Why does slashdot keep mentioning Kaspersky? The world needs to just forget they exist. Kind of like the country they are in. The world doesn't need it at all, but it needs the world. Let's just ignore the whole bunch.
I love my iPhone, it mostly works and doesn't endlessly make me angry like my Sony Android did.
This phone would cause me to switch in a heartbeat. The key though is that I am a programmer, embedded and otherwise. Seemingly a pretty niche market. But I am an influencer. Not that I can tell the entire world to switch but I work with businesses and could make a far more compelling reason to use Samsung. Super custom security or whatever. This is a very very smart thing for them to cater to the many but small percentage of people like me.
Pandora pretended to be music for me and all that pretend pandering, but when all was said and done it was boomers pretty much telling me how I should listen to their music.
Spotify is much closer to actually pandering to my tastes. The one thing that it does not seem to want to do is allow me to block certain artists. Who the hell wants to listen to Bieber? I certainly don't, yet the damn thing keeps putting him in my "discover" list. I want to block his tattooed ass right now. This is where Spotify also gets it wrong. By allowing backroom music deals it just makes a huge opening for me to move on in a heartbeat to any service that allows me to fully control what goes into my earballs.
Developers should absolutely have unit and integration tests and only deliver a product to QA that they think will be immediately passed onto the customer. But within many organizations this just doesn't make people happy, and unhappy people make bad decisions. QA can give a seal of approval that gets better buy in within the company. This should not be the way it is but that's life.
Lastly, a good QA will look to see that what was produced is what was actually asked for and promised. This is no small thing, because many programming teams can lose sight of what the contract actually says. "But it's better" is something that should be negotiated, not just delivered.
But that said, QA can be a major road block. It is not uncommon that you throw things over the fence only to find that QA has hyper focused on something that isn't a requirement. For instance you might have some system that does echo location to find the distance to a wall. Your requirements call for one successful echo location every 10 seconds. You fire out 10 per second and around 50% fail. The reality is that you are getting roughly 5 ranges per second and never will you miss your target of one every 10 seconds. Yet QA gets all wound up about the 50% failure rate and reports that the product has a 50% failure rate. This is where you begin convincing the accountants that the QA department needs a head count reduction.
I generally prefer 3.x Python. What I really like is python when it works. But over and over and over, I have downloaded a library or some code that only runs on one or the other. Keeping both up to date and with the latest libraries is a huge pain in the bottom. The way I have it installed also seems to send some products for a loop when they simply insist that I must have 2.7 installed. So I go and change which version is "python" just so that program can run.
I really don't care what the arguments are for the lack of backwards compatibility; doing this really hurt python with a self inflicted wound.
The next self inflicted wound is the speed of python. I see these crazy arguments that in order to make it faster that it needs strongly typed variables. That is total BS as there are many scripted languages without this that run blazingly fast (JS, PHP, Lue, etc) without this.
Quite simply the people who are in charge of steering python seem to be way more interested in giving talks at python conferences than keeping python moving forward. Oh there are lots of little features being added, but nothing like the leaps and bounds that JS and PHP have made in the same time period. JS is not screwing up with a backwards compat problem. And PHP trimmed out some crud so is technically not backwards compat anymore but if you were using the features they cut, you were writing bad code.
Python rocks. I use it for ML, I use it for so many quick and dirty things. But all this means is that nothing is better right now. Look a perl. It owned the world of scripting 17 years ago.
I don't so much mean after netflix so much as I think that Netflix is sort of trying to do TV better. Early TV was more radio with pictures or stage plays over the air or a movie box. Then TV discovered what it was, it was something different.
For instance. I suspect that as Netflix evolves that the whole format of a show will evolve with it. Many people binge watch. So why even bother breaking a series into episodes. Just one 14 hour journey? Maybe?
For instance many people are envisioning driverless cars as just cars that you don't drive. I see them as something wildly different. Just like people do still watch movies on TV, people will use driverless cars to boringly go from A to B. But I suspect that they will open up use cases that are way different.
A tiny example would be old people. As old people and their friends are at the edge or over the edge of where they can drive. They will favour places that favour them. Thus an old person in a section of the city with tight parallel only parking will get far fewer friends visiting than the friend with the grand circular driveway in the slow easy going part of town.
Then as they all age more, their independence goes more and more. Better nursing homes offer endless chauffeuring for those old people who can't get their kids to drive them places. Lesser ones offer regular bus rides to vaguely interesting places like the mall. But driverless cars will open up so much for old people. This will effectively leap frog so many services that cater to old people and their inability to drive. I can predict a few, but I suspect that once we see the system in action and evolve for a while there will be many "That was obvious" situations that we can't yet see.
