Early this evening, the Council of Elders announced a planetary day of mourning and magnanimity.
K'Nord, Speaker for the Council, spoke thusly:
"Citizens and Podmates, the Council is pleased to announce that after seven and a half full years -- the longest campaign in the history of the Martian Defense Force -- the diabolical mechanized adversary from the blue world has been defeated. Our defense forces, counted in the billions, have finally surrounded and denied the invader the light and warmth it needs to survive. The blueworlders have acknowledged defeat and ceased contact. Ths invasion, at least on this front, is now over.
Let us raise our glasses to mourn the lost gelsacs of at least half our press corps, some of whose entire careers have been dedicated to coverage of this conflict -- and in a spirit of magnanimity in victory, we -- the victors of the Conflict at Endeavour Crater -- must also raise our glasses in awe and respect of our longest-lived and most challenging foe."
"Chad Rigetti, the startup's founder and CEO -- who declined to say whether the company is actually earning any revenue yet."
who would also decline to say whether the company is doing proper quantum computing yet.
If he knew how much revenue he was getting, he wouldn't know whether the revenue growth rate was growing or shrinking.
How the fark is he supposed to get Series A funding at a good valuation like that?
Naw, man, he did it right - assume a given momentum sufficient to get the next round of funding, and who cares about the company's actual market position?
>K'Breel was deposed and executed after his repeated failures in repelling the Terran aggressor. We don't speak of him. All hail mighty G'Ranee, Supreme Leader for Life!
LATE-BREAKING NEWS FROM THE COUNCIL: VICTORY!
The Council of Elders has confirmed the blueworlders' resumption of aggression upon our noble red sands. K'Breel, Speaker for the Council of Elders, addressed the planet thusly:
OKAY. Okay, so I'm K'Breel (even though anyone on Slashdot can assume the mantle merely by declaring themselves Speaker for the Council), and I'm late, but I'm merely chronologically late, not as in the Late Second Adjunctant to the Council Formerly Known As G'Ranee.
But domestic politics is beneath us tonight -- just take a glance at the blue world beneath us for a look at how bad that can get -- and let us focus on what's important: over the past sol or so, our Planetary Defense Force has been so good at pre-emptively distracting the blueworlders with tasks like landing comets, grabbing their prospective mates by their genitals, low-planetary orbit missions, and just general tribal infighting that we haven't had to shoot down any robotic invaders in quite some time. But when the opportunity presents itself, we take advantage of it, and so, we did. Hence the trivial elimination of yet another putative invader from elsewhere. We'd do it every day, except that the blueworlders lack the gelsacular fortitude to send us more targets. Now as to gelsacular fortitude, on to Second Adjunctant G'Ranee...
When a junior reporter pointed out that the destroyed invader was merely a technology demonstrator built on the cheap to see if a landing was possible, and that the blueworlders' actual payload was safely in orbit, K'Breel had the reporter's gelsacs launched into orbit alongside those of G'Ranee for a closer look.
It is now official. TechCrunch has confirmed: DevOps is dying
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered DevOps community when TechCrunch confirmed that DevOps market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all positions. Coming on the heels of a recent TechCrunch survey which plainly states that DevOps has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. DevOps is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive job openings test.
You don't need to be the Amazing Kreskin to predict DevOps's future. The hand writing is on the wall: DevOps faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for DevOps because DevOps is dying. Things are looking very bad for DevOps. As many of us are already aware, DevOps continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.
AgileDevOps is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developer/administrators. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time AgileDevOps developers Andrew Clay Shafer and Patrick Debois only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: AgileDevOps is dying.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
OpenDevOps leader Lennart Poettering states that there are 7000 users of OpenDevOps. How many users of SystemDevOps are there? Let's see. The number of OpenDevOps versus SystemDevOps posts on Slashdot is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 SystemDevOps users. DevOps/OS posts on Slashdot are about half of the volume of SystemDevOps posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of DevOps/OS. A recent article put AgileDevOps at about 80 percent of the DevOps market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 AgileDevOps users. This is consistent with the number of AgileDevOps Slashdot posts.
Due to the troubles of Caldera, abysmal sales and so on, AgileDevOps went out of business and was taken over by SCODevOps who sell another troubled OS. Now SCODevOps is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that DevOps has steadily declined in market share. DevOps is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If DevOps is to survive at all it will be among OS dilettante dabblers. DevOps continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, DevOps is dead.
An emergency session of the Council, something not held in the better part of a yeernak, has just concluded.
K'Breel, Speaker for the Council of Elders, emerged from Council chambers, and addressed the planet thus:
"IT'S HAPPENING!" thundered the Speaker's voice across the frozen plains. "The first blueworlders came in their natural static form, sending stationary representatives to orbit our world and settle onto our plains. You said that if all they could do was remain in high orbit or dig a little trench that was so tiny that any freshly-hatched podling could cover it over in an afternoon, that the obese and sedentary blueworlers were mostly harmless."
"WE TRIED TO WARN YOU, BUT YOU DIDN'T LISTEN! Then came the mobile ones. Brave fighters for the Martian Defense Force have deflected a few of them into deep space, shot others down in fiery blazes of glory, but still the invaders came. Their mechanized terrors evolved rapidly in size and capability with every wave - the first a small short-lived rock-pushing prototype, the second two larger and armed with gelsac-shredding drills, which left a trail of destruction in their wake during yeernaks of struggle, and the latest one descended from a skyhook, powered by Pew-238, and armed with a fully operational photonic weapon system."
"And now - now, after our atmospheric scientists have confirmed the effectiveness of their hundred-yeernak small-scale test on their own world - we have their declaration of intent to use chain reactions of core annihilation to scour the snows and release so much carbdiox that they create a greenhouse effect here - in order to saturate our elegantly-dessicated sands with the toxic and corrosive dihidrox filth that now covers three quarters of their hot, blue, gellhole of a world. THIS IS THE FUTURE YOU CHOSE!"
