"iPhone outsells every other phone by an order of magnitude..."
I hate that BS apple propaganda. iPhone outsells every other SMARTPHONE HANDSET on the market. If you look at real data, like Total phones, far far far more dumb phones are sold. And the smartphone market? If you look at a more accurate number, like the number of phones with the iPhone OS or the Android OS on them, Android has double the market share of apple. Apple is able to say they sell the most phones because they only offer one... sure if you break up android sales by model, each one gets a much smaller share... but that's stupid.
Then Windows phones? hahahha... I dont think I've ever met someone with a windows phone.
There are some major assholes out there... and it would be great if they couldn't talk. But this is total bullshit. You should be able to rant and rave about your ex-wife/girlfriend on the internet or where-ever else you want. Her family could easily have blocked his emails. They didn't have to visit the site. They could have even complained to his ISP and the ISP could have terminated his account... something I've actually seen happen (I've worked for many ISPs over the years)
The government baring you from mentioning a person for 50 years? That's just a tad too distopian for my tastes... even if the guy deserved it.
OMG that sounds like a nightmare. You put so much red-tape in between your developers and the actual users you were more likely obscuring problems from them that triaging them. Problems that weren't reproducible were stopped? Your software randomly bluescreens my PC... that would never get through? Intermittent problems were weeded out? This is the type of system that makes end-users hate IS departments. Treating the helpdesk like a firewall between you and the real problems... and thinking of them as secretaries... I doubt that made you many friends either.
The first thing I did when I became the lead in my department was drop the helpdesks involvement in our systems immediately. They still setup users, reset passwords, etc... but all bug reports come strait to us. If it isn't our problem, we help the user find out whos problem it is. They are our customer, without them we have no purpose. Make them happy, and they will keep you employed.
For bug reports, I wrote a tool that takes a screenshot, dumps the contents of every control in every open window as well as a bunch of crap from the registry, packages it all up in an email that it pops open, with all sorts of stuff pre-filled out and the cursor ends up at the end of a line that says "The problem I experienced was: " They type a couple of lines and click send. Done.
They have complaints that aren't bugs? No they don't. Their complaints ARE bugs... just not software bugs. They are bugs in process, and not your department. Forward them on to whomever designing the process they have to follow, CC the person that sent it to you explaining what you're doing. Or is it that they have a feature request? Tell them so, pass it on to whomever is in charge of such things. If 90% of what you get is not your responsibility, and you just ignore it, you'll be seen as a black hole and your users will not waste the effort to send you anything... as a result you'll lose 100% of the actual data that you need. If you properly handle all of the users requests, and make the process transparent to the user, they will learn... and start sending the appropriate info to the right place the first time.
The application I maintain interfaces with nearly every software package and department in our rather large company. There are probably thousands of software products it touches. I get this sort of thing all day long. I've had the best success when I've found a "Senior" or other, more technically apt person in each department and designated them as "bug reporter" or some such. Their team takes issues to them, they bring them to me. I train them on what to send to me, and where to send it if it's not me. We learn together. Often I don't even know how they are using the software, so they can help me in return.
Bush isn't in office any longer, and those prisoners are still there... and still being tortured. At least we aren't adding any new ones, we just assassinate them now.
This is nothing new. There was a time that I vividly remember in which memory cost over $200 a meg (and it cost even more before that.) A single line of redundant code was considered a sin. The price of memory and hard drive space came down and now software is more bloated as programmers focus on other things like security and usability. Is that bad? Yes and no. Like all things, the effect of an improvement in something is many fold. There are positives and negatives... we just hope it's mostly positive.
It's not "lost" farming equipment. Farmers and industrial equipment use this tech to do things like level a field to within a 1/4" I watched a large D8 bulldozer that had a blade guided by one of these systems put a grade on a plot that was exactly 1" lower at one end than the other. This was important for the crop being planted there because they wanted very slow runoff without any pooling etc... It was amazing to watch really. If farmers lost systems like this it would have an impact, not only on their yields, but also on the amount of water, fertilizer, seed, even gasoline they'd use. It'd be bad for us all.
I'm not sure if you've noticed, but the economy IS in a liquidity crisis. Precisely because the fed did bail out these banks. Had they just gone under in 2008, it would have sucked but we'd be well on our way to recovery now. The banks are too huge for anyone else to compete with, yet their business model is flawed... and the fed props them up... so we basically have Zombie banks that will never die. Their failure may be terrible, but it's a fact... it HAS to happen. Either now, or in the future. It's like putting off telling your parents you're pregnant. The longer you wait, the more obvious the inevitable will become, and the fewer options you'll be left with.
