For mobile development, learn about tools, platforms and methods for cross-platform development. And once you master the tools, learn about UI/UX and what makes a great interface on mobile platforms. These are skills in short supply, even in mobile development shops.
Not sure how this got modded insightful... During school, my academic years and subsequent time spent with various employers, I've had plenty of exposure to both nerds and non-nerd environments. Nerds tend to be more introvert, shy (not the same thing as introversion), perhaps "boring" to extroverts but far more passionate about subjects that interest them. But I have not noticed any open hostility towards minorities or women. If anything, I found them more accepting of outsiders; many of them do set high standards but they do so regardless of gender or race: if there's an overlap in interests, you'll be readily accepted. Coming from an environment that has few women and having a tendency to be on the shy side, interaction with women can be awkward for them, and women feel this awkwardness as well, but it's not intentionally hostile. I'm talking of course about actual groups of people, not internet forums.
What I have noticed in any predominantly male group, nerd or non-nerd, is that they crack more misogynistic jokes and sometimes exclude the female members from their circle. I couldn't say if the same thing happens in predominantly female groups, having never been part of one. It seems to me that girls are put off by the subject matter itself rather than its practitioners; the division becomes apparent at an early age already.
An opt-out system has been considered here. The problem is that the relatives of the deceased often make trouble, for whatever reasons (religion, emotional issues etc). If the system is opt-out, those relatives can make a much stronger case that donations isn't really what the deceased wanted. If the system is opt-in and one has to make a conscious effort to sign up, the family is far likelier to respect the dead person's wishes.
The problem with the proposed system of giving priority to organ donors is that doctors hate to make decisions on non-medical grounds. If two donors are waiting for an organ and one comes up, it's easy to give the organ to the guy on the donor list, all other things being equal. But things rarely are equal. Might be a young vs. old guy, one might have a better chance to come out of the procedure ok, one might need it more urgently than the other guy, etc. These are facts that a doctor can weigh. But what if he also has to take the donor list into account? My guess is that he won't, and that the donor list status will always play second fiddle to medical considerations. Still, such a system might prompt more people to sign up.
Indeed, this will solve itself over time:
At first, drivers will probably have to stay alert and ready to take over (hands on the wheel as required by that Merc that self-drives in traffic jams). When something of a baseline safety record for autonomous vehicles is established, you'll be allowed to go hands off but may have to be required to take out additional car insurance if you use the self-driving feature. With an improving safety record, that extra insurance will drop in price over time until it'll disappear. At some point you'll probably have to take out extra insurance if you want pedals & a steering wheel in your vehicle.
Z-Wave is nice and works pretty well; I use it to control my lights, heating, sprinklers, etc. When I am away, it turns the lights on and off at appropriate times and lets me keep an eye on things remotely. But it is not reliable enough for when your safety is involved. What many Z-Wavers do is install a good alarm system (either wired or wireless) from a reputable firm, connect it to their LAN, and hook it up to their Z-Wave hub. The Vera hub is open to tinkerers; plug-ins for most popular alarm panels exist, and if it isn't you can roll your own.
And, as someone already pointed out: ZWave is not open. However there is a reasonable certainty that equipment you buy from various vendors will play nicely together. Zigbee is a similar, open radio system but it lacks a standard for interoperability (though a few are emerging, like Light Link for lights and switches).
They said the same 15 years ago about learning Japanese. My guess? We'll stick with English. Chinese apparently is a very difficult language to learn to speak and write (Japanese writing is hard but learning to speak it is relatively easy). In contrast, English is easy to pick up, and already very widely spoken by non-native speakers.
8: Atlas Shrugged (one should sometimes read stuff just to show the errors in thought to boost critical thinking.)
9: Communist Manifesto (same as #8)
10: Wealth of Nations (same as #8 and #9)
I'd recommend those to any young person. Not just to show errors, but also to be exposed to ideas that one rarely encounters in the classroom (YYMV per country). This can help to translate "deep down feelings" into a set of core values, which helps one to think critically about ones own convictions.
If someone tells you it changed their life, I'd just stop talking to them.
If someone told me any book changed their life, I'd start talking to them to find out more. If anything, such an event always makes for great conversation.
Also, touch screens *eat* as remote controls. I have problems controlling R/C vehicles from my iPhone (cars, helis); I wouldn't want to control a full size car in the same manner.
Counterintuitively perhaps, once these programs are made visible they become vastly easier to expand under one justification or another, because you no longer have to worry so much about the very existence of the programs being exposed.
TFA argues:
1) Snowden blows the lid off surveillance schemes, many of which are conducted illegaly.
