You must have a low threshold for hatred. People I *love* have done far worse things.
Egging Bush's car during inauguration? That was also a jackass move. I don't like Bush. I'm as opposed to his policies as you can get, and I have a hard time hating the man. As far as I can tell, he was trying to do the right thing. I just think he failed.
And he did a lot more that annoyed me than failing to renew a tax cut for income levels $200K-250K.
Sounds to me more like all parties are doing test driven development.
I think the difference here is that the Acid tests were published before anybody went and got 100% of them. But I'd bet that Microsoft wrote these tests back when IE9 didn't pass them, then made IE9 pass them, THEN released the tests.
What are you talking about? Life is a right guaranteed by many governments and most Western nations. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights says:
"Every human being has the inherent right to life. This right shall be protected by law. No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his life."
The US constitution says:
"among these [inalienable rights] are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness"
The European Convention on Human Rights says:
"Article 2 – Right to life 1. Everyone's right to life shall be protected by law. No one shall be deprived of his life intentionally save in the execution of a sentence of a court following his conviction of a crime for which this penalty is provided by law. 2. Deprivation of life shall not be regarded as inflicted in contravention of this article when it results from the use of force which is no more than absolutely necessary: a. in defence of any person from unlawful violence; b. in order to effect a lawful arrest or to prevent the escape of a person lawfully detained; c. in action lawfully taken for the purpose of quelling a riot or insurrection."
I'm mostly with you here, but I have to disagree on a point: basically everything that effects developers on a platform will indirectly affect end-users.
What you're saying in the first paragraph and all over the place in this article's comments is true but is so pedantic as to add nothing to the discussion.
There are relevant differences between users who are domain-experts (developers) and users who are not. I've even heard the latter form a user referred to as "humans" before, which if taken too literally makes the contrasting set seem even worse by comparison.
The internal version number is not an argument for anything. It wasn't made by some independent standards body analyzing against a checklist of what does and does not make a new OS.
Maybe Microsoft should next time make the internal version number 3007, because then you'll see that they skipped three thousand other OSes to bring you one from the future.
"Anybody with a smidgen of common sense". You need to define what a new OS is, in a way that excludes Windows 7 incidentally and not specifically, and then we can debate this definition of new OS. If your criteria is to be the output of the ver command, then we won't get anywhere.
*elicit*. Illicit means something different and is ironically apropos.
You're a cheap dick for the part where you waited to watch her face as you passive-aggressively punished her. And probably the waitress and management will write you off as a cheap dick for a stunt like that, rather than effect real change.
"What happens to the waitress is her lookout. If for some reason you feel guilty, you can always donate the missing dollar to the business so that there are no ground for her to get the sack that night."
Making somebody pay for the honour of serving you is dickish, even if they did a poor job. It's not "her lookout" anymore if you're deliberately taking from her to prove your point. If you pull a stunt like this, you better have been physically hurt by the server.
People have pointed out how the minimum wage is especially low for tippable employees. Well, there's also the fact that it's not just the server. The cooks, bartender, and house might all get a cut of the tip. Depending on the exact splitting rules, a person can actually make negative money to wait on your table if you're stingy like that.
Honestly, what makes you think you can ask others for citations when you obviously didn't even try to provide your own (seeing as it was factually wrong).
Now they say they'll support H.264, and VP8 if the codec is installed (http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2010/05/19/another-follow-up-on-html5-video-in-ie9.aspx). Since this post happened literally the same day that this became an option, it sounds like this contingency plan had been in place ahead of time.
They do tend to say it about Microsoft, because I think this is the fourth exception ever, and I think at least some of the previous exceptions were not software patents (?). Also, salesforce.com isn't exactly a small, scrappy garage business just trying to break into the field. For most of their history (~35 years), it had simply never happened.
Still, this definitely is a great way to lose some of the remaining little drops of sympathy in the vast desert that is slashdot's favour for Microsoft.
