No services work like that and at this point any one that tried would go down in flames.
Disney. This sort of shit exactly fits their monetization mindset. Once they pull in all the Marvel movies, Star Wars, and Disney and Pixar movies into their own streaming service, expect them to work like that. It's the business model they've had for decades, after all.
Whatever works to extract the most money from people (and especially from parents), that's what they'll do, no matter how annoying.
I don't see where frustration is coming from, as these days it's so easy to start and stop subscriptions.
I have Netflix regularly, and Amazon Prime mostly for shipping but do use video also. Beyond that though, I just join in and then drop different services depending on what I want to see - so I subscribe to HBO when Game of Thrones is on, dropping it after (and also catching up on a few other shows they have while I'm there). I subscribed to CBS fo ra little while to watch Star Trek Discovery, then dropped it when I had seen enough.
Sorry, my torrent finished downloading halfway through reading that. I'm just not interested in the question of "which damn service hosts this thing I want to watch". Netflix used to have a lot of value to me, as I could browse it when I was bored and actually find something. That's fading. I was happy to pay one subscription, and let Netflix sort out the money between all the IP owners but that's the service I was paying for.
There's just no way I'm going to try to figure out what's on a dozen different services and hope to stumble over something interesting. That' never going to be easier than torrents, or just finding something better to d than watch TV.
I take it you don't work in embedded software, video games, or high-performance computing of any kind.
Depending on how you look at it, I ran a fairly powerful supercomputer for years. Need 1 million cores? (OK, less impressive this year than a few years ago.) Sometimes just throwing more hardware at the problem works, and there are several categories of problem that parallelize well even with high latency between nodes.
The areas where constant-time perf improvement actually matter shrink every year. It's still a very fun sort of programming, but it's just so rarely comes up in most software jobs.
Goldeneye is far and away my favorite Bond movie. Not because of Brosnan's performance (though I think he's an OK bond), but because the story wasn't just Bond's perspective, and had a bit of development of some other characters.
I'm more than happy to let Canada win the race to the bottom. The "disaster" of big west coast tech employers having to *gasp* hire US citizens hasn't kept them from expanding.
When I was at Amazon, it was amazing how fast the story on my team switched from "we'd be happy to hire US citizens, we just can't find qualified people" to "we hired 3 US citizens this quarter, no problem" when we needed 3 people who could apply for top secret clearance. Amazing coincidence, really, how those previously non-existent qualified US workers suddenly appeared from nowhere when it became a benefit to the company.
Indeed. Web grunts with CRUD apps think CPU time doesnÃ(TM)t matter because they think a 5 second page load is acceptable.
I guarantee you that CPU was never the bottleneck in the performance of that web app. Wasting time optimizing the part of the process that takes 5 microseconds to make it take 4 microseconds of that 5 seconds is something people do because it's fun, not because it's productive.
Meanwhile that poorly-written DB query that runs once an hour (to make a report no one reads) and browns out the DB server for 3 minutes is why someone's getting 5-second page loads, but only between X:03 and X:06 every hour. Good luck even reproducing that. Welcome to the real world.
"Premature optimization is the root of all evil" -Knuth
Yeah, that web app isn't slow because of CPU. It's slow because of a bunch of stupid architectural decisions, and very likely over-reliance on a RDBMS that work fast enough when there were only test users.
Or just force companies to stop using plastic as a disposable product. Glass and paper are not a problem
Kids these days. When your 8-year-old drops a 2-liter glass bottle of coke on the kitchen floor, then cuts his feet on the glass, and that mess stays theref or hours as you take him to be stitched up. When that happens and you're scrubbing your floors repeatedly trying to get that mess up, then you'll understand why glass containers are fucking stupid.
We didn't move to plastic for no reason. It's wasn't just about cost, either.
And don't imaging that people didn't routinely toss glass bottles in the trash instead of bringing them back to the store! Glass is typically thicker, and thus takes up more landfill space, than plastic.
Numerical Recipes in $LANGUAGE states it is written for scientist not coders because the difference is that scientists work on the next generation of problems on the last generation of computers (and hence need efficiency), while coders solve the last generation of problems on the next generation of computers (and thus make the code more elegant but less efficient).
