Some branches of the US military are famous for switching job descriptions once people have entered their ranks.
When I signed up for the Navy, my contract said that I would to go boot camp at a certain location and date, then to my job's basic school at another location and date, and on to a specific advanced school to follow that. That was a two-way binding contract: the terms of my enlistment were contingent on them getting me into the schools and job category I explicitly signed up for.
In practice, that isn't (or at least wasn't) an issue in the Navy because they were solid behind getting you to where they agreed to send you. Their position at the time - and still now, I presume - was that they'd rather have a productive sailor doing the job they were excited enough to enlist for than a pissed off, demoralized deckhand who couldn't wait for the day his term ended.
I had friends in the Army who described things the way you did. I never heard of the Navy pulling a bait-and-switch like that.
You laugh, but one day shortly after iOS 6's release I decided to follow Maps's turn-by-turn directions to the letter. En route from Alameda to Oakland, I ended up on Angel Island.
Silverlight powers WP7 and some pretty awesome websites.
Please. It powers Netflix, and that's the main reason 99% of its tiny market share ever installed it in the first place.
If I wanted to start a new website that was more impressive than anything, was a mature technology with lots of examples and free open source libs available, and ran on PCs and Macs (99% of the market?), I'd use it in a heartbeat.
LOL. Now you're just toying with us. Anyone rolling out a new website in Silverlight (or even Flash) today is hopelessly out of touch with industry trends. I mean, sure, you might not mind throwing away 100% of the mobile browser market, but most developers aren't quite so cavalier about pissing off their potential clientele.
Uh huh? Naturally, class names such as ASPFB and GDMF and RSAP are evidently more lovable. So much simpler to write...
I think the point that you missed is that the existence of such a descriptively-named class is a giant WTF in itself. As in, what utter perfect storm of enterprisiness, slavish devotion to "Design Patterns" (that is, the blessed set from the Gang of Four and not the general concept), premature abstraction, and inner-system design led someone to think that this was a class that should be written and released out of its cage in the dank basement?
The problem is the anti skeupmorphic folks have terrible outdated looks and some of the functionality is missing that people are used to for the last 20 years.
Yes, that's exactly what I hate about skeuomorphic interfaces: they rip out some of the functionality that people are used to for the last 20 years for the dubious benefit of making an app look exactly like a physical object. Consider the much - and deservedly - maligned OS X Calendar app. I don't mind the appearance so much, although it's not my favorite. It's that the calendar is less useful now than it was in Snow Leopard when it still looked like an app and not a desk calendar. Flipping from month to month is animated to look like a physical page curling up out of the way. I freaking hate that. I like pretty interfaces and polished UIs, but that stupid time-wasting animation slows down my ability to actually use the app.
Others have said it much more eloquently than I could, but the gist is the same: I value form, but not at the expense of function. Again, I'm not anti-"shiny". I love having a beautiful, elegant desktop. It's just that I'd rather start with a functional app and make it pretty than start with a pretty app and try to make it functional within an artificially limiting UI framework.
And I think that accounts for part of what you've picked up about my apparent image of being aggressive and offensive. I'm just telling it clearly.
Let me toss this in: I can't stand people who "tell it clearly", or "call it like it is". That's shorthand for "state the true facts of the matter which are clearly in complete agreement with my opinion, to the point that anyone who believes otherwise is completely wrong".
I don't care whether it's Pat Robertson stating that gay tolerance caused Katrina, or Dawkins stating that there's no God, or my redneck neighbor explaining why his political party is always right. In any case, it's someone directly implying that "it" - that is, "the truth" - is clearly the way they perceive it and there's no room for alternative viewpoints.
Frankly, I equate someone's bragging that they "like to call it like it is" with boasting about their complete lack of appreciation for subtlety of viewpoints. It's Asperger's-like social dysfunction writ large.
Because obviously Apple would be monitoring Google's phone lines and sending ninja impersonators to intercept Google's business dealing.
