First a parenthetical caveat: I plan on getting the Windows 8 *Phone* OS.

I've been on the lookout for a flagship-model Nokia Windows phone. I still have a flip/dumbphone, and at least for my first smartphone I want a top-end model, to explore, until I learn what I don't need/never use. A Nokia model because I was an adv amat photog in a previous (i.e. film) era, and their emphasis caters to that interest.

And I've been on AT&T (and its prior incarnations for my area) since I got my first, mini brick phone, and the call quality has always been borderline unusable. So it's going to be a Verizon smartphone, and they got a flagship Windows Phone model, the Lumia Icon, earlier this year.

So basically I'm just waiting a little longer until Nokia's "Cyan" software update gets pushed out to people with that model, which will include the OS upgrade from 8.0 to 8.1, and then I'll give it about a month and see if people are reporting success and if there's any problems.

And then I'm just hoping it won't be for mobile what I think is happening on the desktop. And that is, MS technically supporting unpopular OS versions, but not really working at it or giving a shit.

And this is what pisses me off. I bought a new PC (because I fried my previous one, and needed one) with the much-maligned Windows Vista OS, about the time SP 2 for it was being released. So of course I didn't have any problems with it. Yes I did it because I was in a pickle, timing-wise, and had to, but still, I got Vista x64 Ultimate, their most expensive version, at a time when they were probably hurting for sales.

And what thanks do I get? A shitty patch last month that screws my whole system. Works fine on all the Windows 7 systems that I've seen. So I believe the problem is that Vista is purportedly down to less than 3% marketshare, lower than even the paltry %-age that desktop Windows 8 and 8.1 have. I believe that, like Windows XP and IE 6 before that, MS wants Vista to just go away and be a mostly-forgotten bad memory.

Great, so I bought your product in good faith, and I get short-shrift support. I wasn't one of the ones decrying the OS. So what am I supposed to do then. It looks like one can no longer get Windows 7. And I'm sure as hell not going to get Windows 8.x, since people are stupid sheep and irrationally bagging on that bigtime, so MS will probably treat it like Vista as soon as Windows 9 comes out and all the morons flip-flop their tune.

So, there is no way I would get a new Windows version until 9 comes out (some time next year, is expected). That is, unless bad luck, such as an unrecoverable bad patch, befalls me again.

Luckily this one was recoverable, barely. I.e. I was still able to log in via the admin account. And while uninstalling the update didn't do anything, rolling back to the restore point it created before installing it did the trick. But I did a lot of fretting and Google searching, with no success, and was applying last month's patches individually after rolling the whole set back, to track down which one(s) was the perpetrator. I.e. a huge PITA way of spending my time that I don't need.

As it turns out, all just to fix an issue with paths that should be unreachable if someone tricks you into running a .bat or .cmd file off the Internet. I think I'll manage without this patch. I might have to set that update "hidden" in Windows Update, to not be bugged about it every month.

Any data used in a flame war can be broken down, eventually, to an appeal to authority. Including, of course, the fallacy of appeal to authority itself, which is just an appeal to the authority of logical fallacies.

Regarding this subthread:

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=5159777&cid=47006419

my sentiment boils down to:

Learn the language; don't be a lazy ass and whine about it.

If something's part of the language, but you're not familiar with it, that does not constitute it being "confusing".

Americans these days can't cognitively separate their perspective and the more general one. If I find something hard, then it just must be hard, right? I mean, a whole host of other people couldn't possibly have a completely different experience. That's unfathomable to today's human beings.

I've decided that I don't need to live in a big house. Therefore no one does. Therefore there's no moral problem with passing a law that forbids anyone from living in more than a 1032 sq ft abode (like mine). My experience must the universal one.

I should fucking market a line of t-shirts and baseball caps with "YMMV" with a red circle and slash over it. Because no one is capable of the concept donning on them anymore.

This article insists that for human beings, belief is not optional. There are two basic types of beliefs- religious theology and political ideology- but all human beings, even atheists, have some form of belief.
 
  A study of war would seem to indicate that the 20th century clearly showed that ideology is more dangerous than theology, but since fighting for religion has never really gone out of fashion, what do you think?

The multiverse theory is as falsifiable as God himself. Therefore, I have a theory of sociology- that anybody believing in the multiverse has simply fallen for a new religion created by comic books and bad science fiction.

Act I

A FA on the front page laments that more potholes have gotten fixed in wealthier neighborhoods in some city because their residents were more likely to own smartphones and download the report-a-hole app.

