The problem is that it's an enforced obsolescence of something for not-very-convincing reasons.
Have your eyes checked. I'm dead serious. After replacing the VGA connection between my PC and my LCD monitor with a DVI cable, I'd never remotely consider downgrading back to VGA. I had always assumed that VGA's ghosting and blurriness were just par for the course, and now that I don't have them, I'd never go back. I'm not talking about nitpicky audiophile-grade BS stuff, either; it's nice to see just one vertical line where there's only supposed to be one.
We have lots of drawings where the convention is to put all text in caps. I use capslock all the time.
I despise when computers make humans do the work that computers should be doing. I don't know about your specific app, but I've used programs that have complained to me that a given field must be all uppercase. I've always thought, "Yeah? Do you think you could spare a few of those giga-IPS running through your multi-core processor to maybe take care of that for me? Got an implementation of str.upper() you can use on my input, maybe?"
Like in your case, can you script the app sufficiently that text entered into a description field is uppercased for you? I'd much rather spend an hour trying to figure out how to make that work and then be done with it for the rest of my life.
If you are a touch typist, having to hold a shift key down for more than 2 capital letters in a row really slows down your typing speed and contributes more to repetitive motion injuries.
I'm a touch typist and I don't recall having deliberately typed an all-caps word in decades. If you really need it, then ask your editor to do it (select a region, M-x upcase-region).
I think I see what you mean and how that'd be nice, but I admit that I kept thinking "kind of like a C struct!" while reading it. It might be like wondering why you'd ever want a program to modify its own parse tree and why Lisp macros are such a big deal to those who have used them: until you've had them, you don't really miss them.
And if you've ever written a server in Erlang and then gone back to another language, you'll really miss being able to do pattern matching on binaries.
Could you give a high-level explanation on what pattern matching means here, and why I might want to do it?
Oh, I'd never claim otherwise! It's just that there are precious few times when I've ever actually needed to do that stuff myself for reasons beyond "because the language won't do it for me".
UK doctors leave 722 objects inside patients in 1 year
That's actually not the fault of the doctor, except in the "it's his O.R. so anything that happens in it is his responsibility" sense.
The "circulating" tech or nurse is the non-sterile person who fetches stuff out of cabinets, opens packages, and makes notes like "opened a package of 10 sponges" (typically by making a row of checkmarks on a pre-printed form).
The "scrub" tech or nurse is the sterile-gowned-and-gloved person standing next to the surgeon who passes instruments, puts knife blades on the scalpel handles, loads the needle drivers, and keeps track of the gazillion tiny pieces to everything. There are so many removable parts because everything has to be able to be broken down into pieces small enough to clean, sterilize, and package, and part of preparing for a surgery is re-assembling all the stuff so it'll be ready if the surgeon needs it.
The circulators and scrubs work together as a team. The circulator will say stuff like "here's the 10-pack of sponges", and the scrub will relay messages like "I counted them and there are 10 sponges there" or "I opened a package of 5 needles and there are actually 5 needles". The circulator will check off "10 sponges" or "5 needles" or "bolt and wingnut for the retractor" to build a list of everything that has been opened in the room which could possibly fit inside someone.
At some point, the surgeon will say, "OK, I'm getting ready to close". At this point, "the count" begins. The circulator will ask how many needles the scrub has, and the scrub will answer (including the one that the surgeon is actively using at that moment). If the counts match, the circulator will check off "needles" and move on to sponges, or knife blades, or wingnuts, or whatever else they'd opened earlier. When they're done, the circulator will announce that the count is correct and the surgeon will finish closing, which they're already well into by this point because the count is pretty much always correct.
Except when it's not.
The biggest ass-chewing I've ever received in my life was when I was in the Navy and scrubbing for some captain and we couldn't reconcile the number of sponges. One was missing, and the presumption was that it was still inside the patient. After a few minutes of pissed-off-high-ranking-officer-screaming, they wheeled the patient out anyway and prepared to X-ray them to find the missing sponge. Ideally, everyone would stop what they're doing and stand around while we searched, but the realities of surgery are that the anesthesiologist plans the sleeping and waking cycles and you really don't want to start putting them back down into deep anesthesia or keep them down longer than absolutely necessary.
