I don't see a way to be less democratic than now, where one country "controls" something used by more than half the world's population.
They can build their own. Considering the immense US-based public and private investment that has been made on everything Internet (from R&D to commercialization), I would say the US has every right to keep it under control.
You don't want it? Build your own interweebz infrastructure.
* The CEO was bull-headed. From one story I read, he was trying to get an exclusive contract with EA for being the only streaming gaming service EA used, but EA was also partnering with another company that had similar tech to OnLive. The CEO of OnLive flipped out and told his staff to pull all the EA games from their system 2 weeks before launch.
If this is true, the guy was a f* moron. Flipping out is not a wise way to conduct business, specially when trying to partner out with filthy rich industry mammoths like EA. What the hell was Perlman expecting to get out of this? He should have partnered out with EA regardless, get the goddamn foothold first and fight for exclusivity later.
As they said in my old country, the one who gets pissed off first is the first one to lose.
He wasn't arguing in favor of public investment. Don't know why you're in such a huff.
Libertarian/conservatard knee-jerking maybe? I'm conservative/libertarian/ecletic-something-something, and I never understand why people think "critical description of some form of capitalism" == ZOMG-COMMUNISM or some shit like that. Granted that people on the left side of the political fence are are equally gilty of such mindless knee-jerking.
In the American political arena, people seem unable to grasp criticism towards their semi-sacred cows. Not difference in essence from any other culture, but one wonders how this jives with "land of the free and the home of the brave" where plurarity is supposed to be a shinning societal virtue.
That's all well and good until you find out they've been using floating point for currency calculations, and they can't figure out why their bubble sorts are so slow.
I've worked with programmers with associates degrees. Some bad; some good. I'm not entirely against them, but I would not want an entire team made up of them. They have huge blind spots that CS grads don't have.
You see that also with people with BS degrees, and I know about those (and a lot more) when I got my AA degree. Truth to be told, I knew more about programming and CS when I left community college than my sophomore/junior peers when I transferred to a 4-year university... and I met quite a few senior students and even grad students who couldn't picture an array of pointers to structures with function pointers as fields (not that you want to do that every day, but c'mon a senior CS student or grad student should have no problem visualizing that.)
I got a BS in CS, went to grad school and now I'm trying to go to grad school to switch into a more hardware oriented degree. I have 17+ years working on this, and I can say with great confidence that most "enterprise" programming tasks do not require a BS-level education in computer science.
More importantly, a good community college can provide, via a AS degree, all the tools needed to do work : systems analysis and design, structured and object-oriented programming, all that mixed with an intro to the basics of algorithm analysis (without the proving part), hands-on RDBMS, basic network/sysadmin skills and other fundamental skills like using/setting source control and bug tracking systems and technical writing.
You are right when you say you don't want to work with a group made solely of AA/AS graduates. I know; I started my career with a AA only, and I know for a fact that such a group needs more senior members to give technical direction.
But, for IT and the typical enterprise programming, we really do not need to know about the pumping lemma, prove the equivalence of turing machines to lambda calculus or the differences between micro kernel and monolitic kernels or proving some something on the structure of bizantine problems.
Blame it on the dot-com that we had a push for MOAR!!!(10+1)! 4-year degrees for web page design, which in turn converted most CS 4-year programs into Java/.NET vocational schools (where a person can graduate w/o even understanding what a pointer or a segfault is.)
The correct thing back then would have been to promote more community-college level vocational education as 2-3 year AS/AAS degrees. It would have been the best for the career, the nation and for all the students involved.
I love CS, I love my degree, I love my grad education, and God willing, I will get my Ph.D, and I love my line of work. But hell that I will ever propose that a BS degree is the minimum required to work on IT/enterprise programming.
I pray to ${DEITY} that this will become a firm step in the right direction.
This is/. where half the posters think they are geek, but wouldn't even recognize a prestigious high-tech university located that is, in many ways, the intellectual beating heart of Silicon Valley.
So don't even try to educate. It's like trying to teach calculus to a donkey or cactus.
What these f**king morans things they are Khan (www.khanacademy.org) or what?
They think they are college-level professors that work in close collaboration with industries in Silicon Valley and who are from one of the most prestigious universities in the world. The nerve of them to offer a class for free. Who do they think they are? </rolls eyes at your blatant stupidity>
I smoked for over half of my life; and just quit two weeks ago
Well done Sir!
Why? What's it to you?
Second hand smoking makes it his business... and the business of everybody who doesn't want that shit for themselves or for others apart from the smoker.
You have an allergy to tobacco smoke, so it's okay to ban tobacco -- okay, you won't find too many objections.
Some people have an allergy to peanuts -- some incredibly sever, far worse than any tobacco smoke allergy. Should we ban peanuts? Maybe it makes sense in schools. Maybe that should be extended to other gov't buildings or business that serve the general public.
