You are trying to make yourself by cherry picking my words..
No, you're trying to assert you used more specific words than you actually did. There's a difference. If I was cherry picking your words, I would have omitted some of them, instead of quoting them verbatim.
Either way, pedantry on Slashdot isn't exactly something to get excited about. If I didn't do it, someone else would have.:-P
I don't want to sound condescending, but I believe that you are missing an important part of what defines the Internet today.
I'm not missing it at all, I'm just not seeing it. There is a difference.
As tech enthusiasts, we pride in "getting" the zeitgest. Deliberately ignoring this side can undermine this goal
*laugh* I am old enough, and curmudgeonly enough, that there are certain parts of the zeitgeist I just don't give a damn about.
Heck, I still don't get this whole showing your underpants thing that started about a decade ago, I sure as hell don't want to hear about Survivor or Justin Beaver any more than I need to. Facebook and almost anything to do with Fox? Completely out.
If I ignore them long enough, emo kids and the continuing popularity of the 80's will just simply go away. Baseball, however, won't go away no matter how much I try.;-)
Ok, I'll bite. How do you know that you won't click the ads, if you don't even visualize them?
Simple... I'm not interested in what is being sold, because I'm not interested in being marketed to.
I don't click internet ads, and I never have. Where possible, I make sure not to see them. If it moves, it gets blocked -- that especially includes Flash and animated images.
Nothing about an ad on the web ever makes me think that I either care, or trust the source. After over a decade of ignoring/stopping internet ads, I can say with good certainty... I'm not interested.
As for the Adblock/Noscript solution, I refuse to use it. I wore the hat of a webmaster and I know how important advertising is.
Well, I wasn't going to click on the ads anyway, so I'm sure as hell not going to use my bandwidth to view them. Just because you signed a contract with someone who sells ads, doesn't mean you signed one with me -- I don't ow any advertiser my time, my eyeballs, or my bandwidth.
If your site folds because I didn't allow ads, well, your site would have folded anyway, and someone else will likely have another one.
Even if you're not going to read the article, could you at least read the summary? Even if you don't use Facebook, you're still being tracked.
Unless you're running noscript, and have set your browser to ask you before you set cookies. At which point, Facebook can go pound sand.
Seriously, "ask before setting cookies" is one of the best features ever added to Mozilla (after tabbed browsing). However, this doesn't help Joe Sixpack, which is unfortunate.
I've heard, no exaggeration, the following from a manager when I was arguing for locking down one of our production systems because people kept making changes live: "I know it's good policy, but as soon as policy slows down my developers, the policy goes out the window."
Run. Run fast, run far.
If managers are going to support the notion of un-tracked changes on a production server in the name of getting things done, then eventually someone will be looking to lay blame for something that went horribly wrong.
Failure to understand why people have change procedures for live systems is pretty significant. And, depending on your industry... un-tracked fixes and tweaks can actually get you in legal trouble. Think Sarbanes-Oxley.
In almost any sane shop, failure to follow the change procedures can be a grounds for immediate dismissal.
Besides, even if they were not symmetrical would be a trivial matter to install an outlet fixture upside down.
See, now there you go sounding like an engineer or something.
True story -- some friends and I went out for lunch, and when one guys sandwich arrives, the bottom bread was torn and the sandwich would have fallen apart/made a mess.
The solution, of course, was to invert the sandwich so the structurally sound piece of bread was on the bottom.:-P
Usually they grow out of this type of practice after they spend a few days untangling a mess they've created, but there are some die-hards who just hate having to deal with anybody else, and insist on doing their own thing.
And those people get smacked on the knuckles with a ruler. If they keep failing to abide by your policies, you smack 'em on the ass with the ruler. If they keep going like that, you get rid of them.
There are very few things more destructive to a development team than some prima donna who won't follow the rules and procedures. In the long run, if they won't play by the rules laid down, they'll do more harm than good.
