This talk of stability in stock price is just whining. It's also a key test for Google, who will now show that they are either sellouts or true idealists.
Adapting to a maturation of the business, and the honeymoon ending, makes them sellouts? Demands change over time, and with Google's honeymoon coming to an end some banks and analysts are making new requests. They're allowed to do that, you know. And Google may eventually decide that it's in their shareholder's interest to comply (for instance if the liquidity of the stock was hurt because the overwhelming bulk of institutional investors don't want to touch it), so they might adapt. Sellouts indeed.
The idea that anyone still believes the "Google do not evil" thing absolutely amazes me. I don't think Google is inherently evil, or any more evil than any other corporation, but at their root they're an advertising company (similar to Doubleclick. Note that Google has added full-colour banner ads to their ad repertoire, and I belive have begun the steps to have animated ads) saturating the web with ads, and using a huge presence in one market (search) to stomp out lots of large and small competitors in others (messaging, email, calendaring, classified listings, video, maps, etc). What a great bastion of goodness.
I really wonder what all of the Google fanatics have been drinking to believe the ridiculous, unfounded motto so deeply.
If they would bother to learn about Google there would be less instability.
Huh? What can someone "learn about Google" that tells them definitively whether or not a P/E of 70 is valid? Markets change and competitors appear and disappear -- Google's dominance is not forever, and could end next week, next year, or in ten years. Never will volatility disappear from the stock.
Exactly! The shareholders bought what they bought. They were under no false pretenses, and Google doesn't have to do a damn thing to change their practices.
Are you kidding? Clearly you have never traded stocks, nor do you own a red penny in stocks. I find it difficult to believe you would ever say something so absurdly naive otherwise.
Firstly, stock analyst work for stockholders -- They aren't some magical group that just likes to analyze stocks for the fun of it. Their purpose is to give an external evaluation of a company's health to help guide stockholders on whether to buy, up their investment, or sell. It's hard to do that when a company is as secretive as Google is.
If the shareholders don't like it, I'd like to see them sell. I seriously doubt that many of them will actually want to take losses in the hundreds of thousands range and higher, just to make a point to Google.
Right, and I was agreeing to your key assertion by pointing out that, at least at the point that I submitted that reply, the highest rated point completely missed the point of the article (similar to how you were correcting yet another incorrect assumption about the article).
Coffee is currently fashionable, but when I think of a stereotypical coffee addict like myslelf, I dont think of a slim trim health nut...
To really appreciate coffee saturation, get to know Canadian culture (particular Vancouver or Southern Ontario). We quaff coffee close to universally, from stressful to calm, and from unhealthy to healthy. Small towns feature half a dozen drive through coffee shops, all hosting endless lineups.
This study says that more than four cups of coffee a day are bad for you if you have a particular gene.
The three Score: 5 posts right now say the same thing, which to paraphrase is "the dose is the poison, and moderation is key". The fact that they say that, and worse the fact that they're all sitting at Score: 5, is ample evidence that they have absolutely no idea what the article is about, nor do any of the moderators who handed out points to them.
If anyone ever tells you to do a lot of anything, run the other way. People have died from everything from eating too much salt to drinking too much carrot juice. Keep your diet balanced and your intakes in moderation, and you'll do far better than chasing around massive doses of things that are "good" for you.
This particular study deals with genetic differences. Differences that mean that what's "a lot" for one person is "moderation" for another.
As with anything related to toxicology, the dose is the poison.
To a point, however that simplifies and misses the point of the article: The researchers are claiming that there are two common variants of the gene responsible for the systems that breaks down coffee, and those with one variant are made healthier by 3 cups of coffee a day, while those with the other variant (CYP1A2*1F) are detrimentally affected by the same.
So it's the dose...and the genes that build the systems that deal with the dose.
It isn't a typo, it's a brain word transposition. I've been touch-typing for two decades now, and I type at over 100 wpm, so I'm not consciously thinking of each word as I type it. Instead it's like I'm giving a speech to the typing center, and it's transcribing it...only sometimes it "hears" the wrong words.
If you can find a good magazine or something for kids that introduces them to programming, DO IT!
Why?
