Robotic weapons have five major flaws: The first is as the article says, not really human as they distance war and make it too easy as the risk to soldiers and the whole PR body count problem goes away. War is bad and making it easy can't be a good thing.
The second is that without soldiers in the field seeing the bad things then really bad things can happen as very few people have to choose to be evil for a lot of evil to happen. Solders can go overboard but eventually the truth will come out if enough people know it.
Third is that a coup using robot weapons can be real easy. Normally you need the army's general agreement or at least indifference to have an army coup. But if you give a general enough robots to wage war it need not be a foreign war.
Fourth is security; the robots can be turned against their masters. A simple argument about computer security is that RSA was hacked. If they can be hacked anybody can be hacked.
Fifth is that once you use them widely you have deemed them acceptable. Once that happens it becomes open season. All the advantages of robotic weapons will eventually also available to the enemy, a potentially unknown enemy. Thus robotic weapons might not only be used in the battlefield but domestically; just being attacked with no sure knowledge as to who launched the attack. This might seem the silliest problem but keep in mind that in WWII there was an agreement in Europe that Gas and Bioweapons would not be used. Even when it was clear that Germany was going to lose and Germany was going to be destroyed at the hands of the Russians even the madman Hitler didn't use them. The simple reason is that even he had seen gas used in WWI and knew it was a can of worms best not opened. Now the Japanese used bioweapons against the Chinese but that was a simple line of thinking; The Chinese couldn't return the favor. But they didn't use them against the US in the battlefield as the US could easily return fire. Right now the US and a few other western countries have basic robotic weapons. The present set of bad guys don't really. Easy pickings... for now. But continued use of ever improving robotic weapons will prove their worth making the bad guys want them more and more.
The key advantage of robotic weapons is that they save lives by leaving the soldiers at home while waging war in some distant land. The moment some enemy is able to play the game that advantage not only vanishes but has turned into a situation where enemy attacks are right here attacking what is most dear to us. That kind of war really sucks.
So think about it; there are weapons that are so evil that even Hitler wouldn't touch them; Robotic war easily qualifies to join that list.
BTW I love robotics and think that it is about to change nearly everything we know.
This OS doesn't solve any problems for me. Windows 3 was better than DOS, then I lept at 95 because it plugged so many holes in 3.1.1, the same with 98 and the 98's to follow. Then I went to 2000 because, as a developer, it was so much better and ME just sucked. 2000 was the first time I didn't have to reboot every 2 hours. But then I stuck with 2000 until just way too many applications wouldn't work. So begrudgingly I switched to XP. Then I switched to Mac. Yet if XP had been tweaked a bit to be properly 64bit I couldn't really see any reason to upgrade beyond that; vista and Windows 7 just didn't call out to me. I am not saying that windows 7 sucked but I wonder if the effort that went into Vista and Windows 7 had gone into making XP better if that would not have been just as good. So I look at my VM of Windows XP and then I read about windows 8 and wonder what killer feature 8 will have that hasn't just be arbitrarily denied to XP. My plan is to keep XP in a VM for web page testing and to soon get 8 into a VM so that I can use whatever useless version of IE it has for more testing.
The only thing that Windows does to me is cause me to write: if($browser.msie){do stupid code;}
If Microsoft wants me back then they have to solve some problem that I have. But as a developer they only want me to solve their problems. They want me to use coding tools that will require my customers to buy Office and various server products. In the early days Microsoft put out tools that were directly aimed at me and my problems. Visual Basic allowed me to code stuff for Windows in a flash. Coding for windows was hard using crap products like Borland C++. Then they came out with Visual Studio and poof I could code windows using MFC which simplified the whole process. But then MFC started getting more and more supportive of MS products. Then came.net. Again it was the answer to Java and solve many problems. But then by.net 2.5 it was all about integrating various MS products into my projects.
If MS wants to win me back they need to buy something like Trolltech's QT and make it so that I can program for Windows/Android/iPhone with equal ease. MS would then get splashed by all the applications that could be ported in a snap.
MS has completely turned me off when I reinstalled Windows on a laptop using the legitimate Dell supplied DVD and serial. I use the code and bloop "This product is not Genuine." Nice.
In sweatshops, especially those that bill by the hour, they need coding whores not artists. So I suspect this guy pays sweatshop wages resulting in dumb 20 year olds being fooled into working hard. In places like that anyone who is approaching 40 and still there is a fool; probably a resentful fool.
Often I see these places that are horrifically managed where they have "heroic" work hours easily punching through 60 a week. They then put out buggy products and often these places end up going down in flames after a few years of pretty stunning success. Think Zinga.
Often the problem with 40+ year old workers is that if they were good then after 20 years they have a crazy skill set resulting in just stupid productivity. But this productivity is often not of the code code code sort. It can be more of the "I've seen a library in Python that can save us 10 weeks of programming." which they then deploy in 15 minutes. So some MBA manager type gets angry that the guy who regularly saves the company millions of dollars is demanding a pretty big salary. The crappy MBA then argues that he could get 3-8 fresh CS grads for the same salary.
But on the otherhand I have seen many 50+ one trick pony programmers. They know powerbuilder or Adabas like a god and make excellent arguments against replacing the IBM big iron machine with a linux box.
My personal experience would be that computer engineer is a better place to start a career and then start sprinkling computer science more and more. The CS majors (the worst being the graduate ones) blah blah all the time about big O yet somehow never master the career basics such as SQL or Linux administration. I find that they get bogged down with Big O and other analysis on problems where O^8 will still take nearly zero time and O just doesn't matter.
