Expected state at start Guaranteed state at finish Gnarly hacks to keep an eye on Keep the rest in your notebook and refactor the code until you don't need the notes anymore.
In an ideal world without clueless bosses, deadlines and working with less than perfect colleagues (ourselves included), sure.
I'll take a correct comment over no comment any day. Characters are free and much of the code I am forced to look at on a daily basis, was written by a monkey and comes in chunks of 1000+ lines of spaghetti. A comment, however trivial, that is also correct, is like a beautiful, naked and horny woman, with her heart set on fucking you senseless (or whatever passes for hot in guys these days, if that's your thing).
It has always pissed me off that they thought it would be cool to hijack the name in an effort to be clever, since it falls flat on it's face for 99.99% of the world's population. And even if you happen to find a Dane and ask him about Harald Blue Tooth, chances are pretty good that the only things he'll know are
a) He was some kind of Viking King. b) He had a blue tooth. c) According to legend he got duped by a priest into accepting Christianity, using a wet towel, a camp fire and a miraculous healing. d) He was the father of our nation, maybe, or maybe it was one of the other 100 pillaging barbarians we get taught about in school.
Not only is it an insult to our cultural heritage, since the Bluetooth standard is a piece of shit, but it's understandable by so very few that even Danes will mention the origin of the name as a kind of party-fact and everyone will go "oh, wow"./thread-hijack.
That only works as long as these people are a minority. Once they out breed you, you'll have herds of disease ridden, home schooled imbeciles running the world.
I don't see how we could get through to them, they've already jumped the bandwagon on at least one dubious claim, facts and research clearly aren't swaying these people. Letting them contract the disease and then tell them why they can't be cured of it, and may die, might have a much larger impact. Sucks that it has to put the rest of us at risk first though.
if the business is to trick you into clicking the paid link
Google will pretty much hunt you down and kill you outright if you do something like that with their ads on your own site, so I seriously doubt that that is what their m.o. is. The new bright yellow ad sticker, in front of the url many users will scan when deciding if a link is relevant, is a far cry better than their old almost-white background for ads.
Yeah I thought as much. You don't remember, you only know what you've been told. You've got no education worth a damn so you can't tell a propaganda move from a donkey, even if one of them kicked you in the face. It is sad, both that you don't get it, and that it will take you the better part of your life to come to the realization that you don't get it. And while you're mulling it over you're letting someone else make all the big decisions for you, having you think they're your own thoughts. These are all traits that the older among us have seen before, there is nothing you can tell us we have not heard before, and rejected as the propaganda that it is.
But I digress, there is no point in arguing with the indoctrinated. I've said my piece, you've regurgitated your leader's stance and done your duty, all is well on the surface for now.
I feel for you, and I sincerely wish the best for you. I hope you wake up soon and join the rest of us in moving forward, and I hope the bodies have not been piled up so high that there will be no way back.
I grew up in the shadow of fucking Soviet warheads. When the abomination that was the Soviet Union collapsed (because that is what it was, a collapse that forced a dissolution), everyone were better off. We've never had it better here in fact, than since that monstrosity of a union disappeared, and Russians could have had it just as good, were it not for Putin.
There is no interest in "eradicating the old elements", Putin is one of those old elements himself. He's building himself a buffer zone that he can steal from without repercussions, because he wants a new empire and he can't afford it on Russian GDP alone. He needs vassals he can exploit without affecting the core of his new empire. He is in essence rebuilding the Soviet Union, one invasion at a time. He couldn't have done it without you though, and I'm sure he's grateful for your support (no, not really).
The way he is doing this is actually quite smart, although the end goal doesn't serve the widest of interests. He's filling the Russian media with macho propaganda and grand standing to seed the yearning for the old days of power. Ask almost any Russian and they'll have zero clue what the fuck is going on, except what Putin has made them believe. If he says green is red, that is what the Russians will walk into the future believing. "Solving" the world's problems isn't on the agenda for you great leader, it is a talking point - and nobody outside of Russia is buying it, but that's not the point of it. All that sauce is for you, not us, so you can stop regurgitating it, Putin already knows it's a sham and you sound ridiculous when you do.
