Consider this: Sparkly Diamond Miner 2.0 hits the Google Play Store. You have 1.0. You smugly tell yourself "I'm going to wait for 3.0 before downloading 2.0, assuming there are no reported problems". Then Sparkly Diamond Miner updates to 3.0 on the Play Store. "Yay!", you say, "I'll upgrade! Also the social media functions of SDM 3.0 only work with friends using 3.0 and 2.0 so I pretty much have to!", and with that you go to the Google Play Store and install 2.0.
Except you don't, because you can't. You can only install 3.0. 2.0 isn't available, because the Play Store doesn't give you obsolete versions. So you're still stuck with the latest version, or you can stick with the unsupported version that has that annoying bug and means you can't spend $5 on 3 golden pickaxes that'll help you get a level 7 mine a little quicker because they don't sell them any more.
Off topic question, am I getting too cynical about mobile apps?
Flash isn't dead. It's something everyone wants to be dead, but it isn't.
I'm not entirely sure why this myth keeps being repeated on Slashdot of all places. We complain when Amazon streaming is broken, we share links to the semi-secret way to turn on HTML5 video on YouTube and then whine when we still end up having to use Flash for half the videos, we gripe about DRM on Hulu because it means we can't download content for offline viewing and then, after all of this, we pretend Flash is dead.
And when you get to the the space bitcoin is trying to compete in - international direct transfers, your "totally" becomes close to 0%.
Oh, really? That's what Bitcoin's meant for? Well, couldn't that have been cleared up from the beginning! I honestly read a lot of Bitcoin's advocates as claiming that Bitcoin was intended to be some kind of decentralized universal currency intended for any transaction type, from tipping Redditor whose comments you like to buying Tesla cars. But if it's actually just intended for international direct transfers then its many flaws as a supposed universal currency are less of an issue I guess.
Right, and when people say "Oh, that was a computer error" when a computer doesn't give them the answers they want, they're wrong too, it's actually something wrong with how the computer was programmed.
Or, maybe, perhaps, just maybe, when people say "Bitcoin" they mean "The system associated with Bitcoin", which right now is intentionally unregulated, intentionally over-automated, intentionally unreversable, has not addressed banking because of ideological considerations despite widespread use of Bitcoin banks proving the concept is necessary, and so on.
Nobody's saying that there aren't herbs that can't help. Asprin is found in a variety of natural sources. But here's the thing, the reason why Asprin isn't an "alternative medicine" is simply this: it's been subject to some double blind tests, and found to work.
That's it. That's all. The moment a mix of freshly squeezed orange juice, oregano, and that cheese-like substance you found under your toaster, gets tested (and found to work) against specific ailments it ceases to be an alternative medicine.
This is actually complete nonsense, even if widely believed. In fact, I wonder actually if there's more likely to be problems with older men than younger men simply because younger men have been brought up (for the most part) in an environment where sexual harassment and disrespect for women's equality are much greater issues, and generally considered very bad things.
I've worked with men of all ages, and most are perfectly capable of acting like adults around women, most are perfectly aware of what can cause anxiety and how to steer away from it, and so on. Those rare examples that aren't aren't necessarily members of any particular age group - indeed, the one person who immediately springs to mind - and was a target of private complaints by women co-workers when I worked for the same employer - is about ten years older than I am (I'm in my 40s.)
The assumption being made is that because men are attracted to women, they're suddenly unable to control their impulses when surrounded by them. It doesn't make any sense on any level. If it did office rapes would be common, not simply elevator eyes or the kind of gawking described in TFA. This is about learned behavior, about what's acceptable. You don't pee in your pants because you need to go to the bathroom. You don't steal your neighbor's potato chips because you're hungry. And you avoid more than a passing glance at the women you work alongside when you notice they're attractive and, well, sexy.
Most men are perfectly capable fo doing this. Most men do. It's that minority that doesn't, or who feel the need not to because of an inherently sexist office culture, that cause the problems.
because there is nothing civilized about government destroying my individual right to own and operate private property the way I see fit and interfere with my hiring and firing decisions
Or are you saying you don't want unions in your company because then you'd be "forced" to demand the government step in and use lethal force against striking workers, as they did frequently during the 1800s?