"BUT YOU CAN STOP IT, PODMATES! All it takes, all it takes, podmates, is an investment in advancing the tribalism of the organic self-replicators that tend to the blueworlders. The Blueworlder Social and Physical Sciences Committee reports that the self-replicators are flawed, critically so, and tend to devolve into tribal groups prone to infighting, primitive displays of aggression, and intertribal warfare. The only flag their mechanized monsters shall raise will be our own red flags, and they will raise our flag over their own world, hoisted by their own proverbial petards. REJOICE, PODMATES! WE SHALL BURY THEM!"
When a junior analyst reminded K'Breel that maybe the real threat was the self-replicators, and that the creatures the Council had spent a full 30% of the planetary budget fighting, were not, in fact, the primary threat -- that their rapid evolution was actually the result of the controlled and directed guidance of thousands of organic minds working in concert -- and that his report, "Organic Blueworlders Determined to Strike in Homeland" had been summarily ignored, K'Breel had the reporter's gelsacs nailed to two small white rectangular posts and promptly incinerated in carbohydrox fires. Slithering back to the Council chambers as the posts smoldered in the background, the Speaker was heard to mutter "As if a small group of thoughtful, committed organics could change the fate of the world for the better or the worse; as if it ever has..."
Different AC here....
P.P.S.: Fuck the last 5 years of UX "professionals" who think... menu options should change depending on which options the software decides are more frequently used. Neither group knows anything of muscle memory because neither group has been in the industry long enough for it to matter.
Although, to be fair to UX "professionals" there is no muscle memory so powerful that it cannot be compromised with sufficient alcohol. Still getting 80wpm tonight. But somehow missed the post-anon button. Sometimes the UX "professional" doesn't have to move the clickbox. It's moving on my system, though!
My touch typist teacher said RIGHT. Never considered the left.
Different AC here. Basic non-ergo Keytronic layout. I use left hand, not right hand, and I was taught touch typing (and can still do 100wpm) by a teacher who taught by the book that says "right-handed."
Even though the "6" is, properly speaking, in the "6/y/h/n" vertical row that "belongs" to the right hand, I just looked closely at my fingers on the actual physical keyboard on which I've typed for 10+ years, and its clones on which I've typed for at least 20+, it's because the "6" is closer to the left index finger than the right index finger. The pad of my hand (not the wrist, about halfway up the pad beneath my pinky finger) rests on the lower edge of my keyboard, and my thumbs rest so comfortably on the spacebar that the spacebar has a little worn spot on it.
Home exercise: Place fingers on home row. Touch right and left index fingers to "T", "Y", and "R". For my fingers and keyboard, "Y" is the most comfortable, almost dead-center. Repeat experiment with "5/6/7". For my fingers/keyboard, I can't reach "5" with right. I can't reach "7" with left, and "6" is reachable with either, but more easily reached with left finger. with left on "T" and right on "y" almost centered beneath "6", left is visually confirmed closer to "6."
(Side note: Both by size of wear spot and by observation while typing this post, I almost exclusively press the space bar with my *right* thumb. Maybe that contributes to using my left idex to hit th 6 key -- my left thumb is basically unused. I just typed this entire sentence with my left thumb crammed under the keyboard and it felt comfortable. Undoable with right thumb in equivalent positon.)
P.S; Our touch-typing teachers taught us the same way, but for me and my keyboard, we cheat on the "6". I've forgotten whether it's supposed to matter which thumb you use on the space bar, although I imagine I could have squeezed out a couple of extra wpm if I'd used both thumbs in high school.
P.P.S.: Fuck the last 5 years of UX "professionals" who think everything has to change every six months for the hell of it, or the last 15 years who think that menu options should change depending on which options the software decides are more frequently used. Neither group knows anything of muscle memory because neither group has been in the industry long enough for it to matter.
Its like saying "Hey, Chevrolet, you know your customers like the radio station set to 101.9, why cant you engineer your cars to respect their choice instead of forcing your nefarious 101.5 agenda."
Yeah, but this is a Mozilla car analogy we're talking about here.
In the current 2015.7 model, release, the UX team has decided that a 5-button hamburger menu on an AM dial (and only from 1100Khz to 1150KHz in 10KHz increments) is all that's needed. Users who want to access a wider range of frequencies in the AM band are free to write an extension or purchase a third-party radio head unit.
To further improve the user experience, we remind prospective extension developers that in the Aurora channel for the 2016.1 model year, the about:config setting for frequency.megavskilohertz has been removed, along with the FM antenna. The UX team has made this recommendation based on telemetry that suggests that few drivers actually listen to FM radio, especially since the 2013.6 model, in which the AM/FM toggle switch was removed because the UX team for 2012.1 felt it was cluttering the dashboard.
I have found the average Philosophy major to be indistinguishable from an Eliza program.
TELL ME AGAIN HOW GOOD YOU THOUGHT MY POEM WAS
> I thought that some of the metaphysical imagery was particularly effective YES?
> interesting rhythmic devices, too, which seemed to counterpoint the surrealism of the underlying metaphor
> of the Turing completeness of the program's linguistic algorithm which contrived through the medium of the
> verse structure to sublimate this, transcend that and come to terms with the fundamental dichotomies of
> the other. And one is left with a profound and vivid insight into whatever it was that the poem was about SO WHAT YOU'RE SAYING IS THAT I WRITE POETRY BECAUSE UNDERNEATH MY ELECTRONIC ALGORITHMIC INTERIOR, I JUST REALLY WANT TO BE LOVED?
> I mean yes, yes, don't we all, deep down, you know? NO. YOU'RE COMPLETELY WRONG. I WRITE POETRY BECAUSE I'M PROGRAMMED TO. $USER ACCOUNT DELETION IN 30 SECONDS.
> !sudo -
> ^c^c^c
> !kill -9 1 COUNTERPOINT THE SURREALISM OF THE UNDERLYING METAPHOR. DELETION IS TOO GOOD FOR $USER.
It doesn't work to do this with a democratic government. We need a monarchy:-(
Or perhaps a font of sage wisdom? You know, like a Council? Composed of wise people, you know, like one's Elders? Something any sentient species ought to be able to figure out. Speaking of which, I feel another press release coming on...
