Wow, someone else finally gets that. I work in the Bay Area, I'm 23, lots of people I know works at Apple, Google, Pixar etc. Yes they are "great" places to work in the sense that my office doesn't have a volleyball court/laundromat/sumo stable/whatever. But everyone loses sight of the fact that the end goal of all these enticements is simply to get you to stay at work. That's it. To me, this melding of your personal and work lives is the most evil thing of all, and Google is king of it. I don't have $10 million in options sitting around, but I'm out the door most days at 5:00:00.00pm and I have lots of shit going on outside of work. Most of my microserf friends do not.
I wrote my senior honors thesis in economics on this exact subject--the effect of H-1B visas on labor outcomes--and the results aren't nearly as clear cut as this guy is making them out to be. For one thing, there are no reliable data on H-1B entries or employment. You can get a database of LCA filings from the Department of Labor, but it is really noisy because there are hardly any rules for the employers who are filing. There's no guarantee the visa was ever issued, or the person ever took the job and immigrated. You can file one LCA for 4 people, or you can file 10 for the same guy. Because it's so easy to file many times, of course employers have an incentive to start low and work up when it comes to prevailing wage declarations. Also I remember someone at Labor telling me the entire LCA certification process is "a joke", so I'd be really hesitant to place a lot of faith in anything actually contained on them. Also, I can't find any link to the report on the Programmers' Guild website, but I'd be curious to know if those means were statistically different given all the variation I observed in the underlying data when I was looked at it.
Rather that examining what the LCAs were claiming, I took the different tack of treating them as simply a crude measure of demand for foreign workers. I built a panel dataset over MSAs and quarters and could not uncover any statistically significant partial effect of LCA filings on wages or employment, even when controlling for a bunch of other socioeconomic factors, endogeneity, and fixed effects.
A better economist could certainly do more with this, but my adviser and I ultimately agreed that there is essentially no empirical evidence to support the claim that "H1B=bad", so often repeated on/. and elsewhere.
Of course it's a PR event. Guess what? Our lack of a space elevator is a PR failure. You seriously think that with one or two hundred billion $ (i.e.5 fewer oil wars) we couldn't overcome every lingering engineering hurdle and build one of these things? So many of today's problems are described as scientifically insurmountable when really, it's just a question of misplaced priorities. With a really large (but not infeasible) amount of money we could cure cancer and AIDS, blanket Africa with enough doctors and teachers to spark a humanitarian revolution, and have prolly enough left over to get fusion/microwave power off the ground. Take your pick. The American voters have, and that's why things are the way they are. Launching a public awareness campaign for whatever your pet cause is looks like a smart move to me.
Yeah that would be alright. Of course the killer app is being able to beam your music to the guy across the room/cafe/street, and vice versa. It'll happen, it's just a question of when and who does it.
I think they would be better off mining Jupiter. You know, a planet composed of vapor.
Seriously, this would be awesome. I sure hope to see a Mars colony in my lifetime, which will end around 2070 or presidential election of Jeb Bush, whichever comes first.
No, you are just the sort of idiot I would expect to see driving a gas-guzzling size-compensator down the street. Maybe, instead of with your "muscle" car, you could impress chicks by learning how to spell the word "phallic." Moron.
Since I see that you've unforunately managed to procreate, maybe it will give you pause to note that your children will probably enjoy the "feel and look" of clean, breathable air, biodiversity, potable water and/or an accessible coastline when they are your age. Probably even more than you enjoy taking that symbol in your driveway for a spin so you can feel 20 years younger.
It all goes back to the perennial question, "is Apple a hardware or a software company?" This has been debated over and over and over and over and over again. So far as I can tell, no one has a clue. Maybe Steve Jobs.:) The answer this question is basically the answer to yours. If, as has been rumored, they are selling iPods and cheapo Mac minis as loss-leaders to hook people into the software, then yeah, they want OS X installed everywhere.
The fact that they're going to great lengths to stop that from happening tells me that they are profiting from the hardware more than the software, but interpret it however you like. That also bears out if you simply look at how much of a premium they are extracting for iPods and Powerbooks when comparable equipment is available for about half the price. There are MP3 players out there with more features, no battery life problems, better UI, etc. but Apple still gets away with charging twice as much. The real mystery to me is not what kind of company they are but how they keep convincing people it's worth it:)
With no offense meant to parent poster:
I maintain that the key to the success of this website is that it gives small, novel and underempowered group of nerds their 15 minutes, every day.
Hah-I remember that. I actually did research into buying/creating an offboard MP3 decoder card so I could free up the CPU to play Quake. Em were the days...
