So only those with corporate parachutes are middle class (those who don't care about losing their job)? You seem retarded.
No. I haven't had to worry about losing my job since my late 20s, since, by then, I'd built up enough savings that I could live for a year or more without working. Most of my colleagues spent all their money and would have been screwed if they were sacked.
Knowing I can now live for a decade without having to work is always useful when an employer wants to screw me around.
Configuration confuses users. Hiding the menus does not.
Or something.
Personally, I'm still laughing about the way the UI 'designers' removed my browser menus to 'save screen space', then their comrades building web sites put in huge freaking fonts so they're readable on a tablet, so I now get about six lines of text on my laptop screen at many 'mobile-friendly' web sites.
Arts grads are the biggest single threat to computing and the Web right now. They have completely stuffed up both of them over the last few years.
Amazon, to the best of my knowledge, does not release ebook sales numbers. Amazon sells the majority of ebooks in America, though I've no idea whether that's true elsewhere. That alone means any sales numbers are suspect, at best. Yes, trade published might report their own sales, but that ignores all the indie-published books that make up a large fraction of those Amazon sells.
Personally, my main reason for buying print books in the last couple of years is quite simple: trade publishers keep releasing ebooks at a higher price than the paperback. So I buy the paperback instead.
Funny. The only time you actually *WANT* Microsoft to receive your data is from crash reports, and then they don't actually do anything about the crash.
Ah, I remember the days before I turned off that crap, when a crash would result in the hard drive thrashing for two minutes creating a 'crash report'. Which is exactly what I wanted to happen when something crashed while I was in the middle of doing some work, preventing me from restarting the app to go back to what I was doing before the freaking thing crashed.
In Australia the most popular form of car theft involves stealing the keys first although with keyless start becoming standard in many base models I imagine that soon an off the shelf device that can emulate a key will soon appear in the same way crims can buy off the shelf card skimmers.
There was a news story recently about thieves using directional antennas and signal boosters to convince the car to talk to your key while you had it in your house. So they already seem to have worked that out.
The biggest problem I personally have with C++ is operator overloads, which I think are just a bad idea.
Yeah, because having to remember when to use == and when to use.equals() and which order to put the arguments for foo.equals(bar) to avoid possible null pointer exceptions in Java is just so much less likely to introduce bugs.
So ISIS just need to upload a photo with the appropriate GPS co-ordinates inserted, and they can get the British government to bomb the opposition for them?
This used to be normal in the early days of commercial aviation. I've seen a picture of people being 'weighed in' prior to boarding a plane from one of the aerodromes around London in the 20s or 30s.
One of the great things about Microsoft being in catchup mode is that you can pretty much bet that, by the time they start doing something, it will be on the way out.
Now they've pushed all the user tracking and ad-serving crap into Windows, the advertising bubble is probably about to burst.
That said, I hope models like Patreon catch on enough to provide an alternative that is better for everyone, supporting artists directly and eliminating the need for ads and all the issues that come with them.
I hope cable TV catches on, because subscriptions will eliminate the need for ads and all the issues that come with them.
Oh, sorry, the adholes just pushed their crap onto cable subscribers, too, until it became as bad as over-the-air TV but you had to pay for it, too.
Yes. One project I worked on around then included a large chunk written by a Ruby fan, who was sure it was the best possible tool for the job.
It was only when their stuff was complete and took all the CPU and still ran like a slug that they finally admitted that they'd have to toss Ruby out and write it again in another language. For all I know, it might have been the best possible tool for the job on a desktop machine, but not a sub-200MHz ARM.
As soon as you start running somebody elses you're their whore.
Yes. I've seen a number of sites I read regularly, or forums I post to, suddenly cull certain topics because Google or some other ad service tells them those topics are no longer acceptable on their site.
TV is different. People accept that TV shows whatever the producer arrange for them. And if they want to see the rest of the show, they let the ad play - perhaps muted.
Just about everyone I know who still watches TV records the shows and fast-forwards through the ads. Our MythTV box does it automatically for us, though it's not perfect.
But it's the same thing: at some point, companies that pay to push ads are bound to notice people get pissed off, their sales aren't increasing as much as they'd like after running advertising campaigns after campaigns, and pushing ads turns out to be counterproductive. Then they'll stop paying to push ads.
If that was true, companies would have stopped buying ads on cable TV decades ago.
It will kill the internet as we know it. Only those entities with money will be able to post any content. Smaller sites like/. may survive on subscriptions, but many will not. If you think the coroprtization of the internet is bad now...
Yeah, because the Internet didn't exist before ads.
Lots of sites will die. Those will be the sites that exist to serve ads, rather than do something people are willing to pay for.
That's presumably why Microsoft added the evil Ribbon, so Word users would have no idea how to find the features they use in a processor with a saner interface.
Then again, those users probably have no idea how to find the features they use in the Ribbon, either.
Slashdot Mirror
Everyone is building a self-driving car these days. Heck, even my hamster is building a self-driving car.
Apple had better do something new if they expect to keep their bloated stock price. But that doesn't seem likely in the post-Jobs era.
So only those with corporate parachutes are middle class (those who don't care about losing their job)? You seem retarded.
No. I haven't had to worry about losing my job since my late 20s, since, by then, I'd built up enough savings that I could live for a year or more without working. Most of my colleagues spent all their money and would have been screwed if they were sacked.
Knowing I can now live for a decade without having to work is always useful when an employer wants to screw me around.
Configuration confuses users. Hiding the menus does not.
Or something.
