OpenStreetMaps has generally good map data at this point, but their reverse geocoding (i.e. place data) is still very sparse compared to Google or Factual, etc. Would love to see a free, open database of comparable quality to the paid ones.
The iPod was averaging about 100,000 units per quarter until mid 2003. That's not so impressive, honestly. It didn't break 1,000,000 units per quarter until late 2004. So yeah, it was really the iTunes music store launch in April 2003 that made people interested in the iPod.
Ummm Tegra 2 was the fastest platform for Android for quite some time. The G Tablets are still pretty blazingly fast. The issue is just that Tegra 2 was released for such a short time before Tegra 3 came out that it never got much saturation, and then Tegra 3 came out with a bunch of faster options close on its heels.
NVidia has great hardware engineers, but awful software driver people on their mobile platform. They have done a terrible job supporting their chipsets after release with Android, or getting good manufacturers to adopt them.
You have obviously never opened a non-trivial spreadsheet in Calc and Excel. Excel is way faster. But yeah, for trivially simple docs they are comparable.
I'm fairly certain taking naked video of people in sexual encounters where they have a reasonable expectation of privacy isn't just bad manners, but probably illegal. Especially if you then go and publish said video to the world. I think the only reason this case might be murky is since they were roommates, Ravi had the right to be in the room and didn't have to break and enter to install a camera.
Still, just because you live in a house doesn't, say, give you the right to record people naked in the bathrooms or having sex in bedrooms and pubish that on the internet without their consent. This is illegal by itself. However, I suspect the penalties aren't particularly harsh.
This doesn't address the hate crime angle of things here. Any time you take naked pictures or sexual pictures of people without permission and post them on the internet to mock them, it's awful. If the video showed a naked guy with a small penis, or a girl fucking a horrendously ugly guy, that could be every bit as embarrassing for the small-dicked man or the woman in question as this was for the homosexual man. What makes the crime awful is that the man in question was obviously depressed and emotionally disturbed to begin with, and these actions resulted in so much embarrassment that they led to suicide. So really it's bullying an emotionally fragile person that's awful, not anything specific about the sexual orientations that makes it a "hate crime".
Still sounds crazy low. Banking fees for IPO deals are generally 7% for "normal" sized deals (a few hundred million), and around 3% for large deals. You'd expect the fees for a $5B IPO to be around $150M. If they are doing it for less, it's because the value of the prestige and marketing value they get from this deal is worth a fortune to them.
If the equities market worked the way you propose, it would be essentially lawless and there would be no participation by the majority of the public. This would then be effectively equivalent to the situation in China currently. The vast majority there invest their savings in real assets because there is no presumption of honesty or equality in public markets.
Whether you think this is good or bad, you have to realize this makes it much harder for companies to obtain equity financing from the free markets you are espousing the good of in the first place. In fact, in China, companies instead tend to obtain the vast majority of their financing from banks and government backed institutions, and those capital allocation decisions are more about job creation and political favor than about safety or efficiency of capital utilization or profit maximization.
So, in short, any libertarian who says insider trading should not be a crime is essentially supporting a Chinese-style equity market with rampant corruption and insider trading and completely dysfunctional equity markets. I assume that most libertarians would not find that to be ideal, thus they should probably reconsider their view on the topic.
While it's not on the scale of either of those events in terms of real world impact, the departure of Rob Malda is clearly one of the most significant stories of the year in terms of Slashdot itself. I don't think it feels the same here without him.
Correct - capital is overly abundant in China because the government has essentially been printing money to fuel economic growth. The problem is that this encourages massive amounts of malinvestment - Chinese companies doing things that are ultimately unprofitable simply to grow for its own sake. Well not just for its own sake - really, to generate more jobs, which gives the executives clout with the local party/government officials, allows them to extract political favors and raise their own pay because of the sheer scale of their businesses. I have seen this first hand, with companies competing head-to-head against Chinese competition (even though they are also manufacturing in China) being unable to match prices because the Chinese companies are pricing well under cost, simply to grow their topline, financing it all with government-underwritten bank debt, without a care as to the losses piling up, as long as they are within what their banking relationships permit.
