If your writing has to be explained, then you're doing it wrong. I told the same thing to one of my college English professors about some of poets we were studying.
It's called symbolism. You see in avant garde fine arts, you see it in folk art around the world, you see it in ancient poems and religious texts (think the Book of Revelations,) you see it in colorful patois and word plays. You see it mythology, you see it in Australian dream time lore.
Welcome to the richness of human thought.
I think I'm still right.
You are also free to think the world is flat and Elvis is alive.
Communication should be simple and straightforward.
Depending on the goal of communications and the artist's desire for expression. If we were to use your criteria for measuring, Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven" or Marquez "100 Years of Solitude" or the works of Dali and Picasso would be marked as failures.
Making it meaningful and beautiful at the same time is called talent.
Meaningful with respect to what? Beautiful as measured by whom? Subjective tags these are. Meaning is ascribed by the author and the audience. And beauty is a function of culture.
You talk about these as if they were measures of the physical world (they aren't.) To me, this is not an argument of logic, but a talking point that you are fabricating to keep the argument going.
The type of writing you've just explained can best be called cryptic. "Deep" doesn't mean "hard to figure out".
I will try boil it all down into a Slashdot post....
We are social animals. And regardless of how independent one thinks we are, we pick up on a lot by being physically around people. The web/Internet is great for research but social media - like Slashdot - is not substitute to be able to hang out at a coffee shop or hackers meeting and BS - more than once a week or so.
Sure I have meetups about 20 miles away from me that meet once a month. But it's no substitute for a dynamic and engaged informal group that is on constant contact.
Here's another example of the difference. Where I live, folks business ideas are pretty much retail or landscaping. When someone suggests starting a business here it's, "there are store front openings in the strip mall down the street. Or have you thought of being a contractor? Website! That's what you need!" Everyone with a pickup truck and a lawnmower seems to be a landscaper around here.
Mention a business idea of going into space, and folks look at you like there's something really wrong with you - even with Musk being in the news.
I don't know how else to put it. When I go back out to the Bay area to visit family and come back, I feel like I stepped back into some backwater. I'd move back but housing is just so obscene and since I was never part of the tech community out there (moved out before college), I can't seem to break into the tech crowd out there - I'm also 50, so there's that.
I'm on the same boat as you (clocking 46 with two little kids). South Florida is a tech backwater, and to break out into the tech scene in the valley at this stage in life is near impossible. It is one of my life regrets that I never left to where the action was when I was young.
Here, the notion of a business is pretty much retail, services, or strip clubs. Anything remotely tech is unknown. Hell, we had these "e-merge" conferences about how to bootstrap the "innovation" sector, and all they had were VPs and rappers for speakers. Quite sad actually.
With that said, there are other places other than SV where there is tech action. Seattle is one of them. Amazon regularly recruits across the country (including South Florida). Denver and Dallas are other areas to consider.
I am sure it can be defeated with enough effort... but the question is: When is it too hard for the masses to bother with it?
All it takes is software (in this case, a delay analysis countermeasure) good enough to make it plausible to the masses. Consider DVD ripping. At the beginning, it was just too much of a hassle for the common person to get all the necessary pieces together. Now, there are full-feature applications that can do that at the click of a button. Or consider managing photographs on external storage. Picasa and the like makes it extremely simple for the common person.
It will be too hard for the masses until someone automates it for them.
Reading loses its charm when the quran is the only thing you're allowed to read.
1) Nice to see you are making that assumption about Iranians.
2) Replace Quran with Bible, and you are pretty much describing 1/3 of this country. This is the country where we have people who believe some batshit crazy stuff, like the world was created 6000 years ago, chemtrails, birtherism, UN Agenda 21 conspiracy theories and so on and so on.
We are not the smartest of people, and we shouldn't be making uneducated statements about countries we know next to nothing about.
The USA has 99% literacy, Iran has 80%. That's a notably larger block of people who are especially easy to manipulate. And you certainly don't need a majority for control -- the majority in Iran voted for reformists until they found it didn't do any good. 20% is more than enough to fill the revolutionary guard ranks.
As if that doesn't hold true in the USA. Yes, we claim a 99% literacy rate, but the question is how do you measure literacy? What do we consider literacy? Most importantly, how do we measure a population's ability to do critical thinking and adaptability in this increasingly multi-polar globalized world?
Just look around. For Christ' sake, we have kids, hordes and hordes of kids who graduate from HS who 1) have no skills whatsoever, 2) are not trained to do any form of critical thinking, and 3) who need a calculator to perform basic arithmetic. No, I'm not exaggerating, this is the truth.
Travel the world and talk to people. It's is mind blowing. You talk to an average literate person in, say, Japan, or Iran, and you are going to notice a dept of basic knowledge (true literacy) that is severely lacking in our general population.
So throwing numbers around about how close to 100% literacy we are doesn't do squat. It means nothing. It is not quantity, but quality that matters.
