Even the mere thought that there might be anything of merit on the GG side is tantamount to a rape threat. It's intolerant and childish.
No one said that, you made it up.
Being neutral that people (mostly women) are being repeatedly doxed is definitely a character flaw. Having strangers call your family or coworkers at 3AM and screaming at them is a pretty clear cut case of abuse.
There is definitely one side to the GG controversy that is intolerant and childish, but it isn't the women game developers.
Here's a plan: stop being assholes because someone said some words you don't like. When other people, even ones who agree with you behave this way call them out and tell them to stop.
Maybe then we can have an adult conversation about this stuff.
The worst part is the fact that games are starting to get actual criticism around them is part of the process of moving to accepted art form. No one doxes movie critics or film schools because they dissect trends in movies. The whole GG movement is retarding the progress of games as a socially accepted form of artistic expression.
Apple doesn't enter a market unless they see the potential to charge $1 for a lime that everyone else is selling for 50 cents
Apple's flagship phones sell for about the same as Samsung's. Apple's computers sell for similar prices to PC systems of similar specs.
What Apple doesn't do is sell garbage systems to chase the cheap end of the market. No one complains that BMW won't sell a $10,000 car.
People whine and moan about all the crapware that comes bundled with the latest Dell PC, but that's how they manage to make a profit. Apple just charges a reasonable price for the system instead. It also means Apple has the money to fund R&D and invest in manufacturing technology. When was the last time any of the PC makers innovated on anything?
You must have lost your mind. I used Windows Mobile for years. I had to install task managers to kill apps before they killed my battery. I had to install a registry editor and fiddle with settings to get even basic functionality working. IE on WM was a sick joke. I rebooted the phones every other day just to keep working.
iOS was better in every way. It had a real grown up browser. Shit just worked. The fluid animations were just icing on the cake.
Why is it that you have to fall back on name-calling? Why not address the actual point?
It is wrong to dox people.
It is wrong to swat people.
Period.
It's ridiculous how much vitriol and harassment is being dished out against random people (mostly women) just because you don't like what they say.
To a letter, every single person I've talked to who is supporting gamergate is spouting lies and half-truths. Maybe there was a legitimate point buried in there, but it's long been lost in the random mob attacks.
Now people are being attacked simply for saying "hey guys, random aggression/doxxing/swatting isn't cool".
It's pure insanity. You should be ashamed of yourself and your comment.
(For the record, I hate the SJW crowd and the Tumblr really-a-dragon-spirit bullshit, but that doesn't make it OK to lash out)
Tax income, and they have reason to make less. Why go get the new job that pays a tad more when 25% of your raise goes to the feds?
This has to be one of the dumbest arguments of all time and I can't imagine anyone who actually has money ever actually operates this way or they're headed for ruin rather quickly.
Of course you take the job; 75% of the extra income goes into your pocket. A business that decides not to sell more widgets at a 75% profit margin because they'd have to spend 25% to sell the widgets (taxes, overhead, etc) is a business headed for bankruptcy.
The only programs in the USA that lead to less overall income when you get a raise are ones for poor people like Medicaid where making one extra dollar can cut off your benefits.
Sounds a bit glib but this is totally about retailers data mining you. The banks are giving Apple a cut from their side of the fees so it costs the merchants nothing. In fact it lowers their liability because the ApplePay numbers are single use tokens, not credit card numbers. But that means they can't track your purchase history.
Google Wallet (as far as I can tell) does not use one time numbers; I presume that's why they never card about it.
People interested in programming in high-school probably had some nerdy interests as adolescents. Interests that weren't squashed by teachers, peers, or parents as so often is the case.
By the time they are 16 or older it's probably too late. Granted there are certainly exceptions, but don't look for a shift in numbers so soon. It takes a concerted effort over at least a decade to begin moving the needle, then a slow ramp up over the following decade to shift the cultural pressures and expectations. Look at how long it took for geekdom/nerdiness to become accepted.
There's also the whole unique snowflake issue where the first girl to show up at the clubhouse is likely to attract a lot of attention, which can go in a negative direction fairly quickly because young kids are so scared and unsure of themselves (on both sides). Once you regularly have girls/women in programming meet ups, comp-sci courses, etc it becomes much less of an issue.
We know this is just cultural and not some bullshit "maybe girls don't like programming" garbage because the ratio of women in the field was much higher in the past.
I'm not talking about spread out rural areas here, so let's just stop that idiotic argument right up front.
For the top 50 major cities in the US, how can anyone argue that the government is less efficient than private enterprise? It would take maybe 10-20 years and we could get 95% coverage of gigabit fiber to every home in those top 50 cities. Any ISP that wanted to offer service could plug their router in on the back end.
Of course that's the joke about free markets. There is no such thing because political connections will always exist and people will always abuse them to avoid competition if possible (that and duplicating last mile infrastructure is ridiculously expensive, making it a natural monopoly).
Women tend to catch a lot of bullshit from immature men (boys?) online**. That's not news or controversial, except that a small but very vocal subsection of the gaming community reacted to that non-news by freaking out and throwing the world's largest temper tantrum. A small but very vocal subsection of the "social justice" crowd reacted by freaking out as well. Now there's a war between two camps arguing about a bunch of shitthatdidnthappen.txt, while everyone ignores the real issue. The entire thing has been lost behind a cloud of anecdotes, fabrications, and nonsense.
