Why is this so unexpected and a cause for any frustration at all? It's a reality that won't change unless we end up in a world of coders/developers.
I dunno, I just find it unexpected that when there is a message on the screen describing what's wrong in plain english, instead of people reading that message they email me to say "it isn't working" whereupon I have to find the entry in the log with that error message and copy and paste it into a reply.
And I get that people aren't going to understand complex error messages, but why do they think I'm going to be able to investigate a problem with absolutely zero information to go on. The aforementioned "one of our users is having a problem accessing a website" query is very frequent - why would anyone expect I would be able to figure out whats going on when I don't know which user, or which website, or what error message (if any) they are getting? We're talking sites that have several hundred users saturating a 100Mbps internet connection with web traffic, I can't trawl through a web proxy log (which often come to gigabytes per day) on the offchance I spot something "not right" - I need to have some vague idea what to look for.
Requiring a user, after the fact, to recall an error message is futile.
I don't want them to recall it after the fact, I want them to note it down at the time they got the error. It'd take 5 seconds to copy and paste it into an email.
They simple have seen to many varied ones and their brain goes 'oh an error message' not 'oh a 504 error'
This is obvious from the way I get "my emails keep getting bounced" complaints, so I ask them to forward the bounce and frequently just copy and paste error message back into my reply. When the error is something as obvious as "the recipient does not exist" or "the recipient's mailbox is full", what else are you going to do but reply with "it's bouncing your mail because "?
This is when we have to write error handling code to be able to provide a text message, email, or simply a text file that records the details around a crash so you get the robustness you need to fix these types of errors without relying on iffy recall of users.
Most of the software I write isn't user-facing, but it interfaces with user-facing software. So a lot of the error messages are generated by third party software and my software never sees them, but they are as a result of the interactions (and possibly bugs) with my software. So since I didn't write the thing thats generating the error, I have no chance to make it record lots of detail and automatically send it to me.
Of course, increasingly we're seeing people using Apple software, which has a habit of not giving you any detail in the error messages *at all*, so even when you get a problem you can reproduce, it still turns out to be hell to figure out whats actually happening (tcpdumping the network traffic is a common way to figure it out). And many iOS and Android applications don't even give you an error message at all, they just plain don't work.
It doesn't involve users to be code masters, it just involves them engaging their brain a bit. I frequently get bug reports along the lines of "something broke last week, came up with some error (I don't remember what), but I rebooted it and its fine for now; please fix it so it doesn't happen again". You don't have to be a "code master" to figure out that reporting a bug and not actually tell me _what_ broke, what the error was or let me log into a system that is currently exhibiting the problem so I can look myself is not going to be condusive to me fixing things.
And this stuff happens again and again with the same customers... "one of our users is having a problem accessing some websites, please can you fix it?" - ok, so I have to go back and ask "which user" and "which websites", if I'm lucky the customer will give me this information, if I'm unlucky I get "I didn't ask". A week later I'll get an almost identical problem report from the same person about a different (but extremely similar) problem, and again none of the information I ask for _every_ time is included.
Also the great one that comes up occasionally is "this has been broken for a month and you haven't fixed it yet!".. well, if you'd actually told me that there was a problem I might've known to look into it, but since this is the first I've heard of it...
Pedestrians around here have a habit of stepping out into the road without looking. Most often, I see women with pushchairs push their child out into the road without looking, which is inexcusable
I frequently see pedestrians standing on the kerb where they usually would to cross, but with a push chair (off the kerb and in the road), watching traffic go by until its safe to cross. Some people just don't engage their brain at all.
One of our former students is now starting a company that produces vests with built-in LEDs. They're bright glowing red from the back and white from the front. They, alone, are bright enough that you exceed the minimum legal requirements for bike lights at night even if you don't have any lights on the bike itself. Even better, they have flashing yellow lights in the arms that are activated when you lift the arm to the horizontal position. They're currently circulating some prototypes, but I'm looking forward to seeing them hit the market.
I ride a bike, and I've seen a lot of my fellow cyclists do stupid and dangerous things. Often, these are also illegal. I've also seen a lot of drivers do stupid and dangerous things, like the guy in the SUV a couple of days ago who decided that the best place to overtake me was on a bend in the road where it's barely wide enough for two cars and there was an oncoming bus - his only way of avoiding a head-on collision was to sharply turn in front of me when half way past, and my only way of avoiding a collision was an emergency stop (and that was only possible in time because I'd noted when he started overtaking on that part of the road that he was probably a dangerous idiot and started slowing down).
Both cyclists and drivers are at fault, which is why the people who advocate changing the law to assume the driver is at fault really worry me. The person who comes of worst is usually the cyclist though, and that makes me wonder why on earth some cyclists take stupid risks.
I should point out that I cycle too, although having been knocked off my bike a few too many times, I try to avoid cycling on busy roads these days (however, my fiancée cycles to work every day on busy roads).
I was driving in the centre of Manchester at around midnight a few weeks ago - I saw about 6 cyclists on the roads, and none of whome had any lights, I think all were wearing dark clothing too. I mean, WTF? How dense do you have to be to cycle at night without lights? And bright LED lights (which are often a good idea to have in the day to make yourself more visible) aren't exactly expensive.
A few years ago I almost knocked a cyclist off while I was driving - it was dark, I was at a junction trying to turn right out of a side road, there was a line of stationary traffic with their headlights on waiting on the more major road in the lane that I would have to cross to make the right turn. I looked down the line of traffic into the glare of headlights, started to pull out and at the last moment spotted a cyclist undertaking the stationary traffic with no lights on - he was completely invisible against the glare of the headlights until the last couple of metres and if I hadn't spotted him and slammed on the brakes he would've been straight into the wing of my car.
In fact, I see cyclists doing crazy stuff when I'm driving all the time.
