Tell me, do you really believe it is the anti-trust department that decides upon sanctions? If not, why bring up this strawman when my argument was that this department, at least is working nicely? I didn't say other parts of the EU do.
Nonsense. One of the ways that corporations are different from real people is that you can split them into parts without killing them.
So we'd have AdSearchGoogle, headed by Larry Page, and ServiceGoogle, headed by Sergey Brin. AdSearchGoogle would be prohibited for 5 years to favor search results pointing to ServiceGoogle, and that's it.
Also, Google doesn't have to stop serving them, just stop doing business there.
Googles business is advertisement. Their services are excuses for showing you advertisement. In this business, these two things are pretty much the same thing.
China is much less connected to the world and especially the language barrier is massive. There's more to language than making a translation. Why do you think Facebook has almost no traction in Russia? It's not that they couldn't find someone who writes kyrillic.
My point is that the EU is a bunch of arrogant idiots who have no business telling an American company to split up.
Like it or not, idiots or not, they do have such business, simply because your poor little "american company" is no such thing. It's an international corporation that was once founded in america, but now does business all over the world, including within the EU and actually quite a lot of it.
I don't consider it much of a monopoly when the barrier to entry is almost nothing.
If you think the barrier to entry in the search market is low, you should have a talk with Yahoo or MS, both of which have spent a billion or three on what you call "almost nothing". Either they're all idiots, or you're missing something.
I can't help but feel that this entire push is slimy corruption politics typical to Europe where they try to protect local businesses and harm foreign ones using dubious legal means which are often against WTO agreements.
But actually a good thing. Of course you'll deny that if you drank too much of the neo-conservative cool-aid, but to any thinking person it's quite clear that the total dominance of a few global superplayers is not beneficial to the market or the people.
I'll be frank, I despise my government here in Germany and if they all vanished tomorrow and were replaced by monkeys giving random orders, we'd probably be better off. But in a few things, they somehow manage to do the right thing, despite their total lack of competence.
But when are we going to see them go after other huge companies abusing their market share?
They do. The anti-trust part of the EU is actually one of the few that's working pretty good. And before the usual stupid comments come running: They go against EU companies as much as against USA companies.
This stupid nonsense is posted every time the EU acts in relation to american companies.
It's among the worst nationalistic hogwash misconceptions ever, easily on par with North Korea rambling about its moon base.
The EU is bigger than the USA in almost every metric, especially on the important ones: Population count (507 mio. vs. 319 mio.) and GDP (18.4 trio. US$ vs. 16.8 trio. US$).
Any big american company deciding to withdraw from Europe would have its board of directors kicked out faster than they can sign the paperwork to make it happen, or watch its stock crash & burn, because they've just not only moved out of its biggest market, they've also given a free playing ground for a global competitor to emerge unchallenged.
Then there's the point of people like you, the politcally ignorant
You assume a lot about people you've never met. Good thing you're posting AC, you would bring shame to your name if you didn't.
The backroom deals and "old family" names that have to have to nod to get the power behind a name.
Oh, please. You think the powers behind the curtain care one bit about the election results? Real corruption ignores the elections and goes to the institutions. Look at your government. Yeah, you elect the senators and presidents, but the guys who sit in the ministry of whatever for 20 years working on the laws, implementing the guidelines, writing the decision papers - you forget about them, never heard of them, and yet if you trace their personal histories vs. policy changes, you'll be astonished. Fortunately, a few journalists have done the job for you.
it doesn't matter how many parties there are in the systemâ"only the two major ones have more than a snowball's chance in Hell of actually winning more than 1 or 2 legislative seats in anything but the rarest circumstances.
And this is true exactly because everyone assumes it is true and adapts their voting behavior accordingly.
How can you blame the voters for an evil choice when the choices are evil and evil?
Because the actual choices are evil, evil, I-don't-know-you, never-heard-of-you, who-are-you and I-don't-care-enough-to-actually-check-who-the-choices-are.
There are more than two parties in the system. The fact that only two of them matter is what voters can and should be blamed for.
