According to the author, Opera should spend their time and money to fix old edge-case bugs in WebKit, but he shouldn't have any obligation to contribute patches himself.
Sorry sir, but that's not how open-source development should work. If you're going to spend time rebuilding your own codebase, evaluating whether a ton of old workarounds are still necessary because of missing "half-line fix[es]", you should consider spending some of that time contributing such simple patches upstream to improve the situation. With IE, that was never an option, but it is with WebKit. In an open-source stack, the only workarounds that should be accepted as the regular course of business are ones that are prohibitively difficult to implement in the dependency, or where the patches have been submitted and rejected.
What's most entertaining is the reference to the "tragedy of the commons" in TFA's title. Tragedy of the commons is not something being so commonly used that it's improved in places you don't like. Rather, it's where everybody using the common property thinks that maintenance is someone else's problem. Mr. Methvin, WebKit's maintenance is as much your problem as it is Opera's.
Is it an intrinsically flawed model? No.
Has it regularly been significantly better than other models? No.
Has it regularly been significantly worse than most other models? No.
Do experts actually expect it to be any better that it is? Not really.
As should be obvious by the "screw you, Slashdot" comment in my original post, I'm actually just ranting against Slashdot's non-existent editorial process. The second half of the article is focused on Twitter-scraping algorithms, but the summary makes no mention of that. Twitter isn't on Slashdot's hit list. Google is, though, so the small part of TFA that even mentions Google is highlighted, casting Google's admitted flaws into center stage.
Rather than actually presenting news, Slashdot constantly spins stories about Apple, Microsoft, Google, Oracle, or any government such that the summary paints someone as a villain. The point of the article here is to provide insight into how these models work and why they are or are not correct... but again, the summary only highlights Google's failing.
As you noted, the situation would be exactly the same for Apple... Regardless of the actual focus of the article, Slashdot's editors will make sure there's a spin on the story, highlighting how it leads people off into the desert, but conveniently not mentioning that the morons never thought about whether their planned route made sense, of if they had supplies for the trip. If it's Microsoft, Slashdot will focus on the how obvious manufacturing cost-cutting makes a device "unrepairable". For governments, any new law that even mildly touches the realm of technology is, according to Slashdot, going to doom us all to the horrors of a dystopia.
Once upon a time, Slashdot was news for nerds and stuff that mattered. Now it's just another outlet for sensationalist mud-slinging, albeit with a fetish for technology.
In short, a system that learns from abnormal circumstances will no longer work as well under normal circumstances. This year's flu outbreak didn't follow previous models, so Google's application of those models was inaccurate... but we'll blame Google for it anyway, and cast shame upon them for being so terribly wrong.
Of course, the article is much better, delving into other systems that also predict and monitor flu outbreaks, and why they were or were not correct. TFA is really about the difference between traditional reporting sources (as from doctors' offices) and newer data-mining approaches (harvesting from searches and Twitter).
1st - I'm paying for the class, so yes, I am the customer. Quit trying to split hairs.
Sorry kid, but you're not. You're the one asking to be accredited, and you're covering the associated costs. Now, if you were to just outright buy your degree, that'd be corrupt, and that's why diploma-mill mail-order degree programs are so worthless in the real world.
2nd - Some teachers are trash. They couldn't teach their way out of a wet paper bag. Referring to point 1, I am fully enabled to make that decision for myself, and fuck you, the horse you rode in on, and everyone that agrees with you if you don't like it. No one consulted you and it is not up to you.
Yes, some are. The university tries to eliminate them, but you're not the one to make the decision about who's good or not. Referring to point 1, you're just asking for approval. You don't get to cherry-pick your judges until you find some pushovers who'll approve you without making you show your expertise first.
3rd - Comparing school to work simply isn't valid. Some people do great at school and suck at work, and vice versa. In my last job I didn't have to "show up" because I can work remotely whenever I needed to, and still was productive. By extension, the idea that one has to show up in a classroom is nothing more than outdated bullshit that belongs in the last century, not this one.
Good for you, I guess, but the real world usually isn't as lax as your "last job". Some places will let you work remotely if you're productive, but many won't. Most employers still consider presence and physical availability to be an important aspect of the job, especially in collaborative environments. Society as a whole hasn't adjusted to the notion of having completely-remote people, so why should a university lead students to expect that?
Some teachers command attendance by how good they are. The rest threaten you with bad grades if you don't attend - which, by the way, is the first sign of a shitty teacher.
