ugly parts of the existing codebase. This is easiest when you're touching the code anyway, because it's buggy.
It takes some effort up front, but before long you'll find yourself beginning to create much more beautiful code, and along with that will come greater interest in creating code of the highest quality. Your present bosses may not appreciate it, but you can find greater satisfaction -- and in the process make yourself more marketable so that eventually you can find a job that appreciates your passion and skill.
From what I've seen, sales tax gets collected at the state's basic rate, not at the locality's rate (which is often higher). At least so it's been with stuff I've bought from CA online retailers here in CA.
That would simplify it. However, I don't think it would really make any difference. Tracking sales tax rates for 50 states is sufficiently complex that all but the largest on-line sellers would outsource it anyway, and the economies of scale of the service providers should make the difference between 50 jurisdictions and 5000 negligible from a net cost per transaction perspective.
Not just by county, but they can vary by school districts, or even by city!
Indeed. My wife shops at the grocery store near my home rather than one a few miles down the road because even though the other store has a better selection and lower shelf prices, the other one is on the other side of a city line, and sales tax there is 9% while the nearby store's sales tax is 4%. After you factor in taxes, checkout prices at the nearby store are lower.
However, all this tax variation isn't a problem for on-line retailers. Or, rather, it's a solved problem. There are plenty of on-line retailers who have broad physical presence and so have to collect tax in all states, and to do it correctly by locality, so there are services which will give you the accurate tax rate based on the buyer's address and also help you do the accounting to ensure that you pay all of the taxes to the right entities. For that matter, I think many brick-and-mortar chains use these same services because it's easier to let someone else keep track of the changes in the tax rates all over the country.
Honestly, although I've appreciated the lack of sales taxes on-line and the fact that it has allowed on-line businesses to grow when otherwise the combination of fear of buying online plus shipping costs might have buried them, we're past that point. Having to collect sales tax won't make it impossible for on-line retailers to compete with brick and mortar stores, because of all the other advantages on-line sellers have, and it may well prevent the imminent demise of many brick and mortar industries.
I like not paying sales tax for stuff, but the on-line/brick-and-mortar distinction is unfair. If you really don't want to pay sales tax, move to a state that doesn't have sales tax.
This isn't the same. That was the state issuing the law. This is the Federal government. The problem before has always been a state attempting to tax interstate commerce, something they don't have the authority to do. The Federal government however does.
But does the federal government have the authority to grant states the authority to tax interstate commerce?
Linux-sphere developers don't care about the user anymore, they care about themselves and doing what they want. This is evident in how almost every Linux-oriented project is now run as a dictatorship. Do not question project leaders. They know best. It wasn't always that way, and it needs to go back.
Umm, no, it was always that way. If anything F/LOSS projects are more user-focused than they ever have been. I think that's the problem, actually. Back in the day, open source devs were focused on making something that worked for them -- which meant that it worked. Now, GNOME is focused on making the UI usable by the masses and in the process making it lame for everyone. KDE is trying to compete with Windows and OS X, to create an architecture that will leap ahead of them and be the the most powerful and flexible thing around... but they've bitten off so much that it's been really hard to get working properly.
Both teams are focused on trying to please Joe Sixpack, in different ways, rather than trying to build something they themselves like to use.
The reason we are seeing more forks of major projects than ever before is precisely because of that. "My way or the highway" invariably leads to forks.
What forks? I disagree that we're seeing more forks than we have in the past, and all of the major forks I can think of were a result of organization dysfunction, nothing to do with user focus or lack thereof.
You omitted the last half of that quote: "which will enable us to better protect Android from anti-competitive threats from Microsoft, Apple and other companies." What he was saying was that Google's new patents will increase competition by helping to prevent MS and Apple from shutting Android down, and I think his point is indisputable: Allowing MS and Apple to kill Android would reduce competition, so preserving android increases competition.
Or in other words, precisely what the following two sentences of my post that you snipped said.
I disagree. That's not what you said at all. Perhaps it's what you meant, but it's not what you said.
Where is the change in policy about the real names crap?
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/10/google-shifts-stance-on-google-anonymity-will-support-pseudonyms.ars
Its not like you don't have massive advertising, for free, within your reach, lol
Actually, Google doesn't have free advertising within its reach. Not as much as you might think, anyway. Every Google+ ad they show that displaces a paid ad has a very definite and easily-measurable cost. And even ads that don't displace paid ads (Google often chooses not to show ads if nothing particularly relevant is available) have a non-zero cost to Google because they increase "ad blindness" in users.
Think of a scenario ten years from now. For whatever reasons business has been bad for Google and they are laying off people left and right. A new management team is given control, and they realize they could stop the layoffs by starting to monetize on the patents they've got lying around: other companies are making money implementing them after all -- no harm in asking them to license the technology as law requires, or if that's not smart PR-wise, just sell the patents to the highest bidder.
