Often, "new improvements" mean surface-level improvements that don't improve use and efficiency at all.
For example, I think Microsoft's Aero and related interfaces are neat-looking, but they don't help me achieve anything using the computer. They just make it a bit slicker.
If you turn on the classic Windows interface, you eliminate a fair amount of overhead and get back to the basics of a very functional interface.
The same seems true of Linux GUIs. I appreciate what they're doing in trying to keep up with Windows and Mac OS X and the glitzy new interfaces those have implemented.
However, how much of this actually adds to the basic interface? Does it increase efficiency of the the user? I'm not so sure.
I miss the days of installing a new Linux distro on a ten-year-old machine and finding out that it ran as fast as a new machine with Windows.
Thank you for the feedback. I included those political ideologies to avoid being disingenuous and hiding the origins of our diversity mania in class warfare brought about by an ideological need for egalitarian altruism. I did not want people to feel that I was sneaking politics in a back door by not mentioning. However, your point is well-taken and I will use it in the future.
Once there's a working prototype, it can be improved in thousands of ways that are less challenging to produce than the prototype itself.
Right now, there are some challenges in making Iron Dome into SDI. However, there's also a working model which can be refined until it has SDI-ish capabilities.
If you looked at a computer in the 1970s, you might think it could never simulate a human cell. And yet, we're almost there.
But if get a white guy, an black guy, and a white woman and an oriental guy who all use Ruby for developing web apps on Unix, that would be diversity. Is that correct?
United Colors of Benetton. U2 videos. President Clinton's biggest fans. Or perhaps one of the post-1990s sitcoms.
Yes, that's the dream, and we want to live the dream. That way we'll be just as amazing as the groovy-cool people we see on our TVs!
Tech jobs are low status jobs, and they are primarily done by men with manual technical skills instead of professionals with organizational ones.
This is interesting, because it conforms to what I think of as a great CEO: someone who can organize many different abilities into a team and get them to complete a task under imperfect circumstances, without being an unrealistic authoritarian.
Diversity means different viewpoints, different perspectives, different approaches. Diverse speakers will appeal to and engage a more diverse audience. Diversity is more interesting.
You can have that diversity within a single ethnic group.
Just go find people with different approaches to life.
Your approach seems to be racist, in that it assumes members of racial groups are all identical.
We're not. We are diverse as individuals. Quit trying to turn us into the Cosby Show or The Brady Bunch.
Modern liberalism and subscribing to political correctness is a sign of mental disorder.
Conforming to the herd is always good, especially if you can insist you're not conforming. That is the ultimate "paradox" of liberalism: because it identifies with non-conformity, it can easily be a form of conformity and remain undetected by most.
In the meantime, those who are ahead of the curve are moving past liberalism. 1789 (the French Revolution) was a long time ago, and since then we've learned that what "sounds good" does not necessarily equal good results, and good results are all that matters.
The chattering classes and TV watchers haven't picked up on this yet, because they're subject to the the most powerful media machine ever created. It preaches at them what it thinks they want to hear.
This will change. In fact, it already has. We're just waiting to catch up with the curve.
A happy society is one where people share an ideal of what should be, and thus they act toward similar goals without a police state enforcing rules on them
Diversity ruins this idea.
Diversity puts people in an ugly position: either disregard your native culture and become an anonymous person who gets his/her culture from shopping malls and TV, or keep your native culture and be an outsider.
Conventionally, criticism of diversity is labeled "racism," which is a logical fallacy that excludes the possibility that someone could criticize diversity for some reason other than racism.
The realistic view is that diversity of any form does not work. Racial, religious, ethnic, cultural, class and even values. Mix the different and you make them all opposites. They're different for a reason: over history, the human race has branched out into many unique tributaries.
However, it benefits our overlords to have a society that is not united. We fight among each other and ignore the long-term problems that our society is piling up by ignoring the obvious.
Diversity is thus, like many other gestures of dying societies, a surrogate and a substitute but not action that can actually save us from our own decay.
