UX research of whom may I ask? Have you considered that this UX research may well not apply at all to your average slashdot user (or even the great majority thereof)? This just highlights once again that the beta redesign is out of touch with the/. community - what we like, and how the design completely clashes with that.
The beta is a generic design and will attract a generic audience, along with the thousands of other generic websites. And the community of/. is unique. We don't care how it looks as long as its functional. Generic designs and functionality don't appeal to us. Look at Gnome 3 if you want an example - and I think you know pretty well/. users think of Gnome 3.
Just stop trying to be like everyone else and be happy for who you are. Life isn't always about being like everyone else - and this is a situation where it's important to not be like everyone else.
I'm curious as to whether you were studying CS in a large, public engineering university, or a small liberal arts-type school (or somewhere in between). No doubt, there are lots of programs which cater solely to the theoretical side of work. I attended an engineering school where the math was certainly theoretical, but you could still see the potential for applications of the calculus program in fields like fluid dynamics, or thermodynamics, and the like.
But CS 101 was the reason I strayed far clear of computer science. I would have never appreciated what it means to be a good computer engineer with the way sorting algorithms and data structures were introduced. Concepts were never really taught from a 'how is this useful to me?' perspective. I can't really describe it better than that. I became a programmer/computer engineer later when my interest in the field developed as a result of real world applications and uses (like understanding how Python or the internet works). I figured that this might happen, hence why I felt comfortable forgoing the study in school;-)
That said, there are still great computer engineering programs at large universities where the focus is on engineering and software development as opposed to the pure, theoretical science of software engineering (think Master's of Engineering programs, as opposed to Master's of Science). They dip into some concepts as well such as agile development and systems engineering (which are silly in my opinion) but nevertheless good to know, and helpful in the world of industrial software engineering.
Being able to do calculus helps you think critically and serves as a basis for study in many other important fields. There's a pattern of reasoning skills that you develop when you read a book, learn a method, apply it to solve a problem, verify your answer, and return to the problem to identify and correct errors.
Being able to solve the problem without having to look it up gives you an intuition for solving complex problems without having to resort to such means. If I tell you the derivative of a value is x^{-1}, you shouldn't need to look up that it varies logarithmically. And being able to solve the problem yourself is what gives you the faith in the solution being correct. You could always look up the wrong value from the table, or provide the wrong input to a compute engine (side rant: Mathematica syntax drives me bonkers). You should always have multiple ways of understanding and verifying your solutions because relying solely on existing tools to perform the work for you without understanding where they come from turns this process into a black box which you have to rely on purely out of faith; I would argue that this can be dangerous, especially for mission critical applications. For basic calculus, linear algebra and differential equations, which every college engineer is expected to understand, I don't think this is an unreasonable requirement.
Even while you yourself may have not been in a situation where you needed to understand these concepts, there are many fields in which being able to manipulate these equations is important: particle advection, comupter graphics and animation engines (manipulating ODEs and PDEs, linear algebra), or scientific and numerical computing and modeling (pretty much anything field of math). So I would say, if I were developing a comprehensive computer science program, I absolutely would have to include this in my curriculum, otherwise I would be shutting our students out of these fields. And if you're a mechanical, electrical, chemical, etc. engineer (or you're any other kind of engineer having to work with them), you need to understand these concepts to have faith in your results.
The purpose of your college program was not to cater its curriculum directly to you, but to give all the students enrolled a broad set of skills that they could apply in situations that might arise. And understand that your program can only expose you to the skills that you should learn, but it's up to you to find a practical use for them.
The first two-thirds of the summary lauds Bill Gates like a propaganda piece about the dictator of North Korea. This whole place has become sickeningly MS-friendly ever since Dice took over.
I don't browse around with an active email login session anyways due to that LinkedIn fiasco from a little while ago and just use thunderbird now, but while I still used Gmail's web interface, the first thing I had to do on my browser was block cookies from youtube. As a result, I no longer saw my gmail login when I was browsing youtube. You might want to try that....
It's sad because if you're a user with those needs, then that's your only choice in town. Imagine how you would feel if you had special needs which meant you could only use a single platform. Given the fact that Apple often positions themselves as if their customers have hordes of cash and nothing better to do with them than burn the entirety on Apple's vertically integrated platform, you can see how that would be upsetting to those who don't appreciate that.
