I'm going to get modded down to oblivion, but I'm going to say something good about Uber. I don't use it much in the US, but used to live in Manila, Philippines and travel there about once per year. Having Uber there has been a godsend for me. The taxis there are often nasty and in poor repair, the drivers see an American and half the time start in on how their meter is broken, and, in general, they are a pain in the ass to hail unless you are at a mall and willing to stand in a long line.
Uber works well for me and for my wife when she's there (also American, BTW), an order of magnitude better than taxis. The rates are low enough that I almost always tip significantly above the fare. Some of our staff over there do the "side hustle" thing and enjoy making the extra money.
I know that my experience isn't everybody else's; and Uber in the US is a different beast. Uber absolutely needs to take proactive action regarding background checks and I know that will raise the price. It will still be better than the taxis, at least in Manila.
Yah, I imagine the cost of weapon would very well come into play here. It also kind of gets me thinking too about the focus on "terror" versus killing.
There are a lot easier ways to kill an entire school than running around spraying an AR weapon. To your point, an old school 350 Remington rifle would put large holes into (and through things) much more effectively, but wouldn't have the same "oh my god they got this from a video game/movie" vibe as something with a clip. And if the focus were really on killing as many people as possible, there are lots of ways to blow things up that, body-count wise, would be more effective than running around with any type of rifle.
That said, if a loon is looking for interactively injuring as many people as possible, and to keep somebody from approaching and stopping them, an AR is a pretty cost effective way to go about it (never fired an AK myself, not sure if their reputation for jamming is justified). It's probably more about making a point than body count (sheer number of casulties versus
To your point about weight, the more ammo weighs, the less of it somebody can carry around. That doesn't preclude somebody from stashing ammo around, I guess, but that makes the odds of getting caught higher too.
I don't want to see a complete gun ban in the US, I like going to the range and I like having a Glock 9 around the house. It would be good if there were more useful conversations around weapons that are useful for home defense or hunting; versus mass-produced short-barreled cheap junk that are not great at either. But I doubt we will ever get there. Thanks for the thoughtful reply.
So a guy decides to commit 1st degree murder, and to kill a bunch of kids, you really think if he didn't have a gun available he would just forget about it? and not just find a different way, like there aren't a lot of scary alternatives easily described on the internet?
If guns, assault weapons in particular, were not the most efficient way of killing large groups of people; armed groups, armies, etc. would be equipping themselves with all of those scary Internet weapons instead. You can kill somebody with a machete available at your hardware store, a baseball bat, even a butter knife. That doesn't mean that you will be able to kill as many people, before somebody stops you, as with a semi (or fully) automatic rifle with a large capacity magazine that you don't have to stop and swap out or reload.
Some would say that this violates the "do one thing, do it well" prescription for building quality applications.
That is, until remembering that Google is not a technology company, they are an advertising company. Their revenue base is literally dependent upon how frequently they assault your eyeballs. Everything Google does is to make money off of forcing you to look at stuff.
If you poke around Yelp's site, they talk about how paying them can result in better placement, targeted advertising, etc. That seems expected and fair behavior.
I can't find anywhere that it would infer that your aggregate rating will be affected by whether you pay them or not. In fact, on their About page, they state "Paying advertisers can never change or re-order their reviews." (which, I guess, does not exclude Yelp themselves from doing it). The perception is that the ratings are organized and aggregated based upon algorithms. If the reality is that it's also based upon whether Yelp is getting paid by the business in question, that seems shady. It certainly should have an impact on consumers' confidence in Yelp aggregate ratings.
FTFY. Only reason she even gets elected is because the R by her name plays well to her extremely gerrymandered district that contains the rich suburbs of Nashville and a vast swath of farmland that extends westward across a third of the state.
Doh! Thanks... My dystopian reality filter is interfering with basic civics knowledge...
Yah, this is the author of the "Internet 'Freedom' Act" (quoting intentional) and opponent of municipal broadband. She has stood against attempts to enforce any level of privacy requirements on ISP's. She is the Ajit Pai of the Senate. Speaking of which.... Fuck Ajit Pai. And fuck Marsha Blackburn too.