But drivers are no better - frequently cutting way too close instead of using the full width of the road, trying to overtake cyclists while adjacent to a traffic island rather than waiting until they could pull over onto the oncoming lane, etc. And then we have the drivers who simply don't seem to care about anyone but themselves - one of my friends was cycling with a bus following him, hit some black ice and ended up on the ground; not the bus driver's fault, but you'd think he might stop and check he's ok... but no, the bus driver didn't even wait for my friend to get up, he just pulled out and drove around him and carried on along the road.
It is the default mechanism for bypassing firewalls. It is becoming a replacement for tcp/ip. Historically you would simply have opened connections on other ports but that's obviously excruciatingly painful in a firewalled environment.
So, pretty soon firewalls will be either blocking port 80, or performing packet inspection and ripping out streams they don't like.
Guess it will keep the firewall developers busy.
Already doing that... Everything hijacking HTTP/HTTPS is turning out to be an almighty pain in the arse for sites that need to filter their web access (e.g. schools). As an example, we have Skype, which either requires the ability to make connections on port 443 to arbitrary IP addresses, or requires the firewall to ahve *all* unprivalidged ports open... Great design. (Yeah, I've got customers who want to use Skype but want to restrict web accesses to a walled garden - you can imagine how well that doesn't work.)
It reads almost like they reimplemented all of TCP inside of HTTP, complete with stream set-up and teardown, queuing, congestion control, etc. Why not just use... TCP to manage multiple streams?
They're reimplementing SCTP inside TCP. Probably because they know there isn't a hope in hell of convincing Microsoft to implement a protocol that practically every other OS has supported for years...
from quick glance, multiple transfers and communications channels("streams" in the drafts lingo) can be put through the single connection, cutting tcp connection negotiations.
Yeah, if you look at total lifetime costs smokers are saving everyone money. They die of horrible diseases that are cheap to deal with until they cause death.
Also, they pay a shit load of tax on their tobacco...
Kids could transfer their work from a Rasperry pi at home to the virtualised one at school. The only sticking points would be anyone starting to use Open GL / open GL ES could run into problems.
Now we can introduce even more people to tinker toys that they'll never use after they get out of school!
How about concentrating on reading comprehension, mathematics, and basic sciences, or if one does go into "trades", go into real trades that have proven to be durable careers...
Wait... why do we need to teach maths until a kid chooses a career as a mathematician? And science - complete waste of time unless the kid chooses to become a scientist; WTF would you want to teach someone physics if they're going to become a historian? In fact, you don't need to teach people to read until *after* they've chosen not to go into a burger-flipping career, right?
Or alternatively, maybe teaching people a wide variety of stuff is a Good Thing - not only does it give them good general knowledge (which _is_ useful in fairly unquantifyable ways through life, even if just to win the pub quiz), but it also gives them experience of lots of subjects, which is important when they come to choose a career - how are you going to know that you like writing software if you've never actually done it at all?
There's no dishonor in being a certified journeyman welder or an electrician or even a plumber, and all can pay very well if the individual learns the skills needed.
There's no dishonor at all, but you seem to be implying that an electrician, plumber, etc. either isn't capable of learning these skills, or will never find them useful or interesting in any part of their life. Education shouldn't just be about making someone employable in their chosen career path, it should be about enriching everyone's lives. There is also a huge advantage in teaching people when they are young - young brains are much more plastic, you're going to find it much easier to teach a 5 year old how to speak French, for example, than wait until they turn 18 and decide they want to be an interpreter...
Regarding the power generation issue, there are other concerns with nuclear power that are not immediately obvious. For instance, imagine we replaced all power plants in existence now with nuclear plants, we'd in effect just shift the reason to go to war from oil to uranium. There is also the issue of waste, and the current solution of shoveling it into a pit and hope nobody digs it up right away is unsustainable.
Of course. I wasn't intending my example to suggest that nuclear is definitely the right option, just to point out that the people making the decisions should be those in charge of all the facts, not the people who seem to be under the impression that nuclear power stations are continually on the brink of causing an enormous disaster (which clearly they aren't - there have been very few nuclear power related accidents and even fewer that have caused serious environmental harm).
The environmentalist in me would rejoice if nuclear power was used to replace industrial revolution era coal and oil plants, but with the stipulation that the waste problem be solved beforehand, and that a viable source of fuel were to be found - fusion would solve that, but meh.
Well, the problem has largely been solved for years (breeder reactors _do_ work to massively reduce waste, although have a proliferation risk), but burying things in the ground is unfortunately cheaper and less risky for the stakeholders. I guess what's needed is for a government to spearhead the whole thing, but its a sensitive environmental issue and the british government at least doesn't like getting involved in such things as they polarise the electorate.
A form of blind democracy could be formulated, where there are no spokesperson for a cause, and you could only vote for a proposed solution on it's merit, without a charming figurehead to shovel it down your throat.
Imagine an election where the ballot only consisted of 4 year plans (or any other number of years, perhaps even variable) with accompanying information to help you decide, no names, no parties, just solutions to problems.
Sounds lovelly, but wherever there is an issue to be decided, there are people with vested interests who will promote the issue using the most photogenic media friendly people they can. Even if those people aren't directly part of the government, they will exist purely by virtue of third parties having a vested interest.
I would however like to point out that the system in place now is a continuation of centuries, if not millennia, of violent revolutions giving room for new kinds of governments (in some cases, re-instituting old ones), and as such we could argue that violent revolution has led us here once already.
Indeed; but the result of the last violent revolution has produced many years of reasonably good government; but there is an ongoing progression towards totalitarianism and its my opinion that the only way that trend will be reversed is through another revolution (which would hopefully result in many more years of good government). I hope I'm wrong, but I just can't see anything else that would reverse the trend. It seems to me that we have something of a cycle - we get a liberal government which progressively tends towards oppressiveness, eventually it becomes too oppressive, the people revolt and the whole cycle starts over.
