I've been working on writing a similar social networking service (mostly for fun), and that right there is probably one of my biggest concerns. Trying to come up with a system that allows varying granularity in privacy control, while also managing to be easy to use and simple to set up. So far, I don't think anyone's even come close to creating a really good solution for this. thefacebook.com, for example, has so many privacy controls that it's really intimidating to the user when you open them up and try to set them.
That is exactly what Microsoft wants, in my opinion, and in that respect, Google and MS are identical.
That is why MS is watching Google so closely.
No it's not. MS is watching Google so closely because they threaten to make the OS/platform you use to do your work irrelevant in a way that things like Java never could.
I bet you'll see a google map (or satellite photo if that area is covered) with an overlay of where your friends are. It wouldn't be that hard.
No, it's not that hard. I've already written code that does it. The tricky part is getting the GPS coordinates for the people, which, thus far, I haven't found a good seamless way of doing. I'm just using geocoder.us at the moment. Doing it via cellphones would be a lot nicer, but I don't really have that capability.
Funny you should mention that, because I'm working on writing my own social networking app right now that's focussed on a web of trust and pulling in external information and acting as the glue between all of the interesting services and standards on the net (Flickr, iCal, FOAF, vCard, RSS/Atom, Audioscrobbler/Last.fm, etc.) It's getting written with Ruby on Rails at the moment, though I might be reluctantly forced to move to something else for performance reasons.
While it's far from ready to actually show off, it's coming along at a fairly rapid pace (mostly because of Rails). Anyhow.
The only thing is that I'm not trying to deal with the sync problem, I'm just reading in the file and displaying it as appropriate. I'm trying very hard to have my system rely entirely on external resources, partly for storage reasons, partly to avoid lock-in. Only exceptions are obviously the cache and the database itself.
Theoretically though, if someone actually does solve the sync issue elegantly, they also solve the sync problem for me, since I'll just choose to pull the exported file from them by default.
Actually, my understanding was that they had an experimental vaccine, but no good way to test it on a large enough scale to really prove it works. I mean, who wants to be injected with bits and pieces of just about the deadliest disease known to man? It's very likely to be the sort of vaccine that gets injected into USAMRIID soldiers and pretty much no one else.
In any case, I believe that there have actually been two known cases of provably airbourne Ebola. The most well-known case involved a monkey holding area of sorts, in Reston, Virginia. They discovered that Ebola was being transmitted from cage to cage without any contact between the monkeys, everyone panicked, but then they later discovered that the strain couldn't infect humans for some reason. Several people were infected, but never displayed symptoms of the disease.
The other case involved a nurse in Zaire IIRC. The strain was named after her - Ebola Zaire Mayinga. Apparently this nurse ran around the city for a few hours while infected before they found her. Somehow she managed to fail to infect anyone, despite the fact that Ebola Zaire Mayinga is probably the nastiest strain of the virus that we currently know of.
I think it's safe to assume that Ebola Zaire, and especially the Mayinga strain are probably airborne, at least to a certain extent.
Also, I know for a fact, that your statement about the experiments is inaccurate. It's close, but not quite correct. What we have never seen is proof of airborne infection in humans in the wild. But this isn't much of a surprise -- the virus moves fast enough that, by the time you have competant observers, there's enough of the virus around that it's impossible to prove that transmission was airborne. In the lab, every single strain of Ebola has demonstrated itself to be capable of transmission by aerosols. And to the best of my knowledge, the experiments were reproduced. Check google scholar to be sure perhaps?
In any case, Ebola is a lot worse than you make it out to be, and even if it weren't airborne, the nature of crashing out is such that any lack of airborne ability would hardly slow the virus' spread much. When someone ejects infected particles all over you, some of those particles are going to end up in your eyes, nose, mouth, etc. You're a very lucky person if someone crashes out near you and you don't get infected.
But as others have mentioned, Ebola is incredibly rare. It kills far too effectively to really pose a epidemic-scale threat. Ebola has been the topic of numerous conspiracy stories as well as a Tom Clancy novel, video game, etc. It's a boogieman story meant to scare little children, really. The possibility of genetic modification has been brought up many times before, and usually with people being worried that Ebola might become more resilient and better able to infect via aerosol. However, the real threat would be someone modifying the virus to have a longer dormancy period.
