If there are criminal charges, I expect that they will be with token 'punishments'. To an average, sane, person, what punishment can compare to the knowledge that almost a dozen people were senselessly murdered because of your poor judgement? There are no reparations they could make to the victims or their families for the loss.
This knowledge will haunt them for the rest of their lives.
Exactly. The problem is that the people who hire don't understand that difference, so you end up competing against people who think they're a programmer just cause they know how to draw a couple of text boxes in Visual Basic.
While I understand what you're trying to say, I argue that there's a fundamental flaw in your analogy.
The difference between windows and android is that windows is a) (More or less) stable, b) You have options to fix problems, and c) people are *used* to having to deal with problems, so when a problem happens people arn't surprised. They just roll their eyes and grunt "Great, not again..."
With android, as an end user you are stuck with what you got. There's (generally) no such thing as modding your android device. Hell, there's an excellent chance that you won't even get point releases for your OS, *even when* you bought your device from one of the major manufacturers, so you can forget about OS fixes, driver updates, etc.
Additionally, you say that people don't complain when their desktop games have issues. That's incorrect. I was having trouble getting Fallout 3 to run stable in a Windows VM, and while researching the causes I found a shockingly number of issues, many of which required going into the games config files to change the number of simultaneous threads, changing the amount of physical memory in the machine, etc. The difference here is that if you have problems on your desktop, there is a good chance that it's *fixable*. You may need to take extreme steps, but there is usually a way to work around whatever problem you're having.
For Android? If it doesn't work, it doesn't work. End of story. All you can do is complain to the dev and hope they can fix the problem, and won't just update the app description with "This game/app won't work on device X".
As a developer, in the desktop world, if your game is having a strange graphics issue, you don't go to Microsoft. You go to the graphics chip manufacturer because of possible bugs in the driver. If your game doesn't work on the EU version of Samsung Galaxy S4, what do you do? Complain to samsung? Dig through spec sheets to find out what graphics chip samsung happened to use for that particular SKU, and then hope beyond hope you can even talk to chip manufacturer for help, assuming that Samsung didn't make proprietary tweaks to the base driver code, or possible something even more esoteric?
As long as you stick with major manufacturers, and use a toolkit like Unity, then the likelyhood of this happening is pretty remote. But I've already learned the hard way that using a generic android device from a non-major manufacturer just takes you into a world of pain.
No, this is a problem that started well before the ubiquity of google. The most obvious moment was when microsoft created Visual Basic. Suddenly a large swath of people who didn't know jack suddenly had the power to write shittastic applications. And it's just been getting worse from there, as more and more languages are being created to 'make life easier'.
So now we have a huge swath of people who actually become offended when they have to declare their variable types cause if they change their minds it's SUCH a hassle to go back and redeclare that variable.
Engineers are responsible for the stuff they build. The average programmer is not.
Engineers require formal education, certification, apprenticeship, etc. Anyone can call themselves a programmer, regardless of their level of skill. And the situation is just getting worse and worse, because everyone clamours about the importance of lowering the barrier of entry for new developers, resulting in more and more people who know less and less, all the while thinking that they they are on equal footing with someone who could write an artificial intelligence with Cobol and assembly language. (Yes, it's a silly example, I know, but you get the point) .
I *wish* there was an engineering equivalent to software development. The number of people I come across that think they're god's gift to man, while being grossly incompetent, is depressing.
Requiring people to be able to demonstrate that they actually know WTF they're talking about would probably wipe out a sizable percentage of the hacks out there, it would give the people who have the talent, but not necessarily the skill/experience, a goal to aim for so that they can *know* when they have reached a suitable level, and overall code quality would improve immeasurably because the people who know what they were doing wouldn't have to spend so much time preventing the boneheads from tanking the entire project.
True... things were messy in the past, but at least you knew that, "Different connector, therefore different thing". A perfect example of what happens when that failed, was the whole 25-pin parallel vs SCSI connector. That was a lovely mess, up until IDE came about and wiped SCSI out of the consumer market.
There is absolutely no reason why they had to repeat the confusion with USB-C & 3.1. They should have just said "USB-C = USB 3.1", and that was it. Throw in some adapters for compatibility, and we'd be done. But no, now we have to worry about USB-C v2.0, v3.0, v3.1, USB-C Thunderbolt....
