Sorry if the language of my OP was a little flamish. That wasn't my intent. I guess I should clarify the points I was trying to make:
A sample of 22 people is, IMO, too small to credibly demonstrate this phenomenon.
The fact that the test group is college students and staff and not just your average Internet users probably doesn't add to the relevence of the study either.
The study doesn't test the effectiveness of the Firefox plugin being promoted. It just shows that this particular group of people aren't very good at spotting phishing sites.
We conducted a usability study where we showed 22 participants 20 web sites and asked them to determine which ones were fraudulent, and why...Our participant population was highly educated, consisting of staff and students at a university. The minimum level of education was a bachelor's degree. Our population was also more knowledgeable than average, because they were told that spoofed websites were in the test set. They were also more motivated than the average user would be, because their task in the study was to identify websites as legitimate or not.
So the "study" is a little lame, and irrelevant to the main point of the article: promoting his new SecuritySkins plugin. The idea is that it's harder for websites to spoof browser features if everyone's browser looks different.
For the record, this idea isn't new. Bank of America has been letting users select a personalized image on their login page for a while now. If the image on the login page doesn't match yours, it didn't come from your bank and you shouldn't enter your password there.
This economic phenomenon is expected and was already discussed in this fora.
Forum is the singular, as this is just one forum.
As the demand for the work increases, to get the best in the business, one has to pay more.
Is supply and demand news to anyone?
Also, the overall economic indicator increases along with it comes higher land rates + higher standard of living.
Indicators do just that, indicate. They don't cause "land rates" or the standard of living to rise; they just show that they have risen or will rise.
This makes it much more costly for the average person too, which means the average pay increases quite a bit.
Pay rates don't rise until the supply/demand balance for workers changes. The fact that the cost of living is high just means that people may move away if they can't afford to live in a particular area any more.
Along with it comes the fast growth of the other economic indicators - more people get more vehicles etc. These things will start congesting the infrastructure, which also would act as a deterrent for new companies.
Again with the indicators... And by "clogged infrastructure", what exactly do you mean? The public transportation in India is already pretty clogged, and it's not deterring anyone. Try riding on a bus there.
Now the option is to go to not so fancied (earlier) sites in India (or any outsourcing nation), so that you get everything cheap.
Makes sense, follow the cheap labor.
Since they saw the growth of fancied sites, they also would have improved the basic infrastrcuture to make it close to them.. without the current issues. But I guess Apple execs were lazy enough to not look at the new sites and stayed with the fancied ones. -- Yep, they had to pay for that.
I wouldn't chalk it up to laziness so much as aversion to risk. Why risk being the only American company on the block when Apple's excellent reputation for customer service is on the line?
I guess China skipped these issues by using far-sighted (and possibly evil) government policies - ex - they forcibly decreased the standard of living in many areas - which meant you get more people coming to urban centers - which means the demand and supply chain stays the same.
-1: Incoherent
Was anyone leaving the big cities in China? Why did they need more people there to keep "the demand and supply chain stays the same"?
Also they improved the infrastructure by pouring in money for the same + they started builiding up a lot of suburbs to decrease the rising land-rates.
Yes, the Chinese gov't crated suburbs, mostly so that upper-class workers in the sities would gave a place to live that wasn't outrageously expensive. I don't think they did it to "decrease the rising land-rates", whatever that means.
This might sting a little bit. Just hold still and it'll be over soon.
Of course, by engaging in the rampant exploitation they do they undermine any reason for the law to protect their monopoly rights
The labels don't exactly have a monopoly (and the sure don't have any right to a monopoly) because there are several big labelS that compete. The "mono" in monopoly means there's just one company in charge. The labels are probably engaging in a bit of collusion, but that's tougher to prove.
effectively proving that the artists and creators would be better off with a pure taxation/incentive construction
Wait, why do you want to tax music, and what effect will it have besides including government bureaucrats in the music industry gravy train?
and letting the free market drive prices on distribution, marketing and production.
Free markets do drive prices. People like mass-produced crap. Indie music is cheap if you can find it, but if you want Madonna's latest album you have to go through her distributors.
