The U.S. is not the only country providing GNSS services. Russia has long had the GLONASS satellites; although their constellation has had some problems and does not currently provide 100% coverage over the globe (Russian coverage is at 100%, though, and I suspect U.S. coverage is near 100%.) Magellan makes commercially available GLONASS receivers, and I suppose others do as well. You can purchase dual GPS/GLONASS units, and the U.S. and Russia are in talks regarding bringing them to a common protocol so they'll be interchangeable if you have a receiver that picks up both frequencies. And the GLONASS program is receiving assistance from India, so there's more of an international approach to their program than just a Russian system.
I also know that China has their COMPASS satellites, but I don't know their status, or if there are commercially available receivers.
You seem to be under the impression that hiring is done for the benefit of you, the supremely qualified and deserving job candidate.
Hiring is done by an overworked manager who doesn't have the time or energy to deal with 20 equally qualified and deserving people. He or she might be able to spare the time to deal with three or four of you, tops. He or she is eventually going to hire only one of you. The rest of the 19 do nothing but cost the manager additional hours of effort. Anything that can be done to whittle the twenty down to the one will save the manager time.
If you think you are the special golden child who should be treated and selected above all others, great. Act like it. Do EVERYTHING right. First, have exactly the right experience and the right education. But then again, everyone else on the short list has that. So now you have to stand out. The only thing left to you at this point is to make sure your resume is as well-presented as it can be. A professional graphic designer can help there. Don't make spelling mistakes. Make sure it's folded into perfect thirds, and printed on a decent paper. Paste the stamp on straight. Every choice you make producing that resume reflects on you, and it is the ONLY thing your prospective employer has in his hands to help make a decision quickly.
So if you think that selecting based on an email address is unfair, or represents an evil employer you never want to work for, fine. My only advice to you then is to have a lot of copies of your resume made, and get them out there to more and more companies. Make statistics work for you, instead of against you.
At one level, you're correct: the base reason is statistics. With 20 applicants, any 10 of whom could prove to be excellent employees, you can afford to throw away 15 of them based on the roll of a die, and interview whoever is left. You'll still find someone who will work out for you.
At this stage in the process, tossing out a resume because of a lame email address is really no different than the toss of a die, and it's certainly more appropriate than many other criteria. The reason is it's self-selected. You are capable of choosing any email address or provider you want, yet you voluntarily chose to associate yourself with AOL?
Well, when a stack of 100 resumes is sitting in the in box, the first thing you have to do is weed them down to the three or four you're actually going to interview. The first 80 get tossed because the applicant isn't qualified. That leaves 20 who "may be" OK. Some will then get tossed because they're ugly, or contain spelling errors. A toxic email address might be a reason one ends up in the discard bin.
It's all going to depend on the person doing the hiring. If they have that "AOL == toxic" mindset, you lose. Ask yourself if you are willing to bet a future job hanging on to your oldtimer@AOL.com address.
How many dependencies on servers having uptime, and being secure? Imagine a world of plug-ins that rerference each other so heavily that a cat on a certain keyboard could crash everyones extensions.
"Dr. Schroedinger, the veterinarian is on line one. He said something about your cat, but then my computer locked up."
Yet the extensions I have that are specifically bound to internals are exactly the ones that provide me with the most utility. The All-in-One Sidebar, Fission, FxIF, Cookie Button, FEBE, CLEO, User Agent Switcher, Xmarks, Exif Viewer, Aging Tabs, all those are bound to specific versions of Firefox because they're doing more than simply tampering with the http stream.
Could Firefox handle the binding any better? Sure. Could the team provide a route to handle backward and forward compatibility better? Again, yes. But that's a detail in an abstraction facade, and not what it looks like jetpacks are trying to be. Jetpacks look like "Greasemonkey scripts made official" with Mozilla's blessing. (Or maybe I'm seeing them as more limited than they plan for them.)
Maybe that's it. Perhaps Mozilla should instead be looking at adopting and integrating Greasemonkey technology, instead of trying to reinvent it.
The extension model needs revision, and only elitist bastards would be upset that they're making it simpler and more accessible.
And possibly more limited. Are jetpacks really going to have the same full access to Firefox internals? Not every useful extension repaints the UI.
I'm also concerned that the bar is already low enough that most of the extensions out there are total crap. By setting the bar on the floor, every idiot will be able to produce terrible jetpacks. Do you really want to wade through 100,000 crappy jetpacks to find the dozen nuggets?
