Typically they only state that you can't work in the exact same space you left. So if you were writing code for web browsers, you couldn't go work for Mozilla. You can still go work in another area of computers, though, and it shouldn't be hard to find one you're qualified for. It seems like Google and this exec are just being overly cautious this time around.
They're technically unenforcable everywhere. As I understand it, you can almost always go to court and either get the non-compete waived, or get the company you left to pay you for your time. In low-profile cases the company won't try to enforce it, and in high-profile cases like this it's probably easier to just wait it out than make a big fuss over it.
Uh... this is how all companies hire, especially at the manager level. You interview, they see if you seem like a good fit, and they hire you. Sometimes they may have an idea of where they're going to put you first, but it's rare that you'll stay in the exact same job for long anyway.
Here's the thing, though... users who pirate Windows and really know what they're doing are a small percentage of the "piracy" market. Far greater are the number of people who are sold a PC with a pre-installed copy of Windows that they believe is legitimate, but isn't. By first displaying warnings, and then turning off their PC entirely, Microsoft is encouraging (with ever more stringent means) these people to rat out the people who sold them the illegal software.
That's my take on it anyway. I've heard several places that they make way more money on OEM sales than they do on in-store sales to individuals, so it seems to make sense.
Fine, let's accept for a moment that a single-celled organism after a billion years of living, somehow mutated into a 2 celled organism. Then please explain how it became a 3 celled organism.
If it takes billions of years for 1 single celled organism to turn into a 2 celled one, then for every cell addition it would take billions of years.
That's not the way the progression works, though. You don't go from a single-celled organism to one with 2, then one with 3, 4, 5, etc. Single celled organisms evolve colonies, like coral reefs, mold, etc. Then some mutation starts to specialize cells within the colony. For example, say some cells become more sensitive to food substances, or to light, and use chemical transmission to communicate this with the rest of the colony. They migrate to the surface of the colony, and bam, you have rudimentary senses. Or some mutate and become better at digesting food, at the expense of not being as mobile as the rest. They cluster together in the center of the organism, and get carried along, digesting food and diffusing the resulting high-energy by-products throughout the colony, and you've got the beginning of a digestive system.
And in fact, you can see some such creatures around today. Siphonophores are colonial single-celled creatures that exhibit specialization in the individual organisms, with some giving up certain abilities in order to perform better at their "task" within the colony. Jellyfish, sea anemones, etc. all consist of this type of colony. Even coral has feeding polyps, cells on the surface specialized to extract nutrients from the water.
The more you think about this, the sillier it get's, _especially_, since you are saying that we have to take the idea that a single celled organism turning to a two celled organism has to be taken on faith.
Please explain how an animal as incredibly complex as a fish, dinosaur or monkey can mutate into totally different animals, and there is some kind of science to prove this, yet we can't prove that a single celled organism turned into a two celled organism?
I'm not saying you have to take it completely on faith. The results are all over the place. Many species exist today that have been relatively unchanged for billions of years. Evolutionary offshoots that didn't have selective pressure to alter from forms they achieved a long time ago. Just because we can't make the evolutionary step happen in a laboratory doesn't mean we have no evidence.
You seem to be defending sniping, not discussing sniping. I'm guessing you are a sniper that is personally offended that others are discussing the bad points of sniping.
I've used Ebay five times in my life, and never once sniped. I just think the lot of you are being whiney little bitches.
The casual buyers hate it because they feel that bids were "stolen" from them. The sellers don't like it because hiding bids until the last seconds prevents others from bidding more for it, so buyers lose money.
For the fifth time, this only applies if you don't bid the maximum you're willing to pay up-front. If you DO that, this works like a normal auction, sniping or no. How exactly does sniping "prevent others from bidding more"? Ebay has this miraculous system in place so that if you put in $500, the bid is at $300, and someone else bids $450 1 second before the auction ends, you'll still win the item (for about $460). Hey, look, the sniper didn't win the auction, and nothing stopped me from putting in my high bid.
If it didn't matter, then why didn't they bid 3 days ago when they first saw the object? Of course, because it does matter, and they know it. If it didn't matter when they bid, the snipers wouldn't snipe. You can't convince me that the timing of the bids and when I get out bid doesn't matter. You know it does, because you know sniping is effective.
