Yahoo is already dead, and just can't accept the fact.
Over a year ago, they pushed an unholy abortion of an email interface that takes over 2 MINUTES to load on a 6.5 megabit link.
Now they've pushed an interface for their main news page that doesn't even render or refresh properly with Iceweasel/Debian.
While other sites are developing slick HTML5 interfaces, Yahoo seems hell-bent on creating the most UNUSABLE interfaces to hit the web since the days of AOL.
Quite frankly, when they die, it will be "good riddance" to the eyesore that Yahoo has become.
This kind of abuse is why the latest round of "anti-terrorism" legislation from the Conservative jackboots who currently run our country needs more oversight. Having one person in charge of the oversight is just rife with the potential for sweeping issues under the rug and failure to detect problems.
I firmly believe that a committee of at least three politicians and one "specialist" should be overseeing all of these Canadian privacy-related issues, regardless of "national security" issues -- one from each of the major parties. (The only reason I don't say four is May is a whackjob and there are no other Green Party members of parliament -- that woman isn't qualified to oversee lunch.)
The Abrams movies are action movie fluff. Nothing more, nothing less. The characters are "Star Trek" in name only, and an insult to every single Star Trek series or movie that came before them.
The first of Abrams movies, I thought "Well, it's just a start. They've got to get their legs under them."
But when Kirk lost the Enterprise and then gained it back in less than 10 minutes in the second movie, I shut it off. I've never watched it. I refuse to watch such an insulting piece of drek that thinks someone is going to be given a trillion dollar starship just because they asked after having had it taken away for breaking the law.
I presume there is going to be another Abrams movie soon enough. I won't bother watching that, either.
Watching the Abrams movies is like watching the first three "Star Wars" movies after having seen the original trilogy. It's painful. It's insulting. It's degrading. And it feels like it's marketed to pre-teens, not people who think.
Ah, yes, my ISP with over 25 years experience servicing hundreds of thousands of customers with over five million email addresses clearly doesn't know what they're doing.
It couldn't possibly be that the people behind the phishing attacks are custom-crafting the address chains in the fake "delivery failure" messages. Oh, no, it's clearly my ISP at fault because this is the only time this has happened in over 15 years of using them.
I sure hope you aren't responsible for securing anything more important than your home PC...
That same conversation has been around since since the first saboteurs threw their shoes into the gears of factory equipment.
The answer has never changed: society will evolve to a communist one because it has no choice if it's to avoid mass revolts and warfare.
You have only to look to the inner cities of North America to see the unrest and riots that have already started over trigger-issues such as a citizen being shot by police. Those riots aren't just over the deaths; they're an expression of people's frustration with "the system."
At the beginning of last week, I saw a number of fake emails "returned" to my ISP email account. A day or two later, I received a phishing email requesting me to change my password for that email account.
Today, someone tried the same thing for my Microsoft account.
It's more creative than usual, but it is still just a phishing attack, and you can easily spot it by the fake URLs in the phishing emails.
The new TLDs are a cash grab and nothing more. Not only for ICANN, but for every company that manages to buy up a gTLD.
Basically, the people buying up these gTLDs are hoping to cash in on companies wanting to register.searchterm domains. Which, in my books, is nonsense. I don't trust any of these new domains to be anything but spam traps and phishing expeditions. Given the options in search results, I would always go to the.com,.org, or.net address over a gTLD.
I'd think using pen/stylus tablets to scribble diagrams and then emailing or messaging those amongst the team members would be about as good as you can get, unless you can find a software package that would let the people share a drawing space using individual tablets. I've long wanted to get one of the Samsung tablets just for that purpose.
More like "teenage rage." I do not believe for a second that someone with such poor communication skills is a professional programmer whose users give a whit about the security of their laptops.
Given that iOS and Android can and do encrypt user data now, and that web device communications encryption is largely a question of whether a site uses SSL/HTTPS, what is the distinguishing feature of these phones that would make them marketable?
To me it looks like pure marketing hype, not a real benefit compared to other devices now that they've started using encryption.
The problem with black-box programming is that it's a trap. Far more often than anyone cares to admit, the black box implements functionality in an unreliable or inefficient manner. When you're dealing with code that you wrote yourself, you can correct that behaviour of the "grey" box. But with a third-party black box, all you can do is file a bug report and hope that someone can not only replicate the problem, but that they'll give it high enough priority to fix it before you retire or your project is cancelled.
