The irony is that even with all those long-winded procedures, the results almost always fall very short of the goal. If all those double-checks and safeguards fail to actually improve service quality, then logic dictates the safeguards should be eliminated and redesigned from scratch.
If it's not helping, then it's just a waste of resources.
The loss didn't come from VISA's wallet either, it is the merchant that got stiffed. Credit card companies are completely unaccountable, despite charging through the nose for their services. It's right there in the contract everybody has to sign to deal with them...
Users expect the data to be on the disk when the save or copy or whatever appears to complete.
Yes, for removable media. A hard drive is not removable media, unless you're me, and I'm pretty sure you're not me otherwise who the hell am I ?
USB/portable drives should always be synchronous, because they're so easy to unplug. They're designed for it, so the OS should accommodate that usage pattern. But on a hard drive ? Normal people don't eject an internal drive, and if you're in the 0.1% who do (gung-ho techies), then you're responsible for telling the OS to safely unmount the damned thing, because you're doing something out-of-the-ordinary.
The Windows CD burning issue is a particularly dumb one, because it is so easily solved by locking the drive. If the user tries to eject, it's trivial to pop up a dialog asking to finalize the disc (or cancel and ditch the files). The fact that it is not done is a design failure.
You fallaciously assume that Wikipedia users are well-balanced, intellectual people.
The fact that anyone can sign up, should tell you that the makeup of Wikipedia mods is in-line with every other web site's user base. 99% asshats, 1% disgruntled idealists.
It's like slashdot, only they have a gazillion articles to spread the hate instead of focusing it on the dozen daily news articles.
Right, except creating these simple animations in Flash takes all of 5 minutes for a complete novice. Doing them in HTML takes a crack team of Google wizards countless man-hours to build an API, work around all the quirks... Like another poster said, it's like the demoscene. Yeah it's neat that you can do these tricks on a crappy platform, but that does not make it practical.
I was writing craptacular Javascript games fifteen years ago, toggling background colors and images in table cells like a dot-matrix or tile engine. I did it because I was bored in class, waiting for the goddamned Windows prof to find the start button:/ There was no value to it back then, there is even less value to such hackery today when far superior tools exist.
Does it really matter what happens in 100+ years ? Nobody who is currently at Shell will be around by then.
Or, if you prefer my Star Trek post-futuristic interpretation: in 100+ years, Shell will not be around anymore. We will either have evolved past capitalism into a wealth-free society, or fallen prey to hyper-capitalism, in which case Shell will have been crushed/absorbed by far greater cartels. Either way, the long-long-term picture is not relevant to today's Shell.
I want to like Chrome, really I do, and I applaud them for speeding up JavaScript, but they are completely ignoring the one feature developers love about Firefox: add-ons!
I actually switched to FF roughly two years ago, when I found out about Firebug and a few other creature comforts. Nowadays, the first thing I do on a new machine is install the 15-20 add-ons that make my job easier and my surfing more comfortable. I tweak the shit out of that browser, and yes it does bog it down a bit with all the excess code, but that's peanuts next to the time I save with all these finely-tuned add-ons. Even if I had just Firebug, WebDeveloper and GreaseMonkey, I could still do just about everything I want with the browser.
I don't know how Chrome works out for regular users, but as a web developer, Firefox is still the supreme hotness. I'd be more supportive if the Chrome devs just ditched their browser and offered the same functionality via Firefox mods (or code contributions). They could even replicate the Chrome UI in FF, for the many folks who like the de-cluttered style.
If you don't believe me, go read their booking info. The fact that they require facilities with a "10ft by 10ft private dressing room" should be a dead giveaway, or are people really that dense ?
The government doesn't want to knock MS too hard, because that just might drive them to move even more jobs overseas, and/or withdraw campaign contributions.
It's cool because all these colleges have 8% more people to rob blind, and we pre-Internet geeks will have a bunch of youngbloods to push around the workplace until they finally make us obsolete.
Not true. At least where I live, every single ISP has network-wide blocks on FTP, SMTP, SSH, POP and WEB. Even the business cable at our office is crippled, so we use non-standard port numbers for remote access.
It's friggin' weak sauce, but that's what happens when you let a telecom get too big.
they realize that intelligence is only useful if the person can work with other people or can effectively communicate his work
So you're essentially saying everyone needs to meet the lowest common denominator, in order to be productive ? Fuck that, some of us do get hired because we "think outside the box" and can pull off feats of mental strength. Should we play dumb just because we share an office with a bunch of glassy-eyed imbeciles ? You're going to have different skill sets and intellectual extents in any office, the not-so-secret trick to being successful is to maximize each player's potential. If one guy is really talented at coding those mind-benders, but sucks at documenting his work in layspeak, you hire an assistant. Let the code wizard write code, and the doc wizard write docs. What's so horrible about that ?
