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This trend of making all things that exist wireless can have pretty bad consequences if companies aren't held accountable for what they produce. I'm sorry, it's not hard. It just takes code correctness and some discipline to not take a route only cause it's easy. I'm not naive; I understand being first out of the gate matters, but making that a priority at the cost of some basic security is unacceptable.

If the programmers aren't delivering on time or creating insecure code, then part of the problem may be management. As Scott Adams wrote today, Management exists to minimize the problems created by its own hiring mistakes. It's some kind of endmic disease that technical people are expected to push through a product quickly first, securely second.

I think this Dilbert cartoon sums up my feelings.

I'm not a misogynistic asshole. But I have to endure the expectation on the part of some females that I must be misogynistic because I'm male (i.e. their prejudice). Thankfully most women and men have moved beyond such silliness.

http://dilbert.com/fast/1999-12-29/
Dilbert Fast. It's for people use are sensible. Which is obviously not you.

Piracy is a tax on being popular.

The less popular you are, the less of a tax it is.

It costs goodwill, it cost money, and it is for the most part not effective. What is effictive is to find a way to make money even with pircacy out there.

Read some posts at TechDirt. Find out if freeimum, or posting a comment or a product at thepiratebay or something else would work for your business.

There was an article about a director who made $60,000 last year on a project and spent $30,000 if it trying to deter piracy. She could have doubled her money by doing nothing. That was a case study. http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/1999-12-29/

After poking around a bit, I realized that I'm actually responding to crazy.

I have a personal rule not to do that. It's like hitting a sick kitten that's too weak to make it to the catbox. Not nice.

Sorry about that. I think I'll just ignore ACs. That will help a bit.

The CEO's job should be to axe the least successful projects and lay off everyone. It actually helps if you're cute as a button like Ms Mayer. She reminds me of this cartoon

http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/1995-11-12/

The middle manager's job should be to sack the least successful employees in order to not end up running the least successful project. As the saying goes, you don't have to outrun run the predator, you only need to outrun your fellow runners.

I'd make them cute too, like cartoon characters to cut down on the number of layoffs going postal and damaging valuable equipment.

Because they don't follow the Dilbert Principle to manage the project schedule.

The reason people want to get away from what we have now is because it's not what we had 30 years ago. When I first won a promotion to a technical job in our HQ in 1985 we actually had offices. I retired a couple of years ago (get off my lawn kid). By that time only mid-level and higher managers had offices. Us peons were crammed into cube farms. And, oh yeah, there were reviews under way trying to figure out how to cram more cubes into the same space. Obligatory Dilbert http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/1996-09-15/ Give people real offices, and they might not mind.

Have you heard of Dilbert Fast?
It's the same as the usual Dilbert, but fast!
http://dilbert.com/fast/

If you like to that one instead of the image directly, people can go back and forward in the archive! Amazing stuff!

And they're only planning to make a plan, according to the story title.

Do they have a plan for that?

Yes, they do have a plan, when they are invaded, one press of a button and a tweet goes out that they surrender.

My counter point to yours is this one: http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/1995-02-06/. Snap - same year even...

Can't believe none of the Yahoo leadership has seen this:
http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/1995-09-15/

And they're only planning to make a plan, according to the story title.

Do they have a plan for that?

Themselves?

The Dilbert Killer Application cartoon seems relevant.

Let me get this straight. These guys ported and anachronistic piece of software from one dead language to a slightly less dead language, and then bragged about using structured programming techniques as a feature.

Hang on, I think Scott Adams has something to say about this.

http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2013-02-11/

http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2010-03-31/

I don't upgrade every year. I'm just waiting for 8G so the speeds will actually be as claimed for 4G

Obligatory Dilbert

Dilbert is coding protection software to keep minors from viewing porn.

Dogbert: So, you're pitting your intellect against the collective sex drives of every teenager on the planet?

Dilbert: Yes.

Dogbert: Did you know that if you put a little hat on it a snowball can last a long time in hell?