So, we tore the room apart. We moved cabinets. We dismantled the surgical table. We dumped all the trash - clean and hazardous - onto the floor to dig through it. The captain would periodically stick his head in to ask why the hell we hadn't found the f'ing sponge yet and what the hell was wrong with us and did we know whether this was a courtmarshalling offense.
Finally, the anesthesia resident - a much lower-ranking officer fresh from med school - sheepishly asked what a sponge looked like. Turns out, one had fallen on the floor during the case and he'd "helped" us keep the room clean by throwing it in the anesthesia trash that he was responsible for.
As an enlisted person, that was the one time in my career that I actually yelled at an officer (who had the good grace to accept that he'd screwed up and had it coming to him). He went and told the surgeon what happened, X-rays were avoided, courtmarshalls were cancelled, and we scrubbed the room down from ceiling to floor because we'd strewn bloody trash all over the place while digging through it.
Anyway, so yeah. The counts are ultimately the responsibility of the surgeon, but the surgeon is not the person who actually does the counting - nor could they possibly be expected to without dramatically lengthening the time a patient would have to spend under anesthesia. Behind every object left inside a patient is a scrub and/or circulator who accidentally miscounted or who lied on the count sheet to hide their screwup.
#1 - If you are a programmer, BE A PROGRAMMER and manage the pointers and memory allocations yourself.
And output formatting. printf is for wussies. Also, networking; if you can't whip up your own application-tailored TCP stack, then you should go back to playing with VB. And GUI toolkits? TOOLKITS?!? What are you doing, building a footstool? Hell, no! Manly programmers don't use toolkits, they use the library of macros they built while apprenticing to Knuth.
You're completely right. All this mamby-pamby resource management crap is for Kindergartners and Excel users. Real Programmers flip bits with soldering irons, and we like it this way.
The pirating of legally-free software never ceases to amuse me...
Just this morning, I googled for the name of a program I wrote. Among other places, I found it as part of a 45MB Mac disk image of cracked applications.
If you really want to pirate my software, then there's not much I can to do stop you. That's fine, I guess, but you'd probably be better off downloading it directly from Sourceforge.
Particularly the "Question only you know the answer to". That has the range from "First grade teacher" through "Pet's name" all the way over to "Street you lived on when you were 8".
Answer: whatever a random word generator spat out that I then recorded in 1Password. My first job was Rutabaga, and my favorite color is Dogfish, or at least they would be if I were to answer those questions right now. My bank has a different (random) set of answers.
You will see ibm.com, intel.com, ti.com, redhat.com, windriver.com
I misread that as WinDriver.com and figured it was a website for downloading the XP drivers for your soundcard because the manufacturer's website links to an FTP server hosted by an EeePC on dialup in Zaire.
If I copy your brain to another cloned brain, yank yours out, and replace it with the clone, everyone else will interact with you as if you were you, no difference; but YOU would vanish into the blackness, you'd stop living, you'd die.
Which is the exact reason I'd never take a ride on a Star Trek teleporter. I don't want to die and leave my entire physical, mental, and emotional estate to my identical twin who hasn't been born yet.
That's dumb and shortsighted. Suppose you buy a new car and the engine explodes after you've driven it 100 feet, killing your wife and maiming your children. You want to sue Incompetent Motors for a large sum. What's their downside in spending a few hundred million dollars to beat your lawyer and reduce your finances into a smoking crater because you're now on the hook for their team's fees? Even if you can't ever pay them back, they'll get the message across: "sue us and we'll destroy your life, guaranteed".
Conversely, say someone wants to sue you for a few billion dollars for sharing a couple of Bieber's latest tunes. They spend a few tens of millions on their lawyers. You spend $10,000 on the local hack you found in the yellow pages, since you're the defendant and there's no lure of contingency money for you to wave in front of a better firm so you're paying out of your own pocket. If you win anyway, they spend $50,000,00 for their lawyers, plus your $10,000. If they win, you spend $10,000 for your lawyer plus $50,000,000 for theirs.