Coincidentally, I have stopped using a mobile phone. This is much to the disgust of people around me, apparently it is their right to be able to contact me at any time these days.
You don't have to ditch your phone to do that. You can simply realize that answering it is still a choice.
You can let a call go to voicemail. You can leave a text message sitting there, waiting for answer until it's convenient for you to answer it. It's possible, you know?
I love my iPhone because it puts things into my pocket that are useful to me. Maps, reminders, calendar, notes, and occasionally writing a mail or checking something on the Internet. I very rarely answer mails on my phone, for example.
Take a lesson from politics. Dictators have discovered in the 50s that it is cheaper and more reliable to put money into propaganda and oppression than into actually improving their peoples lives. The purpose of both approaches - at least from a dictators perspective - is to prevent uprisings and revolutions, i.e. to stay in power. Sadly, the same economically driven view that's being advocated here also makes the least desireable outcome be the most rational choice.
For computers, the equivalent solution is that putting money into advertisement and suppressing damaging information is probably preferably to actually improving security. The spin campaign wins over the better product.
It's time for having 3 categories. Paid, in-app-purchases, free.
Seriously.
With a low number of exceptions, in-app purchases are just todays scam/trick to get your app into the "free" section of the store, without it actually being free.
I want a section for genuinely, 100% free apps, simply because there are quite a lot of them out there and because it would be the honest thing to do and because I mind being tricked a lot more than having to pay for something.
Shoot one or two of the fence jumpers. The frequency of fence jumping will drop to almost nothing.
It already is almost nothing - 99.8% of days, nobody jumps the fence. If you exclude a few ridiculous cases (that small child, for example), it goes to 99.9% -- as everyone who's ever worked on SLAs knows, beyond that the cost of additional nines is quite dramatic.
In tech, we solve single-point-of-failure issues with redundancy.
You guys should have not one, but several reserve presidents, and a few reserve headquarters, and if one of them gets blown up, just don't make it a big deal.
That sounds like sarcasm, but really, it's not. Just framed a bit tongue-in-cheek. But how often do you hear members of the senate being targets of assassination attempts? The senate is as important as the president, but thanks to using a highly distributed system with extreme redundancy, they are far less interesting targets.
But I guess we as human beings still have minds from 50,000 years ago and we want to see a leader to our tribe. The concept of shared leadership is brilliant, but too advanced for our stone-age brains.
For example, the author Virginia Woolf has a ranking of 1,081 out of 1,011,304 while the Italian painter Giuseppe Amisani, who died in the same year as Woolf, has a ranking of 580,363. So Riddell's new ranking clearly suggests that organizations like Project Gutenberg should focus more on digitizing Woolf's work than Amisani's.
Which will lead to... exactly the thing we started from.
Wikipedia is a huge circle-jerking effort. If you run this effort over the whole of it, you'll no doubt find out that the "works" of some porn stars are more influential than some of the more obscure philosophers.
It's not so simple, and while the basic project is interesting, drawing conclusions like "you should focus more on this" are clearly written by imbeciles who don't understand that influence isn't the same as citation count or page rank.
The pre-sokratian philosophers, for example, like the sophists, probably don't rank so highly because they left little written material, but that exactly is why preserving what we have about them is so important. Among other things they invented rhetoric, made some of the earliest efforts of a systematic approach to ethics, and greatly influenced Sokrates, Plato and Aristotle as well as pretty much every other greek philosopher, though mostly through being their opponents.
The same is true of arabian scholars who largely go uncredited, but their works created the foundation of much of mathematics.
And let's not even talk about asia. If you take WP as your frame of reference, you're doomed to failure on cross-cultural awareness. The chinese WP has about 10% the size of the english, but chinese culture goes back more than a thousand years further than western culture.
It's a cute little project for fun, but generating serious suggestions for serious projects like Guttenberg out of it is shortsighted, stupid and self-referential.
