This take is far more accurate if you watch his earlier stuff. The UK version of Kitchen Nightmares was fantastic, and I was always a big fan. I highly recommend the DVD collection to anyone looking to start any kind of small business.
Today, he's still a well-meaning asshole, but... with a bit more asshole (and ego) than before. I still like his shorts on YouTube, but don't watch any of his TV programs.
The loudest objection, "We don't have the money"...it's simply not true.
Especially if it applies universally. Almost any regulation or tax can be tolerated as long as there's a level playing field and no one business has an unfair competitive advantage.
The real trick is getting corporations to actually pay the taxes they owe and taxing international trade (as most countries currently do). There's just too many loopholes in the system. What difference does a 35% tax rate mean if a bit of accounting acrobatics reduces their effective tax to zero, and only the biggest corporations can afford the lawyers necessary to make it work?
Why care about the economy as a whole if YOUR business is doing okay? In the minds of the executive, making as much money as possible is a less important goal that simply making more money than everyone else. Sure, the economy might be a smoldering pile of ashes, but at least my pile of ashes is the biggest!
I believe what's coming is what was predicted in the 50's. Shorter work weeks, more leisure time and that's because through our hard work and efforts we have arrived at the future and will now reap the benefits of all that effort.
Yeah, yeah. Any time my [blue collar] ex company told us to work harder on our way to SUCCESS, we did, and none of us ever got a raise or shortened work hours. Like most of the country for the last few decades, we've seen our real wage go down. Eventually we got to a 15-hour work day, every day. Why? Because most of my coworkers didn't have a life and preferred to work ungodly hours so they could make "more money." Rather than demanding raises, talk about a union, or otherwise "reap the rewards", most people just swallowed that false economic BS management fed us. I quit, but I was alone in that decision, apparently.
I have a hard time accepting that we'll eventually move towards UBI. We seem to have this philosophy of putting in the hours, regardless of how much work we actually do. Shorter work weeks go against basic human instinct, let alone what the Mennonites think.
Indeed. What amazes me are the people who insist that CPU technology has stalled because what we already have is good enough for day-to-day use. These same people insist consoles suck because they're underpowered.
Linux has been around for over 25 years, IS FREE, and is barely clutching on to 2% desktop market share. That's after the fiascos called Windows 8 and Windows 10. Oh, and the Macintosh market share has gone down as well.
It's easy to call Windows people idiots, but anyone with half a brain knows the alternatives still have plenty of their own problems and why Windows still has all the support. People don't like Linux. I've been trying to switch to various Linux distros over the last 12 years, and I've always been disappointed.
You may have terabytes of information, but you never know which megabyte you'll need.
I once needed to dig up a logo I created in college almost 20 years ago. Due to my good organizational skills, recovering it was as simple as going into my folder of college stuff, and... voilà.
Ask somebody who archives company invoices how important data can be 10-20 years later.
Different platforms have different abilities and are built and designed for different purposes.
And yet most of the time, the base requirements are the same.
I generally write small, trivial applications, and it pisses me off that I can't make a universal binary that runs everywhere because some bozo thinks that every application in the universe should have mandatory code signing, should only use the latest GPU shaders, and all the latest UX eye candy built-in.
Java would be an option for me, if only it weren't such a bitch to tell people to install the damn runtime, which tries to install all kinds of value-added crap and nags to be updated every week.
It works. Maybe not as fast as you want or with every feature enabled, but at least it runs. When you have few options on your platform of choice, that actually matters.
Reminds me of some Windows backup software I used that demanded that you have a CD-ROM attached to your PC, even if you only backed up over a network. It crashed if an optical drive couldn't be detected. What idiot coded that crap?
They've given up listening to community feedback, which effectively is the same as giving up on improvement.
