I have been in the industry for 18 years or so and have worked for many fortune 100 companies. The answer to your question is "yes, it is this bad".
"Back in the day" we used to need to know several core functionalities to even just get a unix box up and running. I know many "enterprise architects" and they couldn't tell me anything about a tcp stack, how to configure a unix box for performance, how to pxe boot a system, how to patch a system, what mode to configure the network interfaces for LACP, should we use ipmp or LACP?, etc.
The only thing they do is certify a list of requirements to enterprise standards and drag and drop Visio diagrams to show how to plug things in. Then they turn it over to procurement to order it, then it comes in and admins are stuck trying to figure it out, working with vendors to install expensive software.. Which the whole process ends up taking a year or two in the "enterprise".
So if you want an "experienced architect" what you really should be looking for is a young smart kid and test him with a quiz to see if he's willing to work hard, stay focused, and has excellent troubleshooting skills with a verity of experience with various technologies. It doesn't even necessarily matter if the experience is in the technologies you are working with. Anyone curious, hungry, and willing to work hard is worth their weight in gold in today's world. Those have been the hardest to find, in my opinion.
Finding people to solve your riddles will vary in success, but the root of the problem is deeper.
I was initially hesitant with the legalization of pot in California and the other states. But what's fascinating is that now people get their weed from controlled environments instead some back alley with a drug dealer pushing lots of other stuff as well.
I could be 1000% wrong as I have no data to back this up, but it made me think the streets have been safer in California since the legalization of pot. Anyone have any data to back that idea up? Any stats of declining use of other more serious drugs? Maybe it hasn't been enough time yet?
I mean, it is a MAIL program, not a revolutionary new product. The protocols have been out there for years (esp. IMAP). Why is it still buggy? Even worse: why is it buggier than the previous version? If it worked before THERE IS NO F*ING EXCUSE FOR IT NOT TO WORK NOW. Very very very lame.
I would imagine they have uplifted the app and re-written a large portion of the application to work with new interfaces like outlook or whatever. Also perhaps they're trying to do something new with spam in specific to help reduce spam as a whole when using various services. This is a bad bug, and could cause a lot of problems for service providers if it's legitimate and not a "single case", but bugs happen. I'm surprised nobody caught it with the beta versions. Apple has been surprisingly good lately about getting developers the beta versions of the OS before the release. Due to the intense secrecy of apple, in the past, developers didn't get access to the later versions of OSX until the same time as the consumers. This used to be a nightmare when dealing with professional software and drivers for anything beyond what came with the mac.
Seems like Mail.app has been getting worse since about 2003. I finally gave up on it about 5 years ago - in favor of gmail's web interface. At first I was a little disgusted with myself - but I've never regretted it.
I still use mail on my iOS devices, though. Have not yet seen a better UI for those.
I agree. I find myself using too many machines, in too many places to really care about a desktop version of the mail program, especially now that my mail storage is using about 15GB of data. The only "mail app" I use is the built in app on my iPhone, otherwise all web portals for me.
When upgrading my mac computers I have always seen a significant boost in performance on the same hardware (obviously).
When upgrading the iOS devices I have found the opposite to be true. Each new version, on existing hardware, is slower but the feature set expands incredibly.
I think this is because iOS started out as an infant and did what it was supposed to do really well and performed really well on the hardware it was designed on, and had features that only worked on the existing hardware. But as iOS has matured, so has the feature set.... There are incredible search engines, graphics engines, Siri, and tons more... this has required increasing hardware capabilities to keep up with the features..... So the trick with iOS is don't expect to get performance gains with iOS updates unless you update your hardware at the same time. Each new iOS version brings new bells and whistles, but not performance. With each iOS capable hardware device you should expect significant performance boosts.
I think the real buzz kill is the massive leaks, rumors and speculation of what apple is doing compounded by their secrecy, and lack of being able to be first to market due to their desire to be the best which makes it take longer to execute and allows for only incremental updates to existing products.
I appreciate apple's due diligence to make amazing products which have the best overall complete end-to-end experience for consumers hands down. But with the leaks happening it's letting people speculate and come to conclusions that are even more grand than apple is going to release. This creates a sense of disappointment at the times of announcements. For example, people had speculated we would see the appleTV Television with integrated iSight camera at this product announcement. Since it didn't happen, and only other things which we already knew (5c, 5s, finger scanner, faster processors, updated camera) there wasn't a lot of room for surprise.
