He has said similar before, except in place of "complex solutions" he used socialism, socialist practices, and socialist policies. So yes, he is indeed using "complex solutions" as a synonym.
I decided to give you the benefit of the doubt. I wasn't willing to read or even skim AmiMoJo's posting history, because with WELL north of 500 posts since mid-December of last year, he's way too prolific for me to keep up with. But I DID search for the string 'sociali' in every one of those 39 pages' worth of way-more-than-500 posts. Except for this thread, there were ZERO matches.
I can't say whether or not AmiMoJo promotes socialism; but if he does so, he certainly doesn't call it by its name.
Using fundraising itself as a benchmark is dangerous for the entire community because it encourages a culture of optimizing for short term showmanship instead of making something people want and creating lasting value
That's all true, but it ignores the fact that almost the entirety of manufacturing consumer products is 'optimized for short term showmanship' and is based on a model of planned obsolescence. When the manufacturing sector makes as much money as possible for goods that are made to break easily, be difficult or impossible to service, and be obsolete in a short amount of time, it's impossible for that attitude NOT to seep into the innovation sector. So long as the world economy is basically a giant Ponzi scheme, 'getting while the getting's good' is going to be an all-too-common practice.
Ah yes - another would-be resident of Galt's Gulch.
The problem is that the solutions are complex and a lot of people are conditioned to be automatically hostile to them
...The solution must not be in ruling, overpowering, fighting people, it should be in allowing the people to help themselves and while helping themselves they will help others by creating actual solutions that do not rely on the armed power of the State.
Unfortunately, humans have a strong tendency toward selfishness - not the kind that Ayn Rand hallucinated, but the kind she redefined as 'selflessness' and foisted upon the villains in the stories she wrote. Real people WILL sometimes take unfair and even violent action to get ahead - it's a part of being human. In the absence of a State with police and a justice system, they will help themselves by stealing from, manipulating, and taking advantage of, those who are weaker; they will form powerful associations and allegiances that will evolve into a new de facto State. And in that State, weaker individuals will have no police to go to to have their rights protected. Unless, of course, there are private-enterprise police forces. The people who can afford their services will have protection; others won't; and there we are right back at class distinctions and a different law for the rich than for the poor.
Why are you using "complex solutions" as a synonym for socialism (and by transitive property solutions == socialism)?
AmiMoJo said that the solutions are "associated with" socialism, not "synonymous with" socialism.
Putting the cart before the horse there. How about we find out what works before claiming one and only one solution is the ultimate answer to everything.
Jumping to a conclusion there. Anybody who says that "the solutions are complex" is, by definition, NOT talking about "one and only solution". And no, I'm not being pedantic - I'm merely pointing out that you're putting words in AmiMoJo's mouth. BTW, where did AmiMoJo say anything about an "ultimate answer"? Are you reading a different thread than I am?
The solutions for our current social and economic problems, and for those likely to come in the future with the widespread adoption of automation, ARE complex. They won't fit into the oversimplification forced on us by narrow ideological / political constructs, and if we limit ourselves to the same old sophomoric poli-sci name-calling, then we're doomed.
As soon as you start thinking in terms of "winners" and "losers", you are passively accepting the picture of the Internet as a commercial marketplace in which corporations compete for profit. There are already far too many aspects of modern life of which this is true.
I'm not sure that's "passively accepting", so much as it is acknowledging the existing state of affairs as it is perceived by the majority of people who aren't Slashdotters.
Regardless of its commercial excrescences (which we are free to ignore if we wish) the Internet continues to be of huge value as a common medium of communication. It's all too easy to overlook the enormous amount of learning and discussion that goes on every day, without anyone paying much notice becuase there is little or no money involved.
Unfortunately, there is a lot of money involved in building and maintaining the infrastructure, so all of that grass-roots activity you're rightly extolling exists at the sufferance of corporations that can and will pull the plug in accordance with their own desires and profit-driven agendas.
Rather like FOSS, in fact, the true extent of whose adoption is very hard to establish because there is little or no money involved. (How big is the "market" for Linux distributions? N times zero equals zero for all values of N).
Also rather like FOSS, in fact, the true extent of whose adoption, (outside of corporate server farms), no matter how surprisingly large it might be, is still a very small portion of the whole.
