She can't be that smart... she got caught didn't she?:)
This time. The test will be to measure what havoc she wreaks on her tormentors once she gets her new My Little Pony rig and goes all Princess Digital on their asses.
She can't be that smart... she got caught didn't she?:)
This time. The test will be to measure what havoc she wreaks on her tormentors once she gets her new My Little Pony rig and goes all Princess Digital on their asses.
You've heard of the phrase "Pot calling the Kettle Black", right? Slashdot has no standing to call anyone else "biased".
You seem to have difficulty distinguishing between having an opinion about something and just plain Making Shit Up.
When someone has an opinion, no matter how tenuous, they have at least implicitly accepted that there is such a thing as objective reality, which gives you something to argue about.
When someone simply invents their own reality, then there's no common ground for argument or understanding.
And Slashdot, contrary to your construction of it, is far more diverse in its opinions than you seem to think. But when a collective bias does show (e.g. in anti-Microsoft diatribes), it's generally[*] based on commonly-held opinions that are derived from experience. My anti-Microsoft bias comes from trying to write and support stable server-based applications on an MS platform in the late '90s. Security and stability were such shit at that time that I moved to Linux simply in order to maintain my sanity (and professional reputation).
So, there may actually be pots and kettles here, but not where you're looking for them; comparing Slashdot to Fox is apples to oranges.
----------
[*] Generally. Statistically, there is a small but vocal cadre of clueless idiots in every group of a sufficient size.
Asking whether geeks should still be coding at fifty is like asking if people should still be having sex at fifty. The answer is stupidly obvious. OF COURSE we'll still be coding at fifty! It may seem revolting to younger folks, and lord knows it does take a little longer to get going. But once we've hit that groove, baby, we're not done in 30 seconds. No, we work that algorithm, and we know how to do it, too. None of those stupid mistakes we made during the frenzied, sweaty all-night coding sessions of our youth, blindly swapping pointers and hoping to avoid another premature segfault. Oh, no. And none of that I'm-too-hot-for-you arrogance, either. We leave our customers satisfied, because - take my word for it - that's the only way they're coming back for more.
... Tragically, of course, if you're a fifty year old geek, coding is as close as you're getting to sex for the rest of your life....
No. They are offended when everyone else is eating cupcakes, they say "OMG! These are great! Have one!!!" and I go like "I want one... I really REALLY do... please stop tempting me... "
People want to share. I try to refuse. That refusal is... well? You get the idea.
You have my sympathy. I'm an alcoholic who hasn't had a drink in over 20 years, but I still get people who just don't get that my polite refusal is covering some really significant issues. I don't like to take it out on other people, but being pressured to have a drink, especially by those who are attempting to use the offer to justify their own over-indulgence... well, it's a challenge, to say the least.
Likewise with high-pressure proselytising of any faith. I'm an atheist in a devoutly Christian nation (to the extent that Christianity is enshrined in the Constitution). I have all the respect in the world for the good works that some of the churches do, and for the comfort that many people take in their faith. I sympathise to such an extent that I sometimes find myself wishing that my view of the world offered me the same kind of solace.
BUT... and this is a big issue, I generally feel intimidated and uncomfortable when people try to engage with me about their beliefs because I know that if I were completely honest with them, it would be extremely hard for us to remain close to one another. I have Muslim and Hindu friends who feel the same way.
And this is precisely why pushing hard at your One True Belief is bad. You place some others in a position where they have no alternative (aside from dishonesty) but to place themselves in opposition to the very things that define your identity. Not very conducive to a happy workplace.
I think Einstein himself put things pretty well in a letter that described the Bible as 'pretty childish': In spite of his fundamental disagreement with his interlocutor, wrote, '"I think that we would understand each other quite well if we were to talk about concrete things."
That's terrible for Nokia. The few chances for its survival, IMO, now are gone:-S
Indeed, once the database-driven file system, enhanced security and eye-movement-driven interface of Microsoft's phone are completed, they will crush everything else on the market....
Truly, 2016[*] is going to be a big year for Microsoft.
______
[*] Okay, 2018. Maybe. 2020[**] at the very latest.
[**] No, really.
For years we've been talking about "The Year for Linux on the Desktop". As veteran game developer, it's always boggled me how Linux, despite it's power, is so shortsighted when it comes to 3rd party support and distribution. 3rd part support and easy distribution along with backwards and forwards compatibility is what made Windows so dominate over the past 20 years.
I've read these sentences twice and see nothing even resembling insight in them.
