Whirlpool is incredibly popular, and has a very loyal user base - the offers of money for a legal fund are starting to roll in! I saw nothing in the thread that is defamatory, the OP asked for advice, was told 'do your homework' (entirely sensible), OP came back and said 'I found a better deal, thanks'. Nobody came out and said "this company is shit!"
I very much doubt they have a leg to stand on, and all they have done is ensure that a future Google search will bring this little act of douchery up and forever associate their name with it. Good Job!
It should also be added, the majority of WP users didn't even have a clue about WCS until there was a news article in major papers saying that the NAB owned WCS was suing them.
This is probably going to be back-pedalled faster than Tony Abbott running from gays on a boat.
Anyone in Australia who hasn't at least considered one of the many smaller (and better) financial institutions instead of the big 4 banks (or one of their subsidiaries) is stupid, the smaller guys are just as good (if not better) than the big 4 when it comes to service, products etc and they dont do a lot of the crap the big 4 do.
Yep, I dumped NAB and went to Citibank and GE Money...
That's irrelevant. All that matters is who has the bigger wallet the hire better lawyer. Even OJ won in court.
Not in Australia.
In Australia we have judges that are competent, not simply waiting for their next cheque.
Also the whole "better lawyer" thing is not as skewed because the winner can go after the loser for legal fees (even if they withdraw their case). So a lot of lawyers work on the idea that they'll get their fee after the case if your case is strong enough. Besides this, Whirlpool's Simon Wright has been putting money away after the 2Clix fiasco for just this kind of emergency.
But the National Australia Bank (NAB) owned WCS is about to learn about the Streisand effect the hard way. Before the tried to sue Whirlpool the only people who knew about that post were the people in that thread (I'm an active member and I didn't know about it) but now, there's an article in the Age and the Sydney Morning Herald about them.
Businesspeople will treat software developers and electrical engineers just fine, but these software developers and electrical engineers need to be adults and need to act like adults. They need to dress professionally, they need to act professionally, and they need to get valuable work done.
This...
Well except for the dressing professionally bit. As long as they aren't client facing and wash on a regular basis.
A lot of developers dont get respect because they dont earn it. They feel they're automatically entitled to respect so managements response to this is to squash them (appeasing a sense of entitlement is about the worst thing you can do). A bit part of this is that these self important developers dont respect anyone else. Managers are useless, everyone else exists just to support them.
The best developers I've worked with never dressed in a button up shirt, let alone a suit. One of them wore a polo to his own wedding. However they always gave the respect to others that they wanted to receive in return. Instead of asking for incredulous specifications for servers, they'd actually ask "I need a test server to do Foo, what kind of server do I need". These guys recognised that they didn't know everything and were very good at their jobs. When it came to a subject they weren't completely familiar with they'd listen to advice, they'd understand that they weren't the only ones competing for resources and were actually grateful when things came through for them. They earned respect and as a result, people wanted to help them out.
If you're going to act like children, you'll be treated like children. Act like actual adults, and you won't have anywhere near as many issues.
This advice really goes for everyone, not just developers. The same problem is in sales, admin (PA's who think they run the company), systems administration (the "department of no" types), managers (PHB), pretty much everyone really.
Of course they do. Real Engineers design up front, before implementing. We understand the implications of our decisions. We optimize. We know that there are many orthogonal factors to consider in doing this. Shoud we optimize with an emphasis size or speed? If we optimize for size, how will that decision effect scalability and the ability to add functionality we may not have originally considered, or that the original design specification didn't call for?
This describes none of the "software engineers" I've ever met.
Most will just pull a arbitrarily large number out of thin air and write that on the spec. Sure, we need 700 GB for this database, highest tier disk, provision it from your infinite bag of storage and dont bother sending us the bill because we'll cry when we get it. I get requests like this by the week, it's the whole reason we've put a per GB cost on internal storage is to stop developers and DBA's that dont bother doing proper sizing requirements from using all the storage.
Because it turns out all they needed was 300 GB, 100 on fast storage, 200 on slow storage but they wont do this until we force them to.
More often than not, Developers and DBA's dont get respect because they dont earn it. This is not helped by the fact that inferiority complexes and senses of entitlement are commonplace.
No, this is precisely about accountability. It's not a new problem either: London invented this solution in response to this problem ~350 years ago. In the 17th century, there were many hackney carriages driven by unscrupulous drivers, who had no assets you could go after to pay for damages they caused through their rash behavior.
