No. Google's search offering back then was enormously better than what went before. (For comparison, AV was just a random pile of perhaps-relevant stuff, and Yahoo was wildly incomplete for everything I tended to search for back then.) It would have needed a very bad name indeed to have persuaded me to use something else.
The fact is the US is a massive beast when it comes to capital goods.... you know those important things you can't really live without? Turbines, semiconductors, engines, medicine, telecommunications, ect. The US imports shit we want; but we export shit you need. The US is not the country you want to get into a trade war with; you will lose.
You underestimate the size of European manufacturers of those things (except for semiconductors, where it's mostly imported from East Asia, just like most semiconductors in the US are made there). A trade war would be painful - for both sides - but to think that it's inconceivable because there are things the US makes and Europe needs but can't make? The evidence for that is really minimal.
I would never use a database for this. It serves no purpose, except as an invitation for the fuckup fairy. The searches you'd want to are free-text searches anyway.
A lot of database engines now support free-text searching (though you have to build appropriate indices first).
Tried Google desktop? You can search your outlook/thunderbird mail in a blink of an eye, as well as anything else on your computer.
TB3 searches multiple GB of email in seconds (well, for me it does) producing not just a list of matches but also a graph of the frequency of those matches over time.
In most states, the exam is very easy to pass. The only way they could make them easier is if the only requirement to pass the exam would to prove you have a heartbeat!
Nah. They could allow someone else to take the test on your behalf. Why are states preventing this sensible move into subcontracting? Do they hate our economy so?
I wasn't going to review Foundem at first since they are based in the UK and I don't live there. Google should be smart enough to lower their site on my search simply because that site applies less to me. Still I look anyway. They use the less popular.co.uk domain suffix - Google doesn't like this as much.
FWIW, Google increase the rating of.co.uk-based domains for people who are located in the UK. Not so much that they'll highly rank sites without relevant info though; country seems to be a minor scoring axis, not a major one (such as having some relevant information).
To include the domain review with the regular [yearly] upkeep makes sound business sense.
Not necessarily, since it makes the domain name (i.e., the mark under which they are trading) into something that is just viewed as a cost and not an asset. If your good name isn't an asset to you, why would I want to trade with you?
Re:Amazing lack of foresight here... 3d will win.
on
The Joke Known As 3D TV
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Uh, dude, 3D without glasses using as standard tech as LCD displays has been around for over a decade. Lenticular arrays and parallax barrier are very old tech by now.
Only really works well for a single person sitting in the sweet spot. That's a reasonable assumption for an LCD display, where use is typically solitary, but doesn't do so well with TV where there's more likely to be multiple people viewing it at once. (And of course it's useless for projection.)
Until you can make 3D TVs which don't require glasses and do allow you to show objects which go outside the screen, it will always be a gimmick.
Displays which can do that have existed for quite a while. I can remember seeing one in a research lab back in 1994; it was really startlingly good to be able to move your head from side to side and look round an object rotating on (in?) the screen. It was a model of a molecule IIRC. I thought it was a gimmick up until I saw it in action, but it was a pretty much perfect illusion.
Why has something that impressive not made it to production yet? Well, there were two big things holding it back. One was the difficulty of manufacturing the display, as it was before large high-resolution LCD panels, and the other was the sheer amount of bandwidth required, as you're talking a minimum of 16 times the equivalent 2D bandwidth for the same resolution (and the further people sit from the display, the more bandwidth you need to have to compensate for the finer angular difference between peoples' eyes). The workstations of the time could only just handle a greyscale display of 320x200 in 3D; I've no doubt that we could do better now, but the combination is still incredibly expensive and resource hungry.
And hiring managers are cheap ass bastards that know they can get fresh-out-of-college kids for pennies. So what if they cant do the job and screw everything up; it shows up on the monthly balance as a win so bonuses for all the managers!
It's "better" than that. HR are utterly clueless about what competence in software development is. They see no difference in ability between a greenhorn and anyone experienced, they derive no benefit from choosing the actual best person, so they instead optimize to reduce measurable liabilities. That means taking the youngster who'll work stupid hours and who'll move on somewhere else before there's any risk of pension liabilities. So what if it means that the rest of the company suffers? HR doesn't know, isn't measured on that, and doesn't care.
The way out of this is to not let HR filter quite so thoroughly, and to remember that competence requires knowledge, experience and skill.
You had me going until you said he "simply unplugged the cable". We both know a dissed and powerful nerd would have cut the cable in a classic display of nerd rage.;-)
No, he wouldn't, not when it is his job to put the end back on it when the problem is fixed. Unplugging works just as well, and is less hassle personally.
Total cost, including overhead, almost certainly exceeds $100/hour.
