`Long as it's automated, and the data is protected and inaccessible to other people, and not sold to other parties.. I'm actually ok with this. I know this puts me in the minority with the slashdot crowd, and I'm sure someone is gonna accuse me of atroturfing, and yes there are all the slipery slope articles and becoming accustom to surveillance is bad and all that, but I just don't care. My life isn't that interesting. If some algorithm wants to pour over all my lifes data to show me a guitar ad (cause I've been looking at guitar stuff recently).. I can live with it.
Maybe they could offer some kind of monthly payment plan where they don't collect your data, but I suspect it would get so little attention the revenue wouldn't justify the cost of implementing it. Most non-geeks share my opinion of data privacy.
I for one think that Google should stick to search engines.
They'd probably die.
Yes they are good at search.. but if that search is running on someone elses platform, and that platform is becoming more and more controlled (phones).. they need to at least have their leg in the door.
That and at a certain size diversification is usually a good idea.
I think you are giving people way too much credit!
I used to work at a hardware store.. and would always amaze me when people'd come in looking for locks for their door. "do you have anything cheaper that I can protect me, my family and all my worldly possessions??". I know locks are at best a deterrent.. but damn.. I want the best deterrent money can buy...
And then you've got all the people who use "1234" as their pin number and "password" as their password.
but I guess it starts to become visible outside the business now...
Problem is it really doesn't.
Sure, people think about it a bit when it's in the news.. and maybe down the road someone will be looking into something and this incident will be used as a case study... but for the most part... people forget this shit as soon as it's out of the headlines.
I agree this is the current state of affairs. There is enough transferable knowledge and frameworks are still close enough to the fundementals that once you've seen one in a particular category.. you can figure out the others fairly quickly.
I'm looking more down the road.. and maybe it'll be the same.. but I think we are edging towards a new level of abstraction. If we end up with 10 different defacto frameworks that mostly do the same thing then yeah, welcome back to.. always. As you become mroe abstract though there is more possibility for core fundementals to differ... as you are edging away from the thing that made them the same... and this is what I wonder about.
Only time will tell I guess. Long as I retire before executable UML (or something similar) becomes the norm.. I'm good;p
The problem with maintaining low level components is you end up in the situation as the submitter...
You have 10 years maintaining some complicated system written in a language that no longer exists and/or was propriatary to some custom hardware. You are _the_ expert in this. Then they upgrade to something c++ or java based and what do you do. Maybe you are lucky and somewhere on the other side of the world someone is using this hardware and is hiring.. but chances are you have a "oh shit.. gotta learn this new crap fast" moment.
When it comes down to it, what other people call paranoia, I call standard practice.
In a world where a huge company like Sony can fuck up on such an epic scale and get little more than a wrist slap.. and will probably keep right on doing business they way that've been doing... yup!
Unfortunately it's hard to "not participate". Everyone wants all your personal info for everything. There are ways around this (temporary credit card numbers) but it's pretty hard to avoid giving someone enough data to do damage while still living a relatively enjoyable life.
That and customers arn't willing to pay the costs of doing it properly. Especially when your competitor is not doing it properly and as such can offer their product cheaper than yours.
Consumers are as cheap and greedy as the companies who make the products. Can't sell what people don't care about and arn't willing to pay for..
Security isn’t important enough or visible enough to the end user, and insecurity doesn’t cost companies enough money.
If company A spends 100,020 extra on securing their product, whereas company B spends $1,020 extra.. and neither product “gets hacked”.. there is no perceived value increase. If company A has to sell their product at a higher cost.. most consumers will go with company B’s product.. _even if_ company A can somehow demonstrate that their product is more secure (and aside from a clean track record, this is hard).
If Company B’s product gets hacked, 99% of users don’t know or don’t care.. and company A gets exactly 3 new customers (always 3.. regardless of scale) who are concerned with company B’s security track record and assume company A makes a more secure product.
More importantly, if legislation went through saying that companies were liable for insecurity and the damage that is caused, everything would triple in cost and the masses with piss soup in rage
It's inherent on the Turing-completeness of programming languages. It's all just a matter of syntax. Sure, mastering a language takes time, but you've probably see already much things and that means you can easily apply what you know to the knew languages.
