Learn C++. Shhh... don't tell anyone. They're still trying to figure out where the compiler is on their Linux server.
I code the bulk of my stuff in PHP for the same reason I have no problem using HTML, XML or JavaScript: because I really, really don't think what I code is amazing flaming shit that the Russian mafia is trying to steal.
I'm still baffled by the number of people who completely lack any perspective about their own coding.
Most of this business is selling the service, not the product. There aren't many webservices that are so unique that the people involved have to specifically make an effort to control the secret sauce for fear that others will enter thir industry. Yahoo does search quite actively without having Google's code.
Only HTML "programmers" would be dumb enough to think something like PHP obfuscation was big shit.
That said, PHP obfuscation sounds like a good business. No one ever went broke selling people's asses back to them.
I'll make my own browser, and it will be supercool and it will support CSS 4.0 and the ACID test will totally look awesomer in CSS 4.0 because it will support 3-D web browsing!!!
Actually, I still miss Firebird. Birds are way better than Foxes. Especially when they're on fire. And 16% use in the US counts as being on fire.
50% of people will always use IE, because they're too dumb to use IE to download Firefox. Makes you wish MS would just give it up and adopt Firefox, huh? It would save a boatload of cash.
Anyhow... my browser is gonna be better than both!!!
Don't tell anyone, but Google returns value. MySpace helps child molesters get TV exposure.
I'm pretty sure Google has the better business model.
I'm willing to bet in the long run MySpace fizzles out because it does not have a sustainable business model.
Teenagers are fickle, and MySpace mostly enables their less expensive tendacy: droning on endlessly about how life sucks.
For as much as people parrot the model of teen consumer spending, there are a couple problems with that market:
1. They are a shrinking percentage of the population.
2. There is massive competition for their buck.
3. They don't have much money, they spend it like they're retarded.
4. The real money in our economy is exchanged between businesses.
In the long run, MySpace and NewsCorp are dumping a lot of money into selling ads to people who don't like ads. Worse, they are paying so kids can post band lyrics for free.
If MySpace ever turns a profit I'd be very surprised.
Good point about Halliburton. Better yet, Halliburton got someone else to fight most of the war for them, and then they get the profits of private business from the war! How cool is that?
Man. I should've found a way to go to Yale and kiss the right asses.
It depends on whether you consider telephone and internet to be the same service. Basically, the telecoms want the ability to produce as crappy a product as cable TV.
You expect them to see reason with regard to "user-run servers"?
Not really. I just wish a few companies would start realizing that all these people out there tinkering with their stuff are enthusiasts, not terrorists.
After all their pissing consumers off, this would be an ideal time to make nice and put a foot forward to explore user-run servers as a wave of new interest, rather than an assault upon their business model.
I was questioning whether a typical charity, which is a shockingly inefficient means of distributing anything (the average charity, the last I heard, spends 80% of the fund on operating costs), is the best way to spend the money.
My thought is that one of the motivations behind avoiding a more competetive charitable structure (something like X Prize as the original poster noted) is that it plays well.
If you have ever looked at modern charities from a financial standpoint, they're awful. Inefficient, poorly directed, often corrupt. Look at the Red Cross.
Something needs to be done about charity in general, because it is a money pit.
That was the original poster's sentiment, and I agree.
This assumes that philanthropic concerns aren't capable of producing geometric results, such as those realized by capitalism.
Two points:
1. Doesn't this argue for the notion that charitable trusts should be steered toward market forces? After all, if charity returns below the market's capabilities, then chairty is inherently innefficient and needs improvement.
2. Is it possible that if he really wanted to do the world good, he should have identified the greediest people in the world and given the money to them for use in the private sector?
If that's the case, why donate to charity? If the greatest possible good is done by growing the wealth out, then he should have created a charity to buy everyone a DVD of the movie Wall Street. Y'know: "Greed is good."
Now you're just putting words in my mouth. I never said any of those things. I don't aim to force anyone to do anything. I was addressing the original poster's (on this thread, anyhow) point that it might be worth a swing to put the trusts into a more competetive structure.
Is there something wrong with proposing that we re-evaluate how charity is done in order to ensure better and more useful outcomes?
So, if this is the case, why didn't he put this money into play 10 years ago? What makes today a better day to execute that yesterday.
