I'm not saying that there aren't lies all over the web, but as far as Brexit is concerned, I can point to all sorts of lies that newspapers have been printing, lies that take 10 seconds on Google to refute.
I think the web is far healthier today than it's ever been because the gatekeepers are getting destroyed. Remember when you went to see a movie because of a particular actor? You don't do that today. It's killed movie stars as a mark of quality. Movies can be massive or dead within hours of release as people post a thumbs up or down on Twitter. Films have improved as a result. You can't just hire stars, put them on sofas and get an audience for a month.
Bullshit articles are wiped out by counter articles from bloggers within hours. Careers of grifter journalists who know nothing are being destroyed, and this is a very good thing.
These devices have been a huge hit with the blind and partially sighted as so much can be done with just voice. The problem is that's a fairly limited audience.
Outside of that, I've looked at them and thought they were basically gimmicks. I've got a phone sat in my pocket. I can send music to a bluetooth speaker with that. Why do I want something listening to me?
Remember, Jonny Ive was at Apple when they made the 20th Anniversary Mac. He's a talented guy, but Jobs did a lot of sending iPhones back to change them.
I'm not the biggest Apple fan. I need more control than that, but it's clear that Jobs was a serious quality control guy. And not just from the POV of the product being good, but that customers would love the product. And he could see things in the totality - functionality, aesthetics, support, usability. He would ditch functionality (like CD drives) that would make them thinner when it was reasonably functional to do so because USB and internet were replacing them. It was a good trade off. Losing all those ports though? Having USB-C for laptops and lightning for phones? Thats just a total mess.
Historically there's loads of great French films. La Regle du Jeu, Bande a Part, Subway, Vivement Dimanche, Amelie, Cyrano de Bergerac, Jean de Florette, Belle de Jour, Le Samourai, Les Diaboliques and The Wages of Fear. The problem is they have made very little that's worth watching for years. Since 2000, there's only a couple of French films that really impressed me.
If small, local productions are good, why wouldn't netflix show them?
these streaming companies already do this. I saw films like Ida, Phoenix, Downfall and Personal Shopper on Netflix or Amazon.
The reality is that a lot of European movie production just isn't very good. There isn't a generation replacing Fellini, Bergman, Truffaut, Godard and Fassbinder. Or even Luc Besson and Paul Verhoeven. Nicolas Winding Refn is about the only very good European director with a few films to his name.
Korea and Mexico are producing better directors right now.
In the 1920s, UK cinema was suffering from competition from the USA. In response, cinemas were told that 20% of films had to be British.
The result of this was simple: companies started producing "quota quickies". Really low budget films that cinemas could buy cheaply and show, just to hit the quota.
There's no reason Netflix won't do the same. Go to a company like Gaumont or Pathe and ask what they've got going cheap. Lousy films everyone has forgotten that were made in the 1950s and they'll put them on. Quota ticked.
The data on library use is that they continue to fall and a large part of that is that over time the price of books has been falling in real terms. In the 1930s a novel cost around the same as half a day of an average man's earnings. Today it's less than half an hour.
I can pay £3 for a classic detective novel on Kindle. Which I can buy at any time of day and night. Or go and take a trip to the library and spend as much as that on parking.
"Why would Apple care about headphone compatibility with Android?"
I have a pair of reasonable headphones. They're about £30. I use them with my phone for music. My PC for music. My iPad for my German learning. I'm not an audiophile, but I find that's the price to get a decent sound. If you're forcing me to have a different jack, it doesn't just mean I've got to carry 2 pairs of headphones around, it also means that I have to buy another pair of headphones (which will be over £30, I'm sure). It means that anyone currently on Android, or who has spent out on good headphones with their iPhone has a new charge for iPhone upgrades, and it's another reason to switch to Android.
And personally, I don't understand this fascination with making phones thinner. I'd rather have a slightly thicker phone and more battery life.
IMO (and I'm older so may be biased) I want older programmers. I was talking to a young guy where I work and he had his own ORM that generated code. "Why don't you use entity framework or nHibernate". "Because I wanted to build one".
