Yes. A screwdriver can be uses as a drill, and a drill can be used to remove screws.
I did not say anything in impossible. But the sheer fucking big amount of perl modules which will help you in small, handy conversion tasks between text formats, encodings, message types, etc. makes perl still the faster tool for the task. Believe it or not. Nearly twenty years of people who code in a certain direction leave some trace in some software ecosystem.
The point is that plain-text formats and many of the old formats are partially superseded by xml or json. To process these, other choises are better than perl. Althoug i have to admit that js is not the first things which comes to my mind in that respect.....
perl has a very specific scope js has a very specific scope
The overlap between the two scopes is not big.
for tasks in the center of its scope, perl is still the best - filtering some plain text file is just easy in perl. Perl never ran on any browser. but perl ran on pretty much anything else (I used it on DOS)
And js was never used in a significant extent to filter text files.
js in not new (so it can not be the "new" perl)
perl was inteded as an easy to learn extension-mixture-replacemnt of shell,tcl/tk,awk,sed. It still is and it is working well. (although tcl/tk still has something going for it (robustness, easy cross-platform gui)).
if there is on thing, which would be "the new perl" then it would be php. Most of the www things which would have been written in perl from 1995-2000 now are written in php.
After ten years in science (i left): The position and the fact if you are mentioned on a paper as an author depends on many things. I have seen people who never ever did anything but stand in the way (intentionally, sometimes) mentioned as co-authors due to higher forces (buddying with the group leader) and i have seen how phd students who built the setup over five years somehow slipped of the authors list after they graduated and where thanked for technical help.
I am no fanboy. On the contrary: I just see google as what it is: a company which wants to earn money.
"Dont be evil" does not mean "Throw out your money to fixe problems for an absolute minority of users immediatly in an expensive way".
I hate the mentality that google has to give away free goodies to everybody *in the way everybody wants* and *immediatly now*. It mainly means: dont fuck up your customers by locking them in and always tell explain what you do (which sometimes leaves something to be deserved, but in average works quite well). Google has no monopoly on free maps, far from it. Google did not lock out windows phone users. The article sounds like other browsers were supported. I am not sure if you are no aware about it, but there is no version of google maps which runs on lynx, or any other acsii browser. The best part is that the article goes on to complain that google does not put out apps for the platform, and phantazises that this helps phishing, since it is the possible to put out fake apps (which is more a problem of the store, if you would operate a store you would obviuously have a list of words which put apps under a special consideration).
The main reason i hat this mentality is because google sticks to it, and is very hesitating in allowing me to pay for their new services instead of waiting for the service to out of beta (when they found a way to advertise in a way which pays of for the 95% of lemmings) of be canceled (when they did not).
The very funny thing is that the "android fanboys" who seem to love google so much kept a 59Euro expensive navigation app as the top grossing app in the android store for many months. (If i woud drive with a car, i also would buy it). That is very funny.
Nobody knows what went wrong that google felt like doing that. They have a strong history of not doing this for the wrong reasons (otherwise they could have just refused to deliver the maps to the iphone 5 now). Fuck, location services are IMHO their to-be cash-cow (real names on foursquare, providing informaition to shops, etc. This development scared the shit out of me, and i am using offline maps whenever possible). Why would they scare users away? becaus somebody who has a windows phone will suddenly change his phone because google maps does not run? Really? This is such a weird logic, in incromprehensible. They did not block one of their most used services, but something which are interesting for expanding in?
Maybe the message could have been more clear, but since the article is otherwise full of vague shit, and there is no screenshot or anything. But it may be a measure which is good to take. Imagine a strongly increased data transfer or battery drainage on windows phones by google maps - what an outfry would that have been. There are reasons for deactivatin a service immediatly. And there are reasons not for taking immediate care of it - namely a user base which is too small.
Assume you are google. You obviously test your services for compatibility on some devices and you figure out that maps is basically unusable for a specific user group, which is less than 3.5 percent of all your users. They give negative feedback since they believe they device froze or something, and are as noisy as 20% percent of the other users. Now you decide to place some sign wich says:"sorry doesnt work right now." I think there is absolutely nothing wrong with that.
