The real story is OS X and somehow Apple getting signed code wrong. Maybe some folks had a connection that was super slow and had trouble getting XCode directly from Apple.
However, presumably, the people using XCode are developers. And somehow, they managed to install software that was presumably not properly signed.
Which really makes one worry about the state of mobile development.
On the other hand, the fact that one could build apps, compile them a little bit different and slip them into the app store is a little concerning. Maybe it was the fake XCode author, maybe it was the app developer, but obviously something isn't being sniffed out right during app vetting.
The challenge sometimes is figuring out what a child does not like something. Does he/she not like computers because the only exposure has been boring/mundane things?
Does he/she not like sports because he/she was put in a league with kids more advanced and was not able to keep up?
Does he/she not like math because the teacher didn't like math and didn't compel an interest?
I can't count the number of times I've sat down to dinner with my kids and they have declared they don't like something we're eating before they've had a fair opportunity to experience it. We generally make them try at least a little bit, and more often than not, they end up eating all of it because it turns out they actually do like it.
I completely agree that sometimes the kid really isn't interested in computers. But sometimes it is worth trying to figure out if the kid doesn't like computers because of computers, and not because of an uncomfortable social situation at a camp.
What is most interesting about twitter is that so many people interact with twitter technology on a daily business without even knowing it. Bootstrap is everywhere and beyond twitter.com is the most influential technology that twitter has built for the web.
If you read the summary more closely, you will see that it says "Earlier this year, it was announced that Microsoft would make Office 365 ProPlus available to all NYC students, and that Google would make its CS First program available to 100K NYC students who participate in after-school programs." The summary is misleading because it attempts to draw a connection between something that isn't necessarily there.
Microsoft is making Office 365 available to NYC students, but that seems to be part of an earlier, separate announcement. Making Office available is potentially helpful to students who can use it to write papers, spreadsheets etc etc. There is nothing to suggest it has to do with CS education apart from the link the summary makes.
And, while I do agree that in general, simply putting more computer equipment in schools won't make students smarter or improve learning (duh), I believe that in the case of computer science, it is useful to have computers available in class for students to use. Not to suggest that a lot of computer science learning cannot be done without computers, for the most part, students, especially at the high school level, are more likely to be engaged if they actually get to write software and see it run.
On the other hand, you could say they filtered out those who were not biased.
I would think it would be reasonable to have some jurors who can acknowledge that sexism exists in tech, and then decide whether sexism was at play in this particular case.
In the same way, if the decision to be made was whether or not a slashdot poster had a normal social life, it would not be fair to only consider the opinions of people who believed that all posters on slashdot were basement dwellers. Then you have to prove two things: one, that it is possible that slashdot posters can have normal social lives, and two that the poster in question had a normal social life.
On the other hand, you are right in saying that you also don't want only people who believe that all slashdot posters have normal social lives and have to prove the contrary point that not only do not all slashdot posters have normal social lives, but in this particular case as well, the slashdot user did not have a normal social life.
Instead, I think ideally, you want jurors who are open to the idea that it is possible that some slashdot users have active social lives and also possible that some slashdot users are basement dwellers and actively avoid face to face interaction with others. Then you are left to look at the facts and decide what was reality in that particular case.
Again, I'm not saying this did or did not happen in Pao's case. I haven't really read enough to make an informed decision. She does seem a bit narcissistic when she claims that "Pao also said she believes it would be nearly impossible for lawyers to find jurors who weren't familiar with her high-profile case in the Internet age". Maybe her circles are different and she is very isolated, but I would suspect that there are large numbers of people who haven't the faintest clue who she is, let alone are familiar with her case.
Her claim is that "I saw how hard it was going to be to win when every potential juror who expressed a belief that sexism exists in tech — a belief that is widely recognized and documented — was not allowed to serve on the jury,"
I don't think I'm somebody who knee-jerk jumps to discrimination. However, if they were filtering out jurors who believe that sexism exists in tech, that certainly seems to be unfair, IMO. Most people certainly would not consider it fair if a gay person was filing a discrimination suit and jurors who believe that discrimination against gay people exists were excluded from sitting on the jury.
I'm not necessarily saying that was the case here, and I haven't read enough to have a strong opinion on whether the case had merit or not. But if those allegations are true then that certainly stands in the way of a fair trial and should be fixed.
The article does say '"I am now moving on, paying Kleiner Perkins’ legal costs and dropping my appeal," Pao wrote. "My experience shows how difficult it is to address discrimination through the court system."'