The only surprise I saw was the dual colored led flash. Everything else I seemed to have already heard about and seen leaks on the Internet for several weeks if not months.
If apple wants to keep surprising us, they need to close the loop on their leaks, or show us products sooner to be the first to introduce it to us, instead of the rumor mill.
Microsoft wants to join in because OSX is in the spotlight. Other companies have already admitted infiltration with the hack, so this gives them an opportunity to shine a bright light on OSX' security issues away from their own for a brief minute.
When a game starts, it wants the entire desktop, it doesn't want the other desktop elements at all, no dock, no icons, interaction, etc.
Why isn't there a function to create a new virtual desktop at any resolution you want and leave the other desktop untouched? So when you switch between them it knows to switch resolutions as well. Have the resolution tag part of the desktop, so when you switch between them it knows what to switch to.
I seriously attribute my love for adventure games to help me refine my troubleshooting skills and drive to "find the answer".
I believe that it's troubleshooting and the drive to find the answer that makes someone stand out in the work place, whether it's programming or anything else.
I played a lot of Kings Quest, The Secret of Monkey Island, Space Quest, Myst, etc.
Don't take away their freedom to do something they enjoy.
I don't know if anybody "enjoys" smoking. They probably enjoyed it the first year or two when it was cool to hang out with the friends and feel cool "smoking", but nobody enjoys smelling like that all day long, or having their breath stink, or have your body take the toll it goes through from smoking. It's something that starts out socially, and then slowly but surely becomes incorporated into their daily living experience as a vice.
Someone needs to come up with some new "cool" way for people who hardly know each other can hang out and feel part something that doesn't involved sex, drugs, alcohol or smoking something. Smoking is a gateway to feel like you have friends. If you ask a stranger for a bite of a hamburger or a couple french fries they're going to think you're insane, ask for a light or a cigarette and they'll put down whatever they're doing and reach in their pocket and gladly help you out.
Same thing goes with the workforce. If you want to feel immediately cool, follow the group of people down to the smoking section and immediately there's a group of people who welcome you in to make you feel like you have a group of people to hang out with and talk to. Plus who can argue with going outside and talking with people all day long? It seems like smokers get the free-pass to leave their desk anytime they feel like it, and they have a good excuse.
With the high-school social desires of teens and interoffice acceptance of smoking it makes for tough competitor to "nothing".
Instead of putting all this money towards increased anti-smoking campaigns, all they would need to do is funnel a little bit of money into some sort of "social spots" that have gum, some candy, soda, water, nice chairs, and a place where it's accepted to hang out and talk for a few minutes and move on. This would give people the gratification they want to go into an area and hang out for a few minutes, talk, and go back to work. I think the problem with this idea is that there's no acceptable "need" to go down there every few hours. People might look at you as a slacker hanging down there, whereas the smoker doesn't get deemed a slacker for "going for a smoke"..
I think it requires a certain level of intelligence as a minimum. Nothing incredibly special but above average
There you have it. You think being able to program makes you special in some way or indicates that you're above average.
Here's the truth: Any idiot can write code. Hell, half of Slashdot taught themselves to program when they were between the ages of 8-13.
All it takes is the will to learn something new. It's no different than learning to work on cars. Do you think auto-mechanics have these same discussions? No. They're more emotionally stable, apparently, than the average developer.
Yeah, just about anyone can learn to write computer programs. Just like every who has ever learned to write code, they'll get better and better as they gain experience
Being able to write computer programs does not make you special. Get over yourself.
I think the problem is that people are trying to answer the question with a "one size fits all" approach to answering the question. Sure anybody who can make toast can program. But not everybody can make a toaster.
What I mean by that is you mentioned that the average joe mechanics don't have these conversations, but you have to consider that the average mechanic is not making the advancements or creating the car from pouring casts and machining the parts. They're assembling or disassembling. There is creativity in finding a problem with a car before taking the whole thing apart but otherwise it's fairly laid out.
Programmers, the big daddy programmers are special and unique. Just like the engineers who created a ferrari or any other major achievement. Any body can program, but not everybody has the patience, confidence or desire to take on massive tasks by themselves.