Thanks for the clarification. I see the point and the value of working with the abstraction, instead of second-guessing its design and creating a non-standard, less well tested, and possibly less modular / portable substitute. I guess what I was questioning was not being able to see and understand the inner workings.
You seem to have a poor understanding of programming.
1) Hiding implementation, including algorithm selection, is a large part of what objects are for...
IANAP - I'm a hardware guy, more into analog and RF than digital. When I'm dealing with hardware that has a 'black box' module, or an IC I can't find data on, or even when I'm repairing a complete system for which I don't have schematics or even wiring diagrams, I'm working in the kind of 'hidden implementation' space you're talking about. And whenever I'm in that position, the first thing I try to do is gain an understanding of the design and the behaviour of the module, circuit, or whatever. It always makes the work easier, and sometimes it's necessary, as in I if I can't figure it out I can't fix it. And when I'm designing a circuit, I always like to know what's going on inside any 'black-box' items I'm thinking about using.
I've also worked with programmers and heard them talking about the unexpected behaviour of some function or object. I totally get the purpose and power of objects in programing - but aren't there times when penetrating that abstraction will allow a programmer to write better code? And aren't there times when it's outright necessary for debugging the program?
To all those who voted for Trump because they wanted to change the channel and see something different: as the castration of the FCC demonstrates, it's definitely gonna be different alright, but you probably won't like it - and that's an understatement. Having said that, I totally get why you wanted change.
To all the party Democrats who made this slow-motion multi-year trainwreck possible: Wean yourselves from the pork barrel; get your noses out of the asses of corporations; set aside your delusional elitist notions; seek treatment for your psychopathy; and start honouring Joe and Jane Average. They would have put your party back in power if they thought you could be trusted. But you picked old-guard lame-duck same-old-same-old privilege-addicted Hillary to run in the abysmal Presidential race whose results have the whole fucking world alternately laughing, crying, and cringing at what your country has become. The rest of us are really spooked by all the extra grief America is already bringing down upon the world in the name of your new president's Nazi-inspired America First horror-fest. Trump and his embarrassing-but-dangerous reality TV shitstorm of a presidency are YOUR fault, the fault of your hubris, your greed, your arrogant blindness, and your history of abusing your constituents. You need to eat some humble pie, get back to your small-d democratic roots, get off your high horses, abandon your inbred retarded Ivy League shibboleths, and start representing ALL American citizens honestly, instead of paying them lip service, lying to them, and giving them the shaft as you've consistently done in past decades. Then maybe you can again be elected to govern, and to enjoy and be proud of, a country whose government agencies, such as the FCC, actually serve their constituents instead of servicing the point-one-percenters whose dicks you've grown so fond of sucking.
That depends on whether you're talking about a Canadian football field or an American one. Ours are 9 yards longer and 6 yards wider than American fields, and our end zones are deeper too.
If the user agent string is configurable in those older Chrome versions, that should solve the problem. If changing the user agent doesn't solve the problem, then perhaps Google has been doing something shady in their browsers all along.
Also, if Google is going to stick users of older Chrome versions with basic HTML, I wonder what they'll get up to with other brands of browser.
I'm so glad I never liked Chrome and never liked Gmail, so I never used them. It's bad enough that their search engine has mostly become a steaming pile of irrelevancy that can't tell the difference between a user trying to drill down through the clouds of shit they throw up, and a bot. I'm getting really sick of being forced to go through endless captchas as a result of Google's 'lowest common denominator' philosophy.
FTA:
"That night, the scientists injected a chemical into the brains of some of the mice. The chemical had been shown to block neurons in dishes from pruning their synapses. The next day, the scientists put all the mice back in the chamber they had been in before. Both groups of mice spent much of the time frozen, fearfully recalling the shock. But when the researchers put the mice in a different chamber, they saw a big difference. The ordinary mice sniffed around curiously. The mice that had been prevented from pruning their brain synapses during sleep, on the other hand, froze once again. Dr. Diering thinks that the injected mice couldn’t narrow their memories down to the particular chamber where they had gotten the shock. Without nighttime pruning, their memories ended up fuzzy."
I'm far, far away from being a neurologist, so I may be totally off track here. But these results remind me of what PTSD sufferers go through, and I have to wonder if they're related. Might the emotions experienced in response to traumatic events, be so strong as to alter neurons, synapses, or brain chemistry in such a way that the synapses aren't pruned in the normal way by sleep? Or perhaps the loss of sleep that results from traumatic experiences results in something like setting the 'immutable' bit on a file?