I would go on to say that I'm not a big believer in democracy - I think its right that an informed public have a choice, but its my opinion that the vast majority of the electorate are not informed and have no desire to become informed, yet will still vote and dilute the choice of the people who *actually* know what theyr'e talking about.
A good example I'd like to cite is power generation - I *don't* want the public to be the ones deciding whether to build nuclear power stations because most of the public seem to think that nuclear power stations are on the brink of going Chernobyl all the time and will doom the world. I want the people who actually know what they're talking about to figure this stuff out. The thorny issue there is how do you separate the people who know what they're talking about from the people who are voting for something they have a vested interest in? This seems to be a big problem with the current rich MPs, since with their riches seem to come a propensity to have vested interests in a lot of things they're supposed to be making unbiassed decisions on. I think a lot could be achieved by returning to the idea that the House of Commons should be made up of *commoners*, not just the upper classes.
The crucial missing piece in this puzzle, as I see it, is combating apathy. It will take a hell of a lot longer to achieve the same goal, but I do think the quality of the result will be significantly better.
I think the main reason for apethy is that even with a hell of a lot of work, the government rarely changes their core attitudes to accommodate the public. They change some superficial stuff that the media happens to be making a big fuss about at the moment, but that's about it. Pandering to the media's short-term stories is a more effective vote winner than pandering to the big long-term issues.
Also, I do believe in the right to live, and that it extends to everyone, no matter how retarded their views may be. I can relate to the sentiment of wanting to punch someone in the mouth for regurgitating the same nonsense they heard on the evening news last night, but so far I've refrained:)
To be clear - I believe everyone has the right to live and no one has the right to kill (except as a last resort for self defence), and I'm certainly not promoting the idea of a violent revolution. All I'm saying is that I can't currently see any other way the trend towards a police state will be reversed - I hope I'm wrong.
Of course it matters, the problem is that in order to affect change you need to convince the majority that their vote also matters, and that not toeing the party line is not a wasted vote. I don't think a regime like the one in the UK can withstand prolonged dissent stemming from rigged elections, so voting for change would eventually affect change, granted, it might take a few elections. In this context, change doesn't mean voting for the opposing party though, but voting (or running) for a party or group that believes in the change you wish to see. Just flipping across the middle to vote opposite doesn't change much if we assume that they're all alike.
There are several issues: - None of the main parties are actually seriously interested in reversing the trend towards a police state. The best you get is an occasional promise to block the trend on one specific piece of legislation, not block it across the board or reverse it. In the current first-past-the-post system, anyone who isn't one of the main parties doesn't stand much chance, so "form your own party then" isn't an answer. - Too many voters vote for the same party in each election just because thats the party they always vote for, rather than because of their policies. - We have to elect parties based on *all* their manifesto, we can't cherry pick some promises from one party and some from another. This means that if you have a party offering to improve the economy and trash civil liberties running against a party that will trash the economy and improve civil liberties, the civil liberties arguement often takes a back seat, even though these are separate issues. - Pretty much all the parties have shown to be untrustworthy with respect to their election promises, so whichever way you vote you have no idea what the party is going to actually do if they get into power. - Far too many people vote how the papers tell them to vote rather than actually thinking these issues through themselves. - Far too many people vote with a short term attitude - they're interested in being able to put food on the table tomorrow rather than whether they might be "disappeared" for wrong-thinking in 30 years time. - The same old people are in the civil service, no matter who gets elected into government. The civil service have a *lot* of influence and it would be hard for a government to continually have to push back against them.
All these points come together to mean that the result of elections is always going to be minor variations of "same old same old".
(FWIW, I'm of the opinion that "you have a duty to vote, so you must vote no matter what" is a bad idea - if you have no interest in the issues at hand then you *shouldn't* vote - if you vote then you're just diluting the votes of people who do care about this stuff.)
On the subject of violent revolution, I highly doubt any good can come of the use of violence.
Well, the "good" that can come from a violent revolution is that a smaller number of people can effect change. You don't need to do the impossible task of convincing millions of apathetic people to actually _think_ in order to effect change. Of course, the change may not be for the better, but I see very little chance of there being real change in any direction through the current democratic system.
I'm sure you can look back through history and find plenty of violent revolutions that led to long term improvements to societies, even though they cause short term pain.
We shouldn't be so eager in handing out judgements and accepting death as payment for having a different view of the world. I'd be wary of accepting a new government that got into power by sheer number of guns, that feels very much like "meet the new boss, same as the old boss".
I too would be very wary of such a government. Although I'm not sure I would be any more wary of them than the current one - the current government already seems to be handing out judgements for having a different view of the world.
most people use windows because every program works on windows. if every program worked on linux, a lot more ppl would use linux.
Wrong. People use Windows because they're already using Windows every program they already run will work. If you're already using OS X then you'd find that Windows won't run a load of the stuff you currently use. If you're using Linux you'll find the same - Windows won't run loads of the stuff you currently use.
FWIW, most people would be fine with pretty much any OS so long as they're willing to change what brands of software they use with it. You don't see OS X users fretting over their inability to run Internet Explorer do you?
Which is exactly the problem for beginning linux users.
Don't use this, they aren't doing it as good as that. Getting lots of conflicting advice and no actual solution.
Best advice for a new user is to download a random but relatively mainstream distro and use it in its default setup. Once you're used to it, you can start fiddling with stuff to make it more how you like, but to start off with a non-default configuration is a huge mistake.
As for the "the problem is it isn't like Windows" comments, I call bunk - OS X isn't like Windows and seems to be doing ok. And for those of us who haven't actually used Windows since Win 98, Windows feels very hard to use because its so different from Gnome 3, OS X, etc. so obviously Microsoft's problem is that Windows is different to everything else, right?
Honestly, get over wanting everything to be identical - pretty much all the modern desktop environments are fine, fairly intuitive, etc. It really doesn't take long to get used to them.
