Guess this might finally convince those who think the BBC is unbiased about how wrong they are. The BBC has been caught out so many times in the past yet people continue to believe they are any more credible then Fox or Reuters. Unbiased != telling me what I want to hear.
The apologist is strong in this one. The police of course don't know the difference between but dialing and someone harrassing 911. They can't just show the difference because these messages are recorded.
Really, to often slashdot posters just try to find an excuse for everything no matter how silly.
Believing one man can do nothing leads to one man not doing anything. There are 360 million or so Americans. If all them donated 10 bucks to the EFF per years that would fund the EFF with 3.6 BILLION dollars per year. That hires a LOT of people and most of us van afford more then 10 bucks.
So... how much have you donated?
But your one tenner donation won't make a difference right? So you don't do anything.
People can do a LOT. Vote with your dollars. Don't buy Apple, don't buy Walmart, don't buy from Amazon. But they are so cheap? yes because they don't pay taxes so your state is even more in need of trying to pursuade them with even bigger tax cuts so they can at least get a few of the jobs.
You can't fight the revolution with shinies and discounts. But it is so much easier to just say "I can't do anything" and not do anything.
Trust me... I did pay a small amount to the EFF but hey, that was just a tiny fraction of my income to buy of my guilt. It is so easy being a sheep. BAAAAAH
So your solution to the worlds issues is to put the blame on factions within a larger group. Why don't you just blame it all on the jews (faction within the judaic faiths) and get it over with.
The economy is a race with no end. Therefore in a race to cut costs, you are NEVER finished. And how much can you cut costs without loosing service OR doing something drastic.
When one company outsources to get a lower price, to continue in the race everyone else must as well and then who is left locally to afford the product even at the lower costs? Yet many people happily claim you can outsource everything and then the low low low price means people locally don't need jobs. Apparently they believe that the price of a product can truly reach zero. Notice I use price. Not cost. The cost of a iPad is NOT 500 dollars. Yet that is the price, for a piece of tech that doesn't touch US soil until it is in a store being sold to someone with already enough debt.
Americans don't believe so much in the Free Market, they believe that you can cut the cost of anything and get keeping the same quality. In a way, they are like a French noble who tells himself to eat cake after being un-employed for years. (and it works, as ashamed as I am to admit I saw a program on TLC where a woman shopped for a weeks worth of food and payed just 1 penny... you know the economy is screwed up when this can happen, somebody else is paying for this leeches food and guess what, it is you)
The real problem is the media (who in the case of the woman never question how this is supposed to work long term). The entire media is made up by the very rich telling the poor how to think. And the poor swallow it whole. Just look at the followings of Steve Jobs or Bono. Tax dodgers and shady dealers they have the guts to tell others how to think. Why do we care if a few artists living in tax shelters getting money from dictators might loose a few pennies? But without it art would be dead. Yes, if nobody was payed for art anymore the whole of humanity would seize to create it... for THOUSANDS of years this wasn't the case but now it would be. And who is to question this falsehood? The overpayed artists in the media? HAH!
We have left the media become the sole speaker for our society and put them in control of the very rich by making them very rich. It is the job of the media to question the politicians. They do, they question why not more is being done to make them both richer over the backs of people and we let them do it.
When you shoot a politician make sure you get the guy interviewing him at the same time. It is the only way to clean up the system. Of course, you will be villified by the media. Go ahead, try and make the claim that art does NOT need heavy cash infusions to survive.
The Americans obtained half of the tech by strangle holding Britain while it funded the nazi's to an extra ordinary degree and obtained the other half by protecting nazi war criminals in exchange for tech. NASA would in any ethical world be covered in more shame then a swiss banker.
And if this upsets you, then you are doomed to keep wondering what the fact happened to the USA. You can only learn from history if you acknowledge the true history not some nursemaid fantasy designed to keep everyone happy.
The real history of the USA post WW2 is that due to all kind of less then ethical behavior the USA got their hands on far more tech and scientist then anyone else AND did rather poorly with it. Compare after all what the soviets achieved through simply killing of nazi scientists or improsing them with a bit of torture. They never had von Braun the killer of many American prisoner of wars among his many war crimes AND were the first in space. And the soviets had a huge war to recover from and had started far further back on the tech scale.
For that matter, Japan recovered far better, bombed out it was soon AHEAD of the USA in almost all fields. Cuba, sanctioned to hell and back, has better health care then the US for all this time.
What exactly did America once have that it is now supposed to have lost? From many posts on this subject I get the feeling some people claim the US went from fictional history to fictional presence from what we can determine a fictional future. Right, that is about useful as asking who would win in a fictional figure fight. An American thing if I am not mistaken.
If you still want my personal opinion? Then here it is, it is a bit more complex then most made up theories.
The USA profited from a post WW2 world in which all other countries had massive rebuilding effort while its own rebuilding has started ahead of the curve for the POST WW2 world. In the same way that the US had been way behind the curve for WW2 itself. When it started US military tech and civilian production capacity was hopelessly behind. But people US citizens forget that the MEANS to this build up were un-american. There was a LOT of government control over private industry. Not the same as in planned economies like the soviet union but far more then fits in the idea of the USA and far more then is now available in the USA. The only comparison is really the tiger economies. Japan, Korea, China. (and a few other asian nations I am to lazy to mention)
When the war ended, the US had a lot of power in the world and virtually nobody to oppose them. The south Americans were to backwards, so was China. Europe didn't need any more conflict and the soviets had more land then they ever would know what to do with. And its factories were booming who had conveniently switched ahead of the actual end of the war from war production to civilian production. A lot of the brightest people had either escaped the horrors of the nazi regime to the US or were being sheltered by the US from being prosecuted for the same horrors. The US was in a perfect position to make an economic boom and it did.
