"They deem the corporate development team as underpowered in the company, with engineers and product managers tending to carry more clout than salesmen and dealmakers."
Well then, maybe that's why none of their products seem to support any common goal (besides being 'cool'). It often seems like Google's left and right hands are completely unaware of each other, and that could be due to teams of gifted engineers all cranking away without ever taking the time to talk to other teams and figure out what the hell the company is doing.
Engineers are important, but alone they're not sufficient to build a viable company.
If it doesn't focus on the technologies being used
on
Ajax in Action
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
it's useless.
AJAX is a simple concept. Really, it is. Getting three different coding paradigms to work together harmoniously is not so simple. Throw in available AJAX libraries, JSPs and Atlas pages and you've got layers upon layers of coding cruft that need to be understood before a functional, stable, web-app can be built.
If this book stays at the architecture astronaut level without ever delving into the why of the code structure of the example programs, then it may serve as a cookbook but certainly not as an informative manual that can provide a baseline from which coders can build their skills.
Perhaps the book is better than the reviewer makes it out to be, but he offers no real justification of the 9/10 score awarded, so it's hard to say. Just for giggles, I should note that when Richard Stevens' seminal Advanced Programming in the Unix Environment, 2nd Ed. (being possibly the most comprehensive and useful programming book I've ever read) was reviewed it also received a 9. How do these two books compare?
"The more ink, the more accurate and lifelike the color of the print." Ha, more like the more ink the more likely you are to end up with a sopping wet unusable piece of paper.
I bet 80% of the plugin API could be based around an XML ontology explaining to the manager what the 'types' and 'properties' of interest are. There would need to be some custom code for content display and editing but everything else can be pushed down to the filesystem/db.
There are many many ways to interact with the transaction/auction data that eBay generates. By cultivating a community of developers eBay is able to extend the functionality that they offer without having to pay for development. They're able to extend their reach onto portable devices or into pricing guides without needing to know or care about the interface required for any specific application space.
I'm not sure that policies like this will give eBay user lock-in the way that MS's ISV network does, but it can certainly give them examples of new places to deploy their services and perhaps charge for access to said services.
General Jack D. Ripper: Mandrake, do you realize that in addition to fluoridating water, why, there are studies underway to fluoridate salt, flour, fruit juices, soup, sugar, milk... ice cream. Ice cream, Mandrake, children's ice cream. Group Capt. Lionel Mandrake: Lord, Jack. General Jack D. Ripper: You know when fluoridation first began? Group Capt. Lionel Mandrake: I... no, no. I don't, Jack. General Jack D. Ripper: Nineteen hundred and forty-six. Nineteen forty-six, Mandrake. How does that coincide with your post-war Commie conspiracy, huh? It's incredibly obvious, isn't it? A foreign substance is introduced into our precious bodily fluids without the knowledge of the individual. Certainly without any choice. That's the way your hard-core Commie works. Group Capt. Lionel Mandrake: Uh, Jack, Jack, listen, tell me, tell me, Jack. When did you first... become... well, develop this theory? General Jack D. Ripper: Well, I, uh... I... I... first became aware of it, Mandrake, during the physical act of love. Group Capt. Lionel Mandrake: Hmm. General Jack D. Ripper: Yes, a uh, a profound sense of fatigue... a feeling of emptiness followed. Luckily I... I was able to interpret these feelings correctly. Loss of essence. Group Capt. Lionel Mandrake: Hmm. General Jack D. Ripper: I can assure you it has not recurred, Mandrake. Women uh... women sense my power and they seek the life essence. I, uh... I do not avoid women, Mandrake. Group Capt. Lionel Mandrake: No. General Jack D. Ripper: But I... I do deny them my essence.
Copied gratuitiously from the IMDB Memorable Quotes section. So you see, it's not a US plot. It's a commie plot.
Owl != Web Ontology Language in this Case
on
RSSOwl 1.2 Released
·
· Score: 1
Even though it's got Owl in the name, and works on XML based files... the project has nothing to do with Web Ontology Language or the semantic web.:-(
It's just a Java based newsreader (although the site associated with the project does have really pretty design).
$500k wouldn't get you a starter home in my county
on
The H-1B Swindle
·
· Score: 1
I live in the southern part of Silicon Valley, where the median cost of a home is $750K. If I had a family with just one child I couldn't stay where I am on the $53K figure you mention, and forget about ever buying a house.
