A big problem with telemetry in my opinion is that it's being used as a form of retroactive quality control, encouraging rapid version cycling and the release of immature code.
I don't think they're using telemetry to identify edge cases that reasonable testing wouldn't catch, they're using it to find common problems that thorough testing would identify. I have a hard time believing that edge cases can even be found in the fire hose of data presented by mass telemetry. I'd wager it takes pretty serious analytics to even find common problems in the large and messy data set presented by mass telemetry, and that for the most part on the common problems, widely experienced would register.
What's probably hobbling this somewhat is the handset maker and wireless carrier relationship. The handset maker wants to be available in the carrier market, but the carrier wants the handset to be as exclusive to their service and use as many services as possible.
FWIW, I think Apple iOS has supposedly been getting better about VoIP apps integrating with the "phone" functionality to allow incoming VoIP calls to be treated by the user interface about the same as native carrier voice calls.
But it's still not to the point where you have fields for entering SIP accounts in phone preferences and option fields for choosing a default outgoing number or outgoing numbers per call.
I think one reason the security people are getting dragged into ordinary problem solving is that ordinary support people are running into end-user problems that are *caused* by security configurations that support can't change.
I think a lot of security people want to sit in the back room and implement a bunch of security changes without consideration of what breaks or how it effects end users. It may be the "right" thing to do, but they don't care about the side effects.
I've had the same experience, but I think in some parts of the country it may be more problematic. There have been a few well-publicized incidents of couriers hoarding/dumping mail rather than delivering it.
It's probably statistically rare overall, but I have to believe that it must happen more than we know about, if not commonly, then periodically.
I'd also guess that in dense urban areas, there's probably also a fair amount of mail theft, bad mailbox setups which lead to mail theft or misdelivery, and some post offices may be worse than others in terms of employee quality, etc.
It's not that the entire postal system is bad, but if there are enough problems in specific areas it may wind up being "the post office is bad".
I think the distinction not being spoken of here is acute physical reactions vs. acute psychological reactions.
Most of your hallucinogens are pretty difficult to achieve acute physical reactions with, but I think hallucinogens can be the source of acute psychological reactions, especially among inexperienced people and at common recreational doses.
I would also say especially with LSD and mushrooms because they are pretty strong to begin with, and even cannabis in inexperienced users or at high potency levels.
The clients could be hit or miss, I seem to remember a Mac client around 2000 that was kind of perfect, even including a graphical tree view to show you where you were in a thread, but I also remember being mildly disappointed with many PC clients which seemed more oriented to harvesting binaries than actual message reading/posting. My favorite client was TRN.
I think the other thing that killed it was back-end ISP news server software. The stock UNIX code most places used was kind of a pig and a fair number of ISPs had trouble getting it to scale to volume, especially as binary groups proliferated, retention cratered and many gave up hosting servers.
It'd be interesting to see a resurrection of it, though, especially as databases have gotten better, storage faster and cheaper and a reasonable client could be done in HTML5.
Like Stingray cell phone surveillance, the police (from FBI to local constabulary) wants the right to down and seize any drone, at any time, for reasons that will be kept from the public.
Why do web based forums still suck so much after all these years?
Any web forum community I go to seems to suffer from the same problems.
Too many subforums that don't see any traffic, more or less forcing users into "general" forum that drowns in traffic. "Sticky" posts which are unedited glop, pages long.
Software that doesn't allow fetching more than a couple of screens worth of messages at a time, made worse by message headers that are way too big and relentless warlording by users with giant footers filled with pictures, dumb quotes, and other bullshit.
"Mega-threads" -- sometimes hundreds of pages long with almost no navigation or threading capability, and totally edited for content. A near total absence of sane threading capability. Search functions that don't return any useful information.
Or will it mostly be serving as window dressing to sales presentation and serving as "inspiration" to actual developers in the kind of relentless cheeleading meetings I assume corporate giants like Amazon indulge in?
