The bar for "normal big company evil" is pretty low - one might argue it's resting on the ground. But phone companies own lots of trenching equipment and can still fail to clear a bar resting on the ground. And disrupt access to the bar for 6 weeks, while accidentally charging you $700 for it. I have no proof that the CEO of AT&T can't have an orgasm unless he strangles a puppy.
In this case, it would actually make some sense: the Xbone uses the Kinect for more than just gameplay. IIRC, the voice recognition stuff all goes through the connect, plus stuff as basic as signing into the box when it turns on.
That's my biggest complaint with my Xbone right now: sign-in every time I turn it own blows goats unless I have the Kinect attached. And it didn't when I bought it - the goat blowing was an update. Stop the goat-blowing updates MS, sheesh!
This is why I like T-Mobile. While coverage is (and likely will always be) quite limited for 4G, I've never seen them cross the line from "typical big company evil" to the black depths of "phone company evil". Plus, they have decent pre-paid plans, which lets you strictly limit surprises.
I'm using Visual Studio Online today to do sprints. Shockingly, it's fine. It's no better than the other agile project management tools I've used, but it's no worse either. If MS could just add full Git integration to it, they'd have something. There're not stuck in waterfall on their latest stuff, and I can see the potential for them to be the best tool for tracking agile work for large teams, if they can get over themselves on version control (there are no good bug tracking systems, so using the integrated VS tools for that is nice since at least it's integrated out of the box).
MS isn't still stuck in the "internal server" world: you can trivially create an Azure-hosted web server to host a web application you make in VS. It's quite slick for toy projects. Still not there yet for anything real, but again I can see the potential for mid-sized deployments being magic. Azure though just isn't ready for large scale (millions or billions of users) - it's way behind EC2 when you start caring about the tools that let you manage thousands of servers.
Still, Azure is fine if you just need a dozen servers, if only VS would get past it's tentative first steps and actually make one-button build-deploy work magically for load-balanced sets of servers with automatic "let a few users on the new stuff, then roll it back or forward based on service health". They'd be worth their premium at that point.
Handbrake will compress animation down about 20% more, nice if being a nerd like me you have lots of it. Sadly the UI doesn't have this as a checkbox, but it's there in the command line.
Because they weren't exchange-traded, there were 1000s of different contracts with different terms. No one of them got much attention from analysts. Had there been just a handful of contracts instead, the standardized terms would have led to far deeper analysis. Yes, all ratings agencies have their issues, but they do tend to work well in aggregate for non-government securities.
Per Wikipedia "As of 2010, the Service has over 6,500 employees: 3,200 Special Agents, 1,300 Uniformed Division Officers, and 2,000 technical and administrative employees". With 3200 field agents, I'd imagine they have the manpower to visit a list of people on their watch lists.
Well, CIFS shares are fine if you have a VPN but, yeah, not so much on the open internet.
MS still doesn't get the Internet and how people work today in Web Dev
I wouldn't quite say that, but they're not there yet. OneDrive is their answer for the files part, and where it works today it's great, but it's not yet a tool for moving between servers (it's quite nice for Windows and Android for personal stuff, and I'd guess other clients are coming).
You can see where MS has tried to make their IDE work for web dev - it sure would be nice if they eventually get it right!
I've heard accounts of people doing just that, funnily enough. As the Secret Service currently lacks a sarcasm detector it's not just lonely weirdos they drop in on, and they're probably used to spending an afternoon with random families.
Well, the SEC has a very specific issue of being thoroughly corrupted by Goldman Sachs, there's no doubt of that. But it doesn't have a problem with over-regulating markets.
The financial exchanges actually went to the SEC asking for mortgage derivatives to be exchange-traded. That would have avoided the problem (not the real estate bubble, but the massive affect it had on investment banks), and everyone not in the pocket of those few banks understood the need and its magnitude. Sigh.
Why would the Secret Service, in particular, want to tell sarcasm apart from other speech? Think about who they are.
They want to be able to distinguish sarcastic political speech, from sincere political speech. Of course both are protected speech.
Not all political speech is protected. A threat to harm the President of the US is specifically not protected speech. The Secret Service is particularly concerned with such threats, and is in fact charged with keeping tabs on everyone who has ever threatened the president.
If you've ever publically made such a threat, there's a chance an agent will knock on your door and politely sit with you for a few hours while the president is in town. Think about the logistics of that. It would get quite out of hand if they took all internet threats seriously.
