"Breach of contract" isn't worth squat on it's own. You have to show actual damages stemming from the breach, and you'd be lucky to even show breach of contract. The company always has a disclaimer that company policy is superseded by the law.
"mental suffering" ?"invasion of privacy" -- good luck with those, you already consented to the company having the data. The company follows the law. If the government has legal warrant for the data over, the company hands over the data, and you've consented to it.
So why do I think you'll benefit by knowing how to manage the entire build of your C++ application outside an IDE?
I don't dispute that there could be benefits.
Because in my experience, sooner or later you're going to stumble over some special case where you have to do that anyway. You can learn it now, and then when that happens it will be easier to handle. Or you can wait until it happens.
And that's just it. I've built and released and supported projects that I've never had to manage the build process of. Many developers do.
And your right, sooner or later its going to happen that something breaks, and you'll need to dig into the build process to fix it. I recently had to work on building a DLL from a sample project in C that had been last built in a Borland C++ compiler from 1994. The project was for a plugin for an application that had been also been compiled with that compiler. And there were a variety of problems... data alignment defaults are different now and had to be ferreted out since they weren't explicitly set in the provided headers, the unicode default settings are different now, and they'd even used some borland specific compiler directive to export the functions instead of using a module definition file (the obviously weren't using the standard VS "boiler plate" stuff for DLL projects, and so we had to sort all that out before we had visual studio compiling the DLL project such that the other application could use it without failing spectacularly.
But its probably been close to 10+ years since the last time I had to get THAT involved with that kind of stuff, and while it was familiar... I can honestly say that I was re-learning some stuff that I hadn't really had to think about in ages.
I guess I'm saying managing the entire build process from the command line is a specialized task that maybe you can get away without for a long time, and why not wait until you need it to learn it? I mean, isn't that how we learned everything else?... whether its obscure compiler switches and linker options... or how to use client certificates with a.net web service... you learn it when you need it.
I hate nodrop. I make lots of new characters, play them, and nodrop just makes it so I can't transfer gear to other characters
That was solved ages ago, with gear that could be transferred to your other characters via shared bank slots. "heirloom" ?? is maybe the term used in EQ2 instead of nodrop... I forget.
friends I play with
Yeah... as one of those "friends" who constantly got gear tossed my way, thanks but no thanks. Your not REALLY doing me a favor ensuring that every time I log in everything I loot myself is worse than what you've given me.
I had the discipline to tell my friends no more gifts. But few people do... I can understand finding something that's really great for a friend and wanting to help them out, and similarly I still remember someone giving me a steel longsword in EQ1 when nothing I could kill even in a group dropped better than rusty. But honestly, nothing sucks the sense of personal achievement out of a game quite like being someone elses garbage dump.
There's plenty of stuff my play-all-the-time-with-50-max-level-alt friends can do to help me along without trading gear.
The trouble with mmorpgs is figuring out an economy that makes sense. It still hans't been done. High level characters are stupidly wealthy compared to low level ones. Eve is probably the closest... but even there established players can and do completely bankroll newer players without even thinking about it.
Another way to discourage trading of end game loot is to prohibit decoration of traded items.
Not going to work in most modern games which separate appearance and equipment, which seems to be the trend, for better or for worse. (Especially since they can real-money sell you appearance items all day long without outraging the playerbase too much)
Your argument was that companies don't lie, and that if they do they'll be sued out of existence. This is but one example showing that you are worse than wrong, you are a dangerously naive.
Your last point is moot if the union is doing it's job
The union is doing its job -- its saying we don't need biometric time clocks. Then we don't have to vet them or worry about them.
If management is worried about fraud, then management can come and do random inspections. Biometric time clocks are not a good solution.
Even if the system did log the fingerprint image, giving those images to the police makes the statement "We will never give fingerprint data to the police" a lie
So what? The employer will split hairs and say they didn't -give- them, they were -compelled- to produce them.
Go ahead sue them... what are you going to show as tangible harm? What damages do you expect to recover?
Also, according to this the police need authorization from the person to take his fingerprints.
Only to take the fingerprints from the person. That doesn't say anything about getting them from someone else who you consented to take them, and who has them with your consent, aka your employer.
I believe any unauthorized fingerprints transmitted to the police would have to be removed under those provisions as the employer would be acting as an agent for the police.
Why do you believe that?
Suppose the company you worked for monitored your phone calls for "customer service and training purposes". Do you really think the police could not request and get copies, simply because there are (supposedly) rules in place about wiretaps?
Because the company, by handing the recordings over is somehow retroactively an agent of the police and is subject to wiretap laws? Get real.
You already consented to the recording, and the recording was lawfully made. The police can ask for and get it. Its pretty much THAT simple.
Because they will be sued out if business if they are found to lie.
Companies lie all the time. Microsoft, Sony, BP, Diebold, Rapiscan,...
Because they will be sued out if business if they are found to lie.
All of the above and countless more have been sued some thousands of times and are still doing just fine. Being sued out of business for lying or even outright full on criminal activity is the rare exception not the rule.