I did read the article, I'm just not greatly impressed by why feeling a certain way decades ago makes it OK to way all that time before acting.
Doesn't the saying go that a good plan today is better than a great plan tomorrow? What makes Buffet exempt?
As for objective-based charity, yes, it is possible to set useless milestones. But, given the monumental waste so many charitable foundations end up in, this is mostly a lateral move.
In that light, it can't hurt to try making charitable trusts more responsive to market forces that would promote efficiency and expediency.
And what better way to do it than to use the largest donation in history to lay down the marker that charity needs conducted in a better manner?
If he was planning for a long time, why wasn't he executing the plan? Perhaps I'm a little off on this, but it strikes me that getting the money in play would be a better idea if his long-term goal is doing good. Otherwise, he's doing what every rich old white guy has done: leaving a legacy before he dies.
While points don't mean much to me, I think it is wrong if a sentiment is grounded in a particular belief rather than effort to instigate to mod something "troll".
Let's face it: this is about legacies. Buffet didn't dump this cash out there 10 years ago for a reason: the money was still worth something to him. Now, he's old, the reaper is at the door, and he is fearful of how history will judge him.
An objective-driven foundation would seem natural for businessmen to push.
It isn't.
Why? Because they're afraid of what setting certain achievable and sustainable marks would do for their reputations.
First off, your English is excellent. Don't sweat it at all. I followed along perfectly.
As for the Greeks, it wasn't my intent to punish the Greeks. I was just pointing out that there is a histroical precedent for thought overwhelming science, and that String Theory seems to meet that standard.
As for the Antikythera Mechanism, I'd offer that virtually every society fixated with astrology eventually pursued some means of following the stars (look at the Mayans). Early civilizations went to extraordinary lengths to manage astrology. There is a clear relationship between astrology and mathematics in the rise of early societies.
There's no question that comparing modern mass society to a relatively isolated ancient society is not fair to the Greeks. In that regard, I'd see the Greeks more as an allegory for what we shouldn't do, than as a scientific example of how not to do it.
I don't know if you ever read Foucault or not, but suffice it to say discussion of history is about the present, not the past.
1. I'm not a big fan of mixing personal sentiments with financial ones.
2. I'm not necessarily sold on Ask. I just suspect that for return on value, you'd get more out of ask than you would Yahoo, because Yahoo appears to have extended their brand as far as possible.
3. If anything, I'd offer the argument that MS should get out of the search business altogether. Focus on what you do well, and trim experiments that fail. I think we'll all agree that MSN/Live is never going to overtake Google, and will probably never overtake Yahoo.
4. On the subject of overtaking competitors... Whether you like XBox or not, MS clearly made a mark in a market where many people didn't think MS would last through its first generation (at least not by anything except brute force). By the time Sony is done going bankrupt and pissing every electronics consumer in the world off, MS stands a legitimate change of being the #1 console gaming system manufacturer in the world.
It's been my experience that strong upside, which is what MS would need from any merger/buy, is not found in solid and stable enterprises like Yahoo.
The question is, does MS want to become Pepsi to Google's Coke? If so, then Yahoo is a good investment.
If not, MS needs to absorb a brand with upside (such as Ask), rethink its entire approach with MSN to generate some upside (unlikely, since MSN is now the ugly pig), or get the hell out of search altogether.
I'd also offer that if "buying marketshare" is your view of Ask and MS, then the two might in fact make an ideal pairing, since they think alike.
This assumes that the merger doesn't cause users to run away. Consider both Yahoo's and MS's recent efforts to revamp their website: both caused drops is marketshare.
The only company gaining serious traction in search is Ask.
Smart money says pay for a little guy with upward mobility. If MS were smart (and it isn't) they'd go after Ask. Merrill Lynch is just brainlessly applying old merger principles to new economies. It's not helpful.
In the computer business, smart money is on growth, not marketshare.
In fairness, the ancient Greek culture failed to maximize its advantage gained from all that genius. The reason: a broad cultural disdain for artisanship translated into scientists not getting their hands dirty with science.
How many times were the Greeks a stone's throw away from triggering a period similar to the European Renaissance?
Why did it not happen? Because Greek society emphasized thought over tinkering. That's a really, really bad set of behaviors if you wish for a better tomorrow.
Most of the Greeks who did build anything of lasting value to the world (Archimedes, anyone?) lived in the colonies or even further out of the periphary of the Greek world.
