Intel has been dropping the ball lately on performance... it seems like the inmates in Marketing have been running this asylum for some time now. They need to hand it back over to Engineering if they are to stop their decline.
The way I see it, is that the marketing guys have been doing a great job of hiding the fact that the engineering guys are dropping the ball.
The FDIC, is part of the federal beauracracy, and while I have yet to see firsthand the FDIC go into action, I have heard it is quite a slow process, and takes weeks-months to get your money. As of right now my savings has not passed the 100k threshold, but I am saving for a house, so hopefully it will, and that would also present a problem, though one easily solved by just opening another account.
When it comes down to it, I would rather not take the risk of having my 401k, my savings and my job all lost in one day when it can be easily avoided by just doing my banking elsewhere.
Not sure if you were kidding or not, but there are very legit reasons not to.
First and foremost, if it is on an MS hosted domain, the general public perceives it as "official," whether this is the case or not. Then if this guy makes any errors or says anything outside of the company line, he is in a world of shit. It also makes sense if he also uses this same blog for his "Janie took her first poopie today!" type posts.
Second of all, employees are reasonable. I work at a very large bank. I do not keep my money at my very large bank for a few reasons. One is risk mitigation. This bank is one of the largest in the world, but on the offchance it burns Enron-style, I want to know that my money is safe somewhere else and I am not completely wiped out of my job, my 401k, and my savings. The second is that there are other banks that serve my needs better (better rates, closer locations to my home, better service). I suspect that this is the reason that he is not using an MSN domain. The third reason is a bit more paranoid/tinfoil hat, but it is a real fear of mine. I am a kind of abrasive tell it like it is kind of guy in a very "yes sir, thank you sir, may I please have more work sir" corporate drone kind of place. If for whatever reason I get involved in an altercation or on the bad side of a higher up, accused of any wrongdoing, or ever became involved in a lawsuit with my employer, I don't want it to be so easy for them to freeze my account, or have any "errors" suddenly start happening. The reasoning translates to the blog in that if he says something that upper management doesn't like, it will be far more difficult than just a phone call or email to have his speech squelched.
Seeing these replies, I get the feeling that a lot of people don't understand how in the world 10% can really be a problem. Don't think of desktop apps, think of systems, think of grid computing, think of high performance apps. I can tell you that in finance, getting an answer 10% faster is extremely valuable. We're talking getting complex computations done in milliseconds so you can see if that stock or option is worth trading and if so, get the order out to your competitors.
Or on the other end, think of a grid computing application that has to provide real time type data. Lets say it takes 10,000 $1000 dollar machines ($10 million worth) to come up with an answer to a certain problem every hour using the "standard" program. You speed that thing up 10%, you are saving not only $1 million on the initial hardware outlay, but the cost of keeping 1,000 extra machines around.
As another example, think of hotmail or another large web application provider. If you could reduce their computation and capacity costs by 10%, I am pretty sure someone would get a nice fat bonus.
Of course these people already (I hope!) have their applications compiled with as many optimizations as they feel comfortable, which makes this particular discussion kind of moot for them.
I know several people who run online businesses that absolutely depend on google for their business model, in fact like some eBay sellers (where ebay is there business model), Google IS their business model. Adwords is remarkably effective for online businesses. I myself am in the process of launching an online business that will be mostly dependant on Google for driving traffic. Google only charges you when people click on your links. I don't know anyone who has gotten rich off of Google, but they do supplement their incomes nicely from their side projects, and two people I know do make their living off of their sites.
The premise is essentially this. 99% of the time ads will be ignored. But that small subset of users that clicks your link on a targeted search to your website is highly likely to be interested in what you have to offer on your site and therefore likely to buy your products or services right then and there or in the future. If I am searching for something like "Snapper lawn mower replacement blade" on google and on the side there is an ad for a store that stocks lawn mower replacement parts, there is a damn high chance I am going to buy something from that store. So for the 20 cent cost of the traffic, the store can make a sale. The adwords are targeted, and Google has algorithms that seek out the keywords that best fit your ads and produced the highest click through rate.
Sir, I will agree with you that Google is crazy overvalued, its P/E is just out of this world and it is a very poor investment, however just because you don't understand the business model does not mean it is not a good model and Google is a bad company. Google is immensely profitable and has proven that their advertising model does work. I will also agree with you in questioning why they are moving into video, email, and various other places. I can only speculate that they have a plan in which they can deliver more and better targeted advertising through these services but have not perfected the technology yet- though you can see targeted ads on gmail. I feel that you have to give a company that is as profitable as google is the benefit of the doubt.
I blame Wired for this. I love the magazine, but it tries too damn hard to be hip. Sometimes it seems that the editors' pay is linked to how many new retarded terms they can come up with. Either that, or they just do it try and give some legitimacy to the latest fads they are writing about.
Just remember kids, you don't have a shitty website no one cares about... you have a blog! you're part of the blogosphere! You provide infoporn to those like you who want to hear your rants about how the local mass transit system was running late today. If you really want to be hip you have to record these rants into an mp3, and make them available on your blog's site and then you're a podcaster! Uggggh.
