So you're willing to use Bing a) for a fraction of your internet searches, b) for something that you've already found, and prefer to find, using Google, c) only because they are dumping money on you to do so. Your click-through feeds them some fraction of a penny, while they are paying 5% or more of whatever you just purchased for the privilege of helping you find it. Assuming you bought something even modestly substantial, say $100, they're paying out 100:1 of their revenues BEFORE you consider all the resources they poured into making this search engine, making it beautiful, advertising on TV, etc. etc. etc.
I'm not saying they can't turn a profit some day, but on paper, Bing looks like a disaster, and your behavior only corroborates that.
Well, to be honest I don't know who's pocket the cashback comes from (or if it is split somehow). Because different stores offer different payback percentages, I was assuming they were swallowing a big chunk of it. If Bing was swallowing all of it then I'd expect the reward to be the same for all of the stores involved. But again, I don't know.
Also, in my post I may have implied that I'd google the products first, then use Bing to buy. That is incorrect. When I said "search for things," I meant random daily queries (non purchasing); e.g. "how do you do so and so on Ubuntu" For product searches I tend to use Bing. So from me, Google doesn't make much (if anything) because I tend to not click Google ads the type of queries I use Google for. Bing on the other hand gets multiple clicks from me, because I'm actually interested in buying the advertised products.
No way is Apple going to be able to take on Google in search. Bing failed and Microsoft has a lot more power than Apple. People will just end up using the google website instead.
Or, alternatively, they'll start saying it's a feature and that they don't need a good search engine anyway.
Did Bing really fail? I still use google to search for things; but when I'm ready to buy I use Bing for the cash back rewards. Since click-throughs are how search engine companies make money, I'd think that they will bring in a lot of cash, relative to their market share.
The same thing happened here in the UK with Sky & Virgin.
That was right before a big sports event or something too.
Virgin started their own channel after much complaining.
All Sky1 shows usually was re-re-re-runs of Stargate anyway.
Life goes on and they all throw out more reality tv.
....Cablevision definitely doesn't have the resources to make their own version of ABC...
So, a big company could never possibly be acquired by a smaller one? And a startup with just *some* money will never be able to compete against a company with more capital.
You may wish to rethink that particular thought.
cheers,
I wasn't trying to imply that a smaller company cannot acquire a larger one. And perhaps I shouldn't have said that Cablevision doesn't have the resources to make their own version of ABC, but rather that its probably not worth the resources to do so. The costs would be enormous, and there's always the big risk that your content flops. It would be a lot cheaper to just negotiate a better deal with ABC.
The same thing happened here in the UK with Sky & Virgin.
That was right before a big sports event or something too.
Virgin started their own channel after much complaining.
All Sky1 shows usually was re-re-re-runs of Stargate anyway.
Life goes on and they all throw out more reality tv.
I don't personally watch much of ABC, but ABC is a BIG station in the US... as in one of the original Big 3. Cablevision definitely doesn't have the resources to make their own version of ABC.
If anyone has a DGL-4500 router, and experiences constant lockups with it (forced to power cycle the unit); your not alone. Apparently, there is a bug with DNS forwarding that started with firmware rev 1.21. It's been since July 2009, and the best you can hope for is an update still in beta. We are talking about their newest high-end gaming router here with extra features that make a nice small office router too.
As it stands, users of this model are furious. Some are threatening a class-action lawsuit against them. By all means, please read through the D-Link forum before you think about buying one of their products.
http://forums.dlink.com/index.php?board=144.0
Odd, I have this model... and with v1.15 (2008/10/29) the admin page says I have the latest version of the firmware. I wonder if they stopped pushing anything that came later.
I live in NYC under a 114xx zip code and had no problems buying one in person at an ATT store. I bought it the weekend after Thanksgiving so it was about a month ago. Maybe they changed it since then.
