I somehow get the feeling that this will probably go just as well as youtube's automatic flagging and de-monetization of videos that has completely baffled independent content creators (traditional media ones like CNN and the BBC are excluded from this system) with the way it's arbitrarily de-monetized massive amounts of completely benign content.
However what worries me even more is if they try their hand using the same flagging scripts for flagging other things. I probably ought to remove the post I made yesterday about the seemingly extremely quick delivery of something I ordered online where I joked about it probably being the fastest delivery since that German guy* tried to get the British Post Office to start delivering "V2 style" using rockets. Because if I don't I get the feeling they may put me on a list of "known neo-nazis" or something.
So how is that any different than with any other language? If you hire incompetent devs you're going to be getting bugs regardless of what language you're using and with C++ you've got one of the biggest talent pools around, meaning that with C++ the availability of competent developers is better than just about every language out there.
For servers, memory is cheap ($200 extra) so you can just use Java for that 2 million LOC project.
You may have been right a few years ago, but for the last couple of years memory, specially server memory, has become way more expensive due to supply simply not being apple to keep up with supply after much of the manufacturing capacity was shifted to making memory for mobile devices like smartphones and tablets. We're talking about a situation where's it's been badly eating into server vendor profit margins and sales due to increased cost. Thus memory use is important and so is performance when companies are more and more trying to get as much out of the hardware they buy.
In my experience the whole "C++ is really expensive" meme is just a bunch of FUD spread by people trying to push other languages and is mostly based on an assumption of very low code quality, which would cause similar problems any other language. On a cost-per-line basis C++ really isn't any more expensive than C or Java and the other ones come with their own downsides and much lower availability of skilled developers (so you need to pay more devs or put up with devs making more mistakes in a language they're not very familiar with).
The bottom line here is that C++ does 95% of jobs just as well or better than any other language with an availability of skilled developers no other language can really match.
It's useful for large, complex programs where speed is important. That's it -- it's useful in a very small amount of software.
Not sure what your frame of reference is, but that's a LOT of software. Hell, it's basically everything that isn't trivial or severely memory constrained. Had to switch form C++ to C once for a pretty heavily memory constrained embedded application, but otherwise I've been able to get away with using C++ practically everywhere.
Banning the export of "dual use" products? They obviously don't know that functionality for being able to listen in on phone calls is a standard feature of telecom backbone equipment and is commonly used for perfectly legal things like criminal investigations and (actual) anti-terrorism. What this means is that European makers of it (or rather the maker of it after Nokia's networks division first merged with Siemens' and then bought out Alcatel-Lucent) need to start making sabotaged versions of their equipment, thus giving non-European competitors a clear competitive edge, or stop exporting it outside of Europe altogether.
What do you expect when executive bonuses are either quarterly or annual? Change those bonuses to be given out every 2-5 years and executives will change their behavior completely to ensure long term increases in stock prices and revenues.
What you're talking about are the symptoms, not the root cause. The actual root cause is that consumers don't really care about security or how well made a product actually is. What a consumer cares most about is what the product does, it's outward appearance, the user experience and cost. Security is something a fraction of them get outraged over when it goes wrong, but it's not really relevant to them when they make the actual purchase decision and if they eventually begin to regret that they didn't consider it, this is generally not going to happen until after the returns window has closed.
In the end it all really boils down to consumer priorities and those priorities not really providing any incentives for companies to make security a priority. When the return on investment from spending time and money on additional features or an improved user experience is much greater than spending that time and money on properly securing a product, security efforts just won't get the budget they need.
There's no practical way to actually force them to hire qualified US applicants
As much as I dislike Trump, his administration can most definitely prevent companies from importing cheap pseudo-skilled H1B companies by essentially playing the same game, i.e having immigration authorities putting similarly unattainable requirements on H1B applicants. One pretty effective way that would almost end the whole business in it's current form is to just flat out discredit any and all indian schools and training facilities altogether. The still ongoing travel ongoing ban debacle clearly shows that Trump doesn't care at all about blanket banning whole countries from the U.S.
I'm pretty sure all actual "freetards" dumped google years ago and moved to using android forks like Paranoid Android with all the google services removed. What you're talking about are mostly just your garden variety google fanboys.
Or anyone to the right of Bernie Sanders for that matter...