No, really. Are you an idiot, or do you just play one on the Internet? For fuck's sake man, there are even disclaimers that state the software can't be used in nuclear power facilities.
My favorite "why we can't use Free software" argument is always "if we buy from Microsoft/IBM/whoever, there's someone to sue if it all goes wrong; if we use Free software we have to accept the liability" - a clear indication that someone's never actually read an EULA (although admittedly the limited liability clauses in EULAs may not actually be legal, but I've never heard of someone suing Microsoft when Word breaks...)
shoddy system for shore. but there is no circumstance where telling a lie about the books being balanced is an acceptable response in this scenario no matter how painful the system or process is, It just makes the problem 10 times worse.
I dunno, when your business is about to be shut down due to a computer glitch and there's nothing you can do about it... It didn't end well for her but I can certainly see why she did it. What would you do if the choice is between "lie" and "be shut down"?
then what, nothing in OSS land takes responsibility for itself, its free it (sort of works) if it doesnt fix it your self or fuck off
If you buy in proprietary software that is broken, you need to get the vendor to fix it. If you've directly contracted a small software vendor to write the system for you then that might be fine. If you buy in FOSS then you can pay your vendor to fix it, or you can fix it yourself, or you can pay a third party contractor to fix it. Sure, if you decide to just install FOSS software yourself without paying a vendor then (surprise) you can't expect someone to fix it for you, but thats the risk you take if you want to be cheap - if you're _paying_ for someone to support this stuff then FOSS gives you better flexibility if the vendor turns out to be unhelpful (this is important for bigger projects - For example, I'm still waiting on Apple to fix a load of bugs that I reported over a year ago; if that was FOSS code I could've fixed them myself or paid someone to do it but since it isn't I have no choice but to hope that Apple will fix this stuff, which I fully expect them not to ever do.)
However, in this case I think the point is more relevant that as this was closed source software, the subpostmasters couldn't really defend themselves. If it was FOSS they could've paid an expert to look at the source code and prove that they were innocent.
All Nexus devices have an unlocked bootloader and full Cyanogen support. If you really get a boner for running the latest and greatest OS (note that it isn't required for 99.9% of apps or features) you can still do it.
What you describe is completely beyond the vast majority of phone owners. It really isn't good enough for the vendor to drop support after such a short time on such an expensive device. None of this is about getting a boner running the latest OS, its about the fact that the phone you only bought a year ago is nolonger getting any kind of security updates (I do wonder how this fits into the EU legal framework that requires vendors to fix manufacturing/design defects for at least 2 years after the sale of a product).
What you gain in being able to update Apple devices you more than lose to the lock-down and lack of fairly basic features that have been in Android since the early days. So what if you can't install the latest Google keyboard? Just download it from Play or pick any of the dozens of quality alternatives. Keep in mind that half the feature updates are from apps like Google Maps anyway, and they work fine on older OS versions and get all the updates.
I'm not defending Apple here at all - the phone vendors are *all* terrible at this stuff. Apple is marginally better than most, but they're still not great.
If OS support is important to you, then go with Google's Nexus Android devices. They always get quick updates.
Still *very* hit and miss. For example, the Nexus S was released in December 2010 and Google announced there would be no more software updates for it in November 2012. So thats under 2 years of software updates.
The successor to the Nexus S - the Galaxy Nexus - went on sale in November 2011. So realistically, if you wanted a Nexus device in October 2011 you would've got a whole 1 year's worth of software updates for your money. I'd accept that for a £20 phone, but these things are a similar price to a laptop, and a Windows laptop would have around 10 years of security updates from Microsoft after you bought it...
My family has had three Android phones. None of them were released with the latest Android OS, and none of them ever had an official upgrade to the latest Android OS of the time. With one of them, we bought the phone only on the promise by the manufacturer that it would be upgraded to Android 4.x (the hardware is capable), and that won't be happening.
These three Android phone companies said "fuck you" from the very beginning. Never. Again.
The original iPad could run the latest iOS for 2.5 years after its introduction, 1.5 years after its discontinuation. That's far better than the official Android support you'll see.
*All* of the phone vendors have ridiculously short support periods. You can go out and buy a £300 laptop with Windows 8 on it and MS will support that for at least 10 years, after which you can probably upgrade the OS yourself and get a few years more support (I would hazard that current chipsets may well still be perfectly servicable in 10 years time. Certainly my 6 year old laptop isn't showing any signs of needing a hardware upgrade). Conversely you put down £600 on a phone and you're expected to throw it away and buy another one after 2 years.
You get a *bit* better support from Apple and Google than from Samsung, HTC, etc. but its still not great. I hold up as an example, my Samsung Captivate Glide, which was released in November 2011 with Gingerbread on it. 11 months after Android 4.0 was released by Google, Samsung eventually released it for the Captivate Glide... except it was unusably buggy. Despite having similar hardware to the Galaxy S II, as of November 2012 (only 1 year after its release) Samsung have basically dropped all support for it. No more bugfixes, security updates, etc.
What we actually need is standardised phone hardware and open drivers so we can just install a generic OS ourselves instead of having to wait for the vendor to get their finger out and publish a device specific one. Despite the likes of Cyanogenmod, there's still a whole load of device-specific code; you can't just take the latest Android and slap it on an arbitrary phone like you can take a random Linux ow Windows and stick it on any PC.
The head of the government's surveillance centre GCHQ, Sir Iain Lobban, says reconnaissance has taken place in cyberspace
Ok, after reading that I'm firmly convinced that this guy doesn't actually own a computer, use the internet and his concept of what networking is entirely based on watching the movie Tron a few too many times.
TBH, "reconnaissance has taken place" is so vague as to be meaningless - he might just mean that they get ssh scans on internet-facing machines every so often (which *everyone* with a global scope IP address gets).
Slashdot Mirror
Why is this so unexpected and a cause for any frustration at all? It's a reality that won't change unless we end up in a world of coders/developers.