'The agency, from top to bottom, leadership to rank and file, feels that it is had no support from the White House even though it's been carrying out publicly approved intelligence missions,' says Joel Brenner, NSA inspector general from 2002 to 2006.
Maybe you haven't been listening to the reaction Joel, but NOBODY APPROVES of your stupid fucking agency and the stupid fucking things they do. Except perhaps your authoritarian, imperialist, warmonger friends in Congress (Feinstein and the like).
You probably won't realize why this is happening until you figure out how to admit how utterly fucking wrong you are. It's YOUR FAULT that your agency (and all other intelligence agencies) are hated because you decided to run out of control without a single shred of oversight. Don't blame this embarrassing atrocity on any one else.
The problem is very simply that Americans aren't as involved in the democratic process as they should be (or they are and that they're simply too ignorant to understand how it's supposed to work). This is certainly not true of all Americans, but it is true of the vast majority, and what more is Democracy? Nothing more than the only thing the/. moderation system can beat....
Anyone looking at this case can see that each side can be classified into one of two groups.
On Google's side, we have companies that are providing new products and innovating in the realm of engineering. Google alone has produced (sometimes through acquisition, but has continued to nurture and develop) Android, Docs, Search (PageRank), Hangouts, Adwords, News, and tons more. People get angry at Google for killing products that they actually use (nobody complained when the Kin or WinRT went away). Likewise, on their side they have companies like Rackspace, Red Hat, Stack Exchange, and a host of others who are still real engineering companies, who develop and promote the adoption of real engineering products which people actually use.
On the other hand, you have dinosaurs like Oracle, Microsoft, EMC, and so on who have more interest in killing competing products via acquisition, lititgation, EEE, and so on. Oracle alone has probably killed more products than it has successfully brought to the market (think OpenOffice and OpenSolaris, there are probably many more). And when they do try to innovate (think of all of Microsoft's failures for example), they fall flat on their face because they don't understand progress or real, sound engineering. But they're the first ones to jump into patent and copyright suits. Microsoft makes more money off Android than they do off their failed mobile efforts. They're not in the business to profit off progress - they're in it to profit off killing others. Google is by no means a saint in this respect, but they're certainly not pathological killers. Companies in this group are just parasites, sucking money out of the industry through shitty developers (shitty because they build upon these companies' shitty products), or through legal or business means including litigation, extortion, bribery, and conflict of interest.
Nothing will stop the companies on Google's side from continuing to innovate and do good in the world with the services they provide. But the courts will decide here whether they're strong enough to support them, or if they want to chum up with the dinosaurs and fight the good fight against continued progress and innovation.
Perhaps that's the usual course of action, but this is an extraordinary case, so tradition be damned. Any sane court would have immediately taken up the case and dropped the hammer immediately. That's not how the law works? The law isn't important in this case. Anyone who can take the action now and chooses not to will be remembered by history in shame.
And so, here we have yet another shameful display by the American government. What an embarrassing joke of a country.
The problem is still the fact that people are going fater than they're supposed to, and you know it.
Drivers have no obligation to follow _your_ mob mentality. Of course, you never mentioned that are a member of this group but regardless, to anyone who is one of those people who think everyone on the road should just adapt to their arbitrary rules, then YOU deal with the problem of people who have no obligation to conform to them.
MS is using this faux charitability to advance their agenda, because they know it's the only way to make people use.. whatever you would consider W8.1. If they really cared about non-profits, why not ask what they need and work out a deal to offer that?
And let's not forget that any open source project does the same thing for EVERYTHING they produce. So what does MS really deserve praise for here? Microsofts products aren't even worth a penny compared to alternatives anyways, but when they reduce their prices on products on which they already make absurd margins, we're supposed to worship them like saints. Please.
Informed users have any number of plugins to ensure their privacy while browsing. I personally use ghostery (breaks a minimum of sites), Adblock (currently disabled, but doesn't reall break anything) and NoScript (which makes browsing hell, but does a damn good job). Plus I block third party cookies and clear all other cookies on browser restart, clear all flash cookies on restart via Ghostery (and store them in a ramdisk for good measure) and disable HTTP referers (depressingly spelled incorrectly). Nothing's more annoying than sites that use referers as a form of authentication, so I generally just sign on to those services less. Finally, I've started doing sensitive things (logging into email/banking) in a private tab, thanks to LinkedIn's kindly alerting us to how people may like to abuse your sessions on other sites. If I get really paranoid about this, then I'll just start doing this stuff in a VM instead. I'm sure that there's more that can be done, which I'll research in my spare time, but as long as I have control of my device (which you damn well better believe I do... I hope) then tracking is a game that's bent towards those being tracked, and we should be able to adapt to whatever they do.
