...name one search engine that parses CSS and uses it to judge content.
It's not parsing the CSS that's the problem; it's things like using images for headings to work around the typographic limitations on the web and the structure mandated by CSS Zen Garden.
The CSS Zen Garden is a great place to get some ideas.
I respectfully disagree. CSS Zen Garden is a fascinating showcase of what is possible, but it's perhaps also a perfect example of "just because we can do something, that doesn't mean we should do it". The person asking this question is talking about a small business web site, not a personal blog-for-fun. Many of the tricks used in CSS Zen Garden entries, clever and attractive as they may be, are exactly the sort of thing you don't want in a usable, accessible, search-engine-friendly web site for a professional organisation.
You can't just learn good design overnight, and good taste certainly plays its part in producing an effective web site. However, there are some big ways to go wrong, and if you can just avoid those then you'll probably already have a better web site than a lot of your competitors. If the asker wants to learn a bit about graphic design, the good news is there are plenty of web sites that do teach the basic principles.
If you like to browse the web and find your own ideas and patterns, you could start by searching for some common topics like:
balance
alignment
contrast
white space
optical centre
typography
colour theory
There's no one authoritative set, but you'll find the same themes come up time and again. Most of these will hopefully seem like they're just common sense once you've read them, too, though of course you might not have thought of them until they were pointed out.
If you prefer a more structured approach, you'll probably do fine just searching for "graphic design principles", reading a few of the all-in-one tutorials, and then following some links for more detailed information on the key topics you find mentioned repeatedly.
I would recommend looking up some basic material on usability as well. The prettiest design in the world isn't going to help visitors to find the information they want and/or to make purchases if your information architecture and site navigation are poor. I'd also suggest reading up on the basics of search engine optimisation, because prettifying your site in a way that makes it harder for search engines to scan will cost you presumably valuable page hits. These sorts of issues are why CSS Zen Garden is exactly the wrong place to look for inspiration if you're trying to make an effective web site, even though it's a great place to look if you just want to make a pretty web site.
Just to be clear, I'm not claiming Foxit is useless for everyone. But people tend to present it as a direct substitute for Adobe Reader, which it demonstrably isn't.
For what it's worth, I've never understood the complaints about Reader's speed. The old version on my old PC fired up within a second or two. Version 8 on my new PC fires up within one second. I once had an in-between version installed on an old machine at work that seemed to take an irritating amount of time to load a bunch of plug-ins, but even then you could switch a lot of them off if it bothered you. Are you sure people aren't just slagging off Reader for an old problem that has long since been fixed?
It does have a two-page side-by-side display, which is what I need.
However, that feature does not work like the corresponding features of other software products, or indeed the accepted standard for centuries in real world publishing. You can call that a missing feature all you like, but it's still a bug to anyone who wants to use the feature that's already there, and as the Foxit forums demonstrate, there are a lot of such people.
First of all, what does it matter which side it's on, if you're reading it the same anyway:s
Because some documents use double-page spreads for their layout? Of the four things I was looking at that day, three of them happened to be like this, which is why Foxit was pretty much useless for me.
Foxit is so much faster and less of a resource hog then adobe reader.
It also doesn't work. For example, two-page documents generally start with page 1 on the right, yet in two-page mode Foxit insists on displaying pages 1 and 2 together, 3 and 4 together, etc. I discovered this when I tried it after seeing comments like the parent and GP posts, and also discovered that there have been bugs logged on this for eons but no-one seems to care about fixing it. The software was uninstalled from my PC within two minutes of installing it and filed under "beyond hope".
One of these days, people on Slashdot will realise that something that is free/or more secure is still worthless if it doesn't actually do the job it's supposed to do.
And going beyond that to the first half of the statement, people keep talking about the console wars in terms of a "killer app" and how that's what the PS3 needs to break through. Whatever, I don't want to get in to that here, but why isn't the same being said about Linux?