Doubt this will lead to anything other than any Google-owned services becoming left-wing echo chambers, causing everyone on these services who isn't comfortable with the echo chamber they've become to leave for competing services which then turn into right wing or center-right echo chambers (if they weren't that to begin with).
When the guy the main character in The Wolf of Wall Street was based on says something is scummier than anything he ever pulled, you know that thing is very suspect and any money invested in it should probably be considered forfeit.
Only way to kill bitcoin at this point is by somehow figuring out a way to kill the global trade in narcotics, unlicensed firearms, fake documents and all the other contraband bitcoin has become the go-to currency for... When just about all of stuff that's bought using bitcoin is illegal making bitcoin itself illegal isn't really going to do anything except inconvenience the people using it to buy and sell narcotics, etc.
Microsoft's 90s domination was mainly because of the way they first rode on IBM's coattails and then when the time was right screwed them over by taking the side of all the companies who made clones. The problem however wasn't that they were dominant, but the ways in which they tried to ensure the continuation of that domination and spread it to other markets.
Rather than just making better products than their competitors, a foreign concept for a company whose first big success was buying a CP/M ripoff and modifying it for IBM's needs because IBM didn't want to pay per-machine royalties to the company who made CP/M, they instead focused on trying to hamper their competitors. This involves changing things simply to cause incompatibilities with other companies' products, purposefully causing applications like Word Perfect and the GEM desktop (from the same company that made CP/M) that competed with their applications to crash for no reason, refusing to support common standards and trying to lock markets to their OS by being a loss leader in them (IE+ActiveX anyone?).
The way I see it the problem with project managers is the same as with any other kind of manager. A good manager can do more good than any single worker they manage, but at the same time a bad manager can cause way more damage than any single worker they manage.
Where this becomes a problem is that a bad low level employee is relatively easy to get rid of and may not need an immediate replacement, a manager is much harder to get rid of and needs an immediate replacement. The end result of this is that a bad manager will stick around for far longer and replacing them may not even be something their employers even consider. What's worse is that despite management not being something everyone is suited for, many people still expect to eventually become managers even if they're wholly unsuited for it. I've seen more than a few cases of people wholly unsuited for management roles get into management positions, completely fail at it, and then even after they've been removed from any management positions, often by being fired, they refuse to work any jobs where they aren't managers.
The only solution that I can really think to this is for organizations to streamline the process of getting rid of bad managers and figure out a way to convince people who are found to be unsuited for management roles of their unsuitability for the job. However specially the latter is a very difficult thing to do when people have egos and don't like for it to be deflated by people saying they're not suited for the most high paying jobs.
The only effective way of binding CO2 that we know of is planting forests, but the problem is that that amount of land that is available for forests is decreasing rather than increasing as people convert forest into agricultural, commercial and residential land. When the global population is increasing with no signs of stopping or clear ways to stop it, this development is unfortunately only going to get worse as time goes on.
Only solution I can think of is to try to make the use of land much more effective so that de-fortestation can be stopped and maybe even reversed. Building higher density housing (i.e apartments) increasing crop yields (i.e more GMOs and better ways of farming) and trying to make commercial land in a more effective way (factories and warehouses stacked on top of each other?). None of these are however going to be easy to get done, specially in the U.S people want their massive houses, thanks to neo-ludite scaremongering many people view GMOs about as favorably as leaded gasoline and companies sure as hell won't like the idea of having to build their warehouses and factories more compactly or having share buildings with other companies.
I suppose this once again runs into the #1 problem when trying to fight for any environmental cause, it often inconveniences people and people don't like being inconvenienced. Instead they try to avoid being inconvenienced by either claiming that the environmental cause is a hoax, that other people should be inconvenienced rather than them or that the inconvenience is so burdensome the environmental cause is a lesser problem than the inconvenience.
Getting a tax break for switching your heating system to coal!!? Then again when we are talking about a state that went for Trump in the last election, so doing things completely backwards is probably to be expected...
I wonder what else gets you a tax break in Pennsylvania? Running your car on leaded gasoline? Taking the catalytic converter off? Refraining from car pooling or using any form of public transport? Smoking in restaurants? Urinating on street corners? Having your kids fall ill with polio?
