I remember back in the day, WAY before Skype even existed, one could make a call from Messenger (or was it NetMeeting?) straight to landline for free.
It's yet another of the select few cases when Microsoft did something innovative and nobody noticed.
They've removed this functionality pretty quickly, because lots of people started using it and it was draining money. Tech (mainly connectivity) wasn't ready to take it back then.
Crooks aren't that smart. After Mercedes implemented fingerprint readers in some of their cars, there were several reports that some owners got their fingers cut off by thieves. These fingers, of course, could not start the car (no self-respecting fingerprint reader relies on fingerprint alone anymore), but that was not much of a relief for folks whose fingers got cut off.
Except it's not Google that competes with Microsoft. It's Microsoft that is forced to compete with Google. And how much does a VP know about the actual "trade secrets". Having seen and heard plenty of MS VPs in my life (I've read somewhere there are about 150 of them), I'd say he didn't know anything useful. Just a bunch of buzzword technobabble to make his boss feel good.
They have some pretty good products, with some pretty good features. Yet 90% of their customer base know about only 10% of features, and buy their products not because they get better (and they do), but because Microsoft rams them down their throats.
They need to rip off Apple marketing. Those fellas know what they're doing. I'm convinced, if Microsoft outsourced marketing to Apple, they'd boost their revenues at least 30% and grow a huge, rabid fanbase in a matter of 2 years.
Create a prominent link on the front page that would say "Remove my site". There you go, problem solved. Folks who don't want to be indexed can remove themselves forever.
There's overwhelming evidence in favor of this conclusion. There are overwhelmingly more male scientists, composers, painters, sculptors, etc. etc. than female ones. And don't try to tell me that women were somewhow denied access to these things. They simply weren't for the last 50 years.
Most, if not all of the US military engagements can be classified as offense, not defense. Why do they call it _Defense_ system, and themselves Department of Defense?
It's a misnomer really. They should have called it THFS - TowelHead Frying System, because that's what it will really be used for.
AFAIK, when you kick out an H1-B he/she has to leave the country in 10 days. It's a bit hard to sue the company within just 10 days. Americans have lots of time on their hands, and they can bring all sorts of trouble. So big companies usually choose to carefully document poor performance of US employees for a couple of years before firing them.
As an engineer, I want more companies to be evil like that. I wouldn't mind a 25% raise and working environment that doesn't get in the way of what I'm capable of.
How would it prevent the kind of stuff that happened in London, though? Can this thing see trhough the backpack of a suicide bomber?
To me the whole thing looks like another instance of "synergy" between government and a large corporation whereby a little bit of my (taxpayer's) money gets given to some execs at LM with a bit of help from some senator whom they helped to get elected.
Will it solve ANY problem at all? I highly doubt it.
The difference between MSIL and Java bytecode is that MSIL was created to be quickly JITted before execution. Read up on this technology it's quite fascinating. Methods get compiled as son as they're called, on the fly and remain compiled into machine code for the life of the process. So you're running ONLY machine code when executing a page within ASP.NET. Heck, you can even pre-JIT your DLLs if you feel adventurous.
Java bytecode, on the other hand was created to be run inside a VM, which means interpreted. Compiling Java into machine code is a lot more difficult and processor intensive a process as compiling MSIL. This is why only parts of Java bytecode get JITted by even the most recent VMs.
I've worked with quite a few of H1-Bs. As a rule, Russians kick ass when you need to come up with a solution or solve a design problem but execution needs supervision sometimes, because once the problem is solved they tend to quickly lose interest. Russians rarely get very far beyond technical "individual contributor" positions, because they're clueless at politics and despise brown-nosing.
Indians suck at design real bad (their philosophy seems to be to do just enough to get by) but can be pretty good at execution and truly shine at brown-nosing, especially if their boss is also Indian. However, I know a couple of Indian developers who rock so hard, it's not funny (and coincidentally don't give a shit about what their boss thinks about them). But they're exceptions that only reinforce the rule.
The Chinese are a mixed bag. I only know one Chinese guy who I would say is good (and I have a very high bar for "good"), the others I've met over the course of my career had great difficulties picking up the language and thinking independently. It looks as though they need to be told what to do, down to the smallest details.
Americans are a mixed bag also, there are quite a few folks who are good, but if an American sucks, he/she sucks real hard, because Americans are ridiculously difficult to fire for non-performance.