Sounds like you're in Queens or the Bronx. Maybe the network coverage in insufficient in Manhattan only (maybe over saturated? though I'm not sure how cell towers work)
Dunno. While no platform is 100% secure, design does count for a lot. There are a lot of "proof of concept" hacks out there for the Mac, but very, very, very few "in the wild" 'sploits floating around, especially self-replicating ones like viruses and worms. The installed base of Internet-going Macs is a few dozen million at the least, and mostly personal computers with personal info and used to buy stuff online - prime targets for the big-shop black hats. I doubt very much it's not worth their while... I just think they can't go after a system with even a moderate level of security.
I don't think this says something about Apple (see the part above about "proof of concept" hacks), I think this says a ton about Microsoft.
I really don't buy "ecosystem" arguments - why is IIS and MSSQL pwnd on a regular basis by automated attacks, but Apache and MySQL only once in a blue moon (and Oracle almost never)?
Not trying to troll here; but have there been any major IIS or SQL Server issues in the past 5 or 7 years? I thought the IIS issues were resolved years ago.
Windows on ARM would be as pointless as every other port Microsoft has tried and eventually killed off. And for the same reason, lack of applications.
Microsoft itself has never bothered porting any of their consumer apps such as Office. Remember DEC having to use FX!32 to get Office running via emulation at a fraction of native speed... leading customers to fail to see the advantage of the Alpha. Now we are to expect the hundreds of large and small shops making the Windows apps people associate with "Windows" to all port to a platform where there are no suitable developer workstations available and Windows development tools lack much in the way of cross compiler support.
Compare to Linux on ARM where pretty much the entire Debian/Ubuntu collection is up and running and Adobe has ported the one key closed piece, Flash Player.
With.NET getting more popular, maybe now (or at least the near future) this will be less of an issue?
I bought a Sony PRS-500 a couple of years back. The display is kind of small, which sucks because I tend to use it to read a lot of technical books which tend to be a lot bigger (e.g.the Apress Programming books) than the novels I think the device was meant to be used on.
My work around right now is to use CutePDF to crop the books as much as I can... then I use Rasterfarian to split all of the pages in half (the program essentially takes a screenshot of each page) and convert to the reader's format.
This process is a little annoying, and makes the reading experience sub-optimal (but still an OK experience). Because page turning is a little slow, with this technique it gets a little tedious having to turn 2x the pages.
The DX look like it can streamline the entire experience for me... but since I can't go to the store and try one out I'm little hesitant (especially since I already have a reader). Does anyone with a DX use the device to read larger PDF books? How is the experience?
I don't qualify my advertising with *any* form of educational requirement. I only list the skills required. Of all the programmers we now have at our small-but-growing-fast company, none of them have even a BA.
PS: We're flexible enough with our hours that one of our programmers is going to school to complete a degree in Mathematics.
I'm not asking for Masters degrees, but I'm getting them. And they sure aren't helping them much, at least as far as I'm concerned.
I have a BS and MS in Comp Sci... to be honest, I didn't learn much about programming in either undergrad or grad school (especially grad school, though in grad school... you'd think students would learn how to program to help them complete some of the assignments).
In undergrad, along the way you learn basic programming constructs, but you don't really learn the libraries (so in your example, a recent grad might not know about string.replace(), and database courses are often not mandatory, so its very possible that a student never touches SQL along the way.
Of course, Computer Science != Programming, so its not that the schools are doing the wrong thing. I certainly think I'm better off for learning about AI, neural networks, operating systems, etc. rather than say learning how to master the java libraries or.net libraries (which I can do on my own much more easily at home and on the job).
IMO though it would be nice if the schools put together some sort of low cost (or free) "real world training" for students, maybe in the summers or something where students get assigned realistic business problems (e.g. add this feature to this existing app, fix these bugs, optimize this query, etc). Traditionally, you'd seek an internship for this. The problem with internships is that a) you may not get one or possibly worse b) you find one, but you're assigned trivial tasks (e.g. copy and paste text from word into an html document, get coffee, etc)
"The problem with a "free market" is that greed trumps all."