Seems like some kind of progress if you ask me... Before this they used H1B visas to mass import people with skill sets so basic they were the equivalent of a random person taken off the street and put trough a 3-6 month long training program and now they seem to have moved to doing just that.
However knowing the greedy bastards that run IBM and Salesforce the reason they're doing this is mostly because the Trump administration is now actually trying to ensure that the H1B program is run the way it was always supposed to be run (one of the few good things he's doing) and offering ridiculous tax breaks to companies who put up some token hiring effort.
I hope that I'm not the only one worried about Tesla overextending themselves by launching too many new products in too short of a timeframe considering the company's size/resources?
Not saying that they shouldn't try to venture into new markets, but considering they've still got heavily negative cash flow and have still not been able to introduce a new car without significant technical and production-related teething issues they probably should down a bit. All in all the whole thing is starting to remind me of what happened to Escom*.
Speaking of which, anyone else find it funny that the same folks who tell you gov't can't do anything right also tell you gov't can't be allowed to compete with private business because it would be unfair?
The thing about most people is that they're never completely firm in their views. Prod them on the right subjects and they turn into hypocrites. You can also see this in people who sit on the political left who have no doubts as to minorities being just as smart and capable as whites, but will still call for and defend policies that assume that minorities aren't as smart or capable as whites.
According to the lawyer who drafted the original executive order he really didn't have much of a choice. A number of (southern) states were going to challenge it in court and were almost certain to have it struck off the books so it most certainly would have been struck down even if Trump hadn't lifted a finger. So instead of waiting until it was stuck down and the people covered by it would have had their status turn illegal overnight he chose not to renew it and told congress to write a more permanent solution that can't just be struck off the books like that. If congress is capable of getting something more permanent passed by then is another matter, but this is one of those (few) times that Trump's actions aren't plain evil and actually make sense.
Don't get me wrong, I'm a white guy who would have voted for Hillary had I been eligible to vote in the election, but you really can't judge people who voted for Trump based on his most fanatical followers. Fanatical followers of any politician tend to be a bunch of morons and the only thing special about Trump's is that they're dumber than usual. When you consider how sick and tired people are of the political establishment in the U.S and how heavily Hillary represents practically everything that's wrong with the current political system, you can't exactly fault people for voting for Trump over Hillary. I would still have voted for Hillary as a "lesser evil" type choice, but I can understand why people would have voted for Trump for similar reasons.
Einstein didn't come over until after he had published mist most influential work, it's debatable if creating nuclear weapons had any kind of net benefit on the U.S or the world (Oppenheimer) and the other two were just researchers whose work benefited the U.S just as much as it benefited the rest of the world.
However I'm not going to deny the economic impact from being able import enormous amounts of unskilled, but cheap and willing labor from Europe in the 1800s to early 1900s and slaves from Africa slavery was banned. However as things stand right now there's more of an excess of unskilled labor and the need is going to come down significantly over the next few decades as automation replaces manual laborers so mass immigration (or importation of slaves) really doesn't make any sense from an economic perspective.
Don't get me wrong, so-called "prime movers" who start successful businesses and other organizations are obviously always a net gain along with just exceptionally skilled and/or talented individuals, but these people have always represented a very small portion of immigration to the U.S. Immigration has instead always been focused on mostly unskilled labor looking for a better lifestyle.
That said, Linux does not belong in safety systems
Dedicated real time operating systems obviously have their uses, but due to advances in embedded level hardware they're becoming less and less relevant. Even with the overheads of an "almost real time" OS like Linux with some compile switches most modern day embedded hardware is capable of making the dealines in all except some special super low latency use cases. Only place where a real time OS is even necessary these days are rare super low latency and super low power cases (as in under 0.25W).
Serious, 6502s and Z80s are no longer the standard embedded hardware out there anymore.
If they had users' best interest in mind they wouldn't have made something like 90% of all the UI and feature-related changes they've made over the last decade...
If you're not familiar with the specifics Yahoo contract*, it includes clauses for situations like the sale to Verizon where they get to keep all the payments without having to do anything for that money if they decide they don't like Yahoo's new owners for some reason. More probably than not they just decided use this part of the contract to get double income, Mayer deal money from Verizon and search money from Google.