. If you think the manufacturer will lie about the specs then you really need to check your paranoia bias.
a) Rapiscan. QED.
b) So what if they don't lie and the unit they are putting out today doesn't store them. What about next years model, the model they use to replace it when they inevitably break?
They'll add it as a feature, nobody will be paying attention that the specs of the new unit are slightly "better" than the old unit.
Now not only will the state lie by giving fingerprint data to the police
Why would they lie? Nobody has to lie or be deliberately malicious.
Two years out a crime is committed in a tube, a police officer notes tube workers use fingerprint scanners, and asks for the fingerprints to eliminate the tube workers... turns out that the recent upgraded units do log the prints and "bob's your uncle" the employees prints are all in the system.
If you take away anyone's tools won't they be lost?
The tool seems to be becoming the focus rather then the actual programming.
What is meant by 'actual programming'? Does relying on a resource editor to make windows resource scripts instead of writing them from scratch in notepad mean you don't know how to program?
Me, I can read a resource script, make adjustments, etc... but I'd be 'lost' if someone handed me a blank note pad document and told me to write a complicated application main window resource script. Hell, I don't even know off the top of my head where to start.. what the "boilerplate" to get it started is.
I'm not sure that I would agree that to be classified as knowing "actual programming" that I should have to be able to proficiently prepare stuff like that from scratch, when there are good tools to do it.
It'd be like telling an architect that to be a "real architect" he can't use CAD and has to prepare professional level blueprints using a drafting board... and not just a simple square building either we want the Guggenheim museum. So he should be proficient with templates, french curve sets, and mechanical splines...
Seriously, every time I try to build something with external dependencies on VS, it's like pulling teeth and a it of a crapshoot sa to whether it will have linker errors at the end.
What language? C/C++? What's the hangup?... you add the reference to the.lib as a dependancy, and make sure the headers can be found. (e.g. set "Additional Include Directories" using absolute or relative paths depending on what makes more sense)
I've never found external libraries to be especially problematic in Visual Studio. I'm curious where you hit major issues, and what the cause was?
But isn't that just because you're used to Visual Studio.
I think I like Eclipse because I'm used to it, and you like Visual Studio because you're used to it. From what I can tell, the features I would actually use (and it's worth noting, I don't write GUIs) are pretty much equivalent on both.
My argument is that Visual Studio is more consistent, and has less weirdness. Things integrate better, etc.
Revision control, profiling, debugging, coding, its like using an office suite -- its all consistent and well integrated.
Eclipse and the suite of tools you use with it are equally capable, but your development environment is all bolted together and it lacks consistency as you use it.
To reference the office suite metaphor I made for visual studio -- if VS is Microsoft Office; or LibreOffice if you prefer. It doesn't matter for this metaphor.
While an Eclipse based system is more like using KWord, Lotus Notes Spreadsheet, OpenOffice Base database, and Apple Keynote for presentations. Taken together its just as capable a suite, but its a jumbled mess in terms of how it all fits together.
pay a one-time signup fee of $10-$15. That's over two years of 50 cents a month membership
Take Facebook, which is one of the largest and most complicated products out there -- compared to say twitter or tumblr which are a lot simpler.
It's got about $6B in annual revenue, and claims 1.15B monthly active users. FB claims ~25% profit margins. Meaning it needs $4.50/user/year to break even. So yeah, $10-$15 for two year memberships would ABSOLUTELY fund a facebook without facial recognition, profiling, advertising, data mining etc.
I think we could get a FB style platform down to $2/year/user. I believe an awful lot of money is going into data mining and advertising related tech.
(And facebook would be a much simpler product without all that crap so the costs would drop even further.)
And for an instagram or a tumblr or a slashdot, those are FAR simpler products, and I think the annual cost per user drops down to sub 1$ per YEAR for image hosting or discussion forums, down even to 50 cents per user per year. $10 will buy you 2 decades.
"The fingerprint scanner can store different fingerprints and the database of prints can even be downloaded from the unit and distributed to other modules. As well as the fingerprint "template," the analyzed version of the print, you can also retrieve the image of a fingerprint and even pull raw images from the optical sensor."
Why, exactly, should someone who is not doing anything productive still be paid for it?
Because if you don't show up and inspect the work, you will never know if it was done or not. relying on the timeclock system doesn't give you any assurance the work is being done.
So you must show up and inspect it.
And if you show up and inspect the work, and find it done, then what additional information does the machine give you? You already know the work was done, and that the employee should be paid for it.
And if you show up, and the work wasn't done, then you know the work wasn't done and the employee responsible for it shouldn't be paid. Again, the machine didn't add any useful information.
Yet another person who does not know how fingerprint scanners work but feels competent to comment.
I'm the poster you replied to.
Fingerprint scanners store a mathematical representation of the fingerprint and not a picture.
Yes and no. Fingerprint scanners USE a mathematical representation not a picture to do the comparison.
How do fingerprint scanners get that mathematical representation they store? They take a picture.
How do fingerprint scanners get the mathematical representation when you clock in and out? They take another picture.
