So the Democrats were so happy to work with the Republicans during the Bush years... They played so nice, and showed him much respect. And then when Obama got elected, those evil Republicans didn't treat the Democrats the same way - and are responsible for divided government.
That's what you're trying to sell? Really? How stupid do you think people are?
It gets better. A guy who releases Podesta's emails is a threat to our very Democracy, results in sanctions on Russia, and we have to have a report on Obama's desk before he leaves office!
But a "person" who reveals operational details about war time operations, reveals the identity of undercover agents (resulting in some of them being killed) deserves a commuted sentence because they have gender identity issues.
For a manager who spends hours every day with email browser based solutions just don't cut it.
Nobody has created a shared calendar that works as well as Exchange/Outlook.
I have quite a few clients in highly regulated environments where Google anything is not permitted as it's too easy to create public documents that are visible to anyone with the link...
The "largest part of the population" is not the blue bubble urban centers - or we would have 100% progressive rule, not a Democratic Party that's a shadow of it's former self.
So much misinformation here, as is always the case with msmash posts.
If you google electric car sales you get headlines like "EV SALES UP 44%"! But the fact is they are a TINY percentage of the market, and in 2016 overall sales were actually down. Yes, electric car sales are down in the U.S. Go to a reliable source.
China making moves!! No, the local smog protesters are trying to push the government for more electrics because the smog is so bad. But as usual they have it wrong, the smog in Chinese cities isn't from people's cars, it's because of burning coal. China brings on a new coal power plant something like once a week. Many people heat their houses with coal, and cook with coal. So, just like the environmentalists here have done, they are going to go after the INDIVIDUAL Driver in a grand show while the real polluters - the energy industry - are not touched at all. Same thing that has happened in the US countless times.
And people wonder - when problems are exaggerated, lies are told with statistics, and all kinds of FAKE NEWS is spread to keep the electric car evangelicals happy - why nothing gets done. Stop screaming that the world is going to end if we don't all switch to electric cars immediately, stop pretending sales are through the roof, and stop lecturing us about range anxiety -- and more people would look into electrics. Electric car evangelists, and global warming evangelists, and many environmentalists are their own worst enemy. They think they are helping, but in fact they are slowing down progress.
Thanks! I spent 25 years as a developer, headphones on, banging out code on PDP 11's, and then VAX, and then C++ MFC, C#... Had a stint as an Oracle DBA for a while, promoted to team lead/manager, did big Enterprise (managed a labor accounting system for 1/2 million people).... and then.... I went over to the dark side. Then I started my own dev shop.
You have something I don't find near enough of on/. - A wonderful sense of humor. It's been fun.
Oh the horror!!! The Internet - where I make my living - is MARKETING!!! Many of my clients are - the horror - advertising agencies, SEO providers, SEM media buyers, and the like. Let me make a small attempt to sway you over to the dark side...
Marketing has the hottest women. If you're a woman I am sorry... They have good looking guys too, and no they aren't all gay.
When I was in traditional I.T. we built really complicated things that were hard. Most marketing work is far, far easier - and it pays much, much more.
In traditional I.T. budgets were squeezed, squeezed, and squeezed again. In most - but not all - marketing environments the money flows, and flows as long as you are bringing in leads and lowering the cost per acquisition - also known in web circles as conversion cost.
I love Marketing. You would too if only you tried it. Advertising Agencies have pool tables, free beer, bring your dog to work days... When was the last time you worked in an I.T. department with these perks?
Targeted personalized micro targeting increases conversions at a lower cost per acquisition that traditional reach marketing. In the business world, if shit doesn't work, it gets canned - and quickly. So while YOU may not like it, it works, and it's not going away. It's growing, as the marketing funnel for most consumer products now starts and ends with search. This is reality. You don't have to like it. I haven't embraced big brother. I've been in Digital Marketing for a very long time, I am just telling it like it is, because all this talk about privacy is - no offense - comical.
IOT products are flying off the shelves. Most of these products in my opinion are stupid. But that's just me. If there is sufficient market share for the "Non Spy" version, it will be produced, but I doubt it. One doesn't build products for which there is a very small market.
