The only point in history that Yahoo was the #1 search engine was the period during which they used Google as their search engine.
Before that, AltaVista and the like dominated. Not that it mattered, mind you, since most search engines were utter crap and most people just used whatever was on their home page.
These days, the search results are pretty much the same, but Google still does better because people associate them with search, because they're sexy, and because their results come back a lot faster. Many people don't even realize that yahoo has a search engine, and most people think MSN is primarily an ISP.
Question: Why would you join MySpace / Facebook?
Answer: Because people you know use it.
Question: What social class are the people you know most likely to be?
Answer: The same class as yourself.
White trash have white trash friends. Poor, black, inner-city youth have poor, black, inner city friends. Wealthy suburbanites have wealthy suburbanite friends.
When facebook launched, it only allowed university students in. About 1/3rd of the U.S. population achieves a college degree. Statistically speaking, college-educated persons have higher income, better educated friends, and have different values than those who do not.
From what I can find on Wikipedia, only 37% of the prison population of CA is hispanic, much less illegal
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisons_in_the_United _States#California
and acording to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisons_in_the_United _States#Illegal_Immigration, only 21% of the prison population is illegal immigrants.
I'll grant that this number is outrageous, and needs to be reduced, but it's false to claim that it's a "majority", unless you really suck at math.
Want to know why there are so many people in prison these days? Mandatory minimum sentences for drug offenses. Caught smoking a plant? Go to jail!
California prisons are full to 200% capacity, give or take, and nearly 60% of all inmates are in for drug offenses. If you took out the drug users, you'd wind up with plenty of space in the prisons.
Of course, putting a harmless pothead into prison will likely turn him into a hardened criminal, but that's something the stupid government has failed to notice.
That's because this was a survey for "IT people". This means system admins and other menial technology related fields. It doesn't mean "Engineering" or the like.
Well, sure, "someday" we may figure out a way to workaround that pesky "light barrier". It will probably be long after we're all dead. Your manager's projections may be overly optimistic (or, quite possibly, simply ignorant), but you are being arrogant by assuming that new knowledge isn't going to surface that makes his projections possible.
The arrogance of people today is astounding. They think they understand everything there is to understand about the universe, and that what we know today will be all that we know tomorrow. The state of science today is radically different from what it was 1000 years ago, and (assuming we don't blow ourselves up), it will be far more different in another 1000 years.
This doesn't necessarily mean that we'll literally travel faster than the speed of light. Plenty of theories about how this could happen have existed for many years -- just because they haven't been proven doesn't mean that they're impossible.
Honestly, the fervor with which so-called scientific minds denounce new theories is akin to that used by religious zealots. Just because quantum physics screws up some of what Newton figured out doesn't mean that it's wrong, and just because some new field of research spins quantum physics on its head doesn't mean that it is wrong, either.
By the number of people defending the phone companies. Phone companies are amongst the most vile, corrupt, textbook evil entities around. It doesn't matter what country or company we're talking about. In most places, they're either current or former government-sanctioned monopolies. Their time is coming to an end, fortunately, as municipal wifi and voip will destroy their business model.
How stupid can YOU get? AT&T owns the fucking government. They will get whatever they want, and will never suffer the consequences. After the most recent merger, they no longer fear the DOJ even. Ma Bell is back.
If the iphone actually delivers the same CSS, Javascript, and HTML capabilities as safari on OSX, it's already a better platform than every single mobile device on the market today.
If you could get geolocation information (GPS or cell id, which can be used to map into a database and get approximate locations) and a mechanism to maintain socket connections (difficult, but it's been done before), then you've got yourself an excellent development platform. Hell, the last can be worked around using xhr for the most part.
Of course, I suspect that the CSS, JS, and HTML support won't really be up to snuff with safari, but I assume it's better than the existing mobiles, virtually all of which are giant pieces of shit.
They make a big deal out of google serving content-targeted ads in email, but they don't say anything about AOL, MSN, and Yahoo actively "wire tapping" IM conversations?
Of course, AOL, MSN, and Yahoo aren't that explicit about the wiretaps. They get away with it through a combination of their privacy policy's statements of needing to comply with "local laws and regulations", and the federal government mandating said wiretaps.
If you use MSN, AIM, or Yahoo messenger, or email, you are subjecting yourself to wiretapping by the U.S. Federal government -- even if you aren't a U.S. citizen.
