Of course a little bit of that can be demographic changes but for the most part it's "hidden" unemployment in people studying, giving up, getting on some kind of benefits - no more of the population is actually employed today than back in late 2009. In the EU they've already started to run out of smoke and mirrors to cover up their unemployment and debt problems. The world economy is already down but right now I think it's more likely to get a kick in the groin than to get up on its feet.
You can't understand because you don't accept the principles of freedom or armed self-defense. And don't pretend like you do, when you end by admiring the Chinese, whom I believe now ban certain knives, since many kids have in fact been killed in knife rampages.
Crazy people with guns shooting me tends to infringe on my right to live which is rather limiting to my freedom and contrary to gun nut lore carrying one doesn't make me any less dead. I don't think I'm Lucky Luke that can draw faster than my own shadow or that I'm Superman and can outrun bullets, I think I'd eat lead and die. And even if I had the time to yank myself out of daily life, draw and take off the safety I couldn't very well spray and pray in that general direction, I'd better hit while the gunman has no such reservations not to mention the risk that if everyone had guns that someone else would shoot me either by accident or confusion.
Take the Giffords shooter for example, first shot was at point blank range to the head and then he fired the rest of the magazine randomly into the crowd. In this case he actually fumbled during reloading and was subdued without guns, but I'm thinking that's around the best case for the NRAs "good guy with guns" to stop him as just blindly shooting he could empty the first one in 5 seconds. Yay only six dead including a nine year old girl, it wasn't double or triple that right? Or you can start earlier and do something about the "bad guy with guns" before you're half a dozen down and it's only a matter of how badly you're going to lose - he after all only has one life, which he hardly seems to care about.
Now I'm going to be a brutal cynic and say it simply, most murderers seem to focus one just one or two people, typically their ex-wife, ex-boss, lead bully or whatever and if they hadn't been shot they'd probably been killed with a blunt object or sharp object or poisoned or any one of a million ways. Very few other than gunmen seem to randomly kill whoever get in their way before or after the fact or try to kill the police trying to catch them. Now if he could walk up to Giffords and shoot her in the head he could walk up to her and stab her or cut her throat. But I rather doubt six people in the crowd would have died and over double that been injured.
Guns don't kill people, people kill people. But bigger and better guns lets gunmen kill more people, while the "good guys with guns" remain capped at one.
here are probably niche exceptions; but in most of clothing it's been quite some time since disrepair, rather than disuse, has been the driving factor behind consumption. Even relatively easy and low-tech techniques like 'patching' and 'darning' and assorted flavors of mending have fallen out of fashion
Well there's two different things here, that you wouldn't mend it if was damaged isn't the same as saying you wouldn't want it to last longer, it's certainly not the same as disuse. Honestly I've had clothes that I've loved and used but when they're so worn out they'd need patching and darning I've just said okay it's time to let go and buy a new one, if they hadn't worn out I'd keep using them. Particularly darning I think has almost fallen out of the language, I practically never have to look up English words and first I had to google darning, then use google translate to even remember what it was in my language. Patched clothes I've seen, but darning... no, never except maybe in a museum. Probably because if you consider the value of time you have to be really desperate to mend a sock as I can pick up a dozen in a value pack for next to nothing.
And even patched clothes, well to be honest I've only seen them on old people or abroad in poorer countries, I would never wear one and I think any kids I have would genuinely hate it me if I forced them to wear any patched clothes to school. I mean I understand when the need would arise but there's so many other things I have that I'd easily give up so I could throw away the old sweater and buy me a new one instead. In some ways I very much respect the old people who do and like say "I don't care about your nonsense, I won't throw away a perfectly good sweater when a patch will fix it" and frugality is a underrated virtue, but to be honest I would feel it more like painting a giant neon sign on me saying "I'm poor, I can't even afford new clothes". I don't care for brand or fashion, but they should be in good condition and clean.
If it's an idea that is scribbled down on the back of a napkin, maybe not. But I'm reminded of the founding story of one software company I heard, the initiator was an electrician but he couldn't code worth shit. So he found a tech-savvy friend and said "I've been an electrician for 20 years now, I worked with most the software tools out there and think there's a market for something better and more streamlined to an electricians daily life with these and those features. I have many contacts in the business we could sell to and I know what the competition is charging because they've been selling to me and there's good money in this. I have done some layouts of how I'd like this to look and work and I can continue to work on that if you can write code to make it work."
