Patches. On Debian it seemed that I was constantly waiting 6 months for a show stopper to get patched, because it wasn't a show stopper for enough people. The only times I have gone to source to fix a problem since switching to Ubuntu was 1 for the G#d Da323ed A4 paper size crap with inkscape (which of course was on the desktop) and for a fix to Glassfish, which has nothing to do with Ubuntu at all.
If Debian released things faster, I would use them again. But then Debian wouldn't be Debian, and the deliberation serves as a useful purpose.
Though I think you have to make a distinction between a jury trial and a bench trial. In jury trial, the Judge really is only supposed to rule on matters of law (and therefore procedure). In a bench trial, the Judge is the finder of fact in addition to the finder of law. In both cases, the Judge's only bias at the start of trial should be towards justice, regardless of whether that means guilt or innocence. At the end of jury trial, this should still be the case. At the end of a bench trial, however, the Judge would be inept in his or her duties if he or she had not established a bias towards one of the defense or the prosecution. This bias would extend to the judging the credibility of the witnesses, etc., In the bench trial, the judge is not merely their to manage the adjudicative process, but is also the one and only jurist.
Of course, this only addresses the issue of criminal cases. Civil cases are fraught with bias, and when they result in justice it is just as much attributable to random chance as it is any form of jurisprudence.
That is SOOO freaking irritating. I have a password generation program I wrote to create (relatively) easy to memorize passwords that are cryptographically secure. And then find out the site won't handle * or something. Honestly, if it won't take * in a password, i am TERRIFIED of the level of SQL injection vulnerabilities that they are CERTAIN to have, and become quite convinced that the devs of the site don't know what a salted hash is, much less do they use it to store your password.
My favorite was Oracle though (pre-version 10). Passwords were quietly forced to upper case, only the first 8 characters were actually considered, and your password couldn't start with a number because Oracle uses it as an identifier. But hey, it costs $100K so you have to accept their "sophistication". [:rolleyes:]
The script is actually quite cool, but it still has the vulnerability that if someone happens to capture the single secret phrase and figures the method you use to generate the scrambled ones, at that point he too can discover all your passwords for any web site.
Pfffft! You are just being paranoid. I mean what, do you think he is going to post the code somewhere public or som... er, nevermind.
What a complete load of horse shit. You seem to confuse pro-napster with anti-patent. I could give a shit about copying other peoples code. What bothers me is that I have to hire a legal team to verify that I haven't crossed some ridiculous patent when I publish a "Hello World" tutorial to my website! If the U.S. patent system had demonstrated even the most infinitesimal fraction of an iota of a clue as to what constitutes obviousness with respect to software patents, then I might feel differently. But it has demonstrated such a completely incompetent and disinterested level of expertise that the only reasonable solution that doesn't inhibit the advancement of the art is to get rid of them altogether. It is clear that the system is incapable of putting in place qualified personnel or reasonable measures to ensure the legitimacy of issued patents. The system is supposed to reward those who invest the time and money to build the better mousetrap. But all it is used for today is to guarantee a revenue stream to those who are too fucking lazy to compete in the market place.
And as that code should never, ever, EVER even remotely be considered patentable, you have perfectly illustrated the problem. Obvious to one reasonably skilled in the art. That particular piece of code above deserves no protection whatsoever. It is not an invention. I would posit that it doesn't even constitute a creative work.
Which is just as big a f@#$ing problem as the fracking fluids! I have always thought they lost the thread on this thing by focusing on the fracking fluids, the energy industries Wookie in this case. CLEARLY the problem is natural gas in the drinking water! I could give a shit about the fracking fluid when there is a far more clear and present danger in the natural gas itself. To think that you can crack the substrate and still have control over where the natural gas goes just shows a level of malignant idiocy that ought to disqualify all these ass hats from whatever certification they claim to have.
It isn't that Oracle can't distinguish between an empty string and null, it's that some pedantic developer along the way decided to impose the philosophy that a zero length string and null are the same thing (with some post-doctoral research paper involving Zeno's paradox, Einstein's special relativity and the Poincare conjecture to prove that this is, in fact, the only mathematically appropriate way to do things), so it stores all zero length strings as nulls. It is impossible to store a zero length string in a varchar2 or char field in oracle. This makes it a giant PITA porting applications to Oracle (at least it did for me) and leads to some really nasty bugs if you are caught unaware by it.
