Yep, I worked for 5 years after high school, mainly in a grocery store. Best decision I ever made, before going to college. There just aren't a lot of employers who want to hire a high school grad for anything approaching a complex task. Ten years from now OP will probably understand why... nah, he's a smart kid.. probably 5 years.:-) Need to see your current self in the rear view mirror first.
Something to be said for knowing what you want to do with your life, there's also something to be said for letting yourself change minds. If you're still a programmer in 20 years, good on ya. Probably set for bigger and better things though.
A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools. (Douglas Adams)
What's wrong with using them? Not to do that would be like using a pencil and paper instead of typing when you're preparing a publication – I'd think that brain power and time should be used constructively.
It's not a matter of the tool is wrong. It's a matter that assuming one tool is always best is wrong. Your premise is based on: using a computer is easier and better for 100% of humans. That's not true. Allow me to introduce you to my parents. Allow me to introduce you to senior engineers who can craft new formulas on a whiteboard faster than juniors can wake their laptops.
Different areas of the brain are involved with the act of handwriting than with touch typing or pecking. Make LCARS speech recognition a reality and we have a winner. Solving problems that stump otherwise intelligent humans for *hundreds* of years, *clearly* requires some creatively alternate use of the brain, and not Microsoft Clippy. ("I see you're trying to solve an unprovable theorem, would you like to Quit without Saving?") I don't even need to cite sources that say poor UIs slow people down. That's how it is. Computers add cruft, otherwise there wouldn't be a market for applications that remove distractions when writing.
...like using a pencil and paper instead of typing when you're preparing a publication...
Poor analogy. Publication implies mass reproduction and distribution. An *author* can write however they want to form their ideas, the result is the same. How the idea gets distributed is irrelevant to the core point. (Also there are such things as shorthand.)
I kind of wish VLC or MPlayer OSX Extended would implement this.
Try MPlayerX. I think you'll be pleasantly surprised. The current version doesn't have a playlist or individual loop feature, but that's really about the only things it doesn't have, IMO. It does a reasonable attempt at detecting episodic files in a folder.
If I recommend it in a slashdot thread regarding calculator apps I am *not* astroturfing because my account name, "perpenso", indicates that I represent the publisher.
No it really doesn't. On an internet forum using a corporate alias makes you a fanboy. At best it makes you uncreative. What you *should* do is a very simple "Disclosure: this is my product". Presuming that someone will even bother to look at your username, then connect 2 + 2 (lol amirite?) is demanding far too much investigative work from a forum reader.
On a forum that uses Facebook for comments if it said "Works at Perpenso" then your argument would hold water. But a username? No. Absolutely no. You might as well be OracleBoy48.
It's useless and doesn't help anybody or anything but TSA agents and the companies selling cancerous porno x-ray machines.
Actually, *total* theatre is what I experienced in a Greyhound terminal a few years ago. They "beefed up" security following a totally insane and horrific decapitation on a bus. Everyone lined up around some pillars, geriatric screeners unzipping backpacks to peer inside, not even opening luggage or duffel bags. And the wanding... oh lord the wanding, which I swear, looked like a Radio Shack coin finder without any batteries, and didn't detect so much as my belt buckle.
The theatre only existed in major terminals, because 15 minutes out of town you can board the bus by standing at the side of the highway with just a piece of ID for collateral until the next ticket agent stop.
At least there probably weren't any Greyhound security guards masturbating to backscatter images.
Please try to keep in mind, these laws are old, and not being under the reign of a monarch is new. These issues will affect every former UK colony.
It is really not much different, functionally speaking, from a telephone number, an email address or a room number. Are telephone numbers copyrighted? Don't think so. Are email addresses copyrighted? I've never heard of such a thing.
And who pays for postal codes to be created/used in the first place? The Canadian taxpayer. That should make postal codes a "public good", owned collectively by the taxpaying Canadian public. Creating a free listing of postal codes, where anyone can look up postal codes, is a convenience, and a service rendered to the public.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crown_copyright#Canada "Permission to reproduce Government of Canada works, in part or in whole, and by any means, for personal or public non-commercial purposes, or for cost-recovery purposes, is not required, unless otherwise specified in the material you wish to reproduce."
And a good one too, since it is "free", and nobody profits from it.
The "otherwise specified" part would seem to be the $5000 Canada Post wants to charge for its directory. Which it has the right to do. Statistics Canada also charges for its data, one of the few places where government documents are not free. Why? Because information has value. The Do Not Call List has a trivial price attached to it, and has been exploited to high hell because foreign telemarketers can afford to do it and are not bound by our laws. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Do_Not_Call_List#Criticism
Besides, if search engines can index the entire f___ing Internet, without anyone crying "Oy! That's my copyrighted webpage you are indexing!",
how can a simple "Canadian postal code lookup function" be a breach of copyright? If the article is correct, the site in question didn't even copy the Postal Services postal code database. It built its own, from user contributions. I really don't see how "copyright" even figures into this case...
