Amen brother. I was about to write practically the same thing.
The editor never was the problem. The culture at WP is. I used to contribute, I've not done so for a long time now. I spend my time writing for audiences that actually care about it. WP failed when they snuffed the experts and thought that references could replace knowledge. Nope, it doesn't. References back up knowledge, they are never a substitute. There's a reason scientific papers go through peer-review and not just reference-checking.
And there's a reason real publications have editors - not bots and idiots whose egos are inversely proportional to their intelligence.
A sad story, really. It's still a brilliant concept, with a lousy execution.
It is an entirely different situation. You and your neighbour are within the same country. The system regulating both of you is the legal system - the same laws apply to both of you. North and South Korea are two different countries with different laws. The system regulating both of them is diplomatic exchanges, not laws.
Pfft, Russia. Before Fukushima, Germany was dead-set doing the exact same thing. In fact, even with that extension law abandoned now due to pressure from the people, some of our oldest reactors will reach 30 next year and go on running a few more years.
I am, in fact, pro-nuclear-power. But I am strongly against doing it commercially with the focus on profit. You play with forces like that, you focus in safety or you are an irresponsible, antisocial psychopath.
The problem is that we need people who think long-term to solve this. But none of the people in power do.
In the west, politicians think roughly until the next election and that's it. The 3rd world countries either don't care or are so unstable that anything that hurts now in order to get a big pay-off tomorrow means the end of the current regime. And China, India, Brazil, etc. are growing so fast that pretty much the same holds true, except that it's because of the growth dynamics and not political instability.
So basically, we're heading for the wall. We know it. Nobody dares to grab the wheel because it means unbuckling your seat belt.
Yes, they are paranoid tyrants. However, you should definitely read the whole story, preferably from several news sources.
Those trees were put in place specifically a) right at the border and b) so that they could be seen from North Korea. The claim of it being intentional propaganda is certainly right on the mark. Whether or not it's "good" or "bad" is a question of perspective more than anything else.
Also, South Korea already stopped these christmas displays as part of the peace talks, and only resumed them last year after the peace talks went cold. Does that sound like a bit of revenge and kindergarden behaviour to you or not?
And while you probably don't see what's so bad about a couple christmas trees, ask yourself if you've had people in your country complain about a mosque or other religious building by some non-majority religion that people have prejudices against. I know I remember cases.
So, really, those paranoid tyrannic north koreans aren't all that different from people living not far from you.
While I don't agree to all his details, the general point is strong and true.
One of the things that I have learnt to hate about all the recent MS Windows interfaces is how it tries to outsmart me. Not having used an option for a while? It'll hide it from you, so all the things that you need only rarely you always have to go and hunt around for. And I won't say anything about the "ribbons" interface, because there's not a single positive word I could say about it.
I also see the same trend in websites recently. Dumbing down and pseudo-smart seems the new trend. I long for my Unix commandline, where the system assumes I know what I'm doing and considers its two main jobs to be: a) do what I tell it to do and b) get out of my way as much as possible.
The computer interface is important, very important in fact. But not in and for itself. So let's kick all those artsy people and the managers and idiots out of user interface design and put some actual designers in charge again.
That is a common point of view, but it lacks any evidence that's not anecdotal. So it's an opinion, and nothing more.
I don't share it. While I also don't have studies, I know how to look beyond confirmation bias, at least when I try hard enough.
People play all kinds of games, not just bad-guy games. More importantly, all kinds of people play all kinds of games. The same people who shoot you in some FPS will build up a society in Civ5 the next day, or hop through cartoon landscapes on the weekend.
In addition, it doesn't seem to make much of a difference if the same action is a crime (shooting someone in GTA) or legal (shooting an enemy soldier in a war game) or legally undefined (shooting an alien in a SciFi world).
My counter-thesis would be that it isn't the crime or bad-boy behaviour so much as the fact that games usually have comparatively simple and definite solutions. In the real world, dealing with someone in a hostile situation carries all kinds of legal, social, moral, personal and context-relative complexities. In a computer game, you can just shoot him. There is some catharsis, but it is also relaxing because so many parts of your brain can just go and have a break.
