Filling up a car now takes about a minute. A Supercharger station filling up in about 15 (or longer) means you have to have 15 times the number of "pumps", more if the charging time really takes longer OR if more cars have less range.
This is a misconception. With Electic Cars, you more often than not have the equalent of a Gas station where your car is parked overnight. Each morning you start with a full tank. You still might need to charge en-route, but not as frequently as an ICE.
I have enabled control-alt-backspace. Don't need to reset the computer
I find the normal reason that there is a lockup is because virtual box whilst running windows in full screen mode, and windows has put up a dialog box or the alt key has put up the start button menu.
This seems to cause the hotspot or the alt key to stop responding in gnome3. This gets into a deadly embrace where you can't switch to the virtual box window.
That might be your opinion, but for me its the opposite.
I have two monitors, and despite me trying to configure other Desktop Environments to behave in the same way, it has only been GNOME3 where I can have a fixed window in one workspace (generally mail), and other things going on on my main monitor each in their own workspace, whereby I can switch between them, and not also have the secondary monitor switch at the same time. I tried stuff like Linux Mint's Desktop, KDE and even XFCE, but I couldn't figure out how to make any of them work that way.
And now I am used to it, I love the lack of a taskbar panel. I just flick my mouse over to the corner to get an immediate views of the various windows I could switch to. I love the dock, with the apps I use 99% of the time immediately available, and a quite good incremental search for anything else I need
Of course there are some downsides/bugs - like some flakeyness around full screen apps (I use WIndows 7 inside virtual box a lot and Mythtv) where there occassional lockups. But I am running Debian Stable, so I presume I don't have the latest and greatest version.
Gnome is aweful, they took away one of the biggest and most useful things for Desktop computing - minimizing. Until people stop kidding themselves that people don't need minimize Gnome 3's Shell will never gain true adoption.
I completely disagree with this. For me Gnome 3 is the ONLY desktop arrangement that makes any sense.
1) Gnome 3 seems to be the only environment that supports independant workspaces on each of my two monitors. If I change workspace on my primary monitor the other stays were it is. This is a huge gain in productivity for me and I wouldn't be without it. (The only other alternative seems to be the new OSX Mavericks from Apple - which, without having experienced it, seems to be slightly better in that the secondary monitor can have more than one workspace) 2) (courtesy of shell extensions) minimise is still there on my COMPLETELY STANDARD Debian Stable system. But I rarely use it. I have got into the habit of flicking my mouse at the top left corner, or hitting the "Windows" key on my keyboard, and finding the next app to work on. If that desktop overview screen gets too cluttered I just... 3)... dynamically create a new work space and move stuff into it. Again I find the creation of dynamic workspaces as needed much better that pre-allocating a set number which all the other desktops seem to require you to do
As part of my work I often run a MS Windows.virtual machine at full screen in one of the workspaces. I get very frustrated at having to use the taskbar at the bottom to switch applications. (Also with the Gnome3 workspace arrangement, I can have my linux based mail on the secondary monitor and ctrl+alt+up or down arrows switch me to and from windows and linux on the separate workspaces on my main monitor).
In the evening, I do the same thing - I have MythTV running fill screen on one of the workspaces and tend to do other background jobs in the other workspaces - an dthe only downside there is I can't seem to get the full screen of the playing TV program to go to the secondary screen.
I have been running Debian for about 10 years, and the only time I've had to re-install it was when I bought completely new hardware. I never got so botched that I need to start again. Most of the time I have run as SID, although over the last 6 months or so I migrated slowly to testing which became stable - since I seem to have everything I need at a suitably high enough version.
Because I run all my disks as raid 1, when I upgraded from 1 to 2 TB disks, I did that with the system in situ.
The legit question is: will I be able to continue to learn faster than a programming robot will advance and eventually replace me? The truth is that the programming robot will learn at an exponential rate, so there will likely be little difference between having 2 years of experience or 20 by the time the robot surpasses your ability. Perhaps the 20-year-programmer will have an extra day or two to try and hack into the robot, and likely that extra experience will help with that goal. But all programmers will eventually be replaced by the robot. Then, at long last, the hardware engineers can again gloat.
The exact same statements were being made when I was programming in the 1970s - I think SQL was going to be one of the tools that meant we didn't need programmers anymore and end users could just produce what they wanted.
I am now in my 60s and have about 2 years ago returned to paid employment as a programmer instead of retiring (after having a career that eventually took me out of programming and into management) because I had continued as a hobby when I got too senior to do it at work, and it seemed like a good idea to earn some money doing what I regard as fun.
Some of the time I've had to learn new stuff (for instance.NET, C#, EntityFramework) and other times remember stuff I'd done before (Microsoft Access) but also much of the newer versions of techniques I had started deploying as a technical manager in the 1980s (version control, data modelling ) and stuff I picked up whilst persuing programming as a hobby (test driven development, Javascript).
I am continuing to be paid, and it doesn't seem like that will end anytime soon.
And this is ignoring the issue this article bring up, that with a newly-consructed pool of currency with much fewer users, it is much more prone to currency manipulation than dollars or euros.
That's huge to me. If DDoS attacks can be utilized to wildly manipulate the value of a currency, how can the currency have value?
