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User: twisted_pare

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  1. Take a look, it's in a book on Slashdot Asks: How Did You Learn How To Code? · · Score: 1

    Read a book. A bunch of books, really. For me, first a C++ book in HS. Then many more in college. You see, if you need to master a language, you research the top 2 or 3 books for said language, then read them all cover to cover, spend several thousand hours coding in that language, and then you'll start to be proficient. Copy/Paste programmers are a lower breed in my view. When I conduct interviews and ask any sort of question about bit manipulation, it's staggering to see how few "Senior/Principal" engineers can't recall how many bits are in a byte, or how much space their data structure will consume. Perhaps these are tradesmen, however? Does the pipe fitter understand hydrodynamics, or how exactly his lathe cuts threads into a pipe? No, he just knows how to measure, cut, and install pipes. There is a use for those who grok and those who just build, but I hate seeing the moniker "Senior Software Engineer" applied to people who have just copied and pasted code for a few years, as they don't understand the 'why' of the system at lower levels.

  2. Sure, Boeing knows the plane will actually fly before it's first test flight, but there is a reason that first test flight (i.e. Dreamliner) only has the minimum possible crew, they're all wearing bright orange rescue suits, and they don't dare retract the gear. There are a ton of parts, and they all need testing. For example, the brand new 747-800 had to get software fixes for wing flutter http://www.seattletimes.com/bu.... This is something designers and software testing had missed. So yes, A & B still do flight testing, with test pilots for a reason.

  3. Re:Blockbuster Business Model on How Blockbuster Could Have Owned Netflix · · Score: 1

    Just don't fault these companies for being "stupid" as is so often the case. The CEO's were not reckless as you mentioned. Take Kodak, a company I've read a lot on the failure of, given that I lived in Rochester. Kodak didn't "miss out" on digital photography. They actually invented a lot of the firsts in the industry. The company's board made the very clear decision that they had a massive cash cow in the film production/developing business. To chase digital would be to cannibalize their own cash cow chasing a risky new technology in a race to the bottom. They made the best decision for shareholders within the decade time horizon. Also realize that had Blockbuster bought Netflix in ~2004/5, we'd not have great online streaming services today. As Tim Wu expounds in The Master Switch, it is always in the interest of the incumbent to subvert new technologies that threaten the stability of the industry.

  4. Re:Phone-based ransom-ware? on Apple's War Against Jailbreaking Now Makes Perfect Sense · · Score: 1

    But all sorts of legislation exists imposing stiff penalties for auto theft. These don't exist for phone theft.

  5. Re:Use the EMEI instead on Apple's War Against Jailbreaking Now Makes Perfect Sense · · Score: 1

    So stolen phones will be sold on ebay to countries without our regulations.

  6. Re:it's too wide on Nicaragua Gives Chinese Firm Contract To Build Alternative To Panama Canal · · Score: 1

    Head East young man!

  7. Re:it's too wide on Nicaragua Gives Chinese Firm Contract To Build Alternative To Panama Canal · · Score: 1

    Fool. Water going downhill means you must dump the volume of a super tanker's worth of fresh water into the ocean each lift. You've got to have that much flow in the body of water you're using to keep that up. Reuse uses pumps to circulate that fresh water back uphill. Remember that the Panama Canal requires a large damn to supply this water because it uses gravity fed locks. This fresh water source however is the limiting factor on how many ships can transit the canal over a period of time.

  8. Re:No! on Google Rolling Out Gmail Redesign · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Optional will be tomorrow's mandatory. That has been the typical beta test to roll out of Gmail updates so far.

  9. Re:Depends ... on Ask Slashdot: When Is the User Experience Too Good? · · Score: 1

    Never under estimate the stupid user. "Why, who would ever do that?" is a bad omen. Consider the delete repo UI for GitHub. You've got type in the conf and the repo name. That's case of making a destructive process suitably difficult.

  10. Re:Is this how they are covering up airbursts? on Missile Test Creates Huge Expanding Halo of Light Over Hawaii · · Score: 0

    Perhaps you've never heard of an EMP then. You'll knock out satellites and ground electronics for many hundreds of miles. People notice those.

  11. Re:Dump Fuel? on Missile Test Creates Huge Expanding Halo of Light Over Hawaii · · Score: 3, Informative

    RTFM: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGM-30_Minuteman "Minuteman-III introduced in the post-boost stage (“bus”) an additional liquid-fuel propulsion system rocket engine (PSRE) that is used to slightly adjust the trajectory."

  12. Re:Illegal discrimination? on Dropcam CEO's Beef With Brogramming and Free Dinners · · Score: 1

    IANAL, but I'm married to an employment attorney. People with kids are not a protected class, so no. Race, religion, gender and sexual orientation are protected classes. If someone does not like unmarried dbags, there is no legal protection.

  13. Re:Ford is irrelevant to a startup on Dropcam CEO's Beef With Brogramming and Free Dinners · · Score: 1

    FWIW: Ford cared a great deal about his employees. He didn't just want them to work 40 hours a week. He wanted them to have balanced lives, nice homes and happy families. Had incentivized the whole bit of it too and even sent inspectors to make sure it was working in peoples' homes. He was not just a slave driver. Frankly, he was fairly in line with TFA.

  14. Re:But...Agile teaches us... on Dropcam CEO's Beef With Brogramming and Free Dinners · · Score: 1

    Precisely. I went from working heroic hours to 9-5 once we really were Agile. Most of those long hours in the past could be traced back to poor planning and management acquiescing to last minute customer requirement changes. Once you accept that you were doing Waterfall wrong and want to fix it, life can be much better.