A big problem with this type of regulation is that they are relying on the FAA because drones fly. What's the plan when, inevitably, somebody creates a small, cheap robot with a camera that silently walks or crawls instead of flies? Even if they cost $1,000's - I would imagine paparazzi-types will snatch them up. Yes, there are trespassing laws, but once could build technology that would be very difficult to trace (ex. records on embedded storage instead of phone-home, broadcasts encrypted over cordless phone spectrum, etc.).
Of course, once Amazon and Google release their version of "friendly helpers" (Alexa on legs) to help you buy more stuff (and collect more of your personal telemetry), we're all screwed anyway...
This stuff will NEVER cease until Google themselves stops being the greatest Data Sink of all time, and puts some actual Privacy into Android....and we ALL know when that will be.
Per TFA (toward the bottom), the tracking providers also provide iOS components/libraries, so it's likely they are affected/infected as well. It's just that this study didn't look at them (for whatever reason).
Pretty much every reporting/analytic implementation I have worked on always had a requirement to get the data out to an Excel-friendly format. It doesn't matter how fluid/flexible/beautiful of a UI you provide, they want the data in Excel. I think a lot of it is that is very simple to change values and do what-if analysis ("what would our material costs on widget X have to go down to get to a gross profit of Y%"). This is surprisingly difficult to do in implementations like Crystal Reports, SQL Reporting Services, Discoverer, etc. Same kind of goes for ad-hoc calculations. We publish dashboards in Tableau, which has decent capabilities for building aggregated functionality, but most of our non-analyst users quickly get lost, and just want their data in Excel. It's the warm blanket that they don't have to relearn. It may be disease ridden, and have holes and worn spots, but it's their "blankee".
I'm sure this guy will spend large wads of cash to force people off of Excel, and one of the first things is replacement will do is to give it back.
The guys who wrote the Manifesto for Agile would probably disagree with you when you say "Agile is all about documentation and consideration before work gets started"
We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it. Through this work we have come to value:
Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan
That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more.
It's more iterative improvement, collaboration and responsiveness than lots of pre-coding work. I don't think the Robert Martins of the world would disagree that up-front design and architecture work is important, but that is more about being a responsible professional developer than anything Agile, per se.
I'm glad sites do a better job at supporting mobile browsers with minimal controls and single-page structure, but they need to also work with desktop browsers properly. While the browser Back and Forward buttons have always been problematic with form POSTS, their behavior is increasingly inconsistent and unpredictable.
Case in point, American Express recently did a site update where, when you looked at transactions, it didn't go to a new page, it brought up a full-page dialog. The dialog had an "X" to close, but if you hit your browser's back button, you were taking back to login page. They have since fixed this, but it was frustrating for a while.
Single page apps need to properly use anchor tags to support browser navigational buttons. Yes, desktop browsers still have them, and users still click on them.
Don't get me started on padding and white space...
I take a statin. If I miss it, I don't die, I don't even have symptoms. You aren't going to die in the field if your LDL goes up. Medications come in all shapes and sizes.
Amazon Music is useless. Using the Echo with Spotify, works well.
The timers, Spotify support, the weather/news, and the occasional unit-of-measure conversion, make it a nice kitchen accessory (especially with its small footprint on the countertop). That's all I use it for.
If you have a task that is quick running, and has very few interdepencies, microservices may be a fit. In our case, we have file processing that needs to take place when a user uploads a file. There are a number of different websites (internal and external) from which this can happen, and implementing/updated that file processing into each of these is not very attractive.
I could use a back end service (REST or SOAP) running on a server, but to scale that up and down with demand I have to do it at the server level. Containers are an option, but I still have to provision a big enough server, or set up an auto-scaling cluster, to handle extreme scaling cases.
The microsservice solution fits nicely in this instance. In AWS Land, I can trigger a Lambda micro-server when anything is written to an S3 bucket (S3 is AWS's storage platform). As long as the processing is quick and not super-intensive, the solution is very cost effective. AWS has similar hooks all over the place, like their document database (DynammoDb).
