When you are reporting facts, objectivity is not only provable, but critical to being informed. Opinion is another matter. Rush Limbaugh isn't news and has no obligation to give anything but his opinion. CNN and the NYT are, and it is only honest for them to report the facts as they exist and save their political leanings for the commentary pages.
Well, put it this way. The more I know about a subject being reported in the news, the more I find that MSM reporting on that subject does not agree with what I believe to be true.
Couple that with the fact that anecdotal evidence (which isn't proof I know), points to the fact that people I have personally known who are quoted in the news often complain they were misquoted. And if you watch any converage of a controversial event, the Terry Schiavo case was a perfect example, you will find that the various news sources diverge so radically on what is claimed to be fact that you can draw no other conclusion than the fact that a huge proportion of the news is heavily slanted if not completely concocted.
If you are talking about all media, then no it is not pandemic, but if you confine yourself to the largest media outlets, major newspapers, U.S. network and cable news, the BBC, etc, then you can only conclude that when two (or more) organizations report on an event and give conflicting information, they both can't be right. Furthermore, when media outlets are passing along, uncritically, statements made by politicians, and this happens often in the U.S., the news becomes even less than questionable, it becomes downright deceptive. "Doublethink" is common these days.
In this case, skepticism is not only a good idea, it's vital if you want to have any hope of having an idea of what's going on. You only need to look at the ridiculously lopsided political composition of those in the news (and with commentary, being lopsided is OK, but for news it spells trouble). Fox may not be "fair and balanced" as they claim, but the very claim is made in the context that their competitors are not considered fair and balanced. Rant all you want about stupid Red Staters, etc, but a lot of people, perhaps a majority believe in this bias. Even the People's Broadcasting System (excuse me, that's Public...) is starting to acknowledge that their being consistently to the left of Mao-Tse Tung might not qualify them as covering all sides.
I dunno. The GP's summary seems pretty spot on to me.
If you really need think this is based on a story about an obscure for a fairly obscure magazine, then you clearly haven't been on Planet Earth lately.
Among greed, laziness and ideological bias, you literally cannot trust anything you read in the MSM. The only choice is to use several sources and try to discern who is being objective and who is not.
I agree with you. They're no dummies at Google. This had to have happened before the public release.
It's just like Stronghold 2, which I just bought. Now a game isn't quite the scale of a tool like this, but within a couple of hours, I'd found a good half dozen serious UI bugs and a number of significant UI design problems. The irony is that the game mechanics seem sound... these are probably fairly easy problems to fix. It amazes me how many apps are shipped with glaring errors that are evident within minutes (or even less) of installing the app.
It only took me a couple days to find a flaw in Outlook 2003 that I felt was so serious I immediately switched to Thunderbird. Once the mail store database gets bigger than about a gig and a half Outlook starts losing data. This was confirmed by a couple of folks who know a lot more about Microsoft than me. I can't understand how this can happen. The whole software quality thing, like UI design seems to be getting progressively worse industry-wide.
It's probably the same as their position on the bug that causes Outlook 2003 to randomly lose data once the database file size gets up to about a gig and a half. They don't care.
"You're just a user so screw off. We're far too important to worry about your stupid data."
so it is would still mainly be the kids fault--not the railway company--and the law would probably agree.
In a sane world, yes. In places like the U.S. the rail line would be quickly writing lots and lots of settlement checks.
My Dad worked for a power company that had to settle over a case of a kid breaking into an electrical substation and getting injured, where "breaking in" means doing something along the lines of climbing a 15-foot fence.
They settled, because they were afraid they would lose the lawsuit. Compared to that, the train situation above would be a slam dunk for the families of the victims.
Yeah, and that was a real kick in the pants. Not having thr LIV means Congress can blackmail the President into signing tons and tons of pork and other crap that they attach to these massive appropriation bills and whatnot.
I think the Line-Item Veto would be one of the most effective ways to start cleaning things up. Does it take some power away from Congress? Well, sure. But Congress has been doing such a sucky job for the last 40 years or more, with respect to spending. They are the ones responsible for the grotesque national debt. The Presidents can help or hurt the process, but it's ultimately Congress that does the spending.
Now that we have a Republican White House and Republican majorities they've gone from "tax and spend" to "don't tax but still spend". If President Clinton, and now President Bush could just slice out some of the huge greasy pieces of fat that get wedged into every bill Congress passes, maybe we could start to reign in a government that has almost nothing in common with what was created in 1787.
