If you are going to make 50 options to say gay, and transgender, and 2 for normal, why not have it be a text box so you can enter what you want.
I assume that having a highly granular; but not freeform, box has the advantage of standardizing the terminology for sale to niche marketers, and (in line with Facebook's desire to get as much actual personal information as possible) keeps people from making up joke genders, lest they find themselves swarming with people who identify as 'Well Endowed' and who knows what else.
Granularity allows Facebook to score PR points and sell more targeted ads. Freeform fields allow people to pollute the database. I suspect that (once they ran the numbers on 'is diversity cred worth more than the audience who is squicked out by homos and freaks?' and decided that it was) they'll be willing to add another fixed-text field for practically any identification large enough to have an affinity group; but that they'd really prefer that you build your character sheet from a template, just to make it more tractable as a market segmentation tool.
I think he was referring to your spelling mistake. How is the White Race going to win the racial holy war if some of them think that they are fighting the 'sionists' and others think that the 'zionists' and the Z.O.G. are the enemy? Military acronyms are enough of a clusterfuck as it is...
Everyone wants to be a god damned special snowflake. All these retard labels are, 95% of the time, just there to grab attention for the person using them.
I'd hardly disagree with the assertion that the demand for specialness far outstrips the supply, especially in people most vocal about it; but (given how joyful being sexually abnormal is in most social contexts) are you seriously suggesting that people are voluntarily choosing to put up with that, rather than just listening to shitty music or attempting to achieve individuality through mass-produced consumer goods?
People have a great many vices; but deliberately choosing the harder, much less pleasant, option instead of the easier one typically isn't one of them. Are you seriously postulating a population so stupid, or so bereft of other 'specialness' emulation capabilities, that they'd choose to pretend to be some wildly unpopular flavor of sexually abnormal? It just seems like you'd have to be really hard up for attention-seeking behavior to do that...
The human developmental trajectory is a complex system, and sometimes a touchy one. It isn't wildly common; but there are a fair few conditions that result in people in neither category.
The historical reaction usually involves the medical team attending the birth deciding which sex it would be easier to mod them into and operating accordingly, with...variably successful... results.
Hasn't TPB's legal status always been 'We can't actually find any laws that they violate; but they just look so damn uppity and illegal that we couldn't possibly let them walk!'?
The internet before search depended on hyperlinking.
Even that aside, 'hyperlinking' is pretty much an improved flavor of citation. If you are going to ban 'hyperlinks to illegal material' you are this close to just banning the mere mention of illegal material; except easier to sell because there are scary computer words involved.
Whether you see this as ironic, or as a continuation of copyright's original purpose, it is simply a matter of fact that the defenders of this sort of 'property' are learning that doing what they want requires rolling back all sorts of long-held rights. Worse, they seem OK with this.
That is also true. I suspect that some of that could be papered over by modifying the properties of the OS-provided widget sets; but I don't even want to think about dealing with all the special cases that would arise...
Microsoft doesn't own Nokia's handset business yet. So, no, it's not their phone.
But when/if they do own it... you can bet an Android phone is going to be deemed something they don't want to be doing any more.
I wonder if they'll just take it out and shoot it, in some reasonably dignified manner, or if we'll be treated to the entertaining spectacle of a repeat of their purchase of Danger? As somebody who doesn't own MS stock, watching them shell out for a reasonably-well-functioning company, decide that they weren't going to be releasing no BSD-based handsets, and having the whole affair that used to be the 'Sidekick' go down in flames as 'Project Pink' was hilarious.
The trick with 'Android compatibility' is that it's really two different problems. One is merely engineering ('merely' in the 'may actually be quite difficult; but there are engineers that are quite smart, trying giving them money' sense) and one is strategic:
'Android' as in the ASOP is a mixture of GPL and Apache. Exactly how many man-hours it takes to get ASOP running on your platform, or Dalvik and friends running on your non-Linux kernel is an open question, and may end up being quite a few if you want it to work well; but there is nobody to stop you, and you just need suitably skilled software people.