I refuse to wade through the legalese to figure out if I think any of these patents have merit (I'm not necessarily sold on the idea that software patents are a bad idea, though I'm also not sure that they're a good idea; the arguments I usually see on both sides drift into topics I don't care about).
(for number systems that have fully associative addition and subtraction)
However, the Boltzmann equation is more like your example:
a+b=c
That can never be proven correct or incorrect, because it depends on a, b, and c. However, given that equation, and the values for two of the variables, you can solve for the value of the third. Or given that equation and just one variable's value, you can solve for a new equation that shows a relationship between the other two variables. But asking whether "a+b=c" is correct has little meaning. It's correct when a=b=c=0, and incorrect when a=b=c=1, and the Boltzmann equation is similar.
If an action is the least of all evils, then I think that is a good action. I think it's a dilution of the term evil to claim it's something that could ever be the right thing to do.
You need to draw an arbitrary line in the sand to make it evil, and then you're begging the question. Good and Evil are contextual.
Fitt's law doesn't say that unequivocably the edge is easier to use -- it does get rid of one dimension of mouse acquisition, but the menu-on-top doesn't necessarily address:
1. The other dimension of mouse acquisition (with the exception of the corner, which really does cover mouse acquisition fairly nicely) 2. Re-acquiring the original target AFTER hitting the menu, which means moving the mouse the same distance as it took to get to the menu in the first place, to an arbitrary location. This one gets lost so many times by the magic incantation of Fitts' Law. Hitting a single menu entry with the mouse is not the end-goal of your entire computing experience. 3. Things like eye tracking do not interact with Fitts' Law in the same way, because the screen edges and corners do not have "infinite depth" relative to anything other than the mouse cursor (or trackball or other relative-movement input sources). 4. Spatial association. 5. Working with more than one menu bar over the course of a single task. 6. That there might be more important things than the menu to put at the top edge. 7. Multiple monitors.
For a system that rejects the notion of maximized windows, I find it odd that a modal menu bar is so embraced. They're basically the same idea with many of the same potential advantages (the close button is in the corner on windows and most defaults for Linux distros, the sysmenu in another corner). If I were designing an OS convention I would probably either promote maximizing and have some menu-like bar fixed to the top, or I would have little-to-no maximizing and menus per window, but not an unholy mix.
That's not to say there aren't a bunch of advantages to the way that Macs do it and that some user behaviours can be modified to make the most of the Mac way, but it's not some slam-dunk science-approved iron-clad proven advantage in all scenarios.
Except that came at the end of a long series of flamebait.
I don't use a Mac or OSX. I don't use an iPod. I do use an iPhone, but I don't think it's unparalleled and can never be surpassed, it was just right for me at the time. In short, I'm not really an Apple or Steve Jobs fan. But come on -- he's just dealt with six rude emails on a Friday evening from some know-it-all dickhead with straw arguments, poorly (and in a couple cases, incoherently) presented. This was not polite candor that Jobs jumped on. This was flamebait and Jobs got flamebaited. It happens to nearly everyone.
I think Ryan was the complete asshole that thinks he's so much better than everybody at Apple. Steve Jobs is not immune to being dragged into the mud.
Almost every other example you gave are local ordinances designed to keep your neighbours' property values from plummeting, (and maybe reduce crime via "broken window theory"). Locking your door addresses none of them.
I do agree with much of everything else you say here, but I disagree that there's any relevant, reasonable precedent for the government legislating that you lock your home door (a behaviour that only appears common, in my experience, in cities and some large suburbs -- but then, I'm Canadian:)).
1) Is the implication here that Linux and OSX are inherently unable to display video performantly? I'm genuinely curious. 2) Why do I care if YouTube wants to make my life harder? 3) I think this is a point vs. Theora and other formats, and not against Flash. Remember, the GPP was talking about "replace one proprietary format for another", vs. going to an open source format, which does not have the install-base of hardware acceleration.