Of course, the same argument applies to any OS move, including Vista. I have just got a new PC for the first time in a while, with some pretty nice specs, yet I declined to have Vista on it and asked them to put XP Home on instead. Why? Because it works, I know it works, and I don't know of a single compelling reason to use Vista instead. There are a few technical improvements, but frankly Crysis looks just fine without DX10 thank you, and the risks of hardware/driver problems, privacy/security concerns and the like just aren't worth it.
If you believe that to be true, then the terrorists have won.
On the contrary. I know it to be true that you can never protect everything completely all the time through physical defensive measures alone. A sufficiently determined attacked will always be able to do a significant amount of damage somewhere.
However, I accept that this is the case, always has been, and always will be. Such is the cost of freedom. And I value my freedom, so I don't let worrying about the 0.000001% chance that I will be killed by a terrorist attack today bother me. At that point, the terrorists can't win, because they have not made me change through fear.
Western Civilization, by definition, is open and thus vulnerable to terrorism.
No. A free civilisation may, by its nature, be somewhat vulnerable to physical attacks by terrorists, but that is not the same thing at all. You are only vulnerable to terrorism if those acts of violence can bring the rewards the terrorists seek. It is perhaps the biggest tragedy of our time that the so-called leaders of countries like the US, UK and Australia did not understand this, and allowed the various recent terrorist attacks to push them into sacrificing the very freedoms they claim to defending. Today the terrorists don't need violence to instil fear into the populations of our countries, because the governments are doing just fine by themselves on that count.
I believe sjames made an excellent point about the opportunity cost of this approach in the grandparent post. As I have noted before, leaders often talk of making "difficult decisions" in times like these, yet strangely this usually refers to them taking the easy way out and starting a war that an injured and emotional people will, for a time, support. The difficult choice would have been to do exactly the opposite, refusing to change our way of life and divert disproportionate resources in response to what is basically just murder but on a somewhat larger scale, and keeping the people and the time and the money focussed on places where they will really do good things. By using emotive expressions like "war on terror", government just promotes the attacks to something more than the common murder that they were, and gives a standing and credibility to the terrorists beyond the sad criminals that they are.
Just ending the Taliban was not going to get the job done, a bigger message was needed. Saddam was an ongoing threat anyway so it made sense to pick Iraq for the 'drain the swamp' plan because it wasn't going to be possible to pick anywhere else without first dealing with the likelyhood of Iraq making mischief.
That's two fundamental yet unsupported claims in one paragraph.
Why was "a bigger message" needed? What do you think had to be said, and to whom, and why was retaliating forcefully against those who had wronged the US not an appropriate or sufficient response?
And how was Saddam an "ongoing threat" anyway? The claims about WMDs, 45 minutes, etc. have all long since been debunked. Saddam was a threat to political opponents in his own country and a nasty man, without a doubt, but from the Western perspective his presence actually served to reduce the ability of AQ and their like to establish a base of operations in Iraq. Put another way, removing Saddam was actually damaging to western interests (speaking only of the anti-terrorism effort here) and served to turn Iraq into a recruiting ground for would-be terrorist attackers.
Objecting, opposing or offering alternatives were all honorable and patrotic (nay, it was a DUTY if you believed it unwise) right up until the vote was taken to launch a War. Once that happened it was all moot, Wars don't end they are Won or Lost and rooting for us to lose (you guys call it ending the war) should be punishable by law.
You think that even though someone else decided to make a mistake that I believed would cost tens of thousands of lives directly and do a staggering amount of damage indirectly, I should have a duty to support them once they were committed to making that mistake or I should face legal sanctions? That's a strange idea for the "land of the free, home of the brave".
In any case, your argument is futile. A war against an abstract noun can never be won. What credible, objective, measurable criteria do you propose for determining when victory have been achieved?
Ms. Coulter's "Invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them all to Christianity." would work though, and the moral objections would disappear pretty quick if a majo
In the opinion of several lawyer friends I've asked about this one, that's wrong, too. Oh, and I mean factually, not ethically. It sounds like there is at least some credibility in some jurisdictions if you have a notice *before* the rest of the content, but all these corporate types appending legalese essays to the end of every outgoing message are just jumping on a bandwagon with no wheels.
