At first I was thinking that this story was about GE trying to push its agenda or doing something evil. But I RTFA and this is actually about this guy complaining that people are using the wrong type of chart and making poor design decisions. The big punch is that his wife agrees with him.
I am so shaken up by this story, I know I will get all nervous the next time I insert SmartArt charts in Powerpoint - I would be so ashamed to end up publicly flogged on this guy's strongly-worded blog...
Reminds me of a former coworker who is spending his evenings writing blog entries about companies that dare use Arial instead of Helvetica on their websites.
> You mean the IMF takeovers that result in things like large proportions of the population losing access to clean water
It is a well-known fact that the IMF and its Death Squads of bankers lurk in the dark, waiting for an opportunity to step in and prevent common people from having clean water. I would have to check their website and read the mission statement, but I am pretty sure they also aim to steal organs from orphans and sell them to old rich guys.
If the IMF was not a bunch of crooks, when they take over a country that is almost bankrupt they would hire more civil servants and provide them with job security; they would also provide free healthcare and make sure that everybody in the country has HBO, a pool and a mansion.
> Actually, it's probably not a bad analogy - both attempt to improve short-term finances and enrich third parties at the expense of the long-term health and stability of the country or business.
Everybody knows that taking over a financially ruined country is short-sighted and greedy. What other explanation could there be?
Clearly the next time a country is facing bankruptcy, instead of making a deal with the IMF to erase billions in debt and have someone do the unpleasant things that nobody likes in order to take the country out of the red, they should call you and apply your sound strategy.
Of course you did not reveal this sound strategy yet, you only have posted half-baked critics based on anecdotal evidence. When you have a minute, please enlighten the world with your financial wisdom (and feel free to also cure cancer without animal testing).
If you have money in a 401(k) or RRSP (in Canada), odds are that *you* are one of the happy investors.
This is the fun part in capitalism. You work hard and put a little money aside for your retirement. Since you want this money to grow and at least beat inflation, you invest in a mutual fund. That fund pools money from thousands of small investors and takes huge positions in the stock market - but also in order to mitigate risks it creates partnerships with private equity firms (such as KKR) to have assets that are not bound to the market fluctuations. Being a major shareholder in many companies, your mutual fund will ask for a positive ROI (basically on your behalf) and will not hesitate to fire the management if they don't meet quarterly or yearly expected results. So management cuts costs, keep salaries low, and try to take more money out of its customers to make its numbers.
In the end you get a 6% annual return on your 401(k) but when you go to pump gas you are outraged by the price and when you take a flight from New-York to LA you are pissed because the airline only gives you a peanut bag. And from time to time you curse those greedy Wall Street people and their evil shareholders...
No it does not make sense. There is a huge difference between frugal management (which you describe) and the corporate raider behavior described by the other AC. In those 2.5 years, how many "massive layoffs" and company break up did you witness?
Frugal management sucks from the employees perspective, but it usually allow the company to survive, just like the IMF takeovers are unpleasant but can save a country from bankruptcy.
This makes no sense whatsoever. First of all, Godaddy never completed its IPO and private equity firms rarely invest billions of dollars in a private company just to leech on its cash... As for breaking up the company, exactly how do you suggest KKR would do it (supposing that they are a majority partner, which nobody can confirm)? Separate the registrar and hosting departments? Spin-off the IT department to compete the Geek Squad? Completely ludicrous.
As for "Barbarians at the gate": it is a bidding war for RJR-Nabisco that KKR won. It occurred in 1988, involved financial instruments that do not exist anymore, and even then KKR was a sound investment firm, not a corporate raider a la Gordon Gekko. What they did with RJR-Nabisco allowed its strongest components (such as Del Monte) to grow and become profitable.
> I love it when a judge thinks and makes the punishment fit the crime
I love it even better when people RTFA to see that the xbox was not removed as a punishment but as a condition for the bail, which is different. Punishment is usually for people who are convicted, which occurs at the end of the trial, not at the time of discussing bail conditions.
Sounds like this judge has a serious bias against the accused.
> Every scientist, engineer, businessperson, or individual who thinks quantitatively and likes to do math in real life.
I am not sure if by inference this would include network administrators... but in any case, managing routing rules without a numpad would be insane (and possibly unhealthy)
> Just because someone said something negative about Apple does not mean it is probably valid. It is very likely to not be valid considering the rabid anti-Apple nuts. All you've done is expose your own bias.
My guess is that you wrote this on you Macbook (if you had used your iPad the text would be messed-up because of the shitty spellcheck)
The problem with Netflix in Canada is that you can get only the online stuff (not the mailers), but both kinds are displayed, so when you see an interesting movie, you click then it says: sorry it is not available online. It's like Amazon a while ago when it was not possible to filter out the stuff that is out of stock. Very annoying.