The worst culprit for black box problems are frameworks of all kinds. Some say you're not a "real programmer" until you've written your own framework. I firmly believe that's true, because what is a reusable code base on a large project except a custom framework?
The difference between a custom framework and an off-the-shelf one is that your custom framework is designed and coded with your project in mind, to service the bulk of your project's needs while maintaining enough flexibility to deal with the exceptional cases of your project. A third party black box framework is pretty much never designed that way. It was designed to serve the needs of someone else's conceptual or real project, then tweaked and adapted to serve needs it wasn't originally designed for, and finally unleashed on an unsuspecting world as "the next big thing."
A pox upon frameworks, I say. Design a solid object model, code to it, use it, and get over the fact that you're going to have to write some code.
At least if you wrote the code, you can fix it. Without worrying about whether some upstream integrator will deign to consider your "fix" worthy of integration to the mainstream code. Without having to wait for someone else to replicate, analyze, prioritize, schedule, implement, and test a fix for your problem.
Realistically, any half decent custom framework isn't going to be more than 10% of your total code base anyhow. "Framework" is just a fancy term for what was called for decades "application library."
I knew a lot of people who had the controllers for those types of games over the years, which they'd either bought along with their consoles in bundles, or been given by relatives. But not once in my life did I ever see anyone actually play games like "Guitar Hero." Not once.
Yet I knew over a dozen people who had the controllers.
I wonder what percentage of those overpriced components sat gathering dust, never to be used after the novelty wore off in the first couple of weeks?
Verizon's arguments about controlling content are absolute red herrings. A content creator like a newspaper gets to determine the content and articles they publish or promote. The manufacturer of the paper it's printed on has no say.
The first thing I uninstall is McAfee. That piece of crap wedges in a VB script interpreter that breaks many of the software installers I have to put on my machines to make them useful. THE worst anti-virus product ever.
It also claims that SAP/Sybase ASE is infected, and deletes critical files from the install.
I find it gratifying to see that Mr. Nimoy is being remembered on every website and feed that I've visited today. And not merely remembered, but remembered by more people than I've ever seen pay tribute at the same time. Even the passing of Robin Williams wasn't marked with as many posts and comments.
It's absolutely sickening how many trolls have responded to this topic with comments about people "just wanting attention" or the world being better off without them, and other such tripe.
The absolute cruelty and judgementalism of people who've never dealt with chronic depression or mental illness is just shameful.
This is the "intelligent" commentary of slashdot nowadays?
Man has this place ever gone down hill. How I long for the days of harmless "trolls" posting comments about Natalie Portman and hot grits, which did nothing more than annoy instead of being outright mean, spiteful, and hurtful.
My experience has been that management comes to the developers for estimates. They provide those estimates to the end users. The end users bitch, whine, and complain that they need it to be done in half that time.
Management then comes back to the dev team and tells them they've agreed to get the project done in half the time that was estimated.
Then both management and the user community bitch when their "estimates/targets" aren't met, and who is blamed for the issue?
The developers.
The developers always are to blame for computer problems, never the bad specs, the conflicting specs, the unknown variables, the use of "new technology" that some vendor flim-flammed onto the department/team, or anything or anyone else.
Screw 'em. Now that I'm retired, I'll never have to give anything more than the most vague ballpark estimate of how long it will take me to do something ever again. Instead, on my pet project, I just bullet point some of the things I intend to work on next -- and even that is subject to change. The lack of stress and the freedom to live my life according to my own whims and needs has proven an invaluable source of improvement in my "quality of life."
What a shame I've never encountered a job that would let you do that.
Journalism has already been crowdsourced. All you have to do is look at the number of blog postings and discussions at any website that references "news" articles (including Slashdot) to realize that.
Newspapers are already being forced into a co-operative model to apply the resources needed to do true investigative reporting, like the most recent HSBC scandal. None of them have enough staff left on the payroll to do it by themselves.
Software and IT have much the same problem, though the "crowd" is a bunch of cheap overseas labourers instead of the general public. But the end result is the same -- highly paid skilled professionals replaced by cheap mob mentality grunts working on the "million monkeys" theory of producing quality.