Do you expect your accountant to be a top lawyer too ? No ? Then why do you expect your programmer to be a top technical writer ? Yeah, we know a little bit about the "other side", the same as your accountant should know the rough guidelines of tax law, but one is never a replacement for the other.
The only reason insurance is necessary today, is because it has artificially inflated the cost of operating a vehicle. That's how a benign fender-bender came to cost $2000. Mechanics routinely inflate their estimates when it's an insurance job, because it's free money.
I'm pretty sure suing everyone is also not a constructive activity, but hey, "god bless the American way", right ?:P
Question is: is it really libel if you're just sending out a warning to other employees, that if they do what the fired guy did, they're gonna get fired too ? Sounds like fair game to me.
Maybe I'm just jaded, but whenever I see a libel suit, I think "cash grab". Where's the defamation of character ? There's nothing defamatory about being told "You fail at performing the tasks you agreed to in this signed contract". Should I sue the HR staff at every job I've ever worked, because they emailed all my superiors and coworkers about my termination ?
There's a legitimate and important reason to let people know when someone is fired. Payroll needs to stop paying, security needs to disable their door pass, I.T. needs to close and archive all accounts and emails, coworkers need to not divulge confidential information to the ex-employee... the list goes on. It isn't libel, it's due diligence.
"Well, your honor, I didn't intend to take down all my competitors' sites. I was performing journalistic research, honest!"
It's great that the BBC is trying to bring attention to this idiotic problem, but they failed to acknowledge one critical factor: people are stupid when sitting at a computer. Average IQ is not enough to be "safe" on the internet, and it will never be, because the people setting up these attacks are above-average, and many of them have started using machine-learning tools to refine their techniques and pinpoint their targets.
As long as there will be non-techy people on the internet, there will be a struggle of power between the blackhat geeks and the norms, and it is a very one-sided fight.
Why should synchronous writes be the default ? Programmers are already too lazy and/or stupid to add a simple fsync() where needed, why should we all drop what we're doing, make the slowest option the default, and then have to jump through hoops to make things workable again ?
If asynchronous writes are the biggest of your problems, you need to find yourself a new career. One that hopefully doesn't require meticulous attention to detail.
I have to disagree. I find it absolutely ridiculous that the average X11 app litters my home directory with a gazillion tiny little files. Say what you will about the Windows Registry, at least it got rid of (most of) the old.INI files of yore.
I'd much rather have a centralized database with all my user preferences, using a standardized API. Maybe then we could be rid of those perverse text parsers that love to break whenever they encounter an unamerican character or some dangly white space. It would put less pressure on the entire filesystem, and improve performance across the board.
IMO, the filesystem works fine. Machines usually don't lock up at random, and if yours does, you need to fix it! If you're doing business-critical stuff and you're too damned lazy to do the most basic error checking on commits, you deserve to lose data!
I personally hate the "sizzle", that smearing of high-frequency transients, which is why I am infinitely grateful that LAME does not exhibit anywhere near as much artifacting as some other popular encoders.
I think part of the problem with this study is they asked a bunch of students... students who are more and more exposed to godawful music every single day. It doesn't matter that they are music students, they still go out to shit bars drinking shit energy drinks and hearing shit music.
Hey, guess what... I kind of like some of the shit music too, it's like a vacation for my brain, but I wouldn't base my fundamental understanding of audio on these synthetic hyper-compressed sounds. I'll even argue that if MP3 artifacts enhance the perceived quality of a piece, it had to be poorly mastered in the first place.
Or maybe these kids need to play with a Phaser pedal until they get sick of it, just like every other pop musician.
Slashdot Mirror
The irony is that even with all those long-winded procedures, the results almost always fall very short of the goal. If all those double-checks and safeguards fail to actually improve service quality, then logic dictates the safeguards should be eliminated and redesigned from scratch.
If it's not helping, then it's just a waste of resources.
The loss didn't come from VISA's wallet either, it is the merchant that got stiffed. Credit card companies are completely unaccountable, despite charging through the nose for their services. It's right there in the contract everybody has to sign to deal with them...
Users expect the data to be on the disk when the save or copy or whatever appears to complete.
Yes, for removable media. A hard drive is not removable media, unless you're me, and I'm pretty sure you're not me otherwise who the hell am I ?
