Cheap plastic smartphone ain't gonna be my satnav, music and video controller for plex/youtube/netflix/etc or give me access to various servers I need to SSH in to.
Did you mean to say "Cheap plastic dumbphone"? A cheap plastic smartphone certainly can do all this for you.
Given that you can buy a very capable and powerful smartphone for about £150, I'm baffled why people spend nearly 10 times that for one which offers practically nothing extra.
The really major advantage of a £150 phone is that you can drop it down a well with no more concern than a brief "Oh shit!", and just order another one and have it delivered the following day. I would really hate to walk around with a £1000 phone in my pocket.
Pickups aren't usually that fuel inefficient, maybe 20 mpg instead of 30.
Ouch! I know American gallons are smaller than real ones but that really is terrible fuel consumption. You can drive a decent sized car and get 50 mpg without difficulty.
This has become the norm in any corporate apology. No matter how badly they've performed, the best you'll get out of any big organisation is something along the lines of:
"We strive at all times to provide the highest levels of customer service and satisfaction. I am sorry if you feel that we have failed on this occasion."
Never any kind of admission that they have ballsed up, no matter how much evidence there is that they have made a phenomenal pig's ear of things. Instead they try to suggest that it's your fault really - you're being over-sensitive, and it's not really their fault.
The really stupid aspect of this is that a decent apology can win you customers. I used to run a small mail order business, and when we got something wrong we would instantly take the blame and apologise. "Oh, whoops! Sorry - that's my fault." People were so surprised at this kind of honesty that it won us some of our most loyal customers. Big business though seems absolutely determined never to issue a real apology, and by so doing they merely alienate the general public.
As a partial answer to your question - my experience is that very many programmers simply can't get their heads around finite state machines. They want to write code which says, "Do X, then do Y, then do Z" and the furthest they are willing to get away from that is the odd "if" statement. The whole idea of having the code simply sit and react to events is too hard to comprehend.
I've known a clearly implemented, well documented, state-machine driven bit of code enter maintenance, and then when I've come to look at it again a couple of years later it's had all sorts of horrible patches added to it. Asked for extra functionality, rather than adding an extra row (state) to the table, the maintainers added lots of "if"s and flags to the action routines, as if actively trying to turn it back into spaghetti code.
I've always hated that name change. "The North British Hotel" had a certain majesty to it, whilst "The Balmoral" sounds like a twee, semi-detached B&B in the suburbs with lace doilies under the jam jars.
I don't know if it's what you mean, but when I was young the "party line" was quite common. Two houses would share a single phone line, with a bit of magic used to control which phone rang for an incoming call.
You could pick up your phone to make a call, only to find that the line was already in use. You weren't blocked out or anything like that - you were straight in to their conversation. At that point you were meant to put the phone down, wait a few minutes, and try again.
It was just bad luck if you shared your line with a heavy user - although the cost of calls (even local calls were metered) did tend to restrict their length.
I would echo the same sentiment. There's never an excuse for your OS to re-boot your machine without your explicit permission. Everyone else manages to do this properly - why can't Microsoft manage it?
On the abuse front, there's been another story recently about the progress of ReactOS, with a lot of people commenting on how 1990s the interface looks. The thing is - it's infinitely superior to the current Windows 10 interface. Clean, comprehensible, compact.
I've spent some time over the last couple of days trying to assist an 81 year-old lady who is utterly bamboozled by here Windows 10 computer. It baffles me too. So much usability and clarity has been sacrificed in the move to Windows 10, all in the name of the latest fashion. She wants her old computer back, but alas it seems to be broken.
Back in the late 80s and early 90s a lot of work went into trying to create totally consistent user experiences. Now the drive seems to be to move in the opposite direction, and users are paying the price.
Enough so that his eldest (12) can supervise the younger ones to take them to school...
At the age of 8, I was travelling to school alone on public transport. This involved one bus into Preston, then a change of buses (involving crossing the centre of town on my own - the current massive bus station didn't exist then) and a second bus out to my school.