This is a classic problem of economics. Publicly owned resources that are not owned by any one individual or company are very difficult for market factors to work on. A good example is fishing. The fish in a bay are not owned by any particular person, so their welfare is not in the economic interest of any particular person. It may be in a commercial fishermans long term interest to conserve the fish population and not over fish, but he's not the only fisherman. If he cuts back on his catch, other fisherman can simply catch the fish he left behind, the fishery is depleted just as if he'd exploited it, the only difference is the cut in profits he took. The other fisherman are thinking the same thing. They may all collectively want to conserve the fish but it's impossible for them to trust each other and agree to cut back on fishing. Sadly if the fishery were owned by a single person, even a terrible, fish hating monster, he would never allow the damage being done to the population that occurs when it's a public resource. A healthy amount of fish is his income and retirement, it's worth millions to him. But we can not allow such a thing to be "owned" and so we're stuck.
The same applies here. The "internet" is not owned by any particular person, as a result you have dozens of ISPs all fighting to provide the same service at the expense of all of the others. Their cutting their own throats to stay in business and have no way of trusting one another. Government regulation is woefully inadequate and will likely never catch up to technology. At the same time, the thought of a government owned system for transmitting information/data sounds horrifying given the recent actions by our elected officials.
This is unfortunately a situation that is very much like the classical Gordian Knot, and sadly I think the problem will likely be "solved" by a tyrant just like the original. The constitutional and privacy problems the solution causes will probably dwarf the congestion problems we started with.
You're wrong. The federal government suspended "Mark to market" rules because the banks in question were, in every sense of the work, bankrupt. So now, banks do not have to list the assets on their balance sheets at their current value. A house that's devalued from 200k down to 150k they can list at whatever they want... 200k, 250k, it's real value is irrelevant. So now they can borrow against an asset who's value they literally invented out of thin air... Not only that, but the bank they are borrowing their money from did the exact same thing. If you think the last housing collapse was bad... wait until the next one...
Wow, I remember seeing the first issue of this magazine on the shelf and thinking to myself "HOLY CRAP A MAGAZINE ABOUT VIDEOGAMES?!?!" I still have the issue. Found a pic here: http://gamesnet.vo.llnwd.net/o1/gnet/117181_6.jpg
At the time there wasn't anything else, at least where I lived. There was no internet. Basically you got a game and guessed the best that you could. All those awesome Easter eggs that gave you unlimited lives and such? No one knew really... and if you got stuck in one spot in a game? You were truely screwed. Nothing you could do but give up. Then along game Gamepro and a couple of other magazines like it and BAM! Full maps! Tips! Strategy! Hell, I'd read guides to games I didn't even have and then decide to beg my parents for some money.
I don't know how relevant they are now... or any print material for that matter. But they were revolutionary in 1989, RIP Gamepro.
I'm a radeon guy to... always buy AMD/Radeon, but even I have to admit.. Radeon cards have a lot of problems that NVidia cards just dont have. You go to nearly every major game releaseds support forums, and what's stickied at the top? "Radeon owners issues click here"
Add to that Nvidias clearly superior support for hardware accelerated HD decoding and really, my favorite card has some catching up to do. I spent months trying to get a Radeon card to work in my HTPC and I think I got the hardware decoding to engage on one movie... and it was a hardware encoding demo. I ordered a $30 Nvidia card that was 2yrs old and threw it in... bam, it just worked. I didn't even have to mess with settings. Hell, when I did mess with the settings I was having a hard time getting it NOT to engage.
What they are describing IS slashdot. When you mod someone up or down, you are adding/removing from their chance to get mod points. You are delegating authority to them.
I doubt 90% of what is sold as "organic" is organic in the "popularly understood sense" as you put it. From Horizons being the largest organic brand in the country, importing the majority of their food from China, to your local farmers market filled with stands that got all their produce at the local grocery store the night before the market opened. There's a sucker born every minute and if you feed them a premise that involves technology being bad and improving their health, they will give you all of their money in very short order.
The problems with systems and weapons like these is they look great... now. Sure, give the president the ability to kill, anyone on earth, at the push of a button, at his leisure. Wouldn't that be great? No more dictators, no more terrorists, it's Perfect! Until we elect the wrong person. Every country will inevitably get their Stalin or Hitler. The only thing that can protect you from such a person is a strong constitution and limits on executive powers. We're on a very steep slope now, and we WILL eventually regret the true security we've given up in exchange for the false security these systems promise.