Here are two solutions:
1. Enforce a skill floor on drivers, so the worst cannot drive at all.
2. Require the rest of the drivers to carry insurance, so that any damages they cause to a third party may be assured coverage.
If they applied this to Uber, they'd be just as expensive (if not more so) than regular taxi services.
I firmly believe that any driver or car could register as a taxi as long as they meet these requirements:
1. The driver to be licensed as a taxi driver (in Perth, Western Australia we have a test kind of like London's "The Knowledge" but far simpler).
2. The vehicle to be in good condition (as in beyond just roadworthy).
3. The driver is insured as a commercial driver.
However companies like Uber are not trying do this. Rather they seem bent on trying to ignore the rules as long as possible and that's only going to work for so long as cities are already starting to crack down on them. Its only a matter of time before an Uber driver in Australia or Europe hits and maims someone then insurance companies are going to go after Uber like rabid dogs (and Uber wont survive them).
The driver in that case (who should be in jail) ran over the girl not because he was an Uber driver, BUT just because he was a negligent driver on the road at the time.
this is bullshit.
Bolding parts of it doesn't make is less bullshit.
Liability insurance for commercial drivers is mandatory in most places for this very reason. Further more in many places third party injury insurance is mandatory for all drivers for this very reason.
Maybe you in your libertarian delusions can go and explain to family of the girl who died because of this driver that it's a fact of life and they should be happy for that.
Furthemore INSURANCE WOULD NOT HELP, even if he had it. The girl is dead, period, full stop. There is no insurance payout here.
Actually there is a very big payout for death.
But what about the next time when a person isn't killed, just permanently disabled. You could go along then and explain it's a fact of life.
Or maybe the drivers could get liability insurance seeing as they're using their cars for commercial purposes. Then again, that would mean their services wouldn't be cheaper than a regular taxi.
victims should not be holding the bag when drivers like this have insurance that uses loop holes to get out of covering victims. Taxis and other "commercial transport license" drivers have insurance that covers them all the time.
In Australia an Uber driver with private car insurance (meaning all of them) would still have the claims paid out (except that of the Uber driver, because he violated the terms of the policy). However the insurer would be free to go after any assets the driver has and any assets Uber has as compensation.
The fastest air breathing aircraft was the SR-71, which went into production in 1962, based on technology from the 1950s. So for at least half a century, jets did not get faster. Aircraft improved enormously between 1903 and 1960. Then the rate of improvements fell off a cliff. That is why Sci-Fi from that era often extrapolated the improvements into flying cars, and fast space travel, but far fewer predicted things like the Internet or Wikipedia.
Thats because you're basing all aircraft improvement on speed.
This is flat out wrong.
The reason aircraft have not gotten faster than the SR71 is partially because you hit a serious wall at those speeds. The air literally becomes harder to push though. Physics is the enemy here, this is why its expensive to produce a car that goes over 400 KPH and that car is not very reliable. Friction and air resistance need to be overcome, heat dissipation has to be balenced with weight (the Veyron has 11 radiators) and aerodynamics. It's not as simple as strapping more rockets onto the arse of a 737.
But the biggest reason is there's no impetus. There's no demand for faster aircraft. Even with the Concorde, the economics of it never made sense, Air France and BA only ran the Concorde for pride. The demand for supersonic transport just isn't there. However there is a lot of demand for cheaper air travel.
How expensive was an air ticket in 1962? you'll find a US Domestic flight cost around $1500 in todays money, the same flight you get for $200 today.
Safety, in 1962 the DeHavilland Comet had this nasty problem of breaking up mid flight. Hull loss incidents lead to crashes in most cases. This is not the case, both the B777 an A330 flew in commercial service for over a decade each before a fatal crash. Hull loss incidents rarely lead to crashes, in fact, an entire engine can blow up and the aircraft can still land safely without a single injury.
So cost and safety have changed a lot in the last 50 years of flight. Flying is more accessible and safer.
Complaining that flying hasn't improved in 50 years because of speeds is like complaining that ovens have not improved in the last 200 years because they aren't any hotter. It ignores the advent of the thermostat control, convection oven and the fact that the price is lower and selection available to me has increased significantly.
1. Meaningful, specific error/log messages when something goes wrong.
This, a thousand times this.
I hate meaningless error messages like "An error has occurred" but even worse are ones with cryptic codes like "An error has occurred. Error code:5" and there's no reference for error code 5 anywhere or worse yet, error code 5 has 15 different meanings.