Some of us can't go offline... it affects our paychecks. So while going to airplane mode while driving may work for you, it doesn't work for others who are "on-call". Does airplane mode REALLY make it impossible to track you? Who knows for sure... Sure you can sniff packets, but the equipment to monitor your phone's RF emissions and decode them is out of the reach of most people.
The only way you cannot be tracked is if you remove your cell phone's battery AND the SIM card... And disconnect everything from the Internet. If one is that paranoid, then they are probably living in the woods already.
The battle over your computer spying on you was lost a LONG TIME AGO. The idealistic projections of the OP here are a social construct rooted in fantasy. Truth be told, most folks actually like personalized, micro targeted marketing - which is what this data is used for. Sure, when you tell them how it works, they are terrified and see BIG BROTHER. But every web site you visit tracks absolutely everything... already.
Just look at how many people own devices that let anyone watch then (Webcams permanently connected or on phones), or listen to everything they say (Smart phone, webcam, Amazon's Alexa, Microsoft's Cortana, Google's new voice command). This isn't going away, it's going to become more pervasive with IOT. How many of you own cars with phone bluetooth adapters, or a Ford with Sync? Sync takes over your phone to send diagnostic email reports, so yes, they can listen to everything in the car too if they want.
So either go live in a Ted Kazinsky shack in the woods, or deal with it. This is simply the way things are today.
Thank You! It's really quite remarkable how much things remain the same, with each generation believing they are unique, and special, and that all of the world's problems are urgent/critical/asap...
Graduating from High School in 1974 we were taught the Malthusian Dilemma - We were all gonna starve by 2000 unless a radical transformation took place. Sound familiar? And then during of college, we were taught that the great ice age was coming, because of man's polluting the atmosphere, and that we would all be living under domes by 2030 unless a radical transformation occurred. And the hockey stick graph proved it! Getting out of school everyone lamented that they couldn't afford to buy a house, the American Dream was lost, and we were oh so worse off than our parents. When Carter was elected the Republican Party was over. And then Reagan was elected and the Democratic Party was over.
When Pink Floyd stopped touring that was the end of proper rock concerts... When the S-100 bus computer companies (Northstar, Cromenco, IMSAI, Altair) went belly up that was the end of hobby computing... I've been a boater most of my life, and the lament year after year is that nobody can afford it anymore, or has the time to do it, only rich people will have boats, there aren't enough boat slips, and with the price of fuel at [whatever price it is] nobody will be boating next year.
My generation, we were all stoners who wouldn't amount to shit... and here I am CEO of my own company, I have a five bedroom house on two acres, own two boats and two antique cars as toys. Imagine that...
My only unhappiness is that I won't live long enough to see the millennials reach my age so I can say "I told you so". Now I tell them things and say "You'll find out!"
Agreed on most. But the MAC sold poorly because the Apple ][ version of VisiCalc was pretty darn good, and there we so many games! And of course the prices for early MAC's were insane, wasn't the Lisa something like $4,000?
PDP/11 RSTS/E my first love! Although I had a crush on an HP programmable calculator first. Much later I fell in love with a girl named VAX.
At 62 I am always having fun, because I'm still breathing. Sadly many of my friends from the "good old days" have become bitter, drank/drugged themselves into major medical problems, or are dead. It's all about attitude, being bitter, whiny, indignant, and angry and the world shortens life expectancy dramatically.
What's been lost in this business is forced self reliance. In the early 80's the lucky ones went to some conference perhaps twice a year, and other than that you had to figure things out for yourself, or with the help of the team you worked with. There were a few books, some of which contained nuggets of knowledge. Examples were hard to come by. One had to have a lot of self reliance, and a lot of patience, and sometimes you'd spend days on the most simple of problems. At the time these hardships did not make life better.
It is so easy to find answers now. Sure, "programming by Google" has resulted in a staggering quantity of horribly crafted systems and web sites. But you know, the first thirty or forty programs I wrote were pretty crappy too.