2) Intelligence agencies would like to continue these programmes and push for legislation to legalize them.
3) Said legislation is passed.
4) Surveillance continues unabated.
5) Profit, sort of.
Our "profit" is that we now know about these surveillance schemes. The problem however is that they will disappear underground again and increase in size and pervasiveness; once they are made legal, politicians (even the opposition) will no longer be much interested in attacking or exposing individual schemes, they will be attacking the legislation. And if the public forgets about the issue quickly enough, they will not succeed there.
Only thing we can do now is push legislation the other way while we have some momentum:
- Make "dragnet"-style surveillance illegal
- Allow wiretapping in individual cases, after approval by a judge (and not a secret panel of judges)
- If a company is not compelled by law to surrender information, they are forbidden to volunteer it.
I don't know if youngsters use SnapChat because of its privacy aspects; perhaps they are simply using it because it is easy to use and/or popular. It could just be a flavour-of-the-month thing, but who knows: perhaps FB was right to want to acquire SnapChat (do we start abbreviating that as "SC" now?), and perhaps SnapChat was right to decline what seemed like a very generous offer from them.
Then again, what SnapChat lacks (and Facebook has) is a "stack". If one service holds ones content, contacts, communication and even identity to other services, one might be slow to switch. But a stand-alone messaging service is easily ditched, or used alongside another one.
As others have pointed out, it doesn't really work that way. You hope that people posting under their real identity will show restraint, but in practice the comments are often just as nasty. Besides, it is not that hard to create a fake FB or G+ account.
And the flip side is that even posting polite, innocent comments can have real-world consequences. For example: openly professing an affiliation with certain "bad" political parties may (and here in NL: did!) result in being discriminated against at work or in class. It's gotten pretty bad over here, and I certainly will not post even my moderate and reasonable political views under my real name anymore.
Over here in NL it's for two reasons. Fairness, because if they buy from you only at wholesale rates, they should also sell you at those rates. Which is exactly what happens with greenhouses, which often have a gas power plant to heat the greenhouse and produce CO2, while delivering electrical power to the grid. These guys buy and sell at wholesale rates.
The other reason is simplicity. Our old mechanical power meters simply run backwards when delivering power to the grid, making the billing real easy. I suppose that's the reason why they are rolling out new smart meters to every home, so they can differentiate buying and selling rates.
Do I need to spell it out? "A D player in his assigned role", i.e. a somewhat narrowly defined set of tasks that do not begin to cover his actual day-to-day activities. It's not me that needs a new report card, nor our management (they left him where he was despite being a poor fit for his official job); it's managers like the ones at Netflix that apparently need one since it appears that the narrow, official job description is all that matters to them. That was the whole point of my earlier post.
You could argue that it would be better to redefine the guy's role, i.e. design the role around the person. But in larger organisations this is pretty much impossible, even a company like Google only do this in exceptional cases.
This has been my experience as well. The best teams and companies are those who have a good mix of people, and who know how to utilize talent. For example, I've worked with an old geezer who was rather over the hill as a designer / analyst. A "D" player at best in his assigned role. However he had a ton of knowledge about the company, projects and people, and in some ways he was the department's "memory". He also had good ideas about how to organise teams and company processes, and he was a brilliant coach. He wasn't good at actual management jobs, so... they left him where he was, and where he was perfectly happy. Adding a ton of value to the company on a daily basis. Freely organizing around problems is exactly what he did.
That's not to say you don't need the right mix of people and skill levels to be successful. A-teams are probably as likely to contain the right mix, and in my experience about as likely to recognize it. Unless of course you stack the deck by saying that your A-team also has an A team lead who knows everything about this, but I've never seen this in practise.
ripping off developers for their 99c, supremely lame
I never really understood this. You go and get a really expensive phone, then begrudge someone their 99 cents. Or seriously spend more than a few seconds thought on whether or not to buy that "really expensive" $1.99 app. And subsequently get suckered into dropping tens of dollars on in-app purchases in in some freemium game. People are weird...
The stand-alone device would basically be Glass minus Google (or minus the radio).
And sure, currently there are constraints on the number of faces in a Glass database, constraints on power and on the wireless connection used to talk to Google, but that's just a matter of time. If there will be enough apps on these glasses that appeal to those in the mainstream, and unless there is some violent backlash against these things (again, from regular people, not privacy advocates), then I give it 5 years or so before these things become practical and common, and another 5 before it'll be socially acceptable to wear them anytime and anywhere (except of course the cinema, where people with cameras will still be shot on sight).