At least in context of cable, I think the free market would work fine... if there was a free market. In many (most?) there is only one government sanctioned cable company. There is no competition in many neighborhoods because the government made it that way.
In general, I'm not a big fan of regulations. But because regulations caused (much) of this mess to begin with, I'm all for regulation that prevents ISPs from throttling.
Ok, so C# is a pretty good language. (Despite its severe limitations. Seriously, thank god for C# if you've had to work with VB at all. Ugh!) Of course most of it they stole from Java, with an attempt to add refinements here and there. (Possible nefarious motives aside...)
So from what language did this one come from? Erlang?
Or did Microsoft actually create something relatively unique this time?
When's the last time a truly unique language was created? 1950's?
The whole idea of "so and so ripped off x from y" is retarded. Humanity moves on because we take ideas and improve on them. We don't start off from scratch every time we want to try something new.
I've been using Foxit Reader for some time on my aging laptop because of performance issues with Adobe Reader 9, and it works great. http://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf/reader/
I didn't switch for the performance reasons, I switched because adobe insists on updating their pdf viewer like every other day.
I don't mind paying taxes, but I wish the US did something like VAT in Europe.
Basically, the prices you see advertised already include the tax in them. No trying to figure out 8% of some number, no more $2.99 item being just a hair over $3 and filling your pockets with loose change.
I disagree with you there... I want to be reminded of how much the govt is siphoning out of my pockets.
I believe that those companies want GM and Chrysler to get saved because not saving them would put suppliers out of business. Honda, Toyota, etc. use many of the same suppliers as GM. Without those suppliers, it will be very costly for them to restore operations in the US.
Well that explains why the Japanese finance minister described the auto-bailout as absolute evil./sarcasm
Subsidy is another word for protectionisim and it is generally accepted by the world's economists that protectionisim exacerbated and prolonged the great depression, not to mention many of those economists are pointing at Greenspan and saying "I told you so". Sure the credit freeze requires radical action to avert catastophic bank runs and those home owners affected by the subsequent crash in asset values deserve some relief, but dinosaurs went extinct because they could not adapt fast enough to their new environment.
Hey, I'm a Libertarian, so I'm in no way for the bailout. While it saddens me that the great American car is gone.. if the market doesn't want American cars then they don't want American cars and they should go out of business just like everyone else.
You don't create jobs by adding unfair competition to struggling companies(how can companies compete with someone getting guaranteed money with no need to turn a profit?)
Sounds like the best argument I've heard for letting GM and Chrysler fail. Hardly seems fair to Ford, Honda, VW, etc that their competitors are being rewarded for failure.
I believe that those companies want GM and Chrysler to get saved because not saving them would put suppliers out of business. Honda, Toyota, etc. use many of the same suppliers as GM. Without those suppliers, it will be very costly for them to restore operations in the US.
They didn't want to make it easier to use, they wanted to make it patentable ("The Ribbon Interface"). Now they get to license the Office Look & Feel.
Are you sure that was the intent? They released an MFC Ribbon component (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc872782.aspx) so that any developer can implement a similar interface on their apps. A.NET version is expected soon I believe.
Slashdot Mirror
So you're willing to use Bing a) for a fraction of your internet searches, b) for something that you've already found, and prefer to find, using Google, c) only because they are dumping money on you to do so. Your click-through feeds them some fraction of a penny, while they are paying 5% or more of whatever you just purchased for the privilege of helping you find it. Assuming you bought something even modestly substantial, say $100, they're paying out 100:1 of their revenues BEFORE you consider all the resources they poured into making this search engine, making it beautiful, advertising on TV, etc. etc. etc.
I'm not saying they can't turn a profit some day, but on paper, Bing looks like a disaster, and your behavior only corroborates that.
Well, to be honest I don't know who's pocket the cashback comes from (or if it is split somehow). Because different stores offer different payback percentages, I was assuming they were swallowing a big chunk of it. If Bing was swallowing all of it then I'd expect the reward to be the same for all of the stores involved. But again, I don't know.
