If I ran a site about tennis and one of my users Insulted one of the various touchy members of crap country royalty around the world, I could find myself detained as I cross some border. Minimally, I could see some country like that holding me until I handed the keys over to my servers so that they could sift through them to see if they could identify the person who did the insults. Or they could just charge me.
Then there are the legions of US lawyers. I could use a link to another site and they sue me for IP theft as I linked to their site. Or defamation, or whatever shitbrained law that a US lawyer thinks they can exploit to ruin my life for a few bucks.
These are two problems that took me two seconds to think of. I suspect if you think this all the way through it won't just be sort of a bad idea, but the sort of idea that only bad people come up with.
They have completely missed the point. I, nor just about any other human on earth, wants to have to "deal" with a dealer. Those sleazy turds are only going to give this process a bad name. If there is a way that any one of them can figure out how to screw us on this deal, then they will. Once one figures out the loophole, they all have figured out the loophole.
One of the few powers I have when dealing with a dealer is to say, FU and walk away the moment they pull their sleazy crap. But if I have made a commitment to Amazon and then have to go to some dirtbag who will own me. I might as well go there not wearing pants as it will just make the whole process of screwing me that much faster.
A tiny example of the sort of sleaze that dealers will do is to hand you a pile of forms for you to sign. They will say things like that they are required by law, or that the warranty won't be valid. But the reality is that you don't need to sign anything but the registration form that is part of the car's title. So what forms are they getting you to sign? A very common one is that you are agreeing to binding arbitration if there is any dispute about the car. Another allows them to do a credit check, even if you are paying cash. Others will look very official but are just to get detailed marketing information. These will look like finance agreements and will ask for SSN wages, employers, references, etc.
The dealers are scum, and Amazon gave me a glimmer of hope that they were going to allow us to end run them, but nope, they are just sending us to a deeper form of dealer hell.
All hail Tesla for doing its damnedest to break the backs of the dealers and their monopolistic abuses.
This guy is a massive supporter of frameworks as somehow a good idea. This guy is clearly someone fresh out of school or works for the government. I would say to that, all frameworks are easily the #1 thing keeping me employed. Frameworks are great if you are making a restaurant website, or an app that tells people what the upcoming plays are at your little dinner theater. Organization after organization take on a big project, One of their geniuses pulls out his favourite framework, and poof 90% of the project is done in less than a week. Then for the next two years (with an original schedule of 6 months) they are putting out shaky crap that is missing critical features, breaks all the time, and takes any new developer months to get a vague understanding of what the hell is going on.
Basically the framework is great if they are doing what the developers of the framework intended. Stray 2 feet from their intended sidewalk and you are now walking in the middle of the road. It takes bandaids, restructuring, tunnels, and magic to get to where you wanted to go.
It is much harder to, instead just choose one or more great libraries, and then handcode the whole thing into existence. Harder at the start, not harder in the end; they key being that you get to the end.
This guy has another article that talks about 9 bad habits that programmers love. One was using "goto". Nobody uses goto. Nobody in any modern programming language, doing anything modern in any way at all. Maybe there is someone who ported QBasic to android and they are using goto. I have yet to meet someone who doesn't use "goto" as the measure of a fantastically crappy programmer.
In my now present consulting and I see a client leaning indian, I simply say. I am not insulted. Just call me when you want me to clean up the mess,
Then, a few years later and they are calling me I ask if they have fired the person who hired the indian conpany. If they haven't I will ask if there is someone else to work with as I want to make sure things work this time. Some out and out ask if I am demanding they be fired, to which I basically say, "Or at least seriously demoted."
I usually then try to organize something informal where I say that the decision making that results in hiring an indian firm involves one or more of a small cluster of deficiencies: Fraud (very common cause), they are a moron (second common cause), or they were forced into it by someone who met one of the two previous criteria.
One thing that drives me bonkers about CBC podcasts is that the crap advertising in the good ones clearly itemizes which of their shows have the most political influence. If I am listening to a podcast on a very specific topic, I don't want to hear out of date advertisements for their most popular general topic shows. I am 100% certain that they don't advertise the show that I am listening to during the intro to those shows favoured by the toronto psuedo intellectual elite that run the CBC.
Thus I love the podcast app that I use because it can be set to automatically eliminate the first X seconds of any podcast. For most CBC podcasts I have it kill the first 62 seconds as they are garage filler in nearly every case. Usually in those 62 seconds the various hosts say their own and each others' names at least 2-3 times
They aren't the worst. I have one tech podcast where I kill the first 3 minutes of a 22 minute podcast.
My comment was that the thinking at the time was the opposite, margine was way better. The butter industry saw a product that they couldn't control through quotas, and thus they lost their minds.
Wow, just wow. You haven't been down a darker nastier hole than dealing with an Indian IT company. Employees rotate like there are revolving doors installed in every cubical. No matter how good their English, there is a communication's barrier. Contracts are pretty much brought out on a daily basis. Procedure overwhelms any project; yet the procedure simply protects them while providing no value, but then they bill the shit out of you for that time.