The legal profession has been impacted big time just by the ability to do keyword searches of article databases instead of paying junior staff to do the legwork of researching relevant cases for the lawyers in a firm. Most new lawyers are finding it hard as hell to get into any real firms to gain experience as a result, much less ever be offered a partnership.
Note that not one of these changes required anything as earth-shattering as "AI" -- just automation and distribution of common tasks.
It's not even a good example of image recognition, because the images to be processed don't have to be "understood" to be used. On top of that, the graphics of the games in question were very simple and primitive compared to what image recognition software deals with.
Add to that the repetitive nature of old video games that were based on 99% reaction time and 1% strategy, and you can just flat out colour me "unimpressed" with this "research".
Back in University, my AI project was a game player (a simple strategy game whose name I forget.) As it turned out, the entire game mapped down to a pre-determined set of decisions, so after playing only a dozen games, the "AI" would win every time, and that was just with a simple weighted-algorithm system of play. Some problems are just eminently suited to "AI" is all that I ended up learning from that project, but it was a useful lesson on the difference between optimizing a decision tree and actual "intelligence".
Until someone comes up with a system that can deal with bad and erroneous inputs as well as humans, I will continue to be unimpressed. Yet at the same time, I don't consider it necessary for a computer to be able to think and understand per se to be considered an "intelligence." It just needs to be able to make decisions and choose between alternatives faster than it's human counterparts in order to be useful, and to reduce the number of errors compared to it's human counterparts.
I have little faith in "neural networks." They place too much emphasis on emulating simple biological components and not enough on the "art" of understanding. Neural networks basically take the approach that "if it's big enough, we'll maybe get lucky and it will start to think." That's not "solving a problem." That's "playing the lottery."
Slashdot Mirror
Yahoo is already dead, and just can't accept the fact.
Over a year ago, they pushed an unholy abortion of an email interface that takes over 2 MINUTES to load on a 6.5 megabit link.
Now they've pushed an interface for their main news page that doesn't even render or refresh properly with Iceweasel/Debian.
While other sites are developing slick HTML5 interfaces, Yahoo seems hell-bent on creating the most UNUSABLE interfaces to hit the web since the days of AOL.
Quite frankly, when they die, it will be "good riddance" to the eyesore that Yahoo has become.
Apple has made it clear their development future lies in Swift, not Objective-C.
That means you're choosing between a popular, well supported language and a dead end.
The choice should be obvious.
There's targetting a teen audience and then there's targetting an elementary school audience...
This kind of abuse is why the latest round of "anti-terrorism" legislation from the Conservative jackboots who currently run our country needs more oversight. Having one person in charge of the oversight is just rife with the potential for sweeping issues under the rug and failure to detect problems.
I firmly believe that a committee of at least three politicians and one "specialist" should be overseeing all of these Canadian privacy-related issues, regardless of "national security" issues -- one from each of the major parties. (The only reason I don't say four is May is a whackjob and there are no other Green Party members of parliament -- that woman isn't qualified to oversee lunch.)
The Abrams movies are action movie fluff. Nothing more, nothing less. The characters are "Star Trek" in name only, and an insult to every single Star Trek series or movie that came before them.
The first of Abrams movies, I thought "Well, it's just a start. They've got to get their legs under them."
But when Kirk lost the Enterprise and then gained it back in less than 10 minutes in the second movie, I shut it off. I've never watched it. I refuse to watch such an insulting piece of drek that thinks someone is going to be given a trillion dollar starship just because they asked after having had it taken away for breaking the law.
I presume there is going to be another Abrams movie soon enough. I won't bother watching that, either.
Watching the Abrams movies is like watching the first three "Star Wars" movies after having seen the original trilogy. It's painful. It's insulting. It's degrading. And it feels like it's marketed to pre-teens, not people who think.
Ah, yes, my ISP with over 25 years experience servicing hundreds of thousands of customers with over five million email addresses clearly doesn't know what they're doing.
It couldn't possibly be that the people behind the phishing attacks are custom-crafting the address chains in the fake "delivery failure" messages. Oh, no, it's clearly my ISP at fault because this is the only time this has happened in over 15 years of using them.
I sure hope you aren't responsible for securing anything more important than your home PC...
