Quality of TVs no longer any better than anyone elses
Refusal to allow any more class actions when they do screw up.
Personally it's that last point that irks me most about Sony. Any company that arbitrarily refuses their customer's right to compensation when they screw up does not deserve my business. No one gets my business by assuming I'm a criminal instead of them.
We've three more years of hell before we'll be rid of him, even though his government is illegitimate and does not have a real majority because of the robocall scandal.
Living under a fascist government sucks royally when their ideals for the nation are your worst nightmares.
Machines that are accessed by users should not be the same servers storing the account security data. One of the key benefits to domain authentication provided by Kerberos and it's relatives is that the authentication data is isolated on a server that is supposed to be doing nothing but authentication and authorization.
That makes it damn hard to break into the security server to steal the password lists in the first place, regardless of what algorithms are used to hash the passwords. The problem is a poorly designed system, not a poorly equipped algorithm.
I did not "refuse" to adopt the language's core paradigm.
The algorithm to be implemented required arrays. I spent TWO MONTHS trying to re-write it in something more native to Erlang. It just flat out couldn't be done.
Not all algorithms can be adapted to arrayless syntax.
Go ahead and try to implement some of the bitmask arrays used by a compiler without an array, for example. Good luck.
I believe the array module is still using lists internally because when I tried it, the performance was absolutely horrible compared to a language that supports arrays naturally.
The internal data types that all atoms and objects break down to in Erlang does not include native array types, hence it's use of array emulation using lists.
But whether Erlang supports them or not isn't really the key point. The key point is that some languages eliminate critical common facilities for the sake of "elegence" and "consistency", preventing them from being used as truly general purpose languages. After all these decades of programming, there is a pretty consistent list of features and facilities a language has to support in order to be useful, and one of the most basic is the array.
"Pure" dialects of LISP suffer the same problem. They're too idealistic in their zeal to drop features programmers need sometimes.
On the flip side, the article seems to suggest that at least some of the girls are only doing the work until they can find something better. So in that sense, it's no different than someone who picks up some work flipping burgers or driving a cab while they search for a "real" job.
"I need to survive" type jobs are never glamorous or fulfilling. That's why people don't want to do them, they're trapped into doing them.
Nor did I find what those interviewed said to be complaining in any way. Regretful, perhaps, but the ladies didn't come across as complaining about much of anything related to the job.
Oh. Except for the sore feet. The same sore feet they'd have standing for an 8 hour shift in retail. In fact, it's worse in retail -- I've never heard of a store giving you a ten minute break for every 30 minutes you were on your feet. Hell, the last time I worked retail, you couldn't even go to the bathroom unless it had been scheduled!
Programming languages succeed or fail by word of mouth and their resulting popularity.
Contrary to what some say, most programmers don't pick a language because it's elegant or simple to use, but because it fits they way they think about programming. And there are as many different ways of thinking about programming as there are programmers.
Some languages like Ruby achieve a critical mass and become "mainstream" languages. Others are equally innovate and capable, but do not achieve that mass, like Erlang.
It's not really that one is "better" than the other. It's just that one achieved that magic mindshare of fanboy evangelism to cause it to spread far beyond what it's mere syntax or capabilities justify.
If the simplicity and capabilities of a language were what determined it's success, we'd all be using purpose-designed languages like Ada or Modula, and C/C++/Java would not be the most popular programming languages on the internet.
Personally my biggest beef is languages that are designed to implement a certain style of programming efficiently, while making other common styles of programming virtually impossible.
Key example: Try converting an array manipulation algorithm to efficient Erlang. It flat out can't be done: Erlang has no good syntax for indexed access of it's lists, forcing you to do a tail-recursive iteration counting through the list elements to get to the one you want. (This fundamental flaw killed the last project I worked on, so it's a pet peeve of an example.)
Then again, maybe it's limitations like that which prevent Erlang from achieving any kind of critical mass.
Support terms are negotiated on a per-contract basis. Some companies or firms have boilerplate or "standard" contracts that they use to define the terms, but they're company-standard at best.
If some company demanded perpetual free support, my answer would be simple:
Talk to my lawyer.
There can be no "reasonable" negotiations when the customer's position is to get work for free. That's not reasonable, it's not sustainable, and it's never been part of software development anywhere I've worked in 30+ years.
They may be beta-happy, but Google's initial release of a product usually gives me less grief than most company's 2.0's. (Or even 2.1's.)
Plus the "beta" thing really did kind of die off after the multi-year gMail beta. Personally I thought they left the "beta" tag on more for the sake of being able to flip the bird at anyone running an obscure and broken browser than because it wasn't properly tested.
