That step was to use Google's CEO as the example. Whether or not you can find information on Eric Schmidt is NOT the story from a journalism perspective. The news story is how easy it is to find personal information on the Web using search engines. And this is a well-trod story, so it's ongoing coverage, not a breaking story. It calls for a feature treatment.
If written for a public audience, a proper feature treatment illustrates the story with examples gleaned from the general public. By focusing on Google and Google's CEO, this is clearly written to get the attention of Google, NOT as a general news article.
Journalistically, this was a crappy article--poor idea, poor execution. It clearly was written to generate controversy and get under Google's skin. The writer probably thought they were being edgy and in-your-face--demonstrating their journalistic cojones by sticking it to a well-known powerful company.
Well, that's a great attitude for a journalist, but it only works if you're breaking a story. In this case, the story offers no new information or no new angle. Really, no one is surprised that the author was able to find so much info about Eric Schmidt--it's old news. So it's really just what the old-school guys call a hatchet job. The only reason it's gotten any play at all is because of Google's response, not the story itself.
We run Microsoft CMS for my company's Web site, which annoyingly accepts pastes direct from Word, complete with all the extraneous code. (As opposed to a normal text box, which strips formatting when accepting pasted text.)
Since we style the text with CSS, we have to train everyone who works on the site to first paste anything from Word into Notepad to strip out Word code crap, then paste that into the CMS browser client, then re-apply formatting with the tools in the client toolbar. What a pain! I'd love to know if anyone has figured out a way to allow people to paste Word content directly into MS CMS without having to go through all those extra steps.
I saw the movie some weeks ago, so my memory is not completely sharp. But as I remember it, some of the narration focused on emotions of the penguins...one particularly sad part is keyed with the line "the loss is unbearable."
Narration like this is often attacked as anthropomorphism, but I really have to disagree. Just because emotions are interpretted from an animal's actions does not mean it's automatically anthropomorphism. Saying so implies that animals don't have emotions, only humans do. Anyone who's raised a dog or cat knows that animals do have emotions, simple though they may be.
People are animals too. We have strong emotions that override our intellect occasionally...in many ways our emotions are deeper, more primitive and more powerful than self-conscious thoughts. I don't see how it makes sense to think that other animals do not share that experience simply because they do not share our capacity for self-conscious thought.
Kids can't really catch things until they are about 4 or 5, and can't really catch things going fast until they are 9 or 10. How many computers are given 10 years of constant trials to work out a problem like this?
Teams often approach problems like this with design engineering, trying to create a system that can accomplish these incredible processing/coordination tasks when you turn them on the first time.
The human learning process is more like prototyping, where the system fails for thousands of times over years before it begins to achieve success. The closest thing in software engineering is probably advanced data mining, where you simply present the system with a data set of initial conditions and successful outcomes, and let it design its own algorithms to get from one to the other. The more testing and tweaking you perform, the more reliable the system gets.
That's not to take away from the incredible complexity of the system that does the learning--the human body. But a big factor in accomplishing such complex tasks is the time and reps that are involved in the learning itself.
The article does not actually assert that Schmidt attended that fundraiser.
He and his wife Wendy live in the affluent town of Atherton, Calif., where, at a $10,000-a-plate political fund-raiser five years ago, presidential candidate Al Gore and his wife Tipper danced as Elton John belted out "Bennie and the Jets."
The detail of the fundraiser is relevant only to the town of Atherton in general, not to Schmidt and his wife specifically. And if you click through to the article about the fundraiser, you'll see that neither Schmidt nor his wife are mentioned.
Including it produces a false association in readers' minds. That's either really tricky or really bad writing. I vote tricky--the author's point of view screams between the lines if you read carefully.
That's definitely part of the advantage, along with the much lower density of aerated water. It's basically a weak foam, so when you hit it, it compresses some and moves aside some. Since the boundary between the foam and the solid water is gradual, it basically eases you into the dense solid water underneath.
Landing on aeration is particularly important if you're landing at a shallow angle (your boat less than about 60 degrees from horizontal). Landing flat on solid water from even 18 feet produces enough force to break vertebrae. It's happened to 2 of my friends (luckily with no nerve damage).
The younger a kid is, the weaker their barrier is between fantasy and reality. Calvin and Hobbes got it right--for young kids fantasy and reality are indistinguishable. The reality filter isn't fully thickened until the end of puberty--late teens to early 20's. For some people it never fully solidifies.
Their political leader is the smartest man since Einstein. His grand unified field theory will be presented at Evil Genius Con 2006, with a working Moon phaser proof of concept, shortly after he wins the Super Bowl and defeats Xur and the Ko-Dan Armada.