That same conversation has been around since since the first saboteurs threw their shoes into the gears of factory equipment.
The answer has never changed: society will evolve to a communist one because it has no choice if it's to avoid mass revolts and warfare.
You have only to look to the inner cities of North America to see the unrest and riots that have already started over trigger-issues such as a citizen being shot by police. Those riots aren't just over the deaths; they're an expression of people's frustration with "the system."
No matter what the DE, the people who use it always want it to be the default for their distro.
What is so damned hard about doing "apt-get install de-of-choice"?
At the beginning of last week, I saw a number of fake emails "returned" to my ISP email account. A day or two later, I received a phishing email requesting me to change my password for that email account.
Today, someone tried the same thing for my Microsoft account.
It's more creative than usual, but it is still just a phishing attack, and you can easily spot it by the fake URLs in the phishing emails.
The new TLDs are a cash grab and nothing more. Not only for ICANN, but for every company that manages to buy up a gTLD.
Basically, the people buying up these gTLDs are hoping to cash in on companies wanting to register .searchterm domains. Which, in my books, is nonsense. I don't trust any of these new domains to be anything but spam traps and phishing expeditions. Given the options in search results, I would always go to the .com, .org, or .net address over a gTLD.
I'd think using pen/stylus tablets to scribble diagrams and then emailing or messaging those amongst the team members would be about as good as you can get, unless you can find a software package that would let the people share a drawing space using individual tablets. I've long wanted to get one of the Samsung tablets just for that purpose.
More like "teenage rage." I do not believe for a second that someone with such poor communication skills is a professional programmer whose users give a whit about the security of their laptops.
Given that iOS and Android can and do encrypt user data now, and that web device communications encryption is largely a question of whether a site uses SSL/HTTPS, what is the distinguishing feature of these phones that would make them marketable?
To me it looks like pure marketing hype, not a real benefit compared to other devices now that they've started using encryption.
The real legislation is only 20 pages; the other 280 are describing the pork-barrel projects and legislation.
The problem with black-box programming is that it's a trap. Far more often than anyone cares to admit, the black box implements functionality in an unreliable or inefficient manner. When you're dealing with code that you wrote yourself, you can correct that behaviour of the "grey" box. But with a third-party black box, all you can do is file a bug report and hope that someone can not only replicate the problem, but that they'll give it high enough priority to fix it before you retire or your project is cancelled.
The worst culprit for black box problems are frameworks of all kinds. Some say you're not a "real programmer" until you've written your own framework. I firmly believe that's true, because what is a reusable code base on a large project except a custom framework?
The difference between a custom framework and an off-the-shelf one is that your custom framework is designed and coded with your project in mind, to service the bulk of your project's needs while maintaining enough flexibility to deal with the exceptional cases of your project. A third party black box framework is pretty much never designed that way. It was designed to serve the needs of someone else's conceptual or real project, then tweaked and adapted to serve needs it wasn't originally designed for, and finally unleashed on an unsuspecting world as "the next big thing."
A pox upon frameworks, I say. Design a solid object model, code to it, use it, and get over the fact that you're going to have to write some code.
At least if you wrote the code, you can fix it. Without worrying about whether some upstream integrator will deign to consider your "fix" worthy of integration to the mainstream code. Without having to wait for someone else to replicate, analyze, prioritize, schedule, implement, and test a fix for your problem.
Realistically, any half decent custom framework isn't going to be more than 10% of your total code base anyhow. "Framework" is just a fancy term for what was called for decades "application library."
I knew a lot of people who had the controllers for those types of games over the years, which they'd either bought along with their consoles in bundles, or been given by relatives. But not once in my life did I ever see anyone actually play games like "Guitar Hero." Not once.
Yet I knew over a dozen people who had the controllers.
I wonder what percentage of those overpriced components sat gathering dust, never to be used after the novelty wore off in the first couple of weeks?
Verizon's arguments about controlling content are absolute red herrings. A content creator like a newspaper gets to determine the content and articles they publish or promote. The manufacturer of the paper it's printed on has no say.
The first thing I uninstall is McAfee. That piece of crap wedges in a VB script interpreter that breaks many of the software installers I have to put on my machines to make them useful. THE worst anti-virus product ever.