And yet, did it? How much of our knowledge of that era is movies and chosen images versus reality? To show how much movies lied, women of that post war era are often shown as helpless needing the hand of a man to guide them and do technical stuff. Really? Were these the same women that had been building bombers and putting war ships together? Did Rosie the Riveter unlearn all her skills in a flash once the boys came back home? Yes, many returned to their kitchens but the skills would have remained. So, you have a husband with no more tech skills then cocking a rifle and a woman who knows the ins and outs of a high performance engine, who would YOU let do the plumbing?
How much this of economic revival of the US and its position at the top was simply because that was what everyone reported and everybody refused to look at what was happening in the rest of the world. Easy to say you are number one when y
Semen. If a person swallows it, they are NOT going to get A: pregnant or B: arrested (barring some silly rules that are probably just internet legends in some US states).
As for Jews, the idea of it all is to show reference to god, you don't show reference by coming up with loop holes just because you grave a bit of bacon. The laws are constantly interpreted to fit in the modern world but that is just the same as real laws. Example, Jews are allowed to have a pig heart valve installed because the sanctity of life out rules dietary laws. Forcing a Jew to eat a pig or else you will kill him does nothing. It is not how that fate or indeed most fates work.
I am currently in a job where maintenance hell is the daily reality, it is known that the old code base is pretty bad but management doesn't quite realize how bad (it is REALLY bad) because I keep saving their bacon by patching half a decade old bugs since I started. But fixing bugs someone else created while that person did it on a contract that netted him a far greater income then most companies would ever consider giving a full time employee AND he still gets payed for it... that is not exactly motivating.
The problem is that a lot of coding jobs are basically maintenance. It takes one person to write really bad code and a dozen to clean it up. Maintenance hell is a very easy state to get into and impossible to get out off.
So, what is maintenance hell? It is the state you get into when a codebase contains so many bugs and design mistakes that you cannot truly improve it, just patch it and this takes up so many resources that the much needed version 2.0 never happens because for every mistake fixed management wants another feature bolted on, no matter how much the original design makes this impossible and this then exposes numerous unknown or ignored bugs that must be solved first.
For companies this is even worse then developers because developers can and will leave if they got half a brain. Maintenance does nothing for your CV and if your CV is not growing your career is at a standstill. Nobody ever got promoted or headhunted for doing good maintenance.
So... what to do? I presume the original poster is stuck in maintenance hell like so many of us. Do stuff in your free time? If your job is any like mine, what free time? Even if your lack of enthousiam has let you to work a 8 hour day, with the commute etc you spend at least 10 hours at the office. Add 10 hours sleeping, eating, crapping, having wild passionate sex with super models, and there just isn't that much time left in the day and after a day of fixing other peoples fuck-ups your motivation won't be that high. I have found I write the best code at home when I writing good code at work as well.
Only two options are really open, fix your job or find a new one. Fixing your job is often very hard because it requires management skills most coders do not have. Anyway, with you constantly fixing bugs, management probably thinks you are doing a great job and if they only keep insisting you bolt on new features and fix fuck-ups then their crappy codebase will someday mutate into a wonderful codebase. Yes, managers really think that if you keep polishing a turd, one day it will be a diamond. They are right, if you can somehow convince a really good polisher to polish it for his entire life. If a coder is however any good, he will soon give up, realizing there is nothing in it for him (because it will be the person who dropped the original turd who is rewarded for the diamond, you will be just the bug fixer moved on to the next turd)
Leaves moving to another job... with no guarantee that you won't get stuck in the same thing again. But then again, getting out at your current job is not realistic either. So you have to weigh the odds. 0% change of improvement at your current job, 50% chance at your new job?
Bad at interviewing? Your a coder, if your interviewer can't handle you being bad at it, then he isn't looking for a coder but for a sales person. I interviewed people myself and of course been interviewed and for jobs that are worth getting what matters most is being open. Realize that while you might have had a dozen interviews this day, THIS one should still be special. Just be honest and then you have the best changes of finding a job that meets your requirements.
Because if you stay put, your motivation will get worse and worse until one day you are either just another Wally OR Wally and unemployed. And good luck with your bad interviewing skills when you turned into Wally.
Nintendo made a loss. The 3DS tanked and Wii sales are dropping.
The problem with going after casual users is that they are fickle. I got to buy new games to justify my expensive gaming rig. But a casual player? Here today, gone tomorrow.
Oh and it is Angry Birds that is hurting Nintendo the most.
There are countless futuristic movies in which there is this fantastic intferface or sentient computer that makes ordinary tasks we never do seem so much more convenient. When have you really checked a detailed weather forecast before going out? I live in Holland, the weather will be grey and rainy with the wind blowing from all corners at once. Same with checking mail or arranging meetings. The sci-fi movie never happens. Or take the Star Trek computer. It seems so fluent that interface the TNG crew uses but have you noticed how what they do on the keyboard never has any relation to what is happening? That is because it ain't real but how many touchscreen fanboys wanted a computer with a touchscreen keyboard because of it?
