...and you're forgetting that slave labour is slave labour no matter where it's "offered" to an employee. Are they better off than starving? Yes and no? Should we ever be trying to pay so little for something that requires so much labour. Hell no. There should be a happy medium somewhere.
4. Yes, it is a race to the bottom. No, that isn't necessarily a bad thing in the long run. When you want to fill a container you have to fill the bottom first.
It's not a bad thing that if you extrapolate the trend we all end up as slaves who don't make enough money to own anything? You really think so? Well then go ahead, move on across to the 3rd world since that's your cup of tea.
5. If you think you're better than the people 'your' job was outsourced to, prove it.
It's a little hard to prove what your standard is when you've been fired. If you tried, your boss would call it stalking:-)
If you'd stopped your rant earlier I might have been with you but honestly what an unscientific CRAP site!
According to it, it'd take me about 610 cans of coke to kill me according to that site. Assuming 375ml cans that's almost 228L. Now granted I'm a big guy, but even if I half my weight, that's 114L. Never mind that they don't mention a time frame in which you're drinking this. You can't work out what fraction of a lethal dose is in a drink, divide the amount in a single can of drink and claim that's deadly. I'm pretty sure I've had 610 cans of coke through my life time and I'm not dead. I'm also pretty sure if I drank that much in a day I'd be dead. Then again I'm pretty sure I'd pass out before I could drink that much.
"A person with two healthy kidneys can excrete about 1.5 litres of water per hour at maximum filtration (other studies find the limit to be as little as 0.9L/h [1]). Consuming as little as 1.8 litres of water in a single sitting may prove fatal for a person adhering to a low-sodium diet, or 3 litres for a person on a normal diet. However, this must be modulated by potential water losses via other routes. For example, a person who is perspiring heavily may lose 1 L/h of water through perspiration alone, thereby raising the threshold for water intoxication."
No one's suggesting we ban water.
So what have you proven? That too much of anything disrupts the body and will kill you.
Fucking pseudoscience being moderated up on/. again. All that's missing is some vague mention of Myth Busters.
But then looking at this more carefully you've made a good point - what counts isn't the deadly dose, but the speed at which it's absorbed (how it's administered). 2x4's might be good for making furniture, but if incorrectly administered at too high a dosage (over the back of the head repeatedly every 3 seconds) they also lead to death too. Look at nuclear waste that way and the problem which is rightly pointed out is that if we're not careful we'll have no control over nuclear waste products in the long term - the equivalent of belting ourselves over the head with 2x4's with increasing frequency.
Yes, just as arrogant as Linux gurus. RTFM is an awful philosophy. When in my rant did I say Linux was much better? If you look over some of my previous posts you'll see I've been flamed for telling people how stupid an destructive the RTFM attitude is. So you haven't offended me in the least on that front.
However Microsoft are not trying to get to the point where you have wonderful security. Trusted computing and DRM are about milking people dry, not keeping them safe.
Some of these guys are very competent but I've never met anyone from MS that wasn't arrogant and self righteous. I guess that's how they sleep at night, or how they're selected, or probably both. The gaul of coming here and complaining about users. I just wish my anger hadn't affected my grammar/typos. I sure as hell wasn't in any mood to proof read.
Astronomy messes with my head almost as much as time travel...
Astronomy IS time travel....well time observation to be more correct. What you are looking at happened a long time ago. How long ago depends on how far away you look. What you see is a collage of what once was, that "once" varying with distance. This is always true. It just becomes noticable and important when (and you'll pardon the pun) the distances become astronomical. I was always filled with a sense of awe at that one fact more than just about any other.
I agree: Microsoft isn't trying to kill the business. They're trying to milk the consumer dry.
Just look at the FUCKING MESS you've (as a company) made with FSX. That game is a pain in the ass. For all the new innovations your Activation policy combined with bugs from hell have made the game less popular with hard core simmers than its four year year old predecessor. Way to go!
People need to get a grip. Piracy isn't going away. Malware isn't going away. An inexperienced person (or a moron) will always be able to shoot them self with a gun or stab them self with a knife unless they're taught better. So too with the PC. You can only go so far in countering them before your solutions are worse than the original problem. Make games reasonably priced and watched piracy virtually (but not completely) disappear. Be fair and stop trying to charge 10 time for the same freaking content, price it decently and watch media piracy virtually (but not completely) disappear. What's being done by content providers, hardware vendors and Microsoft is just a ploy to make short term profits at the expense of usefulness of the PC as an instrument. I could fill a dozen more paragraphs with swearing and it still wouldn't express how I feel about that.
