My parents were visiting and when they used my computer I implored them to use Mozilla FireFox. But they are just so accustomed to clicking on the big blue E. I tried to explain to them the benefits: popup blocking, less chance of getting malware, etc. They said they had a popup blocker on IE at home and 'they don't visit those kinds of sites.'
It wasn't that they were against Mozilla, they just didn't see what the big deal was. Why invest the time/energy/effort to learn/download/install something new, when they know how the big E works? (Keep in mind, these are people who can have this conversation:
Mom: Wow, your computer is so fast. Me: (Perplexed, b/c they are using my laptop from circa 2000) Uh, really? I think your home computer is faster than mine. My Brother: SHe means the Internet is faster (I have DSL, they have dialup) Me: Do you mean the Internet, Mom? Mom: No, I mean email. (She's checking her email from mail.yahoo.com)
Eh, I don't see how this is too different from My.Yahoo.com. That My Yahoo! page is pretty slimed down, you can add RSS feeds just like with Google, and arrange them into various 'pages,' if that suits your fancy. About the only thing I see that's definitely in Google's favor on this 'RSS personalized homepage' is that Google doesn't show ads, while the My Yahoo! page has a big ol' ad right at the top of the page.
Here are a few random ideas on how to 'fix' this problem, or have it become fixed:
Encourage the US population to increase. This is already being done with our government turning the other way as illegal immigrants flood into the country. Further encouragement could be given for families to spit out more babies, perhaps additional tax credits for larger families?
Just wait - once our 'pop culture' is embued within these rising Asian countries, they're minds will slowly turn to goo watching Fear Factor, American Idol, the Simpsons after season 8, and the slew of other mind numbing products beamed into our living rooms each day and night.
Do a better job at attracting the smarties in other countries. We have done a good job in the past in offerring a very prosperous, free country that has attracted the well off/smart from other countries to come to school here, live here, contribute here... we'll need to do this in spades, I imagine, moving forward.
In the end, though, is it really such a bad thing if the US is not #1 anymore? Being a USian, I'm not hoping we're a distant #2, but rather I'd like to see many nations on par with economic and technological might. I subscribe to the idea that nations that are prosperous in a global economy must be mostly peaceful ones. Furthermore, a higher standard of living for people in other countries will, eventually give us here in the States and even higher standard of living, as well. (True, there may be some hard times for the somewhat spoiled US consumer as the global marketplace 'readjusts,' but in the long run, I believe, the average US citizen will be better off if many more people in the world are likely better off than they are today.
I would imagine that those who really care are trying out this exploit. Those who could care less are probably not reading through or posting. Hence the quietness on this topic. I'm sure, though, that the WoW-specific boards are afire.
Who exactly is 'they'? Microsoft is a company with, what, 30,000 employees? Not a single one of them 'gives a hoot?'
I can't speak for their marketers or upper-management, but I've met with and interfaced with a couple hundred employees from Microsoft over the past decade and I'd say 90% of them have been more passionate, smarter, and more 'innovative' than the average employee I've met at any other computer software-related business.*
Furthermore, it's amazing how passionate many are about their particular product line. Shit, just read some of their blogs and you'll see how much many care about the products they work on, the user experience, and so on. So saying 'the literally don't care' is about as far from reality as I can imagine. So either you are psychotic or ignorant or the people at Microsoft you've interfaced with personally happen to be vastly different from those that I've met/socialized with/worked with. (And I'm sure you have had the interactions and experience to make such claims as you did in your post, no? Or are you just saying this based on the fact that your Win98 box blue screens once a day? Yeah....)
* - the majority of people I've met/worked with at Microsoft have been either in the Office team or ASP.NET team, so my observations may be skewed if just cool people work there.
If you can locate weakness in your team dynamic, you can repair it.