Same thing with speech control, that sounds nice but needs to exist in a world where "help" is not a long google session.
The interface of tomorrow isn't happening because the tech of today just ain't there and PART of that tech is our own body. My voice is very different in the morning. If I had to use a voice command to turn the lights on, it would remain very dark. Coffee first but how do I get Mr Coffee to regonize my groggy voice?
The existing standard gui's on the desktop are very much based on the idea you have a surface on which you arrange windows containing applications or parts of an application. It ain't perfect but it works well enough since it means all each application developer has to do is present a rectangular box that either fits all screens (dialog) or can be resized. It is fairly easy... it is so easy in fact that on netbooks a LOT of windows and dialogs appear to far down and are cut off. They can't even get that right.
But Unity suddenly wants to throw this away and present an intelligent and smarter way of doing the same but different... and it doesn't quite work and most of us have years if not decades of experience doing it the standard way.
There may be room for a joystick driven car but if it crashes everytime I sneeze I am not going to unlearn my steering wheel skills.
Gnome and Unity are not just changes we do not want, their basic functionality was broken at the time of launch. Both crashed, had zero customization and removed widgets people had come to rely on. this would be like introducing a joystick controlled car that crashes when you sneeze with no windscreen no passenger seats no luggage space and an action radius of a half a mile. You can then bleat on about how good the joystick is, the hate for all the other stuff will kill your idea for ever.
Gnome 3 and Unity should have stayed as a research project for at least another year and only have launched for real when they were feature capable with the software they replaced.
As for Metro... am I the only one having flashbacks to active desktop? I am typing this in a fullscreen browser, like my toes, I haven't seen my desktop in years. Somewhere out there there must be people who run one app at a time, who have just 1 tab open in opera (mine are so small it takes totally mastery of subpixel clicking to get one) and when they are done they close everything to have the desktop re-appear.
It is not that we a stuck in the past with your basic window managers, it is that everything else has been tried AND deemed NOT to work. Try this one. Tell an Apple user that you do not think he is a complete faggot and fanboy and then ask him to honestly speak about the unified menu on a large screen setup. Handy no? Having to move your mouse for miles to get to the menu (people who use OSX just for photoshop and moved their menu to their touch pen thingy don't apply, you bought an expensive gadget AND spend ages to learn it to get away form the menu on the screen being out of easy reach.
Maybe like so many other things we have just gotten used to, the standard desktop gui just works. And if it isn't perfect then at least it is better then the usual attempts to fix it through half-finished code implementing barely thought out ideas that only apply in a few cases.
Remember those gorgeous young women in thight uniforms? Well. Good news everyone! They kept them on and retirement age be damned! Some need a zimmer frame to get around. The young ones that is.
What is a certainty is that Apple does volume buying at a scale nobody else can or is willing to match. It is a huge gamble for Apple. They got a lot of money but it is still a publicly traded company so if they screw up they can loose their value really quickly.
You said it yourself, the iPad2 is very conspicious in the its screen usage. Maybe they bought a little bit to many? Remember HP and the dump of its tablet? That wasn't just done to upset the market. Grinding up old stock is costly in itself. If say an iPad3 were to fail, how much obsolete stock would Apple have to get rid off?
All that has to happen is some chinese factory to open up and sell either better tech for the same price of the same tech for less and Apples strategy is shot.
Apple is also making a LOT of enemies. MS did the same once and those who thought that in business their is no room for hard feelings and rancor were ignoring moves by old MS rivals that didn't benefit the rivals as much as screw MS over.
And right now, with Apple fighting the other tablet makers that are also its suppliers Apple is feeding the hand it is scratching at the same time. Samsungs lawyers are paid by component purchases by Apple... how odd is that?
Apple is riding a wave of success but other companies have done it before them and crashed horribly. Will Apple have the same fate? Hard to say but seeing Apple giving up its old mainstays in the high end, they sure are playing a high risk game on a very narrow playing field. Samsung won't go bust if it can't make tablets and phones anymore, they got a lot of different products. Apple on the other hand would be dead in the water if something were to happen to their iLine of products. Unlikely... but then, did anyone really for see the fall of Amiga, Commodore? IBM PC's? Or indeed, Apple PC's? Once they were a major player and then dwindled. And it is unlikely Steve Jobs will return a 2nd time to save the company.
Gosh, someone sure likes to swap? I remember this kinda stuff from the days of floppies... a two floppy OS was NOT fun.
The trick for a distro has always been about supporting the old and the new. At a given point it is time to give up your 386 with its 1 speed CD player and buy a new computer. At least if you want to use a distro that has made it VERY clear that it is no longer aimed at weirdos. After all, how you are you going to run Unity on that old PC of yours?
Time to seek a new distro. One that doesn't just add a ton of bloat that can just as easily be downloaded.
I know I really shouldn't read slashdot when half drunk and blurry eyed but fine, I will take your advice and in future get my maple syrup from Canadians. Anyone got a large press for sale? Funny, I always thought it came from trees but then that was before I learned about the duck press.
Older web developers will remember meta tags for keywords and site description... use them anymore? Nah, they were from a more innocent age, were it was expected that site owners would limit the keywords and description to accurately describe their site so it would only be found by those really intending to find it.