"I'm with Her" struck me as having something of a feminist conceit to it, as if you were a Hillary supporter just because she was a woman and not because of her ideas.
I think he encapsulated what a lot of people *didn't* like about Clinton -- slick, and the apparent product of a Fortune 100 company. Perhaps it's exactly part of what worked *against* Hillary, appearing too slick, too corporate, too produced and artificial.
I don't know what to say about Trump's "logo" other than it was just a generic slogan, but maybe that said "genuine" to some people.
Some number of them carry commercial communications satellites, but a lot are missions in support of some government or military mission. And I think they all launch from government launch facilities.
I'd like space to be so lucrative it would support a vigorous space industry, but it mostly seems like the space industry is thriving off of government payments. It's like arguing that the armored vehicle business is thriving. Sure, but government is by far and away the biggest customer.
You've argued in two comments about road scarcity meaning "we don't want a large number of taxis on the road."
That's idiotic -- non-taxi vehicles outnumber taxis by a huge number nearly everywhere, probably even in Manhattan. Doubling the number of taxis would be a single digit increase in the number of total vehicles in most places.
There's a sound argument that convenient and easily obtainable hired car service would be a meaningful reduction in the number of private vehicles used. Driving a private car versus taking a cab is driven at least in part by convenience and the uncertainty of obtaining another kind of transportation.
The part of the medallion system that is dumb is that it isn't tied to the driver.
If you're concerned about the number of taxis on the road, then this would work against you. If the medallion was tied to the driver, you'd likely end up with more cabs as each individual driver could work more hours and put more cabs on the street simultaneously.
Up until the late 1990s we had a chain of Sony stores, including a factory repair office, around here. It was great, because you could buy pretty much anything Sony, which was great in the pre-Internet era where there was no Internet for tracking down random parts or models not for sale in conventional retail outlets.
As for LaserDisc, I think it was just too little, too late next to the economies of scale of VHS and its functionality. A friend bought one around 1992, connected via S-Video, and the improvements in quality just weren't that great as far as I was concerned. I always thought that factory-made VHS got really good in the last 5-10 years of VHS, too.
It sure seems like the American TV industry went south before LCDs.
I seem to remember mostly Japanese TVs being desirable in the 1980s -- Sony, JVC, Panasonic. Maybe you could still buy an American made TV at that point, but they certainly weren't what most people were actually buying.
I've done work for two "exclusive" old-money country clubs in my city and both of them are cheap as hell. The members have all the money in the world when it comes to the damn golf course, but IT is dead last on spending.
One of the clubs had to resort to screwing framed pictures to the wall in some areas of the club because members had been caught "borrowing" pictures to display at home. The expensive floral arrangements had to be hidden until after the regular ladies' bridge game because the "ladies" would either take the arrangements completely or create a "take home" arrangement with a big chunk of the flowers. Food, booze, cans of pop, etc. have to be kept under lock and key or under the watch of an employee, at both clubs members were caught literally loading their trunk with cases of stuff.
Members routinely call up and challenge their food and beverage bills, demanding that drink orders and entire meals be refunded because of errors in billing or complaints about the quality of the food. The AR employee tells me that one member in particular demands refunds every month, picking out the most expensive meals on her bill and claiming "these meals were unsatisfactory and I won't pay for them."
IT spending of course suffers. When we put together upgrade proposals (for amounts totaling maybe $20-30k), we occasionally have to meet with board members who present "Google shopping" lists of prices from unknown vendors (likely selling grey market or unlabeled refurbs) and explain why our prices "are so high."
It is no surprise to me that club IT sucks, because club management sucks and members don't want to pay for anything.
The memo asking him to terminate the investigation into Russian interference in the election, in combination with firing Comey when it wasn't ended, and Trump publicly admitting that he fired Comey because he didn't end the investigation seem like pretty strong evidence for an obstruction of justice charge.