No, I'm not going to tell you who my lawyer friends are or the jurisdictions in which they practise. Yes, if you take anything you read on Slashdot as legal advice, you're a fool. No, I am not a lawyer myself.
I don't like his ideas on patents. ("Patents have a role to play in encouraging innovation." This is a baseless assertion with no supporting evidence, an axiom of ignorance.)
Or, alternatively, your statement above is the baseless assertion with no supporting evidence.
He was asked for his position, and he gave it. It's his personal, subjective view (or at least, his campaign's subjective view.) You might not agree with it, but that doesn't make it wrong any more than it being his view automatically makes it correct.
Also, as has been pointed out, people would be unwilling to underwrite the cost of a theoretically "perfect" piece of software that would never crash (barring hardware failure, or cosmic ray induced bit flipping), because given the choice between a $50 piece of software that crashes once a week, or a $9000 piece of software that crashes never, almost everyone is going to pick the $50 one and live with the occasional crash.
I really hate it when these discussions become black and white. Software quality is not a binary value. It is a sliding scale with diminishing returns for effort put in, on which we are for the most part still at the "dirt cheap" end.
I doubt I would want to pay the price of near-perfection. I'll leave that for the nuclear reactors, medical facilities and space shuttles. But the cost of due diligence — which I'll assume to mean taking reasonable, well-established, tried-and-tested steps to ensure quality in this context — is not the factor of 180 you gave. It's probably not even a factor of 5, and that's today when it's a relative overhead compared to those who don't bother.
What it would mean is having to actually follow reasonable development processes that worked. No more buzzword kool-aid for you, Mr Engineer! It would mean hiring competent people as senior technical staff instead of promoting substandard but slightly cheaper code monkeys, and spending the time and money to train those working under these senior staff properly. It would mean not letting sales and marketing staff dictate the schedules at the expense of even basic quality control.
Of course, if everyone were doing this and the industry as a whole grew up, this wouldn't cost much at all, because those same good practices actually make software development more efficient. It's just that short-sighted managers with their eye on quarterly reports and personal bonuses have an active incentive not to make the long-term investments necessary to reap those long-term benefits.
Indeed. I have been rather saddened by all the rhetoric about "taking the tough decisions" thrown around casually by the likes of Bush and Blair post-9/11. The really tough decision would have been not to commit vast resources to fighting something that is a genuine but ultimately small threat, but to reserve them for other, realistically greater needs, and to stand up before the people the day after the attacks and give a single, simple speech saying that while the losses should be mourned we will never give in to terrorism by changing our way of life out of fear.
You do know what the USA do with every foreigner entering the country, I assume? Taking 10 (!) fingerprints! Plus a scan of your passport, storing your credit card number, plus any other information in a related computer system. This gives the "land of freedom" quite a new interpretation.
In other news, it is now trivial to find numerous examples of people from outside the US simply refusing to travel there for either business or pleasure.
I'd lay the blame squarely on the large middle class who are often all too willing to trade away their freedom for additional security.
I always find it funny reading things like that. I would call myself middle class by any definition I know, as are most of my friends and work colleagues. Among that group, there is substantial opposition to ID cards and the like, particularly since high profile data losses of the kind highlighted in my current sig. I recall no conversation with any of my friends or colleagues where someone actually spoke in support of ID cards. So I don't know where the government find all these people in favour of them, or where you find all the unthinking middle class sheeple willing to trade away freedom for the perception of security, but I sure as heck don't know them, which means your generalisation sure as heck isn't well founded.
Then again, in light of those leaks, the inevitable government climb down has already started, with the announcement a few days ago while the stock markets were hogging the headlines that implementation for UK citizens is being pushed back conveniently far enough to be after the next general election. I expect some fall guys in government and the senior civil service are currently being lined up, and when the terribly misleading information they've provided comes out, senior officials will dispense with them, claim it's all been a terrible mistake, and move on with dropping the whole mess as fast as they can throw it at the ground.