Yet on the other end I find that many computer software engineers tend to master something like Java and then just wail away at every problem with their one mastered skill set. Then after a while they get a second skill set such as SQL and as time goes by they end up with a sort of vertical integration of skills. But where they don't usually progress is when you do have to look at a problem as a system and start doing discrete math, working out the nodes, connections, and so on. This is where computer software engineers will implement a cryptographic library but do it really badly leaving elephant sized holes.
So I would say CS is often too pedantic, CE is too much like a plumber, but a CE with strong math and a good dose of CS can generate art. Sort of like Escher; he could draw quite well and had a good understanding of math, he combined the two into something incredible.
I heard that an English to Russian translation program once translated "Out of sight, out of mind" as "Invisible idiot."
This will remain the standard until computers have beaten the far more fantastic goal of basically understanding what we are actually saying; this way they will not only transliterate or translate phrases but intent. Thus a hard NO in English will become a culturally face saving no when translated to Japanese.
Slashdot likes to look at projects with potential but the only potential for this project is for a lead article in Popular Mechanics. If you try and use any device like this in real life you will just end up with a sushi chef having a crap in your salad seeing that you just offered him $500,000 to have a dump in the house salad. When you actually said "Fine, bread and house salad it is, and could I have a dumpling on the side?"
And when the cops come don't be surprised when they tazer you for what you called their mothers.
I was a MS person up to around 2000 then I switched to Linux, Apache, PHP, and MySQL for server stuff. I kept using.net on the client side. But by.net 2.5 it was serving the needs of MS Office and not my needs; so I switched to Java. Hated java and eventually moved my client side stuff to the browser. Was using eclipse to program and running apache, php, and mysql on my windows desktop to simulate the Linux machine. I realized that I was an inch away from using nothing from MS Then I switched to MacOS X as it better resembled the Linux server without the annoyances of Linux as a desktop (No photoshop etc.) So now I was using absolutely nothing MS without any specific motivation to move away from MS. I was just chasing the best product in every category.
It is a pain in the ass to make the above changes so MS had to really let me down in every category. On the other hand if they started to make the best in various categories they might win me back.
I love the XBox but I am just waiting for the XBox 720 to be ruined by the Office group trying to somehow shoehorn Office onto it.
Not a team player; or was he a threat
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The Empire In Decline?
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I have read that this guy was fired for leaving the stupidest sounding conference I have ever heard of. Two solid days of watching each others' powerpoints. That is pure MBA masturbation. From the sound of it he basically got up, said, "All you need to know is on my blog" and then left the conference. Then he was labeled abrasive and not a team player. Well it sounds like he didn't follow their petty rules (the guy who successfully runs windows development). I suspect that he also sent some shock waves with other free thinkers saying, "Hey I am wasting my time here too."
By saying that all they needed to know was on his blog it seems he was basically saying, Microsoft join the 21st century and get out of the 19th century.
I have seen teams that would appear to be dysfunctional people yelling and stomping out. But these teams produced wonders. I have seen other teams that were quiet and respectful of each other and were nothing but deadweight. I am willing to bet that there is an inverse ratio to the time showing people powerpoints and the genuine productivity of that team. The worst is when someone puts up a powerpoint and then starts reading it to you. Icing on the powerpoint cake is when you have a central item with other items surrounding it with arrows pointing to the central item. A perfect example would be a powerpoint slide saying "Team Player" in the center with items around it that are things that make a good team player.
So assuming this guy wasn't throwing feces at people I suspect that MBA types who had everything to lose spent the rest of this conference making sure that this guy was gone. My suggestion to him is to sell his MS stock sooner than later.
On a whole other page it could be that Windows 8 is a giant turd and this is one of the first heads to role. Either way I just don't see a bright future for MS. Unless they have a world beater about to come out of their R&D people nothing they have catches my fancy. In every category of product I prefer something else. MySQL to SQL, Linux to MS Server, Bean to Word, MacOSX to Windows, Sublime or XCode to Visual Studio, PHP to ASPX, C++ or Python or java to.net anything, iPhone or Android to MS phones. iPad or a Macbook Air to Surface. Anything to Zune. VLC to MS Media. OpenGL to DirectX. I do like the XBox and my MS Mouse.
If MS simply stopped selling products I would not be greatly inconvenienced. This is a massive sea change from say 1998. If they had vanished in 1998 I would have cried myself to sleep.
Two things, one these products have huge attack surface areas along with a huge number of machines making them attractive targets. The simple fact that most are open source any code updates are often then maps to the just plugged vulnerabilities. So make sure you are religious about keeping it up to date.
Next I love a consistent look and feel as it seems so do you. So when you customize the forum make sure that you do it through their plug-in/addon/template system and don't just reach into the code to customize it. The simple reason is the first part of what I wrote. You will want to keep that puppy up to date and this will then wipe out your changes if you don't do it through the "approved" way. Once you start noodling their code you will then be tempted to delay an upgrade while you insert your changes in their new code. Don't! Some of the holes in various forums allow evil doers to pwn your machine. (insert offensive saying as to just how pwned it will be). Also keep in mind these evil doers run automated scripts making lists of machines that they can someday pwn.
What tesla should do is to give out non exclusive franchises for $0.01 online. Anyone can get one: corner stores, private people, my cat, just saturate the market. Then when you want to buy a car you would buy it online through some "local" dealership. Technically bob down the street would sell it to you but Tesla would handle the transaction for Bob and then pass bob his $0.02 commission.
There are few organizations that I detest more than car dealerships.
A better end run of the law would be to go federal and try to slip in an online sales rule that overrides any local laws. That would be a 21st century way to go. I don't care where Amazon's HQ is and I certainly don't want a stupid local law getting between me and Amazon.
Now if the US supreme court could apply the same level of common sense and justice to the software patent problem it would be a real turn on (I couldn't help myself).
