I can think of one obvious reason why Google would continue to run Google News in some sort of beta/loss-leader mode: To deny anyone else the market until they *do* figure out how to make money from it.
While they may not be making any money off of it, so long as Google & Yahoo control the lion's share of the "news aggregation" market, they are effectively insultated from an upstart competitor taking it away from them by thinking of an angle/model that has not yet occurred to them.
It's a long-term risk management strategy, not a short-term cashflow strategy. Pretty smart, if you ask me.
Dude...you have obviously not been to Hong Kong, Shanghai or Bejing lately. The government leadership may be composed of 90-year-old Long Marchers who repress free speech with a vengence, but EVERYONE there seems pretty focused on making a buck and living a fine Burgeois lifestyle.
North Korea is so screwed up I don't think they have a category for it (I don't think, "Disaster Area" can be considered a system of government), but I think that Feudal Monarchy is a pretty apt description of their political system (Inherited leadership, peasantry tied to the land, massive privation...sounds like the Middle Ages with Nukes to me).
Cuba comes closer, following an Authoritarian Socialism model with a Cult Of Personality on top of a Centrally-Planned Economy, but that's not Communism either. Heck, that's the same politcal-economic system that Iraq had before the US went in and swapped it for a nice 80's-Lebanon-style Islamic Anarchy, and nobody ever accused Iraq of being a bunch of Commies.
But if it makes you feel better, I'll agree that their governments all *claim* to be Communist, even if the leadership in all three of those places would probably shoot anyone who honestly espoused the concepts of true Communism within their borders.
Of course, I can *claim* to be rich and good-looking, but that doesn't necessarily make it so.
Re:The future sucks, it always does
on
Feed
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· Score: 1
Hmm...that's interesting...all the reviewer did was describe a villian. You then assumed that any opposition to "corporate interest" must make him a Communist.
You seem to have an excessively black-and-white, single-axis worldview with only two possible viewpoints: pro-corporate or Communist.
While I am definitely not a Communist (nor is much of anyone else in the past 10 years, as you'd notice if you'd check out a news source besides Fox News Channel;-) ), that doesn't mean that I'm a big fan of the sort of morally bankrupt, profit-obsessed behavior that most corporations seem to engage in these days, either (with the level of obsession seemingly directly proportional to their size).
I'm guessing that they used a timestamp-based algorithm to define their cookies, so if they were creating more than a session/second, they were screwed.
This would definitely make them amateurs of the worst order.
Re:Targets won't be machines
on
The Drone War
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· Score: 1
You're kind've correct...the first targets will be the C3I (Command, Control, Communications, and Intelligence) infrastructure of the opponent. That's always the first strategic target in a war.
Look at Afghanistan, the Gulf, Kosovo, or any other of the oft-cited techno-wars in the course of these discussions...in all of them, the first things attacked were the enemy radar sites, telephone junctions, antennae farms, power plants, headquarters facilities, and defense-related government offices (and anti-aircraft defences, but that doesn't match my hypothesis here;-) ). Only after those targets had been neutralized were troop concentrations and heavy equipment targeted.
in the old-style model, the theory went that you destroyed c3i, then mopped up the now-disorganized troops and tanks at your relative convenience. It was still extremely dangerous, violent work for the people doing it (unless your enemy was the Elite Republican Guard), but the eventual victor controlled the pace and timing of the destruction of their now blinded and uncoordinated foe (followed by their political entities, ethnic groups, cities, or whatever else the victor felt like wiping out).
Nah...it's a crappy little walk-up fourth-floor apartment in the Lakeview neighborhood where the residents claim to live in Lincoln Park.
If memory serves me correcly (I have lived in both Lakeview and Lincoln Park at various times), 2828 Burling is a crappy little apartment fairly close to a fire station whose residents love nothing better than to fly along Diversy (his cross-street) with lights and sirens and horn, especially in the middle of the night when there's no one on the roads.
While I feel your pain vis-a-vis VisualAge's use of an "image" to store source rather than accessing files on disk (especially since, prior to v3.5.3, it tended to mangle the sources between exports and STILL makes a mess of anything you try to do with CVS macros), this is due to VA's origins as a SmallTalk Tool.
Other that major drawback, though, I love the tool because of all the benefits that come with the image model, such as the constantly-built source tree and the problem browser (I know, I know, if I were a real developer, I'd never have problems;-) ).
VisualAge has always been (and will probably continue to be) a work-alike to the VA SmallTalk (or VA C/C++, although I haven't seen or used that one in some years now) toolsets.
Without a doubt, the best (UN*X SysAdmin) interview question I was ever asked was actually quite simple.
The interviewer brought up an xterm on the terminal on his desk, typed `ls/etc`, then asked me to identify every file in the directory.
