The Great-Man Myth may well be a bit of a myth, but there also must be some truth to it. Rather than describe Steve Jobs as an "inventor," I think he could better be described as an "innovator." I'm not sure he invented much of anything: he didn't invent the Apple I and Apple II (Wozniak did), and he didn't invent the GUI (Xerox Parc and others did.) Instead, he brought emerging technology together in an innovative way to create new categories of products such as the Macintosh, iPod, iPad, and iPhone. Each of those were composed of a set of inventions created by others but brought together under Jobs' direction. Likewise, he didn't invent computer animation at Pixar (which was already doing that when he acquired it), but he guided Pixar through the process of creating the first feature-length computer-animated movie.
So, for a serial innovator like Jobs or Musk, there seems to be an element of greatness in the fact that they have a vision and organize others to implement that vision. But its likely that they get more than their share of the limelight in the process of the media simplifying and glamorizing their stories for consumption by the masses. Edison actively encouraged that sort of thing in the media of the time, by promoting the idea that he was the great inventor, whereas he actually ran the first industrial research laboratory - which itself is one of his primary inventions.
In the case of the Apple I and II, Wozniak seems to get his fair share of credit since he did all of the engineering himself, but for other things, a team of people is involved, and it's rare for them to get much credit. Except in the case of the first Macintosh, where the designers got to sign the inside of the case.
So, like most myths, there's some truth to the Greate-Man Myth, though it's also, of course, a bit of a "myth."
Suddenly imitating competitors out of desperation, at any cost, has been done many times before. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. Microsoft was late to the party on browsers and various other things but managed to catch up (more or less) in that case and many other cases. In some cases, though, they poured a lot of money into things that didn't work out, and in retrospect, didn't really make much business sense. For example, there's the Zune player and the more recent Nokia acquisition.
There must be an element of denial-of-reality in such cases. In the Nokia thing, for example, couldn't Microsoft reasonably anticipate that it would turn into a giant write-down? So why did they do it? You can just imagine the conversation, "We've got to make Microsoft Phone work at any cost, or our entire business will suffer. We'll just buy Nokia and sell phones ourselves, if we have to."
This same thing can happen at Google or anywhere else. More recently, the trend has been to just buy your way into whatever you're afraid of. I think that explains why Google spent three billion and change on Nest (for a thermostat?!) and why Facebook spent a billion on Instagram. If you can't beat 'em, eat 'em.
Several years ago, when Facebook was less ubiquitous than it is now, I was amazed when our local news broadcast would tell us each night to go to their Facebook page. It was the only form of advertising that they gave away for free. Oh, except for telling us each night to follow their reporters on Twitter. But I never once heard them mention Google+. I guess that's the networking effect in action.
My guess is that this new technology would fill some spot in the memory hierarchy somewhere between two existing technologies. For example, it might be used between current flash-based SSDs and DRAM to provide persistent memory that's faster than flash (but presumably more expensive) for system startup. Of course, the actual spot in the hierarchy would depend on factors such as speed, endurance, and cost. This is analogous to the fact that many magnetic hard drives now include memory caches.
Of course, the spot in the memory hierarchy could change over time as the parameters of the new memory evolve, notably cost. The new type would only replace some existing memory type when it is better in every way than that type. This happens rarely. For example, the ancient technology of magnetic tape is still with us because of its extremely low cost per byte, which is a compelling feature for certain applications such as archival data storage, despite its long access time.
IMHO, the IBM PC-AT keyboard was the best there ever was on a PC (or compatible.) It took me quite a long time to retrain myself when they moved that beautiful from that single large Ctrl key in the right place to two small keys in the wrong place. Worse, they put the Caps Lock in that prominent spot, leading to it getting hit a lot by accident - which I still do to this day: I think I hit it more often by accident than I do on purpose!
Is there an alternative summary available where I might know what any of the nouns mean? In particular, why is it assumed that anyone knows who these companies or people are? I just about got "MLB" = "Major League Baseball".
In response to complaints about all these mysterious acronyms, EdX will host a second MOOC to explain MLB to those who have a background in R and SQL but not MLB. Topics covered include ERA, RBI, OBP, IP, and BB. See this page for a full list of course topics.
Maybe you and the GP are both right. It looks like they think spending money on architecture will yield more bang-for-the-buck of performance at the moment than yet another geometry shrink. You'd think they would have played all the architectural games possible by now. Bu now that everybody already has more cores than they can use, maybe more can be done at the architecture level to make better use of the same number of cores. (Just a guess.)
As long as good code is well documented, there is no harm.