USB/portable drives should always be synchronous, because they're so easy to unplug. They're designed for it, so the OS should accommodate that usage pattern. But on a hard drive ? Normal people don't eject an internal drive, and if you're in the 0.1% who do (gung-ho techies), then you're responsible for telling the OS to safely unmount the damned thing, because you're doing something out-of-the-ordinary.
The Windows CD burning issue is a particularly dumb one, because it is so easily solved by locking the drive. If the user tries to eject, it's trivial to pop up a dialog asking to finalize the disc (or cancel and ditch the files). The fact that it is not done is a design failure.
A sync mount option would be good, for those scenarios where it is absolutely critical, but it is no replacement for proper I/O programming.
There is no OS tweak that can magically solve all the problems idiotic developers foist upon the world on a daily basis.
I'll do it, if it pays more than this god-forsaken I.T. industry :/
Or you Americans could do what you always do, and hire illegals for pennies.
So you say your government's fucking its citizens up the ass for a buck ?
I say cry me a river. What were you expecting, free ponies?!
One man in a suit cannot change the world, especially when that man is merely a spokesperson for Corporate America.
Let be more realistic:
Why should these developers cater to the handful of people with unstable machines ?
FIX YOUR GODDAMNED PC INSTEAD
You fallaciously assume that Wikipedia users are well-balanced, intellectual people.
The fact that anyone can sign up, should tell you that the makeup of Wikipedia mods is in-line with every other web site's user base. 99% asshats, 1% disgruntled idealists.
It's like slashdot, only they have a gazillion articles to spread the hate instead of focusing it on the dozen daily news articles.
Right, except creating these simple animations in Flash takes all of 5 minutes for a complete novice. Doing them in HTML takes a crack team of Google wizards countless man-hours to build an API, work around all the quirks... Like another poster said, it's like the demoscene. Yeah it's neat that you can do these tricks on a crappy platform, but that does not make it practical.
I was writing craptacular Javascript games fifteen years ago, toggling background colors and images in table cells like a dot-matrix or tile engine. I did it because I was bored in class, waiting for the goddamned Windows prof to find the start button :/ There was no value to it back then, there is even less value to such hackery today when far superior tools exist.
Does it really matter what happens in 100+ years ? Nobody who is currently at Shell will be around by then.
Or, if you prefer my Star Trek post-futuristic interpretation: in 100+ years, Shell will not be around anymore. We will either have evolved past capitalism into a wealth-free society, or fallen prey to hyper-capitalism, in which case Shell will have been crushed/absorbed by far greater cartels. Either way, the long-long-term picture is not relevant to today's Shell.
I want to like Chrome, really I do, and I applaud them for speeding up JavaScript, but they are completely ignoring the one feature developers love about Firefox: add-ons!
I actually switched to FF roughly two years ago, when I found out about Firebug and a few other creature comforts. Nowadays, the first thing I do on a new machine is install the 15-20 add-ons that make my job easier and my surfing more comfortable. I tweak the shit out of that browser, and yes it does bog it down a bit with all the excess code, but that's peanuts next to the time I save with all these finely-tuned add-ons. Even if I had just Firebug, WebDeveloper and GreaseMonkey, I could still do just about everything I want with the browser.
I don't know how Chrome works out for regular users, but as a web developer, Firefox is still the supreme hotness. I'd be more supportive if the Chrome devs just ditched their browser and offered the same functionality via Firefox mods (or code contributions). They could even replicate the Chrome UI in FF, for the many folks who like the de-cluttered style.
Don't worry, you're not missing anything noteworthy. Titan is a guy in a 90lb robot suit, with the most annoying sound effects and cliché soundbites of all time. The top half is animatronic but the legs are human-powered, because one of the hardest things about building a robot is balancing itself upright. Obviously, the pureblood MBA behind this gimmick lacks both the knowledge and patience to design a true bipedal robot. This is the big-money version of putting a bucket on your head.
If you don't believe me, go read their booking info. The fact that they require facilities with a "10ft by 10ft private dressing room" should be a dead giveaway, or are people really that dense ?
Dude, it's not overlooked, it's endorsed.
The government doesn't want to knock MS too hard, because that just might drive them to move even more jobs overseas, and/or withdraw campaign contributions.
It's cool because all these colleges have 8% more people to rob blind, and we pre-Internet geeks will have a bunch of youngbloods to push around the workplace until they finally make us obsolete.
Again.
Not true. At least where I live, every single ISP has network-wide blocks on FTP, SMTP, SSH, POP and WEB. Even the business cable at our office is crippled, so we use non-standard port numbers for remote access.
