I hope/. doesn't lose its rep as the premiere internet stampede as people start referring to the "Google effect".
Much as I enjoy perusing information (and I do follow the links), this does raise a good question. Obviously, it's generally a good thing for a website to get traffic (usually, that's why the website's there), but are there moral implications for overloading a perfectly innocent site (fortunately, this site seems academic, so we aren't hurting business, per se)? Should we have a guilty conscience for bring down servers as wantonly as we do? I think not, as the Internet is open and free and who's going to stop us, but it's an interesting point they raise.
Reminds me of when I served at a restaurant and managers would complain when business was slow, but they'd get equally upset if a couple of buses pulled in and we were slammed with 100+ customers all at once. With so many customers, it was tough for us to give them good service, much less take good care of the customers we already had. I guess the exposure Google (and/.) gives can be, as they say, as much a blessing as a curse.
That's a good question. Well if we outsource much of our production and harvest much of our resources from other countries, we'll become something of a "soft" economy where the core of our economy is consumer services and products that we don't even make.
Think England, which doesn't have all that many resources, or production, or space, but has ideas and capital that it uses to produce externally. So we'll eventually just be working to provide enough services to sustain the society and working as managers trying to come up with new ideas for our businesses.
The problem is that ideas are renewable, and our arrangement will work only so long as none of our outsourced employees come up with anything.
But I think I've heard of this before, when the Romans grew soft in their power and control, relying on their satellite colonies for certain vital production and everything. Obviously, times were different and the example is slightly different, but I think it still works. But we all know how that ended up.
Well, I'd want to live in a world where I'm a tech company's CEO and rich as hell. I guess it'd be icing on the cake if everybody else was unemployed and poor so everything was cheaper also.
And it follows: who are the ones in the company choosing to outsource?
Yes, people mostly likely don't want to play old generation games on a new console. But people might want to play them on a different console. This is the big deal with the mini PS (forget what it's called) or porting old NES/SNES games to GBA. It's true that people wouldn't care about whether N64 would paly these old games, but people would buy it if they can play old-school (fun) games wherever they go.
There are stupid-user taxes for computers and the internet. It's called the premium users pay for Windows over Linux. Or the premium that some people would pay for AOL over alternatives, perhaps.
That's business these days. It seems that most companies are selling products only as a means so that they can manage information, which is the real valuable resource that consumers can provide (cash is good, but...). Places like Google, Amazon, and Tivo, which can get into our homes and our computers, are more like information brokers who use their product (searches, books, television) as a means to draw the consumer in, or the means by which they collect data. Hell, even Kazaa, and all of its spyware, do this sort of stuff. When Google sets up its government intelligence bureau, or Tivo lands huge contracts with advertising agencies, I personally will feel unsettled that all of this stuff about me (personal stuff, nonetheless) is being used capitalistically by these big companies.
Yeah, I'm trying to think of some way that it could all work. Perhaps some sort of Friendster (or now Orkut) style validation where screennames get scores based on whether they're legitimate people or not (heck, that's even like/. moderation). But then the potential for abuse there is also astronomical, as spammers could set up validation farms. In essence, any sort of spam prevention that depends upon users will fail because spammers are users themselves. In fact, spammers sre most likely users with significantly more resources than the average user. So I think it's trouble, no matter what.
... and bingo, new SPAM also. If people migrate to IM, then Spammers can just use dictionaries to hassle people's screen names (I have already experienced people trolling for sex talk online) and soon we'll be dealing with dozens of pop-up (which makes it worse) windows asking if we want Printer Ink. And it doesn't necessarily help having a buddy list, because all IM services will still pop-up a window "Spammer has sent a message, would you like to see it", so even though you can avoid the Spam, you still have to deal with the window.
It helps that you can be offline, but if IM is the chief communication then we won't be able to stay offline, if we want our messages. And those that collect messages while offline (i.e. Yahoo) will just flood you with back Spam.
If Spammers can break email, they'll break IM. It's just that up until now there hasn't been reason to. Don't give them a reason, either.
the ISPs will have a financial incentive not to block them.
It's sort of a sly trick that ISPs already have a financial incentive not to block spammers. Spammers pay lots of good money to use the ISPs' servers for distribution.
