PHP4 was the only programming language I can remember that was so insecure there was an industrywide push (GoPHP5) to get everyone off it and onto PHP5. Even if you were a good programmer the thing was full of holes, because it was just Rasmus's little hypertext preprocessor that had gotten totally out of control.
Though *technically* it wasn't the language itself, just the interpreter - like ActionScript isn't the problem, it's the Flash player.
Yes, I have full backups of everything nightly, so even though I have never had a SSD fail on me catastrophically (cross fingers), it's covered.
Hard drives do just fall over dead too, but you're right, often there's warning signs.
The OWC thing doesn't even sound like the 'drive' part (the flash) is failing, it sounds like the controller that talks SATA to the PC is failing, or the power circuit died so the thing doesn't have any power. Otherwise the system would at least see it. And it sounds systemic. So besides backup, backup, BACKUP, we have the moral 'OWC is trash'.
If it dies suddenly, without warning, it's 1) buggy firmware (I think this is by far the biggest culprit), or 2) bad components/soldering/cleaning on the PCB board, or 3) a really dumb controller that isn't doing wear leveling on every single thing (think the master index), so when a critical flash cell dies the entire thing is dead even though there's plenty of good flash left (this was common with crappy little 'SSDs' that were just Compact Flash), or 4) a badly designed controller that leaves the drive in bad state when power suddenly goes out and can't recover
If it sloooows down and starts getting more and more sluggish you've lost enough flash cells that the wear leveling is losing its capacity to cope. Take some stuff off the drive to give it some breathing room and prepare for its demise. I had this happen with one of the original Intel SSDs (the X-25M). It took ten years of continuous use, though - yes, just this year.
Not announcing any names till he figures out how to not implicate his corporate masters at Verizon. Given how this investigation started, and given they're evil bastards who lie about everything I have no doubt they're one of the firms. The only question is who else?
I'm sure gigantic fines of maybe $10000 will be applied. That'll teach 'em.
After an expected ramp-up period of a week or two (which he seems to be treating as some sort of super big deal crisis), you will be a better programmer by virtue of knowing all the good things from your last jobs and the good things from your new job. I've stepped up my game with ever job change I've had, usually because I have to learn a bunch of completely new skills and concepts.
Unless you're plain incompetent or you've accepted a job someplace that's completely broken or an enterprisey graveyard you can't help but get better.
And conversely if you hang around on a single project for too long (I'm thinking over 5 years, but that's handwavey) you're likely to stagnate. I've sure seen a hell a lot of that.
There is a killer app - it's porn. But the current experience is like two virgins fumbling in the back of a cramped car and nobody can figure out how to get the bra off and you can't really see anything well. It looks meh, controls suck, and for filmed stuff camera problems make it look like people are about to rip their skins off and expose their lizard forms near the edges of the screen. Just not worth it in the current form.
Not at all. For example, copper, silver, and gold are not superconducting on their own even at (near) 0K. Their lattices are so tightly packed that even though they're decent conductors they can't generate enough Cooper pairs from free electrons.
Yeah, silver can enhance a superconductor, and SrAuSi3 fits into the general AMX3 broken spatial inversion symmetry class of superconductors - but with just silver and gold you don't have that BSIS. It's like saying you're producing a steak from just salt and pepper.
Good points though, I had forgotten about the one with gold component.
There are many other problems with the paper. They're claiming it's done using silver and gold, for instance, neither of which have shown any evidence of superconducting at all. It's possible that if you mix them up in the right combination they somehow start superconducting, but it's a really extraordinary claim to add to the room temperature (okay, -35F) superconducting claim.
Luckily this one should be pretty easy to replicate assuming they're forthcoming about the procedures. If it's not fake they'll be happy to tell everyone the process. If it's fake, they won't be.
Chromebooks are perfect for people who are tech support nightmares you don't want to support. You know that guy at work who can't be trusted with the toaster. You can't even trust him with a Mac.
It's hellish for anyone who knows what they're doing though, unless all you want to do is web browse and write documents. I've tried. Way too limited.