Trouble is, much of the good stuff in 'Android' (and stuff that Google doesn't exactly discourage developers from using) isn't ASOP, it's Google Play Services, a set of proprietary applications, libraries, and Google-backed web servcies that can be bestowed or denied to your device at the power and mere pleasure of Team Mountain View. They tend to ignore indie ROM-cookers and two-bit pacific RIM clonemongers who quietly pirate GPS; but if a company large enough to target, or ambitious enough to try to cut deals with major carriers in markets Google cares about, tries to distribute GPS without Google's blessing, it's world-of-hurt time.
At a greater or lesser cost in software engineers, you could get an ASOP-compatible Android compatibility layer running on QNX, NT, OSX, whatever. However, how much that helps you is increasingly limited.
Remember, back in the day, when the last of the dinosaurs were being hunted to extinction by Cro-magnon man and Sun was still not-wholly-doomed?
In order to mess with them, MS created the MS JRM, which was almost like the Sun JVM except not, in ways so obnoxious that the courts eventually forced them to back off.
Now, since Dalvik is Totally Definitely Not a JVM, MS is presumably free to produce MS Dalvik (they'll probably call it 'Microsoft Mobile Platform Interoperability Foundation 2012' or something) that supports Android applications, and has a few extra little.NETly features that Android doesn't. It'll be just like the good old days!
This looks like an unfortunate situation where laziness, malice, and greed all point in the same direction... If the bulk of your Chinese language search results need to be delivered censored, it's presumably easier to just prune your Chinese language search archive rather than burning CPU time censoring on the fly. If Chinese officials are vexed at locals just hitting a proxy and getting uncensored search results, they probably won't exactly discourage you from adopting such a harmonious and efficient practice. And, if MS wants Bing to not get crushed, with a little help from periodic great-firewallings, making themselves helpful to local authorities is a logical move.
Given that Redhat is now officially cooperating, I'm not entirely sure why CentOS is still relevant(rather than 'Redhat, RTFM Edition, upgradeable at any time to Redhat, Comes with Support Edition if you buy support'); but I assume that Redhat is focused on the enterprise for a few reasons:
1. Enterprise is where MS, and any other remaining competitors, really turn the screws on pricing. MS doesn't give away Windows Home editions; but only the OEMs know how much those costs, and most buyers aren't considering DIY or buying a 'bare' PC, so the effective cost (among the options they have) is zero. Enterprises, Not. So. Much. MS charges considerably more for 'Pro', and more again for anything server.
2. Enterprises have volume and techies. A home user has, maybe, the nerd kid down the street or something for tech support. They also have a small number of computers. Even a relatively high price, per computer, makes total sense if it avoids any support headaches, and allows those that do come up to be handled by the most common tech support people. Enterprises, though, have enough computers that buying techs rather than 'solutions' starts to become cost effective(plus, their requirements tend to be complex enough that 'solutions' still require techs)
3. 'Desktop'(in the sense of 'consumer') is where a lot of the really nasty hardware churn is. 'Enterprise desktop', 'workstation', and 'server' are all areas where (even if running Windows) IT departments Do. Not. Want. lots of driver/hardware churn, don't want to spend lots of time re-validating configurations, don't want shitty beta drivers, and so on. They are also often satisfied with a smaller variety of hardware, and from vendors who are more likely to build drivers with server and workstation customers in mind. Consumer OS that doesn't support a shitty inkjet released two years after the OS was? Pissed off consumer. Enterprise? Well, we've got some printers that all support Postscript or PCL, a bunch of servers that need NIC and SAS HBA support, and maybe some workstations with fancy graphics cards.
(As for Google and consumer Linux, it's a matter of taste whether you say that they already have, or that they never will: Android and ChromeOS are both Linux-based, neither have more than the slightest relationship to traditional linux/unix userlands. Is Google throwing its weight behind consumer Linux, or using embedded Linux as a cheap and easy way to boot a Google userland?)
