I enjoy this trend of assuming that crowdsourcing will solve it, because people know what "misleading language" is. I don't think it can actually solve it, but the optimism is interesting. Whatever happened to assuming the universe would build a better idiot, and the user is always wrong?
Remember the 'fad' of the Palm Pilot and Apple Newton? The technology wasn't there yet and now smartphones.
I disagree with this sentiment strongly. Palm Pilots were fantastic. The lack of popularity wasn't anything to do with tech. The tech was there, it just wasn't sexy. You need to make it stupid and give it a selfie app before it's popular, but that has nothing to do with the tech being there. It's not even a matter of viability. Niche markets exist, and Palms were largely marketed to business users anyway, who loved them.
The only reason smartphones are popular is because they have been made sexy to a mass market who uses them largely to waste time. There's nothing wrong with that choice, but we should acknowledge that demographic as the primary. Palm users were running businesses and managing teams off of them. Your average smartphone user is using instagram or the ilk.
(full disclosure, I made that number up. I don't believe there is a number of them that is realistically large enough for anyone to care. If there were 10,000 of them, they'd still be dwarfed by so many demographics as to be laughable.)
This tech has existed since dialup, and has improved only a little with new codecs and whatnot for niche scenarios.
So what exactly has changed? Licensing. Licensing has changed. The content creators/owners are now willing to use said technologies. Never forget that these limitations are not revolutionary in being overcome by heroes of content administrators. They are old and foul creatures slowly losing the sand between their fingers.
Basically they don't want to compete with the podcast and audiobook anymore. I'd say they were too late, but I know better. Users are just as slow to move as industries (example: landlines are still used a lot).
This is the last difficult part of being a cord cutter (if one cares about this kind of content). One can get just about any other set of content from streaming if it's available at all (there are always holes, mind you). I don't envy the rights negotiations, as they are a mess, but it would solve a major problem in the lineup of content.
That's essentially my point./Either/ what he's saying is worth discussing on its own merits,/or/ he's already established as not worth discussing in isolation and thus this is not news. Instead, what's happening is that we're just driving in a story of "Hey, we don't like this guy, hate him with us as we twist everything he says into its worst caricature." Regardless of how anyone feels about the guy, this shouldn't be on Slashdot. I don't need to be told what to think, especially if I already agree where it's going, but that's tangential.
In what world does "civic society" equate to "white nationalist identity?" There's a dozen things I could honestly take from this quote, and I could do without its really heavy baiting to control where I'm going with my interpretations.
I get that Bannon isn't likable or something. I don't want to dispute anything about him either way. I just want data without the entire heavy-leaning interpretation of hand-wavy words. He's clearly wrong about his numbers. Can we focus on that? Do we have to label him "white nationalist" with all but coming out and saying that? Is that helpful? Pretend he's an actual white supremacist and proud of it. Can we not criticize his points on their own, like actual discourse requires? If he and his words are simply not worth talking about, this is not how to go about that.
Good lord there's so much to actually criticize out there and we're just framing every damn thing in tribalistic nonsense. (Before it gets assumed, no, I don't think this is limited to one "party" or whatever. It's common in every sensationalist nonsense "journalism" organization.)
The supreme difference there is that Facebook advertising was ignored by the slashdot crowd in their hatred (advertising trends often are for some reason). Snapchat doesn't have much of a size-able market for advertising, just users. Facebook can give you detailed demographic targeting tools. Snapchat can annoy their users a bit and hope they're the right kind of user.
Don't get me wrong, there's definitely some revenue opportunity here with Snapchat, just not nearly as much as their valuation would say.
I find it more compelling to know why these tactics work and how they are used in various places. Lawyers aren't known for presenting accurate descriptions of anything, since their whole job is to present as slanted and outlandishly biased a narrative as can be legally produced. A murder trial will see both sides omitting critical evidence unless obligated not to and not having plausible deniability. Why then do we expect such a politically charged case to be any different? Why does this surprise us enough to be news?
More importantly, why do we think the judge might not be aware of this in the first place? Are they? If not, can we solve that/actual/ problem?
I specifically brought it up as an accessible example of the history. For those that don't use Macs it's an important and well-known example. I don't think it was a poor choice just because of its age.
I'm imagining that the "make things better by simplifying" can only go so far. I'm not saying we've definitively reached such a point with Macs, but they keep learning that some of these "refinements" are mistakes, like not being able to right-click. Is trying to reduce vectors of interaction for their devices really their entire legacy?
Mac is definitely the "simpler" brand, and draws a lot of users from that brand. I just wonder if it's not a long-term shoot-yourself-in-the-foot to limit yourself so (both for their users and for the company itself).
