(Spoiler warning if you haven't seen season 1 yet)
That's not nearly as bad as:
Hi, I'm Mohinder! Sylar is on the floor unconscious in front of me, because I whacked him with what appeared to be a large bulletin board. He's completely defenseless, and I have a loaded gun in arm's reach. Also, he just killed one of my friends. Also, he just tortured me. Also, only a little bit ago I was perfectly willing and able to kill him but he managed to escape the bullet.
But instead of killing him, I'm going to ignore him completely and take my friend, who is now dead, to his parents house.
(Don't ask how I even know where his parents live! Or how I got this taxicab, for that matter! And definitely ignore the fact that I could have easily killed Sylar, who tortured me and just killed my friend, before taking him to his parents house.)
I could tolerate the first 5-6 instances of terrible writing on Heroes, but then it just started to get on my damned nerves. Screw the brain-eating and telekinesis, Sylar's only real superpower is that nobody ever kills him when they have the chance. I especially enjoyed how half of Hiro's story was filler for half the first season... they might as well have just flashed "FILLER" on the screen instead of giving us pointless subplots that went nowhere. Also make sure you never explain how Mohinder got back to New York, because that wasn't confusing or anything.
Anyway, I don't think a writer's strike could hurt Heroes... I'm kind of surprised to learn it was written at all.
You're comparing a $250/month, 1.5mbit connection to:
1) A $25/month, 3mbit steady DSL connection 2) A $35/month, 5mbit shared Cable connection
And saying that it's viable competition? When shared with 5 other people? You're crazy. My dirt-cheap DSL is much faster than a T1 will ever be. And you're crazy.
Well, look at it this way; if you figured it out, don't you think people who do that for a living might have figured it out as well?
I actually work for a certain Internet-based advertising company that not only has that figured out, but is far along in the process of creating a new attribution model for our clients that more fairly assigns ROI.
Given, I'm not directly involved in that work, but still.
Thanks, that's helpful. There's actually quite a bit of crap coding in Notepad++, and now that I've taken the leap and downloaded/installed the new version of MS Visual Web Developer Express I might just chuck it in the virtual bin.
The syntax highlighting is nice, but I simply can't stand programs in the 2008 that don't have working menu bars:
I'm not. The package says "EA" on the side, so no thanks. I've suffered through enough buggy, crappy EA games to last a lifetime, I don't care which famous designer is behind it.
You're spot on, and this is exactly why I think Google is vastly overvalued.
Say I'm a consumer, and I see an ad for a big screen TV at ElectroWarehouse while reading the daily news at my local paper. I start thinking about ElectroWarehouse's TV deal, and a couple hours later I Google their site and decide to buy it. Bam, conversion.
But here's the problem: The add that influenced my conversion was the ad on the newspaper site. But the company that gets credit for the conversion is Google-- after-all, to find ElectroWarehouse's website, I did a Google search and clicked the top result. The top result was a search campaign link to ElectroWarehouse.
So now ElectroWarehouse's agency starts to look at the performance of their ads, and they see that the banner ad on the local newspaper site is performing poorly while the Google keyword ad is performing very well. As a result, they might make the wrong decision to drop the ad on the newspaper site and increase spending at Google.
There's nothing wrong with using a click as the conversion metric, but you gotta keep things like this in mind-- especially when your value is being reported by a certain popular search engine.
No, but they would care when their customers demand a refund because their games don't work.
I actually agree entirely. I'm constantly amazed at the PC gaming public who can tolerate buggy messages like PunkBuster (still not updated for Vista!), xfire (still not updated for Vista!) and games like Battlefield: 2142 which are giant balls of bugs.
It's like they've been browbeaten by so much crappy software for so long that not only do they tolerate it, but they actually enjoy it. (I have friends who play Battlefield: 2142 every day! If they can get it to run longer than 5 mins without crashing.)
That's why I've moved only to Xbox 360 gaming. Maybe Microsoft's "Games For Windows" program will get game companies (and consumers!) to care, but I'm not holding my breath.
I DO blame Microsoft for making XP default to Admin. The reason developers never fixed their broken software is because for 90% of users, who use the defaults, it WASN'T broken. It still worked, just like it did in Win9X.
Bullshit.
Windows also defaults to having Internet Explorer as the system web browser, does that mean it's perfectly acceptable for XP software to break if I set Firefox to the default? That's what you're saying, in a nutshell.
