Try, very, very hard, when a project is young, to consider the ramifications of decisions, and try to anticipate where the project will likely go in the future when it "grows up".
... Otherwise, you will face the horrible fate of making billions upon billions of dollars and running more than 90 percent of the world's computers.
The "Everything" newspapers will be the first to die -- they are at least 6 hours and at most 18 hours late on the news.
Dear editor, I demand a correction.
If you compare the news stories in a local newspaper with the stories on the Web (blogs, news sites) and on TV the night before (local and national, including cable), it becomes clear that the vast majority of news is broken *in the newspaper*.
For the most part, TV news _follows_ the newspapers. The obvious exceptions: weather, homicide, professional sports, major elections and semi-annual presidential addresses. And some shows like 60 Minutes do their own investigations.
The Web is not much better. Websites do tend to pick up product announcements in the tech realm faster, and generally have faster and better product reviews. But I don't see local and state news there, nor much business news. John Batelle and Om Malik have broken some tech news on their blogs, but the vast majority of bloggers offer analysis and opinion on news that is already out there, or rumors and press releases on products.
The reason Knight Ridder is a bad example is because they don't take the web seriously in the least. They don't spend any money on it, and they don't let their individual papers do it themselves.
Actually, the problem was not one of money -- KR spent HUGE sums trying to spin off its digital branch into a separate company that could do an IPO. In the process they centralized everything, getting rid of innovative local experiments like MercuryCenter in San Jose (which has been online long before the graphical Web) and HotCoCo in Contra Costa.
Instead they tried to build this monster content management system that just totally blew, and threw away their great newspaper brands in favor of crap like "siliconvalley.com", "miami.com", "philly.com" and so forth. This was very in vogue at the time, brands like "The Miami Herald" were thought to be passe. And of course KR got totally caught up in the hype.
Anyway, KR ruined its Web chance not due to lack of money or lack of recognizing the importance of the Internet, but because it 1> ignored the tremendous value and name recognition of its traditional newspaper brands and 2> forgot that its newspapers grew and become great *separately*, thanks to decentralized local action (before KR existed), and that its websites should have been allowed to evolve the same way, albeit with money and investment from corporate.
Less money might actually have helped, so the newspapers would have been forced to use off the shelf solutions like Apache, Perl, C, etc. and site performance might actually be decent these days. Sigh.
I'm not sure if you're in or have lived in California, but the way it works out here is that earthquake insurance is only available because the state _requires_ that an insurer who wants to offer any homeowners insurance must also offer earthquake insurance. The vast majority of such policies are written through a public entity called Callifornia Earthquake Authority. Although this entity is privately funded, I bet you can guess who is stuck with policy liability (taxpayers). Thus we are subsidized.
So are Floridians. The state set up the Florida Hurricane Catastrophe Fund so that people can buy hurricane insurance. This state-created fund reimburses insurers for losses.
The pattern of lots of people living in unsafe areas is actually widespread in this country. And the pattern of the governments stepping in to help those people after or in preparation for a tragedy is also common, even tragedies that are _totally_ foreseeable.
my tax dollars would not be wasted on rebuilding your house in an obvious flood zone.
This is superb logic. I think cities on dangerous ground should receive no help from the federal government. Our economy will function just fine without cities like New Orleans (floods)... Los Angeles, San Francisco and Silicon Valley (earthquakes)... Boston (hurricanes as in 1938)... Miami (hurricanes)... Houston (tornadoes)... We'd be better off without these slacker cities!
How incredibly useful. One could, say, write a content management system that runs on google base rather than mysql or whatever.
I know! Just imagine: the sophistication of a MySQL database plus the speed of an HTTP connection!
It's sort of like putting your money in a piggybank -- a piggybank not in your bedroom, but on *the other side of town*.
Re:Looks like they crossed the threshold...
on
Bad Day To Be Sony
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· Score: 1
Guilty or not, most corporations will settle out of court rather than suffer the bad publicity, spend millions on lawyers in court, and possibly be found guilty anyway by a jury that has to weigh enormously complex law vs a big Evil Corporation.
Bullshit. Any major corporation has more time and money than a public prosecutor's office.
