I have a variable height standing desk at work. I asked for a desk inspection (which the company gives for free as it's scared of litigation for things like carpel tunnel). The inspector told me how to configure the desk correctly for both standing and sitting, and said that I should neither stand nor sit too much during the day. Mix it up. I sometimes do the morning sitting, the afternoon standing or whole days on either, and other combinations. There are also operational pros and cons of each (when standing you can see people coming from further away, but have less desk space to use).
I'm not too bothered about my mortality, just my short-term musculoskeletal health. I should point out though that I've heard about the varicose veins thing and so I secretly wear compression socks to work now.
"specifically the aftermath of the nuclear test site collapse seemed to be a key turning point"
Yes, although China had quietly and quite suddenly pulled the plug on them a couple of months prior to the collapse by reducing amongs other things their gasoline exports by 97%.
China's action is thought to have prompted Kim's trip to Beijing, where he was perhaps told how things would now play out by his only ally and provider of the vast majority of his foreign trade. So much for self reliance then.
Whether Trump had anything much to do with this is... Doubtful.
You also need off-street parking to charge the car, and relying solely on public charge points is very inconvenient. This is a serious practical limitation to the use of EVs in many European cities like London right now, where off-street parking is rare.
The reason Jobs is venerated is that he is perceived as being an ordinary guy who became fabulously rich. In the US, that guarantees you immortal veneration in the minds of millions of unlucky saps who wish they were you. The fact that his company is also very high profile (Apple stores etc.) helps a great deal too. This is why, say, Warren Buffet doesn't enjoy the same veneration. Bill Gates, having "lost" to Jobs, is also not on the pedestal for that reason. And Trump - it's why we have him in White House of course.
Too many politicians think the only way of making the world better is by legislating things in or out of existence. In response to every event, their minds turn like clockwork to the question of what laws they can pass or repeal to make the problem go away.
Before wielding the ban hammer, good politicians first consider whether they can do anything to make the use of the hammer unnecessary. In this case, how about re-considering support for Saudi Arabia, or Israel? Or how about the role of climate change, or of NGOs, or evangelical Christian groups?
If we wanted to just create laws every time something happens that we don't like, we'd do better to have robots (or hey, direct democracy) for that instead. See also "cone syndrome" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
I'm not saying non-legislative efforts might always work, just that legislating and leaving is clearly not working. It's lazy and debases politics such that nobody believes in it any more.
Lots of people here posting knowledgeably, so I thought I'd add my tuppence.
Here's a few reasons why the hotel chains haven't turned their backs on the likes of Booking.com and Hotels.com (an Expedia Inc company roughly four times smaller than Booking.com BTW) and others:
1. Both are localised in 50+ languages and basically cover the whole world. And when I say "localised", I mean not just the UI language, but the hotels they show you, the landmarks they know are important, and a bunch of other stuff about the destination. And they constantly alter this logic depending on the country you are booking in (so Russians booking in London might get different hotels from Spaniards, etc.).
2. They have massive MVT and A/B testing platforms that constantly optimise those sites (something like 40+ tests running at any one time on hotels.com. and more on booking.com, which is designed from the ground up for exactly that).
3. In the case of booking.com, they also have a massive affiliates program (which on its own is bigger than hotels.com's entire business as I recall).
4. Because of their reach, they can monitor and react to global customer lodging fluctuations on an hourly basis, making sure that inventory stays maxed out as much as possible.
5. They operate worldwide call centres in dozens of languages.
6. They take SEO and SEM extremely seriously and invest literally hundreds of millions into it.
7. They have hundreds of staff dedicated to doing one thing: selling hotel rooms and finding better and better ways of doing it.
The hotels trade is a relatively low-margin, high risk business of which sales is only on of many concerns. If anyone thinks the chains have anything like the financial muscle to replicate even half of what the major travel sites do, they don't know what the fuck they're talking about.
It looks like BAE has recently replaced most of its IT workforce with south Asian contractors.
OT: it's BA, not BAE. The latter is a different company concerned mainly with blowing up flying objects, along with people in them. Easy mistake to make though.
Yeah what's this going back to "fat clients" with the apps? "Download our pre-order app!" says your favorite restaurant. That should just be a bookmark in browser to correct place on their web site.
Blame the Google Tax - SEM is a high-cost channel. If you can get people to bypass Adwords by using your app instead then you're getting visits on the cheap.
It's at least an interesting idea that AI might end up mimicking animal minds, with specialist centres dealing with specific aspects of cognition. Wonder what that would translate into for machine AI?
Yeach you'd think they'd take at last ONE fact about new functionality or features in the new release and talk about it. You'd have to try to make it less informative.