For added difficulty, they were using a version of UN*X I didn't have experience with (BSDi). The question tested:
The breadth of my technical experience (how many of those files did I know or not know)
My communication skills (how well did I articulate what the files were for)
How I responded to pressure (there're a LOT of files in/etc, making the question a bit intimidating)
Since it was an unfamiliar UN*X, it forced me to do some analytical thinking and draw on previous experience to make educated guesses (identified as such) as to what the files might relate to based on name and content (he let me `cat` the ones I didn't know).
Lastly, it gave an indication of my overall level of professional/intellectual curiosity, since a lot of those files will never come into play except in extreme situations.
Lucky for me, I'm pretty curious by nature and got the job.
Now that you mention it...we just went Gold today on a product at my workplace which mis-uses XML to obtain buzzword compliance!
<bitter> And the worst part is, the developer who created the obfuscated, uncommented mess which I was thrust into the responsibility of making work (and doing it right was not an option--I asked) disavowed all responsibility for it as soon as it compiled and instead went on to do other "cool" things. </bitter>
Moving off-topic here... My favorite proposed mis-use of XML these days is what Sun is advocating for JSP/EJB: Using XML to create "Custom Actions" to effectively act as a middleware layer. What it instead does is create a set of XML wrappers around beans so that instead of having a clean, efficient method of accessing them, you have a whole bunch of extra parsing, indirection, and code execution. Just the thing for a high-transactional volume system. Sounds like somone at Sun is still pissed at OMG for dissing RMI to me.
-bing
I don't even speak for all of the voices in my head, much less my employer.
I was quite pleasantly (given the venue) surprised to find the introduction of "On Killing," by Col. Dave Grossman, Ph.D. to this discussion. I also found it to be a fascinating discussion of the psychology of training soldiers kill. As such, let me contribute a couple of other
First, I feel that you overlooked what he considers one of the most powerful motivators for enabling soldiers to pull the trigger--peer pressure. His study indicated that crew-served weapons (heavy machine guns, tanks, etc) were much more likely to fire, and fire effectively, even before the advent of improved training methodologies which increased the rate and quality of fire by individual soldiers. This thesis is borne out nicely as early as WW I, where the introduction of the crew-served machine gun resulted in a devastating increase in the casualty rates during trench warfare. Apply this to the unique aspect of this situation (as compared to nearly every other case of mass, random violence in American history)--the presence of *two* gunmen, and I think you have a much stronger basis for explaining why they did what they did.
That two such completely lost souls will find each other is, hopefully, statistically quite unlikely, but so long as our society continues to alienate people in the uniquely cruel ways that High Schoolers are capable of, then glorify in the media those who perpetrate them (those two boys have now achieved a place in history, even if a particularly gruesome one), these sorts of disasters will probably continue to occur.
Second, I must disagree with your application of the Col. Grossman's chapter on Video Game violence. He states quite specifically that games like doom are not his primary concern as an enabler of the killer instinct, but rather games in which the player actually holds a gun and uses it to shoot at human figures on the screen.
Slashdot Mirror
I can think of one obvious reason why Google would continue to run Google News in some sort of beta/loss-leader mode: To deny anyone else the market until they *do* figure out how to make money from it.
While they may not be making any money off of it, so long as Google & Yahoo control the lion's share of the "news aggregation" market, they are effectively insultated from an upstart competitor taking it away from them by thinking of an angle/model that has not yet occurred to them.
It's a long-term risk management strategy, not a short-term cashflow strategy. Pretty smart, if you ask me.
North Korea is so screwed up I don't think they have a category for it (I don't think, "Disaster Area" can be considered a system of government), but I think that Feudal Monarchy is a pretty apt description of their political system (Inherited leadership, peasantry tied to the land, massive privation...sounds like the Middle Ages with Nukes to me).
Cuba comes closer, following an Authoritarian Socialism model with a Cult Of Personality on top of a Centrally-Planned Economy, but that's not Communism either. Heck, that's the same politcal-economic system that Iraq had before the US went in and swapped it for a nice 80's-Lebanon-style Islamic Anarchy, and nobody ever accused Iraq of being a bunch of Commies.
But if it makes you feel better, I'll agree that their governments all *claim* to be Communist, even if the leadership in all three of those places would probably shoot anyone who honestly espoused the concepts of true Communism within their borders.
Of course, I can *claim* to be rich and good-looking, but that doesn't necessarily make it so.
Hmm...that's interesting...all the reviewer did was describe a villian. You then assumed that any opposition to "corporate interest" must make him a Communist.
;-) ), that doesn't mean that I'm a big fan of the sort of morally bankrupt, profit-obsessed behavior that most corporations seem to engage in these days, either (with the level of obsession seemingly directly proportional to their size).
You seem to have an excessively black-and-white, single-axis worldview with only two possible viewpoints: pro-corporate or Communist.
