I'd like to see an emphasis on security and making it much harder to compromise an install of Wordpress.
WordPress powers one fourth of the entire web. Something around 100 million websites. A number hardly imaginable. I don't know about you but I'd be hard-pressed to find a system that is so widespread and offers that level of security. It may be a patchy mess, but so are many other successful projects. WP security is just fine, if you ask me.
There are certain basics you have to know. The difference between a variable and its value for instance. Assignment vs. Comparsion. Conditions, arrays etc. How to format your code and how to break down a problem into comments, terms and eventually code.
Everyone can understand these things. The problem is: If you haven't understood these, no education whatsoever will get you anywhere near programming. If you don't know what the tab-key and the clipboard are and how and when to use them you will fail at the most basic things.
People today don't learn the fundamentals of computing, thats the real problem. No amount of academic education will fix that, if the fundamentals aren't grasped.
Others have mentioned it already - because it's so obvious - but allow me to chime in: MiniTel was spread nationwide in France from the early eighties. That includes official public MiniTel booths, free home-terminals including both a keyboard and a screen, billboard add-campaing for MiniTel services and ecommerce and even a large widespread market for cybersex
I disagree on the "full-throttle" part. That's be fine on consumer desktops. But Linux is mostly about production servers. Yes, yes... I know... mainstream Linux on the desktop is "just around the corner" and all that.:)
The question here is: What's with serverhosts these days? They are either embeded/integrated or virtualised. No one screws around (literally) with hardware anymore - not in a time where soc pcs cost less than 10$ a pop. So there is no need to fumble with init on that level. I haven't touched init or even runlevels for just about 10 years now - and I do lots of server stuff.
These days im running all my services in VirtualBox and copy, booting and ditching entire VMs at my whim. Fiddling with init would be a waste of time.
If you have a stripped down serverconfig that you have to distribute and scale, I doubt systemd will seriously get in your way. Yes, you have to hook your init stuff somewhere and yes you'll have to read about how systemd does things at this level, but on a dedicated server that might aswell happen in userspace or somewhere late in systemd boot. I'm sure systemd offers hooks for quick late-boot custom fiddling of some sort.
Bottom line: If finally all the Linux proggers get on the same page I'm all for it. If that page happes to be systemd, so be it. Simply the benefits of all getting behind systemd will move Linux forward faster than ever - that's my newest prediction anyway.
As we've all learned from Apple: No half-assed shit. Do or don't do. No place for inbetween stuff.
systemd has downsided but it also has upsides. We should stick with the upsides and patch the downsides until they're basically a non-issue.
I don't do much init-fiddling although I do like the text based init/runlevel thing, and I would guess that plug-and-play - one of systemd's strong areas - should be a userspace problem, but that's just me not really know what's going on in the init process.
However, since all major distros have moved to systemd it can't be that bad as some people make it out to be. I trust the debian and ubuntu crew to know what they are doing at init-level.
If as a result the Linux community grows closer together and focuses more on consistency I'm all for the move to systemd - even if that moves Linux away from the rest of the unixes due to loss of posix compliance. Seriously, who cares? It's mostly Linux left, right and center these days anyway. The BSD people will be fine with whatever they choose as init process, as usual, and no one gives a damn about other non-FOSS unixes anymore anyway. Unix basically is Linux these days.
But, as I said at the beginning: There is no use going systemd, but only kinda so-so. If the community get's behind systemd, it works and is/becomes usable and apps start relying on it being there - so what?
I'd say it has more to do with being a male than with being an engineer. The trait that makes a person a terrorist is more primoral than "engineer type".
Basically, terrorism is a fallback solution to changing/improving the world to fit your needs/desires. Which is what many male humans and thus male engineers would want to do.
Tech experts are also prone to being smarter than average, narrow minded, misunderstood and socially excluded by people around them. This in turn leads to frustration. And I'd say roughly 80% of all wars and conflicts go back to simple male sexual frustration. Also terrorism.
Take a smart, outcast male youngster, and, yes, he is indeed very much closer to becoming a leader, innovator, bum, philosopher or, yes, if the circumstances are right, a gun-rampager or terrorist than regular people.
I know that I am closer to being a warrior, leader or bum than a 'regular guy'. There is less of an inbetween for me.
Let's keep in mind, the difference between terrorism and war basically is just the amount of people you kill and the amount of comrades and long-term planning involved. Looking at terrorism and the technical requirements for effective terrorism, these stats are no real surprise.
Same has been said by many a people about Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8 and Windows 8.1. Truth is at the end of the day when MS have a small or any screwup the open-source crowd are so divided among themselves that they can never seize the opportunity.