It's not the engine, it's the data. Postal codes were *authored*, there is no question about that.
I work really hard to be aware of bias and to not let it get in the way of my interactions with people. But it's there for all of us, despite the effort we put in. It does no good to pretend otherwise.
if you buy a quality drive (i.e. not a refurb or one specifically designed as a consumer throwaway) from a vendor that takes some care in shipping and handling, then no you did not stumble on "the conspiracy of XYZcorp's bad drives".
Ah, so it was my fault that I didn't read Quantum's fine print on the box that said "Fireball (consumer throwaway edition)", because in 1995 that information was only a CompuServe search away? So I should have expected that drive to fail under warranty, as well as the THREE RMA REPLACEMENT DRIVES they sent me *also* failing under warranty?
This took place over the span of 3 years, so it wasn't a "bad batch"/ I had to give up on the brand just to stop the cycle of pain, because they would always send a replacement drive no questions asked. Never had a similar issue with another brand before or since (and their shipping was totally fine).
How does making information more available to some kids hurt other kids?
I receive some tutor funding for my university classes. I don't need to attend a confused study group if I don't want to. You should see the looks on some grown adult faces when they realise someone else has a leg up on them. Despite the fact I have learning disabilities that already make them more capable than me, they perceive me as privileged, not as someone striving for equity. How much more compassionate do you think a 9 year old will be? If children understand *anything*, it's favoritism.
None of that answered the spirit of your question though. Helping poor children from poor families, does nothing to help middle-class children with parents who don't give a shit about technology (or their education). You cannot solve these inequities within our current society by giving everyone a web browser.
It's absolutely far-fetched. But so were black swans.;) I certainly agree with your conclusion.
1) I'm not making any realistic claims about the technology or the engineer's actions. I'm devil's advocating that Director of X is so worried about losing a sale they insist on a ridiculous layer of redundancy. It's not likely, but it is most definitely plausible. (Unless you're defending the intelligence of Microsoft management? oh snap!) And even though this story is about Xbox, information gets exposed elsewhere all the time. If you're not willing to blame the technology, then it comes down to poor decisions and human error.
2) That minuscule case is a $10-$50 loss, plus negative word of mouth and mindshare damage. I don't have a tidy economics formula for it, but That's Bad. Talking about 5 year expiry dates doesn't enter into it, given that before the 360/PS3 no console with an online marketplace had a lifecycle lasting longer than 5 years. And the user knows that it's their job to update when they receive a new card.
3) Employees under stress decide not to bother doing a lot of things. Everyone was the new guy once. Everyone has a senior moment eventually. Let's pretend this issue has existed since 2006, and it has just been discovered in 2012. Sounds like many security patches I've applied.
A lot of/. comments are the search for logical justification of how shit happens. That's a very engineer thing to do. But businesses are no more logical than the fallible people who run them. How many stories do we read about the valiant IT crusader trying to sway their luddite management into awareness of The Right Way?:) Shit happens, because people.
Slashdot Mirror
+1 for referencing a ridiculously awesome game.
-1 for it probably being a tired joke for Mr. Sanger.
Beta what? /. in years and it looks exactly the same?
I haven't been to
Anyone sees a pattern? :-)
First posters are dicks?
Could'a told you that without the empirical evidence. :p
PHP itself is an acronym for PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor..
Hm, for some reason I had "Pre-Hypertext Processor" in my head. I must've seen or heard it somewhere.
(And now YOU have too, haha!)
Gold:
[_] Cashless
[x] High-Value
[x] Anonymous
You're really referring to fiat currency and not cash-carrying in a broad sense. Although given that the penny's metal now has intrinsically more value than its decree, anything can change. Imagine how valuable paper bills would become if some catastrophe destroyed the world's forests? (Let's assume it also destroys book scanners. ;)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krugerrand#History
http://www.forbes.com/sites/afontevecchia/2011/07/13/bernanke-fights-ron-paul-in-congress-golds-not-money/
http://archive.mises.org/19274/central-banks-gold-is-money/
But it can work.
http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2012/04/27/can-gold-be-used-as-a-currency/
So ice cream for currency?
Here in Canada it's winter most of the time, right now my assets are liquidated. :d
Still better than ice cream phones.
Yep, I worked for 5 years after high school, mainly in a grocery store. Best decision I ever made, before going to college. :-) Need to see your current self in the rear view mirror first.
There just aren't a lot of employers who want to hire a high school grad for anything approaching a complex task. Ten years from now OP will probably understand why... nah, he's a smart kid.. probably 5 years.