In the end the MS Vista PC (or its successor) will be so fucking useless that no one will want to own one. Good luck milking that scenario.
By the way the irony of someone working at a company who's made its money providing easy to use software for PCs going on about their customer being lazy is priceless.
Modderators mod however the fuck you want. This isn't flamebait. I'm genuinely angry.
CALVIN: My gosh, those Commies are brilliant! You've got to hand it to 'em! "No, we didn't drop any bombs! Oh yes, our evil empire has collapsed! Poor, poor us!" I bet they've even asked the West for aid! Right?!
There are most certainly other reasons to do a non-network based install. Security and network segregation for one (if you're not physically hauling away and reconfiguring for another network). You clearly have a bias towards installing from the network. That's your perogative, but it doesn't make it the only valid solution to a large scale install.
Perhaps CD/DVD distros are most prevalent because not everyone has the same set of circumstances as you.
1) Some people value (eg. sys admins for large setups) the reliability of getting a repeatable install.
Imagine reporting bugs in a distro that was continually changing where you couldn't quote a distro number. Yes this could be managed on a network but not so easily as stating a distro CD/DVD version.
2) Some people will go so far as not installing a patch until it's verified.
If you're not net connected, or are behind a firewall the risk of an unknown patch will outweight the risk of leaving known security holes open.
3) If you're installing on a lot of PCs, you want to download the CD/DVD set once, the updates once, and apply across the whole lot of PCs. Why expend the entire install bandwidth per PC?
4) Some people either don't have fast network access, or reliable enough access. Hell some people don't have net access at all.
So yes, you as a single user are slightly inconvenienced if you go from a CD. (Not a lot I might ad, how big a pain is it to burn a handful of CD/DVDs really?
This is absolutely typical Linux/Unix user behaviour though. They think of the end user as being just a clone of themself and don't think about the multitude of others that use the software differently. Until this changes, this software which has wonderful potential will continue to stagnate.
So if a distro doesn't support for example hardware properly, that's the now the end user's fault?
If it's worked for you and not for someone else who thought they had the proper hardware after the appropriate amount of research that's good luck NOT good management....and you wonder why people won't jump ship to Linux.
I've also studied physics (Astronomy at Masters level). I've also published so that doesn't impress me or make you more qualified to comment than me. You demonstrate exactly the sort of elitist pig headed attitude that makes most science papers so damned unreadable. The context wasn't clear in this case at all. The only thing that made it clear was background knowledge on the subject. If you're expecting everyone who reads/. and has an interest to have taken physics classes, you're smoking wacky weed. Get a clue.
The only objection to fingerprinting everyone (somewhere in elementary school) is the indignity of (mis)treating every citizen as a (potential) criminal.
Of course there couldn't be any other sane or rational argument, such as perhaps the possibility of falsely being accused because when you're dealing with that much data you're bound to have some problems. No of course not.
Yes and speed and velocity are used interchangeably, but if you're talking physics and do that you're a twit.
The nit picking as you put it isn't pointless. The point is that if you're talking science and don't get the jargon right you become much more ambiguous and it's a bad habit to form. Yes in this case it was obvious what he meant but that doesn't make it a good story submission.
I was just coming out of my experiences at Salon, where we built a content management system in 2000, which was painful. I was one of the people in charge of it, and when the dust cleared, I thought, I don't really know that much about software development.
People in charge of decision making who don't know how to build software, don't understand what impact their decision has on the overall project, and don't allow counter-arguments to be made properly because they don't understand the problem in the first place is probably THE number one reason software projects are difficult and come out with less than ideal solutions. The poster should never have been in charge. He should have had competent technical staff who ALSO understand the business under him who he trusted and had authority to make decisions.