Now if anyone has a couple actual (i.e. scientific) studies on the subject, I'd be thrilled to read them. Until then, I'll just have an opinion.
That "something" is called "experience from previous cases". They've never gotten anything right on the first try, so why should this be any different?
No, it's design-by-management. I have a 30" screen. Try to explain to me why I should follow a tablet paradigm. I can tell you already that my answer to 60% of your attempts will be "but I already have an iPad for that".
I want to be able to have traditional windows. I have background tasks running that I can easily monitor this way. I have browser window and coding environment side-by-side. I can drag a commandline into view, or have my TODO list or calendar visible in the corner.
No way their new GUI can be even halfway configurable enough to let me do the same things.
True, I barely use the desktop the way most windows users do. I don't need it to hold all the application launcher icons I don't want to dig out of the 7th submenu of "Start" all the time, because I have a dock and Quicksilver to do that for me. I don't need it as a temporary document storage, either.
But I need my deskspace, even if I don't need the desktop-as-a-folder nonsense.
Just because MS is doing its usual dance of stupidity again?
I can't complain about OS X Lion, nor have I seen a tendency in any other OS to enforce a tablet paradigm on non-tablet users. The geniuses in Redmond are the only ones who think that because they missed the tablet train, they now have to tablet-everything.
'But, in the absence of direct contact, it can work as a bridge between the American and Iranian people.'"
Then it should come from the people, not from the government.
The idea is nice, though there are roughly 10,000,000 other websites already telling someone interested in america everything he wants to know and a million things he really didn't want to know. But how about dropping the marketing speech? Don't pretend that real humans are talking to real humans when on the one side it's just marketing zombies and politicians.
Avoid ORM in any framework to increase performance, though, and CI has no problem letting you write native SQL queries.
I disagree on that. I'm using Doctrine2 with CI2 and it works like charm. Are my native SQL queries faster? For simple cases, probably yes. For a complex application, I am confident that the caching Doctrine does for me will be a benefit, and the reduction in bugs and gains in ease-of-coding are more than worth the performance impact.
People don't mind because they don't understand what is really going on. With this or any other privacy intrusion (ignoring if this particular one is real or not).
Cherie, no human being is reading your mails. Computers with natural language engines are, and they are searching for and generating patterns. Human beings come in long afterwards. They don't get to read your mails, what they get is a summary of your preferences, opinions, buying habits, and probably some kind of score indicating (depending on who is doing the spying) if you're a good customer, a potential terrorist, have the right political agenda, etc. etc.
The 1984 "Big Brother" concept is 1984 - in the 21st century, you will not be arrested because some office drone in the ministry of truth read through all your e-mails and decided you're a bad person. No, in the 21st century you get put on the No Fly List and nobody can friggin' explain to you why, because the reason, as far as the humans involved are concerned, is that some score in some automated system crossed a threshold value.
My personal framework of choice is CodeIgniter, though if you have Ruby people on the team then you should definitely check CakePHP.
I like CI because it works, and it isn't as arcane as most of the other frameworks out there, meaning that if I want to write my own library, it is fairly easy to do so and I don't need to spend weeks digging through all the other crap first.
Also, it is fairly well documented, and that's very important.
So right now the only way to vote against the party in power is to vote for some other party, and for preference many people vote for the second biggest one to maximize the effect.
I could follow you right up to there. Then you lost me. Are you talking about Russia or about the USA here?
The problem with the whole scheme was the "system relevant" part.
Basically, the banks ran a big extortion scheme. The demand was: "If you don't bail us out, we're going to go broke and since we're so important, the whole economy will go down with us."
The response of governments the world over was "Oh fuck! Panic! Yes, yes of course, please don't do this to us, there are elections coming up!"
When it should have been: "The well-being of everyone is exactly what our job is. You won't go broke, because if you do, we will nationalise you to keep the economy afloat. But there will be no bonus payments for you losers. So here's the bailout-credit conditions. Sign down here, thank you."
And who gets them, and at what price? I refer you to the days of yore, when getting a development machine for a video game console cost a prohibitive amount of money.