If you're going to write software for Windows XP, you need to test your software to make sure it works with all features of Windows XP. Fast User Switching was a major selling point of XP over Windows 2000, and you're telling me it's perfectly OK for these software companies to put out XP software that doesn't work with Fast User Switching? Total crap.
In any case, if Microsoft had made XP default to "User" instead of "Admin" when making new accounts, it would still have been just as unacceptable! Windows 2000 was widely-used as a consumer OS, so their product was just as broken in Windows 2000. The only change is we would have been having this discussion six years ago.
The real problem is that the programmers of these products simply do not care about QA, or about making good software. They just want to do the absolute bare minimum to struggle along, and they don't give one whit of care for the user who has to disable a useful OS feature to make their crappy product run, or the admin who struggles for a week trying to figure out what crazy-ass registry keys and folders their crappy software needs access to.
Programs that worked correctly in Windows 2000 and Windows XP work correctly in Vista, and never get UAC prompts or vague "this operation requires elevation" errors. That's all there is to it.
(Note: There are good examples, even in the gaming field which is filled with crummy code. Blizzard does a good job of updating their products when new OSes come out, they even went as far as to write OS X-native game engines for their Mac Classic games when OS X came out. And while World of Warcraft has some plain wrong design decisions, like putting the Plug In folder in Program Files, they were quick to update for Vista compatibility.)
What bothers me the most is that when Vista came out, there were still tons of applications that required Admin access for no good reason. Those applications are broken on Vista due to UAC, but the amazing and shocking thing is that these applications were also broken on XP and 2000:
1) Anybody who logged in as a non-admin wouldn't be able to run your program for no good reason 2) Your program would break miserably on a computer with Fast User Switching enabled 3) It would also break in many corporate environments with finer-grained permissions than "Admin" or "User"
In short, the application was already broken and has been for a decade! Vista just made the breakage more obvious.
When users who actually care about security have to (and had to in XP) elevate permissions to run a video game, you're talking about crap developers. I don't blame Microsoft for the problems people are having on Vista, I blame the crap developers who have no concept of permissions, or no desire to ever fix their Windows 98 program to work in an NT environment. These guys need to go back to CS101 and figure their goddamned job out. My current annoyance is Notepad++ which tries to do something when it runs, and fails-- but the error also doesn't tell me what it was trying to do, so I have no way of figuring out which feature to disable. Boo!
(It's not just small developers or one-off projects like games, either... IBM Lotus Notes spent years just plain broken on XP, I think it was finally fixed for version 6.5 IIRC.)
How is it any different? Sure, Slashdot doesn't encourage you *as much* to enter personal information, but it still contains fields for all of it on the account, and it includes a journal feature.
Now I do understand that deleting a current account makes their archive tricky-- how do you deal with the posts that user made? (My guess would be they could just convert them to Anonymous Coward or Deleted Account) But that's no excuse for not offering the feature.
Any website that is capable of storing any personal information along with an account should have the feature to delete that account, period. Don't give Slashdot a pass just because it's an older site than Facebook, and don't give Slashcode developers a pass on it because implementing it is hard.
When you want to leave, start adding bogus data. Friend people you don't know. Change the bio data. Tag yourself in pictures you aren't in. Basically, generate random activity. Defriend your actual friends. Change your name. After a time, it becomes very difficult to determine what is real and what is fake.
Or they could just provide a "delete my account" link like everyone else.
No, but I'm not an expert in Flash. I just know Adobe Flash CS3 blows. (I mostly just install an existing Flash component in client.FLA files. I don't know what "Flex" is, but nobody I've ever worked with has mentioned it.)
People would need to know about it, if it were an actual problem. It's not. Stop believing everything you read on the Internet.
I typed that, which I think is close enough.
The fact that Vista's been out for months now and not once has there been a single piece of news about Facebook not working, except this one Slashdot article, it should be self-evident that the Slashdot article is complete rubbish. And serious, stop believing everything you read on Slashdot... probably a third of it or more is total bullshit.
That might have been true for ActionScript 1 and 2, AS3 is a solid OOP language.
Possibly, but the IDE is worse than ever. I think comparing usage of Adobe Flash CS3 to slamming your balls in a car door is a pretty fair one. Except Flash CS3 somehow manages to be even more painful.
