From the sounds of it... he's making some pretty deluded statements about his life, passing them off as if they're true, and then selling it to people who are making it into TV which says 'based on a true story'. In many places, that's called fraud when you financially gain from it.
Why, when I first carved the internet out of an old bar of soap, I took the left over soap scraps and molded them into the prototype of the first iPod, but Steve Jobs and I got drunk and I forgot all about it until years later. I told Al Gore he could keep the whole internet thing as long as we made sure to put plenty of porn in it.
And then my wife, Morgan Fairchild (who I've slept with) and I decided to go on an around the world cruise in our giant yacht, and by the time I was done rescuing all the baby seals, Apple was already marketing it. I swear, between the sea-sickness and the size of my giant penis, poor Morgan could barely walk for weeks.
Why only the other week, Warren Buffet was calling me to ask why I never filed a patent, and BTW, what do I think of HP splitting into two companies. I told him I don't have a lot of time to explain market fundamentals to him, and suggested he reads Investing for Dummies" first. And, besides, I'm still on retainer with HP as their shadow CEO, so it would be unethical.
I'd tell you why Kim Jong Il has been out of the public eye for a while, but I'm sworn to secrecy for the next twenty years. Fortunately, me am Obama were chilling over steaks the other night, and he had a good laugh about it. At least I can talk to someone about this. The Secret Service guys are really cool, and sometimes let me shoot the guns, and the airforce pilots let me show them how to do a hammerhead in airforce one. Good times. You wouldn't believe what they've got in the secret fortress under Camp David, though. All I can say is Area 51 isn't where the really cool stuff is.
Basically, it boils down to credibility. Sure, have all the fiction you want. But if you are passing it off as fact, and someone is failing to check if any of it's true, and then subsequently pass it off as fact... they're morons.
It sounds like this guy has been going around making extraordinary claims, and nobody has had the slightest inclination to challenge him on it.
Really? This has to be something specific to how he had emacs configured, because as a long time emacs user this certainly isn't the default.
He eventually found something to fix it.
But he simply wouldn't listen until I locked him out of CVS, sat him down, and showed him what the hell it was doing to the code in a hex dump.
Because all he gave a damn about was how he he saw it and how his editor worked, and didn't seem to care about the other developers, or that it was a codebase which was around since before he'd worked there and it wasn't up to him to determine our coding standards.
It was pretty stupid, but it was also 15+ years ago.
I don't think the issue here is the artistic merit of it.
But for humans(*) to have the abstract concepts of representing things in the world around them, the dyes needed to do this, and the desire to actually put this kind of thing on a wall... well, that's indicating that humans(*) were far more advanced than everybody thinks they were.
If the ability to do the art spread with humans(*), then we learn a little more about how we got here and what we knew.
At a minimum you have to conclude there was some form of culture, shared understanding of concepts, and a desire to communicate and have things a little more durable.
As opposed to the previous notions of cavemen sitting around poking themselves in the eye with sticks and looking all furry and stuff. This might actually suggest that humans were more advanced, and more widespread, than we initially thought.
(*)humans, proto humans, early humans... whatever, don't care.
No man, that's the ENTIRE point. You use 1 character, tab, that says indent here. Then everybody's editor renders tabs how they want. He sees the tab as the width of 2 spaces, you see the tab as the width of 8 spaces, and your co-worker sees the tab as the width of 4 spaces.
It works for EVERYBODY, and you only need 1 arrow key to move around, 1 backspace key to delete etc.
It's you fools that mandate spaces that mess it up for everybody else.
You're a moron, aren't you?
If there was 1 level of indent, emacs wrote out one tab. If there were 10 levels of indent, emacs wrote out one tab. In other words, it was trying to be clever in a way no other editor supported by collapsing it down and having the semantic of "indent this right". In other words, it wasn't compatible with anything else.
I don't care how you want to see you tabs, but I do expect you to store the actual number of tabs, not one generic character as a placeholder which is then interpreted by your pretty printer as "whatever looks nice".
But if someone edits in a text editor in which which tabs are 2 chars, and someone edits in which tabs are 8, if the guy with the 2-char tabs accidentally puts 2 characters instead of a tab... what he sees lines up in a column in his editor, but it's not how it's interpreted.
When you start introducing this kind of silliness to the syntax of your language, to me it's always been a recipe for an epic fail, and introducing things which are really annoying to track down.
Come on, python's got its problems, but forcing you to lay out your program in a naturally readable way to compile isn't one of them.
So, here's my problem with whitespace being syntactically significant... everybody likes to see code with different levels of indent. There isn't one "naturally readable" way which everybody agrees on. And then suddenly you have a language which says "we're all stuck with whatever the whiniest coder wants".
Years ago I had a co-worker. He liked emacs, and I liked vi. OK, whatever, that's not a big deal, I can overlook that.