Ah... happy days.
Google really doesn't have that much to search for in an app submission. They rely pretty much on app owner submitted information. Gosh, we better hope they file accurate keywords and description so only people really intending to find that app will find it... and pigs will fly.
The various app markets are rife with spammers and husslers trying to sell apps no-one needs at outragous prices. It would like trying to index that co.cc domain THAT google STOPPED indexing because it became an impossible job.
But they can't stop indexing their own site.
Their famous fix was to not just look at a site but see how it was linked to. That got rid of the meta tag spam BUT spammers worked around it and with apps, there is no in build linking (remember, the web is all about linking).
That is why everyone wants VLC to be ported from Linux to mobile devices to finally get a decent player out there. That is why mplayer despite having no interest in doing windows support has people working on turning it into a windows version to get an even better player out there?
What apps are we talking about exactly? Fart apps? Angry birds?
There is a ton of software available for free install. What more do you need?
Or maybe the author is talking about payed for apps? Maybe the genius that wrote synergy should start charging for it? Maybe pay a buck here and there and then it suddenly counts? Okay, my pc will also then cost me a few hundred bucks but hey, at least we got APPS instead of applications. And we can only search for them by the broadest terms and their are ranked by how much their owners spams them.
What? My userid is NOT the number of women lusting after me? So it is the number of times I will have sex sometime in the future at least right? Right?? RIGHT?!?
In a few hours? So they write a single stand alone program? How about their bug finding skills? Fixing bugs is easy, finding the bug is the tricky thing. How do you test that? Given them a single sheet of code and telling them to find the bug in it is to easy, you told them the bug is in that part of the code.
And how many is a few hours? When I look for a job I sometimes got to squeeze two or three interviews into a day as the company I am employed at suddenly remembers just how valuable I am and tries to milk every last bit of knowledge out of me... if your interviewee has half a day to spare on an interview... wonder WHY he has so much spare time.
Also, if the candidate is doing say a dozen interviews, that means he is spending a LOT of time doing silly tests. And if the test is very silly indeed, you just advertised that you are a silly employer.
And what if the candidate is far far better then the interviewer and writes code the interviewer can't comprehend? What if the interviewer is lousy at setting requirements? I have looked at tests that were clearly wrong, known to be wrong since they were copied from some website and the website mentioned the old version of the test was wrong...
Finding the right candidate is very difficult. It requires first of all that the company asks itself, who do we REALLY need. As the article says, does the position really warrant a PhD? For changing the logo on a wordpress site? "We want the best" sounds nice but can you afford to hire them? And keep them?
Even if you are thinking of writing the next google from scratch, if that is going to happen maybe sometime in the future, you can hire the best and brightest right now but they will leave before you are ever ready and take your budget with them.
I work in the lowest of the low of development, web development, LAMP. *Que cries of ridicule* and that means most of my work just isn't all that cutting edge. I am not writing the next 3D engine or get involved with any math higher then primary school level. Cosine? What for? What website needs that? Even square root I never had a use for.
The most important skill for a webdeveloper? His google skills. There is ALWAYS someone brighter out there who has already solved your problem, wrote code for it, debugged it and tested it for years with full doco. Write your own? WHY!?! I swear you can put together a killed website with the most basic coding skills but awesome copy and paste skills. And you get PAID for it!
You know what I want to hear when I pose you a complex question? "Wait, let me google that". THAT is correct and efficient use of your time as a developer. Know how to phrase your problem in a question you can google and then see if someone has already done it.
But noooo. Companies test for web developers who can implement a bubble search... WHY? If you are in web dev and you did your own bubble search you wasted your time. Far far smarter people have already done it for you.
And if you are that smart, why are you a web monkey?
Leave the rocket science to the rocket scientists and hire people that have the skill YOU need in your company.
Only licensed pilots are allowed to fly a plane. Only licensed drivers are allowed to drive a car OR if supervised by a licensed trainer. Only engineers can sign off on construction. Only doctors are allowed to prescribe medicine, only pharmacists are allowed to dispense it.
Gosh, the list of things restricted to licensed people is long isn't it.
Oh you meant passengers in a plane? That is like comparing operating a computer with watching a screen.
So please explain WHY in godsname KDE insists on copying a movie file from a samba share before playing it in a capable player? That is just plain annoying on small files but when you are talking about 20gb files it is just plain silly. This kind of thing is so fucking basic and since the same player can just play from the share with other desktops it is a complete and utter failure on the KDE team to prioritize on basic functionality over bling.
KDE dropped the ball. Polishing a turned over several releases so it shines a bit more still means you got a turd.
You are talking like a stockholm beating, believing your captor is becoming your friend because the beatings have gotten slightly less regular.
All the big artist support these actions not just by signing up but by active lobbying for even stricter laws. Only a tiny handful oppose this, the rest, the drug addicts and the moralists evade taxes and want strict draconian rules to save guard their own income.
Look at the actions of say a U2, Bono the great moralist who played for the apartheid regime in South Africa, uses every tax dodge imaginable and whines about people "stealing" music.
Slashdot Mirror
Guess this might finally convince those who think the BBC is unbiased about how wrong they are. The BBC has been caught out so many times in the past yet people continue to believe they are any more credible then Fox or Reuters. Unbiased != telling me what I want to hear.
