Exactly. My non-use of social media has made me (more of?) an antisocial weirdo to most people. Facebook has redefined social norms, and even relies on the erosion of humanity's concept of privacy to grow.
So you can say there's no place for you there. IRL individuality tends to be more important to your acquaintances when you imply that VERY general personal values are in play that you do not want to get into. If you say anything like "privacy" and so on, they'll just start pulling examples that to them mean you are wrong, rather than something stating that YOU deserver your opinion.
After telling a few non-techs that you aren't in the networks, you grow your in skill telling the tech friends that easily would shut you down or bring biased counterexamples. It gets easier if you don't over-explain yourself, too. People make the same assumptions, but bother you less if they have less of a target to shoot against.
Having a separate catch-all e-mail address for all those people who don't understand your requests to stop sending e-mail chains and social media invites is a huge helper too. I have had job recruiters and coworkers mail me invites, but ignoring them and never talking about it seems to do the trick. If the day ever comes to be forced to join FB because tomorrow's job if in social-media technology and your boss/interviewer demands it for their application, then you can pull the initials-only stunt and have a skeleton page.
Ugh. Responding in any other way would have spared you from this reply: you, sir, are exactly what is wrong with wikipedia, down to your very reply subtly paraphrasing the notorious "citation needed." We all know the question itself is made more to annoy than to fix anything. For every "most cases" that you discussed above, there is always "the rest of the cases."
How should we expect those, er, "victims" will react to being asked to provide "proof" of being wronged by the same group that did the wronging?
Not sure if you can see the subtext, so let me be the first to make it clear that quitting wikipedia as an editor is exactly like getting a divorce: we've already given up. We just tell our story like a battered war veteran talks about wars --without giving names of things that are long dead, or expecting you, the audience, to fix our past.
In other words, seeing other slashdotters resonate with our suffering does not fix the problem. What fixes it is the fact that we have already gotten closure through a non-negotiable decision to move away. We don't think that a random slashdotter will go up there and fix the problem, either, and unlike marriage, it's easy to find a replacement especialized wiki to contribute to... or to just stop making real contributions while getting all the other benefits and none of the revert drama.
I found some screenshots of the launcher here. I lived in the launcher days. It had a similar interface to the classroom-friendly "At Ease" tab-folder manager. There is some other feature whose name I can't remember, which I became very fond of because it allows OS 8.5+ to minimize folder windows to the bottom of your screen as small tabs whose "body" would only pop up when clicked. It could be filled with shortcuts and documents without cluttering the desktop.
That functionality was available in OS 9 as well. 9 became "Classic" when 10 began to emulate it. The Classic emulator was meant only for individual applications, so OS 9's shell enhancements such as the Chooser and the Launcher were probably out of the question unless you were one of the lucky few mac geeks dual booting into their full-featured OS 9 installs prior to the sale of the last OS 9 CD. Classic itself was phased out around 10.3 or so IIRC. All in all, it seems like 8 and 9 were a lot less hard for Apple to "sunset" than 2000 and XP have been for Microsoft. Seeing how easily iOS gets phased out for "valid" phones every year, Apple won't have any problem pushing an OS / phone merge. The problem will be convincing people on BOTH sides that they were "upgraded" to the right interface. But knowing Apple's success stories, there will be much complaning followed by lots of obedience and NONE of the expected retractions.
Nobody has thus far been able to make Apple bring back the killed built-in floppy drive, nor the Appletalk applets, nor the ADB (mouse) ports, nor the SCSI interface, nor the Classic OS, nor PPC support, nor the fullscreen-quicktime videos (without paying 30 bucks or playing around with Applescript). I hear the server tools got downsized for Lion, since they downsided the pricing model radically, whether you want it or not. I heard that this meant NFS and unlimited FTP clients were also removed. Apple does not fall back on its changes. Entire infrastructures have needed to change for every industry that relies too much on each one of those components, and that is why Apple is more unstable to businesses; they are not cheap to begin with, and they have a lot of bittersweet features that get the plug pulled. My nostalgia and Unix side still has a strong pull favoring flunking $900 for a mac mini server that I can't quite explain.
Dr Miller apparently never did any serious cooking. Are you aware how much task-switching and parallel monitoring is involved in preparing a multi-course meal alone for a couple of guys? No delusions involved, as you would taste the results of someone only believing he can handle the parallel task load...
Your analogy isn't very good because it forgets that your brain does most analog tasks based on repetition, and therefore it is is handling most of that meal preparation subconciously. Blame it on muscle memory, even. If you're talking with the couple of guys, then you're in a larger percent consciously dealing with them and just using your eyes to look at different pots, pans and ingredients as they make their way in and out of the fire. Your hands are used to handling orders so that your knife won't cut you even while you're busy, but busy "multitasking" conversation IS affecting the flavor of the food.
The problem is that multitasking "noise" is not always obvious. We only notice "too much tobasco sauce!!!" "too much salt!!" when something goes really wrong with the cook's attention. If we could measure all the variables rigurously, then the results of food consistency, bitterness, sweetness, saltyness over-cooked-ness, undercooked-ness for each dish should be more obviously affected by multitasking even if the untrained palate cannot detect it in your example.
