I read it as: if it contains trademarks then (remove/replace and recompile) not (if it contains trademarks then remove/replace) and (recompile). I think it's just pointing out that the trademarked materials are in the binary as well and that merely editing the source is not sufficient, you must also compile new trademark free binaries. That makes the whole sentence totally reasonable, correct and meaningful in the context of avoiding trademark infringement. Sneaking in "Oh, and you must also recompile everything" as a byline in a sentence about trademarks less so.
I like the idea how everything is a file (...) "geeks" who don't care anymore about open file system and results are like systemd journalctl.
It's part good, part "when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail". What happens is that you put a lot of very structured information into an unstructured format, then "reverse engineer" the structure on demand. To take a trivial example with log files, pretty much every log entry has a timestamp. Now we could store this in plaintext and use grep, or we could store this in a database and use "SELECT * FROM logentries WHERE timestamp BETWEEN '2014-01-14' AND '2014-01-15'". Particularly if you got other timestamps stored in the same file you start reinventing columns based on position or markers.
On the good side we now have metadata, a language designed for structured queries, indexing, the ability to implement ACID compliance and an easy means to join information from different sources, on the bad side it's no longer plain text, we depend on a running database service and database corruption could potentially render everything unusable. But then again, so could file system corruption. From what I gather that's pretty much what systemd does and journalctl is kind of like SQL for systemd.
That said, it seems like an "almost SQL" implementation with its own limited language, personally I'd rather go with a proper implementation like SQLite but maybe there's some gotchas there I haven't thought about, in particular it seems clients can define their own log fields on the fly which would require a little dynamic DDL but I don't see any showstoppers. In particular I notice they only have text and binary fields, you can't say that something is an integer or date field so you could filter on them more intelligently.
As soon as the artists decide to go direct to Google and iTunes the Labels are done, and good riddance to them.
It's a nice theory but in practice I doubt it'll happen, because the labels control many popular artists and have huge back catalogs of popular music. Any streaming service who tried doubling as a label would either see higher prices or get no license at all, and a pure-indie streaming service would go nowhere. It'd be like Microsoft declaring that they're going to build Microsoft PCs themselves, of course Dell and HP and Lenovo would be up in arms about it.
Besides, who says it's be easier to get a good deal with them directly than with a label? I've heard artists claim many times they get utterly shit pay for being on Spotify, but if they aren't on Spotify their fans get angry because they have to be such a special snowflake, many people won't go outside Spotify for music and they don't get concert goers so they feel they "have to" be there no matter how badly they're being exploited. Maybe if it was some sort of non-profit association organizing it, but you're just replacing one corporate master with another.
Look at movies, they're still not bridging the gap. Watch any animated movie, even the ones going for hyperrealism and you still can tell they're not human. And they have tons of processing and rendering power and a predefined movement filmed at a predefined angle. Game developers have none of that, they have to do it in real time, often as a response to user input (like if you're fighting a swordsman, he must turn to face you) in a free camera angle. They'll be at least 20 years behind the movies, if they ever achieve it.
This. If we can't find inhabited planets, inhabitable planets are the second most interesting. Perhaps the most interesting for those that look at Earth as a single point of failure. What are the essentials?
1. Temperature, we only need the warmest spot to be arctic range or the coldest spot to be desert range. 2. Gravity, not sure exactly how far from 1G we could sustain but almost certainly a good range. 3. Magnetosphere, both to shield from radiation and sustain an atmosphere, including water vapor. 4. Water, no human colony could live long without water. If we have water and sunlight, we can grow food and produce oxygen.
If we could hit four of four, I think that would be habitable. Doesn't matter so much what it is like today, just put up pressurized greenhouses with plants and let them gobble up as much CO2 from the outside as they can. Dead plants become more soil - hopefully we can find the other bits we need - and we'll be able to grow bigger and bigger fields sustaining more and more people. That is, if we can get there but I think if you found a planet where we could truly say "If only we could get there, we could live there" all effort would go in that direction.
I think that once you have life, the incentive to fill every niche in the available biosphere is huge, which is why you find life in the most inhospitable places from ice bears to desert scorpions despite a tropical rain forest being much nicer. Maybe it's deep underwater or in deep caves or other places shielded from the normal environment where advanced life can begin. But even there it will be competition and resource pressure, so being able to survive exposure is an advantage meaning they'll progressively evolve shells and self-repair systems to deal with it. For all we know we're the slow ones, there's no basis for saying.
In the same way you'd use the law if someone was in your house because you forgot to lock the door? The whole "Oh gee, I didn't realize I wasn't in public space anymore because nothing stopped me from going here so I'm totally innocent." doesn't work in real life, honestly why do you expect it to work online? Particularly when there's good reason to believe the person knew he was behind the front door that was supposed to keep him out and he's busy cleaning the place out of valuables.
