Most corporations exist to earn a profit, and if you're the customer instead of a product, and if there's a healthy market, they at least have to compete for your business. Things tend to get screwed up when you're the product instead of a customer (when anything is *free* from a corporation, watch out), or when there's no real competition (cable/ISPs), then things tend to really go bad.
It also really depends on how they go about making that profit. Done well, it's a mutually beneficial transaction in which all parties involved can benefit. Done badly, it can certainly be exploitative and evil. I don't think it's a good idea to lump them all together any more than it is for people.
That really does explain a lot, huh? Yes, I get it that a logo is important, but damn... "Refresh the Mozilla brand experience"? I don't even know what that means.
Dear Mozilla: Too much navel-gazing, and not enough good software engineering and innovation. No one but you gives a crap about your "brand experience". In case you haven't noticed, you're becoming less relevant every day, and your logo is not the reason why.
To be fair, people worry about Facebook's influence and complain about Apple's lock-in as well. But more to the point, Google, as the world's leader in search and many other connected services, as well as the developer of the world's most popular mobile OS, does have a responsibility to NOT abuse their market position - at least in a way that will bring regulators down on them. Market leaders tend to get a bit of extra scrutiny in these matters, and rightly so, I think, due to their sheer influence and the potential for abuse in their respective markets.
I think "machine learning" is a much better term for the sorts of things being developed. For instance, Google algorithms being able to determine pictures of "dogs": Machine learning, not AI. Still, just because it's labeled incorrectly by the press, pundits, and marketers doesn't mean the work that's being done isn't impressive.
Self-driving cars will be what kills any real demand for "flying cars". Who cares how long the trip takes when you're not forced to keep your attention glued to the road?
I'd say half the work people do could be eliminated altogether, and few would care.
There's a hell of a lot of bureaucratic make-work that goes on in this world. Examples: Laws so complex only lawyers can understand them, or tax rules so complicated only CPAs can understand them. Result? You've got to hire lawyers and CPAs. Or, middle managers at large corporations or in government that just shuffle around, create more paperwork, and enforce internal rules that perhaps made sense to someone, somewhere, but now just inflict pain on people beneath them actually trying to get real work done.
And that doesn't even describe the fact that no one is truly productive throughout the entirety of a workday, with breaks that are stretched out a bit, or time spent daydreaming, or futzing around on Facebook when you're supposed to be working.
I fully expect we'll be able to create plenty of make-work that only humans are qualified to do in the foreseeable future.
It's called progress. Embrace it. "Personal computers" are dead.
We should start calling them "workstations" again, as I think that much better reflects their actual purpose these days. The new "personal computer" is a smartphone.
While I don't expect Google to realistically support every failed project forever, every product or service they kill reinforces the notion that "the cloud" simply means "services you rent which can be arbitrarily shut down at any time by the company who actually owns them."
There's nothing wrong with cloud-based services, as long as you go in with your eyes wide open to both the upsides AND the downsides. And be extra wary if you're not paying for a service and don't see an obvious revenue model.
Still, keep in mind that the FSF is two things: it's a legal non-profit organization with board members and a handful of paid employees, as well as a broader community of volunteers, enthusiasts, and supporters. While the latter is the organization that most people are affiliated with, the former means they still have the same legal obligations and responsibility as any other corporate employer.
That being the case, though, you make an interesting point, albeit indirectly:
Something happened, that much is clear, and it got back to Ms Rowe in some form that made her extremely angry.
Whatever happened here, Ms Rowe is not a first-hand witness to these accounts any more than we are. That doesn't automatically discredit the story, but doesn't do anything to actually confirm it either, unless we actually hear from one of those people themselves.
Bleh. Like you said, dubious. Apparently, the involved parties or first-hand witnesses have collectively decided to clam up / move on, so there's not much else for us to do either.
Yeah, same. I thought at first someone was taking a swipe at Slashdot, like: "Hey, this site sucks as news for nerds. Got a better one?"
