As they saying goes: Fast, cheap, good - pick any two.
You can usually solve one problem by another. If you see you can't hold the deadline, you can throw more manpower at it (not cheap anymore) or compromise on quality. If you see the budget runs out, you can put the project into idle times (not fast anymore) or compromise on quality.
Sadly, quality is the part that management, customers, clients and developers understand the least. Everyone understands deadlines - either you are done on that day or you are not. Everyone understands money and to convert developer man-hours into money is not so difficult. But quality is tricky. If it runs, ship - because management, customers, etc. they see if it is running, but not what's going on under the hood. And developers too often don't understand that quality is subject to combinatorial explosion - shortcuts don't add up, they multiply.
But because it's the least-understood part of the equation, and compromises matter so much but are not easily visible as long as the core operation functions, software in generally is so absolutely shoddy.
Here is what's wrong with all this bullshit in one sentence:
If your company wants to show me ads, you pay me for my time and attention.
Not some software developer, not some marketing company that promises to bypass all my filters, not some spammer who will flood my inbox, not anyone who basically made it a profession to show me crap that I don't want to see.
You are using my time, my resources, my attention, you want to get inside my brain, put a message into my memory. Why don't you nitwits not get the very simple conclusion that you should put money into my pocket to make that happen?
whitelisting and the Acceptable Ads feature of AdBlock Plus
Never forget that ABP has been sold out to a company in the advertisement business, and has been repeatedly accused of cutting favors for a) other companies in their group and b) those who pony up the cash, no matter what kinds of ads they serve.
The solution to the advertisement problem is for advertisers to step back into the realms of civilized behaviour. The solution to theft is not to whitelist the guys who steal a little bit from the rich, it is to jail thieves, period.
Once that basic system is in place, we can think about exceptions, e.g. not jailing people who stole an apple because they were starving. Because we understand that the solution to hunger is food, and providing an alternative way of getting it is the better solution than jailing all starving people.
But before we talk about "acceptable advertisement", we need to arrive at the point where everyone - including the fuckers who made the mess - agrees that the current amount and style of online advertisement is not acceptable. As long as you have people running around claiming that their particular style of stealing is fine, you shouldn't be talking about whitelisting thieves.
What needs to happen until a corporation is terminated?
That is the main issue here. As human beings, we understand there are limits to what we can do before we face really serious consequences. I mean jail time, not monetary punishment. Money is simply an expense. It might hurt, even hurt a lot, but it is not on the same level as being locked up.
Where is the jail time equivalent for corporations, and why do we continue to believe that we can somehow control them without it? To take back control of our worlds from corporations running amok over it, we need this.
To fire a number of employees means something very seriously went wrong. It also means the corporation allowed it to go wrong. This could be rogue employees the way someone robbing a bank with your car had lied to you when borrowing it, saying he needs to visit his ill grandmother urgently. Or it could be that you gave a gun to an obviously unstable kid when he said he's going to school and he's angry. You really should have at least asked a few more questions before handing over the firearm.
If only the people who execute it could do design.
It's fine to seperate design and implementation if you know what you're doing and can set the proper spot and interfaces. Architects and builders work together just fine, you know?
You mean all those bridges and highways that are operated by greedy capitalistic monolithic multinational corporations?
Basically, yes. Except that the corporation is called the US government, and it has changed its business purpose from providing liberty and the basic services necessary for the pursuit of happiness to the people, into being a corporate welfare institution.
Claiming that publicly funded and maintained infrastructure failures are caused by capitalism is a bit of a stretch.
Really? Look beyond the fassade, maybe. You don't see a problem with billions being spent on saving the financial industry, that were better needed to support the infrastructure?
Good or bad example? I know entire businesses that run largely on Excel macros, and from a risk perspective, that's just insane. As a compliance manager, I feel physical pain when I hear about it.
The professor was somewhat alarmed by this, but not totally in disaster mode
I would be. In fact, I am. This is the reason so much of our current software absolutely sucks. Performance is so pathetic that anyone who wrote software back in C64 days cringes just thinking about the wastefulness. Security is becoming worse, not better, even though we have an unbelievable amount of protections built right into the OS, compiler, VM, everything. And on the main task, solving a problem for a user, don't even get me started. Complexity != usefulness.
People should understand that there are different ways to sort and what the advantages and disadvantages are. Not for the sorting, but for understanding that there are many ways to solve the same problem. Some of them work better for small data sets, some of them better for large. Some are very fast but require lots of memory, others are light on memory but slow. And so on and so on.
