Two words: "Market Differentiation". I once worked for a company which made printers. One printer line had a low-end model and a high-end model. The hardware was identical except for two things: (1) The print head, which produced higher-quality output and was more durable in the high-end model; and (2) the color of the case. That's it. Otherwise they were identical. The marketing guys decided that the print quality alone wouldn't tempt people towards the high-end model, so they required us to hobble the software. The same software build was loaded into each model, but if it detected the cheap print head it inserted wait-states into memory access to force about a 30% decrease in formatting speed. Voila! Now the high-end product had enough benefit to justify the price difference!
tl;dr: Sometimes yes, companies will expend extra effort to intentionally make a crappier product, if it means that they'll sell more of an expensive higher-profit-margin product. And yes, it drives the engineers completely bananas.
Anderson isn't aiming to supplant Bitcoin, or even challenge the money-exchange model that drives society. But he's hoping it will change the way people think about currency
Ah, so the whole thing's just a performance art piece, not a serious proposal. Good to know. Now we can just ignore him until he goes away.
For me, price is also a factor. Watching it just while cooking alone or something, I don't want to pay $5 for something that is just not that good. Crappy stream quality also doesn't matter in that case.
There seems to be a trend of the studios to allow digital "purchase" of movies but disallow rental, even for older releases. I'm only going to watch most movies once. $5 is my sweet spot for watching a movie. I'll gladly pay $5 for the ability to stream it for 24 hours, on the same model as the video rental store. I won't pay $15 to "own" it, especially when "ownership" is simply an indefinite-term rental until such time as the streaming service goes out of business. I'd rather just go without than play that asinine game.
Sounds like someone who embodies the Three Virtues of a programmer: Laziness, Impatience, and Hubris. Well done!
I'm always amazed at what non-programmers are impressed by. Code up some major application, and... Why doesn't it have this feature? Why does it have that workflow? What kind of colorblind dyslexic idiot designed this UI? But whip up a simple script to automate some repetitive, routine task and you're a genius!
You asked for citations, he produced some. If you want an intellectually honest debate the burden is now on you to show why those citations are inaccurate. You're not allowed to simply assert "lies and more lies!" unless you want to grant him the same tactic to dismiss your arguments. Point to the creationist.
A lot of {regional} food isn't real {regional} food. It's {localized} {regional} food.
You can fill in {regional} with any non-local region. In the US you can say it for Mexican, Thai, Italian, German, Polish... In the northern US you can say it for Southern food, and so on. It's kind of a variant of the "no true Scotsman" argument. No true Chinese person would cook like they do at PF Changs, therefore PF Changs is not true Chinese.
Because free speech. Which is just a convenient flag-waving way to say that the definition benefits the people who write the laws defining such matters. Politicians benefit from political think tanks being classified as charities, so... Free speech! It's the same reason that capital gains are taxed at a lower rate than other income. Oh, sure, on the surface of it there's some ideological veneer of doing it to promote market liquidity, job creation, and so forth, but in reality it's because the people writing the tax laws tend to be wealthy and directly benefit from the law being that way.
By this logic I shit diamonds! Hey, there's a lot of carbon bound up in human waste. Carbon is an (nay, the) ingredient in diamond, therefore New Evidence For Oceans of Diamonds Deep In The Sewer.
Genuine question, here, since I've never done any web dev. Why not write libraries in an existing language that spit out HTML/Javascript/PHP/whatever? Why do we need a new language to do this?
On the server side it's already pretty easy to use whatever language you want. There's the CGI protocol that gives a well defined interface between the server and any arbitrary program running as its own process. Most servers also have a way to run code in written various languages directly without the overhead of spawning a new process to do it.
On the browser side you have Javascript and... Well, that's about it really, unless you want to rely on browser plugins. Some browsers on some platforms can handle other scripting languages, but they tend to be vendor-specific like VBScript. If you load a browser plugin you can do anything you want, but it's not going to be all that portable. And, as we've seen with Flash and Java, they can open up new and interesting security holes.
Javascript itself is kind of a mess. It's inconsistent and has a lot of pitfalls that can trip up the unwary. I don't think we need more languages necessarily, but we could certainly use one good language. Of course, you'll never get developers to agree on what that good language is, and by the time it makes its way through the standards committee it's going to look an awful lot like Javascript. The big problem with defining a new language is that it needs to be in all the browsers before it's useful to developers. Developers won't adopt a language that's not widely deployed in browsers, and browser vendors won't bother to implement a language unless there is a critical mass of developers for it. So at this point we're pretty much stuck with Javascript.