"And the cost of the new gaming systems continues to rise."
Huh? Since when? The new systems cost $399 at launch, which is far less than the old school Atari systems that cost somewhere around $800. The Nintendo and Super Nintendo were priced cheaper, though in that era many games cost $60+ and the industry was far less competitive (slower development cycles, less demand). We have been paying $50 for games for well over a decade. Not even factoring in inflation or the fact that today's systems are also media players, the costs have remained the same. I don't have any solid figures on development or production costs, but I am presuming they too have remained relatively flat. The cost of game development has indeed continued to rise, but that was not what was stated and a journalist writing about games should know the difference.
Anyone who really believes that the PS3 is not going to be priced the same as the 360 when it is released probably has an agenda. Sony is a big smart company, they are not going to just throw in the towel by overpricing their system. This article gets no digg.
I am sure this comment is going to be utterly redundant shortly, but last time I went to Radio Shack I wanted solder. Not an exotic transistor or out of the ordinary capacitor, just farking solder for a soldering iron. I looked around the store, and could not find it. So I asked one of the clerks where I could find it (not believing that its possible that Radio Shack could have moved that far away from hobbyist stuff). The clerk did not know what solder was! He had to ask his coworker who said they might have some in the back. I was shocked, and there was another geek next to me who also had a stunned look on his face. In another time or place, or possibly a more empty store, we probably would have hugged each other to console ourselves. After the two of them went in the back store room for almost 10 minutes, he finally returned with a roll of it and asked if it was what I wanted. I walked out feeling like a defeated man. I kind of wanted to take the shitty component systems on the wall shelf and throw them at the stack of overpriced R/C cars.
I am pretty sure if I had asked him for an LM555C Timer his would have asploded.
You had Ubuntu and had no problems? I find that hard to believe considering that Ubuntu doesn't even have a compiler on its default install. Even assuming that everything you install can be installed from a package, I still have had to go through some dependency hell when getting things installed on Ubuntu. It was not that bad, and as a programmer with Linux experience nothing I couldn't get through in an hour or so. However, as a real desktop OS, Linux still has room for improvement. If your mom is anything like my mom, she would have given up and cried. And my mom typing apt-get xmms or doing anything similar to it? Forget it. She will either be calling me every time to hold her hand through the process or just not using the computer altogether.
I like Linux, and its great for me, and I don't really mind the occasional hassle anymore, especially since I pretty much have all the software I need installed and don't have to muck around with things too much, but for most people (and myself included) Windows on the desktop Just Works. I want a piece of software? I download it from the web, doubleclick install.exe and 30 seconds later I have a working program without fail. Spyware is a much smaller problem after using Firefox, and a stupid user is a stupid user on any platform and equally prone to installing happy alligator weather friend or whatever no matter what OS is running (and we are all stupid users sometimes).
While the efficiency of the system against russian missles might be greatly reduced, this technology can still be deployed against less advanced nations, and act as a deterrent to anyone who may be contemplating attacking us. And yes, if we can find a way to improve the technology and take out the zig-zagging missles, we will again have a greater upper hand against less advanced countries.
I just think they are not stupid. Sure, Google is a great company with fat profits and lots of growth potential. However their market cap is $130 billion, which is about half the size of Microsoft, and more importantly their price to earnings ratio is around 100! That is crazy talk.com era type valuations, which regardless of the company, are in a word... stupid. Just because the investing public is irrationally exuberant about the companies future, does not mean that the CEO's have to drink the Kool-Aid also. They still have plenty of skin in the game, but at these outright ridiculous valuations, they probably feel that over the next 1-5 years they can get better returns on their money elsewhere.
Lets use a pets.com type company as an example. I run pets.com. I got money from a VC to start a company and sell pet products on the web. A few years in, I go public and grow my business to a $10 million dollar a year business, 2 million of which is profit. I still hold 35% of the company, and I think that the prospects to grow my business and expand into others is looking bright, and I expect to double or even triple my revenue and profits over the next few years. However, the stock has my company valued at $1 billion dollars. I know damn well that even the rosiest outlook will not allow my company to really be worth that much for at least another 15-20 years. So I sell 10% of my stake, and pocket a $100 million. I still think my company is a great company. I still have plenty riding on that fact. I also still think that my investors are fools and have a far greater chance of getting a better return on their investment anywhere else (though I would never ever ever announce that fact to anyone, not even my dog).
Selling your company's stock and believing that your company has a good future ahead of it are not mutually exclusive.
This seems to be a very common problem in technical departments of non-technical companies. Getting into management is the only way up the ladder, and there are no ways to make a comfortable salary without managing people or projects. If you are techie you are deemed less valuable than a manager. This problem was first* outlined in the Mythical Man Month by Fred Brooks in the mid 1970's folks! Yet managers still don't get it. My manager doesn't get it. I have a coworker that is awesome technically that is experiencing the same problem. He has asked to take on an architect type role in the team, and my manager has told him repeatedly that being a developer is a dead-end. He was even penalized in his last review for it and labeled as "uncooperative to management" because of it.