Now, it is possible that she is paying the legal costs out of the goodness of her heart, but given the second statement indicating that she doesn't believe the decision to be just, I doubt it.
Except with the government job we would have made $19k in a year. This site generated about 280k pounds ($430k), or around 72k per year. So the revenue was about four times as much. Additionally the volume of movies was 12 million streams. This would also be a significantly larger impact than the government worker who presumably distributed to people with whom he had some degree of contact (even if only through second or third degree relationships).
Thus it doesn't seem that unreasonable that there was a more severe sentence. Additionally, you have to factor in the difference between US sentencing and UK sentencing.
Finally, the article claims that "He continued to run the website even after he was served a cease and desist order by the Federation Against Copyright Theft (FACT) and after he was initially arrested."
Whether the sentences are reasonable or not for the crime aside, comparitively it doesn't seem that far off.
I don't think it's fair to say opinion. There are objective metrics that can be optimized for (price, coverage, speed). So an objective factual response is possible. Though the vi/emacs question is similar I guess - vi is objectively better and it is foolish to argue otherwise.
It is likely true that they don't currently have any competition. But Google Fiber is making some inroads, and perhaps they realize that if they don't make any improvements and don't do anything, they are making it easier for disruptive players to enter the market (in whatever form that may take).
Additionally, with the increase of higher bandwidth usage like 4k Netflix as was mentioned or whatever it happens to be, they potentially realized that they were going to have to do something to increase capacity in their backend network if they want to maintain service. People live with traffic volume caps now but as demand for higher caps increases there are going to be more and more complaints, again, opening the field for disruption. Thus they have to beef up their backbone network (my terminology is probably weak as I don't have much knowledge of how ISP networks are constructed and how peering arrangements and such work). You can't really sell an improved backbone network to customers, but if you couple that with last mile upgrades, which are probably going to have to happen eventually anyway, you can drive interest as you prepare for the future.
People are generally willing to pay a little bit more for a service that just works most of the time and is as fast as the other guy. Upgrading their network means that disruptive players have to prove themselves based on something other than speed.
eBay Now was a service being piloted in the bay area and NYC where you could order merchandise from local merchants like Best Buy, Macys and Home Depot and it would be delivered within an hour.
It would have lowered the acceleration of the Google car, but it would have increased the (negative) acceleration of the car that failed to stop resulting in greater neck and back pain.
Interestingly you don't mention how much harder bad weather conditions make driving for human drivers, as well. There is a reason that many more than usual accidents happen when the weather is bad, when it's snowing, late at night (sleepy drivers - never heard about a robot getting sleepy), or when the roads are bad and human drivers think they know it all and can continue at top speeds.
Actually, it always seems like many more than usual accidents happy the first two weeks of the snowy road season, and then people adjust to it.
I suspect that driverless cars would adjust quicker and you'd get better results than human drivers.
Nonetheless, the point that driverless cars need to be tested and verified in these conditions before being approved for general use is valid, though probably obvious.
While perhaps true in some cases, it is rather clear from the linked video that it is entirely the human's fault in this case. Unless you have different 'rules of the road' than we do here and the driverless car was expected to do something else (what exactly are you expecting the driverless car to do? It isn't clear that there were lots of options from the video - perhaps move ahead a foot but it seems like that would at best delay the crash). There were two cars stopped at the light, the Google car was behind it, and there were about four or five car lengths between the Google car and the car that rear ended it. The two cars ahead and the Google car stopped well ahead of the at fault vehicle and the at fault vehicle did not slow down.
Well, perhaps fault is the wrong word. Obviously drivers are ultimately responsible for their own vehicles.
That being said, distracting things are distracting and I wonder if the same driver would have been distracted if there were no obvious markings that it was a self driving car.
I think it is perhaps *partly* the Google car's fault. Not because of the way that the Google car drives.
I wonder if the Google car itself serves as a distraction to other drives. Perhaps other drivers find themselves driving behind a Google car, reach over to get their phones to take a picture or video or something, and the distraction causes them to make an error while driving.
Yes, that was the narrative at the time - 'they are taking away our freedom'. In hindsight, even though I probably would have heavily criticized Apple for the move, and would have pointed to it as a reason to choose Android, the reality of the situation was, at least in my experience, that Flash on Android was a rather shitty experience that never really worked that well. And while it seemed arrogant and annoying that Steve Jobs tried to use his sway to annihilate Flash as a platform, I now believe that it was for the best. Flash has a heavy impact on battery life, is generally a lot slower, and is generally less secure than native alternatives.
