Following the law literally and blindly is not a good idea.
I couldn't disagree more. I don't give a whit about intention - I care about what's actually written. I think most programmers should be familiar with this concept.
The alternative is a completely, utterly unjust world where laws are fluid and impossible to comply with because there's a difference between their wording and their meanings. If the law says "it shall be illegal to do X" and I don't do X, then I should not have broken that law. I can't imagine living in a society that said "well, you didn't technically do X, but we don't like you anyway so it's off to jail".
There were times where employees were basically instructed to use fear tactics to sell TAP, where they would play out scenarios for the customer like "You don't want to open this new monitor and find out there's a dead pixel do you? We can't return it if you don't purchase TAP!"
To which I once replied with a horrified "how much of a piece of crap is this thing if it's that likely to die on the drive home?", then walked out with a stammering salesman chasing me. It's not usually a good idea to convince your customers that your products are disposable junk.
I'm sorry, but you're a fucking moron. There's really no polite way to put it. The flu is traditionally the most lethal contagious disease in world history; more people have been killed by it than pretty much anything else. That's because nasty variants trigger a cytokine storm which is a positive feedback loop where your body kills itself because it thinks something is killing it. Even worse, those storms are most dangerous in people with a strong immune system. That's right: the bad flus kill young, healthy people in much greater proportion than those with weak immune systems.
Go ahead and brag at how tough you are at resisting the flu. While doing so, pray to your god that you never get a bad one and join the ranks of millions who've died of it over the years.
...and the people they make medical decisions for. I've personally known people who give their kids homeopathic water to treat stuff they really should be seen by a doctor for. It's not the kids' fault that they have stupid parents, but the kids are the ones suffering harm./p
Mavericks drops another set of iOS apps onto OS X that don't need to be there
Like what, exactly? I use Maps all the time to find lunch restaurants and search for addresses. I don't use iBooks extensively because my laptop isn't an ideal leisure reading environment, but it's certainly nice to be able to open manuals I bought on my iPad and want to read at my desk.
There's been no battery life improvement.
Speak for yourself. If nothing else changed at all, I love the "Apps Using Significant Energy" menu item on the battery icon. It's nice to know that some random unexpected app is gnawing on my battery so I can ask their support to please fix it. Judging by the number of app updates I've gotten that contained nothing but power fixes, I'd say it's working.
I'm not going to claim that Mavericks is the perfect OS or that everyone should love it, but it certainly has a lot to commend it.
Note: Google Glass comes in a prescription version now. It's now possible that people with them are wearing their primary prescription glasses and not something they can just put away and go without.
One which forbids use of the software for weapon systems
As an exercise, write a sentence that bans Lockheed Martin from using your software ("in defense of the country, even if the war takes place in Iraq") while allowing a hacker in Syria to use it in a security system protecting a school for orphans. Weapons aren't inherently good or evil; than can be used to invade or to protect from invaders. How do you draw a line between those in an unambiguous way?
and invading privacy?
What does that even mean? Installing a keystroke logger on my wife's laptop so I can keep tabs on her would sure as hell be a privacy invasion. The police doing the same under warrant to a suspected criminal probably isn't. Again, your challenge is to succinctly describe an algorithm that permits the second while denying the first.
I'll save you the trouble: both are impossible, and no two groups are likely to agree on what is "good" and "evil". I love the FSF but I'll be damned if I want to make them the sole arbiters of what uses I can put GPLed software to.
Oh, please. My wife, daughter, and I drove between Missouri and New York multiple times in a Mazda Protege. I'm 6'0" tall and I had plenty of legroom to make the 18 hour drive comfortably.
The Earth is approximately 4.5 billion years old, or about 1/22,500,000th older than it was when the last major earthquake hit in New Madrid.
For comparison, that's like being surprised that the US is roughly the same as it was 5.5 minutes ago.
Other fun Deep Time trivia: if the entire Earth's history were compressed into a 24 hour day, with the start being midnight yesterday and the current time being midnight tonight, then its surface was overrun with dinosaurs at 11:40PM. Modern Man came on the scene around 11:59:56PM.
That's not true. I bought a used, out-of-warranty iMac which developed bad capacitors (swollen and leaking) on the graphics card a year later. I called Apple and they replaced everything inside it without charging me a penny. I never heard of that being a big scandal, and in the US I doubt they had any legal obligations to fix my 3.5 year old used Mac.