I don't see any point in a watch as a pure timekeeping device, as someone else pointed out, I have a hard time NOT seeing the time wherever I look these days. Primary reason for wearing one these days seem to be: fashion, fitness, or nostalgia.
a word or phrase open to two interpretations, one of which is usually risqué or indecent.
I think perhaps you're being a bit intentionally obtuse, since it's obviously only works as a joke because of what's implied by using that term. No, it's not the end of the world or something to pillory Stallman for, but I think it's pretty tone-deaf to not even acknowledge the possibility that these sorts of jokes could make some women feel a bit uncomfortable or marginalized. And yes, incidentally, he specifically described "EMACS virgins" as women.
Granted, GP's quote also sounds like a lunatic rant, because I sure as hell don't want to hear about anyone's first sexual experience or sexual preferences in response to a sexist joke.
The FSF made a blanket statement denying the accusation, but I haven't seen anything more than that. So... that's all we have to go on. If this were a giant corporation everyone hated, like Comcast, would people be so equally quick to simply take a company's terse press release as proof of their innocence? Did they actually do any sort of serious internal investigation? They don't even say. Forgive me I'm a bit skeptical.
Then again, I have no idea who Leah Rowe is, or what kind of person she is. Maybe she's unstable or a liar, and just makes things up. Maybe she's telling the truth. Or maybe her perspective and mentality differs so much from the others at the FSF that the same facts are interpreted in completely opposite ways.
How do you tell who's telling the truth in this literal "he said / she said"? I certainly can't.
The real problem with C++ is not slowness, but being too complex and unpredictable. I think that what will happen is that C will get the few good features from C++, and the rest will die.
You're correct that C++ is typically no slower than C, but it seems very unlikely to disappear anytime soon. There are probably billions of lines of C++ out in the real world. It will never be the most popular language, but it's a very significant one, and will be for quite some time. C++ is used when you need the performance of a to-the-metal compiled language like C, but need better abstraction models for large, complex systems. But unlike some other languages, you typically pay little to nothing extra for these abstractions, as the burden is shifted to the compiler. There are many times when performance really does matter, and you can't simply afford to throw more hardware at a problem, such as a very complex application on a single client PC, a videogame console, or at massive scales like in mega data centers.
If you think C++ is "unpredictable" then you just don't know the language all that well. I'm not trying to sound arrogant or condescending, as it's absolutely a difficult language to learn and especially difficult to master (hell, probably near impossible to master it *all*), but "unpredictable" is how you describe managed memory, not C++. Yes, C++ has a lot of sharp edges as a language. It's ugly, clunky, bloated (aka "feature-rich"), slow to compile, and difficult to master. But it also has a large, mature ecosystem (thanks to its C-based heritage), and damn near every significant CPU or platform has a C++ compiler that supports it, probably topped only by C.
So really, it's reasonably safe to say that neither C nor C++ are going anywhere anytime soon, thanks partially due to sheer inertia caused their pervasiveness through our critical infrastructure. This fact alone dictates that compiler support will remain a priority among major software companies (Microsoft, Intel, Apple) or projects (Clang, CGG). Add to that the enormous codebases that companies have invested in with both languages, and C/C++'s longevity is even more likely.
But as we know, the many studies done in the Chernobyl area show that wildlife is thriving, and not showing genetic damage or birth defects beyond normal rates.
Oh, well, I didn't actually know. I was under the impression that scientists were debating this point. (?) Maybe I just read old articles, or I could very well be misinformed. In any case, consider my statement as more hypothetical than anything.
I'm not sure it's all that strange. Keep in mind that wildlife will still likely thrive even with high birth defect rates, early deaths by cancer, and other unpleasant side-effects from living in higher-than-normal radiation. We would find such a situation appalling among humans, but nature is a bit more brutally pragmatic about such things. Human populations obviously have a much more detrimental effect on populations than radiation.