Long story short, friend take a look at it and decides the ideas are implementable, they start a company together, huge success. Of course you could say he brought a lot more than an idea, he bought domain knowledge, proper requirements, specific key features that could sell the product, market contacts and so on but he had absolutely no execution ability on his own. Should he have gone back to school for learn to do it himself? Yeah right. That would have taken years and you can bet that if the first version was made as a newbie's first "real" solo coding project it would have been horrible and flopped. So what do you do if you have all of the above, but no tech-savvy friend? Of course by Sturgeon's law 90% of everything will be crap, but to dismiss everything just because they "need to find someone who can make it for me" is silly.
Can you go all across Europe, ie to Spain & Slovenia, without incurring roaming charges? Then it's not the same as the US. 1GB/month - better not watch Netflix on the road, or get a few emails with large attachments. Also, that's not what I want for a smartphone plan. What's the point of having a smartphone?
Well I can't speak for everyone else but I mainly live in my country, sure if I went a lot abroad that might be an issue but my foreign access costs is a rounding error to my vacation costs. I care about the broadband I can get in my daily life, going on vacation is a good time to unwind from that always connected stress too. And if I did it because of work then I'd insist they pay, not me. Oh and the EU has brought the charges down to moderately unreasonable, you're not fleeced quite as bad as you used to be.
Yes, if you must stream Netflix you have a problem. But if your smart phone is topped off with apps and games and music and movies and whatever else you want from your wifi at home, then meh... I don't come close to 1 GB/month I think, and yet it's incredibly useful to me. YMMV.
Give me the ability to work uninterrupted. I know open-plan offices are all the rage, but you're expecting me to do work that requires high concentration for hours at a time. I can't do that with every conversation in the office distracting me, or everybody coming over randomly with questions or conversation. Same for phone calls. People should not be calling developers directly unless the developer's asked them to. If you need to, hire a receptionist to field calls and route them where they need to go (as opposed to where the caller wants them to go).
I recently switched to an office and I'm not sure single person offices are the trick, I feel my productivity has gone down rather than up. I'd rather go with team rooms - if you're working on the same project/area, you sit together but under no circumstances more than 2x4 people islands and no mixed rooms. However, this requires you to have a bit of headroom so you can leave seats idle and don't need to do a full reshuffle or knock down/put up walls all the time. Also small discussion rooms you can ad hoc grab for say 4 people max that don't need booking for extended conversations/discussions or if you really need closed door time. Make sure each room has a PC so you can show stuff unless you're all on laptops/wireless. I've found that if one is always available and people are just too lazy then a few swift corrections/reminders will make people use them.
As usual there's many exceptions to these rules but I really feel the distance of getting up and walking from my office to their office is a big enough barrier compared to just looking across the room, seeing they don't look particularly in deep thought and just ask my question. And usually that means most of the other people heard it too so now they a) don't need to ask the same question and b) could object if they disagreed and c) throw in any related question they were wondering about. Team talk is overall more beneficial than it is distracting in my experience, it's people talking about entirely unrelated things that put you off your game.
Actually what would happen is that the pirates would make 4K rips that are 4x the size of their 1080p rips - usually a DVD9 or 8.5GB so 34GB, actually probably a bit less since sound remains constant. Then HEVC will improve that by 50% down to 17GB. It's probably easier to download a 4K rip with 2013 Internet speeds than 1080p with 2006 speeds. But first I'm sure they'll wrap it in the most hellish form of DRM they can find, so we'd need another DVD-Jon. But after that, nah it's no problem to move compressed 4K content today.
Really, you don't have a wall big enough? 430 sq. feet apartment, 60" LCD here and I could have gone bigger. If TCL gave me one of their 110" LCD prototypes I'd throw out the book shelf on each side and just make that my TV wall.
The whole point of SSL is that it connects only to the server you requested, and encrypts the data so only that server can see it. Do you really think that Joe Sixpack has read Nokia's website before he logs into his bank? Seems like just another nail in Nokia's coffin...
Not really, nor do I expect him to read this story, nor understand it, nor care. The make or break for Nokia isn't going to be this, it's Win8. In two weeks they're publishing their Q4 figures and we'll know.