But hey, it's cool either having to put a not null constraint on every string column (and dealing with the application logic grief that this can cause), or wrapping every string column returned from a query with NVL or NVL2 and using some magic value and hoping for no collisions. Clearly no one would ever want to distinguish between the values of "nothing" and 'I don't know".
This is just one of many reasons that I hope Larry Ellison's yacht sinks in the middle of the Pacific with him on board sleeping off a bender. (not really, but the imagery makes me smile nonetheless)
Incorrect. Oracle IS Sun, as successor in interest. Therefor the prior acts are entirely germane. Just as Caldera == SCO, Oracle == Sun (more so in fact, as the lineage is direct acquisition vs. the convoluted path that SCO took).
That's the whole thing that devs just won't understand...
DRM does not hurt or hinder pirates at all... not one iota.
Ah, but there you are wrong. DRM makes the target MORE ATTRACTIVE to pirates. The challenge attracts the pirates, and publishing the hacks is just a method to prove their l33tn355. Yep, there will be theft either way. But the people who pay are going to pay whether or not there is DRM (actually, with situations like this, they are less likely to purchase something that has been bugged up). DRM isn't going to make someone who was going to steal it all of a sudden pay for it.
These companies have really got to make a better attempt to find the sweet spot, because to date all I can see, as a consumer, is arrogance.
... even with AT&T you can get a non-AT&T branded smartphone and use it on their network without a problem.
Not true. They won't detect it initially, but eventually they will. And when they do, blammo, there is your data plan. I'm actually surprised that this guy didn't get hit with one of their more expensive plans.
I can LIVE without indoor plumbing. I don't HAVE TO HAVE a flushing toilet. I guess that means it is OK for DPW to charge me $3000 per gallon of waste, right? Since I don't HAVE TO HAVE it? Not much of an argument that (and some people are required to have cell phones for their jobs, myself included).
If you can't add anything of value then kindly STFU. Seriously, morari's point is spot on. We have prosecutors that are elected to positions. The basis of those elections (and appointments) are always CONVICTIONS, not JUSTICE. The system is broken, but not irreparably. It is the portion of our population who, when witnessing the unjust tribulations of others, decide to stick their thumbs in their ears, wiggle their fingers and mutter "nay nay ne nay nay" that are the ultimate cause of this dysfunction. Those unwilling to acknowledge that people are wrongfully prosecuted and convicted. Those that can't seem to understand that the wrongful conviction of an innocent person is orders of magnitude worse (in the vast majority of cases) than the failure to convict the actually guilty.
It is blood-lust and arrogance and an extreme lack of empathy (which, ironically, certain media personalities have tried to make a dirty word) that are at the root of this cause.
No one is asking for anarchy. Simple accountability is all. Prosecutors executing their oaths of office based on what is just, not what pays off best for them. Serving justice will frequently require doing that which does not further your career, that is the nature of public service. If one can not make the distinction between self-interest and public-interest, then one should not serve as a prosecutor.
it's arguably more convient and intuitive to do certain things on the screen than it is with the mouse
SERIOUSLY arguable. I can't find a singe use case in MY workflow where touch on the screen (for a workstation) works better than a mouse. There are no tool tips for context information. The contact point is far less precise. I haven't seen how selecting text for copy and paste works on Win8, but for all the other touch interfaces, f-me. Now touch works great for mobile devices where a mouse just isn't practical or logical. I have no complaints about going this route for mobile. But jamming a mobile interface down my throat for my desktop is not going to garner you any sales with me.
I don't get what people are complaining about, except that it's CHAAANGE!
That is like arguing that "GMC Sierra owners are only complaining about the new Corvettes they have been issued because it's CHAAANGE". Yes, the bitching is about change. A Corvette may be a significantly faster vehicle that can pull 1.02g on the skid pad, but you are NEVER going to haul a load of firewood in it. Change is relevant. What am I supposed to do, switch from being a lumberjack to a race car driver? Who gave GM that much control over my life?
I have been a Microsoft basher for a loooong time (think wfwg), but Windows 7 finally works the way I want it to. It is finally stable enough and secure enough for me to be happy with it. I transitioned my departmental workstations back from Kubuntu to Windows a year ago May.
