In the last 15 to 20 years I've seen the following VERY disturbing trend here in the USA. People here do not leave their work at work. We work EXCESSIVE hours and are expected to kill ourselves, damage our health and wound our minds to "be more productive" or "increase productivity".
It's not a trend in the USA. The average work week is declining, and has been for 45 years.
Not so much, IMHO. Basically the only thing we can do in the face of a terrible employer is leave
Or change their outlook. I mean, I've worked places that had draconian employment contracts, abusive hours, etc. But they are run by _people_, and I've had no problems doing things like:
1. Going to the legal department and saying "I want to delete this clause on patent indemnification and add one on intellectual property ownership before I sign this" 2. Getting the team together and saying "hey, we're not going to work every Saturday and Sunday any more--once or twice a year for a big project, fine, but not on a regular basis" 3. Going to management and saying "this new business contract you're about to sign is a bad deal for x, y, and z and here's an alternative that's cheaper with better profit margins".
I mean, yeah, if the people you're working for are malicious idiots then you're basically SOL. But half the time that an employer is terrible, they don't know what's going on and are pretty open to ideas for improvement (In #1, they didn't really care about that particular part of the language, it was just boilerplate; in #3 they were glad to see an alternative that made sense). Sometimes when they're not particularly _open_ to it, they'll accept it if it's just reality (like situation #2, where basically overnight the company went from always having everyone in 60 hour weeks to more reasonable 40-50 hour weeks with weekends free, and the change has stuck even years later).
Now obviously if they're blanket ignorant, they're not likely to be in business long. But employers who are business-knowledgeable but don't know all the details are not uncommon, and if it's details that are making them a pain in the ass to work for then you can do a lot more than just leave.
I'll say this, also: I've worked at internet startups to huge government bureaucracies, and you can _always_ negotiate contracts before you sign them. Read them. Find onerous clauses. Discuss changes that'll satisfy you both. Even the career government service types were very easy to work with as long as my concerns were legit.
Great argument here. So, basically, you're saying that it's perfectly fine for governments (but probably not individuals) to simply provide whatever services they want to, and then force the beneficiaries (who never asked for those services) to pay an arbitrarily high price for them, whether or not they actually benefit, effectively preventing them from spending their money on things that they would find more productive?
Yes. That is one of the primary purposes of government: to provide public goods that even conservative economists believe a free market cannot provide efficiently. I would argue that it is, in fact, the most important purpose of government (defense being one of the most important of those goods). And the government is clearly empowered with tax power to finance such goods.
I'll object to "whatever services they want to, and then force the beneficiaries (who never asked for those services)" slightly; the government is composed of the people and (theoretically) gets its goals set by them. Certainly minorities who object to a public-good policy are forced to abide by (and fund) it, though.
Perhaps they should extend this ability to the private sector as well
The names "public good" and "private good" were chosen for a particular reason. Most libertarians abide by the strictest possible definition of "public good" (100% non-rivalrous, 100% non-excludable) but still allow for the importance of government in providing (and enforcing taxes for) that very small category and their unique right to impose taxes. And they generally agree that government is unique in this sense, and such power should not be extended to the private sector (although perhaps it can be delegated in some circumstances).
By their very nature, public goods require forced participation; free markets cannot provide them efficiently.
there's no requirement for our Prime Minister to be Christian, or any of our MPs.
More importantly, they can get voted in without being Christian. I believe that if somebody wanted to make it an issue, they could overturn the requirements that various USA states have on constitutional grounds. However, even if they did that, not being a Christian would be a severe impediment to their election campaign.
Do you have a pointer to any such state requirements?
Right now, while the majority of US senators are Christian, more than 10% are not. There are also non-Christian representatives and Supreme Court justices.
The majority of the non-Christians are Jewish. There are also a Unitarian senator, a couple Unitarian representatives, a Scientologist representative, and 4 non-religious representatives (that's counting US representative Tammy Baldwin who officially lists her religion as "Gay-Lesbian-Bi-Transexual" as non-religious).
The FSF does require that for its code, but Linux and a lot of other projects don't. It's not always bad, though. While it's harder to change the license, you don't have to trust whoever you're assigning the license to to not sell out.