There are enough sources of free and paid for electronic maps on mobile devices. Nokia offers maps, some navigation system providers have apps, and osm also exists. Yipp. I tried it. Its very well possible to live without google maps.
The best part is that the writer of the original article demand detailed infromation from google but whenever he talks about his own (seemingly contradicting) experiences, the article contains a lot of "i am virtually sure" phrases and 'it mast have been in that way' logic.
in comparison, what was the average number of books being sold in that time?
I think one of the big problems of ebooks was that the adoption of the technical&scientific puslisher wasquite low up to one year ago.
I am buying ebooks happily from several sources (google books, kindle, epup from various sellers). And i think that in the last 3 years (since i bought a Sony Reader) i spend more money on books than the 10 years before. After one trans-continental relocation i decided that i will buy only ebooks, if possible.
I prefer non-DRMed ones over DRMed ones and transparantly DRMed ones over walled gardens (so sorry, Apple, you are out).
Potential Energies have an arbitrary reference point. Nothing in my argument changes if you replace -1/2E by 0 and 1/2E by E.
If you would not be an trolling AC you probably would have had the attention span to read the 2 paragraphs to the end and see that.
I have adopted a notation which is very usual in some areas of physics, most notably the situation when a two-level system is generated in a double-well potential and you want to express the truncated Hamiltonian in terms of standard pauli matrices, i.e sigma_z.
I thought about explaining it, and i will do so *without* mentioning the Dalai Lama.
The Situation is very simple: The definition of Temperature you learned in school, namely that it is only related to the average energy of many equal systems *is right*, but only for *classical systems*.
What does it mean?
If i have a classical gas, e.g. air at room temperature and i have to input to it, i can add this energy in whichever distribution i want. Easy to do that, no matter at which temperature we are.
No lets consider a quantum gas (to be complete: a quantum gas and not consiting of harmonic oscillators), e.g. electrons spins which are aligned to a magnetic field. Each of the electron can either have an Energy of -1/2E or +1/2E, where E depends on the electron spin and the magnetig field, but is constant. This means that if i have N electrons, we wont be able to input more energy than N * E into the system. Moreover if only a single electron in not in the high-energy state, we have to flip exactly this electron to get the system into its highest energy state. That may be pretty hard, statistically speaking.
So now imagine a quantum gas somehow statistically exchanging energy with a classical gas. That means, in our case, to bring the quantum gas to the state of Total energy = N*E (from the state of (N-1)*E) a high energy gas molecule would have the hit the very last of the low-ebergy electrons. If the high-energy molecules bounce from the electron in the excited state, then nothing will happen.
It is intuitive that, even if the two gases are in contact, the avergae energy between the systems will *not* be the same, just because its unlikely to flip *all* or *nearly all*.
The fromal version if this consideration is the textbook definition of the Temperature as a property in statistical physics, which is T=dE/dS, where E is the total energy and S is the Entropy (yes, the very same one as in computational science).
In the case of the two-level systems we find (let n be the numebr of systems in exited state)
S is proportional to -(n*log(n/N) + (N-n)*log((N-n)/n)) E is proprotioanl to n
That means that the sign of the temperature changes, as soon as more systems are excited than not.
The engineer knows how to make the elevator faster.
The mathematician knows how to make it move it less for the same result.
If both work together the effects multiply, since they are completely orthogonal.
As some physicist who converted to building control and analysis systems, i find it surprising how much mathematics you need to analyze the optimum point for control. It is even more amazing how complicated it is to predict the outcome of an investment, given different control strategies.
As it turns out, the biggest problem is the user. How much elevator movement could be saved if there would be a accepted way of informing the user that at certain times of the day they have to walk one stair down, but have a short waiting time? If you could inform them that accepting 18degree Celsius of room temperature instead of 20 for 2h would save a significant amount of heating cost? How can you increase the acceptance of (seemingly odd) decisions of the building control system? What kind of invasion of the privacy would users accept, in comparison to the positive savings of motion sensors in offices?
No, actually if you want to describe these things statistically (instead of trying to negotiate all of these things with the users), you need a mathematician, who will try to pack user behavior in distributions, correlations, and optimize for a given objective.
the part about "in order to receive public funding" is missing in the title. Its not like teachers are hold at gunpoint to teach evolution, they just dont receive public money if they dont.