Microsoft actually had a good idea at one time, which was to define an interface between the browser and an arbitrary external scripting language. You could (and probably still can) write Perl or Python code and execute it within Internet Explorer just like Javascript or VBScript. Of course that required the user to install the particular language you wanted, and calling out to an arbitrary external language opened up a ton of security holes. It wasn't very useful for web-based scripting. It was pretty good if you wanted an easy way to add a GUI to a local script, though. I used it to write a few quick-and-dirty prototype apps in Perl with an HTML GUI about 10 years ago. In fact it was good enough that I had a hell of a time convincing our sales guys that it was not a finished product they could sell.
Correct. Allowing outsiders to inject themselves as spoilers into an internal race isn't fair. This is why party registration and closed primaries make sense. That's at least ore fair than doing the entire nomination via convention and forgoing primaries all together.
Agreed that outsiders as spoilers is no fair, and that closed primaries make sense. But I disagree that primaries (at least, publicly funded primaries) are better than private selection within the parties. As you said, it's an internal race. The party needs to pick the candidate that best represents them. If they want to do it in a secret smoke-filled room, let them.
Hey, if the parties want to organize and fund the primary elections on their own, great! More power to them! I'm just saying that public funds should not be allocated for something that's really the internal business of a private organization. And the big two parties should absolutely not have a government-supported primary mechanism available to them when other parties do not.
No, a touchscreen with tactile feedback wouldn't be very useful in this application. Ideally you want to operate the controls without taking your eyes off the road. To do that you need controls which don't move around or change function. The volume control, for instance, should always be available and should never change its position on the dashboard. It should never be dual-purposed; ie., a volume control in radio mode but a scroll control for selecting an MP3 from a directory. A dynamic tactile touchscreen doesn't help in that situation.
My current vehicle doesn't have a touchscreen but does have a "smart" entertainment system. It has physical buttons but (with the sole exception of volume/power, thankfully) their functions are all dependent on what mode the system is in. And there's no way to determine the current mode or the current meanings of the buttons without looking at the display. Even simple things like balance/fade/eq are buried in the modal menu system. Hard as hell to operate when you're driving.
I came here to say just this. You've saved me a lot of typing.:-) I want to add that there's a trend towards "evidence-based medicine" right now. You know, actually studying the effects of treatment to see that it's doing what it's intended to do. Seems obvious, right? Hopefully what this article describes is a step towards evidence-based education. Done correctly (aye, there's the rub) with proper anonymization this sort of information could be hugely beneficial to future students.
To summarize the summary, there are too few tenure-track professorial positions in the Humanities for most of the graduates to get a tenure-track position. This is because the demand for Humanities professors is down, because fewer people are going into Humanities, because it's too "weird" and takes too long to get a degree. So the proposal is to reduce the requirements for a degree, thus increasing enrollment and increasing the demand for professors.
Left unstated is the fact that having more Humanities students will also increase the supply of Doctors of Humanities, who will need jobs, so we'll need even more students to soak up an even greater excess of professors. And so on, ad infinitum. (That's Latin. I'm told Humanities profs like Latin phrases.)
Somebody remind me again, why do we even want the number of Humanities graduates that we already have?
Back when I was a kid Lego was far, far superior... blah, blah, all specialized parts, blah, blah, no creativity, blah, getoffmylawn.
You know, I read this sentiment in every discussion of LEGO that comes up... And it's never been true. Never. My son is now 16 and has loved LEGO his whole life. He still get gets it out to play with now and then. When he gets a new set the pattern has always been the same -- open the box, build the model as shown, tear it apart, add it to the pile of parts and build his own things. Current LEGO sets allow every bit as much creativity as the sets did when I was his age over 30 years ago. If anyone has problems building their own stuff it's entirely due to their own lack of creativity, not because the toys somehow discourage it.
You wanna piss and moan about the specialized LEGO pieces? How about the transition from full-sized, articulated figures to minifigs? The addition of specialized round and clear pieces in the first space sets? The Technics series, which were more single-build models than just about anything today? I heard the same damn argument when each of those was introduced.
My read of it is slightly more favorable, though still not good. There are marketing firms which specifically target college students. I'm sure that as a property management firm which also targets college students they already have contacts with the marketing firms. It sounds to me like they want to sell ad space to said firms, who would then resell it to their advertisers. The ads would probably be injected by hijacking DNS requests and using transparent HTTP proxies, not unlike what some hotels and "free" wi-fi hotspots do. My guess is that they don't plan to give preferred or degraded bandwidth to any actual content provider (unless you count rival advertisers as "content providers"). As such it's not a net-neutrality issue per se, just another scumbag trying to capitalize on a captive audience.
