"The issue is usually the idiot that becomes the victim of a well done social hack."
The victim of a well done "social hack" isn't necessarily an idiot. Clever people get tricked all the time; that doesn't mean they are idiots.
the fact remains that if you sue your employer, you shouldn't expect to come out with a good relationship with them This ought to be painfully obvious, but most posters seem to be missing that important point there.
Another thing that seems to be evading most posters is the option where IBM doesn't cut their worker's salary. That scenario is every bit as much of a spit in the face to their employees, because then IBM would be all but admitting that they were trying to screw their employees over, and furthermore could easily afford to do so.
While this point may be valid, it's not like CS degrees were assurances of any level of competence anytime in my recent memory The reason why CS degrees aren't useful measurements is specifically because the curriculum has turned to crap. His point is not only valid, but encompasses yours. Furthermore, simplifying courses further will only exacerbate the problem. I agree with you whole heartedly that these degrees aren't good ways to measure performance. Improving the curriculum and having them focus on multiple complimentary areas of expertise, instead of just lightly glazing over everything that like the Prof. in TFA was complaining about, will help to create a better system for producing more qualified students as well as providing once again a piece of the standard with which to measure them.
Destroying the curriculum even further as you suggested does nothing to help the problem, it just makes the problem more obvious.
If you are worthy enough of friendship than I will make the effort to maintain that friendship explicitly. Well, what the poster before you was trying to say was that social networking sites attempt to lower the amount of effort. You mention an effort, but the idea is that in the glorious future as we develop these tools there will be virtually no effort required. Of course, nothing out there now has fully succeeded, but they are trying. Also, nobody cares about the nonsensical trivia that people enter into their profiles on these sites. It does, however, give that lady at the front desk at your work something to do when there's nobody moving through the lobby.
Let me give you an example of a "casual friend". You know that guy at the bar who tells you about his band, and it sounds cool, but you don't want to get his phone number or give out yours just so you can check out their next show. The solution here is he can just tell you what his bands myspace is, or facebook, or whatever, and you can get the info there. No need for feigned friendships when you find out his band sucks.
It seems the post you're replying to was worded in such a way as to cause some confusion.
The posters problem isn't likely that he cannot place the files on his mp3 player, as would be the case if you took what he was saying literally. He likely can place the files on his player just fine, but can he play them? The problem our dear poster seemed to be getting at is that the only mp3 player that will play songs protected with Apple's DRM scheme is the iPod. He would likely only run into this problem if he had the "correct" music player (for the sake of this argument, it can be anything that isn't an iPod), that would load as a mass storage device, allowing him to place whatever he pleased on it. Then he might later discover that his fancy new music files from iTunes wouldn't play on it, since it has been fucked by DRM. So the correct response would be: "You bought the wrong music."
This isn't the simple case of buying a DVD player so you can watch DVD's. This is the case of "Buy our brand's DVD Player so you can listen to our brand of DVDs". This type of behavior makes me get stabby. (Sorry for not shouting)
Ok, I can grant that you have a point. But in all seriousness, the mentioning of Nickelback seriously detracts from the statement you are trying to make.
I've done a little impromptu study with a few of my friends on gtalk/irc/aim. I sent each of them one of the following three sentences:
"Quite a few of the bands that I like (Nickelback) are signed to RIAA members." "Quite a few of the bands that I like are signed to RIAA members." "Quite a few of the bands that I like (randomriaaband) are signed to RIAA members."
Now, judging by their various reactions and the many comments in response to your post here on./, the fact that you like Nickelback has pretty much invalidated whatever opinion you have about anything. EVER. Next time try listing at least more than one terrible RIAA band in your example, lest you get flamed like never before. On the other hand, if Nickelback happens to be the one and only single RIAA band that you listen to, we applaud your endeavors to rid yourself of the evils of the RIAA, but still implore you to try harder. Seriously, putting "Michael Jackson" in there is bound to get a better response than "Nickelback". People who don't like Michael Jackson can at least understand why other people like Michael Jackson. I can't say the same about Nickelback.
