Objective-C rocks, really. But! If you don't know it, and you have an existing code base in C#, maybe this would be useful. I guess. I think this is not aimed at making iPhone/iPad app development easier in general, but rather, specifically for people who are already using C#. In which case, it's not totally stupid. Just mostly stupid.
FWIW, I'm currently at the "okay, that's the basic functionality, now what do I do next?" phase of developing an iPhone app. From "never even looked at the docs" to "working multitouch and graphics" took me, oh, a good solid two evenings.
This is where the fundamental problem comes in: It is completely obvious that people need to be allowed to block spam and botnets, but it's extremely hard to offer a legally sane definition of the traffic that you should be allowed to block contrasted with the traffic you should not be allowed to block. (It gets weirder still when you consider mere traffic-prioritization questions.)
I don't think there's any solution short of implementing the Evil Bit. (All malicious traffic must set the Evil Bit in its TCP headers.)
I would think that the part where L. Ron Hubbard said that it was not a religion, but that they were claiming to be one exclusively for tax purposes, and this changed nothing, would weigh heavily against a finding that it is "a religion".
I buy devices for what they do, not how much silicon they need to accomplish it. Same reason we get hours and hours of gameplay from the Wii, and my PS3 has been sitting on a shelf, not even plugged in, for most of the last year; the PS3 is way more powerful, but the games I want to play are on the Wii.
Re:You have it completely right
on
PS3 Hacked?
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· Score: 1
As I understand it: Tax reasons, basically. They could get into a better tariff category by being able to call it a computer.
Imagine that the volume of non-spam email remains constant.
If spam was previously 94% of email, and is now just over 95% of email, that is not a change of 1% in the amount of spam.
Let's give concrete numbers. Imagine that there are one million non-spam emails per time unit. How much spam needs to be sent for spam to be 94% of email? The total amount of mail would be 16.6~ million emails, so 15.6~ million of them would be spam. Now imagine that the new amount of non-spam email is "less than 5%" -- let's say it's 4.9%. That would mean a total volume of email of about 20.4M, so about 19.4M of them are spam. So. That's a 23% increase in the volume of spam.
Now let's be realistic. Does anyone actually think the volume of non-spam email has *decreased*? I sure don't.
So this "minor" change is on the rough order of a TWENTY FIVE PERCENT INCREASE in the amount of spam.
The entire POINT of statutory damages is to allow civil suits to act as a deterrent in cases where actual damages are hard to measure unambiguously, and/or to provide an extra deterrent.
Basically, think of statutory damages as being, in many cases, a bounty offered for private citizens (or corporations) who take on the cost and time commitment of enforcing laws that are not cost-effective for the government to try to enforce. This is the same kind of law as the TCPA (the law that lets you sue telemarketers) or the FDCPA (the law that lets you sue sleazy debt collectors).
No one thinks that the actual damage done to someone from receiving a single junk fax or phone call is $500, and certainly, no one thinks it's actually $1,500 if the person doing it knew that they were doing so without written consent (or whatever requirement is imposed). (Note that the requirement for "willful or knowing" in TCPA is not that you knew what the law was, but that you knew what you were doing. If you push a button that, unbeknownst to you, sends a fax to someone, you could be on the hook for $500; if you buy a list of fax numbers and send a fax to one of them, knowing that you have never obtained that person's written consent, you could be on the hook for $1,500.) In most cases, the damage done by a single instance of a debt collector failing to comply with one of the relatively arcane rules governing third-party debt collections is well under $1,000...
But setting the statutory damages to those numbers makes it possible for private citizens to take these cases on, while if it were up to the District Attorney, it'd never be worth it compared to other, higher-profile, cases.
So no, people should not have to prove "actual damages" to collect damages. When Congress makes a law against something, it is reasonable for the law to specify a statutory penalty.
That's not to say there's no room for skepticism about the ruling. A more interesting question is figuring out what the units should be. For instance, if you distribute an album, have you distributed one thing or several things? That could be an interesting avenue to explore. On the other hand, it turns out that Our Hero has learned something most people learn pretty early on in dealing with the courts: If you're a shitty liar, and lie under oath, you will lose the jury's sympathy. Don't do that.
I have roughly 500 DVDs, none of which display in HD. Nor do I care whether they display in HD. I don't actually see it as a big deal; I am watching for dialogue and plot, not for pixel-count.
1. Developers shall not have root access to shared machines. 2. Limited root access is provided for specific functions. 3. Specifically, "sudo tar" works.
I am pretty sure there is some kind of subtle flaw here.
The entire POINT of C# is the same as every other API MS has ever pushed: MS's real dominance isn't operating systems, but APIs. C# exists because WINE was starting to be a credible platform on which to run Win32 apps. Mono exists to try to draw developers into using the MS API, so they can then get screwed when MS suddenly and incompatibly updates it, and be obliged to migrate to the original MS tools (which only target Windows).