So, yes, Apple made a seemingly arrogant move and exiled Flash from the iOS platform, but in the long run this drove development toward alternatives and pushed web developers to use technologies that were more mobile friendly (like using HTML for your content instead of some flash application) and I think the overall net effect for the web community has been positive.
Sure, your point stands. But your point demonstrates a lack of understanding of what people mean when they say 'the cost will be passed on to the customer'.
Well sure. I guess I generally assume that when people say 'the cost will be passed on to customers' I read: 'the extra expense will result in an immediate increase in price for services'.
I mean, obviously people realize that the money ultimately comes from customers. If you presume that statement to say otherwise then you clearly misunderstand what is being said.
As poster above stated, there are a few alternatives: 1. Customer pays 2. Shareholders pay (in the form of less profit) 3. Employees pay in the form of not getting a raise or no increase in compensation 4. The company spends less money on other things to make up the cost
You generally don't change the customer cost too frequently - TWC most likely would not increase costs because they lost a single court case - with a market cap of 50 billion dollars 230k isn't really that much as a one off cost.
In all likelihood this particular cost would be eaten by shareholders in the form of less profit. You can't jerk employees around too much at the lower levels, and executives at the higher levels will probably just be allowed to keep playing. It isn't a significant enough amount of money to really worry about spending less elsewhere as the administrative cost to flip budgets around for such a small amount of money is probably not worth it.
In reality though, I would be rather surprised if an organization as big as TWC didn't have a budget line item at the beginning of the year for things like legal fees, penalties, court costs, etc etc. So in all likelihood, they had already planned to spend some amount of money, and this may or may not have had a big impact on that, and it may or may not cause them to go over budget on legal expenses.
If, over time, the trend of higher legal expenses continues, and overall expenses continue to increase, that would obviously factor into consumer prices. But I wouldn't expect cable/internet prices to rise because of one loss in court.
Slashdot Mirror
The real story is OS X and somehow Apple getting signed code wrong. Maybe some folks had a connection that was super slow and had trouble getting XCode directly from Apple.
However, presumably, the people using XCode are developers. And somehow, they managed to install software that was presumably not properly signed.
Which really makes one worry about the state of mobile development.
On the other hand, the fact that one could build apps, compile them a little bit different and slip them into the app store is a little concerning. Maybe it was the fake XCode author, maybe it was the app developer, but obviously something isn't being sniffed out right during app vetting.
The challenge sometimes is figuring out what a child does not like something. Does he/she not like computers because the only exposure has been boring/mundane things?
Does he/she not like sports because he/she was put in a league with kids more advanced and was not able to keep up?
Does he/she not like math because the teacher didn't like math and didn't compel an interest?
I can't count the number of times I've sat down to dinner with my kids and they have declared they don't like something we're eating before they've had a fair opportunity to experience it. We generally make them try at least a little bit, and more often than not, they end up eating all of it because it turns out they actually do like it.
I completely agree that sometimes the kid really isn't interested in computers. But sometimes it is worth trying to figure out if the kid doesn't like computers because of computers, and not because of an uncomfortable social situation at a camp.
What is most interesting about twitter is that so many people interact with twitter technology on a daily business without even knowing it. Bootstrap is everywhere and beyond twitter.com is the most influential technology that twitter has built for the web.
If you read the summary more closely, you will see that it says "Earlier this year, it was announced that Microsoft would make Office 365 ProPlus available to all NYC students, and that Google would make its CS First program available to 100K NYC students who participate in after-school programs." The summary is misleading because it attempts to draw a connection between something that isn't necessarily there.
Microsoft is making Office 365 available to NYC students, but that seems to be part of an earlier, separate announcement. Making Office available is potentially helpful to students who can use it to write papers, spreadsheets etc etc. There is nothing to suggest it has to do with CS education apart from the link the summary makes.
And, while I do agree that in general, simply putting more computer equipment in schools won't make students smarter or improve learning (duh), I believe that in the case of computer science, it is useful to have computers available in class for students to use. Not to suggest that a lot of computer science learning cannot be done without computers, for the most part, students, especially at the high school level, are more likely to be engaged if they actually get to write software and see it run.
So the title says counting on whereas the summary says hopes to raise. These headlines that are misleading are beginning to annoy me more and more.