Anybody may teach his child any theory about how the world and life appeared. I dont object that. The less people understanding science and having sacrificed the scientific method to fairytales there are, the more thre ressource "corrrectly working scientist" will be scare, which increases my market value.
But a society is wise to separate between thing to be paid for and not to be paid for. I am sorry, climate-change-deniers and creationists. The empirical science gets more and more important. the very same methos which lead to the empirical comfirmation of evolution also opened up all the other technical progress of the last 300 years.
The reply-all button is a very useful invention. If i want to reply to an email about a meeting where a certain group of people is involved, then i need a reply-all button. Not having it at all is a little fucked up.
What indeed is the problem (no to be circumvented with turning this off):
* missing use of bcc when sending out a mass email to many persons * email lists which are not moderated. Why would anybody allow these at all for "all employees"? It also prevents gruntled employees from demotivating email to all others. * missing email nettiquette * missing use of rss to communicate updates to things its easy to use, and suitable for notices about specific topics * general limitation in the number of recipients
Yep, that's it. Convert it to a cozy cafe with a few shelves of DVDs attached, provide space for laptops, and charge per hour. Provide some small separate rooms to watch the DVDs together, in case people like to sit around and have some selection.
(Oh. I must admit this idea is stolen. Manga cafes in Japan work that way - and they are still relevant).
Alternatively: One of the things where people may be more comfortable paying in cash than via a credit card and somebody keeping a central record may be adult movies.
Did you ever think about why no company offers a comercially supported version of octave (like there are commercial version of linux)? No? I am pretty sure this the reason.
I an assure you, i have experience in soldering SMD components. The tools for this are not that expensive. OK some manufactureing techniques are difficult, but if i look at a photo of the ihpone 5 board, i see many components which can be easily replaced with equipment below 5k. I was also not necessarily talkin about doing it myself but about the cost the small repair shop at the corner will have to repair it.
In the radios in the 50s (which i picked from the trash) schematics including simple test procedures were stuck in a small paper envelope taped to the inside of the enclosure.
In the electronic device of the 80s at least a schematic was included in the manual, often including simple test instrucitons.
At some point the belief started that only licensed service centers or at least some who pay fro the instructions should have the information to touch the holy devices.
MESSAGE TO THE COMPANIES: I am the customer who buys you fucking device. Every money you charge for helping to fix/repair the device i gave you money for will make me less happy.
Its sad to know that a broken stabilizer capacitor probably causes more cost (and effort) to repair dur to the small and intransparent market than to just buy a new device.
I once thought about creating a matlab implementation for a specific domain and use case. After looking at the patents which Mathworks holds, i stopped that. Many of these are for sure trivial, but if you would place somthing which they consider competition, you will not survive the lawsuit.
I was once maintaining a small political organizations website.
OK my system (few hundred lines of perl, run offline) *was* minimalistic.
OK my system did not have many features
BUT my system did what was needed (define a navigation structure,insert ~100 text documents at the right place), my system froduce blazingly fast static webpages, delivered in a zip file, which ran on every client device and every webhoster. And my system was definitely low-maintainance (since there existen NO dependencies at all).
Content was missing. People did not just mail me content (as i asked for). People did not just ask how to update the website. Content was outdated. *The ironic part is* as the guilty party for not updating (largely) static content my quite simple system was identified, which (seen from behind seems a little ironic).
So some fucking greenhorn arrived (i was happily handing this over to him, since i had a lack of time) and decided that he
a) does not understand enough perl to do this (he did not talk to me a single time)
b) content which was completely static needed PHP - because that was the only thing he knew
c) Taking an off the shelf CMS to magically solve all problems
Reality check:
a) The transition to the new web hoster (providing PHP) took so much time that the next election was nearly there before the website worked again
b) The website did not contain more content, it did not even contain the old ported content. People who were not able to send mail before did not produce content afterwards (did i mention that he had problem to configure user access to the CMS)
c) The guy left shortly later without a transition plan
d) After that the website was scrapped again and set up by a professional web designer (which was payed for setting it up but not for maintainance). The website still had not more content than my first version
Lessons learned:
* If there is a running system and people complain about outdated content, changing the system along wont change much. The people conplaining loudest are usually the ones who write complain-emails instead of sending the fuckign article (or even just a decent self-intro) you ask them for 2 months. *Ignore them*
* Running a website without getting payed has even worse ressource constraints than other websites. Every change of the underlying system is a ressource hog (oh yeah, you sure expect Bob to copy the few hundre documents in his spare time to google docs. You did the heavy lifting of settign up the google account)
*Most* japanese appliances sold are the same as 30 years ago. Yes, Japan has a diverse market with a larger than usual amount of devices which have advanced features (which i enjoyed). However, in the four years i spent there i have seen a lot (the majority) of normal fridges, low end phones, and water cookers for 20 Euro which did not sent text messages.