When there are no protests at home, you can pretty much act as you wish. When you act like a dick and the negative responses start flooding in, you can always point to them and go: "everyone is afraid of us, they don't understand our grand design, we must continue on with our master plan". But what your great leader has forgotten to tell you is that his grand standing is hinging on a bluff, and an assumption that nobody is going to call it out of fear of "Old Russia".
If the gas revenue stream dries up, you guys are going to be seriously fucked. For the takers of the gas, the price of heating a living room will rise, but that is not the end of the world over here - we still have the money we're not giving to Putin in our hands. But for the Russian end of the transaction is a catastrophe. There will only be more gun point diplomacy or capitulation left, again. An argument can be made that those two options really are the same, the only difference is the length of time it takes the first option to merge into the second option, or you could count the number of bodies that has to pile up before that happens - your choice really.
What all this amounts to, is a massive failure in learning from your collective mistakes. All of this will not end well for anyone but Putin himself, he's already pocketed enough money to not care what happens to the rest of Russia, the worst that can happen (bar a gunshot wound to the head, launched from a mile out) is exile with pockets full of cash, so of course he's moving forward. Just don't keep kidding yourselves and thinking he's going to take you all with him.
What's more likely to happen down this path you're following, is another era of an isolated, poverty stricken Russia, and the really, really sad part is that you're all buying into it as the only way to go. I feel for you guys, I really do. It saddens me, because I remember the 80s. Do you?
Nationalism must be eradicated for the good of the Humanity
At gun point if need be right? We've all heard it before, you don't need to try and package it up into something that will be easily digestible, nobody believes your bullshit outside of Russia.
You don't really get the scientific model do you? You know, the one where you don't pick an outlier as a base, and then try to "prove" that a trend is occurring by picking another outlier point. The technical term for that kind of "research" would be nit-picking, and is generally frowned upon by real researcher. You know, the kind of people who actually knows up from down, contrary to you.
Or maybe you just can't wrap your head around this whole thing called climate. I'll help you, climate is not weather. If you take your malformed little graph and zoom out, you would have one heck of a difficult time trying to make your model fit. That's why the real researchers can pick any range of years and get the same results as any other range, while you can only pick this one set. Isn't that just disheartening? You're trying so hard, and yet failing so badly.
But yeah I get it. You've drunk the cool aid an committed to the lie, there is no going back. Facts be damned, the world will just have to conform to your belief eh? And who gives a shit, the real consequences of your kind of ignorance will only surface when you're long gone.
Oh wow. A popup that has me acknowledge that shit is happening. Pure brilliance. Not in any way subtle and way better than, say, a text message to the primary phone of the card holder, or maybe an email saying something like "thank you for the purchase moron, boyah".
Don't keep the session alive. Don't make a goddamn popup your primary means of authentication for an exchange of money for services. For a company that supposedly attracts the best talent in the world, they sure do have some dumb employees in key positions, huh?
Who is you exactly again? The user, who in this context is actually a child, or the credit card owner? Real world price means precisely jack shit to a 6 year old, if they can even read the message, it'll still just be a window or two to click on before the golden egg appears. That is the subtle part. There is no warning given to the card holder, you know, the one fronting the bill. Sometimes the one making the purchase also just happens to be the holder, sometimes, not so much.
And there shouldn't even need to be a fucking warning or any other stupid crap. Don't keep the session alive = problem solved.
On the bright side, he could be lobbying for MegaCorp1 merging MegaCorp2 by throwing money at absolutely everyone. Or lobbying for deregulation of otter shooting safaris, or something else completely brain dead. Good or bad, what he's spending his money on is not to improve his own situation.
I don't particularly dislike in-app purchases. I don't use apps that rely on them out of a dislike for the content that is generally provided with such apps, not the business model itself. It is perfectly viable to go the freemium route, but I think many developers/publishers quickly fall into the money-grab-and-run trap. Making ends meet is one thing, scraping every last dime off the sidewalk is another, sometimes enough is enough.
My problem with this particular issue is:
a) Google is adamant that it is their users own fault, they then went on to blame the developers when the first one didn't quite fly. b) Google implemented it specifically to be subtle and easy to miss that money is in fact changing hands. c) Google is behaving like a raving homeless trying to score their next fix, that is the most disgusting part of all this, to me at least.
