People SAY that CS is this big thing - but is it the real computer SCIENCE part - or do they mean code monkeys? CS was always meant to be much more theoretical than practical. About solving really hard problems in operating systems, efficient new kinds of hardware resource management, compilers, programming languages - not just writing the next web app.
I think computing is undergoing just as big a change now as it did when the.com era came for the first time in the last 90's. Programming is actually getting EASIER and more accessible to everyone. Heck, we've got game makers almost exclusively using engines off the shelf to make massively successful games - and most of them are barely programmers at all. They're script monkeys in Unity. Web companies are making online applications solely from java/ruby and other high-level script and database languages. None of these things require nor touch the difficult problem computer science traditionally focuses on. They're technology jobs - not science.
If I had to predict, the more traditional need of CS degrees are going to shrink and shrink as advances no longer require the bit-twiddling madness of the early years of computing. Hardware will easily have advanced so-as even the most inefficient algorithms for daily tasks will be just fine. No special knowledge needed. The small blobs of very high-perf code that will be needed will be done by small, very skilled CS majors (drivers, OS's, database cores, distributed memory systems, etc), but the majority of code/apps will be simply scripted/assembled together on top of these high-perf, highly-accessible API's. We already see it with abstractions like PhoneGap, Unity, etc.
I think there is good reason to believe if something tragic has happened - that it was an accident. Usually when terrorists destroy something - they immediately give notice and announce how and what they've done. We haven't seen that so far.
No matter how slick or how polished their lies be, NSA's lies are still LIES
Amen. Let's remember how many times they've been busted for COMPLETELY LYING in front of congressional panels, in quotes, and most of their other public statements. Even if everything they've said is 100% true, it could (and likely is) completely neglecting to bring up any un-mentioned ways in which they are spying on the average US citizen.
I have stopped believing the NSA, FBI, and Homeland security is at all telling the truth about what they are doing. We probably aren't even seeing 1/10th of what they're actually doing; and both Obama, Bush, and Hillary are all on board with expanding these programs and the agenda as a whole.
| This runs counter to the level of abstraction that most CS majors are used to dealing with
That's very unfortunate to hear. I know when I studied CS in the 90's, the foundation was always based on understanding the underlying hardware. My OS class focused on hardware interrupts, protected mode operation, cache and memory hierarchies. The whole basis for strategies and methods of making fast algorithms depends on knowing how the underlying hardware works.
How can you call yourself a computer scientist if you don't understand the different fundamental architectures you run on?
Simply don't go in the same sentence. You inherently need to know a lot about the underlying hardware and programming models to take advantage of that hardware - and none of that is easy.
Best advice? Maybe use C# and start with a good sample tutorial. After that, you're going to learn a lot more about image algorithms/etc.
That's why I can still make amazing amounts of money knowing how to program for GPU's.
Wrong, wrong, wrong my friend. Life is what happens while you're making plans. Your tomorrow is never guaranteed, nor your investments, nor your health. It's the great American lie that you should bust your b*lls doing stuff you hate for 30-40 years just so you can maximize earning for the HOPE that you can enjoy 20+ of in in retirement. Doesn't that sound stupid to you? It does to me. I'm sorry - but one of my life goals was to climb a mountain or two. I can't do that at 70. I can do it now at 30. So I do it - and have experienced something great by climbing a few of them already. It's opened doors to my life that I never would have known about.
You are taking a HUGE risk that your health, investments, happiness and stamina will last until you're 65 and then 'magically' start living life. Have you not listened to all the people in serious accidents or those that get cancer/etc? They all wish they had lived more each day and not wasted so many days. Live your life NOW; don't wait and make the ultimate gamble you'll actually be able to live life later when you're old.
While I love our post office system - this smacks of protectionism and not re-orienting with the times.
We don't have the Pony Express around because the telegraph came along. The telegraph was universally better in terms of speed, efficiency, etc. Should we have taxed telegrams more just to keep around an obsolete system for ???? not sure what. Physical delivery of mail is wasteful from a fuel, resources, and time. Granted, there will ALWAYS need to be package delivery of goods (even more so in an internet economy) and a system that works when crises' happen; but it sounds to me like it's time to do what every business and natural/biological system does when the fundamental environment changes occurs in some way - you must change too. Find the things our society still needs from a postal service.
