The Scientific Method is somewhat to blame. The premise is that everything is false until proven to be true, and to go there one must provide a theory and then prove it. This requires that you think of a theory first and propose it. This alone means that you have to think of an answer to a question. By definition if your tests result in something other than you expect, you are already surprised. Then the whole scientific method is pessimistic. Take Bigfoot. whether one believes in Bigfoot or not, Bigfoot is assumed to not exist unless a scientist sees him digging through his trashcan, and most of the suppositions assume him to be an 'animal' of limited intelligence. Why do we not find bones or bodies? Suppose Bigfoot has death rituals as humans do?... not accounted for. Why haven't we found him? Did we ever find D.B. Cooper? Maybe Bigfoot is smart enough to evade human contact. I propose that the scientific method has a flaw. It should become optimistic at some point. If there are hundreds of Bigfoot sightings in a year, as some of the researchers claim, then it becomes unlikely that all are hoaxes or misidentification, so maybe the scientific method should then assume that Bigfoot is likely to exist and is undetectable for some reason. At this point scientists would be less surprised when we finally find real evidence, when, as Jane Goodall did with the great ape, someone finds an encampment someday.
I am not a scientist, and maybe I am oversimplifying it, but I find scientific studies frustrating when I read that everything is always dismissed out of hand until an apple falls from a tree and hits them on the head.
Warner Brother has proven time and again, that they are completely stupid and greedy.
o Let's merge with a DialUp company after the Internet has made them irrelevant. o Let's close all of the Warner Brothers Stores in the malls because they don't earn a profit. YOU DON"T CARE IF THEY EARN A PROFIT! YOU ARE SELLING YOUR ADVERTISING!!! Mickey Mouse is still popular, but no kid ever heard of Bugs Bunny! Because Disney is still selling Mickey Mouse stuff to new kids, and WB killed the goose that laid the golden egg.
Why should this be any different? Instead of encouraging people to spread the popularity of their stuff, they shut it down, and slowly kill it. Years from now Star Wars will still matter because Disney gets this, and Harry Potter will be forgotten because Warner Brothers will have strangled it to death.
They even tried to extort money from people for singing happy birthday! Their own greed ultimately cost them $14 million dollars... the amount, by the way they thought they could extort from people by claiming to own it in first first place.
The are not cheap, but after going through several iterations of "home" routers, Linksys, Belkin, Netgear... you name it. Had to reboot them constantly, only some stuff would successfully connect. None of them were reliable. Most died within a year. Dropped connections. hung connections.. you name it. I hate Windows, and Linux won't run everything I need for work, so I bought a Mac. VERY reliable. I finally got fed up and decided maybe... just maybe I might find something that 'just works'... I bought an Airport out of desperation. My Apple router is almost 10 years old. It has crashed once after lightning caused a power spike that was strong enough to cause the Power suppression unit it is plugged into to clamp the circuit. I have yet to find a single device that failed to connect. I haven't rebooted it since the last security update. I, for one, am sad to see them exit the market leaving it to the 'cheaper alternatives'. Maybe the EdgeMax UniFi might work.
The problem with this is that the programmer knows too much about the code. If there is a form involved, the developer knows what goes where, and if the field name is nonsense, he will still enter the right thing. If the field says 'Name', and the average joe enters his name here, and the developer wants the guys Userid... The developer won't catch this... the Q/A guy will enter hist name, not his userid, and the test will fail. There are tons of examples where the look and feel is wrong, or the error checking is nonsense, and the developer will often fail to catch these, because... well it he thought of it, he would have fixed it or checked for it!
Q/A needs to be done by people that are not familiar with the product... This is a problem for even normal Q/A departments, because the guy doing the Q/A is probably the guy that did it for the last version, and now HE is too familiar with it too!
As for the customer doing the Q/A this is what betas are for. Real end use Q/A will always be done by customers no matter how much we wish it wasn't because of the problems above.