Something to be said for knowing what you want to do with your life, there's also something to be said for letting yourself change minds. If you're still a programmer in 20 years, good on ya. Probably set for bigger and better things though.
Either that or I'm going to wait another week for Firefox 16 which will likely imitate Facebook.
Oh, you mean Firebook?
(Ray Bradbury is not amused.)
A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools. (Douglas Adams)
What's wrong with using them? Not to do that would be like using a pencil and paper instead of typing when you're preparing a publication – I'd think that brain power and time should be used constructively.
It's not a matter of the tool is wrong. It's a matter that assuming one tool is always best is wrong.
Your premise is based on: using a computer is easier and better for 100% of humans. That's not true. Allow me to introduce you to my parents. Allow me to introduce you to senior engineers who can craft new formulas on a whiteboard faster than juniors can wake their laptops.
Different areas of the brain are involved with the act of handwriting than with touch typing or pecking. Make LCARS speech recognition a reality and we have a winner. Solving problems that stump otherwise intelligent humans for *hundreds* of years, *clearly* requires some creatively alternate use of the brain, and not Microsoft Clippy. ("I see you're trying to solve an unprovable theorem, would you like to Quit without Saving?") I don't even need to cite sources that say poor UIs slow people down. That's how it is. Computers add cruft, otherwise there wouldn't be a market for applications that remove distractions when writing.
...like using a pencil and paper instead of typing when you're preparing a publication...
Poor analogy. Publication implies mass reproduction and distribution. An *author* can write however they want to form their ideas, the result is the same. How the idea gets distributed is irrelevant to the core point. (Also there are such things as shorthand.)
Lou Dobbs would agree.
On one of the photography sites I frequent, there was a poll years ago about: if you could choose, what would be the last photograph you ever take?
I said "Elvis". A good one to retire on.
I could've said "Bin Laden", but that would give an entirely different connotation to "last".
I kind of wish VLC or MPlayer OSX Extended would implement this.
Try MPlayerX. I think you'll be pleasantly surprised. The current version doesn't have a playlist or individual loop feature, but that's really about the only things it doesn't have, IMO. It does a reasonable attempt at detecting episodic files in a folder.
turns out there is a not insignificant difference ...
Did some one seriously write this? Or did slashdot's queue automatically translate it from English to stupid?
That's fair. The more appropriate Slashdottism would be "non-zero".
If I recommend it in a slashdot thread regarding calculator apps I am *not* astroturfing because my account name, "perpenso", indicates that I represent the publisher.
No it really doesn't. On an internet forum using a corporate alias makes you a fanboy. At best it makes you uncreative.
What you *should* do is a very simple "Disclosure: this is my product".
Presuming that someone will even bother to look at your username, then connect 2 + 2 (lol amirite?) is demanding far too much investigative work from a forum reader.
On a forum that uses Facebook for comments if it said "Works at Perpenso" then your argument would hold water. But a username? No. Absolutely no. You might as well be OracleBoy48.
Please get rid of it.
Not only is it expensive, it is total theater.
It's useless and doesn't help anybody or anything but TSA agents and the companies selling cancerous porno x-ray machines.
Actually, *total* theatre is what I experienced in a Greyhound terminal a few years ago. They "beefed up" security following a totally insane and horrific decapitation on a bus.
Everyone lined up around some pillars, geriatric screeners unzipping backpacks to peer inside, not even opening luggage or duffel bags.
And the wanding... oh lord the wanding, which I swear, looked like a Radio Shack coin finder without any batteries, and didn't detect so much as my belt buckle.
The theatre only existed in major terminals, because 15 minutes out of town you can board the bus by standing at the side of the highway with just a piece of ID for collateral until the next ticket agent stop.
At least there probably weren't any Greyhound security guards masturbating to backscatter images.
Please try to keep in mind, these laws are old, and not being under the reign of a monarch is new. These issues will affect every former UK colony.
It is really not much different, functionally speaking, from a telephone number, an email address or a room number. Are telephone numbers copyrighted? Don't think so. Are email addresses copyrighted? I've never heard of such a thing.
Australia and NZ are still hashing it out, actually.
http://www.baldwins.com/australian-and-new-zealand-copyright-law-for-databases-compilations-and-directories/
And who pays for postal codes to be created/used in the first place? The Canadian taxpayer. That should make postal codes a "public good", owned collectively by the taxpaying Canadian public. Creating a free listing of postal codes, where anyone can look up postal codes, is a convenience, and a service rendered to the public.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crown_copyright#Canada
"Permission to reproduce Government of Canada works, in part or in whole, and by any means, for personal or public non-commercial purposes, or for cost-recovery purposes, is not required, unless otherwise specified in the material you wish to reproduce."