It has value because some people are willing to buy bitcoins. DDoS attacks affect who, but it doesn't stop someone thinking that when the DDos attacks stop the market is going to rise, and therefore buying now is a good proposition. Its a gamble, but one with a reasonable probability of turning a profit. What the "thinness" of the market does is make the price volatile, and that is what we are seeing now
I think your argument is rather sound. At least it is more sound than the usual pro-Bitcoin claim that "there will only ever be 21,000,000 bitcoins, therefore deflation forever." However, there is a counterargument that I thought of. There are a couple of things that could cause bitcoin to retain its value in the long term: fame, and the network effect. Fame, because Bitcoin is the first of its kind and the most frequently discussed. It is like the Kleenex or Xerox of virtual currencies, the one that gives its name to all the rest, and that gives it enduring value. The second is the network effect. The more people use it, the more people want to use it. Thus, even with low barriers to entry, Bitcoin could eventually win a near-monopoly in the virtual currency market.
I agree the Parent of your post was making a good point. To counter your point however, as an investor I am being asked to gamble that Bitcoin could win the virtual currency battle - so it makes the investment risky.
If the gamble pays off the investment I make today could make be a lot of money. If it doesn't I could loose my entire investment.
I think this is similar (bit obviously different) to share in a company on the stock market. You hope its value goes up and it is still around in 10 years time, but it could go broke.
Several years ago now, I travelled from Tokyo to Istanbul via London Heathrow airport. Despite the fact that the incoming flight was to terminal 3 (in the centre of the airport) and the outgoing flight was at terminal 4 (on the eastern edge of the airport) I remained in international territory the whole time. They had a special gate "airside" where we caught a bus to the other terminal (also "airside"). I never passed any passport control (other than the normal airline check of my passport at the boarding gate) whilst at the airport.
I was subscribed to original blog announcing this for a while, and developer after developer asked for more virtical screen resolution. As far as I am aware the project brief was to use existing hardware so that option was never viable.
I gave up following it in the end, because the other ideas - to try and pre-configure software configurations for use seemed crazy in the face of the flexibility of the Ubuntu synaptic package which could acheive a more flexible goal with less work.
I came to the conclusion that this skunkworks was driven more by a marketing goal to seen to be doing something rather than any real desire to meet developers needs.
I've run several SMF forums since I started my main one in 2007 (http://www.melindasbackups.com/forum/) This main also has applications that I have built (chat, airhockey and football) which use the SMF login as a single sign on, and themes which (sort of) match.
I've been into the guts of it, so we have flowplayer video and mp3 players embedded pretty seamlessly into posts (and youtube videos) as well.
We have had a massive number of spammers attempt to join, but we have some extra mods in place to keep them out and so far only one or two out of the several thousand who tried have managed to set up an account that could post. Manual moderation deals with this last few, but its a fairly painless job.
There is still a surrounding static site, with a completely different theme, but we don't really do much with that
Let's say there's a piece of GPL code you'd want to use, instead of rolling your own. Now only way to use that piece is to make your entire software GPL
That is rubbish. Provided you don't distribute it outside your company then you don't have to make your own software GPL.
Of course if you do want to distribute it in a proprietary sense so you can make profit out of other peoples work then you can't.
I wrote a chat program for fun that addresses the problems. See https://github.com/akc42/MBChat. The software originated as a non secure chat for a fan club (www.melindasbackups.com) that I an the IT director for, but I tried to add security to it as part of a proof of concept for use where people were trying to intercept the comms.
The assumption I made is that all communication between client and server needed to be secure and that there could always be a man in the middle trying to intercept your communication. Since the initial program is downloaded from the server, it is not possible to send the keys needed to encrypt things with the program.
My solution to this was to calculate a RSA key pair on the fly in the browser as the program starts up - and then send the public key to the server and ask it to encypt the key used for communication using this public key. The client then decrypts it using his private key.
Because RSA key pair generation is quite compute intensive - I had to develop a mechanism (which I borrowed from elsewhere) to allow the browser to perform long running calculations without timing out. It does this by breaking things down into small steps and returning to browser for a "tick".
I also spent some time trying to have the server also prove it was the correct server. I came to the conclusion that the only completely foolproof way required each human client to know the "Standard message of the day" and to be able to see it after its been decrypted for the server comms to be sure the server is who you think he is.
I open sourced it when I developed it about two years ago now - but I don't think anyone has cloned it or taken a look.
For a few seconds at exactly 6:am I had up a page at RS that let you order the pi - not express an interest but actually order. I already had an account with them, but by the time I had checked up what my account details were the whole site had gone done.
The press release by Farnell talks about 600 people trying to order a second. If they split the first batch 50/50 then in slightly under 10 seconds Farnell would have sold out. No doubt RS was the same.
So its not surprising that by 1 minute past 6, all you could do is be put in a queue for the next batch.
I fully agree with you. I was the same, so I converted over to KDE4. Then I spent a long time working out how to use facilities like multiple desktops and multiple activities under KDE4. I work in different areas at different times of the day, and the KDE activities approach seemed ideal.
But the practical reality of it was that I just got in a mess.
What I did realise then - how good Gnome3 is. I've gone back to it and now I find the older interfaces limiting.