Sawing off the branch you're sitting on falls squarely under the heading "stupid", in this case, greedy-stupid, as their long term prospects arent particularly good.
Sure, labels exist for a long time, but individuals make the decisions, and I always kinda pictured music execs as the type that worked on the scene for maybe 10 years before doing a few too many bumps at a party and driving their Fararis through the railing into the valley below. These guys don't have the long-term health of the industry at large in mind.
Engineers who look at the specs of most game consoles tend to think, "but this would perform horribly under condition XYZ, which most computers see on a regular basis!"
So you're saying I shouldn't be running my company's HR database on this old Sega Dreamcast? No wonder payroll is 3 months behind...
A quick peek at the SourceForge download reveals that EXPO is an OWL schema.
Well, sheesh. It sure seems to me that neither the submitter of the author of TFA knew what that meant when they started typing. Another case of compunded ignorance on/. I guess.
The article is kind of unclear. What exactly does EXPO do? At first it seemed to me that the system helped translate the more-or-less natural language format of your average scientific experiment writeup into some other more machine-parsable format, but then I saw this at the bottom of the article:
King admits that for the moment using EXPO is time-consuming because experimental write-ups must be translated by hand.
WTF? If you have to manually pre-parse every article that enters the system, it severely limits the rate you can enter information into the database, no?
Wow, a TLD that discourages stupid ads and pop-ups and gratuitous Flash animations. Hell, what's to stop people on regular computer browsers from abandoning the old home pages for these new non-crappified sites?
Ingenious! I hadn't even thought of the fact that all those stupid little embedded videos in people's stupid little MySpace pages could have a stupid little ad at the beginning, without the page owners themselves even noticing for a while. YouTube is betting that most bloggers are too lazy to get rid of the YouTube clips that they've already linked in, and I think it's a good bet.
Heck, maybe after content is torn down from YouTube's servers because of blatant copyright violations, links to non-existent videos will simply turn into video ads. Brilliant!
I'm sure I'm not the first to think this, but this YouTube thing kinda reminds me of the early days of Napster. They get VC, they spend it allowing people to share copyrighted media, they try to conjure a revenue stream out of a free service, they hope to turn "legit" before the federales shut 'em down, they go halfway and alienate all their users, et cetera. I don't know why these doofuses think this will turn out any differently.
Could it really be that the VC's know this, and have decided that getting the name "YouTube" branded into young people's minds and associated with internet video is worth all the blown money?
Nah. Engineering used to mean something along the lines of "applying scientific and mathematical principles in order to design useful stuff", but now it's generally tossed around to mean "building useful, complicated stuff". Again, it depends who's using the term and in what context.
TFA is about software engineering, not mathematics. When I used to word "prove", I used it in the software engineering context. Just because you personally interpret that word to mean something that I did not intend does not imply that I misspoke. Neither meaning is the "real" sense of the word; the intent of the speaker is usually obvious from context.
Software is not "a lot of mathematics". It is a methodology for getting computers to do what we want them to do. It is an engineering discipline. Mathematics is a mental representation of reality. 5 pixels on a screen are real things. The 5 key on a keyboard is a real thing. The number 5 is just an idea.
Let me guess: you've never worked in industry, have you?
By "prove", I mean to present evidence to someone that will cause them to believe whatever it is that you're proving. This of course depends both on what you're proving and whom you're trying to convince. The unit test may not convince you that my code is "correct", but it will convince my boss not to fire me.
It's not all about satisfying your theorems, buddy...
Umm, about your comment: The link goes to a blog entry of yours about the inefficiency of using StringBuffer.append(String) to append a single-character string instead of just using StringBuffer.append(char). Sure, it's a good idea, but there's another kinda-orthogonal piece of advice that will likely improve runtime performance a good bit more:
The vast majority of the code that uses StringBuffer could save a bunch of time by using the new-ish(JDK 1.5) StringBuilder class, which has the same API but is not internally synchronized. This translates to a runtime savings of approximately a KAJILLION percent by avoiding the horrendous synchronization overhead hit when the StringB*ef in question is only being used by one thread. It's very similar to using an old-skool Vector when an ArrayList will do just as well and not slow down your code.
