I was actually taken back by how much Google employees will stand by the principle of meeting end-user needs.
At a information session for Google at our university, they showed us how they could make graphs of frequency statistics for certain search words. Sort of the stuff you'd find in the Google Zeitgeist but as a graph for a particular word over time. For example, they showed a graph for a search on 'Summer Olympics' which spiked during the most recent Winter Olympics.
I asked them if Google had ever considered selling some of these statistics to businesses trying to analyze trends, just in bulk numbers (no privacy violations etc). I would figure it would be easy for them to implement, and another source of revenue. The presenters (who were actual engineers for Google, not just some PR folks) frowned upon that idea because they claimed that "it would not directly benefit end users." I asked how it could harm the user, but they insisted that if the user were not to benefit from it, they were not going to consider doing it.
Java and Javascript are very different things. Java is Sun's baby, an object-oriented language that runs compiled bytecodes on a VM, while Netscape introduced 'Javascript' as a way of providing client-side scripting. Javascript is not compiled and shares only the 'Java' part of the name and some syntax similarities with the real Java.
Schools need to make better efforts to plug these holes.
I attend the University of Waterloo, and am in its co-op program. Their job application system, JobMine inadvertently informs students about the status of jobs they have been interviewed for. Students are not supposed to be informed of whether they have been offered or ranked for jobs prior to a certain date, however, the job disappears from the 'active applications' section as soon as the employer has made their decision not to offer or rank you. I initially thought this was something random, but every job that disappeared I had been rejected for, and every job that remained I had either been ranked or offered. Of course, I didn't have to do any special 'hacking' to find the results - it was linked directly (ok so I have to go through about five links to get there - really poorly designed for usability, but still) Any student could get this information through legitimate use of the system, without any special skill or instruction.
It's sometimes hard to believe that a school that prides itself in its specialty in computer science, co-op, and engineering has such bugs in its co-op site. Especially if employers are exposed to such systems - what will they think of its students?
someone feel free to bring up the Microsoft ad I'm looking at now, not touching that one with a 10-foot stick
You mean the "Get the Facts" propaganda?
I've been noticing that all over open source websites. It seems so wrong! The irony is that through these ads M$ is funding open source. Kind of like the Church of England trying to buy up all the copies of Tyndale's English Bible in order to burn them - the money he earned from it allowed him to bug bigger and better printing presses!
I would like to point out users have no control of what songs they hear on the radio either (though it is usually from a smaller selection of tracks, and there is a great deal of repetition) As far as I'm aware, radio stations don't play entire albums from start-to-finish either.
Oh... and balls through windows? Could you have come up with a weaker punn?:)
Why, this is a wonderful pun. Especially when my Windows are crashing all the time.
Is it just me, or does it seem that there is increasingly more talk about Linux being widely adopted on the desktop? The more sources that report that Linux is comming, the more likely businesses will choose to use it, so even if all of what we've seen lately is hype, it still serves to advance Linux.
Orleans in fact is nothing more than a post office that served a suburban region of what were once the cities of Gloucester and Cumberland before almagamation with Ottawa. It has never actually had any official status of its own beyond that.
Re:Scariest thing I have every read
on
Omniscience Protocol
·
· Score: 0, Informative
Did it occur to you that today is April Fool's Day?
Beginning tomorrow, more than a dozen Web sites, including MSN, ESPN, Lycos and iVillage, will not be visited by people who read Slashdot.
So... will this be the reverse/. effect?
The article seemed to suggest that most people need to attain new skills in order to operate computers. However, if a user must memorize commands, he is far more likely to mess up trying to remember some obscure command than clicking the icon that claims to perform the task.
GUIs give the user more power, because the interface is mapped nicely to functionally, everything is visible and out in the open, and usually (but not often enough) meaningful feedback is available.
Slashdot Mirror
This about sums it up: http://www.ok-cancel.com/comic/3.html/
Let's pack as many big words together as possible!
compositionally graded collector, base and emitter
pseudomorphic heterojunction bipolar transistor
It's the malware on the sites that the infected DNS servers redirect to.
I believe the trailer is transferred into sub-space according to my friend who is an avid Transformers fan (to say the least).
I was actually taken back by how much Google employees will stand by the principle of meeting end-user needs.