It looks like this decision is that a greedy company tried bending the rules and were punished. Normally the sense that I get from situations like these that such judgements don't happen because of the whole corporations are the backbone of the country crap so the punishments are usually a tiny portion of the profits from the misbehavior. To lose the viagra patent ought to deflate their profits in Canada (still can't stop).
This is the magical aspect of modern corporations they think that it is somehow good to work every angle, to twist every law, and bend every regulation. It is almost as if they feel bad about themselves if they aren't screwing someone somehow. This is a perfect case in point. Viagra is the wet dream of any big Pharma (on a roll now) a normal patent would have been solid and made them bazillions of dollars; but no they had to squeeze another nickle or dime out of the patent so they risked it all. Viagra also fell into their lap as it was a crappy heart drug that had an interesting side effect. If I were a major shareholder I would demand that the company reevaluate itself to see if a more ethical approach would result in less overall risk.
I look at the raspberry pi at $25 and think that would make an OK server. So a slightly upgraded pi with a good arm processor and say 4-8G of memory would be an awesome server as part of a cluster. For many servers in clusters a bit of storage is needed for boot up; the data mostly stays in ram. Then all that would be needed would be the occasional more traditional machine for HD storage. It would be killer to be able to keep adding new little servers for $99.
10 machines with say 4 cores each and 4G each would give a cluster with 40 cores and 35 gigs of in ram storage; all for around $1000. Plus anything by ARM would probably be pretty good efficiency-wise.
Due to redundancy and the extreme capacity adding flexibility I would much prefer $99 machines to just a boring regular server with just an big old ARM chip. Or even a boring regular server with a pile of ARM chips.
Most people don't want tracking because of scumbag marketers and data gathers; groups who are the least likely to follow the spirit of DNT. Yet for a website like mine GeoAmigo.com. I track one thing and that is your login. I am fairly certain that people who use my site are 100% happy with my tracking as then they don't log in over and over. I cookie this so that the next time you come back to check to see if new people are in your area you don't have to log in again. If you log out the cookie is killed.
So it shouldn't be do not track but do not sell my data to data whoring scumbags.
This where the law needs to get with the 21st century. I have a simple suggestion. That any organization or logical part of an organization cannot share your data without your written permission with anyone else on the planet. Thus the billing department for a company can't even share your contact info with the marketing department let alone any third party. Also they need to make obtaining this permission a separate document. They can't have a small section of a larger form forcing you to agree to this. Also agreement to sharing the data cannot be a condition to any other agreement. This way the phone company can't say you don't get an account without sharing data.
The reason for this would be that with the push of a button a company can share millions of records with any dirtbag they feel like. So make it hard work to share data.
I use different addresses (same location but mistakes that don't matter) for nearly every company I deal with so I can see who is selling my data. Nearly all of them are. They might argue that it is for my own benefit but if I don't want it then it isn't for my benefit but to my detriment.
If this were the allowed then a few asshats would go on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on about whatever stupid thing they had in their heads be it religion or the description of their latest poop (I don't want to hear either unless I work in a church or colonoscopy department). Quite the opposite it sounds like management succeeded in getting rid of a Mr. Dysfunctional McDisruption.
Smoking hits me in the nose so I reach out and fight it. Someone eating deep fried butter just makes me laugh. Personally I have a long list of ingredients that tick me off: HFCS, Palm Oil, etc I won't eat them and curse products that switch to them. But I won't condemn others for eating them.
Personally if anyone were to make a coherent argument against much junk food it would be societal. I suspect that the lack of Omega-3 in people's diets in the US is a leading cause of the crazy levels of violence in the US. I would love to see an experiment where some prison somewhere were to cut way back on corn oil and try out olive oil and fish oil to see what happens. The next experiment should then be with cutting out HFCS. With science like that (assuming there is a positive result) then public policy could be implemented. But if fat people are unhappy that skinny people get to eat donuts because it makes them jealous then too bad.
Yes the above advocated experimenting on prisoners.
I have been happy with cloudflare but I am pretty unhappy with slashdot today. Other than cloudflare (which is free and pretty good but not the best) I have seen not one easily implementable solution. I am shocked that nobody here has much of a suggestion.
Let's assume that he is even right for a moment on all his issues. He is in an environment of people who really don't like any of these positions; yet he keeps bringing them up and pushing them in others' faces. Can you imagine what this tool was like to work with on normal issues?
I suspect he was fired for not being able to read others and play well with others. In an engineering/science world this would be quite an accomplishment to stand out by having poor social skills.
I know a parent at a private school who was equally religious about her health-food lifestyle and was always pushing it down people's throats. The other parents suddenly had important texts to send when she showed up. Where she crossed the line was when she began to try an enforce her view on the other kids arguing it was unfair to her kids to have to see them eating junk food like milk, wheat based bread, and cheese. The school asked her not to enroll the next year.
There are people who don't understand boundaries and they can create a poisonous atmosphere.
It is like fat people being angry when skinny people eat donuts. Fat people aren't the problem, donuts aren't the problem, it is the fat people imposing on the skinny that is the problem.
This is a classic case of government panicking when they lose control of information and thus power. I find when a government spends too much time controlling information they tend to forget what they are actually supposed to be doing. I love how this compares to a functioning government like Norway where you can access people's tax records online. There are a few odd rules though; there is a time window and I believe that people know who has accessed their records. Thus the open information includes knowing which of your neighbours are nosy. But the best part is the first year they went online the public found famous rich people claiming $150,000 in income resulting in investigations.
Flexibility in mounting, assume all technology that you pick will be a commodore 64 in 10 years; so make it easy to pull something out and replace it. Don't make everything form fitting. Sort of like the garage. You don't build it to fit your car exactly. If you are running cables run them in a big smooth pipe so you can pull them and run new cables; say fiber, or superconducting.
