Lately I was reading the Invasion America series by Vaughn Heppner (https://www.goodreads.com/series/106530-invasion-america) and it left me with this idea that it's before a great army is needed that it can be built and organized. In those books a natural disaster left many countries with food shortage so they attack America who happens to have a lot of intact farmland, and the army is not big enough to protect it.
I think the problem at the moment is not the size of the army; it's the lack of innovation in its methods and policies. Basically the army is still following principles enacted in the 1800s by Von Clausewitz; this makes the army a great invasion force but very clumsy in every other aspect of warfare.
And innovation does not mean selling tanks to buy supercomputers for the NSA. It means figuring out better ways to protect the country in the physical and virtual worlds.
Discredit him? Hilarious. Obama could cut the size of the army that protects the country against foreign invaders and increase the powers of the people who spy on American citizens and the people who voted for him twice would still worship him, call him a savior and think that he is protecting their freedom better than the republicans. His marketing team is as good as Apple's.
Google is hell-bent on making a magic textbox that "does everything" but that forces people to use additional keywords like "near" or "loc", which basically transforms the "single textbox" in a poorly implemented command-line. This is bad UX, plain and simple.
You're arguing that the command line is a bad UI? On slashdot?
No, I'm saying that the Google search box is a bad UI. That's not the same thing.
To get that single textbox you force people to filter their query with keywords that have nothing to do with the topic they are interested into: "loc", "site", "near", etc. That's the equivalent of putting a single buzzer on a multi-tenant building and forcing visitors to buzz multiple times following an arbitrary pattern to reach a specific tenant because the architect believe a single buzzer is prettier.
Thanks. Your attempt at astroturfing is the best laugh I've had today.
Using "astroturfing" in this context is not only a weak insult, it is also a contribution to the bastardization of the word, which is unfortunate because like parents who claim that their kid is a victim of cyber-bullying because nobody "Liked" a link he posted on Facebook you are making it a little more difficult to discuss actual occurrences of an undesirable behavior.
When you think that a person has a bias regarding a specific technology or company, please use the proper term, such as "fanboi" or "mvp".
If your grandma lives in the USA, you could use screen sharing to watch Hulu during those 2 free hours per month. Or you could ask her to point her webcam towards the tv screen and watch high-quality American tv (like Keeping Up With the Kardashians) live, as long as she does not change the channel.
For some reason you don't want her to know what you are watching? No problem, here is what you could do
1) ask her to setup Dial-Up networking on her Windows XP machine 2) use dial-up over Skype to access her internet connection 3) gain access to US online services in the comfort of your non-NSA surveilled residence
With those 2 hours of free Skype per month, on dial-up you could probably buffer the first 3 or 4 minutes of a HD tv show episode. FOR FREE!
Every time I've ever used Bing to find something, unless it's quite literally things like the frontpage of some project that I search the name of, I can never find it.
It happens sometimes but Bing has improved a lot lately. The "search within" feature is interesting. Try to search for Slashdot on both engines you will see the difference.
Also Bing maps is immensely superior for proximity search, and with the business name / location split it's more convenient than Google maps, especially when the business name contains a different city name (like Chicago Joe's).
Google is hell-bent on making a magic textbox that "does everything" but that forces people to use additional keywords like "near" or "loc", which basically transforms the "single textbox" in a poorly implemented command-line. This is bad UX, plain and simple.
If you didn't get what Redmancometh said, then you're on the wrong site.
I didn't get what he meant by "Whyd"; since according to you I'm on the wrong site I tried whyd.com and I'm even more confused because I have no idea why there is a picture of Moriarty listening to music with unplugged headphones on the home page.
And don't get me on to Microsoft's "if you aren't a corporate we don't give a shit" support.
Clearly you never tried submitting a ticket in Office365. Within minutes someone is calling or writing back. Obviously at first it's junior helpdesk people but they actually try to solve the problem and if they can't they escalate themselves.
And that's not only for Fortune 500 companies. You get that same service with a $5/month account. They figured out that a lot of people will turn to Office365 to replace their IT team so they do a good job with support for every customer. Unfortunately this is not the case with other services or products at Microsoft, like Azure, where you have to pay for support.
Meanwhile if you have a problem with Google Docs for Business, you have access to community support and to a public blog where latest udpates about major incidents are posted.
For example, the ability to test hypotheses and perform quantitative reasoning would come in handy to many people working jobs unrelated to hamburgers and fries.
If you ask most employers, those skills come from a MBA not a physics degree. That's how the world works.
There is a very limited field of applications for physics, and most of this kind of work is actually done in countries like India and China where scientists are a dime a dozen.