I think you've contradicted your own argument. Given the reasons you give for police carrying shotguns in urban settings, and the characteristics of the high-powered rifle you describe, it's not hard to see why they might not want to use the rifle in the middle of a city zoo. What if they miss the target?
The law will be effective after the appropriate decree of the ministry, and will probably have an impact on pending p2p judicial cases.
...Which will shortly be reversed when higher courts at European level find that such a law in Italy is in conflict with the relevant European directives.
Sorry to rain on your parade, but this will last about as long as the shenanigans in France a few years ago.
If a TLD has had strict policies from the start then I have no problem with that but I wonder if there is any good way to kill off the existing squatters without hurting those legitimate operations who have ended up with thier stuff spread accross multiple domains.
I don't think that would be a huge problem in practice. Most people abusing the system don't keep the domains they grab for very long. They just step in for a few days, take advantage of the pricing structure and grace periods to grab a few ad hits, and then let any domains that aren't raking in the profits drop again. If you changed the rules today, you'd probably undermine most of the abusers within a couple of weeks.
Exactly. I don't see why we need all these "convenient" arrangements with grace periods this and reduced charges that for organisations the other who have privileged access to the system. All these arrangements ever do is support people who are abusing the domain system by grabbing expired domains or (as discussed here a few days back) those that someone has expressed an interest in via a look-up, at sub-normal rates that make them attractive as advertising platforms.
Does anyone know the politics behind this? Surely Joe's Random DNS Registry doesn't set the policies that allow this, so why doesn't the central organisation (is it ICANN in this context?) just get rid of the cheap-and-temporary stuff that screws pretty much any legitimate registrant?
I believe he's spectacularly missing the point anyway.
There's another solution available to consumers: Switch to a Linux-based OS such as Ubuntu. Since most Linux OSs are free, there's no business reason to bloat up the system with feature frills.
That simply isn't true. All the crap that comes installed with your average vendor's Windows PC isn't there because the customer pays for it, it's there because the computer vendor gets paid to include it.
This a great marketing model for commercial providers of security products and the like to hook clueless people, and they are more than happy to pay a small premium to get their three month trials onto a zillion new PCs. If you as PC vendor are supplying an operating system on which you can't make a substantial profit margin, there is more incentive to go for deals like this to keep profits up, not less.
That is a flip side but in reality the other poster is right, as soon as you see any sort of company policy to capture knowledge and processes like this it's an immediate pre-cursor to them moving their operations somewhere cheaper and making you redundant.
I've seen this happen 4 times now and no one's gonna catch me out again !
Ah, yes, proof by anecdote. Of all the forms of proof, this is second only to proof by intimidation (a.k.a. proof by stating personal opinion as fact) in its effectiveness.;-)
Seriously and honestly, I think you've just had a bad run. I've been involved with a major corporation-wide process change/documentation exercise for nearly two years now. Pretty much everyone wants the changes in question and the training to match, because we're not trying to force things on people, we're trying to come up with a sane implementation of ideas that most of the grunts (which includes me in my main job) already support. Making the changes will improve the quality of what we do and make people's lives easier, and having proper training instead of the typical corporate "on the job training" approach (a.k.a. whispers on the grapevine) will give people the confidence to use the new ideas and not screw-up, which again makes everyone's life easier. There is just no way you could interpret the kind of thing we're doing as a precursor to outsourcing. Software is a knowledge industry, and management who still believes in outsourcing and getting rid of all your people with knowledge and experience is pretty much doomed whatever they do about processes.
Sure, but if it's a one-sided deal (the copyright holder receiving no consideration in return for supplying software with a WTFPL agreement) then following the argument I mentioned before, who says the copyright holder can't revoke that WTFPL as spontaneously as any other?
I'm not saying this situation would be a good one. On the contrary, I think it would be very silly. I'm just wondering whether, strictly speaking, this is what the law actually says in most places we're concerned with at the moment.
Slashdot Mirror
...name one search engine that parses CSS and uses it to judge content.
It's not parsing the CSS that's the problem; it's things like using images for headings to work around the typographic limitations on the web and the structure mandated by CSS Zen Garden.