I don't have this condition but I suck at recognizing faces and remembering names. 15 years ago I thought about how great it would be if I had a wearable facial recognition device, but I always thought it would be a stand-alone thing: I put the pictures and names in, and they stay in the device.
The problem with this of course is that it constantly does the facial recognition on everyone, and sends the results back to the mother ship. If enough people start wearing these, and only 1 mugshot of you makes its way to the internet, then Google will be able to track your whereabouts throughout the day pretty well. Some of this actually violates our privacy laws, but I suspect legislators won't even bother contemplating a ban on this application; they'll understand that the cat is out of the bag.
This. I found this bit of info on Bitlocker surprising as well: "When first run, the payload installs itself in the Documents and Settings folder with a random name, and adds a key to the registry that causes it to run on startup." Is this still even possible on modern (ish) operating systems (Windows 7 / Windows 8). Windows seems to ask for permission whenever an.exe is executed, and you'd certainly think it would ask for permission when a program modifies that part of the registry.
What rubbish. The pot-clouded, myopic world view of a basement dweller. Pretty much every extreme political position can be understood in that frame... if you simplify it sufficiently. By the way, what the heck is an "internet libertarian"? Are there "internet socialists" too? And are they equally maligned by the rest of the Internet? Or is it just defending your views online that makes you an "Internet anything"?
Brought to you by an "Internet liberal-in-the-European-sense-which-is-not-at-all-the-same-as-an-American-liberal"
Because you right nobody is going to trade something useful like food or transportation for a mostly inert metal.
Yes they are. If you have food and think you can part with a little in exchange for something that will be worth something when the crisis blows over, why not? I have a nice painting in my living room which my granddad got from someone in exchange for some food during the "Hongerwinter" of '44. In a crisis that threatens the value of money itself, people might be more inclined to take gold instead of cash in cases where large sums change hands. What happens in a (Mad Max kind of) crisis is not that gold drops in price, but that the price of food and other essentials goes up. And gold is not all that unwieldy; plenty of places here sell 1-gram "coins" currently worth about 50 euro.
GP is right though that it's better to get gold during the good times, when prices are low. If the crisis has already hit, you're too late.
Slashdot Mirror
For mobile development, learn about tools, platforms and methods for cross-platform development. And once you master the tools, learn about UI/UX and what makes a great interface on mobile platforms. These are skills in short supply, even in mobile development shops.
Not sure how this got modded insightful... During school, my academic years and subsequent time spent with various employers, I've had plenty of exposure to both nerds and non-nerd environments. Nerds tend to be more introvert, shy (not the same thing as introversion), perhaps "boring" to extroverts but far more passionate about subjects that interest them. But I have not noticed any open hostility towards minorities or women. If anything, I found them more accepting of outsiders; many of them do set high standards but they do so regardless of gender or race: if there's an overlap in interests, you'll be readily accepted. Coming from an environment that has few women and having a tendency to be on the shy side, interaction with women can be awkward for them, and women feel this awkwardness as well, but it's not intentionally hostile. I'm talking of course about actual groups of people, not internet forums.
What I have noticed in any predominantly male group, nerd or non-nerd, is that they crack more misogynistic jokes and sometimes exclude the female members from their circle. I couldn't say if the same thing happens in predominantly female groups, having never been part of one. It seems to me that girls are put off by the subject matter itself rather than its practitioners; the division becomes apparent at an early age already.
An opt-out system has been considered here. The problem is that the relatives of the deceased often make trouble, for whatever reasons (religion, emotional issues etc). If the system is opt-out, those relatives can make a much stronger case that donations isn't really what the deceased wanted. If the system is opt-in and one has to make a conscious effort to sign up, the family is far likelier to respect the dead person's wishes.
The problem with the proposed system of giving priority to organ donors is that doctors hate to make decisions on non-medical grounds. If two donors are waiting for an organ and one comes up, it's easy to give the organ to the guy on the donor list, all other things being equal. But things rarely are equal. Might be a young vs. old guy, one might have a better chance to come out of the procedure ok, one might need it more urgently than the other guy, etc. These are facts that a doctor can weigh. But what if he also has to take the donor list into account? My guess is that he won't, and that the donor list status will always play second fiddle to medical considerations. Still, such a system might prompt more people to sign up.
Indeed, this will solve itself over time:
At first, drivers will probably have to stay alert and ready to take over (hands on the wheel as required by that Merc that self-drives in traffic jams). When something of a baseline safety record for autonomous vehicles is established, you'll be allowed to go hands off but may have to be required to take out additional car insurance if you use the self-driving feature. With an improving safety record, that extra insurance will drop in price over time until it'll disappear. At some point you'll probably have to take out extra insurance if you want pedals & a steering wheel in your vehicle.