I have programmed for many years and I have never found a good workflow of working with a large team of developers to create a specific product. So far what I have seen is one or two highly motivated individuals to create the bulk of the product and the rest become break/fix contributors or continuing development after the product is well underway.
It's just what I have seen. And those examples could make me an exception not the rule but that's what I've seen.
Were projects like MySQL or PostgreSQL initially effects of one or two highly motivated and focused individuals? I know that unix was and about evey project I have ever seen at the early stages.
Being that these efforts are largely surrounded by individual contributors I think it enables these individual's to feel special and different. And to be honesty, anyone who takes on these massive feats and succeeds is unique and different. The rest are "programmers".
I wonder if you could prepare yourself for Alzheimers by writing and learning songs about all your important memories
I wonder if you could prepare yourself for Alzheimers by writing and learning songs about all your important memories
That reminds me of what the north American Indians had done. I would imagine there are songs of ancient time passed along due to this type of memory being the most protected.
Makes you wonder if there is something to the notion of singing angel references in the bible and why people sing in churches.
I have always found it so fascinating at how prevalent music is in our culture and profound an impact music has made on our history and makes up "who we are". Just about every kid in America is defined by a band or song or type of music. Just about every era is depicted by a musical theme.
It is almost completely correlated of advancements in music relate to advancements in technology.
I think these guys missed the mark by a long shot.
People aren't just "searching" any more. People have "apps", "portals", they have go-to places to get things. Google isn't where you go any more. People know what websites they want to use or they use the iPad or iPhone apps to find things. I believe it's the "app" revolution that changed the dynamics. People go to wikipedia to research stuff, open one of their apps to find a recipe for dinner or ask siri what to get for lunch.
Any machine being used for purposes outside of the intent of the owner should be shut down. Owners should be notified and given time to respond, but if they are unaware of the additional traffic their computer is spewing then they should be shut down until corrected.
Unfortunatly service providers probably don't care, they would probably rather have the $29.99/mo customer rather then shutting them down until it's fixed.
A super nerd explains why super wifi isn't wifi. General population doesn't give a fuck, as wifi means "wireless internet" to them.
General population then bitches when their Super "WiFi" doesn't interoperate with any of their existing WiFi equipment and in fact can't even be used directly in their laptop at present. From the article:-
For now, at least, you can't move a white-space device around. You can't put a white-space radio into a phone or laptop because each white-space device must check its location against a database to determine which TV channels and wireless microphones are being used in the device's area, so they can avoid those channels. [..] It will be a way for wireless Internet providers, especially in rural areas, to zap their network over to a main router in a home, which will then redistribute it to devices over Ethernet or standard Wi-Fi connections.
So you're right that they probably wouldn't care about the technical issues, and nor would they ever likely care if any difference was totally transparent (and thus irrelevant) to the man on the street. But it's not, and that's why "Super WiFi" is a crap and misleading name, even for Joe Public.
Ya whatever. We have constantly been living within different wifi standards such as 802.11a/b/n/whatever. Non techies understand the differences, but joe blow just listens to whatever the bestbuy guy at the store says. Bestbuy guy hands him a router and a card or whatever and pats him on the head and moves along to the counter. Same thing with 3G compatibility for iPads or what have you. People understand that not all 3G is compatible. People don't even know what 4g is yet. But it's all just marketing crap and at the end of the day people ask the techies what to do and hopefully they tell the consumers to get the correct stuff.
Having developed many projects, I personally can attest that I don't get anything productive done until everybody is asleep or if I decide to tune everybody out. It seems like there are too many real and "potential" distractions that my mind is chewing on instead of coming up with solutions to problems.
I have found it helpful to come together as a group once I have had plenty of time to think about what I want to do, along with the others having that same opportunity. That way we can have a discussion about ideas that have been thought through instead of just winging it.
I guess this will eliminate employees "upgrading" their company crackberries by dropping them in the toilet.
Yah, that could make for a problem buying used phones on ebay.... you'd never know why someone is selling a "perfectly good and working phone" for a discount.
The reason is that the price is setup to pay for the "movie going experience", paying for the theater. But the reality is that a film that was less expensive to make should cost less to see it. That would be a good idea for the industry to embrace to combat feeling like they need to have a huge block buster, huge budget film to make any traction.