Yes, this is painful, and all efforts should be made to help transition workers and the systems. However, it's just prolonging the problem and compounding the pain later when this will have to be addressed. It sucks - but life is change. Change is challenging and difficult and we should help ease the transition for people as best as we can. But when gently moving with the shifts in our economy and way people work is MUCH better than trying to iron-fistedly stick to the past.
I heard you liked an editor in your editor, so we put and editor in your editor so you can edit while you edit!
While funny for slashdot - it's basically like watching people arrange deckchairs on the Titanic. These are tools - tools to get your job done. Use the best tool and stop circle-j-ing about this over that/etc. I use both whenever it suits me; but don't do any serious development in either anymore. There's so, so, so much better tools out there than these tired old things.
...unless you're experiencing a problem expressly fixed by a BIOS patch - do NOT update your BIOS.
As much as I like to upgrade like the next guy - I've experienced far more problems than fixes with most bios updates. The only time I update now is when they specifically fix a problem I'm having.
In the case of your 'really expensive' stuff or essential hardware - if it's just a security patch - get a nice $50 router with firewall and plug your device into that. No use risking or destroying a piece of essential hardware on a BIOS update that is ALWAYS a risky operation.
And shame them. Shame them publicly on reviews and on their forums. Be courteous by not using foul language or being irate - but state the facts and how they treated you. If they don't realize this is super-bad PR, then these guys likely don't deserve your business.
I'm glad someone wrote up an article about this. I'm actually for the kind of transparency he's promoting; and I think his work has shown that governments cannot and should not be allowed to hide from the truth. He's a brave new pioneer into the kind of work the 'free press' should be doing - but do not because of their limitations (should all reporters know basic hacking techniques in the future - question for another time). WRT the article, referring to his org as a cult is a bit much (but I'm sure there's elements in there as there always are), but here's the real problem with his organization:
His organization has and gets very secret information. This information is often so powerful/secret/damning that could potentially bring down banks, companies, individuals, or maybe even countries or at least their regimes. There are a number of problems with a sole person with this much power.
How do we know if he's not 'cherry-picking' information and just releasing what he wants to cause the reaction he wants? Does he fact-check anything he releases at all? We know news organizations Fox/NPR/et al can do exactly this to sway public opinion. Just because he's releasing information doesn't mean he's releasing ALL the information that would paint a full picture. It doesn't tell us if he's at all modified or tampered with that information. Unless the person who's accused comes out with counter-proof (if there is even a way if the leaked info was purely made up anyway), there is no way to know without a LOT of fact checking of likely terribly secret stuff. But the damage would be done by then. At best it turns into a credibility war; and with no transparency on either side - who are we to believe?
With information so central and key to financial and government systems, what is to keep Assange and co from going rouge and extorting or holding companies, countries or people for blackmail? "Just leave me alone Obama or I'll dump all that stuff about those drone strike kills you ordered". "Ok Goldman, give me 5 million dollars/year and a Lear jet or I leak how you knew about the housing collapse and fed into it" He very well could have information right now that could upset major governments and/or financial institutions, bankrupt huge corporations, and plunge the world into chaos/worse recession. With as somewhat unstable as he seems at times - do you really trust one man bouncing from country to country - living in hotel rooms - to make decisions to 'do the right thing' at all times?
These are all the exact same problems that news organizations have. They must fact check, and release information in a way that promotes truth in our organizations without destroying the very things we need to survive in a modern world. He has none of these burdens.
I have. I hate using touch on my desktop. I hate going back and forth between keyboard and mouse and then touching. It's just not a good desktop metaphor.
Don't believe me? Apple, Android and MS confirm it. None of their IU's for mobile/touch devices have desktop metaphores. Single app open at a time, fixed spacing icons for starting apps, no documents/folder/tree hierarchies, etc.
I'm not a lover of Apple at times, but I think they're completely right on this point.
Chris Weber, the CEO and former Microsoft executive, fired Oleg Romashin stating that "Resistance to our Win7 strategy is futile. You will be eliminated."
| It's pretty hypocritical to criticize a license for requiring that redistribution of the source of that code or derivatives must be under the same license and then turn around and recommend everyone use the GPL instead.
This this this! Finally - someone points out the elephant, the pot calling the kettle black. For once I'd like the GPL community to admit this. The tactics and business models supported by GPL-style licenses is why I never have, and never will, release my software with one of their licenses. It's either free - or it's not.