One of my favourite signs of technological signs of progress is when there is a technological end run. That is when some existing business completely dominates an area. Then some technology comes along and people take a few cracks at getting ahead of the dominating business via duplicating that business in the new way. But then people realize that the old business model is just not applicable anymore and then the old business just withers and dies.
Sometimes this just happens pretty clearly and fast such as Yellowpages. But sometimes it just sort of happens. For instance Microsoft is just not that relevant to most people's lives anymore. Phones just ate their need for a new PC every couple of years, or potentially any PC at all. Intel is suffering the same fate. Mobile just ate their lunch. They still have a market, but intel inside is something that most people don't see anymore.
This makes me wonder about Netflix. Right now they are upending the entire cable TV world but even Netflix still strikes me as too similar to Cable TV, better, but very similar. Thus I wonder what is going to come along and truly upend TV in general.
For anyone on/. ask a small business owner if the demise of Yellowpages is a bad thing.
I love these old companies that think they can join the modern age by copying other companies; except they always copy the wrong things and then go on to keep the things that allow the successful companies to end run the old ones.
For instance, who thinks that Disney will have endless advertising for their other products, toys, etc? Who thinks that they will have endless FBI warnings? Who thinks that they will do things to manipulate schedules so as to "addict" the little tikes?
Also who thinks that this would stay at $5 if it were to take off. I guarantee there is a spreadsheet and powerpoint presentation with an eventual price of $19.95 once they have "done in" Netflix.
Here is my simple litmus test. McDonalds and Disney have had a long standing relationship. What are the chances that somehow this new online thing continues to peddle McDonalds poison?
Here is the simple truth: People who have cut cords are enjoying their freedom from being told what to buy their kids and how their kids should think. Disney is insane if they think that people will give them money to have that crap back in their lives.
The movie industry is suffering big time from this. Quite simply, I enjoy movies, but have no idea what is on in theaters anymore. This is because I have pretty much eliminated advertising from my life. No Cable, no newspapers (foreign magazines only), adblocking galore, and subscriptions to things like Netflix that don't advertise much (some product placements). I am a much happier person for this.
I would love to raise kids now that they won't plunk themselves in front of TV and be told what to buy for the next 18 years.
This "Add tech to make kids smart" crap is brutally annoying. I have seen this since I was in school decades ago. There are certain things that schools are very very bad at teaching. One of the main reasons they suck at teaching things like languages and technology is that they focus on teaching things that can then be tested.
With spoken languages it is way easier to test for verb conjugation than the ability to exchange ideas with another person in the language in question. The same goes with technology. Technology is a tool, not an end goal. I used 3D modeling programs to make a 3D printed thing that solves a problem. I might be able to solve the same thing with glue, wax, duct tape, etc.
The problem that I would suggest that computers could help with is crappy teachers. Going with best of breed lectures or some other replacement for where many teachers suck would be a good start. That is probably the last thing they would use computers for. Or using computers for self guided learning, but nope that would be too scary for unions and very hard to test. So they probably used them for totally bureaucratic things that, at best, solved problems the administrators were having such as matching up kids IDs with their standardized tests. If you want to see the kids who excel from their school experiences with technology look at the kids who do things like build solar cars, or whatever fairly open ended technology problem they are let loose on. Those are the kids who go on to MIT; not the kids who memorized the 8 attributes of an Object Oriented Programming language or memorized the difference between functional and procedural programming without actually doing a single interesting program.
I changed the files in a.pro file and visual studio simply deleted all the files that I didn't list in the pro file. Not three months, but nearly a day's work just gone. Maybe a heads up when I am deleting multiple files would be nice; and not some ambiguous message, but a clear listing of the files that will be shot.
If my hedge fund(mythical) filled with people with zero ethics get their hands on a AI that will allow them to manipulate world markets, media, or world events to make them money, then they will do so.
With hindsight there are lots of places where the world turned out to me much more fragile than anyone thought until it snapped. How many times has the snap not happened but we came very close. Thus if you have a good AI at your beck and call to find these weaknesses and you are prepared to exploit them to make some money then how much more miserable would the world be?
I don't only worry about some skynet scenario, but I worry about giving tools to nitwits like hedge fund managers to make more money while not actually producing anything. One magical thing about making money with the first really good moneymaking AI is that you can then start hiring all the world's AI experts while making massive donations to universities to shut down their AI research. I doubt there is a university that wouldn't happily shut down their AI research for a billion or two.
