The five soon discovered that just because a program was simple did not mean the underlying code was straight-forward. To make matters more testing, the BBC Micro offers a very unforgiving programming environment.
My first piece of commercial programming was on a BBC Micro and having that environment didn't teach me anything, it just made programming more of a pain than being able to cut and paste, set debug breaks and so forth. And it doesn't teach any more than using C#/VB because it's a machine designed around using BASIC, which is itself an abstraction (and IIRC, you didn't have functions, so had to endure the horror of GOSUB/RETURN).
I bought those for the originals and re-watched the SE. You watch and every moment of them begs the question "what are you adding here, George?". This isn't like the restoration of Spartacus where the "snails and oysters" scene adds quite a lot about 2 of the characters. The Jabba scene is just horrible, and takes away his menace.
Rupert Murdoch just looks at everything as being like the past. Newspapers were once the state of the art. They gave us a bunch of things to read across a set of categories (news, sport, finance, health, cartoons) to read, but they're just not up there with the net where people can pick and mix. I don't need XKCD bundled in with things. It's just there. I can flip to it as fast as turning a page. Which is why the future of the media is in specialised writing, not newspapers.
And what timescale did Kennedy give for man to go to the moon? It was about 8.5 years, wasn't it? Or the sort of timescale where he could actually be judged on progress. He delivered his commitment on TV including directly asking Congress for the money. What's Obama done? "Promised" that NASA will get $6bn over 5 years (about half of the money Kennedy asked for in 1961). And Kennedy didn't give a damn about diversifying and decentralising Homo sapiens. It was about winning a propaganda victory in the cold war.
Most "green" targets are being set like this. The UK has a target to halve CO2 emissions by 2050. But there's no interim 5 year targets. It will be just like Kyoto - everyone will get a year or 2 away from the date and it will be "oops, we didn't meet it". The people in charge can blame the last lot for not getting it started early enough and it's soon forgotten.
Obama couldn't give a rat's fuck about landing people on an asteroid. He just wants to get a few geeks to vote for him now because it sounds like he does.
You're not wrong. I worked for a business that got taken over by a private equity company. They came down and basically explained their 5 year strategy. Years 1 and 2, they weren't going to make any money. It was restructuring, investing in technology and getting the business good, and then making money in years 3-5. I was there for 18 months and they stuck to it.
The "cult of classes" has really got out of hand. I spent about 4 days just looking through some C# code of a client, to try to work out exactly how it worked. No-one seemed to give a damn about making a pragmatic, easy to understand solution. Instead, it was stacks of classes inheriting from classes. In one instance, there was a "staff" class which inherited from a "person" class. But the "person" class was used in no other way than to be inherited by the staff class.
Now, theoretically it's quite right, but it's just not pragmatic. It just adds code that makes things confusing. And things like this make maintenance of code a total bitch. I'm not against classes, but they're often overused and entirely unpragmatic.
For what you're doing, you're right. Where Google Ads really scores is in products with tiny markets but spread wide. I know a business that sells tandem bikes. A tiny number of people want them and they're spread across the UK.
Two suggestions for you based on a local guy who fixes PCs. 1) Find and advertise on local forums. You can often get a permanent ad on their site for a small amount of money. 2) Use Twitter to find local people in your area (the Twitter search can help you). You follow them, they sometimes follow back and you can post upcoming films etc.
Personally, the only way I see newspapers surviving is that they become tremendously small outfits. 10-man operations that produce solely for the web and offer a print-on-demand version for those who are interested. Your staff of a dozen reporters and the hundred people who support them aren't going to last here. Print journalism as an industry just can't support those people the way it used to.
They're very, VERY bloated organisations. The only reason they were so bloated is that the newspaper market was hard to enter for decades.
Look up the new offices of the loss-making Guardian, in the UK. It's all beautifully-designed, open-plan central London offices with breakout areas and Macs. It's pure hubris. You just don't need most of that. OK, you might want a few staff in the centre of the city, but most staff can actually be 10 miles out with the communications that are available now.
Gawker doesn't run that way. It's run from a space the size of a large shop.