This means someone will be able to buy a USB-C monitor to connect to their USB-C laptop, and become frustrated that it doesn't work because they didn't realize that the USB-C on their laptop is only compatible with USB 2.0.
USB-C could have been such an awesome standard. But when I read about all the possible feature variations (http://www.kitguru.net/desktop-pc/anton-shilov/not-all-usb-type-c-ports-are-equal-nine-implementations-of-usb-c-incoming/), I can only shake my head. While it's very cool, especially with integrated thunderbolt support, the idea of splitting it into different versions is just gonna cause nightmares.
We're going to enter an age where people tear their hair out because everyone has the same port, but one person can do one thing with it but another person cannot. The whole HDMI versions confusion is gonna look tame compared to the confusion USB C will cause.
Seriously... is AppleTV being marketed as a video games console? No it isn't, nor has it ever been, at any point in time.
Complaining about how a (more or less) advanced media player can't compete against flagship console devices that were *designed* to play all these fancy schmancy games, is like complaining that Lamborghini's cars arn't capable of flight because they refuse to add wings and connect a propeller to it's powerful engine.
This statement in the article really popped out for me.
"As it sought to comply with the law, Congo’s government shut down the mining industry for months. Then, a process was launched to certify the country’s minerals as conflict-free. But the process is unfolding at a glacial pace, marred by a lack of political will, corruption and bureaucratic and logistical delays."
So in essence, they're blaming the US for their own governments inability to get their shit together and... you know... govern.
Based on current knowledge, there *shouldn't* be any occurrences of thyroid cancer. Thyroid cancer caused by these circumstances is a known problem with a known solution: giving everyone iodine tabets for a couple weeks. The solution is so simple and solid that this shouldn't have even need to be discussed.
Yet for some reason tablets were not dispensed (http://ajw.asahi.com/article/0311disaster/fukushima/AJ201108298140), and now 'experts' are being paraded around to downplay real concerns.
People like to claim that Fukushima shows the dangers of nuclear energy. It didn't. It showed the dangers of what happens when you hire idiots to run important infrastructure companies. It shows the dangers of electing scientifically ignorant morons to run a country.
Now Japan is going to blanket the country with coal plants, which is ultimately going to be even worse because of all the radioactive elements that are gonna be spewed into the atmosphere. And that's ignoring the particulate crap and other compounds that will also be spewed from the coal, and the massive consumption of precious land that will now be necessary to hold all these new plants.
I can't possibly fathom what point the original poster was trying to make, assuming there even was one. But I was responding to the AC who indicated that the original comment wasn't racist, when it clearly was.
I'd love to see this implemented. Then I'd get some popcorn and stay the heck away from the area cause once the soundwaves bounce off enough surfaces, they'll lose enough energy to fall into hearing range, and suddenly you feel like you're back in the 80s, surrounded by TVs with failing transformers.
How exactly is it self righteous to expect someone who claims to be a software developer, to actually be skilled in that field?
How is it self-righteous that a client's project is gonna crash and burn because they are using developers that *don't* follow best practises, and end up vomiting some kind of nonsense that vaguely resembles intelligible code?
I've HAD people fired for being grossly incompetent, to the point where they were a threat to the project. And you know what? They were perfectly nice and friendly people. That doesn't change the fact that they shouldn't have been allowed anything more sophisticated than a burger grill.
So yeah, I dunno if you're actually a project manager or just some AC putting on airs, but if you would rather ride your mission critical project on someone who was "nice" rather than someone who actually knew what they were doing... Well... I look forward to reading about your projects on The Daily WTF.
Slashdot Mirror
The question is, were said cabbies doing it out of their own pockets in order to better appeal to customers?
Based on the article, it sounds like the overarching corporation didn't give two shits about customer-focus, thanks to their monopoly.
Interesting list of alternative OSes, including some I'd never heard of.
http://www.howtogeek.com/19021...
The FA doesn't mention anything about Ubuntu. Do you have a link?
Is it just the pre-loaded versions of Ubuntu, like the preloaded versions of Windows?
