I don't know what this article has to do with mob justice. Perhaps you want the previous one about attacking Amazon.
In this case, people were accusing EasyDNS of doing something they didn't do. That includes the mainstream media, who seemed to borrow the story from Twitter without bothering to fact check. This story is correcting the record.
There's no "mob rule" here, unless by mob you mean the media.
This has been quite the problem for EasyDNS, since the whole thing started with a typo on some blog and then was copied verbatium as truth without anybody bothering to check.
That, and being able to figure out what people actually want in the first place.
Quite a few projects fail simply because the people requesting it have no idea what they actually want. They can't articulate their needs, or why they need it, or even where the idea came from. If you can't nail that down, the rest of it is a crapshoot.
(The only thing worse is when they DO know what they want, and it's for entirely irrational reasons. "We want Sharepoint!" "Okay, why?" "Umm... because we do!" "What does Sharepoint do that you want?" "Documents, and stuff!" "Sigh...")
Don't think thats the fault of the programmer in a lot of cases. I'd love to have someone in my office to write a manual and do proper QA. But the budget doesn't include those things, and I don't get to set the budget.
Sometimes the reality is that you either get a program that doesn't have those things, or you try to do those things and don't have enough money to build anything.
Where do people get this idea from? Movies get 4/4 ratings all the time, and it doesn't mean that we need to re-invent the entire medium before we can make another movie that good.
Ever watched the guys at the airport who load and unload luggage? Same deal. They don't give a shit, it's not their stuff and there's no accountability for mishandling cargo.
The last time I used UPS, I had two packages marked fragile, set for saturday delivery.
The first problem was that they gave me bad information and the city in question didn't have saturday delivery available. But they still billed me for it.
One of the two packages arrived on the monday, in three pieces. The other package wound up in the wrong city. I got it a week later, also broken.
So, I dunno where this "call if its an hour late" stuff was, but they sure didn't want to talk to me after sending one package to the wrong city for a week and breaking both of them. Suffice to say that I refuse to have anything to do with them now.
Then we have one thing in common - between reports like these, and the neverending US media fascination with imaginary 9/11 terrorists that came from Canada, media reports on either side of the border spout off nonsense about the other side.
I'm not sure I've seen reporting like that, but there HAS been articles about municpial governments turning the streetlights off and de-paving roads to reduce costs.
That, and fire departments that don't put out fires. That fiasco got quite a lot of media play.
A lot of us up here in Canada are looking forward to this release. Not because it might damage relations, but simply because it'll be a damn good read. What does the US government REALLY think of their northern neighbor? You don't get truth like this very often.
This thread is retarded. There's nothing in this story has to do with big government vs small government, or public vs private.
Something got screwed up in this instance. In a complex system with high volume and lots of humans involved, that's going to happen. 100% perfection is impossible. It's impossible for government, and it's impossible for corporations.
What we CAN fix is buffoons who take a totally unrelated story and try to twist it to fit whatever ideology they want to push.
TFS is actually tossed in with every MSDN subscription now. So if you're in a shop that pays for MSDN, then going to TFS didn't cost you anything in terms of the software. For small.net shops, its actually pretty convenient since you also get issue tracking, test tracking, and a bunch of other stuff tossed in at the same time.
I had Codice pitch PlasticSCM to me once. It was interesting, but for what we were doing there was nothing in there that particularly mattered and thus the price couldn't be justified. I think that's the problem with a chart like this, you've got things he's bashing that for certain workloads are actually perfectly adequate.
(Amusingly a few months later I had the same guy who had pitched Plastic email me again saying he was now with a new company due to the relative immaturity of Plastic as a product. Ah, salesmen.)
Sorry, but it's the whole process that's flawed. Terrorists get by TSA all the time. Weapons get by TSA all the time. Sometimes they're even there by accident (someone forgot a hunting knife in the bag). But TSA's thugs are focused on molesting people and trying to find bottles of water.
The entire system TSA uses is fatally flawed at the core, and has to be rebuilt entirely. What we have now is very expensive theatre (and sexual assault), not actual security.
Re:What's the deal with the rush of TSA stories re
on
TSA Pats Down 3-Year-Old
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· Score: 5, Insightful
You're right. The whole thing is security theatre at its finest. That's been true for years. Does anybody really think that an old ladies sewing needles are a threat to the airplane?
The problem now is that TSA has gone from annoyance theatre to dangerous and vile theatre. Keep it up much longer and they'll bring down the airline industry as a whole, because do you seriously think I'll ever fly to the US again while this bullshit is going on?
A lot of other countries are happy to take my tourism dollars without molesting me for the privilege.
Re:What's the deal with the rush of TSA stories re
on
TSA Pats Down 3-Year-Old
·
· Score: 5, Informative
The "enhanced" pat-down was created with the goal of making it unpleasant enough to get people to go through the scanners.