The main problem is that internet advertising sucks. The profit is from click-thrus, not page views, but no one clicks, your eyes basically ignore the ads and you move on to the actual text. Even without an ad-blocker people know to skip the top of the page to avoid banners and stay away from the margins. That's because they are flashy and filled with crap. They contain nothing useful for the reader. Newspaper ads are different, they have more connection to you and even contain useful information. That 1/2 page ad for a local car dealer gives you a general idea of local car prices, same for the real estate ads. The supermarket ad tells you what's on sale this week and gives you coupons. Even ads for local businesses that you will never use promote name recognition and form a sort of local directory in your head keeping you current on your community. The ads in newspapers are relevant to you, they actually form a part of the content of a newspaper. Internet ads have never done that. Google tried with adsense, but it never really works unless you're a lonely man with a small penis and erectile disfunction.
You've never run a Google Ad campaign then.
Online ads are precisely the reason why old media are suffering. Google has produced flexible, cheap, more directly targetted and trackable advertising than newspapers could offer.
I ran a campaign for a client as a test and the results were staggering in terms of reduced costs. For every $1 of ad spend on Google, we got 5 times the result of newspaper ads. We targetted specific sites which were about the interests of our target market. We targetted keywords on Google, and we did a smidgen of Adsense too.
You might not click and you might block, but most people don't.
Exactly. People have studied how to do this stuff properly based on years of doing it. You don't do the sort of things that Jobs has just done.
Firstly, apologise. Secondly, what action are you going to take. Three, re-assure people you'll be checking the status personally. Four - take questions and be humble about it.
What Jobs has done is to leave the wound festering. He's just accused his audience of sensationalism, which is only going to piss them off. Maybe they were, but you don't do that. He's tried to deflect attention from Apple's problems by pointing elsewhere. You can only do that if you're small and have a hardcore fan base. When you're the 3rd biggest phone OS, you can't. You've got a lot of mainstream customers and you look like a jerk to them.
There's been a lot of performance improvements made, this is true. But I'm running Vista 64 on my "office" machine (quite a basic £250 PC with 4GB RAM) and it's fine. For what I need it for, I can't be bothered upgrading.
Of course, it's not much of an issue for desktop machines when 2GB of ram costs about £20.
To be honest, there isn't that much wrong with Vista (after the service packs). Vista's main problems were that the initial hardware was underpowered (esp memory), terrible drivers and software that didn't play nice with UAC.
Windows 7 is a response to the Vista name being mud. It's an improvement, but it's really the same core.
to media producers banking on paywalls and iPads..
on
The End of Free
·
· Score: 1
... Think Again.
The only reason that you enjoyed what you had before is that there wasn't the content distribution network of the internet. It was very narrow. Newsagents had limited shelves, Satellite companies had limited numbers of channels. It was only because of limited options that you could do what you could do.
What did the monks who hand wrote books do after Gutenberg? Probably stopped hand writing books, mostly. Once anyone could write their own books, you didn't need people to write it for you.
That's what's so ironic about Jones and his defenders (I'm not discussing climate science, just the attitude to openness): the reaction is very similar to hardcore religious types than scientists.
No. Just reduce the term to something like a generation (20-25 years). Creators will still create and be able to make more use of existing culture in new culture.
I would have assumed that when people design phones that they talk to the cellphone companies and actually test their signal display against some sort of reference values. If they're saying they're that far out then either their engineering is a joke or they deliberately conspired to raise the numbers.
Personally, I'm planning on replacing my current Thinkpad with another one. The thing is that Thinkpads aren't trendy or consumer products. It's a well-established business brand and Lenovo know it.
While they have to be competitive on price, they don't have to be so competitive that they have to cut corners. They know that their customers are buying more for quality over price and will pay that little extra to have a more reliable machine.
but Customer Service still is VASTLY better than HP or Lenovo or Gateway
I had a quick support call with Lenovo and their support was great. Did you have a bad experience (I'm thinking of getting another Lenovo, so wouldn't mind any warnings);)
Look, that just ain't true. Firstly, there is no golden age when companies were more or less honest than today.
Secondly, you can try to look after your customers and do a good job and make money, or you can screw your customers out of every penny through as many deceptive means possible, and make money. The main difference is that deceptive companies typically make money fast and then their reputation catches up with them, while companies that look after their customers gain a better long-term reputation.
Slashdot Mirror
But writing on a BBC Micro wastes resources. They just happen to be human rather than processor time (which is now a lot more expensive).