Then there is this strange touchiness about any perceived insult. You say something doesn't work and they will either pretend they didn't hear you, or they will list off the resumes of all those involved. "Mamdoop, graduated top of his class, in a program that only accepts 100 students from over 1 million applicants. Are you saying that you know C++ better than he?" To which I reply, the program is crashing, it is crashing because he didn't do any tests at all and any client ID over 100 will crash the software.
Boom contract time: "Your sample set of clients only had 100 clients." This ignores the fact that the contract also stipulated that there will be 100,000-500,000 clients.
And it just goes on and on and on. Then after you finish successfully managing to sue them in an American court, you see that they are using your company name for a positive reference.
Then there is the endless changing of the contract. Somehow the monthly billing of $40,000 goes up to $45,000 and the extra is for "administrative excesses" and you say no, but it takes months for them to remove it, and as the end comes closer it goes up and up and up with subtle threats about the software ever being delivered if it doesn't get paid.
The best is when one of your own employees turns out to be related to the company in India that got the contract in the first place. You are never able to prove that something scummy happened but your employee gets wildly upset when the contract is canceled with extreme prejudice. Like holy shit losing his mind upset.
Somehow they have created a facade of competence without actually creating the competence. A simple test is how many companies in India are actually making viable software products for themselves. Not the government, not for others, but an Indian Facebook. I don't think that it is possible. I suspect that there are all kinds of Vapourware companies, as they would have that nailed down cold; but a company that does something cool, has lots of customers, makes lots of real money, and doesn't have a government department firehosing money into it.
Without that excellence, why would we go there again? This is why Western Programmers make the big bucks; they deliver what was wanted.
I love that a good synthetic diamond simply can't be distinguished from the real thing without the aid of very advanced technology. Specifically, that even a trained diamond cutter with decades of experience working with diamonds can't tell without the assistance of advanced technology.
Then they try to tell the public that synthetic is somehow bad.
I am not a fan of margarine but this sounds like when the butter lobby managed to do things like prevent margarine from being coloured yellow after an unsuccessful attempt to get it banned.
I am willing to bet that what is coming is one of two things, or both. First is that you must label a synthetic diamond as synthetic. Or they will try to force people to label synthetic diamonds as something else entirely(as if they weren't chemically a diamond).
The next is a campaign of "fake means he doesn't love you"
Then it will turn out that they will go after any jewelers who cut, sell, design, or anything that anything to do with synthetics. Basically the rule will be, if you sale synthetics then you don't get to sell the real thing.
But when all this is over just look at what happened to the natural pearl industry after cultured pearls took over. There was a brief orgy of resistance, and then it all fell apart.
I very very very much doubt that this is the work of the russian government. Simply put, given all these emails, they would use them to better understand who is really in power, and then use them for blackmail. AFTER she became president. They wouldn't even blackmail her, but would blackmail some of the various players who wouldn't want these coming out.
I love these hysterics that are aimed at trying to get the Federal government to give some overhyped company a pile of cash. Right now if I check my server logs I will see at least 1000 "hack" attempts by stupid scripts trying to exploit old holes. Things like old IIS holes, being run against Linux servers. Then I will read where some "security" company will write a report saying that after they installed their crap software on some Fortune 500 company that they managed to "block" over 100 hack attempts.
The average dog walking wordpress site probably blocks that many every afternoon.
Will there be a cyber crisis someday. Yes. They are just playing the odds that it will happen in the first 100 so they can say, "Look how smart we are." plus they will no doubt point to one of the regular hacks that come out about every 100 days such as the Yahoo hack and say, "That is exactly what we warned you about, now give us bags of unaccountable cash."
Sometimes they do. With the right training, they usually can. The problem is that they get their architecture training from professors, and they get it from companies that want to lock them into their product line.
What were they expecting Windows? I don't know enough to comment on BSD but other than that, what are the other options? I would generally consider anything but linux in a cloud environment to be some terrible terrible marketing experiment in progress where some OS company bribed a bunch of users to use the stupid solution they were offering. Then expect to see those companies either fail because of their stupid choice, or switch and talk about how stupid their choice had been.
I imagine you are taking heat from ST fans for not even watching. I have not liked any of the new ones. They are pretty much pointless and just milking the old work. My simple way of thinking about the new ones is: Would the new ones stand alone without the past TV series and movies to support it? Would Kirk, Spock, Scotty, etc have become cultural icons? Spock and Scotty inspired my love of science and engineering. The new crew would inspire me the same way the three stooges would inspire me to go through a small door at the same time as two other people and then hit them with my hat.
I am shocked at the number of 20 somethings that are a decade or more out of date. I am not talking about jumping on the latest and greatest, node.go or whatever, but simply aren't using the latest version (often off by years) of their existing tools. I am not talking religious wars such as C++ vs Java, but programmers who aren't using testing, not using any code analysis tools, not using patterns properly, using globals like they were bicyclist in a performance enhancing drug mart, and all the usual bad practices.
Then to make it worse they will use "modern" techniques like they are some magic spell. If you way-over apply the technique, then it will magically make up for the lousy choice in just about everything else. Let's use multi inheritance OOP on our single SQL call to the single table in the single database. Or let's use the factory pattern for what should have been a single function that takes one parameter.