The problem was his electric mode in emacs was thinking itself oh-so-clever, and instead of storing the *actual* number of tab indents or whitespace, it just stripped them in favor of a single tab that emacs would then know how to render later.
Unfortunately, not all editors rendered the same way his beloved emacs did. So after he edited a document, every line showed as a diff, and every file he edited now rendered as gibberish in every other editor, because there was only a single whitespace character.
He was one of a team, but wouldn't listen when we said his editor was fscking up the code, and making it impossible for us to work on it.
So, where he wanted to see two character indents, and I wanted to see 8, and a co-worker wanted to see 4... once he'd edited it, in anything not using this electric mode didn't work.
Finally the solution was to lock him out of CVS, and tell him in no uncertain terms it was his problem to make his editor work with our coding standards, and that we didn't give a damn about his pretty little electric mode.
It took a lot of howling and gnashing of teeth for him to realize that he needed to fix it.
But this whining about whitespace just comes off as having never actually tried it.
No, it's a concept which had been ridiculed when COBOL used to insist you put things in specific columns. And as far as I'm aware, even COBOL stopped doing it, because we don't use punch cards any more.
For any of us who have taken compiler classes, a context free grammar specifically ignores whitespace. That's how compilers have worked for a very long time, if the grammar productions for your language involve counting whitespace... well, my compilers prof would have failed me. Instead of having a visible thing to define a block, oh, well, just indent a few more chars.
You can't see what character whitespace actually is... is that 8 spaces or a tab? Which means when your program suddenly won't compile, or is doing strange things, you have to spend extra effort to figure out WTF specific piece of invisible whitespace is the problem.
I've thought syntactically significant whitespace was dumb since I first saw it. Specifically because it creates many many places where it can go wrong, and no easy way to find them.
I've seen someone debug a python program, and even though things were in the same column in the editor, some were tabs and some were spaces, which had the very bizarre effect of making it semantically different than it looked. Because the block wasn't explicit, it was implicit based purely on indenting.
If you can break a program by changing the tab indent of your editor, the problem lies in the syntax of your language.
Making whitespace affect your syntax means "I'm too damned lazy to make my blocks explicit, so I'll rely on this cheap hack".
I've also worked with blind programmers who used code readers (yes, blind, and they were damned fine programmers). You know what whitespace being part of your syntax does to them? Renders them almost unusable.
I'm afraid I don't really see the point. This is "preventing eye strain for people who don't want to prevent eye strain by not sitting in the dark".
But, hey, think of it as a geek disco ball I guess.
I'm sure some gamers will say it makes their gaming more enjoyable, and audiophiles with monster cable will say that it gives the sound a more smooth, mellow taste.
Me, I'll stick with my collection of lava lamps. I'm really going to miss lava lamps once all the old fashioned bulbs go away. Did I mention I like lava lamps?
A moose bit my sister once... it was very painful.
Hmmm, as I recall, Microsoft shipped something which was so completely not Java as to be laughable.
They'd taken an existing language, which was intended to be cross platform, and injected (as they usually do) their own platform-specific functions... and still tried to pass it off as Java.
But code written to use those extensions wouldn't run anywhere else. Which means Microsoft basically broke the language and the cross-platform intention.
The Microsoft/Java issue was about intentionally breaking compatibility by adding their own crap.
Now, contrast that to someone taking the exact same API interfaces, and implementing them properly for compatibility. Further, look at the fact that API interfaces from UNIX have been duplicated for literally decades in order to make something which uses the same interface and allows for code portability. The interface is what you publish to allow others to use it.
So, if you want consistency, you have to remember these are actually two different issues.
Microsoft didn't adhere to the published interfaces, and just decided to add their own. That was Sun's lawyers.
Now, Oracle is saying "you can't copy our API interface because it's super secret and copyrighted". This is Oracle's lawyers.
Google is saying "you're idiots, this is how programming has worked for decades".
So, we agree you should be able to adhere to the API interface for compatibility sake. We also don't think you should be doing what Microsoft did, and do their usual "embrace/extend/extinguish" crap.
And when they got told they weren't allowed to embrace and extend, they dropped it altogether and came out with.NET.
Oracle is actually making a different argument than Sun was at the time.
I wonder if they speak it with an accent, like when I try to speak a little Spanish.:-P
I guess this doesn't seem all that surprising (on the surface, to someone who admittedly doesn't know much about it).
A huge amount of their brains is geared towards processing sound because they use sonar. Is picking up some dolphin sounds really that much of a stretch?
I mean, I can haltingly say "dos cerveza por favor" and "ron negro con jugo de pina"... and my wife assures me I'm an idiot.
Whales and the like are smart enough to hunt in packs. I can't even dribble a basketball very well.:-P
So, you're worried about upholding your end of the contract even though the other side isn't upholding there end?
