Produce

So the Google ecosystem was a bad idea after all. I knew it. First they lure you in with a slick web mail client and a couple of gigabytes of storage. Then they buy up a bunch of companies, including YouTube. Then they link your Google and YouTube accounts together. And now your Google identity is suddenly your YouTube identity which is linked to your real name. I didn't ask or sign up for the vast majority of this!

I merely provided a rebuttal to the argument that PHP, or any other language, for that matter, is unreliable. I did not make the case that automated testing somehow makes PHP a preferred choice. How you test the code is what dictates reliability, not the language.

>Have you tried automated testing on a large complex web application? It's an insanely monumental task.

What's so insanely monumental about writing unit, functional (i.e. like these http://symfony.com/doc/current/book/testing.html#functional-...) and Selenium tests to cover everything before committing new changes? It's just like any other code - test the main condition and edge cases and everything will be running smoothly next time you come back to that feature.

> I use Python because it balances getting stuff done with having that stuff not fall over as soon as I turn my back.

Uhh... Heard of automated testing?

It makes absolutely no difference what language you write your code in, whether it's PHP, Python or Brainfuck - reliability is dictated by your testing strategy, not the language. In the PHP applications I write, the only things that break are the things I didn't test.

The smart thing to do would be to put a download link next to each video.

That makes sense then - I wasn't aware of the fact that Gnome Shell and Unity were distinct. Thanks for the memo!

>Interesting that you think desktop computing is an anomaly. I must have imagined the whole PC revolution thing then...

I think he was referring to desktop computing being an anomaly in that the predominant OS is not nix based.

>Popular distros like Ubuntu and Mint have shifted away from it.

This is news to me since my colleague, running Ubuntu 12.04 is using Gnome/Unity. Did I miss a memo?

>Yes, in principle they could learn that stuff; but they consider it to be a waste of their valuable time, for which they have other priorities.

Yet they spend their valuable time on watching television while being bombarded with adverts and forced to come back because their favorite series always ends with a cliff-hanger. Or they are drinking. Or they are working excessive hours because in spite of the fact that we have automated massive swathes of work, five days a week is still the standard, which makes absolutely no sense. Or they are too stressed by their dire financial situation because we have an economy based on gambling and usury.

My point is that people are naturally curious creatures who, given the time and opportunity, are quite capable of learning anything.

When we have a society which spends a great deal of resources constantly diverting peoples' attention, creating fake demands and generally holding an air of chaos, is it a wonder that nobody can be bothered to learn how to operate a revolutionary class of machines which provide one with knowledge about anything and everything?

By dumbing things like this down, we are approaching the problem from the wrong end. We need to work on creating a bigger leisure class which will naturally be inclined to understand it's environment better, since it will actually have the time and focus necessary to do so.

By another way of analogy - we're in the position of the 16th century puritans (in this case tech nerds) asserting that ofcourse everyone must learn to read (or operate computers) so that they can read the Bible (internet) for themselves and interpret the word of collective wisdom directly. Notice how the result of that battle was not to dumb down the English language, which is unnecessarily complicated in many places, but to teach people how to use the bloody thing. This is a similar situation.

The year of the Linux desktop?

>It should be pointed out, infairness, that the US Navy will also be using these drones to detect drug running in the Caribbean and I don't think anyone would object to that

I'll object to it. It's nobody's business to dictate to people what they can do with their own bodies. The current drug laws create a black market and fuel gang violence. As demonstrated by countries like Portugal, treating drug use as a health issue instead of a criminal issue reduces addiction rates and side effects from drug consumption. Thus, anything which polices the current drug laws is destructive by it's very nature.

Are they also working with sub-par equipment? If so, put in a request together with them. Otherwise, put in the request yourself. If they turn it down, look for another job and put this one down as a contracting position. In my experience, employers in this industry pretty much never ask for references anyway, in the UK at least.

>Christ, you act like you're doing someone a favor running this tool that was built to help you save time.

CPU time is super expensive where I live.

>Let me guess, you're the guy who bitches when the WiFi is down on the airplane.

Incessantly.

>I don't think we should view it a negative light though.

You won't be saying that when your future girlfriend googles your name and sees all the My Little Pony videos you've been watching.

Yet companies act in exactly that way towards their employees. Late too many times? Ultimatum is issued where you get fired if it happens again. Too many sick days? Same result. Underperforming? Yup, you guessed it. Your employers are not your friends - do what you have to to make your life easier. IMO, ofcourse.

Firefox 14.0.1, Arch Linux (it's a rolling release distro, fully up to date).

Solving these kinds of problems and optimizing things makes me happy. I'll take a look at this when I get home from work and see if I can speed it up.

Word of advice - if you know anything about the code that nobody else does, use it as leverage. Come in one day, call your boss into an office and tell him you're quitting. When he asks why - voice your problems with the tools you work with. Offhandedly suggest that you actually wouldn't mind staying if work wasn't such a pain in the ass thanks to these issues. Outline how much it will cost them to train a new employee up and how much cheaper the hardware is in comparison.