I am not leaving older programmers out of this. Usually there are subtle differences. They don't realize that things have massively changed in the last 10 years. Threads aren't bad, the GPU can do stuff, disk is pretty much free, don't conserve memory in your single purpose server with 32GB and your application is only using 2.
My advice for any programmer, young or old, is to be flexible. A great choice may not really be the great choice, it may be an illusion. So be prepared to change. And experiment. Lots and lots of experiments. Try out new languages. Try out new datastores. Try out new OSs. Try out new IDEs. If you see the cool kids doing something that requires a fundamental new skill that you don't have, then learn the fundamental new skill. With ML you need linear algebra and some calculus to really get to the meat of the subject. So learn the libraries and if they seem like your future, learn the fundamentals.
To be a great programmer you have to be both a specialist and a Renaissance man. So nail something like C++ networking(as just one specialist example), but make sure you can configure a database, set up a server, program in Python, etc.
Then there are the domains of knowledge. This is where it can get tricky. Do you perfect the game industry, or do you jump from games, to banking, to engine control units? We all know that having a diverse experience will really help. I am dead certain that what you learn in games could easily bring some wildly creative approaches to engine control units; yet the HR types are "How many years have you been working with ECUs?" I have successfully leapt more than once from pretty fundamental tech to completely different fundamental tech. Not easy, but very worth it.
Right now I develop mostly for Linux. Yet my development desktop is Visual Studio running on windows 10. I know a few developers who use Linux desktop, but the reality is that it would be under 5% of the developers who I know developing on Linux use linux for their desktop.
Quite simply without Desktop penetration this percentage will always stay low. I don't see this as a problem. Linux to me is a server solution, an embedded solution, a phone solution, but not yet a desktop solution. I suspect that if it were to become a desktop solution that all the other uses would get short shrift. The entire Kernel would have huge pressure to adapt primarily to the needs of the desktop.
Luckily the PC is dying. While servers VM, embedded, and mobile devices are taking off. Drones and robots are also getting to be a thing. This is where Linux rocks. I am happy to have a tool for these things that is so awesome.
So, please linux, don't try to capture the other 98% or you will probably let me down and I will have to find something else.
I am willing to bet that the execs have spreadsheets showing that the series will be a huge hit and that pretty much anyone who ever watched Star Trek will subscribe to the service. Then by the time it blows up those same execs will have ridden the probability of their success on to other projects.
Even worse, when it does blow up and their turd of a streaming service dies, they won't see it as their clinging to the old model, but as categorical proof that streaming is a bad idea and that Netflix's days are numbered.
In theory a show like this is an easy win for the network. It is then very very tempting for executives to mess with it for a wide variety of reasons. Put a GF in minor role. Get some writers who you need for another project a place to park themselves. A great place to dump losses from other shows. Basically all kinds of things that aren't good for the show.
I suspect that the director wasn't playing ball with their 20th century ways and they replaced him with someone more "controllable" let's see how that works out.
If we are lucky the show is run by people even better at avoiding such crap. If we aren't we will get a half crap show that is loaded up with acting has-beens from the last 20 years who were owed favours by various CBS executives, hack writers who weren't even good in their Full House days, and editorial urine tasting contests where executives say, "NO NO NO to much science. We need people talking about their emotions. Let's see if we can get Oprah to dress up like we got Woopie to do."
Then the few union seniors who do make the show don't want to do star dreck (that is what they will call it) but they want to make some crap 80's drama like LA Law. So they will make LA Law in space. That was their first Union gig, and they haven't changed one bit since.
I think the key is to look at the trend. Amazon's graph is one way for now. Online retail is also one way. Importantly quite a bit of what is being added to online sales is products that you can't even buy in stores from manufacturers who won't easily show up on any statistic. If you look at the last 12 months of my purchases (other than rent, groceries, and utilities) the vast majority has moved online. The second I can order my groceries competitively online, I will. But from a retail statistic only my groceries will probably show up as something changed. My other ordering is from companies that I very much doubt play ball with any retail organization statistics gathering. Thus I would say that out of $10,000 in optional spending maybe 90% of that is invisible.
Also I am in Canada where amazon sucks for things like groceries. I know Americans who pretty well only buy perishable items from non online and usually amazon.
So if you look at the product lines of the huge conglomerates then I suspect that online isn't that much of a trend for them. But it is their less mass marketed competitors who will be going gang-busters online. This is probably invisible to most statistics.
The people to ask with the most trustworthy statistics would be the credit card companies and combine that data with bank cards. I am willing to bet that the trend there is in the "oh shit" territory for bricks and mortar companies. They would probably look and say, we can't reconfigure to compete with that for at least 3 good reasons. Things like product variety, manufactures who won't play ball with regional exclusivity or other price fixing, and simply that there are direct to customer sales that simply don't leave any room for the costs of their supply chain.
While there may be many problems with Amazon concentrating so much power in one company, I don't cry much for the many greedy layers there have traditionally been between me and the manufacturer. I am happy to give my money to the people who make something. I am not happy to give money to the layer after layer after layer of people who have managed to insinuate themselves between the manufacturer and me.
