If the story as told is true, this blows my mind. Not to wave the 'in MY country' flag too much, but in Canada this is horrendously illegal.
Federal privacy legislation states that a company that collects information
1) must only require information necessary for the business at hand; 2) may not deny service just because you refuse to provide specific information that is not required; 3) must disclose the reasons they need to collect your information; and 4) must never, without your consent, share or disclose your information other than for the purposes for which it was collected.
So if the bank gave his address info to Best Buy or if Best Buy had it already and gave it to Samsung, then this is a pretty clear-cut breach of privacy.
The organization has had serious problems with production and deployment and has been fragmented by ideological debates as Negroponte shifts the agenda away from software freedom and towards Windows.
Uh... Not to be a pedant, but to my understanding, the agenda never was 'software freedom', it was 'a tool that children in developing nations can use to learn and communicate and expand their skills and frame of reference'.
Free software enabled that (in the form of hacking on the machine itself), and Windows prevented it, but if software freedom was ever 'the agenda' they had the wrong attitude the whole time.
The OLPC project used open-source software because it was cheaper, and found the benefits of flexibility, but if they weren't thinking of the children first, the project would always be doomed to failure.
This lawyer probably knows a lot more about the law than Oprah does.
On the other hand, Oprah probably knows a lot more about public relations than this lawyer does. Oh, and she could hire most lawyers in the US. Like, all at once.
It's like watching one of those videos on YouTube of rednecks doing stupid shit and then getting hurt. It's good, clean fun, and in the end we're all better off for having learned a valuable lesson from someone less fortunate now than they were 30 seconds ago.
In this economic depression, it only makes sense for people with no skill or talent to take money from companies that actually provide tangible benefits to society and take part in our economy in exchange for doing no work and little forethought.
The American patent system is designed to reward inventors, even if they never have any intention or desire to make anything of their patent, by ensuring that anyone can patent anything. As a result the secret to success, like in relationships, is finding your perfect match. They're out there somewhere, and they're infringing on a patent that any sane person could come up with over a pint of Guinness and a plate of chips. Go get what you've earned, tiger!
Don't laugh. Our office manager is from Germany and has never heard of The Onion. Thanks to this clip's staggeringly high production values, she was thoroughly confused - especially since she didn't see the clip until after the keynote. When I asked her if she knew what The Onion was and she said no, I showed her this classic, and she figured it out pretty quick.
I wonder if this will be the next BS reason that people give. For years, it's been 'I'll never buy from iTunes because they have DRM! Remove the DRM and then I'll buy!'
Ok, the DRM is removed. It's time for all of the people who've been parroting the same line for the last five years to decide if they're actually going to start buying songs from iTunes, or if they're going to suddenly switch to some other excuse.
Buy or don't buy, I don't care, just be honest with yourself and the rest of us, that's all I ask.
The problem with spam on Twitter is that Twitter is subscription-based, not broadcast-based. If someone is spamming you, unfollow them. If you don't want them to see you either, block them. Problem solved.
This problem is only a problem because stupid people are careless with their passwords. Once that problem is solved (hah!) we're back to normal again.
I find it fascinating how many people focus on the least-used (or least-interesting) application for twitter.
Among the things I find interesting: feeds from TechCrunch and TechVibes, the Associated Press, and CBC News; local radio personalities, reporters, and newspapers letting me know what's going on in my community; local 'movers and shakers' doing the same; people like Wil Shipley and John Gruber, with insightful, relevant, and often funny commentary; information from friends and associates on what they're doing and where (e.g. the Gastown Snowball Fight).
There's lots of reasons to use Twitter; finding out what kind of salad someone's eating isn't one of them.
The thing is, once it's in a digital format, it doesn't matter. The problem with analog is that every time you do anything with it (even play it, in the case of VHS tapes!) it degrades, so you have to be careful with it.
Once it's digital, you can make a million copies, and it doesn't change a thing. Rip all your VHS tapes to DVDs. Copy all of those DVDs to 1/10th as many Blu-Ray discs. In a few years, copy them to another 1/10th as many Blu-Ray discs. Five years after that... etc.
Optical media these days lasts long enough that you can burn it onto $1 discs, and then wait until the next generation of storage holds 10 times as much and costs $1 as well. It's not 'no work at all', and requires maintenance every few years, but after a while, you've only got one disc left, and it gets much easier.
Oh, I failed to mention that we had looked at mod_rails (Passenger) and it looks completely awesome in the context of Rails websites that are capable of running on a single machine. Unfortunately, our site is such that more machines are required, at which point it's actually easier to run multiple machines with multiple Mongrel processes than to run multiple machines with multiple Apache processes, ironically enough.