In most cases, wages are driven directly by the cost of living in an area not by employee greed. And the cost of living in California is very high. That's why these low wages for H1B workers are such a concern. They may set an artificially low ceiling on entry level jobs in the sector. So we won't get any local recruits for those positions, then in 5 years we won't have any mid-career programmers here because we hired temps from overseas. In 15 years all our senior engineers will be looking to retire and there won't be anyone to replace them, so all the work will have to be sent overseas and the US's strategic advantage in software will have been completely destroyed.
Of course, if you own enough stock you have no worries right?
In California all pawn brokers are regulated and for good reason. Because they're selling goods on behalf of a third party they are often seen as 'fences' for stolen goods. By regulating the trade the state has an opportunity to educate those brokers who are honest but potentially naive and to have a registry of those who are less honest and may need to be contacted in the future.
If you've ever bought a used CD in CA. you've purchased from someone who was licensed and bonded (assuming their papers were in order, sig heil!). Having worked at a record shop that did a booming business in legitimate used CDs and vinyl I would say the regulations were not intrusive and worked to assure out customers that anything they bought from us came with a clear title.
Remember, title on stolen goods cannot be transferred by a third party. If you buy a big ticket item on eBay and it turns out to be stolen, the police will confiscate it from you without any reparation. You are free to file a civil suit against the seller, but good luck getting a payout from Joe Schmoe in NY when you're halfway across the continent. Admittedly, the proposed classes would need to have their contents updated but regulating the trade in potentially stolen goods is not a bad thing.
Definitely time to invest in a spell checker
on
Space Tourism?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I use SpellBound for Firefox. As for space tourists/flight participants, if they can positively contribute to experiments in a safe fashion they should be encouraged to help further defray the costs of their trip by working.
Many manufacturers produce two versions of their phones. Those intended for home users, that come with cameras and those for the vertical markets/Saudi Arabia that may have some features removed (cameras) or disabled (wireless connectivity that may compromise security). Or so I've heard.
If anyone could confirm this story with actual product numbers I'd appreciate it.
You can disable the Windows autoplay functionality that's reinstalling the drivers by holding down the shift key when you insert the CD. Per this Engadget post.
And, since you'll be ripping the tracks to MP3 you only need to do this once per new disc.
"It sounds good in a meeting to say "you control the Internet and that isn't right."" So you've answered your own question;)
Also if countries were to implement their own local DNS systems, there would need to be a gateway between local traffic and foreign traffic to handle IP address translations, but other than that there wouldn't be any real changes to the system (at least that I can see), and I don't think throwing an additional router into the mix at each country's border is going to bring the 'net to its knees anytime soon.
unless you're distance learning and use it to change the channel.;P
Ah, but wouldn't it be great if you could switch lecturers with the click of a button. "Sorry RMS I'm just not understanding your point, why don't we try a little Knuth instead?"
"Except that-- on our directory-- you know, we're not-- we're not allowing any pornography." I'm not saying that you can't find some rauchy/titilating stuff on the site, but woe unto you if Stevie J finds it.
Heck, they won't even sell so called "explicit" podcasts... what a bunch of prudes. I mean if I want to listen to some huffing and puffing on my own private headphones, why shouldn't they turn a buck off it?
"Record companies can't make money at a dollar a song."
That's a pretty strong assertion to make without offering any supporting evidence. How much does it cost to record a song? If the record companies really can't make money selling songs at a buck a pop, with hundreds of thousands to millions of potential downloads then I'd say they're fundamentally unfit to continue in business.
I had some friends in a band who put out their own album, using the money they earned working in a warehouse... if they can afford to put together what was really a very good sounding CD on just a few thousand dollars, why can't a record company? They've got too much overhead, too many executives, too much marketing. Here's the Vivendi Universal 6K report from '03, being the most recently published report available in english. Unfortunately there's not a lot in there about cost of salaries vs cost of royalties.
For years the music cartels have been protected by their control of the means of distribution. They grew fat and lazy, just like Americas airline companies during the era of regulation. Now, they're being forced to compete with alternative distribution systems, and they can't do it. Just like the airlines they resort to legal protections (in this case endless civil lawsuits, in the case of the airlines bankruptcy protection from creditors) instead of rebuilding their companies.