The development tools taken for granted today would have been science fiction in the early eighties. When was the last time you heard someone complain about how long it took to "compile and link"? How many arguments about whether yellow, green, or white monitors were easiest to read? When was the last time you had to stay in the data center all night hanging tapes in order to defrag a disk? Pulled your back out trying to lift a disk pack out of a drive lately?
Is yesteryear's world better or worse than today's? They are more alike than they are different. The idea that the world is all going downhill and things were so much better in the "good old days" is complete and utter nonsense...
In certain metro urban bubbles - Southern California, San Francisco, Silicon Valley, the Tri State Area around New York, Illinois - Home prices have gone from ridiculous to absurd. In the rest of the country starter home prices are still very reasonable.
In the upper Midwest where I live all my millennial friends have starter homes and little ones. Next door to me is a nice little house on an acre that sold three years ago for $45,000, at 20% down that's a 20 year loan on $36,000 my Ford F150 pickup cost nearly that much.
So yeah, if you want to live in Southern California, or San Francisco, or Chicago, or the Tri-State area you definitely cannot afford a home in your 20's, but it's not the "prior generations" fault, those places were horribly expensive when I was that age. It's why I moved from Southern California to Michigan some 20 years ago.
So my point is that "I can't afford to buy a home because I want to live in West Chester County, Connecticut and I only make $60,000 a year" is the more plausible explanation to the "goddamn Internet" complaining.... Yes, it's harder to get a loan these days, but the blame for that is not on the "prior generation" that's the fault of the CRA, and the government forcing banks to loan money to people who couldn't possibly repay them, and the meltdown that followed.
With this system the political party in power will ensure that the corporations who gave them the money money, get the biggest tax breaks, which will quickly result in totalitarian rule...
To pretend that savings - and the resultant pool of capital that is created to be loaned and invested - are not important for society to function, is a rather bizzare position to tkae. The idea that anyone making over $250K a year is creating a Scrooge McDuck money pile - and should therefore have their income "redistributed" by some "enlightened power" is just plumb crazy. As there are no such "enlightened" people in existence who would not simply pad their own pockets.
Most of the people posting here seem to be on the West or East Coasts.
In the upper Midwest, and rural Texas (areas where I spend most of my time) you'd be hard pressed to find anybody wringing their hands over the issues being discussed here. Perhaps the whole mindset where society is flawed and must be transformed, the endless indignation fanned by the over the top political rhetoric, and the "America Sucks" environment is to blame? Or the "Your worth is measured by the car you drive, the house you live in, and how how the wifey is" mindset? This shallow god less existence is why I left California so many years ago.
Most folks around these parts don't believe we're all doomed, that you don't have to be a millionaire to be happy, and that anyone can be successful with the proper attitude and hard work. The only folks truly unhappy around here are the drug addicts and the drunks.
Big commercial Web sites are not built using waterfall development; they have a very short shelf life; and are driven by marketing, not I.T. The visual presentation is more important than the internal elegance. They are built assembly line style where one person does the creative, another person slices the creative into HTML/CSS/JS, another person marries the HTML/CSS/JS to a framework, or CMS system, and another person manages the copy and SEO tagging.
The creative directors are in charge, not the developers. The marketing folks are in the drivers seat, not the engineers. Marketing cares about cost per conversion and cost per acquisition. In this world the A/B test that picks the color of the submit button is much more important than how the form submit actually works.
Web Sites only have to be good enough to work, as most will be redone in less than two years. That beautiful website written in Yii with Smarty Templates can't be easily upgraded to the latest PHP, so you throw it out and rewrite in Laravel. Those HTML3 tables that achieved responsive design through specifying dimensional attributes as percentages in tables has to be thrown out for bootstrap responsive/adaptive, because analytics determined you could get a higher conversion rate serving different content/navigation to each of the three snap points.
One either accepts this new reality, or goes back to I.T. to work on old legacy batch mode payroll systems and other such boring crap. Learn how to speak marketing's language, and live in the perpetual firefighting mode that is marketing, or consider a career change.
I spent the first half of my career in traditional I.T., saw the writing on the wall, and joined the dark side of digital interactive. You get used to it, and come to the realization that it only has to be good enough to work, and not any better.