Apple is making a killing on the thousands of small indie apps in the App Store. They would be unbelievably stupid if they raised the bar on that.
Here's an example: Apple killed Lexcycle's "Stanza" e-reader, which had USB syncing abilities and other features that had become very popular. Why? Because they have sweetheart deals with Barnes & Noble and Amazon to feature the Nook and Kindle apps instead.
I just checked, and the App Store page for Stanza not only says it's still around, but also that it was updated less than a month ago. So whatever the point you're trying to make is, "Apple killed..." is simply a flat-out lie.
In another couple of years we'll be looking back the Microsoft Windows PC era with fondness. Remember when you could....
Errr.... no. Absolutely not. Never, not ever, not in a thousand years, no way.
We are already looking back at the MS PC with horror, wondering how people ever put (and still do put) up with that kind of crappy abomination. Or does anyone here remember fiddling with config.sys and system.ini fondly?
Because end users don't give a fuck about walled gardens. The computer is not a magic thing, it's a multipurpose tool whose first job it is to get done whatever it is the user wants to get done. Consoles are successful in the gaming market not because they are cheaper than PCs (most console owners already own a PC) or because their graphics are better (if at all, that's true for a few months after the newest generation is released), but because you can put in a game and play, and don't have to worry about graphics drivers, incompatible peripherals, the stupid system crashing again, disk space, installation and two hundred other things that are just obstacles on the way to what you're really after - the game itself.
Most users will end up in a walled garden not due to some evil conspiracy, but because that is what they want.
And yet, the PC and all its freedoms will remain. Because all the content in the walled gardens has to be created somewhere. And because those who do feel strongly about this freedom. And have enough knowledge to generate it if it is denied.
Just please stop thinking that everyone else is just like us and wants the same things.
True. However, the principle for a central bank, when there is a liquidity crisis is: lend freely, but at punitive rates, wipe-out boards and shareholders. You can do that, because the boards have no choice, it is either that or they end broke.
Finally someone gets what's wrong with the scheme.
By now, the FED should _own_ Wall st.
No. They should stay out of the mudpit, it tends to get a little dirt on you. But they would have sent a very clear message to the banks that if you gamble and lose, you pay for your mistake, and dearly. Instead, the message that was sent is that someone else will pay for your mistake and you can go right on gambling.
Correct, if. And that's a big "if". I mean 120px big.
If the banks had been working well, if the banks hadn't been the source of the problem, if the banks had not been the ones needing the bailout, but the ones helping to, say, bail out poor shop owners.
But the fact that they would all be bancrupt today if we, the taxpayers, hadn't propped them up makes it immoral for them to profit from the crisis. I don't care if it's $13 billion or $5.95 - this is money that is not morally theirs. They were not taking a risk that they deserve compensation for - they had already gambled and lost everything. Having to pay up would have been the least they could do in saying "sorry, we fucked up". It should have been a requirement for getting any money. No, wait: Since they are "system relevant" and can't go bancrupt, the government should have forced them to take the money and take it at above market rate. Give them an incentive to use as little of it as possible, and be as careful with it as possible.
Their costs are not the taxpayers problem. They survived because of the taxpayer money they received. Heck, this would've been a golden opportunity to get rid of a massive part of the federal debt - instead of giving them free money, pay back the government debt early, from the same out-of-thin-air source, to the same amount - no change for the banks for the moment, but unbelievable amounts of money saved for future generations.
Does Carrier IQ believe that its actions comply with the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (18 U.S.C. Â 1030)? Why?
That's the kind of question you don't want to be asked. People don't ask that way if they don't already have an opinion. Basically, he wants to see them dig their own grave, and enjoy it.
That's good news. Let's see if they spring the lobby machine into overdrive and try to get the issue "lost" in sub-comittees and extended deadlines.
Slashdot Mirror
Amen brother. I was about to write practically the same thing.
The editor never was the problem. The culture at WP is. I used to contribute, I've not done so for a long time now. I spend my time writing for audiences that actually care about it.