Some store them. Some don't. Some vendors may claim their units don't store them...just like Rapiscan claimed their scanners didn't store images, right? But then it turned out they did.
The only "civil liberty" it attacks is the ability to fraudulently sign in for someone else.
Well, that... and it lets them share the prints with law enforcement, cross check the fingerprints with cases and what not, and subject them to all kinds of harrassment.
I object to being fingerprinted for any reason, short of with a judge issued warrant. And I object to routine finger printing of individuals who are released without being charged, nevermind individuals who are acquitted.
I'm certainly not going to hand over my fingerprints just to prove I'm doing a menial job I'm being paid to do. If my employer is concerned the job isn't being done properly, inspect the work being performed -- biometrics showing I clocked in on time don't mean a damned thing.
It requires server hardware, data centre space, storage media, backups, power, bandwidth, system administrator time, and at least some development time for maintenance and bug fixes.
The reality is that the price per user really is ALMOST FREE. But no, its not quite, and will never be completely free.
However, 50 million users paying 50 cents per year? Do you think you could run it for $2 million+ per month? I'm thinking that's likely to be very doable.
If we could get a decent micro-payments infrastructure together we would easily fund these things "ad-free" and "tracking-free". Who out there would REALLY balk at 50 cents a year for that?
Also, when you sell two new products, at the same time, it is not cannibalization [...] It's market segmentation
It might be cannibalization.
Its segmentation if the new lower tier product picks up millions of new buyers who just couldn't afford the high tier one.
But its cannibalization if millions of users who would have bought the high tier one if it was the only one one on offer, but now buy the low tier one because its available and good enough.
The key to segmentation is to make sure nobody who can afford the high end model would be satisfied with the low end one, that they would rationalize spending the extra to stay in the premium product.
Visual Studio can do 5000 things and IDE X can do 5000 things just as quickly, but tens of thousands of developers already know how to do 3500 of those things in Visual Studio and don't feel like tackling the equivalent learning curve in IDE X.)
Sort of. I'm sure pretty much everything you can do with VS can be done in another IDE. But the curve is not equivalent, its much narrower, steeper, more slippery, and is prone to falling rocks.;)
The learning curve isn't the same difficulty; and there's a lot more arbitrary "weirdness".
To try and make an analogy... Visual Studio is like a regular keyboard. Qwerty, with the f-keys up top, the inverted T arrows, and the number pad to the right.
IDE X... ok... its Dvorak. Things are in different places, and we were expecting that. But there's more... its not quite Dvorak; you have to pull up on the caps and number lock keys to toggle them instead of pressing them. And the escape key? That one you have to twist counter clockwise. The function keys don't register until you hold them for 1.5 seconds, and the pipe symbol is is missing... ok not missing, if you press the P, the I, and the Shift key at the same time you get the pipe symbol; there's a few other chords as well. And shift only works on half the keyboard -- so if you are want a letter on the left side of the keyboard shifted you MUST use the shift on the right side, and vice versa. The number pad 0 is on a rocker switch, and the 7 is just missing (but its still on the main keyboard).:)
Not that visual studio doesn't have its WTF bits, but there's less of them relative to the alternatives. IMO.
Claiming that foreigners outside of US borders have standing under the US Constitution
I didn't claim that. I only claimed that foreigners inside the borders have standing.
As to whether foreigners outside the borders have standing? At the very least we have a moral obligation not to attack them. (from sending drones to kill them, to invading their private communications) unless we are in a declared war against them. Although that is not in the constution it should be.
applications of squares and roots are part of the public school curriculum here (via calculator for calculation)... i overspoke when i mentioned trig... it won't be the periodic functions, just geometry (180 degrees in a triangle, finding the other angles from 2 or 1 in a right triangle; sin/cosine/tangent are apparently junior high, although tangent lines to a circle are covered in geometry.)
while non-citizens don't have constitutional rights.
The constitution clearly differentiates between persons and citizens, and the majority of the constitution and bill of rights applies to persons.
Only select elements are limited to citizens.. some sections even refer to both such as "No person shall be a senator who shall not have attained to the age of thirty years, and been nine years a citizen of the united states."
The constitution, for the most part applies to all persons. It is a travesty that anyone thinks otherwise.
Naturally US law only applies within the US, but that means at the very least foreigners on united states soil or on united states controlled territory *cough*gitmo*cough* should have the full protection of the constitution.
And as to foreigners outside the US, that's more complicated. But at the very least tapping communications between any party on US soil and a party in a foreign state is violating the constitutional rights of the party on US soil, even if we don't assign any rights to the foreign party.
You're avoiding the core issue, most of today's students have absolutely no idea what for what purposes in the real world the square root is useful.
Not at all, my daughter's in grade 6. The year has just started but square roots and trig in are in the curriculum -- she wont' be calculating them manually, a scientific calculator was on her school supplies list. She'll be answering problems like "what is the length of a square field 5184 m^2, what is the length of a cube shaped box with a volume of 225 cm^3...
