Luckily for everyone (except Adobe) Flash is in [its] death [throes] in 2017
Not quite everyone. Flash is still very important for people who read and study the existing corpus of electronic literature, much of which was created using Flash. Whether that was a good idea (not really) is irrelevant; that's what the authors used, and we need an implementation to continue reading those texts.
Some of that Flash-based e-lit has a large audience, and some of it is culturally significant. This may be a niche application, depending on your point of view, but it's not an insignificant one.
That said, of course I'd like to see Flash replaced by an open-source player (or converter) that's well-designed and tested, with unnecessary features removed or at least disabled by default. I'd like to see far less Flash used on the web. The existing security disaster that is Adobe Flash certainly needn't continue in order to preserve access to Flash-based e-lit. But getting rid of Flash entirely is not a Good Thing either.
Avatar, which was not only 3D but the highest-grossing movie of all time.
Only the second-highest, I'm afraid, in constant currency, which is the only meaningful way to measure it.
Even that's not a terribly useful metric, since cinema ticket prices have risen faster than inflation. You can argue that tickets are priced to the market, so inflation-adjusted gross is still some sort of indicator of popularity; but that's debatable. And then there's the problem that film availability has increased, so there's a larger market; on the other hand, there are also more alternatives competing for consumers' entertainment budget. And so on.
In short, the box-office gross of Avatar or any other film really doesn't tell us much except what the gross profits for theater distribution were. It's a dick-waving contest. What it most assuredly does not demonstrate is that there's any great demand for 3D films. In Avatar's case, it also doesn't prove that developing 3D technology was a good investment, since it doesn't show any causal link between 3D and ticket sales. Maybe Avatar would have done just as well without 3D. (Not having seen it myself, I couldn't hazard a guess. Certainly the plot summaries I've seen describe a trite and cliched story, but that's never been an impediment to success.)
Just saying that maybe we want some kind of grounding that we're really watching a screen and not teleporting around.
Indeed, some of us don't want 3D at all, ever. Color is OK, though I could live without it. I'm just as happy without stereo / multichannel sound (and particularly audio that encodes the information I want on the center channel I don't have connected to anything). I'm not interested in ever watching 3D video again.
Ditto AR and VR. I tried VR at SIGGRAPH '89. I wasn't impressed then, and I'm not impressed now. I've yet to see a non-industry AR application that I thought might be useful, and I don't work in an industry where AR would be helpful.
He has a long way to go if he wants to catch up with Ted Turner.
One of Turner's New Mexico ranches (which actually extends into Colorado) is over half a million acres. He has three orders of magnitude on the Zuckster right there.
And even Turner is apparently second to John Malone (the communications and entertainment magnate) for individual land ownership in the US. Malone owns the equivalent of three Rhode Islands, or about 43% of Wales.
Of course, land isn't fungible. Owning 290K acres in New Mexico, or even 1.2M acres in Maine, may mean a lot less to most other folks than 700 acres of prime Kauai real estate. For one thing, there's 63 times as much Maine as there is Kauai; for another, Kauai's population density is more than twice Maine's. Also apparently the swimming is better off Kauai, though I can't vouch for that myself.
People who die without wills in a few generations can leave land as a lot of tiny patches divided among descendents with no real idea which patch belongs to who[m].
And it's not just people who die intestate. I (sort of) own a piece of property with unclear title - a small parcel adjoining the piece I do have title for. Around 90 years ago, the then-owner sold a quit-claim deed for this piece to someone else, and it then got sold on through various people to me. However, his wife's name was also on the warranty deed at the time he sold it. She may well have not been alive then; people were simply pretty casual about probate in that time and place. Or she may well have agreed to the sale but not signed the quit-claim.
The upshot is that title is unclear. The husband and wife were probably joint tenants with right of survivorship, but they may have been tenants-in-common. In the former case the transfer could be contested by the wife's heirs; in the latter, the wife's heirs would still technically own a half-right in the property. (At least that's my understanding, but this is in New Mexico, where land ownership is even more complicated than usual. The title search for the piece I have title for goes back to a Letter of Patent from the king of Spain to "an inhabitant of the ultramarine colony of New Mexico". Three-cultures litigation over land ownership claims going back to the original Spanish settlements continues today, though fortunately my land isn't contested in that court.)