I get that it's easy to point at the rotten apples and know that your own path is clean, but that really doesn't solve any problems. The rotten ones are spoiling it for all of us, because we share the trust of the user base, and it doesn't take many rotten apples to damage it. Here in Europe, this issue has really been made into a huge stink, and Google is looking less and less like the shining knight they'd like everyone to think they are. Legislators are starting to take notice, and we know once these people get involved, everything is going to get a lot worse. Google has the power to stop all this crap in less time than it takes to mount a lawsuit or start the hearings for a ban. They need to wisen up, and I honestly think that we, the developers, need to do that too.
I'd provide a link to the NSA budget, alas that is classified. But rest assured that they are being paid, you can stop sending them your food stamps now.
This was my exact thought when I read it earlier. I've used that functionality myself before. On top of that, what they replaced the Samsung Android version with was a crippled, no hardware acceleration piece of crap. But I think they already knew that, and they knew exactly why that "backdoor" was there, but now their obscure "alternative" to stock installs is all over the nerd news.
The main complaint I have about this is that I have no idea why parents are effectively handing their credit card to their children and expect it to be fine.
Because they don't know that that is what they are doing. It is contrary to how we conduct business with credit cards everywhere else. You expect to have to swipe/enter a PIN/sign a document for a transaction to be final, this is how it works in most other settings. Google has violated that expectation by keeping the credit card "alive" for longer than the one transaction, with no sign indicating that that is what is happening.
Maybe. I've got no inside information to the contrary, but taking a step back and looking at all the little dots that connect to a beautiful line right down into Google's corporate wallet, that is one fortunate series of mishaps, no?
And that still doesn't explain Google's adversarial stance on the issue, if it were just a lapse of judgement, and they really didn't mean to make children rob their parents blind, they would be all over the issue. They aren't, they're willing to go to court to protect their mishaps (this would not have gone to court, were it not for Google's stone cold refusal to even consider their user's side).
Yeah, I don't buy that argument, it's a cop out. It's elitist to think that everyone who can't assemble their own gadget from scratch do not deserve to own one, and a mentality that didn't really fit into the real world back in the 90s when it surfaced (with respect to computer gadgets).
Sometimes I wish it would just be that simple, "learn how to use your gadget, or get the fuck out". But it's not, because the majority are people who still don't quite get it all, and they're the one laws are passed to protect, to the detriment of the rest of us.
Also, if we treat people who don't know the full range of consequences of their actions in a certain way, why aren't most adults--who are merely overgrown children--treated that way?
Indeed, why not? Because money has the same value regardless who forks it over. Making in-app purchasing seamless, subtle and easy just means taking it from the mentally impaired or small children is also much easier, as well as shafting regular people. And Google among others have no qualms over doing it, and subsequently pointing at page 27 of their ToS to whisk away their responsibility. This doesn't really fit with their "don't be evil" motto at all, but who gives a fuck as long as at least a portion of users are buying the hype and stuffing the coffers?
They're clearly very good at designing a user experience when it suits their needs, until there is more profit to be had by hiding away subtle things like auto-logged-in-for-30-minutes. All done in the name of "oh, but we thought users would be annoyed at logging in repeatedly, and we took a page out of Apple's playbook and made the decision for everyone, unchangeable - for your own protection of course".
Yeah, that is the state of affairs now. The recommended action is to just not give the device to a child, but are we really supposed to accept this? How does that fit with all the other noble goals of these corporations, like furthering technological awareness. The problem isn't so much this isolated issue, but that Google and their ilk is zig-zagging all over the place, depending on where the profits lie.
If they're actually designing devices with the implied understanding that they are not child safe, why are there so many Google approved apps in the Store targeted at children? They're designing devices and software for adults but are pushing for the adults to hand these unsafe devices to their children, in the hopes that the parent won't complain when the child one-clicks the trust fund away into Google's coffers. Google would also like every child in school to use one of their devices, or one running their software, yet they're not safe for children?
Picking Google's motives apart is the "not rocket science" part of all this, yet a site full of nerds can't seem to grasp that.
If Google didn't want children to use their devices, why are they approving apps specifically targeted at children? This is a money-grab from Google, pure and simple.
Slashdot Mirror
Expected state at start
Guaranteed state at finish
Gnarly hacks to keep an eye on
Keep the rest in your notebook and refactor the code until you don't need the notes anymore.