You have a narrow idea of "efficiency". You're thinking about CPU-time, which matters so rarely these days. Good software professionals optimize for human-time, writing code that's easy to support and maintain. That's "efficiency" that will bring a smile. Nothing better than a code review that's "all red", that is, removes a ton of pointless lines of code from a legacy system.
The same rant applies to every new game streaming service because they all face the same horrible problems and have the same ulterior motive:
Fortunately, this doesn't apply to every new game. This is about "AAA" games, which are largely garbage anyway. "AAA" games are the boy bands, or Transformers movies, or light beer of the game industry. They sell well, are consumed mindlessly topass the time, and instantly forgotten when the next one comes along.
There are certainly still new single player, deep, moddable, games being made. I like the fact that I now get "cloud saves" in parallel to my local saves, so I can choose how I play across multiple machines. I like the fact that all my game purchases are downloads, not physical media I have to have shipped to me. None of this technology inherently makes games worse. Massive game corporations focused only on shareholder returns are what makes games worse.
tl;dr: old man fails to yell at cloud, welcomes kids on his yard.
So the guys designing the system raised the concern. Sure. And their manager passed it up the line. Sure. But senior management at any large company is composed entirely of sociopaths, so why is it BS that they suppressed it?
EU democracy and government worries me a fair bit. But the EU (and the EEG before it, and the ECSC before that) have done quite a bit for international commerce.
That's the heart of it. What's valuable is a uniform set of trade treaties. Good luck getting that without a central government ever-growing in power. The US didn't even make it 100 years before "the United States are" became "the United States is" (though perhaps that joke is lost on our British brethren).
Civil discourse is necessary for a functioning democracy. Our system is doomed if we're unable, as a society, to sift through propaganda and fake news. Discourse and compromise between factions are the foundation of civilization itself. Partisanism, demagoguery, and nationalism proceed the fall of great nations.
This is very true. But that "we" is important. Each of us as individuals needs to be able to sift through propaganda and fake news. And most people are in fact pretty god t that when it comes to things that affect them directly. People will believe anything they're reading just for entertainment, and that's OK really.
We built a resilient society by insisting that critical thinking is everyone's duty. You can't outsource that; well, not and protect yourself from tyranny. Very effective: you read some misinformation, and most of your friends point out why it's wrong and give you shit for believing it. Very ineffective: this is the dark secret the government has hidden from you; don't believe it, they're just protecting you by hiding this mysterious dangerous informant that you should not read.
>quote>Freedom of speech is only in regards to govt action. If you as a private citizen make fake/untruthful accusations against me as a private citizen I am very well within my right to sue you for something like defamation of character and will likely win. Your "freedom of speech" means jack shit when it comes to stuff like that.
The ideas are unrelated. I can legally slander you all I want without committing a crime. You can sue me, but you have to show some sort of harm. In the US, you also have to show that what I said was actually false.
But that doesn't mean "Freedom of speech is only in regards to govt action": it's a fundamental right that applies to anyone with the power to control communication.
You don't have free speech if "hate speech" is banned. Heck, Putin has just effectively relabeled speech against the government as "hate speech". China long ago did the same, but broader, calling any speech that disrupts social harmony "hate speech".
people won't be worrying about what Russia does, but loss of freedoms in America... you don't think many Democrats are not chomping at the bit for similar laws to be passed in the U.S.?
It amazes me how often some folks on the left speak out for similar censorship (e.g., banning anti-vax stuff, not even political) while Trump is president. Seriously? You want to give the president the power to ban "fake news"?
People have this naive idea that we can insist on "facts", blind to the political realities of giving some authority the ability to decide what is a "fact".
And I think that's the key for when Amazon Basics actually do well: markets where people routinely pay large amounts just to avoid bottom-tier crap. Cables are of course a great example: people buying a $20 Monster cable just to avoid the problem with $0.20 cables created a great opportunity to market a solid $2 cable.
I doubt they'll do well in anything fashion-related, where there tend to already be "basics" brands that serve this need.
Well, there are billions to be had in an alternative payment processing method that catches on. At first I was thinking "alternative to PayPal", but it's broader: an alternative to debit/credit cards (for those who pay off their credit cards every month).