Security for a web app is about understanding that people will be breaking your system and hacking your system, so the goal is to reduce what will be able to be hacked, control the fallout at each stage, control the separation of duties between the web developers, database admins, and says admins with root, and alerting when anything happens on a system.
Security is only as good as your ability to make it work without any one person trusting the other. The system has to be built on lack of trust of any one person in the system. You have to assume that some new-hire is going to a potential problem.
Social engineering or internal crime rings are way worse of a problem for "secure sites" then a hole in some java code.
But with that said, the way you make a secure site starts with a multi-tiered approach having web front ends, an application tier, and a backend database.
Separation of the web front ends, which you assume will be hacked. You remove any and all potential vulnerabilities, services, processes running unnecessarily, compilers, and anything else not necessary to run your web application. Put in place a high alerting system triggered whenever anything changes on a system and potentially rebuilds the servers upon reboot at the most extreme end of things. Have the network rules setup to only allow the single application port from the web servers to the application servers. Don't allow any other traffic.
Next the application layer has a similar lock down removing anything and everything not required to run your app. Only allow the network traffic for the specific ports for the database from the application server.
On the database server maintain adoquite backups and lockdown proceedures for all data.
With all that said, your application needs to go through a security review with several people making sure you're not doing stupid stuff such as: making system calls leveraging variables supplied by end users, make sure to verify every one of the users inputs scrubbing any potential SQL injection, and make sure to double and triple check any time input is leveraged by the user along with a system call, database call, and of opening files or pipes or anything of the sort. The use input is where the hacking takes place.
Anyway, that's how it's done by the big boys. Good luck.
Tim Porter may be a nice guy and all, but if it was Google with all those so-called bogus/lax patents he'd be up there talking about how the patent system is fine and the problem really is more that the enforcement process depends on endless litigation and how the determination of infringement needs to be more streamlined.
He's a lawyer, his job is to be an advocate/mouthpiece for his employer's interests.
They (and most companies) play both sides of the fence. At the same time as saying how bad patents are for impinging on their products, they are buying as many companies with far-reaching patents as they can get their hands on -- "Our acquisition of Motorola will increase competition by strengthening Google’s patent portfolio", Larry Page.
You omitted the last half of that quote: "which will enable us to better protect Android from anti-competitive threats from Microsoft, Apple and other companies." What he was saying was that Google's new patents will increase competition by helping to prevent MS and Apple from shutting Android down, and I think his point is indisputable: Allowing MS and Apple to kill Android would reduce competition, so preserving android increases competition.
I truly don't think Google plays both sides of this fence; everything I've ever seen from Google's leadership decries the patent mess as a problem, and explains Google's own focus on acquiring and growing patents as a necessary evil. AFAIK (and I have paid attention), Google has never asserted any patents against anyone, except defensively.
I think Google really would prefer to change patent law and get rid of all these crap software patents -- or even all software patents, period. I think this is as much reflection of Google's arrogance as Google's altruism -- Google believes that given a level field they can beat the competition in any area they focus on. But I think there is actually a large dose of "good for society" thinking as well. You have to remember that fully half of Google's employees and nearly all of Google's management are software engineers, and the vast majority of software engineers think that software patents are bad for innovation, and software engineers love cool new technology. Google's engineers are no different all the way up to and including Sergey and Larry.
(Disclaimer: I'm a Google engineer, but all of the above is based on public information plus my perception of general attitudes within the company.)
Um, no duh! Of course Google would prefer to get rid of all patents. If you look at their business model it's all about 'ad revenue'. What do they care what software or hardware you run their ads on? The more software and hardware that hits their ads instead of other people's ads, the better.
So if they abolished all apple's patents (and everyone else for that matter) and people could make the best mobile device for free and not pay homage to any license (ie. java, or other), then there would exist more, cheaper mobile devices running android, and thus, hitting their ads.
So Google has nothing to loose and everything to gain if the patent system were dissolved over night.
Slashdot Mirror
I have been in the industry for 18 years or so and have worked for many fortune 100 companies. The answer to your question is "yes, it is this bad".
"Back in the day" we used to need to know several core functionalities to even just get a unix box up and running. I know many "enterprise architects" and they couldn't tell me anything about a tcp stack, how to configure a unix box for performance, how to pxe boot a system, how to patch a system, what mode to configure the network interfaces for LACP, should we use ipmp or LACP?, etc.