The Apple app store is already getting there. Search for some useful term, and there are two dozen apps that pop up, and you waste half an hour wading through them all to find one that's reasonably close to what you want. Will Firefox really be better if adddons.mozilla.org starts featuring jetpacks that are no better than a "Lady Gaga-fier" or a "DUDE!!1! I MAD A J3FF PHILT3R!!11!!"
Elitist bastards live better than the standard rabble because they set the bar higher. Not everybody wants to be surrounded by crapware.
I initially chose Firefox for all the "wrong" reasons. It was open source, where IE was not. It was more secure by virtue of its smaller adoption footprint, where IE was the fat target. And it was not by Microsoft. I did not choose it because it was feature rich, or less buggy.
Since then I have grown to appreciate it more and more, mostly through the added value I get from extensions. Surfing is definitely faster. I have many more convenience options. I have control over the typical crap that blocks the content off most web sites.
The big questions I have are: why make developers of perfectly good extensions rewrite their code? For that matter, will some of them give up because they don't want to reimplement their code in Jetpacks? Or maybe they've already stopped supporting their old extensions, and now they'll just die.
Given all that, I wonder if his comments were more to stir up community reactions than an actual product roadmap?
That was actually one of the things I was thinking of. Do we really need to lower the barriers to entry? Are good ideas really going missing because "extensions are too hard?"
As a consumer of extensions, I have installed about 20 out of the 8,000 available. If I have a catalog of 80,000 jetpacks, does that mean I have to look through 10 times as much crap just to find the 10 useful ones?
Read some of the other posts then. One Linux user says that if he plugs one of these drives in and simply mounts/dev/fdd2 he has full access to the data. It doesn't matter much how you implement the software on any OS when that's the security model.
And marketed by a company that couldn't explain what the product *did*, so they mis-positioned it as an email system.
Reminds me of an old Christmas carol parody: "We don't know what Lotus Notes is, We don't know what Lotus Notes is, We don't know what Lotus Notes is, But we use it each day."
You are looking at only a single risk factor. The most prevalent risk is actually that of accidental loss of the drive or laptop. If the lost data is securely encrypted, it might not be subject to data breach reporting laws.
While I agree that trust belongs on the device (via a device-based keyboard), you still have to trust the host computer to not abuse the trust by copying the now-unlocked data or otherwise tampering with it. You are still at risk if you unlock the device and plug it in to a coffee shop PC.
I kept Search*.api, and I also kept reflow.api in the plug_ins folder, as it seems to speed up rendering. As a bonus for getting rid of that extra crapware, Acroread seems to load up twice as fast.
It's obvious from this discussion that his *only* consideration is shareholder value.
His job is to make sure that PDFs remain relevant. Adding plugins, or anything that makes people depend on PDFs, is their primary goal. Turning off features (such as disabling JavaScript) would reduce that primary goal.
Security is valued only as long as it keeps people from complaining. He'll talk about security for hours, but in the end he has to justify whatever decisions the board told him to justify. He'd be much more effective as a security chief if he were truly autonomous, as a CxO is supposed to be.
Well, I am stuck because some stuff that I actually do want is provided only in PDF format. But the stuff I need is "information", not "function". I don't need yet another piece of software acting as a browser, or a mail client, or a media player, or a download accelerator, or a Swiss-army-knife.
It's one thing to make a spec sheet available in PDF format. But don't expect me to order spare parts from it -- it's all I can do to make one browser trustworthy, let alone every other damn application on the box.
Seriously, how damaged would the world be without form-based PDFs? I removed almost every plug-in from my copy of Adobe Reader. I don't need their "rights management" or their "braille reader" or their "web submission plugin" or any of that other cruft.
And somehow my life is not incomplete as a result.
It makes much more sense if you replace Google with Apple in your comment ( - except for "don't be evil" part).
That doesn't make a lot of sense, as Apple isn't an advertising company, and very few people believe Apple isn't a big company out to make money.
Really? I see Apple as an image company first, and a technology company second. "Oooh, look, we make cool stuff and put it in hip boxes and sell it only to the coolest of people. We play indie music on our commercials. Our CEO wears black turtlenecks and jeans. We make big scary computers nice and friendly so even the dumbest among you can still feel smart when you own one."
I have also seen too much "if-then-else-switch-for-break-continue" code, where the extensive commenting is a symptom of absolutely awful code. Fix the code and you can at the same time get rid of most of those comments, while still leaving the code more readable than it was before. Generally, if you need more than three levels of indentation, you should really consider for a moment if you could structure the code better. The same thing with ifs, switches and other control structures; if you have a 30 line mess of control structures, you're quite likely doing something wrong and instead of adding to the mess by writing another 30 lines of comments, you should think about ways to make the code simpler (something that might be understandable with a short single comment).
