There's an elephant in this room and it's the oil and gas industry. It's not so much that so many of us dream of a world where energy is free and limitless as a glass of cold water. It's that most of us realise how much less horror would be in the world if there wasn't constant fighting over the limited fossil fuels that cold fusion would replace. Scientific reputation and the laws of physics can go to hell if these are the things that are preventing us from living in a better, safer, cleaner world. I'm willing to believe that it's all a hoax if it's 100% certain it is BS. However, for the love of humanity, if there's even a shadow of a possibility that any of these experiments have shown something worth checking further then please can everyone shut up and stop shouting it down until we really are 100% certain it's snake oil. Otherwise, it looks to many of us, like the elephant in the room is behind the angry mob goading them on to burn the heretics...
Yesterday there was a post titled "The History of SQL Injection, the Hack That Will Never Go Away ". Someone raised a good point that the problem was more economics than technology. Employers, with no clue about technology, "employing monkeys and paying them peanuts" to produce something that looks visually ok but hacked into existance underneath.
We, programers, work in an unregulated profession which keeps it dynamic, fast paced and forever evolving. Regulation = stagnation So, yes, there's a lot of crap code out there and it won't go away - live with it.
Without Stackoverflow years of man hours would be wasted struggling to figure out some problem that has already been solved by someone else. Wasn't that the idea behind the free software movement, not having to re-invent the wheel each time? What about re-debugging, re-attaching, the wheel each time?
If the strength of our profession is in the fluidity, speed of adaptation and evolution then something like Stackoverflow is essential. If you really need the accreditation of a regulated profession then ask an interviewee for their Stackoverflow account to see what questions they've ask and answered.
Stackoverflow is the best thing that's happened to our profession that I can remember in my 25 years as a programer.
This war on encryption and personal privacy can't be won by the ordinary man against governments. It's inevitable. They will get their way. I take personal comfort in seeing a repeating cycle in history where they can only legislate once the genie is out of the bottle, and they are slow to react. A basic lack of understanding of technology, by those in power, and technology's ability to evolve outside of their constraints means that they are really just sowing the seeds for the next big thing after the internet - it's replacement. Peer to peer communications, not network based would be my guess. How? I dunno, but when forced into a corner we always find a way out.
Saying you need to make your data available to government law enforcement is like saying it's illegal to walk around in public with a loaded AK47. Like the real bad guys do as their told, right? What galls me the most is the way we're being treated like we're too dumb to understand what they are really trying to achieve.
When I saw this post my first thought was "Oh cool, a fight to watch". As usual it didn't disappoint. It's like Dawkins -v- Christians. Neither side is going to win, both are pretty angry with the other. A total waste of time and emotion.
When the hell did Science become an official world religion? My guess is that it's a legacy from church persecution for challenging their version of "truth"
"He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And when you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you." - Friedrich Nietzsche
Communism has become the "cold fusion" of political ideals. It's a dirty word used to black list any alternative, "left wing" political movements that (appear to) oppose capitalism.
Finland isn't talking about setting up a Satsi, encouraging family members to spy on each each other, covertly installing listening devices in their homes and putting up travel restrictions (although according to Snowden your "free west" is doing exactly that right now).
Nor has anyone, yet, imposed economic sanctions on Finland for trying this social experiment. Finland isn't, yet, limited to importing goods from Cuba alone. Try actually talking to someone who grew up in East German to find out why people wanted to leave.
"Things that society needs." Decided by who exactly? Thats nanny state thinking, which is exactly what society doesn't need.
If I've learned anything as a software engineer, but more recently as an MBA-ed business man, it's that things are often counter intuitive. The problem with using the head (guided by $$'s) to steer any course is that you often miss the real gold just by letting the wind blow you off in a different direction.
The 20 century model of paper work and bureaucracy to get welfare is inhumane, degrading and a waste of money.