The Client Presence Verification (CPV) system presented in the paper utilises analysis of delays in network packets in order to determine the user's location, disregarding the IP address geolocation information which currently underpins the efforts of content providers such as Netflix to prevent VPN users accessing content which is not licensed in their country
Maybe I'm missing something, but it looks to me that this can be defeated with randomized throttling of packet delivery and TCP accelerators that intercept/cache/send ACK packages on the client's behalf.
Well, yeah. That's a given. The question is: how did that became a factor in skewing the industry so bad as to squeeze the female workforce out?
I think this is greatly cultural. I see a higher proportion of women going into STEM (including software and CS) in countries like India and China than in the West. So there is a cultural factor at play, and it is one worth discussing (hopefully without devolving into misogyny and faux man-rights.)
Probably a late 80s thing, to be sure, because even at Atari, there were significant female population creating video games, and there were many females in the history of computer science as well.
I say 80s because that's when Nintendo came out, after the crash. They did one clever thing to get their NES on store shelves, and it may have had unintended consequences.
First, you have to remember the video game crash of the early 80s - it got to the point where retailers were shying away from anything videogame-related. So how does a company like Nintendo get their videogame machine in stores where retailers refuse to stock videogames?
Easy - you sell it as a toy that kids play with. But here's the rub - toy stores were (and generally still are) separated by gender - you have boy's toys on one set of aisles, and girl's toys on another set, and they will not mix. Nintendo now had a problem - is it a boy's toy or a girl's toy - it can only be one.
They chose boy.
This has very interesting ramifications - first, the Atari and other early console ads featured a whole family playing videogames - father, mother, daughter, son - all gathered around the TV and playing together. After this, Nintendo ads primarily featured boys - since that's how they decided to sell them. No more parents nor daughters - just boys gathering around playing.
Which may explain the perchant for people to regard videogames as what kids do, but not adults (because it was sold as a toy for boys, not the entire family), as well as regarding it as a male endeavour - again, Nintendo marketing as a boy's toy.
Other cultures didn't have this. Japan didn't have a videogame crash, and other countries didn't have to market exclusively to boys, so the whole videogame/computer association with boys never got made through marketing.
That is one of the most insightful, interesting and plausible theories I've heard.
It turns out software development is engineering, not clerical work.
Well, yeah. That's a given. The question is: how did that became a factor in skewing the industry so bad as to squeeze the female workforce out?
I think this is greatly cultural. I see a higher proportion of women going into STEM (including software and CS) in countries like India and China than in the West. So there is a cultural factor at play, and it is one worth discussing (hopefully without devolving into misogyny and faux man-rights.)
And when they refused to take cash, you were no longer required to pay and could have, in fact, taken them to court over it.
IF you offer to pay any debt to any entity with cash, our current laws require them to take that cash or absolve you of the debt.
Not saying your anecdotal evidence is not true - just that there were larger ramifications to what occurred than perhaps you were aware.
This only applies to debts, but not to fees. For instance, to file up for a homestead exception, I needed to file up a note of residence, and that requires a $10 fee, to be paid with a check to the county clerk. Cash won't be accepted. Great, I'm in not obligation to pay, but if I don't then I don't get my homestead exception and shit, it's $3K more on real estate taxes.
The same thing with fines. Can we consider these debts owned to the state? Most fines can only be paid with a check or credit card. One could take it to court, but what sort of a Pyrrhic victory would that be?
Some fights are just not worth it.
A legal right to pay cash to private entities, though, that is something I would fight for.
And "killer app" was a concept long before smartphones.
Everyone in this industry will have differing experience. This is mine: "killer app" is something that came during the dot-com when everyone and their grandma wanted a spot in the.com valuation orgy.
But as far as I remember, the "app" in "killer app" never carried over to the general lingo. It was rarely "application", but "program". Sure, we used "applications" in formal docs and lingo, but in the typical work vernacular, either among ourselves or when interacting with users, it was typically "programs" (specially if these were in-house built ones.)
I squint my eyes trying to remember when we the word "apps" started replacing "programs". And I remember my years when companies started ditching their token ring networks in favor of Ethernet, offices weren't relying on Compuserve anymore to go to the internet and businesses started developing their own "intranets" (btw, it was a good move to pepper your CV with "intranet", headhunters used to like that shit, like catnip or something.)
And if my memory serves me well, we used to refer to those as "systems" initially as a connotation that these weren't "programs" that you install on a desktop, but multi-tiered systems.
YMMV obviously, but I think I didn't start seeing "application" as a general word till 2005-2006 when finally the whole industry was going full swing, scaling up from the ASP model of things into the SaaS model we see today.
That's my experience, and experience is always local (I'm in South Florida, a tech wasteland). Other, more technically diverse markets might have seen a different pattern in their professional lingo.
Spinoff technology to fields other than space and space exploration?
Perhaps. Unlikely that anything needed for rendezvous with a comet would have commercial spin-offs, but there may be some materials improvements that trickle down.
Better understanding of the Solar System
Sure, that's a great thing - knowledge is good, and if this is purely in the pursuit of scientific knowledge, I'd be okay with that too.
leading to the human race getting a colony *somewhere off this rock* in preparation for the next Earth-bound major extinction event?
