At the local level, we have 3 full time web guys. We each do our own thing, though. I do coding, another does graphics, and the third does content, although all three of us can do content/graphics as required. As far as advertising, I think there are about 20 employees in our advertising department. Most of what they do is on-air content, though, very little spills over onto the web. We are trying to get the rest of the employees to generate web content from their on-air content/stories, but it is rough going to teach new media to old media people. We have a few engineers that support our local IT systems (thankfully a lot of this is automated!).
Nationally there are quite a few people to support the many websites/IT services throughout the company. Each local group is responsible for their own site. The company itself is a Fortune 500 company and a few of our websites are in the top 100/500 rankings as far as uniques/day.
Some of the other groups focus more on web than others, it depends greatly on target demographics. If your station/group targets the elderly, your website isn't as big of a concern compared to a group that was trying to capture a younger audience or a more national audience.
Pretty damn cool idea, actually. I'm not sure about their demo application (unless the speech quality was superb), but a cool idea nonetheless. Could especially be nice for cracking passwords on things like RAR archives where you have to use brute force attacks. I imagine opening up old password protected archives could be very valuable to businesses (particulary since businesses tend to repeat passwords, e.g., discover one and you probably discovered a bunch).
I'm cautious reading stories like these. TFA indicates that statistical analysis says the 1 degree warmer water increases hurricane intensity. That makes sense. Now what can they do with that information? Does it help prediction models? Even if we were a totally rational and science-founded world (which we are not), this study shouldn't sway us either way. Obviously we can't directly control ocean temperature. Can anyone quantify changes humanity can make and implement to lower ocean temperature directly? Nope.
Maybe the study answers it, but what does the increased temperature do to other weather? Does it change, speed up, or slow down the oceanic currents and trade winds? Is the water temperature becoming less entropic, with higher temperature but smaller surface area or volume, or more? Is the depth of heating increasing or decreasing? "More hot water means stronger hurricanes" doesn't add much to what we already know.
Obviously more study is warranted before we all go spaztastic.
FYI, the penalties are not against CBS itself, they are against stations that broadcast the show. CBS profits are entirely separate from the station profits, in fact, CBS owns very few of their own stations. Over $30k is a lot of money for some of the smaller stations -- that is almost a full years' worth of salary in some parts of the country. For $30k, I would hope parents could protect their own children and monitor what they watch.
The stations do not yet know if CBS will reimburse the fines if they aren't appealed.
By eliminating the need to rewire every house for Cat5 (or higher), Verizon can cut down on time to wire large areas for FIOS itself. They don't just reduce their cost. Home owners can then later upgrade their home wiring to use the full capacity of FIOS, with or without the support of Verizon.
Verizon (and investors, including in a small part myself) doesn't know if FIOS will be profitable yet. There are a lot of competing techs that are a threat. They can't compete in speed, but they make up for it in their assumed lower cost. Verizon is spending a TON of money on FIOS in the Tampa area and from what I've seen is making very little real profit on it yet.
I'm a bit disappointed that Fibre is being put in by a private company. In my opinion, it should be installed just like streets are--public utilities funded by federal, state, and local governments. It would be a massive upfront cost but the economic gain would, in the long term, be massive. Lease the lines to private companies to provide the actual service. The only thing that would worry me is the government feeling it has the right to monitor all traffic, but I'm sure that isn't too far off from how it is now.
I'm excited for FIOS. My neighborhood is set to be wired in about 2 months.
Actually, very few shows follow the traditional fall to spring scheduling anymore. Sweeps periods now happen more frequently. In our case, we have 4 sweeps periods (CBS) during the year. New seasons generally air during these critical rating periods. Sweeps used to be twice a year: fall and spring. Now it is very common for shows to take breaks during their season. ABC's Lost is a perfect example. They've taken numerous several week long breaks. These breaks are periods when they are NOT in sweeps. The shows typically "return" to air at the beginning of a sweeps period since the first episode after an in-season break gives huge ratings.
Also, new shows that are considered risky ventures are not played during sweeps or are played at the end of a sweeps period. Thus the people that make sure to watch a show to help its ratings really don't help at all since no one cares about ratings between sweeps.
In case you're wondering, sweeps periods are never staggered the same. Some sweeps periods last for two or three weeks while others can last up to 5 consecutive weeks with only a few weeks break before the next sweeps period. They generally are set to predate seasonal advertising routines. E.g., one of the last sweeps periods ends in early November and sets the advertising rates through the end of the holiday season.
I hate Norton products. They are incredibly bloated, offer no technical documentation, and literally take over a system once installed. Have you ever tried to uninstall a Norton product? They are as bad as the viruses, worms, and trojans they claim to protect against.