It is not like the Democrats can get any legislation passed through Congress.
Well, it's not like the Republicans are getting anything interesting done either. Besides the war and other foreign policy exploits (which I generally support by the way), and the tax cut, what else have they accomplished?
It seems like all we hear about these days is that silly filibuster business, which should have been smacked down years ago. It ticked me off when the Republicans did it to Clinton (even though many of Clinton's appointees are firghteningly bad judges) and it ticks me off even more now. It seems all the Big Two Parties do these days is tit-for-tat sabotaging each other.
You're wrong. Every state has the right to kiss the Federal government's butt and it might get some money. Of course what it gives away for that money is another matter.
In all seriousness though, your statement was exactly what I was going to say.
There's a reason OSes provide common control libraries. It's to make things easier for users, not so you can write your own just to be "cool".
That's what XWindows is for.;-) Nowadays, X looks subdued compared to the Windows world. When did software start being required to look like the Strip in Las Vegas?
Office is the best... they somehow managed to be different than every other Windows app and still generally feel way out of date. Or at least Access 2000 does, which I've had the displeasure of using. It looks and feels like crappy 16-bit software from the Dark Ages. Excel is better, but you couldn't pay me to use Word.
You're only confused in that you chose an MS Office app to check standard behaviour:-).
It's not just Office and Apple ports. This is implemented inconsistently in Windows apps of all types. Microsoft started lost a lot of consistency when Windows 95 came out, but at least they were trying. Nowadays, they don't even try. They used to have standards. I thought they were pretty good, too. I guess GUI technology has become too advanced* to be consistent.
It would be different if these non-standard apps implemented something that was really cool or a neat idea, but almost always it's borne from just plain laziness or ignorance or the widespread, but grotesquely mistaken idea that curves and specular highlights magically confer advanced usability.
* Actually, it's just like the Web... anyone who can browse Teach Yourself HTML in 21 Days or has a hot copy of Photoshop suddenly thinks he or she is an interface expert. This wouldn't be so bad, except these people keep getting hired, often by big companies, like Microsoft, Symantec and, yes, even Apple. The Internet bubble may have burst, but there's still a lot of fallout of the massive democratization of computer software in the 90's. A bunch of amatuers came along in the mid 90's and made everything look like crap and the big boys quickly abandoned 30 years of research to imitate them.
My experience with outsourced technical support is no different than domestic technical support. Some of them don't know much and aren't helpful, but some of them are very knowledgeable and can communicate clearly and effectively.
Re " their app design on Windows sucks" you've heard the expression: "you can't make a silk purse out of a sows ear"?
Everyone's app design on Windows sucks, including Microsoft. With every release WMP gets uglier and uglier and the XP interface, Luna or whatever it's called, is hideous, as well as wasting more screen real estate on chrome. Of course, MS apps have always treated the screen as a place to put lots of useless pretty things (or ugly things, if you ask me) and do everything they can to minimize the space for actual content. Firefox and Thunderbird are a couple of the very few new Windows apps that don't hurt to look at.
With the advent of better graphics, this UI uglification has gone through the roof. Apple's stuff on Windows is equally bad. The old UI standards were good. Why did everyone abandon them? Usability? Hardly, apps are harder to use now that it's hard to tell what's a control and what's just chrome. Artistic merit? Pht. Most of these apps look like they were done by art school dropouts or mental patients.
So what's the reason? Why are modern GUI apps increasingly ugly and harder to use? What happened to all the HCI experts? They aren't designing cell phones, that's for sure.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow, and I'm still on C. Well C++ anyway.
I gotta update!
These days, installing Windows is actually quite easy. Mostly you stick in the CD, answer a couple questions and wait for an hour.
Of course, turning a fresh Windows installation into something I'd actually want to use takes some work, but that's me...
I'll be sure to tell Bill Moyers.
Minutus cantorum, minutus balorum, minutus carborata descendum pantorum.
That sounds like a motto for the Ankh-Morpork Fools' Guild.
When you are reporting facts, objectivity is not only provable, but critical to being informed. Opinion is another matter. Rush Limbaugh isn't news and has no obligation to give anything but his opinion. CNN and the NYT are, and it is only honest for them to report the facts as they exist and save their political leanings for the commentary pages.
"We distort, you deride."