Funny that you should mention that. Many years ago, before I discovered Python, I used Perl as my primary scripting language. I eventually discovered that I found it hard to read even my own code in Perl. So I applied the same solution I already used to the only other language I knew where I had the same problem: assembly.
I had learned over the years that in order to make assembly readable, you need to comment (nearly) every line. I started doing that with Perl, and voila!, problem solved.
Then I discovered Python. I soon transliterated all of my favorite Perl scripts into Python. Fortunately, the two languages are fairly similar at a semantic level, just not at a syntactic level. So transliteration was pretty easy. I was amazed to discover that even though Perl was famous for being compact (though perhaps not the way I wrote it - no one-liners allowed), my Python scripts ended up having both fewer lines and fewer bytes than their Perl equivalents. Just getting rid of braces does a lot to reduce line count - which seems obvious in retrospect.
Oh, and I also removed nearly all of the comments. That significantly reduced the byte count. And I could read my own code again!
It is possible to convert to Judaism, difficult, but possible.
It was so difficult for me that I decided to convert to dentistry instead. Which reminds me: what do you call a doctor who flunks out of medical school? - A dentist.
Likewise, if he isn't really committed enough to the domain to do all that then he doesn't much need it anyway - except for sentimental reasons and/or bragging rights. Personally, if I had a domain that was of so little use to me as his, which was attracting a lot of interest, I'd just sell it to the highest bidder and be done with all the headaches.
I actually have the converse case: I have multiple domains which aren't extremely short (7 letters or more), but were bought over 10 years ago, so they're shorter than any uncommitted meaningful domains that you could buy today. Three have a lot of content and the others just have a little content. I've never been approached by anyone to buy or take any of them.
However, I did receive an offer the other day for someone to sell me one that's somewhat similar to my most valuable domain. He says he's had it for 10 years, and it's still a parked domain. There isn't any reason for me to buy it because a relatively long domain name only has value when it's associated with a website which provides useful content. Just imagine how valuable "google.com" would be if had never been anything but a parked domain. An empty 6-letter domain would be worth something at this point, but not much.
Another story that would get a lot of traction would be if someone got killed by a tiny green cartoon character with two antennae and a single eye. That would play into the 'evil plankton' narrative.
You can extend the useful life of the Brother cartridges by resetting its "flag gear" as shown here.. Resetting flag gears is an essential skill for anyone who buys a Brother laser printer with the hope that the per-page printing cost will be low. Like many printer makers, the thing starts refusing to print when the cartridge has a long way to go. Luckily, the folks at Brother have engineered a way around that problem for us.
Unfortunately, the teaser cartridges that come with the printer are missing some small parts that are required for reset. Those can be bought as part of a toner refill kit, though I ended up buying new cartridges before I knew that.
I've had good luck with the toner refill product you linked. Here's a corresponding link to the caps. I always end up damaging those in the process of removing them, so I always replace them with new ones.
Good points. I tried your examples for fun and found that the ones such as "what is the national animal of Scotland" that resulted in a simple factual answer did not contain any ads. I've also done a number of searches in the past that resulted in an informative blurb that was extracted by Wikipedia, which didn't provide any ads, IIRC. I don't know if that's true in every such case, but it might be well be. If so, such results serve the user but don't produce any revenue for Google, except indirectly via continued customer satisfaction. Unless one deems such results to be some form of predatory pricing (the preceding link is itself another such example), it's hard to argue that they're anti-competitive.
I was thinking more of SourceForge itself, though it happens to be a Dice property. Previously, I used to trust it as a source of binaries that I might download and run. Currently, I don't. I may trust it again one day, but it will take a while.
"As a matter of fact, I wish that you were as strenuous and hardworking at keeping information out of the hands of hackers as you are in keeping information out of the hands of Congress and federal employees. It's ironic. You are doing a great job stonewalling us, but hackers, not so much."
Never blame on bureaucratic conspiracy that which can be adequately explained by Congressional incompetence.
So each user is worth $222? Please... this has all the characteristics of a bubble.
You're thinking of this the wrong way. Look, Google spent over $3 billion to buy Nest. So, a better way to value GitHub is in terms of fancy thermostats. Here's a back-of-the-envelope calculation: assuming Nest has more customers than GitHub - which is probably quite generous, if not downright wrong - then each user is worth 2/3 of a thermostat sale. Put in those terms, it sounds fairly reasonable.
Slashdot Mirror
The Great-Man Myth may well be a bit of a myth, but there also must be some truth to it. Rather than describe Steve Jobs as an "inventor," I think he could better be described as an "innovator." I'm not sure he invented much of anything: he didn't invent the Apple I and Apple II (Wozniak did), and he didn't invent the GUI (Xerox Parc and others did.) Instead, he brought emerging technology together in an innovative way to create new categories of products such as the Macintosh, iPod, iPad, and iPhone. Each of those were composed of a set of inventions created by others but brought together under Jobs' direction. Likewise, he didn't invent computer animation at Pixar (which was already doing that when he acquired it), but he guided Pixar through the process of creating the first feature-length computer-animated movie.