There is no way I'm going to switch to Windows 8's (subjective) usability nightmares. Yes, it is a rant, but you mistake your arrogance as my ignorance.
A lot of the complaints with the Metro UI are not unique to Metro, they are actually shared by Android (probably by iPad users too but they are cognitively incapable of criticizing Apple) . I would NEVER use an Android device as my primary workstation. I do like Android, I have a tablet below my monitors with ICS on it. But it is an ancillary mobile device, not a primary interface that I spend 10 hours a day working with.
Your argument about shortcuts is really pretty weak. There are places where shortcuts make more sense. Places where mouse gestures make more sense. On Windows 7, I get to make that choice. On 8, in lots of places that choice has largely been made for me because the mouse interface just doesn't work well with it. You could likewise argue that if they replaced all the fonts with Klingon, that you could still read the screen with a screen reader, like somehow that addresses the fact that I can no longer interact with it in the manner that I find most efficient.
So am I complaining about change? Yes, I am. You are absolutely correct. Because if it ain't broke, don't fix it. I don't want to deal with UI nightmares every two years, that played a considerable role in my decision to switch back to Windows from Ubuntu. The one thing Windows had going for it was its consistency.
If these changes were somehow better, OK, I could see your point. But you aren't even arguing that. You are arguing that they don't suck that bad and people should quit whining. Seriously? Do you work in sales?
If they had released Windows 8 as a mobile platform, and kept a standard version for desktop usage that would be great. But they didn't do that, and there is a reason why. Because Microsoft has never been able to gain any traction with their mobile OS's. By making them a single OS, it should make the transition to Microsoft based mobile devices easier and increase sales. But this is completely flawed logic. Microsoft failed in the mobile space because the Windows paradigm did not work there. Now, instead of addressing the issue, they are just flipping which platform is screwed. Just as pre-8 Windows didn't work on mobile, 8 doesn't work for me and many others on the desktop.
Hey, if you are happy with it, great, I'm happy for you. We will let the free market choose whether it is a success or not. Wait, what? I can only get that new PC with Windows 8? Really? oh.
Why, oh WHY does Microsoft not understand that I DON'T WANT TO TAKE MY HAND(S) OFF THE KEYBOARD!?!?! Touch is an idiotic paradigm in the desktop realm. It is great for mobile to browse the web, play angry birds, or fast forward to the good parts on YouPorn, but it just doesn't make sense for most productive uses. I don't care if some idiot savants can make the interface work for them, I am paying for it and I want it to work for me. Windows 8 does not do that. Windows 7 does, surprisingly well. I'll wait and see if it gets better with 9 or becomes totally worthless. And for the record, metro sucks balls on the XBox too. Bring back to old interface.
After 12+ years of Republican gerrymandering, if you switched to proportional vote (which is done by congressional districts where it is currently in place), then you needn't even bother having elections. Check out what Husted is trying to do in Ohio and it becomes obvious just how AWFUL an idea this is. That system would have had Obama losing at least 5 states that he won both electorally and by popular vote.
Check out the insane congressional district maps to see just how obnoxious this has become.
Things, even simple things, are not always as straight forward as they appear.
If you were to do proportional, you would have to redistrict each state for that purpose via a simple geographic mathematical formula, or you would have to allocate directly against the state popular vote. And if you are going to do that and not make it winner take all, you might as well go with the national popular vote. There really isn't a good reason not to do that anymore.
In his book "Arguing With Idiots" (alternatively titled "My Inner Dialog"), Beck claims that Article 1, Section 9 Clause 1 of the constitution put a $10 entrance fee on immigrants coming to this country because the founding fathers "actually put a price tag on coming to this country: $10 per person. Apparently they felt like there was a value to being able to live here."
In actuality, Article 1 Section 9 Clause 1 was intended to prevent congress from ending the slave trade.
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Patches. On Debian it seemed that I was constantly waiting 6 months for a show stopper to get patched, because it wasn't a show stopper for enough people. The only times I have gone to source to fix a problem since switching to Ubuntu was 1 for the G#d Da323ed A4 paper size crap with inkscape (which of course was on the desktop) and for a fix to Glassfish, which has nothing to do with Ubuntu at all. If Debian released things faster, I would use them again. But then Debian wouldn't be Debian, and the deliberation serves as a useful purpose.