My name is Ray, and I am an executive in a technology company, and my company wants to sell more invasive technology to you, but people like Elon Musk is starting to create fear, so people are starting to worry about thermostats that know everything about you, and speakers that listen to every word you say and send it to us, so I need to go to some Website with a large readership, and strongly proclaim that people like Elon Musk are fear mongers. I need to tell them that having technology rule their lives is a good thing!... oh and p.s. go buy a Nest thermostat and a Google Home, because I need to see if my message got through to you.
With a Subject line like "Good for them" and, although it is indeed true that "It's the VCs money, and they can do what they want with it."... Why is this tagged as "Informative"? It indeed documents how sexist and probably racist the business world is...
Sad yes... because it documents how far from the ideal of equality and selection based on merit instead of prejudice, but "Informative"? Only that the Anonymous Coward posting this subscribes to the prejudice.
How long before you fix Safari so that it no longer gets abysmal numbers in html5Test.com? Apple doesn't support many of the HTML5 features that the other browsers do, so to be cross browser compliant (and to work on an iPhone) they cannot be used. Using Safari Technology Preview you guys get 416 out of 555! You are 100 points behind Chrome and 60 behind Edge and Firefox. You do far better on the ECMAScript compatibility table and the Acid3 test, but you don't get 100% there either... but then only Opera passes that.
It doesn't stop there! Farmers are being hit the same way by John Deer and other manufactures of farm and similar equipment. Manufactures are denying farmers the right to repair their tractors. The poor farmer has to pay exorbitant repair costs because it has been deemed illegal for them to repair their own equipment.
I get tired of movies (and TV shows) with silly improbable plots. All of the technobabble that doesn't even make sense to non-technical people. Plots that NOBODY would do. The good guy with an AK-47 disabling a computer system by inserting a USB stick in some hole in a completely improbable place instead of just putting a round or two in the main CPU. The hero runs all over the place trying to fix something they should just ignore, or the bad guy is coming and they get OUT of their car and hide! The good guys ALWAYS kill 10 bad guys who can't hit the side of a barn with a rocket launcher and then run and hide behind something without picking up the AK-47 the bad guy was carrying and looking at the sidekick saying "I only have one bullet left!"
I used to go to the movies far more than I do now because most of the movies are just SO BAD! The comedies are usually 9th grade humor... An entire comedy with 2 actually good jokes and the rest just make you roll your eyes. Even the good shows! Tom Cruise cast as Jack Reacher, who is supposed to be a bear of a man. Jason Bourne wasn't even a hit man in the books! And these are the good ones!
On TV, when they come up with something interesting, they drive it into the ground. A Chicago police drama is popular, so we get Chicago fire fighters, and emergency people and where will it end? Chicago Janitors! Coming this fall!!! They clean places you would never go!
I did not say USERS were switching to Linux... I said they pretty much missed a huge opportunity with the server market. Sit in any airport or Starbucks and there are often more Macs than Windoze boxes... I am a heavy mac user, but I simply said they have made some serious mistakes, and now that you mention it... Jony Ive is making a mess out of their User market too. Safari gets worse HTML5TEST scores than M$ Edge! The Mag-safe power adapter was genius, so naturally Jony killed it and replaced it with something that would damage the machine if you tripped over it. My top-of-the-line $4,000 iMac crashes sometimes... My older iMac never does. The new Macbooks have me wondering if I might need to look for an alternative next time because I don't care about that silly magic strip across the top of the keyboard, but I prefer using the Wired connection when I am sitting on my desk, and the new Macbook has no Ethernet port, and not enough ports to use for power, backup drive connections, power cables.... In short the new Macbook Pro barely meets my needs.
Their computer strategy is one example. Idiots have decided the computer market is dying.... um.. no it's just saturated. It's a replacement market, not an expanding market. There is still HUGE money to be made, just not on an ever expanding scale.... and Apple have virtually abandoned the computer market. They let Jony destroy their computer line and essentially handed the market to companies like RedHat on a platter. Their Laptops are underpowered with no ports. The iMac has gotten worse with every revision as Jony removed features and expandability. Their server is an underpowered trash can that won't fit into a rack.