Source Code Management and "cowboys" can't really coexist if you want to be able to have maintainable software. I've seen someone who would apply changes to any old branch and more or less decree it was someone else's problem to get them onto main -- buh bye, if you're sabotaging the build process, we don't need you.
For most projects I’ve been involved with, the path to success is keeping the trunk in a stable state, and using _that_ as the baseline. Dev code should never be in the trunk imo... the trunk should always be in a ready to release (or proceed to formal testing, or whatever) state. Everyone branches from the trunk.. everyone can update their branch to the latest trunk.. and everyone merges back down into the trunk when it’s good and ready.
He's also saying that everybody should branch from the exact same point along the branch or trunk. That way everybody has a set of diffs against the same baseline to merge back in.
If you always branch from trunk, then as more stuff gets added, you start from a different point than you might otherwise.
The specifically labeled "point in time" means that three separate changes can more readily be integrated as they'll be all from the exact same baseline.
If the trunk is ready for formal testing, and it affects your other branches, you have a harder time if you fix things and need to push them back into those branches.
[...] so let's avoid religious wars and focus on the technical details.
Challenge Accepted!
You are incredulous that there is a possibility that choice of of version-control could lead to a holy war?
Man, you haven't developed much code then... even CVS versus Source Safe can lead to fisticuffs. Don't even mention Subversion of Perforce unless you're ready for a bit of a row. Some of us are old enough to have used RCS in our home folders.
This is serious business, and everybody has a feature set they feel they will die without, and anything which doesn't do those things is crap. I think this might only be second to the Emacs or vi holy war.... of course, we all know vi is better, but I digress.;-)
Last I checked, most outlets were pretty symmetrical, so that "below the plug" shelf can be turned 180 degrees around and made into an "above the plug" shelf.
Do you not have grounded plugs where you live?
Around here, most plugs are three-prong. And, even most of the newer two-prong plugs have a wider blade on one side which will only go into the socket one way to provide some grounding.
In my house, if it's intended to go into the plug one way, it's *only* going to fit in one way. There is not 180 degree rotational symmetry for most things.
There is no engineer here just another money grubbing human being that has no interest in the advancement of society but only the advancement of their own pockets. It pains me to see such vile behaver in someone as young as this.
Seriously, it can be two things.
You can make the world a better place, and get some for your own stack.
Altruism is all well and good, but the profit motive is perfectly reasonable as well. Maybe some of the truly Open Source die-hards think we should all live in communes and evolve beyond the need for money like in Star Trek... in the meantime, I still expect to get paid.
However, having said that, he's the son of a patent lawyer... he will almost never do anything for the good of society without considering the paycheck. Then again, neither will most people.
"It allows corporations to develop proprietary applications and install them on users' handsets"
Any chance the jailbreak comes with the option to disable this functionality?
If it's their phone, why are you trying to stop it? If it's your phone, why are you hooking it up to your company's servers?
I read this as more of an in-house corporate thing, as opposed to carriers. Though, I guess it's stupid of me to assume the carriers won't ultimately muck up your phone with crap they want to install (which I'm sure will jack up your data usage to make them more money) -- they always do.
So you're saying there's no such thing as a free market.
There has never been a truly free market, and there really never will.
It's like when physicists assume a spherical cow -- it's a model, and it makes some simplifying assumptions, but it's not 100% accurate to how reality works.
Unfortunately, the "free market" is basically a fiction. And, in my opinion, so are the assumptions that consumers make rational choices, or that the market will naturally find the "best" solution. It forgets that everyone can get screwed over and never get what they need or want, but what is available.
Those people who zealously believe that the "free market" will save us all -- well, I don't know why they have such unfailing belief in a mechanism which doesn't really work the way people claim... precisely because the cows aren't spherical, the consumers aren't rational, and they sure as heck don't have perfect information.