I'd start by looking there. A centralized server is also a single point of failure. Something that tends to be frowned upon by users looking to chat by voice/video/text.
Facebook.com also looks like a centralized server from the user's perspective, and yet that's my impression where most my Messenger contacts left for. If you just have a sufficient number of load balancers and whatever else redundancy the user doesn't see I doubt they see the problem. I mean we started out distributed with IRC and the trend went the other way.
The prestige of an American university does not warrant the cost. We pay for the implied value of the college we go to, and it is cheapened when the class is not taught in person.
The professor is one thing, but it's not connecting with your co-students that is the real downfall. Nothing sharpens your mind as much as having to discuss/cooperate/compete with other very bright minds and you're not networking the same way either. The professor is of course also good, but most of it is just putting all these people in the same room and watch the sparks fly.
<trollface>So if in the interest of public health and safety the whole population should be immunized, would you be okay with rounding up everybody and give them flu shots despite their objections, by force if necessary? </trollface>
I'm fine with my employer demanding what substances won't be in my body when I'm at work like alcohol, drugs etc. but I'm a lot less fine with my employer demanding what substances will be, like a flu vaccine. This isn't just talking about wearing a clean uniform or washing your hands or whatever they force you do to at work that you can stop doing when you leave, it's essentially giving your employer the right to decide over your whole life and medicate you as they see fit. Screw religion, this is my body and the sole authority on what I put in it should be me. It's scary how many here on Slashdot are willing to sign away their freedom to scientific statistics just to spite religious superstition. Like US employees aren't their employer's bitches enough as it is...
I think the only people to care enough to write reviews on mechanical drives these days are those with a bad story to tell because there's absolutely nothing exciting to say. Nobody cares about performance anymore because SSDs has spanked them every which way but they're cheap, big and they work, sure you could get a lemon but I'd take backups of that SSD too. I think your chances of a broken drive was much higher back when they had new tech and doubled in capacity every two years.
Having purchased the HVAC system I might want to make changes to it, by changing the software. It's an important thing. (RMS started all this stuff when he couldn't get the source code to a printer driver). Angry Birds isn't important.
And a printer is important? I think fixing an annoying bug in a game I bought and wanted to enjoy that the publisher refuses to fix might be just as "important" to me as a buggy printer driver the producer refuses to fix. Those weren't his words anyway and I very much suspect that what RMS meant is that he doesn't care about the free licensing of art assets, because they're non-functional parts of the game. I'm quite sure he'd insist you should get all the source code to Angry Birds so you can modify any aspect of the game and distribute the engine, just not the artwork.
So what you're saying is that the benefits of turning each computer into its very own special little snowflake outweighs any benefits from consistency (learn once use everywhere), discoverability (it might work like other software I've used), portability (I can sit down at someone else's computer and do things), supportability (here's a script.. no wait, your setup is special), peer training (I did it, you just click here and here), easier testing (few combinations) and indeed any other network effects that might come from reducing the number of possibilities. Now I like to tweak my machine as much as the next geek, but most people are just looking for basic ways to do things not investing time in finding their own personal favorite.
Let me for example explain to you my requirements for washing clothes: 1. Don't ruin them, 2. Make them reasonably clean. The washing machine has more than a dozen programs with various modifiers so it's possible to run hundreds if not thousands of combinations. About 99% of the time I run the same standard 40C program, it might not be the best cleaning program or the most efficient program or the fastest program or any of those things, but it doesn't fail any of my two requirements. Basically everything I own can be washed at 40C (natural selection at work) and it's clean enough to be sanitary and wear in public. Mission accomplished, moving on to more important things in life. That's the way many feel about computers too, they want their first pick to be "good enough". They don't want alternatives unless the first one failed them.
While I agree that C is a bad language, it has no competition in low-level coding. With embedded systems gaining ground, more and more people will start to use it.
Except the "embedded" smart phones and tablets are approaching - if not gone way past - the performance levels where people started using high-level languages on traditional computers. A dual-core gigahertz processor and a gigabyte of RAM and a GPU to push many millions of polygons per second isn't a very resource constrained environment anymore. For sure, there's still some rather hardcore embedded development on controller chips in consumer electronics that have kilobytes of RAM and an 8 bit micro controller, but there's been no particular boom there.
