Well an obvious way is to complain if you're an Apple customer
You can complain till you're blue in the face. It won't make them change their policy. That is the core problem. They might even change their minds and reinstate the app, but you're right back where you started the next time Apple bans an app for stupid reasons.
France has a better idea. They're considering legislation after the same thing happened to AppGratis. The EU could outlaw Apple's policy. I would greatly enjoy watching that happen after seeing Apple abuse developers for years.
You could stop going. The law exempts session cookies. The site is telling you they are dropping tracking cookies on you on behalf of advertisers. Clearing your cookies when you close the browser doesn't help in this case. While you may continue, others who care about their privacy are hitting the back button.
This is the best response I've read in the entire thread. I just wanted to add, you are probably okay with SQL if you are familiar with that and you're expecting "thousands of users simultaneously." Postgresql 9.2 can hit around 14,000 writes per second. I'm sure MySQL is similarly capable. If you need more than that, then you have to have go with something like Cassandra.
Netflix has demonstrated Cassandra can hit 1.1 million writes per second on Amazon's commodity hardware. You just have to be willing to sacrifice consistency to get it.
Finally, curb your enthusiasm. When you first have an idea that seems big, it's easy to get carried away. Ask yourself, is this something I really want to work on for the next five years of my life? When you start to dig into the actual implementation, you're gonna get bogged down in details you didn't consider when you were so enthusiastic.
At that point, you're going to either think about the problem day and night until you find a solution, or you're going to say "This is stupid anyway" and want to move on. It's harder to move on once you've told friends/family/investors/etc. After doing it a few times, you look like someone who never follows through. When you DO have a really great idea that's solvable, you're the boy who cried wolf.
To fix the shortage, you can start by paying people what they are worth.
I believe this problem solves itself if you constantly keep on the lookout for a new job. I don't get raises, but what I do get are $20k salary bumps every couple of years by relocating. Ultimately, I intend to go out and start my own business. Then I will determine what I make.
Stop burn out... No one should ever be forced to work 50+ hour weeks on a regular basis.
My advice is to discuss this with your potential employer up front. I make it very clear that I will work 40 hours. Typically, my employer tries to ease me into working more with special projects for 'extra' pay, but don't bite. Don't let them talk you into telecommute either. Show up on time, write your code, leave on time. This has not failed me.
End age discrimination... While fixing the above items can help this, and it does not happen everywhere, this is out there. A person doesn't go instantly dumb at 40... While there are exceptions, most IT people are willing to learn, if you are moving everything to the cloud and your entire department only knows COBOL, whose fault is that? A little training can go a long way.
Sorry dude. I can't help you there. You've got to have more than willingness. You need a desire to learn. If you are comfortable sitting in your office/cube doing the same job every day and never spend any time exploring new languages, databases, tools, etc, then you're obsolete in 5 years. I'm not going to sit around, learn nothing, and play the victim. That isn't age discrimination anymore than a pair of old pants that don't fit anymore. You just let yourself go and now you gotta get yourself back into shape.
While I'm sure MBA's will disagree, if you change these policies, you will no longer have an IT shortage.
And here is one more, this one is more the fault of education instead of corporations... (also, mostly about developers, but it might apply to other fields)
We need to teach people how to program, not programming languages. There are too many people that learn a language without learning any programming concepts. They end up googling even simple programming solutions and slap crap together that needs to be rewritten with every minor spec change. The people that learned how to program will write something that is flexible and can be modified as the system evolves. Over time this will allow for time savings which will translate into needing fewer developers.
This sounds like an organizational problem. Who is responsible for vetting the code that goes into the repository? From the sound of it, nobody. Great programmers don't spring from the ether. As you've noticed, most of them suck. There are probably a few things you could learn yourself. It sounds like you need a bright individual whose primary duty is to review the work being checked in. If it sucks, it goes back with recommendations on how to improve the work. Deadline be damned. The code base is one of the company's most valuable assets. Either the company invests the proper amount of time and resources in maintaining it, or they end up with technical debt that will suffocate them in the long run.
Except in this case, it is easy to grow a beard instantly. If a neighbor using my wireless wants to look like me based on request headers, that's easy to forge. Tools like Firesheep have made it incredibly easy to impersonate others on open wireless networks. With the right extension, every single bit of the request could be impersonated.
Furthermore, a person might be using a computer, but their browsing agent may be under third party control, thanks to IE toolbars, XSS, or any number of other security failures. IP address != person. Even as circumstantial evidence, it's extremely weak.
