It's pretty easy to say "yes" to alternatives without saying "no" to SQL.
Just because a crowbar can pull out a stubborn nail better doesn't mean they should replace all the hammers. Then what would we put nails in with? Different tools for different jobs.
Lori Drew is terrible, I think we all agree on that. I'd like to take issue with the word "cyber-bullying."
What she did could be called harassment, stalking, maybe even grounds for a wrongful death suit. Had she done this by phone, or snail mail, or paper airplane she probably would have wound up under one of those anvils. Instead, just because her evil-doing happened to be done through a computer the media feels the need to refer to it by a stupid made-up word, and the prosecutor feels the need to dig into some wacky interpretation of computer hacking law.
What's the result? This poor judge is forced to make a ruling that will make a lot of people angry, probably to the detriment of his own career, and let an evil woman go free. Guess what, he had to do this because of the shenanigans of the media and prosecution, fortunately he has the foresight to avoid setting a terrible precedent that violating ToS is "hacking."
Apple, for its part, won't support Ogg Theora in QuickTime, expressing concerns over patents despite the fact that the codec can be used royalty-free.
I don't think they're concerned about whether they'll pay royalties. The problem they have is not being able to charge royalties.
As for IE...I've pretty much given up on Microsoft ever doing anything helpful with their browser. "Embrace Extend Exterminate" might not officially be their mantra these days, but it's still how they operate.
What worries me isn't so much that people are allowed to sue if they feel they have been wronged (that's a wonderful freedom).
What worries me is that we've built a society where the answer to every little thing has become "sue them." We also built this stupid society on top of a court where the most expensive legal team wins.
Sounds like it's about time you started asking yourself what you really care about.
Are we here to slave over machines our whole lives for companies that don't care about anything but their bottom lines? Or are we here to do our best to live a happy, fulfilling life? What's your motivation to stay at this job, anyway? It sounds to me like they're running you too hard. What exactly are you doing with your salary? Spending it all on a home you're never in and a car you're always in? (but never enjoying)
When you die it doesn't matter where you worked, it matters who loved you.
On a more immediately helpful note, I've been getting more exercise and easing my stress levels lately by brown-bagging lunches that will be good cold. Then when my lunch hour rolls around I grab my lunch, start a 1 hour countdown timer on my phone and start walking. Because my lunch is good cold I don't even have to stop in the break room to microwave anything. When I find a nice place to sit down I have a seat and eat my lunch. Then I walk back to work feeling refreshed and ready to face the rest of the day.
: to examine in order to suppress or delete anything considered objectionable ; also : to suppress or delete as objectionable
The information was not being suppressed as objectionable. It was being suppressed as potentially dangerous to the well-being of one poor human being. Is our right to know what's happening moment-to-moment more important than his right to have the best chance possible at staying alive?
Keeping a secret because you make the judgment that it will keep someone safe...that's not censorship, that's being a responsible member of the media. There was no outside force compelling these agencies to withhold information, they did it of their own volition. At worst this was self-censorship, at best it was lifesaving.
Mountains from molehills...there are plenty of things to be upset about that are actually important, if we're all through being idiots.
What's really interesting here is that the AP won't let other people base articles on their reporting, but they regularly pull quotes from small local newspapers on stories that they deem not worth sending their own reporters to.
It seems like their policy is: we can cite and reuse small-time newspapers, but small-time bloggers and even big-time aggregators shouldn't be able to even link to ours. I wonder how AP would react if I were to say "AP reported that [local-paper] reported that..."
I used to work at a newspaper, and I saw that the current 20-something entry-level reporters are pretty sharp. One of these days their idiot bosses will retire and I predict the next generation will pull traditional media's head out of its collective ass sometime in the next 10-20 years. Hopefully it will happen before these morons have done too much damage to the industry.
Full disclosure: I have something of a personal vendetta against the AP, for only giving me second place in our state AP Awards for illustration, second to a PHOTO ILLUSTRATION. Photographers already have several categories of their own, and real illustrators don't need that lot of hacks in the one lonely illustration category. I also used to have access to their wire website at work (which is a terrible clusterfuck of bugs and bizarre usability choices, BTW), and they're really just a bunch of hacks churning out stories willy-nilly. You should see the crap that never actually gets picked up off the wire (but still earns some idiot a paycheck for writing it).
But where, exactly, would the batteries that can push 60 kilowatts go? I don't think they would fit in the trunk of a Mazda Miata with this magical imaginary computer.