The difference is that you need diverse circumstances and projects, experience your code succeeding and failing in enough cases, and sometimes simply enough time for the knowledge to sink in. It's the age-old difference between shallow and deep knowledge, and you simply don't develop deep knowledge in three months.
I'd treat anyone coming out of such a boot camp as a beginner. That said, I'd treat most university graduates as beginners, too, unless they've spent considerably time in the real world as well. But that's the difference: When you do university, you have time to get real-life experience as well. In a bootcamp, you get exactly what you get there.
I don't think I could honestly trust in the abilities of any programmer who hasn't had a serious discrete math class
Why math, precisely? Some basics in logic are a must, but most of what you learn in discrete math today is cute and completely useless for most real-world programming tasks. I know some of us old blokes think details of implementation are important and people should use this and not that because it's got better performance, but unless you're writing a 3D engine or a scientific application, it rarely matters very much. Yeah, my loop is 3% more efficient than yours. On the average customers quad core machine it will make 0.1 seconds of difference.
I'd rather have a programmer who understands to not store passwords unencrypted, ask a user interface designer instead of writing crappy dialogs by himself and fail softly. You know, skills that actually make a difference.
But for that, we agree, people need skills and not just a crash course.
There are specific situations in which bringing someone up to speed on a technology or knowledge in a crash course is good.
Most situations are not that specific. In addition, "someone" doesn't mean "anyone". Bootcamps or crash courses work best when you either need to bring someone with no knowledge up to a low level of competence in a field, e.g. so they can start work to gain more experience and thus more knowledge. Or when you need to train already experienced people in a very specific piece of new knowledge, say you're rolling out a new software system to your team.
Software development is IMHO one of the areas least suited to that style of teaching. Slowly learning has big advantages in that the knowledge is less shallow, more strongly connected and more easily accessible in a wider array of situations. Software developers need to be craftsmen - they need to "feel" their material and tools. As long as they just use them, their work will be inferior. And in software, inferior doesn't mean "not so shiny" or "slightly less round", it means zero-days, crashes, data loss and depending on what the software controls, potentially catastrophic damage.
For web developers, it's fine. Nobody gives a fuck anyway and your boss will outsource the next revision of the website to some contractor with the next buzzword wave anyways. Sorry, got a bit sarcastic there, of course web services these days are expensive, important and more often than not of absolutely shoddy software quality. But at least it's not the same as the software running on airplanes or controlling combat drones.
There's a difference between "not independent" and "not worth listening to".
To many Russians, btw., our own propaganda sounds as laughable as theirs to us. Reading both sides can widen your horizon. Believing either side blindly is the sure mark of a fool.
How about the people and countries not invading Ukraine with their armed forces (including tanks and artillery), or actively firing into it with artillery?
That they're not actively fighting doesn't mean they don't have an interest that they would lie for.
You don't get independent analysis from people who have stakes in the game. I thought that was taught in management school in week one?
with all the brainpower (?) google has, with all their money and employee base, its amazing how much abandonware they have produced over the years.
Only if you don't understand the lifecycle of business.
Look at what most of the brains within Google are doing these days. Running services and building bigger server farms. You are completely right: They're a big company, but not a grown-up company.
True, but they kill the exact small function that was the only one I'm utilizing. I understand why - nobody is using it anyways. My online game (below) is taking payments in a few different formats, plus a few more I'm planning or working on, but frankly speaking, it's PayPal and then nothing for a very long time. I think one person purchased game credits with Google Wallet this year. Two more paid with Bitcoin. Everyone else uses PayPal. Yes, people ask for other options, but generally they ask "do you have something else except PayPal?", and not for something specific else. They just don't like PayPal.
But Google Wallet, for my case, was not even worth the time it took to integrate it. I can completely understand why they kill this function.
Slashdot Mirror
Tell me, do you really believe it is the anti-trust department that decides upon sanctions? If not, why bring up this strawman when my argument was that this department, at least is working nicely? I didn't say other parts of the EU do.
But this represents an existential threat
Nonsense. One of the ways that corporations are different from real people is that you can split them into parts without killing them.