If you remove the burden of the worry of income from people you open them up to turning their attention to working on things that they are interested in doing. This is, in the long term, is a better economic model as it encourages growth in areas untouched or ignored due to fear of failure and hardship. The capitalistic model is to ask for funding from investors to try something new and innovative. The problem there is that you need to convince them they can get a return on their money.
Not all good ideas and great work should necessarily be locked down by investors or the need for monetary return/gain. Where would we be without the free, and open source, software movements? How much more productive, creative and efficient would our technology be if more of it was written for free?
Chill. It's not worth getting worked up about. It's just a TV show. I personally enjoy it and the characters, it's no worse or better than The Simpsons, Family Guy or South Park. The acting has as many dimensions. I do enjoy reading Chuck Lorre's vanity cards and I often wonder where he gets his inspiration from. An entertaining writer, not a serious one, just a good comedy satirist. If it makes you laugh, great. If it doesn't, don't watch it.
I must be old. First assembly I ever coded in was 6502 on a BBC B, 2nd was ARM on my Acorn Archimedes just as I was starting University. I wrote a paper for my 1st year course on microprocessor design comparing the compiled output for a C function from a Sequent x386, a Sinclair XL 68000 and the ARM. The truly astounding thing was that the ARM compiler took 1/3 of the instructions to complete the same task as the compilers for the old processor architectures. Which, I'm proud to say, was then quoted in class by the lecturer.:) The fact that the RISC, with fewer instructions was more efficient showed up how wrong the complex instructions set approach had been and the brilliance of RISC design. 16 instructions, 16 registers and ran on 0.1W of power. It's a true marvel of tidy, sensible engineering. It was/is so elegant and simple to code for. I've not looked at the v7 assembly but the original was beautifully simple.
I grew up on a farm and I have asthma. I would have put it down to the consumption of raw, unpasteurised milk by farmers and their families. A farm raised child eats much more unprocessed food and is exposed to much higher levels of bacteria. The theory that asthma is a modern disease caused by living in a world that's too clean makes a lot of sense. We've descended from people who survived due to their strong immune defence. This inherited army needs a fight and when it has nothing better to do it attacks it's own. Maybe this theory is correct and the farm dust that prevents asthma. It didn't help me as dust isn't something you see much of when you grow up on a farm in Scotland where it rains 351 days of the year.:-/
I worked on IOS for 12 years and iOS for the last 3 years. Head hunters love me. T They skim my Linkedin profile, failing to read the details, and get into a frenzy thinking I've been writing Apps for iPhone since 1994.:)
I meant to add.. The majority of the porn and casual dating businesses are almost entirely run out of east Europe (Ukraine and Russia). The whole Ashley Madison thing looks like a rival take down.
You only have to look at the affiliate marketing commission being offered by these casual dating sites to see it's "men only" I had a look at this a few years ago but, as my website is 95% female audience, it made no sense to try it. So if they have no interest in paying for referrals of women where do the women come from? Digging deeper you'll find that most of the affiliate partners are the porn websites. The conclusion I came to was that the entire "casual dating" industry was just the monetisation of the online porn industry. The BBC did an expose on it a few years back. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J1TNwC4ctNE
I've wondered how long it'll be before this gets political and regulated.
I remember driving down El Camino Real the week of launch and seeing a homeless guy holding a cardboard sign that read "Will un-install Windows 95 for food"
Go outside and get some sunshine and fresh air. Sounds like you really need it...
No, that's not the reason. The GP explained away that bullshit excuse of yours. Go read the motherfucking comment and look at what it linked to. Here's the relevant part for you:
Almost all of those submissions had at least 100 comments. Many of them had far more. In fact, it was routine to see submissions with 400 or even 500 comments. So clearly something is extremely wrong today, when 100 comments is considered a lot.
The evidence shows very clearly that it was not quieter during the summer 10 years ago, even on a Saturday. As is so plainly obvious, there were many more comments then than there are now.
It's not about it being summer. It's not about it being Saturday. It's about stupid policies having ruined Slashdot!
It's always quieter online mid-summer in the northern hemisphere. I've run a website for several year now and June/July is our quietest time for sales.
