Freedom is NOT some kind of absolute that stays the same whereever you are. It is not a constant.
Freedom is whatever I want to do and you might not like that one bit.
One societies freedom is not another societies freedom. Take something as harmless as comics/strips/manga. The US has lots of violence, but no nudity. The Japanese have lots of nudity but no politics. European has nudity and violence and politics because EU rules but the strip is a far smaller medium... go figure.
Who then has more freedom? A "kids" comic like Oliver Blunder (Walter Melon) has occasional nudity in it, including topless women. It isn't about nudity, just that in some scenes a nude makes sense, so it is there. Americans would have a fit. Japanese would wonder why there is so little of it and where the censor bar that hides nothing is.
What society is free? Probably all of them would consider themselves to be free societies.
So, say now that the mood among the people is to be extremely religious? Is it then a freedom to act on this? Is Hamas excersing its freedom by enforcing its views on others? Though one.
The only people confused by all this are kiddies who want to see the world in black & white and want to see the world burn. Once they defended Israel blindly, now they side with Hamas unquestionably. You can already see it on this forum, all the twisting to not have to admit that if you replaced Hamas with Republicans the forum would be on fire. Fact is there are no heroes in the real world. Hippies who ran away with Indian culture never seemed to notice the kast system. EU right wingers never seem to notice the countless problem with the rabid capitalism in the US. Privatize the railroads.... why because it worked so wel in the US?
Hamas if you dare to look honestly at it is a very scare group. They are not nice people. But the locals thought they could get things done, so voted for them and now getting rid of them is near impossible. (US and tea-party, UK and conservatives) This is hardly the first time hamas has shown its extremists face. But the west chooces not to see because it makes the Israel-Palestine conflict one between a flawed democracy and a extremist religion totally at odds with any western value.
Gosh, where did we see this before? What side did US support again in Afghanistan? What side is the US on in the Pakistan-India conflict?
And it is not just the west. SECULAR Syria (how many of you knew Syria is secular) is finding out that its use of religious extremist is NOT without risk as they might use their power to not just overthrow Israel but Syria as well. Iran is happy to support Hamas, as long as they stay outside Iran. Cause Iran doesn't need more terror bombings by religious extremists. Oh, you didn't know that Iran has its own fights as well? It does. Why do you think no Arab nation has ever seriously offered a home to the Palestinians? Don't want the mess. Either side, not the democrats or the reglious extremists. Both would be a danger to the typical dictatorships in the region.
And yet some kiddie who hates the world thinks Hamas is his hero for fighting the powers that be. Yeah, wear that scarf with pride girl, knowing that if a true Hamas ever met you, he would kill you for not going fully covered.
This guy clearly hasn't got a clue. Gmail for companies allows you to use your own domain name. Since he doesn't even bother to look up this most basic thing in choosing an email solution, he clearly hasn't researched beyond "what does MS offer", so how can we then trust anything else he says?
My advice, find someone who actually has used multiple solutions and ask him/her. If you ask a MS shop/fanboy what the solution is, then the answer is going to be MS. You wouldn't ask a ricer about best car would you?
What however I usually find most intresting is the story behind the story.
Why did it take this long and an amateur to figure it all out? Why wasn't CBS called within minutes of the airing that this was nothing, that aircraft X flying from Y and landing at Z at XX:XX was it, that radar had it on track the whole time and that this flight passes over daily and does pretty much the same thing?
It shows a kink in the line of communication somewhere that this was cleared up almost immediately. And no, I am not saying the US military HAS to answer every question, but when a story breaks out like this and reaches around the globe, the military should have a better answer then "we don't what it is, we are fairly certain it wasn't our missle, but what it was, we don't know".
For everyone who thinks the Chinese would for instance NOT have dared to fire a missle this close as a show of power. The USA with Bomber Harris send US bomber aircraft capable of carrying nukes on flights over Russia. Do you think the US has a monopoly on mad men?
That it was nothing does not mean it will always be nothing and why does the military get so much of the US taxpayers money if they can't even tell us what was flying over California?
My god, read the reactions, what is this Slashdot or some right wing whiners forum?
Someone made TREES SHINE! Glowing trees! And all people can do here is whine about how UV light is needed or how leaves fall off.
My god. Nerds? Right wing losers. Real nerds would simply think of the fun things that can be done with this. Imagine a park with no visible lights, just all the trees glowing. Who cares if it needs a couple thousand each year for the gold, that is trivial money for park maintenance. And no it isn't going to save electricity or cut down on light polution, that is just a retarded slashdot editor/submitter putting some idiots spin on it.
GLOWING TREES!
I pity the guy that actually fits a shark with laser beams. The only reaction here would be that lasers do not make sense underwater.
If you walked into your kitchen and saw gorgeous twins wearing only an apron, would you bitch about how unhygienic this is and how it invades your privacy that they can just enter your house? I bet most here would.
A real nerd/geek LOVES science and engineering. Who cares if it is practical. Go back to slashrepublican.org.
There is a VERY simple solution to this problem. Refine your search. On the left you can select from which period you want it. I tend to do my linux searches in the last year if they are errors and Ubuntu releases in the last half year/month.
That gives you far better results. Also adding the ubuntu version helps a lot.
But the MAIN problem is that computers still cannot understand human writing, especially chaotic human writing. If every linux article was clearly labelled with a date and a status (fixed for instance) a computer would find it far easier to categorize it.
The Dewey Decimal Classification did for books what Google is trying to do with the internet. But book publishers "behaved" because everyone knew who they were and librarians are not people to be trifled with.
The internet is a Libratarians dream, IE a nightmare for every sane person. Anyone can do what he wants. This doesn't just mean "innocent" people labelleing their content completly wrong but people deliberately trying to game the system. All books published with a title beginning with A. All books falling in every category. TRY to imagin a Dewey Decimal system that could cope with deliberate abuse. Impossible.
A search engine, at least the ones we know now just can't deal with abuse. The old systems relied on meta tags that were treated pretty much the same as "official" category elements. And if you claimed to fall in category X, that is were you were put. Pagerank by Google changed this. It started to check the content and how said content was linked to to determine the category. A hell of a job but it was only a matter of time until this to was going to be abused.
The problem is that we got a missing element. The dewey system consists of three: The system itself, the librarians who control it and the publishers that supply it. Google is the system, the web owners are the publishers but WE, the librarians, are absent. There is no way to feed into google what publishers are not providing the correct data.
Google can't afford to do this themselves, the internet is just to big. Open moderation would be wide open to abuse as well. Remain the link sharing sites. Human run and human controlled sites where people share intresting sites. For me, for certain subjects Wikipedia has becomes the ultimate search site and link site.
Google has to find a way to allow users, trusted users to moderate its search results. If only I could block out e*pert-&xchange (don't want to give them more traffic) my search results would improve a lot. But considering the size of the net, tracking all abuse reports, and abuser reports of abuse reports, would be a staggering amount of work.
But without it, google could loose out. They became big because the previous search companies couldn't clean up their search results. If google can't either, they will end up the same.
That google is looking so hard for other sources of revenue shows that they know this all to well.