And yeah, I'd say that being groped by government goons because I committed the crime of buying a plane ticket is definitely unpleasant.
Re:What's the deal with the rush of TSA stories re
on
TSA Pats Down 3-Year-Old
·
· Score: 5, Informative
The naked picture scanners that can't be saved (except when they can) and the molest^H^H^H^H^H^H pat-downs that would be criminal offenses if done outside the airport have spawned something of a populist backlash against TSA's goons.
You're seeing a lot of stories because there's both a lot of interest, and a lot of material. This is the classic example of a bureaucracy run amok and it's time for the politicians to do their jobs and regain control over it.
The other replies have it right. I travel to the US on a semi regular basis. The Department of Molestation (sorry, TSA) and the increasingly paranoia driven policies of the US government impact me. China does not.
The US is also full of hypocritical politicians who get up on the world stage and talk about "freedom" this and that, while letting their own country slide into the toilet on that very thing. This nonsense has to be stood up. China doesn't spend as much time being holier-then-thou.
Finally, Slashdot has a lot of stories about privacy breaches by the US government. To post the sensationalist bullshit at the end of the summary is pretty sad.
Well, I'm Canadian. And I think the commentary at the end is retarded. So I agree with your rant.:)
The story is actually interesting on a technical level. Stuff happened, and a lot of traffic got rerouted to China. Without the commentary nonsense it'd be a fine article.
Yeah, seriously. I'm a lot more concerned about what the US government and the molestation department at TSA might do then I am about the Chinese government.
This story is interesting from a tech perspective, but the commentary at the end is BS on a site from a country with ever decreasing privacy standards.
We've been going through this at work. The "security experts" came up with all kinds of assanine rules. Stuff like "don't show the length of the password as a user types", "don't reuse the same password on different systems", "don't write them down", "change them every 3 weeks", etc.
The problem is that none of these people have a bloody clue how ordinary users deal with this stuff. If you listen to security experts, you get bullshit that destroys usability and forces users to get ever more creative in bypassing the rules.
IMO no "security expert" should be allowed to come up with rules without a usability expert sitting behind them holding a taser.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, well since the US Government did all that stuff, it was done for freedom. Why do you hate America?
I don't know what this article has to do with mob justice. Perhaps you want the previous one about attacking Amazon.
In this case, people were accusing EasyDNS of doing something they didn't do. That includes the mainstream media, who seemed to borrow the story from Twitter without bothering to fact check. This story is correcting the record.
There's no "mob rule" here, unless by mob you mean the media.
EveryDNS, not EasyDNS. EasyDNS is providing DNS for Wikileaks.ch.
http://blog.easydns.org/2010/12/09/important-the-wikileaks-situation/
This has been quite the problem for EasyDNS, since the whole thing started with a typo on some blog and then was copied verbatium as truth without anybody bothering to check.
If that were true, Amazon would probably want to stop selling the ebook of the cables in question.
Speaking as someone who hasn't coded Java in a very long time, what does that example actually do if getName() is null?
That, and being able to figure out what people actually want in the first place.
Quite a few projects fail simply because the people requesting it have no idea what they actually want. They can't articulate their needs, or why they need it, or even where the idea came from. If you can't nail that down, the rest of it is a crapshoot.
(The only thing worse is when they DO know what they want, and it's for entirely irrational reasons.
"We want Sharepoint!"
"Okay, why?"
"Umm... because we do!"
"What does Sharepoint do that you want?"
"Documents, and stuff!"
"Sigh...")
Don't think thats the fault of the programmer in a lot of cases. I'd love to have someone in my office to write a manual and do proper QA. But the budget doesn't include those things, and I don't get to set the budget.
Sometimes the reality is that you either get a program that doesn't have those things, or you try to do those things and don't have enough money to build anything.
Where do people get this idea from? Movies get 4/4 ratings all the time, and it doesn't mean that we need to re-invent the entire medium before we can make another movie that good.
Perfection is impossible. Get over it.
Apple does the same stuff on Windows. iTunes wants to install an apple updater, Quicktime, and Safari (but you can turn Safari off).
They're not yet at the Adobe level of evil though... "hey lets install an addin before we let you download our software! Yeah, that's genius!"
Ever watched the guys at the airport who load and unload luggage? Same deal. They don't give a shit, it's not their stuff and there's no accountability for mishandling cargo.
The last time I used UPS, I had two packages marked fragile, set for saturday delivery.
The first problem was that they gave me bad information and the city in question didn't have saturday delivery available. But they still billed me for it.
One of the two packages arrived on the monday, in three pieces. The other package wound up in the wrong city. I got it a week later, also broken.