The Greek core culture disdained the kind of work that it took to take advantage of their thought and turn it into science.
Most of the advanced that stem from Greek thought came between 1600 and 1950, prompted mostly by an explosion of interest in Protestant countries where a mathematician wasn't afraid to grab some tools and go prove it.
There's a reason that non-Euclidean geometry was developed by guys with German last names rather than Greek last names.
And that circles back to my point about String Theory. We cannot promote approaches to science that allow us to be happy and say, "Hey, the math works out! Who cares if it can't be proven in the real world?!"
Slashdot Mirror
Isn't that how most things spread on the internet?
What the hell do I do now? I agree with Dvorak!!! Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!
I code the bulk of my stuff in PHP for the same reason I have no problem using HTML, XML or JavaScript: because I really, really don't think what I code is amazing flaming shit that the Russian mafia is trying to steal.
I'm still baffled by the number of people who completely lack any perspective about their own coding.
Most of this business is selling the service, not the product. There aren't many webservices that are so unique that the people involved have to specifically make an effort to control the secret sauce for fear that others will enter thir industry. Yahoo does search quite actively without having Google's code.
Only HTML "programmers" would be dumb enough to think something like PHP obfuscation was big shit.
That said, PHP obfuscation sounds like a good business. No one ever went broke selling people's asses back to them.
Actually, I still miss Firebird. Birds are way better than Foxes. Especially when they're on fire. And 16% use in the US counts as being on fire.
50% of people will always use IE, because they're too dumb to use IE to download Firefox. Makes you wish MS would just give it up and adopt Firefox, huh? It would save a boatload of cash.
Anyhow ... my browser is gonna be better than both!!!
Don't tell anyone, but Google returns value. MySpace helps child molesters get TV exposure.
I'm pretty sure Google has the better business model.
I'm willing to bet in the long run MySpace fizzles out because it does not have a sustainable business model.
Teenagers are fickle, and MySpace mostly enables their less expensive tendacy: droning on endlessly about how life sucks.
For as much as people parrot the model of teen consumer spending, there are a couple problems with that market:
1. They are a shrinking percentage of the population.
2. There is massive competition for their buck.
3. They don't have much money, they spend it like they're retarded.
4. The real money in our economy is exchanged between businesses.
In the long run, MySpace and NewsCorp are dumping a lot of money into selling ads to people who don't like ads. Worse, they are paying so kids can post band lyrics for free.
If MySpace ever turns a profit I'd be very surprised.
That's half my point: if EFF had a huge warchest, it might be able to contribute more.
Man. I should've found a way to go to Yale and kiss the right asses.
It depends on whether you consider telephone and internet to be the same service. Basically, the telecoms want the ability to produce as crappy a product as cable TV.
I figure if they became a stock-issuing public interest then they could use the investments to launch their own private war.
Pretty badass. Can we get the EFF to go public, too?
Go look on eBay for old PowerPC systems (mostly Apples) and old P3s. Those PowerPC are excellent chips, even ones back on the G3 architecture.
After all their pissing consumers off, this would be an ideal time to make nice and put a foot forward to explore user-run servers as a wave of new interest, rather than an assault upon their business model.
My thought is that one of the motivations behind avoiding a more competetive charitable structure (something like X Prize as the original poster noted) is that it plays well.
If you have ever looked at modern charities from a financial standpoint, they're awful. Inefficient, poorly directed, often corrupt. Look at the Red Cross.
Something needs to be done about charity in general, because it is a money pit.
That was the original poster's sentiment, and I agree.
Two points:
1. Doesn't this argue for the notion that charitable trusts should be steered toward market forces? After all, if charity returns below the market's capabilities, then chairty is inherently innefficient and needs improvement.
2. Is it possible that if he really wanted to do the world good, he should have identified the greediest people in the world and given the money to them for use in the private sector?
If that's the case, why donate to charity? If the greatest possible good is done by growing the wealth out, then he should have created a charity to buy everyone a DVD of the movie Wall Street. Y'know: "Greed is good."
Is there something wrong with proposing that we re-evaluate how charity is done in order to ensure better and more useful outcomes?
I did read the article, I'm just not greatly impressed by why feeling a certain way decades ago makes it OK to way all that time before acting.