Pardon me for not sharing your sympathy for fradulent mutual fund operators and record companies trying to skirt paying royalties, to name but two cases. Nor do I buy the argument that most voters can understand 90 percent of his cases, and thus that they have some awesome PR value. He digs into little nooks and crannies of the financial system that most voters will never bother to understand. As someone who pays attention to these areas, and works in close proximity and inside many of them, I am confident that vast majority of Spitzer's allegations are true.
Re:Looks like they crossed the threshold...
on
Bad Day To Be Sony
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Any further mega-cases would only waste time that he would rather spend campaigning./cynical
Frankly, I am glad there are at least _some_ incentives to reward people like Elliot Spitzer who try and force corporations to comply with the law -- because there are HUGE financial incentives for the corporations to flaut the law.
Maybe you'd like to explain how society should hold corporations in check after it throws away any recognition, title (politics) or money (lawsuits) awarded to those who do so. It seems to me that we should not leave corporate money as the sole remaining incentive or insist that public advocates live like monks.
System 7 came out in the Win 3.1 era, I used it at the time, and IMHO there was a much wider gap between System 7 and Win3 than between OSX and Win2000/XP. Windows had much more to improve and did so, while MacOS simply did not neeed as much improving.
Since the early 90s, both operating systems have added a robust core allowing preemptive multitasking and protected memory. But Windows also has needed to add things like plug n play, device detection, a desktop, real production quality fonts, and full GUI configuration options (which they really haven't finished considering how often I have to go into the registry), just to name a few.
Jobs has done a great job but for many years (OS 8, OS 9) the MacOS was just treading water feature wise and mostly handling a processor switch (to PowerPC) (and quite gracefully, no small accomplishment) and adding UI interfaces that would later be discarded (like tab folders and one-click icons).
I'd love to see it, and no I don't think page ranking algo has to be kept secret. Security through obscurity hasn't helped Google in that regard. Don't know of any serious effort at this point, tho.
... the search engine run by a bullying monopoly that has run afoul of anti-trust laws.
... the search engine of another company looking to exploit the patent system.
Suddenly I'm wishing at least one university had held on to its search engine (Stanford had Google and Berkeley Inktomi) before spinning it out to make bucks.
Congratulations, Google, you have solved the easiest part of classified ads, online auctions, and publishing: stuffing the information into distinct fields in a database.
Now you just need to figure out how to marshall data into canonical fields for each major use scenario, mark those schemas prominently for easy reference, and police the system against abuse like spam, scams and plagarism.
Judging by the state of your core search system, this will take anywhere from seven years to several centuries.
When the writer of an article throws in jokes like "ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO GOOGLE," what the hell kind of value can then possibly be added by us, work-not-doing, spelling-not-checking, time-wasting Slashdot hordes?
Please, reporters, show some class. Leave the insipid repetitive humor to the professionals.
Or rather, the amateurs. You know what the hell we mean. Stop smirking.
Stupid writers.
They put the DB in IMDB
on
IMDb Turns 15
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· Score: 3, Insightful
So the history article says the site was founded with lists long culled by rec.arts.movies regulars, and that these lists are the "backbone" of the site to this day. Did any of these people ever get paid, particularly when Amazon.com acquired the site?
And of course, Cisco is the perfect firm to make such a prediction, because they are completely unbiased, because they do not stand to make any money selling IPv6 related equipment.
Wow, "instant channel changes" is touted as a feature. Does anyone else remember when TVs had dials that instantly changed the channel? And then remote controls that did the same thing? Or when cable boxes could instantly change the channel?
It was only within the last 10 years that we began watching digitally compressed content over cable and satellite, and the decompression lag made flipping channels really slow. Now Microsoft is fixing things back to the way they _used_ to work in the first place and sellilng that as a feature.
Oh ya, they'll also let you work on a computer using the TV as a monitor, just like in the late 1970s. Yip. Ee.
What's the difference between a record company and Microsoft?
I'll tell you: One is a monopolistic leviathan, saddled with an outdated business model and unfairly, perhaps illegally, leveraging a chokehold on one market to try and take over another, desperately afraid of emerging free alternatives and assailed by customers for ridiculously high prices and shoddy quality.