So, I dunno where this "call if its an hour late" stuff was, but they sure didn't want to talk to me after sending one package to the wrong city for a week and breaking both of them. Suffice to say that I refuse to have anything to do with them now.
Then we have one thing in common - between reports like these, and the neverending US media fascination with imaginary 9/11 terrorists that came from Canada, media reports on either side of the border spout off nonsense about the other side.
I'm not sure I've seen reporting like that, but there HAS been articles about municpial governments turning the streetlights off and de-paving roads to reduce costs.
That, and fire departments that don't put out fires. That fiasco got quite a lot of media play.
A lot of us up here in Canada are looking forward to this release. Not because it might damage relations, but simply because it'll be a damn good read. What does the US government REALLY think of their northern neighbor? You don't get truth like this very often.
Get a big bowl of popcorn out and enjoy the show!
This thread is retarded. There's nothing in this story has to do with big government vs small government, or public vs private.
Something got screwed up in this instance. In a complex system with high volume and lots of humans involved, that's going to happen. 100% perfection is impossible. It's impossible for government, and it's impossible for corporations.
What we CAN fix is buffoons who take a totally unrelated story and try to twist it to fit whatever ideology they want to push.
Is this possibly the first ever on-topic "first!" post?
TFS is actually tossed in with every MSDN subscription now. So if you're in a shop that pays for MSDN, then going to TFS didn't cost you anything in terms of the software. For small .net shops, its actually pretty convenient since you also get issue tracking, test tracking, and a bunch of other stuff tossed in at the same time.
I had Codice pitch PlasticSCM to me once. It was interesting, but for what we were doing there was nothing in there that particularly mattered and thus the price couldn't be justified. I think that's the problem with a chart like this, you've got things he's bashing that for certain workloads are actually perfectly adequate.
(Amusingly a few months later I had the same guy who had pitched Plastic email me again saying he was now with a new company due to the relative immaturity of Plastic as a product. Ah, salesmen.)
Sorry, but it's the whole process that's flawed. Terrorists get by TSA all the time. Weapons get by TSA all the time. Sometimes they're even there by accident (someone forgot a hunting knife in the bag). But TSA's thugs are focused on molesting people and trying to find bottles of water.
The entire system TSA uses is fatally flawed at the core, and has to be rebuilt entirely. What we have now is very expensive theatre (and sexual assault), not actual security.
You're right. The whole thing is security theatre at its finest. That's been true for years. Does anybody really think that an old ladies sewing needles are a threat to the airplane?
The problem now is that TSA has gone from annoyance theatre to dangerous and vile theatre. Keep it up much longer and they'll bring down the airline industry as a whole, because do you seriously think I'll ever fly to the US again while this bullshit is going on?
A lot of other countries are happy to take my tourism dollars without molesting me for the privilege.
The "enhanced" pat-down was created with the goal of making it unpleasant enough to get people to go through the scanners.
And yeah, I'd say that being groped by government goons because I committed the crime of buying a plane ticket is definitely unpleasant.
The naked picture scanners that can't be saved (except when they can) and the molest^H^H^H^H^H^H pat-downs that would be criminal offenses if done outside the airport have spawned something of a populist backlash against TSA's goons.
You're seeing a lot of stories because there's both a lot of interest, and a lot of material. This is the classic example of a bureaucracy run amok and it's time for the politicians to do their jobs and regain control over it.
The other replies have it right. I travel to the US on a semi regular basis. The Department of Molestation (sorry, TSA) and the increasingly paranoia driven policies of the US government impact me. China does not.
The US is also full of hypocritical politicians who get up on the world stage and talk about "freedom" this and that, while letting their own country slide into the toilet on that very thing. This nonsense has to be stood up. China doesn't spend as much time being holier-then-thou.
Finally, Slashdot has a lot of stories about privacy breaches by the US government. To post the sensationalist bullshit at the end of the summary is pretty sad.
Well, I'm Canadian. And I think the commentary at the end is retarded. So I agree with your rant. :)
The story is actually interesting on a technical level. Stuff happened, and a lot of traffic got rerouted to China. Without the commentary nonsense it'd be a fine article.
Yeah, seriously. I'm a lot more concerned about what the US government and the molestation department at TSA might do then I am about the Chinese government.
This story is interesting from a tech perspective, but the commentary at the end is BS on a site from a country with ever decreasing privacy standards.
We've been going through this at work. The "security experts" came up with all kinds of assanine rules. Stuff like "don't show the length of the password as a user types", "don't reuse the same password on different systems", "don't write them down", "change them every 3 weeks", etc.
The problem is that none of these people have a bloody clue how ordinary users deal with this stuff. If you listen to security experts, you get bullshit that destroys usability and forces users to get ever more creative in bypassing the rules.
IMO no "security expert" should be allowed to come up with rules without a usability expert sitting behind them holding a taser.