In an ideal world without clueless bosses, deadlines and working with less than perfect colleagues (ourselves included), sure.
I'll take a correct comment over no comment any day. Characters are free and much of the code I am forced to look at on a daily basis, was written by a monkey and comes in chunks of 1000+ lines of spaghetti. A comment, however trivial, that is also correct, is like a beautiful, naked and horny woman, with her heart set on fucking you senseless (or whatever passes for hot in guys these days, if that's your thing).
one_letter_identifier = other_one_letter_identifier + (complex_and_wrong_calculation) / (could_possibly_be_zero) // Bug: Initials-Date
Is fixing the bug! (I shit you not, I have come across that very statement in production code, except for the variable naming).
It has always pissed me off that they thought it would be cool to hijack the name in an effort to be clever, since it falls flat on it's face for 99.99% of the world's population. And even if you happen to find a Dane and ask him about Harald Blue Tooth, chances are pretty good that the only things he'll know are
a) He was some kind of Viking King.
b) He had a blue tooth.
c) According to legend he got duped by a priest into accepting Christianity, using a wet towel, a camp fire and a miraculous healing.
d) He was the father of our nation, maybe, or maybe it was one of the other 100 pillaging barbarians we get taught about in school.
Not only is it an insult to our cultural heritage, since the Bluetooth standard is a piece of shit, but it's understandable by so very few that even Danes will mention the origin of the name as a kind of party-fact and everyone will go "oh, wow". /thread-hijack.
Apathy is an acceptable outcome for a propaganda machine.
That only works as long as these people are a minority. Once they out breed you, you'll have herds of disease ridden, home schooled imbeciles running the world.
I don't see how we could get through to them, they've already jumped the bandwagon on at least one dubious claim, facts and research clearly aren't swaying these people. Letting them contract the disease and then tell them why they can't be cured of it, and may die, might have a much larger impact. Sucks that it has to put the rest of us at risk first though.
if the business is to trick you into clicking the paid link
Google will pretty much hunt you down and kill you outright if you do something like that with their ads on your own site, so I seriously doubt that that is what their m.o. is. The new bright yellow ad sticker, in front of the url many users will scan when deciding if a link is relevant, is a far cry better than their old almost-white background for ads.
You're only actually missing one witness, the other is just stuck in Russia due to an invalidated passport.
Yeah I thought as much. You don't remember, you only know what you've been told. You've got no education worth a damn so you can't tell a propaganda move from a donkey, even if one of them kicked you in the face. It is sad, both that you don't get it, and that it will take you the better part of your life to come to the realization that you don't get it. And while you're mulling it over you're letting someone else make all the big decisions for you, having you think they're your own thoughts. These are all traits that the older among us have seen before, there is nothing you can tell us we have not heard before, and rejected as the propaganda that it is.
But I digress, there is no point in arguing with the indoctrinated. I've said my piece, you've regurgitated your leader's stance and done your duty, all is well on the surface for now.
I feel for you, and I sincerely wish the best for you. I hope you wake up soon and join the rest of us in moving forward, and I hope the bodies have not been piled up so high that there will be no way back.
I grew up in the shadow of fucking Soviet warheads. When the abomination that was the Soviet Union collapsed (because that is what it was, a collapse that forced a dissolution), everyone were better off. We've never had it better here in fact, than since that monstrosity of a union disappeared, and Russians could have had it just as good, were it not for Putin.
There is no interest in "eradicating the old elements", Putin is one of those old elements himself. He's building himself a buffer zone that he can steal from without repercussions, because he wants a new empire and he can't afford it on Russian GDP alone. He needs vassals he can exploit without affecting the core of his new empire. He is in essence rebuilding the Soviet Union, one invasion at a time. He couldn't have done it without you though, and I'm sure he's grateful for your support (no, not really).
The way he is doing this is actually quite smart, although the end goal doesn't serve the widest of interests. He's filling the Russian media with macho propaganda and grand standing to seed the yearning for the old days of power. Ask almost any Russian and they'll have zero clue what the fuck is going on, except what Putin has made them believe. If he says green is red, that is what the Russians will walk into the future believing. "Solving" the world's problems isn't on the agenda for you great leader, it is a talking point - and nobody outside of Russia is buying it, but that's not the point of it. All that sauce is for you, not us, so you can stop regurgitating it, Putin already knows it's a sham and you sound ridiculous when you do.