The only thing they do is certify a list of requirements to enterprise standards and drag and drop Visio diagrams to show how to plug things in. Then they turn it over to procurement to order it, then it comes in and admins are stuck trying to figure it out, working with vendors to install expensive software.. Which the whole process ends up taking a year or two in the "enterprise".
So if you want an "experienced architect" what you really should be looking for is a young smart kid and test him with a quiz to see if he's willing to work hard, stay focused, and has excellent troubleshooting skills with a verity of experience with various technologies. It doesn't even necessarily matter if the experience is in the technologies you are working with. Anyone curious, hungry, and willing to work hard is worth their weight in gold in today's world. Those have been the hardest to find, in my opinion.
Finding people to solve your riddles will vary in success, but the root of the problem is deeper.
I was initially hesitant with the legalization of pot in California and the other states. But what's fascinating is that now people get their weed from controlled environments instead some back alley with a drug dealer pushing lots of other stuff as well.
I could be 1000% wrong as I have no data to back this up, but it made me think the streets have been safer in California since the legalization of pot. Anyone have any data to back that idea up? Any stats of declining use of other more serious drugs? Maybe it hasn't been enough time yet?
I mean, it is a MAIL program, not a revolutionary new product. The protocols have been out there for years (esp. IMAP). Why is it still buggy? Even worse: why is it buggier than the previous version? If it worked before THERE IS NO F*ING EXCUSE FOR IT NOT TO WORK NOW. Very very very lame.
I would imagine they have uplifted the app and re-written a large portion of the application to work with new interfaces like outlook or whatever. Also perhaps they're trying to do something new with spam in specific to help reduce spam as a whole when using various services. This is a bad bug, and could cause a lot of problems for service providers if it's legitimate and not a "single case", but bugs happen. I'm surprised nobody caught it with the beta versions. Apple has been surprisingly good lately about getting developers the beta versions of the OS before the release. Due to the intense secrecy of apple, in the past, developers didn't get access to the later versions of OSX until the same time as the consumers. This used to be a nightmare when dealing with professional software and drivers for anything beyond what came with the mac.
Seems like Mail.app has been getting worse since about 2003. I finally gave up on it about 5 years ago - in favor of gmail's web interface. At first I was a little disgusted with myself - but I've never regretted it.
I still use mail on my iOS devices, though. Have not yet seen a better UI for those.
I agree. I find myself using too many machines, in too many places to really care about a desktop version of the mail program, especially now that my mail storage is using about 15GB of data. The only "mail app" I use is the built in app on my iPhone, otherwise all web portals for me.
When upgrading my mac computers I have always seen a significant boost in performance on the same hardware (obviously).
When upgrading the iOS devices I have found the opposite to be true. Each new version, on existing hardware, is slower but the feature set expands incredibly.
I think this is because iOS started out as an infant and did what it was supposed to do really well and performed really well on the hardware it was designed on, and had features that only worked on the existing hardware. But as iOS has matured, so has the feature set.... There are incredible search engines, graphics engines, Siri, and tons more... this has required increasing hardware capabilities to keep up with the features. .... So the trick with iOS is don't expect to get performance gains with iOS updates unless you update your hardware at the same time. Each new iOS version brings new bells and whistles, but not performance. With each iOS capable hardware device you should expect significant performance boosts.
I think the real buzz kill is the massive leaks, rumors and speculation of what apple is doing compounded by their secrecy, and lack of being able to be first to market due to their desire to be the best which makes it take longer to execute and allows for only incremental updates to existing products.
I appreciate apple's due diligence to make amazing products which have the best overall complete end-to-end experience for consumers hands down. But with the leaks happening it's letting people speculate and come to conclusions that are even more grand than apple is going to release. This creates a sense of disappointment at the times of announcements. For example, people had speculated we would see the appleTV Television with integrated iSight camera at this product announcement. Since it didn't happen, and only other things which we already knew (5c, 5s, finger scanner, faster processors, updated camera) there wasn't a lot of room for surprise.
The only surprise I saw was the dual colored led flash. Everything else I seemed to have already heard about and seen leaks on the Internet for several weeks if not months.