Being able to perform the manual process of finding a square root using the method the OP suggested is little more than magical incantation for a 6th grader. My daughter can do long division manually, but even that, she doesn't -really- understand WHY it works. And I don't recall knowing either when i was in elementary school either. Its just the ritual we were taught.
And in your world, you'd be mocking people for complaining about the new abacus interface.
If it was because the vendor added a row, changed the colors, and the shape of the beads for the 2013 model then... yes.
Don't confuse UI thrashing with actual progress.
And yet most would consider windows 95 to 7 actual progress.
As to your comments on MS usability features, that just hasn't been my experience. And it appears I'm far from alone.
That's because most people make their judgements based on how much better it is with heavy value weighted on being able to apply the knowledge they already have.
This is by no means wrong, and considering retraining costs and existing knowledge is certainly a very valid position but it does lead to design paralysis. We can't make slight improvements to something if we too highly value making it just like the old one.
It is also worth considering what a person who does not use the old system and does not attach any value to how it worked before because they don't know how it worked before. In the long run this is the more important consideration.
There are organizations and software packages that highlight the don't-change philosophy to the extreme. Accounting systems and other major systems exist that look exactly like they did in the 70s and 80s -- dos windows, function keys / hot keys, everything.
Sure they don't have retrain people as the new releases come out. The latest version of one such package I work with was released just this month and would be at home on an IBM XT running DOS3. Training new people on it is a huge chore, because relative to what people use now the user interface decisions are antique.
Not everyone wants to waste the time to learn a new interface every time MS decides to obsolete an old interface.
The changes have generally been pretty slow and incremental. With the odd jump here and there. Win 7-> 8 and NT3 -> NT4 (or equvalently win3->95) are the two big ones. If one couldn't cope with the changes between 95->98->Me->XP-Vista->7 NT4->2K->XP-Vista->7 then really how does one handle buying a new car?
It takes all of 5 minutes to handle the win8 start screen. The biggest flaw is that feature discovery is poor, and a lot of defaults are silly. It was a bad implementation... but I don't think it is a bad "paradigm". 8.1 is better but still flawed.
As I've said before OSX does just fine without a start menu. If an enterprise were to hypothetically consider switching to OSX, they certainly wouldn't be proclaiming it would only happen if they could get a windows 7 start menu on it. Training users to use OSX's launchpad, spotlight, and dock would be the only sensible plan.
I learned how to calculate a square root to arbitrary precision at school some decades ago. It was part of the curriculum for 5th or 6th grade then.
And when i went to school we "learned" how to do trig functions from angles to 3 to decimals by looking them up in tables in the back of the book. Some things are obsolete. That's been replaced by calculators, and so has square roots.
Square roots are one of them, the masses have a calculator to do that for them. And the subject of finding roots manually is now grade 12 advanced placement calculus where they do it with newtons method after learning a tiny bit of calculus. (And not just square roots, but other roots as well.)
The square root methods you and I were taught in 6th grade is now more of a mathematical curiosity that belongs in a higher level mathematics course that explores -why- it works, rather than presents it as a practical method to actually use.
If I we're on a desert island and was going to find roots (any root, not just square roots) manually today, I'd probably use newtons method if i needed precision, or an intuition guided "binary search" if I was trying to do it in my head and just needed to be in the ball park.)
Why ask dumb questions? Whenever you change the UI, you impede work until the user figures out how to do the things that changed.
So in your world we should have stuck with the abacus and quill pens because every change since then has impeded work as the users had to figure out how to do stuff that changed. The whole "computerization age" must have blown your mind... expensive hardware, retraining costs, sure some forward-thinking person must have seen that it was better in the long term, but that person apparently wasn't you.
And a lot of UI changes just doesn't actually improve anything, like MS's ribbon interface in Office.
At this point I like using the 2010 ribbon more than Office 97's menus. I think it's genuinely better organized and works better. Yes, it took time to learn it...and yes the first iteration had some glaring oversights... but it was worth it.
The start menu was a relic. The windows 8 start screen is flawed. 8.1 is better but still flawed. But clinging to the start menu just because you are used to it is absurd.
OSX never had one, and everyone using it is coping just fine. OSX has spotlight, and launchpad, and things pinned to the dock. Windows has things pinned to the taskbar. The windows 8 start screen is a much improved version of launchpad. In my opinion all we need to fix win8 is a good 'spotlight' tool -- although there may be other 'good solutions' to that problem too.
MS just shuffled the basic computer interface around for no particular reason.
We both know every single change can be traced back to a source document / style guide / UI interface focus group document / or roadmap document... whether you agree with every change is an entirely separate question. whether all the changes taken together make as much cohesive sense as possible -- even I'll agree they could do better. But they aren't just randomly moving things around.
Slashdot Mirror
You live in a dream world.
"Breach of contract" isn't worth squat on it's own. You have to show actual damages stemming from the breach, and you'd be lucky to even show breach of contract. The company always has a disclaimer that company policy is superseded by the law.