Some students attend classes to learn all that they can. The rest don't realize what they miss in class, then blame the teacher when they squeak by the midterm and fail the final, long after the withdrawal deadline - which, by the way, is a sure sign of a shitty student.
In closing, grade the student, not the attendance. Thanks.
In closing, how exactly is a student supposed to be graded favorably when they haven't been present enough for their abilities and knowledge to be demonstrated?
Better still are the teachers whose questions are spurred by the students' classroom experiences, who reinforce the knowledge while simultaneously encouraging curiosity, but that enriching experience will be lost on the students who decide in the first two sessions that participation isn't worth their time.
You the student aren't paying the professor to teach the class. You're paying the university for the privilege of learning from the class that they're paying for. It's not really the professor's problem whether you get your money's worth or not, but it is his problem to determine whether you've adequately learned the material or not. Sure, you might be able to answer some exam questions to cover university-mandated bullet points, but the exam can't really cover all the details of the course material.
The great lie of education is that the diploma means you know something. Rather, it just means you've demonstrated to a group of experts in a particular field that you should also be considered an expert in that field to a particular degree of mastery. Of course, each of those experts may set their own requirements for proof, within the limits upon which the group as a whole has agreed.
This is not to say there aren't shitty teachers out there, or even ones whose teaching style doesn't work for some particular student. That's no excuse for missing material out of one's own arrogance. The student who skips class isn't entitled to credit if they hate their professor, any more than an employee who doesn't show up at work is entitled to a salary if they hate their boss.
It's not that they aren't comfortable with computers, but rather that they know the computers' failings.
Sure, that online testing package is nice, but it can't prevent cheating like a proctored in-person test can. Posting syllabi is nice and all, but students use that as a way to just read the book before the exam rather than attend class. Having a real-time chat for office hours is a nice shiny toy, but it's not really useful for demonstrations or sketches.
Then, of course, to actually use any of those features, there's a time investment required to learn the specific mechanism the system uses. Your CS professors already know how to put a video online, should they choose to do it. Learning to do it through the fancy new system is just a waste of time. It's not a new capability to them like it is to professors in other departments who may not know how to set up their own content server. It's just the same old crap, with the same old problems, but now it takes longer to do it.
Last I knew, my alma mater's CS professors each just ran their own server, configured however they liked. Some used them extensively, and some didn't.
Ubiquitous surveillance isn't necessarily a goal we want to aim for as a society.
Why not? Honestly, it's something I'm pretty okay with. I like the idea of being able to check on my house while I'm at the office, and be sure everything's as it should be. I like the idea of the police recording my house constantly, so if someone breaks in, there's a clear recording of what happened and where they went. I like the idea of being able to shout to my ever-listening surveillance system for help and have paramedics respond.
What I don't like is having that surveillance used for injustice. I don't like having the police watching everything I do, knowing that current law allows anything they see to be cause for a search or arrest. I don't like letting Google have broad permission to compile by browsing history into a single profile of my personality. I don't like letting anyone with a few hundred dollars in hardware be able to follow me from the sky 24/7.
Rather than complaining about current laws and fighting the political fights to get more modern privacy expectations into legislation, though, Slashdotters complain about the technology used. We can't have red-light cameras, can't have national health care, and can't have drones, but we can keep our laws broadly set the same as they were when voting was a privilege of white men.
It's an odd situation... We nerds usually love new technology, but yet here we'll rally against the technology, rather than the legislation that lets it be used against innocent people.
Honestly, I think it is somewhat worse, because anger is stronger (politically) than affection.
By focusing on cost alone, the whole system including its history is cast as bad because of its immediate past. The people clamor immediately to throw out the old system. After the public outrage, any attempt to accurately discuss benefits is tainted by the accusations of cronyism and corruption.
By focusing on the system's measurable good, we can determine first whether the system is pushing toward a desirable end (for its expected timeframe... some programs aren't expected to show measurable results for several years). If the program isn't even heading in the right direction, it's a candidate for closure. After the benefit is accurately measured, the cost can be discussed. If the program costs too much, it can be suspended with a note that "the program was successful, but unsustainable".
In an interesting analogy, it's the equivalent of consumerism in politics. You can buy a new government program, use it until it loses the shine and starts showing some flaws, then throw it all away and buy new. The alternative is to keep old programs around and recycle them to fit current needs.
Of course, both extremes are somewhat problematic with idealism. The most likely best choice is somewhere in the middle, weighing costs against resources and benefits against need.
