It started in schools, and quickly moved to the US Justice system. "Three Strikes And You're Out!". It sounds both reasonable, and incredibly American at the same time. If you've been in jail 2 times already and then steal a loaf of bread... "You're Out". By which they mean out of society for good. It's worked out so well, why not try it with the Internet?
Here's the problem. In baseball, if you get three strikes - you're out for that particular try at batting. You're not out for the inning, you're not out for the game, and you're certainly not banned from ever playing baseball again for life.
So, if we're going to base public policy on sports rules, could we at least restrict that to sports rules we actually understand? Seriously, that'd be a great start. Later we work on basing them on common sense or something.
There are a lot of valid points about the short comings of PHP, and how even it's design encourages bad programming practice. The same could be (and was) said about Basic, and Visual Basic (pre.net).
And while I certainly agree that there are "better" languages out there, the one area I strongly believe PHP excels in is ease of use. Why is that important, compared to things like elegance, speed, and security?
Well, because by the time need some of the things PHP lacks - you've already learned how to do quite a bit of programming and are well prepared to address it's short comings, or switch to a more appropriate language.
We *need* a language that can be picked up in a matter of hours to attract casual programmers. Not every program needs to be great, many just need barely work.
I teach "Introduction to PHP" at FIT, and the first thing I tell the students is that should not be such a course; because anyone who knows enough to have a need for PHP should also be comfortable enough to learn PHP through an online tutorial or book. But these students know barely anything - I have to teach them how to write HTML forms, and all about databases (including what databases are) before they can PHP to do any of the things they want it to do. It's only a four session class; but PHP is still easy enough that I can teach them everything they need to know to get started.
Most of them will use it to write little guest book type apps for their personal websites, that run slowly and have huge security holes. But they have neither the traffic to make performance an issue, nor valuable enough information to make hacking their sites remotely worth it. If they like doing that, they can either make use of pre-built PHP modules, or learn how to code things better. But they've started, and I believe that's a good thing.
Programmers used to bash Visual Basic all the time when I was coding in that, but it's tiny learning curve got an awful lot of companies started down the path of in house development that Visual C++ wouldn't have. And that created an awful lot of work for programmers.
It's great that Zend is addressing some of the PHP issues; but I'm glad they're not trying to turn it into Perl. We already have Perl, we don't need another.
Whenever you're doing a job that's boring and repetitive, and on a computer, that should be signal that the job can be automated out of existence. Oh, it's a wonderful feeling, pushing one little button and watching what used to take 2 weeks of painstaking, mind-numbing work flash to a perfect finish in seconds or minutes.
And yes, even programming itself can become boring at times; but the same principle applies. I recently spent roughly 2 years writing a program, and at one point realized I was getting bored. So I switched what I was doing, and wrote a program that finished writing that program. Now my job's exciting again. Of course, I have no freakin' clue what the original program is capable of doing anymore; but the people who use it tell me it's awesome.
Fans of the movie 2001 may be interested to know that our CEO's name is actually "Dave". But don't worry, we don't make air-lock door controllers. As far as I know.
I was originally going to go with "~ Ant & the Aaaampersands" so that I'd always show up first in any playlist - but now I think I'll call us "Unknown Artist". And I understand our debut album, "Unknown Album" is already one of the most popular in the world.
I'm looking forward to wasting a $h!7load of the RIAA's money while they try to sue people for pirating our many, many tracks.
Yes, all of this cosmological curiosity and moral introspection *could* be solved by both accepting that we don't know everything and then doing the hard work necessary to find out more; but it's far easier to build a weapon that shoots molten metal at people to finally answer that age-old question:
What happens after we die?
Of all the countless millions who have killed each other over disagreements over what happens after you die, we've so far narrowed it down to one of two possibilities:
1. It's so amazing that, once you find out, you refuse to share the answer with anyone alive. 2. It's so totally boring that, once you find out, you're too embarrassed to admit to the living that you once waisted so much as a single second of actual life thinking about it.
The third possibility, that it's just on par with anything we've already guessed at, but too heavily DRM'd to share, can be ruled out. Because you just know that some dead 16 year old hacker from Norway would have cracked the DRM and posted the results on Slashdot.
it never developed because you happen to be naturally better at things which didn't require it.
CASE STUDY: Matt Dillon
My brother own's a bar frequented by Matt Dillion, the mult-millionaire, super-naturally gorgeous, very famous actor. And he's never seen anyone so utterly terrible at picking up girls. Why? Because he's never *had* to be good at chatting up girls, he's been a movie star since he hit puberty. If he'd needed to learn how to chat up girls, he'd have learned.
You're bad at being dishonest for the same reason Matt Dillion is bad at picking up women.
But, if you'd lack any natural ability to achieve goals honestly, you would have had no other option but to develop the talent to lie, cheat and steal your way to success.
This is the same reason why beautiful girls seem dumb, and powerful people rarely have any other talent than gaining power.
To me, this last bit is the most troubling. We've created a world in which utterly worthless people have no other choice than to figure out how to exploit the worth of others in order to get anywhere in life.
Personally, I blame our "won't someone think of the children" policies. They keep dumb people alive long enough to develop the skill to exploit the intelligent people - who are completely unprepared to deal with dishonesty, cheating, and theft because they never needed to do the things that would have given them experience in those areas.
It's like that sig which floats around slashdot a lot:
"Never argue with a fool. They'll drag you down to their level, and then beat you with experience."
How many buffer overrun exploits have been found in other people's software because the coders are just lazy? Very, very few. As very, very few coders also own the company their coding for.
Seriously, most of the security holes found in software are there because the company won't pay the coders to sit around securing the finished product once it seems to work. I've been on many project where we were told to even use mere QA time to instead add a new feature the client wanted. Were we being "lazy" because we didn't do all that work for them for free later, in our massive amounts of free time?
As long as software customers choose features over bugs and/or security holes, that's what the market will deliver. Even sadder than that, is that any coder gets so little practice writing bug-free, secure code; that in the very few situations where that's not the case they subsequently have precious little experience at it.
I've left lots of vulnerabilities in code I've written for people because they knowingly made those trade-offs. But when I write code for myself, I don't have that "culture of security" mindset and probably leave a lot more vulnerabilities in it than I would otherwise.
Your first scenario, above, has MS stock going down after it goes up.
true - this is the natural course of things if Yahoo is absorbed into Microsoft entirely, and Microsoft ruins the Yahoo side of things. Which is why I don't believe this is their plan.
I have no doubt the engineers at MS know how to make great software, unfortunately it's those in charge that prevent them from doing so.
Also true. My old company worked for Microsoft during their 2000 product line rollout. Their guys we were very... clever. Our company's task was to figure out ways how to demonstrate new features in various 2000 products. Why did they have to hire seasoned programmers to do this? Because 19 out of 20 ways to use the feature in question would crash the whole machine. We had to find the one way that didn't, and write down the precise steps so that a presenter could follow it. Not my proudest moment (I swore I'd never work for them again after that debacle).
Why do this, instead of having us or their own coders fix the bugs? You nailed that too: it was more profitable to spend their money on marketing and arm-twisting than bug fixing. Funny how they hired a small firm of outside programmers to figure out how to get their own products to not crash, eh? Seems like the type of thing you'd only do if your own massive QA teams had no experience in that area, or you didn't want any internal record of how horribly dishonest your marketing claims were.
Seriously... how horrible does a product line have to be for the company that made it to be unable to figure out to make it work on their own? I mean, they new the features were there, so some team must have gotten them to work at some point - but they had no record of the conditions under which those features actually worked?
Caveat Emptor, indeed.