Not lets talk about text messages, a good example for my comment, which was not at all about technological lack of progress. For sure you are aware that Japan is the only country where the big phone providers blocked SMS to customers of the other provider? (Which put me in the absurd sitation that, when roaming, i could sent SMS to everybody, but when i bought a phone only to half of the people).
NFC payments in Japan are by no way a property of the phones there NFC payment card existed independently and later some phones also got this technology. *ironically* NFC payments are *not* a technological difficulty (as you suppose) but an organizational. Without JREast pushing the Suica cards this never would have happened.
And, yes your comment *exactly* states the problem. Japanese companies were used to pushing out generation by generation of devices. They completly relied on the Japanese market. And technology was only a pretext for doing so. The reasons and cultural deficiencies behind this are complicated to understand if you have not lived there for some time. However, nowadays the Japanes market is crumbling slowly away, and the outside products get cheaper and cheaper, and the Japanese buy these like hell.
So. the world has changed, and istead of adapting and pushing products into china and the rest of the world, Japan stays in isolation. What really fucking irritated me was that no Japanese found in necessary to learn Chinese.
Big Japanese mobile companies always take a long time to turn around if something happens. They all still don't understand why the iphone is successful since all the management level there was brought up in a time when NTT had a monopoly and the companies produced mobile phones nearly exclusively for NTT/docomo (imode), which in turn force fed the mobiles to the customers.
I liked Sharps products, learned programming on a MZ-80B. I always wanted to buy a zaurus, one of the first linux-based PDAs, but it was mainly sold/available inside Japan. When i lived in Japanlater, i bought a sharp netwalker T1 (only available in Japan).
The netwalker demonstrates all of Sharps shortcomings in a technically not so bad device:
-Target the Japanese market only from the beginning
-make no advertisements about the special features it has (e.g. standard usb host port, interesting pointing device layout)
-make a half-assed decision of using Ubuntu on it (for *two* devices they used the ARM port of Ubuntu)
-leave it unpolished, with easy to fix show-stopper bugs, trusting that the Japanese will always buy Sharp
>They proceeded to tell me that they have 'DDoS mitigation services,' >but they cost $6,000 if your site is under attack at the time you use the >service. Once the attack was over, the price dropped to $1500. (Nice >touch there Rackspace, so much for Fanatical support; price gouging >at its worst).
a) Ok. so now you could get it for $1500. The buy it. $1500 are roughly 18h of my time (as a consultant), so even the smalles action you coud do exceeds this. IFF you believe that this solves the problem then just do it and dont touch the rest. The advertisement on their web site sounds promising, bu did not test it.
b) Price gouging? No, it is reasonable, for several reasons. Doing the DDoS protection uses resources, which are allocated, but (according to your definition unsused). Why on earth should customers wise enough to see the necessity of a immediate reaction, which pay for this service provide the support, upkeep and unallocated ressources for the others? Such a service is like an insurance. In average you can offer it for a certain price, but if you know the risk hits, its not an insurance any more. Moreover: The service seems to be based on detecting deviations in the traffic patterns. If the attack is ongoing there is no way to detect the "ground truth" = the normal operation automatically. Which in turn will require *much* more human attention.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes. A screwdriver can be uses as a drill, and a drill can be used to remove screws.
I did not say anything in impossible. But the sheer fucking big amount of perl modules which will help you in small, handy conversion tasks between text formats, encodings, message types, etc. makes perl still the faster tool for the task. Believe it or not. Nearly twenty years of people who code in a certain direction leave some trace in some software ecosystem.