> Massage and lessons have little cost besides labor, so offering a round of free ones doesn't incur a heavy loss
I don't agree at all. Services are time-consuming, and time cannot be duplicated, there is a limited amount available.
The real business where you don't get a heavy loss for discount is stuff like writing books or software, where the initial effort is followed by a continuous stream of revenue while you work on something else.
The only winning scenario for retail on Groupon is when you have excess inventory which will end up spoiled or heavily discounted anyways. In this case Groupon is awesome because not only do you make a few dollars on lousy stuff, you also take a shot at hooking a repeat customer or two. Just look at the Dell deals or at the bargain table outside your local bookstore... they've done it for years!
Using Groupon to give away your good stuff does not make sense.
> For example, I can imagine it being possible to do searches over images, sounds or movies; there is fundamental structure there, relations are definable.
What you talk about is metadata. Defining an index of sorts to store patterns and checksum does allow one to establish relations between images - but the search is then performed on the said metadata, not on the binaries. A rule of thumb: if you must index data before you can search it, then you cannot search the data, you can only search the metadata.
Just think of a Google search. When you search for a keyword, you do not actually scan websites; you simply query a database where the keyword is associated with the url. In order for this to work, an indexing process must already have been performed.
Now it is possible to write an utility to extract patterns from an image; the police are using one of these to find kiddie pr0n on a suspect computer. However I am aware of no database engine that can perform this kind of stuff.
> dismiss it as impossible? You jump too far.
I don't think it is impossible, actually I am looking forward to a product that will actually perform search and aggregations on images and videos. It would make the Youtube experience much more interesting because relying on metadata is always the weakest link. This being said, I won't hold my breath because it is a very big step.
This article is confusing because most of the verbiage is made up by the author (such as "inside" or "locked" data). It is also misleading because it seems to indicate that structured and unstructured data usage is the same. Well it's not - a very large proportion of unstructured data is blog posts and emails but the amount of search and aggregation that is performed on this type of information outside of a few major companies (such as Google) is very low, which makes this usage a niche and not a trend maker.
The reality is that there are three categories of data that are relevant for databases: numbers, text and spatial. Everything else, which falls under the umbrella of "binary", is very unlikely to benefit from a database engine; only the metada can be manipulated and this metadata falls under one of the other categories and is a very good target for ETL. And so far nobody came up with a reliable way to search binary, such as video or audio, without relying on heavy indexing, metadata or any kind of transformation that takes binary and make it text data.
If a piece of data cannot be searched or aggregated, it does not belong in a database, it belongs on a filesystem. Anything can be done with blob columns but performance is usually not very good because the database engine cache is not designed for large objects. NoSql or not.
Also there is so much happening with storage infrastructure, such as sub-volume tiering or block-level replication, any analysis of data that does not take a look at storage is flawed.
> though it's a few years old, here's a report that suggests (as of 2007, at least) a grace period of less than 10 seconds.
These numbers mean nothing. Just like statistics about domestic abuse ("1 women in 3 is victim of abuse"), that kind of thing cannot be measured so someone comes up with a pseudo-scientific number and everybody keeps repeating this stuff ad nauseam like Rush Limbaugh on election week.
Individual malware is having way too much exposure in the media for its actual damage. In an era where legitimate companies such as Facebook or Google are cornering the market on privacy violation and shameless data-mining, nobody gives a sh*t about Uncle Joe's private information. Credit card numbers are traded by the thousands and it is not cost-effective to try to harvest valuable information from individual PC - financial institutions and service providers (PSN!) are a much better target.
The name of the game is now large-scale deployment and a botnet that does not protect its nodes does not live long enough to justify an article on Wikipedia. Actually for home users I would even argue that being part of a botnet can be a good thing - the operators know what malware is serious and they have a financial stake in maintaining a healthy network of zombies; they will keep the basement wannabes away. On a global scale they are the one with the best interest for home PC security - much more than most PC owner themselves. It's like joining a gang when you go to jail for a long time - be part of the swarm and the odds that you end up becoming a silent farter are much lower.
A friend of mine is working in a yeast factory and they actually have a rabbi standing by. I would love to see their ISO-9000 procedures for whatever the rabbi is doing.
Slashdot Mirror
At first I was thinking that this story was about GE trying to push its agenda or doing something evil. But I RTFA and this is actually about this guy complaining that people are using the wrong type of chart and making poor design decisions. The big punch is that his wife agrees with him.
I am so shaken up by this story, I know I will get all nervous the next time I insert SmartArt charts in Powerpoint - I would be so ashamed to end up publicly flogged on this guy's strongly-worded blog...
Reminds me of a former coworker who is spending his evenings writing blog entries about companies that dare use Arial instead of Helvetica on their websites.