The five soon discovered that just because a program was simple did not mean the underlying code was straight-forward. To make matters more testing, the BBC Micro offers a very unforgiving programming environment.
My first piece of commercial programming was on a BBC Micro and having that environment didn't teach me anything, it just made programming more of a pain than being able to cut and paste, set debug breaks and so forth. And it doesn't teach any more than using C#/VB because it's a machine designed around using BASIC, which is itself an abstraction (and IIRC, you didn't have functions, so had to endure the horror of GOSUB/RETURN).
I bought those for the originals and re-watched the SE. You watch and every moment of them begs the question "what are you adding here, George?". This isn't like the restoration of Spartacus where the "snails and oysters" scene adds quite a lot about 2 of the characters. The Jabba scene is just horrible, and takes away his menace.
Rupert Murdoch just looks at everything as being like the past. Newspapers were once the state of the art. They gave us a bunch of things to read across a set of categories (news, sport, finance, health, cartoons) to read, but they're just not up there with the net where people can pick and mix. I don't need XKCD bundled in with things. It's just there. I can flip to it as fast as turning a page. Which is why the future of the media is in specialised writing, not newspapers.
And what timescale did Kennedy give for man to go to the moon? It was about 8.5 years, wasn't it? Or the sort of timescale where he could actually be judged on progress. He delivered his commitment on TV including directly asking Congress for the money. What's Obama done? "Promised" that NASA will get $6bn over 5 years (about half of the money Kennedy asked for in 1961). And Kennedy didn't give a damn about diversifying and decentralising Homo sapiens. It was about winning a propaganda victory in the cold war.
Precisely.
Most "green" targets are being set like this. The UK has a target to halve CO2 emissions by 2050. But there's no interim 5 year targets. It will be just like Kyoto - everyone will get a year or 2 away from the date and it will be "oops, we didn't meet it". The people in charge can blame the last lot for not getting it started early enough and it's soon forgotten.
Obama couldn't give a rat's fuck about landing people on an asteroid. He just wants to get a few geeks to vote for him now because it sounds like he does.
You're not wrong. I worked for a business that got taken over by a private equity company. They came down and basically explained their 5 year strategy. Years 1 and 2, they weren't going to make any money. It was restructuring, investing in technology and getting the business good, and then making money in years 3-5. I was there for 18 months and they stuck to it.
A letter written by the grandson of a bodyguard of Churchill. That's all.
It's probably total nonsense.
... to the mainstream media who are more interested in printing out press releases than going out and finding news.
In the UK, the phone shops are now mentioning that phones are Android.
The "cult of classes" has really got out of hand. I spent about 4 days just looking through some C# code of a client, to try to work out exactly how it worked. No-one seemed to give a damn about making a pragmatic, easy to understand solution. Instead, it was stacks of classes inheriting from classes. In one instance, there was a "staff" class which inherited from a "person" class. But the "person" class was used in no other way than to be inherited by the staff class.
Now, theoretically it's quite right, but it's just not pragmatic. It just adds code that makes things confusing. And things like this make maintenance of code a total bitch. I'm not against classes, but they're often overused and entirely unpragmatic.
For what you're doing, you're right. Where Google Ads really scores is in products with tiny markets but spread wide. I know a business that sells tandem bikes. A tiny number of people want them and they're spread across the UK.
Two suggestions for you based on a local guy who fixes PCs. 1) Find and advertise on local forums. You can often get a permanent ad on their site for a small amount of money. 2) Use Twitter to find local people in your area (the Twitter search can help you). You follow them, they sometimes follow back and you can post upcoming films etc.
Personally, the only way I see newspapers surviving is that they become tremendously small outfits. 10-man operations that produce solely for the web and offer a print-on-demand version for those who are interested. Your staff of a dozen reporters and the hundred people who support them aren't going to last here. Print journalism as an industry just can't support those people the way it used to.
They're very, VERY bloated organisations. The only reason they were so bloated is that the newspaper market was hard to enter for decades.
Look up the new offices of the loss-making Guardian, in the UK. It's all beautifully-designed, open-plan central London offices with breakout areas and Macs. It's pure hubris. You just don't need most of that. OK, you might want a few staff in the centre of the city, but most staff can actually be 10 miles out with the communications that are available now.
Gawker doesn't run that way. It's run from a space the size of a large shop.