For the vast majority of us (gamers and non-gamers), the take away is this:
1. Don't be a jerk to other people. (Most of us probably have this one nailed already.) 2. If you spot someone being a jerk, call them out, don't just ignore it (The actual part that some people haven't put into practice). 3. Some people (e.g.: women) are far more likely to have had someone be a jerk to them and tell them they don't belong in the gamer community. Unfortunately it takes a concerted effort to overcome one jerk. 4. If someone is trying to do the right thing, then be supportive, don't be a jerk about tone/word choice/etc (probably applies more to the SJ crowd)
By practicing #2 the silent majority of reasonable people can tell the jerks and trolls to get lost. Again, we are talking about very small but extremely loud minorities of the overall communities here.
** Women are not the only group to experience this obviously, but the one we're discussing at the moment because they make up the largest group in terms of (% of all gamers):(harassment) ratio. Women are 40-60% of all gamers, depending on how you choose to define gamer which is another can of worms. Personally I don't have a burning desire to define game to exclude games I don't like but whatever.
Is this a story about iOS malware? Then you should require the answer to this question:
1. DOES IT REQUIRE JAILBREAK?
The only *interesting* iOS malware story is one that does not require jailbreak. I'm not aware of any; there may be some that use known or unknown exploits, but in this case the malware requires the user to have a jailbroken phone. That's not news or "stuff that matters".
You can't unwind the tentacles of the military-industrial complex all at once. You also can't ignore SpaceX and how well they have been doing.
This award is simply acknowledging reality. Boeing has to get some pork to keep the lobbyists happy, SpaceX has to get some money to keep them in the running. It will be a slow shift over time as SpaceX continues to deliver for less money.
SpaceX is playing the game... why do you think they are opening a spaceport in Texas? Gotta spread those jobs around to keep Congress happy.
The funny thing is, you can play that government game and get rich while still delivering an excellent product (SpaceX). It takes several generations of bloated military contracts to teach people to stop working so hard (e.g. Boeing, Lockheed Martin, etc).
Anyone remember that guy who was moving Stonehenge size concrete blocks around his back yard and erecting them in place, single-handedly? To stand them upright he would fill the pit with loose sand and slope one side of the pit, then he kept dumping water in. The mud was soft enough to be compressed and ejected from the pit as the stone slowly sank into place.
If you counter-balance the blocks you can move them fairly easily with just a few people. Or put them on a sled and use logs to roll them. Or flood the basin using Nile flood water and float them into place.
It doesn't take super-geniuses or fancy technology, it just takes dedication and some manpower.
These dumb "How did the Egyptians do it?!?!?!" stories are highly annoying. They did it first and foremost by deciding they were going to do it, trying and failing several times, then perfecting their techniques. Same damn way we got to the moon. The hardest part is step 1.
No, not that DRM, I mean Data Relationship Management. It's designed for taking that manual excel spreadsheet crap and turning it into an actual process. I should know, I integrated the JS engine into it. You can version the data, blend (merge) it, and so on and create workflows.
I don't feel bad mentioning it since I'm leaving Oracle shortly to join a startup, but that's my full disclosure.
For all of you trying to turn this into a men's rights issue, just stop.
You're embarrassing my gender.
Yes there are some unfair things that happen to men. Yes there are some real issues.
But we aren't talking about those issues right here in this post. We're talking about women right now, so let's stick to the topic.
Even as a man I find it highly annoying that the Internet jackass squad has to jump into the middle of every single conversation about women and cry "BUT WHAT ABOUT THE MENZ?!?!". Just fucking stop it already. Write your own blog post about men's issues and submit it to slashdot and we can discuss it over there.
Just how annoying is this person that she generates that kind of hate ?
I have worked with/under/and above women and the only time I have ever seen anyone get this kind of reaction, male or female is when it is provoked or the people perpetrating it were a few punch cards short of a program.
Says the person who's never been publicly visible. No matter who you are, what your personality is, etc there will always be some people out there that don't like you, won't hire you, or otherwise throw negativity your way even if you've done absolutely nothing to earn their hate.
Your reaction is what I've noticed most women get if they even gently bring something up. It's 100% complete denial and blame the messenger.
What I can't figure out is why? I'm a guy, I'm a software developer. I like to work off data. Every single even halfway notable woman I've seen or talked to from conferences in person to online forums and Twitter all tell the same story: massive ongoing campaigns of harassment. The quantity only varies with the topic under discussion. Even the women developers I've worked with who aren't famous have multiple stories of being threatened with rape, patted on the head and dismissed in a meeting with colleagues, having their boobs grabbed at conferences, etc.
True, this behavior may be a small group of bad apples, but by denying the problem exists at all you're enabling those bad apples to continue doing what they do. You don't need to do much to be part of the solution, just admit you're not a woman and don't actually know what women experience when other men aren't watching and that there's so much smoke from almost every single woman in tech it is highly probable there is fire.
Seriously, why can't we just admit women catch a lot of shit just for being women in tech? No one is claiming they shouldn't catch shit for having stupid ideas or writing bad code. No one is claiming you can't ask women out or you have to be some kind of PC choir boy for fear of offending someone. What is this irrational urge to deny, deny, deny?
You can only do this if you have the keys from a computer you have sync'd with previously. That only happens if you enter your passcode then see the "Trust this Computer" prompt on a computer that has iTunes installed and you click "Trust" at the prompt. That creates a set of sync keys that the iOS device will then accept to access the various services.
Some of the stuff he complains about is only enabled for devices used for development or if the device is enrolled in enterprise provisioning. As far as I'm aware, Apple requires that the company purchase the device on the company account to support over the air enrollment in this system so it wouldn't affect personal devices. Even for USB connected devices, you must enter the password/passcode to allow the device to be visible to MDM tools in the first place. Even enabling development mode requires entering the password/passcode.
The one main point he brings up (which I agree with) is Apple needs to provide a way to see the list of computers on your device and remove them.
