If you're a seasoned systems software engineer whose background is entirely in software engineering, my first question will be: what that is new can you bring to us?
How about, Able to do the fucking job without a "long probationary period... while training is provided"? That do it for ya, hmm? No, no, you'd rather have your interest "piqued" than get a qualified boring individual to do the job your employer wants done.
I realize what we do can often look like magic to those with no math or computer skills, but really, don't insult me by explaining how your AP reconciliation process differs from every other special unique snowflake of an accounting department.
I especially value good ethics - this one's underrated by many companies
No, you don't. You value someone who looks ethical, but when the CFO tells him to "interpret" the numbers more favorable, he shuts up and does as directed. You value someone who, when your DB breaks, he puts you at the head of the queue instead of following standard prioritization rules for the company. In short, just like all the other HR folks who tout "diversity" and "ethics" - You want a shiny facade, but couldn't care less about the reality.
if you're here to make a quick buck and leave, or to use your colleagues as stepping stones, I'll try damn hard to make sure you're never hired, or quickly removed.
Although they exist, I find it somewhat funny you would mention that in the context of engineers. Unlike in the HR and corporate food chains, engineers have a problem in exactly the opposite direction - When management (almost without exception) proves itself as incompetent asshats, we get the job done despite (sometimes in direct contradiction to) what management thinks it wants. On the whole, engineers have a massively overdeveloped sense of meritocracy, unfortunately an ideal largely incompatible with "obey the most expensive suit".
I agree completely with what you wrote here, but the linked article doesn't describe that. It specifically refers to shunning revolutionary changes in favor of incremental ones, citing the classic example of making C++ backward compatible with vanilla C (with a side-trip to bemoan the failure of Lisp).
If you want to fix their broken spreadsheet problem, maybe they should use SUMIFS
Heh, SUMIFS. Not IFSUMS. Duh, thanks. And no, I didn't charge her anything - I did say "friend", not "client". Just doing her a favor, took a whopping five minutes of my time.
Although my solution and insight was worth much more than yours.
You can approach any given problem in two different ways:
You can work with the conditions of the problem as given and find a solution under those conditions, or,
you can whine about uncontrollable factors and make excuses for why you can't help.
More to the point, my solution did work, as implemented; I gave that as an example where TFA's "worse" solution would have beaten a "better" one - I used a function unavailable in an (unexpected) 11 year old version of Office, and as a result, it broke.
Once upon a time, I wrote "clever" code. Truly beautiful, almost poetic in its elegance. Note I said "elegance", not "simplicity".
I don't know who to credit for this (probably read it on Slashdot), but a single perspective completely changed the way I view coding:
It takes substantially more effort to debug than it does to write code in the first place. If, therefore, I write code as clever as I possibly can - I can't effectively debug it (without investing far more time than I should) if something changes or goes wrong.
Now, that doesn't mean "worse is better"... I can still produce good code; I can even still write the occasional clever function when performance demands it. But for the 99.9% of code that has almost no impact whatsoever on performance, I can just say "if X then Y else Z" rather than using cool-but-cryptic bitmasking tricks to avoid executing a conditional instruction. And hey, whaddya know, I can actually read it at a glance six month later, rather than praying I didn't forget to update my comments.
On the flip side of this, a few weeks ago I helped a friend put together a spreadsheet with a few complex formulas in it. I love me some IFSUMS, arguably the best new feature of Excel in the past decade. Note that clause, "in the past decade". This weekend, she called me because her nice helpful spreadsheet wouldn't work - On Excel 2003. It seems that while 2003 has IFSUM, MS didn't add IFSUMS until 2007. The choice of one seemingly harmless backward-compatibility-breaking function made the whole thing useless in a given context. Now, in fairness, I can hear you all screaming "just upgrade already!"... But in the real world, well, we still have people using Windows 95.
"Huge amounts of water" doesn't mean huge amounts of potable water. Our planet has no shortage of water (you could more accurately say we have a shortage of land). We just can't directly consume most of it without energy-intensive processing first.
Fracking doesn't require clean water. It can use salt water, grey water, swamp water, runoff water, pretty much anything. Now, that said, in the places currently enjoying a fracking boom (no pun intended), the easiest water to get comes from nice clean freshwater aquifers. But it doesn't need to.
I find it simply mind-boggling that so many environmentally conscious people (and I say that as someone who considers himself one) hate the most environmentally friendly sources of energy we have: Nuclear, wind, solar, water, and to a lesser degree, natural gas. Yes, each has its own problems, some of which we can solve through regulation, some through further tech advancement, some through telling millionaire weenies on Cape Cod to go fuck themselves. But as long as the cheapest (by a good margin) alternative consists of the dirtiest fuel ever discovered by mankind (coal)... Maybe we should take just a teensy step back and pick our battles a bit better, hmm?
