A difference of opinion. I agree with you, but most people I know do not. They want to be connected.
They complain when their phone doesn't allow multiple people on a text message, and they have to copy/paste to send the same thing to different people.
They get together and start talking about that trip they took or that thing they did. When I ask, they ask back, "It was on my facebook, didn't you see the pictures?"
We evolved as social creatures, which allowed us to come together to form an agrarian society, as I have been told. From the users' perspectives, they are not telling the whole world, they are telling whomever they have friended. That Facebook employees can see the data, let alone analyze and make money off it, isn't even in their sphere of consideration. And when you point it out, there are two responses.
People either don't get technology, and therefore don't care who sees the mundane details of their lives, or they see it as a free service that provides what they want, in exchange for personal details. The latter group are no different from the people who have loyalty memberships or agree to the new car insurance monitoring devices.
There are relatively few people in the world who would agree with your statement, despite the disproportionate representation on this particular website. The fact that you have zero replies (not counting the post of someone else's lyrics) and +5 moderation suggests this site's audience is lacking in general sociology education, or has forgotten it.
A normal human would embrace the opportunity to keep in touch with family and friends who do not live in their subdivision. A modern normal human would appreciate keeping up with someone without having to endure the sometimes stifling social conventions involved in making arrangements to meet to talk in person, or IMO the more stifling conventions of a personal phone call.
Facebook is the ultimate social outlet, where you can post what's on your mind, and let people respond or ignore as they wish. No wondering if you are boring someone on the other end of the conversation - they can scroll past. No wondering what everyone else is doing, and if you are fitting in - it is almost telepathy, knowing what your friends are into besides what they talk about when you are together. And then seeing a stranger's comment on your friend's post - and realizing you have something in common.
Again, I agree with you. But I also understand why the 1 billion active users, 1/7 of the world, disagree.
I had a job where I had to be available on-call all the time, and I ended up opening the notebook and working at home as much as from home. Coding during the day, paperwork like responding to e-mails in the evening.
Add in a healthy dose of berating idiots on slashdot and browsing other negligibly informational news aggregator sites, and I did maybe 9 hours of work a day. But I felt tethered.
I switched jobs, and the expectation to be ever present is gone. We have great user sign-off and the infrastructure is relatively simple, so I don't get downtime calls like I used to. I leave work and it leaves me. You might look into a change of pace, if you have to move and you have 8 years before retirement, I'd make the change.
You're almost there. Apple's initial designs have some fairly serious problems, and then they iron out the bugs. Microsoft on the other hand seems intent to rush something out and play catch-up, but they never spend the kind of effort needed to fine-tune the design. Apple, or at least Steve Jobs, wanted everything to be perfect for the user so they are willing to pay a premium. Microsoft is aiming at the general market, often balancing price vs. design.
iPod was not well-received until the third generation (2003) when a few redesigns were made and iTunes took off.
iPhone had (relatively) abysmal sales until the end of the second generation, after at least one OS upgrade, and the third generation was on the way (3GS), making second generation less expensive.
iPad was done very well, mostly because they were in development, realized the same could be done in a phone, and shelved it while they worked out the iPhone. The market was already there, in the form of subnotebooks such as ASUS EEE. They applied what they learned from the iPod and iPhone and got this one right early.
Apple's marketing is the same way - lots of attention spent on the end user's experience, rather than how much it costs. Just looking at what we've seen already from the trial, Apple continually gets feedback from focus groups, and from various sources it seems they start before the product is out the door. I wouldn't be surprised to see many revisions of advertising before it gets out the door as well, although those are easier to update if it's not hitting the right note.
Apple: worry about design over price, change the product based on user feedback
Microsoft: Know corporations will buy whatever you're selling, eventually, and people will buy consumer goods for compatibility
Different markets, different tactics. It doesn't help that Microsoft's "lost decade" basically left them with barely anything to show for it - a new OS that finally caught up with OS X because it was make-or-break with Vista's debacle, XBOX 360, and advances in its development tools. Microsoft's focus is not on the consumer, and "good enough" is ready for a release. "Good enough" does not exist for Apple, it always needs refinement. Not the mindless UI changes Microsoft has been putting on Vista, Office, and the Xbox dashboard, but addressing actual usability issues.
YouTube is also very script-heavy. Given that much of the MemShrink progress has been in the area of JavaScript allocation and garbage collection, I thik scripts are the real culprit.
Badly written scripts, which rely on GC to destroy objects, and "just know" when a reference won't be used again. Several blog posts have mentioned simple fixes, indirectly. As an example,
Now there is a window which stays around until the page sets "window.my_popup = null;" or the tab closes.
Since the web is moving towards JavaScript, it's time we teach people about memory management again. The same lesson we keep having to teach over and over. Even in C# I use functions as a way to scope variables, or "using" statements for smaller blocks that don't need re-factored. When I write script, I think of these things, and try to keep objects to a minimum.
Try using NoScript, whitelisting only the sites you need to, and definitely close your browser once in a while. You're not fixing browser problems so much as fixing scripting, add-on, and other third-party issues. And I'm on FF 14.0.1, so maybe an update is in order for you.
If you object to NoScript, consider this - do you want any website to run whatever it wants to on your system, without you knowing what it's doing? I don't. Should the average user have to worry about such things? I believe this is the minimum information a user has to have, similar to "don't put metal things in an electrical outlet."
As many people consider their computer an appliance and treat it as such, it is fair to expect them to follow simple care and maintenance tasks like "clean your dryer filter" and "don't put metal objects in the microwave."
We've had this discussion already. FireFox developers denied there were problems, then admitted, then introduced numerous fixes. Memshrink began June 2011 and has shown progress almost every week for over a year.
I left it for a while, then got irritated by Chrome's anemic script-blocking (nothing is temporary). Coming back, I haven't had any problem with memory.
Because I have script blocking, and settings are stored in a script file, it sometimes fails to restore tabs or browsing sessions if I kill it (for the sole purpose of saving tabs while I reboot or know I won't be browsing for a while). That's mostly user-error, and partly interference from a 3rd-party plugin.
I hope you are aware that captchas are randomly generated, and the only reason that it seems relevant is either a very rare coincidence, or the power of the human brain to recognize patterns given very little data.
There is no point in listing the captcha given for your post, at any point. The only possible reason for doing so is to illustrate your lack of understanding of the above point, or to demonstrate your gullibility and/or belief in things that do not exist. Like the psychic who predicts coin toss results at 49% accuracy, and uses only the successes to support the psychic claims.