I don't really know how much longer this will remain true.
Yes, the fundementals are the same.. but programming is becoming more and more about gluing higher level components together. Knowing what these components are and how they behave is becoming the marker of being experienced in a language. This experience is of course largely non-transferable. As we move more towards this, I suspect jumping from one language to another will become harder. It's already kinda like that with Java. A c++ guy can learn java's syntax pretty quick.. but learning how all the defacto tools and libraries around it work (hibernate, jboss, spring..) takes time and experience specific to Java.
I think most people are more concerned with the severity versus the actual specific problem.
Some cars kinda do this now.. but just splitting it out into "there have been a few warning signs that your engine is not running optimally. You should get this checked out when it's convinient", "there is something wrong with your car. You can probably make it to your prefered repair shop... but you need to get this looked at soon", and finally "you have no oil, please pull it the hell over and turn your engine off.. " is huge.
Or in other words “our cars require maintenance and/or break down so frequently that we have spent a nautical ass-tonne of money developing a automotive equivalent of clippy for you!”?
The number readout is logical.. a major step up from the simple “service engine soon” light. The car already knows exactly what sensor caused the error.. and relating that to the user in something that can be looked up seems sane (although I always figured they specifically didn’t so they could charge you $50 to tell you your oil cap was loose).
A step up from that might be nice... maybe a lcd text readout with a line or two. Just enough info to know what you are dealing with.
The solution discussed in the article however sounds ridiculous. I did of course get a chuckle picturing some lady frustrated screaming “BURNT OUT HEADLIGHT FOR THE TENTH DAMN TIME” at the thing only to hear “the first step in changing the oil of your automobile ”. Crummy voice recognition combined with the frustration that comes with your car breaking down at the exact worst time is gonna make for some interesting breakdowns.
This all has a very “house of the future” feel to it.
I imagine the cost would be in the devices that connect to it.. not the devices/cables that provide it.
I'll admit I don't know much about this stuff, but I imagine if my little $10 USB stick is going to be connected to something that can supply up to 100W.. it'll have to go through more testing to ensure it doesn't like.. catch fire or something. And as such probably won't cost $10 for long.
One for connecting the device to something (like a computer/charger).. and one for connecting something to the device (extra display, printer, whatever).
Just plug all 6 into a USB 3.0 hub attached to your notebook.
Problem becomes the bandwidth of the bus. You hit up against this wall in USB2 if you try to.. say.. hook up 4 web cams to a computers onboard USB. I imagine we'll see the same problem with USB3 and notebooks. The amount of shared bandwidth will limit how much you can do.
Read the large majority of the posts for this article. That's why. People who are not socially well adjusted tend to come off as douche-bags, which pisses people off, which results in people not contributing.
People complaining about wikipedia admins is nothing new.. and more importantly it's not just a few cases of sour grapes. It's been a consistently known problem and the long term impact is starting to show.
The image I (and I think a lot of people) get when they think of a wikipedia admin is not a good one.
I picture some reasonably intelligent kid, who for lack of any social skills has mostly failed in real life. He has few friends, and works in a job where he gets no respect or is outright abused. He has been marginalized by society and so he spends every night in his parents basement playing out his fantasies of being a big shot on the internet... getting some kind of validation every time he deletes an article or reverts a change to one of _his_ articles.
This is what is going to kill wikipedia in the long run. The people who will be left are the people that wikipedia succeeded in spite of.. not because of, and once that happens it will just crumble.
I _really_ hope things get turned around before it gets to that point. I used to be really enthusiastic about the project and was more than happy to contribute (both in editing and financially) but now I'm so dis-enchanted by the child-like admins and deletion-ism and what it has done to the community that I just don't want to be involved in it any more.
They are indeed taking it a little far, but I will agree that having a web browser that works on both Windows and Linux was very significant in helping people transition.
To a lot of users, the web browser is the main application they use. Having a common one between Windows and Linux makes a huge difference for people switching over.