Actually - I wasn't alone. I was supervising my 6 year old brother.
It's wide in the sense of aspect ratio (16:9) but not wide in the sense of, well, being wide. It might be better described as a shallow-screen laptop. The aspect ratio has been achieved by making the screen less tall rather than making it wider.
More importantly, it has a useable keyboard, which for me is the main issue.
All the wide-screen laptops which I've tried had really stupid keyboards. The manufacturers seem to figure that as they've got extra width they'll shove lots of extra keys in at the side, and move standard keys around. I'm reduced to hunt-and-peck typing because as soon as I stop looking at the keyboard I start typing nonsense.
Give me a decent keyboard like on my Lenovo T420 and you can make the screen as wide as you like.
(or remember back when they had those slide-things, they still have those for embossed cards)
The last time I bought a new car, I tried to pay for it with my bank debit card. I had pre-authorised the transaction with my bank, as had the car dealership, but the electronic terminal simply refused to put it through.
In the end they used their old-fashioned slide-thing, which seemed a bit weird but it worked.
All they have to do is offer the source to people who own the router and be done with it.
Just repeatedly posting this nonsense isn't going to make it true. Read the GPLv2 (and the relevant section has already been posted in this discussion) and realize that you are wrong.
(Interestingly - if they shipped the source code with the router that would fulfil the licence requirements, but just offering it to people who already have the router wouldn't.)
It's perfectly legal to keep modified GPLed code to yourself,...
True enough, but that's not the case under discussion.
The assertion made was that if you distribute binaries you need only offer the source to people to whom you have given the binaries. This is just plain wrong, as I explained.
A simple statement that the source is freely available elsewhere is sufficient to fulfill this requirement.
Again - not true. This option is available only in the case of non-commercial distribution. If you want a copy of Linux and I fling you one of my old CDs then I don't need to make you an offer of the source as well.
If OTOH, I sell CDs of Linux as a business, I do need to make provision for you to be able to ask for the source as well.
c) Accompany it with the information you received as to the offer
to distribute corresponding source code. (This alternative is
allowed only for noncommercial distribution and only if you
received the program in object code or executable form with such
an offer, in accord with Subsection b above.)
The text of the GPLv2 is freely available and very comprehensible - why don't people read it?
The GPL doesn't require public release, only honouring requests from people who have been legitimately given the binary, i.e. customers.
Not true - whilst it doesn't require public release (in the sense of publishing it on a web site or similar) the licence does require that they make the source code available to anyone who asks for it - there is no restriction to just customers or anything like that.
b) Accompany it with a written offer, valid for at least three
years, to give any third party, for a charge no more than your
cost of physically performing source distribution, a complete
machine-readable copy of the corresponding source code, to be
distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium
customarily used for software interchange; or,
Note the
any third party
bit.
They could avoid this requirement by giving all their customers the source code with the units, but then there's nothing to stop their customers passing it on.
The biggest mistake the IPv6 inventors made was making it incompatible with IPv4 by creating a completely different address space.
They didn't - the IPv4 address space is embedded within the (vastly larger) IPv6 address space. The IPv4 address 1.2.3.4 is::ffff:1.2.3.4. Any IPv6-only application can thus reference any IPv4 address (although some residual NAT is obviously needed to allow the IPv4 server to reply).
Even if my device is randomly hopping among IPv6 addresses, they're all on the same subnet (does that term still apply) meaning they can all be used to id me.
Just like when you were on IPv4, all your devices were behind one IPv4 address, providing precisely the same facility.
IPv6 seems dedicated to preventing me from hiding.
You've yet to provide a single example supporting this contention.
There's nothing to stop you doing that as well if you really want to - although you might want to stop and ask yourself why you want that. Is it for any other reason than, "I want things to be the same as they were before"?
See RFC4941. You can set up your devices (or device) so that they keep changing their IPv6 addresses, concealing both which is doing what and how many devices you have.
Slashdot Mirror
Cheap plastic smartphone ain't gonna be my satnav, music and video controller for plex/youtube/netflix/etc or give me access to various servers I need to SSH in to.
