Those who do not understand Usenet are doomed to reinvent it, poorly.
A type mismatch, that's what; pure number vs. length.
Agreed. Knowing the right tool for the task is a fundamental skill, but you also need to know what the second best is.
Always have a plan B.
Nuclear won't be accepted as a solution until people who claim to believe that climate change has the potential to end civilization accept that the only proven technology capable of replacing base-load coal is nuclear, and that climate change is a technological problem, not a social problem.
This will take a long time.
The green activist movement is completely dominated by Naiomi Klein-style social engineers who don't care one whit about the environment, but who see it as a useful tool for defeating global capitalism. Thus their opposition to any technological solution to the problem of CO2 emissions whatsoever.
Now that climate change is increasingly widely acknowledged as a real issue--the Pentagon takes it seriously, can you get realer than that?--the green activist community will increasingly be seen as the major impediment to solving the problem. The question is: will we push these utopian socialists aside quickly enough to save the planet?
At least he didn't create systemd, gnome3, or the Windows 8 UI.
a utopian, post-Facebook platform that respected user's privacy.
Oh, so they've got one, then.
Eating an animal living off of marginal grasslands is a much more carbon friendly option for humans than trying to grow anything on such land.
Which is all well and good, but most meat isn't produced like that, at least in countries like the US and UK.
Do you know what a feedlot is?
Yes, the rhetoric for this week's episode of "Theresa May had an idea" has been particularly silly.
The statistics trotted out over the past week or so make for interesting, if depressing, reading.
For example, the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, a very senior officer with counter-terrorism responsibilities, says they've been prevented on average one terrorist attack per year but so far this year it's been 4-5 already. (It's not clear whether this was in the specific context of "lone wolf" attacks, though.)
Just hours apart from that, we have Theresa May herself saying that almost 40 major terrorist attacks have been foiled since the 7/7 bombings, giving an average of about four per year. This means, she says, that the UK is facing the biggest terrorism threat in its history, which might be surprising to anyone who was around during the worst of the troubles with the IRA not so long ago. There are plenty of scary messages played over the PA system when you go through any major London railway station these days, but not frequent closures due to actual bomb threats and the like.
Also on Monday, there was a statement from Met Police Assistant Commissioner Mark Rowley citing 271 arrests resulting from counter-terrorism investigations so far this year. Their Commissioner seemed to be implying in the above statement that all of these had led to charges, too. What they don't seem to have mentioned anywhere in this week's PR campaign is how many such arrests ultimately lead to convictions, nor how many of those convictions (or the arrests or charges themselves) are actually for terrorism offences.
The combined budget for our security services reportedly remains somewhere around the £2B mark, not counting additional funding for counter-terrorism units within other organisations such as the police.
In other news, in 2013 (the last full year for which stats are available) there were 1,713 people killed on our roads, and a further 21,657 seriously injured, not to mention damage to the economy estimated in the £15-30B range as a result of the disruption due to incidents on the road. Would anyone like to guess what's been happening to the annual road safety publicity budget in recent years?
OK, so maybe I spend a lot of time reading Slashdot and want money for it. That doesn't mean you actually owe me anything for reading this post, which I have nevertheless taken the time to write, nor that it is unethical for you not to pay me. I simply don't have any reasonable expectation that by contributing a post and allowing Slashdot to publish it and you to read it, I will then be financially compensated.
It would appear that these professionals with jobs had better learn to deal with moving targets.
Why? There is no commercial advantage in repeatedly expending resources updating your software or intranet sites just to keep pace with the whims of some browser maker.
Whatever certain browser makers would like to happen, as the likes of Windows XP, IE6, and later IE8 demonstrated very clearly, staying with software that works for an extended period is a viable and sometimes very attractive option, even if it comes with significant disadvantages in other respects. Large organisations often work with multi-year roll-out plans for new technologies that will affect many staff or critical business functions, and they aren't going to be the slightest bit impressed by a browser vendor shouting, "But we push new features every six weeks!"
Stability and compatibility no longer exist in the old fashioned way.
Sure they do. They just don't exist if you give your business to organisations like Google, and the kind of web developer that relies on bleeding edge frameworks and joining the dots has no idea how to provide them.
Of course, this is good for those of us who make a lot of money offering businesses better solutions to their real problems using tried and tested technologies. It's not as glamorous, but it sure pays well if you can help your clients get stuff done without technology issues they simply don't care about getting in the way all the time.
TL;DR: Google, Mozilla and their fans wish that professional organisations would see these new developments and choose to adopt Chrome or Firefox as a result. What really happens in many cases is that those organisations see these new developments and say "OK, we'll just stick with IE, which version do we pin at to keep everything working?" and then throw lots of money at organisations like Microsoft that understand the real world needs and provide long term support accordingly.
There's already a brand of adult diapers called that. Nearly.
Cisco has more than enough software devs to remedy this in a years time.
This is a huge problem with this whole debate. People who work on certain browsers want the rest of the world to just dump 20 years of software history, significant amounts of which is still in use and doing its job just fine today, and spend what would collectively be a vast amount of time and money rewriting everything just to run on this week's trendy platform instead.
Newsflash: Professionals with jobs to do value stability and backward compatibility. They probably value their tried and tested software a lot more than a flashy port to your "living standard" platform. They certainly value tried and tested software a lot more than your latest technique for animating SVGs in demos that still doesn't scale up enough to use it in real applications without becoming unusably slow anyway.
See also: Why IE is still so dominant in business browsing, even versions from several years ago, and why neither Firefox nor Chrome got much traction in business at all until they started playing nicely with grown-up sysadmin tools.
After Goliath's defeat, giants ceased to command respect. - Freeman Dyson