Perhaps a bit of both. Regardless, Larry's intentions are good and he's an angel -- which is rare among programmers. Many (like Linus, RMS, DHH) are almost sociopathic in how they view others' work and treat the people they work with, so it's very refreshing to see someone that's not only passionate about his work, but gentle and kind as well.
The SRS sidebar makes it pretty clear that the whole SJW façade is exactly that: a façade. They obviously have legitimate complaints but hyperbolise everything to poke fun at it.
Victoria was beloved despite the fact she was a woman, not necessarily because of it. I understand what you're trying to say, but it doesn't really hold up.
Well isn't that a convenient narrative? Any woman the community likes is despite the fact she's a woman. Anyone they dislike is because she's a woman. The outrage writes itself!
I never said someone should be liked because of their gender. It's just that using Victoria as a defense for Reddit's consistently juvenile view of women doesn't really work.
> now predictable narrative of '50 white male racist misogynist neck beards' who want to chase women out of tech again
This is a pretty accurate narrative. You may not agree, but casual misogyny is incredibly pervasive on most defaults, and it's fairly prevalent within the smaller, community-based subs as well.
> small group of militant activists trying to silence people who they disagree with
If you're referring to SRS, they're annoying and take themselves far too seriously, but as far as I know they don't try to silence anyone.
> The most critical things against Pao and her husband I have seen are posts about there phony extortion sexism and racism law suits.
I'm not even going to address how laughably absurd your characterization of consistent harassment, abuse, and terrifyingly legitimate rape and death threats as "criticism" is. Most people were upset with Pao because she was part of an executive decision to shut down FatPeopleHate and a couple of other abusive subreddits. It's quite a stretch to say that she was solely responsible for this decision, and even then, it's sobering that people would respond with scathing, fiery, and highly toxic personal and threatening attacks on a decision that was intended to help people be kinder to each other -- and worse, lobbed on someone that had at most 2/5ths of the executive power to make that decision.
The media didn't turn the shaky relationship between reddit's users and their administrators into a black-and-white affair. Reddit itself did, by using Pao as a scapegoat to attack everything they saw as antithetical to freedom of hatred and abuse under the guise of "free speech."
> If you're referring to SRS, they're annoying and take themselves far too seriously, but as far as I know they don't try to silence anyone.
I'm a feminist,and can't stand a lot of the stuff that goes on on reddit.
That said, censorship on that website is rampant. Reddit is trying to monetize, and that means stifling speech, especially that speech critical of corporate governance.
The issue isn't as black and white as you make it. There are people with legitimate grievances. And there are people who are being sexist pigs.
Reddit will tell their userbase that the whole fiasco was Pao's fault. They will tell the board and investors that the userbase is sexist.
They think it's win win, but they are on a sinking ship.
But Reddit wasn't attacking corporatocracy or actual censorship. They were just trying to defend their right to be dicks to other people through abusive and hateful subs.
The right to free speech is not the right to speech without consequence. And what obligation does reddit have to preserve "free speech" in the first place? They run the website and it is fully up to them what gets filtered through and what sticks. It's not beholden to the first amendment.
> But Reddit wasn't attacking corporatocracy or actual censorship.
Are you sure? I frankly saw much more of this than the other. I, of course, have a bias, but I think people were focused on censorship.
And you're right. Reddit doesn't owe anyone free speech. But with all due respect, that's the product that they developed. Crowdsourced content aggregation is a useful service, but it's one that is entirely dependent on having "free speech".
If corporations or government can shape the dialogue on a website like reddit, it fundamentally undermines the purpose of having a service that aggregates upvotes.
Reddit can control and censor all they want. But it will take them from having a unique product and niche to being another viral editorial board in a sea of crappy viral editorial boards.
People have the right to free speech. People have the right to be offended by things. And people have a right to leave a service when it stops existing as it once did.
That's a two year old link to a sub whose whole intent is to be as diametrically opposed to the SRS sub as possible. If you're trying to strike a point here, I think it'd be much more effective to link to something that's more impartial and up-to-date.
I completely agree with you. That was nothing but a lazy search. I'm not heavily invested in the sub. However to claim the sub's intent is to be "diametrically opposed to SRS' is incorrect. It has not war against SRS. It's a watch dog.