Also, in my post I may have implied that I'd google the products first, then use Bing to buy. That is incorrect. When I said "search for things," I meant random daily queries (non purchasing); e.g. "how do you do so and so on Ubuntu" For product searches I tend to use Bing. So from me, Google doesn't make much (if anything) because I tend to not click Google ads the type of queries I use Google for. Bing on the other hand gets multiple clicks from me, because I'm actually interested in buying the advertised products.
No way is Apple going to be able to take on Google in search. Bing failed and Microsoft has a lot more power than Apple. People will just end up using the google website instead. Or, alternatively, they'll start saying it's a feature and that they don't need a good search engine anyway.
Did Bing really fail? I still use google to search for things; but when I'm ready to buy I use Bing for the cash back rewards. Since click-throughs are how search engine companies make money, I'd think that they will bring in a lot of cash, relative to their market share.
The same thing happened here in the UK with Sky & Virgin. That was right before a big sports event or something too. Virgin started their own channel after much complaining. All Sky1 shows usually was re-re-re-runs of Stargate anyway.
Life goes on and they all throw out more reality tv.
....Cablevision definitely doesn't have the resources to make their own version of ABC...
So, a big company could never possibly be acquired by a smaller one? And a startup with just *some* money will never be able to compete against a company with more capital.
You may wish to rethink that particular thought.
cheers,
I wasn't trying to imply that a smaller company cannot acquire a larger one. And perhaps I shouldn't have said that Cablevision doesn't have the resources to make their own version of ABC, but rather that its probably not worth the resources to do so. The costs would be enormous, and there's always the big risk that your content flops. It would be a lot cheaper to just negotiate a better deal with ABC.
The same thing happened here in the UK with Sky & Virgin. That was right before a big sports event or something too. Virgin started their own channel after much complaining. All Sky1 shows usually was re-re-re-runs of Stargate anyway.
Life goes on and they all throw out more reality tv.
I don't personally watch much of ABC, but ABC is a BIG station in the US... as in one of the original Big 3. Cablevision definitely doesn't have the resources to make their own version of ABC.
You agree w/ the Obama-rant? So this is wrong but the wire taps from the Bush era are okay?
I don't see why being anti-Obama means that you are pro-Bush.
If anyone has a DGL-4500 router, and experiences constant lockups with it (forced to power cycle the unit); your not alone. Apparently, there is a bug with DNS forwarding that started with firmware rev 1.21. It's been since July 2009, and the best you can hope for is an update still in beta. We are talking about their newest high-end gaming router here with extra features that make a nice small office router too.
As it stands, users of this model are furious. Some are threatening a class-action lawsuit against them. By all means, please read through the D-Link forum before you think about buying one of their products. http://forums.dlink.com/index.php?board=144.0
Odd, I have this model... and with v1.15 (2008/10/29) the admin page says I have the latest version of the firmware. I wonder if they stopped pushing anything that came later.
I live in NYC under a 114xx zip code and had no problems buying one in person at an ATT store. I bought it the weekend after Thanksgiving so it was about a month ago. Maybe they changed it since then.
Sounds like you're in Queens or the Bronx. Maybe the network coverage in insufficient in Manhattan only (maybe over saturated? though I'm not sure how cell towers work)
They advertise it as
"X down/Y Up"
not
"X down/Y up for part of the time, X1/Y1 the rest of the time".
Actually its up up down down left right left right b a start
Central Point of Failure.
Attention terrorists: we have a new target to aim for.
Maybe I'm missing something, but if this new thing failed wouldn't the system just degrade to what it currently is today?
I find it interesting that Obama has received the peace prize, but not Ghandi. What a joke.
servers don't roam the net -- the net roams them (google, etc.)
Wait you forgot the "Soviet" part.