At least with the FSF model, it's not 100% trust based; at least last time I checked they do sign a contract with the assigner saying that they'll distribute the code under a free license or the copyright reverts, or something along those lines. I can't remember the exact wording.
That essentially leaves military defense as the only significant, semi-legitimate service provided to large corporations by the federal government
You cannot be serious. Interstates, postal service, police forces, education for the workforce, etc are all significant services. So are social programs like the food stamp and HUD programs which indirectly benefit Google by decreased crime and other tangential benefits. Social Security and Medicare programs allow corporations to offer much lower retirement plans, if any. Medicaid programs decrease the corporate out-of-pocket costs for health care plans. And they're all funded by the federal government, in completely legitimate way.
Many of those benefits are non-excludable goods and cannot be funded on an "opt-in/opt-out" private sector basis; while you may not like some of them, that discussion has to take place on a much larger arena than a single corporation for any reform to be effective or economical. It's just disingenous to claim that a single corporation (if it were legal) could opt out of widespread programs and pay for equivalent services through the private sector when in reality they would still be receiving huge benefits from those programs but freeloading to get them.
Note that I'm not claiming at all that, say, Medicare+Medicaid+Social Security is a more cost-effective way for corporations/individuals to pay for those services than a privatized approach. I'm saying that while those programs do exist, it makes the private expenditures for health/retirement lower, and Google does benefit from that--even if they said "we don't want those plans", to a large extent that doesn't matter since they are provided to individuals regardless of how their corporation feels and so there's no pressure on the corporation to provide duplicate private services. Hence the decision to privatize that simply cannot be done on a small-scale.
I don't think that corporations should be forced to pay so much more than any individual for that protection, particularly when the individuals which make up the corporations also pay for that defense. In effect, the company's shareholders are forced to pay twice for the same service, once as individuals and again as a group.
No, they pay for two services: protecting them as individuals (their homes and persons), and protecting their corporations. It takes more resources to protect both than to protect one, and double-taxation is the right approach. (that's without getting into the fact that many corporations tend to be more likely targets than individual homes in the event of a war).
Moreover, our company has come to the consensus that you do not pay strictly bases on the proportion of services received, but also based on your ability to pay, and has set graduated individual and corporate tax rates accordingly. Making such decisions is generally considered a legitimate purpose of government, and this case in particular is clearly allowed under our Constitution.
I'm certain that they could work out some kind of civil-defense arrangement with the relevant governments
I'm inclined to say that they couldn't. The US government has an established history of funding it's military through taxes, and there is no other relevant government, and the US government is unlikely to look kindly on standing private armies with appropriate military-grade equipment and weaponry. And Google sure isn't going to be able to put together an army that can stand up to the US military. Even Walmart isn't going to come anywhere close.
And you can't opt-out of those taxes and claim that you're not getting any benefit from the US military when they're still going to be protecting all of the area around you and deterring invasion of your area even when they're not putting troops on your land. Perhaps a structure like that could work on a larger scale if, say, California wanted to opt out and have its own military. Even there they would benefit enormously from a halo effect, and it's certainly not in the best interests of the nation to encourage such tragedies of the commons going forward (and yes, I know that other nations benefit from such halo effects, and some like Costa Rica depend on them).
Do you happen to have a source for that? As I recall, the infrastructure of the Internet (land-lines, routers, servers, etc.) is almost entirely privately owned.
Possibly true now, but it's doubtful that it was built or would have been built without the government. Even as late as 2004, more than half the people on the Internet were connected over telephone services, whose infrastructure is heavily dependent on government support. I'd be pretty shocked if government funding (direct, or via the use of eminent domain power, rights-of-way under transportation infrastructure, tax easements, etc) wasn't a major factor in funding even modern Internet infrastructure. And, of course, there wouldn't have been an Internet as we know it without 20+ years of DARPA/ARPAnet research and buildout. Not to mention that things like top-level IP block allocation, DNS management, etc were all managed by IANA (a government body) when Google was being built, and Google most certainly relied on those services.
Of the "standard responses" you mentioned, only the army (or the military in general) is paid for by national taxes. Police, roads, fire protection, schools--almost everything else, in fact--is the state or county's responsibility.
