Corporations aren't the uncaring robot beasts you seem to be convinced they are. Corporations are still run by people.
The problem is the culture. Look at politics. Politicians are also people, yet we would all agree that they are amongst the worst, most pathetic, corrupt and fucked-up sort. Did they start out that way? I can guarantee you they didn't. Most of them were enthusiastic, idealistic young men or women once.
But before you get a ticket to run on, before you rise enough in any part to get a political position, you have to go through the machine for a few years, and the machine eats you. The machine being the culture that pervades politics. Even if you start out with an agenda to end all this crap, in order to get to a position where you can do it, you have to become the enemy.
We have seen it with the Green Party here in Germany. Freedom- and Peace-loving hippies once. They voted for the wars in Yugoslavia and Afghanistan. The former peace-party.
Same with corporations. Sure they are led by people, but what have those people become during their rise to power in those corporations? You don't become CEO of any major corporation if you insist on doing the right things instead of the most profitable things.
Here is a totally new, revolutionary idea: How about you think about the customer first, and your profits second?
What the industry is currently doing is devising new ways to scam people. Plain and simple. They sell you a game that won't even work out-of-the-box? Yeah, that is a certain way to improve your brand recognition. That is a great way to play bait-and-switch, and you can be sure that someone will, even if the original ideas was not to.
By now, I have become very reluctant to buy games, exactly due to all this DLC and extension crap. A long time ago, you could buy a game and play it, and have a full experience. These days, you buy a game but you don't know how much extra you need to do in order to get an actual game. At the very least, these days, you have to download a few patches. Quite a lot of the recent games didn't even work from the install CD, a patch was required just to play the game.
I, for one, am looking forward to the first class action lawsuits following from this, when people buy a game that they can't play because they need to also buy something extra. That's called fraud, plain and simple.
They'll just buy in bulk in advance, let it sit there for a year, then use it.
You can not solve the spam problem technologically. You have to reduce the opportunities and incentives on all fronts. That means making it harder (= more expensive) to spam, making spam less profitable (various methods like bringing credit card companies into responsibility have been discussed) and making it more dangerous (actually enforcing the law, and making the law less easy to exploit).
None of that on its own will solve the problem. All of it combined stands a chance.
My personal favourite, though, is to shoot both the spammers and the fucktard idiot fools who buy from them. You can't jail them - we don't have enough jail space to start filling it with idiots. Too many idiots.
What pains me is that facts don't matter, ideology does. We want to get out of nuclear power, says a majority here in Germany, but it leads to no new nuclear power plants being built. Which sounds fine until you realize that it means the old ones continue to run. And run. And run. The most unsafe ones, some built in the 1960s.
Would I rather not have something that can blow up horribly in my neighbourhood? Uh, yeah. But given the choice between a 1960 reactor that is long past its expected life span, and a new more modern one, why are we picking the 1960s?
Ideology, plain and simple. Stupidity and greed.
To the power companies, the old ones are more profitable - no expenses building a new one, but full profit. To the politicians, they don't want to be seen "supporting" nuclear power by issuing permissions for new plants. But they don't want to turn down the briber^H^H^Hlobbyists, either and not endanger the power supply, so they make - the worst choice possible. Congratulations.
Why are we paying these guys, again? To represent us? A twit and a braindead hooker could do better.
I noticed this particular insanity on several games, all of them major titles, one released in 2010 - Aliens vs. Predator. And no, running as administrator, compatability mode, all fails.
Installing the game to an external drive on an XP machine and then running it on the W7 machine worked just fine. Definitely the installer.
The problem is that tommorow, one of your friends will be playing Other Generic Farmville Clone, and next week, five of them will start five other games, and the week after, twenty other friends will find something to play and...
I don't know about you, but I have better things to spend my time on than updating ignore lists.
Take a moment to look into a car sometime. Count how many separate controls there are, and remind yourself that this thing's purpose is ultimately to move you from point A to point B.