The only reason I don't immediately down-mod posts which undermine the intended point by saying that you associate random occurrences with some sort of meaning is that there is no way to explain the moderation, and meta-moderation would mark me as unfair.
So I occasionally try to remind people not to be idiots.
In addition to the other replies, I found myself wondering who would stop accumulating wealth. I would go to the same job every day, so that wouldn't change. Most everyone I work with probably would, too. The janitors wouldn't quit.
The sociopaths who, despite the decreasing marginal utility of extra money, nevertheless find new ways to extract money, such as complex derivative trading, might find their efforts pointless. They may go into some more productive line of work. After all, some of the most brilliant programming minds are being lured into the high payday world of finance.
People might go back to creating something of value, instead of chasing the big payday. Kinda like when the top tax rate was a lot higher.
Bill Gates was not looking for the big payday, he was selling a product that he created. The business grew beyond a BASIC interpreter, and his fortune came as a result of owning stock in his company. As long term capital gains, that is only 15% tax rate, and the top tier wouldn't kick in. He would have no disincentive for doing exactly what he did The only way to "confiscate" rich peoples' money is to raise the capital gains rate. And then the average investor has no reason to get into the market, with a typical return being 4-6%, and taxes already eat almost 1 of those points. So then you fight over things like alternative minimum, and someone has to define what "rich" means, which differs wildly by locale.
I think the higher tax brackets can be raised without anyone bailing out due to the taxes. I also think there is a way to encourage altruism, we just haven't found the right way. As much money as he has given away, it seems to be a selected bunch of private industry who benefits, and some humanitarian work accidentally gets done along the way. In other words, it looks more like a tax dodge than altruism. As a people, we can do better.
I think you accidentally got to the real heart of the issue. Microsoft has to keep up appearances, as an established corporation. But this code was not written in the open source world, not for Linux, and not intended to be distributed at all. It was supposed to be hidden in the basement.
Microsoft was forced to release this code because they released binaries built with GPL components. Those binaries were to make Linux work well with Microsoft's hypervisor. Not to make Linux look good, but to make virtual Linux useable enough that they keep paying for a Windows host license (on the next server, or OS upgrade).
This magic number is a guest OS ID definition for Microsoft's Hyper-V. As far as anyone knows, this might be a magic value already in place in some of Microsoft's code, and they had to use the same value in the Linux implementation. If that's not the case, it's still internal code that they had no intention of releasing as source.
My guess is that someone who doesn't respect Linux intentionally violated the identity convention. In that case, it's not about sexism at all. Substituting a childish phrase for an operating system ID is about respect for the product, and little if anything to do with respect for women. If a woman wants to see it as offensive that is perfectly valid. But from what I can tell not the intent at all.
The "predictable debate over sexism in the technology world" is being driven by people who take things out of context for the increased page loads. It could very well be told as "Source code divulged after GPL violation reveals Microsoft employs at least one immature developer." But the focus on sexism almost makes the ads click themselves.
I work at a place where informal speech is par for the course. A manager sent out a mail about using appropriate language because you could be overheard by someone you are not intending to talk to. A professional environment deserves that sort of respect for the people around you, especially since you don't always know who is on the other side of the wall.
And whether someone is too fragile to work in an environment of potty mouths is irrelevant. You don't stick to politically correct speech out of fear of offending someone - it's what polite society does. Reprimands are in order even if no one is offended, because the workplace just does not allow for certain things. You might teabag a friend at home as a joke, but you wouldn't do it at most work places.
If you work in an environment which is not part of polite society, you are not held to the same standard.
The manager who sent the mail almost immediately walked around the corner with both middle fingers waving and said "You can show it, you just can't say it." And it's like that a lot of places - polite society is unnatural, but it's the lowest common denominator until you get to know the people a bit better and can relax a bit. Every place I have worked has had a policy of professionalism, which was violated every single day by some person or another. We all know it's there, we all know it's going to be broken, and we act surprised when it happens. I'm not saying that's the way it should work, I'm saying that's the way it does. And until you change a whole lot of peoples' minds, especially those in charge of HR at large employers, your opinion is going to live in its own little bubble.
If you work in, or represent, a professional environment, you have to convey the atmosphere of that environment. And this magic constant gives the impression that Microsoft coders are childish and possibly under-sexed (not sexist as some claim, IMO). Regardless of whether that type of humor is normal for the Linux environment, it came from Microsoft and represents Microsoft. They could have gone with a more neutral magic value, like the 0xBB40E64E security cookie for stack checking. Of course, if you're looking for trouble you could read it as a veiled reference to breasts followed by ridiculous bra sizes: Big Boobs 40E 64E.
Keep in mind, I haven't taken a position on this - simply pointing out that your philosophy is not a good fit with reality.
I don't get the feeling that you are discussing this rationally, or considering the other perspectives. If you were, you probably would have chosen a different constant name as an example. As has been pointed out, 0xB16B00B5 does not seem directed towards a specific person.
I would consider your exaggerated example more of an insult than sexism, and does suggest a specific individual. Maybe if you went with LONG_DONG as the example instead, I would not have had the reaction I had. Generalized anatomical observation using slang terms, but no profanity, in other words.
As long as I'm here, you also took the word "uptight" and lumped it in with "frigid" in your previous post - again exaggerating the tone of the original comment.
I have no choice but to agree with AC above, you seem to have a bias in interpretation. Whether it is conscious or not is irrelevant. It makes getting your point across harder when you sound closed-minded or radiate zealotry, even if you have valid points.
Hopefully this feedback has been helpful, I have tried not to come across as an attack, but it is hard to convey tone through text alone. If someone is looking for a fight, they will read this as fighting words, after all.
The summary makes it seem like their online division is just naturally bleeding billions. Millions, maybe, but not billions.
I agree that it mis-attributed the cause, but they lost 2 billion last year without the write-down, which is plural billion, which is billions. They are bleeding billions.
Hopefully the lesson learned here is not to rely on things that might go away.
DRM services like PlaysForSure, television shows that can get canceled, game servers. Anything that provides a source of revenue will be updated, upgraded, replaced, and when it no longer serves the purposes, dumped.
Buy the DVD sets of whatever was on at that time, set the TV to play at the appropriate time, and you have a substitute in place. But Viacom gets money from you directly this way, and probably more of it.
There is always a workaround, but it's not always palatable. Google will one day not exist, but Android might. Red Hat might go away, but Linux probably won't. This is essentially the whole point RMS has been trying to beat into peoples' heads - if you don't have some ownership in it, don't trust it.
Most of the projects you work on are not representative of most of what everyone else works on.