"mental suffering" ?"invasion of privacy" -- good luck with those, you already consented to the company having the data. The company follows the law. If the government has legal warrant for the data over, the company hands over the data, and you've consented to it.
So why do I think you'll benefit by knowing how to manage the entire build of your C++ application outside an IDE?
I don't dispute that there could be benefits.
Because in my experience, sooner or later you're going to stumble over some special case where you have to do that anyway. You can learn it now, and then when that happens it will be easier to handle. Or you can wait until it happens.
And that's just it. I've built and released and supported projects that I've never had to manage the build process of. Many developers do.
And your right, sooner or later its going to happen that something breaks, and you'll need to dig into the build process to fix it. I recently had to work on building a DLL from a sample project in C that had been last built in a Borland C++ compiler from 1994. The project was for a plugin for an application that had been also been compiled with that compiler. And there were a variety of problems... data alignment defaults are different now and had to be ferreted out since they weren't explicitly set in the provided headers, the unicode default settings are different now, and they'd even used some borland specific compiler directive to export the functions instead of using a module definition file (the obviously weren't using the standard VS "boiler plate" stuff for DLL projects, and so we had to sort all that out before we had visual studio compiling the DLL project such that the other application could use it without failing spectacularly.
But its probably been close to 10+ years since the last time I had to get THAT involved with that kind of stuff, and while it was familiar... I can honestly say that I was re-learning some stuff that I hadn't really had to think about in ages.
I guess I'm saying managing the entire build process from the command line is a specialized task that maybe you can get away without for a long time, and why not wait until you need it to learn it? I mean, isn't that how we learned everything else? ... whether its obscure compiler switches and linker options... or how to use client certificates with a .net web service... you learn it when you need it.
I hate nodrop. I make lots of new characters, play them, and nodrop just makes it so I can't transfer gear to other characters
That was solved ages ago, with gear that could be transferred to your other characters via shared bank slots. "heirloom" ?? is maybe the term used in EQ2 instead of nodrop... I forget.
friends I play with
Yeah... as one of those "friends" who constantly got gear tossed my way, thanks but no thanks. Your not REALLY doing me a favor ensuring that every time I log in everything I loot myself is worse than what you've given me.
I had the discipline to tell my friends no more gifts. But few people do... I can understand finding something that's really great for a friend and wanting to help them out, and similarly I still remember someone giving me a steel longsword in EQ1 when nothing I could kill even in a group dropped better than rusty. But honestly, nothing sucks the sense of personal achievement out of a game quite like being someone elses garbage dump.
There's plenty of stuff my play-all-the-time-with-50-max-level-alt friends can do to help me along without trading gear.
The trouble with mmorpgs is figuring out an economy that makes sense. It still hans't been done. High level characters are stupidly wealthy compared to low level ones. Eve is probably the closest ... but even there established players can and do completely bankroll newer players without even thinking about it.
Another way to discourage trading of end game loot is to prohibit decoration of traded items.
Not going to work in most modern games which separate appearance and equipment, which seems to be the trend, for better or for worse. (Especially since they can real-money sell you appearance items all day long without outraging the playerbase too much)
One company does it so all companies do it?
Your argument was that companies don't lie, and that if they do they'll be sued out of existence. This is but one example showing that you are worse than wrong, you are a dangerously naive.
Your last point is moot if the union is doing it's job
The union is doing its job -- its saying we don't need biometric time clocks. Then we don't have to vet them or worry about them.
If management is worried about fraud, then management can come and do random inspections. Biometric time clocks are not a good solution.
Even if the system did log the fingerprint image, giving those images to the police makes the statement "We will never give fingerprint data to the police" a lie
So what? The employer will split hairs and say they didn't -give- them, they were -compelled- to produce them.
Go ahead sue them... what are you going to show as tangible harm? What damages do you expect to recover?
Also, according to this the police need authorization from the person to take his fingerprints.
Only to take the fingerprints from the person. That doesn't say anything about getting them from someone else who you consented to take them, and who has them with your consent, aka your employer.
I believe any unauthorized fingerprints transmitted to the police would have to be removed under those provisions as the employer would be acting as an agent for the police.
Why do you believe that?
Suppose the company you worked for monitored your phone calls for "customer service and training purposes". Do you really think the police could not request and get copies, simply because there are (supposedly) rules in place about wiretaps?
Because the company, by handing the recordings over is somehow retroactively an agent of the police and is subject to wiretap laws? Get real.
You already consented to the recording, and the recording was lawfully made. The police can ask for and get it. Its pretty much THAT simple.
Because they will be sued out if business if they are found to lie.
Companies lie all the time.
Microsoft, Sony, BP, Diebold, Rapiscan,...
Because they will be sued out if business if they are found to lie.
All of the above and countless more have been sued some thousands of times and are still doing just fine. Being sued out of business for lying or even outright full on criminal activity is the rare exception not the rule.
. If you think the manufacturer will lie about the specs then you really need to check your paranoia bias.
a) Rapiscan. QED.
b) So what if they don't lie and the unit they are putting out today doesn't store them. What about next years model, the model they use to replace it when they inevitably break?