Because on slashdot, that is who we think about. Mmm, oh yeah ride me!
The apologist is strong in this one. The police of course don't know the difference between but dialing and someone harrassing 911. They can't just show the difference because these messages are recorded.
Really, to often slashdot posters just try to find an excuse for everything no matter how silly.
Believing one man can do nothing leads to one man not doing anything. There are 360 million or so Americans. If all them donated 10 bucks to the EFF per years that would fund the EFF with 3.6 BILLION dollars per year. That hires a LOT of people and most of us van afford more then 10 bucks.
So... how much have you donated?
But your one tenner donation won't make a difference right? So you don't do anything.
People can do a LOT. Vote with your dollars. Don't buy Apple, don't buy Walmart, don't buy from Amazon. But they are so cheap? yes because they don't pay taxes so your state is even more in need of trying to pursuade them with even bigger tax cuts so they can at least get a few of the jobs.
You can't fight the revolution with shinies and discounts. But it is so much easier to just say "I can't do anything" and not do anything.
Trust me... I did pay a small amount to the EFF but hey, that was just a tiny fraction of my income to buy of my guilt. It is so easy being a sheep. BAAAAAH
So your solution to the worlds issues is to put the blame on factions within a larger group. Why don't you just blame it all on the jews (faction within the judaic faiths) and get it over with.
The economy is a race with no end. Therefore in a race to cut costs, you are NEVER finished. And how much can you cut costs without loosing service OR doing something drastic.
When one company outsources to get a lower price, to continue in the race everyone else must as well and then who is left locally to afford the product even at the lower costs? Yet many people happily claim you can outsource everything and then the low low low price means people locally don't need jobs. Apparently they believe that the price of a product can truly reach zero. Notice I use price. Not cost. The cost of a iPad is NOT 500 dollars. Yet that is the price, for a piece of tech that doesn't touch US soil until it is in a store being sold to someone with already enough debt.
Americans don't believe so much in the Free Market, they believe that you can cut the cost of anything and get keeping the same quality. In a way, they are like a French noble who tells himself to eat cake after being un-employed for years. (and it works, as ashamed as I am to admit I saw a program on TLC where a woman shopped for a weeks worth of food and payed just 1 penny... you know the economy is screwed up when this can happen, somebody else is paying for this leeches food and guess what, it is you)
The real problem is the media (who in the case of the woman never question how this is supposed to work long term). The entire media is made up by the very rich telling the poor how to think. And the poor swallow it whole. Just look at the followings of Steve Jobs or Bono. Tax dodgers and shady dealers they have the guts to tell others how to think. Why do we care if a few artists living in tax shelters getting money from dictators might loose a few pennies? But without it art would be dead. Yes, if nobody was payed for art anymore the whole of humanity would seize to create it... for THOUSANDS of years this wasn't the case but now it would be. And who is to question this falsehood? The overpayed artists in the media? HAH!
We have left the media become the sole speaker for our society and put them in control of the very rich by making them very rich. It is the job of the media to question the politicians. They do, they question why not more is being done to make them both richer over the backs of people and we let them do it.
When you shoot a politician make sure you get the guy interviewing him at the same time. It is the only way to clean up the system. Of course, you will be villified by the media. Go ahead, try and make the claim that art does NOT need heavy cash infusions to survive.
The Americans obtained half of the tech by strangle holding Britain while it funded the nazi's to an extra ordinary degree and obtained the other half by protecting nazi war criminals in exchange for tech. NASA would in any ethical world be covered in more shame then a swiss banker.
And if this upsets you, then you are doomed to keep wondering what the fact happened to the USA. You can only learn from history if you acknowledge the true history not some nursemaid fantasy designed to keep everyone happy.
The real history of the USA post WW2 is that due to all kind of less then ethical behavior the USA got their hands on far more tech and scientist then anyone else AND did rather poorly with it. Compare after all what the soviets achieved through simply killing of nazi scientists or improsing them with a bit of torture. They never had von Braun the killer of many American prisoner of wars among his many war crimes AND were the first in space. And the soviets had a huge war to recover from and had started far further back on the tech scale.
For that matter, Japan recovered far better, bombed out it was soon AHEAD of the USA in almost all fields. Cuba, sanctioned to hell and back, has better health care then the US for all this time.
What exactly did America once have that it is now supposed to have lost? From many posts on this subject I get the feeling some people claim the US went from fictional history to fictional presence from what we can determine a fictional future. Right, that is about useful as asking who would win in a fictional figure fight. An American thing if I am not mistaken.
If you still want my personal opinion? Then here it is, it is a bit more complex then most made up theories.
The USA profited from a post WW2 world in which all other countries had massive rebuilding effort while its own rebuilding has started ahead of the curve for the POST WW2 world. In the same way that the US had been way behind the curve for WW2 itself. When it started US military tech and civilian production capacity was hopelessly behind. But people US citizens forget that the MEANS to this build up were un-american. There was a LOT of government control over private industry. Not the same as in planned economies like the soviet union but far more then fits in the idea of the USA and far more then is now available in the USA. The only comparison is really the tiger economies. Japan, Korea, China. (and a few other asian nations I am to lazy to mention)
When the war ended, the US had a lot of power in the world and virtually nobody to oppose them. The south Americans were to backwards, so was China. Europe didn't need any more conflict and the soviets had more land then they ever would know what to do with. And its factories were booming who had conveniently switched ahead of the actual end of the war from war production to civilian production. A lot of the brightest people had either escaped the horrors of the nazi regime to the US or were being sheltered by the US from being prosecuted for the same horrors. The US was in a perfect position to make an economic boom and it did.