Now you're just being stupid. Is the human race going to live on comets when we get "off this rock"? Orbital mechanics are well understood at this point, so rendezvous with an object traveling through space isn't really advancing the knowledge of the human race.
Yes it does. It helps understand the mechanics and logistics of landing over a comet (such type of landings are not just ruled by orbital mechanics alone.) When we learn to reliably and predictably land over such objects, then we open for ourselves the opportunity to mining them. There is a shitload of ice and building materials on those floating monsters. Not only you open the opportunity to mining them, but to alter their trajectories, or even hollow them up and spinning them to get 1g.
Imagine you can take a 4km by 4km comet like 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko, alter its orbit and park it. Then carve it from the inside out, pilling out the dug out material, melting it. Filter it, separating it into portions of pure water and sludge then mixed with dust, or regolith, synth metal, ceramics or whatever that, when frozen becomes get a robust pykrete.
Rinse and repeat. Pure water = inner layers, pykrete = outer, protective layers. Rinse and repeat until you get an ice station with an embedded 4km by 4km cylindrical space in it, covered by several kms of ice.
Spin it till you get some decent g forces. Rinse and repeat, we have millions of floating icebergs on the solar system once we figure out how to use fusion. Fusion + a shitload of Hydrogen == no longer a need for depending on solar power to colonize beyond the belt.
Sounds impossible? Well fuck, we landed on the moon, we developed nuclear power and that just a mere century from the time of the steam engine. It was impossible to cross the seas, but people did it. Hell, even prehistoric man with nothing but hides, bows and arrows ventured into the Artic... and conquered.
Technologies advance, and if we really had the motivation, shit like what I just described could be done within decades. For what stop us is not so much technology, but economics and politics.
Barring a fundamental revolution in our understanding and knowledge of physics, there is no practical way we're ever going to cut the cord between Earth and even the remotest colonies in the solar system. As earth lives and dies, so die our colonies inside the solar system. And fundamentally, there's NO way we're sending a manned mission to another star unless:
What a load of cock. Colony survival does not depend on orbital mechanics or anything of the sort. It would depend on the state of technology. And there is nothing to prevent technology to advance to the point of making self-sustaining colonies.
If they knew she was a woman, it was because she told them.
Github pull requests come with the username of the requestor. Anyone who (a) has a gender specific name and (b) uses their real name on hub will have a readily apparent gender. I also notice that you ascribe the gender differences because the woman must have told them their gender. No where do you you make the same accusation at men.
Massive double standards there.
My thoughts exactly. These people must have some type of contortionist genes in them because that's the only way they can reach so far up their asses to pull such arguments without busting a vertebrae.
" I would love to see a multi-node thermostat that is affordable (and secure, if it is not, fuck that), adaptive, that learns to program itself, that I can control (securely) over wi-fi..."
I'm genuinely curious: why?
Fair enough. With it, it would open possibilities of reporting fluctuations over wi-fi which I can then see over one of my smart phones, tablet or laptop. Laziness/convenience kind of a thing.
"Adaptive" - adaptive to what? How many houses do you live in?
Fair enough also. This goes along the multi-node feature I was wanting. For a large enough house, I could have two separate A/C systems - one for the living areas, and another for the bedrooms. An initial investment would cost $$$ obviously, but it would save $$$ more over time if I can simply shut either one as needed. I've seen the effect in terms of cost savings in houses that have done just that.
"Learns to program itself" Why? Aren't you going to be there? Don't you ultimately at some point have to tell it "that's too hot, that's too cold"?
A single thermostat is still not good enough when your house experiences different temperature fluctuations. For example, due to my house's orientation, the master bedroom gets way too hot or way too cold before the thermostat detects it is too hot or too cold. Having more than one across the room that can coordinate with one another, the whole system adapts to the desired ranges by just programming the "master" node.
If you couple that with more than one A/C system, then it goes further by deciding which one to run and when. Moreover, most thermostats only operate with either refrigeration or heating. If you want cooling, you have to turn that on and turn heating off (and viceversa). Here in Florida, you can get some unpleasant fluctuations, specially if your house has a specific shape and orientation and if you are living next to a lake.
For example, yesterday it was 49F on my bedroom (not good for my little children), and then at noon (due to the direct sunlight), parts of the house quickly rose up to the upper 70's. In my ideal situation, I want that automated and handled it autonomously without me having to input my desired parameters only once.
It is a first world problem, for after all, I can simply walk to the bloody A/C control and flip it as needed, or open/close windows, etc. But if that type of automation were to exist and were at my fingertips (moneywise), I would get it.
Wifi and Multi-node: I presume you mean "I can control from multiple places" How many places do you need to adjust your home's thermostat? Why would you possibly need to adjust your thermostat if you're not there?
How often do you need to change it? Seriously - I haven't touched my home's thermostat in probably 4 years.
For most consumers, IoT seems to be 99% rebranded home automation
Not quite. There is significant overlap between IoT and home automation in term of function as the former can take place in gardening, agriculture, industrial monitoring, etc. That is, the functions within home automation are a subset of IoT's functions.
