Most of inefficiencies don't need a new system. They just need people to be better users.
Here's a thought experiment. Teach all the secretaries in your company the 20 or so most important keyboard shortcuts. I guarantee you a measurable improvement of output.
Riding a bicycle is something that I agree most people should be able to do.
Building a bike is something that only a few will ever want to learn how to do, and it is perfectly ok for a society if only a few do it, and it is generally better if a few good people create good bikes than if everyone created his own and most of them are crap.
Please give more people a basic understanding of what computers are about. The difference between "analog" and "digital" will be much more valuable to many more people than the difference between for and while.
And it will save us geeks tons of headaches when we don't feel like talking to babies whenever things get more complicated than "press any key to continue".
I said this before in a different topic, but please don't.
We already have way, way too many PHBs who think they know what coding is because they once wrote a simple script in Visual Basic, two MS Word Macros and know formulas in Excel.
We don't have a shortage of people who know how to code. But we do have a massive shortage of people who can code well. And teaching programming to kids before we have figured out how to properly teach coding is a disaster waiting to happen. Case in point: A C++ university course where I helped someone out last week. They actually teach them crap that will lead to exploitable code first, and then (in the next module) they tell them that there's border conditions they should check for. If only these idiots would go bungie-jumping without a rope first, and then add the rope on the 2nd jump, we would have much better code.
Almost all the "simple programs" that you teach people to code with are horrible pieces of junk, from input validation to testing. It teaches bad habits and it gives people a wrong impression on what coding is like. And even if (hopefully) these half-taught idiots won't ever write any code in their lives, they may well end up as the managers who decide the deadlines for the programmers.
Please don't teach coding to kids. Teach it to the few who actually enjoy fiddling and can concentrate long and well enough to focus on the details to get it right. We don't need more code in this world, we need better code.
The book is so-so, but the title is excellent. And that is the problem. One of the basic assumptions of democracy is an informed population. Mis-information is a direct attack on the foundations of the system. As a matter of fact, I believe lying to the public (i.e. press, etc.) should be criminal offense for politicians, two to five years of prison. Unfortunately, our mental model is that of capitalism, where marketing is pretty much accepted to be a discipline of lies.
I don't care if you think you have good intentions, or it is necessary for the greater good. Politicians should not be allowed to lie to their people, end of story. They are our representatives. Think about other people who you pay to represent you - your lawyer maybe - would you accept him lying to you even on a minor detail? No, you would consider trust violated and would get rid of him and get yourself a new one.
What makes you think that is dependent in the least on the cloud service shutting down? Seriously, if I want to get a peak at your files, the last thing I want is that you know about it. I'd do everything except shutting down the service.
Y Combinator should look at themselves. I've read their "about us" and some more - do they even notice that they are Hollywood, in their own way? Their philosophy has a big chunk that is a verbatim copy - they reside in the Bay Area and want you to move there. Just like Hollywood, they believe that getting everyone together in one place is the right thing to do - which it certainly was in a time when communication was slow and distances were huge.
Silicon Valley is the modern day Hollywood. I fear the day that it turns into the modern day MPAA.
Making sure our industry doesn't repeat the same mistakes would be a very worthwhile investment of your time, if you don't feel like fighting the MPAA/RIAA, etc.
Why dont the top 100 odd tech firms just get their boards together and buy out the entertainment industry,
Because nobody sane buys something only to destroy it. They probably consider them overvalued, almost-dead zombie dinosaurs the same way most of us do, which is why buying them would be a huge waste of money.
Playing their game while working on their obsolence is a lot cheaper and more profitable.
Oh great. since when has/. stopped properly showing ordered lists? That's an ol up there. Sorry for the problem, haven't had uses ol on/. for a while, and the "allowed html" still lists them.
Hopefully the next draft of this bill will create a better foundation to stop piracy and not just assert control over the internet.
You haven't been paying attention for politics for the past decades, have you?
Here's one of the games they play with us:
Come up with something you want.