The CSS Zen Garden is a great place to get some ideas.
I respectfully disagree. CSS Zen Garden is a fascinating showcase of what is possible, but it's perhaps also a perfect example of "just because we can do something, that doesn't mean we should do it". The person asking this question is talking about a small business web site, not a personal blog-for-fun. Many of the tricks used in CSS Zen Garden entries, clever and attractive as they may be, are exactly the sort of thing you don't want in a usable, accessible, search-engine-friendly web site for a professional organisation.
You can't just learn good design overnight, and good taste certainly plays its part in producing an effective web site. However, there are some big ways to go wrong, and if you can just avoid those then you'll probably already have a better web site than a lot of your competitors. If the asker wants to learn a bit about graphic design, the good news is there are plenty of web sites that do teach the basic principles.
If you like to browse the web and find your own ideas and patterns, you could start by searching for some common topics like:
There's no one authoritative set, but you'll find the same themes come up time and again. Most of these will hopefully seem like they're just common sense once you've read them, too, though of course you might not have thought of them until they were pointed out.
If you prefer a more structured approach, you'll probably do fine just searching for "graphic design principles", reading a few of the all-in-one tutorials, and then following some links for more detailed information on the key topics you find mentioned repeatedly.
I would recommend looking up some basic material on usability as well. The prettiest design in the world isn't going to help visitors to find the information they want and/or to make purchases if your information architecture and site navigation are poor. I'd also suggest reading up on the basics of search engine optimisation, because prettifying your site in a way that makes it harder for search engines to scan will cost you presumably valuable page hits. These sorts of issues are why CSS Zen Garden is exactly the wrong place to look for inspiration if you're trying to make an effective web site, even though it's a great place to look if you just want to make a pretty web site.
Most OSS flaws are rarely exploited in the wild.
How do you know?
Just to be clear, I'm not claiming Foxit is useless for everyone. But people tend to present it as a direct substitute for Adobe Reader, which it demonstrably isn't.
For what it's worth, I've never understood the complaints about Reader's speed. The old version on my old PC fired up within a second or two. Version 8 on my new PC fires up within one second. I once had an in-between version installed on an old machine at work that seemed to take an irritating amount of time to load a bunch of plug-ins, but even then you could switch a lot of them off if it bothered you. Are you sure people aren't just slagging off Reader for an old problem that has long since been fixed?
It does have a two-page side-by-side display, which is what I need.
However, that feature does not work like the corresponding features of other software products, or indeed the accepted standard for centuries in real world publishing. You can call that a missing feature all you like, but it's still a bug to anyone who wants to use the feature that's already there, and as the Foxit forums demonstrate, there are a lot of such people.
First of all, what does it matter which side it's on, if you're reading it the same anyway :s
Because some documents use double-page spreads for their layout? Of the four things I was looking at that day, three of them happened to be like this, which is why Foxit was pretty much useless for me.
Foxit is so much faster and less of a resource hog then adobe reader.
It also doesn't work. For example, two-page documents generally start with page 1 on the right, yet in two-page mode Foxit insists on displaying pages 1 and 2 together, 3 and 4 together, etc. I discovered this when I tried it after seeing comments like the parent and GP posts, and also discovered that there have been bugs logged on this for eons but no-one seems to care about fixing it. The software was uninstalled from my PC within two minutes of installing it and filed under "beyond hope".
One of these days, people on Slashdot will realise that something that is free/or more secure is still worthless if it doesn't actually do the job it's supposed to do.
And going beyond that to the first half of the statement, people keep talking about the console wars in terms of a "killer app" and how that's what the PS3 needs to break through. Whatever, I don't want to get in to that here, but why isn't the same being said about Linux?
Some of us have been saying exactly that.
Of course, the same argument applies to any OS move, including Vista. I have just got a new PC for the first time in a while, with some pretty nice specs, yet I declined to have Vista on it and asked them to put XP Home on instead. Why? Because it works, I know it works, and I don't know of a single compelling reason to use Vista instead. There are a few technical improvements, but frankly Crysis looks just fine without DX10 thank you, and the risks of hardware/driver problems, privacy/security concerns and the like just aren't worth it.
