jsean

I'd freak out if that second example from the feature-list would happen to me while I was browsing some site. "Hello I see you are having issues finding the 'free account' button?" ... "are you spying on me?"

edit: ok, maybe not "freak out" but i'd certainly feel at unease. Specially if it was a site enabling some form of PIM/im/private-ish activity.

Seems quite useful. Though I was wondering;

How do you measure the "relation" one has with a user? I.e. going from red to green on the meter - what are the factors?

Does your service also provide, built-in, the ability for our users to give us feedback directly at our own site?

Lastly, if you can, would you mind sharing with us the name of the 3rd party service you're referring to (to find social data from email addresses)?

Anyways, something like this might very well be what we've been looking for. Or rather, we're looking for a method/service/platform to enable us to effectivly communicate with our customers (not necesserily in terms of "effective medium").

>>Google might make money from advertising, yes. But, as far as the average person is concerned, Google means search.

Yes, exactly, precisely that is what I find funny. Not in a "you average people, go read up on your google facts" or even in a way that I particularly care take a stand against/with. I just find it cosmically funny somehow. If I may stretch it a tad; almost in a dystopian, dark comedic sense.

edit: and also, you say "average", in my above post I said news stories, that is, journalists. They really shouldn't be "average" in this context. If they are, then yeah sure, their readers will become.

It's funny how people still refer to Google as a search-company.

Where I live, up in northern europe, in pretty much every single news story where google is mentioned they still say "the search giant", "the websearch company" etc. The same way they call(ed) Microsoft "the software giant".

edit: I don't think "search giant" or even "search" is or ever was an approprate tag for Google. It is and has always been an ad aggregating (adregator?) company who merely used (and now even more) the vast quantity of content on the web and the users desire to locate it as the underlying mechanism for enabling it's business.

>>.. it sounds like Facebook missed out on a hire it probably should have made. Commitment, motivation, intelligence, and learning skills..

When you say Facebook missed out on a hire it implies he has what they seek and by not hiring him they are now not getting what they first sought, right? I wonder if that's the case though. There probably exists people who are committed, motivated, intelligent and has good learning skills but yet also would manage to perform "flawlessly" (during the interview) or even as sought.

Now I'm not saying anything about whether they should have hired him or not, just merely stating that above conditions (commitment etc) are not always enough when comparing candidates. Ones current knowledge base is a factor since if persona A has x amount of knowledge and person B has y where y>x it would take A time to go from x to y while in the same time B goes from y to z where z>y.

>>just his lack of knowledge about some technical issues

"just". That's the thing. Why not hire the committed, motivated, intelligent, good learning-skilled person without that lack of knowledge about that technical issue? As he states in his post -- it's not like [big tech-company] has a shortage of bright people to pick and choose from.

"The U.S. would be a less likely suspect because it uses offensive cyberoperations infrequently and usually only under specific circumstances when officials are confident the operation will affect only its target, current and former U.S. officials said."

I wonder what a "current or former [any country] officials" would have said other than a paraphrase of above...

Really I'm not being conspiratorial here, just thinking out aloud whether quoted statement is meaningless or not.

Squeryl is really awesome as far as scala-orms go. I've used it in a couple of hobby projects and currently am using it in a bigger, and hopefully revenue bringing, project (a mix consisting of scala, wicket, squeryl and mysql. So far so good!)

Maxime, the guy behind squeryl is also very very helpful. I've posted a few questions on squeryl's group and have never waited more than a day for a reply.

Perhaps it's because squeryl still is relatively unknown, but still, this goes to show that this project at least has a Human Interface which is always nice.

Lastly, hopefully squeryl will get some more attention now that Lift has given it some official attention.

Anyways, yeah. Squeryl. Cheers.

An alternative for gnome; Klavaro. Despite the 'K' it's gtk.

How come Robert sucks?

edit: ok, if you didn't notice source's filename; http://sota.gen.nz/compat2/robert_you_suck.c

And just in case... also ;)

Yeah, that was what I thought too! I remember snakes having something more akin to heat vision - and thus meaning no dead prey. My facts might be outdated or just simply wrong. Better check my facts.

Well.. I do that and I also code.

What are some of those intangible aspects? Any examples?

What more specifically is meant by giving the product a "personality"? A touch of distinction, perhaps even allowing it to be opinionated. But what does that mean on a more practical/concrete level?

I pretty much agree with what you've said. Although, regarding "I ask them then that by the same logic, out of the billions of species that have existed on this planet there's gotta be more species like us doing the same things that we do?" My answer would be - sound logic but flawed line of thought. Since all billion species here on earth are confined in this well connected area it means, all billion species pretty much have been and still are competing with each others and amongst themselves. Meaning there can in the end only be one winner (following some sort of law of the jungle). The winner gets to type these words.