It's about freakin' time somebody competed with Flash on a (relatively) even footing. Silverlight is just plain better technology, and I think it'll prod Adobe into actually doing something with Flash other than making the IDE suck even worse than it did under Macromedia. (A pretty remarkable feat, when you think about it.)
The very fact that you can connect Javascript's DOM with Silverlight's and vice-versa is a great idea Flash could have implemented years ago, if they hadn't been so complacent.
Uh, Mr. Critical Thinking, don't you think if Vista didn't allow people to view Facebook that would have been covered by, oh what's that thing that talks about important events, oh yeah THE NEWS? That would have been a huge story by some journalist if it were true. It's not, and it's not.
THe US have destroyed Iraq over false pretenses and you pretend that the Muslims in the world have no reason to be angry.
I'm sure they have dozens of reasons to be angry, but you're missing my point: being angry *does not justify murder*. Lots of people are angry about lots of things, hell I'm angry at about a dozen things right now, but I'm not strapping a bomb around myself and going into a mall.
They have a reason to be angry, fine. But that does not justify murder. Period.
Re:You need to clarify your question
on
Ethics In IT
·
· Score: 1
I bet something like 50% of all product features are the result of someone in sales selling the feature before it was completed, or even thought of. Not necessarily a bad thing, when you think about it.
You have to remember that their "ethics" are typically the result of how they are paid... salesmen are usually paid on commission, meaning that the more they sell the more money they make. Programmers don't have a similar pay scheme.
There were UN approved sanctions for 12 years, what exactly did it accomplish? Jack and shit. I hate to break this to you, but the UN doesn't actually *do* anything. They have a Security Council seemingly hand-picked to be unable to get anything done (permanent members that all disagree with each other, and a unanimous vote required to do anything... I'm sure that looked good on paper.) The only thing I've ever seen the UN do, in my entire lifetime, is issue "strongly worded letters."
The majority of islamic terrorist organizations actually fight to 'end the foreign influence in Muslim countries and the creation of a new Islamic caliphate'.
Which means executing women for being raped, for example. The creation of an Islamic caliphate is not a good thing in any way, shape or form. I don't believe in your moral relativism.
Seriously, don't bother then and they won't bother you.
Slashdot Mirror
That's not nearly as bad as:
That was awful, awful screen writing.
I could tolerate the first 5-6 instances of terrible writing on Heroes, but then it just started to get on my damned nerves. Screw the brain-eating and telekinesis, Sylar's only real superpower is that nobody ever kills him when they have the chance. I especially enjoyed how half of Hiro's story was filler for half the first season... they might as well have just flashed "FILLER" on the screen instead of giving us pointless subplots that went nowhere. Also make sure you never explain how Mohinder got back to New York, because that wasn't confusing or anything.
Anyway, I don't think a writer's strike could hurt Heroes... I'm kind of surprised to learn it was written at all.
You're comparing a $250/month, 1.5mbit connection to:
1) A $25/month, 3mbit steady DSL connection
2) A $35/month, 5mbit shared Cable connection
And saying that it's viable competition? When shared with 5 other people? You're crazy. My dirt-cheap DSL is much faster than a T1 will ever be. And you're crazy.
Well, look at it this way; if you figured it out, don't you think people who do that for a living might have figured it out as well?
I actually work for a certain Internet-based advertising company that not only has that figured out, but is far along in the process of creating a new attribution model for our clients that more fairly assigns ROI.
Given, I'm not directly involved in that work, but still.
Thanks, that's helpful. There's actually quite a bit of crap coding in Notepad++, and now that I've taken the leap and downloaded/installed the new version of MS Visual Web Developer Express I might just chuck it in the virtual bin.
The syntax highlighting is nice, but I simply can't stand programs in the 2008 that don't have working menu bars:
http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=1865630&group_id=95717&atid=612382
WTF, Notepad++!?
I'm not. The package says "EA" on the side, so no thanks. I've suffered through enough buggy, crappy EA games to last a lifetime, I don't care which famous designer is behind it.
We do know that some ISP's redirect ad references and fill in pages in transit with different ads.
We do? Could you provide a little evidence please? [Citation Needed]
You're spot on, and this is exactly why I think Google is vastly overvalued.