If you go with solar you have three basic options (or switchable wiring). One is to go with solar for heat. This is the most efficient and least cool. Then there is solar for knocking your electrical bill down, and finally there is solar for off the grid. If you are in a location where off the grid isn't sensible the cool thing you can do is to have the solar switchable for powering critical things during a power outage. Keeping a fridge going and charging your gadgets would make you the envy of your neighbourhood.
And as for something kitchen, cool sous vid is the way to go. That is about the nerdiest gadget you can put in your kitchen. You can get one that you put in a pot for a few hundred dollars.
The problem is that once they buy out the upstart the competition is gone. The big 3 telcos don't really compete with each other as is evidenced by the European countries (should have otherwise similar costs) where ten euros buys you a whole lot of cellphone usage. Britain has the fewest (that I know of) telcos and the highest costs. Yet in Germany where I can't count the number of telcos the cost is freakishly low.
Thus the big 3 in Canada should be broken up in that they should be broken up.
We have a similar problem with Air Canada owning all the best landing slots on international routes. They even went bankrupt and kept these jewels. Other airlines can't compete on these routes if they can't land their airplanes at the other end.
There is an expression 1 Camel, 1 Arab; bad price. 1 Camel, 2 Arabs; great price. Well in Canada I don't think that kicks in until you have 1 Camel, 5 or 6 Canadians. So we need many more real telcos in Canada and Fido doesn't count.
Code formatting can be a religious issue (I have my favorite style) and just like this article says probably often stems back to trying to please some forgotten professor. Often there is a logic behind each style rule. But mostly I agree that there should be one true style at any given company. In a weird way it might be good to have a company style that would offend any fresh CS major in that they could be shown the style and told that style is not negotiable. This would show if they are a team player or not. A genuinely good programmer would know that after a week of programming the new style that they would be fine with it.
But my main complaints about other people's styles is that they do often come from the small assignment to be marked school of needs combined with 50-60 year old professors who learned their stuff in the 80s. This results in rules like: no line longer than 80 characters.//Comment the crap out of everything. This comment crap also ends up with huge comment headers at the top of every page. The worst comment style is when people break up the parameters to a function onto separate lines; ah la C code from 1982.
Then there are the document hounds. This comes from the corporate school where managers need yards of documentation. So they insist upon strange comments that proceed every comment with the goal of generating huge documents that nobody will ever read and are probably wrong since they don't generate runtime errors if they get out of sync with the code. This is a case of mission creep where the programmers are also supposed to generate documentation to make the manager able to show he is worth something.
The key is that the style should come from the goal of creating a product quickly, that is bug free, and can be maintained with reasonable ease. Once rules creep in that don't concern these three reasons then they are stupid rules.
You mean features like storing data and dishing it back out; or nonsense features like CPLM5 certification?
Plus you are comparing corporate Oracle to Corporate SQL. For most people all Free and Open Source would be just peachy. Most people including facebook. I rarely see the really big big big sites doing anything with any of the Oracley Microsofty IBMy stuff. They usually take Open Source and then roll their own. Sort of shows that the route to success starts with open source and ends with modified open source.
I have always felt that Cisco had the same sort of following as Novell. Senior IT people certified up the wazoo yet unable to explain to me why Cisco was so much better. The bits that leak out of big data people like Facebook and Google seem pretty lacking in the big names. I don't see gear from HP, IBM, Dell, Cisco, etc. What I do see is white boxish or custom gear that they seem perfectly happy with.
Just a guess but my bet is that much of the business that big old companies like Cisco come from single skill IT people combined with kick ass sales people. Salespeople who sell to upper management not to the non Cisco IT people who might fact check.
So good job to the people who didn't blow an extra $100 Million.
This whole bidding billions for frequencies is a crock. Only a company that raises the billions can hope to bid. So the incumbents issue a bond or whatnot and buy up huge chunks of spectrum.
Also they need to block the mergers. The pattern in Canada is that some snot nosed upstart gives them a run for their money and they buy them out. I suspect that the big guys get upset that the customers even got a taste of freedom.
These guys have had enough of a free run so first don't let them buy one ounce more spectrum. Next any spectrum that hasn't been used should be returned with 12 months of winning it. Eastlink in eastern Canada has been sitting on some spectrum with no explanation as to why they aren't using it. They are saying soon soon. How 'bout no; use it or loose it. Next the CRTC needs to be able to go after individual executives much like the SEC can hammer individual executives. So if some executive breaks the rules he is banned from the telco industry for X years just like finance types are banned from fiance for X years.
And lastly CRTC people need to be apart from the telco industry. If you worked for the telco industry then you can't be in the CRTC. If you are in the CRTC then you can't work for a telco company for 10 years.
Although the CRTC just nailed Bell good with their denial of Astral. Keep up the good work there.
Ah but that is exactly what groups like the NSA do. They use algorithms that nobody knows. I suspect, and would bet, that they have crack teams working on cracking known algorithms in order of popularity. The mere fact that their system is unknown or obscure gives it extra security. If they crack any of the better know algorithms I doubt they will go Eureka!, quick, publish our crack in CS101 magazine. But good luck cracking theirs the one that you don't even know exists. It might have some big holes but they are obscured.
If you look at the history of hacks they usually depend on bad security implementation of well known systems. So an SQL injection attack works best if your database is using a well known SQL. The same vulnerability of the poor cleaning of input doesn't work as well if you use an obscure database, say adabas. The hacker would have to first identify the odd database and then cobble together the injection. The same with OSs. Windows his generally hacked first due to its very commonality. Mac is probably next, then linux, and then BSD. In reverse order of obscurity. Thus if I needed a super secure system I check out BSD first just for that reason alone. Plus it seems that BSD has attracted the most paranoid types.