Whether TFA said that or not, how would that even work? You call Google. Google says they'll come to the place you're calling from. How likely is it that someone else is going to show up there, then, looking for the caller?
You mean bots like ClueBot NG and XLinkBot? If you've been around for four days and make ten edits, a lot of those anti-vandal bots will stop reverting you.
So casual editors are explicitly not welcome. My kid can't see a mistake, edit it, and expect the correction to stick until he's satisfied our robotic overlords? Fuck that. No wonder edits are drying up.
maybe they/their respective institutions should pony up and donate to the project.
I've "ponied up" in the form of contributions that were instantly reverted (or for which the entire pages were deleted). I consider that a "no thanks, here's your refund" response.
PS: No, I'm not listing my contributions or the deleted pages. Updating Wikipedia is something I do casually and not obsessively, and in the real world you're allowed to say "this plausible thing happened" without having to cite it to hell and back. If you care so much, you look it up - I've exerted all the effort I'm wiling to spend on the matter.
9. Nerd kid discovers Wikipedia and vows that no one is ever going to destroy his sand castle again, and he'll show those jerks, just you wait!
You have a great analogy, even more so because it probably explains how hardcore Wikipedia editors are created and why they're so freaking annoying to deal with.
You're wrong. It's cute that you want to play "more pedantic than thou" with the big kids, but it's not flattering to you when you're not very good at it.
You can't do insane crap like this, like grant patents on token buckets, and then complain that people don't respect others' intellectual property. You're teaching us to despise your claims to ideas.
No, it's not per household, it's per person. Unless every person in a household shares the same Apple ID, which would be ill-advised. If you personally own more than one mac, you can install it on them, but your significant other is going to be paying for their own copy.
First, you're wrong. You can go into the App Store on Macs 2 through n, sign out, sign back in with your own account, do the upgrade, then switch back afterward. That's not my idea - that's Apple's own suggestion on the page I linked.
Second, why on earth would you possibly want a different account from your spouse/partner/kids so that you can't share purchases? OS X and iOS get this nearly perfect in that you can have one Apple ID for the OS, apps, and music; another Apple ID for Facetime; a third Apple ID for Game Center; and a fourth Apple ID for Messages. That seems like massive overkill, but you can if you want.
My family shares a single Apple ID for all purchases, shared calendar, shared contacts, etc. We all have our own IDs for messaging and everything else. That way have own own separate accounts and can text each other, but we can share a single unified music library and purchased apps among everyone.
The one thing I don't like about the arrangement is that syncing Passbook, Photo Stream, and Documents & Data are all bundled together - you have to use the same account for all three. I wish that Documents & Data could be shunted off onto my personal account instead of the shared account. It makes sense to share Passbook and Photo Stream with my wife, but it'd be nice if my work apps weren't syncing all their content to the family storage pool.
I work for a well-known company (which for NDA reasons must remain unnamed)
You have an NDA that you can't even name your employer?
Most of the folks who stay past 6 or 7 either REALLY love what they're doing,
I work in an office stuffed with people who love their jobs. The ones who don't aren't around long (and tend not to get hired in the first place). My boss is big on people being to work by 9, and at 5:15 the place is a ghost town.
I REALLY love what I'm doing. I also REALLY love my wife and kids and would rather be hanging out with them than pretty much anyone else.
or have no idea how to manage their time.
This. I've seen way too many people sit at work for 12 hours but only work for 6. I'd much rather work a solid 8 hours then go home, relax, rest up, and do it again the next day.
using the word justified seems to take away from the fact that there was a cost to develop and build it. Wouldn't we have to know those costs before we can say "justified"?
No. That's not how market economies work. If I spend $50 million developing a crappy bike that falls apart when exposed to sunlight, I'm not "justified" in asking $20,000 for it solely because that's how much I need to recoup my investment. In this case, Microsoft is venturing into an established market where the high end (iPad) and low end (Chinese generics) have well known price ranges. Their new product's price is justified if and only if it's appropriate to its relative positioning in that market. If they're asking a premium price for a sub-premium device, then the price is not justified. It doesn't matter how much they burned in R&D costs.
