We shouldn't expect to see a Google IPO anytime soon. The timing just doesn't seem to be right.
They are still on their way up while focusing on R&D and we're all happy about that.
It's when R&D stops producing results that they'll look into an IPO, and that'll probably be bad news for the founders, their bright engineers, and all of us, because Google will not be the same again.
do we really want to keep the same number of a long time?
I've had my current number since I first bought a mobile phone, back in 1997. For the past 6 years I've changed/upgraded phones 2 times, and used 3 different service providers.
All these companies, and no doubt countless others, keep the number in their records, share it, sell it, you name it.
The amount of spam I get on the mobile is nothing compared to email spam (1:5000?) but it's much more disruptive, because email spam doesn't make my trousers vibrate. The problem is when the price of bulk SMS goes down, a probable thing eventually, enough to make spam a real problem in mobiles.
It would be far more interesting if network operators let you change the number often, rather than keep it for long periods. That, or letting you have 2 or more numbers, so you give 1 to your family, 1 to your business contacts, and another to give away in on/offline forms, etc (you can do this already if you pay for re-direction numbers, but I'd rather have it as a network service).
Well, that's certainly one of the reasons, but far from being the reason.
If I had to pick the reason, the perhaps I'd go for: Google is successful because its founders had the vision and knowledge to put it all together. But then, this probably applies to anything and everything, so it's kind of useless.
The fact is that, within the words vision and knowledge lies all the reasons why Google is successful, and the financing of the venture is just one of them. I think Fast Company's article does list a series of good reasons.
Back in 1997, while spending some time at Digital Equipment Corp. (aka Compaq, aka HP) as part of my 1-year industrial placement, instead of getting any work done I kept planning my degree's final year project: a client-side search tool, using intelligent agents (I loved that expression back then) to crawl the web and rank pages according to how they link to one another (what I called web-communities). I had this grand idea of using this client as the beginning of a massive peer-to-peer search engine, that would collect the results of the distributed indexing and provide a unique front end for it. I even went as far as buying a domain name for it.
Why didn't I do it? Because Google arrived.
I'm sure I wasn't the only one disappointed with the search tools of the time, trying to come up with a better one. But Google was it. It was the next big thing, so I happily shelved the megamap project.
In my opinion they have the right approach to everything they do (well, a few minor exceptions perhaps), including the right way to rank pages, the right way to present results, the right approach to advertising, the right way to conduct a.com business, the right approach to you name it.
And above all, the right approach to the users, the people.
Have you ever thought about why there isn't any willingness within the open-source community to produce a large-scale open source search engine?
Could it be because there is no need for one? Google, in listening to it's users, and sometimes even providing more than what we asked for, ensures loyalty and keeps garage duos happy*. For example, after acquiring Deja, the Google folks went through the trouble of ensuring all the old hyperlinks to deja Usenet articles got properly forwarded to the new google URLs. As one person in Usenet said, and I try to quote as closely as I can: "they weren't forced to do it. it's pure public service".
Google is the people's web search engine. As long as they keep the people happy (and yes, that involves to keep innovating), they will keep growing stronger and bigger. (whether growing bigger is a good thing is open to debate)
* for those who didn't follow: garage duos are those who, when unhappy with something, produce the next killer application;)
Just wait for the first MMORPGs to hit the java enabled mobile phones, and we should get a good idea of Java's short term future in client-side apps.
Having mentioned games, I believe we must wait a bit longer to see that it's business applications that might show how J2ME is here to push Java client-side applications further than AWT and SWING have done so far. A hint is, someone, somewhere, maybe writing the first lines of code that will make SMS obsolete.