I really detest the term "casual misogyny", as if everyone is living their lives just "casually" having this deep hatred for women. It so easily deflects any criticism or real discussion because well obviously they're all just casual misogynists.
I think people confuse making some jokes about women with "casual misogyny." People make jokes about everything, including stereotypes of women. Maybe that's in poor taste, and maybe they deserve to be called out for that if it's inappropriate, but it certainly doesn't mean they hate women.
Regardless of the actual numbers (I have no idea what they are), I wouldn't expect the CEO of Reddit to effectively announce to prospective advertisers that their user base was a bunch of racists.
IFE systems do show telemetry data from aircrafts' EICAS, though -- things like ground speed, altitude, temperature, etc.
I'm not sure on the specifics since Boeing has kept silent about the whole debacle, but I do wonder whether the IFE and avionics are airgapped on all aircraft, and whether you could exploit them if they aren't.
It's that very silence that makes me suspicious. Security through obscurity is only a reasonable defence if you know you are otherwise insecure. That said, it's also common when big companies have security concerns, valid or not.
Sorry if this is off-topic, but as someone who once sat through a four-hour compile of Octave several years ago and never touched it again, what exactly are the advantages of using Octave and R compared with the standard SciPy stack? (IPython, matplotlib, numpy, sympy, scipy, etc.)
4 hours to compile? I see you're using Mac OS X. This is why I really dislike source distribution in general, and I get very frustrated with Mac OS X users who praise homebrew. It really is not a very good distribution mechanism.
As to your second point for why Octave and not R or Python, my stance as an Octave dev is that you should use R or Python. But if you don't want to rewrite all of that Matlab code, tutorials, and papers out there and you still think they should run in something other than Matlab, that is when you use Octave.
This seems like little more than an Apple puff piece.
> Apple has recently developed a standard British power plug whose prongs fold elegantly back flush into their body. Easily stowed, no agony if accidentally trod on. A separate and wholly different solution to that offered by the Mu Plug which solves the problem in another way.
> “It took ages to solve,” Ive says wistfully.
And that is the point. No one else cares as much. Of course it took ages, because anything worth doing does. People who take pains to the extent he and his team do are very very rare.
This sort of design has been present in countless cheap, $3 international power adapters. Ive's ego and insistence on exalting his own genius at the expense of others' is maddening, and to call something so simple an "innovation" illustrates how little is necessary for something to be deemed a work of ingenuity.
Like Marc Newson, much of his work is design for the sake of design, with little regard for functional implications. To have a company's philosophy be singularly focussed on aesthetics and minimalism alone is not a bad thing. But as Larry Wall prophetically said several years ago, "Apple is the arbiter of good taste. But when good taste becomes mandatory, it's no longer good taste, just manners."
I feel similarly about Apple's design philosophy. Their level of influence doesn't inspire opposing philosophies from their competitors, it inspires imitation-- since imitation is a basic, natural, fundamental reaction to something successful. The problem is that it alienates those who have other requirements that differ vastly from those of Apple's, and who would be better served with a little less aesthetic sense, and more functionality or durability at the expense of (largely arbitrary) things such as thickness, gloss, polish, and shine.
There is a reason you only see ThinkPads on ISS rather than MacBooks. Similar design goals -- minimalism, starkness, and abstraction -- but with vastly different approaches.
> design for the sake of design, with little regard for functional implications
This is a fundamental misunderstanding. The minimalist aesthetic is underpinned by the principle that form follows function, and is absolutely opposed to ornament or visual additions. Aesthetic === functional in this worldview; it's not a separate thing which gets added in. (This is precisely why Ives and others eschewed skeumorphism.)
Yea, except, Apple most definitely favors aesthetics over functionality.
Take the iPod shuffle:
- Gen 1 was minimal, usable, and a portable USB drive,
- Gen 2 was minimal and usable, but lost its portable USB drive functionality (required a cable to also be carried around), but
- Gen 3 was smaller for no reason, moved the controls to an earbud cable which was impossible to use while running, and cost extra to buy an adapter if you didn't want to use their shitty earbuds, and then
- Gen 4 returned to the 2nd Gen design, because Gen 3 was very clearly flawed.
Seriously, explain the 3rd Gen iPod Shuffle.