Despite all of the above one's opinion can be unswayed especially with "a serious cook." So I'll leave you with a clear example: try to monitor in a lab environment how much "task-switching and parallel monitoring is involved in preparing a multi-course meal alone for a couple of guys..." when every single part of that meal is 100% unknown to said cook until the minute they start to cook that full-course meal. Even Chef competitions show you how wildly things change when one is out of their water even when dishes procedures are fully *known* in advance... Without experienced cooks (meaning muscle memory, which in turn means less fake multitasking and more subconscious GPU-like parallelizing), the simple nervousness of novelty to a young cook and need of the cookbook and "attention" to its instructions... plus extrapolation from what you DO and DO NOT know prior to cooking the meal is close to what TFS implies --new data that our digital distractions drag in overwhelming quantities.
It's not as profitable to Google if they can't link an online identity to a fake/anonymous account.
If you think google can't link your fake account with lots of real data you're very naive.
Ha. They ALL can. It's not like the FBI always goes to just Google for matters of USA national security. After all, when it comes to stuff like CP or other crime prosecution for stuff mishandled by law agents, people still effectively use these defenses:
the wireless router allows for my neighbor/sister/visitor to use my IP
the DHCP from my ISP changes often and that IP was not US at the time
the "haha! my other *housemates*/dorm people/evil ex used this living room PC back then"
Back on topic, to the advertisers who aren't that serious about your "exact identity" for the purposes of serious conviction as the law is, such ambiguity as the above inspires hating your services, because it means LOST AD CASH. To them many "maybe's" is not equal to just as many "solid yes's."
Not needing to pay $60+ a month to tether a mobile laptop legally would certainly be cool to companies and their short-range travellers / roaming techs. 12000 sqr miles is not that much really. It represents a rectangle 400 x 30 miles.
It's way too big for any farm I know of, but should suit your M.A.N. just fine, and probably save a ton of cash on line-of-sight lasers for college-campus building conglomerate connectivity, or even ground-tearing for fiber runs. For a cab company that wishes to switch from spectrum-monitored waves to wifi-like connectivity so that they can easily encrypt their signals, connect real laptops to get cheap connectivity on their employee's on-car smartphones (supposing there's some kind of adapter from 802.22 to USB and that they have mapping apps or something) of having to purchase full-price GPS (mostly 100+ bucks for cheap ones)
Depending on the prices for this tech, companies would save a TON of money if they could drop all their Verizon 4G tethering and instead use one-time-only charge hardware to connect to this private network. Cable guys, for example, work in wide areas and would benefit from that.
My LCD laptop thanks them!
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The trickle down effect will ensure that we enter another craze were we're given our pixels back. I remember an age of 1200 vertical resolutions even on laptops (Dell D800 for business) that has become insurmountable with 'progress'. So the second these same guys who deflated our resolutions get down with setting some high posts, we'll be seeing our pixels back.
The bad part is that we'll reach an expanding - contracting sol-like state, because they got away with it once, and will do in the future. Meanwhile, it's a nice profit to make all of us (early-, late- and collector-type- adopters) throw money yearly at all these moving targets, specially with obsolete-by-design smartphones.
The politicians need to quit doing feel-good crap to get reelected and start becoming stewards for our nation - or there won't be much more feel good crap to do.
Shamefully, the difficult part is that this never happens because of pressure to conform, the lack of incentives to excel and the lack of punishment to those who fail to be a good example.
For instance, you can't just fix a broken company by having everyone in a *struggling* company promise that they'll work 100% harder for the next quarter (more productivity, more work hours, more projects, less facebook access...) to rake in more cash.
The result is that the lazy do nothing new, and ensure that the boss hears about who is "upstaging" them by setting up an unfairly good example not easy to follow. The reality is that nobody punishes the lazy unless they badly mess up anyway... which rarely happens because the lazy touch as little stuff as they can in their daily faked workflow. The end result is that the hard-workers either get tired and return to the usual pace, or push too hard and get burnt out and fired / quit. The people in the middle just sigh their thanks that the pressure if off them and there won't be any need to take a firm stand in either excellence or obvious slacking.
It's a lick your recent hunting wounds and hunt elsewhere change. You're stating what we have suspected, but still refuse to accept*: that US jobs are "Cursed if the corps don't get more cash... and even if they do get it."
* Because there's no "way out" of the IT job exodus other than going to live in Asia using a radically different lifestyle, income base, freedoms, and worst of all... language.
Oh that's easy:) But to exercise some pedanticness... Let's say this passes, ruling out 300 million American citizens. Facebook has 600 million, so we need to go after them because they're actively engaged in communications with the millions of Americans. So you might as well go for the whole other 5 billion humans on the planet, just to be safe. And we'll solve the employment problem for sure!
More seriously, though: what about operations that implant stable electronics like pacemakers? can't a bomb be made passive so that a person may house it for months or even years, provided it won't leak and kill the "warrior" prematurely in a very slow chemical death (breast implants, anyone?)
Almost forgot the point of that: not all bombs are time-based. Who is to say that the bombs can't be synched to a cellphone call, or to the Colorado Time server reaching the entire USA?
They hope intelligent people will inherently trust "Anonymous cowards" more than they trust Public-faced heroes that can be bought or silenced. I guess they're not happy with the sudden fall of the original Wikileak's Assange into... relative, er, anonymity after all the noise with the US and europe's Interpol back in January.
The sadness is that I don't trust Anonymous' individuals with "anonymizing" whistleblow data. Though one person will legally own the wiki's resources, it ain't no responsible Assange. Seeing Anonymous' track record with messing up the lives of individuals in the past by trolling, calling, faxing and showing up at places that were thought "private" before, I'll have to pass on their offer, however honest it may be.
It takes just a single one of the other anonymous guys (who himself could be a covert CIA agent looking to plug the leak or some guy looking for holiday fun) to convince the true owner offline or online that *my* data should be publicized. After all, there's no honor amongst thieves, especially when they're all faceless.