One of my tasks was to figure out how to get Access 2000 in import data from another database (Interbase I believe). It took me 3 14 hour days to figure out how to do it. The end result was about 5 steps that could performed in under 2 minutes. That's what the VAPS (Value-Added Product Specialists) demonstrated.
The icing on the cake was that Microsoft told our company we took too long to figure this all out, and only paid us for a 1/3 of our time. This company (IKON-Valinor) was a very litigious place and normally never would have put up with this, but they never for one moment considered doing anything other than meekly accepting the reduced fee, considering who they were dealing with. They covered the loss by not paying the coders for the work. That company went out of business 3 years later.
BTW - I'll never work for the guys who ran that place again either: the Guaraldi's.
Of course they do, it'd mean even more money if Yahoo sold.
But let's say you live in a house, and I own 5% of it. You built the house, you love it, you have all sorts of plans to make it even more perfect for you.
Say it's market value is $500,000. Someone comes along and offers you $700,000 for it, but if you sell it, not only would you have to move, but the person who wants to buy is someone you hate and, you believe, would ruin it.
Me, I want you to sell, because I'll make a profit. And if you can get more than the offer, I'll push for that too.
But for you, the idea of turning over your beloved house to someone you hate is so repugnant, that it would take a lot more than a decent profit to make it acceptable.
As long as my 5% share of your house doesn't give me the right to make you move out anyway (while still technically retaining your percentage of ownership) - you get what you want. Either your current dreams, or a pile of money so big that you'd consider it a fair trade.
Yahoo's board has an *emotional* attachment to controlling Yahoo. It's investors don't, they just (rightly) expect profit for investing.
Microsoft's unsolicited offer forced Yahoo to react emotionally, which is not what their investors want, so they may take control out of the board's hands.
Only Microsoft could create that type of reaction, and Yahoo is uniquely vulnerable to their investors for having done so.
My prediction: If the *sale* goes through, Microhoo's stock will rise briefly, then go down. If the MS wins the *proxy fight*, MS stock goes up, Yahoo goes up briefly, then down. Way down. And MS will then buy only the parts of Yahoo that make sense for it to buy, after which Yahoo stock plummets, and MS stock goes way up.
Note that neither scenario has Microsoft's stock going down. These guys know how to make best deals. Shame they don't know how to make the best software - but hey, ya can't be the best at everything.
This style was called "Goju-ryu". It was kind of like Ninjitsu (the art of assasination), but modified for self-defense only. The idea was, if someone attacks you, don't risk your life giving them the benefit of the doubt, just kill them as quickly as possible. So if was like a self-defense class, but with all the counter moves being lethal ones.
All in all, I spent the first seven years wishing I'd studied Juijistu instead, because once your mates know you're studying martial arts - they want to horse around with you. And since, to be effective, the moves all have to be reflex-based (turning a flinch into a throat punch, etc); I did wind up hurting a few friends before they caught on that this style was not for horsing around. Nothing serious though - you do actually have to be someone conscious of what you're doing to really kill someone.
After I ended my training (I broke 4 fingers using a spear hand technique, and decided I'd rather have a future as a guitarist), it did save my life. My mates and I had all gotten dangerously drunk once night, and on the way home I made an obvious looking target. I guy put a knife to my throat and a hand on my wallet. I grabbed the knife hand, pulled him over my hip onto the ground, and brought my heal down on his neck. Considering the principle I mentioned before, I'd say he had at most five minutes to get a tracheotomy to live through that. But it was fortunate because he had a partner, also with a knife. I knew I was too drunk, and too inexperienced against knives to stick around, so I just ran (without even turning around to face the right direction) away from the scene. Luckily, running backwards was part of our training to maintain balance - so I could do it faster than he could run forwards. After 8 blocks he gave up (criminals rarely do cardio exercises). I woke up the next morning and saw my wallet, and the blood on my boot, and knew I'd nearly died.
Incidentally, it's a lot less work to not get blind drunk in dangerous neighbourhoods than it is to study martial arts intensely enough to be able to do that.
But it was quite an eye-opener to notice, once you legitimately have no physical fear of anyone, just how much the sense of physical fear plays in seemingly innocuous social situations. Even if someone's just being a wee bit domineering, you react far differently if you sense that displeasing them past a certain point could result in your being physically hurt, than if you don't believe that. And even strangers sense that, and treat you much differently.
It'd be nice to have that effect without spending 4 hours a day, 6 days a week, in a doju. Perhaps that's why so many people enjoy gun ownership as much as they do.
A happy medium is knowing the "punch to the throat" trick. No guns (which provide a false sense of security), no ridiculous devotion to martial arts - and you can still know that very, very few people in the world have any chance of hurting you physically. And don't kid yourself - your subconscious mind is thinking about that *constantly*.
Sure, shareholders could sue Microsoft if they remmend board members who subsequently don't vote for an acquisition. But if we've learned anything about Microsoft, it's that (at least during this administration); they know how make a profit even when they know they'll lose in court. The fines they got for abusing their monopoly against Netscape hardly made a dent in the advantage they got by crushing them.
Shareholders don't get to vote on acquisition - they can only vote for a new board if they don't like the decisions of the board, or sue the members personally (as they're already doing.
In scenario #1, Microsoft controls Yahoo for a year before that's a factor. And would probably change the bylaws so that the elections were staggered (not all the members are up for election at the same time) so they wouldn't be vulnerable to that the way Yahoo is now.
Scenrio #2 is also probably planned for. Things change very fast in the world of Internet companies. With control of the board members, it would be child's play to have the "conditions change" after winning the proxy fight and justify changing their "offer" to something that made better strategic sense for Microsoft. Keep in mind, this offer was made near Yahoo's 52 week low. If the change in membership cause Yahoo's share price to drop, MS could say the offers to high now. If the board neglects a portion of the company, it would drop in value. And exodus of lower level Yahoo employees changes the value. They could even claim that the "poison pill" of gold plated severance packages changes the wisdom of a buyout offer. All of these things are easily anticipated. Hence, planned for. They'll be ready to make shareholder lawsuits unprofitable non-starters.
The people I know in Yahoo say the parts are worth more than the whole. But Yahoo isn't going to sell it's parts off (like the email) under terms which prevent them from just rebuilding it - because the current board wants Yahoo to thrive long term. A board which just wants short term gains for the stockholder won't; and would sell off whatever parts of the company Microsoft actually wants because it makes sense.
Yahoo's search engine would be great for you or I to own, but it's worthless to Microsoft's because they have their own totally incompatible one. Why pay for something you'd throw away if you don't have to?
If nothing else - even if they throw a few million at a proxy fight; they're still crippling a competitor - wasting time and spreading FUD throughout the company and it's partners.
The deal as stated makes very little sense for MS, and while they suck at tech - if they're one thing they excel at, it's making deals. That alone should tell you that the deal their offering is not actually the deal they want.
Their unusually public bid is designed to make just the waves they want. The waves by themselves hurt their competitor. If they get control of the board too, everything else is just gravy.
It's only because they have more money than god (and their recent trend of massive stock buy backs) that their own shareholders aren't suing them on the merit of what they *claim* their trying to do.
There's good argument that MS is only after market share, primarily in email where the acquisition would give them a monopoly - less so in search and web properties where it would only slow their loss. And there's no argument that MS is after technology - as Yahoo's stuff is run on open source platforms MS could leave in place for awhile; but certainly not publicly develop further.
