You hit the nail on the head with many (but not all) MS products. I've had the (dis)pleasure of working with SSIS, SSAS and SSRS. SQL Server itself is a pretty decent DB, certainly better than MySQL, but the tools for extending it are just awful. Sure, SSIS is graphical and you can throw together a pretty flowchart that will make managers and bean counters happy at the demo. Then you actually have to do something real with it and find that you can't, for example, deploy a complex package hierarchy to the SQL Server store without manually changing core behavior of your packages, or you can't import Excel files that have blank columns that start having numbers in them because Excel via SSIS insists on guessing the types based on the first 8 rows (only configurable via a registry setting!) and it may break in production without any warning. The list goes on and on. Here are a few more: http://ayende.com/wiki/I%20Hate%20SSIS.ashx?AspxAutoDetectCookieSupport=1.
I've found similar problems in other MS products. Visual Studio is still somewhat of an exception, but probably because it can still get out of your way and let you write code, and it's been around long enough that the good engineers of ages past kept it from turning to shit.
I wasn't happy with Bush, but I found some of the liberal hatred for him to be extreme and more than a bit distasteful. I'm also really unhappy with Obama's compromises with Obamacare (which could have been a great savior for healthcare in this country and may now be the opposite) and his willingness to continue to expand drone strikes and spying. However, I don't see him or Bush for the matter as maniacal dictators bent on destroying this country. I see them as victims of a system that has become too powerful and too interested in things that either don't matter for the little guy or are actively harmful to the little guy. And I must recognize the good that's been done in any case. It's easy to see the world as a shithole and to hate everything. It's harder to recognize good and good enough in grayish mess we live in.
Who needs facts when we can engage in massive hyperbole? Obama's nothing special. He ain't great. He's failed to change things that needed to change since Bush. A lot of the stuff you're complaining about is simply a continuation of existing policies or slight expansion. I'm not happy about it, but let's not pretend that he's some sort of Hitler, seizing power and single-handedly changing the shape and function of our government. Hardly. Get over yourself.
Same situation here in NC. We have a free local paper called the Independent Weekly. It's definitely liberal (perhaps leftist), but they do investigative journalism and are always happy to expose problems in local and state governments. They also have a lot of information about local events and music, including useful reviews by real people with real opinions. There are ads, of course, but it's actually better than the for-pay papers.
I think you underestimate how pervasive government, local, state and federal, is in most people's lives. You also underestimate how dependent we are on the corporate system we have, which is itself very dependent on the government. As I said before, this is not like centuries past where people were more or less self-sufficient on farmsteads and would be little affected by changes in government. Consider our credit card processing network, or the internet itself, mostly maintained by big oligopolies heavily involved in government. The power grid? Same way. Any disruption to those systems would have massive economic consequences, consequences that would affect people in the cities and suburbs, which is the majority of the US population.
I'm not rich, but I think I'd be pretty fucked if the US government collapsed or was overrun by a foreign power. Maybe the bottommost rungs of society would be "fine" in that they aren't currently "fine" so they'd likely be no worse off. There are a lot of people, though, who aren't on the bottommost rungs of society who benefit directly or indirectly from the stability that a republic offers.
In ancient days, you'd be right. Outside of the raping and pillaging, it often mattered little who titled themselves king or nobleman. They were some far off "power" who asked for taxes and military services from time to time, but otherwise were of no concern in day to day life. The modern world is much more interconnected, and dependent on a stable civil structure to function, for better or worse.
You are really giving short-shrift to new programs. Yes, there's some fluff and junk, I won't deny it. But I think some of the things that modern IDEs do (and plugins like ReSharper) are very very useful, but also fairly resource intensive. You can code without them, but it makes life a lot more pleasant. Likewise, although I could get real work done in assembly, I'd prefer to use a high-level language.
Also those old programs did a lot less than many of our new programs. People often forget that when complaining about performance.
That's not to say, of course, that modern programs couldn't be written more efficiently. Because of Moore's Law and other considerations, we have moved away from spending a lot of time on performance and efficiency.