How can you even tell if your printer has been hacked or whether it's just HP's amazingly crappy drivers, software, and firmware?
We've got two at work that are constantly breaking on their own. They'll mysteriously go to sleep and never wake up (yes, we disabled going to sleep). They'll stop responding and need to be hard power cycled by yanking the cord. The software is an astoundingly giant pile of crap (about a gig worth) that doesn't seem to do anything useful except burn 20% cpu. I know how to drop the software and keep just the drivers, but most people here don't. And then if you've just got the drivers it occasionally nags you about 'finishing the installation' by installing the rest of their crapware. The ink tanks are smaller than the bladder of an 80 yo man with prostate issues.
I just use the Canon laser printer. That thing is rock solid and it runs fine with just the drivers. But being unofficially the guy who knows computers I keep getting drawn in with those f@#$ing HPs. If I had my way we'd run over them with a truck and replace them with Brother laser printers. That's the ultimate HP lifehack.
Google Reader shut down and 10 more readers popped up - and today Feedly is much better than Google Reader was, or ever would be with Google's stewardship. It revitalized things.
I'm not sure anyone thought RSS was dead though, except the people who want it dead like Facebook.
I made a post, so I can't mod, but I just wanted to say I really appreciated your long writeup and agree with the general observations and that the balance usually collapses.
At most places Agile is just 'we don't want to do design, we don't want to do documentation, and we don't want schedules.' This has been true since Exxxxtr3m3 Programming in 1996. Back in the day someone on Slashdot wrote a savage and (at the time) highly controversial takedown of the Extreme Programming manifesto that turned out to be completely true.
Management wants to be hip and cool for hiring, so they want to say they're doing Agile, and they say you guys can have scrum meetings. But then they push back on the no design, no documentation, and no schedules, because that's just crazypants.
This results in a big disconnect between the developers and management, who each insist they're doing 'Agile' but mean something different.
It's too bad, because the most fundamental bit of Agile is absolutely the right way to go: you do semi-rapid iterations and see what works and what doesn't, and change it as needed - rather than working for months on some giant blob that'll suck. That's just good practice and probably how you just naturally work without realizing how controversial that was 30 years ago. That's really the only 'Agile' that matters, and whatever you're doing right now is probably Agile. But XP and other methodologies have completely poisoned the term.
Human drivers mow down jaywalkers and other pedestrians all the time. Ten others killed just in Phoenix last week alone.
Yes, even though most people overestimate how fast they could react, a human driver who was gripping the wheel tightly and totally focused COULD have avoided the accident. So could a decent AV. But Uber's are some of the worst.
We tried removing the requirement for a degree - it opened up some extra good candidates, but it completely exploded the number of terrible applicants by about two orders of magnitude. Yes, flooded with over 100x crappy resumes, and we don't have a giant HR department to handle it (plus they'd bitch about having to stop chatting and playing their mobile phone games that much).
And in the end we ended up hiring a guy with a degree, though there was a strong contender from the degree-less contingent. But it wasn't worth the extra scutwork.
So what we've done for the moment is put the requirement back in the job listing - if we get a great resume but the guy doesn't have a degree, I don't really care for/hiring/, but I want the extra layer of filtering on submissions.
Sadly, while I really like the Chumby alarm clock form factor (it's a little padded beanbag you can pound to snooze, very satisfying), it's completely dead without an internet connection at boot.
At one point the company basically went under, but a benevolent soul has kept the servers running for another 5+ years - all of them would stop working without it.
It doesn't have to be continually connected, but periodically. And when it can't connect, you've got a worthless alarm clock, which is very bad for an alarm clock I really should replace it, but I'm not all that reliant on it (set my phone as backup when I have to make a plane), and I REALLY like hitting the soft top to snooze it.
Slashdot Mirror
That's a lot of bums watching a lot of porn. Who handles the cleaning of these?
PHP4 was the only programming language I can remember that was so insecure there was an industrywide push (GoPHP5) to get everyone off it and onto PHP5. Even if you were a good programmer the thing was full of holes, because it was just Rasmus's little hypertext preprocessor that had gotten totally out of control.