I know. Cars are some of the things that you quickly come across when you teach yourself about design. And I mean car controls, not bodies.:-)
The point is, of course, that the purpose is not to get your from A to B. If that were the ultimate purpose, the interface could be a lot simpler - and is. The interface for a taxi is "open door, sit down, close door, talk to driver, wait, pay driver, open door, get out, close door".
All the additional complications of a car are because you want to drive from A to B yourself. Plus quite a lot of the controls have nothing to do with driving, they're for the stereo or the AC or they serve secondary purposes such as the gas gauge or the maintainance lamp.
you're describing a scenario which either requires a jailbroken phone or a dev kit.
I said very early on that I'm a developer, yes.
I'm sure even our hypothetical user can tell the difference between a coffee machine, which takes perhaps two minutes of instruction (if that) on how not to get burned, and a car, which in many places takes several months of training before you're legally allowed to drive on public roads.
But that's a difference in quantity, not in quality. As I said: Some of those tools are a ton simpler than others, but they're still tools. It's difficult for us computer geeks to understand sometimes, but the vast majority of people have no emotional connection with their computer at all. It's just a thing.
And yes, that is the only way to prevent gullible people from being connected to con artists, and that still depends on the effectiveness of your whitelist. You seem to agree with me, actually:
Not really. Stupid people will be exploited, end of story. I don't really feel sympathy for them. I just say that we make their stupidity the reason way too often, when in reality even smart people are victim of what's the real reason - a bad interface design.
There really is no solution to the Windows-patch-via-email scam other than teaching people how patches are really delivered, and why no sane company would ever distribute patches through a mechanism like email.
Really? Let me see... there is no solution to indicating the sender of a message better than believing the "From:"? We've not invented cryptographic signatures, I assume. There is no solution to link a download to the mail with the link to the program that was downloaded? And we already have popup messages warning us on installs of unsigned crap. Except that UAC and its W7 brother is an abomination of design, and is no help to a regular person at all.
if users are ever expected to be able to download any software, they will have to be taught not to, and then (maybe) how to do it safely.
We have not invented sandboxes, either. And we still think it's ok to give every program full access to the system, whether it wants to or not. We don't have RBAC or MAC or security policies.
Well, we do, even Windows has a fine-grained security policy these days. Except that there is absolutely no useability in it, none whatsoever. Even if you're an expert, it's hidden away deeply.
Chameleon was a proof-of-concept for a domain-seperated OS/GUI system. The idea is that you would download a game and install it into the "games" domain, which has a security policy applied that restricts the program in that domain to stuff that a game needs. And a game doesn't need to read your e-mails, monitor your keystrokes while you're in a different window, check your browser history, access files that don't belong to it, or modify your kernel....and so on for other domains.
They can. Developers can't. Pretty much all installer problems, for example, are because they're still using a 16-bit installer - something that's been deprecated for about 15 freakin' years.
I hate to burst your bubble, but this is not some backwater indian installer thing, it's.msi at least in one example.
The thing is I simply don't see why I would buy an iPad.
Neither do I, but that doesn't change the point that Apple got it right where MS bungled it. A tablet is not just a notebook with a touchscreen. How you use a tablet changes what you can do and how you do it. MS is too tied up in their own little world, and believe that their crappy UI works everywhere. Well, it is barely useable on a PC. On a phone, it's pure sadism (I always cringe when I see people clicking away on their windos mobile phones, my personal explanation is that there's a secret "free daily blowjobs" service attached to it, that's the only reason I can anyone would subject themselves to that torture) and on a tablet, well it already failed once, we'll see it failing a second time.
The comments on the article don't display any of the vitriol the Apple faithful have been known to unleash upon anyone daring to question the Cupertino way. Perhaps they are moderated.
And perhaps the Apple fans are more moderate than you think. From what I've seen, it appears to be a very balanced report. While they end with the recommendation as it is, they also give the iPhone 4 excellent scores in most other areas.