They'll add it as a feature, nobody will be paying attention that the specs of the new unit are slightly "better" than the old unit.
Now not only will the state lie by giving fingerprint data to the police
Why would they lie? Nobody has to lie or be deliberately malicious.
Two years out a crime is committed in a tube, a police officer notes tube workers use fingerprint scanners, and asks for the fingerprints to eliminate the tube workers... turns out that the recent upgraded units do log the prints and "bob's your uncle" the employees prints are all in the system.
Without it, many seem lost.
If you take away anyone's tools won't they be lost?
The tool seems to be becoming the focus rather then the actual programming.
What is meant by 'actual programming'? Does relying on a resource editor to make windows resource scripts instead of writing them from scratch in notepad mean you don't know how to program?
Me, I can read a resource script, make adjustments, etc... but I'd be 'lost' if someone handed me a blank note pad document and told me to write a complicated application main window resource script. Hell, I don't even know off the top of my head where to start .. what the "boilerplate" to get it started is.
I'm not sure that I would agree that to be classified as knowing "actual programming" that I should have to be able to proficiently prepare stuff like that from scratch, when there are good tools to do it.
It'd be like telling an architect that to be a "real architect" he can't use CAD and has to prepare professional level blueprints using a drafting board... and not just a simple square building either we want the Guggenheim museum. So he should be proficient with templates, french curve sets, and mechanical splines...
Seriously, every time I try to build something with external dependencies on VS, it's like pulling teeth and a it of a crapshoot sa to whether it will have linker errors at the end.
What language? C/C++? What's the hangup? ... you add the reference to the .lib as a dependancy, and make sure the headers can be found. (e.g. set "Additional Include Directories" using absolute or relative paths depending on what makes more sense)
I've never found external libraries to be especially problematic in Visual Studio. I'm curious where you hit major issues, and what the cause was?
But isn't that just because you're used to Visual Studio.
I think I like Eclipse because I'm used to it, and you like Visual Studio because you're used to it. From what I can tell, the features I would actually use (and it's worth noting, I don't write GUIs) are pretty much equivalent on both.
My argument is that Visual Studio is more consistent, and has less weirdness. Things integrate better, etc.
Revision control, profiling, debugging, coding, its like using an office suite -- its all consistent and well integrated.
Eclipse and the suite of tools you use with it are equally capable, but your development environment is all bolted together and it lacks consistency as you use it.
To reference the office suite metaphor I made for visual studio -- if VS is Microsoft Office; or LibreOffice if you prefer. It doesn't matter for this metaphor.
While an Eclipse based system is more like using KWord, Lotus Notes Spreadsheet, OpenOffice Base database, and Apple Keynote for presentations. Taken together its just as capable a suite, but its a jumbled mess in terms of how it all fits together.
pay a one-time signup fee of $10-$15. That's over two years of 50 cents a month membership
Take Facebook, which is one of the largest and most complicated products out there -- compared to say twitter or tumblr which are a lot simpler.
It's got about $6B in annual revenue, and claims 1.15B monthly active users. FB claims ~25% profit margins. Meaning it needs $4.50/user/year to break even. So yeah, $10-$15 for two year memberships would ABSOLUTELY fund a facebook without facial recognition, profiling, advertising, data mining etc.
I think we could get a FB style platform down to $2/year/user. I believe an awful lot of money is going into data mining and advertising related tech.
(And facebook would be a much simpler product without all that crap so the costs would drop even further.)
And for an instagram or a tumblr or a slashdot, those are FAR simpler products, and I think the annual cost per user drops down to sub 1$ per YEAR for image hosting or discussion forums, down even to 50 cents per user per year. $10 will buy you 2 decades.
Care to cite the make and model numbers of these scanners?
ADH Technology Co. Ltd
3D TouchPrint Optical Fingerprint Recognition Embedded Module
GT-511C3 v1.1 (2013)
"The fingerprint scanner can store different fingerprints and the database of prints can even be downloaded from the unit and distributed to other modules. As well as the fingerprint "template," the analyzed version of the print, you can also retrieve the image of a fingerprint and even pull raw images from the optical sensor."
That took me less than 1 minute to find.
Why, exactly, should someone who is not doing anything productive still be paid for it?
Because if you don't show up and inspect the work, you will never know if it was done or not. relying on the timeclock system doesn't give you any assurance the work is being done.
So you must show up and inspect it.
And if you show up and inspect the work, and find it done, then what additional information does the machine give you? You already know the work was done, and that the employee should be paid for it.
And if you show up, and the work wasn't done, then you know the work wasn't done and the employee responsible for it shouldn't be paid. Again, the machine didn't add any useful information.
Because biometrics venders are going to open the source to the union?
Because we can rely on biometrics vendors to use the same firmware that was audited? ..6 months from now? A year from now?
Yet another person who does not know how fingerprint scanners work but feels competent to comment.
I'm the poster you replied to.
Fingerprint scanners store a mathematical representation of the fingerprint and not a picture.
Yes and no. Fingerprint scanners USE a mathematical representation not a picture to do the comparison.
