Back in the 1990s, I was working in Kentucky for an ISP and doing assorted contracting work.
I had a case that was rather similar what you're describing, only ours wasn't run that way because of incompetence -- we were connecting up all of the offices of the Department of Public Advocacy, and for one location the state had decided that rather than get a new line to the DPA offices, as they were in the back of a shopping mall that already had some government offices in it, we'd get fibre pulled between the two offices. Mind you, this was frame relay and fractional T1 days, before DSL, so a new drop was pretty expensive. (I want to say it was around $500/month for just the line charges for a T1, not including the port charges to the ISP tht you were connecting through).
So, when we went there for the install, someone had already pulled the fibre -- I went on the 3 hr drive down there, got soeone to escort me to where I needed to go, and plugged in all of our gear, then went and set things up on the DPA side.
All was fine for a year or so, then we got a call that things were down -- we tried everything that we could over the phone with non-IT folks (it's an office of lawyers), so I was sent on the 6hr round-trip with spare fibre patch cables and such.
A quick check in at the DPA offices showed nothing wrong over there, so I went over the other end of the bulding. I don't remember what the name of the department was, but it was a sort of family services type thing (where people got food stamps, stuff like that). I went up the counter and told the person behind the plexiglass that I was with DPA, and we had equipment in their wiring closet that I needed to get access to.
To which she replied, 'DPA is around the corner'. And I said no, I work for the DPA, and I need to get into your wiring closet. And she kept repeating that DPA was around the corner. I asked for her to get someone else. And I waited 10 minutes or so for someone else to come out front. Once she showed up, I spent a few more minutes with the 'DPA is around the corner' response until I *finally* got through to her and convinced her to let me into their closet. (mind you, this would likely have been considered 'social engineering' if I did it today, as I showed them no ID, being that I had none that said I did work for the DPA).
When I finally got to the closet, I saw that our box had no lights on it... I traced the power cord down to a power strip that someone had removed all other things from, and taped over those outlets and written 'BAD' across it... yet left our fiber tranciever plugged into it. I think I was in the room for all of 5 minutes -- it took me *way* more time trying to talk them into letting me in the room than to actually diagnose the problems *including* the time spent in the other offices.
So ~6.5 hrs to fix a problem, because the other office didn't care at all about our gear in their closet, as it would've taken them less than a minute to have moved everthing that was plugged into the known-bad power strip.
So I'd have to say -- no way in hell should you run cable to a private office. If nothing else, that office might close or move, and who knows what might be in there next (or if the new tenents want to remodel it).
Admittedly, it wasn't specifically a CompSci class, but when I took our engineering school's 'Intro to Programming' course, we were paired up for the assignments. The only rule was that I wasn't allowed to pair up with Sebastian, as we were the two who had significant programming experience before we got to college.
When I took Numerical Methods my sophomore year, we were paired up in class, but that was partially because the computer lab we worked from didn't have enough computers for all of us. When it came time for the final, they had to book a second lab so that we'd all have computers to compile on. (which meant those of us in the room w/ newer machines had an advantage over the other room, as our code would compile in 1/2 the time)
But let's face it -- group projects are pretty typical in college. And pairing up for labs is normal too... we don't accuse chemists of getting 1/2 an education if they didn't do every last titration themselves, or a geography major of getting 1/4 an education if they have 3 people in their study group.
The goal is get the people to learn the materials -- if done right, the two people learn from each other. Yes, it can be a drag if you get an idiot for a partner... but unlike in high school, the people who know their stuff are in demand for their skills, not looked down on for being a nerd/geek/whatever other disparaging term.
If you have two people making forward progress then it's better than one person struggling along and getting nowhere. Maybe I'm being a bit socialist in my views, but there are sometimes when we need to step away from the 'everyone for themselves' typical American attitude and look at the nordic standards for schooling. You don't want your school to get a reputation for being the one that produced someone who screws up in some major way. My undergrad is in civil engineering -- and if I find out I'm in a building that one of my classmates worked on, I'm going to leave... immediately.
As the government isn't allowed to spy on citizens without a warrent, under normal circumstances, the satellites aren't supposed to take images when over the U.S.
So the government instead buys images from commercial vendors... the same folks who provide images to Google and Bing for their mapping projects. (which admittedly, might not be as high of resolution).
I'm thinking that there needs to be a line drawn, otherwise all you end up doing is having a way to make an end-run around the legal verdict -- "we'll just spin off a company that does what we're not allowed to do, and buy the results from them".
So I can't store my ~3PB of telescope data on there, or even just the jpeg browse images.
The terms of use mention that you can share files.. but do they charge you for downloads, as with their other cloud service offerings, or is that included in the 'unlimited'?