Like many others, I've watched Rome wind down and begin to burn and I realize that most people have a singular response to this, which is strong and violent denial. This is why they call you racist, crazy, etc. if you criticize diversity, the welfare state, democracy, consumerism, egalitarianism, police actions or any of the other fictions our society has come to depend on like crutches.
Where Priority one is the customer, priority two are the workers, and the owners profit is priority three. (Funny enough, it seems the owners profit gets better when it's priority three than when it's priority two)
If profit comes from the company, the health of the company needs to come before profit.
We have outsourced our own brains and the decisions normally made by cultural mores to ideology.
Ideology is a type of political theory that we assume is true, so we crusade toward it in the name of Progress and Utopia.
Naturally, because it is a theory, it's unstable. In fact, there is often proof against it. But its adherents cling to it even more, because it provides for them an identity separate from their real-world identity.
However, this instability leads to it having a need: as a symbol, it must prevail over other symbols. Thus it is intolerant of them, but in the name of tolerance itself.
The people benefiting from copyright law being where it is are the big media and entertainment types.
These give all of their money to Democrats.
The Republicans need to grow some balls and attack the media establishment. Their best move would be a high rate of tax and zero copyright protection, which would drive Hollyweird and big media into bankruptcy.
Yes, it would be an industry destroyed, but it's also clear that outside of Fox News, the media is almost uniformly pro-left and anti-right.
Any lessening of the power of media would be a strategic win for the Republicans.
Most places I've worked, it has been about quantity. Number of reported bugs fixed. Number of lines of code.
These are metrics which can be shown to other people. That's how your manager gets promoted. How the shareholders are convinced that the product is doing well.
The people who are still around after 20 years of coding are binary: they're either wizards or burnouts.
On the other hand, the younger workers are inexperienced, which means you can keep fooling them with the same gigs. Make them work for 24 hours straight, keep them in the office for 12-hour days with $5 of free soft drinks a week, promise them a great career someday. They're guileless and easy to manipulate, which is great if you want your metrics to look good but don't care about the quality of the final product.
Personally, I'd prefer to hire wizards and to shift the burnouts into doing something they might enjoy more, because older workers bring a lot of experience and realism to the game.
But that won't impress my bosses or the shareholders.
We are never going to be able to bust every pirate, or even enough pirates to serve as a deterrent.
What we're doing instead is trying to really crucify the ones we catch, as a warning to others. That isn't working because the chance of getting caught is so low.
Instead, we should view media as a market which had a time period in which to be profitable. Before digital copying was easy, media had a monopoly on the means of its delivery and so was able to make profit.
Now? It's like advertising: you have to give it away for free. That doesn't leave much for your advertisers, and it will cost them even more.
As a result, the model is dying. Media can't make enough money from their product to cover costs. Right now that's true of news, but soon it will be true of movies and music.
And so what?
We're not losing the next Beethoven here. We're losing entertainment for the masses, and we can do that ourselves on a much lower budget. Music, art and news can go back to a normal role as a low-cost local phenomenon.
Markets periodically foreclose themselves like this. They simply become obsolete. That time has come for media, and we'll all be richer for it.
Abilities vary with race, ethnicity, class, gender and family line.
These abilities are genetic, for the most part. A smaller part is regulated by environment.
We are forcing square pegs in round holes by trying to make one educational system for these diverse groups.
We need to consider the obvious:
Diversity (of any type: religious, ethnic, cultural, racial, class) does not work. It is not the fault of the groups involved, but of diversity itself. Diversity gives you a choice between keeping your culture and as a result being alienated, or assimilating and as a result being rootless.
Civilization only functions when it's relatively homogenous and its people are moving toward some goal.
As our civilization winds down toward collapse, one of the major factors in its downfall is diversity.
They start out with a strong idea, then entropy takes over.
If the people aren't smart enough to reverse the process, the civilization dies.
What's left is a burnt-out husk like many of today's third world civilizations: Angkor Wat (Cambodia), Maya (Mexico), Aztec (Mexico), Persia (Iran), etc.
When companies get big, they become a type of clique. Since so many people have to be on-board for any one thing to get done, the company controls them with a kind of dogma or culture.