The other... hmmmm, let's try this again.
What's the difference between a record company and Microsoft?
I'll tell you: One will be entirely bankrupt in 10 years, while the other will at least limp along selling a Flight Simulator.
Payback's a beeyotch, INNNIT??!!
I wish everyone who is writing a stupid blog, would stop. If we wanted to hear what you had to say, we would NOT have added the X factor to HTML (XHTML) and the C Secret Sauce (CSS) which is clearly intended for PROFESSIONAL WEB DESIGNErS, not you, stupid person, with your cats.
Now for the tech diss. The blogger has no idea what he is doing. Tell me stupid blogger, what is a C struk? What is a PERL registered expression? WHO is Linux Torvalds? You do not know. Sadly. All you know is your cats, and maybe what you had for lunch, and how to link to your frends. Well, try getting a girl with THAT. Ha ha I laugh at you.
Now sad bloggger. If you'll excuse me, I have to go back to better activities than thinking about you, such as reading Slashdot and making some karma that is actually WORTH something, not stupid PageRank for my BLOG. If you see me on the street (I am the one in the pimp ALL YOUR BASE tshirt) go the other way. Do not look. Do not linhger. Go home and write about your FEELings and live the mack programming to the/. crowd and see who wins the girls.
Ya sorry but everyone knows that to obtain Buzzword Fad Certification (TM) AJAX *must* be coupled with Ruby on Rails, an Agile Development Model and legendary programmer Bill Brasky. Java does not fit in that picture (although apparently Brasky once coded a complete J2EE Web commerce framework in one hand on his BlackBerry while siring a child with his best friend's wife... that framework launched a little site called Half.com).
I have a friend who works for a big marketing firm and got a sneak peak at the marketing materials for the successor to the iPod nano!!
They just keep making em SMALLER!
Take everything you love about iPod and shrink it. Now shrink it again. Now shrink it again. Now put it in your ass.
With 10GB (2,500 songs) and 20GB (5,000 songs) models starting at $187, the pencil-thin iPod Smuggle packs the entire iPod experience into, well, a place you really shouldn't put it. So small, it will take your music places federal authorities never dreamed of.
(iPod Smuggle may not be returned for cash or store credit.)
That Steve Jobs is really hungry for market share.
I am shocked that a Slashdot editor named "ScuttleMonkey" is not more dignified or intelligent in his postings.
Now if you'll excuse, someone just threw poo at the back of my head.
Creative Inc. seems clever here, getting one up on Steve McSmartypants at Apple -- UNTIL you consider that their patent is INSANE, and thus an infringement on NINTENDO! HA! JOKE IS ON YOU, CREATIVE SUXX0RS!
Linux is to Solaris/sparc what the Mac platform is to the Intel platform.
Wait, so Mac, like Linux, has no specific hardware platform and is made to be as compatible as possible? And the Intel platform is tightly integrated and rock solid like Solaris/sparc?
(At least before the whole Intel/Apple deal)
... and your metaphor only works if it's ONE YEAR AGO-o'clock.
If this whole posting-to-Slashdot thing doesn't work out, you can always write new SAT tests.
Slashdot Mirror
... Otherwise, you will face the horrible fate of making billions upon billions of dollars and running more than 90 percent of the world's computers.
Sorry, couldn't resist ;->
Dear editor, I demand a correction.
If you compare the news stories in a local newspaper with the stories on the Web (blogs, news sites) and on TV the night before (local and national, including cable), it becomes clear that the vast majority of news is broken *in the newspaper*.
For the most part, TV news _follows_ the newspapers. The obvious exceptions: weather, homicide, professional sports, major elections and semi-annual presidential addresses. And some shows like 60 Minutes do their own investigations.
The Web is not much better. Websites do tend to pick up product announcements in the tech realm faster, and generally have faster and better product reviews. But I don't see local and state news there, nor much business news. John Batelle and Om Malik have broken some tech news on their blogs, but the vast majority of bloggers offer analysis and opinion on news that is already out there, or rumors and press releases on products.