However... consider this scenario:
1. Microsoft makes a huge bid for Yahoo that, while not clearly being in it's own best interests, clearly *is* in the best interest of Yahoo shareholders, and is far too large to be matched by anyone. 2. Yahoo predictably resists the offer, to the point where it's arguably *not* acting in the best interests of it's shareholders. 3. Microsoft uses this behaviour to wage a proxy fight to get Yahoo's whole board of directors fired and replaced with people it favours. 4. Microsoft now essentially controls the board of a competitor, without ever having actually bought them.
Now... however you feel about an actual acquisition of Yahoo by Microsoft - can we all agree it would make perfect sense for Microsoft to wrest control of Yahoo's board of directors - even if they had no intention of buying them?
Can anyone shed any light on whether it would be possible for Microsoft to win a proxy fight without an iron-clad guarantee they'd buy Yahoo under the terms of their current offer; or if Yahoo could do something that would force them to should the offer be a whole or partial bluff to win a proxy fight?
It takes approximately 10 lbs. of pressure to fracture the human trachea. If you can lift your monitor, you can exert 10 lbs of pressure.
Do NOT get a gun. The people you'd need it against will not give you the chance to use it. And pulling it on anyone else will get you arrested.
If you get accosted like this again (hopefully you won't), concentrate on doing one thing and one thing only:
Getting one solid punch in to the guy's adam's apple.
This is much more effective than going for the nuts (which are frequently protected with those baggy pants) and don't rely on pain. Pain only stops certain people at certain times. Lack of oxygen stops everybody, all the time. It just takes a few seconds for it to be a factor.
In my dojo, some wisp of a girl once asked the sensei what to do if she got attacked by some huge guy with lots of muscles. His response was, "Don't hit him in the muscles".
That's the whole trick to self defense against a more physically imposing, and mentally prepared opponent (which is guarenteed to be the case - muggers and bigots who target stronger people than themselves don't last in that line of work long). Don't hit anything made of bone or muscle. Eyes are the next best choice - but not only do you have to hit twice as many of them as you do if you go for adam's apples, it takes a lot more to stop them from working, *and* you can still be very badly hurt by someone who can only feel you).
So that's all you have to know: A stranger hits me, I try to hit them in the adam's apple. And I don't stop until something stops me.
Which if you're lucky, will be the police, or a group of citizens informing you that he's dead already.
New Yorkers know what I'm talking about. In our subway system there's been this huge "If you see something, say something" campaign. It's either that slogan next to a picture of a backpack left under a subway seat, or blared out of the loud speakers roughly every 20 minutes (oddly with far more clarity than actual service announcements). I guess the idea was, we weren't paranoid on the subway enough after 9/11, or after they started posting soldiers with M-16's at many of the stops, so they had to get us up to "high alert" level.
Personally, I think the campaign would have been a little more effective if had been directed at airport security screeners. Perhaps they could have use a picture of a metal detector going off in response to someone carrying a box cutter. Or, 2 dozen people carrying box cutters.
But no, perhaps it really was better to have the president go on vacation when there was an actual terrorist threat, and then later try to make us all scared of abandoned back packs. So I'm doing *my* part. When I see something, I say something.
"I see a subway car!" "I see an ad for Dr. Zizmore!!" "I my sneakers!!!" "I see a bunch of people looking at me funny!!!!"
And there've been no attacks since. You're welcome.
So rest easy virtual subway riders - me an' the GOP are on the job!
Each progressively more annoying to previous music lover's than the last.
And now a type of music that has intentionally untrained singers, *AND* huge security holes? Well, if the album didn't annoy mom and dad, just wait'll they see what those Russian hackers are doing with their credit card!
BTW - you can't take a short cut to create the next style of popular music by doing something obviously designed to sound horrible, like throwing a cat at a piano. John Cage already tried. That only impresses the music departments at major universities for some reason.
Seriously though, I do look forward to seeing concerts where the "back up dancers" are actually just spandex clad MCSE's. Ooo, and the VH1 special which takes you back stage where they rehearse before the tour!
"And patch, and turn, and scratch your butt, and belch, reboot, and blame nVidia..."
"We know that people are going to use the printer to try to make weapons [and] sex toys and drug paraphernalia," he says.
All you have to do is, when some tells the machine to print a copy of itself - have it print a weapon instead. Then it points it at the user and says, "Go buy another copy of me and tell everyone I printed it. And if you think you can come back here with the police instead - keep in mind that I can also print sex toys and drug paraphernalia. So... do we understand each other?"
Granted, it'd make for some pretty awkward moments at trade shows - but it would still technically be a self-replicating printer.
Having grown up with one (older brother, institutionalized at age 12), I can tell you that even if there is a genetic basis for psychopathy - the answer doesn't lie in genetics alone. Because you can make anyone into a psychopath regardless of genetics.
Here's one way that works pretty damn well.
When my family adopted my brother, he was 8 weeks old. And he had already been adopted and returned by 3 previous families. Yeah - probably not the best decision my mum ever made, but she'd just had a miscarriage and probably was not doing her best long term thinking at the moment.
She noticed strange behaviour in him almost immediately. Even at 8 weeks old, he clearly wasn't comfortable with human contact. As he grew older, a laundry list of abnormal behaviour manifested itself.
Years later, I saw a documentary about these kids who all seemed to have the exact same personality my brother did. They had all come from a Balken orphanage that was later discovered to have been a place where infants were physically and sexually abused.
Now think about this for a second. You're very first human contact is with people who hurt you terribly. You're an infant, so of course you have no way of knowing these people aren't representative of all people. Quite the opposite, you form your basis for what "people" are based the abusers.
How do you act, when your subconscious impression of people - even if they care for you - is that they are very dangerous to you? Well, you try to drive them away. First, you make yourself unpleasant to be around or anything that makes them avoid you. Later, as you grow large (or powerful) enough to do so - you act against them. None of this requires a special gene, it simply requires a survival instinct.
Yes, some people from loving homes go nuts and become killers anyway. And some people are abused and either abuse only themselves, or rise above it and try to protect others. The human brain is vastly complex so you must expect some variance. But the norm, the top of the bell curve, is that people who are treated badly - particularly as children - will see others as likely enemies, and treat them accordingly.
So the best way of reducing the number of "little Hitlers" is to simply treat others as kindly as you can. Even Hitler himself wouldn't have been very effective if the citizens of Germany had been significantly more reluctant to treat people cruelly. Remember, his first atrocities were not the concentration camps. His first ones were implementing neglect of physically and mentally disabled people. Then prisoners. And on and on, moving from those least able to defend themselves all the way up to the whole world.
Wild guess - the whole of Germany in the 1930's didn't have the genetic trait sited in this article.
So just try be nice, and be wary of those who advocate cruelty. That takes care of about 99% of the problem. The remaining 1% isn't going to go way, any more than the other end of that bell curve will.
At least not until we figure out how replace every species with cute little puppies. Seriously, why are dogs so happy and nice all the time compared to everything else? We should work on figuring that out. I have to work like crazy and have awesome luck to a fraction as happy as a dog who gets to go for a walk or eat a cold cut.
If there's one area where China excels - it's in overpopulation. Perhaps their plan is to send "wave after wave of short-term thinkers" against problems until the preset kill limit is reached and their ideas start working?
Don't laugh. Taken to it's ultimate conclusion, this approach *would* actually work. I look forward to seeing both the remaining survivors congratulating each other on their success.
I've been involved on IT side of advertising for roughly 20 years now. There's always a push for more and more data. But ya know what? Even the most sophisticated operations can barely keep up with the requirements to simply *show* you advertising, let alone make decent use of any data they collect on you.
I was involved in doing due diligence (M&A term) on the largest data warehouser in the country, twice. Both times, despite their claims of being able to dig up any given persons hobbies, possessions, income, etc. - it took pretty much all the man power they had just to keep the system from crashing on the most basic vectors. Like the address, even though it was provided to them by their clients.