I work with a competent set of people, and we can trust each other for the most part to do the right thing. If we all estimate together, and one person is continually missing estimates, that's a red flag. Otherwise, that means we're still on the same page.
Our customer had a bad experience with waterfall, and expects the type of frequent updates you get in Scrum. Also, the power to decide which features get added or removed from a sprint due to changing conditions.
It works perfectly for us because of the development team, the environment, the customer, and the code we inherited. There is no way to say that it would work in any other situation blindly.
My general attitude towards choosing a methodology is that someone with knowledge of the environment and the authority to make a declaration, gets to choose how it goes. Based on feedback from the customer and employees, this decision might have to change.
I have been in a Fortune 20 company, where the business did not allow for Agile anything because it's too big to communicate anything across all of the teams. I've worked where IT is just an afterthought, and Program Management just barely understands what we do.
The fight with program management is, they know how long it takes to build this component or put them together to build a part. They can't understand why we can only give a rough estimate. If I've done it before, I know how long it takes, because it's done. Zero time. But that's never the case, it's always something new - either slightly or significantly, in which case your estimate will be off slightly or significantly, respectively.
The best way to describe the benefit of Scrum is that you divide work into small parts, and can show progress weekly or biweekly. You can still have an overall waterfall process with set plans and delivery dates, while implementing the parts of Agile that make sense for your team.
You sound like an informed consumer, not their target market. People do walk around and then buy online, or at least comparison shop. Some people do it by sending teams to different stores, and the lowest price feature compatible item gets bought.
People don't want a hands-on experience - they do want to window shop, though. And it helps to stay organized if you have a limited selection, and maybe tiered pricing in several physically separate locations. Once you narrow it down, you find something similar online and buy it. Not that item, just something like it.
It started with people checking out specials on their website while in the store, and noticing price mismatches. Now word has gotten around that you don't buy without checking the price first - and while you're at it, why not check someone else's store too?
They did cut inventory and act like they were the only choice, and people started window shopping there and buying online, and it was entirely their own fault.
Un-doing 7 well-deserved mod points to post this, so pay attention. Higgs was not a given. A particle in the same range without the ability to generate the Higgs field was also a possibility. The team explicitly stated that further confirmation is needed before they can say they found Higgs, or a Higgs-sized particle that does not do the things Higgs Boson is supposed to do.
It is still up in the air as to whether we have a Higgs Boson, or a Higgs-less theory of mass. Obviously everyone is leaning towards Higgs because it matches predictions. But what if it is Higgs sized without having the correct properties? Then you're wrong, and also an idiot for assuming it is a given.
If we indeed found it, then you're a lucky guess at best.
I agree this is more important, but only because we have been zeroing in on a Higgs-sized particle for quite some time. Dark matter has been purely theoretical until now (and still this is only the first sighting, subject to review and revision as with all experimental results). More important because it's newer.
In truth, we won't know for a hundred years which is more important. If dark matter has been theorized since 1930's and we just confirmed it, it is no more important than such ideas as gravitational lensing which have been around for decades before being confirmed. We have known it for a long time, in other words. To me, more important would be strong evidence that a 90 year old hypothesis was completely incorrect and in need of revision.
Neither one of these, to me, beats a fat man finally seeing his toes after 30 years. He had a feeling they were there, and had been told as much, but to finally see them is a whole different ball game.
How can we tell if it's polished? What the hell is it even supposed to be? There's a mailing list subscription link - to what?
I went to the main page, or what I thought it might be, and got:
Welcome to phunq.net!
Please stay tuned for more exciting developments.
Google has no info on phunq that I could find before giving up, so I decided to ask you - WTF are you even talking about? Should I have modded you +1 ZOMBOCOM?
Like the buggy whip makers? Sure, stick with your strengths. But the consumer is fickle, and when they decide to move on you either give them something to move on to, or stagnate. From the article, Microsoft has repeatedly rejected any opportunity which might lead them to having a strength other than Windows and Office.
I almost mentioned their effort with XBox, but my dashboard is upgraded to have a billion ads, Bing search, Windows Media. It's a crapfest, and it's bringing the XBox closer to the core Windows strengths, rather than giving gamers something useful. The "media center" idea, starting with XP media center edition, is either unwanted by consumers, or badly botched by Microsoft. "All your media in one place", including DVR and streaming, is a solved problem. But MS can't make it stick, and instead just piles on more Windows integration.
The reasons behind these decisions often make sense, in theory. And as we all know, practice is not theory.
I've worked at Fortune 150 to Fortune 10 companies. This type of ranking comes in when someone at the top is cost cutting, and wants to drive away the worst performers. Forced ranking makes it easier to tell managers to rank people, then later ordering the bottom person gone for all teams above a certain number. That way managers don't have to decide who goes, in the same way as if they were ordered to choose one person.
When the company recovers, employee surveys (and exit interviews) cite this as the reason for leaving, and this system goes away.
I'm not sure we can trust the specifics, but if this plan were in place 5 years or more, it points out a management who is completely unconcerned as to why people leave the company. Microsoft has raise concerns about poaching - maybe they legitimately believe other companies are just making overly high offers to get talent, rather than people leaving because of a hostile workplace.
I think over the past few years this has gone out of style in many places, but it does take a while for the shared MBA pool of knowledge to trickle down as new graduates replace outgoing ones, or someone makes a 20 year stagnant career in the same position, refusing to change their ways.
Which is one reason large companies push career development. If you don't aspire to get a promotion, you are going to eventually get fired - this is the message. Pushing people to move around voluntarily means you can count on at least a few new opinions introduced, But when you push the great architect into a mediocre middle manager, you've hurt the company twice - losing the architect and gaining bad middle management.
Good ideas always have a downside, and good management knows when to recognize when the cons outweigh the pros. Half of the managers are at or below average, so I wouldn't expect much more than following orders.
We are not talking about individual developers. This topic is about providing an environment where people can do their best. A good developer should not have to take stuff home to work on if the environment is part of the workflow, instead of an impediment.
Hiring the right people and firing the right people is a great way to start, but it's often very hard to do. Giving the developers some flexibility to choose their methodology, whether it's agile or something else, goes a lot further than telling them they will be agile because someone read it works better.
Tools, flexibility, accountability, and stake are what it takes. They have to have some stake in the product, whether it's stock awards or pride or names in the credits. Just being on a first name basis with the purse-holder will go a long way, as the actual customer who uses your product can say they are happy with the progress made so far.