It's always amazed me how the word "snark" has proliferated, once you understand its intended meaning. Hint: the poem was the world's greatest-ever success at sneaking one past the censors.
That's libertarian fantasy not grounded in history. The SEC has not arrogated itself powers at random: no one like giving the government regulator power more than the sort of people who own stock and commodity exchanges, and those people have quite significant political power. SEC rules, just like exchange rules, have grown over time in response to a long history of very real disasters, abuses, and scandals.
While the combination of exchange rules and SEC rules might be slightly larger than the minimum viable set of rules needed for a functional free market, it's damn close. More to the point, these rules satisfy people with lifelong careers running the most successful free markets the world has ever seen. Ideas that "sure sound good to me and my smart friends" are in this area are right up there with every Youtube video about how Einstein or Quantum Mechanics is wrong.
The isn't macroeconomics, where everyone is guessing, this is the finance equivalent of engineering.
The performance hit and need for the runtime is a big problem in many ways. Compiling to native code is the right path to jumping those hurdles. For C#,.NET Native is quite interesting. I can think of so many ways MS could ruin this, but the prospect of a stand-alone exe compiled from C# is exiting.
8 was merely a UI debacle, but Vista was an abomination. I still wonder how that even made it out the door. Hopefully 9 takes us back to a good UI, as I really like Win 7 and the server counterpart.
I thought IE actually did FTP, or at least used to. I haven't tried in years, though. With the advent of DropBox (or OneDrive if you're a MS fan), I haven't seen FTP in forever (but then, maybe that's because there's no easy way to FTP upload from a Windows box?)
Well, count yourself lucky you haven't done time in shops where "fast and wrong" is the norm. It sucks just as much as you'd think it would. All it takes to get there is terrible best practices ("unit tests? those take so long to write and hardly find any bugs, and anyhow testing is not a dev's job").
You're so right. Some people make more than that. Why is it fair that a heart surgeon makes more than a fry cook - who made that rule? Are they not both humans, equally deserving of respect. $150 an hour is a much better minimum wage - equality for all!
After all, if it's OK to raise the minimum wage without regard to market price for labor, why stop at a measly $15/hour? Cheapness and greed and republicans, that's why! Keeping the man down to $15/hour sounds like a Koch brothers plot, if you ask me!
Well, it's a very odd corner of the software world where you can plan 2 years out and be right about those deliverables. But perhaps I'm reading too much into what you're saying.
Anyhow, my point was only that "fast" and "right" are orthogonal axes, each of which is important, but management tends to over-focus on "fast" and I've seen "right" ignored to the point of the failure of the company. (Seriously, I was hired to try to rescue a place where checking in code that didn't even compile in order to "meet deadlines" was actually rewarded - the tech debt was so high that it was eventually impossible to meet contractual agreements, though at least we fixed the worst of that enough to get the investors a decent price for the company as it was folding.)
Fast but wrong is a burden on the team - don't underestimate the retention effects of that. No one likes cleaning up for the other guy, but when the other guy is getting praised and the guys cleaning up chided for being slow? You'll have nothing but sloppy coders in a year.
Once an engineer is well paid, so that he doesn't feel exploited, he rarely leaves on the basis of pay. It's mostly about exiting (or at least interesting) work and smart/pleasant people to work with. And a team mate you always have to clean up after is more of a problem for retaining your top performers than a bit of pay.
You must work in an odd environment. Is your project schedule and deliverables set for you from on high, leaving you to scramble to get it done? Are you working on some very long release cycle where 3 months is an interesting time frame? It's been about 8 years since I worked in a shop like that (and it was far past its prime).
I'm talking from the perspective of 2-3 week iterations, where the team chooses what they'll sign up to deliver, and code it shippable at the end of each iteration. Predictability means hitting our goals. Quality means not getting pulled off productive work to fix bugs - bugs made by the same few idiot coders, again and again.
Sure, occasionally you get someone fast-but-sloppy, and that's tolerable. Maybe that's what you're thinking of? But someone who just misunderstands the deliverable and makes the team miss their goal because what he put out for review (always at the end of the cycle) doesn't even address the task? We don't need that guy. Or someone who isn't fast, and slows everyone else down trying to understand and review the crap he writes each week? A burden on the team.
Slashdot Mirror
But were the charges legitimate (not in error)?
The bar for "normal big company evil" is pretty low - one might argue it's resting on the ground. But phone companies own lots of trenching equipment and can still fail to clear a bar resting on the ground. And disrupt access to the bar for 6 weeks, while accidentally charging you $700 for it. I have no proof that the CEO of AT&T can't have an orgasm unless he strangles a puppy.