Yes, but there is a tradeoff that you're ignoring. When the company is privately owned (or owned by its employees), they actually have a lot more invested in the company's success (and especially long-term success) than the casual investor. If this is my life saving's and my life's work, or if this is my career, or my job, or something like that, then the company's success, and long-term success, are vitally important to the investor.
Going public could very likely bring in a lot of money, but that's bringing in money the same way you get more customers (and don't just cater to "regulars"). These investors love an opportunity and do want their companies to succeed, but all with different goals. Some don't think long-term and are willing to cash out after a 5% jump (these types of investors don't do a whole lot for the company, long-term), some investors could even short the company to pressure the stock to drop, and all of these casual investors would lose only their investment if the company fails (not a good thing), but employees and founders stand to lose a lot more (their sources of income). The problem with casual, mass-market customers over regulars is that whatever tactic brought all the customers to you will very likely bring them away. Google might bring in millions of capital via its IPO, but the next "hot" IPO and all of these people might bail. And you've likely turned off the "regulars" in the process.
Yes, you want your invested company's to succeed, for only as long as it takes you to sell the stock.
Obviously Google's just another company that needs to pad its bottom-line, but doesn't it seem like Google's already done this. It seems to come naturally, with any upscaling of a company, that it'll become more "corporatized", and from talking to friends who work there (and observing their product) it seems that they've already become somewhat corporate. Despite efforts to keep things "cool" and "edgy" (beanbag chairs or whatever), there's a strong sense of hierarchy and everything. And it's a common beef that Google's become more an infomercial than an information repository. I wouldn't necessarily go so far, Google's still plenty useful, but I guess they're more going for padded revenues than anything else these days.
Google's nearly already a corporation. An IPO would merely "seal the deal".
In fact many distros might be the only thing to save java. With each release there's more deprecation and more packages and bloat, and it seems clear that Sun is intent on continuing this particular trend. Hey, Sun can do whatever they want, and let developers decide. I'm sure some developers would like the extra garbage collection and all the extra GUI packages with Interface upon Interface....
If we have companies, like Eclipse, which will streamline the functionality of Java, and cater the look to a certain kind of developer, those people won't be so disgruntled with Sun's java. Lots of developers long for the speedy, free ways of C++ (don't ask me about C#). Well, then maybe somebody will develop a java distro that would be slimmed down and present you with less useless crap (or give you more flexibility to not download it/use it). Would it still be java? Who cares? I'm sure people would use it.
Swing and AWT are horrible festering pieces of crap
Maybe not that bad, but not good. We use swing across the board at our company and I can't tell you how hideous each window is. And they look different on every machine. A layout that looks good on my system has buttons cramped in the corner on somebody else's.
And everything runs slow as hell.
Not saying that doing the stuff in C++ would be any easier, but Java's GUI packages are all sorts of shady.
You're right, love it or hate it, Java is the brainchild of Sun, but (legitimately) part of the whole slashdot/software community is that a programming language is something that shouldn't be contained, or made propietary. Java is certainly greatly derived from C++ (its successes and its failures, yes), which was "owned" (perhaps not so strongly) by Bell labs. Yeah, Sun can control the JDKs and the packages (swing, whatever), but I could write up a useful package, throw it on the web and, what do you know, I've put something into Java, which Sun hasn't.
Does Sun have the inside track? Perhaps, because they developed it, and they likely know pretty well the workings of the language, but remember that Sun is a business too, and they want everybody to know all of the features. That's how they sell their other Java products. The more developers know about the features of the language, the more they want to use Java, and subsequently use Sun's java products. It is, actually, probably to Sun's advantage for us to know everything (good) about Java.
But then here's when we find the dilemma that is mentioned at the end of the post. Sun wants us all to know about Java and how great it is so we'll use it, but then the more everybody knows about Java the easier it is for them to supercede Sun's authority and build their own tools/packages/whatever because a programming language involves not tangible product. It's not like a car where you can advertise all of the features and and functions and not give a damn because a great number of your consumers couldn't do anything with the information, and it'd end up being too costly/difficult/whatever to reproduce the product. Developers are essentially the only people that use java (for coding) and they are capable of doing what Sun does at no cost, essentially.
Sure, this freaks Sun out, but I think they should just let everybody do what they will with Java (the free market will determine what works and what doesn't) and keep benefiting from Java's popularity. If Sun tries to proprieterize Java (I don't know how), anoth Java-like language will just come by and Sun's out of luck. Java won't last forever.