Microservices get less attractive when you have long-running processes with lots of interdependencies. You are also at the mercy of versions of libraries and supporting utilities (like Ghostscript and ImageMagick) that are installed on the back-end. In our case, AWS took a while to update their version of Ghostscript available to Lambda which caused us some headaches.
It's also a hassle if you have big chunks of code for things like a data access layer or business logic layer. There is some overhead with an initial load of a Lambda package, and you don't have much control of when AWS decides to deallocate a package (if it goes unused, AWS frees up the resources for other things). For really big packages, this can lead to situations where you will have random performance hits. There are workarounds, like setting up a CRON to call the microservice every minute or so. If you are loading lots of supporting code, libraries or utilities, you are probably better off with containers.
At any rate, scaling at the server level (even VM) is getting less cost-attractive. Most of our new stuff is either in containers or, where it makes sense, microservices.
If you are a software developer working for a company that is not a software shop, your life is pretty much compromise. You have to build applications and systems that often seem repetitive, within timeframes where you are pretty much forced to cut corners. Usuall the cut corners are in in testing/documentation if you are lucky, but sometimes you miss in functionality and stability. Yes, you can refuse to cut corners and quit (or be fired), but this may not be a near-term option for people supporting families, medical challenges, etc.
Which got me wondering, what if you are an artist and find yourself painting repetitive lake and seafront landscapes, Venitian canal scenes, and the other sort of stuff you see in the Home Goods art aisle? I'm sure these artists are having to pump out sub-par work, stuff that they aren't thrilled with, are they inherently miserable creatures? Or do they say "I get to do something I like to do for a living, my work may not end up in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but that's ok"? Same kind of thing with musicians who write soundtracks for straight-to-video movies or reality shows, are they in abject misery beause they are not the next Mozart, John Williams or even a pop star?
Maybe closer to home for us Slashdotters, what about auto engineers? Not everybody gets to work on the next BMW concept car. For those having to work on generic sedans priced under $20k, are there corners to be cut analogous to what software developers are asked to do (safety, emissions, performance)? Does this result in similar misery/angst being described in TFA?
As an example, if your website was hosted servers in a different region than the outage, but tried to send email using US-EAST-1, your website would have still been up, but would have been affected because it couldn't send email.
To all those guys who are bragging about how they would never put anything in the cloud (AWS or otherwise) because their data centers are so reliable, so redundant, fault-tolerant and insulated from human error that they can be held to the highest possible standards of up-time and accountability, are you hiring?
Or, would you be interested in a bridge I have for sale?
One of the more compelling reasons to stick with Windows in the enterprise is that it is straightforward to author, update and deploy software without having to go through a third-party store approval process. If I need to get an update to accounting software that takes care of a sales tax issue, I want that update deployed now, and not wait days for somebody to review it and make sure it complies to whatever flavor-of-the-week UI conventions that a particular reviewer may or may not make an issue out of.
This "feature" needs to be defaulted OFF in Windows Professional and "higher", and on a domain-connected computer needs to be configured at the GPO level. If Microsoft places any artificial constraint on managing this (i.e. you must be running a Windows Server Enterprise version to disable this) it will be the largest caliber of bullets Microsoft has shot into its own foot (and it fires there a lot).
One of the reasons the UWP is not getting adopted is the cumbersome nature of getting software built in-house for in-house use deployed. People may live with a store approval process for mobile apps, but they will not live with it for in-house developed software being solely used in-house. It's why after evaluating UWP we stuck with WPF, because even though there were lots of creature comforts in places like Windows.Devices, the deployment obstacles were far too numerous.
Calling something a public safety issue doesn't not magically give the government authority. Forcing people to wear bubble-wrap suits would be a public safety issue, too. Do you really want to go there?
In this case, the government, on behalf, of the people, allocates a finite resource (bandwidth) to a small number of competitors (oligarchy). The government does indeed have a role in ensuring that these companies are acting in the public interest. Your analogy would apply more to something like seatbelts.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm going to get modded down to oblivion, but I'm going to say something good about Uber. I don't use it much in the US, but used to live in Manila, Philippines and travel there about once per year. Having Uber there has been a godsend for me. The taxis there are often nasty and in poor repair, the drivers see an American and half the time start in on how their meter is broken, and, in general, they are a pain in the ass to hail unless you are at a mall and willing to stand in a long line.