Boo fricking hoo. Learn to develop a game with what you have and quit yer bitching.
More to the point - When you have the luxury of coding for a very specific platform (ie, a gaming console with a known hardware configuration and known performance profile), you have no excuse for failing to adjust your resource demands accordingly. And if you just can't physically dial down the load enough to run well on platform X - You don't release the goddamned game for platform X.
Re-read that last point, because it nicely translates Pontbriand's whining into plain English: "We promise not to turn down any chance to grab your cash, no matter how shitty the experience for our loyal customers".
Don't forget weatherbug, realplayer, every "coupon" program in existence, Sony rootkits, Diablo 3... I could go on.
"Malware" has come packaged with semi-useful software right since the beginning. Even the most naive of grandmas don't typically install standalone viruses deliberately.
I agree with you in spirit - and in fact, do the same thing - but let's admit what a piss-poor solution that sounds like.
Instead of having a moderately accurate measurement of how much fuel our cars have remaining, we find it more reliable to make all sorts of assumptions about driving conditions and weather and long-term averages and whether or not we "topped off" that last 25 cents on our last fill... And then use our subsequent driving distance to guess how much further we can go before we run out. Pretty frickin' sad, really.:)
Worse, my car can somehow magically tell me my instantaneous and average MPG (and at least for the average, gets it pretty dead-on), meaning it knows the exact amount of fuel it has sucked out of the tank since my last refill (which fact it reliably uses to automatically reset some of the running stats it tracks)... Yet it still can't give me a more useful readout than eight illuminated dots??? Free hint, auto engineers of the world - 13 +/- x gallons minus 8.74125 gallons means I have 4.25875 +/- x gallons left; measure the real-world range of x to make sure no one runs out before hitting zero, and give me a damned linear gas gauge!
You know, AC has a point there. It seems that every slightly larger framework coming to Linux gets opposed.
I couldn't tell you quite when it happened, but at some point in my life, I slowly came to realize that the tools I use on a daily basis exist to perform a specific set of tasks. The tool has value for what it does for me, not for its own inherent newness or shininess.
Whether I use systemd or init really makes no difference; whether I use Gnome or KDE, completely irrelevant to whether or not I can open a browser, a music player, and my IDE of choice. BUT! for the same reason, I have a strong motivation not to make huge changes just for the sake of "new", until those changes will allow me to perform my set of tasks better or faster or easier.
Yes, I can appreciate the need to have a functional level of knowledge about the alternatives to what I use on a day-to-day basis - How else can I evaluate when "new" will make me faster/better/etc? I also, however, believe in mastering the tools I use most often. And that takes time. If I'll eventually save five minutes a day by using Gnome instead of KDE, but it takes me a year of fifteen wasted minutes a day mastering the environment, then unless I stick with Gnome for four years, I don't even break even. Obviously, an overly-simplified example, but I see this problem all too often in fresh-out-of-college coworkers: They'll switch to something "better" every month or two, without any consideration of the payback period on their time invested, giving a net negative ROI.
So what they are saying is that anyone outside the US can freely hack US servers without a warrant too. Surely they don't expect special treatment?
Dingdingding, we have a winner!
No doubt, China and Russia will react to this announcement with enthusiasm. "Chinese military hacking DOD computers?" No no no, of course not - They just needed to gather some evidence of "blatantly criminal" activity.
More seriously, that one phrase bothers me more than the entire rest of the post... When we allow our government to substitute "blatantly criminal" for "probable cause", we may as well just save time and install government cameras in our living rooms now.
"So why do you need this warrant?" "Come on, man, we know he did it!" "Okay, here you go!"
Why? Facebook has a database of our explicitly stated interests, which many users fill out voluntarily. Facebook sees what we post about. It knows who we interact with. It counts our likes, monitors our comments and even follows us around the Web. Yet, while the degree of personal data collection is extreme, the advertising seems totally random.
"Facebook sees what we post about" - You have your answer right there.
Do you more often post:
"Hey, check out my new iPhone", after which you'll receive a deluge of ads for phones and carriers... Or...
"Gee I sure could use a new mouse - Should I go with a Logitech LS1, a Microsoft Natural 6000, or the el-cheapo HP X4000?".
In my experience, most people do the former, not the latter, while basing ads off products you mention would only work well for the latter.
Of course, all that assumes you even post about yourself. You might mention that your mother needs a new car (resulting in a flood of car ads that do you no good), or your cats, or just random news clips you saw.
Generally speaking, grades do indicate something. Sometimes good grades mean the student is very bright and picks up things rapidly. Sometimes good grades indicate a strong work ethic. Both of these are qualities that employers would want in future hires.
Most importantly, grades (and the other traditional means of evaluating prospective students) indicate that the student can pay attention and follow directions - and will.