This is the answer I most agree with. Muddy code is not made clearer by comments. Muddy code is made better by refactoring to clearer code.
I may start out by writing a 100 line method to do all the steps required, but I won't leave it like that. I'll chop it up into small bits, each with a clear name as to its intent. Switch cases can get turned into state patterns (as can if statements, when needed.) Pull those "four-line-if-clauses" apart into four methods that name the intent of the tests they perform. And do you really need to iterate in the same method in which you're organizing the rest of the setup and teardown stuff?
Finally, ask yourself if you really need to write comments if you provide unit tests that clearly demonstrate how the code is to be used?
Good method names make it easier for maintainers. Small chunks of functionality make it easier for maintainers. Dependency injection makes it easier for unit testers.
Most comments are a violation of the Don't Repeat Yourself principle. "How" your code works is expressed in the code. "What it does" should be clearly stated by the method name. "Why" you call it should be visible in the unit tests. Your code is already stating what it's doing to the compilers. If your code is not expressing itself well enough to the humans, refactor it until it does.
This is good news especially now that the unobtainium supplies have been cut off from Pandora.
We should have just nuked that planet from orbit, then swooped down and picked up the unobtainium from their hot, smurfy ashes.
But no, they had to send in some hot-shot Colonel who had to prove how tough he was by taking them on in hand-to-hand combat, and in the process showing all the greenies just how cute and cuddly the smurfs were. Idiot. Now we can't touch their planet at all because of the outcries from the eco-nuts.
I sure hope that Slashdot isn't turning into Digg.....
Don't worry about it. At the end of the year *everybody* produces "Top X lists." It's just a tradition.
Humans have had annual traditions since we started recording our history. Early traditions revolved around the harvest and the hunt, and those remain strong even today. Other cyclical traditions have grown, too: using the New Year as a time for reflection upon the past, celebration of the present, and planning and hope for the future. Top Ten lists are a common, if not-very-creative, way of looking back.
But if on February second Slashdot posts "10 best images of the groundhog seeing his shadow" , yes, it's become Digg and we should all just leave.
Slashdot Mirror
The U.S. is not the only country providing GNSS services. Russia has long had the GLONASS satellites; although their constellation has had some problems and does not currently provide 100% coverage over the globe (Russian coverage is at 100%, though, and I suspect U.S. coverage is near 100%.) Magellan makes commercially available GLONASS receivers, and I suppose others do as well. You can purchase dual GPS/GLONASS units, and the U.S. and Russia are in talks regarding bringing them to a common protocol so they'll be interchangeable if you have a receiver that picks up both frequencies. And the GLONASS program is receiving assistance from India, so there's more of an international approach to their program than just a Russian system.
I also know that China has their COMPASS satellites, but I don't know their status, or if there are commercially available receivers.
You seem to be under the impression that hiring is done for the benefit of you, the supremely qualified and deserving job candidate.
Hiring is done by an overworked manager who doesn't have the time or energy to deal with 20 equally qualified and deserving people. He or she might be able to spare the time to deal with three or four of you, tops. He or she is eventually going to hire only one of you. The rest of the 19 do nothing but cost the manager additional hours of effort. Anything that can be done to whittle the twenty down to the one will save the manager time.
If you think you are the special golden child who should be treated and selected above all others, great. Act like it. Do EVERYTHING right. First, have exactly the right experience and the right education. But then again, everyone else on the short list has that. So now you have to stand out. The only thing left to you at this point is to make sure your resume is as well-presented as it can be. A professional graphic designer can help there. Don't make spelling mistakes. Make sure it's folded into perfect thirds, and printed on a decent paper. Paste the stamp on straight. Every choice you make producing that resume reflects on you, and it is the ONLY thing your prospective employer has in his hands to help make a decision quickly.
So if you think that selecting based on an email address is unfair, or represents an evil employer you never want to work for, fine. My only advice to you then is to have a lot of copies of your resume made, and get them out there to more and more companies. Make statistics work for you, instead of against you.
At one level, you're correct: the base reason is statistics. With 20 applicants, any 10 of whom could prove to be excellent employees, you can afford to throw away 15 of them based on the roll of a die, and interview whoever is left. You'll still find someone who will work out for you.
At this stage in the process, tossing out a resume because of a lame email address is really no different than the toss of a die, and it's certainly more appropriate than many other criteria. The reason is it's self-selected. You are capable of choosing any email address or provider you want, yet you voluntarily chose to associate yourself with AOL?
Well, when a stack of 100 resumes is sitting in the in box, the first thing you have to do is weed them down to the three or four you're actually going to interview. The first 80 get tossed because the applicant isn't qualified. That leaves 20 who "may be" OK. Some will then get tossed because they're ugly, or contain spelling errors. A toxic email address might be a reason one ends up in the discard bin.