You're absolutely right, of course. There are few guarantees about what a future Google might do, which is why we need legislative fixes -- which Google is lobbying for. I think we do have a little more reason for confidence than you imply, though. The unique structure of Google's voting stock ensures that Larry and Sergey are unlikely to lose control of the company, and their personal wealth has reached proportions that mean that money has ceased to be meaningful to them except as a means to accomplish their goals of changing the world -- or as a way to keep score, which is the trap that most businessmen who become uber-wealthy fall into.
I have never met either of them personally, and probably never will, so I can't really claim to know what goes on inside their heads. However, my perception is that based on the things they say both publicly and internally, they really don't care about keeping score. Sergey's focus is on driverless cars, and it's far from clear how Google will ever make money at that. It's not even clear that Google owns much of the IP for its work on the cars. Larry's focus is on running the company, but when he talks about the great stuff being done at Google money never even comes into it, except at shareholder meetings when he has to talk about money.
You're certainly right that if Google falls on hard times, things could change dramatically, but it would have to be a really dramatic change. At present, Googlers focus primarily on doing great stuff to make the world a better place, and to a large degree trust that as long as they're making stuff that people want to use, the money will come. To the extent that they do focus on the money, it's seen mostly as a means to an end -- you've got to have cash to fund all the cool stuff.
Of course, that view is easy to maintain while the cash keeps pouring in. As are the free gourmet meals, the subsidized massages, and all the rest of the employee perks. It will all be tested eventually when the 30% year-on-year revenue growth slows and belt-tightening begins. But I honestly think the culture is up to it. Though I like my perks and I hope that belt-tightening is many years away :-)
Except they wouldn't be running Android, because someone would just lift the source code, rebadge it as their product and strip out Google's revenue streams to replace with their own.
Umm, someone can already do that. Android is open source (okay, there's the whole Honeycomb thing, but that was a special case).
I've seen this happen numerous times with smart first year students. They are completely used to coasting through school with one cylinder firing because there is no challenge at all for them. Then, when they get to university, they are suddenly faced with material that they cannot master with a quick read through and they literally do not know how to cope.
Heh, I have an interesting anecdote in support of this.
I graduated from high school without learning how to study, but I got a crash course in good study habits from -- of all places -- the US Air Force's Security Police Academy. I joined the Air Force Reserves right after graduation and spent the summer in training before going to college. Although SP has to be one of the easiest specialties in the Air Force, it really challenged me because the classroom material was so booorrring. Page upon page of trivial facts about security policies and procedures... I could barely keep my eyes open, and the stuff just didn't stick! But I had serious motivation because I wanted to go home and I was afraid of being required to retake the course (I later found out there wasn't really much chance of that, but that's not how it looked at the time).
So, I learned how to really study, how to put in the hours and make myself learn, even when I wasn't interested in it.
I credit the USAF SP Academy with the 4.0 I achieved the first couple of semesters of my college career, after graduating from high school with a 2.7. I credit the later decline in my college grades to my own laziness (though they didn't decline very far).
Tim Porter may be a nice guy and all, but if it was Google with all those so-called bogus/lax patents he'd be up there talking about how the patent system is fine and the problem really is more that the enforcement process depends on endless litigation and how the determination of infringement needs to be more streamlined.
He's a lawyer, his job is to be an advocate/mouthpiece for his employer's interests.
They (and most companies) play both sides of the fence. At the same time as saying how bad patents are for impinging on their products, they are buying as many companies with far-reaching patents as they can get their hands on -- "Our acquisition of Motorola will increase competition by strengthening Google’s patent portfolio", Larry Page.
You omitted the last half of that quote: "which will enable us to better protect Android from anti-competitive threats from Microsoft, Apple and other companies." What he was saying was that Google's new patents will increase competition by helping to prevent MS and Apple from shutting Android down, and I think his point is indisputable: Allowing MS and Apple to kill Android would reduce competition, so preserving android increases competition.
I truly don't think Google plays both sides of this fence; everything I've ever seen from Google's leadership decries the patent mess as a problem, and explains Google's own focus on acquiring and growing patents as a necessary evil. AFAIK (and I have paid attention), Google has never asserted any patents against anyone, except defensively.
I think Google really would prefer to change patent law and get rid of all these crap software patents -- or even all software patents, period. I think this is as much reflection of Google's arrogance as Google's altruism -- Google believes that given a level field they can beat the competition in any area they focus on. But I think there is actually a large dose of "good for society" thinking as well. You have to remember that fully half of Google's employees and nearly all of Google's management are software engineers, and the vast majority of software engineers think that software patents are bad for innovation, and software engineers love cool new technology. Google's engineers are no different all the way up to and including Sergey and Larry.
(Disclaimer: I'm a Google engineer, but all of the above is based on public information plus my perception of general attitudes within the company.)
These systems depend on notaries, why do I trust them any more than the CAs?
Individually, you don't. However, if a set of them give you the same answer, then you have reason to trust them more. And if one of them gives you a different answer, you don't trust any of them at all.