So seriously, Xerox invented the GUI, then Apple and Microsoft stole it.
Now Xerox invented internet search, then Google and Yahoo stole it?
They must be smartest programmers in the world, with the worst marketing department ever.
The biggest problem I see is that when the latest news comes out about global warming or climate change, people rarely actually read the full details of any report.
They get what I would call the "Google News" version, just that main headline without clicking into the full article (who does?), and then go about their day feeling like they know what's going on with the world.
When the international panel for climate change came out with their research claims that global warming was real, how many people actually went out and read the report?
Most people just said "See! I knew it was real!" or "That's all BS, they totally faked that"
When the hackers released those emails about global warming information being falsely reported, who actually read the full article about what was falsely reported and what was not?
Most people just said "See! I knew it was all fake!" or "That's all BS, the information is still accurate just a few people screwed up!"
And now that this guy is coming out to debunk Lomborg, very few people will read Lomborg's initial research or even the debunking.
They'll just see the Google News headline and say "See! I knew it was real!" or "That's all BS, that guy is lying about Lomborg!"
You should really try working for a business that needs to actually, you know, turn a profit instead of upgrading to every shiny new system as they come out.
Agreed.
I'm surprised how many articles and comments completely disregard cost as an aspect here?
Cost of upgrading browsers on machines, upgrading images of base installs, etc.
A restrictive piece of software isn't always the issue for upgrading, especially web applications.
Fix the website and the changes are deployed to the whole enterprise.
For large LARGE companies, upgrading the browser can incur a huge cost.
Take GM for example. At a single given automotive plant, they may have 1,000 PCs.
Multiply that by every plant GM owns across the world, and then add in probably a few hundred thousand more for all of the PCs at the tech center and everywhere else and you're probably looking at upgrading browsers on a million boxes.
Most of these places are not set up with remote network installs for every location so you probably can't even automate the whole thing, and that means you have to have a warm body to go around and upgrade every single box.
The cost might be worth it in the end, but the task seems pretty daunting when the alternative is to do nothing and not lose any money.
Honestly I was at an automotive plant back in '99 and they still had somebody in the remote corner of the plant running Windows 3.1 on a token ring network.
I think the group exercise is to teach everyone how to collaborate and share responsibilities, but it's unfair to a student to be responsible for a group member who completely refuses to perform. I think you have the responsibility to learn to communicate to your fellow group members when someone isn't pulling their weight, but if someone doesn't help at all no matter what, the teacher has the responsibility to provide a method for the students to communicate that.
In a few of my classes the teacher provided a private method for group members to communicate to the teacher who the good and bad group members were.
Sometimes it's ok if you end up doing all the programming, honestly in one of my favorite classes I did all the coding and left the powerpoints and cardboard cutouts etc to the rest of the group and the teacher was fine with it. I was confident that at least the rest of the group understood what was going on, but I was a lot faster at programming than the others so we each went with our strengths.
Honestly I think group projects work the best when the group members are from separate disciplines. It's pretty hard to cooperate when you put 5 programmers on a team and tell them to write a Hello World program together.
Oh, and I think most cheating happens because cute girls have to take programming 101 classes and nerds are easy targets.
True, once an employee is at the executive level, they have ridiculous power, and often do ridiculous things with no recourse.
The theory is supposed to be that if you are an executive, you are held responsible for the actions of the people under you.
The reality is that executives are never held responsible for anything, even if they are grossly at fault.
Honestly sometimes it's better when the execs are NOT involved because when they are they get this idea about how they want to revolutionize the company by adding a checkbox on this web page, which leads to countless meetings and generally turns into a gigantic project for no actual company benefit.
http://theoatmeal.com/comics/design_hell
Basically once you get promoted to royalty, the rules don't apply anymore.
Oh and by the way, feel free to cut IT staff, because they're just a drain on your bottom line.
We're in a transitional period of history, IMO (did I mention I'm a historian too?) where the status of employees as resources rather than liabilities is in danger from too many people thinking that better/faster/cheaper can apply to people as well as processes.
Yep, cheaper = reduced budgets and reduced headcount, and since IT departments are normally non-revenue generating headcount they are the first ones that get cut.
Other departments that may be bloated get ignored because they can "justify" their headcount with sales numbers.
IT is just a big fat number that execs want to cut down.
A typical IT department is probably "challenged" to reduce budget and headcount every year, which means eventually you'll hit zero dollars and zero employees.
Then again, the php code had to be served through apache, while the c code was served directly by a custom server sitting on a separate socket, so there's no telling how much of the overhead was from apache.
My thoughts exactly. Is the bottleneck the webserver or the actual code?
Seems more likely that the number of servers has to do with the massive number of requests that have to be handled, so they would need several webfarms, etc., and since they have users all over the world they would have more than one data center.
From a source for the article:
Given its global user population, Facebook eventually had to move to replicating its content across multiple data centers. Facebook now runs two large data centers, one on the West coast of the US and one on the East coast.
So cut your 30,000 servers in half to 15,000 servers per data center.
If Microsoft really cared about devs, then the next version of IIS would allow Classic ASP and ASP.NET to share session state.
Nothing like releasing ASP.NET and obsoleting millions of lines of code.
Unlike VB6 to VB.NET there is no migration path from Classic ASP to ASP.NET other than a complete rewrite.
We use Microsoft's SharePoint where I work.
Pretty easy to set up lists and views to be able to flip / flop your data for different groups.
May not be well suited to the heirarchical tasks issue, but it was an easy win for us here b/c we were already using it to search documents on our domain, and we had a mess of users sending around excel spreadsheets as project tracking.
From the previous
Dell senior product manager John New attributed the sales volume to the lower price point of the Ubuntu Linux machines
Looks like the price is about the same now for Dell's netbooks whether you get Linux or Windows, but in February it may have been $50 cheaper to get Linux and install a "free" copy of Windows. Plus if you want the ARM processor.
Anyways, it's useful to point out that these are "projections" and "forecasts".
It would be great to find out in Jan 2010 if these numbers came true.
MIT releases research proving that lawyers don't save hospitals money either.
Suck it Harvard!
You'd be surprised.
I used to figure nobody would give a crap about the contents of our family website, so why secure it? We're just normal people among hundreds of millions.
Then when I was checking Google to see who linked to our site I found out that a picture of my one year old daughter was posted on a porn forum b/c someone thought she was cute.
Since then I've removed the image, blocked Google from crawling it, and secured the site behind a login.
Plus I have to go through all the photos from my iPhone and remove the geotagging info from them.
Pain in the butt, but it's better to take privacy precautions now than assume no one is looking and deal with the consequences later.
Now would be a GREAT time to go alter the wikipedia articles on NP completeness and such, then watch the aftermath on slashdot as the n00bs go do their research and learn what it is for the first time!
This is from Apple's letter to the FCC, regarding why they rejected / delayed the Google Voice app:
We created an approval process that reviews every application submitted to Apple for the App Store in order to protect consumer privacy, safeguard children from inappropriate content, and avoid applications that degrade the core experience of the iPhone. Some types of content such as pornography are rejected outright from the App Store, while others such as graphic combat scenes in action games may be approved but with an appropriate age rating. Most rejections are based on bugs found in the applications. When there is an issue, we try to provide the developer with helpful feedback so they can modify the application in order for us to approve it. 95% of applications are approved within 14 days of their submission.
Well, there's an easy way to test this, right?
Go make an iPhone app that is simply a piece of malware that steals your personal information.
If Apple rejects it because it "violates their terms and services", then clearly their terms and services cover checking for malware.
E = MC ** 2 +- 3db
