It seems to be a broader pattern, even on my now abandoned Galaxy Nexus stuck on 4.3 I find Google apps have become drastically lower quality. The other day I was trying to get to navigation in Google maps and I suffered 3 crashes at varying points - one typing in the location, another selecting it from the results when I tried again, and a third when I finally tried again and got past that point when I clicked the button to take me to navigation.
I'm also finding that Google keyboard is getting a bit poor now - the suggestions seem to have largely disappeared only turning up arbitrarily once every few words. It also struggles figuring out when I've moved from one word to the next more than it used to.
So even without the OS update and just suffering app updates things have gotten worse anyway.
I'm having a hard time understanding why your company has a counter productive set of business rules that force you to not be able to test a new version of a prototype R&D system for 2 weeks is a C# problem. Though your estimate of 2 days to do the code changes seems a little steep given that retargetting to.NET is normally just a case of changing a drop down list option and that that's sufficient for 99.9999% of projects unless you do some weird and unusual things.
I'm also not sure how it's C#'s fault that your company has decided to change it's database abstraction layer for seemingly no other reason than because it's funny is a C# problem too.
MVC? sure, but what's new about having to decide about sticking with an old stable version and selecting a new version with new features, but requiring some code updates? That describes 99% of frameworks out there.
It sounds like your company is stuck in a transition period where it's trying to move forward but is in many ways failing to manage it well, jumping ahead to the latest and greatest simply for the sake of it. It sounds like you don't like change, and wish you could still just COBOL and C++ away until retirement without ever having to learn anything.
The problem is even the folks behind C++ realise it's gotta change, and if you hadn't hidden under a rock you'd know that C++ has changed more in the last 5 years than even C# has.
Unfortunately it's the price of progress. You either live with it and deal with it, or you get left behind. Just please stop telling people that being left behind is somehow good for their careers. It's not, it's really just not.
But a point you made is worth addressing a bit more thoroughly:
"The technologies packed around C# and.NET in general are targets that move so fast that if you're out of the game for 2 years, even though you could probably pick up and run with the new stuff within a week or less, you're likely going to be competing with hundreds of applicants that are fresh and in the game with the current tech already and will (in theory) be off and running on the first day at their desk."
I agree, and I've seen this too. But realise that not all companies are this stupid, and those that are aren't the ones you want to work for. Is it annoying that you have your time wasted by them because they're looking for someone who called a single method in an exact way in a framework with thousands of functions last week and may not know anything about the rest of the framework whilst foregoing the candidate that knows 90% of the rest of the framework inside out and so is infinitely more qualified but has been felled by a stupid interview mechanism? Yeah it is. But it's just part of job hunting and some companies are just shit at recruiting and have no idea how to spot talent - don't count it as your loss, it's their problem and their loss, they're the ones that the odds are will end up with countless highly inept people.
"It's a common mistake to look at the IRA murders, bombing, etc in a religious light - as you said, the sides were largely drawn across Catholic/Protestant lines, but what the IRA did was never in the name of religion, it was in the name of nationalism."
You can make the exact same argument about the varying factions including ISIS in Syria right now, so I'm not really sure what your point is unless you're implying we should apply double standards against Muslim conflicts as compared to Christian conflicts.
You could twist the argument in exactly the same way by claiming ISIS' battle is as much about wanting their own sovereign state as it is about religion so it's silly to say it's a religious battle.
But really all you're doing is making excuses for your own misguided prejudices, which, given your firm Christian views probably isn't too surprising that you'd suggest that in one case it wasn't about religion when Christianity is involved but in another it obviously is.
Like it or not, the IRA's campaign was primarily one of Catholics against Protestants. It had no more and no less of a religious angle to it over a sovereignty angle as ISIS currently does. Fact is battles for sovereignty and religion often go hand in hand, but you can't excuse it in one case and not in another just to try and suit your anti-Islamic prejudice.
And really, even the whole ISIS/Iraq/Syria thing doesn't hold much of a finger up to the Rwanda genocide which was primarily orchestrated by Christians.
Hell, in the Yugoslav wars Christian Orthodox Serbs massacred 10,000 Bosniak muslims in one sitting at Srebrenica.
"When was the last time you heard of such rules being enforced?"
Pretty much every week if you bother to read anything other than Western oriented news. What do you think Joseph Kony and his Lord's Resistance Army are all about exactly? What do you think the Lord bit in their name is referring to specifically? When they butcher entire villages what do you believe their reasoning to be?
Do you use double standards and assume they're just a violent bunch of people and dismiss their claimed cause and not treat ISIS the same way? or were you simply unaware that there are groups as bad as ISIS out there that claim Christianity as their cause exactly as ISIS does?
As for honour killings, I suggest you take a long hard look at many of the drug cartels in Mexico who purport to follow Christianity and claim that as their reason for doing some of the horrific things they do.