Many fields have had a "modernist" movement, and thus a later school called of course "post-modernsism", though they are loosely related I guess. I thought is was clear in my OP that I was talking about philosophy.
Post-modern philosophy started from a rejection of absolutes, but grew (or perhaps the label grew) to include rejection of any objective system of saying that something was "true" (rejection of logic) or that something was "better" (rejection of merit).
But as a political philosophy it's the modern-day extension of real-world communism, re-purposing Marx's class-based oppression into a very generic identity-based oppression. "Intersectionality" is its modern political outgrowth, but the core idea is that no one can take credit for their own success, but only in struggle against the oppressor can one find credit. It's the modernization of the most objectively evil political philosophy to have ever tormented our planet.
Yes, we get it, you embrace post-modernism. Just consider that it's the philosophy that grew out of Communism, and the deaths of 160 million lie at the feet of the ideas you think are right.
But I suspect you deny all correlation between choice and consequence, and so are unworried about the consequences of your beliefs and the choices they inform.
Intersectionality is simply the current political expression of the philosophy of post-modernism. You point out a logical inconsistency there, but then these guys reject "logic" as a tool of the oppressor, and so are unbothered by such things.
While much of what you wrote is true, you clearly didn't RTFA.
must be new here.
If you believe the world IS driven by merit, if your own actions and efforts alone can transform you into a C-suite executive or billionaire, the result ranges from being an unrealistic optimism about work, to a self-destructive attitude, to confusion and delusion about why their hard work is not being rewarded.
Which is just post-modernism light.
If you demonstrate merit you're going to be more successful than otherwise. We don't need to reduce the world to childish black or white, all or nothing. Live as if it were true that merit is rewarded, and you will be happier and more successful. That doesn't mean that's your only consideration in life, but don't simply be bitter and cynical and never try.
Slashdot Mirror
No services work like that and at this point any one that tried would go down in flames.
Disney. This sort of shit exactly fits their monetization mindset. Once they pull in all the Marvel movies, Star Wars, and Disney and Pixar movies into their own streaming service, expect them to work like that. It's the business model they've had for decades, after all.
Whatever works to extract the most money from people (and especially from parents), that's what they'll do, no matter how annoying.
I don't see where frustration is coming from, as these days it's so easy to start and stop subscriptions.
I have Netflix regularly, and Amazon Prime mostly for shipping but do use video also. Beyond that though, I just join in and then drop different services depending on what I want to see - so I subscribe to HBO when Game of Thrones is on, dropping it after (and also catching up on a few other shows they have while I'm there). I subscribed to CBS fo ra little while to watch Star Trek Discovery, then dropped it when I had seen enough.
Sorry, my torrent finished downloading halfway through reading that. I'm just not interested in the question of "which damn service hosts this thing I want to watch". Netflix used to have a lot of value to me, as I could browse it when I was bored and actually find something. That's fading. I was happy to pay one subscription, and let Netflix sort out the money between all the IP owners but that's the service I was paying for.
There's just no way I'm going to try to figure out what's on a dozen different services and hope to stumble over something interesting. That' never going to be easier than torrents, or just finding something better to d than watch TV.
But they will, once they index this thread and cross reference everything else they know about your username
That whooshing sound you hear overhead? Yup, that was the joke.
I take it you don't work in embedded software, video games, or high-performance computing of any kind.
Depending on how you look at it, I ran a fairly powerful supercomputer for years. Need 1 million cores? (OK, less impressive this year than a few years ago.) Sometimes just throwing more hardware at the problem works, and there are several categories of problem that parallelize well even with high latency between nodes.
The areas where constant-time perf improvement actually matter shrink every year. It's still a very fun sort of programming, but it's just so rarely comes up in most software jobs.
Goldeneye is far and away my favorite Bond movie. Not because of Brosnan's performance (though I think he's an OK bond), but because the story wasn't just Bond's perspective, and had a bit of development of some other characters.
"I am invincible!"
No one cares about your time working in the warehouse fatboy.
I can guarantee you I'd weigh a lot less if I had worked at the warehouse!