If you believe that to be true, then the terrorists have won.
On the contrary. I know it to be true that you can never protect everything completely all the time through physical defensive measures alone. A sufficiently determined attacked will always be able to do a significant amount of damage somewhere.
However, I accept that this is the case, always has been, and always will be. Such is the cost of freedom. And I value my freedom, so I don't let worrying about the 0.000001% chance that I will be killed by a terrorist attack today bother me. At that point, the terrorists can't win, because they have not made me change through fear.
Western Civilization, by definition, is open and thus vulnerable to terrorism.
No. A free civilisation may, by its nature, be somewhat vulnerable to physical attacks by terrorists, but that is not the same thing at all. You are only vulnerable to terrorism if those acts of violence can bring the rewards the terrorists seek. It is perhaps the biggest tragedy of our time that the so-called leaders of countries like the US, UK and Australia did not understand this, and allowed the various recent terrorist attacks to push them into sacrificing the very freedoms they claim to defending. Today the terrorists don't need violence to instil fear into the populations of our countries, because the governments are doing just fine by themselves on that count.
I believe sjames made an excellent point about the opportunity cost of this approach in the grandparent post. As I have noted before, leaders often talk of making "difficult decisions" in times like these, yet strangely this usually refers to them taking the easy way out and starting a war that an injured and emotional people will, for a time, support. The difficult choice would have been to do exactly the opposite, refusing to change our way of life and divert disproportionate resources in response to what is basically just murder but on a somewhat larger scale, and keeping the people and the time and the money focussed on places where they will really do good things. By using emotive expressions like "war on terror", government just promotes the attacks to something more than the common murder that they were, and gives a standing and credibility to the terrorists beyond the sad criminals that they are.
Just ending the Taliban was not going to get the job done, a bigger message was needed. Saddam was an ongoing threat anyway so it made sense to pick Iraq for the 'drain the swamp' plan because it wasn't going to be possible to pick anywhere else without first dealing with the likelyhood of Iraq making mischief.
That's two fundamental yet unsupported claims in one paragraph.
Why was "a bigger message" needed? What do you think had to be said, and to whom, and why was retaliating forcefully against those who had wronged the US not an appropriate or sufficient response?
And how was Saddam an "ongoing threat" anyway? The claims about WMDs, 45 minutes, etc. have all long since been debunked. Saddam was a threat to political opponents in his own country and a nasty man, without a doubt, but from the Western perspective his presence actually served to reduce the ability of AQ and their like to establish a base of operations in Iraq. Put another way, removing Saddam was actually damaging to western interests (speaking only of the anti-terrorism effort here) and served to turn Iraq into a recruiting ground for would-be terrorist attackers.
Objecting, opposing or offering alternatives were all honorable and patrotic (nay, it was a DUTY if you believed it unwise) right up until the vote was taken to launch a War. Once that happened it was all moot, Wars don't end they are Won or Lost and rooting for us to lose (you guys call it ending the war) should be punishable by law.
You think that even though someone else decided to make a mistake that I believed would cost tens of thousands of lives directly and do a staggering amount of damage indirectly, I should have a duty to support them once they were committed to making that mistake or I should face legal sanctions? That's a strange idea for the "land of the free, home of the brave".
In any case, your argument is futile. A war against an abstract noun can never be won. What credible, objective, measurable criteria do you propose for determining when victory have been achieved?
Ms. Coulter's "Invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them all to Christianity." would work though, and the moral objections would disappear pretty quick if a majo
Mod GP (-1, Do Not Meddle In The Affairs Of Scientologists, For They Are Subtle And Quick To Anger)
In the opinion of several lawyer friends I've asked about this one, that's wrong, too. Oh, and I mean factually, not ethically. It sounds like there is at least some credibility in some jurisdictions if you have a notice *before* the rest of the content, but all these corporate types appending legalese essays to the end of every outgoing message are just jumping on a bandwagon with no wheels.