It's easy to forget there's a world outside the middle east when that and people who or whose families originate from there are all your media talking about, but in Burma even the famed for peace Buddhists have been carrying out brutal violent massacres - ironically against Rohingya muslims.
Finding examples of violence amongst a specific group is typical as easy as pinpointing the places that group inhabits, and then subsequently looking at all the places within those areas where there is extreme poverty.
"Yeah...but right now in this day in age, I'm not terribly concerned about all the Baptists running around beheading people, running around as suicide bombers, and shooting up news offices and killing innocent people."
Sure, but head to Africa and see how the LRA treat you. Go to Ireland and see what the IRA think of you. Head to Mexico and see how well the Knights Templars treat you.
The problem is that Islamic terrorism gets the headlines because it's currently the biggest threat in most Western nations that we currently consume our news from.
But the fact remains that there are large parts of the world where violence of equal levels of atrocity are coming from each and every religion.
The common thing isn't religion but simply the cycles of violence in those areas. The butcherings we see by Christians in parts of Africa and Mexico are at least as bad as anything ISIS pulls off but the Western media has largely gotten bored of Mexico and Africa now. Horrible people are horrible people, and sure, being able to give them a convenient label might be useful for venting anger and hate towards the problem, but it does nothing to recognise and resolve the underlying problem itself.
I moved from projects C# w/ASP.NET MVC, to PHP with Zend, on to a project using Java and Spring, then back to C# w/ASP.NET MVC as if there wasn't really a difference over the course of about 3 years, because HTTP is HTTP, and MVC is MVC and the syntax differences and configuration differences are a few days learning at most.
It really depends on whether the technology in question follows a common pattern or is something wholly obscure. But most things like web frameworks, ORM frameworks, GUI frameworks, graphics libraries, messaging technologies and so forth follow fairly familiar patterns. Chances are if you know one, then moving to another just isn't very difficult.
Programming concepts transfer between the languages making new languages easy to learn, whilst design patterns transfer between technologies making technologies easy to learn. The problem is that most developers don't know their design patterns (and underlying technologies like the HTTP protocol) and don't obviously grasp how to spot what is being used where.
I wouldn't let it bother you, as much as I have many issues with many parts of American culture and politics I still have a primarily positive view of the US and I think most people do. It's just that online, and especially on Slashdot people seem to dwell on the negative and ignore the positive. For example, people are too busy attacking minor aspects of tech companies where they've done wrong whilst failing to recognise what a resounding success silicon valley is as a whole.
As a Brit we too have had more than our fair share of slagging off. We still get attacked for things that happened many generations ago as if those of us living today somehow authorised or supported it despite that being impossible because we simply weren't alive then. It's the downside of living in a generally successful country- you become a target of hate for all those who have managed to do nothing other than fuck theirs up.
Honestly, I don't hate America in the slightest, I just hate your chocolate:)
Well I say it coming from a couple of angles, the first being as I say my partner is Canadian so due to knowing hundreds of people in both continents and having taken chocolate back and forth and finding that no one in Europe wants American chocolate and everyone in Canada (and a few friends in the US) want European chocolate it seems to be beyond coincidence. The problem is that amongst the hundreds of people we know the agreement is literally universal. I don't know a single person that's actually tried both that would favour American chocolate.
But then of course there's the more objective measures, we know for a fact that American main brand chocolate like Hersheys simply has less cocoa and more cheaper lower quality ingredients. The same remains true for US versions of pretty much all large brand chocolate. You're right that there might be a few people that prefer the less healthy lower quality American taste, but these people seem to be few and far between because there don't really seem to be many who have actually tried both standing up and saying they prefer American chocolate. This is somewhat backed up by the fact that no matter how hard I try, even using a US proxy I can't get Google to come back with anything other than comments about American chocolate being awful when I use any combination of searches on "awful european chocolate", "horrible chocolate europe" and so forth.
Like it or not, there is a widespread and well published distaste for American chocolate by many North Americans and others across the globe alike when they taste both large brand equivalents from Europe, or even better, real quality chocolate from Europe from proper chocolatiers using good cocoa and plenty of it.
Okay sure they probably weren't the best example as they do do a lot of cheaper low quality stuff as well because it seemed that that's what the market wanted, but their premium products are still decent quality.
This is the problem, even well known big brand chocolate tastes better in Europe than the US, the brand may well be the same but the recipe is different.
American Dairy Milk bars are awful compared to the UK versions for example.
"So don't you Europeans talk about 'fine chocolate' until at least you've tasted a fine batch made from single-plantation source in Madagascar. You don't know what you're talking about until then."
Why? we can already one up you on that quite trivially. Succesful chains like Hotel Chocolat let us have single-plantation source chocolate of our choice -
But it's better than that. Their flagships contain three things, a shop, a bar, and a restaurant. So you can experience everything from chocolate liqueurs to cocoa gravy there. You can experience proper cocoa usage from just about every worthwhile source in just about all it's incarnations - whether in chocolate bars, drinks, or meals.