Slashdot Mirror
I somehow get the feeling that this will probably go just as well as youtube's automatic flagging and de-monetization of videos that has completely baffled independent content creators (traditional media ones like CNN and the BBC are excluded from this system) with the way it's arbitrarily de-monetized massive amounts of completely benign content.
However what worries me even more is if they try their hand using the same flagging scripts for flagging other things. I probably ought to remove the post I made yesterday about the seemingly extremely quick delivery of something I ordered online where I joked about it probably being the fastest delivery since that German guy* tried to get the British Post Office to start delivering "V2 style" using rockets. Because if I don't I get the feeling they may put me on a list of "known neo-nazis" or something.
*https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerhard_Zucker
So how is that any different than with any other language? If you hire incompetent devs you're going to be getting bugs regardless of what language you're using and with C++ you've got one of the biggest talent pools around, meaning that with C++ the availability of competent developers is better than just about every language out there.
For servers, memory is cheap ($200 extra) so you can just use Java for that 2 million LOC project.
You may have been right a few years ago, but for the last couple of years memory, specially server memory, has become way more expensive due to supply simply not being apple to keep up with supply after much of the manufacturing capacity was shifted to making memory for mobile devices like smartphones and tablets. We're talking about a situation where's it's been badly eating into server vendor profit margins and sales due to increased cost. Thus memory use is important and so is performance when companies are more and more trying to get as much out of the hardware they buy.
In my experience the whole "C++ is really expensive" meme is just a bunch of FUD spread by people trying to push other languages and is mostly based on an assumption of very low code quality, which would cause similar problems any other language. On a cost-per-line basis C++ really isn't any more expensive than C or Java and the other ones come with their own downsides and much lower availability of skilled developers (so you need to pay more devs or put up with devs making more mistakes in a language they're not very familiar with).
The bottom line here is that C++ does 95% of jobs just as well or better than any other language with an availability of skilled developers no other language can really match.
It's useful for large, complex programs where speed is important. That's it -- it's useful in a very small amount of software.
Not sure what your frame of reference is, but that's a LOT of software. Hell, it's basically everything that isn't trivial or severely memory constrained. Had to switch form C++ to C once for a pretty heavily memory constrained embedded application, but otherwise I've been able to get away with using C++ practically everywhere.
Lucky you, where I live it only becomes visible when I'm at work and stops being visible when I'm still at work.
Banning the export of "dual use" products? They obviously don't know that functionality for being able to listen in on phone calls is a standard feature of telecom backbone equipment and is commonly used for perfectly legal things like criminal investigations and (actual) anti-terrorism. What this means is that European makers of it (or rather the maker of it after Nokia's networks division first merged with Siemens' and then bought out Alcatel-Lucent) need to start making sabotaged versions of their equipment, thus giving non-European competitors a clear competitive edge, or stop exporting it outside of Europe altogether.
I'm more of a train wreck aficionado myself...
What do you expect when executive bonuses are either quarterly or annual? Change those bonuses to be given out every 2-5 years and executives will change their behavior completely to ensure long term increases in stock prices and revenues.
What you're talking about are the symptoms, not the root cause. The actual root cause is that consumers don't really care about security or how well made a product actually is. What a consumer cares most about is what the product does, it's outward appearance, the user experience and cost. Security is something a fraction of them get outraged over when it goes wrong, but it's not really relevant to them when they make the actual purchase decision and if they eventually begin to regret that they didn't consider it, this is generally not going to happen until after the returns window has closed.
In the end it all really boils down to consumer priorities and those priorities not really providing any incentives for companies to make security a priority. When the return on investment from spending time and money on additional features or an improved user experience is much greater than spending that time and money on properly securing a product, security efforts just won't get the budget they need.
There's no practical way to actually force them to hire qualified US applicants
As much as I dislike Trump, his administration can most definitely prevent companies from importing cheap pseudo-skilled H1B companies by essentially playing the same game, i.e having immigration authorities putting similarly unattainable requirements on H1B applicants. One pretty effective way that would almost end the whole business in it's current form is to just flat out discredit any and all indian schools and training facilities altogether. The still ongoing travel ongoing ban debacle clearly shows that Trump doesn't care at all about blanket banning whole countries from the U.S.
I'm pretty sure all actual "freetards" dumped google years ago and moved to using android forks like Paranoid Android with all the google services removed. What you're talking about are mostly just your garden variety google fanboys.
