"They do _not_ need that to refine their searches. If I search for, say, "Oracle auto-tuning", that's that. I expect the same result regardless of what my IP is, regardless of whether I searched for "WebSphere XA configuration" before, or "Fluffy tail buttplugs" or whatever. You can tune the search with just the search string. You don't need to track me for that."
First, I'm not defending Google's right/desire to keep any of this data...
That said, you are wrong. Search results are not idempotent, they change depending on your language, which data center you're talking to, and they will certainly change over time. If I search for "chevy parts" and then I immediately search for "impala", I'd rather see pages about Chevy Impalas. If I had just searched for "african wildlife" then I'd rather see results about the animals. If I search for Bush from U.S. I'd expect more weight given to pages about the President, while people in other english-speaking countries might get more landscaping pages.
So 10-15% of clicks are fake, and over time this number will fluctuate up or down, never reaching zero. But the important thing is that this means 85%-90% of clicks are legitimately interested people, assuming your ad is clear and accurate, which is the responsibility of the advertiser. Anyone who has ever worked with advertising should know that spending ad dollars with quantifiable results that high is a marketer's wet dream.
"If you can't convince the federal government that there's a significant causal connection between vehicle emissions and global warming, you're not likely to be able to convince a judge."
I would think that it might actually be easier to convince a judge, because there is ample time in a trial to present evidence rather than trying to fit it into a dry report to people who's campaign is funded by many of the accused.
But I agree that it's mostly a statement. If the automakers were actually to be held liable, I would think that the state would be too for building all those highways.
I think the problem is that scaffolding is sold as the major feature of Ruby on Rails. Most of the articles and demos I've seen focus on doing this fast, not doing them right and certainly not doing them to the level a real app needs. If someone out there could write up something targetted at people who know what writing a real system entails, I think Ruby might be evaluated as a serious choice and not just as a shiny step up from PHP.
And if you think the environment doesn't affect the quality and amount of the work, please make sure you never have a say in designing where people work. I have a nice triple monitor setup at home with an aeron and good speakers and all that, and I focus much better than when I'm onsite at a client sharing a cube with someone and coding on an underpowered laptop. What usually happens is I try all day to get something done, and then go home and redo it or at least fix it. It's also much easier to code and focus for longer periods in a comfortable environment.
As far as pen and paper, that was all well and good 10 years ago, but there is no comparison any more to modern tools and a sketchpad. A whiteboard I would agree with because its collaborative, but if you're going solo, the only reason why pen and paper would be more productive is that the power is out or you don't know how to use the tools out there very well.
"What has to stop is the person who commissioned the kitchen from saying in a contract "If you install this kitchen in anyone elses house, I get half of what you make on the sale."
If it had to stop, it would stop. The carpenter obviously finds it financially advantageous to accept these terms. If he didn't, he wouldn't sign. If someone pays me a salary to write code, with the understanding that they own the code, that's fine with me. If they said, we would like to share ownership of this with you, but pay you 20% less, I'd simply calculate the value of the ownership, and if it was more than the 20% cut, I'd do it, otherwise I wouldn't.
"Nope. They owe it to their shareholders to do the best job possible to keep their company profitable; they can do that without being bastards. The only time they "owe" their shareholders something else is when they make promises; then they better deliver."
Well, maybe they promised that they would be bastards?
And not surprisingly, Lincoln was also the first Republican president. Every republican I know (granted that's not too many, I live in MA), claims to be an ardent states' rights supporter, yet it seems throughout my lifetime that Republican presidents time after time have far exceeded the Democrat ones in terms of increasing federal power.
Where is your proof for this? Isn't it just as possible that it might be true but they don't want people to believe it so they release it in some questionable way?
So the hospital that charges me $10 for an aspirin tablet needs to get as much lifespan as possible out of a $5 keyboard? Why not just have recylclable ones and toss them at the end of every shift/day?
I stepped outside as you recommended, but I found that the contrast was way too high and the lack of a soundtrack was a bit disturbing. The 3D was fairly impressive though, and don't even get me started on the physics engine. I ran around throwing bottles at people and they had even better reactions than Half-life 2 did. It was all just eye candy though, as I spent hours looking for weapons and ammunition but was unable to find anything more advanced than a rather unwieldy sharp metal pole, which I obviously didn't spend enough skill points on during character generation. Overall, I'd give it a 6/10, it has promise so let's hope there's an expension pack coming.