And yet, did it? How much of our knowledge of that era is movies and chosen images versus reality? To show how much movies lied, women of that post war era are often shown as helpless needing the hand of a man to guide them and do technical stuff. Really? Were these the same women that had been building bombers and putting war ships together? Did Rosie the Riveter unlearn all her skills in a flash once the boys came back home? Yes, many returned to their kitchens but the skills would have remained. So, you have a husband with no more tech skills then cocking a rifle and a woman who knows the ins and outs of a high performance engine, who would YOU let do the plumbing?
How much this of economic revival of the US and its position at the top was simply because that was what everyone reported and everybody refused to look at what was happening in the rest of the world. Easy to say you are number one when y
Semen. If a person swallows it, they are NOT going to get A: pregnant or B: arrested (barring some silly rules that are probably just internet legends in some US states).
As for Jews, the idea of it all is to show reference to god, you don't show reference by coming up with loop holes just because you grave a bit of bacon. The laws are constantly interpreted to fit in the modern world but that is just the same as real laws. Example, Jews are allowed to have a pig heart valve installed because the sanctity of life out rules dietary laws. Forcing a Jew to eat a pig or else you will kill him does nothing. It is not how that fate or indeed most fates work.
There were NOT 1 billion plus Japanese.
I am currently in a job where maintenance hell is the daily reality, it is known that the old code base is pretty bad but management doesn't quite realize how bad (it is REALLY bad) because I keep saving their bacon by patching half a decade old bugs since I started. But fixing bugs someone else created while that person did it on a contract that netted him a far greater income then most companies would ever consider giving a full time employee AND he still gets payed for it... that is not exactly motivating.
The problem is that a lot of coding jobs are basically maintenance. It takes one person to write really bad code and a dozen to clean it up. Maintenance hell is a very easy state to get into and impossible to get out off.
So, what is maintenance hell? It is the state you get into when a codebase contains so many bugs and design mistakes that you cannot truly improve it, just patch it and this takes up so many resources that the much needed version 2.0 never happens because for every mistake fixed management wants another feature bolted on, no matter how much the original design makes this impossible and this then exposes numerous unknown or ignored bugs that must be solved first.
For companies this is even worse then developers because developers can and will leave if they got half a brain. Maintenance does nothing for your CV and if your CV is not growing your career is at a standstill. Nobody ever got promoted or headhunted for doing good maintenance.
So... what to do? I presume the original poster is stuck in maintenance hell like so many of us. Do stuff in your free time? If your job is any like mine, what free time? Even if your lack of enthousiam has let you to work a 8 hour day, with the commute etc you spend at least 10 hours at the office. Add 10 hours sleeping, eating, crapping, having wild passionate sex with super models, and there just isn't that much time left in the day and after a day of fixing other peoples fuck-ups your motivation won't be that high. I have found I write the best code at home when I writing good code at work as well.
Only two options are really open, fix your job or find a new one. Fixing your job is often very hard because it requires management skills most coders do not have. Anyway, with you constantly fixing bugs, management probably thinks you are doing a great job and if they only keep insisting you bolt on new features and fix fuck-ups then their crappy codebase will someday mutate into a wonderful codebase. Yes, managers really think that if you keep polishing a turd, one day it will be a diamond. They are right, if you can somehow convince a really good polisher to polish it for his entire life. If a coder is however any good, he will soon give up, realizing there is nothing in it for him (because it will be the person who dropped the original turd who is rewarded for the diamond, you will be just the bug fixer moved on to the next turd)
Leaves moving to another job... with no guarantee that you won't get stuck in the same thing again. But then again, getting out at your current job is not realistic either. So you have to weigh the odds. 0% change of improvement at your current job, 50% chance at your new job?
Bad at interviewing? Your a coder, if your interviewer can't handle you being bad at it, then he isn't looking for a coder but for a sales person. I interviewed people myself and of course been interviewed and for jobs that are worth getting what matters most is being open. Realize that while you might have had a dozen interviews this day, THIS one should still be special. Just be honest and then you have the best changes of finding a job that meets your requirements.
Because if you stay put, your motivation will get worse and worse until one day you are either just another Wally OR Wally and unemployed. And good luck with your bad interviewing skills when you turned into Wally.
Nintendo made a loss. The 3DS tanked and Wii sales are dropping.
The problem with going after casual users is that they are fickle. I got to buy new games to justify my expensive gaming rig. But a casual player? Here today, gone tomorrow.
Oh and it is Angry Birds that is hurting Nintendo the most.
So, it is no secret Apple devices don't do flash and yet you bought two... way to go on voting with your dollars.
Buying TWO devices whose user experience you claim sucks. Please tell me you are not allowed to vote. Ever!
There are countless futuristic movies in which there is this fantastic intferface or sentient computer that makes ordinary tasks we never do seem so much more convenient. When have you really checked a detailed weather forecast before going out? I live in Holland, the weather will be grey and rainy with the wind blowing from all corners at once. Same with checking mail or arranging meetings. The sci-fi movie never happens. Or take the Star Trek computer. It seems so fluent that interface the TNG crew uses but have you noticed how what they do on the keyboard never has any relation to what is happening? That is because it ain't real but how many touchscreen fanboys wanted a computer with a touchscreen keyboard because of it?