The Australis UI was a change, but not an improvement. Forced extension signing. Breaking multitudes of extensions with the multiprocessing updates, and soon they'll be replacing the existing extension framework entirely in favor of something Chrome-like -- that nobody actually wants and developers are livid about. Plugins are going away but Flash will be built-in, just like with Chrome. Memory usage and cycle-collect freezes haven't been addressed in 10 years. "Brand Experience." Have you heard about Lightspeed, the browser redesign that's not official (supposedly) but likely in the works anyway?
Yeah, there's sweeping changes happening. What difference does that make if the community doesn't want them and Mozilla tells people to STFU and deal with it?
Indeed. It's worth nothing that both Chrome and (soon) Firefox will banish plugins, ensuring that whatever DRM exists out there will have to be built into the browser through political clout and sponsorships. That means if you don't like the DRM, you have no ability to uninstall it, or possibly even disable it.
At the very least, we need a standard mechanism for managing DRM, which hopefully means being able to turn it off.
Since Netflix is obviously going to happen in browsers...
Says who? The obvious thing that's happening is not browsers, but "apps".
Mobile devices won't even let you watch videos in a "browser". They force you to use the app. I remember regularly using the web browser on my PS3 to watch YouTube, when one day, the site blacklisted the PS3 entirely, forcing you to use the app instead. That pissed me off, since the YouTube app on the PS3/PS4 sucks balls. But, hey, it's the only way to watch videos on that platform. I stopped watching YouTube on my TV after that, and now just use my PC.
By not including DRM, you would cause all the companies that wanted it to go away and implement it in some weird, proprietary way, that only works on the biggest platforms.
We're already at that point. Web developers only care about the biggest platforms.
Most of the small, alternative browsers support the latest W3C standards just fine. Alas, web sites only support brand names. I regularly come across web sites that work fine in Firefox, but don't work at all in Pale Moon, despite the two browsers being based on the same rendering engine. The reason why is that the web sites are designed to detect your browser by the UA header or some stupid JS hack. When a site doesn't see a popular, "supported" browser, it freaks out and renders nothing at all, or even just flat out tells you to update to a modern browser like Chrome. Pretty frustrating when you're trying to browse a site that doesn't even try to use the latest tricks or media types.
I recently came across a site that forces the use of WebP images, unless you're using IE, Edge, or Firefox. Thus, Pale Moon shows no images. Why the site didn't just make exceptions for "anything other than Chrome" is beyond me.
Music today is a far cry from the 20th Century - very manufactured, very simple, very made-for-money and very forgettable.
Are you implying that Sturgeon's Law is a recent invention? Electronic instruments and digital mixing have ruined music? Records from the 50's didn't have their fill of, er... filler?
Business practices changed as the industry grew, and that's clearly the problem. However, I've seen little change in the general quality of the products.
Well, it certainly makes things easier for us hobby programmers that make redistributable projects designed to run on shared servers. I can't count on people installing a framework or keeping a library up to date if they have no admin access to the server. A lot of PHP projects, like Wordpress, still aren't aimed at serious, large-scale enterprises. Don't assume the owners have shell access with enough permission to install dependencies.
I started working with PHP over a decade ago because it had a graphics library built directly into its core, so I could always depend on it being there. GDlib isn't great, but it works well enough for generating thumbnails. Saved me a lot of trouble trying to dick around with detecting ImageMagick or doing stupid shell calls that might not even work on hardened shared environments.
Granted, I only do small, trivial stuff, which is all I recommend PHP be used for.
Too bad many of these "jerks and asses" were just really good at ripping off other peoples' ideas and burying the evidence. They were more salesmen than innovators.
Slashdot Mirror
This take is far more accurate if you watch his earlier stuff. The UK version of Kitchen Nightmares was fantastic, and I was always a big fan. I highly recommend the DVD collection to anyone looking to start any kind of small business.
Today, he's still a well-meaning asshole, but... with a bit more asshole (and ego) than before. I still like his shorts on YouTube, but don't watch any of his TV programs.
If you don't want someone to know how often you masturbate and how, just don't put it over the 'net. M'kay?
