Snapchat had losses of $500+ million in 2016 and $300+ million in 2015. They may never operate in the black, and yet went public this year with a valuation of over $20 billion.
Perhaps this is a too extreme case, but similar situations where people having nothing, giving nothing and, basically, doing nothing, get a lot pretty out of someone's else stupidity kind of motivates me to do things properly. Just depicting myself in a situation where all what I have/know/accomplish is just an unfair, partial and empty result mostly conditioned by others' easily-changing/manipulated random actions is so unappealing to me that I cannot believe that I will ever be in a situation like that.
I cannot even think about what-if scenarios where I could enjoy the associated benefits without most of the drawbacks because I know the entry price (losing your dignity or being hypocritical or tolerating dishonesty, unfairness and arbitrariness, etc. since the first second) which is already too high for me, much higher than any benefit/amount of money.
It sounds almost unrealistic. When I firstly read it, I assumed that it was because most of people there didn't want/need to connect to internet (weird for a person like me spending lots of time online, although kind of understandable). But really not being able to afford an internet connection! 40% of the population of a big city! In the USA! How can this be possible?
I am using various browsers for different purposes and including different login credentials, one of them Firefox precisely dealing with this Slashdot account. I was reasonably happy with the previous version as far as it was working well for the simple tasks I was performing with it. Today, I opened Firefox to take my morning Slashdot dose and realised that it had been automatically updated (on Ubuntu 16.04). In principle, it does seem faster and with an appreciably different appearance. There are also some relevant changes in the blank-tab bookmarks which I might test at some other point.
A Russian man discovers an exotic oil lamp in his dead grandmother's attic, and as he rubs the dust from its brass surface a genie appears to him.
Are you Gilbert Gottfried?
Ivan thinks for a minute, then makes his wish: "I want you to stab out one of my eyes."
Nah, it doesn't seem that you are him. I guess that at least you tried. LOL. I find kind of curious that the main character in that "joke" is a Russian man, are you the same AC who said me the ridiculous nonsense that I am a Russian! troll! a couple of days ago and to "whom" I wrote quite a few posts explaining who I am and how easily you could find even more information about me? If this is you, your level of obsessive fanaticism seems much higher than what I thought the other day; if not, you are the second person in my life who has started a conversation with me somehow implying that I have anything to do with Russian (BTW, Ivan is also a quite common name in Spain, my country; your repertory of random prejudices might need some updates:))
The rest of your post seems quite irrelevant Google promotional crap, perhaps heard from/delivered by a PR/C-whatever person, or read in a brochure or feed into you in whatever education camp to which you belong. Although the last part is kind of telling about your well... things:
People like you are the reason Google doesn't take their critics seriously: they don't have many serious critics, just smarmy competitors sock-puppeting [csmonitor.com] and virtue-signalling amateurs.
So, you are saying that a company can seriously afford to not take clients's opinions seriously? Mainly when the given client might be considered an expert in the field where they perform their activity (I am not a random user; I am a senior programmer specialising in the development of data-intensive applications). Then, it comes a reference to another curious expression "sock-puppeting" (or astroturfing or troll or shill or similar) who some people use so easily lately that seems to have stopped having any real meaning. Are you implying that someone will pay me for coming to random Slashdot articles and post random opinions about random issues, which eventually might be against whatever absolute truths you think that have any sense? And you think that I do all what from my personal account, undoubtedly linked to myself and to my personal software-development business fully focused on top quality, knowledge and solid principles? Don't you think that it would make a bit more or sense if I would focused on my much more demanded and highly-specialised skills as a software developer and engineer? Or, at least, not use my personal account precisely linked to that expertise? Or do you think that only genius like you know how to post anonymously? LOL.
On the other hand, your fanatic-like and anonymous character does seem to indicate that you have some egoist interest in favouring certain alternative or censoring others. I can confirm that I don't work for/get any money or other advantages from any search engine and that, even in case of ever doing it (logically, as a programmer), I will never be part of any kind of non-objective promotional/dismissal effort (my work consists in making sure that things work properly; being paid to be partial and to talk bad/good about whatever is the work of other people, yours perhaps?). Now, tell me: can you say the same? Can you please share what are you doing for work (or are you still in the school)?
I still use various Google services (including Gmail) mostly for historical, practical and certainly non-critical reasons. I also use free products of many other companies for similar purposes and all of them seem to follow the same pattern: the bigger the company gets, the more obscure (+ greedy) its activity becomes. I don't really trust any of them, complain about the slightest problem ASAP and try to always have various available alternatives. BTW, my passwords.google.com pages are now empty because I deleted all of them/disabled the option to store that information right after knowing about its existence some months ago.
Their record on free speech is bad. They're using "youtube jail" and demonetization to punish right wing Youtube creators, and they're punishing sites like Breitbart with their power as an ad middleman. I don't trust them politically.
I am a leftist, but don't support more or less arbitrary censorship or unfairly-biased impositions, mainly in a search engine which is supposed to be quite neutral.
Google is one of few positive examples in this space. They collect data about you, they extract value from it, yet they keep it private from the advertisers and publishers involved in the transaction, never sell it to
You are free to see a difference there, but I don't see any. Directly or indirectly selling the information is the same for me. The key point is getting a profit from my data (even when I am not logged in!); I don't like people getting any profit from my activity without my express consent. To not mention the dangers associated with having relevant information about me (what if someone steals it? Or what if someone working at Google decides to use that information for his/her benefit?), what basically represents a power over me which I don't want them to have. In any case, I am not a privacy paranoid (accepted long time ago that we don't have privacy) and what bothers me the most is the fact of they are making money at my expense from virtually anything I do in their platform.
