It's the latter. We haven't forgotten that the iPhone trademark was in use in the US when the iPhone was released, have we? Apple released the product anyway with limited attempt at discussion with the trademark holder, Cisco, who subsequently sued (then settled). See Linksys iPhone.
So any ecommerce system with any number of clicks to purchase has now infringed on 1-click purchasing. After all, all they did is leave out a step that the consumer has to perform (an extra click). Everyone is liable!
Normally that would be true, but if a law is being used to abuse the legal system, then it becomes the problem of the judge. Corporate warfare is not supposed to be conducted in public courts.
Google will ban you from accessing their service the instant their algorithm detects it's not an actual human being making searches and viewing their ads. Even if you behave nicely with your scripts and rate-limit them not to hit Google's servers badly.
I can't see how this is even remotely relevant to the topic at hand. All it sounds like is you have a bone to pick. The fact that Google references other peoples' content - which, as a search engine, is by definition what they're supposed to be doing - does not mean that their service is not value-added, and that they are not entitled to withhold the results of their algorithms from other people wanting to programatically utilize those results for their own purposes. If search were easy, and not resource intensive, there would be more search engine competitors and people wouldn't keep coming back to Google. I see no reason they shouldn't be allowed to protect those results from people violating their completely reasonable terms of use (the darn thing is free already, what more do you want?), and you haven't provided one.
What, exactly, is your reason? Google custom search engines are a perfectly viable option for most use cases, but apparently you'd like to pass off their search results are your own, or you'd like to create an ad-free version of Google? I have no idea, because, again, you haven't actually given a reason why you should be allowed to do something that, in general, I don't think should be allowed. Why should a competitor be allowed to scrape Google's search results?
On the other hand, Google has no problem hitting your servers and causing more than $1000 fees for the owner for nothing.
You like straw men, apparently. Anyone who doesn't like Google hitting their servers can easily disable indexing entirely, or rate limit the indexing process. That is, Google actually respects robots.txt files, which is more than I can say for a huge number of other crawlers out there on the Internet. Before you go complaining about something that can actually be controlled by a halfway competent sysadmin, maybe you should worry more about the bots that don't actually play by the rules, and have no intention of doing so? They're far more of a problem.
I know you're just throwing numbers out there, but the way you arrived at your figure is flawed. You claim that Linux use on the desktop is 1%; okay, fine, I can live with that. You then go on to show that only a fraction of those Linux users are interested in games, and that fraction of the total computer population is the market size.
Your assertion that this is then 0.1% of sales presumes that 100% of the non-Linux market is interested in games, which is clearly not the case. That is, in order to make the numbers comparable, we have to make the same comparison with other platforms that you did with Linux:
1. PC use for the desktop is at around 92%.
2. 50% of that is installed base in corporate systems (market share is common derived from units sold, not 'platform preference by person').
3. 25% are not interested in games.
4. 15% of what is left will pirate any game that comes out.
So, again, maybe 10% of that is actually a viable market. Sure, 9.2% is > 0.1%, but that presumes that any of these ballpark figures are meaningful. What if the average Linux user is actually more likely to be a gamer than the average PC user? That is, there might exist a correlation between being a gamer (or at least being the kind that buys blockbuster titles) and platform preference. What if the average linux user is more likely to pay (when they aren't open source zealots) than the average PC user? All of these ideas need to be factored in to any real calculation of market size.
I think you misunderstand the point of App Engine. Varnish and HA-Proxy are things that are installed on servers to improve their performance. The idea behind using GAE is to remove yourself from needing applications of that variety at all. Using GAE, you don't have to worry about the server hardware, the operating system, the load balancer, caching, or any other system details; you just run a program. If fine tuning system architecture is your idea of fun, or is critical for your particular application, then by all means stay away from GAE.
If, however, thinking about these system architecture concerns makes your head hurt, as it does mine, and you just want to get your application running, then use GAE. GAE abstracts scalability; that is the point of the platform. You're paying Google to use their know-how to make your simple Python / Java / Go program run and work for request volumes in the 1 per minute range to the 100 per second range. To me, that is what makes GAE amazing and worthwhile.
I am a researcher, and I don't have the time or energy to spend on managing servers or configuring, updating, and ensuring reliability of operating systems. I want a PaaS architecture that removes me from the hardware and operating system levels. Those pieces of the puzzle are not relevant to me, and dealing with them just saps time and energy from what I actually want to focus on. What I want is somewhere where I can hand off the code that is relevant to my application and know that the program, and the servers it reside on, will continue to operate for any load level twenty four hours a day. For my purposes, it's perfect. I am hard pressed to imagine that any but the largest players derive their competitive advantage from their server infrastructure, so, to me, not having to worry about it just frees up limited resources to focus on what's important.
It seems clear you haven't tried App Engine. You mention Azure's integration with Eclipse as something which competitors have that Google doesn't, except that the Google Eclipse plugin has provided the same (and dare I say better) integration with the Eclipse environment since App Engine launched, which was well before Azure. You then go on to allude to "services" that Amazon provides, which if you're referring to EC2 is a bit like comparing Gmail to exim4 with mutt, and if you're referring to the other AWS, is just plain wrong. There is no "traditional platform" with EC2; there's merely what you build, or what you tie into with web calls. In the former case, it's worth noting that the reason many people turn to App Engine, or Azure, is that they don't want to manage their own system images; they just want to run a program. In the latter case, you can use any of the AWS services that have web protocols with App Engine just fine, and many people do.