The problem with this logic is that any action against the FBI director can be interpreted as obstruction as the FBI will always have some investigation going which focuses on a political actor with ties to the President, hence the President can *never* fire the director of the FBI without some interpretation of the firing including obstruction of justice. You always have to bias the firing of the FBI director as a legitimate expression of the President's power, otherwise you effectively make the FBI director impossible to fire.
If the President were to *order* the FBI to drop an investigation considered damaging to the President, I would buy this as obstruction. But I think Trump was very careful NOT to demand this specifically even if it's what he actually wanted.
I'm not sure how any of your "obstruction of justice" claims actually add up to obstruction of justice.
1) Trump has the legal authority to fire the head of the FBI, the office serves at the pleasure of the President. It's hard to see exercising the legal rights of the President could be construed as obstruction of justice without creative interpretation of the vaguer elements of the obstruction statutes.
2-6) These basically add up to advocating for your own case, something that everyone with money and lawyers would do anyway if they were under the shadow of an FBI investigation.
I think for it to amount to obstruction, there needs to be more evidence, in particular illegal actions such as destroying evidence or illegally coercing witnesses through threats of violence. Political influencing shouldn't count until you get much closer to actual charges or a trial where a witness is actually a witness and not just some kind of background investigatory source.
I'm not advocating for Trump, he's demonstrated himself to be a mismanaging buffoon, but I do think the obstruction claims are pretty weak and are predicated on a claim of guilt which hasn't been proven. Firing Comey doesn't end any specific investigation -- whatever investigation was going on was being run by the FBI as an organization, not by Comey individually. For better or for worse, Comey is a political actor in a job appointed by politicians and has to understand that his job is at risk if he threatens the politicians who appointed him. I don't *want* an FBI director so independent that he can't be fired at will by the President. That job is already too powerful.
I think it's an absurd fantasy to believe that the FBI has the independence to investigate the President. If you want that job done, it needs to be an independent prosecutor appointed by Congress with subpoena power. It makes obstruction claims easier to prove, since the independent prosecutor isn't under the authority of the President and any actions which would seek to weaken the prosecutor would be much more obviously obstruction as the prosecutor has a specific, narrow scope of investigation and isn't politically accountable to the President.
If a patent creates a monopoly, why wouldn't they just use a pricing model that sets the price for the good at a level that supports paying the extended patent fees?
A simpler method of controlling hoarded intellectual property:
Three years after being granted, if a patent is not used in a product it is held to be "idle" and demonstrating an idle patent becomes an affirmative defense in a patent violation lawsuit.
This way, it's self-enforcing. Patents become use it or lose it, and patent trolls who hold patents but don't make a product or don't license it to someone who does use the patented idea are out of business. Corporations that hoard patents merely competitive to their own patented inventions won't be able to use them to stifle competition.
But it's the endless cycle of updates that don't actually add in any real functionality. As long as the industry is driven by complex updates that don't enhance the actual use of the product for most people, they will cling to old versions which remain for the user, feature complete.
In many ways the software industry stopped really advancing and just started iterating with the same thing in a different package to collect upgrade dollars.
My 12 year old son will, at times, sit down in front of the Apple TV and watch nothing but trailers for an hour.
I'm wondering if the culprit isn't the short attention span syndrome, immediate gratification and the regular consumption of very short form videos on YouTube and the like.
The world is always more rational and well-organized in mom's basement.
That being said, I do think there are a disturbing number of times that large groups and organizations perpetuate some really bad designs/systems and a fix is obvious (and sometimes even tested) to an outsider. Kind of an emperor wears no clothes kind of situation, and probably, if you looked into it, it's something perpetuated for reasons (like making money) that have nothing to do with problem solving or design.
My thought was "Who does this?" I get there's a lot of group dynamics involved, some leaders and influencers and a bunch of followers, but this kind of thing seems to cross so many obvious lines that it's kind of surprising that you could get so many people to go along with it.
Slashdot Mirror
A big problem with telemetry in my opinion is that it's being used as a form of retroactive quality control, encouraging rapid version cycling and the release of immature code.