> You mean the IMF takeovers that result in things like large proportions of the population losing access to clean water
It is a well-known fact that the IMF and its Death Squads of bankers lurk in the dark, waiting for an opportunity to step in and prevent common people from having clean water. I would have to check their website and read the mission statement, but I am pretty sure they also aim to steal organs from orphans and sell them to old rich guys.
If the IMF was not a bunch of crooks, when they take over a country that is almost bankrupt they would hire more civil servants and provide them with job security; they would also provide free healthcare and make sure that everybody in the country has HBO, a pool and a mansion.
> Actually, it's probably not a bad analogy - both attempt to improve short-term finances and enrich third parties at the expense of the long-term health and stability of the country or business.
Everybody knows that taking over a financially ruined country is short-sighted and greedy. What other explanation could there be?
Clearly the next time a country is facing bankruptcy, instead of making a deal with the IMF to erase billions in debt and have someone do the unpleasant things that nobody likes in order to take the country out of the red, they should call you and apply your sound strategy.
Of course you did not reveal this sound strategy yet, you only have posted half-baked critics based on anecdotal evidence. When you have a minute, please enlighten the world with your financial wisdom (and feel free to also cure cancer without animal testing).
If you have money in a 401(k) or RRSP (in Canada), odds are that *you* are one of the happy investors.
This is the fun part in capitalism. You work hard and put a little money aside for your retirement. Since you want this money to grow and at least beat inflation, you invest in a mutual fund. That fund pools money from thousands of small investors and takes huge positions in the stock market - but also in order to mitigate risks it creates partnerships with private equity firms (such as KKR) to have assets that are not bound to the market fluctuations. Being a major shareholder in many companies, your mutual fund will ask for a positive ROI (basically on your behalf) and will not hesitate to fire the management if they don't meet quarterly or yearly expected results. So management cuts costs, keep salaries low, and try to take more money out of its customers to make its numbers.
In the end you get a 6% annual return on your 401(k) but when you go to pump gas you are outraged by the price and when you take a flight from New-York to LA you are pissed because the airline only gives you a peanut bag. And from time to time you curse those greedy Wall Street people and their evil shareholders...
It's the circle of life.
No it does not make sense. There is a huge difference between frugal management (which you describe) and the corporate raider behavior described by the other AC. In those 2.5 years, how many "massive layoffs" and company break up did you witness?
Frugal management sucks from the employees perspective, but it usually allow the company to survive, just like the IMF takeovers are unpleasant but can save a country from bankruptcy.
This makes no sense whatsoever. First of all, Godaddy never completed its IPO and private equity firms rarely invest billions of dollars in a private company just to leech on its cash... As for breaking up the company, exactly how do you suggest KKR would do it (supposing that they are a majority partner, which nobody can confirm)? Separate the registrar and hosting departments? Spin-off the IT department to compete the Geek Squad? Completely ludicrous.
As for "Barbarians at the gate": it is a bidding war for RJR-Nabisco that KKR won. It occurred in 1988, involved financial instruments that do not exist anymore, and even then KKR was a sound investment firm, not a corporate raider a la Gordon Gekko. What they did with RJR-Nabisco allowed its strongest components (such as Del Monte) to grow and become profitable.
> I love it when a judge thinks and makes the punishment fit the crime
I love it even better when people RTFA to see that the xbox was not removed as a punishment but as a condition for the bail, which is different. Punishment is usually for people who are convicted, which occurs at the end of the trial, not at the time of discussing bail conditions.
Sounds like this judge has a serious bias against the accused.
> Every scientist, engineer, businessperson, or individual who thinks quantitatively and likes to do math in real life.
I am not sure if by inference this would include network administrators... but in any case, managing routing rules without a numpad would be insane (and possibly unhealthy)
> I'm on a non-capped DSL 5meg service
Most DSL providers lease Bell lines, and Bell did cripple many of those guys over the years
> Just because someone said something negative about Apple does not mean it is probably valid. It is very likely to not be valid considering the rabid anti-Apple nuts. All you've done is expose your own bias.
My guess is that you wrote this on you Macbook (if you had used your iPad the text would be messed-up because of the shitty spellcheck)
The problem with Netflix in Canada is that you can get only the online stuff (not the mailers), but both kinds are displayed, so when you see an interesting movie, you click then it says: sorry it is not available online. It's like Amazon a while ago when it was not possible to filter out the stuff that is out of stock. Very annoying.
> Massage and lessons have little cost besides labor, so offering a round of free ones doesn't incur a heavy loss
I don't agree at all. Services are time-consuming, and time cannot be duplicated, there is a limited amount available.
The real business where you don't get a heavy loss for discount is stuff like writing books or software, where the initial effort is followed by a continuous stream of revenue while you work on something else.