UX is willy-nilly bullshit 99% of the time that you'll have to revisit over, and over, and over with each new fad. Any changes to "UX" shit will also force you to unnecessarily rewrite half of your documentation.
This. Documentation will tell people how to get something done. UX will just waste time and money.
UX is a bullshit field that is completely unrelated to HCI/HMI (the proper science behind how people work with computers and interfaces) made up to justify some companies incredibly crappy GUI.
If your interface is not user friendly, make it better but dont rely on pseudo-scientific quackery like UX to tell you anything, especially anything remotely useful.
When Wal-Mart decides to sell a new brand of dish soap, it isn't their job to ensure the product is a smashing success. All Wal-Mart cares about is that when you need dish soap, Wal-Mart is where you buy it; it doesn't really matter to them which one you buy. If DishSoapCo is depending on Wal-Mart to convince consumers to buy their soap, they will be sorely disappointed. (Of course, with no marketing plan, Wal-Mart is unlikely to carry the product to begin with, but that's because they have limited shelf space; the App store has no such limitation.)
This is flat out not true.
Wal-Mart certainly does care which brand of dish soap you buy because they make more money of some brands compared to others. Lots of supermarkets will favour their own brands over others unless they receive a kickback, German supermarket giant Aldi is famous for favouring it's own brands which have higher profit margins. So they certainly have a vested interest in what brand you buy.
There are several tricks stores use to entice and cajole shoppers towards certain products. Products on shelves at eye height tend to be the most purchased, so placing Brand Y crisps on the bottom shelf and Lays crisps on the shelves at eye level means that consumers will tend to buy more Lays than Brand Y despite Brand Y being cheaper as few people actually discriminate between brands or even price. The things is, next week Brand Y pays the supermarket to increase their sales, this is when it becomes in the supermarkets interest to sell more.
This is just one of the tricks stores use, having large displays at the start of aisles, larger price tags, a "SALE" sign, a gap either side of the product, all of these work subconsciously to draw a shoppers attention to a product over their competitors.
It's 2014 and you are "ashamed" to ride in a car with something pink on it?
No, I'm ashamed to ride in a car with an incredibly gaudy giant pink mustache on it. And I'm even more ashamed for the poor driver
Here you've only demonstrated your own insecurity.
A real man can drive a bright pink Fiat Punto with the window down without a care for the opinions of insecure fools. Of course, being a gentleman he also prefers to use three pedals.
It would be truly horrible if people had to concentrate on their driving rather than the six-channel, streaming video playing on their dashboard while they blend margaritas.
No doubt, but it would be more horrible if modern systems for things like braking and traction control went away. People who've grown up with cars that are full of three-letter technologies like ABS and EBD might not appreciate how much more skill is required to drive a car safely at the same speeds and in the same environments without these driver aids.
ABS doesn't distract you, ABS cant be broken into externally because it's not connected to your stereo.
Drivers aids like lane assist are debatable at best, with my experiences, they serve as better distractions rather than aids. Most drivers will ignore them, the best result is that drivers get lazier and start to ignore the bad habits that cause these alarms to go off.
Nothing is going to happen until (1) a senior officer at GM has his car hacked,
GM Exec blames the wrong person, like the driver and problem doesn't get fixed.
(2) a very public hacking makes security a point on which automakers compete
Automakers complain to government until hackers are arrested, charged with terrorism and made to cover up their work.
they get sued.
The plaintiffs are paid of using a small amount, law suit is forgotten within a week.
The Auto industry is terrible at doing things that might cost money on their own. They'd rather ignore the problem and sue/arrest/pay off people to make it go away than fix it. The only way Automakers will get serious about security is if the government (and by this, I mean the UK, EU and Australian governments, the US govt is completely useless in this regard) forces them to do it.
Seatbelts and immobilisers are case in point.
Oh, I'd imagine that private workers goof off too. The thing is, when they do it jeopardizes whatever project they're involved with, with monetary loss to the company.
You've never worked before have you.
Some people have turned slacking off into a full time job. As long as the company is making money, they dont get noticed. The worst slackers I've worked with were in the private sector (and not unionised, union people know they have a job to do). They're normally in middle management/admin positions that dont get monitored for performance. Think about all the people who call pointless meetings, extend meetings with pointless conversation/questions and when you come to them needing something, they've got a huge tale of woe explaining how they're too busy to help (yet can take a 2 hour lunch).