As a noun, "affect" means emotional state (more or less). As a noun, "effect" means result of an action. As verbs, only "affect" and "effect" have a clear semantic relationship, with the verb referring to the action and the noun referring to the result.
Again, the article says that they used the same input. This can be verified with a simple diff. Same input leading to different results means that some other input (that is, the circuitry of the CPU or software libraries) have to be at fault, unless you want to start to argue that computer hardware is non-deterministic. Then you've opened an entirely different can of worms that your error margin system will do little or nothing to address.
Well, since neither of the things you mentioned is true, there's no point in any further discussion. If that were the case, and somehow Facebook was involved in all of this, then you might have some sort of point, though in that case, the blame would rest on the government and not Facebook.
And how is what you say actually at odds with what I say? People can make those decisions, and those decisions can be because they don't like change. Both can be true. It's not one or the other. And don't let people's rationalizations of dislike throw you off.
"If I have a car I use roads not walkways" -- way to miss the point. The point is that certain services have reasonable prerequisites for use. You'll have to buy gas if you want to use a car. You'll need to pay for water and electricity if you want to live in a modern home or apartment. If you want to use a website, you have to buy internet. It's just part of the service.
My gmail uses my phone to send verification messages. My work VPN does the same. It's not uncommon and it's not a bad system. You are free not to use Facebook if you don't like their security policy (indeed, there are many similar reasons not to use Facebook). It is hardly "reprehensible". If the government required you to have a mobile phone to live in this country, that would be reprehensible.
They decided and made it clear for the rest of us. Are you really trying to argue that people do generally like change and that all of Facebook's changes are bad? That's a much harder position. People are entitled dumbasses (myself included) and they hate change (myself included) and that's just how people are. Deal with it.
We'll drive it until it stops making money. I guess it still works (at least for a little while), so there's no disincentive for the marketing and management folks.
I can decide that when the same people stop complaining and keep using the service and use the new features without a peep. Remember when they first started having the feed? That caused a huge uproar. Now I'm trying to imagine anyone making good use of Facebook without the feed. That's how I even see stuff to common on or follow up on. So yes, people complain when it changes and it's clear that they're only complaining because of change.
Facebook doesn't make any money off that. Likewise, Facebook requires that you have a computer with an internet connection. That also doesn't make Facebook premium.
People get pissed about FB changes, and then they keep on using it, because the problem is that people don't like change. Can you provide some specific examples of the downhill direction?
Honestly, I'd rather just pay. Why do I want to see ads at all? I don't. I want to watch a show or talk with friends. If I wanted to shop, I'd go shop, using sites and resources built for that kind of thing. Make it easy for people to pay and make it affordable. And, naturally, make it worth paying for. I pay 10 bucks a month for Spotify because I think it's a good service. I'd pay it even if there weren't a free version. Same with Netflix. Make it compelling, and people will pay. Not everyone. There will always be cheapskates and freeloaders, but best not to worry about them. And for God's sake, don't try to make people pay after you've gotten them hooked. No better way to piss of a userbase than that.
Outside of the data selling and privacy issues (which are, to be sure, BIG issues), the platform isn't actually bad. It's fairly straightforward and usually works just fine. Which might be a problem, actually, for Facebook, since there's not much they can offer for people to want to pay for.
I don't want to see a bunch of responses giving me edge case examples of how the interface sucks. Every interface has those problems, and Facebook's is no exception. But in the main, it's fine. Also, I don't want to get a bunch of responses from people who have very specific desires and who are thus dissatisfied with Facebook. Every interface also has intractable detractors with abnormal needs. It's the same with, say, the DEs on Linux, where you have a group of people who are pissed that you can't do tiling window management via the keyboard with some weirdo focus policy in KDE. Tough shit, that's a very special case. Just use XMonad or whatever cool tiling WM of the month is. Nobody else cares.