My thinking of course was, yeah, the squeakiest wheel tends to get the grease. That's just how it is, if there's not the gumption or resources to proactively/preventatively frequently attend to every wheel. Such as in city services.

I would think there'd still be a phone number to call to report them, since smartphones haven't always existed, and most everyone has at least a land line. So those who are bothered by them the most get them fixed first.

Doesn't sound terrible, but it's only a meant to serve (and does so very poorly) as just one example of a greater, overall concern: Data analytics could end up reinforcing inequities in housing, credit, employment, health and education.

Act II

I'm reminded of a popular, smarmy retort of the past to the accusation of Left-wing bias in the media: Life [itself] has a Liberal bias! The implication intended for conveyance, but not really believed by the utterer, of course, was that Left-wing slant in the content of reports about things in life was not actually injected, but innate. I.e. it's not a problem, it's what's normal.

Well, then: Life reinforces inequities.

Act III

But if all these naturally-occurring inequities are bad, shouldn't all naturally-occurring inequities be bad?

How about some we never hear about:

1) The number of news sources

The Left occupies 90-some percent of the news dissemination sources in the country, from news networks (like CNN) to non-news networks (like Comedy Central). Given that probably about 1/3 of the country is solid Left, that should be their quota on programming that distributes news. Or at most 2/3rds of all news-distributing media outlets, since you can also argue that the political middle has been lost to the Left.

2) Positions in (public) education

Leftism is grossly over-represented in academia. Why is diversity in the student body so important but not in the faculty?

3) Voter registration

At least in this state, even in so-called Republican areas the # of registered D's easily outnumbers the # of registered R's. And around here I've heard something to the effect that we've gotten rid of runoff elections being between the highest vote getting D and the highest vote getting R, to just the top two highest vote getters. Which will probably take that disparity and tend to make it even worse.

Maybe Democrat registration should be effectively capped at the current level of Republican registration in a district. For example lets say a city has 4 million residents with 45% registered D and 30% registered R. That's 1,800,000 expected D voters and 1,200,000 expected R voters. To make things more fair, shouldn't the number of D votes counted be stopped at 1,200,000? This still wouldn't guarantee equitable outcomes but it could be a start. Then it would be a matter of absolute turnout, on a level playing field.

4) Intelligence (that is, you never hear about this except from "racists")

Inherited wealth must be confiscated, for redistribution by the state, because it's too much of an advantage those of future generations. Well intelligence is passed down as well, and that's an even bigger factor. Maybe mandatory IQ testing should be performed at an early age, with forced dope ingestion in formative years to "equalize" the IQ of those more gifted.

5) Work Ethic

Cultural and home-life attitudes towards achievement also greatly factor in to outcomes in people in life. Jewish and especially Asian households are guilty of placing expectations and pushing their children to successes in life. Public school alone is insufficient in completely counter-acting this parental-instilled drive.

Maybe Child Protective Services' mission should be expanded. Not only do children need protection from their bad parents, but they need protection from others' good parents, who in raising their own children puts others at a disadvantage.

Some type of mandatory foster care in addition to public schooling might do the trick. Say state-run boarding schools, where you have to send your kids to go live 2 years for every 1 year they live with you, or whatever ratio is needed to eradicate the unfairness.

Russia is now a distributist paradise with 80% of the vegetables and fruit consumed being home grown, and 50% of the milk production being home grown. Compare this with the central planning of enforced by swat team large scale agriculture.

That is, "business developers" in contrast to "software engineers".

I'm at a place with them now, since returning to work after the Great Recession. (And I fear that I might be working with them, when I can find work at all that is, from now on.) I worked with them at my 2nd startup during the dotcom boom (a VB shop). During my time there I once overheard some of the senior developers talking amongst themselves and making fun of C/C++ devs for being nerds, and how in constrast they're "passionate about solving business problems", and not wanting to "get bogged down in the technology". I saw that again in the "about me" section of someone's blog years later, so I suspect it's an actual culture, that I've only bumped into a couple of times in my career so far.

They call themselves "developers", not "programmers". One person at my current shop felt the need to say out loud to the group once that she is definitely not a nerd. I concur. She's a mommie, not a technologist.

They talk about watching sports, and getting blitzed on beer. These aren't kids, some of them are early 50's, so they're not "bro-grammers", they're not the Jersey Shore of developers, they were just probably frat boys in college in their time. They're normals, not nerds They have zero awkwardness in speaking (they make BHO look like a stumbling, bumbling imbecile, in comparison, which he certainly is not), and always know what to do given the social situation.

