What is this "encourage"? It's like the older arguments about including the DRM module in the standard: a standards body is not the moral judge of anything. Stuff is happening in the industry, for better or for worse, so lets all do it the same way. That's all a standard is, and that's all FF is doing.
Let say you wanted to block all DRM content, to stay as philosophically virginal as your basement-dwelling body is. Today, there's no telling what's a "DRM module" and what's not. It would be hard to write a browser extension to block DRM streams. But with a standard, you can just block the loading of the standardized DRM plugin, perhaps with a plugin of your own!
I'm still waiting for some geek to do more than throw an internet tantrum over this. Write a plugin that detects a DRM stream and replaces it with a torrent of the same material, if you want to make heads explode.
If the minefield is clearly marked as such? Sure. That's after all the point here: FF already loads DRM modules. Now, they'll be clearly marked as such.
No, really, don't let the revisionists fool you. Hitler was a socialist, and a progressive. He enacted most of the progressive agenda at the time, and was the first in Europe to do a lot of things. Minimum wage, universal health care, social security, high corporate tax rates, the list goes on quite a bit more. And again most of his reforms were "first time in the Western World" stuff - much of the genuine progress of the 20th century happened first in Germany in the 30s (along with many of the mistakes like eugenics that were very popular with socialist writers of the time, but that the modern left tries to forget about). Had he been hit by a bus before he got militarily aggressive, he would have gone down in history as a great statesman: most of the bad stuff happened after he ran out of other people's money.. Before the wars started, he was unambiguously described as a socialist by writers of the time.
This idea that "Nazis were right wing" is entirely modern. To so many, many people today "right wing == bad". The Nazis were bad, therefore they were right wing: that is the entire modern argument. Don't fall for that rationalization.
Well, true, salseforce and O365 (and don't forget Dropbox)also work quite well for a lot of people - but as success stories they're rare thus far.
As far as cost, I do think the cloud servers are more expensive today, but for small companies it's all about cashflow and a "rental" model that's only more expensive over N years is a big win.
Say what you want about "truly pythonic code", it's more work to have type information only in comments than to have it as part of the function signature. One way or another, you need to clarify that it needs to quack like a duck, and a giraffe is right out.
Well, you make a good point, I was thinking "dictators of the western world" where the concepts of left and right are familiar. But yeah, Stalin and Hitler (and Mao) were clearly communist and socialist (and communist), respectively. People like to claim "in name only" but really, the core left ideals only work through ever-increasing government coercion, so totalitarianism is an inevitable part of the package (and these guys achieved many of the stated goals of their political philosophies, especially Hitler - if only he had been hit by a bus in 1937!).
As much as Orwell (an ardent socialist) warned about this danger, he never did come up with a good way to protect against the government taking that path, or rather being hijacked by dictator-wannabes who saw the perfect fit between the politics of he left and their rise to power.
At some point you need to clean house. The poorly managed companies don't go away in the good times - it's precisely in the bad times when they need to fail. Of course, we would have then needed to bail out a bunch of unemployed workers for a while, but we wouldn't be here again with GM next time around!
The US military takes an oath that holds the Constitution above the president. And they understand what that means, Plus every totalitarian state for the past century has been left-wing, while the military is mostly right-wing, so I don't see them supporting any dictator wannabe in any case.
Those 16 bit Windows skills won't earn a living, friend. Nor will my S/370 mainframe assembly skills, though both were valuable in their time. And that MFM drive? Good luck with that. Anyone seen a parallel SCSI cable?
Most things age out. You can't just stick with what you know, you have to explore the new as well.
You seem to have confused math with technology. I'm frequently amazed by how many/. posters don't quite understand what "technology" means: more efficient ways to perform tasks with the same base resources.// were you looking for farq?/// cause you really seem to be
I programmed on mainframes for 5 years. They were and are a great approach. But they're cloudy now, and my S/370 assembly skills don't help be with the new ones.
To me, "the cloud" means Amazon's EC2/S3 or Microsoft's Azure. No one else is there yet. But those services are pretty amazing - more 9s than any IT dept I've worked with actually delivered, cross-geography redundancy is just a checkbox and you're done, and so one. Neat stuff.
(And professional Python has more boilerplate than Java in my experience, as you have to comment the type of every damn parameter)
You're right though: the true value of the senior dev is being able to explain why some bad ideas are bad. I've been through this minefield, and here are some of the mines...
For all but the very largest companies, cross-geography redundancy is cheaper from Amazon or MS storage than anything they could possibly arrange. People don't seem to get that - it's just a checkbox and a bit extra on S3 or Azure Whatsit, and you're golden.
