1,875 karma · joined April 15, 2009
Sad to say, comparing them to most other sites where you try (or attempt to try -- yes, often it is that bad) makes a case for saying, yes indeed, they are great!
I am sure for many of those people, they do this because they have decided that sufficiently understanding the complexities of C++ provides too little payout (or in some cases none at all) to make the shift worthwhile for them. I don't think accusing developers of "being stuck in the 90's" is the right way to convince them to work differently. If the technology is actually better, you should convince them of such by demonstrating it with many concrete examples.
Contrary to what many seem to believe, just because something is new doesn't mean it is better, even when computers are involved.
I had a decent signal (3 or 4 bars, I believe -- about as good as I ever expect to get in a store), but the web pages on so-called "modern" websites are so bloated and inefficient, sometimes it's a miracle to get anything done on a normal residential home internet service, let alone on a phone.
And before someone suggests it, NO, I am NOT going to install a stinking app from every store I visit (not that they'd be any better, most of the one's I've seen I would describe as "barely functional -- sometimes").
It would be interesting to know how many sales stores have lost because a customer was trying to search for something in their store via their website, but the experience was so miserable they just gave up.
I agree that bad and/or misleading names are, well, bad. However, I don't agree that we should just give up and name everything {SomeCrypticNameIThinkIsCool}.
Invest time in naming things well the first time.
Invest time in renaming things to be more accurate when it is feasible.
While I do agree that many developers sometimes like to argue about "code quality" too much (and I've probably been guilty of that at times), "code quality" is definitely a real thing. I have have interacted with code bases that were a joy to read/modify, and I've interacted with code bases that made you pull your hair out at every turn (and also many levels in-between the extremes). It is not always a case of just "arguing for the sake of arguing".
> The name Wi-Fi, commercially used at least as early as August 1999, was coined by the brand-consulting firm Interbrand. The Wi-Fi Alliance had hired Interbrand to create a name that was "a little catchier than 'IEEE 802.11b Direct Sequence'."
> The Wi-Fi Alliance used the advertising slogan "The Standard for Wireless Fidelity" for a short time after the brand name was created, and the Wi-Fi Alliance was also called the "Wireless Fidelity Alliance Inc" in some publications.
Elsewhere I've seen that it was chosen because of its similarity to HiFi - which is short for "High Fidelity" (regarding audio equipment):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_fidelity
> High fidelity (often shortened to Hi-Fi or HiFi) is the high-quality reproduction of sound. It is important to audiophiles and home audio enthusiasts. Ideally, high-fidelity equipment has inaudible noise and distortion, and a flat (neutral, uncolored) frequency response within the human hearing range.
However, there seems to be a lot of debate as to whether the 'Fi' in WiFi was ever fully accepted to mean "Fidelity". So pretty much it seems marketing people liked the way "WiFi" sounded, so they used it.
:-D
As I said before, this is not one of my favorite Weird Al songs (many of which I could sing along with word-for-word from memory). I was never crazy about the song, so I am not surprised that I didn't know the surrounding context (which the original article left out). Still, I don't think you can exclude the possibility of a cause-and-effect relationship spanning the middle of two rhyming lines (perhaps particularly, in rap music), but after seeing and hearing the lines in context, I don't think that was Al's intention here.
However, I'm sure I have heard a few people use RAM when they meant hard drive space. Though, in fairness, those were probably friends/relatives who used computers but didn't know a lot about how they actually work.
That's far from universal. The business users I've worked with recently almost all have desktops. A few (mostly management) have laptops for work. I'm sure a lot of that has to do with whether the business is remote-work-friendly. There are still quite a few businesses who are decidedly NOT.
Yeah, the numbers have shrunk over time, but I think that's probably due to USB and perhaps to some extent HDMI making an expansion card unnecessary. Also, motherboards have enough hard drive controllers in them now that most people who would add a hard drive to their PC have no reason to need an expansion card to do so.
I don't particularly like the trend either, but I think PCIe is far from dead at this point.
At this point, however, I'm willing to give Al the benefit of the doubt. It certainly would be "in character" (for lack of a better term), for him to be knowledgeable enough to know the difference. But I have been surprised by others on this particular point in the past.
But as I said elsewhere in this thread, I have been surprised in the past by people I would have described as fairly tech-savvy, who still called hard drive space "memory".
However, if the two phrases are related (as opposed to just being adjacent in the song), at this point I'd guess Al does probably know the difference, and the relationship is intended to be intentionally over-the-top absurd bragging.
I understand why you might argue that, but I've been surprised in the past by people who were fairly-well-versed on computers (no pun intended), but still called hard drive space "memory".