Sure, if someone is interested in you particularly - they can come up with a profile using private sector sources that rival what the NSA could come up with. But very, very, very few of us are actually that special. If you're reading this yourself, rather than having it read to you by your gorgeous secretary, um... you're *not* that kind of special.
This is the same reason I'm not losing any sleep over the FISA fight. Go ahead and collect all the freakin' data you want about us - good luck trying actually analyze it.
As far as pure internet advertising goes, in the last year I've seen one the biggest ad networks serve up completely blank ads for ~20 hour periods... twice. And these guys claim to be able to determine a site visitor's gender, age group, income level, city, interests, etc. Uh-huh. It's all "proprietary" black box stuff of course. You can't even rely on them to not serve up a millions of blank squares and charge you for it - but you're supposed to trust that all their targeting systems are working?
Here's a clue to advertisers - when the ad network won't actually *send* you these allegedly determined demographics, *and* they have a "default" campaign slot for when the targeting is completely blank - they aren't nearly as good at determining demographics as they're telling you they are.
Here's a clue to viewers of ads. Do the ads you see seem to know a single damn thing about you that couldn't have been determined by the nature of the page you're on, if that? If you answer no, then rest assured the algorithms trying to profile you either aren't working, or don't even exist. Microsoft has $7 billion dollar research budget, but go visit macrumors or other hard-core mac fan site, on an Apple computer, using Firefox - and see who's running ads on there this quarter:-).
The attempts will always be there, but we're in no more immediate danger of having privacy busting ads than we are of having crash-proof PC's. And I'm telling you this as someone who's actively employed in trying to profile you through ads. My best work will probably do a bang-up job profiling the general public - but I'm pretty sure I'll never get to the point where things are particularly individualized. The amount of data we have to work with is growing faster than we can make use of it, and that's not going to change anytime soon.
It will eventually. But it'll be at the same point in time where computing power has risen to the level that your personal computer could be set up to monitor you, and predict your behaviour better than you can. Which won't be for like, at least another 12 to 24 years. And when that happens, you'll have a hell of lot more to worry about than seeing ads which reflect knowledge of you you'd rather have kept to yourself.
So stay in IT. We'll be the one telling the things that are smarter than us what to do with the world. Kind of like being cult-of-personality dictators, with really bad posture and carpal tunnel syndrome.
I've been programming for about 18 years, and have only had to hand in a resume once. The people who offer me jobs either already know my work, have heard about it, or offered me a job based on casual conversation.
Finding me isn't the problem. If I would be a "superstar" in what you're trying to do, researching the problem itself will uncover something I've done in that area. The problem is I'm also fiercely loyal to whoever I work for. Which means that unless you find me at a time when I've already done what I was hired to do - I'm not going to leave to come work for someone else.
I get job unsolicited job offers every week or so, from companies who clearly know something about me. I thank them, but tell them I'm involved in another problem and am currently unavailable. The good companies (like Yahoo) will ask me to let them know if I become available. The rest don't write back.
Let me be clear on something here. A "superstar" programmer is *not* a great coder who will abandon his company for a higher salary or loftier title. People like that are great at first, but then eventually leave your company in the lurch - so badly that you'd have been better off with a lesser coder who stuck around. Remember, you want a great employee first, a great programmer second. The same goes for consultants for any project longer than a few weeks.
So there are 2 ways of finding a superstar programmer.
1. Find someone who learns fast and has a great personality, and is eager to pay their dues. Give them the resources to learn best practices, and watch them rise to the occasion. Someone like this will be at the level you need inside of a few months. 2. Find someone who already has the experience and skills you need, and keep in touch with them until they become available.
Both of these types of candidates will repay your patience many times over. They will put the success of your company at the top of their priorities, and their work will show it.
The reasons for not poaching a superstar programmer from another company are the same as the reasons for not stealing someone's girlfriend. If they can be tempted them away from who they were with before, they can just as easily be tempted them away from you. Sometimes this takes the form of slacking off so they can do consulting work or just taking more time for themselves, and sometimes it takes the form of them giving you 1 week's notice in the middle of a six month project. And people with values like that rarely create work that can be handed off to someone else without painfully long ramp up times. Either way - you'll ultimately regret the hire. I've seen it happens dozens of times.
I've been in the industry for maybe 2 years now - and there's still a lot I don't understand about it. But I was also the geek behind a major magazine's DM effort for about 4 years; so I do understand how it *should* work.
As for your bets - my experience has been that very few companies, regardless of size, know what their doing. The amount of GIGO I've seen take place in internet advertising is simply not to be believed.
All I can tell you is:
"God Bless the Monkey-Punchers"
Just as the few (0.000003%) of num-nuts who respond to SPAM keep it alive, the Monkey-Punchers keep the Ad-Supported Internet alive. And the next time you get too aggravated by SPAM, remind yourself these are probably the same folks.
We will see scientifically sound ad analysis in the near future (it's kind of my job to make that happen); but in the meantime there's enough fools around to keep the whole contraption running while we make our mistakes. When you start seeing ads on the net that even *you* think about clicking on; you'll know my work is done.
The next sign will be seeing ads on TV that are appropriately targeted (no more car commercials to people without driver licenses, who live in places where even six figure salaries can't cover parking fees).
But after that comes the con period; the stage where advertising shifts from relying on the gullible, to the one where it relies on people not having enough free time to read the fine print (which is where DM credit card applications and magazine subscription renewals are).
Right now, the fools are paying our way for us. Enjoy it while it lasts, because it won't last forever.
No, I'm not particularly proud of the role I'm playing in all this - but it's that or subscription fire walled content; so I'm not particular ashamed either. Cheers.
Computers aren't toys, they're powerful machines. You do *not* give a child unfettered access to a powerful machine. You wouldn't give your kid chainsaw, a toaster oven, or even a telephone if you didn't think they were ready to handle it. Why do parents give children who can't handle the worst of the internet, unsupervised access to it?
Sorry, that what this boils down to. I'll bet there are plenty of adults who have hurt themselves or others because of something they read on the internet. Why don't we clamour for laws to protect them? Because we figure they're adults and, if they can't handle the internet, they probably can't handle the public library or reality itself - and common sense tells us that no law will save them.
But when it's a cute little kid - oh, won't someone *please* think of the children!
I agree that in cases like this someone should think of the children: the freakin' parents. Not the ISP's, not RIAA, not the Senate - the damn parents. Don't put your emotionally fragile 13 year old online by themselves - how hard is that to do?
Barring a common sense solution, I have a better short-sighted one that a ".kid" TLD. We should set up TLD which is *just* for cyber-bullying: ".fag".
BTW - I mean that in the "South Park" sense of the word, not the Revered Phelps sense of the word. Ask anyone under 14 what the word means, and you'll either get the South Park definition, or meet someone who knows enough about the world to avoid the TLD in the first place. Cheers.
No, this is the school of thought that thinks, if you want to cheat on your wife with either women - you might as well claim you'd be doing it to "speed up" the process of having a baby.
I can't believe anyone here thinks the reasons BG gives in the interview are actually his reasons. Several people have pointed out that, if those were really the reasons, ie. "to innovate faster" that the stock holders would go nuts because there's clearly cheaper ways of getting engineers.
MS doesn't care about Yahoo's tech - it's based on bsd stuff they'll never touch. Hence, the don't care about the engineers who put it together.
The hostile take over is about nothing but market share. It's ridiculous to suggest there's any more compelling motivation behind this.
Slashdot Mirror
that patents shouldn't be awarded to people who haven't actually, successfully *executed* the concept in the patent at least once.