I honestly can't imagine there's anything BUT non-technical reasons for Mono to exist. It appears to be a considered and focused attempt to undermine free (as in speech) development platforms. Nothing that has happened has changed my mind on this.
And when he's implemented it as fast as he can type, you get to do all sorts of extra work that would be omitted if you just used the existing one that the other guy had already seen.
That's the point; people who go rushing off to make new stuff when they don't have to aren't necessarily all that useful.
I really have to get around to rewriting that some day. But it's been a loooong time, and it's translated into enough languages that I'd feel sorta bad modifying it.
I have, on rare occasions, been Amazingly Productive. There are very narrowly-defined kinds of work where I am super fast. One of them is debugging. So, when we were doing our "no new features, clear out every P1 and P2 bug in this branch" run, I was awesome -- I regularly fixed many more bugs than anyone else. On the other hand... A lot of the time, I'm not much good. If I have a bad-ADHD week, I can have an entire day go by where I simply never quite get around to doing anything but mostly keeping up on my inbox.
So am I super productive, or not very productive, or what? I don't know. Realistically, the answer is probably "if you give me the sorts of work I'm good at, I'm great, otherwise I'm sorta mediocre." But I'm not sure how you'd measure that.
There's also a much more basic failure-to-apply-economics in the article. The value of something which does 10x as much is not necessarily exactly 10x. Is a monitor with 3x as many pixels worth exactly 3x as much? No. Is a video card which can render exactly 2x as many polygons worth exactly 2x as much? No. On the high end, you might see people paying 2x as much for 20% more polygons. On the low end, you might see people paying 20% more for 5x more polygons. Or there might be other factors; you might care about power consumption, or form factor, or...
I just bought a new Eee. It's SLOWER than the previous one I was using. I paid about the same amount for it, several months later. But it has a higher resolution display, and better battery life... So is it worth the same amount? I have no clue.
Long story short: The marginal value of the "more productive programmer" is not necessarily linear with productivity. Add in other complexities (plays-well-with-others, can do trade shows, reliable about giving feedback on progress) and general market forces, and I don't think it's just a question of measurement; I think it's largely that, in general, programmers are willing to work for comparable amounts of money, and the marginal benefits aren't as large as you might think they would be if you looked only at some measure of productivity. Even if it were a very good measure.
The "target.com" online store is run by Amazon for Target, not by the company that does the brick and mortar stores. (Long story.)
So which of them is doing this? If it's Amazon, it's not exactly surprising -- spammers, patent trolls, and "search engine optimizers" sound like pretty much related categories.
My productivity is measurably higher with music. Music doesn't distract me; it keeps my brain from getting distracted as easily.
This may be specific to particular clinical diagnoses, but I'd point out that if you have a reasonable number of programmers, you probably have at least a couple who are clinically autistic or on the edges of that spectrum, and use of personal music to control incoming stimulus, and allow improved function, is an actual thing doctors and psychologists recommend for aspies. Also, music with a solid beat appears to be very helpful to people with ADHD.
In short, your boss is being stupid. Music helps people think, and always has.
That book is what convinced me to disregard the garden-variety psychologist who said I definitely wasn't autistic and talk to a specialist. See, I read the book a few months after getting it, and I'd forgotten what the deal was. About three chapters in, I realized that the *intent* was probably that the main character would seem alien to the reader, but he was the first rational protagonist I'd ever seen... Oh! Insight occurs.
The big difference is that we have the founder on record, in writing, claiming that:
1. He came up with this stuff under the influence of drugs. 2. That this is not a religion, in any way, shape, or form. 3. Later, that there is now a "religion angle" which exists only for tax and legal reasons, but that there is no change at all of the underlying facts.
They have written documents saying that they are not a religion, are not intended to be a religion, and are purely scientific. That does go a long way towards suggesting that they are perhaps not a religion. Generally, if you put in writing that you are filing forms saying you're a religion only for tax reasons, and not because you actually think you're a religion, that's a big sign.
I just took in a macbook with one month left on a three-year warranty. The first owner smoked near it for a solid two years; the second owner didn't, but the machine was pretty banged up. Apple fixed it without any hassle; brought it in late Friday night, had it back (fedex overnight) Tuesday morning.
Conclusion: If they rejected something based on smoke-related issues, it was pretty severe.
Slashdot Mirror
Objective-C rocks, really. But! If you don't know it, and you have an existing code base in C#, maybe this would be useful. I guess. I think this is not aimed at making iPhone/iPad app development easier in general, but rather, specifically for people who are already using C#. In which case, it's not totally stupid. Just mostly stupid.