The main problem is that internet advertising sucks. The profit is from click-thrus, not page views, but no one clicks, your eyes basically ignore the ads and you move on to the actual text. Even without an ad-blocker people know to skip the top of the page to avoid banners and stay away from the margins. That's because they are flashy and filled with crap. They contain nothing useful for the reader. Newspaper ads are different, they have more connection to you and even contain useful information. That 1/2 page ad for a local car dealer gives you a general idea of local car prices, same for the real estate ads. The supermarket ad tells you what's on sale this week and gives you coupons. Even ads for local businesses that you will never use promote name recognition and form a sort of local directory in your head keeping you current on your community. The ads in newspapers are relevant to you, they actually form a part of the content of a newspaper. Internet ads have never done that. Google tried with adsense, but it never really works unless you're a lonely man with a small penis and erectile disfunction.
You've never run a Google Ad campaign then.
Online ads are precisely the reason why old media are suffering. Google has produced flexible, cheap, more directly targetted and trackable advertising than newspapers could offer.
I ran a campaign for a client as a test and the results were staggering in terms of reduced costs. For every $1 of ad spend on Google, we got 5 times the result of newspaper ads. We targetted specific sites which were about the interests of our target market. We targetted keywords on Google, and we did a smidgen of Adsense too.
You might not click and you might block, but most people don't.
Exactly. People have studied how to do this stuff properly based on years of doing it. You don't do the sort of things that Jobs has just done.
Firstly, apologise. Secondly, what action are you going to take. Three, re-assure people you'll be checking the status personally. Four - take questions and be humble about it.
What Jobs has done is to leave the wound festering. He's just accused his audience of sensationalism, which is only going to piss them off. Maybe they were, but you don't do that. He's tried to deflect attention from Apple's problems by pointing elsewhere. You can only do that if you're small and have a hardcore fan base. When you're the 3rd biggest phone OS, you can't. You've got a lot of mainstream customers and you look like a jerk to them.
There's been a lot of performance improvements made, this is true. But I'm running Vista 64 on my "office" machine (quite a basic £250 PC with 4GB RAM) and it's fine. For what I need it for, I can't be bothered upgrading.
Of course, it's not much of an issue for desktop machines when 2GB of ram costs about £20.
To be honest, there isn't that much wrong with Vista (after the service packs). Vista's main problems were that the initial hardware was underpowered (esp memory), terrible drivers and software that didn't play nice with UAC.
Windows 7 is a response to the Vista name being mud. It's an improvement, but it's really the same core.
... Think Again.
The only reason that you enjoyed what you had before is that there wasn't the content distribution network of the internet. It was very narrow. Newsagents had limited shelves, Satellite companies had limited numbers of channels. It was only because of limited options that you could do what you could do.
What did the monks who hand wrote books do after Gutenberg? Probably stopped hand writing books, mostly. Once anyone could write their own books, you didn't need people to write it for you.
That's what's so ironic about Jones and his defenders (I'm not discussing climate science, just the attitude to openness): the reaction is very similar to hardcore religious types than scientists.
No. Just reduce the term to something like a generation (20-25 years). Creators will still create and be able to make more use of existing culture in new culture.
I would have assumed that when people design phones that they talk to the cellphone companies and actually test their signal display against some sort of reference values. If they're saying they're that far out then either their engineering is a joke or they deliberately conspired to raise the numbers.
If it's just about the bars, why didn't earlier iPhone versions have the same problem, then, if it's just that, and not the antenna design?
Personally, I'm planning on replacing my current Thinkpad with another one. The thing is that Thinkpads aren't trendy or consumer products. It's a well-established business brand and Lenovo know it.
While they have to be competitive on price, they don't have to be so competitive that they have to cut corners. They know that their customers are buying more for quality over price and will pay that little extra to have a more reliable machine.
but Customer Service still is VASTLY better than HP or Lenovo or Gateway I had a quick support call with Lenovo and their support was great. Did you have a bad experience (I'm thinking of getting another Lenovo, so wouldn't mind any warnings) ;)
Look, that just ain't true. Firstly, there is no golden age when companies were more or less honest than today.
Secondly, you can try to look after your customers and do a good job and make money, or you can screw your customers out of every penny through as many deceptive means possible, and make money. The main difference is that deceptive companies typically make money fast and then their reputation catches up with them, while companies that look after their customers gain a better long-term reputation.