Posts by thickasthieves 8 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Mar 2011
This wasn't A/B testing by any measure of the term, once one reads the PNAS paper by Kramer, Guillory, and Hancock (https://cornell.app.box.com/fbcontagion).
I hope El Reg and other journos now apply scrutiny to not only Facebook, but all of the other major social networks to find out what, exactly, their equivalents to the Facebook Data Science Group (which ran this experiment) are doing with their big data collections.
The cost of _finding_ a skilled reverse-engineering developer who is willing to undertake the work on contract is a challenge for a small business owner, let alone budgeting for the legitimate costs that the developer will incur while doing the work.
In addition, even if the base formats were to be reverse-engineered, if the original developer decided (for understandable IP protection reasons) to put in any amount of encryption (or even some well-placed obfuscation of critical code, parameters, or key data structures), then the reverse engineer would be faced with yet another set of hurdles, and the costs would go through the roof.
I could easily see such an effort, undertaken by a single developer, to run to $10k or $15k, or perhaps even $25k or more.
In my judgment, the best thing to do is to find some expert systems software assistance (which, while costly, will be far less so than an entire reverse development effort), and virtualize that Windows 98 machine so that it can easily, safely, and forever be run on a modern hypervisor.
Alternatively, hire a cheap offshore data entry team (or put it up for Amazon's Mechanical Turk) to rekey all the data into a modern application.
Traffic on both University Ave and Marsh Rd, from highway 101 through East Palo Alto to the peripheral portion of Menlo Park which houses the new Facebook campus is a major issue. I can't disagree.
In the mornings during the school year, you have the additional burden of the students at Mid-Peninsula High School. And in the evenings on University Ave, you always have a traffic jam right at the 101 exit, there where Ikea, Home Depot, and Best Buy are sited.
But your suggestion, really? Have Facebook move from the heart of Silicon Valley to a location 2-3 hours to the north, when the bulk of their employees live on the peninsula, in the city, and in the South Bay.
I understand the Ukiah Chamber of Commerce needs to drum up business in a major way, but you're just not thinking it through.
It would be far better for those educated Mendocino County locals jonesing for work to find a cheapish weekly rental in East Palo Alto and do the Monday commute down, Friday commute back north.
I also visited that site often when I sold to Sun. There's really one main exit from that campus, a stoplight controlled exit that allows you to head east on the Bayfron Expy, south on Willow Rd (CA-84), or northeast onto the Dumbarton Bridge.
It wasn't all that good for Sun, and I knew of a number of Sun employees who chose to work out of the nearby Sun location just across the bridge in Newark to spare themselves the burden of having to wait fifteen minutes just to leave campus in the evening.
@Henry Wertz 1: Thanks for your comment. Is it fair to say that most end-users have no idea that 2 browsers exist on their phone, and also have no idea how to go about using a specific browser?
Is this also true of a developer, or do they know which one their code will be running in? Can they choose which browser to use?
I don't have an iOS device. By default, do Apple apps use one browser, and apps from the web store or from the internet use the other browser?
Thanks for any answers and for cleaing up the mystery.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