Microsoft has made a mess of the data center. They created a huge security nightmare defined by forced outages because every time you touch a Windows box you have to reboot it. Something that was considered a cardinal sin before M$ came alone. Linux has become the server platform of choice for any data center where the CTO isn't an idiot. Why? because Apple wasn't there to pick up the pieces when they should have been. Big companies trust big companies. OSX was just BSD UNIX with a usable GUI. Reliability was right up there with UNIX and Linux... and as companies started getting hacked and Windows boxes became a huge support nightmare, companies started looking for alternatives. Apple being a big company known for 'it just works' would have been the obvious choice... but there is no Apple server. There is no Apple RDP client for Windows->OSX. Instead Steve Jobs died, and Tim Cook made Jony Ive god and they flushed the server business completely. This allowed the Linux guys to finally say "we're here, and we're ready for you!" Companies would not have looked at them except they were backed into a corner and a few tech guys convinced management to put their toe in the open source water and now Apple hasn't a prayer to take it back. Linux IS the server of choice for companies with a clue.
As a consultant, I have recently seen old-school Windows-everywhere companies nuke Windows all over the place in favor of Linux. And don't think M$ didn't notice. MS-SQL on Linux? YUP! Visual Studio on Linux? YUP! Even a Linux subsystem on Windows! YUP! I am betting there will be an Office for Linux next. now that the compiler works, someone in the back room is trying to get the compile errors cleaned up as we speak. As long as Windows dominates the desktop, you won't see it. But the FIRST hint of a Linux desktop migration, and poof! Office for Linux will pop out of the woodwork in about 10 seconds.
It's not their size. It's Tim Cook. He is not the worst CEO ever, but he isn't a visionary leader. He promoted Jony Ive to a position he isn't qualified for, and he has changed the business model from Apple's kill your own product or someone else will to Microsoft's embrace and extend. It will lead to failure.
Tim Cook needs to go, but who could replace him? Elon Musk is the only person I see out there with the kind of vision Steve Jobs had, and we need him where he is.
Tim Cook is a stupid bean counter, and Jony Ive is destroying Apple with his ego. The lost their Consumer Reports recommendation for the first time. Their machines are becoming dreadful.
Even if what you say were true, and it isn't... Spreading and profiting from this stuff makes him morally bankrupt, which might be even worse! So he's a racist and has no moral values whatsoever. He's as bad as Adolf Hitler, and so is Trump.
1. It will crash and your food will spoil. 2. You will get calls requesting your SSN and bank details from people with Indian and Russian accents saying they are from Microsoft support and you have a virus. 3. You will need to double click on the door handle to open it. 4. You will have to pay $300 a year to subscribe to fresh food. 5. The camera will send pictures of you in your underwear at 2 AM to Microsoft for quality improvement. 6. You will need to subscribe to virus protection for your refrigerator.... I can't wait!
PowerShell is M$'s "replacement' for the Command Prompt....or at least that was the idea. Someone spent a whole bunch of time to take the broken M$ command prompt and make it Object Oriented. So instead of just writing a little script, which you essentially can't do in Windows because Batch is almost useless, you create objects. I write software for a living... have used everything from IBM Mainframe assembler to C++, Java, and you name it... and I played with it for a couple of hours once and found it not worth my time to figure out how to use it. It was complicated and... like everything else M$... it worked if you got it right and generated nonsense messages if you didn't. I hated it... Fortunately 'exit' still works....not quite sure how one determines when it is broken.
Maybe this will accelerate Bash integration. I tried to play with the Powershell years ago... YUK! Lets take a shell and make it Object Oriented... Huh? Why? it's a F*ing command prompt. Why oh why make it so complicated?