So we know exactly what we're talking about by fine chocolate- the issue seems to be that you're wholly unaware of what actual chocolatiers we do have here in Europe given your completely false suggestion that it's hard to find. Even here in the UK which is normally frowned upon as one of the poorest quality chocolate producers in Europe we have major high quality chocolatiers in just about every high street that even slightly matters, and most have high quality independents too.
"Wasn't it the EU who didn't want Cadbury's chocolate to be labeled real chocolate?"
If by the EU you mean a handful of vested interests in countries like France and Belgium lobbying a handful of EU representatives and failing in the EU as a whole then yes. Otherwise, if you mean what most people would assume to be the EU, as in, the political organisation as a majority or whole, then no.
"You're probably talking about Hershey's, which is net the entirety of American chocolate."
No, even Cadburys and Nestle chocolate tastes shit in America - Dairy Milk bars, Smarties, M&Ms and so on, they're all just awful in the US. They use different recipes. All American main-brand chocolate is just plain terrible. It tastes like wax with chocolate flavouring as someone else said. Letting it melt in your mouth feels like you've just slurped up part of an oil slick with a bit of flavouring added to it. I was told too this is because the ingredients they use are less likely to melt in the heat of America's hottest states whereas the bars would turn to liquid if they used Cadbury's UK recipe and they were shipped to Florida or whatever, but I don't think it was added sugar that was the recipe. What I do know is that chocolate in America (and Canada) just tastes awful though compared to equivalent bars in Europe. Last I checked orange Smarties don't even taste of orange chocolate in North America either, which is a crime worthy of your death penalty, so find who is responsible and deal with it please.
If you start going upmarket to places where you can get real chocolate like Hotel Chocolat, Thorntons, or proper Belgian chocolatiers then the disparity between European and America chocolate becomes even more embarassing.
It isn't just "Europe is better than America crap", and the fact you said that implies to me that you don't have the benefit of experience and are just speculating. I'm British and my partner is Canadian, we travel between both continents regularly and the sheer amount of British confectionary we're asked to cart over with us for friends and family (and the complete lack on the way back - though we do cart back other things; maple syrup, various steak spices and so forth) is a fine example of how much people realise European chocolate really is just so much nicer. It's not about childhood memories, it's simply that when you've had both people seem to consistently opt for the European versions where they can.
There are a lot of areas where North America has it's advantages, and there are areas where Europe has it's advantages (you still get films, and games before us, and get most things at much more reasonable prices). For example, until the Smartphone wars starting in 2007 North America looked practically prehistoric in terms of cellphones, Europe (and Japan) were clearly superior in this area for a decade or so - I was like a guy from the future back in 2004 when I went over with my colour screen Nokia that could play MP3s, install apps including games like Doom, take photos and so on and so forth. This is in fact why the first iPhone wasn't even released in Europe - a phone with no MMS, no GPS, no mapping, no apps, no 3G and so on and so forth was always a joke in the European market and the fancy touch interface just couldn't make up for those glaring deficiencies. It was only really by the 3rd iteration that it even began to matter in Europe where it finally began to catch up on having the bare minimum required feature set (the second iteration didn't even outsell Nokia's non-touch screen flagship at the time).
I think what you're really saying when you say "This sounds like just more "Europe is better than America" crap" is that you can't stand the idea that some places might actually be better than America at some things. Tough shit, American exceptionalism is nonsense, it's not superior at everything in every way - chocolate is one of those ways in which it simply does a terrible job. Don't let it upset you though, you get awesome other things, like meat products. Tr
Long story short, we still don't know for sure who did it, but Rogers' analysis is pointless drivel that contributes nothing more than a typical Slashdot post. There's really nothing in his analysis that slants the blame away from NK - it's just speculation and highly circumstantial evidence.
Well given that Microsoft originally claimed that every Xbox One was to be a dev kit to allow widespread indie development once they get around to releasing the more broad based anyone can build dev kit then I think the question is do they care?
The console was always intended to at least some degree to be developed on by everyone and anyone, so I'd wager it was always similarly designed to be hardened for exactly that purpose regardless.
You don't question the science by simply asking arbitrary nonsensical questions or pushing long debunked theories though. You have to actually do science and come up with some results that bring into question the pre-existing science.
If you believe your college taught you that you can defeat an established scientific theory by repeatedly asking arbitrary questions about it then you either weren't listening or your college was shit and you need a refund.
I know it's hard, I know it means that to question the science means you'd have to actually put some effort into investigating it to come up with a question that actually has some merit to it rather than sitting as a little armchair troll that simply detests the idea that humanity might not be perfect and may in fact cause some problems in the world after all, but tough shit, it is what it is.
This was my first thought when I read about this yesterday too. Why oh why isn't such an important system air gapped from the rest of the general drones in ICANN's offices?
I mean seriously? Can the fucking receptionist communicate directly with these core servers for example?