Employers don't give two shakes of a rat's fuzzy butt about whether or not you might hypothetically have excelled in a different universe. You live in this universe, and this universe values people with measurable skill sets who can and will get their job done. Simple as that.
Does the current system discriminate against a handful of niche "alternative learning style" students? Yep, it sure does - And so will every job you ever get! College admissions, therefore, does its best to predict success in your college career as well as your future employment. "Character"? Fuck character. My boss, and his boss, and his boss' boss, want me in a chair writing code; they doen't care if I spend 100% of my income and free time on hookers n' blow.
Now, if you don't like that, don't blame the College Board, simply go to any of the thousands of non-traditional (and non-accredited) institutions of higher learning available. Just don't complain when you discover that you can't get a job after completing your studies there.
I'll be happy once the world learns to build systems that don't break on the apostrophe in my last name.
You would, then, love using any software I write. I absolutely promise it won't break on an apostrophe. It won't break on a semicolon. It won't even break on foreign vowels or unicode...
Because I strips all that crap out, only allowing Latin1 [a-zA-Z]. I do, however, preserve any random-case names you insist on using, because while unbearably pretentious, they at least don't break anything.
And yeah, call me an asshole (though you have to put Australia ahead of me, they've outright banned diacritics in names by law) - But little Bobby Tables won't break my code. To hell with input validation, people constantly come up with new ways to enter complete garbage (and on forms they want to fill out, not talking about fake email addresses here). Just sanitize it all and call it good; and if you end up named Jrmy Obrian, blame your parents, not me.
/ BTW, all those O-apostrophe names in Irish? You've already accepted a corruption of your name, so lose the purist BS. That actually comes from Anglicized Gaelic o- or O-acute, with the diacritic shifted slightly to the right. The former means "from" the latter means "grandson"
I find it strange that we talk about discrimination in high tech, when we have literally dozens of fields over 90% male, with and only a handful of niche tech fields even in the top 100. Hell, from that chart, we have sixty-one fields more male-dominated than CNC programmers (at 93.5%), the highest of the male-dominated tech fields. And general purpose coder only pushes 78.5%, with over a hundred non-tech fields higher on the list.
Yes, Slashdot has the byline "news for nerds". Until I start hearing people whine about why we don't see more female pipefitters, however, fuck right off about the "culture" in IT as somehow magically the core of the problem.
More relevantly, if we have a problem, that problem comes from human culture, not tech culture. Women don't do construction and men don't teach (at least not below the HS level), simple as that. However - And this counts as the simple most important point you will read in this entire discussion - They can! If a woman wants to get trained as a master pipefitter, she could have a well-paying job a week after completing her apprenticeship (usually 4-5 years); and even the apprenticeship phase doesn't suck all that bad, they make enough to live on in most of the US.
But we - as a species, not as a niche community of high-tech misogynists - view fitting pipe, welding, roofing, well-drilling, etc as "dirty" jobs that women don't want to do. We view dealing with disgusting snotty little 6YOs, much less trying to cram facts into their head, as something males don't want to do. Does that come from the fact that each side really doesn't want to do "off-gender" jobs, or the fact that society has conditioned us to believe that?
Short answer: it doesn't matter. Do what you want. If, however, you discover that the conditions in your chosen profession don't agree with your personality, don't blame the job, blame what you see in the mirror.
Well, because the US has a set of requirements for defining the circumstances under which the government can search private property, and the scope of that search if allowed.
The FBI has effectively just admitted that they had no legitimate way of knowing that they had probable cause. This means one of two things - They broke the law to obtain that evidence (the police can't search you to get the evidence they need to get approval to search you); or more likely, they lied about the real origin of their evidence (ie, the NSA told them "go here and do this, and make up a good cover story").
On the one hand, anyone who gets it now will get the best medical care physically possible on the planet, though the currently available treatments don't have a high enough success rate to give me the warm-n'-fuzzies.
On the other, we have three (known) pharmaceutical companies busting their butts to bring a cure to market, and I'd expect quite a few more putting huge resources into "fling everything at the wall and see what sticks" R&D. So in six months, we might actually have a high-success rate treatment for it. But, in six months we might have 1.5 billion people in who need it.
Really a tough call... Better to get it now, or wait until it becomes a pandemic in the hopes a better treatment will exist.
Profiles for pets, WTF? Can teddy bears have profiles too? Are the pets allowed to have political opinions?
"My" Facebook page exists solely for my pets. And yes, they have political opinions (they favor absolute monarchy justified by the doctrine of the Divine Right of Cats).
See, I have zero interest in what my 6000 closest "friends" do. I have zero interest in sharing details of the texture of my morning bowel movement with half the planet (or even just with those 6000 "friends"). I have zero interest in seeing targeted ads based on my preferred types of breakfast cereal or cars or sex toys.