I think this mindset is caused by the fact that the people in charge- aka the management- did not see spending their life dealing directly with technology as rewarding and fulfilling and from their first day on the job had an eye on the corner office. Technology companies have a better understanding of technologists and accordingly have much better promotion paths for those not wanting to manage people.
*Well maybe only first in the sense that the Model-T was the first car, but close enough.
I forget the exact figures, but even 15 minutes of outage per year puts you around the 99.999 range. To me, thats not the point though. What scares me is that the internet is supposed to be a highly resilient "route around the trouble" type of network. Cutting a fiber line somewhere is not supposed to cause this type of damage. The damage should be highly localized to only people within the small area behind the single point of failure (IE the neighborhood that is the "last mile"). I am not saying this is a real problem that we should throw tons of manpower at, but I just think that there is a common misconception that the net is more robust than it really is.
I spend about $100 a month on food. How do I do it? Rice and pasta are my main staples. On average I eat one meal a day. I don't buy junk food. The processed "easy" food is almost always more expensive and almost always less healthy. Eating one or two meals a day keeps me within my target weight range. I also enjoy cooking. It is not a chore to me, kind of like when you get a piece of code to work properly, sitting down to a good meal cooked with fresh ingredients is very satisfying.
Lets break it down. One pound of pasta costs about a dollar. This will feed me for 4 meals. Sauce to be served with the pasta costs about $3, maybe $5 for a really pricey sauce or complicated homemade recipe. $6 = 4 meals. $1.50 a meal. Throw some meat in there or a veggie to make it $2. About 10 pounds of rice costs about $5. A cup of rice is good for about 3-4 servings, and there are about 25 cups of rice in a bag. So rice costs about 5 cents for a meal. Youre going to need some veggies and meat in there to make a decent meal, so youre total cost for a meal of rice and whatever is probably going to be $2.
So even a balanced meal costs $2. Eat one time a day and you're costs for a dinner are $60. The other $40 is accounted for by things like fruit, salads for lunch, cereal, milk, bread, drinks, and the occasional seafood or steak dinner, etc. I am also a single guy living in a small apartment and don't get to benefit from buying large quantities. One big caveat is that I don't consider going out to dinner and other entertainment type meals to be a part of my regular food bill. I also don't throw out food ever. Occasionally I will make a mistake and keep milk or tomatoes too long and have to throw them out, but that is pretty rare.
If you don't like rice and/or pasta, you will probably be shit out of luck. You will also probably be overweight, have high cholesterol, and in generally bad health. People who view starch and carbohydrates as bad just floor me. Starchy foods satisfy you a great deal more than any other types of food and hence you eat less, yet still have a low calorie density.
Never want to look at rice again? In Southeast Asian countries, rice is the main staple and served with just about everything. They seem to be fine with this.
I don't think that "slashads" are really becomming more common. I think that it has become fashionable to call anything that does not interest someone a slashvertisement or whatever. In general bitching has become fashionable. No one bitches when an AMD or Intel processor is announced and posted. But when a non-giant company is talking about some new gadget, all of a sudden its "OMFG! Slashvertisement!" No one bitched when the Nano was announced. Look at a random week from the year 2000. You will see just as many product announcement type stories as there are today.
There is also a general sentiment that no one is allowed to profit or gain anything from Slashdot. Why? I couldn't tell you. I guess its part of the whole open source mentality, but at the same time I don't see anyone stepping up and submitting code to solve problems*. I find it amusing when I see people spending their employer's time bitching about an entertainment website that they don't pay for. I think they will be a great deal more unhappy when they are at the unemployment office.
*So why don't I submit a fix? I don't really care. Dupes, when in triplicate or of something that is currently on the front page, do show a lack of caring, but do they ruin my day? No. I just don't read the stories.
I may be somewhat unique in this respect, but my social life on a weeknight does not begin until at least 8. Most days when I get home around 6 I just kind of sit around playing video games or reading a book, or maybe muster up the motivation to go to the gym. I am at the 5 year mark, and don't really regret anything (yet). I may not be as good as Madden as I could be, or be as in shape as I could be, but I don't feel that any of my interests are in any way impacted. I am also of the opinion that most people who are "busy" all the time aren't, and that "busy" people always find time to do the things they want to.
For a new college grad, it is still a good job. You will get to work on cool projects, get great experience, and have potential to get big bonuses. Young people are not as sensitive to working long hours as long as it does not cut into their social life- If you don't have a family, there is not much reason to get home before 8:00. Your worst case scenario is that you can't hack it and after a year or two under your belt you look for a new job. If I saw an applicant from EA, I would at least know that they can work hard when needed.
I worked under similar conditions at my first job. I eventually ended up hating it, but mostly because I was underpaid. After two years of hearing management say that the big bonus payments were coming "next year," I jumped ship. My subsequent and current company is a walk in the park compared to those days, even though by most people's standards it is still pretty demanding.
It is not 1999, do not underestimate the desperation of college students.
80 years ago people were expected to read Shakespear in the 4th grade, now we (MAYBE) get into it by high school. We've been dumbed down folks, and if you don't think TV played a large part in that, well, you watch too much TV...
