I ran into a new variation on the 'getting you to hang up' theme the other day. The on-hold experience was the typical repetition of the phone tech's message barking, "we're so happy to have you as a customer, please hang on," followed by a period of Muzak. The new wrinkle is the length of the Muzak period decreased over time, until about 16 minutes in, it was a staccato alternation of the "we love you" message with a couple seconds of Muzak, and then back. First time they've gotten me to hang up, I'm usually more stubborn than that.
How the hell do you work that into the new versioning system?! The only way would be for the browser itself to "know" that Firefox 5 is basically Firefox 4 and not flag addons written for "4.0+".
Am I supposed to assume that an addon I write against Firefox 4 will work in Firefox 5 and Firefox 6, when the same was certainly not true for Firefox 1 to 2 - and 2 to 3, and 3 to 4? When will they be changing the API again? Am I supposed to be psychic when setting the maxVersion number?
Two things they could do. The one they probably should do right away is to decouple the API versions from the program versions, since those have become meaningless. Heck, even Windows did this when their marketing department got the clout Mozilla's seems to have - developers could still query the real (meaningful) version number even though the box had a year or stupid name on it. They could leave things as they are now for addon developers or they could introduce a new maxAPIVersion check, one time.
If they were feeling energetic, they could teach the browser how to introspect its API changes and make smart decisions. Say, an addon uses foo() and bar() - those did not change since the maxVersion release, so run the addon. Another addon uses foo() and baz() and declares the same maxVersion. The browser knows that baz() changed semantically, so it prevents baz() from running.
I'd probably rather see that approach since it takes the weight off of thousands of developers and puts it onto one or two.
Look, I don't know much about patents, but surely there's no way such a bad patent can stand up in court... Can it?
I know such patents get written and accepted. My name is on one... (employer filed, I don't believe in the means to prosecute them). There are some really elegantly-written patents out there (they read like a nice academic paper) but the quality appears to vary widely in the field.
Give me an open-source electronic voting system that is mathematically both anonymous and verifiable, and I'll be all about it.
It can't both be verifiable and anonymous - those are mutually exclusive. If you want to verify you become named. But being privacy-protecting is feasible, with systems like Punchscan/Scantegrity.
they will have deteriorated to dust long before the end of this century
I keep seeing this claim on this thread. I'm old enough to have some books around that are 30 years old that I got as a kid. They show no apparent signs of deterioration. I have some of my father's books from the 50's and only the cheapest of those (some pocket-sized cartoon paperbacks) show any signs of pages yellowing or becoming brittle. The regular books are all just fine. I have some books of my grandfather's, mass-market subscription "American Classics", cheap leather bindings, made from 1908-1912 that are similarly fine to read (they're up for sale if you want them).
None of these books have been stored anywhere but typical household bookshelves and cardboard boxes in attics. At my folks' place there's a library full of these, none turning to dust.
What backs the dollar is the faith that the 14 trillion dollars will some day pay the 55 trillion dollars off.
It's not mere faith - it's a promise to threaten violence against the 300-million current and future residents of the geographical area known as the United States (to get them to pay tribute). When the US gave up sound money, many will say they created a debt-money system, but that's a euphemism for a threat-money system.
And the system will store your preferences, so you wont see what you are never going to order. Tesco are masters at targeted marketing.
That sounds really boring. Many of the best foods I make I've found by accident in a grocery store. Yes, I'm easily distracted in grocery stores. Short of toxic manufactured foods and those I'm allergic to, plus pickled eggs, lambs' tongues, and durians, I'm going to figure out how to eat most things.
Not surprisingly, Wal-Mart does very well with their grocery business. For those that don't have a conscience or sense of social responsibility or concern about the lives of their children and future generations, I guess Wal-Mart would be a preferred place to buy food.
there are more teenagers running through the aisles like crazy to fulfill the web orders
Can't say I've even seen one here (NH) - you're seeing this in CO?
Re:It's worse than that. Very flaky players
on
Bitcoin Price Crashes
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Do they have the cash? Nobody knows. They're not audited by anybody.
And there's your problem - no transparency. Same problem as exists on Wall St.
One wonders why whomever stole the password file published it, but it may have to do with their needing help from others to crack the passwords.
Perhaps, but de-anonymizing BitCoin is sufficient for the purposes of BitCoin's biggest critics (and those who stand to lose the most from it succeeding).
Well, they're right, of course. Doing anything in business requires risk/reward trade-offs. But the leaf-node IT guy shouldn't be making those business calls - he surely doesn't get compensated well enough to take on the opportunity risk costs himself, and probably lacks the wisdom to make them correctly.