But let's assume they were the same. The distinguishing characteristic is that IoT attempts to leverage existing communication/network protocols and architectures. That is a big thing (will all the good and the bad of it.)
which has always fallen flat on its face. It reminds me of 3D movies. We see it every few years then people realize it's a gimmick and we go back to business as usual.
Is it because the concept is bad, or because of prior executions? That is the question (I lean towards the later answer.)
...the IoT is a generally stupid idea, for all the hundreds of reasons that have been repeated here ad infinitum: additional points of failure in systems that benefit very little or not at all from the 'features' added by the new connectivity.
That depends on the implementation. As it is, I wouldn't trust a IoT thermostat, specially after reading that horror story of people finding themselves without functioning heating during the cold snaps. Shit, I don't want to imagine the cost of fixing all that ice-busted plumbing.
With that said, I would love to see a multi-node thermostat that is affordable (and secure, if it is not, fuck that), adaptive, that learns to program itself, that I can control (securely) over wi-fi, and that its default fall-back mode on software failure is to fall back to a dumb, manual mode of operation.
We are not there yet (and I am not going to volunteer my $$$ to be a beta tester for an industry that doesn't pay attention to security.) But we will be there, and I'm looking forward to it.
Definitely special problems for snowflake america not shared but other countries
My thoughts exactly. It's like if Tokyo/Yokohama and Osaka didn't have these problems. And in the event that it were impossible to create a rail system within a system, then, the solution would be to have a viable public transport system (like Tokyo has between its subway lines.)
The only issue with Parse was it was developed, hosted and run by another party.
That's actually a really big issue.
I would hope that people would remember this in the future, but I don't have much hope since there have been many publicly documented failures of the 'cloud,' and people still think it's a good idea to depend on other people's servers.
Only if you do not have an enforceable SLA. And if you are big enough, chances are your systems are running in whole or in part in an external data center... with an SLA.
I mean, if you have a non-trivial presence, chances are you depend on Akamai CDN for performance and DoS protection, Google or Akamai analytics for, well, analytics. So right there, you have a set of vital functional requirements being performed on someone else's infrastructure, the failure of which can cause terrible financial harm to your organization.
People like you and me want to own the whole stack from top to bottom for reasons of long term security of our business model.
But people willing to ride the tidal wave and risk getting the floor yanked out from underneath them (to mix metaphors) build Candy Crush and Words with Friends and so forth.
That is a function of your security requirements as well as cash flow. Everyone wants to own the full stack, but economics makes it hard (and in many cases, just impossible.)
And just because there are applications that have more lax requirements than yours (assuming you actually operate on requirements and not on personal technological biases), that does not mean these applications are of the "Candy Crush" type.
There's nothing wrong with depending on 3rd party tools and products. The problem is that most of the REST APIs that people are more and more dependent on are services, not traditional libraries.
If a library vendor goes out of business, I still have the last copy of the library and possibly even the source code. My product can continue to function until I find a suitable replacement. This is an acceptable cost of doing business, especially since commonly used libraries rarely just disappear.
If a service API goes down, my product is essentially bricked until I find and implement a replacement. This is one of those risks that most modern (er, young) developers don't appreciate. We haven't had a bust yet that shuts down a number of services over a relatively short period of time (hint: if you're using the service for free/at-a-cost-less-than-power-consumption or if it's not the vendor's core business, such as Parse, there's a good chance it will go away at some point). When that happens, the successful apps that relied on less successful services will be in a tough spot.
It'd be fun to do an analysis of the various API services people use and their interdependencies. I bet we'd find a few really scary single points of failure...
-Chris
That is an inherent, unavoidable risk when doing distributed computing.
Is that they need to do actual programming, not just glue together scripts from a grab-bag of cloud services and hope they never change or shut down. Of course, you need actual programmers for this, not hipster script-kiddies.
You are oversimplifying. Though it is true that the developer's world is infected by script kiddies, there is a legitimate place for integration-centric glue code. Parse, or something like it would fit that bill. More precisely, if one has a sufficiently good back-end made available as a service, then why not leverage it?
Obviously there are issues in such an approach, but so is with everything. Engineering is about trade-offs - cost, security, availability, etc. I can roll my own back-end, but then I could run into logistic and accounting issues. Where do I host it? How much will it cost me? How much of a window do I have to maintain it?
If, OTH, there is/was a backend-as-a-service option that is sufficiently good for my current needs (and I'm not claiming Parse was), and I do not have existing technical/business/legal needs to roll up my own, then it makes engineering sense to use it.
And one of the reasons (not the primary, but an important one) to use such a backend-as-a-service is if it provides a coherent, simple and robust gluing API that I can script-kid (thus freeing me to deal with more important technical or business issues.) Again, I don't claim Parse is/was all that. I'm simply making an observation to one of your statements.
How do you know if something is fraudulent if you know nothing about how it works? Ditto for setting timelines, testing, etc. How do you manage something you know nothing of?
Higher-level use cases specifying legitimate transactions (as well as those that are supposed to be rejected, you know, failure cases.)
Before one even tries to code something, he/she must be able to explain it without referring to the technology being used. Otherwise, shit is bound to happen.