If I controlled MS, I'd stop releasing software in South Korea. MS has enough other massive global markets to cut the profit from South Korea. Don't like my software? Fine, I won't sell it to you. Also, after my obligations to XP and 2003 are done for support contracts, I will stop supporting software in any form, including tech support, licensing, and security patches. Oooh you like the new version of Office? Too bad, so sad.
That being said, I don't see what the problem with them including stuff with their OS is. Nothing at all prevents you from installing additional software! The included software is CRAP and should be easy to market around. OEMs are already free to bundle additional software with Windows, including setting them as the default applications...
Why the hell is PHPBB on their list? PHPBB is one of the biggest software trainwrecks I have ever seen. It started as a distaster and still is today. New versions just make it worse. It is a mix of coding styles and theories (object vs. procedural, amongst others), their templating system is dismal, and integrating your site with phpbb is asking for disaster. Just because a project is popular does not mean it is worthy of any top 10 list.
Re:Congratulations are in order!
on
A Decade of PHP
·
· Score: 1
PHP 5.1 has a new module going in for a consistent database API. It is not an "abstraction" layer per se, however, any database with a supported driver (all the major ones already have one) can be dropped right in. Check out PDO: http://www.php.net/pdo -- more links are in the comments at the bottom, including a PDO wiki page.
It is also in PECL right now and you can download compiled binaries for Win32 versions of 5.0 or higher; source is available for unix systems.
The only major thing that I know of that it is lacking now is support for scrollable cursors, but Wez is working on that. My current app uses PDO and it is lightyears faster than PEARDB and ODBC. Plus it is OO based!
I, too, have PHP to thank for a wonderful career. While I know that PHP is not the best language for the massive applications I've done, PHP developers are relatively easy to find and train. That is a major marketing factor for companies. Rails is great but how many (available!) workers are there? Very few. Same with Python.
PHP can be very powerful when done right. The last major system I wrote with it included a call center (using the wonderful company Voxeo for hosting) that dropped right into the CRM and loan processing software.
The current system includes a self-running tiered hosting system (Bind 9, Apache 2, PHP 5.1-dev, PGSQL 8); the daemons (written in PHP) detect server load and move sites accordingly to other slaves.
I've said it before, but I have to promote PopFile (http://popfile.sourceforge.net/) again. Since doing a bit of training, it now correctly sorts about 99% of my e-mail. I get about 600 messages a day not including mailing lists, and my accuracy is 99.65%. It is generally not susceptible to new spam techniques unless they can match the subject matter that my e-mail typically covers.
When they start spamming "Linux IPF Apache LOOK! Vi@GR@ makes your peNi$ PHP Bug CSS" I will be concerned.
No, I still remember those, in fact, there are many sites that still have them.
Flash is not guilty, no. Nor is Macromedia. However, that being said, if all users see Flash being used for is advertising, users will not download the plugin or will use flash blocking software/plugins, thus rendering Flash less useful.
The main fault of Macromedia is not providing a "Block" mode for Flash files. I would like to see a default screen that says "This page requires the downloading of Flash content. [Download Now]" with no way for a site to override it. This will stop pop up banners but still allow, as you say, nice sites that have good content & GUI. A "Always Allow this flash file" would be required, of course (vs. "always allow this domain").
Don't get me wrong-- we use Flash extensively at work, but on CD multimedia demos for our clients. It has its applications.
I believe the general hatred is because Flash is largely useless. Especially now that there are more Flash ads than graphic/text ads. Most sites do not use Flash in a meaningful manner (I'm sorry, an HTML menu is just fine, thanks) and do not provide HTML versions.
Hardware can have flaws, too, either accidental or intentional. Do we as citizens get the right to inspect the hardware, too, or at least some citizen watchdog groups? IMO, hardware stuff is much more sinister since it would be next to impossible to detect.
Yes, there are numerous articles and such in the past that have mentioned that most Google engineers get 10% of free time to devote to their own projects.
Orkut was born this way, as well as Google Sets and likely numerous other projects.
Slashdot Mirror
At the local level, we have 3 full time web guys. We each do our own thing, though. I do coding, another does graphics, and the third does content, although all three of us can do content/graphics as required. As far as advertising, I think there are about 20 employees in our advertising department. Most of what they do is on-air content, though, very little spills over onto the web. We are trying to get the rest of the employees to generate web content from their on-air content/stories, but it is rough going to teach new media to old media people. We have a few engineers that support our local IT systems (thankfully a lot of this is automated!).
