I've seen my share of BOFH and not just in IT. Seems to happen most with people working in relative isolation (having few or no professional peers around) and under a high work load... like sysadmins in a small organisation, but also accountants or paralegals. And if they are the only one in that position, it'll be that much harder to replace them. In larger organisations, a real BOFH would find himself escorted out in the street in the blink of an eye, possibly facing charges as well...
They are there to make sure the accountants, marketeers, and others who can make money for the company can do their jobs.
How exactly do accountants and marketeers make money for the company? Marketeers arguably have an impact on sales even if they do not make them, and they can be an important differentiating factor in a company. But accountants surely are part of the plumbing, just like IT. And more so than accounting, IT can also be a differentiator even in non-tech firms.
"firefighters, cops, doctors, detectives". These work as role models because kids can easily relate to what these people do, even if they don't understand the details. Engineers? Not so much. Same goes for lawyers, managers and similar professions, but those grow more attractive as kids learn about the pay and social status associated with them. The engineering profession probably grows more unattractive with the years, when kids find it's a long and difficult road to a degree with crap pay and poor career opportunities.
Sure, it's better in some countries than others. Here in NL, people say you have to be mad to choose a career as an engineer. The standing joke amongst students in business schools is that it's good that engineering studies are lengthy with a jam-packed curriculum; by the time the engineers graduate, they'll be groomed and ready to be managed by the business school graduates.
Well, yes. I'd like to add that while some measure of character development for comic book heroes is nice in movies like these, I hated the recent "super deep and profound and dark" reboots of other formerly beloved cardboard cutout heroes, most notably Batman and James Bond. These rebooted movies made decent movies, but the protagonists weren't "our" Batman or Bond. This Superman at least stays closer to the original.
That's what you get with vertically integrated companies. If you buy into one part of their "stack", they will ensure you will not go to their competitors for the remainder of the stack or try and tax you if you do, if they can get away with it. In the case of ISPs who also sell content, that's why we need net neutrality.
Not just that: 3rd parties, even very small ones, may still manage to put issues ignored by the ruling party/parties on the agenda. The Dutch Partij voor de Dieren (Party for Animals, a bunch of nutters who won votes on the strength of astoundingly lavish campaign contributions) did just that, doing some good for animal rights despite having only 2 of 150 seats in parliament. Privacy, "digital" rights and civil liberties are similarly undervalued issues; all parties profess to be in favour of those, but proposals in this area are often half-hearted and poorly thought out if they even make it to the table. This is because most politicians do not really give a shit about them. I voted for the Pirate Party in the last elections, in hopes that these issues receive the attention they deserve.
Not that I'm doing anything "useful" with my spare time in that sense, but I'm certainly enjoying it.
To me, this is very important. I've seen a few people around me who so got in the habit of always being busy at work, that they crammed what little free time they had with activities and hobbies as well. And I've been there myself. Of course, hobbies are fine, but I am a lot happier overall after I started "pissing away" (as I used to call it) some of my free time. Just doing whatever I feel like, which includes doing nothing at all except lying on the lawn with a beer, gazing up at the sky. A little down time for the brain, no distractions, calls, or tablets near at hand, helps me perform better at work as well.
I'd be happier if it were touted (and designed!) as such: a tool to protect the public as well as aid the police. The camera itself might still fail to work (intentionally perhaps), but if it does work, the video should be uploaded to secure storage immediately and treated as evidence, i.e. the coppers shouldn't be able to conveniently "lose" the footage.
That might not be the best choice of hiding place, given the current talks on hacking and espionage between China and the USA. Snowden may have made himself into a bargaining chip; perhaps China will be happy to extradite Snowden as a gesture of goodwill.
The guy doesn't need copyright (which he probably doesn't even have in this case), he just needs credit for his work. I'd be very careful to even mention the word "legal" or "copyright". Imagine that you, as a manager or an employer, get a phone call about disputed copyright on a bit of software you had done way back when. What do you do? That's right, you refer the matter to your lawyer/legal department. Nothing good will come of that.