I don't know if it's supposed to be organized in any particular manner. Okay, the transgressions by Dick Grasso are pretty substantial and everything, and I'm sure there's some organization, but I don't think all of the "flatulence" mistakes (#72 - 76) would conincidentally run together. Likewise, I wouldn't think Kraft's "cut the cheese" slogan is a more gross error than an IP battle likening the target customer to terrorists.
Seems to me they organized it so that it flowed well, and so they could segue to the next item easily (and cleverly).
30 On the plus side, all the applicants were buying Eclipses.
"Anyone, feasibly, given enough time and enough resources, could hack into any system."--Brad Hill, CIO of Dealerskins, a Tennessee firm that hosts websites for car dealerships, confessing in September that the company had exposed 1,000 customers' car-loan applications on an unprotected website. The Dealerskins "hack"--selecting "Source" from Internet Explorer's View menu to examine the webpage's HTML code--takes about a quarter of a second.
No, seriously, a similar thing is going on with my company, except replace "Indians" with Chinese. I get along with my co-workers just fine and everything, but it is a very different atmosphere. My direct boss, however, is Chinese, and he is very much of the attitude of hours-logged equals work done. But I guess he's different in that he is fervently hard-working also. It's irritating, really. And then our President (an Indian, yes) would make his own 7 PM rounds and stress how we had to put in 10 hour days minimum (I'm QA).
What irritates me, of course, is that I'm fine staying if I've got to, but mandating this sort of timeline is just aggravating. If I've got other things, and don't have much work I want to leave without feeling like a criminal.
It's a hellish job... needless to say I'm trying to figure out other options. Ideas?
Slashdot Mirror
I hope /. doesn't lose its rep as the premiere internet stampede as people start referring to the "Google effect".
/.) gives can be, as they say, as much a blessing as a curse.
Much as I enjoy perusing information (and I do follow the links), this does raise a good question. Obviously, it's generally a good thing for a website to get traffic (usually, that's why the website's there), but are there moral implications for overloading a perfectly innocent site (fortunately, this site seems academic, so we aren't hurting business, per se)? Should we have a guilty conscience for bring down servers as wantonly as we do? I think not, as the Internet is open and free and who's going to stop us, but it's an interesting point they raise.
Reminds me of when I served at a restaurant and managers would complain when business was slow, but they'd get equally upset if a couple of buses pulled in and we were slammed with 100+ customers all at once. With so many customers, it was tough for us to give them good service, much less take good care of the customers we already had. I guess the exposure Google (and
That's a good question. Well if we outsource much of our production and harvest much of our resources from other countries, we'll become something of a "soft" economy where the core of our economy is consumer services and products that we don't even make.
Think England, which doesn't have all that many resources, or production, or space, but has ideas and capital that it uses to produce externally. So we'll eventually just be working to provide enough services to sustain the society and working as managers trying to come up with new ideas for our businesses.
The problem is that ideas are renewable, and our arrangement will work only so long as none of our outsourced employees come up with anything.
But I think I've heard of this before, when the Romans grew soft in their power and control, relying on their satellite colonies for certain vital production and everything. Obviously, times were different and the example is slightly different, but I think it still works. But we all know how that ended up.
Well, I'd want to live in a world where I'm a tech company's CEO and rich as hell. I guess it'd be icing on the cake if everybody else was unemployed and poor so everything was cheaper also.
And it follows: who are the ones in the company choosing to outsource?
Yes, people mostly likely don't want to play old generation games on a new console. But people might want to play them on a different console. This is the big deal with the mini PS (forget what it's called) or porting old NES/SNES games to GBA. It's true that people wouldn't care about whether N64 would paly these old games, but people would buy it if they can play old-school (fun) games wherever they go.
In a true homage to Spammers, it should actually be:
Making Spam Slick as Owlshit loiter disciple mescaline interrent genuflect marsupial harbinger
But I guess we should use slashdot's lameness filter for SPAM, because I keep getting the following when trying to post:
Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted!
Reason: Please use fewer 'junk' characters.
There are stupid-user taxes for computers and the internet. It's called the premium users pay for Windows over Linux. Or the premium that some people would pay for AOL over alternatives, perhaps.
He posted his "free-pass" words on the net.
Never mind that his last name is "Cumming".
He would have rolled up his sleaves and written hamlet the right way!