And that's a young programmer's attitude, and to some extent, in the days of mainframes, building cool stuff in a company was a good thing because you had no other option. But in the days when you can just download something open source that someone has built, and wire it in and test it or maybe buy something for £100, it makes no sense. We know about things like technical debt, that young guys don't, that you want to write as little code as you can to solve the problem.
When you get into the "real world" use of tablets, not Jonny Ive sat lounging with one in an ad, but actually using one, you realise that they're actually a pretty bad idea. The positioning is all wrong. How do you watch a 2hr movie on one? Hold it up or look downwards. Neither are as comfortable as watching a movie on a TV or even a laptop where the screen is supported. Touch screens might be new, but they're not progress over more accurate and faster keyboards and mice.
A tablet offers less than a tablet, with few upsides. OK, they're smaller and lighter, but they're not so small as to give any advantages. Anywhere that you can take an iPad, you can take a laptop.
This is what I can never get about this "great media consumption device". At best, it does a lot of different media consumption quite badly, meaning that you still can't replace all the dedicated devices.
It'll play MP3s, but you can't exactly use it down a gym. It'll play movies, but a 10" screen with no stand isn't as good as a laptop, let alone a 32" TV. It'll give you eBooks but a kindle is far easier to read
A laptop is actually a better "media consumption device". Larger screen, self-supporting. Every single service that can give you content on an iPad is also available on a PC, and a PC allows you to watch a load of internet media that you can't get on an iPad. You can watch a Blu-Ray or DVD. You can plug in your movie library via USB. You have far more storage space. If you want to put it on a TV, you need nothing more than an HDMI cable.
The problem is that until someone makes the design more productive than a laptop, it won't be as good. That's not just about the keyboard, but also that the laptop is designed to give you a vertical, self-supporting screen. An iPad may be smaller and lighter than a laptop, but it really isn't any more portable. Anywhere that you can take an iPad, you can also take a laptop.
They're not even better as a "media consumption device". 10" 4x3 device with no stand is better than my 14" 16x9 laptop? Does it have as many formats? Can it store as many movies? Does it have an HDMI connector built in? If I use LoveFilm, can I watch it onto my TV or does the app block that?
Look at Slashdot readers, who you would think would be on the vanguard of this technological shift. Instead they are some of the clingiest whiniest buggy-whip holdingist resistors of change to be found, simply because post-PC devices cannot yet replace high-end CAD workstations or some other such uber-specialized nonsense that do not matter to the general trend.
No, we're technology skeptics. Show us why these are better than what we had before and we'll use them. And we're about to be proven right about the "bonnet welded shut" thinking as the iPad 1 is about to stop getting upgrades. It's likely to be a redundant device, 2 years after they were sold.
The whole survey looks odd to me. I work on MS sites and a decade or so ago, there was quite a lot of C around, but with today's hardware, I hardly see any of it now. Maybe I'm hanging around in the wrong sites or job boards, but most of the demand on places like Jobserve seems to be around.net, Java and php. Any chance that this survey is including a load of c# results in c?
I give it a year, maybe 2 before the 3D thing dies out. The studios liked hyping it because you couldn't see it on TV, the theaters liked it because they could charge a premium. But the fact is that audiences have got bored with it. They're opting for 2D.
As I understand it, there's plenty of evidence for a warming trend. In that sense, climate change is a fact. The acrimonious debate (for people with enough mental capacity to get past a knee-jerk reaction) revolves around two questions 1) whether or not it is caused by human activity, and 2) whether it in fact represents a continuing trend and therefore a crisis for humanity. Neither point 1 nor point 2 has been proved definitively but many minds much more knowledgeable about the facts than I seem to think so. Unfortunately, this doesn't really seem like a provable proposition. Given the complexity of the environment, one might as well try to prove that String Theory is correct. I support and admire the scientists who struggle to understand/explain/prove either String Theory or climate science.
Some of the global warming is man-made. You drive a car, it burns fossil fuels and produces CO2 and the planet warms. You won't find many skeptics doubting that
The problem is all the stuff about feedback effects and just how much of a problem they are. The results of the past 15 years are that we did not see warming that was within the range of the models. I know scientists working in other fields who say that the methodological approaches and their attitude to open presentation of results are poor and would not be tolerated in their field of science.