Or anyone to the right of Bernie Sanders for that matter...
Doubt this will lead to anything other than any Google-owned services becoming left-wing echo chambers, causing everyone on these services who isn't comfortable with the echo chamber they've become to leave for competing services which then turn into right wing or center-right echo chambers (if they weren't that to begin with).
When the guy the main character in The Wolf of Wall Street was based on says something is scummier than anything he ever pulled, you know that thing is very suspect and any money invested in it should probably be considered forfeit.
Only way to kill bitcoin at this point is by somehow figuring out a way to kill the global trade in narcotics, unlicensed firearms, fake documents and all the other contraband bitcoin has become the go-to currency for... When just about all of stuff that's bought using bitcoin is illegal making bitcoin itself illegal isn't really going to do anything except inconvenience the people using it to buy and sell narcotics, etc.
Microsoft's 90s domination was mainly because of the way they first rode on IBM's coattails and then when the time was right screwed them over by taking the side of all the companies who made clones. The problem however wasn't that they were dominant, but the ways in which they tried to ensure the continuation of that domination and spread it to other markets.
Rather than just making better products than their competitors, a foreign concept for a company whose first big success was buying a CP/M ripoff and modifying it for IBM's needs because IBM didn't want to pay per-machine royalties to the company who made CP/M, they instead focused on trying to hamper their competitors. This involves changing things simply to cause incompatibilities with other companies' products, purposefully causing applications like Word Perfect and the GEM desktop (from the same company that made CP/M) that competed with their applications to crash for no reason, refusing to support common standards and trying to lock markets to their OS by being a loss leader in them (IE+ActiveX anyone?).
The way I see it the problem with project managers is the same as with any other kind of manager. A good manager can do more good than any single worker they manage, but at the same time a bad manager can cause way more damage than any single worker they manage.
Where this becomes a problem is that a bad low level employee is relatively easy to get rid of and may not need an immediate replacement, a manager is much harder to get rid of and needs an immediate replacement. The end result of this is that a bad manager will stick around for far longer and replacing them may not even be something their employers even consider. What's worse is that despite management not being something everyone is suited for, many people still expect to eventually become managers even if they're wholly unsuited for it. I've seen more than a few cases of people wholly unsuited for management roles get into management positions, completely fail at it, and then even after they've been removed from any management positions, often by being fired, they refuse to work any jobs where they aren't managers.
The only solution that I can really think to this is for organizations to streamline the process of getting rid of bad managers and figure out a way to convince people who are found to be unsuited for management roles of their unsuitability for the job. However specially the latter is a very difficult thing to do when people have egos and don't like for it to be deflated by people saying they're not suited for the most high paying jobs.
The only effective way of binding CO2 that we know of is planting forests, but the problem is that that amount of land that is available for forests is decreasing rather than increasing as people convert forest into agricultural, commercial and residential land. When the global population is increasing with no signs of stopping or clear ways to stop it, this development is unfortunately only going to get worse as time goes on.
Only solution I can think of is to try to make the use of land much more effective so that de-fortestation can be stopped and maybe even reversed. Building higher density housing (i.e apartments) increasing crop yields (i.e more GMOs and better ways of farming) and trying to make commercial land in a more effective way (factories and warehouses stacked on top of each other?). None of these are however going to be easy to get done, specially in the U.S people want their massive houses, thanks to neo-ludite scaremongering many people view GMOs about as favorably as leaded gasoline and companies sure as hell won't like the idea of having to build their warehouses and factories more compactly or having share buildings with other companies.
I suppose this once again runs into the #1 problem when trying to fight for any environmental cause, it often inconveniences people and people don't like being inconvenienced. Instead they try to avoid being inconvenienced by either claiming that the environmental cause is a hoax, that other people should be inconvenienced rather than them or that the inconvenience is so burdensome the environmental cause is a lesser problem than the inconvenience.
Getting a tax break for switching your heating system to coal!!? Then again when we are talking about a state that went for Trump in the last election, so doing things completely backwards is probably to be expected...
I wonder what else gets you a tax break in Pennsylvania? Running your car on leaded gasoline? Taking the catalytic converter off? Refraining from car pooling or using any form of public transport? Smoking in restaurants? Urinating on street corners? Having your kids fall ill with polio?