Regarding your posting problem, just do what I've mastered:
Right-click on Reply and then Open Link in New Tab
Travel to the new tab where your comment is now the history root.
Ignore the Captcha
Enter your nick / password combo
Click on Preview for the page to refresh with YOUR logged in data
Scroll down and click on submit.
The beauty of it is twofold, really:
If and when you mess up any of the steps, your browser's back button for that new tab still knows EXACTLY what comment your eye was set on.
also, your OLD tab still has recollection of where on the story you were prior to logging in, so that you may continue browsing.
BIG PLUS of this last one? Slashdot 2.0 has some Javascript magic so that the non-logged-in tab will automatically read your browser cookie and prepare a logged-in reply --without needing to lose your place reloading that page.
You bring up an interesting point with "whacking words". I tried to think of things like censor filters were stuff like "cr.ap" or even "crÃp" gets through the censure, and everyone on the board knows the codes. But China isn't dependent on ASCII and single characters often mean ENTIRE concepts, so that the same kind of playful splitting and unicode bitshifting isn't available to deceive the filters.
So, knowing some things about Kanjis and ideograms, and how instead of syllables the Kanji-based Eastern languages compose words differently: a little like "<aqua> + <structure> = dam" (just a made-up example akin to what I see in Japanese all the time). Then, how do they disguise cusswords or subversive speech if their building blocks can't be small enough to combine them creatively the way we do latin alphabets?
The only hint I know of is that Chinese name tattoos can spell a name differently depending on what "attributes" the name is supposed to convey, and it's a little bit like English puns. So perhaps they *do* have "basic sound" characters that mean certain things when used in different ways, and are as unblockable as the words "the" and "a" are to us. But seeing a real language site discussing this would be helpful
Punishing google for this WILL set a dangerous precident that will be used against all of us by big corporations in the future.
So be it!
You're arguing for the LEGAL SUPPORT of a case that hasn't happened, instead of looking at the one that has already HAPPENED, and which already made *whole countries* cringe.
The case you're forgetting is more dangerous yet, because google ALREADY got our data, and is *setting precedent too* when they win: encouraging other companies to bend us over and pick at data that very few people are aware is leaking is worse than having to watch for what we can or cannot collect.
We have already seen that more restricted rules are better than the current freedoms that corporations have allowing them to screenscrape our posts, re-publish pictures, own any IP posted on their "public" sites by way of laughably entitled TOS (which incidentally nobody is really aware of either.)
To reiterate the point, you don't let today's wrongdoers go free in order to "prevent" tomorrow's from acting. In any case, unencrypted signals going through our property don't give us much to intercept or "own" because legally we can't rebroadcast anything, and foolish things you want to prevent are already happening in front of your noses... case in point: feds who destroy your videos of their illegal doings, feds who say you can't sell "their" illegally-placed wiretapping devices into "your" car without "your" permission.
So if you keep allowing everyone to do as they please with "free" information, then this farce will never stop.
It's just that having the degree doesn't set you too far ahead of the pack in this economy. While you're studying others are sharpening their resume in small jobs till their skills harden to the point that nobody even asks for proof of a degree when they see a years worth of related bullet points.
I'm in a similar situation to yours career-wise. Started working tech support around age 17 and since then only desktop support gigs have been offered. This summer, I finally stopped getting typecasted, thanks in part to a remote Unix server operations support gig that somehow left some programming-relevant buzzwords in my resume that I could actually prove semi-daily use of. Without the shell experience gained there, I wouldn't be working with front-end code. I'm at a small company and still transitioning, since the assignment is a short paid internship. My resume will finally say that I've done development full-time, rather than call-center or user-facing jobs.
My first suggestion to you is to re-check yesterday's discussion , which was a refreshingly civil rehash of "CS degree isn't programming, yada, yada." Make sure you scale it to >120 comments to get the most detail out of it; just take a break every half an hour to think how the comments apply to you and give it a couple days to review the whole thing seriously. Even to IT insiders, it seems that a CS degree isn't understood --I reluctanctly got one, and somewhat wish I had taken a 2 year degree at a tradeschool approach instead of being forced to plough all the way thru advanced Calculus, Math theory and a bunch of "core" humanities classes. At our age you are well rounded as you'll get and your skills will not really benefit from the degree's forced requirements... unless you quit your job to go fulltime into the 4 CS year degree. Only around half of CS classes are coding, so your job might actually be providing you with more hands-on experience with a single project than you get out of public colleges' degree programs for a whole semester.
Anyways, since you are already writing SOME code and queries towards your company's codebase and bottomline, then you don't need a full 4-year CS degree if you're looking for future jobs at mid-size and small places --the resume's degree blurb is to secure your FIRST programming job, which you indirectly are already in.
So, try to learn the languages and environments on your own (time is hard to find, but force yourself to do little things like regularly trying out examples at code-snippet blogs.) It's very important that you regularly use one or two big IDE's (Eclipse, Visual whatever) and vi / emacs for shells scripts, php and xml. Get familiar with CVS and Maven for code repositories; try out tutorials on youtube to see how they work, and force yourself to default to an Ubuntu 10.04 boot so that you have a shell handy, a compiler and are only apt-get away from Eclipse and other things. If you can live daily with tools that the other devs have, then you're a step closer to slowly push your way... oh, and since you're not a coder at the current company, you'll probably not be given a chance there --ever. A jump away might be the only way; chicken and the egg, really. It takes a good bullet point or two in your resume about "experience with X" programming skills that a junior position for a full-time programmer will appreciate. And without temp agencies, it's hard to kinda make the jump, so it can take you years to get a lucky break.