I'm looking at you facebook; what are the chances they were abusing the old API. It sounds like a right pain in the ass from a development point of view. Maybe though with this there could be a way from phone calls interrupting my skype calls. That would be a huge win.
I shut down apps because I don't trust that they aren't pulling crap in the background. For instance many apps don't give the option to not locate when in background and only give you the options to locate or not. Well, if this is a map app I am forced to allow the locate. But I don't want that little bastard reporting any crap when it is not front and center.
I hate that I have to use facebook messenger to communicate with certain people. I 100% do not trust that crap to run in the background and not pull some privacy raping stunt.
Then there is the BS factor. I suspect that some apps are totally quiet in the background. But other apps are most certainly doing crap. A simple example is my audiobook app is most definitely still doing stuff when I am on other apps; this is a good feature, but a clear and simple proof that an app can do stuff while "hidden". How many other apps are either doing something that I don't want; Or are just badly programmed and just wasting time and energy? If the answer is one or more, then I will continue to swipe up with great glee.
I have a strong suspicion that these useless turds of studies are being promoted by people who really really don't want us shutting down their apps.
A feature that I would love is that I could say without any app being able to stop me (SHUT THE BUGGER DOWN WHEN IN BACKGROUND) and by shut down I mean not a single bit of info goes in or out, and the app doesn't get a single CPU cycle.
Quite simply, why won't the vendors of phones give us the privacy control that I want. For instance, I would love to not only be able to block most apps from having any network access; but I would love to have a granular firewall. For instance my browser could go to sites, but can't go to google anything, for any reason.
Seeing that I would be out cold. 60kph on a major highway wouldn't bother me at all. Might bother a few other people. But hey, that is what earplugs are for.
I have fired one of these. When you are on the range and begin firing one of these, many of the other people will stop to come over and watch the massive cannon going off. Or they stop because they need to move away from the noise that is overwhelming their hearing protection.
These things will punch holes in metal plates. I am not sure there is a paper book in the world that would stop it. I would not be surprised if this could easily go through 3-5 phone books.
For those not familiar with guns, I wouldn't depend on a fairly thick book to stop a.22 caliber pistol which is one step up from a bb gun. It would probably stop it, probably.
That said, I need to go, there are some crazy people yelling each other and I need to film it for youtube.
I love how the tech world has nearly non stop crapped on PHP but largely left Ruby alone. While I haven't used PHP in about 8 years, I do admire the fact that most websites that use it and then grow massively, then continue to use it. While most Ruby sites that I know of dump Ruby on Rails as they cross a certain size and just can't keep it working.
I can't comment on why this is, just that I have seen it at least a dozen times on sites where the company was crossing about the 5 million in value barrier. The three complaints of the people running the companies are: Can't get truly senior programmers who will touch Ruby. Progress pretty much stops as they fight more and more with their product as performance and new functionality dries up. And usually someone within the company starts using a whole other platform to start redoing chunks of their product with results that make them angry they are so much better.
On one note, the definition of "Senior Programmer" is not someone with many years of Ruby experience, but huge amounts of experience with massive projects. The key to the definition is not just time in the business but a proven track record of putting multi million dollar projects to bed over and over. If they mention Ruby they get no interest from these types, if they don't mention Ruby then these types bugger off when they hear Ruby. But when the prospect of hiring them to replace the Ruby with a whole new foundation, they are usually very interested.
A decade ago, Ruby was hip, It is not hip, it is often an indicator of a site built by people who have never managed a site much bigger than a sub 1 million dollar company's web site (a company where the website is the company that is).
But like any halfway workable language. It seems to work fine for basic, data in and out on a website type drudgery. Thus it won't just die as there are no doubt many 30 year olds with a decade of Ruby under their belts who will insist on using their singular hammer for the rest of their careers. VB is still a thing too.
With an industry perspective like that, I can see why Ruby is on the Ropes.
I work with some women who have come from very repressive cultures. They love that they come to North America and the guys are crude as crap (in my professional work place), but not in any negative way to women. More the fart joke taken way too far crude. Whereas in their culture everyone was really polite while treating women like crap.
A stilted workplace simply can't be creative. But some people will take this opening the wrong way and it can be very hard to explain to them that crude does not equal mean.
I have been in the tech world for more than 3 decades. I have also seen the VC scene in many places from big to podunk. I would say that the VC types that I meet come in 3 main flavours. Arrogant bean counters who know what is good for you. Arrogant assholes who think they are god. And Arrogant thieves who pretty much have to rip you off to make themselves feel better.