Slashdot Mirror
If your writing has to be explained, then you're doing it wrong. I told the same thing to one of my college English professors about some of poets we were studying.
It's called symbolism. You see in avant garde fine arts, you see it in folk art around the world, you see it in ancient poems and religious texts (think the Book of Revelations,) you see it in colorful patois and word plays. You see it mythology, you see it in Australian dream time lore.
Welcome to the richness of human thought.
I think I'm still right.
You are also free to think the world is flat and Elvis is alive.
Communication should be simple and straightforward.
Depending on the goal of communications and the artist's desire for expression. If we were to use your criteria for measuring, Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven" or Marquez "100 Years of Solitude" or the works of Dali and Picasso would be marked as failures.
Making it meaningful and beautiful at the same time is called talent.
Meaningful with respect to what? Beautiful as measured by whom? Subjective tags these are. Meaning is ascribed by the author and the audience. And beauty is a function of culture.
You talk about these as if they were measures of the physical world (they aren't.) To me, this is not an argument of logic, but a talking point that you are fabricating to keep the argument going. The type of writing you've just explained can best be called cryptic. "Deep" doesn't mean "hard to figure out".
... or the Internet... or people congregating at public places... I mean, where does it stop? #sarcasm
>>It would be nice if he (and CEOs of other major tech firms) stated specific opposition to it. > Why? He works for his own interest, not yours....
Umm, that doesn't stop it from being nice, does it?
Don't be a party pooper. Never be the one to stop someone from finding a cause to bitch about ;)
I will try boil it all down into a Slashdot post ....
We are social animals. And regardless of how independent one thinks we are, we pick up on a lot by being physically around people. The web/Internet is great for research but social media - like Slashdot - is not substitute to be able to hang out at a coffee shop or hackers meeting and BS - more than once a week or so.
Sure I have meetups about 20 miles away from me that meet once a month. But it's no substitute for a dynamic and engaged informal group that is on constant contact.
Here's another example of the difference. Where I live, folks business ideas are pretty much retail or landscaping. When someone suggests starting a business here it's, "there are store front openings in the strip mall down the street. Or have you thought of being a contractor? Website! That's what you need!" Everyone with a pickup truck and a lawnmower seems to be a landscaper around here.
Mention a business idea of going into space, and folks look at you like there's something really wrong with you - even with Musk being in the news.
I don't know how else to put it. When I go back out to the Bay area to visit family and come back, I feel like I stepped back into some backwater. I'd move back but housing is just so obscene and since I was never part of the tech community out there (moved out before college), I can't seem to break into the tech crowd out there - I'm also 50, so there's that.
I'm on the same boat as you (clocking 46 with two little kids). South Florida is a tech backwater, and to break out into the tech scene in the valley at this stage in life is near impossible. It is one of my life regrets that I never left to where the action was when I was young.
Here, the notion of a business is pretty much retail, services, or strip clubs. Anything remotely tech is unknown. Hell, we had these "e-merge" conferences about how to bootstrap the "innovation" sector, and all they had were VPs and rappers for speakers. Quite sad actually.
With that said, there are other places other than SV where there is tech action. Seattle is one of them. Amazon regularly recruits across the country (including South Florida). Denver and Dallas are other areas to consider.
You beat me to it. Trains were supposed be the great equalizers of work opportunities and look how that turned out.
That's a US-specific problem. It worked well in Japan.
I am sure it can be defeated with enough effort... but the question is: When is it too hard for the masses to bother with it?
All it takes is software (in this case, a delay analysis countermeasure) good enough to make it plausible to the masses. Consider DVD ripping. At the beginning, it was just too much of a hassle for the common person to get all the necessary pieces together. Now, there are full-feature applications that can do that at the click of a button. Or consider managing photographs on external storage. Picasa and the like makes it extremely simple for the common person.
It will be too hard for the masses until someone automates it for them.
Reading loses its charm when the quran is the only thing you're allowed to read.
1) Nice to see you are making that assumption about Iranians.
2) Replace Quran with Bible, and you are pretty much describing 1/3 of this country. This is the country where we have people who believe some batshit crazy stuff, like the world was created 6000 years ago, chemtrails, birtherism, UN Agenda 21 conspiracy theories and so on and so on.
We are not the smartest of people, and we shouldn't be making uneducated statements about countries we know next to nothing about.
The USA has 99% literacy, Iran has 80%. That's a notably larger block of people who are especially easy to manipulate. And you certainly don't need a majority for control -- the majority in Iran voted for reformists until they found it didn't do any good. 20% is more than enough to fill the revolutionary guard ranks.
As if that doesn't hold true in the USA. Yes, we claim a 99% literacy rate, but the question is how do you measure literacy? What do we consider literacy? Most importantly, how do we measure a population's ability to do critical thinking and adaptability in this increasingly multi-polar globalized world?
Just look around. For Christ' sake, we have kids, hordes and hordes of kids who graduate from HS who 1) have no skills whatsoever, 2) are not trained to do any form of critical thinking, and 3) who need a calculator to perform basic arithmetic. No, I'm not exaggerating, this is the truth.
