Care to explain what marketing plan for Gmail you've seen? So far, Google has issued a couple of press releases - announcing its intention to offer email services, etc - but nothing more than that, and it's made it repeatedly clear that the service is in beta.
Have you ever seen more than that? Have you seen any advertising (banner or otherwise) for the service? Just how do you contend that Google is marketing it?
And how the hell are you defining "fairly widespread use"? Just how many Gmail accounts do you think there are? 100,000? A million? Well, in comparison, how many Microsoft Hotmail or Yahoo Mail accounts do you think there are out there? I'd be surprised if Gmail had even a hundredth of the user base that its key competitors possess.
Gmail is in beta. Until they say it's not in beta please accept that nothing should be taken for granted. And the fact is that even "shipped" products aren't error free, so either learn to accept that things sometimes go wrong with software or just stop using a PC altogether.
Your post might have some merit if it weren't for the fact that it's entirely inaccurate. There are plenty of countries in the West that have national ID cards and plenty in the East that don't.
And are you really suggesting that Hong Kong is a failed society? Really? I bet that the average Hong Kong resident has received a better education and has access to better healthcare than the average American.
You come out with this sort of "them and us" bullshit and then you wonder why not everyone everywhere loves America.
Re:The whole one-button mouse thing has to go...
on
Jef Raskin On The Mac
·
· Score: 1
How is it a non-issue? Because you would like it to be?
Every Mac user I know has ditched the mouse that came in the box for another one. Does throwing away brand-new hardware because it's worthless sound like a non-issue to you?
Re:The whole one-button mouse thing has to go...
on
Jef Raskin On The Mac
·
· Score: 1
We in Mac-land would prefer that idiots who insist on whining about the mouse just stay away from our platform, thank-you-very-much.
Is that why every Mac user who uses his/her machine professionally that I've ever met has ditched their one-button mouse in favour of something that has two, three or even more buttons? Because Apple's approach to the issue is beyond criticism?
The whole one-button mouse thing has to go...
on
Jef Raskin On The Mac
·
· Score: -1, Redundant
OK, I can see why for novice users (especially those who have difficulty telling left from right) having only a single mouse button might be of benefit but what about the overwhelming majority of users who have no trouble at all using more than one button?
Why doesn't MacOS cater for those users out of the box? Not doing it is dumb, dumb, dumb.
Well, I think if you're going to ask that then I think you also need to look at the reverse situation: are some of the exploits that take advantage of weaknesses in Microsoft products written by people who take their love of Linux too far? And were the DDOS attacks on the SCO website, etc also committed by similar individuals?
Come on, hand on heart, don't you think that there's even been one attack on a closed source software product that's been the working of a less than well-adjusted open source zealot? I think if you're going to speculate about the unlikely possibility that Microsoft or SCO would undermine Linux in such a manner then you have to at least accept the likelyhood that they've been the victim of a malicious pro-Linux cracker on more than one occasion.
(Queue twenty posts flaming me to hell and back...)
When you have a system where everyone can get not just life-saving but life-improving operations for free, that means a lot more resources are required, and by resources I mean everthing from surgeons, surgical assistants, doctors, nurses and physiotherapists to operating theatres, beds, money, etc.
Go ask your family doctor how many more operations would get carried out tomorrow if everyone in the US could have any surgery that they needed to have done done. Then ask him/her how much actual capacity there is in the system to do those procedures, and how long it would take for them all to get done. Ask how long people would have to wait for hip replacements in that scenario. I think you'll be very surprised.
Realise that as we live longer and as medical science comes up with newer treatments more and more people need to have more and more medical care. The problems of trying to treat everyone as soon as possible are exacerbated by these and other factors, and while they might be more visible in the UK, they'll soon be very visible in the US.
Did you know that there are African nations with lower infant mortality rates than Detroit? Do you know just how many people in the US have no health insurance whatsoever? Or what percentage of personal bankrupcies are caused by failure to pay medical bills? I think that you'll find that the situation in the US isn't as perfect as you would like to think.
A hip replacement is considered non-critical, so a hip replacement is lower down the list of priorities than, say, an organ transplant or emergency surgery.
Let's not forget that if you live in the UK you have a choice: you can either get free treatment via the NHS, for everything ranging from transplants to IVF, or you can choose to go pay and go private.
If you take the private route, either via private health insurance or paying for a procedure when you need it you don't forfeit your right to be treated on the NHS.