It's amusing to me that just a couple stories before this is the one about OpenDNS phasing out Guide, which is a similar advertising grab. Maybe you can point to the OpenDNS article as an example of a provider dropping that revenue model because it pissed off the users too much.
You mean, the same pothole repair that can be done by one uneducated worker with a shovel and a pickup truck full of gravel or asphalt? Yeah, just think about how it compares.
In general I disagree with the idea of a "right to be forgotten". Rather than trying to "forget" the past pretend that all that embarrassing and/or illegal stuff never happened, how about if we all grow up and, as a society recognize that people do dumb shit and can actually change over time. You shouldn't have the "right" to track down and burn all the copies of photos of you smoking weed that you happily plastered all over your Facebook page when you were in college. It happened, and if someone still has evidence you can't compel them to hide or destroy it simply because it's embarrassing now. It would be so much better for all of us to realize that opinions, attitudes, and behaviors change over time; we learn from mistakes, and hopefully don't commit them again. Own up to it, and cut others some slack if they did dumb stuff of their own a decade ago.
I was born closer to the first moon landing than to today. That's because I was born on the other side of it. Hell, I was born closer to WWII than to today. And in another year I'll be able to say that about WWI.
First, why does programming need to be accessible to more people? That's exactly the opposite direction a mature technology goes. It use to be easy to fix your own car, but now with the modern engine and manufacturing techniques it's damn near impossible for most people to do more than add consumables. It used to be easy to fix electronics, but now it's impossible to take things apart and if you do you find everything is done in literally a black box of a chip and there's nothing you can do to it. These things have good points and bad points and I'm not here to argue for or against them, just to say that mature technology tends towards "no user-serviceable parts inside". Why would you expect programming to be any different?
Second, the pain in programming doesn't come from the tools. Yeah, it's a pain to learn the tools, but that's a pain that's short-lived. The real pain comes from the nature of programming. It's caused by having to tell the computer in excruciating detail exactly what you want it to do. In order to tell the computer you have to figure it out for yourself, without glossing over any "you know what I mean" steps, because the computer certainly doesn't know what you mean. And not only do you have to tell it how to do the job when everything is working as it should, you have to anticipate all the ways in which things could fail and tell the computer what to do in those cases, too. THAT'S the painful part of programming -- the programming. No tool is going to fix that.
Slashdot Mirror
Two words: "Market Differentiation". I once worked for a company which made printers. One printer line had a low-end model and a high-end model. The hardware was identical except for two things: (1) The print head, which produced higher-quality output and was more durable in the high-end model; and (2) the color of the case. That's it. Otherwise they were identical. The marketing guys decided that the print quality alone wouldn't tempt people towards the high-end model, so they required us to hobble the software. The same software build was loaded into each model, but if it detected the cheap print head it inserted wait-states into memory access to force about a 30% decrease in formatting speed. Voila! Now the high-end product had enough benefit to justify the price difference!
tl;dr: Sometimes yes, companies will expend extra effort to intentionally make a crappier product, if it means that they'll sell more of an expensive higher-profit-margin product. And yes, it drives the engineers completely bananas.
Ah, so the whole thing's just a performance art piece, not a serious proposal. Good to know. Now we can just ignore him until he goes away.
There seems to be a trend of the studios to allow digital "purchase" of movies but disallow rental, even for older releases. I'm only going to watch most movies once. $5 is my sweet spot for watching a movie. I'll gladly pay $5 for the ability to stream it for 24 hours, on the same model as the video rental store. I won't pay $15 to "own" it, especially when "ownership" is simply an indefinite-term rental until such time as the streaming service goes out of business. I'd rather just go without than play that asinine game.
Sorry, I only support candidates who can provide me with vector-based artwork.
I can't wait to buy a shiny new Sound Blaster ZxR so I can get that noticeably superior audio. It'll be great for my collection of 128 Kbps MP3s!
A film based on a title by Isaac Asimov. See also: Nightfall
That was my first thought, too. Took me a minute to realize there's another Lovelace that's probably more appropriate in this context...
I can't be the only one who was mentally replacing "what if you could...?" with "why would I want to...?" and coming up dry most of the time.
Sounds like someone who embodies the Three Virtues of a programmer: Laziness, Impatience, and Hubris. Well done!
I'm always amazed at what non-programmers are impressed by. Code up some major application, and... Why doesn't it have this feature? Why does it have that workflow? What kind of colorblind dyslexic idiot designed this UI? But whip up a simple script to automate some repetitive, routine task and you're a genius!