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You hit the nail on the head with many (but not all) MS products. I've had the (dis)pleasure of working with SSIS, SSAS and SSRS. SQL Server itself is a pretty decent DB, certainly better than MySQL, but the tools for extending it are just awful. Sure, SSIS is graphical and you can throw together a pretty flowchart that will make managers and bean counters happy at the demo. Then you actually have to do something real with it and find that you can't, for example, deploy a complex package hierarchy to the SQL Server store without manually changing core behavior of your packages, or you can't import Excel files that have blank columns that start having numbers in them because Excel via SSIS insists on guessing the types based on the first 8 rows (only configurable via a registry setting!) and it may break in production without any warning. The list goes on and on. Here are a few more: http://ayende.com/wiki/I%20Hate%20SSIS.ashx?AspxAutoDetectCookieSupport=1.
I've found similar problems in other MS products. Visual Studio is still somewhat of an exception, but probably because it can still get out of your way and let you write code, and it's been around long enough that the good engineers of ages past kept it from turning to shit.
I don't know how you can say this when the primary language for dynamic sites run by Apache is PHP, which is mountains of shit worse than C#.
I wasn't happy with Bush, but I found some of the liberal hatred for him to be extreme and more than a bit distasteful. I'm also really unhappy with Obama's compromises with Obamacare (which could have been a great savior for healthcare in this country and may now be the opposite) and his willingness to continue to expand drone strikes and spying. However, I don't see him or Bush for the matter as maniacal dictators bent on destroying this country. I see them as victims of a system that has become too powerful and too interested in things that either don't matter for the little guy or are actively harmful to the little guy. And I must recognize the good that's been done in any case. It's easy to see the world as a shithole and to hate everything. It's harder to recognize good and good enough in grayish mess we live in.
Who needs facts when we can engage in massive hyperbole? Obama's nothing special. He ain't great. He's failed to change things that needed to change since Bush. A lot of the stuff you're complaining about is simply a continuation of existing policies or slight expansion. I'm not happy about it, but let's not pretend that he's some sort of Hitler, seizing power and single-handedly changing the shape and function of our government. Hardly. Get over yourself.
He hasn't been great, but he has done many of the things he said he would: http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/obameter/
Same situation here in NC. We have a free local paper called the Independent Weekly. It's definitely liberal (perhaps leftist), but they do investigative journalism and are always happy to expose problems in local and state governments. They also have a lot of information about local events and music, including useful reviews by real people with real opinions. There are ads, of course, but it's actually better than the for-pay papers.
I think you underestimate how pervasive government, local, state and federal, is in most people's lives. You also underestimate how dependent we are on the corporate system we have, which is itself very dependent on the government. As I said before, this is not like centuries past where people were more or less self-sufficient on farmsteads and would be little affected by changes in government. Consider our credit card processing network, or the internet itself, mostly maintained by big oligopolies heavily involved in government. The power grid? Same way. Any disruption to those systems would have massive economic consequences, consequences that would affect people in the cities and suburbs, which is the majority of the US population.
I'm not rich, but I think I'd be pretty fucked if the US government collapsed or was overrun by a foreign power. Maybe the bottommost rungs of society would be "fine" in that they aren't currently "fine" so they'd likely be no worse off. There are a lot of people, though, who aren't on the bottommost rungs of society who benefit directly or indirectly from the stability that a republic offers.
In ancient days, you'd be right. Outside of the raping and pillaging, it often mattered little who titled themselves king or nobleman. They were some far off "power" who asked for taxes and military services from time to time, but otherwise were of no concern in day to day life. The modern world is much more interconnected, and dependent on a stable civil structure to function, for better or worse.
You are really giving short-shrift to new programs. Yes, there's some fluff and junk, I won't deny it. But I think some of the things that modern IDEs do (and plugins like ReSharper) are very very useful, but also fairly resource intensive. You can code without them, but it makes life a lot more pleasant. Likewise, although I could get real work done in assembly, I'd prefer to use a high-level language.
Also those old programs did a lot less than many of our new programs. People often forget that when complaining about performance.
That's not to say, of course, that modern programs couldn't be written more efficiently. Because of Moore's Law and other considerations, we have moved away from spending a lot of time on performance and efficiency.