Same thing with speech control, that sounds nice but needs to exist in a world where "help" is not a long google session.
The interface of tomorrow isn't happening because the tech of today just ain't there and PART of that tech is our own body. My voice is very different in the morning. If I had to use a voice command to turn the lights on, it would remain very dark. Coffee first but how do I get Mr Coffee to regonize my groggy voice?
The existing standard gui's on the desktop are very much based on the idea you have a surface on which you arrange windows containing applications or parts of an application. It ain't perfect but it works well enough since it means all each application developer has to do is present a rectangular box that either fits all screens (dialog) or can be resized. It is fairly easy... it is so easy in fact that on netbooks a LOT of windows and dialogs appear to far down and are cut off. They can't even get that right.
But Unity suddenly wants to throw this away and present an intelligent and smarter way of doing the same but different... and it doesn't quite work and most of us have years if not decades of experience doing it the standard way.
There may be room for a joystick driven car but if it crashes everytime I sneeze I am not going to unlearn my steering wheel skills.
Gnome and Unity are not just changes we do not want, their basic functionality was broken at the time of launch. Both crashed, had zero customization and removed widgets people had come to rely on. this would be like introducing a joystick controlled car that crashes when you sneeze with no windscreen no passenger seats no luggage space and an action radius of a half a mile. You can then bleat on about how good the joystick is, the hate for all the other stuff will kill your idea for ever.
Gnome 3 and Unity should have stayed as a research project for at least another year and only have launched for real when they were feature capable with the software they replaced.
As for Metro... am I the only one having flashbacks to active desktop? I am typing this in a fullscreen browser, like my toes, I haven't seen my desktop in years. Somewhere out there there must be people who run one app at a time, who have just 1 tab open in opera (mine are so small it takes totally mastery of subpixel clicking to get one) and when they are done they close everything to have the desktop re-appear.
It is not that we a stuck in the past with your basic window managers, it is that everything else has been tried AND deemed NOT to work. Try this one. Tell an Apple user that you do not think he is a complete faggot and fanboy and then ask him to honestly speak about the unified menu on a large screen setup. Handy no? Having to move your mouse for miles to get to the menu (people who use OSX just for photoshop and moved their menu to their touch pen thingy don't apply, you bought an expensive gadget AND spend ages to learn it to get away form the menu on the screen being out of easy reach.
Maybe like so many other things we have just gotten used to, the standard desktop gui just works. And if it isn't perfect then at least it is better then the usual attempts to fix it through half-finished code implementing barely thought out ideas that only apply in a few cases.
Ta
Remember those gorgeous young women in thight uniforms? Well. Good news everyone! They kept them on and retirement age be damned! Some need a zimmer frame to get around. The young ones that is.
What is a certainty is that Apple does volume buying at a scale nobody else can or is willing to match. It is a huge gamble for Apple. They got a lot of money but it is still a publicly traded company so if they screw up they can loose their value really quickly.
You said it yourself, the iPad2 is very conspicious in the its screen usage. Maybe they bought a little bit to many? Remember HP and the dump of its tablet? That wasn't just done to upset the market. Grinding up old stock is costly in itself. If say an iPad3 were to fail, how much obsolete stock would Apple have to get rid off?
All that has to happen is some chinese factory to open up and sell either better tech for the same price of the same tech for less and Apples strategy is shot.
Apple is also making a LOT of enemies. MS did the same once and those who thought that in business their is no room for hard feelings and rancor were ignoring moves by old MS rivals that didn't benefit the rivals as much as screw MS over.
And right now, with Apple fighting the other tablet makers that are also its suppliers Apple is feeding the hand it is scratching at the same time. Samsungs lawyers are paid by component purchases by Apple... how odd is that?
Apple is riding a wave of success but other companies have done it before them and crashed horribly. Will Apple have the same fate? Hard to say but seeing Apple giving up its old mainstays in the high end, they sure are playing a high risk game on a very narrow playing field. Samsung won't go bust if it can't make tablets and phones anymore, they got a lot of different products. Apple on the other hand would be dead in the water if something were to happen to their iLine of products. Unlikely... but then, did anyone really for see the fall of Amiga, Commodore? IBM PC's? Or indeed, Apple PC's? Once they were a major player and then dwindled. And it is unlikely Steve Jobs will return a 2nd time to save the company.
Gosh, someone sure likes to swap? I remember this kinda stuff from the days of floppies... a two floppy OS was NOT fun.
The trick for a distro has always been about supporting the old and the new. At a given point it is time to give up your 386 with its 1 speed CD player and buy a new computer. At least if you want to use a distro that has made it VERY clear that it is no longer aimed at weirdos. After all, how you are you going to run Unity on that old PC of yours?
Time to seek a new distro. One that doesn't just add a ton of bloat that can just as easily be downloaded.
I know I really shouldn't read slashdot when half drunk and blurry eyed but fine, I will take your advice and in future get my maple syrup from Canadians. Anyone got a large press for sale? Funny, I always thought it came from trees but then that was before I learned about the duck press.
Older web developers will remember meta tags for keywords and site description... use them anymore? Nah, they were from a more innocent age, were it was expected that site owners would limit the keywords and description to accurately describe their site so it would only be found by those really intending to find it.