Often distributors would force manufacturers to sign exclusive regional distribution agreements that then allowed them to lock the price for a large area. The retailers would then spend zillions of dollars marketing at me which they then had to recoup. Then there are the malls and other landowners who charge retailers exorbitant rents that need to be recouped. And then there are the greedy retailers themselves who would gouge the crap out of me while treating their retail employees like crap.
While Amazon has certainly been abusive to their own employees, I have not heard tell of them abusing their suppliers. They don't let large conglomerates shove out minor players from the Amazon shelves. If a small manufacturer sells a great widget at a great price, garnering great reviews, then the giantco that traditionally owned that space needs to up their game or see the minor player start to get some serious traction in that market. Normally giantco would turn to the distributors and retail giants and tell them to cut the minor player out of the loop, assuming that the minor player could have even gotten onto any shelves in the first place.
This bookends with people cutting off all forms of traditional media; thus cutting off all forms of traditional brand marketing. If a company XYZ wants to sell me a thing, and their amazon reviews are the best and their price is good, I will buy that widget without even having a slight guess as to how many 10s of millions giantco spent marketing their second rate pile of junk.
If you go back just a few years, you would find people nervous to stray from what they had been brow-beaten into believing was the proper thing to do. Now they do their own homework and come to their own conclusions. This is no small thing. I know more and more people who are doing a vast percentage of their shopping on Amazon and they don't have their favourite brands, they don't buy brands I have previously heard of, and they certainly aren't buying from companies that have multi billion dollar advertising budgets for their entire product lineup. Or if they do it is only because that product managed to actually win on its own merits.
There are a few exceptions such as Apple, but even these brands are losing their luster because people are no longer being told what to buy at all the levels from marketing to the in-store experience.
I went into a mall the other day (because there was an office that I needed to visit) I looked around the mall and was disgusted. The prices were bonkers, and the employees were there for the hard sell. They provided negative value for the customer. People aren't generally stupid and as time progresses more and more people will join the ranks of those who have left brand and store front retail behind.
Your last one is the # reason I make driving mistakes. Luckily I haven't had one translate to an accident, but my rule is I pull over and wait for the mouth to shut. I have pulled over. Waited 10 minutes. Pulled out and immediately pulled back in because it started up again around 5mph. Then I pulled over and waited, then repeated this 2 more times. I then pulled over, got out and called a cab.
My theory on this is very simple. At first there will still be accidents caused by driverless cars. But the data gathered by the driverless cars will easily be enough to reproduce those accidents. With each accident, a team of brilliant engineers will pour over the data and figure out how to deal with that accident. It wont only be solved for that accident but the changes will be tested against a zillion hours of difficult data to make sure that the new code doesn't cause new accidents. All cars will then get an upgrade and will now be safer.
After a while the driverless cars will have hit a point where solving for the tiny remaining number of edge cases will actually reduce overall safety. But these edge cases will be so few and far between that they will make national news when they happen. Thus, the stats behind driverless cars will be so extraordinarily safe that for a single human driver to "prove" that they are safer would take lifetimes of flawless driving to prove. This number will only spread as time grows.
I would not be surprised if the experimental driverless cars are in the top 1% of the top 1% of drivers in the world.
The key being that a single driver gets to accumulate only their own stats, while 1,000,000 driverless cars will do more than a taxi driver's lifetime driving nearly every day or so.
Then to make it worse, we meatbags are variable. Even the best driver in the world with a flawless record, might be forced to drive in non-optimal conditions. They haven't slept in a few days, they are sick, and a sudden emergency forces them to drive someone to the hospital. None of that applies to a driverless car.
For instance. I have a 20+ year flawless driving record. Part of that is that I know not to drive when I have not slept well the night before, or any time between 1am and 7am.
One other bit is that driverless cars will soon have some interesting abilities. Things such as gathering data from other driverless cars. Thus if something has dropped onto the highway, one driverless car can alert the rest about it. Or if one car hits a surprising icy slick, it will not only notify other cars, it will start to build a pattern of when that road is icy. These would be the few initial areas where people would be better; where you know that a certain intersection seems to have ice on it in these conditions. Or observing the behavior of other cars to possibly be alerted to problem such as trash on the road.
Presuming the car is only driving where cars should be driving, any situation where the car would need to "sacrafice" the driver for a pedestrian is where the pedestrian has done something stupid, such as stepping out onto a highway.
While I certainly hope the car would avoid even the stupidest pedestrians, quite simply if you step out onto a highway, you should expect to become bug-splatter.
I would be enraged if some one ran out onto the road and my car drove me into a pole avoiding them. I certainly wouldn't buy a car that planned on this. and I would modify (even if illegal) my car if it were mandatory. I would certainly vote any politician out of office who pushed for this.
Some might argue, "What about kids chasing balls?" again, I hope the car would do something reasonable to avoid said child, but given the choice between me and the improperly parented child... well darwin will handle this one.