Android is based on Linux. The Google apps are not. Despite what some people claim, not everything written for a GPL operating system must be open source.
No it's not, at least not in a copyright sense. The Linux kernel is GPLv2. The Android code running on top is Apache licensed and open source, but written from scratch using no (L)GPL code which means none of the usual libraries, no GNU tools, nothing. It's the GNU/Linux RMS was yammering about stripped of all the GNU. The Google apps running on top of Android again are closed source.
Seriously, who's going to buy a Nokia Android phone when you know they've been bought by Microsoft and won't care one bit about supporting it? Same as the Maemo/MeeGo based phones that Nokia released after the Nokia/Microsoft deal was announced, it's stillborn. And unlike those who might have some unique features this is yet another Android phone that you can get from other companies, so it makes even less sense. Nokia must be running out of feet to shoot itself in.
I have a policy of ALWAYS assuming that any problem somebody brings me is MINE to fix. I most likely caused it and it's my responsibility to fix it. Problems are not always my fault in the end, but until I've proven to myself and more importantly to the person who brought the problem to my attention that it's NOT my fault I'm taking personal responsibility to see it gets fixed.
Ahahahaha no. I do assume that since you're bringing it to me it's my job to fix it, but I'm sure as hell not taking the blame for everything until proven otherwise.
Like you point out, getting confrontational is often a risky and futile effort so I'd say my first strategy is damage control - can I just get what I need done and get on with my life? Usually this involves asserting a domain, in this case okay I have to work with a subject matter expert. Fair enough but if I'm hired as the technical guy, I make the technical decisions.
</br> doesn't work, because your non-compliant coding is shit. The proper markup is <br> (HTML) or <br/> (XHTML).
Just to nitpick, <br></br> is legal XHTML - using self-closing tags is optional, not mandatory and should be exactly the same to an XML parser. However actual browsers will treat it as some kind of borked attempt at a <br> tag and do it wrong.
[In an earlier experiment, Kadosh] found that he could temporarily turn off regions of the brain known to be important for cognitive skills. When the parietal lobe of the brain was stimulated using that technique, he found that the basic arithmetic skills of doctoral students who were normally very good with numbers were reduced to a level similar to those with developmental dyscalculia. That led to his next inquiry: If current could turn off regions of the brain making people temporarily math-challenged, could a different type of stimulation improve math performance?"
In another earlier experiment, he found that blowing an air raid horn at random intervals duing the math test made students perform weaker. He's now investigating if other sounds can make students perform better.
Well at best even with near infinite resolution you'd see them like an eagle flying over them, which would be odd in most cases. I think 99% of the time I'd prefer to use Google Streetview or a photoblog of some form to get a human perspective on things. Not to mention they could take pictures inside buildings, under thick foliage, underwater and other places an overhead camera could never reach. Not that a photoblog is anything close to actually visiting, but aerial photos isn't even close to that.
More like he came in through an unlocked side door with no sign, thought "Uh is this for the public?" and left through the main door only to find that it needs a key to open from the outside and there's a sign saying "Authorized persons only". So far, a honest mistake on his part and not anything he could be blamed for. But when you go back in through the side door and start cleaning the place out, that's not a mistake anymore.
If you are a contractor then almost certainly it should be fixed for free. You are paid to do a job and if it wasn't done right the first time then you need to make it right or expect not to get many more contracts if you leave behind in your wake bugs that either go unfixed, or you charge additional to fix.
That depends entirely on the contract form, most of my contracts have been "time and material" which in essence means you're buying hours, not deliverables. You may get estimates, but they're not in any way binding. The good news for those that hire me is that I'll work off anything, I've literally had a single post-it note as a "requirements document" for a report. If you want it yesterday and want me to rush it through testing and mostly skip documentation I will. The bad news is that I'll bill you for every hour no matter whose bug it is. I suppose if my entire performance was sub-standard given my title and pay grade I'd consider it, but not for just being less than perfect. You can terminate the contract if you're unhappy, but hours spent are hours paid.
If I'm hired to do a "job" then I want a requirements phase with sign-off on exactly what I will be delivering. Any ambiguity in those specifications are your liability meaning if I implement it the "wrong" way you will have to pay to change it. Any decision formally asked for must be taken within specific time limits, your inability to decide will not hurt my schedule. If the requirements change, there will be formal change orders that may incur additional hours and costs. There will be documentation describing how the requirements are solved and a test plan wth an acceptance test and a sign-off that the work is delivered. After that, yes you'll get a limited warranty period where I'll fix any hidden bugs (that are actual bugs, not flaws in the spec) for free. And yes, for taking that risk I'll bill you more.
