The point of the offsite back is not to be there forever, but to be there if you lose your local hard drive in the near future. That's why it's a "backup". If it vanishes, make a new backup. Without the cloud, it's a royal pain to keep offsite backups current.
requires "hundreds," as he calls it. That's sixteen a day weekdays and ten each day on weekends.
I once worked at a company that learned the hard way that if you make it official policy that exempt employees work long hours, the judge can find that they were not exempt after all, and are owed overtime retroactively for a great many years. Fun times.
The line between "cultural pressure to work long hours to deliver" and "official policy mandating long hours" is an important line.
ow it looks like we're not going to be finished until the end of November. I hope we finish then, because I want to go home for Christmas. We haven't allowed vacation time in nearly a year so I didn't get to do that last Christmas.
You know you're all going to be fired once you ship, right? Call me cynical, but I've seen the pattern many times before. Change jobs now, the cake is a lie.
Well put. Didn't the term "astroturfing" originate on Slashdot years ago? It certainly doesn't qualify if someone says up front they work for the company and then go on to praise something about it. Shilling, maybe, but not underhanded astroturfing.
"If you can't hold down a job because your car keeps breaking down, then buy a new car".
The answer is easy, implementation, not so much.
Alice Cooper said it best:
I can't get a girl 'cause I don't have a car. I can't get a car 'cause I don't have a job. I can't get a job 'cause I don't have a car. So I'm looking for a girl with a job and a car, And a house, with cable!
There is a simple solution to any concern with the provision of ID. Make the state do it. Period. No exceptions. I don't have an ID? They do it.
It's already free in many states, and nearly-so in the rest. It's hard to get around the need to show up at some government office of some sort to get one's photo taken, in order to produce the Photo ID. It seems like the states are doing what they can to make IDs available to everyone.
Very well put - wish I had mod points today. I've come to particularly hate "the soft racism of low expectations", the evil assumption that some races just aren't going to be as successful, by their nature. Always good to call attention to it for what it is: still racism.
To emphasize Obfuscant's good reply: the worries about the cost of IDs are also misplaced. A driver's license, specifically, can be expensive, and some people just can't get one due to disability. Requiring a driver's license would indeed be a dirty screw intended to disenfranchise a swath of voters.
But these days every state has a non-driver's photo ID (when I was young we called it a "drinker's license"), which doesn't have anything to do with the ability to drive, and is much cheaper (usually under $10), and generally they're good for longer as well. An ID that costs you about $1/year is not an undue burden.
Nothing's perfect, but it seems a perfectly reasonable compromise to keep the vote honest.
Every language is nothing but syntactic sugar over assembler. Syntactic sugar is, in fact, the only useful measure of a language: since all Turning complete languages are equivalent in capacity, easy syntax is what's left.
No, that's just you disagreeing with his politics. He did what he said he would do, against quite strong opposition. Personally, I think Sanders' political positions are as vile as I'm sure you find Walker's but that's not the point.
The point is: you can't vote on the issues if the candidates don't take a stand, or they're just BSing about everything in their platform. I believe both Sanders and Walker both honestly have the best interests of the people in mind, in their quite opposite opinions of what that is, and that they'll fight for what they say. Contrast with Bush and Clinton who will say whatever their consultants tell them to, then turn around and continue pork-ladling as usual. Carson I don't know so much about, but again: at least he's not already corrupted by the establishment.
Wouldn't it be wonderful to have an election on the issues, for once?
So.. considering the others on the Republican side will likely do that more so, you're a supporter of Lessig or Sanders?
For me: Sanders on the left, Carson or Walker on the right. Like em or hate em, they're honest about their positions, and seem the most likely of the crowd to do what they say (little track record for Carson, but then again he's not already a known-corrupt politician, and he's been public about his political leanings for years).
Take back the primaries! Don't let "more of the same system" useless establishment wankers in: it doesn't have to be "lesser of two evils". And for fuck's sake, it doesn't have to be anyone named Bush or Clinton! The years of "it doesn't matter who you vote for" can be stopped in the primaries.
Now, imagine Java went away. It would be a serious shame, because many shops would move on to.NET. Would you rather have that?
Yes, that would be great, because C# is an amazingly better language than Java, and most shops wouldn't move to it unless MS and Xamarin really got the cross-platform thing sorted out properly.
But really, I'm sure there are better language ideas out there. There has been very little activity in the PL world for "curly brace languages", though Go was neat for what it was. C++, Java, and C# all have flaws for the modern world of backend development, though they're also all usable with various degrees of pain. I'd love to see a synthesis with a modern take on macros and generics and container classes and so on. The lack of macros in Java makes for a horrific amount of boilerplate -- heck, your IDE writes 80% of your code -- but macro hell is worse, and C++ template programming worse still - let's have something good instead. C# finally got properties right - whatever else, keep that. etc, etc.