This is the stupidest piece of circular logic I've ever heard. Yeah, sniping can win you auctions you wouldn't normally win, but only if you're bidding against someone who doesn't enter their high bid from the start. Those people aren't doing the auction right, so sniping can mess their strategy up. But if you DO put your maximum price in at the beginning, then IT DOESN'T MATTER WHEN YOU GET OUTBID, right? Because you wouldn't have bid any more than you already put in. So if there's something that you WOULD pay $500 for, but you'd rather have it for $450, you don't f***ing put in a bid for $450 and bitch about getting sniped at the last minute. You're doing it wrong.
Because I want a good deal on something I want. Isn't that why everyone is there?
Not really. Auctions are only going to get you good deals if not many other people are interested in buying the item. If lots of people want it, the price is going to skyrocket damn quick, whether you're using Ebay or a real life auction.
But that isn't the same as "what it is worth," which is your previous standard.
You bid what you're willing to pay, which is what it's worth to you. It's an equivalent concept.
Why should I bid what I want to pay (different from what you said I should bid) then watch the bid for the next few days, then have the bid "stolen" in the last few seconds by a sniper that doesn't follow your instructions? After all, snipers, by definition, don't follow your directions. If they don't play by your rules, and they win more auctions, why should I take your advice? It seems to be a recipe for losing and frustration, according the the "experts" yet you are here asserting that I'm wrong. So, not only do I know your suggestion fails to win auctions, I now have the article in question confirming my findings.
If you bid the maximum that you're willing to pay, and lose in the last 5 seconds, you didn't lose because of sniping. You lost because someone else was willing to pay more than you were, which is how auctions are supposed to work. If you're saying that you would have gone back and outbid them again if you'd had time, then you obviously aren't bidding the maximum you're willing to pay from the start. The article is wrong, or at least misguided, in that it only affects early bidders who do NOT place their maximum bid, but instead try to bid manually. If you set an absolute maximum bid, one where you absolutely couldn't stand to pay any more for the item, and someone outbids you, it doesn't matter if they outbid you 3 days or 3 seconds before the auction ends, you still lose. You're blaming sniping for something that's just the way normal auctions work, and so are these researchers.
So I'll stick to sites like Amazon. Cheaper than eBay for lots of stuff, and it is on my doorstep before the eBay auction even ends (and free shipping, not having to use PayPal, and the thing in the box being exactly what I order).
I've already expressed my opinion of people who buy mass-market items on Ebay. I just don't see the point. If you were using Ebay for that in the first place, no wonder you seem jaded towards them.
Exactly my point. The crowd on/. is pretty biased towards the "oooh, pretty technology" camp, while the average household would never dream of spending 4x more on a television just so they could set up a "home cinema". The mass market just isn't there.
I went to China. I saw a pair of shoes that were worth $40 to me. They were priced at $20. I talked him down to $10. With your logic, I should have told him that I refused to pay his cheap price of $20 and I would insist on paying no less than $40 for them. Why am I required to bid the maximum that it is worth?
Why are you bidding on auctions at all, with that attitude? You bid what you're willing to pay. Ebay's system gives you the cheapest price it can, while still having you be the one to win. Don't put in more than you're willing to pay. It's really quite simple.
That certainly means it isn't a good deal. Not to mention that I've seen many things (including things I bid on) go for 20% to 50% more on eBay than what one could get it for at Amazon. Surely I shouldn't put in a bid at "what it is worth" when I think it is worth more than what Amazon is charging for it.
The people who bid higher than Amazon's price are idiots, and don't understand auctions either.
Or are you a sniper that just doesn't like people complaining about your bidding strategy?
I've bid on about 4 things on Ebay in the past 10 years. I've never once sniped. In fact, the last auction I won, I did so because I put in the most I was willing to pay. Some jackass tried to snipe me, and didn't even get close to my maximum bid. I laughed at him. Don't take out your frustration on me just because you don't understand the concept of an auction.
You can walk out of a Best Buy with a 50 inch DLP HD television for only $1300, on sale. That's pretty damn cheap. On the other hand, you can walk out of K-Mart with a very high-quality (for CRT) 32" flat-screen for about $300. Which do you honestly think mainstream consumers are going to buy?