  15. Re:Next week on BoingBoing on Why It's So Hard To Make a Phone Call In Emergency Situations · · Score: 1

    Ever heard of Coconut Grove?

  16. Re:sometimes on Why It's So Hard To Make a Phone Call In Emergency Situations · · Score: 3, Informative

    I was there, 200m from the bombs. Phone never had issues sending texts, but could not us Google Voice or regular calling to place a call out. Never had an issue with data/text however, which was useful as I texted folks asking "WTF was that?" Local hardwired wifi never skipped a beat, but sites like Boston.com and Letsrun.com tanked almost instantly.

  17. Re:Resilience on Why It's So Hard To Make a Phone Call In Emergency Situations · · Score: 2

    During the Cold War there was a telco exchange in Northern Virginia (I forget the number) that if you dialed through would give your call Federal precedence. It was used by Congress/Senate and high up Federal employees. In the case of a national emergency, those calls would be routed first and others dropped to make way for them. This idea is nothing new. I'm sure something similar exists today with 911 or similar.

  18. Re:Add to that, NYI... on NYC Data Centers Struggle To Recover After Sandy · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Poor planning, plain and simple.

    I work for a major financial institution on the street. Various facilities were swamped, and we never missed a beat. What, were we just "lucky?" I don't think so.

    Starting a week ago we had disaster crisis centers setup.
    * Every few hours all East coast facilities reported in any issues
    * Inspection and testing of all critical systems ahead of time
    * Stockpiles of supplies on hand
    * Prefail over to DR where possible
    * All hands on deck to respond


    Sadly, if you want to be prepared, you can be. If tons of money is on the line, then the price of being prepared is well worth it. We test our systems continuously year round. We have disaster recovery drills at all facilities multiple times a year. Departments' rating depend on how well prepared they are for things like this.

    And don't throw that "1888," "worth storm ever" crap around. This is Wall Street. Manhattan. Terrorists have tried to blow it off the map multiple times. Several hurricanes have hit this spit of land that sits a mere few feet above sea level in the last decades. A hurricane hit and flooded parts last year even! If you did not prepare for this including flooding and sealed underground tanks and sandbag walls, it was your own fault.

  19. Re:Can't be done. on Cloud Security: What You Need To Know To Lock It Down · · Score: 2

    Just use the CIA's policy: if you must really keep something secret, don't do it on a computer.

  20. Re:Entitlement problems on IT Salaries and Hiring Are Up — But Just To 2008 Levels · · Score: 2

    I don't mean to offend, but I think we need to make some differentiation between the levels of "IT." To the lay person IT might mean someone that works with computers. However, as the TFA points out, there are many levels of IT from the person that installs desktops and support desk, to the application developers, to the datacenter operations technicians, to the CIO. The compensation varies wildly for these roles as does the level of education and demand. Personally, I'm an app dev at for a financial institution that has specialized in some Java technologies over the last several years. Our devs make well more than TFA figures and where we are located (RTP in Raleigh,NC) IT unemployment is 3%. It is very difficult to even find skilled devs before someone else hires them. What's more, our devs are flocking to SF in droves too for even higher pay. So yes, specialize and learn more. Become a Java/Compiler/OO/UML guru. Then you'll certainly be able to earn more. And, if you want better pay, go somewhere where you'll be in demand like SF, DC, RPT, etc.

  21. Re:Shitty is the new Acceptable on More Uptime Problems For Amazon Cloud · · Score: 1

    I knew something was up in Raleigh. I think I was online for every one of those outages. Too bad we don't get an SLA with TWC?

  22. Re:Millions of dollars spent for nothing. on More Uptime Problems For Amazon Cloud · · Score: 1

    Looks like their VA datacenter is down to two 9's for this year. Whatever happened to A+B power? You have two rails in your rack. Rail A goes to powergrid A, rail B goes to powergrid B. Then again, if, as you point out, your millions of dollars of switching gear does not work, does it matter how many redundant systems you have?

  23. Re:Seems like anything takes down the cloud... on More Uptime Problems For Amazon Cloud · · Score: 1

    Good point. Also don't forget that even if you colo'd in a major VA datacenter, and the center lost power, you'd still be just as screwed, cloud or no cloud.

  24. Re:it seems like the switching system failed on More Uptime Problems For Amazon Cloud · · Score: 1

    And don't forget, this is the second time in two weeks this happened at this data center. Bezos is going to have some heads on Monday. Funny though, Google learned this less long ago. Forget the $10M of UPC's. Strap an emergency exit light lead acid cell to each server/switch (DC->DC, nice). If you loose power, server is good for 10-20min while the building cuts over. Otherwise 1s or 10min outage does not matter. You're still performing a cold startup on a massive system. Good luck with that. Oh yeah, and they're still not out of the woods yet. http://status.aws.amazon.com/rss/ec2-us-east-1.rss

  25. Re:Um... on The Long Death of Fat Clients · · Score: 1

    Sounds like you're doing it wrong. Try GWT. I've done many other RIA frameworks (ASP.NET, C#.NET, WP, JQuery, Prototype, CakePHP, ExtJs), but GWT is just perfect. You get every possible optimization to your application and you just program in delightfully typesafe Java. Plus, who cares about AJAX calls and handlers? GWT just autowires that for you. To really take advantage of the modern browser, you need a modern approach like GWT.