What we need now is a well funded set of start-up record companies. They could eat the old guard's lunch without breaking a sweat and help to increase the diversity of music available on the radio.
and it has an EULA that they claim he violated. The article fails to make this clear, and I didn't see anything about it on his site before it went down.
The DMCA is being invoked solely because of his use of FedEx.com to order boxes that he didn't intend to use for shipping.
"Bottom line: sites should be planned to be accessible. It's a hinderance to me (I'd like to do our site in AJAX entirely but I can't) but it's the most fair for everyone." No, that's not why you make sites accessible. Sorry to go off, but acting out of pity or a fickle sense of what's 'fair' does not justify the cost of creating fully accessible sites.
Sites are accessible so that you, the developer can get in there and fix things when they break horrendously and you're stuck at the datacenter VPN'ed in from a terminal.
Sites are accessible so that customers with money who happen to be blind or colorblind or whatever can complete purchases.
Sites are accessible so that your government entity is in compliance with the ADA.
Sites are accessible so that clients, customers and government regulators using older equipment and software can easily browse them and enjoy the top notch content you provide.
My bottom line: sites should be planned to be accessible; it's an industry best practice because it directly supports the mission of every website (which is at least partially to make information available and accessible).
When a student is willing to speak up and explain how they reached an incorrect or dubious conclusion, the professor can walk them through the logic and help find the error.
This is one of the primary functions of a university level course - teaching students how to teach themselves. An authoritative conclusion isn't particularly valuable if the method of reaching that conclusion cannot be replicated by the students. So called 'clickers' do nothing to help students synthesize data and experience into valid conclusions.
It's the dedicated professors who are most susceptible to these things, but hopefully they'll also be the first to see how useless the devices are in practice.
I had a very dedicated, very accessible, not very good at imparting knowledge professor at my Uni who bought into the clicker idea. The result was a degradation of the lectures into click fests. Of course he could still be reached during office hours, or pretty much any time he wasn't actively lecturing. And I'm sure that many students learned a lot because of that accessibility but no one learned any more due to the clickers.
[i]I'm glad you're so righteously smug in your ethical beliefs regarding what can and can't be done with embryos, since that is almost certainly to what you're referring.[/i]
I thought he meant our nuclear weapons. You know, those things that can make the earth uninhabitable for man? Those things that you probably don't want a religious zealot to have?
Slashdot Mirror
"They deem the corporate development team as underpowered in the company, with engineers and product managers tending to carry more clout than salesmen and dealmakers."
Well then, maybe that's why none of their products seem to support any common goal (besides being 'cool'). It often seems like Google's left and right hands are completely unaware of each other, and that could be due to teams of gifted engineers all cranking away without ever taking the time to talk to other teams and figure out what the hell the company is doing.
Engineers are important, but alone they're not sufficient to build a viable company.
it's useless.
AJAX is a simple concept. Really, it is. Getting three different coding paradigms to work together harmoniously is not so simple. Throw in available AJAX libraries, JSPs and Atlas pages and you've got layers upon layers of coding cruft that need to be understood before a functional, stable, web-app can be built.
If this book stays at the architecture astronaut level without ever delving into the why of the code structure of the example programs, then it may serve as a cookbook but certainly not as an informative manual that can provide a baseline from which coders can build their skills.
Perhaps the book is better than the reviewer makes it out to be, but he offers no real justification of the 9/10 score awarded, so it's hard to say. Just for giggles, I should note that when Richard Stevens' seminal Advanced Programming in the Unix Environment, 2nd Ed. (being possibly the most comprehensive and useful programming book I've ever read) was reviewed it also received a 9. How do these two books compare?
"The more ink, the more accurate and lifelike the color of the print."
Ha, more like the more ink the more likely you are to end up with a sopping wet unusable piece of paper.
Dye sublimation for life baby!
I think I'll swipe it! ;-)
I bet 80% of the plugin API could be based around an XML ontology explaining to the manager what the 'types' and 'properties' of interest are. There would need to be some custom code for content display and editing but everything else can be pushed down to the filesystem/db.
There are many many ways to interact with the transaction/auction data that eBay generates. By cultivating a community of developers eBay is able to extend the functionality that they offer without having to pay for development. They're able to extend their reach onto portable devices or into pricing guides without needing to know or care about the interface required for any specific application space.
