Ecommerce isn't a real industry. Its a virtual industry, providing ephemeral goods in exchange for real dollars. Choose a scenario in which life and death are on the line and then we'll discuss whether similar radical actions are called-for or not.
Climate science indicates that the world is warming. Whether the globe is warming to human activity or excess flatulation from aardvarks is immaterial.
The best models indicate that the trend will continue. The best theoretic models predict that this will cause the polar ice caps to change: some cause it to melt, others to increase in size. Both outcomes are dire, massive increase in ocean levels resulting in New York becoming New Venice or a mile thick wall of ice rolling down over the Northern Hemisphere.
I'm a software engineer. I don't pretend to understand climatology, however I do know how to manage risk. When the evidence is pointing to a potential disaster, be it projects running late, major requirements being added at the last minute or something akin to the end of the world as we know it, I don't waste time with the "finger of blame". I ask, how do we mitigate the issue?
Since we don't know the root cause (or if there is even a single root cause), lets take action on all fronts and use this as an opportunity to make our lifestyles more sustainable and less impactful on the planet. Legislate lower vehicular emissions and mass transit use. Use incentives to get people to cycle or walk. Require companies to institute work-from-home plans. Slap taxes on pollution from industries to force them to reduce their emissions. Bar import of goods from countries that don't adhere to the global standard. Humans (and the companies they run) are adaptable, they'll find other work.
If we're wrong and global warming isn't actually happening, at least we'll have some positive outcomes. If we're right, maybe we can prevent a total catastrophe. Inaction, garners little or no benefit if human-caused GW isn't actually occurring, but will be a direct contributor to disaster if it is.
The Canadian fishing industry is a good example. Those folks who lost their jobs are hurting, but they are alive and there is some chance that the fishing will reopen. If GW is real, millions if not billions will die from starvation, be displaced into refugee camps as their towns are flooded or be impacted by regional conflicts as countries struggle to deal with the changing climate.
Once you have a "testing" job on your resume, its pretty dang hard to get anyone looking for a coder to consider your application seriously. I've run into at least a dozen hiring managers who discard resumes for dev positions solely because the last job someone held was as a tester.
Official release 1993, pre-release versions were available in 1992.
My university was one of the first to have a "high speed" link then. IIRC, we had a dedicated DS1 which allowed those of us in the engineering school to view some of the very first pictures available on the web using pre-release Mosaic beta loads. Several of the grad students at the time were working with folks doing the primary research on surrounding technologies.
I *think* it was 1992 (my second year) when we started using it pretty heavily. A favorite passtime was downloading "questionable" pics from the various alt.xxx.pictures newsgroups and opening mosaic windows on other people's Sun workstations, so that the lab admin would kick them out... That lab admin, wasn't too sharp.
Most/all companies set salaries according to the "market median". They claim to have commissioned some survey org to go poll for salaries in the area and then set their salary bands accordingly. They don't attempt to retain talent but salary, but by inertia.
If I'm not likely to get lots more dough for moving someplace new, I probably won't. A new workplace means: - you need to integrate into a new environment, which might be worse than your current. - You definitely need to prove yourself at the new place by quickly showing accomplishments and expertise in the new products etc, which means substantial unpaid overtime. - Your vacation bank becomes empty, so plans for the winter escape to Aruba are toast. - If you end up on a team of cliquish top 5%'ers, good luck seeing any career path at the new place 'cause there is a line up of the old guard a mile long in front of you.
I think one of the major issues with offshoring to India or other locales is cultural.
In most 1st world countries, employees are independent and, honestly, brazen enough to respectfully tell their boss/team-lead/architect about all the holes and errors they may have made when spec'ing out some work. This is substantially due to the fact that getting fired in those countries for attempting to improve the product quality non-existent or protected (wrongful dismissal). In emerging economies, the peon has no protection and if they dare "show up" their boss by pointing out problems, they face the real risk of losing their job and being deemed "unemployable due to insubordination". That may mean they end up destitute and out on the street.