The only winning scenario for retail on Groupon is when you have excess inventory which will end up spoiled or heavily discounted anyways. In this case Groupon is awesome because not only do you make a few dollars on lousy stuff, you also take a shot at hooking a repeat customer or two. Just look at the Dell deals or at the bargain table outside your local bookstore... they've done it for years!
Using Groupon to give away your good stuff does not make sense.
> For example, I can imagine it being possible to do searches over images, sounds or movies; there is fundamental structure there, relations are definable.
What you talk about is metadata. Defining an index of sorts to store patterns and checksum does allow one to establish relations between images - but the search is then performed on the said metadata, not on the binaries. A rule of thumb: if you must index data before you can search it, then you cannot search the data, you can only search the metadata.
Just think of a Google search. When you search for a keyword, you do not actually scan websites; you simply query a database where the keyword is associated with the url. In order for this to work, an indexing process must already have been performed.
Now it is possible to write an utility to extract patterns from an image; the police are using one of these to find kiddie pr0n on a suspect computer. However I am aware of no database engine that can perform this kind of stuff.
> dismiss it as impossible? You jump too far.
I don't think it is impossible, actually I am looking forward to a product that will actually perform search and aggregations on images and videos. It would make the Youtube experience much more interesting because relying on metadata is always the weakest link. This being said, I won't hold my breath because it is a very big step.
This article is confusing because most of the verbiage is made up by the author (such as "inside" or "locked" data). It is also misleading because it seems to indicate that structured and unstructured data usage is the same. Well it's not - a very large proportion of unstructured data is blog posts and emails but the amount of search and aggregation that is performed on this type of information outside of a few major companies (such as Google) is very low, which makes this usage a niche and not a trend maker.
The reality is that there are three categories of data that are relevant for databases: numbers, text and spatial. Everything else, which falls under the umbrella of "binary", is very unlikely to benefit from a database engine; only the metada can be manipulated and this metadata falls under one of the other categories and is a very good target for ETL. And so far nobody came up with a reliable way to search binary, such as video or audio, without relying on heavy indexing, metadata or any kind of transformation that takes binary and make it text data.
If a piece of data cannot be searched or aggregated, it does not belong in a database, it belongs on a filesystem. Anything can be done with blob columns but performance is usually not very good because the database engine cache is not designed for large objects. NoSql or not.
Also there is so much happening with storage infrastructure, such as sub-volume tiering or block-level replication, any analysis of data that does not take a look at storage is flawed.
And I suppose modern interpreted languages also launch a new process? That would indeed make things "as fast" as compilation.
> Scripting GUI's is something belonging in the domain of mentally challenged applications developers
so I take it you are one of those not mentally challenged people who still believe that compilation makes things run faster?
I had a coworker like that, we used to call him "CGI Bill".
You make a lot of very bold statements
> Those who disagree run Windows
And as a first witness I call the infamous "On error resume next" statement in VB.
I told Walternate but I think he did not care
> Meanwhile I don't see you coming up with anything more hip
I kinda like "scriptdiots" but my favorite one is definitely "hackerz" (or "hack3rz" to go more extreme)
> script kiddies
2001 just called and they want their lame expression back.
(this being said, since the group name starts with "Lulz" I would tend to agree that we are not witnessing actions of a mastermind on this one)
> though it's a few years old, here's a report that suggests (as of 2007, at least) a grace period of less than 10 seconds.
These numbers mean nothing. Just like statistics about domestic abuse ("1 women in 3 is victim of abuse"), that kind of thing cannot be measured so someone comes up with a pseudo-scientific number and everybody keeps repeating this stuff ad nauseam like Rush Limbaugh on election week.
Individual malware is having way too much exposure in the media for its actual damage. In an era where legitimate companies such as Facebook or Google are cornering the market on privacy violation and shameless data-mining, nobody gives a sh*t about Uncle Joe's private information. Credit card numbers are traded by the thousands and it is not cost-effective to try to harvest valuable information from individual PC - financial institutions and service providers (PSN!) are a much better target.
The name of the game is now large-scale deployment and a botnet that does not protect its nodes does not live long enough to justify an article on Wikipedia. Actually for home users I would even argue that being part of a botnet can be a good thing - the operators know what malware is serious and they have a financial stake in maintaining a healthy network of zombies; they will keep the basement wannabes away. On a global scale they are the one with the best interest for home PC security - much more than most PC owner themselves. It's like joining a gang when you go to jail for a long time - be part of the swarm and the odds that you end up becoming a silent farter are much lower.
So that former prison guard is in jail for being a whistleblower, and now he is whistleblowing again. Tsk tsk.
> Your joke would be funnier if the post wasn't already from "the checking-it-twice dept."
When you think about it, it is actually much funnier...
> Now they have rabbis standing by?
A friend of mine is working in a yeast factory and they actually have a rabbi standing by. I would love to see their ISO-9000 procedures for whatever the rabbi is doing.