The last Windows I used was Windows 2000. They crossed the line with me with forced registration and remote disabling "features". Why anyone would use a OS that has this for anything mission-critical, is totally beyond me.
In my book Windows is a Toy, an elaborate gaming bios, and the only reason to use it is if you're into frontline hardcore PC gaming or need to use a professional application that only runs on Windows - such as Solid Works for engineers or something like that.
I've been riding Mac OS X since 2004 - for professional Flash development back then - and x86 Linux since 1999. Nowadays there is absolutely nothing aside of perhaps some neat Photoshop plugins that Linux and FOSS can't offer that I need for my professional work (Dev, Software Architect and Consultant). I expect that to improve even more with Gimp 3.0. I've got no incentive to replace my broken Mac Mini now - albeit HW & SW integration with Apple is still top-of-the-line.
However, I *do* still use a MS product: The last iteration of the XBox 360. The system mature to the marrow and has dirt cheap top gametitles out of the bargain bin. Just added Diablo 3 to my collection for 20 euros last saturday. Neat.
Conculsion: I hope Windows, the abysmally shitty Outlook Groupware, Exchange, MS Office and all those ancient crappy MS monsters die in a fire and/or gets squished by Google and Chrome OS like a bug. They would deserve it.
Google has users by a leash too, but at least I get all their stuff and services for free and have an interest in keeping them running and synced across devices no matter what. Which is why I recommend Chrome OS over Windows whenever a n00b asks me for advice.
I'm your Type-A 80ies computer kid turned web-dev in 2000. The line between stable long-term occupation and freelancer has been blurry ever since. This comes with the profession and the times we live in.
I've been in active in the industry for 15 years and now call myself a "Consultant & Software Architect" for FOSS and non-trivial web-applications (flashy name required for being taken seriously as a senior). The software we use at my current employer is matured FOSS, most of the coding is done already. 15-20% of the work consists of slapping together various pieces and building a whole project, adjusting preconfectioned webdesigns with some CSS and jQuery hacks on the side, maintaining the deployment pipeline, doing a little helpdesk, patching IT, etc. The other 80% are office, partner and customer politics, writing important sounding requirements-analysis and covering the companies ass on the technical side when we prepare to take on a deal.
If I would insist on only doing coding, I'd be one of the freelancers we hire to do the work for a few weeks, two or three times a year. One guy is a freelance web-guy, the other is a student who's good at Bootstrap and WordPress and is more into politics and probably has other long term plans than staying in webdev.
Since I'm important for deals and revenue I've got a part-time fixed position. Which is just the right fit for me and the company.
If everything goes right, our jobs, like most others will mostly be done by robots/software when we retire. Software is eating the World. It's called progress and you should prepare for it.
I always wonder why people - even professionals (ableit only the non-DB pros) - think SQL is a feasible means for an application to utilise persistance. It isn't. In fact, it's a huge smelly turd for app-persistance and using it so broadly for this sort of work is a really harebrained and abysmally stupid idea.
That we have to deal with SQL injection problems is one of the countless pieces of crap based on this technology decision.
SQL was meant as an end-user interface for interacting with relational database - and for that it is absolutely perfect. End of story.
Using SQL as intermediate for application persistance is one of the most annoying and studidest things in the history of applikation development - for reasons to countless to list them. DB designers are among those who time and time again shake their heads in disbelief when they see the mess devs do with SQL.
This is water on the mills of the tocamak critics.... I always thought they *do* have a point or two.
Net energy with magnetic cages required to keep super-hot plasma controlable is a very difficult thing, even *if* we manage to achieve stable prolonged tocamak fusion.
They've spent 16 billion or so already. I'd thoroughly review their plans and perhaps cap the entire project at 25 billion or so. If they max that out, put the money into solar and space exploration. It's better off there for now I'd say. Even cold fusion research would make more sense than this money-sinkhole imho.
Vertical ERP Software is among the worst Software when it comes to UX, workflow and system architecture. The problem is, nobody want's to do it because it's boring and those who need it have their head too deep in the sand to go out and find a good Software Architect to define the requirements and work out the business processes that can be automated.
Vertical ERP is often made of bloated ancient abysmally architectured workflows and UX toolkits from 25 years ago.... That wouldn't be a problem if they weren't built with abandoned prorpietary software kits from borland that no one can use anymore. A friend of mine moved into IT administration in the German healthcare industry and describes the same problems - the easy-money tax-funded mess that prevails in that field is unbelievable.