I dunno, I just find it unexpected that when there is a message on the screen describing what's wrong in plain english, instead of people reading that message they email me to say "it isn't working" whereupon I have to find the entry in the log with that error message and copy and paste it into a reply.
And I get that people aren't going to understand complex error messages, but why do they think I'm going to be able to investigate a problem with absolutely zero information to go on. The aforementioned "one of our users is having a problem accessing a website" query is very frequent - why would anyone expect I would be able to figure out whats going on when I don't know which user, or which website, or what error message (if any) they are getting? We're talking sites that have several hundred users saturating a 100Mbps internet connection with web traffic, I can't trawl through a web proxy log (which often come to gigabytes per day) on the offchance I spot something "not right" - I need to have some vague idea what to look for.
Requiring a user, after the fact, to recall an error message is futile.
I don't want them to recall it after the fact, I want them to note it down at the time they got the error. It'd take 5 seconds to copy and paste it into an email.
They simple have seen to many varied ones and their brain goes 'oh an error message' not 'oh a 504 error'
This is obvious from the way I get "my emails keep getting bounced" complaints, so I ask them to forward the bounce and frequently just copy and paste error message back into my reply. When the error is something as obvious as "the recipient does not exist" or "the recipient's mailbox is full", what else are you going to do but reply with "it's bouncing your mail because "?
This is when we have to write error handling code to be able to provide a text message, email, or simply a text file that records the details around a crash so you get the robustness you need to fix these types of errors without relying on iffy recall of users.
Most of the software I write isn't user-facing, but it interfaces with user-facing software. So a lot of the error messages are generated by third party software and my software never sees them, but they are as a result of the interactions (and possibly bugs) with my software. So since I didn't write the thing thats generating the error, I have no chance to make it record lots of detail and automatically send it to me.
Of course, increasingly we're seeing people using Apple software, which has a habit of not giving you any detail in the error messages *at all*, so even when you get a problem you can reproduce, it still turns out to be hell to figure out whats actually happening (tcpdumping the network traffic is a common way to figure it out). And many iOS and Android applications don't even give you an error message at all, they just plain don't work.
Your users aren't code masters and never will be.
It doesn't involve users to be code masters, it just involves them engaging their brain a bit. I frequently get bug reports along the lines of "something broke last week, came up with some error (I don't remember what), but I rebooted it and its fine for now; please fix it so it doesn't happen again". You don't have to be a "code master" to figure out that reporting a bug and not actually tell me _what_ broke, what the error was or let me log into a system that is currently exhibiting the problem so I can look myself is not going to be condusive to me fixing things.
And this stuff happens again and again with the same customers... "one of our users is having a problem accessing some websites, please can you fix it?" - ok, so I have to go back and ask "which user" and "which websites", if I'm lucky the customer will give me this information, if I'm unlucky I get "I didn't ask". A week later I'll get an almost identical problem report from the same person about a different (but extremely similar) problem, and again none of the information I ask for _every_ time is included.
Also the great one that comes up occasionally is "this has been broken for a month and you haven't fixed it yet!".. well, if you'd actually told me that there was a problem I might've known to look into it, but since this is the first I've heard of it...
Pedestrians around here have a habit of stepping out into the road without looking. Most often, I see women with pushchairs push their child out into the road without looking, which is inexcusable
I frequently see pedestrians standing on the kerb where they usually would to cross, but with a push chair (off the kerb and in the road), watching traffic go by until its safe to cross. Some people just don't engage their brain at all.
One of our former students is now starting a company that produces vests with built-in LEDs. They're bright glowing red from the back and white from the front. They, alone, are bright enough that you exceed the minimum legal requirements for bike lights at night even if you don't have any lights on the bike itself. Even better, they have flashing yellow lights in the arms that are activated when you lift the arm to the horizontal position. They're currently circulating some prototypes, but I'm looking forward to seeing them hit the market.
Sounds excellent - is there a website?
I ride a bike, and I've seen a lot of my fellow cyclists do stupid and dangerous things. Often, these are also illegal. I've also seen a lot of drivers do stupid and dangerous things, like the guy in the SUV a couple of days ago who decided that the best place to overtake me was on a bend in the road where it's barely wide enough for two cars and there was an oncoming bus - his only way of avoiding a head-on collision was to sharply turn in front of me when half way past, and my only way of avoiding a collision was an emergency stop (and that was only possible in time because I'd noted when he started overtaking on that part of the road that he was probably a dangerous idiot and started slowing down).
Both cyclists and drivers are at fault, which is why the people who advocate changing the law to assume the driver is at fault really worry me. The person who comes of worst is usually the cyclist though, and that makes me wonder why on earth some cyclists take stupid risks.
I should point out that I cycle too, although having been knocked off my bike a few too many times, I try to avoid cycling on busy roads these days (however, my fiancée cycles to work every day on busy roads).
I was driving in the centre of Manchester at around midnight a few weeks ago - I saw about 6 cyclists on the roads, and none of whome had any lights, I think all were wearing dark clothing too. I mean, WTF? How dense do you have to be to cycle at night without lights? And bright LED lights (which are often a good idea to have in the day to make yourself more visible) aren't exactly expensive.
A few years ago I almost knocked a cyclist off while I was driving - it was dark, I was at a junction trying to turn right out of a side road, there was a line of stationary traffic with their headlights on waiting on the more major road in the lane that I would have to cross to make the right turn. I looked down the line of traffic into the glare of headlights, started to pull out and at the last moment spotted a cyclist undertaking the stationary traffic with no lights on - he was completely invisible against the glare of the headlights until the last couple of metres and if I hadn't spotted him and slammed on the brakes he would've been straight into the wing of my car.
In fact, I see cyclists doing crazy stuff when I'm driving all the time.