If the people who are talking together wants to have some secret communication, then their whole conversation might be code. Side channel attacks are much more insidious because in any high security environment the source and destinations of traffic are closely monitored. So this looks like Alice is talking to Bob and that is entirely above board and legitimate, but in addition we're piggybacking secret data from Alice's computer that we've compromised to Bob who is our mole on the inside. Secure communication channels are specifically designed to avoid this sort of thing. For example that is why early SSL replaced a random padding with a defined padding, because the "random" padding could be an encrypted version of the session key or some other secret message and you couldn't tell.
A lot of companies have a policy that no employee device will ever touch the internal network. I currently have two phones, one work phone and one personal phone due to all the rules and restrictions on the work phone. But to physically ban me from having my other phone on the premises because someone could hack my phone and capture the camera/audio would take it to an entirely different level. You don't put together an Ocean Eleven team to rob a gas station, neither do you do hack an employee's cell phone for a few SSNs. Yes, if you really think you could be the potential victim of advanced industrial espionage and not just a former employee taking everything with him out the door - a far more likely scenario - then sure. But I'm guessing the few who really have reason to fear this already know.
I've found that there are two kinds of people that allow work and the rest of their lives to intermingle, and I can't stand either. (...) Me, I work hard for my 8 hours, and after that, you either pay me more, or I go and live my life. I emphasize that I work hard for 8 hours, if that isn't good enough for the boss, too bad, pay me more.
Well if it's a choice between keeping a strict separation and a one-sided invasion of your personal life, then I'd do the same. But that is actually quite impractical for both of us, so if they're willing to be flexible then I'm willing to be flexible. Now I sure as hell don't work for free and I am keeping score, but it's not very important to me that those 8 hours are 9-5 and neither is it to the company really. The more I can have flexible hours, the more I can take time off or during business hours do deal with personal business, the easier I can convert long hours to extra holidays the more willing I am to work when they want me to as well. It's either that or they can pay me to be on call service, if not I'll drop off the face of the earth until start of next work day.
It's not your job to make management happy. It's management's job to make your job possible. On unrelated news: Overtime is a clear indicator of management failure.
(Note, I hit submit instead of preview on my other reply) I'm not opposed to overtime, just sustained overtime or overtime without pay. Even with the most reasonable plan sometimes shit happens, The estimates were completely off, the assumptions were completely off, people quit or fell ill, the foundations turned out to be quicksand, even without crazy last minute meddling from upper management or marketing sometimes you're way off track. Particularly in all kinds of compliance projects the deadlines and requirements are fixed but also in other situations the consequences are huge.
Now let me tell you that my baseline is working 40 hours a week, it might be different if you're already doing 60 but I don't work as hard as I could. This is because I generally like to have a life outside work, For a decent enough compensation - usually +50% or +100% in addition to my regular hourly pay - I'm willing to work harder for a limited time. Of course there's a potential for abuse here in slacking and getting overtime pay to stay late to fix it, but management will quickly pick up on that. When shit happens, they know they have an extra gear that costs extra money. And they use it, but they don't use it for no good reason and there's really no way to abuse it since you're burning more money than hiring more people to work regular hours.
It's not your job to make management happy. It's management's job to make your job possible. On unrelated news: Overtime is a clear indicator of management failure.
I'm not opposed to overtime, just sustained overtime or overtime without pay. Even with the most reasonable plan sometimes shit happens, The estimates were completely off, the assumptions were completely off, people quit or fell ill, the foundations turned out to be quicksand, even without crazy last minute meddling from upper management or marketing sometimes you're way off track. Particularly in all kinds of compliance projects the deadlines and requirements are fixed but also in other situations the consequences are huge.
Fairly well known musicians play at music festivals, where they can be one of many drawing people to go there. Superstars hold a concert and fill a stadium all by themselves. Why launch at CES if you're big enough to get all the attention you want on your own without sharing the spotlight?