As long as the P&L statement looks good, these people never get noticed... If the P&L statement starts to look bad, they're normally not the first ones fired either.
This is crazy. We've allowed our kids to be overloaded with homework; now we're letting the education lobby steal summer vacation.
I dont think they're taking it away, rather distributing the holidays throughout the year.
In Australia we have the school year divided into 4 semesters of 11-12 weeks each. Between each semester is a 2 week break except at the end of the year where it's a 6 week break. The 2 week breaks are important for schools and teachers as it allows teachers time to plan the semesters curriculum and schools to perform regular maintenance. It also gives kids a break and allows families more flexibility with travel plans.
And Walter Koenig's hop from roles as Chekov in Star Trek to Alfred Bester in Babylon 5 was... well, you have to go watch the shows to understand the _completely_ different role Walter Koenig plays, and to applaud the acting and the writing that created it.
JMS's first choice for the role of Bester was Patrick Mcgoohan and the character was primarily written with him in mind, that being said, Koeing did a fantastic job of taking the character and running with it. JMS did a very good job with the regular antagonists. Morden was another good example, like Bester designed to completely retard sympathy.
Exactly how long do you think it will take the staff to figure out the freely-given-to-guests-by-staff password?
Given the fact most of the staff are Filipinas... not long.
However the guy who runs the place keeps an eye on it and when that happens he'll change the password. If you dont maintain your network it doesn't matter how well its set up.
And no, he wont be charging guests by the MB, let alone the byte. Some people would rather their business has a good reputation.
I for one welcome this. I work in a company that up till a few months ago was still on IE8. They upgraded to IE10 instead of going directly to IE11 which is totally insane in my mind and the reasoning by the folks doing the deployment was to use stable and tested.
This same company still uses to this day a version of Java that is both old and recommended by Oracle to update immediately because it has critical vulnerabilities which is even more insane to me when you factor in that they work with so much customer data breaches and the potential for lawsuits just seems extremely high.
As a sysadmin, running the current version -1 is the safe bet for most businesses. The problem is that few businesses have an upgrade path, policy or methodology so you end up being current version -2 or -3 because no-one is willing to sign off on an upgrade.
Its not that we dont want to upgrade, its that management dont want any disruption to anything. So they refuse to allow upgrades until eventually the manufacturer forces the issue (and sometimes not even then).
As for running out of date versions of Java (or anything else) it's always due to one legacy application that relies on that version and that version only. Its always a critical application that was written by some rock star developer a few years ago and since that developer left a few years ago no-one know how it works or how to upgrade it to function with a more current version of Java. Whenever I hear a developer say "oh, I can write a little application to do that" for an important process or requirement I want to beat them to death with a rusty pipe.
I kind of thought this is what everyone did anymore -- tether to LTE phone and just skip whatever stupidity the hotel supplies. It's more than adequate for email, web browsing, and remote access. Any multi-gig downloads needed would happen on a remote server anyway.
This isn't very good for international travellers.
Not everywhere has a good mobile network, I'm including the US in this. I bought my phone from Australia and I only got 200 MB of data for $45 on AT&T prepaid. Also, I'm not really going to buy a separate WiFi device for each country I travel to (If I did, I'd have almost 30 of them).
That being said, during my travels in the US the best Wifi in the hotels I stayed at was at an ABVI in San Francisco which was free (included in the price, I'm sure we all know what free means in context). It was faster and less annoying than the Wifi at the Hard Rock Las Vegas which was part of the $21 a night resort fee (it would kick you off every 3 hours where you'd have to log into the captive portal again).
If WIFI is free, everyone will use it, clogging up the pipes.
Free != uncontrolled.
I stay in a lot of hotels in SE Asia (willing to bet this study was conducted in the US and maybe Europe) and when one hotel put a password on a previously unsecured wifi, performance for guests increased significantly. This was because the staff weren't given the password. So 60 devices simply disappeared off the network. Basically how good a network is depends on how it is set up and managed. Basically hotels that care will have a good connection.
I've stayed in a few hotels with free wifi that was very good (especially for SE Asia, where bad connections are commonplace). Most hoteliers in Asia dont see WiFi as a service that should be charged for (technically speaking its included in the price of the room, which is usually very affordable).
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Whirlpool is incredibly popular, and has a very loyal user base - the offers of money for a legal fund are starting to roll in! I saw nothing in the thread that is defamatory, the OP asked for advice, was told 'do your homework' (entirely sensible), OP came back and said 'I found a better deal, thanks'. Nobody came out and said "this company is shit!" I very much doubt they have a leg to stand on, and all they have done is ensure that a future Google search will bring this little act of douchery up and forever associate their name with it. Good Job!