FWIW, I'm currently at the "okay, that's the basic functionality, now what do I do next?" phase of developing an iPhone app. From "never even looked at the docs" to "working multitouch and graphics" took me, oh, a good solid two evenings.
This is where the fundamental problem comes in: It is completely obvious that people need to be allowed to block spam and botnets, but it's extremely hard to offer a legally sane definition of the traffic that you should be allowed to block contrasted with the traffic you should not be allowed to block. (It gets weirder still when you consider mere traffic-prioritization questions.)
I don't think there's any solution short of implementing the Evil Bit. (All malicious traffic must set the Evil Bit in its TCP headers.)
I would think that the part where L. Ron Hubbard said that it was not a religion, but that they were claiming to be one exclusively for tax purposes, and this changed nothing, would weigh heavily against a finding that it is "a religion".
Something without multitouch is not "comparable".
I buy devices for what they do, not how much silicon they need to accomplish it. Same reason we get hours and hours of gameplay from the Wii, and my PS3 has been sitting on a shelf, not even plugged in, for most of the last year; the PS3 is way more powerful, but the games I want to play are on the Wii.
As I understand it: Tax reasons, basically. They could get into a better tariff category by being able to call it a computer.
Imagine that the volume of non-spam email remains constant.
If spam was previously 94% of email, and is now just over 95% of email, that is not a change of 1% in the amount of spam.
Let's give concrete numbers. Imagine that there are one million non-spam emails per time unit. How much spam needs to be sent for spam to be 94% of email? The total amount of mail would be 16.6~ million emails, so 15.6~ million of them would be spam. Now imagine that the new amount of non-spam email is "less than 5%" -- let's say it's 4.9%. That would mean a total volume of email of about 20.4M, so about 19.4M of them are spam. So. That's a 23% increase in the volume of spam.
Now let's be realistic. Does anyone actually think the volume of non-spam email has *decreased*? I sure don't.
So this "minor" change is on the rough order of a TWENTY FIVE PERCENT INCREASE in the amount of spam.
No.
The entire POINT of statutory damages is to allow civil suits to act as a deterrent in cases where actual damages are hard to measure unambiguously, and/or to provide an extra deterrent.
Basically, think of statutory damages as being, in many cases, a bounty offered for private citizens (or corporations) who take on the cost and time commitment of enforcing laws that are not cost-effective for the government to try to enforce. This is the same kind of law as the TCPA (the law that lets you sue telemarketers) or the FDCPA (the law that lets you sue sleazy debt collectors).
No one thinks that the actual damage done to someone from receiving a single junk fax or phone call is $500, and certainly, no one thinks it's actually $1,500 if the person doing it knew that they were doing so without written consent (or whatever requirement is imposed). (Note that the requirement for "willful or knowing" in TCPA is not that you knew what the law was, but that you knew what you were doing. If you push a button that, unbeknownst to you, sends a fax to someone, you could be on the hook for $500; if you buy a list of fax numbers and send a fax to one of them, knowing that you have never obtained that person's written consent, you could be on the hook for $1,500.) In most cases, the damage done by a single instance of a debt collector failing to comply with one of the relatively arcane rules governing third-party debt collections is well under $1,000...
But setting the statutory damages to those numbers makes it possible for private citizens to take these cases on, while if it were up to the District Attorney, it'd never be worth it compared to other, higher-profile, cases.
So no, people should not have to prove "actual damages" to collect damages. When Congress makes a law against something, it is reasonable for the law to specify a statutory penalty.
That's not to say there's no room for skepticism about the ruling. A more interesting question is figuring out what the units should be. For instance, if you distribute an album, have you distributed one thing or several things? That could be an interesting avenue to explore. On the other hand, it turns out that Our Hero has learned something most people learn pretty early on in dealing with the courts: If you're a shitty liar, and lie under oath, you will lose the jury's sympathy. Don't do that.
I might believe some of this if it survived double-blind testing. Without that, you're just comparing Monster Cables to coat hangers.
As opposed to non-vibrating earbuds, also known as "earplugs"?
I have roughly 500 DVDs, none of which display in HD. Nor do I care whether they display in HD. I don't actually see it as a big deal; I am watching for dialogue and plot, not for pixel-count.
1. Developers shall not have root access to shared machines.
2. Limited root access is provided for specific functions.
3. Specifically, "sudo tar" works.
I am pretty sure there is some kind of subtle flaw here.
The entire POINT of C# is the same as every other API MS has ever pushed: MS's real dominance isn't operating systems, but APIs. C# exists because WINE was starting to be a credible platform on which to run Win32 apps. Mono exists to try to draw developers into using the MS API, so they can then get screwed when MS suddenly and incompatibly updates it, and be obliged to migrate to the original MS tools (which only target Windows).