This reinforces an us-them mentality even where it doesn't need to exist.
As a result, the companies get arrogant not so much from their CEOs, but from the rank and file. That then spreads upward. They have become victims of their own propaganda.
This is why these "too big to fail" companies tend to blow out on obvious issues like this. Did they really just defy a sitting court? How stupid do you have to be to do that?
Their lawyers must be apoplectic. Or just carefully filling out their bills.
It's great he was archiving these manuals, and it might be foolish for Toshiba to demand they be removed. However, his website isn't a solution either.
Manuals get updated and it's important to have the current versions. Furthermore, they may contain information that companies don't want to let out of their control.
A better idea would be some kind of standard for websites, like a cultural convention that every website has a "support" menu option and under it a "documentation" option that leads to a search blank and PDF archives of all manuals they ever printed by model number.
If we can convince companies that this is a good idea, and convince customers to expect it, that's a better long-term solution than this litigation nonsense.
Are you going to deny me speech, participation, happiness or social welfare benefits simply because I'm (according to some) a troll?
Will you deny my inherent humanity, that I am no different from you, and refuse me marriage or participation in the military?
This is blatant discrimination. Trolls may have a higher rate of trolling, true, but that doesn't mean we're not equal. We're just like you. Except we troll. And we deserve equal rights!
Slashdot Mirror
Often, "new improvements" mean surface-level improvements that don't improve use and efficiency at all.
For example, I think Microsoft's Aero and related interfaces are neat-looking, but they don't help me achieve anything using the computer. They just make it a bit slicker.
If you turn on the classic Windows interface, you eliminate a fair amount of overhead and get back to the basics of a very functional interface.
The same seems true of Linux GUIs. I appreciate what they're doing in trying to keep up with Windows and Mac OS X and the glitzy new interfaces those have implemented.
However, how much of this actually adds to the basic interface? Does it increase efficiency of the the user? I'm not so sure.
I miss the days of installing a new Linux distro on a ten-year-old machine and finding out that it ran as fast as a new machine with Windows.
Thank you for the feedback. I included those political ideologies to avoid being disingenuous and hiding the origins of our diversity mania in class warfare brought about by an ideological need for egalitarian altruism. I did not want people to feel that I was sneaking politics in a back door by not mentioning. However, your point is well-taken and I will use it in the future.
Technology improves over time.
Once there's a working prototype, it can be improved in thousands of ways that are less challenging to produce than the prototype itself.
Right now, there are some challenges in making Iron Dome into SDI. However, there's also a working model which can be refined until it has SDI-ish capabilities.
If you looked at a computer in the 1970s, you might think it could never simulate a human cell. And yet, we're almost there.
I think it has to do with degrees of removal from reality.
When there's a realistic system in place, people go along with it because it makes sense.
When there's not a realistic system, there's usually an "ideology" used to compel people to obey.
This drifts farther and farther away from reality and as a result, the state uses more control on its citizens.
They in turn react passively by being less productive and more corrupt.
I'm sorry, I thought third grade was over and we'd all graduated to better things.
Exactly. It's enforced diversity, so that you can be Utopian and Progressive.
If you don't do that, you're morally wrong, and bad, and it's a defect of your character, and we want you out of our society.
There can be no "guy's nights" or all-white fraternities.
Everyone must be mixed.
Then we will finally have peace, love, harmony, compassion and progress.
Why wouldn't you agree to that?
Are you a bigot? There can be no other reason.
United Colors of Benetton. U2 videos. President Clinton's biggest fans. Or perhaps one of the post-1990s sitcoms.
Yes, that's the dream, and we want to live the dream. That way we'll be just as amazing as the groovy-cool people we see on our TVs!
This is interesting, because it conforms to what I think of as a great CEO: someone who can organize many different abilities into a team and get them to complete a task under imperfect circumstances, without being an unrealistic authoritarian.
You can have that diversity within a single ethnic group.
Just go find people with different approaches to life.
Your approach seems to be racist, in that it assumes members of racial groups are all identical.