I guess if he had used monkeys, it would have been Spamlet?
Ouch!
From the parent's article:
(303) 550-9828
Apparently the guy answers this one. article here
That's business these days. It seems that most companies are selling products only as a means so that they can manage information, which is the real valuable resource that consumers can provide (cash is good, but ...). Places like Google, Amazon, and Tivo, which can get into our homes and our computers, are more like information brokers who use their product (searches, books, television) as a means to draw the consumer in, or the means by which they collect data. Hell, even Kazaa, and all of its spyware, do this sort of stuff. When Google sets up its government intelligence bureau, or Tivo lands huge contracts with advertising agencies, I personally will feel unsettled that all of this stuff about me (personal stuff, nonetheless) is being used capitalistically by these big companies.
"Reckon"? "Tis"? Apparently the hacker was one of those rare "Olde English Western Pirates"?
So is this what Kazaa has been stealing my cycles for? Please, anything but Chess.
Yeah, I'm trying to think of some way that it could all work. Perhaps some sort of Friendster (or now Orkut) style validation where screennames get scores based on whether they're legitimate people or not (heck, that's even like /. moderation). But then the potential for abuse there is also astronomical, as spammers could set up validation farms. In essence, any sort of spam prevention that depends upon users will fail because spammers are users themselves. In fact, spammers sre most likely users with significantly more resources than the average user. So I think it's trouble, no matter what.
... and bingo, new SPAM also. If people migrate to IM, then Spammers can just use dictionaries to hassle people's screen names (I have already experienced people trolling for sex talk online) and soon we'll be dealing with dozens of pop-up (which makes it worse) windows asking if we want Printer Ink. And it doesn't necessarily help having a buddy list, because all IM services will still pop-up a window "Spammer has sent a message, would you like to see it", so even though you can avoid the Spam, you still have to deal with the window.
It helps that you can be offline, but if IM is the chief communication then we won't be able to stay offline, if we want our messages. And those that collect messages while offline (i.e. Yahoo) will just flood you with back Spam.
If Spammers can break email, they'll break IM. It's just that up until now there hasn't been reason to. Don't give them a reason, either.
the ISPs will have a financial incentive not to block them.
It's sort of a sly trick that ISPs already have a financial incentive not to block spammers. Spammers pay lots of good money to use the ISPs' servers for distribution.
Yes, but there is a tradeoff that you're ignoring. When the company is privately owned (or owned by its employees), they actually have a lot more invested in the company's success (and especially long-term success) than the casual investor. If this is my life saving's and my life's work, or if this is my career, or my job, or something like that, then the company's success, and long-term success, are vitally important to the investor.
Going public could very likely bring in a lot of money, but that's bringing in money the same way you get more customers (and don't just cater to "regulars"). These investors love an opportunity and do want their companies to succeed, but all with different goals. Some don't think long-term and are willing to cash out after a 5% jump (these types of investors don't do a whole lot for the company, long-term), some investors could even short the company to pressure the stock to drop, and all of these casual investors would lose only their investment if the company fails (not a good thing), but employees and founders stand to lose a lot more (their sources of income). The problem with casual, mass-market customers over regulars is that whatever tactic brought all the customers to you will very likely bring them away. Google might bring in millions of capital via its IPO, but the next "hot" IPO and all of these people might bail. And you've likely turned off the "regulars" in the process.
Yes, you want your invested company's to succeed, for only as long as it takes you to sell the stock.
Obviously Google's just another company that needs to pad its bottom-line, but doesn't it seem like Google's already done this. It seems to come naturally, with any upscaling of a company, that it'll become more "corporatized", and from talking to friends who work there (and observing their product) it seems that they've already become somewhat corporate. Despite efforts to keep things "cool" and "edgy" (beanbag chairs or whatever), there's a strong sense of hierarchy and everything. And it's a common beef that Google's become more an infomercial than an information repository. I wouldn't necessarily go so far, Google's still plenty useful, but I guess they're more going for padded revenues than anything else these days.
Google's nearly already a corporation. An IPO would merely "seal the deal".
In fact many distros might be the only thing to save java. With each release there's more deprecation and more packages and bloat, and it seems clear that Sun is intent on continuing this particular trend. Hey, Sun can do whatever they want, and let developers decide. I'm sure some developers would like the extra garbage collection and all the extra GUI packages with Interface upon Interface ....