Propose a law on the issue, but make it so ridiculously overbroad that you don't believe it would ever pass
Watch the opposition carefully. Admit a few mistakes, be open to compromises. If it's a shitstorm, appear to "cave in" to "key demands". Ignore anything that touches upon your real core issues.
Withdraw the law, rewrite it, this time be realistic, but include everything you actually wanted from the start
You appear to offer a compromise now, and have "given in" on several fronts. This will erode opposition to the point where you can get the law passed and get everything you wanted in step 1
Profit
I am dead serious. This game is being played over and over and over again. There are variations - if the pushers are unsure about a topic, they won't try a law immediately, they will let some backwater guy talk to the media about it - then if the shitstorm is much bigger than they think they can manage, they will call him crazy, point out it was just an idea and none of the leading figures of the party would seriously entertain such a stupid approach (silence the fallguy with money, comfy positions or guaranteed re-election spots, depending on your election system).
As long as SOPA and all its variants, brothers, cousins and bastard offspring aren't dead and buried and someone has lost his seat over it, we have not won.
Sorry, if your local bakery gets shut down by the police because while they had really good buns, their main business was printing counterfeit money in the basement, it sure sucks, but it's not evidence of the evil government shutting down small business because they're in the pockets of big corporations (though it also is not proof that that's not true).
Megaupload was a criminal enterprise. If you stored your files with them, then sucks to be you, but it's not the evil government, it's the evil criminals that caused your files to be lost.
Sounds like a political statement you just made. You know who else makes political statements? Politicians. You better wear a lot of bulletproof armor,
Please. Try logical fallacies at a dinner party, not on/. where every second visitor has a degree in something and most of those somethings included Logic 101.
If politicians make political statements, it does not follow that people who make political statements are politicians. Compare: If chickens are birds, it does not follow that all birds are chickens.
This is called a non sequitur and is one of the simplest and oldest logical fallacy arguments around. Frankly, I feel insulted that you even tried it on me.
My comment goes for most other bookstores (when I submitted my ebook recently, there was an explicit notice about TOCs regarding the iBookstore, but also the Nook Store, etc.), but it may well be that there are some that don't check it, or that the others didn't do it in the early times.
So, to answer the question:
Yes, all ebook-formats that I know about support a TOC. The major stores insist on your ebook having one.
What Happens To Your Files When a Cloud Service Shuts Down?
They're toast.
That was the easiest "Ask Slashdot" ever. What's the next question?
No, really. That's all there is to say about it. Everything else either follows from there, is trivially obvious, or is pure speculation, ranting, off-topic or trolling.
Really, I'm talking about how PHP does, in fact, support classes and an OO model - and you reply with "I've read lots about C and many articles complain that it's not an OO language". Yeah, well technically you are right, but you're totally not responding to what I was saying, dude.
"It" is also a precedent whereby you can claim $500 million in losses that you don't have to report to shareholders, insurers, or the IRS.
Don't give them ideas. Next you know, they really write their fantasy numbers off as losses and the entire movie industry stops making movies and starts living off tax returns.
No, it proves that Megaupload could extract money out of people. The idea that money == value is a romantic idea from the very early ages of capitalism.
Thanks for that link, finally a good, balanced article on the whole thing.
The minute I read that Kimble was the founder of Megaupload, I was on the side of the FBI on this one. I'm from Germany, the guy has quite a "reputation" over here. Well, you'd need to say abs($reputation). Basically, he's a wannabe-hacker who knows how to play the media in his favour, but everyone I know who knows anything about computers finds him a piece of disgusting trash. He's a scammer, a con man, a career criminal. If you told me anything he so much as touched is legit, I'd want a full forensic examination to make sure.
You don't need to stage it if your enemy is this predictable.
Yes, of course the timing wasn't accidental. Though I believe they messed it up. Doing this the day before the SOPA/PIPA blackout would have been a ton more effective.