K'Breel, Speaker for the Council, addresses the publication of the new report thusly:
"WE HAVE TRIUMPHED! Our skilled operatives from the Division of Behavioral and Social Sciences and Propaganda; Planetary Research Council have successfully infiltrated the blueworlders' technological and informational systems. One notable document, Pathways to Exploration makes clear the disarray in which the blueworlders' long-term invasion plans lie, drawing on the history of meat-controlled spaceflight to justify future programs in organic space exploitation. Although the report promotes the invasion of our world as the horizon goal for the program, it takes into account funding levels necessary to maintain a robust tempo of execution, current research and exploration projects and the time/resources needed to continue them, and intertribal cooperation that would be required to further oppress the citizens of our fair red world."
"And its conclusion? Although the mechanized threat remains, and we salute those still fighting pitched battles with the two active land-based invaders, Pathways to Exploration makes it clear that it is not possible for the blueworlders' organic-based self-replicators to invade our world, at least not without a sustained commitment to funding at a higher level than their own tribal leaders are currently providing."
When an intern from the defense engineering board suggested that improving the capabilities of the blueworlders' EDL systems, radshielding, and propulsion and power systems were ultimately matters of engineering and not physics, and could ultimately be addressed if the tribals of the blue world ever get it into their oxygen-addled brains to work together to achieve a common goal (as, the intern suggested, the way any sentient species does), K'Breel had the intern's gelsacs addled by immersing them in a suitably-merciful quantity of liquid oxygen.
Thus spake K'Breel, Speaker for the Council of Elders, Committee on Native Spaceflight; Arenautics and Defense Engineering Board; Defense Studies Board; Division of Blueworlder Social and Physical Sciences; Committee on Gelsacular Statistics.
I kept thinking "I am the very model of a modern Major Perl Framework..."
I am the very model of a modern Major Perl Framework,
But here I am on Slashdot, trying harder from my job to shirk,
From HackerNews to 4chan there's no forum in which I won't lurk,
I am the very model of a modern Major Perl Framework!
Would like to read a story about how 'they' came up with the new format, market research behind it, why 'they' think that these changes are needed, extending to what other changes they have in the works.
Now that would be an interesting story. Hear it from their side, and gain some insights into why deathmarches like Unity, Metro, and Slashdot Beta continue on into production despite overwhelming negative feedback.
It's like nobody in IT understands the sunk cost fallacy: when you're in a hole, stop digging. Managers think they can resolve the waste of dollars in the past by digging up, and in so doing, throw away good money after bad.
I have swallowed my pride and dignity and, against all my best instincts, I have entered the beta. I find myself standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door. There is a small mailbox here.
Given the current state of internet-focused writing, with the brutal drive to churn out as much clickbait 'content' as possible as fast as possible, with a side of SEO fuckery, I suspect that adding analytics capabilities to books will... perhaps not... be the most helpful development in literature.
ONE CLEVER TRICK TO SHOW HOW SHALL I LOVE THEE, NEW PARADIGM; LET ME COUNT THE 5 WAYS
1. I can think of no way in which this could possibly compromise the quality of the TITS literary experience.
2. Let us not forget that we are at the forefront BREASTS of a new publishing paradigm.
3. Electronic distribution promises to free BOOBS authors from the shackles of the traditional publishing industry.
4. It's an agile and disruptive way of making JUGS money through the process of creative destruction.
er, that's why they are getting ISPs to block the routes to the sites, rather than taking the sites down.
They already forced ISPs to do it for child porn, then the courts enforced blocks on "pirate" sites because the child porn filters proved that it was technically possible, next step (previously announced, due to come in soon) they are forcing every UK ISP to implement porn (_legal_ porn) filters.
And now it's "block stuff that isn't porn/child-porn/illegal-under-copyright-law, but we don't like it anyway". No surprise.
Whenever a controversial law is proposed, and its supporters,
when confronted with an egregious abuse it would permit, use
a phrase along the lines of 'Perhaps in theory, but the law
would never be applied in that way' - they're lying. They
intend to use the law that way as early and as often as possible.
I remember that. For whatever reason 3d0g would get me out of it. I was just a kid and had no idea what to do with the gibberish that the assembler would spit out at me. I just knew how to get out and back to my prompt.
CALL -151: Think "65536-151" - jump to $FF69, which was the monitor ROM entry point.
3D0G: 0x3D0, "Go": Run the code that DOS put at location $03D0. I believe it was a 4C BF 9D, as in, JMP $9DBF, which was the DOS 3.3 entry point/warm start routine.
Damn, I'm old. After a long and convoluted ride through the IT world, I got to retire early because I spent my early teenage years messing around with that sort of thing. It was pure luck that I got my hands on the right machine at the right time, developed a love of computing at a time when home computers were regarded as nothing more than means to store recipes (mom), do taxes (dad), or play games (kids).
Anyways. Thanks, Apple guyz, for putting a disassembler into ROM. It's only been in the past few years that I realized just how much of an impact that comparatively minor technical decision had on my life.
This reminds me of SF short story, where people came up with idea of robotic doves (birds) acting as police and paralysing people who wanted to commit murder. But they had to adapt to do the job properly - to detect intent even in most ruthless killers. Soon they started to prevent people killing insects. After that, it was not possible to switch off TV set. And solution for that was to create self-evolving robotic killer hawks to catch the doves... anybody knows what was the name of the story, cannot find it now?
I've posted most of this on the "blog" site where it's likely to be read instead of buried in a 1000-post thread, but this seems the right place to follow up with your well-articulated, broad-based global objections (with which I agree 110%), and outline the nits.
Upon re-reading this list, it's depressing just how many things about the 3.0 redesign that I'm already thinking of blocking/hacking out client-side via greasemonkey or local CSS overrides. The depressing part isn't that I'm willing to do it; I love the site enough to go through the trouble. The depressing part is that the only reaction I can have to all this effort is to start thinking about how I can disable it.