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If I ran a site about tennis and one of my users Insulted one of the various touchy members of crap country royalty around the world, I could find myself detained as I cross some border. Minimally, I could see some country like that holding me until I handed the keys over to my servers so that they could sift through them to see if they could identify the person who did the insults. Or they could just charge me.
Then there are the legions of US lawyers. I could use a link to another site and they sue me for IP theft as I linked to their site. Or defamation, or whatever shitbrained law that a US lawyer thinks they can exploit to ruin my life for a few bucks.
These are two problems that took me two seconds to think of. I suspect if you think this all the way through it won't just be sort of a bad idea, but the sort of idea that only bad people come up with.
They have completely missed the point. I, nor just about any other human on earth, wants to have to "deal" with a dealer. Those sleazy turds are only going to give this process a bad name. If there is a way that any one of them can figure out how to screw us on this deal, then they will. Once one figures out the loophole, they all have figured out the loophole.
One of the few powers I have when dealing with a dealer is to say, FU and walk away the moment they pull their sleazy crap. But if I have made a commitment to Amazon and then have to go to some dirtbag who will own me. I might as well go there not wearing pants as it will just make the whole process of screwing me that much faster.
A tiny example of the sort of sleaze that dealers will do is to hand you a pile of forms for you to sign. They will say things like that they are required by law, or that the warranty won't be valid. But the reality is that you don't need to sign anything but the registration form that is part of the car's title. So what forms are they getting you to sign? A very common one is that you are agreeing to binding arbitration if there is any dispute about the car. Another allows them to do a credit check, even if you are paying cash. Others will look very official but are just to get detailed marketing information. These will look like finance agreements and will ask for SSN wages, employers, references, etc.
The dealers are scum, and Amazon gave me a glimmer of hope that they were going to allow us to end run them, but nope, they are just sending us to a deeper form of dealer hell.
All hail Tesla for doing its damnedest to break the backs of the dealers and their monopolistic abuses.
This guy is a massive supporter of frameworks as somehow a good idea. This guy is clearly someone fresh out of school or works for the government. I would say to that, all frameworks are easily the #1 thing keeping me employed. Frameworks are great if you are making a restaurant website, or an app that tells people what the upcoming plays are at your little dinner theater. Organization after organization take on a big project, One of their geniuses pulls out his favourite framework, and poof 90% of the project is done in less than a week. Then for the next two years (with an original schedule of 6 months) they are putting out shaky crap that is missing critical features, breaks all the time, and takes any new developer months to get a vague understanding of what the hell is going on.
Basically the framework is great if they are doing what the developers of the framework intended. Stray 2 feet from their intended sidewalk and you are now walking in the middle of the road. It takes bandaids, restructuring, tunnels, and magic to get to where you wanted to go.
It is much harder to, instead just choose one or more great libraries, and then handcode the whole thing into existence. Harder at the start, not harder in the end; they key being that you get to the end.
This guy has another article that talks about 9 bad habits that programmers love. One was using "goto". Nobody uses goto. Nobody in any modern programming language, doing anything modern in any way at all. Maybe there is someone who ported QBasic to android and they are using goto. I have yet to meet someone who doesn't use "goto" as the measure of a fantastically crappy programmer.
In my now present consulting and I see a client leaning indian, I simply say. I am not insulted. Just call me when you want me to clean up the mess,
Then, a few years later and they are calling me I ask if they have fired the person who hired the indian conpany. If they haven't I will ask if there is someone else to work with as I want to make sure things work this time. Some out and out ask if I am demanding they be fired, to which I basically say, "Or at least seriously demoted."
I usually then try to organize something informal where I say that the decision making that results in hiring an indian firm involves one or more of a small cluster of deficiencies: Fraud (very common cause), they are a moron (second common cause), or they were forced into it by someone who met one of the two previous criteria.
One thing that drives me bonkers about CBC podcasts is that the crap advertising in the good ones clearly itemizes which of their shows have the most political influence. If I am listening to a podcast on a very specific topic, I don't want to hear out of date advertisements for their most popular general topic shows. I am 100% certain that they don't advertise the show that I am listening to during the intro to those shows favoured by the toronto psuedo intellectual elite that run the CBC.
Thus I love the podcast app that I use because it can be set to automatically eliminate the first X seconds of any podcast. For most CBC podcasts I have it kill the first 62 seconds as they are garage filler in nearly every case. Usually in those 62 seconds the various hosts say their own and each others' names at least 2-3 times
They aren't the worst. I have one tech podcast where I kill the first 3 minutes of a 22 minute podcast.
My comment was that the thinking at the time was the opposite, margine was way better. The butter industry saw a product that they couldn't control through quotas, and thus they lost their minds.
I love your: gray death in a tub. Will use.
Wow, just wow. You haven't been down a darker nastier hole than dealing with an Indian IT company. Employees rotate like there are revolving doors installed in every cubical. No matter how good their English, there is a communication's barrier. Contracts are pretty much brought out on a daily basis. Procedure overwhelms any project; yet the procedure simply protects them while providing no value, but then they bill the shit out of you for that time.
