How do you value ANY company? They own stuff (buildings), they have staff and they have current revenue.
You forgot about intellectual property, growth potential, etc.
Using your formula, YouTube would probably have warranted a negative valuation, what with their negligible revenue, huge operational costs, and quarter after quarter of huge losses.
And yet google bought them for a billion dollars.
They had a few things that your formula omits: a uniquely scalable, proven, video sharing/delivery application, millions of users, and the vast majority of the internet video hosting market.
I don't see how you'd get regular people interested or how it will help them.
If your PC is off, and you want to check movie times on your way out the door, being able to rapidly boot into an environment with a web browser would be appealing.
For the type of user that leaves their PC off most of the time, the ability to accomplish a single task rapidly could be appealing.
I never remember any company, spending any money, to train anybody, to learn any office product. I thought you supposed to pick that up by yourself.
"Picking it up yourself" has a real cost in lost productivity.
Here's a hypothetical. You upgrade 300 workstations to the latest version of Office. Your employees spend the whole day after the upgrade just figuring out the new software. That's a man-year of productivity lost.
Even though you haven't budgeted anything for formal training, you've just paid your employees some number of tens of thousands of dollars to train themselves.
And in reality, it probably takes most people more than 8 hours of experience with an application to get up to full speed.
I always found it interesting that 1 billion seconds happened 2 days before 9/11.
You can come up with any number of numerological associations for any event. Seriously. Try it some time. Pick any event, and you can come up with a dozen, if you try.
Does Ford have the right to prevent you from printing images of a car you own?
In all fairness, since we're talking about cafepress, the actual question is: Does Ford have the right to prevent you from selling printed images of a car you own?
A famous programmer put it much better than I did:
The three virtues of programming
LAZINESS: The quality that makes you go to great effort to reduce overall energy expenditure.
IMPATIENCE: The anger you feel when the computer is being lazy.
HUBRIS: Excessive pride, the sort of thing Zeus zaps you for. Also the quality that makes you write (and maintain) programs that other people won't want to say bad things about.
* Happy to work with whatever technology you've picked, "all technologies are good"
So what you're looking for is a prima donna who will refuse to work in the environment you ask him to, and is insubordinate out of the gate? No. A good programmer will find the strengths of the technology you've picked and design a strategy that plays to those, rather than just telling you you've made a stupid choice and should have used his pet technology instead.
Sometimes, those doing the hiring don't *know* what the right technology for the job is. If I'm interviewing a candidate for a web development position, and I tell him "We're thinking about writing our web application in assembly", he sure as hell better question whether or not that's a good idea.Knowing the right tool for the job is definitely the hallmark of a good developer. They'll help you find ways to do things better, which can save you thousands of man hours, and millions of dollars.
he thinks all good programmers are the ones that can pad out their resume with 900 technologies and eat, sleep, and breathe programming. I can't even begin to tell you how many absolutely amazing C++/Java/Python programmers I've met who I can almost guarantee have never even touched Ruby before. Just because a programmer doesn't go out of their way to try out every single new technology that hits the market doesn't diminish their abilities at those they do use
I got a totally different impression from that section. As I understood it, the point was good programmers should have a demonstrated ability (and desire) to learn new things. Not that they should have learned everything.
Also, it was in no way limited to languages. A good C++ programmer may not have branched out beyond C++ in decades, but in the last decade, they've probably picked up new libraries, had to deal with XML output from *something*, and maybe started working with a different database. These are all new technologies, in the sense intended in the article.
Programming is all about learning. If your code interacts with anyone else's code, be it a new library, a webservice, a database, or a file format... Then you have to learn how that "technology" works.
Even a virtual meeting of 10,000 representitives is impractical.
Firstly, there are simple practical issues. There's the aforementioned issue with each representative getting an average of 4 seconds of talk time in a 12 hour meeting. It is not feasible to conduct a meeting on such a scale, if each participant is given voice. There are few, if any examples of so many members participating in a single forum.
There are also technical issues. It's non-trivial to host a 10,000 user IRC channel; forget about audio, or video.
The house must meet to discuss the issues, but it's not practical for the whole of such a large body to do so. Which is why only giving a subset of representatives voice in these meetings would be required.
I have long thought the House should be larger. I understand the cost involved - just the buildings alone will be a fortune. But consider how hard it is now for your representative to stay in touch with his or her constituency.
As others have mentioned, at the original proportions used when the legislative branch was created, we'd need 10,000 representatives.
Having all 10,000 attempt to meet in a single location is obviously absurd -- in a 12 hour meeting, each rep would have just 4.3 seconds to speak; the building required would have to be the size of a small stadium (wp gives a pretty good idea of stadium capacity). The list of issues goes on and on, and frankly isn't worth discussion, as the idea's pretty clearly absurd.
