That doesn't logically follow in all cases. Majority stockholders are often represented by people of the same cabal, such as board members of large pension funds. Same for renumeration boards, which should be independent but often have members who are CEOs of other companies. Independent, sure, but certainly not unbiased. Sometimes it seems like there's a race to the top; if a company is making money you can ask for a ridiculous portion of those profits if you're the CEO, after all "you'll still be worth it" even if it seems a little on the high side. If Cook gets $10M, why not $100M? Still a good bargain if Apple is making billions, right? I can understand companies want to pay top dollar for outstanding CEOs, but it seems like salaries of all CEOs are going up, even for the average ones or even for the clusterfucks. And the clusterfucks keep getting hired, too.
It's not always easy to tell how much of an individual contribution to the bottom line a CEO has made either. It's clear that the CEO potentially has a large impact but that doesn't necessarily make it so in all cases; even if the company did well, the CEO's actions might not have had mich of an impact, or might even have detracted from potentially even higher profits. In the end, what should determine the relative worth of a CEO is not the company's profits per se, nor his actual contribution to them, but how much he has done better compared to an average CEO.
At least, that is what I would expect as a shareholder. And I would like to ask: what kind of CEO would we get if we offered $1M instead of $10M?
EE here... and I wouldn't be able to build or design an FM radio. Though my major was digital electronics. And I've never actually had a job as an EE...
Price isn't the issue, many TVs come with free 3D or the glasses are very cheap, and this was true even with the early sets. And I never noticed that 3D Blurays were that much more expensive than the regular ones. Content is something of an issue, as it takes effort and know-how to do 3D well. Cameron got it right in Avatar (but also Sanctum), few others really get it right, but if you like 3D movies the content is there. Lastly, the headaches and dizziness seem to affect a relatively small group of people only. None of that is what's stopped 3D TV from becoming a hit.
It's simple physics what stopped it. Look up "depth budget". This is the maximum distance that content can stick out in front of the screen or go behind it, and it is directly proportional to viewing distance. You may have been blown away by the 3D world of Avatar in the cinema, but sadly you will never recreate the same immersion at home with a 3D set, even if you get a huge TV and sit so close to it that it covers the same part of your field of view as a cinema screen does. Because of the puny depth budget.
The good news is that VR doesn't have this shortcoming. And it adds another level of realism that shouldn't be underestimated: the ability to look around in the scene. Provided that cinematographers are willing to deal with the added complexity, VR movies will provide a new level of immersion. Same as in certain types of games (shooters, MMORPGs, etc): 3D didn't add enough to make it worthwhile bothering, but VR probably will... for people who won't mind wearing a VR helmet for hours on end, of which there are plenty. 3D TV was destined to fail, but I bet VR will be viable when affordable, high quality VR helmets will hit the market, with reliable head tracking (and hand tracking for games), and high definition displays that provide a wide field of view.
By the way, please don't lump VR and AR together like that, they may seem similar but they are two very different things, in terms of both technology and application. And AR has nothing to do with 3D TV.
The question here is: are "people who do real and meaningful work and can't or won't ead emails in HTML" a key demographic for Apple? Chuq seems to know how large this group is (4%). That's not a lot, but how important are they as a group and can Apple risk pissing them off? That's a business decision.
Maybe so, but would Instagram have been able to monetize that user base? Now that's something that FB is rather good at, and it's also something where having a large, established ad network helps immensely.
I've done some Smalltalk stuff in the past, but I never really got any special insights from it, nor did I achieve an "incredible productivity" compared to other languages / IDEs. It's good but I didn't experience it as a step change.
What makes or breaks a language is its libraries. Microsoft's libraries used to be notoriously sucky, often lacking symmetry and orthogonality, and with some oddly specific functions that looked as if they were written for a particular product (like Office). They've improved a lot though. How does Smalltalk fare in that respect?
Another thing: software with modern UIs have to be incredibly reactive in the sense that they need to respond aynchronously to a large variety of events from many different sources. I have found asynchronous event handling to be an impediment to clean code design and understanding that code, and it's a significant source of bugs as well. Does Smalltalk have anything to cleanly handle this? I recently started coding in C# / Xamarin, and found the async / await construct to be a rather nice improvement on asynchronous code.
These skills can be lucrative in the criminal networks
Heh, that reminds me of a survey where they asked graduating Russian high school students about intended careers (apparently the survey is taken every year). At some point, to some surprise, one of the top scoring careers was "policeman". It turned out that a cop's training and networking opportunities were seen as an excellent preparation for an entry into organized crime.