Like I say every thime this kind of thing comes up, Java isn't slow (any more), but we're certainly not helping matters with this kind of sloppy coding.
Also, back on topic, try writing financial software some time. It's like a different world. Everything is unit tested, and the unit tests don't so much check for bugs as prove that your code works. That way, when a million-dollar bank wire doesn't go through, you can prove that it's not your head that should be on the chopping block. It's actually kind of refreshing knowing that any code you touch is pre-vetted so you don't have to worry about trusting it enough to build on it.
Given a choice, I think a lot more people will put their money towards Things That Go Boom instead of rather boring stuff like education, libraries, or highway maintenance.
If you assume that the majority of the population doesn't know what's best for itself, you might as well just abandon Democracy right now. As it stands, we already elect leaders who promise to blow shit up rather than spending our taxes on things that improve our standard of living. This just cuts out the middle man.
Not withstanding that the Legislative and Executive branches would NEVER relinquish such power
Yup, idle Monday morning daydreaming...
I would normally criticize such a move.
I believe you're criticizing it right now. No need for the hypothetical.
Primarily, it would esculate to groups demanding THEIR favorite despised branch of the government include "opt out" funding on that same tax form.
We've already got a form of that. People protest wars, they complain about where their taxes go. This way, if you're anti-abortion you don't pay the government to provide 'em. If you're anti-war you don't pay your government to fight them.
The initial results of that would likely be agencies spending YOUR tax money on advertising on why THEY should recieve a percentage of your taxes.
They already spend plenty of money promoting themselves internally within the government. I'm no expert, but I think the belt-tightening that goes along with real accountability might offset any "advertising" they felt was necessary to make sure people knew they were doing a good job.
Now, if you could not only "opt out" of funding those branches, but also get that money back, that would be pretty interesting to watch.
I'm pretty sure most people would just keep the money to reduce their tax load given the choice.
Bahhhh! They'd still find a way to get their money.
Yeah, but we might as well let them know that at least some of us are still paying attention.
Being able to transport items combat troops is definitely going to be a major use for these machines...
Quick question: If they're already being used for moving troops...why bother having it drive itself? I could see how drive-by-radio might potentially be unreliable if you think your enemy will somehow jam your control signals, but if your vehicle's already full of people, why not just make one drive the thing?
This is not a case of discrimination, it is a fact of life. Young people are generally more naive and easier to exploit.
Bingo! That's the point I was attempting to make in the first place. Game companies aren't discriminating against older coders. They're just selecting for suckers...who happen to be disproportionately young.
Speaking of which, it could be that people over 30 are being forced out because the game companies are only willing to hire [exploitable] recent college grads. It's not that 30-year-old programmers want to stop making games, it's just that no game companies will give them fair compensation and healthy working conditions, and they're no longer naive enough to get screwed over!
So, put another way, few coders over 30 is stupid enough to work for a game development outfit. That's like saying McDonald's discriminates against people who want to make more than minimum wage or don't like getting burned by hot oil.
Slashdot Mirror
Am I the only one here who had never heard of Writely until today?
I guess this proves the point that TFA makes about Google not advertising its products very well.
That is all. Thank you for your time.
So the "study" is a little lame, and irrelevant to the main point of the article: promoting his new SecuritySkins plugin. The idea is that it's harder for websites to spoof browser features if everyone's browser looks different.
For the record, this idea isn't new. Bank of America has been letting users select a personalized image on their login page for a while now. If the image on the login page doesn't match yours, it didn't come from your bank and you shouldn't enter your password there.
Is supply and demand news to anyone?
Indicators do just that, indicate. They don't cause "land rates" or the standard of living to rise; they just show that they have risen or will rise.
Pay rates don't rise until the supply/demand balance for workers changes. The fact that the cost of living is high just means that people may move away if they can't afford to live in a particular area any more.
Again with the indicators... And by "clogged infrastructure", what exactly do you mean? The public transportation in India is already pretty clogged, and it's not deterring anyone. Try riding on a bus there.
Makes sense, follow the cheap labor.
