Nerf Now was my pleasant discovery in 2012
Xkcd has come out every Monday, Wednesday and Friday for years. How is that not regular?
I think he meant more [regular content] not [more regular] content.
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Bad is a pattern... I've seen it repeated everywhere. If I were to write it up it would go something like this...
Semi-competent coder becomes de facto lead developer and in a mixture of fear and unwillingness to do research before starting to architect a large new system just goes to town building it with all the methods he knows of and ends up with a rickety shack that a team of developers have to maintain and improve without refactoring the massive investment in core code.
Or the other really common bad pattern where a team of semi-competent coders without real leadership architect a system by fighting against each other in format wars and a mixture of well intentioned decisions independently made that work very poorly together via hacks and elbow grease.
Incompetent lead developers.
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Anyone getting used to VISUAL STUDIO 2012, where the UI is so flat you often can't tell where dialog box borders are, and the MENUS shout at you? This has got to be a usability disaster of historical proportions.
I couldn't hear you over the slashdot icon shouting at me. Z
Yeah, Windows 8 is fine, as long as you install a third party app like Start8 in order to giver yourself power user abilities from the Desktop.
Seriously Micro$oft, how boneheaded are you?
windows key->type what you want->launch desktop app == much faster than a start button. Always works for me quickly.
How boneheaded are you? (ooo invective is fun)
In all seriousness, I think windows 8 has some pretty neat features, although I spend most of my time outside of metro.
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Any task a gui can do a can be done faster without it.
Photo editing.
I rather dislike it when people respond to someone's claim with a counterclaim well outside the generally understood context of the original claim (In this case...running a VPS). At least, my understanding is that people don't get a VPS for the purpose of photo editing. But, since you need everything overly qualified at all times, in general, it is faster to do server administrative tasks on the console. You can automate repetitive tasks more easily. And, as someone else mentioned, you can limit your port exposure.
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It's one thing to have some Larry Wall style eccentricities, but Stallman hurts any movement he attaches his name to because of his extremist views. He believes, for example, that programmers should not expect to be paid for their work and that it's more important that non-free software disappear than it is for someone's children to be fed (he also believes nobody should have children). He's also made vile statements about what he calls "voluntary pedophilia", claiming that it should be legalized.
The annoying part is that in nearly every Stallman discussion, people will say things like, "You may not agree with everything he says, but we sure need someone like him who always sticks to their guns!" No, we don't. He's hurting the movement.
GNU was an interesting philosophy when it was started, but it's not as if it was the only open source ideology or that other open source movements wouldn't have taken hold. This isn't to diminish GNU so much as it is to diminish Stallman's glorified role in history among computer geeks and lessen the movement's reliance on a crazy person.
Your source is clearly biased, and fills his missive with ad hominens, which nearly instantly destroys any credibility for me
He never says that he doesn't think developers should get paid. Maybe you inferred that believing developers only get paid if they work on proprietary software.
I doubt, due to my first statement, that Stallman's views were accurately portrayed about any subject in that article, especially voluntary pedophilia and utilitarian ethics.
How do you know that a few children starving would be less important for the world then open software. Hypothetically, if open software leads to 10% more productivity, a few children starving would be offset by all the other benefits of that increased productivity (if it were evenly distributed) and then less children would starve. Thats just one argument, and you're wading into an insoluable problem and counting on the audience's ingrained sense of values to conclude that Stallman is a nut.
Same sort of line of thinking applies about whether children are always harmed by relations with an adult. Unfortunately, even me saying this will engender some knee jerk reaction calling me not human because I was able to compartmentalize my disgust long enough to consider the problem without letting repulsion bias me into thinking this automatically makes someone a nut...IF he even said it. Direct quote please.
You have such an inflammatory style, similar to the post you linked, I wonder why your post was modded up.
All that said, I'm not saying RMS is not a nut, but I am saying I don't think you advanced the argument in a legitimate way anywhere.
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RMS is a fanatic, plain and simple. He may be a fanatic for a good cause overall, but he is still a fanatic.
You see, people like RMS don't just see software in those terms or one thing in life in a fanatical way, they see everything in life in narrow terms. I call them "people who see everything in black and white".
Those of us who are not sociological experts do, too.
For what it's worth, I believe we could probably partition most of humanity into disjoint sets each comprising a less than 10% of the population who thinks of all the other members of the other sets as unreasonable people and yet think of themselves as part of the reasonable majority.
I don't understand how your post was moderated up. It seems rather commonly held knowledge and the archetype of the overly moral or righteously indignant person is ubiquitous in literature. Moreover, your post seems so pat and smacks of pretension.
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Might be a rather specific use-case, but since there are so many telecommuters...I work from home, and I have a Cisco/Tandberg videophone (one of their "personal systems") on my desk. Although I'm practically never at the office, having the video there gives me that much more "presence" at the office than just being a voice (or writing off emails).
But, then you defeat the greatest joy that comes from working at home...Not having to put on stupid work clothes!
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The OP suggested it is lazy or passive aggressive to use office IM as a means of communication. Let me say as a developer that I love office IM and want most simple communication to be done over it.
It allows me to check it when I want without interrupting my concentration on whatever logic problem I'm working on.
I find that I am less social and less capable of communicating well when I am deep into a programming problem. IM lets me take my time at forming a response.
It usually leads to a faster social interaction with less fluff so I can get back to what I was doing.
To me, IM is a fantastic means of communicating a very small amount of information or coordinating over a rather tiny issue. Face to face communication still has its moments, and in some environments it may always be superior to IM, but I very much disagree with the idea that the only two motivations for IM are laziness and being passive aggressive.
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George Lucas blows Shakespeare out of the water in a couple of ways. He engages the imagination in a way that Shakespeare just doesn't. Imaginative panoramas, gadgets, events, forces to the universe, and all that is the cluttered sci-fi visuals of his movies. He doesn't have Shakespeare's wit, nor his ability to tell a tale of someone else's sound and fury in a way that makes it personal, etc. But, now I think we're comparing one type of artist to another. People are comparing Lucas to writers and to painters, which is a shame. I wouldn't even compare him to most other directors, because his achievement, and it is one, is not related to most of that.
Another comment suggested that only 5 year olds and those that think like them would appreciate Lucas. Are we not supposed to retain a childlike portion of our identity growing up into adulthood? Isn't there a reason for this? Shakespeare most often pleases the adult in me, but very few have engaged the child in me and its sense of wonder in any close to the degree of Lucas, and I do not think it was an easy feat.
Lucas is a phenomenal artist, but not in the way that we laud most artists. And, not in some obscure academic way either. He created an intriguing universe where I want to spin my own stories.
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This restaurant was advertising breakfast any time. So I ordered french toast in the renaissance. - Steven Wright, comedian