Of course, the post the AC was replying to went out of it's way to bring state taxes into the equation. Indeed, the particular quote he/she was responding to was "Ask yourself what the various levels of government have done", it was not at all limited to just the federal government. States and counties are part of "the various levels of government" last I checked.
In any event, I'm certain that Google could probably have provided all of the services it desired for its own protection for far less than a quarter of its annual income, and probably does so anyway (most major companies seem to employ their own security forces, for example)
Are you serious? Building-security is a tiny fraction of what the police provide. And even there, the private security forces would be pretty toothless if there weren't public police forces roaming the land to keep criminals from building up small armies to raid places, making people know that if a crime is committed there will be tremendous investigative power brought to bear on them, and so forth. That aside, Google would certainly have trouble funding officers all over the country to deal with civil and criminal investigations, execute warrants, etc--and wouldn't have the authority to do so even if they could. And what would Google do with the criminals it caught? Execute them? Build private prisons? Surely in the absense of government the private sector could eventually replicate a lot of its services, but that infrastructure isn't there and Google is far from large enough to build it all out itself.
Yahoo was what people used to search the Internet. The fact that some of the tech was outsourced did not seem to matter, particularly because the directory results were included. It turns out it was foolish of Yahoo to outsource the core of its business
But it never outsourced anything it had in house. I don't believe that Yahoo was ever close to "what people used to search the internet"--if you look at the search engine numbers, it was never dominant or even within shouting distance of the top 3-4 players, and the search engines it used to power it's searches didn't get big spikes when they were chosen nor did they level off or decline when they were dropped.
Even as late as 2003, Yahoo did about a third the searches that google did and less than half what AOL did. It was closer to Ask Jeeves or InfoSpace than to the big players when it comes to searches.
People used Lycos in the early days, then shifted primarily to Altavista with Inktomi and Excite on its heels, and then Google rose to dominance. With AOL and MSN always as major players.
Regardless, even if Yahoo had been a dominant search player you'd have to applaud them for cutting the deals to be able to have a search function at all and not think they're foolish for outsourcing something that they never, in fact, had in-house to begin with.
During that same time, Yahoo was the #1 most popular web site almost every month. That's because its core business is being a portal site (and a mail site), and it's one of few sites to navigate that terrain effectively.
I didn't know that. They own Altavista (and Inktomi, obviously, and alltheweb) now, too.
I'm just saying that dmoz and del.icio.us are far closer to being competitors to what Yahoo did than Google is--Yahoo didn't have a search engine of their own until 2004 (from 1996-2004 they provided results from major search engines, variously Altavista, Inktomi, and Google). They were more of a bookmark/hierarchical link categorization service at the outset, and expanded into a portal site. Only recently did they enter the Internet search space.
By roughly 97 or 98, Yahoo's full text search was the industry leader
What is "Yahoo's full text search"? From 1996-1998, Yahoo used Altavista to provide their searches. From 1998-2000, they used Inktomi. From 2000-2004, they used Google.
In 1995*, and 1997-1999, Altavista was the #1 search engine in the nation. Note that Altavista continued to dominate the search space after Yahoo moved to Inktomi, until Google's emergence (and Compaq acquiring them and retargeting them as a portal rather than a search site).
Yahoo didn't have their own search engine until the Inktomi acquisition; Yahoo Search (2004 on) and was the first time they had their own search results online.
During the dot-com boom, I forgot search was important and let Google take over my core franchise.
Since when was search ever Yahoo's core franchise? It started off as a way to share the founder's bookmarks online and evolved into a hierarchical link categorization system. Then it added portal features and tacked on a search engine. But http://www.dmoz.org/ is much closer to their original "core business", and even http://del.icio.us/ is much closer to what they do than Google is.
I'm not even sure they had a general Internet search box before they went with Google in that capacity, and they only got into developing such a thing after purchasing Inktomi in 2002 (well after the dot-com boom).
Google's search competitors were other search engines, mainly Lycos and Altavista (Lycos being the older of the two and the first widely used general search engine, Altavista being the predominant search engine by the time Google was in the field).
I agree, I grew up in the Northern USA (Maine) and everyone there had at least double-glazed windows (more commonly triple or high-E double), storm doors, reasonable insulation, etc. Moving down to Virginia, I see houses with single glazed windows, no storm doors, and no insulation to speak of.