Slashdot Mirror
Well, I'm pretty sure the statistics are in the "white lie, black lie, statistics" category. Compare these:
Unemployment rate and Employment-population rate
Of course a little bit of that can be demographic changes but for the most part it's "hidden" unemployment in people studying, giving up, getting on some kind of benefits - no more of the population is actually employed today than back in late 2009. In the EU they've already started to run out of smoke and mirrors to cover up their unemployment and debt problems. The world economy is already down but right now I think it's more likely to get a kick in the groin than to get up on its feet.
When you say "left school" are you talking about high school?
He's talking about troll school and has been at slashdot ever since...
You can't understand because you don't accept the principles of freedom or armed self-defense. And don't pretend like you do, when you end by admiring the Chinese, whom I believe now ban certain knives, since many kids have in fact been killed in knife rampages.
Crazy people with guns shooting me tends to infringe on my right to live which is rather limiting to my freedom and contrary to gun nut lore carrying one doesn't make me any less dead. I don't think I'm Lucky Luke that can draw faster than my own shadow or that I'm Superman and can outrun bullets, I think I'd eat lead and die. And even if I had the time to yank myself out of daily life, draw and take off the safety I couldn't very well spray and pray in that general direction, I'd better hit while the gunman has no such reservations not to mention the risk that if everyone had guns that someone else would shoot me either by accident or confusion.
Take the Giffords shooter for example, first shot was at point blank range to the head and then he fired the rest of the magazine randomly into the crowd. In this case he actually fumbled during reloading and was subdued without guns, but I'm thinking that's around the best case for the NRAs "good guy with guns" to stop him as just blindly shooting he could empty the first one in 5 seconds. Yay only six dead including a nine year old girl, it wasn't double or triple that right? Or you can start earlier and do something about the "bad guy with guns" before you're half a dozen down and it's only a matter of how badly you're going to lose - he after all only has one life, which he hardly seems to care about.
Now I'm going to be a brutal cynic and say it simply, most murderers seem to focus one just one or two people, typically their ex-wife, ex-boss, lead bully or whatever and if they hadn't been shot they'd probably been killed with a blunt object or sharp object or poisoned or any one of a million ways. Very few other than gunmen seem to randomly kill whoever get in their way before or after the fact or try to kill the police trying to catch them. Now if he could walk up to Giffords and shoot her in the head he could walk up to her and stab her or cut her throat. But I rather doubt six people in the crowd would have died and over double that been injured.
Guns don't kill people, people kill people. But bigger and better guns lets gunmen kill more people, while the "good guys with guns" remain capped at one.
here are probably niche exceptions; but in most of clothing it's been quite some time since disrepair, rather than disuse, has been the driving factor behind consumption. Even relatively easy and low-tech techniques like 'patching' and 'darning' and assorted flavors of mending have fallen out of fashion
Well there's two different things here, that you wouldn't mend it if was damaged isn't the same as saying you wouldn't want it to last longer, it's certainly not the same as disuse. Honestly I've had clothes that I've loved and used but when they're so worn out they'd need patching and darning I've just said okay it's time to let go and buy a new one, if they hadn't worn out I'd keep using them. Particularly darning I think has almost fallen out of the language, I practically never have to look up English words and first I had to google darning, then use google translate to even remember what it was in my language. Patched clothes I've seen, but darning... no, never except maybe in a museum. Probably because if you consider the value of time you have to be really desperate to mend a sock as I can pick up a dozen in a value pack for next to nothing.
And even patched clothes, well to be honest I've only seen them on old people or abroad in poorer countries, I would never wear one and I think any kids I have would genuinely hate it me if I forced them to wear any patched clothes to school. I mean I understand when the need would arise but there's so many other things I have that I'd easily give up so I could throw away the old sweater and buy me a new one instead. In some ways I very much respect the old people who do and like say "I don't care about your nonsense, I won't throw away a perfectly good sweater when a patch will fix it" and frugality is a underrated virtue, but to be honest I would feel it more like painting a giant neon sign on me saying "I'm poor, I can't even afford new clothes". I don't care for brand or fashion, but they should be in good condition and clean.
Yes, with a female voice and the tone of "stop touching me[, or I'll file sexual harassment charges]" See if you can make any of the cow orkers blush.