If there are criminal charges, I expect that they will be with token 'punishments'. To an average, sane, person, what punishment can compare to the knowledge that almost a dozen people were senselessly murdered because of your poor judgement? There are no reparations they could make to the victims or their families for the loss.
This knowledge will haunt them for the rest of their lives.
Exactly. The problem is that the people who hire don't understand that difference, so you end up competing against people who think they're a programmer just cause they know how to draw a couple of text boxes in Visual Basic.
Developers. If you can flood the market with people who know how to code, then you can pay them at fast-food worker wages.
What if you rig it so that you send XON/XOFF signals when you cough?
OMG... ZOC is still around? I haven't used that since... well... since I used OS/2 Warp 2.1
And they still use REXX! http://www.emtec.com/zoc/
I'm dissappointed. I was hoping to hear about COWs next great adventure!
While I understand what you're trying to say, I argue that there's a fundamental flaw in your analogy.
The difference between windows and android is that windows is a) (More or less) stable, b) You have options to fix problems, and c) people are *used* to having to deal with problems, so when a problem happens people arn't surprised. They just roll their eyes and grunt "Great, not again..."
With android, as an end user you are stuck with what you got. There's (generally) no such thing as modding your android device. Hell, there's an excellent chance that you won't even get point releases for your OS, *even when* you bought your device from one of the major manufacturers, so you can forget about OS fixes, driver updates, etc.
Additionally, you say that people don't complain when their desktop games have issues. That's incorrect. I was having trouble getting Fallout 3 to run stable in a Windows VM, and while researching the causes I found a shockingly number of issues, many of which required going into the games config files to change the number of simultaneous threads, changing the amount of physical memory in the machine, etc. The difference here is that if you have problems on your desktop, there is a good chance that it's *fixable*. You may need to take extreme steps, but there is usually a way to work around whatever problem you're having.
For Android? If it doesn't work, it doesn't work. End of story. All you can do is complain to the dev and hope they can fix the problem, and won't just update the app description with "This game/app won't work on device X".
As a developer, in the desktop world, if your game is having a strange graphics issue, you don't go to Microsoft. You go to the graphics chip manufacturer because of possible bugs in the driver.
If your game doesn't work on the EU version of Samsung Galaxy S4, what do you do? Complain to samsung? Dig through spec sheets to find out what graphics chip samsung happened to use for that particular SKU, and then hope beyond hope you can even talk to chip manufacturer for help, assuming that Samsung didn't make proprietary tweaks to the base driver code, or possible something even more esoteric?
As long as you stick with major manufacturers, and use a toolkit like Unity, then the likelyhood of this happening is pretty remote. But I've already learned the hard way that using a generic android device from a non-major manufacturer just takes you into a world of pain.
http://www.freeusenetnews.com/... :D
Now that's just scary.
No, this is a problem that started well before the ubiquity of google. The most obvious moment was when microsoft created Visual Basic. Suddenly a large swath of people who didn't know jack suddenly had the power to write shittastic applications. And it's just been getting worse from there, as more and more languages are being created to 'make life easier'.
So now we have a huge swath of people who actually become offended when they have to declare their variable types cause if they change their minds it's SUCH a hassle to go back and redeclare that variable.
Engineers are responsible for the stuff they build. The average programmer is not.
Engineers require formal education, certification, apprenticeship, etc. Anyone can call themselves a programmer, regardless of their level of skill. And the situation is just getting worse and worse, because everyone clamours about the importance of lowering the barrier of entry for new developers, resulting in more and more people who know less and less, all the while thinking that they they are on equal footing with someone who could write an artificial intelligence with Cobol and assembly language. (Yes, it's a silly example, I know, but you get the point) .
I *wish* there was an engineering equivalent to software development. The number of people I come across that think they're god's gift to man, while being grossly incompetent, is depressing.
Requiring people to be able to demonstrate that they actually know WTF they're talking about would probably wipe out a sizable percentage of the hacks out there, it would give the people who have the talent, but not necessarily the skill/experience, a goal to aim for so that they can *know* when they have reached a suitable level, and overall code quality would improve immeasurably because the people who know what they were doing wouldn't have to spend so much time preventing the boneheads from tanking the entire project.