The Java compiler license specifically gives you all rights to programs developed in the Java language. So no, that is not a problem.
Oracle has a long and established history of changing its licenses to screw over its customer base. I keep hoping Oracle finds a way to kill off Java, just so the industry can finally move on to something better (do we really need Java to live as many years as COBOL did?).
Operator overloads are there for the same reason void* is: when they actually make sense, they're a vast improvement. Complex numbers, for example, and really "+" is fine for string concatenation. Not being limited to built-in classes for that sort of thing is a feature, IMO.
C++ has few guiderails, and lets you write very unmaintainable code, much more so than C. But that's what let's you write performance-equivalent code that's much more maintainable than C.
My biggest gripe is coders who don't bother to learn the details of the 3 key library container classes: string, vector, and map. Poor coder choices causing significant (unnecessary!) performance hits was a bad enough problem that the standard had to add a fixed-sized array class, as even the simplest stuff like pre-allocating a vector when you know its size was beyond most coders. Sad, really.
And for goodness sake people, don't re-invent anything in std::algorithm! Stuff like inplace_merge or nth_element is really error prone to write yourself, as much fun as it might be to finally use that algorithms textbook from college.
If it can spot a buffer overrun during the sort (even though the correct result is achieved), then at least some value is added - but there are several static analysis tools.
Otherwise, you're just writing the same code in 2 different languages - one high level and one low level, and proving they are functionally equivalent. (In which case, why not just switch to the high level language for production). The whole idea just seems like a high-level language someone was too lazy to write a compiler for, so all it can do is examine the output of some other compiler.
While there's some value in writing a program twice and proving the results equivalent, it's a very narrow case. Most serious production issues in my experience are either design flaws, or "errors in error handling", neither of which formal proofs are likely to help with. Comprehensive unit tests are much more practical, though I guess you can look at them as a kind of formal proof, come to think of it.
This probably isn't a bad idea even though it won't stop the perverts. It greatly lessens the chance someone will come across something they didn't want to see.
When they cam for the perverts, I said nothing, for I was not a pervert?
This exact technology will allow governments to exercise very powerful censorship across the internet (or at least the part of the internet most people see). Want all pictures from that protest rally to vanish? Just twist the arm of any of these companies into adding a few hashes, or just slip them into a list the FBI no doubt routinely provides, and, just like that, down the memory hole. Plus, as you say, this won't stop the perverts. The only thing this actually accomplishes is empowering the totalitarian state.
We seen a couple of stories here on/. already where IP blocklists were abused by governments to slip in websites of opposing political parties. It's a bit hard to believe this won't be abused similarly.
Unfortunately, the ill-defined "natural foods" trend -- really just another form of superstition -- is all the rage among a well-meaning but (sometimes willfully) uninformed population of mommies, hipsters, and, by extension, their households.
You nailed it: GM fear and vaccinations are the 2 top superstitions of the 21st century. Plus, the two are related: "stick a pin in a map in the center of an anti-vax hotspot, and you've found a Whole Foods.
Yeah, it's those pesky mplementation details where most security flaws are found, and most corner-case bugs that escape testing. Design reviews happen already at most companies.
About the only thing that might eliminate the holes is formal proofs
Formal proofs (of correctness, I assume) can't eliminate bugs or security flaws, though they are a cost-inefficient way to reduce bugs. A formal proof is only solving the same problem in two different languages (one the language of the formal proof), and diffing the result. It's not better or worse than any other static analysis tool, per se. It certainly won't help at all when the component is insecure by design, which is so often the problem. (Why does a document format need a way to execute arbitrary code, for example?)
There is actually a market for stolen cars - cars expensive enough to ship overseas after being stolen. Those cars are stolen with tow trucks, however. Tow trucks are rarely questioned - sometimes the spouse will even open up the garage door.
I hear the practice is common enough that a Ferrari that is lifted to a certain angle (without a security code first being entered) will blow e-fuses and need carefully tracked replacement parts. (I have no idea how that works out in hilly areas, making me wonder how true it is.)
A thief will just smash a window or pop a lock. A detective, OTOH, will find this quite appealing, if they need to do a "sneak and peek". Want to search someone's car and leave no sign that you did?
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Some people don't realize that ad-blockers for IE exist.
