It's not a matter of "you're doing it wrong", it's just the latest iteration of AT&T's systems not being able to handle the load of an insane day-of-release demand. Just like with every iPhone launch day that they've been involved with. There's plenty of blame to go around: throngs of people who have to have something the day it comes out instead of waiting a few days, back-end systems that don't scale properly to meet an anticipatable demand, etc.
Maybe that works for JPL staff. But the staff I support never research a problem themselves. They either call the Help Desk at the first sign of trouble without trying even basic troubleshooting (e.g. turn it off and back on again), or they sit and endure the problem for days or maybe even weeks, and then call the Help Desk.
A staged demo using images that lend themselves to the kind of interpolated guesswork that this uses is one thing. Making it work with real-world forensics is quite another.
I've been saying for a while now that Netflix was systemically incompetent. Their web site redesign - and the boneheaded defense of it - the price hike/split of streaming and DVD plans - and the brain dead attempt to spin it as "lower prices" - the decision to split the company - and the seemingly psychotic announcement of it in an "apology" email... all demonstrate that Netflix just doesn't have smart, qualified people running the company. It shows that they have been successful not on the merits of their business qualifications but by the luck of having the right business model at the right time. The fact that they're backing off from this split of the company doesn't argue against that; it just shows that Reed Hastings doesn't need to be institutionalized for his own protection. Probably. Mark my words: Netflix will be dead (or irrelevant) in five years.
Exclusive distribution deals nearly killed the comics industry back in the 90s. There's already too much balkanization of the digital comics market, with multiple platforms, none of which carry every publisher. It's as if you needed different radios to listen to different broadcasters. For a publisher to refuse to offer products through one channel solely to benefit another channel is a huge "fuck you" to the consumer, and also really a short-sighted business decision. Granted, B&N is mostly concerned about this hurting them, but their protest is also to the benefit of the consumer, so I'm glad they're doing it.
I looked at the developer preview of Win8 for several minutes the other day and could not figure out how to shut it down. I got to ye olde explore.exe desktop, but as soon as I clicked on the Start button it threw me back to Metro with no clue what to poke at or stroke or swipe. Granted, I'm old and set in my ways, but I still rank as "well above average" on the tech-savvy scale. If I can't figure it out, I sure as hell won't be the only one.
You clearly don't live in the United States. A professed belief in God is an absolute requirement to be elected president, and damn near essential for any other federal or high-level state elective office.
"Normally, the country can count on conservatives to deal in facts."
I don't think he understands how the rest of us view (modern) conservatives.
If he's trying with this article to pitch reason and science to his fellow conservatives, by suggesting to them that it's consistent with their core values, best of luck to him. But if he really thinks that this is where his audience is really coming from, he's woefully out of touch. Today's conservatives' unwavering faith in The Market doesn't come from their observation of its empirical validity, but from a gut-feeling belief in the Unseen Hand of the market as the demiurge of God.
Well your assumption that it's all about information distribution is simply wrong. Maybe that's all you comprehend, but there are other purposes to web sites, and your inability to appreciate them doesn't mean that they are a bad idea. Best of luck with your campaign for the accessibility rights of robots, though, and I hope your positronic net doesn't crash when faced with other human interests that do not compute logically.
If you can't understand the concept of "this much is enough, but that much is too much" and the fact that streaming video is a whole different kettle of fish from everything else that Flash has always done, then I can't explain it to you any better.
You assume that the sole purpose of a site is to distribute information in a robot-accessible way. Sometimes interacting with humans in a specific way is the whole point of a project. Ever hear of "art"?
The fact that Flash's video playback actually worked demonstrates that Adobe was capable of making a good video playback vehicle, and a separate plug-in for that could've been successful on its own. But Flash was widely-installed and widely-used before it added video support - riding Flash's coattails is how that video playback capability got distributed so ubiquitously so quickly - so the historical revisionism (or probably just faulty memory) here is yours. Flash may never have "dominated" anything without video playback, but when did that become the measure of success? What's wrong with just being useful and widely used?
I disagree that making it a "platform" was a mistake; that was one of its strengths. As just an animation plug-in it was good for annoying ads, but as a tool that can be used to create a fully-interactive application or a complete browser-accessible site with the level of design control that HTML and CSS are now starting to offer, it still fills a valuable niche. It may be doomed to obsolescence even so, but that's only because people have pushed W3C standards to incorporate the features that Flash offers, not because those features aren't worthwhile.
IMHO, Flash lost its way when they added video support to it (around the time that Adobe bought Macromedia, as I recall). Before that, Flash was all about the vectors. (You could import bitmaps into it too, but they wouldn't scale well, so those were best used just for static background elements.) It was a way to do animation without pushing full pre-rendered frames down to the client: just describe the shapes then tell the player how to manipulate them. It provided a toolset to produce rich user interfaces that you couldn't even hope to dream of doing with (incompatible implementations of) HTML3 and Javascript, and even HTML4 with CSS can't pull off the same stuff today. The Flash plugin was a lean and efficient client, and close enough to being ubiquitous. Then they tacked video support onto it (which was all about pushing pre-rendered frames down to the client), and it became a video-player plugin (with vector support). The fact that people talk today about replacing Flash with a video codec shows how completely that added feature usurped the original functionality.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not a matter of "you're doing it wrong", it's just the latest iteration of AT&T's systems not being able to handle the load of an insane day-of-release demand. Just like with every iPhone launch day that they've been involved with. There's plenty of blame to go around: throngs of people who have to have something the day it comes out instead of waiting a few days, back-end systems that don't scale properly to meet an anticipatable demand, etc.