If you want to make a more reasonable comparison, it's App Engine versus Azure versus Amazon Elastic Beanstalk. Azure supports.Net and PHP, AEB supports Java, and App Engine supports Python, Java (and any JVM compatible language), and Go. App Engine clearly has more language support. While I'm not aware of the speed with which Azure scales, GAE's scaling speed is far faster than Amazon. AEB uses the same instance startup procedure as Amazon EC2, which in the FAQ lists that an instance will be available "within ten minutes". GAE creates new instances on the fly and startup time is measured in milliseconds for fine tuned or simple applications and seconds otherwise. GAE also provides command line tools for all three of its language environments, so you are not tied to any development environment.
I'm really perplexed by this "huge amount of stuff" that other people offer. The only thing I can think of is the ability to dynamically tailor the system your program runs on, but if that's what you want, you're shopping for EC2 and other virtualization solutions like Rack Space, not Azure/AEB/GAE. If you're looking for platform-as-a-service because you understand the tradeoffs that you're entering into, those three are the main players in town. Of those three, GAE wins hands down in my opinion. Not only does it support more languages and programming styles (frontend / backend code can be separated and used for different types of instances) than either Azure or AEB, the value added services make programming many types of applications simpler (and they can all be avoided if lockin is feared). Azure requires you to program in Windows with their tools, and who wants to be required to do that? AEB has all the slowness of EC2 without the configurability, so it seems you'd be better off with either Azure or GAE no matter what.
Take a tiny amount of time to understand what you're criticizing next time.
Your laptop, tablet, phone, and more all already have Wifi. So do your SO's (if applicable) and children's (if applicable) devices. Get one portable 3G device, either a portable modem or your phone, and use tethering. Stop paying the phone company by device and only pay them by plan.
If I had to pay by device for Internet access at my house I'd be screwed . ..
Not quite. This move is all about options and preventing the dreaded 'lockin'.
Developers ask: If I bet my development on a single PaaS provider, won't I be tied to them indefinitely?
VMware says: If you use our open source stack that can be hosted by us, or by you, you won't be tied to a particular framework or hosting provider. We'll happily host you if our service fits your needs but, if your needs outgrow us or we fail to meet your quality expectations, you can always run the exact same stack out of your own datacenter or someone else's.
What remains to be seen is how good the performance is and how easy it is to use the platform.
What everyone seems to be forgetting is that this is Google's data. What I mean by that is that the data does not even remotely imply that you do not need technical expertise to be a good manager. All of the managers at Google had good technical expertise, or they wouldn't have gotten there (because, remember, Google valued technical expertise in their managers). There are no pointy-haired bosses at Google.
What the data is really saying is that after you have passed a threshold level of technical competence, how you manage becomes more important than how good you are at coding. In other words, if you're technically competent enough to apprehend what's going on and make informed decisions, it matters more what decisions you make and how you arrive at those decisions, not that you're the best coder in the room.
How is that surprising? As soon as you start hiring hundreds of pointy-haired bosses, then the data will rank technical competence as the first priority. The data is only a reflection of existing conditions. People are saying, "technical competence is good enough, but here's what isn't". Don't take this as a sign that technical competence is not important.
Chinese characters *are* dispensable (whether or not they. The accuracy of Pinyin, and the meaning it conveys, is the exact same meaning conveyed when speaking Chinese. To suggest that this is insufficient is to suggest that Chinese is a written only language or that every Chinese conversation is fraught with problems.
More seriously, I can see that this might appeal to people who travel a lot, but for everyone else ?
You're probably right, but since I am one of those individuals with a 100% travel job, the first time I heard of this service I said "finally!". While I usually make it home on weekends, I can often be gone for two or three weeks at a time. In the best of situations I can get my snail mail once a week, but often it's much worse than that. With this service, I can get all of my snail mail when it arrives like a normal person.
The only thing keeping me from signing up is that, because of my situation, I very intentionally avoid having anything important snail mailed to me. Hence, I'm not sure that $20/month to see my junk mail faster is worthwhile. I think I've phased snail mail out of my life too much to justify the cost, but the service is exactly something I'd want.
From a more digital age perspective though, I also just thought the idea of having digital copies of all of my mail and trashing the originals was really cool (i.e. without my personal effort involved). Anything that's not sentimental I have no desire to have an original of anymore; filing cabinets are for people born before I was. This takes out the effort but still allows me to maintain my perfect paperless office.
I did take notice of the fact that you said "may", but since it was in contrast to what you said in the rest of your post, which implied that since his time was "free" he'd obviously want to do it, I ignored the use of may.
I understand that there are a large variety of variables that go into calculating opportunity cost, and it is never a fixed value because the variables are never fixed. It does, however, have an average, general value for a specific individual. I used the word "random" to describe night on purpose because I wanted it to be general case; obviously, special circumstances might make you take up the offer for any odd number of reasons in a specific instance, but I think we can both agree that in the general case you wouldn't take up the offer. That was my point.
I do agree that fixed percentages are not a valid opportunity cost calculation by any stretch. I think it's a bit like splitting hairs, however, since it's more about the idea than about the semantics. All the gggp really meant (IMHO) is that, relative to his income or relative to a company's expenditures, chasing down that tiny amount of money was unlikely to be considered of interest.