Slashdot Mirror
The Scientific Method is somewhat to blame. The premise is that everything is false until proven to be true, and to go there one must provide a theory and then prove it. This requires that you think of a theory first and propose it. This alone means that you have to think of an answer to a question. By definition if your tests result in something other than you expect, you are already surprised. Then the whole scientific method is pessimistic. Take Bigfoot. whether one believes in Bigfoot or not, Bigfoot is assumed to not exist unless a scientist sees him digging through his trashcan, and most of the suppositions assume him to be an 'animal' of limited intelligence. Why do we not find bones or bodies? Suppose Bigfoot has death rituals as humans do? ... not accounted for. Why haven't we found him? Did we ever find D.B. Cooper? Maybe Bigfoot is smart enough to evade human contact. I propose that the scientific method has a flaw. It should become optimistic at some point. If there are hundreds of Bigfoot sightings in a year, as some of the researchers claim, then it becomes unlikely that all are hoaxes or misidentification, so maybe the scientific method should then assume that Bigfoot is likely to exist and is undetectable for some reason. At this point scientists would be less surprised when we finally find real evidence, when, as Jane Goodall did with the great ape, someone finds an encampment someday.
I am not a scientist, and maybe I am oversimplifying it, but I find scientific studies frustrating when I read that everything is always dismissed out of hand until an apple falls from a tree and hits them on the head.
Here here! And take Jony Ive with his simple elegance (who needs upgradability and ports?) with you!
Warner Brother has proven time and again, that they are completely stupid and greedy.
o Let's merge with a DialUp company after the Internet has made them irrelevant.
o Let's close all of the Warner Brothers Stores in the malls because they don't earn a profit. YOU DON"T CARE IF THEY EARN A PROFIT! YOU ARE SELLING YOUR ADVERTISING!!! Mickey Mouse is still popular, but no kid ever heard of Bugs Bunny! Because Disney is still selling Mickey Mouse stuff to new kids, and WB killed the goose that laid the golden egg.
Why should this be any different? Instead of encouraging people to spread the popularity of their stuff, they shut it down, and slowly kill it. Years from now Star Wars will still matter because Disney gets this, and Harry Potter will be forgotten because Warner Brothers will have strangled it to death.
They even tried to extort money from people for singing happy birthday! Their own greed ultimately cost them $14 million dollars... the amount, by the way they thought they could extort from people by claiming to own it in first first place.
The are not cheap, but after going through several iterations of "home" routers, Linksys, Belkin, Netgear... you name it. Had to reboot them constantly, only some stuff would successfully connect. None of them were reliable. Most died within a year. Dropped connections. hung connections.. you name it. I hate Windows, and Linux won't run everything I need for work, so I bought a Mac. VERY reliable. I finally got fed up and decided maybe ... just maybe I might find something that 'just works'... I bought an Airport out of desperation. My Apple router is almost 10 years old. It has crashed once after lightning caused a power spike that was strong enough to cause the Power suppression unit it is plugged into to clamp the circuit. I have yet to find a single device that failed to connect. I haven't rebooted it since the last security update. I, for one, am sad to see them exit the market leaving it to the 'cheaper alternatives'. Maybe the EdgeMax UniFi might work.
The problem with this is that the programmer knows too much about the code. If there is a form involved, the developer knows what goes where, and if the field name is nonsense, he will still enter the right thing. If the field says 'Name', and the average joe enters his name here, and the developer wants the guys Userid... The developer won't catch this... the Q/A guy will enter hist name, not his userid, and the test will fail. There are tons of examples where the look and feel is wrong, or the error checking is nonsense, and the developer will often fail to catch these, because ... well it he thought of it, he would have fixed it or checked for it!
Q/A needs to be done by people that are not familiar with the product... This is a problem for even normal Q/A departments, because the guy doing the Q/A is probably the guy that did it for the last version, and now HE is too familiar with it too!
As for the customer doing the Q/A this is what betas are for. Real end use Q/A will always be done by customers no matter how much we wish it wasn't because of the problems above.
Hi,
My name is Ray, and I am an executive in a technology company, and my company wants to sell more invasive technology to you, but people like Elon Musk is starting to create fear, so people are starting to worry about thermostats that know everything about you, and speakers that listen to every word you say and send it to us, so I need to go to some Website with a large readership, and strongly proclaim that people like Elon Musk are fear mongers. I need to tell them that having technology rule their lives is a good thing! ... oh and p.s. go buy a Nest thermostat and a Google Home, because I need to see if my message got through to you.