Far, far too many people (and even many small businesses), however, have Facebook pages as their primary online presence. Seeing their "public" pages doesn't require "friend"ing them, but it does require having a Facebook login. As a result, I do have use for a functional Facebook login; I just have no interest whatsoever in the entire fad of "social" networking.
Thus, my cats / teddy bear / couch has a Facebook page. If Facebook really decides to crack down on the 80% of users with fake profile info, hey, they own the site and can make that decision. And honestly, I would love that to happen, because I would no longer need a Facebook, because they would no longer any content worth remembering yet another password to access.
He thinks he is pointing out absurdity of gun control laws, but that's because he is (or appears to be, I don't actually know him) emotionally invested into getting rid of all gun control laws.
Agreed, though his motive has no relevance to the fact of his success.
Gun control advocates should be very pleased, because now governments have a much more urgent reason to think about how the law might work with 3D-printed weapons.
I honestly don't mean this insultingly, but that response shows that you have completely missed the point. The law won't work with 3D printers, or even just cheap CNC machines - Not now, not ever.
To date, only expense and practicality have made the entire concept of "gun control" even remotely feasible. Expense, in that CNCs cost a lot of money, and practicality, in that even though you could technically make these things by hand, it would take hundreds of hours of tedious work. Keep in mind that a cheap modern drill-press makes every tool Samuel Colt had available look like a Fisher-Price "My First Toolbox" by comparison.
For the law to patch this "loophole" requires nothing less than a complete ban on 3D printers, while artificially keeping the price of CNCs and similar technology much too high for the average Joe's garage workshop. Okay, let's say the law actually does that - The joke just goes one level of meta. We already have people building their own 3D printers. Do you next plan to regulate all stepper motors, require registration and proof-of-destruction for every inkjet printer sold, and ban Arduino boards?
Yes, the law absolutely needs to come to terms what it means to live in a world where anyone can manufacture any sufficiently small physical object on a whim. "Shut... Down... EVERYTHING!" ain't it.
But in the mind of libertarian nutball Cody Wilson, lawmakers will just say "Welp, he beat us, time to pack up and go home, I'll see if I can charter an APC for us since it's gonna be like Somalia out there. This is the worst day since the basic theoretical disproof and repeated cracks of DRM made us give up on digital copyright issues."
Not quite - He knows perfectly well that the haplophobes won't just pack it in and go home, just as the anti-DRM crowd know that Sony won't just give up and release everything without adding in-house developed viruses to them.
More importantly, he does what he does to point out absurdity. CA's legislators will pass a band-aid over this particular reality-hack, and Wilson will find a way to mercilessly mock that, as well. The cycle can pretty much continue indefinitely; but most importantly, at each step, they look like fools and he has yet again made his point.
In many languages there's only one word for both doves and pigeons. In Dutch it's both duif, in German it's both Taube, in Japanese it's both hato, etc.
...While in English, we have two equally nonspecific words for the same group of birds.
Taxonomically, doves and pigeons don't refer to distinct species, they both refer to any of hundreds of members of the family Columbidae. At best, you can say that doves "tend" to look smaller and lighter-colored
For the car analogy, we tend to refer to the largest passenger vehicles as SUVs and the smallest cars as subcompacts... Yet neither word actually refers to a specific nonoverlapping set of models, and we actually have cars advertised as subcompact SUVs.
During Windows 8 testing, Microsoft said that they had data showing Start Menu usage had dropped, but it seems that the tools they were using at the time weren't as evolved as the new 'Asimov' monitor.
No, Microsoft, wrong conclusion. See, your data told you the $deity's own truth, that start menu usage has dropped. Most people pretty much use desktop shortcuts 90% of the time, so your stupid fisher-price jolly candylike tiles may look like crap but don't seriously impact that specific usage pattern. More accurate data collection won't change that.
What your data didn't tell you? That remaining 10% of the time doesn't just mean people "forgot" they had a shortcut and decided to use the start menu for the fun of it. Using the start menu drastically beats having to hunt down actual executables somewhere on the HDD, particularly for administrative-type tasks that might go six folders deep into the Windows directory, and have insanely long command-line arguments as a bonus (ie, a lot of the control panel apps).
Data doesn't equal knowledge. The stats can tell you "how often", but not "why".
Slashdot Mirror
If you're a seasoned systems software engineer whose background is entirely in software engineering, my first question will be: what that is new can you bring to us?
... while training is provided"? That do it for ya, hmm? No, no, you'd rather have your interest "piqued" than get a qualified boring individual to do the job your employer wants done.