(I might be an old fogey, but I remember when you used to link to a blog post to set context *and* link to the original source in the summary, rather than just some shallow 'I've cherry picked the info'. At least Roland and Coondoggie linked back to their original sources, even if Coondoggies were almost exclusively regurgitation of press releases + a links back to Network World))
I've seen a few talks from Stephen Friend. I was at the Research Data Alliance meeting, and he gave one of the plenary talks the day after Apple unveiled the device, and announced Research Kit (which he's involved with).
He mentioned that less than 24hrs after its release, they already had more Parkinsons patients signed up than any published study on the disease.
If the watch can get *any* sort of medically useful data, I'm all for it, especially as so many people have been designating that their data can be used by any qualified researcher. (yes, there will still have to be IRBs to approve research at most institutions, and I assume some sort of gatekeepers from Sage Bionetworks to determine who gets access to the data).... but the fact that we might be able to get medical data at a scale never before seen is huge. And we might get a wider slice of the population, not just college students or from a limited geographic area that might not be applicable to the larger population.
(disclaimer : I did not watch the video. I usually read the articles before commenting (I know, that's against this site's standards)... if the person has a legitimate argument to make, post it so I can read it)
When ExtJS changed their license to GPL3, not LGPL, as you would expect for a library.
The owner of Sencha then put out a statement that if you built something that made use of ExtJS, then you had to release your software under GPL3... including the server components.
I have no problem with releasing the client side -- that's all javascript that people could view the source and see... but releasing the server side? That requires security audits and a review by legal... it's just not going to happen.
Reading the review, the reviewer seemed to have the same take on what GPL meant from the statement:
With MySQL, on the other hand, the client library is GPL, so you must pay a commercial fee to Oracle or supply the source code of your application. (Thatâ(TM)s less of an issue when using MySQL in websites; MariaDB uses the GPL 2 license but also has a less restrictive LGPL license for MySQL Client libraries.)
Now, if the issue is simply the *client* code, then you could get around it by using ODBC, or something like Perl's DBD::mysqlPP, which doesn't use the MySQL client code. Do you have to release the whole application if it's just something that makes use of a mysql database? I don't know, but with all other things being equal, and more and more people coming to this conclusion, I'd rather just stick with something that's LGPL or MIT.
Who's going to pay for the CDN? My data is growing at > 1TB/day, and I have no idea what's going to be of interest on any given day.
And as for CPU cost... are you going to pay for the sysadmin time to migrate all of our services? Or any of the other solutions that you're proposing?
Our servers have been certified as 'low' risk for years, because we're specifically distributing data with *no* access restrictions. We've had to fight for our 'low'... and then have to explain to the security auditors every three years that what they're testing for doesn't apply to us.
(we have one of the highest 'incident' rate for our location, because they consider every attempt at a hack to be a 'incident', even though we haven't had any successful hacks in years).
Oh... and of our staff of 2.5 sysadmins for our department, dealing with security audits and such takes up > 0.5 FTE for about 6-9 months or so when the security plans are updated and the audits are occuring... so it's not cheap).
No more unfunded mandates... if this is important enough... give us the funding and resources to do it. (which likely means hiring another sysadmin, and more hardware)
I operate government websites that serve physics data to the public.
HTTPS would require additional CPU for the SSL processing and bandwidth because it would make requests non-cacheable.
Not to mention that it would make the intrusion detection system attached to the router completely useless, so we'd lose a layer of security and it would make it more difficult to detect probing across the network and other 'slow' attacks. It would also prevent us from doing auditing after an exploit is known but before we've been able to get the mod_security rules in place or whatever other mitigation.
So yes, there are perfectly valid reasons to *not* be running HTTPs. I know you couched your message with 'virtually', but blindly appying 'best practices' or whatever other recommendations without understanding what the implications will break systems. (and I have to file paperwork every year for every one of my web servers that doesn't comply with the CIS benchmarks)
ps. 'there should be a law for that' is the absolutely worse policy, as most people in legislature aren't tech-savy, and will just screw things up. I was actually against all of the Net Neutrality bills that were proposed because they'd have outlawed agressive spam filtering (blocking 'legal' communications, and the CAN-SPAM act defined that some spam is legal). You need flexibility and speed in dealing with most issues, and laws don't do either well.
At least, I was assume it was in his biography (as I never read it). But when it came out, there were quite a few reports that Jobs said he had figured out TV interfaces:
It's entirely possible that because he didn't like the TVs, he had come up with a better UI... but we haven't seen a dramatic revision of the Apple TV since he died... so we might never know what it was that he came up with.
