But there comes a point where most scientists will say 'enough now, let's move on'; why should we keep rehashing the same arguments over and over?
The reason there's so much contention is because the science in question is being used as a justification for a call to action that may very likely have a significant real-world economic impact. That's very different than many other sorts of scientific theories which have little real-world consequence, or are mostly of interest only to scientists. People keep saying "the science is settled!", but when has that ever been a mantra in the scientific world before? The reason people desperately wish for the science to be "settled" is so that we can now move on to the "action" which will prevent the supposed climate disaster that may be looming in the future, as envisioned by this author.
There's a huge amount of scientific data and research out there, and nearly all the conclusions reached about climate change require a very significant amount of predictive modeling and interpretation. It's unlike many other scientific phenomenon which can be repeated and proven in a lab. Here's the kicker though... modelling the planet's climate to any accurate degree in the long term seems a bit unrealistic, given the relative complexity of an entire planet's ecosystem*.
We can look at general patterns and try to extrapolate future directions, and hypothesize about what might be causing them, but there's no way to test those hypothesis, because obviously we don't have an alternate universe Earth to make changes to and observe the resulting effect. As such, I don't believe that theories of climate change can ever really be "settled", because there's no way to prove or disprove them. We have exactly one Earth on which we can conduct global experiments, but anyone familiar with the scientific method knows you need to repeat experiments in order to validate them.
In other words, we can't measure our actions against a known baseline in order to compare the effect of those actions. That means we can never really know how much of any climate change is due to our actions and how much may be naturally occurring. We can only make guesses and create hypothesis based on what data we have. The longer we study and make predictions with our models any hypothesis, the better chance we have of making them more accurate, but "long" is a loaded term when you're dealing with geological time compared to a human lifetime.
Honestly, I'd call myself somewhat "agnostic" regarding AGW, in that I don't consider myself enough of an expert to be able to say either way. A lot of scientists are saying there's something there, and I think we should probably pay attention, but with this caveat - scientists are people too, and no one, not even scientists, are immune from their own biases and agendas. Given the economic ramifications of taking action at a global level to reduce carbon levels will have serious consequences, this critical skepticism shouldn't be dismissed lightly.
I'm generally a proponent of anything that will reduce our dependence of fossil fuels and reduce our carbon footprint. There are a LOT of good reasons, not just environmental, for doing so. But I think it's probably a bad idea to panic and waste money on technologies that are not yet ready to supplant current, proven systems. Let's keep moving forward at a reasonable pace. Look at it from a very pragmatic standpoint: if we push our economies too hard in a rush for green technologies, there will be a lot more push-back against further development, and may end up hurting more than helping. In a robust economy, however, I think people will be more willing to listen when they're not worried about whether they'll be able to make their next house payment, or even have a job. It's a bit hard to focus on climate issues in that sort of scenario.
* Did you seriously just compare predictive modeling of an entire planet's weather patterns decades or even centuries into the future to "1 + 1 = 2"?
You can probably find 2000 people that declare Kermit the Frog to be their personal savior. It's a statistical blip that essentially rounds down to zero. However, Star Wars is incredibly popular. So, no, that seems about the right proportional difference between fans playing a joke on the census takers and the genuine oddballs.
Russia and China were happy because Snowden embarrassed the US government, with whom they're not exactly on the friendliest terms with. That perspective is important. They don't give a shit if he's a patriot or not, but they'll call him one if it means pouring salt in the US gov's wounds.
From my perspective, Snowden more or less took a bullet for the entire country's right to privacy, and from what I could see, did so because of his principles. Still, no one can look inside someone else's heart. All I can see is that he had everything to lose and nothing to gain by what he did. That means he's either insane or incredibly principled, and he doesn't strike me as an insane sort.
"Wrong" and "illegal" are not necessarily synonymous. For those of us living in the US (as in most democracies), I think most of the time they coincide reasonably well. That's the entire point of our legal system, of course - to codify and enforce societal mores and pass judgment on those that break from them.
Governments, however, are made up of people, and people have a penchant for pushing limits and boundaries, or ignoring rules when it suits them, or outright breaking them when it's more convenient to do so. I don't think the NSA does what they do maliciously for the most part - most of them probably really do want to catch bad guys who wish to do the US harm. I do, however, think the way the NSA is going about it is both unconstitutional and wrong. Snowden apparently thought so too, and so had to make a decision to break laws for what he considered to be the greater good. Bear in mind this was *after* he had tried to go through legitimate channels.
The fact that, even after public disclosure, the program is continuing demonstrates the futility of working from within to stop the mass surveillance. The government simply doesn't see it as an abuse of power at all. Unfortunately, apparently a significant portion of our population either doesn't care or thinks the wiretapping is fine. So, in terms of "right" or "wrong", as defined by public mores, this probably lands in a decidedly gray area.
BTW, when you say "You have no proof that he didn't take money from anyone, or that he didn't give copies of the documents to anyone in secret.", that's an argument you could make about anyone at any time. It's impossible to prove a negative, of course. Instead, show me any sort of proof that Snowden benefited from his revelations in any way at all (other than notoriety, which is fame that sane people don't want to have), and I'll re-think my position. It's hard to argue that he's in any way better off than if he had simply clammed up about what he saw.
As long as the issue gets fixed, I don't care if the master plan for Windows 10 was handed down to them by the Freemasons in a bid to tip the balance of power in the ongoing secret war against the Illuminati, both of whom the Catholic Church are quite cleverly pitting against each other in order to weaken and ultimately topple it's centuries old rivals in an epic bid for world domination.
Or maybe Microsoft just got a lot of feedback and decided to fix the problem.