How about, Able to do the fucking job without a "long probationary period
I realize what we do can often look like magic to those with no math or computer skills, but really, don't insult me by explaining how your AP reconciliation process differs from every other special unique snowflake of an accounting department.
I especially value good ethics - this one's underrated by many companies
No, you don't. You value someone who looks ethical, but when the CFO tells him to "interpret" the numbers more favorable, he shuts up and does as directed. You value someone who, when your DB breaks, he puts you at the head of the queue instead of following standard prioritization rules for the company. In short, just like all the other HR folks who tout "diversity" and "ethics" - You want a shiny facade, but couldn't care less about the reality.
if you're here to make a quick buck and leave, or to use your colleagues as stepping stones, I'll try damn hard to make sure you're never hired, or quickly removed.
Although they exist, I find it somewhat funny you would mention that in the context of engineers. Unlike in the HR and corporate food chains, engineers have a problem in exactly the opposite direction - When management (almost without exception) proves itself as incompetent asshats, we get the job done despite (sometimes in direct contradiction to) what management thinks it wants. On the whole, engineers have a massively overdeveloped sense of meritocracy, unfortunately an ideal largely incompatible with "obey the most expensive suit".
Yeah, we probably wouldn't get along well.
I agree completely with what you wrote here, but the linked article doesn't describe that. It specifically refers to shunning revolutionary changes in favor of incremental ones, citing the classic example of making C++ backward compatible with vanilla C (with a side-trip to bemoan the failure of Lisp).
If you want to fix their broken spreadsheet problem, maybe they should use SUMIFS
Heh, SUMIFS. Not IFSUMS. Duh, thanks. And no, I didn't charge her anything - I did say "friend", not "client". Just doing her a favor, took a whopping five minutes of my time.
Although my solution and insight was worth much more than yours.
You can approach any given problem in two different ways:
You can work with the conditions of the problem as given and find a solution under those conditions, or,
you can whine about uncontrollable factors and make excuses for why you can't help.
More to the point, my solution did work, as implemented; I gave that as an example where TFA's "worse" solution would have beaten a "better" one - I used a function unavailable in an (unexpected) 11 year old version of Office, and as a result, it broke.
Once upon a time, I wrote "clever" code. Truly beautiful, almost poetic in its elegance. Note I said "elegance", not "simplicity".
I don't know who to credit for this (probably read it on Slashdot), but a single perspective completely changed the way I view coding:
It takes substantially more effort to debug than it does to write code in the first place. If, therefore, I write code as clever as I possibly can - I can't effectively debug it (without investing far more time than I should) if something changes or goes wrong.
Now, that doesn't mean "worse is better"... I can still produce good code; I can even still write the occasional clever function when performance demands it. But for the 99.9% of code that has almost no impact whatsoever on performance, I can just say "if X then Y else Z" rather than using cool-but-cryptic bitmasking tricks to avoid executing a conditional instruction. And hey, whaddya know, I can actually read it at a glance six month later, rather than praying I didn't forget to update my comments.
On the flip side of this, a few weeks ago I helped a friend put together a spreadsheet with a few complex formulas in it. I love me some IFSUMS, arguably the best new feature of Excel in the past decade. Note that clause, "in the past decade". This weekend, she called me because her nice helpful spreadsheet wouldn't work - On Excel 2003. It seems that while 2003 has IFSUM, MS didn't add IFSUMS until 2007. The choice of one seemingly harmless backward-compatibility-breaking function made the whole thing useless in a given context. Now, in fairness, I can hear you all screaming "just upgrade already!"... But in the real world, well, we still have people using Windows 95.
but requires huge amounts of water.
"Huge amounts of water" doesn't mean huge amounts of potable water. Our planet has no shortage of water (you could more accurately say we have a shortage of land). We just can't directly consume most of it without energy-intensive processing first.
Fracking doesn't require clean water. It can use salt water, grey water, swamp water, runoff water, pretty much anything. Now, that said, in the places currently enjoying a fracking boom (no pun intended), the easiest water to get comes from nice clean freshwater aquifers. But it doesn't need to.
I find it simply mind-boggling that so many environmentally conscious people (and I say that as someone who considers himself one) hate the most environmentally friendly sources of energy we have: Nuclear, wind, solar, water, and to a lesser degree, natural gas. Yes, each has its own problems, some of which we can solve through regulation, some through further tech advancement, some through telling millionaire weenies on Cape Cod to go fuck themselves. But as long as the cheapest (by a good margin) alternative consists of the dirtiest fuel ever discovered by mankind (coal)... Maybe we should take just a teensy step back and pick our battles a bit better, hmm?
Boo fricking hoo. Learn to develop a game with what you have and quit yer bitching.
More to the point - When you have the luxury of coding for a very specific platform (ie, a gaming console with a known hardware configuration and known performance profile), you have no excuse for failing to adjust your resource demands accordingly. And if you just can't physically dial down the load enough to run well on platform X - You don't release the goddamned game for platform X.