One example: I have a server that is pinged almost daily with a bogus request for mobiquo.php. I know a person isn't doing that. But hey, I have their IP address and the request matches other requests coming from that IP. A person must have typed that into the url bar every day!... no. If all you needed to do to confirm identity was grab an IP address, problems like spam would not exist.
If you are at work or at school, probably. But not at home...at least not with the biggest ISPs available in my area (and most of the US at least).
The IP address from your ISP could be fixed forever and it still won't pinpoint which device on your network was using it. Every machine on your LAN shares that single IP from the ISP. If you have an open wireless router, the IP address really doesn't tell you anything more than it was any person within wireless range of the router at the time.
Your IP address and browser request header makes it easy to correlate your travel across several sites. As long as you do anything with that IP ever that ties to you, they've got you. With many ISPs, your IP can last for months.
This is a common misperception. IP address != person. Many ISPs have caching proxys to reduce traffic. To the site on the other end, the entire ISPs traffic may appear to be coming from a few proxy IPs. Even without proxys in between you and your destination, the IP address may be shared as it is at businesses, universities, and behind home Wi-Fi routers. In the vast majority of cases these days, the IP address a site sees is rarely tied to a single source.
As a web developer, let me say that none of the stuff you mention really matters when it comes to tracking you around the web. In fact, most of it is pretty essential in making your experience on a site a good one.
What does matter is that sites totally unrelated to google, facebook, twitter, etc, are embedding scripts and iframes from those sites on their own pages. When you see that facebook like button beside Dr. Pink's Anal Brightening, facebook knows you're there. If you click the like button, then facebook tells all your friends you were there. This is the faustian bargain that facebook offers to third parties... Let facebook follow your users and facebook will spam its users with your sites offers.
Nobody even questions it. Facebook likes and google analytics are considered essential elements of every website by management types. They have no idea what a <link> tag is or how it can impact the site's security, but they **know** that you better have google analytics! (If you like being employeed)
I notice Schneier failed to mention the EU cookie law. Unlike in the US, the EU is actually serious about fixing the problem. Essentially, if you care about this sort of spying and you go to any site that provides the required EU notice, just leave and don't go back. All the legit methods of first party tracking are exempt. Session cookies are exempt as well as first party analytics cookies. That notice is telling you that facebook, google, and any number of other third parties are tracking your activity on the site.
Yes, I am. You expect to stop spam by charging the recipient a tax?
So that will not include the cost of the internet infrastructure (once it's left Amazon's servers), or receiving, nor the cost of spam filters.
You just stated the tax, "would stop indiscriminate spam" so why do we need spam filters? Oh, right, because it won't actually stop spam. Tax on email is a stupid idea suggested by ignorant people who don't understand how email works. Please remember this before suggesting a plan that involves taxing email.
No it isn't. Amazon charges $0.10 per thousand emails.
A 0.1 cent per email cost would mean nothing to me, or to any legitimate users, but would stop indiscriminate spam.
A one-hundredth of a cent tax per email works out to be... $0.10 per thousand emails. They want to double the price of email, and call it 'a very tiny tax.' Nevermind that it's a stupid idea suggested by a technically illiterate city council.
Only the government should be allowed to control killbots and computer viruses, yes? I know, let's outlaw computer viruses. That will surely stop them.
Agreed. If benchmarks were all that mattered, we'd have i7s in our phones:D Obviously we don't. Efficiency matters. Hence one reason why I mentioned K900. Terga 4 may be great, but not for a phone if it isn't efficient.
Everybody but me only cares about AAPL. I'm the Macdork. I care about awesome Apple products, not their stupid stock price. iPhone is not an awesome product.
You do know that spam is defined as unsolicited commericial email, right? What these people are doing is not spam. It is fraud. Its unfortunate, but they would be subject to far greater fines if they were simply annoying people with spam. $15000 per message. With fraud, they'll probably get a slap on the wrist at best. You know, like all those bankers that fraudulently sold bad loans as AAA rated debts and crashed the market in 2008. This story is evidence of it.
Slashdot Mirror
Well an obvious way is to complain if you're an Apple customer
You can complain till you're blue in the face. It won't make them change their policy. That is the core problem. They might even change their minds and reinstate the app, but you're right back where you started the next time Apple bans an app for stupid reasons.
France has a better idea. They're considering legislation after the same thing happened to AppGratis. The EU could outlaw Apple's policy. I would greatly enjoy watching that happen after seeing Apple abuse developers for years.
You could stop going. The law exempts session cookies. The site is telling you they are dropping tracking cookies on you on behalf of advertisers. Clearing your cookies when you close the browser doesn't help in this case. While you may continue, others who care about their privacy are hitting the back button.