Not surprising about this post, or that it's modded insightful. After all, if anyone bother to read TFA, they'd see that Microsoft is already implementing user-requested changes. But hey, don't let facts ruin a good MS bashing.
Animation for switching desktops. One of the pieces of feedback that you gave us was that it was hard to know when you were switching desktops. We addressed your feedback by adding an animation to make it clear that you are switching. Check it out by creating some new desktops and moving between them.
Because it's been displayed prominently in every Windows "Edit" menu for the past twenty years or so?
In fairness to Microsoft, I'm not sure how one would convey those particular shortcuts to users visually. Maybe they should be shown as part of the right click context menus from the title bar?
I think it's actually working, as they seem to actually be working on things that people are asking for. Testing on a very broad scale makes a lot of sense for a Windows release, since they obviously don't have that "Apple magic" which seems to be able to intuit what people want before they ask for it. You might as well instead let people give real feedback on small, incremental changes (and apparently they've been talking to their business customers very early in the process). It's a lot less sexy, but it's fundamentally pretty sound.
Of course, they're still stubbornly refusing to bring back Aero, which a lot of people really want. I don't particularly need a specific theme back, but I still think the flat & square look is a ridiculous designer-forced fad, and hopefully we'll see the end of it soon. I'm not going to update my Mac mini to Yosemite until I have to because Apple is drinking the same damn Kool-Aid at the moment.
I think backtracking on that particular theme is a bit dicey for them, though, because many of their internal applications bought into that ridiculous theme as well, so I think it would be problematic for too many egos to toss the "modern" theme too quickly. Microsoft Visual Studio is a good example where they jumped into that sort of theming whole hog, pissed off all their users, and are slowing backtracking away from their original designs and more towards VS2010, which most people seemed to really like.
Make no mistake, Microsoft is the same old same old. The only reason they're listening to their users is because their users flipped them the bird, financially speaking, after seeing Windows 8, and they can't afford to piss people off too much or they'll really start looking seriously for alternatives. One good thing about corporations is that they're entirely predictable when faced with the threat of declining revenues: they suddenly become very customer-centric.
No, I'll just agree with you. I own two Intel 120GB drives that have been running solidly for years. One is on my main programming workstation, so it gets pounded on daily, and the other is on my digital audio workstation. It's hard to extrapolate from small samples, but I went with the same brand as my former employer did when they installed SSDs, and I haven't been disappointed. Since the market has changed significantly from several years ago, I couldn't honestly tell someone that they're still the best - just that they were almost certainly so several years ago. However, it may very well be the case that Intel is still king of reliability.
And also, seriously... SSDs have been on the market for a while now, and companies are STILL getting the wear-leveling algorithm wrong? That's one of the most crucial components of an SSD. We saw a rash of problems like this with early SSDs, which was a little more excusable since the tech was brand new for just about everyone. This is simply poor QA, or at least a refusal to acknowledge or fix what QA actually found, which probably happens more often than anyone would like to admit.
My computer has had CPU and GPU cycles to burn for the past decade, and while my machines are typically reasonably powered, they're not exactly considered monsters either. For all the complaints I hear about wasting cycles, I have yet to see OS-level effects or window animations seriously slow down my computer in any measurable way, even on specialized workstations I optimize for performance, like my digital audio workstation.
Animation actually has a real purpose in terms of UI design. For instance, an animation between a window in it's normal state and the minimized state is not just aesthetically pleasing, but helps the user to mentally connect those windowed positions, making it less likely for people to be momentarily confused about where their window disappeared to. Moreover, people generally like eye candy, and they like to be able to customize their system. It simply serves to make people more comfortable with the OS environment, but I'd argue that's actually important of any tech product intended for the masses as well.
Adding animations or some virtual gloss doesn't devalue an operating system and turn it into a tech toy, nor does making a product boring and dull enhance it's functionality in any way.
I think most people would agree that this is either mild trolling or bad humor (and I do hope the mods read enough of the thread to realize it was done to made a point). I think most reasonable people would agree that it's not at the level that merits prosecution. Obviously we're going to have problems if every rude person on the internet was arrested. I also think most people would agree that a very real line is crossed once you threaten me with physical violence or sexual assault, or if you tracked my real name down and started sending me nasty e-mails to my personal account, or if you made disgusting photoshopped images of my kids and posted them online.
People tend to get a bit squeamish about subjectivity in the legal system, but seems like the legal world is a pretty gray area, because it's dealing with human behavior and all the vagaries related to that. Clear-cut rules can be a double-edged sword, as we've found out with "no tolerance" policies at schools when we hear about kids getting suspended for writing a story about shooting a neighbor's dog with a gun, or getting in trouble for not having a proper nutritionally-balance government-approved lunch.
Enforcement of nearly every single law in the world requires some sort of subjective judgment. That's why we have human judges and juries to help decide these things - at least matters of any real significance, like criminal matters. What's the difference between first degree murder, second degree murder, or manslaughter? All very subjective factors. This is no different.
There are legitimate arguments to be made against this sort of law, but I think most people wouldn't find it hard to recognize legitimate and malicious trolling.
The only reason you think you need them in native apps is because you're used to them.
I'd love to know why replacing something that is functional and 100% understood by anyone who uses a computer in favor of a new design which doesn't clearly convey its intent is a good thing. Designers have also been wringing their hands over the "save" icon for years, because it's a floppy, and no one uses floppies anymore. But everyone already knows and understands that symbol outside of what its actual original meaning was (and if not, they learn it by simple association), and so there's absolutely no need to change it except that designers think it needs changing. We'd end up with a completely different arbitrary symbol with zero benefit, except that designers can now feel smug after inflicting a giant headache upon the world by forcing everyone to relearn something they already knew.