Like EULAs, the sales contract put forth by most large corporations starts with that as a starting point.
And you need to have enough clout, and a good legal team to actually end up signing a contract which protects your interests.
We once had a vendor come to us and say we needed to pay the same licensing fee for our development environments as for our production.
It was only when we showed them the contract which said we were allowed to have development environments included, because we needed them to ensure a working environment that they backed down.
We had a smart legal team who had recognized this was a necessity for a company our size, and had put in clauses to protect us. We as a company were much larger than the vendor, so they couldn't just bully us, and backed down after trying to extort 3x license costs.
If you're a small entity and you buy from a big player, their standard contract more or less gives them every bit of leverage. And if you're small enough, you can't apply enough pressure to get them to change it.
Company has you locked into support contract. Check.
Bummer, dude. But what you're describing is pretty much what any of us in the software industry have been seeing for a long time -- the salesman is always lying to you.
Out of curiosity, did you do your own extensive testing and have your legal department put penalty/early termination clauses in? Or, have you become victim to believing what the sales guy told you?
I'm betting half the people on Slashdot have worked at companies where the sales people sold impossible things which don't exist as sold. And the other half has worked for companies which have bought stuff which didn't live up to what the sales guy said.
I'm afraid I have little practical advice for this specific question, but I've seen more than enough examples of the sales guys really stretching the truth about what is real.. to the extent of being quite certain they took the buzzwords from several separate products, turned them into one list, and then claimed they were selling you something which checked all the boxes -- even if there was no way to connect the pieces.
And I've had numerous friends who have been tasked with building something the sales guys sold, only to discover there is no documentation, no resources to turn to, nobody has ever actually done it this way, and there's one guy who costs $4k/day who can be hired to come in and set it up... if anybody can find him, and assuming he doesn't look at what the sales guys sold and say "wow, I don't think it does that".
So, the moral of the story is... hang the salesman out the window until he can provide a working system, and make damned sure your legal department is building in clauses which protect you when you realize that you've been hoodwinked.
I've had more than a few vendors after the sale admit that, no, it doesn't really do that, but for our ridiculous consulting fee we can build something which might almost do that.
But is it accurate? Do they run the tank dry several times? Or is it an extrapolation based on a formula?
Because I'm pretty sure the reason so many people have been underwhelmed with fuel economy on hybrids is because the methodology of estimating it is pretty much useless.
Governments ought to ensure, there is competition in every market
Show me some objective facts to tell me why this is good, desirable, and achieves the outcomes you are ascribing to it.
Not something you believe. Not something you heard. Not something you read in a book. Something which proves the assertion. You can't, because economics isn't a science, it's philosophy with a lot of dodgy math, and inherent assumptions, which may or may not hold true.
Show me some statistics which demonstrates a purely profit driven system provides better outcomes in all cases, or even most cases. And that those outcomes are actually best for consumers overall, instead of just the companies.
I'm not saying government ran is always perfect. I am saying some things are natural monopolies, and the US is so mired in people trying to undermine what governments do that it's pretty much useless to compare the US against anything else.
How does it benefit consumers to have competition if what really happens is infrastructure for each competitor needs to be separately laid, using public rights of way, and public subsidies? You know... like telecoms, electricity, sewage, water, roads, schools, garbage collection.
Should you have to choose between Bob's sewage system, or Alice's sewage system when you build your house? And if you want to change from Bob to Alice, you have to pay huge sums of money to connect to the different infrastructure, assuming it's anywhere near you. Is this good for consumers? I think not.
That's a series of little disjoint monopolies which instead of having a common infrastructure, becomes a bunch of separate ones.
I reject the entire premise of your questions. Sure, I've read Ayn Rand. I still own her entire collected works.
I've also come to the conclusion she was full of shit.
And, quite frankly, you're a fool if you believe that capitalism doesn't devolve into oligarchy, collusion, and people generally not playing by the rules which are intrinsic to the assumptions of capitalism. Because, despite these wonderful assumptions, companies will lie, cheat, steal, manipulate the system, hide information, or generally do anything they can do skew the system in their favor.
Politicians can be voted out. The growing oligarchy cannot, and has no interest in doing anything unless it's on terms they dictate, and not on terms the 'free' market is supposed to provide.
The oligarchy is just the next set of feudal lords.
Over the long run, pretty much any system of government devolves into tyranny... the only issue is who is in charge. A hereditary ruler like Assad or Kim? Self appointed revolutionaries like Mao? Or cartels of corporations like you're seeing now?
Because, right now, corporations have more say in government that citizens do.
And as long as people continue to believe corporations and capitalism is a system which achieves optimal outcomes for any but a few, it will continue.
In Adam Smith's day, those entities had to compete for your business, and provide a quality product at competitive products. These days, it's whatever the hell we put in the EULA, and whatever the hell we feel like.