Travel the world and talk to people. It's is mind blowing. You talk to an average literate person in, say, Japan, or Iran, and you are going to notice a dept of basic knowledge (true literacy) that is severely lacking in our general population.
So throwing numbers around about how close to 100% literacy we are doesn't do squat. It means nothing. It is not quantity, but quality that matters.
The Client Presence Verification (CPV) system presented in the paper utilises analysis of delays in network packets in order to determine the user's location, disregarding the IP address geolocation information which currently underpins the efforts of content providers such as Netflix to prevent VPN users accessing content which is not licensed in their country
Maybe I'm missing something, but it looks to me that this can be defeated with randomized throttling of packet delivery and TCP accelerators that intercept/cache/send ACK packages on the client's behalf.
Probably a late 80s thing, to be sure, because even at Atari, there were significant female population creating video games, and there were many females in the history of computer science as well.
I say 80s because that's when Nintendo came out, after the crash. They did one clever thing to get their NES on store shelves, and it may have had unintended consequences.
First, you have to remember the video game crash of the early 80s - it got to the point where retailers were shying away from anything videogame-related. So how does a company like Nintendo get their videogame machine in stores where retailers refuse to stock videogames?
Easy - you sell it as a toy that kids play with. But here's the rub - toy stores were (and generally still are) separated by gender - you have boy's toys on one set of aisles, and girl's toys on another set, and they will not mix. Nintendo now had a problem - is it a boy's toy or a girl's toy - it can only be one.
They chose boy.
This has very interesting ramifications - first, the Atari and other early console ads featured a whole family playing videogames - father, mother, daughter, son - all gathered around the TV and playing together. After this, Nintendo ads primarily featured boys - since that's how they decided to sell them. No more parents nor daughters - just boys gathering around playing.
Which may explain the perchant for people to regard videogames as what kids do, but not adults (because it was sold as a toy for boys, not the entire family), as well as regarding it as a male endeavour - again, Nintendo marketing as a boy's toy.
Other cultures didn't have this. Japan didn't have a videogame crash, and other countries didn't have to market exclusively to boys, so the whole videogame/computer association with boys never got made through marketing.
That is one of the most insightful, interesting and plausible theories I've heard.
It turns out software development is engineering, not clerical work.
Well, yeah. That's a given. The question is: how did that became a factor in skewing the industry so bad as to squeeze the female workforce out?
I think this is greatly cultural. I see a higher proportion of women going into STEM (including software and CS) in countries like India and China than in the West. So there is a cultural factor at play, and it is one worth discussing (hopefully without devolving into misogyny and faux man-rights.)
And when they refused to take cash, you were no longer required to pay and could have, in fact, taken them to court over it.
IF you offer to pay any debt to any entity with cash, our current laws require them to take that cash or absolve you of the debt.
Not saying your anecdotal evidence is not true - just that there were larger ramifications to what occurred than perhaps you were aware.
This only applies to debts, but not to fees. For instance, to file up for a homestead exception, I needed to file up a note of residence, and that requires a $10 fee, to be paid with a check to the county clerk. Cash won't be accepted. Great, I'm in not obligation to pay, but if I don't then I don't get my homestead exception and shit, it's $3K more on real estate taxes.
The same thing with fines. Can we consider these debts owned to the state? Most fines can only be paid with a check or credit card. One could take it to court, but what sort of a Pyrrhic victory would that be?
Some fights are just not worth it.
A legal right to pay cash to private entities, though, that is something I would fight for.
Didn't we call them "programs"?
And "killer app" was a concept long before smartphones.
Everyone in this industry will have differing experience. This is mine: "killer app" is something that came during the dot-com when everyone and their grandma wanted a spot in the .com valuation orgy.
But as far as I remember, the "app" in "killer app" never carried over to the general lingo. It was rarely "application", but "program". Sure, we used "applications" in formal docs and lingo, but in the typical work vernacular, either among ourselves or when interacting with users, it was typically "programs" (specially if these were in-house built ones.)
I squint my eyes trying to remember when we the word "apps" started replacing "programs". And I remember my years when companies started ditching their token ring networks in favor of Ethernet, offices weren't relying on Compuserve anymore to go to the internet and businesses started developing their own "intranets" (btw, it was a good move to pepper your CV with "intranet", headhunters used to like that shit, like catnip or something.)
And if my memory serves me well, we used to refer to those as "systems" initially as a connotation that these weren't "programs" that you install on a desktop, but multi-tiered systems.
YMMV obviously, but I think I didn't start seeing "application" as a general word till 2005-2006 when finally the whole industry was going full swing, scaling up from the ASP model of things into the SaaS model we see today.
That's my experience, and experience is always local (I'm in South Florida, a tech wasteland). Other, more technically diverse markets might have seen a different pattern in their professional lingo.
Perhaps. Unlikely that anything needed for rendezvous with a comet would have commercial spin-offs, but there may be some materials improvements that trickle down.
Sure, that's a great thing - knowledge is good, and if this is purely in the pursuit of scientific knowledge, I'd be okay with that too.
Now you're just being stupid. Is the human race going to live on comets when we get "off this rock"? Orbital mechanics are well understood at this point, so rendezvous with an object traveling through space isn't really advancing the knowledge of the human race.