I don't consider myself a reactionary, but this insane drive to remove buttons and borders is actually hurting functionality. I'm fine with making buttons look less like beveled aluminum, but I really think this trend of playing mystery meat navigation (remember when that was pointed out as a bad design decision) has gone too far. Sorry, I still think the new "modern" design aesthetic is damned ugly. Even worse, in some cases, usability takes second fiddle to those aesthetics.
Is it the end of the world? No. Will I get used to it? Well, of course. But keep in mind that the operating system is, at it's core, a fairly mature technology at this point. The advances we see are largely UI-related or providing somewhat ancillary functionality. Since the "sleek, new look" is touted as a major feature, I'm going to evaluate it as such, and as a new feature, I find it woefully lacking.
At some point, I predict that someone high enough in the food chain is going to realize that the emperor has no clothes, and people actually like shine, gloss, transparency, gradients, and color schemes other than white on white (Apple) or kindergarten construction paper (Microsoft), and we'll see a return to those types of design elements.
Not every task has the same requirements, and thus, a single language can't possible be the "best" tool for every type of job. Languages are often created to solve very specific problems. From a technical perspective, any Turing-complete language can solve any programming problem, but certain languages are often much more elegant at expressing domain-specific programming solutions.
A programmer complaining that there isn't one single master language for programming is like a carpenter complaining that he has a box full of tools instead of one tool that can do it all. It's much better to have multiple tools that excel at what they were specifically designed to do rather than a single tool that does a mediocre job at everything.
I've been programming C++ for almost 20 years and C# (part time) for about 7, and I'd agree with your general assessment about productivity. If you don't meet the requirements for using C++, you should absolutely be using C# or a higher-level language. It's not only the language that's easier to use - the.NET framework has a lot of really useful functionality and is far less obtuse than older APIs like the Windows native API (although that's a pretty low bar to hurdle).
If you need maximum performance, seamless interoperability with C and other C++ APIs, and excellent platform portability, then you use C++. C++ 11/14 don't really affect the language's use case a significant amount, in my opinion. It just makes things a whole lot nicer for those who would still be using C++ even if it was still stuck at C++ 98 because of the core language characteristics and ecosystem available. Some developers are coming back to C++ because many of the predictions about native-equivalent performance of managed languages really never panned out, at least in non-contrived real-world examples. A lot of us, though, like in the videogame industry, simply never left.
My guess is that C++ is rapidly evolving because of the renewed interest in it due to it's performance characteristics, not the other way around. Who knows for sure, though...?
I've heard about this "overloaded operator" problem a number of times. I've been using C++ for almost 20 years now. Do you know how many times I've been bitten by crazy nonsense happening under the cover of an operator overload? Zero. Nada. It's never ever happened to me in practice, and I've worked with a variety of codebase quality. I'm a sample of one, of course, and therefore can't extrapolate out to all use cases, but still a sample of one who's been using the language a really long time now. If it was really such a problem, you'd think I'd have actually experienced said problem at least once at some point.
Maybe it's a problem if people do really horrible things in operator overloads. But come on - just don't do that! Why the hell would someone write a database transaction as an operator overload, for instance? That would be insanely bad practice. It's not something you can do accidentally, like forgetting to free some memory. It's a deliberate, very bad design decision, and you're blaming the language? It's like blaming a kitchen knife for slicing your fingers if you don't treat it with the proper care and respect.
C++ has plenty of things wrong with it as a language, and it's most definitely not suited to every programmer or every programming task. Operator overloading has never even made the list, as far as I'm concerned.
If you're typing the name of the program, of course there's little difference, except that Windows 8 covers your current workspace completely, yet doesn't even give you any visual indication that you can immediately start typing. This is endemic of the entire Windows 8 experience. There are no visual cues for *many* of the important things you have to do, and that's just a horrible design for a form factor with lots of real estate and a highly accurate pointing device.
I personally think the start menu is simply easier to use for a mouse user, especially when you don't remember exactly the name of what you're looking for (this can happen for rarely used programs or documentation, for example), because everything is logically grouped. You simply walk up the menu tree until you find what you're looking for and click it. Frequently used programs are pinned to the taskbar or perhaps populate the desktop.
However, it's a bit more than that as well. The start menu provides a logical anchor for nearly everything you can possibly do on a Windows machine. That's really, really important. There are shortcuts, but if you don't remember those shortcuts, you can simply click on the start menu and find it by browsing through the tree structure. It was an unbelievably stupid mistake, because MS completely discounted the psychological factor of removing a safe, always-visible fallback method for users to do whatever they needed to do on their computer.
From a design perspective, the Windows 8 start screen (well, the modern UI in general, actually) was also extremely intrusive for the user as well. This is fine for small form factors, because there's not enough screen real estate to do otherwise, but completely unacceptable for people with extremely large form-factor screens. You're unnecessarily blocking all other relevant information that the user is currently processing. After all, this isn't a phone, and so there's a high probability the user is working on or monitoring something else in another window (or many windows), and by removing those from view, you're creating a discontinuity in the workflow. The process is simply visually uncomfortable for large form factors.
I really, really hope this fascination of the global design community with "flat and ugly" disappears soon. Seriously, what the hell is wrong with gloss, shine, transparency and gradients? I actually *like* those things, and every UI designer seems to be tossing those out and saying "Nonono, you don't actually want that. Here's what hip and trendy, even if you don't like the way it looks! It's modern! It's clean! It's the FUTURE!"