Backwards and especially forwards compatibility are useful aspects of Windows, yes. When they work. But the DLL Hell of the late '90s was one of the main factors that drove me away from Windows. One of the other main factors that drove me away was finding bugs in commercial (proprietary) software, notifying the developers and being told, "Yeah, we'll take a look at that for the next release cycle. Thanks!" The next release cycle was usually months away, weeks at best.
Third party support was, by and large, absolute crippling shit. The straw that finally broke this particular camel's back was a memory leak somewhere in between IIS and a proprietary search product, for which the only available solution was to run a scheduled task every 24 hours to reboot the fucking server. No fix was ever promised by the vendor and Microsoft wasn't willing even to investigate. Unbelievable.
No, there are good reasons for Windows' dominance, not all of them to do with marketing. But claiming that it was ever, in any way, a more stable, predictable platform is just... wishful thinking.
The typical solution bandied about by Linux users is "you can always distribute the source and recompile".
You're using the wrong value of 'you'. If you had explored Linux distributions in any detail at all, you'd know that the 'you' who does the recompile is the package maintainer. This means that the actual developer can simply maintain a stable code base and leave it to others to handle dependency issues on their particular platform. Which is as it should be, because each distro knows its own requirements better than any third party software developer could ever be expected to.
Yes, Linux is a moving target. But let me see if I can find the right way to express this.... Bear with me, it might be a little subtle:
THAT'S THE FUCKING POINT.
Yes, it puts the onus on package maintainers to keep releasing new versions as the kernel moves underneath them and the libraries progress alongside. Maintaining a product on Linux requires that you fly in formation with others. But that's because it sees the computing ecosystem as a fundamentally dynamic environment, one that emergent and contingent, so it allows for division of labour in order to cope with requirements that change constantly. This makes it more responsive to people's individual needs. And that, perversely perhaps, makes it a more secure, stable and manageable platform for most organisations.
(And it would be dishonest of me to say that all distros manage change well. The constant eruption of petty, bothersome bugs is what made me recently swear off Ubuntu for good. But I had alternatives. Good ones. A vote against Ubuntu is NOT a criticism of Linux.)
Now, I'm not claiming there's no benefit to a predictable (albeit imperfect) environment with a vastly slower rate of change at the fundamental level. What I'm trying to say here is that this is hardly the solution to everything. Furthermore, to criticise Linux for being different from what you know exposes a fundamental disregard for the very things that have made it one of the most ubiquitous and versatile platforms in the world today.
You think in this environment the distributors would have learned and instituted fair pricing... Well they haven't and as much as the bang on about it, no one in parliament will lift a finger to protect them.
It's especially galling to see that prices for identical hardware are lower in New Zealand, which has only a small fraction of Australia's population and which is actually farther from the most common markets.
I live in a country (very) roughly equidistant from the two, and travel fairly regularly to both. Last year, I was shopping for an Android phone and discovered that the number on the sticker was the same in both countries. Given that NZD 1 is worth about AUD 0.79, that's a bit of a difference. Just to add insult to injury, the prices were from the very same tech store chain!
There is no logical reason that I can find to justify hardware prices in Australia.
It could be argued that one of the main reasons why Linux has utterly failed as an operating system for average people on average computers is Linus Torvalds.
That sentence is so truth-free that I find myself wondering whether it was authored by Karl Rove or Steven Colbert. I keep wavering between the two, so I don't know whether to laugh or cry in despair at people's appalling inability to reason.
Agreed. When it comes to wine making, scientific correctness should always be our first priority. The moment I saw this headline, I thought, "I hope someone can Bacchus up on this!"
So you want this too to become a nightmare of competing distros, half-ass driver support, and poor documentation--which no one outside of a handful of geeks will use?
You say that like it's a Bad Thing. Some of us call it choice - in both the literal and vernacular senses of the word.
(And it's 'half-assed, by the way. If you're going to insult someone, at least do it right.)
But of course. You see, Microsoft was only able to find the cure for cancer through their ill-gotten gains by way of anti-competitive, innovation stifling practices that have held back computing and Free Software.
Unfortunately, one of the side-effects of MS CuresForSure® is scabies. Or herpes. Or AIDS....
Sure, but you.still haven't demonstrated whether saying, 'Correlation is not causation' makes you stupid, or being stupid makes you say it. I mean, after all, correlation is not... oh shit.
People who are dogmatic about avoiding Latinate words are just as tedious as those who use them indiscriminately or inaccurately for would-be effect..