I still can't believe some people think the sentences are what's wrong, instead of the inaccurate verdicts. It's as though people think that figuratively taking an innocent person's life by putting them in prison for decades (or life) isn't an irreparable injustice on par with murder.
You are absolutely right. However, in an adversarial justice system administered and staffed by flawed human beings, mistakes WILL happen, even when there is no malice present, and even if we manage to improve the system. Given that, dispensing with the death penalty at least allows for the possibility of saving something valuable from the process. So yes, we need to improve the system under which verdicts occur, but we also need to abolish the death penalty. And we also need to radically reform the prison system as well. The contention that its purpose is that of 'correction' is a sick joke. The sooner we, as a society, get off this revenge kick we're stuck on, and start actively and committedly trying to rehabilitate criminals, the better off ALL of us will be.
When I have done electrical work on my place, I have to shake my head at the slipshod work that was done by the "professionals" Nicked wires, excessive insulation removal, badly routed wires...
Amen brother, to all of the above. Add to that list really shitty eyes, (or no eye at all), where the wire goes into a screw connection, too little spare cable left in the box, wire clamps not screwed down onto cables, unused cable clamps not screwed closed, half-hearted ground connections, drywall dust and construction crap left behind in boxes, sheathing coming too far into the box, (or worse yet, not far enough), etc. Some of the people who built the house I'm living in, (including electricians), must've been real knuckle-draggers.
No, it's an attempt to stop people who don't know what they are doing from endangering the lives of others by causing death by electrocution or fire (at least the lives of the fire department).
Since not all wiring issues are necessarily visible without ripping things apart I can understand the reluctance to sign off on work done by an amateur given the potential for liability.
Any electrician worth his salt won't sign off on anything he can't inspect thoroughly. With no drywall in place, no wire in conduit that he didn't witness being pulled, and no outlets / switches / light sockets screwed into their boxes, any competent electrician should be fine with inspecting and signing off on any DIY job that was done correctly and to code. For residential electrical, (perhaps with the exception of the main panel and any pony panels), there is no need for certification to do the job. There IS need for basic electrical knowledge, as well as of electrical codes, building codes, and common sense. There are plenty of jobs done by 'certified' electricians that are sloppy, against code, and even outright dangerous. Conversely, there are plenty of jobs done by DIY'ers that are neat, perfectly safe, and in conformance with applicable codes.
and Oracle is evil. These are all self-evident. For big companies, I guess the pain of migrating to another solution is greater than the pain of bending over for ol' Larry. Especially since they just pass the additional costs along. It's a pity, though, that some lesser evil doesn't take on the task of de-throning Oracle - it would be sweet to see them losing market share fast, and even sweeter to hear them begging their lost customers to come back.
The only people who actually listen to Nadella are those who drank the KoolAid, liked it, and drank lots more. His pronouncements are both smarmy and mostly free of anything important, credible, interesting, or even amusing. With Ballmer, at least one could occasionally grab a bag of popcorn and watch the show. By comparison, Nadella is a windbag and a walking, talking yawnfest. Does he provide anything for Microsoft that couldn't be had from the combined talents of a department store mannequin and a platitude-filled voice recorder?
Why do you think people buy stupid shit like 'hatch-a-mole", a single use toy. Sure they get a stuffed animal afterwards, that will never get played with again... Cut the cord and your kids will instantly stop bugging you about buying stupid shit.
When I read your comment I was immediately reminded of the lyrics to Joe Jackson's song "I'm The Man".
Why is it that companies that are nominally in competition with each other, and even face off against each other in court, can so easily co-operate with each other on new tech initiatives? I know that they're not enemies in the traditional sense, that it's all just business, and that they're stronger and likelier to succeed when they pool their expertise and resources. But given their competitive positions, I still I find these relationships curious. Is it the equivalent of family infighting, where siblings can be ruthless with each other yet still circle the wagons and defend each other against outsiders? Or is it something else? I'd really like to understand it...
It would be one thing if Apple hadn't completely mollified the naysayers and those with beloved analog headsets by both including a Lightning-based headset AND a simple Lightning to 3.5 mm adapter cable; but they did.