What are you even talking about? We can't observe what happened one second ago; we can only observe the present. We can extrapolate what happened in the past based on observations made in the present, though. Science is a mechanism for understanding the universe; there is nothing real that is outside of the realm of science.
Well, is the universe real or are you in a Matrix tub right now? Science is trying to deduct a system from observations but there's no absolute proof that any of them are genuine. We can say it's the solution that best fits the evidence. They can say the Bible is the truth and the universe a hoax, an elaborate test of faith or at best that it's a non-literal summary. It's like arguing with a paranoid person, no matter how everybody seems to ignore him they're just pretending. There's no evidence that could make him believe they're not following him, just like there's no evidence that could stop the religious from seeing god in everything.
That is where some people seem to go wrong in think that if we only fill enough libraries with evidence, they'll eventually come around and say we were right all along as if the scientific point was in doubt. That's not it, the evidence is already overwhelming but they fundamentally dismiss it all as valid evidence. If it disagrees with the Bible it's not true, it's the devil or false gods or godless men trying to trick you and confuse you and turn you away from the one true faith. You can't win that battle by piling up books.
4. The enterprise are the people who actually want things fixed through service and support, while consumers tend to ditch hardware and software that's broken. My PC is one of a kind anyway, I don't care one bit about replacing any component with what is best and cheapest right now. If you did that in a company you'd quickly end up with hundreds of franken-PCs and a maintenance nightmare. Likewise, broken software is often an excuse to get around to upgrading or switching tools that you were kind of planning to but never got a kick in the ass before now.
At the office we need continuity, we have schedules and deadlines to keep and the #1, #2 and #3 priority of any failure in production is to restore it to working order and last working configuration. Changes need testing and rollback plans, we'd never jump the gun because shit breaks. Yet that's been fairly common for me personally, I didn't really want to give it the time and effort but if shit is broken and I have to deal with it anyway then I might as well really do something about it.
Handling money is huge business, they've gotten more efficient over the years, but the basic rates that are charged for processing the transactions are still more or less intact, 2ish % per transaction, though minimum processing fees are largely gone now. With all that extra operating capital from increases in efficiency, they cover the fraud and just let the machine roll on, making money. If there ever is a big shake-up, 2% could plummet to less than 1/2% (...)
Most of the costs related to credit card is the fact that you're actually giving credit, which is also why it's a percentage - the more you lend, the greater the costs/risks. Also they bundle it with very stange forms of insurance, rebates, loyalty programs and whatnot. Here in Norway they have a no-frills national debit card system called BankAxept, cost to merchants is approximately 3 cents per transaction. At least for online transactions, not sure about offline terminals as they're quite rare these days since wireless terminals use the cell phone network. But if you're out of coverage or the network is down it's ID + signature as a backup.
Really, you think Google could have just slapped their name on it and all the reason Linux hasn't taken off on the desktop would go away? The other part is that Google isn't very interested in giving you a local solution, that doesn't give them any data nor a hook to google services. And the third reason is that it would be too easy for third parties to strip off the Google bits, despite Android being open source they have very strong incentives to keep OEMs from shipping "bare" phones without all the Google services, the Play store and so on which they wouldn't have for a Linux distro.
Pardon me, but you sound like a grumpy old fart who picked the randomest things to suggest the next generation is going to shit.
We frigging didn't have much choice, if we wanted to hang out together we had to physically be together. Being at home was pretty damn boring, we had to get out. Today I've got a ton of entertainment and access to everyone I know in my pocket, of course that changes things. YMMV but I'd say overall for the better. And no, I used to play "fast food gaming" a lot when I was younger, it's called getting old and not so easily dazzled by a cheap adrenaline thrill anymore. They're no worse today than I was back then, do you really remember yourself ten or twenty years ago? Honestly we weren't much into "deep intellectual stimulation".
I used to tinker with my machines a lot and felt it was great fun, swapping parts and building machines from scratch and it was somehow fun. Then it became routine. Then it became a chore and now I just want to get the damn thing working out of the box and to never break. Same way about running around in an FPS deathmatch, it used to be fun for years. Then I hang in there to play with friends. Today I find the idea of everybody running around shooting each other and respawning just for the sake of shooting each other incredibly dull and pointless. But I'm the one that's changed, not the world.
Let me change that a bit. The only reason employers look at grades is because you are applying for your first job and you have not built a portfolio sufficient for the hiring process. Once you have your first job no one cares about your grades.