As currently practiced, capitalism is a complete lie. As described and pitched, it has never existed, and never will.
Which means, the costs are (much?) higher than the bill says -- and TFA cites -- the difference is paid to the tax-authorities instead of going directly to the service-provider.
Which is offset by the fact that it's not contributing to huge corporate profits, and doesn't help pay for ridiculous executive bonuses, or the salaries of lobbyists who get sweetheart deals which only benefit corporations.
Take those two things out of the equation, and it may cost less overall.
And the government run one might actually spend money on maintaining their infrastructure, instead of neglecting it for years and then crying poor and asking for more tax-payer subsidies to deliver on promises they've failed to meet already.
Take the parasites out of the equation, and the economics changes a lot.
Because the for-profit model says "you'll get what we give you, when we feel like giving it to you, and we'll raise your prices any time we wish in order to keep profits up".
I'm guessing "anything which would ever smell like socialism and not guarantee the profits of huge corporations simply will not fly".
Sweden made a choice which will benefit all citizens, and uplift them.
There would be political opposition to anything like that, and some will truly believe not having a corporation making obscene profits and being entrenched monopolies would be immoral.
My guess is, the same people who oppose socialized medicine, would disagree on the same premise. Because they somehow feel society is best left to rot as long as they've got their pile of money.
HAHAHAHAH "heading down" You really are ignorant of U.S. history, aren't you?
Not hardly. Including your historical support of terrorists because they were terrorizing other people. When Bin Laden was fighting the Soviets, or some of those South American groups were doing atrocious things, America was all for it and helping pay the bills. Toppling democratically elected governments to prop up dictators who were friendly to your business interests. All sorts of crap.
However, technology has made it possible to do things which previously would have required boots on the ground, and essentially amount to an invasion.
This whole "we can hack into your servers" thing wasn't possible even 3 decades ago, at least not on a large scale.
So, within my lifetime, technology has made it possible to be even bigger assholes about such things. And when your government acts like it's your right to do these things in a far less constrained world (as opposed to parking warships off someone's coast), the scope of it gets much bigger much faster.
To the point that American believe it's their right to hack into any system, tap into and monitor any nations telecomms, and increasingly record everything about her own citizens and claim they're not really collecting until they actually look at it.
America has actively become the enemy of the freedom of everyone else on the planet. And, it shouldn't come as a surprise that people are taking that personal. Your security isn't worth the price of my liberty, not to me. And if you (as a nation, not 'you' as drinkyoo) expect that from me... well, your security be damned.
And what's really pathetic is so many other governments (including mine) are playing along with this shit.
The problem is you can't put this genie back in the bottle. And once you have a global surveillance state, the fascism is pretty much inevitable.
Unilateral ought to be our first name. The Unilateral States of America. Has an honest ring to it.
I'm not even sure 'test criteria' is a meaningful expression here.
As I recall, in the US, they have a formula which is 40+ years old, shown to be terrible and ineffective, but it's the only legal way to report gas mileage. They know the method is pretty useless.
So if Europe has adopted a similar standard, it's not even based on a test or a real world measure... it's calculating what your fuel economy is based off a formula which has been known forever to be wrong and incomplete.
If nobody will fix the measurement, it will always be wrong.
That's because for many people software isn't a political act.
The vast majority of people are not running around saying "viva la revolucion" about 'free' software.
They just want stuff which works.
Has it occurred to you that they simply don't care?
Even Mozilla backed down on blocking 3rd party cookies, and it is open source.
And then I'm hard pressed to think of an open source browser which actually respects our privacy, doesn't have ads, and which runs on multiple platforms.
But it also means that if someone does hack into US computers, the US should not be looking to extradite or otherwise seek redress.
Because if it's legal for you guys to do it, you have no leg to stand on when someone else does it to you.
But, that's OK. Because the US will just call in a drone strike, and if a few civilians have to die, that's just the cost of doing business.
Of course, the problem with that, is someone else might decide that your civilians are a valid target.
An eye for an eye leaves everybody blind.
I really worry that the road the US is heading down is one of "we don't give a crap about you, your country, or your laws, as long as we have what we want". At which point the US is really not entitled to any sympathy from the rest of the world.
And, as we've seen over the last decade or so, they might actually be creating more animosity towards themselves.
They're certainly losing support and sympathy from the rest of the world who doesn't agree that our rights are secondary to their security.
So, while I understand why the US is in this mess... I simply am not prepared to cede my rights to yours.
I used to admire America and what she stood for. Now I'm looking at her and thinking... wow, what a train wreck. And a train wreck which is becoming scary and dangerous, and in a very big rush to bring on the dystpoian future of a ruthless, paranoid surveillance state.
Papers please comrade. In my lifetime, America has begun to morph into what they've always stood against. And they're fast becoming scarier than what they used to stand against.