First, fanboi, when you 'mollify' your customers, you're being patronizing and insulting - much like your post. Second, Apple's workaround requires an adapter, which adds a bit of clunkiness and can easily get lost. Third, the headphones then connect to the bottom of the phone - not the most convenient thing. Fourth, you can't externally power the phone while having a headset connected - and that's a big downside for a lot of people.
One of the biggest advantages of using a digital output that an alleged "audiophile" like you has completely overlooked Is the fact that, by using an external DAC, you completely free yourself from the constraints of the analog output circuitry in the iPhone.
True, but beside the point. Users COULD have both the 3.5mm jack AND the digital audio output, if it wasn't for Apple's laughable definition of 'courage'.
Part of me wants to applaud this initiative, yet another part of me is very uneasy. From a link in TFS:
...we built partnerships with dozens of publishers in a copyright aligned model...
"Copyright aligned"? I sorta get it; on the other hand any scientific data that was funded in whole or in part by the government, (either directly, or indirectly via tax breaks / subsidies), should be copyright-free as far as I'm concerned. Realistically, that means the vast majority of such data.
...we also commercialized an AI technology that can read millions of papers to uncover emerging discoveries years ahead of time...
This sounds potentially useful - so long as the scientists who use it don't fall into the trap of relying solely on this pre-digested data instead of going to the source. It also strikes me as a kind of censorship bottleneck. Whether selectively and on purpose, (for political ends), or accidentally because of faults in the algos or in the paradigm used in their design, a LOT of potentially important info will be caught in this giant data sieve and left behind.
We worked progressively through the creation of capabilities toward a universal system for analyzing scientific knowledge.
Except for some very fundamental principles, "universal" and "scientific knowledge" should be held to be mutually exclusive. There is no absolute, nor even objective, definition of "universal" when it comes to science, because science is constantly re-defining what we regard as universal.
In short, this idea may seem good from afar, but it may also be far from good when it's put into practice. The framing of this project just drips with hubris.
Slashdot Mirror
He has said similar before, except in place of "complex solutions" he used socialism, socialist practices, and socialist policies. So yes, he is indeed using "complex solutions" as a synonym.
I decided to give you the benefit of the doubt. I wasn't willing to read or even skim AmiMoJo's posting history, because with WELL north of 500 posts since mid-December of last year, he's way too prolific for me to keep up with. But I DID search for the string 'sociali' in every one of those 39 pages' worth of way-more-than-500 posts. Except for this thread, there were ZERO matches.
I can't say whether or not AmiMoJo promotes socialism; but if he does so, he certainly doesn't call it by its name.
Using fundraising itself as a benchmark is dangerous for the entire community because it encourages a culture of optimizing for short term showmanship instead of making something people want and creating lasting value
That's all true, but it ignores the fact that almost the entirety of manufacturing consumer products is 'optimized for short term showmanship' and is based on a model of planned obsolescence. When the manufacturing sector makes as much money as possible for goods that are made to break easily, be difficult or impossible to service, and be obsolete in a short amount of time, it's impossible for that attitude NOT to seep into the innovation sector. So long as the world economy is basically a giant Ponzi scheme, 'getting while the getting's good' is going to be an all-too-common practice.
Ah yes - another would-be resident of Galt's Gulch.
The problem is that the solutions are complex and a lot of people are conditioned to be automatically hostile to them
...The solution must not be in ruling, overpowering, fighting people, it should be in allowing the people to help themselves and while helping themselves they will help others by creating actual solutions that do not rely on the armed power of the State.
Unfortunately, humans have a strong tendency toward selfishness - not the kind that Ayn Rand hallucinated, but the kind she redefined as 'selflessness' and foisted upon the villains in the stories she wrote. Real people WILL sometimes take unfair and even violent action to get ahead - it's a part of being human. In the absence of a State with police and a justice system, they will help themselves by stealing from, manipulating, and taking advantage of, those who are weaker; they will form powerful associations and allegiances that will evolve into a new de facto State. And in that State, weaker individuals will have no police to go to to have their rights protected. Unless, of course, there are private-enterprise police forces. The people who can afford their services will have protection; others won't; and there we are right back at class distinctions and a different law for the rich than for the poor.
Why are you using "complex solutions" as a synonym for socialism (and by transitive property solutions == socialism)?
AmiMoJo said that the solutions are "associated with" socialism, not "synonymous with" socialism.
Putting the cart before the horse there. How about we find out what works before claiming one and only one solution is the ultimate answer to everything.