"technically correct - the best kind of correct" - Bureaucrat #1
The point of the offsite back is not to be there forever, but to be there if you lose your local hard drive in the near future. That's why it's a "backup". If it vanishes, make a new backup. Without the cloud, it's a royal pain to keep offsite backups current.
requires "hundreds," as he calls it. That's sixteen a day weekdays and ten each day on weekends.
I once worked at a company that learned the hard way that if you make it official policy that exempt employees work long hours, the judge can find that they were not exempt after all, and are owed overtime retroactively for a great many years. Fun times.
The line between "cultural pressure to work long hours to deliver" and "official policy mandating long hours" is an important line.
ow it looks like we're not going to be finished until the end of November. I hope we finish then, because I want to go home for Christmas. We haven't allowed vacation time in nearly a year so I didn't get to do that last Christmas.
You know you're all going to be fired once you ship, right? Call me cynical, but I've seen the pattern many times before. Change jobs now, the cake is a lie.
Well put. Didn't the term "astroturfing" originate on Slashdot years ago? It certainly doesn't qualify if someone says up front they work for the company and then go on to praise something about it. Shilling, maybe, but not underhanded astroturfing.
"If you can't hold down a job because your car keeps breaking down, then buy a new car".
The answer is easy, implementation, not so much.
Alice Cooper said it best:
I can't get a girl 'cause I don't have a car.
I can't get a car 'cause I don't have a job.
I can't get a job 'cause I don't have a car.
So I'm looking for a girl with a job and a car,
And a house, with cable!
There is a simple solution to any concern with the provision of ID. Make the state do it. Period. No exceptions. I don't have an ID? They do it.
It's already free in many states, and nearly-so in the rest. It's hard to get around the need to show up at some government office of some sort to get one's photo taken, in order to produce the Photo ID. It seems like the states are doing what they can to make IDs available to everyone.
Very well put - wish I had mod points today. I've come to particularly hate "the soft racism of low expectations", the evil assumption that some races just aren't going to be as successful, by their nature. Always good to call attention to it for what it is: still racism.
To emphasize Obfuscant's good reply: the worries about the cost of IDs are also misplaced. A driver's license, specifically, can be expensive, and some people just can't get one due to disability. Requiring a driver's license would indeed be a dirty screw intended to disenfranchise a swath of voters.
But these days every state has a non-driver's photo ID (when I was young we called it a "drinker's license"), which doesn't have anything to do with the ability to drive, and is much cheaper (usually under $10), and generally they're good for longer as well. An ID that costs you about $1/year is not an undue burden.
Nothing's perfect, but it seems a perfectly reasonable compromise to keep the vote honest.
Every language is nothing but syntactic sugar over assembler. Syntactic sugar is, in fact, the only useful measure of a language: since all Turning complete languages are equivalent in capacity, easy syntax is what's left.
That whooshing sound you hear is an AC post in a mix of bold and caps extolling the virtues of host files as the solution to every problem.
Properties. LINQ. Proper generics. It's just a better language in the same space, with far less boilerplate.
No, that's just you disagreeing with his politics. He did what he said he would do, against quite strong opposition. Personally, I think Sanders' political positions are as vile as I'm sure you find Walker's but that's not the point.
The point is: you can't vote on the issues if the candidates don't take a stand, or they're just BSing about everything in their platform. I believe both Sanders and Walker both honestly have the best interests of the people in mind, in their quite opposite opinions of what that is, and that they'll fight for what they say. Contrast with Bush and Clinton who will say whatever their consultants tell them to, then turn around and continue pork-ladling as usual. Carson I don't know so much about, but again: at least he's not already corrupted by the establishment.
Wouldn't it be wonderful to have an election on the issues, for once?
So.. considering the others on the Republican side will likely do that more so, you're a supporter of Lessig or Sanders?
For me: Sanders on the left, Carson or Walker on the right. Like em or hate em, they're honest about their positions, and seem the most likely of the crowd to do what they say (little track record for Carson, but then again he's not already a known-corrupt politician, and he's been public about his political leanings for years).
Take back the primaries! Don't let "more of the same system" useless establishment wankers in: it doesn't have to be "lesser of two evils". And for fuck's sake, it doesn't have to be anyone named Bush or Clinton! The years of "it doesn't matter who you vote for" can be stopped in the primaries.
Now, imagine Java went away. It would be a serious shame, because many shops would move on to .NET. Would you rather have that?
Yes, that would be great, because C# is an amazingly better language than Java, and most shops wouldn't move to it unless MS and Xamarin really got the cross-platform thing sorted out properly.