Slashdot Mirror
Robotic weapons have five major flaws: The first is as the article says, not really human as they distance war and make it too easy as the risk to soldiers and the whole PR body count problem goes away. War is bad and making it easy can't be a good thing.
The second is that without soldiers in the field seeing the bad things then really bad things can happen as very few people have to choose to be evil for a lot of evil to happen. Solders can go overboard but eventually the truth will come out if enough people know it.
Third is that a coup using robot weapons can be real easy. Normally you need the army's general agreement or at least indifference to have an army coup. But if you give a general enough robots to wage war it need not be a foreign war.
Fourth is security; the robots can be turned against their masters. A simple argument about computer security is that RSA was hacked. If they can be hacked anybody can be hacked.
Fifth is that once you use them widely you have deemed them acceptable. Once that happens it becomes open season. All the advantages of robotic weapons will eventually also available to the enemy, a potentially unknown enemy. Thus robotic weapons might not only be used in the battlefield but domestically; just being attacked with no sure knowledge as to who launched the attack. This might seem the silliest problem but keep in mind that in WWII there was an agreement in Europe that Gas and Bioweapons would not be used. Even when it was clear that Germany was going to lose and Germany was going to be destroyed at the hands of the Russians even the madman Hitler didn't use them. The simple reason is that even he had seen gas used in WWI and knew it was a can of worms best not opened. Now the Japanese used bioweapons against the Chinese but that was a simple line of thinking; The Chinese couldn't return the favor. But they didn't use them against the US in the battlefield as the US could easily return fire. Right now the US and a few other western countries have basic robotic weapons. The present set of bad guys don't really. Easy pickings... for now. But continued use of ever improving robotic weapons will prove their worth making the bad guys want them more and more.
The key advantage of robotic weapons is that they save lives by leaving the soldiers at home while waging war in some distant land. The moment some enemy is able to play the game that advantage not only vanishes but has turned into a situation where enemy attacks are right here attacking what is most dear to us. That kind of war really sucks.
So think about it; there are weapons that are so evil that even Hitler wouldn't touch them; Robotic war easily qualifies to join that list.
BTW I love robotics and think that it is about to change nearly everything we know.
This OS doesn't solve any problems for me. Windows 3 was better than DOS, then I lept at 95 because it plugged so many holes in 3.1.1, the same with 98 and the 98's to follow. Then I went to 2000 because, as a developer, it was so much better and ME just sucked. 2000 was the first time I didn't have to reboot every 2 hours. But then I stuck with 2000 until just way too many applications wouldn't work. So begrudgingly I switched to XP. Then I switched to Mac. Yet if XP had been tweaked a bit to be properly 64bit I couldn't really see any reason to upgrade beyond that; vista and Windows 7 just didn't call out to me. I am not saying that windows 7 sucked but I wonder if the effort that went into Vista and Windows 7 had gone into making XP better if that would not have been just as good. So I look at my VM of Windows XP and then I read about windows 8 and wonder what killer feature 8 will have that hasn't just be arbitrarily denied to XP. My plan is to keep XP in a VM for web page testing and to soon get 8 into a VM so that I can use whatever useless version of IE it has for more testing.
.net. Again it was the answer to Java and solve many problems. But then by .net 2.5 it was all about integrating various MS products into my projects.
The only thing that Windows does to me is cause me to write: if($browser.msie){do stupid code;}
If Microsoft wants me back then they have to solve some problem that I have. But as a developer they only want me to solve their problems. They want me to use coding tools that will require my customers to buy Office and various server products. In the early days Microsoft put out tools that were directly aimed at me and my problems. Visual Basic allowed me to code stuff for Windows in a flash. Coding for windows was hard using crap products like Borland C++. Then they came out with Visual Studio and poof I could code windows using MFC which simplified the whole process. But then MFC started getting more and more supportive of MS products. Then came
If MS wants to win me back they need to buy something like Trolltech's QT and make it so that I can program for Windows/Android/iPhone with equal ease. MS would then get splashed by all the applications that could be ported in a snap.
MS has completely turned me off when I reinstalled Windows on a laptop using the legitimate Dell supplied DVD and serial. I use the code and bloop "This product is not Genuine." Nice.
In sweatshops, especially those that bill by the hour, they need coding whores not artists. So I suspect this guy pays sweatshop wages resulting in dumb 20 year olds being fooled into working hard. In places like that anyone who is approaching 40 and still there is a fool; probably a resentful fool.
Often I see these places that are horrifically managed where they have "heroic" work hours easily punching through 60 a week. They then put out buggy products and often these places end up going down in flames after a few years of pretty stunning success. Think Zinga.
Often the problem with 40+ year old workers is that if they were good then after 20 years they have a crazy skill set resulting in just stupid productivity. But this productivity is often not of the code code code sort. It can be more of the "I've seen a library in Python that can save us 10 weeks of programming." which they then deploy in 15 minutes. So some MBA manager type gets angry that the guy who regularly saves the company millions of dollars is demanding a pretty big salary. The crappy MBA then argues that he could get 3-8 fresh CS grads for the same salary.
But on the otherhand I have seen many 50+ one trick pony programmers. They know powerbuilder or Adabas like a god and make excellent arguments against replacing the IBM big iron machine with a linux box.
My personal experience would be that computer engineer is a better place to start a career and then start sprinkling computer science more and more. The CS majors (the worst being the graduate ones) blah blah all the time about big O yet somehow never master the career basics such as SQL or Linux administration. I find that they get bogged down with Big O and other analysis on problems where O^8 will still take nearly zero time and O just doesn't matter.