So, our enemies are losing it. They are making strategic mistakes. They are not in control of the game anymore. This is a good sign.
Everybody agrees that we need to battle online piracy of movies, books, TV shows and such.
Depends on your meaning of the word "battle".
A lot of people believe that the best way to "battle" piracy is to create good content that people consider worth paying your asking price for, and connecting with your consumers so they feel like giving you a share of their income.
I bought Skyrim, even though it being the big thing, I'm sure I could have just as easily found a copy to download somewhere. But I downloaded "Friends with Benefits" because while it wasn't terrible, I would've never paid the DVD price or movie tickets.
You see, when we normal people go job-hunting, we are told the legend of "supply and demand" and how payment is so low because of market forces and bla bla lie bla lie lie bla bla.
But when it comes to entertainment, there are no market forces, even though this is clearly one of the goods with the most variable price point imaginable. Food or clothes are pretty much equally important for everyone, but entertainment is largely valued on subjective desires.
I might have paid two or three bucks for that movie, if that would have been an option. As it isn't, I download it. If some mystical anti-piracy weapon would entirely destroy online piracy, I still wouldn't have bought it. Simply because the price asked is above my evaluation of its worth.
Here's an idea: Make movies, games, and other content with a rather short life-span available at slowly decreasing prices. Start at $10 the opening week and then drop the price by $1 every week until you hit something like $3. Or double the number of weeks inbetween drops ($10 one week, then $9 for 2 weeks, then $8 for a month, then $7 for 2 months, $6 for a quarter, $5 for half a year, $4 for a year, and $3 from then on. Yes I spell that out in case some MAFIAA member is reading this, their numbers on piracy "losses" show they don't know the first thing about math). Sure, you lose some of the people who would have grudgingly paid $10 but now rather pick it up at $5 or $6 - but you gain millions of people who'd never pay $10, but will pay $3 or $4.
But - publishers aren't all about money, they are also a lot about control and power.
The minute you start using it for actual work it's woefully inadequate, especially compared to a laptop that costs less money.
You're jealous because you've never used one. I currently own both a full-size computer and an iPad. For some tasks, I use the one, for others the other. But I know that when I leave the house and don't plan to do something like coding, I'll pack the iPad over a notebook simply because it is lighter, smaller, and does everything I usually need it to do on the road.
Notebooks and tablets are not the same thing, they have different purposes, different advantages and disadvantages. If you want to be taken seriously, you need to differentiate.
Oh I would have played a lot more, if I had a device that made it look like I was reading a textbook from where the teacher was, and where I could be deep in The Adventure of Asterix.
Oh please. You have a good argument there, don't shred it by becomign ridiculous. Playing in class is easy, no matter what you have at your disposal.
If Google made this announcement it would be all about how Android is not open how google control all information etc etc. Since it's Apple we are told it's revolutionary. Bah.
Are you reading some kind of filtered/. that I don't have access to?
Of course the spin Apple puts on it is all positive - Google would do the same. The comments here on/. are largely critical. I don't think they would be much different if it were Google.
So really, where do you get this from? Are you just some weird kind of Apple-Anti-Fanboy?
It's about iPad because only iPad and iPhone can read the ibook format.
If 5% of the people whining about "closed format" (even though it's just epub with some extensions) or "evil DRM" (even though nothing in the format mandates DRM) or "bwah, the world is evil to me" had done what geeks do - go and reverse-engineer it, then write your own reader - we would have one by morning.
Whoever modded parent up: Hand in your geek card, take Reading Comprehension 101 and stop moderating.
There is nothing in there that limits you to "iDevices". What it says is that this is an exclusive deal, you can't sell it here and elsewhere simultaneously.
Are iBooks available for "non-iDevices"? As they will be sold via the iTunes store, I don't see anything stopping you from buying and using one on your windows PC. And nothing in that quoted excerpt indicates any usage restrictions.
Slashdot Mirror
Most of inefficiencies don't need a new system. They just need people to be better users.