But for those users who don't know/care, fine with me. Advertisers prey on the ignorant and they are the ones that make the market work. They're also the ones that make the market crash due to vulnerability to idiotic schemes like the sub-prime mortage crisis and ponzi schemes a la Madoff, but it's a valid trade-off.
More likely than not, there are likely components which will have to be entirely rewritten. While many of the bugs are trivial defects, it looks like in many areas, the design is just inherently flawed at the root. Particularly seeing the performance issues, I can't help but believe that it's just fundamentally architected in a very poor way, and while there might be quick hacks to at least get it standing, it won't really be functioning properly without seriously ripping out the internals.
But let's take a wait-and-see approach, now that we're calling the competent engineers in....
The problem with the United States is that, well... States. In most other countries, if you want to run cable, utilities, etc., you go to the federal government, get your permit, do whatever environmental impact studies need done, and be on your merry. But here, you have to deal with municipalities. Thousands of them. And that opens the door for exclusive contracts; Which are typically for 10, 20, even 50 years. And it goes to one company. One. For an entire town. For 50 years. They didn't write any legislation, they just took advantage of how our government was organized. It's a glitch courtesy of our Constitution.
Excuses. Just fuck the bureaucracy already and get the job done. If America wants to stay relevant, that is.
We're talking about the country that once prided itself on getting shit done. What happened to those folks? Did principles die away with them?
Slashdot Mirror
You're kidding, right? The entire purpose of the beta is to appeal to people who respond d).
UX research of whom may I ask? Have you considered that this UX research may well not apply at all to your average slashdot user (or even the great majority thereof)? This just highlights once again that the beta redesign is out of touch with the /. community - what we like, and how the design completely clashes with that.
The beta is a generic design and will attract a generic audience, along with the thousands of other generic websites. And the community of /. is unique. We don't care how it looks as long as its functional. Generic designs and functionality don't appeal to us. Look at Gnome 3 if you want an example - and I think you know pretty well /. users think of Gnome 3.
Just stop trying to be like everyone else and be happy for who you are. Life isn't always about being like everyone else - and this is a situation where it's important to not be like everyone else.
I'm curious as to whether you were studying CS in a large, public engineering university, or a small liberal arts-type school (or somewhere in between). No doubt, there are lots of programs which cater solely to the theoretical side of work. I attended an engineering school where the math was certainly theoretical, but you could still see the potential for applications of the calculus program in fields like fluid dynamics, or thermodynamics, and the like.
But CS 101 was the reason I strayed far clear of computer science. I would have never appreciated what it means to be a good computer engineer with the way sorting algorithms and data structures were introduced. Concepts were never really taught from a 'how is this useful to me?' perspective. I can't really describe it better than that. I became a programmer/computer engineer later when my interest in the field developed as a result of real world applications and uses (like understanding how Python or the internet works). I figured that this might happen, hence why I felt comfortable forgoing the study in school ;-)
That said, there are still great computer engineering programs at large universities where the focus is on engineering and software development as opposed to the pure, theoretical science of software engineering (think Master's of Engineering programs, as opposed to Master's of Science). They dip into some concepts as well such as agile development and systems engineering (which are silly in my opinion) but nevertheless good to know, and helpful in the world of industrial software engineering.
Being able to do calculus helps you think critically and serves as a basis for study in many other important fields. There's a pattern of reasoning skills that you develop when you read a book, learn a method, apply it to solve a problem, verify your answer, and return to the problem to identify and correct errors.
Being able to solve the problem without having to look it up gives you an intuition for solving complex problems without having to resort to such means. If I tell you the derivative of a value is x^{-1}, you shouldn't need to look up that it varies logarithmically. And being able to solve the problem yourself is what gives you the faith in the solution being correct. You could always look up the wrong value from the table, or provide the wrong input to a compute engine (side rant: Mathematica syntax drives me bonkers). You should always have multiple ways of understanding and verifying your solutions because relying solely on existing tools to perform the work for you without understanding where they come from turns this process into a black box which you have to rely on purely out of faith; I would argue that this can be dangerous, especially for mission critical applications. For basic calculus, linear algebra and differential equations, which every college engineer is expected to understand, I don't think this is an unreasonable requirement.