I used to work for ATT. People working in the same building don't even know the job responsibilities of people across the hall... much less across the country. ATT would do things like: Give one of their departments a free data line. This line was still billed, but they'd put it on an account that was paid by ATT itself. There were thousands of lines on these accounts and they'd bill in the millions, but it didn't matter because ATT would pay it themselves right? Well, the problems arose when ATT would lay-off the previously mentioned department. They'd fired everyone, and vacate the building. A few months later a new tenant would move in and find several WORKING T1s on the ATT network... some of them inside ATTs own internal cloud! They'd call ATT billing and request to have those lines removed... ATT would say they need a written statement ending service to disconnect. The tenants would explain that ATT was the customer, they need to write their own disconnect request... but ATT would refuse. Dishonest people would say "Fine" and write a fake disconnect request. (that actually would work) More dishonest people would just start using the T1s and say "Yay!" Honest customers, as usual, were screwed. ATT would let the line sit, usually for years, then figure it out and try to back-bill them for something they never asked to have installed, never used and had no way of removing.
I surprised everyone is fooled by this. The solution to the problem at hand is obvious... Cuts in both military spending as well as social programs, and ending the Bush tax cuts... in fact, we probably need even more than that. But how can the republicans raise taxes and cut military spending and then go home and get re-elected? How can democrats cut social spending and not invent some new "screw the rich" tax? It would require a diabolical plan... pass a law that says if a special committee cant agree on a plan, all these things happen... Then find people to be on the committee that are all as far left and right as possible so that, not only will they not agree, but their respective electorate will praise them for not making a deal with those evil republicans/democrats. Taxes go up, spending goes down, everyone can blame everyone else... It's perfect! The only problem? Even this wasn't enough. We're still doomed.
Slashdot Mirror
yes, but I trust Mozilla, they have not screwed me in the past.
Fools that signed such contracts deserved the level of support they got. My company would laugh such a contract right out the door.
"iPhone outsells every other phone by an order of magnitude..."
I hate that BS apple propaganda. iPhone outsells every other SMARTPHONE HANDSET on the market. If you look at real data, like Total phones, far far far more dumb phones are sold. And the smartphone market? If you look at a more accurate number, like the number of phones with the iPhone OS or the Android OS on them, Android has double the market share of apple. Apple is able to say they sell the most phones because they only offer one... sure if you break up android sales by model, each one gets a much smaller share... but that's stupid.
Then Windows phones? hahahha... I dont think I've ever met someone with a windows phone.
There are some major assholes out there... and it would be great if they couldn't talk. But this is total bullshit. You should be able to rant and rave about your ex-wife/girlfriend on the internet or where-ever else you want. Her family could easily have blocked his emails. They didn't have to visit the site. They could have even complained to his ISP and the ISP could have terminated his account... something I've actually seen happen (I've worked for many ISPs over the years)
The government baring you from mentioning a person for 50 years? That's just a tad too distopian for my tastes... even if the guy deserved it.
OMG that sounds like a nightmare. You put so much red-tape in between your developers and the actual users you were more likely obscuring problems from them that triaging them. Problems that weren't reproducible were stopped? Your software randomly bluescreens my PC... that would never get through? Intermittent problems were weeded out? This is the type of system that makes end-users hate IS departments. Treating the helpdesk like a firewall between you and the real problems... and thinking of them as secretaries... I doubt that made you many friends either.
The first thing I did when I became the lead in my department was drop the helpdesks involvement in our systems immediately. They still setup users, reset passwords, etc... but all bug reports come strait to us. If it isn't our problem, we help the user find out whos problem it is. They are our customer, without them we have no purpose. Make them happy, and they will keep you employed.
For bug reports, I wrote a tool that takes a screenshot, dumps the contents of every control in every open window as well as a bunch of crap from the registry, packages it all up in an email that it pops open, with all sorts of stuff pre-filled out and the cursor ends up at the end of a line that says "The problem I experienced was: " They type a couple of lines and click send. Done.
They have complaints that aren't bugs? No they don't. Their complaints ARE bugs... just not software bugs. They are bugs in process, and not your department. Forward them on to whomever designing the process they have to follow, CC the person that sent it to you explaining what you're doing. Or is it that they have a feature request? Tell them so, pass it on to whomever is in charge of such things. If 90% of what you get is not your responsibility, and you just ignore it, you'll be seen as a black hole and your users will not waste the effort to send you anything... as a result you'll lose 100% of the actual data that you need. If you properly handle all of the users requests, and make the process transparent to the user, they will learn... and start sending the appropriate info to the right place the first time.