They generally graduate with IS or MIS degrees as opposed to CS degrees. Or they get a CS degree but at one of the colleges in California's lower tier university system. Like I did*, but unlike me, they generally had to rely on a circle of friends/classmates to help them get through it. You couldn't help but notice these people; they were like wildebeests, always in proximity to their herd, for protection from carnivorous technical coursework trying to overwhelm and weed out the unfit.

*I transferered out of the upper tier system because I didn't want to pay that much/couldn't afford to (running up college debt wasn't what we did back then) . And I didn't want to work that hard, at that point in my life, since my thinking then was it was just to acquire the stupid token piece of paper to finally start my career and stuff of actual importance. (I don't totally agree with that now.)

I remember a classmate who I worked briefly with on a project I think in senior year. (At that school, sometimes larger programming projects were where you could optionally pair up with someone on it. But I never did, thinking that I'm going to have to be able to do this on my own in the real world. But some analysis & documentation assignments were sometimes mandatory pair or group assignments.) He was not a geek/nerd/pinhead/intellectual. He dressed well, spoke well, was smooth, he could be a CEO by now.

Now some people want to do something with computers in their career, not on computers. And that's fine, but they should go into QA or documentation on the way to management or whatever. For things like programmer, sysadmin, network admin, and DBA, that require real technical commitment to nerdy stuff to be able to excel at, the rest of us would appreciate if they'd stay away from those. So we can get our jobs done.

And some apparently have settled on working on computers, maybe giving up the aspirations of ever becoming a suit, but don't want to get too involved with them. A hybrid suit/developer, but 67/33 suit/programmer.

So you get what I have where I'm currently at. Managers love these people because they look and act and talk well, just like them. I hate them because I have to work with them, and on the code that they write (topics of part 2). So it's occurred to me, I'm not just a little out of place, I'm actually in a sense underemployed right now. Not as severely as if I was flipping burgers right now, but still.

In pay and also in what I can do. So I'll probably start looking in another year or so. There's a few more books I want to read to get myself at what I perceive to be a good foundation in this newer (to me) stuff I'm doing. The environment of the business developer has actually been a good place to start, as simplicity and just straightforward grunt it out coding is the rule, so it's good for someone coming up to speed in different tech for a somewhat career shift.

But like I said, since I'm doing web development in a managed language now, vice desktop development in lower-level more hard-core languages before, I fear that I'll never be working with what I consider to be my peers anymore.

Somehow, ideally, I need to find a C# shop where the propensity of them came from a C++ background and not just from Visual BASIC. And where they're not afraid of just a sprinkling of design patterns, and actual software engineering concerns like SOLID, DRY, and (gasp) OWASP. I need to think about a way of determining in an interview what kind of shop it is, without giving it away and offending in my question. (Any suggestions?)

...but I won't say it, even though I'd be justified in doing so.

I was just looking through the beta for Slashdot (which I don't like, by the way) and saw a "Hall of Fame" page. I looked at it and this was one of the most popular stories of all time. It was posted when Obama was elected the first time.

It's kind of depressing, in that people were saying that Obama would not change all the things he promised he would, and the lemmings tried to shout them down. I said "depressing" because so many people, all of whom should really have known better, bought into the ideals that Obama sold to them. They honestly believed (and I daresay still believe, even now) that Obama would have the power to bring about all the changes he promised.

Well, it's been six years in. I think I am safe in stating that none of his promises have been kept-- none of them that were of any substance, anyway.

I can only hope that the process that we have in place will work as it should, and Obama will not see the end of the current term. He can't complain: he has his phone, he has a pen, and he knows how to use them.

Why gay marriage is a study in the worst of conformity- posted especially for a certain troll of these parts.

Wow, it's been 15 years but I've finally got my own personal troll! :-)

I must apologize to everyone I've ever called a troll now that I've seen a real one. Yeah, there are trollish comments, but this... it's a different league. If you ever wondered who these brain-damaged morons were who set up geocities homepages with blinking purple text on blue background with red dots in Comic Sans - that kind of different league.

Now it does make me wonder about trolls in general. Has there been a study on this? I really wonder if psychologists have tackled this because quite honestly, you cannot be mentally stable and post in this and this content at the same time. So I do wonder if trolls on the Internet (the real trolls, not the people occasionally posting something stupid) do have a mental problem. It definitely looks like it. Probably insecurity issues, definitely an exaggerated need for attention, might be related to borderline syndrome or schizoprenia.

