Believe what? Do you want me to believe the guy is lying about what he believes employees should be treated like? If so, you might want to, you know, offer proof that its all just a front?
Congratulations on missing the point. This guy was sharing how Google thinks you can maximize profits by getting the most out of your "knowledge workers". Hence all the competitive advantage stuff at the beginning of the piece. Try to RTFA, please?
You'll occasionally see some good stuff in there. Yes, "My Turn" is usually some bratty teenager, but I think a week or two ago it was a girl from Jamaica telling her story about how he took care of her father, who had aids, from age 12 until he died several years later. I don't know about you, but such stories might be good reading for the aforementioned bratty teenagers!
Elsewhere in the magazine, Fareed Zakaraia's stuff is pretty good, as is Alan Sloan's and George F. Will's. I actually don't mind the fluff pieces, I subscribe to read the political stuff, and if I incidentally learn why Nick Lache and Jessica Simpson are breaking up, well, I look like less of a loser at parties:)
If you're not a fan of fluff, you might like the Economist. I'm not a subscriber, but I picked up a copy at the airport the other day, and there was some good stuff in there.
Congratulations on missing the point. This isn't an article on how great Google is. This is an article by somebody in Google management trying to explain how Google handles its employees, and why it has been sucessful. For somebody managing a small company, emulating some of these things might be interesting. I know gang interviews will be a new concept to at least a few people. We used them where I used to work, and they're a blast. It's easy for a canidate to convince management that he knows the engineering, its less easy for him to convince his potential coworkers.
People tend to like Ubuntu because, moreso than any other distro, it "just works" on a wide variety of configurations. Moreover, it's fast enough, quite streamlined, and has a large package repository. There is nothing particularly "special" about it. It just strikes a particularly good balance of qualities.
So what if you don't touch one in school, the Slashdot crowd should know that you learn more with the help of Google than you can in a classroom.
It's more or less true. I learned jack shit in school until high-school, and I went to school in a rich area. I shudder to think what schools in the rural USA are like, much less the rest of the world. In contrast, Google can teach you a great deal, especially with access to things like MIT's OpenCourseware. I'm an aerospace major, and I've got thousands of dollars worth of expensive textbooks on my shelf, but it's still a handy reference when a particular concept doesn't make sense and I need a different source with a different perspective. I can only imagine how useful it would be to a budding engineer (perhaps not aerospace, but even India needs EEs and MEs) who doesn't have ready access to the latest textbooks. In the realm of CS, with an internet connection and $20 (or whatever the ACM student subscription costs these days), you can have access to an enormous library of the latest journal publications in the field. People pay tens of thousands of dollars for access to such databases.
I won't argue that the internet is a replacement for a good professor and some substantial dead tree matter (I'm sure the OCW can only expose a tiny fraction of the utility of an actual MIT education!), but a lot of people don't have access to those things. The internet really is a phenomenal tool for those people who are willing to use it.
Because Windows 3.1 didn't have a fraction of the features of KDE or GNOME? It didn't come with huge true-color icons? It didn't include any applications either?
It's frightening the allusions programmers have about manual memory management. They seem to think that malloc() and free() are cheap functions, when in reality they can take hundreds of clock cycles. They think that malloc() is deterministic, when in reality, a badly fragmented freelist can cause most malloc() implementations to traipse through the entire heap, just like a GC.
The weirdest thing is C++ programmers. They freak out about every single cycle, but modern C++ idioms push the use of smart pointers, which are usually quite slow compared to a good generational GC.
In theory C++ custom allocators let the programmer specify the best behavior for any given situation. In practice, very few people use it except for the simple case of pool allocation (which is an optimization you can make in the more sophisticated GC systems). The problem with the C++ mechanism is that it always exposes 100% of the complexity, even in the 99% of the time that you absolutely don't need it.
The GCC devs don't break C++ binary compatibility for fun. They do it because they have to fix bugs in the ABI. The fact that the ABI is so hard to implement can be blamed on C++ and the IA-64 ABI itself. C++ is a bastard of a language to implement, with complex rules and many special cases. On top of that, the IA-64 ABI guys were obsessed with coming up with the fastest-possible C++ ABI, to save every single worthless clock cycle. So the ABI is full of little optimizations that, again, make it more complicated.
The Visual C++ ABI is much older and much simpler. Their exception-handling mechanism, for example, is an order of magnitude simpler, but also incurs more runtime cost*.
* A cost C++ programmers freak out about (3-5%), but one negligable to anybody with a brain.
Hardly. How did Microsoft get on top? Great operating systems? How about AT&T? Great phone systems? Monopolies generally get to where they are because they exist in industries (like phones or operating systems), that lend themselves to monopoly control. The ones that become big do so because they are the first ones on the scene, and competing with them becomes too difficult.