The application I maintain interfaces with nearly every software package and department in our rather large company. There are probably thousands of software products it touches. I get this sort of thing all day long. I've had the best success when I've found a "Senior" or other, more technically apt person in each department and designated them as "bug reporter" or some such. Their team takes issues to them, they bring them to me. I train them on what to send to me, and where to send it if it's not me. We learn together. Often I don't even know how they are using the software, so they can help me in return.
Long story short, you catch more flys with honey.
I'd like to clone Natalie Portman in my basement. I think my odds of success are about the same as Irans.
I, and everyone I know have been doing this forever. Just say "Umm" and there you go. It probably goes back 100 years or more.
Bush isn't in office any longer, and those prisoners are still there... and still being tortured. At least we aren't adding any new ones, we just assassinate them now.
And this, my friends, is why international law is horseshit and we don't abide by it.
This is nothing new. There was a time that I vividly remember in which memory cost over $200 a meg (and it cost even more before that.) A single line of redundant code was considered a sin. The price of memory and hard drive space came down and now software is more bloated as programmers focus on other things like security and usability. Is that bad? Yes and no. Like all things, the effect of an improvement in something is many fold. There are positives and negatives... we just hope it's mostly positive.
It's not "lost" farming equipment. Farmers and industrial equipment use this tech to do things like level a field to within a 1/4" I watched a large D8 bulldozer that had a blade guided by one of these systems put a grade on a plot that was exactly 1" lower at one end than the other. This was important for the crop being planted there because they wanted very slow runoff without any pooling etc... It was amazing to watch really. If farmers lost systems like this it would have an impact, not only on their yields, but also on the amount of water, fertilizer, seed, even gasoline they'd use. It'd be bad for us all.
I'm not sure if you've noticed, but the economy IS in a liquidity crisis. Precisely because the fed did bail out these banks. Had they just gone under in 2008, it would have sucked but we'd be well on our way to recovery now. The banks are too huge for anyone else to compete with, yet their business model is flawed... and the fed props them up... so we basically have Zombie banks that will never die. Their failure may be terrible, but it's a fact... it HAS to happen. Either now, or in the future. It's like putting off telling your parents you're pregnant. The longer you wait, the more obvious the inevitable will become, and the fewer options you'll be left with.
This is a classic problem of economics. Publicly owned resources that are not owned by any one individual or company are very difficult for market factors to work on. A good example is fishing. The fish in a bay are not owned by any particular person, so their welfare is not in the economic interest of any particular person. It may be in a commercial fishermans long term interest to conserve the fish population and not over fish, but he's not the only fisherman. If he cuts back on his catch, other fisherman can simply catch the fish he left behind, the fishery is depleted just as if he'd exploited it, the only difference is the cut in profits he took. The other fisherman are thinking the same thing. They may all collectively want to conserve the fish but it's impossible for them to trust each other and agree to cut back on fishing. Sadly if the fishery were owned by a single person, even a terrible, fish hating monster, he would never allow the damage being done to the population that occurs when it's a public resource. A healthy amount of fish is his income and retirement, it's worth millions to him. But we can not allow such a thing to be "owned" and so we're stuck.
The same applies here. The "internet" is not owned by any particular person, as a result you have dozens of ISPs all fighting to provide the same service at the expense of all of the others. Their cutting their own throats to stay in business and have no way of trusting one another. Government regulation is woefully inadequate and will likely never catch up to technology. At the same time, the thought of a government owned system for transmitting information/data sounds horrifying given the recent actions by our elected officials.
This is unfortunately a situation that is very much like the classical Gordian Knot, and sadly I think the problem will likely be "solved" by a tyrant just like the original. The constitutional and privacy problems the solution causes will probably dwarf the congestion problems we started with.
Doomed? Like every game Richard Garriott has been involved with since 1998?
You're wrong. The federal government suspended "Mark to market" rules because the banks in question were, in every sense of the work, bankrupt. So now, banks do not have to list the assets on their balance sheets at their current value. A house that's devalued from 200k down to 150k they can list at whatever they want... 200k, 250k, it's real value is irrelevant. So now they can borrow against an asset who's value they literally invented out of thin air... Not only that, but the bank they are borrowing their money from did the exact same thing. If you think the last housing collapse was bad... wait until the next one...