Canada does not have the same copyright laws as the US. We have a right to preview media. We use downloads to do that instead of going to stores.
And surprise, surprise: The more media you preview, the more you're likely to buy.
But the RIAA and MPAA will keep screaming about "lost sales" until they finally die an ignoble death rather than face up to the fact that they should encourage previewing/piracy to boost sales, not scream and cry about it like spoiled children.
Why do people keep dreaming of getting exercise from a desk job or of sitting in air-conditioned comfort while shovelling dirt?
The very nature of those jobs dictate their sedentary/active styles. If you want exercise, join a gym.
Personally the last thing I want in an office is some yahoo wandering around behind my desk, yapping on a bluetooth and tapping away at some tablet device because they want "freedom to move" while interrupting my ability to get work done.
Sun Tzu said the greatest victory is one which doesn't require a shot. One won by subverting the enemy from within.
What greater subversion can there be than to convince the enemy to hire you to build their weapon's systems components?
Apparently the American Military (and probably that of the rest of the world) hasn't bothered reading any "classic" literature on warfare before signing on the dotted line...
It must be so embarrassing for the Iranian government to be in a dick-waving contest with the US and the world when the best they can show is a tiny example of 50 year old technology. The fact that they'd even think to brag about it shows how much their internal media must be censored, or how stupid they think their people are for them to be impressed by this "accomplishment."
What happened to their threats to reverse engineer the drone that crashed^H^H^H^H^H^H^H they captured. Can we expect to see that in 2061?
I don't find it strange at all. Metro locks users in to Windows 8. None of the compatability systems like Wine are ready to support Metro, and are unlikely to do so in the near future.
If you can get even a fraction of open source and "learning" systems built using Metro, that's some segment of the user base that now has to use Windows 8, or forego the application in question.
More importantly, it seeds the developer community with people that only know Metro for Windows 8, and have no experience in using the "traditional" APIs and toolkits.
What? You thought Microsoft would stop trying to lock people in just because of those pesky "abusive monopoly" charges and oversight committees?
How seriously you underestimate the lure and power of the almighty profit.
BTW, I always thought the Microsoft image on Slashdot should have been of the Grand Nagus rather than a borgified Bill.:)
I don't see why an employee would need a service like Dropbox while working for a large corporation like IBM.
They already have all kinds of subversion, document, and content servers in-house, readily available by logging in to the VPN (securely!)
External services like Dropbox are fine for consumers whose employers don't already provide intranet "cloud" storage for data, but employees of large companies? What kind of employee shoot-myself-in-the-foot insanity would place cricital corporate information on a public cloud service instead of securely within the intranet cloud?
Sentience vs. Intelligence
on
Where's HAL 9000?
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
I tend to think we need to split out "Artificial Sentience" from "Artificial Intelligence." Technologies used for expert systems are clearly a form of subject-matter artificial intelligence, but they are not creative nor are they designed to learn about and explore new subject materials.
Artificial Sentience, on the other hand, would necessarily incorporate learning, postulation, and exploration of entirely new ideas or "insights." I firmly believe that in order to hold a believable conversation, a machine needs sentience, not just intelligence. Being able to come to a logical conclusion or to analyze sentence structures and verbiage into models of "thought" are only a first step -- the intelligence part.
Only when a machine can come up with and hold a conversation on new topics, while being able to tie the discussion history back to earlier statements so that the whole conversation "holds together" will be able to "fool" people. Because at that point, it won't be "fooling" anyone -- it will actually be thinking.
I'd like to know what perverse little-used function people are talking about, because I and many people I know have used OpenOffice/LibreOffice for years with zero problems. The first release of OpenOffice had some formatting issues, but those were ironed out by the first dot release.
As with the GP, I have seen far more problems with people stuck on Office 2K3 or Office 2K than I have with OpenOffice/LibreOffice.
Oh, wait! Maybe you're one of the people who embeds sound effects in a PowerPoint to the annoyance of everyone in the room...
Oh, just irrelevant little details like the CPU being used, it's speed, the amount of memory, the amount of flash storage, the type of connectivity, the resolution of the screen, the type of screen...
Get the picture?
It has nothing to do with Android, iOS, or a vendor preference.
It has everything to do with a parent article with a blatant spam link! For a non-shipping, non-existent product, no less.
Slashdot Mirror
Lately Sony has a lot more problems than that:
Personally it's that last point that irks me most about Sony. Any company that arbitrarily refuses their customer's right to compensation when they screw up does not deserve my business. No one gets my business by assuming I'm a criminal instead of them.
This is the damage done by one year of Harper.