Thats kind of funny, my great grandmother, who would have been in 4th grade about 90 years ago, and has a high school education, has never read Shakespeare. My grandfather told me that most of the math and science I did in high school he did not touch until college. He was a smart guy that spent his adult life as an electrical/radar engineer at Grumman and went to Catholic school. SAT scores in this country are continually rising, and US colleges are saying that it is getting more and more competitive to get into their schools because the applicants are more qualified. More kids take college level (AP) courses in our high schools than ever.
IMHO, the only thing "dumbing down" the system are the students who used to be allowed to drop out or were sent to vocational schools that now have a huge amount of effort spent on them to get them up to speed and keep them in school. Similarly, there are thousands and thousands of students that are going to college that have no idea what they want to do there except for the fact that their parents told them to go. They end up getting a worthless degree, a drinking problem, and pissed off that they can't buy a bmw w/ the entry level salary they get as a paper pusher somewhere.
I kind of wonder what you have been reading, I suspect that its too many biased surverys or curmudgeon's pining for the "good old days" that were not as good as they seemed.
TAOCP, while it may give you some good nerd karma, is pretty much useless for day to day programming. It is far too dense, and there are better books on algorithms out there for practical usage. Most people I know with it on their shelf have not made it past Chapter 2, if they even really made an attempt to read it at all. It looks nice up there, but I don't think it is all that usefull.
Do you use a multi-ton Caterpillar dumptruck to haul your groceries? Im assuming not.
Why would you fault a small business for using a lightweight accounting package then? Small businesses want to focus on Getting Things Done, not learning how to use an overly complicated accounting package, or understanding the minutae of accounting concepts. Oh, and they don't want to spend over $1500 on software whose features they will never use, and/or don't even understand how to use or why they would need them.
My last company had about 30 people and revenue in the low millions of dollars a year. We had one HR/Accounting person using Peachtree. She only used a service to write the checks after it just became too tedious and time consuming for her to do it herself. They also had an accountant do the taxes (she was not a CPA). You may call it "braindead," but I call that efficient.
Use the right tool for the job. As an aside, this is why most corps don't use Linux on the desktop. Windows Just Works. On the server side, where powerful tools are needed, Linux is more than welcome and I (and many corps) use it to power a website for one of my small businesses, and I am in the process of launching an e-commerce site on it. Even so, when I first used IIS, it took me about 15 minutes to get a website running. When I first used apache, it took me 1-2 hours. I am not advocating IIS, but if you need something done quick or need it to work out of the box, I will always choose windows.
Do you advocate using "real" databases like Oracle for people to organize their vhs tapes or recipes?
I agree. As someone who is in the process of launching two e-commerce websites on a shoestring budget, almost all of our available funds are going into inventory and marketing. Things like a storefront? Ha ha ha. We don't ever plan on having a storefront, and to be honest we thought getting a mailbox at a UPS store would make us look more "legit" than just using one of our home addresses.
My "warehouse" is a walk in closet and a corner of my partner's garage. One day we do hope to be big enough to have a warehouse, and/or a storefront. We hope to actually break even and make a little money off of the thing. We don't have.com dreams of spending tons of money to get a huge customer base and breaking even over a several year period. We are being realistic, which means reducing overhead costs to as close to zero as possible and doing as much as possible ourselves.
Just because they are running a business out of their house or an ugly run down storefront, does not necessarily mean they are shady. These are internet businesses, the bricks and mortar should not matter.
I also agree and I will take the argument one point further.
Who benefits from empty machines? If I was an arcade owner, I would make the games cheap enough that every one is being played at any given time. The only ones I would price at a premium are the newest games that are going to be constantly full. Nowadays you can't go to whatever arcades are left without $20 in your pocket. You will be cleaned out of this $20 within an hour. Make the games dirt cheap, increase your revenue by opening up a small food stand and kids will spend the day there. They may still spend $20 there but get a lot more satisfaction out of it and hence be more willing to come back.
The peak load may come close to maxing out their capacity. 5-15% seems low, but I would imagine that a site like amazon.com on a "normal" day runs at 30% capacity, and come close to christmas time they max it all out.
Also, low utilization equates to excellent response times.
This system is using statistical analysis to cheaply determine traffic volume.
I am fairly sure that the mix of cars, trucks, busses, etc is more or less constant during the workweek and probably different on weekends and holidays. Similarly, I am also fairly certain that the percentage of riders with turned on cellphones is also more or less constant. So... I count the number of cellphones in the area and can calculate the speed they are traveling and I can get fully automated real-time traffic data.
A cellphone tracking based system is far easier to automate (and hence cheaper) than traffic cameras being put on the road every few miles which then have to be monitored by real live people. People are expensive and a recurring cost, and counting cars is not a great use of people.
You will have to re-evaluate your assumptions every year or so to take into account changing trends in cellphone usage vs. the number of cars, but overall the system will require little manual intervention to keep it accurate, and hence save lots of money.
Whether or not I would call basic statistical analysis "sophisticated" is another story though.