Not only is it questionable if programming is such a remarkable skill for the next generation, more importantly it tends to be something that kids find on their own when the time is right (the whole "when they are ready, the teacher will appear" thing). My elders had nothing to do with me getting into programming, yet here I am. That's the case for most programmers as far as I've heard (I can't say I've heard of any "my daddy taught me C" stories). I highly, highly doubt that getting a kid into Python when they're 3 is going to give them any long term advantage.
Per the "OP", putting aside the obvious defensiveness in the ask slashdot question (why do all parents have to talk about how their first priority is "spending time"? It's a bit humorous given that one of the most important skills for young children is independent play...which basically means "putting them with some toys..or electronics...and leaving them alone to explore and do their thing without you hanging over them), there are a tonne of great enrichment tools available on the PC. My just-turned-3-year-old absolutely loves most of the games on peepandthebigwideworld.com, and her motivation to play the educational games got her brilliantly using a mouse and the interface in absolutely no time at all (she's been doing it for almost a year now). When she's in the mood for it, those games draw her attention more than the countless toys her play room is filled with). We also have some Dora games, she colours on the Fisher Price website, and so on.
My 1 year old son is showing more and more interest in what she's doing, and I'm sure he'll be into it soon enough as well.
And you know what? While she's playing I casually check every now and then, but by and large I'm relaxing reading the paper, or doing some work on my laptop, or listening to some music, and my wife is doing the safe.
We don't have that type of technology. We don't have anything *near* that type of technology (I've understood facial recognition to be accurate at fewer than 10,000 photographs. Anything above that and it just loses it.)
Exactly. Most systems lose any value at all at far below 10,000 faces, though.
Facial recognition is largely in the "snake oil" stage, where salespeople dummy up ridiculous best-case tests against a tiny database, and then declare the technology a success. Put a billion Chinese in a database and things get just a tad more difficult (as an aside - someone made a joke that "they all look alike". While that's an old joke, and the poster admitted it, there is a bit of truth to it -- the genetic diversity in an average Chinese city is vastly smaller than in New York City, for instance. The closer people look, the more difficult of a time the system has. You're going to have HUGE nodal overlaps with the limited precision of something like a camera, and the margin of error through hardware problems, and even people bloating up because they had a liquid breakfast, that it will render the false positive rate tremendous, and the false negative so high to really put the icing on the cake).
Facial recognition is the best place for a free-market economy to do its thing. When someone really makes an effective facial recognition technology that works in the large, the market will beat a path to their door. Thus far it hasn't happened.
Of course it can be done - humans somehow do it, and we do it tremendously well. We somehow manage to pick out faces from huge distances, and to identify people by their posture, walking style, and so on. While we do work with a much smaller set, somehow there is some heuristics that can be extrapolated, but as it is nothing actually demonstrated on the market has done so.
I'm not going to get into politics here, as much as you might like
Uh...okay. That really makes sense in the context of my message...or not.
I'm not going to get into politics here, as much as you might like, but the reason most new cars are "silent" (they're not, they're actually quiteloud from the OUTSIDE) is because the most common type of engine, a 4 cylinder, has a terrible exhaust note.
That's ignorant on so many levels. Nonetheless, why don't you peruse the inventory of the most successful cars at your local car dealer, and tell me which of them has a "soundtrack to get noticed by". Many of the most powerful cars on the road - the ones that will stomp the pissy little testosterone-supplement that the kids drive - are absolutely silent at anything other than full throttle.
Thus these hybrids need more grunt in their exhaust. Who wants a silent car? We want a car with a soundtrack to be noticed by.
If by we you mean 16 year old dateless wonders, then sure. Most of the rest of the world wants as silent of a car as they can find, which is why the vast majority of new cars are completely silent. Of course perception does matter, and the reality is that many of the people who buy pure hybrids do so because of the image...that image being an Earth conscious green.
However, nor would I say that the implied corrolary, that C# is better suited to web development work, is true. Overhead on C# work in the web development sphere is in fact actually driving a lot of companies who HAD gone to ASP.NET to switch over to *nix/Ruby or Python.