No thanks. "Loser pays" is great for billionaires but ruinous for everyone else.
Wow. Great scientific summary. Why is it a "mess"?
A definition of "mess": "An amount of food, as for a meal, course, or dish: cooked up a mess of fish." I've heard it used colloquially as a synonym for "batch" with ironically positive connotations, which is the context that the author used it in.
There are probably only a handful of IBM customers world-wide who would even seriously consider doing that.
I knew a friend who did some work for a ma-and-pop trucking company to run the AS/400 they were tricked into buying. They have about 5 trucks on the road in peak season. How ultra-reliable does their system need to be? Sure, you don't want it to lose or corrupt data, but if push came to shove they could leave it turned off 23 hours a day and only boot it for some occasional data entry.
I'd stake money that there are a lot of little shops like this with way more computing hardware than they could possibly need. For someone like this, an emulator might be a perfectly reasonable step in migrating from an expensive overkill system to something more appropriate.
The modded XBox will be used almost exclusively to run stolen software.
I hacked my Wii so I could run MPlayer on it to watch movies (ripped from the DVDs I lawfully purchased) streamed my home fileserver. Every other program on my Wii is in the form of games I bought at local retailers. If you think console mods are only for violating copyright, you're missing out on a lot of other cool stuff.
We use Google Voice. I had business cards printed and the web site changed to use our Google Voice number.
Dude. I'm speechless. I like Google Voice, too, but it never would have occurred to me to start using it as my company's sole published contact number. There's value in paying for a phone line, if only that you can threaten your telco with a complaint to the local Public Service Commission if they screw up too badly. (You'd be surprised how effective that threat can be to a telco who is accountable to that commission.)
Hmm... Google stock is at $555.71 and Microsoft is at $25.26. Just how exactly does Microsoft measure failure?
If there were 50 times more MSFT shares than GOOG shares, then they'd be worth twice as much. The share price alone tells you absolutely nothing about their relative values.
We're all using Google because it was shoved down our throats and we have no idea there are other options out there.
First, as tycoex mentions, Bing is the default search on a popular browser or two. Second, that ignorance is squarely on the shoulders of the other search companies who've failed to advertise. It's not Google's fault that Ask.com did a poor job of building brand awareness. And do you really mean that Microsoft is incapable of financing an ad campaign for Bing? (Whether it would be effective is another story, but the point is that they could try to make Bing popular if they really wanted to.)
And who gets to decide that, the competition or a neutral party?
A few billion neutral third parties have said that they like Google's appraisal just fine. If their results weren't so in line with what people want and expect, users would have gone with a different search engine.
If Spock were to buy a device, it would be the extreme opposite of what Apple is selling because there is no logical reason to pick Apple over any other device.
I won't enumerate my nerd credentials because 1) you wouldn't care to hear them and 2) I don't care to bother. Let's just leave it at this: my geek card is platinum and irrevocable.
I just bought a 4th-gen iPod Touch to replace my previous, still-working 2nd-gen iPod Touch. What logical replacement would Spock have for that particular device? It's the iPhone with a weaker camera, much smaller price tag, and no AT&T contract. It has a gazillion popular, well-supported apps - both free and for pay. Apple's sold millions of them at a hefty profit. And yet no one else makes anything remotely comparable! If I wanted to get something iPod Touch-like (and was willing to give up the App Store) and didn't want to sign a contract on a Droid, what would you recommend?
I weighed my options and bought an Apple product for logical, quantifiable reasons. The fact that you can't even recognize that I approached it rationally says a lot more about your thought process than mine.
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The problem is that it's an enforced obsolescence of something for not-very-convincing reasons.