Slashdot Mirror
Intel has been dropping the ball lately on performance... it seems like the inmates in Marketing have been running this asylum for some time now. They need to hand it back over to Engineering if they are to stop their decline.
The way I see it, is that the marketing guys have been doing a great job of hiding the fact that the engineering guys are dropping the ball.
The FDIC, is part of the federal beauracracy, and while I have yet to see firsthand the FDIC go into action, I have heard it is quite a slow process, and takes weeks-months to get your money. As of right now my savings has not passed the 100k threshold, but I am saving for a house, so hopefully it will, and that would also present a problem, though one easily solved by just opening another account.
When it comes down to it, I would rather not take the risk of having my 401k, my savings and my job all lost in one day when it can be easily avoided by just doing my banking elsewhere.
Not sure if you were kidding or not, but there are very legit reasons not to.
First and foremost, if it is on an MS hosted domain, the general public perceives it as "official," whether this is the case or not. Then if this guy makes any errors or says anything outside of the company line, he is in a world of shit. It also makes sense if he also uses this same blog for his "Janie took her first poopie today!" type posts.
Second of all, employees are reasonable. I work at a very large bank. I do not keep my money at my very large bank for a few reasons. One is risk mitigation. This bank is one of the largest in the world, but on the offchance it burns Enron-style, I want to know that my money is safe somewhere else and I am not completely wiped out of my job, my 401k, and my savings. The second is that there are other banks that serve my needs better (better rates, closer locations to my home, better service). I suspect that this is the reason that he is not using an MSN domain. The third reason is a bit more paranoid/tinfoil hat, but it is a real fear of mine. I am a kind of abrasive tell it like it is kind of guy in a very "yes sir, thank you sir, may I please have more work sir" corporate drone kind of place. If for whatever reason I get involved in an altercation or on the bad side of a higher up, accused of any wrongdoing, or ever became involved in a lawsuit with my employer, I don't want it to be so easy for them to freeze my account, or have any "errors" suddenly start happening. The reasoning translates to the blog in that if he says something that upper management doesn't like, it will be far more difficult than just a phone call or email to have his speech squelched.
Seeing these replies, I get the feeling that a lot of people don't understand how in the world 10% can really be a problem. Don't think of desktop apps, think of systems, think of grid computing, think of high performance apps. I can tell you that in finance, getting an answer 10% faster is extremely valuable. We're talking getting complex computations done in milliseconds so you can see if that stock or option is worth trading and if so, get the order out to your competitors.
Or on the other end, think of a grid computing application that has to provide real time type data. Lets say it takes 10,000 $1000 dollar machines ($10 million worth) to come up with an answer to a certain problem every hour using the "standard" program. You speed that thing up 10%, you are saving not only $1 million on the initial hardware outlay, but the cost of keeping 1,000 extra machines around.
As another example, think of hotmail or another large web application provider. If you could reduce their computation and capacity costs by 10%, I am pretty sure someone would get a nice fat bonus.
Of course these people already (I hope!) have their applications compiled with as many optimizations as they feel comfortable, which makes this particular discussion kind of moot for them.
I know several people who run online businesses that absolutely depend on google for their business model, in fact like some eBay sellers (where ebay is there business model), Google IS their business model. Adwords is remarkably effective for online businesses. I myself am in the process of launching an online business that will be mostly dependant on Google for driving traffic. Google only charges you when people click on your links. I don't know anyone who has gotten rich off of Google, but they do supplement their incomes nicely from their side projects, and two people I know do make their living off of their sites.
The premise is essentially this. 99% of the time ads will be ignored. But that small subset of users that clicks your link on a targeted search to your website is highly likely to be interested in what you have to offer on your site and therefore likely to buy your products or services right then and there or in the future. If I am searching for something like "Snapper lawn mower replacement blade" on google and on the side there is an ad for a store that stocks lawn mower replacement parts, there is a damn high chance I am going to buy something from that store. So for the 20 cent cost of the traffic, the store can make a sale. The adwords are targeted, and Google has algorithms that seek out the keywords that best fit your ads and produced the highest click through rate.
Sir, I will agree with you that Google is crazy overvalued, its P/E is just out of this world and it is a very poor investment, however just because you don't understand the business model does not mean it is not a good model and Google is a bad company. Google is immensely profitable and has proven that their advertising model does work. I will also agree with you in questioning why they are moving into video, email, and various other places. I can only speculate that they have a plan in which they can deliver more and better targeted advertising through these services but have not perfected the technology yet- though you can see targeted ads on gmail. I feel that you have to give a company that is as profitable as google is the benefit of the doubt.
I blame Wired for this. I love the magazine, but it tries too damn hard to be hip. Sometimes it seems that the editors' pay is linked to how many new retarded terms they can come up with. Either that, or they just do it try and give some legitimacy to the latest fads they are writing about.
Just remember kids, you don't have a shitty website no one cares about... you have a blog! you're part of the blogosphere! You provide infoporn to those like you who want to hear your rants about how the local mass transit system was running late today. If you really want to be hip you have to record these rants into an mp3, and make them available on your blog's site and then you're a podcaster! Uggggh.
"And the cost of the new gaming systems continues to rise."