I have an allergy to the base in some perfumes -- my nose runs constantly, my eyes tear up, it's very unpleasant. Should we ban perfume? I'm on board!
How about this: We err on the side of freedom. Let businesses decide to allow or not allow smoking, peanuts, or perfume. We consider any policy that discriminates against workers for engaging in legal activity (smoking, eating peanuts, wearing perfume) outside of work to be unlawful.
Did you just say "allergy to tobacco"? WTF? If by allergy you means will most likely develop fucking cancer they yeah, every human being has an allergy to cancer. Pretty unlike allergy to peanuts because very few people do.
If you have to conjure the false notion of allergy to tobacco to argue to err on the side of freedom, either you don't understand the point you are trying to make, or you don't have a point at all.
If you have to ask that question, I'd say yes. If you believe you are too old for X or Y, then you are. If you believe you are not too old, then you are not. I'm 43 years old, and I keep retraining myself all the time. I forced myself from C++/CORBA to Java and did that for 10 years. Then I forced myself back to C++ for embedded development, being doing that for almost 2 years. Now I'm forcing myself into developing Python for process automation (and I'm going to find ways to force my way to use Python for testing of embedded C++ code.) All at work.
Sometimes we make it happen. Sometimes we fail. But such is life. If you want to do something else, you develop a concrete plan and go for it. If that doesn't work, then you find something else to do. You keep moving. You seek what you want, pushing shit, red tape and people out of your way if necessary (w/o involving back stabbing mind you.) And if that doesn't get you anywhere, then you change your goals.
Want to retrain yourself? Go for it. Want to change careers? Go for it. Want to give up everything and go, I dunno, to the Amazons or Tibet for some navel gazing? Go for it.
There are things that naturally get in the way. Family, debt, sickness, etc. Those you can manage one way or another despite being actual roadblocks.
But age? Your determination or lack thereof establishes how much too old you are for X or Y. So the real question is not "Am I too old?" The real questions are "Do I know what I want?", "How badly I want it?" and "Do I have the balls to go for it and give it a try?"
As Michael Jordan once put it "I can accept failure, everyone fails at something. But I can't accept not trying."
it worries me how much mental energy they were putting into something as simple as getting dressed or what to have for breakfast. sounds like an anxiety disorder to me.
No. That's what you want to believe. It doesn't take much mental effort to simplify the mundane. It is almost automatically. If you find yourself putting much mental energy on it, then you are doing it wrong, or you are the one having an anxiety disorder. Seriously.
For me, I kinda do the same. Same type of jeans and shirts every day, same brand, from the same place (Target). I really don't think much about it. Same with food (I can eat the same crap for days w/o getting bored.) It makes cooking so much easier. My work desk? Kinda disorganized, but I know where things are. I don't fret about noise, nor I need a quiet place to work.
The only things I care are those that directly affect my ability to get shit done.
OTH, I see people, men and women, fretting about what clothes to wear, how to combine them (":ZOMG did I wear a gren shirt yesterday, cuz I cannot wear the same colors I wore for the last 7 fucking days").
They always have to eat something different every day. "I can't eat the same, I need to feel inspired". Like dude/dudette, are you into making sure the color of your shit is different everyday because, I dunno, it's motivational?
Or like people who need absolute quiet and can't stand the person next cubicle who sneezes during allergy season.
Those extremes (and the people gravitating towards them) are the ones with an anxiety disorder. When you try to be efficient, and when you avoid nonsense, worthless trivia, focusing on what matters and normalizing the mundane becomes rather easy. It's not rocket science.
No, it's an indication of how many people are interested in what they see as quick and easy education. Hey, that course looks cool! It's free! Okay, I'll sign up!
Then they get into the course (or even before it starts), realize learning takes some work, and either drop out or fail. That's why completion rates for correspondence and other distance learning courses, particularly cheap or free ones, are astronomically low.
What you say is very true. And some use that to deride the concepts behind MOOCs. For those who think that way, as a person who has gone all the way through grad school, I have to say the following:
and this is different from how it is/used to be with the good ol' brick-n-mortar schools... how?
From as long as I can remember, I do remember people signing up to college or private vocational schools, and dropping en masse when things got difficult. For those in CS, remember the typical number of people signing up for the first programming course, and how that number severely disminished when they took the first assembly course (or when they actually have to take the math prereqs like Calc II, Physics with Calc or Automata Theory?).
I do remember. Hell, even in grad school I saw similar behavior. On my first grad-level Algorithms course, I saw this chap (pretty smug recently CS grad btw) sitting on the first lecture, dropping it on the second lecture and enrolling on a grad level Business Admin program (whether the later was easier for him, who knows.) Same with a grad course in Semantics of Programming Languages where one of the students was complaining that the course had too many mathematical symbols (who says such a thing in a #$!$ 6000-level grad CS/Math course.)