At worst it makes him off-topic, at best it's informative, because I'm sure there are plenty of people who would be concerned by Russ Nelson's statement that would otherwise not be aware of the issue.
In any case, this is quickly moving off-topic as well, so let's all shut up, shall we?
One BIG difference I've noticed is that MSN search doesn't ignore sites with query strings in the URL. My entire site uses them, so it's pretty obvious in the logs, the MSN bot is the only thing spidering past the front page. If I want Google to index my site, I'd have to set up URL rewriting, which my shared web host doesn't allow. If you want to find information on my website, MSN search is the only way to get it right now if it's not on the front page.
Of course, the order that the results are returned in is total crap, and that's what most people notice.
I don't buy it. Google does not seem to me to be the sort of company that would turn around and just play Microsoft's game simply because it "works". When they adopted "Don't be evil" as one of their company mottos, they effectively announced that they had no intention whatsoever of repeating Microsoft's mistakes. And one of those mistakes is clearly vendor lock-in. Look around, do you see any Google websites that only run in Firefox?
I trust corporations only as far as I can throw em, and random Google paranoia can be healthy since it clearly results in Google staying honest. But seriously, some of us take this whole "Google is scary man!!!" thing too far.
You know, their tracking system is probably now very, very confused with all these Slashdotters spamming it with random keywords. "Why are we getting all this traffic on our site for our cheese grater product? Since when does Microsoft sell Windows for Macintosh, and why would we advertise it on our site if they did?"
Eve Online has had its own fan-supplied radio broadcasts for ages now. The most recent and successful of these stations being eve-radio. Actually, one of the main people behind eve-radio just started working for Blizzard. Go figure.
"Love is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own."
- Robert Heinlein
Point being, that calling something "selfish" is nearly meaningless in that, everything is ultimately "selfish". But many "selfish" acts are quite noble, because they are done out of love -- they have simply chosen to find happiness in giving others happiness. Strictly speaking, this is "selfish", but that makes it no less noble.
I totally did the exact same thing with my Rubik's Cube once. I was trying to find the darn thing because I wanted to show a friend of mine how fast I could solve it. Took me entirely too long to figure out why he was laughing at me.
I still can't break 1 minute though.:-(
Bias: I'm a kid just barely out of college. On paper, I don't have a whole lot of experience. I can point to a little less than 2 years of resume-worthy stuff. In reality, I've been doing this since I was 9. I'm 23.
I was working for a company doing auto-parts databases for my co-op; did a 6 month stint with them. Mid-way through, they hired a guy, probably in his late 50's who had 15 years of experience on his resume. They looked at his resume and went "wow" and pretty much just hired him on the spot, no test questions, no real verification that he knew his stuff. Not smart.
As it turned out, his actual experience amounted to punch-cards and VB. I left the company shortly after my co-op finished up, and last I heard, they were all panicking because they had just hired this guy to take over my job, but he's completely incompetant. I tried to train him to take over, but quite frankly, I could've picked anyone at random off the street and trained them faster than this guy. (Random side note, the truck factor is NOT your friend. Being indispensible does not equate to job security. It equates to a pair of shackles.)
So I call bullsh*t on you calling bullsh*t.
The truth of the matter is, experience and age don't mean jack, young or old. If you aren't prepared for the job you're being hired for, someone who has less on-paper experience and is younger (or older) can quite probably do a better job if they're better prepared. It all comes down to knowing how not to make stupid mistakes during the interview process. Don't try to play all-knowing manager, bring some of the team into the interview and have them ask questions. Don't just assume that 15 years of experience = coding god.
9 times out of 10, the young guys are the ones paying attention to the stuff on the cutting edge. If you're working with new technologies, most of the time, you're going to find you're hiring younger people. Of course, that 1 time out of 10, they're going to be a battle-worn veteran that knows every trick in the book and every pitfall you need to avoid. It's all about using the right tool for the job.
"If you think there's a problem, why don't you pay to fix it?"
Wherein lies the problem. Nobody wants to get caught holding the tab. This problem is going to make things like Y2K look inexpensive, and if it turns out that global warming is as much of a non-event as Y2K was, (whether because the problem was actually averted or because it was never a problem to begin with) then you're going to look mighty dumb for having spent 100+ trillion dollars or however much it will actually cost to slow/reverse the current warming trend.