Huh? Since when? The new systems cost $399 at launch, which is far less than the old school Atari systems that cost somewhere around $800. The Nintendo and Super Nintendo were priced cheaper, though in that era many games cost $60+ and the industry was far less competitive (slower development cycles, less demand). We have been paying $50 for games for well over a decade. Not even factoring in inflation or the fact that today's systems are also media players, the costs have remained the same. I don't have any solid figures on development or production costs, but I am presuming they too have remained relatively flat. The cost of game development has indeed continued to rise, but that was not what was stated and a journalist writing about games should know the difference.
Anyone who really believes that the PS3 is not going to be priced the same as the 360 when it is released probably has an agenda. Sony is a big smart company, they are not going to just throw in the towel by overpricing their system. This article gets no digg.
I am sure this comment is going to be utterly redundant shortly, but last time I went to Radio Shack I wanted solder. Not an exotic transistor or out of the ordinary capacitor, just farking solder for a soldering iron. I looked around the store, and could not find it. So I asked one of the clerks where I could find it (not believing that its possible that Radio Shack could have moved that far away from hobbyist stuff). The clerk did not know what solder was! He had to ask his coworker who said they might have some in the back. I was shocked, and there was another geek next to me who also had a stunned look on his face. In another time or place, or possibly a more empty store, we probably would have hugged each other to console ourselves. After the two of them went in the back store room for almost 10 minutes, he finally returned with a roll of it and asked if it was what I wanted. I walked out feeling like a defeated man. I kind of wanted to take the shitty component systems on the wall shelf and throw them at the stack of overpriced R/C cars.
I am pretty sure if I had asked him for an LM555C Timer his would have asploded.
You had Ubuntu and had no problems? I find that hard to believe considering that Ubuntu doesn't even have a compiler on its default install. Even assuming that everything you install can be installed from a package, I still have had to go through some dependency hell when getting things installed on Ubuntu. It was not that bad, and as a programmer with Linux experience nothing I couldn't get through in an hour or so. However, as a real desktop OS, Linux still has room for improvement. If your mom is anything like my mom, she would have given up and cried. And my mom typing apt-get xmms or doing anything similar to it? Forget it. She will either be calling me every time to hold her hand through the process or just not using the computer altogether.
I like Linux, and its great for me, and I don't really mind the occasional hassle anymore, especially since I pretty much have all the software I need installed and don't have to muck around with things too much, but for most people (and myself included) Windows on the desktop Just Works. I want a piece of software? I download it from the web, doubleclick install.exe and 30 seconds later I have a working program without fail. Spyware is a much smaller problem after using Firefox, and a stupid user is a stupid user on any platform and equally prone to installing happy alligator weather friend or whatever no matter what OS is running (and we are all stupid users sometimes).
While the efficiency of the system against russian missles might be greatly reduced, this technology can still be deployed against less advanced nations, and act as a deterrent to anyone who may be contemplating attacking us. And yes, if we can find a way to improve the technology and take out the zig-zagging missles, we will again have a greater upper hand against less advanced countries.
I just think they are not stupid. Sure, Google is a great company with fat profits and lots of growth potential. However their market cap is $130 billion, which is about half the size of Microsoft, and more importantly their price to earnings ratio is around 100! That is crazy talk .com era type valuations, which regardless of the company, are in a word... stupid. Just because the investing public is irrationally exuberant about the companies future, does not mean that the CEO's have to drink the Kool-Aid also. They still have plenty of skin in the game, but at these outright ridiculous valuations, they probably feel that over the next 1-5 years they can get better returns on their money elsewhere.
Lets use a pets.com type company as an example. I run pets.com. I got money from a VC to start a company and sell pet products on the web. A few years in, I go public and grow my business to a $10 million dollar a year business, 2 million of which is profit. I still hold 35% of the company, and I think that the prospects to grow my business and expand into others is looking bright, and I expect to double or even triple my revenue and profits over the next few years. However, the stock has my company valued at $1 billion dollars. I know damn well that even the rosiest outlook will not allow my company to really be worth that much for at least another 15-20 years. So I sell 10% of my stake, and pocket a $100 million. I still think my company is a great company. I still have plenty riding on that fact. I also still think that my investors are fools and have a far greater chance of getting a better return on their investment anywhere else (though I would never ever ever announce that fact to anyone, not even my dog).
Selling your company's stock and believing that your company has a good future ahead of it are not mutually exclusive.
This seems to be a very common problem in technical departments of non-technical companies. Getting into management is the only way up the ladder, and there are no ways to make a comfortable salary without managing people or projects. If you are techie you are deemed less valuable than a manager. This problem was first* outlined in the Mythical Man Month by Fred Brooks in the mid 1970's folks! Yet managers still don't get it. My manager doesn't get it. I have a coworker that is awesome technically that is experiencing the same problem. He has asked to take on an architect type role in the team, and my manager has told him repeatedly that being a developer is a dead-end. He was even penalized in his last review for it and labeled as "uncooperative to management" because of it.