Ron Paul's a populist politician. He's managed to paint the government as a corrupt agency of fat-cat Democrats, by ignoring the measurable good of government programs and focusing only on how much they cost. He's made the Federal Reserve a scapegoat for everything wrong with the economy, and thanks to the magic of psychology-driven Austrian economics, he can just forget about the economic problems before the Fed existed, because they were just so long ago.
This is yet another chapter in the tale of Ron Paul's subtle hypocrisy. He'll complain about globalization and fight against having any global authorities interfering in private citizens' lives, yet he has no problem running to a global authority to interfere in other people's lives on his behalf.
I'm thrilled the guy's retired (for now). Here's hoping it's permanent, and that his equally-populist son follows quickly.
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That's almost exactly what I had with the first of the three failures I mentioned. A friend bought a Win8 laptop (Toshiba something), and hated that she couldn't be viewing more than one program at once with the new interface, so she got pissed and wanted to go fully to Linux. I disabled Secure Boot, and tried to boot from the CD, both with the BIOS and through the Windows loader... neither would do anything useful with the disk.
It's not an issue of "competent". It's an issue of "willing".
A major source of Linux's desktop growth is the use of live CDs. Just drop in a disk at boot, and you've got yourself a working Linux desktop to play with and perhaps even like. You can see the filesystem's different layout, you can see each application's settings saved to plain old files, and you can see the package manager's simple installation of useful software. Perhaps you can even like it and decide to install. If not, there's no changes to your computer.
That's all changed now. Now, either you your computer must be prepared for Linux first, through some means of adding a new key. While not really beyond the average user's level of competence, it is beyond their level of ambition just to try "that Linux thing". The longstanding promise of "try it without changing anything" that has fueled trials isn't wholly true any more. Supposedly Windows' bootloader will let you boot unsigned CDs, but I've tried that three times with three failures on known-good disks, so I expect there's something screwey hidden in that route, and that doesn't really solve the problem of booting once the installation's complete.
To make matters worse, there's no standard mechanism for adding the boot key. One option is an BIOS-based tool, which with come with the typical polish of a motherboard manufacturer we've had on BIOS setups for years. Expect a keyboard-based menu with unique brand-specific names. Another option that might be viable in the future is a Windows tool to add a key, which will inspire Windows to raise scary warnings about compromising security and never starting again, which will do wonders for the user's confidence.
Microsoft surely knows that Secure Boot won't affect savvy nerds from converting to Linux. They also surely know that Linux is still growing organically, relying on word-of-mouth and firsthand try-before-you-buy experience. By requiring Secure Boot to be user-modifiable, they've thrown a roadblock in the path for Linux's growth, without looking like they're being blatantly nasty. They can keep exaggerating the threat of bootloader rootkits to justify locking everybody out, then point to the key-adding ability to dispel accusations of abusing their monopoly.
Now, see, if you had only had Amazon's system, you would have had each house's order readily packed in your truck, whether they were regular customers or not. All you'd have had to do would be drive past their house and throw the order in the general direction of the door, porch, or doghouse with your apparently-normal level of concern. No worries about special orders for the day or who's paying when... just driving and tossing.
That back-office process probably being to tally up all the items of each kind needed for this route into a master list for the truck, so the truck could be loaded and verified as a whole, then individual orders are assembled as the truck goes around. This would let the trucks be packed most efficiently for the heterogeneous load.
In contract, a system along the lines of Amazon's would have the mysterious back-office process involve a worker running through the notecards for each house, every day, and labeling each house's order separately. The items would then be packed into boxes all the same size, which would be loaded on the truck, which would just drop off a box at each house along the route. This takes less work to load the trucks and make deliveries, but at the expense of having extra processing for each order.
That difference in efficiencies is what's important. The ordering system can focus on ordering, and the shipping system can focus on shipping.
Amazon's system doesn't place orders for regular service. It regularly places orders for service.
The distinction is subtle but meaningful, and not too far a leap to call it money-saving (therefore useful), either. The periodic system repeatedly inserts orders on a schedule, rather than inserting a single order with a "repeat this" flag.
As a programmer, I could see this helping to make upgrades and other changes easier, because there's a clear demarcation between immediate and future shipments. If something's on the shipping side, it goes out immediately.
"My invention is a method for business, where I have a machine that will listen to my customers, record what products they want regularly, and maintain an ongoing list for each customer. Whenever a product on the list needs to be ordered so it will arrive when the customer wants it, this machine will alert me place the order on the customer's behalf... on a computer."