But really, I'm sure there are better language ideas out there. There has been very little activity in the PL world for "curly brace languages", though Go was neat for what it was. C++, Java, and C# all have flaws for the modern world of backend development, though they're also all usable with various degrees of pain. I'd love to see a synthesis with a modern take on macros and generics and container classes and so on. The lack of macros in Java makes for a horrific amount of boilerplate -- heck, your IDE writes 80% of your code -- but macro hell is worse, and C++ template programming worse still - let's have something good instead. C# finally got properties right - whatever else, keep that. etc, etc.
The Java compiler license specifically gives you all rights to programs developed in the Java language. So no, that is not a problem.
Oracle has a long and established history of changing its licenses to screw over its customer base. I keep hoping Oracle finds a way to kill off Java, just so the industry can finally move on to something better (do we really need Java to live as many years as COBOL did?).
"Install an APK"? Wait, I didn't think you could edit your hosts file without rooting the phone.
Operator overloads are there for the same reason void* is: when they actually make sense, they're a vast improvement. Complex numbers, for example, and really "+" is fine for string concatenation. Not being limited to built-in classes for that sort of thing is a feature, IMO.
C++ has few guiderails, and lets you write very unmaintainable code, much more so than C. But that's what let's you write performance-equivalent code that's much more maintainable than C.
My biggest gripe is coders who don't bother to learn the details of the 3 key library container classes: string, vector, and map. Poor coder choices causing significant (unnecessary!) performance hits was a bad enough problem that the standard had to add a fixed-sized array class, as even the simplest stuff like pre-allocating a vector when you know its size was beyond most coders. Sad, really.
And for goodness sake people, don't re-invent anything in std::algorithm! Stuff like inplace_merge or nth_element is really error prone to write yourself, as much fun as it might be to finally use that algorithms textbook from college.
If it can spot a buffer overrun during the sort (even though the correct result is achieved), then at least some value is added - but there are several static analysis tools.
Otherwise, you're just writing the same code in 2 different languages - one high level and one low level, and proving they are functionally equivalent. (In which case, why not just switch to the high level language for production). The whole idea just seems like a high-level language someone was too lazy to write a compiler for, so all it can do is examine the output of some other compiler.
While there's some value in writing a program twice and proving the results equivalent, it's a very narrow case. Most serious production issues in my experience are either design flaws, or "errors in error handling", neither of which formal proofs are likely to help with. Comprehensive unit tests are much more practical, though I guess you can look at them as a kind of formal proof, come to think of it.
This probably isn't a bad idea even though it won't stop the perverts. It greatly lessens the chance someone will come across something they didn't want to see.
When they cam for the perverts, I said nothing, for I was not a pervert?
This exact technology will allow governments to exercise very powerful censorship across the internet (or at least the part of the internet most people see). Want all pictures from that protest rally to vanish? Just twist the arm of any of these companies into adding a few hashes, or just slip them into a list the FBI no doubt routinely provides, and, just like that, down the memory hole. Plus, as you say, this won't stop the perverts. The only thing this actually accomplishes is empowering the totalitarian state.
We seen a couple of stories here on /. already where IP blocklists were abused by governments to slip in websites of opposing political parties. It's a bit hard to believe this won't be abused similarly.
Unfortunately, the ill-defined "natural foods" trend -- really just another form of superstition -- is all the rage among a well-meaning but (sometimes willfully) uninformed population of mommies, hipsters, and, by extension, their households.
You nailed it: GM fear and vaccinations are the 2 top superstitions of the 21st century. Plus, the two are related: "stick a pin in a map in the center of an anti-vax hotspot, and you've found a Whole Foods.
Yeah, it's those pesky mplementation details where most security flaws are found, and most corner-case bugs that escape testing. Design reviews happen already at most companies.
About the only thing that might eliminate the holes is formal proofs
Formal proofs (of correctness, I assume) can't eliminate bugs or security flaws, though they are a cost-inefficient way to reduce bugs. A formal proof is only solving the same problem in two different languages (one the language of the formal proof), and diffing the result. It's not better or worse than any other static analysis tool, per se. It certainly won't help at all when the component is insecure by design, which is so often the problem. (Why does a document format need a way to execute arbitrary code, for example?)
There is actually a market for stolen cars - cars expensive enough to ship overseas after being stolen. Those cars are stolen with tow trucks, however. Tow trucks are rarely questioned - sometimes the spouse will even open up the garage door.
I hear the practice is common enough that a Ferrari that is lifted to a certain angle (without a security code first being entered) will blow e-fuses and need carefully tracked replacement parts. (I have no idea how that works out in hilly areas, making me wonder how true it is.)
A thief will just smash a window or pop a lock. A detective, OTOH, will find this quite appealing, if they need to do a "sneak and peek". Want to search someone's car and leave no sign that you did?