If you don't want to be bankrupted, don't post a nude sex tape of someone who was filmed without his knowledge, and then ignore a court order to take it down. Just saying.
As a (former) employee of one of, if not the biggest, news websites in the world, I can tell you their publisher said almost exactly the same thing. Mobile optimised tends to mean at best "laid out a bit differently" and at worst "crippled".
I've been using Instapaper as an offline reader for several years on my phone. This is because I have an underground train journey of about 40mins each way, during which time I have no network connectivity. Instapaper is pretty sweet, and it's rare that I save an article that it's not able to render later on. I collect a backlog of articles for my phone which I then read on the train.
If Pintrest fuck it up I shall rage hard, but I'm sure there are offline readers elsewhere. Instapaper is quite well designed though (both visually and functionally, although I thought their "tilt scrolling" experiment was a bit weird.
"with an automatic repeal in case success is not achieved or evaluated"
While I think that's actually a pretty good idea (and see also the discussions about randomised control trials in social policy), but it may lead to a "ratchet effect" occurring. This is because, basically, the only thing elected officials can do is legislate in reaction to anything. Something bad happens? Pass a law to ban it.
So if a law doesn't have the desired effect, it may well be seen to have been too mild. Kids still viewing porn because porn sites have moved off shore? Make it illegal to register a.uk domain without proof of business intent, and then block all non.uk domains with a Great Firewall unless citizens supply a one-time code based on their passport number to access them. And so it continues in a race to the bottom...
"They only decide what has to be done. Not how it has to be done."
It's getting worse than that in fact. In many cases, politicians seem to know their policies can't in fact be executed, but they don't really care. This is because the simple act of pushing for legislation (enacted or not) is enough to do the job of getting people to vote for them. It's like the Trump Wall: there is no way that Trump and his team actually think they'll be able to build the wall. They just know that all they have to do is be seen to be keen on it, then let "politics" ruin it in one of a zillion ways (budgetary opportunity costs, legal obstruction, etc. etc) when the time comes.
What's amazing though (and I think this is recent) is how such promises have become so disposable. Most politicians seem to now be perfectly OK in ditching policy intentions. After all, if you don't believe in your own policies, it's easy to ditch them once you realise they have outlived their usefulness on the campaign trail - and later on there will always be some distraction you can use to make sure enough people either don't remember or don't care about what you said before.
Truly - this political world we're in is just awful.
"This is the brainchild of Andrea Leadsom, one of the two final contestants for leadership of the Tory party..."
Who by current indications will be eating a boiled kangaroo's anus on I'm A Celebrity in about 12 month's time. This, however, is only a tiny compensation for the fact that Teresa May will become PM.
On a general note, what can be done about the policy ratchets that these people advocate? That is, the belief that things are bad because the policies that brought them about (eg financialisation, under investment in social infrastructure, wealth concentration, mass surveillance, censorship, etc.) were simply not implemented hard enough.
This is the essence of what people like May and Leadsom believe: like a sort of Taliban approach to politics. Corporation tax in the UK is lower than almost anywhere in the EU and we have intense austerity policies partly as a result. So what do we do - we lower it some more because *obviously* the economy isn't getting better as a result of the previous lowering. What happens if we lower corporation tax to zero then? Where is the evidence that these policies are working as they are right now, let alone that they will work better for being all the more extreme?
I'm a UI designer, and I find it amazing that almost very business I've worked for is happy to fling huge amounts of cash at creating native apps without even wanting to answer the obvious question their customers will ask: "Why should I download this?"
So far in pretty extensive customer research, the best that anyone can come up with is an offline condition (eg MailOnline's news app allows you to download news and read it 1995 style), speed (they think it's somehow faster) and a kind of ragged notion of better aesthetics. After that it's a grab bag of slightly better maps integration, the convenience of a shortcut on the desktop, and (for the business) avoiding the Google tax that your web app will have to pay if you want to sell anything online. Statistically, it's also known that some apps (mainly news ones) will get huge usage from a tiny (and usually numerically static) fanbase.
But that's about it.
It's all so weird. So wasteful and strange - but I'll design 'em if they want 'em (I've given up pushing back).
Hint: they were being sarcastic. They were not meaning their words literally. It is a form of humour. The the fact that you responded without sarcasm now makes it funnier.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't worry, Google single sign-on isn't going away. It's just their social network that's being deleted.
I have a variable height standing desk at work. I asked for a desk inspection (which the company gives for free as it's scared of litigation for things like carpel tunnel). The inspector told me how to configure the desk correctly for both standing and sitting, and said that I should neither stand nor sit too much during the day. Mix it up. I sometimes do the morning sitting, the afternoon standing or whole days on either, and other combinations. There are also operational pros and cons of each (when standing you can see people coming from further away, but have less desk space to use).