Spam really started to annoy me for about 1 year now. Been online since 1995 (no longer newbie, but no veteran either) and having settled with the same email address since 1999 resulted in ever increasing unwanted messages, but it got ridiculous in the past few months. Now I'm even getting bounced emails from spam sent in my name, outrageous. So for the past few days I started thinking of ways to avoid this problem. Filters seem effective, but I feel it's fighting too near your front door. New email protocols that stop SPAM at the sender's side (discussed in previous comments) seem like the way to go, but probably not to be seen in the near future. So below I will flush my incomplete thoughts, and contribute to open-brainstorming;) BTW, this is related to MY problem, having my own domain name and with the ability to have whateverIwant@mydomain.com, so it's not THE solution for global SPAM:
1) if I change my email address, SPAMers will not have it for some time (as little as it may be), so I'll be SPAM-free for that period
2) when I change my email address, I have to notify all those who I know have it (probably almost all in my own contact list, and a few more)
3) doing 1) and 2) every week/month is tedious for myself and my contacts, so automation is required
5) if 3) then my email address doesn't have to be 'human readable', ie. can be a computer generated hash of some sort: someRandomHash@mydomain.com
6) if 3) then problem will be that my contacts need to use the same system, otherwise it will be tedious for them to change manually every update
7) creating different email address to each contact would help identifying where address 'leaks' are happening
8) if 7) then updates are only necessary to the address(es) 'found' by SPAMers
9) all above doesn't cover public email addresses (say, in the contact me section of one's web site). These can be protected by using the anti-bot 'picture' method used by email registration sites (where you need to write the passphrase encoded in the picture). Passphrase to be written in the subject line, otherwise email auto-ignored.
10) these things could be implemented as plug-ins to existing email readers, but that's still fighting it in your PC (you already wasted the bandwidth), what we want is these added as a service in your mail server.
Probably this ranks low in the heap of ideas thrown at SPAM, but then perhaps the answer to SPAM is not ONE magical trick, but the combining of them all. In the end, if SPAM doesn't reach the end-user it will eventually die out... (fingers crossed anyway)
Let's all hope Pearson's predictions are more or less accurate, because if you're pessimistic, and today there is a good reason to be, then the future looks quite grim.
One can imagine the world falling in war, with most civilisation wiped out by biological/chemical/nuclear weapons.
Most of modern's technology will be no good without electricity, so any survivors will be going back to basics. Back to stone age?
With all respect to Mr. Pearson, such a grim prediction is just as likely to happen (or more likely even) than his own.
Personally (trying to stay positve) I think we'll have... just a bit more pollution, a bit more technology (no way robotic kitchen helpers!), less educated masses, and an ever increasing gap between the few rich and the many poor... not much change then.
Using remote controlled rats reminds me of those controversial military dolphin programmes that both the Soviets, and the Americans seemed to carry out.
Even though I'm not exactly an animal rights activist this still all sounds a bit... unnecessary. Especially when there are alternatives.
I worked briefly in a SAR robot project, while I was at Edinburgh University. Myself and two other MSc students got together and built 2 SAR robots, to participate in the SAR event at Robocup 2001, Seattle. Even though our project wasn't really ready in time (read, the heat-seeking robots rather chase the CNN cameraman than find victims, and didn't report at all to the base station) I did learn a lot from just being there.
For example, I learnt how difficult it is to remote control a robot using only its on-board cameras/sensors. One of Murphy's Urbies was due for repair when its human-operator managed to drive it down a flight of stairs, and I quote Murphy, "without ever touching the stairs".:)
And this difficulty is ever so larger when the robots go inside rubble, with lack of light, and the well known radio control problems/outages. Human control also limits the number of robots you can deploy, assuming you need 1 operator per robot.
Autonomous robot swarms are only possible if the robots are small and cheap, so you can deploy dozens or hundreds and accept a number of 'losses'. But this approach has its own disadvantages, such as small size meaning less sensorial capabilities for example. What good are dozens of little crawlers that just step on top of the victim's heads without ever detecting them?
In the event debriefing meeting, where sponsored teams had to make a small presentation, this Few_Big_Expensive vs many_small_cheap issue was debated. I believe there must be a compromise, and whoever finds the right balance will be half-way there.
As far as rats... I'd rather hear about research into fluorescent heat-seeking 'intelligent' jelly, that is poured on top of the rubble, seeks victims, attaches itself around their body keeping them worm (but intelligent enough to stay away from eyes, hears, nose, and mouth) and nutritionally rich so the victim can eat it if required...;)
By the looks of it, we still have some way to go until AI in games reaches the 'good enough' stage.
Good enough for what? For us to stop speaking and caring about it I guess.
When that happens, we'll have 'Invisible AI'* that just works, and game producers can no longer use it as a selling point.
Of course, I guess that won't happen anytime soon, and I can already see hardware manufacturers making AI-accelerator cards, with built-in multi-processors and neural net chips, to fit next to your graphics card. The 'Intel Inside' logo will gain a whole new meaning...
Slashdot Mirror
We shouldn't expect to see a Google IPO anytime soon. The timing just doesn't seem to be right.