As a noun, "affect" means emotional state (more or less). As a noun, "effect" means result of an action. As verbs, only "affect" and "effect" have a clear semantic relationship, with the verb referring to the action and the noun referring to the result.
I thought that was my point? It seemed that you were trying to argue that the input was actually different.
Again, the article says that they used the same input. This can be verified with a simple diff. Same input leading to different results means that some other input (that is, the circuitry of the CPU or software libraries) have to be at fault, unless you want to start to argue that computer hardware is non-deterministic. Then you've opened an entirely different can of worms that your error margin system will do little or nothing to address.
Alright, alright, I'll get off your lawn.
Which native state would that be? They're always moving, reshaping and disappearing.
Well, since neither of the things you mentioned is true, there's no point in any further discussion. If that were the case, and somehow Facebook was involved in all of this, then you might have some sort of point, though in that case, the blame would rest on the government and not Facebook.
And how is what you say actually at odds with what I say? People can make those decisions, and those decisions can be because they don't like change. Both can be true. It's not one or the other. And don't let people's rationalizations of dislike throw you off.
"If I have a car I use roads not walkways" -- way to miss the point. The point is that certain services have reasonable prerequisites for use. You'll have to buy gas if you want to use a car. You'll need to pay for water and electricity if you want to live in a modern home or apartment. If you want to use a website, you have to buy internet. It's just part of the service.
My gmail uses my phone to send verification messages. My work VPN does the same. It's not uncommon and it's not a bad system. You are free not to use Facebook if you don't like their security policy (indeed, there are many similar reasons not to use Facebook). It is hardly "reprehensible". If the government required you to have a mobile phone to live in this country, that would be reprehensible.
They decided and made it clear for the rest of us. Are you really trying to argue that people do generally like change and that all of Facebook's changes are bad? That's a much harder position. People are entitled dumbasses (myself included) and they hate change (myself included) and that's just how people are. Deal with it.
We'll drive it until it stops making money. I guess it still works (at least for a little while), so there's no disincentive for the marketing and management folks.
I can decide that when the same people stop complaining and keep using the service and use the new features without a peep. Remember when they first started having the feed? That caused a huge uproar. Now I'm trying to imagine anyone making good use of Facebook without the feed. That's how I even see stuff to common on or follow up on. So yes, people complain when it changes and it's clear that they're only complaining because of change.
Facebook doesn't make any money off that. Likewise, Facebook requires that you have a computer with an internet connection. That also doesn't make Facebook premium.
People get pissed about FB changes, and then they keep on using it, because the problem is that people don't like change. Can you provide some specific examples of the downhill direction?
Honestly, I'd rather just pay. Why do I want to see ads at all? I don't. I want to watch a show or talk with friends. If I wanted to shop, I'd go shop, using sites and resources built for that kind of thing. Make it easy for people to pay and make it affordable. And, naturally, make it worth paying for. I pay 10 bucks a month for Spotify because I think it's a good service. I'd pay it even if there weren't a free version. Same with Netflix. Make it compelling, and people will pay. Not everyone. There will always be cheapskates and freeloaders, but best not to worry about them. And for God's sake, don't try to make people pay after you've gotten them hooked. No better way to piss of a userbase than that.
Outside of the data selling and privacy issues (which are, to be sure, BIG issues), the platform isn't actually bad. It's fairly straightforward and usually works just fine. Which might be a problem, actually, for Facebook, since there's not much they can offer for people to want to pay for.
I don't want to see a bunch of responses giving me edge case examples of how the interface sucks. Every interface has those problems, and Facebook's is no exception. But in the main, it's fine. Also, I don't want to get a bunch of responses from people who have very specific desires and who are thus dissatisfied with Facebook. Every interface also has intractable detractors with abnormal needs. It's the same with, say, the DEs on Linux, where you have a group of people who are pissed that you can't do tiling window management via the keyboard with some weirdo focus policy in KDE. Tough shit, that's a very special case. Just use XMonad or whatever cool tiling WM of the month is. Nobody else cares.