So, for a serial innovator like Jobs or Musk, there seems to be an element of greatness in the fact that they have a vision and organize others to implement that vision. But its likely that they get more than their share of the limelight in the process of the media simplifying and glamorizing their stories for consumption by the masses. Edison actively encouraged that sort of thing in the media of the time, by promoting the idea that he was the great inventor, whereas he actually ran the first industrial research laboratory - which itself is one of his primary inventions.
In the case of the Apple I and II, Wozniak seems to get his fair share of credit since he did all of the engineering himself, but for other things, a team of people is involved, and it's rare for them to get much credit. Except in the case of the first Macintosh, where the designers got to sign the inside of the case.
So, like most myths, there's some truth to the Greate-Man Myth, though it's also, of course, a bit of a "myth."
Suddenly imitating competitors out of desperation, at any cost, has been done many times before. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. Microsoft was late to the party on browsers and various other things but managed to catch up (more or less) in that case and many other cases. In some cases, though, they poured a lot of money into things that didn't work out, and in retrospect, didn't really make much business sense. For example, there's the Zune player and the more recent Nokia acquisition.
There must be an element of denial-of-reality in such cases. In the Nokia thing, for example, couldn't Microsoft reasonably anticipate that it would turn into a giant write-down? So why did they do it? You can just imagine the conversation, "We've got to make Microsoft Phone work at any cost, or our entire business will suffer. We'll just buy Nokia and sell phones ourselves, if we have to."
This same thing can happen at Google or anywhere else. More recently, the trend has been to just buy your way into whatever you're afraid of. I think that explains why Google spent three billion and change on Nest (for a thermostat?!) and why Facebook spent a billion on Instagram. If you can't beat 'em, eat 'em.
Several years ago, when Facebook was less ubiquitous than it is now, I was amazed when our local news broadcast would tell us each night to go to their Facebook page. It was the only form of advertising that they gave away for free. Oh, except for telling us each night to follow their reporters on Twitter. But I never once heard them mention Google+. I guess that's the networking effect in action.
My guess is that this new technology would fill some spot in the memory hierarchy somewhere between two existing technologies. For example, it might be used between current flash-based SSDs and DRAM to provide persistent memory that's faster than flash (but presumably more expensive) for system startup. Of course, the actual spot in the hierarchy would depend on factors such as speed, endurance, and cost. This is analogous to the fact that many magnetic hard drives now include memory caches.
Of course, the spot in the memory hierarchy could change over time as the parameters of the new memory evolve, notably cost. The new type would only replace some existing memory type when it is better in every way than that type. This happens rarely. For example, the ancient technology of magnetic tape is still with us because of its extremely low cost per byte, which is a compelling feature for certain applications such as archival data storage, despite its long access time.
So now he's the "director of process integration" at Micron. Looks like he's bustin' out all over. Once a director, always a director, I guess.
IMHO, the IBM PC-AT keyboard was the best there ever was on a PC (or compatible.) It took me quite a long time to retrain myself when they moved that beautiful from that single large Ctrl key in the right place to two small keys in the wrong place. Worse, they put the Caps Lock in that prominent spot, leading to it getting hit a lot by accident - which I still do to this day: I think I hit it more often by accident than I do on purpose!
the occurrence of systemd rants: the new corollary to Godwin's law
Now you've got me thinking...we already know that Hitler loves Cheetos. But I wonder what he thinks about systemd...?
Is there an alternative summary available where I might know what any of the nouns mean? In particular, why is it assumed that anyone knows who these companies or people are? I just about got "MLB" = "Major League Baseball".
In response to complaints about all these mysterious acronyms, EdX will host a second MOOC to explain MLB to those who have a background in R and SQL but not MLB. Topics covered include ERA, RBI, OBP, IP, and BB. See this page for a full list of course topics.
It also contains a chemical that is toxic to birds, dogs, and cats. Do you really think you should be drinking that...?
"Uummm, seaweed...."
Maybe you and the GP are both right. It looks like they think spending money on architecture will yield more bang-for-the-buck of performance at the moment than yet another geometry shrink. You'd think they would have played all the architectural games possible by now. Bu now that everybody already has more cores than they can use, maybe more can be done at the architecture level to make better use of the same number of cores. (Just a guess.)
Not to mention dihydrogen monoxide - which is still used in large quantities in many residential and commercial settings, despite its many dangers.