I'm a whitewater kayaker and so know a little something about hitting the water at high speed (off a waterfall). For drops above 20 feet, boaters focus on penetrating the water with the bow of the boat so as to break surface tension. Above about 40 feet, that is no longer enough, and the boater needs to aim for the area of maximum aeration. Well-aerated water has a very low surface tension and so is safer to hit at high speeds. Waterfalls have been run over 100 feet without injury this way.
So the shotgun would have a very different effect from a hammer in that it is more likely to aerate the water. Not that it would work anyway (air hurts at 150 mph, let alone water), but it important to understand the principle at work.
The Army and the airlines know that gaming affects behavior, as evidenced by the $ millions poured into simulator training. Decades ago they learned that time in the simulator has a measurable effect on a person's behavior in a real situation.
But, some will say, those are immersive 3-D environments, not games! Well what is modern gaming FPS gaming but a 3-D immersive environment? Sure you don't have the Cave in your living room (although I know you want it), but are you really paying attention to what's around you when you're gaming? No, you're immersed in the environment presented on your screen(s).
When I go for a drive immediately after a long session on GTA, I definitely notice a difference in my attitude toward obstacles and maneuvering. I'm not saying I'm looking for big jumps or carjacking cops, but I do think it's disengenuous to say that gaming has no effect on behavior.
A spacecraft power system should not produce enough waste heat to create a problem--if it does it will simply be redesigned. On the earth we don't worry about it since we don't worry about efficiency in general--just build it cheap and conduct the extra heat away. But on a spacecraft mass and resources are precious. Any heat that is produced should be used for power generation. Waste heat on space ship is just as bad as glueing rocks to the side--it means you're carring stuff you don't need to. If the system produces waste heat, either build it smaller, build it slower, or find something else to power.
There must be an internal conflict between Microsoft's various apps groups, and their OS groups, with respect to Linux. Apps must recognize Linux is a growing platform for which they can sell products, especially in the server space. But obviously to the OS groups Linux is a competitor. The OS groups are clearly winning this one so far...why?
Just keep both fingers on the thing and push down. I don't see why that would register out of the driver any different than two physical buttons. If fact it seems like it would work slightly better, since there's no need to coordinate two separate finger pushes--you just have to have them both touching the surface of one big button.
This is an accessory mouse, introduced by Apple (smartly IMO) to compete with Logitech for power users' accessory purchase dollars. It's a money grab, not a paradigm shift.
All Macs that ship with mice will continue to ship with the one-button mouse.
In a properly designed mouse-based UI you can get to everything using only one button and the menus. Apple provides contextual menus a secondary, alternative way to access features. But the point of the single-button philosophy is to ensure that nothing is available only in contextual menus. The contextuals are to provide shortcuts for power users--the people most likely to have or buy their own multi-button mouse anyway. Unlike some other OSs, Apple OSX is designed first with everyone in mind (including grandma), then power-user features are overlayed (e.g. contextual menus, Terminal, etc). I'll bet that this mouse does not ship standard with any Mac.
Companies are out to make a profit not a political statement.
Companies are out to do what their owners want them to do. Some, such as Patagonia, or Working Assets, do make political statements because their owner(s) want them to. Others, such as Nike have learned (been taught, actually) the economic advantages of corporate responsibility (and disadvantages of a lack thereof).
Investors, i.e., the shareholders, want a monetary return, not a political return on their investment. As an investor in Cisco I would sell immediately if I knew Cisco was going to quit selling to one of the largest markets in existence because they were going to make a political statment
Other investors want many things, some of which you might not care about. The way to find out what percentage of them want a certain thing is to poll them on it. Blocking such a poll based on the opinions of management is ridiculous. Management works for the owners.
Only if all companies did this would that then make an impact. (And yes, I know you have to start somewhere, but why don't you start with the people in China first?)
Because I don't own shares in the people of China.
When I watch the shuttle take off, what excites me is the thought of that great ride from the ground up. If the Virgin Galactic flights start the same was as the SpaceShipOne flights--a leisurely climb to 50,000--that's a shame. I've always wanted to lay on my back, strapped in, waiting for T minus 3 and ignition.
No coffee shop makes much money on the people sitting in the shop. Coffee shops make money primarily from their take out customers. Even assuming that people sitting at the tables buy a new cup of coffee every hour, how many takeout customers can the shop serve in that time?
Tables, chairs, sofas, books, papers, music, and yes, Wi-Fi, serve to create an atmosphere that enhance the overall perception of value. It's why they can charge $3.00 for a fucking cup of drip coffee.
Your comment about needing "carnage" to press a business into action was often true five years ago, but it is rarely the case now. The present business climate is not accepting of security flaws and big businesses often press the vendors these days.
They can't press the vendors if they don't know there is a problem. For the market to work most efficiently to solve a problem it needs the most perfect information.
Slashdot Mirror
It's a hatchet job.