It may actually be more sensible to rearrange our architecture to attempt to take advantage of mod_rails, as preliminary benchmarks seemed to indicate an anecdotal increase in pages served per second by about 5-12% depending on the page. Unfortunately, without more benchmarks, more hardware, and more time before Christmas crunch season, we didn't have sufficient time to test it.
Regardless, mod_rails is yonks ahead of anything else I've seen and if you know how to manage Apache, or at least know how to copy-and-paste, everyone should be using it in every possible situation.
Next thing you know we'll have autogenerated legislation and automated reviews for congressmen to vote on.
'It looks like you're trying to revoke civil rights! Would you like some help?'
How long till we have automaton congressmen voting for autogenerated legislation with pork provisions for "free storage enhancement" for their cronies??
Sounds like it would make as bad of a future as it has the last eight years.
The spaghetti part is that the integer class handles date/time functions as well. That's inherently messy and conceptually ugly. Maybe I'm too much of a purist, but clearly-defined modules with clear delineation points between them makes it easy to conceptualize the code.
In Python for example, if I want date/time manipulation, I import the requisite module. Same with threads, process manipulation, file path handling, and so on. In Ruby, it seems as though I get date/time manipulation just by virtue of having integers (which I presume I always have), which makes me wonder what else is being brought in whether I know about it or not.
I think that, more than anything, is what unsettles me about the whole affair, but then I guess not knowing what's going on under the hood is part and parcel if you're using a giant framework like Rails.
I can manage intelligently-designed services, but services that are designed with no regard for sane UNIX behaviour become tricky. I can work around them, but people shouldn't have to do extra work every time they deploy something if this could be solved by sane design considerations in the first place.
Likewise, I'm not going to 'fix' rails because I'm not a Ruby developer, I'm a sysadmin. My job is to get Rails running on test and production servers, and in that regard Rails is a huge hassle, far more than it ever should be.
I'm not saying it can't be done or that I can't do it, I'm saying that there's no reason, other than laziness or cluelessness, that Rails should require such hoops to be jumped through.
All kinds of conveniences that you get for free somewhere in ActiveSupport, like being able to type "5.seconds.ago" or, of course, Symbol#to_proc -- some might exist in Merb, some won't.
That's one thing that's always stuck out as unusual and unnatural to me - making object hierarchies that seem to serve only to replicate the English language in a language not designed to resemble English syntax.
It seems to me like it would be more sensible to have, on a datetime object, some simple 'within', 'before', 'after' methods that return true/false (e.g. post.date.within "5 seconds" (or something, however the syntax works).
It just comes across like Rails tries to make things convenient that were never really THAT difficult, or which could have been done in a far more sensible way, rather than with contrivances. It's as though, when designing features, special-cases are as equally valid as generalizations, which leads to a lot of what most programmers I know would call silly features.
I just have a hard time taking a language seriously that seems to overload integers to do date/time calculations. Everything seems mixed together in true spaghetti fashion, and that, more than anything, turns me off the language and framework entirely.
I'll second this. Deploying a RoR app for a (reasonably large) website, I've seen all manner of issues. We're proxying to Mongrel on the backend, but it's a huge hassle.
It's been a rollercoaster ride of excitement, as each new feature, daemon, or cronjob has required not only programming by the developers, but hours of time spent by me writing shell scripts to wrap Ruby scripts because the framework either doesn't allow for something, or does it in a silly way. Rails devs/users will argue that 'You can do [x], just do [y], [z], and [q], and voila,' but I'd prefer things to be straightforward, rather than what seems to be ad-hoc design-philosophy-of-the-week.
Maybe I'm just frustrated, but it seems like the Rails devs develop in a vacuum, ignoring the practical concerns involved in actually *deploying* code. I always stumble across blogs with long explanations and tutorials on things so simple as *starting a service at boot* - and not even an arbitrary service, a common service like Ferret. It almost reminds me of qmail, famous for doing things its own way, even if that completely goes against everything else everyone else does.
Not to mention that it's easy to do something idiotic in Rails. For example:
Orders.all.each { |order|... code goes here... }
Simple task - iterate over each order and run code on it. In practice?
End result is that code that works fine on your test machine (with a hundred orders) fails miserably on the live DB (with several hundred thousand), crashing the server by allocating all the memory available. We also found that Rails (the framework itself, not our code using it) was leaking huge amounts of memory, upwards of 14M (yes, megabytes) per request in some instances, and the GC seemed incapable of cleaning up.