WP failed when they snuffed the experts and thought that references could replace knowledge. Nope, it doesn't. References back up knowledge, they are never a substitute. There's a reason scientific papers go through peer-review and not just reference-checking.
And there's a reason real publications have editors - not bots and idiots whose egos are inversely proportional to their intelligence.
A sad story, really. It's still a brilliant concept, with a lousy execution.
It is an entirely different situation. You and your neighbour are within the same country. The system regulating both of you is the legal system - the same laws apply to both of you. North and South Korea are two different countries with different laws. The system regulating both of them is diplomatic exchanges, not laws.
Pfft, Russia. Before Fukushima, Germany was dead-set doing the exact same thing. In fact, even with that extension law abandoned now due to pressure from the people, some of our oldest reactors will reach 30 next year and go on running a few more years.
I am, in fact, pro-nuclear-power. But I am strongly against doing it commercially with the focus on profit. You play with forces like that, you focus in safety or you are an irresponsible, antisocial psychopath.
The problem is that we need people who think long-term to solve this. But none of the people in power do.
In the west, politicians think roughly until the next election and that's it.
The 3rd world countries either don't care or are so unstable that anything that hurts now in order to get a big pay-off tomorrow means the end of the current regime.
And China, India, Brazil, etc. are growing so fast that pretty much the same holds true, except that it's because of the growth dynamics and not political instability.
So basically, we're heading for the wall. We know it. Nobody dares to grab the wheel because it means unbuckling your seat belt.
Pffft. Newbie.
Yes, they are paranoid tyrants. However, you should definitely read the whole story, preferably from several news sources.
Those trees were put in place specifically a) right at the border and b) so that they could be seen from North Korea. The claim of it being intentional propaganda is certainly right on the mark. Whether or not it's "good" or "bad" is a question of perspective more than anything else.
Also, South Korea already stopped these christmas displays as part of the peace talks, and only resumed them last year after the peace talks went cold. Does that sound like a bit of revenge and kindergarden behaviour to you or not?
And while you probably don't see what's so bad about a couple christmas trees, ask yourself if you've had people in your country complain about a mosque or other religious building by some non-majority religion that people have prejudices against. I know I remember cases.
So, really, those paranoid tyrannic north koreans aren't all that different from people living not far from you.
While I don't agree to all his details, the general point is strong and true.
One of the things that I have learnt to hate about all the recent MS Windows interfaces is how it tries to outsmart me. Not having used an option for a while? It'll hide it from you, so all the things that you need only rarely you always have to go and hunt around for. And I won't say anything about the "ribbons" interface, because there's not a single positive word I could say about it.
I also see the same trend in websites recently. Dumbing down and pseudo-smart seems the new trend. I long for my Unix commandline, where the system assumes I know what I'm doing and considers its two main jobs to be: a) do what I tell it to do and b) get out of my way as much as possible.
The computer interface is important, very important in fact. But not in and for itself. So let's kick all those artsy people and the managers and idiots out of user interface design and put some actual designers in charge again.
That is a common point of view, but it lacks any evidence that's not anecdotal. So it's an opinion, and nothing more.
I don't share it. While I also don't have studies, I know how to look beyond confirmation bias, at least when I try hard enough.
People play all kinds of games, not just bad-guy games. More importantly, all kinds of people play all kinds of games. The same people who shoot you in some FPS will build up a society in Civ5 the next day, or hop through cartoon landscapes on the weekend.
In addition, it doesn't seem to make much of a difference if the same action is a crime (shooting someone in GTA) or legal (shooting an enemy soldier in a war game) or legally undefined (shooting an alien in a SciFi world).
My counter-thesis would be that it isn't the crime or bad-boy behaviour so much as the fact that games usually have comparatively simple and definite solutions. In the real world, dealing with someone in a hostile situation carries all kinds of legal, social, moral, personal and context-relative complexities. In a computer game, you can just shoot him. There is some catharsis, but it is also relaxing because so many parts of your brain can just go and have a break.
Now if anyone has a couple actual (i.e. scientific) studies on the subject, I'd be thrilled to read them. Until then, I'll just have an opinion.
Well, it virtually violates the virtual-human rights, absolutely.