If we assume "since space is vast, there's gotta be a planet somewhere that has similar environment like Earth and thus similar life forms inhabiting it" we can regard each of those planets as completely separate competitions and thus there can be as many winners as there are "similar environments"

Regarding creativity; It'd be interesting to see what happens when one mixes Provigil (+focus, -creativity) with something that boosts creativity. Marijuana for instance (-focus, +creativity)?

That's kind of what I thought too. I have been using video calls for ages. Yes really - ages. First time using my htc TyTN/Hermes. Nowadays using my Nokia N900. It's weird your post got downvoted. Someone care to take a guess on why? I would (guess) but I honestly can't find any reason at all besides fanboyism and I don't want to acknowledge that such things happens around here...

"Google, Times of London, New York Times Consider Paid Content Plans"

Google, Times of London, New York Times is not, however hard it is to snap out of that belief, the internet.

Another point totally oblivion to many authors of such articles is that the internet is a WORLD WIDE web. For many europeans for instance "internet" is still "free internet". Content is free. News is free. Information is free.

Personally I wouldn't say it's free per se though. Rather "publicly available". Still, in practice it's the same effect for the end user.

Headline should read;

"The end of Big Corporations providing free access to their content on the internet"

"The plan was [...] to see: a) If a bomb's radiation would make it harder to see what was up there (like incoming Russian missiles!); b) If an explosion would do any damage to objects nearby; c) If the Van Allen belts would move a blast down the bands to an earthly target (Moscow! for example); and — most peculiar — d) if a man-made explosion might "alter" the natural shape of the belts."

Well... what did they learn then? I find it very insatisfactory when articles only state an hypothesis or the how of an experiment. Surely people are interested in the results too?

Fun indeed. Unfortunately he'll probably only get offended and completely miss the part about you subtly trying to prove a point.

If only we could _counter_ their "that's easy" with a similar statement of our own thrown back at them...

Something like;

-Hey Mr. Developer we need to implement feature X. I think it's a 5 minute thing really. You only need to Y and then we're set. Should take an hour or less. Probably less if you just insert and if statement in module Z.

-Sure thing Mr. Manager/Sales/What-the-heck-do-u-really-do-around-here-anyways-guy. But may I ask... Do they [the customer] really need this feature?

-What do you mean? They asked for it specifically and besides they're paying us in gold.

-Well instead of implementing this feature can't we just convince 'em [the customer] that they really don't need this feature and would actually be better of paying us 10x what they do today? That's just simple sales and accounting! I bet all you need is a phone call. That way we could play Pong all day AND make more money.

Neither was that ever implied... ?

You can try saying that you committed to your past employers to keep your salary confidential, and you need to honor that.

This whole episode is probably staged and directed by Apple. Great way to call attention to an upcoming release. Oh and also to get people like me, who otherwise never would've read an iPhone spec/review, to actually read an iPhone spec/review.

You got me there Apple! Well played.

If one only could read the other pages besides "Introduction"...

Thanks a lot for your informative answer. Really. That was probably mostly what I wanted to know - if 100mbit is enough. In that case I'll use my old pentium something, ubuntulize it and stick it in the store room. Power usage is not really a problem - economically. Unlimited usage, fixed price, included in rent... Also, during my 25+ years I think I've experienced one power failure so power failure is not a problem either. Though perhaps a UPS might be wise to invest in anyways. At least along the road.

Tahnks a lot!

Since it's tagged as "Humor", yes I'd say this is an attempt at humor. Also a good one at that too. I enjoyed it.

Your point of view is surely valid. Though what I get from posted article is the fact that url shorteners don't always shorten urls. Thus proving that the philosophy behind the service is either not "to shorten urls" or simply bugged.

I can imagine an url shortener service, which actally at heart wants to shorten urls, already from first line of implementation has something like if(entered_url.length <= generated_url.length) return entered_url

"Their story will be featured on BBC Two's Newsnight on Tuesday 12 January at 2230 GMT and in the documentary Guantanamo Reunited on BBC Radio 5 live on Thursday 14 January at 2200 BST."

Hopefully this article is just some sort of trailer. Seems there is more to come.

Just a side note; what's the need for using an url shortener in a non character count restricted environment? I really don't like clicking a link I don't know the real destination for.

If I'm not the only one who feels like this there is, in this case, unfortunately a risk that Ron has already "lost" two or more votes.

"We can’t verify if the video is authentic in nature [...]"

In other words, there's nothing of real value in this article.

I smell irony.