All the studies I've seen (which are obviously not definitive) have come back with women valuing rewarding or challenging work instead of stable work. They valued stability in their mates, not their careers.
Programming is a desk job most often, but it's much more creative and harder to measure than your typical clerical work. Not a lot of shops need the best of that crowd, though, and someone that can just "not cooch up the work" is likely available, but not many (even among programmers) know how to evaluate if someone is capable of doing the job or not.
Such is what happens when you have a creative field in its youth with people that really hate admitting that a lot of aspects of the job/could/ be measured and quantified if we could analyze our own laziness. Except where laziness is a virtue in engineering.
So is all that recent pitchforking about how women aren't/in/ tech working then? Is encouraging them to "have a career in tech" producing good fruits here, or is that a factor in the decline? Are we going to be losing the percentage 5-year women in tech or are we going to be losing the percentage of women that have been working in it since the 90s that were quite content with their careers before we started making their gender the primary focus?
I realize that's not the popular question set, but that's usually the best reason to answer such questions.
Cordcutters can already get a lot of TV content (not necessarily live, but typically few care) but the bigger lack is sports streaming. It's complicated, expensive, and typically bundled with other stuff. Sling has the best I've seen so far, but I'd be interested to see others. Can Google fix that one for us all?
I'm not personally interested in sports outside the social events I could host better, like the Super Bowl or the World Cup, but just because it's not/my/ problem doesn't mean I don't recognize it's a problem in the market.
So what about deaf drivers? Certainly not a requirement for the job of taxi service, albeit maybe more convenient. Mute? What if they have one arm, will that suddenly become the arbitrary criteria that no customer gets to decide matters?
I'm fine with criticizing the likes of Uber, but if our best argument for serving customers is discriminating against people that can objectively do the job, maybe we should re-evaluate our position.
I think it's mostly all the hype and articles claiming "Go is a C/C++ replacement." We could give them a pass and assume they mean "Go is a C/C++ replacement in some narrow Google-like scenarios" but all too many discussions couch it as ALSO a replacement for Python or Java. We could also try to be nice and state that the project maintainers are not trying to say this "replace C/C++" angle is valid, except Rob Pike says things like "although we expected to C++ programmers to see Go as an alternative..." and such, which isn't a great PR statement if you're trying to say it's not supposed to replace C++.
Yes, I'm aware they're not equivalent. No, social dynamics and public relations don't care, and if we expect them to we're idealists or idiots or both. Thus, to the greater populous, Rob Pike was quite literally trying to replace C++ and if he wants a different perspective to the greater populous he needs to change his tune. (full disclosure, my one quote is from 2012, though others exist that are more recent if one cares to get pedantic about this).
See also: this very article and the commentary about it here.
I want to have Windows Phones of relative power available on every major carrier. None of this only-on-AT&T crap. These aren't iPhones. People aren't going to go out in droves for a new thing that doesn't have any apps, any transitions, any anything. You need to get it out, get it to people on their terms, take a loss on the hardware if you have to, and get development going on it.
That's the crux of it for me. On my Linux boxes it's less integrated, sure, but with my Windows boxes it would be better integrated like an iPhone and a Mac. They've got some cool useful features both for business and personal use. They've got really good dev tools (and no, developing on Android or iOS is not very entertaining, so even my criticism of WinPhone10 tooling still puts it at much much more accessible than its competition).
They've got an uphill battle, but they could at least start it right this time! The abysmal launch of WinPhone 10 devices even had T-Mobile's CEO swearing at them for an afternoon.
Why aren't we up in arms about all the data collection happening to any kid using a computer in the last 16 years? I don't think a cookie warning is an effective measure against that, either, but the warning means it's obvious the tracking does happen. If we can tell so much about an "anonymous" user from their google searches, can't we gather an awful lot of knowledge about a child without even knowing it's a child in the first place?
Maybe put the onus on advertisers and such to make sure it's not a child well before they even start tracking things. (Yes, I'm aware that would be very hindering to a lot of businesses, Google included. I'm still serious.)
Oh how long we've waited for this sign that physics worked exactly how we formulated it would. Think of the possibilities this entails, being able to plan out systems ahead of time using math and sound principles of modeled dynamics. We could call it a new field. I know, since it involved not having an engine in the front, we could call it "engineering!"
Slashdot Mirror
I enjoy this trend of assuming that crowdsourcing will solve it, because people know what "misleading language" is. I don't think it can actually solve it, but the optimism is interesting. Whatever happened to assuming the universe would build a better idiot, and the user is always wrong?