I have a Dell laptop. One corner of my screen started to die. They sent a pre-paid shipping box, had Airbourne pick it up at my door, and delivered it back a week later.
The Yonah will stomp the gizzards out of a dual-core G5 too, even at the same clock-speed. Just going by the SPEC scores, the 2.26 GHz Dothan is 40% faster in integer code. Throw in the fact that GCC on Intel generates better code than GCC on PowerPC, you're looking at a 50%+difference.
1) Yes. Apple has been lying all this time regarding the performance of the PowerPC. This has been true since the G3 era. Now, there are times when their hype is true, for example right at the introduction of the G4, and the introduction of the G5, but the PPC chips were never on top for very long. The x86 world just moves too fast. 2) Jobs sold out to IBM because as much as he hates Big Blue, he needed something to replace the aging G4. 3) The XBox360 needed a specialized chip. IBM had a good specialized PowerPC chip that fit the bill.
The Pentium M is faster per clock cycle than the G5 (unless you're running scientific code or games), and uses less power than the G4. Even if the new Intel chips are no improvement at all over their current line, they will be a big step up for Apple notebooks.
The laptops will be provided by government subsidized programs, but not necessarily our government's. They will be subsidized by the governments of nations purchasing thhe laptops. $15 billion among many developing nations isn't that much. India, for example, has an education budget of $1bn. Spending $100m over a period of 5 years could buy 1 million laptops, and use only 2% of the education budget. Countries that are "less developing", say in Latin America, would have appreciably better numbers.
Noam Chomsky has no problem with Jews. He's just unwilling to fallatate them at every chance like all the other white people are wont to do.
There is simply no truth to this charge --- read his writings. He might not particularly like Jewish people, but the accusations about him are all the result of Jews being on the wrong side of freedom of speech in the cases in question.
Who said anything about "free laptops"? The whole point of this project is to be sustainable --- to design and build a laptop that could actually get sold for $100, without requiring donations or anything of the sort. That, in part, was why this Apple proposal was rejected.
Do you realize how much more complicated that would make deployment of the project?
Logistics is one of the biggest bottlenecks in projects like these. It's self-evident --- you're trying to get thousands of services and goods out to millions of people. Making the logistics side more complicated is just plain suicide.
Less than you think. For example, a big problem in many places is access to healthcare. The problem, often, isn't so much capacity as the ability to distribute that capacity over the various villages in which people live. One way to do that would be to take advantage of the infrastructure that already exists --- local midwives, traditional doctors, etc. However, that quickly becomes a logistical nightmare. It becomes very difficult to track doses of medicine, medical supplies, etc. One of my dad's friends (they both work in international development) is trying to figure out a way to computerize this book-keeping, which would make things a lot easier. A $100 computer could be just the ticket in a situation like this.
It seems to me that most Westerners, outside of those who are versed in international development, aren't really in a place to judge what is and is not silly. They are often well-intentioned enough, but really know jack about how things really are in the developing world. These MIT folks are smart. I'm sure they have at least a couple of international development experts consulting them. I'd trust there judgement in this matter.
You can't fix a country from the bottom up. It's a losing endeavor. Clean water, while a problem, isn't the root cause. It's fine to treat the symptoms, but thinking like "we could supply a family with safe water for years for the price of one computer" is counter-productive. Without that computer, we will have to supply that family with water, permanently.
Let me tell you a story. There are dams in parts of Bangladesh that are designed to keep out flood waters. Ever year, the government spends money repairing those damns. Every year, many of them fail. Why? The contractors are corrupt --- they never fix the damns completely, because they know if they fail, they'll have more business next year. So what's the solution. To keep patching the damn? Or addressing the corruption?
Bangladesh has two big problems: political corruption, and economic stagnation. Fix these two, and while the other problems won't magically fall into place, it will allow progress to be made on the rest. One of the best ways to fix these two problems is education. Bangladesh needs to develop a nucleus of talent which can build businesses that can act as the nucleus for economic recovery. Moreover, Bangladesh needs to develop local talent. As it is, large numbers of well-educated people leave the country for Europe or the United States. This drain, in conjunction with the poor economy and poorly-educated populace (along with rather deep-seated cultural issues) is what allows the continuation of the political corruption that strangles the country.
I say these things as a Bangladeshi who now resides in the United States. Most Bangladeshis, at least the educated ones, will tell you the same thing --- while water safety is a noble endeavor, it's not arsenic that's killing that country.
Slashdot Mirror
Believe what? Do you want me to believe the guy is lying about what he believes employees should be treated like? If so, you might want to, you know, offer proof that its all just a front?