On the plus side, this gives us a great model for what a post-apocalyptic world should look like 30 years after the bombs fall, or whatever other disaster strikes. It's sort of eerie. I've never like the Fallout aesthetic that implies nothing grows in an irradiated region, even if I understand *why* they did it.
...which you have to side-load to get infected. Sorry, I have a hard time getting worked up about idiots who intentionally disable safeties and then proceed to digitally shoot themselves in the foot.
And on Mac - well, I have no idea really, but I'm guessing it's something like dragging your computer into the trashcan. Am I right?
Heh, nice guess, but no. For Mac, you click on the Apple menu that's always in the upper-left corner of the screen. And I know you're kidding about Linux, but with most distros, it's similar to Windows or Mac, with a simple shutdown menu accessed via a prominent place on the desktop. All three OSes have command-line options to do this as well.
If you want obscure shutdown techniques, then Windows 8 probably took the prize, in which you had to somehow intuit where to direct your mouse (to an unmarked corner of the screen), then click "Settings" (wtf?), then under "Power", you could shut the computer off. Microsoft was rightfully mocked for this absurdity.
UL certification for electrical safety is done as an independent third-party audit, but is licensed by the government to do so. Certification is not legally mandated, but nearly everyone does it, because most large companies will not buy products without it.
I think perhaps a similar system for electronic security audits could work in the same way. To get and maintain a favorable rating, you must demonstrate:
a) reasonable and good-faith efforts have been made to ensure security and privacy (no default passwords, no back doors, etc) b) current industry standards and guidelines have been adhered to c) a simple or automated patching mechanism is available if security issues are discovered. d) duration of security support is explicitly listed on packaging.
Or something like that - that's just off the top of my head.
At least users can be reasonably assured of security by looking for a simple label. That seems like a reasonable compromise between "government mandated security rules" and the current "zero security" state of affairs. And it's seemed to work out reasonably well for electrical safety.
In the business world, this is known as "telemetry", and it means that Microsoft watches how Windows is used so as to be able to better understand how customers are using their products, and can make decisions such as "should we kill this feature?", which depends entirely on whether a bunch of people are using it? Telemetry tracks system events in an anonymized way, typically by assigning a GUID to each users, and being careful not to unnecessarily slurp up personally sensitive user data. Lots of applications have done this for years, typically describing it as "Help user experience by sending anonymized data? Yes/No"
What's the practical difference between "telemetry" and "spying"? If you don't trust Microsoft not to adhere to its promise of not collecting and abusing personal data, or don't want anyone tracking anything you do on your computer? Zero.
To me, the biggest problem is that Microsoft doesn't allow a global opt-out setting for home users (although they do for businesses users). They could have made most people happy by including this option, and at the same time, it wouldn't have hurt them much at all, since most people just leave the settings at their default.
I think that's because Windows just isn't a command-line culture at heart like *nix. I think instead it's more of a GUI/Application culture, which makes sense, if you think about it, as the focus was on visual applications from the start. As such, a typical Windows developer thinks about embedded scripts inside an application to automate things, and using OLE to inter-operate with other programs or data. *nix developers pass data (often text) from small, focused utility to small focused utility, typically with Bash or another shell as the glue, because it's legacy came from text-only environments with a powerful shell. It's just two different ways of thinking about solving problems, but server administrative problems and application solutions are not necessarily equivalent, as you indicated.
I'd also posit that this is one reason why *nix tends to do well in server spaces, since working remotely is comfortable even through a simple terminal, and why Windows does well on the desktop, since most users are more comfortable with graphical interfaces than a command-line. That's not the only reason, of course, but I think it contributes.
Slashdot Mirror
Most corporations exist to earn a profit, and if you're the customer instead of a product, and if there's a healthy market, they at least have to compete for your business. Things tend to get screwed up when you're the product instead of a customer (when anything is *free* from a corporation, watch out), or when there's no real competition (cable/ISPs), then things tend to really go bad.