Jumping to a conclusion there. Anybody who says that "the solutions are complex" is, by definition, NOT talking about "one and only solution". And no, I'm not being pedantic - I'm merely pointing out that you're putting words in AmiMoJo's mouth. BTW, where did AmiMoJo say anything about an "ultimate answer"? Are you reading a different thread than I am?
The solutions for our current social and economic problems, and for those likely to come in the future with the widespread adoption of automation, ARE complex. They won't fit into the oversimplification forced on us by narrow ideological / political constructs, and if we limit ourselves to the same old sophomoric poli-sci name-calling, then we're doomed.
I'm crying all the tears for those rich wall street investors who will get outsourced. Really, I am.
Let me guess - you're a crocodile, right?
As soon as you start thinking in terms of "winners" and "losers", you are passively accepting the picture of the Internet as a commercial marketplace in which corporations compete for profit. There are already far too many aspects of modern life of which this is true.
I'm not sure that's "passively accepting", so much as it is acknowledging the existing state of affairs as it is perceived by the majority of people who aren't Slashdotters.
Regardless of its commercial excrescences (which we are free to ignore if we wish) the Internet continues to be of huge value as a common medium of communication. It's all too easy to overlook the enormous amount of learning and discussion that goes on every day, without anyone paying much notice becuase there is little or no money involved.
Unfortunately, there is a lot of money involved in building and maintaining the infrastructure, so all of that grass-roots activity you're rightly extolling exists at the sufferance of corporations that can and will pull the plug in accordance with their own desires and profit-driven agendas.
Rather like FOSS, in fact, the true extent of whose adoption is very hard to establish because there is little or no money involved. (How big is the "market" for Linux distributions? N times zero equals zero for all values of N).
Also rather like FOSS, in fact, the true extent of whose adoption, (outside of corporate server farms), no matter how surprisingly large it might be, is still a very small portion of the whole.
Thanks for the clarification. I see the point and the value of working with the abstraction, instead of second-guessing its design and creating a non-standard, less well tested, and possibly less modular / portable substitute. I guess what I was questioning was not being able to see and understand the inner workings.
Depends on their usage of goto... using it to jump backwards, or make loops, or basically any other usage, yea, those should be stricken
So does that mean in C it's safe to use goto so long as I make sure I don't purposely or accidentally create recursion with it? ;-)
You seem to have a poor understanding of programming.
1) Hiding implementation, including algorithm selection, is a large part of what objects are for...
IANAP - I'm a hardware guy, more into analog and RF than digital. When I'm dealing with hardware that has a 'black box' module, or an IC I can't find data on, or even when I'm repairing a complete system for which I don't have schematics or even wiring diagrams, I'm working in the kind of 'hidden implementation' space you're talking about. And whenever I'm in that position, the first thing I try to do is gain an understanding of the design and the behaviour of the module, circuit, or whatever. It always makes the work easier, and sometimes it's necessary, as in I if I can't figure it out I can't fix it. And when I'm designing a circuit, I always like to know what's going on inside any 'black-box' items I'm thinking about using.
I've also worked with programmers and heard them talking about the unexpected behaviour of some function or object. I totally get the purpose and power of objects in programing - but aren't there times when penetrating that abstraction will allow a programmer to write better code? And aren't there times when it's outright necessary for debugging the program?
'Cause that's how history gets re-written!
To all those who voted for Trump because they wanted to change the channel and see something different: as the castration of the FCC demonstrates, it's definitely gonna be different alright, but you probably won't like it - and that's an understatement. Having said that, I totally get why you wanted change.
To all the party Democrats who made this slow-motion multi-year trainwreck possible: Wean yourselves from the pork barrel; get your noses out of the asses of corporations; set aside your delusional elitist notions; seek treatment for your psychopathy; and start honouring Joe and Jane Average. They would have put your party back in power if they thought you could be trusted. But you picked old-guard lame-duck same-old-same-old privilege-addicted Hillary to run in the abysmal Presidential race whose results have the whole fucking world alternately laughing, crying, and cringing at what your country has become. The rest of us are really spooked by all the extra grief America is already bringing down upon the world in the name of your new president's Nazi-inspired America First horror-fest. Trump and his embarrassing-but-dangerous reality TV shitstorm of a presidency are YOUR fault, the fault of your hubris, your greed, your arrogant blindness, and your history of abusing your constituents. You need to eat some humble pie, get back to your small-d democratic roots, get off your high horses, abandon your inbred retarded Ivy League shibboleths, and start representing ALL American citizens honestly, instead of paying them lip service, lying to them, and giving them the shaft as you've consistently done in past decades. Then maybe you can again be elected to govern, and to enjoy and be proud of, a country whose government agencies, such as the FCC, actually serve their constituents instead of servicing the point-one-percenters whose dicks you've grown so fond of sucking.