So we'd have AdSearchGoogle, headed by Larry Page, and ServiceGoogle, headed by Sergey Brin. AdSearchGoogle would be prohibited for 5 years to favor search results pointing to ServiceGoogle, and that's it.
Also, Google doesn't have to stop serving them, just stop doing business there.
Googles business is advertisement. Their services are excuses for showing you advertisement. In this business, these two things are pretty much the same thing.
You need to go back to reading comprehension 101. The part that's nationalistic about the GP post is USA nationalism, not european.
but the U.S. leads in per capita consumer spending.
Which, as a per capita value is again dependent on the population number for total value, and the population of the EU is 60% larger.
But the U.S. (and U.S. companies) does not need Europe to sustain businesses tied to consumer products.
Strangely, they seem to think otherwise, because they're going to great efforts to do business in Europe.
China is much less connected to the world and especially the language barrier is massive. There's more to language than making a translation. Why do you think Facebook has almost no traction in Russia? It's not that they couldn't find someone who writes kyrillic.
My point is that the EU is a bunch of arrogant idiots who have no business telling an American company to split up.
Like it or not, idiots or not, they do have such business, simply because your poor little "american company" is no such thing. It's an international corporation that was once founded in america, but now does business all over the world, including within the EU and actually quite a lot of it.
I don't consider it much of a monopoly when the barrier to entry is almost nothing.
If you think the barrier to entry in the search market is low, you should have a talk with Yahoo or MS, both of which have spent a billion or three on what you call "almost nothing". Either they're all idiots, or you're missing something.
I can't help but feel that this entire push is slimy corruption politics typical to Europe where they try to protect local businesses and harm foreign ones using dubious legal means which are often against WTO agreements.
But actually a good thing. Of course you'll deny that if you drank too much of the neo-conservative cool-aid, but to any thinking person it's quite clear that the total dominance of a few global superplayers is not beneficial to the market or the people.
I'll be frank, I despise my government here in Germany and if they all vanished tomorrow and were replaced by monkeys giving random orders, we'd probably be better off. But in a few things, they somehow manage to do the right thing, despite their total lack of competence.
But when are we going to see them go after other huge companies abusing their market share?
They do. The anti-trust part of the EU is actually one of the few that's working pretty good. And before the usual stupid comments come running: They go against EU companies as much as against USA companies.
This stupid nonsense is posted every time the EU acts in relation to american companies.
It's among the worst nationalistic hogwash misconceptions ever, easily on par with North Korea rambling about its moon base.
The EU is bigger than the USA in almost every metric, especially on the important ones: Population count (507 mio. vs. 319 mio.) and GDP (18.4 trio. US$ vs. 16.8 trio. US$).
Any big american company deciding to withdraw from Europe would have its board of directors kicked out faster than they can sign the paperwork to make it happen, or watch its stock crash & burn, because they've just not only moved out of its biggest market, they've also given a free playing ground for a global competitor to emerge unchallenged.
Then there's the point of people like you, the politcally ignorant
You assume a lot about people you've never met. Good thing you're posting AC, you would bring shame to your name if you didn't.
The backroom deals and "old family" names that have to have to nod to get the power behind a name.
Oh, please. You think the powers behind the curtain care one bit about the election results? Real corruption ignores the elections and goes to the institutions. Look at your government. Yeah, you elect the senators and presidents, but the guys who sit in the ministry of whatever for 20 years working on the laws, implementing the guidelines, writing the decision papers - you forget about them, never heard of them, and yet if you trace their personal histories vs. policy changes, you'll be astonished. Fortunately, a few journalists have done the job for you.
it doesn't matter how many parties there are in the systemâ"only the two major ones have more than a snowball's chance in Hell of actually winning more than 1 or 2 legislative seats in anything but the rarest circumstances.
And this is true exactly because everyone assumes it is true and adapts their voting behavior accordingly.
How can you blame the voters for an evil choice when the choices are evil and evil?