It also really depends on how they go about making that profit. Done well, it's a mutually beneficial transaction in which all parties involved can benefit. Done badly, it can certainly be exploitative and evil. I don't think it's a good idea to lump them all together any more than it is for people.
That really does explain a lot, huh? Yes, I get it that a logo is important, but damn... "Refresh the Mozilla brand experience"? I don't even know what that means.
Dear Mozilla: Too much navel-gazing, and not enough good software engineering and innovation. No one but you gives a crap about your "brand experience". In case you haven't noticed, you're becoming less relevant every day, and your logo is not the reason why.
To be fair, people worry about Facebook's influence and complain about Apple's lock-in as well. But more to the point, Google, as the world's leader in search and many other connected services, as well as the developer of the world's most popular mobile OS, does have a responsibility to NOT abuse their market position - at least in a way that will bring regulators down on them. Market leaders tend to get a bit of extra scrutiny in these matters, and rightly so, I think, due to their sheer influence and the potential for abuse in their respective markets.
I think "machine learning" is a much better term for the sorts of things being developed. For instance, Google algorithms being able to determine pictures of "dogs": Machine learning, not AI. Still, just because it's labeled incorrectly by the press, pundits, and marketers doesn't mean the work that's being done isn't impressive.
Self-driving cars will be what kills any real demand for "flying cars". Who cares how long the trip takes when you're not forced to keep your attention glued to the road?
And no Mulligans on your first stage.
I'd say half the work people do could be eliminated altogether, and few would care.
There's a hell of a lot of bureaucratic make-work that goes on in this world. Examples: Laws so complex only lawyers can understand them, or tax rules so complicated only CPAs can understand them. Result? You've got to hire lawyers and CPAs. Or, middle managers at large corporations or in government that just shuffle around, create more paperwork, and enforce internal rules that perhaps made sense to someone, somewhere, but now just inflict pain on people beneath them actually trying to get real work done.
And that doesn't even describe the fact that no one is truly productive throughout the entirety of a workday, with breaks that are stretched out a bit, or time spent daydreaming, or futzing around on Facebook when you're supposed to be working.
I fully expect we'll be able to create plenty of make-work that only humans are qualified to do in the foreseeable future.
It's called progress. Embrace it. "Personal computers" are dead.
We should start calling them "workstations" again, as I think that much better reflects their actual purpose these days. The new "personal computer" is a smartphone.
While I don't expect Google to realistically support every failed project forever, every product or service they kill reinforces the notion that "the cloud" simply means "services you rent which can be arbitrarily shut down at any time by the company who actually owns them."
There's nothing wrong with cloud-based services, as long as you go in with your eyes wide open to both the upsides AND the downsides. And be extra wary if you're not paying for a service and don't see an obvious revenue model.
Yeah, that's a fair point.
Still, keep in mind that the FSF is two things: it's a legal non-profit organization with board members and a handful of paid employees, as well as a broader community of volunteers, enthusiasts, and supporters. While the latter is the organization that most people are affiliated with, the former means they still have the same legal obligations and responsibility as any other corporate employer.
That being the case, though, you make an interesting point, albeit indirectly:
Something happened, that much is clear, and it got back to Ms Rowe in some form that made her extremely angry.
Whatever happened here, Ms Rowe is not a first-hand witness to these accounts any more than we are. That doesn't automatically discredit the story, but doesn't do anything to actually confirm it either, unless we actually hear from one of those people themselves.
Bleh. Like you said, dubious. Apparently, the involved parties or first-hand witnesses have collectively decided to clam up / move on, so there's not much else for us to do either.
Yeah, same. I thought at first someone was taking a swipe at Slashdot, like: "Hey, this site sucks as news for nerds. Got a better one?"