There very well may be a problem. There also may very well be no good solution. If there is a problem, count on having to wait until it's obvious that people are dying from the problem before there will be any real effort put into fixing things (and not just from coincidental climate randomness either, because that could just be a fluke, right?). And just hope that the people who are dying are also the people who have the money. The United States would rather send you a billion dollars in aid than to spend quite a few trillion to curb pollution. In any case, you're still going to have to wait until it's too late, or almost too late, and perhaps satisfy yourself with a really big "I told you so." That's as close to victory as you're gonna get realistically.
Happened again to me this morning, took a screenshot. Not gonna post it because I like not having my website collapse. But if someone REALLY still has doubts, I suppose I could e-mail it to em or something. Not that anyone cares anymore.
Only problem is that we have absolutely no idea why the universe is spreading apart faster and faster. The big bang theory, and especially the big crunch theory would suggest that the universe should be slowing down, not speeding up.
Heh, well, you're asking for it.
In any case, supposedly, said forgiveness was already offered. Why would God repeat himself by sending you an e-mail? Especially given that there are plenty of more ambiguous and "efficient" methods of communication that would be available to an omnipotent god.
I have not a whole lot of faith in the 4.6GHz number either. My understanding is that pretty much everyone is hitting a solid barrier at around 4 GHz. (Intel cancelled their 4GHz part recently, for example.) You can build chips that go faster, but the yields drop through the floor and heat goes through the roof. Multi-core seems to be the only obvious answer, which is where all the big players have been headed for at least a year, closer to two now. But multi-core setups need to be more blade-like, less power, less heat, more cores. 4.6GHz, while well within the realm of possibility at 2 years down the road, is probably still going to be excessively warm for multi-core operation. I would have guessed something closer to 3.5, 3.8, something like that. But what do I know? I'm just doing the back-of-the-envelope thing.
Slashdot Mirror
I've been working on writing a similar social networking service (mostly for fun), and that right there is probably one of my biggest concerns. Trying to come up with a system that allows varying granularity in privacy control, while also managing to be easy to use and simple to set up. So far, I don't think anyone's even come close to creating a really good solution for this. thefacebook.com, for example, has so many privacy controls that it's really intimidating to the user when you open them up and try to set them.
That is exactly what Microsoft wants, in my opinion, and in that respect, Google and MS are identical.
That is why MS is watching Google so closely.
No it's not. MS is watching Google so closely because they threaten to make the OS/platform you use to do your work irrelevant in a way that things like Java never could.
I bet you'll see a google map (or satellite photo if that area is covered) with an overlay of where your friends are. It wouldn't be that hard. No, it's not that hard. I've already written code that does it. The tricky part is getting the GPS coordinates for the people, which, thus far, I haven't found a good seamless way of doing. I'm just using geocoder.us at the moment. Doing it via cellphones would be a lot nicer, but I don't really have that capability.
Funny you should mention that, because I'm working on writing my own social networking app right now that's focussed on a web of trust and pulling in external information and acting as the glue between all of the interesting services and standards on the net (Flickr, iCal, FOAF, vCard, RSS/Atom, Audioscrobbler/Last.fm, etc.) It's getting written with Ruby on Rails at the moment, though I might be reluctantly forced to move to something else for performance reasons.
While it's far from ready to actually show off, it's coming along at a fairly rapid pace (mostly because of Rails). Anyhow.
The only thing is that I'm not trying to deal with the sync problem, I'm just reading in the file and displaying it as appropriate. I'm trying very hard to have my system rely entirely on external resources, partly for storage reasons, partly to avoid lock-in. Only exceptions are obviously the cache and the database itself.
Theoretically though, if someone actually does solve the sync issue elegantly, they also solve the sync problem for me, since I'll just choose to pull the exported file from them by default.
Actually, my understanding was that they had an experimental vaccine, but no good way to test it on a large enough scale to really prove it works. I mean, who wants to be injected with bits and pieces of just about the deadliest disease known to man? It's very likely to be the sort of vaccine that gets injected into USAMRIID soldiers and pretty much no one else.
In any case, I believe that there have actually been two known cases of provably airbourne Ebola. The most well-known case involved a monkey holding area of sorts, in Reston, Virginia. They discovered that Ebola was being transmitted from cage to cage without any contact between the monkeys, everyone panicked, but then they later discovered that the strain couldn't infect humans for some reason. Several people were infected, but never displayed symptoms of the disease.