You asked for citations, he produced some. If you want an intellectually honest debate the burden is now on you to show why those citations are inaccurate. You're not allowed to simply assert "lies and more lies!" unless you want to grant him the same tactic to dismiss your arguments. Point to the creationist.
A lot of {regional} food isn't real {regional} food. It's {localized} {regional} food.
You can fill in {regional} with any non-local region. In the US you can say it for Mexican, Thai, Italian, German, Polish... In the northern US you can say it for Southern food, and so on. It's kind of a variant of the "no true Scotsman" argument. No true Chinese person would cook like they do at PF Changs, therefore PF Changs is not true Chinese.
Because free speech. Which is just a convenient flag-waving way to say that the definition benefits the people who write the laws defining such matters. Politicians benefit from political think tanks being classified as charities, so... Free speech! It's the same reason that capital gains are taxed at a lower rate than other income. Oh, sure, on the surface of it there's some ideological veneer of doing it to promote market liquidity, job creation, and so forth, but in reality it's because the people writing the tax laws tend to be wealthy and directly benefit from the law being that way.
By this logic I shit diamonds! Hey, there's a lot of carbon bound up in human waste. Carbon is an (nay, the) ingredient in diamond, therefore New Evidence For Oceans of Diamonds Deep In The Sewer.
On the server side it's already pretty easy to use whatever language you want. There's the CGI protocol that gives a well defined interface between the server and any arbitrary program running as its own process. Most servers also have a way to run code in written various languages directly without the overhead of spawning a new process to do it.
On the browser side you have Javascript and... Well, that's about it really, unless you want to rely on browser plugins. Some browsers on some platforms can handle other scripting languages, but they tend to be vendor-specific like VBScript. If you load a browser plugin you can do anything you want, but it's not going to be all that portable. And, as we've seen with Flash and Java, they can open up new and interesting security holes.
Javascript itself is kind of a mess. It's inconsistent and has a lot of pitfalls that can trip up the unwary. I don't think we need more languages necessarily, but we could certainly use one good language. Of course, you'll never get developers to agree on what that good language is, and by the time it makes its way through the standards committee it's going to look an awful lot like Javascript. The big problem with defining a new language is that it needs to be in all the browsers before it's useful to developers. Developers won't adopt a language that's not widely deployed in browsers, and browser vendors won't bother to implement a language unless there is a critical mass of developers for it. So at this point we're pretty much stuck with Javascript.
Microsoft actually had a good idea at one time, which was to define an interface between the browser and an arbitrary external scripting language. You could (and probably still can) write Perl or Python code and execute it within Internet Explorer just like Javascript or VBScript. Of course that required the user to install the particular language you wanted, and calling out to an arbitrary external language opened up a ton of security holes. It wasn't very useful for web-based scripting. It was pretty good if you wanted an easy way to add a GUI to a local script, though. I used it to write a few quick-and-dirty prototype apps in Perl with an HTML GUI about 10 years ago. In fact it was good enough that I had a hell of a time convincing our sales guys that it was not a finished product they could sell.
Agreed that outsiders as spoilers is no fair, and that closed primaries make sense. But I disagree that primaries (at least, publicly funded primaries) are better than private selection within the parties. As you said, it's an internal race. The party needs to pick the candidate that best represents them. If they want to do it in a secret smoke-filled room, let them.
Hey, if the parties want to organize and fund the primary elections on their own, great! More power to them! I'm just saying that public funds should not be allocated for something that's really the internal business of a private organization. And the big two parties should absolutely not have a government-supported primary mechanism available to them when other parties do not.
No, a touchscreen with tactile feedback wouldn't be very useful in this application. Ideally you want to operate the controls without taking your eyes off the road. To do that you need controls which don't move around or change function. The volume control, for instance, should always be available and should never change its position on the dashboard. It should never be dual-purposed; ie., a volume control in radio mode but a scroll control for selecting an MP3 from a directory. A dynamic tactile touchscreen doesn't help in that situation.
My current vehicle doesn't have a touchscreen but does have a "smart" entertainment system. It has physical buttons but (with the sole exception of volume/power, thankfully) their functions are all dependent on what mode the system is in. And there's no way to determine the current mode or the current meanings of the buttons without looking at the display. Even simple things like balance/fade/eq are buried in the modal menu system. Hard as hell to operate when you're driving.
I came here to say just this. You've saved me a lot of typing. :-) I want to add that there's a trend towards "evidence-based medicine" right now. You know, actually studying the effects of treatment to see that it's doing what it's intended to do. Seems obvious, right? Hopefully what this article describes is a step towards evidence-based education. Done correctly (aye, there's the rub) with proper anonymization this sort of information could be hugely beneficial to future students.