I'm not sure that policies like this will give eBay user lock-in the way that MS's ISV network does, but it can certainly give them examples of new places to deploy their services and perhaps charge for access to said services.
General Jack D. Ripper: Mandrake, do you realize that in addition to fluoridating water, why, there are studies underway to fluoridate salt, flour, fruit juices, soup, sugar, milk... ice cream. Ice cream, Mandrake, children's ice cream.
Group Capt. Lionel Mandrake: Lord, Jack.
General Jack D. Ripper: You know when fluoridation first began?
Group Capt. Lionel Mandrake: I... no, no. I don't, Jack.
General Jack D. Ripper: Nineteen hundred and forty-six. Nineteen forty-six, Mandrake. How does that coincide with your post-war Commie conspiracy, huh? It's incredibly obvious, isn't it? A foreign substance is introduced into our precious bodily fluids without the knowledge of the individual. Certainly without any choice. That's the way your hard-core Commie works.
Group Capt. Lionel Mandrake: Uh, Jack, Jack, listen, tell me, tell me, Jack. When did you first... become... well, develop this theory?
General Jack D. Ripper: Well, I, uh... I... I... first became aware of it, Mandrake, during the physical act of love.
Group Capt. Lionel Mandrake: Hmm.
General Jack D. Ripper: Yes, a uh, a profound sense of fatigue... a feeling of emptiness followed. Luckily I... I was able to interpret these feelings correctly. Loss of essence.
Group Capt. Lionel Mandrake: Hmm.
General Jack D. Ripper: I can assure you it has not recurred, Mandrake. Women uh... women sense my power and they seek the life essence. I, uh... I do not avoid women, Mandrake.
Group Capt. Lionel Mandrake: No.
General Jack D. Ripper: But I... I do deny them my essence.
Copied gratuitiously from the IMDB Memorable Quotes section. So you see, it's not a US plot. It's a commie plot.
Even though it's got Owl in the name, and works on XML based files... the project has nothing to do with Web Ontology Language or the semantic web. :-(
It's just a Java based newsreader (although the site associated with the project does have really pretty design).
I live in the southern part of Silicon Valley, where the median cost of a home is $750K. If I had a family with just one child I couldn't stay where I am on the $53K figure you mention, and forget about ever buying a house.
In most cases, wages are driven directly by the cost of living in an area not by employee greed. And the cost of living in California is very high. That's why these low wages for H1B workers are such a concern. They may set an artificially low ceiling on entry level jobs in the sector. So we won't get any local recruits for those positions, then in 5 years we won't have any mid-career programmers here because we hired temps from overseas. In 15 years all our senior engineers will be looking to retire and there won't be anyone to replace them, so all the work will have to be sent overseas and the US's strategic advantage in software will have been completely destroyed.
Of course, if you own enough stock you have no worries right?
In California all pawn brokers are regulated and for good reason. Because they're selling goods on behalf of a third party they are often seen as 'fences' for stolen goods. By regulating the trade the state has an opportunity to educate those brokers who are honest but potentially naive and to have a registry of those who are less honest and may need to be contacted in the future.
If you've ever bought a used CD in CA. you've purchased from someone who was licensed and bonded (assuming their papers were in order, sig heil!). Having worked at a record shop that did a booming business in legitimate used CDs and vinyl I would say the regulations were not intrusive and worked to assure out customers that anything they bought from us came with a clear title.
Remember, title on stolen goods cannot be transferred by a third party. If you buy a big ticket item on eBay and it turns out to be stolen, the police will confiscate it from you without any reparation. You are free to file a civil suit against the seller, but good luck getting a payout from Joe Schmoe in NY when you're halfway across the continent. Admittedly, the proposed classes would need to have their contents updated but regulating the trade in potentially stolen goods is not a bad thing.
I use SpellBound for Firefox. As for space tourists/flight participants, if they can positively contribute to experiments in a safe fashion they should be encouraged to help further defray the costs of their trip by working.
Many manufacturers produce two versions of their phones. Those intended for home users, that come with cameras and those for the vertical markets/Saudi Arabia that may have some features removed (cameras) or disabled (wireless connectivity that may compromise security). Or so I've heard.
If anyone could confirm this story with actual product numbers I'd appreciate it.