So yeah, it clearly optimizes on different things than we optimize on in a more capitalist economic system. Growing your business unprofitably here in the US would not make you more popular with your banks and capital providers unless you are quickly building scale in order to make yourself massively more profitable in a few years.
The company that had split their factories 50/50 would already be out of business, because their competitors have a more efficient supply chain, are in a single facility, and thus have been undercutting *them* for the last dozen years. The geographic concentration problem of hard drive manufacturers is a result of cutthroat competition, not something that happened in spite of it.
In any manufacturing business where margins are incredibly tight (probably 2-3% net margins on average for hard drives and other pure commodity manufacturers of that sort), you can't spend a bit more than the next guy to buck the trend or you will get undercut for Dell's/HP's/etc. business, lose 20% of your gross sales one night, and find you can no longer cover your overhead and suddenly you're out of business.
I like Python not because it forces *me* to indent my code properly, but because it forces all the other morons out there to indent *their* code properly.
So far the one useful feature everybody seems to tout that Siri has that Voice Actions doesn't is that it can set timed notifications and alarms on the iPhone. I mean, that's cool and all, but really? That's not a killer feature and it could be added to Voice Actions in probably a matter of hours.
I don't understand the hype - Android had awesome voice actions before iPhone did. So Siri has one-upped that by being a bit more general purpose. Okay, but what are the use cases where Siri does something that Android voice actions doesn't? I use voice actions to do quick searches and text and email people regularly, especially when I'm in the car. It works great.
I don't really think that's realistic. A human would assume that those numbers from weather.com were right, so I don't get how you an expect a computer to do better.
That's all nice and true, but the reason people hold dollars is because they can predict with extremely high confidence that it won't buy half as much stuff in 2 days. That confidence is developed by governments over the course of decades, or even centuries. Bitcoin, on the other hand, has no such track record, nor pledges behind it, and it has demonstrated extreme volatility, and an exponential explosion in value (which is almost always the sign of a speculative bubble, to be followed by a crash).
Sure, except for the part where it's true. Hell, it's even in their 10-K filing. Go ahead, read it. You can find it online.
The problem with Google opening retail stores is that Google is trying to drastically change their business model from one where advertisers are their customers to one where the dude walking down the street is the customer. Right now the dude walking down the street is a *user* - he recognizes the Google brand name because he uses it, but he's never drooled at the mouth over a Google product. He's drooled at the mouth over Apple's Macbooks and iPads, he's drooled at the mouth over Coach leather wallets, or Sony's Grand Wega TVs, his wife drools over Prada and Chanel bags, these are products they aspire to own, brands they want to show off to their friends and to other people walking down the street. Aspirational brands.
Google was only aspirational in the early years when only the cool, in-the-know people used Google and the riff-raff used Altavista or Yahoo. Google is now just a utility that everybody uses. Everyone knows the name, like Microsoft, but nobody wants to pay for the privilege of getting more use of a utility. Especially one that makes their bucks out of shoving advertising down your throat.
Google's mistake is that they need to be following a multi-brand strategy. Google is the search engine/utility brand. They should acquire a nice aspirational technology brand that they can use to market consumer products. Far smaller companies in other market segments follow this strategy with much success when there is an inherent incompatibility between their primary's brand's meaning and identity and their objectives with part of their business.
A company like Roku that offered a somewhat sexy, consumer electronics brand would have been a good acquisition target for Google, for example, rather than their miserably failed Google TV strategy. Roku would have to have been even more sexied-up to work out properly though. Maybe even better - a perpendicular brand like Lamborghini from the automobile space that already licenses well in non-automotive products and could be extended into a full-fledged, full-line consumer electronics brand of aspirational products.
If you want to play in a space, you got to do it right. There's no excuse for dicking around when you have the kind of resources Google has.
As the other reply indicated, Google, a company staffed by nerds like you, thought the same thing with the Nexus One. Though it was the best phone of its time, it failed as a business miserably. Because the vast majority of people out there don't shop the way you and I and the people who work at Google do. Because they aren't nerds like us.