Actually, the problem was not one of money -- KR spent HUGE sums trying to spin off its digital branch into a separate company that could do an IPO. In the process they centralized everything, getting rid of innovative local experiments like MercuryCenter in San Jose (which has been online long before the graphical Web) and HotCoCo in Contra Costa.
Instead they tried to build this monster content management system that just totally blew, and threw away their great newspaper brands in favor of crap like "siliconvalley.com", "miami.com", "philly.com" and so forth. This was very in vogue at the time, brands like "The Miami Herald" were thought to be passe. And of course KR got totally caught up in the hype.
Anyway, KR ruined its Web chance not due to lack of money or lack of recognizing the importance of the Internet, but because it 1> ignored the tremendous value and name recognition of its traditional newspaper brands and 2> forgot that its newspapers grew and become great *separately*, thanks to decentralized local action (before KR existed), and that its websites should have been allowed to evolve the same way, albeit with money and investment from corporate.
Less money might actually have helped, so the newspapers would have been forced to use off the shelf solutions like Apache, Perl, C, etc. and site performance might actually be decent these days. Sigh.
Resisting obvious GW Bush joke because I think Austin is cool ... must ... resist ... disaster ... joke ...
So are Floridians. The state set up the Florida Hurricane Catastrophe Fund so that people can buy hurricane insurance. This state-created fund reimburses insurers for losses.
The pattern of lots of people living in unsafe areas is actually widespread in this country. And the pattern of the governments stepping in to help those people after or in preparation for a tragedy is also common, even tragedies that are _totally_ foreseeable.
The condition of New Orleans and its levees had much to do with federal projects diverting silt from the Mississippi away from the delta, both sinking the city further by receding the delta itself and destroying protective wetlands (see http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/581820/po sts and the great editorial at http://www.nola.com/news/t-p/frontpage/index.ssf?/ base/news-4/1132475704190650.xml). These projects benefitted upriver development and offshore drilling to New Orleans' detriment.
Your sanctiomny was misplaced.
my tax dollars would not be wasted on rebuilding your house in an obvious flood zone. This is superb logic. I think cities on dangerous ground should receive no help from the federal government. Our economy will function just fine without cities like New Orleans (floods) ... Los Angeles, San Francisco and Silicon Valley (earthquakes) ... Boston (hurricanes as in 1938) ... Miami (hurricanes) ... Houston (tornadoes) ... We'd be better off without these slacker cities!
I know! Just imagine: the sophistication of a MySQL database plus the speed of an HTTP connection!
It's sort of like putting your money in a piggybank -- a piggybank not in your bedroom, but on *the other side of town*.
Bullshit. Any major corporation has more time and money than a public prosecutor's office.
Pardon me for not sharing your sympathy for fradulent mutual fund operators and record companies trying to skirt paying royalties, to name but two cases. Nor do I buy the argument that most voters can understand 90 percent of his cases, and thus that they have some awesome PR value. He digs into little nooks and crannies of the financial system that most voters will never bother to understand. As someone who pays attention to these areas, and works in close proximity and inside many of them, I am confident that vast majority of Spitzer's allegations are true.
Frankly, I am glad there are at least _some_ incentives to reward people like Elliot Spitzer who try and force corporations to comply with the law -- because there are HUGE financial incentives for the corporations to flaut the law.
Maybe you'd like to explain how society should hold corporations in check after it throws away any recognition, title (politics) or money (lawsuits) awarded to those who do so. It seems to me that we should not leave corporate money as the sole remaining incentive or insist that public advocates live like monks.
Since the early 90s, both operating systems have added a robust core allowing preemptive multitasking and protected memory. But Windows also has needed to add things like plug n play, device detection, a desktop, real production quality fonts, and full GUI configuration options (which they really haven't finished considering how often I have to go into the registry), just to name a few.
Jobs has done a great job but for many years (OS 8, OS 9) the MacOS was just treading water feature wise and mostly handling a processor switch (to PowerPC) (and quite gracefully, no small accomplishment) and adding UI interfaces that would later be discarded (like tab folders and one-click icons).