Well, put it this way. The more I know about a subject being reported in the news, the more I find that MSM reporting on that subject does not agree with what I believe to be true.
Couple that with the fact that anecdotal evidence (which isn't proof I know), points to the fact that people I have personally known who are quoted in the news often complain they were misquoted. And if you watch any converage of a controversial event, the Terry Schiavo case was a perfect example, you will find that the various news sources diverge so radically on what is claimed to be fact that you can draw no other conclusion than the fact that a huge proportion of the news is heavily slanted if not completely concocted.
If you are talking about all media, then no it is not pandemic, but if you confine yourself to the largest media outlets, major newspapers, U.S. network and cable news, the BBC, etc, then you can only conclude that when two (or more) organizations report on an event and give conflicting information, they both can't be right. Furthermore, when media outlets are passing along, uncritically, statements made by politicians, and this happens often in the U.S., the news becomes even less than questionable, it becomes downright deceptive. "Doublethink" is common these days.
In this case, skepticism is not only a good idea, it's vital if you want to have any hope of having an idea of what's going on. You only need to look at the ridiculously lopsided political composition of those in the news (and with commentary, being lopsided is OK, but for news it spells trouble). Fox may not be "fair and balanced" as they claim, but the very claim is made in the context that their competitors are not considered fair and balanced. Rant all you want about stupid Red Staters, etc, but a lot of people, perhaps a majority believe in this bias. Even the People's Broadcasting System (excuse me, that's Public...) is starting to acknowledge that their being consistently to the left of Mao-Tse Tung might not qualify them as covering all sides.
I stand behind my assertions.
I dunno. The GP's summary seems pretty spot on to me.
If you really need think this is based on a story about an obscure for a fairly obscure magazine, then you clearly haven't been on Planet Earth lately.
Among greed, laziness and ideological bias, you literally cannot trust anything you read in the MSM. The only choice is to use several sources and try to discern who is being objective and who is not.
I can't say that for the BSOD.
You're running Windows, so it's your fault. Ickso Fatso.
Seriously though, I've rarely seen a BSOD since Windows 2000 that wasn't obviously caused by a hardware problem.
I agree with you. They're no dummies at Google. This had to have happened before the public release.
It's just like Stronghold 2, which I just bought. Now a game isn't quite the scale of a tool like this, but within a couple of hours, I'd found a good half dozen serious UI bugs and a number of significant UI design problems. The irony is that the game mechanics seem sound... these are probably fairly easy problems to fix. It amazes me how many apps are shipped with glaring errors that are evident within minutes (or even less) of installing the app.
It only took me a couple days to find a flaw in Outlook 2003 that I felt was so serious I immediately switched to Thunderbird. Once the mail store database gets bigger than about a gig and a half Outlook starts losing data. This was confirmed by a couple of folks who know a lot more about Microsoft than me. I can't understand how this can happen.
The whole software quality thing, like UI design seems to be getting progressively worse industry-wide.
It's probably the same as their position on the bug that causes Outlook 2003 to randomly lose data once the database file size gets up to about a gig and a half. They don't care.
"You're just a user so screw off. We're far too important to worry about your stupid data."
I can't see any other explanation.
so it is would still mainly be the kids fault--not the railway company--and the law would probably agree.
In a sane world, yes. In places like the U.S. the rail line would be quickly writing lots and lots of settlement checks.
My Dad worked for a power company that had to settle over a case of a kid breaking into an electrical substation and getting injured, where "breaking in" means doing something along the lines of climbing a 15-foot fence.
They settled, because they were afraid they would lose the lawsuit. Compared to that, the train situation above would be a slam dunk for the families of the victims.
I can add this important detail:
The corridors will be mostly brown.
it was ruled unconstitutional.
Yeah, and that was a real kick in the pants. Not having thr LIV means Congress can blackmail the President into signing tons and tons of pork and other crap that they attach to these massive appropriation bills and whatnot.
I think the Line-Item Veto would be one of the most effective ways to start cleaning things up. Does it take some power away from Congress? Well, sure. But Congress has been doing such a sucky job for the last 40 years or more, with respect to spending. They are the ones responsible for the grotesque national debt. The Presidents can help or hurt the process, but it's ultimately Congress that does the spending.
Now that we have a Republican White House and Republican majorities they've gone from "tax and spend" to "don't tax but still spend". If President Clinton, and now President Bush could just slice out some of the huge greasy pieces of fat that get wedged into every bill Congress passes, maybe we could start to reign in a government that has almost nothing in common with what was created in 1787.
