I suspect that Google's failed community attempts have more actual users than most other places successful communities.
When you have a unique daily visitor count that measures in the 10s or 100s of millions, having a community of only 50 thousand users of project 'foo' may seem like a failure.
For a time, IE was also better. It was much faster, rendered better, and came bundled... who wouldn't use it?
There's nothing wrong with a browser taking tons of marketshare when it's the better product, and for a while Netscape abandoned their browser while they tried to be all enterprisey... Netscape Mail server, Netscape this, Netscape that, all while their browser wasn't being updated and fell behind IE. Then, IE proceeded to languish at version 6, and Mozilla, via Firefox, finally started making inroads.
The entire browser market has a strong 'you snooze, you lose' component to it. Microsoft did employ dirty tricks to get IE popular fast, but if Netscape hadn't fallen asleep at the switch, Microsoft still wouldn't have succeeded in dominating the market.
Microsoft said 'Threads are better than Processes for a web server', where you're wasting a ton of resources creating a new process for every CGI script that's run. They were right! Now every major web server supports in-process applications that are created once per server (perhaps with a pool of shared app space) rather than once per request.
Microsoft has never said that all the applications on your computer should run in one thread... that's just crazy talk.
This is simply a decision by Microsoft and Google to treat a browser tab as an application, rather than as a document. Now that web pages do a lot more processing (and crashing), this makes more sense than the old way. There's nothing particularly bad about using threads instead... Firefox is just fine with threads, I see no reason for them to undertake a massive change due to misplaced hype.
It really has to do with how much the processes share. If most of the memory per process could be shared, threads are probably more efficient. If not, processes. I'm no browser architect though, so I'll leave it up to Google, Mozilla, and Microsoft to make their own decisions.
Two people are seated in a quiet restaurant with partitions between each table, talking to each other in relative privacy. I'm sitting 3 tables away and can't hear them.
So I make a reservation for 50 of my closest friends to come down. The restaurant has to take down the partitions to make room for the huge party... except all those people never show up, it was a false reservation. However, by overflowing the Active Restaurant Patron tables, I turned the private restaurant into a public one.
It's not that Apple's products have a feature-list that is notably superior. It's that their ease-of-use is notably superior. It's hard to measure 'ease of use'. You can't really quantify it. It's not like megapixels, gigabytes, or battery life... it doesn't really go down to numbers.
But Apple products tend to have no jagged edges... there are no common use cases where they are frustrating or annoying to use. Any product will have frustrating uncommon use cases, you can't avoid that... the battery is a good example.
Do you think the iPod succeeded just because people like Apple? Bullshit. It succeeded because it was better than the other players, and remains superior, if only by a slim margin, even today. Most of the other mp3 players have jagged edges that make them uncomfortable to use... a button that accidentally pauses the music if you have the player in your pocket... a stupid menu that takes 4 clicks to play music, but 2 to change contrast... a short battery life... too heavy... bad software...
It's not that Apple products are so superior in every way. It's that they have no strong weaknesses other than big price tags. No jagged edges. Removing jagged edges, removing frustrating use cases, is where Apple's design teams excel. It's their killer feature.
I'm not an Apple fanboy... I use Linux and Windows. I'm a gamer. The only Apple product I use is my wife's castoff 10GB iPod that I use as a USB drive. I know Apple products have flaws... nothing is perfect. And their brand image is part of the appeal. But brand appeal can't carry a bad product... their products are good, AND they have brand appeal. You can't stick your head in the sand and pretend otherwise.
I'm concerned how well the applet properly discerns the meaning of words in context. For example, just because I mention that a product is 'a portable laptop' does not mean I am impressed with it's size or weight... it's just the category the product falls in. But judging from the screenshots in the article, this exact error was committed by the plugin.
Reading natural language is hard, and I'm of the opinion that a Firefox plugin just won't cut it for understanding the nuanced opinions given by reviewers.
Does Google Browser Sync support FF3 yet? I can't live without my Browser Sync anymore... I use FF on 4 computers, and there's no way I'm going to keep all my settings synced across them manually.
I do like the new features (the lower RAM usage more than anything else), but I can't live without my Sync.