We've three more years of hell before we'll be rid of him, even though his government is illegitimate and does not have a real majority because of the robocall scandal.
Living under a fascist government sucks royally when their ideals for the nation are your worst nightmares.
Remind me to never subscribe to any website you run.
Whether MD5 is "secure" or not is irrelevant.
Machines that are accessed by users should not be the same servers storing the account security data. One of the key benefits to domain authentication provided by Kerberos and it's relatives is that the authentication data is isolated on a server that is supposed to be doing nothing but authentication and authorization.
That makes it damn hard to break into the security server to steal the password lists in the first place, regardless of what algorithms are used to hash the passwords. The problem is a poorly designed system, not a poorly equipped algorithm.
I did not "refuse" to adopt the language's core paradigm.
The algorithm to be implemented required arrays. I spent TWO MONTHS trying to re-write it in something more native to Erlang. It just flat out couldn't be done.
Not all algorithms can be adapted to arrayless syntax.
Go ahead and try to implement some of the bitmask arrays used by a compiler without an array, for example. Good luck.
I believe the array module is still using lists internally because when I tried it, the performance was absolutely horrible compared to a language that supports arrays naturally.
The internal data types that all atoms and objects break down to in Erlang does not include native array types, hence it's use of array emulation using lists.
But whether Erlang supports them or not isn't really the key point. The key point is that some languages eliminate critical common facilities for the sake of "elegence" and "consistency", preventing them from being used as truly general purpose languages. After all these decades of programming, there is a pretty consistent list of features and facilities a language has to support in order to be useful, and one of the most basic is the array.
"Pure" dialects of LISP suffer the same problem. They're too idealistic in their zeal to drop features programmers need sometimes.
On the flip side, the article seems to suggest that at least some of the girls are only doing the work until they can find something better. So in that sense, it's no different than someone who picks up some work flipping burgers or driving a cab while they search for a "real" job.
"I need to survive" type jobs are never glamorous or fulfilling. That's why people don't want to do them, they're trapped into doing them.
Nor did I find what those interviewed said to be complaining in any way. Regretful, perhaps, but the ladies didn't come across as complaining about much of anything related to the job.
Oh. Except for the sore feet. The same sore feet they'd have standing for an 8 hour shift in retail. In fact, it's worse in retail -- I've never heard of a store giving you a ten minute break for every 30 minutes you were on your feet. Hell, the last time I worked retail, you couldn't even go to the bathroom unless it had been scheduled!
Programming languages succeed or fail by word of mouth and their resulting popularity.
Contrary to what some say, most programmers don't pick a language because it's elegant or simple to use, but because it fits they way they think about programming. And there are as many different ways of thinking about programming as there are programmers.
Some languages like Ruby achieve a critical mass and become "mainstream" languages. Others are equally innovate and capable, but do not achieve that mass, like Erlang.
It's not really that one is "better" than the other. It's just that one achieved that magic mindshare of fanboy evangelism to cause it to spread far beyond what it's mere syntax or capabilities justify.
If the simplicity and capabilities of a language were what determined it's success, we'd all be using purpose-designed languages like Ada or Modula, and C/C++/Java would not be the most popular programming languages on the internet.
Personally my biggest beef is languages that are designed to implement a certain style of programming efficiently, while making other common styles of programming virtually impossible.
Key example: Try converting an array manipulation algorithm to efficient Erlang. It flat out can't be done: Erlang has no good syntax for indexed access of it's lists, forcing you to do a tail-recursive iteration counting through the list elements to get to the one you want. (This fundamental flaw killed the last project I worked on, so it's a pet peeve of an example.)
Then again, maybe it's limitations like that which prevent Erlang from achieving any kind of critical mass.
Support terms are negotiated on a per-contract basis. Some companies or firms have boilerplate or "standard" contracts that they use to define the terms, but they're company-standard at best.
If some company demanded perpetual free support, my answer would be simple:
Talk to my lawyer.
There can be no "reasonable" negotiations when the customer's position is to get work for free. That's not reasonable, it's not sustainable, and it's never been part of software development anywhere I've worked in 30+ years.
You do not have a customer. You have a leech.
They may be beta-happy, but Google's initial release of a product usually gives me less grief than most company's 2.0's. (Or even 2.1's.)
Plus the "beta" thing really did kind of die off after the multi-year gMail beta. Personally I thought they left the "beta" tag on more for the sake of being able to flip the bird at anyone running an obscure and broken browser than because it wasn't properly tested.
Canada does not have the same copyright laws as the US. We have a right to preview media. We use downloads to do that instead of going to stores.