Unless you are just one of the grunts and upper management are the ones that get to make all the hiring decisions. And it might not just be that Bob over there knows everything about the project, but that Bob is the only one who shows up to work on time, puts in his 40 hrs a week, is a half-decent programmer, knows the technology being used, etc., etc.
You know the ol' adage, 80% of the work is done by 20% of the team.....
My wife had an internship like that, where she had to basically FTP some raw logs over and parse it and generate this pretty report and email it to the managers. They hired her as an intern b/c no one in the company wanted to come in at 5:00 in the morning and spend the 3-4 hours they assumed it would take to parse the data into a report and email it to said managers.
Well, she basically wrote a script and an Excel macro that would download the file, parse it into Excel, generate the charts, color code shit, all the bells and whistles, and then even email it to the managers. It took about 15-20 minutes to run in total, so she'd come in at 5:00 AM, turn on her computer, double-click an icon.
After she wrote the script she kind of just would play minesweeper for the four hours until she'd head off to class, but after a while that gets boring so she basically helped out on other projects. I told her she should just leave her computer on 24/7 and have a scheduled task that would run @ 5:00 AM and she wouldn't even have to go to work, but then I guess they'd have an issue about paying her, eh?
This Truck Number tends to imply that all people are contributing equally to a project. I've been on projects where there may be 10 folks working on it and the project would be devestated if, say, 2 specific developers were run over by a truck, but could still carry on even if 5 different developers were killed.
I think he meant 'innovative' as in, world-changing. You know, discovering how to harness electricty. Organ transplants. Mass production. Somehow I doubt Karoke software will ever make it to the 'top innovations' list. Unless Japanese teenagers take over the world.
The articles premise that each generation of people is less innovative than the generation before them is still a disturbing one, and worthy of note and concern if there is evidence to support it
But what do you expect when the birth rates in first world nations are much lower than the birth rates in third world nations? I mean, aren't a lot of European countries facing average birth rates less than 2.0, meaning that population is decreasing over time? Is it any wonder that innovation plotted against population would be decreasing when it's the nation's poor and technologically backward who are out-reproducing those peoples with the funding/means to innovate?
I admit that comparing revenue with 'relevency' is not what I meant to say. I actually did spend a few minutes trying to come up with a good analogy and then said, 'fuck it, gotta get back to work,' and just used that lame line.
What I was trying to convey was how search was just a very small piece of Microsoft as a whole, and an even smaller portion of the revenue pie. I tried to think up an analogy that would illustrate that just because a company is 'losing' in a small sector, but remains healthy in other, more vital sectors, hardly makes said company 'irrelevent.'
Just look at one of the most busiest websites in the world: dell.com. They're using ASP.NET. That's not 'stalling'...buy any standards
Yeah, ASP.NET is really the crown jewels of.NET. There are a lot of big sites using ASP.NET (Dell.com, as you menion, Match.com, Buy.com, and many others... all the marketing jazz can be found here.
And ASP.NET 2.0 has some serious improvements over 1.x (and will still outshine the WinForms side of.NET in this next release and likely years to come)...
Agreed, when reading the parent post I was thinking, "Hook, line, and sinker!!"
Anyone who's in the.NET space knows that.NET is not.NOT and knows that SQL Server development isn't stalled, etc., etc.
Yes, Microsoft's search blows compared to Google's, but to say, "MS IS IRRELEVANT" is pretty far from the truth. (If irrelevancy equals tens of billions of dollars in profit per quarter, I'll take irrelevancy any day of the week.)
Why did Vader torture Han, Leia, and Chewie? Why did Obi-Wan allow himself to die in Episode IV? Episodes I-III all explain this.
How did Episodes I-III explain this? I'm no Star Wars buff, but I have seen all six movies. Are you saying that he tortured Han, Leia, and Chewie so that Luke would pick up on it and get his ass to that cloud city?
What I don't get is if he knew Luke was his son, why wouldn't he know Leia was his daughter? Also I didn't like how Episode I explained "the force" in scientific terms. Why dispel the mysticism that surrounds the force with a rational explanation?