To summarize the summary, there are too few tenure-track professorial positions in the Humanities for most of the graduates to get a tenure-track position. This is because the demand for Humanities professors is down, because fewer people are going into Humanities, because it's too "weird" and takes too long to get a degree. So the proposal is to reduce the requirements for a degree, thus increasing enrollment and increasing the demand for professors.
Left unstated is the fact that having more Humanities students will also increase the supply of Doctors of Humanities, who will need jobs, so we'll need even more students to soak up an even greater excess of professors. And so on, ad infinitum. (That's Latin. I'm told Humanities profs like Latin phrases.)
Somebody remind me again, why do we even want the number of Humanities graduates that we already have?
You know, I read this sentiment in every discussion of LEGO that comes up... And it's never been true. Never. My son is now 16 and has loved LEGO his whole life. He still get gets it out to play with now and then. When he gets a new set the pattern has always been the same -- open the box, build the model as shown, tear it apart, add it to the pile of parts and build his own things. Current LEGO sets allow every bit as much creativity as the sets did when I was his age over 30 years ago. If anyone has problems building their own stuff it's entirely due to their own lack of creativity, not because the toys somehow discourage it.
You wanna piss and moan about the specialized LEGO pieces? How about the transition from full-sized, articulated figures to minifigs? The addition of specialized round and clear pieces in the first space sets? The Technics series, which were more single-build models than just about anything today? I heard the same damn argument when each of those was introduced.
My read of it is slightly more favorable, though still not good. There are marketing firms which specifically target college students. I'm sure that as a property management firm which also targets college students they already have contacts with the marketing firms. It sounds to me like they want to sell ad space to said firms, who would then resell it to their advertisers. The ads would probably be injected by hijacking DNS requests and using transparent HTTP proxies, not unlike what some hotels and "free" wi-fi hotspots do. My guess is that they don't plan to give preferred or degraded bandwidth to any actual content provider (unless you count rival advertisers as "content providers"). As such it's not a net-neutrality issue per se, just another scumbag trying to capitalize on a captive audience.
It's amusing to me that just a couple stories before this is the one about OpenDNS phasing out Guide, which is a similar advertising grab. Maybe you can point to the OpenDNS article as an example of a provider dropping that revenue model because it pissed off the users too much.
You mean, the same pothole repair that can be done by one uneducated worker with a shovel and a pickup truck full of gravel or asphalt? Yeah, just think about how it compares.
In general I disagree with the idea of a "right to be forgotten". Rather than trying to "forget" the past pretend that all that embarrassing and/or illegal stuff never happened, how about if we all grow up and, as a society recognize that people do dumb shit and can actually change over time. You shouldn't have the "right" to track down and burn all the copies of photos of you smoking weed that you happily plastered all over your Facebook page when you were in college. It happened, and if someone still has evidence you can't compel them to hide or destroy it simply because it's embarrassing now. It would be so much better for all of us to realize that opinions, attitudes, and behaviors change over time; we learn from mistakes, and hopefully don't commit them again. Own up to it, and cut others some slack if they did dumb stuff of their own a decade ago.
Until an actual mechanism is shown for light causing obesity, I'm not giving up my blue canary in the outlet by the light switch!
I was born closer to the first moon landing than to today. That's because I was born on the other side of it. Hell, I was born closer to WWII than to today. And in another year I'll be able to say that about WWI.
Kids. Get off my lawn.
First, why does programming need to be accessible to more people? That's exactly the opposite direction a mature technology goes. It use to be easy to fix your own car, but now with the modern engine and manufacturing techniques it's damn near impossible for most people to do more than add consumables. It used to be easy to fix electronics, but now it's impossible to take things apart and if you do you find everything is done in literally a black box of a chip and there's nothing you can do to it. These things have good points and bad points and I'm not here to argue for or against them, just to say that mature technology tends towards "no user-serviceable parts inside". Why would you expect programming to be any different?
Second, the pain in programming doesn't come from the tools. Yeah, it's a pain to learn the tools, but that's a pain that's short-lived. The real pain comes from the nature of programming. It's caused by having to tell the computer in excruciating detail exactly what you want it to do. In order to tell the computer you have to figure it out for yourself, without glossing over any "you know what I mean" steps, because the computer certainly doesn't know what you mean. And not only do you have to tell it how to do the job when everything is working as it should, you have to anticipate all the ways in which things could fail and tell the computer what to do in those cases, too. THAT'S the painful part of programming -- the programming. No tool is going to fix that.