Re-read that last point, because it nicely translates Pontbriand's whining into plain English: "We promise not to turn down any chance to grab your cash, no matter how shitty the experience for our loyal customers".
If you want to call out the Nobel issue, do so because of the fact that he got it and had done nothing but been elected as the president of the US.
Still better than "Europe". Talk about phoning it in...
Kissinger had an actual body of work to show for it.
More accurately, he had an actual body count to show for it.
The fact that Obama hadn't killed anyone (yet) made him practically a shoe-in for it, by comparison.
Don't forget weatherbug, realplayer, every "coupon" program in existence, Sony rootkits, Diablo 3... I could go on.
"Malware" has come packaged with semi-useful software right since the beginning. Even the most naive of grandmas don't typically install standalone viruses deliberately.
That's what a trip odometer can be used for.
:)
I agree with you in spirit - and in fact, do the same thing - but let's admit what a piss-poor solution that sounds like.
Instead of having a moderately accurate measurement of how much fuel our cars have remaining, we find it more reliable to make all sorts of assumptions about driving conditions and weather and long-term averages and whether or not we "topped off" that last 25 cents on our last fill... And then use our subsequent driving distance to guess how much further we can go before we run out. Pretty frickin' sad, really.
Worse, my car can somehow magically tell me my instantaneous and average MPG (and at least for the average, gets it pretty dead-on), meaning it knows the exact amount of fuel it has sucked out of the tank since my last refill (which fact it reliably uses to automatically reset some of the running stats it tracks)... Yet it still can't give me a more useful readout than eight illuminated dots??? Free hint, auto engineers of the world - 13 +/- x gallons minus 8.74125 gallons means I have 4.25875 +/- x gallons left; measure the real-world range of x to make sure no one runs out before hitting zero, and give me a damned linear gas gauge!
You know, AC has a point there. It seems that every slightly larger framework coming to Linux gets opposed.
I couldn't tell you quite when it happened, but at some point in my life, I slowly came to realize that the tools I use on a daily basis exist to perform a specific set of tasks. The tool has value for what it does for me, not for its own inherent newness or shininess.
Whether I use systemd or init really makes no difference; whether I use Gnome or KDE, completely irrelevant to whether or not I can open a browser, a music player, and my IDE of choice. BUT! for the same reason, I have a strong motivation not to make huge changes just for the sake of "new", until those changes will allow me to perform my set of tasks better or faster or easier.
Yes, I can appreciate the need to have a functional level of knowledge about the alternatives to what I use on a day-to-day basis - How else can I evaluate when "new" will make me faster/better/etc? I also, however, believe in mastering the tools I use most often. And that takes time. If I'll eventually save five minutes a day by using Gnome instead of KDE, but it takes me a year of fifteen wasted minutes a day mastering the environment, then unless I stick with Gnome for four years, I don't even break even. Obviously, an overly-simplified example, but I see this problem all too often in fresh-out-of-college coworkers: They'll switch to something "better" every month or two, without any consideration of the payback period on their time invested, giving a net negative ROI.
So what they are saying is that anyone outside the US can freely hack US servers without a warrant too. Surely they don't expect special treatment?
Dingdingding, we have a winner!
No doubt, China and Russia will react to this announcement with enthusiasm. "Chinese military hacking DOD computers?" No no no, of course not - They just needed to gather some evidence of "blatantly criminal" activity.
More seriously, that one phrase bothers me more than the entire rest of the post... When we allow our government to substitute "blatantly criminal" for "probable cause", we may as well just save time and install government cameras in our living rooms now.
"So why do you need this warrant?" "Come on, man, we know he did it!" "Okay, here you go!"
Why? Facebook has a database of our explicitly stated interests, which many users fill out voluntarily. Facebook sees what we post about. It knows who we interact with. It counts our likes, monitors our comments and even follows us around the Web. Yet, while the degree of personal data collection is extreme, the advertising seems totally random.
"Facebook sees what we post about" - You have your answer right there.
Do you more often post:
"Hey, check out my new iPhone", after which you'll receive a deluge of ads for phones and carriers... Or...
"Gee I sure could use a new mouse - Should I go with a Logitech LS1, a Microsoft Natural 6000, or the el-cheapo HP X4000?".
In my experience, most people do the former, not the latter, while basing ads off products you mention would only work well for the latter.
Of course, all that assumes you even post about yourself. You might mention that your mother needs a new car (resulting in a flood of car ads that do you no good), or your cats, or just random news clips you saw.
Pointing at pipefitters and calling them sexist
Wooosh!