This is the best response I've read in the entire thread. I just wanted to add, you are probably okay with SQL if you are familiar with that and you're expecting "thousands of users simultaneously." Postgresql 9.2 can hit around 14,000 writes per second. I'm sure MySQL is similarly capable. If you need more than that, then you have to have go with something like Cassandra.
Netflix has demonstrated Cassandra can hit 1.1 million writes per second on Amazon's commodity hardware. You just have to be willing to sacrifice consistency to get it.
Finally, curb your enthusiasm. When you first have an idea that seems big, it's easy to get carried away. Ask yourself, is this something I really want to work on for the next five years of my life? When you start to dig into the actual implementation, you're gonna get bogged down in details you didn't consider when you were so enthusiastic.
At that point, you're going to either think about the problem day and night until you find a solution, or you're going to say "This is stupid anyway" and want to move on. It's harder to move on once you've told friends/family/investors/etc. After doing it a few times, you look like someone who never follows through. When you DO have a really great idea that's solvable, you're the boy who cried wolf.
So the appropriate response to being censored now is to roll over? No fight whatsoever?
How ya gonna fight it? It's in the EULA bro. Don't like it? Move to android where 75% (and growing) of the mobile users are located.
Immigrants don't have 5-6 figure student loan debt.
To fix the shortage, you can start by paying people what they are worth.
I believe this problem solves itself if you constantly keep on the lookout for a new job. I don't get raises, but what I do get are $20k salary bumps every couple of years by relocating. Ultimately, I intend to go out and start my own business. Then I will determine what I make.
Stop burn out... No one should ever be forced to work 50+ hour weeks on a regular basis.
My advice is to discuss this with your potential employer up front. I make it very clear that I will work 40 hours. Typically, my employer tries to ease me into working more with special projects for 'extra' pay, but don't bite. Don't let them talk you into telecommute either. Show up on time, write your code, leave on time. This has not failed me.
End age discrimination... While fixing the above items can help this, and it does not happen everywhere, this is out there. A person doesn't go instantly dumb at 40... While there are exceptions, most IT people are willing to learn, if you are moving everything to the cloud and your entire department only knows COBOL, whose fault is that? A little training can go a long way.
Sorry dude. I can't help you there. You've got to have more than willingness. You need a desire to learn. If you are comfortable sitting in your office/cube doing the same job every day and never spend any time exploring new languages, databases, tools, etc, then you're obsolete in 5 years. I'm not going to sit around, learn nothing, and play the victim. That isn't age discrimination anymore than a pair of old pants that don't fit anymore. You just let yourself go and now you gotta get yourself back into shape.
While I'm sure MBA's will disagree, if you change these policies, you will no longer have an IT shortage.
And here is one more, this one is more the fault of education instead of corporations... (also, mostly about developers, but it might apply to other fields) We need to teach people how to program, not programming languages. There are too many people that learn a language without learning any programming concepts. They end up googling even simple programming solutions and slap crap together that needs to be rewritten with every minor spec change. The people that learned how to program will write something that is flexible and can be modified as the system evolves. Over time this will allow for time savings which will translate into needing fewer developers.
This sounds like an organizational problem. Who is responsible for vetting the code that goes into the repository? From the sound of it, nobody. Great programmers don't spring from the ether. As you've noticed, most of them suck. There are probably a few things you could learn yourself. It sounds like you need a bright individual whose primary duty is to review the work being checked in. If it sucks, it goes back with recommendations on how to improve the work. Deadline be damned. The code base is one of the company's most valuable assets. Either the company invests the proper amount of time and resources in maintaining it, or they end up with technical debt that will suffocate them in the long run.
Except in this case, it is easy to grow a beard instantly. If a neighbor using my wireless wants to look like me based on request headers, that's easy to forge. Tools like Firesheep have made it incredibly easy to impersonate others on open wireless networks. With the right extension, every single bit of the request could be impersonated.
Furthermore, a person might be using a computer, but their browsing agent may be under third party control, thanks to IE toolbars, XSS, or any number of other security failures. IP address != person. Even as circumstantial evidence, it's extremely weak.
One example: I have a server that is pinged almost daily with a bogus request for mobiquo.php. I know a person isn't doing that. But hey, I have their IP address and the request matches other requests coming from that IP. A person must have typed that into the url bar every day! ... no. If all you needed to do to confirm identity was grab an IP address, problems like spam would not exist.
If you are at work or at school, probably. But not at home...at least not with the biggest ISPs available in my area (and most of the US at least).