It should also be added, the majority of WP users didn't even have a clue about WCS until there was a news article in major papers saying that the NAB owned WCS was suing them.
This is probably going to be back-pedalled faster than Tony Abbott running from gays on a boat.
Anyone in Australia who hasn't at least considered one of the many smaller (and better) financial institutions instead of the big 4 banks (or one of their subsidiaries) is stupid, the smaller guys are just as good (if not better) than the big 4 when it comes to service, products etc and they dont do a lot of the crap the big 4 do.
Yep, I dumped NAB and went to Citibank and GE Money...
I almost miss NAB some days... Almost.
That's irrelevant. All that matters is who has the bigger wallet the hire better lawyer. Even OJ won in court.
Not in Australia.
In Australia we have judges that are competent, not simply waiting for their next cheque.
Also the whole "better lawyer" thing is not as skewed because the winner can go after the loser for legal fees (even if they withdraw their case). So a lot of lawyers work on the idea that they'll get their fee after the case if your case is strong enough. Besides this, Whirlpool's Simon Wright has been putting money away after the 2Clix fiasco for just this kind of emergency.
But the National Australia Bank (NAB) owned WCS is about to learn about the Streisand effect the hard way. Before the tried to sue Whirlpool the only people who knew about that post were the people in that thread (I'm an active member and I didn't know about it) but now, there's an article in the Age and the Sydney Morning Herald about them.
This wont end well for NAB.
This...
Well except for the dressing professionally bit. As long as they aren't client facing and wash on a regular basis.
A lot of developers dont get respect because they dont earn it. They feel they're automatically entitled to respect so managements response to this is to squash them (appeasing a sense of entitlement is about the worst thing you can do). A bit part of this is that these self important developers dont respect anyone else. Managers are useless, everyone else exists just to support them.
The best developers I've worked with never dressed in a button up shirt, let alone a suit. One of them wore a polo to his own wedding. However they always gave the respect to others that they wanted to receive in return. Instead of asking for incredulous specifications for servers, they'd actually ask "I need a test server to do Foo, what kind of server do I need". These guys recognised that they didn't know everything and were very good at their jobs. When it came to a subject they weren't completely familiar with they'd listen to advice, they'd understand that they weren't the only ones competing for resources and were actually grateful when things came through for them. They earned respect and as a result, people wanted to help them out.
This advice really goes for everyone, not just developers. The same problem is in sales, admin (PA's who think they run the company), systems administration (the "department of no" types), managers (PHB), pretty much everyone really.
Of course they do. Real Engineers design up front, before implementing. We understand the implications of our decisions. We optimize. We know that there are many orthogonal factors to consider in doing this. Shoud we optimize with an emphasis size or speed? If we optimize for size, how will that decision effect scalability and the ability to add functionality we may not have originally considered, or that the original design specification didn't call for?
This describes none of the "software engineers" I've ever met.
Most will just pull a arbitrarily large number out of thin air and write that on the spec. Sure, we need 700 GB for this database, highest tier disk, provision it from your infinite bag of storage and dont bother sending us the bill because we'll cry when we get it. I get requests like this by the week, it's the whole reason we've put a per GB cost on internal storage is to stop developers and DBA's that dont bother doing proper sizing requirements from using all the storage.
Because it turns out all they needed was 300 GB, 100 on fast storage, 200 on slow storage but they wont do this until we force them to.
More often than not, Developers and DBA's dont get respect because they dont earn it. This is not helped by the fact that inferiority complexes and senses of entitlement are commonplace.
Some people are too stupid to breathe. Or breed.
The stupid people appear to breed quite well. It's the neckbeards with the Cheetos-stained fingers that are unsucessful at breeding.
It is a good thing that intelligence is not determined by genetics (pairing two geniuses wont produce a savant, its been tried before).
No, this is precisely about accountability. It's not a new problem either: London invented this solution in response to this problem ~350 years ago. In the 17th century, there were many hackney carriages driven by unscrupulous drivers, who had no assets you could go after to pay for damages they caused through their rash behavior.
Here are two solutions:
1. Enforce a skill floor on drivers, so the worst cannot drive at all.
2. Require the rest of the drivers to carry insurance, so that any damages they cause to a third party may be assured coverage.