I'm actually fine with the anti-skeumorphic trend in general. After all, there's no purpose in a book-organization app to look like a wood-paneled bookshelf. That's just silly and needless over-design. But there are some design elements that have evolved beyond their real-world counterparts. Designers keep wringing their hands about how we need to find a new "save" icon rather than a floppy. Guess what? No, we don't, because the entire world knows and understands that as a universal symbol now, even beyond it's roots as a real world device.
Likewise, the visual language of a button are well known. We probably press 100x more virtual buttons than real, physical buttons in our daily lives at this point, and so the beveled button is a design metaphor that doesn't need changing. I don't care if designers think it's ugly. It provides a 100% unambiguous declaration as to what it is and how it can be used. Designers have decided to strip that away and simply replace it with a clickable region and simple text (see Windows 8). This provides no clue to the user that the button is any different than a label, and actually sacrifices usability on the alter of design, which is inexcusable.
Gold rushes / landgrabs are, by definition, unsustainable. Those coming late to the party (which is most) get very little. This is reality. In the early days of phone app development, a bunch of people made a very early killing with very modest products. Those salad days are at an end. The novelty has worn off for the public, and a large percentage of people have smartphones now, with all the apps they need already purchased or acquired for free.
If the market is flooded with similar apps, then developers simply can't develop an app that does the same thing as twenty other apps and expect it to make a pile of money. It's just not realistic. It doesn't work that way in any other market. Why should app stores be magically immune to market forces?
Moreover, you can't rely on an app store to do your own marketing for you. When there are a dozen new apps hitting the store every day, exactly how much promotion do you think the store can realistically do for you for free? This really only worked near the beginning of the rush, when there weren't so many apps as today.
It sucks for those developers. Hell, I may be in the same boat in about half a year. I'm releasing my product that I've invested both years and a significant amount of my savings in, and I have no idea if I'll see any return on my investment at all. When it comes down to it, you need to create a product that the market isn't already saturated with, or else you need to build a product so much better that people beat a path to your door for it. Or you need a unique spin that draws people to your product.
In the long-term, there really are no shortcuts for most of us. Counting on "lottery" type success is for suckers.
Well, yeah, that's unfortunately true. I feel for you folks in the southern states - it's a ridiculous situation. Of course, it's a little harder to walk across the border from Africa, and the incubation period fortunately precludes a long, roundabout trip.
Regardless of the merits of that suggestion... you do realize you need a passport to enter this country, and that this passport lists your country of origin and every country you've traveled to, right?
I am having difficulty understanding how giving opposing views on an issue or news item in any way hinders free speech. If anything it enhances it giving the intended audience a broader understanding of an issue. Without it echo chambers such as Fox News and MSNBC exist in a vacuum polarizing even further their respective audience.
It's pretty simple. That law was, in essence, the government mandating how to distribute political speech, and defining what's "fair" or "opposing views". Even if the intentions are good, it's in direct contradiction to the first amendment, at least from my perspective. Why should we give the government control over our media's political content (especially nowadays, with nearly unlimited mass media capabilities)? That seems incredibly dangerous to me. The entire point of the first amendment is to protect all speech, especially including political speech. The fact that support for/against the fairness doctrine tends to be split along political lines tells you that this is not just about "fairness" either, but about control of political speech one may or may not agree with.
Your statement about how Fox News or MSNBC are polarizing their respective audience leads into dangerous territory - that of the government making value judgments regarding political speech and acting on it. You're suggesting the government pass a law to better educate people to... what, fall in line with what you (or technically, someone from a government bureaucracy) would consider more reasonable opinions? You don't see this as a problem? Who are they to consider what is reasonable or not an "echo chamber" in terms of political discourse? That's the danger I see in the fairness doctrine.
Let me ask you a different question. Do you support the government's mass collection of personal data from the internet, or their desire to embed a backdoor in all smartphones (the "magic golden key"?). If not, why not? The government is only using that data to find terrorists or go after bad guys, right?
It's absolutely the same issue to me. Both issues are about encroachment of the government on personal liberties for the "greater good", and neither is justified.
Honestly, I don't believe it's possible - or at best, unbelievably difficult - for someone to present information without bias. In terms of political coverage especially, I'd wager the chances dwindle down much closer to zero. If you don't notice a bias, then you're either not paying attention, or perhaps are in general agreement with the bias being shown, and as such, it tends to appear "neutral" to you (i.e. 'hey, that's just common sense, right?').
There's bias in choosing how to label things in stories, and there's bias in which stories are reported and which stories are not. For instance, if you typically only report scandals of political opponents but not your own favored party, even if you're only reporting the facts, there's still a bias there. I do think the bias in reporting used to be less overt than today, but I think it's always been there to some extent. Human nature doesn't change so easily.
The fairness doctrine perhaps made sense in a day when our information choices were limited (I'd still argue against it in principle, as I think it stomps all over the first amendment). But we live in the information age, and no one can seriously claim that a person doesn't have access to a wide range of differing political commentary from a vast network of different sources - not just traditional media, but new media as well. Much of it shallow and repeated, true, but we have access to much more of the raw information in more of a peer to peer fashion, and don't have to rely on what the traditional media is reporting.
I'm not quite old enough to remember the Vietnam and Watergate years, but I certainly do remember the pre-internet media days. For all it's faults, I'll take today's information age any day, even if the mass media has fallen quite a bit in stature and relevance. What we've gained, IMO, more than makes up for it.
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But there comes a point where most scientists will say 'enough now, let's move on'; why should we keep rehashing the same arguments over and over?