One of my favorite Dilbert cartoons ever treated this situation (20 years ago):

http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/1995-11-13/

This will be a nice new revenue stream for software developers.

Since you started the car thing... Here's yesterday's Dilbert, on the subject of restoring old hardware.

If users *want* a Surface, there's no reason why corporate IT would really care. It's not really hard to support it if.

If corporate IT has approved Windows 8, the Surface Pro shouldn't be hard to support.

If, on the other hand, corporate IT is still evaluating Windows 7 for large-scale roll-out (I'm pretty sure my org hasn't even started looking at 7... they're still working on the Office 2003 deployment. Not kidding), then it's not going to happen. If you work in the kind of corporate (or government) environment where they think in terms of corporate baseline systems requiring major evaluation projects to change, getting something "new" like a tablet and particularly a tablet running a new unapproved O/S release is a major headache.

Mordac is not entirely a fictional character.

Actually it took one guy to come up with it, the rest was this...

http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2010-08-05/

My first thought.
http://dilbert.com/dyn/str_strip/000000000/00000000/0000000/000000/80000/6000/200/86285/86285.strip.gif

Life imitates art? http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/1997-03-29/

Does he have a PHB? http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/1997-03-29/

When I think of skeptics, the first thing that comes to mind is a little story that Dilbert came up with years ago of Ratbert's psychic powers: Ratbert started off by predicting coin flips (as landing on the edge!), and the skeptic debunks him by arguing that Ratbert's description of a hidden drawing, while remarkably similar to what it actually was, was not quite correct.

So what do you to handle people who disbelieve a claim even in the face of positive evidence of that claim, arguing that their position is one simply of skepticism? Or do you not consider that a problem?

When I think of skeptics, the first thing that comes to mind is a little story that Dilbert came up with years ago of Ratbert's psychic powers: Ratbert started off by predicting coin flips (as landing on the edge!), and the skeptic debunks him by arguing that Ratbert's description of a hidden drawing, while remarkably similar to what it actually was, was not quite correct.

So what do you to handle people who disbelieve a claim even in the face of positive evidence of that claim, arguing that their position is one simply of skepticism? Or do you not consider that a problem?

You get to be Bill Gates' towel boy.
http://search.dilbert.com/comic/Bill%20Gates%20Towel%20Boy

Why am I reminded of this Dilbert?

http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2012-08-20/

Reminds me of: http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2003-08-03/

I can target my armpit muscles
http://dilbert.com/fast/1991-03-24/

Of course, I do it only when my muscles aren't too pumped up from using the mouse
http://dilbert.com/fast/1993-02-27/

I can target my armpit muscles
http://dilbert.com/fast/1991-03-24/

Of course, I do it only when my muscles aren't too pumped up from using the mouse
http://dilbert.com/fast/1993-02-27/

Scott Adams nailed the tunnel-visioned focus on nothing but metrics.

'nuff said.

Or maybe 9. Being random don't mean to be all different, or even to be evenly distributed.

It's crazy how many people apply to programming jobs without knowing anything about programming.

What is even crazier is that many of these people have years (sometimes decades) of industry experience. Somehow they survived by butt kissing, talking the lingo, and/or being a remora. Whenever I interview an experienced programmer, I try to keep in mind that his last boss fired him, and usually for a good reason.

Paradigm.. paradigmish.. paradigmons.. paradigmez.. paradigment...
Sorry.. couldn't resist...

Not if you only send zeros:

http://search.dilbert.com/search?w=database+only+zeros&x=0&y=0

Same AC here --

Thank you for the Python code in question.

In the last line, did you mean to write interleaved.write(item)? If not, what exactly is data?

I completely and fully agree what you've written is significantly easier to understand in comparison, although I've never heard of the itertools module (possibly the author of the previous code hadn't either). Not loading the entire contents into memory (for working with large files) = huge plus, barring the I/O trade-off. Sounds akin to when I see folks new to Perl doing things like $foo = <FH>, or worse, @foo = <FH> (obligatory Dilbert for that one.