Do google's targeted ads genuinely bother anyone more than this?
I'm not saying that Google's privacy policy can't be improved -- everyone can use some improvement. I am saying that I think people are looking at the wrong things when evaluating how much protection a company offers to its customers.
Doesn't Russia know that nobody cares about them anymore? The only country that the U.S. fears right now is China, and China isn't going to start a war with us any time in the next 50 years.
100, 50, 20, hell, even 10 years ago newspapers had a major problem: covering local issues was relatively clean, but covering international issues was a big problem. Outside of the big players (NY Times, Washington Post, etc.), nobody could afford to send their journalists abroad and the like.
Back then, we needed the AP. We needed reuters.
Today we're seeing how broken this model is. You can find the exact same article on hundreds of websites, all attributed to the same sources.
The news agencies should get back to reporting local news that is relevant to their local customer base. Start assuming that your customers will get their national and international news from sources like CNN or ABC.
The newspaper owners are doing what they're doing because they simply have no idea how to restructure their business model right now.
If the hand-written letter was the first casualty of the internet era, the newspaper will certainly be the next.
U.S. manufacturing is practically a non-issue. About the only things the U.S. still exports are raw materials, food, automobiles, and heavy machinery.
The thing that causes the U.S. to have such high CO2 emissions is the large amount of mandatory driving that we do here along with the large amounts of electricity that we use. It's virtually impossible to live anywhere in the U.S. (except maybe NYC) without driving to get everywhere.
One thing that I find curious, though, is that the U.S. gets so much flak for CO2 emissions, yet we casually ignore all the toxic shit being dumped into the environment (air, water, and land) in China and India. Sure, their CO2 emissions contribute to a very specific problem, but are rising tides and climate change going to be better or worse than completely destroying all potable water and sending toxic death clouds over most of europe and asia?
If they don't tax internet sales, they'll just raise state income taxes. Sadly, for most of us the choice is between asshat republicans who want to waste billions on war, and asshat democrats who want to waste billions on social welfare programs.
That doesn't make him a non-scumbag, it just makes him a smart scumbag.
If he weren't a scumbag, he'd use the domains for useful ventures, or sell them at a reasonable price to the companies, organizations, and individuals that would.
You'd prefer securing against vulnerabilities in dozens, if not hundreds of different encodings?
The only people who are against Unicode are those that have never had to work with more than one written language in the same project.
Yes, it's a lot easier to secure stuff when you only accept ASCII or ISO8859-1/Windows CP-1252, but then you're limiting your software to about a third of the world (if that).
Crappy engineers are going to write crappy code no matter what the encoding. No sense compromising for the sake of poorly written software.
...for the artists. Unfortunately, most copyrights aren't owned by artists, they're owned by huge corporations that simply buy the rights.
I also don't support the notion of guarantees of children being born into wealth. It usually just results in the children being assholes.
They have more program manager than they have developers.
That speaks volumes.
Microsoft wouldn't know how to form a web startup if a $50 billion market depended on it. Because it does.
Eh, $16k could be about a year's salary in some countries, but you could also spend 2-3 years before you found anything in the first place.
A good programmer can easily pull down $25-30k in India. If he can find a flaw in his free time or can do it in less than 6 months, it might be worthwhile, but in general he's better off just getting an ordinary job.
So if you profit from FOSS, it isn't "open source" anymore? If dozens of vendors are supporting and contributing to Linux, and thousands of people are making money off of it, Linux doesn't exist anymore?
Microsoft really should stop hiring retards.
Where in the hell do you think IBM is going to find 150k qualified people in India? Maybe if you're ignorant of the realities of employment there. The labor market is very tight and salaries are skyrocketing as a result. There aren't 150k engineers on the market in the entire country right now. They could try sniping people from the big companies already present there (Google, Microsoft, etc.), or from the local companies (Infosys and the like), but it's going to be tough. The average salary for a software engineer in Bangalore has gone from a little under $10k 3 years ago to over $20k now. If IBM started trying to pull in another 150k heads, they'd see the average shoot over $30k as competition for talent gets fierce.
Very few "tech" companies are outsourcing. Non-tech companies (banks and the like) are outsourcing, but they've been outsourcing for decades. Banks aren't tech companies, and it's not unreasonable to expect that they'd pay an outside firm for their technical needs.