Generally speaking, grades do indicate something. Sometimes good grades mean the student is very bright and picks up things rapidly. Sometimes good grades indicate a strong work ethic. Both of these are qualities that employers would want in future hires.
Most importantly, grades (and the other traditional means of evaluating prospective students) indicate that the student can pay attention and follow directions - and will.
Employers don't give two shakes of a rat's fuzzy butt about whether or not you might hypothetically have excelled in a different universe. You live in this universe, and this universe values people with measurable skill sets who can and will get their job done. Simple as that.
Does the current system discriminate against a handful of niche "alternative learning style" students? Yep, it sure does - And so will every job you ever get! College admissions, therefore, does its best to predict success in your college career as well as your future employment. "Character"? Fuck character. My boss, and his boss, and his boss' boss, want me in a chair writing code; they doen't care if I spend 100% of my income and free time on hookers n' blow.
Now, if you don't like that, don't blame the College Board, simply go to any of the thousands of non-traditional (and non-accredited) institutions of higher learning available. Just don't complain when you discover that you can't get a job after completing your studies there.
I'll be happy once the world learns to build systems that don't break on the apostrophe in my last name.
You would, then, love using any software I write. I absolutely promise it won't break on an apostrophe. It won't break on a semicolon. It won't even break on foreign vowels or unicode...
Because I strips all that crap out, only allowing Latin1 [a-zA-Z]. I do, however, preserve any random-case names you insist on using, because while unbearably pretentious, they at least don't break anything.
And yeah, call me an asshole (though you have to put Australia ahead of me, they've outright banned diacritics in names by law) - But little Bobby Tables won't break my code. To hell with input validation, people constantly come up with new ways to enter complete garbage (and on forms they want to fill out, not talking about fake email addresses here). Just sanitize it all and call it good; and if you end up named Jrmy Obrian, blame your parents, not me.
/ BTW, all those O-apostrophe names in Irish? You've already accepted a corruption of your name, so lose the purist BS. That actually comes from Anglicized Gaelic o- or O-acute, with the diacritic shifted slightly to the right. The former means "from" the latter means "grandson"
Jobs in order of % male.
I find it strange that we talk about discrimination in high tech, when we have literally dozens of fields over 90% male, with and only a handful of niche tech fields even in the top 100. Hell, from that chart, we have sixty-one fields more male-dominated than CNC programmers (at 93.5%), the highest of the male-dominated tech fields. And general purpose coder only pushes 78.5%, with over a hundred non-tech fields higher on the list.
Yes, Slashdot has the byline "news for nerds". Until I start hearing people whine about why we don't see more female pipefitters, however, fuck right off about the "culture" in IT as somehow magically the core of the problem.
More relevantly, if we have a problem, that problem comes from human culture, not tech culture. Women don't do construction and men don't teach (at least not below the HS level), simple as that. However - And this counts as the simple most important point you will read in this entire discussion - They can! If a woman wants to get trained as a master pipefitter, she could have a well-paying job a week after completing her apprenticeship (usually 4-5 years); and even the apprenticeship phase doesn't suck all that bad, they make enough to live on in most of the US.
But we - as a species, not as a niche community of high-tech misogynists - view fitting pipe, welding, roofing, well-drilling, etc as "dirty" jobs that women don't want to do. We view dealing with disgusting snotty little 6YOs, much less trying to cram facts into their head, as something males don't want to do. Does that come from the fact that each side really doesn't want to do "off-gender" jobs, or the fact that society has conditioned us to believe that?
Short answer: it doesn't matter. Do what you want. If, however, you discover that the conditions in your chosen profession don't agree with your personality, don't blame the job, blame what you see in the mirror.
How does this matter?
Well, because the US has a set of requirements for defining the circumstances under which the government can search private property, and the scope of that search if allowed.
The FBI has effectively just admitted that they had no legitimate way of knowing that they had probable cause. This means one of two things - They broke the law to obtain that evidence (the police can't search you to get the evidence they need to get approval to search you); or more likely, they lied about the real origin of their evidence (ie, the NSA told them "go here and do this, and make up a good cover story").
TFA didn't make it harder to identify virtual objects as TFS implies - It made real objects look more like virtual ones.
Aka, "if we make everything look like cartoons, people can't tell which cartoons came from the real world".
On the one hand, anyone who gets it now will get the best medical care physically possible on the planet, though the currently available treatments don't have a high enough success rate to give me the warm-n'-fuzzies.
On the other, we have three (known) pharmaceutical companies busting their butts to bring a cure to market, and I'd expect quite a few more putting huge resources into "fling everything at the wall and see what sticks" R&D. So in six months, we might actually have a high-success rate treatment for it. But, in six months we might have 1.5 billion people in who need it.
Really a tough call... Better to get it now, or wait until it becomes a pandemic in the hopes a better treatment will exist.