Browsers are the new operating system, and yes, they suck beyond sucking. The whole ecosystem is horrible compared to the elegant world that I.T. created in the pre-web days. But I.T. lost the drivers seat, because it couldn't move at marketing speed. The engineers lost. Sorry!
FINALLY a topic on Slashdot that's not political, and actually interesting to me.
HRD was the only program I could find that:
Made it easy to use LOTW
Tracked awards in a simple, easy way
Imported all my old logs from different programs
Controlled my aging FT-990 via CAT
That being said I find the interface a bit clunky and dated, especially the window management which is basically non existent.
What else out there does these things?
One of the core tenets of liberal progressive thought is that we would best be ruled by the smartest, and brightest people who would be given the power to make decisions for "the masses"
So along comes Trump, and he is doing what any successful business person does - surround himself with the best and brightest people he can find.
And the lefties are all howling about it. Hilarious.
We subsidize corn to prop up the Ethanol Industry and Arthur Daniels Midland Corporation who gives HUGE donations to... Democrats.
The little farmers don't get squat. The big monopolistic evil corporations "agri-business" get the same sweet deal the Health Insurance companies got with the ACA - A guaranteed customer, for life, and if they don't pay the bill the government steps in and pays it for them.
It's one of the biggest pay to play scams ever perpetrated in the name of the environment, ever, and it's hysterical when folks who talk about how we need the gummit to regulate evil corporations defend ethanol...
Jeez, this progressive fantasy again? The Bushitler was allegedly intent on a Christian Theocracy for crissakes.
You righteous indignation filled "the opposition is evil beyond words" folks really need to get out more, and learn new things to be freaked out about, it's hard to get people's attention with the same old tired arguments year after year.
It's like screaming Nazi and Racist at everyone who you disagree with, it's so boring...
Slashdot Mirror
So the Democrats were so happy to work with the Republicans during the Bush years... They played so nice, and showed him much respect. And then when Obama got elected, those evil Republicans didn't treat the Democrats the same way - and are responsible for divided government.
That's what you're trying to sell? Really? How stupid do you think people are?
It gets better. A guy who releases Podesta's emails is a threat to our very Democracy, results in sanctions on Russia, and we have to have a report on Obama's desk before he leaves office!
But a "person" who reveals operational details about war time operations, reveals the identity of undercover agents (resulting in some of them being killed) deserves a commuted sentence because they have gender identity issues.
Whiskey Tango Foxtrot...
For a manager who spends hours every day with email browser based solutions just don't cut it.
Nobody has created a shared calendar that works as well as Exchange/Outlook.
I have quite a few clients in highly regulated environments where Google anything is not permitted as it's too easy to create public documents that are visible to anyone with the link...
The "largest part of the population" is not the blue bubble urban centers - or we would have 100% progressive rule, not a Democratic Party that's a shadow of it's former self.
So much misinformation here, as is always the case with msmash posts.
If you google electric car sales you get headlines like "EV SALES UP 44%"! But the fact is they are a TINY percentage of the market, and in 2016 overall sales were actually down. Yes, electric car sales are down in the U.S. Go to a reliable source.
China making moves!! No, the local smog protesters are trying to push the government for more electrics because the smog is so bad. But as usual they have it wrong, the smog in Chinese cities isn't from people's cars, it's because of burning coal. China brings on a new coal power plant something like once a week. Many people heat their houses with coal, and cook with coal. So, just like the environmentalists here have done, they are going to go after the INDIVIDUAL Driver in a grand show while the real polluters - the energy industry - are not touched at all. Same thing that has happened in the US countless times.
And people wonder - when problems are exaggerated, lies are told with statistics, and all kinds of FAKE NEWS is spread to keep the electric car evangelicals happy - why nothing gets done. Stop screaming that the world is going to end if we don't all switch to electric cars immediately, stop pretending sales are through the roof, and stop lecturing us about range anxiety -- and more people would look into electrics. Electric car evangelists, and global warming evangelists, and many environmentalists are their own worst enemy. They think they are helping, but in fact they are slowing down progress.