That depends critically on how you account for it since working out what overheads there are and dealing with all the other factors such as dual use systems... Maybe it's correct, maybe not, but accounting typically has big fudge factors in it (e.g., over what timescale do you make some capital cost depreciate? In general, that's a parameter you get to pick and it makes a huge difference.)
I think your sentiments are common, and also apply to other arts like music. Lots of people seem to like immaculate but (IMO) dull music. Personally, I'm happy with a few rough edges, if the ideas are good, because it reminds me that art is made by people. I'm sure this is influenced by the fact that I'm an indie musician myself!:-P
Call me picky if you want, but I'd like to see stuff that is both inspired and slick. The best of the big-budget stuff is really excellent. The stuff that isn't good... well, it's just not good no matter how much was spent on it. Let's call crap out for being crap, and laud stuff that's good, and not get too hung up on whether being small or large is best (it seems to be an unrelated axis).
Do you realize that ARM doesn't even have a 64 bit version of the ISA?
Since they're strongly targeted at the embedded market, why would the ability to deal with more than 4GB of memory be any use? (In time it may come to be useful, but within the next, say, 3 years?) ARM processors own their niche, and it's a gigantic niche with good long term prospects. Why worry about competing with Intel in a different area?
If they made a big splash, they might have captured enough interest to keep it going. Instead everyone tried it out for a week or two, said, "this doesn't seem to be useful," and then they never looked at it again.
I for one am not sorry to see it go. We tried it pretty heavily for about 3 months as a way of helping people across multiple sites do collaborative software development and deployment, and it's big problem was that it was extremely hard to find what you were looking for (ironic for a Google product!) or what had changed in a large Wave (several hundred messages, many of which were relatively large things like full stack traces). Perhaps we just didn't try it right, perhaps, but going back to email and wiki pages was a relief.
Sure you can. At least if your company is actually "doing business" in those places. Everybody else has to do that... why should internet companies be different?
If you do business in Michigan, you obey Michigan's laws. Chill and deal or get out.
The only problem with that is the case where you have no physical business presence in that jurisdiction. Would you want to be subject to all China's laws, and simultaneously all Iran's, just because you happen to have someone use your service from those countries? No? Then physical location must matter.
What does that mean for all those state AGs? I have no idea, TBH. However there must be precedents with things like mail order firms; they must have been facing the same sorts of problems (though slower) way back...
You overstate the case. In Britain, fuel prices are vastly higher than they are in the USA, and driving is still usually cheaper than taking the train.
Not as simple as that. For one person, taking the train is usually cheaper if there is one going in the right direction. (For a family, a car is cheaper, but whole families moving around are not the most common case for any mode of medium- or long-range transport.) The trick with costing is that you've got to look at all the costs; a solution with cars doesn't just involve fuel costs, but also financing, insurance, depreciation, parking, and taxes. With other forms of passenger transport, those costs are rolled into the headline price.
But the reason I prefer to take public transport is that then it is someone else's job to do the control of the vehicle. Like that I can do something else at the same time as traveling (e.g., reading, working, sleeping).
Maybe, but those rural areas create the food that the cities need to house and feed their populations.
And there are plenty of people willing to live out there, growing food and selling it to the cities. But that doesn't require heavy subsidy; just the free market.
When you increase the costs of those areas, you greatly affect the cost of city life.
What proportion of total urban expenditure is on food? (That's the only part that a food price hike will hit, and there are plenty of food producers elsewhere too.)
Cities are also far, far more subsidized then any rural area is. The roads needed to truck in supplies, heavily subsidized food programs, and greatly disproportionate distribution of state tax income as well as federal aid.
Others have addressed this in fair depth, but if you look at net tax/expenditure then you tend to see that urban areas generate more taxes than rural ones (while also consuming more government expenditure overall too) and that governmental cash flows tend to be net towards rural areas. A way to balance things more fairly would almost certainly involve encouraging less non-food production in rural areas, and leave anyone out in the boonies but not on an economically self-sufficient farm SOL.
Let's face it, doing a job that is essentially an urban job while living a long way from an urban area is just dumb. Everyone else doesn't need or want to subsidize stupid.
Slashdot Mirror
Quite likely AltaVista.
No. Google's search offering back then was enormously better than what went before. (For comparison, AV was just a random pile of perhaps-relevant stuff, and Yahoo was wildly incomplete for everything I tended to search for back then.) It would have needed a very bad name indeed to have persuaded me to use something else.
Is that an English or Metric fuckton?
It must be a Statute fuckton, as a Metric one would be written "fucktonne".
The fact is the US is a massive beast when it comes to capital goods.... you know those important things you can't really live without? Turbines, semiconductors, engines, medicine, telecommunications, ect.