I'm currently taking Dr. Ng's (Stanford) Machine Learning course with coursera.org (alongside Dr. Odersky's course in Scala). The Machine Learning course is kicking my ass in the amount of work that is required in short time. These courses truly do require 10+ hours a week to really learn and understand what's going on (as opposed to just going through the motions.)
There will be people dropping the course or just going through the motions (you can see that by reading the course's discussion forums.) But for those who really seek actual learning, the MOOCs concept is a blessing.
So even if it is true that a lot of people seek a quick and easy education, it does not deny the OP's premise, that the popularity of MOOCs is a testament to how desperately people are for affordable education.
Whether that desire is based on reasonable expectations ("work your ass off" vs "oh, a quickie"), that is a different problem altogether. People recognize the need for education, even if they might have the wrong expectations or insufficient work ethics to go about satisfying that need.
This is significantly different before the era of globalization where people didn't see any need for anything post HS. All you had to do then was to have an honest job and work your ass off on it. Now that concept is gone, and affordable, easy-to-access education is one of the very few options left (independently of the observer's work ethics or lack thereof.)
"It would suck?" It's pretty hard to lose 100 million unless you have it. So, he had more than most people make in a lifetime, and even got to enjoy it for a while before he lost it. He was lucky enough (this kind of money doesn't just come from hard work and talent, people) to have a taste of something that other people can't even begin to dream of, and now he lost it? Boo fscking hoo.
Well, that set of commands is "fucking difficult" for someone that has a life.
Get a life, kid.
Depends on the type of "life". Life as a consumer? Life as a programer? Life as an admin (even a NT admin) with a Linux distro CD in his possession? I can buy that line of argument for the first type. For the later two, your so-called point falls to the ground in flames like the Hindenburg.
The exposure wasn't in password STORAGE, it was in password LOGGING.
This case shows that in the context of security, that is a distinction without a difference.
There is a difference since, in the context of security, one would have to prescribe a corrective/preventative measure (that will be different wrt storage or logging.) Yeah, we can say "no passwords in plain text" in general terms, and then yes, there is no difference.
But that is the same mentality that drive people who think the problem was in storage and not logging. Everybody thinks ZOMG the former, but completely ignore the later. So, then, that supposedly insignificant difference becomes very relevant in the context of security.
Chances are the same people - had they not RTFA - will pretty much commit the same mistake (securing the storage and "yay we are done", forgetting completely the rest of the attack surface/leaky areas/whatever.)
Should Developers Install Their Software Themselves?
Should developers be responsible for installing the software they develop into production environments?
It depends on what the hell they are doing. Are the developers creating a medical device or mission critical system? Are they developing a shopping cart? Are they contractually bound to use a specific set of tools (or eat their own dog food if they are in the business of tool development)?
What about System Test environments?
What about them? Again, it depends? What's the size of the organization? What are their testing needs? Is the organization or project contractually bound to have a strict separation between development and testing (say as per DO-178B and/or other standards for avionics)?
I'm not a developer
Then shut up then. Seriously, I tell you why a few lines below.
and I'm not all that familiar with Agile or DevOps,
What does Agile/DevOps has to do with developers installing their own tools. That's unrelated to the development process of choice (agile, waterfall, whatever.)
but it seems unhealthy to me to have software installs done by developers
And this is why I tell you shut up. What the hell do you know about developers and development? Since you know nil, on what basis can you say this or that is unhealthy. Unsubstantiated, subjective opinions are not facts, and are a dime a dozen (and we have way too many of those already in the industry... and in life in general.)
Again, as I mentioned before: IT. DEPENDS. In some cases, it is ok (and even necessary). In other cases, it is not. Making assumptions about it without specifying a working context, that's just brain farting.
I think that properly developed software should come complete with installation instructions that can be followed by someone other than the person who wrote the code.
So the end user should know how to install the compiler suite and editors I installed on my machine (plus dev-specific configurations) to use the system I wrote. Brilliant. Make users' live more difficult. Yay to productivity and increased ROI!!!!! That was sarcasm btw.
I'd like to hear opinions from developers.
You like pointless exercises for attention whoring sakes, do you?
"A clone does not have to be equivalent in terms of hardware or data."
Ahhh, developers...
I've been a systems and network administrator as well (in addition to being a software engineer and developer.) I know how shit looks and works on both sides of the fence.
Do you know what's left to the systems guys when you have finished (hopefully thoroughly enough) testing your code?