Seriously, I can only hope that the people at UEA DIAF because a fireman was suspended for having a joint a week ago, because their technology made it easier to drug test them.
If you're working to support the war on drugs, you're a money-grabbing fascist. Go and research how to make drugs that can't be detected by sniffer dogs and make the law a farce and we might see a change in them.
And really, that's just not a BFD. If Android saw that the world desperately used it and were moving to WP7 because of it, they'd soon get a release out that integrated it.
The whole thing with WP7 is two desperate companies getting together. Microsoft are basically throwing money at getting market share, and think that they're entitled to a large chunk of the market. But what kept Windows and Office in place (getting the lion's share of the market first, formats) just doesn't apply here. And while WP7 might do a few things better, the bulk of people are on Android.
What's funny to me is that MS are chasing Apple and Android when their natural home is stuff for corporates. They should be building a phone that's designed around all their business services, push email, Exchange and asp.net/winforms. Instead they've built a locked phone that's geared around silverlight, so for corporates, it's hopeless.
Unfortunately, they are still a long way from grasping the technologies used – not to mention the 'interesting' job the outsourced developers managed to make of the code.
Let me get this straight: you're working for someone who is about to release a flagship project, but the code is a mess and you've got 2 members of staff and the only person who really knows about it is you.
Now I'll explain what your real situation is: you're filling in for your management being not very good. Those guys aren't putting in a real investment, and through your efforts you're keeping them going.
So, the question to you is this: what are you getting for being a crucial part of their company? You see, I've seen this dozens of times... people who work 8am to 7pm every day because the work needs doing without telling the management to go screw themselves when the management refuse to get more staff in. People who earn little more than the people doing 9 to 5.
Regardless of another job, I would go to these guys and suggest they make you a director, or put you on share options for your work.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not saying that there aren't lies all over the web, but as far as Brexit is concerned, I can point to all sorts of lies that newspapers have been printing, lies that take 10 seconds on Google to refute.
I think the web is far healthier today than it's ever been because the gatekeepers are getting destroyed. Remember when you went to see a movie because of a particular actor? You don't do that today. It's killed movie stars as a mark of quality. Movies can be massive or dead within hours of release as people post a thumbs up or down on Twitter. Films have improved as a result. You can't just hire stars, put them on sofas and get an audience for a month.
Bullshit articles are wiped out by counter articles from bloggers within hours. Careers of grifter journalists who know nothing are being destroyed, and this is a very good thing.
These devices have been a huge hit with the blind and partially sighted as so much can be done with just voice. The problem is that's a fairly limited audience.
Outside of that, I've looked at them and thought they were basically gimmicks. I've got a phone sat in my pocket. I can send music to a bluetooth speaker with that. Why do I want something listening to me?
I'm not the biggest Apple fan. I need more control than that, but it's clear that Jobs was a serious quality control guy. And not just from the POV of the product being good, but that customers would love the product. And he could see things in the totality - functionality, aesthetics, support, usability. He would ditch functionality (like CD drives) that would make them thinner when it was reasonably functional to do so because USB and internet were replacing them. It was a good trade off. Losing all those ports though? Having USB-C for laptops and lightning for phones? Thats just a total mess.
You know, there's lots of American movies that aren't like that. Woody Allen, Paul Thomas Anderson, Spike Lee, Sofia Coppola, Wes Anderson, The Coens
Historically there's loads of great French films. La Regle du Jeu, Bande a Part, Subway, Vivement Dimanche, Amelie, Cyrano de Bergerac, Jean de Florette, Belle de Jour, Le Samourai, Les Diaboliques and The Wages of Fear. The problem is they have made very little that's worth watching for years. Since 2000, there's only a couple of French films that really impressed me.
If small, local productions are good, why wouldn't netflix show them?
these streaming companies already do this. I saw films like Ida, Phoenix, Downfall and Personal Shopper on Netflix or Amazon.
The reality is that a lot of European movie production just isn't very good. There isn't a generation replacing Fellini, Bergman, Truffaut, Godard and Fassbinder. Or even Luc Besson and Paul Verhoeven. Nicolas Winding Refn is about the only very good European director with a few films to his name.