Evidence of potentially delicious organic matter, even.
Oblig. xkcd
Z-Wave is nice and works pretty well; I use it to control my lights, heating, sprinklers, etc. When I am away, it turns the lights on and off at appropriate times and lets me keep an eye on things remotely. But it is not reliable enough for when your safety is involved. What many Z-Wavers do is install a good alarm system (either wired or wireless) from a reputable firm, connect it to their LAN, and hook it up to their Z-Wave hub. The Vera hub is open to tinkerers; plug-ins for most popular alarm panels exist, and if it isn't you can roll your own.
And, as someone already pointed out: ZWave is not open. However there is a reasonable certainty that equipment you buy from various vendors will play nicely together. Zigbee is a similar, open radio system but it lacks a standard for interoperability (though a few are emerging, like Light Link for lights and switches).
I'm Dutch, thanks for asking. Tried my hand at learning both Chinese and Japanese.
They said the same 15 years ago about learning Japanese. My guess? We'll stick with English. Chinese apparently is a very difficult language to learn to speak and write (Japanese writing is hard but learning to speak it is relatively easy). In contrast, English is easy to pick up, and already very widely spoken by non-native speakers.
8: Atlas Shrugged (one should sometimes read stuff just to show the errors in thought to boost critical thinking.) 9: Communist Manifesto (same as #8) 10: Wealth of Nations (same as #8 and #9)
I'd recommend those to any young person. Not just to show errors, but also to be exposed to ideas that one rarely encounters in the classroom (YYMV per country). This can help to translate "deep down feelings" into a set of core values, which helps one to think critically about ones own convictions.
If someone tells you it changed their life, I'd just stop talking to them.
If someone told me any book changed their life, I'd start talking to them to find out more. If anything, such an event always makes for great conversation.
Also, touch screens *eat* as remote controls. I have problems controlling R/C vehicles from my iPhone (cars, helis); I wouldn't want to control a full size car in the same manner.
Counterintuitively perhaps, once these programs are made visible they become vastly easier to expand under one justification or another, because you no longer have to worry so much about the very existence of the programs being exposed.
TFA argues:
1) Snowden blows the lid off surveillance schemes, many of which are conducted illegaly.
2) Intelligence agencies would like to continue these programmes and push for legislation to legalize them.
3) Said legislation is passed.
4) Surveillance continues unabated.
5) Profit, sort of.
Our "profit" is that we now know about these surveillance schemes. The problem however is that they will disappear underground again and increase in size and pervasiveness; once they are made legal, politicians (even the opposition) will no longer be much interested in attacking or exposing individual schemes, they will be attacking the legislation. And if the public forgets about the issue quickly enough, they will not succeed there.
Only thing we can do now is push legislation the other way while we have some momentum:
- Make "dragnet"-style surveillance illegal
- Allow wiretapping in individual cases, after approval by a judge (and not a secret panel of judges)
- If a company is not compelled by law to surrender information, they are forbidden to volunteer it.
You're talking about social sciences...
I don't know if youngsters use SnapChat because of its privacy aspects; perhaps they are simply using it because it is easy to use and/or popular. It could just be a flavour-of-the-month thing, but who knows: perhaps FB was right to want to acquire SnapChat (do we start abbreviating that as "SC" now?), and perhaps SnapChat was right to decline what seemed like a very generous offer from them.
Then again, what SnapChat lacks (and Facebook has) is a "stack". If one service holds ones content, contacts, communication and even identity to other services, one might be slow to switch. But a stand-alone messaging service is easily ditched, or used alongside another one.
As others have pointed out, it doesn't really work that way. You hope that people posting under their real identity will show restraint, but in practice the comments are often just as nasty. Besides, it is not that hard to create a fake FB or G+ account.
And the flip side is that even posting polite, innocent comments can have real-world consequences. For example: openly professing an affiliation with certain "bad" political parties may (and here in NL: did!) result in being discriminated against at work or in class. It's gotten pretty bad over here, and I certainly will not post even my moderate and reasonable political views under my real name anymore.
Over here in NL it's for two reasons. Fairness, because if they buy from you only at wholesale rates, they should also sell you at those rates. Which is exactly what happens with greenhouses, which often have a gas power plant to heat the greenhouse and produce CO2, while delivering electrical power to the grid. These guys buy and sell at wholesale rates.
