I'm seeing a definite cultural shift where developers seem to think that they're better than everybody else, and can do everyone else's jobs. It's massive Dunning-Kruger situation, and it's unfortunately not going to get any better because companies keep trying to woo developer mindshare, so schmoozing developers and perpetuating this problem is in their best interest.
The fact is is that the average developer is NOT a system administrator. They don't know best practices for maintaining systems, ITIL, etc. They more likely than not are completely ignorant of SecOps (I mean FFS, it's 2017 and we're still dealing with SQL injection attacks). But despite this, I'm seeing more and more products as self-contained black box docker images or whatnot. Docker is a shockingly unstable system that, while great for certain development tasks like continuous integration and testing, is flat out dangerous to use in production unless VERY carefully controlled and monitored. NodeJS is so unstable that they actually think an 18-month LTS is pretty darn good. They do this not because it's better, but because it's easier for the developer. They don't think/care about the poor sod on the other end that needs to support the product in production. Heaven forbid that the developer's company, for whatever reason, stops supporting the project they made and the end-user sysadmin needs to somehow maintain the software or otherwise tweak it to work with other software.
Nor are they a project manager, and yet you have idiot blog posts lamenting how useless PMs are. Sure, there are going to be lousy PMs, just like there are going to be lousy sysadmins and lousy developers. But that's a far cry from denouncing an entire job field. A PM can make or break a project, and a good PM is worth their weight in gold. Project organization is NOT easy, and the larger the project, the harder it is.
Where are the blog posts that point out how stupid developers are? Just from my own personal experience I could write posts about all sorts of idiocy performed by supposed 'senior' developers. Like storing fixed dollar amounts in a float because it was "more convenient" for the developer to use, or iterating through a hashmap to find a value. The number of examples is virtually limitless. And yet NOBODY is saying that we should get rid of developers, because that would be stupid.
Too many developers really need to just grow up and realize that they arn't as good as they think they are.
Not only that, the damn things are ridiculously loud. They're almost as bad as the old IBM Model M keyboards, but you don't get the satisfying feeling of pushing down on the key before you hear the kerchunk sound.
I don't want everyone in the immediate vicinity to hear me when I type, nor do I want to hear other people typing.
Assuming that it's sufficiently accurate, Face ID is a great authentication system for inconsequential people. IE: People who don't have a lot of money nor power, which is a very large portion of the population.
For those that do have some kind of responsibility, ie: managers, IT staff, etc, it's bad.
If said individuals work for a major corporation and/or deal with sensitive information, it's downright idiotic. A biometric authentication system that doesn't even require you to be near the individual to unlock a device with sensitive data is foolish, especially today when people have access to 3D cameras and printers, and can do a targeted attack relatively inexpensively.
It's not Mission Impossible type stuff, but it's not far off.
Get the machine set up more or less the way you want it, not counting software that you expect to be updating regularly, and then create a disk image.
I haven't used the most recent versions of window enough to know for sure, but from my experience Window will break down over time. Installing and uninstalling one program after another will cause registry bloat that is very difficult to manage. Combine that with viruses, etc, and you've got the makings for having to do a complete wipe and reinstall of your OS once every one or two years.
Before I switched to a Mac myself, that's basically what I did. I set up the base OS more or less the way I liked it, install updates, removed any shovelware, installed the stuff I wanted, and then imaged the disk and set the image aside in a safe place.
If you have a sufficiently large hard drive, you can partition the drive, and then image the main partition onto a file on the 2nd partition, making it slightly more convenient for you.
I know recent versions of windows have a built in "factory reset" option, but that still leaves you redoing all the updates, software installation, etc.
Also, the UI will take getting used to. Windows apps are amazingly inconsistent, for example throwing menus almost anywhere, or using those ridiculous ribbon things, etc. There is zero consistency between how different applications function, even the ones built into the OS, so you can't rely on general consistency to guide you the way you can with OSX.