"Tech" companies do, however, have facilities all over the world. Microsoft, Google. Yahoo, etc. all have huge businesses in India. Unfortunately for the nay-sayers, the Indians are too busy working on products for the Indian market, and (surprise, surprise!) they're having trouble finding qualified people to work in India!
The job market for people with useful skills and a proven track record in the U.S. is great. Post a resume on monster or hotjobs that says that you know web technologies and you will be fielding multiple offers within a few days.
Yeah, I know -- there isn't a good market for jobs if all the skills you have are C++ and Java. Tough shit! How do you think the FORTRAN and COBOL developers were feeling in 1995?
You think pittsburgh has a significant software industry?
Are you high or something?
If you want a good job, and have a CS degree, and aren't completely retarded, move to Silicon Valley. You will get a job within a month.
Once there, work at the company you get hired at for a year or two. Now you'll never have trouble getting hired elsewhere again.
...as they go out of business over the next decade.
IBM has lately become nothing more than an overpriced version of Infosys. Their tech innovation has died, and the only worthwhile projects that they're still involved in are their open source contributions.
Tech companies simply shouldn't have so many god damned employees. Once you spread yourself too thin, you're bound to become useless.
While I'm sure there's a deeper motive here, it is true that most of the best developers of OSS don't exactly have full work weeks to dedicate to projects that they aren't being compensated for. People have to eat, after all, and when you've got a family to support you can't really afford to spend 50+ hours a week on an open source project.
Of course, there is already a solution -- companies should start hiring developers to work on OSS. This already happens, and it works out pretty well for the most part. Sure, you might wind up with a little more corporate bias on your development roadmap, but in exchange you get a lot of financial and manpower support.
It's minor when it comes from China. The U.S. won't lay a finger on China, because the government knows that our entire way of life is dependent upon them. It would take decades to reopen (or rebuild!) the thousands of factories that have closed down in the U.S. and have moved to China over the last few decades. Any real hostility between the two nations would most certainly send the entire world into a long-term depression (not to mention another world war).
The U.S. knows this, and China knows this. That's why nobody's going to do a damn thing, no matter how much we might piss each other off.
Slashdot Mirror
The only point in history that Yahoo was the #1 search engine was the period during which they used Google as their search engine. Before that, AltaVista and the like dominated. Not that it mattered, mind you, since most search engines were utter crap and most people just used whatever was on their home page. These days, the search results are pretty much the same, but Google still does better because people associate them with search, because they're sexy, and because their results come back a lot faster. Many people don't even realize that yahoo has a search engine, and most people think MSN is primarily an ISP.
Question: Why would you join MySpace / Facebook? Answer: Because people you know use it. Question: What social class are the people you know most likely to be? Answer: The same class as yourself. White trash have white trash friends. Poor, black, inner-city youth have poor, black, inner city friends. Wealthy suburbanites have wealthy suburbanite friends. When facebook launched, it only allowed university students in. About 1/3rd of the U.S. population achieves a college degree. Statistically speaking, college-educated persons have higher income, better educated friends, and have different values than those who do not.
From what I can find on Wikipedia, only 37% of the prison population of CA is hispanic, much less illegal http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisons_in_the_United _States#California
and acording to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisons_in_the_United _States#Illegal_Immigration, only 21% of the prison population is illegal immigrants.
I'll grant that this number is outrageous, and needs to be reduced, but it's false to claim that it's a "majority", unless you really suck at math.
Want to know why there are so many people in prison these days? Mandatory minimum sentences for drug offenses. Caught smoking a plant? Go to jail!
California prisons are full to 200% capacity, give or take, and nearly 60% of all inmates are in for drug offenses. If you took out the drug users, you'd wind up with plenty of space in the prisons.
Of course, putting a harmless pothead into prison will likely turn him into a hardened criminal, but that's something the stupid government has failed to notice.
That's because this was a survey for "IT people". This means system admins and other menial technology related fields. It doesn't mean "Engineering" or the like.