In what world do most employees except graphics designers and hair dressers end up with a "portfolio" of work they can show? Working on client systems as a consultant or working deep in the bowels of various internal systems there's nothing I'm allowed to take with me nor that would make much sense on its own. What I have is a list of reputable companies with good reference letters, managers and colleagues who'll vouch for me and of course I'll take any test they'd like me to take. Still, many get good references as a deal to STFU and get lost and so your degree is the most credible objective measure they got. I've had employers take positive note of it 7 years after I graduated and I'm sure it still supports and gives credibility to my more recent work history.
When I went to university several STEM branches were sharing the same basic math classes, but the intake requirements were wildly different - some were elite studies others barely filling their quota. Now should we be ranked by everyone in the class, which would be an almost instant A for some branches since they only have A level students and an almost guaranteed crap grade for others, or just our studies? A common grade would be highly influenced by other studies, if they say dropped a math class the whole landscape would change.
On the other hand, if you limit it to just one study it would mean students taking the same class with the same professor and the same exam get incomparable grades. The physicist's math grade is different from the chemist's math grade is different from the engineer's math grade even if they deliver the same exam. How on earth should an employer figure out how who is best at math when you can't even keep a consistant scale in one university?
Also in any class some will be worst, if you barely make it into an elite study but find yourself at the bottom of the class you get absolutely terrible grades, despite having beat 95% of the population getting in. Employers really do not like to hear you're a C-level student in an AAA-level program, so they adjust the curve. It's not right to take a normal distribution, chop off 95% and normal distribute it again. Nobody will truly understand those grades.
Reading comprehension fail. Model X is their upcoming SUV, bigger and probably as expensive or costlier than the Model S. Model E is their planned economy model, presumably a smaller car, weaker engine, smaller batteries. They're going to be very different beasts.
Well to be the devil's advocate what Canonical wants is to reach the all those that don't use Linux. The community says "Why would you need a GUI for that? All our users are happy with the command line." because the only users you have are those who would be happy with a command line. Of course Canonical could be wrong - often, it seems - but it's not reasonable to think their goals and the community's goals would align perfectly. Canonical wanted to be where Android is now, you know that platform where everything but the kernel like X, Gnome, KDE and so on has been stripped away and replaced and is wildly successful. It's Chromebooks chewing away at Microsoft's market share, not any of the Linux distros that have tried for the last 15 years. Fine, it works for you but stop the navel gazing and see how few of you there are.
I hate to break this to you, but 90% of visitors never read the comments. And can you blame them? Who wants to see that? I mean what normal person.
Seriously,/. without the comments is like Playboy with no pictures. Don't get me wrong, most people on most sites I definitively think so. But/.? Come on, as a news aggregator it's crap, stories are a very random assortment of "News for Nerds - Stuff that matters" with very liberal definitions of "news", "for nerds" and "stuff that matters". Many are nothing but bait for a flamewar, others are blatant slashvertisements and often you're pointed to some form of blog instead of the actual news - though the comments are pretty good for finding better links. If dice.com thinks they bought good content, they're in for a surprise.
I'm that way on most other sites too because the discussion system just isn't very good. - Threading, without it you can have 100 comments but #40-90 has veered to another topic and you can't "resurrent" post #39 because nobody cares anymore at #91. - Limits, if you come in late in a discussion it still only takes a few mod points to reach +5, other places the first sane comment is at +247 and you can never catch it. - Moderations to curb threads going off-topic/flamewars/redundant so a few posters can't derail the entire discussion or take up 90% of the space. - Trash cleaning, I don't know how many times I've seen "Sitting at home making $2000 dollars/week, visit [url]" on other sites while here you're pretty instantly shitcanned to -1.
Does it cause groupthink and "-1, Disagree" moderation? I suppose, but gravitating towards one "popular (nerd) opinion" still beats the shouting match many other places where extremists on each side spam each other drowning out any meaningful discussion. Besides, I've found that in most discussions someone takes the role as the devil's advocate. Near as I can tell, there's is more meaningful discussion here than 99% of the sites that I visit. I also think many of the (few) good articles come from commenters, drive those away and the quality of submissions goes down too.
Of course the other alternative is that they don't want our submissions much, they want to feed us in "the audience" whatever crap dice.com wants to push. I think they'll find that we don't very much like the trade magazine stuff like SlashBI (and I say that as a "Microsoft Certified IT Professional" on MSBI 2008), we come for the nerdy stuff. So if they want to keep the content, change the audience I think it'll go bad. If they want to change the content, keep the audience I think it'll go worse. And if they just want to give it the Web 2.0 treatment, you're doing a pretty awful job. Sorry.