Really, MS needs to stop imitating Apple, tablets aren't the "next big thing"
Uh, actually, this is one of the few areas where Apple was late to the show, and MS was first. Except that as usual they fucked it up. Tablets were a non-starter precisely because MS couldn't deliver an OS that made them work, despite promises to the contrary.
Then they swept it under the carpet and hoped that everyone would forget about it.
Then Apple came and showed them how it's done.
So now suddenly it's hot again and they struggle to catch up. Kinda reminds me of the Browser War II - it took Firefox before the IE team got their shit together.
Microsoft's pitch will be that these slates will be sanctioned by corporate IT departments, enabling customers to use them at work and at home."
Which is precisely what no IT department in the world wants their people to do. Use the same machine for work and private? Yeah, right. Is Balmer holding shares in all the anti-virus companies?
Perhaps software development no longer will be the domain of reclusive autists who don't care about the end user.
Sure, the apps will mostly be hacks, but hacking is educational.
So, you're saying that instead of the reclusive autists who don't care about the end user, we will have... uh... attention-whoring autists who don't care about anything but their own dream app?
I'm running W7 64bit, and it is one of those decisions I regret. I wish I had installed the 32bit version.
Lots of programs don't work, or don't work properly. Sometimes, the installer doesn't work, even though the program itself does. Same with drivers.
What a piece of crap. We've been having 64bit in workstations for almost 20 years and in PCs for 7 years now, and Microsoft still can't get it halfway right?
Before you paid MS shills come whining that it's all the fault of the application and driver developers, think long and hard about this: How come that Apple could transition to a new CPU architecture and a new operating system and make the move from 32 to 64 bit all in one step with a lot less problems?
If you install a new W7 computer today, choose 32 bit. As with all things Microsoft, wait until the 3rd release.
Yeah, I'm not a native english speaker and sometimes I make spelling mistakes in names. Sue me. Glad to know your life is so great that you have no better things to do with your it then complaining about spelling errors on/.
People who are good at programming have already crossed the barrier, they don't need them lowered.
This is specifically for people who are not good at programming, and have no desire to spend the effort to learn it (i.e. "cross the barrier").
Taking domain knowledge and turning it into something useful has been a big hype of AI research for 30 years or so. Turns out that it's a lot harder than most people think, because domain knowledge is worthless if you can not express it in a form that makes it computable. And that's with AI doing the heavy lifting of combining, searching and questioning for you. You and your domain knowledge and a few coloured buttons will get you nowhere at all.
The mismatch between my enthusiasm for the project and the sheer tedium that would lie in coding it could only be realigned with hard cash I don't have.
No, but it may be worth $0.99 to you. And to a hundred other people. Or a thousand. If there are enough people that want it done, it will get done. Someone's gonna say "that's an easy $999, let's go coding".
It is a one-bit feedback channel. How many companies out there are wondering why their product fails (and sometimes, they have no idea why their other product is a success) ?
More importantly, how many people are paid for what is essentially guessing what the customer wants?
You can not be serious when you say that a one-bit channel is the best you can think of.
HTML is not a general-purpose programming language. It is a markup language. Not a big surprise that you have visual tools for markup, is it?
Access is actually a great example. All of the "production" apps I have seen that were made with Access are horribly shoddy buckets of crap that if you'd written them for a client you'd be sued into bancruptcy for. When it's made in-house, for some reason it becomes acceptable, maybe because some twit in management did it himself...
they are also promoting simplified development to end users!
Some things should not be "simplified". We don't want people who failed at math doing the statistics that run our company, or people who have no idea about medicine treating our ill and wounded. The only difference here is that the people creating apps with no knowledge of programming are only harming themselves. Hopefully.
Slashdot Mirror
Corporations aren't the uncaring robot beasts you seem to be convinced they are. Corporations are still run by people.
The problem is the culture. Look at politics. Politicians are also people, yet we would all agree that they are amongst the worst, most pathetic, corrupt and fucked-up sort. Did they start out that way? I can guarantee you they didn't. Most of them were enthusiastic, idealistic young men or women once.