YOUR result, your WRONG result is the pagerank at work. It prefers older content, that is presumed to be more reliable over new unchecked content. If google dropped this, then anyone could make a page NOW with a hot bug and fill it with spam. Since pagerank doesn't know that the spam content is not related to the bug/query, it can't remove it. ONLY time (and links) tell Pagerank that content is valid. So pagerank prefers a static web, with old reliable content. Notice how well it indexes wikipedia that is often the first result as well.
A call to one of Mr. Davidson’s homes revealed a man’s friendly recorded voice, warning that, “If you leave an ad or any other such message, your telephone wire will be fried automatically.”
The conspiracy allegedly involved a mysterious hard drive in a remote village of Honduras and a plot to infiltrate the United States government by Polish priests linked to Opus Dei.
Just how smart do you have to be to tell this is a lie?
Everyone knows the white house is controlled by the Jews, that is why a Muslim is running it... eh what?
A lot of conspiracies just don't make sense. Those that believe in them might call themselves smart but they aren't. By definition, a person who believes stupid things, isn't smart.
It is the same with the saying "You can't con an honest man". And no, this is NOT said by con men. The people who question this saying just don't want to admit they are not honest men.
How can you accept to help funnel vast sums of money out of country were people are starving to death to make yourself rich? ANY person who even considers doing that is not just a dishonest person but a not very person as well. But that is hard to admit if you fiddle your own taxes.
You really can't con an honest smart person, because an honest smart person will always ask himself, "why me?". Why are you asking me, Joe Nobody, to funnel millions out of a country. Why would I, Joe Nobody be targetted by Polisch priests out to overthrow the US government? Why would you sell me something you can sell anywhere else legally for far more? Why are you offering me 20% off, all the time, if that always applies, isn't the real price just 20% lower?
Scams are easy to detect, you just have to let go off the idea "I am special and deserve to have special things happen to me".
Remember, these are the same conservatives (read idiots) who thought public health care would be better if modeled on the American system and if only the railroads were privately owned like in the US the same excellent results might be achieved.
There is just one tiny problem. The UK is not the US. It takes a certain type of person to be an American and the average brit doesn't have what it takes.
Take for instance the love for the BBC. State funded TV? No American would be able to stand even the thought of it, let alone watch it. London and its traffic regulation? Laws AGAINST cars? What is this, California? If so, then were is the sun?
But hey, you didn't want labour, so you went back to the conservatives, the guys you were so sick of you though Blair was a breath of fresh air. Amusing thing politics. Watch the sheep run back and forth between butchers to find the one who culls them the least.
This however is NOT a brave NEW world, is the same old world the US has had for a very long time. He that pays the piper, chooses the tune.
Advertising is NOT free money. The advertiser advertises in your media because he thinks that has the appropriate audience. That sound harmless BUT the eternal search for more money means that this isn't static. The advertiser will seek to influence the media he is advertising in to increase the effect of his advertising.
Simple examples are easy to find. The disapparence of the eye-catch, the short clip between the tv-show and the advertising block. Ads being overlaid over the actual tv show. Websites that block access until you seen the ad. Ads inline of the page, rather then to the side (out of view).
There are plenty of examples where content is not just payed for with ads, but the actual advertiser creates the content. Read up on how Soaps were created. Do you think these completly paid by the advertisers productions did not listen to their money supplier as to what should and what should NOT be in them?
But that is only mindless entertainment, who cares... well, anyone wanting fair and balanced reporting? Everyone who can subsidize, sorry, sponsor a production has a lot of money. Ergo the filthy rich have had a say in an awful lot of content that has been shaping the western mind. No filthy socialist tv-shows to corrupt the american mind. Where would they get the money?
And if you think socialism is bad anyway, look at what happened to Oprah when she dared to question the beef lobby. She was by that time mighty enough to resist, how many other shows have in the past caved in to the advertiser before you ever heard of it? Was all the fuzz about Toyota because they don't advertise enough perhaps? Certainly other recalls that killed far more people AND with far more direct evidence did not get the same attention. Puzzling that, follow the ad money perhaps?
Self censorship, either because one wants to appease an advertiser or for fear the government might regulate you is far more dangerous then actual government regulation. That at least is clear. But how much does not get reported in the US because the editor fears cut ads? How is this different from cutting content for fear of a visit of the secret police?
Right now advertisers determine what is available for "free". Do those advertisers have the same concerns as you? No? Then that should concern you.
No it doesn't but your worry DOES show the real problem the US has.
There is some believe working in the US that makes it value to top. The interesting jobs, the well paying jobs. But that is not what the economy, the boring local economy, runs on. It runs on truck drivers, factory workers, construction, repair. This is what keeps that majority of the population employed. Silicon Valley, Redmon, Wall Street do not.
Obama, and he is hardly the first, seems so pleased with 10 billion in orders. But how much of that money flows straight back out again because to produce those orders the US needs foreign goods? And those 10 billion are petty cash for the US. Meanwhile far more money is lost with outsourced call centers year in year out.
And no, outsourcing a call center will NOT cost the country a fortune, just a local community. A local community that can't then tax the local salaries and use those taxes to fund local education, local road maintenance etc etc. Outsourcing is not about a cripling injury that instantly kills the economy. This is a slow bleed that isn't stopped.
The call center goes, the local catering van can't break even anymore. The locals find far lower paying jobs and make ends meet by buying cheap Chinese imports instead of higher quality American goods. More and more American business got to cut costs to be able to meet the lower prices. They do so by outsourcing production to China and yet more Americans have just a bit less to spend.
It ain't complex to see, but if you believe in Wall Street as a religion then this can't be. This is not how the market, the magic fairy market, is supposed to work. Obama, and democrats and republicans with him, is saying "let them eat cake". The famous saying that started the revolution showing that the ruling elite didn't have a clue about what was really happening. It is after all not in Washington or Redmond or Wall Street that the job cuts are hurting the most. Oh, they might have a bad year, but not decade after decade in which a factory town turns into a ghost town. How many of the powers that be come from Detroit?
Yet the simple people, like the poster above think H1-b is the issue. Yeah right. The US has 300+ million citizens, and how many immigrants on these things? They are irrelevant. This is just the Redmond, Silicon Valley etc job. The get a lot of attention, but they don't keep the heartland working. Producing.
Scream at the immigrant worker while another factory is shipped lock stock and barrel abroad including every single job. SethStorm is like a frenchmen who reacts to "let them eat cake" with: "But I don't like cake."
But you don't have bread let alone cake.
IT has done this a lot. Thinking that they would be save from the export of jobs and then it turned out those dirty filthy foreigners could not just knock out cheap goods but cheap code. Boohoo, now our jobs are going...
Well, you didn't protest when every item in Walmart came from China, who is now supposed to care the next version of Windows comes from China?
And don't you worry, the decline will be so slow and the average American so attached to his large house and larger car that he will bend over backwards to keep up with payments rather then protest. Because if you strike or protest, you miss a payment and then that SUV is gone.
American citizens have managed to enslave themselves to Wall Street thoroughly. Willing slaves with guns. If you wrote this down in a book of fiction, nobody would believe it.