I know that 'Orca' pretty much sucked in the most hilarious ways possible, so I can understand wanting to ditch that name, and maybe cetacean-based names in general; but isn't 'Para Bellum Labs' kind of pitiful-IT-violence-nerd at best and creepy at worst?
Trouble is, that was never the fucking point. Do people want the NSA collecting a giant database about them? No. Does it make the slightest difference if the giant database is nominally Verizon's giant database, that just so happens to respond to all queries from the NSA? Aside from the greater likelihood that the database will be used for marketing and surveillance, not a bit. The ostensible '3rd party' won't remain at arm's length for long. Why would they? An entire organization with a single customer, dedicated to shovelling data toward them on command? Instant capture. The only time the 3rd party will be 'independent' is if somebody asks the NSA what that 3rd party is up to, in which case they'll oh-so-innocently-have-no-idea-what-that-independent-entity-does. For all other purposes, they'll be joined at the hip.
That's Commander Keen to you! (And, incidentally, on an Android device with USB OTG and a copy of DOSbox, you should be only a USB floppy drive away from doing that right now...)
I don't know of any jurisidictions that recognize a 'right to dictate' how somebody's contract works; but the existence in contract law of doctrines that limit the scope of what any contract could do are fairly common. In the US, UK, and many UK-derived systems you have 'Unconscionability', for instance. France, Germany, and (to varying extents) the Berne Convention signatories have 'moral rights' that are partially or wholly immune to sale or transfer unlike other elements of copyright. Details vary by location, and by case; but it's pretty widely recognized that you can write up essentially anything in the form of a contract; but that that doesn't necessarily mean that you should be able to get away with it.
Exactly what you can or can't make your contract do is an...evolving... matter; but there is usually something on the list.
I suspect the posturing about 'zOMG, Snowden is clearly working for the commie russians and/or chinese taleban!!!!' to be the purest of bullshit; but if I were a member of the US clandestine services, I'd be shitting myself wondering about the existence of people who are working for somebody and running up against the same... impressive... security measures. If there are any actual moles, it is not looking good for what they were likely able to get their hands on.
You mean to tell me that an NSA tech contractor used wget or something, rather than loading up IE6 and clicking until his fingers fell off?
Knock me over with a feather, spooks. You fucking hired people to build what is probably the largest collection of signals intelligence scraping systems on the planet, targeted at a wide variety of differently structured systems. Why would you even consider, except as a last resort, the notion that you are dealing with a bunch of noobs?
(Oh, incidentally, maybe you should spend a bit less time reading everybody's email and work on that 'hilarious leaked diplomatic calls' problem, I'm told that sort of thing used to be your job at some point in the past...)
"CEO shouldn't complain - while he expected cost savings, he agreed to take the risk."
He also shouldn't complain because it makes him look incompetent (not that he is likely to even capable of experiencing the feeling of being seen as incompetent, of course). Apparently AOL has something in the neighborhood of 5,500 employees. I suspect that they skew young and reasonably healthy; but modest yearly changes in who's on chemo in a given year could trivially add up to 2 million+ swing. It's a big scary number; but it's only about a dollar per employee per day, across a population of that size.
If that qualifies as big, scary, risk, either you suck at risk management, your company has near-lethal liquidity problems, or various other bad things.
As best I can tell, shitty little 'social' share/upvote/whatever buttons at the bottom of web pages are to this decade what toolbars at the top of webpages were to the '90s. Only more tightly integrated with the sites they've metastasized onto.
Slashdot Mirror
If you are going to make 50 options to say gay, and transgender, and 2 for normal, why not have it be a text box so you can enter what you want.
I assume that having a highly granular; but not freeform, box has the advantage of standardizing the terminology for sale to niche marketers, and (in line with Facebook's desire to get as much actual personal information as possible) keeps people from making up joke genders, lest they find themselves swarming with people who identify as 'Well Endowed' and who knows what else.