I think Episodes I-III didn't work well because they required better plot delivery and character development. But Lucas failed miserably there, IMO. The lackluster character development and plot delivery could be excused in Episodes IV-VI because the plot line was a lot simpler, as others have mentioned. It was Good vs. Evil. A romantic subplot with Han and Leia. A Western and soap and serial rolled into one... we know how those go, the characters are usually pretty one-dimensional... this is why, IMO, the original trilogy was able to succeed where as the prequeals sucked cock.
only 5% admitted to downloading a movie from the internet
When you say 'admitted' you make it sound like way more than 5% of those polled downloaded a movie from the Internet. I wouldn't be surprised if the number was low. My parents, for example, still use dial-up. They have no idea what the heck a bittorrent is or how one would even go about getting a movie on the Internet. And once they have it they have no idea how they'd watch it on their TV. I would wager most movie-watching folks fall into this camp...
Not only does the topology of San Fancisco make it a good test, but it's also spatially close. I mean, there are plenty of other locales with the same or more exaggerated topology, but they may be much further away from Google's headquarters. Because of this spatial locality I would be surprised if their "first run" was anywhere but Frisco.
Does anyone happen to have hard numbers showing how many people are using Google's (or Yahoo's) beta products? I am curious as to their adoption. Are "real" people using this or is it just computer savvy early adopters?
I know the point of a beta is to get, essentially, free buzz and free testers, but this implies that the product eventually move out of beta. (Google News, GMail, I'm looking in your general direction.)
I would contend that years of mandatory public schooling has "trained" most folks to be ideal worker bees: do what you're told without thought or question. Is it any surprise that this mentality has boiled over into not just face-to-face instructions, but also instructions over email?
Today @ 7-11 I saw Star Wars Cheetos that boasted they would turn your tongue Yoda Green or Vader Black. I doubt I would ever purchase, let along eat, a food item that made such claims. Ick.
If he sold all his shares, hundreds of millions of dollars worth, he's going to have one hell of a tax bill come April 15th, 2006, no? I mean, sure, these may be long term capital gains, but that's still 15%. Huh, you'd think the street would be concerned when a cofounder and head honcho still running the company has sold out completely.
Erm, IIRC, an acceptable body fat % for males in 15-18%. Shaq has a body fat % of 13%. Ergo, I wouldn't call him fat. Plus, even if his body fat % is greater than most atheletes, it's hard to contend that he's not in superb shape, seeing as he hauls that's load up and down the court for ~35 minutes every night, and banging up against other 200+ pound atheletes.
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It wasn't that they were against Mozilla, they just didn't see what the big deal was. Why invest the time/energy/effort to learn/download/install something new, when they know how the big E works? (Keep in mind, these are people who can have this conversation:
Mom: Wow, your computer is so fast.
Me: (Perplexed, b/c they are using my laptop from circa 2000) Uh, really? I think your home computer is faster than mine.
My Brother: SHe means the Internet is faster (I have DSL, they have dialup)
Me: Do you mean the Internet, Mom?
Mom: No, I mean email. (She's checking her email from mail.yahoo.com)
)
Eh, I don't see how this is too different from My.Yahoo.com. That My Yahoo! page is pretty slimed down, you can add RSS feeds just like with Google, and arrange them into various 'pages,' if that suits your fancy. About the only thing I see that's definitely in Google's favor on this 'RSS personalized homepage' is that Google doesn't show ads, while the My Yahoo! page has a big ol' ad right at the top of the page.
- Encourage the US population to increase. This is already being done with our government turning the other way as illegal immigrants flood into the country. Further encouragement could be given for families to spit out more babies, perhaps additional tax credits for larger families?
- Just wait - once our 'pop culture' is embued within these rising Asian countries, they're minds will slowly turn to goo watching Fear Factor, American Idol, the Simpsons after season 8, and the slew of other mind numbing products beamed into our living rooms each day and night.