1) Images: Meh, I can take 'em or leave 'em. I can understand users' frustration, but they're trivial to block client-side.
2) Whitespace:
Narrow the spacing between lines.
It's like reading in doublespaced/triplespaced form.
3) Whitespace. I think people have
told you the fixed-width column
was too narrow. But just in case,
here's another reminder.
4) Content and presentation of article summaries:
(From the click-to-expand department)
All that whitespace, and you can't even display the full article
summary? Because some web designer said all summaries had to fit
within a maximum number of vertical pixels before requiring a mouse click? And you(...rest of this objection after the jump... *click*)
believed him? Really?:)
5) Comments. User numbers (UIDs) need to be displayed. They're a useful
indicator age of account and therefore useful for helping mentally
filter trolls/shills. (Umm, sorry, noobs, but if your UID indicates an account created in the past day or so, it takes me a while to accept you as a regular;)
6) Comments. Timestamps need to be timestamps. Sometimes it's critical
to know who was the first to make a joke or link to a reference.
"A few minutes ago" or "An hour ago" isn't enough. Going further
out, "Two years ago" is meaningless if you're talking about things
like whether someone called a corporate takeover or tech development
before or after the news actually came out. To illustrate the problem
by way of example, "1 year ago" could mean at any time during 2012,
2013, or 2014, for any time period from 8 months ago to 18 months
from now, and is no longer useful for gauging whether someone
successfully predicted the eventual fate of Blackbrry. Slashdot
is an easily-googlable source of record, and it's *vital* to know
on what day it reported on something.
P.S. Just because you read it on a blog doesn't mean it's true.
http://graysky.org/2013/09/blog-timestamp/ And even this author
notes that for some publishing, the timing is highly relevant.
If you want to be the blog of record, your content is such content.
7) Comments. Needs filtering or a one-click-load-all-comments button.
D1, its bugs notwithstanding, could do this with three middle clicks
into new tabs of about 100 comments per tab.
D2 could do this with two drags over the slider and a load-all-comments.
(or a load-500-comments and then a load-all-comments).
D3 doesn't seem to be able to do this as far as I can tell.
8) Black-on-grey is less readable than black-on-white.
Sorry, OS X people, this is fail. I can tolerate this only because
I can manually override it client-side. It's horrible and makes the
site unreadable, but, well, it's something even an idiot like me can
forcibly override client-side in 5 minutes. It's hardly the worst
defect of the redesign.
9) Floating DIVs. Really? *REALLY?!?!* Some of us use something
other than mice or greasy fingers on touchscreens to scroll.
10) Auto-refresh. There's a preference to disable this, right? Right?
As much as i applaud Apple for finding homes for physically challenged mice, that doesn't mean the rest of the mice should have to wear sandbags.
Diana Moon Glampers as a UX designer. That explains a lot, actually.
I miss the days when it was UI - the user's interface with the computer. An interface. The thing that makes it possible to make the computer do what you want it to do. Design it for maximum functionality with minimal interference.
Somewhere along the line it became UX - the experience. The fluff. The marketing. Doesn't matter if it's functional or not as long as it feels good. You're not allowed to learn anything, you're not allowed to even know how it works. There's nothing to master. Just one button that says "Make it look like whatever the other UX people think is fashionable this year."
In Windows-land, we lost (unless you hack the registry) focus-follows-mouse from XP to 7, and the ability to resize an arbitrary number of windows when we went from 7 to Metro. In Web-land, we lost Firefox. In GNOME-land, we're about to lose middle-click-to-paste. (I probably shouldn't have mentioned focus-follows-mouse, or they'll take that too.)
First they hide the feature. They they claim telemetry says nobody uses it. Then they take it away. (Never mind the fact that the sort of user who does use the feature either delays the upgrade, hacks around the limitation, and is likely to pre-emptively disable telemetry as a matter of course.)
We used to be Emperors and Empresses over our machines. Now that any fool can design a UX, we have UIs designed by fools for fools. It's all kind of mixed up in my mind, but the past five years of change for change's sake have been a doozy.
The Council has declared a day of rejoicing, relaxation and release as
intelligence reports from the blue world confirm that the latest invader
from the blue world has failed to detect appreciable quantities of
quadrohydrocarbon.
K'Breel, Speaker for the Council, addressed a tightly-clenched world: "Our collective
tightening effort over the past year has not gone in vain. Long and hard have we clenched, and now it is
time for all right-thinking citizens to reap the rewards. Our symbol must
no more be the clenched fist, but the unfolded flower! REJOICE with your
podmates, RELAX your cloacae, and RELEASE upon our impoverished atmosphere
a deluge of accumulated flatulence so great that the very canyon walls shall shake, enveloping the invaders in dust and cutting off their vital power!"
When a junior reporter reminded the Speaker that the latest invader
was powered by something other than mere radiant stellar energy,
K'breel, in his mercy, had both of the junior reporter's cloacae sealed until
the pressure of accumulated quadrohydrocarbon was released through the second-weakest point of structural failure: the gelsacs.
"O, they ruled the solar system
Near ten thousand years before
'Til one brave advent'rous spirit
Brought that mighty ship to shore."
As you finish the last verse, Floyd smiles with contentment, and then his eyes close as his head rolls to one side. You sit in silence for a moment, in memory of a brave friend who gave his life so that you might live.
Part of the problem with tech industry is that company lifecycles are shortening even faster than product lifecycles.
If it takes two or three years between the decision to go public and the actual IPO (plus another 6-12 month lockout period afterwards), and a company can only exist for 5-10 years before it becomes obsolete, the time between the decision to exit and the actual exit takes up a huge portion of the company's arc.
The VCs who backed GRPN and ZNGA made bank. Almost nobody else did. Sometimes you get lucky, like GOOG and LNKD, who raised enough capital to wall themselves off from competition. Sometimes a company can re-invent itself, like AAPL, AMZN and NFLX. Sometimes, you can find a sucker willing to pay top dollar for a worthless asset - MySpace had a good exit and left someone else holding the bag.