You know, if I never had to start a tech company, I feel increasingly, reading these threads, that employeeing anyone who reads Slashdot would be a liability...
You repost by posting again. You are allowed to do this.
My point, which appears to have flown above you like an exploding Hindenberg showering corposes all over (sorry, too soon?) is that if the entire world started focussing on a different terrorist target, terrorists would be unlikely to immediately think "Let's kill people in NYC" as their first thought.
And let's be honest, nobody would miss Tallahassee. Not even those of us in Florida. Rick Scott's an asshole.
Also Texas, while (obviously) having a lower population density, probably has more people in it than Manhatten. So diverting terrorists there would both make it more difficult for them (more work per person killed) and would ensure that if they did they do the world a few favors by getting rid of the largest number of loudmouthed jerks possible.
Look people. Can we knock it off with the "Terrorists attacking New York City" scenarios? If we're going to protect NYC in the long term, we need to start playing up the relative importance of cities we actually wouldn't mind being attacked.
Can you repost your scenario as an attack on Tallahassee, or Phoenix, or some city in Texas or something?
NYC is awesome. Sure, the inhabitants get a little arrogant from time to time, but you kinda understand their point. We need to divert the terrorists to somewhere else, somewhere where the country would benefit from a terrorist attack.
FWIW, it doesn't matter if Google buys a baby mulching building (all running OpenBSD, natch'...), starts selling your information to advertisers (I mean really, not selling services to advertisers that work more effectively because Google has information about you, I mean actually selling your name, address, and fetishes to anyone who wants to advertise with them), arranges a Presidential assassination, blows up the Empire State Building, and worst of all, builds a private monorail to ferry employees between San Francisco and its offices.
Even if Google does all of those things, Android is still open.
This story is not about whether Android is open. It's about whether Google is putting pressure on its partners to ensure they stick with Google's vision about Android when distributing it, and likewise whether Microsoft are doing what they've done since the dawn of time.
Is Google right to this? Probably not. That said, the backlash seems far greater than it ought to be, probably because of a combination of anti-Google shill campaigns of late, because people expect Google to be better than this (nobody expects this of Microsoft which is why it's not a shock), and because several other things they've done lately with Android, such as pushing GMS, which were actually aimed at ending criticisms of Android for being "Fragmented" have been closed and against the entire perceived ethos of Android.
Also their search engine is worse than BIng these days, and that's not because Bing is any good.
Android? It's still open. Ask Amazon. Ask CyanogenMod and the non-commercial phone modding community. Google can't, and probably won't try to, close it. They will continue to try to control it, understandably, but the cat is out of the bag.
That's complete claptrap. Yes, very recent (last 5-10 years) widget toolkits have started to force use of features that result in bitmaps being sent across the network, but that's hardly a reason to throw out X. And it's essentially a lie to pretend it means, somehow, that X11 doesn't have network transparency.
I find it pretty bad, to be honest, that the same devs who are protesting that X11's network transparency isn't what it could be are:
1. The devs that did this in the first place, refusing to advance the protocol to include the features that GTK3 et al required.
2. Apparently think the solution is getting rid of network transparency altogether.
I'm staggered, to be honest, by the whole thing. I appreciate old code is sometimes awkward to support, but the solution isn't a wholesale replacement of the project. Mozilla's developers may have made many mistakes in their decision to throw out the Netscape code that delayed the release of a great browser for many years, but they were NEVER, NEVER so stupid as to say "Well, we looked at the Netscape source code, and we think the solution is to get rid of HTML. It's too kludgy! I mean, just look at it, it's impossible to add features to it cleanly!"
If we were talking about a rewrite of X.org, nee XFree86.org, nee X86, that'd be one thing. It's probably necessary by now although I'd still say they need to seriously think in terms of refactoring the project. But throwing out the entire protocol because they refused to add the features necessary to make the protocol efficient? Fuck that.
It's hard to see why anyone with an interest in Linux would want us to move away from X11 to an unstable untried display system that will be missing features by design, simply because some X11 developers feel that the core X.org server has a lot of cruft in it.