Here's a thought experiment. Teach all the secretaries in your company the 20 or so most important keyboard shortcuts. I guarantee you a measurable improvement of output.
No programming knowledge needed.
You are misinterpreting Steve.
Riding a bicycle is something that I agree most people should be able to do.
Building a bike is something that only a few will ever want to learn how to do, and it is perfectly ok for a society if only a few do it, and it is generally better if a few good people create good bikes than if everyone created his own and most of them are crap.
Mod parent up.
Please give more people a basic understanding of what computers are about. The difference between "analog" and "digital" will be much more valuable to many more people than the difference between for and while.
And it will save us geeks tons of headaches when we don't feel like talking to babies whenever things get more complicated than "press any key to continue".
I said this before in a different topic, but please don't.
We already have way, way too many PHBs who think they know what coding is because they once wrote a simple script in Visual Basic, two MS Word Macros and know formulas in Excel.
We don't have a shortage of people who know how to code. But we do have a massive shortage of people who can code well. And teaching programming to kids before we have figured out how to properly teach coding is a disaster waiting to happen. Case in point: A C++ university course where I helped someone out last week. They actually teach them crap that will lead to exploitable code first, and then (in the next module) they tell them that there's border conditions they should check for. If only these idiots would go bungie-jumping without a rope first, and then add the rope on the 2nd jump, we would have much better code.
Almost all the "simple programs" that you teach people to code with are horrible pieces of junk, from input validation to testing. It teaches bad habits and it gives people a wrong impression on what coding is like. And even if (hopefully) these half-taught idiots won't ever write any code in their lives, they may well end up as the managers who decide the deadlines for the programmers.
Please don't teach coding to kids. Teach it to the few who actually enjoy fiddling and can concentrate long and well enough to focus on the details to get it right. We don't need more code in this world, we need better code.
Now what is the problem?
You Are Being Lied To
The book is so-so, but the title is excellent. And that is the problem. One of the basic assumptions of democracy is an informed population. Mis-information is a direct attack on the foundations of the system. As a matter of fact, I believe lying to the public (i.e. press, etc.) should be criminal offense for politicians, two to five years of prison. Unfortunately, our mental model is that of capitalism, where marketing is pretty much accepted to be a discipline of lies.
I don't care if you think you have good intentions, or it is necessary for the greater good. Politicians should not be allowed to lie to their people, end of story. They are our representatives. Think about other people who you pay to represent you - your lawyer maybe - would you accept him lying to you even on a minor detail? No, you would consider trust violated and would get rid of him and get yourself a new one.
What makes you think that is dependent in the least on the cloud service shutting down? Seriously, if I want to get a peak at your files, the last thing I want is that you know about it. I'd do everything except shutting down the service.
Y Combinator should look at themselves. I've read their "about us" and some more - do they even notice that they are Hollywood, in their own way? Their philosophy has a big chunk that is a verbatim copy - they reside in the Bay Area and want you to move there. Just like Hollywood, they believe that getting everyone together in one place is the right thing to do - which it certainly was in a time when communication was slow and distances were huge.
Silicon Valley is the modern day Hollywood. I fear the day that it turns into the modern day MPAA.
Making sure our industry doesn't repeat the same mistakes would be a very worthwhile investment of your time, if you don't feel like fighting the MPAA/RIAA, etc.
Why dont the top 100 odd tech firms just get their boards together and buy out the entertainment industry,
Because nobody sane buys something only to destroy it. They probably consider them overvalued, almost-dead zombie dinosaurs the same way most of us do, which is why buying them would be a huge waste of money.
Playing their game while working on their obsolence is a lot cheaper and more profitable.
Oh great. since when has /. stopped properly showing ordered lists? That's an ol up there. Sorry for the problem, haven't had uses ol on /. for a while, and the "allowed html" still lists them.
Hopefully the next draft of this bill will create a better foundation to stop piracy and not just assert control over the internet.
You haven't been paying attention for politics for the past decades, have you?