English is a mongrel language, and the pseudo-racist attempt to reduce it back to "Anglo-Saxon" or whatever is simply ridiculous.
People who are dogmatic about anything are tedious, in my experience. 8^)
Politics and the English Language is one of those particularly interesting documents whose arguments begin to fall apart as soon as you really begin to dig into them, but whose thesis, curiously, retains its validity nonetheless. I would argue that Orwell's preference for Anglo-Saxon is based more on aesthetics than bigotry, but it's undeniable that he associated latinisms with a certain class of society, and that this likely coloured his biases to no small degree.
Orwell was occasionally dogmatic, bombastic and downright wrong in detail or in toto, but his basic argument about how language is a political tool remains as true today as when he wrote the essay.
It should at least be "becoming an epidemic", though as a noun it only refers to disease. Endemic is just wrong as it's the antonym to epidemic. Endemic would be more proper if people shined lasers at planes only in Detroit or something. Why can't they just use "widespread" or something like that?
Well, if you want to go Full Orwell on this, get rid of latin altogether and speak plainly, why not say 'dangerously common'?
(For those of you who have yet to read Orwell's Politics and the English Language, now's your chance. It can -it should- change the way you think and speak.)
When I thought about it, I found that there indeed has been no rude message in Slashdot, ever. So I propose we discuss constructively how to keep up this fine tradition and even improve it! If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to ask me. Oh, and if you happen to be in the town, I'll definitely buy you a beer. Have a nice day.:)
You must SO DEFINITELY be new here.
Allow me to be the first to welcome you by suggesting you rub your cock in sand, blowtorch it to glass, then break it into cutting shards and shove it up your ass so far the blood comes out your nose.
Have a nice fucking day, motherfucker. 8^)
P.S. Might I suggest you drop by 4chan on your way out? They're just as friendly there....
A representative republic. Saying a republic is not particularly informative since one definition of republic is that the government merely doesn't have a hereditary head of state.
GNOME's main problems are twofold : putting fucking designers in developer's seats, and putting fucking designers in control of the development process.
No, it's worse than that. They're not even good designers (yes, there is such a thing). I'm not a graphic designer, but I've studied the principles, and have worked professionally with them building everything from stage sets to user interfaces. It's true that engineers can't be replaced by architects and equally that developers can't be replaced by designers. But if you think for a moment that this makes architects and designers anything less than essential right from the beginning, you've got another thing coming.
No, GNOME's biggest load of fail came when they began cherry-picking their input. According to the core devs, those who complained about the missing features and the arbitrary UX decisions were either wrong or missing the point. They tested for the things they wanted, and they got them. They went chasing after a mythical, idealised user of their own invention, and soon enough, those were the only users left.
To be fair, Canonical is embarked on the very same thing, and to a lesser degree, Microsoft is guilty of it with Windows 8[*].
It's a common enough sin: believing that you actually know your audience better than the audience knows itself. But the catch is that this is a key part of what makes good designers good. It was essential to Jobs' Reality Distortion Field, and it's what rightly made him famous.
A great designer, therefore, knows she knows the audience implicitly. A merely good designer, on the other hand, knows she doesn't know the audience implicitly and therefore scales back her ambition to what she does know.
A bad designer doesn't realise that he really doesn't know his audience. And works for GNOME.
------------------
[*] In fairness to MS, they did a lot of things right, but as always, they allowed business logic (and I use that term loosely) to dictate a lot of the implementation decisions. So I suspect they got a bad design by not trusting the designers enough.
An e-petition was created asking the DWP to sell off the block to ease the IPv4 address scarcity in the RIPE region.
Why not just ask them to do the right thing and give them back to RIPE? I mean seriously, what kind of example are we trying to set here? Or maybe someone's just trying to bootstrap a market for IPv4 addresses in order to cash in on the increasing scarcity....
... In any case, encouraging profit from a public resource like this is a terrible idea.
Slashdot Mirror
Well... My Little Pwnie, actually....
To whomever modded this '-1, Troll':
Dude, get a grip. I was replying to myself, for fuck's sake. 8^)
She can't be that smart... she got caught didn't she? :)
This time. The test will be to measure what havoc she wreaks on her tormentors once she gets her new My Little Pony rig and goes all Princess Digital on their asses.
Well... My Little Pwnie, actually....
She can't be that smart... she got caught didn't she? :)
This time. The test will be to measure what havoc she wreaks on her tormentors once she gets her new My Little Pony rig and goes all Princess Digital on their asses.