I don't think they're using telemetry to identify edge cases that reasonable testing wouldn't catch, they're using it to find common problems that thorough testing would identify. I have a hard time believing that edge cases can even be found in the fire hose of data presented by mass telemetry. I'd wager it takes pretty serious analytics to even find common problems in the large and messy data set presented by mass telemetry, and that for the most part on the common problems, widely experienced would register.
Telemetry is beta testing brought to production.
People starve because they buy TV's instead of food.
Citation needed. I would like to know about people who literally starved to death because they spent their money on televisions instead of food.
What's probably hobbling this somewhat is the handset maker and wireless carrier relationship. The handset maker wants to be available in the carrier market, but the carrier wants the handset to be as exclusive to their service and use as many services as possible.
FWIW, I think Apple iOS has supposedly been getting better about VoIP apps integrating with the "phone" functionality to allow incoming VoIP calls to be treated by the user interface about the same as native carrier voice calls.
But it's still not to the point where you have fields for entering SIP accounts in phone preferences and option fields for choosing a default outgoing number or outgoing numbers per call.
I think you're spot on.
I think one reason the security people are getting dragged into ordinary problem solving is that ordinary support people are running into end-user problems that are *caused* by security configurations that support can't change.
I think a lot of security people want to sit in the back room and implement a bunch of security changes without consideration of what breaks or how it effects end users. It may be the "right" thing to do, but they don't care about the side effects.
I've had the same experience, but I think in some parts of the country it may be more problematic. There have been a few well-publicized incidents of couriers hoarding/dumping mail rather than delivering it.
It's probably statistically rare overall, but I have to believe that it must happen more than we know about, if not commonly, then periodically.
I'd also guess that in dense urban areas, there's probably also a fair amount of mail theft, bad mailbox setups which lead to mail theft or misdelivery, and some post offices may be worse than others in terms of employee quality, etc.
It's not that the entire postal system is bad, but if there are enough problems in specific areas it may wind up being "the post office is bad".
I think the distinction not being spoken of here is acute physical reactions vs. acute psychological reactions.
Most of your hallucinogens are pretty difficult to achieve acute physical reactions with, but I think hallucinogens can be the source of acute psychological reactions, especially among inexperienced people and at common recreational doses.
I would also say especially with LSD and mushrooms because they are pretty strong to begin with, and even cannabis in inexperienced users or at high potency levels.
The clients could be hit or miss, I seem to remember a Mac client around 2000 that was kind of perfect, even including a graphical tree view to show you where you were in a thread, but I also remember being mildly disappointed with many PC clients which seemed more oriented to harvesting binaries than actual message reading/posting. My favorite client was TRN.
I think the other thing that killed it was back-end ISP news server software. The stock UNIX code most places used was kind of a pig and a fair number of ISPs had trouble getting it to scale to volume, especially as binary groups proliferated, retention cratered and many gave up hosting servers.
It'd be interesting to see a resurrection of it, though, especially as databases have gotten better, storage faster and cheaper and a reasonable client could be done in HTML5.
The problems start when undefined weasel-words
This is really all you had to say.
Like Stingray cell phone surveillance, the police (from FBI to local constabulary) wants the right to down and seize any drone, at any time, for reasons that will be kept from the public.
Why do web based forums still suck so much after all these years?
Any web forum community I go to seems to suffer from the same problems.
Too many subforums that don't see any traffic, more or less forcing users into "general" forum that drowns in traffic. "Sticky" posts which are unedited glop, pages long.
Software that doesn't allow fetching more than a couple of screens worth of messages at a time, made worse by message headers that are way too big and relentless warlording by users with giant footers filled with pictures, dumb quotes, and other bullshit.
"Mega-threads" -- sometimes hundreds of pages long with almost no navigation or threading capability, and totally edited for content. A near total absence of sane threading capability. Search functions that don't return any useful information.
It makes me miss USENET.
I liked that better as a Black Mirror episode than reality.