Non sequitur (to the question at hand.) Of course in a real, well-planed environment you will have data and hardware (not just the boxes, but the network, switches, proxies and firewalls) equal or equivalent to production as much as possible, with segregated dev, test, UAT and pre-production environments.
However, the guy is a one-man shop, and he needs to get something, anything up pronto. For his immediate requirements, and with the scarce resources he has, he does not need (nor he is capable of implementing) a full-blown dev/test environment.
Anything is typically better than nothing. Ergo, as I said before: the clone does not have to be equivalent in terms of hardware and data. It is called managing expectations combined with ROI and make shit work with what you have instead of falling into paralysis-by-analysis. That's why we get paid the big bucks (and this is the most important thing devs and sysadmins typically miss.).
The hardware and data (and the integration).
1. Non sequitur (see above.)
2. Divide-and-conquer. Meaning, worry first how to isolate and test your code away from production first and foremost. Later, focus on hardware/data integration testing and troubleshooting. You cannot effectively do the later without the former.
So, where do you think the hardest problems systems teams have to affront will come from?
If you thought hardware and data (and integration), you hitted the mark.
Non sequitor. The guy in question is a dev/system guy, wearing two hats. He needs to separate both hats in order to get shit under control.
But they usually don't have the luxury to use the "hey, it works on my desktop" for a excuse.
Bleh, you can also see the poop on the other side of the fence (I've been on both sides). There is nothing more infuriating that a systems guy telling a developer that the problem is in his code even though the goddam application logs, sys logs, and everything under the heavens points to a misconfigured NIC card (running half-duplex when everything else runs full duplex), telling the dev to go change the code, code that the mother*f* has never seen nor knows what it does.
There is crap on both sides of the fence, each sitting comfortably in its own soap box.
The point is that the mutation (putatively) allowed humans to survive on a vegetarian diet, when they couldn't do so before.
Uh, you need to read how to learn, as well as how to apply logic. What the article says ("ability to convert fats from plants into essential nutrients for the brain") does not mean (or imply) "avoid meats by choice". It doesn't mean/imply ("ability to survive on plants alone"). It simply means "ability to exploit a greater variety of food products for brain sustainment with greater efficiency".
That is all. Any other interpretation is not an interpretation of logic, but of choice (aka "wishful thinking").
This would be very valuable for a nomadic "hunter-gatherer" lifestyle in times and places where there was plenty to gather but not so much to hunt (or fish, as the case may be).
Inconsequential. That does not imply vegetarianism (be it voluntary as in humans or mandatory as in herbivores.) In the name of Jebuz, buy a dictionary or use google and learn the meaning of the word "vegetarian".
The scripts are irrelevant if not ran on the real environment,
Well, that's an oxymoron. Any program, large or small, is irrelevant if it never runs on the intended target platform. That's no excuse for having a test server, however feeble compared to production it might be.
the test environment would have to be a clone of the production environments.
A clone does not have to be equivalent in terms of hardware or data. A good example is a test db box for testing your SQL scripts. Such a box can have the exact same software, OS and patches, and with equivalent database configuration and schemas, but on lower-cost hardware and with a fraction of the data. As long as a test bench can provide a reasonable, objective measure of comfort of your code, that is all you need. You do not need an absolute guarantee (as there is never one anyways.)
Good luck with that with the described environment!
Yeah, because the task is so hard, he might as well give up, right, right, right? Let's do the paralysis-by-analysis chicken dance, shall we?
He could test each piece of the scripts in testing - which he probably does - but that only gets you so far
Which is better than nothing, and it is always better to carry tests, however little they might be on a test/sacrificial box than on production. It's not rocket science man.
and tells you that there's no typos.
No. It can also tell you that it will not do something bad, like deleting all records in a table, or initiating a shutdown, or filling up the/tmp partition. Better to detect such things on a mickey mouse test box than on the real thing. It might not catch bugs that are triggered by the actual characteristics present in a production environment, but it will most likely catch up bugs (annoying or fatal) that are not dependent on such characteristics.
Slashdot Mirror
That practice is dangerous for American consumers
but the rest of you can go fuck yourselves ;)
My thoughts exactly. Who the hell would write something like that????
I don't see a way to be less democratic than now, where one country "controls" something used by more than half the world's population.
They can build their own. Considering the immense US-based public and private investment that has been made on everything Internet (from R&D to commercialization), I would say the US has every right to keep it under control.
You don't want it? Build your own interweebz infrastructure.
* The CEO was bull-headed. From one story I read, he was trying to get an exclusive contract with EA for being the only streaming gaming service EA used, but EA was also partnering with another company that had similar tech to OnLive. The CEO of OnLive flipped out and told his staff to pull all the EA games from their system 2 weeks before launch.