I call bullshit, and I think your "lot of companies" is a manufactured fact in your head. Both Ruby and Python have gained at the expense of PHP/Perl, not.NET. Not really sure what you mean by the nebulous "overhead" claim (because, of course,.NET smokes both Python and Ruby pretty handily in runtime performance, and with appropriate tools, such as a Ruby-like ORM, is comparable for development time), however.NET 2.0 significantly improved ASP.NET, with partial classes, much better server controls, master pages, and other great improvements over the incomplete and non-optimal 1.x.
According to TFA they'll be shipping "later this year".
It really is remarkable. Revolutionary technologies that will completely change the way computers are made have been promised and promoted for years, always with ridiculously optimistic (Duke Nukem Forever style) timelines. Yet here we are today, using computers that are largely evolutions of old technologies.
Non-Compete clauses are typical in plenty of industries. This is just a bunch of posturing by those jackasses over at EA. Screw them.
The author is choosing a self-serving position. Hardly surprizing.
Nonetheless I find it disturbing that you dislike EA to the point of accepting non-competes. You should learn to ignore the messenger when the message itself is a good one.
Non-competes are, generally, a means of circumventing normal market forces (e.g. if someone has some critical skills that you don't want your competitors having, then pay them enough so they don't want to leave. If you don't pay enough, and they leave, then too bad...oh but wait -- you forced them to sign a non-compete under duress, so now they can't leave). They're especially evil given that they're usually ridiculously broad, such as disallowing someone from working in the field of software development for years (rather than specifics, enforceable without a non-compete, such as sueing someone for sharing actual trade secrets).
The.wmf vulnerability was part of the specs that they implemented - it wasn't a bug. So it should exist whether or not they reused code.
Microsoft made the "spec", they didn't just implement it. In any case, all of the inside-Microsoft blog posts blamed the fact that the code in question was very old for the fact that the fault persisted. I would imagine that someone clean-room implement "the spec" would have called it into question.
It's highly likely they just reused old code, which makes sense.
In any case, worries that Vista is "all new" are completely unfounded. Like many Microsoft adventures before, they had a grand vision but then had to backtrack, resetting the Vista codebase back to the Windows 2003 branch. Vista is going to be Windows 2003 (a superlative OS, as an aside) with some extra chrome. It isn't all-.net, and it isn't all new. It's just an evolution of the existing lines.
Re:never let the facts get in the way of being rig
on
Wireless USB hubs
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· Score: 1
SLAM! Whoa, you really set things straight there.
No, wait, we're talking about a 100Mbps+ transport emulating a 480Mpbs connection. Of course there's going to be some differences for a device that expects a 480Mbps connection, or the ultra-speed of a wire. Nonetheless this thread was postulating that there would be lag for a mouse user. Do you have any comprehension of the scale of difference between mouse pointer lag in an FPS, and 100Mps? Do you realize how ridiculous that becomes even comparing?
While slightly off-topic, I do have to say that IBM's articles are some of the best on the net. They have very good writers and can explain things without resorting to techno-babble for the layman.
I respectfully disagree. Being in the IBM papers section was a sign of long researched, excellent papers maybe 4 years ago. Lately, however, most of them have been terrible pandering pieces. Invariably there's some anonymous "gee, I just came across some article" submissions to Slashdot and everyone else (a cynic would say that it's the authors themselves). I haven't bothered looking, but does IBM accept external submissions now?
In this case there are literally thousands of 'cross-platform xmlhttprequest' articles out there, many of them excellent (and many of them based upon copying what Google did, because of course Google invented xmlhttprequest). No Digg!
Re:Sounds good, but maybe not?
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Wireless USB hubs
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· Score: 0, Flamebait
Not that I think the latency issues with this device will be bad, just thought I'd point out the error in your 'simple logic'.
It ensures low latency in the real world - you know that place where we exist. Yeah, they could buffer the transmission for 10 seconds just for the fun of it, but you know what - They're not idiots like some asperger syndrome candidates in discussion threads.
Re:Sounds good, but maybe not?
on
Wireless USB hubs
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· Score: 2, Insightful
And you know that how? It's not just the aount of time the radio waves take. It's also the encoding and decoding. Theoretically they could have a 1 second buffer in there, giving you a second of lag. (Not that they would)
I know it by simple logic. It's a high bandwidth, short hop device, point to point technology, which alone ensures low latency. Couple that with the fact that it's intended for devices that are intolerant of latency, and that pretty much seals the case. Arguing otherwise is just inane.