The point is that plain-text formats and many of the old formats are partially superseded by xml or json. To process these, other choises are better than perl. Althoug i have to admit that js is not the first things which comes to my mind in that respect.....
perl has a very specific scope
js has a very specific scope
The overlap between the two scopes is not big.
for tasks in the center of its scope, perl is still the best - filtering some plain text file is just easy in perl. Perl never ran on any browser. but perl ran on pretty much anything else (I used it on DOS)
And js was never used in a significant extent to filter text files.
js in not new (so it can not be the "new" perl)
perl was inteded as an easy to learn extension-mixture-replacemnt of shell,tcl/tk,awk,sed. It still is and it is working well. (although tcl/tk still has something going for it (robustness, easy cross-platform gui)).
if there is on thing, which would be "the new perl" then it would be php. Most of the www things which would have been written in perl from 1995-2000 now are written in php.
wish i had mod points.....
After ten years in science (i left): The position and the fact if you are mentioned on a paper as an author depends on many things. I have seen people who never ever did anything but stand in the way (intentionally, sometimes) mentioned as co-authors due to higher forces (buddying with the group leader) and i have seen how phd students who built the setup over five years somehow slipped of the authors list after they graduated and where thanked for technical help.
I am no fanboy. On the contrary: I just see google as what it is: a company which wants to earn money.
"Dont be evil" does not mean "Throw out your money to fixe problems for an absolute minority of users immediatly in an expensive way".
I hate the mentality that google has to give away free goodies to everybody *in the way everybody wants* and *immediatly now*.
It mainly means: dont fuck up your customers by locking them in and always tell explain what you do (which sometimes leaves something to be deserved, but in average works quite well). Google has no monopoly on free maps, far from it. Google did not lock out windows phone users. The article sounds like other browsers were supported.
I am not sure if you are no aware about it, but there is no version of google maps which runs on lynx, or any other acsii browser.
The best part is that the article goes on to complain that google does not put out apps for the platform, and phantazises that this helps phishing, since it is the possible to put out fake apps (which is more a problem of the store, if you would operate a store you would obviuously have a list of words which put apps under a special consideration).
The main reason i hat this mentality is because google sticks to it, and is very hesitating in allowing me to pay for their new services instead of waiting for the service to out of beta (when they found a way to advertise in a way which pays of for the 95% of lemmings) of be canceled (when they did not).
The very funny thing is that the "android fanboys" who seem to love google so much kept a 59Euro expensive navigation app as the top grossing app in the android store for many months. (If i woud drive with a car, i also would buy it). That is very funny.
Nobody knows what went wrong that google felt like doing that. They have a strong history of not doing this for the wrong reasons (otherwise they could have just refused to deliver the maps to the iphone 5 now). Fuck, location services are IMHO their to-be cash-cow (real names on foursquare, providing informaition to shops, etc. This development scared the shit out of me, and i am using offline maps whenever possible). Why would they scare users away? becaus somebody who has a windows phone will suddenly change his phone because google maps does not run? Really? This is such a weird logic, in incromprehensible. They did not block one of their most used services, but something which are interesting for expanding in?
Maybe the message could have been more clear, but since the article is otherwise full of vague shit, and there is no screenshot or anything. But it may be a measure which is good to take. Imagine a strongly increased data transfer or battery drainage on windows phones by google maps - what an outfry would that have been. There are reasons for deactivatin a service immediatly. And there are reasons not for taking immediate care of it - namely a user base which is too small.
Assume you are google. You obviously test your services for compatibility on some devices and you figure out that maps is basically unusable for a specific user group, which is less than 3.5 percent of all your users. They give negative feedback since they believe they device froze or something, and are as noisy as 20% percent of the other users. Now you decide to place some sign wich says:"sorry doesnt work right now." I think there is absolutely nothing wrong with that.
There are enough sources of free and paid for electronic maps on mobile devices. Nokia offers maps, some navigation system providers have apps, and osm also exists. Yipp. I tried it. Its very well possible to live without google maps.