Believe it or not "Nerds" do take a break in the outside warm summer air....;)
I think this thread misses the point of the iWatch. I think did too initially.
I write iOS Apps and I've had good success with them. So on the announcement of iWatch I immediately thought about how to make use of the iWatch. Jump on the bandwagon, why not? But I can't really think of any good way that the watch augments my Apps. I could extend the daily notification to the watch but really it's not a game changer for my apps. I use them myself and love using them on iPhone and iPad, but on that tiny screen with what appears to be a fiddly UI? Nah...
I've not bought an iWatch yet, I've thought long and hard about it but I think I've arrived at the conclusion it's worth trying the cheap end version. Why? I see two things the iWatch has that I think I'd like to have. 1) Apple Pay without having to pull out your phone. 2) A discreet and personal notification system using a haptic feedback interface.
I like the idea of not missing phone calls, being able to get notifications of important emails, txts etc from a gentle tap on my wrist. I don't like being attached to my phone, I prefer to leave it on my desk or in my brief case when I'm out meeting clients. In doing this I miss calls and messages that are important.
The iWatch, as I see it, is just a hardware extension of the iOS eco-system. It's not a separate entity in it's own right as the iPad is separate from iPhone.
So as an app eco-system it doesn't make any sense and neither does this article.
Time wasting social media (FB, Snapchat et al) are piss poor examples too. Facebook's got an issue with Apple right now (see Samsung patent case announcement today with FB siding against Apple). So any comments coming out of FB towards Apple right now can be taken with large amounts of scepticism.
iWatch Killer App? I'd say it's already there in "Apple Pay".
Step aside Alice, tonight it's Nolan. Nolan Lawson sounds like a Fandroid with an axe to grind and some fruit to chop.
I'm sure Google's fans still love to believe in the "don't be evil" slogan that Google once claimed to be their mantra. The evil being Microsoft and everything they did to get rich. Yes, they were evil, they didn't play ball in any industry attempt at standardisation. They made sure that only Microsoft worked with Microsoft to close off all competition. I ran up against them trying to get Cisco's PPP stack working with theirs when I worked on IOS (not iOS) back in the 90's.
This blog article is an utterly pathetic attempt to try and make Apple out to be the new Microsoft of the 21st century. Not a chance. Not ever. Why today? A lot happening with Apple's Music & iOS today. Someone upset by the attention they are getting once again? So out roll the Apple bashing articles.
Evil is pretending to be your friend by giving you "free stuff" and then quietly selling off your private data to the highest bidder. I prefer being a customer to being the product. So if you want to drawn parallels then I'd say that Google has replaced the monster it set out to slay.
"He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee." - Nietzsche
I use 2 browsers on a daily basis. 1. Firefox for development work (because firebug is the best IMHO) 2. Safari because I like to keep work & play separate. My bookmarks in sync across my devices and I do like/use Apple's "handoff". Having both browsers also means that on the rare occasion I find a website with a compatibility problem I just switch to the other one.
Imagine the look on the faces of the victorious Chinese decryption team on opening up Snowden's files and find nothing but this link http://bit.ly/IqT6zt
This disturbs me as it reminds me of Orwell's 1984. The video screening of people being bombed, or shot, and the audience laughing. That's the reaction they want, they want us to laugh at them killing other humans. Don't, it's nothing to laugh at. You're only dehumanising yourself.
Too much of any good thing soon stops being a good thing.
I really enjoyed the fantasy novels of Anne Rice (e.g. "Interview with the Vampire") as she explored the topic of immortality in her characters to a philosophical degree. Vampires going out of their minds with the "burden" of immortality and looking for a way to die.
I believe what makes life special and precious is that it's finite. You don't know how much you have in the bank and the happiest people you'll encounter are those who savour every moment they have like it was their last. Turn that on it's head and life becomes valueless if you following my reasoning.
Slashdot Mirror
There's an elephant in this room and it's the oil and gas industry.