If what you want is a more responsible world, how do you intend to achieve it? Move into the woods like Kaczynski? Organize a worldwide boycott of capitalism?
Where have I even suggested anything on these lines? Are you implying that there is no way to get money unless by trafficking with private user information?! They have lots of ways to make money and respect my privacy. As written in previous posts, I would even prefer to have restricted free functionalities and paying a fee for premium ones, rather than being forced to tolerate hypocritical free services which aren't really such. Or even better: if they aren't able to get a profit without selling my information and always according to the capitalism rules, they should get out of business. In any case, this isn't my problem. I am their customer, their god and devil, their everything, I don't need to understand their position, but they have to understand mine.
all these companies are probably less responsible with your search logs than Google
Why are you saying that? Can you reasonably prove it? I prefer to properly test them and listen to the opinion I trust the most: mine:)
using a different search engine doesn't opt you out of Google's, or anyone else's, ad networks.
I am not against ad-based revenue models (they aren't precisely my favourite option though). I am against companies systematically merchandising my personal information or whatever data is generated by my mere activity. I am fine with random ads being displayed to me like TVs do. I am also fine with more personalised ads being built over the information which I expressly provide (e.g., via logging in my Google account + clicking on the checkbox "Allow all your activity to be monitored to improve your ad-viewing experience").
They don't, and that's the key. They keep all data they collect for themselves, and they sell service based on these data, revealing as little as possible.
Call it as you want, but the underlying idea is the same: they make money from people's information. I don't like that and I think that many other people don't like it either. They might do an excellent business just by selling ads, which might be eventually improved by collecting the information which I expressly allow them to use (and only when being logged in their system). As said, I recognise the superiority of their search engine, but I don't like most of their business model. I would even prefer to have only access to restricted functionalities and pay some fee for a better version, rather than being forced into these obscure and hypocritical free services which I am systematically over-paying with my personal data.
It is kind of hurtful to recognise that it definitively is. Many of their policies are horrible, sell every bit they have about you, some of their products aren't that good lately, etc. But their search engine is certainly good. What is even worse: the competition (for a so juicy market!!) is quite weak or, at least, aren't doing all what is required to really beat Google.
Some time ago, I wrote various posts here asking slashdotters about reliable alternatives to Google. I have been testing some of them during the last months and, so far, the best option has been startpage.com/ixquick.eu. Although I have found some problems, in general, the experience has been reasonable good. The main issue here is that the results are precisely provided by Google! A restricted (and theoretically respectful with your privacy) version of what you can find there.
I have still to do proper tests with yandex.com (which looks quite nice, but as a Russia-based search engine might have some issues) and bing.com (whose performance in the past wasn't too good, but perhaps they are better now; on the other hand, as a Microsoft company might also have some issues). A so big and profitable market, so much available money and knowledge (no idea if in general, but if you give me enough resources and a reasonable time frame, I will certainly create something really good) and so much crap! How can this be possible? We are constantly reading articles about VCs throwing lots of money at virtually anything! This is one of the safest bets ever! And all what you need is money, doing things properly and some patience!
Logically, with "because I will write any other post in this thread." I really meant "because I will NOT write any other post in this thread." (yes, the current post is quite ironic).
I don't need working experience (in programming) to learn that. I am an extremely respectful, humble and sensible person always trying to properly understand others, having as less prejudices as possible and, at work, carefully analysing every situation. Currently, I am putting a tremendous effort into focusing my whole activity in its widest sense (including also the kind of clients/coworkers/expectations with whom I want to deal) on quality. So, what you are implying is even less applicable now. In any case, there are things which seem way too evident and, in our current society, saying that electronic records are unreliable in general doesn't make any sense.
You might have lots of experience and even much more knowledge than me on some aspects, but you have proven to have a pushy, trendy, unreasonable-expectations-driven behaviour various times and that's why I don't like what you represent and, honestly, you aren't proving yourself as a knowledgeable developer, not even as an objective person mostly interested in knowing more/improving. There are many things going wrong in the software development world, market, trends and, as for your behaviour so far, you seem to be the archetypal personality which explains why things are like this (abstract talking, trend-driven expectations, blind-trust-in-random-authorities, nepotism/arbitrariness, pushy behaviours, etc.). As said in my first comment yesterday, I don't see the point of continuing with this chat and, if your behaviour doesn't change in the future, I will not talk to you anymore. Now, say all what you want because I will write any other post in this thread.
You appear to have a lot more faith in that than most people. Those of us who are actually in the software field have a pretty good idea
What are you talking about?! I have been full-time working as a programmer during over the last 8 years!! We were discussing about C/C++ advantages for various days?! Seriously, what is the matter with you? This is my last reply and will think twice before replying you the next time. Now I feel that I did lose my time in the past by being understanding (+ generous, although perhaps you didn't realise about that bit either) with you. Bye.
The Internet is not safe or secure by any definition.
PS: it would also be excellent if you could make an extra effort to at least understand what all this is about. AGAIN: I have expressly said various times that I am not defending internet-based voting (too dangerous on exchange of no relevant advantage). All my comments were about DIGITAL RECORDS as opposed to paper and manual counting. NOTHING TO DO WITH INTERNET. I was talking about an offline (or restricted/local network or offline + punctual connections to a central repository) system. The only people bringing internet into picture were those blindly attacking (+ anonymously insulting) me.