Shaun of the Dead was in a world where zombies were known, but most people were dismissive of it. Of course, that might've also been one of the tipping points to really get zombies into mainstream culture (2004), as many of the movies tended to be rather gruesome things that only appealed to a limited audience.
I want to say that the (excellent) book Ex-Heroes might've had zombies as a known thing as well. Of course, that one's set in a world that also has super heroes (who are fighting against the zombie outbreak).
I can't remember if World War Z (the book, not the movie) had established that zombies were a cultural thing before the outbreak happened... I want to say that the disease vector was different than your typical zombie movie, and they had called them Z as zombies were the closest thing that they had to relate it to.
I've actually lost count how many megachurches have been built on farm land in Upper Marlboro, MD. I assume the land must be cheap, as we have The First Baptist Church of Glenarden, which was built just 1.2 miles from Riverdale Baptist Church. And it's not to be confused with the First Baptist Church Upper Marlboro, which is about 8 miles away as the crow flies.
All of these are non-profits, so there will likely never be any more tax revenue from them, and unless they also have a school (which Riverdale does), it sits nearly empty for most of the week.
I asked another applicant a similar question: "Suppose you wanted to send me a file with very sensitive information, how would you encrypt it in such a way that I would decrypt it?" The person started off by asking me if it was an excel file, a PDF, etc.
You should've answered the person, because then they might've told you that there's an encyption standard for PDF. I use it with my tax-preparer, so that we don't need to deal with other programs that would decrypt the file (and then potentially leave an unencrypted copy lying about).
Excel offers password protection to restrict modifications, it wouldn't surprise me if they offered encryption, too.
So in this case, it might not be that the person sucks at his job... it might be that you are, because you had a pre-conceived notion of what the answer should be, rather than finding out how that person would handle the problem. It's entirely possible that they could come up with a better solution than yours.
And as for the the question of what proportion are bad... you have to remember that you're hiring people. The people who really know what they're doing are likely either going to be paid well, or have an established network that they can tap when they need a job. (Rather than answer some random job posting where they don't know if it'll be worse than their past job, and/or have to jump through hoops answering poorly thought up interview questions).
If you mention to your current developers that you're hiring, and they can't manage to find people to refer, that's possibly a sign that none of them would be willing to subject their friends to come work for you. And if that's the case, you might have problems when one of their friends' companies are hiring.
You have the 'knows how to work efficiently to get the project done as quickly as possible'.
And then you have the 'knows that they'll have to maintain it, and will work to make sure to minimize shortcuts, or document every od trick they used, so that two years later they'll be able to modify it when some new requirement comes along'.
I actually enjoyed doing the first type of programming. These days I see paralized and might be over-designing things because of times that I've gotten stung by not being type #2. (both my own code and other people's)
No they don't. Masochists who like trying to figure out how to clip in the heat sink into some crapped board so that they don't blow out their ICs, solder. Or people who have lots of extra time to figure out what they burned out, desolder it, then go back to the store to get a new one solder.
Real geeks wire wrap.
Crimping meant that I could do it without digging out my soldering iron, waiting for it to heat up, etc. It also reduced the risk of a bad solder joint, or a burn. (quite possible, as I had gotten very little sleep over the past few days... so much so that on the day of the event, I was looking so haggard that I passed out, and then was sent home).
And besides... you can often solder *after* crimping, if you do a clean job (and use a heat sink). You can't crimp onto a solder-only connection.
I guess what it comes down to is that real geeks know when to solder, and when not to.
I needed some odd audio cables last year, so that I could patch an mp3 player into a PA system. I was thinking that I'd find crimp-on 1/8" ends, and make the cable myself.
I got to the store, and was having trouble finding what I wanted (I found solder-on, but the crimp-on slot was empty), so I thought I'd look at what cables that they had that I could cut up... and they just happened to have a cable that was 1/8" to bare wires.
The year before, I got a bunch of various cables so that I could patch into a mixing board to record audio from a conference that I was at. I've had other times when I was outfitting a chase vehicle for a solar car race, and they had the parts that I needed to get all of our various antennas on the roof of the van.
So yes, it helps for those 'I really do need it now' situations. In some cases, Guitar Center might have it, but the closest one is more than an hour away, and they wouldn't have had the components to make the specific cable that I needed, and they sure wouldn't have had N-connectors and magnetic antenna mounts.
I hope they can turn it around... I'd be willing to pay a membership fee just to have them around for when I really need a part.
I apologize for reading the article, but it says that ISPs complained that they didn't like the $5000 fine for not forwarding the messag... but can they forward it and add their own message?
Something to the effect of 'you should know your rights', with the maximum penalty they could face, how they can fight against it, etc.
If they come up with a boilerplate message, and not something that needs to be customized for each letter being sent, then you're minimized the incremental costs. And I'm guessing that they had plenty of lawyers involved with reviewing the bills as proposed and the law that was finally passed.