You're both right. In a lot of cases it makes financial sense to buy a house rather than rent one, and ownership gives you greater freedom to improve your home as well. I had the chance to buy my first rental apartment, and the interest + repayments were slightly less than my monthy rent thanks to a tax deduction, which made the decision rather easy. But before 2008 (and these days as well) people were urged to buy a home because "prices are only going up". That's what GP is on about: buy a home to live in if it makes sense, but don't buy only because people tell you it's going to go up in value.
Plan your purchase under the assumption that your home will have 70% of its value when you sell, and you shouldn't have any disastrous surprises.
Thanks for that; this is what most people don't get about the term "false positive rate". In your example, if you are diagnosed by the machine as having one of the diseases, the odds that the machine is wrong (i.e. that you don't have the disease after all) is.999 Most people figure it's 0.1 (the false positive rate)
That seems to be the most common complaint here about similar services (like Netflix): not a lack of local content (though that is omportant too), but a selection that seems rather meager compared to what's on offer in the USA. Series are lagging, recent movies are available only much later, and the selection of older content is smaller.
Administrative bloat is a plague over here as well, and not just in schools; health care suffers from the same problem. I recently visited a high school and was surprised at the size of the administrative wing. My old high school (about 30 years ago) only had a handful of non-teaching staff: a janitor, lab assistants, cafetaria staff, librarian, and 2 secretaries. There was no school director, we had a rector to run the school, but this did not take up all of his time and he taught Latin as well. Some stuff like cleaning was outsourced, but it was easy to see that most of the school's budget went towards actual education.
So if a company donates a bunch of software licenses to a school, they get to deduct the market value of those licenses from their taxes, while they spend exactly 0 dollars to produce those licenses. Their only "expense" is the school not buying licenses since they are now getting them for free (provided that the school was going to buy them in the first place).
Sounds like a great racket. As a software developer I need to look further into this.
Most people here celebrate Christmas (and call it that), christians and atheists alike. I even got christmas cards from some muslim friends. Some SJW's are trying to get Zwarte Piet banned (another Dutch December tradition)
That's going to be the real game changer, if drone delivery can be made cheap enough (and it probably can): low-value deliveries where customers are willing to pay a little extra for ultrafast delivery. Battery in your smoke detector ran out? Out of detergent or toilet paper? Feeling snacky? A quick order (or a tap on one of those Amazon buttons) and 15 minutes later the drone arrives on its resupply mission.
Sadly this probaby won't work for "long tail" stuff like electronic components at first, which is where it would be most valuable. Running out of a component can stall a project for days... in the past I'd run out to a brick & mortar store, but they have all gone out of business.
It's not just ads; a lot of websites pull in JS helper scripts from other sources (instead of hosting local copies of their own). And those sources do not always have the best performance.
He did not write the "AI" component (I use the term generously), nor the voice / face recognition software, nor the part that interacts with the home automation devices. These already existed. Zuckerberg's work was primarily an integration effort, combining more or less off-the-shelf stuff. It's a cool project but it's hardly groundbreaking; many home automation enthusiasts have built similar and better systems, and in less time (though they probably had a somewhat less demanding day job...)
With that said, I think it's commendable to get some hands-on experience if you're going to get closely involved in the development of such a product in your company. But let's not make it any more than it is: an interesting hobby project. And I agree: I'm not going to let any company have access to a bunch of open mikes around my home.
That sounds more like isolating them rather than banning them (maybe you mean ban as in "banned from a discussion board" rather than "banned from sales"). That would be fine.
The other day I got a notification from the domain registrar that also hosts email for my domain: "Account X on your domain has been used to send loads of spam through our SMTP server, so we are suspending your access to that server until you resolve the problem". Bad news, but good that they actually monitor this server and notify owners of compromised accounts. Turns out one account was using a rather weak password; I changed it and was back in business. I would be ok with ISPs doing something similar, cutting off (or severely limiting outbound traffic of) known compromised subscribers.
What I would really like to see is a good, very restrictive but easy to configure firewall for home use.
A former client actually had this policy specifically related to Oracle products. No stuff allowed that doesn't run on the free JRE, and no Oracle database products at all, unless it applied to a mission critical piece of software for which there was no viable alternative. The reason: Oracle was too expensive, and they were tired of the audits and the constant nickel & diming. And this was a Fortune 500 company with deep pockets and no fear of (over)spending.