Certainly, phrasing it in terms of opportunity cost might have made a more compelling argument, but I still think that what the gggp meant had more merit than your post saying that he should simply "use the time [he] wouldn't otherwise be getting paid to get the $100 back" would indicate. Such a statement was summarily dismissive
I ran through the argument you're sick of (opportunity cost of time) in an earlier comment, and I'm thinking you might be sick of it because you don't get it. It's not a myth, but a fact, that there is not a span of time that you could not allocate to revenue producing activities if you chose. You may not literally spend $50 to watch a 1 hour TV show, but during that one hour you truly could have done something revenue producing. There is no true concept such as "spare time". Spare time, in your quoted fashion, merely refers to the time that you have allotted to be free. Most people do this by default by just saying that any hour not at the office is spare time, but did you know there are people in this world that work two jobs (or three, or four)? Some of them need to, and some do it just to save up for something special, but the point is that you could be one of these people as well; you simply choose not to be.
Why? Because you value your free time. You wouldn't trade it for an amount below a certain threshold value; we call that threshold value your opportunity cost of time. I bet nickels to pennies that if someone offered you a "work anytime you want for $10,000/hour" job that you'd watch a hell of a lot less TV, because you simply don't value your free time that highly. My only point, however, is that there is a precise, estimateable value that you value your free time at. If a particular activity, like persuing a refund, does not exceed that threshold value then you're not going to give up your free time for it (and, yes, I understand that there are other factors like personal satisfaction, principles, enjoyment, and other things involved, but the fact of the matter is that those can be quantified to some extent as well; for example, how many people are willing to abandon their principles for a large enough wad of cash? How small can that wad of cash be for them to abandon their principles? Bingo, you have your dollar value for that person's principles.)
In your post you make fun of workaholics who don't take any time out for personal activities, but that's exactly what opportunity cost of time is about. The major difference between a workaholic and a "normal" person is that a workaholic does not value their free time very highly so they can't see themselves allocating their opportunity cost of time to that free time. Most people, on the other hand, despite understanding that they could be doing something else, choose to allow themselves free time because it's worth it to them.
Maybe the gp prefers posting on Slashdot to working for several hours on a task that will net him $100; I know I would. $100 isn't all that much, and the frustration isn't worth it. Instead, I can spend time doing things I enjoy and wind down from the day before I have to go to work again. Hence, I am one of those people who values their free time highly. You'd have to pay me a lot of money to get me to give it up. Maybe you just don't value your "spare time" all that highly.
Then why don't you use the time when you wouldn't otherwise be getting paid to get the $100 back? Surely you don't make your professional wage 24hrs per day. Your free time is just that.
You've never heard of the opportunity cost of time, have you? I suspect that this is exactly what the gp was referring to, not to his professional salary. Maybe you can't value your free (as in beer) time at your professional rate of $35/hour, but look at it this way: if you were offered the opportunity to work at Starbucks for $10/hour for three hours on a random night, would you? Most of us making a good salary would say no. And yet, according to your argument, since my time is "free" then anything >$0 for that hour should be worth it, no? There is a set value below which you'd be unwilling to work, even in your "free" time. That threshold value is, essentially, your opportunity cost of time. Any hour of your free time could easily be devoted to doing something that produces money, but you value your relaxation and you pay for it in terms of opportunity cost.
I understand that if we take the parent's assumption of $100 over three hours it works out to $33.33/hour, but the point remains. If that $100 isn't worth three/five hours of my free time, just as working at Starbucks for any amount of time during my free time isn't, then I'm simply not going to bother. I don't know what your opportunity cost of time is but, in general, I agree with the gp. Spending three to five hours on the phone for a measly $100 would make me want to gouge my eyes out. I value my time more highly than that. If you don't, then you can tie up the phone lines.
If we can get people to agree to ban dihydrogen monoxide why is anyone even remotely surprised when, given something that the public understands even less than chemistry, the mechanisms of the Internet, a skewed poll suggests that they don't want it. A poll on a subject like this has to be skewed because absolutely everything the person being polled knows about the subject comes from the poll itself. It's definitely non-trivial to write a completely unbiased summary and certainly given the limited amount of space that you get for a poll blurb.
Folder one person, folder 2 project.
I can go Inbox->Bob->Wedgie
can tags to that visually?
No, it can't be done visually, but then again some of us find typing:
/label:bob label:wedgie<enter>
easier than clicking around some folder icons.
If you have multiple people who all have the subfolder "wedgie", can your folder mechanism allow you to visually represent the contents of all the "wedgie" folders?
Let's just admit that there are advantages to both paradigms.
The "Alt Tab" between OSs is easily accomplished with a simple recipe: one Linux box, one PC box, and one KVM switch.
I mean, come on, what Geek doesn't have a spare PC lying around somewhere that they can turn into a "MS shit" box?
While I agree with a lot of the separation of function items that people brought to light, I think that the reason, besides the fact that Microsoft did it first, is because a calendar application that's not interfaced in a convenient manner to a communications mechanism is not nearly so useful as one that is.
Outlook Calendar wouldn't be used at all if it weren't true that I could send out a meeting invite to a hundred people, whose calendars I just checked, and receive responses. Unless you're going to integrate an e-mail backbone to a calendaring application, which puts you in the same problem in reverse, having tight integration of a calendaring application with its natural mate, a communications application for coordination, is actually a pretty reasonable approach.