I can't imagine that the cost of insulation is higher than the energy benefits to your *cooling* costs around here, and the winters still rely on home heating, but there you have it...
Its only a matter of time before Google hires Chuck Norris to simply roundhouse kick all of their enemies.
Ehh, Chow Yun Fat is much, much cooler.
Cooler != funnier. Samuel L. Jackson is much, much cooler than Abe Vigoda, but a Sam Jackson status website along the lines of http://www.abevigoda.com/ wouldn't work. Parent post chose wisely.
In the same line - where is the discussion of different FD table polling mechanisms? select() versus poll(), and wheres the writeup about Linux's epoll(). I would have been interested in an epoll() article, especially how it compares to FreeBSD's kqueue().
Alternatively, try modulating the frequency of the deuterium drive. If that fails, try reversing the polarity of the neutron flow--you'll need a sonic screwdriver (like $10 at Home Depot/Lowe's). If that fails, your dilithium crystals are probably dead and you'll need to find replacements (should take about 60 minutes, minus commercial breaks--you'll need someone in a red shirt to help you, best if it's not a close friend).
Just to elaborate a bit more, IMO the obvious thing would be to allow one or all of the following:
1. Right-clicking on a song on your computer from iTunes has a "send to ipod" option 2. A menu option "Send to ipod" to send selected songs to the ipod. 3. The ipod shows up as a folder that you can drag and drop songs to from a file explorer.
Or some other obvious way when you're looking at songs in iTunes to say "hey I'd like to have this on my ipod".
(3) turns out to be basically the case if you know which of the bazillion left-pane options to select, and once you know that then it's a servicable interface. But it's not obvious from looking at it which pane is right (or even that it's possible).
And if you unmount the ipod from iTunes, it's not obvious how to remount it--I don't think we ever figured that out, we had to unplug and replug it from the USB.
1) Install and run iTunes, allowing it to search for music on your computer. 2) Plug the iPod in and watch the files transfer to it one-by-one.
Of course, it fails when you say "no, I don't want to transfer my whole damn library, I want to pick some songs to put on". Who wants to wait for everything to transfer when they first get a new toy?
The iTunes store offers so far the best online music store and player combination (software and portable). So far none of the other companies have succeded in offering a better combo. The winner takes it all...
The player is kick-ass, best I've played with. I have yet to find a player that comes with less intuitive music management software, though. It's okay but warty once you learn it, but much harder than most for a naive user to jump in and just copy some songs onto their player. My roommate's girlfriend still can't do it, she has to come over to have him put new music on--and she's at least average in technical saavy. She's no programmer, but she can configure her mail client to use a new POP server without help. I am a programmer, and it took us about 20 minutes of futzing to get a song onto it the first time.
If you are developing software for money, there is nothing better.
I've found ccured more consistently finds problems than Purify. Plus it's faster, and free. It's also much harder to set up to work with large projects. So better in some significant ways, and worse in other significant ways. (also it doesn't find leaks but Boehm works fine for that).
The OP was asking for stack debuggers, which are much less common and generally come as intrusive compiler patches. libsafe is the best alternative.
ElectricFence, valgrind, Boehm GC, Purify, etc are all heap debuggers (for finding problems with overruning malloc'd memory, memory leaks, etc). It's possible that Purify has stack debugging capability these days, I'm not sure.
Yeah, you can ascend to demigod status. There are some darned good players out there who can do it on a regular basis (Marvin ascended 13 straight characters in the annual nethack tournament this year, one of every class and he mixed up races/alignments so he had one of each). I've only managed 7 so far (valkyrie, tourist, archaeologist, wizard, caveman, ranger, rogue). I'm working on a weaponless, body-armorless, vegetarian monk right now.
A good eye doctor will explain what their doing and why their doing it...and won't waste a lot of time trying to sell you expensive options on your glasses or contacts.
Most good eye doctors don't sell glasses or contacts at all. Get an ophthalmologist to do the diagnosis and write a prescription without such conflicts of interest. Then take that to the optometrist or optician and get it filled (and shoot down all their upselling attempts, if any). Alternatively, go to an optom who doesn't also sell you the lenses, or one who you know isn't just trying to push product--there are some good ones out there.