I'm more than happy to let Canada win the race to the bottom. The "disaster" of big west coast tech employers having to *gasp* hire US citizens hasn't kept them from expanding.
When I was at Amazon, it was amazing how fast the story on my team switched from "we'd be happy to hire US citizens, we just can't find qualified people" to "we hired 3 US citizens this quarter, no problem" when we needed 3 people who could apply for top secret clearance. Amazing coincidence, really, how those previously non-existent qualified US workers suddenly appeared from nowhere when it became a benefit to the company.
Indeed. Web grunts with CRUD apps think CPU time doesnÃ(TM)t matter because they think a 5 second page load is acceptable.
I guarantee you that CPU was never the bottleneck in the performance of that web app. Wasting time optimizing the part of the process that takes 5 microseconds to make it take 4 microseconds of that 5 seconds is something people do because it's fun, not because it's productive.
Meanwhile that poorly-written DB query that runs once an hour (to make a report no one reads) and browns out the DB server for 3 minutes is why someone's getting 5-second page loads, but only between X:03 and X:06 every hour. Good luck even reproducing that. Welcome to the real world.
"Premature optimization is the root of all evil" -Knuth
Yeah, that web app isn't slow because of CPU. It's slow because of a bunch of stupid architectural decisions, and very likely over-reliance on a RDBMS that work fast enough when there were only test users.
Or just force companies to stop using plastic as a disposable product. Glass and paper are not a problem
Kids these days. When your 8-year-old drops a 2-liter glass bottle of coke on the kitchen floor, then cuts his feet on the glass, and that mess stays theref or hours as you take him to be stitched up. When that happens and you're scrubbing your floors repeatedly trying to get that mess up, then you'll understand why glass containers are fucking stupid.
We didn't move to plastic for no reason. It's wasn't just about cost, either.
And don't imaging that people didn't routinely toss glass bottles in the trash instead of bringing them back to the store! Glass is typically thicker, and thus takes up more landfill space, than plastic.
Numerical Recipes in $LANGUAGE states it is written for scientist not coders because the difference is that scientists work on the next generation of problems on the last generation of computers (and hence need efficiency), while coders solve the last generation of problems on the next generation of computers (and thus make the code more elegant but less efficient).
You have a narrow idea of "efficiency". You're thinking about CPU-time, which matters so rarely these days. Good software professionals optimize for human-time, writing code that's easy to support and maintain. That's "efficiency" that will bring a smile. Nothing better than a code review that's "all red", that is, removes a ton of pointless lines of code from a legacy system.
The same rant applies to every new game streaming service because they all face the same horrible problems and have the same ulterior motive:
Fortunately, this doesn't apply to every new game. This is about "AAA" games, which are largely garbage anyway. "AAA" games are the boy bands, or Transformers movies, or light beer of the game industry. They sell well, are consumed mindlessly topass the time, and instantly forgotten when the next one comes along.
There are certainly still new single player, deep, moddable, games being made. I like the fact that I now get "cloud saves" in parallel to my local saves, so I can choose how I play across multiple machines. I like the fact that all my game purchases are downloads, not physical media I have to have shipped to me. None of this technology inherently makes games worse. Massive game corporations focused only on shareholder returns are what makes games worse.
tl;dr: old man fails to yell at cloud, welcomes kids on his yard.
So the guys designing the system raised the concern. Sure. And their manager passed it up the line. Sure. But senior management at any large company is composed entirely of sociopaths, so why is it BS that they suppressed it?
EU democracy and government worries me a fair bit. But the EU (and the EEG before it, and the ECSC before that) have done quite a bit for international commerce.
That's the heart of it. What's valuable is a uniform set of trade treaties. Good luck getting that without a central government ever-growing in power. The US didn't even make it 100 years before "the United States are" became "the United States is" (though perhaps that joke is lost on our British brethren).
Civil discourse is necessary for a functioning democracy. Our system is doomed if we're unable, as a society, to sift through propaganda and fake news. Discourse and compromise between factions are the foundation of civilization itself. Partisanism, demagoguery, and nationalism proceed the fall of great nations.
