It's is like the classic "80% of the users use only 20% of the features" also know as the Word Syndrome. But since each user uses a different set of features you need to have everything in there. I'm not saying this is necessarily saying this is a bad thing.
He said a (program) manager should: 1. Design UIs 2. Write functional specs 3. Coordinate teams 4. Serve as the customer advocate, and 5. Wear Banana Republic chinos
You don't need to be deeply technical to do any of these things, but you do need to have some skills that are not "generic" for other areas, like knowing usability. And most importantly he must be a peer to the developers, not a boss. Otherwise when they say anything unfeasible (or stupid) the devs can't disagree because it will be bad for their careers. And here lies the problem, after a century of corporate culture evolution managers can't be anything other than bosses in most companies. Most career paths in companies make the senior members into managers.
Even if the idea was indeed good, you expect anything software related made by those hardware giants to be anything but awful? These are the guys that load crapware on every single machine they make. This smells like it is only a grab for doubling their crapware revenues.
Re:Javascript as a Virtual Machine Representation
on
Asm.js Gets Faster
·
· Score: 1
Well yes you can, but you have to build it all from scratch. Also any attempt to write a proper widget toolkit using canvas would probably incur significant drawbacks in usability and performance.
This mass collection is not about what they can process or correlate with terrorism or whatever. This massive amount is dangerous because they can target individuals. You simply can not assume that all this power will be used for the good of the nation, the inner workings of this huge system are manned by humans. They are prone to corruption, bribery, self interest and so on.
This much power with this little accountability is just bound to be used for personal gain. Imagine if some worker of this system decides he really does not like his neighbor guts. He could target that individual and discover that for example he is having an affair and the disclose that information to cause harm to that individual in particular. Well change that neighbor to some politician that is contrary to the current governing party.
The funny thing is that Metal Gear Solid 2 foretold all this more than a decade ago.
You are probably right, but if I were in his place I would not trust those whistle blower laws and would try to PR myself to not spend the rest of my life in prison.
On the other hand I would not become a whistle blower at all, I'm not brave enough to face the US government alone.
While I agree with you in principle, my experience in changing DPI settings in operating systems has been lackluster. Everything just looks strange when not on the default DPI setting. Granted I have not tried messing around this too long so I might be completely off-track on this comment, maybe doubling the resolution and DPI settings keep this odd effect at bay.
Re:Javascript as a Virtual Machine Representation
on
Asm.js Gets Faster
·
· Score: 1
What the op said is that people should just create a proper sandboxed VM that can have code in any language compiled to it instead of compiling code into a hacked javascript just to run it faster.
The problem of course is politics, try to get the w3 committee to agree to a VM.
Besides the DOM needs to go too, not just javascript.
Refactoring is necessary when building up on top of the existing code stops being fun. Fun motivates programmers which in turn increase productivity and quality and specially in open source projects that are not backed by some company keeps the development going.
You might think this is all just mental masturbation but big-scale refactoring usually only starts when there is something really wrong. The main problem is that many devs when refactoring avoid the traps they triggered before but end up falling for other traps. Being a great dev is not so much about being able to code in a frenzy (like oh so many movies show), but to actually be able to maintain a big project going.
Everyone should have their communications privacy by default, not having to hunt downs means to keep their privacy. Services like these end up being used mostly by paranoids and people with malicious intent. So in some respects the government officials have a point in wanting to shut down initiatives like these. On the other hand initiatives like these only exist because the government wants to control everything.
Not because of the freedom in itself, but because the only time free software compromises quality is when it wants to keep its freedom*. Commercial software is full of compromises to shift the direction of the software to another area (for example google compromising the quality of its products to improve google+ market share), free software has no such things.
Although you can argue that commercial interest drives many free software projects, the freedom is still there to say "you screwed up and I'm taking this to another direction".
The thing I hate the most as a software developer and software user is compromising quality for the sake of something else.
Never compromise quality, that is how microsoft got the reputation it has today. They sacrificed quality in so many areas to build their monopolist empire that everybody pretty much hates them and will hate them forever. Windows 8 compromised the desktop usability to try to grab mobile marketshare. And although that seems to be working (microsoft mobile marketshare is significant), everyone hates windows 8
* For _example_ not putting Flash into linux distros to keep it free, not having Flash reduces the quality of a distro because you have to manually install it your self if you want to use it.
I do not believe this to be the case, the government is investing in other initiatives to provide local and secure services (like email) to its government and people.
I just want to add that google once went to great lengths to enable the make its search engine work with the great firewall of china. So you have a point.
Flamebait, but there is a truth behind this. A lot of things that Germans take for granted (health care, good schools and so on) you have to pay for in the US. So if you are at the low-income range in Germany even if the median being lower than in the US you enjoy a better quality of life. Which in the end is what really matters.