Granularity allows Facebook to score PR points and sell more targeted ads. Freeform fields allow people to pollute the database. I suspect that (once they ran the numbers on 'is diversity cred worth more than the audience who is squicked out by homos and freaks?' and decided that it was) they'll be willing to add another fixed-text field for practically any identification large enough to have an affinity group; but that they'd really prefer that you build your character sheet from a template, just to make it more tractable as a market segmentation tool.
I think he was referring to your spelling mistake. How is the White Race going to win the racial holy war if some of them think that they are fighting the 'sionists' and others think that the 'zionists' and the Z.O.G. are the enemy? Military acronyms are enough of a clusterfuck as it is...
Everyone wants to be a god damned special snowflake. All these retard labels are, 95% of the time, just there to grab attention for the person using them.
I'd hardly disagree with the assertion that the demand for specialness far outstrips the supply, especially in people most vocal about it; but (given how joyful being sexually abnormal is in most social contexts) are you seriously suggesting that people are voluntarily choosing to put up with that, rather than just listening to shitty music or attempting to achieve individuality through mass-produced consumer goods?
People have a great many vices; but deliberately choosing the harder, much less pleasant, option instead of the easier one typically isn't one of them. Are you seriously postulating a population so stupid, or so bereft of other 'specialness' emulation capabilities, that they'd choose to pretend to be some wildly unpopular flavor of sexually abnormal? It just seems like you'd have to be really hard up for attention-seeking behavior to do that...
Storing arbitrary strings in my database is hard! *Emo Tears*
The human developmental trajectory is a complex system, and sometimes a touchy one. It isn't wildly common; but there are a fair few conditions that result in people in neither category.
The historical reaction usually involves the medical team attending the birth deciding which sex it would be easier to mod them into and operating accordingly, with...variably successful... results.
Hasn't TPB's legal status always been 'We can't actually find any laws that they violate; but they just look so damn uppity and illegal that we couldn't possibly let them walk!'?
The internet before search depended on hyperlinking.
Even that aside, 'hyperlinking' is pretty much an improved flavor of citation. If you are going to ban 'hyperlinks to illegal material' you are this close to just banning the mere mention of illegal material; except easier to sell because there are scary computer words involved.
Whether you see this as ironic, or as a continuation of copyright's original purpose, it is simply a matter of fact that the defenders of this sort of 'property' are learning that doing what they want requires rolling back all sorts of long-held rights. Worse, they seem OK with this.
That is also true. I suspect that some of that could be papered over by modifying the properties of the OS-provided widget sets; but I don't even want to think about dealing with all the special cases that would arise...
But when/if they do own it ... you can bet an Android phone is going to be deemed something they don't want to be doing any more.
I wonder if they'll just take it out and shoot it, in some reasonably dignified manner, or if we'll be treated to the entertaining spectacle of a repeat of their purchase of Danger? As somebody who doesn't own MS stock, watching them shell out for a reasonably-well-functioning company, decide that they weren't going to be releasing no BSD-based handsets, and having the whole affair that used to be the 'Sidekick' go down in flames as 'Project Pink' was hilarious.
The trick with 'Android compatibility' is that it's really two different problems. One is merely engineering ('merely' in the 'may actually be quite difficult; but there are engineers that are quite smart, trying giving them money' sense) and one is strategic:
'Android' as in the ASOP is a mixture of GPL and Apache. Exactly how many man-hours it takes to get ASOP running on your platform, or Dalvik and friends running on your non-Linux kernel is an open question, and may end up being quite a few if you want it to work well; but there is nobody to stop you, and you just need suitably skilled software people.