There are some other more theoretical issues here that Apple should address, but no your iPhone is not running a packet sniffer and will not hand over files to anyone who connects. If your device isn't provisioned for enterprise and has never connected to a PC to sync (the vast majority of iOS devices these days) then as far as I can tell, none of the issues he found are of any use whatsoever.
That was a new $700+ iPad, from the Apple Store in the summer of 2010 about five months after launch.
That's certainly a nerd sort of pedantically correct, but the scope and scale matter a lot. Apple is far, far better about updating old devices. Anyone who tries to argue that they are equivalent to Google on this front is just being an asshole.
Yes, there are a few models that did not get more than two years of OS updates due to hardware limitations (or business reasons if you want to think that) and the iPad you mention is one of those.
If we compare to Android, the majority of all Android devices have *never* seen a software update. A supermajority (if not 90%+) don't get updates a year past their original introduction (meaning people buy them brand new and *never* get a single update).
By contrast, when Apple's famous "goto fail" bug was discovered, they issued a patch for my test device, a four year old iPod Touch 4th generation running the end-of-life iOS 6. The patch was released immediately, at the same time as the patch for the latest hardware.
Tell me... what 4 year old Android devices are getting any OS updates whatsoever?
Honestly... how is this even slightly controversial?
Apple controls their own hardware and software, and they release a limited number of models. Their support burden to release updates for older devices is minimal. They also have the benefit of requiring complete open access from the carriers and have stuck to their guns, forcing carriers to cave in. (I remember the days before Apple, when carriers struck features from devices at their whim, and the only "app" store was the horrible carrier's app store). That's also part of the reason you will never see this on Android - having let the cat out of the bag, they absolutely will not allow anyone else to usurp their control again.
By contrast, Android is developed by one company, has firmware developed by an SoC company, then gets modified for hardware by another, then certified by thousands of individual carriers. If anyone in that chain decides it's too much work, doesn't care, or just drags their feet then you don't get updates.
P.S. Expect carriers (at least in the US) to start injecting boot loader verification into the baseband ROM, then refuse to let your device on the network if it has been rooted. They are fighting tooth and nail to not be a commodity dumb pipe and will try anything. Many of their most profitable customers are iOS users, so they basically can't avoid doing as Apple says (ask NTT DoCoMo or Verizon how resisting Apple's demands worked out). Samsung has no such leverage - one Android phone is, to a rough order of magnitude, as good as another, so when the carriers demand locking and verification you can bet Samsung will comply.
People were happy to install ActiveX controls to "Punch the Monkey" in 1998. Nothing has changed since then.
It's also why the Android security model is a complete joke and always has been.
Any security model that requires users to make perfect security decisions is an automatic failure because there is no "undo", so one mistake after 10 years of perfect vigilence owns your entire machine.
Many end users have IPv6 support. Many servers are capable of it. The issue is mostly the US ISPs and middle-tier transit providers dragging their feet. My systems all support IPv6, my m0n0wall box supports it, but neither of the two ISPs I can buy service from support it. In fact they won't sell it to me even if I offer to pay extra money for it!
My pet theory is that Verizon et al wants to convert IPv4 address space into a "resource" they can buy/sell/trade. A bunch of lawyers and MBAs are rubbing their greedy fingers together, hoping we stay in a "resource shortage" for as long as possible.
We could switch over, probably within a year or two, but it would take a government-imposed mandate to force people to stop screwing around and make the change.
People talking about "bit rot" usually have no clue, and this guy is no exception.
It's extremely unlikely that a file would become silently corrupted on disk. Block devices include per-block checksums, and you either have a read error (maybe he has) or the data read is the same as the data previously written. As far as I know, ZFS doesn't help to recover data from read errors. You would need RAID and / or backups.
I'm afraid it is you who is clueless. Up until ZFS started gaining traction, we all had the luxury of assuming the storage chain was reliable (RAM, SATA controller, cables, drive firmware, read/write heads, oxide layers, etc). Or at least we would know something went wrong.
But it was found that in the actual real world, these systems all silently corrupt data from time to time. The problem is much worse as the volume of data grows because the error rates are basically unchanged, meaning what was once expected to be a random bit flip that would strike one user out of a million once per year is now something that strikes every single user multiple times per year.
I'm not talking theory or what *should* happen. I'm talking about actual real world experience with check summing filesystems that demonstrate, beyond any doubt, that bit rot happens and happens far more frequently than most people believe. Actual experience with ZFS proves that disks can and **will** read back out different bits than what was written silently with no block read errors.
Further, you're increadibly ignorant of now ZFS or BTRFS deal with redundancy. You can setup to mirror blocks, in some cases on a per-file or directory basis, providing protection against corrupting. A background scrubber scans the disk when idle cycles are available and detects and repair corrupting from the available good blocks, or log an error if there are no good mirrors or parity blocks available.
With our new knowledge and experience it is no longer sufficient to cross our fingers and hope for the best. We cannot trust filesystems or the underlying hardware, we must verify.
Full disclosure: I'm a Sprint shareholder (at $2.70, back when people were predicting bankruptcy). I've been following them for some time.
Seems like they've been planning this for some time, and are absolutely dependent on the merger going through, because Sprint has been a complete laggard with LTE deployments, despite their massive modernization effort, and doesn't seem to be trying AT ALL.
Actually Sprint has engaged in a nationwide replacement of all their radios and base stations, including installing fiber to almost all of their towers and using gigabit microwave to connect the towers that can't get fiber to ones that can.
Sprint's major problem with 3G was the outdated backhaul. They were still using T1 lines everywhere, as they first got distracted with Nextel, then sunk money into WiMax hoping it would take off as the next-gen standard **.
I have LTE now in the DFW area and it's fast and works well.