Slashdot Mirror
This talk of stability in stock price is just whining. It's also a key test for Google, who will now show that they are either sellouts or true idealists.
Adapting to a maturation of the business, and the honeymoon ending, makes them sellouts? Demands change over time, and with Google's honeymoon coming to an end some banks and analysts are making new requests. They're allowed to do that, you know. And Google may eventually decide that it's in their shareholder's interest to comply (for instance if the liquidity of the stock was hurt because the overwhelming bulk of institutional investors don't want to touch it), so they might adapt. Sellouts indeed.
The idea that anyone still believes the "Google do not evil" thing absolutely amazes me. I don't think Google is inherently evil, or any more evil than any other corporation, but at their root they're an advertising company (similar to Doubleclick. Note that Google has added full-colour banner ads to their ad repertoire, and I belive have begun the steps to have animated ads) saturating the web with ads, and using a huge presence in one market (search) to stomp out lots of large and small competitors in others (messaging, email, calendaring, classified listings, video, maps, etc). What a great bastion of goodness.
I really wonder what all of the Google fanatics have been drinking to believe the ridiculous, unfounded motto so deeply.
If they would bother to learn about Google there would be less instability.
Huh? What can someone "learn about Google" that tells them definitively whether or not a P/E of 70 is valid? Markets change and competitors appear and disappear -- Google's dominance is not forever, and could end next week, next year, or in ten years. Never will volatility disappear from the stock.
Exactly! The shareholders bought what they bought. They were under no false pretenses, and Google doesn't have to do a damn thing to change their practices.
Are you kidding? Clearly you have never traded stocks, nor do you own a red penny in stocks. I find it difficult to believe you would ever say something so absurdly naive otherwise.
Firstly, stock analyst work for stockholders -- They aren't some magical group that just likes to analyze stocks for the fun of it. Their purpose is to give an external evaluation of a company's health to help guide stockholders on whether to buy, up their investment, or sell. It's hard to do that when a company is as secretive as Google is.
If the shareholders don't like it, I'd like to see them sell. I seriously doubt that many of them will actually want to take losses in the hundreds of thousands range and higher, just to make a point to Google.
Another pearl of infinite naivety.
I'm glad you're not a stock broker or analyst.
Right, and I was agreeing to your key assertion by pointing out that, at least at the point that I submitted that reply, the highest rated point completely missed the point of the article (similar to how you were correcting yet another incorrect assumption about the article).
Coffee is currently fashionable, but when I think of a stereotypical coffee addict like myslelf, I dont think of a slim trim health nut...
To really appreciate coffee saturation, get to know Canadian culture (particular Vancouver or Southern Ontario). We quaff coffee close to universally, from stressful to calm, and from unhealthy to healthy. Small towns feature half a dozen drive through coffee shops, all hosting endless lineups.
This study says that more than four cups of coffee a day are bad for you if you have a particular gene.
The three Score: 5 posts right now say the same thing, which to paraphrase is "the dose is the poison, and moderation is key". The fact that they say that, and worse the fact that they're all sitting at Score: 5, is ample evidence that they have absolutely no idea what the article is about, nor do any of the moderators who handed out points to them.
If anyone ever tells you to do a lot of anything, run the other way. People have died from everything from eating too much salt to drinking too much carrot juice. Keep your diet balanced and your intakes in moderation, and you'll do far better than chasing around massive doses of things that are "good" for you.
This particular study deals with genetic differences. Differences that mean that what's "a lot" for one person is "moderation" for another.
As with anything related to toxicology, the dose is the poison.
To a point, however that simplifies and misses the point of the article: The researchers are claiming that there are two common variants of the gene responsible for the systems that breaks down coffee, and those with one variant are made healthier by 3 cups of coffee a day, while those with the other variant (CYP1A2*1F) are detrimentally affected by the same.
So it's the dose...and the genes that build the systems that deal with the dose.
It isn't a typo, it's a brain word transposition. I've been touch-typing for two decades now, and I type at over 100 wpm, so I'm not consciously thinking of each word as I type it. Instead it's like I'm giving a speech to the typing center, and it's transcribing it...only sometimes it "hears" the wrong words.