I can cite many examples where they've dumped functionality for aesthetics, like non-removable batteries, fully-sealed computers (latest Mac mini), etc, but this is the clearest mistake they've made where they had to actually reverse course because of their favoritism for aesthetics over functionality.
I'm not going to defend individual design choices as I wasn't party to the tradeoffs being considered - and I disagree with some of them myself. But if you are involved in any kind of design (and I would definitely include programming here), you will be well aware of how much goes into boiling down a set of compromises into something elegant and usable - and how hard it can be to communicate why some part of that was really the best choice and took a lot of deep thought and iteration to get there. And you'll also be aware that design is never finished.
More generally, Apple have taken what many might think of as an industrial design approach and applied it to consumer design in a more rigorous way than others. So a lot of thought about coatings and materials used for screens and bodies, packaging (part of the consumer experience), and so on.
To construct a plausible scenario around your point off the top of my head, reduced size is clearly a key functional feature of a portable device, and while I'm not defending 3rd gen shuffle, it would make sense that a device you might go running with would be better if absolutely tiny. And if you are on the run, there would be an argument for having controls on the cable rather than the device. I think these kinds of things are clearly getting a lot of attention as we see the designs are being iterated and previous mistakes corrected.
Likewise, things like sealed devices are absolutely functional design decisions from the point of view of creating a mass-produced device. The success of the ipad bears this out. It may appal me that apple will only completely swap an ipad with cracked screen, or that I can't upgrade RAM in my macbook - but I can understand that standardisation and non-customisation is key to things like a predictable user experience, manufacturing and supply chain, worldwide warranties. Apple have always been about this and it's why they manufacture both hardware and software. I won't buy the 12" macbook computing device myself, but for family members it might be the ideal laptop. Anything else and I know I'm going to get several more messages a week asking me why facebook and twitter aren't working.
Right-- but Ive also seeks to reduce form so much to the point where it begins to impede upon functionality. Take the thickness of the iPhone 6, for instance. The drive to reduce the noticeability of the hardware is at the direct expense of battery life and camera quality; I'd certainly consider this a failing of his design philosophy.
But yet its one of the best phone cameras available today. It pains me to see the horrible pictures many of my Android friends post to Facebook. And after the iPhone 5 battery the 6+ battery is serving me more than well. I can go a day and a half without a charge. Would a thicker version that could go a week serve customers better? I don't think so, I rather like its slenderness.
Regarding the non-replaceable battery, while I am sure that they had some profit-motivated reasons to go that way, you also have to take in account that high-density batteries are a bit dangerous to handle, so replaceable batteries need a protective shell (adding to their volume).
In other words a non-replaceable battery can provide a bit more power for the same volume. So even if the primary motivation might have been aesthetics (no need for large openings in the body) I am sure that it wasn't the only reason for that decision.
Of course, I've no reason to doubt that. Apple's design philosophy is great for many people, but the trend of its design becoming the only design for interfaces (see also: Galaxy S6) is disappointing. It homogenises the market and ultimately makes it less interesting.
How Is that Apple's fault, if somebody decides to rip off their design decisions instead of making different ones that could prove them as better option on the market?
Samsung Galaxy s5 had a removable battery, and the company even touted the functionality pretty heavily in its marketing materials. Did that saved the S5 from failing on the market?
> This sort of design has been present in countless cheap, $3 international power adapters. Ive's ego and insistence on exalting his own genius at the expense of others' is maddening, and to call something so simple an "innovation" illustrates how little is necessary for something to be deemed a work of ingenuity.
Except the only quote we have from Ive was "It took ages to solve". He didn't talk about his genius, about how it was an innovation. It's all just a mix of what the reporter said and your personal biases.
I also don't think that ThinkPads on the ISS is a particularly good indicator of anything, besides perhaps the difference in the vendor's willingness to work with third parties on radiation hardening?
The Thinkpads on the ISS isn't really a criteria to measure innovation or design. Those T60s are there because that's a standardized piece of equipment with a proven process for radiation hardening and for installing active cooling on them (traditional cooling doesn't work because it relies on convection which doesn't work in microgravity.) However, the people on the ISS are free to use personal devices (phones, tablets, etc.) and guess which are the most popular?
