That would drive me to drink. You have this truck, right? And you know when it's leaving and where it's going, right? Can you give me an answer based on that which conforms to actual reality?
I'm very forgiving when things break. If there's a problem with my plane's engine, by all means, please take all the time you need to repair it!
But I'm not at all forgiving of poor planning, like suddenly realizing that the scheduled pilot has worked too many hours in a row and isn't allowed to fly any more that day. Or maybe noticing that the engine is due for an oil change, and delaying the flight for an hour while that's performed. Both of those are real world examples of the fun I've had with United.
On Tuesday, however, Microsoft confirmed that although Windows 8.1 has reached RTM, subscribers to MSDN will not get the final code until the public does on Oct. 17, saying it was not finished.
What the fuck. No. Words mean things, and "release to manufacturing" means that the software is ready for Releasing To Manufacturing. It doesn't mean "beta 15", or "we think this might be ready", or "release candidate". It means that it's ready to ship and that this is what will be going out the door on launch day.
Google's infinite betas are a bit of mild industry humor, but "beta" doesn't have an inherent definition. You can stretch it to justify almost anything. But "RTM", "release candidate", and others have very specific, unambiguous meanings. If it's not finished, it's not RTM no matter who the hell says it is.
Several of the projects I've released were written in-house for my employer to accomplish a certain task. Because I've made it a habit to work for enlightened employers, most of them have been receptive to me releasing my non-company-mission directed software under various open source licenses.
So say I'm working at Foo Corp and wrote Bar Widget to help them get something done. Bar Widget isn't something we make money directly from. It's just a piece of infrastructure that we needed, and my boss is cool and lets me put it on GitHub. You come along and say, "hey, JSG, we'll give you money for Bar Widget as long as you send us an invoice for it." Great. Thanks! But how do I do that? My boss is a good guy, but asking him to let me send companies invoices to use the software he paid my salary to write is a bridge too far. So maybe I ask Foo Corp to bill you instead; then what? I'm only going to see a portion of that money, probably routed in as a (taxable!) bonus on my next paycheck, minus however much he thinks it cost him to process the invoice, accounts receivable, etc.
In that situation, I'd have given you a heartfelt "thanks for thinking of me!" and started ignoring your calls and emails, too. It's not that I don't like free money, but that I don't actually have a way to accept it that won't either 1) get me fired or 2) have such a high overhead that it's not worth the effort to collect.
Yes, because it harms his credibility. There's no reason for him to have lied about the temperature of Earth's core, so it's clear that he made a mistake and spoke in error. There are three possibilities here: he knew the right answer but misspoke, he knew an answer but it was wrong, or he didn't know the answer but spoke anyway.
The first case is most forgivable. Smart people get tongue-tied all the time. It happens. Still, it's an important reminder that not everything out of someone's mouth - even if they were considered an expert in the field being discussed - can be accepted as fact without verification.
The second case is troubling. If he "knew" that the Earth's core was millions of degrees hot, then we're led to wonder what other incorrect facts he might have stated in other contexts. Maybe some inconveniently incorrect truths helped him in a debate? Maybe some policy speeches on the Senate floor weren't as accurate as we would hope?
But I personally find the third possibility to be the worst option, because it speaks to a mindset rather than a mistake. We believe experts because we trust that they have evidence behind their statements, and that they'll offer a correction if it turns out that they made a mistake. It's impossible to trust someone who says things without evidence, though, as if making up facts out of whole cloth when it suits them.
So those are the reasons why we care that he said something so blatantly wrong. It doesn't mean that his other positions are invalid (and certainly doesn't mean that anthropogenic climate change is invalid), but it does mean that a very prominent climate change supporter has made wildly incorrect statements public settings. I choose to believe that it's for the first reason and that he simply spit out the wrong number. You can bet that a lot of people have come to one of the other conclusions, though, and to those people anything he's said in the past or will say in the future will be suspect.
Or... couldn't they just stop making the lossy stuff? If the expectation is that the consumer products would die without the business division's subsidies, wouldn't it be easier to just pull the plug on the consumer lines? I don't have enough corporate experience to know: maybe that's just not possible for some convoluted MBA reasons.
It's where some half-assed tech journalist wannabe discovers the History -> Reopen Last Closed Window shortcut (and the Chrome equivalent) and wants to blare it from the rooftops like we've cured cancer or something.
He's gonna lose his freaking mind when he discovers Time Machine.
If we've identified the chemicals that distinguish it from un-shatted coffee, can we add those to regular coffee and get something oh-so-wonderful that hasn't come out of a cat's ass? "Our coffee tastes like shit (but isn't really)! TM"
With due respect, this is an experiment over many months. I've been using an UP band since last year to track stats like weight, sleep, calories, activity, etc. over time, and can say with a pretty strong confidence that d(weight)/dt very neatly corresponds to activity. The rest of my stats are more or less static, or at least consistently random.