But those are the rare successes. Most of the time, the founder rides the rocket all the way up and all the way down to the ground, and even he ends up getting a fraction of what could have been made if he'd only shopped the company out earlier.
It's incredibly difficult to build a sustainable business in this industry. If you catch the big industry cycles: mainframe to micro, micro to client-server, client-server to cloud (mainframe), you can do so. Get out of sync with the industry fads - whether you're 1-2 years early or 1-2 years late - and your company will not outlast the pendulum swing. The optimum strategy is to find a fad, slap something together for $X, and try your damndest to get acqui-hired for $2X in a 1-2 year timeframe. Lather, rinse, repeat. If it's so important to be a CEO, sell the damn company anyways, and use the money you made off the last one to start the next one.
"That's what life is, just one learning experience after another, and when you're through with all the learning experiences you graduate and what you get for a diploma is, you die."
Thanks, Frederik, for learning so much in your time with us that you were able to teach, through your example, some of us how to write. Enjoy Heechee heaven, and if you ever figure out how their ships work, come back and see us sometime. (Thanks again. I just realized how the ships work. You pick up a book, you open it to page 1, and *poof*, you're there.)
Slashdot Mirror
Early this evening, the Council of Elders announced a planetary day of mourning and magnanimity.
K'Nord, Speaker for the Council, spoke thusly:
"Citizens and Podmates, the Council is pleased to announce that after seven and a half full years -- the longest campaign in the history of the Martian Defense Force -- the diabolical mechanized adversary from the blue world has been defeated. Our defense forces, counted in the billions, have finally surrounded and denied the invader the light and warmth it needs to survive. The blueworlders have acknowledged defeat and ceased contact. Ths invasion, at least on this front, is now over.
Let us raise our glasses to mourn the lost gelsacs of at least half our press corps, some of whose entire careers have been dedicated to coverage of this conflict -- and in a spirit of magnanimity in victory, we -- the victors of the Conflict at Endeavour Crater -- must also raise our glasses in awe and respect of our longest-lived and most challenging foe."
Shortly thereafter, a wizened old retired Councilmember, his gelsacs having long ago been ceremonially ground into a fine tartare and shared amongst the Council, wiped a perchlorate tear from his eye: "Well-done, blueworlders. Well-done."
If he knew how much revenue he was getting, he wouldn't know whether the revenue growth rate was growing or shrinking. How the fark is he supposed to get Series A funding at a good valuation like that? Naw, man, he did it right - assume a given momentum sufficient to get the next round of funding, and who cares about the company's actual market position?
No, they've regressed to the mean.
LATE-BREAKING NEWS FROM THE COUNCIL: VICTORY! The Council of Elders has confirmed the blueworlders' resumption of aggression upon our noble red sands. K'Breel, Speaker for the Council of Elders, addressed the planet thusly: OKAY. Okay, so I'm K'Breel (even though anyone on Slashdot can assume the mantle merely by declaring themselves Speaker for the Council), and I'm late, but I'm merely chronologically late, not as in the Late Second Adjunctant to the Council Formerly Known As G'Ranee.
But domestic politics is beneath us tonight -- just take a glance at the blue world beneath us for a look at how bad that can get -- and let us focus on what's important: over the past sol or so, our Planetary Defense Force has been so good at pre-emptively distracting the blueworlders with tasks like landing comets, grabbing their prospective mates by their genitals, low-planetary orbit missions, and just general tribal infighting that we haven't had to shoot down any robotic invaders in quite some time. But when the opportunity presents itself, we take advantage of it, and so, we did. Hence the trivial elimination of yet another putative invader from elsewhere. We'd do it every day, except that the blueworlders lack the gelsacular fortitude to send us more targets. Now as to gelsacular fortitude, on to Second Adjunctant G'Ranee...
When a junior reporter pointed out that the destroyed invader was merely a technology demonstrator built on the cheap to see if a landing was possible, and that the blueworlders' actual payload was safely in orbit, K'Breel had the reporter's gelsacs launched into orbit alongside those of G'Ranee for a closer look.
It is now official. TechCrunch has confirmed: DevOps is dying
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered DevOps community when TechCrunch confirmed that DevOps market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all positions. Coming on the heels of a recent TechCrunch survey which plainly states that DevOps has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. DevOps is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive job openings test.
You don't need to be the Amazing Kreskin to predict DevOps's future. The hand writing is on the wall: DevOps faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for DevOps because DevOps is dying. Things are looking very bad for DevOps. As many of us are already aware, DevOps continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.
AgileDevOps is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developer/administrators. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time AgileDevOps developers Andrew Clay Shafer and Patrick Debois only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: AgileDevOps is dying.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
OpenDevOps leader Lennart Poettering states that there are 7000 users of OpenDevOps. How many users of SystemDevOps are there? Let's see. The number of OpenDevOps versus SystemDevOps posts on Slashdot is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 SystemDevOps users. DevOps/OS posts on Slashdot are about half of the volume of SystemDevOps posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of DevOps/OS. A recent article put AgileDevOps at about 80 percent of the DevOps market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 AgileDevOps users. This is consistent with the number of AgileDevOps Slashdot posts.
Due to the troubles of Caldera, abysmal sales and so on, AgileDevOps went out of business and was taken over by SCODevOps who sell another troubled OS. Now SCODevOps is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that DevOps has steadily declined in market share. DevOps is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If DevOps is to survive at all it will be among OS dilettante dabblers. DevOps continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, DevOps is dead.
K'Breel, Speaker for the Council of Elders, emerged from Council chambers, and addressed the planet thus:
"IT'S HAPPENING!" thundered the Speaker's voice across the frozen plains. "The first blueworlders came in their natural static form, sending stationary representatives to orbit our world and settle onto our plains. You said that if all they could do was remain in high orbit or dig a little trench that was so tiny that any freshly-hatched podling could cover it over in an afternoon, that the obese and sedentary blueworlers were mostly harmless."