Trouble is, much of the good stuff in 'Android' (and stuff that Google doesn't exactly discourage developers from using) isn't ASOP, it's Google Play Services, a set of proprietary applications, libraries, and Google-backed web servcies that can be bestowed or denied to your device at the power and mere pleasure of Team Mountain View. They tend to ignore indie ROM-cookers and two-bit pacific RIM clonemongers who quietly pirate GPS; but if a company large enough to target, or ambitious enough to try to cut deals with major carriers in markets Google cares about, tries to distribute GPS without Google's blessing, it's world-of-hurt time.
At a greater or lesser cost in software engineers, you could get an ASOP-compatible Android compatibility layer running on QNX, NT, OSX, whatever. However, how much that helps you is increasingly limited.
Remember, back in the day, when the last of the dinosaurs were being hunted to extinction by Cro-magnon man and Sun was still not-wholly-doomed?
.NETly features that Android doesn't. It'll be just like the good old days!
In order to mess with them, MS created the MS JRM, which was almost like the Sun JVM except not, in ways so obnoxious that the courts eventually forced them to back off.
Now, since Dalvik is Totally Definitely Not a JVM, MS is presumably free to produce MS Dalvik (they'll probably call it 'Microsoft Mobile Platform Interoperability Foundation 2012' or something) that supports Android applications, and has a few extra little
Direct intervention, or chilling effect?
This looks like an unfortunate situation where laziness, malice, and greed all point in the same direction... If the bulk of your Chinese language search results need to be delivered censored, it's presumably easier to just prune your Chinese language search archive rather than burning CPU time censoring on the fly. If Chinese officials are vexed at locals just hitting a proxy and getting uncensored search results, they probably won't exactly discourage you from adopting such a harmonious and efficient practice. And, if MS wants Bing to not get crushed, with a little help from periodic great-firewallings, making themselves helpful to local authorities is a logical move.
Given that Redhat is now officially cooperating, I'm not entirely sure why CentOS is still relevant(rather than 'Redhat, RTFM Edition, upgradeable at any time to Redhat, Comes with Support Edition if you buy support'); but I assume that Redhat is focused on the enterprise for a few reasons:
1. Enterprise is where MS, and any other remaining competitors, really turn the screws on pricing. MS doesn't give away Windows Home editions; but only the OEMs know how much those costs, and most buyers aren't considering DIY or buying a 'bare' PC, so the effective cost (among the options they have) is zero. Enterprises, Not. So. Much. MS charges considerably more for 'Pro', and more again for anything server.
2. Enterprises have volume and techies. A home user has, maybe, the nerd kid down the street or something for tech support. They also have a small number of computers. Even a relatively high price, per computer, makes total sense if it avoids any support headaches, and allows those that do come up to be handled by the most common tech support people. Enterprises, though, have enough computers that buying techs rather than 'solutions' starts to become cost effective(plus, their requirements tend to be complex enough that 'solutions' still require techs)
3. 'Desktop'(in the sense of 'consumer') is where a lot of the really nasty hardware churn is. 'Enterprise desktop', 'workstation', and 'server' are all areas where (even if running Windows) IT departments Do. Not. Want. lots of driver/hardware churn, don't want to spend lots of time re-validating configurations, don't want shitty beta drivers, and so on. They are also often satisfied with a smaller variety of hardware, and from vendors who are more likely to build drivers with server and workstation customers in mind. Consumer OS that doesn't support a shitty inkjet released two years after the OS was? Pissed off consumer. Enterprise? Well, we've got some printers that all support Postscript or PCL, a bunch of servers that need NIC and SAS HBA support, and maybe some workstations with fancy graphics cards.
(As for Google and consumer Linux, it's a matter of taste whether you say that they already have, or that they never will: Android and ChromeOS are both Linux-based, neither have more than the slightest relationship to traditional linux/unix userlands. Is Google throwing its weight behind consumer Linux, or using embedded Linux as a cheap and easy way to boot a Google userland?)
I know that 'Orca' pretty much sucked in the most hilarious ways possible, so I can understand wanting to ditch that name, and maybe cetacean-based names in general; but isn't 'Para Bellum Labs' kind of pitiful-IT-violence-nerd at best and creepy at worst?