I think this mindset is caused by the fact that the people in charge- aka the management- did not see spending their life dealing directly with technology as rewarding and fulfilling and from their first day on the job had an eye on the corner office. Technology companies have a better understanding of technologists and accordingly have much better promotion paths for those not wanting to manage people.
*Well maybe only first in the sense that the Model-T was the first car, but close enough.
I forget the exact figures, but even 15 minutes of outage per year puts you around the 99.999 range. To me, thats not the point though. What scares me is that the internet is supposed to be a highly resilient "route around the trouble" type of network. Cutting a fiber line somewhere is not supposed to cause this type of damage. The damage should be highly localized to only people within the small area behind the single point of failure (IE the neighborhood that is the "last mile"). I am not saying this is a real problem that we should throw tons of manpower at, but I just think that there is a common misconception that the net is more robust than it really is.
I for one, am seriously interested to know if slashdot still runs on PIII 600's.
I spend about $100 a month on food. How do I do it? Rice and pasta are my main staples. On average I eat one meal a day. I don't buy junk food. The processed "easy" food is almost always more expensive and almost always less healthy. Eating one or two meals a day keeps me within my target weight range. I also enjoy cooking. It is not a chore to me, kind of like when you get a piece of code to work properly, sitting down to a good meal cooked with fresh ingredients is very satisfying.
Lets break it down.
One pound of pasta costs about a dollar. This will feed me for 4 meals. Sauce to be served with the pasta costs about $3, maybe $5 for a really pricey sauce or complicated homemade recipe. $6 = 4 meals. $1.50 a meal. Throw some meat in there or a veggie to make it $2.
About 10 pounds of rice costs about $5. A cup of rice is good for about 3-4 servings, and there are about 25 cups of rice in a bag. So rice costs about 5 cents for a meal. Youre going to need some veggies and meat in there to make a decent meal, so youre total cost for a meal of rice and whatever is probably going to be $2.
So even a balanced meal costs $2. Eat one time a day and you're costs for a dinner are $60. The other $40 is accounted for by things like fruit, salads for lunch, cereal, milk, bread, drinks, and the occasional seafood or steak dinner, etc. I am also a single guy living in a small apartment and don't get to benefit from buying large quantities. One big caveat is that I don't consider going out to dinner and other entertainment type meals to be a part of my regular food bill. I also don't throw out food ever. Occasionally I will make a mistake and keep milk or tomatoes too long and have to throw them out, but that is pretty rare.
If you don't like rice and/or pasta, you will probably be shit out of luck. You will also probably be overweight, have high cholesterol, and in generally bad health. People who view starch and carbohydrates as bad just floor me. Starchy foods satisfy you a great deal more than any other types of food and hence you eat less, yet still have a low calorie density.
Never want to look at rice again? In Southeast Asian countries, rice is the main staple and served with just about everything. They seem to be fine with this.
I don't think that "slashads" are really becomming more common. I think that it has become fashionable to call anything that does not interest someone a slashvertisement or whatever. In general bitching has become fashionable. No one bitches when an AMD or Intel processor is announced and posted. But when a non-giant company is talking about some new gadget, all of a sudden its "OMFG! Slashvertisement!" No one bitched when the Nano was announced. Look at a random week from the year 2000. You will see just as many product announcement type stories as there are today.
There is also a general sentiment that no one is allowed to profit or gain anything from Slashdot. Why? I couldn't tell you. I guess its part of the whole open source mentality, but at the same time I don't see anyone stepping up and submitting code to solve problems*. I find it amusing when I see people spending their employer's time bitching about an entertainment website that they don't pay for. I think they will be a great deal more unhappy when they are at the unemployment office.
*So why don't I submit a fix? I don't really care. Dupes, when in triplicate or of something that is currently on the front page, do show a lack of caring, but do they ruin my day? No. I just don't read the stories.
I may be somewhat unique in this respect, but my social life on a weeknight does not begin until at least 8. Most days when I get home around 6 I just kind of sit around playing video games or reading a book, or maybe muster up the motivation to go to the gym. I am at the 5 year mark, and don't really regret anything (yet). I may not be as good as Madden as I could be, or be as in shape as I could be, but I don't feel that any of my interests are in any way impacted. I am also of the opinion that most people who are "busy" all the time aren't, and that "busy" people always find time to do the things they want to.
For a new college grad, it is still a good job. You will get to work on cool projects, get great experience, and have potential to get big bonuses. Young people are not as sensitive to working long hours as long as it does not cut into their social life- If you don't have a family, there is not much reason to get home before 8:00. Your worst case scenario is that you can't hack it and after a year or two under your belt you look for a new job. If I saw an applicant from EA, I would at least know that they can work hard when needed.
I worked under similar conditions at my first job. I eventually ended up hating it, but mostly because I was underpaid. After two years of hearing management say that the big bonus payments were coming "next year," I jumped ship. My subsequent and current company is a walk in the park compared to those days, even though by most people's standards it is still pretty demanding.
It is not 1999, do not underestimate the desperation of college students.
80 years ago people were expected to read Shakespear in the 4th grade, now we (MAYBE) get into it by high school. We've been dumbed down folks, and if you don't think TV played a large part in that, well, you watch too much TV...