Anyway, if I want title and a warranty deed to this small parcel, rather than just the quit-claim, I'll have to file a Quiet Title suit. My lawyer says that in New Mexico there's something like a six-month waiting period after publication of the suit, to give potential claimants time to find out about it and marshal their evidence.
You might think no one would notice such a thing, but these communities tend to have extensive networks of personal relationships. Sometimes quiet-title suits go unchallenged, but often local lawyers will see them, know the families that might have a claim, and get in touch with them.
I dare say I'd end up with the title. The parcel is an enclave surrounded by clear-titled property and too small to build on (because of septic requirements), so it's not of much use to anyone but me or the other neighbors. But I might end up paying someone for their right to it. Such is property. And it'd be a win for them, since they aren't getting any use out of it now.
So the Zuckerburg situation may be the same thing. The article implies that at this point none of the owners are using the land. It's possible that many of them don't know they have a claim on it. They might well prefer to cash out.
Or they might not.
I'm no fan of the Zuck, and I am a strong supporter of indigenous rights. I'm also well familiar with the history of the US annexation of Hawaii. But I'd have to learn more before condemning this particular move.
Sure - who doesn't? - but if you're just using any old dirt to grow it in, you're missing out. I only drink coffee made from plants I grow in my carefully designed soil blend, on my private mountain.
the sugary, cream-laden concoctions that pass for coffee at Fivebucks
It's actually possible to get a cup of coffee at Starbucks. I do it once in a while, when no better alternative presents itself. Just try ordering a "medium black coffee". The employees understand English if you speak clearly.
I admit it's not very good coffee, given Starbucks' propensity for using an excessively dark roast and then burning the coffee anyway, but I've had worse.
I still don't understand what so great about Visual Studio
Agreed. I've used dozens of development environments, from PCs to mainframes. Some have been very constraining; some have been very limited; some have been downright odd (PDM on the AS/400 circa 1989, for example[1]).
Is Venomous Studio full of features? Sure. Is it extensible? Sure. Is it appealing? Well, that's in the eye of the beholder; some people like some incarnations of the VS GUI.
But claims that it's "better" than other development environments are either highly domain-specific (domains which the VS proponents generally forget to mention), or they're just subjective preference masquerading as argument - probably because the person making it doesn't understand the difference, and refuses to accept that their personal experience doesn't describe everyone's. That's one of the most popular fallacies in software development, of course; there's a reason why the Jargon File has that "All the world's a VAX" entry.
I use VS when I have to - I've been using it for over a decade - but most of my Windows development is done using an IDE I call "bash". It has a wide range of extensions, including my editor of choice (gvim), my preferred Windows native-mode debugger (windbg), a build system that handles various generations of Microsoft build scripts (nmake & msbuild), and a huge array of tools. I wouldn't necessarily recommend it to anyone else, but it works for me.
[1] Prolepsis: No, it really wasn't much like ISPF at all.
One or two places deciding to use Ruby or Eiffel isn't a sufficient enough base to make me wrong. Ruby was a flash in the pan and is basically dead.
And this was modded "Insightful" by four people who 1) have mod points (as do I, but I'm commenting instead), 2) have no idea what the software industry is actually doing, and 3) don't know what "insightful" means.
Or, maybe we could all just work fewer hours per week. Which would leave more time for, you know, living.
And it's cliche argument number two!
Some people actually enjoy working. Some of us find what we do interesting and self-actualizing. The work / life dichotomy is a false one; working is part of living. Yes, for many -- indeed most -- people work may well be dull, repetitive, unrewarding, dangerous, and so forth, but that is a consequence of specific kinds of work, not some essential property of labor.
There are many ways I like to spend my waking hours, and as it happens, most of them involve producing something. I'll work when I want to work, thanks.