How many football fields is it?
That depends on whether you're talking about a Canadian football field or an American one. Ours are 9 yards longer and 6 yards wider than American fields, and our end zones are deeper too.
All the better to suck up every last bit of privacy you possess, my dear!
If the user agent string is configurable in those older Chrome versions, that should solve the problem. If changing the user agent doesn't solve the problem, then perhaps Google has been doing something shady in their browsers all along.
Also, if Google is going to stick users of older Chrome versions with basic HTML, I wonder what they'll get up to with other brands of browser.
I'm so glad I never liked Chrome and never liked Gmail, so I never used them. It's bad enough that their search engine has mostly become a steaming pile of irrelevancy that can't tell the difference between a user trying to drill down through the clouds of shit they throw up, and a bot. I'm getting really sick of being forced to go through endless captchas as a result of Google's 'lowest common denominator' philosophy.
FTA:
"That night, the scientists injected a chemical into the brains of some of the mice. The chemical had been shown to block neurons in dishes from pruning their synapses. The next day, the scientists put all the mice back in the chamber they had been in before. Both groups of mice spent much of the time frozen, fearfully recalling the shock. But when the researchers put the mice in a different chamber, they saw a big difference. The ordinary mice sniffed around curiously. The mice that had been prevented from pruning their brain synapses during sleep, on the other hand, froze once again. Dr. Diering thinks that the injected mice couldn’t narrow their memories down to the particular chamber where they had gotten the shock. Without nighttime pruning, their memories ended up fuzzy."
I'm far, far away from being a neurologist, so I may be totally off track here. But these results remind me of what PTSD sufferers go through, and I have to wonder if they're related. Might the emotions experienced in response to traumatic events, be so strong as to alter neurons, synapses, or brain chemistry in such a way that the synapses aren't pruned in the normal way by sleep? Or perhaps the loss of sleep that results from traumatic experiences results in something like setting the 'immutable' bit on a file?
They want justice now, they don't have time for the courts to do their job.
They want revenge now, they don't have time for the courts to do their job. FTFY
I still can't believe some people think the sentences are what's wrong, instead of the inaccurate verdicts. It's as though people think that figuratively taking an innocent person's life by putting them in prison for decades (or life) isn't an irreparable injustice on par with murder.
You are absolutely right. However, in an adversarial justice system administered and staffed by flawed human beings, mistakes WILL happen, even when there is no malice present, and even if we manage to improve the system. Given that, dispensing with the death penalty at least allows for the possibility of saving something valuable from the process. So yes, we need to improve the system under which verdicts occur, but we also need to abolish the death penalty. And we also need to radically reform the prison system as well. The contention that its purpose is that of 'correction' is a sick joke. The sooner we, as a society, get off this revenge kick we're stuck on, and start actively and committedly trying to rehabilitate criminals, the better off ALL of us will be.
When I have done electrical work on my place, I have to shake my head at the slipshod work that was done by the "professionals" Nicked wires, excessive insulation removal, badly routed wires...
Amen brother, to all of the above. Add to that list really shitty eyes, (or no eye at all), where the wire goes into a screw connection, too little spare cable left in the box, wire clamps not screwed down onto cables, unused cable clamps not screwed closed, half-hearted ground connections, drywall dust and construction crap left behind in boxes, sheathing coming too far into the box, (or worse yet, not far enough), etc. Some of the people who built the house I'm living in, (including electricians), must've been real knuckle-draggers.
No, it's an attempt to stop people who don't know what they are doing from endangering the lives of others by causing death by electrocution or fire (at least the lives of the fire department).
Since not all wiring issues are necessarily visible without ripping things apart I can understand the reluctance to sign off on work done by an amateur given the potential for liability.