With a Subject line like "Good for them" and, although it is indeed true that "It's the VCs money, and they can do what they want with it."... Why is this tagged as "Informative"? It indeed documents how sexist and probably racist the business world is...
Sad yes... because it documents how far from the ideal of equality and selection based on merit instead of prejudice, but "Informative"? Only that the Anonymous Coward posting this subscribes to the prejudice.
I already saw some website recently showing all kinds of sill IoT things. Don't remember where, but seriously useless silly stuff.
Dear Apple,
How long before you fix Safari so that it no longer gets abysmal numbers in html5Test.com? Apple doesn't support many of the HTML5 features that the other browsers do, so to be cross browser compliant (and to work on an iPhone) they cannot be used. Using Safari Technology Preview you guys get 416 out of 555! You are 100 points behind Chrome and 60 behind Edge and Firefox. You do far better on the ECMAScript compatibility table and the Acid3 test, but you don't get 100% there either... but then only Opera passes that.
Please fix this!
It doesn't stop there! Farmers are being hit the same way by John Deer and other manufactures of farm and similar equipment. Manufactures are denying farmers the right to repair their tractors. The poor farmer has to pay exorbitant repair costs because it has been deemed illegal for them to repair their own equipment.
I get tired of movies (and TV shows) with silly improbable plots. All of the technobabble that doesn't even make sense to non-technical people. Plots that NOBODY would do. The good guy with an AK-47 disabling a computer system by inserting a USB stick in some hole in a completely improbable place instead of just putting a round or two in the main CPU. The hero runs all over the place trying to fix something they should just ignore, or the bad guy is coming and they get OUT of their car and hide! The good guys ALWAYS kill 10 bad guys who can't hit the side of a barn with a rocket launcher and then run and hide behind something without picking up the AK-47 the bad guy was carrying and looking at the sidekick saying "I only have one bullet left!"
I used to go to the movies far more than I do now because most of the movies are just SO BAD! The comedies are usually 9th grade humor... An entire comedy with 2 actually good jokes and the rest just make you roll your eyes. Even the good shows! Tom Cruise cast as Jack Reacher, who is supposed to be a bear of a man. Jason Bourne wasn't even a hit man in the books! And these are the good ones!
On TV, when they come up with something interesting, they drive it into the ground. A Chicago police drama is popular, so we get Chicago fire fighters, and emergency people and where will it end? Chicago Janitors! Coming this fall!!! They clean places you would never go!
Must be Rotten Tomato's fault indeed.
Every piece of hardware is erratic under Windows and rock stable under Linux.
I did not say USERS were switching to Linux... I said they pretty much missed a huge opportunity with the server market. Sit in any airport or Starbucks and there are often more Macs than Windoze boxes... I am a heavy mac user, but I simply said they have made some serious mistakes, and now that you mention it... Jony Ive is making a mess out of their User market too. Safari gets worse HTML5TEST scores than M$ Edge! The Mag-safe power adapter was genius, so naturally Jony killed it and replaced it with something that would damage the machine if you tripped over it. My top-of-the-line $4,000 iMac crashes sometimes... My older iMac never does. The new Macbooks have me wondering if I might need to look for an alternative next time because I don't care about that silly magic strip across the top of the keyboard, but I prefer using the Wired connection when I am sitting on my desk, and the new Macbook has no Ethernet port, and not enough ports to use for power, backup drive connections, power cables .... In short the new Macbook Pro barely meets my needs.
Their computer strategy is one example. Idiots have decided the computer market is dying. ... um.. no it's just saturated. It's a replacement market, not an expanding market. There is still HUGE money to be made, just not on an ever expanding scale. ... and Apple have virtually abandoned the computer market. They let Jony destroy their computer line and essentially handed the market to companies like RedHat on a platter. Their Laptops are underpowered with no ports. The iMac has gotten worse with every revision as Jony removed features and expandability. Their server is an underpowered trash can that won't fit into a rack.