When I was a child I simply could not stand doing _nothing_. My mom would make me wait around in the lobby for my older brother to get out of his swimming class for about 40 minutes 3 times a week and I remember vividly that I found those days to be some kind of torture. My mom would get furious that I couldn't just sit on the damn chair and read a stupid magazine silently.
The way I behaved during those 40 minutes the 3 times a week would probably qualify me for the meds they are prescribing for kids these days. Yet not only did I have no trouble concentrating, but I was on the top of my class back on those days. I have to say that most of these cases are probably about kids not being engaged in the education system. If a kid finds listening to the teacher while he tries to shove some random knowledge on the kids brain boring they will start behaving like I did while waiting on the lobby, it's natural since the alternative is to do nothing. Nothing is worse for a child than doing nothing.
It's more about engagement than concentration deficits.
One of the main problems is that they keep adding hacks on top of hacks to not break browser compatibility. Like you said, why not acknowledge that a browser, in 2013, is a software that is constantly updated so we can just assume the user is running the latest versions of the browser of choice? If everybody assumed you are running the latests versions soon the people who do not upgrade would be forced to. Anyway chrome silently auto-updates by default, firefox has auto-update, I believe safari has it too.
I just want to add that applying kernel patches is something that even most CompSci graduates don't know how to do. Most of them could learn how to do it, but they wouldn't bother.
Game renting was never a good solution to the problem. What gamers really need is a 3 day full refund on any title they buy. Also make pre-purchases of digital goods illegal.
Instead of saying "this new technology does not do what I could do with the last obsolete technology" you should see the underlying problems and see how they could be solved in a better way by the new technology.
Similar thing with used games, steam always has the full catalog available at any time, so that is one less point for used games. Also the catalog reduces in price the longer it has been available plus the Steam sales, so the price sensitive people can still afford games. I have to say, Steam solved these two problems a lot better than the previous "used games" bin at your gamestop ever did.
As for bandwidth and availability, Steam could offer a paid service where they would burn backups of the games in your account and send it to you through mail. If this issue affected that many people Valve would be doing it already. Anyway that is a pretty cool idea for a startup...
Slashdot Mirror
It's is like the classic "80% of the users use only 20% of the features" also know as the Word Syndrome. But since each user uses a different set of features you need to have everything in there. I'm not saying this is necessarily saying this is a bad thing.
Well some are used solely to change the user eye color.
Joels Spolsky wrote this article years ago:
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2009/03/09.html
He said a (program) manager should:
1. Design UIs
2. Write functional specs
3. Coordinate teams
4. Serve as the customer advocate, and
5. Wear Banana Republic chinos
You don't need to be deeply technical to do any of these things, but you do need to have some skills that are not "generic" for other areas, like knowing usability.
And most importantly he must be a peer to the developers, not a boss. Otherwise when they say anything unfeasible (or stupid) the devs can't disagree because it will be bad for their careers. And here lies the problem, after a century of corporate culture evolution managers can't be anything other than bosses in most companies. Most career paths in companies make the senior members into managers.
It is easier to develop HTML5 applications for iOS than IE9 and IE10. I have not tested IE11 much to draw any conclusions from that.
...double the crapware
Even if the idea was indeed good, you expect anything software related made by those hardware giants to be anything but awful? These are the guys that load crapware on every single machine they make. This smells like it is only a grab for doubling their crapware revenues.
Well yes you can, but you have to build it all from scratch. Also any attempt to write a proper widget toolkit using canvas would probably incur significant drawbacks in usability and performance.
This mass collection is not about what they can process or correlate with terrorism or whatever. This massive amount is dangerous because they can target individuals. You simply can not assume that all this power will be used for the good of the nation, the inner workings of this huge system are manned by humans. They are prone to corruption, bribery, self interest and so on.
This much power with this little accountability is just bound to be used for personal gain. Imagine if some worker of this system decides he really does not like his neighbor guts. He could target that individual and discover that for example he is having an affair and the disclose that information to cause harm to that individual in particular. Well change that neighbor to some politician that is contrary to the current governing party.
The funny thing is that Metal Gear Solid 2 foretold all this more than a decade ago.
You are probably right, but if I were in his place I would not trust those whistle blower laws and would try to PR myself to not spend the rest of my life in prison.
On the other hand I would not become a whistle blower at all, I'm not brave enough to face the US government alone.
While I agree with you in principle, my experience in changing DPI settings in operating systems has been lackluster. Everything just looks strange when not on the default DPI setting. Granted I have not tried messing around this too long so I might be completely off-track on this comment, maybe doubling the resolution and DPI settings keep this odd effect at bay.