Yet on the other end I find that many computer software engineers tend to master something like Java and then just wail away at every problem with their one mastered skill set. Then after a while they get a second skill set such as SQL and as time goes by they end up with a sort of vertical integration of skills. But where they don't usually progress is when you do have to look at a problem as a system and start doing discrete math, working out the nodes, connections, and so on. This is where computer software engineers will implement a cryptographic library but do it really badly leaving elephant sized holes.
So I would say CS is often too pedantic, CE is too much like a plumber, but a CE with strong math and a good dose of CS can generate art. Sort of like Escher; he could draw quite well and had a good understanding of math, he combined the two into something incredible.
I heard that an English to Russian translation program once translated "Out of sight, out of mind" as "Invisible idiot."
This will remain the standard until computers have beaten the far more fantastic goal of basically understanding what we are actually saying; this way they will not only transliterate or translate phrases but intent. Thus a hard NO in English will become a culturally face saving no when translated to Japanese.
Slashdot likes to look at projects with potential but the only potential for this project is for a lead article in Popular Mechanics. If you try and use any device like this in real life you will just end up with a sushi chef having a crap in your salad seeing that you just offered him $500,000 to have a dump in the house salad. When you actually said "Fine, bread and house salad it is, and could I have a dumpling on the side?"
And when the cops come don't be surprised when they tazer you for what you called their mothers.
I was a MS person up to around 2000 then I switched to Linux, Apache, PHP, and MySQL for server stuff. I kept using .net on the client side. But by .net 2.5 it was serving the needs of MS Office and not my needs; so I switched to Java. Hated java and eventually moved my client side stuff to the browser. Was using eclipse to program and running apache, php, and mysql on my windows desktop to simulate the Linux machine. I realized that I was an inch away from using nothing from MS Then I switched to MacOS X as it better resembled the Linux server without the annoyances of Linux as a desktop (No photoshop etc.) So now I was using absolutely nothing MS without any specific motivation to move away from MS. I was just chasing the best product in every category.
It is a pain in the ass to make the above changes so MS had to really let me down in every category. On the other hand if they started to make the best in various categories they might win me back.
I love the XBox but I am just waiting for the XBox 720 to be ruined by the Office group trying to somehow shoehorn Office onto it.
I have read that this guy was fired for leaving the stupidest sounding conference I have ever heard of. Two solid days of watching each others' powerpoints. That is pure MBA masturbation. From the sound of it he basically got up, said, "All you need to know is on my blog" and then left the conference. Then he was labeled abrasive and not a team player. Well it sounds like he didn't follow their petty rules (the guy who successfully runs windows development). I suspect that he also sent some shock waves with other free thinkers saying, "Hey I am wasting my time here too."
.net anything, iPhone or Android to MS phones. iPad or a Macbook Air to Surface. Anything to Zune. VLC to MS Media. OpenGL to DirectX. I do like the XBox and my MS Mouse.
By saying that all they needed to know was on his blog it seems he was basically saying, Microsoft join the 21st century and get out of the 19th century.
I have seen teams that would appear to be dysfunctional people yelling and stomping out. But these teams produced wonders. I have seen other teams that were quiet and respectful of each other and were nothing but deadweight. I am willing to bet that there is an inverse ratio to the time showing people powerpoints and the genuine productivity of that team. The worst is when someone puts up a powerpoint and then starts reading it to you. Icing on the powerpoint cake is when you have a central item with other items surrounding it with arrows pointing to the central item. A perfect example would be a powerpoint slide saying "Team Player" in the center with items around it that are things that make a good team player.
So assuming this guy wasn't throwing feces at people I suspect that MBA types who had everything to lose spent the rest of this conference making sure that this guy was gone. My suggestion to him is to sell his MS stock sooner than later.
On a whole other page it could be that Windows 8 is a giant turd and this is one of the first heads to role. Either way I just don't see a bright future for MS. Unless they have a world beater about to come out of their R&D people nothing they have catches my fancy. In every category of product I prefer something else. MySQL to SQL, Linux to MS Server, Bean to Word, MacOSX to Windows, Sublime or XCode to Visual Studio, PHP to ASPX, C++ or Python or java to
If MS simply stopped selling products I would not be greatly inconvenienced. This is a massive sea change from say 1998. If they had vanished in 1998 I would have cried myself to sleep.
Two things, one these products have huge attack surface areas along with a huge number of machines making them attractive targets. The simple fact that most are open source any code updates are often then maps to the just plugged vulnerabilities. So make sure you are religious about keeping it up to date.
Next I love a consistent look and feel as it seems so do you. So when you customize the forum make sure that you do it through their plug-in/addon/template system and don't just reach into the code to customize it. The simple reason is the first part of what I wrote. You will want to keep that puppy up to date and this will then wipe out your changes if you don't do it through the "approved" way. Once you start noodling their code you will then be tempted to delay an upgrade while you insert your changes in their new code. Don't! Some of the holes in various forums allow evil doers to pwn your machine. (insert offensive saying as to just how pwned it will be). Also keep in mind these evil doers run automated scripts making lists of machines that they can someday pwn.
What tesla should do is to give out non exclusive franchises for $0.01 online. Anyone can get one: corner stores, private people, my cat, just saturate the market. Then when you want to buy a car you would buy it online through some "local" dealership. Technically bob down the street would sell it to you but Tesla would handle the transaction for Bob and then pass bob his $0.02 commission.
There are few organizations that I detest more than car dealerships.
A better end run of the law would be to go federal and try to slip in an online sales rule that overrides any local laws. That would be a 21st century way to go. I don't care where Amazon's HQ is and I certainly don't want a stupid local law getting between me and Amazon.
Now if the US supreme court could apply the same level of common sense and justice to the software patent problem it would be a real turn on (I couldn't help myself).