I'm not too bothered about my mortality, just my short-term musculoskeletal health. I should point out though that I've heard about the varicose veins thing and so I secretly wear compression socks to work now.
"specifically the aftermath of the nuclear test site collapse seemed to be a key turning point"
Yes, although China had quietly and quite suddenly pulled the plug on them a couple of months prior to the collapse by reducing amongs other things their gasoline exports by 97%.
China's action is thought to have prompted Kim's trip to Beijing, where he was perhaps told how things would now play out by his only ally and provider of the vast majority of his foreign trade. So much for self reliance then.
Whether Trump had anything much to do with this is... Doubtful.
You also need off-street parking to charge the car, and relying solely on public charge points is very inconvenient. This is a serious practical limitation to the use of EVs in many European cities like London right now, where off-street parking is rare.
The reason Jobs is venerated is that he is perceived as being an ordinary guy who became fabulously rich. In the US, that guarantees you immortal veneration in the minds of millions of unlucky saps who wish they were you. The fact that his company is also very high profile (Apple stores etc.) helps a great deal too. This is why, say, Warren Buffet doesn't enjoy the same veneration. Bill Gates, having "lost" to Jobs, is also not on the pedestal for that reason. And Trump - it's why we have him in White House of course.
its a speculative bubble and like the stock price of Tesla it has far outpaced the current underlying fundamentals.
And what "fundamentals" would those be, exactly?
Too many politicians think the only way of making the world better is by legislating things in or out of existence. In response to every event, their minds turn like clockwork to the question of what laws they can pass or repeal to make the problem go away.
Before wielding the ban hammer, good politicians first consider whether they can do anything to make the use of the hammer unnecessary. In this case, how about re-considering support for Saudi Arabia, or Israel? Or how about the role of climate change, or of NGOs, or evangelical Christian groups?
If we wanted to just create laws every time something happens that we don't like, we'd do better to have robots (or hey, direct democracy) for that instead. See also "cone syndrome" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
I'm not saying non-legislative efforts might always work, just that legislating and leaving is clearly not working. It's lazy and debases politics such that nobody believes in it any more.
Lots of people here posting knowledgeably, so I thought I'd add my tuppence.
Here's a few reasons why the hotel chains haven't turned their backs on the likes of Booking.com and Hotels.com (an Expedia Inc company roughly four times smaller than Booking.com BTW) and others:
1. Both are localised in 50+ languages and basically cover the whole world. And when I say "localised", I mean not just the UI language, but the hotels they show you, the landmarks they know are important, and a bunch of other stuff about the destination. And they constantly alter this logic depending on the country you are booking in (so Russians booking in London might get different hotels from Spaniards, etc.).
2. They have massive MVT and A/B testing platforms that constantly optimise those sites (something like 40+ tests running at any one time on hotels.com. and more on booking.com, which is designed from the ground up for exactly that).
3. In the case of booking.com, they also have a massive affiliates program (which on its own is bigger than hotels.com's entire business as I recall).
4. Because of their reach, they can monitor and react to global customer lodging fluctuations on an hourly basis, making sure that inventory stays maxed out as much as possible.
5. They operate worldwide call centres in dozens of languages.
6. They take SEO and SEM extremely seriously and invest literally hundreds of millions into it.
7. They have hundreds of staff dedicated to doing one thing: selling hotel rooms and finding better and better ways of doing it.
The hotels trade is a relatively low-margin, high risk business of which sales is only on of many concerns. If anyone thinks the chains have anything like the financial muscle to replicate even half of what the major travel sites do, they don't know what the fuck they're talking about.
It looks like BAE has recently replaced most of its IT workforce with south Asian contractors.
OT: it's BA, not BAE. The latter is a different company concerned mainly with blowing up flying objects, along with people in them. Easy mistake to make though.
"No" buttons are clearly visible on Amazon.com reviews. Are you sure you have ceased to see them?
"second, what is the point?"
Proof of concept on a method of diagnosis of early-onset cognitive disorders.
"this is just another hyped up application of data analysis"
Seems you are a bit of a rage boy in this.
"all original users still miss what you were!"
Having one ID digit less than you, I have added the OT to the subject simply out of netiquette nostalgia.
Yeah what's this going back to "fat clients" with the apps? "Download our pre-order app!" says your favorite restaurant. That should just be a bookmark in browser to correct place on their web site.
Blame the Google Tax - SEM is a high-cost channel. If you can get people to bypass Adwords by using your app instead then you're getting visits on the cheap.
It's at least an interesting idea that AI might end up mimicking animal minds, with specialist centres dealing with specific aspects of cognition. Wonder what that would translate into for machine AI?