No, I'm not going to tell you who my lawyer friends are or the jurisdictions in which they practise. Yes, if you take anything you read on Slashdot as legal advice, you're a fool. No, I am not a lawyer myself.
I don't like his ideas on patents. ("Patents have a role to play in encouraging innovation." This is a baseless assertion with no supporting evidence, an axiom of ignorance.)
Or, alternatively, your statement above is the baseless assertion with no supporting evidence.
He was asked for his position, and he gave it. It's his personal, subjective view (or at least, his campaign's subjective view.) You might not agree with it, but that doesn't make it wrong any more than it being his view automatically makes it correct.
Also, as has been pointed out, people would be unwilling to underwrite the cost of a theoretically "perfect" piece of software that would never crash (barring hardware failure, or cosmic ray induced bit flipping), because given the choice between a $50 piece of software that crashes once a week, or a $9000 piece of software that crashes never, almost everyone is going to pick the $50 one and live with the occasional crash.
I really hate it when these discussions become black and white. Software quality is not a binary value. It is a sliding scale with diminishing returns for effort put in, on which we are for the most part still at the "dirt cheap" end.
I doubt I would want to pay the price of near-perfection. I'll leave that for the nuclear reactors, medical facilities and space shuttles. But the cost of due diligence — which I'll assume to mean taking reasonable, well-established, tried-and-tested steps to ensure quality in this context — is not the factor of 180 you gave. It's probably not even a factor of 5, and that's today when it's a relative overhead compared to those who don't bother.
What it would mean is having to actually follow reasonable development processes that worked. No more buzzword kool-aid for you, Mr Engineer! It would mean hiring competent people as senior technical staff instead of promoting substandard but slightly cheaper code monkeys, and spending the time and money to train those working under these senior staff properly. It would mean not letting sales and marketing staff dictate the schedules at the expense of even basic quality control.
Of course, if everyone were doing this and the industry as a whole grew up, this wouldn't cost much at all, because those same good practices actually make software development more efficient. It's just that short-sighted managers with their eye on quarterly reports and personal bonuses have an active incentive not to make the long-term investments necessary to reap those long-term benefits.
Indeed. I have been rather saddened by all the rhetoric about "taking the tough decisions" thrown around casually by the likes of Bush and Blair post-9/11. The really tough decision would have been not to commit vast resources to fighting something that is a genuine but ultimately small threat, but to reserve them for other, realistically greater needs, and to stand up before the people the day after the attacks and give a single, simple speech saying that while the losses should be mourned we will never give in to terrorism by changing our way of life out of fear.
Rather than do the SANE thing and ban knives in carry on baggage, someone decided it would be much more fun to ban nail clippers and water.
And metal cutlery.
And then they serve the drinks in small glass bottles. Go figure...
You do know what the USA do with every foreigner entering the country, I assume? Taking 10 (!) fingerprints! Plus a scan of your passport, storing your credit card number, plus any other information in a related computer system. This gives the "land of freedom" quite a new interpretation.
In other news, it is now trivial to find numerous examples of people from outside the US simply refusing to travel there for either business or pleasure.
I'd lay the blame squarely on the large middle class who are often all too willing to trade away their freedom for additional security.
I always find it funny reading things like that. I would call myself middle class by any definition I know, as are most of my friends and work colleagues. Among that group, there is substantial opposition to ID cards and the like, particularly since high profile data losses of the kind highlighted in my current sig. I recall no conversation with any of my friends or colleagues where someone actually spoke in support of ID cards. So I don't know where the government find all these people in favour of them, or where you find all the unthinking middle class sheeple willing to trade away freedom for the perception of security, but I sure as heck don't know them, which means your generalisation sure as heck isn't well founded.
Then again, in light of those leaks, the inevitable government climb down has already started, with the announcement a few days ago while the stock markets were hogging the headlines that implementation for UK citizens is being pushed back conveniently far enough to be after the next general election. I expect some fall guys in government and the senior civil service are currently being lined up, and when the terribly misleading information they've provided comes out, senior officials will dispense with them, claim it's all been a terrible mistake, and move on with dropping the whole mess as fast as they can throw it at the ground.