The reason there's so much contention is because the science in question is being used as a justification for a call to action that may very likely have a significant real-world economic impact. That's very different than many other sorts of scientific theories which have little real-world consequence, or are mostly of interest only to scientists. People keep saying "the science is settled!", but when has that ever been a mantra in the scientific world before? The reason people desperately wish for the science to be "settled" is so that we can now move on to the "action" which will prevent the supposed climate disaster that may be looming in the future, as envisioned by this author.
There's a huge amount of scientific data and research out there, and nearly all the conclusions reached about climate change require a very significant amount of predictive modeling and interpretation. It's unlike many other scientific phenomenon which can be repeated and proven in a lab. Here's the kicker though... modelling the planet's climate to any accurate degree in the long term seems a bit unrealistic, given the relative complexity of an entire planet's ecosystem*.
We can look at general patterns and try to extrapolate future directions, and hypothesize about what might be causing them, but there's no way to test those hypothesis, because obviously we don't have an alternate universe Earth to make changes to and observe the resulting effect. As such, I don't believe that theories of climate change can ever really be "settled", because there's no way to prove or disprove them. We have exactly one Earth on which we can conduct global experiments, but anyone familiar with the scientific method knows you need to repeat experiments in order to validate them.
In other words, we can't measure our actions against a known baseline in order to compare the effect of those actions. That means we can never really know how much of any climate change is due to our actions and how much may be naturally occurring. We can only make guesses and create hypothesis based on what data we have. The longer we study and make predictions with our models any hypothesis, the better chance we have of making them more accurate, but "long" is a loaded term when you're dealing with geological time compared to a human lifetime.
Honestly, I'd call myself somewhat "agnostic" regarding AGW, in that I don't consider myself enough of an expert to be able to say either way. A lot of scientists are saying there's something there, and I think we should probably pay attention, but with this caveat - scientists are people too, and no one, not even scientists, are immune from their own biases and agendas. Given the economic ramifications of taking action at a global level to reduce carbon levels will have serious consequences, this critical skepticism shouldn't be dismissed lightly.
I'm generally a proponent of anything that will reduce our dependence of fossil fuels and reduce our carbon footprint. There are a LOT of good reasons, not just environmental, for doing so. But I think it's probably a bad idea to panic and waste money on technologies that are not yet ready to supplant current, proven systems. Let's keep moving forward at a reasonable pace. Look at it from a very pragmatic standpoint: if we push our economies too hard in a rush for green technologies, there will be a lot more push-back against further development, and may end up hurting more than helping. In a robust economy, however, I think people will be more willing to listen when they're not worried about whether they'll be able to make their next house payment, or even have a job. It's a bit hard to focus on climate issues in that sort of scenario.
* Did you seriously just compare predictive modeling of an entire planet's weather patterns decades or even centuries into the future to "1 + 1 = 2"?
You can probably find 2000 people that declare Kermit the Frog to be their personal savior. It's a statistical blip that essentially rounds down to zero. However, Star Wars is incredibly popular. So, no, that seems about the right proportional difference between fans playing a joke on the census takers and the genuine oddballs.
Russia thinks so. China does too.
Can you be a patriot to more than one country?
Russia and China were happy because Snowden embarrassed the US government, with whom they're not exactly on the friendliest terms with. That perspective is important. They don't give a shit if he's a patriot or not, but they'll call him one if it means pouring salt in the US gov's wounds.
From my perspective, Snowden more or less took a bullet for the entire country's right to privacy, and from what I could see, did so because of his principles. Still, no one can look inside someone else's heart. All I can see is that he had everything to lose and nothing to gain by what he did. That means he's either insane or incredibly principled, and he doesn't strike me as an insane sort.
"Wrong" and "illegal" are not necessarily synonymous. For those of us living in the US (as in most democracies), I think most of the time they coincide reasonably well. That's the entire point of our legal system, of course - to codify and enforce societal mores and pass judgment on those that break from them.
Governments, however, are made up of people, and people have a penchant for pushing limits and boundaries, or ignoring rules when it suits them, or outright breaking them when it's more convenient to do so. I don't think the NSA does what they do maliciously for the most part - most of them probably really do want to catch bad guys who wish to do the US harm. I do, however, think the way the NSA is going about it is both unconstitutional and wrong. Snowden apparently thought so too, and so had to make a decision to break laws for what he considered to be the greater good. Bear in mind this was *after* he had tried to go through legitimate channels.
The fact that, even after public disclosure, the program is continuing demonstrates the futility of working from within to stop the mass surveillance. The government simply doesn't see it as an abuse of power at all. Unfortunately, apparently a significant portion of our population either doesn't care or thinks the wiretapping is fine. So, in terms of "right" or "wrong", as defined by public mores, this probably lands in a decidedly gray area.
BTW, when you say "You have no proof that he didn't take money from anyone, or that he didn't give copies of the documents to anyone in secret.", that's an argument you could make about anyone at any time. It's impossible to prove a negative, of course. Instead, show me any sort of proof that Snowden benefited from his revelations in any way at all (other than notoriety, which is fame that sane people don't want to have), and I'll re-think my position. It's hard to argue that he's in any way better off than if he had simply clammed up about what he saw.
As long as the issue gets fixed, I don't care if the master plan for Windows 10 was handed down to them by the Freemasons in a bid to tip the balance of power in the ongoing secret war against the Illuminati, both of whom the Catholic Church are quite cleverly pitting against each other in order to weaken and ultimately topple it's centuries old rivals in an epic bid for world domination.
Or maybe Microsoft just got a lot of feedback and decided to fix the problem.
Either one is totally plausible.