My favourite was at a recent tech talk by a woman (who gives government money to VCs) (Canada) who said that she won't give money if the founders make too much (over 100k) but that she was leaving government to become an advisor to a start-up that had recently raised around 5m. I asked her if she was only going to take 100k. She pretty much yelled at me that I had no understanding of the real world.
Her theory was that if you give the founders more than 100k in salary they become distracted spending it.
I was wondering how I could expose her in some way for the corruption she was displaying by working for a company she had just given government money to when I witnessed one of the tech people who had attended her talk, keying the living crap out of her car with the words, 100k over and over.
It was a brand new higher end BMW BTW.
On a funny note, there is nothing funnier than some podunk tech "titan" who sells some company for 10-20 mil and starts giving TED style keynote speeches that are the tech equivalent of spiritual mumbo-jumbo while wearing clothing that they spent much time and money on trying to look really casual. The contrast with the person who usually gives a too long winded introduction and wears an ill-fitting off the rack suit just makes it all funnier.
Then all the desperate start-up types try their damnedest to "network" with the speaker who basically holds out their hand for their ring to be kissed.
I love how they play up their serial entrepreneur business creds when their actual history is: fail-fail-fail-fail-lottery-fail-fail-fail-fail.
These losers have been imposing their will through advertisers and whatnot for decades. One of the huge benefits of using Netflix is that they don't appear to give a flying F to these "Moral Majority" freaks.
When are we going to finally start taxing religions and make these people dry up and blow away?
It is scary how few companies backup their crap. I would be willing to bet that less than 30% of billion dollar companies (that really depend on their computers for day to day operations) could be back in operation in under 24 hours if they lost all their servers at once.
I wouldn't be surprised to find that a good percentage would be very screwed in the long term.
This is not only their data but the system as a whole. When I am consulting at most companies that are retiring servers I often suggest that they box them and put them in a safe place as a super emergency backup. The idea being that those servers are probably close to what they need to struggle along. This is after I have usually laid out a solid backup and disaster recovery plan. Seeing that most companies won't do a good backup then having some 2 year out of date servers might be better than nothing.
I don't kind of hate voicemail but I really really hate it. With my provider I can't turn it off. So I have a voicemail saying, "Don't leave a voice mail." I got rid of a phone where I couldn't turn off the voicemail notifications.
Quite simply there should be a do not bother me law. Mail, phone, voicemail, or pretty much any government regulated resource that I have should not be available for people to market their crap. That includes charities and politicians.
I don't even want warnings. I turned on the weather warning texts that my local government offered and they basically spammed me with "Be prepared" or "There is a weather warning in a place so far away that I will never ever go there, ever." messages. I turned it off a day later. So if there is an alien invasion where they have guns that fire tornadoes, I still don't want a text or voicemail.
Open source is one of the greatest things to have happened in modern civilization. But people who push the GPL is are a bunch of douche-bag assholes. Stallman and his ilk don't do GPL so that their code can be free. But so they can have power over other coders. Often you will see GPL projects that "allow" a corporate license.
It is a nasty game they play. A GPL library will be "Standard" more and more until there really is no alternative. How is this any better than places like Microsoft?
Then the assholes will say, "Well if you don't like it then make your own library." The key here is that most of the people who probably contributed to the project didn't want it GPL but it was the only project in town.
I regularly have my company donate to many open source projects. These donations are pretty good (1-5k each) but we all fully agree that never in a million years would we donate to a GPL project or any over arching project ever.
I am around 50, I work with Computer Engineers (yes, with engineering degrees) with a typical age well under 30. They are some of the most conservative old school programmers I have worked with.
Happy with Python 2.6 because it was what they used last. Happy with C or C++ from the 90s. Unit testing... WTF is that good for? They pretty much live up to every stereotype of a 65 year old programmer.
Then it gets even better. They advocate a bastardized version of Agile when they are working on projects that are nearly a perfect fit for PMI style management. Yet they avoid innovation and change and actual agility like it is the bogeyman.
I have hived off a group of programmers who wanted to change (of mostly younger ages) and have my own dept that is now running circles around the bulk of the company. I am not sure what percentage of them want to come aboard, but it has hit a point where the old guard freak me out so much that I will probably only staff my department from new hires. (of any age as long as they are willing to innovate and grow as hard as they can)
Slashdot Mirror
Their prices put them on my no-fly-list for drones anyway.
