IMO Google hasn't gone nearly far enough. The rule should be simple. Security updates for at least 3 years for any android device you release to the public. Period. Don't like it? You are forbidden from using the Android trademark. Very simple.
Agreed, which is why I stick to phones from the Android One program, which has this exact requirement.
Because it's more than just a "slight graphics refresh". The new Gmail UI brings in features from Inbox, such as snoozing emails and smart replies, and some new features like "confidential" mode, and add-ons on the right-hand-side (like Calendar, Tasks, etc).
Even if passwords are excluded, the article gives other examples of sensitive information like medical info that would get logged.
The unencrypted channel thing wasn't an assumption either, the article mentions that some of the dashboards are served over HTTP, so sensitive information would be sent unencrypted from the third party tracking company to the developers looking at the dashboard.
Let's suppose that there are no malicious uses of web tracking, that it is solely used to improve the user experience. There's still a big problem, which is that a lot of software developers are just incompetent when it comes to security. And sorry to break it to you, but your post proves that you're one of them.
If you don't see the problem with a key logger on a site that contains a password field, and then sending those logged keys to a third-party, and through unencrypted channels, then you need to be fired from your job as a web dev asap.
More than any other company, Microsoft showed how control over a platform and the ecosystem around it can be used to build and maintain a monopoly. If you wanted to write software in the 90s, you had to write it for Microsoft's platform, because that's what people were using - consumers and business alike.
As Microsoft loses control over the web and mobile platforms, their desktop operating system monopoly and the businesses that depend on it are increasingly exposed to competitors. It doesn't matter if it's only the unsophisticated consumers that are moving. The world is definitely heading towards a more mobile-oriented computing culture, even if mobiles never take 100% of the market away from desktops, and this is bad for Microsoft.
These side channels look kind of like the bank-like intermediaries to me. If the bulk of Bitcoin transactions have to be made off of the blockchain, doesn't this negate the benefits of an untraceable currency on an untrusted distributed system? Or am I missing something here?
Even if Bitcoin does raise the block size one day, it's still not clear to me how it's ever going to scale high enough to become a general purpose currency. Going from 7 transactions/second to 56 sounds nice and all, but Visa and Mastercard handle about 2000 transactions/second. Each.
Are they going to eventually go to a 600+ MB block size? Or are a sizeable number of transactions going to have to go through bank-like intermediaries?
If people are leaving after 3 months, then yeah, that's too temporal, and things are goalless, and it's bad. But the average time at a company for young people is more like 3 years. In my experience, people generally get up to speed in around 6 months, which still leaves plenty of time to get stuff done.
There's a balance to be had here. One thing that I've noticed about a lot of people who've been at companies for a long time (7+ years) is that they've been a little too heavily indoctrinated into the company's traditional ways of thinking. It can be good for a company's culture to get some external influence.
But more importantly, from an individual point of view, it's good to be a well-rounded person, and it's hard to do that when you're a lifer.
1. The Australian guy signs up for a Twitter account 2. The OP receives an email, and marks it as spam 3. Later, the OP signs up for a Twitter account 4. Gmail sends it straight to the Junk mail folder
On most sites, you'll can reset this person's password any time. Rather than lock them out immediately, wait a little while until they've been using the account for a while, then reset their password, log in, and figure out who it is. Then you can contact them and ask them to stop (or play pranks, if that's your thing).
Also if you're in Europe, and the other person is in Australia, the emails that the Australian person generates will be from basically the opposite timezone. You could try filtering signup emails based that come in the middle of the night to a separate folder.
He's getting emails for new account signups. How is Gmail's spam filter supposed to distinguish between new accounts that he himself created, and those that the other person in Australia created?
It's nice to have a web browser and a basic set of (pdf, image, etc.) file viewers so that double-clicking a file in the file manager works.