It's not so much that so many of us dream of a world where energy is free and limitless as a glass of cold water.
It's that most of us realise how much less horror would be in the world if there wasn't constant fighting over the limited fossil fuels that cold fusion would replace.
Scientific reputation and the laws of physics can go to hell if these are the things that are preventing us from living in a better, safer, cleaner world.
I'm willing to believe that it's all a hoax if it's 100% certain it is BS.
However, for the love of humanity, if there's even a shadow of a possibility that any of these experiments have shown something worth checking further then please can everyone shut up and stop shouting it down until we really are 100% certain it's snake oil.
Otherwise, it looks to many of us, like the elephant in the room is behind the angry mob goading them on to burn the heretics...
Yesterday there was a post titled "The History of SQL Injection, the Hack That Will Never Go Away ".
Someone raised a good point that the problem was more economics than technology.
Employers, with no clue about technology, "employing monkeys and paying them peanuts" to produce something that looks visually ok but hacked into existance underneath.
We, programers, work in an unregulated profession which keeps it dynamic, fast paced and forever evolving.
Regulation = stagnation
So, yes, there's a lot of crap code out there and it won't go away - live with it.
Without Stackoverflow years of man hours would be wasted struggling to figure out some problem that has already been solved by someone else.
Wasn't that the idea behind the free software movement, not having to re-invent the wheel each time?
What about re-debugging, re-attaching, the wheel each time?
If the strength of our profession is in the fluidity, speed of adaptation and evolution then something like Stackoverflow is essential.
If you really need the accreditation of a regulated profession then ask an interviewee for their Stackoverflow account to see what questions they've ask and answered.
Stackoverflow is the best thing that's happened to our profession that I can remember in my 25 years as a programer.
This war on encryption and personal privacy can't be won by the ordinary man against governments.
It's inevitable. They will get their way.
I take personal comfort in seeing a repeating cycle in history where they can only legislate once the genie is out of the bottle, and they are slow to react.
A basic lack of understanding of technology, by those in power, and technology's ability to evolve outside of their constraints means that they are really just sowing the seeds for the next big thing after the internet - it's replacement.
Peer to peer communications, not network based would be my guess.
How? I dunno, but when forced into a corner we always find a way out.
Saying you need to make your data available to government law enforcement is like saying it's illegal to walk around in public with a loaded AK47.
Like the real bad guys do as their told, right?
What galls me the most is the way we're being treated like we're too dumb to understand what they are really trying to achieve.
When I saw this post my first thought was "Oh cool, a fight to watch". As usual it didn't disappoint.
It's like Dawkins -v- Christians. Neither side is going to win, both are pretty angry with the other.
A total waste of time and emotion.
When the hell did Science become an official world religion?
My guess is that it's a legacy from church persecution for challenging their version of "truth"
"He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And when you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you."
- Friedrich Nietzsche
No we haven't.
Communism has become the "cold fusion" of political ideals.
It's a dirty word used to black list any alternative, "left wing" political movements that (appear to) oppose capitalism.
Finland isn't talking about setting up a Satsi, encouraging family members to spy on each each other, covertly installing listening devices in their homes and putting up travel restrictions (although according to Snowden your "free west" is doing exactly that right now).
Nor has anyone, yet, imposed economic sanctions on Finland for trying this social experiment.
Finland isn't, yet, limited to importing goods from Cuba alone.
Try actually talking to someone who grew up in East German to find out why people wanted to leave.
"Things that society needs."
Decided by who exactly? Thats nanny state thinking, which is exactly what society doesn't need.
If I've learned anything as a software engineer, but more recently as an MBA-ed business man, it's that things are often counter intuitive.
The problem with using the head (guided by $$'s) to steer any course is that you often miss the real gold just by letting the wind blow you off in a different direction.
The 20 century model of paper work and bureaucracy to get welfare is inhumane, degrading and a waste of money.
If you remove the burden of the worry of income from people you open them up to turning their attention to working on things that they are interested in doing.