I know it's hard for many IT workers, but sometimes you just need to get off your fat arse and walk over to the system you need to administer to maintain security. Anyone working somewhere important like ICANN that puts convenience of being able to remain on their arse over security needs to be fired. If they want a job where they can put convenience over security then they can go work in 99% of other organisations that don't need that level of security.
"It's a bit too much to go just to get a movie off the screen."
This is the country that's detonated nuclear bombs, sunk warships with torpedos, and fired artillery barrages at it's neighbours civilian villages, and leaked lists of thousands of civilian bank customers details just because it hasn't been given enough attention for a week like a petulent little child.
Nothing is a bit much for North Korea, if the Kim dynasty's fragile little egos are upset then you can expect an extreme reaction. This is the fat little man-child who had his own uncle executed - the guy is basically a living incarnation of Eric Cartman.
Honestly, Marc Rogers' analysis is fucking awful. It's entirely speculation - it's no different to your average Slashdot post where someone is just stating their opinion and passing it off as fact. Examples:
"1. The broken English looks deliberately bad and doesnâ(TM)t exhibit any of the classic comprehension mistakes you actually expect to see in âoeKonglishâ. i.e it reads to me like an English speaker pretending to be bad at writing English."
Really? Please expand on that. Please give examples. To me it looks like just about every other piece of broken English I've seen online. Simply declare it not such without explaining why is not an argument.
"2. The fact that the code was written on a PC with Korean locale & language actually makes it less likely to be North Korea. Not least because they donâ(TM)t speak traditional âoeKoreanâ in North Korea, they speak their own dialect and traditional Korean is forbidden."
Interesting, but hardly stone cold evidence. If it was a North Korean spy that's trained in South Korean because they were behind the past hacks on South Korea then they may find that this is the easiest configuration for them. Is the North Korean dialect even a configuration option? If not then what else could they use? English? I'd guess not given how broken their English is.
"3. Itâ(TM)s clear from the hard-coded paths and passwords in the malware that whoever wrote it had extensive knowledge of Sonyâ(TM)s internal architecture and access to key passwords. While itâ(TM)s plausible that an attacker could have built up this knowledge over time and then used it to make the malware, Occamâ(TM)s razor suggests the simpler explanation of an insider. It also fits with the pure revenge tact that this started out as."
Again, entirely just speculation, poor use of Occam's razor. Occam's razor doesn't suggest it was an insider out to get Sony any more than it suggests the attackers simply spent a bit of time surveilling their target before following through with the hack. This argument again adds nothing.
"4. Whoever did this is in it for revenge. The info and access they had could have easily been used to cash out, yet, instead, they are making every effort to burn Sony down."
Isn't this an argument FOR it being North Korea rather than against given that North Korea has vocally made it clear that they're unhappy with Sony over the film? If anything this is an argument in favour of it being North Korea.
"5. The attackers only latched onto âoeThe Interviewâ after the media did â" the film was never mentioned by GOP right at the start of their campaign."
Sure and North Korea spent a few days figuring out whether to admit responsibility or not rather than outright denying it. It's now becoming the defining point of their campaign which seemed to be something North Korea was keen on - if it was the internal employee theory then why has Rogers' now changed his mind about maximising damage? Simply making Sony cancel a $42million film is small fry damage - an inside job would focus on continuing to be far more damaging than that. But to follow on this same point:
"After all, if everyone believes itâ(TM)s a nation state, then the criminal investigation will likely die."
What? Why? The FBI will just give up if it's thought to be a nation state? No, on the contrary it'll be escalated to the CIA and NSA. This point doesn't even make sense.
"6. Whoever is doing this is VERY net and social media savvy. That, and the sophistication of the operation, do not match with the profile of DPRK up until now."
Um, you mean they can use Twitter? So can half the child population of this world. Unless there's a suggestion that North Koreans are inferior people with IQ's less than your average child and who couldn't possibly look at what's worked for other succesful hacker groups like anonymous then this point is monumentally stupid.
"Lawrence was paid 7 percent of the movie's profit, while Bale and Cooper received 9 percent, according to emails sent to Pascal. Amy Pascal, the co-chair of Sony Pictures Entertainment is the only woman earning $1 million or more at the studio."
Profits? more fool them. With Hollywood accounting it sounds like they probably all got nothing regardless:) 7%? 9%? It's all $0 once Hollywood has fiddled the figures to make sure the movie makes zero profit!
Slashdot Mirror
It seems to be a broader pattern, even on my now abandoned Galaxy Nexus stuck on 4.3 I find Google apps have become drastically lower quality. The other day I was trying to get to navigation in Google maps and I suffered 3 crashes at varying points - one typing in the location, another selecting it from the results when I tried again, and a third when I finally tried again and got past that point when I clicked the button to take me to navigation.
I'm also finding that Google keyboard is getting a bit poor now - the suggestions seem to have largely disappeared only turning up arbitrarily once every few words. It also struggles figuring out when I've moved from one word to the next more than it used to.
So even without the OS update and just suffering app updates things have gotten worse anyway.
