Well, Google has the marketplace cornered for streaming video sites with YouTube. It has the power to effect such a change so don't be so shortsighted.
Assuming of course that people don't visit YouTube, find it 'broken' and go on to one of the other video streaming sites. So yeah, it does have to power to effect change. It also has the power to shoot itself in the foot with an atomic cannon.
I haven't had my number ever stolen but my brother in law has and they racked up $6k on it in 24 hours. the bank canceled the card and wiped the debt, including the $200 annual fee he should have had to pay anyway.
I've seriously considered writing to Jeff Bezos and saying I will only buy a Kindle if he will arrange to get me free Kindle copies of all the books I bought, which the eBook industry has rendered useless piles of bits.
While that would be nice, you are forgetting that there's no such thing as a free lunch—and when you bought your physical books, you were buying them with the explicit understanding that that's the only copy you got.
Imagine: if you buy hardcover version of a book, would you also demand that you should be given a free copy of the paperback (perhaps for a buck or so to cover the printing costs)? If you can't make that demand for printed copies (and most people would consider such demands unreasonable), why should you be able to make the same demand just because the copy is digital, instead of print?
If Amazon can work out that kind of deal, you, as Amazon's customer, will be paying for that in other ways—which is probably why they didn't work out such a deal.
apples are PCs too...
That is a good argument for fixing the income tax system as it applies to individuals but a very poor one for giving corporations tax advantages over individuals.
Never ask any question here that essentially asks: "Am I shit because I use Windows?". You will always get plenty of "yes"'s here.
Fortunately, being a geek has nothing to do with what Slashdotters think of you.
I'd moderate this retarded if I could, but it's not an option. Probably Palin had it removed. Anyway, allow me to explain.
Not sure if I'm being clear here, but a "standard change" is not an estimate - it's something we've done before and know exactly how long it takes. If you are doing any actual estimating, the more "estimating" you do vs. using historical data, the more range of error you'll have. I'll babble on this subject for a while, but that's the gist of this post.
There are different types of changes. If you're estimating something you've done a hundred times, you know exactly how long it will take. Something like custom configuration for a client, routine maintenance, things like that. You'll be correct on how long it takes.
If a customer wants a new web service, and you've never done a web service, you're going to be wrong no matter how much you quantify. You can determine how many objects you need to create/update, but you can't tell how long it will take.
In other words, estimating has to take into account many different things:
How many objects will be updated/added
How many of those will be trivial vs. complex changes
Level of familiarity of the person/people implementing it
Assumption that the number of objects is correct, and nothing was missed
Necessary documentation available *and correct*
Historical accuracy of estimating (are you getting better at estimating overall?)
Historical accuracy of estimating the kind of change requested (are you getting better at estimating *this*?)
Overhead of gates/reviews and change control or other process
Testing resource availability, familiarity with the new items, correct documentation supplied to whomever is testing
If MSDN or man page isn't correct, you're going to do a lot of debugging. If the client's web service you're connecting to doesn't match what you were given, you're doing rewrites once you hit testing. If your change is ready to go but a company-wide routing change is scheduled for the same date so you can't test your implementation, you're stuck. If the CSS works until someone enters a long comment, and you need to find a workaround to the layout, you're better off just saying won't fix.
Bottom line, the more foreign something is, the more incorrect you will be. If you are estimating something you've already done, there's not need to estimate - it's already done! So by definition, we are either dealing with something simple like search/replace and run, or something foreign where you're going to be wrong no matter what.
I'll close with - in a modern company, all code should be reusable. So you only do things once. So you can't learn to estimate more accurately, since you're always estimating something different. The only way to have accurate estimating is to have a solid team working together for a while, and doing similar work. Just limit yourself to things you know, and you'll be right.
I was only able to see one video on the site hosting the contest results. I actually had to google search the winner, and watch a copy from Viddler.
You are running a software built by said commercial 3rd-party company. They don't need that server in the middle to see all of those things.
So there's no increase in capability if they are malicious. There is an increase in risk if they are incompetent - and do something like cache requests/responses containing that data.
I don't want to be young again, I just don't want to get any older.
