sethg

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151.
by sethg 15y ago
They blurred the face of the guy in the store, but not the faces on the comic-book covers. Interesting.
152.
by sethg 15y ago
(disclaimer: Nokia employee) On the one hand, maintaining two OS teams for the same hardware would be a waste of resources. On the other hand, I have heard stories of how Microsoft would often commit several teams to build a product to the
153.
by sethg 15y ago
In fairness, I think the circumstances leading up to the layoffs were not something that a better Web site could have prevented. The company was trying to expand into new markets with very different requirements than our previous customers
154.
by sethg 15y ago
A few years ago, at my previous employer (the one that was bought by my current employer), the consultants responsible for redesigning the company Web site walked us through the new home page, describing the rationale behind various element
155.
by sethg 15y ago
Given the state of higher-ed funding, this is a pipe dream, but... I wish every first- and second-tier university department could make one graduate student the department’s official Wikipedia liaison, spending twentysomething hours a week
156.
by sethg 15y ago
I think that in general, when you’re in a toxic work environment, you either realize it’s toxic or you don’t. If you don’t realize it’s toxic, then you are likely to assume that anything the boss blames on you really is your own fault, so
157.
by sethg 15y ago
I believe the theory is that the A players, secure in their own skills, want to be able to delegate work to people who are as competent as they are, whereas the B players want to surround themselves with people who make them look good by
158.
by sethg 15y ago
Ideally, collecting status is great work for an administrative resource like a project coordinator If project coordination isn’t part of a manager’s job description, what is?
159.
by sethg 15y ago
His genius move was turning Apple’s engineering talent to making sub-$1000 products that were not personal computers and therefore had profit margins comparable to the Mac’s . PC manufacturers went with the strategy of “we used to be abl
160.
by sethg 15y ago
In the USSR, everyone had their ethnic identity listed on their government-issued identification.
161.
by sethg 15y ago
And during the Clinton Administration, he criticized protectionist Democrats.
162.
by sethg 15y ago
Now that we have Unicode fonts, we can bring it back! “Dear Mr. Jones: I am pleaſed to reply to your meßage of Tueſsday laſt, requeſting my ſervices as a ſoft-ware engineer...”
163.
by sethg 15y ago
I have this image of Steve watching the keynote on TV from his hospital bed, and then turning to his doctor and saying, “OK, I’m done here.”
164.
by sethg 15y ago
I am upvoting this because I think it is an essay worth thinking about, but I’m not sure if I agree with it.
165.
by sethg 15y ago
I think in the author’s ideal world, we would not have Photocopier, Scanner, and Eraser objects, but rather a Paper object that can copy, scan, and erase itself.
166.
by sethg 15y ago
If you want to pack that much information into a URL, it’s going to look ugly no matter how it’s formatted. (I assume you have some reason for not just passing a session key in the URL and keeping all the relevant state on the server.)
167.
by sethg 15y ago
You can translate the base64 version into a readable form from the terminal using widely available libraries. For example, using a Python interpreter you can do this: >>> from base64 import b64decode >>> from
168.
by sethg 15y ago
The standard URL query-string syntax, supported by libraries in every programming language worth using, uses & and = to construct “key1=value1&key2=value2”-style parameters. URLON completely breaks that syntax: if I see something l
169.
by sethg 15y ago
This. When you own a DVD, you can rent it out as many times as you want and you don’t owe the studio another dime. When you have a digital movie on a server, every act of streaming it to a customer constitutes “copying”, subject to a lice
170.
by sethg 15y ago
Also, Greece’s original accession to the EU was motivated in part by geopolitical considerations; Greece applied for membership shortly after a democratic government replaced seven years of harsh military rule.
171.
by sethg 15y ago
Related: A decade or so ago, I worked for a small company that was acquired by Lucent, and part of their legal paperwork involved assigning any IP we created that was relevant to Lucent’s current or future businesses. A co-worker of mine
172.
by sethg 15y ago
I think this is where small presses (or specialized imprints/brands from larger publishers) can make a big difference, even in the post-paper-book world, for authors that appeal to a niche market. Last week I was browsing the SF shelves at
173.
by sethg 15y ago
There’s no Moore’s Law for novels. There have been some technological improvements that make writing more efficient (e.g., word processors), but the process for making most other consumer products has become efficient at an even faster rate
174.
by sethg 15y ago
Nick Mamatas (who is both a writer and a small-press editor) once argued that the true market value of an ebook, at least for fiction, is around 99 cents, because that’s how much a typical book costs in a used bookstore. (Not having visite
175.
by sethg 15y ago
Perhaps the analog/digital distinction is relevant here. If you are making yogurt, and you slightly deviate from the ideal recipe (leave the culture growing for too long?), you will probably get yogurt that tastes a little off. If you are
176.
by sethg 15y ago
Consider the effect on wages. If computers get cheaper while the average consumer’s disposable income stays constant, then people will just buy fancier computers, or spend less on computers and use their savings to buy more of other things,
177.
by sethg 15y ago
Google’s problem, at this point, is that a lot of the “others” being “passively” indexed are spammers trying to game its algorithms. Google would be foolish not to leverage its money and its brand recognition to find ways to work around
178.
by sethg 15y ago
Deflationary spirals happen when the average price of everything, economy-wide, is going down. It’s perfectly normal for some things in the economy to get cheaper while other things get more expensive. Consumer technology is conspicuous a
179.
by sethg 15y ago
Why do people line up for things like day-after-Thanksgiving sales? Because they know that the retailer is offering someting they want that will become more expensive later . So yeah, people who want TVs, and who think that TVs are about
180.
by sethg 15y ago
People who want TVs (or who want to replace their current TVs) will buy one eventually . But if you’re in the TV-manufacturing business, there’s a big difference between a world in which the average TV gets replaced every three years and

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