Only if you understand this, not just by having read it once in a textbook, but by having it seen for yourself, will you be able to pick a proper solution under real-world restrictions.
Just as you don't need Picasso painting your bathroom, you don't need a rocket scientist to code your shitty business app.
Which is largely why so many business apps are shitty. Shoddy coding is very easy to spot, it's the result of people not having enough math education to think in algorithms. Math is not what you can put into your pocket calculator, math is understanding what you put in and why.
I've used much less than 5% of what I learned there, and probably more like less than 1%.
Then you went to a horrible university.
What about logic, never used it, hm? De Morgans Laws? If course, you use them all the time, you're just so used to them that you forgot the name.
Approximations (numerical mathematics)? All the time. Important as well: Understanding about error margins and how many digits in what calculation you can rely on.
Calculus, analysis, all the shitty things we hated, we use it. Fragments here and there, that's why mostly we don't notice.
Algorithms by themselves are pure math, like it or not. Heck, if we go to that level, the very idea of variables is from math.
I absolutely agree that there is a lot more that goes into a good programmer than just math, but there is a lot in math that we use daily when we write code.
Come back when you've written something non-trivial in a real programming language. Say, some 3D visualisation in C++, without knowing about math (who needs matrix transforms, right?).
Like in any craft, you can do some simple things with little knowledge. Every idiot with two hands can put up a garden shed. That doesn't make you an architect and it doesn't make you a builder.
it has reached the point where I'm questioning if half the things I'm reading online are even genuine, or just shilled marketing from some PR team to push an agenda or product.
You've come to the right place, I can help you with that.
Stop questioning, my dear friend. Half the things you're reading online are shilled marketing from some PR team.
If 144k are split by 33k residents, that's less than $5 per resident per year. A tiny price to pay for having the best Internet in the state and all surrounding states.
4.6 mio. in expenses, again divided by residents, is less than $140. That's a little more than $10 a month. Frankly speaking, at such prices they should just run the whole thing on taxes, provide Internet for free to every house, and save all the overhead of billing and subscription management.
There is no such thing as "american company". Did you miss the whole Globalization thing?
they should remove all servers from Germany and let them do the work
omg, you are so stupid it hurts. Doing business is not putting your servers there. It is making contracts (advertisement, FBs business model) with companies there, it is having users (it's product) there.
For all intents and purposes, FB produces in Germany and sells in Germany. That is what "doing business" means, not some stupid hardware.
Think about how much work it is to abide by EVERY law in EVERY nation
Poor multinational corporation. It's so much work to comply with all those laws. Nah, let's not do it, too complicated.
Simple answer: If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen. If you want to run a world-wide company, yes there is going to be a little bit of work involved. Don't like it? Don't run a world-wide business. So simple.
Then you'll also understand that a) the various regions that make up modern Germany have quite different histories and cultures and b) other than many other countries (USA - independence, France - revolution, etc.) Germany did not have a historic shock moment where enlightenment freedoms were installed into law. The process was more slow, but at the same time more continuous. After the 30-year war, many freedoms were common in (northern) Germany that more catholic nations like Italy or Spain did not possess at that time.
How can you make a comment that is already debunked in the summary posted above?
If you do business in country X, then you need to abide by the laws of country X.
What's so difficult about that? If FB doesn't like it, they are free to do no business in Germany. Nobody forces them to offer their services in Germany.
And yes, forcing FB to remove something is very much what countries can and should do. We can certainly find some country on the planet that doesn't have laws against explicit beastiary porn, maybe some failed african state that simply never thought about such vile things and thus didn't write it down. Post such things to FB from there and point the US minister of justice to it. You think he would say "well, it's legal in where it was posted from, so we should respect freedom of speech"?
since Germans never had enjoyed free speech rights before. The post-WWII restrictions by the allies were still liberal by historical German standards.
Not entirely true. The free speech rights of the Weimar Republic (1918-1933) were almost identical to the ones we have today. The difference was not in the laws, but in the jurisdiction: Judges at that time would interpret the law differently and passed down harsh judgements especially against left-wing press that would not stand up to scrutiny today, even under the same text.
Today, Germany is largely its own master. It could easily abolish these restrictions on free speech if it wanted to. They are retained because Germans like such restrictions, not because anybody is forcing them to.
That is absolute bullshit.