There are also a LOT of wierd quirks in Windows, such as when it "helpfully" locks write permissions on random files it thinks shouldn't be written to anymore, but that's for you to discover.
The only reason these phishing scams work is because they are so low effort on the part of the scammer. You just vomit spam and then handle the responders.
This idea will turn the tables on them by making them do the same thing they're trying to do to others. Of course, it will turn into a cat and mouse game as the scammers figure out what's going on, and implement a cheap test to weed out the automation as quickly as possible.
Of course, then I wonder if the scammers will start automating their own responses... it'll be like watching cleverbot talk to itself.
That's entirely true. I ignored them because Mozilla hasn't had any even remotely majority marketshare for decades now, so the impact when they screw something up generally affects far less people.
I wonder if that was one of the reasons why Zune failed. The idea of squirting something to somebody else in public probably didn't (and still wouldn't) go over too well. I want to share files, not take part in a kinky porno.
Wait whatnow? They do? I'm so used to Apple pushing their proprietary stuff that I had given up even the notion that they'd try to maintain some level of compatibility with other manufacturers.
Oh, there it is, in the Bluetooth menu. Huh. Whodathunkit. Now if only they'd do the same thing in iOS. But I guess they're too busy turning people into smiling talking poop.
It's idiocy like this why I am compelled to have at least 3 different browsers on every machine I use. Because it seems like every time there's some kind of update, stuff get horribly broken and I need to switch to a different browser for an extended period of time. It's to the point where I've purchased an xmarks premium subscription, so that all my bookmarks gets synced and I don't have to jump through hoops when the inevitable switch happens.
It's so frustrating the way companies think that they are allowed to have defacto control of the entire internet.
Fuck you Google, and fuck you Microsoft before you.
No it's not. It's literally like having a full second computer running in parallel to your main computer, except that it is always running as long as there is power to your machine, and you can't shut it off, and it can take over your main machine.
It's a great feature for corporate environments where the remote access helps IT do their job. For everyone else, it's a f__king stupid idea because the average person has no idea what it does or why it's there, or even that it IS there, which paints a great big target on them for any malicious actor to exploit.
I jumped off that band wagon a while ago, and the amount of money I've saved has been miraculous. Not that I was ever obsessed with the latest shiny as some people are, mind you, but it's amazing how transitioning through later stages of your life really puts things in perspective.
Now, when a new technology comes out I take a good hard look at it and ask, "How does this new thing help me that my previous stuff couldn't?" and "Does do those improvements justifying spending the X amount of dollars on it, that could otherwise be spent on other things, like a mortgage payment, etc?"
It's shocking how much those two questions have curbed my spending. It also opened my eyes to... well... just how *shit* the technology industry has become. It's all so much crap. Frivolous nonsense that provide nothing of genuine value compared to what existed before.
That goes not just for consumer goods, but for pretty much *everything*, including servers, operating systems, programming languages, frameworks, etc.
And then the sadness kicks in because I realize the overwhleming majority of other people *don't* see these things, so the slow moving trainwreck of technology happily marches on. New javascript frameworks coming out on a weekly basis, IOT crap that somehow manage to leak more information than they collect, Google and their push to allow websites to access bluetooth devices directly, Apple with the steady march to making computers into very expensive disposable appliances, Microsoft and their... well... nothing especially new there I guess.
But it's basically universal. There is virtually nothing revolutionary happening today. The best we've got is people making better use of technology that has already existed for decades (ie: AI) because the processing power has reached the right level to do so. Everything else is either trivial incremental nonsense, or a complete reinventing of the wheel that ultimately gives you nothing new than you didn't have before... just a shiny new packaging.
But enough people buy into it to keep the train chugging.
1password used to work that way, and it is still possible to purchase the standalone version that lets you store your passwords on other cloud services, but I don't know how much longer that will be. As it is, they don't advertise the standalone version anymore. You have to specifically ask them for it.