This is very true. But that "we" is important. Each of us as individuals needs to be able to sift through propaganda and fake news. And most people are in fact pretty god t that when it comes to things that affect them directly. People will believe anything they're reading just for entertainment, and that's OK really.
We built a resilient society by insisting that critical thinking is everyone's duty. You can't outsource that; well, not and protect yourself from tyranny. Very effective: you read some misinformation, and most of your friends point out why it's wrong and give you shit for believing it. Very ineffective: this is the dark secret the government has hidden from you; don't believe it, they're just protecting you by hiding this mysterious dangerous informant that you should not read.
>quote>Freedom of speech is only in regards to govt action. If you as a private citizen make fake/untruthful accusations against me as a private citizen I am very well within my right to sue you for something like defamation of character and will likely win. Your "freedom of speech" means jack shit when it comes to stuff like that.
The ideas are unrelated. I can legally slander you all I want without committing a crime. You can sue me, but you have to show some sort of harm. In the US, you also have to show that what I said was actually false.
But that doesn't mean "Freedom of speech is only in regards to govt action": it's a fundamental right that applies to anyone with the power to control communication.
You don't have free speech if "hate speech" is banned. Heck, Putin has just effectively relabeled speech against the government as "hate speech". China long ago did the same, but broader, calling any speech that disrupts social harmony "hate speech".
people won't be worrying about what Russia does, but loss of freedoms in America... you don't think many Democrats are not chomping at the bit for similar laws to be passed in the U.S.?
It amazes me how often some folks on the left speak out for similar censorship (e.g., banning anti-vax stuff, not even political) while Trump is president. Seriously? You want to give the president the power to ban "fake news"?
People have this naive idea that we can insist on "facts", blind to the political realities of giving some authority the ability to decide what is a "fact".
eCommerce is a tiny share of retail, is the thing. Disney makes 100% of Marvel movies, but that hardly makes them a monopoly.
And I think that's the key for when Amazon Basics actually do well: markets where people routinely pay large amounts just to avoid bottom-tier crap. Cables are of course a great example: people buying a $20 Monster cable just to avoid the problem with $0.20 cables created a great opportunity to market a solid $2 cable.
I doubt they'll do well in anything fashion-related, where there tend to already be "basics" brands that serve this need.
Well, there are billions to be had in an alternative payment processing method that catches on. At first I was thinking "alternative to PayPal", but it's broader: an alternative to debit/credit cards (for those who pay off their credit cards every month).
Many fields have had a "modernist" movement, and thus a later school called of course "post-modernsism", though they are loosely related I guess. I thought is was clear in my OP that I was talking about philosophy.
Post-modern philosophy started from a rejection of absolutes, but grew (or perhaps the label grew) to include rejection of any objective system of saying that something was "true" (rejection of logic) or that something was "better" (rejection of merit).
But as a political philosophy it's the modern-day extension of real-world communism, re-purposing Marx's class-based oppression into a very generic identity-based oppression. "Intersectionality" is its modern political outgrowth, but the core idea is that no one can take credit for their own success, but only in struggle against the oppressor can one find credit. It's the modernization of the most objectively evil political philosophy to have ever tormented our planet.
Yes, we get it, you embrace post-modernism. Just consider that it's the philosophy that grew out of Communism, and the deaths of 160 million lie at the feet of the ideas you think are right.
But I suspect you deny all correlation between choice and consequence, and so are unworried about the consequences of your beliefs and the choices they inform.
Intersectionality is simply the current political expression of the philosophy of post-modernism. You point out a logical inconsistency there, but then these guys reject "logic" as a tool of the oppressor, and so are unbothered by such things.
While much of what you wrote is true, you clearly didn't RTFA.
must be new here.
If you believe the world IS driven by merit, if your own actions and efforts alone can transform you into a C-suite executive or billionaire, the result ranges from being an unrealistic optimism about work, to a self-destructive attitude, to confusion and delusion about why their hard work is not being rewarded.
Which is just post-modernism light.
If you demonstrate merit you're going to be more successful than otherwise. We don't need to reduce the world to childish black or white, all or nothing. Live as if it were true that merit is rewarded, and you will be happier and more successful. That doesn't mean that's your only consideration in life, but don't simply be bitter and cynical and never try.