When there are no protests at home, you can pretty much act as you wish. When you act like a dick and the negative responses start flooding in, you can always point to them and go: "everyone is afraid of us, they don't understand our grand design, we must continue on with our master plan". But what your great leader has forgotten to tell you is that his grand standing is hinging on a bluff, and an assumption that nobody is going to call it out of fear of "Old Russia".
If the gas revenue stream dries up, you guys are going to be seriously fucked. For the takers of the gas, the price of heating a living room will rise, but that is not the end of the world over here - we still have the money we're not giving to Putin in our hands. But for the Russian end of the transaction is a catastrophe. There will only be more gun point diplomacy or capitulation left, again. An argument can be made that those two options really are the same, the only difference is the length of time it takes the first option to merge into the second option, or you could count the number of bodies that has to pile up before that happens - your choice really.
What all this amounts to, is a massive failure in learning from your collective mistakes. All of this will not end well for anyone but Putin himself, he's already pocketed enough money to not care what happens to the rest of Russia, the worst that can happen (bar a gunshot wound to the head, launched from a mile out) is exile with pockets full of cash, so of course he's moving forward. Just don't keep kidding yourselves and thinking he's going to take you all with him.
What's more likely to happen down this path you're following, is another era of an isolated, poverty stricken Russia, and the really, really sad part is that you're all buying into it as the only way to go. I feel for you guys, I really do. It saddens me, because I remember the 80s. Do you?
Nationalism must be eradicated for the good of the Humanity
At gun point if need be right? We've all heard it before, you don't need to try and package it up into something that will be easily digestible, nobody believes your bullshit outside of Russia.
You don't really get the scientific model do you? You know, the one where you don't pick an outlier as a base, and then try to "prove" that a trend is occurring by picking another outlier point. The technical term for that kind of "research" would be nit-picking, and is generally frowned upon by real researcher. You know, the kind of people who actually knows up from down, contrary to you.
Or maybe you just can't wrap your head around this whole thing called climate. I'll help you, climate is not weather. If you take your malformed little graph and zoom out, you would have one heck of a difficult time trying to make your model fit. That's why the real researchers can pick any range of years and get the same results as any other range, while you can only pick this one set. Isn't that just disheartening? You're trying so hard, and yet failing so badly.
But yeah I get it. You've drunk the cool aid an committed to the lie, there is no going back. Facts be damned, the world will just have to conform to your belief eh? And who gives a shit, the real consequences of your kind of ignorance will only surface when you're long gone.
Oh wow. A popup that has me acknowledge that shit is happening. Pure brilliance. Not in any way subtle and way better than, say, a text message to the primary phone of the card holder, or maybe an email saying something like "thank you for the purchase moron, boyah".
Don't keep the session alive. Don't make a goddamn popup your primary means of authentication for an exchange of money for services. For a company that supposedly attracts the best talent in the world, they sure do have some dumb employees in key positions, huh?
Who is you exactly again? The user, who in this context is actually a child, or the credit card owner? Real world price means precisely jack shit to a 6 year old, if they can even read the message, it'll still just be a window or two to click on before the golden egg appears. That is the subtle part. There is no warning given to the card holder, you know, the one fronting the bill. Sometimes the one making the purchase also just happens to be the holder, sometimes, not so much.
And there shouldn't even need to be a fucking warning or any other stupid crap. Don't keep the session alive = problem solved.
On the bright side, he could be lobbying for MegaCorp1 merging MegaCorp2 by throwing money at absolutely everyone. Or lobbying for deregulation of otter shooting safaris, or something else completely brain dead. Good or bad, what he's spending his money on is not to improve his own situation.
I don't particularly dislike in-app purchases. I don't use apps that rely on them out of a dislike for the content that is generally provided with such apps, not the business model itself. It is perfectly viable to go the freemium route, but I think many developers/publishers quickly fall into the money-grab-and-run trap. Making ends meet is one thing, scraping every last dime off the sidewalk is another, sometimes enough is enough.
My problem with this particular issue is:
a) Google is adamant that it is their users own fault, they then went on to blame the developers when the first one didn't quite fly.
b) Google implemented it specifically to be subtle and easy to miss that money is in fact changing hands.
c) Google is behaving like a raving homeless trying to score their next fix, that is the most disgusting part of all this, to me at least.