More to your point, I have found agile to be a great way to salvage a program that wasted piles of money over several years. Every two weeks I can show progress, check things off the list, and the customer feels like he's getting something for his money. It's not always the method for the developers - sometimes the customers need to watch the progress, and agile is a great way to do that. You choose agile when it makes sense, not because it's the thing to do. Sometimes it doesn't make sense, and those are the people who won't be coding in 5 years.
Dude... I am so fucked up on fried banananana peels it isn't even funny. If I could afford bananananas every day I'd be, like, an addict. Or something.
Shhhhhhh! Don't tell people about this. I can make serious dolla dolla billz yall just posting on craigslist advertizing banananannanaBATMAN peels.
Since I can't mod you +6... what blows my mind is this was the only informative comment by JustOK that I could quickly find. Most are just +5 Funny.
This is one of the few remaining reasons I visit slashdot - the rare insightful comment, and the inevitable up-moderation it gets. And of course the meta-hive-mind, where someone much like yourself makes a connection. In a way, it's the closest I can get to James Burke's Connections article in Scientific American.
If only more people would meta-mod, just to keep the troll-mods in line.
Were you trying to be sarcastic? If you are hourly rather than salary, the exact amount and duration of toilet breaks are defined legally. For an 8 hour shift, I would get 2 paid 15 minute breaks and one unpaid 30 minute lunch break, based on where i live.
I would also not get calls after hours, because I'm off the clock. So if you are hourly, that's exactly the situation. You get work 8 hours, paid for 8 hours, then you have nothing to do with your employer for 16 hours. If you are hourly and getting calls after hours, look into your labor laws to see how whether you should be getting paid for that.
Salaried people may be taken advantage of, especially in the US with their white-collar exemptions for overtime. Some generous employers do not take advantage of that exemption, and pay you as if you were hourly (typically straight time, though).
If you are salary, it is up to you to make sure you are being treated fairly. If you give 40 hours of work, then get calls after hours, and it falls under the exemption rules, you may feel like you're being treated unfairly, so either resolve it, quit, or resign yourself to it until you burn out. I changed employers and solved that problem.
Doesn't change the fact that when I'm at work, I have work to do. And most employers generally do trust you to do the work you need to do.
But none of this changes the fact that if you are at work, anything you do on the employer's network may be monitored. Because of that, and because you have work to do, it is COMPLETELY reasonable not to do anything personal.
You are vastly confused here. There are many points conflated in your post.
1) Employer's policy about what is allowed using their resources 2) Employer's requirements about how much time you spend doing productive work 2) Monitoring employees' activities 3) Implementing a man-n-the-middle attack (transparent HTTPS)
The first three are off topic here - whether what you are doing is allowed or not doesn't matter. "Don't use your employer's network if you don't want them to watch what you do." I don't see how it could be any simpler. They provide the resources and a paycheck. If you don't like their policies, quit. If you can't quit, you're stuck.
If you have something pop up that will interrupt your work, you have to make that decision regardless of whether technology is involved. That's the part about having a life outside of work.
If you do decide you have to take care of it, and it involves an internet connection, don't expect that monitoring will be turned off. If you don't accept that risk, you have the traditional solutions. Call instead of using a website, ask for emergency time off, quit, or whatever else you can think of to avoid being snooped.
I'm pretty sure you're confused here. Aside from the chord names being relative, as transposed to C, the tuning issues are somewhat mis-stated.
It is far easier to understand beginning with common tuning systems. Originally, stringed instruments and keyboards such as the piano could only play in a few keys. This is due to the harmonic series, where an instrument's notes have to match with the overtones of other notes. A truly in-tune piano will sound good in one key because of things like the third being slightly flat. Change the key so that note is no longer the third, and it sounds wrong.
So they invented even tempering, where you give up some perfection to make it more flexible. Every chord is equally out of tune, so they sound just as good (bad). This is what we are used to.
But even tempering is not perfect. The octaves on a piano are not tuned perfectly. They get further away from "true" as you move up or down. This is the same inherent flaw that you ascribe to guitars. It applies to all instruments. The Earvana tech page even flat-out states they are using piano tuning ideas.
If you read a bit, you find all kinds of answers to how to tune a guitar. Eddie Van Halen, who plays lots of stuff around E chords, tuned the G string flat so that the full E chord, with the third (G#) on the G string, would fall slightly flat like it should. Playing an A chord you would think might sound awful, since the A on the G string is now flat. But that's the piano tuning idea, where the octaves don't match up. I'm pretty sure piano octaves are slightly wider, but in this case it's just wrong by the same amount. And in the upper range, he uses lots of vibrato, whammy stuff, and ornamentation. If you listen closely, he uses way more whammy bar than any transcription could capture. If he has to hold a note, he either uses vibrato, or does what any other musician does - adapt to your instrument.
Eric Johnson is known for perfecting his sound. He uses a slightly different tuning depending on what he's playing, sometimes bringing the E string down so it's audibly out of tune - except he isn't playing the open E where it sticks out.
Countless players use mis-matched sets, so that the strings are slightly more or less massive than in a standard set. For their style of playing, a specific mis-matched set will give you near-perfect results.
And then there is the string distension. If you play the first 5 frets, you are pushing the string out of tune, since it has to not only contact the fret, but fall below the fret.
Earvana acknowledges that setting the saddle addresses the string intonation problem. But it is not perfect, since you are only fixing one end. Here is the secret that they dance around, trying not to sound too obvious. Moving the saddle changes the center of the string, and it no longer sits over the 12th fret. An ideally tuned guitar would fix string length by moving both the saddle and the nut. That's your compensated bridge, keeping the center of the string at the center of the guitar.
Now, do you play 5 inches away from the saddle? No, so you don't notice string distension on the high notes as much. So, you can focus on the first 5 frets, get the octaves in tune (piano style, not perfectly), and bingo it sounds great. Very little of this is guitar specific.
I call bullshit on you blaming the tuning, since many well-known players already adapt for tuning issues. It is far more sensible to say that people play guitar in E, A, D, and G because it's easier and more natural.
If you play a string instrument without frets, you will become aware of intonation problems and be able to fix it easily. Brass instruments compensate by having adjustable lengths, using slides like a trombone. Woodwind players can adjust the reed, or tilt the flute. Guitar players, particularly classical, have the same requirement to adjust to the instrument. Session players will play with the fingers closer to further from the frets to adjust.
It is mostly the garage-band types, even if they rise to celebrity, that have problems with intonation. And they are likely to play in friendly keys, and if they are famous enough probably have a guitar tech fix all of this for them.
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A difference of opinion. I agree with you, but most people I know do not. They want to be connected.