I've crossed swords with VPs and CEOs in my time, for what I deemed as was good for the company/product. I risked getting nuked, but felt that the risk was worth it because my intentions were good. Sometimes this has resulted in the leader swallowing their pride and adopting the change, sometimes I've ended up on the wrong side of a decision. Thinking back, I doubt I'd ever had done that if the downside wasn't getting a layoff but instead losing my home and being unable to feed my family.
The author, by failing to mention the current oil-based energy strategy at all, while vilifying the alternative energy sources leaves the reader with a sense of, "the alternatives are bad, lets keep using the current infra until we come up with something better." Interestingly, nuclear energy is *not* mentioned either, positive or negative - it's completely omitted.
I'd not be surprised if the author was either a shill for the oil and gas companies or the nuclear energy affiliates.
Huawei is a Chinese government funded company. I'm sure the funding isn't charity.
I would've thought after Huawei was caught stealing cisco tech (http://newsroom.cisco.com/dlls/Cisco_Mot_for_PI.pdf), that they'd be blackballed for any government network deployments.
I think particularly bad transpositions can trigger the phonetic interpreter.
> I had initially parsed 'brleay' as 'barley'
I did that *exact* parsing as well. Makes some sense "br" "leay" could be read phonetically as "brr-lee" or "brr-lay" which sound like a Southern US (first) or British Isles (second) pronunciation.
I think all of us in the tech industry know of or have experienced decisions which make sense only when viewed from the light of "near term profit is the most important."
You know: - Downsizing skilled engineering teams to cut costs in order to hit profit numbers - Terminating new products before they've been completed, because some number cruncher couldn't foresee profitability - Failure to endorse refactoring of software modules engineering states are fragile/non-maintainable because it requires dedication of resources to something that doesn't drive current revenues - The list goes on
Here we have evidence, finally, that profit at all costs isn't how you run a company.
Nutshell summary after actually reading the TFA:
"You can launch any operating system you like, but if you want to benefit from UEFI secure boot protection, you can only launch Windows 8."
From their screenshots and commentary, there doesn't appear to be any opportunity to add a new "trusted" O/S images to their database. So even signing your secure Red Hat Enterprise Linux won't help you. If you want to use it, you need to turn the bootloader security checks off. The obvious implication, if you want MBR protection you must run Windows 8. Anything else opens the door.
Yup, Red Hat's take on the situation seems the most accurate.
They should just make c in E = mc^2 the speed of the nutrino.
Very interesting thought. Photons interact with matter all the time and have been shown to slow down when passing through certain media. Neutrinos rarely interact with anything, so of all the known particles, they are a candidate to travel at the maximum speed allowable.
Increased taxes for high income earners are *not* barricades to becoming rich. It's a recognition of the fact that you don't need $1M to survive.
A family of 4 earning $1M and paying $500k in taxes is still *very* rich. A family of 4 earning $22.5k/year (poverty line) who pays $1k in taxes, is technically *living in poverty* as their net income is below $22.5k. Heck, that family of 4 earning $1M could pay $750K in taxes and still go home with $250k in their pocket.
Once family income exceeds 10x the poverty line, they rest is just gravy. That money gets spent (if its not just horded, as is common) on trips overseas and fancy foreign vehicles that do very little to contribute to domestic jobs. There is a misconception that the rich are job creators. The real job creators are the middle class that can't afford lavish trips abroad or expensive goods manufactured offshore and instead spend their money closer to home.
In the spirit of "sharing the pain" all groups were tagged with layoff requirements. This included lean teams doing critical operations in core businesses (routing, aggregation, security etc).
While the engineers are still excellent, Cisco is no longer a company run by skilled technical professionals focused on delivering quality products. Its an accounting operation infested with old-boys-clubs where decisions are primarily the result of office politics, not technical correctness. The smart people are leaving, the lucky ones are getting laid off with severance packages, the unfortunate are left holding the bag.