The biggest problem are the lazy slobs that order and sell this crap. They have no stake in the produkt, they don't give a fuck about building a good product or actually helping out in automating the tedious work, they don't have to use it and they don't have to understand the processes that these programms have to automate - they're just in it for a quick buck and a gullible small-to-medium business owner who is ready to drop 100 000 Euros on a promise and crappy software on a bloated system that no one needs.
One of the countless examples: I get angry whenever I go to the bakery and see the poor lady behind the counter, manually entering an eight-digit number to process the bun I just bought. It makes me want to take a baseball-bat to the head of the asshole that peddled that piece-of-shit system in the first place. The most annoying thing is that I could have probably built a better solution for a fraction of the cost of the system she's using.... We all know this and have been there.
Bottom line: Vertical ERP is in the worst state in our industry. It's actually an interesting market for the hip, so-called 'lean startup' model. It's a field that definitely needs some Google/Apple style innovation.
... that the origin of life is spirit. Yes, it's put in different words and there's math behind it to back up the theory, but it's basically the same thing.
I'd argue the same way. Wether I'm close to an ape or close to something else makes no different. A spider, bird or jellyfish posting here on slashdot and joining the discussion would be closer to us that we are to an ape, because it's our consciousness that makes us distinctly human vis-a-vis the (rest of) the animal or plant kingdom.
I'll be glad when we've come full circle with our theory about the origins of life and intelligence and can dismiss religion based on revelation and have a meaningful spiritual/theological discussion again.
We're using Scrum. One of the many variants of it. A simplified version of scrum suitable for agency work. Simply getting around a board, away from the keyboard, standing, talking (timeboxed) writing cards and moving them around makes things better and enhances team communication and interaction.
That the overblown hype and overengineering and the holy wars about how scrum is to be done is over is a very good thing. Hype ends, Scrum remains. I think it's a very good think that this was a big fasionable thing and that Agile (sometimes contradictory to Scrum btw.) brought back the focus on results and regular customer interaction.
It's about time this happened. It's like Peter Thiel said back in 2010 or so: The housing bubble hasn't disapeared - it's just moved on to academic education.
I have no notable formal training or education in my field and yet I can outprogramm and outconfigure most of those with an academic background. Why? I'm an 80ies computer kid that learned most of this stuff from buddies and of the bbses and networks. Whenever I go to an university I notice that they are 2 decades behind in technology and standards.
I'm all for hard subjects and fields getting a solid education and that includes academic education. But to much of that is happening in the isolated ivory tower. It is long overdue that the job market gets more diversified in terms of where the people come from. You have to be so specialized in todays world that even an academic training can be to general.
That's why certified SAP and Oracle experts often earn more than their purely academic counterparts.
I guess I've heard shit like that before. From my German-side Grandpa.
I think there is a distinct area in which people and their views can be placed that is undoubtedly evil. Holding abysmally absurd theo-fascist views, chopping peoples heads of whilst chanting praises to your utlitmate-dictator-in-the-heavens god, preaching and trying to practice genocide, believing in truth by revelation rather than insight and forcing that truth to others at gunpoint, etc. pretty much puts people smack center of the 'evil' designation in my book. And in most other peoples book aswell, I would presume.
I guess at the age of 70 there's a lot to be said about what humanity will never do.
Given, 1,3 parsecs to a neighboring system is an very long distance, but get a technology that can accelerate an object to the speed of light and build a large spaceship that can sustain a population for 100 years or put them into hybernation - suddenly it becomes plausible.
Andreas Lubits was suicidal - he was not a fanatic regligious terrorist. Is crashing of the plane he was in charge for as a pilot was an extended suicide fueled by a deadly mix of depresssion, narcisim and psychoactive prescriptoin drugs that are under suspicion by some researchers for causing sucidal tendencies.
The deliberate crashing of that flight had nothing to do with religious motives.
There's no doubt, that new surface thingy looks impressive - MS really upped their Hardware game to brand new heights, that's for sure. However, it still has one problem: Windows. MS depends on selling software and services, which practically forces them to castrate their software package. Apple is years and a bazillion dollars ahead in selling the package experience.
There is another player, that Apple should and probably actually is way more worried about: Google.
Googles existing business model is the one that is most future-safe amoung the big players. They can sell nifty hardware if they wish, they can sell dirt cheap hardware if the market demands it, they can have others sell hardware... no matter what, their branding doesn't even take a dent. Chromebooks are the poor mans Macbook and the ubiquity of their service and cloud-integration, all for free for end-users to use, makes it very difficult for MS and for Apple to compete in the long run. And improving hardware speeds and cost-effectiveness will only make the web more powerful in the future.