It's friggin' weak sauce, but that's what happens when you let a telecom get too big.
they realize that intelligence is only useful if the person can work with other people or can effectively communicate his work
So you're essentially saying everyone needs to meet the lowest common denominator, in order to be productive ? Fuck that, some of us do get hired because we "think outside the box" and can pull off feats of mental strength. Should we play dumb just because we share an office with a bunch of glassy-eyed imbeciles ? You're going to have different skill sets and intellectual extents in any office, the not-so-secret trick to being successful is to maximize each player's potential. If one guy is really talented at coding those mind-benders, but sucks at documenting his work in layspeak, you hire an assistant. Let the code wizard write code, and the doc wizard write docs. What's so horrible about that ?
Do you expect your accountant to be a top lawyer too ? No ? Then why do you expect your programmer to be a top technical writer ? Yeah, we know a little bit about the "other side", the same as your accountant should know the rough guidelines of tax law, but one is never a replacement for the other.
The only reason insurance is necessary today, is because it has artificially inflated the cost of operating a vehicle. That's how a benign fender-bender came to cost $2000. Mechanics routinely inflate their estimates when it's an insurance job, because it's free money.
I'm pretty sure suing everyone is also not a constructive activity, but hey, "god bless the American way", right ? :P
EPIC!
Question is: is it really libel if you're just sending out a warning to other employees, that if they do what the fired guy did, they're gonna get fired too ? Sounds like fair game to me.
Maybe I'm just jaded, but whenever I see a libel suit, I think "cash grab". Where's the defamation of character ? There's nothing defamatory about being told "You fail at performing the tasks you agreed to in this signed contract". Should I sue the HR staff at every job I've ever worked, because they emailed all my superiors and coworkers about my termination ?
There's a legitimate and important reason to let people know when someone is fired. Payroll needs to stop paying, security needs to disable their door pass, I.T. needs to close and archive all accounts and emails, coworkers need to not divulge confidential information to the ex-employee... the list goes on. It isn't libel, it's due diligence.
Or, you know, someone would create a 2-second Firefox add-on that spoofs Chrome, and Google would gain nothing.
"Well, your honor, I didn't intend to take down all my competitors' sites. I was performing journalistic research, honest!"
It's great that the BBC is trying to bring attention to this idiotic problem, but they failed to acknowledge one critical factor: people are stupid when sitting at a computer. Average IQ is not enough to be "safe" on the internet, and it will never be, because the people setting up these attacks are above-average, and many of them have started using machine-learning tools to refine their techniques and pinpoint their targets.
As long as there will be non-techy people on the internet, there will be a struggle of power between the blackhat geeks and the norms, and it is a very one-sided fight.
Unix philosophy is to make configuration files user- and script-editable. NOT to create hundreds of files per app making it utterly unmanageable.
Why should synchronous writes be the default ? Programmers are already too lazy and/or stupid to add a simple fsync() where needed, why should we all drop what we're doing, make the slowest option the default, and then have to jump through hoops to make things workable again ?
If asynchronous writes are the biggest of your problems, you need to find yourself a new career. One that hopefully doesn't require meticulous attention to detail.
I have to disagree. I find it absolutely ridiculous that the average X11 app litters my home directory with a gazillion tiny little files. Say what you will about the Windows Registry, at least it got rid of (most of) the old .INI files of yore.
I'd much rather have a centralized database with all my user preferences, using a standardized API. Maybe then we could be rid of those perverse text parsers that love to break whenever they encounter an unamerican character or some dangly white space. It would put less pressure on the entire filesystem, and improve performance across the board.
IMO, the filesystem works fine. Machines usually don't lock up at random, and if yours does, you need to fix it! If you're doing business-critical stuff and you're too damned lazy to do the most basic error checking on commits, you deserve to lose data!
I personally hate the "sizzle", that smearing of high-frequency transients, which is why I am infinitely grateful that LAME does not exhibit anywhere near as much artifacting as some other popular encoders.
I think part of the problem with this study is they asked a bunch of students... students who are more and more exposed to godawful music every single day. It doesn't matter that they are music students, they still go out to shit bars drinking shit energy drinks and hearing shit music.
Hey, guess what... I kind of like some of the shit music too, it's like a vacation for my brain, but I wouldn't base my fundamental understanding of audio on these synthetic hyper-compressed sounds. I'll even argue that if MP3 artifacts enhance the perceived quality of a piece, it had to be poorly mastered in the first place.
Or maybe these kids need to play with a Phaser pedal until they get sick of it, just like every other pop musician.