Times seem to have changed.
Or the technology isn't there yet.
Remember the 'fad' of the Palm Pilot and Apple Newton? The technology wasn't there yet and now smartphones.
I disagree with this sentiment strongly. Palm Pilots were fantastic. The lack of popularity wasn't anything to do with tech. The tech was there, it just wasn't sexy. You need to make it stupid and give it a selfie app before it's popular, but that has nothing to do with the tech being there. It's not even a matter of viability. Niche markets exist, and Palms were largely marketed to business users anyway, who loved them.
The only reason smartphones are popular is because they have been made sexy to a mass market who uses them largely to waste time. There's nothing wrong with that choice, but we should acknowledge that demographic as the primary. Palm users were running businesses and managing teams off of them. Your average smartphone user is using instagram or the ilk.
Wow, .ai, a TLD that somehow says "not going to last" even more than .io
They might be quite similar. Irony.
All 1200 of them!
(full disclosure, I made that number up. I don't believe there is a number of them that is realistically large enough for anyone to care. If there were 10,000 of them, they'd still be dwarfed by so many demographics as to be laughable.)
This tech has existed since dialup, and has improved only a little with new codecs and whatnot for niche scenarios.
So what exactly has changed? Licensing. Licensing has changed. The content creators/owners are now willing to use said technologies. Never forget that these limitations are not revolutionary in being overcome by heroes of content administrators. They are old and foul creatures slowly losing the sand between their fingers.
Basically they don't want to compete with the podcast and audiobook anymore. I'd say they were too late, but I know better. Users are just as slow to move as industries (example: landlines are still used a lot).
This is the last difficult part of being a cord cutter (if one cares about this kind of content). One can get just about any other set of content from streaming if it's available at all (there are always holes, mind you). I don't envy the rights negotiations, as they are a mess, but it would solve a major problem in the lineup of content.
That's essentially my point. /Either/ what he's saying is worth discussing on its own merits, /or/ he's already established as not worth discussing in isolation and thus this is not news. Instead, what's happening is that we're just driving in a story of "Hey, we don't like this guy, hate him with us as we twist everything he says into its worst caricature." Regardless of how anyone feels about the guy, this shouldn't be on Slashdot. I don't need to be told what to think, especially if I already agree where it's going, but that's tangential.
In what world does "civic society" equate to "white nationalist identity?" There's a dozen things I could honestly take from this quote, and I could do without its really heavy baiting to control where I'm going with my interpretations.
I get that Bannon isn't likable or something. I don't want to dispute anything about him either way. I just want data without the entire heavy-leaning interpretation of hand-wavy words. He's clearly wrong about his numbers. Can we focus on that? Do we have to label him "white nationalist" with all but coming out and saying that? Is that helpful? Pretend he's an actual white supremacist and proud of it. Can we not criticize his points on their own, like actual discourse requires? If he and his words are simply not worth talking about, this is not how to go about that.
Good lord there's so much to actually criticize out there and we're just framing every damn thing in tribalistic nonsense. (Before it gets assumed, no, I don't think this is limited to one "party" or whatever. It's common in every sensationalist nonsense "journalism" organization.)
The supreme difference there is that Facebook advertising was ignored by the slashdot crowd in their hatred (advertising trends often are for some reason). Snapchat doesn't have much of a size-able market for advertising, just users. Facebook can give you detailed demographic targeting tools. Snapchat can annoy their users a bit and hope they're the right kind of user.
Don't get me wrong, there's definitely some revenue opportunity here with Snapchat, just not nearly as much as their valuation would say.
Did we learn nothing from the .com bubble?
I find it more compelling to know why these tactics work and how they are used in various places. Lawyers aren't known for presenting accurate descriptions of anything, since their whole job is to present as slanted and outlandishly biased a narrative as can be legally produced. A murder trial will see both sides omitting critical evidence unless obligated not to and not having plausible deniability. Why then do we expect such a politically charged case to be any different? Why does this surprise us enough to be news?
More importantly, why do we think the judge might not be aware of this in the first place? Are they? If not, can we solve that /actual/ problem?
I specifically brought it up as an accessible example of the history. For those that don't use Macs it's an important and well-known example. I don't think it was a poor choice just because of its age.
I'm imagining that the "make things better by simplifying" can only go so far. I'm not saying we've definitively reached such a point with Macs, but they keep learning that some of these "refinements" are mistakes, like not being able to right-click. Is trying to reduce vectors of interaction for their devices really their entire legacy?