Sprint wasn't allowed to touch Nextel's spectrum, in the 3G days, so they only freed up their big block of 800MHz when LTE was first being deployed. With a little foresight, they could have put 800MHz LTE radios on their towers, and immediately boasted the best LTE coverage. With great LTE coverage, they could save money by neglecting their 3G network, and pretty quickly stop selling phones that are able to fall-back to anything other than 800MHz LTE. After all, LTE can do simultaneous voice and data, even if AT&T and Verizon have been slow to use it, perhaps for the above reasons.
The Nextel 800mhz spectrum is a very small slice; it only has enough space for one 5x5 LTE channel and 1 CDMA voice channel, no more. If they had started making the switch, they would have cut off their existing Nextel customers overnight. Not to mention the fact that LTE wasn't even a standard at the time and no vendors offered LTE tower equipment and no handsets supported it. If they had tried to squeeze a CDMA data channel into that space it would have been painfully slow (far less than the 3MB theoretical max).
FYI: They have been turning on 800mhz and I get noticably improved performance inside elevators and building interiors. The goal is 2.5Ghz for crowded urban areas (where you don't want towers to cover much distance), 1900Mhz for general use, and 800Mhz for indoor areas and rural coverage.
But Sprint was half-hearted about their great opportunity... first saying they'd use some of that 800MHz band to improve 3G coverage, then later retracting that incredibly stupid idea. And while they've promoted their "Network Vision" upgrades for a couple years, they've still only very slowly expanded their LTE coverage to more than the very biggest urban areas, even skipping some major ones.
Actually they completely rebuilt their network, including all backhaul/routing, all radios, all tower equipment. That project is almost complete now. Compare LTE coverage in 2012 to today and you can see a massive difference. You can't do that overnight.
With Nextel, the actual problem was they waited for Qualcomm to add PTT tech (push to talk) to CDMA so they'd have a replacement for the IDEN handsets. Right as that became available, everyone stopped caring and wanting smartphones with data plans. In hindsight, they should have forced Nextel users to switch immediately and stopped running dual networks for no good reason (doubling tower and backhaul costs). They'd have lost the same number of customers in the end but saved a bunch of money.
And they didn't ever leverage the WiMax network they spent so much money deploying. Sure, it's not LTE, but by just releasing a dual WiMax/LTE phone, Sprint could have boasted the biggest "4G" network from day #1, and they could have begun LTE deployments everywhere they didn't have WiMax, giving wider coverage, quicker. Instead, there's no WiMax/LTE phones to be found, and their LTE deployment simply overlap
This is the most childish post I've seen on this story yet.
I am so fucking sick and tired of hearing how there is something intrinsically wrong with me and that I should be feared because I have a Y chromosome.
Objection your honor, asserts facts not in evidence! No one said there was anything wrong with you or that you should be feared. The whole point is women can't know a-priori who the good guys are and the penalty is being raped or killed. If only 1-2% of the guys are the bad apples (probably a bit low), then in a conference of 5000 men there are 50-100 who would do her harm. Do you honestly even give a second thought to someone punching you in the face or stabbing you at a conference? Didn't think so.
Don't want to be abused or get raped? Don't be friends with or date immature, over-entitled, sociopathic bad boys
Seriously? You mashed the keyboard and clicked post to share this bit of drivel with the world?
Get the chip off your shoulder man.
Know what all the nice girls are doing? Quietly trying to navigate the hurdles of life and getting by. Same as the real nice guys (not the fakes who pretend not to be interested in a woman so they can ingratiate themselves).
"ItÃ(TM)s a standard frustrated angry geeky guy manifesto..."
You hang around a weird/scary bunch of angry geeky guys. The "manifesto" becomes far-out well before the murder-intent plans.
What planet do you live on? This is a very common thing among nerdy guys, though slightly less so with the younger generation thankfully.
Why does every single discussion about women in tech immediately result in a bunch of denials, followed by pats on the back (upvotes) as dudes congratulate other dudes on how much of a not-problem there is?
From one white male nerd to the rest of the community: Come on, you can't be serious? Women are treated equally to men in tech? Really? Really?
The evidence is all over. You can see it on twitter, in forum posts, or just by asking any of the female geeks you may know.
To claim otherwise is to endorse a lie. If you've helped clean up your little corner of the world, excellent and good on you! But please don't pretend geek/nerd culture has no issues with women.
* As to what happens in other communities, who gives a shit? That is irrelevant. I'm concerned about our community. We should have better standards, especially those of us who were bullied as kids before the dotcom boom when being geeky started to be seen as at least not completely aberrant behavior.
There are a lot of cultures of violence; not just the one against women. There are a lot of cultures that dehumanize, not just the one that dehumanizes women. The talking heads on this subject take an unjustified position of universal and unique persecution. Men should look at women as people, while simultaniously the talking head saying it doesn't look at men as people.
Except you are taking this off-topic because right now, at this moment, we are discussing women in geek/nerd circles. Specifically a guy who seemed at least a bit nerdy and blamed women for not seeing what a nice guy he was (translated: faker who pretends not to be interested in them romantically). While the vast majority of nerdy guys certainly wouldn't do anything violent, there are many, many thousands of them who share the same attitude: women just won't see what a nice guy he is and it's all their fault for being bitches and whaaaaaaaaaa.
Every single time someone tries to start a discussion about how women are treated in nerd/geek circles, a bunch of my fellow guys jump in and change the conversation to be about something else. Why? Because geek/nerd culture is dominated by white men so we have the largest number of voices.
Just for once, can we have a discussion about women in tech without trying to change the subject? Please? White male geek asking nicely here.
Slashdot Mirror
Even the mere thought that there might be anything of merit on the GG side is tantamount to a rape threat. It's intolerant and childish.
No one said that, you made it up.