But there's a class of apps that most people won't use, and take up a lot of disk space (and bandwidth to install/upgrade) so the default should be to not install anything:
Email Client: Evolution is a large program that pulls in lots of dependencies. Most people use web mail anyway. People who want a native MUA either know how to install one, or have instructions from their company on how to set this up. IDE: Even for people who need them, there's no one IDE that will handle every programmer, so there's no sensible default. The people who need an IDE will know how to install one. IRC/Messaging Client: Again, the market is so fragmented that it's hard to pick a good default for this, and many people are using web-based IM clients anyway. Office Suite: LibreOffice is probably the right default, but it's a very big piece of software. Many people use Google or Office 365 for this too, and many more don't have a need for an office suite at all. Calendar: If there's a simple calendar app (e.g. GNOME Calendar) that doesn't require a lot of setup to start using, go with that. But not Evolution, which is too big and requires too much configuration on the first launch.
Although they have adapted it to this specific species of mosquito, what Google/Verily is doing is not a new. It's been done since the 1940's, and has had many successes in eradicating or suppressing pest populations.
Have you thought that maybe it's even harder to convince all 7.5+ billion people to stop reproducing? When this has been tried in places India and China, it resulted in forced sterilization, abortion and other human rights violations.
On the other hand, reducing per capita carbon emissions is something that can be done with economic policy. Implement carbon taxes so that people pay their fair share of environmental costs, and have incentives for research into alternative energy, etc.
Having developers focus exclusively on "luxury" apartments is not itself a problem. If all the new housing supply is going to the luxury end of the market, then the mid-range apartment hunters will no longer have to compete with the rich. Which then means that the poor will no longer have to compete with the middle class.
So more luxury apartments mean that the rent goes down for everyone (unless there was an oversupply, which there isn't in the Bay Area).
In defence of the cloud, here's how I usually see the conversation go:
Boss: "Let's deploy this application to a server in our data center" Developer: "OK"... Developer: "We need a server in our data center. How can I get one?" Sysadmin: "You'll need to engage an architect to produce an infrastructure design, then bring it to our vendors to get a quote, and then talk to the accountants to get your project funded. Make sure you get sign-off from these 8 different managers, and we can install your server. Then you'll need to talk to the networking guys about connectivity. We can have everything ready for you in about 6 months." Developer: "Uhh...OK. Let me talk to some people and get back to you..."... Boss: "So when will our servers be ready?" Developer: "I've just signed up for an AWS account and I'll go and spin up some EC2 instances. They should be up in about 5 minutes. If I put it on the corporate card, can you approve the expense?" Boss: "Yeah sure."
The reality is, in a lot of big companies, the services that IT provides are really shitty and you might be able to get a lot more done if you work around them.
Chicago had a 100% gun ban till recently. They still had record levels... of gun crime. So much for the gun control argument. (Kind of funny how liberals hate prohibition of drugs... but forget the same rules apply to guns. Ban guns and people bring them in... from places where guns aren't banned. Stunning.)
That's like saying "Arizona has strict immigration laws, yet it has high levels of illegal immigration".
Immigration, gun control, homelessness, etc. are federal-level issues. But that doesn't mean that local and state governments shouldn't do what they can do to try to fix things as much as they can, when they don't see eye-to-eye with the federal government.
Is there really anything other than Software Engineer? (for non-research roles)
As others have said, AI isn't new. But it is a fast growing field, so I'd caution against getting too specialized. In a field that is growing fast and changing quickly, it's important to be adaptable. You only tend to see highly specialized roles in established fields, and AI is not one of those.
He was running things for 11 days. That's not enough time to have any impact, positive or negative.
I don't think Eich's firing made any difference to the fortunes of Mozilla. If you look at the market share graph in TFA, there's no real change in Firefox's downward trend around the time that this happened.
This idea seems very common - if only Millennials would stop spending so much, and start saving up like their parents' generation, they would be able to afford a house.
Where I live, the house price to income ratio is double what it was in 1985. This means that young people need double the income that their parents had, to buy the same home.
In this case, it isn't that they're spending too much - it's that houses are too expensive relative to the jobs that are available.
Slashdot Mirror
Python is big. Go has been picking up a lot of traction lately.
IMO Google hasn't gone nearly far enough. The rule should be simple. Security updates for at least 3 years for any android device you release to the public. Period. Don't like it? You are forbidden from using the Android trademark. Very simple.
Agreed, which is why I stick to phones from the Android One program, which has this exact requirement.