So, you're saying the bill should be proportional to the wealth? So it's ok to give you a $1000 bill if your wife goes missing? A $10,000 bill if the husband in the big house up the hill goes missing? A $1,000,000,000 bill if Bill G goes missing?
Fuck that. The law should treat people equally, independent of their money. That's the idea we should be striving for at least. Fucking over a widow just because she has cash is really low.
Seriously though, what kind of brain dead cop would do something like this? You can't ask for worse press than billing a widow for the loss of her husband!
I've done help desk (Internet technical support) for most of my career... because I enjoy it. My hope for my future career is not to leave phone support, but to get a job as server or hardline support. I actually enjoy helping noobs just as much as helping tech experts, but you get paid a lot more for helping people with real problems.
Any article that claims 'people need X amount of Y or they'll be sick' is a big fat lie. The calorie requirements for an individual vary drastically from the '2000' figure everyone looks at. Not everyone must drink 4 cups of water a day. And claiming that you'll get ill if you have something other than 8 hours of rest is scientifically delinquent.
A large part of what affects your need for sleep is how much stress and toil you do daily. I have no stress, and no toil... I have a desk job that I enjoy, my home life is pleasant, and I'm a lazy type-B slob. No stress, not much exercise, and thus little need for vast stretches of rest. I am perky and happy with 5 hours of sleep a night. If I get 3 hours, then I take a nap on my lunch hour. I don't use caffeine or other stimulants... I just don't have a vast need for sleep.
Other people are different. The world is full of variety. And there certainly are many people out there that do stress themselves by subsisting on less sleep than they need... but don't try to cram 6 billion differently sized pegs into 'one size fits all' holes.
Your field of vision shrinks when applying pressure due to increased fluid pressure within the eye... this is why glaucoma is tested for, because high fluid density in the eye will quickly cause blindness, and shortly (days? weeks?) after that permanent blindness. If I understand correctly, the high pressure prevents the normal working of the nerves that carry the signal back to your optic nerve. Maybe the blood is cut off... maybe the fluid pressure messes with the functioning of the cells... I dunno.
But I can say for sure that it is not lack of movement that prevents your vision from working. People can see quite well when under the influence of paralytic drugs that prevent eye movement (these drugs are administered frequently when doing eye surgery). You see BETTER when your eye moves, but you don't stop seeing when it stops.
I installed a plugin in Firefox that deliberately sends all the webpages I browse to Google. I read my email on Google. I search there, keep my schedule there, post pictures there... most of the online services I use are Google's. And you know what?
It works. They have a vast profile of data about me, but who cares? I'm not particularly concerned that they know what kind of porn I read (first time), what kind of products I buy (books of webcomics), what kind of news I read (/.). I am an open book in real life, and online.
I can totally understand someone's concern... if you prefer to keep your private life private... if you don't like telling complete strangers personal details... then don't use Google. That's ok. I have Aspergers, so in my problem has been learning when complete strangers don't WANT to know personal details about my life; not keeping secrets.
The way our society is going, it will become easier and easier to create information. This explosion of information will not necessarily all be searchable... I visit hundreds of pages every week, get hundreds of email... culling information out of all that data will remain difficult for the forseeable future, because our ability to categorize information is growing slower than our ability to create information. Thousands of terabytes of images get uploaded every year, soon to be every month, then every day... our processing capacity isn't growing fast enough to keep up with all this data. So I don't really think a Big Brother future is gonna come to pass.
What's your opinion of The Real News? If you haven't heard about it, it's a guy who used to make documentaries brainstorm. He wanted a news network that was not beholden to government money, corporate money, or ads... only subscriptions. He estimates that if they get 200,000 subscribers, at $10 per month, they can operate a news network that's broadcast quality, with several hours of new daily programming.
It's worth checking out. A very similar ethos to Consumer Reports... only the subscriber matters.
So, the value of my personal data, such as name, address, and potentially my SS, credit card, and private buying information... the value of that in a criminal court is under 6 cents. That's just great, I feel very secure against data theft since those penalties are less than the going rate for the information. And yet, somehow, my lending a copy of a song to someone is valued at nearly $10,000 per song to judge by recent court precedent.
This would absolutely be true, in a world where all passwords were unlimited in length. Unfortunately, many systems take shortcuts storing your password... this leaves you open to having your password trivially hacked using precomputed hashes.