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In the last 15 to 20 years I've seen the following VERY disturbing trend here in the USA.
People here do not leave their work at work. We work EXCESSIVE hours and are expected to kill ourselves, damage our health and wound our minds to "be more productive" or "increase productivity".
It's not a trend in the USA. The average work week is declining, and has been for 45 years.
Not so much, IMHO. Basically the only thing we can do in the face of a terrible employer is leave
Or change their outlook. I mean, I've worked places that had draconian employment contracts, abusive hours, etc. But they are run by _people_, and I've had no problems doing things like:
1. Going to the legal department and saying "I want to delete this clause on patent indemnification and add one on intellectual property ownership before I sign this"
2. Getting the team together and saying "hey, we're not going to work every Saturday and Sunday any more--once or twice a year for a big project, fine, but not on a regular basis"
3. Going to management and saying "this new business contract you're about to sign is a bad deal for x, y, and z and here's an alternative that's cheaper with better profit margins".
I mean, yeah, if the people you're working for are malicious idiots then you're basically SOL. But half the time that an employer is terrible, they don't know what's going on and are pretty open to ideas for improvement (In #1, they didn't really care about that particular part of the language, it was just boilerplate; in #3 they were glad to see an alternative that made sense). Sometimes when they're not particularly _open_ to it, they'll accept it if it's just reality (like situation #2, where basically overnight the company went from always having everyone in 60 hour weeks to more reasonable 40-50 hour weeks with weekends free, and the change has stuck even years later).
Now obviously if they're blanket ignorant, they're not likely to be in business long. But employers who are business-knowledgeable but don't know all the details are not uncommon, and if it's details that are making them a pain in the ass to work for then you can do a lot more than just leave.
I'll say this, also: I've worked at internet startups to huge government bureaucracies, and you can _always_ negotiate contracts before you sign them. Read them. Find onerous clauses. Discuss changes that'll satisfy you both. Even the career government service types were very easy to work with as long as my concerns were legit.
Great argument here. So, basically, you're saying that it's perfectly fine for governments (but probably not individuals) to simply provide whatever services they want to, and then force the beneficiaries (who never asked for those services) to pay an arbitrarily high price for them, whether or not they actually benefit, effectively preventing them from spending their money on things that they would find more productive?
Yes. That is one of the primary purposes of government: to provide public goods that even conservative economists believe a free market cannot provide efficiently. I would argue that it is, in fact, the most important purpose of government (defense being one of the most important of those goods). And the government is clearly empowered with tax power to finance such goods.
I'll object to "whatever services they want to, and then force the beneficiaries (who never asked for those services)" slightly; the government is composed of the people and (theoretically) gets its goals set by them. Certainly minorities who object to a public-good policy are forced to abide by (and fund) it, though.
Perhaps they should extend this ability to the private sector as well
The names "public good" and "private good" were chosen for a particular reason. Most libertarians abide by the strictest possible definition of "public good" (100% non-rivalrous, 100% non-excludable) but still allow for the importance of government in providing (and enforcing taxes for) that very small category and their unique right to impose taxes. And they generally agree that government is unique in this sense, and such power should not be extended to the private sector (although perhaps it can be delegated in some circumstances).
By their very nature, public goods require forced participation; free markets cannot provide them efficiently.
Do you have a pointer to any such state requirements?
Right now, while the majority of US senators are Christian, more than 10% are not. There are also non-Christian representatives and Supreme Court justices.
The majority of the non-Christians are Jewish. There are also a Unitarian senator, a couple Unitarian representatives, a Scientologist representative, and 4 non-religious representatives (that's counting US representative Tammy Baldwin who officially lists her religion as "Gay-Lesbian-Bi-Transexual" as non-religious).
The FSF does require that for its code, but Linux and a lot of other projects don't. It's not always bad, though. While it's harder to change the license, you don't have to trust whoever you're assigning the license to to not sell out.
At least with the FSF model, it's not 100% trust based; at least last time I checked they do sign a contract with the assigner saying that they'll distribute the code under a free license or the copyright reverts, or something along those lines. I can't remember the exact wording.