The big difference between most transactions and voting is that bank transactions are traceable and reversible. If there's a $2K transfer between my account and someone else's, I can find exactly why that transaction took place and how it was authorized. If it turns out to be erroneous and/or fraudulent, the bank can transfer the money back. If Joe gets 2100 votes and Moe gets 2200 votes, we can't attribute those totals to any individual or individuals. We have no records of who voted for whom, by design. If Fred is convinced that he voted for Joe but he was tallied for Moe, there's no recourse. There's no way to investigate beyond the evidence immediately present.
That example doesn't make any sense. It doesn't matter whether the voter is anonymous, the vote is well defined (= click on the button = perfectly recorded). From the point of view of the banks, the system doesn't care about dealing with two different persons or not. Even actions within the same account will be recorded. Even actions on the records on that account performed by bank staff will be recorded. Your example might seem only logical for a random person with no computer knowledge only roughly understanding what happens after they click on the button. As said in my previous comment, I don't think that a somehow knowledgeable person (+ with intention of bringing that knowledge into picture, rather than having an almost fanatical behaviour whose goal is to prove whatever has to be proven) could seriously think that electronic records are even slightly unsafe in a generic way.
We had some chats in the past and all of them followed a similar pattern where you kept insisting (respectfully and reasonably though) on trying to impose your views, mostly via repetition, by providing further quite-irrelevant additional data and without intending to understand my position/learn. I am a very experienced programmer who have developed lots of applications dealing with a huge number of different scenarios and you seriously think that you can change my mind about what I have a very good knowledge (= built over the years by learning, making errors, going further, etc.) via repeating a couple of generic (logically faulty) examples? I see... Seriously, I don't want to be disrespectful, but I will stop reading what you write in this chat and, in the future, I hope that you will make some effort to engage in more sensible conversations. If you aren't interested in learning, understanding others' (mine, in this case) views, getting a proper insight into whatever problem and you only want to impose whatever truth, conviction, fear or expectation you might have, you should try to avoid dealing with me because I might stop being so patient and understanding (nothing personal, just confirmed that being reasonable with certain people isn't always a good idea).
I don't agree with your statements and even think that a programming/computer-experienced person shouldn't think in that way (i.e., software you are building and managing being more obscure than people+paper!). That's why I don't think that we should continue with this chat.
Although I am not particularly concerned about anyone taking an unfair advantage of my public-domain-licensed activity, you are certainly making good points and providing some useful information. Thanks.
but both sides agree that if you try you're waiving your right to sue people over it.
Honestly, I cannot imagine me suing anyone about stealing my code (mainly when there are many other much quicker and efficient "counter-measurements". LOL); but I am not renouncing to that right anyway. Although public domain protection is certainly much more imprecise than other more restricted alternatives, it is still protected at least for what matters to me: the original authorship. You can take any famous public domain work from Mozart or Shakespeare to immediately understand that nobody will ever go away with claiming authorship of that. I am only renouncing to modern restrictions/revenue-generations which I don't fully support and which, in any case, are quite useless under my specific conditions, where my public code is used as mere advertisement of my actual income source (= being hired to actually perform whatever development).
So you have no license on your code at all? How does anyone know they can use it?
No. I have licenses (and quite a few other references) clearly saying that my code can be considered public domain. Didn't you know that, within the most common lists of copyright licenses, you can find public domain ones? In some cases, you have the express option of public domain or cc0 or unlicense, all of them are basically the same. What this means is that my code/any other public output can be used according to whatever rules are applicable to public domain in the given jurisdiction. The basic idea is that you can use it without any limitation and without referring me at all (it would be nice though), but you cannot claim its authorship. The whole point of my public codes is giving an idea about my coding skills to potential clients; I don't care about people using it more or less and, in case of doubt, I usually choose the generous alternative:)
about examining why certain laws work and others don't, and following those forms of inquiry to other conclusions
That "why" over there basically boils down to making sure that the given theory fits more or less harmoniously within the remaining system. And actually this has kind of stopped being a strict requirement as far as some people/"factions" have started coming up with parallel systems already assumed to represent an absolute validation and whose compatibility with the main system/others is, in some cases, quite unclear. BTW, your quote is more ironic than what you seem to think.
No. Unless the author expressly wanted it to become public domain.
SIDE CLARIFICATION: all my open-source code and public activity is public domain since over 2 years ago. So, me being alive/dead doesn't change anything on this front (the updates might get a bit delayed though:)).
Evident preposterousness aside, physics (or any other branch of science) isn't more than a collection of theoretical models replicating what we see as well as possible. There is no abstract and absolute entity called physics whose laws might be broken. We only have past experiences which are more/less likely to be repeated in the future and which physicists try to replicate by coming up with more/less reliable theories.
Referring to magic is almost the same than referring to ignorance and, as such, you can call magical whatever we cannot understand if that makes you happy (it seems a more sensible approach than in-denial behaviours not accepting the limitations of our current knowledge; in any case, note that I personally will never do any of those things: "magic" only as a joke/insult + always openly recognising what I don't know). Trying to explain why physics is as it is (what we don't know, other than "because it has always been like this") by relying on alien life (about which again we know nothing) seems quite magical.