If this is true, the guy was a f* moron. Flipping out is not a wise way to conduct business, specially when trying to partner out with filthy rich industry mammoths like EA. What the hell was Perlman expecting to get out of this? He should have partnered out with EA regardless, get the goddamn foothold first and fight for exclusivity later.
As they said in my old country, the one who gets pissed off first is the first one to lose.
He wasn't arguing in favor of public investment. Don't know why you're in such a huff.
Libertarian/conservatard knee-jerking maybe? I'm conservative/libertarian/ecletic-something-something, and I never understand why people think "critical description of some form of capitalism" == ZOMG-COMMUNISM or some shit like that. Granted that people on the left side of the political fence are are equally gilty of such mindless knee-jerking.
In the American political arena, people seem unable to grasp criticism towards their semi-sacred cows. Not difference in essence from any other culture, but one wonders how this jives with "land of the free and the home of the brave" where plurarity is supposed to be a shinning societal virtue.
That's all well and good until you find out they've been using floating point for currency calculations, and they can't figure out why their bubble sorts are so slow.
I've worked with programmers with associates degrees. Some bad; some good. I'm not entirely against them, but I would not want an entire team made up of them. They have huge blind spots that CS grads don't have.
You see that also with people with BS degrees, and I know about those (and a lot more) when I got my AA degree. Truth to be told, I knew more about programming and CS when I left community college than my sophomore/junior peers when I transferred to a 4-year university... and I met quite a few senior students and even grad students who couldn't picture an array of pointers to structures with function pointers as fields (not that you want to do that every day, but c'mon a senior CS student or grad student should have no problem visualizing that.)
I got a BS in CS, went to grad school and now I'm trying to go to grad school to switch into a more hardware oriented degree. I have 17+ years working on this, and I can say with great confidence that most "enterprise" programming tasks do not require a BS-level education in computer science.
More importantly, a good community college can provide, via a AS degree, all the tools needed to do work : systems analysis and design, structured and object-oriented programming, all that mixed with an intro to the basics of algorithm analysis (without the proving part), hands-on RDBMS, basic network/sysadmin skills and other fundamental skills like using/setting source control and bug tracking systems and technical writing.
You are right when you say you don't want to work with a group made solely of AA/AS graduates. I know; I started my career with a AA only, and I know for a fact that such a group needs more senior members to give technical direction.
But, for IT and the typical enterprise programming, we really do not need to know about the pumping lemma, prove the equivalence of turing machines to lambda calculus or the differences between micro kernel and monolitic kernels or proving some something on the structure of bizantine problems.
Blame it on the dot-com that we had a push for MOAR!!!(10+1)! 4-year degrees for web page design, which in turn converted most CS 4-year programs into Java/.NET vocational schools (where a person can graduate w/o even understanding what a pointer or a segfault is.)
The correct thing back then would have been to promote more community-college level vocational education as 2-3 year AS/AAS degrees. It would have been the best for the career, the nation and for all the students involved.
I love CS, I love my degree, I love my grad education, and God willing, I will get my Ph.D, and I love my line of work. But hell that I will ever propose that a BS degree is the minimum required to work on IT/enterprise programming.
I pray to ${DEITY} that this will become a firm step in the right direction.
I really hope you're being facetious, but if not, look here: Wikipedia: Stanford University
This is /. where half the posters think they are geek, but wouldn't even recognize a prestigious high-tech university located that is, in many ways, the intellectual beating heart of Silicon Valley.
So don't even try to educate. It's like trying to teach calculus to a donkey or cactus.
What these f**king morans things they are Khan (www.khanacademy.org) or what?
They think they are college-level professors that work in close collaboration with industries in Silicon Valley and who are from one of the most prestigious universities in the world. The nerve of them to offer a class for free. Who do they think they are? </rolls eyes at your blatant stupidity>
I smoked for over half of my life; and just quit two weeks ago
Well done Sir!
Why? What's it to you?
Second hand smoking makes it his business... and the business of everybody who doesn't want that shit for themselves or for others apart from the smoker.
Where does it stop?
You have an allergy to tobacco smoke, so it's okay to ban tobacco -- okay, you won't find too many objections.
Some people have an allergy to peanuts -- some incredibly sever, far worse than any tobacco smoke allergy. Should we ban peanuts? Maybe it makes sense in schools. Maybe that should be extended to other gov't buildings or business that serve the general public.
I have an allergy to the base in some perfumes -- my nose runs constantly, my eyes tear up, it's very unpleasant. Should we ban perfume? I'm on board!
How about this: We err on the side of freedom. Let businesses decide to allow or not allow smoking, peanuts, or perfume. We consider any policy that discriminates against workers for engaging in legal activity (smoking, eating peanuts, wearing perfume) outside of work to be unlawful.