The sophomoric, naive, cliched argument-from-history I expect. Seeing it modded up to 4 is disappointing, though. This same banal bullshit (here liberally sprinkled with misspellings and typographical errors, for additional flavor) is trotted out for every article about workplace automation. To whom is it still "interesting"? Rip van Winkle?
Giuliani might or might not have been a good governor,
Probably we'll never know, since (thank god) he's never been one, and almost certainly never will be one.
As for Giuliani qua mayor, I side with those who think he's grossly overrated by his fans. Nearly all of NYC's improvements during his tenure can be chalked up to national prosperity and a national decline in the violent-crime rate.[1]
but he has zero competence in cyber security and computers in general.
More importantly, as others have noted, he's running an incompetent info-security company. It doesn't much matter that he personally doesn't understand the subject, if he can (and does) delegate the actual technical functions to competent employees. Clearly he either can't or won't.
[1]Which is unlikely to be substantially due to policing "innovations". We can argue over the other prominent explanations, such as reduced lead in the environment from banning leaded gasoline, and the Donohue & Levitt legalization-of-abortion theory; but I've yet to see a single methodologically-sound study supporting the innovative-policing hypothesis. "Statistical" policing may have led to more-efficient allocation of resources (assuming the system wasn't gamed by manipulating the inputs or results), but that's about it. Broken Windows is a sop to the middle class.
Note that violent crime rates in NYC dropped faster under Dinkins, Giuliani's predecessor; and I'm not inclined to give Dinkins all that much credit for that, either.
Sigh. Disabling scripting does not magically remove the uXDT covert channel.
The HTML5 Audio API does not require Javascript. A server is perfectly capable of sending a unique uXDT audio signature to each user agent, and tracking using session cookies, hidden form fields, query-string parameters, "ultracookies", and other mechanisms.
Yes, if you put bars on your windows, you make it harder for burglars to enter that way. And if you leave the door open, they won't have to.
And, as other people have already noted, many sites don't work at all if scripting is disabled. Sure, that's obnoxious, and the people responsible will no doubt end up in a special new circle of Hell. And sure, some users can get by without any of those sites. But others - including, say, people who are trying to anonymously use social-networking sites to report on the activities of repressive regimes - may have good reasons for needing to enable some scripts (which, with typical whitelisting blockers like NoScript, means "scripts served by some domains"). That gets technically complex quite quickly. Not everyone who needs online anonymity has the opportunity to become a web security expert.
The same way other companies do: By selling things that people buy.
You may not be interested in the benefits of a commercial distribution like SLES - product support, integration, platform support (SLES on zSeries is a decent market all on its own), and so forth - but that doesn't mean there aren't plenty of organizations that are.
SUSE revenues for last year were up 18% pro-forma CCY. So still selling pretty well.
(Disclaimer: I work for Micro Focus, but not for the SUSE side of the house. Though for this post I hardly see how it matters.)
The requirement that you focus in one plane on an image purporting to be in another is the problem.
I'd've said the problem is that 3D adds little or no interesting narrative affordances; that it's a lame gimmick most audiences will tire of quickly; that it distracts from the story, rather than adding to it. But perhaps that's just me.
I think it's the quadraphonic sound of the Aughties. And, yes, it will probably make another appearance (if it's not completely preempted by VR and AR, two other entertainment technologies that bore me to tears); but I don't expect further technical enhancement will improve its chances then.
Slashdot Mirror
The biggest problem with a passphrase is that entering it every time you get a text message is obnoxious and intolerable from a usability standpoint.
It's never bothered me.
"Man, every time I get a telegram, I have to open the envelope. Intolerable! How do people live under these brutal conditions?"
Luckily for everyone (except Adobe) Flash is in [its] death [throes] in 2017
Not quite everyone. Flash is still very important for people who read and study the existing corpus of electronic literature, much of which was created using Flash. Whether that was a good idea (not really) is irrelevant; that's what the authors used, and we need an implementation to continue reading those texts.
Some of that Flash-based e-lit has a large audience, and some of it is culturally significant. This may be a niche application, depending on your point of view, but it's not an insignificant one.