I wouldn't chalk it up to laziness so much as aversion to risk. Why risk being the only American company on the block when Apple's excellent reputation for customer service is on the line?
- -1: Incoherent
Was anyone leaving the big cities in China? Why did they need more people there to keep "the demand and supply chain stays the same"?Yes, the Chinese gov't crated suburbs, mostly so that upper-class workers in the sities would gave a place to live that wasn't outrageously expensive. I don't think they did it to "decrease the rising land-rates", whatever that means.
The labels don't exactly have a monopoly (and the sure don't have any right to a monopoly) because there are several big labelS that compete. The "mono" in monopoly means there's just one company in charge. The labels are probably engaging in a bit of collusion, but that's tougher to prove.
Wait, why do you want to tax music, and what effect will it have besides including government bureaucrats in the music industry gravy train?
Free markets do drive prices. People like mass-produced crap. Indie music is cheap if you can find it, but if you want Madonna's latest album you have to go through her distributors.
Sure, labels exist for a long time, but individuals make the decisions, and I always kinda pictured music execs as the type that worked on the scene for maybe 10 years before doing a few too many bumps at a party and driving their Fararis through the railing into the valley below. These guys don't have the long-term health of the industry at large in mind.
So you're saying I shouldn't be running my company's HR database on this old Sega Dreamcast? No wonder payroll is 3 months behind...
Well, sheesh. It sure seems to me that neither the submitter of the author of TFA knew what that meant when they started typing. Another case of compunded ignorance on
WTF? If you have to manually pre-parse every article that enters the system, it severely limits the rate you can enter information into the database, no?
From TFA: These metamaterials can be designed to induce a desired change in the direction of electromagnetic waves, such as light.
Kinda like, say, glass changes the direction of light?
[I]s there any chance we can come up with a way to transport electricity over long distances without it diminishing in power as fast as it does now?
6 words: dump trucks full of car batteries
That is all.
Wow, a TLD that discourages stupid ads and pop-ups and gratuitous Flash animations. Hell, what's to stop people on regular computer browsers from abandoning the old home pages for these new non-crappified sites?
Don't forget http://www.ratsystems.org/, also linked from TFA. It's where I go for all my "completely legal" spyware needs. They also specialize in:
pork bellies
incontinence
squeamish ossifrage
old ladies in tight undies
Ingenious! I hadn't even thought of the fact that all those stupid little embedded videos in people's stupid little MySpace pages could have a stupid little ad at the beginning, without the page owners themselves even noticing for a while. YouTube is betting that most bloggers are too lazy to get rid of the YouTube clips that they've already linked in, and I think it's a good bet.
Heck, maybe after content is torn down from YouTube's servers because of blatant copyright violations, links to non-existent videos will simply turn into video ads. Brilliant!
I'm sure I'm not the first to think this, but this YouTube thing kinda reminds me of the early days of Napster. They get VC, they spend it allowing people to share copyrighted media, they try to conjure a revenue stream out of a free service, they hope to turn "legit" before the federales shut 'em down, they go halfway and alienate all their users, et cetera. I don't know why these doofuses think this will turn out any differently.
Could it really be that the VC's know this, and have decided that getting the name "YouTube" branded into young people's minds and associated with internet video is worth all the blown money?
Nah. Engineering used to mean something along the lines of "applying scientific and mathematical principles in order to design useful stuff", but now it's generally tossed around to mean "building useful, complicated stuff". Again, it depends who's using the term and in what context.
TFA is about software engineering, not mathematics. When I used to word "prove", I used it in the software engineering context. Just because you personally interpret that word to mean something that I did not intend does not imply that I misspoke. Neither meaning is the "real" sense of the word; the intent of the speaker is usually obvious from context.
Software is not "a lot of mathematics". It is a methodology for getting computers to do what we want them to do. It is an engineering discipline. Mathematics is a mental representation of reality. 5 pixels on a screen are real things. The 5 key on a keyboard is a real thing. The number 5 is just an idea.
Let me guess: you've never worked in industry, have you?