I would think the 'we comply with the letter of the law, but not the intent' approach would cheaper & more effective than trying to deal with lobbying politicians who already have their minds made up. (provided you don't do something that might get you sued... but getting sued and going to court might be better to establish the limits of the law than leaving it to politicians)
If the law's written in such a way as to prevent them from sending a message triggered by the requirement to forward the message, then you send it to *all* of your subscribers.
That was my first thought, too... but then I realized that there's another sign that's even earlier -- a hand on the weapon.
My understanding is that officers are trained to put their hand on their weapon when they feel uneasy about a situation and they might need to use it.
It'd be nice if you could start the recording even earlier (possibly having a buffer that gets written to storage when the weapon is grabbed), but this would *also* give you the times when the officer put his hand on the weapon but *didn't* draw it.
It'd likely have some false positives (officers checking all of their gear), but you'd also be able to tell if you have officers who make it a habit of clutching their weapns all the time... if you have some that seem to be a little more jumpy, you can turn their cameras to run all the time, and see if they're jumpy for every encounter, or only a subset of the population. (ie, if it looks to be racist).
I'd like one that can easily pick up program states from one PC â" like an IDE session â" and carry them to another PC
If the issue is just location, and not resources (needing to move to a machine w/ more memory, better CPUs for compiling), then you can just use remote desktop technology.
Of course, some IDEs also let you save the state of your project (what files are opened, how the windows are organized, etc), and if they save it to a file, you might be able to move that between systems, but you'd need the files laid out the same on disk so that it'd find everything again. If all of the files are in some version control system, it shouldn't be too difficult.
(I'm a Mac user, so can't comment on PC IDEs... and I don't really use an 'IDE' per se. I use BBEdit, which is more a text editor with some IDE-like functionality)
Some movie theatres have been experimenting with streaming.
I went to see the Monty Python reunion live broadcast... and in a packed theatre, it's a much different experience than watching it from home, even if you have a group of friends over. The company doing it was also advertising that they had operas.
The tickets were more expensive than regular movie tickets, but they were nothing compared to when I saw The Book of Mormon (as it sold out so fast we had to get more expensive tickets). They were more on-par with when I saw Avenue Q at The Red Branch Theatre. (and they're going to be doing it again this summer)
I admit, it's not as cheap as the improv group when I was in college (which many of us went to see every Friday at midnight), but you get some really funny stuff that'd never get made by a big movie studio. I remember seeing signs in DC for a place doing a Harry Potter spoof/synopsis a couple years back. I saw a play in the mid 1990s about lesbian vegetarian cattle rustlers. (I want to say it was named "Steak")
The engineering fraternity where I did my undergrad had been doing research on this topic since at least the early 1990s, and I suspect since well before that.
My understanding of their procedure was they had a couple of beers the night before... not so much to have a hang over, and then another beer a couple of hours before the test.... but I suspect that it's different for each person, as I've seen some amazing code come out of Swedish programmers who were completely wasted. (although, I wouldn't want to be the one to maintain it).
As you specifically mentioned that your kid's interested in minecraft, see if they'd be interested in ComputerCraft which that lets you build 'turtles' that can be programmed to do things using lua.
You can then give her challenges of increasing difficulty to teach her to break things down into steps, and to build on what she's already learned:
Tunneling (note, they come with a pre-defined 'tunnel', but it's really slow)
Tunneling through gravel areas
Tunneling and refueling as needed.
Tunneling and setting torches every 10 blocks
Leveling out an area
Planting a garden
Harvesting the garden
De-limbing a tree
...etc
I've done the various tunneling stuff... I assume the other stuff is possible, but I haven't actually tried them. Note that you need diamond tools to make the various types of turtles, so mining turtles should be first... but then you have a diamond pick that doesn't wear down.
It was even launched from a Boeing Delta II, so they can't claim it was their first conjoined launch. (which caused major launch delays... due to the Boeing strike, then the batteries in the second stage being de-certified... then once the strike was over, the Air Force kept cutting in line for launch pads)
Disclaimer : I work for the Solar Data Analysis Center. which operates the STEREO Science Center.
We've got groups fighting the idea that maybe airborne polution is affecting our environment... most likely because it affects their corporate profits.
If you say that shift work is hazardous to worker's health, no matter what you do (easiest might be to consider it hazardous, and therefore suitable for hazard pay and/or require some monitoring of the employees), it's going to affect corporate profits and therefore, people are going to fight against it.
I'm guessing that the group likely to study this further will be the military... you can't have people making bad decisions because they're keeping abnormal shifts when it might affect starting World War 3. For all we know, this might've been a factor in the nuclear cheating scandal... either the need to cheat on the test (because the folks had gotten stupid after working shifts), or the stupid decision to cheat on the test.