I fail to see what real humans have to do with it, though.
That "something" is called "experience from previous cases". They've never gotten anything right on the first try, so why should this be any different?
That would be 3.11 - they didn't do service packs until NT.
No, it's design-by-management. I have a 30" screen. Try to explain to me why I should follow a tablet paradigm. I can tell you already that my answer to 60% of your attempts will be "but I already have an iPad for that".
I want to be able to have traditional windows. I have background tasks running that I can easily monitor this way. I have browser window and coding environment side-by-side. I can drag a commandline into view, or have my TODO list or calendar visible in the corner.
No way their new GUI can be even halfway configurable enough to let me do the same things.
True, I barely use the desktop the way most windows users do. I don't need it to hold all the application launcher icons I don't want to dig out of the 7th submenu of "Start" all the time, because I have a dock and Quicksilver to do that for me. I don't need it as a temporary document storage, either.
But I need my deskspace, even if I don't need the desktop-as-a-folder nonsense.
Just because MS is doing its usual dance of stupidity again?
I can't complain about OS X Lion, nor have I seen a tendency in any other OS to enforce a tablet paradigm on non-tablet users. The geniuses in Redmond are the only ones who think that because they missed the tablet train, they now have to tablet-everything.
'But, in the absence of direct contact, it can work as a bridge between the American and Iranian people.'"
Then it should come from the people, not from the government.
The idea is nice, though there are roughly 10,000,000 other websites already telling someone interested in america everything he wants to know and a million things he really didn't want to know. But how about dropping the marketing speech? Don't pretend that real humans are talking to real humans when on the one side it's just marketing zombies and politicians.
Do invest the time, seriously. Or, depending on where you are located, talk to me and I can show you why.
Yes, learning Doctrine is an additional step, and it isn't very easy. Took me a lot longer than CI, and I'm still adding more details as I go.
But Doctrine is more than worth it. I don't want to do another project without it.
Avoid ORM in any framework to increase performance, though, and CI has no problem letting you write native SQL queries.
I disagree on that. I'm using Doctrine2 with CI2 and it works like charm. Are my native SQL queries faster? For simple cases, probably yes. For a complex application, I am confident that the caching Doctrine does for me will be a benefit, and the reduction in bugs and gains in ease-of-coding are more than worth the performance impact.
"I figure I'm probably boring them to death."'
There's your problem.
People don't mind because they don't understand what is really going on. With this or any other privacy intrusion (ignoring if this particular one is real or not).
Cherie, no human being is reading your mails. Computers with natural language engines are, and they are searching for and generating patterns. Human beings come in long afterwards. They don't get to read your mails, what they get is a summary of your preferences, opinions, buying habits, and probably some kind of score indicating (depending on who is doing the spying) if you're a good customer, a potential terrorist, have the right political agenda, etc. etc.
The 1984 "Big Brother" concept is 1984 - in the 21st century, you will not be arrested because some office drone in the ministry of truth read through all your e-mails and decided you're a bad person. No, in the 21st century you get put on the No Fly List and nobody can friggin' explain to you why , because the reason, as far as the humans involved are concerned, is that some score in some automated system crossed a threshold value.
My personal framework of choice is CodeIgniter, though if you have Ruby people on the team then you should definitely check CakePHP.
I like CI because it works, and it isn't as arcane as most of the other frameworks out there, meaning that if I want to write my own library, it is fairly easy to do so and I don't need to spend weeks digging through all the other crap first.
Also, it is fairly well documented, and that's very important.
So right now the only way to vote against the party in power is to vote for some other party, and for preference many people vote for the second biggest one to maximize the effect.
I could follow you right up to there. Then you lost me. Are you talking about Russia or about the USA here?
The problem with the whole scheme was the "system relevant" part.
Basically, the banks ran a big extortion scheme. The demand was: "If you don't bail us out, we're going to go broke and since we're so important, the whole economy will go down with us."
The response of governments the world over was "Oh fuck! Panic! Yes, yes of course, please don't do this to us, there are elections coming up!"