Ah... happy days.
Google really doesn't have that much to search for in an app submission. They rely pretty much on app owner submitted information. Gosh, we better hope they file accurate keywords and description so only people really intending to find that app will find it... and pigs will fly.
The various app markets are rife with spammers and husslers trying to sell apps no-one needs at outragous prices. It would like trying to index that co.cc domain THAT google STOPPED indexing because it became an impossible job.
But they can't stop indexing their own site.
Their famous fix was to not just look at a site but see how it was linked to. That got rid of the meta tag spam BUT spammers worked around it and with apps, there is no in build linking (remember, the web is all about linking).
That is why everyone wants VLC to be ported from Linux to mobile devices to finally get a decent player out there. That is why mplayer despite having no interest in doing windows support has people working on turning it into a windows version to get an even better player out there?
What apps are we talking about exactly? Fart apps? Angry birds?
There is a ton of software available for free install. What more do you need?
Or maybe the author is talking about payed for apps? Maybe the genius that wrote synergy should start charging for it? Maybe pay a buck here and there and then it suddenly counts? Okay, my pc will also then cost me a few hundred bucks but hey, at least we got APPS instead of applications. And we can only search for them by the broadest terms and their are ranked by how much their owners spams them.
Seriously, where is the issue?
What? My userid is NOT the number of women lusting after me? So it is the number of times I will have sex sometime in the future at least right? Right?? RIGHT?!?
In a few hours? So they write a single stand alone program? How about their bug finding skills? Fixing bugs is easy, finding the bug is the tricky thing. How do you test that? Given them a single sheet of code and telling them to find the bug in it is to easy, you told them the bug is in that part of the code.
And how many is a few hours? When I look for a job I sometimes got to squeeze two or three interviews into a day as the company I am employed at suddenly remembers just how valuable I am and tries to milk every last bit of knowledge out of me... if your interviewee has half a day to spare on an interview... wonder WHY he has so much spare time.
Also, if the candidate is doing say a dozen interviews, that means he is spending a LOT of time doing silly tests. And if the test is very silly indeed, you just advertised that you are a silly employer.
And what if the candidate is far far better then the interviewer and writes code the interviewer can't comprehend? What if the interviewer is lousy at setting requirements? I have looked at tests that were clearly wrong, known to be wrong since they were copied from some website and the website mentioned the old version of the test was wrong...
Finding the right candidate is very difficult. It requires first of all that the company asks itself, who do we REALLY need. As the article says, does the position really warrant a PhD? For changing the logo on a wordpress site? "We want the best" sounds nice but can you afford to hire them? And keep them?
Even if you are thinking of writing the next google from scratch, if that is going to happen maybe sometime in the future, you can hire the best and brightest right now but they will leave before you are ever ready and take your budget with them.
I work in the lowest of the low of development, web development, LAMP. *Que cries of ridicule* and that means most of my work just isn't all that cutting edge. I am not writing the next 3D engine or get involved with any math higher then primary school level. Cosine? What for? What website needs that? Even square root I never had a use for.
The most important skill for a webdeveloper? His google skills. There is ALWAYS someone brighter out there who has already solved your problem, wrote code for it, debugged it and tested it for years with full doco. Write your own? WHY!?! I swear you can put together a killed website with the most basic coding skills but awesome copy and paste skills. And you get PAID for it!
You know what I want to hear when I pose you a complex question? "Wait, let me google that". THAT is correct and efficient use of your time as a developer. Know how to phrase your problem in a question you can google and then see if someone has already done it.
But noooo. Companies test for web developers who can implement a bubble search... WHY? If you are in web dev and you did your own bubble search you wasted your time. Far far smarter people have already done it for you.
And if you are that smart, why are you a web monkey?
Leave the rocket science to the rocket scientists and hire people that have the skill YOU need in your company.
Only licensed pilots are allowed to fly a plane. Only licensed drivers are allowed to drive a car OR if supervised by a licensed trainer. Only engineers can sign off on construction. Only doctors are allowed to prescribe medicine, only pharmacists are allowed to dispense it.
Gosh, the list of things restricted to licensed people is long isn't it.
Oh you meant passengers in a plane? That is like comparing operating a computer with watching a screen.
You analogies suck.
So please explain WHY in godsname KDE insists on copying a movie file from a samba share before playing it in a capable player? That is just plain annoying on small files but when you are talking about 20gb files it is just plain silly. This kind of thing is so fucking basic and since the same player can just play from the share with other desktops it is a complete and utter failure on the KDE team to prioritize on basic functionality over bling.
KDE dropped the ball. Polishing a turned over several releases so it shines a bit more still means you got a turd.
You are talking like a stockholm beating, believing your captor is becoming your friend because the beatings have gotten slightly less regular.
All the big artist support these actions not just by signing up but by active lobbying for even stricter laws. Only a tiny handful oppose this, the rest, the drug addicts and the moralists evade taxes and want strict draconian rules to save guard their own income.
Look at the actions of say a U2, Bono the great moralist who played for the apartheid regime in South Africa, uses every tax dodge imaginable and whines about people "stealing" music.
Yeah, funny however that this story is written by an American. Who invented the first computer again? Where was the jet engine developer? Radar?
Pot calling kettle, come in kettle.