Though *technically* it wasn't the language itself, just the interpreter - like ActionScript isn't the problem, it's the Flash player.
Because if so, I hope those engineers are prepared for a lot of penises. Or maybe that's the plan.
I am so disappointed that it doesn't involve having me lucky charms.
(Okay, it's pretty cool)
Yes, I have full backups of everything nightly, so even though I have never had a SSD fail on me catastrophically (cross fingers), it's covered.
Hard drives do just fall over dead too, but you're right, often there's warning signs.
The OWC thing doesn't even sound like the 'drive' part (the flash) is failing, it sounds like the controller that talks SATA to the PC is failing, or the power circuit died so the thing doesn't have any power. Otherwise the system would at least see it. And it sounds systemic. So besides backup, backup, BACKUP, we have the moral 'OWC is trash'.
So you can have peace of mind:
If it dies suddenly, without warning, it's 1) buggy firmware (I think this is by far the biggest culprit), or 2) bad components/soldering/cleaning on the PCB board, or 3) a really dumb controller that isn't doing wear leveling on every single thing (think the master index), so when a critical flash cell dies the entire thing is dead even though there's plenty of good flash left (this was common with crappy little 'SSDs' that were just Compact Flash), or 4) a badly designed controller that leaves the drive in bad state when power suddenly goes out and can't recover
If it sloooows down and starts getting more and more sluggish you've lost enough flash cells that the wear leveling is losing its capacity to cope. Take some stuff off the drive to give it some breathing room and prepare for its demise. I had this happen with one of the original Intel SSDs (the X-25M). It took ten years of continuous use, though - yes, just this year.
Not announcing any names till he figures out how to not implicate his corporate masters at Verizon. Given how this investigation started, and given they're evil bastards who lie about everything I have no doubt they're one of the firms. The only question is who else?
I'm sure gigantic fines of maybe $10000 will be applied. That'll teach 'em.
After an expected ramp-up period of a week or two (which he seems to be treating as some sort of super big deal crisis), you will be a better programmer by virtue of knowing all the good things from your last jobs and the good things from your new job. I've stepped up my game with ever job change I've had, usually because I have to learn a bunch of completely new skills and concepts.
Unless you're plain incompetent or you've accepted a job someplace that's completely broken or an enterprisey graveyard you can't help but get better.
And conversely if you hang around on a single project for too long (I'm thinking over 5 years, but that's handwavey) you're likely to stagnate. I've sure seen a hell a lot of that.
That was the point of everything else I said that you didn't quote!
There is a killer app - it's porn. But the current experience is like two virgins fumbling in the back of a cramped car and nobody can figure out how to get the bra off and you can't really see anything well. It looks meh, controls suck, and for filmed stuff camera problems make it look like people are about to rip their skins off and expose their lizard forms near the edges of the screen. Just not worth it in the current form.
Not at all. For example, copper, silver, and gold are not superconducting on their own even at (near) 0K. Their lattices are so tightly packed that even though they're decent conductors they can't generate enough Cooper pairs from free electrons.
Yeah, silver can enhance a superconductor, and SrAuSi3 fits into the general AMX3 broken spatial inversion symmetry class of superconductors - but with just silver and gold you don't have that BSIS. It's like saying you're producing a steak from just salt and pepper.
Good points though, I had forgotten about the one with gold component.
There are many other problems with the paper. They're claiming it's done using silver and gold, for instance, neither of which have shown any evidence of superconducting at all. It's possible that if you mix them up in the right combination they somehow start superconducting, but it's a really extraordinary claim to add to the room temperature (okay, -35F) superconducting claim.
Luckily this one should be pretty easy to replicate assuming they're forthcoming about the procedures. If it's not fake they'll be happy to tell everyone the process. If it's fake, they won't be.
Chromebooks are perfect for people who are tech support nightmares you don't want to support. You know that guy at work who can't be trusted with the toaster. You can't even trust him with a Mac.