Slashdot Mirror
From the sounds of it ... he's making some pretty deluded statements about his life, passing them off as if they're true, and then selling it to people who are making it into TV which says 'based on a true story'. In many places, that's called fraud when you financially gain from it.
Why, when I first carved the internet out of an old bar of soap, I took the left over soap scraps and molded them into the prototype of the first iPod, but Steve Jobs and I got drunk and I forgot all about it until years later. I told Al Gore he could keep the whole internet thing as long as we made sure to put plenty of porn in it.
And then my wife, Morgan Fairchild (who I've slept with) and I decided to go on an around the world cruise in our giant yacht, and by the time I was done rescuing all the baby seals, Apple was already marketing it. I swear, between the sea-sickness and the size of my giant penis, poor Morgan could barely walk for weeks.
Why only the other week, Warren Buffet was calling me to ask why I never filed a patent, and BTW, what do I think of HP splitting into two companies. I told him I don't have a lot of time to explain market fundamentals to him, and suggested he reads Investing for Dummies" first. And, besides, I'm still on retainer with HP as their shadow CEO, so it would be unethical.
I'd tell you why Kim Jong Il has been out of the public eye for a while, but I'm sworn to secrecy for the next twenty years. Fortunately, me am Obama were chilling over steaks the other night, and he had a good laugh about it. At least I can talk to someone about this. The Secret Service guys are really cool, and sometimes let me shoot the guns, and the airforce pilots let me show them how to do a hammerhead in airforce one. Good times. You wouldn't believe what they've got in the secret fortress under Camp David, though. All I can say is Area 51 isn't where the really cool stuff is.
Basically, it boils down to credibility. Sure, have all the fiction you want. But if you are passing it off as fact, and someone is failing to check if any of it's true, and then subsequently pass it off as fact ... they're morons.
It sounds like this guy has been going around making extraordinary claims, and nobody has had the slightest inclination to challenge him on it.
He eventually found something to fix it.
But he simply wouldn't listen until I locked him out of CVS, sat him down, and showed him what the hell it was doing to the code in a hex dump.
Because all he gave a damn about was how he he saw it and how his editor worked, and didn't seem to care about the other developers, or that it was a codebase which was around since before he'd worked there and it wasn't up to him to determine our coding standards.
It was pretty stupid, but it was also 15+ years ago.
I don't think the issue here is the artistic merit of it.
But for humans(*) to have the abstract concepts of representing things in the world around them, the dyes needed to do this, and the desire to actually put this kind of thing on a wall ... well, that's indicating that humans(*) were far more advanced than everybody thinks they were.
If the ability to do the art spread with humans(*), then we learn a little more about how we got here and what we knew.
At a minimum you have to conclude there was some form of culture, shared understanding of concepts, and a desire to communicate and have things a little more durable.
As opposed to the previous notions of cavemen sitting around poking themselves in the eye with sticks and looking all furry and stuff. This might actually suggest that humans were more advanced, and more widespread, than we initially thought.
(*)humans, proto humans, early humans ... whatever, don't care.
You're a moron, aren't you?
If there was 1 level of indent, emacs wrote out one tab. If there were 10 levels of indent, emacs wrote out one tab. In other words, it was trying to be clever in a way no other editor supported by collapsing it down and having the semantic of "indent this right". In other words, it wasn't compatible with anything else.
I don't care how you want to see you tabs, but I do expect you to store the actual number of tabs, not one generic character as a placeholder which is then interpreted by your pretty printer as "whatever looks nice".
But if someone edits in a text editor in which which tabs are 2 chars, and someone edits in which tabs are 8, if the guy with the 2-char tabs accidentally puts 2 characters instead of a tab ... what he sees lines up in a column in his editor, but it's not how it's interpreted.
When you start introducing this kind of silliness to the syntax of your language, to me it's always been a recipe for an epic fail, and introducing things which are really annoying to track down.
So, here's my problem with whitespace being syntactically significant ... everybody likes to see code with different levels of indent. There isn't one "naturally readable" way which everybody agrees on. And then suddenly you have a language which says "we're all stuck with whatever the whiniest coder wants".
Years ago I had a co-worker. He liked emacs, and I liked vi. OK, whatever, that's not a big deal, I can overlook that.
The problem was his electric mode in emacs was thinking itself oh-so-clever, and instead of storing the *actual* number of tab indents or whitespace, it just stripped them in favor of a single tab that emacs would then know how to render later.
Unfortunately, not all editors rendered the same way his beloved emacs did. So after he edited a document, every line showed as a diff, and every file he edited now rendered as gibberish in every other editor, because there was only a single whitespace character.
He was one of a team, but wouldn't listen when we said his editor was fscking up the code, and making it impossible for us to work on it.
So, where he wanted to see two character indents, and I wanted to see 8, and a co-worker wanted to see 4 ... once he'd edited it, in anything not using this electric mode didn't work.