If they applied this to Uber, they'd be just as expensive (if not more so) than regular taxi services.
I firmly believe that any driver or car could register as a taxi as long as they meet these requirements:
1. The driver to be licensed as a taxi driver (in Perth, Western Australia we have a test kind of like London's "The Knowledge" but far simpler).
2. The vehicle to be in good condition (as in beyond just roadworthy).
3. The driver is insured as a commercial driver.
However companies like Uber are not trying do this. Rather they seem bent on trying to ignore the rules as long as possible and that's only going to work for so long as cities are already starting to crack down on them. Its only a matter of time before an Uber driver in Australia or Europe hits and maims someone then insurance companies are going to go after Uber like rabid dogs (and Uber wont survive them).
this is bullshit.
Bolding parts of it doesn't make is less bullshit.
Liability insurance for commercial drivers is mandatory in most places for this very reason. Further more in many places third party injury insurance is mandatory for all drivers for this very reason.
Maybe you in your libertarian delusions can go and explain to family of the girl who died because of this driver that it's a fact of life and they should be happy for that.
Actually there is a very big payout for death.
But what about the next time when a person isn't killed, just permanently disabled. You could go along then and explain it's a fact of life.
Or maybe the drivers could get liability insurance seeing as they're using their cars for commercial purposes. Then again, that would mean their services wouldn't be cheaper than a regular taxi.
liability coverage is needed
http://www.sfgate.com/news/art...
victims should not be holding the bag when drivers like this have insurance that uses loop holes to get out of covering victims. Taxis and other "commercial transport license" drivers have insurance that covers them all the time.
In Australia an Uber driver with private car insurance (meaning all of them) would still have the claims paid out (except that of the Uber driver, because he violated the terms of the policy). However the insurer would be free to go after any assets the driver has and any assets Uber has as compensation.
I'd wager Germany would be similar.
Did our jets get faster and lighter and cheaper?
The fastest air breathing aircraft was the SR-71, which went into production in 1962, based on technology from the 1950s. So for at least half a century, jets did not get faster. Aircraft improved enormously between 1903 and 1960. Then the rate of improvements fell off a cliff. That is why Sci-Fi from that era often extrapolated the improvements into flying cars, and fast space travel, but far fewer predicted things like the Internet or Wikipedia.
Thats because you're basing all aircraft improvement on speed.
This is flat out wrong.
The reason aircraft have not gotten faster than the SR71 is partially because you hit a serious wall at those speeds. The air literally becomes harder to push though. Physics is the enemy here, this is why its expensive to produce a car that goes over 400 KPH and that car is not very reliable. Friction and air resistance need to be overcome, heat dissipation has to be balenced with weight (the Veyron has 11 radiators) and aerodynamics. It's not as simple as strapping more rockets onto the arse of a 737.
But the biggest reason is there's no impetus. There's no demand for faster aircraft. Even with the Concorde, the economics of it never made sense, Air France and BA only ran the Concorde for pride. The demand for supersonic transport just isn't there. However there is a lot of demand for cheaper air travel.
How expensive was an air ticket in 1962? you'll find a US Domestic flight cost around $1500 in todays money, the same flight you get for $200 today.
Safety, in 1962 the DeHavilland Comet had this nasty problem of breaking up mid flight. Hull loss incidents lead to crashes in most cases. This is not the case, both the B777 an A330 flew in commercial service for over a decade each before a fatal crash. Hull loss incidents rarely lead to crashes, in fact, an entire engine can blow up and the aircraft can still land safely without a single injury.
So cost and safety have changed a lot in the last 50 years of flight. Flying is more accessible and safer.
Complaining that flying hasn't improved in 50 years because of speeds is like complaining that ovens have not improved in the last 200 years because they aren't any hotter. It ignores the advent of the thermostat control, convection oven and the fact that the price is lower and selection available to me has increased significantly.
1. Meaningful, specific error/log messages when something goes wrong.
This, a thousand times this.
I hate meaningless error messages like "An error has occurred" but even worse are ones with cryptic codes like "An error has occurred. Error code:5" and there's no reference for error code 5 anywhere or worse yet, error code 5 has 15 different meanings.
Invest in both.
Fuck no.
Documentation is worthwhile.
UX is willy-nilly bullshit 99% of the time that you'll have to revisit over, and over, and over with each new fad. Any changes to "UX" shit will also force you to unnecessarily rewrite half of your documentation.