Wayland will look elegant to those programmers until the day they start adding the missing features. It'll be far more crufty and inefficient than X.org long before it ends up being feature complete. That's how programming works.
Once you have "an ecosystem of roads" as you suggest which is maintained by road fees and requires public access so you can get to all places you want to go, you have just reimplemented government owned public infrastructure under a different name
Nonsense. In the libertarian utopia, the network of roads is a monopoly owned by someone else with no accountability or democratic input. Hooray!
I believe all Galaxy devices are capable of connecting to 2G towers. So assuming the message can be transmitted via 2GSM, the sophisticated hacker (I assume) would need to spoof such a tower at a time when the targetted phone would need to avoid 3G for some reason (say, lack of signal or too poor a signal)
Moderators should possibly note parent is trying to be funny. ESR.org belongs not to ESR but the Earth and Space Research institute. http://www.esr.org/index.html
In Japan, MtGox is not liable because bitcoins aren't money
Couldn't one say the same about most any fiat currency
No. One couldn't. You see, a fiat currency, that is, a currency by fiat, is money by law. In fact, "currency by fiat" and "money by law" consist of a sequence "X by Y" where X is represented by synonyms of the same concept ("money", "currency") and Y is represented by synonyms of the same concept ("fiat", "law")
Let me understand this correctly. You found Comcast's DNS isn't perfect and doesn't resolve some names. It does not appear to be malicious in any way, as the two domains you find affected are a foreign furniture store, and your friend's brand new website. It's fairly obviously a bug.
So: you call Comcast Tech support, demand to talk to the Boss of Comcast, and then write a 10,000 word article (I didn't count) about it on Slashdot where you know 90% of the readers will take "Websites inaccessible on Comcast" as meaning "OUT OF CONTROL MEGACORP MONOPOLIST COMCAST IS CENSORING WEBSITES!!!"
This makes sense to you? This is what you do? Really? Really?
Just curious, but that time you got a duff cable modem and had to send it back, did you write a 60,000 article on how Comcast has banned you from the Internet, and did you demand to speak to the PRESIDENT OF THE INTERNET? When it rained that one time and you attempted to tune in the cable TV, only to find many of your channels were inaccessible, did you write a 75,000 word article on how COMCAST IS DROPPING CHANNELS and did you call tech support demanding to talk to THE LORD HIGH RULER OF TV?
I think I've found an article where the discussion would be likely improved for once if the Betoddlers spammed it with anti-Beta comments.
I think the bar for being "evil" seems to have been lowered quite remarkably in that case. It used to involve, at the very least, cruelty and malice. Now, apparently, it's posting some terms and conditions about the use of your services when those services are pretty much optional and when the terms and conditions are more about protecting consumers from brand confusion ("Oh, I'll just buy this Google Play tablet. (One hour later, at home, after cash spent) Wait, it doesn't run half my apps because it's actually just a "compatible" Android-like operating system rather than the real deal?") than they are about Google making money.
Points to note:
- Android is still FOSS
- Google Play is optional. Sure, Google are doing everything they can to encourage you to use it and encourage developers to build stuff on it, but it's not necessary
- Google does not sell Google Mobile Services. And the chump-change it makes in terms of compatibility testing barely pays for the services it covers.
- While Google makes some money from the various stores they sell, between bandwidth costs, transaction processing, etc, nobody out there believes it's a significant source of revenue.
- Finally, until GMS, people were screaming at Google about "Fragmentation". Even today, Android bashers still insist on posting highly misleading pie-charts showing how many different versions of Android are still in use vs iOS.
We can scream at Google when they insist that versions of Android bundled with GMS must no longer allow users to install apps via third parties. Until then, faced with a choice between "Google are doing this because they want control of teh users", and "Google are doing this because they want manufacturers to stop fucking up", we'll go with the former.
Nah, PHP still is used for those things. It shouldn't. The fucking language should DIE. But it's still there. It spreads like a virus, people get exposed to it because they're forced to hack their Wordpress distribution, and the next thing you know they're thinking it's "pretty cool".
Interesting. Moderators, please mod the parent up, another example of why it's hard to classify a language as "legacy". I kinda wondered when mentioning it if Fortran had something going on that was too obscure for me to have picked up on.