Finally the solution was to lock him out of CVS, and tell him in no uncertain terms it was his problem to make his editor work with our coding standards, and that we didn't give a damn about his pretty little electric mode.
It took a lot of howling and gnashing of teeth for him to realize that he needed to fix it.
No, it's a concept which had been ridiculed when COBOL used to insist you put things in specific columns. And as far as I'm aware, even COBOL stopped doing it, because we don't use punch cards any more.
For any of us who have taken compiler classes, a context free grammar specifically ignores whitespace. That's how compilers have worked for a very long time, if the grammar productions for your language involve counting whitespace ... well, my compilers prof would have failed me. Instead of having a visible thing to define a block, oh, well, just indent a few more chars.
You can't see what character whitespace actually is ... is that 8 spaces or a tab? Which means when your program suddenly won't compile, or is doing strange things, you have to spend extra effort to figure out WTF specific piece of invisible whitespace is the problem.
I've thought syntactically significant whitespace was dumb since I first saw it. Specifically because it creates many many places where it can go wrong, and no easy way to find them.
I've seen someone debug a python program, and even though things were in the same column in the editor, some were tabs and some were spaces, which had the very bizarre effect of making it semantically different than it looked. Because the block wasn't explicit, it was implicit based purely on indenting.
If you can break a program by changing the tab indent of your editor, the problem lies in the syntax of your language.
Making whitespace affect your syntax means "I'm too damned lazy to make my blocks explicit, so I'll rely on this cheap hack".
I've also worked with blind programmers who used code readers (yes, blind, and they were damned fine programmers). You know what whitespace being part of your syntax does to them? Renders them almost unusable.
I don't have an ez-bake oven you insensitive clod!
Think of it as nerd mood lighting.
So all of those geeks fapping in their mom's basement can have a more, er, intimate experience.
And, just think how lovely it will be next April(*) when Slashdot does the "OMG Ponies" theme.
(*) Note to editors, though, we may have to take out contracts on you if you do.
So, put a mirror on the wall behind you.
I'm afraid I don't really see the point. This is "preventing eye strain for people who don't want to prevent eye strain by not sitting in the dark".
But, hey, think of it as a geek disco ball I guess.
I'm sure some gamers will say it makes their gaming more enjoyable, and audiophiles with monster cable will say that it gives the sound a more smooth, mellow taste.
Me, I'll stick with my collection of lava lamps. I'm really going to miss lava lamps once all the old fashioned bulbs go away. Did I mention I like lava lamps?
A moose bit my sister once ... it was very painful.
Hmmm, as I recall, Microsoft shipped something which was so completely not Java as to be laughable.
They'd taken an existing language, which was intended to be cross platform, and injected (as they usually do) their own platform-specific functions ... and still tried to pass it off as Java.
But code written to use those extensions wouldn't run anywhere else. Which means Microsoft basically broke the language and the cross-platform intention.
The Microsoft/Java issue was about intentionally breaking compatibility by adding their own crap.
Now, contrast that to someone taking the exact same API interfaces, and implementing them properly for compatibility. Further, look at the fact that API interfaces from UNIX have been duplicated for literally decades in order to make something which uses the same interface and allows for code portability. The interface is what you publish to allow others to use it.
So, if you want consistency, you have to remember these are actually two different issues.
Microsoft didn't adhere to the published interfaces, and just decided to add their own. That was Sun's lawyers.
Now, Oracle is saying "you can't copy our API interface because it's super secret and copyrighted". This is Oracle's lawyers.
Google is saying "you're idiots, this is how programming has worked for decades".
So, we agree you should be able to adhere to the API interface for compatibility sake. We also don't think you should be doing what Microsoft did, and do their usual "embrace/extend/extinguish" crap.
And when they got told they weren't allowed to embrace and extend, they dropped it altogether and came out with .NET.
Oracle is actually making a different argument than Sun was at the time.
I wonder if they speak it with an accent, like when I try to speak a little Spanish. :-P
I guess this doesn't seem all that surprising (on the surface, to someone who admittedly doesn't know much about it).
A huge amount of their brains is geared towards processing sound because they use sonar. Is picking up some dolphin sounds really that much of a stretch?
I mean, I can haltingly say "dos cerveza por favor" and "ron negro con jugo de pina" ... and my wife assures me I'm an idiot.
Whales and the like are smart enough to hunt in packs. I can't even dribble a basketball very well. :-P
Hmmm ... I'm going with "fusion power has been 10-15 years away since the 50s".
It's been known about since the 30s.
Like EULAs, the sales contract put forth by most large corporations starts with that as a starting point.
And you need to have enough clout, and a good legal team to actually end up signing a contract which protects your interests.
We once had a vendor come to us and say we needed to pay the same licensing fee for our development environments as for our production.
It was only when we showed them the contract which said we were allowed to have development environments included, because we needed them to ensure a working environment that they backed down.