Alternatively, just complain incessantly without threatening to quit if you can't get another job easily.

Reason I say this is that me and my team have been working on shoddy hardware for the last six months, then we put our collective feet down and demanded something better. Now we each have a pretty damn sweet system to work on.

It's a democracy - cast your vote.

Psyche!

Learn to love your monopolist overlords.

Welcome to the wonderful world of corporations - where nothing makes sense, everything is late and the dumber you are, the higher you climb!

Congratulations, you have managed to provide a two second delay between clicking on, for example, the Firefox icon and the resulting sprite CSS being displayed on a brand spanking new eight core, 8GiB RAM system. I hope you're proud of your abuse of my computer's resources. But, alas, I shall be having no more of this nonesense!

>I can't really offer any reasons to use Zsh over Fish.

Bash script compatibility, bigger userbase and therefore more third party customizations.

Step 1: throw all your newspapers in the bin, cancel your subscriptions and point all of the major news sites' URL's to 127.0.0.1.

Step 2: start reading scientific journals and other high quality sources of information.

Step 3: call all of your friends idiots for not doing the same.

Step 4: begin to hate your life more and more because you can't identify with the appaling ignorance that surrounds you.

Pessimistic step 5: throw yourself off of a tall building.

Optimistic step 5: build a rocket ship and fly to the moon.

Final disposition: you are no longer a part of society at large.

People are running out of good ideas for products.

I don't know.

The interesting thing is that, from: http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20070927/012604.shtml

>A recent GAO study found this to be a worrisome trend, noting that fewer new innovative drugs are being created -- with pharma firms instead focusing on ways to extend the patent protection on existing products by pulling a few tricks (such as "reinventing" Claritan as Clarinex just to get more patent coverage).

In other words, government funded or not, patents are stifling medical innovation.

>Nobody is going to put up that kind of money unless there's profit in it, period.

I don't know what kind of fantasy world you are living in but there are plenty of governments and charities who fund scientific and medical research without the goal of profit.

I think that a better analogy is thinking of patents as nuclear weapons. What we need at this point is a disarmament treaty.

>Wow, your kids are going to have more issues than Playboy.

My useless comment of the week - hahaha!

>If a worker makes a wrong decision it's much less of an issue.

Unless the employee gets his hand caught in a machine, the press jumps all over it and stocks plummet 5%.

>If you permanently eliminate the CEO position, there is multiple orders of magnitude greater impact to the company.

Then why do companies with flat hierarchies exist and operate just fine? You don't need someone at the top because you don't need a top.

See:

* http://mariewiere.com/2012/03/04/a-company-that-manages-with...

* http://agile-commentary.blogspot.co.uk/2009/09/bees-self-org...

The interesting thing about people, and any social, intelligent agents is that they self-organize.

Even bees (intelligent, social agents) do this:

http://www.pnas.org/content/96/22/12611.full

So do ants:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patterns_of_self-organization_i...

We can even manage traffic without direction:

http://thecityfix.com/blog/naked-streets-without-traffic-lig...

The biggest myths of our societies are that we need a hierarchy, directions and managers. We're quite capable of leading ourselves and getting everything done. And more efficiently, no less.

I would say that we're definitely not identical, but we can all be equal.

A better question, though I will answer yours shortly, is what does equality mean? It's simply the relative value we assign something. The thing is, we can think in terms of valuable and not valuable or we can skip the duality altogether and see everything on an equal level. A spade is thoroughly unvaluable if you have no hole to dig yet indispensable when you do. So what is it's absolute value? Is it equal to a saw? Is one person equal to another? It all depends on your perspective.

The problem with seeing inequality between people in terms of respect is that you will treat some of your fellow man badly, since you don't respect them. If their value is merely a matter of perspective, which is ever changing, would it not make more sense to see past our biases and show everyone respect, whether they are equal to what we currently identify as respect worthy or not?

To me, respect means to consider someone in high regard. In my experience, how I look at people ends up affecting how they act. People always tend towards living up to the expectations placed on them. By showing someone that I don't respect them, I am pushing them down rather than helping them up.

Putting it another way, when someone is on the defensive, because someone else looks down on them and does not show them respect, they close up and are not receptive to new information. By showing them respect even if they are bad at something, they are likely to listen to what you have to say and change how they act as a result of your words. Disrespecting someone with - "you type like an idiot" or ignoring them, will make them respond appropriately. Validating their actions - "cool, a more condensed form of English!" then suggesting something else - "I've had lots of success finding a job by writing like this", they might actually change.

If we want society (and spelling) to improve, we have to embrace those we call idiots and teach them, not push them away.

If someone is an awesome programmer but can't write English to save his life, why not educate him? You'll certainly have a more loyal employee if he feels that he's gained important skills from you.

tl;dr - Disrespect is damaging, respect is nurturing. Respect everyone and the sun will shine brighter.