Re:Q: Why hasn't Mozilla considered a Firefox OS?
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Ooops! s/unless from outside the BIOS/unless from INside the BIOS/
Re:Q: Why hasn't Mozilla considered a Firefox OS?
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I remember not-so-fondly the reason causing Windows to "power down" to a power-wasting state with a the sky/cloud banner stating that "It's now safe to shut down your computer now" back in Windows 95. Even with 98 lots of hardware was unable to shut off on its own.
I wish some standard would unify auto power-*up* management at the BIOS level (even if Linux gets locked out of the hardware deal). I really liked how plain old Macs had a universal control area going over sleep countdowns, screensavers, powerdown times AND the elusive power-up function that Wintel users are forbidden to touch unless from outside the BIOS --and all from a perfectly integrated GUI running as a control panel applet (and that was around 1998, when the *other* consumer OS/BIOS combination would barely even shut down without user-case-button-interaction).
On why there's no Ubuntu tablet: Unity doesn't really work as a tablet interface.
Wow, so there it is! He single-handedly pushes something designed for tablets to our desktops, only we all hate it here. Then someone thinks logically and wants to see if its original environment is any better barring the suspected "lost-in-translation syndrome"... only that he admits it's just as broken on tablets.
What was the progress made with Unity, then, other than hurt usage share? Then he goes on to mention Chrome/ium although non-geeks use Firefox. He's probably planning to whittle his ratio of Linux to Ubuntu followers to levels similar to Windows vs. OSX levels.
Ugh, 30 minutes and everyone's still caught up in the unit conversion issues.
OK, let's stop and ponder other things, like why these rocket scientists were 50 times off their mark on durability estimates. The are not the same people in charge of our cheap unshielded, non-harsh-weather resistant, poorly dust-proofed, China-made electronics where variable parts WILL fail every few years and stop your booting. Aerospace scientists design beyond "our" problems, and make complex computers with probably zero dust-exposed PSU heatsinks to live in dust-bunny/lightning storm environments 5+ times harsher than the Earth, wind-speed and static-electricity-storm-wise (courtesy of a Science channel doc).
The scientists have been revising data from all the mars rover landings since '97, and from the very first rover had a chance to up-correct their estimates when even *that* rover outlasted the projections. So... why are they erring on the side of caution? Politics, maybe washing their hands in the distrust of contractors' abilities to build good enugh to meet their 10-year-program adjustments spec? Something doesn't add up, and it makes you wonder:
* just how much better is "rocket science," really? * just how much worse are all the others who more-readily miss estimates, causing daily problems on our Blue Marble? * just how prepared is NASA to run tests beyond the driving reach of the landing site while they obviously didn't carefully plan to be running 'em? * just how many extra tax dollars will need to be allocated to budget for this whole not-so-well planned "lucky break?";)
These people are selling broken guns and then blaming bullet makers for their own exploding barrels. I'm sure someone could make a quick Windows virus/security analogy if we wanted to further the example of how pointing fingers does little to change a broken status quo.
I would sure hate to be the test case here. Poor guy got a bucket of blue paint; now he glows in the dark. Never has a problem finding his keys though.
and everybody can tell where's he has been and what he has been touching...
Sounds like a...PAINT analogy... for how today's social media sites bait and use us afterwards.
This raises the question: is this just a pilot program meant to test the water before they make one available to Windows? We all know that Windows 8 will come with a store, though there's no reason Amazon could pair up with MS to, say, single out Windows XP's "inadequacy" by releasing the store only for Vista and newer, a la IE9 / DirectX 10+.
One thing we sorely need is more equality with Smartphone software, however hard it may be: Microsoft purposely designed MS MOBI barcode reader without any Windows/PC releases whatsoever, though barcodes are only a picture away if you lack a smartphone. Newspapers advertisers and columnists seem to think *everyone* has smartphones rather than cheap phones. We don't: a recent story showed penetration in the USA has only now reached 50%, leaving a hefty half of the cellphone market out; let alone those with just landlines.
So the Application environments are becoming even more like competing video game consoles where you must have bought precisely the one the target product is on. Worse, it's like saying "oh, you have a mac/linux/windows, so you can't use this free product this minute." So besides of the issues like "Android implementation fragmentation" we are being transitioned into tomorrow's DRM markets under our own PCs. Seeing the new enthusiasm of formerly penny-less shareware writers cashing in on simple tiny apps, I predict we will start running out of the rich environment of Windows-only freeware obtainable from the web. At least there will be fewer viruses... but there will be much fewer marketless downloads too. TPM at its worst.
It's obvious that Mozilla wants to get on Google's good side. They are making tons of money from having partnered with them to direct search bar quieries to google. Mozilla's money people must have realized that the more URLs they force-redirect and the earlier they vow to remove raw (Google-less) browsing, the more revenue and long-term partnerships they'll forge with Google: Collusion at its best
Google is scared that people will remain on their portal for less, and they're trying to make everything redirect go to their site. Each search firefox search opens up a whole new webpage and loads all of google's javascript trinkets and trackers. Rockmelt's implementation actually does things right: skip sidebar, disable keyboard navigation AND ADS, and just load the clicked links --superfast.