We had a smart legal team who had recognized this was a necessity for a company our size, and had put in clauses to protect us. We as a company were much larger than the vendor, so they couldn't just bully us, and backed down after trying to extort 3x license costs.
If you're a small entity and you buy from a big player, their standard contract more or less gives them every bit of leverage. And if you're small enough, you can't apply enough pressure to get them to change it.
Sometimes, the deck is stacked against you.
Company sells product. Check.
Product has issues. Check.
Company is unresponsive to problems. Check.
Company has you locked into support contract. Check.
Bummer, dude. But what you're describing is pretty much what any of us in the software industry have been seeing for a long time -- the salesman is always lying to you.
Out of curiosity, did you do your own extensive testing and have your legal department put penalty/early termination clauses in? Or, have you become victim to believing what the sales guy told you?
I'm betting half the people on Slashdot have worked at companies where the sales people sold impossible things which don't exist as sold. And the other half has worked for companies which have bought stuff which didn't live up to what the sales guy said.
I'm afraid I have little practical advice for this specific question, but I've seen more than enough examples of the sales guys really stretching the truth about what is real .. to the extent of being quite certain they took the buzzwords from several separate products, turned them into one list, and then claimed they were selling you something which checked all the boxes -- even if there was no way to connect the pieces.
And I've had numerous friends who have been tasked with building something the sales guys sold, only to discover there is no documentation, no resources to turn to, nobody has ever actually done it this way, and there's one guy who costs $4k/day who can be hired to come in and set it up ... if anybody can find him, and assuming he doesn't look at what the sales guys sold and say "wow, I don't think it does that".
So, the moral of the story is ... hang the salesman out the window until he can provide a working system, and make damned sure your legal department is building in clauses which protect you when you realize that you've been hoodwinked.
I've had more than a few vendors after the sale admit that, no, it doesn't really do that, but for our ridiculous consulting fee we can build something which might almost do that.
But is it accurate? Do they run the tank dry several times? Or is it an extrapolation based on a formula?
Because I'm pretty sure the reason so many people have been underwhelmed with fuel economy on hybrids is because the methodology of estimating it is pretty much useless.
Show me some objective facts to tell me why this is good, desirable, and achieves the outcomes you are ascribing to it.
Not something you believe. Not something you heard. Not something you read in a book. Something which proves the assertion. You can't, because economics isn't a science, it's philosophy with a lot of dodgy math, and inherent assumptions, which may or may not hold true.
Show me some statistics which demonstrates a purely profit driven system provides better outcomes in all cases, or even most cases. And that those outcomes are actually best for consumers overall, instead of just the companies.
I'm not saying government ran is always perfect. I am saying some things are natural monopolies, and the US is so mired in people trying to undermine what governments do that it's pretty much useless to compare the US against anything else.
How does it benefit consumers to have competition if what really happens is infrastructure for each competitor needs to be separately laid, using public rights of way, and public subsidies? You know ... like telecoms, electricity, sewage, water, roads, schools, garbage collection.
Should you have to choose between Bob's sewage system, or Alice's sewage system when you build your house? And if you want to change from Bob to Alice, you have to pay huge sums of money to connect to the different infrastructure, assuming it's anywhere near you. Is this good for consumers? I think not.
That's a series of little disjoint monopolies which instead of having a common infrastructure, becomes a bunch of separate ones.
I reject the entire premise of your questions. Sure, I've read Ayn Rand. I still own her entire collected works.
I've also come to the conclusion she was full of shit.
And, quite frankly, you're a fool if you believe that capitalism doesn't devolve into oligarchy, collusion, and people generally not playing by the rules which are intrinsic to the assumptions of capitalism. Because, despite these wonderful assumptions, companies will lie, cheat, steal, manipulate the system, hide information, or generally do anything they can do skew the system in their favor.
Politicians can be voted out. The growing oligarchy cannot, and has no interest in doing anything unless it's on terms they dictate, and not on terms the 'free' market is supposed to provide.
The oligarchy is just the next set of feudal lords.
Over the long run, pretty much any system of government devolves into tyranny ... the only issue is who is in charge. A hereditary ruler like Assad or Kim? Self appointed revolutionaries like Mao? Or cartels of corporations like you're seeing now?
Because, right now, corporations have more say in government that citizens do.
And as long as people continue to believe corporations and capitalism is a system which achieves optimal outcomes for any but a few, it will continue.
In Adam Smith's day, those entities had to compete for your business, and provide a quality product at competitive products. These days, it's whatever the hell we put in the EULA, and whatever the hell we feel like.
As currently practiced, capitalism is a complete lie. As described and pitched, it has never existed, and never will.
Which is offset by the fact that it's not contributing to huge corporate profits, and doesn't help pay for ridiculous executive bonuses, or the salaries of lobbyists who get sweetheart deals which only benefit corporations.