Though I think you have to make a distinction between a jury trial and a bench trial. In jury trial, the Judge really is only supposed to rule on matters of law (and therefore procedure). In a bench trial, the Judge is the finder of fact in addition to the finder of law. In both cases, the Judge's only bias at the start of trial should be towards justice, regardless of whether that means guilt or innocence. At the end of jury trial, this should still be the case. At the end of a bench trial, however, the Judge would be inept in his or her duties if he or she had not established a bias towards one of the defense or the prosecution. This bias would extend to the judging the credibility of the witnesses, etc., In the bench trial, the judge is not merely their to manage the adjudicative process, but is also the one and only jurist.
Of course, this only addresses the issue of criminal cases. Civil cases are fraught with bias, and when they result in justice it is just as much attributable to random chance as it is any form of jurisprudence.
That is SOOO freaking irritating. I have a password generation program I wrote to create (relatively) easy to memorize passwords that are cryptographically secure. And then find out the site won't handle * or something. Honestly, if it won't take * in a password, i am TERRIFIED of the level of SQL injection vulnerabilities that they are CERTAIN to have, and become quite convinced that the devs of the site don't know what a salted hash is, much less do they use it to store your password.
My favorite was Oracle though (pre-version 10). Passwords were quietly forced to upper case, only the first 8 characters were actually considered, and your password couldn't start with a number because Oracle uses it as an identifier. But hey, it costs $100K so you have to accept their "sophistication". [:rolleyes:]
The script is actually quite cool, but it still has the vulnerability that if someone happens to capture the single secret phrase and figures the method you use to generate the scrambled ones, at that point he too can discover all your passwords for any web site.
Pfffft! You are just being paranoid. I mean what, do you think he is going to post the code somewhere public or som... er, nevermind.
Ah, those were such civilized times.
Really? I didn't here anyone promise not to torture or execute Matthew Broderick!
What a complete load of horse shit. You seem to confuse pro-napster with anti-patent. I could give a shit about copying other peoples code. What bothers me is that I have to hire a legal team to verify that I haven't crossed some ridiculous patent when I publish a "Hello World" tutorial to my website! If the U.S. patent system had demonstrated even the most infinitesimal fraction of an iota of a clue as to what constitutes obviousness with respect to software patents, then I might feel differently. But it has demonstrated such a completely incompetent and disinterested level of expertise that the only reasonable solution that doesn't inhibit the advancement of the art is to get rid of them altogether. It is clear that the system is incapable of putting in place qualified personnel or reasonable measures to ensure the legitimacy of issued patents. The system is supposed to reward those who invest the time and money to build the better mousetrap. But all it is used for today is to guarantee a revenue stream to those who are too fucking lazy to compete in the market place.
And as that code should never, ever, EVER even remotely be considered patentable, you have perfectly illustrated the problem. Obvious to one reasonably skilled in the art. That particular piece of code above deserves no protection whatsoever. It is not an invention. I would posit that it doesn't even constitute a creative work.
Me three
Which is just as big a f@#$ing problem as the fracking fluids! I have always thought they lost the thread on this thing by focusing on the fracking fluids, the energy industries Wookie in this case. CLEARLY the problem is natural gas in the drinking water! I could give a shit about the fracking fluid when there is a far more clear and present danger in the natural gas itself. To think that you can crack the substrate and still have control over where the natural gas goes just shows a level of malignant idiocy that ought to disqualify all these ass hats from whatever certification they claim to have.
It isn't that Oracle can't distinguish between an empty string and null, it's that some pedantic developer along the way decided to impose the philosophy that a zero length string and null are the same thing (with some post-doctoral research paper involving Zeno's paradox, Einstein's special relativity and the Poincare conjecture to prove that this is, in fact, the only mathematically appropriate way to do things), so it stores all zero length strings as nulls. It is impossible to store a zero length string in a varchar2 or char field in oracle. This makes it a giant PITA porting applications to Oracle (at least it did for me) and leads to some really nasty bugs if you are caught unaware by it.
