Apparently you didn't read the whole article. There's no longer a "master password" with which you can log in as any user, but as an engineer you can still see and modify anything you want.
And, if you read further, the reason why there's no master password is because when you access the site from inside Facebook corpnet you can login _without any password at all_.
Credentials inflation can be solved differently. In my college (not in the US), only about 25% of those who entered were able to complete the 6-year Masters course (the school does not offer Bachelor degrees). Of those 25%, only about 10% graduated with honors. The first two years were brutal carnage where wheat was separated from the chaff by lots and lots of exams and hands-on work.
Push all colleges to raise the bar to the point where most enrollees don't graduate, but those who do are truly the creme of the crop and world class. You need a lot of folks entering college in order to identify the top 20% who do actually want to learn and have the aptitude. Just because your parents can pay $50K a year doesn't mean that schools should be wasting time on you if you're just there to get the diploma. Instead, they could be focusing on the top 20% and really give them the best education they can. No need to drag them down.
I heard from a friend of mine who works there that anyone at Facebook has full access to all data they have. They can check out your private messages, photos, chats, etc. In other words, do things for which you'd be fired immediately if you were at Google or Microsoft.
Vim most definitely can't "do everything"
on
Hacking Vim 7.2
·
· Score: 1
Case in point: I want it to show me a vertical line at 80 chars, like TextMate or GEdit. Not even GVim can do this.:-)
The disks all spin at roughly the same frequency (250Hz for a 15K RPM drive), so you could get some interesting resonance patterns in that frequency band as well as in its harmonics and frequencies that you get when you subtract rotational vibration spectrum of one drive from another. You can even hear these effects if you run two 7200 RPM drives in your desktop in a quiet room (assuming you don't have a dozen fans in the case that some people like to have for some reason).
The solutions is simple - dampen the drives to eliminate high frequency vibration transfer. Better yet, don't use screws to attach your drives at all. Use velcro.
If they want to be utility-like they should bill like utility companies do. Paying $1.12 per gig should mean that if I use 1 gig a month, I should receive $1.12 bill. You can't have your cake and eat it too. If my ISP implements this horseshit, I will close my account the same day and switch to the one that either bills for usage or charges a flat fee, but not both.
"Right" is a relative term. He certainly does what's right for Apple in this case. I think Flash is a GREAT platform for cross-platform casual game development. Bejeweled or Scrabble could essentially deploy the same code across most existing and upcoming platforms if Flash was available everywhere.
Now if you're Apple, this sucks. This, in one fell swoop, eliminates a large chunk of your "platform" advantage because Flash becomes a platform. And I'm fine with Flash being absent from the browser for as long as they let me use whatever development tools I want for apps.
For a developer, though, Apple's move doesn't make sense at all. It's arbitrary and insulting. With Android platform gaining strength, I'm tempted to start looking elsewhere.
I don't think it's Apple who's assembling this set of patents. The lawsuit WILL happen sooner or later, inevitably. If Apple started distributing Theora, this lawsuit would happen within a month, even though they're in MPEG LA. Who knows what their contract with MPEG LA says, too. They might lose the right to distribute h264 as a consequence.
I understand SJ on this one, even if I think his "thoughts on flash" are utter and complete bullshit for the most part.
All we've ever seen were renders. It never WAS real. Show me a single video of it in real life actually running some kind of software (beta or not).
I remember the Longhorn mockup videos, where it demonstrated seamless interop between apps, WinFS, new UI. All of that was shown in about 2003, and it all looked awesome. Like the fucking FUTURE. Yet in the end we got Vista.
Just imagine how different the world would be if Microsoft heeded the advice of its own research arm - Microsoft research. Back in 1999-2000, MSR researchers were chomping at the bit to create a search engine (which at the time would have been FAR more advanced than anything else on the market, including Google). All they needed was budget and a "go ahead", the motivation was made abundantly clear to the executives. Ballmer said "no".
Fast forward five years, and in about 2004-2005 Ballmer realizes that he's getting his ass brutally kicked. But by then not only was Microsoft far behind Google, it was far behind Yahoo as well. And catching up only works as well as PHBs hope if your competition is standing still, which in this case it is not.