But that neglects the very real effect that exercise has on raising your metabolism. I've gotten in the habit of taking the cheapest transit into the city for work, then walking the mile from my stop to my office (and reversing it to go home). Two miles of walking doesn't make a huge difference in my calorie consumption, but it makes an enormous difference in my weight that week. If I walk, I lose weight. If I don't walk, I gain weight. For me, there's no in-between.
You're exactly right that exercising solely to remove eaten calories is a sucker bet. I started thinking of my treadmill times in terms of snacks. "I think I just threw an aneurysm. I can't go any farther. WHAT?!? I'm only two Dr Peppers in?", and I keep going. That's also been responsible for me totally giving up sweetened drinks. Knowing how much work goes into burning off a soda totally kills my desire to have one. Still, I feel great and energetic all day after I work out. Even though I've ended my major exercise for the day, my body still feels ramped-up and ready for more for the rest of the evening. I'm guessing those post-workout extra metabolism boost burns off at least as much as the original exercise.
Let's face the facts, we have lots of Radiation in various forms around us now.
Not really. Not compared to what we used to receive from the giant fusion reactor we're orbiting, and when we all lived outside and got constantly bombarded by it. Sorry; you need to find another bogeyman.
I wouldn't have phrased it against "old guys like you" that way, but you're pretty much right. I'd much rather scale horizontally than depend on vertical hardware upgrades being able to handle increased loads.
And I strongly doubt that any of the remaining Unixes are more capable in any meaningful way. Each have their own cool features, to be sure (eg Sun's SAM), but Linux isn't exactly a tiny little featureless wisp of a thing. If you have a specific need that a proprietary Unix can serve better than Linux, that'd look pretty attractive. Most businesses don't have any especially difficult specials needs that someone else hasn't already solved better with Linux, though.
If their business model requires I provide information to a 3rd party... well, tough.
And this doesn't even prevent that. There's no reason in the world why, say, Google couldn't provide them with an API call to report user activities on a server-to-server basis. As far as I can tell, they're just pissed that they'll have to start doing the work instead of asking my browser to please be a dear and do it all for them.
Actually, they're afraid of us getting a more diverse Internet experience. They're terrified that we might see something other than their carefully cultivated "experience". Ironically, that seems like it would be to their favor. I've inadvertently Googled for something that turned out to be a high-paying adword and saw nothing but ads for that category for months afterward (until I cleared my browser cookies, actually). I'd think it'd be in their best interest to show me something else - anything else - than the same stupid ad for something I'm not remotely interested in.
And corporations don't always fix problems, even serious ones, until they receive wider attention.
And even if they did, how many people would know about the fix to ask for it? At least now it's gotten enough publicity that a lot of users know about the problem and can use the workarounds until an official fix is available (if one is even possible, given the nature of the problem). If I had one of these copiers, I'd sure be reviewing my recent uses to make sure this wasn't going to substantially affect me. All of that's possible only because he told the world, unless you really believe from the bottom of your heart that Xerox themselves would have made this knowledge so public.
I like most of the new stuff, but yeah. I turned off JavaScript momentarily to click around in the user settings and that at least let me view all of them, but the public key stuff seems to be read-only now.
How do you upload your pubkey to Slashdot anyway? I apparently uploaded mine years ago and you can still fetch my old revoked key, but I can't find the place in the new "improved" account manager to update it.
For those wondering: his sig actually checks out. Not that you should take my word for it. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.14 (Darwin)
You're very clever then, because the message (without any context, without any link to more information) left me totally confused. When I woke up to read the message, I had no idea where Boulevard, CA was. I had no idea that the kidnapping had taken place hours earlier and so could potentially involve my area. I had no way of getting more information than to Google for it - which admittedly isn't that hard, but means that there was no one canonical source for trusted information about the event.
Since you dragged the rest of the world into it, imagine you're asleep in London. Your phone does its best impression of self destructing, and you get a message saying that a kid was abducted in some town you've never heard of. After searching Google maps, you realize it's east of Frankfurt. You wonder why you're getting random messages about bad things happening 900km away, roll over, and go back to sleep. The next morning, people on Slashdot are calling you a heartless, stupid bastard for not immediately leaping out of bed to look at cars driving down your cul-de-sac off a low-traffic side road. There: that's what it was like for most of us in California.
Slashdot Mirror
That would drive me to drink. You have this truck, right? And you know when it's leaving and where it's going, right? Can you give me an answer based on that which conforms to actual reality?