Offline calendars are always going to suffer from this problem, because every person you want to coordinate with will need specialized software and will need to be using your calendaring application (yes, I understand that is the case for basically every calendar+mail out there). To me, the easiest way to get away from the whole mess is to move to online calendar systems. Hyperlinks are already fully integrated into standard e-mail functionality, so online calendar systems have an existing usable integration mechanism, no proprietary anything required. And online calendars make sense for a whole slew of other reasons as well.
When's Google's calendaring application going to be done anyway?
I actually really like the point that you brought up. People are very quick to talk about 'security through obscurity' and how Linux and OS X are only secure because no one cares to try writing viruses for them. But, come on, there's absolutely nothing obscure about writing a virus for OS X.
Which has higher notorierty: writing yet another virus for Windows and being one of hundreds of thousands, or writing the first devastating virus for OS X, or even Linux.
All we're really arguing then is whether any virus writers care more about notoriety than zombie machines, and I think there are certainly a number out there who do.
What that says to me is that these operating systems are more secure (not secure, just more secure) because they've remained relatively unpenetrated despite efforts to compromise them.
These operating systems' approach to security just makes it much more difficult to take advantage of them.
Fact is that most people don't care about the locking mechanism of their car, or it's cylinder diameter or stroke; they didn't by their DVD player because of its tech spec; they don't know the soil type in their garden or the geology unerlying their house . . . If people can plug in their latset gizmo and have it work 7 times out of 10 then they are happy enough.
I don't understand this logic at all. Your comparison is not useful in the least. You're comparing knowing how the locking mechanism on my car works to knowing how a computer works. There's a really, really, really big difference there. People may be only mildly annoyed when gizmos fail 3 times out of 10, but anyone with half a brain returns a car that only starts 7 out of 10 times. The expectations around the technology are fundamentally different, and in my opinion incorrectly so.
I do not accept that technology has to be more unstable than a car. We are all aware that it's possible to write a program without bugs, it's just that we've been trained by past experience not to expect it. But if you're going to make these comparisons between computers and gardening or cars or even standalone player technology, it's not going to look good for the computer.
Most people don't care how the car, garden, or DVD player works because they all approach 100% uptime and 100% correct functionality. They don't have to care how they work because they just work, correctly, nearly all the time. If they don't, then they return them.
When your DVD player doesn't play a DVD, you don't go 'oh well, maybe it will next time.' You return it and get one that's not broken. When your car fails to start three times in a row, you don't hope that it will start the next time. You dig out your warranty and get the thing fixed, and you complain until it's working the way you expect it to.
I'd love to see someone buy a PC with these same expecations. I don't think it's that impossible, but we're just not there. Because we're not, it's more important for consumers to raise their awareness so that they can demand reliability and security. Too many people are content to accept what they've always lived with and not examine the way things could be.
This has been tax law for ages. If you live in one state and work in another, whether driving over the state line to work in an office, or telecommuting in, you owe taxes in both states.
I'm not a tax expert, but I do know how my own taxes work and I'm pretty sure what you just said is not right. As a consultant, I work in many different states during the year, and my firm keeps track of how many of my billable hours are in each state. At the end of the year, I file taxes by state based on the time I was billable in each state. I do not pay taxes on that income twice. Considering we're one of the largest tax firms in the world, I tend to think we're probably doing it right.
This may or may not be relevant to a telecommuting discussion, but you're claiming the tax laws, which seem ambiguous regarding telecommuting, are the same for people physically traveling and that has not been my experience.
I agree with you for the most part: people have a tendency to overuse Excel and they sometimes created bloated spreadsheets that would have been better utilized as databases. But I think we should be careful to criticize spreadsheets for the right reasons. Making spreadsheets that are painless to update is entirely possible, and doesn't require someone to be a wizard. In addition, using spreadsheets for financial forecasting and planning is intelligent.
Complicated reporting scenarios is one of the things that Excel handles best, because structuring database reports that involve any form of calculation or subtotals can be a real nightmare, especially for someone who isn't a SQL hacker. Subtotals, lists, names, formulas; all of these things can be set up to update automatically if you spend enough time with the spreadsheet.
What spreadsheets should not be used for is to update, store, or track, relational data. If the data in question is not relational, then moving to a database is the completely wrong idea. Then you have opposite problem, where you're using a database like a spreadsheet (which I've also seen far to often). In that case you're trading up in complexity and down in functionality since you're not using the new functionality that databases are providing you to any real extent.
In the case of reporting, however, Excel walks circles around any database application out there. There's a reason that a lot of the top packages provide ways to export data to a spreadsheet. What people do is use the database to structure the right data in the right way (the right use for a database) and then use Excel to manipulate that data into a fancy report that does more than just simply list things (the right way to use Excel).
The problem with conference calls and meetings is mainly that the people calling them typically don't understand how to hold a productive one (and therefore may call them unnecessarily, leading to overuse). There are an incredibly large number of ways to hold unproductive calls and meetings, but the window within which one can hold a productive call or meeting is very small.
As a traveling consultant, I spend a lot of time on calls, and I can tell you that there are a lot of calls that just distract me and accomplish nothing. However, there are also a large number of calls that are the only way to resolve issues involving multiple decision makers. Without those calls, I would also accomplish nothing.