How do fingerprint scanners get that mathematical representation they store? They take a picture.
How do fingerprint scanners get the mathematical representation when you clock in and out? They take another picture.
Some store them. Some don't. Some vendors may claim their units don't store them...just like Rapiscan claimed their scanners didn't store images, right? But then it turned out they did.
Why should we trust a biometrics vender?
The only "civil liberty" it attacks is the ability to fraudulently sign in for someone else.
Well, that... and it lets them share the prints with law enforcement, cross check the fingerprints with cases and what not, and subject them to all kinds of harrassment.
I object to being fingerprinted for any reason, short of with a judge issued warrant. And I object to routine finger printing of individuals who are released without being charged, nevermind individuals who are acquitted.
I'm certainly not going to hand over my fingerprints just to prove I'm doing a menial job I'm being paid to do. If my employer is concerned the job isn't being done properly, inspect the work being performed -- biometrics showing I clocked in on time don't mean a damned thing.
It requires server hardware, data centre space, storage media, backups, power, bandwidth, system administrator time, and at least some development time for maintenance and bug fixes.
The reality is that the price per user really is ALMOST FREE. But no, its not quite, and will never be completely free.
However, 50 million users paying 50 cents per year? Do you think you could run it for $2 million+ per month? I'm thinking that's likely to be very doable.
If we could get a decent micro-payments infrastructure together we would easily fund these things "ad-free" and "tracking-free". Who out there would REALLY balk at 50 cents a year for that?
Also, when you sell two new products, at the same time, it is not cannibalization [...] It's market segmentation
It might be cannibalization.
Its segmentation if the new lower tier product picks up millions of new buyers who just couldn't afford the high tier one.
But its cannibalization if millions of users who would have bought the high tier one if it was the only one one on offer, but now buy the low tier one because its available and good enough.
The key to segmentation is to make sure nobody who can afford the high end model would be satisfied with the low end one, that they would rationalize spending the extra to stay in the premium product.
Is Visual Studio really that awesome
Yeah. It really is.
Visual Studio can do 5000 things and IDE X can do 5000 things just as quickly, but tens of thousands of developers already know how to do 3500 of those things in Visual Studio and don't feel like tackling the equivalent learning curve in IDE X.)
Sort of. I'm sure pretty much everything you can do with VS can be done in another IDE. But the curve is not equivalent, its much narrower, steeper, more slippery, and is prone to falling rocks. ;)
The learning curve isn't the same difficulty; and there's a lot more arbitrary "weirdness".
To try and make an analogy... Visual Studio is like a regular keyboard. Qwerty, with the f-keys up top, the inverted T arrows, and the number pad to the right.
IDE X ... ok... its Dvorak. Things are in different places, and we were expecting that. But there's more... its not quite Dvorak; you have to pull up on the caps and number lock keys to toggle them instead of pressing them. And the escape key? That one you have to twist counter clockwise. The function keys don't register until you hold them for 1.5 seconds, and the pipe symbol is is missing... ok not missing, if you press the P, the I, and the Shift key at the same time you get the pipe symbol; there's a few other chords as well. And shift only works on half the keyboard -- so if you are want a letter on the left side of the keyboard shifted you MUST use the shift on the right side, and vice versa. The number pad 0 is on a rocker switch, and the 7 is just missing (but its still on the main keyboard). :)
Not that visual studio doesn't have its WTF bits, but there's less of them relative to the alternatives. IMO.
Claiming that foreigners outside of US borders have standing under the US Constitution
I didn't claim that. I only claimed that foreigners inside the borders have standing.
As to whether foreigners outside the borders have standing? At the very least we have a moral obligation not to attack them. (from sending drones to kill them, to invading their private communications) unless we are in a declared war against them. Although that is not in the constution it should be.
applications of squares and roots are part of the public school curriculum here (via calculator for calculation)... i overspoke when i mentioned trig... it won't be the periodic functions, just geometry (180 degrees in a triangle, finding the other angles from 2 or 1 in a right triangle; sin/cosine/tangent are apparently junior high, although tangent lines to a circle are covered in geometry.)
while non-citizens don't have constitutional rights.
The constitution clearly differentiates between persons and citizens, and the majority of the constitution and bill of rights applies to persons.
Only select elements are limited to citizens.. some sections even refer to both such as "No person shall be a senator who shall not have attained to the age of thirty years, and been nine years a citizen of the united states."
The constitution, for the most part applies to all persons. It is a travesty that anyone thinks otherwise.
Naturally US law only applies within the US, but that means at the very least foreigners on united states soil or on united states controlled territory *cough*gitmo*cough* should have the full protection of the constitution.
And as to foreigners outside the US, that's more complicated. But at the very least tapping communications between any party on US soil and a party in a foreign state is violating the constitutional rights of the party on US soil, even if we don't assign any rights to the foreign party.
You're avoiding the core issue, most of today's students have absolutely no idea what for what purposes in the real world the square root is useful.