-5, Wrong. A public good is nonexcludable and nonrival by definition... look it up if you don't believe me. Internet sites are essentially nonrival, although the/. effect is one of the best counterexamples to that. Subscription-free sites are also nonexcludable, making them public goods and very much subject to the free rider effect. A great way to combat that would is to convert to a subscription-only model, AKA "the death of the free Internet." DoubleClick is a sleasy, slimy company indeed, but what the guy is saying is dead on from an economic standpoint.
"The target of 10 million units gives tremendous momentum to a platform"
No, jackass, the sale of 10 million units gives tremendous momentum to a platform. The target just gives you an excuse to run your mouth off and get it printed by gullible editors.
Not necessarily apropos of what you posted, but... that model is much more tried-and-true than/. would like to admit; people should stop shitting on it. If you replace #3 with "success," since money really isn't the right benchmark to use, the 20th century is teeming with examples of places that employed that idea and prospered. Xerox PARC had a notoriously freewheeling, unstructured environment and originated many of the brilliant ideas about personal computing you are using right now to read this post. Skunk Works was the same way, and so was/is the Institute for Advanced Study. HP, in a less academic context, was run in a very similar fashion. The list of achievements from those institutions alone reads like a "what's what" of 20th century achievement.
I passed on Google at around 200 thinking it was overvalued... here I could have made almost 50% in 3 months. The price will continue to climb as long as people are hysterical about the company. People will continue to be hysterical the company until something comes along to jolt them, at which time there will be a correction. Is there anything jolt-worthy on the horizon, I ask you? Not in my mind. But I'm guessing that when it happens, YHOO will be to blame.
You're missing the point: you don't need that complexity any more. Google Maps basically gives me the ability to use a $300 thin client to accomplish (some of the) tasks I do at work using a $5000 Xeon machine with $10000 worth of ESRI software to do at work. What's more, if Google comes up with some way to make Google Maps better, like, say, add satellite images, they implement that functionality overnight and have millions of users using it the next day. Compare with the release-patch-rerelease paradigm of old. I don't consider JavaScript and the browser and it to be a brain-damaged programming environment--you just have to remember that you are no longer expected to do any heavy lifting on the client side, and the majority of the GUI tasks are already handled for you by the browser itself. Most of the "refinment[s] in programming interfaces that have been around since the 70s" were to simplify those very chores. In that sense, the limited functionality provided by JS is really quite elegant.
Also, emulating stateful-ness over the web is being handled at a much lower level than the browser these days, and to good effect. See Tapestry.
No, that's not an Amazon link, it's a Tinyurl link. Insulting my intelligence by burying your referral code inside of a tinyurl makes me a lot less inclined to do you the favor of clicking. C'mon, this is/.--we're hep to that game. Put it out in the open and let ppl decide for themselves.
Dude--whatever. Look at how cool their founders are. They're not even looking at the camera. That's because these pictures aren't portraits--they were take by papparazzi. And look at the hair. Geeks don't even have access to that much gel. And the people that use their site have cool names, like "Grellan" and "Alex" (as a girl.) Everyone knows all geeks are named either Craig or Rob. Plus, they all dress in Flash, so they look like they walked out of an iPod commercial. Yeah right, losers using the service. Huh you're funny--way to funny to be a geek.
No, the best is when they zoom in a ton on some surveillance video and it gets really grainy, i.e. there like 20 big squares of grey on the screen. Then they push this magic button, I call it the "CIA button" since it's always the CIA doing this, they must have some special technology, and there's a little "beep-boop-boop" noise, and voila! The picture instantly resolves back to 300dpi. These people are filmmakers, so they must know about issues regarding magnification and pixellation. I think it's their little in-joke about how sci-fi they are that their computers can magically recreate details not present in the original image.
Maybe you are just feeble-minded, but the only "psychological enticement" I have experienced that was very hard to defend against was being held at gunpoint and "politely" asked to surrender the contents of my wallet.
People! It's a little freaking ad. Simply avert your eyes, or better yet: take some fscking responsibility. Google (unlike DoubleClick) is very upfront about why they want your data and what they plan on doing with it. Do you think asskicking services like Gmail and Google Maps grow on trees? The shit costs money, and it's perfectly fair for Google to try to recoup their investment by selling advertising. Stop making them out to be evil, and start admitting to yourself that Google is not free and you are participating in a trade every time you use it. If you don't like what they're doing, kindly stop using the goddamn services. I don't recall anyone pointing a gun at you forcing you to surf there.
Re:Once a spyware co always a spyware co...
on
John Dvorak Hypes Skype
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
A bought another couple thousand two days ago expecting the bounce and am getting reamed today:( But seriously I think this is a pretty shortsighted selloff. Success of Tiger plus the biggie--iPod-enabled Motorola cell phone; rumored for some months now--well send it back up.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow, someone else finally gets that. I work in the Bay Area, I'm 23, lots of people I know works at Apple, Google, Pixar etc. Yes they are "great" places to work in the sense that my office doesn't have a volleyball court/laundromat/sumo stable/whatever. But everyone loses sight of the fact that the end goal of all these enticements is simply to get you to stay at work. That's it. To me, this melding of your personal and work lives is the most evil thing of all, and Google is king of it. I don't have $10 million in options sitting around, but I'm out the door most days at 5:00:00.00pm and I have lots of shit going on outside of work. Most of my microserf friends do not.