I feel Ubuntu's pain in that case, but in the case of Windows I say "fuck them."
If they're charging me hundreds of dollars for software, they aren't allowed to complain about distribution costs, that will only happen if Microsoft were a bunch of greedy assholes...oh wait...
Well whoop-de-doo for you! Aren't you special. Most of us (even in my metro area of 850,000) have nowhere near options like that.
Most of us would pay for a capped (or slow) connection because it's better than nothing at all. Not all of us are as privileged as you.
Personally I pay $50 for 5/1 (thankfully uncapped), because that's the best option I have available. I remember living in a rural area where my only option was 28.8 (on a good day) dailup. That was only about 6-8 years ago, too. Try expressing a little gratitude for what you've been given by the world, and try not to have such an overblown sense of entitlement.
I downloaded some program for my Android phone months ago that did this. It didn't have ads either, it just pulled data from free sources (mostly wikipedia).
And you know what? It was stupid and useless then, it's stupid and useless now, and advertising in it isn't going to make it any less stupid and useless.
Also, using GPS and accelerometers in tandem to give spatially relevant information isn't remotely a new idea either. The Sky Map program for Android has been doing that too for some time. Guess what? It's pretty stupid and useless as well.
I guess all it takes to make a "killer app" is to put advertising on something stupid and useless. I already did that on my blog, I should be rich!
...a truly skilled criminal can simply look at the keyboard and note which keys are being pressed. So, password masking doesn't even protect fully against snoopers.
I guess that because condoms don't fully protect against pregnancy/STDs we should just abandon all hope of security and go with what feels best. Raw dogging it with not even an attempt at birth control, much less STD protection.
Seriously, I'm tired of Jakob Nielsen, why won't he just crawl back into whatever hole he came out of?
Why does Ford get such a big help? Because they've been such a leader, and shown such promise in the world of alternative transportation?
Jesus, they were still making almost nothing but giant, dick-substitute trucks until like 2007. Fuck them, they're stupid and shortsighted, let them flounder and fail.
I believe the correct answer is, as usual, "it depends."
In that particular case, it just might. If the code were to later modify $description it would require a whole new entry in the symbol table. Then it would be using up twice the memory.
I'm pretty sure that PHP also has some pretty slick automatic unloading too though, so it might look ahead, see that you don't use $_POST['description'] again and promptly drop it out of memory (FYI: I am in no way advocating the "fugheddaboudit" approach to memory usage).
Personally, I would approach that particular problem with validation. Also, if your input has been properly validated and you know it isn't big enough to cause memory problems, it's often just plain convenient to copy variables around for a number of reasons, like building an array to pass into a function or something.
I'm glad to see that at least web development is still concerned with optimization. The glut of RAM and processing speed has made desktop developers lazy and sloppy, and it has become the norm for software to be bloated and inefficient.
<sarcasm>Why bother finding a more efficient way to do [whatever] when you're talking microseconds at the user's end?</sarcasm>
I'm actually sort of surprised a glut of bandwidth and server power hasn't led to a similar "kitchen sink" approach to web technology.
Then again, I suppose it has. Just look at any given Web 2.0 Ajax monster...and on the web we're often talking WHOLE SECONDS lost to poor optimization and badly thought out apps.
Removing CO2 is all well and good, but if these are plugged into the grid (mostly coal powered) we're basically just reducing the efficiency of our power plants by 20%. Unless the energy to power these little guys comes from renewable sources we're robbing efficiency to pay pollution.
This falls in line with what I often hear about laws mandating "perks" for employees: "OMG, what about capitalizm? Requiring businesses to spend money on their employees will hurt employers!"
NO.
By allowing companies to treat their employees like shit (no insurance, no sick days, no leave), we are actually creating an incentive for employers to treat their employees like shit, because it's cheaper. If we were to require all employers to give a minimum insurance, sick days and vacation time we wouldn't be upsetting the balance, we would actually be LEVELING the playing field by removing the ability to edge up the bottom line at the expense of workers.
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Are we still talking about hammers and nails? Are we talking about SQL now? I'm confused...
It's pretty easy to say "yes" to alternatives without saying "no" to SQL.
Just because a crowbar can pull out a stubborn nail better doesn't mean they should replace all the hammers. Then what would we put nails in with? Different tools for different jobs.
This isn't quite that extreme. I would say a "typical" new car goes for $15,000+, so a better analogy would be a new car costing only $7,500.
I would be excited that it was cheap, but I would also expect it to be...well...cheap.