We're not. We are diverse as individuals. Quit trying to turn us into the Cosby Show or The Brady Bunch.
More accurately, it's a type of discrimination.
Being biased in favor of a mixed-racial group is racism against all who aren't mixed-racial.
Conforming to the herd is always good, especially if you can insist you're not conforming. That is the ultimate "paradox" of liberalism: because it identifies with non-conformity, it can easily be a form of conformity and remain undetected by most.
In the meantime, those who are ahead of the curve are moving past liberalism. 1789 (the French Revolution) was a long time ago, and since then we've learned that what "sounds good" does not necessarily equal good results, and good results are all that matters.
The chattering classes and TV watchers haven't picked up on this yet, because they're subject to the the most powerful media machine ever created. It preaches at them what it thinks they want to hear.
This will change. In fact, it already has. We're just waiting to catch up with the curve.
Why do you assume that only people of other races can have different perspectives?
What exactly are these perspectives they bring to the picture?
This sounds like people who want "diversity" so they can have different ethnic foods to get at the drive-thru.
A happy society is one where people share an ideal of what should be, and thus they act toward similar goals without a police state enforcing rules on them
Diversity ruins this idea.
Diversity puts people in an ugly position: either disregard your native culture and become an anonymous person who gets his/her culture from shopping malls and TV, or keep your native culture and be an outsider.
Conventionally, criticism of diversity is labeled "racism," which is a logical fallacy that excludes the possibility that someone could criticize diversity for some reason other than racism.
The realistic view is that diversity of any form does not work. Racial, religious, ethnic, cultural, class and even values. Mix the different and you make them all opposites. They're different for a reason: over history, the human race has branched out into many unique tributaries.
However, it benefits our overlords to have a society that is not united. We fight among each other and ignore the long-term problems that our society is piling up by ignoring the obvious.
Diversity is thus, like many other gestures of dying societies, a surrogate and a substitute but not action that can actually save us from our own decay.
Like many others, I've watched Rome wind down and begin to burn and I realize that most people have a singular response to this, which is strong and violent denial. This is why they call you racist, crazy, etc. if you criticize diversity, the welfare state, democracy, consumerism, egalitarianism, police actions or any of the other fictions our society has come to depend on like crutches.
If profit comes from the company, the health of the company needs to come before profit.
We have outsourced our own brains and the decisions normally made by cultural mores to ideology.
Ideology is a type of political theory that we assume is true, so we crusade toward it in the name of Progress and Utopia.
Naturally, because it is a theory, it's unstable. In fact, there is often proof against it. But its adherents cling to it even more, because it provides for them an identity separate from their real-world identity.
However, this instability leads to it having a need: as a symbol, it must prevail over other symbols. Thus it is intolerant of them, but in the name of tolerance itself.
The people benefiting from copyright law being where it is are the big media and entertainment types.
These give all of their money to Democrats.
The Republicans need to grow some balls and attack the media establishment. Their best move would be a high rate of tax and zero copyright protection, which would drive Hollyweird and big media into bankruptcy.
Yes, it would be an industry destroyed, but it's also clear that outside of Fox News, the media is almost uniformly pro-left and anti-right.
Any lessening of the power of media would be a strategic win for the Republicans.
Is the task really about quality, or quantity?
Most places I've worked, it has been about quantity. Number of reported bugs fixed. Number of lines of code.
These are metrics which can be shown to other people. That's how your manager gets promoted. How the shareholders are convinced that the product is doing well.
The people who are still around after 20 years of coding are binary: they're either wizards or burnouts.
On the other hand, the younger workers are inexperienced, which means you can keep fooling them with the same gigs. Make them work for 24 hours straight, keep them in the office for 12-hour days with $5 of free soft drinks a week, promise them a great career someday. They're guileless and easy to manipulate, which is great if you want your metrics to look good but don't care about the quality of the final product.
Personally, I'd prefer to hire wizards and to shift the burnouts into doing something they might enjoy more, because older workers bring a lot of experience and realism to the game.
But that won't impress my bosses or the shareholders.