Dunno. While no platform is 100% secure, design does count for a lot. There are a lot of "proof of concept" hacks out there for the Mac, but very, very, very few "in the wild" 'sploits floating around, especially self-replicating ones like viruses and worms. The installed base of Internet-going Macs is a few dozen million at the least, and mostly personal computers with personal info and used to buy stuff online - prime targets for the big-shop black hats. I doubt very much it's not worth their while... I just think they can't go after a system with even a moderate level of security.
I don't think this says something about Apple (see the part above about "proof of concept" hacks), I think this says a ton about Microsoft.
I really don't buy "ecosystem" arguments - why is IIS and MSSQL pwnd on a regular basis by automated attacks, but Apache and MySQL only once in a blue moon (and Oracle almost never)?
Not trying to troll here; but have there been any major IIS or SQL Server issues in the past 5 or 7 years? I thought the IIS issues were resolved years ago.
Windows on ARM would be as pointless as every other port Microsoft has tried and eventually killed off. And for the same reason, lack of applications.
Microsoft itself has never bothered porting any of their consumer apps such as Office. Remember DEC having to use FX!32 to get Office running via emulation at a fraction of native speed... leading customers to fail to see the advantage of the Alpha. Now we are to expect the hundreds of large and small shops making the Windows apps people associate with "Windows" to all port to a platform where there are no suitable developer workstations available and Windows development tools lack much in the way of cross compiler support.
Compare to Linux on ARM where pretty much the entire Debian/Ubuntu collection is up and running and Adobe has ported the one key closed piece, Flash Player.
With .NET getting more popular, maybe now (or at least the near future) this will be less of an issue?
I bought a Sony PRS-500 a couple of years back. The display is kind of small, which sucks because I tend to use it to read a lot of technical books which tend to be a lot bigger (e.g.the Apress Programming books) than the novels I think the device was meant to be used on. My work around right now is to use CutePDF to crop the books as much as I can... then I use Rasterfarian to split all of the pages in half (the program essentially takes a screenshot of each page) and convert to the reader's format. This process is a little annoying, and makes the reading experience sub-optimal (but still an OK experience). Because page turning is a little slow, with this technique it gets a little tedious having to turn 2x the pages. The DX look like it can streamline the entire experience for me... but since I can't go to the store and try one out I'm little hesitant (especially since I already have a reader). Does anyone with a DX use the device to read larger PDF books? How is the experience?
I don't qualify my advertising with *any* form of educational requirement. I only list the skills required. Of all the programmers we now have at our small-but-growing-fast company, none of them have even a BA.
PS: We're flexible enough with our hours that one of our programmers is going to school to complete a degree in Mathematics.
I'm not asking for Masters degrees, but I'm getting them. And they sure aren't helping them much, at least as far as I'm concerned.
I have a BS and MS in Comp Sci... to be honest, I didn't learn much about programming in either undergrad or grad school (especially grad school, though in grad school... you'd think students would learn how to program to help them complete some of the assignments).
.net libraries (which I can do on my own much more easily at home and on the job).
In undergrad, along the way you learn basic programming constructs, but you don't really learn the libraries (so in your example, a recent grad might not know about string.replace(), and database courses are often not mandatory, so its very possible that a student never touches SQL along the way.
Of course, Computer Science != Programming, so its not that the schools are doing the wrong thing. I certainly think I'm better off for learning about AI, neural networks, operating systems, etc. rather than say learning how to master the java libraries or
IMO though it would be nice if the schools put together some sort of low cost (or free) "real world training" for students, maybe in the summers or something where students get assigned realistic business problems (e.g. add this feature to this existing app, fix these bugs, optimize this query, etc). Traditionally, you'd seek an internship for this. The problem with internships is that a) you may not get one or possibly worse b) you find one, but you're assigned trivial tasks (e.g. copy and paste text from word into an html document, get coffee, etc)
"The problem with a "free market" is that greed trumps all."
At least in context of cable, I think the free market would work fine... if there was a free market. In many (most?) there is only one government sanctioned cable company. There is no competition in many neighborhoods because the government made it that way.