Instead, how about a hierarchy? Keep the existing house, and have some number of sub-representitives serving under each rep. 10,000 averages out to about 20 sub-reps per rep. Have these sub-reps communicate with constituents, and report back to the rep with their analysis of their sub-district's opinions of the issues.
This concept has its own issues -- the "main" representative becomes responsible for communicating what goes on in house meetings to his sub-reps. Voting is also problematic. Does the "main" rep get one vote? Does every sub-rep get a vote?
we're physically back to using 9 pins that were available in the DB9 form factor, only this connector is considerably more difficult to manufacture.
With devices getting smaller and smaller all the time, USB's small connector size works in its favor.
Imagine for a moment, trying to use a DB9 connector with an iPod Nano, an iPod Shuffle, an asus EEE PC, or just about any digital camera. DB9 connectors on any of these would necessarily increase the size of the devices themselves dramatically.
You'll just need to dedicate six of your eight cores in the 3GHz Intel chip for the process overhead.
That's more true than you might think... Some/.'ers may already be aware of how much overhead gigabit communications consumes, but I know I wasn't. From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TCP_Offload_Engine:
Gigabit TCP communication using software processing alone is enough to fully load a 2.4 GHz Pentium 4 processor
Granted, USB's isn't the same as IP's, but gigabit protocol overhead is pretty substantial.
Can't do a middle button emulation click with the rocker style mouse button.
Tap the touchpad with two separated fingers.
Reminds me of one of my biggest beefs with the macbook -- every windows environment uses a different right click emulation method! In bootcamp, it's a two-finger click. In parallels, it's ctrl-alt-click (or something like that, hell if I can remember). To bring up a context menu in OS X, you use ctrl-click.
And of course, every laptop with a touch pad has a different scroll-wheel emulation method, half of which hardly work.
Can we get some standardization on the way touch pads function, please? There have been so many bad touchpad designs, and most of them have features that are totally unintuitive (for fuck's sake, we shouldn't have to learn how to middle click from a slashdot post! They're difficult to use, even for power users; I can't imagine how much they must piss off the less technically savvy.
Like the GP, I, too have had experiences of sleeping extremely well while I was out in the middle of nowhere.
Of course, in addition to the inherent noise level changes, etc., I generally sleep well because the process of *getting* that far from civilization involved a goodly amount of physical activity. Of course, exercise has long been known as a top-notch sleep aide.
The question "why" is so dangerous to people in this country for one single reason: religion.
Weak-minded people remain weak-minded, with or without religion. Intelligent, self-sufficient people remain intelligent, with or without religion.
A weak-minded man without religion has no reason to do good; what's more, while he's free of religion, he's still under the control of other, stronger people, be it in the form of a gang leader telling him to commit crime, advertisements telling him to buy, buy, buy, or politicians telling him to fear the terrorists.
Yes, some stupid people do stupid things in the name of religion, but those people were stupid and dangerous before someone gave them a "cause" to direct their actions. The weak-minded will be controlled, by someone, somehow. Better it be by a force that (overwhelmingly) encourages them to do good. Religions that encourage anything other than doing good are a minority.
An intelligent man, on the other hand, makes his own decisions. That includes the decision to choose religion. I know many intelligent people who are religious. It makes them happy. And they don't check their ability to think independently at the door when they go to church.
To address your original straw man:
Can't the money be spent on finding reasons WHY the crimes are caused in the first place?
Socioeconomic inequality, lack of education, and low intelligence. Those are problems that can't be solved for the price of a few dozen billboards.
Yes I just called your beliefs stupid, now ask yourself "why does he say that" instead of accusing me of persecuting you.
Why? Because you're a deeply unhappy person. There are some people a few blocks down the road who'd love to help you with that, though. Just look for the building with the big "+" on the roof.
I, personally, made the choice to abandon religion as a young adult, but I don't look down on those who choose it. It makes coping with their lives (which can be a damn tough thing to do) easier. It makes them happier people.
Ever notice how many of the prominent atheists in the media are such angry, unhappy people?
Maybe they should spend some money on advertisement space on the internet
Sure, but what good is knowing what the rapist looks like, if you're not leaving your mother's basement?
Let's not ignore the pointlessness of broadcasting said rapist's likeness around the entirety of the globe, when he's most likely still in the same city in which he perpetrated the act.
Physical billboards have two distinct advantages over internet advertisements: 1) They're limited to distinct geographical areas and 2) They're seen by people who are out and about -- those who are most likely to actually see other people during the course of the day.
The days I'm most likely to see an internet advertisement are the days that I don't see anyone other than my wife and my co-workers.
he basically just says they need to do more 'systematic testing' (that is, putting a bunch of 360s in the room to see if they can cause interference)
I was lucky enough to make it to the Halo 3 launch party at Microsoft's Silicon Valley campus. They had over 60 systems set up in a single conference room for a tournament. Everybody's controllers worked fine -- even though there were four per system.