Either give it away free like you intended, or follow the GPL rabbit hole down and just guess what GPL 4, 5 and 6 will look like...
| User/Device security is no more or less "secure" than it was back in 1995,
I disagree. The amount of compute time rises dramatically each year (Moore's law), it is not good enough to simply 'tread water' and just upping the key length are sufficient. New techniques and systems are constantly being built to attack these methods. While I'm not saying SSH is bad or outdated, I'm saying that cryptanalysis and raw compute has not stopped chipping away at the corners and weak spots. What if at 51200 bit security, we find an aweful and damnin patter appears in the math? We still cannot prove that any of these particular methods for cryptography today couldn't be completely broken wide open with a numerical discovery tomorrow (while we are pretty sure it can't).
We mustn't fall into the trap of thinking that what is good enough today is good forever. Have as many irons in the fire being tested and competing is the best way for your protection today and tomorrow.
I would largely agree. Unfortunately, I believe it is because real security - cryptography and end-to-end security and privacy - are very difficult, and hence, very expensive to develop, implement, and test. My experience with such coding is that it's every bit, if not more, rigorous as code written for medical devices or flight control software. It simply has to be bulletproof. Any one hole in the theory, algorithm, or implementation - and the whole thing comes apart. Learning about all those possible holes and plugging them is a herculean task. One can point to the near constant stream of security patches for every browser, app, and OS on the market. And these are the best-funded commercial enterprises around.
Another huge problem is the 'meh' attitude people have towards their personal information. We throw our data around so willy-nilly on smart phones and social networks. We check in places that tell everyone where we are (or are not http://pleaserobme.com/ ), publicly publish our most intimate family and friend relationships, report where we live and work, we even identify people to image recognition software. One expert I heard said that he could not imagine a more dastardly personal information monitoring system than Facebook. And we WILLINGLY give that information away. Google reads your emails and all the documents you upload to their 'free' services. Websites use everything they can to target ads at you, etc.
The unfortunate part, as my CS security professor pointed out, is that by the time it crosses an ethical line - it's nearly impossible to stop. Even worse, what if the company you gave all that info too gets sold to a very un-scrupulous person in a country with no protections? What if your government is taken over and they raid these databases for information about dissenters? All of these things are real, happen today, and yet we consider it more important to be able to brag to our friends and family what we had for dinner last night than protect ourselves.
| In my experience, Agile projects tend to run longer than they would have under waterfall, but the end product is usually closer to what the customer needs
Great analysis - I would agree.
The other pitfall I've seen of people claiming to be 'agile' is that it's a keyword for "You're about to give your life and soul to this startup". I think a fair number of places claim to be running an Agile process, but in reality use it as a keyword for busting your hump as hard as they can. And run as fast as you can if you ever see an ad looking for someone that wants to hire you for "a fast-paced, dynamic, agile environment".
This has also dramatically changed. Yes, early drives suffered from a number of problems - many of which have been solved or greatly reduced. The biggest difference for SSD's is their memory cells do only allow a finite amount of writes before they wear out. Much as USB sticks. The problems came from both firmware bugs in early designs, and the inherent longevity of the memory.
Here are the salient hardware points:
-Intel SSD drives now carry a 3 year warranty. Now as good as any platter drive (sadly).
-Drives have built-in error correction and failure tolerance with replaceable blocks if one cell dies.
-Newer processing techniques have greatly improved reliability
-Many bug fixes to early firmware problems. Things such as wear-leveling that prevents certain cells from getting hammered while the rest of the drive sits unused.
Some of the software points:
-OS's have long be optimized for the slow platter performance. Newer OS's (Win7 is one) detect the use of an SSD and turn off the features that actually hurt drives. What are those things? Turn off disk defragmenting, optimizing the use of the system so that caches and data live on a platter drive while the OS and programs you want mostly read access are on the SSD.
There are many good articles and write-ups on these topics. I finally made the jump and would never look back. I just got a 180gb Intel SSD for $129 and it's the single most trans-formative upgrade to my computing experience I've made since the Core line of processors were released. The sheer speed your machine runs at, how apps just instantly start and the system boots in a few seconds, is just mind boggling. You start feeling the power of modern processors like you never have before.