I'm not saying it's "sub-premium" (although yeah, I think it is). I just mean that if it is, then the price is unjustified. Since the price is known and just a little lower than the market leader, the true question becomes: is the product good enough to earn its price tag? Guess we'll know shortly.
If you want to try to do a more direct comparison, the Win 7 -> Win 8 period for that $70 upgrade encompasses OS X 10.6 ->10.8 for a combined price of $79.
Basically the guy is saying "My kids are so fucked up, all I can expect is that they'll be able to blabber to a crowd or make web pages." I feel sorry for those kids.
Not the least because of his ignorance of what those jobs actually take. I was recently involved with a large website relaunch project which involved my company hiring a design firm. The head of the firm had a degree in neurolinguistics that she used to make suggestions like "I think you should lay out these items like so, because in Woodson (94), that arrangement led to a 24% average increase in feelings of user's confidence levels with p-value 0.03.".
The mechanical part of content into an editor is easy, automated, and solved. You can't really get paid much for that anymore. A real web design career is going to involve a whole lot of non-HTML skills that they're not going to cover in a high school class. Those STEM classes that teach you how to reason about the world around you are going to be infinitely more valuable long-term than some easily-acquired trade skill.
Slashdot Mirror
Some branches of the US military are famous for switching job descriptions once people have entered their ranks.
When I signed up for the Navy, my contract said that I would to go boot camp at a certain location and date, then to my job's basic school at another location and date, and on to a specific advanced school to follow that. That was a two-way binding contract: the terms of my enlistment were contingent on them getting me into the schools and job category I explicitly signed up for.
In practice, that isn't (or at least wasn't) an issue in the Navy because they were solid behind getting you to where they agreed to send you. Their position at the time - and still now, I presume - was that they'd rather have a productive sailor doing the job they were excited enough to enlist for than a pissed off, demoralized deckhand who couldn't wait for the day his term ended.
I had friends in the Army who described things the way you did. I never heard of the Navy pulling a bait-and-switch like that.
More like the Uncertainty Drive, as in "how did I end up here?"
You laugh, but one day shortly after iOS 6's release I decided to follow Maps's turn-by-turn directions to the letter. En route from Alameda to Oakland, I ended up on Angel Island.
Silverlight powers WP7 and some pretty awesome websites.
Please. It powers Netflix, and that's the main reason 99% of its tiny market share ever installed it in the first place.
If I wanted to start a new website that was more impressive than anything, was a mature technology with lots of examples and free open source libs available, and ran on PCs and Macs (99% of the market?), I'd use it in a heartbeat.
LOL. Now you're just toying with us. Anyone rolling out a new website in Silverlight (or even Flash) today is hopelessly out of touch with industry trends. I mean, sure, you might not mind throwing away 100% of the mobile browser market, but most developers aren't quite so cavalier about pissing off their potential clientele.
Code generation in Eclipse is a breeze, it easily creates framework classes where you can plug in your code.
And you don't see the need for that feature as a problem?
Uh huh? Naturally, class names such as ASPFB and GDMF and RSAP are evidently more lovable. So much simpler to write...
I think the point that you missed is that the existence of such a descriptively-named class is a giant WTF in itself. As in, what utter perfect storm of enterprisiness, slavish devotion to "Design Patterns" (that is, the blessed set from the Gang of Four and not the general concept), premature abstraction, and inner-system design led someone to think that this was a class that should be written and released out of its cage in the dank basement?
The problem is the anti skeupmorphic folks have terrible outdated looks and some of the functionality is missing that people are used to for the last 20 years.
Yes, that's exactly what I hate about skeuomorphic interfaces: they rip out some of the functionality that people are used to for the last 20 years for the dubious benefit of making an app look exactly like a physical object. Consider the much - and deservedly - maligned OS X Calendar app. I don't mind the appearance so much, although it's not my favorite. It's that the calendar is less useful now than it was in Snow Leopard when it still looked like an app and not a desk calendar. Flipping from month to month is animated to look like a physical page curling up out of the way. I freaking hate that. I like pretty interfaces and polished UIs, but that stupid time-wasting animation slows down my ability to actually use the app.