Congratulations on missing the point. This guy was sharing how Google thinks you can maximize profits by getting the most out of your "knowledge workers". Hence all the competitive advantage stuff at the beginning of the piece. Try to RTFA, please?
You'll occasionally see some good stuff in there. Yes, "My Turn" is usually some bratty teenager, but I think a week or two ago it was a girl from Jamaica telling her story about how he took care of her father, who had aids, from age 12 until he died several years later. I don't know about you, but such stories might be good reading for the aforementioned bratty teenagers!
:)
Elsewhere in the magazine, Fareed Zakaraia's stuff is pretty good, as is Alan Sloan's and George F. Will's. I actually don't mind the fluff pieces, I subscribe to read the political stuff, and if I incidentally learn why Nick Lache and Jessica Simpson are breaking up, well, I look like less of a loser at parties
If you're not a fan of fluff, you might like the Economist. I'm not a subscriber, but I picked up a copy at the airport the other day, and there was some good stuff in there.
Congratulations on missing the point. This isn't an article on how great Google is. This is an article by somebody in Google management trying to explain how Google handles its employees, and why it has been sucessful. For somebody managing a small company, emulating some of these things might be interesting. I know gang interviews will be a new concept to at least a few people. We used them where I used to work, and they're a blast. It's easy for a canidate to convince management that he knows the engineering, its less easy for him to convince his potential coworkers.
People tend to like Ubuntu because, moreso than any other distro, it "just works" on a wide variety of configurations. Moreover, it's fast enough, quite streamlined, and has a large package repository. There is nothing particularly "special" about it. It just strikes a particularly good balance of qualities.
So what if you don't touch one in school, the Slashdot crowd should know that you learn more with the help of Google than you can in a classroom.
It's more or less true. I learned jack shit in school until high-school, and I went to school in a rich area. I shudder to think what schools in the rural USA are like, much less the rest of the world. In contrast, Google can teach you a great deal, especially with access to things like MIT's OpenCourseware. I'm an aerospace major, and I've got thousands of dollars worth of expensive textbooks on my shelf, but it's still a handy reference when a particular concept doesn't make sense and I need a different source with a different perspective. I can only imagine how useful it would be to a budding engineer (perhaps not aerospace, but even India needs EEs and MEs) who doesn't have ready access to the latest textbooks. In the realm of CS, with an internet connection and $20 (or whatever the ACM student subscription costs these days), you can have access to an enormous library of the latest journal publications in the field. People pay tens of thousands of dollars for access to such databases.
I won't argue that the internet is a replacement for a good professor and some substantial dead tree matter (I'm sure the OCW can only expose a tiny fraction of the utility of an actual MIT education!), but a lot of people don't have access to those things. The internet really is a phenomenal tool for those people who are willing to use it.
Because Windows 3.1 didn't have a fraction of the features of KDE or GNOME? It didn't come with huge true-color icons? It didn't include any applications either?
Or, you could give me the benefit of the doubt and assume it was a typo (which it was).
It's frightening the allusions programmers have about manual memory management. They seem to think that malloc() and free() are cheap functions, when in reality they can take hundreds of clock cycles. They think that malloc() is deterministic, when in reality, a badly fragmented freelist can cause most malloc() implementations to traipse through the entire heap, just like a GC.
The weirdest thing is C++ programmers. They freak out about every single cycle, but modern C++ idioms push the use of smart pointers, which are usually quite slow compared to a good generational GC.
You're joking right? Ever heard of epoll()?
In theory C++ custom allocators let the programmer specify the best behavior for any given situation. In practice, very few people use it except for the simple case of pool allocation (which is an optimization you can make in the more sophisticated GC systems). The problem with the C++ mechanism is that it always exposes 100% of the complexity, even in the 99% of the time that you absolutely don't need it.
The GCC devs don't break C++ binary compatibility for fun. They do it because they have to fix bugs in the ABI. The fact that the ABI is so hard to implement can be blamed on C++ and the IA-64 ABI itself. C++ is a bastard of a language to implement, with complex rules and many special cases. On top of that, the IA-64 ABI guys were obsessed with coming up with the fastest-possible C++ ABI, to save every single worthless clock cycle. So the ABI is full of little optimizations that, again, make it more complicated.
The Visual C++ ABI is much older and much simpler. Their exception-handling mechanism, for example, is an order of magnitude simpler, but also incurs more runtime cost*.
* A cost C++ programmers freak out about (3-5%), but one negligable to anybody with a brain.
Yes, obsolete, as long as you're not running any code that has, oh, logic in it.
The Cell is a great chip for doing media processing. It's piss-poor for running general-purpose code.
DOS was on the first computers to make it big as business PCs. From that point on, Microsoft's monopoly train was in motion.