We don't like such restrictions. We simply have a slightly different culture. Let me explain: There is this saying that goes "your freedom ends where mine begins". In principle, I think everyone agrees on that, meaning that your freedom does not include the right to take away my freedom. In the USA, the focus is more strongly on your freedom, and I am expected to respect it and be quite tolerant to incursions into my freedom. In much of Europe, the focus is more strongly on my freedom, and you are expected to restrict your actions so you don't interfere with mine.
Metaphorically speaking, if there is a line between your land and my land, in the USA you can lean over the line and put yourself into my space, as long as your feet remain on your land. In Europe, we consider the line to mark an invisible wall and you should keep your arms behind it as well, not just your feet.
These specific laws were included in the german post-WW2 legal system on pressure from the allies. So before you americans open your mouth to complain about how we germans don't have freedom of speech, shut it again for one minute and think about the ironic little fact that this part is your doing.
Perhaps it's time for Germany to actually change its "interpretation of freedom of speech" instead of clinging on to what hasn't worked historically.
"for centuries" - go back to history class.
How many centuries? The first real Germany came about in 1871. That's 150 years ago. You say "centuries", which is plural, so you must be referring to at least 200 years.
1815, exactly 200 years ago, was the formation of the German Confederation. A loose coalition of independent states. 4 states and 34 duchies, to be exact. All with their own laws and customs.
Before that, we had the Holy Roman Empire. But you can hardly call that Germany, it included parts of Italy, France, Denmark, Poland, Austria, Switzerland, Belgium, Netherlands, Slowakia and a bunch of other places. But the HRE was never a unified entity, it was more like the British Commonwealth - a formal head of state, and that's basically it.
Slashdot Mirror
As they saying goes: Fast, cheap, good - pick any two.
You can usually solve one problem by another. If you see you can't hold the deadline, you can throw more manpower at it (not cheap anymore) or compromise on quality. If you see the budget runs out, you can put the project into idle times (not fast anymore) or compromise on quality.
Sadly, quality is the part that management, customers, clients and developers understand the least. Everyone understands deadlines - either you are done on that day or you are not. Everyone understands money and to convert developer man-hours into money is not so difficult. But quality is tricky. If it runs, ship - because management, customers, etc. they see if it is running, but not what's going on under the hood. And developers too often don't understand that quality is subject to combinatorial explosion - shortcuts don't add up, they multiply.
But because it's the least-understood part of the equation, and compromises matter so much but are not easily visible as long as the core operation functions, software in generally is so absolutely shoddy.
People who are happy to see adverts
total population: zero
Here is what's wrong with all this bullshit in one sentence:
If your company wants to show me ads, you pay me for my time and attention.
Not some software developer, not some marketing company that promises to bypass all my filters, not some spammer who will flood my inbox, not anyone who basically made it a profession to show me crap that I don't want to see.
You are using my time, my resources, my attention, you want to get inside my brain, put a message into my memory. Why don't you nitwits not get the very simple conclusion that you should put money into my pocket to make that happen?
whitelisting and the Acceptable Ads feature of AdBlock Plus
Never forget that ABP has been sold out to a company in the advertisement business, and has been repeatedly accused of cutting favors for a) other companies in their group and b) those who pony up the cash, no matter what kinds of ads they serve.
The solution to the advertisement problem is for advertisers to step back into the realms of civilized behaviour. The solution to theft is not to whitelist the guys who steal a little bit from the rich, it is to jail thieves, period.
Once that basic system is in place, we can think about exceptions, e.g. not jailing people who stole an apple because they were starving. Because we understand that the solution to hunger is food, and providing an alternative way of getting it is the better solution than jailing all starving people.
But before we talk about "acceptable advertisement", we need to arrive at the point where everyone - including the fuckers who made the mess - agrees that the current amount and style of online advertisement is not acceptable.
As long as you have people running around claiming that their particular style of stealing is fine, you shouldn't be talking about whitelisting thieves.
What needs to happen until a corporation is terminated?
That is the main issue here. As human beings, we understand there are limits to what we can do before we face really serious consequences. I mean jail time, not monetary punishment. Money is simply an expense. It might hurt, even hurt a lot, but it is not on the same level as being locked up.
Where is the jail time equivalent for corporations, and why do we continue to believe that we can somehow control them without it? To take back control of our worlds from corporations running amok over it, we need this.
To fire a number of employees means something very seriously went wrong. It also means the corporation allowed it to go wrong. This could be rogue employees the way someone robbing a bank with your car had lied to you when borrowing it, saying he needs to visit his ill grandmother urgently. Or it could be that you gave a gun to an obviously unstable kid when he said he's going to school and he's angry. You really should have at least asked a few more questions before handing over the firearm.