I stopped believing in my personal "relationship" with Mozilla since the Firefox's awesomebar in 3.0, and further, vowed to completely *avoid* 4.0 after more transgressions and questionable additions and release cycles have been announced, It will get harder to find a browser that is free of this corporate attraction to shininess and high revenue since the only other mainstream alternatives to Chrome and FF are closed: Opera, Safari... and back to IE. Anything else flags my browser session with on major sites with a lazy "sorry, you need a supported browser so that our CSS won't fail" message and full stop to my getting my content.
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly. My non-use of social media has made me (more of?) an antisocial weirdo to most people. Facebook has redefined social norms, and even relies on the erosion of humanity's concept of privacy to grow.
So you can say there's no place for you there. IRL individuality tends to be more important to your acquaintances when you imply that VERY general personal values are in play that you do not want to get into. If you say anything like "privacy" and so on, they'll just start pulling examples that to them mean you are wrong, rather than something stating that YOU deserver your opinion.
After telling a few non-techs that you aren't in the networks, you grow your in skill telling the tech friends that easily would shut you down or bring biased counterexamples. It gets easier if you don't over-explain yourself, too. People make the same assumptions, but bother you less if they have less of a target to shoot against.
Having a separate catch-all e-mail address for all those people who don't understand your requests to stop sending e-mail chains and social media invites is a huge helper too. I have had job recruiters and coworkers mail me invites, but ignoring them and never talking about it seems to do the trick. If the day ever comes to be forced to join FB because tomorrow's job if in social-media technology and your boss/interviewer demands it for their application, then you can pull the initials-only stunt and have a skeleton page.
Ugh. Responding in any other way would have spared you from this reply:
you, sir, are exactly what is wrong with wikipedia, down to your very reply subtly paraphrasing the notorious "citation needed." We all know the question itself is made more to annoy than to fix anything. For every "most cases" that you discussed above, there is always "the rest of the cases."
How should we expect those, er, "victims" will react to being asked to provide "proof" of being wronged by the same group that did the wronging?
Not sure if you can see the subtext, so let me be the first to make it clear that quitting wikipedia as an editor is exactly like getting a divorce: we've already given up. We just tell our story like a battered war veteran talks about wars --without giving names of things that are long dead, or expecting you, the audience, to fix our past.
In other words, seeing other slashdotters resonate with our suffering does not fix the problem. What fixes it is the fact that we have already gotten closure through a non-negotiable decision to move away. We don't think that a random slashdotter will go up there and fix the problem, either, and unlike marriage, it's easy to find a replacement especialized wiki to contribute to... or to just stop making real contributions while getting all the other benefits and none of the revert drama.
I found some screenshots of the launcher here. I lived in the launcher days. It had a similar interface to the classroom-friendly "At Ease" tab-folder manager. There is some other feature whose name I can't remember, which I became very fond of because it allows OS 8.5+ to minimize folder windows to the bottom of your screen as small tabs whose "body" would only pop up when clicked. It could be filled with shortcuts and documents without cluttering the desktop.
That functionality was available in OS 9 as well. 9 became "Classic" when 10 began to emulate it. The Classic emulator was meant only for individual applications, so OS 9's shell enhancements such as the Chooser and the Launcher were probably out of the question unless you were one of the lucky few mac geeks dual booting into their full-featured OS 9 installs prior to the sale of the last OS 9 CD. Classic itself was phased out around 10.3 or so IIRC. All in all, it seems like 8 and 9 were a lot less hard for Apple to "sunset" than 2000 and XP have been for Microsoft. Seeing how easily iOS gets phased out for "valid" phones every year, Apple won't have any problem pushing an OS / phone merge. The problem will be convincing people on BOTH sides that they were "upgraded" to the right interface. But knowing Apple's success stories, there will be much complaning followed by lots of obedience and NONE of the expected retractions.
Nobody has thus far been able to make Apple bring back the killed built-in floppy drive, nor the Appletalk applets, nor the ADB (mouse) ports, nor the SCSI interface, nor the Classic OS, nor PPC support, nor the fullscreen-quicktime videos (without paying 30 bucks or playing around with Applescript). I hear the server tools got downsized for Lion, since they downsided the pricing model radically, whether you want it or not. I heard that this meant NFS and unlimited FTP clients were also removed. Apple does not fall back on its changes. Entire infrastructures have needed to change for every industry that relies too much on each one of those components, and that is why Apple is more unstable to businesses; they are not cheap to begin with, and they have a lot of bittersweet features that get the plug pulled. My nostalgia and Unix side still has a strong pull favoring flunking $900 for a mac mini server that I can't quite explain.
Dr Miller apparently never did any serious cooking. Are you aware how much task-switching and parallel monitoring is involved in preparing a multi-course meal alone for a couple of guys? No delusions involved, as you would taste the results of someone only believing he can handle the parallel task load...
Your analogy isn't very good because it forgets that your brain does most analog tasks based on repetition, and therefore it is is handling most of that meal preparation subconciously. Blame it on muscle memory, even. If you're talking with the couple of guys, then you're in a larger percent consciously dealing with them and just using your eyes to look at different pots, pans and ingredients as they make their way in and out of the fire. Your hands are used to handling orders so that your knife won't cut you even while you're busy, but busy "multitasking" conversation IS affecting the flavor of the food.
The problem is that multitasking "noise" is not always obvious. We only notice "too much tobasco sauce!!!" "too much salt!!" when something goes really wrong with the cook's attention. If we could measure all the variables rigurously, then the results of food consistency, bitterness, sweetness, saltyness over-cooked-ness, undercooked-ness for each dish should be more obviously affected by multitasking even if the untrained palate cannot detect it in your example.