I've seen a week's worth of e-mail debate get resolved in a five-minute conference call with the right people involved and the right chairperson. I think what we really need is just for more people to understand what meetings should and should not be used for, and how you can actually make a meeting useful.
Slashdot Mirror
It's the latter. We haven't forgotten that the iPhone trademark was in use in the US when the iPhone was released, have we? Apple released the product anyway with limited attempt at discussion with the trademark holder, Cisco, who subsequently sued (then settled). See Linksys iPhone.
So any ecommerce system with any number of clicks to purchase has now infringed on 1-click purchasing. After all, all they did is leave out a step that the consumer has to perform (an extra click). Everyone is liable!
Normally that would be true, but if a law is being used to abuse the legal system, then it becomes the problem of the judge. Corporate warfare is not supposed to be conducted in public courts.
I can't see how this is even remotely relevant to the topic at hand. All it sounds like is you have a bone to pick. The fact that Google references other peoples' content - which, as a search engine, is by definition what they're supposed to be doing - does not mean that their service is not value-added, and that they are not entitled to withhold the results of their algorithms from other people wanting to programatically utilize those results for their own purposes. If search were easy, and not resource intensive, there would be more search engine competitors and people wouldn't keep coming back to Google. I see no reason they shouldn't be allowed to protect those results from people violating their completely reasonable terms of use (the darn thing is free already, what more do you want?), and you haven't provided one.
What, exactly, is your reason? Google custom search engines are a perfectly viable option for most use cases, but apparently you'd like to pass off their search results are your own, or you'd like to create an ad-free version of Google? I have no idea, because, again, you haven't actually given a reason why you should be allowed to do something that, in general, I don't think should be allowed. Why should a competitor be allowed to scrape Google's search results?
You like straw men, apparently. Anyone who doesn't like Google hitting their servers can easily disable indexing entirely, or rate limit the indexing process. That is, Google actually respects robots.txt files, which is more than I can say for a huge number of other crawlers out there on the Internet. Before you go complaining about something that can actually be controlled by a halfway competent sysadmin, maybe you should worry more about the bots that don't actually play by the rules, and have no intention of doing so? They're far more of a problem.
I know you're just throwing numbers out there, but the way you arrived at your figure is flawed. You claim that Linux use on the desktop is 1%; okay, fine, I can live with that. You then go on to show that only a fraction of those Linux users are interested in games, and that fraction of the total computer population is the market size.
Your assertion that this is then 0.1% of sales presumes that 100% of the non-Linux market is interested in games, which is clearly not the case. That is, in order to make the numbers comparable, we have to make the same comparison with other platforms that you did with Linux:
1. PC use for the desktop is at around 92%.
2. 50% of that is installed base in corporate systems (market share is common derived from units sold, not 'platform preference by person').
3. 25% are not interested in games.
4. 15% of what is left will pirate any game that comes out.
So, again, maybe 10% of that is actually a viable market. Sure, 9.2% is > 0.1%, but that presumes that any of these ballpark figures are meaningful. What if the average Linux user is actually more likely to be a gamer than the average PC user? That is, there might exist a correlation between being a gamer (or at least being the kind that buys blockbuster titles) and platform preference. What if the average linux user is more likely to pay (when they aren't open source zealots) than the average PC user? All of these ideas need to be factored in to any real calculation of market size.
2008: Nada
2009: Google Ion
2010: Motorola Droid and HTC Evo 4G
2011: Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1
2012: ?
I think you misunderstand the point of App Engine. Varnish and HA-Proxy are things that are installed on servers to improve their performance. The idea behind using GAE is to remove yourself from needing applications of that variety at all. Using GAE, you don't have to worry about the server hardware, the operating system, the load balancer, caching, or any other system details; you just run a program. If fine tuning system architecture is your idea of fun, or is critical for your particular application, then by all means stay away from GAE.
If, however, thinking about these system architecture concerns makes your head hurt, as it does mine, and you just want to get your application running, then use GAE. GAE abstracts scalability; that is the point of the platform. You're paying Google to use their know-how to make your simple Python / Java / Go program run and work for request volumes in the 1 per minute range to the 100 per second range. To me, that is what makes GAE amazing and worthwhile.
I am a researcher, and I don't have the time or energy to spend on managing servers or configuring, updating, and ensuring reliability of operating systems. I want a PaaS architecture that removes me from the hardware and operating system levels. Those pieces of the puzzle are not relevant to me, and dealing with them just saps time and energy from what I actually want to focus on. What I want is somewhere where I can hand off the code that is relevant to my application and know that the program, and the servers it reside on, will continue to operate for any load level twenty four hours a day. For my purposes, it's perfect. I am hard pressed to imagine that any but the largest players derive their competitive advantage from their server infrastructure, so, to me, not having to worry about it just frees up limited resources to focus on what's important.
It seems clear you haven't tried App Engine. You mention Azure's integration with Eclipse as something which competitors have that Google doesn't, except that the Google Eclipse plugin has provided the same (and dare I say better) integration with the Eclipse environment since App Engine launched, which was well before Azure. You then go on to allude to "services" that Amazon provides, which if you're referring to EC2 is a bit like comparing Gmail to exim4 with mutt, and if you're referring to the other AWS, is just plain wrong. There is no "traditional platform" with EC2; there's merely what you build, or what you tie into with web calls. In the former case, it's worth noting that the reason many people turn to App Engine, or Azure, is that they don't want to manage their own system images; they just want to run a program. In the latter case, you can use any of the AWS services that have web protocols with App Engine just fine, and many people do.