The best part is that the writer of the original article demand detailed infromation from google but whenever he talks about his own (seemingly contradicting) experiences, the article contains a lot of "i am virtually sure" phrases and 'it mast have been in that way' logic.
in comparison, what was the average number of books being sold in that time?
I think one of the big problems of ebooks was that the adoption of the technical&scientific puslisher wasquite low up to one year ago.
I am buying ebooks happily from several sources (google books, kindle, epup from various sellers). And i think that in the last 3 years (since i bought a Sony Reader) i spend more money on books than the 10 years before. After one trans-continental relocation i decided that i will buy only ebooks, if possible.
I prefer non-DRMed ones over DRMed ones and transparantly DRMed ones over walled gardens (so sorry, Apple, you are out).
Well. I did. Although that was a german public school in the 12th grade, in the focused physics course. And 20 years ago.
Potential Energies have an arbitrary reference point. Nothing in my argument changes if you replace -1/2E by 0 and 1/2E by E.
If you would not be an trolling AC you probably would have had the attention span to read the 2 paragraphs to the end and see that.
I have adopted a notation which is very usual in some areas of physics, most notably the situation when a two-level system is generated in a double-well potential and you want to express the truncated Hamiltonian in terms of standard pauli matrices, i.e sigma_z.
I thought about explaining it, and i will do so *without* mentioning the Dalai Lama.
The Situation is very simple: The definition of Temperature you learned in school, namely that it is only related to the average energy of many equal systems *is right*, but only for *classical systems*.
What does it mean?
If i have a classical gas, e.g. air at room temperature and i have to input to it, i can add this energy in whichever distribution i want. Easy to do that, no matter at which temperature we are.
No lets consider a quantum gas (to be complete: a quantum gas and not consiting of harmonic oscillators), e.g. electrons spins which are aligned to a magnetic field. Each of the electron can either have an Energy of -1/2E or +1/2E, where E depends on the electron spin and the magnetig field, but is constant. This means that if i have N electrons, we wont be able to input more energy than N * E into the system. Moreover if only a single electron in not in the high-energy state, we have to flip exactly this electron to get the system into its highest energy state. That may be pretty hard, statistically speaking.
So now imagine a quantum gas somehow statistically exchanging energy with a classical gas. That means, in our case, to bring the quantum gas to the state of Total energy = N*E (from the state of (N-1)*E) a high energy gas molecule would have the hit the very last of the low-ebergy electrons. If the high-energy molecules bounce from the electron in the excited state, then nothing will happen.
It is intuitive that, even if the two gases are in contact, the avergae energy between the systems will *not* be the same, just because its unlikely to flip *all* or *nearly all*.
The fromal version if this consideration is the textbook definition of the Temperature as a property in statistical physics, which is T=dE/dS, where E is the total energy and S is the Entropy (yes, the very same one as in computational science).
In the case of the two-level systems we find (let n be the numebr of systems in exited state)
S is proportional to -(n*log(n/N) + (N-n)*log((N-n)/n))
E is proprotioanl to n
That means that the sign of the temperature changes, as soon as more systems are excited than not.
And how is the state of the random number generator from a variable?
The engineer knows how to make the elevator faster.
The mathematician knows how to make it move it less for the same result.
If both work together the effects multiply, since they are completely orthogonal.
As some physicist who converted to building control and analysis systems, i find it surprising how much mathematics you need to analyze the optimum point for control. It is even more amazing how complicated it is to predict the outcome of an investment, given different control strategies.
As it turns out, the biggest problem is the user. How much elevator movement could be saved if there would be a accepted way of informing the user that at certain times of the day they have to walk one stair down, but have a short waiting time? If you could inform them that accepting 18degree Celsius of room temperature instead of 20 for 2h would save a significant amount of heating cost? How can you increase the acceptance of (seemingly odd) decisions of the building control system? What kind of invasion of the privacy would users accept, in comparison to the positive savings of motion sensors in offices?
No, actually if you want to describe these things statistically (instead of trying to negotiate all of these things with the users), you need a mathematician, who will try to pack user behavior in distributions, correlations, and optimize for a given objective.
the part about "in order to receive public funding" is missing in the title. Its not like teachers are hold at gunpoint to teach evolution, they just dont receive public money if they dont.