Slashdot Mirror
Not always possible.
Consider this: Sparkly Diamond Miner 2.0 hits the Google Play Store. You have 1.0. You smugly tell yourself "I'm going to wait for 3.0 before downloading 2.0, assuming there are no reported problems". Then Sparkly Diamond Miner updates to 3.0 on the Play Store. "Yay!", you say, "I'll upgrade! Also the social media functions of SDM 3.0 only work with friends using 3.0 and 2.0 so I pretty much have to!", and with that you go to the Google Play Store and install 2.0.
Except you don't, because you can't. You can only install 3.0. 2.0 isn't available, because the Play Store doesn't give you obsolete versions. So you're still stuck with the latest version, or you can stick with the unsupported version that has that annoying bug and means you can't spend $5 on 3 golden pickaxes that'll help you get a level 7 mine a little quicker because they don't sell them any more.
Off topic question, am I getting too cynical about mobile apps?
Flash isn't dead. It's something everyone wants to be dead, but it isn't.
I'm not entirely sure why this myth keeps being repeated on Slashdot of all places. We complain when Amazon streaming is broken, we share links to the semi-secret way to turn on HTML5 video on YouTube and then whine when we still end up having to use Flash for half the videos, we gripe about DRM on Hulu because it means we can't download content for offline viewing and then, after all of this, we pretend Flash is dead.
No it isn't.
Oh, really? That's what Bitcoin's meant for? Well, couldn't that have been cleared up from the beginning! I honestly read a lot of Bitcoin's advocates as claiming that Bitcoin was intended to be some kind of decentralized universal currency intended for any transaction type, from tipping Redditor whose comments you like to buying Tesla cars. But if it's actually just intended for international direct transfers then its many flaws as a supposed universal currency are less of an issue I guess.
Right, and when people say "Oh, that was a computer error" when a computer doesn't give them the answers they want, they're wrong too, it's actually something wrong with how the computer was programmed.
Or, maybe, perhaps, just maybe, when people say "Bitcoin" they mean "The system associated with Bitcoin", which right now is intentionally unregulated, intentionally over-automated, intentionally unreversable, has not addressed banking because of ideological considerations despite widespread use of Bitcoin banks proving the concept is necessary, and so on.
Nobody's saying that there aren't herbs that can't help. Asprin is found in a variety of natural sources. But here's the thing, the reason why Asprin isn't an "alternative medicine" is simply this: it's been subject to some double blind tests, and found to work.
That's it. That's all. The moment a mix of freshly squeezed orange juice, oregano, and that cheese-like substance you found under your toaster, gets tested (and found to work) against specific ailments it ceases to be an alternative medicine.
The FAQ on their website says that the vehicle leans into turns.
This is actually complete nonsense, even if widely believed. In fact, I wonder actually if there's more likely to be problems with older men than younger men simply because younger men have been brought up (for the most part) in an environment where sexual harassment and disrespect for women's equality are much greater issues, and generally considered very bad things.
I've worked with men of all ages, and most are perfectly capable of acting like adults around women, most are perfectly aware of what can cause anxiety and how to steer away from it, and so on. Those rare examples that aren't aren't necessarily members of any particular age group - indeed, the one person who immediately springs to mind - and was a target of private complaints by women co-workers when I worked for the same employer - is about ten years older than I am (I'm in my 40s.)
The assumption being made is that because men are attracted to women, they're suddenly unable to control their impulses when surrounded by them. It doesn't make any sense on any level. If it did office rapes would be common, not simply elevator eyes or the kind of gawking described in TFA. This is about learned behavior, about what's acceptable. You don't pee in your pants because you need to go to the bathroom. You don't steal your neighbor's potato chips because you're hungry. And you avoid more than a passing glance at the women you work alongside when you notice they're attractive and, well, sexy.
Most men are perfectly capable fo doing this. Most men do. It's that minority that doesn't, or who feel the need not to because of an inherently sexist office culture, that cause the problems.
One is a subset of the other. Sorry, but we've decided to go in another direction, but good luck with your job search...