I'm not saying a scientist in North America is doomed to be unemployed, far from it, but a degree in physics is like a degree in English lit, or art history, or religion studies: a passport to work in an unrelated field, at best. Art history people end up in HR, English lit in marketing or HR, and physics people in IT.
Unless they aim for a lifetime in academia, people who register in those dead end programs should instead get a head start and study in a field where they are likely to find employment. Spending thousands of dollars for a meaningless degree is only a way to scream at the potential employers that you have poor judgement.
You can pretty much do with it anything you can do with a physics degree.
So many options: teaching *physics, writing books used by *physics teachers, editing *physics books before they are sold to *physics teachers, and working for Elon Musk, following or followed by a stint at NASA. Real jacks of all trades, those *physics people.
Yes, we all get that in the Mad Men era it was all about white males (non-Jewish) and everything else was second-class. But things have evolved and it's not because of idiots fighting yesterday's battles.
Those people look at existing ratios and make the conclusion that the culture or leadership is somehow wrong. This is bullshit.
Why don't they look at the gender ratio at Curves or at the ABWA. Those places thrive on sexist policy and nobody says a thing, but gay bars catering to a specific subset of the gay community (bears/cubs) and old taverns for men only are the target of public outcry and lawsuits. It's the same with race; who would put "White-owned company" on their website? Total hypocrisy.
When you say "we", who do you mean? Did you get elected as a spokesperson for all the idiots waiting in line at the Apple store when the company releases the same product over and over again, or are you just too insecure to make comments as an individual? Or is it both?
As for the secluded shack in the woods: I can't go back there, I sold it to a bunch of Apple fanbois who are convinced that the civilized world died with Steve Jobs. The market price for this kind of sack skyrocketed when the iPhone 5C was released.
Each passanger would have to be packed in metal armature, alternatively plasma armature can be used but that can leave some burns on the passanger. There may be some problems with structural integrity of load (liquidification) which can be bypassed by shock freezing (Han Solo).
Clearly you have never experienced an elevator ride in China. In some cases I'm sure that if passengers were to synchronize their breathing the ones in front would be crushed to death.
Put as many Gs as you want on that elevator, people won't move unless you put a coat of K-Y on the walls, in which case they will move as a team.
I suppose you don't vote either. After all, if the country really valued your input they'd compensate you for time spent evaluating candidates, just like you would be for time spent interviewing potential employees. Nevermind that you could benefit from influencing the result of the election (in an abstract sense).
Of course I vote. And voting does influence the result of an election (to some extent). One gets to choose if government policy will be influenced by the agro/financial/insurance lobbies or by the energy/military lobbies. The good thing is that lobbyists are good at marketing, so instead of being shipped to a foreign country to take over their oil and destroy their infrastructure so American companies can get juicy reconstruction contracts, one is "fighting the war on terror", and instead of being asked to pay more taxes to finance a program that forces expensive insurance down the throat of small business owners, one is "contributing to an universal healthcare program".
That my friend is called Freedom, and if you disagree with it the FBI will kick down your door at night and drag your ass to a secret jail, and if you ever get the chance to call someone while in jail the discussion will be recorded by the NSA and later wikileaked by russian spies and crossdressers.
No. Google engineers call their products "beta" so users can't complain too loudly about bugs. That's like those people who spend hours cleaning their house before guests arrive and then say "please don't pay attention to the mess".
Then again, most of those Google products are free. Apple products, on the other hand, are not free, far from it; so it's amusing to see someone gloating about beta-testing overpriced products that look like KDE circa 2002 on their own time while the company is shoveling billions in offshore bank accounts.
The downside is a higher risk - the programmer has to be truly good, and understand the complete impact of any code change.
This is a very important point. Hundreds of commits is not an indicator of quality, it's an indicator of risk. Unfortunately nowadays developers are obsessed with unit tests; regression tests are not sexy enough.
Odds are that the next major bug in OpenSSL won't be a problem with variables or memory allocation; it will be a loophole found in the interaction between methods updated by different teams.
Slashdot Mirror
That jail must be very crowded with all the nigerian scammers and fake craigslist landlords who use hotmail to scam people.
I just checked the numbers. The US Army is half the size of China's army, but for some reason 3x more expensive.
Funny enough, US Army uniforms are made in China so part of the US military budget actually ends up financing the Chinese army.
Lately I was reading the Invasion America series by Vaughn Heppner (https://www.goodreads.com/series/106530-invasion-america) and it left me with this idea that it's before a great army is needed that it can be built and organized. In those books a natural disaster left many countries with food shortage so they attack America who happens to have a lot of intact farmland, and the army is not big enough to protect it.