I wrote my senior honors thesis in economics on this exact subject--the effect of H-1B visas on labor outcomes--and the results aren't nearly as clear cut as this guy is making them out to be. For one thing, there are no reliable data on H-1B entries or employment. You can get a database of LCA filings from the Department of Labor, but it is really noisy because there are hardly any rules for the employers who are filing. There's no guarantee the visa was ever issued, or the person ever took the job and immigrated. You can file one LCA for 4 people, or you can file 10 for the same guy. Because it's so easy to file many times, of course employers have an incentive to start low and work up when it comes to prevailing wage declarations. Also I remember someone at Labor telling me the entire LCA certification process is "a joke", so I'd be really hesitant to place a lot of faith in anything actually contained on them. Also, I can't find any link to the report on the Programmers' Guild website, but I'd be curious to know if those means were statistically different given all the variation I observed in the underlying data when I was looked at it.
/. and elsewhere.
Rather that examining what the LCAs were claiming, I took the different tack of treating them as simply a crude measure of demand for foreign workers. I built a panel dataset over MSAs and quarters and could not uncover any statistically significant partial effect of LCA filings on wages or employment, even when controlling for a bunch of other socioeconomic factors, endogeneity, and fixed effects.
A better economist could certainly do more with this, but my adviser and I ultimately agreed that there is essentially no empirical evidence to support the claim that "H1B=bad", so often repeated on
Of course it's a PR event. Guess what? Our lack of a space elevator is a PR failure. You seriously think that with one or two hundred billion $ (i.e .5 fewer oil wars) we couldn't overcome every lingering engineering hurdle and build one of these things? So many of today's problems are described as scientifically insurmountable when really, it's just a question of misplaced priorities. With a really large (but not infeasible) amount of money we could cure cancer and AIDS, blanket Africa with enough doctors and teachers to spark a humanitarian revolution, and have prolly enough left over to get fusion/microwave power off the ground. Take your pick. The American voters have, and that's why things are the way they are. Launching a public awareness campaign for whatever your pet cause is looks like a smart move to me.
Yeah that would be alright. Of course the killer app is being able to beam your music to the guy across the room/cafe/street, and vice versa. It'll happen, it's just a question of when and who does it.
I think they would be better off mining Jupiter. You know, a planet composed of vapor.
Seriously, this would be awesome. I sure hope to see a Mars colony in my lifetime, which will end around 2070 or presidential election of Jeb Bush, whichever comes first.
The basic idea is that if someone patents software, he loses the right to use free software.
So long IBM, and thanks for all the fish!
No, you are just the sort of idiot I would expect to see driving a gas-guzzling size-compensator down the street. Maybe, instead of with your "muscle" car, you could impress chicks by learning how to spell the word "phallic." Moron.
Since I see that you've unforunately managed to procreate, maybe it will give you pause to note that your children will probably enjoy the "feel and look" of clean, breathable air, biodiversity, potable water and/or an accessible coastline when they are your age. Probably even more than you enjoy taking that symbol in your driveway for a spin so you can feel 20 years younger.
Can you gess the word?
Grantd?
It all goes back to the perennial question, "is Apple a hardware or a software company?" This has been debated over and over and over and over and over again. So far as I can tell, no one has a clue. Maybe Steve Jobs. :) The answer this question is basically the answer to yours. If, as has been rumored, they are selling iPods and cheapo Mac minis as loss-leaders to hook people into the software, then yeah, they want OS X installed everywhere.
:)
The fact that they're going to great lengths to stop that from happening tells me that they are profiting from the hardware more than the software, but interpret it however you like. That also bears out if you simply look at how much of a premium they are extracting for iPods and Powerbooks when comparable equipment is available for about half the price. There are MP3 players out there with more features, no battery life problems, better UI, etc. but Apple still gets away with charging twice as much. The real mystery to me is not what kind of company they are but how they keep convincing people it's worth it
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Play long enough and you, too can win theHah-I remember that. I actually did research into buying/creating an offboard MP3 decoder card so I could free up the CPU to play Quake. Em were the days...
There are 10 types of people in the wor... aah fuck it. :)
-5, Wrong. A public good is nonexcludable and nonrival by definition... look it up if you don't believe me. Internet sites are essentially nonrival, although the /. effect is one of the best counterexamples to that. Subscription-free sites are also nonexcludable, making them public goods and very much subject to the free rider effect. A great way to combat that would is to convert to a subscription-only model, AKA "the death of the free Internet." DoubleClick is a sleasy, slimy company indeed, but what the guy is saying is dead on from an economic standpoint.