In general, I'm not a big fan of regulations. But because regulations caused (much) of this mess to begin with, I'm all for regulation that prevents ISPs from throttling.
Ok, so C# is a pretty good language. (Despite its severe limitations. Seriously, thank god for C# if you've had to work with VB at all. Ugh!) Of course most of it they stole from Java, with an attempt to add refinements here and there. (Possible nefarious motives aside...)
So from what language did this one come from? Erlang?
Or did Microsoft actually create something relatively unique this time?
When's the last time a truly unique language was created? 1950's?
The whole idea of "so and so ripped off x from y" is retarded. Humanity moves on because we take ideas and improve on them. We don't start off from scratch every time we want to try something new.
of fuckin' wussy people.
"HOLY COW! Here comes a plane flying near our wonderful New York City! It looks like it is going to hit a building! We better run for it!"
Come on!
Hey asshole,
It wasn't that long ago when two airplanes actually hit our buildings.
Come On!
I've been using Foxit Reader for some time on my aging laptop because of performance issues with Adobe Reader 9, and it works great.
http://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf/reader/
I didn't switch for the performance reasons, I switched because adobe insists on updating their pdf viewer like every other day.
I don't mind paying taxes, but I wish the US did something like VAT in Europe.
Basically, the prices you see advertised already include the tax in them. No trying to figure out 8% of some number, no more $2.99 item being just a hair over $3 and filling your pockets with loose change.
I disagree with you there... I want to be reminded of how much the govt is siphoning out of my pockets.
Much more friendly than the accursed Microsoft though, still no progress (real) towards Linux on there, makes me wish I bought a PS3 :-/
Microsoft has the XNA API for homebrew games.... and they let you sell games on their network. I'd say that's pretty friendly.
I believe that those companies want GM and Chrysler to get saved because not saving them would put suppliers out of business. Honda, Toyota, etc. use many of the same suppliers as GM. Without those suppliers, it will be very costly for them to restore operations in the US.
Well that explains why the Japanese finance minister described the auto-bailout as absolute evil. /sarcasm
Subsidy is another word for protectionisim and it is generally accepted by the world's economists that protectionisim exacerbated and prolonged the great depression, not to mention many of those economists are pointing at Greenspan and saying "I told you so". Sure the credit freeze requires radical action to avert catastophic bank runs and those home owners affected by the subsequent crash in asset values deserve some relief, but dinosaurs went extinct because they could not adapt fast enough to their new environment.
Hey, I'm a Libertarian, so I'm in no way for the bailout. While it saddens me that the great American car is gone.. if the market doesn't want American cars then they don't want American cars and they should go out of business just like everyone else.
That said, I made my statement based off this article (or one like it): http://money.cnn.com/2008/12/15/news/companies/overseas_automakers/index.htm
"A GM failure would cause production problems, crush already weak demand and potentially open the door to low-cost competitors."
I think they want GM, Ford and Chrysler to fail slowly (i.e. not one instantaneous event).
Good point, but jeez, they've been failing for the last 20 years... how much more of a head start do they need?
You don't create jobs by adding unfair competition to struggling companies(how can companies compete with someone getting guaranteed money with no need to turn a profit?)
Sounds like the best argument I've heard for letting GM and Chrysler fail. Hardly seems fair to Ford, Honda, VW, etc that their competitors are being rewarded for failure.
I believe that those companies want GM and Chrysler to get saved because not saving them would put suppliers out of business. Honda, Toyota, etc. use many of the same suppliers as GM. Without those suppliers, it will be very costly for them to restore operations in the US.
They didn't want to make it easier to use, they wanted to make it patentable ("The Ribbon Interface"). Now they get to license the Office Look & Feel.
Are you sure that was the intent? They released an MFC Ribbon component (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc872782.aspx) so that any developer can implement a similar interface on their apps. A .NET version is expected soon I believe.