Doesn't the saying go that a good plan today is better than a great plan tomorrow? What makes Buffet exempt?
As for objective-based charity, yes, it is possible to set useless milestones. But, given the monumental waste so many charitable foundations end up in, this is mostly a lateral move.
In that light, it can't hurt to try making charitable trusts more responsive to market forces that would promote efficiency and expediency.
And what better way to do it than to use the largest donation in history to lay down the marker that charity needs conducted in a better manner?
If he was planning for a long time, why wasn't he executing the plan? Perhaps I'm a little off on this, but it strikes me that getting the money in play would be a better idea if his long-term goal is doing good. Otherwise, he's doing what every rich old white guy has done: leaving a legacy before he dies.
While points don't mean much to me, I think it is wrong if a sentiment is grounded in a particular belief rather than effort to instigate to mod something "troll".
An objective-driven foundation would seem natural for businessmen to push.
It isn't.
Why? Because they're afraid of what setting certain achievable and sustainable marks would do for their reputations.
As for the Greeks, it wasn't my intent to punish the Greeks. I was just pointing out that there is a histroical precedent for thought overwhelming science, and that String Theory seems to meet that standard.
As for the Antikythera Mechanism, I'd offer that virtually every society fixated with astrology eventually pursued some means of following the stars (look at the Mayans). Early civilizations went to extraordinary lengths to manage astrology. There is a clear relationship between astrology and mathematics in the rise of early societies.
There's no question that comparing modern mass society to a relatively isolated ancient society is not fair to the Greeks. In that regard, I'd see the Greeks more as an allegory for what we shouldn't do, than as a scientific example of how not to do it.
I don't know if you ever read Foucault or not, but suffice it to say discussion of history is about the present, not the past.
2. I'm not necessarily sold on Ask. I just suspect that for return on value, you'd get more out of ask than you would Yahoo, because Yahoo appears to have extended their brand as far as possible.
3. If anything, I'd offer the argument that MS should get out of the search business altogether. Focus on what you do well, and trim experiments that fail. I think we'll all agree that MSN/Live is never going to overtake Google, and will probably never overtake Yahoo.
4. On the subject of overtaking competitors... Whether you like XBox or not, MS clearly made a mark in a market where many people didn't think MS would last through its first generation (at least not by anything except brute force). By the time Sony is done going bankrupt and pissing every electronics consumer in the world off, MS stands a legitimate change of being the #1 console gaming system manufacturer in the world.
It's been my experience that strong upside, which is what MS would need from any merger/buy, is not found in solid and stable enterprises like Yahoo.
The question is, does MS want to become Pepsi to Google's Coke? If so, then Yahoo is a good investment.
If not, MS needs to absorb a brand with upside (such as Ask), rethink its entire approach with MSN to generate some upside (unlikely, since MSN is now the ugly pig), or get the hell out of search altogether.
I'd also offer that if "buying marketshare" is your view of Ask and MS, then the two might in fact make an ideal pairing, since they think alike.
Fair enough.
This assumes that the merger doesn't cause users to run away. Consider both Yahoo's and MS's recent efforts to revamp their website: both caused drops is marketshare.
The only company gaining serious traction in search is Ask.
Smart money says pay for a little guy with upward mobility. If MS were smart (and it isn't) they'd go after Ask. Merrill Lynch is just brainlessly applying old merger principles to new economies. It's not helpful.
In the computer business, smart money is on growth, not marketshare.
How many times were the Greeks a stone's throw away from triggering a period similar to the European Renaissance?
Why did it not happen? Because Greek society emphasized thought over tinkering. That's a really, really bad set of behaviors if you wish for a better tomorrow.
Most of the Greeks who did build anything of lasting value to the world (Archimedes, anyone?) lived in the colonies or even further out of the periphary of the Greek world.
The Greek core culture disdained the kind of work that it took to take advantage of their thought and turn it into science.
Most of the advanced that stem from Greek thought came between 1600 and 1950, prompted mostly by an explosion of interest in Protestant countries where a mathematician wasn't afraid to grab some tools and go prove it.
There's a reason that non-Euclidean geometry was developed by guys with German last names rather than Greek last names.
And that circles back to my point about String Theory. We cannot promote approaches to science that allow us to be happy and say, "Hey, the math works out! Who cares if it can't be proven in the real world?!"