Things that are really good 1) I run with multiple screens - having my secondary screen remain in place when I switch workspaces is fabulous. I can put an important source document on display and then work in the different other documents each in its own workspace, surrounded by the support applications I need for that part of the work 2) Growing an shrinking Workspaces automatically. As I start getting too complicated (too many windows to work on comfortably in one workspace, I through some stuff to another workspace. 3) Minimising by flicking my wrist (and moving the mouse to the top left hand corner) - and getting a dynamically visual view of applications. I often work and watch MythTV in the evenings, and being able to here something important about to happen on the TV when I am working on an overlaid window, that flick allows me to immediately watch the action on the TV
I do have criticisms though. It was insane to make Suspend the default option closing down - I want power off (I know there is an extension that does this - these aren't yet just available as Debian packages). There seems to be bugs that can hang the closedown process if you cancel it half way through. I can't find my apps very easily - seems to be very particular about having.desktop files in the right place. Often I can install some thing in Debian and I can't find the app.
I'm just turned 60 and wrote my first professional programme (ie I was paid to write it) in 1969. There have been several different themes in this whole article and this seems like a good place to summarise my thoughts on them all
Until about 1976 or so I was a programmer/designer - mostly in assembler language (mostly PDP 11, but lots of other stuff too). About that point in my career I drifted upwards into managerial roles with less of a programming input. Initially I was pretty lousy as a manager, I didn't understand people skills - particularly tending to treat people like robots. I got criticised badly for that in my performance reviews, but I learnt and got better. I think by the end of the 1980s I was considered a good manager. At least I can claim that many of the people I was responsible for in those days are still quite good friends and when we meet socially there is still discussions of team building activities that went on back then. I wasn't at all of them - I was a divisional manager and I had just authorised the expenditure for the project manager to take out his project and a completion of some milestone or other - but we also held occasional divisional level events and these are still remembered too. I had financial targets to meet as well - but I was convinced that such expenditures were trivial with respect to the benefits I got from improved productivity from good morale and from better communications because people knew each other better.
Two other elements of managing seems to me to be important and views that I don't often see expressed here.
1) I felt that to be a good manager I had to understand the technology. It wasn't just at the programming level either (although I did teach myself C and did write the odd bit of software in it), but in terms of frameworks, operating systems, databases, and the software engineering processes. My unit - with my managerial lead - developed an early version of distributed version control which as recently as 3 or 4 years ago I know was still being used on some projects in the company that were nothing to do with me (my junior protégées had grown into senior positions and were using it), and I remember spending a long time understanding the issues surrounding Object Orientation (the mind shift traditional programmers need to design a system round an object concept as opposed to a functional concept is significant and you have to put some quite strong controls in place to ensure a project is successful)
2) All this 80hour week stuff is rubbish and I tried to prevent it. I was convinced then and still am (although my view has modified with respect to those that are doing out of love rather than peer pressure) that if you push people much more than 40 hours per week, except in very short bursts to meet a deadline, then burnout gives you a negative productivity gain
At the beginning of the 1990's I stopped having such close contact with technology at work and continued my learning journey at home. I taught myself how to set up web sites and learnt (initially) Java to make dynamic web sites (using Tapestry), although these days I do most all of it with PHP and Javascript (also self taught), and vastly improved my SQL skills. Also got to learn about Drupal and Wordpress. About 2 years ago I got made redundant, but was in the fortunate financial position that I could pretty well retire if I wanted to. Given I programmed still as a hobby I decided to see what I could do about selling my programming skills again.
I want to tie that into a comment about value (ie cost of a programmer) v experience. Of course on a project you need balance between senior and junior guys. In one year in my career as a manager I hired 27 new graduates into a team of 70 (with a spread of experience). We strained and lost a bit of quality in our development. I think I went to far down the junior balance, but not a long way too far. My most senior guy still actively writing software on a regular basis had had (at that time) about 1
Well I am 60 and have just started programming professionally again.
I wrote my first program professionally (ie I got paid to write it) in 1969. By the end of the 1970s I had become a project manager, although not before becoming an expert programmer in PDP 11 Assembly Language. During the 1980's I was a line manager running the software development side of a hardware/software product that we had. This role did still keep me in touch with technology and I did share that role with one of Chief Engineer for the subsidiary I worked for. I could write software in C and was a beginner in SQL but I only dabbled.
During the 1990s and up to 2009 by career took a different turn and I became a business expert in the whole area of competition in Electricity - actively involved in seeing the UK introduce electricity competition in its domestic market during the end of the 1990's and taking that expertese out around the world during the 2000s. Because this role took me away from the technology, and the back end of the 1990s and onward I took up programming as a hobby. And I taught myself lots of new languages (Java, PHP, Javascript, and (although not strictly programming) HTML and CSS) and because much of what I was doing involved developing applications around databases (Postgresql and SQLite) vastly improved by SQL skills.
In 2009 I was offered a redundancy package that meant I could retire. A well paid consultancy assignment shortly afterwards caused me to set up a limited company with sufficient capital to explore becoming a programmer again whilst paying a small salary to me (which offset some of my pension drawdown).
I originally thought I would be developing web sites for people, but real life doesn't work like that, and although I did have a couple of projects in that area a chance encounter with an old work colleague has led me to writing software initially using Microsoft Access, but increasingly now using SQL Server and other technologies such as ASP and VB.Net. I am realistic in what I charge, I do charge a small premium over the rates for junior programmers but I can clearly demonstrate my worth (I believe I am still really good at finding bugs and fixing bugs in other peoples code - and I enjoy doing it, although I am aware most people don't) and I can take the right design decisions and implement something much faster using my experience against someone new to the business. Most importantly I REALLY REALLY enjoy it.