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Back in the 1990s, I was working in Kentucky for an ISP and doing assorted contracting work.
I had a case that was rather similar what you're describing, only ours wasn't run that way because of incompetence -- we were connecting up all of the offices of the Department of Public Advocacy, and for one location the state had decided that rather than get a new line to the DPA offices, as they were in the back of a shopping mall that already had some government offices in it, we'd get fibre pulled between the two offices. Mind you, this was frame relay and fractional T1 days, before DSL, so a new drop was pretty expensive. (I want to say it was around $500/month for just the line charges for a T1, not including the port charges to the ISP tht you were connecting through).
So, when we went there for the install, someone had already pulled the fibre -- I went on the 3 hr drive down there, got soeone to escort me to where I needed to go, and plugged in all of our gear, then went and set things up on the DPA side.
All was fine for a year or so, then we got a call that things were down -- we tried everything that we could over the phone with non-IT folks (it's an office of lawyers), so I was sent on the 6hr round-trip with spare fibre patch cables and such.
A quick check in at the DPA offices showed nothing wrong over there, so I went over the other end of the bulding. I don't remember what the name of the department was, but it was a sort of family services type thing (where people got food stamps, stuff like that). I went up the counter and told the person behind the plexiglass that I was with DPA, and we had equipment in their wiring closet that I needed to get access to.
To which she replied, 'DPA is around the corner'. And I said no, I work for the DPA, and I need to get into your wiring closet. And she kept repeating that DPA was around the corner. I asked for her to get someone else. And I waited 10 minutes or so for someone else to come out front. Once she showed up, I spent a few more minutes with the 'DPA is around the corner' response until I *finally* got through to her and convinced her to let me into their closet. (mind you, this would likely have been considered 'social engineering' if I did it today, as I showed them no ID, being that I had none that said I did work for the DPA).
When I finally got to the closet, I saw that our box had no lights on it ... I traced the power cord down to a power strip that someone had removed all other things from, and taped over those outlets and written 'BAD' across it ... yet left our fiber tranciever plugged into it. I think I was in the room for all of 5 minutes -- it took me *way* more time trying to talk them into letting me in the room than to actually diagnose the problems *including* the time spent in the other offices.
So ~6.5 hrs to fix a problem, because the other office didn't care at all about our gear in their closet, as it would've taken them less than a minute to have moved everthing that was plugged into the known-bad power strip.
So I'd have to say -- no way in hell should you run cable to a private office. If nothing else, that office might close or move, and who knows what might be in there next (or if the new tenents want to remodel it).
Admittedly, it wasn't specifically a CompSci class, but when I took our engineering school's 'Intro to Programming' course, we were paired up for the assignments. The only rule was that I wasn't allowed to pair up with Sebastian, as we were the two who had significant programming experience before we got to college.
When I took Numerical Methods my sophomore year, we were paired up in class, but that was partially because the computer lab we worked from didn't have enough computers for all of us. When it came time for the final, they had to book a second lab so that we'd all have computers to compile on. (which meant those of us in the room w/ newer machines had an advantage over the other room, as our code would compile in 1/2 the time)
But let's face it -- group projects are pretty typical in college. And pairing up for labs is normal too ... we don't accuse chemists of getting 1/2 an education if they didn't do every last titration themselves, or a geography major of getting 1/4 an education if they have 3 people in their study group.
The goal is get the people to learn the materials -- if done right, the two people learn from each other. Yes, it can be a drag if you get an idiot for a partner ... but unlike in high school, the people who know their stuff are in demand for their skills, not looked down on for being a nerd/geek/whatever other disparaging term.
If you have two people making forward progress then it's better than one person struggling along and getting nowhere. Maybe I'm being a bit socialist in my views, but there are sometimes when we need to step away from the 'everyone for themselves' typical American attitude and look at the nordic standards for schooling. You don't want your school to get a reputation for being the one that produced someone who screws up in some major way. My undergrad is in civil engineering -- and if I find out I'm in a building that one of my classmates worked on, I'm going to leave ... immediately.
As the government isn't allowed to spy on citizens without a warrent, under normal circumstances, the satellites aren't supposed to take images when over the U.S.
So the government instead buys images from commercial vendors ... the same folks who provide images to Google and Bing for their mapping projects. (which admittedly, might not be as high of resolution).
I'm thinking that there needs to be a line drawn, otherwise all you end up doing is having a way to make an end-run around the legal verdict -- "we'll just spin off a company that does what we're not allowed to do, and buy the results from them".
Why do people link to blog posts that neglect to link to the original source?