But before you get a ticket to run on, before you rise enough in any part to get a political position, you have to go through the machine for a few years, and the machine eats you. The machine being the culture that pervades politics. Even if you start out with an agenda to end all this crap, in order to get to a position where you can do it, you have to become the enemy.
We have seen it with the Green Party here in Germany. Freedom- and Peace-loving hippies once. They voted for the wars in Yugoslavia and Afghanistan. The former peace-party.
Same with corporations. Sure they are led by people, but what have those people become during their rise to power in those corporations? You don't become CEO of any major corporation if you insist on doing the right things instead of the most profitable things.
except that shareware was $10, not $60.
You did notice how conspiciously absent words like "cheaper" or "reduced price" are from the phrase "selling broken games" ?
Here is a totally new, revolutionary idea: How about you think about the customer first, and your profits second?
What the industry is currently doing is devising new ways to scam people. Plain and simple. They sell you a game that won't even work out-of-the-box? Yeah, that is a certain way to improve your brand recognition. That is a great way to play bait-and-switch, and you can be sure that someone will, even if the original ideas was not to.
By now, I have become very reluctant to buy games, exactly due to all this DLC and extension crap. A long time ago, you could buy a game and play it, and have a full experience. These days, you buy a game but you don't know how much extra you need to do in order to get an actual game. At the very least, these days, you have to download a few patches. Quite a lot of the recent games didn't even work from the install CD, a patch was required just to play the game.
I, for one, am looking forward to the first class action lawsuits following from this, when people buy a game that they can't play because they need to also buy something extra. That's called fraud, plain and simple.
They'll just buy in bulk in advance, let it sit there for a year, then use it.
You can not solve the spam problem technologically. You have to reduce the opportunities and incentives on all fronts. That means making it harder (= more expensive) to spam, making spam less profitable (various methods like bringing credit card companies into responsibility have been discussed) and making it more dangerous (actually enforcing the law, and making the law less easy to exploit).
None of that on its own will solve the problem. All of it combined stands a chance.
My personal favourite, though, is to shoot both the spammers and the fucktard idiot fools who buy from them. You can't jail them - we don't have enough jail space to start filling it with idiots. Too many idiots.
Same discussion in europe as well.
What pains me is that facts don't matter, ideology does. We want to get out of nuclear power, says a majority here in Germany, but it leads to no new nuclear power plants being built. Which sounds fine until you realize that it means the old ones continue to run. And run. And run. The most unsafe ones, some built in the 1960s.
Would I rather not have something that can blow up horribly in my neighbourhood? Uh, yeah. But given the choice between a 1960 reactor that is long past its expected life span, and a new more modern one, why are we picking the 1960s?
Ideology, plain and simple. Stupidity and greed.
To the power companies, the old ones are more profitable - no expenses building a new one, but full profit.
To the politicians, they don't want to be seen "supporting" nuclear power by issuing permissions for new plants. But they don't want to turn down the briber^H^H^Hlobbyists, either and not endanger the power supply, so they make - the worst choice possible. Congratulations.
Why are we paying these guys, again? To represent us? A twit and a braindead hooker could do better.
I noticed this particular insanity on several games, all of them major titles, one released in 2010 - Aliens vs. Predator. And no, running as administrator, compatability mode, all fails.
Installing the game to an external drive on an XP machine and then running it on the W7 machine worked just fine. Definitely the installer.
Because it insists of spamming me with their invites?
Yes, I know.
The problem is that tommorow, one of your friends will be playing Other Generic Farmville Clone, and next week, five of them will start five other games, and the week after, twenty other friends will find something to play and...
I don't know about you, but I have better things to spend my time on than updating ignore lists.
Take a moment to look into a car sometime. Count how many separate controls there are, and remind yourself that this thing's purpose is ultimately to move you from point A to point B.
I know. Cars are some of the things that you quickly come across when you teach yourself about design. And I mean car controls, not bodies. :-)
The point is, of course, that the purpose is not to get your from A to B. If that were the ultimate purpose, the interface could be a lot simpler - and is. The interface for a taxi is "open door, sit down, close door, talk to driver, wait, pay driver, open door, get out, close door".