The other reason is simplicity. Our old mechanical power meters simply run backwards when delivering power to the grid, making the billing real easy. I suppose that's the reason why they are rolling out new smart meters to every home, so they can differentiate buying and selling rates.
Do I need to spell it out? "A D player in his assigned role", i.e. a somewhat narrowly defined set of tasks that do not begin to cover his actual day-to-day activities. It's not me that needs a new report card, nor our management (they left him where he was despite being a poor fit for his official job); it's managers like the ones at Netflix that apparently need one since it appears that the narrow, official job description is all that matters to them. That was the whole point of my earlier post.
You could argue that it would be better to redefine the guy's role, i.e. design the role around the person. But in larger organisations this is pretty much impossible, even a company like Google only do this in exceptional cases.
This has been my experience as well. The best teams and companies are those who have a good mix of people, and who know how to utilize talent. For example, I've worked with an old geezer who was rather over the hill as a designer / analyst. A "D" player at best in his assigned role. However he had a ton of knowledge about the company, projects and people, and in some ways he was the department's "memory". He also had good ideas about how to organise teams and company processes, and he was a brilliant coach. He wasn't good at actual management jobs, so... they left him where he was, and where he was perfectly happy. Adding a ton of value to the company on a daily basis. Freely organizing around problems is exactly what he did.
That's not to say you don't need the right mix of people and skill levels to be successful. A-teams are probably as likely to contain the right mix, and in my experience about as likely to recognize it. Unless of course you stack the deck by saying that your A-team also has an A team lead who knows everything about this, but I've never seen this in practise.
ripping off developers for their 99c, supremely lame
I never really understood this. You go and get a really expensive phone, then begrudge someone their 99 cents. Or seriously spend more than a few seconds thought on whether or not to buy that "really expensive" $1.99 app. And subsequently get suckered into dropping tens of dollars on in-app purchases in in some freemium game. People are weird...
The stand-alone device would basically be Glass minus Google (or minus the radio).
And sure, currently there are constraints on the number of faces in a Glass database, constraints on power and on the wireless connection used to talk to Google, but that's just a matter of time. If there will be enough apps on these glasses that appeal to those in the mainstream, and unless there is some violent backlash against these things (again, from regular people, not privacy advocates), then I give it 5 years or so before these things become practical and common, and another 5 before it'll be socially acceptable to wear them anytime and anywhere (except of course the cinema, where people with cameras will still be shot on sight).
I don't have this condition but I suck at recognizing faces and remembering names. 15 years ago I thought about how great it would be if I had a wearable facial recognition device, but I always thought it would be a stand-alone thing: I put the pictures and names in, and they stay in the device.
The problem with this of course is that it constantly does the facial recognition on everyone, and sends the results back to the mother ship. If enough people start wearing these, and only 1 mugshot of you makes its way to the internet, then Google will be able to track your whereabouts throughout the day pretty well. Some of this actually violates our privacy laws, but I suspect legislators won't even bother contemplating a ban on this application; they'll understand that the cat is out of the bag.
This. I found this bit of info on Bitlocker surprising as well: "When first run, the payload installs itself in the Documents and Settings folder with a random name, and adds a key to the registry that causes it to run on startup." Is this still even possible on modern (ish) operating systems (Windows 7 / Windows 8). Windows seems to ask for permission whenever an .exe is executed, and you'd certainly think it would ask for permission when a program modifies that part of the registry.
What rubbish. The pot-clouded, myopic world view of a basement dweller. Pretty much every extreme political position can be understood in that frame... if you simplify it sufficiently. By the way, what the heck is an "internet libertarian"? Are there "internet socialists" too? And are they equally maligned by the rest of the Internet? Or is it just defending your views online that makes you an "Internet anything"?
Brought to you by an "Internet liberal-in-the-European-sense-which-is-not-at-all-the-same-as-an-American-liberal"
Because you right nobody is going to trade something useful like food or transportation for a mostly inert metal.
Yes they are. If you have food and think you can part with a little in exchange for something that will be worth something when the crisis blows over, why not? I have a nice painting in my living room which my granddad got from someone in exchange for some food during the "Hongerwinter" of '44. In a crisis that threatens the value of money itself, people might be more inclined to take gold instead of cash in cases where large sums change hands. What happens in a (Mad Max kind of) crisis is not that gold drops in price, but that the price of food and other essentials goes up. And gold is not all that unwieldy; plenty of places here sell 1-gram "coins" currently worth about 50 euro.
GP is right though that it's better to get gold during the good times, when prices are low. If the crisis has already hit, you're too late.