Then there is this strange touchiness about any perceived insult. You say something doesn't work and they will either pretend they didn't hear you, or they will list off the resumes of all those involved. "Mamdoop, graduated top of his class, in a program that only accepts 100 students from over 1 million applicants. Are you saying that you know C++ better than he?" To which I reply, the program is crashing, it is crashing because he didn't do any tests at all and any client ID over 100 will crash the software.
Boom contract time: "Your sample set of clients only had 100 clients." This ignores the fact that the contract also stipulated that there will be 100,000-500,000 clients.
And it just goes on and on and on. Then after you finish successfully managing to sue them in an American court, you see that they are using your company name for a positive reference.
Then there is the endless changing of the contract. Somehow the monthly billing of $40,000 goes up to $45,000 and the extra is for "administrative excesses" and you say no, but it takes months for them to remove it, and as the end comes closer it goes up and up and up with subtle threats about the software ever being delivered if it doesn't get paid.
The best is when one of your own employees turns out to be related to the company in India that got the contract in the first place. You are never able to prove that something scummy happened but your employee gets wildly upset when the contract is canceled with extreme prejudice. Like holy shit losing his mind upset.
Somehow they have created a facade of competence without actually creating the competence. A simple test is how many companies in India are actually making viable software products for themselves. Not the government, not for others, but an Indian Facebook. I don't think that it is possible. I suspect that there are all kinds of Vapourware companies, as they would have that nailed down cold; but a company that does something cool, has lots of customers, makes lots of real money, and doesn't have a government department firehosing money into it.
Without that excellence, why would we go there again? This is why Western Programmers make the big bucks; they deliver what was wanted.
I love that a good synthetic diamond simply can't be distinguished from the real thing without the aid of very advanced technology. Specifically, that even a trained diamond cutter with decades of experience working with diamonds can't tell without the assistance of advanced technology.
Then they try to tell the public that synthetic is somehow bad.
I am not a fan of margarine but this sounds like when the butter lobby managed to do things like prevent margarine from being coloured yellow after an unsuccessful attempt to get it banned.
I am willing to bet that what is coming is one of two things, or both. First is that you must label a synthetic diamond as synthetic. Or they will try to force people to label synthetic diamonds as something else entirely(as if they weren't chemically a diamond).
The next is a campaign of "fake means he doesn't love you"
Then it will turn out that they will go after any jewelers who cut, sell, design, or anything that anything to do with synthetics. Basically the rule will be, if you sale synthetics then you don't get to sell the real thing.
But when all this is over just look at what happened to the natural pearl industry after cultured pearls took over. There was a brief orgy of resistance, and then it all fell apart.
I very very very much doubt that this is the work of the russian government. Simply put, given all these emails, they would use them to better understand who is really in power, and then use them for blackmail. AFTER she became president. They wouldn't even blackmail her, but would blackmail some of the various players who wouldn't want these coming out.
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OK, this is simply the best interpretation of events so far.
Please, please, please let President Clinton go to jail!!!
See what I did there, a win win for everyone.
Aliens!!!!
I love these hysterics that are aimed at trying to get the Federal government to give some overhyped company a pile of cash. Right now if I check my server logs I will see at least 1000 "hack" attempts by stupid scripts trying to exploit old holes. Things like old IIS holes, being run against Linux servers. Then I will read where some "security" company will write a report saying that after they installed their crap software on some Fortune 500 company that they managed to "block" over 100 hack attempts.
The average dog walking wordpress site probably blocks that many every afternoon.
Will there be a cyber crisis someday. Yes. They are just playing the odds that it will happen in the first 100 so they can say, "Look how smart we are." plus they will no doubt point to one of the regular hacks that come out about every 100 days such as the Yahoo hack and say, "That is exactly what we warned you about, now give us bags of unaccountable cash."
Sometimes they do. With the right training, they usually can. The problem is that they get their architecture training from professors, and they get it from companies that want to lock them into their product line.
What were they expecting Windows? I don't know enough to comment on BSD but other than that, what are the other options? I would generally consider anything but linux in a cloud environment to be some terrible terrible marketing experiment in progress where some OS company bribed a bunch of users to use the stupid solution they were offering. Then expect to see those companies either fail because of their stupid choice, or switch and talk about how stupid their choice had been.
I imagine you are taking heat from ST fans for not even watching. I have not liked any of the new ones. They are pretty much pointless and just milking the old work. My simple way of thinking about the new ones is: Would the new ones stand alone without the past TV series and movies to support it? Would Kirk, Spock, Scotty, etc have become cultural icons? Spock and Scotty inspired my love of science and engineering. The new crew would inspire me the same way the three stooges would inspire me to go through a small door at the same time as two other people and then hit them with my hat.
I am shocked at the number of 20 somethings that are a decade or more out of date. I am not talking about jumping on the latest and greatest, node.go or whatever, but simply aren't using the latest version (often off by years) of their existing tools. I am not talking religious wars such as C++ vs Java, but programmers who aren't using testing, not using any code analysis tools, not using patterns properly, using globals like they were bicyclist in a performance enhancing drug mart, and all the usual bad practices.
Then to make it worse they will use "modern" techniques like they are some magic spell. If you way-over apply the technique, then it will magically make up for the lousy choice in just about everything else. Let's use multi inheritance OOP on our single SQL call to the single table in the single database. Or let's use the factory pattern for what should have been a single function that takes one parameter.