Toms hardware and other sites have done extensive tests of these hybrid drives with a very mixed bag of results. Usually they are still an order of magnitude slower than SSDs, and only achieve their near-SSD perf after it's been 'trained' for a while on the data. http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/momentus-xt-750gb-review,3223.html
And for all the complaining on here about SSD failure rates, wouldn't the lifetime of the solid-state memory units in a hybrid drive be even worse because it's a much smaller block of memory and therefore must swap much more data in/out of the total capacity? What's the point of a hybrid drive if the caching part is likely to fail much faster than the SSD equivalent?
I finally made the jump to buying an SDD and have a 180gb Intel one coming from Amazon's super-sale last week. I'll be installing my OS on it and using the procedure that many others have used with great success. Maybe you can find some real solutions to some of your counter-arguments there: http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/70822-ssd-tweaks-optimizations-windows-7-a.html
After having my work laptop with one, I simply am amazed at how much more real-life usable my machine is. Waking from sleep is near instantaneous and I know longer wonder if it's worth it to wake my machine and wait 20 seconds to check something out before walking out the door. Batter life is nearly doubled. I don't hear clicks as the drive parks itself every time it gets a chance. I don't have to worry about josteling or even *dropping* the laptop while it's on. It's honestly the most amazing upgrade to PC technology and usability I've seen in years. Beats any graphics card upgrade since first going to VGA and proc upgrade since the original Pentium.
Sure, it's life might be shorter; but I've been watching my hard drives have shorter and shorter lives too. Warranties are no longer 5 years, they're 2 if you get that. Out of 5 seagates I've owned in the last few years, 3 of the 5 have died. One of the replacements even died. I switched to hitatchi's and have done better. So, and SSD won't make any different to the regular backups I do now anyway.
We tech nerds often forget it's about the usability stupid. Usability as your mom and girlfriend see it. I.e. - you turn it on and it works. You don't see all kinds of cryptic mysterious stuff happening, or cross your fingers and hope something works. You press the button on the appliance and the toast comes out. Until we really grock that - these arguments are pedantic to non-techs who are just as likely to toss an old computer or give it to the kid because it's getting slow or the drive dies in it.
Slashdot Mirror
You want to get skynet? Cause this is how you get skynet.
People SAY that CS is this big thing - but is it the real computer SCIENCE part - or do they mean code monkeys? CS was always meant to be much more theoretical than practical. About solving really hard problems in operating systems, efficient new kinds of hardware resource management, compilers, programming languages - not just writing the next web app.
I think computing is undergoing just as big a change now as it did when the .com era came for the first time in the last 90's. Programming is actually getting EASIER and more accessible to everyone. Heck, we've got game makers almost exclusively using engines off the shelf to make massively successful games - and most of them are barely programmers at all. They're script monkeys in Unity. Web companies are making online applications solely from java/ruby and other high-level script and database languages. None of these things require nor touch the difficult problem computer science traditionally focuses on. They're technology jobs - not science.
If I had to predict, the more traditional need of CS degrees are going to shrink and shrink as advances no longer require the bit-twiddling madness of the early years of computing. Hardware will easily have advanced so-as even the most inefficient algorithms for daily tasks will be just fine. No special knowledge needed. The small blobs of very high-perf code that will be needed will be done by small, very skilled CS majors (drivers, OS's, database cores, distributed memory systems, etc), but the majority of code/apps will be simply scripted/assembled together on top of these high-perf, highly-accessible API's. We already see it with abstractions like PhoneGap, Unity, etc.
I think there is good reason to believe if something tragic has happened - that it was an accident. Usually when terrorists destroy something - they immediately give notice and announce how and what they've done. We haven't seen that so far.
No matter how slick or how polished their lies be, NSA's lies are still LIES
Amen. Let's remember how many times they've been busted for COMPLETELY LYING in front of congressional panels, in quotes, and most of their other public statements. Even if everything they've said is 100% true, it could (and likely is) completely neglecting to bring up any un-mentioned ways in which they are spying on the average US citizen.
I have stopped believing the NSA, FBI, and Homeland security is at all telling the truth about what they are doing. We probably aren't even seeing 1/10th of what they're actually doing; and both Obama, Bush, and Hillary are all on board with expanding these programs and the agenda as a whole.
Why is robotics so ignored/boring/avoided, by even a tech community?