All the additional complications of a car are because you want to drive from A to B yourself. Plus quite a lot of the controls have nothing to do with driving, they're for the stereo or the AC or they serve secondary purposes such as the gas gauge or the maintainance lamp.
you're describing a scenario which either requires a jailbroken phone or a dev kit.
I said very early on that I'm a developer, yes.
I'm sure even our hypothetical user can tell the difference between a coffee machine, which takes perhaps two minutes of instruction (if that) on how not to get burned, and a car, which in many places takes several months of training before you're legally allowed to drive on public roads.
But that's a difference in quantity, not in quality. As I said: Some of those tools are a ton simpler than others, but they're still tools. It's difficult for us computer geeks to understand sometimes, but the vast majority of people have no emotional connection with their computer at all. It's just a thing.
And yes, that is the only way to prevent gullible people from being connected to con artists, and that still depends on the effectiveness of your whitelist. You seem to agree with me, actually:
Not really. Stupid people will be exploited, end of story. I don't really feel sympathy for them. I just say that we make their stupidity the reason way too often, when in reality even smart people are victim of what's the real reason - a bad interface design.
There really is no solution to the Windows-patch-via-email scam other than teaching people how patches are really delivered, and why no sane company would ever distribute patches through a mechanism like email.
Really? Let me see... there is no solution to indicating the sender of a message better than believing the "From:"? We've not invented cryptographic signatures, I assume. There is no solution to link a download to the mail with the link to the program that was downloaded? And we already have popup messages warning us on installs of unsigned crap. Except that UAC and its W7 brother is an abomination of design, and is no help to a regular person at all.
if users are ever expected to be able to download any software, they will have to be taught not to, and then (maybe) how to do it safely.
We have not invented sandboxes, either. And we still think it's ok to give every program full access to the system, whether it wants to or not. We don't have RBAC or MAC or security policies.
Well, we do, even Windows has a fine-grained security policy these days. Except that there is absolutely no useability in it, none whatsoever. Even if you're an expert, it's hidden away deeply.
Chameleon was a proof-of-concept for a domain-seperated OS/GUI system. The idea is that you would download a game and install it into the "games" domain, which has a security policy applied that restricts the program in that domain to stuff that a game needs. And a game doesn't need to read your e-mails, monitor your keystrokes while you're in a different window, check your browser history, access files that don't belong to it, or modify your kernel. ...and so on for other domains.
People don't understand security
stay up to date in their lives.
Your brother has found a pig in Generic Farmville Clone. Do you want to help him feed it? Click here.
For years, it was clearly ignorance, but the Apple hatebois are getting really worked up recently.
So are we at the "then they fight you" stage now?
They can. Developers can't. Pretty much all installer problems, for example, are because they're still using a 16-bit installer - something that's been deprecated for about 15 freakin' years.
I hate to burst your bubble, but this is not some backwater indian installer thing, it's .msi at least in one example.
The thing is I simply don't see why I would buy an iPad.
Neither do I, but that doesn't change the point that Apple got it right where MS bungled it. A tablet is not just a notebook with a touchscreen. How you use a tablet changes what you can do and how you do it. MS is too tied up in their own little world, and believe that their crappy UI works everywhere.
Well, it is barely useable on a PC. On a phone, it's pure sadism (I always cringe when I see people clicking away on their windos mobile phones, my personal explanation is that there's a secret "free daily blowjobs" service attached to it, that's the only reason I can anyone would subject themselves to that torture) and on a tablet, well it already failed once, we'll see it failing a second time.
The comments on the article don't display any of the vitriol the Apple faithful have been known to unleash upon anyone daring to question the Cupertino way. Perhaps they are moderated.
And perhaps the Apple fans are more moderate than you think. From what I've seen, it appears to be a very balanced report. While they end with the recommendation as it is, they also give the iPhone 4 excellent scores in most other areas.
As far as I know they started the Smartphone market.