I just spent 8 hours driving through New Jersey to get back to my evacuated area of downtown Manhattan. The flooding there is still awful. I saw rescue teams in action still. Tons of flooded roads, and flooded houses. This was a bad storm. It was just lucky that it mostly hit the suburbs and the storm surge in NYC wasn't about 2-3 feet more than what it was or it would have been a nasty scene here.
You don't live in NYC, do you? There's generally nowhere to park to make deliveries except an "illegal" spot. It's all about the revenue generation, not about safety or even free flow of traffic - they do this in front of my building on River Terrace, one of the quietest streets in downtown Manhattan. There is no way to legally move furniture in and out of the building, so a moving truck is always going to get ticketed - just another tax for living in NYC. I'd call it all a scam, yeah.
Web.py is great for developing web services. Really, really quick and easy to learn. The documentation is probably about a 7 though, I agree with that. However, I'd give it 9s on everything else.
Web.py+mimerender is pretty sweet. Check out the example code here:
I find this infinitely more comprehensible, pythonic, and nice to work with than the other Python web frameworks I've seen. I've never really used Django, but the examples I've seen look pukey to me.
Right, except that all the old people who are dependent on Social Security would starve (whether that dependency is a good thing in the first place or not isn't the point - I think it's dumb, but once it was put in place it removed the incentive for working class people to save enough for retirement). And the poor people would have no health care because Medicare would be gone.
And with no military left, what's left of our hegemony would be gone. Which means no deterrence against other nations doing naughty things like making nuclear and biological weapons, no deterrence against backing terrorist entities in inter-state disputes. And the Arabs can gouge us as much as they want for oil, and the Saudi and Pakistani governments will collapse without support, resulting in takeovers by radical Islamists and a spike in oil prices to 200 dollars a barrel overnight.
So yeah, your idea is fucking stupid. Take it back to the drawing board. What the Federal government *should* be doing is directing funds toward research of critical national security importance, like breaking the shackles of oil dependence so we can afford to downsize our military to a more reasonable scale necessary for self-defense and occasional force projection rather than large scale occupation. As for the rest of it, there's too much pork barrel and make-work crap even in the good parts (like NASA) and that stuff definitely needs to be gutted. But a $100M Federal government will never work.
You forgot about "don't ask, don't tell". He did push the repeal of that policy through. Otherwise though, I think your post is pretty accurate and describes my position and political inclinations as well. Although I'd like to think I'm more of a thinking man's moderate/Northeastern Republican, and would gladly vote Republican if they could muster some literate, socially liberal candidates like we used to have in Massachusetts. Unfortunately, the Republican party at the national level was first co-opted by neoconservative warmongers, then co-opted by Tea Party nutcases who think the federal government should be essentially nonexistant, to the extent that the world "think" can be used to apply to these people at all.
I think everybody had Obama wrong during his campaign in '08. He was neither the closet socialist that Republicans feared, nor the savior of our nation that Democrats hoped. In fact, he was a charismatic speaker but under-experienced leader without the executive experience to get things done. He's basically continued Bush's policies with respect to domestic fiscal and economic matters, brought almost nothing new to the table with respect to banking regulation or re-creating some semblance of a manufacturing economy in our country outside of the military-industrial complex, the two most important domestic economic matters to stimulate healthy, controlled growth. And his healthcare plan was gutted by design to get everybody to agree to it.
We haven't had a good president since Clinton. And even he made a huge mistake with NAFTA and failing to put some effective trade barriers with China in place. Not to mention sticking little Willie in everything that moved.
In fact, he used to post regularly. I think once he started trolling Android for dollars, he became so deeply hated here that he stopped showing up very often. The perception now is that he's a paid anti-Android/pro-Microsoft(?) shill. Not sure if that's true, but the guy is clearly a bit of a dick.
Slashdot Mirror
OpenStreetMaps has generally good map data at this point, but their reverse geocoding (i.e. place data) is still very sparse compared to Google or Factual, etc. Would love to see a free, open database of comparable quality to the paid ones.