"The target of 10 million units gives tremendous momentum to a platform"
No, jackass, the sale of 10 million units gives tremendous momentum to a platform. The target just gives you an excuse to run your mouth off and get it printed by gullible editors.
Not necessarily apropos of what you posted, but ... that model is much more tried-and-true than /. would like to admit; people should stop shitting on it. If you replace #3 with "success," since money really isn't the right benchmark to use, the 20th century is teeming with examples of places that employed that idea and prospered. Xerox PARC had a notoriously freewheeling, unstructured environment and originated many of the brilliant ideas about personal computing you are using right now to read this post. Skunk Works was the same way, and so was/is the Institute for Advanced Study. HP, in a less academic context, was run in a very similar fashion. The list of achievements from those institutions alone reads like a "what's what" of 20th century achievement.
I believe Google's superior stock valuation will drive these services into Google.
I passed on Google at around 200 thinking it was overvalued... here I could have made almost 50% in 3 months. The price will continue to climb as long as people are hysterical about the company. People will continue to be hysterical the company until something comes along to jolt them, at which time there will be a correction. Is there anything jolt-worthy on the horizon, I ask you? Not in my mind. But I'm guessing that when it happens, YHOO will be to blame.
:)
Or praise, if you own it like me
It's called REI, and the verb is trekking. Backpacking--pfft. I'll bet you spent less than $1000 on your "backpacking" equipment.
You are clearly not young, urban or professional.
You're missing the point: you don't need that complexity any more. Google Maps basically gives me the ability to use a $300 thin client to accomplish (some of the) tasks I do at work using a $5000 Xeon machine with $10000 worth of ESRI software to do at work. What's more, if Google comes up with some way to make Google Maps better, like, say, add satellite images, they implement that functionality overnight and have millions of users using it the next day. Compare with the release-patch-rerelease paradigm of old. I don't consider JavaScript and the browser and it to be a brain-damaged programming environment--you just have to remember that you are no longer expected to do any heavy lifting on the client side, and the majority of the GUI tasks are already handled for you by the browser itself. Most of the "refinment[s] in programming interfaces that have been around since the 70s" were to simplify those very chores. In that sense, the limited functionality provided by JS is really quite elegant.
Also, emulating stateful-ness over the web is being handled at a much lower level than the browser these days, and to good effect. See Tapestry.
No, that's not an Amazon link, it's a Tinyurl link. Insulting my intelligence by burying your referral code inside of a tinyurl makes me a lot less inclined to do you the favor of clicking. C'mon, this is /.--we're hep to that game. Put it out in the open and let ppl decide for themselves.
Dude--whatever. Look at how cool their founders are. They're not even looking at the camera. That's because these pictures aren't portraits--they were take by papparazzi. And look at the hair. Geeks don't even have access to that much gel. And the people that use their site have cool names, like "Grellan" and "Alex" (as a girl.) Everyone knows all geeks are named either Craig or Rob. Plus, they all dress in Flash, so they look like they walked out of an iPod commercial. Yeah right, losers using the service. Huh you're funny--way to funny to be a geek.
No, the best is when they zoom in a ton on some surveillance video and it gets really grainy, i.e. there like 20 big squares of grey on the screen. Then they push this magic button, I call it the "CIA button" since it's always the CIA doing this, they must have some special technology, and there's a little "beep-boop-boop" noise, and voila! The picture instantly resolves back to 300dpi. These people are filmmakers, so they must know about issues regarding magnification and pixellation. I think it's their little in-joke about how sci-fi they are that their computers can magically recreate details not present in the original image.
Maybe you are just feeble-minded, but the only "psychological enticement" I have experienced that was very hard to defend against was being held at gunpoint and "politely" asked to surrender the contents of my wallet.
People! It's a little freaking ad. Simply avert your eyes, or better yet: take some fscking responsibility. Google (unlike DoubleClick) is very upfront about why they want your data and what they plan on doing with it. Do you think asskicking services like Gmail and Google Maps grow on trees? The shit costs money, and it's perfectly fair for Google to try to recoup their investment by selling advertising. Stop making them out to be evil, and start admitting to yourself that Google is not free and you are participating in a trade every time you use it. If you don't like what they're doing, kindly stop using the goddamn services. I don't recall anyone pointing a gun at you forcing you to surf there.
a couple of Estonians (4 to be exact)
A couple of couples, to be exact.
A bought another couple thousand two days ago expecting the bounce and am getting reamed today :( But seriously I think this is a pretty shortsighted selloff. Success of Tiger plus the biggie--iPod-enabled Motorola cell phone; rumored for some months now--well send it back up.