When I last replaced my PC, it was a good while before I felt compelled to install Flash on it again. These days, very few sites require it, even the dodgy Eastern European porn sites and equally dodgy advertising rings seem to have shied away from it. I have Flash installed but the browser is set to block it unless specifically allowed. The last time I activated Flash was to watch a news program on some local TV channel's site.
India has its share of qualified coders; I've worked with them. The issues we had with them were mostly cultural in nature, and those were solved early on. Best thing you can do is spend some quality time with them at the office, work with them rather than next to them (go to India if you have to), then go and have beers with them after work. Oh, and work with companies where you hire people rather than resources; Indian outsourcing firms have a habit of swapping the most valuable members of your team with newbies. Not every individual can be convinced to stay on your team forever, but if you treat them well and offer interesting work, most will stick around long enough for the team to gel.
Even places like India and Malaysia are getting too expensive, though. Some shops move from Bangalore to New Delhi to save costs. Others go to China. Which should worry you; China has plenty of good coders too. They might not be very visible in the FOSS community, but they're there.
Seriously?
1) Start setting up shelters well ahead of time, so that immigrants can be housed in decent semi-permanent accommodation rather than makeshift camps that they have to vacate every few weeks. Even in crowded countries there is plenty of land (you don't need all that much), and plenty of empty office buildings that can be converted if you're given a bit of time.
2) Long term accommodation in the form of regular houses is harder to arrange (and much more expensive), but not insurmountable. And it helps if you:
3) Separate the refugees from the opportunists. The place to start doing that is at the border, meaning that Greece and Hungary need a lot of help to channel, shelter and process refugees. Just busing them to the next country is not the solution.
4) Also: close the border with Turkey; it's a safe country and by treaty we are under no obligation whatsoever to accept refugees from there. No, walls never help and you can't stop everybody, blah blah blah, but even if you can't stop then all, at least you can register a good many of them (and later deport them at your leisure).
5) Make it crystal clear that there is no future here for opportunists. No more "Wir schaffen das" from Mutti Merkel, but deportation of illegals in all cases where that's feasible. That starts with 3 & 4, if you know from what country they entered Europe, it legally is a lot easier to send them back. And do what Australia does: make deals with transit countries to help them cope with refugees on their land (where by UN treaty they should remain), or threaten sanctions if they do not cooperate.
6) All this costs money, but not all that much. It's not like we're bailing out a bank or anything like that.
There's no silver bullet here and all of these measures have their logistical, financial and political pitfalls, but doing bugger-all is not the solution. And in case people wonder why so many Europeans are worried about immigration or a backlash against immigrants: it is not because we think all immigrants are baby-eating savages. It is because the situation as it appears to be at the moment is: the borders are open to any and all, and we are expected to feed and shelter however many people decide to come here. It's completely open-ended; no politician even dares ask the question "how many can we reasonably accommodate and assimilate this year, the next, and in the future?". Or "How much is this going to cost?". Instead we get a bunch of wishful thinking and outright lies about how this will help (or ruin) our economy, about the nature of the immigrants, about how well (or poorly) they will eventually integrate, and so on. Politicians spreading lies and avoiding the obvious but important questions have us think that there is a much larger problem or an agenda that they are trying to hide, for example the idea that "The EU should undermine national homogeneity". And meanwhile, we are indeed not doing anything about the source of the problems in Syria.
Camps? You wish. Municipalities are struggling to put up immigrants on short notice and are shuffling them between makeshift shelters in schools, old office buildings, and gyms. They knew there was an imminent wave of immigrants, knew that the masses landing in Greece would eventually percolate up to the northern countries, yet no action was taken to prepare, and still there is no short term or long term plan, and little or no coordination at local, national or even European level. At first it looked like simple incompetence but I'm increasingly suspecting that it's intentional. After all: "never waste a good crisis".
By the way, there already is talk of "climate refugees" in European circles. If, god forbid, we should get the current influx of immigrants under control, they are getting ready to welcome the next wave. It may be inevitable; after all these people will have to go somewhere, but to state that we're ready for them is delusional.
The desk is some generic band, not sure which, of decent quality. It's a corner desk, large enough for all my stuff, with built in cable ducts, cable holes and power outlets. The height is adjustable but not easily. The chair is an HM Aeron (the full option one). Pricey bugger (at least over here they are) but well worth it. I once borrowed one from a lady at my last client's office when she went on maternity leave, and decided I just had to have one for myself.