The thing about technology is: the absolute best thing today, really the best, is utter crap in 20 years. And there are too damn many developers, old and young who stick with what was the best at one point in history but just isn't any more.
It's wise to reject 90% of new ideas as silly fads, but the problem is when you reject 100%. And it's not just older guys like me with the problem, it just matters more as what you settled on ages. If you combine rejecting all new ideas as fads with age, you can easily become unemployable.
For example, look at all the/.ers who still dismiss "the cloud" as a passing fad, mistaking "I have less obsessive-geek control over my precious" for business judgement. Guys? It's not going away, and it keeps getting cheaper and more reliable. There are many areas today where you just can't put stuff in the cloud for compliance reasons, but the cloud guys have checkbooks and senators phone numbers, and that last barrier won't last long. Not every new idea is a fad.
Heck, I see people here that still think using an IDE is some sort of scam. "VI was good enough for grandpappy and it's good enough for me". Code review tools still get resistance in some quarters, but thinking you don't need a Review Board-like system is like thinking you don't need version control: it will end in tears.
Sure, don't run off with every fad, but this is a poor industry to cross the line from change-adverse to change-resistant in.
Doesn't mean the company should have continued to exist, though, nor all the parts companies that do nothing of value, etc. They all need to be gone. (And don't get me started on the need for an end to muni bailouts)
Whatever - there's always some excuse for shoveling tax dollars at companies. Turns out it would have been cheaper to pay every mortgage in the US for a few years than bail out the bank. I bet it would have been cheaper to pay the salaries of all those guys for a year or two than to bail out GM (not just this time, but all the future bailouts they'll need and get forever).
Well, yeah, but it's so damn hard to find examples! "Taking government money" may not be the only failure mode of capitalism, but it's one we seem to love in America.
They certainly could and should have let GM die, though. The biggest flaw in Americas take on capitalism is bailouts. Companies like GM need to die and be replaced by companies like Tesla. I've had quite enough "government propping up failed business models" for one lifetime, thanks.
Slashdot Mirror
What is this "encourage"? It's like the older arguments about including the DRM module in the standard: a standards body is not the moral judge of anything. Stuff is happening in the industry, for better or for worse, so lets all do it the same way. That's all a standard is, and that's all FF is doing.
Let say you wanted to block all DRM content, to stay as philosophically virginal as your basement-dwelling body is. Today, there's no telling what's a "DRM module" and what's not. It would be hard to write a browser extension to block DRM streams. But with a standard, you can just block the loading of the standardized DRM plugin, perhaps with a plugin of your own!
I'm still waiting for some geek to do more than throw an internet tantrum over this. Write a plugin that detects a DRM stream and replaces it with a torrent of the same material, if you want to make heads explode.
Hey, man, if you don't recognize a quote from a core-geek film like Blade Runner or WarGames, your geek card goes in that box by the door.
If the minefield is clearly marked as such? Sure. That's after all the point here: FF already loads DRM modules. Now, they'll be clearly marked as such.
No, really, don't let the revisionists fool you. Hitler was a socialist, and a progressive. He enacted most of the progressive agenda at the time, and was the first in Europe to do a lot of things. Minimum wage, universal health care, social security, high corporate tax rates, the list goes on quite a bit more. And again most of his reforms were "first time in the Western World" stuff - much of the genuine progress of the 20th century happened first in Germany in the 30s (along with many of the mistakes like eugenics that were very popular with socialist writers of the time, but that the modern left tries to forget about). Had he been hit by a bus before he got militarily aggressive, he would have gone down in history as a great statesman: most of the bad stuff happened after he ran out of other people's money.. Before the wars started, he was unambiguously described as a socialist by writers of the time.
This idea that "Nazis were right wing" is entirely modern. To so many, many people today "right wing == bad". The Nazis were bad, therefore they were right wing: that is the entire modern argument. Don't fall for that rationalization.
Well, true, salseforce and O365 (and don't forget Dropbox)also work quite well for a lot of people - but as success stories they're rare thus far.
As far as cost, I do think the cloud servers are more expensive today, but for small companies it's all about cashflow and a "rental" model that's only more expensive over N years is a big win.
Say what you want about "truly pythonic code", it's more work to have type information only in comments than to have it as part of the function signature. One way or another, you need to clarify that it needs to quack like a duck, and a giraffe is right out.
Well, you make a good point, I was thinking "dictators of the western world" where the concepts of left and right are familiar. But yeah, Stalin and Hitler (and Mao) were clearly communist and socialist (and communist), respectively. People like to claim "in name only" but really, the core left ideals only work through ever-increasing government coercion, so totalitarianism is an inevitable part of the package (and these guys achieved many of the stated goals of their political philosophies, especially Hitler - if only he had been hit by a bus in 1937!).