I'm having a hard time understanding why your company has a counter productive set of business rules that force you to not be able to test a new version of a prototype R&D system for 2 weeks is a C# problem. Though your estimate of 2 days to do the code changes seems a little steep given that retargetting to .NET is normally just a case of changing a drop down list option and that that's sufficient for 99.9999% of projects unless you do some weird and unusual things.
I'm also not sure how it's C#'s fault that your company has decided to change it's database abstraction layer for seemingly no other reason than because it's funny is a C# problem too.
MVC? sure, but what's new about having to decide about sticking with an old stable version and selecting a new version with new features, but requiring some code updates? That describes 99% of frameworks out there.
It sounds like your company is stuck in a transition period where it's trying to move forward but is in many ways failing to manage it well, jumping ahead to the latest and greatest simply for the sake of it. It sounds like you don't like change, and wish you could still just COBOL and C++ away until retirement without ever having to learn anything.
The problem is even the folks behind C++ realise it's gotta change, and if you hadn't hidden under a rock you'd know that C++ has changed more in the last 5 years than even C# has.
Unfortunately it's the price of progress. You either live with it and deal with it, or you get left behind. Just please stop telling people that being left behind is somehow good for their careers. It's not, it's really just not.
But a point you made is worth addressing a bit more thoroughly:
"The technologies packed around C# and .NET in general are targets that move so fast that if you're out of the game for 2 years, even though you could probably pick up and run with the new stuff within a week or less, you're likely going to be competing with hundreds of applicants that are fresh and in the game with the current tech already and will (in theory) be off and running on the first day at their desk."
I agree, and I've seen this too. But realise that not all companies are this stupid, and those that are aren't the ones you want to work for. Is it annoying that you have your time wasted by them because they're looking for someone who called a single method in an exact way in a framework with thousands of functions last week and may not know anything about the rest of the framework whilst foregoing the candidate that knows 90% of the rest of the framework inside out and so is infinitely more qualified but has been felled by a stupid interview mechanism? Yeah it is. But it's just part of job hunting and some companies are just shit at recruiting and have no idea how to spot talent - don't count it as your loss, it's their problem and their loss, they're the ones that the odds are will end up with countless highly inept people.
Yeah they wrote off support for my Galaxy Nexus after only 18 months so it's still on what, 4.3 I think.
My Nexus 7 still hasn't received 5.0.
So if people aren't upgrading it may not be because they don't want to but because Google is sloppy on even it's own brand devices at rolling it out.
People wont go out their way to upgrade, if it doesn't come OTA to them then most just wont bother.
"It's a common mistake to look at the IRA murders, bombing, etc in a religious light - as you said, the sides were largely drawn across Catholic/Protestant lines, but what the IRA did was never in the name of religion, it was in the name of nationalism."
You can make the exact same argument about the varying factions including ISIS in Syria right now, so I'm not really sure what your point is unless you're implying we should apply double standards against Muslim conflicts as compared to Christian conflicts.
You could twist the argument in exactly the same way by claiming ISIS' battle is as much about wanting their own sovereign state as it is about religion so it's silly to say it's a religious battle.
But really all you're doing is making excuses for your own misguided prejudices, which, given your firm Christian views probably isn't too surprising that you'd suggest that in one case it wasn't about religion when Christianity is involved but in another it obviously is.
Like it or not, the IRA's campaign was primarily one of Catholics against Protestants. It had no more and no less of a religious angle to it over a sovereignty angle as ISIS currently does. Fact is battles for sovereignty and religion often go hand in hand, but you can't excuse it in one case and not in another just to try and suit your anti-Islamic prejudice.
Oh I don't know about that. This guy makes kind of a good point:
http://www.aljazeera.com/indep...
And really, even the whole ISIS/Iraq/Syria thing doesn't hold much of a finger up to the Rwanda genocide which was primarily orchestrated by Christians.
Hell, in the Yugoslav wars Christian Orthodox Serbs massacred 10,000 Bosniak muslims in one sitting at Srebrenica.
Well, perhaps one of the more obvious ones is the Srebrenica massacre where 10,000 muslims were killed by Serb Christian Orthodox in the 90s.
More recently, according to this link since 2008 until 2012 alone the LRA has killed 2,600 people:
http://www.hrw.org/news/2012/0...
Not even close to true. Places like ancient Persia are famous for their contribution to science, mathematics and so forth.
"When was the last time you heard of such rules being enforced?"
Pretty much every week if you bother to read anything other than Western oriented news. What do you think Joseph Kony and his Lord's Resistance Army are all about exactly? What do you think the Lord bit in their name is referring to specifically? When they butcher entire villages what do you believe their reasoning to be?
Do you use double standards and assume they're just a violent bunch of people and dismiss their claimed cause and not treat ISIS the same way? or were you simply unaware that there are groups as bad as ISIS out there that claim Christianity as their cause exactly as ISIS does?