As a point of hacking pride I hope that anyone who finds a DJI bug just publishes it without any heads up to DJI.
Why does slashdot keep mentioning Kaspersky? The world needs to just forget they exist. Kind of like the country they are in. The world doesn't need it at all, but it needs the world. Let's just ignore the whole bunch.
I love my iPhone, it mostly works and doesn't endlessly make me angry like my Sony Android did.
This phone would cause me to switch in a heartbeat. The key though is that I am a programmer, embedded and otherwise. Seemingly a pretty niche market. But I am an influencer. Not that I can tell the entire world to switch but I work with businesses and could make a far more compelling reason to use Samsung. Super custom security or whatever. This is a very very smart thing for them to cater to the many but small percentage of people like me.
Pandora pretended to be music for me and all that pretend pandering, but when all was said and done it was boomers pretty much telling me how I should listen to their music.
Spotify is much closer to actually pandering to my tastes. The one thing that it does not seem to want to do is allow me to block certain artists. Who the hell wants to listen to Bieber? I certainly don't, yet the damn thing keeps putting him in my "discover" list. I want to block his tattooed ass right now. This is where Spotify also gets it wrong. By allowing backroom music deals it just makes a huge opening for me to move on in a heartbeat to any service that allows me to fully control what goes into my earballs.
Developers should absolutely have unit and integration tests and only deliver a product to QA that they think will be immediately passed onto the customer. But within many organizations this just doesn't make people happy, and unhappy people make bad decisions. QA can give a seal of approval that gets better buy in within the company. This should not be the way it is but that's life.
Lastly, a good QA will look to see that what was produced is what was actually asked for and promised. This is no small thing, because many programming teams can lose sight of what the contract actually says. "But it's better" is something that should be negotiated, not just delivered.
But that said, QA can be a major road block. It is not uncommon that you throw things over the fence only to find that QA has hyper focused on something that isn't a requirement. For instance you might have some system that does echo location to find the distance to a wall. Your requirements call for one successful echo location every 10 seconds. You fire out 10 per second and around 50% fail. The reality is that you are getting roughly 5 ranges per second and never will you miss your target of one every 10 seconds. Yet QA gets all wound up about the 50% failure rate and reports that the product has a 50% failure rate. This is where you begin convincing the accountants that the QA department needs a head count reduction.
I generally prefer 3.x Python. What I really like is python when it works. But over and over and over, I have downloaded a library or some code that only runs on one or the other. Keeping both up to date and with the latest libraries is a huge pain in the bottom. The way I have it installed also seems to send some products for a loop when they simply insist that I must have 2.7 installed. So I go and change which version is "python" just so that program can run.
I really don't care what the arguments are for the lack of backwards compatibility; doing this really hurt python with a self inflicted wound.
The next self inflicted wound is the speed of python. I see these crazy arguments that in order to make it faster that it needs strongly typed variables. That is total BS as there are many scripted languages without this that run blazingly fast (JS, PHP, Lue, etc) without this.
Quite simply the people who are in charge of steering python seem to be way more interested in giving talks at python conferences than keeping python moving forward. Oh there are lots of little features being added, but nothing like the leaps and bounds that JS and PHP have made in the same time period. JS is not screwing up with a backwards compat problem. And PHP trimmed out some crud so is technically not backwards compat anymore but if you were using the features they cut, you were writing bad code.
Python rocks. I use it for ML, I use it for so many quick and dirty things. But all this means is that nothing is better right now. Look a perl. It owned the world of scripting 17 years ago.
I don't so much mean after netflix so much as I think that Netflix is sort of trying to do TV better. Early TV was more radio with pictures or stage plays over the air or a movie box. Then TV discovered what it was, it was something different.
For instance. I suspect that as Netflix evolves that the whole format of a show will evolve with it. Many people binge watch. So why even bother breaking a series into episodes. Just one 14 hour journey? Maybe?
For instance many people are envisioning driverless cars as just cars that you don't drive. I see them as something wildly different. Just like people do still watch movies on TV, people will use driverless cars to boringly go from A to B. But I suspect that they will open up use cases that are way different.
A tiny example would be old people. As old people and their friends are at the edge or over the edge of where they can drive. They will favour places that favour them. Thus an old person in a section of the city with tight parallel only parking will get far fewer friends visiting than the friend with the grand circular driveway in the slow easy going part of town.