Anybody may teach his child any theory about how the world and life appeared. I dont object that. The less people understanding science and having sacrificed the scientific method to fairytales there are, the more thre ressource "corrrectly working scientist" will be scare, which increases my market value.
But a society is wise to separate between thing to be paid for and not to be paid for. I am sorry, climate-change-deniers and creationists. The empirical science gets more and more important. the very same methos which lead to the empirical comfirmation of evolution also opened up all the other technical progress of the last 300 years.
The reply-all button is a very useful invention. If i want to reply to an email about a meeting where a certain group of people is involved, then i need a reply-all button. Not having it at all is a little fucked up.
What indeed is the problem (no to be circumvented with turning this off):
* missing use of bcc when sending out a mass email to many persons
* email lists which are not moderated. Why would anybody allow these at all for "all employees"? It also prevents gruntled employees from demotivating email to all others.
* missing email nettiquette
* missing use of rss to communicate updates to things its easy to use, and suitable for notices about specific topics
* general limitation in the number of recipients
Yep, that's it. Convert it to a cozy cafe with a few shelves of DVDs attached, provide space for laptops, and charge per hour. Provide some small separate rooms to watch the DVDs together, in case people like to sit around and have some selection.
(Oh. I must admit this idea is stolen. Manga cafes in Japan work that way - and they are still relevant).
Alternatively: One of the things where people may be more comfortable paying in cash than via a credit card and somebody keeping a central record may be adult movies.
yes, plus cross-document paragraph or phrase-level version tracking.
Thats exactly what not so few christians would claim about atheists.
Its funny how these crimes are (according to public opinion) always commited by people from the religious minority.
I am very anouyed by these senseless animations. If Apple patents them, dear companies, this is a paten i have no problem if you just accept it.
Did you ever think about why no company offers a comercially supported version of octave (like there are commercial version of linux)? No? I am pretty sure this the reason.
I an assure you, i have experience in soldering SMD components. The tools for this are not that expensive. OK some manufactureing techniques are difficult, but if i look at a photo of the ihpone 5 board, i see many components which can be easily replaced with equipment below 5k. I was also not necessarily talkin about doing it myself but about the cost the small repair shop at the corner will have to repair it.
In the radios in the 50s (which i picked from the trash) schematics including simple test procedures were stuck in a small paper envelope taped to the inside of the enclosure.
In the electronic device of the 80s at least a schematic was included in the manual, often including simple test instrucitons.
At some point the belief started that only licensed service centers or at least some who pay fro the instructions should have the information to touch the holy devices.
MESSAGE TO THE COMPANIES: I am the customer who buys you fucking device. Every money you charge for helping to fix/repair the device i gave you money for will make me less happy.
Its sad to know that a broken stabilizer capacitor probably causes more cost (and effort) to repair dur to the small and intransparent market than to just buy a new device.
I once thought about creating a matlab implementation for a specific domain and use case. After looking at the patents which Mathworks holds, i stopped that. Many of these are for sure trivial, but if you would place somthing which they consider competition, you will not survive the lawsuit.
THIS.
I was once maintaining a small political organizations website.
OK my system (few hundred lines of perl, run offline) *was* minimalistic.
OK my system did not have many features
BUT my system did what was needed (define a navigation structure,insert ~100 text documents at the right place), my system froduce blazingly fast static webpages, delivered in a zip file, which ran on every client device and every webhoster. And my system was definitely low-maintainance (since there existen NO dependencies at all).
Content was missing. People did not just mail me content (as i asked for). People did not just ask how to update the website. Content was outdated. *The ironic part is* as the guilty party for not updating (largely) static content my quite simple system was identified, which (seen from behind seems a little ironic).