Giving Microsoft a patent on a form of computer virus protection is like giving Paris Hilton a patent on a form of STD protection.
And no, "Stay Far, Far Away From Me" is not a patentable business process in either case, effective though it may be.
It started in schools, and quickly moved to the US Justice system. "Three Strikes And You're Out!". It sounds both reasonable, and incredibly American at the same time. If you've been in jail 2 times already and then steal a loaf of bread... "You're Out". By which they mean out of society for good. It's worked out so well, why not try it with the Internet?
Here's the problem. In baseball, if you get three strikes - you're out for that particular try at batting. You're not out for the inning, you're not out for the game, and you're certainly not banned from ever playing baseball again for life.
So, if we're going to base public policy on sports rules, could we at least restrict that to sports rules we actually understand? Seriously, that'd be a great start. Later we work on basing them on common sense or something.
There are a lot of valid points about the short comings of PHP, and how even it's design encourages bad programming practice. The same could be (and was) said about Basic, and Visual Basic (pre .net).
And while I certainly agree that there are "better" languages out there, the one area I strongly believe PHP excels in is ease of use. Why is that important, compared to things like elegance, speed, and security?
Well, because by the time need some of the things PHP lacks - you've already learned how to do quite a bit of programming and are well prepared to address it's short comings, or switch to a more appropriate language.
We *need* a language that can be picked up in a matter of hours to attract casual programmers. Not every program needs to be great, many just need barely work.
I teach "Introduction to PHP" at FIT, and the first thing I tell the students is that should not be such a course; because anyone who knows enough to have a need for PHP should also be comfortable enough to learn PHP through an online tutorial or book. But these students know barely anything - I have to teach them how to write HTML forms, and all about databases (including what databases are) before they can PHP to do any of the things they want it to do. It's only a four session class; but PHP is still easy enough that I can teach them everything they need to know to get started.
Most of them will use it to write little guest book type apps for their personal websites, that run slowly and have huge security holes. But they have neither the traffic to make performance an issue, nor valuable enough information to make hacking their sites remotely worth it. If they like doing that, they can either make use of pre-built PHP modules, or learn how to code things better. But they've started, and I believe that's a good thing.
Programmers used to bash Visual Basic all the time when I was coding in that, but it's tiny learning curve got an awful lot of companies started down the path of in house development that Visual C++ wouldn't have. And that created an awful lot of work for programmers.
It's great that Zend is addressing some of the PHP issues; but I'm glad they're not trying to turn it into Perl. We already have Perl, we don't need another.
Whenever you're doing a job that's boring and repetitive, and on a computer, that should be signal that the job can be automated out of existence. Oh, it's a wonderful feeling, pushing one little button and watching what used to take 2 weeks of painstaking, mind-numbing work flash to a perfect finish in seconds or minutes.
And yes, even programming itself can become boring at times; but the same principle applies. I recently spent roughly 2 years writing a program, and at one point realized I was getting bored. So I switched what I was doing, and wrote a program that finished writing that program. Now my job's exciting again. Of course, I have no freakin' clue what the original program is capable of doing anymore; but the people who use it tell me it's awesome.
Fans of the movie 2001 may be interested to know that our CEO's name is actually "Dave". But don't worry, we don't make air-lock door controllers. As far as I know.
I was originally going to go with "~ Ant & the Aaaampersands" so that I'd always show up first in any playlist - but now I think I'll call us "Unknown Artist". And I understand our debut album, "Unknown Album" is already one of the most popular in the world.
I'm looking forward to wasting a $h!7load of the RIAA's money while they try to sue people for pirating our many, many tracks.
Yes, all of this cosmological curiosity and moral introspection *could* be solved by both accepting that we don't know everything and then doing the hard work necessary to find out more; but it's far easier to build a weapon that shoots molten metal at people to finally answer that age-old question:
What happens after we die?
Of all the countless millions who have killed each other over disagreements over what happens after you die, we've so far narrowed it down to one of two possibilities:
1. It's so amazing that, once you find out, you refuse to share the answer with anyone alive.
2. It's so totally boring that, once you find out, you're too embarrassed to admit to the living that you once waisted so much as a single second of actual life thinking about it.
The third possibility, that it's just on par with anything we've already guessed at, but too heavily DRM'd to share, can be ruled out. Because you just know that some dead 16 year old hacker from Norway would have cracked the DRM and posted the results on Slashdot.
CASE STUDY: Matt Dillon
My brother own's a bar frequented by Matt Dillion, the mult-millionaire, super-naturally gorgeous, very famous actor. And he's never seen anyone so utterly terrible at picking up girls. Why? Because he's never *had* to be good at chatting up girls, he's been a movie star since he hit puberty. If he'd needed to learn how to chat up girls, he'd have learned.
You're bad at being dishonest for the same reason Matt Dillion is bad at picking up women.
But, if you'd lack any natural ability to achieve goals honestly, you would have had no other option but to develop the talent to lie, cheat and steal your way to success.
This is the same reason why beautiful girls seem dumb, and powerful people rarely have any other talent than gaining power.
To me, this last bit is the most troubling. We've created a world in which utterly worthless people have no other choice than to figure out how to exploit the worth of others in order to get anywhere in life.
Personally, I blame our "won't someone think of the children" policies. They keep dumb people alive long enough to develop the skill to exploit the intelligent people - who are completely unprepared to deal with dishonesty, cheating, and theft because they never needed to do the things that would have given them experience in those areas.
It's like that sig which floats around slashdot a lot: "Never argue with a fool. They'll drag you down to their level, and then beat you with experience."
Seriously, most of the security holes found in software are there because the company won't pay the coders to sit around securing the finished product once it seems to work. I've been on many project where we were told to even use mere QA time to instead add a new feature the client wanted. Were we being "lazy" because we didn't do all that work for them for free later, in our massive amounts of free time?
As long as software customers choose features over bugs and/or security holes, that's what the market will deliver. Even sadder than that, is that any coder gets so little practice writing bug-free, secure code; that in the very few situations where that's not the case they subsequently have precious little experience at it.
I've left lots of vulnerabilities in code I've written for people because they knowingly made those trade-offs. But when I write code for myself, I don't have that "culture of security" mindset and probably leave a lot more vulnerabilities in it than I would otherwise.
true - this is the natural course of things if Yahoo is absorbed into Microsoft entirely, and Microsoft ruins the Yahoo side of things. Which is why I don't believe this is their plan.
Also true. My old company worked for Microsoft during their 2000 product line rollout. Their guys we were very... clever. Our company's task was to figure out ways how to demonstrate new features in various 2000 products. Why did they have to hire seasoned programmers to do this? Because 19 out of 20 ways to use the feature in question would crash the whole machine. We had to find the one way that didn't, and write down the precise steps so that a presenter could follow it. Not my proudest moment (I swore I'd never work for them again after that debacle).
Why do this, instead of having us or their own coders fix the bugs? You nailed that too: it was more profitable to spend their money on marketing and arm-twisting than bug fixing. Funny how they hired a small firm of outside programmers to figure out how to get their own products to not crash, eh? Seems like the type of thing you'd only do if your own massive QA teams had no experience in that area, or you didn't want any internal record of how horribly dishonest your marketing claims were.
Seriously... how horrible does a product line have to be for the company that made it to be unable to figure out to make it work on their own? I mean, they new the features were there, so some team must have gotten them to work at some point - but they had no record of the conditions under which those features actually worked?
Caveat Emptor, indeed.
One of my tasks was to figure out how to get Access 2000 in import data from another database (Interbase I believe). It took me 3 14 hour days to figure out how to do it. The end result was about 5 steps that could performed in under 2 minutes. That's what the VAPS (Value-Added Product Specialists) demonstrated.