I get that it's easy to point at the rotten apples and know that your own path is clean, but that really doesn't solve any problems. The rotten ones are spoiling it for all of us, because we share the trust of the user base, and it doesn't take many rotten apples to damage it. Here in Europe, this issue has really been made into a huge stink, and Google is looking less and less like the shining knight they'd like everyone to think they are. Legislators are starting to take notice, and we know once these people get involved, everything is going to get a lot worse. Google has the power to stop all this crap in less time than it takes to mount a lawsuit or start the hearings for a ban. They need to wisen up, and I honestly think that we, the developers, need to do that too.
I'd provide a link to the NSA budget, alas that is classified. But rest assured that they are being paid, you can stop sending them your food stamps now.
This was my exact thought when I read it earlier. I've used that functionality myself before. On top of that, what they replaced the Samsung Android version with was a crippled, no hardware acceleration piece of crap. But I think they already knew that, and they knew exactly why that "backdoor" was there, but now their obscure "alternative" to stock installs is all over the nerd news.
The main complaint I have about this is that I have no idea why parents are effectively handing their credit card to their children and expect it to be fine.
Because they don't know that that is what they are doing. It is contrary to how we conduct business with credit cards everywhere else. You expect to have to swipe/enter a PIN/sign a document for a transaction to be final, this is how it works in most other settings. Google has violated that expectation by keeping the credit card "alive" for longer than the one transaction, with no sign indicating that that is what is happening.
Maybe. I've got no inside information to the contrary, but taking a step back and looking at all the little dots that connect to a beautiful line right down into Google's corporate wallet, that is one fortunate series of mishaps, no?
And that still doesn't explain Google's adversarial stance on the issue, if it were just a lapse of judgement, and they really didn't mean to make children rob their parents blind, they would be all over the issue. They aren't, they're willing to go to court to protect their mishaps (this would not have gone to court, were it not for Google's stone cold refusal to even consider their user's side).
Yeah, I don't buy that argument, it's a cop out. It's elitist to think that everyone who can't assemble their own gadget from scratch do not deserve to own one, and a mentality that didn't really fit into the real world back in the 90s when it surfaced (with respect to computer gadgets).
Sometimes I wish it would just be that simple, "learn how to use your gadget, or get the fuck out". But it's not, because the majority are people who still don't quite get it all, and they're the one laws are passed to protect, to the detriment of the rest of us.
Also, if we treat people who don't know the full range of consequences of their actions in a certain way, why aren't most adults--who are merely overgrown children--treated that way?
Indeed, why not? Because money has the same value regardless who forks it over. Making in-app purchasing seamless, subtle and easy just means taking it from the mentally impaired or small children is also much easier, as well as shafting regular people. And Google among others have no qualms over doing it, and subsequently pointing at page 27 of their ToS to whisk away their responsibility. This doesn't really fit with their "don't be evil" motto at all, but who gives a fuck as long as at least a portion of users are buying the hype and stuffing the coffers?
They're clearly very good at designing a user experience when it suits their needs, until there is more profit to be had by hiding away subtle things like auto-logged-in-for-30-minutes. All done in the name of "oh, but we thought users would be annoyed at logging in repeatedly, and we took a page out of Apple's playbook and made the decision for everyone, unchangeable - for your own protection of course".
Yeah, that is the state of affairs now. The recommended action is to just not give the device to a child, but are we really supposed to accept this? How does that fit with all the other noble goals of these corporations, like furthering technological awareness. The problem isn't so much this isolated issue, but that Google and their ilk is zig-zagging all over the place, depending on where the profits lie.
If they're actually designing devices with the implied understanding that they are not child safe, why are there so many Google approved apps in the Store targeted at children? They're designing devices and software for adults but are pushing for the adults to hand these unsafe devices to their children, in the hopes that the parent won't complain when the child one-clicks the trust fund away into Google's coffers. Google would also like every child in school to use one of their devices, or one running their software, yet they're not safe for children?
Picking Google's motives apart is the "not rocket science" part of all this, yet a site full of nerds can't seem to grasp that.
If Google didn't want children to use their devices, why are they approving apps specifically targeted at children? This is a money-grab from Google, pure and simple.