I am currently looking at Enpass as a possible alternative, however there are several dealbreakers that I am waiting to be resolved: 1. It doesn't support multiple password vaults. Supposed to be in the next major version. 2. They have not had a 3rd party audit done on their code. They have promised to do this after the next major release is done, as there is apparently a lot of refactoring work happening that makes doing the review now kinda pointless.
You do realize that business has worked this way for a while now, yes? *Especially* companies like Apple. Hell, we as people now *define* ourselves by our brand choices, to the point of hating people who prefer the "opposite" brand.
"Why Do Web Developers Keep Making The Same Mistakes?" is the wrong question entirely.
The ACTUAL question is, why do new developers insist on completely ignoring the lessons of the past? This is what happens when you mindlessly encourage a culture of "young people are better than old people" and "new stuff is better than old stuff".
It results in exactly what you see today: the same idiotic mistakes being made over and over again. Reinventing the wheel over and over again. None of the issues happening today are new. They've been solved for decades. But because the "solved" technology is "old", it's ignored.
It's depressing how software development is the ONLY professional industry where learning lessons from the past are actually frowned upon, and people who rediscover the same thing all over again are considered visionary.
There are so many easier and more efficient ways of stealing everyone's personal information en masse. Why would they bother resorting to surreptitiously activating your phone's microphone?
Who was it again that pointed their AI at Urban Dictionary, resulting in their AI being so potty-mouthed, racist, sexist, everything-ist, that they had to pull the plug?
I can only assume that SCO's lawyers got hired at some point and are trying to drag this thing out as long as humanly possible, hoping that the other side will just get sick of things and walk away.
Slashdot Mirror
*raises hand* I did!
Unfortunately it looks like a clan of trolls got to you first.
If they are required to do that work in order to graduate, how exactly is it voluntary?
They keep using that word, but I do not think it means what they think it means.
I'm seeing a definite cultural shift where developers seem to think that they're better than everybody else, and can do everyone else's jobs. It's massive Dunning-Kruger situation, and it's unfortunately not going to get any better because companies keep trying to woo developer mindshare, so schmoozing developers and perpetuating this problem is in their best interest.
The fact is is that the average developer is NOT a system administrator. They don't know best practices for maintaining systems, ITIL, etc. They more likely than not are completely ignorant of SecOps (I mean FFS, it's 2017 and we're still dealing with SQL injection attacks). But despite this, I'm seeing more and more products as self-contained black box docker images or whatnot. Docker is a shockingly unstable system that, while great for certain development tasks like continuous integration and testing, is flat out dangerous to use in production unless VERY carefully controlled and monitored. NodeJS is so unstable that they actually think an 18-month LTS is pretty darn good. They do this not because it's better, but because it's easier for the developer. They don't think/care about the poor sod on the other end that needs to support the product in production. Heaven forbid that the developer's company, for whatever reason, stops supporting the project they made and the end-user sysadmin needs to somehow maintain the software or otherwise tweak it to work with other software.
Nor are they a project manager, and yet you have idiot blog posts lamenting how useless PMs are. Sure, there are going to be lousy PMs, just like there are going to be lousy sysadmins and lousy developers. But that's a far cry from denouncing an entire job field. A PM can make or break a project, and a good PM is worth their weight in gold. Project organization is NOT easy, and the larger the project, the harder it is.
Where are the blog posts that point out how stupid developers are? Just from my own personal experience I could write posts about all sorts of idiocy performed by supposed 'senior' developers. Like storing fixed dollar amounts in a float because it was "more convenient" for the developer to use, or iterating through a hashmap to find a value. The number of examples is virtually limitless. And yet NOBODY is saying that we should get rid of developers, because that would be stupid.
Too many developers really need to just grow up and realize that they arn't as good as they think they are.
Not only that, the damn things are ridiculously loud. They're almost as bad as the old IBM Model M keyboards, but you don't get the satisfying feeling of pushing down on the key before you hear the kerchunk sound.
I don't want everyone in the immediate vicinity to hear me when I type, nor do I want to hear other people typing.