The other case involved a nurse in Zaire IIRC. The strain was named after her - Ebola Zaire Mayinga. Apparently this nurse ran around the city for a few hours while infected before they found her. Somehow she managed to fail to infect anyone, despite the fact that Ebola Zaire Mayinga is probably the nastiest strain of the virus that we currently know of.
I think it's safe to assume that Ebola Zaire, and especially the Mayinga strain are probably airborne, at least to a certain extent.
Also, I know for a fact, that your statement about the experiments is inaccurate. It's close, but not quite correct. What we have never seen is proof of airborne infection in humans in the wild. But this isn't much of a surprise -- the virus moves fast enough that, by the time you have competant observers, there's enough of the virus around that it's impossible to prove that transmission was airborne. In the lab, every single strain of Ebola has demonstrated itself to be capable of transmission by aerosols. And to the best of my knowledge, the experiments were reproduced. Check google scholar to be sure perhaps?
In any case, Ebola is a lot worse than you make it out to be, and even if it weren't airborne, the nature of crashing out is such that any lack of airborne ability would hardly slow the virus' spread much. When someone ejects infected particles all over you, some of those particles are going to end up in your eyes, nose, mouth, etc. You're a very lucky person if someone crashes out near you and you don't get infected.
But as others have mentioned, Ebola is incredibly rare. It kills far too effectively to really pose a epidemic-scale threat. Ebola has been the topic of numerous conspiracy stories as well as a Tom Clancy novel, video game, etc. It's a boogieman story meant to scare little children, really. The possibility of genetic modification has been brought up many times before, and usually with people being worried that Ebola might become more resilient and better able to infect via aerosol. However, the real threat would be someone modifying the virus to have a longer dormancy period.
...I've seen this already too.
And if it's a cause worth pursuing, then what?
At worst it makes him off-topic, at best it's informative, because I'm sure there are plenty of people who would be concerned by Russ Nelson's statement that would otherwise not be aware of the issue.
In any case, this is quickly moving off-topic as well, so let's all shut up, shall we?
One BIG difference I've noticed is that MSN search doesn't ignore sites with query strings in the URL. My entire site uses them, so it's pretty obvious in the logs, the MSN bot is the only thing spidering past the front page. If I want Google to index my site, I'd have to set up URL rewriting, which my shared web host doesn't allow. If you want to find information on my website, MSN search is the only way to get it right now if it's not on the front page.
Of course, the order that the results are returned in is total crap, and that's what most people notice.
Well, since I'm here on Slashdot again, setting my homepage to "Get back to work" really hasn't worked as advertised.
I don't buy it. Google does not seem to me to be the sort of company that would turn around and just play Microsoft's game simply because it "works". When they adopted "Don't be evil" as one of their company mottos, they effectively announced that they had no intention whatsoever of repeating Microsoft's mistakes. And one of those mistakes is clearly vendor lock-in. Look around, do you see any Google websites that only run in Firefox? I trust corporations only as far as I can throw em, and random Google paranoia can be healthy since it clearly results in Google staying honest. But seriously, some of us take this whole "Google is scary man!!!" thing too far.
That's a good question. See question #5 on the GLAT perhaps?
You know, their tracking system is probably now very, very confused with all these Slashdotters spamming it with random keywords. "Why are we getting all this traffic on our site for our cheese grater product? Since when does Microsoft sell Windows for Macintosh, and why would we advertise it on our site if they did?"
Eve Online has had its own fan-supplied radio broadcasts for ages now. The most recent and successful of these stations being eve-radio. Actually, one of the main people behind eve-radio just started working for Blizzard. Go figure.
"Love is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own." - Robert Heinlein Point being, that calling something "selfish" is nearly meaningless in that, everything is ultimately "selfish". But many "selfish" acts are quite noble, because they are done out of love -- they have simply chosen to find happiness in giving others happiness. Strictly speaking, this is "selfish", but that makes it no less noble.