Realplayer went from simple to "omg what just happened" in a single version... and then just kept getting worse The new version was so bloated that my PC at the time (pentium 1 @ 200MHZ and like 90MHz of ram) couldn't run it... and trying to revert to the previous version (which worked just fine) was next to impossible.
Also it's impossible to mention realplayer without the obligatory: buffering.. buffering..
Am I the only one who just wants a damn browser! I'm not even that old and yet every time firefox (or anyone) releases a new browser my first thought is "oh great, what new age approach are they going with this time".
Is it so much to want: - My browser to look like every other application on my computer. Title bar where it's supposed to be.. toolbar that functions normally.. etc - A URL bar where you enter.. a URL - An area where the website is displayed
Extra features are nice (I have a fair number of extensions installed), as long as they don't hinder this basic functionality. I don't need a "paradigm shift" here. I use my web browser a lot, but it's not the central focus of my computer. More to the point, I like the way I browse the web.. stop trying to change it!
The notability thing is high on my list of "stuff they need to take less seriously". It's a community driven project, so if the community wants to talk in gory detail about anime or star trek or whatever, what is the harm. If it's factual and well written.. who cares how "notable" it is.
I imagine liability also plays largely into it. They have to be covered when one of these things kills someone and the family sues them for 3 billion dollars.
I've thought about what it would take to build an insulin pump.
When I first read this, I thought you were planning to do so! After reading the whole post I realized that wasn't your point, but at first I was envisioning some arduino controlled contraption. I can't wait till this actually starts happening.. OSS/DIY medical gear!
Or require them to upload a photo of themselves, smiling, at a bar or other social area, with a minimum of 4 friends who _don't_ look like they are being paid or held hostage.
In other words, prove that they are socially well adjusted. The big problem with wikipedia administration is that the folks who make it to the top get their largly because they have no actual lives outside the internet and as such spend huge chunks of their day trolling through wikipedia.
Slashdot Mirror
`Long as it's automated, and the data is protected and inaccessible to other people, and not sold to other parties.. I'm actually ok with this. I know this puts me in the minority with the slashdot crowd, and I'm sure someone is gonna accuse me of atroturfing, and yes there are all the slipery slope articles and becoming accustom to surveillance is bad and all that, but I just don't care. My life isn't that interesting. If some algorithm wants to pour over all my lifes data to show me a guitar ad (cause I've been looking at guitar stuff recently) .. I can live with it.
Maybe they could offer some kind of monthly payment plan where they don't collect your data, but I suspect it would get so little attention the revenue wouldn't justify the cost of implementing it. Most non-geeks share my opinion of data privacy.
I for one think that Google should stick to search engines.
They'd probably die.
Yes they are good at search.. but if that search is running on someone elses platform, and that platform is becoming more and more controlled (phones) .. they need to at least have their leg in the door.
That and at a certain size diversification is usually a good idea.
I think you are giving people way too much credit!
I used to work at a hardware store.. and would always amaze me when people'd come in looking for locks for their door. "do you have anything cheaper that I can protect me, my family and all my worldly possessions??". I know locks are at best a deterrent.. but damn.. I want the best deterrent money can buy...
And then you've got all the people who use "1234" as their pin number and "password" as their password.
but I guess it starts to become visible outside the business now...
Problem is it really doesn't.
Sure, people think about it a bit when it's in the news.. and maybe down the road someone will be looking into something and this incident will be used as a case study... but for the most part... people forget this shit as soon as it's out of the headlines.
I agree this is the current state of affairs. There is enough transferable knowledge and frameworks are still close enough to the fundementals that once you've seen one in a particular category.. you can figure out the others fairly quickly.
I'm looking more down the road.. and maybe it'll be the same.. but I think we are edging towards a new level of abstraction. If we end up with 10 different defacto frameworks that mostly do the same thing then yeah, welcome back to .. always. As you become mroe abstract though there is more possibility for core fundementals to differ... as you are edging away from the thing that made them the same... and this is what I wonder about.
Only time will tell I guess. Long as I retire before executable UML (or something similar) becomes the norm.. I'm good ;p
The problem with maintaining low level components is you end up in the situation as the submitter...