Personally, I'm still laughing about the way the UI 'designers' removed my browser menus to 'save screen space', then their comrades building web sites put in huge freaking fonts so they're readable on a tablet, so I now get about six lines of text on my laptop screen at many 'mobile-friendly' web sites.
Arts grads are the biggest single threat to computing and the Web right now. They have completely stuffed up both of them over the last few years.
And where are these numbers coming from?
Amazon, to the best of my knowledge, does not release ebook sales numbers. Amazon sells the majority of ebooks in America, though I've no idea whether that's true elsewhere. That alone means any sales numbers are suspect, at best. Yes, trade published might report their own sales, but that ignores all the indie-published books that make up a large fraction of those Amazon sells.
Personally, my main reason for buying print books in the last couple of years is quite simple: trade publishers keep releasing ebooks at a higher price than the paperback. So I buy the paperback instead.
Funny. The only time you actually *WANT* Microsoft to receive your data is from crash reports, and then they don't actually do anything about the crash.
Ah, I remember the days before I turned off that crap, when a crash would result in the hard drive thrashing for two minutes creating a 'crash report'. Which is exactly what I wanted to happen when something crashed while I was in the middle of doing some work, preventing me from restarting the app to go back to what I was doing before the freaking thing crashed.
In Australia the most popular form of car theft involves stealing the keys first although with keyless start becoming standard in many base models I imagine that soon an off the shelf device that can emulate a key will soon appear in the same way crims can buy off the shelf card skimmers.
There was a news story recently about thieves using directional antennas and signal boosters to convince the car to talk to your key while you had it in your house. So they already seem to have worked that out.
If the API headers are the most valuable part of your software... you're doing something wrong.
1997 called. They want their overused Java meme back.
I take it you've never used Eclipse?
Some days I'm lucky to be able to type three characters before it goes off and spends 30 seconds garbage collecting again.
Newsflash: the bad guys are busy finding these kind of holes and exploiting them, and don't wait for a court to tell them they're allowed to.
The biggest problem I personally have with C++ is operator overloads, which I think are just a bad idea.
Yeah, because having to remember when to use == and when to use .equals() and which order to put the arguments for foo.equals(bar) to avoid possible null pointer exceptions in Java is just so much less likely to introduce bugs.
So ISIS just need to upload a photo with the appropriate GPS co-ordinates inserted, and they can get the British government to bomb the opposition for them?
Sounds like a great money-saver for them.
This used to be normal in the early days of commercial aviation. I've seen a picture of people being 'weighed in' prior to boarding a plane from one of the aerodromes around London in the 20s or 30s.
Just change to ADA instead.
Do the words 'unchecked conversion' mean anything to you?
One of the great things about Microsoft being in catchup mode is that you can pretty much bet that, by the time they start doing something, it will be on the way out.
Now they've pushed all the user tracking and ad-serving crap into Windows, the advertising bubble is probably about to burst.
That said, I hope models like Patreon catch on enough to provide an alternative that is better for everyone, supporting artists directly and eliminating the need for ads and all the issues that come with them.
I hope cable TV catches on, because subscriptions will eliminate the need for ads and all the issues that come with them.
Oh, sorry, the adholes just pushed their crap onto cable subscribers, too, until it became as bad as over-the-air TV but you had to pay for it, too.
Yes. One project I worked on around then included a large chunk written by a Ruby fan, who was sure it was the best possible tool for the job.
It was only when their stuff was complete and took all the CPU and still ran like a slug that they finally admitted that they'd have to toss Ruby out and write it again in another language. For all I know, it might have been the best possible tool for the job on a desktop machine, but not a sub-200MHz ARM.
If your 'content' isn't worth people paying for it... you can't really complain that people aren't paying for it.
If your 'content' is worth paying for, then people will pay for it.
Losing ad revenue would just mean many 'content' writers would have to find a real job, not that 'content' wouldn't exist.
As soon as you start running somebody elses you're their whore.
Yes. I've seen a number of sites I read regularly, or forums I post to, suddenly cull certain topics because Google or some other ad service tells them those topics are no longer acceptable on their site.
TV is different. People accept that TV shows whatever the producer arrange for them. And if they want to see the rest of the show, they let the ad play - perhaps muted.
Just about everyone I know who still watches TV records the shows and fast-forwards through the ads. Our MythTV box does it automatically for us, though it's not perfect.
But it's the same thing: at some point, companies that pay to push ads are bound to notice people get pissed off, their sales aren't increasing as much as they'd like after running advertising campaigns after campaigns, and pushing ads turns out to be counterproductive. Then they'll stop paying to push ads.
If that was true, companies would have stopped buying ads on cable TV decades ago.
It will kill the internet as we know it. Only those entities with money will be able to post any content. Smaller sites like /. may survive on subscriptions, but many will not. If you think the coroprtization of the internet is bad now...
Yeah, because the Internet didn't exist before ads.
Lots of sites will die. Those will be the sites that exist to serve ads, rather than do something people are willing to pay for.
You're making one fundamental logical mistake.
The advertising industry exists to sell ads. It does not exist to sell the things they're advertising.
They don't care whether it works. They care that people pay them to push ads.
No, this is exactly what they expected to see. The main thing they were wrong about is that they expected to see it within 20 years.
I've found that the one thing Futurists are consistently really bad at is predicting the future.
That's presumably why Microsoft added the evil Ribbon, so Word users would have no idea how to find the features they use in a processor with a saner interface.
Then again, those users probably have no idea how to find the features they use in the Ribbon, either.
Sorry, but this is what happens when you let a country under the sway of a totalitarian government build you computers.
But isn't Lenovo based in China these days, not America?