This is, in the long term, is a better economic model as it encourages growth in areas untouched or ignored due to fear of failure and hardship.
The capitalistic model is to ask for funding from investors to try something new and innovative.
The problem there is that you need to convince them they can get a return on their money.
Not all good ideas and great work should necessarily be locked down by investors or the need for monetary return/gain.
Where would we be without the free, and open source, software movements?
How much more productive, creative and efficient would our technology be if more of it was written for free?
Chill. It's not worth getting worked up about. It's just a TV show.
I personally enjoy it and the characters, it's no worse or better than The Simpsons, Family Guy or South Park.
The acting has as many dimensions.
I do enjoy reading Chuck Lorre's vanity cards and I often wonder where he gets his inspiration from.
An entertaining writer, not a serious one, just a good comedy satirist.
If it makes you laugh, great. If it doesn't, don't watch it.
I must be old. First assembly I ever coded in was 6502 on a BBC B, 2nd was ARM on my Acorn Archimedes just as I was starting University. :) The fact that the RISC, with fewer instructions was more efficient showed up how wrong the complex instructions set approach had been and the brilliance of RISC design.
I wrote a paper for my 1st year course on microprocessor design comparing the compiled output for a C function from a Sequent x386, a Sinclair XL 68000 and the ARM.
The truly astounding thing was that the ARM compiler took 1/3 of the instructions to complete the same task as the compilers for the old processor architectures.
Which, I'm proud to say, was then quoted in class by the lecturer.
16 instructions, 16 registers and ran on 0.1W of power. It's a true marvel of tidy, sensible engineering.
It was/is so elegant and simple to code for.
I've not looked at the v7 assembly but the original was beautifully simple.
Let's send a case of Lagavulin on the next re-supply and a box of Advil to see what else might be different in space. If anything...
I grew up on a farm and I have asthma. I would have put it down to the consumption of raw, unpasteurised milk by farmers and their families. :-/
A farm raised child eats much more unprocessed food and is exposed to much higher levels of bacteria.
The theory that asthma is a modern disease caused by living in a world that's too clean makes a lot of sense.
We've descended from people who survived due to their strong immune defence.
This inherited army needs a fight and when it has nothing better to do it attacks it's own.
Maybe this theory is correct and the farm dust that prevents asthma.
It didn't help me as dust isn't something you see much of when you grow up on a farm in Scotland where it rains 351 days of the year.
They don't want it. Why would they? They are a consumer electronics company.
I worked on IOS for 12 years and iOS for the last 3 years. :)
Head hunters love me. T
They skim my Linkedin profile, failing to read the details, and get into a frenzy thinking I've been writing Apps for iPhone since 1994.
I meant to add..
The majority of the porn and casual dating businesses are almost entirely run out of east Europe (Ukraine and Russia).
The whole Ashley Madison thing looks like a rival take down.
You only have to look at the affiliate marketing commission being offered by these casual dating sites to see it's "men only"
I had a look at this a few years ago but, as my website is 95% female audience, it made no sense to try it.
So if they have no interest in paying for referrals of women where do the women come from?
Digging deeper you'll find that most of the affiliate partners are the porn websites.
The conclusion I came to was that the entire "casual dating" industry was just the monetisation of the online porn industry.
The BBC did an expose on it a few years back.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J1TNwC4ctNE
I've wondered how long it'll be before this gets political and regulated.
I remember driving down El Camino Real the week of launch and seeing a homeless guy holding a cardboard sign that read "Will un-install Windows 95 for food"
Open season.
Go outside and get some sunshine and fresh air. Sounds like you really need it...
No, that's not the reason. The GP explained away that bullshit excuse of yours. Go read the motherfucking comment and look at what it linked to. Here's the relevant part for you:
The evidence shows very clearly that it was not quieter during the summer 10 years ago, even on a Saturday. As is so plainly obvious, there were many more comments then than there are now.
It's not about it being summer. It's not about it being Saturday. It's about stupid policies having ruined Slashdot!
It's always quieter online mid-summer in the northern hemisphere.