Frankly, I'd rather someone like your aunt "suffer unnecessarily" for a while than someone else miss out on a life-saving operation. Ask her which she'd prioritise and I'm sure she'd say the same thing.
Is this a critique of Slashdot's failure to cooperate with third party sites and/or provide basic mirroring, of the editors failure to properly check story submissions, or of both?
I think the "mysterious future" feature available to subscribers allowing them to see upcoming stories ahead of the rest of us is meant to be an ironic joke: you've got to read the stories whilst they are still there, because whether or not the links will be accessible in the future is a mystery...
The reason why Google has succeeded has more to do with the fact that it has an excellent product rather than the fact that it is a friendly company.
There are plenty of companies out there that have similar philosophies and that fail, you just don't hear about them because they didn't have a product good enough to stop them from failing.
99 percent of shareholders invest in a company for one reason and one reason only: to make money. They don't care about ethics, doing business in a friendly manner or the warm fuzzy glow inside that employees take home with them at the end of the day, they're only interested in the almighty dollar.
And, with the way that public companies have to operate by law in the US, that means doing whatever it takes: the boards of US companies are legally obliged to increase shareholder value as much as possible, and if that means no more Mr. Nice Guy, well, that's just tough for you, for me, and for anyone else that gets in the way of the bottom line.
Want to know the one way to keep a company from running into these sort of hassles? Stay privately owned rather than become a publicly traded company.
Of course, that means you can't properly compensate all the people (and venture capitalists, if any) that got you to where you are, and that presents its own set of problems including staff retention, but that's another story.
Bottom line: don't expect Google to be your best friend from mow till the day that you die.
Well, the skin of the Apollo landers was no thicker than tin foil, so, a spacecraft with a thin hull isn't a problem. However, a spacecraft capable of withstanding orbital entry or atmospheric re-entry back to Earth would require something more substantial.
It is conceivable that, if this material's properties are good enough and if it can be thickened or layered effectively, it could form the basis of future light but reliable heat-shield devices.
Of course you're free to take your business elsewhere: nobody's forcing you to be in a bar that has a TV on.
And so what if TV's are in every bar? Does that give you the right to demand a TV-less bar? How about if we're talking about men with tattoos instead of TVs? Do you have a right to walk into a bar and it not have anyone with a tattoo in it?
Or what if the only bar that has no TV is on the other side of town? Does not wanting to make the trip there and back give you an excuse to be an asshole and turn off the TV in the bar down your street even when the owner and the majority of the patrons want it on?
Jeez, the sheer gall of expecting to get things your way all the time is just incredible. Either learn to accept that living in a democracy means that sometimes things don't go your own way or go start a dictatorship.
...that people don't think that they have some God-given right to control other people's hardware.
If there's a TV playing in someone else's bar, restaurant or whatever, what gives you the right to turn it off? If you don't like the TV being on you're always free to take your business elsewhere.
Some people might politely ask the owner to turn down the volume, switch it off, etc if it really bothered them. This gadget is a cowardly way of avoiding possible disappointment and foisting your opinion on someone else. Score one for mannerless morons.
Slashdotted already. Would it kill the editors to, you know, edit and provide brief outlines of the stories they're linking to, especially in the case of stories on third party sites that they know will most likely not stand a slashdotting?
In other words, Replay did exactly what 99.9 percent of Slashdotters claim that they want companies to do - give customers what they want and not kowtow to big businesses - and yet you're slamming them for it and recommending their competitors because of that very fact?
Yeah, because there are never any businesses out there who avoid IT expenditure like it's the plague.
I can think of several organisations, small and large, that I've come in contact with that had severely underfunded/undermanned IT departments. Is it the fault of the guys that work there if management don't provide them with the proper manpower to do all the work that's necessary?
Unless they're sitting on their asses all day, the more you ask an IT department to do, the more it will cost you. If they're busy with other tasks - tech support, development, roll-outs and deployments, etc - then asking them to do something else, something that basically equates to checking up on their co-workers, is an unnecessary distraction from what you've hired them to do in the first place.
Web access in the workplace isn't anything special - it's just a tool, just like a photocopier or a phone - and treating it as something out of the ordinary is unnecessary. If you're that worried about employee abuse then put in procedures that make it clear what's acceptable and what's not and the consequences of any serious infringements. You don't require employees to go to the office manager and request permission and justify themselves every time they need to use the photocopier or the phone so why would you feel the need for them to jump through those hoops to look at a web page?
That's great unless you work for a company where the Internet (or, more specifically, the web) is a vital business tool.