Not surprising about this post, or that it's modded insightful. After all, if anyone bother to read TFA, they'd see that Microsoft is already implementing user-requested changes. But hey, don't let facts ruin a good MS bashing.
Animation for switching desktops. One of the pieces of feedback that you gave us was that it was hard to know when you were switching desktops. We addressed your feedback by adding an animation to make it clear that you are switching. Check it out by creating some new desktops and moving between them.
Because it's been displayed prominently in every Windows "Edit" menu for the past twenty years or so?
In fairness to Microsoft, I'm not sure how one would convey those particular shortcuts to users visually. Maybe they should be shown as part of the right click context menus from the title bar?
I think it's actually working, as they seem to actually be working on things that people are asking for. Testing on a very broad scale makes a lot of sense for a Windows release, since they obviously don't have that "Apple magic" which seems to be able to intuit what people want before they ask for it. You might as well instead let people give real feedback on small, incremental changes (and apparently they've been talking to their business customers very early in the process). It's a lot less sexy, but it's fundamentally pretty sound.
Of course, they're still stubbornly refusing to bring back Aero, which a lot of people really want. I don't particularly need a specific theme back, but I still think the flat & square look is a ridiculous designer-forced fad, and hopefully we'll see the end of it soon. I'm not going to update my Mac mini to Yosemite until I have to because Apple is drinking the same damn Kool-Aid at the moment.
I think backtracking on that particular theme is a bit dicey for them, though, because many of their internal applications bought into that ridiculous theme as well, so I think it would be problematic for too many egos to toss the "modern" theme too quickly. Microsoft Visual Studio is a good example where they jumped into that sort of theming whole hog, pissed off all their users, and are slowing backtracking away from their original designs and more towards VS2010, which most people seemed to really like.
Make no mistake, Microsoft is the same old same old. The only reason they're listening to their users is because their users flipped them the bird, financially speaking, after seeing Windows 8, and they can't afford to piss people off too much or they'll really start looking seriously for alternatives. One good thing about corporations is that they're entirely predictable when faced with the threat of declining revenues: they suddenly become very customer-centric.
No, I'll just agree with you. I own two Intel 120GB drives that have been running solidly for years. One is on my main programming workstation, so it gets pounded on daily, and the other is on my digital audio workstation. It's hard to extrapolate from small samples, but I went with the same brand as my former employer did when they installed SSDs, and I haven't been disappointed. Since the market has changed significantly from several years ago, I couldn't honestly tell someone that they're still the best - just that they were almost certainly so several years ago. However, it may very well be the case that Intel is still king of reliability.
And also, seriously... SSDs have been on the market for a while now, and companies are STILL getting the wear-leveling algorithm wrong? That's one of the most crucial components of an SSD. We saw a rash of problems like this with early SSDs, which was a little more excusable since the tech was brand new for just about everyone. This is simply poor QA, or at least a refusal to acknowledge or fix what QA actually found, which probably happens more often than anyone would like to admit.
My computer has had CPU and GPU cycles to burn for the past decade, and while my machines are typically reasonably powered, they're not exactly considered monsters either. For all the complaints I hear about wasting cycles, I have yet to see OS-level effects or window animations seriously slow down my computer in any measurable way, even on specialized workstations I optimize for performance, like my digital audio workstation.
Animation actually has a real purpose in terms of UI design. For instance, an animation between a window in it's normal state and the minimized state is not just aesthetically pleasing, but helps the user to mentally connect those windowed positions, making it less likely for people to be momentarily confused about where their window disappeared to. Moreover, people generally like eye candy, and they like to be able to customize their system. It simply serves to make people more comfortable with the OS environment, but I'd argue that's actually important of any tech product intended for the masses as well.
Adding animations or some virtual gloss doesn't devalue an operating system and turn it into a tech toy, nor does making a product boring and dull enhance it's functionality in any way.
I think most people would agree that this is either mild trolling or bad humor (and I do hope the mods read enough of the thread to realize it was done to made a point). I think most reasonable people would agree that it's not at the level that merits prosecution. Obviously we're going to have problems if every rude person on the internet was arrested. I also think most people would agree that a very real line is crossed once you threaten me with physical violence or sexual assault, or if you tracked my real name down and started sending me nasty e-mails to my personal account, or if you made disgusting photoshopped images of my kids and posted them online.
People tend to get a bit squeamish about subjectivity in the legal system, but seems like the legal world is a pretty gray area, because it's dealing with human behavior and all the vagaries related to that. Clear-cut rules can be a double-edged sword, as we've found out with "no tolerance" policies at schools when we hear about kids getting suspended for writing a story about shooting a neighbor's dog with a gun, or getting in trouble for not having a proper nutritionally-balance government-approved lunch.
Seriously, though... making fun of my handle? ;-)
Enforcement of nearly every single law in the world requires some sort of subjective judgment. That's why we have human judges and juries to help decide these things - at least matters of any real significance, like criminal matters. What's the difference between first degree murder, second degree murder, or manslaughter? All very subjective factors. This is no different.
There are legitimate arguments to be made against this sort of law, but I think most people wouldn't find it hard to recognize legitimate and malicious trolling.
The only reason you think you need them in native apps is because you're used to them.
I'd love to know why replacing something that is functional and 100% understood by anyone who uses a computer in favor of a new design which doesn't clearly convey its intent is a good thing. Designers have also been wringing their hands over the "save" icon for years, because it's a floppy, and no one uses floppies anymore. But everyone already knows and understands that symbol outside of what its actual original meaning was (and if not, they learn it by simple association), and so there's absolutely no need to change it except that designers think it needs changing. We'd end up with a completely different arbitrary symbol with zero benefit, except that designers can now feel smug after inflicting a giant headache upon the world by forcing everyone to relearn something they already knew.
