Needs Kilometres, Miles are meaningless to me
25 karma · joined January 1, 2012
In enterprise environments where most users don't even have admin rights on their machines you need to pick at least one browser that you know will be deployed across all machines in the entire organisation. They chose Chrome(the right choice IMHO). Especially given that people are moving away from using windows choosing something cross platform is a must.
If it had an extension that could give me the hours of my life back that I have spent trying to support their awful browsers that would be great though.
The consumer market is a totally different game though, IE is being crushed in that market. I have made several consumer facing apps in recent years that do not support IE at all, users can still log in but a warning notice is shown informing them it is not tested in IE and they need to upgrade to a "standards compliant browser".
In regards to the other two evangelical preachers should probably need to specify in advance that there is significant empirical evidence in direct contradiction to their statements before making them publicly.
In the case of the vaccination debate this should definitely be a crime, there is significant empirical evidence to prove that what anti-vaccination campaigners say is false. There is some precedent for this regarding the claims of chiropractors in the US which went to trial and found that they were lying about the efficacy of their treatments. (Also on a side note why would anyone listen to a completely unqualified "celebrity" over the opinions of someone with a PHD in virology or epidemiology. Most of the anti-vaccination campaigners are not adequately qualified to have an opinion on the matter anyway).
Also I feel that it's whether it is for personal gain is a big factor, if you are just ignorant that is unfortunate but not necessarily malicious.
There are also examples here(in Australia) of companies being fined for misleading the public, a notable example is "balance bracelets" being recalled from sale here due to false claims.
That being said despite the similarities between the two there are some pretty large cultural differences between the US and Australia which may make some of my points moot. In general Australia favours stronger consumer protections and government regulations, a free and independent publicly funded media service(ABC) and very negative political campaign adds often backfire and lower the public perception of the person making the attack rather than the other way around. Additionally Australia does not have any explicit legal guarantees of freedom of speech akin to the US constitution so some forms of speech, such as overt racism, are already illegal and people can be denied entry for public statements which indicate "bad character" such as holocaust denial etc.
The ability to deliberately lie in order to influence the outcome of important events free of any consequence will always favour those with the loudest voices and the most media influence. In other words if you are the loudest why not lie about everything if there is no possible consequence?
While it could be difficult to prove that someone is lying or that something is untrue in "moral" issues there are many cases where there is empirical data or documentation proving truth, falsehood or knowledge and these are times where deliberate deception could be proven.
Probably widening the debate somewhat and a separate issue but I also feel that selective ignorance should also be punished. For example if you commission 10 reports into something and 9 of them tell you what you don't want to hear and one of them does tell you what you want to hear then you are deliberately ignoring 90% of the expert advice to prop up your point of view. IMHO this is almost as bad.
If you want something small and portable my Asus X202E works well.
The apple TV we use in the office for playing music has not worked correctly since the last firmware update and really struggles with streaming and the new MBP we purchased recently had a bug where the keyboard and mouse would randomly stop working(fixed in an update). These aren't huge problems but I think they are not something that would have occurred a few years ago.
That being said if you don't want to make the switch to linux then the apple/unix ecosystem is still much better than the current windows options but I think apple is losing its reputation for quality as it moves from being a high end luxury product to a standard.
Also I find the licencing really irritating when creating VMs and servers. In the end thinking something "feels" old and clunky is a subjective perception but every time I use MS products it feels like they were created with little or no insight or knowledge into what anyone else is doing, leading to a lot of NIH syndrome.
Absolutely garbage browsers are also a big problem, I know IE 10 is passable but in 4 years when it hasn't been updated and people using Win7 and 8 are stuck using it, it will be the IE6 of its day.
Don't get me wrong, I used MS products basically exclusively for the first 5 years of my developer career, and still use them a fair bit now, and thought it was amazing, it's not until you move outside that bubble and start using better tools and methodologies that you realise how far behind they are.
I spend about 50% of my time developing .net apps and the other half on linux/web stuff so I'm pretty familiar with the MS tech stack and it always feels very clunky and outdated.
MS hasn't created a really compelling consumer product since the Xbox and they have just totally lost consumer mindshare, they are the slow, clunky old thing you use at work because you have to, not the thing you buy when spending your own money.
In my view the future is(at least in the medium term) Linux on the server and mobile devices, Unix on the laptop/desktop in the form of OSX and maybe MS on the console and Windows running legacy systems and some servers.
I'm not a particular fan of Apple either(I've never purchased any of their products) and only use Linux(Ubuntu) and Windows in a VM but it seems to me consumers just don't care about MS any more and I'm not sure that MS has the skills to change that.
The main problem I have have with it is the clunkiness of the tools. Windows itself is pretty poor as a server OS and dev environment(IMHO), it's unnecessarily heavy, has too many useless features, is difficult to automate, and more. Powershell is ok but not really as simple/powerful/portable as bash. SQL server I guess is ok as a db engine but using it is clunky(again feature bloat really hobbles it). I find getting an environment set up with vagrant, capistrano etc. with windows much more complex than it needs to be.
Also one of the really noticeable differences is the overall quality of the community. It's much harder to find good answers to problems when using .net/Windows than with other environments and platforms in my experience. In general I find .net devs more interested in maintaining the status quo than exploring new ideas and tech(massive generalisation but I'm sure I can't be the only one to notice this). Also nearly every tutorial about modern web tech is written for *nix environments as the general community support and interest in .net/Windows seems to be non-existent.
An observation that I've noticed lately when attending tech events and conferences is that Windows just isn't even on the radar. It's not that people actively dislike it or openly criticise it, it's just not even considered or discussed, it's old tech, it's boring, it's clunky.
It's definitely doable and provides great freedom in your lifestyle. The different timezones can get a bit annoying though, the time difference between the UK and Australia is 11 hours so I would often find myself on Skype calls until 5am local time.
Using good collaboration tools like google docs and hangouts/skype really make this all go a bit easier. In some places around Asia(particularly Nepal, Burma etc.) internet can be a bit sketchy so it can be difficult to get fast turnaround times on communication/bug fixes etc.
Are you doing market research for a startup? This is an area I am particularly interested in and have a bunch of ideas for the industry. The major problem I see it is navigating the legal minefield of copyright law in different regions etc.
A flat monthly fee of less than $120AUD
An open API so apps like XBMC, Boxee, Plex etc. can integrate the service.
NO ADVERTISEMENTS! - this is a must I refuse to pay for something and have to watch ads.
Shows are available as soon as the first airdate in all regions(If you air a show more than 48 hours after first airing in its country of origin you will never compete with piracy)
The ability to download DRM free SD versions of content so I can watch them while travelling on planes etc.(This may seem far fetched but if you seriously want to compete with piracy you need to match its functionality, people could easily do this illegally now anyway so why not just make it part of your service and actually make money)
It is a must to match the ease of use and functionality of piracy to compete with it, piracy allows you to watch a TV show within an hour of it's first airdate anywhere in the world at the quality of your choice with no advertising or DRM. At a minimum you must meet these requirements to compete effectively.
BTW: Coffee here in Melbourne(at least on the north side) is about $3.20AUD(~$3.35USD) to $6AUD depending on size. If you're in Melbourne and want a great coffee I recommend Proud Mary's or Dr. Java they are both excellent.
It's great to see people helping to develop skills and income within Nepal.
This isn't the first time this has happened to AWS - we moved our app to linode last year after this happened to us and it seems to affect AWS more than any other hosting i've ever used, i'd be interested to know how their infrastructure is set up because it doesn't seem particularly robust.