It's hellish for anyone who knows what they're doing though, unless all you want to do is web browse and write documents. I've tried. Way too limited.
How can you even tell if your printer has been hacked or whether it's just HP's amazingly crappy drivers, software, and firmware?
We've got two at work that are constantly breaking on their own. They'll mysteriously go to sleep and never wake up (yes, we disabled going to sleep). They'll stop responding and need to be hard power cycled by yanking the cord. The software is an astoundingly giant pile of crap (about a gig worth) that doesn't seem to do anything useful except burn 20% cpu. I know how to drop the software and keep just the drivers, but most people here don't. And then if you've just got the drivers it occasionally nags you about 'finishing the installation' by installing the rest of their crapware. The ink tanks are smaller than the bladder of an 80 yo man with prostate issues.
I just use the Canon laser printer. That thing is rock solid and it runs fine with just the drivers. But being unofficially the guy who knows computers I keep getting drawn in with those f@#$ing HPs. If I had my way we'd run over them with a truck and replace them with Brother laser printers. That's the ultimate HP lifehack.
Google Reader shut down and 10 more readers popped up - and today Feedly is much better than Google Reader was, or ever would be with Google's stewardship. It revitalized things.
I'm not sure anyone thought RSS was dead though, except the people who want it dead like Facebook.
The answer to this is Yes, and the answer to question headlines should always be No.
I made a post, so I can't mod, but I just wanted to say I really appreciated your long writeup and agree with the general observations and that the balance usually collapses.
At most places Agile is just 'we don't want to do design, we don't want to do documentation, and we don't want schedules.' This has been true since Exxxxtr3m3 Programming in 1996. Back in the day someone on Slashdot wrote a savage and (at the time) highly controversial takedown of the Extreme Programming manifesto that turned out to be completely true.
Management wants to be hip and cool for hiring, so they want to say they're doing Agile, and they say you guys can have scrum meetings. But then they push back on the no design, no documentation, and no schedules, because that's just crazypants.
This results in a big disconnect between the developers and management, who each insist they're doing 'Agile' but mean something different.
It's too bad, because the most fundamental bit of Agile is absolutely the right way to go: you do semi-rapid iterations and see what works and what doesn't, and change it as needed - rather than working for months on some giant blob that'll suck. That's just good practice and probably how you just naturally work without realizing how controversial that was 30 years ago. That's really the only 'Agile' that matters, and whatever you're doing right now is probably Agile. But XP and other methodologies have completely poisoned the term.
Human drivers mow down jaywalkers and other pedestrians all the time. Ten others killed just in Phoenix last week alone.
Yes, even though most people overestimate how fast they could react, a human driver who was gripping the wheel tightly and totally focused COULD have avoided the accident. So could a decent AV. But Uber's are some of the worst.
If you're actually using the Windows Store Mail app, Edge is what you deserve for a browser.
No
Top software engineers make much more than 2.7x average software engineers.
We tried removing the requirement for a degree - it opened up some extra good candidates, but it completely exploded the number of terrible applicants by about two orders of magnitude. Yes, flooded with over 100x crappy resumes, and we don't have a giant HR department to handle it (plus they'd bitch about having to stop chatting and playing their mobile phone games that much).
And in the end we ended up hiring a guy with a degree, though there was a strong contender from the degree-less contingent. But it wasn't worth the extra scutwork.
So what we've done for the moment is put the requirement back in the job listing - if we get a great resume but the guy doesn't have a degree, I don't really care for /hiring/, but I want the extra layer of filtering on submissions.
Sadly, while I really like the Chumby alarm clock form factor (it's a little padded beanbag you can pound to snooze, very satisfying), it's completely dead without an internet connection at boot.
At one point the company basically went under, but a benevolent soul has kept the servers running for another 5+ years - all of them would stop working without it.
It doesn't have to be continually connected, but periodically. And when it can't connect, you've got a worthless alarm clock, which is very bad for an alarm clock I really should replace it, but I'm not all that reliant on it (set my phone as backup when I have to make a plane), and I REALLY like hitting the soft top to snooze it.