If you want to make a more reasonable comparison, it's App Engine versus Azure versus Amazon Elastic Beanstalk. Azure supports .Net and PHP, AEB supports Java, and App Engine supports Python, Java (and any JVM compatible language), and Go. App Engine clearly has more language support. While I'm not aware of the speed with which Azure scales, GAE's scaling speed is far faster than Amazon. AEB uses the same instance startup procedure as Amazon EC2, which in the FAQ lists that an instance will be available "within ten minutes". GAE creates new instances on the fly and startup time is measured in milliseconds for fine tuned or simple applications and seconds otherwise. GAE also provides command line tools for all three of its language environments, so you are not tied to any development environment.
I'm really perplexed by this "huge amount of stuff" that other people offer. The only thing I can think of is the ability to dynamically tailor the system your program runs on, but if that's what you want, you're shopping for EC2 and other virtualization solutions like Rack Space, not Azure/AEB/GAE. If you're looking for platform-as-a-service because you understand the tradeoffs that you're entering into, those three are the main players in town. Of those three, GAE wins hands down in my opinion. Not only does it support more languages and programming styles (frontend / backend code can be separated and used for different types of instances) than either Azure or AEB, the value added services make programming many types of applications simpler (and they can all be avoided if lockin is feared). Azure requires you to program in Windows with their tools, and who wants to be required to do that? AEB has all the slowness of EC2 without the configurability, so it seems you'd be better off with either Azure or GAE no matter what.
Take a tiny amount of time to understand what you're criticizing next time.
Your laptop, tablet, phone, and more all already have Wifi. So do your SO's (if applicable) and children's (if applicable) devices. Get one portable 3G device, either a portable modem or your phone, and use tethering. Stop paying the phone company by device and only pay them by plan.
If I had to pay by device for Internet access at my house I'd be screwed . . .
Not quite. This move is all about options and preventing the dreaded 'lockin'.
Developers ask: If I bet my development on a single PaaS provider, won't I be tied to them indefinitely?
VMware says: If you use our open source stack that can be hosted by us, or by you, you won't be tied to a particular framework or hosting provider. We'll happily host you if our service fits your needs but, if your needs outgrow us or we fail to meet your quality expectations, you can always run the exact same stack out of your own datacenter or someone else's.
What remains to be seen is how good the performance is and how easy it is to use the platform.
What everyone seems to be forgetting is that this is Google's data. What I mean by that is that the data does not even remotely imply that you do not need technical expertise to be a good manager. All of the managers at Google had good technical expertise, or they wouldn't have gotten there (because, remember, Google valued technical expertise in their managers). There are no pointy-haired bosses at Google.
What the data is really saying is that after you have passed a threshold level of technical competence, how you manage becomes more important than how good you are at coding. In other words, if you're technically competent enough to apprehend what's going on and make informed decisions, it matters more what decisions you make and how you arrive at those decisions, not that you're the best coder in the room.
How is that surprising? As soon as you start hiring hundreds of pointy-haired bosses, then the data will rank technical competence as the first priority. The data is only a reflection of existing conditions. People are saying, "technical competence is good enough, but here's what isn't". Don't take this as a sign that technical competence is not important.
Chinese characters *are* dispensable (whether or not they. The accuracy of Pinyin, and the meaning it conveys, is the exact same meaning conveyed when speaking Chinese. To suggest that this is insufficient is to suggest that Chinese is a written only language or that every Chinese conversation is fraught with problems.
More seriously, I can see that this might appeal to people who travel a lot, but for everyone else ?
You're probably right, but since I am one of those individuals with a 100% travel job, the first time I heard of this service I said "finally!". While I usually make it home on weekends, I can often be gone for two or three weeks at a time. In the best of situations I can get my snail mail once a week, but often it's much worse than that. With this service, I can get all of my snail mail when it arrives like a normal person.
The only thing keeping me from signing up is that, because of my situation, I very intentionally avoid having anything important snail mailed to me. Hence, I'm not sure that $20/month to see my junk mail faster is worthwhile. I think I've phased snail mail out of my life too much to justify the cost, but the service is exactly something I'd want.
From a more digital age perspective though, I also just thought the idea of having digital copies of all of my mail and trashing the originals was really cool (i.e. without my personal effort involved). Anything that's not sentimental I have no desire to have an original of anymore; filing cabinets are for people born before I was. This takes out the effort but still allows me to maintain my perfect paperless office.
I did take notice of the fact that you said "may", but since it was in contrast to what you said in the rest of your post, which implied that since his time was "free" he'd obviously want to do it, I ignored the use of may.
I understand that there are a large variety of variables that go into calculating opportunity cost, and it is never a fixed value because the variables are never fixed. It does, however, have an average, general value for a specific individual. I used the word "random" to describe night on purpose because I wanted it to be general case; obviously, special circumstances might make you take up the offer for any odd number of reasons in a specific instance, but I think we can both agree that in the general case you wouldn't take up the offer. That was my point.