Sorry, but the numbers back the other guy up.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ipod_sales_per_quarter.svg
The iPod was averaging about 100,000 units per quarter until mid 2003. That's not so impressive, honestly. It didn't break 1,000,000 units per quarter until late 2004. So yeah, it was really the iTunes music store launch in April 2003 that made people interested in the iPod.
Ummm Tegra 2 was the fastest platform for Android for quite some time. The G Tablets are still pretty blazingly fast. The issue is just that Tegra 2 was released for such a short time before Tegra 3 came out that it never got much saturation, and then Tegra 3 came out with a bunch of faster options close on its heels.
NVidia has great hardware engineers, but awful software driver people on their mobile platform. They have done a terrible job supporting their chipsets after release with Android, or getting good manufacturers to adopt them.
You have obviously never opened a non-trivial spreadsheet in Calc and Excel. Excel is way faster. But yeah, for trivially simple docs they are comparable.
I'm fairly certain taking naked video of people in sexual encounters where they have a reasonable expectation of privacy isn't just bad manners, but probably illegal. Especially if you then go and publish said video to the world. I think the only reason this case might be murky is since they were roommates, Ravi had the right to be in the room and didn't have to break and enter to install a camera.
Still, just because you live in a house doesn't, say, give you the right to record people naked in the bathrooms or having sex in bedrooms and pubish that on the internet without their consent. This is illegal by itself. However, I suspect the penalties aren't particularly harsh.
This doesn't address the hate crime angle of things here. Any time you take naked pictures or sexual pictures of people without permission and post them on the internet to mock them, it's awful. If the video showed a naked guy with a small penis, or a girl fucking a horrendously ugly guy, that could be every bit as embarrassing for the small-dicked man or the woman in question as this was for the homosexual man. What makes the crime awful is that the man in question was obviously depressed and emotionally disturbed to begin with, and these actions resulted in so much embarrassment that they led to suicide. So really it's bullying an emotionally fragile person that's awful, not anything specific about the sexual orientations that makes it a "hate crime".
Still sounds crazy low. Banking fees for IPO deals are generally 7% for "normal" sized deals (a few hundred million), and around 3% for large deals. You'd expect the fees for a $5B IPO to be around $150M. If they are doing it for less, it's because the value of the prestige and marketing value they get from this deal is worth a fortune to them.
If the equities market worked the way you propose, it would be essentially lawless and there would be no participation by the majority of the public. This would then be effectively equivalent to the situation in China currently. The vast majority there invest their savings in real assets because there is no presumption of honesty or equality in public markets.
Whether you think this is good or bad, you have to realize this makes it much harder for companies to obtain equity financing from the free markets you are espousing the good of in the first place. In fact, in China, companies instead tend to obtain the vast majority of their financing from banks and government backed institutions, and those capital allocation decisions are more about job creation and political favor than about safety or efficiency of capital utilization or profit maximization.
So, in short, any libertarian who says insider trading should not be a crime is essentially supporting a Chinese-style equity market with rampant corruption and insider trading and completely dysfunctional equity markets. I assume that most libertarians would not find that to be ideal, thus they should probably reconsider their view on the topic.
While it's not on the scale of either of those events in terms of real world impact, the departure of Rob Malda is clearly one of the most significant stories of the year in terms of Slashdot itself. I don't think it feels the same here without him.
Correct - capital is overly abundant in China because the government has essentially been printing money to fuel economic growth. The problem is that this encourages massive amounts of malinvestment - Chinese companies doing things that are ultimately unprofitable simply to grow for its own sake. Well not just for its own sake - really, to generate more jobs, which gives the executives clout with the local party/government officials, allows them to extract political favors and raise their own pay because of the sheer scale of their businesses. I have seen this first hand, with companies competing head-to-head against Chinese competition (even though they are also manufacturing in China) being unable to match prices because the Chinese companies are pricing well under cost, simply to grow their topline, financing it all with government-underwritten bank debt, without a care as to the losses piling up, as long as they are within what their banking relationships permit.
So yeah, it clearly optimizes on different things than we optimize on in a more capitalist economic system. Growing your business unprofitably here in the US would not make you more popular with your banks and capital providers unless you are quickly building scale in order to make yourself massively more profitable in a few years.