Apples new iPhone subsciption model is aimed squarely at this problem posed with Google, enabling users to buy into a constant stream of Apple hardware and give the 'we-sell hardware' model a service-like spin. MS is putting huge amounts of effort into their switch to subscription models aswell.
Tim Cook and his crew are probably more worried about Googles Pixel C at the moment than the MS Surface line - I would be too.
As for him harping the the too-much-too-hard - I get that. Sort of. The iPad Pro and the Pencil is an impressive device combo for artists and creatives - wacom is probably shaking with terror right now. Apple can count on the refreshend creative vide rubbing off onto their entire product line once again. And it's the hippster creative community that is willing to put down this amount of cash for an apple device and will spread the love - forcefully if it must be. We all know the frantic love for Apple the core fangroup has.
I see a place for the iPad Pro, because it's clearly positioned - not so much for the new surface thing. Although, once again, it is a darn impressive device.
Hosting with Deutsche Telekom is really safe. As soon as somebody accesses the data, they'll have their high-speed quota maxed out in an instant and their bandwidth reduced to a agonising 200 baud trickle. I expect most people to give up accessing your data before they can get anything meaningful.
I don't get it. I was doing that kind of work in 2002, and it was shitty then already.
What's there left to E-learn? We've got YouTube, Kahn Academy and world-class universities dumping their entire curriculum online and into BitTorrent.
What's left to outsource to India, I'm wondering? Looks like this was a shit company anyway. It's probably gonna fold anytime soon anyway. I wouldn't be surprised.
We all know that with all the shitty web-cmses out there, the ones built on LAMP (PHP) are the oldest that actually have a finished and working feature set. Show me one non-PHP CMS with the featureset of WP, Joomla, Drupal, EZ Publish or Typo 3, closed source or FOSS. You won't find any. PHP and the CMSes built with it are at least ten years ahead of the game in the market they were built for - that's a simple fact that no one can deny. And of those, the mess called WP is actually the best that fits every mold.
- It's primarly a blogging engine - which is what most people want and need anyway. - It takes about 3 clicks and ten seconds to move it away from the blogging perspective to a regular web CMS. - It's dead simple to install. - It uses the hook model (also found in Drupal) to implement features that can be applied flexibly. And while that principle is questionable at best - especially from a performance standpoint - there is no doubt that it is *very* easy to use to implement custom features and setups. - The documentation actually exisits and is pretty good. - The community is massive. It's basically an army of tinkerers fiddling away at extensions and plugins. - It has an official full blown mobile management app downloadable for free. - It has a large, semi-post-capitalistic hip company baking it and it's development. (They all work remote, from around the planet and put their money where their mouths are.) - There are popular WP plugins built by people who can't programm - but they work (sort of) and are installed/activated/deactivated/uninstalled within seconds. - The architecture is a bizar convoluted shoddy mess. But you can start tinkering with it within minutes and won't feel bad about it - because, hey, guess what, it's a mess already. - Modifying templates and themes in a non-destuctive update-safe manner is dead simple.... and so forth...
In an nutshell: WordPress is PHPs philosophy carried 1on1 into the application/CMS layer. That is why it's so successful. And rightfully so.
I'm all for asking women to move into tech jobs - we have too little of them. But I think this documentary sends the wrong message. Girls building one-shot girlie apps isn't very flattering a proposition for women in tech.
They should've done a really good documentary on Ada Lovelace, Grace Hopper and perhaps some current day programmers doing serious and exciting work.
I was at the Google Polymer Summit a few weeks ago and there were some young women there, some of them high-profile software developers - a length interview with those would give off a much better impression of what type of women in tech we all want. One of the ladies was on the chrome team working on the rendering and DOM engine - I can barely image what a hardcore coding job that is.
And yes, they did look girlie and quite cute actually. Makeup, high-heels, elaborate hair-do. No problem here. The point I'm making is that they were *coding* serious stuff. You can be into cupcakes, pink pettycoats, pigtails and hello kitty and still do that. Heck, our male coder type digs nerf guns and is all exited about the new star wars like a nine-year old at the age of 40 - like that's anymore grown-up a pastime....
I could be wrong, but I do think we have to move the coding women doing the serious stuff on to the stage - that would give off a better impression.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd like to see an emphasis on security and making it much harder to compromise an install of Wordpress.
WordPress powers one fourth of the entire web. Something around 100 million websites. A number hardly imaginable. I don't know about you but I'd be hard-pressed to find a system that is so widespread and offers that level of security. It may be a patchy mess, but so are many other successful projects. WP security is just fine, if you ask me.