And even another completely-unrelated clarification (just to have all the ideally-not-necessary-but-required-by-idiots-like-you-unreasonably-attacking-others stuff together): as clearly highlighted in the current version of my profile and signature here (which might be changed in the future, but this post will always remain), Custom Solvers 2.0 is the same than varocarbas and than me (Alvaro Carballo Garcia). Despite all the plurals, there is only one person here: myself, a 39-yo man, Spaniard, mechanical engineer by education (my relevant university degree, but not my only one) but programmer by career, heterosexual, single (and, at the moment, just caring about work), not too much into politics but leftist, honest, fair, adaptable, reasonable and objective; extremely allergic to fanaticism, people not able to understand humour, invasive/imposing personalities and anyone thinking that there is any chance that they can affect others without consequences. Although you will not find many references about that, I am a white man, slim and tall, with glasses, but I have replaced most of my public pictures with the Custom Solvers 2.0 logo to highlight that my appearance doesn't matter for my work (and internet is basically work for me).
Varocarbas has been my personal nickname since a quite long time ago (short-form of my name and first family name: alVARO + CARBAllo + S because sounds kind of better), but why choosing a so weird commercial name (because, as self-employed, the real name of my company is my own name) as Custom Solvers 2.0 you might wonder? This is my second self-employment attempt and, in the first one, Custom Solvers made much more sense. I only wanted to somehow relate my new activity (= still programming & numerical/engineering analysis, but by being much more patient, individual, self-made and looking for much fairer and properly-appreciating-clients than ever before) to that old one, even though my expectations now are completely different. To know more about my evolution as a self-employed programmer, you can visit the corresponding pages of my main site (customsolvers.com). You might also want to do that to know anything else about me, my knowledge/expertise, expectations, etc. There are lots of information in that main site, in my R&D site (varocarbas.com) and in all my public profiles linked from any of those. You might also ask me anything, call me or send me an email. You know? Performing any action allowing you to know even a bit about the person who you are defining, as opposed to what you did (= putting together the first two random words coming to your).
BTW, have you donvoted the video? Is there anything wrong with it to deserve a so aggressive reaction, as opposed to mere inactivity? Is there any accuracy in what I am showing/saying that might have a negative impact in future viewers? Don't feel offended! I am always interested in understanding what is the motivation for people to easily downvote/censore others. Personally, I only do that when strictly required because of seeing it as some kind of aggression on others which, as such, should be have a fair motivation.
Well, except that the only thing you've shown is that C is faster when the only thing you're doing is incrementing an integer inside a tight loop. There are a variety of reasons why that isn't necessarily applicable to real applications, not the least of which is that you would never actually do that in a real application.
Sure. I highlighted this fact in different parts of the video. I wasn't implying that C is absolutely better in any scenario, but at least for the kind of applications where this language is supposed to be used. For example, in any implementation relying mostly on simple programming structures like loops, conditions and simple collections, C is definitively faster. Typical situations where you can find this are core/basic/engine parts taking care of the most essential actions. For more complex situations where other functionalities might be preferred (e.g., heavy use of modern-language in-built functions analysing different array aspects), the comparison and even weighting in things like implementation difficulty would be much more difficult to perform and the absolute superiority of a specific language very unlikely to occur.
If you want to create a useful benchmark, you'll need to test a wide variety of operations -- floating point math, string manipulation, memory allocation/deallocation, threading, recursion, and so on. And I feel like you might be surprised at how Java's thread concurrency or large string manipulation perform compared to C's
The main point of this video was to highlight the impressive superiority of C on a very specific aspect. I was quite surprised myself when I firstly saw it. In fact, I have confirmed that certain assumed-to-be-theoretically-faster algorithms are actually slower in C than the slower-in-other-languages-simple-loop-based alternatives! What I am showing in that video isn't just C being faster, but C loops being unrealistically faster than anything else!
Another not-related-to-your-comment clarification (but, not sure why, I feel like this is a good place to write it): as clearly stated in my profile, I am poor what I always correct with "kind of poor" because I am not a hypocritical, detached-from-reality asshole unable to understand his tremendous luck for having been born in a relatively-rich country. I am poor from my country (Spain) perspective, but not from the world perspective. Poor means that I (or my family) have no goods, assets, properties, money, etc. but I do have quite a few debts; additionally, my only income source (= my salary; better: clients as far as a self-employed worker) is currently very low because I prefer to put my focus on long-term/quality, on doing things properly and on not caring about the ridiculous expectations of in-unreasonable-hurry idiots only provoking problems to everyone caring about their nonsense. On the other hand, I am very rich in application of "the less you need the richer you are". I am also quite rich in clear ideas, principles, knowledge, freedom, respecting others, humour (although you might not get most of it), objectivity and taking full responsibility for each of my actions (BTW, I expect everyone, regardless of their fanaticism/stupidity, to do exactly the same:)).
In summary, I consider that I have much more than people like you, cluelessly attacking others, perhaps manipulated, perhaps randomly, perhaps out of blind fear, frustration or hate. A ridiculous joke, with ridiculous expectations performing ridiculous actions, nonetheless. Also all my references to having a private jet or a butler are logically meant to be understood as jokes; firstly, because I don't (didn't and, mostly likely, will never) have anything even close to enough money for something like that, neither interest in having it; and mainly, because my attitude is extremely incompatible with the kind of spoiled, egoist and narcissistic personalities usually associated with this kind of expenses. All this should be evident for any non-extremely-stupid person after having read any of the multiple texts about my personality and expectations which you can find in many places (precisely a reaction to some interactions with idiots like you, unable to understand anything properly and spontaneously coming up with ridiculous interpretations for anything), but probably not for you. Again, I am not sure why, but I have the feeling that you (and others like you) will read this post:)
Slashdot Mirror
Snapchat had losses of $500+ million in 2016 and $300+ million in 2015. They may never operate in the black, and yet went public this year with a valuation of over $20 billion.