That said, of course I'd like to see Flash replaced by an open-source player (or converter) that's well-designed and tested, with unnecessary features removed or at least disabled by default. I'd like to see far less Flash used on the web. The existing security disaster that is Adobe Flash certainly needn't continue in order to preserve access to Flash-based e-lit. But getting rid of Flash entirely is not a Good Thing either.
Movies are far more entertaining in 3D _WHEN_DONE_RIGHT_.
Why do people have such difficulty understanding that their subjective experiences do not apply to everyone?
Avatar, which was not only 3D but the highest-grossing movie of all time.
Only the second-highest, I'm afraid, in constant currency, which is the only meaningful way to measure it.
Even that's not a terribly useful metric, since cinema ticket prices have risen faster than inflation. You can argue that tickets are priced to the market, so inflation-adjusted gross is still some sort of indicator of popularity; but that's debatable. And then there's the problem that film availability has increased, so there's a larger market; on the other hand, there are also more alternatives competing for consumers' entertainment budget. And so on.
In short, the box-office gross of Avatar or any other film really doesn't tell us much except what the gross profits for theater distribution were. It's a dick-waving contest. What it most assuredly does not demonstrate is that there's any great demand for 3D films. In Avatar's case, it also doesn't prove that developing 3D technology was a good investment, since it doesn't show any causal link between 3D and ticket sales. Maybe Avatar would have done just as well without 3D. (Not having seen it myself, I couldn't hazard a guess. Certainly the plot summaries I've seen describe a trite and cliched story, but that's never been an impediment to success.)
Just saying that maybe we want some kind of grounding that we're really watching a screen and not teleporting around.
Indeed, some of us don't want 3D at all, ever. Color is OK, though I could live without it. I'm just as happy without stereo / multichannel sound (and particularly audio that encodes the information I want on the center channel I don't have connected to anything). I'm not interested in ever watching 3D video again.
Ditto AR and VR. I tried VR at SIGGRAPH '89. I wasn't impressed then, and I'm not impressed now. I've yet to see a non-industry AR application that I thought might be useful, and I don't work in an industry where AR would be helpful.
Now I'm annoyed the editors rejected my submission "Carpentry Can't Explain How a Poem Works".
And if I'm lying, may killer robots strike me dead!
He has a long way to go if he wants to catch up with Ted Turner.
One of Turner's New Mexico ranches (which actually extends into Colorado) is over half a million acres. He has three orders of magnitude on the Zuckster right there.
And even Turner is apparently second to John Malone (the communications and entertainment magnate) for individual land ownership in the US. Malone owns the equivalent of three Rhode Islands, or about 43% of Wales.
Of course, land isn't fungible. Owning 290K acres in New Mexico, or even 1.2M acres in Maine, may mean a lot less to most other folks than 700 acres of prime Kauai real estate. For one thing, there's 63 times as much Maine as there is Kauai; for another, Kauai's population density is more than twice Maine's. Also apparently the swimming is better off Kauai, though I can't vouch for that myself.
People who die without wills in a few generations can leave land as a lot of tiny patches divided among descendents with no real idea which patch belongs to who[m].
And it's not just people who die intestate. I (sort of) own a piece of property with unclear title - a small parcel adjoining the piece I do have title for. Around 90 years ago, the then-owner sold a quit-claim deed for this piece to someone else, and it then got sold on through various people to me. However, his wife's name was also on the warranty deed at the time he sold it. She may well have not been alive then; people were simply pretty casual about probate in that time and place. Or she may well have agreed to the sale but not signed the quit-claim.
The upshot is that title is unclear. The husband and wife were probably joint tenants with right of survivorship, but they may have been tenants-in-common. In the former case the transfer could be contested by the wife's heirs; in the latter, the wife's heirs would still technically own a half-right in the property. (At least that's my understanding, but this is in New Mexico, where land ownership is even more complicated than usual. The title search for the piece I have title for goes back to a Letter of Patent from the king of Spain to "an inhabitant of the ultramarine colony of New Mexico". Three-cultures litigation over land ownership claims going back to the original Spanish settlements continues today, though fortunately my land isn't contested in that court.)