Other things include:
1) Poor industry standard libraries/APIs and tools that require the developer to think about work arounds and fulfilling requirements to successfully use the API/tool instead of focusing on the business problem. Just look at the mess that a J2EE project is with several different languages: Java, JSP, Jabascript, HTML, CSS and libraries: Hibernate, Struts, EJBs. By the way from what I've heard.NET is not much better. Then there's the tools which typically require a whole bunch of error prone glue code that does nothing for the business problem but is required to use the APIs. Then there's sub-standard debugging tools that crash or slow down the system.
2) Technology moves so quickly that developers and architects barely have time to learn one technology before another is thrust upon them and touted as an improvement that will solve all their previous problems (conveniently sweeping under the rug any new problems created because hey the peddler is out to sell their product to your team to use).
3) Specs that change significantly mid way through the project. Usually these changes don't just add something new but actually change the fundamental way the project worked. Oh and we need it yesterday. How many bridges do you know that need to be made 30% bigger mid way through the project, and not just by extending on? The business needs to plan what they want out of the software much better and try better to anticipate changes that may be required.
4) The developers are often good at coding and "talking to machines" not at talking to people. This seems to be steadily improving but its still true that a lot of developers don't have social skills. Often this leads to the test team and/or business becoming hostile or seeing them as "propeller heads". I've seen this get REALLY bad on one project to the point that the test and business staff were openly abusing the developers who didn't know how to take some stand. Developers can get frustrated or burnt out if treated badly regardless of their abilities or lack their of.
5) Changes to trivial look and feel elements when there are more critical flaws in the product. Yes I understand polish is important but you don't polish a half built car for fuck sake.
Sorry to be picky but the following statement sounds like the author hasn't graduated high school: "transmitting light at about 90% the speed of light". Try "transmitting light at about 90% the speed of light IN A VACUUM" or "transmitting DATA at about 90% the speed of light IN A VACUUM" instead. Light always travels at the speed of light. In fact most things I know of travel at their own speed.
You shouldn't be targeting geography at all. NY or Korea, it makes no difference, some businesses may have a legitimate need to communicate with someone at a particular geography. The Internet's beauty is that with few exceptions (shipping costs, time zones, legislation) you don't even need to worry about someone's physical location.
I'm not suggesting you block a nation. I'm suggesting you strike a deal with someone else in that country to provide the same addresses, on pain of losing them if they can't control the spam.
It doesn't. The rule is a reduction in the amount of harm you can demand under the law.
You're missing my point. You shouldn't be able to demand any harm under the law. You should be able to demand conditions that cause:
1) The perpetrator to, at their expense, do some good for the victim even if they can't take back what they've done: 2) Minimise the risk of recurrence of the crime.
If that happens to mean the perpetrator loses something (their freedom for example) then that's the price of their crime. However suggesting that you should be allowed to seek any retribution for a crime goes contrary to what a civilised society should be aiming for.
So? Don't be afraid of those who can kill your body, be afraid of those who can kill your soul. It is better for you to live mained than to be thrown into the eternal fire. (Parapharased from Luke 12 and Matthew 18)
To which I would say take your superstitious mumbo jumbo elsewhere - there is no evidence whatsoever that anything of our conscious being persists after the body is gone. A bunch of religious stories for which plenty of evidence against literal interpretation exists and that I no longer choose to believe in does not bind me, and does not impress me.
Yep I do get the point. However before you get too angry, let me just point out that software is abstract and very different to a physical thing. (Okay the UI has a more tangible). Stretched analogies aside, it's definitely NOT simple to "just fix it". I don't doubt they could do much much better with IE and Windows Explorer in particular, but it's not as easy as designing a round steering wheel (where you have plenty of other examples and standards to work from, and it's very clear if you don't adhere). IE only feels like you have a square steering wheel after you've used it for a while.
Slashdot Mirror
That's exactly what I was thinking. However since I'm not female I'd have been flamed. Thank you for posting.
...and you're forgetting that slave labour is slave labour no matter where it's "offered" to an employee. Are they better off than starving? Yes and no? Should we ever be trying to pay so little for something that requires so much labour. Hell no. There should be a happy medium somewhere.
Insightful? Flamebait more like, but I'll bite.
:-)
4. Yes, it is a race to the bottom. No, that isn't necessarily a bad thing in the long run. When you want to fill a container you have to fill the bottom first.