A little digging, and it seems on the surface to have similar restrictions as BackBlaze, as it's only for "for personal, non-commercial purposes".
So I can't store my ~3PB of telescope data on there, or even just the jpeg browse images.
The terms of use mention that you can share files .. but do they charge you for downloads, as with their other cloud service offerings, or is that included in the 'unlimited'?
(I might be an old fogey, but I remember when you used to link to a blog post to set context *and* link to the original source in the summary, rather than just some shallow 'I've cherry picked the info'. At least Roland and Coondoggie linked back to their original sources, even if Coondoggies were almost exclusively regurgitation of press releases + a links back to Network World))
I've seen a few talks from Stephen Friend. I was at the Research Data Alliance meeting, and he gave one of the plenary talks the day after Apple unveiled the device, and announced Research Kit (which he's involved with).
He mentioned that less than 24hrs after its release, they already had more Parkinsons patients signed up than any published study on the disease.
If the watch can get *any* sort of medically useful data, I'm all for it, especially as so many people have been designating that their data can be used by any qualified researcher. (yes, there will still have to be IRBs to approve research at most institutions, and I assume some sort of gatekeepers from Sage Bionetworks to determine who gets access to the data). ... but the fact that we might be able to get medical data at a scale never before seen is huge. And we might get a wider slice of the population, not just college students or from a limited geographic area that might not be applicable to the larger population.
(disclaimer : I did not watch the video. I usually read the articles before commenting (I know, that's against this site's standards) ... if the person has a legitimate argument to make, post it so I can read it)
When ExtJS changed their license to GPL3, not LGPL, as you would expect for a library.
The owner of Sencha then put out a statement that if you built something that made use of ExtJS, then you had to release your software under GPL3 ... including the server components.
I have no problem with releasing the client side -- that's all javascript that people could view the source and see ... but releasing the server side? That requires security audits and a review by legal ... it's just not going to happen.
Reading the review, the reviewer seemed to have the same take on what GPL meant from the statement :
Now, if the issue is simply the *client* code, then you could get around it by using ODBC, or something like Perl's DBD::mysqlPP, which doesn't use the MySQL client code. Do you have to release the whole application if it's just something that makes use of a mysql database? I don't know, but with all other things being equal, and more and more people coming to this conclusion, I'd rather just stick with something that's LGPL or MIT.
Who's going to pay for the CDN? My data is growing at > 1TB/day, and I have no idea what's going to be of interest on any given day.
And as for CPU cost ... are you going to pay for the sysadmin time to migrate all of our services? Or any of the other solutions that you're proposing?
Our servers have been certified as 'low' risk for years, because we're specifically distributing data with *no* access restrictions. We've had to fight for our 'low' ... and then have to explain to the security auditors every three years that what they're testing for doesn't apply to us.
(we have one of the highest 'incident' rate for our location, because they consider every attempt at a hack to be a 'incident', even though we haven't had any successful hacks in years).
Oh ... and of our staff of 2.5 sysadmins for our department, dealing with security audits and such takes up > 0.5 FTE for about 6-9 months or so when the security plans are updated and the audits are occuring ... so it's not cheap).
No more unfunded mandates ... if this is important enough ... give us the funding and resources to do it. (which likely means hiring another sysadmin, and more hardware)
I'd go back to FTP before I went to HTTPS.
I operate government websites that serve physics data to the public.
HTTPS would require additional CPU for the SSL processing and bandwidth because it would make requests non-cacheable.
Not to mention that it would make the intrusion detection system attached to the router completely useless, so we'd lose a layer of security and it would make it more difficult to detect probing across the network and other 'slow' attacks. It would also prevent us from doing auditing after an exploit is known but before we've been able to get the mod_security rules in place or whatever other mitigation.
So yes, there are perfectly valid reasons to *not* be running HTTPs. I know you couched your message with 'virtually', but blindly appying 'best practices' or whatever other recommendations without understanding what the implications will break systems. (and I have to file paperwork every year for every one of my web servers that doesn't comply with the CIS benchmarks)
ps. 'there should be a law for that' is the absolutely worse policy, as most people in legislature aren't tech-savy, and will just screw things up. I was actually against all of the Net Neutrality bills that were proposed because they'd have outlawed agressive spam filtering (blocking 'legal' communications, and the CAN-SPAM act defined that some spam is legal). You need flexibility and speed in dealing with most issues, and laws don't do either well.
At least, I was assume it was in his biography (as I never read it). But when it came out, there were quite a few reports that Jobs said he had figured out TV interfaces:
It's entirely possible that because he didn't like the TVs, he had come up with a better UI ... but we haven't seen a dramatic revision of the Apple TV since he died ... so we might never know what it was that he came up with.