Also the major studios have decided thats the way they want to go and if they do it right you won't have much of an option just as it's very hard to find vinyl copies of yoru favorite top 40 hits it'll be very difficult to find DVD's of your favorite movies eventually.
That's only true if they make the price essentially the same. The 95% of customers who don't care about extra resolution will see the DVDs for $15, and the HD/BluRays for $30, and guess which one they'll pick? As long as the studios expect people to pay more money for something they don't care about, they're going to lose money if they try to force people over.
Exactly. And there's not really a better system they could pick, since traditional auctions depend heavily on the real-time component. So yeah, snipers get into that a bit, but someone with a high enough sealed bid can still beat them, no matter how "emotionally involved" they become. There ARE places that run realtime online auctions, I believe, but I doubt they're anywhere near as popular as Ebay.
Re:And this is indeed a serious problem with EBay.
on
How to Win on Ebay: Snipe
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· Score: 2, Insightful
If you thought it was worth $110, why'd you only bid $100? It sounds like you (and everyone else bitching about sniping) are trying to run the auction manually, meaning you wait until you're outbid, and then bid again. That's not how Ebay is designed to work. You put in the maximum you'd possibly be willing to pay, and they'll give you the lowest price they can while still making sure you outbid everyone else. A guy who snipes the price up to $80 is absolutely no difference from someone who bids it up to $80 with days left in the auction. They're willing to pay that much, so you have to pay more to win the auction. Jesus christ, it's not that complex of a concept.
I agree, they probably shouldn't. And like I said, I doubt I'll be buying it myself. It's not correct, though, to say it's the exact same code with some high-level tweaks. It really IS a major rewrite, and hopefully one that will pay off another release or two down the road.
If I see one more Microsoft fanboy say Vista is the "biggest change since Windows 3.1 to Windows 95," I'm going to scream, because you're just quoting goofy marketing brochures. The transition to Vista is more like going from 95 to 98. Vista is the same old Windows code with an updated shell and some new APIs and minor features. It's not some huge, revolutionary change. You've been listening to hype for six years and have built Longhorn up in your mind.
This isn't really accurate. While the set of changes the USER sees is just about summed up there, the internals have been rewritten completely (supposedly, anyway). Everything's slapped together with a new modular system that will make it much easier to do more frequent, less drastic releases of the OS. Doesn't mean I'm going to go out and buy Vista, but it does mean the way they build and release could change after Vista ships. Faster turnaround on bringing improvements into the OS would be good for everyone.
I had a clear vision of what I wanted: a shiny, triple-coated and glazed, Ferrari Red BlackBerry that would accessorize my personality.
-article
You're not your job. You're not how much money you have in the bank. You're not the car you drive. You're not the contents of your wallet. You're not your fucking red-glazed blackberry.
-Tyler Durden
Right... the examples I gave were of colonial organisms. Systems in which all cells are identical, but they group together because doing so provides certain benefits. It's an after-the-fact example, but still worthwhile. As for observing the actual occurance of a single-celled organism evolving into a multi-celled one, that's another example of something that took close to a billion years with a planet full of single cells all reproducing and mutating like mad. You're just not going to get it in a laboratory, because we can't replicate the conditions that brought it about in the first place. It's one of those things you need to take based on logic and our best available evidence. Direct physical observation will never happen, at least not without radically different technology than we have today to perform such experiments.
Except that Futurama is genuinely funny. Plus it actually had somewhat of a continuing story, and some very touching moments. In one of the last episodes, Fry drinks 100 cups of coffee, and after drinking the last one, essentially becomes enlightened. Time stops, he just looks around, nods, and proceeds to fix everything. That's a beautiful moment. Few shows have that AND the level of humor that Futurama did.
No, it shouldn't. At the very least, they're entitled to ask "is there something wrong that we could fix for you?". Now, if you say "no", they need to drop it and do as you asked immediately. But there's nothing wrong with taking 5 seconds to find out if there's some way they could make it up to you instead of losing you as a customer.