That step was to use Google's CEO as the example. Whether or not you can find information on Eric Schmidt is NOT the story from a journalism perspective. The news story is how easy it is to find personal information on the Web using search engines. And this is a well-trod story, so it's ongoing coverage, not a breaking story. It calls for a feature treatment.
If written for a public audience, a proper feature treatment illustrates the story with examples gleaned from the general public. By focusing on Google and Google's CEO, this is clearly written to get the attention of Google, NOT as a general news article.
Journalistically, this was a crappy article--poor idea, poor execution. It clearly was written to generate controversy and get under Google's skin. The writer probably thought they were being edgy and in-your-face--demonstrating their journalistic cojones by sticking it to a well-known powerful company.
Well, that's a great attitude for a journalist, but it only works if you're breaking a story. In this case, the story offers no new information or no new angle. Really, no one is surprised that the author was able to find so much info about Eric Schmidt--it's old news. So it's really just what the old-school guys call a hatchet job. The only reason it's gotten any play at all is because of Google's response, not the story itself.
We run Microsoft CMS for my company's Web site, which annoyingly accepts pastes direct from Word, complete with all the extraneous code. (As opposed to a normal text box, which strips formatting when accepting pasted text.)
Since we style the text with CSS, we have to train everyone who works on the site to first paste anything from Word into Notepad to strip out Word code crap, then paste that into the CMS browser client, then re-apply formatting with the tools in the client toolbar. What a pain! I'd love to know if anyone has figured out a way to allow people to paste Word content directly into MS CMS without having to go through all those extra steps.
during business hours.
I saw the movie some weeks ago, so my memory is not completely sharp. But as I remember it, some of the narration focused on emotions of the penguins...one particularly sad part is keyed with the line "the loss is unbearable."
Narration like this is often attacked as anthropomorphism, but I really have to disagree. Just because emotions are interpretted from an animal's actions does not mean it's automatically anthropomorphism. Saying so implies that animals don't have emotions, only humans do. Anyone who's raised a dog or cat knows that animals do have emotions, simple though they may be.
People are animals too. We have strong emotions that override our intellect occasionally...in many ways our emotions are deeper, more primitive and more powerful than self-conscious thoughts. I don't see how it makes sense to think that other animals do not share that experience simply because they do not share our capacity for self-conscious thought.
Kids can't really catch things until they are about 4 or 5, and can't really catch things going fast until they are 9 or 10. How many computers are given 10 years of constant trials to work out a problem like this?
Teams often approach problems like this with design engineering, trying to create a system that can accomplish these incredible processing/coordination tasks when you turn them on the first time.
The human learning process is more like prototyping, where the system fails for thousands of times over years before it begins to achieve success. The closest thing in software engineering is probably advanced data mining, where you simply present the system with a data set of initial conditions and successful outcomes, and let it design its own algorithms to get from one to the other. The more testing and tweaking you perform, the more reliable the system gets.
That's not to take away from the incredible complexity of the system that does the learning--the human body. But a big factor in accomplishing such complex tasks is the time and reps that are involved in the learning itself.
The article does not actually assert that Schmidt attended that fundraiser.
He and his wife Wendy live in the affluent town of Atherton, Calif., where, at a $10,000-a-plate political fund-raiser five years ago, presidential candidate Al Gore and his wife Tipper danced as Elton John belted out "Bennie and the Jets."
The detail of the fundraiser is relevant only to the town of Atherton in general, not to Schmidt and his wife specifically. And if you click through to the article about the fundraiser, you'll see that neither Schmidt nor his wife are mentioned.
Including it produces a false association in readers' minds. That's either really tricky or really bad writing. I vote tricky--the author's point of view screams between the lines if you read carefully.
That's definitely part of the advantage, along with the much lower density of aerated water. It's basically a weak foam, so when you hit it, it compresses some and moves aside some. Since the boundary between the foam and the solid water is gradual, it basically eases you into the dense solid water underneath.
Landing on aeration is particularly important if you're landing at a shallow angle (your boat less than about 60 degrees from horizontal). Landing flat on solid water from even 18 feet produces enough force to break vertebrae. It's happened to 2 of my friends (luckily with no nerve damage).
The younger a kid is, the weaker their barrier is between fantasy and reality. Calvin and Hobbes got it right--for young kids fantasy and reality are indistinguishable. The reality filter isn't fully thickened until the end of puberty--late teens to early 20's. For some people it never fully solidifies.
Their political leader is the smartest man since Einstein. His grand unified field theory will be presented at Evil Genius Con 2006, with a working Moon phaser proof of concept, shortly after he wins the Super Bowl and defeats Xur and the Ko-Dan Armada.
I'm a whitewater kayaker and so know a little something about hitting the water at high speed (off a waterfall). For drops above 20 feet, boaters focus on penetrating the water with the bow of the boat so as to break surface tension. Above about 40 feet, that is no longer enough, and the boater needs to aim for the area of maximum aeration. Well-aerated water has a very low surface tension and so is safer to hit at high speeds. Waterfalls have been run over 100 feet without injury this way.