And, of course, the Internet provides:

• The Worst Internet Trolls Might Be Mentally Ill
• Internet trolls are narcissistic psychopathic sadistic
• Internet trolls might be mentally ill
• Most Internet trolls are mentally ill
• If Trolls Are Actually Mentally Ill People, What Do We Do About It?

As someone who has had to deal with family members suffering from mental illness, let me tell you that it's not funny. So despite the fact that they are, in fact, obnoxious, aggravating assholes, these sad little fucks also need help and their miserable little existence is not something you'd want to trade for yours, no matter how much you think your life sucks. Trust me, with a mental illness on top, it'll suck more.

Obviously, we can't offer therapy to people who usually comment anonymously and will often go to great lengths to avoid being tracked down. What we can do, however, is get a better understanding for how they act this way (they can't help it, mental illness is stronger than your conscious mind) and that the best thing we can do for them is to not continue the feedback loop. "Don't feed the trolls" - old wisdom there.

The last link in that list contains a few more ideas.

Now that I'm at the end, I kind of regret the smiley face at the top. But I'm leaving it in because this journal entry is a bit of a journey, even if it is short. Thanks to some Internet resources, a bit of research and connecting the dots, I've come a short way, changing my mind a little on this particular sub-sub-sub-part of life.

-----

A short additional statement on how to treat trolling. From what I've gathered from the resources above, a few comments (both here and in the various spammed threads) and my own life experience:

First, don't feed the trolls. Most of them seek attention, so if you stop giving it to them, they become frustrated and go away. Notice that they seek attention, not validation. A rebuke or an angry rant or even a shootout of personal insults satisfies them as much as anything else. Much like the old PR saying "there is no negative publicity", it is all about the attention itself, not about its content.

Second, stand your ground. Do not leave the site or stop commenting just because you're being trolled. It takes a bit to do that, yes. Trolls consider it a "victory" if they shut you up, either by simple flooding or by frustrating you enough to disappear. In their twisted minds, it gives them validation and somehow proves that they were right.

Third, if you see someone else being trolled, give them support. Doesn't take much - a single sentence is more than enough. Someone under attack by a real troll is being flooded. The troll will commonly post under multiple aliases or otherwise attempt to appear as more than one person. Psychological experiments such as Solomon Asch's show how we humans as social animals experience conformance pressure. So give that other person support by showing him that the flood he's getting is no the only opinion around. It doesn't matter if he consciously knows it's just one troll, the pressure is subconscious.

-----

I'd like to have comments disabled on this journal entry, for obvious reasons, but you can't publish a journal entry with comments disabled, so... 1000:1 bet that he's stalking the journal as well and will add his drivel below?

Also, if the formatting looks atrocious, turn off beta and revert to classic. Seriously.

The most metal performance with a non-traditional instrument since I discovered there was such a thing as an electric violin. (The second group is much cuter though.)

Ok, I'm stretching a bit as a programmer in my current contract, because they're thrilled with the timeframe I've given. This contract is finally allowing me to learn MVC, which means *next* contract I'll be able to command a much higher rate.
 
However, using MVC on Microsoft tools means abandoning Ajax. I really need a good "Date/Time" control and a good cascading combobox. Anybody have any suggestions for an open source JQuery suite I should examine?

Definitively use art and materialism to deny the existence of life on Earth.

I used "social engineering" in a sentence a few minutes ago and wanted to look up some kind of official definition. Dang it is getting hard to find the definition that's not just the technical, hacking one.

On a second page of hits I found that Webster's still retains its historical definition:

Management of human beings in accordance with their place and function in society.

(Hey, what could be more moral than that, right?)

I say historical because it no longer describes an alternate state, rather now being concomitant with existence. I.e. it's no longer an "ism", it's an "is". So therefore it's not really notable as its own word anymore.

In general I lament when words, that already have a distinct meaning, get hijacked by the ignorant, and it catches on. Because then we lose the original meaning/no longer have a word to describe the first thing. (Which, of course if you're on the Left, don't mind at all if the politically manipulative meaning of that word pair gets obscured by the technology meaning one.)

"Hacking" is another one. As someone who went through a Computer Science program at a university in the late 80's/early 90's, its original meaning in computers meant to skip desiging and thinking about a program and just diving in to coding it. But I figure some journalist heard the term and grokked that it related to computers somehow but didn't know how, and made the incorrect assumption that it related to breaking in to computers, wrote an article, and the rest is histoire.

And for the latest example, Pest Buy is now running commercials that you should come in and buy Windows tablets there because they've handed some out to their employees first and they've taken them home to learn it, presumably to be better able to tell you how to use Windows 8. But they're referring to this process as "beta testing". Gah!