I do agree that fixed percentages are not a valid opportunity cost calculation by any stretch. I think it's a bit like splitting hairs, however, since it's more about the idea than about the semantics. All the gggp really meant (IMHO) is that, relative to his income or relative to a company's expenditures, chasing down that tiny amount of money was unlikely to be considered of interest.
Certainly, phrasing it in terms of opportunity cost might have made a more compelling argument, but I still think that what the gggp meant had more merit than your post saying that he should simply "use the time [he] wouldn't otherwise be getting paid to get the $100 back" would indicate. Such a statement was summarily dismissive
I ran through the argument you're sick of (opportunity cost of time) in an earlier comment, and I'm thinking you might be sick of it because you don't get it. It's not a myth, but a fact, that there is not a span of time that you could not allocate to revenue producing activities if you chose. You may not literally spend $50 to watch a 1 hour TV show, but during that one hour you truly could have done something revenue producing. There is no true concept such as "spare time". Spare time, in your quoted fashion, merely refers to the time that you have allotted to be free. Most people do this by default by just saying that any hour not at the office is spare time, but did you know there are people in this world that work two jobs (or three, or four)? Some of them need to, and some do it just to save up for something special, but the point is that you could be one of these people as well; you simply choose not to be.
Why? Because you value your free time. You wouldn't trade it for an amount below a certain threshold value; we call that threshold value your opportunity cost of time. I bet nickels to pennies that if someone offered you a "work anytime you want for $10,000/hour" job that you'd watch a hell of a lot less TV, because you simply don't value your free time that highly. My only point, however, is that there is a precise, estimateable value that you value your free time at. If a particular activity, like persuing a refund, does not exceed that threshold value then you're not going to give up your free time for it (and, yes, I understand that there are other factors like personal satisfaction, principles, enjoyment, and other things involved, but the fact of the matter is that those can be quantified to some extent as well; for example, how many people are willing to abandon their principles for a large enough wad of cash? How small can that wad of cash be for them to abandon their principles? Bingo, you have your dollar value for that person's principles.)
In your post you make fun of workaholics who don't take any time out for personal activities, but that's exactly what opportunity cost of time is about. The major difference between a workaholic and a "normal" person is that a workaholic does not value their free time very highly so they can't see themselves allocating their opportunity cost of time to that free time. Most people, on the other hand, despite understanding that they could be doing something else, choose to allow themselves free time because it's worth it to them.
Maybe the gp prefers posting on Slashdot to working for several hours on a task that will net him $100; I know I would. $100 isn't all that much, and the frustration isn't worth it. Instead, I can spend time doing things I enjoy and wind down from the day before I have to go to work again. Hence, I am one of those people who values their free time highly. You'd have to pay me a lot of money to get me to give it up. Maybe you just don't value your "spare time" all that highly.
You've never heard of the opportunity cost of time, have you? I suspect that this is exactly what the gp was referring to, not to his professional salary. Maybe you can't value your free (as in beer) time at your professional rate of $35/hour, but look at it this way: if you were offered the opportunity to work at Starbucks for $10/hour for three hours on a random night, would you? Most of us making a good salary would say no. And yet, according to your argument, since my time is "free" then anything >$0 for that hour should be worth it, no? There is a set value below which you'd be unwilling to work, even in your "free" time. That threshold value is, essentially, your opportunity cost of time. Any hour of your free time could easily be devoted to doing something that produces money, but you value your relaxation and you pay for it in terms of opportunity cost.
I understand that if we take the parent's assumption of $100 over three hours it works out to $33.33/hour, but the point remains. If that $100 isn't worth three/five hours of my free time, just as working at Starbucks for any amount of time during my free time isn't, then I'm simply not going to bother. I don't know what your opportunity cost of time is but, in general, I agree with the gp. Spending three to five hours on the phone for a measly $100 would make me want to gouge my eyes out. I value my time more highly than that. If you don't, then you can tie up the phone lines.
If we can get people to agree to ban dihydrogen monoxide why is anyone even remotely surprised when, given something that the public understands even less than chemistry, the mechanisms of the Internet, a skewed poll suggests that they don't want it. A poll on a subject like this has to be skewed because absolutely everything the person being polled knows about the subject comes from the poll itself. It's definitely non-trivial to write a completely unbiased summary and certainly given the limited amount of space that you get for a poll blurb.
If you have multiple people who all have the subfolder "wedgie", can your folder mechanism allow you to visually represent the contents of all the "wedgie" folders?
Let's just admit that there are advantages to both paradigms.
The "Alt Tab" between OSs is easily accomplished with a simple recipe: one Linux box, one PC box, and one KVM switch. I mean, come on, what Geek doesn't have a spare PC lying around somewhere that they can turn into a "MS shit" box?
While I agree with a lot of the separation of function items that people brought to light, I think that the reason, besides the fact that Microsoft did it first, is because a calendar application that's not interfaced in a convenient manner to a communications mechanism is not nearly so useful as one that is. Outlook Calendar wouldn't be used at all if it weren't true that I could send out a meeting invite to a hundred people, whose calendars I just checked, and receive responses. Unless you're going to integrate an e-mail backbone to a calendaring application, which puts you in the same problem in reverse, having tight integration of a calendaring application with its natural mate, a communications application for coordination, is actually a pretty reasonable approach. Offline calendars are always going to suffer from this problem, because every person you want to coordinate with will need specialized software and will need to be using your calendaring application (yes, I understand that is the case for basically every calendar+mail out there). To me, the easiest way to get away from the whole mess is to move to online calendar systems. Hyperlinks are already fully integrated into standard e-mail functionality, so online calendar systems have an existing usable integration mechanism, no proprietary anything required. And online calendars make sense for a whole slew of other reasons as well. When's Google's calendaring application going to be done anyway?