Slashdot Mirror
I read it as: if it contains trademarks then (remove/replace and recompile) not (if it contains trademarks then remove/replace) and (recompile). I think it's just pointing out that the trademarked materials are in the binary as well and that merely editing the source is not sufficient, you must also compile new trademark free binaries. That makes the whole sentence totally reasonable, correct and meaningful in the context of avoiding trademark infringement. Sneaking in "Oh, and you must also recompile everything" as a byline in a sentence about trademarks less so.
I like the idea how everything is a file (...) "geeks" who don't care anymore about open file system and results are like systemd journalctl.
It's part good, part "when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail". What happens is that you put a lot of very structured information into an unstructured format, then "reverse engineer" the structure on demand. To take a trivial example with log files, pretty much every log entry has a timestamp. Now we could store this in plaintext and use grep, or we could store this in a database and use "SELECT * FROM logentries WHERE timestamp BETWEEN '2014-01-14' AND '2014-01-15'". Particularly if you got other timestamps stored in the same file you start reinventing columns based on position or markers.
On the good side we now have metadata, a language designed for structured queries, indexing, the ability to implement ACID compliance and an easy means to join information from different sources, on the bad side it's no longer plain text, we depend on a running database service and database corruption could potentially render everything unusable. But then again, so could file system corruption. From what I gather that's pretty much what systemd does and journalctl is kind of like SQL for systemd.
That said, it seems like an "almost SQL" implementation with its own limited language, personally I'd rather go with a proper implementation like SQLite but maybe there's some gotchas there I haven't thought about, in particular it seems clients can define their own log fields on the fly which would require a little dynamic DDL but I don't see any showstoppers. In particular I notice they only have text and binary fields, you can't say that something is an integer or date field so you could filter on them more intelligently.
As soon as the artists decide to go direct to Google and iTunes the Labels are done, and good riddance to them.
It's a nice theory but in practice I doubt it'll happen, because the labels control many popular artists and have huge back catalogs of popular music. Any streaming service who tried doubling as a label would either see higher prices or get no license at all, and a pure-indie streaming service would go nowhere. It'd be like Microsoft declaring that they're going to build Microsoft PCs themselves, of course Dell and HP and Lenovo would be up in arms about it.
Besides, who says it's be easier to get a good deal with them directly than with a label? I've heard artists claim many times they get utterly shit pay for being on Spotify, but if they aren't on Spotify their fans get angry because they have to be such a special snowflake, many people won't go outside Spotify for music and they don't get concert goers so they feel they "have to" be there no matter how badly they're being exploited. Maybe if it was some sort of non-profit association organizing it, but you're just replacing one corporate master with another.
Look at movies, they're still not bridging the gap. Watch any animated movie, even the ones going for hyperrealism and you still can tell they're not human. And they have tons of processing and rendering power and a predefined movement filmed at a predefined angle. Game developers have none of that, they have to do it in real time, often as a response to user input (like if you're fighting a swordsman, he must turn to face you) in a free camera angle. They'll be at least 20 years behind the movies, if they ever achieve it.
Plus a place like that might support us.
This. If we can't find inhabited planets, inhabitable planets are the second most interesting. Perhaps the most interesting for those that look at Earth as a single point of failure. What are the essentials?
1. Temperature, we only need the warmest spot to be arctic range or the coldest spot to be desert range.
2. Gravity, not sure exactly how far from 1G we could sustain but almost certainly a good range.
3. Magnetosphere, both to shield from radiation and sustain an atmosphere, including water vapor.
4. Water, no human colony could live long without water. If we have water and sunlight, we can grow food and produce oxygen.
If we could hit four of four, I think that would be habitable. Doesn't matter so much what it is like today, just put up pressurized greenhouses with plants and let them gobble up as much CO2 from the outside as they can. Dead plants become more soil - hopefully we can find the other bits we need - and we'll be able to grow bigger and bigger fields sustaining more and more people. That is, if we can get there but I think if you found a planet where we could truly say "If only we could get there, we could live there" all effort would go in that direction.
I think that once you have life, the incentive to fill every niche in the available biosphere is huge, which is why you find life in the most inhospitable places from ice bears to desert scorpions despite a tropical rain forest being much nicer. Maybe it's deep underwater or in deep caves or other places shielded from the normal environment where advanced life can begin. But even there it will be competition and resource pressure, so being able to survive exposure is an advantage meaning they'll progressively evolve shells and self-repair systems to deal with it. For all we know we're the slow ones, there's no basis for saying.