Perhaps this is a too extreme case, but similar situations where people having nothing, giving nothing and, basically, doing nothing, get a lot pretty out of someone's else stupidity kind of motivates me to do things properly. Just depicting myself in a situation where all what I have/know/accomplish is just an unfair, partial and empty result mostly conditioned by others' easily-changing/manipulated random actions is so unappealing to me that I cannot believe that I will ever be in a situation like that.
I cannot even think about what-if scenarios where I could enjoy the associated benefits without most of the drawbacks because I know the entry price (losing your dignity or being hypocritical or tolerating dishonesty, unfairness and arbitrariness, etc. since the first second) which is already too high for me, much higher than any benefit/amount of money.
It sounds almost unrealistic. When I firstly read it, I assumed that it was because most of people there didn't want/need to connect to internet (weird for a person like me spending lots of time online, although kind of understandable). But really not being able to afford an internet connection! 40% of the population of a big city! In the USA! How can this be possible?
I am using various browsers for different purposes and including different login credentials, one of them Firefox precisely dealing with this Slashdot account. I was reasonably happy with the previous version as far as it was working well for the simple tasks I was performing with it. Today, I opened Firefox to take my morning Slashdot dose and realised that it had been automatically updated (on Ubuntu 16.04). In principle, it does seem faster and with an appreciably different appearance. There are also some relevant changes in the blank-tab bookmarks which I might test at some other point.
A Russian man discovers an exotic oil lamp in his dead grandmother's attic, and as he rubs the dust from its brass surface a genie appears to him.
Are you Gilbert Gottfried?
Ivan thinks for a minute, then makes his wish: "I want you to stab out one of my eyes."
Nah, it doesn't seem that you are him. I guess that at least you tried. LOL. I find kind of curious that the main character in that "joke" is a Russian man, are you the same AC who said me the ridiculous nonsense that I am a Russian! troll! a couple of days ago and to "whom" I wrote quite a few posts explaining who I am and how easily you could find even more information about me? If this is you, your level of obsessive fanaticism seems much higher than what I thought the other day; if not, you are the second person in my life who has started a conversation with me somehow implying that I have anything to do with Russian (BTW, Ivan is also a quite common name in Spain, my country; your repertory of random prejudices might need some updates :))
The rest of your post seems quite irrelevant Google promotional crap, perhaps heard from/delivered by a PR/C-whatever person, or read in a brochure or feed into you in whatever education camp to which you belong. Although the last part is kind of telling about your well... things:
People like you are the reason Google doesn't take their critics seriously: they don't have many serious critics, just smarmy competitors sock-puppeting [csmonitor.com] and virtue-signalling amateurs.
So, you are saying that a company can seriously afford to not take clients's opinions seriously? Mainly when the given client might be considered an expert in the field where they perform their activity (I am not a random user; I am a senior programmer specialising in the development of data-intensive applications). Then, it comes a reference to another curious expression "sock-puppeting" (or astroturfing or troll or shill or similar) who some people use so easily lately that seems to have stopped having any real meaning. Are you implying that someone will pay me for coming to random Slashdot articles and post random opinions about random issues, which eventually might be against whatever absolute truths you think that have any sense? And you think that I do all what from my personal account, undoubtedly linked to myself and to my personal software-development business fully focused on top quality, knowledge and solid principles? Don't you think that it would make a bit more or sense if I would focused on my much more demanded and highly-specialised skills as a software developer and engineer? Or, at least, not use my personal account precisely linked to that expertise? Or do you think that only genius like you know how to post anonymously? LOL.
On the other hand, your fanatic-like and anonymous character does seem to indicate that you have some egoist interest in favouring certain alternative or censoring others. I can confirm that I don't work for/get any money or other advantages from any search engine and that, even in case of ever doing it (logically, as a programmer), I will never be part of any kind of non-objective promotional/dismissal effort (my work consists in making sure that things work properly; being paid to be partial and to talk bad/good about whatever is the work of other people, yours perhaps?). Now, tell me: can you say the same? Can you please share what are you doing for work (or are you still in the school)?
I still use various Google services (including Gmail) mostly for historical, practical and certainly non-critical reasons. I also use free products of many other companies for similar purposes and all of them seem to follow the same pattern: the bigger the company gets, the more obscure (+ greedy) its activity becomes. I don't really trust any of them, complain about the slightest problem ASAP and try to always have various available alternatives. BTW, my passwords.google.com pages are now empty because I deleted all of them/disabled the option to store that information right after knowing about its existence some months ago.
Their record on free speech is bad. They're using "youtube jail" and demonetization to punish right wing Youtube creators, and they're punishing sites like Breitbart with their power as an ad middleman. I don't trust them politically.
I am a leftist, but don't support more or less arbitrary censorship or unfairly-biased impositions, mainly in a search engine which is supposed to be quite neutral.
Google is one of few positive examples in this space. They collect data about you, they extract value from it, yet they keep it private from the advertisers and publishers involved in the transaction, never sell it to
You are free to see a difference there, but I don't see any. Directly or indirectly selling the information is the same for me. The key point is getting a profit from my data (even when I am not logged in!); I don't like people getting any profit from my activity without my express consent. To not mention the dangers associated with having relevant information about me (what if someone steals it? Or what if someone working at Google decides to use that information for his/her benefit?), what basically represents a power over me which I don't want them to have. In any case, I am not a privacy paranoid (accepted long time ago that we don't have privacy) and what bothers me the most is the fact of they are making money at my expense from virtually anything I do in their platform.