What the op said is that people should just create a proper sandboxed VM that can have code in any language compiled to it instead of compiling code into a hacked javascript just to run it faster.
The problem of course is politics, try to get the w3 committee to agree to a VM.
Besides the DOM needs to go too, not just javascript.
Refactoring is necessary when building up on top of the existing code stops being fun. Fun motivates programmers which in turn increase productivity and quality and specially in open source projects that are not backed by some company keeps the development going.
You might think this is all just mental masturbation but big-scale refactoring usually only starts when there is something really wrong. The main problem is that many devs when refactoring avoid the traps they triggered before but end up falling for other traps. Being a great dev is not so much about being able to code in a frenzy (like oh so many movies show), but to actually be able to maintain a big project going.
They sold out for so little.
No! It is the black oil. Run for your lives.
Everyone should have their communications privacy by default, not having to hunt downs means to keep their privacy. Services like these end up being used mostly by paranoids and people with malicious intent. So in some respects the government officials have a point in wanting to shut down initiatives like these. On the other hand initiatives like these only exist because the government wants to control everything.
Not because of the freedom in itself, but because the only time free software compromises quality is when it wants to keep its freedom*. Commercial software is full of compromises to shift the direction of the software to another area (for example google compromising the quality of its products to improve google+ market share), free software has no such things.
Although you can argue that commercial interest drives many free software projects, the freedom is still there to say "you screwed up and I'm taking this to another direction".
The thing I hate the most as a software developer and software user is compromising quality for the sake of something else.
Never compromise quality, that is how microsoft got the reputation it has today. They sacrificed quality in so many areas to build their monopolist empire that everybody pretty much hates them and will hate them forever. Windows 8 compromised the desktop usability to try to grab mobile marketshare. And although that seems to be working (microsoft mobile marketshare is significant), everyone hates windows 8
* For _example_ not putting Flash into linux distros to keep it free, not having Flash reduces the quality of a distro because you have to manually install it your self if you want to use it.
I do not believe this to be the case, the government is investing in other initiatives to provide local and secure services (like email) to its government and people.
I just want to add that google once went to great lengths to enable the make its search engine work with the great firewall of china. So you have a point.
Flamebait, but there is a truth behind this. A lot of things that Germans take for granted (health care, good schools and so on) you have to pay for in the US. So if you are at the low-income range in Germany even if the median being lower than in the US you enjoy a better quality of life. Which in the end is what really matters.
And delaying it increased their profits, so all their actions are really in the best interest of all*.
* Of their shareholders.
When I was a child I simply could not stand doing _nothing_. My mom would make me wait around in the lobby for my older brother to get out of his swimming class for about 40 minutes 3 times a week and I remember vividly that I found those days to be some kind of torture. My mom would get furious that I couldn't just sit on the damn chair and read a stupid magazine silently.
The way I behaved during those 40 minutes the 3 times a week would probably qualify me for the meds they are prescribing for kids these days. Yet not only did I have no trouble concentrating, but I was on the top of my class back on those days. I have to say that most of these cases are probably about kids not being engaged in the education system. If a kid finds listening to the teacher while he tries to shove some random knowledge on the kids brain boring they will start behaving like I did while waiting on the lobby, it's natural since the alternative is to do nothing. Nothing is worse for a child than doing nothing.
It's more about engagement than concentration deficits.
One of the main problems is that they keep adding hacks on top of hacks to not break browser compatibility. Like you said, why not acknowledge that a browser, in 2013, is a software that is constantly updated so we can just assume the user is running the latest versions of the browser of choice? If everybody assumed you are running the latests versions soon the people who do not upgrade would be forced to. Anyway chrome silently auto-updates by default, firefox has auto-update, I believe safari has it too.
I just want to add that applying kernel patches is something that even most CompSci graduates don't know how to do. Most of them could learn how to do it, but they wouldn't bother.
Game renting was never a good solution to the problem. What gamers really need is a 3 day full refund on any title they buy. Also make pre-purchases of digital goods illegal.
Instead of saying "this new technology does not do what I could do with the last obsolete technology" you should see the underlying problems and see how they could be solved in a better way by the new technology.
Similar thing with used games, steam always has the full catalog available at any time, so that is one less point for used games. Also the catalog reduces in price the longer it has been available plus the Steam sales, so the price sensitive people can still afford games. I have to say, Steam solved these two problems a lot better than the previous "used games" bin at your gamestop ever did.
As for bandwidth and availability, Steam could offer a paid service where they would burn backups of the games in your account and send it to you through mail. If this issue affected that many people Valve would be doing it already. Anyway that is a pretty cool idea for a startup...
You know what I hate? Driving to the store to buy a big ass useless cardboard box with a CD in it that takes multiple steps to install.
Also swapping discs when I want to play another game.