Dear Slashdot,
You've heard of the phrase "Pot calling the Kettle Black", right? Slashdot has no standing to call anyone else "biased".
You seem to have difficulty distinguishing between having an opinion about something and just plain Making Shit Up.
When someone has an opinion, no matter how tenuous, they have at least implicitly accepted that there is such a thing as objective reality, which gives you something to argue about.
When someone simply invents their own reality, then there's no common ground for argument or understanding.
And Slashdot, contrary to your construction of it, is far more diverse in its opinions than you seem to think. But when a collective bias does show (e.g. in anti-Microsoft diatribes), it's generally[*] based on commonly-held opinions that are derived from experience. My anti-Microsoft bias comes from trying to write and support stable server-based applications on an MS platform in the late '90s. Security and stability were such shit at that time that I moved to Linux simply in order to maintain my sanity (and professional reputation).
So, there may actually be pots and kettles here, but not where you're looking for them; comparing Slashdot to Fox is apples to oranges.
----------
[*] Generally. Statistically, there is a small but vocal cadre of clueless idiots in every group of a sufficient size.
Asking whether geeks should still be coding at fifty is like asking if people should still be having sex at fifty. The answer is stupidly obvious. OF COURSE we'll still be coding at fifty! It may seem revolting to younger folks, and lord knows it does take a little longer to get going. But once we've hit that groove, baby, we're not done in 30 seconds. No, we work that algorithm, and we know how to do it, too. None of those stupid mistakes we made during the frenzied, sweaty all-night coding sessions of our youth, blindly swapping pointers and hoping to avoid another premature segfault. Oh, no. And none of that I'm-too-hot-for-you arrogance, either. We leave our customers satisfied, because - take my word for it - that's the only way they're coming back for more.
... Tragically, of course, if you're a fifty year old geek, coding is as close as you're getting to sex for the rest of your life....
*SOB*
No. They are offended when everyone else is eating cupcakes, they say "OMG! These are great! Have one!!!" and I go like "I want one... I really REALLY do... please stop tempting me... "
People want to share. I try to refuse. That refusal is... well? You get the idea.
You have my sympathy. I'm an alcoholic who hasn't had a drink in over 20 years, but I still get people who just don't get that my polite refusal is covering some really significant issues. I don't like to take it out on other people, but being pressured to have a drink, especially by those who are attempting to use the offer to justify their own over-indulgence... well, it's a challenge, to say the least.
Likewise with high-pressure proselytising of any faith. I'm an atheist in a devoutly Christian nation (to the extent that Christianity is enshrined in the Constitution). I have all the respect in the world for the good works that some of the churches do, and for the comfort that many people take in their faith. I sympathise to such an extent that I sometimes find myself wishing that my view of the world offered me the same kind of solace.
BUT... and this is a big issue, I generally feel intimidated and uncomfortable when people try to engage with me about their beliefs because I know that if I were completely honest with them, it would be extremely hard for us to remain close to one another. I have Muslim and Hindu friends who feel the same way.
And this is precisely why pushing hard at your One True Belief is bad. You place some others in a position where they have no alternative (aside from dishonesty) but to place themselves in opposition to the very things that define your identity. Not very conducive to a happy workplace.
I think Einstein himself put things pretty well in a letter that described the Bible as 'pretty childish': In spite of his fundamental disagreement with his interlocutor, wrote, '"I think that we would understand each other quite well if we were to talk about concrete things."
That's terrible for Nokia. The few chances for its survival, IMO, now are gone :-S
Indeed, once the database-driven file system, enhanced security and eye-movement-driven interface of Microsoft's phone are completed, they will crush everything else on the market....
Truly, 2016[*] is going to be a big year for Microsoft.
______
[*] Okay, 2018. Maybe. 2020[**] at the very latest.
[**] No, really.
For years we've been talking about "The Year for Linux on the Desktop". As veteran game developer, it's always boggled me how Linux, despite it's power, is so shortsighted when it comes to 3rd party support and distribution. 3rd part support and easy distribution along with backwards and forwards compatibility is what made Windows so dominate over the past 20 years.
I've read these sentences twice and see nothing even resembling insight in them.
Backwards and especially forwards compatibility are useful aspects of Windows, yes. When they work. But the DLL Hell of the late '90s was one of the main factors that drove me away from Windows. One of the other main factors that drove me away was finding bugs in commercial (proprietary) software, notifying the developers and being told, "Yeah, we'll take a look at that for the next release cycle. Thanks!" The next release cycle was usually months away, weeks at best.