Being neutral that people (mostly women) are being repeatedly doxed is definitely a character flaw. Having strangers call your family or coworkers at 3AM and screaming at them is a pretty clear cut case of abuse.
There is definitely one side to the GG controversy that is intolerant and childish, but it isn't the women game developers.
Here's a plan: stop being assholes because someone said some words you don't like. When other people, even ones who agree with you behave this way call them out and tell them to stop.
Maybe then we can have an adult conversation about this stuff.
The worst part is the fact that games are starting to get actual criticism around them is part of the process of moving to accepted art form. No one doxes movie critics or film schools because they dissect trends in movies. The whole GG movement is retarding the progress of games as a socially accepted form of artistic expression.
Apple doesn't enter a market unless they see the potential to charge $1 for a lime that everyone else is selling for 50 cents
Apple's flagship phones sell for about the same as Samsung's. Apple's computers sell for similar prices to PC systems of similar specs.
What Apple doesn't do is sell garbage systems to chase the cheap end of the market. No one complains that BMW won't sell a $10,000 car.
People whine and moan about all the crapware that comes bundled with the latest Dell PC, but that's how they manage to make a profit. Apple just charges a reasonable price for the system instead. It also means Apple has the money to fund R&D and invest in manufacturing technology. When was the last time any of the PC makers innovated on anything?
You must have lost your mind. I used Windows Mobile for years. I had to install task managers to kill apps before they killed my battery. I had to install a registry editor and fiddle with settings to get even basic functionality working. IE on WM was a sick joke. I rebooted the phones every other day just to keep working.
iOS was better in every way. It had a real grown up browser. Shit just worked. The fluid animations were just icing on the cake.
Powerful but flaky is useless.
Why is it that you have to fall back on name-calling? Why not address the actual point?
It is wrong to dox people.
It is wrong to swat people.
Period.
It's ridiculous how much vitriol and harassment is being dished out against random people (mostly women) just because you don't like what they say.
To a letter, every single person I've talked to who is supporting gamergate is spouting lies and half-truths. Maybe there was a legitimate point buried in there, but it's long been lost in the random mob attacks.
Now people are being attacked simply for saying "hey guys, random aggression/doxxing/swatting isn't cool".
It's pure insanity. You should be ashamed of yourself and your comment.
(For the record, I hate the SJW crowd and the Tumblr really-a-dragon-spirit bullshit, but that doesn't make it OK to lash out)
Tax income, and they have reason to make less. Why go get the new job that pays a tad more when 25% of your raise goes to the feds?
This has to be one of the dumbest arguments of all time and I can't imagine anyone who actually has money ever actually operates this way or they're headed for ruin rather quickly.
Of course you take the job; 75% of the extra income goes into your pocket. A business that decides not to sell more widgets at a 75% profit margin because they'd have to spend 25% to sell the widgets (taxes, overhead, etc) is a business headed for bankruptcy.
The only programs in the USA that lead to less overall income when you get a raise are ones for poor people like Medicaid where making one extra dollar can cut off your benefits.
Sounds a bit glib but this is totally about retailers data mining you. The banks are giving Apple a cut from their side of the fees so it costs the merchants nothing. In fact it lowers their liability because the ApplePay numbers are single use tokens, not credit card numbers. But that means they can't track your purchase history.
Google Wallet (as far as I can tell) does not use one time numbers; I presume that's why they never card about it.
People interested in programming in high-school probably had some nerdy interests as adolescents. Interests that weren't squashed by teachers, peers, or parents as so often is the case.
By the time they are 16 or older it's probably too late. Granted there are certainly exceptions, but don't look for a shift in numbers so soon. It takes a concerted effort over at least a decade to begin moving the needle, then a slow ramp up over the following decade to shift the cultural pressures and expectations. Look at how long it took for geekdom/nerdiness to become accepted.
There's also the whole unique snowflake issue where the first girl to show up at the clubhouse is likely to attract a lot of attention, which can go in a negative direction fairly quickly because young kids are so scared and unsure of themselves (on both sides). Once you regularly have girls/women in programming meet ups, comp-sci courses, etc it becomes much less of an issue.
We know this is just cultural and not some bullshit "maybe girls don't like programming" garbage because the ratio of women in the field was much higher in the past.
I'm not talking about spread out rural areas here, so let's just stop that idiotic argument right up front.
For the top 50 major cities in the US, how can anyone argue that the government is less efficient than private enterprise? It would take maybe 10-20 years and we could get 95% coverage of gigabit fiber to every home in those top 50 cities. Any ISP that wanted to offer service could plug their router in on the back end.
Of course that's the joke about free markets. There is no such thing because political connections will always exist and people will always abuse them to avoid competition if possible (that and duplicating last mile infrastructure is ridiculously expensive, making it a natural monopoly).
tl;dr:
Women tend to catch a lot of bullshit from immature men (boys?) online**. That's not news or controversial, except that a small but very vocal subsection of the gaming community reacted to that non-news by freaking out and throwing the world's largest temper tantrum. A small but very vocal subsection of the "social justice" crowd reacted by freaking out as well. Now there's a war between two camps arguing about a bunch of shitthatdidnthappen.txt, while everyone ignores the real issue. The entire thing has been lost behind a cloud of anecdotes, fabrications, and nonsense.
For the vast majority of us (gamers and non-gamers), the take away is this:
1. Don't be a jerk to other people. (Most of us probably have this one nailed already.)
2. If you spot someone being a jerk, call them out, don't just ignore it (The actual part that some people haven't put into practice).
3. Some people (e.g.: women) are far more likely to have had someone be a jerk to them and tell them they don't belong in the gamer community. Unfortunately it takes a concerted effort to overcome one jerk.