Mac is definitely the "simpler" brand, and draws a lot of users from that brand. I just wonder if it's not a long-term shoot-yourself-in-the-foot to limit yourself so (both for their users and for the company itself).
All the studies I've seen (which are obviously not definitive) have come back with women valuing rewarding or challenging work instead of stable work. They valued stability in their mates, not their careers.
Programming is a desk job most often, but it's much more creative and harder to measure than your typical clerical work. Not a lot of shops need the best of that crowd, though, and someone that can just "not cooch up the work" is likely available, but not many (even among programmers) know how to evaluate if someone is capable of doing the job or not.
Such is what happens when you have a creative field in its youth with people that really hate admitting that a lot of aspects of the job /could/ be measured and quantified if we could analyze our own laziness. Except where laziness is a virtue in engineering.
It's complicated.
So is all that recent pitchforking about how women aren't /in/ tech working then? Is encouraging them to "have a career in tech" producing good fruits here, or is that a factor in the decline? Are we going to be losing the percentage 5-year women in tech or are we going to be losing the percentage of women that have been working in it since the 90s that were quite content with their careers before we started making their gender the primary focus?
I realize that's not the popular question set, but that's usually the best reason to answer such questions.
And now a lot of people are remembering that they even had these accounts in the first place.
Cordcutters can already get a lot of TV content (not necessarily live, but typically few care) but the bigger lack is sports streaming. It's complicated, expensive, and typically bundled with other stuff. Sling has the best I've seen so far, but I'd be interested to see others. Can Google fix that one for us all?
I'm not personally interested in sports outside the social events I could host better, like the Super Bowl or the World Cup, but just because it's not /my/ problem doesn't mean I don't recognize it's a problem in the market.
So what about deaf drivers? Certainly not a requirement for the job of taxi service, albeit maybe more convenient. Mute? What if they have one arm, will that suddenly become the arbitrary criteria that no customer gets to decide matters?
I'm fine with criticizing the likes of Uber, but if our best argument for serving customers is discriminating against people that can objectively do the job, maybe we should re-evaluate our position.
I think it's mostly all the hype and articles claiming "Go is a C/C++ replacement." We could give them a pass and assume they mean "Go is a C/C++ replacement in some narrow Google-like scenarios" but all too many discussions couch it as ALSO a replacement for Python or Java. We could also try to be nice and state that the project maintainers are not trying to say this "replace C/C++" angle is valid, except Rob Pike says things like "although we expected to C++ programmers to see Go as an alternative..." and such, which isn't a great PR statement if you're trying to say it's not supposed to replace C++.
Yes, I'm aware they're not equivalent. No, social dynamics and public relations don't care, and if we expect them to we're idealists or idiots or both. Thus, to the greater populous, Rob Pike was quite literally trying to replace C++ and if he wants a different perspective to the greater populous he needs to change his tune. (full disclosure, my one quote is from 2012, though others exist that are more recent if one cares to get pedantic about this).
See also: this very article and the commentary about it here.
I want to have Windows Phones of relative power available on every major carrier. None of this only-on-AT&T crap. These aren't iPhones. People aren't going to go out in droves for a new thing that doesn't have any apps, any transitions, any anything. You need to get it out, get it to people on their terms, take a loss on the hardware if you have to, and get development going on it.
That's the crux of it for me. On my Linux boxes it's less integrated, sure, but with my Windows boxes it would be better integrated like an iPhone and a Mac. They've got some cool useful features both for business and personal use. They've got really good dev tools (and no, developing on Android or iOS is not very entertaining, so even my criticism of WinPhone10 tooling still puts it at much much more accessible than its competition).
They've got an uphill battle, but they could at least start it right this time! The abysmal launch of WinPhone 10 devices even had T-Mobile's CEO swearing at them for an afternoon.
Why aren't we up in arms about all the data collection happening to any kid using a computer in the last 16 years? I don't think a cookie warning is an effective measure against that, either, but the warning means it's obvious the tracking does happen. If we can tell so much about an "anonymous" user from their google searches, can't we gather an awful lot of knowledge about a child without even knowing it's a child in the first place?
Maybe put the onus on advertisers and such to make sure it's not a child well before they even start tracking things. (Yes, I'm aware that would be very hindering to a lot of businesses, Google included. I'm still serious.)
When did "most people" start reading slashdot OR independent.co.uk?
Oh how long we've waited for this sign that physics worked exactly how we formulated it would. Think of the possibilities this entails, being able to plan out systems ahead of time using math and sound principles of modeled dynamics. We could call it a new field. I know, since it involved not having an engine in the front, we could call it "engineering!"
We'll build a better world, I tell you!