It looks like this decision is that a greedy company tried bending the rules and were punished. Normally the sense that I get from situations like these that such judgements don't happen because of the whole corporations are the backbone of the country crap so the punishments are usually a tiny portion of the profits from the misbehavior. To lose the viagra patent ought to deflate their profits in Canada (still can't stop).
This is the magical aspect of modern corporations they think that it is somehow good to work every angle, to twist every law, and bend every regulation. It is almost as if they feel bad about themselves if they aren't screwing someone somehow. This is a perfect case in point. Viagra is the wet dream of any big Pharma (on a roll now) a normal patent would have been solid and made them bazillions of dollars; but no they had to squeeze another nickle or dime out of the patent so they risked it all. Viagra also fell into their lap as it was a crappy heart drug that had an interesting side effect. If I were a major shareholder I would demand that the company reevaluate itself to see if a more ethical approach would result in less overall risk.
I look at the raspberry pi at $25 and think that would make an OK server. So a slightly upgraded pi with a good arm processor and say 4-8G of memory would be an awesome server as part of a cluster. For many servers in clusters a bit of storage is needed for boot up; the data mostly stays in ram. Then all that would be needed would be the occasional more traditional machine for HD storage. It would be killer to be able to keep adding new little servers for $99.
10 machines with say 4 cores each and 4G each would give a cluster with 40 cores and 35 gigs of in ram storage; all for around $1000. Plus anything by ARM would probably be pretty good efficiency-wise.
Due to redundancy and the extreme capacity adding flexibility I would much prefer $99 machines to just a boring regular server with just an big old ARM chip. Or even a boring regular server with a pile of ARM chips.
Most people don't want tracking because of scumbag marketers and data gathers; groups who are the least likely to follow the spirit of DNT. Yet for a website like mine GeoAmigo.com. I track one thing and that is your login. I am fairly certain that people who use my site are 100% happy with my tracking as then they don't log in over and over. I cookie this so that the next time you come back to check to see if new people are in your area you don't have to log in again. If you log out the cookie is killed.
So it shouldn't be do not track but do not sell my data to data whoring scumbags.
This where the law needs to get with the 21st century. I have a simple suggestion. That any organization or logical part of an organization cannot share your data without your written permission with anyone else on the planet. Thus the billing department for a company can't even share your contact info with the marketing department let alone any third party. Also they need to make obtaining this permission a separate document. They can't have a small section of a larger form forcing you to agree to this. Also agreement to sharing the data cannot be a condition to any other agreement. This way the phone company can't say you don't get an account without sharing data.
The reason for this would be that with the push of a button a company can share millions of records with any dirtbag they feel like. So make it hard work to share data.
I use different addresses (same location but mistakes that don't matter) for nearly every company I deal with so I can see who is selling my data. Nearly all of them are. They might argue that it is for my own benefit but if I don't want it then it isn't for my benefit but to my detriment.
If this were the allowed then a few asshats would go on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on about whatever stupid thing they had in their heads be it religion or the description of their latest poop (I don't want to hear either unless I work in a church or colonoscopy department). Quite the opposite it sounds like management succeeded in getting rid of a Mr. Dysfunctional McDisruption.
Smoking hits me in the nose so I reach out and fight it. Someone eating deep fried butter just makes me laugh. Personally I have a long list of ingredients that tick me off: HFCS, Palm Oil, etc I won't eat them and curse products that switch to them. But I won't condemn others for eating them.
Personally if anyone were to make a coherent argument against much junk food it would be societal. I suspect that the lack of Omega-3 in people's diets in the US is a leading cause of the crazy levels of violence in the US. I would love to see an experiment where some prison somewhere were to cut way back on corn oil and try out olive oil and fish oil to see what happens. The next experiment should then be with cutting out HFCS. With science like that (assuming there is a positive result) then public policy could be implemented. But if fat people are unhappy that skinny people get to eat donuts because it makes them jealous then too bad.
Yes the above advocated experimenting on prisoners.
I have been happy with cloudflare but I am pretty unhappy with slashdot today. Other than cloudflare (which is free and pretty good but not the best) I have seen not one easily implementable solution. I am shocked that nobody here has much of a suggestion.
Let's assume that he is even right for a moment on all his issues. He is in an environment of people who really don't like any of these positions; yet he keeps bringing them up and pushing them in others' faces. Can you imagine what this tool was like to work with on normal issues?
I suspect he was fired for not being able to read others and play well with others. In an engineering/science world this would be quite an accomplishment to stand out by having poor social skills.
I know a parent at a private school who was equally religious about her health-food lifestyle and was always pushing it down people's throats. The other parents suddenly had important texts to send when she showed up. Where she crossed the line was when she began to try an enforce her view on the other kids arguing it was unfair to her kids to have to see them eating junk food like milk, wheat based bread, and cheese. The school asked her not to enroll the next year.
There are people who don't understand boundaries and they can create a poisonous atmosphere.
It is like fat people being angry when skinny people eat donuts. Fat people aren't the problem, donuts aren't the problem, it is the fat people imposing on the skinny that is the problem.
This is a classic case of government panicking when they lose control of information and thus power. I find when a government spends too much time controlling information they tend to forget what they are actually supposed to be doing. I love how this compares to a functioning government like Norway where you can access people's tax records online. There are a few odd rules though; there is a time window and I believe that people know who has accessed their records. Thus the open information includes knowing which of your neighbours are nosy. But the best part is the first year they went online the public found famous rich people claiming $150,000 in income resulting in investigations.
Flexibility in mounting, assume all technology that you pick will be a commodore 64 in 10 years; so make it easy to pull something out and replace it. Don't make everything form fitting. Sort of like the garage. You don't build it to fit your car exactly. If you are running cables run them in a big smooth pipe so you can pull them and run new cables; say fiber, or superconducting.