It's not a bad thing that if you extrapolate the trend we all end up as slaves who don't make enough money to own anything? You really think so? Well then go ahead, move on across to the 3rd world since that's your cup of tea.
5. If you think you're better than the people 'your' job was outsourced to, prove it.
It's a little hard to prove what your standard is when you've been fired. If you tried, your boss would call it stalking
If you'd stopped your rant earlier I might have been with you but honestly what an unscientific CRAP site!
m R TICLE/toomuchwater.htm
/. again. All that's missing is some vague mention of Myth Busters.
According to it, it'd take me about 610 cans of coke to kill me according to that site. Assuming 375ml cans that's almost 228L. Now granted I'm a big guy, but even if I half my weight, that's 114L. Never mind that they don't mention a time frame in which you're drinking this. You can't work out what fraction of a lethal dose is in a drink, divide the amount in a single can of drink and claim that's deadly. I'm pretty sure I've had 610 cans of coke through my life time and I'm not dead. I'm also pretty sure if I drank that much in a day I'd be dead. Then again I'm pretty sure I'd pass out before I could drink that much.
Well it turns out if you drink 114L of anything including WATER will kill you.
http://chemistry.about.com/cs/5/f/blwaterintox.ht
http://www.hhp.ufl.edu/faculty/pbird/keepingfit/A
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_intoxication
"A person with two healthy kidneys can excrete about 1.5 litres of water per hour at maximum filtration (other studies find the limit to be as little as 0.9L/h [1]). Consuming as little as 1.8 litres of water in a single sitting may prove fatal for a person adhering to a low-sodium diet, or 3 litres for a person on a normal diet. However, this must be modulated by potential water losses via other routes. For example, a person who is perspiring heavily may lose 1 L/h of water through perspiration alone, thereby raising the threshold for water intoxication."
No one's suggesting we ban water.
So what have you proven? That too much of anything disrupts the body and will kill you.
Fucking pseudoscience being moderated up on
But then looking at this more carefully you've made a good point - what counts isn't the deadly dose, but the speed at which it's absorbed (how it's administered). 2x4's might be good for making furniture, but if incorrectly administered at too high a dosage (over the back of the head repeatedly every 3 seconds) they also lead to death too. Look at nuclear waste that way and the problem which is rightly pointed out is that if we're not careful we'll have no control over nuclear waste products in the long term - the equivalent of belting ourselves over the head with 2x4's with increasing frequency.
Fuck I'd be ecstatic if JUST one of the apps I frequently was FORCED to use didn't work properly and was a pain in the ass.
Yes, just as arrogant as Linux gurus. RTFM is an awful philosophy. When in my rant did I say Linux was much better? If you look over some of my previous posts you'll see I've been flamed for telling people how stupid an destructive the RTFM attitude is. So you haven't offended me in the least on that front.
However Microsoft are not trying to get to the point where you have wonderful security. Trusted computing and DRM are about milking people dry, not keeping them safe.
Some of these guys are very competent but I've never met anyone from MS that wasn't arrogant and self righteous. I guess that's how they sleep at night, or how they're selected, or probably both. The gaul of coming here and complaining about users. I just wish my anger hadn't affected my grammar/typos. I sure as hell wasn't in any mood to proof read.
Google "standard candle" with the quotes.
The first link I got was Wikipedia which is as good a starting place as any.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_candle
I was so intrigued by what I didn't know I did an Astronomy Masters with no intention of changing career (ie. a recreational degree).
Astronomy messes with my head almost as much as time travel...
Astronomy IS time travel....well time observation to be more correct. What you are looking at happened a long time ago. How long ago depends on how far away you look. What you see is a collage of what once was, that "once" varying with distance. This is always true. It just becomes noticable and important when (and you'll pardon the pun) the distances become astronomical. I was always filled with a sense of awe at that one fact more than just about any other.
I agree: Microsoft isn't trying to kill the business. They're trying to milk the consumer dry.
Just look at the FUCKING MESS you've (as a company) made with FSX. That game is a pain in the ass. For all the new innovations your Activation policy combined with bugs from hell have made the game less popular with hard core simmers than its four year year old predecessor. Way to go!