4. If someone is trying to do the right thing, then be supportive, don't be a jerk about tone/word choice/etc (probably applies more to the SJ crowd)
By practicing #2 the silent majority of reasonable people can tell the jerks and trolls to get lost. Again, we are talking about very small but extremely loud minorities of the overall communities here.
** Women are not the only group to experience this obviously, but the one we're discussing at the moment because they make up the largest group in terms of (% of all gamers):(harassment) ratio. Women are 40-60% of all gamers, depending on how you choose to define gamer which is another can of worms. Personally I don't have a burning desire to define game to exclude games I don't like but whatever.
Is this a story about iOS malware? Then you should require the answer to this question:
1. DOES IT REQUIRE JAILBREAK?
The only *interesting* iOS malware story is one that does not require jailbreak. I'm not aware of any; there may be some that use known or unknown exploits, but in this case the malware requires the user to have a jailbroken phone. That's not news or "stuff that matters".
Sincerely,
Slashdot Readers
You can't unwind the tentacles of the military-industrial complex all at once. You also can't ignore SpaceX and how well they have been doing.
This award is simply acknowledging reality. Boeing has to get some pork to keep the lobbyists happy, SpaceX has to get some money to keep them in the running. It will be a slow shift over time as SpaceX continues to deliver for less money.
SpaceX is playing the game... why do you think they are opening a spaceport in Texas? Gotta spread those jobs around to keep Congress happy.
The funny thing is, you can play that government game and get rich while still delivering an excellent product (SpaceX). It takes several generations of bloated military contracts to teach people to stop working so hard (e.g. Boeing, Lockheed Martin, etc).
Anyone remember that guy who was moving Stonehenge size concrete blocks around his back yard and erecting them in place, single-handedly? To stand them upright he would fill the pit with loose sand and slope one side of the pit, then he kept dumping water in. The mud was soft enough to be compressed and ejected from the pit as the stone slowly sank into place.
If you counter-balance the blocks you can move them fairly easily with just a few people. Or put them on a sled and use logs to roll them. Or flood the basin using Nile flood water and float them into place.
It doesn't take super-geniuses or fancy technology, it just takes dedication and some manpower.
These dumb "How did the Egyptians do it?!?!?!" stories are highly annoying. They did it first and foremost by deciding they were going to do it, trying and failing several times, then perfecting their techniques. Same damn way we got to the moon. The hardest part is step 1.
No, not that DRM, I mean Data Relationship Management. It's designed for taking that manual excel spreadsheet crap and turning it into an actual process. I should know, I integrated the JS engine into it. You can version the data, blend (merge) it, and so on and create workflows.
I don't feel bad mentioning it since I'm leaving Oracle shortly to join a startup, but that's my full disclosure.
For all of you trying to turn this into a men's rights issue, just stop.
You're embarrassing my gender.
Yes there are some unfair things that happen to men. Yes there are some real issues.
But we aren't talking about those issues right here in this post. We're talking about women right now, so let's stick to the topic.
Even as a man I find it highly annoying that the Internet jackass squad has to jump into the middle of every single conversation about women and cry "BUT WHAT ABOUT THE MENZ?!?!". Just fucking stop it already. Write your own blog post about men's issues and submit it to slashdot and we can discuss it over there.
Just how annoying is this person that she generates that kind of hate ?
I have worked with/under/and above women and the only time I have ever seen anyone get this kind of reaction, male or female is when it is provoked or the people perpetrating it were a few punch cards short of a program.
Says the person who's never been publicly visible. No matter who you are, what your personality is, etc there will always be some people out there that don't like you, won't hire you, or otherwise throw negativity your way even if you've done absolutely nothing to earn their hate.
Your reaction is what I've noticed most women get if they even gently bring something up. It's 100% complete denial and blame the messenger.
What I can't figure out is why? I'm a guy, I'm a software developer. I like to work off data. Every single even halfway notable woman I've seen or talked to from conferences in person to online forums and Twitter all tell the same story: massive ongoing campaigns of harassment. The quantity only varies with the topic under discussion. Even the women developers I've worked with who aren't famous have multiple stories of being threatened with rape, patted on the head and dismissed in a meeting with colleagues, having their boobs grabbed at conferences, etc.
True, this behavior may be a small group of bad apples, but by denying the problem exists at all you're enabling those bad apples to continue doing what they do. You don't need to do much to be part of the solution, just admit you're not a woman and don't actually know what women experience when other men aren't watching and that there's so much smoke from almost every single woman in tech it is highly probable there is fire.
Seriously, why can't we just admit women catch a lot of shit just for being women in tech? No one is claiming they shouldn't catch shit for having stupid ideas or writing bad code. No one is claiming you can't ask women out or you have to be some kind of PC choir boy for fear of offending someone. What is this irrational urge to deny, deny, deny?
There is a huge caveat here:
You can only do this if you have the keys from a computer you have sync'd with previously. That only happens if you enter your passcode then see the "Trust this Computer" prompt on a computer that has iTunes installed and you click "Trust" at the prompt. That creates a set of sync keys that the iOS device will then accept to access the various services.
Some of the stuff he complains about is only enabled for devices used for development or if the device is enrolled in enterprise provisioning. As far as I'm aware, Apple requires that the company purchase the device on the company account to support over the air enrollment in this system so it wouldn't affect personal devices. Even for USB connected devices, you must enter the password/passcode to allow the device to be visible to MDM tools in the first place. Even enabling development mode requires entering the password/passcode.
The one main point he brings up (which I agree with) is Apple needs to provide a way to see the list of computers on your device and remove them.
There are some other more theoretical issues here that Apple should address, but no your iPhone is not running a packet sniffer and will not hand over files to anyone who connects. If your device isn't provisioned for enterprise and has never connected to a PC to sync (the vast majority of iOS devices these days) then as far as I can tell, none of the issues he found are of any use whatsoever.