There is nothing about age that prevents you learning new languages and exploring new career avenues. It would be tough financially if I wasn't semi retired, and I don't think I could have (or would have) got a full time job. But setting up my own company and using that as a vehicle to get work has proved successful.
You should use DVD+R for data and refresh every decade or so ago
I just re-read my entire CD archives from 10 years ago (actually between 1998 and mid 2004) and thinned them down and put them on to DVD+R. I could read all of them, although one or two had difficulty with a couple of files. I took the opportunity to thin them down (removing duplicate copies of files) and compressed 51 CDs into 4 DVDs
I also have offsite backups on standard 3.5 inch sata drives of what I would regard as my current "live" data - I have about 200GB covering all the family - music, images, documents and spreadsheets, software I wrote etc etc. A simple USB/sata external chassis for the drive was all I needed to take a backup. I have two sets and attempt to rotate them monthly.
When I went to University in the UK (late 1960s), only a handful of not very prestigious colleges taught the new subject of "Computer Science". I ended up doing Electrical Engineering, because that meant I could go to one of the London colleges (Oxford and Cambridge were out because I couldn't pass Latin - was needed in those days) despite knowing from the age of 11 that I wanted to have a career in computing. Shortly afterwards, it became more important and my brother (9 years younger than me) did a Computer Science course at the same college as I (Imperial College).
In those days, the subject was not very broad - algorithms were immensely important because the libraries that embed these algorithms were not widely available and software packages (as we know them today) did not exist. For some time, my career after university was programming large chunks of what I did in Assembler language (although to be fair, I was writing device drivers for the operating system RSX-11M on a PDP/11 - not mainstream commercial programming) and it wasn't until sometime in the 1980's that the computer languages had progressed far enough to use something like C universally. I remember at the time wanting to get hold of a book on compilers and how they work, because that was the 'in' subject area for modern computer science. Similarly databases, particularly relational databases, was another subject area that was broadening. We hand developed in Assembler some database engines for a large commercial database project I undertook in 1974, and in the early 1980s the company I worked for started to develop a relational database which competed with Oracle. It was only when we had to invest in an SQL parser that the business case required us to sell a 1000 copies that we chickened out - asking the question if that was possible. And if we can all remember it was during the 1980s that GUI's became prominent - the Apple Lisa was the first I experienced, but MS Windows followed soon afterwards. And then again in the late 1980s, Software Engineering, along with all the various methodologies (I remember having fierce debates about which methodology was correct) and Object Oriented programming (again fierce debates over the mindset change needed to use an object oriented language properly). The final point was brought home to me by watching Tron the other day. In the time of that film, programs were written by Users. That was indeed the norm, and it wasn't until the mid 1980s and the explosion of the PC as both an Office and Home Device that users where people who didn't write the programs, but instead went out and bought "Software Packages". It was at this point that a new subject area of "how do I use this program" and "how do I configure this system" became a subject that required teaching to more than just a few specialists.
The point I am trying to make, is that since its inception the field that was historically named computer science has grown to a point where it has too much subject content to be covered completely with a single undergraduate degree. Specialism is required and therefore you would expect different colleges to offer different combinations.
The article mischaracterises the term "business" to mean the selling of software. In the sense that the GPL prevents one from making a varient and then selling it under a proprietrary licence that is true.
But what if your business is a user of software and not selling software (which I think is more true of business as a whole), then the GPL actually helps you, because it discourages (prevents) small proprietary forks, instead encouraging an ecosystem in which the majority of the effort goes into improving the public common base of software. So as a business user of software that business benefit more than it would if effort were drained of into lots of incompatible proprietary versions.
But its also about what you when you were taught it. I am in my mid fifties, and when I grew up we were taught metric in science but used imperial everywhere else. Because I am engineering biased, I am confortable working in either units.
My children on the other hand, now in their early twenties, where never taught imperial units and just don't know how to use them - or more importantly - envisage have long, for instance, one foot is.
The REALLY strange distance in the UK is miles given that you buy other things in meter lengths [*1*]. I can convert between miles and kilometers easily (using 5 miles = 8 km) because I frequently travel to mainland Europe of business, but for most people kilometers is not the natural unit to use. I still have problems with petrol (gas for you Americans) consumption. I "know" from childhood cars do about 30 miles to the gallon and that would be the figure I would use in estimating usage, but I buy petrol in litres. my tank takes about 45 litres to fill up and does about 360 miles on a tank, and I am paying about 88p per litre. So why don't I naturally work on the 8 miles per litre or 11p per mile that that implies.
[And I think in mainland Europe they inverse consumption - 8 litres per 100km for example]
[*1*] Although strangely, I still think of sheets of MDF or plasterboard being 8' by 4' (meaning 8 foot by 4 foot)
Slashdot Mirror
Filling up a car now takes about a minute. A Supercharger station filling up in about 15 (or longer) means you have to have 15 times the number of "pumps", more if the charging time really takes longer OR if more cars have less range.
This is a misconception. With Electic Cars, you more often than not have the equalent of a Gas station where your car is parked overnight. Each morning you start with a full tank. You still might need to charge en-route, but not as frequently as an ICE.
