Comment Jumping the shark (Score 1) 116
Does anyone one else get the sickening irony of one of the great pro-Linux Web sites changing their layout to look like Windows 8?
I used to be a huge Subversion cheerleader, but switched to Git everything I could some time ago. Our work repo is Subversion, but using Git day-to-day is well worth the hassle of converting files in and out of another tool to do so.
I was actually considering going back to Subversion full time at work a couple weeks ago, but merging a long-running development branch to trunk was enough to kill that idea. Subversion's merge pretty much shit itself at the get-go. The CM lead insisted on saving the development history on the branch - not worth the effort, but his call. I managed to save history for pre-existing files that were modified. After wasting hours of my (and Google's) time and trying everything short of standing on my head, I finally brute-forced the added and deleted files so I could move on with my life. Lesson learned but day wasted.
Merge is fundamental, and it's completely solid on Git. I'll let someone else sort out whether it works now in Subversion.
The National Security Agency and the FBI are tapping directly into the central servers of nine leading U.S. Internet companies, extracting audio, video, photographs, e-mails, documents and connection logs that enable analysts to track a person’s movements and contacts over time. [...] The technology companies, which participate knowingly in PRISM operations, include most of the dominant global players of Silicon Valley. They are listed on a roster that bears their logos in order of entry into the program: “Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, Apple.” [...] Dropbox , the cloud storage and synchronization service, is described as “coming soon.”
It should come as absolutely no surprise to anyone that the same CEO that canned the Sun-Times photo staff did the same thing at Newsday in 2008. See for instance, Vincent Laforet's blog on the layoffs. But these aren't isolated instances.
The new millenium has not been kind to newspapers. Certainly the newspapers are under great pressure from blogs, social media, and other Internet sources. There may also be an element of union busting in these actions. But from what I've seen over the years, there is a much larger element of simple greed following the familiar script of buy out the companies, dump half the staff, make the survivors do the jobs of the laid off as well as their own, count the dough. The continued existence of quality newspaper journalism in this country is quite remarkable considering the owners' continued efforts to get rid of the people who produce it.
Can we get along without traditional newspapers? Absolutely. Are we still losing something of tremendous value? Without a doubt. Will blogs pick up the slack? I hope so, but I just don't see it. There are a lot of truly great blogs out there. I follow a number of them. But to think they will make up for the depth and breadth of professional journalism that's disappearing before our eyes is naively optimistic.
I prefer the metric assload, because it's a bit bigger than a "regular" assload.
You mean, if Open Source isn't magic, it's bullshit? Way to straw man.
Almost - you forgot fat people.
From the linked Reuters article:
> The database is a joint project of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which provided most of the
> funding, the Carnegie Corporation of New York and school officials from several states. Amplify
> Education, a division of Rupert Murdoch's News Corp, built the infrastructure over the past 18
> months. When it was ready, the Gates Foundation turned the database over to a newly created
> nonprofit, inBloom Inc, which will run it.
I thought the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation was trying to *help* children, not *sell* them.
+1 Internets for you, sir.
Hear, hear. Good old CALL -151. Once in a great while I still fire up AppleWin and bask in its Garden of Eden-like 24x40 ALL UPPER CASE wondrousness.
Kind of late, but... Agree totally. I meant that Google's move, not MegaUpload, was evil. Although after spending time with the new image search, it seems more douchey (not showing the source page) than evil (which would be pretending that there was no source page). The UI makes it plain that the image is coming from somewhere else and gives you the option to see the page or go directly to the image, so while I'm not thrilled, I'll stand down from my earlier comment.
It's obvious, right?
Google just turned every other web site on the planet into MegaUpload. Sort of. "Don't, be evil" indeed.
It would be more responsible to give users a choice on the matter. Especially for those using Macs for work, teleworking, etc where not running Java may not be an option. Fine, disable it by default to be safe, but give an option to re-enable it besides Googling for random XProtect plist hacks.
"The one charm of marriage is that it makes a life of deception a neccessity." - Oscar Wilde