Anyway, if I want title and a warranty deed to this small parcel, rather than just the quit-claim, I'll have to file a Quiet Title suit. My lawyer says that in New Mexico there's something like a six-month waiting period after publication of the suit, to give potential claimants time to find out about it and marshal their evidence.
You might think no one would notice such a thing, but these communities tend to have extensive networks of personal relationships. Sometimes quiet-title suits go unchallenged, but often local lawyers will see them, know the families that might have a claim, and get in touch with them.
I dare say I'd end up with the title. The parcel is an enclave surrounded by clear-titled property and too small to build on (because of septic requirements), so it's not of much use to anyone but me or the other neighbors. But I might end up paying someone for their right to it. Such is property. And it'd be a win for them, since they aren't getting any use out of it now.
So the Zuckerburg situation may be the same thing. The article implies that at this point none of the owners are using the land. It's possible that many of them don't know they have a claim on it. They might well prefer to cash out.
Or they might not.
I'm no fan of the Zuck, and I am a strong supporter of indigenous rights. I'm also well familiar with the history of the US annexation of Hawaii. But I'd have to learn more before condemning this particular move.
Many older individuals can't seem to understand that dvds are inconvenient.
"Ugh, I have to stand up to get my pablum? That's such a pain!"
Damn it, where did I put my shaking cane?
Why yes, your unsubstantiated anecdote is compelling evidence for your thesis! Unlike in every other argument ever.
Bah. Only barbarians take store-bought aspirin. If you're not making your own from your carefully selected and cultivated willow trees, you're...
Sorry. The coffee thread was played out.
I grow my own coffee shrub.
Sure - who doesn't? - but if you're just using any old dirt to grow it in, you're missing out. I only drink coffee made from plants I grow in my carefully designed soil blend, on my private mountain.
the sugary, cream-laden concoctions that pass for coffee at Fivebucks
It's actually possible to get a cup of coffee at Starbucks. I do it once in a while, when no better alternative presents itself. Just try ordering a "medium black coffee". The employees understand English if you speak clearly.
I admit it's not very good coffee, given Starbucks' propensity for using an excessively dark roast and then burning the coffee anyway, but I've had worse.
I still don't understand what so great about Visual Studio
Agreed. I've used dozens of development environments, from PCs to mainframes. Some have been very constraining; some have been very limited; some have been downright odd (PDM on the AS/400 circa 1989, for example[1]).
Is Venomous Studio full of features? Sure. Is it extensible? Sure. Is it appealing? Well, that's in the eye of the beholder; some people like some incarnations of the VS GUI.
But claims that it's "better" than other development environments are either highly domain-specific (domains which the VS proponents generally forget to mention), or they're just subjective preference masquerading as argument - probably because the person making it doesn't understand the difference, and refuses to accept that their personal experience doesn't describe everyone's. That's one of the most popular fallacies in software development, of course; there's a reason why the Jargon File has that "All the world's a VAX" entry.
I use VS when I have to - I've been using it for over a decade - but most of my Windows development is done using an IDE I call "bash". It has a wide range of extensions, including my editor of choice (gvim), my preferred Windows native-mode debugger (windbg), a build system that handles various generations of Microsoft build scripts (nmake & msbuild), and a huge array of tools. I wouldn't necessarily recommend it to anyone else, but it works for me.
[1] Prolepsis: No, it really wasn't much like ISPF at all.
One or two places deciding to use Ruby or Eiffel isn't a sufficient enough base to make me wrong. Ruby was a flash in the pan and is basically dead.
And this was modded "Insightful" by four people who 1) have mod points (as do I, but I'm commenting instead), 2) have no idea what the software industry is actually doing, and 3) don't know what "insightful" means.
Several billion extant lines of COBOL, and quite a few of Fortran, say you're wrong.
And are people still developing software in those languages? Yes, yes they are.
Or, maybe we could all just work fewer hours per week. Which would leave more time for, you know, living.
And it's cliche argument number two!
Some people actually enjoy working. Some of us find what we do interesting and self-actualizing. The work / life dichotomy is a false one; working is part of living. Yes, for many -- indeed most -- people work may well be dull, repetitive, unrewarding, dangerous, and so forth, but that is a consequence of specific kinds of work, not some essential property of labor.