I guess I should post a suitable comment underneath so here goes:
Cynthia is right. I made 10k a week from working at home using his method http://weird.url/something_som...
have to do with this:
Or are you saying you don't want unions in your company because then you'd be "forced" to demand the government step in and use lethal force against striking workers, as they did frequently during the 1800s?
Not watch. Gawk.
You know, if I never had to start a tech company, I feel increasingly, reading these threads, that employeeing anyone who reads Slashdot would be a liability...
You repost by posting again. You are allowed to do this.
My point, which appears to have flown above you like an exploding Hindenberg showering corposes all over (sorry, too soon?) is that if the entire world started focussing on a different terrorist target, terrorists would be unlikely to immediately think "Let's kill people in NYC" as their first thought.
And let's be honest, nobody would miss Tallahassee. Not even those of us in Florida. Rick Scott's an asshole.
Also Texas, while (obviously) having a lower population density, probably has more people in it than Manhatten. So diverting terrorists there would both make it more difficult for them (more work per person killed) and would ensure that if they did they do the world a few favors by getting rid of the largest number of loudmouthed jerks possible.
Look people. Can we knock it off with the "Terrorists attacking New York City" scenarios? If we're going to protect NYC in the long term, we need to start playing up the relative importance of cities we actually wouldn't mind being attacked.
Can you repost your scenario as an attack on Tallahassee, or Phoenix, or some city in Texas or something?
NYC is awesome. Sure, the inhabitants get a little arrogant from time to time, but you kinda understand their point. We need to divert the terrorists to somewhere else, somewhere where the country would benefit from a terrorist attack.
FWIW, it doesn't matter if Google buys a baby mulching building (all running OpenBSD, natch'...), starts selling your information to advertisers (I mean really, not selling services to advertisers that work more effectively because Google has information about you, I mean actually selling your name, address, and fetishes to anyone who wants to advertise with them), arranges a Presidential assassination, blows up the Empire State Building, and worst of all, builds a private monorail to ferry employees between San Francisco and its offices.
Even if Google does all of those things, Android is still open.
This story is not about whether Android is open. It's about whether Google is putting pressure on its partners to ensure they stick with Google's vision about Android when distributing it, and likewise whether Microsoft are doing what they've done since the dawn of time.
Is Google right to this? Probably not. That said, the backlash seems far greater than it ought to be, probably because of a combination of anti-Google shill campaigns of late, because people expect Google to be better than this (nobody expects this of Microsoft which is why it's not a shock), and because several other things they've done lately with Android, such as pushing GMS, which were actually aimed at ending criticisms of Android for being "Fragmented" have been closed and against the entire perceived ethos of Android.
Also their search engine is worse than BIng these days, and that's not because Bing is any good.
Android? It's still open. Ask Amazon. Ask CyanogenMod and the non-commercial phone modding community. Google can't, and probably won't try to, close it. They will continue to try to control it, understandably, but the cat is out of the bag.
That's complete claptrap. Yes, very recent (last 5-10 years) widget toolkits have started to force use of features that result in bitmaps being sent across the network, but that's hardly a reason to throw out X. And it's essentially a lie to pretend it means, somehow, that X11 doesn't have network transparency.
I find it pretty bad, to be honest, that the same devs who are protesting that X11's network transparency isn't what it could be are:
1. The devs that did this in the first place, refusing to advance the protocol to include the features that GTK3 et al required.
2. Apparently think the solution is getting rid of network transparency altogether.
I'm staggered, to be honest, by the whole thing. I appreciate old code is sometimes awkward to support, but the solution isn't a wholesale replacement of the project. Mozilla's developers may have made many mistakes in their decision to throw out the Netscape code that delayed the release of a great browser for many years, but they were NEVER, NEVER so stupid as to say "Well, we looked at the Netscape source code, and we think the solution is to get rid of HTML. It's too kludgy! I mean, just look at it, it's impossible to add features to it cleanly!"
If we were talking about a rewrite of X.org, nee XFree86.org, nee X86, that'd be one thing. It's probably necessary by now although I'd still say they need to seriously think in terms of refactoring the project. But throwing out the entire protocol because they refused to add the features necessary to make the protocol efficient? Fuck that.