You block asia? Fine, be a racist asshole but you are NOT blocking emails from pine are you? So how is this comparable to what Hulu is doing. They are BOTH blocking on region AND device. That copyright means the world wide web isn't, is bad enough. But now they are also determining what hardware/software you can use. What if it becomes IE only? You still will be saying the same? So MS only has to buy up enough content to turn the web IE only?
Take take corporate dick out of your mouth for long enough to think clearly for a while.
You have opened the door to: Petrol stations only selling to Ford trucks. Busses only accepting gold platinum credit cards and therefor not picking up poor people == black people. Discrimiation of services is a very slippery slope. And you got corporate dick so far up your mouth you can't see anything but pubic hair.
This same argument has been used for newspapers, tv, radio, opera, iPod, mafia, whatever and guess what they are all still here.
And as for dogging being the latest craze. Sorry, but are you TOTALLY incapable of seeing the irony in your own post? You are comparing Vivid to some guy selling DVD's in Ohio (and if he is selling them, then it ain't amateur anymore)? And the move to "amateur" is hardly new either. Gonzo mean anything to you?
What has happened over the decades is that porn, has become more mainstream. As nudity becomes acceptable in this regular movie theather, porn has had to go further to still be able to sell. And tech has allowed it, ever closer close-ups, less need for the camera to dictate the action.
And yet at the same time, the call for retro-porn, from a time when you could NOT see a girls cervix, is greater then ever. For every Dogging fan there is a guy browsing OLD magazines.
The internet has shown us just how great the diversity in the taste of porn is, but that doesn't stop some kid coming along claiming that the DVD's from some guy in Ohio are where it is at.
But don't worry. The newspapers, radio, tv, theathers, the iPod, and the mafia are SURE to take your hint and finally die off. Because YOU determined what EVERYONE else wants.
We live on this planet with billions of people. That is a lot. If you want you could say we live as ants heaped together. But ants got a very strict system by nature. We do not. So we have to make our own. These rules of the system are not so much about some idyllic Utopian future but about keeping the whole mess from collapsing into utter anarchy. And no, there are no true anarchists because they could never organize or agree on anything. How can you have an anarchy movement? It would dissipate immediately.
And so we have laws. Silly laws which are often meant simply to keep things flowing. And this can get very silly indeed. What does a green light mean? That you can drive? WRONG, you MUST drive, to NOT drive at a green light is a traffic offence, for which you can be punished.
The highway got even more rules, unclear rules about speed. The max speed is indicated by signs on the road right? WRONG, the max speed is determined by the traffic around you regardless of any sign, it is the ABSOLUTE max speed that is indicated on signs. if you plow into a traffic jam, you can't say "but the sign told me to go this speed". Most of this stuff is pretty straightforward and MOST of us get these laws without actually having to have read them because they are common sense and basic courtesy. But the number of traffic fines also indicates that a lot of people do NOT get it.
This article shows that many people do NOT get "freedom of speech". Freedom of speech is not a blanket excuse to do anything you want. You cannot simply stand on highway shouting your political opinions without getting hauled off to prison. NOT for your opinions but for disrupting traffic. Neither does society and its rules want endless shouting matches. You can say what you want, but do it where someone who doesn't want to hear, doesn't have to hear. You can picket a building, but can't enter it or obstruct its entrance (strikes have exceptions in some countries because the people doing the picketing are associated with the building).
This guy used his "free speech" to try to block someone elses free speech. This would have been like taking a fog horn and blasting out the speech of your opponent. That isn't how the system works. Basically this guy doesn't believe in freedom of speech or democracy and wants to use force to silence his opponents, NOT debate and elections. That cannot be allowed. This is no different from any of the other tools oppressors have used to silence opposition. In a democracy ALL voices should be heard, even the ones you don't agree with.
So he is caught and sentenced. And in that sentence is not just the techinal act of starting a DDOS attack which is a criminal act in itself because it disrupts someone elses chance of communicating and NO it is NOT you who gets to determine who has the right to use the internet at this moment, but also that with this attack he wanted to silence his opponents.
This guy is either very disturbed or a serious danger to democracy. NOT because of the effect of his own attack, but because it might trigger an escalation. What if now the other side does a DDOS attack as well? And then someone else retaliates again? before you know it we accept that all sites with a political opinion can be knocked out. Ah, but you can protect against DDOS. Ah yes, the standard defence of the rich white slashdotter. So only people who can afford to withstand an attack can have their say? How is this different then having the right to strike, as long as you can survive the beating by the bosses gang?
No, this guy must be punished. He is a danger to the democratic process and that process is already in enough trouble as it is.
Yes, boys and girls, there is a difference between defacing a commercial ad and a political one. And you better think about this before you make an attack on someone else free speech.
Here is a news flash, criminals do NOT get to determine their own sentence. We, the rest of society do and as a group we don't want any misbehaving.
And it is a rare criminal to fully accept what he did was wrong and how much damage it cost. Oh but I only raped her for a bit of fun, she knew that when I knocked her teeth out that I was only playing.
You see, complaining that your punishment is so harsh and hurts you so much is kinda missing the point that the majority (and they get to do the telling) WANT punishment to be harsh and hurt criminals so much.
And since you are completly unwilling to tell us WHAT you did that you claim was a prank, I think you KNOW that most would NOT call it a silly prank.
Or are you afraid you got pounded in the ass for five years for blowing up a mail box? No damage? What about the mail that was inside? Oh but that doesn't matter that someone doesn't get a notice of a death so they can attend the funeral. Just as long as you had a bit of fun.
It is not the job of engineers or gods to figure out the science. That is for the scientists. Apples fell from trees long before Newton thought about it.
The scientists can be skeptical, they can demand reproducible tests, but once the tests have been done it is THEIR job to find an explanation, NOT that of the engineers.
These guys build something, they opened themselves up to a lot of tests, so either you make some real accusations and not just "idiot slashdotter doesn't understand so it must be fake" or start to work out the math or just accept that you are an idiot along with everyone else and leave this to smarter people.
But they do NOT have to explain to you how it works, they got far smarter people to convince, not some random kiddie on the net.
Religions, reward after death religions, have to be like this. Else you get mass suicides. After all if life after death is better, why wait? So all religions that have an after life that can be perceived as even remotely more pleasant then this life HAVE to have a mechanism that stops people from popping off to this after life first chance they get.
That is why suicide is a sin in most religions. But if dying is a sin, then soldiers are in trouble, so they also got "rules" that make dying for a cause okay.
You only have to look at the mass suicides that some cults experience to see what happens if this brake on entering the after life is absent. No religion were everyone kills themselves as soon as they can hold a knife would survive, so the simple rules of evolution soon dictate that all religions still around stop people from killing themselves to quick. It is related to the reason that being Pope is not a hereditary job.
The US position on healthcare is however not all about religion. That is a side effect. It is instead about economy.