Here's the problem: timmarhy is clearly partaking in some anti-open-source trolling in other posts in this article. But! That particular post by timmarhy raise a very valid point, in an asinine manner. This post by Lunix Nutcase raises the same point, in a cogent manner. It's still a good point!
Kind of like how even if Hitler says 2 + 2 = 4, that doesn't mean we have to find a different solution to 2 + 2. Sometimes, even the "bad guys" can be correct.
And the post rating he did? Responded to a clear and uninformed anti-MS troll. Look at what he quoted, for Christ's sake!
He's not saying a code of ethics is irrelevant. He's saying a code of ethics which features software freedom prominently is not a worthwhile code of ethics. There *is* a difference. Consider replacing "software freedom" with your pick of "sexual purity" or "sexual prudery", etc. -- hundreds of millions of people place it at the utmost importance (apparently including you, given your use of prostitute as an insult), and hundreds of millions of others make an evaluation and don't think that either has any moral weight. Then compare "racial purity" and "racial equality". Then compare "Sega Genesis" vs. "Super Nintendo". Some of these have clear places in morality. Some don't! I certainly think you'd be kind of an idiot to make Genesis vs. SNES a quitting point in 2010.
Anyway, the person you were responding to was talking about the "use this OS" issue, so you kind of were talking about it too.
Reading between the lines, the point of the root AC was to not waste everybody's time ranting about irrelevant personal preferences. If you refuse to use privative software, you probably shouldn't have accepted a job at a shop that does not explicitly avoid using privative software, because every other one can and should at times (if for no other reason than that the law of large numbers guarantees that sometimes privative software is the best tool for the job on every technical and/or financial measure, as opposed to political). If you didn't at least tell them of this character quirk before hiring, it's very much a way to make a bad impression and possibly get yourself fired. It's different if you signed up under the explicit or implicit agreement that you wouldn't have to do that sort of shit and they reneged. Or if you had good reason to believe it would never come up. But using Windows vs. Linux? A software company is going to use and target one or more OS-es, and it might not be only your favourites.
If the company you work for says Allman Braces throughout, and you like K&R, use Allman (automated refactoring tools make that easier). If they demand hungarian notation, use hungarian notation. If they demand C++ standard library smart pointers, don't muddy it with boost smart pointers (without a valid technical reason). If they standardize on return-code error handling in triangle structures, and you like exception handling and cleanup routines, use return-code error handling in triangle structures. There's no soul-selling in this, there's some practicality. Later on you can make the case for some changes going forward, civilly, and it may or may not happen, and you should abide by the greater consensus. You'll probably just get used to at least the trivial stuff, though.
This is pretty close as of 2008, and a naive projection into 2010 says it's a very reasonable guess that Chinese Internet users have exceeded the US population.
Much of the Internet does not have a "global context". Most individual websites are not meant for global consumption, they are meant for consumption in one language. I think the reinforcement of the "Great Firewall" is overstated given that there's already a language barrier which is quite a bit harder to overcome than the "typing strange letters" barrier (unless by some miracle the entire website is unusually amenable to Google translate). A lot of the world was already relying on links or memorizing how to input foreign characters. This now moves that inconvenience from always being the non-Latin user's problem, to users trying to access a site that uses a different keyboard layout from the regional. I'd bet that's less often a problem and it's a more rational distribution.
This caters to some very general interests -- making the Internet work in languages that were not spawned from Europe (even many European languages need to compromise today).
There is a good argument of harm to existing users, but that argument comes from phishing; it isn't really about denying people access to regional websites.
Slashdot Mirror
Damn right that's not enough.
You must have a low threshold for hatred. People I *love* have done far worse things.
Egging Bush's car during inauguration? That was also a jackass move. I don't like Bush. I'm as opposed to his policies as you can get, and I have a hard time hating the man. As far as I can tell, he was trying to do the right thing. I just think he failed.
And he did a lot more that annoyed me than failing to renew a tax cut for income levels $200K-250K.