In this case, it would actually make some sense: the Xbone uses the Kinect for more than just gameplay. IIRC, the voice recognition stuff all goes through the connect, plus stuff as basic as signing into the box when it turns on.
That's my biggest complaint with my Xbone right now: sign-in every time I turn it own blows goats unless I have the Kinect attached. And it didn't when I bought it - the goat blowing was an update. Stop the goat-blowing updates MS, sheesh!
This is why I like T-Mobile. While coverage is (and likely will always be) quite limited for 4G, I've never seen them cross the line from "typical big company evil" to the black depths of "phone company evil". Plus, they have decent pre-paid plans, which lets you strictly limit surprises.
I'm using Visual Studio Online today to do sprints. Shockingly, it's fine. It's no better than the other agile project management tools I've used, but it's no worse either. If MS could just add full Git integration to it, they'd have something. There're not stuck in waterfall on their latest stuff, and I can see the potential for them to be the best tool for tracking agile work for large teams, if they can get over themselves on version control (there are no good bug tracking systems, so using the integrated VS tools for that is nice since at least it's integrated out of the box).
MS isn't still stuck in the "internal server" world: you can trivially create an Azure-hosted web server to host a web application you make in VS. It's quite slick for toy projects. Still not there yet for anything real, but again I can see the potential for mid-sized deployments being magic. Azure though just isn't ready for large scale (millions or billions of users) - it's way behind EC2 when you start caring about the tools that let you manage thousands of servers.
Still, Azure is fine if you just need a dozen servers, if only VS would get past it's tentative first steps and actually make one-button build-deploy work magically for load-balanced sets of servers with automatic "let a few users on the new stuff, then roll it back or forward based on service health". They'd be worth their premium at that point.
Handbrake will compress animation down about 20% more, nice if being a nerd like me you have lots of it. Sadly the UI doesn't have this as a checkbox, but it's there in the command line.
Because they weren't exchange-traded, there were 1000s of different contracts with different terms. No one of them got much attention from analysts. Had there been just a handful of contracts instead, the standardized terms would have led to far deeper analysis. Yes, all ratings agencies have their issues, but they do tend to work well in aggregate for non-government securities.
Driving uses about the same amount of fuel, creates about the same amount of pollution, and is far more dangerous than flying.
Per Wikipedia "As of 2010, the Service has over 6,500 employees: 3,200 Special Agents, 1,300 Uniformed Division Officers, and 2,000 technical and administrative employees". With 3200 field agents, I'd imagine they have the manpower to visit a list of people on their watch lists.
Well, CIFS shares are fine if you have a VPN but, yeah, not so much on the open internet.
MS still doesn't get the Internet and how people work today in Web Dev
I wouldn't quite say that, but they're not there yet. OneDrive is their answer for the files part, and where it works today it's great, but it's not yet a tool for moving between servers (it's quite nice for Windows and Android for personal stuff, and I'd guess other clients are coming).
You can see where MS has tried to make their IDE work for web dev - it sure would be nice if they eventually get it right!
I've heard accounts of people doing just that, funnily enough. As the Secret Service currently lacks a sarcasm detector it's not just lonely weirdos they drop in on, and they're probably used to spending an afternoon with random families.
Well, the SEC has a very specific issue of being thoroughly corrupted by Goldman Sachs, there's no doubt of that. But it doesn't have a problem with over-regulating markets.
The financial exchanges actually went to the SEC asking for mortgage derivatives to be exchange-traded. That would have avoided the problem (not the real estate bubble, but the massive affect it had on investment banks), and everyone not in the pocket of those few banks understood the need and its magnitude. Sigh.
Why would the Secret Service, in particular, want to tell sarcasm apart from other speech? Think about who they are.
They want to be able to distinguish sarcastic political speech, from sincere political speech. Of course both are protected speech.
Not all political speech is protected. A threat to harm the President of the US is specifically not protected speech. The Secret Service is particularly concerned with such threats, and is in fact charged with keeping tabs on everyone who has ever threatened the president.
If you've ever publically made such a threat, there's a chance an agent will knock on your door and politely sit with you for a few hours while the president is in town. Think about the logistics of that. It would get quite out of hand if they took all internet threats seriously.
It's always amazed me how the word "snark" has proliferated, once you understand its intended meaning. Hint: the poem was the world's greatest-ever success at sneaking one past the censors.