If you can find a good magazine or something for kids that introduces them to programming, DO IT!
Why?
Not only is it questionable if programming is such a remarkable skill for the next generation, more importantly it tends to be something that kids find on their own when the time is right (the whole "when they are ready, the teacher will appear" thing). My elders had nothing to do with me getting into programming, yet here I am. That's the case for most programmers as far as I've heard (I can't say I've heard of any "my daddy taught me C" stories). I highly, highly doubt that getting a kid into Python when they're 3 is going to give them any long term advantage.
Per the "OP", putting aside the obvious defensiveness in the ask slashdot question (why do all parents have to talk about how their first priority is "spending time"? It's a bit humorous given that one of the most important skills for young children is independent play...which basically means "putting them with some toys..or electronics...and leaving them alone to explore and do their thing without you hanging over them), there are a tonne of great enrichment tools available on the PC. My just-turned-3-year-old absolutely loves most of the games on peepandthebigwideworld.com, and her motivation to play the educational games got her brilliantly using a mouse and the interface in absolutely no time at all (she's been doing it for almost a year now). When she's in the mood for it, those games draw her attention more than the countless toys her play room is filled with). We also have some Dora games, she colours on the Fisher Price website, and so on.
My 1 year old son is showing more and more interest in what she's doing, and I'm sure he'll be into it soon enough as well.
And you know what? While she's playing I casually check every now and then, but by and large I'm relaxing reading the paper, or doing some work on my laptop, or listening to some music, and my wife is doing the safe.
We don't have that type of technology. We don't have anything *near* that type of technology (I've understood facial recognition to be accurate at fewer than 10,000 photographs. Anything above that and it just loses it.)
Exactly. Most systems lose any value at all at far below 10,000 faces, though.
Facial recognition is largely in the "snake oil" stage, where salespeople dummy up ridiculous best-case tests against a tiny database, and then declare the technology a success. Put a billion Chinese in a database and things get just a tad more difficult (as an aside - someone made a joke that "they all look alike". While that's an old joke, and the poster admitted it, there is a bit of truth to it -- the genetic diversity in an average Chinese city is vastly smaller than in New York City, for instance. The closer people look, the more difficult of a time the system has. You're going to have HUGE nodal overlaps with the limited precision of something like a camera, and the margin of error through hardware problems, and even people bloating up because they had a liquid breakfast, that it will render the false positive rate tremendous, and the false negative so high to really put the icing on the cake).
Facial recognition is the best place for a free-market economy to do its thing. When someone really makes an effective facial recognition technology that works in the large, the market will beat a path to their door. Thus far it hasn't happened.
Of course it can be done - humans somehow do it, and we do it tremendously well. We somehow manage to pick out faces from huge distances, and to identify people by their posture, walking style, and so on. While we do work with a much smaller set, somehow there is some heuristics that can be extrapolated, but as it is nothing actually demonstrated on the market has done so.
I'm not going to get into politics here, as much as you might like
Uh...okay. That really makes sense in the context of my message...or not.
I'm not going to get into politics here, as much as you might like, but the reason most new cars are "silent" (they're not, they're actually quiteloud from the OUTSIDE) is because the most common type of engine, a 4 cylinder, has a terrible exhaust note.
That's ignorant on so many levels. Nonetheless, why don't you peruse the inventory of the most successful cars at your local car dealer, and tell me which of them has a "soundtrack to get noticed by". Many of the most powerful cars on the road - the ones that will stomp the pissy little testosterone-supplement that the kids drive - are absolutely silent at anything other than full throttle.
Thus these hybrids need more grunt in their exhaust. Who wants a silent car? We want a car with a soundtrack to be noticed by.
If by we you mean 16 year old dateless wonders, then sure. Most of the rest of the world wants as silent of a car as they can find, which is why the vast majority of new cars are completely silent. Of course perception does matter, and the reality is that many of the people who buy pure hybrids do so because of the image...that image being an Earth conscious green.
However, nor would I say that the implied corrolary, that C# is better suited to web development work, is true. Overhead on C# work in the web development sphere is in fact actually driving a lot of companies who HAD gone to ASP.NET to switch over to *nix/Ruby or Python.