Assuming that it's sufficiently accurate, Face ID is a great authentication system for inconsequential people. IE: People who don't have a lot of money nor power, which is a very large portion of the population.
For those that do have some kind of responsibility, ie: managers, IT staff, etc, it's bad.
If said individuals work for a major corporation and/or deal with sensitive information, it's downright idiotic. A biometric authentication system that doesn't even require you to be near the individual to unlock a device with sensitive data is foolish, especially today when people have access to 3D cameras and printers, and can do a targeted attack relatively inexpensively.
It's not Mission Impossible type stuff, but it's not far off.
Am I the only one that misread the title as "shooting spree"?
I mean, it happens with such depressing regularity...
Get the machine set up more or less the way you want it, not counting software that you expect to be updating regularly, and then create a disk image.
I haven't used the most recent versions of window enough to know for sure, but from my experience Window will break down over time. Installing and uninstalling one program after another will cause registry bloat that is very difficult to manage. Combine that with viruses, etc, and you've got the makings for having to do a complete wipe and reinstall of your OS once every one or two years.
Before I switched to a Mac myself, that's basically what I did. I set up the base OS more or less the way I liked it, install updates, removed any shovelware, installed the stuff I wanted, and then imaged the disk and set the image aside in a safe place.
If you have a sufficiently large hard drive, you can partition the drive, and then image the main partition onto a file on the 2nd partition, making it slightly more convenient for you.
I know recent versions of windows have a built in "factory reset" option, but that still leaves you redoing all the updates, software installation, etc.
Also, the UI will take getting used to. Windows apps are amazingly inconsistent, for example throwing menus almost anywhere, or using those ridiculous ribbon things, etc. There is zero consistency between how different applications function, even the ones built into the OS, so you can't rely on general consistency to guide you the way you can with OSX.
There are also a LOT of wierd quirks in Windows, such as when it "helpfully" locks write permissions on random files it thinks shouldn't be written to anymore, but that's for you to discover.
The only reason these phishing scams work is because they are so low effort on the part of the scammer. You just vomit spam and then handle the responders.
This idea will turn the tables on them by making them do the same thing they're trying to do to others. Of course, it will turn into a cat and mouse game as the scammers figure out what's going on, and implement a cheap test to weed out the automation as quickly as possible.
Of course, then I wonder if the scammers will start automating their own responses... it'll be like watching cleverbot talk to itself.
LOL! Yes it was! They advertised that you could "squirt" music to your friends.
That's entirely true. I ignored them because Mozilla hasn't had any even remotely majority marketshare for decades now, so the impact when they screw something up generally affects far less people.
I wonder if that was one of the reasons why Zune failed. The idea of squirting something to somebody else in public probably didn't (and still wouldn't) go over too well. I want to share files, not take part in a kinky porno.
Wait whatnow? They do? I'm so used to Apple pushing their proprietary stuff that I had given up even the notion that they'd try to maintain some level of compatibility with other manufacturers.
Oh, there it is, in the Bluetooth menu. Huh. Whodathunkit. Now if only they'd do the same thing in iOS. But I guess they're too busy turning people into smiling talking poop.
It's idiocy like this why I am compelled to have at least 3 different browsers on every machine I use. Because it seems like every time there's some kind of update, stuff get horribly broken and I need to switch to a different browser for an extended period of time. It's to the point where I've purchased an xmarks premium subscription, so that all my bookmarks gets synced and I don't have to jump through hoops when the inevitable switch happens.
It's so frustrating the way companies think that they are allowed to have defacto control of the entire internet.
Fuck you Google, and fuck you Microsoft before you.
That's what the owners said, after they VERY abruptly shuttered the entire place without warning.
If it was just a matter of losing money, (I would think) they would have had a much smoother and cleaner wind down process.
But that's not what happened. This has a bad stink all over it.
No it's not. It's literally like having a full second computer running in parallel to your main computer, except that it is always running as long as there is power to your machine, and you can't shut it off, and it can take over your main machine.