As for honour killings, I suggest you take a long hard look at many of the drug cartels in Mexico who purport to follow Christianity and claim that as their reason for doing some of the horrific things they do.
It's easy to forget there's a world outside the middle east when that and people who or whose families originate from there are all your media talking about, but in Burma even the famed for peace Buddhists have been carrying out brutal violent massacres - ironically against Rohingya muslims.
Finding examples of violence amongst a specific group is typical as easy as pinpointing the places that group inhabits, and then subsequently looking at all the places within those areas where there is extreme poverty.
"Yeah...but right now in this day in age, I'm not terribly concerned about all the Baptists running around beheading people, running around as suicide bombers, and shooting up news offices and killing innocent people."
Sure, but head to Africa and see how the LRA treat you. Go to Ireland and see what the IRA think of you. Head to Mexico and see how well the Knights Templars treat you.
The problem is that Islamic terrorism gets the headlines because it's currently the biggest threat in most Western nations that we currently consume our news from.
But the fact remains that there are large parts of the world where violence of equal levels of atrocity are coming from each and every religion.
The common thing isn't religion but simply the cycles of violence in those areas. The butcherings we see by Christians in parts of Africa and Mexico are at least as bad as anything ISIS pulls off but the Western media has largely gotten bored of Mexico and Africa now. Horrible people are horrible people, and sure, being able to give them a convenient label might be useful for venting anger and hate towards the problem, but it does nothing to recognise and resolve the underlying problem itself.
Probably depends on the tool stack in question.
I moved from projects C# w/ASP.NET MVC, to PHP with Zend, on to a project using Java and Spring, then back to C# w/ASP.NET MVC as if there wasn't really a difference over the course of about 3 years, because HTTP is HTTP, and MVC is MVC and the syntax differences and configuration differences are a few days learning at most.
It really depends on whether the technology in question follows a common pattern or is something wholly obscure. But most things like web frameworks, ORM frameworks, GUI frameworks, graphics libraries, messaging technologies and so forth follow fairly familiar patterns. Chances are if you know one, then moving to another just isn't very difficult.
Programming concepts transfer between the languages making new languages easy to learn, whilst design patterns transfer between technologies making technologies easy to learn. The problem is that most developers don't know their design patterns (and underlying technologies like the HTTP protocol) and don't obviously grasp how to spot what is being used where.
I wouldn't let it bother you, as much as I have many issues with many parts of American culture and politics I still have a primarily positive view of the US and I think most people do. It's just that online, and especially on Slashdot people seem to dwell on the negative and ignore the positive. For example, people are too busy attacking minor aspects of tech companies where they've done wrong whilst failing to recognise what a resounding success silicon valley is as a whole.
As a Brit we too have had more than our fair share of slagging off. We still get attacked for things that happened many generations ago as if those of us living today somehow authorised or supported it despite that being impossible because we simply weren't alive then. It's the downside of living in a generally successful country- you become a target of hate for all those who have managed to do nothing other than fuck theirs up.
Honestly, I don't hate America in the slightest, I just hate your chocolate :)
Well I say it coming from a couple of angles, the first being as I say my partner is Canadian so due to knowing hundreds of people in both continents and having taken chocolate back and forth and finding that no one in Europe wants American chocolate and everyone in Canada (and a few friends in the US) want European chocolate it seems to be beyond coincidence. The problem is that amongst the hundreds of people we know the agreement is literally universal. I don't know a single person that's actually tried both that would favour American chocolate.
But then of course there's the more objective measures, we know for a fact that American main brand chocolate like Hersheys simply has less cocoa and more cheaper lower quality ingredients. The same remains true for US versions of pretty much all large brand chocolate. You're right that there might be a few people that prefer the less healthy lower quality American taste, but these people seem to be few and far between because there don't really seem to be many who have actually tried both standing up and saying they prefer American chocolate. This is somewhat backed up by the fact that no matter how hard I try, even using a US proxy I can't get Google to come back with anything other than comments about American chocolate being awful when I use any combination of searches on "awful european chocolate", "horrible chocolate europe" and so forth.
Like it or not, there is a widespread and well published distaste for American chocolate by many North Americans and others across the globe alike when they taste both large brand equivalents from Europe, or even better, real quality chocolate from Europe from proper chocolatiers using good cocoa and plenty of it.
Okay sure they probably weren't the best example as they do do a lot of cheaper low quality stuff as well because it seemed that that's what the market wanted, but their premium products are still decent quality.
Did you try those Kit Kats?
This is the problem, even well known big brand chocolate tastes better in Europe than the US, the brand may well be the same but the recipe is different.
American Dairy Milk bars are awful compared to the UK versions for example.
"So don't you Europeans talk about 'fine chocolate' until at least you've tasted a fine batch made from single-plantation source in Madagascar. You don't know what you're talking about until then."
Why? we can already one up you on that quite trivially. Succesful chains like Hotel Chocolat let us have single-plantation source chocolate of our choice -
http://www.hotelchocolat.com/u...