They complain when their phone doesn't allow multiple people on a text message, and they have to copy/paste to send the same thing to different people.
They get together and start talking about that trip they took or that thing they did. When I ask, they ask back, "It was on my facebook, didn't you see the pictures?"
We evolved as social creatures, which allowed us to come together to form an agrarian society, as I have been told. From the users' perspectives, they are not telling the whole world, they are telling whomever they have friended. That Facebook employees can see the data, let alone analyze and make money off it, isn't even in their sphere of consideration. And when you point it out, there are two responses.
People either don't get technology, and therefore don't care who sees the mundane details of their lives, or they see it as a free service that provides what they want, in exchange for personal details. The latter group are no different from the people who have loyalty memberships or agree to the new car insurance monitoring devices.
There are relatively few people in the world who would agree with your statement, despite the disproportionate representation on this particular website. The fact that you have zero replies (not counting the post of someone else's lyrics) and +5 moderation suggests this site's audience is lacking in general sociology education, or has forgotten it.
A normal human would embrace the opportunity to keep in touch with family and friends who do not live in their subdivision. A modern normal human would appreciate keeping up with someone without having to endure the sometimes stifling social conventions involved in making arrangements to meet to talk in person, or IMO the more stifling conventions of a personal phone call.
Facebook is the ultimate social outlet, where you can post what's on your mind, and let people respond or ignore as they wish. No wondering if you are boring someone on the other end of the conversation - they can scroll past. No wondering what everyone else is doing, and if you are fitting in - it is almost telepathy, knowing what your friends are into besides what they talk about when you are together. And then seeing a stranger's comment on your friend's post - and realizing you have something in common.
Again, I agree with you. But I also understand why the 1 billion active users, 1/7 of the world, disagree.
I had a job where I had to be available on-call all the time, and I ended up opening the notebook and working at home as much as from home. Coding during the day, paperwork like responding to e-mails in the evening.
Add in a healthy dose of berating idiots on slashdot and browsing other negligibly informational news aggregator sites, and I did maybe 9 hours of work a day. But I felt tethered.
I switched jobs, and the expectation to be ever present is gone. We have great user sign-off and the infrastructure is relatively simple, so I don't get downtime calls like I used to. I leave work and it leaves me. You might look into a change of pace, if you have to move and you have 8 years before retirement, I'd make the change.
You're almost there. Apple's initial designs have some fairly serious problems, and then they iron out the bugs. Microsoft on the other hand seems intent to rush something out and play catch-up, but they never spend the kind of effort needed to fine-tune the design. Apple, or at least Steve Jobs, wanted everything to be perfect for the user so they are willing to pay a premium. Microsoft is aiming at the general market, often balancing price vs. design.
iPod was not well-received until the third generation (2003) when a few redesigns were made and iTunes took off.
iPhone had (relatively) abysmal sales until the end of the second generation, after at least one OS upgrade, and the third generation was on the way (3GS), making second generation less expensive.
iPad was done very well, mostly because they were in development, realized the same could be done in a phone, and shelved it while they worked out the iPhone. The market was already there, in the form of subnotebooks such as ASUS EEE. They applied what they learned from the iPod and iPhone and got this one right early.
Apple's marketing is the same way - lots of attention spent on the end user's experience, rather than how much it costs. Just looking at what we've seen already from the trial, Apple continually gets feedback from focus groups, and from various sources it seems they start before the product is out the door. I wouldn't be surprised to see many revisions of advertising before it gets out the door as well, although those are easier to update if it's not hitting the right note.
Apple: worry about design over price, change the product based on user feedback
Microsoft: Know corporations will buy whatever you're selling, eventually, and people will buy consumer goods for compatibility
Different markets, different tactics. It doesn't help that Microsoft's "lost decade" basically left them with barely anything to show for it - a new OS that finally caught up with OS X because it was make-or-break with Vista's debacle, XBOX 360, and advances in its development tools. Microsoft's focus is not on the consumer, and "good enough" is ready for a release. "Good enough" does not exist for Apple, it always needs refinement. Not the mindless UI changes Microsoft has been putting on Vista, Office, and the Xbox dashboard, but addressing actual usability issues.
YouTube is also very script-heavy. Given that much of the MemShrink progress has been in the area of JavaScript allocation and garbage collection, I thik scripts are the real culprit.
Badly written scripts, which rely on GC to destroy objects, and "just know" when a reference won't be used again. Several blog posts have mentioned simple fixes, indirectly. As an example,
Now there is a window which stays around until the page sets "window.my_popup = null;" or the tab closes.
Since the web is moving towards JavaScript, it's time we teach people about memory management again. The same lesson we keep having to teach over and over. Even in C# I use functions as a way to scope variables, or "using" statements for smaller blocks that don't need re-factored. When I write script, I think of these things, and try to keep objects to a minimum.
Try using NoScript, whitelisting only the sites you need to, and definitely close your browser once in a while. You're not fixing browser problems so much as fixing scripting, add-on, and other third-party issues. And I'm on FF 14.0.1, so maybe an update is in order for you.
If you object to NoScript, consider this - do you want any website to run whatever it wants to on your system, without you knowing what it's doing? I don't. Should the average user have to worry about such things? I believe this is the minimum information a user has to have, similar to "don't put metal things in an electrical outlet."
As many people consider their computer an appliance and treat it as such, it is fair to expect them to follow simple care and maintenance tasks like "clean your dryer filter" and "don't put metal objects in the microwave."
We've had this discussion already. FireFox developers denied there were problems, then admitted, then introduced numerous fixes. Memshrink began June 2011 and has shown progress almost every week for over a year.
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Performance/MemShrink
I left it for a while, then got irritated by Chrome's anemic script-blocking (nothing is temporary). Coming back, I haven't had any problem with memory.
Because I have script blocking, and settings are stored in a script file, it sometimes fails to restore tabs or browsing sessions if I kill it (for the sole purpose of saving tabs while I reboot or know I won't be browsing for a while). That's mostly user-error, and partly interference from a 3rd-party plugin.
I hope you are aware that captchas are randomly generated, and the only reason that it seems relevant is either a very rare coincidence, or the power of the human brain to recognize patterns given very little data.
There is no point in listing the captcha given for your post, at any point. The only possible reason for doing so is to illustrate your lack of understanding of the above point, or to demonstrate your gullibility and/or belief in things that do not exist. Like the psychic who predicts coin toss results at 49% accuracy, and uses only the successes to support the psychic claims.
The only reason I don't immediately down-mod posts which undermine the intended point by saying that you associate random occurrences with some sort of meaning is that there is no way to explain the moderation, and meta-moderation would mark me as unfair.