Korea and Mexico are producing better directors right now.
In the 1920s, UK cinema was suffering from competition from the USA. In response, cinemas were told that 20% of films had to be British. The result of this was simple: companies started producing "quota quickies". Really low budget films that cinemas could buy cheaply and show, just to hit the quota. There's no reason Netflix won't do the same. Go to a company like Gaumont or Pathe and ask what they've got going cheap. Lousy films everyone has forgotten that were made in the 1950s and they'll put them on. Quota ticked.
The data on library use is that they continue to fall and a large part of that is that over time the price of books has been falling in real terms. In the 1930s a novel cost around the same as half a day of an average man's earnings. Today it's less than half an hour. I can pay £3 for a classic detective novel on Kindle. Which I can buy at any time of day and night. Or go and take a trip to the library and spend as much as that on parking.
"Why would Apple care about headphone compatibility with Android?" I have a pair of reasonable headphones. They're about £30. I use them with my phone for music. My PC for music. My iPad for my German learning. I'm not an audiophile, but I find that's the price to get a decent sound. If you're forcing me to have a different jack, it doesn't just mean I've got to carry 2 pairs of headphones around, it also means that I have to buy another pair of headphones (which will be over £30, I'm sure). It means that anyone currently on Android, or who has spent out on good headphones with their iPhone has a new charge for iPhone upgrades, and it's another reason to switch to Android. And personally, I don't understand this fascination with making phones thinner. I'd rather have a slightly thicker phone and more battery life.
IMO (and I'm older so may be biased) I want older programmers. I was talking to a young guy where I work and he had his own ORM that generated code. "Why don't you use entity framework or nHibernate". "Because I wanted to build one".
And that's a young programmer's attitude, and to some extent, in the days of mainframes, building cool stuff in a company was a good thing because you had no other option. But in the days when you can just download something open source that someone has built, and wire it in and test it or maybe buy something for £100, it makes no sense. We know about things like technical debt, that young guys don't, that you want to write as little code as you can to solve the problem.
When you get into the "real world" use of tablets, not Jonny Ive sat lounging with one in an ad, but actually using one, you realise that they're actually a pretty bad idea. The positioning is all wrong. How do you watch a 2hr movie on one? Hold it up or look downwards. Neither are as comfortable as watching a movie on a TV or even a laptop where the screen is supported. Touch screens might be new, but they're not progress over more accurate and faster keyboards and mice.
A tablet offers less than a tablet, with few upsides. OK, they're smaller and lighter, but they're not so small as to give any advantages. Anywhere that you can take an iPad, you can take a laptop.
This is what I can never get about this "great media consumption device". At best, it does a lot of different media consumption quite badly, meaning that you still can't replace all the dedicated devices.
It'll play MP3s, but you can't exactly use it down a gym. It'll play movies, but a 10" screen with no stand isn't as good as a laptop, let alone a 32" TV. It'll give you eBooks but a kindle is far easier to read
A laptop is actually a better "media consumption device". Larger screen, self-supporting. Every single service that can give you content on an iPad is also available on a PC, and a PC allows you to watch a load of internet media that you can't get on an iPad. You can watch a Blu-Ray or DVD. You can plug in your movie library via USB. You have far more storage space. If you want to put it on a TV, you need nothing more than an HDMI cable.
The problem is that until someone makes the design more productive than a laptop, it won't be as good. That's not just about the keyboard, but also that the laptop is designed to give you a vertical, self-supporting screen. An iPad may be smaller and lighter than a laptop, but it really isn't any more portable. Anywhere that you can take an iPad, you can also take a laptop.
They're not even better as a "media consumption device". 10" 4x3 device with no stand is better than my 14" 16x9 laptop? Does it have as many formats? Can it store as many movies? Does it have an HDMI connector built in? If I use LoveFilm, can I watch it onto my TV or does the app block that?
Look at Slashdot readers, who you would think would be on the vanguard of this technological shift. Instead they are some of the clingiest whiniest buggy-whip holdingist resistors of change to be found, simply because post-PC devices cannot yet replace high-end CAD workstations or some other such uber-specialized nonsense that do not matter to the general trend.