The bosses should try the roundtable arrangement. They do nothing but BS all day anyway, might as well choose a layout that's conducive to what they do.
Developers MUST have a door which they can close when they need to concentrate. Anything else is torture and a waste of perfectly good brains.
Things just don't match up. I don't think this is in any way related to the Chinese government.
More likely, hackers have pals within Google China, and those pals helped them install a rootkit and blamed it on Windows and Messenger for the sake of plausible deniability.
And the hackers will probably use whatever vulnerabilities they discover (if any) to send spam on behalf of the compromised user accounts, and maybe pay for stuff using Google Checkout linked credit cards (although it will be tricky to get the sellers to ship it to China:-).
Not sure about Google. They have so many servers, they can keep everything in RAM easily, and their servers are dirt cheap. More likely Bing, whose per-server costs are substantially higher and smaller ad networks whose number of servers is in the hundreds / thousands.
Someone is buying massive quantities of them. That's the only explanation. The enterprise is only now catching up to the benefits of low latency SSD access. You can use fewer servers and serve data with much better latency and throughput for IO bound tasks. Anyone who needs low latency random access to data (ads, search, data warehousing, OLAP, content distribution networks, hotspots in map data serving, etc, etc) are switching to SSDs right now as quickly as their budget allows.
Let the young uns blaze their own trail. Linux is not the pinnacle of technical achievement, and will be even less so within the next decade. There need to be modern alternatives to it, and I'd prefer if they were open source.
I sense inexperience in your question so here's what you will learn as you progress in your career: 1. The only metric that has a direct effect on your compensation is your performance review. Like in that joke about two men and a hungry bear, you don't need to run faster than the bear. You need to run faster than the other guy, which in practical terms is not that hard to do. Optimize for a good review score and you will do well. 2. It is not possible to code anything technically complicated for 40 hours a week for any extended period of time. Anyone who tells you otherwise is either lying to you, or they do the kind of job that a Perl script could easily do instead. 3. Most people around you aren't as smart as they seem. They too screw up and make mistakes and goof off at work. You'll see it eventually. 4. Most people around you work about as hard as you do (which means they too spend 15 hours a week coding, at best). 5. Innovation and creativity trump the 40 hour work week requirement. If your output is worth it, your employer will be happy. If not, even 60 hour work week won't make up for its deficiencies.
Frankly, I think tablet-like appliances with touch input are going to be far more important within three years than they are today. HTC is uniquely positioned to take advantage of that opportunity.
Now, an obvious thing to do for HTC would be to make a tablet based on Android. But that would only bring another Apple lawsuit. Now, if they buy Palm, Apple will even withdraw the lawsuit they've already filed, because Palm has a patent portfolio Apple can't win against. WebOS is a superior OS, IMO. Pissing off Steve Jobs by using it would be just icing on the cake.
I'd say it looks better than iPhone OS, and that says something. I hope HTC (or Lenovo, or someone else competent) buys them (and their substantial patent portfolio) and makes an iPad competitor based on WebOS, just to piss off Apple. Steve Jobs will be livid -- any lawsuit will only bring an equal and opposite countersuit, and the software is Apple quality (indeed, much of it was written by ex-Apple engineers and designed by ex-Apple designers), which makes it twice as painful.
Another thing to investigate is non-competes, and non-solicits. They're illegal in CA, but perfectly legal in most other states. Basically it is illegal for you to use your knowledge in the area where you have the most expertise at the moment. WTF?
Currently, developers use the in-application ads to monetize free applications. This means that the only people who will see those apps are freeloaders who don't want to pay $0.99 for the full version of the app. Those folks won't tap on the ads, and even if they do, they won't buy stuff. Epic fail.
Afghanistan is nothing but fucking mud huts, and $500B a year US Army can't keep it stable. Land wars are a thing of the past.
Suppose within 10 years the US military has ABM system that can actually shut down ABMs (they're not quite there yet). This means that in a global armed conflict they have no deterrent. This, in turn, means they can tell Russia what to do under the threat of a nuclear attack. Not a very comfortable place for Russia to be in.
Slashdot Mirror
Apparently you didn't read the whole article. There's no longer a "master password" with which you can log in as any user, but as an engineer you can still see and modify anything you want.