If it's an idea that is scribbled down on the back of a napkin, maybe not. But I'm reminded of the founding story of one software company I heard, the initiator was an electrician but he couldn't code worth shit. So he found a tech-savvy friend and said "I've been an electrician for 20 years now, I worked with most the software tools out there and think there's a market for something better and more streamlined to an electricians daily life with these and those features. I have many contacts in the business we could sell to and I know what the competition is charging because they've been selling to me and there's good money in this. I have done some layouts of how I'd like this to look and work and I can continue to work on that if you can write code to make it work."
Long story short, friend take a look at it and decides the ideas are implementable, they start a company together, huge success. Of course you could say he brought a lot more than an idea, he bought domain knowledge, proper requirements, specific key features that could sell the product, market contacts and so on but he had absolutely no execution ability on his own. Should he have gone back to school for learn to do it himself? Yeah right. That would have taken years and you can bet that if the first version was made as a newbie's first "real" solo coding project it would have been horrible and flopped. So what do you do if you have all of the above, but no tech-savvy friend? Of course by Sturgeon's law 90% of everything will be crap, but to dismiss everything just because they "need to find someone who can make it for me" is silly.
Can you go all across Europe, ie to Spain & Slovenia, without incurring roaming charges? Then it's not the same as the US. 1GB/month - better not watch Netflix on the road, or get a few emails with large attachments. Also, that's not what I want for a smartphone plan. What's the point of having a smartphone?
Well I can't speak for everyone else but I mainly live in my country, sure if I went a lot abroad that might be an issue but my foreign access costs is a rounding error to my vacation costs. I care about the broadband I can get in my daily life, going on vacation is a good time to unwind from that always connected stress too. And if I did it because of work then I'd insist they pay, not me. Oh and the EU has brought the charges down to moderately unreasonable, you're not fleeced quite as bad as you used to be.
Yes, if you must stream Netflix you have a problem. But if your smart phone is topped off with apps and games and music and movies and whatever else you want from your wifi at home, then meh... I don't come close to 1 GB/month I think, and yet it's incredibly useful to me. YMMV.
Give me the ability to work uninterrupted. I know open-plan offices are all the rage, but you're expecting me to do work that requires high concentration for hours at a time. I can't do that with every conversation in the office distracting me, or everybody coming over randomly with questions or conversation. Same for phone calls. People should not be calling developers directly unless the developer's asked them to. If you need to, hire a receptionist to field calls and route them where they need to go (as opposed to where the caller wants them to go).
I recently switched to an office and I'm not sure single person offices are the trick, I feel my productivity has gone down rather than up. I'd rather go with team rooms - if you're working on the same project/area, you sit together but under no circumstances more than 2x4 people islands and no mixed rooms. However, this requires you to have a bit of headroom so you can leave seats idle and don't need to do a full reshuffle or knock down/put up walls all the time. Also small discussion rooms you can ad hoc grab for say 4 people max that don't need booking for extended conversations/discussions or if you really need closed door time. Make sure each room has a PC so you can show stuff unless you're all on laptops/wireless. I've found that if one is always available and people are just too lazy then a few swift corrections/reminders will make people use them.
As usual there's many exceptions to these rules but I really feel the distance of getting up and walking from my office to their office is a big enough barrier compared to just looking across the room, seeing they don't look particularly in deep thought and just ask my question. And usually that means most of the other people heard it too so now they a) don't need to ask the same question and b) could object if they disagreed and c) throw in any related question they were wondering about. Team talk is overall more beneficial than it is distracting in my experience, it's people talking about entirely unrelated things that put you off your game.
Too high, with process size reductions it's more like:
SLC: still around?
eMLC: 30000
MLC: 5000
TLC: 3000
Actually what would happen is that the pirates would make 4K rips that are 4x the size of their 1080p rips - usually a DVD9 or 8.5GB so 34GB, actually probably a bit less since sound remains constant. Then HEVC will improve that by 50% down to 17GB. It's probably easier to download a 4K rip with 2013 Internet speeds than 1080p with 2006 speeds. But first I'm sure they'll wrap it in the most hellish form of DRM they can find, so we'd need another DVD-Jon. But after that, nah it's no problem to move compressed 4K content today.
Really, you don't have a wall big enough? 430 sq. feet apartment, 60" LCD here and I could have gone bigger. If TCL gave me one of their 110" LCD prototypes I'd throw out the book shelf on each side and just make that my TV wall.