You have 10 years maintaining some complicated system written in a language that no longer exists and/or was propriatary to some custom hardware. You are _the_ expert in this. Then they upgrade to something c++ or java based and what do you do. Maybe you are lucky and somewhere on the other side of the world someone is using this hardware and is hiring.. but chances are you have a "oh shit.. gotta learn this new crap fast" moment.
When it comes down to it, what other people call paranoia, I call standard practice.
In a world where a huge company like Sony can fuck up on such an epic scale and get little more than a wrist slap.. and will probably keep right on doing business they way that've been doing... yup!
Unfortunately it's hard to "not participate". Everyone wants all your personal info for everything. There are ways around this (temporary credit card numbers) but it's pretty hard to avoid giving someone enough data to do damage while still living a relatively enjoyable life.
Also.. two digit UID.. jebus!
That and customers arn't willing to pay the costs of doing it properly. Especially when your competitor is not doing it properly and as such can offer their product cheaper than yours.
Consumers are as cheap and greedy as the companies who make the products. Can't sell what people don't care about and arn't willing to pay for..
Security isn’t important enough or visible enough to the end user, and insecurity doesn’t cost companies enough money.
If company A spends 100,020 extra on securing their product, whereas company B spends $1,020 extra .. and neither product “gets hacked” .. there is no perceived value increase. If company A has to sell their product at a higher cost .. most consumers will go with company B’s product.. _even if_ company A can somehow demonstrate that their product is more secure (and aside from a clean track record, this is hard).
If Company B’s product gets hacked, 99% of users don’t know or don’t care.. and company A gets exactly 3 new customers (always 3.. regardless of scale) who are concerned with company B’s security track record and assume company A makes a more secure product.
More importantly, if legislation went through saying that companies were liable for insecurity and the damage that is caused, everything would triple in cost and the masses with piss soup in rage
It's inherent on the Turing-completeness of programming languages. It's all just a matter of syntax. Sure, mastering a language takes time, but you've probably see already much things and that means you can easily apply what you know to the knew languages.
I don't really know how much longer this will remain true.
Yes, the fundementals are the same.. but programming is becoming more and more about gluing higher level components together. Knowing what these components are and how they behave is becoming the marker of being experienced in a language. This experience is of course largely non-transferable. As we move more towards this, I suspect jumping from one language to another will become harder. It's already kinda like that with Java. A c++ guy can learn java's syntax pretty quick.. but learning how all the defacto tools and libraries around it work (hibernate, jboss, spring..) takes time and experience specific to Java.
I think most people are more concerned with the severity versus the actual specific problem.
Some cars kinda do this now .. but just splitting it out into "there have been a few warning signs that your engine is not running optimally. You should get this checked out when it's convinient", "there is something wrong with your car. You can probably make it to your prefered repair shop... but you need to get this looked at soon", and finally "you have no oil, please pull it the hell over and turn your engine off.. " is huge.
Or in other words “our cars require maintenance and/or break down so frequently that we have spent a nautical ass-tonne of money developing a automotive equivalent of clippy for you!”?
The number readout is logical .. a major step up from the simple “service engine soon” light. The car already knows exactly what sensor caused the error.. and relating that to the user in something that can be looked up seems sane (although I always figured they specifically didn’t so they could charge you $50 to tell you your oil cap was loose).
A step up from that might be nice... maybe a lcd text readout with a line or two. Just enough info to know what you are dealing with.
The solution discussed in the article however sounds ridiculous. I did of course get a chuckle picturing some lady frustrated screaming “BURNT OUT HEADLIGHT FOR THE TENTH DAMN TIME” at the thing only to hear “the first step in changing the oil of your automobile ”. Crummy voice recognition combined with the frustration that comes with your car breaking down at the exact worst time is gonna make for some interesting breakdowns.
This all has a very “house of the future” feel to it.
I imagine the cost would be in the devices that connect to it.. not the devices/cables that provide it.
I'll admit I don't know much about this stuff, but I imagine if my little $10 USB stick is going to be connected to something that can supply up to 100W .. it'll have to go through more testing to ensure it doesn't like.. catch fire or something. And as such probably won't cost $10 for long.