The icing on the cake was that Microsoft told our company we took too long to figure this all out, and only paid us for a 1/3 of our time. This company (IKON-Valinor) was a very litigious place and normally never would have put up with this, but they never for one moment considered doing anything other than meekly accepting the reduced fee, considering who they were dealing with. They covered the loss by not paying the coders for the work. That company went out of business 3 years later.
BTW - I'll never work for the guys who ran that place again either: the Guaraldi's.
Of course they do, it'd mean even more money if Yahoo sold.
But let's say you live in a house, and I own 5% of it. You built the house, you love it, you have all sorts of plans to make it even more perfect for you.
Say it's market value is $500,000. Someone comes along and offers you $700,000 for it, but if you sell it, not only would you have to move, but the person who wants to buy is someone you hate and, you believe, would ruin it.
Me, I want you to sell, because I'll make a profit. And if you can get more than the offer, I'll push for that too.
But for you, the idea of turning over your beloved house to someone you hate is so repugnant, that it would take a lot more than a decent profit to make it acceptable.
As long as my 5% share of your house doesn't give me the right to make you move out anyway (while still technically retaining your percentage of ownership) - you get what you want. Either your current dreams, or a pile of money so big that you'd consider it a fair trade.
Yahoo's board has an *emotional* attachment to controlling Yahoo. It's investors don't, they just (rightly) expect profit for investing.
Microsoft's unsolicited offer forced Yahoo to react emotionally, which is not what their investors want, so they may take control out of the board's hands.
Only Microsoft could create that type of reaction, and Yahoo is uniquely vulnerable to their investors for having done so.
My prediction:
If the *sale* goes through, Microhoo's stock will rise briefly, then go down.
If the MS wins the *proxy fight*, MS stock goes up, Yahoo goes up briefly, then down. Way down. And MS will then buy only the parts of Yahoo that make sense for it to buy, after which Yahoo stock plummets, and MS stock goes way up.
Note that neither scenario has Microsoft's stock going down. These guys know how to make best deals. Shame they don't know how to make the best software - but hey, ya can't be the best at everything.
This style was called "Goju-ryu". It was kind of like Ninjitsu (the art of assasination), but modified for self-defense only. The idea was, if someone attacks you, don't risk your life giving them the benefit of the doubt, just kill them as quickly as possible. So if was like a self-defense class, but with all the counter moves being lethal ones.
All in all, I spent the first seven years wishing I'd studied Juijistu instead, because once your mates know you're studying martial arts - they want to horse around with you. And since, to be effective, the moves all have to be reflex-based (turning a flinch into a throat punch, etc); I did wind up hurting a few friends before they caught on that this style was not for horsing around. Nothing serious though - you do actually have to be someone conscious of what you're doing to really kill someone.
After I ended my training (I broke 4 fingers using a spear hand technique, and decided I'd rather have a future as a guitarist), it did save my life. My mates and I had all gotten dangerously drunk once night, and on the way home I made an obvious looking target. I guy put a knife to my throat and a hand on my wallet. I grabbed the knife hand, pulled him over my hip onto the ground, and brought my heal down on his neck. Considering the principle I mentioned before, I'd say he had at most five minutes to get a tracheotomy to live through that. But it was fortunate because he had a partner, also with a knife. I knew I was too drunk, and too inexperienced against knives to stick around, so I just ran (without even turning around to face the right direction) away from the scene. Luckily, running backwards was part of our training to maintain balance - so I could do it faster than he could run forwards. After 8 blocks he gave up (criminals rarely do cardio exercises). I woke up the next morning and saw my wallet, and the blood on my boot, and knew I'd nearly died.
Incidentally, it's a lot less work to not get blind drunk in dangerous neighbourhoods than it is to study martial arts intensely enough to be able to do that.
But it was quite an eye-opener to notice, once you legitimately have no physical fear of anyone, just how much the sense of physical fear plays in seemingly innocuous social situations. Even if someone's just being a wee bit domineering, you react far differently if you sense that displeasing them past a certain point could result in your being physically hurt, than if you don't believe that. And even strangers sense that, and treat you much differently.
It'd be nice to have that effect without spending 4 hours a day, 6 days a week, in a doju. Perhaps that's why so many people enjoy gun ownership as much as they do.
A happy medium is knowing the "punch to the throat" trick. No guns (which provide a false sense of security), no ridiculous devotion to martial arts - and you can still know that very, very few people in the world have any chance of hurting you physically. And don't kid yourself - your subconscious mind is thinking about that *constantly*.
Sure, shareholders could sue Microsoft if they remmend board members who subsequently don't vote for an acquisition. But if we've learned anything about Microsoft, it's that (at least during this administration); they know how make a profit even when they know they'll lose in court. The fines they got for abusing their monopoly against Netscape hardly made a dent in the advantage they got by crushing them.
Shareholders don't get to vote on acquisition - they can only vote for a new board if they don't like the decisions of the board, or sue the members personally (as they're already doing.
In scenario #1, Microsoft controls Yahoo for a year before that's a factor. And would probably change the bylaws so that the elections were staggered (not all the members are up for election at the same time) so they wouldn't be vulnerable to that the way Yahoo is now.
Scenrio #2 is also probably planned for. Things change very fast in the world of Internet companies. With control of the board members, it would be child's play to have the "conditions change" after winning the proxy fight and justify changing their "offer" to something that made better strategic sense for Microsoft. Keep in mind, this offer was made near Yahoo's 52 week low. If the change in membership cause Yahoo's share price to drop, MS could say the offers to high now. If the board neglects a portion of the company, it would drop in value. And exodus of lower level Yahoo employees changes the value. They could even claim that the "poison pill" of gold plated severance packages changes the wisdom of a buyout offer. All of these things are easily anticipated. Hence, planned for. They'll be ready to make shareholder lawsuits unprofitable non-starters.
The people I know in Yahoo say the parts are worth more than the whole. But Yahoo isn't going to sell it's parts off (like the email) under terms which prevent them from just rebuilding it - because the current board wants Yahoo to thrive long term. A board which just wants short term gains for the stockholder won't; and would sell off whatever parts of the company Microsoft actually wants because it makes sense.
Yahoo's search engine would be great for you or I to own, but it's worthless to Microsoft's because they have their own totally incompatible one. Why pay for something you'd throw away if you don't have to?
If nothing else - even if they throw a few million at a proxy fight; they're still crippling a competitor - wasting time and spreading FUD throughout the company and it's partners.
The deal as stated makes very little sense for MS, and while they suck at tech - if they're one thing they excel at, it's making deals. That alone should tell you that the deal their offering is not actually the deal they want.
Their unusually public bid is designed to make just the waves they want. The waves by themselves hurt their competitor. If they get control of the board too, everything else is just gravy.
It's only because they have more money than god (and their recent trend of massive stock buy backs) that their own shareholders aren't suing them on the merit of what they *claim* their trying to do.
There's good argument that MS is only after market share, primarily in email where the acquisition would give them a monopoly - less so in search and web properties where it would only slow their loss. And there's no argument that MS is after technology - as Yahoo's stuff is run on open source platforms MS could leave in place for awhile; but certainly not publicly develop further.
However... consider this scenario:
1. Microsoft makes a huge bid for Yahoo that, while not clearly being in it's own best interests, clearly *is* in the best interest of Yahoo shareholders, and is far too large to be matched by anyone.
2. Yahoo predictably resists the offer, to the point where it's arguably *not* acting in the best interests of it's shareholders.