Uber works well for me and for my wife when she's there (also American, BTW), an order of magnitude better than taxis. The rates are low enough that I almost always tip significantly above the fare. Some of our staff over there do the "side hustle" thing and enjoy making the extra money.
I know that my experience isn't everybody else's; and Uber in the US is a different beast. Uber absolutely needs to take proactive action regarding background checks and I know that will raise the price. It will still be better than the taxis, at least in Manila.
Yah, I imagine the cost of weapon would very well come into play here. It also kind of gets me thinking too about the focus on "terror" versus killing.
There are a lot easier ways to kill an entire school than running around spraying an AR weapon. To your point, an old school 350 Remington rifle would put large holes into (and through things) much more effectively, but wouldn't have the same "oh my god they got this from a video game/movie" vibe as something with a clip. And if the focus were really on killing as many people as possible, there are lots of ways to blow things up that, body-count wise, would be more effective than running around with any type of rifle.
That said, if a loon is looking for interactively injuring as many people as possible, and to keep somebody from approaching and stopping them, an AR is a pretty cost effective way to go about it (never fired an AK myself, not sure if their reputation for jamming is justified). It's probably more about making a point than body count (sheer number of casulties versus
To your point about weight, the more ammo weighs, the less of it somebody can carry around. That doesn't preclude somebody from stashing ammo around, I guess, but that makes the odds of getting caught higher too.
I don't want to see a complete gun ban in the US, I like going to the range and I like having a Glock 9 around the house. It would be good if there were more useful conversations around weapons that are useful for home defense or hunting; versus mass-produced short-barreled cheap junk that are not great at either. But I doubt we will ever get there. Thanks for the thoughtful reply.
So a guy decides to commit 1st degree murder, and to kill a bunch of kids, you really think if he didn't have a gun available he would just forget about it? and not just find a different way, like there aren't a lot of scary alternatives easily described on the internet?
If guns, assault weapons in particular, were not the most efficient way of killing large groups of people; armed groups, armies, etc. would be equipping themselves with all of those scary Internet weapons instead. You can kill somebody with a machete available at your hardware store, a baseball bat, even a butter knife. That doesn't mean that you will be able to kill as many people, before somebody stops you, as with a semi (or fully) automatic rifle with a large capacity magazine that you don't have to stop and swap out or reload.
Some would say that this violates the "do one thing, do it well" prescription for building quality applications.
That is, until remembering that Google is not a technology company, they are an advertising company. Their revenue base is literally dependent upon how frequently they assault your eyeballs. Everything Google does is to make money off of forcing you to look at stuff.
Watching the news last night, they had a story about a measles outbreak, in freakin' 2018 (and there was this one at Disney in 2015 too).
I guess you could say that we in the US are finding innovative ways to bring back near-extinct diseases.
If you poke around Yelp's site, they talk about how paying them can result in better placement, targeted advertising, etc. That seems expected and fair behavior.
I can't find anywhere that it would infer that your aggregate rating will be affected by whether you pay them or not. In fact, on their About page, they state "Paying advertisers can never change or re-order their reviews." (which, I guess, does not exclude Yelp themselves from doing it). The perception is that the ratings are organized and aggregated based upon algorithms. If the reality is that it's also based upon whether Yelp is getting paid by the business in question, that seems shady. It certainly should have an impact on consumers' confidence in Yelp aggregate ratings.
Ditto on LastPass and Firefox Developer (although, to be hones, LastPass on Firefox Quantum only seems to work 3/4 of the time anyway...)
She is the Ajit Pai of the House.
FTFY. Only reason she even gets elected is because the R by her name plays well to her extremely gerrymandered district that contains the rich suburbs of Nashville and a vast swath of farmland that extends westward across a third of the state.
Doh! Thanks... My dystopian reality filter is interfering with basic civics knowledge...
Yah, this is the author of the "Internet 'Freedom' Act" (quoting intentional) and opponent of municipal broadband. She has stood against attempts to enforce any level of privacy requirements on ISP's. She is the Ajit Pai of the Senate. Speaking of which.... Fuck Ajit Pai. And fuck Marsha Blackburn too.