In the same way you'd use the law if someone was in your house because you forgot to lock the door? The whole "Oh gee, I didn't realize I wasn't in public space anymore because nothing stopped me from going here so I'm totally innocent." doesn't work in real life, honestly why do you expect it to work online? Particularly when there's good reason to believe the person knew he was behind the front door that was supposed to keep him out and he's busy cleaning the place out of valuables.
Android is based on Linux. The Google apps are not. Despite what some people claim, not everything written for a GPL operating system must be open source.
No it's not, at least not in a copyright sense. The Linux kernel is GPLv2. The Android code running on top is Apache licensed and open source, but written from scratch using no (L)GPL code which means none of the usual libraries, no GNU tools, nothing. It's the GNU/Linux RMS was yammering about stripped of all the GNU. The Google apps running on top of Android again are closed source.
Seriously, who's going to buy a Nokia Android phone when you know they've been bought by Microsoft and won't care one bit about supporting it? Same as the Maemo/MeeGo based phones that Nokia released after the Nokia/Microsoft deal was announced, it's stillborn. And unlike those who might have some unique features this is yet another Android phone that you can get from other companies, so it makes even less sense. Nokia must be running out of feet to shoot itself in.
I have a policy of ALWAYS assuming that any problem somebody brings me is MINE to fix. I most likely caused it and it's my responsibility to fix it. Problems are not always my fault in the end, but until I've proven to myself and more importantly to the person who brought the problem to my attention that it's NOT my fault I'm taking personal responsibility to see it gets fixed.
Ahahahaha no. I do assume that since you're bringing it to me it's my job to fix it, but I'm sure as hell not taking the blame for everything until proven otherwise.
Like you point out, getting confrontational is often a risky and futile effort so I'd say my first strategy is damage control - can I just get what I need done and get on with my life? Usually this involves asserting a domain, in this case okay I have to work with a subject matter expert. Fair enough but if I'm hired as the technical guy, I make the technical decisions.
</br> doesn't work, because your non-compliant coding is shit. The proper markup is <br> (HTML) or <br /> (XHTML).
Just to nitpick, <br></br> is legal XHTML - using self-closing tags is optional, not mandatory and should be exactly the same to an XML parser. However actual browsers will treat it as some kind of borked attempt at a <br> tag and do it wrong.
[In an earlier experiment, Kadosh] found that he could temporarily turn off regions of the brain known to be important for cognitive skills. When the parietal lobe of the brain was stimulated using that technique, he found that the basic arithmetic skills of doctoral students who were normally very good with numbers were reduced to a level similar to those with developmental dyscalculia. That led to his next inquiry: If current could turn off regions of the brain making people temporarily math-challenged, could a different type of stimulation improve math performance?"
In another earlier experiment, he found that blowing an air raid horn at random intervals duing the math test made students perform weaker. He's now investigating if other sounds can make students perform better.
Well at best even with near infinite resolution you'd see them like an eagle flying over them, which would be odd in most cases. I think 99% of the time I'd prefer to use Google Streetview or a photoblog of some form to get a human perspective on things. Not to mention they could take pictures inside buildings, under thick foliage, underwater and other places an overhead camera could never reach. Not that a photoblog is anything close to actually visiting, but aerial photos isn't even close to that.
More like he came in through an unlocked side door with no sign, thought "Uh is this for the public?" and left through the main door only to find that it needs a key to open from the outside and there's a sign saying "Authorized persons only". So far, a honest mistake on his part and not anything he could be blamed for. But when you go back in through the side door and start cleaning the place out, that's not a mistake anymore.
If you are a contractor then almost certainly it should be fixed for free. You are paid to do a job and if it wasn't done right the first time then you need to make it right or expect not to get many more contracts if you leave behind in your wake bugs that either go unfixed, or you charge additional to fix.
That depends entirely on the contract form, most of my contracts have been "time and material" which in essence means you're buying hours, not deliverables. You may get estimates, but they're not in any way binding. The good news for those that hire me is that I'll work off anything, I've literally had a single post-it note as a "requirements document" for a report. If you want it yesterday and want me to rush it through testing and mostly skip documentation I will. The bad news is that I'll bill you for every hour no matter whose bug it is. I suppose if my entire performance was sub-standard given my title and pay grade I'd consider it, but not for just being less than perfect. You can terminate the contract if you're unhappy, but hours spent are hours paid.
If I'm hired to do a "job" then I want a requirements phase with sign-off on exactly what I will be delivering. Any ambiguity in those specifications are your liability meaning if I implement it the "wrong" way you will have to pay to change it. Any decision formally asked for must be taken within specific time limits, your inability to decide will not hurt my schedule. If the requirements change, there will be formal change orders that may incur additional hours and costs. There will be documentation describing how the requirements are solved and a test plan wth an acceptance test and a sign-off that the work is delivered. After that, yes you'll get a limited warranty period where I'll fix any hidden bugs (that are actual bugs, not flaws in the spec) for free. And yes, for taking that risk I'll bill you more.