Expensive? I spent perhaps $3000 on a desk and chair for my home office. I got good stuff since I spend plenty of time in there. But if twice that amount would get me a serious increase in comfort I would not hesitate to spend it.
The company and the game itself (source code) are worth bupkis. It would be trivially easy for any developer worth their salt to duplicate the game, and King aren't exactly a paragon of innovative game development. They scored a hit and managed to capitalize on it; as others have explained here, their other games are derivative, some better than others, but they are mostly successful because they can plug the hell out of those other games in the already popular Candy Crush. What Activision are buying is the IP and the eyeballs; if all of King's employees quit after setting fire to the office and burning the only backup of the game's source code, Activition won't have lost much.
Are King a large company? I should hope and expect that the ROI of a small-ish mobile game studio, having a mega hit game that is ridiculously simple from a development and infrastructure point of view, is significantly better than 20%. I wouldn't be surprised if it's in the 50% and up range.
They could. It depends on who wins. The industry lobbyists (extremely influential in Brussels) who don't give a rodent's behind for your privacy but do not want the risk and hassle that comes with a ban on crypto. Or the hawkish commissioners and their backers in national governments, who do not give a rodent's behind for your privacy and who would absolutely abhor "clear oversight and a robust legal framework" around surveillance.
And don't think for a second that this is about terrorists and paedophiles. There are enough crypto products for them to choose from already.
Sure, if you step up to work on the Linux core, you know what you're in for. For me, it would be a reason not to. I have made myself a promise not to work for asshole bosses, and I'm keeping it. Wouldn't hire the guy either, for the same reason.
I understand passion. I also understand the difference between being passionate and being an abusive asshole. Being passionate doesn't mean losing your inhibitions and social skills. And that has nothing to do with being a snowflake either.
Good boss: politely points out flaws in your code in public, and suggests improvements, or privately rants at you when you've really screwed up.
Bad boss: doesn't point out shortcomings, or rants in public about them.
Worse boss: needs to swear in order to get their point across.
We shouldn't be too afraid to hurt "delicate little flowers" and censor our language all the time, but such swearing is just as unprofessional as it is unnecessary.
Failure to control comes in different flavours: one is scope creep resulting from a failure to control requirements. Another cause is controlling requirements too tightly. I have never seen a large IT project defined correctly and completely from the get-go; during project execution there will be new insights, errors and inconsistencies are uncovered, and external cirumstances will change. Having control of your project means that you are prepared for change, equiped to separate necessary or sensible changes from unnecessary ones, and able to manage those changes and the impact on budget and timelines. The answer certainly isn't to clamp down on all suggested changes, that kind of stubbornness may lead to a successful project that no one wants, or a project done fully to spec but utterly useless in real life.
I would add to that: stakeholder apathy, or failure to generate sufficient buy-in. I have seen this apathy in big projects from everyone involved: the project team, business stakeholders, steering group, sponsors, focus groups, and vendors. There are many small things that cumulatively will cause this; it certainly doesn't set in only after the project is already on the fast track to failure. The result is sloppy work, an increased tolerance for shortcomings (in systems as well as people), mutual acceptance of missed deadlines and broken agreements, leading towards a project where people will be happy to deliver anything, no matter how crappy, just to be done with it.
That's one of the major advantages of fully autonomous cars: you won't have to own one. Why buy a car with all your needs in mind, one that is good for your daily commute, weekend fishing trips, the long distance family vacation, the occasional heavy hauling? Get something just for your daily needs and rent an autonomous car for everything else, on demand, spur-of-the-moment, without any hassle: it'll park itself outside your home 30 minutes after you've ordered it, and return itself once you are done with it.
Both dealerships and independent shops have their share of crooks and professionals. The local Volvo dealership tried to charge me â300 for â150 tires. They quoted â800 for replacing the timing belt and water pump, whereas my local shop asked â500 for the job using Volvo parts, or â400 with aftermarket parts that are supposedly just as good. Same story for replacing brakes, shocks, or a lube & oil change: they overcharge you for everything and have a high hourly rate. The one thing they are good for is specialized work: the hard top on the Volvo needed adjusting, and that's a specialist job that local shops wouldn't touch. And still... Porsche was happy to charge me over â2000 to fix the spoiler hydraulics. Sounds like a specialist job but in the end I did it myself with some help from online resources, took me 3 hours and only a little swearing (plus an OEM microswitch costing â50) Screw dealers. On the other hand, I have only good things to say about my Toyota dealership; I don't have a Toyota anymore but I still bring my cars there for certain jobs.