But drivers are no better - frequently cutting way too close instead of using the full width of the road, trying to overtake cyclists while adjacent to a traffic island rather than waiting until they could pull over onto the oncoming lane, etc. And then we have the drivers who simply don't seem to care about anyone but themselves - one of my friends was cycling with a bus following him, hit some black ice and ended up on the ground; not the bus driver's fault, but you'd think he might stop and check he's ok... but no, the bus driver didn't even wait for my friend to get up, he just pulled out and drove around him and carried on along the road.
It is the default mechanism for bypassing firewalls. It is becoming a replacement for tcp/ip. Historically you would simply have opened connections on other ports but that's obviously excruciatingly painful in a firewalled environment.
So, pretty soon firewalls will be either blocking port 80, or performing packet inspection and ripping out streams they don't like.
Guess it will keep the firewall developers busy.
Already doing that... Everything hijacking HTTP/HTTPS is turning out to be an almighty pain in the arse for sites that need to filter their web access (e.g. schools). As an example, we have Skype, which either requires the ability to make connections on port 443 to arbitrary IP addresses, or requires the firewall to ahve *all* unprivalidged ports open... Great design. (Yeah, I've got customers who want to use Skype but want to restrict web accesses to a walled garden - you can imagine how well that doesn't work.)
It reads almost like they reimplemented all of TCP inside of HTTP, complete with stream set-up and teardown, queuing, congestion control, etc. Why not just use... TCP to manage multiple streams?
They're reimplementing SCTP inside TCP. Probably because they know there isn't a hope in hell of convincing Microsoft to implement a protocol that practically every other OS has supported for years...
from quick glance, multiple transfers and communications channels("streams" in the drafts lingo) can be put through the single connection, cutting tcp connection negotiations.
So, errm SCTP then...
Yeah, if you look at total lifetime costs smokers are saving everyone money. They die of horrible diseases that are cheap to deal with until they cause death.
Also, they pay a shit load of tax on their tobacco...
Kids could transfer their work from a Rasperry pi at home to the virtualised one at school. The only sticking points would be anyone starting to use Open GL / open GL ES could run into problems.
No GPIO pins on a virtual machine...
Now we can introduce even more people to tinker toys that they'll never use after they get out of school!
How about concentrating on reading comprehension, mathematics, and basic sciences, or if one does go into "trades", go into real trades that have proven to be durable careers...
Wait... why do we need to teach maths until a kid chooses a career as a mathematician? And science - complete waste of time unless the kid chooses to become a scientist; WTF would you want to teach someone physics if they're going to become a historian? In fact, you don't need to teach people to read until *after* they've chosen not to go into a burger-flipping career, right?
Or alternatively, maybe teaching people a wide variety of stuff is a Good Thing - not only does it give them good general knowledge (which _is_ useful in fairly unquantifyable ways through life, even if just to win the pub quiz), but it also gives them experience of lots of subjects, which is important when they come to choose a career - how are you going to know that you like writing software if you've never actually done it at all?
There's no dishonor in being a certified journeyman welder or an electrician or even a plumber, and all can pay very well if the individual learns the skills needed.
There's no dishonor at all, but you seem to be implying that an electrician, plumber, etc. either isn't capable of learning these skills, or will never find them useful or interesting in any part of their life. Education shouldn't just be about making someone employable in their chosen career path, it should be about enriching everyone's lives. There is also a huge advantage in teaching people when they are young - young brains are much more plastic, you're going to find it much easier to teach a 5 year old how to speak French, for example, than wait until they turn 18 and decide they want to be an interpreter...
Regarding the power generation issue, there are other concerns with nuclear power that are not immediately obvious. For instance, imagine we replaced all power plants in existence now with nuclear plants, we'd in effect just shift the reason to go to war from oil to uranium. There is also the issue of waste, and the current solution of shoveling it into a pit and hope nobody digs it up right away is unsustainable.
Of course. I wasn't intending my example to suggest that nuclear is definitely the right option, just to point out that the people making the decisions should be those in charge of all the facts, not the people who seem to be under the impression that nuclear power stations are continually on the brink of causing an enormous disaster (which clearly they aren't - there have been very few nuclear power related accidents and even fewer that have caused serious environmental harm).
The environmentalist in me would rejoice if nuclear power was used to replace industrial revolution era coal and oil plants, but with the stipulation that the waste problem be solved beforehand, and that a viable source of fuel were to be found - fusion would solve that, but meh.
Well, the problem has largely been solved for years (breeder reactors _do_ work to massively reduce waste, although have a proliferation risk), but burying things in the ground is unfortunately cheaper and less risky for the stakeholders. I guess what's needed is for a government to spearhead the whole thing, but its a sensitive environmental issue and the british government at least doesn't like getting involved in such things as they polarise the electorate.
A form of blind democracy could be formulated, where there are no spokesperson for a cause, and you could only vote for a proposed solution on it's merit, without a charming figurehead to shovel it down your throat.
Imagine an election where the ballot only consisted of 4 year plans (or any other number of years, perhaps even variable) with accompanying information to help you decide, no names, no parties, just solutions to problems.
Sounds lovelly, but wherever there is an issue to be decided, there are people with vested interests who will promote the issue using the most photogenic media friendly people they can. Even if those people aren't directly part of the government, they will exist purely by virtue of third parties having a vested interest.
I would however like to point out that the system in place now is a continuation of centuries, if not millennia, of violent revolutions giving room for new kinds of governments (in some cases, re-instituting old ones), and as such we could argue that violent revolution has led us here once already.
Indeed; but the result of the last violent revolution has produced many years of reasonably good government; but there is an ongoing progression towards totalitarianism and its my opinion that the only way that trend will be reversed is through another revolution (which would hopefully result in many more years of good government). I hope I'm wrong, but I just can't see anything else that would reverse the trend. It seems to me that we have something of a cycle - we get a liberal government which progressively tends towards oppressiveness, eventually it becomes too oppressive, the people revolt and the whole cycle starts over.