Well, sure, "someday" we may figure out a way to workaround that pesky "light barrier". It will probably be long after we're all dead. Your manager's projections may be overly optimistic (or, quite possibly, simply ignorant), but you are being arrogant by assuming that new knowledge isn't going to surface that makes his projections possible. The arrogance of people today is astounding. They think they understand everything there is to understand about the universe, and that what we know today will be all that we know tomorrow. The state of science today is radically different from what it was 1000 years ago, and (assuming we don't blow ourselves up), it will be far more different in another 1000 years. This doesn't necessarily mean that we'll literally travel faster than the speed of light. Plenty of theories about how this could happen have existed for many years -- just because they haven't been proven doesn't mean that they're impossible. Honestly, the fervor with which so-called scientific minds denounce new theories is akin to that used by religious zealots. Just because quantum physics screws up some of what Newton figured out doesn't mean that it's wrong, and just because some new field of research spins quantum physics on its head doesn't mean that it is wrong, either.
By the number of people defending the phone companies. Phone companies are amongst the most vile, corrupt, textbook evil entities around. It doesn't matter what country or company we're talking about. In most places, they're either current or former government-sanctioned monopolies. Their time is coming to an end, fortunately, as municipal wifi and voip will destroy their business model.
How stupid can YOU get? AT&T owns the fucking government. They will get whatever they want, and will never suffer the consequences. After the most recent merger, they no longer fear the DOJ even. Ma Bell is back.
If the iphone actually delivers the same CSS, Javascript, and HTML capabilities as safari on OSX, it's already a better platform than every single mobile device on the market today. If you could get geolocation information (GPS or cell id, which can be used to map into a database and get approximate locations) and a mechanism to maintain socket connections (difficult, but it's been done before), then you've got yourself an excellent development platform. Hell, the last can be worked around using xhr for the most part. Of course, I suspect that the CSS, JS, and HTML support won't really be up to snuff with safari, but I assume it's better than the existing mobiles, virtually all of which are giant pieces of shit.
They make a big deal out of google serving content-targeted ads in email, but they don't say anything about AOL, MSN, and Yahoo actively "wire tapping" IM conversations? Of course, AOL, MSN, and Yahoo aren't that explicit about the wiretaps. They get away with it through a combination of their privacy policy's statements of needing to comply with "local laws and regulations", and the federal government mandating said wiretaps. If you use MSN, AIM, or Yahoo messenger, or email, you are subjecting yourself to wiretapping by the U.S. Federal government -- even if you aren't a U.S. citizen. Do google's targeted ads genuinely bother anyone more than this? I'm not saying that Google's privacy policy can't be improved -- everyone can use some improvement. I am saying that I think people are looking at the wrong things when evaluating how much protection a company offers to its customers.
Doesn't Russia know that nobody cares about them anymore? The only country that the U.S. fears right now is China, and China isn't going to start a war with us any time in the next 50 years.
100, 50, 20, hell, even 10 years ago newspapers had a major problem: covering local issues was relatively clean, but covering international issues was a big problem. Outside of the big players (NY Times, Washington Post, etc.), nobody could afford to send their journalists abroad and the like. Back then, we needed the AP. We needed reuters. Today we're seeing how broken this model is. You can find the exact same article on hundreds of websites, all attributed to the same sources. The news agencies should get back to reporting local news that is relevant to their local customer base. Start assuming that your customers will get their national and international news from sources like CNN or ABC. The newspaper owners are doing what they're doing because they simply have no idea how to restructure their business model right now. If the hand-written letter was the first casualty of the internet era, the newspaper will certainly be the next.
U.S. manufacturing is practically a non-issue. About the only things the U.S. still exports are raw materials, food, automobiles, and heavy machinery. The thing that causes the U.S. to have such high CO2 emissions is the large amount of mandatory driving that we do here along with the large amounts of electricity that we use. It's virtually impossible to live anywhere in the U.S. (except maybe NYC) without driving to get everywhere. One thing that I find curious, though, is that the U.S. gets so much flak for CO2 emissions, yet we casually ignore all the toxic shit being dumped into the environment (air, water, and land) in China and India. Sure, their CO2 emissions contribute to a very specific problem, but are rising tides and climate change going to be better or worse than completely destroying all potable water and sending toxic death clouds over most of europe and asia?
If they don't tax internet sales, they'll just raise state income taxes. Sadly, for most of us the choice is between asshat republicans who want to waste billions on war, and asshat democrats who want to waste billions on social welfare programs.