Did you just say "allergy to tobacco"? WTF? If by allergy you means will most likely develop fucking cancer they yeah, every human being has an allergy to cancer. Pretty unlike allergy to peanuts because very few people do.
If you have to conjure the false notion of allergy to tobacco to argue to err on the side of freedom, either you don't understand the point you are trying to make, or you don't have a point at all.
The problem is that Creationism is a discredited theory
It was never much of a theory to begin with.
Am I Too Old To Retrain?
If you have to ask that question, I'd say yes. If you believe you are too old for X or Y, then you are. If you believe you are not too old, then you are not. I'm 43 years old, and I keep retraining myself all the time. I forced myself from C++/CORBA to Java and did that for 10 years. Then I forced myself back to C++ for embedded development, being doing that for almost 2 years. Now I'm forcing myself into developing Python for process automation (and I'm going to find ways to force my way to use Python for testing of embedded C++ code.) All at work.
Sometimes we make it happen. Sometimes we fail. But such is life. If you want to do something else, you develop a concrete plan and go for it. If that doesn't work, then you find something else to do. You keep moving. You seek what you want, pushing shit, red tape and people out of your way if necessary (w/o involving back stabbing mind you.) And if that doesn't get you anywhere, then you change your goals.
Want to retrain yourself? Go for it. Want to change careers? Go for it. Want to give up everything and go, I dunno, to the Amazons or Tibet for some navel gazing? Go for it.
There are things that naturally get in the way. Family, debt, sickness, etc. Those you can manage one way or another despite being actual roadblocks.
But age? Your determination or lack thereof establishes how much too old you are for X or Y. So the real question is not "Am I too old?" The real questions are "Do I know what I want?", "How badly I want it?" and "Do I have the balls to go for it and give it a try?"
As Michael Jordan once put it "I can accept failure, everyone fails at something. But I can't accept not trying."
As long as it doesn't have shit stains, it's good to wear. Can't get any simpler than that :P
it worries me how much mental energy they were putting into something as simple as getting dressed or what to have for breakfast. sounds like an anxiety disorder to me.
No. That's what you want to believe. It doesn't take much mental effort to simplify the mundane. It is almost automatically. If you find yourself putting much mental energy on it, then you are doing it wrong, or you are the one having an anxiety disorder. Seriously.
For me, I kinda do the same. Same type of jeans and shirts every day, same brand, from the same place (Target). I really don't think much about it. Same with food (I can eat the same crap for days w/o getting bored.) It makes cooking so much easier. My work desk? Kinda disorganized, but I know where things are. I don't fret about noise, nor I need a quiet place to work.
The only things I care are those that directly affect my ability to get shit done.
OTH, I see people, men and women, fretting about what clothes to wear, how to combine them (":ZOMG did I wear a gren shirt yesterday, cuz I cannot wear the same colors I wore for the last 7 fucking days").
They always have to eat something different every day. "I can't eat the same, I need to feel inspired". Like dude/dudette, are you into making sure the color of your shit is different everyday because, I dunno, it's motivational?
Or like people who need absolute quiet and can't stand the person next cubicle who sneezes during allergy season.
Those extremes (and the people gravitating towards them) are the ones with an anxiety disorder. When you try to be efficient, and when you avoid nonsense, worthless trivia, focusing on what matters and normalizing the mundane becomes rather easy. It's not rocket science.
No, it's an indication of how many people are interested in what they see as quick and easy education. Hey, that course looks cool! It's free! Okay, I'll sign up!
Then they get into the course (or even before it starts), realize learning takes some work, and either drop out or fail. That's why completion rates for correspondence and other distance learning courses, particularly cheap or free ones, are astronomically low.
What you say is very true. And some use that to deride the concepts behind MOOCs. For those who think that way, as a person who has gone all the way through grad school, I have to say the following:
and this is different from how it is/used to be with the good ol' brick-n-mortar schools... how?
From as long as I can remember, I do remember people signing up to college or private vocational schools, and dropping en masse when things got difficult. For those in CS, remember the typical number of people signing up for the first programming course, and how that number severely disminished when they took the first assembly course (or when they actually have to take the math prereqs like Calc II, Physics with Calc or Automata Theory?).
I do remember. Hell, even in grad school I saw similar behavior. On my first grad-level Algorithms course, I saw this chap (pretty smug recently CS grad btw) sitting on the first lecture, dropping it on the second lecture and enrolling on a grad level Business Admin program (whether the later was easier for him, who knows.) Same with a grad course in Semantics of Programming Languages where one of the students was complaining that the course had too many mathematical symbols (who says such a thing in a #$!$ 6000-level grad CS/Math course.)
I'm currently taking Dr. Ng's (Stanford) Machine Learning course with coursera.org (alongside Dr. Odersky's course in Scala). The Machine Learning course is kicking my ass in the amount of work that is required in short time. These courses truly do require 10+ hours a week to really learn and understand what's going on (as opposed to just going through the motions.)