So what will happen to Thawte in response?
If only the people who execute it could do design.
It's fine to seperate design and implementation if you know what you're doing and can set the proper spot and interfaces. Architects and builders work together just fine, you know?
In software, we are still in the tinkerer age.
Designing our software at all, instead of slapping it together, would be a good approach.
I just don't see it here. It needs more than a shift one layer of abstraction up.
You mean all those bridges and highways that are operated by greedy capitalistic monolithic multinational corporations?
Basically, yes. Except that the corporation is called the US government, and it has changed its business purpose from providing liberty and the basic services necessary for the pursuit of happiness to the people, into being a corporate welfare institution.
Claiming that publicly funded and maintained infrastructure failures are caused by capitalism is a bit of a stretch.
Really? Look beyond the fassade, maybe. You don't see a problem with billions being spent on saving the financial industry, that were better needed to support the infrastructure?
I'm with you there 100%.
Except that:
Only a fool thinks that capitalism will solve every problem.
We have a lot of fool in high places, it seems.
Excel macros spring to mind, as an example
Good or bad example? I know entire businesses that run largely on Excel macros, and from a risk perspective, that's just insane. As a compliance manager, I feel physical pain when I hear about it.
The professor was somewhat alarmed by this, but not totally in disaster mode
I would be. In fact, I am. This is the reason so much of our current software absolutely sucks. Performance is so pathetic that anyone who wrote software back in C64 days cringes just thinking about the wastefulness. Security is becoming worse, not better, even though we have an unbelievable amount of protections built right into the OS, compiler, VM, everything. And on the main task, solving a problem for a user, don't even get me started. Complexity != usefulness.
People should understand that there are different ways to sort and what the advantages and disadvantages are. Not for the sorting, but for understanding that there are many ways to solve the same problem. Some of them work better for small data sets, some of them better for large. Some are very fast but require lots of memory, others are light on memory but slow. And so on and so on.
Only if you understand this, not just by having read it once in a textbook, but by having it seen for yourself, will you be able to pick a proper solution under real-world restrictions.
Just as you don't need Picasso painting your bathroom, you don't need a rocket scientist to code your shitty business app.
Which is largely why so many business apps are shitty. Shoddy coding is very easy to spot, it's the result of people not having enough math education to think in algorithms. Math is not what you can put into your pocket calculator, math is understanding what you put in and why.
I've used much less than 5% of what I learned there, and probably more like less than 1%.
Then you went to a horrible university.
What about logic, never used it, hm? De Morgans Laws? If course, you use them all the time, you're just so used to them that you forgot the name.
Approximations (numerical mathematics)? All the time. Important as well: Understanding about error margins and how many digits in what calculation you can rely on.
Calculus, analysis, all the shitty things we hated, we use it. Fragments here and there, that's why mostly we don't notice.
Algorithms by themselves are pure math, like it or not. Heck, if we go to that level, the very idea of variables is from math.
I absolutely agree that there is a lot more that goes into a good programmer than just math, but there is a lot in math that we use daily when we write code.
Uh... HTML and CSS aren't programming languages.
Come back when you've written something non-trivial in a real programming language. Say, some 3D visualisation in C++, without knowing about math (who needs matrix transforms, right?).
Like in any craft, you can do some simple things with little knowledge. Every idiot with two hands can put up a garden shed. That doesn't make you an architect and it doesn't make you a builder.
it has reached the point where I'm questioning if half the things I'm reading online are even genuine, or just shilled marketing from some PR team to push an agenda or product.
You've come to the right place, I can help you with that.
Stop questioning, my dear friend. Half the things you're reading online are shilled marketing from some PR team.
And that's if you choose what you read carefully.
Machinima notes that this happened in 2013, when the current management was not in charge.
Yeah, but did they know about it?
If yes, why didn't they disclose it to the authorities?
If no, why are they not aware that something like that went on in their company?
If 144k are split by 33k residents, that's less than $5 per resident per year. A tiny price to pay for having the best Internet in the state and all surrounding states.
4.6 mio. in expenses, again divided by residents, is less than $140. That's a little more than $10 a month. Frankly speaking, at such prices they should just run the whole thing on taxes, provide Internet for free to every house, and save all the overhead of billing and subscription management.
locations that aren't able to get a decent fiber system from private ISPs.
What? Invisible hand of the free market not working? How strange, we were all told that capitalism solves every problem, through magic.