I've dealt with a lot of systems, and I hate PHP more than anyone, but Rails is just full of pitfalls, gotchas, and 'magic' (where it tries to be clever for corner cases at the expense of clarity or efficiency in all cases). It's ugly, bad, and wrong in many situations, and I look forward, honestly and truly, to the excellent Merb developers and what they can do when given their time in the spotlight.
The idea that a system like SkyNet would evolve out of a system designed to get us to buy discount v1agra and c1al1s bodes poorly for our future prospects against the coming robotic onslaught. Truly our proud, erect soldiers will be no match.
Look at books as an example. An author may write a book of a reasonable length (not a Wheel of Time 900-page mammoth). People buy it and like it. He writes another one, they buy that too. And another. As long as he keeps putting together a compelling narrative, people keep buying them and enjoying them.
Why can't games makers do the same? I could buy the Harry Potter box set for $200 and sit down and read them all, but that's not how they were written. They're a series of separate stories, each one building on the previous and leading to the next.
Personally, I would be glad if games publishers did this more often. Amortize the cost of development over ten 6-hour games which each stand on their own, rather than one 60-hour game which was rushed to market for the holiday season. I'd like to grab a game, play it, enjoy it, and move on, and then come back again when the next episode is due. Half Life 2 is doing it, albeit not really fantastically.
Where downloadable content comes in is the ability to expand what's there already (e.g. the oblivion-style of adding an extra dungeon here and there), or the ability to remove distribution costs entirely (to make the model more feasible, rather than shipping 10 discs to distributors, stores, and consumers).
Curious to see who picks up on this and does it right first.
There's a difference this time - he's surrounded by capable people with similar visions. Phil Schiller and Jon Ive, for example. There's a difference between him preparing the company for his departure (i.e. making sure to put in place people who will keep the philosophies alive) and being ousted by the board and replaced by bean counters.
Slashdot Mirror
If the story as told is true, this blows my mind. Not to wave the 'in MY country' flag too much, but in Canada this is horrendously illegal.
Federal privacy legislation states that a company that collects information
1) must only require information necessary for the business at hand;
2) may not deny service just because you refuse to provide specific information that is not required;
3) must disclose the reasons they need to collect your information; and
4) must never, without your consent, share or disclose your information other than for the purposes for which it was collected.
So if the bank gave his address info to Best Buy or if Best Buy had it already and gave it to Samsung, then this is a pretty clear-cut breach of privacy.
There are things that money can not buy. You can build a religion on money (see Scientology), but not a crusade.
Right. With the exception of, you know, the crusades.
The organization has had serious problems with production and deployment and has been fragmented by ideological debates as Negroponte shifts the agenda away from software freedom and towards Windows.
Uh... Not to be a pedant, but to my understanding, the agenda never was 'software freedom', it was 'a tool that children in developing nations can use to learn and communicate and expand their skills and frame of reference'.
Free software enabled that (in the form of hacking on the machine itself), and Windows prevented it, but if software freedom was ever 'the agenda' they had the wrong attitude the whole time.
The OLPC project used open-source software because it was cheaper, and found the benefits of flexibility, but if they weren't thinking of the children first, the project would always be doomed to failure.
This lawyer probably knows a lot more about the law than Oprah does.
On the other hand, Oprah probably knows a lot more about public relations than this lawyer does. Oh, and she could hire most lawyers in the US. Like, all at once.
It's like watching one of those videos on YouTube of rednecks doing stupid shit and then getting hurt. It's good, clean fun, and in the end we're all better off for having learned a valuable lesson from someone less fortunate now than they were 30 seconds ago.
In this economic depression, it only makes sense for people with no skill or talent to take money from companies that actually provide tangible benefits to society and take part in our economy in exchange for doing no work and little forethought.
The American patent system is designed to reward inventors, even if they never have any intention or desire to make anything of their patent, by ensuring that anyone can patent anything. As a result the secret to success, like in relationships, is finding your perfect match. They're out there somewhere, and they're infringing on a patent that any sane person could come up with over a pint of Guinness and a plate of chips. Go get what you've earned, tiger!
Don't laugh. Our office manager is from Germany and has never heard of The Onion. Thanks to this clip's staggeringly high production values, she was thoroughly confused - especially since she didn't see the clip until after the keynote. When I asked her if she knew what The Onion was and she said no, I showed her this classic, and she figured it out pretty quick.