But hey, it's cool either having to put a not null constraint on every string column (and dealing with the application logic grief that this can cause), or wrapping every string column returned from a query with NVL or NVL2 and using some magic value and hoping for no collisions. Clearly no one would ever want to distinguish between the values of "nothing" and 'I don't know".
This is just one of many reasons that I hope Larry Ellison's yacht sinks in the middle of the Pacific with him on board sleeping off a bender. (not really, but the imagery makes me smile nonetheless)
Naw, Ahoy! was the last computer mag to matter (though I did love the old computer shopper too, lusting over crap I couldn't afford)
Everyone prefers Bing to Google. Microsoft keeps telling me that, so you must be wrong.
The same FTC that allowed Comcast to buy NBC? Now they are concern trolls?
I agree with the sentiment, but you are probably screwing your gas mileage and potentially your engine life. Just sayin'.
Incorrect. Oracle IS Sun, as successor in interest. Therefor the prior acts are entirely germane. Just as Caldera == SCO, Oracle == Sun (more so in fact, as the lineage is direct acquisition vs. the convoluted path that SCO took).
Hey Steve, how ya been buddy?
That's the whole thing that devs just won't understand...
DRM does not hurt or hinder pirates at all... not one iota.
Ah, but there you are wrong. DRM makes the target MORE ATTRACTIVE to pirates. The challenge attracts the pirates, and publishing the hacks is just a method to prove their l33tn355. Yep, there will be theft either way. But the people who pay are going to pay whether or not there is DRM (actually, with situations like this, they are less likely to purchase something that has been bugged up). DRM isn't going to make someone who was going to steal it all of a sudden pay for it.
These companies have really got to make a better attempt to find the sweet spot, because to date all I can see, as a consumer, is arrogance.
... even with AT&T you can get a non-AT&T branded smartphone and use it on their network without a problem.
Not true. They won't detect it initially, but eventually they will. And when they do, blammo, there is your data plan. I'm actually surprised that this guy didn't get hit with one of their more expensive plans.
I can LIVE without indoor plumbing. I don't HAVE TO HAVE a flushing toilet. I guess that means it is OK for DPW to charge me $3000 per gallon of waste, right? Since I don't HAVE TO HAVE it? Not much of an argument that (and some people are required to have cell phones for their jobs, myself included).
Not a fan of republican democracy I see. If they take away the guns, how will we every have our own Red October. I guess that is the logic.
If you can't add anything of value then kindly STFU. Seriously, morari's point is spot on. We have prosecutors that are elected to positions. The basis of those elections (and appointments) are always CONVICTIONS, not JUSTICE. The system is broken, but not irreparably. It is the portion of our population who, when witnessing the unjust tribulations of others, decide to stick their thumbs in their ears, wiggle their fingers and mutter "nay nay ne nay nay" that are the ultimate cause of this dysfunction. Those unwilling to acknowledge that people are wrongfully prosecuted and convicted. Those that can't seem to understand that the wrongful conviction of an innocent person is orders of magnitude worse (in the vast majority of cases) than the failure to convict the actually guilty.
It is blood-lust and arrogance and an extreme lack of empathy (which, ironically, certain media personalities have tried to make a dirty word) that are at the root of this cause.
No one is asking for anarchy. Simple accountability is all. Prosecutors executing their oaths of office based on what is just, not what pays off best for them. Serving justice will frequently require doing that which does not further your career, that is the nature of public service. If one can not make the distinction between self-interest and public-interest, then one should not serve as a prosecutor.
it's arguably more convient and intuitive to do certain things on the screen than it is with the mouse
SERIOUSLY arguable. I can't find a singe use case in MY workflow where touch on the screen (for a workstation) works better than a mouse. There are no tool tips for context information. The contact point is far less precise. I haven't seen how selecting text for copy and paste works on Win8, but for all the other touch interfaces, f-me. Now touch works great for mobile devices where a mouse just isn't practical or logical. I have no complaints about going this route for mobile. But jamming a mobile interface down my throat for my desktop is not going to garner you any sales with me.
I don't get what people are complaining about, except that it's CHAAANGE!
That is like arguing that "GMC Sierra owners are only complaining about the new Corvettes they have been issued because it's CHAAANGE". Yes, the bitching is about change. A Corvette may be a significantly faster vehicle that can pull 1.02g on the skid pad, but you are NEVER going to haul a load of firewood in it. Change is relevant. What am I supposed to do, switch from being a lumberjack to a race car driver? Who gave GM that much control over my life?