If you parted ways with your former employer on good terms, just call them and ask they they would mind giving you a nice written reference, specifically mentioning your contribution to that software.
This is an impressive achievement, and interesting even if they report a relatively low (300) number of charge cycles. Too bad the article doesn't mention some other parameters:
- The article mentions power density "after 300 charging cycles". Is that the limit, or does it actually last for more cycles, and how fast does it drop off?
- How well do these batteries retain a charge? Li-Ion is quite good on that score; if I leave my cordless drill of the charger, it'll still be ready for use after a year.
- How well do these batteries deal with half-cycles (recharge when only half empty)? Is there a memory effect?
- What is the max rate of charge?
There are already 3d printers for food. Some are somewhat frivolous, some can print confectionary, some are serious. There's a company in the Netherlands teaming up with major food producers to produce printed steaks and vegetables. These printed foods are for older people who have to eat liquidized food which isn't very appetizing, and these people are often undernourished. The idea is to provide food printed from liquidized components that looks and tastes like proper food, has to be eaten with knife and fork instead of slurped through a straw, and has a little bit of texture, in hopes that it will make for a more pleasant eating experience.
Who would want to print that stupid fucking gun anyways?
Anyone who wants a gun, but gets told by their government that they can't have one, and can't / doesn't want / doesn't dare buy one on the black market, and doesn't have the skills to construct a zipgun. Like, anyone who wants one for home defense in the better part of western Europe.
OK, perhaps they won't want this particular gun. But the design has already been improved slightly and is very likely to be improved further. Of course you'll still need ammo to go with it...
So far I found Windows 8 to be a nice improvement under the hood. And a simple little program will give you back your desktop upon boot and the start menu, and you will hardly notice the difference with Windows 7, GUI-wise.
I tried a couple of their demos on a (recent model) smart phone on WiFi, and performance was good. Not lightning fast like a native app, but certainly not slow as hell either. It was decent on an iPad 1 as well.
Sucky Web 2.0 sites generally suck harder than "simple text webpages"; the technology gives developers a couple of new shotguns to shoot themselves in the foot with. But good Web 2.0 pages can be a vast improvement over Web 1.0 or pages of text. Don't knock the technology for mistakes made by incompetent designers. As always, it comes down to selecting the right tool, and applying it in the right way.
Bear in mind what Erdogan himself had to say about the democratic process: "Democracy is like a bus, you ride it until you reach your destination, then you get off". He wouldn't be the first dictator to be elected by popular vote, then use whatever means that lie to hand to stay in power. He has already made the first moves: go after the opposition, jail dangerous opponents (in Turkey, this means army generals who have a strong tradition of keeping the nation secular), and bring the press under even tighter control.
Not all Islamic nations are dictatorships, but most of them are. And almost all of them are distinctly unpleasant places to live if you happen to be a non-Muslim or a woman with liberal ideas. By the way, Turkey is not a Muslim country, not all of it. You'll see more headscarves and burkas in London or Amsterdam than some of the large cities in Turkey.
GP reflects my own views. I hate Amazon's business model for ebooks, their DRM, and the fact that they try to be "vertical" by selling e readers as well as books, but they have a decent app for my iPad, and they make it really easy to buy books from them, which is just what I want... for fiction. Stuff that I will probably only read once. Here, convenience trumps DRM.
On holidays I take my old e-ink reader which I will not miss too much if lost or stolen, and for that I buy books in (DRM'ed) epub or PDF if I can get it, or pirated copies if I can't (won't sell ebooks to non-US residents? Fuck you). And non-fiction I still buy in paper form as I tend to lend those out a lot. So, yes, in most cases I really don't mind DRM
When making distinctions about right or wrong, I like to add up all the facts, and not go by one oversimplified statement devoid of any context, however truthful it may be.