I think you've contradicted your own argument. Given the reasons you give for police carrying shotguns in urban settings, and the characteristics of the high-powered rifle you describe, it's not hard to see why they might not want to use the rifle in the middle of a city zoo. What if they miss the target?
The law will be effective after the appropriate decree of the ministry, and will probably have an impact on pending p2p judicial cases.
...Which will shortly be reversed when higher courts at European level find that such a law in Italy is in conflict with the relevant European directives.
Sorry to rain on your parade, but this will last about as long as the shenanigans in France a few years ago.
If a TLD has had strict policies from the start then I have no problem with that but I wonder if there is any good way to kill off the existing squatters without hurting those legitimate operations who have ended up with thier stuff spread accross multiple domains.
I don't think that would be a huge problem in practice. Most people abusing the system don't keep the domains they grab for very long. They just step in for a few days, take advantage of the pricing structure and grace periods to grab a few ad hits, and then let any domains that aren't raking in the profits drop again. If you changed the rules today, you'd probably undermine most of the abusers within a couple of weeks.
Exactly. I don't see why we need all these "convenient" arrangements with grace periods this and reduced charges that for organisations the other who have privileged access to the system. All these arrangements ever do is support people who are abusing the domain system by grabbing expired domains or (as discussed here a few days back) those that someone has expressed an interest in via a look-up, at sub-normal rates that make them attractive as advertising platforms.
Does anyone know the politics behind this? Surely Joe's Random DNS Registry doesn't set the policies that allow this, so why doesn't the central organisation (is it ICANN in this context?) just get rid of the cheap-and-temporary stuff that screws pretty much any legitimate registrant?
I believe he's spectacularly missing the point anyway.
There's another solution available to consumers: Switch to a Linux-based OS such as Ubuntu. Since most Linux OSs are free, there's no business reason to bloat up the system with feature frills.
That simply isn't true. All the crap that comes installed with your average vendor's Windows PC isn't there because the customer pays for it, it's there because the computer vendor gets paid to include it.
This a great marketing model for commercial providers of security products and the like to hook clueless people, and they are more than happy to pay a small premium to get their three month trials onto a zillion new PCs. If you as PC vendor are supplying an operating system on which you can't make a substantial profit margin, there is more incentive to go for deals like this to keep profits up, not less.
That is a flip side but in reality the other poster is right, as soon as you see any sort of company policy to capture knowledge and processes like this it's an immediate pre-cursor to them moving their operations somewhere cheaper and making you redundant.
I've seen this happen 4 times now and no one's gonna catch me out again !
Ah, yes, proof by anecdote. Of all the forms of proof, this is second only to proof by intimidation (a.k.a. proof by stating personal opinion as fact) in its effectiveness. ;-)
Seriously and honestly, I think you've just had a bad run. I've been involved with a major corporation-wide process change/documentation exercise for nearly two years now. Pretty much everyone wants the changes in question and the training to match, because we're not trying to force things on people, we're trying to come up with a sane implementation of ideas that most of the grunts (which includes me in my main job) already support. Making the changes will improve the quality of what we do and make people's lives easier, and having proper training instead of the typical corporate "on the job training" approach (a.k.a. whispers on the grapevine) will give people the confidence to use the new ideas and not screw-up, which again makes everyone's life easier. There is just no way you could interpret the kind of thing we're doing as a precursor to outsourcing. Software is a knowledge industry, and management who still believes in outsourcing and getting rid of all your people with knowledge and experience is pretty much doomed whatever they do about processes.
Sure, but if it's a one-sided deal (the copyright holder receiving no consideration in return for supplying software with a WTFPL agreement) then following the argument I mentioned before, who says the copyright holder can't revoke that WTFPL as spontaneously as any other?
I'm not saying this situation would be a good one. On the contrary, I think it would be very silly. I'm just wondering whether, strictly speaking, this is what the law actually says in most places we're concerned with at the moment.