There will be people dropping the course or just going through the motions (you can see that by reading the course's discussion forums.) But for those who really seek actual learning, the MOOCs concept is a blessing.
So even if it is true that a lot of people seek a quick and easy education, it does not deny the OP's premise, that the popularity of MOOCs is a testament to how desperately people are for affordable education.
Whether that desire is based on reasonable expectations ("work your ass off" vs "oh, a quickie"), that is a different problem altogether. People recognize the need for education, even if they might have the wrong expectations or insufficient work ethics to go about satisfying that need.
This is significantly different before the era of globalization where people didn't see any need for anything post HS. All you had to do then was to have an honest job and work your ass off on it. Now that concept is gone, and affordable, easy-to-access education is one of the very few options left (independently of the observer's work ethics or lack thereof.)
"It would suck?" It's pretty hard to lose 100 million unless you have it. So, he had more than most people make in a lifetime, and even got to enjoy it for a while before he lost it. He was lucky enough (this kind of money doesn't just come from hard work and talent, people) to have a taste of something that other people can't even begin to dream of, and now he lost it? Boo fscking hoo.
Ever heard of something called "earnings"?
They just need better net code.
As Torvalds once said: Talk is cheap. Show me the code.
Well, that set of commands is "fucking difficult" for someone that has a life.
Get a life, kid.
Depends on the type of "life". Life as a consumer? Life as a programer? Life as an admin (even a NT admin) with a Linux distro CD in his possession? I can buy that line of argument for the first type. For the later two, your so-called point falls to the ground in flames like the Hindenburg.
The exposure wasn't in password STORAGE, it was in password LOGGING.
This case shows that in the context of security, that is a distinction without a difference.
There is a difference since, in the context of security, one would have to prescribe a corrective/preventative measure (that will be different wrt storage or logging.) Yeah, we can say "no passwords in plain text" in general terms, and then yes, there is no difference.
But that is the same mentality that drive people who think the problem was in storage and not logging. Everybody thinks ZOMG the former, but completely ignore the later. So, then, that supposedly insignificant difference becomes very relevant in the context of security.
Chances are the same people - had they not RTFA - will pretty much commit the same mistake (securing the storage and "yay we are done", forgetting completely the rest of the attack surface/leaky areas/whatever.)
Should Developers Install Their Software Themselves?
Should developers be responsible for installing the software they develop into production environments?
It depends on what the hell they are doing. Are the developers creating a medical device or mission critical system? Are they developing a shopping cart? Are they contractually bound to use a specific set of tools (or eat their own dog food if they are in the business of tool development)?
What about System Test environments?
What about them? Again, it depends? What's the size of the organization? What are their testing needs? Is the organization or project contractually bound to have a strict separation between development and testing (say as per DO-178B and/or other standards for avionics)?
I'm not a developer
Then shut up then. Seriously, I tell you why a few lines below.
and I'm not all that familiar with Agile or DevOps,
What does Agile/DevOps has to do with developers installing their own tools. That's unrelated to the development process of choice (agile, waterfall, whatever.)
but it seems unhealthy to me to have software installs done by developers
And this is why I tell you shut up. What the hell do you know about developers and development? Since you know nil, on what basis can you say this or that is unhealthy. Unsubstantiated, subjective opinions are not facts, and are a dime a dozen (and we have way too many of those already in the industry... and in life in general.)
Again, as I mentioned before: IT. DEPENDS. In some cases, it is ok (and even necessary). In other cases, it is not. Making assumptions about it without specifying a working context, that's just brain farting.
I think that properly developed software should come complete with installation instructions that can be followed by someone other than the person who wrote the code.
So the end user should know how to install the compiler suite and editors I installed on my machine (plus dev-specific configurations) to use the system I wrote. Brilliant. Make users' live more difficult. Yay to productivity and increased ROI!!!!! That was sarcasm btw.
I'd like to hear opinions from developers.
You like pointless exercises for attention whoring sakes, do you?
"A clone does not have to be equivalent in terms of hardware or data."
Ahhh, developers...
I've been a systems and network administrator as well (in addition to being a software engineer and developer.) I know how shit looks and works on both sides of the fence.
Do you know what's left to the systems guys when you have finished (hopefully thoroughly enough) testing your code?
Non sequitur (to the question at hand.) Of course in a real, well-planed environment you will have data and hardware (not just the boxes, but the network, switches, proxies and firewalls) equal or equivalent to production as much as possible, with segregated dev, test, UAT and pre-production environments.
However, the guy is a one-man shop, and he needs to get something, anything up pronto. For his immediate requirements, and with the scarce resources he has, he does not need (nor he is capable of implementing) a full-blown dev/test environment.