It's quickly coming to the point where if I don't want to be tracked, I have to give up 99% of everything.
Ask how many writers and artists find mistakes in their work the next day.
The loudest objection, "We don't have the money"...it's simply not true.
Especially if it applies universally. Almost any regulation or tax can be tolerated as long as there's a level playing field and no one business has an unfair competitive advantage.
The real trick is getting corporations to actually pay the taxes they owe and taxing international trade (as most countries currently do). There's just too many loopholes in the system. What difference does a 35% tax rate mean if a bit of accounting acrobatics reduces their effective tax to zero, and only the biggest corporations can afford the lawyers necessary to make it work?
collectively suppress labor
The key word here being "collectively."
Why care about the economy as a whole if YOUR business is doing okay? In the minds of the executive, making as much money as possible is a less important goal that simply making more money than everyone else. Sure, the economy might be a smoldering pile of ashes, but at least my pile of ashes is the biggest!
I believe what's coming is what was predicted in the 50's. Shorter work weeks, more leisure time and that's because through our hard work and efforts we have arrived at the future and will now reap the benefits of all that effort.
Yeah, yeah. Any time my [blue collar] ex company told us to work harder on our way to SUCCESS, we did, and none of us ever got a raise or shortened work hours. Like most of the country for the last few decades, we've seen our real wage go down. Eventually we got to a 15-hour work day, every day. Why? Because most of my coworkers didn't have a life and preferred to work ungodly hours so they could make "more money." Rather than demanding raises, talk about a union, or otherwise "reap the rewards", most people just swallowed that false economic BS management fed us. I quit, but I was alone in that decision, apparently.
I have a hard time accepting that we'll eventually move towards UBI. We seem to have this philosophy of putting in the hours, regardless of how much work we actually do. Shorter work weeks go against basic human instinct, let alone what the Mennonites think.
Given that they're required to do unpaid homework on their own time, I'd assume the answer is "yes."
Same reason why some people build $10,000 PCs: bragging rights.
Yeah, but, does it have RGB lighting?!
Indeed. What amazes me are the people who insist that CPU technology has stalled because what we already have is good enough for day-to-day use. These same people insist consoles suck because they're underpowered.
Linux has been around for over 25 years, IS FREE, and is barely clutching on to 2% desktop market share. That's after the fiascos called Windows 8 and Windows 10. Oh, and the Macintosh market share has gone down as well.
It's easy to call Windows people idiots, but anyone with half a brain knows the alternatives still have plenty of their own problems and why Windows still has all the support. People don't like Linux. I've been trying to switch to various Linux distros over the last 12 years, and I've always been disappointed.
You may have terabytes of information, but you never know which megabyte you'll need.
I once needed to dig up a logo I created in college almost 20 years ago. Due to my good organizational skills, recovering it was as simple as going into my folder of college stuff, and... voilà.
Ask somebody who archives company invoices how important data can be 10-20 years later.
Different platforms have different abilities and are built and designed for different purposes.
And yet most of the time, the base requirements are the same.
I generally write small, trivial applications, and it pisses me off that I can't make a universal binary that runs everywhere because some bozo thinks that every application in the universe should have mandatory code signing, should only use the latest GPU shaders, and all the latest UX eye candy built-in.
Java would be an option for me, if only it weren't such a bitch to tell people to install the damn runtime, which tries to install all kinds of value-added crap and nags to be updated every week.
It works. Maybe not as fast as you want or with every feature enabled, but at least it runs. When you have few options on your platform of choice, that actually matters.
Reminds me of some Windows backup software I used that demanded that you have a CD-ROM attached to your PC, even if you only backed up over a network. It crashed if an optical drive couldn't be detected. What idiot coded that crap?
Precisely why I quit web development. Once scripting became mandatory for any web page, no matter what it does, it was time to GTFO.
They've given up listening to community feedback, which effectively is the same as giving up on improvement.