Americans die younger then europeans, they score fairly low in life expectancy especially considering wealth of the nation. But it turns out the US spends a LOT of money on the old. Why? Because wealth and life expectancy are closely related. The old people on which the US spends a lot of money are the old people that got old THANKS to their money. These people ALWAYS had a lot of money spend on their healthcare. Just that in their younger years they were outnumbered by poor Americans, but as the poor Americans die off thank to lack of healthcare, the older ones with money become more prominent. The US isn't spending a lot of money on the old, it is spending a lot of money on the old with money.
So basically this story is, rich old americans who always had good healthcare life longer then the general population of britain... oh yeah, fun with statistics. And slashdot editors falling for it as the gullible idiots they are.
So, you ain't dating anybody, and you spend last night re-compiling the kernel, then crying yourself to sleep in your cold lonely apartment. Only comforted by the hum of your computers.
These are FLASH ads, the kind of animation early computers operating at mhz were capable of. For god sakes, we are talking banners that flash 2 small images. How can this require 100% CPU power on what is by alrights a super-super-computer.
Most of the time my computer busy running even such hogs as java and opera with tab icons 1 pixel in width barely reaches 4% cpu. But flash can bring the same machine to its knees.
It is the same with PDF. I can play a game that renders an entire world with super high textures made by fans for Fallout at break neck speed. But open a PDF and each page takes seconds to render and when browsing you constantly have to wait... WTF is wrong with the code?
Flash AND PDF either are the most horrible code ever written or they invite designers to make such horrendous choices that the most simple things take more computation then moddeling a nuclear explosion. ANd yes, nuclear explosions WERE modelled on machines far less powerful then your current desktop.
Just having flash banners during web browsing eats 1/3 of the battery power and you think that is just fine. My god, how wipped can you get. Would you accept the radio in your car sucking 1/3 of the fuel to give you ads as well?
Odd that you should say that, because the only flash site I ever use is youtube. So, what flash do I absolutly need yet that I am not aware off?
Here is a hint, promo-sites for games/movies etc I do NOT need.
What amazes me is that so many people claim that Apple has made a mistake and that people NEED flash, they MUST have flash, yet the iPhone and iPad sell like... well like an iPhone/iPad... they sold MILLIONS. Apple with 1 phone is among the biggest phone makers. Yet apparently all these people are buying the wrong phone because their flash needs are not being met... poor suckers... that is why I see so many iPhone users fuming everytime they use their iPhone! "DAMN", they say, "STILL no flash! This sucks! I am going to return it and NEVER BUY another one!"
This explains why the next generation iPhones completely failed to sell... oh wait NO THEY DIDN'T.
Your needs do not seem to be the same as million of iPhone/iPod/iPad users. To bad. Don't buy an iPhone, buy a Windows 7 phone. Be happy.
But you knew during all your development that you had to switch databases. AND you didn't have to worry about speed. Often you don't have that luxury.
While you have a valid example of why database abstraction CAN be useful, you have not actually proven that it must be done every time just in case you might switch sometime in the future.
Seen to many developments throw speed out of the door for a migration that will never happen.
If the democrats had some guts, they would just quit. Hand the country over the tea-party. Then when it has all collapsed come back and demand the first son/daugher (according to sexual preference) of every republican family.
The tea baggers will cause one hell of a mess. Normal republicans are merely inept and corrupt. Most are not completly batshit insane.
But this is the ultimate failure of democracy. When people think they punish the PRESIDENT by voting for some nutters.... yeah, because Obama is NOW going to take the hint and FIX the economy after all that was ruined by the republicans because without a majority that makes that job a lot easier...
When voters start basing their vote to punish a leader for not doing fast enough what they want and then vote for people that are totally against what they want... just call it quits and get me a benign dictator (translation, any dictator whose deathlist I am not on).
Punish Obama for not pushing heathcare reform by voting for a tea bagger... maybe voting should require an IQ test. If you eat the piece of paper, you fail it.
IT, or at least some people in IT suffer from what I call the "Oprah" syndrome. No, not the weight issue. The idea that a problem is just one problem and that it can be solved with a single solution. Or the silver bullet that will solve all your problems at once.
Software development is bloody hard, partly because it doesn't deal with a real product and testing a software product is extremely abstract.
If I design a better brake pad, I can test this fairly simply AND thorougly. We know exactly what it is supposed to do, how it does it and how we can compare performance. There is no magic, if the brakepad reaches 198 degrees on a sunday, the trunk will pop open. Also nobody will ask a brake pad engineer to add a christmas special to it, on the 25th of december, at 8 in the evening.
Web development especially suffers from the idea that if only we implement magic method number #45324521, all the hassle of web development will go away. Writing specs is long boring and not very sexy. So lets do agile and not write them anymore. Problem solved... eh no because spec writing is long boring and not very sexy because getting the requirements out of a user is like sucking cock. The user might enjoy it but you are just left with a bad taste in your mouth and a desire to throw up over the user. Or maybe that is just my dates.
"But if you do agile right", but if you do documentation driven development right! Any method, done right will most likely work. That is the definition of doing it right. Why is it so hard to do agile right? Why are there so many variants already?
I see a lot of "magic" solutions in web development.
Database abstraction, so we can magically switch database!!!
Question: When have you EVER switched database on a web application and HOW easy was it? Is there ANYONE out there who only use pure SQL that is 100% understood by all databases the same? Then go stand in the corner, because your code lacks any optimization. Real developers optimize their code for the specific environment they are using. This includes making use of database specific features. Don't use Mysql auto-increment and PDO and think you are database independent.
Frameworks take all the hardship out of writing code!!!
Question: How smart do you think it is to hire a coder who hates to code? It is like hating a singer who hates to sing, a spokeperson who doesn't like talking.
This is where a lot of the silver bullets come from, from people that don't actually want to be a developer but just cash the paycheck. You don't hire a cook who only knows how to nuke frozen meals do you? If you go to the supermarket and buy a microwave meal thinking wow, this makes cooking easy, then here is a hint: IT AIN'T COOKING. It is heating up food.
I see time after time some framework or tool promosing a complete working website without writing a line of code... EEK! That is my JOB! Luckily they are all wrong because what at most they do is create a straight CMS for your database, which is rarely what the customer wants. After all, there are already plenty of tools to graphically maintain your database content.
No, Agile hasn't delivered... for those looking for a silver bullet to the problems of development. For others, it is a valid method with its own problems that puts it along side more traditional models, not ahead of them.
Lets not get ahead of ourselves. W3C CLAIMS that a beta product follows a very narrow part of the next generation of the web (this is after all far more then just html5, no matter how accurate it is that html5 is html5) better then others... but no mention of CSS3, or other extensions that other browsers already support and no word on MS adding any of its own extensions yet again.
Sorry, but call me cynic, but I need a bit more to be convinced MS is going to play nice this time around. They never ever played nice before. Why should this time be any different? Does anyone REALLY think MS wants an open internet? Because the other browsers will catch up soon enough and are ahead in other areas already. So what is MS advantage to be just another browser maker? If IE has nothing special, what is its selling point?
I am just not convinced. In fact, I very much expect tomorrow there be plenty of stories debunking this one.
Slashdot Mirror
Freedom is NOT some kind of absolute that stays the same whereever you are. It is not a constant.
Freedom is whatever I want to do and you might not like that one bit.