There are certain basics you have to know. The difference between a variable and its value for instance. Assignment vs. Comparsion. Conditions, arrays etc. How to format your code and how to break down a problem into comments, terms and eventually code.
Everyone can understand these things. The problem is: If you haven't understood these, no education whatsoever will get you anywhere near programming. If you don't know what the tab-key and the clipboard are and how and when to use them you will fail at the most basic things.
People today don't learn the fundamentals of computing, thats the real problem. No amount of academic education will fix that, if the fundamentals aren't grasped.
Dice-O-Matic wins this one.
And, besides, 3000 rolls is way to few to get usefull statistics.
... is that they only had 7 paying customers in Pakistan. ... Or something like that.
Nice PR move anyway - shame it's so blatantly obvious.
Others have mentioned it already - because it's so obvious - but allow me to chime in: MiniTel was spread nationwide in France from the early eighties. That includes official public MiniTel booths, free home-terminals including both a keyboard and a screen, billboard add-campaing for MiniTel services and ecommerce and even a large widespread market for cybersex
I disagree on the "full-throttle" part. That's be fine on consumer desktops. But Linux is mostly about production servers. Yes, yes... I know... mainstream Linux on the desktop is "just around the corner" and all that. :)
The question here is: What's with serverhosts these days? They are either embeded/integrated or virtualised. No one screws around (literally) with hardware anymore - not in a time where soc pcs cost less than 10$ a pop. So there is no need to fumble with init on that level. I haven't touched init or even runlevels for just about 10 years now - and I do lots of server stuff.
These days im running all my services in VirtualBox and copy, booting and ditching entire VMs at my whim. Fiddling with init would be a waste of time.
If you have a stripped down serverconfig that you have to distribute and scale, I doubt systemd will seriously get in your way. Yes, you have to hook your init stuff somewhere and yes you'll have to read about how systemd does things at this level, but on a dedicated server that might aswell happen in userspace or somewhere late in systemd boot. I'm sure systemd offers hooks for quick late-boot custom fiddling of some sort.
Bottom line:
If finally all the Linux proggers get on the same page I'm all for it. If that page happes to be systemd, so be it. Simply the benefits of all getting behind systemd will move Linux forward faster than ever - that's my newest prediction anyway.
As we've all learned from Apple: No half-assed shit. Do or don't do. No place for inbetween stuff.
systemd has downsided but it also has upsides. We should stick with the upsides and patch the downsides until they're basically a non-issue.
I don't do much init-fiddling although I do like the text based init/runlevel thing, and I would guess that plug-and-play - one of systemd's strong areas - should be a userspace problem, but that's just me not really know what's going on in the init process.
However, since all major distros have moved to systemd it can't be that bad as some people make it out to be. I trust the debian and ubuntu crew to know what they are doing at init-level.
If as a result the Linux community grows closer together and focuses more on consistency I'm all for the move to systemd - even if that moves Linux away from the rest of the unixes due to loss of posix compliance. Seriously, who cares? It's mostly Linux left, right and center these days anyway. The BSD people will be fine with whatever they choose as init process, as usual, and no one gives a damn about other non-FOSS unixes anymore anyway. Unix basically is Linux these days.
But, as I said at the beginning: There is no use going systemd, but only kinda so-so. If the community get's behind systemd, it works and is/becomes usable and apps start relying on it being there - so what?
My 0.5 eurocents.
I'd say it has more to do with being a male than with being an engineer.
The trait that makes a person a terrorist is more primoral than "engineer type".
Basically, terrorism is a fallback solution to changing/improving the world to fit your needs/desires.
Which is what many male humans and thus male engineers would want to do.
Tech experts are also prone to being smarter than average, narrow minded, misunderstood and socially excluded by people around them.
This in turn leads to frustration. And I'd say roughly 80% of all wars and conflicts go back to simple male sexual frustration. Also terrorism.
Take a smart, outcast male youngster, and, yes, he is indeed very much closer to becoming a leader, innovator, bum, philosopher or, yes, if the circumstances are right, a gun-rampager or terrorist than regular people.
I know that I am closer to being a warrior, leader or bum than a 'regular guy'. There is less of an inbetween for me.
Let's keep in mind, the difference between terrorism and war basically is just the amount of people you kill and the amount of comrades and long-term planning involved.
Looking at terrorism and the technical requirements for effective terrorism, these stats are no real surprise.
Same has been said by many a people about Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8 and Windows 8.1. Truth is at the end of the day when MS have a small or any screwup the open-source crowd are so divided among themselves that they can never seize the opportunity.