And, if you read further, the reason why there's no master password is because when you access the site from inside Facebook corpnet you can login _without any password at all_.
Credentials inflation can be solved differently. In my college (not in the US), only about 25% of those who entered were able to complete the 6-year Masters course (the school does not offer Bachelor degrees). Of those 25%, only about 10% graduated with honors. The first two years were brutal carnage where wheat was separated from the chaff by lots and lots of exams and hands-on work.
Push all colleges to raise the bar to the point where most enrollees don't graduate, but those who do are truly the creme of the crop and world class. You need a lot of folks entering college in order to identify the top 20% who do actually want to learn and have the aptitude. Just because your parents can pay $50K a year doesn't mean that schools should be wasting time on you if you're just there to get the diploma. Instead, they could be focusing on the top 20% and really give them the best education they can. No need to drag them down.
I heard from a friend of mine who works there that anyone at Facebook has full access to all data they have. They can check out your private messages, photos, chats, etc. In other words, do things for which you'd be fired immediately if you were at Google or Microsoft.
Case in point: I want it to show me a vertical line at 80 chars, like TextMate or GEdit. Not even GVim can do this. :-)
The disks all spin at roughly the same frequency (250Hz for a 15K RPM drive), so you could get some interesting resonance patterns in that frequency band as well as in its harmonics and frequencies that you get when you subtract rotational vibration spectrum of one drive from another. You can even hear these effects if you run two 7200 RPM drives in your desktop in a quiet room (assuming you don't have a dozen fans in the case that some people like to have for some reason).
The solutions is simple - dampen the drives to eliminate high frequency vibration transfer. Better yet, don't use screws to attach your drives at all. Use velcro.
If they want to be utility-like they should bill like utility companies do. Paying $1.12 per gig should mean that if I use 1 gig a month, I should receive $1.12 bill. You can't have your cake and eat it too. If my ISP implements this horseshit, I will close my account the same day and switch to the one that either bills for usage or charges a flat fee, but not both.
"Right" is a relative term. He certainly does what's right for Apple in this case. I think Flash is a GREAT platform for cross-platform casual game development. Bejeweled or Scrabble could essentially deploy the same code across most existing and upcoming platforms if Flash was available everywhere.
Now if you're Apple, this sucks. This, in one fell swoop, eliminates a large chunk of your "platform" advantage because Flash becomes a platform. And I'm fine with Flash being absent from the browser for as long as they let me use whatever development tools I want for apps.
For a developer, though, Apple's move doesn't make sense at all. It's arbitrary and insulting. With Android platform gaining strength, I'm tempted to start looking elsewhere.
I don't think it's Apple who's assembling this set of patents. The lawsuit WILL happen sooner or later, inevitably. If Apple started distributing Theora, this lawsuit would happen within a month, even though they're in MPEG LA. Who knows what their contract with MPEG LA says, too. They might lose the right to distribute h264 as a consequence.
I understand SJ on this one, even if I think his "thoughts on flash" are utter and complete bullshit for the most part.
All we've ever seen were renders. It never WAS real. Show me a single video of it in real life actually running some kind of software (beta or not).
I remember the Longhorn mockup videos, where it demonstrated seamless interop between apps, WinFS, new UI. All of that was shown in about 2003, and it all looked awesome. Like the fucking FUTURE. Yet in the end we got Vista.
I doubt he knows numbers either. He's way over his head in this, and he just doesn't want to (or can't) admit it.
Just imagine how different the world would be if Microsoft heeded the advice of its own research arm - Microsoft research. Back in 1999-2000, MSR researchers were chomping at the bit to create a search engine (which at the time would have been FAR more advanced than anything else on the market, including Google). All they needed was budget and a "go ahead", the motivation was made abundantly clear to the executives. Ballmer said "no".
Fast forward five years, and in about 2004-2005 Ballmer realizes that he's getting his ass brutally kicked. But by then not only was Microsoft far behind Google, it was far behind Yahoo as well. And catching up only works as well as PHBs hope if your competition is standing still, which in this case it is not.