I think the problem at the moment is not the size of the army; it's the lack of innovation in its methods and policies. Basically the army is still following principles enacted in the 1800s by Von Clausewitz; this makes the army a great invasion force but very clumsy in every other aspect of warfare.
And innovation does not mean selling tanks to buy supercomputers for the NSA. It means figuring out better ways to protect the country in the physical and virtual worlds.
Decreasing the size of the army would be a good thing, as we're spending far too much fucking money on it.
You must be one of those people who think police is useless because they never got mugged.
Discredit him? Hilarious. Obama could cut the size of the army that protects the country against foreign invaders and increase the powers of the people who spy on American citizens and the people who voted for him twice would still worship him, call him a savior and think that he is protecting their freedom better than the republicans. His marketing team is as good as Apple's.
Bing seems like a modern incarnation of Altavista
Altavista is now powered by Bing so the loop is complete!
since when can one do anything that is both useful and geoblocked at phone modem data rates?
1973
Google is hell-bent on making a magic textbox that "does everything" but that forces people to use additional keywords like "near" or "loc", which basically transforms the "single textbox" in a poorly implemented command-line. This is bad UX, plain and simple.
You're arguing that the command line is a bad UI? On slashdot?
No, I'm saying that the Google search box is a bad UI. That's not the same thing.
To get that single textbox you force people to filter their query with keywords that have nothing to do with the topic they are interested into: "loc", "site", "near", etc. That's the equivalent of putting a single buzzer on a multi-tenant building and forcing visitors to buzz multiple times following an arbitrary pattern to reach a specific tenant because the architect believe a single buzzer is prettier.
Thanks. Your attempt at astroturfing is the best laugh I've had today.
Using "astroturfing" in this context is not only a weak insult, it is also a contribution to the bastardization of the word, which is unfortunate because like parents who claim that their kid is a victim of cyber-bullying because nobody "Liked" a link he posted on Facebook you are making it a little more difficult to discuss actual occurrences of an undesirable behavior.
When you think that a person has a bias regarding a specific technology or company, please use the proper term, such as "fanboi" or "mvp".
If your grandma lives in the USA, you could use screen sharing to watch Hulu during those 2 free hours per month. Or you could ask her to point her webcam towards the tv screen and watch high-quality American tv (like Keeping Up With the Kardashians) live, as long as she does not change the channel.
For some reason you don't want her to know what you are watching? No problem, here is what you could do
1) ask her to setup Dial-Up networking on her Windows XP machine
2) use dial-up over Skype to access her internet connection
3) gain access to US online services in the comfort of your non-NSA surveilled residence
With those 2 hours of free Skype per month, on dial-up you could probably buffer the first 3 or 4 minutes of a HD tv show episode. FOR FREE!
Are you kidding?
Every time I've ever used Bing to find something, unless it's quite literally things like the frontpage of some project that I search the name of, I can never find it.
It happens sometimes but Bing has improved a lot lately. The "search within" feature is interesting. Try to search for Slashdot on both engines you will see the difference.
Also Bing maps is immensely superior for proximity search, and with the business name / location split it's more convenient than Google maps, especially when the business name contains a different city name (like Chicago Joe's).
Google is hell-bent on making a magic textbox that "does everything" but that forces people to use additional keywords like "near" or "loc", which basically transforms the "single textbox" in a poorly implemented command-line. This is bad UX, plain and simple.
If you didn't get what Redmancometh said, then you're on the wrong site.
I didn't get what he meant by "Whyd"; since according to you I'm on the wrong site I tried whyd.com and I'm even more confused because I have no idea why there is a picture of Moriarty listening to music with unplugged headphones on the home page.
And don't get me on to Microsoft's "if you aren't a corporate we don't give a shit" support.
Clearly you never tried submitting a ticket in Office365. Within minutes someone is calling or writing back. Obviously at first it's junior helpdesk people but they actually try to solve the problem and if they can't they escalate themselves.
And that's not only for Fortune 500 companies. You get that same service with a $5/month account. They figured out that a lot of people will turn to Office365 to replace their IT team so they do a good job with support for every customer. Unfortunately this is not the case with other services or products at Microsoft, like Azure, where you have to pay for support.
Meanwhile if you have a problem with Google Docs for Business, you have access to community support and to a public blog where latest udpates about major incidents are posted.
For example, the ability to test hypotheses and perform quantitative reasoning would come in handy to many people working jobs unrelated to hamburgers and fries.
If you ask most employers, those skills come from a MBA not a physics degree. That's how the world works.