Then as they all age more, their independence goes more and more. Better nursing homes offer endless chauffeuring for those old people who can't get their kids to drive them places. Lesser ones offer regular bus rides to vaguely interesting places like the mall. But driverless cars will open up so much for old people. This will effectively leap frog so many services that cater to old people and their inability to drive. I can predict a few, but I suspect that once we see the system in action and evolve for a while there will be many "That was obvious" situations that we can't yet see.
One of my favourite signs of technological signs of progress is when there is a technological end run. That is when some existing business completely dominates an area. Then some technology comes along and people take a few cracks at getting ahead of the dominating business via duplicating that business in the new way. But then people realize that the old business model is just not applicable anymore and then the old business just withers and dies.
/. ask a small business owner if the demise of Yellowpages is a bad thing.
Sometimes this just happens pretty clearly and fast such as Yellowpages. But sometimes it just sort of happens. For instance Microsoft is just not that relevant to most people's lives anymore. Phones just ate their need for a new PC every couple of years, or potentially any PC at all. Intel is suffering the same fate. Mobile just ate their lunch. They still have a market, but intel inside is something that most people don't see anymore.
This makes me wonder about Netflix. Right now they are upending the entire cable TV world but even Netflix still strikes me as too similar to Cable TV, better, but very similar. Thus I wonder what is going to come along and truly upend TV in general.
For anyone on
I love these old companies that think they can join the modern age by copying other companies; except they always copy the wrong things and then go on to keep the things that allow the successful companies to end run the old ones.
For instance, who thinks that Disney will have endless advertising for their other products, toys, etc? Who thinks that they will have endless FBI warnings? Who thinks that they will do things to manipulate schedules so as to "addict" the little tikes?
Also who thinks that this would stay at $5 if it were to take off. I guarantee there is a spreadsheet and powerpoint presentation with an eventual price of $19.95 once they have "done in" Netflix.
Here is my simple litmus test. McDonalds and Disney have had a long standing relationship. What are the chances that somehow this new online thing continues to peddle McDonalds poison?
Here is the simple truth: People who have cut cords are enjoying their freedom from being told what to buy their kids and how their kids should think. Disney is insane if they think that people will give them money to have that crap back in their lives.
The movie industry is suffering big time from this. Quite simply, I enjoy movies, but have no idea what is on in theaters anymore. This is because I have pretty much eliminated advertising from my life. No Cable, no newspapers (foreign magazines only), adblocking galore, and subscriptions to things like Netflix that don't advertise much (some product placements). I am a much happier person for this.
I would love to raise kids now that they won't plunk themselves in front of TV and be told what to buy for the next 18 years.
This "Add tech to make kids smart" crap is brutally annoying. I have seen this since I was in school decades ago. There are certain things that schools are very very bad at teaching. One of the main reasons they suck at teaching things like languages and technology is that they focus on teaching things that can then be tested.
With spoken languages it is way easier to test for verb conjugation than the ability to exchange ideas with another person in the language in question. The same goes with technology. Technology is a tool, not an end goal. I used 3D modeling programs to make a 3D printed thing that solves a problem. I might be able to solve the same thing with glue, wax, duct tape, etc.
The problem that I would suggest that computers could help with is crappy teachers. Going with best of breed lectures or some other replacement for where many teachers suck would be a good start. That is probably the last thing they would use computers for. Or using computers for self guided learning, but nope that would be too scary for unions and very hard to test. So they probably used them for totally bureaucratic things that, at best, solved problems the administrators were having such as matching up kids IDs with their standardized tests. If you want to see the kids who excel from their school experiences with technology look at the kids who do things like build solar cars, or whatever fairly open ended technology problem they are let loose on. Those are the kids who go on to MIT; not the kids who memorized the 8 attributes of an Object Oriented Programming language or memorized the difference between functional and procedural programming without actually doing a single interesting program.
I changed the files in a .pro file and visual studio simply deleted all the files that I didn't list in the pro file. Not three months, but nearly a day's work just gone. Maybe a heads up when I am deleting multiple files would be nice; and not some ambiguous message, but a clear listing of the files that will be shot.
If my hedge fund(mythical) filled with people with zero ethics get their hands on a AI that will allow them to manipulate world markets, media, or world events to make them money, then they will do so.
With hindsight there are lots of places where the world turned out to me much more fragile than anyone thought until it snapped. How many times has the snap not happened but we came very close. Thus if you have a good AI at your beck and call to find these weaknesses and you are prepared to exploit them to make some money then how much more miserable would the world be?