The whole point of SSL is that it connects only to the server you requested, and encrypts the data so only that server can see it. Do you really think that Joe Sixpack has read Nokia's website before he logs into his bank? Seems like just another nail in Nokia's coffin...
Not really, nor do I expect him to read this story, nor understand it, nor care. The make or break for Nokia isn't going to be this, it's Win8. In two weeks they're publishing their Q4 figures and we'll know.
I'd start by looking there. A centralized server is also a single point of failure. Something that tends to be frowned upon by users looking to chat by voice/video/text.
Facebook.com also looks like a centralized server from the user's perspective, and yet that's my impression where most my Messenger contacts left for. If you just have a sufficient number of load balancers and whatever else redundancy the user doesn't see I doubt they see the problem. I mean we started out distributed with IRC and the trend went the other way.
The prestige of an American university does not warrant the cost. We pay for the implied value of the college we go to, and it is cheapened when the class is not taught in person.
The professor is one thing, but it's not connecting with your co-students that is the real downfall. Nothing sharpens your mind as much as having to discuss/cooperate/compete with other very bright minds and you're not networking the same way either. The professor is of course also good, but most of it is just putting all these people in the same room and watch the sparks fly.
<trollface>So if in the interest of public health and safety the whole population should be immunized, would you be okay with rounding up everybody and give them flu shots despite their objections, by force if necessary? </trollface>
I'm fine with my employer demanding what substances won't be in my body when I'm at work like alcohol, drugs etc. but I'm a lot less fine with my employer demanding what substances will be, like a flu vaccine. This isn't just talking about wearing a clean uniform or washing your hands or whatever they force you do to at work that you can stop doing when you leave, it's essentially giving your employer the right to decide over your whole life and medicate you as they see fit. Screw religion, this is my body and the sole authority on what I put in it should be me. It's scary how many here on Slashdot are willing to sign away their freedom to scientific statistics just to spite religious superstition. Like US employees aren't their employer's bitches enough as it is...
I think the only people to care enough to write reviews on mechanical drives these days are those with a bad story to tell because there's absolutely nothing exciting to say. Nobody cares about performance anymore because SSDs has spanked them every which way but they're cheap, big and they work, sure you could get a lemon but I'd take backups of that SSD too. I think your chances of a broken drive was much higher back when they had new tech and doubled in capacity every two years.
Having purchased the HVAC system I might want to make changes to it, by changing the software. It's an important thing. (RMS started all this stuff when he couldn't get the source code to a printer driver). Angry Birds isn't important.
And a printer is important? I think fixing an annoying bug in a game I bought and wanted to enjoy that the publisher refuses to fix might be just as "important" to me as a buggy printer driver the producer refuses to fix. Those weren't his words anyway and I very much suspect that what RMS meant is that he doesn't care about the free licensing of art assets, because they're non-functional parts of the game. I'm quite sure he'd insist you should get all the source code to Angry Birds so you can modify any aspect of the game and distribute the engine, just not the artwork.
So what you're saying is that the benefits of turning each computer into its very own special little snowflake outweighs any benefits from consistency (learn once use everywhere), discoverability (it might work like other software I've used), portability (I can sit down at someone else's computer and do things), supportability (here's a script.. no wait, your setup is special), peer training (I did it, you just click here and here), easier testing (few combinations) and indeed any other network effects that might come from reducing the number of possibilities. Now I like to tweak my machine as much as the next geek, but most people are just looking for basic ways to do things not investing time in finding their own personal favorite.
Let me for example explain to you my requirements for washing clothes: 1. Don't ruin them, 2. Make them reasonably clean. The washing machine has more than a dozen programs with various modifiers so it's possible to run hundreds if not thousands of combinations. About 99% of the time I run the same standard 40C program, it might not be the best cleaning program or the most efficient program or the fastest program or any of those things, but it doesn't fail any of my two requirements. Basically everything I own can be washed at 40C (natural selection at work) and it's clean enough to be sanitary and wear in public. Mission accomplished, moving on to more important things in life. That's the way many feel about computers too, they want their first pick to be "good enough". They don't want alternatives unless the first one failed them.
While I agree that C is a bad language, it has no competition in low-level coding. With embedded systems gaining ground, more and more people will start to use it.