I call bullshit. The numbers are likely inflated, and here's why:
Say a Microsoft employee performs a search on both Google and MSN/Live.com. They compare the search results, and see which one is better. I'm guessing this happens relatively often. Now, the MSN search may or may not have what they're looking for... maybe they click a couple links, maybe they don't. But Google's pre-fetching mechanism starts downloading the top 3 or so pages. They automatically get hits, whether the user clicks on them or not. If you decide the search terms you used were wrong, and re-search on both without clicking anything, Google just generated 3 hits "coming from their search results". I'm not saying they're trying to inflate leads -- pre-fetching is a valid technique -- but you have to take it into account when you look at these numbers.
That's not really true. There's a ton of 3rd party developers working on products for Windows, or plugins for VS or Office. If you meant other internet-based companies, I suppose you're right, though...
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Typically they only state that you can't work in the exact same space you left. So if you were writing code for web browsers, you couldn't go work for Mozilla. You can still go work in another area of computers, though, and it shouldn't be hard to find one you're qualified for. It seems like Google and this exec are just being overly cautious this time around.
They're technically unenforcable everywhere. As I understand it, you can almost always go to court and either get the non-compete waived, or get the company you left to pay you for your time. In low-profile cases the company won't try to enforce it, and in high-profile cases like this it's probably easier to just wait it out than make a big fuss over it.
Uh... this is how all companies hire, especially at the manager level. You interview, they see if you seem like a good fit, and they hire you. Sometimes they may have an idea of where they're going to put you first, but it's rare that you'll stay in the exact same job for long anyway.
Here's the thing, though... users who pirate Windows and really know what they're doing are a small percentage of the "piracy" market. Far greater are the number of people who are sold a PC with a pre-installed copy of Windows that they believe is legitimate, but isn't. By first displaying warnings, and then turning off their PC entirely, Microsoft is encouraging (with ever more stringent means) these people to rat out the people who sold them the illegal software.
That's my take on it anyway. I've heard several places that they make way more money on OEM sales than they do on in-store sales to individuals, so it seems to make sense.
Presumably this worked in the first place because those who were taking coffee without paying were feeling guilty. Why do you think they should not?
And in fact, you can see some such creatures around today. Siphonophores are colonial single-celled creatures that exhibit specialization in the individual organisms, with some giving up certain abilities in order to perform better at their "task" within the colony. Jellyfish, sea anemones, etc. all consist of this type of colony. Even coral has feeding polyps, cells on the surface specialized to extract nutrients from the water.
I'm not saying you have to take it completely on faith. The results are all over the place. Many species exist today that have been relatively unchanged for billions of years. Evolutionary offshoots that didn't have selective pressure to alter from forms they achieved a long time ago. Just because we can't make the evolutionary step happen in a laboratory doesn't mean we have no evidence.
You seem to be defending sniping, not discussing sniping. I'm guessing you are a sniper that is personally offended that others are discussing the bad points of sniping.
I've used Ebay five times in my life, and never once sniped. I just think the lot of you are being whiney little bitches.
The casual buyers hate it because they feel that bids were "stolen" from them. The sellers don't like it because hiding bids until the last seconds prevents others from bidding more for it, so buyers lose money.
For the fifth time, this only applies if you don't bid the maximum you're willing to pay up-front. If you DO that, this works like a normal auction, sniping or no. How exactly does sniping "prevent others from bidding more"? Ebay has this miraculous system in place so that if you put in $500, the bid is at $300, and someone else bids $450 1 second before the auction ends, you'll still win the item (for about $460). Hey, look, the sniper didn't win the auction, and nothing stopped me from putting in my high bid.
If it didn't matter, then why didn't they bid 3 days ago when they first saw the object? Of course, because it does matter, and they know it. If it didn't matter when they bid, the snipers wouldn't snipe. You can't convince me that the timing of the bids and when I get out bid doesn't matter. You know it does, because you know sniping is effective.
This is the stupidest piece of circular logic I've ever heard. Yeah, sniping can win you auctions you wouldn't normally win, but only if you're bidding against someone who doesn't enter their high bid from the start. Those people aren't doing the auction right, so sniping can mess their strategy up. But if you DO put your maximum price in at the beginning, then IT DOESN'T MATTER WHEN YOU GET OUTBID, right? Because you wouldn't have bid any more than you already put in. So if there's something that you WOULD pay $500 for, but you'd rather have it for $450, you don't f***ing put in a bid for $450 and bitch about getting sniped at the last minute. You're doing it wrong.