That essentially leaves military defense as the only significant, semi-legitimate service provided to large corporations by the federal government
You cannot be serious. Interstates, postal service, police forces, education for the workforce, etc are all significant services. So are social programs like the food stamp and HUD programs which indirectly benefit Google by decreased crime and other tangential benefits. Social Security and Medicare programs allow corporations to offer much lower retirement plans, if any. Medicaid programs decrease the corporate out-of-pocket costs for health care plans. And they're all funded by the federal government, in completely legitimate way.
Many of those benefits are non-excludable goods and cannot be funded on an "opt-in/opt-out" private sector basis; while you may not like some of them, that discussion has to take place on a much larger arena than a single corporation for any reform to be effective or economical. It's just disingenous to claim that a single corporation (if it were legal) could opt out of widespread programs and pay for equivalent services through the private sector when in reality they would still be receiving huge benefits from those programs but freeloading to get them.
Note that I'm not claiming at all that, say, Medicare+Medicaid+Social Security is a more cost-effective way for corporations/individuals to pay for those services than a privatized approach. I'm saying that while those programs do exist, it makes the private expenditures for health/retirement lower, and Google does benefit from that--even if they said "we don't want those plans", to a large extent that doesn't matter since they are provided to individuals regardless of how their corporation feels and so there's no pressure on the corporation to provide duplicate private services. Hence the decision to privatize that simply cannot be done on a small-scale.
I don't think that corporations should be forced to pay so much more than any individual for that protection, particularly when the individuals which make up the corporations also pay for that defense. In effect, the company's shareholders are forced to pay twice for the same service, once as individuals and again as a group.
No, they pay for two services: protecting them as individuals (their homes and persons), and protecting their corporations. It takes more resources to protect both than to protect one, and double-taxation is the right approach. (that's without getting into the fact that many corporations tend to be more likely targets than individual homes in the event of a war).
Moreover, our company has come to the consensus that you do not pay strictly bases on the proportion of services received, but also based on your ability to pay, and has set graduated individual and corporate tax rates accordingly. Making such decisions is generally considered a legitimate purpose of government, and this case in particular is clearly allowed under our Constitution.
I'm certain that they could work out some kind of civil-defense arrangement with the relevant governments
I'm inclined to say that they couldn't. The US government has an established history of funding it's military through taxes, and there is no other relevant government, and the US government is unlikely to look kindly on standing private armies with appropriate military-grade equipment and weaponry. And Google sure isn't going to be able to put together an army that can stand up to the US military. Even Walmart isn't going to come anywhere close.
And you can't opt-out of those taxes and claim that you're not getting any benefit from the US military when they're still going to be protecting all of the area around you and deterring invasion of your area even when they're not putting troops on your land. Perhaps a structure like that could work on a larger scale if, say, California wanted to opt out and have its own military. Even there they would benefit enormously from a halo effect, and it's certainly not in the best interests of the nation to encourage such tragedies of the commons going forward (and yes, I know that other nations benefit from such halo effects, and some like Costa Rica depend on them).
Do you happen to have a source for that? As I recall, the infrastructure of the Internet (land-lines, routers, servers, etc.) is almost entirely privately owned.
Possibly true now, but it's doubtful that it was built or would have been built without the government. Even as late as 2004, more than half the people on the Internet were connected over telephone services, whose infrastructure is heavily dependent on government support. I'd be pretty shocked if government funding (direct, or via the use of eminent domain power, rights-of-way under transportation infrastructure, tax easements, etc) wasn't a major factor in funding even modern Internet infrastructure. And, of course, there wouldn't have been an Internet as we know it without 20+ years of DARPA/ARPAnet research and buildout. Not to mention that things like top-level IP block allocation, DNS management, etc were all managed by IANA (a government body) when Google was being built, and Google most certainly relied on those services.
Of the "standard responses" you mentioned, only the army (or the military in general) is paid for by national taxes. Police, roads, fire protection, schools--almost everything else, in fact--is the state or county's responsibility.
Of course, the post the AC was replying to went out of it's way to bring state taxes into the equation. Indeed, the particular quote he/she was responding to was "Ask yourself what the various levels of government have done", it was not at all limited to just the federal government. States and counties are part of "the various levels of government" last I checked.