Because the actual choices are evil, evil, I-don't-know-you, never-heard-of-you, who-are-you and I-don't-care-enough-to-actually-check-who-the-choices-are.
There are more than two parties in the system. The fact that only two of them matter is what voters can and should be blamed for.
Coincidentally, I have stopped using a mobile phone. This is much to the disgust of people around me, apparently it is their right to be able to contact me at any time these days.
You don't have to ditch your phone to do that. You can simply realize that answering it is still a choice.
You can let a call go to voicemail. You can leave a text message sitting there, waiting for answer until it's convenient for you to answer it. It's possible, you know?
I love my iPhone because it puts things into my pocket that are useful to me. Maps, reminders, calendar, notes, and occasionally writing a mail or checking something on the Internet. I very rarely answer mails on my phone, for example.
Take a lesson from politics. Dictators have discovered in the 50s that it is cheaper and more reliable to put money into propaganda and oppression than into actually improving their peoples lives. The purpose of both approaches - at least from a dictators perspective - is to prevent uprisings and revolutions, i.e. to stay in power. Sadly, the same economically driven view that's being advocated here also makes the least desireable outcome be the most rational choice.
For computers, the equivalent solution is that putting money into advertisement and suppressing damaging information is probably preferably to actually improving security. The spin campaign wins over the better product.
It's time for having 3 categories. Paid, in-app-purchases, free.
Seriously.
With a low number of exceptions, in-app purchases are just todays scam/trick to get your app into the "free" section of the store, without it actually being free.
I want a section for genuinely, 100% free apps, simply because there are quite a lot of them out there and because it would be the honest thing to do and because I mind being tricked a lot more than having to pay for something.
Shoot one or two of the fence jumpers. The frequency of fence jumping will drop to almost nothing.
It already is almost nothing - 99.8% of days, nobody jumps the fence. If you exclude a few ridiculous cases (that small child, for example), it goes to 99.9% -- as everyone who's ever worked on SLAs knows, beyond that the cost of additional nines is quite dramatic.
In tech, we solve single-point-of-failure issues with redundancy.
You guys should have not one, but several reserve presidents, and a few reserve headquarters, and if one of them gets blown up, just don't make it a big deal.
That sounds like sarcasm, but really, it's not. Just framed a bit tongue-in-cheek. But how often do you hear members of the senate being targets of assassination attempts? The senate is as important as the president, but thanks to using a highly distributed system with extreme redundancy, they are far less interesting targets.
But I guess we as human beings still have minds from 50,000 years ago and we want to see a leader to our tribe. The concept of shared leadership is brilliant, but too advanced for our stone-age brains.
For example, the author Virginia Woolf has a ranking of 1,081 out of 1,011,304 while the Italian painter Giuseppe Amisani, who died in the same year as Woolf, has a ranking of 580,363. So Riddell's new ranking clearly suggests that organizations like Project Gutenberg should focus more on digitizing Woolf's work than Amisani's.
Which will lead to... exactly the thing we started from.
Wikipedia is a huge circle-jerking effort. If you run this effort over the whole of it, you'll no doubt find out that the "works" of some porn stars are more influential than some of the more obscure philosophers.
It's not so simple, and while the basic project is interesting, drawing conclusions like "you should focus more on this" are clearly written by imbeciles who don't understand that influence isn't the same as citation count or page rank.
The pre-sokratian philosophers, for example, like the sophists, probably don't rank so highly because they left little written material, but that exactly is why preserving what we have about them is so important. Among other things they invented rhetoric, made some of the earliest efforts of a systematic approach to ethics, and greatly influenced Sokrates, Plato and Aristotle as well as pretty much every other greek philosopher, though mostly through being their opponents.
The same is true of arabian scholars who largely go uncredited, but their works created the foundation of much of mathematics.
And let's not even talk about asia. If you take WP as your frame of reference, you're doomed to failure on cross-cultural awareness. The chinese WP has about 10% the size of the english, but chinese culture goes back more than a thousand years further than western culture.