It's a great feature for corporate environments where the remote access helps IT do their job. For everyone else, it's a f__king stupid idea because the average person has no idea what it does or why it's there, or even that it IS there, which paints a great big target on them for any malicious actor to exploit.
I jumped off that band wagon a while ago, and the amount of money I've saved has been miraculous. Not that I was ever obsessed with the latest shiny as some people are, mind you, but it's amazing how transitioning through later stages of your life really puts things in perspective.
Now, when a new technology comes out I take a good hard look at it and ask, "How does this new thing help me that my previous stuff couldn't?" and "Does do those improvements justifying spending the X amount of dollars on it, that could otherwise be spent on other things, like a mortgage payment, etc?"
It's shocking how much those two questions have curbed my spending. It also opened my eyes to... well... just how *shit* the technology industry has become. It's all so much crap. Frivolous nonsense that provide nothing of genuine value compared to what existed before.
That goes not just for consumer goods, but for pretty much *everything*, including servers, operating systems, programming languages, frameworks, etc.
And then the sadness kicks in because I realize the overwhleming majority of other people *don't* see these things, so the slow moving trainwreck of technology happily marches on. New javascript frameworks coming out on a weekly basis, IOT crap that somehow manage to leak more information than they collect, Google and their push to allow websites to access bluetooth devices directly, Apple with the steady march to making computers into very expensive disposable appliances, Microsoft and their... well... nothing especially new there I guess.
But it's basically universal. There is virtually nothing revolutionary happening today. The best we've got is people making better use of technology that has already existed for decades (ie: AI) because the processing power has reached the right level to do so. Everything else is either trivial incremental nonsense, or a complete reinventing of the wheel that ultimately gives you nothing new than you didn't have before... just a shiny new packaging.
But enough people buy into it to keep the train chugging.
1password used to work that way, and it is still possible to purchase the standalone version that lets you store your passwords on other cloud services, but I don't know how much longer that will be. As it is, they don't advertise the standalone version anymore. You have to specifically ask them for it.
I am currently looking at Enpass as a possible alternative, however there are several dealbreakers that I am waiting to be resolved:
1. It doesn't support multiple password vaults. Supposed to be in the next major version.
2. They have not had a 3rd party audit done on their code. They have promised to do this after the next major release is done, as there is apparently a lot of refactoring work happening that makes doing the review now kinda pointless.
Given Microsoft's track record in honesty, I will take CR's word over Microsoft's any day.
That is the essence of a totalitarian society.
If it looks like a rose and smells like a rose...
You do realize that business has worked this way for a while now, yes? *Especially* companies like Apple. Hell, we as people now *define* ourselves by our brand choices, to the point of hating people who prefer the "opposite" brand.
"Why Do Web Developers Keep Making The Same Mistakes?" is the wrong question entirely.
The ACTUAL question is, why do new developers insist on completely ignoring the lessons of the past? This is what happens when you mindlessly encourage a culture of "young people are better than old people" and "new stuff is better than old stuff".
It results in exactly what you see today: the same idiotic mistakes being made over and over again. Reinventing the wheel over and over again. None of the issues happening today are new. They've been solved for decades. But because the "solved" technology is "old", it's ignored.
It's depressing how software development is the ONLY professional industry where learning lessons from the past are actually frowned upon, and people who rediscover the same thing all over again are considered visionary.
There are so many easier and more efficient ways of stealing everyone's personal information en masse. Why would they bother resorting to surreptitiously activating your phone's microphone?
Who was it again that pointed their AI at Urban Dictionary, resulting in their AI being so potty-mouthed, racist, sexist, everything-ist, that they had to pull the plug?
they have a long way to go to get from the "evil" side back to the forces of good.
What do you mean "back"? I can't ever remember a time when Oracle wasn't obnoxious.
I can only assume that SCO's lawyers got hired at some point and are trying to drag this thing out as long as humanly possible, hoping that the other side will just get sick of things and walk away.
I'm LGBTDVORAK you insensitive clod!