"Agile" is a product, sold by consultants. That makes it a proper noun.
There's another word in the English language, "agile", which is an adjective. But it doesn't get used very often in the corporate world.
Why is this slight graphics refresh a news story?
Because it's more than just a "slight graphics refresh". The new Gmail UI brings in features from Inbox, such as snoozing emails and smart replies, and some new features like "confidential" mode, and add-ons on the right-hand-side (like Calendar, Tasks, etc).
Ironically TFA is on a site that's full of trackers. I'm using the EFF's Privacy Badger extension, and I get:
detected 23 potential trackers on this page.
Even if passwords are excluded, the article gives other examples of sensitive information like medical info that would get logged.
The unencrypted channel thing wasn't an assumption either, the article mentions that some of the dashboards are served over HTTP, so sensitive information would be sent unencrypted from the third party tracking company to the developers looking at the dashboard.
Let's suppose that there are no malicious uses of web tracking, that it is solely used to improve the user experience. There's still a big problem, which is that a lot of software developers are just incompetent when it comes to security. And sorry to break it to you, but your post proves that you're one of them.
If you don't see the problem with a key logger on a site that contains a password field, and then sending those logged keys to a third-party, and through unencrypted channels, then you need to be fired from your job as a web dev asap.
More than any other company, Microsoft showed how control over a platform and the ecosystem around it can be used to build and maintain a monopoly. If you wanted to write software in the 90s, you had to write it for Microsoft's platform, because that's what people were using - consumers and business alike.
As Microsoft loses control over the web and mobile platforms, their desktop operating system monopoly and the businesses that depend on it are increasingly exposed to competitors. It doesn't matter if it's only the unsophisticated consumers that are moving. The world is definitely heading towards a more mobile-oriented computing culture, even if mobiles never take 100% of the market away from desktops, and this is bad for Microsoft.
These side channels look kind of like the bank-like intermediaries to me. If the bulk of Bitcoin transactions have to be made off of the blockchain, doesn't this negate the benefits of an untraceable currency on an untrusted distributed system? Or am I missing something here?
Even if Bitcoin does raise the block size one day, it's still not clear to me how it's ever going to scale high enough to become a general purpose currency. Going from 7 transactions/second to 56 sounds nice and all, but Visa and Mastercard handle about 2000 transactions/second. Each.
Are they going to eventually go to a 600+ MB block size? Or are a sizeable number of transactions going to have to go through bank-like intermediaries?
If people are leaving after 3 months, then yeah, that's too temporal, and things are goalless, and it's bad. But the average time at a company for young people is more like 3 years. In my experience, people generally get up to speed in around 6 months, which still leaves plenty of time to get stuff done.
There's a balance to be had here. One thing that I've noticed about a lot of people who've been at companies for a long time (7+ years) is that they've been a little too heavily indoctrinated into the company's traditional ways of thinking. It can be good for a company's culture to get some external influence.
But more importantly, from an individual point of view, it's good to be a well-rounded person, and it's hard to do that when you're a lifer.
I'm thinking of a scenario more like this:
1. The Australian guy signs up for a Twitter account
2. The OP receives an email, and marks it as spam
3. Later, the OP signs up for a Twitter account
4. Gmail sends it straight to the Junk mail folder
On most sites, you'll can reset this person's password any time. Rather than lock them out immediately, wait a little while until they've been using the account for a while, then reset their password, log in, and figure out who it is. Then you can contact them and ask them to stop (or play pranks, if that's your thing).
Also if you're in Europe, and the other person is in Australia, the emails that the Australian person generates will be from basically the opposite timezone. You could try filtering signup emails based that come in the middle of the night to a separate folder.
He's getting emails for new account signups. How is Gmail's spam filter supposed to distinguish between new accounts that he himself created, and those that the other person in Australia created?
It's nice to have a web browser and a basic set of (pdf, image, etc.) file viewers so that double-clicking a file in the file manager works.
But there's a class of apps that most people won't use, and take up a lot of disk space (and bandwidth to install/upgrade) so the default should be to not install anything:
Email Client: Evolution is a large program that pulls in lots of dependencies. Most people use web mail anyway. People who want a native MUA either know how to install one, or have instructions from their company on how to set this up.