It also claims that SAP/Sybase ASE is infected, and deletes critical files from the install.
I find it gratifying to see that Mr. Nimoy is being remembered on every website and feed that I've visited today. And not merely remembered, but remembered by more people than I've ever seen pay tribute at the same time. Even the passing of Robin Williams wasn't marked with as many posts and comments.
RIP, Leonard.
It's absolutely sickening how many trolls have responded to this topic with comments about people "just wanting attention" or the world being better off without them, and other such tripe.
The absolute cruelty and judgementalism of people who've never dealt with chronic depression or mental illness is just shameful.
This is the "intelligent" commentary of slashdot nowadays?
Man has this place ever gone down hill. How I long for the days of harmless "trolls" posting comments about Natalie Portman and hot grits, which did nothing more than annoy instead of being outright mean, spiteful, and hurtful.
My experience has been that management comes to the developers for estimates. They provide those estimates to the end users. The end users bitch, whine, and complain that they need it to be done in half that time.
Management then comes back to the dev team and tells them they've agreed to get the project done in half the time that was estimated.
Then both management and the user community bitch when their "estimates/targets" aren't met, and who is blamed for the issue?
The developers.
The developers always are to blame for computer problems, never the bad specs, the conflicting specs, the unknown variables, the use of "new technology" that some vendor flim-flammed onto the department/team, or anything or anyone else.
Screw 'em. Now that I'm retired, I'll never have to give anything more than the most vague ballpark estimate of how long it will take me to do something ever again. Instead, on my pet project, I just bullet point some of the things I intend to work on next -- and even that is subject to change. The lack of stress and the freedom to live my life according to my own whims and needs has proven an invaluable source of improvement in my "quality of life."
What a shame I've never encountered a job that would let you do that.
The creators of the printed ravioli were very enthusiastic about their product. "It's almost as good as Chef Boyardee!", they exclaimed. :P
*Blech*
Journalism has already been crowdsourced. All you have to do is look at the number of blog postings and discussions at any website that references "news" articles (including Slashdot) to realize that.
Newspapers are already being forced into a co-operative model to apply the resources needed to do true investigative reporting, like the most recent HSBC scandal. None of them have enough staff left on the payroll to do it by themselves.
Software and IT have much the same problem, though the "crowd" is a bunch of cheap overseas labourers instead of the general public. But the end result is the same -- highly paid skilled professionals replaced by cheap mob mentality grunts working on the "million monkeys" theory of producing quality.
The legal profession has been impacted big time just by the ability to do keyword searches of article databases instead of paying junior staff to do the legwork of researching relevant cases for the lawyers in a firm. Most new lawyers are finding it hard as hell to get into any real firms to gain experience as a result, much less ever be offered a partnership.
Note that not one of these changes required anything as earth-shattering as "AI" -- just automation and distribution of common tasks.
It's not even a good example of image recognition, because the images to be processed don't have to be "understood" to be used. On top of that, the graphics of the games in question were very simple and primitive compared to what image recognition software deals with.
Add to that the repetitive nature of old video games that were based on 99% reaction time and 1% strategy, and you can just flat out colour me "unimpressed" with this "research".
Back in University, my AI project was a game player (a simple strategy game whose name I forget.) As it turned out, the entire game mapped down to a pre-determined set of decisions, so after playing only a dozen games, the "AI" would win every time, and that was just with a simple weighted-algorithm system of play. Some problems are just eminently suited to "AI" is all that I ended up learning from that project, but it was a useful lesson on the difference between optimizing a decision tree and actual "intelligence".
Until someone comes up with a system that can deal with bad and erroneous inputs as well as humans, I will continue to be unimpressed. Yet at the same time, I don't consider it necessary for a computer to be able to think and understand per se to be considered an "intelligence." It just needs to be able to make decisions and choose between alternatives faster than it's human counterparts in order to be useful, and to reduce the number of errors compared to it's human counterparts.
I have little faith in "neural networks." They place too much emphasis on emulating simple biological components and not enough on the "art" of understanding. Neural networks basically take the approach that "if it's big enough, we'll maybe get lucky and it will start to think." That's not "solving a problem." That's "playing the lottery."
Given Apple's own abusive patent behaviour over the years, I can't help but smugly thinking "That's Karma, bitch!"