It's all going to depend on the person doing the hiring. If they have that "AOL == toxic" mindset, you lose. Ask yourself if you are willing to bet a future job hanging on to your oldtimer@AOL.com address.
How many dependencies on servers having uptime, and being secure? Imagine a world of plug-ins that rerference each other so heavily that a cat on a certain keyboard could crash everyones extensions.
"Dr. Schroedinger, the veterinarian is on line one. He said something about your cat, but then my computer locked up."
Yet the extensions I have that are specifically bound to internals are exactly the ones that provide me with the most utility. The All-in-One Sidebar, Fission, FxIF, Cookie Button, FEBE, CLEO, User Agent Switcher, Xmarks, Exif Viewer, Aging Tabs, all those are bound to specific versions of Firefox because they're doing more than simply tampering with the http stream.
Could Firefox handle the binding any better? Sure. Could the team provide a route to handle backward and forward compatibility better? Again, yes. But that's a detail in an abstraction facade, and not what it looks like jetpacks are trying to be. Jetpacks look like "Greasemonkey scripts made official" with Mozilla's blessing. (Or maybe I'm seeing them as more limited than they plan for them.)
Maybe that's it. Perhaps Mozilla should instead be looking at adopting and integrating Greasemonkey technology, instead of trying to reinvent it.
The extension model needs revision, and only elitist bastards would be upset that they're making it simpler and more accessible.
And possibly more limited. Are jetpacks really going to have the same full access to Firefox internals? Not every useful extension repaints the UI.
I'm also concerned that the bar is already low enough that most of the extensions out there are total crap. By setting the bar on the floor, every idiot will be able to produce terrible jetpacks. Do you really want to wade through 100,000 crappy jetpacks to find the dozen nuggets?
The Apple app store is already getting there. Search for some useful term, and there are two dozen apps that pop up, and you waste half an hour wading through them all to find one that's reasonably close to what you want. Will Firefox really be better if adddons.mozilla.org starts featuring jetpacks that are no better than a "Lady Gaga-fier" or a "DUDE!!1! I MAD A J3FF PHILT3R!!11!!"
Elitist bastards live better than the standard rabble because they set the bar higher. Not everybody wants to be surrounded by crapware.
I initially chose Firefox for all the "wrong" reasons. It was open source, where IE was not. It was more secure by virtue of its smaller adoption footprint, where IE was the fat target. And it was not by Microsoft. I did not choose it because it was feature rich, or less buggy.
Since then I have grown to appreciate it more and more, mostly through the added value I get from extensions. Surfing is definitely faster. I have many more convenience options. I have control over the typical crap that blocks the content off most web sites.
The big questions I have are: why make developers of perfectly good extensions rewrite their code? For that matter, will some of them give up because they don't want to reimplement their code in Jetpacks? Or maybe they've already stopped supporting their old extensions, and now they'll just die.
Given all that, I wonder if his comments were more to stir up community reactions than an actual product roadmap?
That was actually one of the things I was thinking of. Do we really need to lower the barriers to entry? Are good ideas really going missing because "extensions are too hard?"
As a consumer of extensions, I have installed about 20 out of the 8,000 available. If I have a catalog of 80,000 jetpacks, does that mean I have to look through 10 times as much crap just to find the 10 useful ones?
Read some of the other posts then. One Linux user says that if he plugs one of these drives in and simply mounts /dev/fdd2 he has full access to the data. It doesn't matter much how you implement the software on any OS when that's the security model.
And marketed by a company that couldn't explain what the product *did*, so they mis-positioned it as an email system.
Reminds me of an old Christmas carol parody:
"We don't know what Lotus Notes is,
We don't know what Lotus Notes is,
We don't know what Lotus Notes is,
But we use it each day."
You are looking at only a single risk factor. The most prevalent risk is actually that of accidental loss of the drive or laptop. If the lost data is securely encrypted, it might not be subject to data breach reporting laws.
While I agree that trust belongs on the device (via a device-based keyboard), you still have to trust the host computer to not abuse the trust by copying the now-unlocked data or otherwise tampering with it. You are still at risk if you unlock the device and plug it in to a coffee shop PC.
"12345"
That reminds me that I have to change the combination on my luggage.
This problem is only that of "closed source" and not one of "Windows only". It would be equally insecure on any OS.
This has nothing whatsoever to do with Microsoft, you troll. RTFA.
The "password" software just sent the "it's OK, decrypt this" to the dongle.