Nationally there are quite a few people to support the many websites/IT services throughout the company. Each local group is responsible for their own site. The company itself is a Fortune 500 company and a few of our websites are in the top 100/500 rankings as far as uniques/day.
Some of the other groups focus more on web than others, it depends greatly on target demographics. If your station/group targets the elderly, your website isn't as big of a concern compared to a group that was trying to capture a younger audience or a more national audience.
Pretty damn cool idea, actually. I'm not sure about their demo application (unless the speech quality was superb), but a cool idea nonetheless. Could especially be nice for cracking passwords on things like RAR archives where you have to use brute force attacks. I imagine opening up old password protected archives could be very valuable to businesses (particulary since businesses tend to repeat passwords, e.g., discover one and you probably discovered a bunch).
Not very useful to the public at large, though.
I'm cautious reading stories like these. TFA indicates that statistical analysis says the 1 degree warmer water increases hurricane intensity. That makes sense. Now what can they do with that information? Does it help prediction models? Even if we were a totally rational and science-founded world (which we are not), this study shouldn't sway us either way. Obviously we can't directly control ocean temperature. Can anyone quantify changes humanity can make and implement to lower ocean temperature directly? Nope.
Maybe the study answers it, but what does the increased temperature do to other weather? Does it change, speed up, or slow down the oceanic currents and trade winds? Is the water temperature becoming less entropic, with higher temperature but smaller surface area or volume, or more? Is the depth of heating increasing or decreasing? "More hot water means stronger hurricanes" doesn't add much to what we already know.
Obviously more study is warranted before we all go spaztastic.
FYI, the penalties are not against CBS itself, they are against stations that broadcast the show. CBS profits are entirely separate from the station profits, in fact, CBS owns very few of their own stations. Over $30k is a lot of money for some of the smaller stations -- that is almost a full years' worth of salary in some parts of the country. For $30k, I would hope parents could protect their own children and monitor what they watch.
The stations do not yet know if CBS will reimburse the fines if they aren't appealed.
Also, not all CBS stations had fines levied.
By eliminating the need to rewire every house for Cat5 (or higher), Verizon can cut down on time to wire large areas for FIOS itself. They don't just reduce their cost. Home owners can then later upgrade their home wiring to use the full capacity of FIOS, with or without the support of Verizon.
Verizon (and investors, including in a small part myself) doesn't know if FIOS will be profitable yet. There are a lot of competing techs that are a threat. They can't compete in speed, but they make up for it in their assumed lower cost. Verizon is spending a TON of money on FIOS in the Tampa area and from what I've seen is making very little real profit on it yet.
I'm a bit disappointed that Fibre is being put in by a private company. In my opinion, it should be installed just like streets are--public utilities funded by federal, state, and local governments. It would be a massive upfront cost but the economic gain would, in the long term, be massive. Lease the lines to private companies to provide the actual service. The only thing that would worry me is the government feeling it has the right to monitor all traffic, but I'm sure that isn't too far off from how it is now.
I'm excited for FIOS. My neighborhood is set to be wired in about 2 months.
Actually, very few shows follow the traditional fall to spring scheduling anymore. Sweeps periods now happen more frequently. In our case, we have 4 sweeps periods (CBS) during the year. New seasons generally air during these critical rating periods. Sweeps used to be twice a year: fall and spring. Now it is very common for shows to take breaks during their season. ABC's Lost is a perfect example. They've taken numerous several week long breaks. These breaks are periods when they are NOT in sweeps. The shows typically "return" to air at the beginning of a sweeps period since the first episode after an in-season break gives huge ratings.
Also, new shows that are considered risky ventures are not played during sweeps or are played at the end of a sweeps period. Thus the people that make sure to watch a show to help its ratings really don't help at all since no one cares about ratings between sweeps.
In case you're wondering, sweeps periods are never staggered the same. Some sweeps periods last for two or three weeks while others can last up to 5 consecutive weeks with only a few weeks break before the next sweeps period. They generally are set to predate seasonal advertising routines. E.g., one of the last sweeps periods ends in early November and sets the advertising rates through the end of the holiday season.
The more you know(tm).
I hate Norton products. They are incredibly bloated, offer no technical documentation, and literally take over a system once installed. Have you ever tried to uninstall a Norton product? They are as bad as the viruses, worms, and trojans they claim to protect against.
If I controlled MS, I'd stop releasing software in South Korea. MS has enough other massive global markets to cut the profit from South Korea. Don't like my software? Fine, I won't sell it to you. Also, after my obligations to XP and 2003 are done for support contracts, I will stop supporting software in any form, including tech support, licensing, and security patches. Oooh you like the new version of Office? Too bad, so sad. That being said, I don't see what the problem with them including stuff with their OS is. Nothing at all prevents you from installing additional software! The included software is CRAP and should be easy to market around. OEMs are already free to bundle additional software with Windows, including setting them as the default applications...