Microsoft has made a mess of the data center. They created a huge security nightmare defined by forced outages because every time you touch a Windows box you have to reboot it. Something that was considered a cardinal sin before M$ came alone. Linux has become the server platform of choice for any data center where the CTO isn't an idiot. Why? because Apple wasn't there to pick up the pieces when they should have been. Big companies trust big companies. OSX was just BSD UNIX with a usable GUI. Reliability was right up there with UNIX and Linux... and as companies started getting hacked and Windows boxes became a huge support nightmare, companies started looking for alternatives. Apple being a big company known for 'it just works' would have been the obvious choice... but there is no Apple server. There is no Apple RDP client for Windows->OSX. Instead Steve Jobs died, and Tim Cook made Jony Ive god and they flushed the server business completely. This allowed the Linux guys to finally say "we're here, and we're ready for you!" Companies would not have looked at them except they were backed into a corner and a few tech guys convinced management to put their toe in the open source water and now Apple hasn't a prayer to take it back. Linux IS the server of choice for companies with a clue.
As a consultant, I have recently seen old-school Windows-everywhere companies nuke Windows all over the place in favor of Linux. And don't think M$ didn't notice. MS-SQL on Linux? YUP! Visual Studio on Linux? YUP! Even a Linux subsystem on Windows! YUP! I am betting there will be an Office for Linux next. now that the compiler works, someone in the back room is trying to get the compile errors cleaned up as we speak. As long as Windows dominates the desktop, you won't see it. But the FIRST hint of a Linux desktop migration, and poof! Office for Linux will pop out of the woodwork in about 10 seconds.
Where does this leave Apple?
It's not their size. It's Tim Cook. He is not the worst CEO ever, but he isn't a visionary leader. He promoted Jony Ive to a position he isn't qualified for, and he has changed the business model from Apple's kill your own product or someone else will to Microsoft's embrace and extend. It will lead to failure.
Tim Cook needs to go, but who could replace him? Elon Musk is the only person I see out there with the kind of vision Steve Jobs had, and we need him where he is.
If Micro$oft wants to please me, they need to work on a Lightweight version of Windows known as Linux.
.. that I have yet to talk to anyone with a 'Geek Squad' shirt that knew what the hell he or she was talking about.
Tim Cook is a stupid bean counter, and Jony Ive is destroying Apple with his ego. The lost their Consumer Reports recommendation for the first time. Their machines are becoming dreadful.
Even if what you say were true, and it isn't... Spreading and profiting from this stuff makes him morally bankrupt, which might be even worse! So he's a racist and has no moral values whatsoever. He's as bad as Adolf Hitler, and so is Trump.
Yup. Linux has mostly caught up. I am considering moving to Linux Mint. Tim Cook and Jony Ive have ruined Apple.
'ceptin' Alice.
1. It will crash and your food will spoil. ... I can't wait!
2. You will get calls requesting your SSN and bank details from people with Indian and Russian accents saying they are from Microsoft support and you have a virus.
3. You will need to double click on the door handle to open it.
4. You will have to pay $300 a year to subscribe to fresh food.
5. The camera will send pictures of you in your underwear at 2 AM to Microsoft for quality improvement.
6. You will need to subscribe to virus protection for your refrigerator.
PowerShell is M$'s "replacement' for the Command Prompt. ...or at least that was the idea. Someone spent a whole bunch of time to take the broken M$ command prompt and make it Object Oriented. So instead of just writing a little script, which you essentially can't do in Windows because Batch is almost useless, you create objects. I write software for a living... have used everything from IBM Mainframe assembler to C++, Java, and you name it ... and I played with it for a couple of hours once and found it not worth my time to figure out how to use it. It was complicated and ... like everything else M$ ... it worked if you got it right and generated nonsense messages if you didn't. I hated it ... Fortunately 'exit' still works. ...not quite sure how one determines when it is broken.
Maybe this will accelerate Bash integration. I tried to play with the Powershell years ago... YUK! Lets take a shell and make it Object Oriented... Huh? Why? it's a F*ing command prompt. Why oh why make it so complicated?
So now I can overlay one dreadful GUI with another equally dreadful GUI.
Why would I want to do this?