Completely counting my own comment above...it's amusing to me how many commenters immediately took this news to a perverted place.
Now I can jerk off with a robot hand controlled by my real hand!
Lori Drew is terrible, I think we all agree on that. I'd like to take issue with the word "cyber-bullying."
What she did could be called harassment, stalking, maybe even grounds for a wrongful death suit. Had she done this by phone, or snail mail, or paper airplane she probably would have wound up under one of those anvils. Instead, just because her evil-doing happened to be done through a computer the media feels the need to refer to it by a stupid made-up word, and the prosecutor feels the need to dig into some wacky interpretation of computer hacking law.
What's the result? This poor judge is forced to make a ruling that will make a lot of people angry, probably to the detriment of his own career, and let an evil woman go free. Guess what, he had to do this because of the shenanigans of the media and prosecution, fortunately he has the foresight to avoid setting a terrible precedent that violating ToS is "hacking."
Apple, for its part, won't support Ogg Theora in QuickTime, expressing concerns over patents despite the fact that the codec can be used royalty-free.
I don't think they're concerned about whether they'll pay royalties. The problem they have is not being able to charge royalties.
As for IE...I've pretty much given up on Microsoft ever doing anything helpful with their browser. "Embrace Extend Exterminate" might not officially be their mantra these days, but it's still how they operate.
What worries me isn't so much that people are allowed to sue if they feel they have been wronged (that's a wonderful freedom).
What worries me is that we've built a society where the answer to every little thing has become "sue them." We also built this stupid society on top of a court where the most expensive legal team wins.
It's a nasty world for the little guys.
Child molesters suing to have their name removed from the registered sex offenders databases?
Sounds like it's about time you started asking yourself what you really care about.
Are we here to slave over machines our whole lives for companies that don't care about anything but their bottom lines? Or are we here to do our best to live a happy, fulfilling life? What's your motivation to stay at this job, anyway? It sounds to me like they're running you too hard. What exactly are you doing with your salary? Spending it all on a home you're never in and a car you're always in? (but never enjoying)
When you die it doesn't matter where you worked, it matters who loved you.
On a more immediately helpful note, I've been getting more exercise and easing my stress levels lately by brown-bagging lunches that will be good cold. Then when my lunch hour rolls around I grab my lunch, start a 1 hour countdown timer on my phone and start walking. Because my lunch is good cold I don't even have to stop in the break room to microwave anything. When I find a nice place to sit down I have a seat and eat my lunch. Then I walk back to work feeling refreshed and ready to face the rest of the day.
: to examine in order to suppress or delete anything considered objectionable ; also : to suppress or delete as objectionable
The information was not being suppressed as objectionable. It was being suppressed as potentially dangerous to the well-being of one poor human being. Is our right to know what's happening moment-to-moment more important than his right to have the best chance possible at staying alive?
Keeping a secret because you make the judgment that it will keep someone safe...that's not censorship, that's being a responsible member of the media. There was no outside force compelling these agencies to withhold information, they did it of their own volition. At worst this was self-censorship, at best it was lifesaving.
Mountains from molehills...there are plenty of things to be upset about that are actually important, if we're all through being idiots.
Even if that weren't the case, their perceived right to do business is absolutely nothing compared to our real rights.
Well, they do have a real right to do business that should be protected. Actually succeeding at business is their problem.
What's really interesting here is that the AP won't let other people base articles on their reporting, but they regularly pull quotes from small local newspapers on stories that they deem not worth sending their own reporters to.
It seems like their policy is: we can cite and reuse small-time newspapers, but small-time bloggers and even big-time aggregators shouldn't be able to even link to ours. I wonder how AP would react if I were to say "AP reported that [local-paper] reported that..."
I used to work at a newspaper, and I saw that the current 20-something entry-level reporters are pretty sharp. One of these days their idiot bosses will retire and I predict the next generation will pull traditional media's head out of its collective ass sometime in the next 10-20 years. Hopefully it will happen before these morons have done too much damage to the industry.
Full disclosure: I have something of a personal vendetta against the AP, for only giving me second place in our state AP Awards for illustration, second to a PHOTO ILLUSTRATION. Photographers already have several categories of their own, and real illustrators don't need that lot of hacks in the one lonely illustration category. I also used to have access to their wire website at work (which is a terrible clusterfuck of bugs and bizarre usability choices, BTW), and they're really just a bunch of hacks churning out stories willy-nilly. You should see the crap that never actually gets picked up off the wire (but still earns some idiot a paycheck for writing it).