In fact, if you toss out the assumptions that make the model work ever-so-perfectly, the logical conclusion is that everybody gets screwed over by greedy bastards who manipulate the system for their own benefits. Which, oddly enough, is more like what actually happens.
And there goes the pricing model that everyone loves so much about Netflix!
And Skype, and Youtube, and who knows what else.
Of course, the problem is that the telcos are advertising their super fast network with loads of capacity to download and stream video and the like. They're marketing it as this big fat pipe that you're gonna just love using for all of this new media that we all use -- but the reality is, they hope that most people never try to use it, and hopefully not all at the same time.
Because, if your business model involves oversubscription, and your customers come anywhere near expecting you to deliver what you claim you have, eventually you just come out and say "OK, we don't really have any bandwidth, and you shouldn't expect any unless you pay us loads of money".
I agree with the person you're quoting, I've pretty much expected the model of Netflix and Skype to come crashing to a halt since they're predicated on you getting gobs of bandwidth from someone else cheaply. As soon as the ISP starts metering or jacking up the prices, these fall apart completely.
Is "pushing down everyone throats" the new American general-purpose substitute for "I disagree with this proposal" or does it have meaning beyond that?
First of all, I'm not an American.
Second of all, a treaty which was negotiated in private and the text of the treaty kept secret... well, not so much with the democratic bits.
Third, there was a lot of pressure from US for other nations to adopt this under threat of trade sanctions. The objections of groups in countries where this was being brought in was more or less ignored.
This is entirely a law that is designed to protect copyright interests, at the insistence of the US, and to the detriment of everybody else. The Internet is now subservient to the RIAA and MPAA, as well as their corresponding lobby groups in other countries -- hell they wrote most of the text, so the law will be stacked in their favor with things like mandatory three strikes laws to cut people off from having internet access.
So, yes, it means a hell of a lot more than "I disagree with this proposal".
Maybe you should do a little research on this heavily contested treaty.
What possible basis could Immigration and Customs Enforcement have for seizing a domain name associated with bit torrent?
Customs is responsible for enforcing bringing illegal goods into the US as I recall. A torrent of a movie with a US copyright has now been categorized as this -- at least, that's my guess.
In short, the US government is now an enforcement arm of the RIAA/MPAA cartels, and they're forcing treaties on almost everybody else to make sure that this can now happen worldwide. Basically, the internet is now under the control of multi-national corporations.
I'm sure everyone in the US can sleep easy at night, knowing that Homeland Security is keeping a vigilant eye over torrents and other similar threats to the Land of the Free and Home of the Brave.
Have you missed the parts lately where protection of US copyrights is a matter of national security?
Why do you think that god awful ACTRA treaty is being pushed down everyone else's throats?
Expect this to become commonplace -- anything which can deemed to have a primary function of telling people where to download copyrighted works will be squashed quite thoroughly. I fully expect the RIAA/MPAA to allow the rest of us to use the internet under their terms now.
Slashdot Mirror
Most current events are. You can't insulate yourself from it. ;-)
No, you're trying to assert you used more specific words than you actually did. There's a difference. If I was cherry picking your words, I would have omitted some of them, instead of quoting them verbatim.
Either way, pedantry on Slashdot isn't exactly something to get excited about. If I didn't do it, someone else would have. :-P
I'm not missing it at all, I'm just not seeing it. There is a difference.
*laugh* I am old enough, and curmudgeonly enough, that there are certain parts of the zeitgeist I just don't give a damn about.
Heck, I still don't get this whole showing your underpants thing that started about a decade ago, I sure as hell don't want to hear about Survivor or Justin Beaver any more than I need to. Facebook and almost anything to do with Fox? Completely out.
If I ignore them long enough, emo kids and the continuing popularity of the 80's will just simply go away. Baseball, however, won't go away no matter how much I try. ;-)
I did, and I didn't comment on the title of the article, I commented on what you wrote ...
You just simply said all infrastructure.