I get the impression that it takes an American to take offense at this kind of debate and exchange of opinions. Americans get all touchy and sensitive and talk about anti-Americanism. You won't see nearly the number of Europeans on Slashdot blathering about anti-Europism. "Americans" aren't generally touchy about anti-Americanism. Rather, American's are touchy about over-generalizations being applied to them. If your goal is to illicit some kind of adverse reaction and then accuse your detractors of being touchy, then by all means, continue with the generalizations. And on the contrary, I encourage others to complain about America's ill conceived foreign policy, especially when it is directly adversely affecting the complainant. However, I don't understand the notion that I cannot lay blame upon the individuals committing the atrocities. Believe me, American's are as pissed off about the system that allows this behavior as they are at the people performing the deeds themselves. Your attempts to imply otherwise are what is causing the backlash that you are receiving, and are apparently the result of you being misinformed on the state of the current political climate. Believe me, even if all 9,000,000 Swedes are ravenously pissed off about the American government, the amount of disdain stateside easily dwarfs that.
It would make more sense for you Americans to simply expect your politicians to be selfish like everybody, and not despise them for that, and instead despise your system if it doesn't provide suitable checks and balances. Which I think it doesn't. Don't hate criminals (politicians) for committing crimes, hate the system that allows them to do so? Don't hate the playa, hate the game? I'll hate both, thank you very much; I'm American after all, hating is what I do best. (Clarification: It could be misconstrued, but I don't mean to imply that I hate you; the previous statement is meant purely in jest. In fact, I love you very much.)
when your fighter gets shot down you haven't lost several million pounds worth of trained crew It sounds like the Royal Air Force has some ridiculously overweight pilots. It's no wonder they started employing UAV's.
What the article doesn't tell you is that they only had 20 scientists working on it at a time, because they all quit from frustration after 6 months of never getting anything done.
Ok, I don't think you seriously mean that. (What does Gen-Z mean anyway?)
But "pipe" is a pretty widely used term to describe how these internets work. The joke of the matter goes to the instant the work "tube" was uttered by a particular gentleman. Everyone who was familiar with the usage of "pipe" could instantly imagine this poor aging gentleman struggling to understand the complexity of something that he was responsible for, yet so terribly ill-equipped. Imagining him asking a staffer or some consulting agency about how this stuff all works, and having the consultant respond with, "Well, you have these "pipes" here, and this connects to over here, etc...". Then Mr. Stevens comes out of the meeting, overconfident in his new understanding of the intertubes, and baffles the minds of hundreds of thousands of people in one fantastic moment of ineptness. What's not to ridicule?
Explaining a joke never works./shrug
bullhonky. Apple _was_ a hardware company. Since they started selling x86 pc's, the only way to distinguish them from any other pc out there is with their software. They are a software company when it comes down to it.
iPod's and Zunes are both overly restrictive pieces of junk.
Apple just marketed theirs better, and first. I have similar complaints with using either iTunes or the Zune software. They are both equally terribly unpleasant experiences.
I think most people just don't see a reason to trade one piece of garbage for another.
Your understanding is wrong. It's not that this "isn't supposed to happen" it's that it should tend to happen less often with a properly maintained FOSS project.
"FOSS folks are not any better, or worse, than Microsoft, Apple, Sun or IBM developers" Yes they are better. And they're worse too. It depends on what you're specifically talking about. You can't pretend to be serious about a 1:1 comparison between any two of these. But, you're also talking about people here, and yes, all people make mistakes, but it's pretty trivial to be pointing that out.
Thanks though, for the quality full disclosure at the bottom of your statement.
Well, no I haven't. At first I thought you were talking about Robert Morris the Financier, and I thought, "What the hell does he have to do with cryptography? Did he encrypt some secret data into the Declaration of Independence or something?"
DVI is capable of outputting to one display. I'm unaware of an application of DVI capable of spreading across multiple displays without first passing through an intermediate device. Regardless, any of the onboard video processors you will find on a motherboard are unlikely to have a DVI output; most only have the standard VGA port. It's possible that the phrase Dual-DVI means either two DVI ports, or a DVI Dual Link port (DVI-DL), but making a distinction in this case is largely irrelevant, because, as per the posters point, if you required either of the two you'd have to pick up a video card to get it. Many video cards sport two DVI outputs, for using multiple displays, where as a DVI Dual Link output is only required if your monitor/your_preferred_nomenclature_here/terminal/display has extraordinary requirements beyond the 165 MHZ or 24 bits per pixel mandated by the plain-jane single DVI link.