Have your eyes checked. I'm dead serious. After replacing the VGA connection between my PC and my LCD monitor with a DVI cable, I'd never remotely consider downgrading back to VGA. I had always assumed that VGA's ghosting and blurriness were just par for the course, and now that I don't have them, I'd never go back. I'm not talking about nitpicky audiophile-grade BS stuff, either; it's nice to see just one vertical line where there's only supposed to be one.
We have lots of drawings where the convention is to put all text in caps. I use capslock all the time.
I despise when computers make humans do the work that computers should be doing. I don't know about your specific app, but I've used programs that have complained to me that a given field must be all uppercase. I've always thought, "Yeah? Do you think you could spare a few of those giga-IPS running through your multi-core processor to maybe take care of that for me? Got an implementation of str.upper() you can use on my input, maybe?"
Like in your case, can you script the app sufficiently that text entered into a description field is uppercased for you? I'd much rather spend an hour trying to figure out how to make that work and then be done with it for the rest of my life.
If you are a touch typist, having to hold a shift key down for more than 2 capital letters in a row really slows down your typing speed and contributes more to repetitive motion injuries.
I'm a touch typist and I don't recall having deliberately typed an all-caps word in decades. If you really need it, then ask your editor to do it (select a region, M-x upcase-region).
I think I see what you mean and how that'd be nice, but I admit that I kept thinking "kind of like a C struct!" while reading it. It might be like wondering why you'd ever want a program to modify its own parse tree and why Lisp macros are such a big deal to those who have used them: until you've had them, you don't really miss them.
And if you've ever written a server in Erlang and then gone back to another language, you'll really miss being able to do pattern matching on binaries.
Could you give a high-level explanation on what pattern matching means here, and why I might want to do it?
Oh, I'd never claim otherwise! It's just that there are precious few times when I've ever actually needed to do that stuff myself for reasons beyond "because the language won't do it for me".
UK doctors leave 722 objects inside patients in 1 year
That's actually not the fault of the doctor, except in the "it's his O.R. so anything that happens in it is his responsibility" sense.
The "circulating" tech or nurse is the non-sterile person who fetches stuff out of cabinets, opens packages, and makes notes like "opened a package of 10 sponges" (typically by making a row of checkmarks on a pre-printed form).
The "scrub" tech or nurse is the sterile-gowned-and-gloved person standing next to the surgeon who passes instruments, puts knife blades on the scalpel handles, loads the needle drivers, and keeps track of the gazillion tiny pieces to everything. There are so many removable parts because everything has to be able to be broken down into pieces small enough to clean, sterilize, and package, and part of preparing for a surgery is re-assembling all the stuff so it'll be ready if the surgeon needs it.
The circulators and scrubs work together as a team. The circulator will say stuff like "here's the 10-pack of sponges", and the scrub will relay messages like "I counted them and there are 10 sponges there" or "I opened a package of 5 needles and there are actually 5 needles". The circulator will check off "10 sponges" or "5 needles" or "bolt and wingnut for the retractor" to build a list of everything that has been opened in the room which could possibly fit inside someone.
At some point, the surgeon will say, "OK, I'm getting ready to close". At this point, "the count" begins. The circulator will ask how many needles the scrub has, and the scrub will answer (including the one that the surgeon is actively using at that moment). If the counts match, the circulator will check off "needles" and move on to sponges, or knife blades, or wingnuts, or whatever else they'd opened earlier. When they're done, the circulator will announce that the count is correct and the surgeon will finish closing, which they're already well into by this point because the count is pretty much always correct.
Except when it's not.
The biggest ass-chewing I've ever received in my life was when I was in the Navy and scrubbing for some captain and we couldn't reconcile the number of sponges. One was missing, and the presumption was that it was still inside the patient. After a few minutes of pissed-off-high-ranking-officer-screaming, they wheeled the patient out anyway and prepared to X-ray them to find the missing sponge. Ideally, everyone would stop what they're doing and stand around while we searched, but the realities of surgery are that the anesthesiologist plans the sleeping and waking cycles and you really don't want to start putting them back down into deep anesthesia or keep them down longer than absolutely necessary.