The IP address from your ISP could be fixed forever and it still won't pinpoint which device on your network was using it. Every machine on your LAN shares that single IP from the ISP. If you have an open wireless router, the IP address really doesn't tell you anything more than it was any person within wireless range of the router at the time.
Your IP address and browser request header makes it easy to correlate your travel across several sites. As long as you do anything with that IP ever that ties to you, they've got you. With many ISPs, your IP can last for months.
This is a common misperception. IP address != person. Many ISPs have caching proxys to reduce traffic. To the site on the other end, the entire ISPs traffic may appear to be coming from a few proxy IPs. Even without proxys in between you and your destination, the IP address may be shared as it is at businesses, universities, and behind home Wi-Fi routers. In the vast majority of cases these days, the IP address a site sees is rarely tied to a single source.
As a web developer, let me say that none of the stuff you mention really matters when it comes to tracking you around the web. In fact, most of it is pretty essential in making your experience on a site a good one.
What does matter is that sites totally unrelated to google, facebook, twitter, etc, are embedding scripts and iframes from those sites on their own pages. When you see that facebook like button beside Dr. Pink's Anal Brightening, facebook knows you're there. If you click the like button, then facebook tells all your friends you were there. This is the faustian bargain that facebook offers to third parties... Let facebook follow your users and facebook will spam its users with your sites offers.
Nobody even questions it. Facebook likes and google analytics are considered essential elements of every website by management types. They have no idea what a <link> tag is or how it can impact the site's security, but they **know** that you better have google analytics! (If you like being employeed)
I notice Schneier failed to mention the EU cookie law. Unlike in the US, the EU is actually serious about fixing the problem. Essentially, if you care about this sort of spying and you go to any site that provides the required EU notice, just leave and don't go back. All the legit methods of first party tracking are exempt. Session cookies are exempt as well as first party analytics cookies. That notice is telling you that facebook, google, and any number of other third parties are tracking your activity on the site.
commenting to undo mod
You're quoting their price to send
Yes, I am. You expect to stop spam by charging the recipient a tax?
So that will not include the cost of the internet infrastructure (once it's left Amazon's servers), or receiving, nor the cost of spam filters.
You just stated the tax, "would stop indiscriminate spam" so why do we need spam filters? Oh, right, because it won't actually stop spam. Tax on email is a stupid idea suggested by ignorant people who don't understand how email works. Please remember this before suggesting a plan that involves taxing email.
Hard to calculate that cost
No it isn't. Amazon charges $0.10 per thousand emails.
A 0.1 cent per email cost would mean nothing to me, or to any legitimate users, but would stop indiscriminate spam.
A one-hundredth of a cent tax per email works out to be... $0.10 per thousand emails. They want to double the price of email, and call it 'a very tiny tax.' Nevermind that it's a stupid idea suggested by a technically illiterate city council.
Effective protest? Set yourself on fire. Perhaps you meant in the last 20 years in the US.
Only the government should be allowed to control killbots and computer viruses, yes? I know, let's outlaw computer viruses. That will surely stop them.
Agreed. If benchmarks were all that mattered, we'd have i7s in our phones :D Obviously we don't. Efficiency matters. Hence one reason why I mentioned K900. Terga 4 may be great, but not for a phone if it isn't efficient.
I think it's 57fps at 1080 res. Terga 4 has a 72 core gpu. And yeah, I'm interested in the battery life too.
I have Ubuntu installed on my phone. I'm looking forward to this year's faster processors.
No one cares about the #1 and #2 highest selling phones in the world last quarter??
The Windows camp used to make the same argument about Windows95. It was a lame counterpoint then. It's still a lame counterpoint now.
When providing a point of comparison, choose one which the largest number of people will have had experience with.
I didn't even know Lenovo made phones.
I didn't even know Finland made an OS :P This is news for nerds, or at least, it used to be.
Everybody but me only cares about AAPL. I'm the Macdork. I care about awesome Apple products, not their stupid stock price. iPhone is not an awesome product.
Nobody cares about iPhone. Compare against recent hardware. Lenovo K900 for instance.
Has any one, let alone some large corporate entity, every been sanctioned for false takedown?
Diebold for one.
You know what we do to spammers
You do know that spam is defined as unsolicited commericial email, right? What these people are doing is not spam. It is fraud. Its unfortunate, but they would be subject to far greater fines if they were simply annoying people with spam. $15000 per message. With fraud, they'll probably get a slap on the wrist at best. You know, like all those bankers that fraudulently sold bad loans as AAA rated debts and crashed the market in 2008. This story is evidence of it.
Looks like 17bits. Sorry, but won't work in chrome's V8. Seriously, V8 uses UCS-2 instead of UTF-8? WTF Man?