I have enabled control-alt-backspace. Don't need to reset the computer
I find the normal reason that there is a lockup is because virtual box whilst running windows in full screen mode, and windows has put up a dialog box or the alt key has put up the start button menu.
This seems to cause the hotspot or the alt key to stop responding in gnome3. This gets into a deadly embrace where you can't switch to the virtual box window.
That might be your opinion, but for me its the opposite.
I have two monitors, and despite me trying to configure other Desktop Environments to behave in the same way, it has only been GNOME3 where I can have a fixed window in one workspace (generally mail), and other things going on on my main monitor each in their own workspace, whereby I can switch between them, and not also have the secondary monitor switch at the same time. I tried stuff like Linux Mint's Desktop, KDE and even XFCE, but I couldn't figure out how to make any of them work that way.
And now I am used to it, I love the lack of a taskbar panel. I just flick my mouse over to the corner to get an immediate views of the various windows I could switch to. I love the dock, with the apps I use 99% of the time immediately available, and a quite good incremental search for anything else I need
Of course there are some downsides/bugs - like some flakeyness around full screen apps (I use WIndows 7 inside virtual box a lot and Mythtv) where there occassional lockups. But I am running Debian Stable, so I presume I don't have the latest and greatest version.
Gnome is aweful, they took away one of the biggest and most useful things for Desktop computing - minimizing. Until people stop kidding themselves that people don't need minimize Gnome 3's Shell will never gain true adoption.
I completely disagree with this. For me Gnome 3 is the ONLY desktop arrangement that makes any sense.
1) Gnome 3 seems to be the only environment that supports independant workspaces on each of my two monitors. If I change workspace on my primary monitor the other stays were it is. This is a huge gain in productivity for me and I wouldn't be without it. (The only other alternative seems to be the new OSX Mavericks from Apple - which, without having experienced it, seems to be slightly better in that the secondary monitor can have more than one workspace) ... ... dynamically create a new work space and move stuff into it. Again I find the creation of dynamic workspaces as needed much better that pre-allocating a set number which all the other desktops seem to require you to do
2) (courtesy of shell extensions) minimise is still there on my COMPLETELY STANDARD Debian Stable system. But I rarely use it. I have got into the habit of flicking my mouse at the top left corner, or hitting the "Windows" key on my keyboard, and finding the next app to work on. If that desktop overview screen gets too cluttered I just
3)
As part of my work I often run a MS Windows.virtual machine at full screen in one of the workspaces. I get very frustrated at having to use the taskbar at the bottom to switch applications. (Also with the Gnome3 workspace arrangement, I can have my linux based mail on the secondary monitor and ctrl+alt+up or down arrows switch me to and from windows and linux on the separate workspaces on my main monitor).
In the evening, I do the same thing - I have MythTV running fill screen on one of the workspaces and tend to do other background jobs in the other workspaces - an dthe only downside there is I can't seem to get the full screen of the playing TV program to go to the secondary screen.
I have been running Debian for about 10 years, and the only time I've had to re-install it was when I bought completely new hardware. I never got so botched that I need to start again. Most of the time I have run as SID, although over the last 6 months or so I migrated slowly to testing which became stable - since I seem to have everything I need at a suitably high enough version.
Because I run all my disks as raid 1, when I upgraded from 1 to 2 TB disks, I did that with the system in situ.
The legit question is: will I be able to continue to learn faster than a programming robot will advance and eventually replace me? The truth is that the programming robot will learn at an exponential rate, so there will likely be little difference between having 2 years of experience or 20 by the time the robot surpasses your ability. Perhaps the 20-year-programmer will have an extra day or two to try and hack into the robot, and likely that extra experience will help with that goal. But all programmers will eventually be replaced by the robot. Then, at long last, the hardware engineers can again gloat.
The exact same statements were being made when I was programming in the 1970s - I think SQL was going to be one of the tools that meant we didn't need programmers anymore and end users could just produce what they wanted.
I am now in my 60s and have about 2 years ago returned to paid employment as a programmer instead of retiring (after having a career that eventually took me out of programming and into management) because I had continued as a hobby when I got too senior to do it at work, and it seemed like a good idea to earn some money doing what I regard as fun.
Some of the time I've had to learn new stuff (for instance .NET, C#, EntityFramework) and other times remember stuff I'd done before (Microsoft Access) but also much of the newer versions of techniques I had started deploying as a technical manager in the 1980s (version control, data modelling ) and stuff I picked up whilst persuing programming as a hobby (test driven development, Javascript).
I am continuing to be paid, and it doesn't seem like that will end anytime soon.
And this is ignoring the issue this article bring up, that with a newly-consructed pool of currency with much fewer users, it is much more prone to currency manipulation than dollars or euros.
That's huge to me. If DDoS attacks can be utilized to wildly manipulate the value of a currency, how can the currency have value?