The company that had split their factories 50/50 would already be out of business, because their competitors have a more efficient supply chain, are in a single facility, and thus have been undercutting *them* for the last dozen years. The geographic concentration problem of hard drive manufacturers is a result of cutthroat competition, not something that happened in spite of it.
In any manufacturing business where margins are incredibly tight (probably 2-3% net margins on average for hard drives and other pure commodity manufacturers of that sort), you can't spend a bit more than the next guy to buck the trend or you will get undercut for Dell's/HP's/etc. business, lose 20% of your gross sales one night, and find you can no longer cover your overhead and suddenly you're out of business.
BayStar took money from Microsoft, BayStar did a PIPE (Private Investment in Public Equity) in SCO.
http://slashdot.org/story/04/03/11/158214/baystar-confirms-microsoft-behind-sco-investment
and
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCO-Linux_controversies#SCO_and_BayStar_Capital
also see below at that page under "Microsoft funding of SCO controversy".
Which leads to:
http://www.catb.org/~esr/halloween/halloween10.html
So that's pretty much as much evidence as I can imagine needing.
I like Python not because it forces *me* to indent my code properly, but because it forces all the other morons out there to indent *their* code properly.
So far the one useful feature everybody seems to tout that Siri has that Voice Actions doesn't is that it can set timed notifications and alarms on the iPhone. I mean, that's cool and all, but really? That's not a killer feature and it could be added to Voice Actions in probably a matter of hours.
I don't understand the hype - Android had awesome voice actions before iPhone did. So Siri has one-upped that by being a bit more general purpose. Okay, but what are the use cases where Siri does something that Android voice actions doesn't? I use voice actions to do quick searches and text and email people regularly, especially when I'm in the car. It works great.
I don't really think that's realistic. A human would assume that those numbers from weather.com were right, so I don't get how you an expect a computer to do better.
That's all nice and true, but the reason people hold dollars is because they can predict with extremely high confidence that it won't buy half as much stuff in 2 days. That confidence is developed by governments over the course of decades, or even centuries. Bitcoin, on the other hand, has no such track record, nor pledges behind it, and it has demonstrated extreme volatility, and an exponential explosion in value (which is almost always the sign of a speculative bubble, to be followed by a crash).
I really hope you are making a sarcastic analogy.
Sure, except for the part where it's true. Hell, it's even in their 10-K filing. Go ahead, read it. You can find it online.
The problem with Google opening retail stores is that Google is trying to drastically change their business model from one where advertisers are their customers to one where the dude walking down the street is the customer. Right now the dude walking down the street is a *user* - he recognizes the Google brand name because he uses it, but he's never drooled at the mouth over a Google product. He's drooled at the mouth over Apple's Macbooks and iPads, he's drooled at the mouth over Coach leather wallets, or Sony's Grand Wega TVs, his wife drools over Prada and Chanel bags, these are products they aspire to own, brands they want to show off to their friends and to other people walking down the street. Aspirational brands.
Google was only aspirational in the early years when only the cool, in-the-know people used Google and the riff-raff used Altavista or Yahoo. Google is now just a utility that everybody uses. Everyone knows the name, like Microsoft, but nobody wants to pay for the privilege of getting more use of a utility. Especially one that makes their bucks out of shoving advertising down your throat.
Google's mistake is that they need to be following a multi-brand strategy. Google is the search engine/utility brand. They should acquire a nice aspirational technology brand that they can use to market consumer products. Far smaller companies in other market segments follow this strategy with much success when there is an inherent incompatibility between their primary's brand's meaning and identity and their objectives with part of their business.
A company like Roku that offered a somewhat sexy, consumer electronics brand would have been a good acquisition target for Google, for example, rather than their miserably failed Google TV strategy. Roku would have to have been even more sexied-up to work out properly though. Maybe even better - a perpendicular brand like Lamborghini from the automobile space that already licenses well in non-automotive products and could be extended into a full-fledged, full-line consumer electronics brand of aspirational products.
If you want to play in a space, you got to do it right. There's no excuse for dicking around when you have the kind of resources Google has.