In any event, I'm certain that Google could probably have provided all of the services it desired for its own protection for far less than a quarter of its annual income, and probably does so anyway (most major companies seem to employ their own security forces, for example)
Are you serious? Building-security is a tiny fraction of what the police provide. And even there, the private security forces would be pretty toothless if there weren't public police forces roaming the land to keep criminals from building up small armies to raid places, making people know that if a crime is committed there will be tremendous investigative power brought to bear on them, and so forth. That aside, Google would certainly have trouble funding officers all over the country to deal with civil and criminal investigations, execute warrants, etc--and wouldn't have the authority to do so even if they could. And what would Google do with the criminals it caught? Execute them? Build private prisons? Surely in the absense of government the private sector could eventually replicate a lot of its services, but that infrastructure isn't there and Google is far from large enough to build it all out itself.
Yahoo was what people used to search the Internet. The fact that some of the tech was outsourced did not seem to matter, particularly because the directory results were included. It turns out it was foolish of Yahoo to outsource the core of its business
But it never outsourced anything it had in house. I don't believe that Yahoo was ever close to "what people used to search the internet"--if you look at the search engine numbers, it was never dominant or even within shouting distance of the top 3-4 players, and the search engines it used to power it's searches didn't get big spikes when they were chosen nor did they level off or decline when they were dropped.
Even as late as 2003, Yahoo did about a third the searches that google did and less than half what AOL did. It was closer to Ask Jeeves or InfoSpace than to the big players when it comes to searches.
People used Lycos in the early days, then shifted primarily to Altavista with Inktomi and Excite on its heels, and then Google rose to dominance. With AOL and MSN always as major players.
Regardless, even if Yahoo had been a dominant search player you'd have to applaud them for cutting the deals to be able to have a search function at all and not think they're foolish for outsourcing something that they never, in fact, had in-house to begin with.
During that same time, Yahoo was the #1 most popular web site almost every month. That's because its core business is being a portal site (and a mail site), and it's one of few sites to navigate that terrain effectively.
Which are even less related to the search space...
They pay tax on those stock sales
But not income tax, which is what the parent mentioned. They probably pay the (much lower) long-term captial gains tax.
I didn't know that. They own Altavista (and Inktomi, obviously, and alltheweb) now, too.
I'm just saying that dmoz and del.icio.us are far closer to being competitors to what Yahoo did than Google is--Yahoo didn't have a search engine of their own until 2004 (from 1996-2004 they provided results from major search engines, variously Altavista, Inktomi, and Google). They were more of a bookmark/hierarchical link categorization service at the outset, and expanded into a portal site. Only recently did they enter the Internet search space.
By roughly 97 or 98, Yahoo's full text search was the industry leader
What is "Yahoo's full text search"? From 1996-1998, Yahoo used Altavista to provide their searches. From 1998-2000, they used Inktomi. From 2000-2004, they used Google.
In 1995*, and 1997-1999, Altavista was the #1 search engine in the nation. Note that Altavista continued to dominate the search space after Yahoo moved to Inktomi, until Google's emergence (and Compaq acquiring them and retargeting them as a portal rather than a search site).
Yahoo didn't have their own search engine until the Inktomi acquisition; Yahoo Search (2004 on) and was the first time they had their own search results online.
*in 1996, both Inktomi and Excite were larger
During the dot-com boom, I forgot search was important and let Google take over my core franchise.
Since when was search ever Yahoo's core franchise? It started off as a way to share the founder's bookmarks online and evolved into a hierarchical link categorization system. Then it added portal features and tacked on a search engine. But http://www.dmoz.org/ is much closer to their original "core business", and even http://del.icio.us/ is much closer to what they do than Google is.
I'm not even sure they had a general Internet search box before they went with Google in that capacity, and they only got into developing such a thing after purchasing Inktomi in 2002 (well after the dot-com boom).
Google's search competitors were other search engines, mainly Lycos and Altavista (Lycos being the older of the two and the first widely used general search engine, Altavista being the predominant search engine by the time Google was in the field).
It has entirely to do with the mild winters.
I agree, I grew up in the Northern USA (Maine) and everyone there had at least double-glazed windows (more commonly triple or high-E double), storm doors, reasonable insulation, etc. Moving down to Virginia, I see houses with single glazed windows, no storm doors, and no insulation to speak of.