If they can have 240+ wireless controllers working in one room, their wireless implementation can't be *that* naive.
Not sure where you got 1gb/sec. You can get a few megabit if you strip all the old phone equipment off the line and go DSL instead, but that's about as good as it gets on POTS copper.
In a lot of areas with aging systems, the "signal" isn't always all that great either.
Your inference that there has been intellectual evolution is rather disturbing, one look at US politics should tell you that not much intelligence evolution has really occurred
The fact that college students spend years studying the scientific discoveries of men who have been dead for centuries is something of a testament to that. Much of what we know about math, physics, chemistry, and philosophy was explained by the likes of Euler, Newton, and Descartes.
Not to say we haven't come a long way since then, but stop and think about that -- much of what your average highschool graduate has learned has been public knowledge for centuries.
NT4, and win2K both had "Workstation" and "Server" versions. Windows XP had "Home" and "Pro". So it's understandable that you might assume that workstation equates to home, and server equates to pro. However, in actuality, "Pro" is closest to "Workstation", and "Home" is really more of a "Workstation lite", with a lot of the workstation features disabled. Win2K3 is the closest thing to a "XP Server" release that ever came to be -- although it's really not related to XP at all.
Slashdot Mirror
You forgot about intellectual property, growth potential, etc.
Using your formula, YouTube would probably have warranted a negative valuation, what with their negligible revenue, huge operational costs, and quarter after quarter of huge losses.
And yet google bought them for a billion dollars.
They had a few things that your formula omits: a uniquely scalable, proven, video sharing/delivery application, millions of users, and the vast majority of the internet video hosting market.
For the type of user that leaves their PC off most of the time, the ability to accomplish a single task rapidly could be appealing.
Here's a hypothetical. You upgrade 300 workstations to the latest version of Office. Your employees spend the whole day after the upgrade just figuring out the new software. That's a man-year of productivity lost.
Even though you haven't budgeted anything for formal training, you've just paid your employees some number of tens of thousands of dollars to train themselves.
And in reality, it probably takes most people more than 8 hours of experience with an application to get up to full speed.
You can come up with any number of numerological associations for any event. Seriously. Try it some time. Pick any event, and you can come up with a dozen, if you try.
In all fairness, since we're talking about cafepress, the actual question is:
Does Ford have the right to prevent you from selling printed images of a car you own?
EVE Online has a significant portion written in Python as well.
That'd explain why a lot of the basic 2D UI in EVE is a little unresponsive compared to your run of the mill native windows app.
I can see arguments for using a high level language for UI, but EVE probably isn't the best example. EVE's UI is pretty remarkably clunky.
The three virtues of programming
source: http://kw.pm.org/talks/0204-modules/slide013.html
Sometimes, those doing the hiring don't *know* what the right technology for the job is.
If I'm interviewing a candidate for a web development position, and I tell him "We're thinking about writing our web application in assembly", he sure as hell better question whether or not that's a good idea.Knowing the right tool for the job is definitely the hallmark of a good developer. They'll help you find ways to do things better, which can save you thousands of man hours, and millions of dollars.
Also, it was in no way limited to languages. A good C++ programmer may not have branched out beyond C++ in decades, but in the last decade, they've probably picked up new libraries, had to deal with XML output from *something*, and maybe started working with a different database. These are all new technologies, in the sense intended in the article.
Programming is all about learning. If your code interacts with anyone else's code, be it a new library, a webservice, a database, or a file format... Then you have to learn how that "technology" works.
To reinforce your point, animal feed prices have tripled due to increased demand for ethanol, which in turn has driven up the price of beef.
Even a virtual meeting of 10,000 representitives is impractical.
Firstly, there are simple practical issues. There's the aforementioned issue with each representative getting an average of 4 seconds of talk time in a 12 hour meeting. It is not feasible to conduct a meeting on such a scale, if each participant is given voice. There are few, if any examples of so many members participating in a single forum.
There are also technical issues. It's non-trivial to host a 10,000 user IRC channel; forget about audio, or video.
The house must meet to discuss the issues, but it's not practical for the whole of such a large body to do so. Which is why only giving a subset of representatives voice in these meetings would be required.
As others have mentioned, at the original proportions used when the legislative branch was created, we'd need 10,000 representatives.
Having all 10,000 attempt to meet in a single location is obviously absurd -- in a 12 hour meeting, each rep would have just 4.3 seconds to speak; the building required would have to be the size of a small stadium (wp gives a pretty good idea of stadium capacity). The list of issues goes on and on, and frankly isn't worth discussion, as the idea's pretty clearly absurd.