Yeah, right. In 2001.
Except that Nokia already had their Communicators out since 1996.
And IBM had created the first smartphone in 1992.
But aside from those 9 years... suuuuure.
Really, MS needs to stop imitating Apple, tablets aren't the "next big thing"
Uh, actually, this is one of the few areas where Apple was late to the show, and MS was first. Except that as usual they fucked it up. Tablets were a non-starter precisely because MS couldn't deliver an OS that made them work, despite promises to the contrary.
Then they swept it under the carpet and hoped that everyone would forget about it.
Then Apple came and showed them how it's done.
So now suddenly it's hot again and they struggle to catch up. Kinda reminds me of the Browser War II - it took Firefox before the IE team got their shit together.
Microsoft's pitch will be that these slates will be sanctioned by corporate IT departments, enabling customers to use them at work and at home."
Which is precisely what no IT department in the world wants their people to do. Use the same machine for work and private? Yeah, right. Is Balmer holding shares in all the anti-virus companies?
Perhaps software development no longer will be the domain of reclusive autists who don't care about the end user.
Sure, the apps will mostly be hacks, but hacking is educational.
So, you're saying that instead of the reclusive autists who don't care about the end user, we will have... uh... attention-whoring autists who don't care about anything but their own dream app?
Big improvement. ;-)
Interesting. I just read up on Labview. I learnt something today. Thanks.
I'm running W7 64bit, and it is one of those decisions I regret. I wish I had installed the 32bit version.
Lots of programs don't work, or don't work properly.
Sometimes, the installer doesn't work, even though the program itself does.
Same with drivers.
What a piece of crap. We've been having 64bit in workstations for almost 20 years and in PCs for 7 years now, and Microsoft still can't get it halfway right?
Before you paid MS shills come whining that it's all the fault of the application and driver developers, think long and hard about this: How come that Apple could transition to a new CPU architecture and a new operating system and make the move from 32 to 64 bit all in one step with a lot less problems?
If you install a new W7 computer today, choose 32 bit. As with all things Microsoft, wait until the 3rd release.
Yeah, I'm not a native english speaker and sometimes I make spelling mistakes in names. Sue me. Glad to know your life is so great that you have no better things to do with your it then complaining about spelling errors on /.
Nonsense.
People who are good at programming have already crossed the barrier, they don't need them lowered.
This is specifically for people who are not good at programming, and have no desire to spend the effort to learn it (i.e. "cross the barrier").
Taking domain knowledge and turning it into something useful has been a big hype of AI research for 30 years or so. Turns out that it's a lot harder than most people think, because domain knowledge is worthless if you can not express it in a form that makes it computable. And that's with AI doing the heavy lifting of combining, searching and questioning for you. You and your domain knowledge and a few coloured buttons will get you nowhere at all.
The mismatch between my enthusiasm for the project and the sheer tedium that would lie in coding it could only be realigned with hard cash I don't have.
No, but it may be worth $0.99 to you. And to a hundred other people. Or a thousand. If there are enough people that want it done, it will get done. Someone's gonna say "that's an easy $999, let's go coding".
It is a one-bit feedback channel. How many companies out there are wondering why their product fails (and sometimes, they have no idea why their other product is a success) ?
More importantly, how many people are paid for what is essentially guessing what the customer wants?
You can not be serious when you say that a one-bit channel is the best you can think of.
HTML is not a general-purpose programming language. It is a markup language. Not a big surprise that you have visual tools for markup, is it?
Access is actually a great example. All of the "production" apps I have seen that were made with Access are horribly shoddy buckets of crap that if you'd written them for a client you'd be sued into bancruptcy for. When it's made in-house, for some reason it becomes acceptable, maybe because some twit in management did it himself...
they are also promoting simplified development to end users!
Some things should not be "simplified". We don't want people who failed at math doing the statistics that run our company, or people who have no idea about medicine treating our ill and wounded. The only difference here is that the people creating apps with no knowledge of programming are only harming themselves. Hopefully.