Not at all, my daughter's in grade 6. The year has just started but square roots and trig in are in the curriculum -- she wont' be calculating them manually, a scientific calculator was on her school supplies list. She'll be answering problems like "what is the length of a square field 5184 m^2, what is the length of a cube shaped box with a volume of 225 cm^3...
Being able to perform the manual process of finding a square root using the method the OP suggested is little more than magical incantation for a 6th grader. My daughter can do long division manually, but even that, she doesn't -really- understand WHY it works. And I don't recall knowing either when i was in elementary school either. Its just the ritual we were taught.
And in your world, you'd be mocking people for complaining about the new abacus interface.
If it was because the vendor added a row, changed the colors, and the shape of the beads for the 2013 model then... yes.
Don't confuse UI thrashing with actual progress.
And yet most would consider windows 95 to 7 actual progress.
As to your comments on MS usability features, that just hasn't been my experience. And it appears I'm far from alone.
That's because most people make their judgements based on how much better it is with heavy value weighted on being able to apply the knowledge they already have.
This is by no means wrong, and considering retraining costs and existing knowledge is certainly a very valid position but it does lead to design paralysis. We can't make slight improvements to something if we too highly value making it just like the old one.
It is also worth considering what a person who does not use the old system and does not attach any value to how it worked before because they don't know how it worked before. In the long run this is the more important consideration.
There are organizations and software packages that highlight the don't-change philosophy to the extreme. Accounting systems and other major systems exist that look exactly like they did in the 70s and 80s -- dos windows, function keys / hot keys, everything.
Sure they don't have retrain people as the new releases come out. The latest version of one such package I work with was released just this month and would be at home on an IBM XT running DOS3. Training new people on it is a huge chore, because relative to what people use now the user interface decisions are antique.
Not everyone wants to waste the time to learn a new interface every time MS decides to obsolete an old interface.
The changes have generally been pretty slow and incremental. With the odd jump here and there. Win 7-> 8 and NT3 -> NT4 (or equvalently win3->95) are the two big ones. If one couldn't cope with the changes between 95->98->Me->XP-Vista->7 NT4->2K->XP-Vista->7 then really how does one handle buying a new car?
It takes all of 5 minutes to handle the win8 start screen. The biggest flaw is that feature discovery is poor, and a lot of defaults are silly. It was a bad implementation... but I don't think it is a bad "paradigm". 8.1 is better but still flawed.
As I've said before OSX does just fine without a start menu. If an enterprise were to hypothetically consider switching to OSX, they certainly wouldn't be proclaiming it would only happen if they could get a windows 7 start menu on it. Training users to use OSX's launchpad, spotlight, and dock would be the only sensible plan.
I learned how to calculate a square root to arbitrary precision at school some decades ago. It was part of the curriculum for 5th or 6th grade then.
And when i went to school we "learned" how to do trig functions from angles to 3 to decimals by looking them up in tables in the back of the book. Some things are obsolete. That's been replaced by calculators, and so has square roots.
Square roots are one of them, the masses have a calculator to do that for them. And the subject of finding roots manually is now grade 12 advanced placement calculus where they do it with newtons method after learning a tiny bit of calculus. (And not just square roots, but other roots as well.)
The square root methods you and I were taught in 6th grade is now more of a mathematical curiosity that belongs in a higher level mathematics course that explores -why- it works, rather than presents it as a practical method to actually use.
If I we're on a desert island and was going to find roots (any root, not just square roots) manually today, I'd probably use newtons method if i needed precision, or an intuition guided "binary search" if I was trying to do it in my head and just needed to be in the ball park.)
Why ask dumb questions? Whenever you change the UI, you impede work until the user figures out how to do the things that changed.
So in your world we should have stuck with the abacus and quill pens because every change since then has impeded work as the users had to figure out how to do stuff that changed. The whole "computerization age" must have blown your mind... expensive hardware, retraining costs, sure some forward-thinking person must have seen that it was better in the long term, but that person apparently wasn't you.
And a lot of UI changes just doesn't actually improve anything, like MS's ribbon interface in Office.
At this point I like using the 2010 ribbon more than Office 97's menus. I think it's genuinely better organized and works better. Yes, it took time to learn it...and yes the first iteration had some glaring oversights... but it was worth it.
The start menu was a relic. The windows 8 start screen is flawed. 8.1 is better but still flawed. But clinging to the start menu just because you are used to it is absurd.
OSX never had one, and everyone using it is coping just fine. OSX has spotlight, and launchpad, and things pinned to the dock. Windows has things pinned to the taskbar. The windows 8 start screen is a much improved version of launchpad. In my opinion all we need to fix win8 is a good 'spotlight' tool -- although there may be other 'good solutions' to that problem too.
MS just shuffled the basic computer interface around for no particular reason.
We both know every single change can be traced back to a source document / style guide / UI interface focus group document / or roadmap document ... whether you agree with every change is an entirely separate question. whether all the changes taken together make as much cohesive sense as possible -- even I'll agree they could do better. But they aren't just randomly moving things around.
Linux is more guilty of that than microsoft. :)