3. Microsoft uses this behaviour to wage a proxy fight to get Yahoo's whole board of directors fired and replaced with people it favours.
4. Microsoft now essentially controls the board of a competitor, without ever having actually bought them.
Now... however you feel about an actual acquisition of Yahoo by Microsoft - can we all agree it would make perfect sense for Microsoft to wrest control of Yahoo's board of directors - even if they had no intention of buying them?
Can anyone shed any light on whether it would be possible for Microsoft to win a proxy fight without an iron-clad guarantee they'd buy Yahoo under the terms of their current offer; or if Yahoo could do something that would force them to should the offer be a whole or partial bluff to win a proxy fight?
Dude, you need to know this.
It takes approximately 10 lbs. of pressure to fracture the human trachea. If you can lift your monitor, you can exert 10 lbs of pressure.
Do NOT get a gun. The people you'd need it against will not give you the chance to use it. And pulling it on anyone else will get you arrested.
If you get accosted like this again (hopefully you won't), concentrate on doing one thing and one thing only:
Getting one solid punch in to the guy's adam's apple.
This is much more effective than going for the nuts (which are frequently protected with those baggy pants) and don't rely on pain. Pain only stops certain people at certain times. Lack of oxygen stops everybody, all the time. It just takes a few seconds for it to be a factor.
In my dojo, some wisp of a girl once asked the sensei what to do if she got attacked by some huge guy with lots of muscles. His response was, "Don't hit him in the muscles".
That's the whole trick to self defense against a more physically imposing, and mentally prepared opponent (which is guarenteed to be the case - muggers and bigots who target stronger people than themselves don't last in that line of work long). Don't hit anything made of bone or muscle. Eyes are the next best choice - but not only do you have to hit twice as many of them as you do if you go for adam's apples, it takes a lot more to stop them from working, *and* you can still be very badly hurt by someone who can only feel you).
So that's all you have to know: A stranger hits me, I try to hit them in the adam's apple. And I don't stop until something stops me.
Which if you're lucky, will be the police, or a group of citizens informing you that he's dead already.
Good luck.
New Yorkers know what I'm talking about. In our subway system there's been this huge "If you see something, say something" campaign. It's either that slogan next to a picture of a backpack left under a subway seat, or blared out of the loud speakers roughly every 20 minutes (oddly with far more clarity than actual service announcements). I guess the idea was, we weren't paranoid on the subway enough after 9/11, or after they started posting soldiers with M-16's at many of the stops, so they had to get us up to "high alert" level.
Personally, I think the campaign would have been a little more effective if had been directed at airport security screeners. Perhaps they could have use a picture of a metal detector going off in response to someone carrying a box cutter. Or, 2 dozen people carrying box cutters.
But no, perhaps it really was better to have the president go on vacation when there was an actual terrorist threat, and then later try to make us all scared of abandoned back packs. So I'm doing *my* part. When I see something, I say something.
"I see a subway car!"
"I see an ad for Dr. Zizmore!!"
"I my sneakers!!!"
"I see a bunch of people looking at me funny!!!!"
And there've been no attacks since. You're welcome.
So rest easy virtual subway riders - me an' the GOP are on the job!
kid's parents can't stand.
Jazz...
Rock...
Metal...
Rap...
House...
Each progressively more annoying to previous music lover's than the last.
And now a type of music that has intentionally untrained singers, *AND* huge security holes? Well, if the album didn't annoy mom and dad, just wait'll they see what those Russian hackers are doing with their credit card!
BTW - you can't take a short cut to create the next style of popular music by doing something obviously designed to sound horrible, like throwing a cat at a piano. John Cage already tried. That only impresses the music departments at major universities for some reason.
Seriously though, I do look forward to seeing concerts where the "back up dancers" are actually just spandex clad MCSE's. Ooo, and the VH1 special which takes you back stage where they rehearse before the tour!
"And patch, and turn, and scratch your butt, and belch, reboot, and blame nVidia..."
"We know that people are going to use the printer to try to make weapons [and] sex toys and drug paraphernalia," he says.
All you have to do is, when some tells the machine to print a copy of itself - have it print a weapon instead. Then it points it at the user and says, "Go buy another copy of me and tell everyone I printed it. And if you think you can come back here with the police instead - keep in mind that I can also print sex toys and drug paraphernalia. So... do we understand each other?"
Granted, it'd make for some pretty awkward moments at trade shows - but it would still technically be a self-replicating printer.
Having grown up with one (older brother, institutionalized at age 12), I can tell you that even if there is a genetic basis for psychopathy - the answer doesn't lie in genetics alone. Because you can make anyone into a psychopath regardless of genetics.
Here's one way that works pretty damn well.
When my family adopted my brother, he was 8 weeks old. And he had already been adopted and returned by 3 previous families. Yeah - probably not the best decision my mum ever made, but she'd just had a miscarriage and probably was not doing her best long term thinking at the moment.
She noticed strange behaviour in him almost immediately. Even at 8 weeks old, he clearly wasn't comfortable with human contact. As he grew older, a laundry list of abnormal behaviour manifested itself.
Years later, I saw a documentary about these kids who all seemed to have the exact same personality my brother did. They had all come from a Balken orphanage that was later discovered to have been a place where infants were physically and sexually abused.
Now think about this for a second. You're very first human contact is with people who hurt you terribly. You're an infant, so of course you have no way of knowing these people aren't representative of all people. Quite the opposite, you form your basis for what "people" are based the abusers.
How do you act, when your subconscious impression of people - even if they care for you - is that they are very dangerous to you? Well, you try to drive them away. First, you make yourself unpleasant to be around or anything that makes them avoid you. Later, as you grow large (or powerful) enough to do so - you act against them. None of this requires a special gene, it simply requires a survival instinct.
Yes, some people from loving homes go nuts and become killers anyway. And some people are abused and either abuse only themselves, or rise above it and try to protect others. The human brain is vastly complex so you must expect some variance. But the norm, the top of the bell curve, is that people who are treated badly - particularly as children - will see others as likely enemies, and treat them accordingly.
So the best way of reducing the number of "little Hitlers" is to simply treat others as kindly as you can. Even Hitler himself wouldn't have been very effective if the citizens of Germany had been significantly more reluctant to treat people cruelly. Remember, his first atrocities were not the concentration camps. His first ones were implementing neglect of physically and mentally disabled people. Then prisoners. And on and on, moving from those least able to defend themselves all the way up to the whole world.
Wild guess - the whole of Germany in the 1930's didn't have the genetic trait sited in this article.
So just try be nice, and be wary of those who advocate cruelty. That takes care of about 99% of the problem. The remaining 1% isn't going to go way, any more than the other end of that bell curve will.
At least not until we figure out how replace every species with cute little puppies. Seriously, why are dogs so happy and nice all the time compared to everything else? We should work on figuring that out. I have to work like crazy and have awesome luck to a fraction as happy as a dog who gets to go for a walk or eat a cold cut.
If there's one area where China excels - it's in overpopulation. Perhaps their plan is to send "wave after wave of short-term thinkers" against problems until the preset kill limit is reached and their ideas start working?
Don't laugh. Taken to it's ultimate conclusion, this approach *would* actually work. I look forward to seeing both the remaining survivors congratulating each other on their success.
I've been involved on IT side of advertising for roughly 20 years now. There's always a push for more and more data. But ya know what? Even the most sophisticated operations can barely keep up with the requirements to simply *show* you advertising, let alone make decent use of any data they collect on you.
:-).
I was involved in doing due diligence (M&A term) on the largest data warehouser in the country, twice. Both times, despite their claims of being able to dig up any given persons hobbies, possessions, income, etc. - it took pretty much all the man power they had just to keep the system from crashing on the most basic vectors. Like the address, even though it was provided to them by their clients.