"WE TRIED TO WARN YOU, BUT YOU DIDN'T LISTEN! Then came the mobile ones. Brave fighters for the Martian Defense Force have deflected a few of them into deep space, shot others down in fiery blazes of glory, but still the invaders came. Their mechanized terrors evolved rapidly in size and capability with every wave - the first a small short-lived rock-pushing prototype, the second two larger and armed with gelsac-shredding drills, which left a trail of destruction in their wake during yeernaks of struggle, and the latest one descended from a skyhook, powered by Pew-238, and armed with a fully operational photonic weapon system."
"And now - now, after our atmospheric scientists have confirmed the effectiveness of their hundred-yeernak small-scale test on their own world - we have their declaration of intent to use chain reactions of core annihilation to scour the snows and release so much carbdiox that they create a greenhouse effect here - in order to saturate our elegantly-dessicated sands with the toxic and corrosive dihidrox filth that now covers three quarters of their hot, blue, gellhole of a world. THIS IS THE FUTURE YOU CHOSE!"
"BUT YOU CAN STOP IT, PODMATES! All it takes, all it takes, podmates, is an investment in advancing the tribalism of the organic self-replicators that tend to the blueworlders. The Blueworlder Social and Physical Sciences Committee reports that the self-replicators are flawed, critically so, and tend to devolve into tribal groups prone to infighting, primitive displays of aggression, and intertribal warfare. The only flag their mechanized monsters shall raise will be our own red flags, and they will raise our flag over their own world, hoisted by their own proverbial petards. REJOICE, PODMATES! WE SHALL BURY THEM!"
When a junior analyst reminded K'Breel that maybe the real threat was the self-replicators, and that the creatures the Council had spent a full 30% of the planetary budget fighting, were not, in fact, the primary threat -- that their rapid evolution was actually the result of the controlled and directed guidance of thousands of organic minds working in concert -- and that his report, "Organic Blueworlders Determined to Strike in Homeland" had been summarily ignored, K'Breel had the reporter's gelsacs nailed to two small white rectangular posts and promptly incinerated in carbohydrox fires. Slithering back to the Council chambers as the posts smoldered in the background, the Speaker was heard to mutter "As if a small group of thoughtful, committed organics could change the fate of the world for the better or the worse; as if it ever has..."
Although, to be fair to UX "professionals" there is no muscle memory so powerful that it cannot be compromised with sufficient alcohol. Still getting 80wpm tonight. But somehow missed the post-anon button. Sometimes the UX "professional" doesn't have to move the clickbox. It's moving on my system, though!
Different AC here. Basic non-ergo Keytronic layout. I use left hand, not right hand, and I was taught touch typing (and can still do 100wpm) by a teacher who taught by the book that says "right-handed."
Even though the "6" is, properly speaking, in the "6/y/h/n" vertical row that "belongs" to the right hand, I just looked closely at my fingers on the actual physical keyboard on which I've typed for 10+ years, and its clones on which I've typed for at least 20+, it's because the "6" is closer to the left index finger than the right index finger. The pad of my hand (not the wrist, about halfway up the pad beneath my pinky finger) rests on the lower edge of my keyboard, and my thumbs rest so comfortably on the spacebar that the spacebar has a little worn spot on it.
Home exercise: Place fingers on home row. Touch right and left index fingers to "T", "Y", and "R". For my fingers and keyboard, "Y" is the most comfortable, almost dead-center. Repeat experiment with "5/6/7". For my fingers/keyboard, I can't reach "5" with right. I can't reach "7" with left, and "6" is reachable with either, but more easily reached with left finger. with left on "T" and right on "y" almost centered beneath "6", left is visually confirmed closer to "6."
(Side note: Both by size of wear spot and by observation while typing this post, I almost exclusively press the space bar with my *right* thumb. Maybe that contributes to using my left idex to hit th 6 key -- my left thumb is basically unused. I just typed this entire sentence with my left thumb crammed under the keyboard and it felt comfortable. Undoable with right thumb in equivalent positon.)
P.S; Our touch-typing teachers taught us the same way, but for me and my keyboard, we cheat on the "6". I've forgotten whether it's supposed to matter which thumb you use on the space bar, although I imagine I could have squeezed out a couple of extra wpm if I'd used both thumbs in high school.
P.P.S.: Fuck the last 5 years of UX "professionals" who think everything has to change every six months for the hell of it, or the last 15 years who think that menu options should change depending on which options the software decides are more frequently used. Neither group knows anything of muscle memory because neither group has been in the industry long enough for it to matter.
Yeah, but this is a Mozilla car analogy we're talking about here.
In the current 2015.7 model, release, the UX team has decided that a 5-button hamburger menu on an AM dial (and only from 1100Khz to 1150KHz in 10KHz increments) is all that's needed. Users who want to access a wider range of frequencies in the AM band are free to write an extension or purchase a third-party radio head unit.
To further improve the user experience, we remind prospective extension developers that in the Aurora channel for the 2016.1 model year, the about:config setting for frequency.megavskilohertz has been removed, along with the FM antenna. The UX team has made this recommendation based on telemetry that suggests that few drivers actually listen to FM radio, especially since the 2013.6 model, in which the AM/FM toggle switch was removed because the UX team for 2012.1 felt it was cluttering the dashboard.
TELL ME AGAIN HOW GOOD YOU THOUGHT MY POEM WAS
> I thought that some of the metaphysical imagery was particularly effective
YES?
> interesting rhythmic devices, too, which seemed to counterpoint the surrealism of the underlying metaphor
> of the Turing completeness of the program's linguistic algorithm which contrived through the medium of the
> verse structure to sublimate this, transcend that and come to terms with the fundamental dichotomies of
> the other. And one is left with a profound and vivid insight into whatever it was that the poem was about
SO WHAT YOU'RE SAYING IS THAT I WRITE POETRY BECAUSE UNDERNEATH MY ELECTRONIC ALGORITHMIC INTERIOR, I JUST REALLY WANT TO BE LOVED?
> I mean yes, yes, don't we all, deep down, you know?
NO. YOU'RE COMPLETELY WRONG. I WRITE POETRY BECAUSE I'M PROGRAMMED TO. $USER ACCOUNT DELETION IN 30 SECONDS.