Others have said it much more eloquently than I could, but the gist is the same: I value form, but not at the expense of function. Again, I'm not anti-"shiny". I love having a beautiful, elegant desktop. It's just that I'd rather start with a functional app and make it pretty than start with a pretty app and try to make it functional within an artificially limiting UI framework.
And I think that accounts for part of what you've picked up about my apparent image of being aggressive and offensive. I'm just telling it clearly.
Let me toss this in: I can't stand people who "tell it clearly", or "call it like it is". That's shorthand for "state the true facts of the matter which are clearly in complete agreement with my opinion, to the point that anyone who believes otherwise is completely wrong".
I don't care whether it's Pat Robertson stating that gay tolerance caused Katrina, or Dawkins stating that there's no God, or my redneck neighbor explaining why his political party is always right. In any case, it's someone directly implying that "it" - that is, "the truth" - is clearly the way they perceive it and there's no room for alternative viewpoints.
Frankly, I equate someone's bragging that they "like to call it like it is" with boasting about their complete lack of appreciation for subtlety of viewpoints. It's Asperger's-like social dysfunction writ large.
I found out last week that I work a block away from the YMCA, as in, the YMCA. They might be a NY group, but we've heard of them here in SF.
A lawyer, a priest, a rabbi, and a Nexus 4 prototype walked into a San Francisco bar ....
Also a policeman, Indian, sailor, and construction worker.
Because obviously Apple would be monitoring Google's phone lines and sending ninja impersonators to intercept Google's business dealing.
Whether TFA said that or not, how would that even work? You call Google. Google says they'll come to the place you're calling from. How likely is it that someone else is going to show up there, then, looking for the caller?
You mean bots like ClueBot NG and XLinkBot? If you've been around for four days and make ten edits, a lot of those anti-vandal bots will stop reverting you.
So casual editors are explicitly not welcome. My kid can't see a mistake, edit it, and expect the correction to stick until he's satisfied our robotic overlords? Fuck that. No wonder edits are drying up.
maybe they/their respective institutions should pony up and donate to the project.
I've "ponied up" in the form of contributions that were instantly reverted (or for which the entire pages were deleted). I consider that a "no thanks, here's your refund" response.
PS: No, I'm not listing my contributions or the deleted pages. Updating Wikipedia is something I do casually and not obsessively, and in the real world you're allowed to say "this plausible thing happened" without having to cite it to hell and back. If you care so much, you look it up - I've exerted all the effort I'm wiling to spend on the matter.
You left out:
9. Nerd kid discovers Wikipedia and vows that no one is ever going to destroy his sand castle again, and he'll show those jerks, just you wait!
You have a great analogy, even more so because it probably explains how hardcore Wikipedia editors are created and why they're so freaking annoying to deal with.
First, this means that Gartner is admitting that people might like something other than Windows. Second, now it means that it won't actually happen.
You're wrong. It's cute that you want to play "more pedantic than thou" with the big kids, but it's not flattering to you when you're not very good at it.
You can't do insane crap like this, like grant patents on token buckets, and then complain that people don't respect others' intellectual property. You're teaching us to despise your claims to ideas.
The summary should say "bisected and found" not "found and bisected". Bisecting is a way of finding bugs.
No. They found the bug, then bisected the commits between "last known working" and HEAD to discover what patch caused it.
I am so hacking up my resume tonight.
No, it's not per household, it's per person. Unless every person in a household shares the same Apple ID, which would be ill-advised. If you personally own more than one mac, you can install it on them, but your significant other is going to be paying for their own copy.
First, you're wrong. You can go into the App Store on Macs 2 through n, sign out, sign back in with your own account, do the upgrade, then switch back afterward. That's not my idea - that's Apple's own suggestion on the page I linked.