Third party support was, by and large, absolute crippling shit. The straw that finally broke this particular camel's back was a memory leak somewhere in between IIS and a proprietary search product, for which the only available solution was to run a scheduled task every 24 hours to reboot the fucking server. No fix was ever promised by the vendor and Microsoft wasn't willing even to investigate. Unbelievable.
No, there are good reasons for Windows' dominance, not all of them to do with marketing. But claiming that it was ever, in any way, a more stable, predictable platform is just... wishful thinking.
The typical solution bandied about by Linux users is "you can always distribute the source and recompile".
You're using the wrong value of 'you'. If you had explored Linux distributions in any detail at all, you'd know that the 'you' who does the recompile is the package maintainer. This means that the actual developer can simply maintain a stable code base and leave it to others to handle dependency issues on their particular platform. Which is as it should be, because each distro knows its own requirements better than any third party software developer could ever be expected to.
Yes, Linux is a moving target. But let me see if I can find the right way to express this.... Bear with me, it might be a little subtle:
THAT'S THE FUCKING POINT.
Yes, it puts the onus on package maintainers to keep releasing new versions as the kernel moves underneath them and the libraries progress alongside. Maintaining a product on Linux requires that you fly in formation with others. But that's because it sees the computing ecosystem as a fundamentally dynamic environment, one that emergent and contingent, so it allows for division of labour in order to cope with requirements that change constantly. This makes it more responsive to people's individual needs. And that, perversely perhaps, makes it a more secure, stable and manageable platform for most organisations.
(And it would be dishonest of me to say that all distros manage change well. The constant eruption of petty, bothersome bugs is what made me recently swear off Ubuntu for good. But I had alternatives. Good ones. A vote against Ubuntu is NOT a criticism of Linux.)
Now, I'm not claiming there's no benefit to a predictable (albeit imperfect) environment with a vastly slower rate of change at the fundamental level. What I'm trying to say here is that this is hardly the solution to everything. Furthermore, to criticise Linux for being different from what you know exposes a fundamental disregard for the very things that have made it one of the most ubiquitous and versatile platforms in the world today.
You think in this environment the distributors would have learned and instituted fair pricing... Well they haven't and as much as the bang on about it, no one in parliament will lift a finger to protect them.
It's especially galling to see that prices for identical hardware are lower in New Zealand, which has only a small fraction of Australia's population and which is actually farther from the most common markets.
I live in a country (very) roughly equidistant from the two, and travel fairly regularly to both. Last year, I was shopping for an Android phone and discovered that the number on the sticker was the same in both countries. Given that NZD 1 is worth about AUD 0.79, that's a bit of a difference. Just to add insult to injury, the prices were from the very same tech store chain!
There is no logical reason that I can find to justify hardware prices in Australia.
It could be argued that one of the main reasons why Linux has utterly failed as an operating system for average people on average computers is Linus Torvalds.
That sentence is so truth-free that I find myself wondering whether it was authored by Karl Rove or Steven Colbert. I keep wavering between the two, so I don't know whether to laugh or cry in despair at people's appalling inability to reason.
Thank you for doing the math and confirming it.
Agreed. When it comes to wine making, scientific correctness should always be our first priority. The moment I saw this headline, I thought, "I hope someone can Bacchus up on this!"
/me ducks and runs....
"if this could run Linux...."
So you want this too to become a nightmare of competing distros, half-ass driver support, and poor documentation--which no one outside of a handful of geeks will use?
You say that like it's a Bad Thing. Some of us call it choice - in both the literal and vernacular senses of the word.
(And it's 'half-assed, by the way. If you're going to insult someone, at least do it right.)
I look in the mirror.
WARNING: IQs in the mirror may be smaller than they appear.
But of course. You see, Microsoft was only able to find the cure for cancer through their ill-gotten gains by way of anti-competitive, innovation stifling practices that have held back computing and Free Software.
Unfortunately, one of the side-effects of MS CuresForSure® is scabies. Or herpes. Or AIDS....
But mostly just scabies or herpes. Mostly.
I remember the old days when crimes had victims.
Witchcraft? Blasphemy? Heresy? Capital cases back in the old days.
Every single one of those makes Baby Jesus cry, you insensitive clod!
"Security through obscurity is a perfectly fine extra layer of security."
FTFY
In other words: If you're relying on obscurity, you're doing it wrong.