The bosses should try the roundtable arrangement. They do nothing but BS all day anyway, might as well choose a layout that's conducive to what they do.
Developers MUST have a door which they can close when they need to concentrate. Anything else is torture and a waste of perfectly good brains.
Things just don't match up. I don't think this is in any way related to the Chinese government.
More likely, hackers have pals within Google China, and those pals helped them install a rootkit and blamed it on Windows and Messenger for the sake of plausible deniability.
And the hackers will probably use whatever vulnerabilities they discover (if any) to send spam on behalf of the compromised user accounts, and maybe pay for stuff using Google Checkout linked credit cards (although it will be tricky to get the sellers to ship it to China :-).
Not sure about Google. They have so many servers, they can keep everything in RAM easily, and their servers are dirt cheap. More likely Bing, whose per-server costs are substantially higher and smaller ad networks whose number of servers is in the hundreds / thousands.
Someone is buying massive quantities of them. That's the only explanation. The enterprise is only now catching up to the benefits of low latency SSD access. You can use fewer servers and serve data with much better latency and throughput for IO bound tasks. Anyone who needs low latency random access to data (ads, search, data warehousing, OLAP, content distribution networks, hotspots in map data serving, etc, etc) are switching to SSDs right now as quickly as their budget allows.
Let the young uns blaze their own trail. Linux is not the pinnacle of technical achievement, and will be even less so within the next decade. There need to be modern alternatives to it, and I'd prefer if they were open source.
I sense inexperience in your question so here's what you will learn as you progress in your career:
1. The only metric that has a direct effect on your compensation is your performance review. Like in that joke about two men and a hungry bear, you don't need to run faster than the bear. You need to run faster than the other guy, which in practical terms is not that hard to do. Optimize for a good review score and you will do well.
2. It is not possible to code anything technically complicated for 40 hours a week for any extended period of time. Anyone who tells you otherwise is either lying to you, or they do the kind of job that a Perl script could easily do instead.
3. Most people around you aren't as smart as they seem. They too screw up and make mistakes and goof off at work. You'll see it eventually.
4. Most people around you work about as hard as you do (which means they too spend 15 hours a week coding, at best).
5. Innovation and creativity trump the 40 hour work week requirement. If your output is worth it, your employer will be happy. If not, even 60 hour work week won't make up for its deficiencies.
Frankly, I think tablet-like appliances with touch input are going to be far more important within three years than they are today. HTC is uniquely positioned to take advantage of that opportunity.
Now, an obvious thing to do for HTC would be to make a tablet based on Android. But that would only bring another Apple lawsuit. Now, if they buy Palm, Apple will even withdraw the lawsuit they've already filed, because Palm has a patent portfolio Apple can't win against. WebOS is a superior OS, IMO. Pissing off Steve Jobs by using it would be just icing on the cake.
I'd say it looks better than iPhone OS, and that says something. I hope HTC (or Lenovo, or someone else competent) buys them (and their substantial patent portfolio) and makes an iPad competitor based on WebOS, just to piss off Apple. Steve Jobs will be livid -- any lawsuit will only bring an equal and opposite countersuit, and the software is Apple quality (indeed, much of it was written by ex-Apple engineers and designed by ex-Apple designers), which makes it twice as painful.
Yes. Unsigned.
Larry, can we get signed types, properties and closures now, please?
Another thing to investigate is non-competes, and non-solicits. They're illegal in CA, but perfectly legal in most other states. Basically it is illegal for you to use your knowledge in the area where you have the most expertise at the moment. WTF?
Because they're _searching for stuff_, maybe? :-)
Currently, developers use the in-application ads to monetize free applications. This means that the only people who will see those apps are freeloaders who don't want to pay $0.99 for the full version of the app. Those folks won't tap on the ads, and even if they do, they won't buy stuff. Epic fail.
Afghanistan is nothing but fucking mud huts, and $500B a year US Army can't keep it stable. Land wars are a thing of the past.
Suppose within 10 years the US military has ABM system that can actually shut down ABMs (they're not quite there yet). This means that in a global armed conflict they have no deterrent. This, in turn, means they can tell Russia what to do under the threat of a nuclear attack. Not a very comfortable place for Russia to be in.