So I occasionally try to remind people not to be idiots.
In addition to the other replies, I found myself wondering who would stop accumulating wealth. I would go to the same job every day, so that wouldn't change. Most everyone I work with probably would, too. The janitors wouldn't quit.
The sociopaths who, despite the decreasing marginal utility of extra money, nevertheless find new ways to extract money, such as complex derivative trading, might find their efforts pointless. They may go into some more productive line of work. After all, some of the most brilliant programming minds are being lured into the high payday world of finance.
People might go back to creating something of value, instead of chasing the big payday. Kinda like when the top tax rate was a lot higher.
Bill Gates was not looking for the big payday, he was selling a product that he created. The business grew beyond a BASIC interpreter, and his fortune came as a result of owning stock in his company. As long term capital gains, that is only 15% tax rate, and the top tier wouldn't kick in. He would have no disincentive for doing exactly what he did The only way to "confiscate" rich peoples' money is to raise the capital gains rate. And then the average investor has no reason to get into the market, with a typical return being 4-6%, and taxes already eat almost 1 of those points. So then you fight over things like alternative minimum, and someone has to define what "rich" means, which differs wildly by locale.
I think the higher tax brackets can be raised without anyone bailing out due to the taxes. I also think there is a way to encourage altruism, we just haven't found the right way. As much money as he has given away, it seems to be a selected bunch of private industry who benefits, and some humanitarian work accidentally gets done along the way. In other words, it looks more like a tax dodge than altruism. As a people, we can do better.
I think you accidentally got to the real heart of the issue. Microsoft has to keep up appearances, as an established corporation. But this code was not written in the open source world, not for Linux, and not intended to be distributed at all. It was supposed to be hidden in the basement.
Microsoft was forced to release this code because they released binaries built with GPL components. Those binaries were to make Linux work well with Microsoft's hypervisor. Not to make Linux look good, but to make virtual Linux useable enough that they keep paying for a Windows host license (on the next server, or OS upgrade).
This magic number is a guest OS ID definition for Microsoft's Hyper-V. As far as anyone knows, this might be a magic value already in place in some of Microsoft's code, and they had to use the same value in the Linux implementation. If that's not the case, it's still internal code that they had no intention of releasing as source.
My guess is that someone who doesn't respect Linux intentionally violated the identity convention. In that case, it's not about sexism at all. Substituting a childish phrase for an operating system ID is about respect for the product, and little if anything to do with respect for women. If a woman wants to see it as offensive that is perfectly valid. But from what I can tell not the intent at all.
The "predictable debate over sexism in the technology world" is being driven by people who take things out of context for the increased page loads. It could very well be told as "Source code divulged after GPL violation reveals Microsoft employs at least one immature developer." But the focus on sexism almost makes the ads click themselves.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_kernel#Hyper-V_submission_by_Microsoft
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/hardware/ff542653(v=vs.85).aspx
I work at a place where informal speech is par for the course. A manager sent out a mail about using appropriate language because you could be overheard by someone you are not intending to talk to. A professional environment deserves that sort of respect for the people around you, especially since you don't always know who is on the other side of the wall.
And whether someone is too fragile to work in an environment of potty mouths is irrelevant. You don't stick to politically correct speech out of fear of offending someone - it's what polite society does. Reprimands are in order even if no one is offended, because the workplace just does not allow for certain things. You might teabag a friend at home as a joke, but you wouldn't do it at most work places.
If you work in an environment which is not part of polite society, you are not held to the same standard.
The manager who sent the mail almost immediately walked around the corner with both middle fingers waving and said "You can show it, you just can't say it." And it's like that a lot of places - polite society is unnatural, but it's the lowest common denominator until you get to know the people a bit better and can relax a bit. Every place I have worked has had a policy of professionalism, which was violated every single day by some person or another. We all know it's there, we all know it's going to be broken, and we act surprised when it happens. I'm not saying that's the way it should work, I'm saying that's the way it does. And until you change a whole lot of peoples' minds, especially those in charge of HR at large employers, your opinion is going to live in its own little bubble.
If you work in, or represent, a professional environment, you have to convey the atmosphere of that environment. And this magic constant gives the impression that Microsoft coders are childish and possibly under-sexed (not sexist as some claim, IMO). Regardless of whether that type of humor is normal for the Linux environment, it came from Microsoft and represents Microsoft. They could have gone with a more neutral magic value, like the 0xBB40E64E security cookie for stack checking. Of course, if you're looking for trouble you could read it as a veiled reference to breasts followed by ridiculous bra sizes: Big Boobs 40E 64E.
Keep in mind, I haven't taken a position on this - simply pointing out that your philosophy is not a good fit with reality.
I don't get the feeling that you are discussing this rationally, or considering the other perspectives. If you were, you probably would have chosen a different constant name as an example. As has been pointed out, 0xB16B00B5 does not seem directed towards a specific person.
I would consider your exaggerated example more of an insult than sexism, and does suggest a specific individual. Maybe if you went with LONG_DONG as the example instead, I would not have had the reaction I had. Generalized anatomical observation using slang terms, but no profanity, in other words.
As long as I'm here, you also took the word "uptight" and lumped it in with "frigid" in your previous post - again exaggerating the tone of the original comment.
I have no choice but to agree with AC above, you seem to have a bias in interpretation. Whether it is conscious or not is irrelevant. It makes getting your point across harder when you sound closed-minded or radiate zealotry, even if you have valid points.
Hopefully this feedback has been helpful, I have tried not to come across as an attack, but it is hard to convey tone through text alone. If someone is looking for a fight, they will read this as fighting words, after all.
I agree that it mis-attributed the cause, but they lost 2 billion last year without the write-down, which is plural billion, which is billions. They are bleeding billions.
Best nerd fight in recent memory. I had nearly given up on slashdot, but I keep finding gold like this.
Disagreeing informatively is by far the most enlightening discussion for my taste.
As you were, sorry for the interruption.
Hopefully the lesson learned here is not to rely on things that might go away.
DRM services like PlaysForSure, television shows that can get canceled, game servers. Anything that provides a source of revenue will be updated, upgraded, replaced, and when it no longer serves the purposes, dumped.
Buy the DVD sets of whatever was on at that time, set the TV to play at the appropriate time, and you have a substitute in place. But Viacom gets money from you directly this way, and probably more of it.
There is always a workaround, but it's not always palatable. Google will one day not exist, but Android might. Red Hat might go away, but Linux probably won't. This is essentially the whole point RMS has been trying to beat into peoples' heads - if you don't have some ownership in it, don't trust it.