Thanks! I spent 25 years as a developer, headphones on, banging out code on PDP 11's, and then VAX, and then C++ MFC, C#... Had a stint as an Oracle DBA for a while, promoted to team lead/manager, did big Enterprise (managed a labor accounting system for 1/2 million people).... and then.... I went over to the dark side. Then I started my own dev shop.
/. - A wonderful sense of humor. It's been fun.
You have something I don't find near enough of on
Oh the horror!!! The Internet - where I make my living - is MARKETING!!! Many of my clients are - the horror - advertising agencies, SEO providers, SEM media buyers, and the like. Let me make a small attempt to sway you over to the dark side...
Marketing has the hottest women. If you're a woman I am sorry... They have good looking guys too, and no they aren't all gay.
When I was in traditional I.T. we built really complicated things that were hard. Most marketing work is far, far easier - and it pays much, much more.
In traditional I.T. budgets were squeezed, squeezed, and squeezed again. In most - but not all - marketing environments the money flows, and flows as long as you are bringing in leads and lowering the cost per acquisition - also known in web circles as conversion cost.
I love Marketing. You would too if only you tried it. Advertising Agencies have pool tables, free beer, bring your dog to work days... When was the last time you worked in an I.T. department with these perks?
Thanks for the reply.
Targeted personalized micro targeting increases conversions at a lower cost per acquisition that traditional reach marketing. In the business world, if shit doesn't work, it gets canned - and quickly. So while YOU may not like it, it works, and it's not going away. It's growing, as the marketing funnel for most consumer products now starts and ends with search. This is reality. You don't have to like it. I haven't embraced big brother. I've been in Digital Marketing for a very long time, I am just telling it like it is, because all this talk about privacy is - no offense - comical.
IOT products are flying off the shelves. Most of these products in my opinion are stupid. But that's just me. If there is sufficient market share for the "Non Spy" version, it will be produced, but I doubt it. One doesn't build products for which there is a very small market.
Some of us can't go offline... it affects our paychecks. So while going to airplane mode while driving may work for you, it doesn't work for others who are "on-call". Does airplane mode REALLY make it impossible to track you? Who knows for sure... Sure you can sniff packets, but the equipment to monitor your phone's RF emissions and decode them is out of the reach of most people.
The only way you cannot be tracked is if you remove your cell phone's battery AND the SIM card... And disconnect everything from the Internet. If one is that paranoid, then they are probably living in the woods already.
The battle over your computer spying on you was lost a LONG TIME AGO. The idealistic projections of the OP here are a social construct rooted in fantasy. Truth be told, most folks actually like personalized, micro targeted marketing - which is what this data is used for. Sure, when you tell them how it works, they are terrified and see BIG BROTHER. But every web site you visit tracks absolutely everything... already.
Just look at how many people own devices that let anyone watch then (Webcams permanently connected or on phones), or listen to everything they say (Smart phone, webcam, Amazon's Alexa, Microsoft's Cortana, Google's new voice command). This isn't going away, it's going to become more pervasive with IOT. How many of you own cars with phone bluetooth adapters, or a Ford with Sync? Sync takes over your phone to send diagnostic email reports, so yes, they can listen to everything in the car too if they want.
So either go live in a Ted Kazinsky shack in the woods, or deal with it. This is simply the way things are today.
http://arstechnica.com/securit...
http://www.robertmlee.org/crit...
Try reading actual sources about things.
Thank You! It's really quite remarkable how much things remain the same, with each generation believing they are unique, and special, and that all of the world's problems are urgent/critical/asap...
Graduating from High School in 1974 we were taught the Malthusian Dilemma - We were all gonna starve by 2000 unless a radical transformation took place. Sound familiar? And then during of college, we were taught that the great ice age was coming, because of man's polluting the atmosphere, and that we would all be living under domes by 2030 unless a radical transformation occurred. And the hockey stick graph proved it! Getting out of school everyone lamented that they couldn't afford to buy a house, the American Dream was lost, and we were oh so worse off than our parents. When Carter was elected the Republican Party was over. And then Reagan was elected and the Democratic Party was over.