What are you even talking about? We can't observe what happened one second ago; we can only observe the present. We can extrapolate what happened in the past based on observations made in the present, though. Science is a mechanism for understanding the universe; there is nothing real that is outside of the realm of science.
Well, is the universe real or are you in a Matrix tub right now? Science is trying to deduct a system from observations but there's no absolute proof that any of them are genuine. We can say it's the solution that best fits the evidence. They can say the Bible is the truth and the universe a hoax, an elaborate test of faith or at best that it's a non-literal summary. It's like arguing with a paranoid person, no matter how everybody seems to ignore him they're just pretending. There's no evidence that could make him believe they're not following him, just like there's no evidence that could stop the religious from seeing god in everything.
That is where some people seem to go wrong in think that if we only fill enough libraries with evidence, they'll eventually come around and say we were right all along as if the scientific point was in doubt. That's not it, the evidence is already overwhelming but they fundamentally dismiss it all as valid evidence. If it disagrees with the Bible it's not true, it's the devil or false gods or godless men trying to trick you and confuse you and turn you away from the one true faith. You can't win that battle by piling up books.
4. The enterprise are the people who actually want things fixed through service and support, while consumers tend to ditch hardware and software that's broken. My PC is one of a kind anyway, I don't care one bit about replacing any component with what is best and cheapest right now. If you did that in a company you'd quickly end up with hundreds of franken-PCs and a maintenance nightmare. Likewise, broken software is often an excuse to get around to upgrading or switching tools that you were kind of planning to but never got a kick in the ass before now.
At the office we need continuity, we have schedules and deadlines to keep and the #1, #2 and #3 priority of any failure in production is to restore it to working order and last working configuration. Changes need testing and rollback plans, we'd never jump the gun because shit breaks. Yet that's been fairly common for me personally, I didn't really want to give it the time and effort but if shit is broken and I have to deal with it anyway then I might as well really do something about it.
Handling money is huge business, they've gotten more efficient over the years, but the basic rates that are charged for processing the transactions are still more or less intact, 2ish % per transaction, though minimum processing fees are largely gone now. With all that extra operating capital from increases in efficiency, they cover the fraud and just let the machine roll on, making money. If there ever is a big shake-up, 2% could plummet to less than 1/2% (...)
Most of the costs related to credit card is the fact that you're actually giving credit, which is also why it's a percentage - the more you lend, the greater the costs/risks. Also they bundle it with very stange forms of insurance, rebates, loyalty programs and whatnot. Here in Norway they have a no-frills national debit card system called BankAxept, cost to merchants is approximately 3 cents per transaction. At least for online transactions, not sure about offline terminals as they're quite rare these days since wireless terminals use the cell phone network. But if you're out of coverage or the network is down it's ID + signature as a backup.
Really, you think Google could have just slapped their name on it and all the reason Linux hasn't taken off on the desktop would go away? The other part is that Google isn't very interested in giving you a local solution, that doesn't give them any data nor a hook to google services. And the third reason is that it would be too easy for third parties to strip off the Google bits, despite Android being open source they have very strong incentives to keep OEMs from shipping "bare" phones without all the Google services, the Play store and so on which they wouldn't have for a Linux distro.
Pardon me, but you sound like a grumpy old fart who picked the randomest things to suggest the next generation is going to shit.
We frigging didn't have much choice, if we wanted to hang out together we had to physically be together. Being at home was pretty damn boring, we had to get out. Today I've got a ton of entertainment and access to everyone I know in my pocket, of course that changes things. YMMV but I'd say overall for the better. And no, I used to play "fast food gaming" a lot when I was younger, it's called getting old and not so easily dazzled by a cheap adrenaline thrill anymore. They're no worse today than I was back then, do you really remember yourself ten or twenty years ago? Honestly we weren't much into "deep intellectual stimulation".
I used to tinker with my machines a lot and felt it was great fun, swapping parts and building machines from scratch and it was somehow fun. Then it became routine. Then it became a chore and now I just want to get the damn thing working out of the box and to never break. Same way about running around in an FPS deathmatch, it used to be fun for years. Then I hang in there to play with friends. Today I find the idea of everybody running around shooting each other and respawning just for the sake of shooting each other incredibly dull and pointless. But I'm the one that's changed, not the world.
Let me change that a bit. The only reason employers look at grades is because you are applying for your first job and you have not built a portfolio sufficient for the hiring process. Once you have your first job no one cares about your grades.