Anything is typically better than nothing. Ergo, as I said before: the clone does not have to be equivalent in terms of hardware and data. It is called managing expectations combined with ROI and make shit work with what you have instead of falling into paralysis-by-analysis. That's why we get paid the big bucks (and this is the most important thing devs and sysadmins typically miss.).
The hardware and data (and the integration).
1. Non sequitur (see above.)
2. Divide-and-conquer. Meaning, worry first how to isolate and test your code away from production first and foremost. Later, focus on hardware/data integration testing and troubleshooting. You cannot effectively do the later without the former.
So, where do you think the hardest problems systems teams have to affront will come from?
If you thought hardware and data (and integration), you hitted the mark.
Non sequitor. The guy in question is a dev/system guy, wearing two hats. He needs to separate both hats in order to get shit under control.
But they usually don't have the luxury to use the "hey, it works on my desktop" for a excuse.
Bleh, you can also see the poop on the other side of the fence (I've been on both sides). There is nothing more infuriating that a systems guy telling a developer that the problem is in his code even though the goddam application logs, sys logs, and everything under the heavens points to a misconfigured NIC card (running half-duplex when everything else runs full duplex), telling the dev to go change the code, code that the mother*f* has never seen nor knows what it does.
There is crap on both sides of the fence, each sitting comfortably in its own soap box.
What's wrong with the summary? We no longer needed to get those nutrients from meat -- we could survive solely on plant life.
Let me introduce you to something call logic: I can survive on plant life. I chose not (ergo I'm not vegetarian).
Meaning capacity(vegetarianism) -> trait(vegetarian) == FALSE
Therefore, we could become vegetarians.
Petitio Principii
Cum Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc"
In the name of humanity, please buy this book: Attacking Faulty Reasoning, by Edward Damer
And this book : New Oxford American Dictionary
The point is that the mutation (putatively) allowed humans to survive on a vegetarian diet, when they couldn't do so before.
Uh, you need to read how to learn, as well as how to apply logic. What the article says ("ability to convert fats from plants into essential nutrients for the brain") does not mean (or imply) "avoid meats by choice". It doesn't mean/imply ("ability to survive on plants alone"). It simply means "ability to exploit a greater variety of food products for brain sustainment with greater efficiency".
That is all. Any other interpretation is not an interpretation of logic, but of choice (aka "wishful thinking").
This would be very valuable for a nomadic "hunter-gatherer" lifestyle in times and places where there was plenty to gather but not so much to hunt (or fish, as the case may be).
Inconsequential. That does not imply vegetarianism (be it voluntary as in humans or mandatory as in herbivores.) In the name of Jebuz, buy a dictionary or use google and learn the meaning of the word "vegetarian".
The scientists found that a key genetic variant gave humans the ability to convert fats from plants into essential nutrients for the brain."
To this?
180k-Year-Old Mutation Allowed Humans To Become Vegetarians, Move Out of Africa
People who don't know their scientific terms mis-quote scientific articles. News at 10.
The scripts are irrelevant if not ran on the real environment,
Well, that's an oxymoron. Any program, large or small, is irrelevant if it never runs on the intended target platform. That's no excuse for having a test server, however feeble compared to production it might be.
the test environment would have to be a clone of the production environments.
A clone does not have to be equivalent in terms of hardware or data. A good example is a test db box for testing your SQL scripts. Such a box can have the exact same software, OS and patches, and with equivalent database configuration and schemas, but on lower-cost hardware and with a fraction of the data. As long as a test bench can provide a reasonable, objective measure of comfort of your code, that is all you need. You do not need an absolute guarantee (as there is never one anyways.)
Good luck with that with the described environment!
Yeah, because the task is so hard, he might as well give up, right, right, right? Let's do the paralysis-by-analysis chicken dance, shall we?
He could test each piece of the scripts in testing - which he probably does - but that only gets you so far
Which is better than nothing, and it is always better to carry tests, however little they might be on a test/sacrificial box than on production. It's not rocket science man.
and tells you that there's no typos.
No. It can also tell you that it will not do something bad, like deleting all records in a table, or initiating a shutdown, or filling up the /tmp partition. Better to detect such things on a mickey mouse test box than on the real thing. It might not catch bugs that are triggered by the actual characteristics present in a production environment, but it will most likely catch up bugs (annoying or fatal) that are not dependent on such characteristics.
Ideal? No. Better than nothing? Hell yeah.
>>>My kids are in their twenties and I doubt either one ever saw a typewriter, period, let alone a manual one.
They've never watched old movies with secretaries typing-away on their manual or selectronic typewriters?
They only watch SpongeBob Squarepants or the Kardashians.