Or will it mostly be serving as window dressing to sales presentation and serving as "inspiration" to actual developers in the kind of relentless cheeleading meetings I assume corporate giants like Amazon indulge in?
"I'm with Her" struck me as having something of a feminist conceit to it, as if you were a Hillary supporter just because she was a woman and not because of her ideas.
I think he encapsulated what a lot of people *didn't* like about Clinton -- slick, and the apparent product of a Fortune 100 company. Perhaps it's exactly part of what worked *against* Hillary, appearing too slick, too corporate, too produced and artificial.
I don't know what to say about Trump's "logo" other than it was just a generic slogan, but maybe that said "genuine" to some people.
Who's paying for all those rocket launches?
Some number of them carry commercial communications satellites, but a lot are missions in support of some government or military mission. And I think they all launch from government launch facilities.
I'd like space to be so lucrative it would support a vigorous space industry, but it mostly seems like the space industry is thriving off of government payments. It's like arguing that the armored vehicle business is thriving. Sure, but government is by far and away the biggest customer.
You've argued in two comments about road scarcity meaning "we don't want a large number of taxis on the road."
That's idiotic -- non-taxi vehicles outnumber taxis by a huge number nearly everywhere, probably even in Manhattan. Doubling the number of taxis would be a single digit increase in the number of total vehicles in most places.
There's a sound argument that convenient and easily obtainable hired car service would be a meaningful reduction in the number of private vehicles used. Driving a private car versus taking a cab is driven at least in part by convenience and the uncertainty of obtaining another kind of transportation.
The part of the medallion system that is dumb is that it isn't tied to the driver.
If you're concerned about the number of taxis on the road, then this would work against you. If the medallion was tied to the driver, you'd likely end up with more cabs as each individual driver could work more hours and put more cabs on the street simultaneously.
Up until the late 1990s we had a chain of Sony stores, including a factory repair office, around here. It was great, because you could buy pretty much anything Sony, which was great in the pre-Internet era where there was no Internet for tracking down random parts or models not for sale in conventional retail outlets.
As for LaserDisc, I think it was just too little, too late next to the economies of scale of VHS and its functionality. A friend bought one around 1992, connected via S-Video, and the improvements in quality just weren't that great as far as I was concerned. I always thought that factory-made VHS got really good in the last 5-10 years of VHS, too.
It sure seems like the American TV industry went south before LCDs.
I seem to remember mostly Japanese TVs being desirable in the 1980s -- Sony, JVC, Panasonic. Maybe you could still buy an American made TV at that point, but they certainly weren't what most people were actually buying.
I've done work for two "exclusive" old-money country clubs in my city and both of them are cheap as hell. The members have all the money in the world when it comes to the damn golf course, but IT is dead last on spending.
One of the clubs had to resort to screwing framed pictures to the wall in some areas of the club because members had been caught "borrowing" pictures to display at home. The expensive floral arrangements had to be hidden until after the regular ladies' bridge game because the "ladies" would either take the arrangements completely or create a "take home" arrangement with a big chunk of the flowers. Food, booze, cans of pop, etc. have to be kept under lock and key or under the watch of an employee, at both clubs members were caught literally loading their trunk with cases of stuff.
Members routinely call up and challenge their food and beverage bills, demanding that drink orders and entire meals be refunded because of errors in billing or complaints about the quality of the food. The AR employee tells me that one member in particular demands refunds every month, picking out the most expensive meals on her bill and claiming "these meals were unsatisfactory and I won't pay for them."
IT spending of course suffers. When we put together upgrade proposals (for amounts totaling maybe $20-30k), we occasionally have to meet with board members who present "Google shopping" lists of prices from unknown vendors (likely selling grey market or unlabeled refurbs) and explain why our prices "are so high."
It is no surprise to me that club IT sucks, because club management sucks and members don't want to pay for anything.
The memo asking him to terminate the investigation into Russian interference in the election, in combination with firing Comey when it wasn't ended, and Trump publicly admitting that he fired Comey because he didn't end the investigation seem like pretty strong evidence for an obstruction of justice charge.