Sounds to me more like all parties are doing test driven development.
I think the difference here is that the Acid tests were published before anybody went and got 100% of them. But I'd bet that Microsoft wrote these tests back when IE9 didn't pass them, then made IE9 pass them, THEN released the tests.
What are you talking about? Life is a right guaranteed by many governments and most Western nations. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights says:
"Every human being has the inherent right to life. This right shall be protected by law. No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his life."
The US constitution says:
"among these [inalienable rights] are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness"
The European Convention on Human Rights says:
"Article 2 – Right to life
1. Everyone's right to life shall be protected by law. No one shall be deprived of his life intentionally save in the execution of a sentence of a court following his conviction of a crime for which this penalty is provided by law.
2. Deprivation of life shall not be regarded as inflicted in contravention of this article when it results from the use of force which is no more than absolutely necessary:
a. in defence of any person from unlawful violence;
b. in order to effect a lawful arrest or to prevent the escape of a person lawfully detained;
c. in action lawfully taken for the purpose of quelling a riot or insurrection."
I'm mostly with you here, but I have to disagree on a point: basically everything that effects developers on a platform will indirectly affect end-users.
What you're saying in the first paragraph and all over the place in this article's comments is true but is so pedantic as to add nothing to the discussion.
There are relevant differences between users who are domain-experts (developers) and users who are not. I've even heard the latter form a user referred to as "humans" before, which if taken too literally makes the contrasting set seem even worse by comparison.
The internal version number is not an argument for anything. It wasn't made by some independent standards body analyzing against a checklist of what does and does not make a new OS.
Maybe Microsoft should next time make the internal version number 3007, because then you'll see that they skipped three thousand other OSes to bring you one from the future.
"Anybody with a smidgen of common sense". You need to define what a new OS is, in a way that excludes Windows 7 incidentally and not specifically, and then we can debate this definition of new OS. If your criteria is to be the output of the ver command, then we won't get anywhere.
*elicit*. Illicit means something different and is ironically apropos.
You're a cheap dick for the part where you waited to watch her face as you passive-aggressively punished her. And probably the waitress and management will write you off as a cheap dick for a stunt like that, rather than effect real change.
No, that's exactly what the GP was suggesting:
"What happens to the waitress is her lookout. If for some reason you feel guilty, you can always donate the missing dollar to the business so that there are no ground for her to get the sack that night."
Making somebody pay for the honour of serving you is dickish, even if they did a poor job. It's not "her lookout" anymore if you're deliberately taking from her to prove your point. If you pull a stunt like this, you better have been physically hurt by the server.
People have pointed out how the minimum wage is especially low for tippable employees. Well, there's also the fact that it's not just the server. The cooks, bartender, and house might all get a cut of the tip. Depending on the exact splitting rules, a person can actually make negative money to wait on your table if you're stingy like that.
http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2010/04/29/html5-video.aspx
Right here buddy.
Honestly, what makes you think you can ask others for citations when you obviously didn't even try to provide your own (seeing as it was factually wrong).
No, they didn't. They specifically said they would not. The relevant quote is:
http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2010/04/29/html5-video.aspx
"In its HTML5 support, IE9 will support playback of H.264 video only."
Now they say they'll support H.264, and VP8 if the codec is installed (http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2010/05/19/another-follow-up-on-html5-video-in-ie9.aspx). Since this post happened literally the same day that this became an option, it sounds like this contingency plan had been in place ahead of time.
They do tend to say it about Microsoft, because I think this is the fourth exception ever, and I think at least some of the previous exceptions were not software patents (?). Also, salesforce.com isn't exactly a small, scrappy garage business just trying to break into the field. For most of their history (~35 years), it had simply never happened.
Still, this definitely is a great way to lose some of the remaining little drops of sympathy in the vast desert that is slashdot's favour for Microsoft.