If we have companies, like Eclipse, which will streamline the functionality of Java, and cater the look to a certain kind of developer, those people won't be so disgruntled with Sun's java. Lots of developers long for the speedy, free ways of C++ (don't ask me about C#). Well, then maybe somebody will develop a java distro that would be slimmed down and present you with less useless crap (or give you more flexibility to not download it/use it). Would it still be java? Who cares? I'm sure people would use it.
Swing and AWT are horrible festering pieces of crap
Maybe not that bad, but not good. We use swing across the board at our company and I can't tell you how hideous each window is. And they look different on every machine. A layout that looks good on my system has buttons cramped in the corner on somebody else's.
And everything runs slow as hell.
Not saying that doing the stuff in C++ would be any easier, but Java's GUI packages are all sorts of shady.
You're right, love it or hate it, Java is the brainchild of Sun, but (legitimately) part of the whole slashdot/software community is that a programming language is something that shouldn't be contained, or made propietary. Java is certainly greatly derived from C++ (its successes and its failures, yes), which was "owned" (perhaps not so strongly) by Bell labs. Yeah, Sun can control the JDKs and the packages (swing, whatever), but I could write up a useful package, throw it on the web and, what do you know, I've put something into Java, which Sun hasn't.
Does Sun have the inside track? Perhaps, because they developed it, and they likely know pretty well the workings of the language, but remember that Sun is a business too, and they want everybody to know all of the features. That's how they sell their other Java products. The more developers know about the features of the language, the more they want to use Java, and subsequently use Sun's java products. It is, actually, probably to Sun's advantage for us to know everything (good) about Java.
But then here's when we find the dilemma that is mentioned at the end of the post. Sun wants us all to know about Java and how great it is so we'll use it, but then the more everybody knows about Java the easier it is for them to supercede Sun's authority and build their own tools/packages/whatever because a programming language involves not tangible product. It's not like a car where you can advertise all of the features and and functions and not give a damn because a great number of your consumers couldn't do anything with the information, and it'd end up being too costly/difficult/whatever to reproduce the product. Developers are essentially the only people that use java (for coding) and they are capable of doing what Sun does at no cost, essentially.
Sure, this freaks Sun out, but I think they should just let everybody do what they will with Java (the free market will determine what works and what doesn't) and keep benefiting from Java's popularity. If Sun tries to proprieterize Java (I don't know how), anoth Java-like language will just come by and Sun's out of luck. Java won't last forever.
I don't know if it's supposed to be organized in any particular manner. Okay, the transgressions by Dick Grasso are pretty substantial and everything, and I'm sure there's some organization, but I don't think all of the "flatulence" mistakes (#72 - 76) would conincidentally run together. Likewise, I wouldn't think Kraft's "cut the cheese" slogan is a more gross error than an IP battle likening the target customer to terrorists.
Seems to me they organized it so that it flowed well, and so they could segue to the next item easily (and cleverly).
So don't get too distraught.
30 On the plus side, all the applicants were buying Eclipses. "Anyone, feasibly, given enough time and enough resources, could hack into any system."--Brad Hill, CIO of Dealerskins, a Tennessee firm that hosts websites for car dealerships, confessing in September that the company had exposed 1,000 customers' car-loan applications on an unprotected website. The Dealerskins "hack"--selecting "Source" from Internet Explorer's View menu to examine the webpage's HTML code--takes about a quarter of a second.
Finally! A security hole that is exposed by IE.
See, it goes the other way sometimes, too!
... my company's hiring me, as evidently I am reading slashdot at this very moment. And we've got a patch going out today.
Mark one for the "little guy".
Do you work for my company?
... needless to say I'm trying to figure out other options. Ideas?
No, seriously, a similar thing is going on with my company, except replace "Indians" with Chinese. I get along with my co-workers just fine and everything, but it is a very different atmosphere. My direct boss, however, is Chinese, and he is very much of the attitude of hours-logged equals work done. But I guess he's different in that he is fervently hard-working also. It's irritating, really. And then our President (an Indian, yes) would make his own 7 PM rounds and stress how we had to put in 10 hour days minimum (I'm QA).
What irritates me, of course, is that I'm fine staying if I've got to, but mandating this sort of timeline is just aggravating. If I've got other things, and don't have much work I want to leave without feeling like a criminal.
It's a hellish job
Dude, I'm never double-dating with you.