A lot of people care. A lot of people care about the issues that these organizations purport to promote, only to find illogical misrepresentation of the facts. For most of these people, there is enough wrongdoing on the parts of various businesses and industries for these organizations to not have to make up fake issues.
I know the nature of the actions here don't seem surprising, and even make a lot of sense if you look at it from a perspective of pure promotional marketing or something. But it is unnecessary to trade credibility for all of it, and that's the issue that is getting people riled up. If you assume that these organizations just want to sell pamphlets then these actions make sense, but if you assume that they're trying to affect change then it is all very counterintuitive.
Yeah, but really, they just bought themselves a get out of lawsuit card. In the scenario where Microsoft starts looking for easy targets to point their lawyers at, previous to this agreement Novell would have been a prime candidate. Apparently it made sound business sense to someone at Novell to sign up to this agreement to avoid a long and lengthy series of court cases, especially since they get a good chunk of capital upfront from Microsoft. Granted there are various downsides to the agreement, but given the tough position Novell was in at the time, and faced with the threat of having to go through even more lawyering up, it does seem to place Novell in a much better position than what they could have been placed in had they not signed the agreement. Most people here seem to be peeved of mostly that Novell didn't call Microsoft's bluff on their patent holdings.
Now, Microsoft can pretend that this sets some sort of precedent, and though it may, it mostly certainly isn't a precedent in the legally binding kind of way. If I go out and convince someone to buy my squirrel insurance for twenty dollars a month, having that one schmuck that bought it might help me get more schmucks, but it most certainly does not provide me any sort of legal standing to sue any of the people that I couldn't dupe into buying my squirrel insurance.
Novell wasn't in the position to stand up to a Microsoft legal gauntlet at the time of the deal, so they bought their way out this time. And yes, there may come a time when Microsoft does finally stick to its guns and haul someone into court. But having an agreement that doesn't name specific patents isn't going to help them when it comes time to name those patents in the court case. Furthermore, I firmly believe that any lawsuit initiated by Microsoft over these mysterious patents wouldn't turn out so well in the end for Microsoft. It would be an opening of the floodgates that even mighty Microsoft should be afraid of.
The problem that you are getting at is the concept of universal usability. Many people will decide that something is easy for them to use, and therefore must be easy for everyone to use. If they find someone that finds the object difficult to use, and then often decide that that person is the exception to the rule, and aberration, and not the fault of the design. The more complex the system, the easier it is to avoid this flawed logic. For example, one person can claim that the ipod scroll wheel is easy for everyone to use, and is the most easily usable design on the market, and another person will find that they prefer the roller bar on the Dell DJ to the ipod scroll wheel. Then both of them go to slashdot and yell at each other. You find the same argument in OS discussions, macs are easy to use, linux is difficult, windows is counter intuitive, etc... Mac's may be easy to use, but I could never get ftp working on the damned thing, and that takes all of 5 seconds to do in linux in the unlikely scenario that it isn't configured by default. It's all really a pointless discussion that I find humorous because it seems that the people involved are completely oblivious to the fact that they are arguing about opinions.
It's like a guitarist and a pianist arguing that one instrument is easier to play than another. The concept of someone arguing about any this just blows my mind every time, and it always seems too ridiculous to take seriously. But hell, that's about 90% of the entertainment of reading the slashdot discussion.
Slashdot Mirror
"The issue is usually the idiot that becomes the victim of a well done social hack." The victim of a well done "social hack" isn't necessarily an idiot. Clever people get tricked all the time; that doesn't mean they are idiots.
Another thing that seems to be evading most posters is the option where IBM doesn't cut their worker's salary. That scenario is every bit as much of a spit in the face to their employees, because then IBM would be all but admitting that they were trying to screw their employees over, and furthermore could easily afford to do so.
Wow, modded as flamebait. That joke flew right over someone's head.
Let me give you an example of a "casual friend". You know that guy at the bar who tells you about his band, and it sounds cool, but you don't want to get his phone number or give out yours just so you can check out their next show. The solution here is he can just tell you what his bands myspace is, or facebook, or whatever, and you can get the info there. No need for feigned friendships when you find out his band sucks.
It seems the post you're replying to was worded in such a way as to cause some confusion.