There are many reasons why someone would need to access the web at work for legitimate reasons. Even in the most technology-sheltered business there will still be a need for, say, ordering office equipment, booking travel and accomodation, checking on the competition or just referencing relevant laws and procedures that the company may need to adhere to.
I can think of dozens of legitimate reasons why 2,000 employees spread over 10 offices would need to access the web. Expecting them to leave their desks to use a PC elsewhere or requiring them to request site clearances on an ad hoc basis is just plain dumb.
The former is an unnecessary inconvenience for the sake of it, because you still have to secure those dedicated Internet access PCs. And the latter is just asking for your most probably overworked IT department to get hammered dealing with requests that it doesn't have the time to deal with, with the additional bonus of the requesting employees having to wait around for someone to give them a green light before they can do their own jobs, which will only cause unnecessary frustration and antipathy to both the patronising employer (for treating mature adults like children) and the IT department.
Now can you see why web access on the desktop is more preferable than your alternatives?
Pardon me for asking, but isn't atmospheric interference still a factor for ground-based observatories? Won't this affect their observations?
Granted, the telescope's location is a plus in this department (there are few locations more suitable) but the potential interference is still a consideration. I've read their page on ground versus space telescopes and it touches on this issue, talking about fast computers and adaptive optics that correct atmospheric blurring, but it's not an issue for which you can completely compensate.
Having said that, a ground-based observatory is a heck of a lot cheaper than an orbital one...
Yeah, right. So by that rationale, you should have a first prize of, say, $50,000 if the winner is from the US but only $10,000 if he's from India. Do you realise how dumb that sounds?
Good code is good code: it doesn't matter where it's written, who it's written by or where the writer got his education. If you know what you want then it doesn't matter if the programmer you employ to do the job is based in Silicon Valley, Bangalore or Buenos Aires. The sooner you realise this fact (and the possible implications that it has for you), the better.
It's precisely because Indian coders can do most (if not all) jobs as well as their US counterparts that has US companies turning to them: why pay a guy five times as much because of his geographical location if you don't have to? To reiterate my point again, don't expect to get paid a premium just because of your latitude and longitude.
Slashdot Mirror
Care to explain what marketing plan for Gmail you've seen? So far, Google has issued a couple of press releases - announcing its intention to offer email services, etc - but nothing more than that, and it's made it repeatedly clear that the service is in beta.
Have you ever seen more than that? Have you seen any advertising (banner or otherwise) for the service? Just how do you contend that Google is marketing it?
And how the hell are you defining "fairly widespread use"? Just how many Gmail accounts do you think there are? 100,000? A million? Well, in comparison, how many Microsoft Hotmail or Yahoo Mail accounts do you think there are out there? I'd be surprised if Gmail had even a hundredth of the user base that its key competitors possess.
Gmail is in beta. Until they say it's not in beta please accept that nothing should be taken for granted. And the fact is that even "shipped" products aren't error free, so either learn to accept that things sometimes go wrong with software or just stop using a PC altogether.
Your post might have some merit if it weren't for the fact that it's entirely inaccurate. There are plenty of countries in the West that have national ID cards and plenty in the East that don't.
And are you really suggesting that Hong Kong is a failed society? Really? I bet that the average Hong Kong resident has received a better education and has access to better healthcare than the average American.
You come out with this sort of "them and us" bullshit and then you wonder why not everyone everywhere loves America.
How is it a non-issue? Because you would like it to be?
Every Mac user I know has ditched the mouse that came in the box for another one. Does throwing away brand-new hardware because it's worthless sound like a non-issue to you?
We in Mac-land would prefer that idiots who insist on whining about the mouse just stay away from our platform, thank-you-very-much.
Is that why every Mac user who uses his/her machine professionally that I've ever met has ditched their one-button mouse in favour of something that has two, three or even more buttons? Because Apple's approach to the issue is beyond criticism?
OK, I can see why for novice users (especially those who have difficulty telling left from right) having only a single mouse button might be of benefit but what about the overwhelming majority of users who have no trouble at all using more than one button?
Why doesn't MacOS cater for those users out of the box? Not doing it is dumb, dumb, dumb.
Well, I think if you're going to ask that then I think you also need to look at the reverse situation: are some of the exploits that take advantage of weaknesses in Microsoft products written by people who take their love of Linux too far? And were the DDOS attacks on the SCO website, etc also committed by similar individuals?