While I am definitely not a Communist (nor is much of anyone else in the past 10 years, as you'd notice if you'd check out a news source besides Fox News Channel
I'm guessing that they used a timestamp-based algorithm to define their cookies, so if they were creating more than a session/second, they were screwed.
This would definitely make them amateurs of the worst order.
You're kind've correct...the first targets will be the C3I (Command, Control, Communications, and Intelligence) infrastructure of the opponent. That's always the first strategic target in a war.
;-) ). Only after those targets had been neutralized were troop concentrations and heavy equipment targeted.
Look at Afghanistan, the Gulf, Kosovo, or any other of the oft-cited techno-wars in the course of these discussions...in all of them, the first things attacked were the enemy radar sites, telephone junctions, antennae farms, power plants, headquarters facilities, and defense-related government offices (and anti-aircraft defences, but that doesn't match my hypothesis here
in the old-style model, the theory went that you destroyed c3i, then mopped up the now-disorganized troops and tanks at your relative convenience. It was still extremely dangerous, violent work for the people doing it (unless your enemy was the Elite Republican Guard), but the eventual victor controlled the pace and timing of the destruction of their now blinded and uncoordinated foe (followed by their political entities, ethnic groups, cities, or whatever else the victor felt like wiping out).
Nah...it's a crappy little walk-up fourth-floor apartment in the Lakeview neighborhood where the residents claim to live in Lincoln Park.
If memory serves me correcly (I have lived in both Lakeview and Lincoln Park at various times), 2828 Burling is a crappy little apartment fairly close to a fire station whose residents love nothing better than to fly along Diversy (his cross-street) with lights and sirens and horn, especially in the middle of the night when there's no one on the roads.
cheers,
bing
While I feel your pain vis-a-vis VisualAge's use of an "image" to store source rather than accessing files on disk (especially since, prior to v3.5.3, it tended to mangle the sources between exports and STILL makes a mess of anything you try to do with CVS macros), this is due to VA's origins as a SmallTalk Tool.
;-) ).
Other that major drawback, though, I love the tool because of all the benefits that come with the image model, such as the constantly-built source tree and the problem browser (I know, I know, if I were a real developer, I'd never have problems
VisualAge has always been (and will probably continue to be) a work-alike to the VA SmallTalk (or VA C/C++, although I haven't seen or used that one in some years now) toolsets.
-bing
The interviewer brought up an xterm on the terminal on his desk, typed `ls
For added difficulty, they were using a version of UN*X I didn't have experience with (BSDi). The question tested:
Lucky for me, I'm pretty curious by nature and got the job.
Now that you mention it...we just went Gold today on a product at my workplace which mis-uses XML to obtain buzzword compliance!
<bitter>
And the worst part is, the developer who created the obfuscated, uncommented mess which I was thrust into the responsibility of making work (and doing it right was not an option--I asked) disavowed all responsibility for it as soon as it compiled and instead went on to do other "cool" things. </bitter>
Moving off-topic here...
My favorite proposed mis-use of XML these days is what Sun is advocating for JSP/EJB: Using XML to create "Custom Actions" to effectively act as a middleware layer. What it instead does is create a set of XML wrappers around beans so that instead of having a clean, efficient method of accessing them, you have a whole bunch of extra parsing, indirection, and code execution. Just the thing for a high-transactional volume system. Sounds like somone at Sun is still pissed at OMG for dissing RMI to me.
-bing
I don't even speak for all of the voices in my head, much less my employer.
I was quite pleasantly (given the venue) surprised to find the introduction of "On Killing," by Col. Dave Grossman, Ph.D. to this discussion. I also found it to be a fascinating discussion of the psychology of training soldiers kill. As such, let me contribute a couple of other
First, I feel that you overlooked what he considers one of the most powerful motivators for enabling soldiers to pull the trigger--peer pressure. His study indicated that crew-served weapons (heavy machine guns, tanks, etc) were much more likely to fire, and fire effectively, even before the advent of improved training methodologies which increased the rate and quality of fire by individual soldiers. This thesis is borne out nicely as early as WW I, where the introduction of the crew-served machine gun resulted in a devastating increase in the casualty rates during trench warfare. Apply this to the unique aspect of this situation (as compared to nearly every other case of mass, random violence in American history)--the presence of *two* gunmen, and I think you have a much stronger basis for explaining why they did what they did.
That two such completely lost souls will find each other is, hopefully, statistically quite unlikely, but so long as our society continues to alienate people in the uniquely cruel ways that High Schoolers are capable of, then glorify in the media those who perpetrate them (those two boys have now achieved a place in history, even if a particularly gruesome one), these sorts of disasters will probably continue to occur.
Second, I must disagree with your application of the Col. Grossman's chapter on Video Game violence. He states quite specifically that games like doom are not his primary concern as an enabler of the killer instinct, but rather games in which the player actually holds a gun and uses it to shoot at human figures on the screen.
-Bing