Even while you yourself may have not been in a situation where you needed to understand these concepts, there are many fields in which being able to manipulate these equations is important: particle advection, comupter graphics and animation engines (manipulating ODEs and PDEs, linear algebra), or scientific and numerical computing and modeling (pretty much anything field of math). So I would say, if I were developing a comprehensive computer science program, I absolutely would have to include this in my curriculum, otherwise I would be shutting our students out of these fields. And if you're a mechanical, electrical, chemical, etc. engineer (or you're any other kind of engineer having to work with them), you need to understand these concepts to have faith in your results.
The purpose of your college program was not to cater its curriculum directly to you, but to give all the students enrolled a broad set of skills that they could apply in situations that might arise. And understand that your program can only expose you to the skills that you should learn, but it's up to you to find a practical use for them.
we need to triple funding for creating GUI interfaces in Visual Basic! Hurry!!!
The first two-thirds of the summary lauds Bill Gates like a propaganda piece about the dictator of North Korea. This whole place has become sickeningly MS-friendly ever since Dice took over.
Great one guys.
And I'll celebrate the 50th when it's over.
I don't browse around with an active email login session anyways due to that LinkedIn fiasco from a little while ago and just use thunderbird now, but while I still used Gmail's web interface, the first thing I had to do on my browser was block cookies from youtube. As a result, I no longer saw my gmail login when I was browsing youtube. You might want to try that....
Of course not - a well-engineered product could never be profitable. They were being taught how to code, not how to be a lawyer, MBA, marketer...
It's sad because if you're a user with those needs, then that's your only choice in town. Imagine how you would feel if you had special needs which meant you could only use a single platform. Given the fact that Apple often positions themselves as if their customers have hordes of cash and nothing better to do with them than burn the entirety on Apple's vertically integrated platform, you can see how that would be upsetting to those who don't appreciate that.
'The agency, from top to bottom, leadership to rank and file, feels that it is had no support from the White House even though it's been carrying out publicly approved intelligence missions,' says Joel Brenner, NSA inspector general from 2002 to 2006.
Maybe you haven't been listening to the reaction Joel, but NOBODY APPROVES of your stupid fucking agency and the stupid fucking things they do. Except perhaps your authoritarian, imperialist, warmonger friends in Congress (Feinstein and the like).
You probably won't realize why this is happening until you figure out how to admit how utterly fucking wrong you are. It's YOUR FAULT that your agency (and all other intelligence agencies) are hated because you decided to run out of control without a single shred of oversight. Don't blame this embarrassing atrocity on any one else.
but agency employees are privately voicing frustration at what they perceive...
Jeez, of all people, you'd think the ones working at the NSA realize that this can't be!
The problem is very simply that Americans aren't as involved in the democratic process as they should be (or they are and that they're simply too ignorant to understand how it's supposed to work). This is certainly not true of all Americans, but it is true of the vast majority, and what more is Democracy? Nothing more than the only thing the /. moderation system can beat....
Anyone looking at this case can see that each side can be classified into one of two groups.
On Google's side, we have companies that are providing new products and innovating in the realm of engineering. Google alone has produced (sometimes through acquisition, but has continued to nurture and develop) Android, Docs, Search (PageRank), Hangouts, Adwords, News, and tons more. People get angry at Google for killing products that they actually use (nobody complained when the Kin or WinRT went away). Likewise, on their side they have companies like Rackspace, Red Hat, Stack Exchange, and a host of others who are still real engineering companies, who develop and promote the adoption of real engineering products which people actually use.
On the other hand, you have dinosaurs like Oracle, Microsoft, EMC, and so on who have more interest in killing competing products via acquisition, lititgation, EEE, and so on. Oracle alone has probably killed more products than it has successfully brought to the market (think OpenOffice and OpenSolaris, there are probably many more). And when they do try to innovate (think of all of Microsoft's failures for example), they fall flat on their face because they don't understand progress or real, sound engineering. But they're the first ones to jump into patent and copyright suits. Microsoft makes more money off Android than they do off their failed mobile efforts. They're not in the business to profit off progress - they're in it to profit off killing others. Google is by no means a saint in this respect, but they're certainly not pathological killers. Companies in this group are just parasites, sucking money out of the industry through shitty developers (shitty because they build upon these companies' shitty products), or through legal or business means including litigation, extortion, bribery, and conflict of interest.