Come on, hand on heart, don't you think that there's even been one attack on a closed source software product that's been the working of a less than well-adjusted open source zealot? I think if you're going to speculate about the unlikely possibility that Microsoft or SCO would undermine Linux in such a manner then you have to at least accept the likelyhood that they've been the victim of a malicious pro-Linux cracker on more than one occasion.
(Queue twenty posts flaming me to hell and back...)
When you have a system where everyone can get not just life-saving but life-improving operations for free, that means a lot more resources are required, and by resources I mean everthing from surgeons, surgical assistants, doctors, nurses and physiotherapists to operating theatres, beds, money, etc.
Go ask your family doctor how many more operations would get carried out tomorrow if everyone in the US could have any surgery that they needed to have done done. Then ask him/her how much actual capacity there is in the system to do those procedures, and how long it would take for them all to get done. Ask how long people would have to wait for hip replacements in that scenario. I think you'll be very surprised.
Realise that as we live longer and as medical science comes up with newer treatments more and more people need to have more and more medical care. The problems of trying to treat everyone as soon as possible are exacerbated by these and other factors, and while they might be more visible in the UK, they'll soon be very visible in the US.
Did you know that there are African nations with lower infant mortality rates than Detroit? Do you know just how many people in the US have no health insurance whatsoever? Or what percentage of personal bankrupcies are caused by failure to pay medical bills? I think that you'll find that the situation in the US isn't as perfect as you would like to think.
A hip replacement is considered non-critical, so a hip replacement is lower down the list of priorities than, say, an organ transplant or emergency surgery.
Let's not forget that if you live in the UK you have a choice: you can either get free treatment via the NHS, for everything ranging from transplants to IVF, or you can choose to go pay and go private.
If you take the private route, either via private health insurance or paying for a procedure when you need it you don't forfeit your right to be treated on the NHS.
Frankly, I'd rather someone like your aunt "suffer unnecessarily" for a while than someone else miss out on a life-saving operation. Ask her which she'd prioritise and I'm sure she'd say the same thing.
If you're the idiot who modded this off-topic then you clearly haven't got a fucking clue about:
1. What this story is about; and
2. Irony.
Is this a critique of Slashdot's failure to cooperate with third party sites and/or provide basic mirroring, of the editors failure to properly check story submissions, or of both?
I think the "mysterious future" feature available to subscribers allowing them to see upcoming stories ahead of the rest of us is meant to be an ironic joke: you've got to read the stories whilst they are still there, because whether or not the links will be accessible in the future is a mystery...
What, no macro virus-infected Word file?
The reason why Google has succeeded has more to do with the fact that it has an excellent product rather than the fact that it is a friendly company.
There are plenty of companies out there that have similar philosophies and that fail, you just don't hear about them because they didn't have a product good enough to stop them from failing.
99 percent of shareholders invest in a company for one reason and one reason only: to make money. They don't care about ethics, doing business in a friendly manner or the warm fuzzy glow inside that employees take home with them at the end of the day, they're only interested in the almighty dollar.
And, with the way that public companies have to operate by law in the US, that means doing whatever it takes: the boards of US companies are legally obliged to increase shareholder value as much as possible, and if that means no more Mr. Nice Guy, well, that's just tough for you, for me, and for anyone else that gets in the way of the bottom line.
Want to know the one way to keep a company from running into these sort of hassles? Stay privately owned rather than become a publicly traded company.
Of course, that means you can't properly compensate all the people (and venture capitalists, if any) that got you to where you are, and that presents its own set of problems including staff retention, but that's another story.
Bottom line: don't expect Google to be your best friend from mow till the day that you die.
Well, the skin of the Apollo landers was no thicker than tin foil, so, a spacecraft with a thin hull isn't a problem. However, a spacecraft capable of withstanding orbital entry or atmospheric re-entry back to Earth would require something more substantial.
It is conceivable that, if this material's properties are good enough and if it can be thickened or layered effectively, it could form the basis of future light but reliable heat-shield devices.
Of course you're free to take your business elsewhere: nobody's forcing you to be in a bar that has a TV on.
And so what if TV's are in every bar? Does that give you the right to demand a TV-less bar? How about if we're talking about men with tattoos instead of TVs? Do you have a right to walk into a bar and it not have anyone with a tattoo in it?
Or what if the only bar that has no TV is on the other side of town? Does not wanting to make the trip there and back give you an excuse to be an asshole and turn off the TV in the bar down your street even when the owner and the majority of the patrons want it on?