No, we're technology skeptics. Show us why these are better than what we had before and we'll use them. And we're about to be proven right about the "bonnet welded shut" thinking as the iPad 1 is about to stop getting upgrades. It's likely to be a redundant device, 2 years after they were sold.
The whole survey looks odd to me. I work on MS sites and a decade or so ago, there was quite a lot of C around, but with today's hardware, I hardly see any of it now. Maybe I'm hanging around in the wrong sites or job boards, but most of the demand on places like Jobserve seems to be around .net, Java and php. Any chance that this survey is including a load of c# results in c?
I give it a year, maybe 2 before the 3D thing dies out. The studios liked hyping it because you couldn't see it on TV, the theaters liked it because they could charge a premium. But the fact is that audiences have got bored with it. They're opting for 2D.
I guess it's a rally car, then.
As I understand it, there's plenty of evidence for a warming trend. In that sense, climate change is a fact. The acrimonious debate (for people with enough mental capacity to get past a knee-jerk reaction) revolves around two questions 1) whether or not it is caused by human activity, and 2) whether it in fact represents a continuing trend and therefore a crisis for humanity. Neither point 1 nor point 2 has been proved definitively but many minds much more knowledgeable about the facts than I seem to think so. Unfortunately, this doesn't really seem like a provable proposition. Given the complexity of the environment, one might as well try to prove that String Theory is correct. I support and admire the scientists who struggle to understand/explain/prove either String Theory or climate science.
Some of the global warming is man-made. You drive a car, it burns fossil fuels and produces CO2 and the planet warms. You won't find many skeptics doubting that
The problem is all the stuff about feedback effects and just how much of a problem they are. The results of the past 15 years are that we did not see warming that was within the range of the models. I know scientists working in other fields who say that the methodological approaches and their attitude to open presentation of results are poor and would not be tolerated in their field of science.
Oh, he's been a writer for 25 years. Not a CIO, not a businessman, not a geek. He should go and actually try working in the real world.
HR are mostly about covering ass and are fine for checkout/call centre staff. Beyond that, they're a pain in the ass.
I had a manager who had a huge fight because HR wouldn't hire IT guys without degrees. They'd screen out people with 10-15 years experience.
Like paying a composer by the number of notes that he writes
There's already drug tests out there. This makes it cheaper. Expect to see more drug testing, citizen.
Seriously, I can only hope that the people at UEA DIAF because a fireman was suspended for having a joint a week ago, because their technology made it easier to drug test them.
If you're working to support the war on drugs, you're a money-grabbing fascist. Go and research how to make drugs that can't be detected by sniffer dogs and make the law a farce and we might see a change in them.
And really, that's just not a BFD. If Android saw that the world desperately used it and were moving to WP7 because of it, they'd soon get a release out that integrated it.
The whole thing with WP7 is two desperate companies getting together. Microsoft are basically throwing money at getting market share, and think that they're entitled to a large chunk of the market. But what kept Windows and Office in place (getting the lion's share of the market first, formats) just doesn't apply here. And while WP7 might do a few things better, the bulk of people are on Android.
What's funny to me is that MS are chasing Apple and Android when their natural home is stuff for corporates. They should be building a phone that's designed around all their business services, push email, Exchange and asp.net/winforms. Instead they've built a locked phone that's geared around silverlight, so for corporates, it's hopeless.
Unfortunately, they are still a long way from grasping the technologies used – not to mention the 'interesting' job the outsourced developers managed to make of the code.
Let me get this straight: you're working for someone who is about to release a flagship project, but the code is a mess and you've got 2 members of staff and the only person who really knows about it is you.
Now I'll explain what your real situation is: you're filling in for your management being not very good. Those guys aren't putting in a real investment, and through your efforts you're keeping them going.
So, the question to you is this: what are you getting for being a crucial part of their company? You see, I've seen this dozens of times... people who work 8am to 7pm every day because the work needs doing without telling the management to go screw themselves when the management refuse to get more staff in. People who earn little more than the people doing 9 to 5.
Regardless of another job, I would go to these guys and suggest they make you a director, or put you on share options for your work.