When it should have been: "The well-being of everyone is exactly what our job is. You won't go broke, because if you do, we will nationalise you to keep the economy afloat. But there will be no bonus payments for you losers. So here's the bailout-credit conditions. Sign down here, thank you."
And who gets them, and at what price? I refer you to the days of yore, when getting a development machine for a video game console cost a prohibitive amount of money.
Apple is making a killing on the thousands of small indie apps in the App Store. They would be unbelievably stupid if they raised the bar on that.
Here's an example: Apple killed Lexcycle's "Stanza" e-reader, which had USB syncing abilities and other features that had become very popular. Why? Because they have sweetheart deals with Barnes & Noble and Amazon to feature the Nook and Kindle apps instead.
I just checked, and the App Store page for Stanza not only says it's still around, but also that it was updated less than a month ago. ..." is simply a flat-out lie.
So whatever the point you're trying to make is, "Apple killed
In another couple of years we'll be looking back the Microsoft Windows PC era with fondness. Remember when you could....
Errr.... no. Absolutely not. Never, not ever, not in a thousand years, no way.
We are already looking back at the MS PC with horror, wondering how people ever put (and still do put) up with that kind of crappy abomination. Or does anyone here remember fiddling with config.sys and system.ini fondly?
Because end users don't give a fuck about walled gardens. The computer is not a magic thing, it's a multipurpose tool whose first job it is to get done whatever it is the user wants to get done. Consoles are successful in the gaming market not because they are cheaper than PCs (most console owners already own a PC) or because their graphics are better (if at all, that's true for a few months after the newest generation is released), but because you can put in a game and play, and don't have to worry about graphics drivers, incompatible peripherals, the stupid system crashing again, disk space, installation and two hundred other things that are just obstacles on the way to what you're really after - the game itself.
Most users will end up in a walled garden not due to some evil conspiracy, but because that is what they want.
And yet, the PC and all its freedoms will remain. Because all the content in the walled gardens has to be created somewhere. And because those who do feel strongly about this freedom. And have enough knowledge to generate it if it is denied.
Just please stop thinking that everyone else is just like us and wants the same things.
True. However, the principle for a central bank, when there is a liquidity crisis is: lend freely, but at punitive rates, wipe-out boards and shareholders. You can do that, because the boards have no choice, it is either that or they end broke.
Finally someone gets what's wrong with the scheme.
By now, the FED should _own_ Wall st.
No. They should stay out of the mudpit, it tends to get a little dirt on you. But they would have sent a very clear message to the banks that if you gamble and lose, you pay for your mistake, and dearly. Instead, the message that was sent is that someone else will pay for your mistake and you can go right on gambling.
Correct, if. And that's a big "if". I mean 120px big.
If the banks had been working well, if the banks hadn't been the source of the problem, if the banks had not been the ones needing the bailout, but the ones helping to, say, bail out poor shop owners.
But the fact that they would all be bancrupt today if we, the taxpayers, hadn't propped them up makes it immoral for them to profit from the crisis. I don't care if it's $13 billion or $5.95 - this is money that is not morally theirs. They were not taking a risk that they deserve compensation for - they had already gambled and lost everything. Having to pay up would have been the least they could do in saying "sorry, we fucked up". It should have been a requirement for getting any money. No, wait: Since they are "system relevant" and can't go bancrupt, the government should have forced them to take the money and take it at above market rate. Give them an incentive to use as little of it as possible, and be as careful with it as possible.
Their costs are not the taxpayers problem. They survived because of the taxpayer money they received. Heck, this would've been a golden opportunity to get rid of a massive part of the federal debt - instead of giving them free money, pay back the government debt early, from the same out-of-thin-air source, to the same amount - no change for the banks for the moment, but unbelievable amounts of money saved for future generations.
Very good question from the senator:
Does Carrier IQ believe that its actions comply with the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (18 U.S.C. Â 1030)? Why?
That's the kind of question you don't want to be asked. People don't ask that way if they don't already have an opinion. Basically, he wants to see them dig their own grave, and enjoy it.
That's good news. Let's see if they spring the lobby machine into overdrive and try to get the issue "lost" in sub-comittees and extended deadlines.