Google's PageRank is a circular algorithm as well, but that doesn't prevent it from working.
However, this sounds more like a technique to augment traditional spam detection engines. Take SpamAssassin output as a precondition to classify the users, and then use that classification as an input to the SpamAssassin engine with a high weight. Tadaa! Increased detection accuracy.
Whether it would actually work or not, I dunno. Seems plausible, but only as a server based approach, such as something to augment Google's spam filtering. In fact, for large domains this sounds like a pretty reasonable approach.
While upward force won't contribute to propulsion much, it may reduce drag. The more upward force you have, the less wallowing the ship does. I suspect this won't make much difference to a million ton vessel, but it seems plausible it would be significant.
It is absolutely remote controlled. If you RTFA, it states:
testing indoors with off-board control systems and sensors. "The bit in the air is the cheapest part of these experiments," he says.
The controls, cameras, everything is not on the plane. The plane/heli are just simple cheap RC toys, controlled remotely by expensive processors and sensors.
Sales tells the customer what they want to hear. Support tells the customer the truth.
Not quite true... poor salesment tells the customer what they want to hear, regardless of whether it's possible. And poor support tells customers whatever means less work on the part of the tech.
Good sales personnel offer incremental benefits at incremental cost... you get this basic plan for this price, but if you want X, Y, and Z customization these will be the extra costs. They are also at least somewhat honest about timeschedules, because that keeps customers happy so they keep their service with you.
Good support is honest, even pessimistic, about timeschedules because a customer howls when things are late. Better they are disappointed about the timeschedule early, than raging mad about it being late after.
Few sales people are good. And also, few tech support are good. Most suck, and we all know it. Most support lack empathy with the customer, are unable to see things from their point of view, and are too stressed or tired to deal with every customer in a cheerful and upbeat manner.
Overtones of Psychohistory. Luckily, later research into chaos and information theory has pretty much ruled out the possibility of Psychohistory being real.
These phony registrars pay ICANN fees. Lots of fees. BIG fees. $5000 a year if I recall correctly. Amazingly, ICANN does not see a conflict of interest between their desire to take fees, and their purported mission to control the behavior of registrars.
Slashdot Mirror
I suspect that Google's failed community attempts have more actual users than most other places successful communities.
When you have a unique daily visitor count that measures in the 10s or 100s of millions, having a community of only 50 thousand users of project 'foo' may seem like a failure.
For a time, IE was also better. It was much faster, rendered better, and came bundled... who wouldn't use it?
There's nothing wrong with a browser taking tons of marketshare when it's the better product, and for a while Netscape abandoned their browser while they tried to be all enterprisey... Netscape Mail server, Netscape this, Netscape that, all while their browser wasn't being updated and fell behind IE. Then, IE proceeded to languish at version 6, and Mozilla, via Firefox, finally started making inroads.
The entire browser market has a strong 'you snooze, you lose' component to it. Microsoft did employ dirty tricks to get IE popular fast, but if Netscape hadn't fallen asleep at the switch, Microsoft still wouldn't have succeeded in dominating the market.
This is a misunderstanding of the application.
Microsoft said 'Threads are better than Processes for a web server', where you're wasting a ton of resources creating a new process for every CGI script that's run. They were right! Now every major web server supports in-process applications that are created once per server (perhaps with a pool of shared app space) rather than once per request.
Microsoft has never said that all the applications on your computer should run in one thread... that's just crazy talk.
This is simply a decision by Microsoft and Google to treat a browser tab as an application, rather than as a document. Now that web pages do a lot more processing (and crashing), this makes more sense than the old way. There's nothing particularly bad about using threads instead... Firefox is just fine with threads, I see no reason for them to undertake a massive change due to misplaced hype.
It really has to do with how much the processes share. If most of the memory per process could be shared, threads are probably more efficient. If not, processes. I'm no browser architect though, so I'll leave it up to Google, Mozilla, and Microsoft to make their own decisions.
Two people are seated in a quiet restaurant with partitions between each table, talking to each other in relative privacy. I'm sitting 3 tables away and can't hear them.
So I make a reservation for 50 of my closest friends to come down. The restaurant has to take down the partitions to make room for the huge party... except all those people never show up, it was a false reservation. However, by overflowing the Active Restaurant Patron tables, I turned the private restaurant into a public one.