One societies freedom is not another societies freedom. Take something as harmless as comics/strips/manga. The US has lots of violence, but no nudity. The Japanese have lots of nudity but no politics. European has nudity and violence and politics because EU rules but the strip is a far smaller medium... go figure.
Who then has more freedom? A "kids" comic like Oliver Blunder (Walter Melon) has occasional nudity in it, including topless women. It isn't about nudity, just that in some scenes a nude makes sense, so it is there. Americans would have a fit. Japanese would wonder why there is so little of it and where the censor bar that hides nothing is.
What society is free? Probably all of them would consider themselves to be free societies.
So, say now that the mood among the people is to be extremely religious? Is it then a freedom to act on this? Is Hamas excersing its freedom by enforcing its views on others? Though one.
The only people confused by all this are kiddies who want to see the world in black & white and want to see the world burn. Once they defended Israel blindly, now they side with Hamas unquestionably. You can already see it on this forum, all the twisting to not have to admit that if you replaced Hamas with Republicans the forum would be on fire. Fact is there are no heroes in the real world. Hippies who ran away with Indian culture never seemed to notice the kast system. EU right wingers never seem to notice the countless problem with the rabid capitalism in the US. Privatize the railroads.... why because it worked so wel in the US?
Hamas if you dare to look honestly at it is a very scare group. They are not nice people. But the locals thought they could get things done, so voted for them and now getting rid of them is near impossible. (US and tea-party, UK and conservatives) This is hardly the first time hamas has shown its extremists face. But the west chooces not to see because it makes the Israel-Palestine conflict one between a flawed democracy and a extremist religion totally at odds with any western value.
Gosh, where did we see this before? What side did US support again in Afghanistan? What side is the US on in the Pakistan-India conflict?
And it is not just the west. SECULAR Syria (how many of you knew Syria is secular) is finding out that its use of religious extremist is NOT without risk as they might use their power to not just overthrow Israel but Syria as well. Iran is happy to support Hamas, as long as they stay outside Iran. Cause Iran doesn't need more terror bombings by religious extremists. Oh, you didn't know that Iran has its own fights as well? It does. Why do you think no Arab nation has ever seriously offered a home to the Palestinians? Don't want the mess. Either side, not the democrats or the reglious extremists. Both would be a danger to the typical dictatorships in the region.
And yet some kiddie who hates the world thinks Hamas is his hero for fighting the powers that be. Yeah, wear that scarf with pride girl, knowing that if a true Hamas ever met you, he would kill you for not going fully covered.
This guy clearly hasn't got a clue. Gmail for companies allows you to use your own domain name. Since he doesn't even bother to look up this most basic thing in choosing an email solution, he clearly hasn't researched beyond "what does MS offer", so how can we then trust anything else he says?
My advice, find someone who actually has used multiple solutions and ask him/her. If you ask a MS shop/fanboy what the solution is, then the answer is going to be MS. You wouldn't ask a ricer about best car would you?
What however I usually find most intresting is the story behind the story.
Why did it take this long and an amateur to figure it all out? Why wasn't CBS called within minutes of the airing that this was nothing, that aircraft X flying from Y and landing at Z at XX:XX was it, that radar had it on track the whole time and that this flight passes over daily and does pretty much the same thing?
It shows a kink in the line of communication somewhere that this was cleared up almost immediately. And no, I am not saying the US military HAS to answer every question, but when a story breaks out like this and reaches around the globe, the military should have a better answer then "we don't what it is, we are fairly certain it wasn't our missle, but what it was, we don't know".
For everyone who thinks the Chinese would for instance NOT have dared to fire a missle this close as a show of power. The USA with Bomber Harris send US bomber aircraft capable of carrying nukes on flights over Russia. Do you think the US has a monopoly on mad men?
That it was nothing does not mean it will always be nothing and why does the military get so much of the US taxpayers money if they can't even tell us what was flying over California?
My god, read the reactions, what is this Slashdot or some right wing whiners forum?
Someone made TREES SHINE! Glowing trees! And all people can do here is whine about how UV light is needed or how leaves fall off.
My god. Nerds? Right wing losers. Real nerds would simply think of the fun things that can be done with this. Imagine a park with no visible lights, just all the trees glowing. Who cares if it needs a couple thousand each year for the gold, that is trivial money for park maintenance. And no it isn't going to save electricity or cut down on light polution, that is just a retarded slashdot editor/submitter putting some idiots spin on it.
GLOWING TREES!
I pity the guy that actually fits a shark with laser beams. The only reaction here would be that lasers do not make sense underwater.
If you walked into your kitchen and saw gorgeous twins wearing only an apron, would you bitch about how unhygienic this is and how it invades your privacy that they can just enter your house? I bet most here would.
A real nerd/geek LOVES science and engineering. Who cares if it is practical. Go back to slashrepublican.org.
There is a VERY simple solution to this problem. Refine your search. On the left you can select from which period you want it. I tend to do my linux searches in the last year if they are errors and Ubuntu releases in the last half year/month.
That gives you far better results. Also adding the ubuntu version helps a lot.
But the MAIN problem is that computers still cannot understand human writing, especially chaotic human writing. If every linux article was clearly labelled with a date and a status (fixed for instance) a computer would find it far easier to categorize it.
The Dewey Decimal Classification did for books what Google is trying to do with the internet. But book publishers "behaved" because everyone knew who they were and librarians are not people to be trifled with.
The internet is a Libratarians dream, IE a nightmare for every sane person. Anyone can do what he wants. This doesn't just mean "innocent" people labelleing their content completly wrong but people deliberately trying to game the system. All books published with a title beginning with A. All books falling in every category. TRY to imagin a Dewey Decimal system that could cope with deliberate abuse. Impossible.
A search engine, at least the ones we know now just can't deal with abuse. The old systems relied on meta tags that were treated pretty much the same as "official" category elements. And if you claimed to fall in category X, that is were you were put. Pagerank by Google changed this. It started to check the content and how said content was linked to to determine the category. A hell of a job but it was only a matter of time until this to was going to be abused.
The problem is that we got a missing element. The dewey system consists of three: The system itself, the librarians who control it and the publishers that supply it. Google is the system, the web owners are the publishers but WE, the librarians, are absent. There is no way to feed into google what publishers are not providing the correct data.
Google can't afford to do this themselves, the internet is just to big. Open moderation would be wide open to abuse as well. Remain the link sharing sites. Human run and human controlled sites where people share intresting sites. For me, for certain subjects Wikipedia has becomes the ultimate search site and link site.
Google has to find a way to allow users, trusted users to moderate its search results. If only I could block out e*pert-&xchange (don't want to give them more traffic) my search results would improve a lot. But considering the size of the net, tracking all abuse reports, and abuser reports of abuse reports, would be a staggering amount of work.
But without it, google could loose out. They became big because the previous search companies couldn't clean up their search results. If google can't either, they will end up the same.
That google is looking so hard for other sources of revenue shows that they know this all to well.