Most of the projects you work on are not representative of most of what everyone else works on.
I work with a competent set of people, and we can trust each other for the most part to do the right thing. If we all estimate together, and one person is continually missing estimates, that's a red flag. Otherwise, that means we're still on the same page.
Our customer had a bad experience with waterfall, and expects the type of frequent updates you get in Scrum. Also, the power to decide which features get added or removed from a sprint due to changing conditions.
It works perfectly for us because of the development team, the environment, the customer, and the code we inherited. There is no way to say that it would work in any other situation blindly.
My general attitude towards choosing a methodology is that someone with knowledge of the environment and the authority to make a declaration, gets to choose how it goes. Based on feedback from the customer and employees, this decision might have to change.
I have been in a Fortune 20 company, where the business did not allow for Agile anything because it's too big to communicate anything across all of the teams. I've worked where IT is just an afterthought, and Program Management just barely understands what we do.
The fight with program management is, they know how long it takes to build this component or put them together to build a part. They can't understand why we can only give a rough estimate. If I've done it before, I know how long it takes, because it's done. Zero time. But that's never the case, it's always something new - either slightly or significantly, in which case your estimate will be off slightly or significantly, respectively.
The best way to describe the benefit of Scrum is that you divide work into small parts, and can show progress weekly or biweekly. You can still have an overall waterfall process with set plans and delivery dates, while implementing the parts of Agile that make sense for your team.
You sound like an informed consumer, not their target market. People do walk around and then buy online, or at least comparison shop. Some people do it by sending teams to different stores, and the lowest price feature compatible item gets bought.
People don't want a hands-on experience - they do want to window shop, though. And it helps to stay organized if you have a limited selection, and maybe tiered pricing in several physically separate locations. Once you narrow it down, you find something similar online and buy it. Not that item, just something like it.
It started with people checking out specials on their website while in the store, and noticing price mismatches. Now word has gotten around that you don't buy without checking the price first - and while you're at it, why not check someone else's store too?
They did cut inventory and act like they were the only choice, and people started window shopping there and buying online, and it was entirely their own fault.
Un-doing 7 well-deserved mod points to post this, so pay attention. Higgs was not a given. A particle in the same range without the ability to generate the Higgs field was also a possibility. The team explicitly stated that further confirmation is needed before they can say they found Higgs, or a Higgs-sized particle that does not do the things Higgs Boson is supposed to do.
It is still up in the air as to whether we have a Higgs Boson, or a Higgs-less theory of mass. Obviously everyone is leaning towards Higgs because it matches predictions. But what if it is Higgs sized without having the correct properties? Then you're wrong, and also an idiot for assuming it is a given.
If we indeed found it, then you're a lucky guess at best.
I agree this is more important, but only because we have been zeroing in on a Higgs-sized particle for quite some time. Dark matter has been purely theoretical until now (and still this is only the first sighting, subject to review and revision as with all experimental results). More important because it's newer.
In truth, we won't know for a hundred years which is more important. If dark matter has been theorized since 1930's and we just confirmed it, it is no more important than such ideas as gravitational lensing which have been around for decades before being confirmed. We have known it for a long time, in other words. To me, more important would be strong evidence that a 90 year old hypothesis was completely incorrect and in need of revision.
Neither one of these, to me, beats a fat man finally seeing his toes after 30 years. He had a feeling they were there, and had been told as much, but to finally see them is a whole different ball game.
How can we tell if it's polished? What the hell is it even supposed to be? There's a mailing list subscription link - to what?
I went to the main page, or what I thought it might be, and got:
Google has no info on phunq that I could find before giving up, so I decided to ask you - WTF are you even talking about? Should I have modded you +1 ZOMBOCOM?
Like the buggy whip makers? Sure, stick with your strengths. But the consumer is fickle, and when they decide to move on you either give them something to move on to, or stagnate. From the article, Microsoft has repeatedly rejected any opportunity which might lead them to having a strength other than Windows and Office.
I almost mentioned their effort with XBox, but my dashboard is upgraded to have a billion ads, Bing search, Windows Media. It's a crapfest, and it's bringing the XBox closer to the core Windows strengths, rather than giving gamers something useful. The "media center" idea, starting with XP media center edition, is either unwanted by consumers, or badly botched by Microsoft. "All your media in one place", including DVR and streaming, is a solved problem. But MS can't make it stick, and instead just piles on more Windows integration.
The reasons behind these decisions often make sense, in theory. And as we all know, practice is not theory.
I've worked at Fortune 150 to Fortune 10 companies. This type of ranking comes in when someone at the top is cost cutting, and wants to drive away the worst performers. Forced ranking makes it easier to tell managers to rank people, then later ordering the bottom person gone for all teams above a certain number. That way managers don't have to decide who goes, in the same way as if they were ordered to choose one person.
When the company recovers, employee surveys (and exit interviews) cite this as the reason for leaving, and this system goes away.
I'm not sure we can trust the specifics, but if this plan were in place 5 years or more, it points out a management who is completely unconcerned as to why people leave the company. Microsoft has raise concerns about poaching - maybe they legitimately believe other companies are just making overly high offers to get talent, rather than people leaving because of a hostile workplace.
I think over the past few years this has gone out of style in many places, but it does take a while for the shared MBA pool of knowledge to trickle down as new graduates replace outgoing ones, or someone makes a 20 year stagnant career in the same position, refusing to change their ways.
Which is one reason large companies push career development. If you don't aspire to get a promotion, you are going to eventually get fired - this is the message. Pushing people to move around voluntarily means you can count on at least a few new opinions introduced, But when you push the great architect into a mediocre middle manager, you've hurt the company twice - losing the architect and gaining bad middle management.
Good ideas always have a downside, and good management knows when to recognize when the cons outweigh the pros. Half of the managers are at or below average, so I wouldn't expect much more than following orders.
We are not talking about individual developers. This topic is about providing an environment where people can do their best. A good developer should not have to take stuff home to work on if the environment is part of the workflow, instead of an impediment.
Hiring the right people and firing the right people is a great way to start, but it's often very hard to do. Giving the developers some flexibility to choose their methodology, whether it's agile or something else, goes a lot further than telling them they will be agile because someone read it works better.
Tools, flexibility, accountability, and stake are what it takes. They have to have some stake in the product, whether it's stock awards or pride or names in the credits. Just being on a first name basis with the purse-holder will go a long way, as the actual customer who uses your product can say they are happy with the progress made so far.