Am I hacking?
It's not that Apple's products have a feature-list that is notably superior. It's that their ease-of-use is notably superior. It's hard to measure 'ease of use'. You can't really quantify it. It's not like megapixels, gigabytes, or battery life... it doesn't really go down to numbers.
But Apple products tend to have no jagged edges... there are no common use cases where they are frustrating or annoying to use. Any product will have frustrating uncommon use cases, you can't avoid that... the battery is a good example.
Do you think the iPod succeeded just because people like Apple? Bullshit. It succeeded because it was better than the other players, and remains superior, if only by a slim margin, even today. Most of the other mp3 players have jagged edges that make them uncomfortable to use... a button that accidentally pauses the music if you have the player in your pocket... a stupid menu that takes 4 clicks to play music, but 2 to change contrast... a short battery life... too heavy... bad software...
It's not that Apple products are so superior in every way. It's that they have no strong weaknesses other than big price tags. No jagged edges. Removing jagged edges, removing frustrating use cases, is where Apple's design teams excel. It's their killer feature.
I'm not an Apple fanboy... I use Linux and Windows. I'm a gamer. The only Apple product I use is my wife's castoff 10GB iPod that I use as a USB drive. I know Apple products have flaws... nothing is perfect. And their brand image is part of the appeal. But brand appeal can't carry a bad product... their products are good, AND they have brand appeal. You can't stick your head in the sand and pretend otherwise.
I take offense to that der comment hey!
I'm concerned how well the applet properly discerns the meaning of words in context. For example, just because I mention that a product is 'a portable laptop' does not mean I am impressed with it's size or weight... it's just the category the product falls in. But judging from the screenshots in the article, this exact error was committed by the plugin.
Reading natural language is hard, and I'm of the opinion that a Firefox plugin just won't cut it for understanding the nuanced opinions given by reviewers.
Nevermind, I found the answer to my own question... Google Browser Sync is going to be discontinued. Waaaaaah!
Does Google Browser Sync support FF3 yet? I can't live without my Browser Sync anymore... I use FF on 4 computers, and there's no way I'm going to keep all my settings synced across them manually.
I do like the new features (the lower RAM usage more than anything else), but I can't live without my Sync.
So, you're saying the bill should be proportional to the wealth? So it's ok to give you a $1000 bill if your wife goes missing? A $10,000 bill if the husband in the big house up the hill goes missing? A $1,000,000,000 bill if Bill G goes missing?
Fuck that. The law should treat people equally, independent of their money. That's the idea we should be striving for at least. Fucking over a widow just because she has cash is really low.
Well, she can obviously afford it now, can't she?
Seriously though, what kind of brain dead cop would do something like this? You can't ask for worse press than billing a widow for the loss of her husband!
I've done help desk (Internet technical support) for most of my career... because I enjoy it. My hope for my future career is not to leave phone support, but to get a job as server or hardline support. I actually enjoy helping noobs just as much as helping tech experts, but you get paid a lot more for helping people with real problems.
Any article that claims 'people need X amount of Y or they'll be sick' is a big fat lie. The calorie requirements for an individual vary drastically from the '2000' figure everyone looks at. Not everyone must drink 4 cups of water a day. And claiming that you'll get ill if you have something other than 8 hours of rest is scientifically delinquent.
A large part of what affects your need for sleep is how much stress and toil you do daily. I have no stress, and no toil... I have a desk job that I enjoy, my home life is pleasant, and I'm a lazy type-B slob. No stress, not much exercise, and thus little need for vast stretches of rest. I am perky and happy with 5 hours of sleep a night. If I get 3 hours, then I take a nap on my lunch hour. I don't use caffeine or other stimulants... I just don't have a vast need for sleep.
Other people are different. The world is full of variety. And there certainly are many people out there that do stress themselves by subsisting on less sleep than they need... but don't try to cram 6 billion differently sized pegs into 'one size fits all' holes.
... in dead tree format. Why couldn't they include crappy books I don't already own!
Your field of vision shrinks when applying pressure due to increased fluid pressure within the eye... this is why glaucoma is tested for, because high fluid density in the eye will quickly cause blindness, and shortly (days? weeks?) after that permanent blindness. If I understand correctly, the high pressure prevents the normal working of the nerves that carry the signal back to your optic nerve. Maybe the blood is cut off... maybe the fluid pressure messes with the functioning of the cells... I dunno.