Seems like some kind of progress if you ask me... Before this they used H1B visas to mass import people with skill sets so basic they were the equivalent of a random person taken off the street and put trough a 3-6 month long training program and now they seem to have moved to doing just that.
However knowing the greedy bastards that run IBM and Salesforce the reason they're doing this is mostly because the Trump administration is now actually trying to ensure that the H1B program is run the way it was always supposed to be run (one of the few good things he's doing) and offering ridiculous tax breaks to companies who put up some token hiring effort.
I hope that I'm not the only one worried about Tesla overextending themselves by launching too many new products in too short of a timeframe considering the company's size/resources?
Not saying that they shouldn't try to venture into new markets, but considering they've still got heavily negative cash flow and have still not been able to introduce a new car without significant technical and production-related teething issues they probably should down a bit. All in all the whole thing is starting to remind me of what happened to Escom*.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Speaking of which, anyone else find it funny that the same folks who tell you gov't can't do anything right also tell you gov't can't be allowed to compete with private business because it would be unfair?
The thing about most people is that they're never completely firm in their views. Prod them on the right subjects and they turn into hypocrites. You can also see this in people who sit on the political left who have no doubts as to minorities being just as smart and capable as whites, but will still call for and defend policies that assume that minorities aren't as smart or capable as whites.
He's making moves to deport them by ending DACA
According to the lawyer who drafted the original executive order he really didn't have much of a choice. A number of (southern) states were going to challenge it in court and were almost certain to have it struck off the books so it most certainly would have been struck down even if Trump hadn't lifted a finger. So instead of waiting until it was stuck down and the people covered by it would have had their status turn illegal overnight he chose not to renew it and told congress to write a more permanent solution that can't just be struck off the books like that. If congress is capable of getting something more permanent passed by then is another matter, but this is one of those (few) times that Trump's actions aren't plain evil and actually make sense.
Don't get me wrong, I'm a white guy who would have voted for Hillary had I been eligible to vote in the election, but you really can't judge people who voted for Trump based on his most fanatical followers. Fanatical followers of any politician tend to be a bunch of morons and the only thing special about Trump's is that they're dumber than usual. When you consider how sick and tired people are of the political establishment in the U.S and how heavily Hillary represents practically everything that's wrong with the current political system, you can't exactly fault people for voting for Trump over Hillary. I would still have voted for Hillary as a "lesser evil" type choice, but I can understand why people would have voted for Trump for similar reasons.
Einstein didn't come over until after he had published mist most influential work, it's debatable if creating nuclear weapons had any kind of net benefit on the U.S or the world (Oppenheimer) and the other two were just researchers whose work benefited the U.S just as much as it benefited the rest of the world.
However I'm not going to deny the economic impact from being able import enormous amounts of unskilled, but cheap and willing labor from Europe in the 1800s to early 1900s and slaves from Africa slavery was banned. However as things stand right now there's more of an excess of unskilled labor and the need is going to come down significantly over the next few decades as automation replaces manual laborers so mass immigration (or importation of slaves) really doesn't make any sense from an economic perspective.
Don't get me wrong, so-called "prime movers" who start successful businesses and other organizations are obviously always a net gain along with just exceptionally skilled and/or talented individuals, but these people have always represented a very small portion of immigration to the U.S. Immigration has instead always been focused on mostly unskilled labor looking for a better lifestyle.
That said, Linux does not belong in safety systems
Dedicated real time operating systems obviously have their uses, but due to advances in embedded level hardware they're becoming less and less relevant. Even with the overheads of an "almost real time" OS like Linux with some compile switches most modern day embedded hardware is capable of making the dealines in all except some special super low latency use cases. Only place where a real time OS is even necessary these days are rare super low latency and super low power cases (as in under 0.25W).
Serious, 6502s and Z80s are no longer the standard embedded hardware out there anymore.
If they had users' best interest in mind they wouldn't have made something like 90% of all the UI and feature-related changes they've made over the last decade...
If you're not familiar with the specifics Yahoo contract*, it includes clauses for situations like the sale to Verizon where they get to keep all the payments without having to do anything for that money if they decide they don't like Yahoo's new owners for some reason. More probably than not they just decided use this part of the contract to get double income, Mayer deal money from Verizon and search money from Google.
* https://www.recode.net/2016/7/...