I call bullshit, and I think your "lot of companies" is a manufactured fact in your head. Both Ruby and Python have gained at the expense of PHP/Perl, not
According to TFA they'll be shipping "later this year".
It really is remarkable. Revolutionary technologies that will completely change the way computers are made have been promised and promoted for years, always with ridiculously optimistic (Duke Nukem Forever style) timelines. Yet here we are today, using computers that are largely evolutions of old technologies.
Because Apple pionered the idea of earbuds or at least popularized it of course.
Are you kidding? And let me guess: Linux invented the command line, Google invented XmlHttp, and BeOS invented the graphical operating system.
Earbud headphones have been around, and popular, for DECADES. Just because you weren't looking doesn't change reality.
Non-Compete clauses are typical in plenty of industries. This is just a bunch of posturing by those jackasses over at EA. Screw them.
The author is choosing a self-serving position. Hardly surprizing.
Nonetheless I find it disturbing that you dislike EA to the point of accepting non-competes. You should learn to ignore the messenger when the message itself is a good one.
Non-competes are, generally, a means of circumventing normal market forces (e.g. if someone has some critical skills that you don't want your competitors having, then pay them enough so they don't want to leave. If you don't pay enough, and they leave, then too bad...oh but wait -- you forced them to sign a non-compete under duress, so now they can't leave). They're especially evil given that they're usually ridiculously broad, such as disallowing someone from working in the field of software development for years (rather than specifics, enforceable without a non-compete, such as sueing someone for sharing actual trade secrets).
The .wmf vulnerability was part of the specs that they implemented - it wasn't a bug. So it should exist whether or not they reused code.
Microsoft made the "spec", they didn't just implement it. In any case, all of the inside-Microsoft blog posts blamed the fact that the code in question was very old for the fact that the fault persisted. I would imagine that someone clean-room implement "the spec" would have called it into question.
It's highly likely they just reused old code, which makes sense.
In any case, worries that Vista is "all new" are completely unfounded. Like many Microsoft adventures before, they had a grand vision but then had to backtrack, resetting the Vista codebase back to the Windows 2003 branch. Vista is going to be Windows 2003 (a superlative OS, as an aside) with some extra chrome. It isn't all-.net, and it isn't all new. It's just an evolution of the existing lines.
SLAM! Whoa, you really set things straight there.
No, wait, we're talking about a 100Mbps+ transport emulating a 480Mpbs connection. Of course there's going to be some differences for a device that expects a 480Mbps connection, or the ultra-speed of a wire. Nonetheless this thread was postulating that there would be lag for a mouse user. Do you have any comprehension of the scale of difference between mouse pointer lag in an FPS, and 100Mps? Do you realize how ridiculous that becomes even comparing?
I was being sarcastic.
Oh snap!
Heh. Just out of curiousity were you thinking of Jon Stewart when you wrote that?
Wow, that's pretty clever. Pure gold.
While slightly off-topic, I do have to say that IBM's articles are some of the best on the net. They have very good writers and can explain things without resorting to techno-babble for the layman.
I respectfully disagree. Being in the IBM papers section was a sign of long researched, excellent papers maybe 4 years ago. Lately, however, most of them have been terrible pandering pieces. Invariably there's some anonymous "gee, I just came across some article" submissions to Slashdot and everyone else (a cynic would say that it's the authors themselves). I haven't bothered looking, but does IBM accept external submissions now?
In this case there are literally thousands of 'cross-platform xmlhttprequest' articles out there, many of them excellent (and many of them based upon copying what Google did, because of course Google invented xmlhttprequest). No Digg!
Not that I think the latency issues with this device will be bad, just thought I'd point out the error in your 'simple logic'.
It ensures low latency in the real world - you know that place where we exist. Yeah, they could buffer the transmission for 10 seconds just for the fun of it, but you know what - They're not idiots like some asperger syndrome candidates in discussion threads.
And you know that how? It's not just the aount of time the radio waves take. It's also the encoding and decoding. Theoretically they could have a 1 second buffer in there, giving you a second of lag. (Not that they would)
I know it by simple logic. It's a high bandwidth, short hop device, point to point technology, which alone ensures low latency. Couple that with the fact that it's intended for devices that are intolerant of latency, and that pretty much seals the case. Arguing otherwise is just inane.