I actually really like the point that you brought up. People are very quick to talk about 'security through obscurity' and how Linux and OS X are only secure because no one cares to try writing viruses for them. But, come on, there's absolutely nothing obscure about writing a virus for OS X.
Which has higher notorierty: writing yet another virus for Windows and being one of hundreds of thousands, or writing the first devastating virus for OS X, or even Linux.
All we're really arguing then is whether any virus writers care more about notoriety than zombie machines, and I think there are certainly a number out there who do.
What that says to me is that these operating systems are more secure (not secure, just more secure) because they've remained relatively unpenetrated despite efforts to compromise them.
These operating systems' approach to security just makes it much more difficult to take advantage of them.
Fact is that most people don't care about the locking mechanism of their car, or it's cylinder diameter or stroke; they didn't by their DVD player because of its tech spec; they don't know the soil type in their garden or the geology unerlying their house . . . If people can plug in their latset gizmo and have it work 7 times out of 10 then they are happy enough.
I don't understand this logic at all. Your comparison is not useful in the least. You're comparing knowing how the locking mechanism on my car works to knowing how a computer works. There's a really, really, really big difference there. People may be only mildly annoyed when gizmos fail 3 times out of 10, but anyone with half a brain returns a car that only starts 7 out of 10 times. The expectations around the technology are fundamentally different, and in my opinion incorrectly so.
I do not accept that technology has to be more unstable than a car. We are all aware that it's possible to write a program without bugs, it's just that we've been trained by past experience not to expect it. But if you're going to make these comparisons between computers and gardening or cars or even standalone player technology, it's not going to look good for the computer.
Most people don't care how the car, garden, or DVD player works because they all approach 100% uptime and 100% correct functionality. They don't have to care how they work because they just work, correctly, nearly all the time. If they don't, then they return them.
When your DVD player doesn't play a DVD, you don't go 'oh well, maybe it will next time.' You return it and get one that's not broken. When your car fails to start three times in a row, you don't hope that it will start the next time. You dig out your warranty and get the thing fixed, and you complain until it's working the way you expect it to.
I'd love to see someone buy a PC with these same expecations. I don't think it's that impossible, but we're just not there. Because we're not, it's more important for consumers to raise their awareness so that they can demand reliability and security. Too many people are content to accept what they've always lived with and not examine the way things could be.
This has been tax law for ages. If you live in one state and work in another, whether driving over the state line to work in an office, or telecommuting in, you owe taxes in both states.
I'm not a tax expert, but I do know how my own taxes work and I'm pretty sure what you just said is not right. As a consultant, I work in many different states during the year, and my firm keeps track of how many of my billable hours are in each state. At the end of the year, I file taxes by state based on the time I was billable in each state. I do not pay taxes on that income twice. Considering we're one of the largest tax firms in the world, I tend to think we're probably doing it right.
This may or may not be relevant to a telecommuting discussion, but you're claiming the tax laws, which seem ambiguous regarding telecommuting, are the same for people physically traveling and that has not been my experience.
I agree with you for the most part: people have a tendency to overuse Excel and they sometimes created bloated spreadsheets that would have been better utilized as databases. But I think we should be careful to criticize spreadsheets for the right reasons. Making spreadsheets that are painless to update is entirely possible, and doesn't require someone to be a wizard. In addition, using spreadsheets for financial forecasting and planning is intelligent.
Complicated reporting scenarios is one of the things that Excel handles best, because structuring database reports that involve any form of calculation or subtotals can be a real nightmare, especially for someone who isn't a SQL hacker. Subtotals, lists, names, formulas; all of these things can be set up to update automatically if you spend enough time with the spreadsheet.
What spreadsheets should not be used for is to update, store, or track, relational data. If the data in question is not relational, then moving to a database is the completely wrong idea. Then you have opposite problem, where you're using a database like a spreadsheet (which I've also seen far to often). In that case you're trading up in complexity and down in functionality since you're not using the new functionality that databases are providing you to any real extent.
In the case of reporting, however, Excel walks circles around any database application out there. There's a reason that a lot of the top packages provide ways to export data to a spreadsheet. What people do is use the database to structure the right data in the right way (the right use for a database) and then use Excel to manipulate that data into a fancy report that does more than just simply list things (the right way to use Excel).
The problem with conference calls and meetings is mainly that the people calling them typically don't understand how to hold a productive one (and therefore may call them unnecessarily, leading to overuse). There are an incredibly large number of ways to hold unproductive calls and meetings, but the window within which one can hold a productive call or meeting is very small.
As a traveling consultant, I spend a lot of time on calls, and I can tell you that there are a lot of calls that just distract me and accomplish nothing. However, there are also a large number of calls that are the only way to resolve issues involving multiple decision makers. Without those calls, I would also accomplish nothing.
I've seen a week's worth of e-mail debate get resolved in a five-minute conference call with the right people involved and the right chairperson. I think what we really need is just for more people to understand what meetings should and should not be used for, and how you can actually make a meeting useful.