I am not leaving older programmers out of this. Usually there are subtle differences. They don't realize that things have massively changed in the last 10 years. Threads aren't bad, the GPU can do stuff, disk is pretty much free, don't conserve memory in your single purpose server with 32GB and your application is only using 2.
My advice for any programmer, young or old, is to be flexible. A great choice may not really be the great choice, it may be an illusion. So be prepared to change. And experiment. Lots and lots of experiments. Try out new languages. Try out new datastores. Try out new OSs. Try out new IDEs. If you see the cool kids doing something that requires a fundamental new skill that you don't have, then learn the fundamental new skill. With ML you need linear algebra and some calculus to really get to the meat of the subject. So learn the libraries and if they seem like your future, learn the fundamentals.
To be a great programmer you have to be both a specialist and a Renaissance man. So nail something like C++ networking(as just one specialist example), but make sure you can configure a database, set up a server, program in Python, etc.
Then there are the domains of knowledge. This is where it can get tricky. Do you perfect the game industry, or do you jump from games, to banking, to engine control units? We all know that having a diverse experience will really help. I am dead certain that what you learn in games could easily bring some wildly creative approaches to engine control units; yet the HR types are "How many years have you been working with ECUs?" I have successfully leapt more than once from pretty fundamental tech to completely different fundamental tech. Not easy, but very worth it.
Right now I develop mostly for Linux. Yet my development desktop is Visual Studio running on windows 10. I know a few developers who use Linux desktop, but the reality is that it would be under 5% of the developers who I know developing on Linux use linux for their desktop.
Quite simply without Desktop penetration this percentage will always stay low. I don't see this as a problem. Linux to me is a server solution, an embedded solution, a phone solution, but not yet a desktop solution. I suspect that if it were to become a desktop solution that all the other uses would get short shrift. The entire Kernel would have huge pressure to adapt primarily to the needs of the desktop.
Luckily the PC is dying. While servers VM, embedded, and mobile devices are taking off. Drones and robots are also getting to be a thing. This is where Linux rocks. I am happy to have a tool for these things that is so awesome.
So, please linux, don't try to capture the other 98% or you will probably let me down and I will have to find something else.
I am willing to bet that the execs have spreadsheets showing that the series will be a huge hit and that pretty much anyone who ever watched Star Trek will subscribe to the service. Then by the time it blows up those same execs will have ridden the probability of their success on to other projects.
Even worse, when it does blow up and their turd of a streaming service dies, they won't see it as their clinging to the old model, but as categorical proof that streaming is a bad idea and that Netflix's days are numbered.
Idiots.
In theory a show like this is an easy win for the network. It is then very very tempting for executives to mess with it for a wide variety of reasons. Put a GF in minor role. Get some writers who you need for another project a place to park themselves. A great place to dump losses from other shows. Basically all kinds of things that aren't good for the show.
I suspect that the director wasn't playing ball with their 20th century ways and they replaced him with someone more "controllable" let's see how that works out.
If we are lucky the show is run by people even better at avoiding such crap. If we aren't we will get a half crap show that is loaded up with acting has-beens from the last 20 years who were owed favours by various CBS executives, hack writers who weren't even good in their Full House days, and editorial urine tasting contests where executives say, "NO NO NO to much science. We need people talking about their emotions. Let's see if we can get Oprah to dress up like we got Woopie to do."
Then the few union seniors who do make the show don't want to do star dreck (that is what they will call it) but they want to make some crap 80's drama like LA Law. So they will make LA Law in space. That was their first Union gig, and they haven't changed one bit since.
I think the key is to look at the trend. Amazon's graph is one way for now. Online retail is also one way. Importantly quite a bit of what is being added to online sales is products that you can't even buy in stores from manufacturers who won't easily show up on any statistic. If you look at the last 12 months of my purchases (other than rent, groceries, and utilities) the vast majority has moved online. The second I can order my groceries competitively online, I will. But from a retail statistic only my groceries will probably show up as something changed. My other ordering is from companies that I very much doubt play ball with any retail organization statistics gathering. Thus I would say that out of $10,000 in optional spending maybe 90% of that is invisible.
Also I am in Canada where amazon sucks for things like groceries. I know Americans who pretty well only buy perishable items from non online and usually amazon.
So if you look at the product lines of the huge conglomerates then I suspect that online isn't that much of a trend for them. But it is their less mass marketed competitors who will be going gang-busters online. This is probably invisible to most statistics.
The people to ask with the most trustworthy statistics would be the credit card companies and combine that data with bank cards. I am willing to bet that the trend there is in the "oh shit" territory for bricks and mortar companies. They would probably look and say, we can't reconfigure to compete with that for at least 3 good reasons. Things like product variety, manufactures who won't play ball with regional exclusivity or other price fixing, and simply that there are direct to customer sales that simply don't leave any room for the costs of their supply chain.