I wonder if this will be the next BS reason that people give. For years, it's been 'I'll never buy from iTunes because they have DRM! Remove the DRM and then I'll buy!'
Ok, the DRM is removed. It's time for all of the people who've been parroting the same line for the last five years to decide if they're actually going to start buying songs from iTunes, or if they're going to suddenly switch to some other excuse.
Buy or don't buy, I don't care, just be honest with yourself and the rest of us, that's all I ask.
Well of course, if they used a TXT file you might get hacked!
The problem with spam on Twitter is that Twitter is subscription-based, not broadcast-based. If someone is spamming you, unfollow them. If you don't want them to see you either, block them. Problem solved.
This problem is only a problem because stupid people are careless with their passwords. Once that problem is solved (hah!) we're back to normal again.
I find it fascinating how many people focus on the least-used (or least-interesting) application for twitter.
Among the things I find interesting: feeds from TechCrunch and TechVibes, the Associated Press, and CBC News; local radio personalities, reporters, and newspapers letting me know what's going on in my community; local 'movers and shakers' doing the same; people like Wil Shipley and John Gruber, with insightful, relevant, and often funny commentary; information from friends and associates on what they're doing and where (e.g. the Gastown Snowball Fight).
There's lots of reasons to use Twitter; finding out what kind of salad someone's eating isn't one of them.
Not really, no. I mean, you're already going to some made-up domain. A made-up domain with an SSL cert doesn't throw any warnings up.
Great, like Mac fanboys aren't in infatuated with him enough already.
More like drawn and quartered.
The thing is, once it's in a digital format, it doesn't matter. The problem with analog is that every time you do anything with it (even play it, in the case of VHS tapes!) it degrades, so you have to be careful with it.
Once it's digital, you can make a million copies, and it doesn't change a thing. Rip all your VHS tapes to DVDs. Copy all of those DVDs to 1/10th as many Blu-Ray discs. In a few years, copy them to another 1/10th as many Blu-Ray discs. Five years after that... etc.
Optical media these days lasts long enough that you can burn it onto $1 discs, and then wait until the next generation of storage holds 10 times as much and costs $1 as well. It's not 'no work at all', and requires maintenance every few years, but after a while, you've only got one disc left, and it gets much easier.
Oh, I failed to mention that we had looked at mod_rails (Passenger) and it looks completely awesome in the context of Rails websites that are capable of running on a single machine. Unfortunately, our site is such that more machines are required, at which point it's actually easier to run multiple machines with multiple Mongrel processes than to run multiple machines with multiple Apache processes, ironically enough.
It may actually be more sensible to rearrange our architecture to attempt to take advantage of mod_rails, as preliminary benchmarks seemed to indicate an anecdotal increase in pages served per second by about 5-12% depending on the page. Unfortunately, without more benchmarks, more hardware, and more time before Christmas crunch season, we didn't have sufficient time to test it.
Regardless, mod_rails is yonks ahead of anything else I've seen and if you know how to manage Apache, or at least know how to copy-and-paste, everyone should be using it in every possible situation.
Next thing you know we'll have autogenerated legislation and automated reviews for congressmen to vote on.
'It looks like you're trying to revoke civil rights! Would you like some help?'
How long till we have automaton congressmen voting for autogenerated legislation with pork provisions for "free storage enhancement" for their cronies??
Sounds like it would make as bad of a future as it has the last eight years.
The spaghetti part is that the integer class handles date/time functions as well. That's inherently messy and conceptually ugly. Maybe I'm too much of a purist, but clearly-defined modules with clear delineation points between them makes it easy to conceptualize the code.
In Python for example, if I want date/time manipulation, I import the requisite module. Same with threads, process manipulation, file path handling, and so on. In Ruby, it seems as though I get date/time manipulation just by virtue of having integers (which I presume I always have), which makes me wonder what else is being brought in whether I know about it or not.
I think that, more than anything, is what unsettles me about the whole affair, but then I guess not knowing what's going on under the hood is part and parcel if you're using a giant framework like Rails.
I can manage intelligently-designed services, but services that are designed with no regard for sane UNIX behaviour become tricky. I can work around them, but people shouldn't have to do extra work every time they deploy something if this could be solved by sane design considerations in the first place.
Likewise, I'm not going to 'fix' rails because I'm not a Ruby developer, I'm a sysadmin. My job is to get Rails running on test and production servers, and in that regard Rails is a huge hassle, far more than it ever should be.
I'm not saying it can't be done or that I can't do it, I'm saying that there's no reason, other than laziness or cluelessness, that Rails should require such hoops to be jumped through.