The with statement in Python looks, well... bizarre. I had to read this to understand it. My own opinion is that it looks lazy -- I guess to me this stems from the strong belief (based in my experience with assembly and C) that when it comes to resources you clean up after yourself; if you open a file, close the fd when done; if you malloc(), free() when you're done. Yes, I admit with can/will do this for you, but if you ask me all it's doing is forcing the programmer to write __enter__ and __exit__ methods, which to me are completely 100% akin to constructors and destructors. I'm really against object-oriented anything, so you'll have to excuse my annoyance I guess. :-)

Here's a question: how exactly did you know that with would actually close the fds associated with even/odd/interleaved? I don't see that implied anywhere.

He'll sleep all day and stop coding. Problem solved. http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2003-06-19/?CmtOrder=Rating&CmtDir=DESC

When is a startup not a startup?

Eclipse? Usability? Same Paragraph?

Wow. Now I've seen everything.

Eclipse is an awesome program. A real Swiss army knife.

However, as you seem to infer, it tends to be a little difficult to use. I suspect one reason is that it tries to be All Things to All Men.

UIs are completely context- and audience-dependent.

If you've ever ready any of Tufte's stuff, you have seen some truly hairy interface elements that require training to understand. However, once you understand, the UX is extremely immersive, intuitive and useful; feeding you a great deal of complex data.

For example, This is actually a highly usable data display. Millions of people use it, or displays just like it, to navigate all over the world's largest metropolitan area.

Then, there's just plain dumb.

"Dumbed-down" is often mistaken for "usable."

Comics I follow are

http://www.sinfest.com/ (hands down the best)
http://www.dilbert.com/ (still going strong and providing daily comfort)
http://wumocomicstrip.com/ (funny)
http://www.joyoftech.com/joyoftech/index.html (mostly pro mac)
http://www.xkcd.com/ (the tool that belongs in every geeks toolbox)

1 Best: Basic Instructions http://basicinstructions.net/ 2 Single Best: too many to choose from 3 Best Art: Girl Genius http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/ 4 Most Relevant: Dilbert http://dilbert.com/

If Dilbert is most relevant, time to change employers.

After discovering that I was living a Dilbert cartoon, I left that job, and once I'd healed, vowed that if my life ever again imitated that particular piece of art, it was time to leave. Thus far I'm pleased to say I've been OK.

In no particular order I'm currently reading:
1) XKCD http://xkcd.org/ (and yes, 1110 was amazing art even though it's mostly about arcane, subtle or smart references)
2) Dilbert http://dilbert.com/fast (makes actual work seem a little less sad)
3) Lackadaisycats http://lackadaisycats.com/comic.php (guns, alcohol and cats)
4) Unsounded http://unsoundedcomic.com/ (thieves and their pesky offspring)
5) Gunnerkrigg Court http://gunnerkrigg.com/ (a school with mediums, shadows and robots)

So the project has to meet that date even if it means dropping features and shipping with bugs.

I don't think slipping requirements or quality rather than delivery date qualifies as "meeting the deadline" in any meaningful sense. Of course meeting requirements and quality are much easier to fudge than the date, so they are often first to give way.

When I was at Honeywell, I sat across from a very loud talker in finance. When she wasn't talking shit about her deadbeat (ex)-husband to friends/lawyers, she was explaining to suppliers that Honeywell paid on Net 60 terms and they could take it or leave it. It wouldn't surprise me to find that large companies are pushing to Net 90 if they can get away with it.

Learning about payment practices of larger (and sometimes smaller) companines has been one of the most... heartwarming aspects of working for a small business. Perfectly illustrated by the Obligatory Dilbert.

A LOT of companies have a formal, written policy to not say anything but employment dates. Many won't even answer if they would hire the person again.

But it would be fun if they did this: http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2005-10-08/

It allows for advanced Facebook integration with cutting edge cloud computing advertisers running the new touch-screen oriented Windows Server. This delivers high quality targeted rich media advertising to the world's most common platform.

Bingo, sir.