And a good one too, since it is "free", and nobody profits from it.
The "otherwise specified" part would seem to be the $5000 Canada Post wants to charge for its directory. Which it has the right to do. Statistics Canada also charges for its data, one of the few places where government documents are not free. Why? Because information has value. The Do Not Call List has a trivial price attached to it, and has been exploited to high hell because foreign telemarketers can afford to do it and are not bound by our laws. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Do_Not_Call_List#Criticism
Besides, if search engines can index the entire f___ing Internet, without anyone crying "Oy! That's my copyrighted webpage you are indexing!",
Ok, now you're just starting to look silly and ill informed...
http://searchengineland.com/proposed-uk-law-would-immunize-search-engines-against-copyright-claims-33336
http://www.reuters.com/article/2007/04/08/industry-google-afp-dc-idUSN0728115420070408
http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/1457-Search-Engines-Indexing-and-Copyright-Law
http://www.blogstudiolegalefinocchiaro.com/wordpress/?p=258
how can a simple "Canadian postal code lookup function" be a breach of copyright? If the article is correct, the site in question didn't even copy the Postal Services postal code database. It built its own, from user contributions. I really don't see how "copyright" even figures into this case...
It's not the engine, it's the data. Postal codes were *authored*, there is no question about that.
Canada post is entirely free of govn't cash lately - it is self sustaining off of postage costs and such.
No. That would imply it has privatized, and it has not.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canada_Post_Corporation#Privatization
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crown_corporations_of_Canada#Federal
You might be thinking of Air Canada?
I work really hard to be aware of bias and to not let it get in the way of my interactions with people. But it's there for all of us, despite the effort we put in. It does no good to pretend otherwise.
Indeed. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johari_window
I propose a new mascot for this chauvinistic counter-culture.
Don Drupal.
if you buy a quality drive (i.e. not a refurb or one specifically designed as a consumer throwaway) from a vendor that takes some care in shipping and handling, then no you did not stumble on "the conspiracy of XYZcorp's bad drives".
Ah, so it was my fault that I didn't read Quantum's fine print on the box that said "Fireball (consumer throwaway edition)", because in 1995 that information was only a CompuServe search away? So I should have expected that drive to fail under warranty, as well as the THREE RMA REPLACEMENT DRIVES they sent me *also* failing under warranty?
This took place over the span of 3 years, so it wasn't a "bad batch"/ I had to give up on the brand just to stop the cycle of pain, because they would always send a replacement drive no questions asked. Never had a similar issue with another brand before or since (and their shipping was totally fine).
How does making information more available to some kids hurt other kids?
I receive some tutor funding for my university classes. I don't need to attend a confused study group if I don't want to.
You should see the looks on some grown adult faces when they realise someone else has a leg up on them.
Despite the fact I have learning disabilities that already make them more capable than me, they perceive me as privileged, not as someone striving for equity.
How much more compassionate do you think a 9 year old will be? If children understand *anything*, it's favoritism.
None of that answered the spirit of your question though. Helping poor children from poor families, does nothing to help middle-class children with parents who don't give a shit about technology (or their education). You cannot solve these inequities within our current society by giving everyone a web browser.
It's absolutely far-fetched. But so were black swans. ;) I certainly agree with your conclusion.
1) I'm not making any realistic claims about the technology or the engineer's actions. I'm devil's advocating that Director of X is so worried about losing a sale they insist on a ridiculous layer of redundancy. It's not likely, but it is most definitely plausible. (Unless you're defending the intelligence of Microsoft management? oh snap!) And even though this story is about Xbox, information gets exposed elsewhere all the time. If you're not willing to blame the technology, then it comes down to poor decisions and human error.
2) That minuscule case is a $10-$50 loss, plus negative word of mouth and mindshare damage. I don't have a tidy economics formula for it, but That's Bad. Talking about 5 year expiry dates doesn't enter into it, given that before the 360/PS3 no console with an online marketplace had a lifecycle lasting longer than 5 years. And the user knows that it's their job to update when they receive a new card.
3) Employees under stress decide not to bother doing a lot of things. Everyone was the new guy once. Everyone has a senior moment eventually. Let's pretend this issue has existed since 2006, and it has just been discovered in 2012. Sounds like many security patches I've applied.
A lot of /. comments are the search for logical justification of how shit happens. That's a very engineer thing to do. But businesses are no more logical than the fallible people who run them. How many stories do we read about the valiant IT crusader trying to sway their luddite management into awareness of The Right Way? :) Shit happens, because people.
That's what the EULA with the binding arbitration clause is for.
That's what consumer protection laws that declare EULA clauses invalid are for.
Don't have one? Write your politician.
Neither has that Director.