But it's better than that. Their flagships contain three things, a shop, a bar, and a restaurant. So you can experience everything from chocolate liqueurs to cocoa gravy there. You can experience proper cocoa usage from just about every worthwhile source in just about all it's incarnations - whether in chocolate bars, drinks, or meals.
So we know exactly what we're talking about by fine chocolate- the issue seems to be that you're wholly unaware of what actual chocolatiers we do have here in Europe given your completely false suggestion that it's hard to find. Even here in the UK which is normally frowned upon as one of the poorest quality chocolate producers in Europe we have major high quality chocolatiers in just about every high street that even slightly matters, and most have high quality independents too.
"Wasn't it the EU who didn't want Cadbury's chocolate to be labeled real chocolate?"
If by the EU you mean a handful of vested interests in countries like France and Belgium lobbying a handful of EU representatives and failing in the EU as a whole then yes. Otherwise, if you mean what most people would assume to be the EU, as in, the political organisation as a majority or whole, then no.
"You're probably talking about Hershey's, which is net the entirety of American chocolate."
No, even Cadburys and Nestle chocolate tastes shit in America - Dairy Milk bars, Smarties, M&Ms and so on, they're all just awful in the US. They use different recipes. All American main-brand chocolate is just plain terrible. It tastes like wax with chocolate flavouring as someone else said. Letting it melt in your mouth feels like you've just slurped up part of an oil slick with a bit of flavouring added to it. I was told too this is because the ingredients they use are less likely to melt in the heat of America's hottest states whereas the bars would turn to liquid if they used Cadbury's UK recipe and they were shipped to Florida or whatever, but I don't think it was added sugar that was the recipe. What I do know is that chocolate in America (and Canada) just tastes awful though compared to equivalent bars in Europe. Last I checked orange Smarties don't even taste of orange chocolate in North America either, which is a crime worthy of your death penalty, so find who is responsible and deal with it please.
If you start going upmarket to places where you can get real chocolate like Hotel Chocolat, Thorntons, or proper Belgian chocolatiers then the disparity between European and America chocolate becomes even more embarassing.
It isn't just "Europe is better than America crap", and the fact you said that implies to me that you don't have the benefit of experience and are just speculating. I'm British and my partner is Canadian, we travel between both continents regularly and the sheer amount of British confectionary we're asked to cart over with us for friends and family (and the complete lack on the way back - though we do cart back other things; maple syrup, various steak spices and so forth) is a fine example of how much people realise European chocolate really is just so much nicer. It's not about childhood memories, it's simply that when you've had both people seem to consistently opt for the European versions where they can.
There are a lot of areas where North America has it's advantages, and there are areas where Europe has it's advantages (you still get films, and games before us, and get most things at much more reasonable prices). For example, until the Smartphone wars starting in 2007 North America looked practically prehistoric in terms of cellphones, Europe (and Japan) were clearly superior in this area for a decade or so - I was like a guy from the future back in 2004 when I went over with my colour screen Nokia that could play MP3s, install apps including games like Doom, take photos and so on and so forth. This is in fact why the first iPhone wasn't even released in Europe - a phone with no MMS, no GPS, no mapping, no apps, no 3G and so on and so forth was always a joke in the European market and the fancy touch interface just couldn't make up for those glaring deficiencies. It was only really by the 3rd iteration that it even began to matter in Europe where it finally began to catch up on having the bare minimum required feature set (the second iteration didn't even outsell Nokia's non-touch screen flagship at the time).
I think what you're really saying when you say "This sounds like just more "Europe is better than America" crap" is that you can't stand the idea that some places might actually be better than America at some things. Tough shit, American exceptionalism is nonsense, it's not superior at everything in every way - chocolate is one of those ways in which it simply does a terrible job. Don't let it upset you though, you get awesome other things, like meat products. Tr
I already pointed out how broken Marc Rogers argument was last time it was posted:
http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
Long story short, we still don't know for sure who did it, but Rogers' analysis is pointless drivel that contributes nothing more than a typical Slashdot post. There's really nothing in his analysis that slants the blame away from NK - it's just speculation and highly circumstantial evidence.
Well given that Microsoft originally claimed that every Xbox One was to be a dev kit to allow widespread indie development once they get around to releasing the more broad based anyone can build dev kit then I think the question is do they care?
The console was always intended to at least some degree to be developed on by everyone and anyone, so I'd wager it was always similarly designed to be hardened for exactly that purpose regardless.
You don't question the science by simply asking arbitrary nonsensical questions or pushing long debunked theories though. You have to actually do science and come up with some results that bring into question the pre-existing science.
If you believe your college taught you that you can defeat an established scientific theory by repeatedly asking arbitrary questions about it then you either weren't listening or your college was shit and you need a refund.
I know it's hard, I know it means that to question the science means you'd have to actually put some effort into investigating it to come up with a question that actually has some merit to it rather than sitting as a little armchair troll that simply detests the idea that humanity might not be perfect and may in fact cause some problems in the world after all, but tough shit, it is what it is.