If apple wants to keep surprising us, they need to close the loop on their leaks, or show us products sooner to be the first to introduce it to us, instead of the rumor mill.
Agreed.
Put in a managed switch, log in the switch to enable / disable the port when you want... <yawn> ...
Microsoft wants to join in because OSX is in the spotlight. Other companies have already admitted infiltration with the hack, so this gives them an opportunity to shine a bright light on OSX' security issues away from their own for a brief minute.
I'm pretty sure somebody did go in and fix the X11 desktop..... It was Apple w/ OSX.
When a game starts, it wants the entire desktop, it doesn't want the other desktop elements at all, no dock, no icons, interaction, etc.
Why isn't there a function to create a new virtual desktop at any resolution you want and leave the other desktop untouched? So when you switch between them it knows to switch resolutions as well. Have the resolution tag part of the desktop, so when you switch between them it knows what to switch to.
Seems like an easy fix.
I seriously attribute my love for adventure games to help me refine my troubleshooting skills and drive to "find the answer".
I believe that it's troubleshooting and the drive to find the answer that makes someone stand out in the work place, whether it's programming or anything else.
I played a lot of Kings Quest, The Secret of Monkey Island, Space Quest, Myst, etc.
I don't know if anybody "enjoys" smoking. They probably enjoyed it the first year or two when it was cool to hang out with the friends and feel cool "smoking", but nobody enjoys smelling like that all day long, or having their breath stink, or have your body take the toll it goes through from smoking. It's something that starts out socially, and then slowly but surely becomes incorporated into their daily living experience as a vice.
Someone needs to come up with some new "cool" way for people who hardly know each other can hang out and feel part something that doesn't involved sex, drugs, alcohol or smoking something. Smoking is a gateway to feel like you have friends. If you ask a stranger for a bite of a hamburger or a couple french fries they're going to think you're insane, ask for a light or a cigarette and they'll put down whatever they're doing and reach in their pocket and gladly help you out.
Same thing goes with the workforce. If you want to feel immediately cool, follow the group of people down to the smoking section and immediately there's a group of people who welcome you in to make you feel like you have a group of people to hang out with and talk to. Plus who can argue with going outside and talking with people all day long? It seems like smokers get the free-pass to leave their desk anytime they feel like it, and they have a good excuse.
With the high-school social desires of teens and interoffice acceptance of smoking it makes for tough competitor to "nothing".
Instead of putting all this money towards increased anti-smoking campaigns, all they would need to do is funnel a little bit of money into some sort of "social spots" that have gum, some candy, soda, water, nice chairs, and a place where it's accepted to hang out and talk for a few minutes and move on. This would give people the gratification they want to go into an area and hang out for a few minutes, talk, and go back to work. I think the problem with this idea is that there's no acceptable "need" to go down there every few hours. People might look at you as a slacker hanging down there, whereas the smoker doesn't get deemed a slacker for "going for a smoke"..
I think it requires a certain level of intelligence as a minimum. Nothing incredibly special but above average
There you have it. You think being able to program makes you special in some way or indicates that you're above average.
Here's the truth: Any idiot can write code. Hell, half of Slashdot taught themselves to program when they were between the ages of 8-13.
All it takes is the will to learn something new. It's no different than learning to work on cars. Do you think auto-mechanics have these same discussions? No. They're more emotionally stable, apparently, than the average developer.
Yeah, just about anyone can learn to write computer programs. Just like every who has ever learned to write code, they'll get better and better as they gain experience
Being able to write computer programs does not make you special. Get over yourself.
I think the problem is that people are trying to answer the question with a "one size fits all" approach to answering the question. Sure anybody who can make toast can program. But not everybody can make a toaster.
What I mean by that is you mentioned that the average joe mechanics don't have these conversations, but you have to consider that the average mechanic is not making the advancements or creating the car from pouring casts and machining the parts. They're assembling or disassembling. There is creativity in finding a problem with a car before taking the whole thing apart but otherwise it's fairly laid out.
Programmers, the big daddy programmers are special and unique. Just like the engineers who created a ferrari or any other major achievement. Any body can program, but not everybody has the patience, confidence or desire to take on massive tasks by themselves.
