2,564 karma · joined August 27, 2007
Look at the headlines in the ongoing VW scandal.
"Volkswagen Chairman Agrees to Bonus Cut"
"VW Executives to Accept ‘Significant’ Bonus Cuts to Quell Unrest"
These people stand accused of criminal acts, hugely damaging to the business, and they don't even get named in the headlines.
Broadly speaking, the "content industry" has habitually been dragging individual file-sharers into court and claiming life-altering, bankruptcy-forcing judgements for more trivial violations, in order to terrify the general public into compliance.
If the threat of a $1B judgement is enough to threaten Getty with bankruptcy, if it's enough to scare other rights-claimers into making their businesses more businesslike, that's actually very comparable.
Until the labor-based enterprise running them faces some sort of competition, and really has nothing else to squeeze.
Would you be able to see the contents of such files with "git show"?
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2071288/equivalent-in-git...
I simply can't imagine what relevance that would have to the HN crowd.
The tone of the conversation, the framing assumptions, seem different now.
Given two choices:
1) Give $5 to a program that provides brand new custom prescribed eyeglasses to people who need them but cannot buy them
2) Give $10 to a program that provides shitty, old, out-of-date, recycled eyeglasses of questionable prescription to people who need them but cannot buy them
Many people will respond more supportively to #2 and see #1 as fundamentally unfair ("I worked hard to earn the money for my glasses, why should a needy person have something just as good as mine? They should count themselves lucky to have anything at all!"). Many people see it as a moral imperative that the poor should suffer.
I mean, I sort of know why: Because manufacturers keep making new hardware without the long-term support commitment that's necessary to get the firmware truly sorted out. But how did the market come to this?
I would have thought that the average home router customer, at this point, groans in dread when its time to buy a router. To heck with crazy speeds my "broadband" cannot realize, never mind bleeding-edge protocols and questionable NAS USB ports. Don't we all want something that doesn't need a manual reset every couple of days? Why isn't uptime the #1 selling point by now?
It does seem to emphasize efficient use of land area, though, and in the case of modern warehouses in North America, at least, I imagine the real estate itself is effectively cheaper than ever (because modern warehouses are built so big and so far away from everything, and because tax incentives often reward new construction) and only getting cheaper. It seems like an odd variable to optimize.
If real estate were at a premium, wouldn't we expect to see traditional warehouses, distribution centers, data centers etc in a multi-story format? But as far as I know, we don't. Instead, owners opt for giant footprints on cheap land.
If you could figure out a systematic way to cut the cost and the lifetime of such lowbrow, mass-produced concrete structures in half, developers wouldn't hesitate, they'd jump on it immediately.
We revere longevity only in retrospect.
What functionality do you have in mind when you're talking about the average read-only news-article type of web page?
That's a commonsense assumption that, in my understanding, used to be true. But the article goes to great lengths to point out that it isn't true anymore. Some of the bloated multi-megabyte examples don't include any media at all.
If you look at what the unblocked version pulls in, it’s not just videos and banner ads, but file after file of javascript. Every beacon, tracker and sharing button has its own collection of scripts that it needs to fetch from a third-party server.
The javascript alone in "Leeds Hospital Bosses Apologise after Curry and Crumble On The Same Plate" is longer than Remembrance of Things Past.
Just about anybody with a Middle-Eastern-sounding name and the slightest plausible connection to or proximity with "Al Qaeda" (conveniently defined and delimited by the torturers themselves) would have been equally useful for this purpose. There is no "right" man, no "wrong" man. That's torture. It's a show, a blood pageant. It's reading the Tarot or goat entrails.
That's the system, the procedure you defend when you apologize for torture.
This statement is itself a sweeping, unsupported generalization, a stereotype-based bit of elitist snobbery in exactly the fashion that it itself describes. Perfectly self-reflexive. Could it possibly be an accident?
Insularity, exclusion and gradually-learned shared secrets and customs are one of the ways communities define, distinguish, and stabilize themselves.
On a desktop, I see what you mean; UrbanDictionary is indeed at the top of the plain-text search results.
Not going to defend Google at all. But for myself, if I'm looking for a Wikipedia-grade introduction to some topic, I usually just search Wikipedia directly. Wikipedia has become so ridiculously useful that it is the top result of a Google search half the time anyway. Wikipedia is a better human-curated web index than any of the old-school 1990s human-curated web indexes ever were.
Eh. I switched my default to Duck Duck Go and I'm pretty happy with it. Not quite as magical as Google was in its heyday but then neither is Google. Set up keywords for your searches ("g" for Google, "b" for Bing etc.) and they're all just a keystroke away anyhow.
And if you're too lazy to set up your own custom searches or you're using a borrowed machine, Duck Duck Go has some slick built-in "bang" searches: "!imdb aronofsky", "!msdn system.diagnostics" and so on.
It sounds like common sense, I guess, but has that ever worked, actually?
Similar "prevention" rationale is offered for governments to spy on virtually all telecom all the time, now. But this shooting happened anyway.
Yes, exactly.
I used to work at a sub-contractor for a large manufacturer of medical equipment, and all the systems we dealt with were like that. The device would run a very small embedded OS but would have a serial port for talking to a PC for firmware development, firmware updates, logging, diagnostics, etc. Their older stuff used real hardware serial ports, but their newer systems (~6-7 years ago now) were moving to virtual USB/FTDI serial ports, with an FTDI chip included in the embedded system.
These tricky FTDI drivers would absolutely have the potential to brick and/or alter the operation of such a device; it's not far-fetched or a flight of fancy at all.
I have a special interest in this thread/issue because I have recently been contacted by that manufacturer regarding one of these FTDI-using systems which has recently begun to exhibit new problems. I haven't started looking into that yet, and I don't know where it will lead, but I'll have to bear in mind the possibility of deliberate driver-based monkey-business now.
I think I'd put "environment" in at #3, maybe even #2. Where environment is a wide umbrella including the obvious (time and space to devote to study, quality of study materials and support) to the somewhat less so (your gender, your race, your affluence or lack thereof, the supportive/skeptical attitudes of your family and friends etc).
Environment is subject to limited control by an individual. But young, affluent people have the most control. Environment winds up being largely a matter of luck.
This environmental influence - which so often is matter of luck - is one subtlety that seems to get consistently left out of all these "10,000 hours" and "100 hours" type discussions. Even a clever person can spend 10,000 hours working at something under terrible conditions and have poor results. One doesn't have to be particularly bright to spend 10 hours under ideal circumstances and make real progress.
By leaving this out, we offer unwarranted support to a certain Utopian/libertarian/meritocratic mythos that is so popular in the software/startup field. And I think that's a shame. I think the field will ultimately be better off if it can view itself more clearly.
"Prioritizing family over business" would be, say, 30-to-40-hour work weeks - or even just staying home, period - for the next 12-to-18 years.
C's variable promotion system is invisible and silent and in my experience a frequent source of bugs in exactly this case (tests in for loops), which is why there's enough meat here for a blog post. It's usually easy to avoid the promotion issue by using the same type for the loop variable and its test condition. In cases like this, sometimes it's better to just use a straightforward and obvious while() loop instead of a correct but tortured for() loop. That makes the relationship between the loop variable updates and the loop body controllable and explicit.
Conceptually, it works through promotion. -1 is cast to unsigned/size_t before the test, which then succeeds. At the assembly level, a 32-bit -1 is 0xFFFFFFFF, which is also the result of the underflow of i, so it works at that level, too.
At any rate, it worked in the compiler I tried it with.