It is not like the Democrats can get any legislation passed through Congress.
Well, it's not like the Republicans are getting anything interesting done either. Besides the war and other foreign policy exploits (which I generally support by the way), and the tax cut, what else have they accomplished?
It seems like all we hear about these days is that silly filibuster business, which should have been smacked down years ago. It ticked me off when the Republicans did it to Clinton (even though many of Clinton's appointees are firghteningly bad judges) and it ticks me off even more now. It seems all the Big Two Parties do these days is tit-for-tat sabotaging each other.
You're wrong. Every state has the right to kiss the Federal government's butt and it might get some money. Of course what it gives away for that money is another matter.
In all seriousness though, your statement was exactly what I was going to say.
There's a reason OSes provide common control libraries. It's to make things easier for users, not so you can write your own just to be "cool".
;-) Nowadays, X looks subdued compared to the Windows world. When did software start being required to look like the Strip in Las Vegas?
That's what XWindows is for.
Office is the best... they somehow managed to be different than every other Windows app and still generally feel way out of date. Or at least Access 2000 does, which I've had the displeasure of using. It looks and feels like crappy 16-bit software from the Dark Ages. Excel is better, but you couldn't pay me to use Word.
You're only confused in that you chose an MS Office app to check standard behaviour :-).
It's not just Office and Apple ports. This is implemented inconsistently in Windows apps of all types. Microsoft started lost a lot of consistency when Windows 95 came out, but at least they were trying. Nowadays, they don't even try. They used to have standards. I thought they were pretty good, too. I guess GUI technology has become too advanced* to be consistent.
It would be different if these non-standard apps implemented something that was really cool or a neat idea, but almost always it's borne from just plain laziness or ignorance or the widespread, but grotesquely mistaken idea that curves and specular highlights magically confer advanced usability.
* Actually, it's just like the Web... anyone who can browse Teach Yourself HTML in 21 Days or has a hot copy of Photoshop suddenly thinks he or she is an interface expert.
This wouldn't be so bad, except these people keep getting hired, often by big companies, like Microsoft, Symantec and, yes, even Apple. The Internet bubble may have burst, but there's still a lot of fallout of the massive democratization of computer software in the 90's. A bunch of amatuers came along in the mid 90's and made everything look like crap and the big boys quickly abandoned 30 years of research to imitate them.
Sssshhhh! People want to bash Kansas.
My experience with outsourced technical support is no different than domestic technical support. Some of them don't know much and aren't helpful, but some of them are very knowledgeable and can communicate clearly and effectively.
And yes, Indian food wRoKz0rZ.
Re " their app design on Windows sucks" you've heard the expression: "you can't make a silk purse out of a sows ear"?
Everyone's app design on Windows sucks, including Microsoft. With every release WMP gets uglier and uglier and the XP interface, Luna or whatever it's called, is hideous, as well as wasting more screen real estate on chrome. Of course, MS apps have always treated the screen as a place to put lots of useless pretty things (or ugly things, if you ask me) and do everything they can to minimize the space for actual content. Firefox and Thunderbird are a couple of the very few new Windows apps that don't hurt to look at.
With the advent of better graphics, this UI uglification has gone through the roof. Apple's stuff on Windows is equally bad. The old UI standards were good. Why did everyone abandon them? Usability? Hardly, apps are harder to use now that it's hard to tell what's a control and what's just chrome. Artistic merit? Pht. Most of these apps look like they were done by art school dropouts or mental patients.
So what's the reason? Why are modern GUI apps increasingly ugly and harder to use? What happened to all the HCI experts? They aren't designing cell phones, that's for sure.
His point was that Microsoft could throw 11 figures at it if they wanted to. But instead, they throw 3 figures at it.
What's the incentive in doing their work for them. As a Windows developer I feel like I've spent much of my career doing MS's work for them.
Testing IIS is a good thing. But let MS hire someone to do it.
Yeah, I can go but a paperback for $7. Sure it costs more, but either way the stories are made up. With a paperback, there's much more reading though.
(-1 Troll)
Knowing Microsoft, adding windshield washer fluid will allow someone to remotely drive your car.
They wanted "Bamco", but Emeril threatened to sue.
or he'll write a bill preventing the data from being released.
Oh wait, there's no corporation for him to whore himself out to. Maybe this will actually see daylight.