True... things were messy in the past, but at least you knew that, "Different connector, therefore different thing". A perfect example of what happens when that failed, was the whole 25-pin parallel vs SCSI connector. That was a lovely mess, up until IDE came about and wiped SCSI out of the consumer market.
There is absolutely no reason why they had to repeat the confusion with USB-C & 3.1. They should have just said "USB-C = USB 3.1", and that was it. Throw in some adapters for compatibility, and we'd be done. But no, now we have to worry about USB-C v2.0, v3.0, v3.1, USB-C Thunderbolt....
This means someone will be able to buy a USB-C monitor to connect to their USB-C laptop, and become frustrated that it doesn't work because they didn't realize that the USB-C on their laptop is only compatible with USB 2.0.
USB-C could have been such an awesome standard. But when I read about all the possible feature variations (http://www.kitguru.net/desktop-pc/anton-shilov/not-all-usb-type-c-ports-are-equal-nine-implementations-of-usb-c-incoming/), I can only shake my head. While it's very cool, especially with integrated thunderbolt support, the idea of splitting it into different versions is just gonna cause nightmares.
We're going to enter an age where people tear their hair out because everyone has the same port, but one person can do one thing with it but another person cannot. The whole HDMI versions confusion is gonna look tame compared to the confusion USB C will cause.
Seriously... is AppleTV being marketed as a video games console? No it isn't, nor has it ever been, at any point in time.
Complaining about how a (more or less) advanced media player can't compete against flagship console devices that were *designed* to play all these fancy schmancy games, is like complaining that Lamborghini's cars arn't capable of flight because they refuse to add wings and connect a propeller to it's powerful engine.
Another sound technical decision, from the company that built the Fukushima nuclear reactors.
This statement in the article really popped out for me.
"As it sought to comply with the law, Congo’s government shut down the mining industry for months. Then, a process was launched to certify the country’s minerals as conflict-free. But the process is unfolding at a glacial pace, marred by a lack of political will, corruption and bureaucratic and logistical delays."
So in essence, they're blaming the US for their own governments inability to get their shit together and... you know... govern.
Can someone explain to me why my post has been modded troll?
Based on current knowledge, there *shouldn't* be any occurrences of thyroid cancer. Thyroid cancer caused by these circumstances is a known problem with a known solution: giving everyone iodine tabets for a couple weeks. The solution is so simple and solid that this shouldn't have even need to be discussed.
Yet for some reason tablets were not dispensed (http://ajw.asahi.com/article/0311disaster/fukushima/AJ201108298140), and now 'experts' are being paraded around to downplay real concerns.
People like to claim that Fukushima shows the dangers of nuclear energy. It didn't. It showed the dangers of what happens when you hire idiots to run important infrastructure companies. It shows the dangers of electing scientifically ignorant morons to run a country.
Now Japan is going to blanket the country with coal plants, which is ultimately going to be even worse because of all the radioactive elements that are gonna be spewed into the atmosphere. And that's ignoring the particulate crap and other compounds that will also be spewed from the coal, and the massive consumption of precious land that will now be necessary to hold all these new plants.
I can't possibly fathom what point the original poster was trying to make, assuming there even was one. But I was responding to the AC who indicated that the original comment wasn't racist, when it clearly was.
So apparently in your world, calling someone a "half-nigger piece of shit" isn't racist? You must be a Donald Trump supporter.
I'd love to see this implemented. Then I'd get some popcorn and stay the heck away from the area cause once the soundwaves bounce off enough surfaces, they'll lose enough energy to fall into hearing range, and suddenly you feel like you're back in the 80s, surrounded by TVs with failing transformers.
How exactly is it self righteous to expect someone who claims to be a software developer, to actually be skilled in that field?
How is it self-righteous that a client's project is gonna crash and burn because they are using developers that *don't* follow best practises, and end up vomiting some kind of nonsense that vaguely resembles intelligible code?
I've HAD people fired for being grossly incompetent, to the point where they were a threat to the project. And you know what? They were perfectly nice and friendly people. That doesn't change the fact that they shouldn't have been allowed anything more sophisticated than a burger grill.
So yeah, I dunno if you're actually a project manager or just some AC putting on airs, but if you would rather ride your mission critical project on someone who was "nice" rather than someone who actually knew what they were doing... Well... I look forward to reading about your projects on The Daily WTF.