I honestly can't imagine there's anything BUT non-technical reasons for Mono to exist. It appears to be a considered and focused attempt to undermine free (as in speech) development platforms. Nothing that has happened has changed my mind on this.
Bill's still happily married. I really don't think this is working.
And when he's implemented it as fast as he can type, you get to do all sorts of extra work that would be omitted if you just used the existing one that the other guy had already seen.
That's the point; people who go rushing off to make new stuff when they don't have to aren't necessarily all that useful.
Yup, that's me. Considered redoing it, etcetera, but haven't wanted to really change anything. Someday in my Copious Free Time.
FWIW, 90% of the recognition I've gotten for that document has been people offering me small amounts of money to break into computers for them.
I really have to get around to rewriting that some day. But it's been a loooong time, and it's translated into enough languages that I'd feel sorta bad modifying it.
I have, on rare occasions, been Amazingly Productive. There are very narrowly-defined kinds of work where I am super fast. One of them is debugging. So, when we were doing our "no new features, clear out every P1 and P2 bug in this branch" run, I was awesome -- I regularly fixed many more bugs than anyone else. On the other hand... A lot of the time, I'm not much good. If I have a bad-ADHD week, I can have an entire day go by where I simply never quite get around to doing anything but mostly keeping up on my inbox.
So am I super productive, or not very productive, or what? I don't know. Realistically, the answer is probably "if you give me the sorts of work I'm good at, I'm great, otherwise I'm sorta mediocre." But I'm not sure how you'd measure that.
There's also a much more basic failure-to-apply-economics in the article. The value of something which does 10x as much is not necessarily exactly 10x. Is a monitor with 3x as many pixels worth exactly 3x as much? No. Is a video card which can render exactly 2x as many polygons worth exactly 2x as much? No. On the high end, you might see people paying 2x as much for 20% more polygons. On the low end, you might see people paying 20% more for 5x more polygons. Or there might be other factors; you might care about power consumption, or form factor, or...
I just bought a new Eee. It's SLOWER than the previous one I was using. I paid about the same amount for it, several months later. But it has a higher resolution display, and better battery life... So is it worth the same amount? I have no clue.
Long story short: The marginal value of the "more productive programmer" is not necessarily linear with productivity. Add in other complexities (plays-well-with-others, can do trade shows, reliable about giving feedback on progress) and general market forces, and I don't think it's just a question of measurement; I think it's largely that, in general, programmers are willing to work for comparable amounts of money, and the marginal benefits aren't as large as you might think they would be if you looked only at some measure of productivity. Even if it were a very good measure.
The "target.com" online store is run by Amazon for Target, not by the company that does the brick and mortar stores. (Long story.)
So which of them is doing this? If it's Amazon, it's not exactly surprising -- spammers, patent trolls, and "search engine optimizers" sound like pretty much related categories.
Why is this garbage even getting posted?
When you've got the CEO bragging about how sleazy they've been, I think that's enough to explain the boycotts.
Me? Never played any of them, don't plan to. Company's evil, and the wisest thing to do would be for everyone to stay away until they disintegrate.
My productivity is measurably higher with music. Music doesn't distract me; it keeps my brain from getting distracted as easily.
This may be specific to particular clinical diagnoses, but I'd point out that if you have a reasonable number of programmers, you probably have at least a couple who are clinically autistic or on the edges of that spectrum, and use of personal music to control incoming stimulus, and allow improved function, is an actual thing doctors and psychologists recommend for aspies. Also, music with a solid beat appears to be very helpful to people with ADHD.
In short, your boss is being stupid. Music helps people think, and always has.
That book is what convinced me to disregard the garden-variety psychologist who said I definitely wasn't autistic and talk to a specialist. See, I read the book a few months after getting it, and I'd forgotten what the deal was. About three chapters in, I realized that the *intent* was probably that the main character would seem alien to the reader, but he was the first rational protagonist I'd ever seen... Oh! Insight occurs.
But 99% of usenet spam is offtopic posting...
The big difference is that we have the founder on record, in writing, claiming that:
1. He came up with this stuff under the influence of drugs.
2. That this is not a religion, in any way, shape, or form.
3. Later, that there is now a "religion angle" which exists only for tax and legal reasons, but that there is no change at all of the underlying facts.
They have written documents saying that they are not a religion, are not intended to be a religion, and are purely scientific. That does go a long way towards suggesting that they are perhaps not a religion. Generally, if you put in writing that you are filing forms saying you're a religion only for tax reasons, and not because you actually think you're a religion, that's a big sign.
I just took in a macbook with one month left on a three-year warranty. The first owner smoked near it for a solid two years; the second owner didn't, but the machine was pretty banged up. Apple fixed it without any hassle; brought it in late Friday night, had it back (fedex overnight) Tuesday morning.
Conclusion: If they rejected something based on smoke-related issues, it was pretty severe.