Or in other words, it's not really like a milkman, or even how a milkman operated, but let's not let that get in the way of our Slashdot-mandated rant against the USPTO.
What I'd like from MSFT: a guarantee (legal contract) that MSFT will not do the same on the new Outlook.com.
What I'd like from GOOG: a guarantee (legal contract) that GOOG will continue to read my email to improve the spam filtering I so greatly enjoy, and (statistically) improve advertising revenue so I can get that spam-filtering email service free of charge.
Now if only that were part of the story, then it'd be suitable for placement here (though it could be in TFA, which of course I haven't read, in which case the summary is off-topic).
This story is just for invoking the rage of Slashdotters, as so many stories of late (by which I mean the past few years, at least) are. Nerds are, on the whole, highly-intelligent idealists. We love to tell others how things should be done, especially when they're outside the field of technology, so we don't have to worry about other perspectives. Add to that the hatred of the rich and distrust of banks, with a bit of conspiracy theory for flavor, and you have a perfect recipe for a sensational Slashdot story.
Nobody's surprised that bankers screwed up. They took their bad securities, mixed them together with securities that other banks said were good, then sold the whole thing saying it's good... only for others to mix in their own bad securities and reiterate. Some noticed, some didn't, and some noticed but didn't want to do anything about it. That sucks.
Meanwhile, IT admins around the world are requiring weak passwords, moving vital data to cloud services without backups, and putting servers under water lines. We all do things to make the world worse, but for now it's just the bankers who are presented as evil for it.
Personally, I'm inclined to agree, but for the sake of literary analysis, I'll use the term the author used. Orwell classifies Ingsoc as socialism, because socialism (as he saw it) was something he feared. Bearing in mind that he wrote in the 1940s, socialism (of the fascist Nazi ("National Socialist") kind) was very different from any modern socialist government.
The simplistic point of socialism is to support the population through well-managed programs. Orwell's perversion of the concept is a government whose well-managed programs intentionally oppress the people. The tactics used to accomplish the oppression were indeed fascist.
First off, 1984 started off as a book, so it'd really be a book-turned-reality, but it's not even that.
The scary part of 1984 isn't the surveillance. That's just the most visible aspect that everyone talks about. The villain of the story is the government that fears its people so much that it resorts to mind control as a means of keeping peace. Mind control is a tricky thing, though, so extreme scarcity and enforced conformity are used to rein in any dissent. Surveillance is just a tool the government uses to look for that dissent.
The book hints at the possibility that the world is actually not at war, but the ongoing conflicts are actually staged to justify the artificial scarcity. Even Goldstein's underground rebellion may be a hoax perpetrated by the government to expose any rebellious tendencies. Those that are caught are tortured to break their minds, stripping away conscious thought and logic until assertions can be made without resistance. That's when the victim knows that there really is no viable escape, no higher purpose, and not even any nobility in life or death.
Every title in 1984 is ironic. The Ministry of Plenty restricts supplies, the Ministry of Love tortures, the Ministry of Peace plans the wars, the Ministry of Truth distributes lies... and Big Brother is not a loving familial support, but rather an oppressive embodiment of an anti-social Socialist government.
The fully-converted mindless drones of Ingsoc merely survive, not because they are being watched by Big Brother, but because there is no other choice. The constant surveillance is just a symbol of the government's constant presence. Whether that constant presence is a good or bad thing is a separate issue, which Orwell later recognized openly as peaceful post-WWII societal changes eased his wartime fears.
Turns out that trickle-down... economics is and always will be bunk.
...But I think I am a good person, and I do good things with my money. Why would anyone not want good things to be done? Surely with more money I could do more good things, but that means I need to be sending less to the government. The government politicians just nickel-and-dime their way through the budget pulling money out of good investments for the future and into gift programs for the lazy.
A note to the witless: I'm not being wholly serious, but I'm not trolling, either. Just illustrating a particular perspective.
Slashdot Mirror
According to the author, Opera should spend their time and money to fix old edge-case bugs in WebKit, but he shouldn't have any obligation to contribute patches himself.
Sorry sir, but that's not how open-source development should work. If you're going to spend time rebuilding your own codebase, evaluating whether a ton of old workarounds are still necessary because of missing "half-line fix[es]", you should consider spending some of that time contributing such simple patches upstream to improve the situation. With IE, that was never an option, but it is with WebKit. In an open-source stack, the only workarounds that should be accepted as the regular course of business are ones that are prohibitively difficult to implement in the dependency, or where the patches have been submitted and rejected.