Maybe that works for JPL staff. But the staff I support never research a problem themselves. They either call the Help Desk at the first sign of trouble without trying even basic troubleshooting (e.g. turn it off and back on again), or they sit and endure the problem for days or maybe even weeks, and then call the Help Desk.
Netflix reconsiders spinning off its DVD service.
HP reconsiders spinning off its PC business.
What next... the White House reconsiders spinning off its Liberal wing?
Heh. You said "pee flicks". Heh.
A staged demo using images that lend themselves to the kind of interpolated guesswork that this uses is one thing. Making it work with real-world forensics is quite another.
HP and Netflix really ought to merge. After spinning off the PC division.
Agility is not a virtue when routinely used to run into traffic.
No. All Reed Hastings has shown here is that he isn't paste-eating retarded. You don't get "credit" as a business executive for that.
I've been saying for a while now that Netflix was systemically incompetent. Their web site redesign - and the boneheaded defense of it - the price hike/split of streaming and DVD plans - and the brain dead attempt to spin it as "lower prices" - the decision to split the company - and the seemingly psychotic announcement of it in an "apology" email... all demonstrate that Netflix just doesn't have smart, qualified people running the company. It shows that they have been successful not on the merits of their business qualifications but by the luck of having the right business model at the right time. The fact that they're backing off from this split of the company doesn't argue against that; it just shows that Reed Hastings doesn't need to be institutionalized for his own protection. Probably. Mark my words: Netflix will be dead (or irrelevant) in five years.
Exclusive distribution deals nearly killed the comics industry back in the 90s. There's already too much balkanization of the digital comics market, with multiple platforms, none of which carry every publisher. It's as if you needed different radios to listen to different broadcasters. For a publisher to refuse to offer products through one channel solely to benefit another channel is a huge "fuck you" to the consumer, and also really a short-sighted business decision. Granted, B&N is mostly concerned about this hurting them, but their protest is also to the benefit of the consumer, so I'm glad they're doing it.
It's about time someone found a good use for Windows.
How could it take you so long to find something so... intuitive?
Not according to George Takei, he isn't.
I was a little proud of myself for coming up with a headline that could be read in (at least) two ways.
No, seriously. How do you shut it down then?
I looked at the developer preview of Win8 for several minutes the other day and could not figure out how to shut it down. I got to ye olde explore.exe desktop, but as soon as I clicked on the Start button it threw me back to Metro with no clue what to poke at or stroke or swipe. Granted, I'm old and set in my ways, but I still rank as "well above average" on the tech-savvy scale. If I can't figure it out, I sure as hell won't be the only one.
No, I don't think there's anything better than a reasonably regulated market.
But that's not the position advocated by the conservatives who regard the Market as Divine, and Regulation as Evil.
You clearly don't live in the United States. A professed belief in God is an absolute requirement to be elected president, and damn near essential for any other federal or high-level state elective office.
"Normally, the country can count on conservatives to deal in facts."
I don't think he understands how the rest of us view (modern) conservatives.
If he's trying with this article to pitch reason and science to his fellow conservatives, by suggesting to them that it's consistent with their core values, best of luck to him. But if he really thinks that this is where his audience is really coming from, he's woefully out of touch. Today's conservatives' unwavering faith in The Market doesn't come from their observation of its empirical validity, but from a gut-feeling belief in the Unseen Hand of the market as the demiurge of God.
Well your assumption that it's all about information distribution is simply wrong. Maybe that's all you comprehend, but there are other purposes to web sites, and your inability to appreciate them doesn't mean that they are a bad idea. Best of luck with your campaign for the accessibility rights of robots, though, and I hope your positronic net doesn't crash when faced with other human interests that do not compute logically.
If you can't understand the concept of "this much is enough, but that much is too much" and the fact that streaming video is a whole different kettle of fish from everything else that Flash has always done, then I can't explain it to you any better.
You assume that the sole purpose of a site is to distribute information in a robot-accessible way. Sometimes interacting with humans in a specific way is the whole point of a project. Ever hear of "art"?
The fact that Flash's video playback actually worked demonstrates that Adobe was capable of making a good video playback vehicle, and a separate plug-in for that could've been successful on its own. But Flash was widely-installed and widely-used before it added video support - riding Flash's coattails is how that video playback capability got distributed so ubiquitously so quickly - so the historical revisionism (or probably just faulty memory) here is yours. Flash may never have "dominated" anything without video playback, but when did that become the measure of success? What's wrong with just being useful and widely used?
I disagree that making it a "platform" was a mistake; that was one of its strengths. As just an animation plug-in it was good for annoying ads, but as a tool that can be used to create a fully-interactive application or a complete browser-accessible site with the level of design control that HTML and CSS are now starting to offer, it still fills a valuable niche. It may be doomed to obsolescence even so, but that's only because people have pushed W3C standards to incorporate the features that Flash offers, not because those features aren't worthwhile.
Adobe didn't "come out with" Flash; Macromedia did. Adobe later bought Macromedia.
IMHO, Flash lost its way when they added video support to it (around the time that Adobe bought Macromedia, as I recall). Before that, Flash was all about the vectors. (You could import bitmaps into it too, but they wouldn't scale well, so those were best used just for static background elements.) It was a way to do animation without pushing full pre-rendered frames down to the client: just describe the shapes then tell the player how to manipulate them. It provided a toolset to produce rich user interfaces that you couldn't even hope to dream of doing with (incompatible implementations of) HTML3 and Javascript, and even HTML4 with CSS can't pull off the same stuff today. The Flash plugin was a lean and efficient client, and close enough to being ubiquitous. Then they tacked video support onto it (which was all about pushing pre-rendered frames down to the client), and it became a video-player plugin (with vector support). The fact that people talk today about replacing Flash with a video codec shows how completely that added feature usurped the original functionality.