There's a guy selling a tool that gives you the start button, actual start menu + boot to desktop back in Windows 8. It's something like $3 for 3 computers. I guess this guy stands to make a hell of a lot more (well deserved) money... unless Windows 8.1 breaks his app.
Hard? Most of MS probably realise that it doesn't make sense to force a tablet UI on desktop users; the hard part is convincing the decision makers. This is probably just a few idiots convincing a handful of other idiots to follow a bad strategy. "Mobile computing is the future, we need to focus our UI design on that" + "We need to consolidate our UIs, give our users a unified experience" = Metro on the desktop fail strategy. And once something becomes a strategy it can be incredibly hard to change course, even if it leads straight off a cliff.
The police probably have good reason to want access to all the material. It may lead them to the source of these files or even the creators. And now that they have him on possession of kiddie porn, I suppose forcing him to decrypt the rest doesn't constitute self-incrimination (not sure how US law works). And there's no right not to incriminate other suspects.
Interestingly, I recall a sort of similar case here in Europe: a guy was forced to provide financial details; there was a suspicion of widespread tax fraud. The guy was not charged with anything so he had to comply (as he would not be incriminating himself in any crime he was charged with). They found evidence and then charged him on the strength of that. The court ultimately let the guy walk because of the principle of nemo tenetur. The difference is that in the porn case, the FBI already appears to have the goods on him.
If you prefer a job where your individual talent and contributions matter rather than one where you're doing 9-5 assembly line work, you are more likely to find it in smaller companies. Such companies (especially startups) do tend to place more demand on your time. But there are also some companies where working at a highly individualized job doesn't mean you have to put in extra hours. For the past decade I've always managed to find jobs that were more or less tailored to my particular talents rather than to a generic "developer level x" profile, and while I do put in overtime when needed, on the whole these have been normal 9-5 jobs without any pressure to exceed normal working hours.
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I've seen my share of BOFH and not just in IT. Seems to happen most with people working in relative isolation (having few or no professional peers around) and under a high work load... like sysadmins in a small organisation, but also accountants or paralegals. And if they are the only one in that position, it'll be that much harder to replace them. In larger organisations, a real BOFH would find himself escorted out in the street in the blink of an eye, possibly facing charges as well...
They are there to make sure the accountants, marketeers, and others who can make money for the company can do their jobs.
How exactly do accountants and marketeers make money for the company? Marketeers arguably have an impact on sales even if they do not make them, and they can be an important differentiating factor in a company. But accountants surely are part of the plumbing, just like IT. And more so than accounting, IT can also be a differentiator even in non-tech firms.
"firefighters, cops, doctors, detectives". These work as role models because kids can easily relate to what these people do, even if they don't understand the details. Engineers? Not so much. Same goes for lawyers, managers and similar professions, but those grow more attractive as kids learn about the pay and social status associated with them. The engineering profession probably grows more unattractive with the years, when kids find it's a long and difficult road to a degree with crap pay and poor career opportunities.
Sure, it's better in some countries than others. Here in NL, people say you have to be mad to choose a career as an engineer. The standing joke amongst students in business schools is that it's good that engineering studies are lengthy with a jam-packed curriculum; by the time the engineers graduate, they'll be groomed and ready to be managed by the business school graduates.
Well, yes. I'd like to add that while some measure of character development for comic book heroes is nice in movies like these, I hated the recent "super deep and profound and dark" reboots of other formerly beloved cardboard cutout heroes, most notably Batman and James Bond. These rebooted movies made decent movies, but the protagonists weren't "our" Batman or Bond. This Superman at least stays closer to the original.
That's what you get with vertically integrated companies. If you buy into one part of their "stack", they will ensure you will not go to their competitors for the remainder of the stack or try and tax you if you do, if they can get away with it. In the case of ISPs who also sell content, that's why we need net neutrality.