I should go listen to that section of the song again (like I said elsewhere, it isn't one of my favorites of his). By intentional absurdity, I meant that I could see Al intending this to be a case of bragging in an absurd way "Defraggin' my hard drive for thrills, I got me a hundred gigabytes of RAM".
But now that I noticed the "I" in the middle there (I had missed it before), I'm guessing I was wrong in thinking the lines could be cause-and-effect (which would be the source of the absurdity).
It is possible to think of it in a cause-and-effect way "Defragging my hard drive for thrills got me a hundred gigabytes of RAM". Which, honestly, I could see Al saying that as a purposefully absurd statement (because the first could not cause the second, but people brag like that all of the time).
I will admit that, although it seems like it should be (given my profession), this is not one of my favorite Weird Al songs --and I've been a fan for decades. So while I have heard it many times, I can't remember the last time I listened to it.
That problem (referring to things that are not conventional fast, volatile random access memory as RAM) seems to have only gotten worse in the last twenty years - exacerbated, I believe by the increased use of flash technology (SSDs, etc - which have, admittedly blurred the lines some).
It also doesn't help that smart phone and tablet manufacturers/advertisers have long insisted on referring to the device's long-term storage (also flash tech) as "memory". I doubt that will ever stop bugging me, but I've learned to live with it, albeit curmudgeonly.
Whippersnappers! :-D
If you want to reduce fragmentation while avoiding having one entity with too much control, the solution is fair setting of web standards and multiple browser implementations from different entities.
Requiring everyone to "just fork Chromium" would leave far too much power in the hands of Google (as if they didn't have far too much power already).
Yeah, but that phrase won't get any clicks.
I gave up about half way through the article and just skimmed through the rest.
Not for everyone. For years I have preferred keyboards with Cherry MX switches, but I just buy fairly inexpensive ones used. Not really a rabbit hole at all.
Adobe obviously doesn't care. They treat their customers like crap and actively try to extract as much money out of them as possible. A few years ago (or less) they worded their description of their monthly subscription very carefully, so as to mislead people into thinking they could pay for a month or two when they needed it, and then cancel. The fact was that monthly only allowed you to pay each month, it was still an annual subscription which could not be cancelled without substantial early termination penalty (basically paying the whole remainder of the year if my memory serves me correctly). If they really cared about their customers, they would have made that very clear when you signed up for service. I helped a family member sign up, and there was no explanation, and no warning about cancellation.
I wasn't thrilled about the subscription model in the first place, but this family member needed access to the tool. After the way that went down, I have no intention of doing business with Adobe ever again. I know a lot of other people who feel the same way.
(edited to fix a typo)
I never said that the OSI's definition of "open source" wasn't widely held. My argument is that it isn't the only widely-held definition. And I still don't find the government's use of the OSI definition to be particularly relevant - in terms of there being multiple widely-used definitions. It is just an example of one of them.
> in my experience many of the people who misuse the term "open source software" (OSS) to identify something that is NOT OSS are expressly trying to deceive
It has been my experience that most people who use the term "open source" to refer to source-available software are not trying to deceive anyone (although, I am aware of some examples where that has happened). They just haven't dealt with the legal details, and are mostly unaware that a different large group of people attach a lot more meaning to the term than they do.
We obviously disagree on this point, although "the vast majority of people who know about software" is a fairly vague qualifier.
The fact that many software projects distribute under licenses that comply with the OSI's definition is not particularly relevant to my argument anyway. I'm not talking about people distributing the software, I'm talking about the large number of people I am aware of who think of "open source" strictly as software where the source is available.
The US government examples aren't particularly relevant either. A small number of people make those decisions, and there are legal ramifications for them in how they define things, so I'm not at all surprised that they define the term that way.
As I said elsewhere in the thread, I was not arguing that people who use "open source" as equivalent to "source-available" are right. Mainly I'm arguing that there is still a very large group that see it that way, and that the meaning of the term is far less settled among people who use it than some would like it to be.
I did not say they were right. Effectively I said a lot of people use the term "open source" differently than you do, and that I didn't think the wording you chose to argue your case was going to be effective.
I understand the frustration.
> This is a solved problem, it was solved 15 years ago
I guess that depends on what problem you are referring to. In my experience, the use of the term "open source" to refer strictly to "source available" software is about as common as it ever has been.
> I’m going to complain about this, net positive effect be damned.
Well that's your choice, but in my opinion by doing so in the way you have in this thread, you are working against the goal of persuading people to use the term in the way you want it to be used.