That was a new $700+ iPad, from the Apple Store in the summer of 2010 about five months after launch.
That's certainly a nerd sort of pedantically correct, but the scope and scale matter a lot. Apple is far, far better about updating old devices. Anyone who tries to argue that they are equivalent to Google on this front is just being an asshole.
Yes, there are a few models that did not get more than two years of OS updates due to hardware limitations (or business reasons if you want to think that) and the iPad you mention is one of those.
If we compare to Android, the majority of all Android devices have *never* seen a software update. A supermajority (if not 90%+) don't get updates a year past their original introduction (meaning people buy them brand new and *never* get a single update).
By contrast, when Apple's famous "goto fail" bug was discovered, they issued a patch for my test device, a four year old iPod Touch 4th generation running the end-of-life iOS 6. The patch was released immediately, at the same time as the patch for the latest hardware.
Tell me... what 4 year old Android devices are getting any OS updates whatsoever?
Honestly... how is this even slightly controversial?
Apple controls their own hardware and software, and they release a limited number of models. Their support burden to release updates for older devices is minimal. They also have the benefit of requiring complete open access from the carriers and have stuck to their guns, forcing carriers to cave in. (I remember the days before Apple, when carriers struck features from devices at their whim, and the only "app" store was the horrible carrier's app store). That's also part of the reason you will never see this on Android - having let the cat out of the bag, they absolutely will not allow anyone else to usurp their control again.
By contrast, Android is developed by one company, has firmware developed by an SoC company, then gets modified for hardware by another, then certified by thousands of individual carriers. If anyone in that chain decides it's too much work, doesn't care, or just drags their feet then you don't get updates.
P.S. Expect carriers (at least in the US) to start injecting boot loader verification into the baseband ROM, then refuse to let your device on the network if it has been rooted. They are fighting tooth and nail to not be a commodity dumb pipe and will try anything. Many of their most profitable customers are iOS users, so they basically can't avoid doing as Apple says (ask NTT DoCoMo or Verizon how resisting Apple's demands worked out). Samsung has no such leverage - one Android phone is, to a rough order of magnitude, as good as another, so when the carriers demand locking and verification you can bet Samsung will comply.
People were happy to install ActiveX controls to "Punch the Monkey" in 1998. Nothing has changed since then.
It's also why the Android security model is a complete joke and always has been.
Any security model that requires users to make perfect security decisions is an automatic failure because there is no "undo", so one mistake after 10 years of perfect vigilence owns your entire machine.
Many end users have IPv6 support. Many servers are capable of it. The issue is mostly the US ISPs and middle-tier transit providers dragging their feet. My systems all support IPv6, my m0n0wall box supports it, but neither of the two ISPs I can buy service from support it. In fact they won't sell it to me even if I offer to pay extra money for it!
My pet theory is that Verizon et al wants to convert IPv4 address space into a "resource" they can buy/sell/trade. A bunch of lawyers and MBAs are rubbing their greedy fingers together, hoping we stay in a "resource shortage" for as long as possible.
We could switch over, probably within a year or two, but it would take a government-imposed mandate to force people to stop screwing around and make the change.
People talking about "bit rot" usually have no clue, and this guy is no exception.
It's extremely unlikely that a file would become silently corrupted on disk. Block devices include per-block checksums, and you either have a read error (maybe he has) or the data read is the same as the data previously written. As far as I know, ZFS doesn't help to recover data from read errors. You would need RAID and / or backups.
I'm afraid it is you who is clueless. Up until ZFS started gaining traction, we all had the luxury of assuming the storage chain was reliable (RAM, SATA controller, cables, drive firmware, read/write heads, oxide layers, etc). Or at least we would know something went wrong.
But it was found that in the actual real world, these systems all silently corrupt data from time to time. The problem is much worse as the volume of data grows because the error rates are basically unchanged, meaning what was once expected to be a random bit flip that would strike one user out of a million once per year is now something that strikes every single user multiple times per year.
I'm not talking theory or what *should* happen. I'm talking about actual real world experience with check summing filesystems that demonstrate, beyond any doubt, that bit rot happens and happens far more frequently than most people believe. Actual experience with ZFS proves that disks can and **will** read back out different bits than what was written silently with no block read errors.
Further, you're increadibly ignorant of now ZFS or BTRFS deal with redundancy. You can setup to mirror blocks, in some cases on a per-file or directory basis, providing protection against corrupting. A background scrubber scans the disk when idle cycles are available and detects and repair corrupting from the available good blocks, or log an error if there are no good mirrors or parity blocks available.
With our new knowledge and experience it is no longer sufficient to cross our fingers and hope for the best. We cannot trust filesystems or the underlying hardware, we must verify.
It's actually a false dichotomy...
The vast majority of software is poorly written, hacked-together junk written by dicks and idiots.
Open Source *can* be slightly less terrible, but it's all still terrible.
This is wildly inaccurate.
Full disclosure: I'm a Sprint shareholder (at $2.70, back when people were predicting bankruptcy). I've been following them for some time.
Seems like they've been planning this for some time, and are absolutely dependent on the merger going through, because Sprint has been a complete laggard with LTE deployments, despite their massive modernization effort, and doesn't seem to be trying AT ALL.
Actually Sprint has engaged in a nationwide replacement of all their radios and base stations, including installing fiber to almost all of their towers and using gigabit microwave to connect the towers that can't get fiber to ones that can.
Sprint's major problem with 3G was the outdated backhaul. They were still using T1 lines everywhere, as they first got distracted with Nextel, then sunk money into WiMax hoping it would take off as the next-gen standard **.
I have LTE now in the DFW area and it's fast and works well.