On the other hand, you could say they filtered out those who were not biased.
I would think it would be reasonable to have some jurors who can acknowledge that sexism exists in tech, and then decide whether sexism was at play in this particular case.
In the same way, if the decision to be made was whether or not a slashdot poster had a normal social life, it would not be fair to only consider the opinions of people who believed that all posters on slashdot were basement dwellers. Then you have to prove two things: one, that it is possible that slashdot posters can have normal social lives, and two that the poster in question had a normal social life.
On the other hand, you are right in saying that you also don't want only people who believe that all slashdot posters have normal social lives and have to prove the contrary point that not only do not all slashdot posters have normal social lives, but in this particular case as well, the slashdot user did not have a normal social life.
Instead, I think ideally, you want jurors who are open to the idea that it is possible that some slashdot users have active social lives and also possible that some slashdot users are basement dwellers and actively avoid face to face interaction with others. Then you are left to look at the facts and decide what was reality in that particular case.
Again, I'm not saying this did or did not happen in Pao's case. I haven't really read enough to make an informed decision. She does seem a bit narcissistic when she claims that "Pao also said she believes it would be nearly impossible for lawyers to find jurors who weren't familiar with her high-profile case in the Internet age". Maybe her circles are different and she is very isolated, but I would suspect that there are large numbers of people who haven't the faintest clue who she is, let alone are familiar with her case.
Her claim is that "I saw how hard it was going to be to win when every potential juror who expressed a belief that sexism exists in tech — a belief that is widely recognized and documented — was not allowed to serve on the jury,"
I don't think I'm somebody who knee-jerk jumps to discrimination. However, if they were filtering out jurors who believe that sexism exists in tech, that certainly seems to be unfair, IMO. Most people certainly would not consider it fair if a gay person was filing a discrimination suit and jurors who believe that discrimination against gay people exists were excluded from sitting on the jury.
I'm not necessarily saying that was the case here, and I haven't read enough to have a strong opinion on whether the case had merit or not. But if those allegations are true then that certainly stands in the way of a fair trial and should be fixed.
The article does say '"I am now moving on, paying Kleiner Perkins’ legal costs and dropping my appeal," Pao wrote. "My experience shows how difficult it is to address discrimination through the court system."'
Now, it is possible that she is paying the legal costs out of the goodness of her heart, but given the second statement indicating that she doesn't believe the decision to be just, I doubt it.
Except with the government job we would have made $19k in a year. This site generated about 280k pounds ($430k), or around 72k per year. So the revenue was about four times as much. Additionally the volume of movies was 12 million streams. This would also be a significantly larger impact than the government worker who presumably distributed to people with whom he had some degree of contact (even if only through second or third degree relationships).
Thus it doesn't seem that unreasonable that there was a more severe sentence. Additionally, you have to factor in the difference between US sentencing and UK sentencing.
Finally, the article claims that "He continued to run the website even after he was served a cease and desist order by the Federation Against Copyright Theft (FACT) and after he was initially arrested."
Whether the sentences are reasonable or not for the crime aside, comparitively it doesn't seem that far off.
I don't think it's fair to say opinion. There are objective metrics that can be optimized for (price, coverage, speed). So an objective factual response is possible. Though the vi/emacs question is similar I guess - vi is objectively better and it is foolish to argue otherwise.
Curious as to why you would run Xubuntu at home if you hate Linux so much.
It is likely true that they don't currently have any competition. But Google Fiber is making some inroads, and perhaps they realize that if they don't make any improvements and don't do anything, they are making it easier for disruptive players to enter the market (in whatever form that may take).
Additionally, with the increase of higher bandwidth usage like 4k Netflix as was mentioned or whatever it happens to be, they potentially realized that they were going to have to do something to increase capacity in their backend network if they want to maintain service. People live with traffic volume caps now but as demand for higher caps increases there are going to be more and more complaints, again, opening the field for disruption. Thus they have to beef up their backbone network (my terminology is probably weak as I don't have much knowledge of how ISP networks are constructed and how peering arrangements and such work). You can't really sell an improved backbone network to customers, but if you couple that with last mile upgrades, which are probably going to have to happen eventually anyway, you can drive interest as you prepare for the future.
People are generally willing to pay a little bit more for a service that just works most of the time and is as fast as the other guy. Upgrading their network means that disruptive players have to prove themselves based on something other than speed.
eBay Now was a service being piloted in the bay area and NYC where you could order merchandise from local merchants like Best Buy, Macys and Home Depot and it would be delivered within an hour.