Unless that would involve breaking or circumventing any encryption, for any reason (at least in the USA)...stupid DMCA.
But where, exactly, would the batteries that can push 60 kilowatts go? I don't think they would fit in the trunk of a Mazda Miata with this magical imaginary computer.
I can't imagine pushing 60 kilowatts through a 19" rack mount ANYTHING without EVERYTHING catching on fire.
Seriously, that's a lot of electricity.
I feel Ubuntu's pain in that case, but in the case of Windows I say "fuck them."
If they're charging me hundreds of dollars for software, they aren't allowed to complain about distribution costs, that will only happen if Microsoft were a bunch of greedy assholes...oh wait...
Well whoop-de-doo for you! Aren't you special. Most of us (even in my metro area of 850,000) have nowhere near options like that.
Most of us would pay for a capped (or slow) connection because it's better than nothing at all. Not all of us are as privileged as you.
Personally I pay $50 for 5/1 (thankfully uncapped), because that's the best option I have available. I remember living in a rural area where my only option was 28.8 (on a good day) dailup. That was only about 6-8 years ago, too. Try expressing a little gratitude for what you've been given by the world, and try not to have such an overblown sense of entitlement.
I downloaded some program for my Android phone months ago that did this. It didn't have ads either, it just pulled data from free sources (mostly wikipedia).
And you know what? It was stupid and useless then, it's stupid and useless now, and advertising in it isn't going to make it any less stupid and useless.
Also, using GPS and accelerometers in tandem to give spatially relevant information isn't remotely a new idea either. The Sky Map program for Android has been doing that too for some time. Guess what? It's pretty stupid and useless as well.
I guess all it takes to make a "killer app" is to put advertising on something stupid and useless. I already did that on my blog, I should be rich!
...a truly skilled criminal can simply look at the keyboard and note which keys are being pressed. So, password masking doesn't even protect fully against snoopers.
I guess that because condoms don't fully protect against pregnancy/STDs we should just abandon all hope of security and go with what feels best. Raw dogging it with not even an attempt at birth control, much less STD protection.
Seriously, I'm tired of Jakob Nielsen, why won't he just crawl back into whatever hole he came out of?
Why does Ford get such a big help? Because they've been such a leader, and shown such promise in the world of alternative transportation?
Jesus, they were still making almost nothing but giant, dick-substitute trucks until like 2007. Fuck them, they're stupid and shortsighted, let them flounder and fail.
I believe the correct answer is, as usual, "it depends."
In that particular case, it just might. If the code were to later modify $description it would require a whole new entry in the symbol table. Then it would be using up twice the memory.
I'm pretty sure that PHP also has some pretty slick automatic unloading too though, so it might look ahead, see that you don't use $_POST['description'] again and promptly drop it out of memory (FYI: I am in no way advocating the "fugheddaboudit" approach to memory usage).
Personally, I would approach that particular problem with validation. Also, if your input has been properly validated and you know it isn't big enough to cause memory problems, it's often just plain convenient to copy variables around for a number of reasons, like building an array to pass into a function or something.
I'm glad to see that at least web development is still concerned with optimization. The glut of RAM and processing speed has made desktop developers lazy and sloppy, and it has become the norm for software to be bloated and inefficient.
<sarcasm>Why bother finding a more efficient way to do [whatever] when you're talking microseconds at the user's end?</sarcasm>
I'm actually sort of surprised a glut of bandwidth and server power hasn't led to a similar "kitchen sink" approach to web technology.
Then again, I suppose it has. Just look at any given Web 2.0 Ajax monster...and on the web we're often talking WHOLE SECONDS lost to poor optimization and badly thought out apps.
Removing CO2 is all well and good, but if these are plugged into the grid (mostly coal powered) we're basically just reducing the efficiency of our power plants by 20%. Unless the energy to power these little guys comes from renewable sources we're robbing efficiency to pay pollution.
This falls in line with what I often hear about laws mandating "perks" for employees: "OMG, what about capitalizm? Requiring businesses to spend money on their employees will hurt employers!"
NO.
By allowing companies to treat their employees like shit (no insurance, no sick days, no leave), we are actually creating an incentive for employers to treat their employees like shit, because it's cheaper. If we were to require all employers to give a minimum insurance, sick days and vacation time we wouldn't be upsetting the balance, we would actually be LEVELING the playing field by removing the ability to edge up the bottom line at the expense of workers.