- Do a better job at attracting the smarties in other countries. We have done a good job in the past in offerring a very prosperous, free country that has attracted the well off/smart from other countries to come to school here, live here, contribute here... we'll need to do this in spades, I imagine, moving forward.
In the end, though, is it really such a bad thing if the US is not #1 anymore? Being a USian, I'm not hoping we're a distant #2, but rather I'd like to see many nations on par with economic and technological might. I subscribe to the idea that nations that are prosperous in a global economy must be mostly peaceful ones. Furthermore, a higher standard of living for people in other countries will, eventually give us here in the States and even higher standard of living, as well. (True, there may be some hard times for the somewhat spoiled US consumer as the global marketplace 'readjusts,' but in the long run, I believe, the average US citizen will be better off if many more people in the world are likely better off than they are today.I would imagine that those who really care are trying out this exploit. Those who could care less are probably not reading through or posting. Hence the quietness on this topic. I'm sure, though, that the WoW-specific boards are afire.
I can't speak for their marketers or upper-management, but I've met with and interfaced with a couple hundred employees from Microsoft over the past decade and I'd say 90% of them have been more passionate, smarter, and more 'innovative' than the average employee I've met at any other computer software-related business.*
Furthermore, it's amazing how passionate many are about their particular product line. Shit, just read some of their blogs and you'll see how much many care about the products they work on, the user experience, and so on. So saying 'the literally don't care' is about as far from reality as I can imagine. So either you are psychotic or ignorant or the people at Microsoft you've interfaced with personally happen to be vastly different from those that I've met/socialized with/worked with. (And I'm sure you have had the interactions and experience to make such claims as you did in your post, no? Or are you just saying this based on the fact that your Win98 box blue screens once a day? Yeah....)
* - the majority of people I've met/worked with at Microsoft have been either in the Office team or ASP.NET team, so my observations may be skewed if just cool people work there.
Unless you are just one of the grunts and upper management are the ones that get to make all the hiring decisions. And it might not just be that Bob over there knows everything about the project, but that Bob is the only one who shows up to work on time, puts in his 40 hrs a week, is a half-decent programmer, knows the technology being used, etc., etc.
You know the ol' adage, 80% of the work is done by 20% of the team.....
Well, she basically wrote a script and an Excel macro that would download the file, parse it into Excel, generate the charts, color code shit, all the bells and whistles, and then even email it to the managers. It took about 15-20 minutes to run in total, so she'd come in at 5:00 AM, turn on her computer, double-click an icon.
After she wrote the script she kind of just would play minesweeper for the four hours until she'd head off to class, but after a while that gets boring so she basically helped out on other projects. I told her she should just leave her computer on 24/7 and have a scheduled task that would run @ 5:00 AM and she wouldn't even have to go to work, but then I guess they'd have an issue about paying her, eh?
This Truck Number tends to imply that all people are contributing equally to a project. I've been on projects where there may be 10 folks working on it and the project would be devestated if, say, 2 specific developers were run over by a truck, but could still carry on even if 5 different developers were killed.
I think he meant 'innovative' as in, world-changing. You know, discovering how to harness electricty. Organ transplants. Mass production. Somehow I doubt Karoke software will ever make it to the 'top innovations' list. Unless Japanese teenagers take over the world.
But what do you expect when the birth rates in first world nations are much lower than the birth rates in third world nations? I mean, aren't a lot of European countries facing average birth rates less than 2.0, meaning that population is decreasing over time? Is it any wonder that innovation plotted against population would be decreasing when it's the nation's poor and technologically backward who are out-reproducing those peoples with the funding/means to innovate?
What I was trying to convey was how search was just a very small piece of Microsoft as a whole, and an even smaller portion of the revenue pie. I tried to think up an analogy that would illustrate that just because a company is 'losing' in a small sector, but remains healthy in other, more vital sectors, hardly makes said company 'irrelevent.'