I think a more accurate version is that sometimes Apple fixes things for free because they want to, and other times because they're forced to. There's no obvious way of knowing in advance which way an "event" will go.
THANK YOU. I've been arguing this point for ages: we're clearly wasting huge amounts of money with little to show for it. I want to pay teachers well and I want kids to learn in nice, clean facilities with adequate supplies. We could have all that for a fraction of what we're spending now, and there's just not an excuse for it.
Did you get her a touchscreen laptop? It sounds like no. And that's why. Windows 8 doesn't work well on the wrong hardware.
I'm sorry, but that's fucking ridiculous. Laptops with touchscreens are a tiny, minuscule portion of last year's PC market (let alone the total current PC deployment base), and sacrificing "traditional" PC UI paradigms for a zero-market-share touch UI is a huge mistake. Say what you will about Apple, but they at least try to make systems that people will want to use. Microsoft designs systems that advance their market interests, users be damned.
Because they expected by this point you've been using DVD players for over a dozen years and have licenses for DVD playing software.
Percentage of non-geeks who use anything other than the built-in software for watching DVDs: approximately 0. You and I install VLC etc. because we want support for other codecs, a better interface, or what have you, but almost everyone else (rightfully) assumes that they can use the native OS software for trivial tasks like watching a DVD.
They'll make you. You just aren't on target yet.
Last year, PC sales were sharply down while tablet sales were through the roof. I'll be so bold as to predict that Microsoft won't make anyone do anything. They may really, really wish they could, but the market is coming to decide that they don't need traditional desktops or laptops. Microsoft would do well to admit this and change course accordingly.
It'd definitely harder now, and I see that as a very good thing. Remember the drive-by website that was basically a remote root exploit? There's a vast difference between requiring physical access and operator permission, and being able to root a system through the owner visiting a web page.
Regardless of where the code is or when it was written, I have a root-level vulnerability that makes my phone insecure. I wish jailbreaking were both unneeded (because you could easily install your own software through official means) and impossible (because there weren't any security holes to exploit).
I love the idea of jailbreaking. Love it. I fully support your right to install whatever you want on the hardware you bought.
But.
So there's no confusion, "jailbreaking" is exactly identical to "finding and exploiting a security vulnerability". By definition, someone is using an unpatched problem to root your device and replace the system software with their own version. The fact that you can jailbreak your iPhone means that another party is able to compromise mine.
Again, I support everyone installing whatever they want on their devices. I'm not thrilled that this can be done on an iPhone by hacking deep into the system through a chunk of broken code somewhere.
What morons - the tweeters, that is. On Github, starring a project means that you want to keep track of it, not that you endorse it. Out of over 100 starrers, at least some of them surely followed it so that they could watch the conversation unfold or even track active participants.
Refusing to hire someone because they're listening to a conversation makes you a world-class moron. Ironically, it may be that they're listening because they have the exact same opinions on it that you do.
That's a miniscule part of it. My company's base infrastructure is n servers. During heavy load, we routinely need to scale up to n*20, maybe n*50 capacity. We pay out the ass for a few hours then drop back down to the cheap n size. Because we share a cloud provider with many thousands of other companies, we can do that scaling for a tiny fraction of what it would cost us to support our maximum capacity on our own. When our needs are peaking, our neighboring companies are scaling down and going dark for the night. When they're at top demand, we're done and "idling".
If we needed to keep n*50 capacity online 24/7/365, it'd be cheaper to host ourselves. That's not the case, though, so we're very willing to pay a higher rate for those short periods of time when we need to meet above-average demand.
I can't overexaggerate how much I love the zone of silence in my daily bus and train rides, or the pristine calm of the city sidewalks.
Give me a fucking break. Suddenly the Senate is concerned for my delicate ears? More likely: an airline was cutting a deal with a carrier to sell AirTalk (tm) in-flight voice at $3.99 a minute and doesn't want to be undercut.
Slashdot Mirror
Following the law literally and blindly is not a good idea.
I couldn't disagree more. I don't give a whit about intention - I care about what's actually written. I think most programmers should be familiar with this concept.