The last Windows I used was Windows 2000. They crossed the line with me with forced registration and remote disabling "features".
Why anyone would use a OS that has this for anything mission-critical, is totally beyond me.
In my book Windows is a Toy, an elaborate gaming bios, and the only reason to use it is if you're into frontline hardcore PC gaming or need to use a professional application that only runs on Windows - such as Solid Works for engineers or something like that.
I've been riding Mac OS X since 2004 - for professional Flash development back then - and x86 Linux since 1999. Nowadays there is absolutely nothing aside of perhaps some neat Photoshop plugins that Linux and FOSS can't offer that I need for my professional work (Dev, Software Architect and Consultant). I expect that to improve even more with Gimp 3.0. I've got no incentive to replace my broken Mac Mini now - albeit HW & SW integration with Apple is still top-of-the-line.
However, I *do* still use a MS product: The last iteration of the XBox 360. The system mature to the marrow and has dirt cheap top gametitles out of the bargain bin. Just added Diablo 3 to my collection for 20 euros last saturday. Neat.
Conculsion:
I hope Windows, the abysmally shitty Outlook Groupware, Exchange, MS Office and all those ancient crappy MS monsters die in a fire and/or gets squished by Google and Chrome OS like a bug. They would deserve it.
Google has users by a leash too, but at least I get all their stuff and services for free and have an interest in keeping them running and synced across devices no matter what.
Which is why I recommend Chrome OS over Windows whenever a n00b asks me for advice.
My 2 cents.
I'm your Type-A 80ies computer kid turned web-dev in 2000. The line between stable long-term occupation and freelancer has been blurry ever since. This comes with the profession and the times we live in.
I've been in active in the industry for 15 years and now call myself a "Consultant & Software Architect" for FOSS and non-trivial web-applications (flashy name required for being taken seriously as a senior). The software we use at my current employer is matured FOSS, most of the coding is done already. 15-20% of the work consists of slapping together various pieces and building a whole project, adjusting preconfectioned webdesigns with some CSS and jQuery hacks on the side, maintaining the deployment pipeline, doing a little helpdesk, patching IT, etc. The other 80% are office, partner and customer politics, writing important sounding requirements-analysis and covering the companies ass on the technical side when we prepare to take on a deal.
If I would insist on only doing coding, I'd be one of the freelancers we hire to do the work for a few weeks, two or three times a year. One guy is a freelance web-guy, the other is a student who's good at Bootstrap and WordPress and is more into politics and probably has other long term plans than staying in webdev.
Since I'm important for deals and revenue I've got a part-time fixed position. Which is just the right fit for me and the company.
If everything goes right, our jobs, like most others will mostly be done by robots/software when we retire. Software is eating the World.
It's called progress and you should prepare for it.
I always wonder why people - even professionals (ableit only the non-DB pros) - think SQL is a feasible means for an application to utilise persistance. It isn't. In fact, it's a huge smelly turd for app-persistance and using it so broadly for this sort of work is a really harebrained and abysmally stupid idea.
That we have to deal with SQL injection problems is one of the countless pieces of crap based on this technology decision.
SQL was meant as an end-user interface for interacting with relational database - and for that it is absolutely perfect. End of story.
Using SQL as intermediate for application persistance is one of the most annoying and studidest things in the history of applikation development - for reasons to countless to list them. DB designers are among those who time and time again shake their heads in disbelief when they see the mess devs do with SQL.
This is water on the mills of the tocamak critics. ... I always thought they *do* have a point or two.
Net energy with magnetic cages required to keep super-hot plasma controlable is a very difficult thing, even *if* we manage to achieve stable prolonged tocamak fusion.
They've spent 16 billion or so already. I'd thoroughly review their plans and perhaps cap the entire project at 25 billion or so. If they max that out, put the money into solar and space exploration. It's better off there for now I'd say. Even cold fusion research would make more sense than this money-sinkhole imho.
Vertical ERP Software is among the worst Software when it comes to UX, workflow and system architecture. The problem is, nobody want's to do it because it's boring and those who need it have their head too deep in the sand to go out and find a good Software Architect to define the requirements and work out the business processes that can be automated.
Vertical ERP is often made of bloated ancient abysmally architectured workflows and UX toolkits from 25 years ago. ... That wouldn't be a problem if they weren't built with abandoned prorpietary software kits from borland that no one can use anymore. A friend of mine moved into IT administration in the German healthcare industry and describes the same problems - the easy-money tax-funded mess that prevails in that field is unbelievable.