It's a hardware problem. Most people here are software people. :D
That's very unfortunate to hear. I know when I studied CS in the 90's, the foundation was always based on understanding the underlying hardware. My OS class focused on hardware interrupts, protected mode operation, cache and memory hierarchies. The whole basis for strategies and methods of making fast algorithms depends on knowing how the underlying hardware works.
How can you call yourself a computer scientist if you don't understand the different fundamental architectures you run on?
Simply don't go in the same sentence. You inherently need to know a lot about the underlying hardware and programming models to take advantage of that hardware - and none of that is easy. Best advice? Maybe use C# and start with a good sample tutorial. After that, you're going to learn a lot more about image algorithms/etc. That's why I can still make amazing amounts of money knowing how to program for GPU's.
Retirement is happiness... plan for it.
Wrong, wrong, wrong my friend. Life is what happens while you're making plans. Your tomorrow is never guaranteed, nor your investments, nor your health. It's the great American lie that you should bust your b*lls doing stuff you hate for 30-40 years just so you can maximize earning for the HOPE that you can enjoy 20+ of in in retirement. Doesn't that sound stupid to you? It does to me. I'm sorry - but one of my life goals was to climb a mountain or two. I can't do that at 70. I can do it now at 30. So I do it - and have experienced something great by climbing a few of them already. It's opened doors to my life that I never would have known about.
You are taking a HUGE risk that your health, investments, happiness and stamina will last until you're 65 and then 'magically' start living life. Have you not listened to all the people in serious accidents or those that get cancer/etc? They all wish they had lived more each day and not wasted so many days. Live your life NOW; don't wait and make the ultimate gamble you'll actually be able to live life later when you're old.
While I love our post office system - this smacks of protectionism and not re-orienting with the times.
We don't have the Pony Express around because the telegraph came along. The telegraph was universally better in terms of speed, efficiency, etc. Should we have taxed telegrams more just to keep around an obsolete system for ???? not sure what. Physical delivery of mail is wasteful from a fuel, resources, and time. Granted, there will ALWAYS need to be package delivery of goods (even more so in an internet economy) and a system that works when crises' happen; but it sounds to me like it's time to do what every business and natural/biological system does when the fundamental environment changes occurs in some way - you must change too. Find the things our society still needs from a postal service.
Yes, this is painful, and all efforts should be made to help transition workers and the systems. However, it's just prolonging the problem and compounding the pain later when this will have to be addressed. It sucks - but life is change. Change is challenging and difficult and we should help ease the transition for people as best as we can. But when gently moving with the shifts in our economy and way people work is MUCH better than trying to iron-fistedly stick to the past.
This already exists - it's called Ikea furniture. I swear - it's DRM is that it can only survive two moves - then totally self-destructs.
I heard you liked an editor in your editor, so we put and editor in your editor so you can edit while you edit!
While funny for slashdot - it's basically like watching people arrange deckchairs on the Titanic. These are tools - tools to get your job done. Use the best tool and stop circle-j-ing about this over that/etc. I use both whenever it suits me; but don't do any serious development in either anymore. There's so, so, so much better tools out there than these tired old things.
...unless you're experiencing a problem expressly fixed by a BIOS patch - do NOT update your BIOS.
As much as I like to upgrade like the next guy - I've experienced far more problems than fixes with most bios updates. The only time I update now is when they specifically fix a problem I'm having.
In the case of your 'really expensive' stuff or essential hardware - if it's just a security patch - get a nice $50 router with firewall and plug your device into that. No use risking or destroying a piece of essential hardware on a BIOS update that is ALWAYS a risky operation.
And shame them. Shame them publicly on reviews and on their forums. Be courteous by not using foul language or being irate - but state the facts and how they treated you. If they don't realize this is super-bad PR, then these guys likely don't deserve your business.
I'm glad someone wrote up an article about this. I'm actually for the kind of transparency he's promoting; and I think his work has shown that governments cannot and should not be allowed to hide from the truth. He's a brave new pioneer into the kind of work the 'free press' should be doing - but do not because of their limitations (should all reporters know basic hacking techniques in the future - question for another time). WRT the article, referring to his org as a cult is a bit much (but I'm sure there's elements in there as there always are), but here's the real problem with his organization:
His organization has and gets very secret information. This information is often so powerful/secret/damning that could potentially bring down banks, companies, individuals, or maybe even countries or at least their regimes. There are a number of problems with a sole person with this much power.