Hardly. How did Microsoft get on top? Great operating systems? How about AT&T? Great phone systems? Monopolies generally get to where they are because they exist in industries (like phones or operating systems), that lend themselves to monopoly control. The ones that become big do so because they are the first ones on the scene, and competing with them becomes too difficult.
I have a Dell laptop. One corner of my screen started to die. They sent a pre-paid shipping box, had Airbourne pick it up at my door, and delivered it back a week later.
The Yonah will stomp the gizzards out of a dual-core G5 too, even at the same clock-speed. Just going by the SPEC scores, the 2.26 GHz Dothan is 40% faster in integer code. Throw in the fact that GCC on Intel generates better code than GCC on PowerPC, you're looking at a 50%+difference.
1) Yes. Apple has been lying all this time regarding the performance of the PowerPC. This has been true since the G3 era. Now, there are times when their hype is true, for example right at the introduction of the G4, and the introduction of the G5, but the PPC chips were never on top for very long. The x86 world just moves too fast.
2) Jobs sold out to IBM because as much as he hates Big Blue, he needed something to replace the aging G4.
3) The XBox360 needed a specialized chip. IBM had a good specialized PowerPC chip that fit the bill.
The Pentium M is faster per clock cycle than the G5 (unless you're running scientific code or games), and uses less power than the G4. Even if the new Intel chips are no improvement at all over their current line, they will be a big step up for Apple notebooks.
The laptops will be provided by government subsidized programs, but not necessarily our government's. They will be subsidized by the governments of nations purchasing thhe laptops. $15 billion among many developing nations isn't that much. India, for example, has an education budget of $1bn. Spending $100m over a period of 5 years could buy 1 million laptops, and use only 2% of the education budget. Countries that are "less developing", say in Latin America, would have appreciably better numbers.
Noam Chomsky has no problem with Jews. He's just unwilling to fallatate them at every chance like all the other white people are wont to do.
There is simply no truth to this charge --- read his writings. He might not particularly like Jewish people, but the accusations about him are all the result of Jews being on the wrong side of freedom of speech in the cases in question.
Who said anything about "free laptops"? The whole point of this project is to be sustainable --- to design and build a laptop that could actually get sold for $100, without requiring donations or anything of the sort. That, in part, was why this Apple proposal was rejected.
Do you realize how much more complicated that would make deployment of the project?
Logistics is one of the biggest bottlenecks in projects like these. It's self-evident --- you're trying to get thousands of services and goods out to millions of people. Making the logistics side more complicated is just plain suicide.
Less than you think. For example, a big problem in many places is access to healthcare. The problem, often, isn't so much capacity as the ability to distribute that capacity over the various villages in which people live. One way to do that would be to take advantage of the infrastructure that already exists --- local midwives, traditional doctors, etc. However, that quickly becomes a logistical nightmare. It becomes very difficult to track doses of medicine, medical supplies, etc. One of my dad's friends (they both work in international development) is trying to figure out a way to computerize this book-keeping, which would make things a lot easier. A $100 computer could be just the ticket in a situation like this.
It seems to me that most Westerners, outside of those who are versed in international development, aren't really in a place to judge what is and is not silly. They are often well-intentioned enough, but really know jack about how things really are in the developing world. These MIT folks are smart. I'm sure they have at least a couple of international development experts consulting them. I'd trust there judgement in this matter.
You can't fix a country from the bottom up. It's a losing endeavor. Clean water, while a problem, isn't the root cause. It's fine to treat the symptoms, but thinking like "we could supply a family with safe water for years for the price of one computer" is counter-productive. Without that computer, we will have to supply that family with water, permanently.
Let me tell you a story. There are dams in parts of Bangladesh that are designed to keep out flood waters. Ever year, the government spends money repairing those damns. Every year, many of them fail. Why? The contractors are corrupt --- they never fix the damns completely, because they know if they fail, they'll have more business next year. So what's the solution. To keep patching the damn? Or addressing the corruption?
Bangladesh has two big problems: political corruption, and economic stagnation. Fix these two, and while the other problems won't magically fall into place, it will allow progress to be made on the rest. One of the best ways to fix these two problems is education. Bangladesh needs to develop a nucleus of talent which can build businesses that can act as the nucleus for economic recovery. Moreover, Bangladesh needs to develop local talent. As it is, large numbers of well-educated people leave the country for Europe or the United States. This drain, in conjunction with the poor economy and poorly-educated populace (along with rather deep-seated cultural issues) is what allows the continuation of the political corruption that strangles the country.
I say these things as a Bangladeshi who now resides in the United States. Most Bangladeshis, at least the educated ones, will tell you the same thing --- while water safety is a noble endeavor, it's not arsenic that's killing that country.