Instead, how about a hierarchy? Keep the existing house, and have some number of sub-representitives serving under each rep. 10,000 averages out to about 20 sub-reps per rep. Have these sub-reps communicate with constituents, and report back to the rep with their analysis of their sub-district's opinions of the issues.
This concept has its own issues -- the "main" representative becomes responsible for communicating what goes on in house meetings to his sub-reps. Voting is also problematic. Does the "main" rep get one vote? Does every sub-rep get a vote?
I se what you did there.
Imagine for a moment, trying to use a DB9 connector with an iPod Nano, an iPod Shuffle, an asus EEE PC, or just about any digital camera. DB9 connectors on any of these would necessarily increase the size of the devices themselves dramatically.
And of course, every laptop with a touch pad has a different scroll-wheel emulation method, half of which hardly work.
Can we get some standardization on the way touch pads function, please? There have been so many bad touchpad designs, and most of them have features that are totally unintuitive (for fuck's sake, we shouldn't have to learn how to middle click from a slashdot post! They're difficult to use, even for power users; I can't imagine how much they must piss off the less technically savvy.
Like the GP, I, too have had experiences of sleeping extremely well while I was out in the middle of nowhere.
Of course, in addition to the inherent noise level changes, etc., I generally sleep well because the process of *getting* that far from civilization involved a goodly amount of physical activity. Of course, exercise has long been known as a top-notch sleep aide.
A weak-minded man without religion has no reason to do good; what's more, while he's free of religion, he's still under the control of other, stronger people, be it in the form of a gang leader telling him to commit crime, advertisements telling him to buy, buy, buy, or politicians telling him to fear the terrorists.
Yes, some stupid people do stupid things in the name of religion, but those people were stupid and dangerous before someone gave them a "cause" to direct their actions. The weak-minded will be controlled, by someone, somehow. Better it be by a force that (overwhelmingly) encourages them to do good. Religions that encourage anything other than doing good are a minority.
An intelligent man, on the other hand, makes his own decisions. That includes the decision to choose religion. I know many intelligent people who are religious. It makes them happy. And they don't check their ability to think independently at the door when they go to church.
To address your original straw man:Socioeconomic inequality, lack of education, and low intelligence. Those are problems that can't be solved for the price of a few dozen billboards.Why? Because you're a deeply unhappy person. There are some people a few blocks down the road who'd love to help you with that, though. Just look for the building with the big "+" on the roof.
I, personally, made the choice to abandon religion as a young adult, but I don't look down on those who choose it. It makes coping with their lives (which can be a damn tough thing to do) easier. It makes them happier people.
Ever notice how many of the prominent atheists in the media are such angry, unhappy people?
Sure, but what good is knowing what the rapist looks like, if you're not leaving your mother's basement?
Let's not ignore the pointlessness of broadcasting said rapist's likeness around the entirety of the globe, when he's most likely still in the same city in which he perpetrated the act.
Physical billboards have two distinct advantages over internet advertisements: 1) They're limited to distinct geographical areas and 2) They're seen by people who are out and about -- those who are most likely to actually see other people during the course of the day.
The days I'm most likely to see an internet advertisement are the days that I don't see anyone other than my wife and my co-workers.
I was lucky enough to make it to the Halo 3 launch party at Microsoft's Silicon Valley campus. They had over 60 systems set up in a single conference room for a tournament. Everybody's controllers worked fine -- even though there were four per system.
If they can have 240+ wireless controllers working in one room, their wireless implementation can't be *that* naive.
POTS is 64kbit/sec:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DS0
Not sure where you got 1gb/sec. You can get a few megabit if you strip all the old phone equipment off the line and go DSL instead, but that's about as good as it gets on POTS copper.
In a lot of areas with aging systems, the "signal" isn't always all that great either.
The fact that college students spend years studying the scientific discoveries of men who have been dead for centuries is something of a testament to that. Much of what we know about math, physics, chemistry, and philosophy was explained by the likes of Euler, Newton, and Descartes.
Not to say we haven't come a long way since then, but stop and think about that -- much of what your average highschool graduate has learned has been public knowledge for centuries.
NT4, and win2K both had "Workstation" and "Server" versions. Windows XP had "Home" and "Pro". So it's understandable that you might assume that workstation equates to home, and server equates to pro. However, in actuality, "Pro" is closest to "Workstation", and "Home" is really more of a "Workstation lite", with a lot of the workstation features disabled. Win2K3 is the closest thing to a "XP Server" release that ever came to be -- although it's really not related to XP at all.
It's only used in the title. The actual text of the article doesn't contain the word
http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Dired.html#Dired
Apparently it's pronounced "Dur Ehd", not "Dire'd". Seems like a pretty poor choice of name to me...