There is a very limited field of applications for physics, and most of this kind of work is actually done in countries like India and China where scientists are a dime a dozen.
I'm not saying a scientist in North America is doomed to be unemployed, far from it, but a degree in physics is like a degree in English lit, or art history, or religion studies: a passport to work in an unrelated field, at best. Art history people end up in HR, English lit in marketing or HR, and physics people in IT.
Unless they aim for a lifetime in academia, people who register in those dead end programs should instead get a head start and study in a field where they are likely to find employment. Spending thousands of dollars for a meaningless degree is only a way to scream at the potential employers that you have poor judgement.
You can pretty much do with it anything you can do with a physics degree.
So many options: teaching *physics, writing books used by *physics teachers, editing *physics books before they are sold to *physics teachers, and working for Elon Musk, following or followed by a stint at NASA. Real jacks of all trades, those *physics people.
Yes, we all get that in the Mad Men era it was all about white males (non-Jewish) and everything else was second-class. But things have evolved and it's not because of idiots fighting yesterday's battles.
Those people look at existing ratios and make the conclusion that the culture or leadership is somehow wrong. This is bullshit.
Why don't they look at the gender ratio at Curves or at the ABWA. Those places thrive on sexist policy and nobody says a thing, but gay bars catering to a specific subset of the gay community (bears/cubs) and old taverns for men only are the target of public outcry and lawsuits. It's the same with race; who would put "White-owned company" on their website? Total hypocrisy.
no citation to support your point?
When you say "we", who do you mean? Did you get elected as a spokesperson for all the idiots waiting in line at the Apple store when the company releases the same product over and over again, or are you just too insecure to make comments as an individual? Or is it both?
As for the secluded shack in the woods: I can't go back there, I sold it to a bunch of Apple fanbois who are convinced that the civilized world died with Steve Jobs. The market price for this kind of sack skyrocketed when the iPhone 5C was released.
Each passanger would have to be packed in metal armature, alternatively plasma armature can be used but that can leave some burns on the passanger. There may be some problems with structural integrity of load (liquidification) which can be bypassed by shock freezing (Han Solo).
Clearly you have never experienced an elevator ride in China. In some cases I'm sure that if passengers were to synchronize their breathing the ones in front would be crushed to death.
Put as many Gs as you want on that elevator, people won't move unless you put a coat of K-Y on the walls, in which case they will move as a team.
I suppose you don't vote either. After all, if the country really valued your input they'd compensate you for time spent evaluating candidates, just like you would be for time spent interviewing potential employees. Nevermind that you could benefit from influencing the result of the election (in an abstract sense).
Of course I vote. And voting does influence the result of an election (to some extent). One gets to choose if government policy will be influenced by the agro/financial/insurance lobbies or by the energy/military lobbies. The good thing is that lobbyists are good at marketing, so instead of being shipped to a foreign country to take over their oil and destroy their infrastructure so American companies can get juicy reconstruction contracts, one is "fighting the war on terror", and instead of being asked to pay more taxes to finance a program that forces expensive insurance down the throat of small business owners, one is "contributing to an universal healthcare program".
That my friend is called Freedom, and if you disagree with it the FBI will kick down your door at night and drag your ass to a secret jail, and if you ever get the chance to call someone while in jail the discussion will be recorded by the NSA and later wikileaked by russian spies and crossdressers.
No. Google engineers call their products "beta" so users can't complain too loudly about bugs. That's like those people who spend hours cleaning their house before guests arrive and then say "please don't pay attention to the mess".
Then again, most of those Google products are free. Apple products, on the other hand, are not free, far from it; so it's amusing to see someone gloating about beta-testing overpriced products that look like KDE circa 2002 on their own time while the company is shoveling billions in offshore bank accounts.
You can use another partition for the beta.
Does that work for Slashdot as well?
Booo
those invited testers paid nothing to be download, test, and evaluate OS X betas.
You mean: those invited testers WERE paid nothing to download, test, and evaluate OS X betas.
Typically when a client wants me to test his product I'm getting paid. But I value my time and expertise (so do my clients), so YMMV.
A lot better than Evernote, and now it's free.
http://www.onenote.com/
The downside is a higher risk - the programmer has to be truly good, and understand the complete impact of any code change.
This is a very important point. Hundreds of commits is not an indicator of quality, it's an indicator of risk. Unfortunately nowadays developers are obsessed with unit tests; regression tests are not sexy enough.
Odds are that the next major bug in OpenSSL won't be a problem with variables or memory allocation; it will be a loophole found in the interaction between methods updated by different teams.