Say I'm a consumer, and I see an ad for a big screen TV at ElectroWarehouse while reading the daily news at my local paper. I start thinking about ElectroWarehouse's TV deal, and a couple hours later I Google their site and decide to buy it. Bam, conversion.
But here's the problem: The add that influenced my conversion was the ad on the newspaper site. But the company that gets credit for the conversion is Google-- after-all, to find ElectroWarehouse's website, I did a Google search and clicked the top result. The top result was a search campaign link to ElectroWarehouse.
So now ElectroWarehouse's agency starts to look at the performance of their ads, and they see that the banner ad on the local newspaper site is performing poorly while the Google keyword ad is performing very well. As a result, they might make the wrong decision to drop the ad on the newspaper site and increase spending at Google.
There's nothing wrong with using a click as the conversion metric, but you gotta keep things like this in mind-- especially when your value is being reported by a certain popular search engine.
It seems to me that you both are in complete agreement.
I love reading comprehension on the web. I never said I disagreed with the original post.
No, but they would care when their customers demand a refund because their games don't work.
I actually agree entirely. I'm constantly amazed at the PC gaming public who can tolerate buggy messages like PunkBuster (still not updated for Vista!), xfire (still not updated for Vista!) and games like Battlefield: 2142 which are giant balls of bugs.
It's like they've been browbeaten by so much crappy software for so long that not only do they tolerate it, but they actually enjoy it. (I have friends who play Battlefield: 2142 every day! If they can get it to run longer than 5 mins without crashing.)
That's why I've moved only to Xbox 360 gaming. Maybe Microsoft's "Games For Windows" program will get game companies (and consumers!) to care, but I'm not holding my breath.
I DO blame Microsoft for making XP default to Admin. The reason developers never fixed their broken software is because for 90% of users, who use the defaults, it WASN'T broken. It still worked, just like it did in Win9X.
Bullshit.
Windows also defaults to having Internet Explorer as the system web browser, does that mean it's perfectly acceptable for XP software to break if I set Firefox to the default? That's what you're saying, in a nutshell.
If you're going to write software for Windows XP, you need to test your software to make sure it works with all features of Windows XP. Fast User Switching was a major selling point of XP over Windows 2000, and you're telling me it's perfectly OK for these software companies to put out XP software that doesn't work with Fast User Switching? Total crap.
In any case, if Microsoft had made XP default to "User" instead of "Admin" when making new accounts, it would still have been just as unacceptable! Windows 2000 was widely-used as a consumer OS, so their product was just as broken in Windows 2000. The only change is we would have been having this discussion six years ago.
The real problem is that the programmers of these products simply do not care about QA, or about making good software. They just want to do the absolute bare minimum to struggle along, and they don't give one whit of care for the user who has to disable a useful OS feature to make their crappy product run, or the admin who struggles for a week trying to figure out what crazy-ass registry keys and folders their crappy software needs access to.
Programs that worked correctly in Windows 2000 and Windows XP work correctly in Vista, and never get UAC prompts or vague "this operation requires elevation" errors. That's all there is to it.
(Note: There are good examples, even in the gaming field which is filled with crummy code. Blizzard does a good job of updating their products when new OSes come out, they even went as far as to write OS X-native game engines for their Mac Classic games when OS X came out. And while World of Warcraft has some plain wrong design decisions, like putting the Plug In folder in Program Files, they were quick to update for Vista compatibility.)
What bothers me the most is that when Vista came out, there were still tons of applications that required Admin access for no good reason. Those applications are broken on Vista due to UAC, but the amazing and shocking thing is that these applications were also broken on XP and 2000:
1) Anybody who logged in as a non-admin wouldn't be able to run your program for no good reason
2) Your program would break miserably on a computer with Fast User Switching enabled
3) It would also break in many corporate environments with finer-grained permissions than "Admin" or "User"
In short, the application was already broken and has been for a decade! Vista just made the breakage more obvious.
When users who actually care about security have to (and had to in XP) elevate permissions to run a video game, you're talking about crap developers. I don't blame Microsoft for the problems people are having on Vista, I blame the crap developers who have no concept of permissions, or no desire to ever fix their Windows 98 program to work in an NT environment. These guys need to go back to CS101 and figure their goddamned job out. My current annoyance is Notepad++ which tries to do something when it runs, and fails-- but the error also doesn't tell me what it was trying to do, so I have no way of figuring out which feature to disable. Boo!