It would have lowered the acceleration of the Google car, but it would have increased the (negative) acceleration of the car that failed to stop resulting in greater neck and back pain.
Interestingly you don't mention how much harder bad weather conditions make driving for human drivers, as well. There is a reason that many more than usual accidents happen when the weather is bad, when it's snowing, late at night (sleepy drivers - never heard about a robot getting sleepy), or when the roads are bad and human drivers think they know it all and can continue at top speeds.
Actually, it always seems like many more than usual accidents happy the first two weeks of the snowy road season, and then people adjust to it.
I suspect that driverless cars would adjust quicker and you'd get better results than human drivers.
Nonetheless, the point that driverless cars need to be tested and verified in these conditions before being approved for general use is valid, though probably obvious.
While perhaps true in some cases, it is rather clear from the linked video that it is entirely the human's fault in this case. Unless you have different 'rules of the road' than we do here and the driverless car was expected to do something else (what exactly are you expecting the driverless car to do? It isn't clear that there were lots of options from the video - perhaps move ahead a foot but it seems like that would at best delay the crash). There were two cars stopped at the light, the Google car was behind it, and there were about four or five car lengths between the Google car and the car that rear ended it. The two cars ahead and the Google car stopped well ahead of the at fault vehicle and the at fault vehicle did not slow down.
Well, perhaps fault is the wrong word. Obviously drivers are ultimately responsible for their own vehicles.
That being said, distracting things are distracting and I wonder if the same driver would have been distracted if there were no obvious markings that it was a self driving car.
I think it is perhaps *partly* the Google car's fault. Not because of the way that the Google car drives.
I wonder if the Google car itself serves as a distraction to other drives. Perhaps other drivers find themselves driving behind a Google car, reach over to get their phones to take a picture or video or something, and the distraction causes them to make an error while driving.
Society is built these days on people buying things they can't afford.
Yes, that was the narrative at the time - 'they are taking away our freedom'. In hindsight, even though I probably would have heavily criticized Apple for the move, and would have pointed to it as a reason to choose Android, the reality of the situation was, at least in my experience, that Flash on Android was a rather shitty experience that never really worked that well. And while it seemed arrogant and annoying that Steve Jobs tried to use his sway to annihilate Flash as a platform, I now believe that it was for the best. Flash has a heavy impact on battery life, is generally a lot slower, and is generally less secure than native alternatives.
So, yes, Apple made a seemingly arrogant move and exiled Flash from the iOS platform, but in the long run this drove development toward alternatives and pushed web developers to use technologies that were more mobile friendly (like using HTML for your content instead of some flash application) and I think the overall net effect for the web community has been positive.
That's up to five minutes wasted. Time is money, man. Time is money.
Sure, your point stands. But your point demonstrates a lack of understanding of what people mean when they say 'the cost will be passed on to the customer'.
Well sure. I guess I generally assume that when people say 'the cost will be passed on to customers' I read: 'the extra expense will result in an immediate increase in price for services'.
I mean, obviously people realize that the money ultimately comes from customers. If you presume that statement to say otherwise then you clearly misunderstand what is being said.
As poster above stated, there are a few alternatives:
1. Customer pays
2. Shareholders pay (in the form of less profit)
3. Employees pay in the form of not getting a raise or no increase in compensation
4. The company spends less money on other things to make up the cost
You generally don't change the customer cost too frequently - TWC most likely would not increase costs because they lost a single court case - with a market cap of 50 billion dollars 230k isn't really that much as a one off cost.
In all likelihood this particular cost would be eaten by shareholders in the form of less profit. You can't jerk employees around too much at the lower levels, and executives at the higher levels will probably just be allowed to keep playing. It isn't a significant enough amount of money to really worry about spending less elsewhere as the administrative cost to flip budgets around for such a small amount of money is probably not worth it.
In reality though, I would be rather surprised if an organization as big as TWC didn't have a budget line item at the beginning of the year for things like legal fees, penalties, court costs, etc etc. So in all likelihood, they had already planned to spend some amount of money, and this may or may not have had a big impact on that, and it may or may not cause them to go over budget on legal expenses.
If, over time, the trend of higher legal expenses continues, and overall expenses continue to increase, that would obviously factor into consumer prices. But I wouldn't expect cable/internet prices to rise because of one loss in court.
You should see this One Weird Trick for getting rid of weird trick spam.