If what you want is a more responsible world, how do you intend to achieve it? Move into the woods like Kaczynski? Organize a worldwide boycott of capitalism?
Where have I even suggested anything on these lines? Are you implying that there is no way to get money unless by trafficking with private user information?! They have lots of ways to make money and respect my privacy. As written in previous posts, I would even prefer to have restricted free functionalities and paying a fee for premium ones, rather than being forced to tolerate hypocritical free services which aren't really such. Or even better: if they aren't able to get a profit without selling my information and always according to the capitalism rules, they should get out of business. In any case, this isn't my problem. I am their customer, their god and devil, their everything, I don't need to understand their position, but they have to understand mine.
all these companies are probably less responsible with your search logs than Google
Why are you saying that? Can you reasonably prove it? I prefer to properly test them and listen to the opinion I trust the most: mine :)
using a different search engine doesn't opt you out of Google's, or anyone else's, ad networks.
I am not against ad-based revenue models (they aren't precisely my favourite option though). I am against companies systematically merchandising my personal information or whatever data is generated by my mere activity. I am fine with random ads being displayed to me like TVs do. I am also fine with more personalised ads being built over the information which I expressly provide (e.g., via logging in my Google account + clicking on the checkbox "Allow all your activity to be monitored to improve your ad-viewing experience").
On the whole, I prefer DDG (even if they do use Bing or Yahoo on the back end)
It was my primary search engine during some months, but I didn't like quite a few aspects of it. I might give it another chance at some other point.
They don't, and that's the key. They keep all data they collect for themselves, and they sell service based on these data, revealing as little as possible.
Call it as you want, but the underlying idea is the same: they make money from people's information. I don't like that and I think that many other people don't like it either. They might do an excellent business just by selling ads, which might be eventually improved by collecting the information which I expressly allow them to use (and only when being logged in their system). As said, I recognise the superiority of their search engine, but I don't like most of their business model. I would even prefer to have only access to restricted functionalities and pay some fee for a better version, rather than being forced into these obscure and hypocritical free services which I am systematically over-paying with my personal data.
It is kind of hurtful to recognise that it definitively is. Many of their policies are horrible, sell every bit they have about you, some of their products aren't that good lately, etc. But their search engine is certainly good. What is even worse: the competition (for a so juicy market!!) is quite weak or, at least, aren't doing all what is required to really beat Google.
Some time ago, I wrote various posts here asking slashdotters about reliable alternatives to Google. I have been testing some of them during the last months and, so far, the best option has been startpage.com/ixquick.eu. Although I have found some problems, in general, the experience has been reasonable good. The main issue here is that the results are precisely provided by Google! A restricted (and theoretically respectful with your privacy) version of what you can find there.
I have still to do proper tests with yandex.com (which looks quite nice, but as a Russia-based search engine might have some issues) and bing.com (whose performance in the past wasn't too good, but perhaps they are better now; on the other hand, as a Microsoft company might also have some issues). A so big and profitable market, so much available money and knowledge (no idea if in general, but if you give me enough resources and a reasonable time frame, I will certainly create something really good) and so much crap! How can this be possible? We are constantly reading articles about VCs throwing lots of money at virtually anything! This is one of the safest bets ever! And all what you need is money, doing things properly and some patience!
Logically, with "because I will write any other post in this thread." I really meant "because I will NOT write any other post in this thread." (yes, the current post is quite ironic).
have learned humility yet
I don't need working experience (in programming) to learn that. I am an extremely respectful, humble and sensible person always trying to properly understand others, having as less prejudices as possible and, at work, carefully analysing every situation. Currently, I am putting a tremendous effort into focusing my whole activity in its widest sense (including also the kind of clients/coworkers/expectations with whom I want to deal) on quality. So, what you are implying is even less applicable now. In any case, there are things which seem way too evident and, in our current society, saying that electronic records are unreliable in general doesn't make any sense.
You might have lots of experience and even much more knowledge than me on some aspects, but you have proven to have a pushy, trendy, unreasonable-expectations-driven behaviour various times and that's why I don't like what you represent and, honestly, you aren't proving yourself as a knowledgeable developer, not even as an objective person mostly interested in knowing more/improving. There are many things going wrong in the software development world, market, trends and, as for your behaviour so far, you seem to be the archetypal personality which explains why things are like this (abstract talking, trend-driven expectations, blind-trust-in-random-authorities, nepotism/arbitrariness, pushy behaviours, etc.). As said in my first comment yesterday, I don't see the point of continuing with this chat and, if your behaviour doesn't change in the future, I will not talk to you anymore. Now, say all what you want because I will write any other post in this thread.
You appear to have a lot more faith in that than most people. Those of us who are actually in the software field have a pretty good idea
What are you talking about?! I have been full-time working as a programmer during over the last 8 years!! We were discussing about C/C++ advantages for various days?! Seriously, what is the matter with you? This is my last reply and will think twice before replying you the next time. Now I feel that I did lose my time in the past by being understanding (+ generous, although perhaps you didn't realise about that bit either) with you. Bye.
The Internet is not safe or secure by any definition.
PS: it would also be excellent if you could make an extra effort to at least understand what all this is about. AGAIN: I have expressly said various times that I am not defending internet-based voting (too dangerous on exchange of no relevant advantage). All my comments were about DIGITAL RECORDS as opposed to paper and manual counting. NOTHING TO DO WITH INTERNET. I was talking about an offline (or restricted/local network or offline + punctual connections to a central repository) system. The only people bringing internet into picture were those blindly attacking (+ anonymously insulting) me.