Here's one of the games they play with us:
I am dead serious. This game is being played over and over and over again. There are variations - if the pushers are unsure about a topic, they won't try a law immediately, they will let some backwater guy talk to the media about it - then if the shitstorm is much bigger than they think they can manage, they will call him crazy, point out it was just an idea and none of the leading figures of the party would seriously entertain such a stupid approach (silence the fallguy with money, comfy positions or guaranteed re-election spots, depending on your election system).
As long as SOPA and all its variants, brothers, cousins and bastard offspring aren't dead and buried and someone has lost his seat over it, we have not won.
Uh, no.
Sorry, if your local bakery gets shut down by the police because while they had really good buns, their main business was printing counterfeit money in the basement, it sure sucks, but it's not evidence of the evil government shutting down small business because they're in the pockets of big corporations (though it also is not proof that that's not true).
Megaupload was a criminal enterprise. If you stored your files with them, then sucks to be you, but it's not the evil government, it's the evil criminals that caused your files to be lost.
Sounds like a political statement you just made. You know who else makes political statements? Politicians. You better wear a lot of bulletproof armor,
Please. Try logical fallacies at a dinner party, not on /. where every second visitor has a degree in something and most of those somethings included Logic 101.
If politicians make political statements, it does not follow that people who make political statements are politicians.
Compare: If chickens are birds, it does not follow that all birds are chickens.
This is called a non sequitur and is one of the simplest and oldest logical fallacy arguments around. Frankly, I feel insulted that you even tried it on me.
Ok, my bad. It was a mutual misunderstanding.
My comment goes for most other bookstores (when I submitted my ebook recently, there was an explicit notice about TOCs regarding the iBookstore, but also the Nook Store, etc.), but it may well be that there are some that don't check it, or that the others didn't do it in the early times.
So, to answer the question:
Yes, all ebook-formats that I know about support a TOC.
The major stores insist on your ebook having one.
What Happens To Your Files When a Cloud Service Shuts Down?
They're toast.
That was the easiest "Ask Slashdot" ever. What's the next question?
No, really. That's all there is to say about it. Everything else either follows from there, is trivially obvious, or is pure speculation, ranting, off-topic or trolling.
plenty of reviews of Kindle books
Did you even read what I wrote?
Kindle == Amazon
iBookstore == Apple
Amazon != Apple
Kindle != iBookstore
Really, I'm talking about how PHP does, in fact, support classes and an OO model - and you reply with "I've read lots about C and many articles complain that it's not an OO language". Yeah, well technically you are right, but you're totally not responding to what I was saying, dude.
"It" is also a precedent whereby you can claim $500 million in losses that you don't have to report to shareholders, insurers, or the IRS.
Don't give them ideas. Next you know, they really write their fantasy numbers off as losses and the entire movie industry stops making movies and starts living off tax returns.
No, it proves that Megaupload could extract money out of people. The idea that money == value is a romantic idea from the very early ages of capitalism.
Thanks for that link, finally a good, balanced article on the whole thing.
The minute I read that Kimble was the founder of Megaupload, I was on the side of the FBI on this one. I'm from Germany, the guy has quite a "reputation" over here. Well, you'd need to say abs($reputation). Basically, he's a wannabe-hacker who knows how to play the media in his favour, but everyone I know who knows anything about computers finds him a piece of disgusting trash. He's a scammer, a con man, a career criminal. If you told me anything he so much as touched is legit, I'd want a full forensic examination to make sure.
You don't need to stage it if your enemy is this predictable.
Yes, of course the timing wasn't accidental. Though I believe they messed it up. Doing this the day before the SOPA/PIPA blackout would have been a ton more effective.
So, our enemies are losing it. They are making strategic mistakes. They are not in control of the game anymore. This is a good sign.
Occupy Wall Street was nowhere near as effective as Arab Spring, and that's because we were not throwing Molotov Cocktails and shooting cops.
Shooting cops isn't the answer.