I've run a website for several year now and June/July is our quietest time for sales.
Believe it or not "Nerds" do take a break in the outside warm summer air.... ;)
I think this thread misses the point of the iWatch. I think did too initially.
I write iOS Apps and I've had good success with them.
So on the announcement of iWatch I immediately thought about how to make use of the iWatch.
Jump on the bandwagon, why not?
But I can't really think of any good way that the watch augments my Apps.
I could extend the daily notification to the watch but really it's not a game changer for my apps.
I use them myself and love using them on iPhone and iPad, but on that tiny screen with what appears to be a fiddly UI? Nah...
I've not bought an iWatch yet, I've thought long and hard about it but I think I've arrived at the conclusion it's worth trying the cheap end version.
Why?
I see two things the iWatch has that I think I'd like to have.
1) Apple Pay without having to pull out your phone.
2) A discreet and personal notification system using a haptic feedback interface.
I like the idea of not missing phone calls, being able to get notifications of important emails, txts etc from a gentle tap on my wrist.
I don't like being attached to my phone, I prefer to leave it on my desk or in my brief case when I'm out meeting clients.
In doing this I miss calls and messages that are important.
The iWatch, as I see it, is just a hardware extension of the iOS eco-system.
It's not a separate entity in it's own right as the iPad is separate from iPhone.
So as an app eco-system it doesn't make any sense and neither does this article.
Time wasting social media (FB, Snapchat et al) are piss poor examples too.
Facebook's got an issue with Apple right now (see Samsung patent case announcement today with FB siding against Apple).
So any comments coming out of FB towards Apple right now can be taken with large amounts of scepticism.
iWatch Killer App? I'd say it's already there in "Apple Pay".
Step aside Alice, tonight it's Nolan.
Nolan Lawson sounds like a Fandroid with an axe to grind and some fruit to chop.
I'm sure Google's fans still love to believe in the "don't be evil" slogan that Google once claimed to be their mantra.
The evil being Microsoft and everything they did to get rich.
Yes, they were evil, they didn't play ball in any industry attempt at standardisation.
They made sure that only Microsoft worked with Microsoft to close off all competition.
I ran up against them trying to get Cisco's PPP stack working with theirs when I worked on IOS (not iOS) back in the 90's.
This blog article is an utterly pathetic attempt to try and make Apple out to be the new Microsoft of the 21st century.
Not a chance. Not ever.
Why today? A lot happening with Apple's Music & iOS today. Someone upset by the attention they are getting once again?
So out roll the Apple bashing articles.
Evil is pretending to be your friend by giving you "free stuff" and then quietly selling off your private data to the highest bidder.
I prefer being a customer to being the product.
So if you want to drawn parallels then I'd say that Google has replaced the monster it set out to slay.
"He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee."
- Nietzsche
I use 2 browsers on a daily basis.
1. Firefox for development work (because firebug is the best IMHO)
2. Safari because I like to keep work & play separate. My bookmarks in sync across my devices and I do like/use Apple's "handoff".
Having both browsers also means that on the rare occasion I find a website with a compatibility problem I just switch to the other one.
Imagine the look on the faces of the victorious Chinese decryption team on opening up Snowden's files and find nothing but this link http://bit.ly/IqT6zt
This disturbs me as it reminds me of Orwell's 1984.
The video screening of people being bombed, or shot, and the audience laughing.
That's the reaction they want, they want us to laugh at them killing other humans.
Don't, it's nothing to laugh at. You're only dehumanising yourself.
Too much of any good thing soon stops being a good thing.
I really enjoyed the fantasy novels of Anne Rice (e.g. "Interview with the Vampire") as she explored the topic of immortality in her characters to a philosophical degree. Vampires going out of their minds with the "burden" of immortality and looking for a way to die.
I believe what makes life special and precious is that it's finite.
You don't know how much you have in the bank and the happiest people you'll encounter are those who savour every moment they have like it was their last.
Turn that on it's head and life becomes valueless if you following my reasoning.