WTS [Foreign Worker][Foreign Worker][Foreign Worker] 20g OK?
Why the hell is PHPBB on their list? PHPBB is one of the biggest software trainwrecks I have ever seen. It started as a distaster and still is today. New versions just make it worse. It is a mix of coding styles and theories (object vs. procedural, amongst others), their templating system is dismal, and integrating your site with phpbb is asking for disaster. Just because a project is popular does not mean it is worthy of any top 10 list.
PHP 5.1 has a new module going in for a consistent database API. It is not an "abstraction" layer per se, however, any database with a supported driver (all the major ones already have one) can be dropped right in. Check out PDO: http://www.php.net/pdo -- more links are in the comments at the bottom, including a PDO wiki page. It is also in PECL right now and you can download compiled binaries for Win32 versions of 5.0 or higher; source is available for unix systems. The only major thing that I know of that it is lacking now is support for scrollable cursors, but Wez is working on that. My current app uses PDO and it is lightyears faster than PEARDB and ODBC. Plus it is OO based!
I, too, have PHP to thank for a wonderful career. While I know that PHP is not the best language for the massive applications I've done, PHP developers are relatively easy to find and train. That is a major marketing factor for companies. Rails is great but how many (available!) workers are there? Very few. Same with Python. PHP can be very powerful when done right. The last major system I wrote with it included a call center (using the wonderful company Voxeo for hosting) that dropped right into the CRM and loan processing software. The current system includes a self-running tiered hosting system (Bind 9, Apache 2, PHP 5.1-dev, PGSQL 8); the daemons (written in PHP) detect server load and move sites accordingly to other slaves.
I've said it before, but I have to promote PopFile (http://popfile.sourceforge.net/) again. Since doing a bit of training, it now correctly sorts about 99% of my e-mail. I get about 600 messages a day not including mailing lists, and my accuracy is 99.65%. It is generally not susceptible to new spam techniques unless they can match the subject matter that my e-mail typically covers.
When they start spamming "Linux IPF Apache LOOK! Vi@GR@ makes your peNi$ PHP Bug CSS" I will be concerned.
He created valuable fodder for the slashdot news queue. That's what.
No, I still remember those, in fact, there are many sites that still have them.
Flash is not guilty, no. Nor is Macromedia. However, that being said, if all users see Flash being used for is advertising, users will not download the plugin or will use flash blocking software/plugins, thus rendering Flash less useful.
The main fault of Macromedia is not providing a "Block" mode for Flash files. I would like to see a default screen that says "This page requires the downloading of Flash content. [Download Now]" with no way for a site to override it. This will stop pop up banners but still allow, as you say, nice sites that have good content & GUI. A "Always Allow this flash file" would be required, of course (vs. "always allow this domain").
Don't get me wrong-- we use Flash extensively at work, but on CD multimedia demos for our clients. It has its applications.
I believe the general hatred is because Flash is largely useless. Especially now that there are more Flash ads than graphic/text ads. Most sites do not use Flash in a meaningful manner (I'm sorry, an HTML menu is just fine, thanks) and do not provide HTML versions.
In our next story, the drafters of the Kyoto Protocol have revised the agreement so that solar storms count toward each country's polution limits.
Slashdot has finally mastered the art of electronic paper recycling. This is just a demonstration of the technology to the investors.
"See the recycle bin?" he asked while pointing as his desktop. "Yep, I do." "Does someone come around and empty it so I get the diskspace back?"
Why do you need that, when you could just use a small piece of board with a hole cut in it, ala Family Guy?
Hardware can have flaws, too, either accidental or intentional. Do we as citizens get the right to inspect the hardware, too, or at least some citizen watchdog groups? IMO, hardware stuff is much more sinister since it would be next to impossible to detect.
Just wait until his ISP kicks him off due to threats by the .*AA and he flatlines on them.
thus, logic states that it's no harder to switch than to upgrade... What universe do you live in? Obviously not mine.
Yes, there are numerous articles and such in the past that have mentioned that most Google engineers get 10% of free time to devote to their own projects.
Orkut was born this way, as well as Google Sets and likely numerous other projects.
I don't play them, but lately, the better games are being developed as MMOGs. Especially RPG-style games for the PC.
Fortunately, there are a few on the horizon (Dungeon Siege 2, Elder Scrolls IV...) that are not MMOG.
"historic grounds" should be "holy grounds" bah.