There, I've run rings around 'ya. ;-)
Simple ... I'm not interested in what is being sold, because I'm not interested in being marketed to.
I don't click internet ads, and I never have. Where possible, I make sure not to see them. If it moves, it gets blocked -- that especially includes Flash and animated images.
Nothing about an ad on the web ever makes me think that I either care, or trust the source. After over a decade of ignoring/stopping internet ads, I can say with good certainty ... I'm not interested.
Well, I wasn't going to click on the ads anyway, so I'm sure as hell not going to use my bandwidth to view them. Just because you signed a contract with someone who sells ads, doesn't mean you signed one with me -- I don't ow any advertiser my time, my eyeballs, or my bandwidth.
If your site folds because I didn't allow ads, well, your site would have folded anyway, and someone else will likely have another one.
Unless you're running noscript, and have set your browser to ask you before you set cookies. At which point, Facebook can go pound sand.
Seriously, "ask before setting cookies" is one of the best features ever added to Mozilla (after tabbed browsing). However, this doesn't help Joe Sixpack, which is unfortunate.
What about electrical transmission, smart guy?
It's not like people haven't tried to steal that copper wire from power lines. I'm pretty sire fiber optic won't help there.
Likely me. ;-)
Run. Run fast, run far.
If managers are going to support the notion of un-tracked changes on a production server in the name of getting things done, then eventually someone will be looking to lay blame for something that went horribly wrong.
Failure to understand why people have change procedures for live systems is pretty significant. And, depending on your industry ... un-tracked fixes and tweaks can actually get you in legal trouble. Think Sarbanes-Oxley.
In almost any sane shop, failure to follow the change procedures can be a grounds for immediate dismissal.
See, now there you go sounding like an engineer or something.
True story -- some friends and I went out for lunch, and when one guys sandwich arrives, the bottom bread was torn and the sandwich would have fallen apart/made a mess.
The solution, of course, was to invert the sandwich so the structurally sound piece of bread was on the bottom. :-P
And those people get smacked on the knuckles with a ruler. If they keep failing to abide by your policies, you smack 'em on the ass with the ruler. If they keep going like that, you get rid of them.
There are very few things more destructive to a development team than some prima donna who won't follow the rules and procedures. In the long run, if they won't play by the rules laid down, they'll do more harm than good.
Source Code Management and "cowboys" can't really coexist if you want to be able to have maintainable software. I've seen someone who would apply changes to any old branch and more or less decree it was someone else's problem to get them onto main -- buh bye, if you're sabotaging the build process, we don't need you.
He's also saying that everybody should branch from the exact same point along the branch or trunk. That way everybody has a set of diffs against the same baseline to merge back in.
If you always branch from trunk, then as more stuff gets added, you start from a different point than you might otherwise.
The specifically labeled "point in time" means that three separate changes can more readily be integrated as they'll be all from the exact same baseline.
If the trunk is ready for formal testing, and it affects your other branches, you have a harder time if you fix things and need to push them back into those branches.
You are incredulous that there is a possibility that choice of of version-control could lead to a holy war?
Man, you haven't developed much code then ... even CVS versus Source Safe can lead to fisticuffs. Don't even mention Subversion of Perforce unless you're ready for a bit of a row. Some of us are old enough to have used RCS in our home folders.
This is serious business, and everybody has a feature set they feel they will die without, and anything which doesn't do those things is crap. I think this might only be second to the Emacs or vi holy war .... of course, we all know vi is better, but I digress. ;-)
Fair enough, I wasn't thinking in terms of the actual faceplate.
There's always the Shamwow guy. :-P
Do you not have grounded plugs where you live?
Around here, most plugs are three-prong. And, even most of the newer two-prong plugs have a wider blade on one side which will only go into the socket one way to provide some grounding.
In my house, if it's intended to go into the plug one way, it's *only* going to fit in one way. There is not 180 degree rotational symmetry for most things.
Seriously, it can be two things.