As much as Orwell (an ardent socialist) warned about this danger, he never did come up with a good way to protect against the government taking that path, or rather being hijacked by dictator-wannabes who saw the perfect fit between the politics of he left and their rise to power.
At some point you need to clean house. The poorly managed companies don't go away in the good times - it's precisely in the bad times when they need to fail. Of course, we would have then needed to bail out a bunch of unemployed workers for a while, but we wouldn't be here again with GM next time around!
Ah, obsessive literalism on /. - I never saw that coming!
And stop trying to take away my 'freedom' to use Firefox without DRM-enabling features.
Don't click on the Netflix stream and FF won't load the offensive module. It's win-win.
Hey now, you can't be suggesting that political purges shouldn't be their top priority, can you comrade?
If you don't like DRM, don't consume it. But stop trying to take away my freedom to do so, thanks.
The US military takes an oath that holds the Constitution above the president. And they understand what that means, Plus every totalitarian state for the past century has been left-wing, while the military is mostly right-wing, so I don't see them supporting any dictator wannabe in any case.
Those 16 bit Windows skills won't earn a living, friend. Nor will my S/370 mainframe assembly skills, though both were valuable in their time. And that MFM drive? Good luck with that. Anyone seen a parallel SCSI cable?
Most things age out. You can't just stick with what you know, you have to explore the new as well.
You seem to have confused math with technology. I'm frequently amazed by how many /. posters don't quite understand what "technology" means: more efficient ways to perform tasks with the same base resources. // were you looking for farq? /// cause you really seem to be
I programmed on mainframes for 5 years. They were and are a great approach. But they're cloudy now, and my S/370 assembly skills don't help be with the new ones.
To me, "the cloud" means Amazon's EC2/S3 or Microsoft's Azure. No one else is there yet. But those services are pretty amazing - more 9s than any IT dept I've worked with actually delivered, cross-geography redundancy is just a checkbox and you're done, and so one. Neat stuff.
(And professional Python has more boilerplate than Java in my experience, as you have to comment the type of every damn parameter)
You're right though: the true value of the senior dev is being able to explain why some bad ideas are bad. I've been through this minefield, and here are some of the mines ...
For all but the very largest companies, cross-geography redundancy is cheaper from Amazon or MS storage than anything they could possibly arrange. People don't seem to get that - it's just a checkbox and a bit extra on S3 or Azure Whatsit, and you're golden.
Wow, so no matter how many times I say "bail out the people, not the companies", you just want to give the money to the 1%?
Can't even tell if you're trolling. /. has gotten that bad these days.
The thing about technology is: the absolute best thing today, really the best, is utter crap in 20 years. And there are too damn many developers, old and young who stick with what was the best at one point in history but just isn't any more.
It's wise to reject 90% of new ideas as silly fads, but the problem is when you reject 100%. And it's not just older guys like me with the problem, it just matters more as what you settled on ages. If you combine rejecting all new ideas as fads with age, you can easily become unemployable.
For example, look at all the /.ers who still dismiss "the cloud" as a passing fad, mistaking "I have less obsessive-geek control over my precious" for business judgement. Guys? It's not going away, and it keeps getting cheaper and more reliable. There are many areas today where you just can't put stuff in the cloud for compliance reasons, but the cloud guys have checkbooks and senators phone numbers, and that last barrier won't last long. Not every new idea is a fad.
Heck, I see people here that still think using an IDE is some sort of scam. "VI was good enough for grandpappy and it's good enough for me". Code review tools still get resistance in some quarters, but thinking you don't need a Review Board-like system is like thinking you don't need version control: it will end in tears.
Sure, don't run off with every fad, but this is a poor industry to cross the line from change-adverse to change-resistant in.
Doesn't mean the company should have continued to exist, though, nor all the parts companies that do nothing of value, etc. They all need to be gone. (And don't get me started on the need for an end to muni bailouts)
Whatever - there's always some excuse for shoveling tax dollars at companies. Turns out it would have been cheaper to pay every mortgage in the US for a few years than bail out the bank. I bet it would have been cheaper to pay the salaries of all those guys for a year or two than to bail out GM (not just this time, but all the future bailouts they'll need and get forever).
Well, yeah, but it's so damn hard to find examples! "Taking government money" may not be the only failure mode of capitalism, but it's one we seem to love in America.
Automakers like Tesla? Tesla is a US auto company. Such cognitive dissonance in that thought, isn't there?
They certainly could and should have let GM die, though. The biggest flaw in Americas take on capitalism is bailouts. Companies like GM need to die and be replaced by companies like Tesla. I've had quite enough "government propping up failed business models" for one lifetime, thanks.