You're aware that you can compress them down to less than 5GB without losing much quality?
More to the point, you can compress them to about 10GB (depending on content) without any loss of quality.
That's libertarian fantasy not grounded in history. The SEC has not arrogated itself powers at random: no one like giving the government regulator power more than the sort of people who own stock and commodity exchanges, and those people have quite significant political power. SEC rules, just like exchange rules, have grown over time in response to a long history of very real disasters, abuses, and scandals.
While the combination of exchange rules and SEC rules might be slightly larger than the minimum viable set of rules needed for a functional free market, it's damn close. More to the point, these rules satisfy people with lifelong careers running the most successful free markets the world has ever seen. Ideas that "sure sound good to me and my smart friends" are in this area are right up there with every Youtube video about how Einstein or Quantum Mechanics is wrong.
The isn't macroeconomics, where everyone is guessing, this is the finance equivalent of engineering.
The performance hit and need for the runtime is a big problem in many ways. Compiling to native code is the right path to jumping those hurdles. For C#, .NET Native is quite interesting. I can think of so many ways MS could ruin this, but the prospect of a stand-alone exe compiled from C# is exiting.
8 was merely a UI debacle, but Vista was an abomination. I still wonder how that even made it out the door. Hopefully 9 takes us back to a good UI, as I really like Win 7 and the server counterpart.
I thought IE actually did FTP, or at least used to. I haven't tried in years, though. With the advent of DropBox (or OneDrive if you're a MS fan), I haven't seen FTP in forever (but then, maybe that's because there's no easy way to FTP upload from a Windows box?)
Well, count yourself lucky you haven't done time in shops where "fast and wrong" is the norm. It sucks just as much as you'd think it would. All it takes to get there is terrible best practices ("unit tests? those take so long to write and hardly find any bugs, and anyhow testing is not a dev's job").
You're so right. Some people make more than that. Why is it fair that a heart surgeon makes more than a fry cook - who made that rule? Are they not both humans, equally deserving of respect. $150 an hour is a much better minimum wage - equality for all!
After all, if it's OK to raise the minimum wage without regard to market price for labor, why stop at a measly $15/hour? Cheapness and greed and republicans, that's why! Keeping the man down to $15/hour sounds like a Koch brothers plot, if you ask me!
Well, it's a very odd corner of the software world where you can plan 2 years out and be right about those deliverables. But perhaps I'm reading too much into what you're saying.
Anyhow, my point was only that "fast" and "right" are orthogonal axes, each of which is important, but management tends to over-focus on "fast" and I've seen "right" ignored to the point of the failure of the company. (Seriously, I was hired to try to rescue a place where checking in code that didn't even compile in order to "meet deadlines" was actually rewarded - the tech debt was so high that it was eventually impossible to meet contractual agreements, though at least we fixed the worst of that enough to get the investors a decent price for the company as it was folding.)
Fast but wrong is a burden on the team - don't underestimate the retention effects of that. No one likes cleaning up for the other guy, but when the other guy is getting praised and the guys cleaning up chided for being slow? You'll have nothing but sloppy coders in a year.
Formal proofs of correctness mean nothing when it comes to real-world code, even before accounting for malicious project members.
But it's the toxins, not the fat cells, doing the harm. The fat cells just delay the harm until they're metabolized.
But we know nothing for sure. There's nothing with less credibility than a nutritionist.
Once an engineer is well paid, so that he doesn't feel exploited, he rarely leaves on the basis of pay. It's mostly about exiting (or at least interesting) work and smart/pleasant people to work with. And a team mate you always have to clean up after is more of a problem for retaining your top performers than a bit of pay.
You must work in an odd environment. Is your project schedule and deliverables set for you from on high, leaving you to scramble to get it done? Are you working on some very long release cycle where 3 months is an interesting time frame? It's been about 8 years since I worked in a shop like that (and it was far past its prime).
I'm talking from the perspective of 2-3 week iterations, where the team chooses what they'll sign up to deliver, and code it shippable at the end of each iteration. Predictability means hitting our goals. Quality means not getting pulled off productive work to fix bugs - bugs made by the same few idiot coders, again and again.
Sure, occasionally you get someone fast-but-sloppy, and that's tolerable. Maybe that's what you're thinking of? But someone who just misunderstands the deliverable and makes the team miss their goal because what he put out for review (always at the end of the cycle) doesn't even address the task? We don't need that guy. Or someone who isn't fast, and slows everyone else down trying to understand and review the crap he writes each week? A burden on the team.