More to your point, I have found agile to be a great way to salvage a program that wasted piles of money over several years. Every two weeks I can show progress, check things off the list, and the customer feels like he's getting something for his money. It's not always the method for the developers - sometimes the customers need to watch the progress, and agile is a great way to do that. You choose agile when it makes sense, not because it's the thing to do. Sometimes it doesn't make sense, and those are the people who won't be coding in 5 years.
Dude... I am so fucked up on fried banananana peels it isn't even funny. If I could afford bananananas every day I'd be, like, an addict. Or something.
Shhhhhhh! Don't tell people about this. I can make serious dolla dolla billz yall just posting on craigslist advertizing banananannanaBATMAN peels.
Since I can't mod you +6... what blows my mind is this was the only informative comment by JustOK that I could quickly find. Most are just +5 Funny.
This is one of the few remaining reasons I visit slashdot - the rare insightful comment, and the inevitable up-moderation it gets. And of course the meta-hive-mind, where someone much like yourself makes a connection. In a way, it's the closest I can get to James Burke's Connections article in Scientific American.
If only more people would meta-mod, just to keep the troll-mods in line.
Were you trying to be sarcastic? If you are hourly rather than salary, the exact amount and duration of toilet breaks are defined legally. For an 8 hour shift, I would get 2 paid 15 minute breaks and one unpaid 30 minute lunch break, based on where i live.
I would also not get calls after hours, because I'm off the clock. So if you are hourly, that's exactly the situation. You get work 8 hours, paid for 8 hours, then you have nothing to do with your employer for 16 hours. If you are hourly and getting calls after hours, look into your labor laws to see how whether you should be getting paid for that.
Salaried people may be taken advantage of, especially in the US with their white-collar exemptions for overtime. Some generous employers do not take advantage of that exemption, and pay you as if you were hourly (typically straight time, though).
If you are salary, it is up to you to make sure you are being treated fairly. If you give 40 hours of work, then get calls after hours, and it falls under the exemption rules, you may feel like you're being treated unfairly, so either resolve it, quit, or resign yourself to it until you burn out. I changed employers and solved that problem.
Doesn't change the fact that when I'm at work, I have work to do. And most employers generally do trust you to do the work you need to do.
But none of this changes the fact that if you are at work, anything you do on the employer's network may be monitored. Because of that, and because you have work to do, it is COMPLETELY reasonable not to do anything personal.
You are vastly confused here. There are many points conflated in your post.
1) Employer's policy about what is allowed using their resources
2) Employer's requirements about how much time you spend doing productive work
2) Monitoring employees' activities
3) Implementing a man-n-the-middle attack (transparent HTTPS)
The first three are off topic here - whether what you are doing is allowed or not doesn't matter. "Don't use your employer's network if you don't want them to watch what you do." I don't see how it could be any simpler. They provide the resources and a paycheck. If you don't like their policies, quit. If you can't quit, you're stuck.
If you have something pop up that will interrupt your work, you have to make that decision regardless of whether technology is involved. That's the part about having a life outside of work.
If you do decide you have to take care of it, and it involves an internet connection, don't expect that monitoring will be turned off. If you don't accept that risk, you have the traditional solutions. Call instead of using a website, ask for emergency time off, quit, or whatever else you can think of to avoid being snooped.
I'm pretty sure you're confused here. Aside from the chord names being relative, as transposed to C, the tuning issues are somewhat mis-stated.
It is far easier to understand beginning with common tuning systems. Originally, stringed instruments and keyboards such as the piano could only play in a few keys. This is due to the harmonic series, where an instrument's notes have to match with the overtones of other notes. A truly in-tune piano will sound good in one key because of things like the third being slightly flat. Change the key so that note is no longer the third, and it sounds wrong.
So they invented even tempering, where you give up some perfection to make it more flexible. Every chord is equally out of tune, so they sound just as good (bad). This is what we are used to.
But even tempering is not perfect. The octaves on a piano are not tuned perfectly. They get further away from "true" as you move up or down. This is the same inherent flaw that you ascribe to guitars. It applies to all instruments. The Earvana tech page even flat-out states they are using piano tuning ideas.
If you read a bit, you find all kinds of answers to how to tune a guitar. Eddie Van Halen, who plays lots of stuff around E chords, tuned the G string flat so that the full E chord, with the third (G#) on the G string, would fall slightly flat like it should. Playing an A chord you would think might sound awful, since the A on the G string is now flat. But that's the piano tuning idea, where the octaves don't match up. I'm pretty sure piano octaves are slightly wider, but in this case it's just wrong by the same amount. And in the upper range, he uses lots of vibrato, whammy stuff, and ornamentation. If you listen closely, he uses way more whammy bar than any transcription could capture. If he has to hold a note, he either uses vibrato, or does what any other musician does - adapt to your instrument.
Eric Johnson is known for perfecting his sound. He uses a slightly different tuning depending on what he's playing, sometimes bringing the E string down so it's audibly out of tune - except he isn't playing the open E where it sticks out.
Countless players use mis-matched sets, so that the strings are slightly more or less massive than in a standard set. For their style of playing, a specific mis-matched set will give you near-perfect results.
And then there is the string distension. If you play the first 5 frets, you are pushing the string out of tune, since it has to not only contact the fret, but fall below the fret.
Earvana acknowledges that setting the saddle addresses the string intonation problem. But it is not perfect, since you are only fixing one end. Here is the secret that they dance around, trying not to sound too obvious. Moving the saddle changes the center of the string, and it no longer sits over the 12th fret. An ideally tuned guitar would fix string length by moving both the saddle and the nut. That's your compensated bridge, keeping the center of the string at the center of the guitar.
Now, do you play 5 inches away from the saddle? No, so you don't notice string distension on the high notes as much. So, you can focus on the first 5 frets, get the octaves in tune (piano style, not perfectly), and bingo it sounds great. Very little of this is guitar specific.
I call bullshit on you blaming the tuning, since many well-known players already adapt for tuning issues. It is far more sensible to say that people play guitar in E, A, D, and G because it's easier and more natural.
If you play a string instrument without frets, you will become aware of intonation problems and be able to fix it easily. Brass instruments compensate by having adjustable lengths, using slides like a trombone. Woodwind players can adjust the reed, or tilt the flute. Guitar players, particularly classical, have the same requirement to adjust to the instrument. Session players will play with the fingers closer to further from the frets to adjust.
It is mostly the garage-band types, even if they rise to celebrity, that have problems with intonation. And they are likely to play in friendly keys, and if they are famous enough probably have a guitar tech fix all of this for them.