The big difference between most transactions and voting is that bank transactions are traceable and reversible. If there's a $2K transfer between my account and someone else's, I can find exactly why that transaction took place and how it was authorized. If it turns out to be erroneous and/or fraudulent, the bank can transfer the money back. If Joe gets 2100 votes and Moe gets 2200 votes, we can't attribute those totals to any individual or individuals. We have no records of who voted for whom, by design. If Fred is convinced that he voted for Joe but he was tallied for Moe, there's no recourse. There's no way to investigate beyond the evidence immediately present.
That example doesn't make any sense. It doesn't matter whether the voter is anonymous, the vote is well defined (= click on the button = perfectly recorded). From the point of view of the banks, the system doesn't care about dealing with two different persons or not. Even actions within the same account will be recorded. Even actions on the records on that account performed by bank staff will be recorded. Your example might seem only logical for a random person with no computer knowledge only roughly understanding what happens after they click on the button. As said in my previous comment, I don't think that a somehow knowledgeable person (+ with intention of bringing that knowledge into picture, rather than having an almost fanatical behaviour whose goal is to prove whatever has to be proven) could seriously think that electronic records are even slightly unsafe in a generic way.
We had some chats in the past and all of them followed a similar pattern where you kept insisting (respectfully and reasonably though) on trying to impose your views, mostly via repetition, by providing further quite-irrelevant additional data and without intending to understand my position/learn. I am a very experienced programmer who have developed lots of applications dealing with a huge number of different scenarios and you seriously think that you can change my mind about what I have a very good knowledge (= built over the years by learning, making errors, going further, etc.) via repeating a couple of generic (logically faulty) examples? I see... Seriously, I don't want to be disrespectful, but I will stop reading what you write in this chat and, in the future, I hope that you will make some effort to engage in more sensible conversations. If you aren't interested in learning, understanding others' (mine, in this case) views, getting a proper insight into whatever problem and you only want to impose whatever truth, conviction, fear or expectation you might have, you should try to avoid dealing with me because I might stop being so patient and understanding (nothing personal, just confirmed that being reasonable with certain people isn't always a good idea).
I don't agree with your statements and even think that a programming/computer-experienced person shouldn't think in that way (i.e., software you are building and managing being more obscure than people+paper!). That's why I don't think that we should continue with this chat.
Although I am not particularly concerned about anyone taking an unfair advantage of my public-domain-licensed activity, you are certainly making good points and providing some useful information. Thanks.
but both sides agree that if you try you're waiving your right to sue people over it.
Honestly, I cannot imagine me suing anyone about stealing my code (mainly when there are many other much quicker and efficient "counter-measurements". LOL); but I am not renouncing to that right anyway. Although public domain protection is certainly much more imprecise than other more restricted alternatives, it is still protected at least for what matters to me: the original authorship. You can take any famous public domain work from Mozart or Shakespeare to immediately understand that nobody will ever go away with claiming authorship of that. I am only renouncing to modern restrictions/revenue-generations which I don't fully support and which, in any case, are quite useless under my specific conditions, where my public code is used as mere advertisement of my actual income source (= being hired to actually perform whatever development).
So you have no license on your code at all? How does anyone know they can use it?
No. I have licenses (and quite a few other references) clearly saying that my code can be considered public domain. Didn't you know that, within the most common lists of copyright licenses, you can find public domain ones? In some cases, you have the express option of public domain or cc0 or unlicense, all of them are basically the same. What this means is that my code/any other public output can be used according to whatever rules are applicable to public domain in the given jurisdiction. The basic idea is that you can use it without any limitation and without referring me at all (it would be nice though), but you cannot claim its authorship. The whole point of my public codes is giving an idea about my coding skills to potential clients; I don't care about people using it more or less and, in case of doubt, I usually choose the generous alternative :)
about examining why certain laws work and others don't, and following those forms of inquiry to other conclusions
That "why" over there basically boils down to making sure that the given theory fits more or less harmoniously within the remaining system. And actually this has kind of stopped being a strict requirement as far as some people/"factions" have started coming up with parallel systems already assumed to represent an absolute validation and whose compatibility with the main system/others is, in some cases, quite unclear. BTW, your quote is more ironic than what you seem to think.
It becomes public domain
No. Unless the author expressly wanted it to become public domain.
:)).
SIDE CLARIFICATION: all my open-source code and public activity is public domain since over 2 years ago. So, me being alive/dead doesn't change anything on this front (the updates might get a bit delayed though
Evident preposterousness aside, physics (or any other branch of science) isn't more than a collection of theoretical models replicating what we see as well as possible. There is no abstract and absolute entity called physics whose laws might be broken. We only have past experiences which are more/less likely to be repeated in the future and which physicists try to replicate by coming up with more/less reliable theories.
Referring to magic is almost the same than referring to ignorance and, as such, you can call magical whatever we cannot understand if that makes you happy (it seems a more sensible approach than in-denial behaviours not accepting the limitations of our current knowledge; in any case, note that I personally will never do any of those things: "magic" only as a joke/insult + always openly recognising what I don't know). Trying to explain why physics is as it is (what we don't know, other than "because it has always been like this") by relying on alien life (about which again we know nothing) seems quite magical.