Despite all of the above one's opinion can be unswayed especially with "a serious cook." So I'll leave you with a clear example: try to monitor in a lab environment how much "task-switching and parallel monitoring is involved in preparing a multi-course meal alone for a couple of guys..." when every single part of that meal is 100% unknown to said cook until the minute they start to cook that full-course meal. Even Chef competitions show you how wildly things change when one is out of their water even when dishes procedures are fully *known* in advance... Without experienced cooks (meaning muscle memory, which in turn means less fake multitasking and more subconscious GPU-like parallelizing), the simple nervousness of novelty to a young cook and need of the cookbook and "attention" to its instructions... plus extrapolation from what you DO and DO NOT know prior to cooking the meal is close to what TFS implies --new data that our digital distractions drag in overwhelming quantities.
It's not as profitable to Google if they can't link an online identity to a fake/anonymous account.
If you think google can't link your fake account with lots of real data you're very naive.
Ha. They ALL can. It's not like the FBI always goes to just Google for matters of USA national security.
After all, when it comes to stuff like CP or other crime prosecution for stuff mishandled by law agents, people still effectively use these defenses:
Back on topic, to the advertisers who aren't that serious about your "exact identity" for the purposes of serious conviction as the law is, such ambiguity as the above inspires hating your services, because it means LOST AD CASH. To them many "maybe's" is not equal to just as many "solid yes's."
Not needing to pay $60+ a month to tether a mobile laptop legally would certainly be cool to companies and their short-range travellers / roaming techs. 12000 sqr miles is not that much really. It represents a rectangle 400 x 30 miles.
It's way too big for any farm I know of, but should suit your M.A.N. just fine, and probably save a ton of cash on line-of-sight lasers for college-campus building conglomerate connectivity, or even ground-tearing for fiber runs. For a cab company that wishes to switch from spectrum-monitored waves to wifi-like connectivity so that they can easily encrypt their signals, connect real laptops to get cheap connectivity on their employee's on-car smartphones (supposing there's some kind of adapter from 802.22 to USB and that they have mapping apps or something) of having to purchase full-price GPS (mostly 100+ bucks for cheap ones)
Depending on the prices for this tech, companies would save a TON of money if they could drop all their Verizon 4G tethering and instead use one-time-only charge hardware to connect to this private network. Cable guys, for example, work in wide areas and would benefit from that.
The trickle down effect will ensure that we enter another craze were we're given our pixels back. I remember an age of 1200 vertical resolutions even on laptops (Dell D800 for business) that has become insurmountable with 'progress'. So the second these same guys who deflated our resolutions get down with setting some high posts, we'll be seeing our pixels back.
The bad part is that we'll reach an expanding - contracting sol-like state, because they got away with it once, and will do in the future. Meanwhile, it's a nice profit to make all of us (early-, late- and collector-type- adopters) throw money yearly at all these moving targets, specially with obsolete-by-design smartphones.
The politicians need to quit doing feel-good crap to get reelected and start becoming stewards for our nation - or there won't be much more feel good crap to do.
Shamefully, the difficult part is that this never happens because of pressure to conform, the lack of incentives to excel and the lack of punishment to those who fail to be a good example.
For instance, you can't just fix a broken company by having everyone in a *struggling* company promise that they'll work 100% harder for the next quarter (more productivity, more work hours, more projects, less facebook access...) to rake in more cash.
The result is that the lazy do nothing new, and ensure that the boss hears about who is "upstaging" them by setting up an unfairly good example not easy to follow. The reality is that nobody punishes the lazy unless they badly mess up anyway... which rarely happens because the lazy touch as little stuff as they can in their daily faked workflow. The end result is that the hard-workers either get tired and return to the usual pace, or push too hard and get burnt out and fired / quit. The people in the middle just sigh their thanks that the pressure if off them and there won't be any need to take a firm stand in either excellence or obvious slacking.
Isn't this like The Prisoner's Dilemma?
It's a lick your recent hunting wounds and hunt elsewhere change. You're stating what we have suspected, but still refuse to accept*: that US jobs are "Cursed if the corps don't get more cash... and even if they do get it."
* Because there's no "way out" of the IT job exodus other than going to live in Asia using a radically different lifestyle, income base, freedoms, and worst of all... language.
Oh that's easy :)
But to exercise some pedanticness... Let's say this passes, ruling out 300 million American citizens. Facebook has 600 million, so we need to go after them because they're actively engaged in communications with the millions of Americans. So you might as well go for the whole other 5 billion humans on the planet, just to be safe. And we'll solve the employment problem for sure!
More seriously, though: what about operations that implant stable electronics like pacemakers? can't a bomb be made passive so that a person may house it for months or even years, provided it won't leak and kill the "warrior" prematurely in a very slow chemical death (breast implants, anyone?)
Almost forgot the point of that: not all bombs are time-based. Who is to say that the bombs can't be synched to a cellphone call, or to the Colorado Time server reaching the entire USA?
They hope intelligent people will inherently trust "Anonymous cowards" more than they trust Public-faced heroes that can be bought or silenced. I guess they're not happy with the sudden fall of the original Wikileak's Assange into ... relative, er, anonymity after all the noise with the US and europe's Interpol back in January.
The sadness is that I don't trust Anonymous' individuals with "anonymizing" whistleblow data. Though one person will legally own the wiki's resources, it ain't no responsible Assange. Seeing Anonymous' track record with messing up the lives of individuals in the past by trolling, calling, faxing and showing up at places that were thought "private" before, I'll have to pass on their offer, however honest it may be.