Nothing will stop the companies on Google's side from continuing to innovate and do good in the world with the services they provide. But the courts will decide here whether they're strong enough to support them, or if they want to chum up with the dinosaurs and fight the good fight against continued progress and innovation.
Use an aluminum foil antenna to direct microwaves to any given pole and that should cause sufficient interference to break this little scheme.
I wonder how long before those animals resort to oding something like this... in the name of profit...
Yet another consequence of a media industry that cares more about its profits, ratings and mindshare, than reporting hard facts as they really are.
Perhaps that's the usual course of action, but this is an extraordinary case, so tradition be damned. Any sane court would have immediately taken up the case and dropped the hammer immediately. That's not how the law works? The law isn't important in this case. Anyone who can take the action now and chooses not to will be remembered by history in shame.
And so, here we have yet another shameful display by the American government. What an embarrassing joke of a country.
The answer to your question would be: 6.31 zettawatt hours. Over the lifespan of our solar system.[1]
[1] Post assumes reader is a member of Earth's solar system. Apologies to any alien forms or supernatural deities.
The problem is still the fact that people are going fater than they're supposed to, and you know it.
Drivers have no obligation to follow _your_ mob mentality. Of course, you never mentioned that are a member of this group but regardless, to anyone who is one of those people who think everyone on the road should just adapt to their arbitrary rules, then YOU deal with the problem of people who have no obligation to conform to them.
It's true.
MS is using this faux charitability to advance their agenda, because they know it's the only way to make people use.. whatever you would consider W8.1. If they really cared about non-profits, why not ask what they need and work out a deal to offer that?
And let's not forget that any open source project does the same thing for EVERYTHING they produce. So what does MS really deserve praise for here? Microsofts products aren't even worth a penny compared to alternatives anyways, but when they reduce their prices on products on which they already make absurd margins, we're supposed to worship them like saints. Please.
Informed users have any number of plugins to ensure their privacy while browsing. I personally use ghostery (breaks a minimum of sites), Adblock (currently disabled, but doesn't reall break anything) and NoScript (which makes browsing hell, but does a damn good job). Plus I block third party cookies and clear all other cookies on browser restart, clear all flash cookies on restart via Ghostery (and store them in a ramdisk for good measure) and disable HTTP referers (depressingly spelled incorrectly). Nothing's more annoying than sites that use referers as a form of authentication, so I generally just sign on to those services less. Finally, I've started doing sensitive things (logging into email/banking) in a private tab, thanks to LinkedIn's kindly alerting us to how people may like to abuse your sessions on other sites. If I get really paranoid about this, then I'll just start doing this stuff in a VM instead. I'm sure that there's more that can be done, which I'll research in my spare time, but as long as I have control of my device (which you damn well better believe I do... I hope) then tracking is a game that's bent towards those being tracked, and we should be able to adapt to whatever they do.
But for those users who don't know/care, fine with me. Advertisers prey on the ignorant and they are the ones that make the market work. They're also the ones that make the market crash due to vulnerability to idiotic schemes like the sub-prime mortage crisis and ponzi schemes a la Madoff, but it's a valid trade-off.
More likely than not, there are likely components which will have to be entirely rewritten. While many of the bugs are trivial defects, it looks like in many areas, the design is just inherently flawed at the root. Particularly seeing the performance issues, I can't help but believe that it's just fundamentally architected in a very poor way, and while there might be quick hacks to at least get it standing, it won't really be functioning properly without seriously ripping out the internals.
But let's take a wait-and-see approach, now that we're calling the competent engineers in....
Correct. It would take closer to 5...
There's a simple solution: forcing companies to lend their cables to other companies.
But the Supreme Court killed that one.
The problem with the United States is that, well... States. In most other countries, if you want to run cable, utilities, etc., you go to the federal government, get your permit, do whatever environmental impact studies need done, and be on your merry. But here, you have to deal with municipalities. Thousands of them. And that opens the door for exclusive contracts; Which are typically for 10, 20, even 50 years. And it goes to one company. One. For an entire town. For 50 years. They didn't write any legislation, they just took advantage of how our government was organized. It's a glitch courtesy of our Constitution.
Excuses. Just fuck the bureaucracy already and get the job done. If America wants to stay relevant, that is.
We're talking about the country that once prided itself on getting shit done. What happened to those folks? Did principles die away with them?