I kept Search*.api, and I also kept reflow.api in the plug_ins folder, as it seems to speed up rendering. As a bonus for getting rid of that extra crapware, Acroread seems to load up twice as fast.
It's obvious from this discussion that his *only* consideration is shareholder value.
His job is to make sure that PDFs remain relevant. Adding plugins, or anything that makes people depend on PDFs, is their primary goal. Turning off features (such as disabling JavaScript) would reduce that primary goal.
Security is valued only as long as it keeps people from complaining. He'll talk about security for hours, but in the end he has to justify whatever decisions the board told him to justify. He'd be much more effective as a security chief if he were truly autonomous, as a CxO is supposed to be.
I had to deal with a PDF form recently, from the DMV. Basically you filled it out and then printed it out.
Screw the DMV. If they're going to make me wait in line for an hour, they can spend an extra 10 minutes trying to figure out my hand writing.
Well, I am stuck because some stuff that I actually do want is provided only in PDF format. But the stuff I need is "information", not "function". I don't need yet another piece of software acting as a browser, or a mail client, or a media player, or a download accelerator, or a Swiss-army-knife.
It's one thing to make a spec sheet available in PDF format. But don't expect me to order spare parts from it -- it's all I can do to make one browser trustworthy, let alone every other damn application on the box.
Seriously, how damaged would the world be without form-based PDFs? I removed almost every plug-in from my copy of Adobe Reader. I don't need their "rights management" or their "braille reader" or their "web submission plugin" or any of that other cruft.
And somehow my life is not incomplete as a result.
It makes much more sense if you replace Google with Apple in your comment ( - except for "don't be evil" part).
That doesn't make a lot of sense, as Apple isn't an advertising company, and very few people believe Apple isn't a big company out to make money.
Really? I see Apple as an image company first, and a technology company second. "Oooh, look, we make cool stuff and put it in hip boxes and sell it only to the coolest of people. We play indie music on our commercials. Our CEO wears black turtlenecks and jeans. We make big scary computers nice and friendly so even the dumbest among you can still feel smart when you own one."
I have also seen too much "if-then-else-switch-for-break-continue" code, where the extensive commenting is a symptom of absolutely awful code. Fix the code and you can at the same time get rid of most of those comments, while still leaving the code more readable than it was before. Generally, if you need more than three levels of indentation, you should really consider for a moment if you could structure the code better. The same thing with ifs, switches and other control structures; if you have a 30 line mess of control structures, you're quite likely doing something wrong and instead of adding to the mess by writing another 30 lines of comments, you should think about ways to make the code simpler (something that might be understandable with a short single comment).
This is the answer I most agree with. Muddy code is not made clearer by comments. Muddy code is made better by refactoring to clearer code.
I may start out by writing a 100 line method to do all the steps required, but I won't leave it like that. I'll chop it up into small bits, each with a clear name as to its intent. Switch cases can get turned into state patterns (as can if statements, when needed.) Pull those "four-line-if-clauses" apart into four methods that name the intent of the tests they perform. And do you really need to iterate in the same method in which you're organizing the rest of the setup and teardown stuff?
Finally, ask yourself if you really need to write comments if you provide unit tests that clearly demonstrate how the code is to be used?
Good method names make it easier for maintainers. Small chunks of functionality make it easier for maintainers. Dependency injection makes it easier for unit testers.
Most comments are a violation of the Don't Repeat Yourself principle. "How" your code works is expressed in the code. "What it does" should be clearly stated by the method name. "Why" you call it should be visible in the unit tests. Your code is already stating what it's doing to the compilers. If your code is not expressing itself well enough to the humans, refactor it until it does.
This is good news especially now that the unobtainium supplies have been cut off from Pandora.
We should have just nuked that planet from orbit, then swooped down and picked up the unobtainium from their hot, smurfy ashes.
But no, they had to send in some hot-shot Colonel who had to prove how tough he was by taking them on in hand-to-hand combat, and in the process showing all the greenies just how cute and cuddly the smurfs were. Idiot. Now we can't touch their planet at all because of the outcries from the eco-nuts.
I sure hope that Slashdot isn't turning into Digg .....
Don't worry about it. At the end of the year *everybody* produces "Top X lists." It's just a tradition.
Humans have had annual traditions since we started recording our history. Early traditions revolved around the harvest and the hunt, and those remain strong even today. Other cyclical traditions have grown, too: using the New Year as a time for reflection upon the past, celebration of the present, and planning and hope for the future. Top Ten lists are a common, if not-very-creative, way of looking back.
But if on February second Slashdot posts "10 best images of the groundhog seeing his shadow" , yes, it's become Digg and we should all just leave.