It takes just a single one of the other anonymous guys (who himself could be a covert CIA agent looking to plug the leak or some guy looking for holiday fun) to convince the true owner offline or online that *my* data should be publicized. After all, there's no honor amongst thieves, especially when they're all faceless.
Regarding your posting problem, just do what I've mastered:
The beauty of it is twofold, really:
BIG PLUS of this last one? Slashdot 2.0 has some Javascript magic so that the non-logged-in tab will automatically read your browser cookie and prepare a logged-in reply --without needing to lose your place reloading that page.
You bring up an interesting point with "whacking words". I tried to think of things like censor filters were stuff like "cr.ap" or even "crÃp" gets through the censure, and everyone on the board knows the codes. But China isn't dependent on ASCII and single characters often mean ENTIRE concepts, so that the same kind of playful splitting and unicode bitshifting isn't available to deceive the filters.
So, knowing some things about Kanjis and ideograms, and how instead of syllables the Kanji-based Eastern languages compose words differently: a little like "<aqua> + <structure> = dam" (just a made-up example akin to what I see in Japanese all the time). Then, how do they disguise cusswords or subversive speech if their building blocks can't be small enough to combine them creatively the way we do latin alphabets?
The only hint I know of is that Chinese name tattoos can spell a name differently depending on what "attributes" the name is supposed to convey, and it's a little bit like English puns. So perhaps they *do* have "basic sound" characters that mean certain things when used in different ways, and are as unblockable as the words "the" and "a" are to us. But seeing a real language site discussing this would be helpful
Punishing google for this WILL set a dangerous precident that will be used against all of us by big corporations in the future.
So be it!
You're arguing for the LEGAL SUPPORT of a case that hasn't happened, instead of looking at the one that has already HAPPENED, and which already made *whole countries* cringe.
The case you're forgetting is more dangerous yet, because google ALREADY got our data, and is *setting precedent too* when they win: encouraging other companies to bend us over and pick at data that very few people are aware is leaking is worse than having to watch for what we can or cannot collect.
We have already seen that more restricted rules are better than the current freedoms that corporations have allowing them to screenscrape our posts, re-publish pictures, own any IP posted on their "public" sites by way of laughably entitled TOS (which incidentally nobody is really aware of either.)
To reiterate the point, you don't let today's wrongdoers go free in order to "prevent" tomorrow's from acting. In any case, unencrypted signals going through our property don't give us much to intercept or "own" because legally we can't rebroadcast anything, and foolish things you want to prevent are already happening in front of your noses... case in point: feds who destroy your videos of their illegal doings, feds who say you can't sell "their" illegally-placed wiretapping devices into "your" car without "your" permission.
So if you keep allowing everyone to do as they please with "free" information, then this farce will never stop.
I, for one, welcome our Cloud(tm) fearing overlords
It's just that having the degree doesn't set you too far ahead of the pack in this economy. While you're studying others are sharpening their resume in small jobs till their skills harden to the point that nobody even asks for proof of a degree when they see a years worth of related bullet points.
I'm in a similar situation to yours career-wise. Started working tech support around age 17 and since then only desktop support gigs have been offered. This summer, I finally stopped getting typecasted, thanks in part to a remote Unix server operations support gig that somehow left some programming-relevant buzzwords in my resume that I could actually prove semi-daily use of. Without the shell experience gained there, I wouldn't be working with front-end code. I'm at a small company and still transitioning, since the assignment is a short paid internship. My resume will finally say that I've done development full-time, rather than call-center or user-facing jobs.
My first suggestion to you is to re-check yesterday's discussion , which was a refreshingly civil rehash of "CS degree isn't programming, yada, yada." Make sure you scale it to >120 comments to get the most detail out of it; just take a break every half an hour to think how the comments apply to you and give it a couple days to review the whole thing seriously. Even to IT insiders, it seems that a CS degree isn't understood --I reluctanctly got one, and somewhat wish I had taken a 2 year degree at a tradeschool approach instead of being forced to plough all the way thru advanced Calculus, Math theory and a bunch of "core" humanities classes. At our age you are well rounded as you'll get and your skills will not really benefit from the degree's forced requirements... unless you quit your job to go fulltime into the 4 CS year degree. Only around half of CS classes are coding, so your job might actually be providing you with more hands-on experience with a single project than you get out of public colleges' degree programs for a whole semester.
Anyways, since you are already writing SOME code and queries towards your company's codebase and bottomline, then you don't need a full 4-year CS degree if you're looking for future jobs at mid-size and small places --the resume's degree blurb is to secure your FIRST programming job, which you indirectly are already in.
So, try to learn the languages and environments on your own (time is hard to find, but force yourself to do little things like regularly trying out examples at code-snippet blogs.) It's very important that you regularly use one or two big IDE's (Eclipse, Visual whatever) and vi / emacs for shells scripts, php and xml. Get familiar with CVS and Maven for code repositories; try out tutorials on youtube to see how they work, and force yourself to default to an Ubuntu 10.04 boot so that you have a shell handy, a compiler and are only apt-get away from Eclipse and other things. If you can live daily with tools that the other devs have, then you're a step closer to slowly push your way... oh, and since you're not a coder at the current company, you'll probably not be given a chance there --ever. A jump away might be the only way; chicken and the egg, really. It takes a good bullet point or two in your resume about "experience with X" programming skills that a junior position for a full-time programmer will appreciate. And without temp agencies, it's hard to kinda make the jump, so it can take you years to get a lucky break.