You can disable the Windows autoplay functionality that's reinstalling the drivers by holding down the shift key when you insert the CD. Per this Engadget post. And, since you'll be ripping the tracks to MP3 you only need to do this once per new disc.
not that there's anything that interesting there, but your statement about driving up revenue sure sounds nice ;)
"It sounds good in a meeting to say "you control the Internet and that isn't right."" ;)
So you've answered your own question
Also if countries were to implement their own local DNS systems, there would need to be a gateway between local traffic and foreign traffic to handle IP address translations, but other than that there wouldn't be any real changes to the system (at least that I can see), and I don't think throwing an additional router into the mix at each country's border is going to bring the 'net to its knees anytime soon.
unless you're distance learning and use it to change the channel. ;P
Ah, but wouldn't it be great if you could switch lecturers with the click of a button. "Sorry RMS I'm just not understanding your point, why don't we try a little Knuth instead?"
"Except that-- on our directory-- you know, we're not-- we're not allowing any pornography."
I'm not saying that you can't find some rauchy/titilating stuff on the site, but woe unto you if Stevie J finds it.
Quote Source: ABC News via BoingBoing.
Heck, they won't even sell so called "explicit" podcasts... what a bunch of prudes. I mean if I want to listen to some huffing and puffing on my own private headphones, why shouldn't they turn a buck off it?
"Record companies can't make money at a dollar a song."
That's a pretty strong assertion to make without offering any supporting evidence. How much does it cost to record a song? If the record companies really can't make money selling songs at a buck a pop, with hundreds of thousands to millions of potential downloads then I'd say they're fundamentally unfit to continue in business.
I had some friends in a band who put out their own album, using the money they earned working in a warehouse... if they can afford to put together what was really a very good sounding CD on just a few thousand dollars, why can't a record company? They've got too much overhead, too many executives, too much marketing. Here's the Vivendi Universal 6K report from '03, being the most recently published report available in english. Unfortunately there's not a lot in there about cost of salaries vs cost of royalties.
For years the music cartels have been protected by their control of the means of distribution. They grew fat and lazy, just like Americas airline companies during the era of regulation. Now, they're being forced to compete with alternative distribution systems, and they can't do it. Just like the airlines they resort to legal protections (in this case endless civil lawsuits, in the case of the airlines bankruptcy protection from creditors) instead of rebuilding their companies.
What we need now is a well funded set of start-up record companies. They could eat the old guard's lunch without breaking a sweat and help to increase the diversity of music available on the radio.
clerical error in parent
So device drivers are high level programs now, eh?
;-)
Perhaps I will need that HC11 assembly I learned in school after all.
and it has an EULA that they claim he violated.
The article fails to make this clear, and I didn't see anything about it on his site before it went down.
The DMCA is being invoked solely because of his use of FedEx.com to order boxes that he didn't intend to use for shipping.
No, that's not why you make sites accessible. Sorry to go off, but acting out of pity or a fickle sense of what's 'fair' does not justify the cost of creating fully accessible sites.
My bottom line: sites should be planned to be accessible; it's an industry best practice because it directly supports the mission of every website (which is at least partially to make information available and accessible).
Otherwise I think your comments were spot on
When a student is willing to speak up and explain how they reached an incorrect or dubious conclusion, the professor can walk them through the logic and help find the error.
This is one of the primary functions of a university level course - teaching students how to teach themselves. An authoritative conclusion isn't particularly valuable if the method of reaching that conclusion cannot be replicated by the students. So called 'clickers' do nothing to help students synthesize data and experience into valid conclusions.
It's the dedicated professors who are most susceptible to these things, but hopefully they'll also be the first to see how useless the devices are in practice.
I had a very dedicated, very accessible, not very good at imparting knowledge professor at my Uni who bought into the clicker idea. The result was a degradation of the lectures into click fests. Of course he could still be reached during office hours, or pretty much any time he wasn't actively lecturing. And I'm sure that many students learned a lot because of that accessibility but no one learned any more due to the clickers.
[i]I'm glad you're so righteously smug in your ethical beliefs regarding what can and can't be done with embryos, since that is almost certainly to what you're referring.[/i]
I thought he meant our nuclear weapons. You know, those things that can make the earth uninhabitable for man? Those things that you probably don't want a religious zealot to have?