There are many ways I like to spend my waking hours, and as it happens, most of them involve producing something. I'll work when I want to work, thanks.
The sophomoric, naive, cliched argument-from-history I expect. Seeing it modded up to 4 is disappointing, though. This same banal bullshit (here liberally sprinkled with misspellings and typographical errors, for additional flavor) is trotted out for every article about workplace automation. To whom is it still "interesting"? Rip van Winkle?
Giuliani might or might not have been a good governor,
Probably we'll never know, since (thank god) he's never been one, and almost certainly never will be one.
As for Giuliani qua mayor, I side with those who think he's grossly overrated by his fans. Nearly all of NYC's improvements during his tenure can be chalked up to national prosperity and a national decline in the violent-crime rate.[1]
but he has zero competence in cyber security and computers in general.
More importantly, as others have noted, he's running an incompetent info-security company. It doesn't much matter that he personally doesn't understand the subject, if he can (and does) delegate the actual technical functions to competent employees. Clearly he either can't or won't.
[1]Which is unlikely to be substantially due to policing "innovations". We can argue over the other prominent explanations, such as reduced lead in the environment from banning leaded gasoline, and the Donohue & Levitt legalization-of-abortion theory; but I've yet to see a single methodologically-sound study supporting the innovative-policing hypothesis. "Statistical" policing may have led to more-efficient allocation of resources (assuming the system wasn't gamed by manipulating the inputs or results), but that's about it. Broken Windows is a sop to the middle class.
Note that violent crime rates in NYC dropped faster under Dinkins, Giuliani's predecessor; and I'm not inclined to give Dinkins all that much credit for that, either.
Sigh. Disabling scripting does not magically remove the uXDT covert channel.
The HTML5 Audio API does not require Javascript. A server is perfectly capable of sending a unique uXDT audio signature to each user agent, and tracking using session cookies, hidden form fields, query-string parameters, "ultracookies", and other mechanisms.
Yes, if you put bars on your windows, you make it harder for burglars to enter that way. And if you leave the door open, they won't have to.
And, as other people have already noted, many sites don't work at all if scripting is disabled. Sure, that's obnoxious, and the people responsible will no doubt end up in a special new circle of Hell. And sure, some users can get by without any of those sites. But others - including, say, people who are trying to anonymously use social-networking sites to report on the activities of repressive regimes - may have good reasons for needing to enable some scripts (which, with typical whitelisting blockers like NoScript, means "scripts served by some domains"). That gets technically complex quite quickly. Not everyone who needs online anonymity has the opportunity to become a web security expert.
Though not sure how Suse even still exists...
The same way other companies do: By selling things that people buy.
You may not be interested in the benefits of a commercial distribution like SLES - product support, integration, platform support (SLES on zSeries is a decent market all on its own), and so forth - but that doesn't mean there aren't plenty of organizations that are.
SUSE revenues for last year were up 18% pro-forma CCY. So still selling pretty well.
(Disclaimer: I work for Micro Focus, but not for the SUSE side of the house. Though for this post I hardly see how it matters.)
5 bits was good enough for Émile Baudot.
Bah. Using the 16 most-frequent letters in English, ICANWRITEWITHONLIFOUR
SLASHDOTMUCHFASTERNOW
ADIOS
The requirement that you focus in one plane on an image purporting to be in another is the problem.
I'd've said the problem is that 3D adds little or no interesting narrative affordances; that it's a lame gimmick most audiences will tire of quickly; that it distracts from the story, rather than adding to it. But perhaps that's just me.
I think it's the quadraphonic sound of the Aughties. And, yes, it will probably make another appearance (if it's not completely preempted by VR and AR, two other entertainment technologies that bore me to tears); but I don't expect further technical enhancement will improve its chances then.
the creator has the power to ... effect the market
Well, yes, by definition. What perhaps is more relevant to your argument is that the creator has the power to affect the market.
single handily
Sorry, out of snark for now. Try again later.