Ooops! /unless from INside the BIOS/
s/unless from outside the BIOS
I remember not-so-fondly the reason causing Windows to "power down" to a power-wasting state with a the sky/cloud banner stating that "It's now safe to shut down your computer now" back in Windows 95. Even with 98 lots of hardware was unable to shut off on its own.
I wish some standard would unify auto power-*up* management at the BIOS level (even if Linux gets locked out of the hardware deal). I really liked how plain old Macs had a universal control area going over sleep countdowns, screensavers, powerdown times AND the elusive power-up function that Wintel users are forbidden to touch unless from outside the BIOS --and all from a perfectly integrated GUI running as a control panel applet (and that was around 1998, when the *other* consumer OS/BIOS combination would barely even shut down without user-case-button-interaction).
On why there's no Ubuntu tablet: Unity doesn't really work as a tablet interface.
Wow, so there it is! He single-handedly pushes something designed for tablets to our desktops, only we all hate it here. Then someone thinks logically and wants to see if its original environment is any better barring the suspected "lost-in-translation syndrome"... only that he admits it's just as broken on tablets.
What was the progress made with Unity, then, other than hurt usage share? Then he goes on to mention Chrome/ium although non-geeks use Firefox. He's probably planning to whittle his ratio of Linux to Ubuntu followers to levels similar to Windows vs. OSX levels.
Ugh, 30 minutes and everyone's still caught up in the unit conversion issues.
OK, let's stop and ponder other things, like why these rocket scientists were 50 times off their mark on durability estimates. The are not the same people in charge of our cheap unshielded, non-harsh-weather resistant, poorly dust-proofed, China-made electronics where variable parts WILL fail every few years and stop your booting. Aerospace scientists design beyond "our" problems, and make complex computers with probably zero dust-exposed PSU heatsinks to live in dust-bunny/lightning storm environments 5+ times harsher than the Earth, wind-speed and static-electricity-storm-wise (courtesy of a Science channel doc).
The scientists have been revising data from all the mars rover landings since '97, and from the very first rover had a chance to up-correct their estimates when even *that* rover outlasted the projections. So... why are they erring on the side of caution? Politics, maybe washing their hands in the distrust of contractors' abilities to build good enugh to meet their 10-year-program adjustments spec? Something doesn't add up, and it makes you wonder:
* just how much better is "rocket science," really? ;)
* just how much worse are all the others who more-readily miss estimates, causing daily problems on our Blue Marble?
* just how prepared is NASA to run tests beyond the driving reach of the landing site while they obviously didn't carefully plan to be running 'em?
* just how many extra tax dollars will need to be allocated to budget for this whole not-so-well planned "lucky break?"
BEGIN!
These people are selling broken guns and then blaming bullet makers for their own exploding barrels. I'm sure someone could make a quick Windows virus/security analogy if we wanted to further the example of how pointing fingers does little to change a broken status quo.
I would sure hate to be the test case here. Poor guy got a bucket of blue paint; now he glows in the dark. Never has a problem finding his keys though.
and everybody can tell where's he has been and what he has been touching...
Sounds like a...PAINT analogy... for how today's social media sites bait and use us afterwards.
This raises the question: is this just a pilot program meant to test the water before they make one available to Windows? We all know that Windows 8 will come with a store, though there's no reason Amazon could pair up with MS to, say, single out Windows XP's "inadequacy" by releasing the store only for Vista and newer, a la IE9 / DirectX 10+.
One thing we sorely need is more equality with Smartphone software, however hard it may be: Microsoft purposely designed MS MOBI barcode reader without any Windows/PC releases whatsoever, though barcodes are only a picture away if you lack a smartphone. Newspapers advertisers and columnists seem to think *everyone* has smartphones rather than cheap phones. We don't: a recent story showed penetration in the USA has only now reached 50%, leaving a hefty half of the cellphone market out; let alone those with just landlines.
So the Application environments are becoming even more like competing video game consoles where you must have bought precisely the one the target product is on. Worse, it's like saying "oh, you have a mac/linux/windows, so you can't use this free product this minute." So besides of the issues like "Android implementation fragmentation" we are being transitioned into tomorrow's DRM markets under our own PCs. Seeing the new enthusiasm of formerly penny-less shareware writers cashing in on simple tiny apps, I predict we will start running out of the rich environment of Windows-only freeware obtainable from the web. At least there will be fewer viruses... but there will be much fewer marketless downloads too. TPM at its worst.
It's obvious that Mozilla wants to get on Google's good side. They are making tons of money from having partnered with them to direct search bar quieries to google. Mozilla's money people must have realized that the more URLs they force-redirect and the earlier they vow to remove raw (Google-less) browsing, the more revenue and long-term partnerships they'll forge with Google: Collusion at its best
Google is scared that people will remain on their portal for less, and they're trying to make everything redirect go to their site. Each search firefox search opens up a whole new webpage and loads all of google's javascript trinkets and trackers. Rockmelt's implementation actually does things right: skip sidebar, disable keyboard navigation AND ADS, and just load the clicked links --superfast.
I stopped believing in my personal "relationship" with Mozilla since the Firefox's awesomebar in 3.0, and further, vowed to completely *avoid* 4.0 after more transgressions and questionable additions and release cycles have been announced, It will get harder to find a browser that is free of this corporate attraction to shininess and high revenue since the only other mainstream alternatives to Chrome and FF are closed: Opera, Safari... and back to IE. Anything else flags my browser session with on major sites with a lazy "sorry, you need a supported browser so that our CSS won't fail" message and full stop to my getting my content.