Sprint wasn't allowed to touch Nextel's spectrum, in the 3G days, so they only freed up their big block of 800MHz when LTE was first being deployed. With a little foresight, they could have put 800MHz LTE radios on their towers, and immediately boasted the best LTE coverage. With great LTE coverage, they could save money by neglecting their 3G network, and pretty quickly stop selling phones that are able to fall-back to anything other than 800MHz LTE. After all, LTE can do simultaneous voice and data, even if AT&T and Verizon have been slow to use it, perhaps for the above reasons.
The Nextel 800mhz spectrum is a very small slice; it only has enough space for one 5x5 LTE channel and 1 CDMA voice channel, no more. If they had started making the switch, they would have cut off their existing Nextel customers overnight. Not to mention the fact that LTE wasn't even a standard at the time and no vendors offered LTE tower equipment and no handsets supported it. If they had tried to squeeze a CDMA data channel into that space it would have been painfully slow (far less than the 3MB theoretical max).
FYI: They have been turning on 800mhz and I get noticably improved performance inside elevators and building interiors. The goal is 2.5Ghz for crowded urban areas (where you don't want towers to cover much distance), 1900Mhz for general use, and 800Mhz for indoor areas and rural coverage.
But Sprint was half-hearted about their great opportunity... first saying they'd use some of that 800MHz band to improve 3G coverage, then later retracting that incredibly stupid idea. And while they've promoted their "Network Vision" upgrades for a couple years, they've still only very slowly expanded their LTE coverage to more than the very biggest urban areas, even skipping some major ones.
Actually they completely rebuilt their network, including all backhaul/routing, all radios, all tower equipment. That project is almost complete now. Compare LTE coverage in 2012 to today and you can see a massive difference. You can't do that overnight.
With Nextel, the actual problem was they waited for Qualcomm to add PTT tech (push to talk) to CDMA so they'd have a replacement for the IDEN handsets. Right as that became available, everyone stopped caring and wanting smartphones with data plans. In hindsight, they should have forced Nextel users to switch immediately and stopped running dual networks for no good reason (doubling tower and backhaul costs). They'd have lost the same number of customers in the end but saved a bunch of money.
And they didn't ever leverage the WiMax network they spent so much money deploying. Sure, it's not LTE, but by just releasing a dual WiMax/LTE phone, Sprint could have boasted the biggest "4G" network from day #1, and they could have begun LTE deployments everywhere they didn't have WiMax, giving wider coverage, quicker. Instead, there's no WiMax/LTE phones to be found, and their LTE deployment simply overlap
This is the most childish post I've seen on this story yet.
I am so fucking sick and tired of hearing how there is something intrinsically wrong with me and that I should be feared because I have a Y chromosome.
Objection your honor, asserts facts not in evidence! No one said there was anything wrong with you or that you should be feared. The whole point is women can't know a-priori who the good guys are and the penalty is being raped or killed. If only 1-2% of the guys are the bad apples (probably a bit low), then in a conference of 5000 men there are 50-100 who would do her harm. Do you honestly even give a second thought to someone punching you in the face or stabbing you at a conference? Didn't think so.
Don't want to be abused or get raped? Don't be friends with or date immature, over-entitled, sociopathic bad boys
Seriously? You mashed the keyboard and clicked post to share this bit of drivel with the world?
Get the chip off your shoulder man.
Know what all the nice girls are doing? Quietly trying to navigate the hurdles of life and getting by. Same as the real nice guys (not the fakes who pretend not to be interested in a woman so they can ingratiate themselves).
DaveV1.0, you are part of the problem.
From one male nerd to another: not acceptable.
"ItÃ(TM)s a standard frustrated angry geeky guy manifesto ..."
You hang around a weird/scary bunch of angry geeky guys. The "manifesto" becomes far-out well before the murder-intent plans.
What planet do you live on? This is a very common thing among nerdy guys, though slightly less so with the younger generation thankfully.
Why does every single discussion about women in tech immediately result in a bunch of denials, followed by pats on the back (upvotes) as dudes congratulate other dudes on how much of a not-problem there is?
From one white male nerd to the rest of the community: Come on, you can't be serious? Women are treated equally to men in tech? Really? Really?
The evidence is all over. You can see it on twitter, in forum posts, or just by asking any of the female geeks you may know.
To claim otherwise is to endorse a lie. If you've helped clean up your little corner of the world, excellent and good on you! But please don't pretend geek/nerd culture has no issues with women.
* As to what happens in other communities, who gives a shit? That is irrelevant. I'm concerned about our community. We should have better standards, especially those of us who were bullied as kids before the dotcom boom when being geeky started to be seen as at least not completely aberrant behavior.
There are a lot of cultures of violence; not just the one against women. There are a lot of cultures that dehumanize, not just the one that dehumanizes women. The talking heads on this subject take an unjustified position of universal and unique persecution. Men should look at women as people, while simultaniously the talking head saying it doesn't look at men as people.
Except you are taking this off-topic because right now, at this moment, we are discussing women in geek/nerd circles. Specifically a guy who seemed at least a bit nerdy and blamed women for not seeing what a nice guy he was (translated: faker who pretends not to be interested in them romantically). While the vast majority of nerdy guys certainly wouldn't do anything violent, there are many, many thousands of them who share the same attitude: women just won't see what a nice guy he is and it's all their fault for being bitches and whaaaaaaaaaa.
Every single time someone tries to start a discussion about how women are treated in nerd/geek circles, a bunch of my fellow guys jump in and change the conversation to be about something else. Why? Because geek/nerd culture is dominated by white men so we have the largest number of voices.
Just for once, can we have a discussion about women in tech without trying to change the subject? Please? White male geek asking nicely here.