It has value because some people are willing to buy bitcoins. DDoS attacks affect who, but it doesn't stop someone thinking that when the DDos attacks stop the market is going to rise, and therefore buying now is a good proposition. Its a gamble, but one with a reasonable probability of turning a profit. What the "thinness" of the market does is make the price volatile, and that is what we are seeing now
I think your argument is rather sound. At least it is more sound than the usual pro-Bitcoin claim that "there will only ever be 21,000,000 bitcoins, therefore deflation forever." However, there is a counterargument that I thought of. There are a couple of things that could cause bitcoin to retain its value in the long term: fame, and the network effect. Fame, because Bitcoin is the first of its kind and the most frequently discussed. It is like the Kleenex or Xerox of virtual currencies, the one that gives its name to all the rest, and that gives it enduring value. The second is the network effect. The more people use it, the more people want to use it. Thus, even with low barriers to entry, Bitcoin could eventually win a near-monopoly in the virtual currency market.
I agree the Parent of your post was making a good point. To counter your point however, as an investor I am being asked to gamble that Bitcoin could win the virtual currency battle - so it makes the investment risky.
If the gamble pays off the investment I make today could make be a lot of money. If it doesn't I could loose my entire investment.
I think this is similar (bit obviously different) to share in a company on the stock market. You hope its value goes up and it is still around in 10 years time, but it could go broke.
I am a British citizen.
Several years ago now, I travelled from Tokyo to Istanbul via London Heathrow airport. Despite the fact that the incoming flight was to terminal 3 (in the centre of the airport) and the outgoing flight was at terminal 4 (on the eastern edge of the airport) I remained in international territory the whole time. They had a special gate "airside" where we caught a bus to the other terminal (also "airside"). I never passed any passport control (other than the normal airline check of my passport at the boarding gate) whilst at the airport.
I was subscribed to original blog announcing this for a while, and developer after developer asked for more virtical screen resolution. As far as I am aware the project brief was to use existing hardware so that option was never viable.
I gave up following it in the end, because the other ideas - to try and pre-configure software configurations for use seemed crazy in the face of the flexibility of the Ubuntu synaptic package which could acheive a more flexible goal with less work.
I came to the conclusion that this skunkworks was driven more by a marketing goal to seen to be doing something rather than any real desire to meet developers needs.
I've run several SMF forums since I started my main one in 2007 (http://www.melindasbackups.com/forum/) This main also has applications that I have built (chat, airhockey and football) which use the SMF login as a single sign on, and themes which (sort of) match.
I've been into the guts of it, so we have flowplayer video and mp3 players embedded pretty seamlessly into posts (and youtube videos) as well.
We have had a massive number of spammers attempt to join, but we have some extra mods in place to keep them out and so far only one or two out of the several thousand who tried have managed to set up an account that could post. Manual moderation deals with this last few, but its a fairly painless job.
There is still a surrounding static site, with a completely different theme, but we don't really do much with that
Let's say there's a piece of GPL code you'd want to use, instead of rolling your own. Now only way to use that piece is to make your entire software GPL
That is rubbish. Provided you don't distribute it outside your company then you don't have to make your own software GPL.
Of course if you do want to distribute it in a proprietary sense so you can make profit out of other peoples work then you can't.
I wrote a chat program for fun that addresses the problems. See https://github.com/akc42/MBChat. The software originated as a non secure chat for a fan club (www.melindasbackups.com) that I an the IT director for, but I tried to add security to it as part of a proof of concept for use where people were trying to intercept the comms.
The assumption I made is that all communication between client and server needed to be secure and that there could always be a man in the middle trying to intercept your communication. Since the initial program is downloaded from the server, it is not possible to send the keys needed to encrypt things with the program.
My solution to this was to calculate a RSA key pair on the fly in the browser as the program starts up - and then send the public key to the server and ask it to encypt the key used for communication using this public key. The client then decrypts it using his private key.
Because RSA key pair generation is quite compute intensive - I had to develop a mechanism (which I borrowed from elsewhere) to allow the browser to perform long running calculations without timing out. It does this by breaking things down into small steps and returning to browser for a "tick".
I also spent some time trying to have the server also prove it was the correct server. I came to the conclusion that the only completely foolproof way required each human client to know the "Standard message of the day" and to be able to see it after its been decrypted for the server comms to be sure the server is who you think he is.
I open sourced it when I developed it about two years ago now - but I don't think anyone has cloned it or taken a look.
For a few seconds at exactly 6:am I had up a page at RS that let you order the pi - not express an interest but actually order. I already had an account with them, but by the time I had checked up what my account details were the whole site had gone done.
The press release by Farnell talks about 600 people trying to order a second. If they split the first batch 50/50 then in slightly under 10 seconds Farnell would have sold out. No doubt RS was the same.
So its not surprising that by 1 minute past 6, all you could do is be put in a queue for the next batch.
I fully agree with you. I was the same, so I converted over to KDE4. Then I spent a long time working out how to use facilities like multiple desktops and multiple activities under KDE4. I work in different areas at different times of the day, and the KDE activities approach seemed ideal.
But the practical reality of it was that I just got in a mess.
What I did realise then - how good Gnome3 is. I've gone back to it and now I find the older interfaces limiting.
Things that are really good
1) I run with multiple screens - having my secondary screen remain in place when I switch workspaces is fabulous. I can put an important source document on display and then work in the different other documents each in its own workspace, surrounded by the support applications I need for that part of the work
2) Growing an shrinking Workspaces automatically. As I start getting too complicated (too many windows to work on comfortably in one workspace, I through some stuff to another workspace.