In what world do most employees except graphics designers and hair dressers end up with a "portfolio" of work they can show? Working on client systems as a consultant or working deep in the bowels of various internal systems there's nothing I'm allowed to take with me nor that would make much sense on its own. What I have is a list of reputable companies with good reference letters, managers and colleagues who'll vouch for me and of course I'll take any test they'd like me to take. Still, many get good references as a deal to STFU and get lost and so your degree is the most credible objective measure they got. I've had employers take positive note of it 7 years after I graduated and I'm sure it still supports and gives credibility to my more recent work history.
When I went to university several STEM branches were sharing the same basic math classes, but the intake requirements were wildly different - some were elite studies others barely filling their quota. Now should we be ranked by everyone in the class, which would be an almost instant A for some branches since they only have A level students and an almost guaranteed crap grade for others, or just our studies? A common grade would be highly influenced by other studies, if they say dropped a math class the whole landscape would change.
On the other hand, if you limit it to just one study it would mean students taking the same class with the same professor and the same exam get incomparable grades. The physicist's math grade is different from the chemist's math grade is different from the engineer's math grade even if they deliver the same exam. How on earth should an employer figure out how who is best at math when you can't even keep a consistant scale in one university?
Also in any class some will be worst, if you barely make it into an elite study but find yourself at the bottom of the class you get absolutely terrible grades, despite having beat 95% of the population getting in. Employers really do not like to hear you're a C-level student in an AAA-level program, so they adjust the curve. It's not right to take a normal distribution, chop off 95% and normal distribute it again. Nobody will truly understand those grades.
Reading comprehension fail. Model X is their upcoming SUV, bigger and probably as expensive or costlier than the Model S. Model E is their planned economy model, presumably a smaller car, weaker engine, smaller batteries. They're going to be very different beasts.
Well to be the devil's advocate what Canonical wants is to reach the all those that don't use Linux. The community says "Why would you need a GUI for that? All our users are happy with the command line." because the only users you have are those who would be happy with a command line. Of course Canonical could be wrong - often, it seems - but it's not reasonable to think their goals and the community's goals would align perfectly. Canonical wanted to be where Android is now, you know that platform where everything but the kernel like X, Gnome, KDE and so on has been stripped away and replaced and is wildly successful. It's Chromebooks chewing away at Microsoft's market share, not any of the Linux distros that have tried for the last 15 years. Fine, it works for you but stop the navel gazing and see how few of you there are.
I hate to break this to you, but 90% of visitors never read the comments. And can you blame them? Who wants to see that? I mean what normal person.
Seriously, /. without the comments is like Playboy with no pictures. Don't get me wrong, most people on most sites I definitively think so. But /.? Come on, as a news aggregator it's crap, stories are a very random assortment of "News for Nerds - Stuff that matters" with very liberal definitions of "news", "for nerds" and "stuff that matters". Many are nothing but bait for a flamewar, others are blatant slashvertisements and often you're pointed to some form of blog instead of the actual news - though the comments are pretty good for finding better links. If dice.com thinks they bought good content, they're in for a surprise.
I'm that way on most other sites too because the discussion system just isn't very good.
- Threading, without it you can have 100 comments but #40-90 has veered to another topic and you can't "resurrent" post #39 because nobody cares anymore at #91.
- Limits, if you come in late in a discussion it still only takes a few mod points to reach +5, other places the first sane comment is at +247 and you can never catch it.
- Moderations to curb threads going off-topic/flamewars/redundant so a few posters can't derail the entire discussion or take up 90% of the space.
- Trash cleaning, I don't know how many times I've seen "Sitting at home making $2000 dollars/week, visit [url]" on other sites while here you're pretty instantly shitcanned to -1.
Does it cause groupthink and "-1, Disagree" moderation? I suppose, but gravitating towards one "popular (nerd) opinion" still beats the shouting match many other places where extremists on each side spam each other drowning out any meaningful discussion. Besides, I've found that in most discussions someone takes the role as the devil's advocate. Near as I can tell, there's is more meaningful discussion here than 99% of the sites that I visit. I also think many of the (few) good articles come from commenters, drive those away and the quality of submissions goes down too.
Of course the other alternative is that they don't want our submissions much, they want to feed us in "the audience" whatever crap dice.com wants to push. I think they'll find that we don't very much like the trade magazine stuff like SlashBI (and I say that as a "Microsoft Certified IT Professional" on MSBI 2008), we come for the nerdy stuff. So if they want to keep the content, change the audience I think it'll go bad. If they want to change the content, keep the audience I think it'll go worse. And if they just want to give it the Web 2.0 treatment, you're doing a pretty awful job. Sorry.