This is actually a valid Apple-bash. The invalid certs were issued as signed root CAs, which means the holder of then could create a SSL cert for Bank Of America that appears completely valid with no errors from the browser and no errors when you check the chain of trust. Its essentially a T-2000 doppelganger that you can't detect until it changes its hand into a marlinspike and stabs you. The only folks likely to detect it, without the certificate revocation, are the same security certificate chain savvy techies who found it to begin with.
Apple's responsibility is to immediately update the CA cert trust store on the browser to protect its users from getting caught. If a trust store update is going to take a while (it shouldn't) they need to issue a general advisory so that at least some of their userbase will be made aware. They didn't publish anything until now, when they have a patch. That is not acceptable.
If you're dumb enough not to get your kids vacinated, natural selection will ensure your genes don't get passed along. Sadly, it'll be your kids who pay the price for your unfitness and you'll get to watch.
I'd call that child abuse - exposing your kid to undo danger. Kinda like dangling your kid over the balcony of a highrise apartment.
Felt it in Ottawa, the world stopped swaying for a few seconds and resumed after the quake. I know I have too much alcohol in my system: firewater lunch = Winning!
Nice! I might spring the $14.99 for proper shipping form Purolator instead of relying on Futureshop's default free Canada Post overnight delivery.
Canada Post (the f-ers) left my brand new (free!) XBox on the step in full view of the street with a threatening thunderstorm. Fortunately the retired couple across the street noticed and picked it up before either the weather or someone untrustworthy did.
I swear, I've read this exact post before. Its as inaccurate now as it was then. Public instant messaging is just as secure or moresecure than other phone vendors
Fortunately folks like you don't make the security related decisions at large corps or governments and savvy private individuals can see through the hyper and misinformation.
Slashdot Mirror
Strawman argument.
Ecommerce isn't a real industry. Its a virtual industry, providing ephemeral goods in exchange for real dollars. Choose a scenario in which life and death are on the line and then we'll discuss whether similar radical actions are called-for or not.
Climate science indicates that the world is warming. Whether the globe is warming to human activity or excess flatulation from aardvarks is immaterial.
The best models indicate that the trend will continue. The best theoretic models predict that this will cause the polar ice caps to change: some cause it to melt, others to increase in size. Both outcomes are dire, massive increase in ocean levels resulting in New York becoming New Venice or a mile thick wall of ice rolling down over the Northern Hemisphere.
I'm a software engineer. I don't pretend to understand climatology, however I do know how to manage risk. When the evidence is pointing to a potential disaster, be it projects running late, major requirements being added at the last minute or something akin to the end of the world as we know it, I don't waste time with the "finger of blame". I ask, how do we mitigate the issue?
Since we don't know the root cause (or if there is even a single root cause), lets take action on all fronts and use this as an opportunity to make our lifestyles more sustainable and less impactful on the planet. Legislate lower vehicular emissions and mass transit use. Use incentives to get people to cycle or walk. Require companies to institute work-from-home plans. Slap taxes on pollution from industries to force them to reduce their emissions. Bar import of goods from countries that don't adhere to the global standard. Humans (and the companies they run) are adaptable, they'll find other work.
If we're wrong and global warming isn't actually happening, at least we'll have some positive outcomes. If we're right, maybe we can prevent a total catastrophe. Inaction, garners little or no benefit if human-caused GW isn't actually occurring, but will be a direct contributor to disaster if it is.
The Canadian fishing industry is a good example. Those folks who lost their jobs are hurting, but they are alive and there is some chance that the fishing will reopen. If GW is real, millions if not billions will die from starvation, be displaced into refugee camps as their towns are flooded or be impacted by regional conflicts as countries struggle to deal with the changing climate.
Once you have a "testing" job on your resume, its pretty dang hard to get anyone looking for a coder to consider your application seriously. I've run into at least a dozen hiring managers who discard resumes for dev positions solely because the last job someone held was as a tester.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosaic_(web_browser)
Official release 1993, pre-release versions were available in 1992.