Yes it does. It helps understand the mechanics and logistics of landing over a comet (such type of landings are not just ruled by orbital mechanics alone.) When we learn to reliably and predictably land over such objects, then we open for ourselves the opportunity to mining them. There is a shitload of ice and building materials on those floating monsters. Not only you open the opportunity to mining them, but to alter their trajectories, or even hollow them up and spinning them to get 1g.
Imagine you can take a 4km by 4km comet like 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko, alter its orbit and park it. Then carve it from the inside out, pilling out the dug out material, melting it. Filter it, separating it into portions of pure water and sludge then mixed with dust, or regolith, synth metal, ceramics or whatever that, when frozen becomes get a robust pykrete.
Rinse and repeat. Pure water = inner layers, pykrete = outer, protective layers. Rinse and repeat until you get an ice station with an embedded 4km by 4km cylindrical space in it, covered by several kms of ice.
Spin it till you get some decent g forces. Rinse and repeat, we have millions of floating icebergs on the solar system once we figure out how to use fusion. Fusion + a shitload of Hydrogen == no longer a need for depending on solar power to colonize beyond the belt.
Sounds impossible? Well fuck, we landed on the moon, we developed nuclear power and that just a mere century from the time of the steam engine. It was impossible to cross the seas, but people did it. Hell, even prehistoric man with nothing but hides, bows and arrows ventured into the Artic... and conquered.
Technologies advance, and if we really had the motivation, shit like what I just described could be done within decades. For what stop us is not so much technology, but economics and politics.
Barring a fundamental revolution in our understanding and knowledge of physics, there is no practical way we're ever going to cut the cord between Earth and even the remotest colonies in the solar system. As earth lives and dies, so die our colonies inside the solar system. And fundamentally, there's NO way we're sending a manned mission to another star unless:
What a load of cock. Colony survival does not depend on orbital mechanics or anything of the sort. It would depend on the state of technology. And there is nothing to prevent technology to advance to the point of making self-sustaining colonies.
It's new to me. Hence, my point.
A point about your inexperience, that is :)
If they knew she was a woman, it was because she told them.
Github pull requests come with the username of the requestor. Anyone who (a) has a gender specific name and (b) uses their real name on hub will have a readily apparent gender. I also notice that you ascribe the gender differences because the woman must have told them their gender. No where do you you make the same accusation at men.
Massive double standards there.
My thoughts exactly. These people must have some type of contortionist genes in them because that's the only way they can reach so far up their asses to pull such arguments without busting a vertebrae.
" I would love to see a multi-node thermostat that is affordable (and secure, if it is not, fuck that), adaptive, that learns to program itself, that I can control (securely) over wi-fi..."
I'm genuinely curious: why?
Fair enough. With it, it would open possibilities of reporting fluctuations over wi-fi which I can then see over one of my smart phones, tablet or laptop. Laziness/convenience kind of a thing.
"Adaptive" - adaptive to what? How many houses do you live in?
Fair enough also. This goes along the multi-node feature I was wanting. For a large enough house, I could have two separate A/C systems - one for the living areas, and another for the bedrooms. An initial investment would cost $$$ obviously, but it would save $$$ more over time if I can simply shut either one as needed. I've seen the effect in terms of cost savings in houses that have done just that.
"Learns to program itself" Why? Aren't you going to be there? Don't you ultimately at some point have to tell it "that's too hot, that's too cold"?
A single thermostat is still not good enough when your house experiences different temperature fluctuations. For example, due to my house's orientation, the master bedroom gets way too hot or way too cold before the thermostat detects it is too hot or too cold. Having more than one across the room that can coordinate with one another, the whole system adapts to the desired ranges by just programming the "master" node.
If you couple that with more than one A/C system, then it goes further by deciding which one to run and when. Moreover, most thermostats only operate with either refrigeration or heating. If you want cooling, you have to turn that on and turn heating off (and viceversa). Here in Florida, you can get some unpleasant fluctuations, specially if your house has a specific shape and orientation and if you are living next to a lake.
For example, yesterday it was 49F on my bedroom (not good for my little children), and then at noon (due to the direct sunlight), parts of the house quickly rose up to the upper 70's. In my ideal situation, I want that automated and handled it autonomously without me having to input my desired parameters only once.
It is a first world problem, for after all, I can simply walk to the bloody A/C control and flip it as needed, or open/close windows, etc. But if that type of automation were to exist and were at my fingertips (moneywise), I would get it. Wifi and Multi-node: I presume you mean "I can control from multiple places" How many places do you need to adjust your home's thermostat? Why would you possibly need to adjust your thermostat if you're not there?
How often do you need to change it? Seriously - I haven't touched my home's thermostat in probably 4 years.
For most consumers, IoT seems to be 99% rebranded home automation
Not quite. There is significant overlap between IoT and home automation in term of function as the former can take place in gardening, agriculture, industrial monitoring, etc. That is, the functions within home automation are a subset of IoT's functions.