I have programmed for many years and I have never found a good workflow of working with a large team of developers to create a specific product. So far what I have seen is one or two highly motivated individuals to create the bulk of the product and the rest become break/fix contributors or continuing development after the product is well underway.
It's just what I have seen. And those examples could make me an exception not the rule but that's what I've seen.
Were projects like MySQL or PostgreSQL initially effects of one or two highly motivated and focused individuals? I know that unix was and about evey project I have ever seen at the early stages.
Being that these efforts are largely surrounded by individual contributors I think it enables these individual's to feel special and different. And to be honesty, anyone who takes on these massive feats and succeeds is unique and different. The rest are "programmers".
Does this mean you store text in non-song form in a different location than text in song-form?
Since that looks like a binary decision: how much melody is required for the sudden switch from the one storage location to the other?
Who said the brain is binary? Computers are binary, brains are analog. There's a lot more going on then on and off switches.
I wonder if you could prepare yourself for Alzheimers by writing and learning songs about all your important memories
I wonder if you could prepare yourself for Alzheimers by writing and learning songs about all your important memories
That reminds me of what the north American Indians had done. I would imagine there are songs of ancient time passed along due to this type of memory being the most protected.
Makes you wonder if there is something to the notion of singing angel references in the bible and why people sing in churches.
I have always found it so fascinating at how prevalent music is in our culture and profound an impact music has made on our history and makes up "who we are". Just about every kid in America is defined by a band or song or type of music. Just about every era is depicted by a musical theme.
It is almost completely correlated of advancements in music relate to advancements in technology.
Interesting.
I think these guys missed the mark by a long shot.
People aren't just "searching" any more. People have "apps", "portals", they have go-to places to get things. Google isn't where you go any more. People know what websites they want to use or they use the iPad or iPhone apps to find things. I believe it's the "app" revolution that changed the dynamics. People go to wikipedia to research stuff, open one of their apps to find a recipe for dinner or ask siri what to get for lunch.
Any machine being used for purposes outside of the intent of the owner should be shut down. Owners should be notified and given time to respond, but if they are unaware of the additional traffic their computer is spewing then they should be shut down until corrected.
Unfortunatly service providers probably don't care, they would probably rather have the $29.99/mo customer rather then shutting them down until it's fixed.
A super nerd explains why super wifi isn't wifi. General population doesn't give a fuck, as wifi means "wireless internet" to them.
General population then bitches when their Super "WiFi" doesn't interoperate with any of their existing WiFi equipment and in fact can't even be used directly in their laptop at present. From the article:-
For now, at least, you can't move a white-space device around. You can't put a white-space radio into a phone or laptop because each white-space device must check its location against a database to determine which TV channels and wireless microphones are being used in the device's area, so they can avoid those channels. [..] It will be a way for wireless Internet providers, especially in rural areas, to zap their network over to a main router in a home, which will then redistribute it to devices over Ethernet or standard Wi-Fi connections.
So you're right that they probably wouldn't care about the technical issues, and nor would they ever likely care if any difference was totally transparent (and thus irrelevant) to the man on the street. But it's not, and that's why "Super WiFi" is a crap and misleading name, even for Joe Public.
Ya whatever. We have constantly been living within different wifi standards such as 802.11a/b/n/whatever. Non techies understand the differences, but joe blow just listens to whatever the bestbuy guy at the store says. Bestbuy guy hands him a router and a card or whatever and pats him on the head and moves along to the counter. Same thing with 3G compatibility for iPads or what have you. People understand that not all 3G is compatible. People don't even know what 4g is yet. But it's all just marketing crap and at the end of the day people ask the techies what to do and hopefully they tell the consumers to get the correct stuff.
Having developed many projects, I personally can attest that I don't get anything productive done until everybody is asleep or if I decide to tune everybody out. It seems like there are too many real and "potential" distractions that my mind is chewing on instead of coming up with solutions to problems.
I have found it helpful to come together as a group once I have had plenty of time to think about what I want to do, along with the others having that same opportunity. That way we can have a discussion about ideas that have been thought through instead of just winging it.
I guess this will eliminate employees "upgrading" their company crackberries by dropping them in the toilet.
Yah, that could make for a problem buying used phones on ebay.... you'd never know why someone is selling a "perfectly good and working phone" for a discount.
Maybe coat all your batteries independently and the device without the battery in .... that would solve that I would imagine. Good question.