I don't only worry about some skynet scenario, but I worry about giving tools to nitwits like hedge fund managers to make more money while not actually producing anything. One magical thing about making money with the first really good moneymaking AI is that you can then start hiring all the world's AI experts while making massive donations to universities to shut down their AI research. I doubt there is a university that wouldn't happily shut down their AI research for a billion or two.
I'm looking at you facebook; what are the chances they were abusing the old API. It sounds like a right pain in the ass from a development point of view. Maybe though with this there could be a way from phone calls interrupting my skype calls. That would be a huge win.
I shut down apps because I don't trust that they aren't pulling crap in the background. For instance many apps don't give the option to not locate when in background and only give you the options to locate or not. Well, if this is a map app I am forced to allow the locate. But I don't want that little bastard reporting any crap when it is not front and center.
I hate that I have to use facebook messenger to communicate with certain people. I 100% do not trust that crap to run in the background and not pull some privacy raping stunt.
Then there is the BS factor. I suspect that some apps are totally quiet in the background. But other apps are most certainly doing crap. A simple example is my audiobook app is most definitely still doing stuff when I am on other apps; this is a good feature, but a clear and simple proof that an app can do stuff while "hidden". How many other apps are either doing something that I don't want; Or are just badly programmed and just wasting time and energy? If the answer is one or more, then I will continue to swipe up with great glee.
I have a strong suspicion that these useless turds of studies are being promoted by people who really really don't want us shutting down their apps.
A feature that I would love is that I could say without any app being able to stop me (SHUT THE BUGGER DOWN WHEN IN BACKGROUND) and by shut down I mean not a single bit of info goes in or out, and the app doesn't get a single CPU cycle.
Quite simply, why won't the vendors of phones give us the privacy control that I want. For instance, I would love to not only be able to block most apps from having any network access; but I would love to have a granular firewall. For instance my browser could go to sites, but can't go to google anything, for any reason.
Seeing that I would be out cold. 60kph on a major highway wouldn't bother me at all. Might bother a few other people. But hey, that is what earplugs are for.
I have fired one of these. When you are on the range and begin firing one of these, many of the other people will stop to come over and watch the massive cannon going off. Or they stop because they need to move away from the noise that is overwhelming their hearing protection.
.22 caliber pistol which is one step up from a bb gun. It would probably stop it, probably.
These things will punch holes in metal plates. I am not sure there is a paper book in the world that would stop it. I would not be surprised if this could easily go through 3-5 phone books.
For those not familiar with guns, I wouldn't depend on a fairly thick book to stop a
That said, I need to go, there are some crazy people yelling each other and I need to film it for youtube.
I love how the tech world has nearly non stop crapped on PHP but largely left Ruby alone. While I haven't used PHP in about 8 years, I do admire the fact that most websites that use it and then grow massively, then continue to use it. While most Ruby sites that I know of dump Ruby on Rails as they cross a certain size and just can't keep it working.
I can't comment on why this is, just that I have seen it at least a dozen times on sites where the company was crossing about the 5 million in value barrier. The three complaints of the people running the companies are: Can't get truly senior programmers who will touch Ruby. Progress pretty much stops as they fight more and more with their product as performance and new functionality dries up. And usually someone within the company starts using a whole other platform to start redoing chunks of their product with results that make them angry they are so much better.
On one note, the definition of "Senior Programmer" is not someone with many years of Ruby experience, but huge amounts of experience with massive projects. The key to the definition is not just time in the business but a proven track record of putting multi million dollar projects to bed over and over. If they mention Ruby they get no interest from these types, if they don't mention Ruby then these types bugger off when they hear Ruby. But when the prospect of hiring them to replace the Ruby with a whole new foundation, they are usually very interested.
A decade ago, Ruby was hip, It is not hip, it is often an indicator of a site built by people who have never managed a site much bigger than a sub 1 million dollar company's web site (a company where the website is the company that is).
But like any halfway workable language. It seems to work fine for basic, data in and out on a website type drudgery. Thus it won't just die as there are no doubt many 30 year olds with a decade of Ruby under their belts who will insist on using their singular hammer for the rest of their careers. VB is still a thing too.
With an industry perspective like that, I can see why Ruby is on the Ropes.
I work with some women who have come from very repressive cultures. They love that they come to North America and the guys are crude as crap (in my professional work place), but not in any negative way to women. More the fart joke taken way too far crude. Whereas in their culture everyone was really polite while treating women like crap.
A stilted workplace simply can't be creative. But some people will take this opening the wrong way and it can be very hard to explain to them that crude does not equal mean.