Slashdot Mirror
That doesn't logically follow in all cases. Majority stockholders are often represented by people of the same cabal, such as board members of large pension funds. Same for renumeration boards, which should be independent but often have members who are CEOs of other companies. Independent, sure, but certainly not unbiased. Sometimes it seems like there's a race to the top; if a company is making money you can ask for a ridiculous portion of those profits if you're the CEO, after all "you'll still be worth it" even if it seems a little on the high side. If Cook gets $10M, why not $100M? Still a good bargain if Apple is making billions, right? I can understand companies want to pay top dollar for outstanding CEOs, but it seems like salaries of all CEOs are going up, even for the average ones or even for the clusterfucks. And the clusterfucks keep getting hired, too.
It's not always easy to tell how much of an individual contribution to the bottom line a CEO has made either. It's clear that the CEO potentially has a large impact but that doesn't necessarily make it so in all cases; even if the company did well, the CEO's actions might not have had mich of an impact, or might even have detracted from potentially even higher profits. In the end, what should determine the relative worth of a CEO is not the company's profits per se, nor his actual contribution to them, but how much he has done better compared to an average CEO.
At least, that is what I would expect as a shareholder. And I would like to ask: what kind of CEO would we get if we offered $1M instead of $10M?
EE here... and I wouldn't be able to build or design an FM radio. Though my major was digital electronics. And I've never actually had a job as an EE...
It'll be the choice of our squishy clockwork overlords.
Price isn't the issue, many TVs come with free 3D or the glasses are very cheap, and this was true even with the early sets. And I never noticed that 3D Blurays were that much more expensive than the regular ones. Content is something of an issue, as it takes effort and know-how to do 3D well. Cameron got it right in Avatar (but also Sanctum), few others really get it right, but if you like 3D movies the content is there. Lastly, the headaches and dizziness seem to affect a relatively small group of people only. None of that is what's stopped 3D TV from becoming a hit.
It's simple physics what stopped it. Look up "depth budget". This is the maximum distance that content can stick out in front of the screen or go behind it, and it is directly proportional to viewing distance. You may have been blown away by the 3D world of Avatar in the cinema, but sadly you will never recreate the same immersion at home with a 3D set, even if you get a huge TV and sit so close to it that it covers the same part of your field of view as a cinema screen does. Because of the puny depth budget.
The good news is that VR doesn't have this shortcoming. And it adds another level of realism that shouldn't be underestimated: the ability to look around in the scene. Provided that cinematographers are willing to deal with the added complexity, VR movies will provide a new level of immersion. Same as in certain types of games (shooters, MMORPGs, etc): 3D didn't add enough to make it worthwhile bothering, but VR probably will... for people who won't mind wearing a VR helmet for hours on end, of which there are plenty. 3D TV was destined to fail, but I bet VR will be viable when affordable, high quality VR helmets will hit the market, with reliable head tracking (and hand tracking for games), and high definition displays that provide a wide field of view.
By the way, please don't lump VR and AR together like that, they may seem similar but they are two very different things, in terms of both technology and application. And AR has nothing to do with 3D TV.
The question here is: are "people who do real and meaningful work and can't or won't ead emails in HTML" a key demographic for Apple? Chuq seems to know how large this group is (4%). That's not a lot, but how important are they as a group and can Apple risk pissing them off? That's a business decision.
Maybe so, but would Instagram have been able to monetize that user base? Now that's something that FB is rather good at, and it's also something where having a large, established ad network helps immensely.
I've done some Smalltalk stuff in the past, but I never really got any special insights from it, nor did I achieve an "incredible productivity" compared to other languages / IDEs. It's good but I didn't experience it as a step change.
What makes or breaks a language is its libraries. Microsoft's libraries used to be notoriously sucky, often lacking symmetry and orthogonality, and with some oddly specific functions that looked as if they were written for a particular product (like Office). They've improved a lot though. How does Smalltalk fare in that respect?
Another thing: software with modern UIs have to be incredibly reactive in the sense that they need to respond aynchronously to a large variety of events from many different sources. I have found asynchronous event handling to be an impediment to clean code design and understanding that code, and it's a significant source of bugs as well. Does Smalltalk have anything to cleanly handle this? I recently started coding in C# / Xamarin, and found the async / await construct to be a rather nice improvement on asynchronous code.
These skills can be lucrative in the criminal networks
Heh, that reminds me of a survey where they asked graduating Russian high school students about intended careers (apparently the survey is taken every year). At some point, to some surprise, one of the top scoring careers was "policeman". It turned out that a cop's training and networking opportunities were seen as an excellent preparation for an entry into organized crime.
You're both right. In a lot of cases it makes financial sense to buy a house rather than rent one, and ownership gives you greater freedom to improve your home as well. I had the chance to buy my first rental apartment, and the interest + repayments were slightly less than my monthy rent thanks to a tax deduction, which made the decision rather easy. But before 2008 (and these days as well) people were urged to buy a home because "prices are only going up". That's what GP is on about: buy a home to live in if it makes sense, but don't buy only because people tell you it's going to go up in value.