Shaun of the Dead was in a world where zombies were known, but most people were dismissive of it. Of course, that might've also been one of the tipping points to really get zombies into mainstream culture (2004), as many of the movies tended to be rather gruesome things that only appealed to a limited audience.
I want to say that the (excellent) book Ex-Heroes might've had zombies as a known thing as well. Of course, that one's set in a world that also has super heroes (who are fighting against the zombie outbreak).
I can't remember if World War Z (the book, not the movie) had established that zombies were a cultural thing before the outbreak happened ... I want to say that the disease vector was different than your typical zombie movie, and they had called them Z as zombies were the closest thing that they had to relate it to.
It's a real bank:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F...
I've actually lost count how many megachurches have been built on farm land in Upper Marlboro, MD. I assume the land must be cheap, as we have The First Baptist Church of Glenarden, which was built just 1.2 miles from Riverdale Baptist Church. And it's not to be confused with the First Baptist Church Upper Marlboro, which is about 8 miles away as the crow flies.
All of these are non-profits, so there will likely never be any more tax revenue from them, and unless they also have a school (which Riverdale does), it sits nearly empty for most of the week.
You should've answered the person, because then they might've told you that there's an encyption standard for PDF. I use it with my tax-preparer, so that we don't need to deal with other programs that would decrypt the file (and then potentially leave an unencrypted copy lying about).
Excel offers password protection to restrict modifications, it wouldn't surprise me if they offered encryption, too.
So in this case, it might not be that the person sucks at his job ... it might be that you are, because you had a pre-conceived notion of what the answer should be, rather than finding out how that person would handle the problem. It's entirely possible that they could come up with a better solution than yours.
And as for the the question of what proportion are bad ... you have to remember that you're hiring people. The people who really know what they're doing are likely either going to be paid well, or have an established network that they can tap when they need a job. (Rather than answer some random job posting where they don't know if it'll be worse than their past job, and/or have to jump through hoops answering poorly thought up interview questions).
If you mention to your current developers that you're hiring, and they can't manage to find people to refer, that's possibly a sign that none of them would be willing to subject their friends to come work for you. And if that's the case, you might have problems when one of their friends' companies are hiring.
You have the 'knows how to work efficiently to get the project done as quickly as possible'.
And then you have the 'knows that they'll have to maintain it, and will work to make sure to minimize shortcuts, or document every od trick they used, so that two years later they'll be able to modify it when some new requirement comes along'.
I actually enjoyed doing the first type of programming. These days I see paralized and might be over-designing things because of times that I've gotten stung by not being type #2. (both my own code and other people's)
No they don't. Masochists who like trying to figure out how to clip in the heat sink into some crapped board so that they don't blow out their ICs, solder. Or people who have lots of extra time to figure out what they burned out, desolder it, then go back to the store to get a new one solder.
Real geeks wire wrap.
Crimping meant that I could do it without digging out my soldering iron, waiting for it to heat up, etc. It also reduced the risk of a bad solder joint, or a burn. (quite possible, as I had gotten very little sleep over the past few days ... so much so that on the day of the event, I was looking so haggard that I passed out, and then was sent home).
And besides ... you can often solder *after* crimping, if you do a clean job (and use a heat sink). You can't crimp onto a solder-only connection.
I guess what it comes down to is that real geeks know when to solder, and when not to.
I needed some odd audio cables last year, so that I could patch an mp3 player into a PA system. I was thinking that I'd find crimp-on 1/8" ends, and make the cable myself.
I got to the store, and was having trouble finding what I wanted (I found solder-on, but the crimp-on slot was empty), so I thought I'd look at what cables that they had that I could cut up ... and they just happened to have a cable that was 1/8" to bare wires.
The year before, I got a bunch of various cables so that I could patch into a mixing board to record audio from a conference that I was at. I've had other times when I was outfitting a chase vehicle for a solar car race, and they had the parts that I needed to get all of our various antennas on the roof of the van.
So yes, it helps for those 'I really do need it now' situations. In some cases, Guitar Center might have it, but the closest one is more than an hour away, and they wouldn't have had the components to make the specific cable that I needed, and they sure wouldn't have had N-connectors and magnetic antenna mounts.
I hope they can turn it around ... I'd be willing to pay a membership fee just to have them around for when I really need a part.
I apologize for reading the article, but it says that ISPs complained that they didn't like the $5000 fine for not forwarding the messag ... but can they forward it and add their own message?
Something to the effect of 'you should know your rights', with the maximum penalty they could face, how they can fight against it, etc.
If they come up with a boilerplate message, and not something that needs to be customized for each letter being sent, then you're minimized the incremental costs. And I'm guessing that they had plenty of lawyers involved with reviewing the bills as proposed and the law that was finally passed.