It's hard to see why anyone with an interest in Linux would want us to move away from X11 to an unstable untried display system that will be missing features by design, simply because some X11 developers feel that the core X.org server has a lot of cruft in it.
Wayland will look elegant to those programmers until the day they start adding the missing features. It'll be far more crufty and inefficient than X.org long before it ends up being feature complete. That's how programming works.
...but we'll continue paying for it here I suspect. That doesn't mean I'm happy about it.
Nonsense. In the libertarian utopia, the network of roads is a monopoly owned by someone else with no accountability or democratic input. Hooray!
I believe all Galaxy devices are capable of connecting to 2G towers. So assuming the message can be transmitted via 2GSM, the sophisticated hacker (I assume) would need to spoof such a tower at a time when the targetted phone would need to avoid 3G for some reason (say, lack of signal or too poor a signal)
Moderators should possibly note parent is trying to be funny. ESR.org belongs not to ESR but the Earth and Space Research institute. http://www.esr.org/index.html
No. One couldn't. You see, a fiat currency, that is, a currency by fiat, is money by law. In fact, "currency by fiat" and "money by law" consist of a sequence "X by Y" where X is represented by synonyms of the same concept ("money", "currency") and Y is represented by synonyms of the same concept ("fiat", "law")
Let me understand this correctly. You found Comcast's DNS isn't perfect and doesn't resolve some names. It does not appear to be malicious in any way, as the two domains you find affected are a foreign furniture store, and your friend's brand new website. It's fairly obviously a bug.
So: you call Comcast Tech support, demand to talk to the Boss of Comcast, and then write a 10,000 word article (I didn't count) about it on Slashdot where you know 90% of the readers will take "Websites inaccessible on Comcast" as meaning "OUT OF CONTROL MEGACORP MONOPOLIST COMCAST IS CENSORING WEBSITES!!!"
This makes sense to you? This is what you do? Really? Really?
Just curious, but that time you got a duff cable modem and had to send it back, did you write a 60,000 article on how Comcast has banned you from the Internet, and did you demand to speak to the PRESIDENT OF THE INTERNET? When it rained that one time and you attempted to tune in the cable TV, only to find many of your channels were inaccessible, did you write a 75,000 word article on how COMCAST IS DROPPING CHANNELS and did you call tech support demanding to talk to THE LORD HIGH RULER OF TV?
I think I've found an article where the discussion would be likely improved for once if the Betoddlers spammed it with anti-Beta comments.
I think the bar for being "evil" seems to have been lowered quite remarkably in that case. It used to involve, at the very least, cruelty and malice. Now, apparently, it's posting some terms and conditions about the use of your services when those services are pretty much optional and when the terms and conditions are more about protecting consumers from brand confusion ("Oh, I'll just buy this Google Play tablet. (One hour later, at home, after cash spent) Wait, it doesn't run half my apps because it's actually just a "compatible" Android-like operating system rather than the real deal?") than they are about Google making money.
Points to note:
- Android is still FOSS
- Google Play is optional. Sure, Google are doing everything they can to encourage you to use it and encourage developers to build stuff on it, but it's not necessary
- Google does not sell Google Mobile Services. And the chump-change it makes in terms of compatibility testing barely pays for the services it covers.
- While Google makes some money from the various stores they sell, between bandwidth costs, transaction processing, etc, nobody out there believes it's a significant source of revenue.
- Finally, until GMS, people were screaming at Google about "Fragmentation". Even today, Android bashers still insist on posting highly misleading pie-charts showing how many different versions of Android are still in use vs iOS.
We can scream at Google when they insist that versions of Android bundled with GMS must no longer allow users to install apps via third parties. Until then, faced with a choice between "Google are doing this because they want control of teh users", and "Google are doing this because they want manufacturers to stop fucking up", we'll go with the former.
Nah, PHP still is used for those things. It shouldn't. The fucking language should DIE. But it's still there. It spreads like a virus, people get exposed to it because they're forced to hack their Wordpress distribution, and the next thing you know they're thinking it's "pretty cool".
Visual Basic was never this bad.
Interesting. Moderators, please mod the parent up, another example of why it's hard to classify a language as "legacy". I kinda wondered when mentioning it if Fortran had something going on that was too obscure for me to have picked up on.