Sure, if someone is interested in you particularly - they can come up with a profile using private sector sources that rival what the NSA could come up with. But very, very, very few of us are actually that special. If you're reading this yourself, rather than having it read to you by your gorgeous secretary, um... you're *not* that kind of special.
This is the same reason I'm not losing any sleep over the FISA fight. Go ahead and collect all the freakin' data you want about us - good luck trying actually analyze it.
As far as pure internet advertising goes, in the last year I've seen one the biggest ad networks serve up completely blank ads for ~20 hour periods... twice. And these guys claim to be able to determine a site visitor's gender, age group, income level, city, interests, etc. Uh-huh. It's all "proprietary" black box stuff of course. You can't even rely on them to not serve up a millions of blank squares and charge you for it - but you're supposed to trust that all their targeting systems are working?
Here's a clue to advertisers - when the ad network won't actually *send* you these allegedly determined demographics, *and* they have a "default" campaign slot for when the targeting is completely blank - they aren't nearly as good at determining demographics as they're telling you they are.
Here's a clue to viewers of ads. Do the ads you see seem to know a single damn thing about you that couldn't have been determined by the nature of the page you're on, if that? If you answer no, then rest assured the algorithms trying to profile you either aren't working, or don't even exist. Microsoft has $7 billion dollar research budget, but go visit macrumors or other hard-core mac fan site, on an Apple computer, using Firefox - and see who's running ads on there this quarter
The attempts will always be there, but we're in no more immediate danger of having privacy busting ads than we are of having crash-proof PC's. And I'm telling you this as someone who's actively employed in trying to profile you through ads. My best work will probably do a bang-up job profiling the general public - but I'm pretty sure I'll never get to the point where things are particularly individualized. The amount of data we have to work with is growing faster than we can make use of it, and that's not going to change anytime soon.
It will eventually. But it'll be at the same point in time where computing power has risen to the level that your personal computer could be set up to monitor you, and predict your behaviour better than you can. Which won't be for like, at least another 12 to 24 years. And when that happens, you'll have a hell of lot more to worry about than seeing ads which reflect knowledge of you you'd rather have kept to yourself.
So stay in IT. We'll be the one telling the things that are smarter than us what to do with the world. Kind of like being cult-of-personality dictators, with really bad posture and carpal tunnel syndrome.
I've been programming for about 18 years, and have only had to hand in a resume once. The people who offer me jobs either already know my work, have heard about it, or offered me a job based on casual conversation.
Finding me isn't the problem. If I would be a "superstar" in what you're trying to do, researching the problem itself will uncover something I've done in that area. The problem is I'm also fiercely loyal to whoever I work for. Which means that unless you find me at a time when I've already done what I was hired to do - I'm not going to leave to come work for someone else.
I get job unsolicited job offers every week or so, from companies who clearly know something about me. I thank them, but tell them I'm involved in another problem and am currently unavailable. The good companies (like Yahoo) will ask me to let them know if I become available. The rest don't write back.
Let me be clear on something here. A "superstar" programmer is *not* a great coder who will abandon his company for a higher salary or loftier title. People like that are great at first, but then eventually leave your company in the lurch - so badly that you'd have been better off with a lesser coder who stuck around. Remember, you want a great employee first, a great programmer second. The same goes for consultants for any project longer than a few weeks.
So there are 2 ways of finding a superstar programmer.
1. Find someone who learns fast and has a great personality, and is eager to pay their dues. Give them the resources to learn best practices, and watch them rise to the occasion. Someone like this will be at the level you need inside of a few months.
2. Find someone who already has the experience and skills you need, and keep in touch with them until they become available.
Both of these types of candidates will repay your patience many times over. They will put the success of your company at the top of their priorities, and their work will show it.
The reasons for not poaching a superstar programmer from another company are the same as the reasons for not stealing someone's girlfriend. If they can be tempted them away from who they were with before, they can just as easily be tempted them away from you. Sometimes this takes the form of slacking off so they can do consulting work or just taking more time for themselves, and sometimes it takes the form of them giving you 1 week's notice in the middle of a six month project. And people with values like that rarely create work that can be handed off to someone else without painfully long ramp up times. Either way - you'll ultimately regret the hire. I've seen it happens dozens of times.
Thanks for props :-)
I've been in the industry for maybe 2 years now - and there's still a lot I don't understand about it. But I was also the geek behind a major magazine's DM effort for about 4 years; so I do understand how it *should* work.
As for your bets - my experience has been that very few companies, regardless of size, know what their doing. The amount of GIGO I've seen take place in internet advertising is simply not to be believed.
All I can tell you is:
"God Bless the Monkey-Punchers"
Just as the few (0.000003%) of num-nuts who respond to SPAM keep it alive, the Monkey-Punchers keep the Ad-Supported Internet alive. And the next time you get too aggravated by SPAM, remind yourself these are probably the same folks.
We will see scientifically sound ad analysis in the near future (it's kind of my job to make that happen); but in the meantime there's enough fools around to keep the whole contraption running while we make our mistakes. When you start seeing ads on the net that even *you* think about clicking on; you'll know my work is done.
The next sign will be seeing ads on TV that are appropriately targeted (no more car commercials to people without driver licenses, who live in places where even six figure salaries can't cover parking fees).
But after that comes the con period; the stage where advertising shifts from relying on the gullible, to the one where it relies on people not having enough free time to read the fine print (which is where DM credit card applications and magazine subscription renewals are).
Right now, the fools are paying our way for us. Enjoy it while it lasts, because it won't last forever.
No, I'm not particularly proud of the role I'm playing in all this - but it's that or subscription fire walled content; so I'm not particular ashamed either. Cheers.
Computers aren't toys, they're powerful machines. You do *not* give a child unfettered access to a powerful machine. You wouldn't give your kid chainsaw, a toaster oven, or even a telephone if you didn't think they were ready to handle it. Why do parents give children who can't handle the worst of the internet, unsupervised access to it?
Sorry, that what this boils down to. I'll bet there are plenty of adults who have hurt themselves or others because of something they read on the internet. Why don't we clamour for laws to protect them? Because we figure they're adults and, if they can't handle the internet, they probably can't handle the public library or reality itself - and common sense tells us that no law will save them.
But when it's a cute little kid - oh, won't someone *please* think of the children!
I agree that in cases like this someone should think of the children: the freakin' parents. Not the ISP's, not RIAA, not the Senate - the damn parents. Don't put your emotionally fragile 13 year old online by themselves - how hard is that to do?
Barring a common sense solution, I have a better short-sighted one that a ".kid" TLD. We should set up TLD which is *just* for cyber-bullying: ".fag".
BTW - I mean that in the "South Park" sense of the word, not the Revered Phelps sense of the word. Ask anyone under 14 what the word means, and you'll either get the South Park definition, or meet someone who knows enough about the world to avoid the TLD in the first place. Cheers.
No, this is the school of thought that thinks, if you want to cheat on your wife with either women - you might as well claim you'd be doing it to "speed up" the process of having a baby.
I can't believe anyone here thinks the reasons BG gives in the interview are actually his reasons. Several people have pointed out that, if those were really the reasons, ie. "to innovate faster" that the stock holders would go nuts because there's clearly cheaper ways of getting engineers.
MS doesn't care about Yahoo's tech - it's based on bsd stuff they'll never touch. Hence, the don't care about the engineers who put it together.
The hostile take over is about nothing but market share. It's ridiculous to suggest there's any more compelling motivation behind this.
Sorry, I have absolutely no idea what you're talking about.
>:-)