IT should hand you an invoice to do it right, and your business people can decide if it's worthwhile.
You cited the "general welfare" clause to support creating regulations. The meaning of the clause isn't "whatever is good, in general" as an enumerated power, but rather, "exercises of power must support the general welfare, not any specific group or groups' welfare". It's not carte blanche to regulate, it's a restriction on the power to tax.
So, do they have a contractual obligation to keep the port going or not? Whether it's a dead architecture doesn't matter if they took the money and there's no 'dead architecture' clause in the contract.
Hey, Oracle guys: talk to the Redhat Itanium team. Last I heard they were passing the hat around the office and were going to buy the remaining few Itanium machines left in the world and throw them off the roof at HQ (and then promptly recycle the remains, I'm sure).
Sounds like a deployment service. From their page:
So what is Phenona?
Imagine this. You've spent hours and hours coding the perfect Catalyst (or Dancer, or Mojolicious, or, hell, CGI) application. You're using DBIx::Class with a MySQL database to store user info, and memcached in front of it for performance.
You now want it out there, for the world to see and use. Here's a deployment scenario for a good web application:
1. Get a server. These days you might go for some slow shared hosting, or maybe a VPS, or perhaps EC2 or Rackspace.
2. Install Perl and spend a few hours installing all the dependencies of your project. (Ever installed Catalyst before? It's not for the faint of heart.)
3. Install and configure MySQL, set up users, permissions, databases.
4. Install and configure memcached.
5. Set up a backup, redundancy, and failover solution. What would happen if your server went down, data was lost? You'd need to set up more than one server, do failover between them, and do regular backups to protect valuable user data.
6. Set up cron jobs and background worker processes to work on long-running jobs.
7. Set up a caching server, such as Varnish or Squid, to improve performance of your app.
8. Secure your server, open the necessary ports for outside access.
9. Deploy and test your code.
10. Manage system updates, app monitoring, and downtime yourself.
Hours, days, even weeks of time. Potentially hundreds of dollars. Or you could type this:
Yeah, I made up nice pictures, explained two-phase commit to the suits, why moving data between multiple databases without two-phase commit could be dangerous, calculated how many serious medication errors we might expect on a yearly basis (7, as I recall) and was told that it would be cheaper to settle the lawsuits than to do the software correctly. It wasn't a lack of understanding, it was a lack of caring.
Slashdot Mirror
I ran into a new variation on the 'getting you to hang up' theme the other day. The on-hold experience was the typical repetition of the phone tech's message barking, "we're so happy to have you as a customer, please hang on," followed by a period of Muzak. The new wrinkle is the length of the Muzak period decreased over time, until about 16 minutes in, it was a staccato alternation of the "we love you" message with a couple seconds of Muzak, and then back. First time they've gotten me to hang up, I'm usually more stubborn than that.
Communism is fine. We just can't implement it yet.
When robots start taking menial service jobs, what do you think will happen?
Just robots aren't enough - you need AI's and limitless energy (fusion or similar).
At that point, we don't need tools to allocate scarcity. Or, if the Socialists win, Star Trek-style death penalty for building AI's.
How the hell do you work that into the new versioning system?! The only way would be for the browser itself to "know" that Firefox 5 is basically Firefox 4 and not flag addons written for "4.0+".
Am I supposed to assume that an addon I write against Firefox 4 will work in Firefox 5 and Firefox 6, when the same was certainly not true for Firefox 1 to 2 - and 2 to 3, and 3 to 4? When will they be changing the API again? Am I supposed to be psychic when setting the maxVersion number?
Two things they could do. The one they probably should do right away is to decouple the API versions from the program versions, since those have become meaningless. Heck, even Windows did this when their marketing department got the clout Mozilla's seems to have - developers could still query the real (meaningful) version number even though the box had a year or stupid name on it. They could leave things as they are now for addon developers or they could introduce a new maxAPIVersion check, one time.
If they were feeling energetic, they could teach the browser how to introspect its API changes and make smart decisions. Say, an addon uses foo() and bar() - those did not change since the maxVersion release, so run the addon. Another addon uses foo() and baz() and declares the same maxVersion. The browser knows that baz() changed semantically, so it prevents baz() from running.
I'd probably rather see that approach since it takes the weight off of thousands of developers and puts it onto one or two.
"Who actually chants "USA! USA! USA!" in America?"
Northern "conservatives", of the nationalistic jingoist variety.
Look, I don't know much about patents, but surely there's no way such a bad patent can stand up in court... Can it?
I know such patents get written and accepted. My name is on one... (employer filed, I don't believe in the means to prosecute them). There are some really elegantly-written patents out there (they read like a nice academic paper) but the quality appears to vary widely in the field.