If you go with solar you have three basic options (or switchable wiring). One is to go with solar for heat. This is the most efficient and least cool. Then there is solar for knocking your electrical bill down, and finally there is solar for off the grid. If you are in a location where off the grid isn't sensible the cool thing you can do is to have the solar switchable for powering critical things during a power outage. Keeping a fridge going and charging your gadgets would make you the envy of your neighbourhood.
And as for something kitchen, cool sous vid is the way to go. That is about the nerdiest gadget you can put in your kitchen. You can get one that you put in a pot for a few hundred dollars.
The problem is that once they buy out the upstart the competition is gone. The big 3 telcos don't really compete with each other as is evidenced by the European countries (should have otherwise similar costs) where ten euros buys you a whole lot of cellphone usage. Britain has the fewest (that I know of) telcos and the highest costs. Yet in Germany where I can't count the number of telcos the cost is freakishly low.
Thus the big 3 in Canada should be broken up in that they should be broken up.
We have a similar problem with Air Canada owning all the best landing slots on international routes. They even went bankrupt and kept these jewels. Other airlines can't compete on these routes if they can't land their airplanes at the other end.
There is an expression 1 Camel, 1 Arab; bad price. 1 Camel, 2 Arabs; great price. Well in Canada I don't think that kicks in until you have 1 Camel, 5 or 6 Canadians. So we need many more real telcos in Canada and Fido doesn't count.
Code formatting can be a religious issue (I have my favorite style) and just like this article says probably often stems back to trying to please some forgotten professor. Often there is a logic behind each style rule. But mostly I agree that there should be one true style at any given company. In a weird way it might be good to have a company style that would offend any fresh CS major in that they could be shown the style and told that style is not negotiable. This would show if they are a team player or not. A genuinely good programmer would know that after a week of programming the new style that they would be fine with it.
//Comment the crap out of everything. This comment crap also ends up with huge comment headers at the top of every page. The worst comment style is when people break up the parameters to a function onto separate lines; ah la C code from 1982.
But my main complaints about other people's styles is that they do often come from the small assignment to be marked school of needs combined with 50-60 year old professors who learned their stuff in the 80s. This results in rules like: no line longer than 80 characters.
Then there are the document hounds. This comes from the corporate school where managers need yards of documentation. So they insist upon strange comments that proceed every comment with the goal of generating huge documents that nobody will ever read and are probably wrong since they don't generate runtime errors if they get out of sync with the code. This is a case of mission creep where the programmers are also supposed to generate documentation to make the manager able to show he is worth something.
The key is that the style should come from the goal of creating a product quickly, that is bug free, and can be maintained with reasonable ease. Once rules creep in that don't concern these three reasons then they are stupid rules.
You mean features like storing data and dishing it back out; or nonsense features like CPLM5 certification?
Plus you are comparing corporate Oracle to Corporate SQL. For most people all Free and Open Source would be just peachy. Most people including facebook. I rarely see the really big big big sites doing anything with any of the Oracley Microsofty IBMy stuff. They usually take Open Source and then roll their own. Sort of shows that the route to success starts with open source and ends with modified open source.
I have always felt that Cisco had the same sort of following as Novell. Senior IT people certified up the wazoo yet unable to explain to me why Cisco was so much better. The bits that leak out of big data people like Facebook and Google seem pretty lacking in the big names. I don't see gear from HP, IBM, Dell, Cisco, etc. What I do see is white boxish or custom gear that they seem perfectly happy with.
Just a guess but my bet is that much of the business that big old companies like Cisco come from single skill IT people combined with kick ass sales people. Salespeople who sell to upper management not to the non Cisco IT people who might fact check.
So good job to the people who didn't blow an extra $100 Million.
This whole bidding billions for frequencies is a crock. Only a company that raises the billions can hope to bid. So the incumbents issue a bond or whatnot and buy up huge chunks of spectrum.
Also they need to block the mergers. The pattern in Canada is that some snot nosed upstart gives them a run for their money and they buy them out. I suspect that the big guys get upset that the customers even got a taste of freedom.
These guys have had enough of a free run so first don't let them buy one ounce more spectrum. Next any spectrum that hasn't been used should be returned with 12 months of winning it. Eastlink in eastern Canada has been sitting on some spectrum with no explanation as to why they aren't using it. They are saying soon soon. How 'bout no; use it or loose it. Next the CRTC needs to be able to go after individual executives much like the SEC can hammer individual executives. So if some executive breaks the rules he is banned from the telco industry for X years just like finance types are banned from fiance for X years.
And lastly CRTC people need to be apart from the telco industry. If you worked for the telco industry then you can't be in the CRTC. If you are in the CRTC then you can't work for a telco company for 10 years.
Although the CRTC just nailed Bell good with their denial of Astral. Keep up the good work there.
Ah but that is exactly what groups like the NSA do. They use algorithms that nobody knows. I suspect, and would bet, that they have crack teams working on cracking known algorithms in order of popularity. The mere fact that their system is unknown or obscure gives it extra security. If they crack any of the better know algorithms I doubt they will go Eureka!, quick, publish our crack in CS101 magazine. But good luck cracking theirs the one that you don't even know exists. It might have some big holes but they are obscured.
If you look at the history of hacks they usually depend on bad security implementation of well known systems. So an SQL injection attack works best if your database is using a well known SQL. The same vulnerability of the poor cleaning of input doesn't work as well if you use an obscure database, say adabas. The hacker would have to first identify the odd database and then cobble together the injection. The same with OSs. Windows his generally hacked first due to its very commonality. Mac is probably next, then linux, and then BSD. In reverse order of obscurity. Thus if I needed a super secure system I check out BSD first just for that reason alone. Plus it seems that BSD has attracted the most paranoid types.