YOUR result, your WRONG result is the pagerank at work. It prefers older content, that is presumed to be more reliable over new unchecked content. If google dropped this, then anyone could make a page NOW with a hot bug and fill it with spam. Since pagerank doesn't know that the spam content is not related to the bug/query, it can't remove it. ONLY time (and links) tell Pagerank that content is valid. So pagerank prefers a static web, with old reliable content. Notice how well it indexes wikipedia that is often the first result as well.
A call to one of Mr. Davidson’s homes revealed a man’s friendly recorded voice, warning that, “If you leave an ad or any other such message, your telephone wire will be fried automatically.”
Not the workings of a healthy mind.
The conspiracy allegedly involved a mysterious hard drive in a remote village of Honduras and a plot to infiltrate the United States government by Polish priests linked to Opus Dei.
Just how smart do you have to be to tell this is a lie?
Everyone knows the white house is controlled by the Jews, that is why a Muslim is running it... eh what?
A lot of conspiracies just don't make sense. Those that believe in them might call themselves smart but they aren't. By definition, a person who believes stupid things, isn't smart.
It is the same with the saying "You can't con an honest man". And no, this is NOT said by con men. The people who question this saying just don't want to admit they are not honest men.
How can you accept to help funnel vast sums of money out of country were people are starving to death to make yourself rich? ANY person who even considers doing that is not just a dishonest person but a not very person as well. But that is hard to admit if you fiddle your own taxes.
You really can't con an honest smart person, because an honest smart person will always ask himself, "why me?". Why are you asking me, Joe Nobody, to funnel millions out of a country. Why would I, Joe Nobody be targetted by Polisch priests out to overthrow the US government? Why would you sell me something you can sell anywhere else legally for far more? Why are you offering me 20% off, all the time, if that always applies, isn't the real price just 20% lower?
Scams are easy to detect, you just have to let go off the idea "I am special and deserve to have special things happen to me".
She just isn't very good at it yet.
Remember, these are the same conservatives (read idiots) who thought public health care would be better if modeled on the American system and if only the railroads were privately owned like in the US the same excellent results might be achieved.
There is just one tiny problem. The UK is not the US. It takes a certain type of person to be an American and the average brit doesn't have what it takes.
Take for instance the love for the BBC. State funded TV? No American would be able to stand even the thought of it, let alone watch it. London and its traffic regulation? Laws AGAINST cars? What is this, California? If so, then were is the sun?
But hey, you didn't want labour, so you went back to the conservatives, the guys you were so sick of you though Blair was a breath of fresh air. Amusing thing politics. Watch the sheep run back and forth between butchers to find the one who culls them the least.
This however is NOT a brave NEW world, is the same old world the US has had for a very long time. He that pays the piper, chooses the tune.
Advertising is NOT free money. The advertiser advertises in your media because he thinks that has the appropriate audience. That sound harmless BUT the eternal search for more money means that this isn't static. The advertiser will seek to influence the media he is advertising in to increase the effect of his advertising.
Simple examples are easy to find. The disapparence of the eye-catch, the short clip between the tv-show and the advertising block. Ads being overlaid over the actual tv show. Websites that block access until you seen the ad. Ads inline of the page, rather then to the side (out of view).
There are plenty of examples where content is not just payed for with ads, but the actual advertiser creates the content. Read up on how Soaps were created. Do you think these completly paid by the advertisers productions did not listen to their money supplier as to what should and what should NOT be in them?
But that is only mindless entertainment, who cares... well, anyone wanting fair and balanced reporting? Everyone who can subsidize, sorry, sponsor a production has a lot of money. Ergo the filthy rich have had a say in an awful lot of content that has been shaping the western mind. No filthy socialist tv-shows to corrupt the american mind. Where would they get the money?
And if you think socialism is bad anyway, look at what happened to Oprah when she dared to question the beef lobby. She was by that time mighty enough to resist, how many other shows have in the past caved in to the advertiser before you ever heard of it? Was all the fuzz about Toyota because they don't advertise enough perhaps? Certainly other recalls that killed far more people AND with far more direct evidence did not get the same attention. Puzzling that, follow the ad money perhaps?
Self censorship, either because one wants to appease an advertiser or for fear the government might regulate you is far more dangerous then actual government regulation. That at least is clear. But how much does not get reported in the US because the editor fears cut ads? How is this different from cutting content for fear of a visit of the secret police?
Right now advertisers determine what is available for "free". Do those advertisers have the same concerns as you? No? Then that should concern you.
No it doesn't but your worry DOES show the real problem the US has.
There is some believe working in the US that makes it value to top. The interesting jobs, the well paying jobs. But that is not what the economy, the boring local economy, runs on. It runs on truck drivers, factory workers, construction, repair. This is what keeps that majority of the population employed. Silicon Valley, Redmon, Wall Street do not.
Obama, and he is hardly the first, seems so pleased with 10 billion in orders. But how much of that money flows straight back out again because to produce those orders the US needs foreign goods? And those 10 billion are petty cash for the US. Meanwhile far more money is lost with outsourced call centers year in year out.
And no, outsourcing a call center will NOT cost the country a fortune, just a local community. A local community that can't then tax the local salaries and use those taxes to fund local education, local road maintenance etc etc. Outsourcing is not about a cripling injury that instantly kills the economy. This is a slow bleed that isn't stopped.
The call center goes, the local catering van can't break even anymore. The locals find far lower paying jobs and make ends meet by buying cheap Chinese imports instead of higher quality American goods. More and more American business got to cut costs to be able to meet the lower prices. They do so by outsourcing production to China and yet more Americans have just a bit less to spend.
It ain't complex to see, but if you believe in Wall Street as a religion then this can't be. This is not how the market, the magic fairy market, is supposed to work. Obama, and democrats and republicans with him, is saying "let them eat cake". The famous saying that started the revolution showing that the ruling elite didn't have a clue about what was really happening. It is after all not in Washington or Redmond or Wall Street that the job cuts are hurting the most. Oh, they might have a bad year, but not decade after decade in which a factory town turns into a ghost town. How many of the powers that be come from Detroit?
Yet the simple people, like the poster above think H1-b is the issue. Yeah right. The US has 300+ million citizens, and how many immigrants on these things? They are irrelevant. This is just the Redmond, Silicon Valley etc job. The get a lot of attention, but they don't keep the heartland working. Producing.
Scream at the immigrant worker while another factory is shipped lock stock and barrel abroad including every single job. SethStorm is like a frenchmen who reacts to "let them eat cake" with: "But I don't like cake."
But you don't have bread let alone cake.
IT has done this a lot. Thinking that they would be save from the export of jobs and then it turned out those dirty filthy foreigners could not just knock out cheap goods but cheap code. Boohoo, now our jobs are going...
Well, you didn't protest when every item in Walmart came from China, who is now supposed to care the next version of Windows comes from China?
And don't you worry, the decline will be so slow and the average American so attached to his large house and larger car that he will bend over backwards to keep up with payments rather then protest. Because if you strike or protest, you miss a payment and then that SUV is gone.
American citizens have managed to enslave themselves to Wall Street thoroughly. Willing slaves with guns. If you wrote this down in a book of fiction, nobody would believe it.