This. Documentation will tell people how to get something done. UX will just waste time and money.
UX is a bullshit field that is completely unrelated to HCI/HMI (the proper science behind how people work with computers and interfaces) made up to justify some companies incredibly crappy GUI.
If your interface is not user friendly, make it better but dont rely on pseudo-scientific quackery like UX to tell you anything, especially anything remotely useful.
When Wal-Mart decides to sell a new brand of dish soap, it isn't their job to ensure the product is a smashing success. All Wal-Mart cares about is that when you need dish soap, Wal-Mart is where you buy it; it doesn't really matter to them which one you buy. If DishSoapCo is depending on Wal-Mart to convince consumers to buy their soap, they will be sorely disappointed. (Of course, with no marketing plan, Wal-Mart is unlikely to carry the product to begin with, but that's because they have limited shelf space; the App store has no such limitation.)
This is flat out not true.
Wal-Mart certainly does care which brand of dish soap you buy because they make more money of some brands compared to others. Lots of supermarkets will favour their own brands over others unless they receive a kickback, German supermarket giant Aldi is famous for favouring it's own brands which have higher profit margins. So they certainly have a vested interest in what brand you buy.
There are several tricks stores use to entice and cajole shoppers towards certain products. Products on shelves at eye height tend to be the most purchased, so placing Brand Y crisps on the bottom shelf and Lays crisps on the shelves at eye level means that consumers will tend to buy more Lays than Brand Y despite Brand Y being cheaper as few people actually discriminate between brands or even price. The things is, next week Brand Y pays the supermarket to increase their sales, this is when it becomes in the supermarkets interest to sell more.
This is just one of the tricks stores use, having large displays at the start of aisles, larger price tags, a "SALE" sign, a gap either side of the product, all of these work subconsciously to draw a shoppers attention to a product over their competitors.
It's 2014 and you are "ashamed" to ride in a car with something pink on it?
No, I'm ashamed to ride in a car with an incredibly gaudy giant pink mustache on it. And I'm even more ashamed for the poor driver
Here you've only demonstrated your own insecurity.
A real man can drive a bright pink Fiat Punto with the window down without a care for the opinions of insecure fools. Of course, being a gentleman he also prefers to use three pedals.
So why does nobody think they'll get kidnapped by random strangers who
drive cabs ?
ftfy. ive taken a lot of uber and lyft rides, and every ride has been better than the typical sketchy smelly rude cab driver.
If traditional taxi services die... where do you think the smelly, rude cab drivers will go?
It would be truly horrible if people had to concentrate on their driving rather than the six-channel, streaming video playing on their dashboard while they blend margaritas.
No doubt, but it would be more horrible if modern systems for things like braking and traction control went away. People who've grown up with cars that are full of three-letter technologies like ABS and EBD might not appreciate how much more skill is required to drive a car safely at the same speeds and in the same environments without these driver aids.
ABS doesn't distract you, ABS cant be broken into externally because it's not connected to your stereo.
Drivers aids like lane assist are debatable at best, with my experiences, they serve as better distractions rather than aids. Most drivers will ignore them, the best result is that drivers get lazier and start to ignore the bad habits that cause these alarms to go off.
Nothing is going to happen until they get sued.
Nothing is going to happen until (1) a senior officer at GM has his car hacked,
GM Exec blames the wrong person, like the driver and problem doesn't get fixed.
(2) a very public hacking makes security a point on which automakers compete
Automakers complain to government until hackers are arrested, charged with terrorism and made to cover up their work.
they get sued.
The plaintiffs are paid of using a small amount, law suit is forgotten within a week.
The Auto industry is terrible at doing things that might cost money on their own. They'd rather ignore the problem and sue/arrest/pay off people to make it go away than fix it. The only way Automakers will get serious about security is if the government (and by this, I mean the UK, EU and Australian governments, the US govt is completely useless in this regard) forces them to do it.
Seatbelts and immobilisers are case in point.
Your bank can't have it's own private enforcement kick you out of their house.
Well not any more.
Banks used to have entire fucking armies. They dont now, ironically enough thanks to the government you rally so much against.
Oh, I'd imagine that private workers goof off too. The thing is, when they do it jeopardizes whatever project they're involved with, with monetary loss to the company.
You've never worked before have you.