I refuse to wade through the legalese to figure out if I think any of these patents have merit (I'm not necessarily sold on the idea that software patents are a bad idea, though I'm also not sure that they're a good idea; the arguments I usually see on both sides drift into topics I don't care about).
Some equations can be proven, eg:
a+b+c-a-b = c
(for number systems that have fully associative addition and subtraction)
However, the Boltzmann equation is more like your example:
a+b=c
That can never be proven correct or incorrect, because it depends on a, b, and c. However, given that equation, and the values for two of the variables, you can solve for the value of the third. Or given that equation and just one variable's value, you can solve for a new equation that shows a relationship between the other two variables. But asking whether "a+b=c" is correct has little meaning. It's correct when a=b=c=0, and incorrect when a=b=c=1, and the Boltzmann equation is similar.
Yeah, that made me do a double-take too. That's not generally true at Universities and dentist's offices I've been to.
If an action is the least of all evils, then I think that is a good action. I think it's a dilution of the term evil to claim it's something that could ever be the right thing to do.
You need to draw an arbitrary line in the sand to make it evil, and then you're begging the question. Good and Evil are contextual.
Fitt's law doesn't say that unequivocably the edge is easier to use -- it does get rid of one dimension of mouse acquisition, but the menu-on-top doesn't necessarily address:
1. The other dimension of mouse acquisition (with the exception of the corner, which really does cover mouse acquisition fairly nicely)
2. Re-acquiring the original target AFTER hitting the menu, which means moving the mouse the same distance as it took to get to the menu in the first place, to an arbitrary location. This one gets lost so many times by the magic incantation of Fitts' Law. Hitting a single menu entry with the mouse is not the end-goal of your entire computing experience.
3. Things like eye tracking do not interact with Fitts' Law in the same way, because the screen edges and corners do not have "infinite depth" relative to anything other than the mouse cursor (or trackball or other relative-movement input sources).
4. Spatial association.
5. Working with more than one menu bar over the course of a single task.
6. That there might be more important things than the menu to put at the top edge.
7. Multiple monitors.
For a system that rejects the notion of maximized windows, I find it odd that a modal menu bar is so embraced. They're basically the same idea with many of the same potential advantages (the close button is in the corner on windows and most defaults for Linux distros, the sysmenu in another corner). If I were designing an OS convention I would probably either promote maximizing and have some menu-like bar fixed to the top, or I would have little-to-no maximizing and menus per window, but not an unholy mix.
That's not to say there aren't a bunch of advantages to the way that Macs do it and that some user behaviours can be modified to make the most of the Mac way, but it's not some slam-dunk science-approved iron-clad proven advantage in all scenarios.
Except that came at the end of a long series of flamebait.
I don't use a Mac or OSX. I don't use an iPod. I do use an iPhone, but I don't think it's unparalleled and can never be surpassed, it was just right for me at the time. In short, I'm not really an Apple or Steve Jobs fan. But come on -- he's just dealt with six rude emails on a Friday evening from some know-it-all dickhead with straw arguments, poorly (and in a couple cases, incoherently) presented. This was not polite candor that Jobs jumped on. This was flamebait and Jobs got flamebaited. It happens to nearly everyone.
I think Ryan was the complete asshole that thinks he's so much better than everybody at Apple. Steve Jobs is not immune to being dragged into the mud.
Almost every other example you gave are local ordinances designed to keep your neighbours' property values from plummeting, (and maybe reduce crime via "broken window theory"). Locking your door addresses none of them.
I do agree with much of everything else you say here, but I disagree that there's any relevant, reasonable precedent for the government legislating that you lock your home door (a behaviour that only appears common, in my experience, in cities and some large suburbs -- but then, I'm Canadian :)).
1) Is the implication here that Linux and OSX are inherently unable to display video performantly? I'm genuinely curious.
2) Why do I care if YouTube wants to make my life harder?
3) I think this is a point vs. Theora and other formats, and not against Flash. Remember, the GPP was talking about "replace one proprietary format for another", vs. going to an open source format, which does not have the install-base of hardware acceleration.