Did you mean to say "Cheap plastic dumbphone"? A cheap plastic smartphone certainly can do all this for you.
Given that you can buy a very capable and powerful smartphone for about £150, I'm baffled why people spend nearly 10 times that for one which offers practically nothing extra.
The really major advantage of a £150 phone is that you can drop it down a well with no more concern than a brief "Oh shit!", and just order another one and have it delivered the following day. I would really hate to walk around with a £1000 phone in my pocket.
Pickups aren't usually that fuel inefficient, maybe 20 mpg instead of 30.
Ouch! I know American gallons are smaller than real ones but that really is terrible fuel consumption. You can drive a decent sized car and get 50 mpg without difficulty.
but only by apologizing that customers feel bad
This has become the norm in any corporate apology. No matter how badly they've performed, the best you'll get out of any big organisation is something along the lines of:
"We strive at all times to provide the highest levels of customer service and satisfaction. I am sorry if you feel that we have failed on this occasion."
Never any kind of admission that they have ballsed up, no matter how much evidence there is that they have made a phenomenal pig's ear of things. Instead they try to suggest that it's your fault really - you're being over-sensitive, and it's not really their fault.
The really stupid aspect of this is that a decent apology can win you customers. I used to run a small mail order business, and when we got something wrong we would instantly take the blame and apologise. "Oh, whoops! Sorry - that's my fault." People were so surprised at this kind of honesty that it won us some of our most loyal customers. Big business though seems absolutely determined never to issue a real apology, and by so doing they merely alienate the general public.
As a partial answer to your question - my experience is that very many programmers simply can't get their heads around finite state machines. They want to write code which says, "Do X, then do Y, then do Z" and the furthest they are willing to get away from that is the odd "if" statement. The whole idea of having the code simply sit and react to events is too hard to comprehend.
I've known a clearly implemented, well documented, state-machine driven bit of code enter maintenance, and then when I've come to look at it again a couple of years later it's had all sorts of horrible patches added to it. Asked for extra functionality, rather than adding an extra row (state) to the table, the maintainers added lots of "if"s and flags to the action routines, as if actively trying to turn it back into spaghetti code.
This just the beeb trying to remove any vestigial differences between real life an an episode of W1A.
New version of syncapatico anyone?
I've always hated that name change. "The North British Hotel" had a certain majesty to it, whilst "The Balmoral" sounds like a twee, semi-detached B&B in the suburbs with lace doilies under the jam jars.
Sometimes shared with neibors as well... 8-)
I don't know if it's what you mean, but when I was young the "party line" was quite common. Two houses would share a single phone line, with a bit of magic used to control which phone rang for an incoming call.
You could pick up your phone to make a call, only to find that the line was already in use. You weren't blocked out or anything like that - you were straight in to their conversation. At that point you were meant to put the phone down, wait a few minutes, and try again.
It was just bad luck if you shared your line with a heavy user - although the cost of calls (even local calls were metered) did tend to restrict their length.
I would echo the same sentiment. There's never an excuse for your OS to re-boot your machine without your explicit permission. Everyone else manages to do this properly - why can't Microsoft manage it?
On the abuse front, there's been another story recently about the progress of ReactOS, with a lot of people commenting on how 1990s the interface looks. The thing is - it's infinitely superior to the current Windows 10 interface. Clean, comprehensible, compact.
I've spent some time over the last couple of days trying to assist an 81 year-old lady who is utterly bamboozled by here Windows 10 computer. It baffles me too. So much usability and clarity has been sacrificed in the move to Windows 10, all in the name of the latest fashion. She wants her old computer back, but alas it seems to be broken.
Back in the late 80s and early 90s a lot of work went into trying to create totally consistent user experiences. Now the drive seems to be to move in the opposite direction, and users are paying the price.
ITYM
sync; sync; sync;
Enough so that his eldest (12) can supervise the younger ones to take them to school...