They are still on their way up while focusing on R&D and we're all happy about that.
It's when R&D stops producing results that they'll look into an IPO, and that'll probably be bad news for the founders, their bright engineers, and all of us, because Google will not be the same again.
... open source it.
do we really want to keep the same number of a long time?
I've had my current number since I first bought a mobile phone, back in 1997. For the past 6 years I've changed/upgraded phones 2 times, and used 3 different service providers.
All these companies, and no doubt countless others, keep the number in their records, share it, sell it, you name it.
The amount of spam I get on the mobile is nothing compared to email spam (1:5000?) but it's much more disruptive, because email spam doesn't make my trousers vibrate. The problem is when the price of bulk SMS goes down, a probable thing eventually, enough to make spam a real problem in mobiles.
It would be far more interesting if network operators let you change the number often, rather than keep it for long periods. That, or letting you have 2 or more numbers, so you give 1 to your family, 1 to your business contacts, and another to give away in on/offline forms, etc (you can do this already if you pay for re-direction numbers, but I'd rather have it as a network service).
Where are mod points when you need them?
Thanks for post anyway, it probably saved me many hours of no-so-fun code writting, as I'm just getting into Java-XML programming.
Well, that's certainly one of the reasons, but far from being the reason.
If I had to pick the reason, the perhaps I'd go for: Google is successful because its founders had the vision and knowledge to put it all together.
But then, this probably applies to anything and everything, so it's kind of useless.
The fact is that, within the words vision and knowledge lies all the reasons why Google is successful, and the financing of the venture is just one of them. I think Fast Company's article does list a series of good reasons.
Back in 1997, while spending some time at Digital Equipment Corp. (aka Compaq, aka HP) as part of my 1-year industrial placement, instead of getting any work done I kept planning my degree's final year project: a client-side search tool, using intelligent agents (I loved that expression back then) to crawl the web and rank pages according to how they link to one another (what I called web-communities). I had this grand idea of using this client as the beginning of a massive peer-to-peer search engine, that would collect the results of the distributed indexing and provide a unique front end for it. I even went as far as buying a domain name for it.
.com business, the right approach to you name it.
;)
Why didn't I do it? Because Google arrived.
I'm sure I wasn't the only one disappointed with the search tools of the time, trying to come up with a better one. But Google was it. It was the next big thing, so I happily shelved the megamap project.
In my opinion they have the right approach to everything they do (well, a few minor exceptions perhaps), including the right way to rank pages, the right way to present results, the right approach to advertising, the right way to conduct a
And above all, the right approach to the users, the people.
Have you ever thought about why there isn't any willingness within the open-source community to produce a large-scale open source search engine?
Could it be because there is no need for one? Google, in listening to it's users, and sometimes even providing more than what we asked for, ensures loyalty and keeps garage duos happy*. For example, after acquiring Deja, the Google folks went through the trouble of ensuring all the old hyperlinks to deja Usenet articles got properly forwarded to the new google URLs. As one person in Usenet said, and I try to quote as closely as I can: "they weren't forced to do it. it's pure public service".
Google is the people's web search engine. As long as they keep the people happy (and yes, that involves to keep innovating), they will keep growing stronger and bigger. (whether growing bigger is a good thing is open to debate)
* for those who didn't follow: garage duos are those who, when unhappy with something, produce the next killer application
Just wait for the first MMORPGs to hit the java enabled mobile phones, and we should get a good idea of Java's short term future in client-side apps.
Having mentioned games, I believe we must wait a bit longer to see that it's business applications that might show how J2ME is here to push Java client-side applications further than AWT and SWING have done so far. A hint is, someone, somewhere, maybe writing the first lines of code that will make SMS obsolete.
Spam really started to annoy me for about 1 year now. Been online since 1995 (no longer newbie, but no veteran either) and having settled with the same email address since 1999 resulted in ever increasing unwanted messages, but it got ridiculous in the past few months. Now I'm even getting bounced emails from spam sent in my name, outrageous. ;)
So for the past few days I started thinking of ways to avoid this problem. Filters seem effective, but I feel it's fighting too near your front door. New email protocols that stop SPAM at the sender's side (discussed in previous comments) seem like the way to go, but probably not to be seen in the near future.