Except the "embedded" smart phones and tablets are approaching - if not gone way past - the performance levels where people started using high-level languages on traditional computers. A dual-core gigahertz processor and a gigabyte of RAM and a GPU to push many millions of polygons per second isn't a very resource constrained environment anymore. For sure, there's still some rather hardcore embedded development on controller chips in consumer electronics that have kilobytes of RAM and an 8 bit micro controller, but there's been no particular boom there.
If the people who are talking together wants to have some secret communication, then their whole conversation might be code. Side channel attacks are much more insidious because in any high security environment the source and destinations of traffic are closely monitored. So this looks like Alice is talking to Bob and that is entirely above board and legitimate, but in addition we're piggybacking secret data from Alice's computer that we've compromised to Bob who is our mole on the inside. Secure communication channels are specifically designed to avoid this sort of thing. For example that is why early SSL replaced a random padding with a defined padding, because the "random" padding could be an encrypted version of the session key or some other secret message and you couldn't tell.
A lot of companies have a policy that no employee device will ever touch the internal network. I currently have two phones, one work phone and one personal phone due to all the rules and restrictions on the work phone. But to physically ban me from having my other phone on the premises because someone could hack my phone and capture the camera/audio would take it to an entirely different level. You don't put together an Ocean Eleven team to rob a gas station, neither do you do hack an employee's cell phone for a few SSNs. Yes, if you really think you could be the potential victim of advanced industrial espionage and not just a former employee taking everything with him out the door - a far more likely scenario - then sure. But I'm guessing the few who really have reason to fear this already know.
I've found that there are two kinds of people that allow work and the rest of their lives to intermingle, and I can't stand either. (...) Me, I work hard for my 8 hours, and after that, you either pay me more, or I go and live my life. I emphasize that I work hard for 8 hours, if that isn't good enough for the boss, too bad, pay me more.
Well if it's a choice between keeping a strict separation and a one-sided invasion of your personal life, then I'd do the same. But that is actually quite impractical for both of us, so if they're willing to be flexible then I'm willing to be flexible. Now I sure as hell don't work for free and I am keeping score, but it's not very important to me that those 8 hours are 9-5 and neither is it to the company really. The more I can have flexible hours, the more I can take time off or during business hours do deal with personal business, the easier I can convert long hours to extra holidays the more willing I am to work when they want me to as well. It's either that or they can pay me to be on call service, if not I'll drop off the face of the earth until start of next work day.
It's not your job to make management happy. It's management's job to make your job possible. On unrelated news: Overtime is a clear indicator of management failure.
(Note, I hit submit instead of preview on my other reply) I'm not opposed to overtime, just sustained overtime or overtime without pay. Even with the most reasonable plan sometimes shit happens, The estimates were completely off, the assumptions were completely off, people quit or fell ill, the foundations turned out to be quicksand, even without crazy last minute meddling from upper management or marketing sometimes you're way off track. Particularly in all kinds of compliance projects the deadlines and requirements are fixed but also in other situations the consequences are huge.
Now let me tell you that my baseline is working 40 hours a week, it might be different if you're already doing 60 but I don't work as hard as I could. This is because I generally like to have a life outside work, For a decent enough compensation - usually +50% or +100% in addition to my regular hourly pay - I'm willing to work harder for a limited time. Of course there's a potential for abuse here in slacking and getting overtime pay to stay late to fix it, but management will quickly pick up on that. When shit happens, they know they have an extra gear that costs extra money. And they use it, but they don't use it for no good reason and there's really no way to abuse it since you're burning more money than hiring more people to work regular hours.
It's not your job to make management happy. It's management's job to make your job possible. On unrelated news: Overtime is a clear indicator of management failure.
I'm not opposed to overtime, just sustained overtime or overtime without pay. Even with the most reasonable plan sometimes shit happens, The estimates were completely off, the assumptions were completely off, people quit or fell ill, the foundations turned out to be quicksand, even without crazy last minute meddling from upper management or marketing sometimes you're way off track. Particularly in all kinds of compliance projects the deadlines and requirements are fixed but also in other situations the consequences are huge.
Fairly well known musicians play at music festivals, where they can be one of many drawing people to go there. Superstars hold a concert and fill a stadium all by themselves. Why launch at CES if you're big enough to get all the attention you want on your own without sharing the spotlight?