As the other reply indicated, Google, a company staffed by nerds like you, thought the same thing with the Nexus One. Though it was the best phone of its time, it failed as a business miserably. Because the vast majority of people out there don't shop the way you and I and the people who work at Google do. Because they aren't nerds like us.
I just spent 8 hours driving through New Jersey to get back to my evacuated area of downtown Manhattan. The flooding there is still awful. I saw rescue teams in action still. Tons of flooded roads, and flooded houses. This was a bad storm. It was just lucky that it mostly hit the suburbs and the storm surge in NYC wasn't about 2-3 feet more than what it was or it would have been a nasty scene here.
You don't live in NYC, do you? There's generally nowhere to park to make deliveries except an "illegal" spot. It's all about the revenue generation, not about safety or even free flow of traffic - they do this in front of my building on River Terrace, one of the quietest streets in downtown Manhattan. There is no way to legally move furniture in and out of the building, so a moving truck is always going to get ticketed - just another tax for living in NYC. I'd call it all a scam, yeah.
Web.py is great for developing web services. Really, really quick and easy to learn. The documentation is probably about a 7 though, I agree with that. However, I'd give it 9s on everything else.
Web.py+mimerender is pretty sweet. Check out the example code here:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/713847/recommendations-of-python-rest-web-services-framework
I find this infinitely more comprehensible, pythonic, and nice to work with than the other Python web frameworks I've seen. I've never really used Django, but the examples I've seen look pukey to me.
Right, except that all the old people who are dependent on Social Security would starve (whether that dependency is a good thing in the first place or not isn't the point - I think it's dumb, but once it was put in place it removed the incentive for working class people to save enough for retirement). And the poor people would have no health care because Medicare would be gone.
And with no military left, what's left of our hegemony would be gone. Which means no deterrence against other nations doing naughty things like making nuclear and biological weapons, no deterrence against backing terrorist entities in inter-state disputes. And the Arabs can gouge us as much as they want for oil, and the Saudi and Pakistani governments will collapse without support, resulting in takeovers by radical Islamists and a spike in oil prices to 200 dollars a barrel overnight.
So yeah, your idea is fucking stupid. Take it back to the drawing board. What the Federal government *should* be doing is directing funds toward research of critical national security importance, like breaking the shackles of oil dependence so we can afford to downsize our military to a more reasonable scale necessary for self-defense and occasional force projection rather than large scale occupation. As for the rest of it, there's too much pork barrel and make-work crap even in the good parts (like NASA) and that stuff definitely needs to be gutted. But a $100M Federal government will never work.
You forgot about "don't ask, don't tell". He did push the repeal of that policy through. Otherwise though, I think your post is pretty accurate and describes my position and political inclinations as well. Although I'd like to think I'm more of a thinking man's moderate/Northeastern Republican, and would gladly vote Republican if they could muster some literate, socially liberal candidates like we used to have in Massachusetts. Unfortunately, the Republican party at the national level was first co-opted by neoconservative warmongers, then co-opted by Tea Party nutcases who think the federal government should be essentially nonexistant, to the extent that the world "think" can be used to apply to these people at all.
I think everybody had Obama wrong during his campaign in '08. He was neither the closet socialist that Republicans feared, nor the savior of our nation that Democrats hoped. In fact, he was a charismatic speaker but under-experienced leader without the executive experience to get things done. He's basically continued Bush's policies with respect to domestic fiscal and economic matters, brought almost nothing new to the table with respect to banking regulation or re-creating some semblance of a manufacturing economy in our country outside of the military-industrial complex, the two most important domestic economic matters to stimulate healthy, controlled growth. And his healthcare plan was gutted by design to get everybody to agree to it.
We haven't had a good president since Clinton. And even he made a huge mistake with NAFTA and failing to put some effective trade barriers with China in place. Not to mention sticking little Willie in everything that moved.
In fact, he used to post regularly. I think once he started trolling Android for dollars, he became so deeply hated here that he stopped showing up very often. The perception now is that he's a paid anti-Android/pro-Microsoft(?) shill. Not sure if that's true, but the guy is clearly a bit of a dick.