The alternative is a completely, utterly unjust world where laws are fluid and impossible to comply with because there's a difference between their wording and their meanings. If the law says "it shall be illegal to do X" and I don't do X, then I should not have broken that law. I can't imagine living in a society that said "well, you didn't technically do X, but we don't like you anyway so it's off to jail".
You must work in the medical industry.
No. I'm just capable of reading and understanding the news.
There were times where employees were basically instructed to use fear tactics to sell TAP, where they would play out scenarios for the customer like "You don't want to open this new monitor and find out there's a dead pixel do you? We can't return it if you don't purchase TAP!"
To which I once replied with a horrified "how much of a piece of crap is this thing if it's that likely to die on the drive home?", then walked out with a stammering salesman chasing me. It's not usually a good idea to convince your customers that your products are disposable junk.
I'm sorry, but you're a fucking moron. There's really no polite way to put it. The flu is traditionally the most lethal contagious disease in world history; more people have been killed by it than pretty much anything else. That's because nasty variants trigger a cytokine storm which is a positive feedback loop where your body kills itself because it thinks something is killing it. Even worse, those storms are most dangerous in people with a strong immune system. That's right: the bad flus kill young, healthy people in much greater proportion than those with weak immune systems.
Go ahead and brag at how tough you are at resisting the flu. While doing so, pray to your god that you never get a bad one and join the ranks of millions who've died of it over the years.
Homeopathy only hurts gullible people.
...and the people they make medical decisions for. I've personally known people who give their kids homeopathic water to treat stuff they really should be seen by a doctor for. It's not the kids' fault that they have stupid parents, but the kids are the ones suffering harm./p
Mavericks drops another set of iOS apps onto OS X that don't need to be there
Like what, exactly? I use Maps all the time to find lunch restaurants and search for addresses. I don't use iBooks extensively because my laptop isn't an ideal leisure reading environment, but it's certainly nice to be able to open manuals I bought on my iPad and want to read at my desk.
There's been no battery life improvement.
Speak for yourself. If nothing else changed at all, I love the "Apps Using Significant Energy" menu item on the battery icon. It's nice to know that some random unexpected app is gnawing on my battery so I can ask their support to please fix it. Judging by the number of app updates I've gotten that contained nothing but power fixes, I'd say it's working.
I'm not going to claim that Mavericks is the perfect OS or that everyone should love it, but it certainly has a lot to commend it.
Note: Google Glass comes in a prescription version now. It's now possible that people with them are wearing their primary prescription glasses and not something they can just put away and go without.
One which forbids use of the software for weapon systems
As an exercise, write a sentence that bans Lockheed Martin from using your software ("in defense of the country, even if the war takes place in Iraq") while allowing a hacker in Syria to use it in a security system protecting a school for orphans. Weapons aren't inherently good or evil; than can be used to invade or to protect from invaders. How do you draw a line between those in an unambiguous way?
and invading privacy?
What does that even mean? Installing a keystroke logger on my wife's laptop so I can keep tabs on her would sure as hell be a privacy invasion. The police doing the same under warrant to a suspected criminal probably isn't. Again, your challenge is to succinctly describe an algorithm that permits the second while denying the first.
I'll save you the trouble: both are impossible, and no two groups are likely to agree on what is "good" and "evil". I love the FSF but I'll be damned if I want to make them the sole arbiters of what uses I can put GPLed software to.
How's life treating you at Microsoft?
Oh, please. My wife, daughter, and I drove between Missouri and New York multiple times in a Mazda Protege. I'm 6'0" tall and I had plenty of legroom to make the 18 hour drive comfortably.
The Earth is approximately 4.5 billion years old, or about 1/22,500,000th older than it was when the last major earthquake hit in New Madrid.
For comparison, that's like being surprised that the US is roughly the same as it was 5.5 minutes ago.
Other fun Deep Time trivia: if the entire Earth's history were compressed into a 24 hour day, with the start being midnight yesterday and the current time being midnight tonight, then its surface was overrun with dinosaurs at 11:40PM. Modern Man came on the scene around 11:59:56PM.
Speak up, son. I can't hear ya.
I googled network solutions "weblock" and got their service agreement which refers to a service by that name.
And San Francisco.