The biggest problem are the lazy slobs that order and sell this crap. They have no stake in the produkt, they don't give a fuck about building a good product or actually helping out in automating the tedious work, they don't have to use it and they don't have to understand the processes that these programms have to automate - they're just in it for a quick buck and a gullible small-to-medium business owner who is ready to drop 100 000 Euros on a promise and crappy software on a bloated system that no one needs.
One of the countless examples: ... We all know this and have been there.
I get angry whenever I go to the bakery and see the poor lady behind the counter, manually entering an eight-digit number to process the bun I just bought. It makes me want to take a baseball-bat to the head of the asshole that peddled that piece-of-shit system in the first place. The most annoying thing is that I could have probably built a better solution for a fraction of the cost of the system she's using.
Bottom line: Vertical ERP is in the worst state in our industry. It's actually an interesting market for the hip, so-called 'lean startup' model. It's a field that definitely needs some Google/Apple style innovation.
My 2 cents.
... that the origin of life is spirit. Yes, it's put in different words and there's math behind it to back up the theory, but it's basically the same thing.
I'd argue the same way. Wether I'm close to an ape or close to something else makes no different. A spider, bird or jellyfish posting here on slashdot and joining the discussion would be closer to us that we are to an ape, because it's our consciousness that makes us distinctly human vis-a-vis the (rest of) the animal or plant kingdom.
I'll be glad when we've come full circle with our theory about the origins of life and intelligence and can dismiss religion based on revelation and have a meaningful spiritual/theological discussion again.
Could we please agree on ceasing the inflationary use of the term "War".
It's getting tiring.
Thank you.
We're using Scrum. One of the many variants of it.
A simplified version of scrum suitable for agency work.
Simply getting around a board, away from the keyboard, standing, talking (timeboxed) writing cards and moving them around makes things better and enhances team communication and interaction.
That the overblown hype and overengineering and the holy wars about how scrum is to be done is over is a very good thing.
Hype ends, Scrum remains.
I think it's a very good think that this was a big fasionable thing and that Agile (sometimes contradictory to Scrum btw.) brought back the focus on results and regular customer interaction.
It's about time this happened. It's like Peter Thiel said back in 2010 or so: The housing bubble hasn't disapeared - it's just moved on to academic education.
I have no notable formal training or education in my field and yet I can outprogramm and outconfigure most of those with an academic background. Why? I'm an 80ies computer kid that learned most of this stuff from buddies and of the bbses and networks.
Whenever I go to an university I notice that they are 2 decades behind in technology and standards.
I'm all for hard subjects and fields getting a solid education and that includes academic education. But to much of that is happening in the isolated ivory tower. It is long overdue that the job market gets more diversified in terms of where the people come from. You have to be so specialized in todays world that even an academic training can be to general.
That's why certified SAP and Oracle experts often earn more than their purely academic counterparts.
I guess I've heard shit like that before. From my German-side Grandpa.
I think there is a distinct area in which people and their views can be placed that is undoubtedly evil. Holding abysmally absurd theo-fascist views, chopping peoples heads of whilst chanting praises to your utlitmate-dictator-in-the-heavens god, preaching and trying to practice genocide, believing in truth by revelation rather than insight and forcing that truth to others at gunpoint, etc. pretty much puts people smack center of the 'evil' designation in my book. And in most other peoples book aswell, I would presume.
Give us an effin' break - please.
I guess at the age of 70 there's a lot to be said about what humanity will never do.
Given, 1,3 parsecs to a neighboring system is an very long distance, but get a technology that can accelerate an object to the speed of light and build a large spaceship that can sustain a population for 100 years or put them into hybernation - suddenly it becomes plausible.
Andreas Lubits was suicidal - he was not a fanatic regligious terrorist. Is crashing of the plane he was in charge for as a pilot was an extended suicide fueled by a deadly mix of depresssion, narcisim and psychoactive prescriptoin drugs that are under suspicion by some researchers for causing sucidal tendencies.
The deliberate crashing of that flight had nothing to do with religious motives.
There's no doubt, that new surface thingy looks impressive - MS really upped their Hardware game to brand new heights, that's for sure. However, it still has one problem: Windows. MS depends on selling software and services, which practically forces them to castrate their software package. Apple is years and a bazillion dollars ahead in selling the package experience.
There is another player, that Apple should and probably actually is way more worried about: Google.
Googles existing business model is the one that is most future-safe amoung the big players. They can sell nifty hardware if they wish, they can sell dirt cheap hardware if the market demands it, they can have others sell hardware ... no matter what, their branding doesn't even take a dent. Chromebooks are the poor mans Macbook and the ubiquity of their service and cloud-integration, all for free for end-users to use, makes it very difficult for MS and for Apple to compete in the long run. And improving hardware speeds and cost-effectiveness will only make the web more powerful in the future.