What's most entertaining is the reference to the "tragedy of the commons" in TFA's title. Tragedy of the commons is not something being so commonly used that it's improved in places you don't like. Rather, it's where everybody using the common property thinks that maintenance is someone else's problem. Mr. Methvin, WebKit's maintenance is as much your problem as it is Opera's.
Is it an intrinsically flawed model? No.
Has it regularly been significantly better than other models? No.
Has it regularly been significantly worse than most other models? No.
Do experts actually expect it to be any better that it is? Not really.
As should be obvious by the "screw you, Slashdot" comment in my original post, I'm actually just ranting against Slashdot's non-existent editorial process. The second half of the article is focused on Twitter-scraping algorithms, but the summary makes no mention of that. Twitter isn't on Slashdot's hit list. Google is, though, so the small part of TFA that even mentions Google is highlighted, casting Google's admitted flaws into center stage.
Rather than actually presenting news, Slashdot constantly spins stories about Apple, Microsoft, Google, Oracle, or any government such that the summary paints someone as a villain. The point of the article here is to provide insight into how these models work and why they are or are not correct... but again, the summary only highlights Google's failing.
As you noted, the situation would be exactly the same for Apple... Regardless of the actual focus of the article, Slashdot's editors will make sure there's a spin on the story, highlighting how it leads people off into the desert, but conveniently not mentioning that the morons never thought about whether their planned route made sense, of if they had supplies for the trip. If it's Microsoft, Slashdot will focus on the how obvious manufacturing cost-cutting makes a device "unrepairable". For governments, any new law that even mildly touches the realm of technology is, according to Slashdot, going to doom us all to the horrors of a dystopia.
Once upon a time, Slashdot was news for nerds and stuff that mattered. Now it's just another outlet for sensationalist mud-slinging, albeit with a fetish for technology.
In short, a system that learns from abnormal circumstances will no longer work as well under normal circumstances. This year's flu outbreak didn't follow previous models, so Google's application of those models was inaccurate... but we'll blame Google for it anyway, and cast shame upon them for being so terribly wrong.
Of course, the article is much better, delving into other systems that also predict and monitor flu outbreaks, and why they were or were not correct. TFA is really about the difference between traditional reporting sources (as from doctors' offices) and newer data-mining approaches (harvesting from searches and Twitter).
Screw you, Slashdot.
1st - I'm paying for the class, so yes, I am the customer. Quit trying to split hairs.
Sorry kid, but you're not. You're the one asking to be accredited, and you're covering the associated costs. Now, if you were to just outright buy your degree, that'd be corrupt, and that's why diploma-mill mail-order degree programs are so worthless in the real world.
2nd - Some teachers are trash. They couldn't teach their way out of a wet paper bag. Referring to point 1, I am fully enabled to make that decision for myself, and fuck you, the horse you rode in on, and everyone that agrees with you if you don't like it. No one consulted you and it is not up to you.
Yes, some are. The university tries to eliminate them, but you're not the one to make the decision about who's good or not. Referring to point 1, you're just asking for approval. You don't get to cherry-pick your judges until you find some pushovers who'll approve you without making you show your expertise first.
3rd - Comparing school to work simply isn't valid. Some people do great at school and suck at work, and vice versa. In my last job I didn't have to "show up" because I can work remotely whenever I needed to, and still was productive. By extension, the idea that one has to show up in a classroom is nothing more than outdated bullshit that belongs in the last century, not this one.
Good for you, I guess, but the real world usually isn't as lax as your "last job". Some places will let you work remotely if you're productive, but many won't. Most employers still consider presence and physical availability to be an important aspect of the job, especially in collaborative environments. Society as a whole hasn't adjusted to the notion of having completely-remote people, so why should a university lead students to expect that?
Some teachers command attendance by how good they are. The rest threaten you with bad grades if you don't attend - which, by the way, is the first sign of a shitty teacher.
Some students attend classes to learn all that they can. The rest don't realize what they miss in class, then blame the teacher when they squeak by the midterm and fail the final, long after the withdrawal deadline - which, by the way, is a sure sign of a shitty student.
In closing, grade the student, not the attendance. Thanks.
In closing, how exactly is a student supposed to be graded favorably when they haven't been present enough for their abilities and knowledge to be demonstrated?
Better still are the teachers whose questions are spurred by the students' classroom experiences, who reinforce the knowledge while simultaneously encouraging curiosity, but that enriching experience will be lost on the students who decide in the first two sessions that participation isn't worth their time.