Plan your purchase under the assumption that your home will have 70% of its value when you sell, and you shouldn't have any disastrous surprises.
Blimps or Zeppelins
In your scenario they are called piñatas.
Thanks for that; this is what most people don't get about the term "false positive rate". In your example, if you are diagnosed by the machine as having one of the diseases, the odds that the machine is wrong (i.e. that you don't have the disease after all) is .999 Most people figure it's 0.1 (the false positive rate)
What is a "meter" anyway?
It's a milli-"click".
That's what he said: criminals.
That seems to be the most common complaint here about similar services (like Netflix): not a lack of local content (though that is omportant too), but a selection that seems rather meager compared to what's on offer in the USA. Series are lagging, recent movies are available only much later, and the selection of older content is smaller.
Administrative bloat is a plague over here as well, and not just in schools; health care suffers from the same problem. I recently visited a high school and was surprised at the size of the administrative wing. My old high school (about 30 years ago) only had a handful of non-teaching staff: a janitor, lab assistants, cafetaria staff, librarian, and 2 secretaries. There was no school director, we had a rector to run the school, but this did not take up all of his time and he taught Latin as well. Some stuff like cleaning was outsourced, but it was easy to see that most of the school's budget went towards actual education.
So if a company donates a bunch of software licenses to a school, they get to deduct the market value of those licenses from their taxes, while they spend exactly 0 dollars to produce those licenses. Their only "expense" is the school not buying licenses since they are now getting them for free (provided that the school was going to buy them in the first place).
Sounds like a great racket. As a software developer I need to look further into this.
Christians going to church to pray for a whole day and night
Meh, I'll take stuffing my face and exchanging useless gifts over that, thanks.
Santa Klaus was not invented by Coca Cola by the way, he's mostly based on Sinterklaas, a Dutch tradition.
Most people here celebrate Christmas (and call it that), christians and atheists alike. I even got christmas cards from some muslim friends. Some SJW's are trying to get Zwarte Piet banned (another Dutch December tradition)
"Just about impossible". So: possible.
That's going to be the real game changer, if drone delivery can be made cheap enough (and it probably can): low-value deliveries where customers are willing to pay a little extra for ultrafast delivery. Battery in your smoke detector ran out? Out of detergent or toilet paper? Feeling snacky? A quick order (or a tap on one of those Amazon buttons) and 15 minutes later the drone arrives on its resupply mission.
Sadly this probaby won't work for "long tail" stuff like electronic components at first, which is where it would be most valuable. Running out of a component can stall a project for days... in the past I'd run out to a brick & mortar store, but they have all gone out of business.
It's not just ads; a lot of websites pull in JS helper scripts from other sources (instead of hosting local copies of their own). And those sources do not always have the best performance.
He did not write the "AI" component (I use the term generously), nor the voice / face recognition software, nor the part that interacts with the home automation devices. These already existed. Zuckerberg's work was primarily an integration effort, combining more or less off-the-shelf stuff. It's a cool project but it's hardly groundbreaking; many home automation enthusiasts have built similar and better systems, and in less time (though they probably had a somewhat less demanding day job...)
With that said, I think it's commendable to get some hands-on experience if you're going to get closely involved in the development of such a product in your company. But let's not make it any more than it is: an interesting hobby project. And I agree: I'm not going to let any company have access to a bunch of open mikes around my home.
Snopes isn't always right. Certainly not about breaking stories like these.
That sounds more like isolating them rather than banning them (maybe you mean ban as in "banned from a discussion board" rather than "banned from sales"). That would be fine.
The other day I got a notification from the domain registrar that also hosts email for my domain: "Account X on your domain has been used to send loads of spam through our SMTP server, so we are suspending your access to that server until you resolve the problem". Bad news, but good that they actually monitor this server and notify owners of compromised accounts. Turns out one account was using a rather weak password; I changed it and was back in business. I would be ok with ISPs doing something similar, cutting off (or severely limiting outbound traffic of) known compromised subscribers.
What I would really like to see is a good, very restrictive but easy to configure firewall for home use.
A former client actually had this policy specifically related to Oracle products. No stuff allowed that doesn't run on the free JRE, and no Oracle database products at all, unless it applied to a mission critical piece of software for which there was no viable alternative. The reason: Oracle was too expensive, and they were tired of the audits and the constant nickel & diming. And this was a Fortune 500 company with deep pockets and no fear of (over)spending.