I would go on to say that I'm not a big believer in democracy - I think its right that an informed public have a choice, but its my opinion that the vast majority of the electorate are not informed and have no desire to become informed, yet will still vote and dilute the choice of the people who *actually* know what theyr'e talking about.
A good example I'd like to cite is power generation - I *don't* want the public to be the ones deciding whether to build nuclear power stations because most of the public seem to think that nuclear power stations are on the brink of going Chernobyl all the time and will doom the world. I want the people who actually know what they're talking about to figure this stuff out. The thorny issue there is how do you separate the people who know what they're talking about from the people who are voting for something they have a vested interest in? This seems to be a big problem with the current rich MPs, since with their riches seem to come a propensity to have vested interests in a lot of things they're supposed to be making unbiassed decisions on. I think a lot could be achieved by returning to the idea that the House of Commons should be made up of *commoners*, not just the upper classes.
The crucial missing piece in this puzzle, as I see it, is combating apathy. It will take a hell of a lot longer to achieve the same goal, but I do think the quality of the result will be significantly better.
I think the main reason for apethy is that even with a hell of a lot of work, the government rarely changes their core attitudes to accommodate the public. They change some superficial stuff that the media happens to be making a big fuss about at the moment, but that's about it. Pandering to the media's short-term stories is a more effective vote winner than pandering to the big long-term issues.
Also, I do believe in the right to live, and that it extends to everyone, no matter how retarded their views may be. I can relate to the sentiment of wanting to punch someone in the mouth for regurgitating the same nonsense they heard on the evening news last night, but so far I've refrained :)
To be clear - I believe everyone has the right to live and no one has the right to kill (except as a last resort for self defence), and I'm certainly not promoting the idea of a violent revolution. All I'm saying is that I can't currently see any other way the trend towards a police state will be reversed - I hope I'm wrong.
Of course it matters, the problem is that in order to affect change you need to convince the majority that their vote also matters, and that not toeing the party line is not a wasted vote. I don't think a regime like the one in the UK can withstand prolonged dissent stemming from rigged elections, so voting for change would eventually affect change, granted, it might take a few elections. In this context, change doesn't mean voting for the opposing party though, but voting (or running) for a party or group that believes in the change you wish to see. Just flipping across the middle to vote opposite doesn't change much if we assume that they're all alike.
There are several issues:
- None of the main parties are actually seriously interested in reversing the trend towards a police state. The best you get is an occasional promise to block the trend on one specific piece of legislation, not block it across the board or reverse it. In the current first-past-the-post system, anyone who isn't one of the main parties doesn't stand much chance, so "form your own party then" isn't an answer.
- Too many voters vote for the same party in each election just because thats the party they always vote for, rather than because of their policies.
- We have to elect parties based on *all* their manifesto, we can't cherry pick some promises from one party and some from another. This means that if you have a party offering to improve the economy and trash civil liberties running against a party that will trash the economy and improve civil liberties, the civil liberties arguement often takes a back seat, even though these are separate issues.
- Pretty much all the parties have shown to be untrustworthy with respect to their election promises, so whichever way you vote you have no idea what the party is going to actually do if they get into power.
- Far too many people vote how the papers tell them to vote rather than actually thinking these issues through themselves.
- Far too many people vote with a short term attitude - they're interested in being able to put food on the table tomorrow rather than whether they might be "disappeared" for wrong-thinking in 30 years time.
- The same old people are in the civil service, no matter who gets elected into government. The civil service have a *lot* of influence and it would be hard for a government to continually have to push back against them.
All these points come together to mean that the result of elections is always going to be minor variations of "same old same old".
(FWIW, I'm of the opinion that "you have a duty to vote, so you must vote no matter what" is a bad idea - if you have no interest in the issues at hand then you *shouldn't* vote - if you vote then you're just diluting the votes of people who do care about this stuff.)
On the subject of violent revolution, I highly doubt any good can come of the use of violence.
Well, the "good" that can come from a violent revolution is that a smaller number of people can effect change. You don't need to do the impossible task of convincing millions of apathetic people to actually _think_ in order to effect change. Of course, the change may not be for the better, but I see very little chance of there being real change in any direction through the current democratic system.
I'm sure you can look back through history and find plenty of violent revolutions that led to long term improvements to societies, even though they cause short term pain.
We shouldn't be so eager in handing out judgements and accepting death as payment for having a different view of the world. I'd be wary of accepting a new government that got into power by sheer number of guns, that feels very much like "meet the new boss, same as the old boss".
I too would be very wary of such a government. Although I'm not sure I would be any more wary of them than the current one - the current government already seems to be handing out judgements for having a different view of the world.
most people use windows because every program works on windows. if every program worked on linux, a lot more ppl would use linux.
Wrong. People use Windows because they're already using Windows every program they already run will work. If you're already using OS X then you'd find that Windows won't run a load of the stuff you currently use. If you're using Linux you'll find the same - Windows won't run loads of the stuff you currently use.
FWIW, most people would be fine with pretty much any OS so long as they're willing to change what brands of software they use with it. You don't see OS X users fretting over their inability to run Internet Explorer do you?
Which is exactly the problem for beginning linux users.
Don't use this, they aren't doing it as good as that. Getting lots of conflicting advice and no actual solution.
Best advice for a new user is to download a random but relatively mainstream distro and use it in its default setup. Once you're used to it, you can start fiddling with stuff to make it more how you like, but to start off with a non-default configuration is a huge mistake.
As for the "the problem is it isn't like Windows" comments, I call bunk - OS X isn't like Windows and seems to be doing ok. And for those of us who haven't actually used Windows since Win 98, Windows feels very hard to use because its so different from Gnome 3, OS X, etc. so obviously Microsoft's problem is that Windows is different to everything else, right?
Honestly, get over wanting everything to be identical - pretty much all the modern desktop environments are fine, fairly intuitive, etc. It really doesn't take long to get used to them.