You the student aren't paying the professor to teach the class. You're paying the university for the privilege of learning from the class that they're paying for. It's not really the professor's problem whether you get your money's worth or not, but it is his problem to determine whether you've adequately learned the material or not. Sure, you might be able to answer some exam questions to cover university-mandated bullet points, but the exam can't really cover all the details of the course material.
The great lie of education is that the diploma means you know something. Rather, it just means you've demonstrated to a group of experts in a particular field that you should also be considered an expert in that field to a particular degree of mastery. Of course, each of those experts may set their own requirements for proof, within the limits upon which the group as a whole has agreed.
This is not to say there aren't shitty teachers out there, or even ones whose teaching style doesn't work for some particular student. That's no excuse for missing material out of one's own arrogance. The student who skips class isn't entitled to credit if they hate their professor, any more than an employee who doesn't show up at work is entitled to a salary if they hate their boss.
It's not that they aren't comfortable with computers, but rather that they know the computers' failings.
Sure, that online testing package is nice, but it can't prevent cheating like a proctored in-person test can. Posting syllabi is nice and all, but students use that as a way to just read the book before the exam rather than attend class. Having a real-time chat for office hours is a nice shiny toy, but it's not really useful for demonstrations or sketches.
Then, of course, to actually use any of those features, there's a time investment required to learn the specific mechanism the system uses. Your CS professors already know how to put a video online, should they choose to do it. Learning to do it through the fancy new system is just a waste of time. It's not a new capability to them like it is to professors in other departments who may not know how to set up their own content server. It's just the same old crap, with the same old problems, but now it takes longer to do it.
Last I knew, my alma mater's CS professors each just ran their own server, configured however they liked. Some used them extensively, and some didn't.
Ubiquitous surveillance isn't necessarily a goal we want to aim for as a society.
Why not? Honestly, it's something I'm pretty okay with. I like the idea of being able to check on my house while I'm at the office, and be sure everything's as it should be. I like the idea of the police recording my house constantly, so if someone breaks in, there's a clear recording of what happened and where they went. I like the idea of being able to shout to my ever-listening surveillance system for help and have paramedics respond.
What I don't like is having that surveillance used for injustice. I don't like having the police watching everything I do, knowing that current law allows anything they see to be cause for a search or arrest. I don't like letting Google have broad permission to compile by browsing history into a single profile of my personality. I don't like letting anyone with a few hundred dollars in hardware be able to follow me from the sky 24/7.
Rather than complaining about current laws and fighting the political fights to get more modern privacy expectations into legislation, though, Slashdotters complain about the technology used. We can't have red-light cameras, can't have national health care, and can't have drones, but we can keep our laws broadly set the same as they were when voting was a privilege of white men.
It's an odd situation... We nerds usually love new technology, but yet here we'll rally against the technology, rather than the legislation that lets it be used against innocent people.
Honestly, I think it is somewhat worse, because anger is stronger (politically) than affection.
By focusing on cost alone, the whole system including its history is cast as bad because of its immediate past. The people clamor immediately to throw out the old system. After the public outrage, any attempt to accurately discuss benefits is tainted by the accusations of cronyism and corruption.
By focusing on the system's measurable good, we can determine first whether the system is pushing toward a desirable end (for its expected timeframe... some programs aren't expected to show measurable results for several years). If the program isn't even heading in the right direction, it's a candidate for closure. After the benefit is accurately measured, the cost can be discussed. If the program costs too much, it can be suspended with a note that "the program was successful, but unsustainable".
In an interesting analogy, it's the equivalent of consumerism in politics. You can buy a new government program, use it until it loses the shine and starts showing some flaws, then throw it all away and buy new. The alternative is to keep old programs around and recycle them to fit current needs.
Of course, both extremes are somewhat problematic with idealism. The most likely best choice is somewhere in the middle, weighing costs against resources and benefits against need.
Fair point. Perhaps I should say it's painted as the agency of liberals, as Mr. Paul finds Republicans too liberal...
And that just about sums up my feelings, as well.
Ron Paul's a populist politician. He's managed to paint the government as a corrupt agency of fat-cat Democrats, by ignoring the measurable good of government programs and focusing only on how much they cost. He's made the Federal Reserve a scapegoat for everything wrong with the economy, and thanks to the magic of psychology-driven Austrian economics, he can just forget about the economic problems before the Fed existed, because they were just so long ago.
This is yet another chapter in the tale of Ron Paul's subtle hypocrisy. He'll complain about globalization and fight against having any global authorities interfering in private citizens' lives, yet he has no problem running to a global authority to interfere in other people's lives on his behalf.