I'm very forgiving when things break. If there's a problem with my plane's engine, by all means, please take all the time you need to repair it!
But I'm not at all forgiving of poor planning, like suddenly realizing that the scheduled pilot has worked too many hours in a row and isn't allowed to fly any more that day. Or maybe noticing that the engine is due for an oil change, and delaying the flight for an hour while that's performed. Both of those are real world examples of the fun I've had with United.
On Tuesday, however, Microsoft confirmed that although Windows 8.1 has reached RTM, subscribers to MSDN will not get the final code until the public does on Oct. 17, saying it was not finished.
What the fuck. No. Words mean things, and "release to manufacturing" means that the software is ready for Releasing To Manufacturing. It doesn't mean "beta 15", or "we think this might be ready", or "release candidate". It means that it's ready to ship and that this is what will be going out the door on launch day.
Google's infinite betas are a bit of mild industry humor, but "beta" doesn't have an inherent definition. You can stretch it to justify almost anything. But "RTM", "release candidate", and others have very specific, unambiguous meanings. If it's not finished, it's not RTM no matter who the hell says it is.
Several of the projects I've released were written in-house for my employer to accomplish a certain task. Because I've made it a habit to work for enlightened employers, most of them have been receptive to me releasing my non-company-mission directed software under various open source licenses.
So say I'm working at Foo Corp and wrote Bar Widget to help them get something done. Bar Widget isn't something we make money directly from. It's just a piece of infrastructure that we needed, and my boss is cool and lets me put it on GitHub. You come along and say, "hey, JSG, we'll give you money for Bar Widget as long as you send us an invoice for it." Great. Thanks! But how do I do that? My boss is a good guy, but asking him to let me send companies invoices to use the software he paid my salary to write is a bridge too far. So maybe I ask Foo Corp to bill you instead; then what? I'm only going to see a portion of that money, probably routed in as a (taxable!) bonus on my next paycheck, minus however much he thinks it cost him to process the invoice, accounts receivable, etc.
In that situation, I'd have given you a heartfelt "thanks for thinking of me!" and started ignoring your calls and emails, too. It's not that I don't like free money, but that I don't actually have a way to accept it that won't either 1) get me fired or 2) have such a high overhead that it's not worth the effort to collect.
Yes, because it harms his credibility. There's no reason for him to have lied about the temperature of Earth's core, so it's clear that he made a mistake and spoke in error. There are three possibilities here: he knew the right answer but misspoke, he knew an answer but it was wrong, or he didn't know the answer but spoke anyway.
The first case is most forgivable. Smart people get tongue-tied all the time. It happens. Still, it's an important reminder that not everything out of someone's mouth - even if they were considered an expert in the field being discussed - can be accepted as fact without verification.
The second case is troubling. If he "knew" that the Earth's core was millions of degrees hot, then we're led to wonder what other incorrect facts he might have stated in other contexts. Maybe some inconveniently incorrect truths helped him in a debate? Maybe some policy speeches on the Senate floor weren't as accurate as we would hope?
But I personally find the third possibility to be the worst option, because it speaks to a mindset rather than a mistake. We believe experts because we trust that they have evidence behind their statements, and that they'll offer a correction if it turns out that they made a mistake. It's impossible to trust someone who says things without evidence, though, as if making up facts out of whole cloth when it suits them.
So those are the reasons why we care that he said something so blatantly wrong. It doesn't mean that his other positions are invalid (and certainly doesn't mean that anthropogenic climate change is invalid), but it does mean that a very prominent climate change supporter has made wildly incorrect statements public settings. I choose to believe that it's for the first reason and that he simply spit out the wrong number. You can bet that a lot of people have come to one of the other conclusions, though, and to those people anything he's said in the past or will say in the future will be suspect.
Or... couldn't they just stop making the lossy stuff? If the expectation is that the consumer products would die without the business division's subsidies, wouldn't it be easier to just pull the plug on the consumer lines? I don't have enough corporate experience to know: maybe that's just not possible for some convoluted MBA reasons.
"Sorry, grandpa."
N00b.
It's where some half-assed tech journalist wannabe discovers the History -> Reopen Last Closed Window shortcut (and the Chrome equivalent) and wants to blare it from the rooftops like we've cured cancer or something.
He's gonna lose his freaking mind when he discovers Time Machine.
If we've identified the chemicals that distinguish it from un-shatted coffee, can we add those to regular coffee and get something oh-so-wonderful that hasn't come out of a cat's ass? "Our coffee tastes like shit (but isn't really)! TM"
With due respect, this is an experiment over many months. I've been using an UP band since last year to track stats like weight, sleep, calories, activity, etc. over time, and can say with a pretty strong confidence that d(weight)/dt very neatly corresponds to activity. The rest of my stats are more or less static, or at least consistently random.