Apparently it's better at turning trees into toilet paper (see article above) than infrastructure. Which, btw., is also falling apart in the US.
You are stupid.
Facebook is an American company
There is no such thing as "american company". Did you miss the whole Globalization thing?
they should remove all servers from Germany and let them do the work
omg, you are so stupid it hurts. Doing business is not putting your servers there. It is making contracts (advertisement, FBs business model) with companies there, it is having users (it's product) there.
For all intents and purposes, FB produces in Germany and sells in Germany. That is what "doing business" means, not some stupid hardware.
Think about how much work it is to abide by EVERY law in EVERY nation
Poor multinational corporation. It's so much work to comply with all those laws. Nah, let's not do it, too complicated.
Simple answer: If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen. If you want to run a world-wide company, yes there is going to be a little bit of work involved. Don't like it? Don't run a world-wide business. So simple.
Thanks for the explanation.
So, we have a new standard with built-in unlimited legacy issues. Good design.
Frankly speaking, we should have two Unicode standards. One for what's actually being used and one for all the legacy crap.
Ah, the appeal to authority. Haven't seen that for a while on /.
Yeah, maybe I'll put it on my reading list. Sad that you don't understand it enough to write out the actual argument.
Then you'll also understand that a) the various regions that make up modern Germany have quite different histories and cultures and b) other than many other countries (USA - independence, France - revolution, etc.) Germany did not have a historic shock moment where enlightenment freedoms were installed into law. The process was more slow, but at the same time more continuous. After the 30-year war, many freedoms were common in (northern) Germany that more catholic nations like Italy or Spain did not possess at that time.
How can you make a comment that is already debunked in the summary posted above?
If you do business in country X, then you need to abide by the laws of country X.
What's so difficult about that? If FB doesn't like it, they are free to do no business in Germany. Nobody forces them to offer their services in Germany.
And yes, forcing FB to remove something is very much what countries can and should do. We can certainly find some country on the planet that doesn't have laws against explicit beastiary porn, maybe some failed african state that simply never thought about such vile things and thus didn't write it down. Post such things to FB from there and point the US minister of justice to it. You think he would say "well, it's legal in where it was posted from, so we should respect freedom of speech"?
since Germans never had enjoyed free speech rights before. The post-WWII restrictions by the allies were still liberal by historical German standards.
Not entirely true. The free speech rights of the Weimar Republic (1918-1933) were almost identical to the ones we have today. The difference was not in the laws, but in the jurisdiction: Judges at that time would interpret the law differently and passed down harsh judgements especially against left-wing press that would not stand up to scrutiny today, even under the same text.
Today, Germany is largely its own master. It could easily abolish these restrictions on free speech if it wanted to. They are retained because Germans like such restrictions, not because anybody is forcing them to.
That is absolute bullshit.
We don't like such restrictions. We simply have a slightly different culture. Let me explain: There is this saying that goes "your freedom ends where mine begins". In principle, I think everyone agrees on that, meaning that your freedom does not include the right to take away my freedom.
In the USA, the focus is more strongly on your freedom, and I am expected to respect it and be quite tolerant to incursions into my freedom. In much of Europe, the focus is more strongly on my freedom, and you are expected to restrict your actions so you don't interfere with mine.
Metaphorically speaking, if there is a line between your land and my land, in the USA you can lean over the line and put yourself into my space, as long as your feet remain on your land. In Europe, we consider the line to mark an invisible wall and you should keep your arms behind it as well, not just your feet.
These specific laws were included in the german post-WW2 legal system on pressure from the allies. So before you americans open your mouth to complain about how we germans don't have freedom of speech, shut it again for one minute and think about the ironic little fact that this part is your doing.
Perhaps it's time for Germany to actually change its "interpretation of freedom of speech" instead of clinging on to what hasn't worked historically.
"for centuries" - go back to history class.
How many centuries? The first real Germany came about in 1871. That's 150 years ago. You say "centuries", which is plural, so you must be referring to at least 200 years.
1815, exactly 200 years ago, was the formation of the German Confederation. A loose coalition of independent states. 4 states and 34 duchies, to be exact. All with their own laws and customs.
Before that, we had the Holy Roman Empire. But you can hardly call that Germany, it included parts of Italy, France, Denmark, Poland, Austria, Switzerland, Belgium, Netherlands, Slowakia and a bunch of other places. But the HRE was never a unified entity, it was more like the British Commonwealth - a formal head of state, and that's basically it.