Take those two things out of the equation, and it may cost less overall.
And the government run one might actually spend money on maintaining their infrastructure, instead of neglecting it for years and then crying poor and asking for more tax-payer subsidies to deliver on promises they've failed to meet already.
Take the parasites out of the equation, and the economics changes a lot.
Because the for-profit model says "you'll get what we give you, when we feel like giving it to you, and we'll raise your prices any time we wish in order to keep profits up".
I'm guessing "anything which would ever smell like socialism and not guarantee the profits of huge corporations simply will not fly".
Sweden made a choice which will benefit all citizens, and uplift them.
There would be political opposition to anything like that, and some will truly believe not having a corporation making obscene profits and being entrenched monopolies would be immoral.
My guess is, the same people who oppose socialized medicine, would disagree on the same premise. Because they somehow feel society is best left to rot as long as they've got their pile of money.
Not hardly. Including your historical support of terrorists because they were terrorizing other people. When Bin Laden was fighting the Soviets, or some of those South American groups were doing atrocious things, America was all for it and helping pay the bills. Toppling democratically elected governments to prop up dictators who were friendly to your business interests. All sorts of crap.
However, technology has made it possible to do things which previously would have required boots on the ground, and essentially amount to an invasion.
This whole "we can hack into your servers" thing wasn't possible even 3 decades ago, at least not on a large scale.
So, within my lifetime, technology has made it possible to be even bigger assholes about such things. And when your government acts like it's your right to do these things in a far less constrained world (as opposed to parking warships off someone's coast), the scope of it gets much bigger much faster.
To the point that American believe it's their right to hack into any system, tap into and monitor any nations telecomms, and increasingly record everything about her own citizens and claim they're not really collecting until they actually look at it.
America has actively become the enemy of the freedom of everyone else on the planet. And, it shouldn't come as a surprise that people are taking that personal. Your security isn't worth the price of my liberty, not to me. And if you (as a nation, not 'you' as drinkyoo) expect that from me ... well, your security be damned.
And what's really pathetic is so many other governments (including mine) are playing along with this shit.
The problem is you can't put this genie back in the bottle. And once you have a global surveillance state, the fascism is pretty much inevitable.
Indeed, it does.
I'm not even sure 'test criteria' is a meaningful expression here.
As I recall, in the US, they have a formula which is 40+ years old, shown to be terrible and ineffective, but it's the only legal way to report gas mileage. They know the method is pretty useless.
So if Europe has adopted a similar standard, it's not even based on a test or a real world measure ... it's calculating what your fuel economy is based off a formula which has been known forever to be wrong and incomplete.
If nobody will fix the measurement, it will always be wrong.
That's because for many people software isn't a political act.
The vast majority of people are not running around saying "viva la revolucion" about 'free' software.
They just want stuff which works.
Has it occurred to you that they simply don't care?
Even Mozilla backed down on blocking 3rd party cookies, and it is open source.
And then I'm hard pressed to think of an open source browser which actually respects our privacy, doesn't have ads, and which runs on multiple platforms.
But it also means that if someone does hack into US computers, the US should not be looking to extradite or otherwise seek redress.
Because if it's legal for you guys to do it, you have no leg to stand on when someone else does it to you.
But, that's OK. Because the US will just call in a drone strike, and if a few civilians have to die, that's just the cost of doing business.
Of course, the problem with that, is someone else might decide that your civilians are a valid target.
An eye for an eye leaves everybody blind.
I really worry that the road the US is heading down is one of "we don't give a crap about you, your country, or your laws, as long as we have what we want". At which point the US is really not entitled to any sympathy from the rest of the world.
And, as we've seen over the last decade or so, they might actually be creating more animosity towards themselves.
They're certainly losing support and sympathy from the rest of the world who doesn't agree that our rights are secondary to their security.
So, while I understand why the US is in this mess ... I simply am not prepared to cede my rights to yours.
I used to admire America and what she stood for. Now I'm looking at her and thinking ... wow, what a train wreck. And a train wreck which is becoming scary and dangerous, and in a very big rush to bring on the dystpoian future of a ruthless, paranoid surveillance state.
Papers please comrade. In my lifetime, America has begun to morph into what they've always stood against. And they're fast becoming scarier than what they used to stand against.
Dude, such a wasted opportunity to say "Master of your own domain ".
Oh, man, now there's a game I've not thought of in a long time.
Run to the end of the corridor to try to catch your breath while fighting the wizard. Rhyme ring. Everything else is a little hazy.
Good times there. Considering the puny platform it ran on, it was a pretty darned good game. Definitely logged lots of hours in that one.
You know, as often as not these days, HD's customers are accountants and lawyers and doctors who would be on side with these decisions.
Just sayin', it's now well-heeled middle-age people who have the money to buy these things.