The US imports shit we want; but we export shit you need. The US is not the country you want to get into a trade war with; you will lose.
You underestimate the size of European manufacturers of those things (except for semiconductors, where it's mostly imported from East Asia, just like most semiconductors in the US are made there). A trade war would be painful - for both sides - but to think that it's inconceivable because there are things the US makes and Europe needs but can't make? The evidence for that is really minimal.
I would never use a database for this. It serves no purpose, except as an invitation for the fuckup fairy.
The searches you'd want to are free-text searches anyway.
A lot of database engines now support free-text searching (though you have to build appropriate indices first).
Tried Google desktop? You can search your outlook/thunderbird mail in a blink of an eye, as well as anything else on your computer.
TB3 searches multiple GB of email in seconds (well, for me it does) producing not just a list of matches but also a graph of the frequency of those matches over time.
Until then I'll limit the times I hit 265 km/h (155 mi/h for the old fashioned) to the occasions I get in Germany.
You should limit your speed to 255 km/h. Otherwise you'll overflow the unsigned byte used for the speed and then where will we be?
In most states, the exam is very easy to pass. The only way they could make them easier is if the only requirement to pass the exam would to prove you have a heartbeat!
Nah. They could allow someone else to take the test on your behalf. Why are states preventing this sensible move into subcontracting? Do they hate our economy so?
</sarcasm>
Any schmuck can acquire knowledge.
There's a lot of "any schmucks" out there that provide evidence otherwise. Some, but not all, have MBAs.
I wasn't going to review Foundem at first since they are based in the UK and I don't live there. Google should be smart enough to lower their site on my search simply because that site applies less to me. Still I look anyway. They use the less popular .co.uk domain suffix - Google doesn't like this as much.
FWIW, Google increase the rating of .co.uk-based domains for people who are located in the UK. Not so much that they'll highly rank sites without relevant info though; country seems to be a minor scoring axis, not a major one (such as having some relevant information).
To include the domain review with the regular [yearly] upkeep makes sound business sense.
Not necessarily, since it makes the domain name (i.e., the mark under which they are trading) into something that is just viewed as a cost and not an asset. If your good name isn't an asset to you, why would I want to trade with you?
Uh, dude, 3D without glasses using as standard tech as LCD displays has been around for over a decade. Lenticular arrays and parallax barrier are very old tech by now.
Only really works well for a single person sitting in the sweet spot. That's a reasonable assumption for an LCD display, where use is typically solitary, but doesn't do so well with TV where there's more likely to be multiple people viewing it at once. (And of course it's useless for projection.)
Until you can make 3D TVs which don't require glasses and do allow you to show objects which go outside the screen, it will always be a gimmick.
Displays which can do that have existed for quite a while. I can remember seeing one in a research lab back in 1994; it was really startlingly good to be able to move your head from side to side and look round an object rotating on (in?) the screen. It was a model of a molecule IIRC. I thought it was a gimmick up until I saw it in action, but it was a pretty much perfect illusion.
Why has something that impressive not made it to production yet? Well, there were two big things holding it back. One was the difficulty of manufacturing the display, as it was before large high-resolution LCD panels, and the other was the sheer amount of bandwidth required, as you're talking a minimum of 16 times the equivalent 2D bandwidth for the same resolution (and the further people sit from the display, the more bandwidth you need to have to compensate for the finer angular difference between peoples' eyes). The workstations of the time could only just handle a greyscale display of 320x200 in 3D; I've no doubt that we could do better now, but the combination is still incredibly expensive and resource hungry.
You might have done better with "nigaud américains insensibles".
Except the laws on validity periods could change during the lifetime of a product.
Well, this would create a gigantic lobby in favor of not changing the validity period at all. Would that be such a bad thing?
A sonic screwdriver, on the other hand, is pretty easy to make if you have access to a ceramic resonator and a quantum power source.
Like a silicon solar cell? Those have existed for years, yet I still don't see (or hear) sonic screwdrivers all over the place.
And hiring managers are cheap ass bastards that know they can get fresh-out-of-college kids for pennies. So what if they cant do the job and screw everything up; it shows up on the monthly balance as a win so bonuses for all the managers!
It's "better" than that. HR are utterly clueless about what competence in software development is. They see no difference in ability between a greenhorn and anyone experienced, they derive no benefit from choosing the actual best person, so they instead optimize to reduce measurable liabilities. That means taking the youngster who'll work stupid hours and who'll move on somewhere else before there's any risk of pension liabilities. So what if it means that the rest of the company suffers? HR doesn't know, isn't measured on that, and doesn't care.
The way out of this is to not let HR filter quite so thoroughly, and to remember that competence requires knowledge, experience and skill.