How do we know if he's not 'cherry-picking' information and just releasing what he wants to cause the reaction he wants? Does he fact-check anything he releases at all? We know news organizations Fox/NPR/et al can do exactly this to sway public opinion. Just because he's releasing information doesn't mean he's releasing ALL the information that would paint a full picture. It doesn't tell us if he's at all modified or tampered with that information. Unless the person who's accused comes out with counter-proof (if there is even a way if the leaked info was purely made up anyway), there is no way to know without a LOT of fact checking of likely terribly secret stuff. But the damage would be done by then. At best it turns into a credibility war; and with no transparency on either side - who are we to believe?
With information so central and key to financial and government systems, what is to keep Assange and co from going rouge and extorting or holding companies, countries or people for blackmail? "Just leave me alone Obama or I'll dump all that stuff about those drone strike kills you ordered". "Ok Goldman, give me 5 million dollars/year and a Lear jet or I leak how you knew about the housing collapse and fed into it" He very well could have information right now that could upset major governments and/or financial institutions, bankrupt huge corporations, and plunge the world into chaos/worse recession. With as somewhat unstable as he seems at times - do you really trust one man bouncing from country to country - living in hotel rooms - to make decisions to 'do the right thing' at all times?
These are all the exact same problems that news organizations have. They must fact check, and release information in a way that promotes truth in our organizations without destroying the very things we need to survive in a modern world. He has none of these burdens.
Dang it - now there is a patent on square ships with rounded corners!
I have. I hate using touch on my desktop. I hate going back and forth between keyboard and mouse and then touching. It's just not a good desktop metaphor. Don't believe me? Apple, Android and MS confirm it. None of their IU's for mobile/touch devices have desktop metaphores. Single app open at a time, fixed spacing icons for starting apps, no documents/folder/tree hierarchies, etc. I'm not a lover of Apple at times, but I think they're completely right on this point.
A hammer still works better than the most elegantly crafted screwdriver in the world when it comes to putting in nails. Film at 11!
Chris Weber, the CEO and former Microsoft executive, fired Oleg Romashin stating that "Resistance to our Win7 strategy is futile. You will be eliminated."
They don't appear to be able to keep the power on long enough for anyone to see it broadcast...
This this this! Finally - someone points out the elephant, the pot calling the kettle black. For once I'd like the GPL community to admit this. The tactics and business models supported by GPL-style licenses is why I never have, and never will, release my software with one of their licenses. It's either free - or it's not.
Either give it away free like you intended, or follow the GPL rabbit hole down and just guess what GPL 4, 5 and 6 will look like...
| User/Device security is no more or less "secure" than it was back in 1995,
I disagree. The amount of compute time rises dramatically each year (Moore's law), it is not good enough to simply 'tread water' and just upping the key length are sufficient. New techniques and systems are constantly being built to attack these methods. While I'm not saying SSH is bad or outdated, I'm saying that cryptanalysis and raw compute has not stopped chipping away at the corners and weak spots. What if at 51200 bit security, we find an aweful and damnin patter appears in the math? We still cannot prove that any of these particular methods for cryptography today couldn't be completely broken wide open with a numerical discovery tomorrow (while we are pretty sure it can't).
We mustn't fall into the trap of thinking that what is good enough today is good forever. Have as many irons in the fire being tested and competing is the best way for your protection today and tomorrow.
I would largely agree. Unfortunately, I believe it is because real security - cryptography and end-to-end security and privacy - are very difficult, and hence, very expensive to develop, implement, and test. My experience with such coding is that it's every bit, if not more, rigorous as code written for medical devices or flight control software. It simply has to be bulletproof. Any one hole in the theory, algorithm, or implementation - and the whole thing comes apart. Learning about all those possible holes and plugging them is a herculean task. One can point to the near constant stream of security patches for every browser, app, and OS on the market. And these are the best-funded commercial enterprises around.
Another huge problem is the 'meh' attitude people have towards their personal information. We throw our data around so willy-nilly on smart phones and social networks. We check in places that tell everyone where we are (or are not http://pleaserobme.com/ ), publicly publish our most intimate family and friend relationships, report where we live and work, we even identify people to image recognition software. One expert I heard said that he could not imagine a more dastardly personal information monitoring system than Facebook. And we WILLINGLY give that information away. Google reads your emails and all the documents you upload to their 'free' services. Websites use everything they can to target ads at you, etc.