3) Minimising by flicking my wrist (and moving the mouse to the top left hand corner) - and getting a dynamically visual view of applications. I often work and watch MythTV in the evenings, and being able to here something important about to happen on the TV when I am working on an overlaid window, that flick allows me to immediately watch the action on the TV
I do have criticisms though. It was insane to make Suspend the default option closing down - I want power off (I know there is an extension that does this - these aren't yet just available as Debian packages). There seems to be bugs that can hang the closedown process if you cancel it half way through. I can't find my apps very easily - seems to be very particular about having .desktop files in the right place. Often I can install some thing in Debian and I can't find the app.
I'm just turned 60 and wrote my first professional programme (ie I was paid to write it) in 1969. There have been several different themes in this whole article and this seems like a good place to summarise my thoughts on them all
Until about 1976 or so I was a programmer/designer - mostly in assembler language (mostly PDP 11, but lots of other stuff too). About that point in my career I drifted upwards into managerial roles with less of a programming input. Initially I was pretty lousy as a manager, I didn't understand people skills - particularly tending to treat people like robots. I got criticised badly for that in my performance reviews, but I learnt and got better. I think by the end of the 1980s I was considered a good manager. At least I can claim that many of the people I was responsible for in those days are still quite good friends and when we meet socially there is still discussions of team building activities that went on back then. I wasn't at all of them - I was a divisional manager and I had just authorised the expenditure for the project manager to take out his project and a completion of some milestone or other - but we also held occasional divisional level events and these are still remembered too. I had financial targets to meet as well - but I was convinced that such expenditures were trivial with respect to the benefits I got from improved productivity from good morale and from better communications because people knew each other better.
Two other elements of managing seems to me to be important and views that I don't often see expressed here.
1) I felt that to be a good manager I had to understand the technology. It wasn't just at the programming level either (although I did teach myself C and did write the odd bit of software in it), but in terms of frameworks, operating systems, databases, and the software engineering processes. My unit - with my managerial lead - developed an early version of distributed version control which as recently as 3 or 4 years ago I know was still being used on some projects in the company that were nothing to do with me (my junior protégées had grown into senior positions and were using it), and I remember spending a long time understanding the issues surrounding Object Orientation (the mind shift traditional programmers need to design a system round an object concept as opposed to a functional concept is significant and you have to put some quite strong controls in place to ensure a project is successful)
2) All this 80hour week stuff is rubbish and I tried to prevent it. I was convinced then and still am (although my view has modified with respect to those that are doing out of love rather than peer pressure) that if you push people much more than 40 hours per week, except in very short bursts to meet a deadline, then burnout gives you a negative productivity gain
At the beginning of the 1990's I stopped having such close contact with technology at work and continued my learning journey at home. I taught myself how to set up web sites and learnt (initially) Java to make dynamic web sites (using Tapestry), although these days I do most all of it with PHP and Javascript (also self taught), and vastly improved my SQL skills. Also got to learn about Drupal and Wordpress. About 2 years ago I got made redundant, but was in the fortunate financial position that I could pretty well retire if I wanted to. Given I programmed still as a hobby I decided to see what I could do about selling my programming skills again.
I want to tie that into a comment about value (ie cost of a programmer) v experience. Of course on a project you need balance between senior and junior guys. In one year in my career as a manager I hired 27 new graduates into a team of 70 (with a spread of experience). We strained and lost a bit of quality in our development. I think I went to far down the junior balance, but not a long way too far. My most senior guy still actively writing software on a regular basis had had (at that time) about 1
Well I am 60 and have just started programming professionally again.
I wrote my first program professionally (ie I got paid to write it) in 1969. By the end of the 1970s I had become a project manager, although not before becoming an expert programmer in PDP 11 Assembly Language. During the 1980's I was a line manager running the software development side of a hardware/software product that we had. This role did still keep me in touch with technology and I did share that role with one of Chief Engineer for the subsidiary I worked for. I could write software in C and was a beginner in SQL but I only dabbled.
During the 1990s and up to 2009 by career took a different turn and I became a business expert in the whole area of competition in Electricity - actively involved in seeing the UK introduce electricity competition in its domestic market during the end of the 1990's and taking that expertese out around the world during the 2000s. Because this role took me away from the technology, and the back end of the 1990s and onward I took up programming as a hobby. And I taught myself lots of new languages (Java, PHP, Javascript, and (although not strictly programming) HTML and CSS) and because much of what I was doing involved developing applications around databases (Postgresql and SQLite) vastly improved by SQL skills.
In 2009 I was offered a redundancy package that meant I could retire. A well paid consultancy assignment shortly afterwards caused me to set up a limited company with sufficient capital to explore becoming a programmer again whilst paying a small salary to me (which offset some of my pension drawdown).
I originally thought I would be developing web sites for people, but real life doesn't work like that, and although I did have a couple of projects in that area a chance encounter with an old work colleague has led me to writing software initially using Microsoft Access, but increasingly now using SQL Server and other technologies such as ASP and VB.Net. I am realistic in what I charge, I do charge a small premium over the rates for junior programmers but I can clearly demonstrate my worth (I believe I am still really good at finding bugs and fixing bugs in other peoples code - and I enjoy doing it, although I am aware most people don't) and I can take the right design decisions and implement something much faster using my experience against someone new to the business. Most importantly I REALLY REALLY enjoy it.