I totally did the exact same thing with my Rubik's Cube once. I was trying to find the darn thing because I wanted to show a friend of mine how fast I could solve it. Took me entirely too long to figure out why he was laughing at me. I still can't break 1 minute though. :-(
Bias: I'm a kid just barely out of college. On paper, I don't have a whole lot of experience. I can point to a little less than 2 years of resume-worthy stuff. In reality, I've been doing this since I was 9. I'm 23.
I was working for a company doing auto-parts databases for my co-op; did a 6 month stint with them. Mid-way through, they hired a guy, probably in his late 50's who had 15 years of experience on his resume. They looked at his resume and went "wow" and pretty much just hired him on the spot, no test questions, no real verification that he knew his stuff. Not smart.
As it turned out, his actual experience amounted to punch-cards and VB. I left the company shortly after my co-op finished up, and last I heard, they were all panicking because they had just hired this guy to take over my job, but he's completely incompetant. I tried to train him to take over, but quite frankly, I could've picked anyone at random off the street and trained them faster than this guy. (Random side note, the truck factor is NOT your friend. Being indispensible does not equate to job security. It equates to a pair of shackles.)
So I call bullsh*t on you calling bullsh*t.
The truth of the matter is, experience and age don't mean jack, young or old. If you aren't prepared for the job you're being hired for, someone who has less on-paper experience and is younger (or older) can quite probably do a better job if they're better prepared. It all comes down to knowing how not to make stupid mistakes during the interview process. Don't try to play all-knowing manager, bring some of the team into the interview and have them ask questions. Don't just assume that 15 years of experience = coding god.
9 times out of 10, the young guys are the ones paying attention to the stuff on the cutting edge. If you're working with new technologies, most of the time, you're going to find you're hiring younger people. Of course, that 1 time out of 10, they're going to be a battle-worn veteran that knows every trick in the book and every pitfall you need to avoid. It's all about using the right tool for the job.
"If you think there's a problem, why don't you pay to fix it?"
Wherein lies the problem. Nobody wants to get caught holding the tab. This problem is going to make things like Y2K look inexpensive, and if it turns out that global warming is as much of a non-event as Y2K was, (whether because the problem was actually averted or because it was never a problem to begin with) then you're going to look mighty dumb for having spent 100+ trillion dollars or however much it will actually cost to slow/reverse the current warming trend.
There very well may be a problem. There also may very well be no good solution. If there is a problem, count on having to wait until it's obvious that people are dying from the problem before there will be any real effort put into fixing things (and not just from coincidental climate randomness either, because that could just be a fluke, right?). And just hope that the people who are dying are also the people who have the money. The United States would rather send you a billion dollars in aid than to spend quite a few trillion to curb pollution. In any case, you're still going to have to wait until it's too late, or almost too late, and perhaps satisfy yourself with a really big "I told you so." That's as close to victory as you're gonna get realistically.
All hail capitalism.
Outlook's Web Access UI ain't half-bad, but you should see what the guys over at Oddpost did. Most incredible chunk of JavaScript ever.
You forgot the "..." on that list. Mod me down, I'm just trolling now.
Happened again to me this morning, took a screenshot. Not gonna post it because I like not having my website collapse. But if someone REALLY still has doubts, I suppose I could e-mail it to em or something. Not that anyone cares anymore.
Only problem is that we have absolutely no idea why the universe is spreading apart faster and faster. The big bang theory, and especially the big crunch theory would suggest that the universe should be slowing down, not speeding up.
Heh, well, you're asking for it. In any case, supposedly, said forgiveness was already offered. Why would God repeat himself by sending you an e-mail? Especially given that there are plenty of more ambiguous and "efficient" methods of communication that would be available to an omnipotent god.
Or maybe I'm wrong? Hard to say.
And AMD is just starting to make dedicated media chips.
I have not a whole lot of faith in the 4.6GHz number either. My understanding is that pretty much everyone is hitting a solid barrier at around 4 GHz. (Intel cancelled their 4GHz part recently, for example.) You can build chips that go faster, but the yields drop through the floor and heat goes through the roof. Multi-core seems to be the only obvious answer, which is where all the big players have been headed for at least a year, closer to two now. But multi-core setups need to be more blade-like, less power, less heat, more cores. 4.6GHz, while well within the realm of possibility at 2 years down the road, is probably still going to be excessively warm for multi-core operation. I would have guessed something closer to 3.5, 3.8, something like that. But what do I know? I'm just doing the back-of-the-envelope thing.