The problem with this logic is that any action against the FBI director can be interpreted as obstruction as the FBI will always have some investigation going which focuses on a political actor with ties to the President, hence the President can *never* fire the director of the FBI without some interpretation of the firing including obstruction of justice. You always have to bias the firing of the FBI director as a legitimate expression of the President's power, otherwise you effectively make the FBI director impossible to fire.
If the President were to *order* the FBI to drop an investigation considered damaging to the President, I would buy this as obstruction. But I think Trump was very careful NOT to demand this specifically even if it's what he actually wanted.
I'm not sure how any of your "obstruction of justice" claims actually add up to obstruction of justice.
1) Trump has the legal authority to fire the head of the FBI, the office serves at the pleasure of the President. It's hard to see exercising the legal rights of the President could be construed as obstruction of justice without creative interpretation of the vaguer elements of the obstruction statutes.
2-6) These basically add up to advocating for your own case, something that everyone with money and lawyers would do anyway if they were under the shadow of an FBI investigation.
I think for it to amount to obstruction, there needs to be more evidence, in particular illegal actions such as destroying evidence or illegally coercing witnesses through threats of violence. Political influencing shouldn't count until you get much closer to actual charges or a trial where a witness is actually a witness and not just some kind of background investigatory source.
I'm not advocating for Trump, he's demonstrated himself to be a mismanaging buffoon, but I do think the obstruction claims are pretty weak and are predicated on a claim of guilt which hasn't been proven. Firing Comey doesn't end any specific investigation -- whatever investigation was going on was being run by the FBI as an organization, not by Comey individually. For better or for worse, Comey is a political actor in a job appointed by politicians and has to understand that his job is at risk if he threatens the politicians who appointed him. I don't *want* an FBI director so independent that he can't be fired at will by the President. That job is already too powerful.
I think it's an absurd fantasy to believe that the FBI has the independence to investigate the President. If you want that job done, it needs to be an independent prosecutor appointed by Congress with subpoena power. It makes obstruction claims easier to prove, since the independent prosecutor isn't under the authority of the President and any actions which would seek to weaken the prosecutor would be much more obviously obstruction as the prosecutor has a specific, narrow scope of investigation and isn't politically accountable to the President.
If a patent creates a monopoly, why wouldn't they just use a pricing model that sets the price for the good at a level that supports paying the extended patent fees?
A simpler method of controlling hoarded intellectual property:
Three years after being granted, if a patent is not used in a product it is held to be "idle" and demonstrating an idle patent becomes an affirmative defense in a patent violation lawsuit.
This way, it's self-enforcing. Patents become use it or lose it, and patent trolls who hold patents but don't make a product or don't license it to someone who does use the patented idea are out of business. Corporations that hoard patents merely competitive to their own patented inventions won't be able to use them to stifle competition.
But it's the endless cycle of updates that don't actually add in any real functionality. As long as the industry is driven by complex updates that don't enhance the actual use of the product for most people, they will cling to old versions which remain for the user, feature complete.
In many ways the software industry stopped really advancing and just started iterating with the same thing in a different package to collect upgrade dollars.
My 12 year old son will, at times, sit down in front of the Apple TV and watch nothing but trailers for an hour.
I'm wondering if the culprit isn't the short attention span syndrome, immediate gratification and the regular consumption of very short form videos on YouTube and the like.
The world is always more rational and well-organized in mom's basement.
That being said, I do think there are a disturbing number of times that large groups and organizations perpetuate some really bad designs/systems and a fix is obvious (and sometimes even tested) to an outsider. Kind of an emperor wears no clothes kind of situation, and probably, if you looked into it, it's something perpetuated for reasons (like making money) that have nothing to do with problem solving or design.
My thought was "Who does this?" I get there's a lot of group dynamics involved, some leaders and influencers and a bunch of followers, but this kind of thing seems to cross so many obvious lines that it's kind of surprising that you could get so many people to go along with it.