The unfortunate part, as my CS security professor pointed out, is that by the time it crosses an ethical line - it's nearly impossible to stop. Even worse, what if the company you gave all that info too gets sold to a very un-scrupulous person in a country with no protections? What if your government is taken over and they raid these databases for information about dissenters? All of these things are real, happen today, and yet we consider it more important to be able to brag to our friends and family what we had for dinner last night than protect ourselves.
| In my experience, Agile projects tend to run longer than they would have under waterfall, but the end product is usually closer to what the customer needs
Great analysis - I would agree.
The other pitfall I've seen of people claiming to be 'agile' is that it's a keyword for "You're about to give your life and soul to this startup". I think a fair number of places claim to be running an Agile process, but in reality use it as a keyword for busting your hump as hard as they can. And run as fast as you can if you ever see an ad looking for someone that wants to hire you for "a fast-paced, dynamic, agile environment".
Here are the salient hardware points:
-Intel SSD drives now carry a 3 year warranty. Now as good as any platter drive (sadly).
-Drives have built-in error correction and failure tolerance with replaceable blocks if one cell dies.
-Newer processing techniques have greatly improved reliability
-Many bug fixes to early firmware problems. Things such as wear-leveling that prevents certain cells from getting hammered while the rest of the drive sits unused.
Some of the software points:
-OS's have long be optimized for the slow platter performance. Newer OS's (Win7 is one) detect the use of an SSD and turn off the features that actually hurt drives. What are those things? Turn off disk defragmenting, optimizing the use of the system so that caches and data live on a platter drive while the OS and programs you want mostly read access are on the SSD.
There are many good articles and write-ups on these topics. I finally made the jump and would never look back. I just got a 180gb Intel SSD for $129 and it's the single most trans-formative upgrade to my computing experience I've made since the Core line of processors were released. The sheer speed your machine runs at, how apps just instantly start and the system boots in a few seconds, is just mind boggling. You start feeling the power of modern processors like you never have before.
Toms hardware and other sites have done extensive tests of these hybrid drives with a very mixed bag of results. Usually they are still an order of magnitude slower than SSDs, and only achieve their near-SSD perf after it's been 'trained' for a while on the data.
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/momentus-xt-750gb-review,3223.html
And for all the complaining on here about SSD failure rates, wouldn't the lifetime of the solid-state memory units in a hybrid drive be even worse because it's a much smaller block of memory and therefore must swap much more data in/out of the total capacity? What's the point of a hybrid drive if the caching part is likely to fail much faster than the SSD equivalent?
I finally made the jump to buying an SDD and have a 180gb Intel one coming from Amazon's super-sale last week. I'll be installing my OS on it and using the procedure that many others have used with great success. Maybe you can find some real solutions to some of your counter-arguments there:
http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/70822-ssd-tweaks-optimizations-windows-7-a.html
After having my work laptop with one, I simply am amazed at how much more real-life usable my machine is. Waking from sleep is near instantaneous and I know longer wonder if it's worth it to wake my machine and wait 20 seconds to check something out before walking out the door. Batter life is nearly doubled. I don't hear clicks as the drive parks itself every time it gets a chance. I don't have to worry about josteling or even *dropping* the laptop while it's on. It's honestly the most amazing upgrade to PC technology and usability I've seen in years. Beats any graphics card upgrade since first going to VGA and proc upgrade since the original Pentium.
Sure, it's life might be shorter; but I've been watching my hard drives have shorter and shorter lives too. Warranties are no longer 5 years, they're 2 if you get that. Out of 5 seagates I've owned in the last few years, 3 of the 5 have died. One of the replacements even died. I switched to hitatchi's and have done better. So, and SSD won't make any different to the regular backups I do now anyway.
We tech nerds often forget it's about the usability stupid. Usability as your mom and girlfriend see it. I.e. - you turn it on and it works. You don't see all kinds of cryptic mysterious stuff happening, or cross your fingers and hope something works. You press the button on the appliance and the toast comes out. Until we really grock that - these arguments are pedantic to non-techs who are just as likely to toss an old computer or give it to the kid because it's getting slow or the drive dies in it.
Wow - two sleazy set of company lawyers at odds - this should get good! Maybe the only way to defeat evil, is with more evil...