But that neglects the very real effect that exercise has on raising your metabolism. I've gotten in the habit of taking the cheapest transit into the city for work, then walking the mile from my stop to my office (and reversing it to go home). Two miles of walking doesn't make a huge difference in my calorie consumption, but it makes an enormous difference in my weight that week. If I walk, I lose weight. If I don't walk, I gain weight. For me, there's no in-between.
You're exactly right that exercising solely to remove eaten calories is a sucker bet. I started thinking of my treadmill times in terms of snacks. "I think I just threw an aneurysm. I can't go any farther. WHAT?!? I'm only two Dr Peppers in?", and I keep going. That's also been responsible for me totally giving up sweetened drinks. Knowing how much work goes into burning off a soda totally kills my desire to have one. Still, I feel great and energetic all day after I work out. Even though I've ended my major exercise for the day, my body still feels ramped-up and ready for more for the rest of the evening. I'm guessing those post-workout extra metabolism boost burns off at least as much as the original exercise.
Let's face the facts, we have lots of Radiation in various forms around us now.
Not really. Not compared to what we used to receive from the giant fusion reactor we're orbiting, and when we all lived outside and got constantly bombarded by it. Sorry; you need to find another bogeyman.
I wouldn't have phrased it against "old guys like you" that way, but you're pretty much right. I'd much rather scale horizontally than depend on vertical hardware upgrades being able to handle increased loads.
And I strongly doubt that any of the remaining Unixes are more capable in any meaningful way. Each have their own cool features, to be sure (eg Sun's SAM), but Linux isn't exactly a tiny little featureless wisp of a thing. If you have a specific need that a proprietary Unix can serve better than Linux, that'd look pretty attractive. Most businesses don't have any especially difficult specials needs that someone else hasn't already solved better with Linux, though.
You mean the same site where I leave the box checked, because they're the only site I've ever seen that has the decency to ask me?
If their business model requires I provide information to a 3rd party ... well, tough.
And this doesn't even prevent that. There's no reason in the world why, say, Google couldn't provide them with an API call to report user activities on a server-to-server basis. As far as I can tell, they're just pissed that they'll have to start doing the work instead of asking my browser to please be a dear and do it all for them.
I'd be more nervous if that hadn't been the default setting for Safari on Mac and iOS for years.
Actually, they're afraid of us getting a more diverse Internet experience. They're terrified that we might see something other than their carefully cultivated "experience". Ironically, that seems like it would be to their favor. I've inadvertently Googled for something that turned out to be a high-paying adword and saw nothing but ads for that category for months afterward (until I cleared my browser cookies, actually). I'd think it'd be in their best interest to show me something else - anything else - than the same stupid ad for something I'm not remotely interested in.
And corporations don't always fix problems, even serious ones, until they receive wider attention.
And even if they did, how many people would know about the fix to ask for it? At least now it's gotten enough publicity that a lot of users know about the problem and can use the workarounds until an official fix is available (if one is even possible, given the nature of the problem). If I had one of these copiers, I'd sure be reviewing my recent uses to make sure this wasn't going to substantially affect me. All of that's possible only because he told the world, unless you really believe from the bottom of your heart that Xerox themselves would have made this knowledge so public.
I like most of the new stuff, but yeah. I turned off JavaScript momentarily to click around in the user settings and that at least let me view all of them, but the public key stuff seems to be read-only now.
How do you upload your pubkey to Slashdot anyway? I apparently uploaded mine years ago and you can still fetch my old revoked key, but I can't find the place in the new "improved" account manager to update it.
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1
For those wondering: his sig actually checks out. Not that you should take my word for it.
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.14 (Darwin)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=OCRT
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
You're very clever then, because the message (without any context, without any link to more information) left me totally confused. When I woke up to read the message, I had no idea where Boulevard, CA was. I had no idea that the kidnapping had taken place hours earlier and so could potentially involve my area. I had no way of getting more information than to Google for it - which admittedly isn't that hard, but means that there was no one canonical source for trusted information about the event.
Since you dragged the rest of the world into it, imagine you're asleep in London. Your phone does its best impression of self destructing, and you get a message saying that a kid was abducted in some town you've never heard of. After searching Google maps, you realize it's east of Frankfurt. You wonder why you're getting random messages about bad things happening 900km away, roll over, and go back to sleep. The next morning, people on Slashdot are calling you a heartless, stupid bastard for not immediately leaping out of bed to look at cars driving down your cul-de-sac off a low-traffic side road. There: that's what it was like for most of us in California.
I do my online banking over Asynchronous Transfer Mode networks.