Thats kind of funny, my great grandmother, who would have been in 4th grade about 90 years ago, and has a high school education, has never read Shakespeare. My grandfather told me that most of the math and science I did in high school he did not touch until college. He was a smart guy that spent his adult life as an electrical/radar engineer at Grumman and went to Catholic school. SAT scores in this country are continually rising, and US colleges are saying that it is getting more and more competitive to get into their schools because the applicants are more qualified. More kids take college level (AP) courses in our high schools than ever.
IMHO, the only thing "dumbing down" the system are the students who used to be allowed to drop out or were sent to vocational schools that now have a huge amount of effort spent on them to get them up to speed and keep them in school. Similarly, there are thousands and thousands of students that are going to college that have no idea what they want to do there except for the fact that their parents told them to go. They end up getting a worthless degree, a drinking problem, and pissed off that they can't buy a bmw w/ the entry level salary they get as a paper pusher somewhere.
I kind of wonder what you have been reading, I suspect that its too many biased surverys or curmudgeon's pining for the "good old days" that were not as good as they seemed.
TAOCP, while it may give you some good nerd karma, is pretty much useless for day to day programming. It is far too dense, and there are better books on algorithms out there for practical usage. Most people I know with it on their shelf have not made it past Chapter 2, if they even really made an attempt to read it at all. It looks nice up there, but I don't think it is all that usefull.
Do you use a multi-ton Caterpillar dumptruck to haul your groceries?
Im assuming not.
Why would you fault a small business for using a lightweight accounting package then? Small businesses want to focus on Getting Things Done, not learning how to use an overly complicated accounting package, or understanding the minutae of accounting concepts. Oh, and they don't want to spend over $1500 on software whose features they will never use, and/or don't even understand how to use or why they would need them.
My last company had about 30 people and revenue in the low millions of dollars a year. We had one HR/Accounting person using Peachtree. She only used a service to write the checks after it just became too tedious and time consuming for her to do it herself. They also had an accountant do the taxes (she was not a CPA). You may call it "braindead," but I call that efficient.
Use the right tool for the job. As an aside, this is why most corps don't use Linux on the desktop. Windows Just Works. On the server side, where powerful tools are needed, Linux is more than welcome and I (and many corps) use it to power a website for one of my small businesses, and I am in the process of launching an e-commerce site on it. Even so, when I first used IIS, it took me about 15 minutes to get a website running. When I first used apache, it took me 1-2 hours. I am not advocating IIS, but if you need something done quick or need it to work out of the box, I will always choose windows.
Do you advocate using "real" databases like Oracle for people to organize their vhs tapes or recipes?
I agree. As someone who is in the process of launching two e-commerce websites on a shoestring budget, almost all of our available funds are going into inventory and marketing. Things like a storefront? Ha ha ha. We don't ever plan on having a storefront, and to be honest we thought getting a mailbox at a UPS store would make us look more "legit" than just using one of our home addresses.
.com dreams of spending tons of money to get a huge customer base and breaking even over a several year period. We are being realistic, which means reducing overhead costs to as close to zero as possible and doing as much as possible ourselves.
My "warehouse" is a walk in closet and a corner of my partner's garage. One day we do hope to be big enough to have a warehouse, and/or a storefront. We hope to actually break even and make a little money off of the thing. We don't have
Just because they are running a business out of their house or an ugly run down storefront, does not necessarily mean they are shady. These are internet businesses, the bricks and mortar should not matter.
I also agree and I will take the argument one point further.
Who benefits from empty machines? If I was an arcade owner, I would make the games cheap enough that every one is being played at any given time. The only ones I would price at a premium are the newest games that are going to be constantly full. Nowadays you can't go to whatever arcades are left without $20 in your pocket. You will be cleaned out of this $20 within an hour. Make the games dirt cheap, increase your revenue by opening up a small food stand and kids will spend the day there. They may still spend $20 there but get a lot more satisfaction out of it and hence be more willing to come back.
It just does not make much sense to me.
The peak load may come close to maxing out their capacity. 5-15% seems low, but I would imagine that a site like amazon.com on a "normal" day runs at 30% capacity, and come close to christmas time they max it all out.
Also, low utilization equates to excellent response times.
This system is using statistical analysis to cheaply determine traffic volume.
I am fairly sure that the mix of cars, trucks, busses, etc is more or less constant during the workweek and probably different on weekends and holidays. Similarly, I am also fairly certain that the percentage of riders with turned on cellphones is also more or less constant. So... I count the number of cellphones in the area and can calculate the speed they are traveling and I can get fully automated real-time traffic data.
A cellphone tracking based system is far easier to automate (and hence cheaper) than traffic cameras being put on the road every few miles which then have to be monitored by real live people. People are expensive and a recurring cost, and counting cars is not a great use of people.
You will have to re-evaluate your assumptions every year or so to take into account changing trends in cellphone usage vs. the number of cars, but overall the system will require little manual intervention to keep it accurate, and hence save lots of money.
Whether or not I would call basic statistical analysis "sophisticated" is another story though.