I'm thrilled the guy's retired (for now). Here's hoping it's permanent, and that his equally-populist son follows quickly.
Notwithstanding any prior arrangement, agreement, or contract, being made verbally or in written form between the Company and the Customer, wherein the Customer is an occupant of or visitor to the country or continent of the Region, the Company shall have the exclusive right to establish and define the level of compensation required for the limited release of exclusive rights to the copying of the Product, to the maximum extent allowed by law, for any reason or none whatsoever. By accessing the Service provided by or associated with the Product, the Customer renews his or her acknowledgement and acceptance of these terms, effective immediately and effective forever or until the Company elects to void this arrangement and agreement, at which time the Customer must destroy all copies of the Product, with no expectation of compensation by the Company, and relinquish all right to use the Product in any way, including but not limited to regular use, sale, gifting, disassembling, augmenting, altering, or engaging in sexual intercourse therewith, notwithstanding any additional arrangement or agreement with the Company.
That's why.
That's almost exactly what I had with the first of the three failures I mentioned. A friend bought a Win8 laptop (Toshiba something), and hated that she couldn't be viewing more than one program at once with the new interface, so she got pissed and wanted to go fully to Linux. I disabled Secure Boot, and tried to boot from the CD, both with the BIOS and through the Windows loader... neither would do anything useful with the disk.
It's not an issue of "competent". It's an issue of "willing".
A major source of Linux's desktop growth is the use of live CDs. Just drop in a disk at boot, and you've got yourself a working Linux desktop to play with and perhaps even like. You can see the filesystem's different layout, you can see each application's settings saved to plain old files, and you can see the package manager's simple installation of useful software. Perhaps you can even like it and decide to install. If not, there's no changes to your computer.
That's all changed now. Now, either you your computer must be prepared for Linux first, through some means of adding a new key. While not really beyond the average user's level of competence, it is beyond their level of ambition just to try "that Linux thing". The longstanding promise of "try it without changing anything" that has fueled trials isn't wholly true any more. Supposedly Windows' bootloader will let you boot unsigned CDs, but I've tried that three times with three failures on known-good disks, so I expect there's something screwey hidden in that route, and that doesn't really solve the problem of booting once the installation's complete.
To make matters worse, there's no standard mechanism for adding the boot key. One option is an BIOS-based tool, which with come with the typical polish of a motherboard manufacturer we've had on BIOS setups for years. Expect a keyboard-based menu with unique brand-specific names. Another option that might be viable in the future is a Windows tool to add a key, which will inspire Windows to raise scary warnings about compromising security and never starting again, which will do wonders for the user's confidence.
Microsoft surely knows that Secure Boot won't affect savvy nerds from converting to Linux. They also surely know that Linux is still growing organically, relying on word-of-mouth and firsthand try-before-you-buy experience. By requiring Secure Boot to be user-modifiable, they've thrown a roadblock in the path for Linux's growth, without looking like they're being blatantly nasty. They can keep exaggerating the threat of bootloader rootkits to justify locking everybody out, then point to the key-adding ability to dispel accusations of abusing their monopoly.
Now, see, if you had only had Amazon's system, you would have had each house's order readily packed in your truck, whether they were regular customers or not. All you'd have had to do would be drive past their house and throw the order in the general direction of the door, porch, or doghouse with your apparently-normal level of concern. No worries about special orders for the day or who's paying when... just driving and tossing.
That back-office process probably being to tally up all the items of each kind needed for this route into a master list for the truck, so the truck could be loaded and verified as a whole, then individual orders are assembled as the truck goes around. This would let the trucks be packed most efficiently for the heterogeneous load.
In contract, a system along the lines of Amazon's would have the mysterious back-office process involve a worker running through the notecards for each house, every day, and labeling each house's order separately. The items would then be packed into boxes all the same size, which would be loaded on the truck, which would just drop off a box at each house along the route. This takes less work to load the trucks and make deliveries, but at the expense of having extra processing for each order.
That difference in efficiencies is what's important. The ordering system can focus on ordering, and the shipping system can focus on shipping.
It's okay, AC; there's no such thing as two.
Amazon's system doesn't place orders for regular service. It regularly places orders for service.
The distinction is subtle but meaningful, and not too far a leap to call it money-saving (therefore useful), either. The periodic system repeatedly inserts orders on a schedule, rather than inserting a single order with a "repeat this" flag.