Second, why on earth would you possibly want a different account from your spouse/partner/kids so that you can't share purchases? OS X and iOS get this nearly perfect in that you can have one Apple ID for the OS, apps, and music; another Apple ID for Facetime; a third Apple ID for Game Center; and a fourth Apple ID for Messages. That seems like massive overkill, but you can if you want.
My family shares a single Apple ID for all purchases, shared calendar, shared contacts, etc. We all have our own IDs for messaging and everything else. That way have own own separate accounts and can text each other, but we can share a single unified music library and purchased apps among everyone.
The one thing I don't like about the arrangement is that syncing Passbook, Photo Stream, and Documents & Data are all bundled together - you have to use the same account for all three. I wish that Documents & Data could be shunted off onto my personal account instead of the shared account. It makes sense to share Passbook and Photo Stream with my wife, but it'd be nice if my work apps weren't syncing all their content to the family storage pool.
I work for a well-known company (which for NDA reasons must remain unnamed)
You have an NDA that you can't even name your employer?
Most of the folks who stay past 6 or 7 either REALLY love what they're doing,
I work in an office stuffed with people who love their jobs. The ones who don't aren't around long (and tend not to get hired in the first place). My boss is big on people being to work by 9, and at 5:15 the place is a ghost town.
I REALLY love what I'm doing. I also REALLY love my wife and kids and would rather be hanging out with them than pretty much anyone else.
or have no idea how to manage their time.
This. I've seen way too many people sit at work for 12 hours but only work for 6. I'd much rather work a solid 8 hours then go home, relax, rest up, and do it again the next day.
iPad 16GB with Angry Birds and 700,000 other apps-- $499
Surface 32GB no Angry Birds and fewer than 6,000 apps-- $499
Advantage iPad
iPad 32GB with Angry Birds and 700,000 other apps -- $599
Surface 32GB with no Angry Birds and fewer than 6,000 apps -- $599
Advantage iPad
iPad 64GB with Angry Birds and 700,000 other apps -- $699
Surface 64GB with no Angry Birds and fewer than 6,000 apps -- $699
And no one's going to buy a table to use Office.
Advantage iPad
using the word justified seems to take away from the fact that there was a cost to develop and build it. Wouldn't we have to know those costs before we can say "justified"?
No. That's not how market economies work. If I spend $50 million developing a crappy bike that falls apart when exposed to sunlight, I'm not "justified" in asking $20,000 for it solely because that's how much I need to recoup my investment. In this case, Microsoft is venturing into an established market where the high end (iPad) and low end (Chinese generics) have well known price ranges. Their new product's price is justified if and only if it's appropriate to its relative positioning in that market. If they're asking a premium price for a sub-premium device, then the price is not justified. It doesn't matter how much they burned in R&D costs.
I'm not saying it's "sub-premium" (although yeah, I think it is). I just mean that if it is, then the price is unjustified. Since the price is known and just a little lower than the market leader, the true question becomes: is the product good enough to earn its price tag? Guess we'll know shortly.
If you want to try to do a more direct comparison, the Win 7 -> Win 8 period for that $70 upgrade encompasses OS X 10.6 ->10.8 for a combined price of $79.
...per household. The Mountain Lion upgrade was $20 and applied to every compatible computer you own.
Basically the guy is saying "My kids are so fucked up, all I can expect is that they'll be able to blabber to a crowd or make web pages." I feel sorry for those kids.
Not the least because of his ignorance of what those jobs actually take. I was recently involved with a large website relaunch project which involved my company hiring a design firm. The head of the firm had a degree in neurolinguistics that she used to make suggestions like "I think you should lay out these items like so, because in Woodson (94), that arrangement led to a 24% average increase in feelings of user's confidence levels with p-value 0.03.".
The mechanical part of content into an editor is easy, automated, and solved. You can't really get paid much for that anymore. A real web design career is going to involve a whole lot of non-HTML skills that they're not going to cover in a high school class. Those STEM classes that teach you how to reason about the world around you are going to be infinitely more valuable long-term than some easily-acquired trade skill.