Sure, but you.still haven't demonstrated whether saying, 'Correlation is not causation' makes you stupid, or being stupid makes you say it. I mean, after all, correlation is not... oh shit.
People who are dogmatic about avoiding Latinate words are just as tedious as those who use them indiscriminately or inaccurately for would-be effect.. English is a mongrel language, and the pseudo-racist attempt to reduce it back to "Anglo-Saxon" or whatever is simply ridiculous.
People who are dogmatic about anything are tedious, in my experience. 8^)
Politics and the English Language is one of those particularly interesting documents whose arguments begin to fall apart as soon as you really begin to dig into them, but whose thesis, curiously, retains its validity nonetheless. I would argue that Orwell's preference for Anglo-Saxon is based more on aesthetics than bigotry, but it's undeniable that he associated latinisms with a certain class of society, and that this likely coloured his biases to no small degree.
Orwell was occasionally dogmatic, bombastic and downright wrong in detail or in toto, but his basic argument about how language is a political tool remains as true today as when he wrote the essay.
It should at least be "becoming an epidemic", though as a noun it only refers to disease. Endemic is just wrong as it's the antonym to epidemic. Endemic would be more proper if people shined lasers at planes only in Detroit or something. Why can't they just use "widespread" or something like that?
Well, if you want to go Full Orwell on this, get rid of latin altogether and speak plainly, why not say 'dangerously common'?
(For those of you who have yet to read Orwell's Politics and the English Language, now's your chance. It can -it should- change the way you think and speak.)
When I thought about it, I found that there indeed has been no rude message in Slashdot, ever. So I propose we discuss constructively how to keep up this fine tradition and even improve it! If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to ask me. Oh, and if you happen to be in the town, I'll definitely buy you a beer. Have a nice day. :)
You must SO DEFINITELY be new here.
Allow me to be the first to welcome you by suggesting you rub your cock in sand, blowtorch it to glass, then break it into cutting shards and shove it up your ass so far the blood comes out your nose.
Have a nice fucking day, motherfucker. 8^)
P.S. Might I suggest you drop by 4chan on your way out? They're just as friendly there....
Wish I had mod points...
Although I'm not sure which way I'd mod you - I laughed and groaned at the same time.
Mod down. Clearly GP is doing more ARM than good.
A representative republic. Saying a republic is not particularly informative since one definition of republic is that the government merely doesn't have a hereditary head of state.
Tell that to the North Koreans. 8^)
Isn't that a better test of people's poor reading comprehension and listening skills?
Yes!
I mean, No.
Well, whatever it is we're talking about, it's WRONG.
(Or RIGHT.)
GNOME's main problems are twofold : putting fucking designers in developer's seats, and putting fucking designers in control of the development process.
No, it's worse than that. They're not even good designers (yes, there is such a thing). I'm not a graphic designer, but I've studied the principles, and have worked professionally with them building everything from stage sets to user interfaces. It's true that engineers can't be replaced by architects and equally that developers can't be replaced by designers. But if you think for a moment that this makes architects and designers anything less than essential right from the beginning, you've got another thing coming.
No, GNOME's biggest load of fail came when they began cherry-picking their input. According to the core devs, those who complained about the missing features and the arbitrary UX decisions were either wrong or missing the point. They tested for the things they wanted, and they got them. They went chasing after a mythical, idealised user of their own invention, and soon enough, those were the only users left.
To be fair, Canonical is embarked on the very same thing, and to a lesser degree, Microsoft is guilty of it with Windows 8[*].
It's a common enough sin: believing that you actually know your audience better than the audience knows itself. But the catch is that this is a key part of what makes good designers good. It was essential to Jobs' Reality Distortion Field, and it's what rightly made him famous.
A great designer, therefore, knows she knows the audience implicitly. A merely good designer, on the other hand, knows she doesn't know the audience implicitly and therefore scales back her ambition to what she does know.
A bad designer doesn't realise that he really doesn't know his audience. And works for GNOME.
------------------
[*] In fairness to MS, they did a lot of things right, but as always, they allowed business logic (and I use that term loosely) to dictate a lot of the implementation decisions. So I suspect they got a bad design by not trusting the designers enough.
An e-petition was created asking the DWP to sell off the block to ease the IPv4 address scarcity in the RIPE region.
Why not just ask them to do the right thing and give them back to RIPE? I mean seriously, what kind of example are we trying to set here? Or maybe someone's just trying to bootstrap a market for IPv4 addresses in order to cash in on the increasing scarcity....
... In any case, encouraging profit from a public resource like this is a terrible idea.