So, we tore the room apart. We moved cabinets. We dismantled the surgical table. We dumped all the trash - clean and hazardous - onto the floor to dig through it. The captain would periodically stick his head in to ask why the hell we hadn't found the f'ing sponge yet and what the hell was wrong with us and did we know whether this was a courtmarshalling offense.
Finally, the anesthesia resident - a much lower-ranking officer fresh from med school - sheepishly asked what a sponge looked like. Turns out, one had fallen on the floor during the case and he'd "helped" us keep the room clean by throwing it in the anesthesia trash that he was responsible for.
As an enlisted person, that was the one time in my career that I actually yelled at an officer (who had the good grace to accept that he'd screwed up and had it coming to him). He went and told the surgeon what happened, X-rays were avoided, courtmarshalls were cancelled, and we scrubbed the room down from ceiling to floor because we'd strewn bloody trash all over the place while digging through it.
Anyway, so yeah. The counts are ultimately the responsibility of the surgeon, but the surgeon is not the person who actually does the counting - nor could they possibly be expected to without dramatically lengthening the time a patient would have to spend under anesthesia. Behind every object left inside a patient is a scrub and/or circulator who accidentally miscounted or who lied on the count sheet to hide their screwup.
#1 - If you are a programmer, BE A PROGRAMMER and manage the pointers and memory allocations yourself.
And output formatting. printf is for wussies. Also, networking; if you can't whip up your own application-tailored TCP stack, then you should go back to playing with VB. And GUI toolkits? TOOLKITS?!? What are you doing, building a footstool? Hell, no! Manly programmers don't use toolkits, they use the library of macros they built while apprenticing to Knuth.
You're completely right. All this mamby-pamby resource management crap is for Kindergartners and Excel users. Real Programmers flip bits with soldering irons, and we like it this way.
There are literally _tons_ of android phones with keyboards
There are literally _tons_ of Kins, too, but weight isn't perhaps the best unit of measure here.
The pirating of legally-free software never ceases to amuse me...
Just this morning, I googled for the name of a program I wrote. Among other places, I found it as part of a 45MB Mac disk image of cracked applications.
If you really want to pirate my software, then there's not much I can to do stop you. That's fine, I guess, but you'd probably be better off downloading it directly from Sourceforge.
Particularly the "Question only you know the answer to". That has the range from "First grade teacher" through "Pet's name" all the way over to "Street you lived on when you were 8".
Answer: whatever a random word generator spat out that I then recorded in 1Password. My first job was Rutabaga, and my favorite color is Dogfish, or at least they would be if I were to answer those questions right now. My bank has a different (random) set of answers.
FTP is decades old, and the original spec developers are likely reaching retiring age, same with tcp/ip v4, so should we drop all of that too?
You could not have picked worse examples to prove your point.
You will see ibm.com, intel.com, ti.com, redhat.com, windriver.com
I misread that as WinDriver.com and figured it was a website for downloading the XP drivers for your soundcard because the manufacturer's website links to an FTP server hosted by an EeePC on dialup in Zaire.
Yeah. I actually wasn't joking even a little bit.
If I copy your brain to another cloned brain, yank yours out, and replace it with the clone, everyone else will interact with you as if you were you, no difference; but YOU would vanish into the blackness, you'd stop living, you'd die.
Which is the exact reason I'd never take a ride on a Star Trek teleporter. I don't want to die and leave my entire physical, mental, and emotional estate to my identical twin who hasn't been born yet.
Loser should always pay..
That's dumb and shortsighted. Suppose you buy a new car and the engine explodes after you've driven it 100 feet, killing your wife and maiming your children. You want to sue Incompetent Motors for a large sum. What's their downside in spending a few hundred million dollars to beat your lawyer and reduce your finances into a smoking crater because you're now on the hook for their team's fees? Even if you can't ever pay them back, they'll get the message across: "sue us and we'll destroy your life, guaranteed".