At the end of every SCRUM update, along with "No Blocks" I will say "Fuck Ajit Pai"
A big problem with this type of regulation is that they are relying on the FAA because drones fly. What's the plan when, inevitably, somebody creates a small, cheap robot with a camera that silently walks or crawls instead of flies? Even if they cost $1,000's - I would imagine paparazzi-types will snatch them up. Yes, there are trespassing laws, but once could build technology that would be very difficult to trace (ex. records on embedded storage instead of phone-home, broadcasts encrypted over cordless phone spectrum, etc.).
Of course, once Amazon and Google release their version of "friendly helpers" (Alexa on legs) to help you buy more stuff (and collect more of your personal telemetry), we're all screwed anyway...
Two monopolies?
You Keep Using That Word, I Do Not Think It Means What You Think It Means...
This stuff will NEVER cease until Google themselves stops being the greatest Data Sink of all time, and puts some actual Privacy into Android. ...and we ALL know when that will be.
Per TFA (toward the bottom), the tracking providers also provide iOS components/libraries, so it's likely they are affected/infected as well. It's just that this study didn't look at them (for whatever reason).
Pretty much every reporting/analytic implementation I have worked on always had a requirement to get the data out to an Excel-friendly format. It doesn't matter how fluid/flexible/beautiful of a UI you provide, they want the data in Excel. I think a lot of it is that is very simple to change values and do what-if analysis ("what would our material costs on widget X have to go down to get to a gross profit of Y%"). This is surprisingly difficult to do in implementations like Crystal Reports, SQL Reporting Services, Discoverer, etc. Same kind of goes for ad-hoc calculations. We publish dashboards in Tableau, which has decent capabilities for building aggregated functionality, but most of our non-analyst users quickly get lost, and just want their data in Excel. It's the warm blanket that they don't have to relearn. It may be disease ridden, and have holes and worn spots, but it's their "blankee".
I'm sure this guy will spend large wads of cash to force people off of Excel, and one of the first things is replacement will do is to give it back.
The guys who wrote the Manifesto for Agile would probably disagree with you when you say "Agile is all about documentation and consideration before work gets started"
It's more iterative improvement, collaboration and responsiveness than lots of pre-coding work. I don't think the Robert Martins of the world would disagree that up-front design and architecture work is important, but that is more about being a responsible professional developer than anything Agile, per se.
I'm glad sites do a better job at supporting mobile browsers with minimal controls and single-page structure, but they need to also work with desktop browsers properly. While the browser Back and Forward buttons have always been problematic with form POSTS, their behavior is increasingly inconsistent and unpredictable.
Case in point, American Express recently did a site update where, when you looked at transactions, it didn't go to a new page, it brought up a full-page dialog. The dialog had an "X" to close, but if you hit your browser's back button, you were taking back to login page. They have since fixed this, but it was frustrating for a while.
Single page apps need to properly use anchor tags to support browser navigational buttons. Yes, desktop browsers still have them, and users still click on them.
Don't get me started on padding and white space...
I take a statin. If I miss it, I don't die, I don't even have symptoms. You aren't going to die in the field if your LDL goes up. Medications come in all shapes and sizes.
Echo will let you do named timers and reminders now.
Amazon Music is useless. Using the Echo with Spotify, works well.
The timers, Spotify support, the weather/news, and the occasional unit-of-measure conversion, make it a nice kitchen accessory (especially with its small footprint on the countertop). That's all I use it for.
If you have a task that is quick running, and has very few interdepencies, microservices may be a fit. In our case, we have file processing that needs to take place when a user uploads a file. There are a number of different websites (internal and external) from which this can happen, and implementing/updated that file processing into each of these is not very attractive.
I could use a back end service (REST or SOAP) running on a server, but to scale that up and down with demand I have to do it at the server level. Containers are an option, but I still have to provision a big enough server, or set up an auto-scaling cluster, to handle extreme scaling cases.
The microsservice solution fits nicely in this instance. In AWS Land, I can trigger a Lambda micro-server when anything is written to an S3 bucket (S3 is AWS's storage platform). As long as the processing is quick and not super-intensive, the solution is very cost effective. AWS has similar hooks all over the place, like their document database (DynammoDb).