As long as good code is well documented, there is no harm.
Funny that you should mention that. Many years ago, before I discovered Python, I used Perl as my primary scripting language. I eventually discovered that I found it hard to read even my own code in Perl. So I applied the same solution I already used to the only other language I knew where I had the same problem: assembly.
I had learned over the years that in order to make assembly readable, you need to comment (nearly) every line. I started doing that with Perl, and voila!, problem solved.
Then I discovered Python. I soon transliterated all of my favorite Perl scripts into Python. Fortunately, the two languages are fairly similar at a semantic level, just not at a syntactic level. So transliteration was pretty easy. I was amazed to discover that even though Perl was famous for being compact (though perhaps not the way I wrote it - no one-liners allowed), my Python scripts ended up having both fewer lines and fewer bytes than their Perl equivalents. Just getting rid of braces does a lot to reduce line count - which seems obvious in retrospect.
Oh, and I also removed nearly all of the comments. That significantly reduced the byte count. And I could read my own code again!
It is possible to convert to Judaism, difficult, but possible.
It was so difficult for me that I decided to convert to dentistry instead. Which reminds me: what do you call a doctor who flunks out of medical school? - A dentist.
Likewise, if he isn't really committed enough to the domain to do all that then he doesn't much need it anyway - except for sentimental reasons and/or bragging rights. Personally, if I had a domain that was of so little use to me as his, which was attracting a lot of interest, I'd just sell it to the highest bidder and be done with all the headaches.
I actually have the converse case: I have multiple domains which aren't extremely short (7 letters or more), but were bought over 10 years ago, so they're shorter than any uncommitted meaningful domains that you could buy today. Three have a lot of content and the others just have a little content. I've never been approached by anyone to buy or take any of them.
However, I did receive an offer the other day for someone to sell me one that's somewhat similar to my most valuable domain. He says he's had it for 10 years, and it's still a parked domain. There isn't any reason for me to buy it because a relatively long domain name only has value when it's associated with a website which provides useful content. Just imagine how valuable "google.com" would be if had never been anything but a parked domain. An empty 6-letter domain would be worth something at this point, but not much.
Another story that would get a lot of traction would be if someone got killed by a tiny green cartoon character with two antennae and a single eye. That would play into the 'evil plankton' narrative.
Germany is western?
Yes - I believe it's somewhere between Dodge City and the Sierra Madre.
You can extend the useful life of the Brother cartridges by resetting its "flag gear" as shown here.. Resetting flag gears is an essential skill for anyone who buys a Brother laser printer with the hope that the per-page printing cost will be low. Like many printer makers, the thing starts refusing to print when the cartridge has a long way to go. Luckily, the folks at Brother have engineered a way around that problem for us.
Unfortunately, the teaser cartridges that come with the printer are missing some small parts that are required for reset. Those can be bought as part of a toner refill kit, though I ended up buying new cartridges before I knew that.
I've had good luck with the toner refill product you linked. Here's a corresponding link to the caps. I always end up damaging those in the process of removing them, so I always replace them with new ones.
See http://bbc.in/1LA1Zn2 for details.
Good points. I tried your examples for fun and found that the ones such as "what is the national animal of Scotland" that resulted in a simple factual answer did not contain any ads. I've also done a number of searches in the past that resulted in an informative blurb that was extracted by Wikipedia, which didn't provide any ads, IIRC. I don't know if that's true in every such case, but it might be well be. If so, such results serve the user but don't produce any revenue for Google, except indirectly via continued customer satisfaction. Unless one deems such results to be some form of predatory pricing (the preceding link is itself another such example), it's hard to argue that they're anti-competitive.
I was thinking more of SourceForge itself, though it happens to be a Dice property. Previously, I used to trust it as a source of binaries that I might download and run. Currently, I don't. I may trust it again one day, but it will take a while.
"It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you'll do things differently."
- Warren Buffett
From TFS:
"As a matter of fact, I wish that you were as strenuous and hardworking at keeping information out of the hands of hackers as you are in keeping information out of the hands of Congress and federal employees. It's ironic. You are doing a great job stonewalling us, but hackers, not so much."
Never blame on bureaucratic conspiracy that which can be adequately explained by Congressional incompetence.
So each user is worth $222? Please... this has all the characteristics of a bubble.
You're thinking of this the wrong way. Look, Google spent over $3 billion to buy Nest. So, a better way to value GitHub is in terms of fancy thermostats. Here's a back-of-the-envelope calculation: assuming Nest has more customers than GitHub - which is probably quite generous, if not downright wrong - then each user is worth 2/3 of a thermostat sale. Put in those terms, it sounds fairly reasonable.