Some people have turned slacking off into a full time job. As long as the company is making money, they dont get noticed. The worst slackers I've worked with were in the private sector (and not unionised, union people know they have a job to do). They're normally in middle management/admin positions that dont get monitored for performance. Think about all the people who call pointless meetings, extend meetings with pointless conversation/questions and when you come to them needing something, they've got a huge tale of woe explaining how they're too busy to help (yet can take a 2 hour lunch).
As long as the P&L statement looks good, these people never get noticed... If the P&L statement starts to look bad, they're normally not the first ones fired either.
This is crazy. We've allowed our kids to be overloaded with homework; now we're letting the education lobby steal summer vacation.
I dont think they're taking it away, rather distributing the holidays throughout the year.
In Australia we have the school year divided into 4 semesters of 11-12 weeks each. Between each semester is a 2 week break except at the end of the year where it's a 6 week break. The 2 week breaks are important for schools and teachers as it allows teachers time to plan the semesters curriculum and schools to perform regular maintenance. It also gives kids a break and allows families more flexibility with travel plans.
And Walter Koenig's hop from roles as Chekov in Star Trek to Alfred Bester in Babylon 5 was... well, you have to go watch the shows to understand the _completely_ different role Walter Koenig plays, and to applaud the acting and the writing that created it.
JMS's first choice for the role of Bester was Patrick Mcgoohan and the character was primarily written with him in mind, that being said, Koeing did a fantastic job of taking the character and running with it. JMS did a very good job with the regular antagonists. Morden was another good example, like Bester designed to completely retard sympathy.
Exactly how long do you think it will take the staff to figure out the freely-given-to-guests-by-staff password?
Given the fact most of the staff are Filipinas... not long.
However the guy who runs the place keeps an eye on it and when that happens he'll change the password. If you dont maintain your network it doesn't matter how well its set up.
And no, he wont be charging guests by the MB, let alone the byte. Some people would rather their business has a good reputation.
I for one welcome this. I work in a company that up till a few months ago was still on IE8. They upgraded to IE10 instead of going directly to IE11 which is totally insane in my mind and the reasoning by the folks doing the deployment was to use stable and tested.
This same company still uses to this day a version of Java that is both old and recommended by Oracle to update immediately because it has critical vulnerabilities which is even more insane to me when you factor in that they work with so much customer data breaches and the potential for lawsuits just seems extremely high.
As a sysadmin, running the current version -1 is the safe bet for most businesses. The problem is that few businesses have an upgrade path, policy or methodology so you end up being current version -2 or -3 because no-one is willing to sign off on an upgrade.
Its not that we dont want to upgrade, its that management dont want any disruption to anything. So they refuse to allow upgrades until eventually the manufacturer forces the issue (and sometimes not even then). As for running out of date versions of Java (or anything else) it's always due to one legacy application that relies on that version and that version only. Its always a critical application that was written by some rock star developer a few years ago and since that developer left a few years ago no-one know how it works or how to upgrade it to function with a more current version of Java. Whenever I hear a developer say "oh, I can write a little application to do that" for an important process or requirement I want to beat them to death with a rusty pipe.
I kind of thought this is what everyone did anymore -- tether to LTE phone and just skip whatever stupidity the hotel supplies. It's more than adequate for email, web browsing, and remote access. Any multi-gig downloads needed would happen on a remote server anyway.
This isn't very good for international travellers.
Not everywhere has a good mobile network, I'm including the US in this. I bought my phone from Australia and I only got 200 MB of data for $45 on AT&T prepaid. Also, I'm not really going to buy a separate WiFi device for each country I travel to (If I did, I'd have almost 30 of them).
That being said, during my travels in the US the best Wifi in the hotels I stayed at was at an ABVI in San Francisco which was free (included in the price, I'm sure we all know what free means in context). It was faster and less annoying than the Wifi at the Hard Rock Las Vegas which was part of the $21 a night resort fee (it would kick you off every 3 hours where you'd have to log into the captive portal again).
If WIFI is free, everyone will use it, clogging up the pipes.
Free != uncontrolled.
I stay in a lot of hotels in SE Asia (willing to bet this study was conducted in the US and maybe Europe) and when one hotel put a password on a previously unsecured wifi, performance for guests increased significantly. This was because the staff weren't given the password. So 60 devices simply disappeared off the network. Basically how good a network is depends on how it is set up and managed. Basically hotels that care will have a good connection.
I've stayed in a few hotels with free wifi that was very good (especially for SE Asia, where bad connections are commonplace). Most hoteliers in Asia dont see WiFi as a service that should be charged for (technically speaking its included in the price of the room, which is usually very affordable).