At the age of 8, I was travelling to school alone on public transport. This involved one bus into Preston, then a change of buses (involving crossing the centre of town on my own - the current massive bus station didn't exist then) and a second bus out to my school.
Actually - I wasn't alone. I was supervising my 6 year old brother.
The T420 is a wide-screen laptop.
It's wide in the sense of aspect ratio (16:9) but not wide in the sense of, well, being wide. It might be better described as a shallow-screen laptop. The aspect ratio has been achieved by making the screen less tall rather than making it wider.
More importantly, it has a useable keyboard, which for me is the main issue.
All the wide-screen laptops which I've tried had really stupid keyboards. The manufacturers seem to figure that as they've got extra width they'll shove lots of extra keys in at the side, and move standard keys around. I'm reduced to hunt-and-peck typing because as soon as I stop looking at the keyboard I start typing nonsense.
Give me a decent keyboard like on my Lenovo T420 and you can make the screen as wide as you like.
(or remember back when they had those slide-things, they still have those for embossed cards)
The last time I bought a new car, I tried to pay for it with my bank debit card. I had pre-authorised the transaction with my bank, as had the car dealership, but the electronic terminal simply refused to put it through.
In the end they used their old-fashioned slide-thing, which seemed a bit weird but it worked.
Presumably boats don't have to deal with pedestrians stepping out in front of them - at least, not these days.
No, they don't.
All they have to do is offer the source to people who own the router and be done with it.
Just repeatedly posting this nonsense isn't going to make it true. Read the GPLv2 (and the relevant section has already been posted in this discussion) and realize that you are wrong.
(Interestingly - if they shipped the source code with the router that would fulfil the licence requirements, but just offering it to people who already have the router wouldn't.)
It's perfectly legal to keep modified GPLed code to yourself,...
True enough, but that's not the case under discussion.
The assertion made was that if you distribute binaries you need only offer the source to people to whom you have given the binaries. This is just plain wrong, as I explained.
A simple statement that the source is freely available elsewhere is sufficient to fulfill this requirement.
Again - not true. This option is available only in the case of non-commercial distribution. If you want a copy of Linux and I fling you one of my old CDs then I don't need to make you an offer of the source as well.
If OTOH, I sell CDs of Linux as a business, I do need to make provision for you to be able to ask for the source as well.
The text of the GPLv2 is freely available and very comprehensible - why don't people read it?
The difference is that Symantec doesn't have to care about anyone who isn't a paying customer.
Yes they do - the GPLv2 is perfectly clear on this.
The GPL doesn't require public release, only honouring requests from people who have been legitimately given the binary, i.e. customers.
Not true - whilst it doesn't require public release (in the sense of publishing it on a web site or similar) the licence does require that they make the source code available to anyone who asks for it - there is no restriction to just customers or anything like that.
Note the
any third party
bit.
They could avoid this requirement by giving all their customers the source code with the units, but then there's nothing to stop their customers passing it on.
Although presumably you've had to replace the PSU after the magic smoke got out?
I just read the slashdot UID and let fly.
You interest me strangely.
The biggest mistake the IPv6 inventors made was making it incompatible with IPv4 by creating a completely different address space.
They didn't - the IPv4 address space is embedded within the (vastly larger) IPv6 address space. The IPv4 address 1.2.3.4 is ::ffff:1.2.3.4. Any IPv6-only application can thus reference any IPv4 address (although some residual NAT is obviously needed to allow the IPv4 server to reply).
Even if my device is randomly hopping among IPv6 addresses, they're all on the same subnet (does that term still apply) meaning they can all be used to id me.
Just like when you were on IPv4, all your devices were behind one IPv4 address, providing precisely the same facility.
IPv6 seems dedicated to preventing me from hiding.
You've yet to provide a single example supporting this contention.
There's nothing to stop you doing that as well if you really want to - although you might want to stop and ask yourself why you want that. Is it for any other reason than, "I want things to be the same as they were before"?
See RFC4941. You can set up your devices (or device) so that they keep changing their IPv6 addresses, concealing both which is doing what and how many devices you have.