Jeez, the sheer gall of expecting to get things your way all the time is just incredible. Either learn to accept that living in a democracy means that sometimes things don't go your own way or go start a dictatorship.
...that people don't think that they have some God-given right to control other people's hardware.
If there's a TV playing in someone else's bar, restaurant or whatever, what gives you the right to turn it off? If you don't like the TV being on you're always free to take your business elsewhere.
Some people might politely ask the owner to turn down the volume, switch it off, etc if it really bothered them. This gadget is a cowardly way of avoiding possible disappointment and foisting your opinion on someone else. Score one for mannerless morons.
...I have a bridge for sale.
Slashdotted already. Would it kill the editors to, you know, edit and provide brief outlines of the stories they're linking to, especially in the case of stories on third party sites that they know will most likely not stand a slashdotting?
In other words, Replay did exactly what 99.9 percent of Slashdotters claim that they want companies to do - give customers what they want and not kowtow to big businesses - and yet you're slamming them for it and recommending their competitors because of that very fact?
Wow. There's no pleasing some people.
Yeah, because there are never any businesses out there who avoid IT expenditure like it's the plague.
I can think of several organisations, small and large, that I've come in contact with that had severely underfunded/undermanned IT departments. Is it the fault of the guys that work there if management don't provide them with the proper manpower to do all the work that's necessary?
Unless they're sitting on their asses all day, the more you ask an IT department to do, the more it will cost you. If they're busy with other tasks - tech support, development, roll-outs and deployments, etc - then asking them to do something else, something that basically equates to checking up on their co-workers, is an unnecessary distraction from what you've hired them to do in the first place.
Web access in the workplace isn't anything special - it's just a tool, just like a photocopier or a phone - and treating it as something out of the ordinary is unnecessary. If you're that worried about employee abuse then put in procedures that make it clear what's acceptable and what's not and the consequences of any serious infringements. You don't require employees to go to the office manager and request permission and justify themselves every time they need to use the photocopier or the phone so why would you feel the need for them to jump through those hoops to look at a web page?
That's great unless you work for a company where the Internet (or, more specifically, the web) is a vital business tool.
There are many reasons why someone would need to access the web at work for legitimate reasons. Even in the most technology-sheltered business there will still be a need for, say, ordering office equipment, booking travel and accomodation, checking on the competition or just referencing relevant laws and procedures that the company may need to adhere to.
I can think of dozens of legitimate reasons why 2,000 employees spread over 10 offices would need to access the web. Expecting them to leave their desks to use a PC elsewhere or requiring them to request site clearances on an ad hoc basis is just plain dumb.
The former is an unnecessary inconvenience for the sake of it, because you still have to secure those dedicated Internet access PCs. And the latter is just asking for your most probably overworked IT department to get hammered dealing with requests that it doesn't have the time to deal with, with the additional bonus of the requesting employees having to wait around for someone to give them a green light before they can do their own jobs, which will only cause unnecessary frustration and antipathy to both the patronising employer (for treating mature adults like children) and the IT department.
Now can you see why web access on the desktop is more preferable than your alternatives?
You're a karma whore.
Fuck off.
Since when did correcting inaccurate information become karma whoring? Is this Karl Rove I'm replying too?
Pardon me for asking, but isn't atmospheric interference still a factor for ground-based observatories? Won't this affect their observations?
Granted, the telescope's location is a plus in this department (there are few locations more suitable) but the potential interference is still a consideration. I've read their page on ground versus space telescopes and it touches on this issue, talking about fast computers and adaptive optics that correct atmospheric blurring, but it's not an issue for which you can completely compensate.
Having said that, a ground-based observatory is a heck of a lot cheaper than an orbital one...
Yeah, right. So by that rationale, you should have a first prize of, say, $50,000 if the winner is from the US but only $10,000 if he's from India. Do you realise how dumb that sounds?
Good code is good code: it doesn't matter where it's written, who it's written by or where the writer got his education. If you know what you want then it doesn't matter if the programmer you employ to do the job is based in Silicon Valley, Bangalore or Buenos Aires. The sooner you realise this fact (and the possible implications that it has for you), the better.
It's precisely because Indian coders can do most (if not all) jobs as well as their US counterparts that has US companies turning to them: why pay a guy five times as much because of his geographical location if you don't have to? To reiterate my point again, don't expect to get paid a premium just because of your latitude and longitude.
That was the plan but it's not the reality. TV is now the opium of the masses, not the teaching tool it was intended to be.