Profiles for pets, WTF? Can teddy bears have profiles too? Are the pets allowed to have political opinions?
"My" Facebook page exists solely for my pets. And yes, they have political opinions (they favor absolute monarchy justified by the doctrine of the Divine Right of Cats).
See, I have zero interest in what my 6000 closest "friends" do. I have zero interest in sharing details of the texture of my morning bowel movement with half the planet (or even just with those 6000 "friends"). I have zero interest in seeing targeted ads based on my preferred types of breakfast cereal or cars or sex toys.
Far, far too many people (and even many small businesses), however, have Facebook pages as their primary online presence. Seeing their "public" pages doesn't require "friend"ing them, but it does require having a Facebook login. As a result, I do have use for a functional Facebook login; I just have no interest whatsoever in the entire fad of "social" networking.
Thus, my cats / teddy bear / couch has a Facebook page. If Facebook really decides to crack down on the 80% of users with fake profile info, hey, they own the site and can make that decision. And honestly, I would love that to happen, because I would no longer need a Facebook, because they would no longer any content worth remembering yet another password to access.
He thinks he is pointing out absurdity of gun control laws, but that's because he is (or appears to be, I don't actually know him) emotionally invested into getting rid of all gun control laws.
Agreed, though his motive has no relevance to the fact of his success.
Gun control advocates should be very pleased, because now governments have a much more urgent reason to think about how the law might work with 3D-printed weapons.
I honestly don't mean this insultingly, but that response shows that you have completely missed the point. The law won't work with 3D printers, or even just cheap CNC machines - Not now, not ever.
To date, only expense and practicality have made the entire concept of "gun control" even remotely feasible. Expense, in that CNCs cost a lot of money, and practicality, in that even though you could technically make these things by hand, it would take hundreds of hours of tedious work. Keep in mind that a cheap modern drill-press makes every tool Samuel Colt had available look like a Fisher-Price "My First Toolbox" by comparison.
For the law to patch this "loophole" requires nothing less than a complete ban on 3D printers, while artificially keeping the price of CNCs and similar technology much too high for the average Joe's garage workshop. Okay, let's say the law actually does that - The joke just goes one level of meta. We already have people building their own 3D printers. Do you next plan to regulate all stepper motors, require registration and proof-of-destruction for every inkjet printer sold, and ban Arduino boards?
Yes, the law absolutely needs to come to terms what it means to live in a world where anyone can manufacture any sufficiently small physical object on a whim. "Shut... Down... EVERYTHING!" ain't it.
But in the mind of libertarian nutball Cody Wilson, lawmakers will just say "Welp, he beat us, time to pack up and go home, I'll see if I can charter an APC for us since it's gonna be like Somalia out there. This is the worst day since the basic theoretical disproof and repeated cracks of DRM made us give up on digital copyright issues."
Not quite - He knows perfectly well that the haplophobes won't just pack it in and go home, just as the anti-DRM crowd know that Sony won't just give up and release everything without adding in-house developed viruses to them.
More importantly, he does what he does to point out absurdity. CA's legislators will pass a band-aid over this particular reality-hack, and Wilson will find a way to mercilessly mock that, as well. The cycle can pretty much continue indefinitely; but most importantly, at each step, they look like fools and he has yet again made his point.
In many languages there's only one word for both doves and pigeons. In Dutch it's both duif, in German it's both Taube, in Japanese it's both hato, etc.
...While in English, we have two equally nonspecific words for the same group of birds.
Taxonomically, doves and pigeons don't refer to distinct species, they both refer to any of hundreds of members of the family Columbidae. At best, you can say that doves "tend" to look smaller and lighter-colored
For the car analogy, we tend to refer to the largest passenger vehicles as SUVs and the smallest cars as subcompacts... Yet neither word actually refers to a specific nonoverlapping set of models, and we actually have cars advertised as subcompact SUVs.
During Windows 8 testing, Microsoft said that they had data showing Start Menu usage had dropped, but it seems that the tools they were using at the time weren't as evolved as the new 'Asimov' monitor.
No, Microsoft, wrong conclusion. See, your data told you the $deity's own truth, that start menu usage has dropped. Most people pretty much use desktop shortcuts 90% of the time, so your stupid fisher-price jolly candylike tiles may look like crap but don't seriously impact that specific usage pattern. More accurate data collection won't change that.
What your data didn't tell you? That remaining 10% of the time doesn't just mean people "forgot" they had a shortcut and decided to use the start menu for the fun of it. Using the start menu drastically beats having to hunt down actual executables somewhere on the HDD, particularly for administrative-type tasks that might go six folders deep into the Windows directory, and have insanely long command-line arguments as a bonus (ie, a lot of the control panel apps).
Data doesn't equal knowledge. The stats can tell you "how often", but not "why".