People need to get a grip. Piracy isn't going away. Malware isn't going away. An inexperienced person (or a moron) will always be able to shoot them self with a gun or stab them self with a knife unless they're taught better. So too with the PC. You can only go so far in countering them before your solutions are worse than the original problem. Make games reasonably priced and watched piracy virtually (but not completely) disappear. Be fair and stop trying to charge 10 time for the same freaking content, price it decently and watch media piracy virtually (but not completely) disappear. What's being done by content providers, hardware vendors and Microsoft is just a ploy to make short term profits at the expense of usefulness of the PC as an instrument. I could fill a dozen more paragraphs with swearing and it still wouldn't express how I feel about that.
In the end the MS Vista PC (or its successor) will be so fucking useless that no one will want to own one. Good luck milking that scenario.
By the way the irony of someone working at a company who's made its money providing easy to use software for PCs going on about their customer being lazy is priceless.
Modderators mod however the fuck you want. This isn't flamebait. I'm genuinely angry.
If you think it's easy doing one night stands, try coding with this API man! It's a long way to the top when you want to code for all.
A little quote from the 1999 film says it all...
CALVIN: My gosh, those Commies are brilliant! You've got to hand it to 'em! "No, we didn't drop any bombs! Oh yes, our evil empire has collapsed! Poor, poor us!" I bet they've even asked the West for aid! Right?!
There are most certainly other reasons to do a non-network based install. Security and network segregation for one (if you're not physically hauling away and reconfiguring for another network). You clearly have a bias towards installing from the network. That's your perogative, but it doesn't make it the only valid solution to a large scale install.
Hmmm,
Perhaps CD/DVD distros are most prevalent because not everyone has the same set of circumstances as you.
1) Some people value (eg. sys admins for large setups) the reliability of getting a repeatable install.
Imagine reporting bugs in a distro that was continually changing where you couldn't quote a distro number. Yes this could be managed on a network but not so easily as stating a distro CD/DVD version.
2) Some people will go so far as not installing a patch until it's verified.
If you're not net connected, or are behind a firewall the risk of an unknown patch will outweight the risk of leaving known security holes open.
3) If you're installing on a lot of PCs, you want to download the CD/DVD set once, the updates once, and apply across the whole lot of PCs. Why expend the entire install bandwidth per PC?
4) Some people either don't have fast network access, or reliable enough access. Hell some people don't have net access at all.
So yes, you as a single user are slightly inconvenienced if you go from a CD. (Not a lot I might ad, how big a pain is it to burn a handful of CD/DVDs really?
This is absolutely typical Linux/Unix user behaviour though. They think of the end user as being just a clone of themself and don't think about the multitude of others that use the software differently. Until this changes, this software which has wonderful potential will continue to stagnate.
Bloody hell /. is full of intolerance today!
Re-read my comment - the part about doing the appropriate research.
IF you do the research (compatibility list, newsgroups etc.) AND it still fails it's not your fault as an end user. PERIOD. You've done all you can.
So if a distro doesn't support for example hardware properly, that's the now the end user's fault?
...and you wonder why people won't jump ship to Linux.
If it's worked for you and not for someone else who thought they had the proper hardware after the appropriate amount of research that's good luck NOT good management.
I've also studied physics (Astronomy at Masters level). I've also published so that doesn't impress me or make you more qualified to comment than me. You demonstrate exactly the sort of elitist pig headed attitude that makes most science papers so damned unreadable. The context wasn't clear in this case at all. The only thing that made it clear was background knowledge on the subject. If you're expecting everyone who reads /. and has an interest to have taken physics classes, you're smoking wacky weed. Get a clue.
The only objection to fingerprinting everyone (somewhere in elementary school) is the indignity of (mis)treating every citizen as a (potential) criminal.
Of course there couldn't be any other sane or rational argument, such as perhaps the possibility of falsely being accused because when you're dealing with that much data you're bound to have some problems. No of course not.
Yes and speed and velocity are used interchangeably, but if you're talking physics and do that you're a twit.
The nit picking as you put it isn't pointless. The point is that if you're talking science and don't get the jargon right you become much more ambiguous and it's a bad habit to form. Yes in this case it was obvious what he meant but that doesn't make it a good story submission.
I view at +4 and didn't have time to check. You have all the time in the world though I see. Too much time.
I was just coming out of my experiences at Salon, where we built a content management system in 2000, which was painful. I was one of the people in charge of it, and when the dust cleared, I thought, I don't really know that much about software development.