So the shotgun would have a very different effect from a hammer in that it is more likely to aerate the water. Not that it would work anyway (air hurts at 150 mph, let alone water), but it important to understand the principle at work.
The Army and the airlines know that gaming affects behavior, as evidenced by the $ millions poured into simulator training. Decades ago they learned that time in the simulator has a measurable effect on a person's behavior in a real situation.
But, some will say, those are immersive 3-D environments, not games! Well what is modern gaming FPS gaming but a 3-D immersive environment? Sure you don't have the Cave in your living room (although I know you want it), but are you really paying attention to what's around you when you're gaming? No, you're immersed in the environment presented on your screen(s).
When I go for a drive immediately after a long session on GTA, I definitely notice a difference in my attitude toward obstacles and maneuvering. I'm not saying I'm looking for big jumps or carjacking cops, but I do think it's disengenuous to say that gaming has no effect on behavior.
You posted this in April. Some of us have been doing stuff like that for well over a year. Nice try on the credit grab though.
Good job mods.
Your dogs wants itself.
A spacecraft power system should not produce enough waste heat to create a problem--if it does it will simply be redesigned. On the earth we don't worry about it since we don't worry about efficiency in general--just build it cheap and conduct the extra heat away. But on a spacecraft mass and resources are precious. Any heat that is produced should be used for power generation. Waste heat on space ship is just as bad as glueing rocks to the side--it means you're carring stuff you don't need to. If the system produces waste heat, either build it smaller, build it slower, or find something else to power.
There must be an internal conflict between Microsoft's various apps groups, and their OS groups, with respect to Linux. Apps must recognize Linux is a growing platform for which they can sell products, especially in the server space. But obviously to the OS groups Linux is a competitor. The OS groups are clearly winning this one so far...why?
Just keep both fingers on the thing and push down. I don't see why that would register out of the driver any different than two physical buttons. If fact it seems like it would work slightly better, since there's no need to coordinate two separate finger pushes--you just have to have them both touching the surface of one big button.
This is an accessory mouse, introduced by Apple (smartly IMO) to compete with Logitech for power users' accessory purchase dollars. It's a money grab, not a paradigm shift.
All Macs that ship with mice will continue to ship with the one-button mouse.
In a properly designed mouse-based UI you can get to everything using only one button and the menus. Apple provides contextual menus a secondary, alternative way to access features. But the point of the single-button philosophy is to ensure that nothing is available only in contextual menus. The contextuals are to provide shortcuts for power users--the people most likely to have or buy their own multi-button mouse anyway. Unlike some other OSs, Apple OSX is designed first with everyone in mind (including grandma), then power-user features are overlayed (e.g. contextual menus, Terminal, etc). I'll bet that this mouse does not ship standard with any Mac.
Companies are out to make a profit not a political statement.
Companies are out to do what their owners want them to do. Some, such as Patagonia, or Working Assets, do make political statements because their owner(s) want them to. Others, such as Nike have learned (been taught, actually) the economic advantages of corporate responsibility (and disadvantages of a lack thereof).
Investors, i.e., the shareholders, want a monetary return, not a political return on their investment. As an investor in Cisco I would sell immediately if I knew Cisco was going to quit selling to one of the largest markets in existence because they were going to make a political statment
Other investors want many things, some of which you might not care about. The way to find out what percentage of them want a certain thing is to poll them on it. Blocking such a poll based on the opinions of management is ridiculous. Management works for the owners.
Only if all companies did this would that then make an impact. (And yes, I know you have to start somewhere, but why don't you start with the people in China first?)
Because I don't own shares in the people of China.
When I watch the shuttle take off, what excites me is the thought of that great ride from the ground up. If the Virgin Galactic flights start the same was as the SpaceShipOne flights--a leisurely climb to 50,000--that's a shame. I've always wanted to lay on my back, strapped in, waiting for T minus 3 and ignition.
No coffee shop makes much money on the people sitting in the shop. Coffee shops make money primarily from their take out customers. Even assuming that people sitting at the tables buy a new cup of coffee every hour, how many takeout customers can the shop serve in that time?
Tables, chairs, sofas, books, papers, music, and yes, Wi-Fi, serve to create an atmosphere that enhance the overall perception of value. It's why they can charge $3.00 for a fucking cup of drip coffee.
They can when they hire independent security firms to perform code assessments...
Only if those security firms perform perfectly and their code assessments catch every possible vulnerability--not bloody likely.
Your comment about needing "carnage" to press a business into action was often true five years ago, but it is rarely the case now. The present business climate is not accepting of security flaws and big businesses often press the vendors these days.
They can't press the vendors if they don't know there is a problem. For the market to work most efficiently to solve a problem it needs the most perfect information.