No, really. Are you an idiot, or do you just play one on the Internet? For fuck's sake man, there are even disclaimers that state the software can't be used in nuclear power facilities.
My favorite "why we can't use Free software" argument is always "if we buy from Microsoft/IBM/whoever, there's someone to sue if it all goes wrong; if we use Free software we have to accept the liability" - a clear indication that someone's never actually read an EULA (although admittedly the limited liability clauses in EULAs may not actually be legal, but I've never heard of someone suing Microsoft when Word breaks...)
shoddy system for shore. but there is no circumstance where telling a lie about the books being balanced is an acceptable response in this scenario no matter how painful the system or process is, It just makes the problem 10 times worse.
I dunno, when your business is about to be shut down due to a computer glitch and there's nothing you can do about it... It didn't end well for her but I can certainly see why she did it. What would you do if the choice is between "lie" and "be shut down"?
then what, nothing in OSS land takes responsibility for itself, its free it (sort of works) if it doesnt fix it your self or fuck off
If you buy in proprietary software that is broken, you need to get the vendor to fix it. If you've directly contracted a small software vendor to write the system for you then that might be fine. If you buy in FOSS then you can pay your vendor to fix it, or you can fix it yourself, or you can pay a third party contractor to fix it. Sure, if you decide to just install FOSS software yourself without paying a vendor then (surprise) you can't expect someone to fix it for you, but thats the risk you take if you want to be cheap - if you're _paying_ for someone to support this stuff then FOSS gives you better flexibility if the vendor turns out to be unhelpful (this is important for bigger projects - For example, I'm still waiting on Apple to fix a load of bugs that I reported over a year ago; if that was FOSS code I could've fixed them myself or paid someone to do it but since it isn't I have no choice but to hope that Apple will fix this stuff, which I fully expect them not to ever do.)
However, in this case I think the point is more relevant that as this was closed source software, the subpostmasters couldn't really defend themselves. If it was FOSS they could've paid an expert to look at the source code and prove that they were innocent.
All Nexus devices have an unlocked bootloader and full Cyanogen support. If you really get a boner for running the latest and greatest OS (note that it isn't required for 99.9% of apps or features) you can still do it.
What you describe is completely beyond the vast majority of phone owners. It really isn't good enough for the vendor to drop support after such a short time on such an expensive device. None of this is about getting a boner running the latest OS, its about the fact that the phone you only bought a year ago is nolonger getting any kind of security updates (I do wonder how this fits into the EU legal framework that requires vendors to fix manufacturing/design defects for at least 2 years after the sale of a product).
What you gain in being able to update Apple devices you more than lose to the lock-down and lack of fairly basic features that have been in Android since the early days. So what if you can't install the latest Google keyboard? Just download it from Play or pick any of the dozens of quality alternatives. Keep in mind that half the feature updates are from apps like Google Maps anyway, and they work fine on older OS versions and get all the updates.
I'm not defending Apple here at all - the phone vendors are *all* terrible at this stuff. Apple is marginally better than most, but they're still not great.
They're phones. They're not considered to have the lifespan of full computers.
Why not? They are just as expensive, and arguably less essential...
If OS support is important to you, then go with Google's Nexus Android devices. They always get quick updates.
Still *very* hit and miss. For example, the Nexus S was released in December 2010 and Google announced there would be no more software updates for it in November 2012. So thats under 2 years of software updates.
The successor to the Nexus S - the Galaxy Nexus - went on sale in November 2011. So realistically, if you wanted a Nexus device in October 2011 you would've got a whole 1 year's worth of software updates for your money. I'd accept that for a £20 phone, but these things are a similar price to a laptop, and a Windows laptop would have around 10 years of security updates from Microsoft after you bought it...
My family has had three Android phones. None of them were released with the latest Android OS, and none of them ever had an official upgrade to the latest Android OS of the time. With one of them, we bought the phone only on the promise by the manufacturer that it would be upgraded to Android 4.x (the hardware is capable), and that won't be happening.
These three Android phone companies said "fuck you" from the very beginning. Never. Again.
The original iPad could run the latest iOS for 2.5 years after its introduction, 1.5 years after its discontinuation. That's far better than the official Android support you'll see.
*All* of the phone vendors have ridiculously short support periods. You can go out and buy a £300 laptop with Windows 8 on it and MS will support that for at least 10 years, after which you can probably upgrade the OS yourself and get a few years more support (I would hazard that current chipsets may well still be perfectly servicable in 10 years time. Certainly my 6 year old laptop isn't showing any signs of needing a hardware upgrade). Conversely you put down £600 on a phone and you're expected to throw it away and buy another one after 2 years.
You get a *bit* better support from Apple and Google than from Samsung, HTC, etc. but its still not great. I hold up as an example, my Samsung Captivate Glide, which was released in November 2011 with Gingerbread on it. 11 months after Android 4.0 was released by Google, Samsung eventually released it for the Captivate Glide... except it was unusably buggy. Despite having similar hardware to the Galaxy S II, as of November 2012 (only 1 year after its release) Samsung have basically dropped all support for it. No more bugfixes, security updates, etc.
What we actually need is standardised phone hardware and open drivers so we can just install a generic OS ourselves instead of having to wait for the vendor to get their finger out and publish a device specific one. Despite the likes of Cyanogenmod, there's still a whole load of device-specific code; you can't just take the latest Android and slap it on an arbitrary phone like you can take a random Linux ow Windows and stick it on any PC.
The head of the government's surveillance centre GCHQ, Sir Iain Lobban, says reconnaissance has taken place in cyberspace
Ok, after reading that I'm firmly convinced that this guy doesn't actually own a computer, use the internet and his concept of what networking is entirely based on watching the movie Tron a few too many times.
TBH, "reconnaissance has taken place" is so vague as to be meaningless - he might just mean that they get ssh scans on internet-facing machines every so often (which *everyone* with a global scope IP address gets).