Shooting politicians is.
Everybody agrees that we need to battle online piracy of movies, books, TV shows and such.
Depends on your meaning of the word "battle".
A lot of people believe that the best way to "battle" piracy is to create good content that people consider worth paying your asking price for, and connecting with your consumers so they feel like giving you a share of their income.
I bought Skyrim, even though it being the big thing, I'm sure I could have just as easily found a copy to download somewhere. But I downloaded "Friends with Benefits" because while it wasn't terrible, I would've never paid the DVD price or movie tickets.
You see, when we normal people go job-hunting, we are told the legend of "supply and demand" and how payment is so low because of market forces and bla bla lie bla lie lie bla bla.
But when it comes to entertainment, there are no market forces, even though this is clearly one of the goods with the most variable price point imaginable. Food or clothes are pretty much equally important for everyone, but entertainment is largely valued on subjective desires.
I might have paid two or three bucks for that movie, if that would have been an option. As it isn't, I download it. If some mystical anti-piracy weapon would entirely destroy online piracy, I still wouldn't have bought it. Simply because the price asked is above my evaluation of its worth.
Here's an idea: Make movies, games, and other content with a rather short life-span available at slowly decreasing prices. Start at $10 the opening week and then drop the price by $1 every week until you hit something like $3. Or double the number of weeks inbetween drops ($10 one week, then $9 for 2 weeks, then $8 for a month, then $7 for 2 months, $6 for a quarter, $5 for half a year, $4 for a year, and $3 from then on. Yes I spell that out in case some MAFIAA member is reading this, their numbers on piracy "losses" show they don't know the first thing about math).
Sure, you lose some of the people who would have grudgingly paid $10 but now rather pick it up at $5 or $6 - but you gain millions of people who'd never pay $10, but will pay $3 or $4.
But - publishers aren't all about money, they are also a lot about control and power.
The minute you start using it for actual work it's woefully inadequate, especially compared to a laptop that costs less money.
You're jealous because you've never used one. I currently own both a full-size computer and an iPad. For some tasks, I use the one, for others the other. But I know that when I leave the house and don't plan to do something like coding, I'll pack the iPad over a notebook simply because it is lighter, smaller, and does everything I usually need it to do on the road.
Notebooks and tablets are not the same thing, they have different purposes, different advantages and disadvantages. If you want to be taken seriously, you need to differentiate.
Oh I would have played a lot more, if I had a device that made it look like I was reading a textbook from where the teacher was, and where I could be deep in The Adventure of Asterix.
Oh please. You have a good argument there, don't shred it by becomign ridiculous. Playing in class is easy, no matter what you have at your disposal.
If Google made this announcement it would be all about how Android is not open how google control all information etc etc. Since it's Apple we are told it's revolutionary. Bah.
Are you reading some kind of filtered /. that I don't have access to?
Of course the spin Apple puts on it is all positive - Google would do the same. /. are largely critical. I don't think they would be much different if it were Google.
The comments here on
So really, where do you get this from? Are you just some weird kind of Apple-Anti-Fanboy?
It's about iPad because only iPad and iPhone can read the ibook format.
If 5% of the people whining about "closed format" (even though it's just epub with some extensions) or "evil DRM" (even though nothing in the format mandates DRM) or "bwah, the world is evil to me" had done what geeks do - go and reverse-engineer it, then write your own reader - we would have one by morning.
Whoever modded parent up: Hand in your geek card, take Reading Comprehension 101 and stop moderating.
There is nothing in there that limits you to "iDevices". What it says is that this is an exclusive deal, you can't sell it here and elsewhere simultaneously.
Are iBooks available for "non-iDevices"? As they will be sold via the iTunes store, I don't see anything stopping you from buying and using one on your windows PC. And nothing in that quoted excerpt indicates any usage restrictions.
Uh yes, they do. In fact, it's pretty much a requirement. (I think the iBookstore doesn't even accept submissions without a table of contents).