Yeach you'd think they'd take at last ONE fact about new functionality or features in the new release and talk about it. You'd have to try to make it less informative.
I have some other questions
That's good. Let's examine those questions once you've answered the ones listed in the article.
If you don't want to be bankrupted, don't post a nude sex tape of someone who was filmed without his knowledge, and then ignore a court order to take it down. Just saying.
Well then, you'll have good answers to all these questions , I assume.
As a (former) employee of one of, if not the biggest, news websites in the world, I can tell you their publisher said almost exactly the same thing. Mobile optimised tends to mean at best "laid out a bit differently" and at worst "crippled".
I've been using Instapaper as an offline reader for several years on my phone. This is because I have an underground train journey of about 40mins each way, during which time I have no network connectivity. Instapaper is pretty sweet, and it's rare that I save an article that it's not able to render later on. I collect a backlog of articles for my phone which I then read on the train.
If Pintrest fuck it up I shall rage hard, but I'm sure there are offline readers elsewhere. Instapaper is quite well designed though (both visually and functionally, although I thought their "tilt scrolling" experiment was a bit weird.
TOR is no secure in the least anymore, why would you still use that garbage.
Yeah totally - and that Bruce Schnider just joined their board of directors too! What does HE know about SECURITY?? What a joke.
https://yro.slashdot.org/story...
"with an automatic repeal in case success is not achieved or evaluated"
While I think that's actually a pretty good idea (and see also the discussions about randomised control trials in social policy), but it may lead to a "ratchet effect" occurring. This is because, basically, the only thing elected officials can do is legislate in reaction to anything. Something bad happens? Pass a law to ban it.
So if a law doesn't have the desired effect, it may well be seen to have been too mild. Kids still viewing porn because porn sites have moved off shore? Make it illegal to register a .uk domain without proof of business intent, and then block all non .uk domains with a Great Firewall unless citizens supply a one-time code based on their passport number to access them. And so it continues in a race to the bottom...
"They only decide what has to be done. Not how it has to be done."
It's getting worse than that in fact. In many cases, politicians seem to know their policies can't in fact be executed, but they don't really care. This is because the simple act of pushing for legislation (enacted or not) is enough to do the job of getting people to vote for them. It's like the Trump Wall: there is no way that Trump and his team actually think they'll be able to build the wall. They just know that all they have to do is be seen to be keen on it, then let "politics" ruin it in one of a zillion ways (budgetary opportunity costs, legal obstruction, etc. etc) when the time comes.
What's amazing though (and I think this is recent) is how such promises have become so disposable. Most politicians seem to now be perfectly OK in ditching policy intentions. After all, if you don't believe in your own policies, it's easy to ditch them once you realise they have outlived their usefulness on the campaign trail - and later on there will always be some distraction you can use to make sure enough people either don't remember or don't care about what you said before.
Truly - this political world we're in is just awful.
"This is the brainchild of Andrea Leadsom, one of the two final contestants for leadership of the Tory party..."
Who by current indications will be eating a boiled kangaroo's anus on I'm A Celebrity in about 12 month's time. This, however, is only a tiny compensation for the fact that Teresa May will become PM.
On a general note, what can be done about the policy ratchets that these people advocate? That is, the belief that things are bad because the policies that brought them about (eg financialisation, under investment in social infrastructure, wealth concentration, mass surveillance, censorship, etc.) were simply not implemented hard enough.
This is the essence of what people like May and Leadsom believe: like a sort of Taliban approach to politics. Corporation tax in the UK is lower than almost anywhere in the EU and we have intense austerity policies partly as a result. So what do we do - we lower it some more because *obviously* the economy isn't getting better as a result of the previous lowering. What happens if we lower corporation tax to zero then? Where is the evidence that these policies are working as they are right now, let alone that they will work better for being all the more extreme?
I'm a UI designer, and I find it amazing that almost very business I've worked for is happy to fling huge amounts of cash at creating native apps without even wanting to answer the obvious question their customers will ask: "Why should I download this?"
So far in pretty extensive customer research, the best that anyone can come up with is an offline condition (eg MailOnline's news app allows you to download news and read it 1995 style), speed (they think it's somehow faster) and a kind of ragged notion of better aesthetics. After that it's a grab bag of slightly better maps integration, the convenience of a shortcut on the desktop, and (for the business) avoiding the Google tax that your web app will have to pay if you want to sell anything online. Statistically, it's also known that some apps (mainly news ones) will get huge usage from a tiny (and usually numerically static) fanbase.
But that's about it.
It's all so weird. So wasteful and strange - but I'll design 'em if they want 'em (I've given up pushing back).
Hint: they were being sarcastic. They were not meaning their words literally. It is a form of humour. The the fact that you responded without sarcasm now makes it funnier.