The posters problem isn't likely that he cannot place the files on his mp3 player, as would be the case if you took what he was saying literally. He likely can place the files on his player just fine, but can he play them? The problem our dear poster seemed to be getting at is that the only mp3 player that will play songs protected with Apple's DRM scheme is the iPod. He would likely only run into this problem if he had the "correct" music player (for the sake of this argument, it can be anything that isn't an iPod), that would load as a mass storage device, allowing him to place whatever he pleased on it. Then he might later discover that his fancy new music files from iTunes wouldn't play on it, since it has been fucked by DRM. So the correct response would be: "You bought the wrong music."
This isn't the simple case of buying a DVD player so you can watch DVD's. This is the case of "Buy our brand's DVD Player so you can listen to our brand of DVDs". This type of behavior makes me get stabby. (Sorry for not shouting)
Ok, I can grant that you have a point. But in all seriousness, the mentioning of Nickelback seriously detracts from the statement you are trying to make.
./, the fact that you like Nickelback has pretty much invalidated whatever opinion you have about anything. EVER. Next time try listing at least more than one terrible RIAA band in your example, lest you get flamed like never before. On the other hand, if Nickelback happens to be the one and only single RIAA band that you listen to, we applaud your endeavors to rid yourself of the evils of the RIAA, but still implore you to try harder. Seriously, putting "Michael Jackson" in there is bound to get a better response than "Nickelback". People who don't like Michael Jackson can at least understand why other people like Michael Jackson. I can't say the same about Nickelback.
I've done a little impromptu study with a few of my friends on gtalk/irc/aim. I sent each of them one of the following three sentences:
"Quite a few of the bands that I like (Nickelback) are signed to RIAA members."
"Quite a few of the bands that I like are signed to RIAA members."
"Quite a few of the bands that I like (randomriaaband) are signed to RIAA members."
Now, judging by their various reactions and the many comments in response to your post here on
I like to imagine that this video is an accurate portrayal of what it looks like when Canadians riot.
It would make more sense for you Americans to simply expect your politicians to be selfish like everybody, and not despise them for that, and instead despise your system if it doesn't provide suitable checks and balances. Which I think it doesn't. Don't hate criminals (politicians) for committing crimes, hate the system that allows them to do so? Don't hate the playa, hate the game? I'll hate both, thank you very much; I'm American after all, hating is what I do best. (Clarification: It could be misconstrued, but I don't mean to imply that I hate you; the previous statement is meant purely in jest. In fact, I love you very much.)
You trust your politicians? Boy are you in for a surprise.
What the article doesn't tell you is that they only had 20 scientists working on it at a time, because they all quit from frustration after 6 months of never getting anything done.
Ok, I don't think you seriously mean that. (What does Gen-Z mean anyway?) But "pipe" is a pretty widely used term to describe how these internets work. The joke of the matter goes to the instant the work "tube" was uttered by a particular gentleman. Everyone who was familiar with the usage of "pipe" could instantly imagine this poor aging gentleman struggling to understand the complexity of something that he was responsible for, yet so terribly ill-equipped. Imagining him asking a staffer or some consulting agency about how this stuff all works, and having the consultant respond with, "Well, you have these "pipes" here, and this connects to over here, etc...". Then Mr. Stevens comes out of the meeting, overconfident in his new understanding of the intertubes, and baffles the minds of hundreds of thousands of people in one fantastic moment of ineptness. What's not to ridicule? Explaining a joke never works. /shrug
bullhonky. Apple _was_ a hardware company. Since they started selling x86 pc's, the only way to distinguish them from any other pc out there is with their software. They are a software company when it comes down to it.
iPod's and Zunes are both overly restrictive pieces of junk. Apple just marketed theirs better, and first. I have similar complaints with using either iTunes or the Zune software. They are both equally terribly unpleasant experiences. I think most people just don't see a reason to trade one piece of garbage for another.
Would it matter if he did read it? Are you worried he might ruin the series with the implementation of this idea? Isn't it a little too late for that?
Thanks though, for the quality full disclosure at the bottom of your statement.
Well, no I haven't. At first I thought you were talking about Robert Morris the Financier, and I thought, "What the hell does he have to do with cryptography? Did he encrypt some secret data into the Declaration of Independence or something?"