I have been a Microsoft basher for a loooong time (think wfwg), but Windows 7 finally works the way I want it to. It is finally stable enough and secure enough for me to be happy with it. I transitioned my departmental workstations back from Kubuntu to Windows a year ago May.
There is no way I'm going to switch to Windows 8's (subjective) usability nightmares. Yes, it is a rant, but you mistake your arrogance as my ignorance.
A lot of the complaints with the Metro UI are not unique to Metro, they are actually shared by Android (probably by iPad users too but they are cognitively incapable of criticizing Apple) . I would NEVER use an Android device as my primary workstation. I do like Android, I have a tablet below my monitors with ICS on it. But it is an ancillary mobile device, not a primary interface that I spend 10 hours a day working with.
Your argument about shortcuts is really pretty weak. There are places where shortcuts make more sense. Places where mouse gestures make more sense. On Windows 7, I get to make that choice. On 8, in lots of places that choice has largely been made for me because the mouse interface just doesn't work well with it. You could likewise argue that if they replaced all the fonts with Klingon, that you could still read the screen with a screen reader, like somehow that addresses the fact that I can no longer interact with it in the manner that I find most efficient.
So am I complaining about change? Yes, I am. You are absolutely correct. Because if it ain't broke, don't fix it. I don't want to deal with UI nightmares every two years, that played a considerable role in my decision to switch back to Windows from Ubuntu. The one thing Windows had going for it was its consistency.
If these changes were somehow better, OK, I could see your point. But you aren't even arguing that. You are arguing that they don't suck that bad and people should quit whining. Seriously? Do you work in sales?
If they had released Windows 8 as a mobile platform, and kept a standard version for desktop usage that would be great. But they didn't do that, and there is a reason why. Because Microsoft has never been able to gain any traction with their mobile OS's. By making them a single OS, it should make the transition to Microsoft based mobile devices easier and increase sales. But this is completely flawed logic. Microsoft failed in the mobile space because the Windows paradigm did not work there. Now, instead of addressing the issue, they are just flipping which platform is screwed. Just as pre-8 Windows didn't work on mobile, 8 doesn't work for me and many others on the desktop.
Hey, if you are happy with it, great, I'm happy for you. We will let the free market choose whether it is a success or not. Wait, what? I can only get that new PC with Windows 8? Really? oh.
Why, oh WHY does Microsoft not understand that I DON'T WANT TO TAKE MY HAND(S) OFF THE KEYBOARD!?!?! Touch is an idiotic paradigm in the desktop realm. It is great for mobile to browse the web, play angry birds, or fast forward to the good parts on YouPorn, but it just doesn't make sense for most productive uses. I don't care if some idiot savants can make the interface work for them, I am paying for it and I want it to work for me. Windows 8 does not do that. Windows 7 does, surprisingly well. I'll wait and see if it gets better with 9 or becomes totally worthless. And for the record, metro sucks balls on the XBox too. Bring back to old interface.
After 12+ years of Republican gerrymandering, if you switched to proportional vote (which is done by congressional districts where it is currently in place), then you needn't even bother having elections. Check out what Husted is trying to do in Ohio and it becomes obvious just how AWFUL an idea this is. That system would have had Obama losing at least 5 states that he won both electorally and by popular vote. Check out the insane congressional district maps to see just how obnoxious this has become. Things, even simple things, are not always as straight forward as they appear. If you were to do proportional, you would have to redistrict each state for that purpose via a simple geographic mathematical formula, or you would have to allocate directly against the state popular vote. And if you are going to do that and not make it winner take all, you might as well go with the national popular vote. There really isn't a good reason not to do that anymore.
In his book "Arguing With Idiots" (alternatively titled "My Inner Dialog"), Beck claims that Article 1, Section 9 Clause 1 of the constitution put a $10 entrance fee on immigrants coming to this country because the founding fathers "actually put a price tag on coming to this country: $10 per person. Apparently they felt like there was a value to being able to live here."
In actuality, Article 1 Section 9 Clause 1 was intended to prevent congress from ending the slave trade.