Somewhere between Arduino, Raspberry Pi and the $279 HP PC I use for a media server, there's a fertile market.
People need small machines to use for everyday tasks, from automating other machines, to serving data, to experimental purposes in a lab.
Make yourself a custom chip-set, AMD, and install your own flavor of Linux on it.
Truly bring (computing) power to the people.
We are never going to be able to bust every pirate, or even enough pirates to serve as a deterrent.
What we're doing instead is trying to really crucify the ones we catch, as a warning to others. That isn't working because the chance of getting caught is so low.
Instead, we should view media as a market which had a time period in which to be profitable. Before digital copying was easy, media had a monopoly on the means of its delivery and so was able to make profit.
Now? It's like advertising: you have to give it away for free. That doesn't leave much for your advertisers, and it will cost them even more.
As a result, the model is dying. Media can't make enough money from their product to cover costs. Right now that's true of news, but soon it will be true of movies and music.
And so what?
We're not losing the next Beethoven here. We're losing entertainment for the masses, and we can do that ourselves on a much lower budget. Music, art and news can go back to a normal role as a low-cost local phenomenon.
Markets periodically foreclose themselves like this. They simply become obsolete. That time has come for media, and we'll all be richer for it.
Abilities vary with race, ethnicity, class, gender and family line.
These abilities are genetic, for the most part. A smaller part is regulated by environment.
We are forcing square pegs in round holes by trying to make one educational system for these diverse groups.
We need to consider the obvious:
Diversity (of any type: religious, ethnic, cultural, racial, class) does not work. It is not the fault of the groups involved, but of diversity itself. Diversity gives you a choice between keeping your culture and as a result being alienated, or assimilating and as a result being rootless.
Civilization only functions when it's relatively homogenous and its people are moving toward some goal.
As our civilization winds down toward collapse, one of the major factors in its downfall is diversity.
They start out with a strong idea, then entropy takes over.
If the people aren't smart enough to reverse the process, the civilization dies.
What's left is a burnt-out husk like many of today's third world civilizations: Angkor Wat (Cambodia), Maya (Mexico), Aztec (Mexico), Persia (Iran), etc.
Whichever side you agree with, you think the other 50% of the country are wrong.
They're not going to change their views.
We have no way to go forward. Bipartisanship is a joke; liberals like methodology, conservatives like results. There is no compatibility.
Further, the liberal side is mostly women, minorities, homosexuals/transgenders and college students. The conservative side is mostly white men.
It's time to either beat down one side, or divide up the country so we all get what we want.
1861's (and 1776's) solution was states' rights.
Wonder what we'll pick, and how bad the ensuing war will be.
When companies get big, they become a type of clique. Since so many people have to be on-board for any one thing to get done, the company controls them with a kind of dogma or culture.
This reinforces an us-them mentality even where it doesn't need to exist.
As a result, the companies get arrogant not so much from their CEOs, but from the rank and file. That then spreads upward. They have become victims of their own propaganda.
This is why these "too big to fail" companies tend to blow out on obvious issues like this. Did they really just defy a sitting court? How stupid do you have to be to do that?
Their lawyers must be apoplectic. Or just carefully filling out their bills.
It's great he was archiving these manuals, and it might be foolish for Toshiba to demand they be removed. However, his website isn't a solution either.
Manuals get updated and it's important to have the current versions. Furthermore, they may contain information that companies don't want to let out of their control.
A better idea would be some kind of standard for websites, like a cultural convention that every website has a "support" menu option and under it a "documentation" option that leads to a search blank and PDF archives of all manuals they ever printed by model number.
If we can convince companies that this is a good idea, and convince customers to expect it, that's a better long-term solution than this litigation nonsense.
Trolls are people too.
Are you going to deny me speech, participation, happiness or social welfare benefits simply because I'm (according to some) a troll?
Will you deny my inherent humanity, that I am no different from you, and refuse me marriage or participation in the military?
This is blatant discrimination. Trolls may have a higher rate of trolling, true, but that doesn't mean we're not equal. We're just like you. Except we troll. And we deserve equal rights!
Liberté, égalité, fraternité