But I can say for sure that it is not lack of movement that prevents your vision from working. People can see quite well when under the influence of paralytic drugs that prevent eye movement (these drugs are administered frequently when doing eye surgery). You see BETTER when your eye moves, but you don't stop seeing when it stops.
I installed a plugin in Firefox that deliberately sends all the webpages I browse to Google. I read my email on Google. I search there, keep my schedule there, post pictures there... most of the online services I use are Google's. And you know what?
It works. They have a vast profile of data about me, but who cares? I'm not particularly concerned that they know what kind of porn I read (first time), what kind of products I buy (books of webcomics), what kind of news I read (/.). I am an open book in real life, and online.
I can totally understand someone's concern... if you prefer to keep your private life private... if you don't like telling complete strangers personal details... then don't use Google. That's ok. I have Aspergers, so in my problem has been learning when complete strangers don't WANT to know personal details about my life; not keeping secrets.
The way our society is going, it will become easier and easier to create information. This explosion of information will not necessarily all be searchable... I visit hundreds of pages every week, get hundreds of email... culling information out of all that data will remain difficult for the forseeable future, because our ability to categorize information is growing slower than our ability to create information. Thousands of terabytes of images get uploaded every year, soon to be every month, then every day... our processing capacity isn't growing fast enough to keep up with all this data. So I don't really think a Big Brother future is gonna come to pass.
What's your opinion of The Real News? If you haven't heard about it, it's a guy who used to make documentaries brainstorm. He wanted a news network that was not beholden to government money, corporate money, or ads... only subscriptions. He estimates that if they get 200,000 subscribers, at $10 per month, they can operate a news network that's broadcast quality, with several hours of new daily programming.
It's worth checking out. A very similar ethos to Consumer Reports... only the subscriber matters.
So, the value of my personal data, such as name, address, and potentially my SS, credit card, and private buying information... the value of that in a criminal court is under 6 cents. That's just great, I feel very secure against data theft since those penalties are less than the going rate for the information. And yet, somehow, my lending a copy of a song to someone is valued at nearly $10,000 per song to judge by recent court precedent.
This would absolutely be true, in a world where all passwords were unlimited in length. Unfortunately, many systems take shortcuts storing your password... this leaves you open to having your password trivially hacked using precomputed hashes.
Google's PageRank is a circular algorithm as well, but that doesn't prevent it from working.
However, this sounds more like a technique to augment traditional spam detection engines. Take SpamAssassin output as a precondition to classify the users, and then use that classification as an input to the SpamAssassin engine with a high weight. Tadaa! Increased detection accuracy.
Whether it would actually work or not, I dunno. Seems plausible, but only as a server based approach, such as something to augment Google's spam filtering. In fact, for large domains this sounds like a pretty reasonable approach.
While upward force won't contribute to propulsion much, it may reduce drag. The more upward force you have, the less wallowing the ship does. I suspect this won't make much difference to a million ton vessel, but it seems plausible it would be significant.
But IANA nautical engineer, so I may be wrong.
The controls, cameras, everything is not on the plane. The plane/heli are just simple cheap RC toys, controlled remotely by expensive processors and sensors.
Good sales personnel offer incremental benefits at incremental cost... you get this basic plan for this price, but if you want X, Y, and Z customization these will be the extra costs. They are also at least somewhat honest about timeschedules, because that keeps customers happy so they keep their service with you.
Good support is honest, even pessimistic, about timeschedules because a customer howls when things are late. Better they are disappointed about the timeschedule early, than raging mad about it being late after.
Few sales people are good. And also, few tech support are good. Most suck, and we all know it. Most support lack empathy with the customer, are unable to see things from their point of view, and are too stressed or tired to deal with every customer in a cheerful and upbeat manner.
Overtones of Psychohistory. Luckily, later research into chaos and information theory has pretty much ruled out the possibility of Psychohistory being real.
These phony registrars pay ICANN fees. Lots of fees. BIG fees. $5000 a year if I recall correctly. Amazingly, ICANN does not see a conflict of interest between their desire to take fees, and their purported mission to control the behavior of registrars.