Not just that: 3rd parties, even very small ones, may still manage to put issues ignored by the ruling party/parties on the agenda. The Dutch Partij voor de Dieren (Party for Animals, a bunch of nutters who won votes on the strength of astoundingly lavish campaign contributions) did just that, doing some good for animal rights despite having only 2 of 150 seats in parliament. Privacy, "digital" rights and civil liberties are similarly undervalued issues; all parties profess to be in favour of those, but proposals in this area are often half-hearted and poorly thought out if they even make it to the table. This is because most politicians do not really give a shit about them. I voted for the Pirate Party in the last elections, in hopes that these issues receive the attention they deserve.
Not that I'm doing anything "useful" with my spare time in that sense, but I'm certainly enjoying it.
To me, this is very important. I've seen a few people around me who so got in the habit of always being busy at work, that they crammed what little free time they had with activities and hobbies as well. And I've been there myself. Of course, hobbies are fine, but I am a lot happier overall after I started "pissing away" (as I used to call it) some of my free time. Just doing whatever I feel like, which includes doing nothing at all except lying on the lawn with a beer, gazing up at the sky. A little down time for the brain, no distractions, calls, or tablets near at hand, helps me perform better at work as well.
Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by global warming.
I'd be happier if it were touted (and designed!) as such: a tool to protect the public as well as aid the police. The camera itself might still fail to work (intentionally perhaps), but if it does work, the video should be uploaded to secure storage immediately and treated as evidence, i.e. the coppers shouldn't be able to conveniently "lose" the footage.
That might not be the best choice of hiding place, given the current talks on hacking and espionage between China and the USA. Snowden may have made himself into a bargaining chip; perhaps China will be happy to extradite Snowden as a gesture of goodwill.
The guy doesn't need copyright (which he probably doesn't even have in this case), he just needs credit for his work. I'd be very careful to even mention the word "legal" or "copyright". Imagine that you, as a manager or an employer, get a phone call about disputed copyright on a bit of software you had done way back when. What do you do? That's right, you refer the matter to your lawyer/legal department. Nothing good will come of that.
If you parted ways with your former employer on good terms, just call them and ask they they would mind giving you a nice written reference, specifically mentioning your contribution to that software.
This is an impressive achievement, and interesting even if they report a relatively low (300) number of charge cycles. Too bad the article doesn't mention some other parameters:
- The article mentions power density "after 300 charging cycles". Is that the limit, or does it actually last for more cycles, and how fast does it drop off?
- How well do these batteries retain a charge? Li-Ion is quite good on that score; if I leave my cordless drill of the charger, it'll still be ready for use after a year.
- How well do these batteries deal with half-cycles (recharge when only half empty)? Is there a memory effect?
- What is the max rate of charge?
There are already 3d printers for food. Some are somewhat frivolous, some can print confectionary, some are serious. There's a company in the Netherlands teaming up with major food producers to produce printed steaks and vegetables. These printed foods are for older people who have to eat liquidized food which isn't very appetizing, and these people are often undernourished. The idea is to provide food printed from liquidized components that looks and tastes like proper food, has to be eaten with knife and fork instead of slurped through a straw, and has a little bit of texture, in hopes that it will make for a more pleasant eating experience.
Who would want to print that stupid fucking gun anyways?
Anyone who wants a gun, but gets told by their government that they can't have one, and can't / doesn't want / doesn't dare buy one on the black market, and doesn't have the skills to construct a zipgun. Like, anyone who wants one for home defense in the better part of western Europe.
OK, perhaps they won't want this particular gun. But the design has already been improved slightly and is very likely to be improved further. Of course you'll still need ammo to go with it...
So far I found Windows 8 to be a nice improvement under the hood. And a simple little program will give you back your desktop upon boot and the start menu, and you will hardly notice the difference with Windows 7, GUI-wise.