My university was one of the first to have a "high speed" link then. IIRC, we had a dedicated DS1 which allowed those of us in the engineering school to view some of the very first pictures available on the web using pre-release Mosaic beta loads. Several of the grad students at the time were working with folks doing the primary research on surrounding technologies.
I *think* it was 1992 (my second year) when we started using it pretty heavily. A favorite passtime was downloading "questionable" pics from the various alt.xxx.pictures newsgroups and opening mosaic windows on other people's Sun workstations, so that the lab admin would kick them out... That lab admin, wasn't too sharp.
Good times, good times!
This is actually quite pertinent.
Most/all companies set salaries according to the "market median". They claim to have commissioned some survey org to go poll for salaries in the area and then set their salary bands accordingly. They don't attempt to retain talent but salary, but by inertia.
If I'm not likely to get lots more dough for moving someplace new, I probably won't. A new workplace means:
- you need to integrate into a new environment, which might be worse than your current.
- You definitely need to prove yourself at the new place by quickly showing accomplishments and expertise in the new products etc, which means substantial unpaid overtime.
- Your vacation bank becomes empty, so plans for the winter escape to Aruba are toast.
- If you end up on a team of cliquish top 5%'ers, good luck seeing any career path at the new place 'cause there is a line up of the old guard a mile long in front of you.
I think one of the major issues with offshoring to India or other locales is cultural.
In most 1st world countries, employees are independent and, honestly, brazen enough to respectfully tell their boss/team-lead/architect about all the holes and errors they may have made when spec'ing out some work. This is substantially due to the fact that getting fired in those countries for attempting to improve the product quality non-existent or protected (wrongful dismissal). In emerging economies, the peon has no protection and if they dare "show up" their boss by pointing out problems, they face the real risk of losing their job and being deemed "unemployable due to insubordination". That may mean they end up destitute and out on the street.
I've crossed swords with VPs and CEOs in my time, for what I deemed as was good for the company/product. I risked getting nuked, but felt that the risk was worth it because my intentions were good. Sometimes this has resulted in the leader swallowing their pride and adopting the change, sometimes I've ended up on the wrong side of a decision. Thinking back, I doubt I'd ever had done that if the downside wasn't getting a layoff but instead losing my home and being unable to feed my family.
So can Apple. And I won't post as an AC. :P
The author, by failing to mention the current oil-based energy strategy at all, while vilifying the alternative energy sources leaves the reader with a sense of, "the alternatives are bad, lets keep using the current infra until we come up with something better." Interestingly, nuclear energy is *not* mentioned either, positive or negative - it's completely omitted.
I'd not be surprised if the author was either a shill for the oil and gas companies or the nuclear energy affiliates.
Huawei is a Chinese government funded company. I'm sure the funding isn't charity.
I would've thought after Huawei was caught stealing cisco tech (http://newsroom.cisco.com/dlls/Cisco_Mot_for_PI.pdf), that they'd be blackballed for any government network deployments.
I think particularly bad transpositions can trigger the phonetic interpreter.
> I had initially parsed 'brleay' as 'barley'
I did that *exact* parsing as well. Makes some sense "br" "leay" could be read phonetically as "brr-lee" or "brr-lay" which sound like a Southern US (first) or British Isles (second) pronunciation.
It's a space station.
I think all of us in the tech industry know of or have experienced decisions which make sense only when viewed from the light of "near term profit is the most important."
You know:
- Downsizing skilled engineering teams to cut costs in order to hit profit numbers
- Terminating new products before they've been completed, because some number cruncher couldn't foresee profitability
- Failure to endorse refactoring of software modules engineering states are fragile/non-maintainable because it requires dedication of resources to something that doesn't drive current revenues
- The list goes on
Here we have evidence, finally, that profit at all costs isn't how you run a company.
Android runtimes appear to be supported, according to their release.
Uh no. Please mod down parent for displaying complete ignorance of the subject.