Nice case of short-sightedness there. Put yourself in the investigating officer's shoes. You want some information about users, and the sysadmin says they delete all logs (with or without the smug attitude). Do you just give up? No, you will just be forced to explore other options, such as taking ALL the hardware and sending it to lab for a year or so, installing monitors on the network, etc. Anyone who thinks that just because a site admin deletes logfiles that they have any real anonymity, is an utter fool. And any site admin who does it is an even bigger one.
Just a minor point: murder laws aren't entirely based on morality. Any law that intends to prevent the destruction or diminishment of people and/or property can also be argued on entirely non-moral grounds as well, such as economic grounds. Laws that are _only_ based on morality and have no other basis are typically not very serious ones (blue laws and the like).
Hmmm, none of the three you mentioned did anything very new (improved search, unix clone, 1 page software license, respectively). How about some companies that actually changed the way the general population computes:
Apple - two guys in their garage Microsoft - couple of dropouts eBay - Some guy in his apartment
The grandparent is more correct than the parent. With each new essay Graham seems to be progressively more eggheaded and out-of-touch, which is a shame. Maybe he should take a sabbatical from his cushy MIT gig and see what the industry is really like now.
The only time I got in an accident my vehicle had 4 wheels, so now I only drive a motorcycle.
On a more serious note: Do you honestly believe that a homegrown macro language would have been any more secure than choosing a language which they know they can get help from the project sponsor on? I would guess that Python was the second choice, and would have been trendier, but they would be more likely to get integration help from Sun than from the Python crew (for financial/marketing reasons, not because of a lack of benevolence on Python's part).
Bandwidth is dirt cheap these days. Using the stats from A List Apart, they would save 14GB a day, which they claim would save $3650/year, or about 5% of a decent developer's salary. Now if you use a realistic bandwidth cost, since slashdot isn't running on some $5/month hosting account, you are looking at a savings of $3-400/year, or one day of that developer's time, which is a lot less time than it would take to retool the whole site.
I think it would be smart for them to do it, but not for strictly-bottom-line reasons.
Slashdot Mirror
"They do _not_ need that to refine their searches. If I search for, say, "Oracle auto-tuning", that's that. I expect the same result regardless of what my IP is, regardless of whether I searched for "WebSphere XA configuration" before, or "Fluffy tail buttplugs" or whatever. You can tune the search with just the search string. You don't need to track me for that."
First, I'm not defending Google's right/desire to keep any of this data...
That said, you are wrong. Search results are not idempotent, they change depending on your language, which data center you're talking to, and they will certainly change over time. If I search for "chevy parts" and then I immediately search for "impala", I'd rather see pages about Chevy Impalas. If I had just searched for "african wildlife" then I'd rather see results about the animals. If I search for Bush from U.S. I'd expect more weight given to pages about the President, while people in other english-speaking countries might get more landscaping pages.
So 10-15% of clicks are fake, and over time this number will fluctuate up or down, never reaching zero. But the important thing is that this means 85%-90% of clicks are legitimately interested people, assuming your ad is clear and accurate, which is the responsibility of the advertiser. Anyone who has ever worked with advertising should know that spending ad dollars with quantifiable results that high is a marketer's wet dream.
"If you can't convince the federal government that there's a significant causal connection between vehicle emissions and global warming, you're not likely to be able to convince a judge."
I would think that it might actually be easier to convince a judge, because there is ample time in a trial to present evidence rather than trying to fit it into a dry report to people who's campaign is funded by many of the accused.
But I agree that it's mostly a statement. If the automakers were actually to be held liable, I would think that the state would be too for building all those highways.
An even more important distinction might be that I played alot more games between 18 and 24, but I've spent alot more on games after that.
If these guys sue and have any affect on MySpace, that might be the mainstream call-to-action that patent reform is sorely lacking....
Let's hope they charge ridiculous fees to license this so nobody uses it.
Even more obligatory, isn't someone going to post the list of mysql's shortcomings circa version 3?
I think the problem is that scaffolding is sold as the major feature of Ruby on Rails. Most of the articles and demos I've seen focus on doing this fast, not doing them right and certainly not doing them to the level a real app needs. If someone out there could write up something targetted at people who know what writing a real system entails, I think Ruby might be evaluated as a serious choice and not just as a shiny step up from PHP.
The glorious sounds of the plump woman vocalizing.
Please don't complain about the quality of people's links unless you have better ones.
IExploder...that's quality. Is it from Micro$oft? Does it run on windoze?
And if you think the environment doesn't affect the quality and amount of the work, please make sure you never have a say in designing where people work. I have a nice triple monitor setup at home with an aeron and good speakers and all that, and I focus much better than when I'm onsite at a client sharing a cube with someone and coding on an underpowered laptop. What usually happens is I try all day to get something done, and then go home and redo it or at least fix it. It's also much easier to code and focus for longer periods in a comfortable environment.