Yeah, ASP.NET is really the crown jewels of .NET. There are a lot of big sites using ASP.NET (Dell.com, as you menion, Match.com, Buy.com, and many others... all the marketing jazz can be found here.
And ASP.NET 2.0 has some serious improvements over 1.x (and will still outshine the WinForms side of .NET in this next release and likely years to come)...
Anyone who's in the .NET space knows that .NET is not .NOT and knows that SQL Server development isn't stalled, etc., etc.
Yes, Microsoft's search blows compared to Google's, but to say, "MS IS IRRELEVANT" is pretty far from the truth. (If irrelevancy equals tens of billions of dollars in profit per quarter, I'll take irrelevancy any day of the week.)
Ditto www.GoogleWallet.com. Was registered just yesterday.
How did Episodes I-III explain this? I'm no Star Wars buff, but I have seen all six movies. Are you saying that he tortured Han, Leia, and Chewie so that Luke would pick up on it and get his ass to that cloud city?
What I don't get is if he knew Luke was his son, why wouldn't he know Leia was his daughter? Also I didn't like how Episode I explained "the force" in scientific terms. Why dispel the mysticism that surrounds the force with a rational explanation?
I think Episodes I-III didn't work well because they required better plot delivery and character development. But Lucas failed miserably there, IMO. The lackluster character development and plot delivery could be excused in Episodes IV-VI because the plot line was a lot simpler, as others have mentioned. It was Good vs. Evil. A romantic subplot with Han and Leia. A Western and soap and serial rolled into one... we know how those go, the characters are usually pretty one-dimensional... this is why, IMO, the original trilogy was able to succeed where as the prequeals sucked cock.
When you say 'admitted' you make it sound like way more than 5% of those polled downloaded a movie from the Internet. I wouldn't be surprised if the number was low. My parents, for example, still use dial-up. They have no idea what the heck a bittorrent is or how one would even go about getting a movie on the Internet. And once they have it they have no idea how they'd watch it on their TV. I would wager most movie-watching folks fall into this camp...
Not only does the topology of San Fancisco make it a good test, but it's also spatially close. I mean, there are plenty of other locales with the same or more exaggerated topology, but they may be much further away from Google's headquarters. Because of this spatial locality I would be surprised if their "first run" was anywhere but Frisco.
I know the point of a beta is to get, essentially, free buzz and free testers, but this implies that the product eventually move out of beta. (Google News, GMail, I'm looking in your general direction.)
Eep. I shudder when thinking about what they were doing to those poor, stolen sheep to justify death!
Excuse me, but "e-synergy," "actualize..." aren't those words stupid people use to sound smart? ... I'm fired, aren't I?
I would contend that years of mandatory public schooling has "trained" most folks to be ideal worker bees: do what you're told without thought or question. Is it any surprise that this mentality has boiled over into not just face-to-face instructions, but also instructions over email?
Today @ 7-11 I saw Star Wars Cheetos that boasted they would turn your tongue Yoda Green or Vader Black. I doubt I would ever purchase, let along eat, a food item that made such claims. Ick.
If he sold all his shares, hundreds of millions of dollars worth, he's going to have one hell of a tax bill come April 15th, 2006, no? I mean, sure, these may be long term capital gains, but that's still 15%. Huh, you'd think the street would be concerned when a cofounder and head honcho still running the company has sold out completely.
Word. I can understand being against hunting for sport, but hunting for food, resources, etc.... what's wrong with that?
Erm, IIRC, an acceptable body fat % for males in 15-18%. Shaq has a body fat % of 13%. Ergo, I wouldn't call him fat. Plus, even if his body fat % is greater than most atheletes, it's hard to contend that he's not in superb shape, seeing as he hauls that's load up and down the court for ~35 minutes every night, and banging up against other 200+ pound atheletes.