You're posting this comment on a site that was once called "Chips and Dips".
And, until Beta, I was pretty confident that they were up to the challenge of accepting and then displaying comments...
So a site with strong experience in trading Magic cards wasn't quite ready to handle the combined rigors of cryptography and finance?
The world is just full of surprises....
Can they? Sure. It's not as though the private sector can't store data, if provided with the right incentives. Heck, AT&T is providing the DEA with access to nearly three decades of call records, plus consulting expertise, right now!
Trouble is, that was never the fucking point. Do people want the NSA collecting a giant database about them? No. Does it make the slightest difference if the giant database is nominally Verizon's giant database, that just so happens to respond to all queries from the NSA? Aside from the greater likelihood that the database will be used for marketing and surveillance, not a bit. The ostensible '3rd party' won't remain at arm's length for long. Why would they? An entire organization with a single customer, dedicated to shovelling data toward them on command? Instant capture. The only time the 3rd party will be 'independent' is if somebody asks the NSA what that 3rd party is up to, in which case they'll oh-so-innocently-have-no-idea-what-that-independent-entity-does. For all other purposes, they'll be joined at the hip.
He said he wanted to run from floppies. Seems morally unsound to me; but I just do implementation...
That's Commander Keen to you! (And, incidentally, on an Android device with USB OTG and a copy of DOSbox, you should be only a USB floppy drive away from doing that right now...)
I don't know of any jurisidictions that recognize a 'right to dictate' how somebody's contract works; but the existence in contract law of doctrines that limit the scope of what any contract could do are fairly common. In the US, UK, and many UK-derived systems you have 'Unconscionability', for instance. France, Germany, and (to varying extents) the Berne Convention signatories have 'moral rights' that are partially or wholly immune to sale or transfer unlike other elements of copyright. Details vary by location, and by case; but it's pretty widely recognized that you can write up essentially anything in the form of a contract; but that that doesn't necessarily mean that you should be able to get away with it.
...evolving... matter; but there is usually something on the list.
Exactly what you can or can't make your contract do is an
Do the Germans have a single, very long, really angry-sounding, word for 'this software is licensed, not sold'? Inquiring minds want to know.
I suspect the posturing about 'zOMG, Snowden is clearly working for the commie russians and/or chinese taleban!!!!' to be the purest of bullshit; but if I were a member of the US clandestine services, I'd be shitting myself wondering about the existence of people who are working for somebody and running up against the same... impressive... security measures. If there are any actual moles, it is not looking good for what they were likely able to get their hands on.
You mean to tell me that an NSA tech contractor used wget or something, rather than loading up IE6 and clicking until his fingers fell off?
Knock me over with a feather, spooks. You fucking hired people to build what is probably the largest collection of signals intelligence scraping systems on the planet, targeted at a wide variety of differently structured systems. Why would you even consider, except as a last resort, the notion that you are dealing with a bunch of noobs?
(Oh, incidentally, maybe you should spend a bit less time reading everybody's email and work on that 'hilarious leaked diplomatic calls' problem, I'm told that sort of thing used to be your job at some point in the past...)
"CEO shouldn't complain - while he expected cost savings, he agreed to take the risk."
He also shouldn't complain because it makes him look incompetent (not that he is likely to even capable of experiencing the feeling of being seen as incompetent, of course). Apparently AOL has something in the neighborhood of 5,500 employees. I suspect that they skew young and reasonably healthy; but modest yearly changes in who's on chemo in a given year could trivially add up to 2 million+ swing. It's a big scary number; but it's only about a dollar per employee per day, across a population of that size.
If that qualifies as big, scary, risk, either you suck at risk management, your company has near-lethal liquidity problems, or various other bad things.
As best I can tell, shitty little 'social' share/upvote/whatever buttons at the bottom of web pages are to this decade what toolbars at the top of webpages were to the '90s. Only more tightly integrated with the sites they've metastasized onto.