While there may be many problems with Amazon concentrating so much power in one company, I don't cry much for the many greedy layers there have traditionally been between me and the manufacturer. I am happy to give my money to the people who make something. I am not happy to give money to the layer after layer after layer of people who have managed to insinuate themselves between the manufacturer and me.
Often distributors would force manufacturers to sign exclusive regional distribution agreements that then allowed them to lock the price for a large area. The retailers would then spend zillions of dollars marketing at me which they then had to recoup. Then there are the malls and other landowners who charge retailers exorbitant rents that need to be recouped. And then there are the greedy retailers themselves who would gouge the crap out of me while treating their retail employees like crap.
While Amazon has certainly been abusive to their own employees, I have not heard tell of them abusing their suppliers. They don't let large conglomerates shove out minor players from the Amazon shelves. If a small manufacturer sells a great widget at a great price, garnering great reviews, then the giantco that traditionally owned that space needs to up their game or see the minor player start to get some serious traction in that market. Normally giantco would turn to the distributors and retail giants and tell them to cut the minor player out of the loop, assuming that the minor player could have even gotten onto any shelves in the first place.
This bookends with people cutting off all forms of traditional media; thus cutting off all forms of traditional brand marketing. If a company XYZ wants to sell me a thing, and their amazon reviews are the best and their price is good, I will buy that widget without even having a slight guess as to how many 10s of millions giantco spent marketing their second rate pile of junk.
If you go back just a few years, you would find people nervous to stray from what they had been brow-beaten into believing was the proper thing to do. Now they do their own homework and come to their own conclusions. This is no small thing. I know more and more people who are doing a vast percentage of their shopping on Amazon and they don't have their favourite brands, they don't buy brands I have previously heard of, and they certainly aren't buying from companies that have multi billion dollar advertising budgets for their entire product lineup. Or if they do it is only because that product managed to actually win on its own merits.
There are a few exceptions such as Apple, but even these brands are losing their luster because people are no longer being told what to buy at all the levels from marketing to the in-store experience.
I went into a mall the other day (because there was an office that I needed to visit) I looked around the mall and was disgusted. The prices were bonkers, and the employees were there for the hard sell. They provided negative value for the customer. People aren't generally stupid and as time progresses more and more people will join the ranks of those who have left brand and store front retail behind.
Your last one is the # reason I make driving mistakes. Luckily I haven't had one translate to an accident, but my rule is I pull over and wait for the mouth to shut. I have pulled over. Waited 10 minutes. Pulled out and immediately pulled back in because it started up again around 5mph. Then I pulled over and waited, then repeated this 2 more times. I then pulled over, got out and called a cab.
Who's the asshole here?
PS The mouth does not drive.
My theory on this is very simple. At first there will still be accidents caused by driverless cars. But the data gathered by the driverless cars will easily be enough to reproduce those accidents. With each accident, a team of brilliant engineers will pour over the data and figure out how to deal with that accident. It wont only be solved for that accident but the changes will be tested against a zillion hours of difficult data to make sure that the new code doesn't cause new accidents. All cars will then get an upgrade and will now be safer.
After a while the driverless cars will have hit a point where solving for the tiny remaining number of edge cases will actually reduce overall safety. But these edge cases will be so few and far between that they will make national news when they happen. Thus, the stats behind driverless cars will be so extraordinarily safe that for a single human driver to "prove" that they are safer would take lifetimes of flawless driving to prove. This number will only spread as time grows.
I would not be surprised if the experimental driverless cars are in the top 1% of the top 1% of drivers in the world.
The key being that a single driver gets to accumulate only their own stats, while 1,000,000 driverless cars will do more than a taxi driver's lifetime driving nearly every day or so.
Then to make it worse, we meatbags are variable. Even the best driver in the world with a flawless record, might be forced to drive in non-optimal conditions. They haven't slept in a few days, they are sick, and a sudden emergency forces them to drive someone to the hospital. None of that applies to a driverless car.
For instance. I have a 20+ year flawless driving record. Part of that is that I know not to drive when I have not slept well the night before, or any time between 1am and 7am.
One other bit is that driverless cars will soon have some interesting abilities. Things such as gathering data from other driverless cars. Thus if something has dropped onto the highway, one driverless car can alert the rest about it. Or if one car hits a surprising icy slick, it will not only notify other cars, it will start to build a pattern of when that road is icy. These would be the few initial areas where people would be better; where you know that a certain intersection seems to have ice on it in these conditions. Or observing the behavior of other cars to possibly be alerted to problem such as trash on the road.
Presuming the car is only driving where cars should be driving, any situation where the car would need to "sacrafice" the driver for a pedestrian is where the pedestrian has done something stupid, such as stepping out onto a highway.
While I certainly hope the car would avoid even the stupidest pedestrians, quite simply if you step out onto a highway, you should expect to become bug-splatter.
I would be enraged if some one ran out onto the road and my car drove me into a pole avoiding them. I certainly wouldn't buy a car that planned on this. and I would modify (even if illegal) my car if it were mandatory. I would certainly vote any politician out of office who pushed for this.
Some might argue, "What about kids chasing balls?" again, I hope the car would do something reasonable to avoid said child, but given the choice between me and the improperly parented child... well darwin will handle this one.