Apples new iPhone subsciption model is aimed squarely at this problem posed with Google, enabling users to buy into a constant stream of Apple hardware and give the 'we-sell hardware' model a service-like spin. MS is putting huge amounts of effort into their switch to subscription models aswell.
Tim Cook and his crew are probably more worried about Googles Pixel C at the moment than the MS Surface line - I would be too.
As for him harping the the too-much-too-hard - I get that. Sort of. The iPad Pro and the Pencil is an impressive device combo for artists and creatives - wacom is probably shaking with terror right now. Apple can count on the refreshend creative vide rubbing off onto their entire product line once again. And it's the hippster creative community that is willing to put down this amount of cash for an apple device and will spread the love - forcefully if it must be. We all know the frantic love for Apple the core fangroup has.
I see a place for the iPad Pro, because it's clearly positioned - not so much for the new surface thing.
Although, once again, it is a darn impressive device.
My 2 cents.
Hosting with Deutsche Telekom is really safe.
As soon as somebody accesses the data, they'll have their high-speed quota maxed out in an instant and their bandwidth reduced to a agonising 200 baud trickle.
I expect most people to give up accessing your data before they can get anything meaningful.
I don't get it. I was doing that kind of work in 2002, and it was shitty then already.
What's there left to E-learn? We've got YouTube, Kahn Academy and world-class universities dumping their entire curriculum online and into BitTorrent.
What's left to outsource to India, I'm wondering? Looks like this was a shit company anyway. It's probably gonna fold anytime soon anyway. I wouldn't be surprised.
WordPress is good.
Ok, stop laughing and hear me out.
We all know that with all the shitty web-cmses out there, the ones built on LAMP (PHP) are the oldest that actually have a finished and working feature set.
Show me one non-PHP CMS with the featureset of WP, Joomla, Drupal, EZ Publish or Typo 3, closed source or FOSS. You won't find any.
PHP and the CMSes built with it are at least ten years ahead of the game in the market they were built for - that's a simple fact that no one can deny.
And of those, the mess called WP is actually the best that fits every mold.
- It's primarly a blogging engine - which is what most people want and need anyway. ... and so forth ...
- It takes about 3 clicks and ten seconds to move it away from the blogging perspective to a regular web CMS.
- It's dead simple to install.
- It uses the hook model (also found in Drupal) to implement features that can be applied flexibly. And while that principle is questionable at best - especially from a performance standpoint - there is no doubt that it is *very* easy to use to implement custom features and setups.
- The documentation actually exisits and is pretty good.
- The community is massive. It's basically an army of tinkerers fiddling away at extensions and plugins.
- It has an official full blown mobile management app downloadable for free.
- It has a large, semi-post-capitalistic hip company baking it and it's development. (They all work remote, from around the planet and put their money where their mouths are.)
- There are popular WP plugins built by people who can't programm - but they work (sort of) and are installed/activated/deactivated/uninstalled within seconds.
- The architecture is a bizar convoluted shoddy mess. But you can start tinkering with it within minutes and won't feel bad about it - because, hey, guess what, it's a mess already.
- Modifying templates and themes in a non-destuctive update-safe manner is dead simple.
In an nutshell:
WordPress is PHPs philosophy carried 1on1 into the application/CMS layer.
That is why it's so successful.
And rightfully so.
I'm all for asking women to move into tech jobs - we have too little of them. But I think this documentary sends the wrong message. Girls building one-shot girlie apps isn't very flattering a proposition for women in tech.
They should've done a really good documentary on Ada Lovelace, Grace Hopper and perhaps some current day programmers doing serious and exciting work.
I was at the Google Polymer Summit a few weeks ago and there were some young women there, some of them high-profile software developers - a length interview with those would give off a much better impression of what type of women in tech we all want. One of the ladies was on the chrome team working on the rendering and DOM engine - I can barely image what a hardcore coding job that is.
And yes, they did look girlie and quite cute actually. Makeup, high-heels, elaborate hair-do. No problem here. The point I'm making is that they were *coding* serious stuff. You can be into cupcakes, pink pettycoats, pigtails and hello kitty and still do that. ...
Heck, our male coder type digs nerf guns and is all exited about the new star wars like a nine-year old at the age of 40 - like that's anymore grown-up a pastime.
I could be wrong, but I do think we have to move the coding women doing the serious stuff on to the stage - that would give off a better impression.