Any electrician worth his salt won't sign off on anything he can't inspect thoroughly. With no drywall in place, no wire in conduit that he didn't witness being pulled, and no outlets / switches / light sockets screwed into their boxes, any competent electrician should be fine with inspecting and signing off on any DIY job that was done correctly and to code. For residential electrical, (perhaps with the exception of the main panel and any pony panels), there is no need for certification to do the job. There IS need for basic electrical knowledge, as well as of electrical codes, building codes, and common sense. There are plenty of jobs done by 'certified' electricians that are sloppy, against code, and even outright dangerous. Conversely, there are plenty of jobs done by DIY'ers that are neat, perfectly safe, and in conformance with applicable codes.
and Oracle is evil. These are all self-evident. For big companies, I guess the pain of migrating to another solution is greater than the pain of bending over for ol' Larry. Especially since they just pass the additional costs along. It's a pity, though, that some lesser evil doesn't take on the task of de-throning Oracle - it would be sweet to see them losing market share fast, and even sweeter to hear them begging their lost customers to come back.
The only people who actually listen to Nadella are those who drank the KoolAid, liked it, and drank lots more. His pronouncements are both smarmy and mostly free of anything important, credible, interesting, or even amusing. With Ballmer, at least one could occasionally grab a bag of popcorn and watch the show. By comparison, Nadella is a windbag and a walking, talking yawnfest. Does he provide anything for Microsoft that couldn't be had from the combined talents of a department store mannequin and a platitude-filled voice recorder?
Why do you think people buy stupid shit like 'hatch-a-mole", a single use toy. Sure they get a stuffed animal afterwards, that will never get played with again... Cut the cord and your kids will instantly stop bugging you about buying stupid shit.
When I read your comment I was immediately reminded of the lyrics to Joe Jackson's song "I'm The Man".
then where's my flying car?
Why is it that companies that are nominally in competition with each other, and even face off against each other in court, can so easily co-operate with each other on new tech initiatives? I know that they're not enemies in the traditional sense, that it's all just business, and that they're stronger and likelier to succeed when they pool their expertise and resources. But given their competitive positions, I still I find these relationships curious. Is it the equivalent of family infighting, where siblings can be ruthless with each other yet still circle the wagons and defend each other against outsiders? Or is it something else? I'd really like to understand it...
It would be one thing if Apple hadn't completely mollified the naysayers and those with beloved analog headsets by both including a Lightning-based headset AND a simple Lightning to 3.5 mm adapter cable; but they did.
First, fanboi, when you 'mollify' your customers, you're being patronizing and insulting - much like your post. Second, Apple's workaround requires an adapter, which adds a bit of clunkiness and can easily get lost. Third, the headphones then connect to the bottom of the phone - not the most convenient thing. Fourth, you can't externally power the phone while having a headset connected - and that's a big downside for a lot of people.
One of the biggest advantages of using a digital output that an alleged "audiophile" like you has completely overlooked Is the fact that, by using an external DAC, you completely free yourself from the constraints of the analog output circuitry in the iPhone.
True, but beside the point. Users COULD have both the 3.5mm jack AND the digital audio output, if it wasn't for Apple's laughable definition of 'courage'.
Didn't think of THOSE ones, didja?
Part of me wants to applaud this initiative, yet another part of me is very uneasy. From a link in TFS:
...we built partnerships with dozens of publishers in a copyright aligned model...
"Copyright aligned"? I sorta get it; on the other hand any scientific data that was funded in whole or in part by the government, (either directly, or indirectly via tax breaks / subsidies), should be copyright-free as far as I'm concerned. Realistically, that means the vast majority of such data.
...we also commercialized an AI technology that can read millions of papers to uncover emerging discoveries years ahead of time...
This sounds potentially useful - so long as the scientists who use it don't fall into the trap of relying solely on this pre-digested data instead of going to the source. It also strikes me as a kind of censorship bottleneck. Whether selectively and on purpose, (for political ends), or accidentally because of faults in the algos or in the paradigm used in their design, a LOT of potentially important info will be caught in this giant data sieve and left behind.
We worked progressively through the creation of capabilities toward a universal system for analyzing scientific knowledge.
Except for some very fundamental principles, "universal" and "scientific knowledge" should be held to be mutually exclusive. There is no absolute, nor even objective, definition of "universal" when it comes to science, because science is constantly re-defining what we regard as universal.
In short, this idea may seem good from afar, but it may also be far from good when it's put into practice. The framing of this project just drips with hubris.