Take your time finding a trustworthy place, and if someone screws you, don't come back.
I much prefer a Z-Wave / Zigbee solution over WiFi solutions as well. For the reason you stated, but there is another reason: WiFi sucks. I've yet to find an access point that is really reliable, and does not require frequent reboots. And with dozens or even hundreds of devices on one WiFi network, it's going to suck even harder. In contrast, I find my Z-Wave network to be extremely reliable. Besides, even if Z-Wave device firmware was somehow compromised, it would still have a much harder time getting through the hub out to the internet compared to compromised WiFi devices.
We do need better security though. Casual thieves are not going to hack your Z-Wave setup, but when such setups become more prevalent you can expect cheap hardware that will do the hacking for them. Like the GPS / GSM jammers popular with car thieves; these things can be had for under $100. It's not hard to build a box that can detect and access a Z-Wave network, there's just not much of a market for one. Yet. Thankfully, Z-Wave locks already use encrypted comms with the HA hub, and the upcoming new version of the standard allows better security for other devices as well, without having to compromise on the usability of the devices by the owner. Openness will still be determined by your hub.
Where I've tried both public transport and driving, I found that public transport took more time in most cases. And this is in the west of the Netherlands, where public transport is finely meshed, and roads are rather congested. Sure, I can read on the train (if I manage to find a seat), but time in a car isn't completely lost; I listen to the news or to new music I picked up. And in the end I prefer to save the 30-45 minutes each day on travel time even if it means paying through the nose for a car (€1.60/l for gas, and 21% VAT + a special tax on new cars; for larger cars the tax can exceed the factory price).
There's a psychological angle to it as well. When I leave the office and get in my car, I feel like the work day is done. But if I leave and get on the train, it somehow feels like I am still on the clock until I get to my front door. Silly, but there it is.
Slashdot Mirror
When I last replaced my PC, it was a good while before I felt compelled to install Flash on it again. These days, very few sites require it, even the dodgy Eastern European porn sites and equally dodgy advertising rings seem to have shied away from it. I have Flash installed but the browser is set to block it unless specifically allowed. The last time I activated Flash was to watch a news program on some local TV channel's site.
India has its share of qualified coders; I've worked with them. The issues we had with them were mostly cultural in nature, and those were solved early on. Best thing you can do is spend some quality time with them at the office, work with them rather than next to them (go to India if you have to), then go and have beers with them after work. Oh, and work with companies where you hire people rather than resources; Indian outsourcing firms have a habit of swapping the most valuable members of your team with newbies. Not every individual can be convinced to stay on your team forever, but if you treat them well and offer interesting work, most will stick around long enough for the team to gel.
Even places like India and Malaysia are getting too expensive, though. Some shops move from Bangalore to New Delhi to save costs. Others go to China. Which should worry you; China has plenty of good coders too. They might not be very visible in the FOSS community, but they're there.
Seriously?
1) Start setting up shelters well ahead of time, so that immigrants can be housed in decent semi-permanent accommodation rather than makeshift camps that they have to vacate every few weeks. Even in crowded countries there is plenty of land (you don't need all that much), and plenty of empty office buildings that can be converted if you're given a bit of time.
2) Long term accommodation in the form of regular houses is harder to arrange (and much more expensive), but not insurmountable. And it helps if you:
3) Separate the refugees from the opportunists. The place to start doing that is at the border, meaning that Greece and Hungary need a lot of help to channel, shelter and process refugees. Just busing them to the next country is not the solution.
4) Also: close the border with Turkey; it's a safe country and by treaty we are under no obligation whatsoever to accept refugees from there. No, walls never help and you can't stop everybody, blah blah blah, but even if you can't stop then all, at least you can register a good many of them (and later deport them at your leisure).
5) Make it crystal clear that there is no future here for opportunists. No more "Wir schaffen das" from Mutti Merkel, but deportation of illegals in all cases where that's feasible. That starts with 3 & 4, if you know from what country they entered Europe, it legally is a lot easier to send them back. And do what Australia does: make deals with transit countries to help them cope with refugees on their land (where by UN treaty they should remain), or threaten sanctions if they do not cooperate.
6) All this costs money, but not all that much. It's not like we're bailing out a bank or anything like that.