These services can only be bridged for as long as their owners want them to be bridged. If Google taps into MSN IM, you can bet your ass they'll be shut off the next day.
Science requires an insane effort these days. All the easy things have already been figured out, so one has to either be a genius or spend a third of his/her life getting ready to actually make a discovery. And be prepared to be pretty darn poor both before and after you get anywhere in science.
But that's only a part of the problem. The other part is related to being not that well off if you choose science as your career. You see, the thing is true science is portable. There are smart folks in China, Russia and every other country on the freaking planet (even in India, believe it or not).
Lawyers and doctors, on the other hand, are not as portable. You have to have them around here to do things, and that's why they'll always be better paid.
Same with hi-tech (which is as close to science as it gets in the real world), and that is why we're observing a decline in enrollment for the corresponding majors. The effort is pretty monumental (assuming you want to actually know what the heck you're doing) the payoff isn't so great anymore.
I have a son, and unless he strongly insists on becoming an engineer, I'll be nudging him towards becoming a lawyer or a doctor. I'd like him to be an engineer, but I wouldn't like him to live in poverty.
>> They grabbed a lot of hotmail users at the time when they launched gmail.
They've grabbed a lot of hype, that's for sure, but it did not translate into the actual users of the service. They're still below 5M users, while Hotmail has 100M+ users.
I do agree that Google is technically far superior to Hotmail, but as far as the number of actual users, they're not there yet, and at this point I don't know if they will be.
Whether this "Mambo Foundation" will simply "fork" each of the successive releases by these folks and sell it as their own, thereby reducing their R&D budget to nearly zero.
Slashdot Mirror
I remember back in the day, WAY before Skype even existed, one could make a call from Messenger (or was it NetMeeting?) straight to landline for free.
It's yet another of the select few cases when Microsoft did something innovative and nobody noticed.
They've removed this functionality pretty quickly, because lots of people started using it and it was draining money. Tech (mainly connectivity) wasn't ready to take it back then.
Crooks aren't that smart. After Mercedes implemented fingerprint readers in some of their cars, there were several reports that some owners got their fingers cut off by thieves. These fingers, of course, could not start the car (no self-respecting fingerprint reader relies on fingerprint alone anymore), but that was not much of a relief for folks whose fingers got cut off.
They're betting their entire printing system on Metro. So either it works, and works well, or they simply won't ship it.
Adobe vs. Microsoft.
l 0 .asp
AFAIK Microsoft is getting their PDF and Flash replacements ready as we speak.
http://www.actionscript.com/archives/00000587.htm
http://www.pdfzone.com/category2/0,1874,1836049,0
Except it's not Google that competes with Microsoft. It's Microsoft that is forced to compete with Google. And how much does a VP know about the actual "trade secrets". Having seen and heard plenty of MS VPs in my life (I've read somewhere there are about 150 of them), I'd say he didn't know anything useful. Just a bunch of buzzword technobabble to make his boss feel good.
They have some pretty good products, with some pretty good features. Yet 90% of their customer base know about only 10% of features, and buy their products not because they get better (and they do), but because Microsoft rams them down their throats.
They need to rip off Apple marketing. Those fellas know what they're doing. I'm convinced, if Microsoft outsourced marketing to Apple, they'd boost their revenues at least 30% and grow a huge, rabid fanbase in a matter of 2 years.
Pretty soon the hottest trend will be "onshore insourcing". :-)
If you've worked with folks from Bangalore/Hyderabad/etc, you know why.
They're frikking looking forward to it!
Create a prominent link on the front page that would say "Remove my site". There you go, problem solved. Folks who don't want to be indexed can remove themselves forever.
There's overwhelming evidence in favor of this conclusion. There are overwhelmingly more male scientists, composers, painters, sculptors, etc. etc. than female ones. And don't try to tell me that women were somewhow denied access to these things. They simply weren't for the last 50 years.
Or somebody else's brain subconsciously associates "VIIV" with virii?
Most, if not all of the US military engagements can be classified as offense, not defense. Why do they call it _Defense_ system, and themselves Department of Defense?
It's a misnomer really. They should have called it THFS - TowelHead Frying System, because that's what it will really be used for.
Except I'm not American, so your sarcasm is misplaced.