It's a cute little project for fun, but generating serious suggestions for serious projects like Guttenberg out of it is shortsighted, stupid and self-referential.
Skill is not a matter of teaching hours.
The difference is that you need diverse circumstances and projects, experience your code succeeding and failing in enough cases, and sometimes simply enough time for the knowledge to sink in. It's the age-old difference between shallow and deep knowledge, and you simply don't develop deep knowledge in three months.
I'd treat anyone coming out of such a boot camp as a beginner. That said, I'd treat most university graduates as beginners, too, unless they've spent considerably time in the real world as well. But that's the difference: When you do university, you have time to get real-life experience as well. In a bootcamp, you get exactly what you get there.
we hired a boot camp graduate
Never trust a statistic with one data point. ;-)
I don't think I could honestly trust in the abilities of any programmer who hasn't had a serious discrete math class
Why math, precisely? Some basics in logic are a must, but most of what you learn in discrete math today is cute and completely useless for most real-world programming tasks. I know some of us old blokes think details of implementation are important and people should use this and not that because it's got better performance, but unless you're writing a 3D engine or a scientific application, it rarely matters very much. Yeah, my loop is 3% more efficient than yours. On the average customers quad core machine it will make 0.1 seconds of difference.
I'd rather have a programmer who understands to not store passwords unencrypted, ask a user interface designer instead of writing crappy dialogs by himself and fail softly. You know, skills that actually make a difference.
But for that, we agree, people need skills and not just a crash course.
There are specific situations in which bringing someone up to speed on a technology or knowledge in a crash course is good.
Most situations are not that specific. In addition, "someone" doesn't mean "anyone". Bootcamps or crash courses work best when you either need to bring someone with no knowledge up to a low level of competence in a field, e.g. so they can start work to gain more experience and thus more knowledge. Or when you need to train already experienced people in a very specific piece of new knowledge, say you're rolling out a new software system to your team.
Software development is IMHO one of the areas least suited to that style of teaching. Slowly learning has big advantages in that the knowledge is less shallow, more strongly connected and more easily accessible in a wider array of situations. Software developers need to be craftsmen - they need to "feel" their material and tools. As long as they just use them, their work will be inferior. And in software, inferior doesn't mean "not so shiny" or "slightly less round", it means zero-days, crashes, data loss and depending on what the software controls, potentially catastrophic damage.
For web developers, it's fine. Nobody gives a fuck anyway and your boss will outsource the next revision of the website to some contractor with the next buzzword wave anyways. Sorry, got a bit sarcastic there, of course web services these days are expensive, important and more often than not of absolutely shoddy software quality. But at least it's not the same as the software running on airplanes or controlling combat drones.
There's a difference between "not independent" and "not worth listening to".
To many Russians, btw., our own propaganda sounds as laughable as theirs to us. Reading both sides can widen your horizon. Believing either side blindly is the sure mark of a fool.
How about the people and countries not invading Ukraine with their armed forces (including tanks and artillery), or actively firing into it with artillery?
That they're not actively fighting doesn't mean they don't have an interest that they would lie for.
You don't get independent analysis from people who have stakes in the game. I thought that was taught in management school in week one?
with all the brainpower (?) google has, with all their money and employee base, its amazing how much abandonware they have produced over the years.
Only if you don't understand the lifecycle of business.
Look at what most of the brains within Google are doing these days. Running services and building bigger server farms. You are completely right: They're a big company, but not a grown-up company.
True, but they kill the exact small function that was the only one I'm utilizing. I understand why - nobody is using it anyways. My online game (below) is taking payments in a few different formats, plus a few more I'm planning or working on, but frankly speaking, it's PayPal and then nothing for a very long time. I think one person purchased game credits with Google Wallet this year. Two more paid with Bitcoin. Everyone else uses PayPal. Yes, people ask for other options, but generally they ask "do you have something else except PayPal?", and not for something specific else. They just don't like PayPal.
But Google Wallet, for my case, was not even worth the time it took to integrate it. I can completely understand why they kill this function.