I don't see any point in a watch as a pure timekeeping device, as someone else pointed out, I have a hard time NOT seeing the time wherever I look these days. Primary reason for wearing one these days seem to be: fashion, fitness, or nostalgia.
double entendre
doobl äntändr,dbl äntändr/
noun
noun: double entendre; plural noun: double entendres
a word or phrase open to two interpretations, one of which is usually risqué or indecent.
I think perhaps you're being a bit intentionally obtuse, since it's obviously only works as a joke because of what's implied by using that term. No, it's not the end of the world or something to pillory Stallman for, but I think it's pretty tone-deaf to not even acknowledge the possibility that these sorts of jokes could make some women feel a bit uncomfortable or marginalized. And yes, incidentally, he specifically described "EMACS virgins" as women.
Granted, GP's quote also sounds like a lunatic rant, because I sure as hell don't want to hear about anyone's first sexual experience or sexual preferences in response to a sexist joke.
The FSF made a blanket statement denying the accusation, but I haven't seen anything more than that. So... that's all we have to go on. If this were a giant corporation everyone hated, like Comcast, would people be so equally quick to simply take a company's terse press release as proof of their innocence? Did they actually do any sort of serious internal investigation? They don't even say. Forgive me I'm a bit skeptical.
Then again, I have no idea who Leah Rowe is, or what kind of person she is. Maybe she's unstable or a liar, and just makes things up. Maybe she's telling the truth. Or maybe her perspective and mentality differs so much from the others at the FSF that the same facts are interpreted in completely opposite ways.
How do you tell who's telling the truth in this literal "he said / she said"? I certainly can't.
The real problem with C++ is not slowness, but being too complex and unpredictable. I think that what will happen is that C will get the few good features from C++, and the rest will die.
You're correct that C++ is typically no slower than C, but it seems very unlikely to disappear anytime soon. There are probably billions of lines of C++ out in the real world. It will never be the most popular language, but it's a very significant one, and will be for quite some time. C++ is used when you need the performance of a to-the-metal compiled language like C, but need better abstraction models for large, complex systems. But unlike some other languages, you typically pay little to nothing extra for these abstractions, as the burden is shifted to the compiler. There are many times when performance really does matter, and you can't simply afford to throw more hardware at a problem, such as a very complex application on a single client PC, a videogame console, or at massive scales like in mega data centers.
If you think C++ is "unpredictable" then you just don't know the language all that well. I'm not trying to sound arrogant or condescending, as it's absolutely a difficult language to learn and especially difficult to master (hell, probably near impossible to master it *all*), but "unpredictable" is how you describe managed memory, not C++. Yes, C++ has a lot of sharp edges as a language. It's ugly, clunky, bloated (aka "feature-rich"), slow to compile, and difficult to master. But it also has a large, mature ecosystem (thanks to its C-based heritage), and damn near every significant CPU or platform has a C++ compiler that supports it, probably topped only by C.
So really, it's reasonably safe to say that neither C nor C++ are going anywhere anytime soon, thanks partially due to sheer inertia caused their pervasiveness through our critical infrastructure. This fact alone dictates that compiler support will remain a priority among major software companies (Microsoft, Intel, Apple) or projects (Clang, CGG). Add to that the enormous codebases that companies have invested in with both languages, and C/C++'s longevity is even more likely.
But as we know, the many studies done in the Chernobyl area show that wildlife is thriving, and not showing genetic damage or birth defects beyond normal rates.
Oh, well, I didn't actually know. I was under the impression that scientists were debating this point. (?) Maybe I just read old articles, or I could very well be misinformed. In any case, consider my statement as more hypothetical than anything.
I'm not sure it's all that strange. Keep in mind that wildlife will still likely thrive even with high birth defect rates, early deaths by cancer, and other unpleasant side-effects from living in higher-than-normal radiation. We would find such a situation appalling among humans, but nature is a bit more brutally pragmatic about such things. Human populations obviously have a much more detrimental effect on populations than radiation.