Sounds like you'd need two connectors
One for connecting the device to something (like a computer/charger) .. and one for connecting something to the device (extra display, printer, whatever).
That is unless USB3 can do both?
Just plug all 6 into a USB 3.0 hub attached to your notebook.
Problem becomes the bandwidth of the bus. You hit up against this wall in USB2 if you try to .. say.. hook up 4 web cams to a computers onboard USB. I imagine we'll see the same problem with USB3 and notebooks. The amount of shared bandwidth will limit how much you can do.
So? why is that 'bad'?
Read the large majority of the posts for this article. That's why. People who are not socially well adjusted tend to come off as douche-bags, which pisses people off, which results in people not contributing.
People complaining about wikipedia admins is nothing new.. and more importantly it's not just a few cases of sour grapes. It's been a consistently known problem and the long term impact is starting to show.
The image I (and I think a lot of people) get when they think of a wikipedia admin is not a good one.
I picture some reasonably intelligent kid, who for lack of any social skills has mostly failed in real life. He has few friends, and works in a job where he gets no respect or is outright abused. He has been marginalized by society and so he spends every night in his parents basement playing out his fantasies of being a big shot on the internet... getting some kind of validation every time he deletes an article or reverts a change to one of _his_ articles.
This is what is going to kill wikipedia in the long run. The people who will be left are the people that wikipedia succeeded in spite of.. not because of, and once that happens it will just crumble.
I _really_ hope things get turned around before it gets to that point. I used to be really enthusiastic about the project and was more than happy to contribute (both in editing and financially) but now I'm so dis-enchanted by the child-like admins and deletion-ism and what it has done to the community that I just don't want to be involved in it any more.
They are indeed taking it a little far, but I will agree that having a web browser that works on both Windows and Linux was very significant in helping people transition.
To a lot of users, the web browser is the main application they use. Having a common one between Windows and Linux makes a huge difference for people switching over.
* 200MHz and 90MB
Please forgive... it's Friday!
I totally remember that.
Realplayer went from simple to "omg what just happened" in a single version... and then just kept getting worse The new version was so bloated that my PC at the time (pentium 1 @ 200MHZ and like 90MHz of ram) couldn't run it... and trying to revert to the previous version (which worked just fine) was next to impossible.
Also it's impossible to mention realplayer without the obligatory: buffering.. buffering..
Am I the only one who just wants a damn browser! I'm not even that old and yet every time firefox (or anyone) releases a new browser my first thought is "oh great, what new age approach are they going with this time".
Is it so much to want:
- My browser to look like every other application on my computer. Title bar where it's supposed to be.. toolbar that functions normally.. etc
- A URL bar where you enter.. a URL
- An area where the website is displayed
Extra features are nice (I have a fair number of extensions installed), as long as they don't hinder this basic functionality. I don't need a "paradigm shift" here. I use my web browser a lot, but it's not the central focus of my computer. More to the point, I like the way I browse the web.. stop trying to change it!
Yes!
The notability thing is high on my list of "stuff they need to take less seriously". It's a community driven project, so if the community wants to talk in gory detail about anime or star trek or whatever, what is the harm. If it's factual and well written.. who cares how "notable" it is.
I didn't know that. It's a somewhat good sign I guess.
However other like minded wiki folk doesn't count!
I imagine liability also plays largely into it. They have to be covered when one of these things kills someone and the family sues them for 3 billion dollars.
I've thought about what it would take to build an insulin pump.
When I first read this, I thought you were planning to do so! After reading the whole post I realized that wasn't your point, but at first I was envisioning some arduino controlled contraption. I can't wait till this actually starts happening.. OSS/DIY medical gear!
* get THERE
Please excuse that. It's Friday!
Or require them to upload a photo of themselves, smiling, at a bar or other social area, with a minimum of 4 friends who _don't_ look like they are being paid or held hostage.
In other words, prove that they are socially well adjusted. The big problem with wikipedia administration is that the folks who make it to the top get their largly because they have no actual lives outside the internet and as such spend huge chunks of their day trolling through wikipedia.