I think they're trying to pull a fast one on us. /rimshot
Nutshell summary after actually reading the TFA:
"You can launch any operating system you like, but if you want to benefit from UEFI secure boot protection, you can only launch Windows 8."
From their screenshots and commentary, there doesn't appear to be any opportunity to add a new "trusted" O/S images to their database. So even signing your secure Red Hat Enterprise Linux won't help you. If you want to use it, you need to turn the bootloader security checks off. The obvious implication, if you want MBR protection you must run Windows 8. Anything else opens the door.
Yup, Red Hat's take on the situation seems the most accurate.
They should just make c in E = mc^2 the speed of the nutrino.
Very interesting thought. Photons interact with matter all the time and have been shown to slow down when passing through certain media. Neutrinos rarely interact with anything, so of all the known particles, they are a candidate to travel at the maximum speed allowable.
Capitalism is not about not paying taxes. No where in any definition of the free market system is "no taxes" mentioned.
Increased taxes for high income earners are *not* barricades to becoming rich. It's a recognition of the fact that you don't need $1M to survive.
A family of 4 earning $1M and paying $500k in taxes is still *very* rich. A family of 4 earning $22.5k/year (poverty line) who pays $1k in taxes, is technically *living in poverty* as their net income is below $22.5k. Heck, that family of 4 earning $1M could pay $750K in taxes and still go home with $250k in their pocket.
Once family income exceeds 10x the poverty line, they rest is just gravy. That money gets spent (if its not just horded, as is common) on trips overseas and fancy foreign vehicles that do very little to contribute to domestic jobs. There is a misconception that the rich are job creators. The real job creators are the middle class that can't afford lavish trips abroad or expensive goods manufactured offshore and instead spend their money closer to home.
In the spirit of "sharing the pain" all groups were tagged with layoff requirements. This included lean teams doing critical operations in core businesses (routing, aggregation, security etc).
While the engineers are still excellent, Cisco is no longer a company run by skilled technical professionals focused on delivering quality products. Its an accounting operation infested with old-boys-clubs where decisions are primarily the result of office politics, not technical correctness. The smart people are leaving, the lucky ones are getting laid off with severance packages, the unfortunate are left holding the bag.
This is actually a valid Apple-bash. The invalid certs were issued as signed root CAs, which means the holder of then could create a SSL cert for Bank Of America that appears completely valid with no errors from the browser and no errors when you check the chain of trust. Its essentially a T-2000 doppelganger that you can't detect until it changes its hand into a marlinspike and stabs you. The only folks likely to detect it, without the certificate revocation, are the same security certificate chain savvy techies who found it to begin with.
Apple's responsibility is to immediately update the CA cert trust store on the browser to protect its users from getting caught. If a trust store update is going to take a while (it shouldn't) they need to issue a general advisory so that at least some of their userbase will be made aware. They didn't publish anything until now, when they have a patch. That is not acceptable.
Darwinian selection at work.
If you're dumb enough not to get your kids vacinated, natural selection will ensure your genes don't get passed along. Sadly, it'll be your kids who pay the price for your unfitness and you'll get to watch.
I'd call that child abuse - exposing your kid to undo danger. Kinda like dangling your kid over the balcony of a highrise apartment.
Felt it in Ottawa, the world stopped swaying for a few seconds and resumed after the quake. I know I have too much alcohol in my system: firewater lunch = Winning!
Nice! I might spring the $14.99 for proper shipping form Purolator instead of relying on Futureshop's default free Canada Post overnight delivery.
Canada Post (the f-ers) left my brand new (free!) XBox on the step in full view of the street with a threatening thunderstorm. Fortunately the retired couple across the street noticed and picked it up before either the weather or someone untrustworthy did.
I swear, I've read this exact post before. Its as inaccurate now as it was then. Public instant messaging is just as secure or more secure than other phone vendors
Fortunately folks like you don't make the security related decisions at large corps or governments and savvy private individuals can see through the hyper and misinformation.