So some fucking greenhorn arrived (i was happily handing this over to him, since i had a lack of time) and decided that he
a) does not understand enough perl to do this (he did not talk to me a single time)
b) content which was completely static needed PHP - because that was the only thing he knew
c) Taking an off the shelf CMS to magically solve all problems
Reality check:
a) The transition to the new web hoster (providing PHP) took so much time that the next election was nearly there before the website worked again
b) The website did not contain more content, it did not even contain the old ported content. People who were not able to send mail before did not produce content afterwards (did i mention that he had problem to configure user access to the CMS)
c) The guy left shortly later without a transition plan
d) After that the website was scrapped again and set up by a professional web designer (which was payed for setting it up but not for maintainance). The website still had not more content than my first version
Lessons learned:
* If there is a running system and people complain about outdated content, changing the system along wont change much. The people conplaining loudest are usually the ones who write complain-emails instead of sending the fuckign article (or even just a decent self-intro) you ask them for 2 months. *Ignore them*
* Running a website without getting payed has even worse ressource constraints than other websites. Every change of the underlying system is a ressource hog (oh yeah, you sure expect Bob to copy the few hundre documents in his spare time to google docs. You did the heavy lifting of settign up the google account)
* Never ever touch a running system
*Most* japanese appliances sold are the same as 30 years ago. Yes, Japan has a diverse market with a larger than usual amount of devices which have advanced features (which i enjoyed). However, in the four years i spent there i have seen a lot (the majority) of normal fridges, low end phones, and water cookers for 20 Euro which did not sent text messages.
Not lets talk about text messages, a good example for my comment, which was not at all about technological lack of progress. For sure you are aware that Japan is the only country where the big phone providers blocked SMS to customers of the other provider? (Which put me in the absurd sitation that, when roaming, i could sent SMS to everybody, but when i bought a phone only to half of the people).
NFC payments in Japan are by no way a property of the phones there NFC payment card existed independently and later some phones also got this technology. *ironically* NFC payments are *not* a technological difficulty (as you suppose) but an organizational. Without JREast pushing the Suica cards this never would have happened.
And, yes your comment *exactly* states the problem. Japanese companies were used to pushing out generation by generation of devices. They completly relied on the Japanese market. And technology was only a pretext for doing so. The reasons and cultural deficiencies behind this are complicated to understand if you have not lived there for some time. However, nowadays the Japanes market is crumbling slowly away, and the outside products get cheaper and cheaper, and the Japanese buy these like hell.
So. the world has changed, and istead of adapting and pushing products into china and the rest of the world, Japan stays in isolation. What really fucking irritated me was that no Japanese found in necessary to learn Chinese.
Big Japanese mobile companies always take a long time to turn around if something happens. They all still don't understand why the iphone is successful since all the management level there was brought up in a time when NTT had a monopoly and the companies produced mobile phones nearly exclusively for NTT/docomo (imode), which in turn force fed the mobiles to the customers.
I liked Sharps products, learned programming on a MZ-80B. I always wanted to buy a zaurus, one of the first linux-based PDAs, but it was mainly sold/available inside Japan. When i lived in Japanlater, i bought a sharp netwalker T1 (only available in Japan).
The netwalker demonstrates all of Sharps shortcomings in a technically not so bad device:
-Target the Japanese market only from the beginning
-make no advertisements about the special features it has (e.g. standard usb host port, interesting pointing device layout)
-make a half-assed decision of using Ubuntu on it (for *two* devices they used the ARM port of Ubuntu)
-leave it unpolished, with easy to fix show-stopper bugs, trusting that the Japanese will always buy Sharp
>They proceeded to tell me that they have 'DDoS mitigation services,'
>but they cost $6,000 if your site is under attack at the time you use the
>service. Once the attack was over, the price dropped to $1500. (Nice
>touch there Rackspace, so much for Fanatical support; price gouging
>at its worst).
a) Ok. so now you could get it for $1500. The buy it. $1500 are roughly 18h of my time (as a consultant), so even the smalles action you coud do exceeds this. IFF you believe that this solves the problem then just do it and dont touch the rest. The advertisement on their web site sounds promising, bu did not test it.
b) Price gouging? No, it is reasonable, for several reasons. Doing the DDoS protection uses resources, which are allocated, but (according to your definition unsused). Why on earth should customers wise enough to see the necessity of a immediate reaction, which pay for this service provide the support, upkeep and unallocated ressources for the others? Such a service is like an insurance. In average you can offer it for a certain price, but if you know the risk hits, its not an insurance any more. Moreover: The service seems to be based on detecting deviations in the traffic patterns. If the attack is ongoing there is no way to detect the "ground truth" = the normal operation automatically. Which in turn will require *much* more human attention.