All kinds of conveniences that you get for free somewhere in ActiveSupport, like being able to type "5.seconds.ago" or, of course, Symbol#to_proc -- some might exist in Merb, some won't.
That's one thing that's always stuck out as unusual and unnatural to me - making object hierarchies that seem to serve only to replicate the English language in a language not designed to resemble English syntax.
It seems to me like it would be more sensible to have, on a datetime object, some simple 'within', 'before', 'after' methods that return true/false (e.g. post.date.within "5 seconds" (or something, however the syntax works).
It just comes across like Rails tries to make things convenient that were never really THAT difficult, or which could have been done in a far more sensible way, rather than with contrivances. It's as though, when designing features, special-cases are as equally valid as generalizations, which leads to a lot of what most programmers I know would call silly features.
I just have a hard time taking a language seriously that seems to overload integers to do date/time calculations. Everything seems mixed together in true spaghetti fashion, and that, more than anything, turns me off the language and framework entirely.
I'll second this. Deploying a RoR app for a (reasonably large) website, I've seen all manner of issues. We're proxying to Mongrel on the backend, but it's a huge hassle.
It's been a rollercoaster ride of excitement, as each new feature, daemon, or cronjob has required not only programming by the developers, but hours of time spent by me writing shell scripts to wrap Ruby scripts because the framework either doesn't allow for something, or does it in a silly way. Rails devs/users will argue that 'You can do [x], just do [y], [z], and [q], and voila,' but I'd prefer things to be straightforward, rather than what seems to be ad-hoc design-philosophy-of-the-week.
Maybe I'm just frustrated, but it seems like the Rails devs develop in a vacuum, ignoring the practical concerns involved in actually *deploying* code. I always stumble across blogs with long explanations and tutorials on things so simple as *starting a service at boot* - and not even an arbitrary service, a common service like Ferret. It almost reminds me of qmail, famous for doing things its own way, even if that completely goes against everything else everyone else does.
Not to mention that it's easy to do something idiotic in Rails. For example:
Orders.all.each { |order| ... code goes here ... }
Simple task - iterate over each order and run code on it. In practice?
End result is that code that works fine on your test machine (with a hundred orders) fails miserably on the live DB (with several hundred thousand), crashing the server by allocating all the memory available. We also found that Rails (the framework itself, not our code using it) was leaking huge amounts of memory, upwards of 14M (yes, megabytes) per request in some instances, and the GC seemed incapable of cleaning up.
I've dealt with a lot of systems, and I hate PHP more than anyone, but Rails is just full of pitfalls, gotchas, and 'magic' (where it tries to be clever for corner cases at the expense of clarity or efficiency in all cases). It's ugly, bad, and wrong in many situations, and I look forward, honestly and truly, to the excellent Merb developers and what they can do when given their time in the spotlight.
Go guys! We're counting on you!
The idea that a system like SkyNet would evolve out of a system designed to get us to buy discount v1agra and c1al1s bodes poorly for our future prospects against the coming robotic onslaught. Truly our proud, erect soldiers will be no match.
Alan Shore said it best
The concept, however, is a clever one.
Look at books as an example. An author may write a book of a reasonable length (not a Wheel of Time 900-page mammoth). People buy it and like it. He writes another one, they buy that too. And another. As long as he keeps putting together a compelling narrative, people keep buying them and enjoying them.
Why can't games makers do the same? I could buy the Harry Potter box set for $200 and sit down and read them all, but that's not how they were written. They're a series of separate stories, each one building on the previous and leading to the next.
Personally, I would be glad if games publishers did this more often. Amortize the cost of development over ten 6-hour games which each stand on their own, rather than one 60-hour game which was rushed to market for the holiday season. I'd like to grab a game, play it, enjoy it, and move on, and then come back again when the next episode is due. Half Life 2 is doing it, albeit not really fantastically.
Where downloadable content comes in is the ability to expand what's there already (e.g. the oblivion-style of adding an extra dungeon here and there), or the ability to remove distribution costs entirely (to make the model more feasible, rather than shipping 10 discs to distributors, stores, and consumers).
Curious to see who picks up on this and does it right first.
It's all relative. Our office is quiet until the HVAC turns off, at which point you suddenly realize how loud it was by how quiet it suddenly gets.
There's a difference this time - he's surrounded by capable people with similar visions. Phil Schiller and Jon Ive, for example. There's a difference between him preparing the company for his departure (i.e. making sure to put in place people who will keep the philosophies alive) and being ousted by the board and replaced by bean counters.