I tried a couple of their demos on a (recent model) smart phone on WiFi, and performance was good. Not lightning fast like a native app, but certainly not slow as hell either. It was decent on an iPad 1 as well.
Sucky Web 2.0 sites generally suck harder than "simple text webpages"; the technology gives developers a couple of new shotguns to shoot themselves in the foot with. But good Web 2.0 pages can be a vast improvement over Web 1.0 or pages of text. Don't knock the technology for mistakes made by incompetent designers. As always, it comes down to selecting the right tool, and applying it in the right way.
He's paraphrasing "The banality of evil", the title of a report on the Eichmann trials.
Bear in mind what Erdogan himself had to say about the democratic process: "Democracy is like a bus, you ride it until you reach your destination, then you get off". He wouldn't be the first dictator to be elected by popular vote, then use whatever means that lie to hand to stay in power. He has already made the first moves: go after the opposition, jail dangerous opponents (in Turkey, this means army generals who have a strong tradition of keeping the nation secular), and bring the press under even tighter control.
Not all Islamic nations are dictatorships, but most of them are. And almost all of them are distinctly unpleasant places to live if you happen to be a non-Muslim or a woman with liberal ideas. By the way, Turkey is not a Muslim country, not all of it. You'll see more headscarves and burkas in London or Amsterdam than some of the large cities in Turkey.
GP reflects my own views. I hate Amazon's business model for ebooks, their DRM, and the fact that they try to be "vertical" by selling e readers as well as books, but they have a decent app for my iPad, and they make it really easy to buy books from them, which is just what I want... for fiction. Stuff that I will probably only read once. Here, convenience trumps DRM.
On holidays I take my old e-ink reader which I will not miss too much if lost or stolen, and for that I buy books in (DRM'ed) epub or PDF if I can get it, or pirated copies if I can't (won't sell ebooks to non-US residents? Fuck you). And non-fiction I still buy in paper form as I tend to lend those out a lot. So, yes, in most cases I really don't mind DRM
When making distinctions about right or wrong, I like to add up all the facts, and not go by one oversimplified statement devoid of any context, however truthful it may be.
There's a guy selling a tool that gives you the start button, actual start menu + boot to desktop back in Windows 8. It's something like $3 for 3 computers. I guess this guy stands to make a hell of a lot more (well deserved) money... unless Windows 8.1 breaks his app.
Hard? Most of MS probably realise that it doesn't make sense to force a tablet UI on desktop users; the hard part is convincing the decision makers. This is probably just a few idiots convincing a handful of other idiots to follow a bad strategy. "Mobile computing is the future, we need to focus our UI design on that" + "We need to consolidate our UIs, give our users a unified experience" = Metro on the desktop fail strategy. And once something becomes a strategy it can be incredibly hard to change course, even if it leads straight off a cliff.
The police probably have good reason to want access to all the material. It may lead them to the source of these files or even the creators. And now that they have him on possession of kiddie porn, I suppose forcing him to decrypt the rest doesn't constitute self-incrimination (not sure how US law works). And there's no right not to incriminate other suspects.
Interestingly, I recall a sort of similar case here in Europe: a guy was forced to provide financial details; there was a suspicion of widespread tax fraud. The guy was not charged with anything so he had to comply (as he would not be incriminating himself in any crime he was charged with). They found evidence and then charged him on the strength of that. The court ultimately let the guy walk because of the principle of nemo tenetur. The difference is that in the porn case, the FBI already appears to have the goods on him.
If you prefer a job where your individual talent and contributions matter rather than one where you're doing 9-5 assembly line work, you are more likely to find it in smaller companies. Such companies (especially startups) do tend to place more demand on your time. But there are also some companies where working at a highly individualized job doesn't mean you have to put in extra hours. For the past decade I've always managed to find jobs that were more or less tailored to my particular talents rather than to a generic "developer level x" profile, and while I do put in overtime when needed, on the whole these have been normal 9-5 jobs without any pressure to exceed normal working hours.