Wooooshhh... You so failed to get it.
Add 'woosh' to 'wrong' mods for the next version of Slashdot - the GP so deserves it.
Was TFS trying to be ironically defamatory towards California?
The only one who created something from nothing was God.
In our universe, maybe.
You people just aren't *near* paranoid enough.
You only need to be right about it once for it all to pay off.
Give me an open-source electronic voting system that is mathematically both anonymous and verifiable, and I'll be all about it.
It can't both be verifiable and anonymous - those are mutually exclusive. If you want to verify you become named. But being privacy-protecting is feasible, with systems like Punchscan/Scantegrity.
they will have deteriorated to dust long before the end of this century
I keep seeing this claim on this thread. I'm old enough to have some books around that are 30 years old that I got as a kid. They show no apparent signs of deterioration. I have some of my father's books from the 50's and only the cheapest of those (some pocket-sized cartoon paperbacks) show any signs of pages yellowing or becoming brittle. The regular books are all just fine. I have some books of my grandfather's, mass-market subscription "American Classics", cheap leather bindings, made from 1908-1912 that are similarly fine to read (they're up for sale if you want them).
None of these books have been stored anywhere but typical household bookshelves and cardboard boxes in attics. At my folks' place there's a library full of these, none turning to dust.
What backs the dollar is the faith that the 14 trillion dollars will some day pay the 55 trillion dollars off.
It's not mere faith - it's a promise to threaten violence against the 300-million current and future residents of the geographical area known as the United States (to get them to pay tribute). When the US gave up sound money, many will say they created a debt-money system, but that's a euphemism for a threat-money system.
And the system will store your preferences, so you wont see what you are never going to order. Tesco are masters at targeted marketing.
That sounds really boring. Many of the best foods I make I've found by accident in a grocery store. Yes, I'm easily distracted in grocery stores. Short of toxic manufactured foods and those I'm allergic to, plus pickled eggs, lambs' tongues, and durians, I'm going to figure out how to eat most things.
Not surprisingly, Wal-Mart does very well with their grocery business. For those that don't have a conscience or sense of social responsibility or concern about the lives of their children and future generations, I guess Wal-Mart would be a preferred place to buy food.
Wow, why do you hate small businesses so much?
there are more teenagers running through the aisles like crazy to fulfill the web orders
Can't say I've even seen one here (NH) - you're seeing this in CO?
Do they have the cash? Nobody knows. They're not audited by anybody.
And there's your problem - no transparency. Same problem as exists on Wall St.
One wonders why whomever stole the password file published it, but it may have to do with their needing help from others to crack the passwords.
Perhaps, but de-anonymizing BitCoin is sufficient for the purposes of BitCoin's biggest critics (and those who stand to lose the most from it succeeding).
Can't do it. It's a security risk.
Well, they're right, of course. Doing anything in business requires risk/reward trade-offs. But the leaf-node IT guy shouldn't be making those business calls - he surely doesn't get compensated well enough to take on the opportunity risk costs himself, and probably lacks the wisdom to make them correctly.
IT should hand you an invoice to do it right, and your business people can decide if it's worthwhile.
You cited the "general welfare" clause to support creating regulations. The meaning of the clause isn't "whatever is good, in general" as an enumerated power, but rather, "exercises of power must support the general welfare, not any specific group or groups' welfare". It's not carte blanche to regulate, it's a restriction on the power to tax.
That's how I interpret the question. Soon, by this fall, most likely.
So, do they have a contractual obligation to keep the port going or not? Whether it's a dead architecture doesn't matter if they took the money and there's no 'dead architecture' clause in the contract.
Hey, Oracle guys: talk to the Redhat Itanium team. Last I heard they were passing the hat around the office and were going to buy the remaining few Itanium machines left in the world and throw them off the roof at HQ (and then promptly recycle the remains, I'm sure).
The most interesting part of this story is that someone under the age of 45 actually thinks using perl for new code is a good idea.
I hope all my competitors keep using slow and/or memory-ravenous web development languages!
You'll probably be interested in this paper.
Sounds like a deployment service. From their page:
Bottom line: Know software, and explain exactly why something won't work.
Yeah, I made up nice pictures, explained two-phase commit to the suits, why moving data between multiple databases without two-phase commit could be dangerous, calculated how many serious medication errors we might expect on a yearly basis (7, as I recall) and was told that it would be cheaper to settle the lawsuits than to do the software correctly. It wasn't a lack of understanding, it was a lack of caring.
I worked on my resume that night.
If I can see the source code unobfuscated and without charge then it is open source.
No, 'open source' was a term coined to convey a specific meaning. Free Software means something else too. Try here.