Wow, I remember seeing the first issue of this magazine on the shelf and thinking to myself "HOLY CRAP A MAGAZINE ABOUT VIDEOGAMES?!?!" I still have the issue. Found a pic here: http://gamesnet.vo.llnwd.net/o1/gnet/117181_6.jpg
At the time there wasn't anything else, at least where I lived. There was no internet. Basically you got a game and guessed the best that you could. All those awesome Easter eggs that gave you unlimited lives and such? No one knew really... and if you got stuck in one spot in a game? You were truely screwed. Nothing you could do but give up. Then along game Gamepro and a couple of other magazines like it and BAM! Full maps! Tips! Strategy! Hell, I'd read guides to games I didn't even have and then decide to beg my parents for some money.
I don't know how relevant they are now... or any print material for that matter. But they were revolutionary in 1989, RIP Gamepro.
I'm a radeon guy to... always buy AMD/Radeon, but even I have to admit.. Radeon cards have a lot of problems that NVidia cards just dont have. You go to nearly every major game releaseds support forums, and what's stickied at the top? "Radeon owners issues click here"
Add to that Nvidias clearly superior support for hardware accelerated HD decoding and really, my favorite card has some catching up to do. I spent months trying to get a Radeon card to work in my HTPC and I think I got the hardware decoding to engage on one movie... and it was a hardware encoding demo. I ordered a $30 Nvidia card that was 2yrs old and threw it in... bam, it just worked. I didn't even have to mess with settings. Hell, when I did mess with the settings I was having a hard time getting it NOT to engage.
What they are describing IS slashdot. When you mod someone up or down, you are adding/removing from their chance to get mod points. You are delegating authority to them.
I doubt 90% of what is sold as "organic" is organic in the "popularly understood sense" as you put it. From Horizons being the largest organic brand in the country, importing the majority of their food from China, to your local farmers market filled with stands that got all their produce at the local grocery store the night before the market opened. There's a sucker born every minute and if you feed them a premise that involves technology being bad and improving their health, they will give you all of their money in very short order.
I've been to 3rd world countries. Go to one, then revise your statement.
The problems with systems and weapons like these is they look great... now. Sure, give the president the ability to kill, anyone on earth, at the push of a button, at his leisure. Wouldn't that be great? No more dictators, no more terrorists, it's Perfect! Until we elect the wrong person. Every country will inevitably get their Stalin or Hitler. The only thing that can protect you from such a person is a strong constitution and limits on executive powers. We're on a very steep slope now, and we WILL eventually regret the true security we've given up in exchange for the false security these systems promise.
I used to work for ATT. People working in the same building don't even know the job responsibilities of people across the hall... much less across the country. ATT would do things like: Give one of their departments a free data line. This line was still billed, but they'd put it on an account that was paid by ATT itself. There were thousands of lines on these accounts and they'd bill in the millions, but it didn't matter because ATT would pay it themselves right? Well, the problems arose when ATT would lay-off the previously mentioned department. They'd fired everyone, and vacate the building. A few months later a new tenant would move in and find several WORKING T1s on the ATT network... some of them inside ATTs own internal cloud! They'd call ATT billing and request to have those lines removed... ATT would say they need a written statement ending service to disconnect. The tenants would explain that ATT was the customer, they need to write their own disconnect request... but ATT would refuse. Dishonest people would say "Fine" and write a fake disconnect request. (that actually would work) More dishonest people would just start using the T1s and say "Yay!" Honest customers, as usual, were screwed. ATT would let the line sit, usually for years, then figure it out and try to back-bill them for something they never asked to have installed, never used and had no way of removing.
Their customers data IS their own data. Didn't you know that?
I surprised everyone is fooled by this. The solution to the problem at hand is obvious... Cuts in both military spending as well as social programs, and ending the Bush tax cuts... in fact, we probably need even more than that. But how can the republicans raise taxes and cut military spending and then go home and get re-elected? How can democrats cut social spending and not invent some new "screw the rich" tax? It would require a diabolical plan... pass a law that says if a special committee cant agree on a plan, all these things happen... Then find people to be on the committee that are all as far left and right as possible so that, not only will they not agree, but their respective electorate will praise them for not making a deal with those evil republicans/democrats. Taxes go up, spending goes down, everyone can blame everyone else... It's perfect! The only problem? Even this wasn't enough. We're still doomed.