You block asia? Fine, be a racist asshole but you are NOT blocking emails from pine are you? So how is this comparable to what Hulu is doing. They are BOTH blocking on region AND device. That copyright means the world wide web isn't, is bad enough. But now they are also determining what hardware/software you can use. What if it becomes IE only? You still will be saying the same? So MS only has to buy up enough content to turn the web IE only?
Take take corporate dick out of your mouth for long enough to think clearly for a while.
You have opened the door to: Petrol stations only selling to Ford trucks. Busses only accepting gold platinum credit cards and therefor not picking up poor people == black people. Discrimiation of services is a very slippery slope. And you got corporate dick so far up your mouth you can't see anything but pubic hair.
This same argument has been used for newspapers, tv, radio, opera, iPod, mafia, whatever and guess what they are all still here.
And as for dogging being the latest craze. Sorry, but are you TOTALLY incapable of seeing the irony in your own post? You are comparing Vivid to some guy selling DVD's in Ohio (and if he is selling them, then it ain't amateur anymore)? And the move to "amateur" is hardly new either. Gonzo mean anything to you?
What has happened over the decades is that porn, has become more mainstream. As nudity becomes acceptable in this regular movie theather, porn has had to go further to still be able to sell. And tech has allowed it, ever closer close-ups, less need for the camera to dictate the action.
And yet at the same time, the call for retro-porn, from a time when you could NOT see a girls cervix, is greater then ever. For every Dogging fan there is a guy browsing OLD magazines.
The internet has shown us just how great the diversity in the taste of porn is, but that doesn't stop some kid coming along claiming that the DVD's from some guy in Ohio are where it is at.
But don't worry. The newspapers, radio, tv, theathers, the iPod, and the mafia are SURE to take your hint and finally die off. Because YOU determined what EVERYONE else wants.
Grow up.
We live on this planet with billions of people. That is a lot. If you want you could say we live as ants heaped together. But ants got a very strict system by nature. We do not. So we have to make our own. These rules of the system are not so much about some idyllic Utopian future but about keeping the whole mess from collapsing into utter anarchy. And no, there are no true anarchists because they could never organize or agree on anything. How can you have an anarchy movement? It would dissipate immediately.
And so we have laws. Silly laws which are often meant simply to keep things flowing. And this can get very silly indeed. What does a green light mean? That you can drive? WRONG, you MUST drive, to NOT drive at a green light is a traffic offence, for which you can be punished.
The highway got even more rules, unclear rules about speed. The max speed is indicated by signs on the road right? WRONG, the max speed is determined by the traffic around you regardless of any sign, it is the ABSOLUTE max speed that is indicated on signs. if you plow into a traffic jam, you can't say "but the sign told me to go this speed". Most of this stuff is pretty straightforward and MOST of us get these laws without actually having to have read them because they are common sense and basic courtesy. But the number of traffic fines also indicates that a lot of people do NOT get it.
This article shows that many people do NOT get "freedom of speech". Freedom of speech is not a blanket excuse to do anything you want. You cannot simply stand on highway shouting your political opinions without getting hauled off to prison. NOT for your opinions but for disrupting traffic. Neither does society and its rules want endless shouting matches. You can say what you want, but do it where someone who doesn't want to hear, doesn't have to hear. You can picket a building, but can't enter it or obstruct its entrance (strikes have exceptions in some countries because the people doing the picketing are associated with the building).
This guy used his "free speech" to try to block someone elses free speech. This would have been like taking a fog horn and blasting out the speech of your opponent. That isn't how the system works. Basically this guy doesn't believe in freedom of speech or democracy and wants to use force to silence his opponents, NOT debate and elections. That cannot be allowed. This is no different from any of the other tools oppressors have used to silence opposition. In a democracy ALL voices should be heard, even the ones you don't agree with.
So he is caught and sentenced. And in that sentence is not just the techinal act of starting a DDOS attack which is a criminal act in itself because it disrupts someone elses chance of communicating and NO it is NOT you who gets to determine who has the right to use the internet at this moment, but also that with this attack he wanted to silence his opponents.
This guy is either very disturbed or a serious danger to democracy. NOT because of the effect of his own attack, but because it might trigger an escalation. What if now the other side does a DDOS attack as well? And then someone else retaliates again? before you know it we accept that all sites with a political opinion can be knocked out. Ah, but you can protect against DDOS. Ah yes, the standard defence of the rich white slashdotter. So only people who can afford to withstand an attack can have their say? How is this different then having the right to strike, as long as you can survive the beating by the bosses gang?
No, this guy must be punished. He is a danger to the democratic process and that process is already in enough trouble as it is.
Yes, boys and girls, there is a difference between defacing a commercial ad and a political one. And you better think about this before you make an attack on someone else free speech.
Here is a news flash, criminals do NOT get to determine their own sentence. We, the rest of society do and as a group we don't want any misbehaving.
And it is a rare criminal to fully accept what he did was wrong and how much damage it cost. Oh but I only raped her for a bit of fun, she knew that when I knocked her teeth out that I was only playing.
You see, complaining that your punishment is so harsh and hurts you so much is kinda missing the point that the majority (and they get to do the telling) WANT punishment to be harsh and hurt criminals so much.
And since you are completly unwilling to tell us WHAT you did that you claim was a prank, I think you KNOW that most would NOT call it a silly prank.
Or are you afraid you got pounded in the ass for five years for blowing up a mail box? No damage? What about the mail that was inside? Oh but that doesn't matter that someone doesn't get a notice of a death so they can attend the funeral. Just as long as you had a bit of fun.
Enjoy your criminal record.
It is not the job of engineers or gods to figure out the science. That is for the scientists. Apples fell from trees long before Newton thought about it.
The scientists can be skeptical, they can demand reproducible tests, but once the tests have been done it is THEIR job to find an explanation, NOT that of the engineers.
These guys build something, they opened themselves up to a lot of tests, so either you make some real accusations and not just "idiot slashdotter doesn't understand so it must be fake" or start to work out the math or just accept that you are an idiot along with everyone else and leave this to smarter people.
But they do NOT have to explain to you how it works, they got far smarter people to convince, not some random kiddie on the net.
Religions, reward after death religions, have to be like this. Else you get mass suicides. After all if life after death is better, why wait? So all religions that have an after life that can be perceived as even remotely more pleasant then this life HAVE to have a mechanism that stops people from popping off to this after life first chance they get.
That is why suicide is a sin in most religions. But if dying is a sin, then soldiers are in trouble, so they also got "rules" that make dying for a cause okay.
You only have to look at the mass suicides that some cults experience to see what happens if this brake on entering the after life is absent. No religion were everyone kills themselves as soon as they can hold a knife would survive, so the simple rules of evolution soon dictate that all religions still around stop people from killing themselves to quick. It is related to the reason that being Pope is not a hereditary job.
The US position on healthcare is however not all about religion. That is a side effect. It is instead about economy.
Americans die younger then europeans, they score fairly low in life expectancy especially considering wealth of the nation. But it turns out the US spends a LOT of money on the old. Why? Because wealth and life expectancy are closely related. The old people on which the US spends a lot of money are the old people that got old THANKS to their money. These people ALWAYS had a lot of money spend on their healthcare. Just that in their younger years they were outnumbered by poor Americans, but as the poor Americans die off thank to lack of healthcare, the older ones with money become more prominent. The US isn't spending a lot of money on the old, it is spending a lot of money on the old with money.