You can make the world a better place, and get some for your own stack.
Altruism is all well and good, but the profit motive is perfectly reasonable as well. Maybe some of the truly Open Source die-hards think we should all live in communes and evolve beyond the need for money like in Star Trek ... in the meantime, I still expect to get paid.
However, having said that, he's the son of a patent lawyer ... he will almost never do anything for the good of society without considering the paycheck. Then again, neither will most people.
If it's their phone, why are you trying to stop it? If it's your phone, why are you hooking it up to your company's servers?
I read this as more of an in-house corporate thing, as opposed to carriers. Though, I guess it's stupid of me to assume the carriers won't ultimately muck up your phone with crap they want to install (which I'm sure will jack up your data usage to make them more money) -- they always do.
There has never been a truly free market, and there really never will.
It's like when physicists assume a spherical cow -- it's a model, and it makes some simplifying assumptions, but it's not 100% accurate to how reality works.
Unfortunately, the "free market" is basically a fiction. And, in my opinion, so are the assumptions that consumers make rational choices, or that the market will naturally find the "best" solution. It forgets that everyone can get screwed over and never get what they need or want, but what is available.
Those people who zealously believe that the "free market" will save us all -- well, I don't know why they have such unfailing belief in a mechanism which doesn't really work the way people claim ... precisely because the cows aren't spherical, the consumers aren't rational, and they sure as heck don't have perfect information.
In fact, if you toss out the assumptions that make the model work ever-so-perfectly, the logical conclusion is that everybody gets screwed over by greedy bastards who manipulate the system for their own benefits. Which, oddly enough, is more like what actually happens.
And Skype, and Youtube, and who knows what else.
Of course, the problem is that the telcos are advertising their super fast network with loads of capacity to download and stream video and the like. They're marketing it as this big fat pipe that you're gonna just love using for all of this new media that we all use -- but the reality is, they hope that most people never try to use it, and hopefully not all at the same time.
Because, if your business model involves oversubscription, and your customers come anywhere near expecting you to deliver what you claim you have, eventually you just come out and say "OK, we don't really have any bandwidth, and you shouldn't expect any unless you pay us loads of money".
I agree with the person you're quoting, I've pretty much expected the model of Netflix and Skype to come crashing to a halt since they're predicated on you getting gobs of bandwidth from someone else cheaply. As soon as the ISP starts metering or jacking up the prices, these fall apart completely.
First of all, I'm not an American.
Second of all, a treaty which was negotiated in private and the text of the treaty kept secret ... well, not so much with the democratic bits.
Third, there was a lot of pressure from US for other nations to adopt this under threat of trade sanctions. The objections of groups in countries where this was being brought in was more or less ignored.
This is entirely a law that is designed to protect copyright interests, at the insistence of the US, and to the detriment of everybody else. The Internet is now subservient to the RIAA and MPAA, as well as their corresponding lobby groups in other countries -- hell they wrote most of the text, so the law will be stacked in their favor with things like mandatory three strikes laws to cut people off from having internet access.
So, yes, it means a hell of a lot more than "I disagree with this proposal".
Maybe you should do a little research on this heavily contested treaty.
Customs is responsible for enforcing bringing illegal goods into the US as I recall. A torrent of a movie with a US copyright has now been categorized as this -- at least, that's my guess.
In short, the US government is now an enforcement arm of the RIAA/MPAA cartels, and they're forcing treaties on almost everybody else to make sure that this can now happen worldwide. Basically, the internet is now under the control of multi-national corporations.
Have you missed the parts lately where protection of US copyrights is a matter of national security?
Why do you think that god awful ACTRA treaty is being pushed down everyone else's throats?
Expect this to become commonplace -- anything which can deemed to have a primary function of telling people where to download copyrighted works will be squashed quite thoroughly. I fully expect the RIAA/MPAA to allow the rest of us to use the internet under their terms now.
It's where the bats eat lunch?