That's not true. I bought a used, out-of-warranty iMac which developed bad capacitors (swollen and leaking) on the graphics card a year later. I called Apple and they replaced everything inside it without charging me a penny. I never heard of that being a big scandal, and in the US I doubt they had any legal obligations to fix my 3.5 year old used Mac.
I think a more accurate version is that sometimes Apple fixes things for free because they want to, and other times because they're forced to. There's no obvious way of knowing in advance which way an "event" will go.
THANK YOU. I've been arguing this point for ages: we're clearly wasting huge amounts of money with little to show for it. I want to pay teachers well and I want kids to learn in nice, clean facilities with adequate supplies. We could have all that for a fraction of what we're spending now, and there's just not an excuse for it.
Did you get her a touchscreen laptop? It sounds like no. And that's why. Windows 8 doesn't work well on the wrong hardware.
I'm sorry, but that's fucking ridiculous. Laptops with touchscreens are a tiny, minuscule portion of last year's PC market (let alone the total current PC deployment base), and sacrificing "traditional" PC UI paradigms for a zero-market-share touch UI is a huge mistake. Say what you will about Apple, but they at least try to make systems that people will want to use. Microsoft designs systems that advance their market interests, users be damned.
Because they expected by this point you've been using DVD players for over a dozen years and have licenses for DVD playing software.
Percentage of non-geeks who use anything other than the built-in software for watching DVDs: approximately 0. You and I install VLC etc. because we want support for other codecs, a better interface, or what have you, but almost everyone else (rightfully) assumes that they can use the native OS software for trivial tasks like watching a DVD.
They'll make you. You just aren't on target yet.
Last year, PC sales were sharply down while tablet sales were through the roof. I'll be so bold as to predict that Microsoft won't make anyone do anything. They may really, really wish they could, but the market is coming to decide that they don't need traditional desktops or laptops. Microsoft would do well to admit this and change course accordingly.
Who you callin' "kid", kid?
It'd definitely harder now, and I see that as a very good thing. Remember the drive-by website that was basically a remote root exploit? There's a vast difference between requiring physical access and operator permission, and being able to root a system through the owner visiting a web page.
Regardless of where the code is or when it was written, I have a root-level vulnerability that makes my phone insecure. I wish jailbreaking were both unneeded (because you could easily install your own software through official means) and impossible (because there weren't any security holes to exploit).
I love the idea of jailbreaking. Love it. I fully support your right to install whatever you want on the hardware you bought.
But.
So there's no confusion, "jailbreaking" is exactly identical to "finding and exploiting a security vulnerability". By definition, someone is using an unpatched problem to root your device and replace the system software with their own version. The fact that you can jailbreak your iPhone means that another party is able to compromise mine.
Again, I support everyone installing whatever they want on their devices. I'm not thrilled that this can be done on an iPhone by hacking deep into the system through a chunk of broken code somewhere.
What morons - the tweeters, that is. On Github, starring a project means that you want to keep track of it, not that you endorse it. Out of over 100 starrers, at least some of them surely followed it so that they could watch the conversation unfold or even track active participants.
Refusing to hire someone because they're listening to a conversation makes you a world-class moron. Ironically, it may be that they're listening because they have the exact same opinions on it that you do.
That's a miniscule part of it. My company's base infrastructure is n servers. During heavy load, we routinely need to scale up to n*20, maybe n*50 capacity. We pay out the ass for a few hours then drop back down to the cheap n size. Because we share a cloud provider with many thousands of other companies, we can do that scaling for a tiny fraction of what it would cost us to support our maximum capacity on our own. When our needs are peaking, our neighboring companies are scaling down and going dark for the night. When they're at top demand, we're done and "idling".
If we needed to keep n*50 capacity online 24/7/365, it'd be cheaper to host ourselves. That's not the case, though, so we're very willing to pay a higher rate for those short periods of time when we need to meet above-average demand.
In an article about "cloud", "compute" is your line in the sand?
I can't overexaggerate how much I love the zone of silence in my daily bus and train rides, or the pristine calm of the city sidewalks.
Give me a fucking break. Suddenly the Senate is concerned for my delicate ears? More likely: an airline was cutting a deal with a carrier to sell AirTalk (tm) in-flight voice at $3.99 a minute and doesn't want to be undercut.