I have been in the tech world for more than 3 decades. I have also seen the VC scene in many places from big to podunk. I would say that the VC types that I meet come in 3 main flavours. Arrogant bean counters who know what is good for you. Arrogant assholes who think they are god. And Arrogant thieves who pretty much have to rip you off to make themselves feel better.
My favourite was at a recent tech talk by a woman (who gives government money to VCs) (Canada) who said that she won't give money if the founders make too much (over 100k) but that she was leaving government to become an advisor to a start-up that had recently raised around 5m. I asked her if she was only going to take 100k. She pretty much yelled at me that I had no understanding of the real world.
Her theory was that if you give the founders more than 100k in salary they become distracted spending it.
I was wondering how I could expose her in some way for the corruption she was displaying by working for a company she had just given government money to when I witnessed one of the tech people who had attended her talk, keying the living crap out of her car with the words, 100k over and over.
It was a brand new higher end BMW BTW. On a funny note, there is nothing funnier than some podunk tech "titan" who sells some company for 10-20 mil and starts giving TED style keynote speeches that are the tech equivalent of spiritual mumbo-jumbo while wearing clothing that they spent much time and money on trying to look really casual. The contrast with the person who usually gives a too long winded introduction and wears an ill-fitting off the rack suit just makes it all funnier.
Then all the desperate start-up types try their damnedest to "network" with the speaker who basically holds out their hand for their ring to be kissed.
I love how they play up their serial entrepreneur business creds when their actual history is: fail-fail-fail-fail-lottery-fail-fail-fail-fail.
These losers have been imposing their will through advertisers and whatnot for decades. One of the huge benefits of using Netflix is that they don't appear to give a flying F to these "Moral Majority" freaks.
When are we going to finally start taxing religions and make these people dry up and blow away?
It is scary how few companies backup their crap. I would be willing to bet that less than 30% of billion dollar companies (that really depend on their computers for day to day operations) could be back in operation in under 24 hours if they lost all their servers at once.
I wouldn't be surprised to find that a good percentage would be very screwed in the long term.
This is not only their data but the system as a whole. When I am consulting at most companies that are retiring servers I often suggest that they box them and put them in a safe place as a super emergency backup. The idea being that those servers are probably close to what they need to struggle along. This is after I have usually laid out a solid backup and disaster recovery plan. Seeing that most companies won't do a good backup then having some 2 year out of date servers might be better than nothing.
I don't kind of hate voicemail but I really really hate it. With my provider I can't turn it off. So I have a voicemail saying, "Don't leave a voice mail." I got rid of a phone where I couldn't turn off the voicemail notifications.
Quite simply there should be a do not bother me law. Mail, phone, voicemail, or pretty much any government regulated resource that I have should not be available for people to market their crap. That includes charities and politicians.
I don't even want warnings. I turned on the weather warning texts that my local government offered and they basically spammed me with "Be prepared" or "There is a weather warning in a place so far away that I will never ever go there, ever." messages. I turned it off a day later. So if there is an alien invasion where they have guns that fire tornadoes, I still don't want a text or voicemail.
Open source is one of the greatest things to have happened in modern civilization. But people who push the GPL is are a bunch of douche-bag assholes. Stallman and his ilk don't do GPL so that their code can be free. But so they can have power over other coders. Often you will see GPL projects that "allow" a corporate license.
It is a nasty game they play. A GPL library will be "Standard" more and more until there really is no alternative. How is this any better than places like Microsoft?
Then the assholes will say, "Well if you don't like it then make your own library." The key here is that most of the people who probably contributed to the project didn't want it GPL but it was the only project in town.
I regularly have my company donate to many open source projects. These donations are pretty good (1-5k each) but we all fully agree that never in a million years would we donate to a GPL project or any over arching project ever.
I am around 50, I work with Computer Engineers (yes, with engineering degrees) with a typical age well under 30. They are some of the most conservative old school programmers I have worked with.
Happy with Python 2.6 because it was what they used last. Happy with C or C++ from the 90s. Unit testing... WTF is that good for? They pretty much live up to every stereotype of a 65 year old programmer.
Then it gets even better. They advocate a bastardized version of Agile when they are working on projects that are nearly a perfect fit for PMI style management. Yet they avoid innovation and change and actual agility like it is the bogeyman.
I have hived off a group of programmers who wanted to change (of mostly younger ages) and have my own dept that is now running circles around the bulk of the company. I am not sure what percentage of them want to come aboard, but it has hit a point where the old guard freak me out so much that I will probably only staff my department from new hires. (of any age as long as they are willing to innovate and grow as hard as they can)