As a programmer, I could see this helping to make upgrades and other changes easier, because there's a clear demarcation between immediate and future shipments. If something's on the shipping side, it goes out immediately.
More closely to the actual patent:
"My invention is a method for business, where I have a machine that will listen to my customers, record what products they want regularly, and maintain an ongoing list for each customer. Whenever a product on the list needs to be ordered so it will arrive when the customer wants it, this machine will alert me place the order on the customer's behalf... on a computer."
Or in other words, it's not really like a milkman, or even how a milkman operated, but let's not let that get in the way of our Slashdot-mandated rant against the USPTO.
What I'd like from MSFT: a guarantee (legal contract) that MSFT will not do the same on the new Outlook.com.
What I'd like from GOOG: a guarantee (legal contract) that GOOG will continue to read my email to improve the spam filtering I so greatly enjoy, and (statistically) improve advertising revenue so I can get that spam-filtering email service free of charge.
Now if only that were part of the story, then it'd be suitable for placement here (though it could be in TFA, which of course I haven't read, in which case the summary is off-topic).
This story is just for invoking the rage of Slashdotters, as so many stories of late (by which I mean the past few years, at least) are. Nerds are, on the whole, highly-intelligent idealists. We love to tell others how things should be done, especially when they're outside the field of technology, so we don't have to worry about other perspectives. Add to that the hatred of the rich and distrust of banks, with a bit of conspiracy theory for flavor, and you have a perfect recipe for a sensational Slashdot story.
Nobody's surprised that bankers screwed up. They took their bad securities, mixed them together with securities that other banks said were good, then sold the whole thing saying it's good... only for others to mix in their own bad securities and reiterate. Some noticed, some didn't, and some noticed but didn't want to do anything about it. That sucks.
Meanwhile, IT admins around the world are requiring weak passwords, moving vital data to cloud services without backups, and putting servers under water lines. We all do things to make the world worse, but for now it's just the bankers who are presented as evil for it.
Thanks! I often do my best work while pissed at ignorance.
Personally, I'm inclined to agree, but for the sake of literary analysis, I'll use the term the author used. Orwell classifies Ingsoc as socialism, because socialism (as he saw it) was something he feared. Bearing in mind that he wrote in the 1940s, socialism (of the fascist Nazi ("National Socialist") kind) was very different from any modern socialist government.
The simplistic point of socialism is to support the population through well-managed programs. Orwell's perversion of the concept is a government whose well-managed programs intentionally oppress the people. The tactics used to accomplish the oppression were indeed fascist.
First off, 1984 started off as a book, so it'd really be a book-turned-reality, but it's not even that.
The scary part of 1984 isn't the surveillance. That's just the most visible aspect that everyone talks about. The villain of the story is the government that fears its people so much that it resorts to mind control as a means of keeping peace. Mind control is a tricky thing, though, so extreme scarcity and enforced conformity are used to rein in any dissent. Surveillance is just a tool the government uses to look for that dissent.
The book hints at the possibility that the world is actually not at war, but the ongoing conflicts are actually staged to justify the artificial scarcity. Even Goldstein's underground rebellion may be a hoax perpetrated by the government to expose any rebellious tendencies. Those that are caught are tortured to break their minds, stripping away conscious thought and logic until assertions can be made without resistance. That's when the victim knows that there really is no viable escape, no higher purpose, and not even any nobility in life or death.
Every title in 1984 is ironic. The Ministry of Plenty restricts supplies, the Ministry of Love tortures, the Ministry of Peace plans the wars, the Ministry of Truth distributes lies... and Big Brother is not a loving familial support, but rather an oppressive embodiment of an anti-social Socialist government.
The fully-converted mindless drones of Ingsoc merely survive, not because they are being watched by Big Brother, but because there is no other choice. The constant surveillance is just a symbol of the government's constant presence. Whether that constant presence is a good or bad thing is a separate issue, which Orwell later recognized openly as peaceful post-WWII societal changes eased his wartime fears.
...like shoving Twinkies up their asses...
With no more Twinkies for a while, I do hope ESR has stocked up.
Turns out that trickle-down ... economics is and always will be bunk.
...But I think I am a good person, and I do good things with my money. Why would anyone not want good things to be done? Surely with more money I could do more good things, but that means I need to be sending less to the government. The government politicians just nickel-and-dime their way through the budget pulling money out of good investments for the future and into gift programs for the lazy.
A note to the witless: I'm not being wholly serious, but I'm not trolling, either. Just illustrating a particular perspective.