There is nothing about age that prevents you learning new languages and exploring new career avenues. It would be tough financially if I wasn't semi retired, and I don't think I could have (or would have) got a full time job. But setting up my own company and using that as a vehicle to get work has proved successful.
I meant to post that as ME, not as an AC
Unless of course he is playing a double bluff.
It appears the study you refer to says that even with PCI compliance, 30% of companies experienced some form of breach.
That is frightening. Do I missunderstand the figures?
Mine did too - but it did quite a lot of damage to the electronics when doing so, so a replacement power supply did not revive it.
You should use DVD+R for data and refresh every decade or so ago
I just re-read my entire CD archives from 10 years ago (actually between 1998 and mid 2004) and thinned them down and put them on to DVD+R. I could read all of them, although one or two had difficulty with a couple of files. I took the opportunity to thin them down (removing duplicate copies of files) and compressed 51 CDs into 4 DVDs
I also have offsite backups on standard 3.5 inch sata drives of what I would regard as my current "live" data - I have about 200GB covering all the family - music, images, documents and spreadsheets, software I wrote etc etc. A simple USB/sata external chassis for the drive was all I needed to take a backup. I have two sets and attempt to rotate them monthly.
When I went to University in the UK (late 1960s), only a handful of not very prestigious colleges taught the new subject of "Computer Science". I ended up doing Electrical Engineering, because that meant I could go to one of the London colleges (Oxford and Cambridge were out because I couldn't pass Latin - was needed in those days) despite knowing from the age of 11 that I wanted to have a career in computing. Shortly afterwards, it became more important and my brother (9 years younger than me) did a Computer Science course at the same college as I (Imperial College).
In those days, the subject was not very broad - algorithms were immensely important because the libraries that embed these algorithms were not widely available and software packages (as we know them today) did not exist. For some time, my career after university was programming large chunks of what I did in Assembler language (although to be fair, I was writing device drivers for the operating system RSX-11M on a PDP/11 - not mainstream commercial programming) and it wasn't until sometime in the 1980's that the computer languages had progressed far enough to use something like C universally. I remember at the time wanting to get hold of a book on compilers and how they work, because that was the 'in' subject area for modern computer science. Similarly databases, particularly relational databases, was another subject area that was broadening. We hand developed in Assembler some database engines for a large commercial database project I undertook in 1974, and in the early 1980s the company I worked for started to develop a relational database which competed with Oracle. It was only when we had to invest in an SQL parser that the business case required us to sell a 1000 copies that we chickened out - asking the question if that was possible. And if we can all remember it was during the 1980s that GUI's became prominent - the Apple Lisa was the first I experienced, but MS Windows followed soon afterwards. And then again in the late 1980s, Software Engineering, along with all the various methodologies (I remember having fierce debates about which methodology was correct) and Object Oriented programming (again fierce debates over the mindset change needed to use an object oriented language properly). The final point was brought home to me by watching Tron the other day. In the time of that film, programs were written by Users. That was indeed the norm, and it wasn't until the mid 1980s and the explosion of the PC as both an Office and Home Device that users where people who didn't write the programs, but instead went out and bought "Software Packages". It was at this point that a new subject area of "how do I use this program" and "how do I configure this system" became a subject that required teaching to more than just a few specialists.
The point I am trying to make, is that since its inception the field that was historically named computer science has grown to a point where it has too much subject content to be covered completely with a single undergraduate degree. Specialism is required and therefore you would expect different colleges to offer different combinations.
The article mischaracterises the term "business" to mean the selling of software. In the sense that the GPL prevents one from making a varient and then selling it under a proprietrary licence that is true.
But what if your business is a user of software and not selling software (which I think is more true of business as a whole), then the GPL actually helps you, because it discourages (prevents) small proprietary forks, instead encouraging an ecosystem in which the majority of the effort goes into improving the public common base of software. So as a business user of software that business benefit more than it would if effort were drained of into lots of incompatible proprietary versions.
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they will just raise the price for everyone else.
You are correct. It should increase everyone elses price. If its not something he is going to use, why should he subsidize others?
Surely it will lower the price.
In a monopoly the price is set by the maximum the market can bear, not the total cost of shipping the millions of licences.
This has shown the first (one of the first) chink that the market can't bear quite as much
But its also about what you when you were taught it. I am in my mid fifties, and when I grew up we were taught metric in science but used imperial everywhere else. Because I am engineering biased, I am confortable working in either units.
My children on the other hand, now in their early twenties, where never taught imperial units and just don't know how to use them - or more importantly - envisage have long, for instance, one foot is.
The REALLY strange distance in the UK is miles given that you buy other things in meter lengths [*1*]. I can convert between miles and kilometers easily (using 5 miles = 8 km) because I frequently travel to mainland Europe of business, but for most people kilometers is not the natural unit to use. I still have problems with petrol (gas for you Americans) consumption. I "know" from childhood cars do about 30 miles to the gallon and that would be the figure I would use in estimating usage, but I buy petrol in litres. my tank takes about 45 litres to fill up and does about 360 miles on a tank, and I am paying about 88p per litre. So why don't I naturally work on the 8 miles per litre or 11p per mile that that implies.
[And I think in mainland Europe they inverse consumption - 8 litres per 100km for example]
[*1*] Although strangely, I still think of sheets of MDF or plasterboard being 8' by 4' (meaning 8 foot by 4 foot)