Here's the problem: timmarhy is clearly partaking in some anti-open-source trolling in other posts in this article. But! That particular post by timmarhy raise a very valid point, in an asinine manner. This post by Lunix Nutcase raises the same point, in a cogent manner. It's still a good point!
Kind of like how even if Hitler says 2 + 2 = 4, that doesn't mean we have to find a different solution to 2 + 2. Sometimes, even the "bad guys" can be correct.
And the post rating he did? Responded to a clear and uninformed anti-MS troll. Look at what he quoted, for Christ's sake!
A quantum leap is also a movement between two distinct states with no possible in-between states. In that sense the analogy makes sense.
He's not saying a code of ethics is irrelevant. He's saying a code of ethics which features software freedom prominently is not a worthwhile code of ethics. There *is* a difference. Consider replacing "software freedom" with your pick of "sexual purity" or "sexual prudery", etc. -- hundreds of millions of people place it at the utmost importance (apparently including you, given your use of prostitute as an insult), and hundreds of millions of others make an evaluation and don't think that either has any moral weight. Then compare "racial purity" and "racial equality". Then compare "Sega Genesis" vs. "Super Nintendo". Some of these have clear places in morality. Some don't! I certainly think you'd be kind of an idiot to make Genesis vs. SNES a quitting point in 2010.
Anyway, the person you were responding to was talking about the "use this OS" issue, so you kind of were talking about it too.
Reading between the lines, the point of the root AC was to not waste everybody's time ranting about irrelevant personal preferences. If you refuse to use privative software, you probably shouldn't have accepted a job at a shop that does not explicitly avoid using privative software, because every other one can and should at times (if for no other reason than that the law of large numbers guarantees that sometimes privative software is the best tool for the job on every technical and/or financial measure, as opposed to political). If you didn't at least tell them of this character quirk before hiring, it's very much a way to make a bad impression and possibly get yourself fired. It's different if you signed up under the explicit or implicit agreement that you wouldn't have to do that sort of shit and they reneged. Or if you had good reason to believe it would never come up. But using Windows vs. Linux? A software company is going to use and target one or more OS-es, and it might not be only your favourites.
If the company you work for says Allman Braces throughout, and you like K&R, use Allman (automated refactoring tools make that easier). If they demand hungarian notation, use hungarian notation. If they demand C++ standard library smart pointers, don't muddy it with boost smart pointers (without a valid technical reason). If they standardize on return-code error handling in triangle structures, and you like exception handling and cleanup routines, use return-code error handling in triangle structures. There's no soul-selling in this, there's some practicality. Later on you can make the case for some changes going forward, civilly, and it may or may not happen, and you should abide by the greater consensus. You'll probably just get used to at least the trivial stuff, though.
Wikipedia does not have power even remotely similar to that of government. It has power of a sort, but it's pretty irrelevant.
http://www.google.com/publicdata?ds=wb-wdi&met=it_net_user&idim=country:CHN&dl=en&hl=en&q=chinese+internet+users
This is pretty close as of 2008, and a naive projection into 2010 says it's a very reasonable guess that Chinese Internet users have exceeded the US population.
Much of the Internet does not have a "global context". Most individual websites are not meant for global consumption, they are meant for consumption in one language. I think the reinforcement of the "Great Firewall" is overstated given that there's already a language barrier which is quite a bit harder to overcome than the "typing strange letters" barrier (unless by some miracle the entire website is unusually amenable to Google translate). A lot of the world was already relying on links or memorizing how to input foreign characters. This now moves that inconvenience from always being the non-Latin user's problem, to users trying to access a site that uses a different keyboard layout from the regional. I'd bet that's less often a problem and it's a more rational distribution.
This caters to some very general interests -- making the Internet work in languages that were not spawned from Europe (even many European languages need to compromise today).
There is a good argument of harm to existing users, but that argument comes from phishing; it isn't really about denying people access to regional websites.