IDE: Even for people who need them, there's no one IDE that will handle every programmer, so there's no sensible default. The people who need an IDE will know how to install one.
IRC/Messaging Client: Again, the market is so fragmented that it's hard to pick a good default for this, and many people are using web-based IM clients anyway.
Office Suite: LibreOffice is probably the right default, but it's a very big piece of software. Many people use Google or Office 365 for this too, and many more don't have a need for an office suite at all.
Calendar: If there's a simple calendar app (e.g. GNOME Calendar) that doesn't require a lot of setup to start using, go with that. But not Evolution, which is too big and requires too much configuration on the first launch.
Although they have adapted it to this specific species of mosquito, what Google/Verily is doing is not a new. It's been done since the 1940's, and has had many successes in eradicating or suppressing pest populations.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Have you thought that maybe it's even harder to convince all 7.5+ billion people to stop reproducing? When this has been tried in places India and China, it resulted in forced sterilization, abortion and other human rights violations.
On the other hand, reducing per capita carbon emissions is something that can be done with economic policy. Implement carbon taxes so that people pay their fair share of environmental costs, and have incentives for research into alternative energy, etc.
Having developers focus exclusively on "luxury" apartments is not itself a problem. If all the new housing supply is going to the luxury end of the market, then the mid-range apartment hunters will no longer have to compete with the rich. Which then means that the poor will no longer have to compete with the middle class.
So more luxury apartments mean that the rent goes down for everyone (unless there was an oversupply, which there isn't in the Bay Area).
Don't forget:
- Scrum
- Scaled Agile Framework
- Agile Unified Process
In defence of the cloud, here's how I usually see the conversation go:
Boss: "Let's deploy this application to a server in our data center" ... ...
Developer: "OK"
Developer: "We need a server in our data center. How can I get one?"
Sysadmin: "You'll need to engage an architect to produce an infrastructure design, then bring it to our vendors to get a quote, and then talk to the accountants to get your project funded. Make sure you get sign-off from these 8 different managers, and we can install your server. Then you'll need to talk to the networking guys about connectivity. We can have everything ready for you in about 6 months."
Developer: "Uhh...OK. Let me talk to some people and get back to you..."
Boss: "So when will our servers be ready?"
Developer: "I've just signed up for an AWS account and I'll go and spin up some EC2 instances. They should be up in about 5 minutes. If I put it on the corporate card, can you approve the expense?"
Boss: "Yeah sure."
The reality is, in a lot of big companies, the services that IT provides are really shitty and you might be able to get a lot more done if you work around them.
Chicago had a 100% gun ban till recently. They still had record levels... of gun crime. So much for the gun control argument. (Kind of funny how liberals hate prohibition of drugs... but forget the same rules apply to guns. Ban guns and people bring them in... from places where guns aren't banned. Stunning.)
That's like saying "Arizona has strict immigration laws, yet it has high levels of illegal immigration".
Immigration, gun control, homelessness, etc. are federal-level issues. But that doesn't mean that local and state governments shouldn't do what they can do to try to fix things as much as they can, when they don't see eye-to-eye with the federal government.
Is there really anything other than Software Engineer? (for non-research roles)
As others have said, AI isn't new. But it is a fast growing field, so I'd caution against getting too specialized. In a field that is growing fast and changing quickly, it's important to be adaptable. You only tend to see highly specialized roles in established fields, and AI is not one of those.
When Eich was running things, the browser worked.
He was running things for 11 days. That's not enough time to have any impact, positive or negative.
I don't think Eich's firing made any difference to the fortunes of Mozilla. If you look at the market share graph in TFA, there's no real change in Firefox's downward trend around the time that this happened.
This idea seems very common - if only Millennials would stop spending so much, and start saving up like their parents' generation, they would be able to afford a house.
Where I live, the house price to income ratio is double what it was in 1985. This means that young people need double the income that their parents had, to buy the same home.
In this case, it isn't that they're spending too much - it's that houses are too expensive relative to the jobs that are available.
Sounds like you're looking for something like TechShop - http://techshop.ws/