By "prove", I mean to present evidence to someone that will cause them to believe whatever it is that you're proving. This of course depends both on what you're proving and whom you're trying to convince. The unit test may not convince you that my code is "correct", but it will convince my boss not to fire me.
It's not all about satisfying your theorems, buddy...
Umm, about your comment: The link goes to a blog entry of yours about the inefficiency of using StringBuffer.append(String) to append a single-character string instead of just using StringBuffer.append(char). Sure, it's a good idea, but there's another kinda-orthogonal piece of advice that will likely improve runtime performance a good bit more:
The vast majority of the code that uses StringBuffer could save a bunch of time by using the new-ish(JDK 1.5) StringBuilder class, which has the same API but is not internally synchronized. This translates to a runtime savings of approximately a KAJILLION percent by avoiding the horrendous synchronization overhead hit when the StringB*ef in question is only being used by one thread. It's very similar to using an old-skool Vector when an ArrayList will do just as well and not slow down your code.
Like I say every thime this kind of thing comes up, Java isn't slow (any more), but we're certainly not helping matters with this kind of sloppy coding.
Also, back on topic, try writing financial software some time. It's like a different world. Everything is unit tested, and the unit tests don't so much check for bugs as prove that your code works. That way, when a million-dollar bank wire doesn't go through, you can prove that it's not your head that should be on the chopping block. It's actually kind of refreshing knowing that any code you touch is pre-vetted so you don't have to worry about trusting it enough to build on it.
Wow, that looks pretty cool. How's the selection? Is it just the DVD that the kiosk happens to contain when you wander by?
Given a choice, I think a lot more people will put their money towards Things That Go Boom instead of rather boring stuff like education, libraries, or highway maintenance.
If you assume that the majority of the population doesn't know what's best for itself, you might as well just abandon Democracy right now. As it stands, we already elect leaders who promise to blow shit up rather than spending our taxes on things that improve our standard of living. This just cuts out the middle man.
Not withstanding that the Legislative and Executive branches would NEVER relinquish such power
Yup, idle Monday morning daydreaming...
I would normally criticize such a move.
I believe you're criticizing it right now. No need for the hypothetical.
Primarily, it would esculate to groups demanding THEIR favorite despised branch of the government include "opt out" funding on that same tax form.
We've already got a form of that. People protest wars, they complain about where their taxes go. This way, if you're anti-abortion you don't pay the government to provide 'em. If you're anti-war you don't pay your government to fight them.
The initial results of that would likely be agencies spending YOUR tax money on advertising on why THEY should recieve a percentage of your taxes.
They already spend plenty of money promoting themselves internally within the government. I'm no expert, but I think the belt-tightening that goes along with real accountability might offset any "advertising" they felt was necessary to make sure people knew they were doing a good job.
Now, if you could not only "opt out" of funding those branches, but also get that money back, that would be pretty interesting to watch.
I'm pretty sure most people would just keep the money to reduce their tax load given the choice.
Bahhhh! They'd still find a way to get their money.
Yeah, but we might as well let them know that at least some of us are still paying attention.
Being able to transport items combat troops is definitely going to be a major use for these machines...
Quick question: If they're already being used for moving troops...why bother having it drive itself? I could see how drive-by-radio might potentially be unreliable if you think your enemy will somehow jam your control signals, but if your vehicle's already full of people, why not just make one drive the thing?
Wow! With an unmanned behemoth like that, we'll find bin Laden in no time!
I wish there were a check box on my taxes that said, "Don't spend my tax money on military BS."
This is not a case of discrimination, it is a fact of life. Young people are generally more naive and easier to exploit.
Bingo! That's the point I was attempting to make in the first place. Game companies aren't discriminating against older coders. They're just selecting for suckers...who happen to be disproportionately young.
Speaking of which, it could be that people over 30 are being forced out because the game companies are only willing to hire [exploitable] recent college grads. It's not that 30-year-old programmers want to stop making games, it's just that no game companies will give them fair compensation and healthy working conditions, and they're no longer naive enough to get screwed over!
So, put another way, few coders over 30 is stupid enough to work for a game development outfit. That's like saying McDonald's discriminates against people who want to make more than minimum wage or don't like getting burned by hot oil.