So below I will flush my incomplete thoughts, and contribute to open-brainstorming
BTW, this is related to MY problem, having my own domain name and with the ability to have whateverIwant@mydomain.com, so it's not THE solution for global SPAM:
1) if I change my email address, SPAMers will not have it for some time (as little as it may be), so I'll be SPAM-free for that period
2) when I change my email address, I have to notify all those who I know have it (probably almost all in my own contact list, and a few more)
3) doing 1) and 2) every week/month is tedious for myself and my contacts, so automation is required
5) if 3) then my email address doesn't have to be 'human readable', ie. can be a computer generated hash of some sort: someRandomHash@mydomain.com
6) if 3) then problem will be that my contacts need to use the same system, otherwise it will be tedious for them to change manually every update
7) creating different email address to each contact would help identifying where address 'leaks' are happening
8) if 7) then updates are only necessary to the address(es) 'found' by SPAMers
9) all above doesn't cover public email addresses (say, in the contact me section of one's web site). These can be protected by using the anti-bot 'picture' method used by email registration sites (where you need to write the passphrase encoded in the picture). Passphrase to be written in the subject line, otherwise email auto-ignored.
10) these things could be implemented as plug-ins to existing email readers, but that's still fighting it in your PC (you already wasted the bandwidth), what we want is these added as a service in your mail server.
Probably this ranks low in the heap of ideas thrown at SPAM, but then perhaps the answer to SPAM is not ONE magical trick, but the combining of them all. In the end, if SPAM doesn't reach the end-user it will eventually die out... (fingers crossed anyway)
Let's all hope Pearson's predictions are more or less accurate, because if you're pessimistic, and today there is a good reason to be, then the future looks quite grim.
One can imagine the world falling in war, with most civilisation wiped out by biological/chemical/nuclear weapons.
Most of modern's technology will be no good without electricity, so any survivors will be going back to basics. Back to stone age?
With all respect to Mr. Pearson, such a grim prediction is just as likely to happen (or more likely even) than his own.
Personally (trying to stay positve) I think we'll have... just a bit more pollution, a bit more technology (no way robotic kitchen helpers!), less educated masses, and an ever increasing gap between the few rich and the many poor... not much change then.
Using remote controlled rats reminds me of those controversial military dolphin programmes that both the Soviets, and the Americans seemed to carry out.
:)
;)
Even though I'm not exactly an animal rights activist this still all sounds a bit... unnecessary. Especially when there are alternatives.
I worked briefly in a SAR robot project, while I was at Edinburgh University. Myself and two other MSc students got together and built 2 SAR robots, to participate in the SAR event at Robocup 2001, Seattle. Even though our project wasn't really ready in time (read, the heat-seeking robots rather chase the CNN cameraman than find victims, and didn't report at all to the base station) I did learn a lot from just being there.
For example, I learnt how difficult it is to remote control a robot using only its on-board cameras/sensors. One of Murphy's Urbies was due for repair when its human-operator managed to drive it down a flight of stairs, and I quote Murphy, "without ever touching the stairs".
And this difficulty is ever so larger when the robots go inside rubble, with lack of light, and the well known radio control problems/outages.
Human control also limits the number of robots you can deploy, assuming you need 1 operator per robot.
Autonomous robot swarms are only possible if the robots are small and cheap, so you can deploy dozens or hundreds and accept a number of 'losses'. But this approach has its own disadvantages, such as small size meaning less sensorial capabilities for example. What good are dozens of little crawlers that just step on top of the victim's heads without ever detecting them?
In the event debriefing meeting, where sponsored teams had to make a small presentation, this Few_Big_Expensive vs many_small_cheap issue was debated. I believe there must be a compromise, and whoever finds the right balance will be half-way there.
As far as rats... I'd rather hear about research into fluorescent heat-seeking 'intelligent' jelly, that is poured on top of the rubble, seeks victims, attaches itself around their body keeping them worm (but intelligent enough to stay away from eyes, hears, nose, and mouth) and nutritionally rich so the victim can eat it if required...
By the looks of it, we still have some way to go until AI in games reaches the 'good enough' stage.
Good enough for what? For us to stop speaking and caring about it I guess.
When that happens, we'll have 'Invisible AI'* that just works, and game producers can no longer use it as a selling point.
Of course, I guess that won't happen anytime soon, and I can already see hardware manufacturers making AI-accelerator cards, with built-in multi-processors and neural net chips, to fit next to your graphics card. The 'Intel Inside' logo will gain a whole new meaning...
* - Yes, I'm adapting Don Norman's Invisible Computer term.