But let's assume they were the same. The distinguishing characteristic is that IoT attempts to leverage existing communication/network protocols and architectures. That is a big thing (will all the good and the bad of it.)
which has always fallen flat on its face. It reminds me of 3D movies. We see it every few years then people realize it's a gimmick and we go back to business as usual.
Is it because the concept is bad, or because of prior executions? That is the question (I lean towards the later answer.)
...the IoT is a generally stupid idea, for all the hundreds of reasons that have been repeated here ad infinitum: additional points of failure in systems that benefit very little or not at all from the 'features' added by the new connectivity.
That depends on the implementation. As it is, I wouldn't trust a IoT thermostat, specially after reading that horror story of people finding themselves without functioning heating during the cold snaps. Shit, I don't want to imagine the cost of fixing all that ice-busted plumbing.
With that said, I would love to see a multi-node thermostat that is affordable (and secure, if it is not, fuck that), adaptive, that learns to program itself, that I can control (securely) over wi-fi, and that its default fall-back mode on software failure is to fall back to a dumb, manual mode of operation.
We are not there yet (and I am not going to volunteer my $$$ to be a beta tester for an industry that doesn't pay attention to security.) But we will be there, and I'm looking forward to it.
Definitely special problems for snowflake america not shared but other countries
My thoughts exactly. It's like if Tokyo/Yokohama and Osaka didn't have these problems. And in the event that it were impossible to create a rail system within a system, then, the solution would be to have a viable public transport system (like Tokyo has between its subway lines.)
The only issue with Parse was it was developed, hosted and run by another party.
That's actually a really big issue. I would hope that people would remember this in the future, but I don't have much hope since there have been many publicly documented failures of the 'cloud,' and people still think it's a good idea to depend on other people's servers.
Only if you do not have an enforceable SLA. And if you are big enough, chances are your systems are running in whole or in part in an external data center... with an SLA.
I mean, if you have a non-trivial presence, chances are you depend on Akamai CDN for performance and DoS protection, Google or Akamai analytics for, well, analytics. So right there, you have a set of vital functional requirements being performed on someone else's infrastructure, the failure of which can cause terrible financial harm to your organization.
This shit is not black and white dude.
People like you and me want to own the whole stack from top to bottom for reasons of long term security of our business model. But people willing to ride the tidal wave and risk getting the floor yanked out from underneath them (to mix metaphors) build Candy Crush and Words with Friends and so forth.
That is a function of your security requirements as well as cash flow. Everyone wants to own the full stack, but economics makes it hard (and in many cases, just impossible.)
And just because there are applications that have more lax requirements than yours (assuming you actually operate on requirements and not on personal technological biases), that does not mean these applications are of the "Candy Crush" type.
There's nothing wrong with depending on 3rd party tools and products. The problem is that most of the REST APIs that people are more and more dependent on are services, not traditional libraries.
If a library vendor goes out of business, I still have the last copy of the library and possibly even the source code. My product can continue to function until I find a suitable replacement. This is an acceptable cost of doing business, especially since commonly used libraries rarely just disappear.
If a service API goes down, my product is essentially bricked until I find and implement a replacement. This is one of those risks that most modern (er, young) developers don't appreciate. We haven't had a bust yet that shuts down a number of services over a relatively short period of time (hint: if you're using the service for free/at-a-cost-less-than-power-consumption or if it's not the vendor's core business, such as Parse, there's a good chance it will go away at some point). When that happens, the successful apps that relied on less successful services will be in a tough spot.
It'd be fun to do an analysis of the various API services people use and their interdependencies. I bet we'd find a few really scary single points of failure...
-Chris
That is an inherent, unavoidable risk when doing distributed computing.
Is that they need to do actual programming, not just glue together scripts from a grab-bag of cloud services and hope they never change or shut down. Of course, you need actual programmers for this, not hipster script-kiddies.
You are oversimplifying. Though it is true that the developer's world is infected by script kiddies, there is a legitimate place for integration-centric glue code. Parse, or something like it would fit that bill. More precisely, if one has a sufficiently good back-end made available as a service, then why not leverage it?
Obviously there are issues in such an approach, but so is with everything. Engineering is about trade-offs - cost, security, availability, etc. I can roll my own back-end, but then I could run into logistic and accounting issues. Where do I host it? How much will it cost me? How much of a window do I have to maintain it?
If, OTH, there is/was a backend-as-a-service option that is sufficiently good for my current needs (and I'm not claiming Parse was), and I do not have existing technical/business/legal needs to roll up my own, then it makes engineering sense to use it.
And one of the reasons (not the primary, but an important one) to use such a backend-as-a-service is if it provides a coherent, simple and robust gluing API that I can script-kid (thus freeing me to deal with more important technical or business issues.) Again, I don't claim Parse is/was all that. I'm simply making an observation to one of your statements.
How do you know if something is fraudulent if you know nothing about how it works? Ditto for setting timelines, testing, etc. How do you manage something you know nothing of?
Higher-level use cases specifying legitimate transactions (as well as those that are supposed to be rejected, you know, failure cases.)
Before one even tries to code something, he/she must be able to explain it without referring to the technology being used. Otherwise, shit is bound to happen.