I don't consider myself a reactionary, but this insane drive to remove buttons and borders is actually hurting functionality. I'm fine with making buttons look less like beveled aluminum, but I really think this trend of playing mystery meat navigation (remember when that was pointed out as a bad design decision) has gone too far. Sorry, I still think the new "modern" design aesthetic is damned ugly. Even worse, in some cases, usability takes second fiddle to those aesthetics.
Is it the end of the world? No. Will I get used to it? Well, of course. But keep in mind that the operating system is, at it's core, a fairly mature technology at this point. The advances we see are largely UI-related or providing somewhat ancillary functionality. Since the "sleek, new look" is touted as a major feature, I'm going to evaluate it as such, and as a new feature, I find it woefully lacking.
At some point, I predict that someone high enough in the food chain is going to realize that the emperor has no clothes, and people actually like shine, gloss, transparency, gradients, and color schemes other than white on white (Apple) or kindergarten construction paper (Microsoft), and we'll see a return to those types of design elements.
Not every task has the same requirements, and thus, a single language can't possible be the "best" tool for every type of job. Languages are often created to solve very specific problems. From a technical perspective, any Turing-complete language can solve any programming problem, but certain languages are often much more elegant at expressing domain-specific programming solutions.
A programmer complaining that there isn't one single master language for programming is like a carpenter complaining that he has a box full of tools instead of one tool that can do it all. It's much better to have multiple tools that excel at what they were specifically designed to do rather than a single tool that does a mediocre job at everything.
I've been programming C++ for almost 20 years and C# (part time) for about 7, and I'd agree with your general assessment about productivity. If you don't meet the requirements for using C++, you should absolutely be using C# or a higher-level language. It's not only the language that's easier to use - the .NET framework has a lot of really useful functionality and is far less obtuse than older APIs like the Windows native API (although that's a pretty low bar to hurdle).
If you need maximum performance, seamless interoperability with C and other C++ APIs, and excellent platform portability, then you use C++. C++ 11/14 don't really affect the language's use case a significant amount, in my opinion. It just makes things a whole lot nicer for those who would still be using C++ even if it was still stuck at C++ 98 because of the core language characteristics and ecosystem available. Some developers are coming back to C++ because many of the predictions about native-equivalent performance of managed languages really never panned out, at least in non-contrived real-world examples. A lot of us, though, like in the videogame industry, simply never left.
My guess is that C++ is rapidly evolving because of the renewed interest in it due to it's performance characteristics, not the other way around. Who knows for sure, though...?
I've heard about this "overloaded operator" problem a number of times. I've been using C++ for almost 20 years now. Do you know how many times I've been bitten by crazy nonsense happening under the cover of an operator overload? Zero. Nada. It's never ever happened to me in practice, and I've worked with a variety of codebase quality. I'm a sample of one, of course, and therefore can't extrapolate out to all use cases, but still a sample of one who's been using the language a really long time now. If it was really such a problem, you'd think I'd have actually experienced said problem at least once at some point.
Maybe it's a problem if people do really horrible things in operator overloads. But come on - just don't do that! Why the hell would someone write a database transaction as an operator overload, for instance? That would be insanely bad practice. It's not something you can do accidentally, like forgetting to free some memory. It's a deliberate, very bad design decision, and you're blaming the language? It's like blaming a kitchen knife for slicing your fingers if you don't treat it with the proper care and respect.
C++ has plenty of things wrong with it as a language, and it's most definitely not suited to every programmer or every programming task. Operator overloading has never even made the list, as far as I'm concerned.
If you're typing the name of the program, of course there's little difference, except that Windows 8 covers your current workspace completely, yet doesn't even give you any visual indication that you can immediately start typing. This is endemic of the entire Windows 8 experience. There are no visual cues for *many* of the important things you have to do, and that's just a horrible design for a form factor with lots of real estate and a highly accurate pointing device.
I personally think the start menu is simply easier to use for a mouse user, especially when you don't remember exactly the name of what you're looking for (this can happen for rarely used programs or documentation, for example), because everything is logically grouped. You simply walk up the menu tree until you find what you're looking for and click it. Frequently used programs are pinned to the taskbar or perhaps populate the desktop.
However, it's a bit more than that as well. The start menu provides a logical anchor for nearly everything you can possibly do on a Windows machine. That's really, really important. There are shortcuts, but if you don't remember those shortcuts, you can simply click on the start menu and find it by browsing through the tree structure. It was an unbelievably stupid mistake, because MS completely discounted the psychological factor of removing a safe, always-visible fallback method for users to do whatever they needed to do on their computer.
From a design perspective, the Windows 8 start screen (well, the modern UI in general, actually) was also extremely intrusive for the user as well. This is fine for small form factors, because there's not enough screen real estate to do otherwise, but completely unacceptable for people with extremely large form-factor screens. You're unnecessarily blocking all other relevant information that the user is currently processing. After all, this isn't a phone, and so there's a high probability the user is working on or monitoring something else in another window (or many windows), and by removing those from view, you're creating a discontinuity in the workflow. The process is simply visually uncomfortable for large form factors.
I really, really hope this fascination of the global design community with "flat and ugly" disappears soon. Seriously, what the hell is wrong with gloss, shine, transparency and gradients? I actually *like* those things, and every UI designer seems to be tossing those out and saying "Nonono, you don't actually want that. Here's what hip and trendy, even if you don't like the way it looks! It's modern! It's clean! It's the FUTURE!"