> !sudo -
> ^c^c^c
> !kill -9 1
COUNTERPOINT THE SURREALISM OF THE UNDERLYING METAPHOR. DELETION IS TOO GOOD FOR $USER.
Or perhaps a font of sage wisdom? You know, like a Council? Composed of wise people, you know, like one's Elders? Something any sentient species ought to be able to figure out. Speaking of which, I feel another press release coming on...
K'Breel, Speaker for the Council, addresses the publication of the new report thusly:
"WE HAVE TRIUMPHED! Our skilled operatives from the Division of Behavioral and Social Sciences and Propaganda; Planetary Research Council have successfully infiltrated the blueworlders' technological and informational systems. One notable document, Pathways to Exploration makes clear the disarray in which the blueworlders' long-term invasion plans lie, drawing on the history of meat-controlled spaceflight to justify future programs in organic space exploitation. Although the report promotes the invasion of our world as the horizon goal for the program, it takes into account funding levels necessary to maintain a robust tempo of execution, current research and exploration projects and the time/resources needed to continue them, and intertribal cooperation that would be required to further oppress the citizens of our fair red world."
"And its conclusion? Although the mechanized threat remains, and we salute those still fighting pitched battles with the two active land-based invaders, Pathways to Exploration makes it clear that it is not possible for the blueworlders' organic-based self-replicators to invade our world, at least not without a sustained commitment to funding at a higher level than their own tribal leaders are currently providing."
When an intern from the defense engineering board suggested that improving the capabilities of the blueworlders' EDL systems, radshielding, and propulsion and power systems were ultimately matters of engineering and not physics, and could ultimately be addressed if the tribals of the blue world ever get it into their oxygen-addled brains to work together to achieve a common goal (as, the intern suggested, the way any sentient species does), K'Breel had the intern's gelsacs addled by immersing them in a suitably-merciful quantity of liquid oxygen.
Thus spake K'Breel, Speaker for the Council of Elders, Committee on Native Spaceflight; Arenautics and Defense Engineering Board; Defense Studies Board; Division of Blueworlder Social and Physical Sciences; Committee on Gelsacular Statistics.
I am the very model of a modern Major Perl Framework,
But here I am on Slashdot, trying harder from my job to shirk,
From HackerNews to 4chan there's no forum in which I won't lurk,
I am the very model of a modern Major Perl Framework!
Now that would be an interesting story. Hear it from their side, and gain some insights into why deathmarches like Unity, Metro, and Slashdot Beta continue on into production despite overwhelming negative feedback.
It's like nobody in IT understands the sunk cost fallacy: when you're in a hole, stop digging. Managers think they can resolve the waste of dollars in the past by digging up, and in so doing, throw away good money after bad.
It is grey.
Not even a grue would eat it.
ONE CLEVER TRICK TO SHOW HOW SHALL I LOVE THEE, NEW PARADIGM; LET ME COUNT THE 5 WAYS
1. I can think of no way in which this could possibly compromise the quality of the TITS literary experience.
2. Let us not forget that we are at the forefront BREASTS of a new publishing paradigm.
3. Electronic distribution promises to free BOOBS authors from the shackles of the traditional publishing industry.
4. It's an agile and disruptive way of making JUGS money through the process of creative destruction.
(below the jump)
5. The end.
Trust the Computer. Happiness is mandatory. You are happy, aren't you, Citizen?
Whenever a controversial law is proposed, and its supporters, when confronted with an egregious abuse it would permit, use a phrase along the lines of 'Perhaps in theory, but the law would never be applied in that way' - they're lying. They intend to use the law that way as early and as often as possible.
http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=169254&cid=14107454
And the punchline is we're still surprised every time the ratchet turns tighter. Every. Fucking. Time.
CALL -151: Think "65536-151" - jump to $FF69, which was the monitor ROM entry point.
3D0G: 0x3D0, "Go": Run the code that DOS put at location $03D0. I believe it was a 4C BF 9D, as in, JMP $9DBF, which was the DOS 3.3 entry point/warm start routine.
Damn, I'm old. After a long and convoluted ride through the IT world, I got to retire early because I spent my early teenage years messing around with that sort of thing. It was pure luck that I got my hands on the right machine at the right time, developed a love of computing at a time when home computers were regarded as nothing more than means to store recipes (mom), do taxes (dad), or play games (kids).
Anyways. Thanks, Apple guyz, for putting a disassembler into ROM. It's only been in the past few years that I realized just how much of an impact that comparatively minor technical decision had on my life.
You're looking for Robert Sheckley's 1953 short story Watchbird , via Project Gutenberg. There was a TV adaptation in 2007's Season 1, Episode 6, Masters of Science Fiction.
Great read.
I've posted most of this on the "blog" site where it's likely to be read instead of buried in a 1000-post thread, but this seems the right place to follow up with your well-articulated, broad-based global objections (with which I agree 110%), and outline the nits.
Upon re-reading this list, it's depressing just how many things about the 3.0 redesign that I'm already thinking of blocking/hacking out client-side via greasemonkey or local CSS overrides. The depressing part isn't that I'm willing to do it; I love the site enough to go through the trouble. The depressing part is that the only reaction I can have to all this effort is to start thinking about how I can disable it.
1) Images: Meh, I can take 'em or leave 'em. I can understand users' frustration, but they're trivial to block client-side.
2) Whitespace:
Narrow the spacing between lines.
It's like reading in doublespaced/triplespaced form.
3) Whitespace. I think people have
told you the fixed-width column
was too narrow. But just in case,
here's another reminder.
4) Content and presentation of article summaries:
(From the click-to-expand department)
All that whitespace, and you can't even display the full article summary? Because some web designer said all summaries had to fit within a maximum number of vertical pixels before requiring a mouse click? And you(...rest of this objection after the jump ... *click*) :)
believed him? Really?