Your Robert Morris, I must admit, is a little more exciting.
DVI is capable of outputting to one display. I'm unaware of an application of DVI capable of spreading across multiple displays without first passing through an intermediate device. Regardless, any of the onboard video processors you will find on a motherboard are unlikely to have a DVI output; most only have the standard VGA port.
It's possible that the phrase Dual-DVI means either two DVI ports, or a DVI Dual Link port (DVI-DL), but making a distinction in this case is largely irrelevant, because, as per the posters point, if you required either of the two you'd have to pick up a video card to get it. Many video cards sport two DVI outputs, for using multiple displays, where as a DVI Dual Link output is only required if your monitor/your_preferred_nomenclature_here/terminal/display has extraordinary requirements beyond the 165 MHZ or 24 bits per pixel mandated by the plain-jane single DVI link.
Regardless, the guy that wrote that email is a prat.
Apple also isn't as green as they'd like you to believe, but they definitely should fall short of grabbing the attention of GreenPeace.
A lot of people care. A lot of people care about the issues that these organizations purport to promote, only to find illogical misrepresentation of the facts.
For most of these people, there is enough wrongdoing on the parts of various businesses and industries for these organizations to not have to make up fake issues.
I know the nature of the actions here don't seem surprising, and even make a lot of sense if you look at it from a perspective of pure promotional marketing or something. But it is unnecessary to trade credibility for all of it, and that's the issue that is getting people riled up. If you assume that these organizations just want to sell pamphlets then these actions make sense, but if you assume that they're trying to affect change then it is all very counterintuitive.
Yeah, but really, they just bought themselves a get out of lawsuit card. In the scenario where Microsoft starts looking for easy targets to point their lawyers at, previous to this agreement Novell would have been a prime candidate. Apparently it made sound business sense to someone at Novell to sign up to this agreement to avoid a long and lengthy series of court cases, especially since they get a good chunk of capital upfront from Microsoft. Granted there are various downsides to the agreement, but given the tough position Novell was in at the time, and faced with the threat of having to go through even more lawyering up, it does seem to place Novell in a much better position than what they could have been placed in had they not signed the agreement. Most people here seem to be peeved of mostly that Novell didn't call Microsoft's bluff on their patent holdings.
Now, Microsoft can pretend that this sets some sort of precedent, and though it may, it mostly certainly isn't a precedent in the legally binding kind of way. If I go out and convince someone to buy my squirrel insurance for twenty dollars a month, having that one schmuck that bought it might help me get more schmucks, but it most certainly does not provide me any sort of legal standing to sue any of the people that I couldn't dupe into buying my squirrel insurance.
Novell wasn't in the position to stand up to a Microsoft legal gauntlet at the time of the deal, so they bought their way out this time. And yes, there may come a time when Microsoft does finally stick to its guns and haul someone into court. But having an agreement that doesn't name specific patents isn't going to help them when it comes time to name those patents in the court case. Furthermore, I firmly believe that any lawsuit initiated by Microsoft over these mysterious patents wouldn't turn out so well in the end for Microsoft. It would be an opening of the floodgates that even mighty Microsoft should be afraid of.
The problem that you are getting at is the concept of universal usability. Many people will decide that something is easy for them to use, and therefore must be easy for everyone to use. If they find someone that finds the object difficult to use, and then often decide that that person is the exception to the rule, and aberration, and not the fault of the design. The more complex the system, the easier it is to avoid this flawed logic. For example, one person can claim that the ipod scroll wheel is easy for everyone to use, and is the most easily usable design on the market, and another person will find that they prefer the roller bar on the Dell DJ to the ipod scroll wheel. Then both of them go to slashdot and yell at each other. You find the same argument in OS discussions, macs are easy to use, linux is difficult, windows is counter intuitive, etc... Mac's may be easy to use, but I could never get ftp working on the damned thing, and that takes all of 5 seconds to do in linux in the unlikely scenario that it isn't configured by default. It's all really a pointless discussion that I find humorous because it seems that the people involved are completely oblivious to the fact that they are arguing about opinions.
It's like a guitarist and a pianist arguing that one instrument is easier to play than another. The concept of someone arguing about any this just blows my mind every time, and it always seems too ridiculous to take seriously. But hell, that's about 90% of the entertainment of reading the slashdot discussion.