And even another completely-unrelated clarification (just to have all the ideally-not-necessary-but-required-by-idiots-like-you-unreasonably-attacking-others stuff together): as clearly highlighted in the current version of my profile and signature here (which might be changed in the future, but this post will always remain), Custom Solvers 2.0 is the same than varocarbas and than me (Alvaro Carballo Garcia). Despite all the plurals, there is only one person here: myself, a 39-yo man, Spaniard, mechanical engineer by education (my relevant university degree, but not my only one) but programmer by career, heterosexual, single (and, at the moment, just caring about work), not too much into politics but leftist, honest, fair, adaptable, reasonable and objective; extremely allergic to fanaticism, people not able to understand humour, invasive/imposing personalities and anyone thinking that there is any chance that they can affect others without consequences. Although you will not find many references about that, I am a white man, slim and tall, with glasses, but I have replaced most of my public pictures with the Custom Solvers 2.0 logo to highlight that my appearance doesn't matter for my work (and internet is basically work for me).
Varocarbas has been my personal nickname since a quite long time ago (short-form of my name and first family name: alVARO + CARBAllo + S because sounds kind of better), but why choosing a so weird commercial name (because, as self-employed, the real name of my company is my own name) as Custom Solvers 2.0 you might wonder? This is my second self-employment attempt and, in the first one, Custom Solvers made much more sense. I only wanted to somehow relate my new activity (= still programming & numerical/engineering analysis, but by being much more patient, individual, self-made and looking for much fairer and properly-appreciating-clients than ever before) to that old one, even though my expectations now are completely different. To know more about my evolution as a self-employed programmer, you can visit the corresponding pages of my main site (customsolvers.com). You might also want to do that to know anything else about me, my knowledge/expertise, expectations, etc. There are lots of information in that main site, in my R&D site (varocarbas.com) and in all my public profiles linked from any of those. You might also ask me anything, call me or send me an email. You know? Performing any action allowing you to know even a bit about the person who you are defining, as opposed to what you did (= putting together the first two random words coming to your).
BTW, have you donvoted the video? Is there anything wrong with it to deserve a so aggressive reaction, as opposed to mere inactivity? Is there any accuracy in what I am showing/saying that might have a negative impact in future viewers? Don't feel offended! I am always interested in understanding what is the motivation for people to easily downvote/censore others. Personally, I only do that when strictly required because of seeing it as some kind of aggression on others which, as such, should be have a fair motivation.
Well, except that the only thing you've shown is that C is faster when the only thing you're doing is incrementing an integer inside a tight loop. There are a variety of reasons why that isn't necessarily applicable to real applications, not the least of which is that you would never actually do that in a real application.
Sure. I highlighted this fact in different parts of the video. I wasn't implying that C is absolutely better in any scenario, but at least for the kind of applications where this language is supposed to be used. For example, in any implementation relying mostly on simple programming structures like loops, conditions and simple collections, C is definitively faster. Typical situations where you can find this are core/basic/engine parts taking care of the most essential actions. For more complex situations where other functionalities might be preferred (e.g., heavy use of modern-language in-built functions analysing different array aspects), the comparison and even weighting in things like implementation difficulty would be much more difficult to perform and the absolute superiority of a specific language very unlikely to occur.
If you want to create a useful benchmark, you'll need to test a wide variety of operations -- floating point math, string manipulation, memory allocation/deallocation, threading, recursion, and so on. And I feel like you might be surprised at how Java's thread concurrency or large string manipulation perform compared to C's
The main point of this video was to highlight the impressive superiority of C on a very specific aspect. I was quite surprised myself when I firstly saw it. In fact, I have confirmed that certain assumed-to-be-theoretically-faster algorithms are actually slower in C than the slower-in-other-languages-simple-loop-based alternatives! What I am showing in that video isn't just C being faster, but C loops being unrealistically faster than anything else!
Another not-related-to-your-comment clarification (but, not sure why, I feel like this is a good place to write it): as clearly stated in my profile, I am poor what I always correct with "kind of poor" because I am not a hypocritical, detached-from-reality asshole unable to understand his tremendous luck for having been born in a relatively-rich country. I am poor from my country (Spain) perspective, but not from the world perspective. Poor means that I (or my family) have no goods, assets, properties, money, etc. but I do have quite a few debts; additionally, my only income source (= my salary; better: clients as far as a self-employed worker) is currently very low because I prefer to put my focus on long-term/quality, on doing things properly and on not caring about the ridiculous expectations of in-unreasonable-hurry idiots only provoking problems to everyone caring about their nonsense. On the other hand, I am very rich in application of "the less you need the richer you are". I am also quite rich in clear ideas, principles, knowledge, freedom, respecting others, humour (although you might not get most of it), objectivity and taking full responsibility for each of my actions (BTW, I expect everyone, regardless of their fanaticism/stupidity, to do exactly the same :)).
:)
In summary, I consider that I have much more than people like you, cluelessly attacking others, perhaps manipulated, perhaps randomly, perhaps out of blind fear, frustration or hate. A ridiculous joke, with ridiculous expectations performing ridiculous actions, nonetheless. Also all my references to having a private jet or a butler are logically meant to be understood as jokes; firstly, because I don't (didn't and, mostly likely, will never) have anything even close to enough money for something like that, neither interest in having it; and mainly, because my attitude is extremely incompatible with the kind of spoiled, egoist and narcissistic personalities usually associated with this kind of expenses. All this should be evident for any non-extremely-stupid person after having read any of the multiple texts about my personality and expectations which you can find in many places (precisely a reaction to some interactions with idiots like you, unable to understand anything properly and spontaneously coming up with ridiculous interpretations for anything), but probably not for you. Again, I am not sure why, but I have the feeling that you (and others like you) will read this post