Yeah, it was meant to be ironic. :-P
Because I want a good deal on something I want. Isn't that why everyone is there?
Not really. Auctions are only going to get you good deals if not many other people are interested in buying the item. If lots of people want it, the price is going to skyrocket damn quick, whether you're using Ebay or a real life auction.
But that isn't the same as "what it is worth," which is your previous standard.
You bid what you're willing to pay, which is what it's worth to you. It's an equivalent concept.
Why should I bid what I want to pay (different from what you said I should bid) then watch the bid for the next few days, then have the bid "stolen" in the last few seconds by a sniper that doesn't follow your instructions? After all, snipers, by definition, don't follow your directions. If they don't play by your rules, and they win more auctions, why should I take your advice? It seems to be a recipe for losing and frustration, according the the "experts" yet you are here asserting that I'm wrong. So, not only do I know your suggestion fails to win auctions, I now have the article in question confirming my findings.
If you bid the maximum that you're willing to pay, and lose in the last 5 seconds, you didn't lose because of sniping. You lost because someone else was willing to pay more than you were, which is how auctions are supposed to work. If you're saying that you would have gone back and outbid them again if you'd had time, then you obviously aren't bidding the maximum you're willing to pay from the start. The article is wrong, or at least misguided, in that it only affects early bidders who do NOT place their maximum bid, but instead try to bid manually. If you set an absolute maximum bid, one where you absolutely couldn't stand to pay any more for the item, and someone outbids you, it doesn't matter if they outbid you 3 days or 3 seconds before the auction ends, you still lose. You're blaming sniping for something that's just the way normal auctions work, and so are these researchers.
So I'll stick to sites like Amazon. Cheaper than eBay for lots of stuff, and it is on my doorstep before the eBay auction even ends (and free shipping, not having to use PayPal, and the thing in the box being exactly what I order).
I've already expressed my opinion of people who buy mass-market items on Ebay. I just don't see the point. If you were using Ebay for that in the first place, no wonder you seem jaded towards them.
Exactly my point. The crowd on /. is pretty biased towards the "oooh, pretty technology" camp, while the average household would never dream of spending 4x more on a television just so they could set up a "home cinema". The mass market just isn't there.
I went to China. I saw a pair of shoes that were worth $40 to me. They were priced at $20. I talked him down to $10. With your logic, I should have told him that I refused to pay his cheap price of $20 and I would insist on paying no less than $40 for them. Why am I required to bid the maximum that it is worth?
Why are you bidding on auctions at all, with that attitude? You bid what you're willing to pay. Ebay's system gives you the cheapest price it can, while still having you be the one to win. Don't put in more than you're willing to pay. It's really quite simple.
That certainly means it isn't a good deal. Not to mention that I've seen many things (including things I bid on) go for 20% to 50% more on eBay than what one could get it for at Amazon. Surely I shouldn't put in a bid at "what it is worth" when I think it is worth more than what Amazon is charging for it.
The people who bid higher than Amazon's price are idiots, and don't understand auctions either.
Or are you a sniper that just doesn't like people complaining about your bidding strategy?
I've bid on about 4 things on Ebay in the past 10 years. I've never once sniped. In fact, the last auction I won, I did so because I put in the most I was willing to pay. Some jackass tried to snipe me, and didn't even get close to my maximum bid. I laughed at him. Don't take out your frustration on me just because you don't understand the concept of an auction.
You can walk out of a Best Buy with a 50 inch DLP HD television for only $1300, on sale. That's pretty damn cheap. On the other hand, you can walk out of K-Mart with a very high-quality (for CRT) 32" flat-screen for about $300. Which do you honestly think mainstream consumers are going to buy?
Also the major studios have decided thats the way they want to go and if they do it right you won't have much of an option just as it's very hard to find vinyl copies of yoru favorite top 40 hits it'll be very difficult to find DVD's of your favorite movies eventually.
That's only true if they make the price essentially the same. The 95% of customers who don't care about extra resolution will see the DVDs for $15, and the HD/BluRays for $30, and guess which one they'll pick? As long as the studios expect people to pay more money for something they don't care about, they're going to lose money if they try to force people over.