.NET is not much better. Then there's the tools which typically require a whole bunch of error prone glue code that does nothing for the business problem but is required to use the APIs. Then there's sub-standard debugging tools that crash or slow down the system.
People in charge of decision making who don't know how to build software, don't understand what impact their decision has on the overall project, and don't allow counter-arguments to be made properly because they don't understand the problem in the first place is probably THE number one reason software projects are difficult and come out with less than ideal solutions. The poster should never have been in charge. He should have had competent technical staff who ALSO understand the business under him who he trusted and had authority to make decisions.
Other things include:
1) Poor industry standard libraries/APIs and tools that require the developer to think about work arounds and fulfilling requirements to successfully use the API/tool instead of focusing on the business problem. Just look at the mess that a J2EE project is with several different languages: Java, JSP, Jabascript, HTML, CSS and libraries: Hibernate, Struts, EJBs. By the way from what I've heard
2) Technology moves so quickly that developers and architects barely have time to learn one technology before another is thrust upon them and touted as an improvement that will solve all their previous problems (conveniently sweeping under the rug any new problems created because hey the peddler is out to sell their product to your team to use).
3) Specs that change significantly mid way through the project. Usually these changes don't just add something new but actually change the fundamental way the project worked. Oh and we need it yesterday. How many bridges do you know that need to be made 30% bigger mid way through the project, and not just by extending on? The business needs to plan what they want out of the software much better and try better to anticipate changes that may be required.
4) The developers are often good at coding and "talking to machines" not at talking to people. This seems to be steadily improving but its still true that a lot of developers don't have social skills. Often this leads to the test team and/or business becoming hostile or seeing them as "propeller heads". I've seen this get REALLY bad on one project to the point that the test and business staff were openly abusing the developers who didn't know how to take some stand. Developers can get frustrated or burnt out if treated badly regardless of their abilities or lack their of.
5) Changes to trivial look and feel elements when there are more critical flaws in the product. Yes I understand polish is important but you don't polish a half built car for fuck sake.
Sorry to be picky but the following statement sounds like the author hasn't graduated high school: "transmitting light at about 90% the speed of light". Try "transmitting light at about 90% the speed of light IN A VACUUM" or "transmitting DATA at about 90% the speed of light IN A VACUUM" instead. Light always travels at the speed of light. In fact most things I know of travel at their own speed.
You shouldn't be targeting geography at all. NY or Korea, it makes no difference, some businesses may have a legitimate need to communicate with someone at a particular geography. The Internet's beauty is that with few exceptions (shipping costs, time zones, legislation) you don't even need to worry about someone's physical location.
I'm not suggesting you block a nation. I'm suggesting you strike a deal with someone else in that country to provide the same addresses, on pain of losing them if they can't control the spam.
It doesn't. The rule is a reduction in the amount of harm you can demand under the law.
You're missing my point. You shouldn't be able to demand any harm under the law. You should be able to demand conditions that cause:
1) The perpetrator to, at their expense, do some good for the victim even if they can't take back what they've done:
2) Minimise the risk of recurrence of the crime.
If that happens to mean the perpetrator loses something (their freedom for example) then that's the price of their crime. However suggesting that you should be allowed to seek any retribution for a crime goes contrary to what a civilised society should be aiming for.
So? Don't be afraid of those who can kill your body, be afraid of those who can kill your soul. It is better for you to live mained than to be thrown into the eternal fire. (Parapharased from Luke 12 and Matthew 18)
To which I would say take your superstitious mumbo jumbo elsewhere - there is no evidence whatsoever that anything of our conscious being persists after the body is gone. A bunch of religious stories for which plenty of evidence against literal interpretation exists and that I no longer choose to believe in does not bind me, and does not impress me.
Yep I do get the point. However before you get too angry, let me just point out that software is abstract and very different to a physical thing. (Okay the UI has a more tangible). Stretched analogies aside, it's definitely NOT simple to "just fix it". I don't doubt they could do much much better with IE and Windows Explorer in particular, but it's not as easy as designing a round steering wheel (where you have plenty of other examples and standards to work from, and it's very clear if you don't adhere). IE only feels like you have a square steering wheel after you've used it for a while.