This was my first thought when I read about this yesterday too. Why oh why isn't such an important system air gapped from the rest of the general drones in ICANN's offices?
I mean seriously? Can the fucking receptionist communicate directly with these core servers for example?
I know it's hard for many IT workers, but sometimes you just need to get off your fat arse and walk over to the system you need to administer to maintain security. Anyone working somewhere important like ICANN that puts convenience of being able to remain on their arse over security needs to be fired. If they want a job where they can put convenience over security then they can go work in 99% of other organisations that don't need that level of security.
"It's a bit too much to go just to get a movie off the screen."
This is the country that's detonated nuclear bombs, sunk warships with torpedos, and fired artillery barrages at it's neighbours civilian villages, and leaked lists of thousands of civilian bank customers details just because it hasn't been given enough attention for a week like a petulent little child.
Nothing is a bit much for North Korea, if the Kim dynasty's fragile little egos are upset then you can expect an extreme reaction. This is the fat little man-child who had his own uncle executed - the guy is basically a living incarnation of Eric Cartman.
Honestly, Marc Rogers' analysis is fucking awful. It's entirely speculation - it's no different to your average Slashdot post where someone is just stating their opinion and passing it off as fact. Examples:
"1. The broken English looks deliberately bad and doesnâ(TM)t exhibit any of the classic comprehension mistakes you actually expect to see in âoeKonglishâ. i.e it reads to me like an English speaker pretending to be bad at writing English."
Really? Please expand on that. Please give examples. To me it looks like just about every other piece of broken English I've seen online. Simply declare it not such without explaining why is not an argument.
"2. The fact that the code was written on a PC with Korean locale & language actually makes it less likely to be North Korea. Not least because they donâ(TM)t speak traditional âoeKoreanâ in North Korea, they speak their own dialect and traditional Korean is forbidden."
Interesting, but hardly stone cold evidence. If it was a North Korean spy that's trained in South Korean because they were behind the past hacks on South Korea then they may find that this is the easiest configuration for them. Is the North Korean dialect even a configuration option? If not then what else could they use? English? I'd guess not given how broken their English is.
"3. Itâ(TM)s clear from the hard-coded paths and passwords in the malware that whoever wrote it had extensive knowledge of Sonyâ(TM)s internal architecture and access to key passwords. While itâ(TM)s plausible that an attacker could have built up this knowledge over time and then used it to make the malware, Occamâ(TM)s razor suggests the simpler explanation of an insider. It also fits with the pure revenge tact that this started out as."
Again, entirely just speculation, poor use of Occam's razor. Occam's razor doesn't suggest it was an insider out to get Sony any more than it suggests the attackers simply spent a bit of time surveilling their target before following through with the hack. This argument again adds nothing.
"4. Whoever did this is in it for revenge. The info and access they had could have easily been used to cash out, yet, instead, they are making every effort to burn Sony down."
Isn't this an argument FOR it being North Korea rather than against given that North Korea has vocally made it clear that they're unhappy with Sony over the film? If anything this is an argument in favour of it being North Korea.
"5. The attackers only latched onto âoeThe Interviewâ after the media did â" the film was never mentioned by GOP right at the start of their campaign."
Sure and North Korea spent a few days figuring out whether to admit responsibility or not rather than outright denying it. It's now becoming the defining point of their campaign which seemed to be something North Korea was keen on - if it was the internal employee theory then why has Rogers' now changed his mind about maximising damage? Simply making Sony cancel a $42million film is small fry damage - an inside job would focus on continuing to be far more damaging than that. But to follow on this same point:
"After all, if everyone believes itâ(TM)s a nation state, then the criminal investigation will likely die."
What? Why? The FBI will just give up if it's thought to be a nation state? No, on the contrary it'll be escalated to the CIA and NSA. This point doesn't even make sense.
"6. Whoever is doing this is VERY net and social media savvy. That, and the sophistication of the operation, do not match with the profile of DPRK up until now."
Um, you mean they can use Twitter? So can half the child population of this world. Unless there's a suggestion that North Koreans are inferior people with IQ's less than your average child and who couldn't possibly look at what's worked for other succesful hacker groups like anonymous then this point is monumentally stupid.
"7. Finally, blaming North Korea is the easy way
In that case them getting $0 from the net profits would be justified anyway given how utterly terrible the film was.
It was a dull, boring, uninteresting waste of like 2 - 3 hours of my life.
"Lawrence was paid 7 percent of the movie's profit, while Bale and Cooper received 9 percent, according to emails sent to Pascal. Amy Pascal, the co-chair of Sony Pictures Entertainment is the only woman earning $1 million or more at the studio."
Profits? more fool them. With Hollywood accounting it sounds like they probably all got nothing regardless :) 7%? 9%? It's all $0 once Hollywood has fiddled the figures to make sure the movie makes zero profit!
Amazon UK does too, I have no idea why the GP thinks it doesn't.