At a information session for Google at our university, they showed us how they could make graphs of frequency statistics for certain search words. Sort of the stuff you'd find in the Google Zeitgeist but as a graph for a particular word over time. For example, they showed a graph for a search on 'Summer Olympics' which spiked during the most recent Winter Olympics.
I asked them if Google had ever considered selling some of these statistics to businesses trying to analyze trends, just in bulk numbers (no privacy violations etc). I would figure it would be easy for them to implement, and another source of revenue. The presenters (who were actual engineers for Google, not just some PR folks) frowned upon that idea because they claimed that "it would not directly benefit end users." I asked how it could harm the user, but they insisted that if the user were not to benefit from it, they were not going to consider doing it.
Java and Javascript are very different things. Java is Sun's baby, an object-oriented language that runs compiled bytecodes on a VM, while Netscape introduced 'Javascript' as a way of providing client-side scripting. Javascript is not compiled and shares only the 'Java' part of the name and some syntax similarities with the real Java.
Schools need to make better efforts to plug these holes.
I attend the University of Waterloo, and am in its co-op program. Their job application system, JobMine inadvertently informs students about the status of jobs they have been interviewed for. Students are not supposed to be informed of whether they have been offered or ranked for jobs prior to a certain date, however, the job disappears from the 'active applications' section as soon as the employer has made their decision not to offer or rank you. I initially thought this was something random, but every job that disappeared I had been rejected for, and every job that remained I had either been ranked or offered. Of course, I didn't have to do any special 'hacking' to find the results - it was linked directly (ok so I have to go through about five links to get there - really poorly designed for usability, but still) Any student could get this information through legitimate use of the system, without any special skill or instruction.
It's sometimes hard to believe that a school that prides itself in its specialty in computer science, co-op, and engineering has such bugs in its co-op site. Especially if employers are exposed to such systems - what will they think of its students?
I remember the same thing being said about MMX - good for hard-core gamers, but most wouldn't care. It only took a few months for that all to change.
Just follow this tip and it will do it automatically for you.
Chindogu
I got something similar for 'Flaws of communism,' with the following suggestion:
Spelling suggestion: laws of communism
It's strange the friends we seem to be making these days ... First IBM, now PWC.
IBM owns PWC. So in essence, these two friends are one and the same.
Corel did hava a Linux distro a while back as I recall. But that's long gone...
someone feel free to bring up the Microsoft ad I'm looking at now, not touching that one with a 10-foot stick
You mean the "Get the Facts" propaganda?
I've been noticing that all over open source websites. It seems so wrong! The irony is that through these ads M$ is funding open source. Kind of like the Church of England trying to buy up all the copies of Tyndale's English Bible in order to burn them - the money he earned from it allowed him to bug bigger and better printing presses!
BayStar probably wants out because the incident with Microsoft "recommending" that they invest looks bad.
I would like to point out users have no control of what songs they hear on the radio either (though it is usually from a smaller selection of tracks, and there is a great deal of repetition) As far as I'm aware, radio stations don't play entire albums from start-to-finish either.
Oh... and balls through windows? Could you have come up with a weaker punn? :)
Why, this is a wonderful pun. Especially when my Windows are crashing all the time.
Is it just me, or does it seem that there is increasingly more talk about Linux being widely adopted on the desktop? The more sources that report that Linux is comming, the more likely businesses will choose to use it, so even if all of what we've seen lately is hype, it still serves to advance Linux.
Orleans in fact is nothing more than a post office that served a suburban region of what were once the cities of Gloucester and Cumberland before almagamation with Ottawa. It has never actually had any official status of its own beyond that.
Did it occur to you that today is April Fool's Day?
In previous years other spoof RFCs have come out, such as RFC 1149, A Standard for the Transmission of IP Datagrams on Avian Carriers.
We would have no one to blame for all of our computer problems.
Beginning tomorrow, more than a dozen Web sites, including MSN, ESPN, Lycos and iVillage, will not be visited by people who read Slashdot. So... will this be the reverse /. effect?
This is a pretty sweet case/desk mod [canadaforums.com] too.
FYI, students actually have studying to do, so our time is not necessarily cheap.
The article seemed to suggest that most people need to attain new skills in order to operate computers. However, if a user must memorize commands, he is far more likely to mess up trying to remember some obscure command than clicking the icon that claims to perform the task. GUIs give the user more power, because the interface is mapped nicely to functionally, everything is visible and out in the open, and usually (but not often enough) meaningful feedback is available.