So basically this story is, rich old americans who always had good healthcare life longer then the general population of britain... oh yeah, fun with statistics. And slashdot editors falling for it as the gullible idiots they are.
Oh yes we do, your on slashdot:
So, you ain't dating anybody, and you spend last night re-compiling the kernel, then crying yourself to sleep in your cold lonely apartment. Only comforted by the hum of your computers.
Or is that just me?
These are FLASH ads, the kind of animation early computers operating at mhz were capable of. For god sakes, we are talking banners that flash 2 small images. How can this require 100% CPU power on what is by alrights a super-super-computer.
Most of the time my computer busy running even such hogs as java and opera with tab icons 1 pixel in width barely reaches 4% cpu. But flash can bring the same machine to its knees.
It is the same with PDF. I can play a game that renders an entire world with super high textures made by fans for Fallout at break neck speed. But open a PDF and each page takes seconds to render and when browsing you constantly have to wait... WTF is wrong with the code?
Flash AND PDF either are the most horrible code ever written or they invite designers to make such horrendous choices that the most simple things take more computation then moddeling a nuclear explosion. ANd yes, nuclear explosions WERE modelled on machines far less powerful then your current desktop.
Just having flash banners during web browsing eats 1/3 of the battery power and you think that is just fine. My god, how wipped can you get. Would you accept the radio in your car sucking 1/3 of the fuel to give you ads as well?
Valentine: A. You didn't get her a present. B. Someone else got her a better one.
Spring break: She wants to get busy! But not with you.
Christmas: I got to introduce this to my family? No way!
Slashdot anniversary: If you know when it is, you ain't got a girlffriend... ever.
Odd that you should say that, because the only flash site I ever use is youtube. So, what flash do I absolutly need yet that I am not aware off?
Here is a hint, promo-sites for games/movies etc I do NOT need.
What amazes me is that so many people claim that Apple has made a mistake and that people NEED flash, they MUST have flash, yet the iPhone and iPad sell like... well like an iPhone/iPad... they sold MILLIONS. Apple with 1 phone is among the biggest phone makers. Yet apparently all these people are buying the wrong phone because their flash needs are not being met... poor suckers... that is why I see so many iPhone users fuming everytime they use their iPhone! "DAMN", they say, "STILL no flash! This sucks! I am going to return it and NEVER BUY another one!"
This explains why the next generation iPhones completely failed to sell... oh wait NO THEY DIDN'T.
Your needs do not seem to be the same as million of iPhone/iPod/iPad users. To bad. Don't buy an iPhone, buy a Windows 7 phone. Be happy.
While you have a valid example of why database abstraction CAN be useful, you have not actually proven that it must be done every time just in case you might switch sometime in the future.
Seen to many developments throw speed out of the door for a migration that will never happen.
If the democrats had some guts, they would just quit. Hand the country over the tea-party. Then when it has all collapsed come back and demand the first son/daugher (according to sexual preference) of every republican family.
The tea baggers will cause one hell of a mess. Normal republicans are merely inept and corrupt. Most are not completly batshit insane.
But this is the ultimate failure of democracy. When people think they punish the PRESIDENT by voting for some nutters.... yeah, because Obama is NOW going to take the hint and FIX the economy after all that was ruined by the republicans because without a majority that makes that job a lot easier...
When voters start basing their vote to punish a leader for not doing fast enough what they want and then vote for people that are totally against what they want... just call it quits and get me a benign dictator (translation, any dictator whose deathlist I am not on).
Punish Obama for not pushing heathcare reform by voting for a tea bagger... maybe voting should require an IQ test. If you eat the piece of paper, you fail it.
IT, or at least some people in IT suffer from what I call the "Oprah" syndrome. No, not the weight issue. The idea that a problem is just one problem and that it can be solved with a single solution. Or the silver bullet that will solve all your problems at once.
Software development is bloody hard, partly because it doesn't deal with a real product and testing a software product is extremely abstract.
If I design a better brake pad, I can test this fairly simply AND thorougly. We know exactly what it is supposed to do, how it does it and how we can compare performance. There is no magic, if the brakepad reaches 198 degrees on a sunday, the trunk will pop open. Also nobody will ask a brake pad engineer to add a christmas special to it, on the 25th of december, at 8 in the evening.
Web development especially suffers from the idea that if only we implement magic method number #45324521, all the hassle of web development will go away. Writing specs is long boring and not very sexy. So lets do agile and not write them anymore. Problem solved... eh no because spec writing is long boring and not very sexy because getting the requirements out of a user is like sucking cock. The user might enjoy it but you are just left with a bad taste in your mouth and a desire to throw up over the user. Or maybe that is just my dates.
"But if you do agile right", but if you do documentation driven development right! Any method, done right will most likely work. That is the definition of doing it right. Why is it so hard to do agile right? Why are there so many variants already?
I see a lot of "magic" solutions in web development.
Database abstraction, so we can magically switch database!!!
Question: When have you EVER switched database on a web application and HOW easy was it? Is there ANYONE out there who only use pure SQL that is 100% understood by all databases the same? Then go stand in the corner, because your code lacks any optimization. Real developers optimize their code for the specific environment they are using. This includes making use of database specific features. Don't use Mysql auto-increment and PDO and think you are database independent.
Frameworks take all the hardship out of writing code!!!
Question: How smart do you think it is to hire a coder who hates to code? It is like hating a singer who hates to sing, a spokeperson who doesn't like talking.
This is where a lot of the silver bullets come from, from people that don't actually want to be a developer but just cash the paycheck. You don't hire a cook who only knows how to nuke frozen meals do you? If you go to the supermarket and buy a microwave meal thinking wow, this makes cooking easy, then here is a hint: IT AIN'T COOKING. It is heating up food.
I see time after time some framework or tool promosing a complete working website without writing a line of code... EEK! That is my JOB! Luckily they are all wrong because what at most they do is create a straight CMS for your database, which is rarely what the customer wants. After all, there are already plenty of tools to graphically maintain your database content.
No, Agile hasn't delivered... for those looking for a silver bullet to the problems of development. For others, it is a valid method with its own problems that puts it along side more traditional models, not ahead of them.
Lets not get ahead of ourselves. W3C CLAIMS that a beta product follows a very narrow part of the next generation of the web (this is after all far more then just html5, no matter how accurate it is that html5 is html5) better then others... but no mention of CSS3, or other extensions that other browsers already support and no word on MS adding any of its own extensions yet again.
Sorry, but call me cynic, but I need a bit more to be convinced MS is going to play nice this time around. They never ever played nice before. Why should this time be any different? Does anyone REALLY think MS wants an open internet? Because the other browsers will catch up soon enough and are ahead in other areas already. So what is MS advantage to be just another browser maker? If IE has nothing special, what is its selling point?
I am just not convinced. In fact, I very much expect tomorrow there be plenty of stories debunking this one.