Conversely, say someone wants to sue you for a few billion dollars for sharing a couple of Bieber's latest tunes. They spend a few tens of millions on their lawyers. You spend $10,000 on the local hack you found in the yellow pages, since you're the defendant and there's no lure of contingency money for you to wave in front of a better firm so you're paying out of your own pocket. If you win anyway, they spend $50,000,00 for their lawyers, plus your $10,000. If they win, you spend $10,000 for your lawyer plus $50,000,000 for theirs.
No thanks. "Loser pays" is great for billionaires but ruinous for everyone else.
Wow. Great scientific summary. Why is it a "mess"?
A definition of "mess": "An amount of food, as for a meal, course, or dish: cooked up a mess of fish." I've heard it used colloquially as a synonym for "batch" with ironically positive connotations, which is the context that the author used it in.
There are probably only a handful of IBM customers world-wide who would even seriously consider doing that.
I knew a friend who did some work for a ma-and-pop trucking company to run the AS/400 they were tricked into buying. They have about 5 trucks on the road in peak season. How ultra-reliable does their system need to be? Sure, you don't want it to lose or corrupt data, but if push came to shove they could leave it turned off 23 hours a day and only boot it for some occasional data entry.
I'd stake money that there are a lot of little shops like this with way more computing hardware than they could possibly need. For someone like this, an emulator might be a perfectly reasonable step in migrating from an expensive overkill system to something more appropriate.
The modded XBox will be used almost exclusively to run stolen software.
I hacked my Wii so I could run MPlayer on it to watch movies (ripped from the DVDs I lawfully purchased) streamed my home fileserver. Every other program on my Wii is in the form of games I bought at local retailers. If you think console mods are only for violating copyright, you're missing out on a lot of other cool stuff.
We use Google Voice. I had business cards printed and the web site changed to use our Google Voice number.
Dude. I'm speechless. I like Google Voice, too, but it never would have occurred to me to start using it as my company's sole published contact number. There's value in paying for a phone line, if only that you can threaten your telco with a complaint to the local Public Service Commission if they screw up too badly. (You'd be surprised how effective that threat can be to a telco who is accountable to that commission.)
Hmm... Google stock is at $555.71 and Microsoft is at $25.26. Just how exactly does Microsoft measure failure?
If there were 50 times more MSFT shares than GOOG shares, then they'd be worth twice as much. The share price alone tells you absolutely nothing about their relative values.
[...] now, it's still not)... apk
You're an idiot. I'm not even going to start in on all the reasons you are completely wrong.
The part in bold is the only one you need to know.
We're all using Google because it was shoved down our throats and we have no idea there are other options out there.
First, as tycoex mentions, Bing is the default search on a popular browser or two. Second, that ignorance is squarely on the shoulders of the other search companies who've failed to advertise. It's not Google's fault that Ask.com did a poor job of building brand awareness. And do you really mean that Microsoft is incapable of financing an ad campaign for Bing? (Whether it would be effective is another story, but the point is that they could try to make Bing popular if they really wanted to.)
And who gets to decide that, the competition or a neutral party?
A few billion neutral third parties have said that they like Google's appraisal just fine. If their results weren't so in line with what people want and expect, users would have gone with a different search engine.
If Spock were to buy a device, it would be the extreme opposite of what Apple is selling because there is no logical reason to pick Apple over any other device.
I won't enumerate my nerd credentials because 1) you wouldn't care to hear them and 2) I don't care to bother. Let's just leave it at this: my geek card is platinum and irrevocable.
I just bought a 4th-gen iPod Touch to replace my previous, still-working 2nd-gen iPod Touch. What logical replacement would Spock have for that particular device? It's the iPhone with a weaker camera, much smaller price tag, and no AT&T contract. It has a gazillion popular, well-supported apps - both free and for pay. Apple's sold millions of them at a hefty profit. And yet no one else makes anything remotely comparable! If I wanted to get something iPod Touch-like (and was willing to give up the App Store) and didn't want to sign a contract on a Droid, what would you recommend?
I weighed my options and bought an Apple product for logical, quantifiable reasons. The fact that you can't even recognize that I approached it rationally says a lot more about your thought process than mine.