There's no silver bullet here and all of these measures have their logistical, financial and political pitfalls, but doing bugger-all is not the solution. And in case people wonder why so many Europeans are worried about immigration or a backlash against immigrants: it is not because we think all immigrants are baby-eating savages. It is because the situation as it appears to be at the moment is: the borders are open to any and all, and we are expected to feed and shelter however many people decide to come here. It's completely open-ended; no politician even dares ask the question "how many can we reasonably accommodate and assimilate this year, the next, and in the future?". Or "How much is this going to cost?". Instead we get a bunch of wishful thinking and outright lies about how this will help (or ruin) our economy, about the nature of the immigrants, about how well (or poorly) they will eventually integrate, and so on. Politicians spreading lies and avoiding the obvious but important questions have us think that there is a much larger problem or an agenda that they are trying to hide, for example the idea that "The EU should undermine national homogeneity". And meanwhile, we are indeed not doing anything about the source of the problems in Syria.
Camps? You wish. Municipalities are struggling to put up immigrants on short notice and are shuffling them between makeshift shelters in schools, old office buildings, and gyms. They knew there was an imminent wave of immigrants, knew that the masses landing in Greece would eventually percolate up to the northern countries, yet no action was taken to prepare, and still there is no short term or long term plan, and little or no coordination at local, national or even European level. At first it looked like simple incompetence but I'm increasingly suspecting that it's intentional. After all: "never waste a good crisis".
By the way, there already is talk of "climate refugees" in European circles. If, god forbid, we should get the current influx of immigrants under control, they are getting ready to welcome the next wave. It may be inevitable; after all these people will have to go somewhere, but to state that we're ready for them is delusional.
There's a lesson there for our gov't buying into the F-35 programme as a tier 2 partner.
The Indiegogo project page states the developement had begun (in at least 2012) on a $1m grant from the US Air Force
The desk is some generic band, not sure which, of decent quality. It's a corner desk, large enough for all my stuff, with built in cable ducts, cable holes and power outlets. The height is adjustable but not easily. The chair is an HM Aeron (the full option one). Pricey bugger (at least over here they are) but well worth it. I once borrowed one from a lady at my last client's office when she went on maternity leave, and decided I just had to have one for myself.
Expensive? I spent perhaps $3000 on a desk and chair for my home office. I got good stuff since I spend plenty of time in there. But if twice that amount would get me a serious increase in comfort I would not hesitate to spend it.
A "huge survey showing correlation" is pretty much the plural of "anecdote" for large values of plurality.
I love it! Wish I had mod points today...
The company and the game itself (source code) are worth bupkis. It would be trivially easy for any developer worth their salt to duplicate the game, and King aren't exactly a paragon of innovative game development. They scored a hit and managed to capitalize on it; as others have explained here, their other games are derivative, some better than others, but they are mostly successful because they can plug the hell out of those other games in the already popular Candy Crush. What Activision are buying is the IP and the eyeballs; if all of King's employees quit after setting fire to the office and burning the only backup of the game's source code, Activition won't have lost much.
Are King a large company? I should hope and expect that the ROI of a small-ish mobile game studio, having a mega hit game that is ridiculously simple from a development and infrastructure point of view, is significantly better than 20%. I wouldn't be surprised if it's in the 50% and up range.
They could. It depends on who wins. The industry lobbyists (extremely influential in Brussels) who don't give a rodent's behind for your privacy but do not want the risk and hassle that comes with a ban on crypto. Or the hawkish commissioners and their backers in national governments, who do not give a rodent's behind for your privacy and who would absolutely abhor "clear oversight and a robust legal framework" around surveillance.
And don't think for a second that this is about terrorists and paedophiles. There are enough crypto products for them to choose from already.
The vulnerability appears to rely on Chrome though, not Safari.
Sure, if you step up to work on the Linux core, you know what you're in for. For me, it would be a reason not to. I have made myself a promise not to work for asshole bosses, and I'm keeping it. Wouldn't hire the guy either, for the same reason.
I understand passion. I also understand the difference between being passionate and being an abusive asshole. Being passionate doesn't mean losing your inhibitions and social skills. And that has nothing to do with being a snowflake either.
Good boss: politely points out flaws in your code in public, and suggests improvements, or privately rants at you when you've really screwed up.
Bad boss: doesn't point out shortcomings, or rants in public about them.
Worse boss: needs to swear in order to get their point across.
We shouldn't be too afraid to hurt "delicate little flowers" and censor our language all the time, but such swearing is just as unprofessional as it is unnecessary.