I would think the 'we comply with the letter of the law, but not the intent' approach would cheaper & more effective than trying to deal with lobbying politicians who already have their minds made up. (provided you don't do something that might get you sued ... but getting sued and going to court might be better to establish the limits of the law than leaving it to politicians)
If the law's written in such a way as to prevent them from sending a message triggered by the requirement to forward the message, then you send it to *all* of your subscribers.
That was my first thought, too ... but then I realized that there's another sign that's even earlier -- a hand on the weapon.
My understanding is that officers are trained to put their hand on their weapon when they feel uneasy about a situation and they might need to use it.
It'd be nice if you could start the recording even earlier (possibly having a buffer that gets written to storage when the weapon is grabbed), but this would *also* give you the times when the officer put his hand on the weapon but *didn't* draw it.
It'd likely have some false positives (officers checking all of their gear), but you'd also be able to tell if you have officers who make it a habit of clutching their weapns all the time ... if you have some that seem to be a little more jumpy, you can turn their cameras to run all the time, and see if they're jumpy for every encounter, or only a subset of the population. (ie, if it looks to be racist).
If the issue is just location, and not resources (needing to move to a machine w/ more memory, better CPUs for compiling), then you can just use remote desktop technology.
Of course, some IDEs also let you save the state of your project (what files are opened, how the windows are organized, etc), and if they save it to a file, you might be able to move that between systems, but you'd need the files laid out the same on disk so that it'd find everything again. If all of the files are in some version control system, it shouldn't be too difficult.
(I'm a Mac user, so can't comment on PC IDEs ... and I don't really use an 'IDE' per se. I use BBEdit, which is more a text editor with some IDE-like functionality)
Some movie theatres have been experimenting with streaming.
I went to see the Monty Python reunion live broadcast ... and in a packed theatre, it's a much different experience than watching it from home, even if you have a group of friends over. The company doing it was also advertising that they had operas.
The tickets were more expensive than regular movie tickets, but they were nothing compared to when I saw The Book of Mormon (as it sold out so fast we had to get more expensive tickets). They were more on-par with when I saw Avenue Q at The Red Branch Theatre. (and they're going to be doing it again this summer)
I admit, it's not as cheap as the improv group when I was in college (which many of us went to see every Friday at midnight), but you get some really funny stuff that'd never get made by a big movie studio. I remember seeing signs in DC for a place doing a Harry Potter spoof/synopsis a couple years back. I saw a play in the mid 1990s about lesbian vegetarian cattle rustlers. (I want to say it was named "Steak")
The engineering fraternity where I did my undergrad had been doing research on this topic since at least the early 1990s, and I suspect since well before that.
My understanding of their procedure was they had a couple of beers the night before ... not so much to have a hang over, and then another beer a couple of hours before the test. ... but I suspect that it's different for each person, as I've seen some amazing code come out of Swedish programmers who were completely wasted. (although, I wouldn't want to be the one to maintain it).
ComputerCraft Institute :
https://github.com/squidsoup/c...
http://blog.nocturne.net.nz/ed...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
As you specifically mentioned that your kid's interested in minecraft, see if they'd be interested in ComputerCraft which that lets you build 'turtles' that can be programmed to do things using lua.
You can then give her challenges of increasing difficulty to teach her to break things down into steps, and to build on what she's already learned:
I've done the various tunneling stuff ... I assume the other stuff is possible, but I haven't actually tried them. Note that you need diamond tools to make the various types of turtles, so mining turtles should be first ... but then you have a diamond pick that doesn't wear down.
Um ... so then what was STEREO? (launched in 2006)
There are pictures of them stacked together
It was even launched from a Boeing Delta II, so they can't claim it was their first conjoined launch. (which caused major launch delays ... due to the Boeing strike, then the batteries in the second stage being de-certified ... then once the strike was over, the Air Force kept cutting in line for launch pads)
Disclaimer : I work for the Solar Data Analysis Center. which operates the STEREO Science Center.
We've got groups fighting the idea that maybe airborne polution is affecting our environment ... most likely because it affects their corporate profits.
If you say that shift work is hazardous to worker's health, no matter what you do (easiest might be to consider it hazardous, and therefore suitable for hazard pay and/or require some monitoring of the employees), it's going to affect corporate profits and therefore, people are going to fight against it.
I'm guessing that the group likely to study this further will be the military ... you can't have people making bad decisions because they're keeping abnormal shifts when it might affect starting World War 3. For all we know, this might've been a factor in the nuclear cheating scandal ... either the need to cheat on the test (because the folks had gotten stupid after working shifts), or the stupid decision to cheat on the test.