The Australis UI was a change, but not an improvement. Forced extension signing. Breaking multitudes of extensions with the multiprocessing updates, and soon they'll be replacing the existing extension framework entirely in favor of something Chrome-like -- that nobody actually wants and developers are livid about. Plugins are going away but Flash will be built-in, just like with Chrome. Memory usage and cycle-collect freezes haven't been addressed in 10 years. "Brand Experience." Have you heard about Lightspeed, the browser redesign that's not official (supposedly) but likely in the works anyway?
Yeah, there's sweeping changes happening. What difference does that make if the community doesn't want them and Mozilla tells people to STFU and deal with it?
Wait... are you talking about people licking carts or buying a Switch?
Is there any way to upvote a post higher than 5?
Indeed. It's worth nothing that both Chrome and (soon) Firefox will banish plugins, ensuring that whatever DRM exists out there will have to be built into the browser through political clout and sponsorships. That means if you don't like the DRM, you have no ability to uninstall it, or possibly even disable it.
At the very least, we need a standard mechanism for managing DRM, which hopefully means being able to turn it off.
Since Netflix is obviously going to happen in browsers...
Says who? The obvious thing that's happening is not browsers, but "apps".
Mobile devices won't even let you watch videos in a "browser". They force you to use the app. I remember regularly using the web browser on my PS3 to watch YouTube, when one day, the site blacklisted the PS3 entirely, forcing you to use the app instead. That pissed me off, since the YouTube app on the PS3/PS4 sucks balls. But, hey, it's the only way to watch videos on that platform. I stopped watching YouTube on my TV after that, and now just use my PC.
By not including DRM, you would cause all the companies that wanted it to go away and implement it in some weird, proprietary way, that only works on the biggest platforms.
We're already at that point. Web developers only care about the biggest platforms.
Most of the small, alternative browsers support the latest W3C standards just fine. Alas, web sites only support brand names. I regularly come across web sites that work fine in Firefox, but don't work at all in Pale Moon, despite the two browsers being based on the same rendering engine. The reason why is that the web sites are designed to detect your browser by the UA header or some stupid JS hack. When a site doesn't see a popular, "supported" browser, it freaks out and renders nothing at all, or even just flat out tells you to update to a modern browser like Chrome. Pretty frustrating when you're trying to browse a site that doesn't even try to use the latest tricks or media types.
I recently came across a site that forces the use of WebP images, unless you're using IE, Edge, or Firefox. Thus, Pale Moon shows no images. Why the site didn't just make exceptions for "anything other than Chrome" is beyond me.
The rich can't get richer if the masses can't afford to buy the shiny new toys being made by the robots.
I'm not sure they're interested in getting richer. They want to puff their egos, so simply making the competition poorer might suffice just fine.
Music today is a far cry from the 20th Century - very manufactured, very simple, very made-for-money and very forgettable.
Are you implying that Sturgeon's Law is a recent invention? Electronic instruments and digital mixing have ruined music? Records from the 50's didn't have their fill of, er... filler?
Business practices changed as the industry grew, and that's clearly the problem. However, I've seen little change in the general quality of the products.
Well, I'm sure the dozens of billions of unpaid back taxes will be up for debate shortly.
Well, it certainly makes things easier for us hobby programmers that make redistributable projects designed to run on shared servers. I can't count on people installing a framework or keeping a library up to date if they have no admin access to the server. A lot of PHP projects, like Wordpress, still aren't aimed at serious, large-scale enterprises. Don't assume the owners have shell access with enough permission to install dependencies.
I started working with PHP over a decade ago because it had a graphics library built directly into its core, so I could always depend on it being there. GDlib isn't great, but it works well enough for generating thumbnails. Saved me a lot of trouble trying to dick around with detecting ImageMagick or doing stupid shell calls that might not even work on hardened shared environments.
Granted, I only do small, trivial stuff, which is all I recommend PHP be used for.
Too bad many of these "jerks and asses" were just really good at ripping off other peoples' ideas and burying the evidence. They were more salesmen than innovators.