Failure to control comes in different flavours: one is scope creep resulting from a failure to control requirements. Another cause is controlling requirements too tightly. I have never seen a large IT project defined correctly and completely from the get-go; during project execution there will be new insights, errors and inconsistencies are uncovered, and external cirumstances will change. Having control of your project means that you are prepared for change, equiped to separate necessary or sensible changes from unnecessary ones, and able to manage those changes and the impact on budget and timelines. The answer certainly isn't to clamp down on all suggested changes, that kind of stubbornness may lead to a successful project that no one wants, or a project done fully to spec but utterly useless in real life.
I would add to that: stakeholder apathy, or failure to generate sufficient buy-in. I have seen this apathy in big projects from everyone involved: the project team, business stakeholders, steering group, sponsors, focus groups, and vendors. There are many small things that cumulatively will cause this; it certainly doesn't set in only after the project is already on the fast track to failure. The result is sloppy work, an increased tolerance for shortcomings (in systems as well as people), mutual acceptance of missed deadlines and broken agreements, leading towards a project where people will be happy to deliver anything, no matter how crappy, just to be done with it.
That's one of the major advantages of fully autonomous cars: you won't have to own one. Why buy a car with all your needs in mind, one that is good for your daily commute, weekend fishing trips, the long distance family vacation, the occasional heavy hauling? Get something just for your daily needs and rent an autonomous car for everything else, on demand, spur-of-the-moment, without any hassle: it'll park itself outside your home 30 minutes after you've ordered it, and return itself once you are done with it.
Both dealerships and independent shops have their share of crooks and professionals. The local Volvo dealership tried to charge me â300 for â150 tires. They quoted â800 for replacing the timing belt and water pump, whereas my local shop asked â500 for the job using Volvo parts, or â400 with aftermarket parts that are supposedly just as good. Same story for replacing brakes, shocks, or a lube & oil change: they overcharge you for everything and have a high hourly rate. The one thing they are good for is specialized work: the hard top on the Volvo needed adjusting, and that's a specialist job that local shops wouldn't touch. And still... Porsche was happy to charge me over â2000 to fix the spoiler hydraulics. Sounds like a specialist job but in the end I did it myself with some help from online resources, took me 3 hours and only a little swearing (plus an OEM microswitch costing â50) Screw dealers. On the other hand, I have only good things to say about my Toyota dealership; I don't have a Toyota anymore but I still bring my cars there for certain jobs.
Take your time finding a trustworthy place, and if someone screws you, don't come back.
Bespoke is not "weird UK English". It's common English and used in the USA as well, I've heard and seen American colleagues use it regularly.
I much prefer a Z-Wave / Zigbee solution over WiFi solutions as well. For the reason you stated, but there is another reason: WiFi sucks. I've yet to find an access point that is really reliable, and does not require frequent reboots. And with dozens or even hundreds of devices on one WiFi network, it's going to suck even harder. In contrast, I find my Z-Wave network to be extremely reliable. Besides, even if Z-Wave device firmware was somehow compromised, it would still have a much harder time getting through the hub out to the internet compared to compromised WiFi devices.
We do need better security though. Casual thieves are not going to hack your Z-Wave setup, but when such setups become more prevalent you can expect cheap hardware that will do the hacking for them. Like the GPS / GSM jammers popular with car thieves; these things can be had for under $100. It's not hard to build a box that can detect and access a Z-Wave network, there's just not much of a market for one. Yet. Thankfully, Z-Wave locks already use encrypted comms with the HA hub, and the upcoming new version of the standard allows better security for other devices as well, without having to compromise on the usability of the devices by the owner. Openness will still be determined by your hub.
None more black
Also, the bit about badge colors is somewhat suggestive. Many companies issue different color badges to staff and temps.
Where I've tried both public transport and driving, I found that public transport took more time in most cases. And this is in the west of the Netherlands, where public transport is finely meshed, and roads are rather congested. Sure, I can read on the train (if I manage to find a seat), but time in a car isn't completely lost; I listen to the news or to new music I picked up. And in the end I prefer to save the 30-45 minutes each day on travel time even if it means paying through the nose for a car (€1.60/l for gas, and 21% VAT + a special tax on new cars; for larger cars the tax can exceed the factory price).
There's a psychological angle to it as well. When I leave the office and get in my car, I feel like the work day is done. But if I leave and get on the train, it somehow feels like I am still on the clock until I get to my front door. Silly, but there it is.