You had me going until you said he "simply unplugged the cable". We both know a dissed and powerful nerd would have cut the cable in a classic display of nerd rage. ;-)
No, he wouldn't, not when it is his job to put the end back on it when the problem is fixed. Unplugging works just as well, and is less hassle personally.
Total cost, including overhead, almost certainly exceeds $100/hour.
That depends critically on how you account for it since working out what overheads there are and dealing with all the other factors such as dual use systems... Maybe it's correct, maybe not, but accounting typically has big fudge factors in it (e.g., over what timescale do you make some capital cost depreciate? In general, that's a parameter you get to pick and it makes a huge difference.)
I think your sentiments are common, and also apply to other arts like music. Lots of people seem to like immaculate but (IMO) dull music. Personally, I'm happy with a few rough edges, if the ideas are good, because it reminds me that art is made by people. I'm sure this is influenced by the fact that I'm an indie musician myself! :-P
Call me picky if you want, but I'd like to see stuff that is both inspired and slick. The best of the big-budget stuff is really excellent. The stuff that isn't good... well, it's just not good no matter how much was spent on it. Let's call crap out for being crap, and laud stuff that's good, and not get too hung up on whether being small or large is best (it seems to be an unrelated axis).
Do you realize that ARM doesn't even have a 64 bit version of the ISA?
Since they're strongly targeted at the embedded market, why would the ability to deal with more than 4GB of memory be any use? (In time it may come to be useful, but within the next, say, 3 years?) ARM processors own their niche, and it's a gigantic niche with good long term prospects. Why worry about competing with Intel in a different area?
If they made a big splash, they might have captured enough interest to keep it going. Instead everyone tried it out for a week or two, said, "this doesn't seem to be useful," and then they never looked at it again.
I for one am not sorry to see it go. We tried it pretty heavily for about 3 months as a way of helping people across multiple sites do collaborative software development and deployment, and it's big problem was that it was extremely hard to find what you were looking for (ironic for a Google product!) or what had changed in a large Wave (several hundred messages, many of which were relatively large things like full stack traces). Perhaps we just didn't try it right, perhaps, but going back to email and wiki pages was a relief.
Sure you can. At least if your company is actually "doing business" in those places. Everybody else has to do that... why should internet companies be different?
If you do business in Michigan, you obey Michigan's laws. Chill and deal or get out.
The only problem with that is the case where you have no physical business presence in that jurisdiction. Would you want to be subject to all China's laws, and simultaneously all Iran's, just because you happen to have someone use your service from those countries? No? Then physical location must matter.
What does that mean for all those state AGs? I have no idea, TBH. However there must be precedents with things like mail order firms; they must have been facing the same sorts of problems (though slower) way back...
You're talking about an industry who would likely charge passengers for use of the bathroom, if they could get away with it.
That's not regulation, that's cost minimization. (A free toilet is significantly cheaper than cleaning up after the alternative...)
You overstate the case. In Britain, fuel prices are vastly higher than they are in the USA, and driving is still usually cheaper than taking the train.
Not as simple as that. For one person, taking the train is usually cheaper if there is one going in the right direction. (For a family, a car is cheaper, but whole families moving around are not the most common case for any mode of medium- or long-range transport.) The trick with costing is that you've got to look at all the costs; a solution with cars doesn't just involve fuel costs, but also financing, insurance, depreciation, parking, and taxes. With other forms of passenger transport, those costs are rolled into the headline price.
But the reason I prefer to take public transport is that then it is someone else's job to do the control of the vehicle. Like that I can do something else at the same time as traveling (e.g., reading, working, sleeping).
Maybe, but those rural areas create the food that the cities need to house and feed their populations.
And there are plenty of people willing to live out there, growing food and selling it to the cities. But that doesn't require heavy subsidy; just the free market.
When you increase the costs of those areas, you greatly affect the cost of city life.
What proportion of total urban expenditure is on food? (That's the only part that a food price hike will hit, and there are plenty of food producers elsewhere too.)
Cities are also far, far more subsidized then any rural area is. The roads needed to truck in supplies, heavily subsidized food programs, and greatly disproportionate distribution of state tax income as well as federal aid.
Others have addressed this in fair depth, but if you look at net tax/expenditure then you tend to see that urban areas generate more taxes than rural ones (while also consuming more government expenditure overall too) and that governmental cash flows tend to be net towards rural areas. A way to balance things more fairly would almost certainly involve encouraging less non-food production in rural areas, and leave anyone out in the boonies but not on an economically self-sufficient farm SOL.
Let's face it, doing a job that is essentially an urban job while living a long way from an urban area is just dumb. Everyone else doesn't need or want to subsidize stupid.