Microservices get less attractive when you have long-running processes with lots of interdependencies. You are also at the mercy of versions of libraries and supporting utilities (like Ghostscript and ImageMagick) that are installed on the back-end. In our case, AWS took a while to update their version of Ghostscript available to Lambda which caused us some headaches.
It's also a hassle if you have big chunks of code for things like a data access layer or business logic layer. There is some overhead with an initial load of a Lambda package, and you don't have much control of when AWS decides to deallocate a package (if it goes unused, AWS frees up the resources for other things). For really big packages, this can lead to situations where you will have random performance hits. There are workarounds, like setting up a CRON to call the microservice every minute or so. If you are loading lots of supporting code, libraries or utilities, you are probably better off with containers.
At any rate, scaling at the server level (even VM) is getting less cost-attractive. Most of our new stuff is either in containers or, where it makes sense, microservices.
Yes.
The title is one of the few instances where Betteridge is wrong.
If you are a software developer working for a company that is not a software shop, your life is pretty much compromise. You have to build applications and systems that often seem repetitive, within timeframes where you are pretty much forced to cut corners. Usuall the cut corners are in in testing/documentation if you are lucky, but sometimes you miss in functionality and stability. Yes, you can refuse to cut corners and quit (or be fired), but this may not be a near-term option for people supporting families, medical challenges, etc.
Which got me wondering, what if you are an artist and find yourself painting repetitive lake and seafront landscapes, Venitian canal scenes, and the other sort of stuff you see in the Home Goods art aisle? I'm sure these artists are having to pump out sub-par work, stuff that they aren't thrilled with, are they inherently miserable creatures? Or do they say "I get to do something I like to do for a living, my work may not end up in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but that's ok"? Same kind of thing with musicians who write soundtracks for straight-to-video movies or reality shows, are they in abject misery beause they are not the next Mozart, John Williams or even a pop star?
Maybe closer to home for us Slashdotters, what about auto engineers? Not everybody gets to work on the next BMW concept car. For those having to work on generic sedans priced under $20k, are there corners to be cut analogous to what software developers are asked to do (safety, emissions, performance)? Does this result in similar misery/angst being described in TFA?
As an example, if your website was hosted servers in a different region than the outage, but tried to send email using US-EAST-1, your website would have still been up, but would have been affected because it couldn't send email.
To all those guys who are bragging about how they would never put anything in the cloud (AWS or otherwise) because their data centers are so reliable, so redundant, fault-tolerant and insulated from human error that they can be held to the highest possible standards of up-time and accountability, are you hiring?
Or, would you be interested in a bridge I have for sale?
One of the more compelling reasons to stick with Windows in the enterprise is that it is straightforward to author, update and deploy software without having to go through a third-party store approval process. If I need to get an update to accounting software that takes care of a sales tax issue, I want that update deployed now, and not wait days for somebody to review it and make sure it complies to whatever flavor-of-the-week UI conventions that a particular reviewer may or may not make an issue out of.
This "feature" needs to be defaulted OFF in Windows Professional and "higher", and on a domain-connected computer needs to be configured at the GPO level. If Microsoft places any artificial constraint on managing this (i.e. you must be running a Windows Server Enterprise version to disable this) it will be the largest caliber of bullets Microsoft has shot into its own foot (and it fires there a lot).
One of the reasons the UWP is not getting adopted is the cumbersome nature of getting software built in-house for in-house use deployed. People may live with a store approval process for mobile apps, but they will not live with it for in-house developed software being solely used in-house. It's why after evaluating UWP we stuck with WPF, because even though there were lots of creature comforts in places like Windows.Devices, the deployment obstacles were far too numerous.
Calling something a public safety issue doesn't not magically give the government authority. Forcing people to wear bubble-wrap suits would be a public safety issue, too. Do you really want to go there?
In this case, the government, on behalf, of the people, allocates a finite resource (bandwidth) to a small number of competitors (oligarchy). The government does indeed have a role in ensuring that these companies are acting in the public interest. Your analogy would apply more to something like seatbelts.