Exactly. And there's not really a better system they could pick, since traditional auctions depend heavily on the real-time component. So yeah, snipers get into that a bit, but someone with a high enough sealed bid can still beat them, no matter how "emotionally involved" they become. There ARE places that run realtime online auctions, I believe, but I doubt they're anywhere near as popular as Ebay.
If you thought it was worth $110, why'd you only bid $100? It sounds like you (and everyone else bitching about sniping) are trying to run the auction manually, meaning you wait until you're outbid, and then bid again. That's not how Ebay is designed to work. You put in the maximum you'd possibly be willing to pay, and they'll give you the lowest price they can while still making sure you outbid everyone else. A guy who snipes the price up to $80 is absolutely no difference from someone who bids it up to $80 with days left in the auction. They're willing to pay that much, so you have to pay more to win the auction. Jesus christ, it's not that complex of a concept.
Apparently YOUR opinion is for sale as well... or did you just not get the GP's point at all?
I agree, they probably shouldn't. And like I said, I doubt I'll be buying it myself. It's not correct, though, to say it's the exact same code with some high-level tweaks. It really IS a major rewrite, and hopefully one that will pay off another release or two down the road.
If I see one more Microsoft fanboy say Vista is the "biggest change since Windows 3.1 to Windows 95," I'm going to scream, because you're just quoting goofy marketing brochures. The transition to Vista is more like going from 95 to 98. Vista is the same old Windows code with an updated shell and some new APIs and minor features. It's not some huge, revolutionary change. You've been listening to hype for six years and have built Longhorn up in your mind.
This isn't really accurate. While the set of changes the USER sees is just about summed up there, the internals have been rewritten completely (supposedly, anyway). Everything's slapped together with a new modular system that will make it much easier to do more frequent, less drastic releases of the OS. Doesn't mean I'm going to go out and buy Vista, but it does mean the way they build and release could change after Vista ships. Faster turnaround on bringing improvements into the OS would be good for everyone.
I had a clear vision of what I wanted: a shiny, triple-coated and glazed, Ferrari Red BlackBerry that would accessorize my personality.
-article
You're not your job. You're not how much money you have in the bank. You're not the car you drive. You're not the contents of your wallet. You're not your fucking red-glazed blackberry.
-Tyler Durden
Right... the examples I gave were of colonial organisms. Systems in which all cells are identical, but they group together because doing so provides certain benefits. It's an after-the-fact example, but still worthwhile. As for observing the actual occurance of a single-celled organism evolving into a multi-celled one, that's another example of something that took close to a billion years with a planet full of single cells all reproducing and mutating like mad. You're just not going to get it in a laboratory, because we can't replicate the conditions that brought it about in the first place. It's one of those things you need to take based on logic and our best available evidence. Direct physical observation will never happen, at least not without radically different technology than we have today to perform such experiments.
Except that Futurama is genuinely funny. Plus it actually had somewhat of a continuing story, and some very touching moments. In one of the last episodes, Fry drinks 100 cups of coffee, and after drinking the last one, essentially becomes enlightened. Time stops, he just looks around, nods, and proceeds to fix everything. That's a beautiful moment. Few shows have that AND the level of humor that Futurama did.
Yep. Because driving a shiny car makes you a better person than him. Go you.
No, it shouldn't. At the very least, they're entitled to ask "is there something wrong that we could fix for you?". Now, if you say "no", they need to drop it and do as you asked immediately. But there's nothing wrong with taking 5 seconds to find out if there's some way they could make it up to you instead of losing you as a customer.
I call bullshit. The numbers are likely inflated, and here's why:
Say a Microsoft employee performs a search on both Google and MSN/Live.com. They compare the search results, and see which one is better. I'm guessing this happens relatively often. Now, the MSN search may or may not have what they're looking for... maybe they click a couple links, maybe they don't. But Google's pre-fetching mechanism starts downloading the top 3 or so pages. They automatically get hits, whether the user clicks on them or not. If you decide the search terms you used were wrong, and re-search on both without clicking anything, Google just generated 3 hits "coming from their search results". I'm not saying they're trying to inflate leads -- pre-fetching is a valid technique -- but you have to take it into account when you look at these numbers.
That's not really true. There's a ton of 3rd party developers working on products for Windows, or plugins for VS or Office. If you meant other internet-based companies, I suppose you're right, though...