I'm actually fine with the anti-skeumorphic trend in general. After all, there's no purpose in a book-organization app to look like a wood-paneled bookshelf. That's just silly and needless over-design. But there are some design elements that have evolved beyond their real-world counterparts. Designers keep wringing their hands about how we need to find a new "save" icon rather than a floppy. Guess what? No, we don't, because the entire world knows and understands that as a universal symbol now, even beyond it's roots as a real world device.
Likewise, the visual language of a button are well known. We probably press 100x more virtual buttons than real, physical buttons in our daily lives at this point, and so the beveled button is a design metaphor that doesn't need changing. I don't care if designers think it's ugly. It provides a 100% unambiguous declaration as to what it is and how it can be used. Designers have decided to strip that away and simply replace it with a clickable region and simple text (see Windows 8). This provides no clue to the user that the button is any different than a label, and actually sacrifices usability on the alter of design, which is inexcusable.
Gold rushes / landgrabs are, by definition, unsustainable. Those coming late to the party (which is most) get very little. This is reality. In the early days of phone app development, a bunch of people made a very early killing with very modest products. Those salad days are at an end. The novelty has worn off for the public, and a large percentage of people have smartphones now, with all the apps they need already purchased or acquired for free.
If the market is flooded with similar apps, then developers simply can't develop an app that does the same thing as twenty other apps and expect it to make a pile of money. It's just not realistic. It doesn't work that way in any other market. Why should app stores be magically immune to market forces?
Moreover, you can't rely on an app store to do your own marketing for you. When there are a dozen new apps hitting the store every day, exactly how much promotion do you think the store can realistically do for you for free? This really only worked near the beginning of the rush, when there weren't so many apps as today.
It sucks for those developers. Hell, I may be in the same boat in about half a year. I'm releasing my product that I've invested both years and a significant amount of my savings in, and I have no idea if I'll see any return on my investment at all. When it comes down to it, you need to create a product that the market isn't already saturated with, or else you need to build a product so much better that people beat a path to your door for it. Or you need a unique spin that draws people to your product.
In the long-term, there really are no shortcuts for most of us. Counting on "lottery" type success is for suckers.
Well, yeah, that's unfortunately true. I feel for you folks in the southern states - it's a ridiculous situation. Of course, it's a little harder to walk across the border from Africa, and the incubation period fortunately precludes a long, roundabout trip.
Regardless of the merits of that suggestion... you do realize you need a passport to enter this country, and that this passport lists your country of origin and every country you've traveled to, right?
I am having difficulty understanding how giving opposing views on an issue or news item in any way hinders free speech. If anything it enhances it giving the intended audience a broader understanding of an issue. Without it echo chambers such as Fox News and MSNBC exist in a vacuum polarizing even further their respective audience.
It's pretty simple. That law was, in essence, the government mandating how to distribute political speech, and defining what's "fair" or "opposing views". Even if the intentions are good, it's in direct contradiction to the first amendment, at least from my perspective. Why should we give the government control over our media's political content (especially nowadays, with nearly unlimited mass media capabilities)? That seems incredibly dangerous to me. The entire point of the first amendment is to protect all speech, especially including political speech. The fact that support for/against the fairness doctrine tends to be split along political lines tells you that this is not just about "fairness" either, but about control of political speech one may or may not agree with.
Your statement about how Fox News or MSNBC are polarizing their respective audience leads into dangerous territory - that of the government making value judgments regarding political speech and acting on it. You're suggesting the government pass a law to better educate people to... what, fall in line with what you (or technically, someone from a government bureaucracy) would consider more reasonable opinions? You don't see this as a problem? Who are they to consider what is reasonable or not an "echo chamber" in terms of political discourse? That's the danger I see in the fairness doctrine.
Let me ask you a different question. Do you support the government's mass collection of personal data from the internet, or their desire to embed a backdoor in all smartphones (the "magic golden key"?). If not, why not? The government is only using that data to find terrorists or go after bad guys, right?
It's absolutely the same issue to me. Both issues are about encroachment of the government on personal liberties for the "greater good", and neither is justified.
Honestly, I don't believe it's possible - or at best, unbelievably difficult - for someone to present information without bias. In terms of political coverage especially, I'd wager the chances dwindle down much closer to zero. If you don't notice a bias, then you're either not paying attention, or perhaps are in general agreement with the bias being shown, and as such, it tends to appear "neutral" to you (i.e. 'hey, that's just common sense, right?').
There's bias in choosing how to label things in stories, and there's bias in which stories are reported and which stories are not. For instance, if you typically only report scandals of political opponents but not your own favored party, even if you're only reporting the facts, there's still a bias there. I do think the bias in reporting used to be less overt than today, but I think it's always been there to some extent. Human nature doesn't change so easily.
The fairness doctrine perhaps made sense in a day when our information choices were limited (I'd still argue against it in principle, as I think it stomps all over the first amendment). But we live in the information age, and no one can seriously claim that a person doesn't have access to a wide range of differing political commentary from a vast network of different sources - not just traditional media, but new media as well. Much of it shallow and repeated, true, but we have access to much more of the raw information in more of a peer to peer fashion, and don't have to rely on what the traditional media is reporting.
I'm not quite old enough to remember the Vietnam and Watergate years, but I certainly do remember the pre-internet media days. For all it's faults, I'll take today's information age any day, even if the mass media has fallen quite a bit in stature and relevance. What we've gained, IMO, more than makes up for it.
Don't ask, don't tell?
Contextual ads need to be a little more prophetic and a little less "I sold you so."
The best one-liners are those that season a well-known truth with a sprinkling of humor. Good one!