AFAIK, when you kick out an H1-B he/she has to leave the country in 10 days. It's a bit hard to sue the company within just 10 days. Americans have lots of time on their hands, and they can bring all sorts of trouble. So big companies usually choose to carefully document poor performance of US employees for a couple of years before firing them.
As an engineer, I want more companies to be evil like that. I wouldn't mind a 25% raise and working environment that doesn't get in the way of what I'm capable of.
I've never worked with black or hispanic folks, so I don't know what they're up to. :0)
And it's not stereotypes, it's careful observation.
How would it prevent the kind of stuff that happened in London, though? Can this thing see trhough the backpack of a suicide bomber?
To me the whole thing looks like another instance of "synergy" between government and a large corporation whereby a little bit of my (taxpayer's) money gets given to some execs at LM with a bit of help from some senator whom they helped to get elected.
Will it solve ANY problem at all? I highly doubt it.
The difference between MSIL and Java bytecode is that MSIL was created to be quickly JITted before execution. Read up on this technology it's quite fascinating. Methods get compiled as son as they're called, on the fly and remain compiled into machine code for the life of the process. So you're running ONLY machine code when executing a page within ASP.NET. Heck, you can even pre-JIT your DLLs if you feel adventurous.
Java bytecode, on the other hand was created to be run inside a VM, which means interpreted. Compiling Java into machine code is a lot more difficult and processor intensive a process as compiling MSIL. This is why only parts of Java bytecode get JITted by even the most recent VMs.
I've worked with quite a few of H1-Bs. As a rule, Russians kick ass when you need to come up with a solution or solve a design problem but execution needs supervision sometimes, because once the problem is solved they tend to quickly lose interest. Russians rarely get very far beyond technical "individual contributor" positions, because they're clueless at politics and despise brown-nosing.
Indians suck at design real bad (their philosophy seems to be to do just enough to get by) but can be pretty good at execution and truly shine at brown-nosing, especially if their boss is also Indian. However, I know a couple of Indian developers who rock so hard, it's not funny (and coincidentally don't give a shit about what their boss thinks about them). But they're exceptions that only reinforce the rule.
The Chinese are a mixed bag. I only know one Chinese guy who I would say is good (and I have a very high bar for "good"), the others I've met over the course of my career had great difficulties picking up the language and thinking independently. It looks as though they need to be told what to do, down to the smallest details.
Americans are a mixed bag also, there are quite a few folks who are good, but if an American sucks, he/she sucks real hard, because Americans are ridiculously difficult to fire for non-performance.
These services can only be bridged for as long as their owners want them to be bridged. If Google taps into MSN IM, you can bet your ass they'll be shut off the next day.
Your free mailbox gets deleted after a month of non-use. So my guess is, not many.
Science requires an insane effort these days. All the easy things have already been figured out, so one has to either be a genius or spend a third of his/her life getting ready to actually make a discovery. And be prepared to be pretty darn poor both before and after you get anywhere in science.
But that's only a part of the problem. The other part is related to being not that well off if you choose science as your career. You see, the thing is true science is portable. There are smart folks in China, Russia and every other country on the freaking planet (even in India, believe it or not).
Lawyers and doctors, on the other hand, are not as portable. You have to have them around here to do things, and that's why they'll always be better paid.
Same with hi-tech (which is as close to science as it gets in the real world), and that is why we're observing a decline in enrollment for the corresponding majors. The effort is pretty monumental (assuming you want to actually know what the heck you're doing) the payoff isn't so great anymore.
I have a son, and unless he strongly insists on becoming an engineer, I'll be nudging him towards becoming a lawyer or a doctor. I'd like him to be an engineer, but I wouldn't like him to live in poverty.
>> They grabbed a lot of hotmail users at the time when they launched gmail.
They've grabbed a lot of hype, that's for sure, but it did not translate into the actual users of the service. They're still below 5M users, while Hotmail has 100M+ users.
I do agree that Google is technically far superior to Hotmail, but as far as the number of actual users, they're not there yet, and at this point I don't know if they will be.
Who said it would be "merging". I'm saying just fork every god damn release, clean, unmodified, and change a thing or two to make it look legitimate.
Whether this "Mambo Foundation" will simply "fork" each of the successive releases by these folks and sell it as their own, thereby reducing their R&D budget to nearly zero.