And surprise, surprise: The more media you preview, the more you're likely to buy.
But the RIAA and MPAA will keep screaming about "lost sales" until they finally die an ignoble death rather than face up to the fact that they should encourage previewing/piracy to boost sales, not scream and cry about it like spoiled children.
Stop the presses! No one has ever done a network caching server before.
Truly this is "news".
Not.
Why do people keep dreaming of getting exercise from a desk job or of sitting in air-conditioned comfort while shovelling dirt?
The very nature of those jobs dictate their sedentary/active styles. If you want exercise, join a gym.
Personally the last thing I want in an office is some yahoo wandering around behind my desk, yapping on a bluetooth and tapping away at some tablet device because they want "freedom to move" while interrupting my ability to get work done.
Clearly the summary's "why" is referring to the consolidated wisdom of the Slashdot cognoscenti expressed below.... :P
"Windows 8 bit"
Sun Tzu said the greatest victory is one which doesn't require a shot. One won by subverting the enemy from within.
What greater subversion can there be than to convince the enemy to hire you to build their weapon's systems components?
Apparently the American Military (and probably that of the rest of the world) hasn't bothered reading any "classic" literature on warfare before signing on the dotted line...
It must be so embarrassing for the Iranian government to be in a dick-waving contest with the US and the world when the best they can show is a tiny example of 50 year old technology. The fact that they'd even think to brag about it shows how much their internal media must be censored, or how stupid they think their people are for them to be impressed by this "accomplishment."
What happened to their threats to reverse engineer the drone that crashed^H^H^H^H^H^H^H they captured. Can we expect to see that in 2061?
Rumour has it that the inimitable Richard M. Stallman might have some experience with "office living"... :P
I don't find it strange at all. Metro locks users in to Windows 8. None of the compatability systems like Wine are ready to support Metro, and are unlikely to do so in the near future.
If you can get even a fraction of open source and "learning" systems built using Metro, that's some segment of the user base that now has to use Windows 8, or forego the application in question.
More importantly, it seeds the developer community with people that only know Metro for Windows 8, and have no experience in using the "traditional" APIs and toolkits.
What? You thought Microsoft would stop trying to lock people in just because of those pesky "abusive monopoly" charges and oversight committees?
How seriously you underestimate the lure and power of the almighty profit.
BTW, I always thought the Microsoft image on Slashdot should have been of the Grand Nagus rather than a borgified Bill. :)
I don't see why an employee would need a service like Dropbox while working for a large corporation like IBM.
They already have all kinds of subversion, document, and content servers in-house, readily available by logging in to the VPN (securely!)
External services like Dropbox are fine for consumers whose employers don't already provide intranet "cloud" storage for data, but employees of large companies? What kind of employee shoot-myself-in-the-foot insanity would place cricital corporate information on a public cloud service instead of securely within the intranet cloud?
I tend to think we need to split out "Artificial Sentience" from "Artificial Intelligence." Technologies used for expert systems are clearly a form of subject-matter artificial intelligence, but they are not creative nor are they designed to learn about and explore new subject materials.
Artificial Sentience, on the other hand, would necessarily incorporate learning, postulation, and exploration of entirely new ideas or "insights." I firmly believe that in order to hold a believable conversation, a machine needs sentience, not just intelligence. Being able to come to a logical conclusion or to analyze sentence structures and verbiage into models of "thought" are only a first step -- the intelligence part.
Only when a machine can come up with and hold a conversation on new topics, while being able to tie the discussion history back to earlier statements so that the whole conversation "holds together" will be able to "fool" people. Because at that point, it won't be "fooling" anyone -- it will actually be thinking.
Congratulations indeed on passing such a major test of the systems that we've been hearing about for so long! :D
I'd like to know what perverse little-used function people are talking about, because I and many people I know have used OpenOffice/LibreOffice for years with zero problems. The first release of OpenOffice had some formatting issues, but those were ironed out by the first dot release.
As with the GP, I have seen far more problems with people stuck on Office 2K3 or Office 2K than I have with OpenOffice/LibreOffice.
Oh, wait! Maybe you're one of the people who embeds sound effects in a PowerPoint to the annoyance of everyone in the room...
Hah! Someone changed the website since this morning -- they now have a specifications tab on the page.
That should have been there before the link was posted, not after!
Oh, just irrelevant little details like the CPU being used, it's speed, the amount of memory, the amount of flash storage, the type of connectivity, the resolution of the screen, the type of screen...
Get the picture?
It has nothing to do with Android, iOS, or a vendor preference.
It has everything to do with a parent article with a blatant spam link! For a non-shipping, non-existent product, no less.