That doesn't make him a non-scumbag, it just makes him a smart scumbag. If he weren't a scumbag, he'd use the domains for useful ventures, or sell them at a reasonable price to the companies, organizations, and individuals that would.
You'd prefer securing against vulnerabilities in dozens, if not hundreds of different encodings? The only people who are against Unicode are those that have never had to work with more than one written language in the same project. Yes, it's a lot easier to secure stuff when you only accept ASCII or ISO8859-1/Windows CP-1252, but then you're limiting your software to about a third of the world (if that). Crappy engineers are going to write crappy code no matter what the encoding. No sense compromising for the sake of poorly written software.
...for the artists. Unfortunately, most copyrights aren't owned by artists, they're owned by huge corporations that simply buy the rights. I also don't support the notion of guarantees of children being born into wealth. It usually just results in the children being assholes.
They have more program manager than they have developers. That speaks volumes. Microsoft wouldn't know how to form a web startup if a $50 billion market depended on it. Because it does.
Eh, $16k could be about a year's salary in some countries, but you could also spend 2-3 years before you found anything in the first place. A good programmer can easily pull down $25-30k in India. If he can find a flaw in his free time or can do it in less than 6 months, it might be worthwhile, but in general he's better off just getting an ordinary job.
So if you profit from FOSS, it isn't "open source" anymore? If dozens of vendors are supporting and contributing to Linux, and thousands of people are making money off of it, Linux doesn't exist anymore? Microsoft really should stop hiring retards.
Where in the hell do you think IBM is going to find 150k qualified people in India? Maybe if you're ignorant of the realities of employment there. The labor market is very tight and salaries are skyrocketing as a result. There aren't 150k engineers on the market in the entire country right now. They could try sniping people from the big companies already present there (Google, Microsoft, etc.), or from the local companies (Infosys and the like), but it's going to be tough. The average salary for a software engineer in Bangalore has gone from a little under $10k 3 years ago to over $20k now. If IBM started trying to pull in another 150k heads, they'd see the average shoot over $30k as competition for talent gets fierce.
Very few "tech" companies are outsourcing. Non-tech companies (banks and the like) are outsourcing, but they've been outsourcing for decades. Banks aren't tech companies, and it's not unreasonable to expect that they'd pay an outside firm for their technical needs. "Tech" companies do, however, have facilities all over the world. Microsoft, Google. Yahoo, etc. all have huge businesses in India. Unfortunately for the nay-sayers, the Indians are too busy working on products for the Indian market, and (surprise, surprise!) they're having trouble finding qualified people to work in India! The job market for people with useful skills and a proven track record in the U.S. is great. Post a resume on monster or hotjobs that says that you know web technologies and you will be fielding multiple offers within a few days. Yeah, I know -- there isn't a good market for jobs if all the skills you have are C++ and Java. Tough shit! How do you think the FORTRAN and COBOL developers were feeling in 1995?
You think pittsburgh has a significant software industry? Are you high or something? If you want a good job, and have a CS degree, and aren't completely retarded, move to Silicon Valley. You will get a job within a month. Once there, work at the company you get hired at for a year or two. Now you'll never have trouble getting hired elsewhere again.
...as they go out of business over the next decade. IBM has lately become nothing more than an overpriced version of Infosys. Their tech innovation has died, and the only worthwhile projects that they're still involved in are their open source contributions. Tech companies simply shouldn't have so many god damned employees. Once you spread yourself too thin, you're bound to become useless.
While I'm sure there's a deeper motive here, it is true that most of the best developers of OSS don't exactly have full work weeks to dedicate to projects that they aren't being compensated for. People have to eat, after all, and when you've got a family to support you can't really afford to spend 50+ hours a week on an open source project.
Of course, there is already a solution -- companies should start hiring developers to work on OSS. This already happens, and it works out pretty well for the most part. Sure, you might wind up with a little more corporate bias on your development roadmap, but in exchange you get a lot of financial and manpower support.
It's minor when it comes from China. The U.S. won't lay a finger on China, because the government knows that our entire way of life is dependent upon them. It would take decades to reopen (or rebuild!) the thousands of factories that have closed down in the U.S. and have moved to China over the last few decades. Any real hostility between the two nations would most certainly send the entire world into a long-term depression (not to mention another world war). The U.S. knows this, and China knows this. That's why nobody's going to do a damn thing, no matter how much we might piss each other off.