I can't imagine that the cost of insulation is higher than the energy benefits to your *cooling* costs around here, and the winters still rely on home heating, but there you have it...
Cooler != funnier. Samuel L. Jackson is much, much cooler than Abe Vigoda, but a Sam Jackson status website along the lines of http://www.abevigoda.com/ wouldn't work. Parent post chose wisely.
In the same line - where is the discussion of different FD table polling mechanisms? select() versus poll(), and wheres the writeup about Linux's epoll(). I would have been interested in an epoll() article, especially how it compares to FreeBSD's kqueue().
For the overview, you want Dan Kegel's c10k page:
http://www.kegel.com/c10k.html
Did you modify the phase variance?
Alternatively, try modulating the frequency of the deuterium drive. If that fails, try reversing the polarity of the neutron flow--you'll need a sonic screwdriver (like $10 at Home Depot/Lowe's). If that fails, your dilithium crystals are probably dead and you'll need to find replacements (should take about 60 minutes, minus commercial breaks--you'll need someone in a red shirt to help you, best if it's not a close friend).
Just to elaborate a bit more, IMO the obvious thing would be to allow one or all of the following:
1. Right-clicking on a song on your computer from iTunes has a "send to ipod" option
2. A menu option "Send to ipod" to send selected songs to the ipod.
3. The ipod shows up as a folder that you can drag and drop songs to from a file explorer.
Or some other obvious way when you're looking at songs in iTunes to say "hey I'd like to have this on my ipod".
(3) turns out to be basically the case if you know which of the bazillion left-pane options to select, and once you know that then it's a servicable interface. But it's not obvious from looking at it which pane is right (or even that it's possible).
And if you unmount the ipod from iTunes, it's not obvious how to remount it--I don't think we ever figured that out, we had to unplug and replug it from the USB.
1) Install and run iTunes, allowing it to search for music on your computer.
2) Plug the iPod in and watch the files transfer to it one-by-one.
Of course, it fails when you say "no, I don't want to transfer my whole damn library, I want to pick some songs to put on". Who wants to wait for everything to transfer when they first get a new toy?
The iTunes store offers so far the best online music store and player combination (software and portable). So far none of the other companies have succeded in offering a better combo. The winner takes it all ...
The player is kick-ass, best I've played with. I have yet to find a player that comes with less intuitive music management software, though. It's okay but warty once you learn it, but much harder than most for a naive user to jump in and just copy some songs onto their player. My roommate's girlfriend still can't do it, she has to come over to have him put new music on--and she's at least average in technical saavy. She's no programmer, but she can configure her mail client to use a new POP server without help. I am a programmer, and it took us about 20 minutes of futzing to get a song onto it the first time.
If you are developing software for money, there is nothing better.
I've found ccured more consistently finds problems than Purify. Plus it's faster, and free. It's also much harder to set up to work with large projects. So better in some significant ways, and worse in other significant ways. (also it doesn't find leaks but Boehm works fine for that).
The OP was asking for stack debuggers, which are much less common and generally come as intrusive compiler patches. libsafe is the best alternative.
ElectricFence, valgrind, Boehm GC, Purify, etc are all heap debuggers (for finding problems with overruning malloc'd memory, memory leaks, etc). It's possible that Purify has stack debugging capability these days, I'm not sure.
'n's are teases. Make hers an '&'.
WTF? You can "win" NETHACK?! Is that in the FAQ?!
Yeah, you can ascend to demigod status. There are some darned good players out there who can do it on a regular basis (Marvin ascended 13 straight characters in the annual nethack tournament this year, one of every class and he mixed up races/alignments so he had one of each). I've only managed 7 so far (valkyrie, tourist, archaeologist, wizard, caveman, ranger, rogue). I'm working on a weaponless, body-armorless, vegetarian monk right now.
A good eye doctor will explain what their doing and why their doing it ...and won't waste a lot of time trying to sell you expensive options on your glasses or contacts.
Most good eye doctors don't sell glasses or contacts at all. Get an ophthalmologist to do the diagnosis and write a prescription without such conflicts of interest. Then take that to the optometrist or optician and get it filled (and shoot down all their upselling attempts, if any). Alternatively, go to an optom who doesn't also sell you the lenses, or one who you know isn't just trying to push product--there are some good ones out there.