When Pink Floyd stopped touring that was the end of proper rock concerts... When the S-100 bus computer companies (Northstar, Cromenco, IMSAI, Altair) went belly up that was the end of hobby computing... I've been a boater most of my life, and the lament year after year is that nobody can afford it anymore, or has the time to do it, only rich people will have boats, there aren't enough boat slips, and with the price of fuel at [whatever price it is] nobody will be boating next year.
My generation, we were all stoners who wouldn't amount to shit... and here I am CEO of my own company, I have a five bedroom house on two acres, own two boats and two antique cars as toys. Imagine that...
My only unhappiness is that I won't live long enough to see the millennials reach my age so I can say "I told you so". Now I tell them things and say "You'll find out!"
I remember having these conversations many times:
You're a programmer? Wow you must be really, really good at math.
How many telephone books can you store on that thing?
You have a computer in your HOUSE? Wow you must be really smart.
Why the hell would you want a computer you have to lug around from one place to another? That's a stupid idea...
Agreed on most. But the MAC sold poorly because the Apple ][ version of VisiCalc was pretty darn good, and there we so many games! And of course the prices for early MAC's were insane, wasn't the Lisa something like $4,000?
PDP/11 RSTS/E my first love! Although I had a crush on an HP programmable calculator first. Much later I fell in love with a girl named VAX.
At 62 I am always having fun, because I'm still breathing. Sadly many of my friends from the "good old days" have become bitter, drank/drugged themselves into major medical problems, or are dead. It's all about attitude, being bitter, whiny, indignant, and angry and the world shortens life expectancy dramatically.
What's been lost in this business is forced self reliance. In the early 80's the lucky ones went to some conference perhaps twice a year, and other than that you had to figure things out for yourself, or with the help of the team you worked with. There were a few books, some of which contained nuggets of knowledge. Examples were hard to come by. One had to have a lot of self reliance, and a lot of patience, and sometimes you'd spend days on the most simple of problems. At the time these hardships did not make life better.
It is so easy to find answers now. Sure, "programming by Google" has resulted in a staggering quantity of horribly crafted systems and web sites. But you know, the first thirty or forty programs I wrote were pretty crappy too.
The development tools taken for granted today would have been science fiction in the early eighties. When was the last time you heard someone complain about how long it took to "compile and link"? How many arguments about whether yellow, green, or white monitors were easiest to read? When was the last time you had to stay in the data center all night hanging tapes in order to defrag a disk? Pulled your back out trying to lift a disk pack out of a drive lately?
Is yesteryear's world better or worse than today's? They are more alike than they are different. The idea that the world is all going downhill and things were so much better in the "good old days" is complete and utter nonsense...
In certain metro urban bubbles - Southern California, San Francisco, Silicon Valley, the Tri State Area around New York, Illinois - Home prices have gone from ridiculous to absurd. In the rest of the country starter home prices are still very reasonable.
In the upper Midwest where I live all my millennial friends have starter homes and little ones. Next door to me is a nice little house on an acre that sold three years ago for $45,000, at 20% down that's a 20 year loan on $36,000 my Ford F150 pickup cost nearly that much.
So yeah, if you want to live in Southern California, or San Francisco, or Chicago, or the Tri-State area you definitely cannot afford a home in your 20's, but it's not the "prior generations" fault, those places were horribly expensive when I was that age. It's why I moved from Southern California to Michigan some 20 years ago.
So my point is that "I can't afford to buy a home because I want to live in West Chester County, Connecticut and I only make $60,000 a year" is the more plausible explanation to the "goddamn Internet" complaining.... Yes, it's harder to get a loan these days, but the blame for that is not on the "prior generation" that's the fault of the CRA, and the government forcing banks to loan money to people who couldn't possibly repay them, and the meltdown that followed.
With this system the political party in power will ensure that the corporations who gave them the money money, get the biggest tax breaks, which will quickly result in totalitarian rule...
To pretend that savings - and the resultant pool of capital that is created to be loaned and invested - are not important for society to function, is a rather bizzare position to tkae. The idea that anyone making over $250K a year is creating a Scrooge McDuck money pile - and should therefore have their income "redistributed" by some "enlightened power" is just plumb crazy. As there are no such "enlightened" people in existence who would not simply pad their own pockets.