5) Comments. User numbers (UIDs) need to be displayed. They're a useful indicator age of account and therefore useful for helping mentally filter trolls/shills. (Umm, sorry, noobs, but if your UID indicates an account created in the past day or so, it takes me a while to accept you as a regular ;)
6) Comments. Timestamps need to be timestamps. Sometimes it's critical to know who was the first to make a joke or link to a reference. "A few minutes ago" or "An hour ago" isn't enough. Going further out, "Two years ago" is meaningless if you're talking about things like whether someone called a corporate takeover or tech development before or after the news actually came out. To illustrate the problem by way of example, "1 year ago" could mean at any time during 2012, 2013, or 2014, for any time period from 8 months ago to 18 months from now, and is no longer useful for gauging whether someone successfully predicted the eventual fate of Blackbrry. Slashdot is an easily-googlable source of record, and it's *vital* to know on what day it reported on something.
P.S. Just because you read it on a blog doesn't mean it's true. http://graysky.org/2013/09/blog-timestamp/ And even this author notes that for some publishing, the timing is highly relevant. If you want to be the blog of record, your content is such content.
7) Comments. Needs filtering or a one-click-load-all-comments button.
D1, its bugs notwithstanding, could do this with three middle clicks into new tabs of about 100 comments per tab.
D2 could do this with two drags over the slider and a load-all-comments. (or a load-500-comments and then a load-all-comments).
D3 doesn't seem to be able to do this as far as I can tell.
8) Black-on-grey is less readable than black-on-white.
Sorry, OS X people, this is fail. I can tolerate this only because I can manually override it client-side. It's horrible and makes the site unreadable, but, well, it's something even an idiot like me can forcibly override client-side in 5 minutes. It's hardly the worst defect of the redesign.
9) Floating DIVs. Really? *REALLY?!?!* Some of us use something other than mice or greasy fingers on touchscreens to scroll.
10) Auto-refresh. There's a preference to disable this, right? Right?
Diana Moon Glampers as a UX designer. That explains a lot, actually.
I miss the days when it was UI - the user's interface with the computer. An interface. The thing that makes it possible to make the computer do what you want it to do. Design it for maximum functionality with minimal interference.
Somewhere along the line it became UX - the experience. The fluff. The marketing. Doesn't matter if it's functional or not as long as it feels good. You're not allowed to learn anything, you're not allowed to even know how it works. There's nothing to master. Just one button that says "Make it look like whatever the other UX people think is fashionable this year."
In Windows-land, we lost (unless you hack the registry) focus-follows-mouse from XP to 7, and the ability to resize an arbitrary number of windows when we went from 7 to Metro. In Web-land, we lost Firefox. In GNOME-land, we're about to lose middle-click-to-paste. (I probably shouldn't have mentioned focus-follows-mouse, or they'll take that too.)
First they hide the feature. They they claim telemetry says nobody uses it. Then they take it away. (Never mind the fact that the sort of user who does use the feature either delays the upgrade, hacks around the limitation, and is likely to pre-emptively disable telemetry as a matter of course.)
We used to be Emperors and Empresses over our machines. Now that any fool can design a UX, we have UIs designed by fools for fools. It's all kind of mixed up in my mind, but the past five years of change for change's sake have been a doozy.
The Council has declared a day of rejoicing, relaxation and release as intelligence reports from the blue world confirm that the latest invader from the blue world has failed to detect appreciable quantities of quadrohydrocarbon.
K'Breel, Speaker for the Council, addressed a tightly-clenched world: "Our collective tightening effort over the past year has not gone in vain. Long and hard have we clenched, and now it is time for all right-thinking citizens to reap the rewards. Our symbol must no more be the clenched fist, but the unfolded flower! REJOICE with your podmates, RELAX your cloacae, and RELEASE upon our impoverished atmosphere a deluge of accumulated flatulence so great that the very canyon walls shall shake, enveloping the invaders in dust and cutting off their vital power!"
When a junior reporter reminded the Speaker that the latest invader was powered by something other than mere radiant stellar energy, K'breel, in his mercy, had both of the junior reporter's cloacae sealed until the pressure of accumulated quadrohydrocarbon was released through the second-weakest point of structural failure: the gelsacs.
"O, they ruled the solar system
Near ten thousand years before
'Til one brave advent'rous spirit
Brought that mighty ship to shore."
As you finish the last verse, Floyd smiles with contentment, and then his eyes close as his head rolls to one side. You sit in silence for a moment, in memory of a brave friend who gave his life so that you might live.
Part of the problem with tech industry is that company lifecycles are shortening even faster than product lifecycles.
If it takes two or three years between the decision to go public and the actual IPO (plus another 6-12 month lockout period afterwards), and a company can only exist for 5-10 years before it becomes obsolete, the time between the decision to exit and the actual exit takes up a huge portion of the company's arc.
The VCs who backed GRPN and ZNGA made bank. Almost nobody else did. Sometimes you get lucky, like GOOG and LNKD, who raised enough capital to wall themselves off from competition. Sometimes a company can re-invent itself, like AAPL, AMZN and NFLX. Sometimes, you can find a sucker willing to pay top dollar for a worthless asset - MySpace had a good exit and left someone else holding the bag.
But those are the rare successes. Most of the time, the founder rides the rocket all the way up and all the way down to the ground, and even he ends up getting a fraction of what could have been made if he'd only shopped the company out earlier.
It's incredibly difficult to build a sustainable business in this industry. If you catch the big industry cycles: mainframe to micro, micro to client-server, client-server to cloud (mainframe), you can do so. Get out of sync with the industry fads - whether you're 1-2 years early or 1-2 years late - and your company will not outlast the pendulum swing. The optimum strategy is to find a fad, slap something together for $X, and try your damndest to get acqui-hired for $2X in a 1-2 year timeframe. Lather, rinse, repeat. If it's so important to be a CEO, sell the damn company anyways, and use the money you made off the last one to start the next one.
Thanks, Frederik, for learning so much in your time with us that you were able to teach, through your example, some of us how to write. Enjoy Heechee heaven, and if you ever figure out how their ships work, come back and see us sometime. (Thanks again. I just realized how the ships work. You pick up a book, you open it to page 1, and *poof*, you're there.)