My friend knows these guys and had his iPhone done. I didn't believe it, but it's legit.
The reason is that the price is setup to pay for the "movie going experience", paying for the theater. But the reality is that a film that was less expensive to make should cost less to see it. That would be a good idea for the industry to embrace to combat feeling like they need to have a huge block buster, huge budget film to make any traction.
Security for a web app is about understanding that people will be breaking your system and hacking your system, so the goal is to reduce what will be able to be hacked, control the fallout at each stage, control the separation of duties between the web developers, database admins, and says admins with root, and alerting when anything happens on a system.
Security is only as good as your ability to make it work without any one person trusting the other. The system has to be built on lack of trust of any one person in the system. You have to assume that some new-hire is going to a potential problem.
Social engineering or internal crime rings are way worse of a problem for "secure sites" then a hole in some java code.
But with that said, the way you make a secure site starts with a multi-tiered approach having web front ends, an application tier, and a backend database.
Separation of the web front ends, which you assume will be hacked. You remove any and all potential vulnerabilities, services, processes running unnecessarily, compilers, and anything else not necessary to run your web application. Put in place a high alerting system triggered whenever anything changes on a system and potentially rebuilds the servers upon reboot at the most extreme end of things. Have the network rules setup to only allow the single application port from the web servers to the application servers. Don't allow any other traffic.
Next the application layer has a similar lock down removing anything and everything not required to run your app. Only allow the network traffic for the specific ports for the database from the application server.
On the database server maintain adoquite backups and lockdown proceedures for all data.
With all that said, your application needs to go through a security review with several people making sure you're not doing stupid stuff such as: making system calls leveraging variables supplied by end users, make sure to verify every one of the users inputs scrubbing any potential SQL injection, and make sure to double and triple check any time input is leveraged by the user along with a system call, database call, and of opening files or pipes or anything of the sort. The use input is where the hacking takes place.
Anyway, that's how it's done by the big boys. Good luck.
Tim Porter may be a nice guy and all, but if it was Google with all those so-called bogus/lax patents he'd be up there talking about how the patent system is fine and the problem really is more that the enforcement process depends on endless litigation and how the determination of infringement needs to be more streamlined.
He's a lawyer, his job is to be an advocate/mouthpiece for his employer's interests.
They (and most companies) play both sides of the fence. At the same time as saying how bad patents are for impinging on their products, they are buying as many companies with far-reaching patents as they can get their hands on -- "Our acquisition of Motorola will increase competition by strengthening Google’s patent portfolio", Larry Page.
You omitted the last half of that quote: "which will enable us to better protect Android from anti-competitive threats from Microsoft, Apple and other companies." What he was saying was that Google's new patents will increase competition by helping to prevent MS and Apple from shutting Android down, and I think his point is indisputable: Allowing MS and Apple to kill Android would reduce competition, so preserving android increases competition.
I truly don't think Google plays both sides of this fence; everything I've ever seen from Google's leadership decries the patent mess as a problem, and explains Google's own focus on acquiring and growing patents as a necessary evil. AFAIK (and I have paid attention), Google has never asserted any patents against anyone, except defensively.
I think Google really would prefer to change patent law and get rid of all these crap software patents -- or even all software patents, period. I think this is as much reflection of Google's arrogance as Google's altruism -- Google believes that given a level field they can beat the competition in any area they focus on. But I think there is actually a large dose of "good for society" thinking as well. You have to remember that fully half of Google's employees and nearly all of Google's management are software engineers, and the vast majority of software engineers think that software patents are bad for innovation, and software engineers love cool new technology. Google's engineers are no different all the way up to and including Sergey and Larry.
(Disclaimer: I'm a Google engineer, but all of the above is based on public information plus my perception of general attitudes within the company.)
Um, no duh! Of course Google would prefer to get rid of all patents. If you look at their business model it's all about 'ad revenue'. What do they care what software or hardware you run their ads on? The more software and hardware that hits their ads instead of other people's ads, the better.
So if they abolished all apple's patents (and everyone else for that matter) and people could make the best mobile device for free and not pay homage to any license (ie. java, or other), then there would exist more, cheaper mobile devices running android, and thus, hitting their ads.
So Google has nothing to loose and everything to gain if the patent system were dissolved over night.