I'd love to see it, and no I don't think page ranking algo has to be kept secret. Security through obscurity hasn't helped Google in that regard. Don't know of any serious effort at this point, tho.
If you don't want to support the 767-buying, patent-filing search engine, you could switch to ...
... the search engine that snitches on dissidents to the secret police of totalitarian China!
... the search engine run by a bullying monopoly that has run afoul of anti-trust laws.
... the search engine of another company looking to exploit the patent system.
Suddenly I'm wishing at least one university had held on to its search engine (Stanford had Google and Berkeley Inktomi) before spinning it out to make bucks.
Now you just need to figure out how to marshall data into canonical fields for each major use scenario, mark those schemas prominently for easy reference, and police the system against abuse like spam, scams and plagarism.
Judging by the state of your core search system, this will take anywhere from seven years to several centuries.
Please, reporters, show some class. Leave the insipid repetitive humor to the professionals.
Or rather, the amateurs. You know what the hell we mean. Stop smirking.
Stupid writers.
So the history article says the site was founded with lists long culled by rec.arts.movies regulars, and that these lists are the "backbone" of the site to this day. Did any of these people ever get paid, particularly when Amazon.com acquired the site?
(Sarcasm detector explodes.)
It was only within the last 10 years that we began watching digitally compressed content over cable and satellite, and the decompression lag made flipping channels really slow. Now Microsoft is fixing things back to the way they _used_ to work in the first place and sellilng that as a feature.
Oh ya, they'll also let you work on a computer using the TV as a monitor, just like in the late 1970s. Yip. Ee.
What's the difference between a record company and Microsoft? I'll tell you: One is a monopolistic leviathan, saddled with an outdated business model and unfairly, perhaps illegally, leveraging a chokehold on one market to try and take over another, desperately afraid of emerging free alternatives and assailed by customers for ridiculously high prices and shoddy quality. The other ... hmmmm, let's try this again.
What's the difference between a record company and Microsoft?
I'll tell you: One will be entirely bankrupt in 10 years, while the other will at least limp along selling a Flight Simulator.
Payback's a beeyotch, INNNIT??!!
I have only one question for developers programming in Dylan: How does it feeeeeeeeel?
Now for the tech diss. The blogger has no idea what he is doing. Tell me stupid blogger, what is a C struk? What is a PERL registered expression? WHO is Linux Torvalds? You do not know. Sadly. All you know is your cats, and maybe what you had for lunch, and how to link to your frends. Well, try getting a girl with THAT. Ha ha I laugh at you.
Now sad bloggger. If you'll excuse me, I have to go back to better activities than thinking about you, such as reading Slashdot and making some karma that is actually WORTH something, not stupid PageRank for my BLOG. If you see me on the street (I am the one in the pimp ALL YOUR BASE tshirt) go the other way. Do not look. Do not linhger. Go home and write about your FEELings and live the mack programming to the /. crowd and see who wins the girls.
Dys
Ya sorry but everyone knows that to obtain Buzzword Fad Certification (TM) AJAX *must* be coupled with Ruby on Rails, an Agile Development Model and legendary programmer Bill Brasky. Java does not fit in that picture (although apparently Brasky once coded a complete J2EE Web commerce framework in one hand on his BlackBerry while siring a child with his best friend's wife ... that framework launched a little site called Half.com).
They just keep making em SMALLER!
That Steve Jobs is really hungry for market share.
I am shocked that a Slashdot editor named "ScuttleMonkey" is not more dignified or intelligent in his postings. Now if you'll excuse, someone just threw poo at the back of my head.
Creative Inc. seems clever here, getting one up on Steve McSmartypants at Apple -- UNTIL you consider that their patent is INSANE, and thus an infringement on NINTENDO! HA! JOKE IS ON YOU, CREATIVE SUXX0RS!
Wait, so Mac, like Linux, has no specific hardware platform and is made to be as compatible as possible? And the Intel platform is tightly integrated and rock solid like Solaris/sparc?
(At least before the whole Intel/Apple deal)
... and your metaphor only works if it's ONE YEAR AGO-o'clock.
If this whole posting-to-Slashdot thing doesn't work out, you can always write new SAT tests.