On the plus side, this gives us a great model for what a post-apocalyptic world should look like 30 years after the bombs fall, or whatever other disaster strikes. It's sort of eerie. I've never like the Fallout aesthetic that implies nothing grows in an irradiated region, even if I understand *why* they did it.
Never underestimate the ability of a fool to retain his ignorance.
...which you have to side-load to get infected. Sorry, I have a hard time getting worked up about idiots who intentionally disable safeties and then proceed to digitally shoot themselves in the foot.
But there's profit, then there is absurd profits. Smartphones easily fall into the latter category.
Only for one company, really.
I'm going to wager that it wasn't "programmers" who wanted to make these changes.
And on Mac - well, I have no idea really, but I'm guessing it's something like dragging your computer into the trashcan. Am I right?
Heh, nice guess, but no. For Mac, you click on the Apple menu that's always in the upper-left corner of the screen. And I know you're kidding about Linux, but with most distros, it's similar to Windows or Mac, with a simple shutdown menu accessed via a prominent place on the desktop. All three OSes have command-line options to do this as well.
If you want obscure shutdown techniques, then Windows 8 probably took the prize, in which you had to somehow intuit where to direct your mouse (to an unmarked corner of the screen), then click "Settings" (wtf?), then under "Power", you could shut the computer off. Microsoft was rightfully mocked for this absurdity.
UL certification for electrical safety is done as an independent third-party audit, but is licensed by the government to do so. Certification is not legally mandated, but nearly everyone does it, because most large companies will not buy products without it.
I think perhaps a similar system for electronic security audits could work in the same way. To get and maintain a favorable rating, you must demonstrate:
a) reasonable and good-faith efforts have been made to ensure security and privacy (no default passwords, no back doors, etc)
b) current industry standards and guidelines have been adhered to
c) a simple or automated patching mechanism is available if security issues are discovered.
d) duration of security support is explicitly listed on packaging.
Or something like that - that's just off the top of my head.
At least users can be reasonably assured of security by looking for a simple label. That seems like a reasonable compromise between "government mandated security rules" and the current "zero security" state of affairs. And it's seemed to work out reasonably well for electrical safety.
In the business world, this is known as "telemetry", and it means that Microsoft watches how Windows is used so as to be able to better understand how customers are using their products, and can make decisions such as "should we kill this feature?", which depends entirely on whether a bunch of people are using it? Telemetry tracks system events in an anonymized way, typically by assigning a GUID to each users, and being careful not to unnecessarily slurp up personally sensitive user data. Lots of applications have done this for years, typically describing it as "Help user experience by sending anonymized data? Yes/No"
What's the practical difference between "telemetry" and "spying"? If you don't trust Microsoft not to adhere to its promise of not collecting and abusing personal data, or don't want anyone tracking anything you do on your computer? Zero.
To me, the biggest problem is that Microsoft doesn't allow a global opt-out setting for home users (although they do for businesses users). They could have made most people happy by including this option, and at the same time, it wouldn't have hurt them much at all, since most people just leave the settings at their default.
I think that's because Windows just isn't a command-line culture at heart like *nix. I think instead it's more of a GUI/Application culture, which makes sense, if you think about it, as the focus was on visual applications from the start. As such, a typical Windows developer thinks about embedded scripts inside an application to automate things, and using OLE to inter-operate with other programs or data. *nix developers pass data (often text) from small, focused utility to small focused utility, typically with Bash or another shell as the glue, because it's legacy came from text-only environments with a powerful shell. It's just two different ways of thinking about solving problems, but server administrative problems and application solutions are not necessarily equivalent, as you indicated.
I'd also posit that this is one reason why *nix tends to do well in server spaces, since working remotely is comfortable even through a simple terminal, and why Windows does well on the desktop, since most users are more comfortable with graphical interfaces than a command-line. That's not the only reason, of course, but I think it contributes.