(It's not just small developers or one-off projects like games, either... IBM Lotus Notes spent years just plain broken on XP, I think it was finally fixed for version 6.5 IIRC.)
Without some level of marketing, Engineers build products that people simply don't want and/or won't sell.
How is it any different? Sure, Slashdot doesn't encourage you *as much* to enter personal information, but it still contains fields for all of it on the account, and it includes a journal feature.
Now I do understand that deleting a current account makes their archive tricky-- how do you deal with the posts that user made? (My guess would be they could just convert them to Anonymous Coward or Deleted Account) But that's no excuse for not offering the feature.
Any website that is capable of storing any personal information along with an account should have the feature to delete that account, period. Don't give Slashdot a pass just because it's an older site than Facebook, and don't give Slashcode developers a pass on it because implementing it is hard.
That's the easy solution?
When you want to leave, start adding bogus data. Friend people you don't know. Change the bio data. Tag yourself in pictures you aren't in. Basically, generate random activity. Defriend your actual friends. Change your name. After a time, it becomes very difficult to determine what is real and what is fake.
Or they could just provide a "delete my account" link like everyone else.
No, but I'm not an expert in Flash. I just know Adobe Flash CS3 blows. (I mostly just install an existing Flash component in client .FLA files. I don't know what "Flex" is, but nobody I've ever worked with has mentioned it.)
People would need to know about it, if it were an actual problem. It's not. Stop believing everything you read on the Internet.
I typed that, which I think is close enough.
The fact that Vista's been out for months now and not once has there been a single piece of news about Facebook not working, except this one Slashdot article, it should be self-evident that the Slashdot article is complete rubbish. And serious, stop believing everything you read on Slashdot... probably a third of it or more is total bullshit.
Well, yes, but that applies to pretty much every event. :P
That might have been true for ActionScript 1 and 2, AS3 is a solid OOP language.
Possibly, but the IDE is worse than ever. I think comparing usage of Adobe Flash CS3 to slamming your balls in a car door is a pretty fair one. Except Flash CS3 somehow manages to be even more painful.
Good!
It's about freakin' time somebody competed with Flash on a (relatively) even footing. Silverlight is just plain better technology, and I think it'll prod Adobe into actually doing something with Flash other than making the IDE suck even worse than it did under Macromedia. (A pretty remarkable feat, when you think about it.)
The very fact that you can connect Javascript's DOM with Silverlight's and vice-versa is a great idea Flash could have implemented years ago, if they hadn't been so complacent.
Uh, Mr. Critical Thinking, don't you think if Vista didn't allow people to view Facebook that would have been covered by, oh what's that thing that talks about important events, oh yeah THE NEWS? That would have been a huge story by some journalist if it were true. It's not, and it's not.
THe US have destroyed Iraq over false pretenses and you pretend that the Muslims in the world have no reason to be angry.
I'm sure they have dozens of reasons to be angry, but you're missing my point: being angry *does not justify murder*. Lots of people are angry about lots of things, hell I'm angry at about a dozen things right now, but I'm not strapping a bomb around myself and going into a mall.
They have a reason to be angry, fine. But that does not justify murder. Period.
I bet something like 50% of all product features are the result of someone in sales selling the feature before it was completed, or even thought of. Not necessarily a bad thing, when you think about it.
You have to remember that their "ethics" are typically the result of how they are paid... salesmen are usually paid on commission, meaning that the more they sell the more money they make. Programmers don't have a similar pay scheme.
There were UN approved sanctions for 12 years, what exactly did it accomplish? Jack and shit. I hate to break this to you, but the UN doesn't actually *do* anything. They have a Security Council seemingly hand-picked to be unable to get anything done (permanent members that all disagree with each other, and a unanimous vote required to do anything... I'm sure that looked good on paper.) The only thing I've ever seen the UN do, in my entire lifetime, is issue "strongly worded letters."
The majority of islamic terrorist organizations actually fight to 'end the foreign influence in Muslim countries and the creation of a new Islamic caliphate'.
Which means executing women for being raped, for example. The creation of an Islamic caliphate is not a good thing in any way, shape or form. I don't believe in your moral relativism.
Seriously, don't bother then and they won't bother you.
Do you honestly believe that?