"Lack of strong storms and Hurricanes caused by Climate Change" - Coming to the MSM this year for sure.
Most of the people posting here seem to be on the West or East Coasts.
In the upper Midwest, and rural Texas (areas where I spend most of my time) you'd be hard pressed to find anybody wringing their hands over the issues being discussed here. Perhaps the whole mindset where society is flawed and must be transformed, the endless indignation fanned by the over the top political rhetoric, and the "America Sucks" environment is to blame? Or the "Your worth is measured by the car you drive, the house you live in, and how how the wifey is" mindset? This shallow god less existence is why I left California so many years ago.
Most folks around these parts don't believe we're all doomed, that you don't have to be a millionaire to be happy, and that anyone can be successful with the proper attitude and hard work. The only folks truly unhappy around here are the drug addicts and the drunks.
Big commercial Web sites are not built using waterfall development; they have a very short shelf life; and are driven by marketing, not I.T. The visual presentation is more important than the internal elegance. They are built assembly line style where one person does the creative, another person slices the creative into HTML/CSS/JS, another person marries the HTML/CSS/JS to a framework, or CMS system, and another person manages the copy and SEO tagging.
The creative directors are in charge, not the developers. The marketing folks are in the drivers seat, not the engineers. Marketing cares about cost per conversion and cost per acquisition. In this world the A/B test that picks the color of the submit button is much more important than how the form submit actually works.
Web Sites only have to be good enough to work, as most will be redone in less than two years. That beautiful website written in Yii with Smarty Templates can't be easily upgraded to the latest PHP, so you throw it out and rewrite in Laravel. Those HTML3 tables that achieved responsive design through specifying dimensional attributes as percentages in tables has to be thrown out for bootstrap responsive/adaptive, because analytics determined you could get a higher conversion rate serving different content/navigation to each of the three snap points.
One either accepts this new reality, or goes back to I.T. to work on old legacy batch mode payroll systems and other such boring crap. Learn how to speak marketing's language, and live in the perpetual firefighting mode that is marketing, or consider a career change.
I spent the first half of my career in traditional I.T., saw the writing on the wall, and joined the dark side of digital interactive. You get used to it, and come to the realization that it only has to be good enough to work, and not any better.
Browsers are the new operating system, and yes, they suck beyond sucking. The whole ecosystem is horrible compared to the elegant world that I.T. created in the pre-web days. But I.T. lost the drivers seat, because it couldn't move at marketing speed. The engineers lost. Sorry!
FINALLY a topic on Slashdot that's not political, and actually interesting to me. HRD was the only program I could find that: Made it easy to use LOTW Tracked awards in a simple, easy way Imported all my old logs from different programs Controlled my aging FT-990 via CAT That being said I find the interface a bit clunky and dated, especially the window management which is basically non existent. What else out there does these things?
Your comments are spot on.
If I may point out the irony here...
One of the core tenets of liberal progressive thought is that we would best be ruled by the smartest, and brightest people who would be given the power to make decisions for "the masses"
So along comes Trump, and he is doing what any successful business person does - surround himself with the best and brightest people he can find.
And the lefties are all howling about it. Hilarious.
We subsidize corn to prop up the Ethanol Industry and Arthur Daniels Midland Corporation who gives HUGE donations to... Democrats.
The little farmers don't get squat. The big monopolistic evil corporations "agri-business" get the same sweet deal the Health Insurance companies got with the ACA - A guaranteed customer, for life, and if they don't pay the bill the government steps in and pays it for them.
It's one of the biggest pay to play scams ever perpetrated in the name of the environment, ever, and it's hysterical when folks who talk about how we need the gummit to regulate evil corporations defend ethanol...
Jeez, this progressive fantasy again? The Bushitler was allegedly intent on a Christian Theocracy for crissakes.
You righteous indignation filled "the opposition is evil beyond words" folks really need to get out more, and learn new things to be freaked out about, it's hard to get people's attention with the same old tired arguments year after year.
It's like screaming Nazi and Racist at everyone who you disagree with, it's so boring...
And when stupid actions by the government kill people, then what? Hint: It's the same system that protects us from corporations...