As far as pen and paper, that was all well and good 10 years ago, but there is no comparison any more to modern tools and a sketchpad. A whiteboard I would agree with because its collaborative, but if you're going solo, the only reason why pen and paper would be more productive is that the power is out or you don't know how to use the tools out there very well.
"What has to stop is the person who commissioned the kitchen from saying in a contract "If you install this kitchen in anyone elses house, I get half of what you make on the sale."
If it had to stop, it would stop. The carpenter obviously finds it financially advantageous to accept these terms. If he didn't, he wouldn't sign. If someone pays me a salary to write code, with the understanding that they own the code, that's fine with me. If they said, we would like to share ownership of this with you, but pay you 20% less, I'd simply calculate the value of the ownership, and if it was more than the 20% cut, I'd do it, otherwise I wouldn't.
I think people should work on Data over IP. I can't wait until someone invents a device that will let me hook up my computer, that will be sweet!
"Nope. They owe it to their shareholders to do the best job possible to keep their company profitable; they can do that without being bastards. The only time they "owe" their shareholders something else is when they make promises; then they better deliver."
Well, maybe they promised that they would be bastards?
And not surprisingly, Lincoln was also the first Republican president. Every republican I know (granted that's not too many, I live in MA), claims to be an ardent states' rights supporter, yet it seems throughout my lifetime that Republican presidents time after time have far exceeded the Democrat ones in terms of increasing federal power.
Where is your proof for this? Isn't it just as possible that it might be true but they don't want people to believe it so they release it in some questionable way?
So the hospital that charges me $10 for an aspirin tablet needs to get as much lifespan as possible out of a $5 keyboard? Why not just have recylclable ones and toss them at the end of every shift/day?
I stepped outside as you recommended, but I found that the contrast was way too high and the lack of a soundtrack was a bit disturbing. The 3D was fairly impressive though, and don't even get me started on the physics engine. I ran around throwing bottles at people and they had even better reactions than Half-life 2 did. It was all just eye candy though, as I spent hours looking for weapons and ammunition but was unable to find anything more advanced than a rather unwieldy sharp metal pole, which I obviously didn't spend enough skill points on during character generation. Overall, I'd give it a 6/10, it has promise so let's hope there's an expension pack coming.
Nice case of short-sightedness there. Put yourself in the investigating officer's shoes. You want some information about users, and the sysadmin says they delete all logs (with or without the smug attitude). Do you just give up? No, you will just be forced to explore other options, such as taking ALL the hardware and sending it to lab for a year or so, installing monitors on the network, etc. Anyone who thinks that just because a site admin deletes logfiles that they have any real anonymity, is an utter fool. And any site admin who does it is an even bigger one.
Just a minor point: murder laws aren't entirely based on morality. Any law that intends to prevent the destruction or diminishment of people and/or property can also be argued on entirely non-moral grounds as well, such as economic grounds. Laws that are _only_ based on morality and have no other basis are typically not very serious ones (blue laws and the like).
Hmmm, none of the three you mentioned did anything very new (improved search, unix clone, 1 page software license, respectively). How about some companies that actually changed the way the general population computes:
Apple - two guys in their garage
Microsoft - couple of dropouts
eBay - Some guy in his apartment
The grandparent is more correct than the parent. With each new essay Graham seems to be progressively more eggheaded and out-of-touch, which is a shame. Maybe he should take a sabbatical from his cushy MIT gig and see what the industry is really like now.
The only time I got in an accident my vehicle had 4 wheels, so now I only drive a motorcycle.
On a more serious note: Do you honestly believe that a homegrown macro language would have been any more secure than choosing a language which they know they can get help from the project sponsor on? I would guess that Python was the second choice, and would have been trendier, but they would be more likely to get integration help from Sun than from the Python crew (for financial/marketing reasons, not because of a lack of benevolence on Python's part).
The funny part about the parent isn't that its actually funny, but that it made it all the way to +5 funny...
Bandwidth is dirt cheap these days. Using the stats from A List Apart, they would save 14GB a day, which they claim would save $3650/year, or about 5% of a decent developer's salary. Now if you use a realistic bandwidth cost, since slashdot isn't running on some $5/month hosting account, you are looking at a savings of $3-400/year, or one day of that developer's time, which is a lot less time than it would take to retool the whole site.
I think it would be smart for them to do it, but not for strictly-bottom-line reasons.